You can still write COM components in Java. I did. It's just a little bit harder.
A year and a half ago I was in charge of modifying one of the last Microsoft-specific parts of code in my company's product. Our goal was to become 100% pure so as to be able to port to Solaris. Doing so involved getting rid of some J++ code which made it really easy to interact with COM. Instead, I used JNI and wrote some wrapper classes in C++ that interacted with the COM components we needed from the Microsoft platform. On Solaris we just plugged in some Java code that did the same thing.
In addition, I believe IBM's alphaWorks has a project bridging COM and Java Beans, and doesn't Sun also have a COM-to-Java bridge?
A little geography lesson: the Panama Isthmus does not have a railway all the way across it. So, even if the other railway systems were connected, you could not cross from South America to North America-- that is, last I checked.
Bill Gates, in an interview today, expounded his views on a number of subjects, one of which is his opinion that Windows, having been vilified since the 1990's for its instability, is not causationally linked to actual data loss.
Quoting this guy on this matter is absolutely ridiculous. Sure, there's a chance he's right. But for crying out loud, quote an objective third party who's qualified to study this matter!
You don't seem to understand how viruses really run. It's not a matter of whether something can send mail or not, it's a matter of whether an incoming mail can have code in it that will cause the host to send mail without the user's permission.
Actually, the viruses afflicting Outlook can only run if the user chooses to run them. The problem is that no warning is given the user, and it's so easy to do.
Java, on the other hand, automatically denies any script, or any code downloaded from the network, the privileges to do anything remotely dangerous. If the applet or other piece of code requests permission to do so, the user is given a clear warning that it is dangerous to permit it. And practically speaking, it is actually quite a bother to even ask the user for these permissions-- Java's security model is almost too strict. In the long run, though, that's probably best.
The Unabomber was [partially] right
on
The Leased Life?
·
· Score: 1
Although what the Unabomber did was really stupid, he had a point: technology really drives us to depend on it, and has many bad effects on our lives in the long run.
Still, I don't want to go back to the Dark Ages, do you? That was his solution.
Behold: another reason Java should be used on these kinds of devices. Its built-in security model has yet to be breached in any significant way by a virus.
You are right. But more people speak Chinese as their native language than any other in the world.
Chinese is not as hard to learn as most non-Chinese seem to think. I'm learning it. It rocks.
And for those Chinese who are obviously reading this (I've seen your comments) please don't get offended too much at the ignorant Americans who want to blast your country for kicks. It's a compliment to get criticized by idiots.
Actually, if you have incontrovertible evidence, of course I would be interested in seeing it. Can you show me some resources? Email to anon0103@hotmail.com. I'm still forming my own opinions about China and if you have good evidence it will definitely contribute.
I take a position based on my experiences, which have shown me that China is getting much better. As I said, though, China is a big place. Perhaps you have the other side of the story that I have somehow missed.
Somehow, though, I think you are missing part of the story too. Try to look at why so many people nowadays are saying China _is_ getting better. You might learn something too.
You are right in some of your comments. You have only part of the truth though. Try getting the whole truth before making yourself sound like an authority on things.
I never said, first of all, that things were ideal. A great improvement over the Cultural Revolution is to be welcomed, especially if it continues. But China has a long ways to go yet.
Second, have you been to China? Have you talked to Chinese Christians, both inside and outside the official church? China is a big place. In some areas, yes, this kind of harsh repression continues. In most it does not.
Have you looked at the documents stating state policy towards religion? It explicitly says that these "house-church" movements are in principle not to be permitted, but that they are not to be forced to register but rather persuaded using gentle means. This document has been around long enough for people to know about it. Unfortunately, and this is where the biggest problem lies, not all the local leaders care to read the "persuading" part. Obviously, this policy needs to change. But it's not all as black as many think. That's my point.
You saw the members of the Falun Gong sect being arrested... wasn't it? The government sees these people differently. They see them as definitely anti-government. If your group is not anti-government and doesn't disturb the peace, as helarno said, you should be OK. And that's the approach that so many Christians are taking these days-- working around the problems, and going quietly about their business of expanding the church almost faster than anywhere else in the world.
Now, I noticed you have a tendency to post strongly anti-Communist posts in the last few weeks. Your views are pretty extreme. I suggest you temper them a little. The world is not black and white, 0s and 1s, much as we'd like to simplify it to that point. The real world is a fuzzy, complicated gray mix. That doesn't mean we should just accept it that way. We should strive to approach the white. But we should realize the complexity of issues and not polarize them so much. Hmmm. I am against Communism just as much as the next American. Yet in history there were a good number of Communists-- especially in the lower ranks-- who really believed they were working for the good of their country, and had very noble and admirable goals. They just had the wrong method. Can you grok that? I imagine that if you are reasonable, you can accept that, but if you continue to show the knee-jerk reactions you have shown in your past posts, you will begin to accuse me of being a Communist myself, and all sorts of nonsense like that.
From someone who has spent enough time in China to say with a fair amount of certainty, things are much better in China now. Sure, during the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s there was bizarre, cruel and extremely oppressive treatment of those who disagreed. But now even the Chinese themselves call those the "ten years of chaos" when no one was safe. Since Deng Xiaoping came in and brought the government to a more sane and moderate position, there has been a lot more freedom and many prisoners unjustly condemned were released (not all, unfortunately). The 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square was the beginning of a bit of a swing back to the extreme left, but lately things have been getting better again.
What is to keep China from going back to another Cultural Revolution? Well, no one would buy it anymore. The Cultural Revolution happened because so many people made a personality cult out of Mao. Mao's dead, and people cynicism toward Marxism is at an all-time high. The only reason China stays as far left as it does is because there are still many old-thought rulers in power. As they are replaced by younger generations, you can be sure things will continue to improve in China.
Things aren't all fine and dandy in China. But compared to twenty years ago, the Chinese feel very free. And it's only going to get better, I think, although perhaps making one step back for every two or three forward.
As for being thrown in prison for attending a non-State church, that happens only rarely. It is not official policy to do so, but unfortunately the policy is vague enough that some local Party leaders who are militant atheists interpret the policy to fit their own dislike for religions. That too is improving as education is spread about the official policy on religious freedom. Ideally, the policy itself would be more clear, but it is not likely to be changed in the near future.
I'm going to fall in the minority here, but I for one tend not to like cars, for many reasons, including environmental reasons. I'm into cycling, but I'm not a freak about it. That is, I don't have to have all the high-tech, high-buck$ equipment; I just have a good bike and like to ride. Last year I put more than 2000 km on my Trek.
However, I do agree that we (geeks in general) tend to be nonconformists with society at large. Often, in defiance of society, we end up choosing the same things as other geeks. Whether or not we choose the same things out of conformity with each other, or just by chance, is not clear to me. In my case, I just try to be myself. I don't try to fit what society expects of me as a "normal" person, nor what it expects of me as a "geek."
Just a correction to the above message. I meant contracting, not necessarily consulting. Anything that will let me work from any point on the globe where there is Internet access.
I would definitely prefer hourly. Why? Because I would rather control my own time. It seems in this industry people get high salaries but they are expected to put in a lot of overtime. If I must put in overtime, I'd rather get paid extra for it.
Speaking of which, since my dream is to be able to travel and work at the same time, I am going to look for a consulting job when I graduate. Does anyone have any thoughts/advice/experience to share about this? How about any contacts, or websites where I could find out more? Thanks!
I just want to say I agree, so you don't feel alone in this. There are plenty of people that think children should be protected, but in this circle it's not exactly the cool thing to say.
Still, though, if you're talking about publicly available computers, vs. those that the parents have control of in their homes, who is going to decide whether to install the protective software?
Oh, here's another thought I've been toying with. Several parents I know take the opinion that kid should be kept away from computers for the most part until they are older. When they are older, they can catch up; it's not like they will be permanently behind the times. I got a grasp of the Internet pretty quickly after being exposed to it for the first time a very few years ago.
As one of the CNET articles on the subject began to say, it seems that companies dislike standards when they are on top and dominating the market, because standards make it easier for their competitors. But they love standards when they are the underdogs and want to force the major players to let them into the market. It's called human nature, and it doesn't matter whether it's AOL or Microsoft, or Sun or whoever.
Incidentally, Microsoft just happens to be especially shameless in doing this.
If a society wants freedom, they must be responsible, or else it doesn't work, and you get these kinds of fiascos. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it's true. We want free source code, so let's be responsible, courteous, and considerate of each other. Then the code can flourish.
I can't believe how many people have no sense of courtesy. Especially over the Internet. I know, it's a lot easier to blast someone you will never see in person, but you have to resist the urge.
Well, why would we need 4 bytes anyway? Shouldn't we be pushing for a fix in Unicode 2.0 or something like that? I think I heard that Unicode as it stands only uses up about half of the 65536 possible values you get with two bytes. Why not revise it?
Check out NoteTab Light if you're going to be doing work in Windows. It has a lot of nifty stuff in it, including HTML tag auto-replace. That is, you type an opening tag and it automatically adds the closing tag, and so on. You can define your own libraries of functions to do with it too, or change the ones it has if you don't like it.
Give me Unicode, yes, I agree... as a user of Chinese and Korean and Spanish characters, all simultaneously on the same computer, I yearn for the ubiquity of Unicode... but what is this about 4-byte Unicode? I've never heard of that... aren't 2 bytes enough?
Eric Hillman, and all others trying to prove it is not worth it, why don't you try it for yourself? Give it a fair chance: type in nothing but Dvorak for two months. It is hard the first two weeks, but with a good typing tutor I was able to get up to my old Qwerty speed in about three weeks. After that it easily surpassed the old layout. I can touch-type much better with this layout than I ever could with Qwerty, and it's much more comfortable, as several others have mentioned. I even got comfortable switching between the hotkey locations on different systems... hey, I had to do that anyway, because I use at least three different editors on different platforms, and they all use different hotkeys.
My major qualm with it is that no platform I've worked with has a template for Dvorak that will also let you do international characters (such as the accented characters in Spanish). I would hope that someone would come up with a Dvorak-International layout. All other problems people have with it (switching back to Qwerty, learning hotkeys, finding less commonly-used symbols used in programming languages, etc.) I have overcome in the year since I started to learn it.
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You can still write COM components in Java. I did. It's just a little bit harder.
A year and a half ago I was in charge of modifying one of the last Microsoft-specific parts of code in my company's product. Our goal was to become 100% pure so as to be able to port to Solaris. Doing so involved getting rid of some J++ code which made it really easy to interact with COM. Instead, I used JNI and wrote some wrapper classes in C++ that interacted with the COM components we needed from the Microsoft platform. On Solaris we just plugged in some Java code that did the same thing.
In addition, I believe IBM's alphaWorks has a project bridging COM and Java Beans, and doesn't Sun also have a COM-to-Java bridge?
A little geography lesson: the Panama Isthmus does not have a railway all the way across it. So, even if the other railway systems were connected, you could not cross from South America to North America-- that is, last I checked.
Isn't that pretty standard cracker practice? Don't a lot of "script kiddies" crack into machines just for fun and to use them as IRC bots?
You don't seem to understand how viruses really run. It's not a matter of whether something can send mail or not, it's a matter of whether an incoming mail can have code in it that will cause the host to send mail without the user's permission.
Actually, the viruses afflicting Outlook can only run if the user chooses to run them. The problem is that no warning is given the user, and it's so easy to do.
Java, on the other hand, automatically denies any script, or any code downloaded from the network, the privileges to do anything remotely dangerous. If the applet or other piece of code requests permission to do so, the user is given a clear warning that it is dangerous to permit it. And practically speaking, it is actually quite a bother to even ask the user for these permissions-- Java's security model is almost too strict. In the long run, though, that's probably best.
Although what the Unabomber did was really stupid, he had a point: technology really drives us to depend on it, and has many bad effects on our lives in the long run.
Still, I don't want to go back to the Dark Ages, do you? That was his solution.
Behold: another reason Java should be used on these kinds of devices. Its built-in security model has yet to be breached in any significant way by a virus.
You are right. But more people speak Chinese as their native language than any other in the world.
Chinese is not as hard to learn as most non-Chinese seem to think. I'm learning it. It rocks.
And for those Chinese who are obviously reading this (I've seen your comments) please don't get offended too much at the ignorant Americans who want to blast your country for kicks. It's a compliment to get criticized by idiots.
Actually, if you have incontrovertible evidence, of course I would be interested in seeing it. Can you show me some resources? Email to anon0103@hotmail.com. I'm still forming my own opinions about China and if you have good evidence it will definitely contribute.
I take a position based on my experiences, which have shown me that China is getting much better. As I said, though, China is a big place. Perhaps you have the other side of the story that I have somehow missed.
Somehow, though, I think you are missing part of the story too. Try to look at why so many people nowadays are saying China _is_ getting better. You might learn something too.
Oh, one more thing:
You are right in some of your comments. You have only part of the truth though. Try getting the whole truth before making yourself sound like an authority on things.
I never said, first of all, that things were ideal. A great improvement over the Cultural Revolution is to be welcomed, especially if it continues. But China has a long ways to go yet.
Second, have you been to China? Have you talked to Chinese Christians, both inside and outside the official church? China is a big place. In some areas, yes, this kind of harsh repression continues. In most it does not.
Have you looked at the documents stating state policy towards religion? It explicitly says that these "house-church" movements are in principle not to be permitted, but that they are not to be forced to register but rather persuaded using gentle means. This document has been around long enough for people to know about it. Unfortunately, and this is where the biggest problem lies, not all the local leaders care to read the "persuading" part. Obviously, this policy needs to change. But it's not all as black as many think. That's my point.
You saw the members of the Falun Gong sect being arrested... wasn't it? The government sees these people differently. They see them as definitely anti-government. If your group is not anti-government and doesn't disturb the peace, as helarno said, you should be OK. And that's the approach that so many Christians are taking these days-- working around the problems, and going quietly about their business of expanding the church almost faster than anywhere else in the world.
Now, I noticed you have a tendency to post strongly anti-Communist posts in the last few weeks. Your views are pretty extreme. I suggest you temper them a little. The world is not black and white, 0s and 1s, much as we'd like to simplify it to that point. The real world is a fuzzy, complicated gray mix. That doesn't mean we should just accept it that way. We should strive to approach the white. But we should realize the complexity of issues and not polarize them so much. Hmmm. I am against Communism just as much as the next American. Yet in history there were a good number of Communists-- especially in the lower ranks-- who really believed they were working for the good of their country, and had very noble and admirable goals. They just had the wrong method. Can you grok that? I imagine that if you are reasonable, you can accept that, but if you continue to show the knee-jerk reactions you have shown in your past posts, you will begin to accuse me of being a Communist myself, and all sorts of nonsense like that.
From someone who has spent enough time in China to say with a fair amount of certainty, things are much better in China now. Sure, during the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s there was bizarre, cruel and extremely oppressive treatment of those who disagreed. But now even the Chinese themselves call those the "ten years of chaos" when no one was safe. Since Deng Xiaoping came in and brought the government to a more sane and moderate position, there has been a lot more freedom and many prisoners unjustly condemned were released (not all, unfortunately). The 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square was the beginning of a bit of a swing back to the extreme left, but lately things have been getting better again.
What is to keep China from going back to another Cultural Revolution? Well, no one would buy it anymore. The Cultural Revolution happened because so many people made a personality cult out of Mao. Mao's dead, and people cynicism toward Marxism is at an all-time high. The only reason China stays as far left as it does is because there are still many old-thought rulers in power. As they are replaced by younger generations, you can be sure things will continue to improve in China.
Things aren't all fine and dandy in China. But compared to twenty years ago, the Chinese feel very free. And it's only going to get better, I think, although perhaps making one step back for every two or three forward.
As for being thrown in prison for attending a non-State church, that happens only rarely. It is not official policy to do so, but unfortunately the policy is vague enough that some local Party leaders who are militant atheists interpret the policy to fit their own dislike for religions. That too is improving as education is spread about the official policy on religious freedom. Ideally, the policy itself would be more clear, but it is not likely to be changed in the near future.
I'm going to fall in the minority here, but I for one tend not to like cars, for many reasons, including environmental reasons. I'm into cycling, but I'm not a freak about it. That is, I don't have to have all the high-tech, high-buck$ equipment; I just have a good bike and like to ride. Last year I put more than 2000 km on my Trek.
However, I do agree that we (geeks in general) tend to be nonconformists with society at large. Often, in defiance of society, we end up choosing the same things as other geeks. Whether or not we choose the same things out of conformity with each other, or just by chance, is not clear to me. In my case, I just try to be myself. I don't try to fit what society expects of me as a "normal" person, nor what it expects of me as a "geek."
Just a correction to the above message. I meant contracting, not necessarily consulting. Anything that will let me work from any point on the globe where there is Internet access.
I would definitely prefer hourly. Why? Because I would rather control my own time. It seems in this industry people get high salaries but they are expected to put in a lot of overtime. If I must put in overtime, I'd rather get paid extra for it.
Speaking of which, since my dream is to be able to travel and work at the same time, I am going to look for a consulting job when I graduate. Does anyone have any thoughts/advice/experience to share about this? How about any contacts, or websites where I could find out more? Thanks!
I just want to say I agree, so you don't feel alone in this. There are plenty of people that think children should be protected, but in this circle it's not exactly the cool thing to say.
Still, though, if you're talking about publicly available computers, vs. those that the parents have control of in their homes, who is going to decide whether to install the protective software?
Oh, here's another thought I've been toying with. Several parents I know take the opinion that kid should be kept away from computers for the most part until they are older. When they are older, they can catch up; it's not like they will be permanently behind the times. I got a grasp of the Internet pretty quickly after being exposed to it for the first time a very few years ago.
As one of the CNET articles on the subject began to say, it seems that companies dislike standards when they are on top and dominating the market, because standards make it easier for their competitors. But they love standards when they are the underdogs and want to force the major players to let them into the market. It's called human nature, and it doesn't matter whether it's AOL or Microsoft, or Sun or whoever.
Incidentally, Microsoft just happens to be especially shameless in doing this.
If a society wants freedom, they must be responsible, or else it doesn't work, and you get these kinds of fiascos. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it's true. We want free source code, so let's be responsible, courteous, and considerate of each other. Then the code can flourish.
I can't believe how many people have no sense of courtesy. Especially over the Internet. I know, it's a lot easier to blast someone you will never see in person, but you have to resist the urge.
Well, why would we need 4 bytes anyway? Shouldn't we be pushing for a fix in Unicode 2.0 or something like that? I think I heard that Unicode as it stands only uses up about half of the 65536 possible values you get with two bytes. Why not revise it?
I just use my favorite text editor...
Check out NoteTab Light if you're going to be
doing work in Windows. It has a lot of nifty stuff in it, including HTML tag auto-replace. That is, you type an opening tag and it automatically adds the closing tag, and so on. You can define your own libraries of functions to do with it too, or change the ones it has if you don't like it.
Give me Unicode, yes, I agree... as a user of Chinese and Korean and Spanish characters, all simultaneously on the same computer, I yearn for the ubiquity of Unicode... but what is this about 4-byte Unicode? I've never heard of that... aren't 2 bytes enough?
My major qualm with it is that no platform I've worked with has a template for Dvorak that will also let you do international characters (such as the accented characters in Spanish). I would hope that someone would come up with a Dvorak-International layout. All other problems people have with it (switching back to Qwerty, learning hotkeys, finding less commonly-used symbols used in programming languages, etc.) I have overcome in the year since I started to learn it.