It would certainly be smarter, but it would also be very bad politics. Voters don't like "treatment". They want bad people restricted, or punished, or removed from society. Look at our own "three strikes" laws: they're no substitute for a decently-funded rehabilitation and probation system (which would certainly be more effective in actually preventing crime), but they cost a lot less and make the voters feel good.
Actually, your nitpick is not so minor. If you kill somebody because they're a pedophile, it's plain old murder. (Though maybe you can play on the jury's dislike for pedophiles and get off on a variation of the Dan White defense.) But if you kill somebody because they molested a child (especially if it's you're child) you'd be very hard to prosecute effectively, and would have all kinds of legal defenses.
In other words, Microsoft screwed up all its early planning for.NET. That's only just, since Sun did exactly the same thing with Java: lousy compilers and virtual machines; too much emphasis on web applications and "network computer" technology. Most of the negative things people think they know about Java comes from that era.
That's sort of like Vernor Vinge's notion that we can replace all clocks and calenders with a system where the only unit is the second (and powers of 10 thereof) and the epoch is the familiar January 1, 1970. There are so many things wrong with that idea, it's hard to know where to start.
A little detail: "Java" is both a platform and a language. C# is just a language, one of several that runs on the.NET platform. (Microsoft doesn't like the word "platform", but it's the only one that fits.) So when you're analyzing market share, you need to compare Java with.NET, not with C#.
The figures you quote show.NET doing pretty good, though still lagging way behind Java. One little improvement in the Java language is not going to spell the "death nell" for the.NET platform. That would be true even if.NET didn't have the backing of the biggest software company on the planet.
What is bad news for.NET is the fact that Sun seems to be capturing a lot of developer mind share with its Java Community Process, which is where this proposal comes from, along with a lot of other good stuff, including JSR 166, which originated outside Sun, and has successfully added a major improvement in concurrency to the Java platform.
The JCP won't spell the "death knell" to C# or.NET either, not as long as they have MS's backing — and are essential tools on Windows. But it will certainly help Java hold onto its lead.
No need for an H1B visa. Bering your guy to the V.). on a student visa. Once he's finished his course, send him home and pay him local rates. Cheaper that way.
OK, I'm not a military person. I'd last about 30 seconds in a military organization, to say nothing of an actual battlefield. But it's my perception that Grant understood industrial-age warfare better than any general of his time. (And a lot of generals in WW I, for that matter.) He grasped that war had become a long, nasty slog.
Lee was known for his strategy, his tactics, and above all for his leadership. It's certainly easier to admire a brilliant leader like Lee than a plodder like Grant — even if you're Grant! But it's the plodders that win modern wars.
Terrorists kill more Americans than foreigners. Well, maybe not in real life, but on the news and in movies and tv, it's American's they're always after. Which is the only "reality" that matters. So voters have terrorism on the brain, and must be catered to.
Sure, politicos take money from the big media companies. Which they pay back by rigging the legal system in their favor. That hardly approaches their response to terrorism. I mean, do you see hundreds of thousands of soldiers chasing down DVD bootleggers?
The problem I see is your making up really contrived excuses for dissing Google. Like what if I forget where I live, why won't google tell me that THEY SUX!!!
I'll leave the hackerspeak insults to you. I just want to explain how Google applications are missing features and idioms that are considered basic. The fact that an uberhacker such as yourself is perfectly happy without them is beside the point. Applications, on the web or elsewhere, should not be designed around the EMACS mindset. Not that there's anything wrong with the EMACS mindset. It's just that it doesn't include 99% of humanity.
Since you think entirely in terms of Ecstatic Love and Dreary Hate, you've failed to consider the possibility that I'm trying to express an attitude somewhere in between. Indeed, there is much to admire in Google. They dominate web searches because they were the first to appreciate the scalability issues a growing web would bring. They have an admirable willingness to try to do things differently and to take big risks. They showed everyone the right way to do online interactive applications. And they have a lot of brilliant people working there.
Thing is, I've worked on software projects dominated by brilliant people. There's an obvious upside to hiring such people: they do brilliant stuff. But there's also a downside: they get bored easily. Once the intellectually challenging parts of the project are done, they don't want to hang around and do all the piddling little polishing and bug fixing — they want to go off and find another challenge. That's why you need to supplement the BPs with PPs (plodding people). QA plodders to make sure everything works to spec. Documentation plodders (that's me) to make sure that people can actually figure out how to use all those fancy features. And most of all, you need Project Management plodders to make sure that what gets done is not dictated entirely by individual whim.
Google doesn't work that way. They hire BPs, and only BPs. Documentation? It's something the BPs can hack together in their spare time. (It's worth mentioning that almost all Google docs are hand-hacked HTML; the most advanced software documented with the most primitive content management!) Project Management? Hire as few as possible, don't want to distract the BPs. I guess they must hire some QA people, but with Google notorious hatred for process and specification, it's hard to see how the can actually assure an quality.
My attitude towards Google isn't dislike. It's disappointment. They used to be my heroes, because they accomplished so much and did things their own way. But now they seem to be stuck in permanent adolescence, totally incapable of creating mature products. Instead they create permanent betas that continually accrete cool new features, but never have their rough edges polished. That they leave to Yahoo.
Yeah, I'm such an idiot that I prefer well tested and widely accepted GUI idioms to the indecipherable little hacks that make up the Google GUI. And of course, anybody who doesn't prefer the user interface (or anything else) that you're used to is just a total moron.
Good God, you think that JFK was the last great president? If he hadn't gotten himself martyred, he would have gone down as one of the most corrupt and inept presidents in history. His party's rigging of the Illinois vote in 1960 was just as blatant as what happened in Florida in 2000. He gets credit for pushing through civil rights, but his support for that was always lukewarm, and ended up being pushed through after his death by his successor. And more than any one person, JFK deserves the blame for that stupid, pointless war in Vietnam.
But he didn't live long enough for his chickens to come home to roost, and his successor, LBJ, found it politically expedient to give JFK the credit for his own accomplishments. Proof that in politics as in everything else, it's better to be lucky than smart.
Every era has had bad presidents. There was Herbert Hoover, of whom it was said, "It ain't what he don't know that scares me -- it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so!" There was U.S. Grant, who was the greatest military leader of his time -- and the worst head of state of all time. There was the long string of bozos who could have prevented the Civil War, but didn't see what the big deal over slavery was....
In that crowd, as in all things, Bush the Tiny just doesn't rate.
Still, I guess it just goes to show that now, perjury is OK!
No, it's still against the rules for people who don't have friends in high places.
This is so bloody typical of the Bush League. They watch out for themselves first, their friends second, and everybody else can go to hell.
And "everybody else" would seem to include their own party! If I were a Republican, I'd be totally pissed. If I were a Republican who hopes to hold onto or get elected to a seat in Congress, I'd be apoplectic . And if I were a Republican who wants to be President, I'd be ready to kill somebody.
But since I'm not a Republican, I'm actually rather pleased!
"Thorn in the side" means "constant source of irritation". An MP3 bootlegger is certainly a "thorn in the side" of the RIAA. But of the U.S. government? Somehow, in this era of major terrorism, genocide, nuclear proliferation, insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other thorny issues, I don't think anybody in the government loses sleep over allofmp3.
The main icon for this story is the one for the handhelds category. Which makes sense, except that the icon is a photo of a Palm V, or something similar. Sadly, a pure PDA is no longer a representative handheld. More typically, a PDA is some kind of feature-bloated "smart phone." The iPhone's a good example of that, and probably the best candidate for the new handhelds icon.
Not to trash the iPhone. It just isn't something I'm ever going to want. I want a simple phone, with easy-to-use PDA functionality. (I'd prefer to have separate phone and PDA, but that train has left the station.) If I want to watch video, I'll get out my LE 1600.
Hello? Circular reasoning? You're saying there is no lost evidence because there's room for it in the big bang theory. But a current theory, by definition, is based on evidence that is not lost.
We'll, I'm smart enough to think through the common use cases, which you obviously are not. Suppose I'm at work, and you want to grab some pizza on the way home. There's a new place that isn't in either the Google or Yahoo databases yet, but I get their address from their web site, or maybe from a shopping site like yelp (which provides links to Google, but not Yahoo). You plug it into Google and you see where it is, but you still want directions. I can never remember the street address of the building I work in. I could pull up a browser bookmark, but then I lose the destination address. Use the google starting point? No, the last time I used Google Maps I set it to my home address. Type it in by hand? Can't remember -- could pull it up from the company web site, but that's a pain. Pull it from "saved destinations"? To do that, I have to remember part of the address, or have previously assigned the location a keyword.
Yahoo anticipates my flaky memory. All my saved destinations are available from a drop-down list. Oh, that's where I work, 1300 Corporate Behemoth Way. Click click, and I'm done.
Slashdot Mirror
Right you are! Actually solving the problem is no substitute for finding somebody to blame!
It would certainly be smarter, but it would also be very bad politics. Voters don't like "treatment". They want bad people restricted, or punished, or removed from society. Look at our own "three strikes" laws: they're no substitute for a decently-funded rehabilitation and probation system (which would certainly be more effective in actually preventing crime), but they cost a lot less and make the voters feel good.
Actually, your nitpick is not so minor. If you kill somebody because they're a pedophile, it's plain old murder. (Though maybe you can play on the jury's dislike for pedophiles and get off on a variation of the Dan White defense.) But if you kill somebody because they molested a child (especially if it's you're child) you'd be very hard to prosecute effectively, and would have all kinds of legal defenses.
In other words, Microsoft screwed up all its early planning for .NET. That's only just, since Sun did exactly the same thing with Java: lousy compilers and virtual machines; too much emphasis on web applications and "network computer" technology. Most of the negative things people think they know about Java comes from that era.
That's sort of like Vernor Vinge's notion that we can replace all clocks and calenders with a system where the only unit is the second (and powers of 10 thereof) and the epoch is the familiar January 1, 1970. There are so many things wrong with that idea, it's hard to know where to start.
A little detail: "Java" is both a platform and a language. C# is just a language, one of several that runs on the .NET platform. (Microsoft doesn't like the word "platform", but it's the only one that fits.) So when you're analyzing market share, you need to compare Java with .NET, not with C#.
.NET doing pretty good, though still lagging way behind Java. One little improvement in the Java language is not going to spell the "death nell" for the .NET platform. That would be true even if .NET didn't have the backing of the biggest software company on the planet.
.NET is the fact that Sun seems to be capturing a lot of developer mind share with its Java Community Process, which is where this proposal comes from, along with a lot of other good stuff, including JSR 166, which originated outside Sun, and has successfully added a major improvement in concurrency to the Java platform.
.NET either, not as long as they have MS's backing — and are essential tools on Windows. But it will certainly help Java hold onto its lead.
The figures you quote show
What is bad news for
The JCP won't spell the "death knell" to C# or
No need for an H1B visa. Bering your guy to the V.). on a student visa. Once he's finished his course, send him home and pay him local rates. Cheaper that way.
A clever hack its own justification!
Certainly a game that takes an infinite amount of time to implement will be infinitely good!
The the best post on the concept of "bestness" ever!
OK, I'm not a military person. I'd last about 30 seconds in a military organization, to say nothing of an actual battlefield. But it's my perception that Grant understood industrial-age warfare better than any general of his time. (And a lot of generals in WW I, for that matter.) He grasped that war had become a long, nasty slog.
Lee was known for his strategy, his tactics, and above all for his leadership. It's certainly easier to admire a brilliant leader like Lee than a plodder like Grant — even if you're Grant! But it's the plodders that win modern wars.
Terrorists kill more Americans than foreigners. Well, maybe not in real life, but on the news and in movies and tv, it's American's they're always after. Which is the only "reality" that matters. So voters have terrorism on the brain, and must be catered to.
Sure, politicos take money from the big media companies. Which they pay back by rigging the legal system in their favor. That hardly approaches their response to terrorism. I mean, do you see hundreds of thousands of soldiers chasing down DVD bootleggers?
Since you think entirely in terms of Ecstatic Love and Dreary Hate, you've failed to consider the possibility that I'm trying to express an attitude somewhere in between. Indeed, there is much to admire in Google. They dominate web searches because they were the first to appreciate the scalability issues a growing web would bring. They have an admirable willingness to try to do things differently and to take big risks. They showed everyone the right way to do online interactive applications. And they have a lot of brilliant people working there.
Thing is, I've worked on software projects dominated by brilliant people. There's an obvious upside to hiring such people: they do brilliant stuff. But there's also a downside: they get bored easily. Once the intellectually challenging parts of the project are done, they don't want to hang around and do all the piddling little polishing and bug fixing — they want to go off and find another challenge. That's why you need to supplement the BPs with PPs (plodding people). QA plodders to make sure everything works to spec. Documentation plodders (that's me) to make sure that people can actually figure out how to use all those fancy features. And most of all, you need Project Management plodders to make sure that what gets done is not dictated entirely by individual whim.
Google doesn't work that way. They hire BPs, and only BPs. Documentation? It's something the BPs can hack together in their spare time. (It's worth mentioning that almost all Google docs are hand-hacked HTML; the most advanced software documented with the most primitive content management!) Project Management? Hire as few as possible, don't want to distract the BPs. I guess they must hire some QA people, but with Google notorious hatred for process and specification, it's hard to see how the can actually assure an quality.
My attitude towards Google isn't dislike. It's disappointment. They used to be my heroes, because they accomplished so much and did things their own way. But now they seem to be stuck in permanent adolescence, totally incapable of creating mature products. Instead they create permanent betas that continually accrete cool new features, but never have their rough edges polished. That they leave to Yahoo.
You're saying that Gordon Brown worries as much about selling the next Harry Potter book as he does about preventing the next bombing? Get real!
Hey, Scooter didn't out any CIA agents. He just covered up for those who did. As far as the CIA goes, the damage is long done.
Dude, we've learned plenty. It's Microsoft that's clueless.
Yeah, I'm such an idiot that I prefer well tested and widely accepted GUI idioms to the indecipherable little hacks that make up the Google GUI. And of course, anybody who doesn't prefer the user interface (or anything else) that you're used to is just a total moron.
Good God, you think that JFK was the last great president? If he hadn't gotten himself martyred, he would have gone down as one of the most corrupt and inept presidents in history. His party's rigging of the Illinois vote in 1960 was just as blatant as what happened in Florida in 2000. He gets credit for pushing through civil rights, but his support for that was always lukewarm, and ended up being pushed through after his death by his successor. And more than any one person, JFK deserves the blame for that stupid, pointless war in Vietnam.
But he didn't live long enough for his chickens to come home to roost, and his successor, LBJ, found it politically expedient to give JFK the credit for his own accomplishments. Proof that in politics as in everything else, it's better to be lucky than smart.
Every era has had bad presidents. There was Herbert Hoover, of whom it was said, "It ain't what he don't know that scares me -- it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so!" There was U.S. Grant, who was the greatest military leader of his time -- and the worst head of state of all time. There was the long string of bozos who could have prevented the Civil War, but didn't see what the big deal over slavery was....
In that crowd, as in all things, Bush the Tiny just doesn't rate.
This is so bloody typical of the Bush League. They watch out for themselves first, their friends second, and everybody else can go to hell.
And "everybody else" would seem to include their own party! If I were a Republican, I'd be totally pissed. If I were a Republican who hopes to hold onto or get elected to a seat in Congress, I'd be apoplectic . And if I were a Republican who wants to be President, I'd be ready to kill somebody.
But since I'm not a Republican, I'm actually rather pleased!
"Thorn in the side" means "constant source of irritation". An MP3 bootlegger is certainly a "thorn in the side" of the RIAA. But of the U.S. government? Somehow, in this era of major terrorism, genocide, nuclear proliferation, insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other thorny issues, I don't think anybody in the government loses sleep over allofmp3.
The main icon for this story is the one for the handhelds category. Which makes sense, except that the icon is a photo of a Palm V, or something similar. Sadly, a pure PDA is no longer a representative handheld. More typically, a PDA is some kind of feature-bloated "smart phone." The iPhone's a good example of that, and probably the best candidate for the new handhelds icon.
Not to trash the iPhone. It just isn't something I'm ever going to want. I want a simple phone, with easy-to-use PDA functionality. (I'd prefer to have separate phone and PDA, but that train has left the station.) If I want to watch video, I'll get out my LE 1600.
Hello? Circular reasoning? You're saying there is no lost evidence because there's room for it in the big bang theory. But a current theory, by definition, is based on evidence that is not lost.
Right, and if I could call up the saved destinations without remembering part of the address, it'd be useful for mapping directions.
We'll, I'm smart enough to think through the common use cases, which you obviously are not. Suppose I'm at work, and you want to grab some pizza on the way home. There's a new place that isn't in either the Google or Yahoo databases yet, but I get their address from their web site, or maybe from a shopping site like yelp (which provides links to Google, but not Yahoo). You plug it into Google and you see where it is, but you still want directions. I can never remember the street address of the building I work in. I could pull up a browser bookmark, but then I lose the destination address. Use the google starting point? No, the last time I used Google Maps I set it to my home address. Type it in by hand? Can't remember -- could pull it up from the company web site, but that's a pain. Pull it from "saved destinations"? To do that, I have to remember part of the address, or have previously assigned the location a keyword.
Yahoo anticipates my flaky memory. All my saved destinations are available from a drop-down list. Oh, that's where I work, 1300 Corporate Behemoth Way. Click click, and I'm done.
RTFP dude. It's only 2 paragraphs long.