Rubbish. I've just had a quick look at the class files that were generated from a couple of JSPs I wrote on Tuesday - 67KB, 83KB and 86KB. They're all "ordinary" JSP files using our inhouse tag library.
As soon as you introduce an IDE kiss scalability GOODBYE!
Yes, because a syntax-aware editor and one-step project compilation will simply *kill* scalability...
I agree with some of your points - the random capitalisation is extremely odd, for one thing. I do think that "local Physics" has a meaning - Physics on a "local" scale, rather than a cosmological or quantum one.
One of the founding assumptions in Physics is that the laws of Physics are the same everywhere. We have no proof that that is the case, though, so sometimes it is necessary to specifically talk about Physics in our domain, ie locally.
The main, lead programmer, who is typcially the copyright holder
Often not - if it's a commercial piece of software, then the company will be copyright holder.
Licensing programmers will tend to accentuate the blame attacks when bugs are found, and will provide incentive to hide them.
Agreed. A licencing scheme is all but meaningless if, once a licence is obtained, it cannot be lost. Therefore, it will be in a licensed programmer's bset interests to hide any such bugs, for fear of losing their licence.
No program is bug-free. No committee of Licensed Gurus can eyeball scan a progran and find all its bugs.
Again, agreed. Writing bug-free, non-trivial code is, imho, impossible in any realistic situation. The best one can hope to do is minimise the nmber of bugs, and fix the rest quickly.
Here's one mistake that I noticed, in the "Microsoft To-Do List" section:
56 Enable automatic file encryption We've heard the promises for years. But even Apple offers this already - what's the holdup?
That's been available since at least Win2K - select a folder, right click, Properties, Advanced, "Encrypt contents to secure data", answer the questions. Select the correct options, and all files moved to/created in that directory will be automatically encrypted. Perhaps that's not simple enough for them, but it's there, and it works.
Some of the other points, there and elsewhere, are similarly wrong, or just plain nonsensical.
but 95% of the time it seems that the "speaker" simply reads thier slides to the audience
That's a trend that started with the overhead projector, if not the blackboard. At least with a blackboard, people tend to restrict themselves to just writing out equations, drawing diagrams, and the like, as its so much harder to have the entire speech/lecture/whatever written out on it ahead of time.
Back when I was doing my Physics degree, one of the experiments in first year lab was on superconductivity. For this, we used liquid nitrogen to cool a ceramic (iirc) down enough to get it superconducting; I don't recall having any particular safety equipment. In fact, I have seen with my own eyes people dipping their fingers in to liquid nitrogen for long enough to flick some out of the container, with no ill effects. (Other than a bit of an ear-bashing from the lab staff)
For that matter, a lecturer once threw some liquid nitrogen on to the floor just in front of a particularly annoyingly nerdy student (whose reply was, comically, a snort and "Good job that wasn't super-cooled liquid helium!"...)
You're confusing "core team" with "bunch of unreasonable, immature idiots who happen to control commit rights to CVS".
If a project has no core team, and literally anyone can get commit access to CVS/whatever VCS they use, then the project is wide open to abuse. There would be nothing to stop people from submitting broken code, code with backdoors/intentional exploits, or even IP-infringing code to the project.
Even if it's just a case of those with commit access vetting people's patches and additions until they've proved themselves worthy of commit access, that's still a "core team".
Look at Windows, it's never been supported and that doesn't seem to stop anyone from continuing to use it.
Bull. If you buy Windows retail, you get 90 days (iirc) of free technical support from MS (limited to some set number of incidents, of course). If you get it with a system, your OEM is supposed to support you - most do, in my experience, for a similar amount of time. MS also offer paid-for support, of course, if you're so inclined.
I'd suspect that the fact that you're an American has something to do with why you were taught about it in your stats class.
I'm from the UK, and have had a fairly extensive mathematical training, including dedicated theoretical statistics classes. This was never even mentioned.
It's hardly surprising, though - there are plenty of ways of addressing the topic, why choose one poll from (then) 45 years ago that took place in another country, when there are other, more recent examples to use?
That's pretty much the way we work - we never rely on the client having javascript enabled, as that could potentially prevent some people from using the site. We don't have a specific "development mode", but on any normal project the back-end code and HTML development are done by different people.
Basically, we have interface developers who take the Photoshop images that the designers/art directors produce, and use them as a blueprint to create the HTML pages. They also produce any javascript that we do use. Meanwhile, we (programmers) are developing the back end code, using "white page" pages - ie plain HTML pages with little or no design. We don't generally waste time putting length restrictions on input boxes in our forms, as we'd only have to do it again when integrating our stuff with the final pages.
On the other hand, we do 90%+ of our work in Java these days, so bounds checking is less of a problem. You still have to check stuff before inserting it into a db record, of course, but that's to prevent exceptions, rather than improve security.
Round here, we call that a "programmer's 90%" - meaning that it mostly works, perhaps lacks one or two required features, has barely been tested (if at all), still needs to be integrated with the front-end, have error checking added, be documented/commented, etc.
The 10% remaining is the boring, tidying up and finishing off stuff that takes 90% of the time...
Take advantage of things like... ext box constraints to make it hard for users to enter bad data
That's good and necessary advice, but it's not sufficient, depending on your environment. If you're programming for the web, then you absolutely cannot rely on such things. Of course you should always set such constraints in the HTML where possible, but you *still* have to validate the inputs fully in your code.
In case the reason why isn't obvious, it's because URLs are very easy to hand craft. There's no way you can stop me from sending 500 chars of data as the value of a field that you thought you'd constrained to be 10 chars. Even if you treat POST and GET differently, I can just whip up a little app to do POSTs for me if I'm so inclined.
Front-end constraints and sanity checking (eg javascript that checks to make sure that all required fields have a value before submitting the form) are an invaluable part of the user experience, but they're no substitute for securely written code. The two things serve entirely different purposes.
More generally speaking, you should santiy-check all input data, at all stages in the code.
After all, homosexual marriages do not contribute to the population (and thus to the economy)
An interesting stance. I have a young daughter. My girlfriend (we're not married) gave up work towards the end of her pregnancy to look after her.
Since that time, four years ago, she's been contributing less to the economy in terms of taxes, work done, etc than she would have been had she not given up work. (She has had part time jobs, but nothing like a full-time career)
She wants to go back to work once our daughter is in full-time education, but that's not going to happen for at least another year, possibly more. meanwhile, our daughter won't be contributing to the economy for another 12 years at least.
On the other hand, gay and lesbian couples, as you so insightfully point out, can't ahve children naturally, and have an extremely hard time adopting. That leaves both members free to work, contribute to the economy and pay lots of taxes.
So, if your reasons are purely economic, you really ought to be in favour of same-sex marriages.
Iirc, that required a forced reboot of the machine, so it wasn't entirely stealthy. I admit, though, that the majority of Win9x users would probably not notice anything unusual in a sudden reboot;-)
Chalk me up too. I'm currently in the market for some sort of personal audio device, and would *love* an iPod, but can't possibly justify that sort of expense. (Life gets expensive with a house, car, family to support...)
A cheap, lower-capacity model would be perfect. I don't need 10 or 20 gigs of storage - I only have about 5 gigs of mp3s as it is. Sure, the extra space would be nice, but I'd be happy enough with deleting/uploading some music every fews days or so if it means the difference between affordable and out of my price range.
Hint to moderators: it's not insightful the 10,000th time.
You can say that about almost any comment attached to a story about Linux, Windows, the RIAA or MPAA, the DMCA, closed source or open source, though - all those discussions tend to go round and round in circles, producing very, very little in the way of new insights.
Besides, calm down - it's now sat at +3, with a couple of "Overrated" moderations. Looks like the "equal airtime" is being reduced...
But that's pretty-much exactly what it *is* like here, for certain topics.
Stuff like general tech and science is okay, but as soon as a discussion starts up on the relative merits of Windows and Linux, or closed source and open, you might as well save your bandwidth. Neither side is going to convince the other, and all you get are the same tired old arguments being used by both parties.
That's just life, though. Once a person has convinced themself of something, it generally takes a hell of a lot to change their mind.
Hold on their cowboy. Intel has nothing to gain by shutting out other OSes - they'll lose market share in the server space if nothing else, where Linux is popular and growing in popularity everyday.
MS has a much more clear-cut reason to try something like that, but think about it - if they don't try it, and create something that is usable by anyone, then they have something to point at. "Look! See! We're not being anti-competitive! We could have locked you all out for good, but we didn't!" Actually trying to lock out competing OSes would be an extremely dangerous move, imho.
Yes, I remember the P3's CPU ID. I remember turning it off in the BIOS on first boot of my (then) brand new P3 700, and I remember it staying off and having absolutely no effect on me at all.
I also remember not reading about any invasions of privacy involving the CPU ID. To be honest, I'm surprised that you mentioned it, given that nothing much really came of it. Sure, perhaps they had designs on something nefarious or underhand - but it came to nothing. That may well be a good indication of what will happen if they try anything similar this time round...
Slashdot Mirror
Stop biting - he's intentionally talking at cross purposes to you.
JVM has a 64K limit on class size
Rubbish. I've just had a quick look at the class files that were generated from a couple of JSPs I wrote on Tuesday - 67KB, 83KB and 86KB. They're all "ordinary" JSP files using our inhouse tag library.
As soon as you introduce an IDE kiss scalability GOODBYE!
Yes, because a syntax-aware editor and one-step project compilation will simply *kill* scalability...
I agree with some of your points - the random capitalisation is extremely odd, for one thing. I do think that "local Physics" has a meaning - Physics on a "local" scale, rather than a cosmological or quantum one.
One of the founding assumptions in Physics is that the laws of Physics are the same everywhere. We have no proof that that is the case, though, so sometimes it is necessary to specifically talk about Physics in our domain, ie locally.
The main, lead programmer, who is typcially the copyright holder
Often not - if it's a commercial piece of software, then the company will be copyright holder.
Licensing programmers will tend to accentuate the blame attacks when bugs are found, and will provide incentive to hide them.
Agreed. A licencing scheme is all but meaningless if, once a licence is obtained, it cannot be lost. Therefore, it will be in a licensed programmer's bset interests to hide any such bugs, for fear of losing their licence.
No program is bug-free. No committee of Licensed Gurus can eyeball scan a progran and find all its bugs.
Again, agreed. Writing bug-free, non-trivial code is, imho, impossible in any realistic situation. The best one can hope to do is minimise the nmber of bugs, and fix the rest quickly.
Here's one mistake that I noticed, in the "Microsoft To-Do List" section:
56 Enable automatic file encryption We've heard the promises for years. But even Apple offers this already - what's the holdup?
That's been available since at least Win2K - select a folder, right click, Properties, Advanced, "Encrypt contents to secure data", answer the questions. Select the correct options, and all files moved to/created in that directory will be automatically encrypted. Perhaps that's not simple enough for them, but it's there, and it works.
Some of the other points, there and elsewhere, are similarly wrong, or just plain nonsensical.
but 95% of the time it seems that the "speaker" simply reads thier slides to the audience
That's a trend that started with the overhead projector, if not the blackboard. At least with a blackboard, people tend to restrict themselves to just writing out equations, drawing diagrams, and the like, as its so much harder to have the entire speech/lecture/whatever written out on it ahead of time.
I think it will help spread the word
Spreading Word is the last thing it'll do...
Indeed.
Back when I was doing my Physics degree, one of the experiments in first year lab was on superconductivity. For this, we used liquid nitrogen to cool a ceramic (iirc) down enough to get it superconducting; I don't recall having any particular safety equipment. In fact, I have seen with my own eyes people dipping their fingers in to liquid nitrogen for long enough to flick some out of the container, with no ill effects. (Other than a bit of an ear-bashing from the lab staff)
For that matter, a lecturer once threw some liquid nitrogen on to the floor just in front of a particularly annoyingly nerdy student (whose reply was, comically, a snort and "Good job that wasn't super-cooled liquid helium!"...)
There is nothing in it about the future of X86, which would be mine and many others big concern.
Don't worry - Intel, AMD, etc have far too much money invested in x86 to kill it off anytime soon
You're confusing "core team" with "bunch of unreasonable, immature idiots who happen to control commit rights to CVS".
If a project has no core team, and literally anyone can get commit access to CVS/whatever VCS they use, then the project is wide open to abuse. There would be nothing to stop people from submitting broken code, code with backdoors/intentional exploits, or even IP-infringing code to the project.
Even if it's just a case of those with commit access vetting people's patches and additions until they've proved themselves worthy of commit access, that's still a "core team".
I'd rather that, hopefully giving me time to get my phone out of my pocket or laptop off my lap with only minor scarring, than an actual explosion...
Look at Windows, it's never been supported and that doesn't seem to stop anyone from continuing to use it.
Bull. If you buy Windows retail, you get 90 days (iirc) of free technical support from MS (limited to some set number of incidents, of course). If you get it with a system, your OEM is supposed to support you - most do, in my experience, for a similar amount of time. MS also offer paid-for support, of course, if you're so inclined.
I'd suspect that the fact that you're an American has something to do with why you were taught about it in your stats class.
I'm from the UK, and have had a fairly extensive mathematical training, including dedicated theoretical statistics classes. This was never even mentioned.
It's hardly surprising, though - there are plenty of ways of addressing the topic, why choose one poll from (then) 45 years ago that took place in another country, when there are other, more recent examples to use?
That's pretty much the way we work - we never rely on the client having javascript enabled, as that could potentially prevent some people from using the site. We don't have a specific "development mode", but on any normal project the back-end code and HTML development are done by different people.
Basically, we have interface developers who take the Photoshop images that the designers/art directors produce, and use them as a blueprint to create the HTML pages. They also produce any javascript that we do use. Meanwhile, we (programmers) are developing the back end code, using "white page" pages - ie plain HTML pages with little or no design. We don't generally waste time putting length restrictions on input boxes in our forms, as we'd only have to do it again when integrating our stuff with the final pages.
On the other hand, we do 90%+ of our work in Java these days, so bounds checking is less of a problem. You still have to check stuff before inserting it into a db record, of course, but that's to prevent exceptions, rather than improve security.
Round here, we call that a "programmer's 90%" - meaning that it mostly works, perhaps lacks one or two required features, has barely been tested (if at all), still needs to be integrated with the front-end, have error checking added, be documented/commented, etc.
The 10% remaining is the boring, tidying up and finishing off stuff that takes 90% of the time...
The spammers cost society more money than the US national debt -- every year.
I'm sorry, but you're really going to have to provide some hard figures to back up that claim.
Take advantage of things like... ext box constraints to make it hard for users to enter bad data
That's good and necessary advice, but it's not sufficient, depending on your environment. If you're programming for the web, then you absolutely cannot rely on such things. Of course you should always set such constraints in the HTML where possible, but you *still* have to validate the inputs fully in your code.
In case the reason why isn't obvious, it's because URLs are very easy to hand craft. There's no way you can stop me from sending 500 chars of data as the value of a field that you thought you'd constrained to be 10 chars. Even if you treat POST and GET differently, I can just whip up a little app to do POSTs for me if I'm so inclined.
Front-end constraints and sanity checking (eg javascript that checks to make sure that all required fields have a value before submitting the form) are an invaluable part of the user experience, but they're no substitute for securely written code. The two things serve entirely different purposes.
More generally speaking, you should santiy-check all input data, at all stages in the code.
After all, homosexual marriages do not contribute to the population (and thus to the economy)
An interesting stance. I have a young daughter. My girlfriend (we're not married) gave up work towards the end of her pregnancy to look after her.
Since that time, four years ago, she's been contributing less to the economy in terms of taxes, work done, etc than she would have been had she not given up work. (She has had part time jobs, but nothing like a full-time career)
She wants to go back to work once our daughter is in full-time education, but that's not going to happen for at least another year, possibly more. meanwhile, our daughter won't be contributing to the economy for another 12 years at least.
On the other hand, gay and lesbian couples, as you so insightfully point out, can't ahve children naturally, and have an extremely hard time adopting. That leaves both members free to work, contribute to the economy and pay lots of taxes.
So, if your reasons are purely economic, you really ought to be in favour of same-sex marriages.
Iirc, that required a forced reboot of the machine, so it wasn't entirely stealthy. I admit, though, that the majority of Win9x users would probably not notice anything unusual in a sudden reboot ;-)
Chalk me up too. I'm currently in the market for some sort of personal audio device, and would *love* an iPod, but can't possibly justify that sort of expense. (Life gets expensive with a house, car, family to support...)
A cheap, lower-capacity model would be perfect. I don't need 10 or 20 gigs of storage - I only have about 5 gigs of mp3s as it is. Sure, the extra space would be nice, but I'd be happy enough with deleting/uploading some music every fews days or so if it means the difference between affordable and out of my price range.
Hint to moderators: it's not insightful the 10,000th time.
You can say that about almost any comment attached to a story about Linux, Windows, the RIAA or MPAA, the DMCA, closed source or open source, though - all those discussions tend to go round and round in circles, producing very, very little in the way of new insights.
Besides, calm down - it's now sat at +3, with a couple of "Overrated" moderations. Looks like the "equal airtime" is being reduced...
But that's pretty-much exactly what it *is* like here, for certain topics.
Stuff like general tech and science is okay, but as soon as a discussion starts up on the relative merits of Windows and Linux, or closed source and open, you might as well save your bandwidth. Neither side is going to convince the other, and all you get are the same tired old arguments being used by both parties.
That's just life, though. Once a person has convinced themself of something, it generally takes a hell of a lot to change their mind.
Hold on their cowboy. Intel has nothing to gain by shutting out other OSes - they'll lose market share in the server space if nothing else, where Linux is popular and growing in popularity everyday.
MS has a much more clear-cut reason to try something like that, but think about it - if they don't try it, and create something that is usable by anyone, then they have something to point at. "Look! See! We're not being anti-competitive! We could have locked you all out for good, but we didn't!" Actually trying to lock out competing OSes would be an extremely dangerous move, imho.
But why must it be that it is Microsoft and Intel that are working on the new progress?
R&D, especially into relatively new areas like this (rather than your core products) costs money, money that you many not see any return on.
MS and Intel, respectively, are pretty-much the richest players in their respective fields. Who else would you expect to see do it?
remember the P4 CPU ID?
Yes, I remember the P3's CPU ID. I remember turning it off in the BIOS on first boot of my (then) brand new P3 700, and I remember it staying off and having absolutely no effect on me at all.
I also remember not reading about any invasions of privacy involving the CPU ID. To be honest, I'm surprised that you mentioned it, given that nothing much really came of it. Sure, perhaps they had designs on something nefarious or underhand - but it came to nothing. That may well be a good indication of what will happen if they try anything similar this time round...