Your disclaimer is relevant, since you never got to experience most of Sun's big mistakes. Some of them will never go away, like the fact that some of the original library writers didn't understand the difference between byte streams and character streams. But all in all Java has a certain maturity it lacked when Sun was overselling it as the solution to all our problems.
But that's not why Java is in no danger of dying. Like any other software technology, programming languages are subject to lockin, that combination of cultural habits and legacy installations that keeps software around long after it's. Languages seem to be more subject to lockin than other technologies: unless it's a total failure right out of the gate, it soon develops a culture that maintains it, and a big body of software that must be maintained, and is too expensive to rewrite in a more modern language.
Consider FORTRAN. It was the very first high-level language (1953) and is full of design mistakes that reflect a total ignorance of artificial linguistics and compiler design theory by its inventors. (Not the designers' fault, these fields hadn't been invented yet.) And yet it remains the language for heavy-duty numerical processing. A lot of hard science and engineering grad schools rebel when told to learn it, but learn it they do.
Ironic story: I was working for Sun's Java org in 1998, when a corporate reshuffle caused our group to be given responsibility for maintaining Sun's FORTRAN compiler. Everybody's response was: What? Why the heck do we even have a FORTRAN compiler? Answer, the people who buy high-end computers for science and engineering won't even look at your platform if it doesn't have a FORTRAN compiler.
So Java (and FORTAN) will live forever. And centuries from now, newbie programmers will be wondering about those weird classes that are used to handle standard input and output.
The suggestion that Fish has no technical expertise is based on what exactly? As a senior executive at a major company I expect him to be familiar with lots of technical issues with regard to the internet. Projection, projection, projection. I never said or implied he had no technical expertise. But he certainly has less than Obama's guy. Just as Obama's guy doesn't have a law degree or experience running a big corporation.
If you apply for a job, and they ask you if you've ever cleaned pools, it's reasonable to assume that pool cleaning is a priority with your potential boss. It's not an implication that you're a bad carpenter.
PS. now sure where the Limbaugh comment came out of. Frankly, I don't really care. While I don't believe that every supporter of Obama is a fuzzy-headed liberal, I can assure you that being a Republican does not mean you're a bigot, a racist, or a religeous nut. It might be hard to accept that, but it's still true. The Limbaugh comment is my response to your assumptions about me. I don't think I've said anything that implies that I despise all Republicans. You, on the other hand, are quick to assume that I have a pathological hatred of same. And that assumption is pretty Limbaughistic.
In point of fact, I rather admire John McCain. He's shown courage, principle, and loyalty. Said loyalty includes personal friends of his who, politically speaking, are his enemies. I certainly wouldn't mind knowing the guy, but I'd never ever vote for him.
Yes, that's a good answer to the question "how can the vendor best serve the customer?" But that's not the question the guy asked. Which was basically, "how can I tell the customer to fuck off without seeming rude?"
Consider the irony of your comments. "Just say no", was NR's contribution to the War on Drugs, which was a disaster in the 80s, and is even more of a disaster now. And the sheer arrogance represented by the "Just say no" is a big reason why.
Arrogance seems to work in politics (well, these days, not so much), but when you're in business, being arrogant towards your customers is not a good way to grow your business.
The worst thing you can do with your first "no" is provide a reason. Then they will focus on this reason until they find a chink in your armor, and you'll come up with another reason and they'll get angry.
First, just say "no". Only if they demand an answer, And precisely why would they not demand an answer? Do you really expect the customer to say, "Oh well, he must know what he's doing, never mind." Nobody responds that way to a blank refusal, this side of Stalinist Russia. All you've done is antagonized the customer, and you still have to provide the explanation.
If you think it's an imposition to explain why you're imposing a policy on somebody, then maybe you need to be forced to come up with an explanation. If your policies don't stand up under critical examination, they need to change.
How can we help him flesh out his argument when he hasn't got one? "His intuition" is not an argument, and it's not at all obvious why giving somebody read-only access to a database is going to cause problems.
Your interpretation is a reasonable one, but I don't buy it. The sad fact is, the lady is a lousy politician. Remember the "baking cupcakes" remark? Remember the way she scuttled her own health care plan. (A plan that was actually pretty good.) Not to mention her gaffs about Bosnia and Robert Kennedy.
(If she's a lousy politician, how'd she get into the Senate? Well, she's smart, she knows how to play the Old Boys Club game, and she came into politics already well-connected. That sort of balances her low political skills for a state election.)
Looking at my own gut feelings, I see a lady who's decided she'd do a better job of running the government than Obama. (She's probably right, though that's not quite the same as being a better President.) She sees the fact that she got almost as many popular votes as Obama, and that she's a lot more experienced than him, and she's a stronger opponent against McCain. To someone like her, that enough. She should win, therefore she will win.
If she were jockeying for position, she'd have quit already. A lot of the Demo leadership think she's screwing things up for the general election. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I'm not one of the key decision makers who gets to decide if anybody will back her for her next run. She's deaf to them, as she's been deaf to so many other power groups over the years.
I'm not interpreting anything. I'm restating your argument in simpler terms. You say my restatement is a distortion, but you don't say why. Repeating yourself doesn't make the point, it just shows off your ability to hide behind pretentious language.
It's certainly true that corporate America has way too much influence over both candidates. But leapingfrom that to "there's no difference between themn" is a familiar cop-out. We heard the same thing in 2000, and please don't try to me that the last 8 years wouldn't have been a lot different if the election had gone the other way.
In fact, don't try to tell anybody, not unless you enjoy being laughed at.
Bigoted? What are you running for public office such that you find it necessary to use such foul adverbs? My comment had little to do with teacher's and their [in]ability to perform their jobs, and was merely pointing out a cliche for the fact that there are a number of individuals that spend time in various roles in universities to avoid performing services in the private sector. Why did I mention this? Because university environments tend to have vastly different standards of performance then the private sector. So, basically you're saying that if you work at a University, your "standards of performance" must suck, even if that University is MIT. Sounds pretty bigoted to me.
I'm amused that you think that "standards of performance" in the private sector are better. If you've opened a newspaper in the last 3 months, you know better. But of course, we all know that the Marketplace Weeds Out Bad Performers, so I guess that must be wrong.
It's bad enough when people mix their metaphors, but you're mixing your cliches. Neither spokesman is a "messenger" in the sense you mean. Neither is reading a script; each is considered by his boss to be an expert on technology. So it makes perfect sense to consider why they're considered experts.
The circle of people they attract? Please, these are their techno advisors, not somebody randomly chosen from their followers.
Far from projecting, I'm assuming that both candidates acted like reasonably intelligent bosses, and picked their advisers on the basis of previous experience. It's the experience that's considered relevant that's telling. McCain went by business experience and ignored a total lack of technical expertise. Which isn't exactly unprecedented when you consider the recent history of his party.
I'll tell you who's projecting. It's the guy who thinks that anybody critical of McCain is a fuzzy-headed liberal suffering from all the cognitive disorders so aptly described by the esteemed Dr. Limbaugh.
But guess what? The electorate pretty sick of that kind of bigotry. Which is precisely why this has been Obama's year, and probably will continue to be so through November.
That headline was written before anybody actually voted. Most Demo primaries have taken place, and the ones that are left are very very unlikely to change the result.
You should ask yourself why the other parties can't get any air time. I'm sure you think you know: there's an evil conspiracy to silence them. But the fact is that the media conglomerates only care about one thing: eyeballs. They'll give even their nastiest detractors exposure if it will bring in more viewers, readers, and listeners.
The simple fact is that Libbies and Greenies have no following in this country, even counting all the Ron Paul fanboys. (Note that the Green Party does quite well in Europe, even though they also have an overconsolidated media.) Put one of them on the air, and people tune away in droves. That is why you never hear from them.
Iraq is one thing, but are you really going to make Amtrack a major factor in choosing the next leader of our nation? Whatever the merits of keeping up rail passenger service, it's not as if the future of society depends on it.
That particularly cliche is arrogant, bigoted, and not even applicable here. For one thing, there are a lot of dedicated teachers out there who don't deserve to be lumped in with the clueless hacks. For another, this guy is not just a "teacher" (though I do hope he makes it to a classroom now and then), he's a scientist at a leading university, one where a lot of the technology we love so much originated.
Politics can get pretty shallow, but there's more to it than being a bitch for the polls. I think this little Q&A is a case in point. Not the answers themselves, but the people chosen to deliver them. McCain chose a lawyer with strong connections to a major media conglomerate that many of us have reason to loathe. Obama chose a computer scientist with connections to a university that played a big role in creating the Internet. That, by itself, should tell you where there respective priorities are.
Technically, neither party has an official candidate, and won't until they nominate one at their respective conventions. But when it comes to counting up the delegate votes, the fat lady has sung. Hillary Clinton still thinks she can scrounge up a majority, but she'd have to get all those delegates from the unsanctioned primaries in Michigan and Florida admitted and convince most of the uncommitted superdelegates to ignore the primary vote. Almost everybody who doesn't actually work for her agrees that's pretty unlikely.
Tethering would be my own first choice. But if AT&T figures out that you're doing it, they'll send you a bill for every packet you sent or received that way. Their flat-rate data plan covers smart phone usage, period. You're supposed to spend an extra $60 for a data card. Yes, I know it's a ripoff. Write your congressman.
Gee! Nobody would have thought of the iPhone if you hadn't suggested it.
Did it occur to you that your opinion isn't very useful without some hint as to why your hold it? There's a difference between expressing an opinion and mental regurgitation.
According to the OED, both spellings were used, though the omega spelling was more common. From the assumption that the alpha spelling is the only "real Greek" spelling, you build a complicated argument that contradicts a lot what I know about social and linguistic history. I'm hardly on expert, but it's obvious you aren't either.
I could attempt to correct you on several points, not just the history you've got wrong, but the way you keep misrepresenting what I've said. But would it penetrate? Obviously not.
So I'll just repeat the central argument that you find it convenient to ignore: the Romans spelled Greek loanwords with a kappa using K , not C. This is not my pet theory, this is widely accepted as the way the letter K was invented. So if "octopus" had come by way of Latin, it would be spelled with a K.
This is the key detail of my argument. You haven't refuted it. You haven't even contradicted it.
If you're just going to ignore my arguments, please take your insults and your poorly informed theories and go bother somebody else.
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Your disclaimer is relevant, since you never got to experience most of Sun's big mistakes. Some of them will never go away, like the fact that some of the original library writers didn't understand the difference between byte streams and character streams. But all in all Java has a certain maturity it lacked when Sun was overselling it as the solution to all our problems.
But that's not why Java is in no danger of dying. Like any other software technology, programming languages are subject to lockin, that combination of cultural habits and legacy installations that keeps software around long after it's. Languages seem to be more subject to lockin than other technologies: unless it's a total failure right out of the gate, it soon develops a culture that maintains it, and a big body of software that must be maintained, and is too expensive to rewrite in a more modern language.
Consider FORTRAN. It was the very first high-level language (1953) and is full of design mistakes that reflect a total ignorance of artificial linguistics and compiler design theory by its inventors. (Not the designers' fault, these fields hadn't been invented yet.) And yet it remains the language for heavy-duty numerical processing. A lot of hard science and engineering grad schools rebel when told to learn it, but learn it they do.
Ironic story: I was working for Sun's Java org in 1998, when a corporate reshuffle caused our group to be given responsibility for maintaining Sun's FORTRAN compiler. Everybody's response was: What? Why the heck do we even have a FORTRAN compiler? Answer, the people who buy high-end computers for science and engineering won't even look at your platform if it doesn't have a FORTRAN compiler.
So Java (and FORTAN) will live forever. And centuries from now, newbie programmers will be wondering about those weird classes that are used to handle standard input and output.
If you apply for a job, and they ask you if you've ever cleaned pools, it's reasonable to assume that pool cleaning is a priority with your potential boss. It's not an implication that you're a bad carpenter. PS. now sure where the Limbaugh comment came out of. Frankly, I don't really care. While I don't believe that every supporter of Obama is a fuzzy-headed liberal, I can assure you that being a Republican does not mean you're a bigot, a racist, or a religeous nut. It might be hard to accept that, but it's still true. The Limbaugh comment is my response to your assumptions about me. I don't think I've said anything that implies that I despise all Republicans. You, on the other hand, are quick to assume that I have a pathological hatred of same. And that assumption is pretty Limbaughistic.
In point of fact, I rather admire John McCain. He's shown courage, principle, and loyalty. Said loyalty includes personal friends of his who, politically speaking, are his enemies. I certainly wouldn't mind knowing the guy, but I'd never ever vote for him.
Yes, that's a good answer to the question "how can the vendor best serve the customer?" But that's not the question the guy asked. Which was basically, "how can I tell the customer to fuck off without seeming rude?"
Consider the irony of your comments. "Just say no", was NR's contribution to the War on Drugs, which was a disaster in the 80s, and is even more of a disaster now. And the sheer arrogance represented by the "Just say no" is a big reason why.
Arrogance seems to work in politics (well, these days, not so much), but when you're in business, being arrogant towards your customers is not a good way to grow your business.
First, just say "no".
Only if they demand an answer, And precisely why would they not demand an answer? Do you really expect the customer to say, "Oh well, he must know what he's doing, never mind." Nobody responds that way to a blank refusal, this side of Stalinist Russia. All you've done is antagonized the customer, and you still have to provide the explanation.
If you think it's an imposition to explain why you're imposing a policy on somebody, then maybe you need to be forced to come up with an explanation. If your policies don't stand up under critical examination, they need to change.
How can we help him flesh out his argument when he hasn't got one? "His intuition" is not an argument, and it's not at all obvious why giving somebody read-only access to a database is going to cause problems.
Your interpretation is a reasonable one, but I don't buy it. The sad fact is, the lady is a lousy politician. Remember the "baking cupcakes" remark? Remember the way she scuttled her own health care plan. (A plan that was actually pretty good.) Not to mention her gaffs about Bosnia and Robert Kennedy.
(If she's a lousy politician, how'd she get into the Senate? Well, she's smart, she knows how to play the Old Boys Club game, and she came into politics already well-connected. That sort of balances her low political skills for a state election.)
Looking at my own gut feelings, I see a lady who's decided she'd do a better job of running the government than Obama. (She's probably right, though that's not quite the same as being a better President.) She sees the fact that she got almost as many popular votes as Obama, and that she's a lot more experienced than him, and she's a stronger opponent against McCain. To someone like her, that enough. She should win, therefore she will win.
If she were jockeying for position, she'd have quit already. A lot of the Demo leadership think she's screwing things up for the general election. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I'm not one of the key decision makers who gets to decide if anybody will back her for her next run. She's deaf to them, as she's been deaf to so many other power groups over the years.
I'm not interpreting anything. I'm restating your argument in simpler terms. You say my restatement is a distortion, but you don't say why. Repeating yourself doesn't make the point, it just shows off your ability to hide behind pretentious language.
It's certainly true that corporate America has way too much influence over both candidates. But leapingfrom that to "there's no difference between themn" is a familiar cop-out. We heard the same thing in 2000, and please don't try to me that the last 8 years wouldn't have been a lot different if the election had gone the other way.
In fact, don't try to tell anybody, not unless you enjoy being laughed at.
I'm amused that you think that "standards of performance" in the private sector are better. If you've opened a newspaper in the last 3 months, you know better. But of course, we all know that the Marketplace Weeds Out Bad Performers, so I guess that must be wrong.
It's bad enough when people mix their metaphors, but you're mixing your cliches. Neither spokesman is a "messenger" in the sense you mean. Neither is reading a script; each is considered by his boss to be an expert on technology. So it makes perfect sense to consider why they're considered experts.
The circle of people they attract? Please, these are their techno advisors, not somebody randomly chosen from their followers.
Far from projecting, I'm assuming that both candidates acted like reasonably intelligent bosses, and picked their advisers on the basis of previous experience. It's the experience that's considered relevant that's telling. McCain went by business experience and ignored a total lack of technical expertise. Which isn't exactly unprecedented when you consider the recent history of his party.
I'll tell you who's projecting. It's the guy who thinks that anybody critical of McCain is a fuzzy-headed liberal suffering from all the cognitive disorders so aptly described by the esteemed Dr. Limbaugh.
But guess what? The electorate pretty sick of that kind of bigotry. Which is precisely why this has been Obama's year, and probably will continue to be so through November.
That headline was written before anybody actually voted. Most Demo primaries have taken place, and the ones that are left are very very unlikely to change the result.
How would you know? They're obviously not going to say anything.
You should ask yourself why the other parties can't get any air time. I'm sure you think you know: there's an evil conspiracy to silence them. But the fact is that the media conglomerates only care about one thing: eyeballs. They'll give even their nastiest detractors exposure if it will bring in more viewers, readers, and listeners.
The simple fact is that Libbies and Greenies have no following in this country, even counting all the Ron Paul fanboys. (Note that the Green Party does quite well in Europe, even though they also have an overconsolidated media.) Put one of them on the air, and people tune away in droves. That is why you never hear from them.
Iraq is one thing, but are you really going to make Amtrack a major factor in choosing the next leader of our nation? Whatever the merits of keeping up rail passenger service, it's not as if the future of society depends on it.
That particularly cliche is arrogant, bigoted, and not even applicable here. For one thing, there are a lot of dedicated teachers out there who don't deserve to be lumped in with the clueless hacks. For another, this guy is not just a "teacher" (though I do hope he makes it to a classroom now and then), he's a scientist at a leading university, one where a lot of the technology we love so much originated.
Politics can get pretty shallow, but there's more to it than being a bitch for the polls. I think this little Q&A is a case in point. Not the answers themselves, but the people chosen to deliver them. McCain chose a lawyer with strong connections to a major media conglomerate that many of us have reason to loathe. Obama chose a computer scientist with connections to a university that played a big role in creating the Internet. That, by itself, should tell you where there respective priorities are.
Technically, neither party has an official candidate, and won't until they nominate one at their respective conventions. But when it comes to counting up the delegate votes, the fat lady has sung. Hillary Clinton still thinks she can scrounge up a majority, but she'd have to get all those delegates from the unsanctioned primaries in Michigan and Florida admitted and convince most of the uncommitted superdelegates to ignore the primary vote. Almost everybody who doesn't actually work for her agrees that's pretty unlikely.
Dude, your sarcasm detector is broken. A sure sign you've been flaming too long. Better dial it back, or you'll end up like twitter!
That would mean admitting that all his previous posts are garbage! That's really too much to ask.
Tethering would be my own first choice. But if AT&T figures out that you're doing it, they'll send you a bill for every packet you sent or received that way. Their flat-rate data plan covers smart phone usage, period. You're supposed to spend an extra $60 for a data card. Yes, I know it's a ripoff. Write your congressman.
Gee! Nobody would have thought of the iPhone if you hadn't suggested it.
Did it occur to you that your opinion isn't very useful without some hint as to why your hold it? There's a difference between expressing an opinion and mental regurgitation.
According to the OED, both spellings were used, though the omega spelling was more common. From the assumption that the alpha spelling is the only "real Greek" spelling, you build a complicated argument that contradicts a lot what I know about social and linguistic history. I'm hardly on expert, but it's obvious you aren't either.
I could attempt to correct you on several points, not just the history you've got wrong, but the way you keep misrepresenting what I've said. But would it penetrate? Obviously not.
So I'll just repeat the central argument that you find it convenient to ignore: the Romans spelled Greek loanwords with a kappa using K , not C. This is not my pet theory, this is widely accepted as the way the letter K was invented. So if "octopus" had come by way of Latin, it would be spelled with a K.
This is the key detail of my argument. You haven't refuted it. You haven't even contradicted it.
If you're just going to ignore my arguments, please take your insults and your poorly informed theories and go bother somebody else.