My biggest complaint with the book was its lack of detail about the setup of an actual Java Spaces environment. I understand that even with the (sorta) WORO Java that steup of a Space differs between platforms, but there's enough similarities between installations that some directions would've been helpful -- especially things like property setups.
Furthermore, I understand that the book is more about the API in general than in Sun's first implementation of said API, but what good is making the source for your examples available online if you're not going to provide sufficient information to get a space up.
Maybe I'd be less bitchy if I hadn't spent 10 hours pawing through java spaces mailing list archives to find the arcane properties necessary for setup, but a little help from the author (who udoubtably knew the sad state of Sun's installation instructions) would've been a huge help.
That said I found the notion of space based distributed systems very interesting and have since gone on to look at T-spaces and other predecessors as well. --
Grrrr. It's not bad Java on that page, it's bad JavaScript and they have nothing to do with each other. JavaScript predates Java and was called LiveScript until it was renamed to capitalize on Sun's over-hyping of Java. As it gets standardized it's getting called Ecma script and I for one will be glad to be rid of the confusion.
KDE/Gnome and X in general do a lot for bringing new users to Linux, but its difficult to migrate new users towards the command line.
I often wonder what effect there will be on hackerdom that the last sub-generation to see text-based computing before they saw graphical computing is no longer the yougest. I recall my first pascal programs being exciting because the marquee wordprocessor of the time (word star) didn't look any different than the text based stuff I was writing.
Hello world used all the display sophistication that the best consumer apps did. Now hello world looks to be a shadow of an app compared to the amazing graphics in today's apps. It seems young hackers have two options: 1) Spend their first 2 years writing apps that look lame in comparison to the apps they use 2) Use GUI builder tools and never understand what's really going on. --
JINI is a nice distributed entity architecture with good automatic discovery of new and local system memebers, but it's little more than a communications frame work and not the "X and Y will work together automatically" system that Sun's PR machine hyped it as. It's also got a particularly virulent license which has really hurt its adoption even within the not terribly pro-open source Java community. --
Slashdot has always had product announcements
on
Pilot Synthesis
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot has had product announcements since it was chip and dips. Granted then it was linking to them on other sites, but just because the submissions are coming straight to slashdot instead of to ZDNet doesn't mean that announcements of tech the editors find interesting is shilling or off topic.
What's more, unless the company was disparaging their own batter life it sounds like this was an acutal reader submission instead of a press release.
The whole font size situation could be greatly improved if more web designers would use relative fonts. Whether in CSS or font tags size="-2" can make the world a much nicer place. The css definitions on http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html use 12px and 10px values which just aren't portable enough. If they were relative I'd be able to have my default font set to whatever size I find happily viewable and the page designer could make his text "slightly smaller".
A code doesn't have anything to do with what the units are, they're just frequently words. A code is a code when you've got a big mapping instead of an algorith you apply.
With the mapping:
bird = bomb cat = house
The phrase:
put the bird in the house
has been encoded rather than enciphered, but the difference lies in the fact that the key is a pattern less mapping instead of a system that's applied.
If you took a sentence, and replaced each word with its antonym you'd have a subsititution cipher rather than a code, even those your units are words.
A mono-alphabetic substibution cipher w/ a "patternless" mapping (ex: not shift, etc.) is both code and cipher.
Java on web pages was a stupid, stupid idea. Java as a non-GUI, server side solution is a viable idea. Just because org.lame.StupidApplet is slow in your browser is no reason to count out a nice language.
Why does everyone feel the need to tell me that? The phrasing commonly (and incorrectly) attributed to Churchill was a little different. The phrasing I use came from the movie _Swimming with Sharks_ with Kevin Spacey.
The now defunct churchill.org web site had an excellent list of quotes often and commonly mis-attributed to Churchill, and the one I use was on that list. They pointed out that Churchill was conservative when he was 12 and liberal when he was 30.
Last year (after Columbine) they deleted (without warning) every gun related web site that they had been hosting for their customers. After they deleted their user's gun related sites they sent the owners of these sites form mail saying their site had been deleted for pornographic content and that putting any more porn on AOLs server would result in the revocation of their membership.
It will be very interesting to see how (if at all) this development is addressed at the QNX Conference 2000 in May (14-17). It would be great in a Vancouver Open Crypto advocate could hand out some flyers letting those in attendence who hadn't heard know about the crack.
Just last week I was trying to remember what crappy cartoon of my youth had the imagination capturing WAVE MOTION GUN. It could take out a whole fleet in a single blast -- but only infrequently and after the 'big things are happening' music had been playing for at least five minutes.
You can set up the server yourself. The gimp has allowed no-UI calls for a long time. http://www.cooltext.com has made the gimp renderer available online for quite a while.
I remember someone was using GIMPs unattended filter application features to make it look as if the moving objects in his web cam were on fire.
Stick with java in a nutshell by O'Reilly. If it's examples youw ant download a lot of Java code. Nutshell is an excellent teaching book and a wonderful reference. What's best is that when you're done using it for the first purpose you'll know it already for the second. We've got a lot of Java folks where I work and all the best learned from O'Reilly.
Microsoft pays a fleet (school?) of laywers a great deal of money to make sure that their contracts are valid in the jurisdictions where they are offered. Ensuring that a hole like this doesn't happen is the job of those lawyers and the nature of contracts.
Now he lawyers messed up and the company looses some money. Next time the company will be more careful and will hire betters laywers. Business is one of that truely Darwinian environments -- Businesses that do poor business go out of business.
While the Libertarian party continues to prop up scary candidates, the platform of the party is sound -- freedom. They're the only party that hits the positions I like on just about every major issue:
Pro-internet freedom Pro-reproductive freedom Pro-gun rights Anti-Censorship Pro-religious freedom
Besides, ESR is a big libertarian supporter, and he can do almost no wrong.:)
Supposedly NASA document 14-307-1792 has findings
on
Sex in Space
·
· Score: 2
Supposedly NASA Document 14-307-1792 has documents from a shuttle mission where tests were made. It's probably a hoax, but if it is the person had beuracrat speak down pat. --
The airfoce doesn't let pilots have the surgury because pilots pull many Gs of acceleration. Unless you're car does 0 to 60 in 0.5s don't let the Air Force's opinion affect yours.
I also read (I'm sorry, "READ") the article and the software does not use the process you describe. I agree, that the methodology you detail (comparing the students answers with the answers of other people who have proved to be violent) can be a valid system. However, in this case the inputs are not answers to questions asked a student, but estimations by administrators about various risk factors.
For example, in the article, this sample question is given:
"A variety of concerns beyond alarming talk or behavior will be included, from the availability of guns to a youngster's abuse of dogs and cats."
With these for possible answers:
"The questions allow a range of answers, from a student who has 'no known gun possession,' for example, to one who has 'friends with gun access.'"
Those aren't the possibly relevent student answers, those are estimations of subjective risk factors which were drawn from a sample size too small for any relevent data to have been extracted.
I find this passage particularly amusing:
"It says, 'Look, we've gone back and spoken to X number of people who have committed these crimes, and these are the risk factors we feel are present in their lives.' It collects these risk factors based on actual cases and organizes them in a way so we can have a consistent approach."
I wonder what counts as a "similar case"? Given that school violence is extremely rare (you're more likely to be a victim at home, the office, or just about anywhere else). I can't imagine that "X" is very large at all.
I agree, that people on/. attack articles w/o reading them far too often, but supporting them by making up details is no better a policy.
Two weeks ago on NPR there was an interview with the person running the system and a few college admissions persons. The concensus among the colleges was that no reputable college would subscribe to the service. The person running the reverse auction was unable to name a college more reputable than 'Joe's University of Nuclear Fizix and Lawn Mower Repair' that had expressed interest in signing up.
Slashdot Mirror
My biggest complaint with the book was its lack of detail about the setup of an actual Java Spaces environment. I understand that even with the (sorta) WORO Java that steup of a Space differs between platforms, but there's enough similarities between installations that some directions would've been helpful -- especially things like property setups.
Furthermore, I understand that the book is more about the API in general than in Sun's first implementation of said API, but what good is making the source for your examples available online if you're not going to provide sufficient information to get a space up.
Maybe I'd be less bitchy if I hadn't spent 10 hours pawing through java spaces mailing list archives to find the arcane properties necessary for setup, but a little help from the author (who udoubtably knew the sad state of Sun's installation instructions) would've been a huge help.
That said I found the notion of space based distributed systems very interesting and have since gone on to look at T-spaces and other predecessors as well.
--
Grrrr. It's not bad Java on that page, it's bad JavaScript and they have nothing to do with each other. JavaScript predates Java and was called LiveScript until it was renamed to capitalize on Sun's over-hyping of Java. As it gets standardized it's getting called Ecma script and I for one will be glad to be rid of the confusion.
Moderate this offtopic, please.
--
KDE/Gnome and X in general do a lot for bringing new users to Linux, but its difficult to migrate new users towards the command line.
I often wonder what effect there will be on hackerdom that the last sub-generation to see text-based computing before they saw graphical computing is no longer the yougest. I recall my first pascal programs being exciting because the marquee wordprocessor of the time (word star) didn't look any different than the text based stuff I was writing.
Hello world used all the display sophistication that the best consumer apps did. Now hello world looks to be a shadow of an app compared to the amazing graphics in today's apps. It seems young hackers have two options:
1) Spend their first 2 years writing apps that look lame in comparison to the apps they use
2) Use GUI builder tools and never understand what's really going on.
--
JINI is a nice distributed entity architecture with good automatic discovery of new and local system memebers, but it's little more than a communications frame work and not the "X and Y will work together automatically" system that Sun's PR machine hyped it as. It's also got a particularly virulent license which has really hurt its adoption even within the not terribly pro-open source Java community.
--
Slashdot has had product announcements since it was chip and dips. Granted then it was linking to them on other sites, but just because the submissions are coming straight to slashdot instead of to ZDNet doesn't mean that announcements of tech the editors find interesting is shilling or off topic.
What's more, unless the company was disparaging their own batter life it sounds like this was an acutal reader submission instead of a press release.
In summary: shut up.
-1 off-topic
--
The whole font size situation could be greatly improved if more web designers would use relative fonts. Whether in CSS or font tags size="-2" can make the world a much nicer place. The css definitions on http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html use 12px and 10px values which just aren't portable enough. If they were relative I'd be able to have my default font set to whatever size I find happily viewable and the page designer could make his text "slightly smaller".
A code doesn't have anything to do with what the units are, they're just frequently words. A code is a code when you've got a big mapping instead of an algorith you apply.
With the mapping:
bird = bomb
cat = house
The phrase:
put the bird in the house
has been encoded rather than enciphered, but the difference lies in the fact that the key is a pattern less mapping instead of a system that's applied.
If you took a sentence, and replaced each word with its antonym you'd have a subsititution cipher rather than a code, even those your units are words.
A mono-alphabetic substibution cipher w/ a "patternless" mapping (ex: not shift, etc.) is both code and cipher.
Java on web pages was a stupid, stupid idea. Java as a non-GUI, server side solution is a viable idea. Just because org.lame.StupidApplet is slow in your browser is no reason to count out a nice language.
Why does everyone feel the need to tell me that? The phrasing commonly (and incorrectly) attributed to Churchill was a little different. The phrasing I use came from the movie _Swimming with Sharks_ with Kevin Spacey.
The now defunct churchill.org web site had an excellent list of quotes often and commonly mis-attributed to Churchill, and the one I use was on that list. They pointed out that Churchill was conservative when he was 12 and liberal when he was 30.
Last year (after Columbine) they deleted (without warning) every gun related web site that they had been hosting for their customers. After they deleted their user's gun related sites they sent the owners of these sites form mail saying their site had been deleted for pornographic content and that putting any more porn on AOLs server would result in the revocation of their membership.
It will be very interesting to see how (if at all) this development is addressed at the QNX Conference 2000 in May (14-17). It would be great in a Vancouver Open Crypto advocate could hand out some flyers letting those in attendence who hadn't heard know about the crack.
Slashdot has always had a healthy mix of tech news and connected quirk. If it loses its sense of humor, it'll just be ZDNet (without the evil).
Just last week I was trying to remember what crappy cartoon of my youth had the imagination capturing WAVE MOTION GUN. It could take out a whole fleet in a single blast -- but only infrequently and after the 'big things are happening' music had been playing for at least five minutes.
I remember someone was using GIMPs unattended filter application features to make it look as if the moving objects in his web cam were on fire.
Or use URLs that have wacky characters in them that change
t ml
http://wherever.com/s7dhf67sdfjkdf76/dir/page.h
For an acronym to be recursive it has to refer back to itself -- not just have itself as its first word. More specifically it will need a verb.
'Pine IS not elm' requires one to see the acronym to understand all the words.
CAVE just has the acronym as its first word, but it doesn't refer to itself, so it's not recurives.
I'm a dork.
Isn't he the same guy that watched his corp go down the toilet? Java in the web browser is over (thank god!), but java on the client has yet to peak.
Stick with java in a nutshell by O'Reilly. If it's examples youw ant download a lot of Java code. Nutshell is an excellent teaching book and a wonderful reference. What's best is that when you're done using it for the first purpose you'll know it already for the second. We've got a lot of Java folks where I work and all the best learned from O'Reilly.
Microsoft pays a fleet (school?) of laywers a great deal of money to make sure that their contracts are valid in the jurisdictions where they are offered. Ensuring that a hole like this doesn't happen is the job of those lawyers and the nature of contracts.
Now he lawyers messed up and the company looses some money. Next time the company will be more careful and will hire betters laywers. Business is one of that truely Darwinian environments -- Businesses that do poor business go out of business.
Acutally they're expected to GPL the Java 2 Standard edition in January.
While the Libertarian party continues to prop up scary candidates, the platform of the party is sound -- freedom. They're the only party that hits the positions I like on just about every major issue:
:)
Pro-internet freedom
Pro-reproductive freedom
Pro-gun rights
Anti-Censorship
Pro-religious freedom
Besides, ESR is a big libertarian supporter, and he can do almost no wrong.
http://www.lp.org
--
Supposedly NASA Document 14-307-1792 has documents from a shuttle mission where tests were made. It's probably a hoax, but if it is the person had beuracrat speak down pat.
--
The airfoce doesn't let pilots have the surgury because pilots pull many Gs of acceleration. Unless you're car does 0 to 60 in 0.5s don't let the Air Force's opinion affect yours.
I also read (I'm sorry, "READ") the article and the software does not use the process you describe. I agree, that the methodology you detail (comparing the students answers with the answers of other people who have proved to be violent) can be a valid system. However, in this case the inputs are not answers to questions asked a student, but estimations by administrators about various risk factors.
/. attack articles w/o reading them far too often, but supporting them by making up details is no better a policy.
For example, in the article, this sample question is given:
"A variety of concerns beyond alarming talk or behavior will be included, from the availability of guns to a youngster's abuse of dogs and cats."
With these for possible answers:
"The questions allow a range of answers, from a student who has 'no known gun possession,' for example, to one who has 'friends with gun access.'"
Those aren't the possibly relevent student answers, those are estimations of subjective risk factors which were drawn from a sample size too small for any relevent data to have been extracted.
I find this passage particularly amusing:
"It says, 'Look, we've gone back and spoken to X number of people who have committed these crimes, and these are the risk factors we feel are present in their lives.' It collects these risk factors based on actual cases and organizes them in a way so we can have a consistent approach."
I wonder what counts as a "similar case"? Given that school violence is extremely rare (you're more likely to be a victim at home, the office, or just about anywhere else). I can't imagine that "X" is very large at all.
I agree, that people on
Two weeks ago on NPR there was an interview with the person running the system and a few college admissions persons. The concensus among the colleges was that no reputable college would subscribe to the service. The person running the reverse auction was unable to name a college more reputable than 'Joe's University of Nuclear Fizix and Lawn Mower Repair' that had expressed interest in signing up.