Okay, I used to code a lot of Java, and I'm now back to c++. I will tell you that I like coding in c++ as much as I like the design of the Java language. In terms of design, Java has made c# a necessity, and program languages once being the core busines of that small company, I think MS has pretty good reasons to Imitate And Extend (tm).
If you looked closely at how Java is build, you'd probably notice the tons of AbstractFoo.class classes, which contain default implementations for certain interfaces. So if we subclass from that, we don't have to write a single byte extra for any subclassing class, avoiding any code duplication. Implement once, then inherit. Ofcourse you can't design your applications and classes in the same way you design your c++ classes, but a) it's certainly possible, and b) without writing duplicate code, and c) using no difficult syntactical constructs and keeping the design clean.
Templates are nifty but invite coding and compiler bugs. A much nicer solution is the Object single inheritance dependency tree which allows for complete polymorphic behaviour through interfaces, without having to worry about all kinds of casts and vtable jumps. The internals of the compiler can be as clean as you can possibly want them because the inheritance model allows for pure specialisation (is a), and no generalisation (has a), except through extension (implementing interfaces)..
To add some juice to the discussion, there are modelling problems that even c++ can not handle correctly, because the language wasn't build to handle it. For example, consider a geometric construct object 'circle' and 'ellipse'. Objviously, the two objects are related, but how would you describe their relationship ? Mathematically, a circle is special case of an ellipse (you only have one radius), but in c++ you would quite possibly derive ellipse from circle, since it has 2 radii. Now, what happens as soon as you have an ellipse that happens to be a circle (both radii are equal)? Presto, you have a faulting software model of the mathematical model.
Conclusion: use the right tool for the right job. Java is crossplatform, stable, well thought-out, manageable, and quite capable to do anything. C++ (including stl) is fast, ugly, all over the place. STL is certainly not that portable as everybody would like, and templates are usually not supported completely. Yet our software team (including me) is currently rewriting parts of the Java core in c++ to benefit from templates and multiple inheritance and it's speed wherever we can. We have various reasons to do this, one being that the c++ standard language constructs and libraries do not offer the ease of use that we need and that a Java-like inheritance scheme offers. Internally, we use c++ to the max, but our outside sdk shell is completely like Java behaves. It's robust, transparent, fast and nicely designed. It is assured to pay off in the future, when we write our applications.
Many anti-globalization voices argue globalization destroys cultures. Not exactly. Japan's old culture, old values, have been mixed and integrated with western ones.
You know, the funny thing is that you're looking at this from a western point of view. I'm sure certain (mostly conservative) Japanese people will look at this evolution of their culture in a completely different way.
As an important sidenote, I'd also like to mention that it's not just about cultures that are influenced by the globalisation trend, but about human values, and the power to assume the right to protect these values. It's pure politics, like someone else mentioned also. You are bigger? Then you can speak up louder and supress other noises easier. A people alone is no longer capable to protect their valus from from what the globalisation is trying to force us to do. Consumption is not the only way of life, but to globalisation and it's strategies/tactics, ideally it should be. Now please read these lines again and imagine you're in Chilly, India or Sri Lanka. See what I mean?
When you say that 'in fact American industry has been damaged by competition' I feel like you are talking about it as if it is almost unfair. I do not see why this matters as to the notion of exploitation of 3rd world countries. It may have affected employment within the US (as much as in other western countries), yes, but those companies had very good reasons to move productions overseas. Not because they could get 'damaged' (well, maybe ehtically) financially. Quite the opposite. The people within those 3rd world countries are being exploited because they don't know better. And unlike the western world, they cannot protect themselves against the whims of those big multinationals, but depend on western opposition to protect their rights. I'm talking Nike, Ikea etc..
Imho it's that very call for better human rights and values that is what the anti-globalists as they were called are all about, see my other post.
No, giving away money is not the right answer. I can only speak for my country, but I think policy in Germany and elsewhere in europe is largely the same. We do also have special unemployement programs, we're redistributing working hours, shortening the work week, encouraging new, educated people to start in new technology markets + all sorts of other things. Some of these measures work, some don't.
Giving people work helps youth off the streets, but it doesn't realy grab the essence of the problem. Giving people education is what makes them think about other things than just their fan-club of skinheads. All in all, tolerance has to do a great deal with empathy. Education is usually a projection of what other people discovered, and it stimulates empathical capacity. Apart from this side-effect, it also helps you start higher-up the society ladder, so I think the solution is obvious. (and costs too much)
Hey you might just be right there, Jack, maybe it's sarcasm. Or wait, no, it IS irony, but especially to see you happy I'll pretend it's sarcasm. Deal?
Don't throw silly definitions at me, they are so boring.
The fact is, European unemployment rates are unbelievably high (compared to American ones), and that breeds hatred.
The fact is, Europe has much more protection for the workers, but this comes at a price. High unemployment and the social problems that come with it.
That`s a lot of facts but I'd like to remind you of the fact that US unemployment rates are low because you're doing the hamburger-job thing. I was in LA this summer, seeing 3 people working as parking attendants on a parking lot. 3 people! In europe, there`s usually just a slot machine taking tickets.
Europe is a socio-economic culture. It has invented the unions. It has more protection for workers, yes, but I don't think you know how the system works.. It surely comes at a price, but I would say your system comes at a price too. I've been to L.A., and a friend of mine is in S.F. right now. I get monthly reports on the awfull distance between upper and lower parts of society, and the contrasts in thinking that results from that, including hatred. Oh sure, everybody is working, but I woulnd't say that takes away the anger..
I can totally understand your reasoning, but you'll agree with me that France is entitled to impose it's laws on any company that is selling products and services on it's territory. In comes the internet, the global trade economy tool. Since Yahoo! is US, of course, US laws apply. Since Yahoo! offers it's services in France, then French laws apply to these services. And voila. I don't think it's as simle as that. The internet is pushing territory-bound laws to their limits, and the harder we stick to our laws, the larger the conflicts will become. Eventually either the laws or the territorial bounds will have to go.
Are you really saying that you think child-pornography should be openly sold on the streets? Because if you don't, you believe in some form of censorship
I think there's a difference in buying or selling a product which in this case happens to be child pronography, and free speech. It is the commercial exchange of certain products that can be regulated, but anything belonging to the personal atmosphere, like free speech, should, in my opinion, be untouchable, yes. You can ofcourse be very much against it, and try to convince a person that he's not doing any good with what he's doing, or you can not care a bit about what he does (the big attitude problem that's come up strongly in the 90ies), either way, you should not be able to forbid it.
In my opinion, censorship is cutting away those tokens that are the witnesses of the problems in our society. If you cut away those signs, you basicly just don't want to see it. That's good. I don't want to see it either. However, you're not attacking the real problem AND you're denying others the knowledge of the consequences a certain problem has, which should normally have a warning effect..
Ofcourse, there are people that follow this kind of reasoning, but there are many others that don't. Only yesterday, a girl said to me she didn't believe in this crap. People just care about their own lives, and then tose same people are surprised when something shocking appears in the paper saying "oh no what an evil society". Oh well, I probably won't be convincing anyone but it never hurts to try again anyway..
So, this does in fact also mean that the rest of the world is not bound by US laws and patents, if their courts should choose to come to the same conclusion on these topics. I would say that this evolution is actually undermining the global economy and tradezone, rather than protecting it.
Just to be clear, I think the ruling is justified, because I am a profound believer in free speech and against any form of censorship. Denial of information is the worst of all evil. That said, I an understand the french ruling, but I honestly think they should have dealth with this issue differently.
However, as inernational laws begin to conflict with each other, in this case just on the freespeech front of just one company policy, but later on maybe also on other topics, we're in the porcess of entering a new kind of tradewar, in which the legal systems will oppose eachother in order to support the opinions and economies of their societies. I'm curious as to what all this might eventually lead.
..is against a kind of patriotism that does happen to be in line with the kind of patriotism US citizens stand for.
Ahem, I meant "..a kind of patriotism that does NOT happen to be in line with etc.. ". Sorry if I offended the US with this, the opposite sentence is not as offensive but it does adequately depict the issue that the US is kind-of playing policeman in the world and is obliging other countries to stick to it's rules, it's judgement of right and wrong. And that, imho, is wrong. I wouldn't vote for that.
One thing many people fail to asses is that the anti-globalist organisation is in fact violence free in it's essence. Much like Marxism you could say, it stands for a general awakening, a reveille the french say, of just common sense. It wants to bring back the power to the consumer, and restore the balance of power, in favour to the people instead of to the companies. One could remark that there is probably nothing more beautifull to the movement than a new-born fight to regain the rights and 'values' of the people. In fact, the anti-globalist's movement is a global movement around the world. There is nothing anti-global to it. It's like greanpeace and the WWF.
Of course, what happened in Milan and Helsinki is not what the movement is about. Those events were programmed by trouble-makers that seized the opportunity to pick a fight and express their general malcontentcy, while remaining virtually incognito under the unfamiliar umbrella of so many other unknown organisations that meant no harm, except to the present system.
You could say that, in many regards, Bin Laden has used the political and econmical structures of financial power to his advantage, and the globalists were (and are) warning against exactly that kind of a system, where sense of the word 'control' is taboo'd, except when it's about people's consumer behaviours. If you hold meetings between steel barred fences about economical issues and there's a crowd yelling outside, I get can't help but think about a book written a long time ago, which was perceived as groundbreaking and very important at it's time, called 'Brave New World'. Have we simply forgotten our arts and sciences, our good common sense? Have we morphed into brainless consumers that are addicted to TV's and MacDonnalds more than anything else? Does everybody just care about anything but our family and our job and hollidays? If we care about tomorrow's world, the world our children have to deal with, then in my opinion it would simply be totally irresponsible to the 'just stick with your own life is good enough for me' attitude. Granted, there's not much you can do, but a positive attitude is worth much more than you can possibly imagine. And that positive attitude, that anger about what's wrong with the world, that calling for change, is what the globalists are truely about.
Democracy's spread has now in fact created a bloody confrontation with fundamentalism, a holy war. Both sides refer to one another in evil blasphemers. Lost in this confrontation is the idea that Democracy isn't only about multi-national markets, cheap labor and business opportunities...[..]
This probably the most horendous statement in this provocative and therefor worthless assessment of Mr. John Katz, who I normally do not disrespect at all. In case Katz had fallen asleep, the war is firstly not against fundamentalism, but against terrorism. If the war is against fundamentalism, why don't we start arresting Amish people, Christian Tv networks and more of this kind of shit first.. I mean, if the war is against fundamentalism, then the war is against a kind of patriotism that does happen to be in line with the kind of patriotism US citizens stand for. And who are we to draw a line for the good and bad, who are we to proclaim a culture better or worse than the other. Katz rethori is intentionally provocative, and he wants discussion on topics that are indeed important, but by relentlessly draggin attention to these issues, people get even more black/white and you end up with the very fundamentalism we are supposed to be at war with. Sorry John no hard feelings. Next time, do one better for me.
I'm not going to get into a Java vs C++ war, but java is a neathly designed modern language with a lot of exception handling built in, so no excuses, while c++ is 20 years old and has a lot of loose ends everywhere (and lots more excuses)
I think most openSourcerers are using C++, not Java. Ofcourse you can still write propper decent code with most of the error handling in that language, but it's never gonna be as complete as what the Java framework can offer you to support.
Besides error handling there is also the way in which you test your code. I don't know if you guy's write tests, but since I started working for this new company we decided that we would follow eXtreme Programming to a certain extend, and allways write tests for each class. I must say that the quality of error handling automatically steps-up along the way, as you're inmediately confronted with most of the bugs and errors that can come about. It also offers a good way to prevent the code from being modified in ways that brake the tests as other people add their stuff. We're still in the early stages of our project so I can't really give a general opinion about it, but I'd allready recommend it to everyone.
Well the cool thing is that it's firmware upgradeable, so the display can really just about show you anything. It's got an elaborate menu structure with settings and a treeview system that allows you to see what's on the disc, or in an m3u playlist, etc..
As for the recording bit.. my borther has MD, so I know all about recording MD's.. it's really not that portable either, and most of us have a PC crammed in some corner anyway..
The reason why MD has not broken through, is because it's not open. It's pushed by just one company, and that never really works well, even if it is the biggest of em all. Because of that, compared to mp3, MD has the annoying built-in property that writers DEgrade the quality(!) of your recording when you copy across MD's.
Of course, MD's are quite sexy, but in my oppinion a tad too expensive..
Well, I recently got a portable rio volt SP 100 mp3 player. At the office we noticed a promotion sale in Holland and we collegially ordered 3 to get even more reduction. It`s a fantastic little thingy and appart from not recharging the batteries when it`s in the main power, it does everything mp3 you can think of. It`s a pitty the device doesn`t come with a display on the remote control, but appart from that, you're set with hours of mp3 listening fun.
Btw rio also has a car mp3 player, and car kits to buid in so you can have your mp3 player through your car speakers.
.. reportedly also has some hijacked aircraft flying around, but since every newsagency is focussing on the US tragedy, this hasn`t been confirmed and is just a rumour. I must say that during the past 6 hours, I`ve only seen our national airport BrusselsX, which I can see from work, release 1 plane for takeoff, all other traffic is apparently shutdown. The NATO in brussels has been evacuated.
From somebody at the stockmarket, insureance shares have crashed and oilshares are sky-rocketing.
You laugh, but you'll laugh even harder with this article basicly saying email is the no1 threat for australian companies.
This shows how rigid they are in their thinking. I mean, if people used propper policies and security protection, there was no need for the digital witch-hunt they are now proclaiming.
Now I don't agree with the way things are now, for instance I don't think security firms SHOULD exist, but this kind of artisanal malpractice where the trade itself corrupts and starts to sustain itself, is present in all sorts of professions. You see it in law, you can see it in the medical department of hospitals, you can see it in university research labs looking for ever more funding, and you have it in the IT world. I think this is where the real issue is.
The abuse in the profession leads to a perverse effect of self sustainability, which is ofcourse exploited without any regulatory force, usually because the knowledge in the field is a barrier on itself, preventing people to get in, unless they comply to the practices of the trade, after which they are absorbed in the system, which will take good care of them.
That's a little abstract, but to give an example, if there weren't any people hacking and cracking, there would not be a need for security. But companies are about money, and are ths subject to hacking/cracking/virus/worms etc, giving existance to security companies. And who works for these companies ? Presto, there's your self-sustainability.
And no I'm not an anticapitalist or communist, or in security or cracking or hacking or law or medicine myself, these issues have been roaming my overly concerned mind for quite some time. Considering my signal to noise ratio, this post probalby won't mean much either way..
That's what the article says, allthough UNIX itself probably is not illegal, but the sysadmin/company owning it is. If Sysadmins are not supposed to be able to test their own machines with scanners, how on earth can they be made secure ? If Anti-virus software makers are left with this law, how on earth can they design antidotes and detectors and scanners ? If tools and sourcecode hacks didn't surface, how can OS vendors fix loopholes in their software ? I'm sorry, but this is really a ticket to the stoneage. Seems the only thing lawyers are interested in these days is 'control', 'control' and even more 'control', who cares how idiot their laws may sound to a softwareworld that appears to be running away with allmost anything. As if digital crime is suddenly going to stop right at their borders. Gimme a break.
Well it might have been nice to have something different from "abort/retry/fail messages" which all 3 resulted in the system pretty much being unresponsive.
Well ok the GPF`s only showed up after EMM's turned up, and yes they don`t actually make part of D.O.S., but they were definately there.
AS for the ctrl-p experience, you could actually reprogram your prompt to reroute keystrokes with an NDOS feature, so effectively I just turned of ctrl-p to echo the prompt and there wasn`t any risk of ctrl=p locking after that for me, ever:) That`s why I never got around to find the keycombo`s that prevented ctrl-p crashes probably.. anyway.. I was pretty fond of my dos setup, and as a matter of fact I still don`t leave my Bootdrive without one.
Consider yourself lucky, it was easy enough to generate a general protection fault. I remember Ctrl-P hanging the kernel in an IO problem loop, also floppy IO operations had their moments of 'reasonable doubt', and certainly memory managers like Qemm and PMode/W were notoriously unstable, and generated somehting comparable to NT`s BSOD. basicly anything hooked into an IRQ or BIOS was (is for me;)) able to crash your box.
Well, Orbital produced 'The girl with the sun in her head' with GreenPeace`s solar power vehicle, a truck equiped with batteries and solar cells on antennae-like deployable pannels.
I`m not gonna shoot anybody, my point was that the people in your system are probably not aware they are being traced this closely, and that this kind of knowledge, whatever restrictions might be on them, can potentially be used maliciously. I don`t doubt your integrity, but such things DO happen, and frankly I don`t want a Casino to be the judge of that. So it`s simple for me. I don`t do casino`s. Not that I ever wanted to do them anyway..
Actually it`s not about IT ethics that much, rather about the way Casino`s work with people (and their data). I don`t believe the restrictions you named make much of an impression. Maybe you can`t sell the raw data, but hey, raw data is just raw data. You can just sell something else.. what level of control is there ? None. What kind of BIG TROUBLE are you talking about anyway ?
Really, I`m very intersted in the subject of datamining. It`s a valuable scientific tool. But I`d rather not see it used to analyse people`s lives and calcualte the potential value of a 'customer', after which anything can happen, without the soul even being aware of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I used to code a lot of Java, and I'm now back to c++. I will tell you that I like coding in c++ as much as I like the design of the Java language. In terms of design, Java has made c# a necessity, and program languages once being the core busines of that small company, I think MS has pretty good reasons to Imitate And Extend (tm).
If you looked closely at how Java is build, you'd probably notice the tons of AbstractFoo.class classes, which contain default implementations for certain interfaces. So if we subclass from that, we don't have to write a single byte extra for any subclassing class, avoiding any code duplication. Implement once, then inherit. Ofcourse you can't design your applications and classes in the same way you design your c++ classes, but a) it's certainly possible, and b) without writing duplicate code, and c) using no difficult syntactical constructs and keeping the design clean.
Templates are nifty but invite coding and compiler bugs. A much nicer solution is the Object single inheritance dependency tree which allows for complete polymorphic behaviour through interfaces, without having to worry about all kinds of casts and vtable jumps. The internals of the compiler can be as clean as you can possibly want them because the inheritance model allows for pure specialisation (is a), and no generalisation (has a), except through extension (implementing interfaces)..
To add some juice to the discussion, there are modelling problems that even c++ can not handle correctly, because the language wasn't build to handle it. For example, consider a geometric construct object 'circle' and 'ellipse'. Objviously, the two objects are related, but how would you describe their relationship ? Mathematically, a circle is special case of an ellipse (you only have one radius), but in c++ you would quite possibly derive ellipse from circle, since it has 2 radii. Now, what happens as soon as you have an ellipse that happens to be a circle (both radii are equal)? Presto, you have a faulting software model of the mathematical model.
Conclusion: use the right tool for the right job. Java is crossplatform, stable, well thought-out, manageable, and quite capable to do anything. C++ (including stl) is fast, ugly, all over the place. STL is certainly not that portable as everybody would like, and templates are usually not supported completely. Yet our software team (including me) is currently rewriting parts of the Java core in c++ to benefit from templates and multiple inheritance and it's speed wherever we can. We have various reasons to do this, one being that the c++ standard language constructs and libraries do not offer the ease of use that we need and that a Java-like inheritance scheme offers. Internally, we use c++ to the max, but our outside sdk shell is completely like Java behaves. It's robust, transparent, fast and nicely designed. It is assured to pay off in the future, when we write our applications.
Many anti-globalization voices argue globalization destroys cultures. Not exactly. Japan's old culture, old values, have been mixed and integrated with western ones.
You know, the funny thing is that you're looking at this from a western point of view. I'm sure certain (mostly conservative) Japanese people will look at this evolution of their culture in a completely different way.
As an important sidenote, I'd also like to mention that it's not just about cultures that are influenced by the globalisation trend, but about human values, and the power to assume the right to protect these values. It's pure politics, like someone else mentioned also. You are bigger? Then you can speak up louder and supress other noises easier. A people alone is no longer capable to protect their valus from from what the globalisation is trying to force us to do. Consumption is not the only way of life, but to globalisation and it's strategies/tactics, ideally it should be. Now please read these lines again and imagine you're in Chilly, India or Sri Lanka. See what I mean?
When you say that 'in fact American industry has been damaged by competition' I feel like you are talking about it as if it is almost unfair. I do not see why this matters as to the notion of exploitation of 3rd world countries. It may have affected employment within the US (as much as in other western countries), yes, but those companies had very good reasons to move productions overseas. Not because they could get 'damaged' (well, maybe ehtically) financially. Quite the opposite. The people within those 3rd world countries are being exploited because they don't know better. And unlike the western world, they cannot protect themselves against the whims of those big multinationals, but depend on western opposition to protect their rights. I'm talking Nike, Ikea etc..
Imho it's that very call for better human rights and values that is what the anti-globalists as they were called are all about, see my other post.
The Yahoo blurb reads out:
The plane crashed shortly after 9 a.m. and thick, black smoke could be scene in televised reports.
Even I make spelling errors, but I think this kind of news should be thoughtfully brought to the public, rather than quickly jotted down.
No, giving away money is not the right answer. I can only speak for my country, but I think policy in Germany and elsewhere in europe is largely the same. We do also have special unemployement programs, we're redistributing working hours, shortening the work week, encouraging new, educated people to start in new technology markets + all sorts of other things. Some of these measures work, some don't.
Giving people work helps youth off the streets, but it doesn't realy grab the essence of the problem. Giving people education is what makes them think about other things than just their fan-club of skinheads. All in all, tolerance has to do a great deal with empathy. Education is usually a projection of what other people discovered, and it stimulates empathical capacity. Apart from this side-effect, it also helps you start higher-up the society ladder, so I think the solution is obvious. (and costs too much)
Hey you might just be right there, Jack, maybe it's sarcasm. Or wait, no, it IS irony, but especially to see you happy I'll pretend it's sarcasm. Deal?
Don't throw silly definitions at me, they are so boring.
This was, ofcourse, pure irony.
The fact is, European unemployment rates are unbelievably high (compared to American ones), and that breeds hatred.
The fact is, Europe has much more protection for the workers, but this comes at a price. High unemployment and the social problems that come with it.
That`s a lot of facts but I'd like to remind you of the fact that US unemployment rates are low because you're doing the hamburger-job thing. I was in LA this summer, seeing 3 people working as parking attendants on a parking lot. 3 people! In europe, there`s usually just a slot machine taking tickets.
Europe is a socio-economic culture. It has invented the unions. It has more protection for workers, yes, but I don't think you know how the system works.. It surely comes at a price, but I would say your system comes at a price too. I've been to L.A., and a friend of mine is in S.F. right now. I get monthly reports on the awfull distance between upper and lower parts of society, and the contrasts in thinking that results from that, including hatred. Oh sure, everybody is working, but I woulnd't say that takes away the anger..
This is probably the best most intelligent comment I've read here in ages! Bravo!
I can totally understand your reasoning, but you'll agree with me that France is entitled to impose it's laws on any company that is selling products and services on it's territory. In comes the internet, the global trade economy tool. Since Yahoo! is US, of course, US laws apply. Since Yahoo! offers it's services in France, then French laws apply to these services. And voila. I don't think it's as simle as that. The internet is pushing territory-bound laws to their limits, and the harder we stick to our laws, the larger the conflicts will become. Eventually either the laws or the territorial bounds will have to go.
Are you really saying that you think child-pornography should be openly sold on the streets? Because if you don't, you believe in some form of censorship
I think there's a difference in buying or selling a product which in this case happens to be child pronography, and free speech. It is the commercial exchange of certain products that can be regulated, but anything belonging to the personal atmosphere, like free speech, should, in my opinion, be untouchable, yes. You can ofcourse be very much against it, and try to convince a person that he's not doing any good with what he's doing, or you can not care a bit about what he does (the big attitude problem that's come up strongly in the 90ies), either way, you should not be able to forbid it.
In my opinion, censorship is cutting away those tokens that are the witnesses of the problems in our society. If you cut away those signs, you basicly just don't want to see it. That's good. I don't want to see it either. However, you're not attacking the real problem AND you're denying others the knowledge of the consequences a certain problem has, which should normally have a warning effect..
Ofcourse, there are people that follow this kind of reasoning, but there are many others that don't. Only yesterday, a girl said to me she didn't believe in this crap. People just care about their own lives, and then tose same people are surprised when something shocking appears in the paper saying "oh no what an evil society". Oh well, I probably won't be convincing anyone but it never hurts to try again anyway..
So, this does in fact also mean that the rest of the world is not bound by US laws and patents, if their courts should choose to come to the same conclusion on these topics. I would say that this evolution is actually undermining the global economy and tradezone, rather than protecting it.
Just to be clear, I think the ruling is justified, because I am a profound believer in free speech and against any form of censorship. Denial of information is the worst of all evil. That said, I an understand the french ruling, but I honestly think they should have dealth with this issue differently.
However, as inernational laws begin to conflict with each other, in this case just on the freespeech front of just one company policy, but later on maybe also on other topics, we're in the porcess of entering a new kind of tradewar, in which the legal systems will oppose eachother in order to support the opinions and economies of their societies. I'm curious as to what all this might eventually lead.
..is against a kind of patriotism that does happen to be in line with the kind of patriotism US citizens stand for.
Ahem, I meant "..a kind of patriotism that does NOT happen to be in line with etc.. ". Sorry if I offended the US with this, the opposite sentence is not as offensive but it does adequately depict the issue that the US is kind-of playing policeman in the world and is obliging other countries to stick to it's rules, it's judgement of right and wrong. And that, imho, is wrong. I wouldn't vote for that.
One thing many people fail to asses is that the anti-globalist organisation is in fact violence free in it's essence. Much like Marxism you could say, it stands for a general awakening, a reveille the french say, of just common sense. It wants to bring back the power to the consumer, and restore the balance of power, in favour to the people instead of to the companies. One could remark that there is probably nothing more beautifull to the movement than a new-born fight to regain the rights and 'values' of the people. In fact, the anti-globalist's movement is a global movement around the world. There is nothing anti-global to it. It's like greanpeace and the WWF.
Of course, what happened in Milan and Helsinki is not what the movement is about. Those events were programmed by trouble-makers that seized the opportunity to pick a fight and express their general malcontentcy, while remaining virtually incognito under the unfamiliar umbrella of so many other unknown organisations that meant no harm, except to the present system.
You could say that, in many regards, Bin Laden has used the political and econmical structures of financial power to his advantage, and the globalists were (and are) warning against exactly that kind of a system, where sense of the word 'control' is taboo'd, except when it's about people's consumer behaviours. If you hold meetings between steel barred fences about economical issues and there's a crowd yelling outside, I get can't help but think about a book written a long time ago, which was perceived as groundbreaking and very important at it's time, called 'Brave New World'. Have we simply forgotten our arts and sciences, our good common sense? Have we morphed into brainless consumers that are addicted to TV's and MacDonnalds more than anything else? Does everybody just care about anything but our family and our job and hollidays? If we care about tomorrow's world, the world our children have to deal with, then in my opinion it would simply be totally irresponsible to the 'just stick with your own life is good enough for me' attitude. Granted, there's not much you can do, but a positive attitude is worth much more than you can possibly imagine. And that positive attitude, that anger about what's wrong with the world, that calling for change, is what the globalists are truely about.
Democracy's spread has now in fact created a bloody confrontation with fundamentalism, a holy war. Both sides refer to one another in evil blasphemers. Lost in this confrontation is the idea that Democracy isn't only about multi-national markets, cheap labor and business opportunities...[..]
This probably the most horendous statement in this provocative and therefor worthless assessment of Mr. John Katz, who I normally do not disrespect at all. In case Katz had fallen asleep, the war is firstly not against fundamentalism, but against terrorism. If the war is against fundamentalism, why don't we start arresting Amish people, Christian Tv networks and more of this kind of shit first.. I mean, if the war is against fundamentalism, then the war is against a kind of patriotism that does happen to be in line with the kind of patriotism US citizens stand for. And who are we to draw a line for the good and bad, who are we to proclaim a culture better or worse than the other. Katz rethori is intentionally provocative, and he wants discussion on topics that are indeed important, but by relentlessly draggin attention to these issues, people get even more black/white and you end up with the very fundamentalism we are supposed to be at war with. Sorry John no hard feelings. Next time, do one better for me.
I'm not going to get into a Java vs C++ war, but java is a neathly designed modern language with a lot of exception handling built in, so no excuses, while c++ is 20 years old and has a lot of loose ends everywhere (and lots more excuses)
I think most openSourcerers are using C++, not Java. Ofcourse you can still write propper decent code with most of the error handling in that language, but it's never gonna be as complete as what the Java framework can offer you to support.
Besides error handling there is also the way in which you test your code. I don't know if you guy's write tests, but since I started working for this new company we decided that we would follow eXtreme Programming to a certain extend, and allways write tests for each class. I must say that the quality of error handling automatically steps-up along the way, as you're inmediately confronted with most of the bugs and errors that can come about. It also offers a good way to prevent the code from being modified in ways that brake the tests as other people add their stuff. We're still in the early stages of our project so I can't really give a general opinion about it, but I'd allready recommend it to everyone.
Well the cool thing is that it's firmware upgradeable, so the display can really just about show you anything. It's got an elaborate menu structure with settings and a treeview system that allows you to see what's on the disc, or in an m3u playlist, etc..
As for the recording bit.. my borther has MD, so I know all about recording MD's.. it's really not that portable either, and most of us have a PC crammed in some corner anyway..
The reason why MD has not broken through, is because it's not open. It's pushed by just one company, and that never really works well, even if it is the biggest of em all. Because of that, compared to mp3, MD has the annoying built-in property that writers DEgrade the quality(!) of your recording when you copy across MD's.
Of course, MD's are quite sexy, but in my oppinion a tad too expensive..
Well, I recently got a portable rio volt SP 100 mp3 player. At the office we noticed a promotion sale in Holland and we collegially ordered 3 to get even more reduction. It`s a fantastic little thingy and appart from not recharging the batteries when it`s in the main power, it does everything mp3 you can think of. It`s a pitty the device doesn`t come with a display on the remote control, but appart from that, you're set with hours of mp3 listening fun.
Btw rio also has a car mp3 player, and car kits to buid in so you can have your mp3 player through your car speakers.
http://www.riohome.com/
.. reportedly also has some hijacked aircraft flying around, but since every newsagency is focussing on the US tragedy, this hasn`t been confirmed and is just a rumour. I must say that during the past 6 hours, I`ve only seen our national airport BrusselsX, which I can see from work, release 1 plane for takeoff, all other traffic is apparently shutdown. The NATO in brussels has been evacuated.
From somebody at the stockmarket, insureance shares have crashed and oilshares are sky-rocketing.
You laugh, but you'll laugh even harder with this article basicly saying email is the no1 threat for australian companies.
This shows how rigid they are in their thinking. I mean, if people used propper policies and security protection, there was no need for the digital witch-hunt they are now proclaiming.
Now I don't agree with the way things are now, for instance I don't think security firms SHOULD exist, but this kind of artisanal malpractice where the trade itself corrupts and starts to sustain itself, is present in all sorts of professions. You see it in law, you can see it in the medical department of hospitals, you can see it in university research labs looking for ever more funding, and you have it in the IT world. I think this is where the real issue is.
The abuse in the profession leads to a perverse effect of self sustainability, which is ofcourse exploited without any regulatory force, usually because the knowledge in the field is a barrier on itself, preventing people to get in, unless they comply to the practices of the trade, after which they are absorbed in the system, which will take good care of them.
That's a little abstract, but to give an example, if there weren't any people hacking and cracking, there would not be a need for security. But companies are about money, and are ths subject to hacking/cracking/virus/worms etc, giving existance to security companies. And who works for these companies ? Presto, there's your self-sustainability.
And no I'm not an anticapitalist or communist, or in security or cracking or hacking or law or medicine myself, these issues have been roaming my overly concerned mind for quite some time. Considering my signal to noise ratio, this post probalby won't mean much either way..
ah well..
That's what the article says, allthough UNIX itself probably is not illegal, but the sysadmin/company owning it is. If Sysadmins are not supposed to be able to test their own machines with scanners, how on earth can they be made secure ? If Anti-virus software makers are left with this law, how on earth can they design antidotes and detectors and scanners ? If tools and sourcecode hacks didn't surface, how can OS vendors fix loopholes in their software ? I'm sorry, but this is really a ticket to the stoneage. Seems the only thing lawyers are interested in these days is 'control', 'control' and even more 'control', who cares how idiot their laws may sound to a softwareworld that appears to be running away with allmost anything. As if digital crime is suddenly going to stop right at their borders. Gimme a break.
Well it might have been nice to have something different from "abort/retry/fail messages" which all 3 resulted in the system pretty much being unresponsive.
Well ok the GPF`s only showed up after EMM's turned up, and yes they don`t actually make part of D.O.S., but they were definately there.
AS for the ctrl-p experience, you could actually reprogram your prompt to reroute keystrokes with an NDOS feature, so effectively I just turned of ctrl-p to echo the prompt and there wasn`t any risk of ctrl=p locking after that for me, ever
Consider yourself lucky, it was easy enough to generate a general protection fault. I remember Ctrl-P hanging the kernel in an IO problem loop, also floppy IO operations had their moments of 'reasonable doubt', and certainly memory managers like Qemm and PMode/W were notoriously unstable, and generated somehting comparable to NT`s BSOD. basicly anything hooked into an IRQ or BIOS was (is for me;)) able to crash your box.
Well, Orbital produced 'The girl with the sun in her head' with GreenPeace`s solar power vehicle, a truck equiped with batteries and solar cells on antennae-like deployable pannels.
Our mailserver got stolen. Physically stolen. 2ce. There`s no such thing as 'impossible'.
(I work at a small university).
I`m not gonna shoot anybody, my point was that the people in your system are probably not aware they are being traced this closely, and that this kind of knowledge, whatever restrictions might be on them, can potentially be used maliciously. I don`t doubt your integrity, but such things DO happen, and frankly I don`t want a Casino to be the judge of that. So it`s simple for me. I don`t do casino`s. Not that I ever wanted to do them anyway..
Actually it`s not about IT ethics that much, rather about the way Casino`s work with people (and their data). I don`t believe the restrictions you named make much of an impression. Maybe you can`t sell the raw data, but hey, raw data is just raw data. You can just sell something else.. what level of control is there ? None. What kind of BIG TROUBLE are you talking about anyway ?
Really, I`m very intersted in the subject of datamining. It`s a valuable scientific tool. But I`d rather not see it used to analyse people`s lives and calcualte the potential value of a 'customer', after which anything can happen, without the soul even being aware of it.
ignace.