Why is it so difficult for companies to do the right thing, even if it will cultivate a more positive image for them in the long run, at a limited expense?
In Palm's case its almost certainly because they are rapidly running out of money. Look at their most recent 10K filing, which shows their cash reserves have fallen steadily over the last three years:
June 2000: $1,062,128 June 2001: $ 513,769 June 2002: $ 278,547
(all figures in thousands of dollars).
I would guess that Palm are very reluctant to dip further into these dwindling cash reserves to fund a recall or other scheme. They believe the short term PR nightmare is better than the risk of running out of money.
The real world is usually more complex and messy than simple ideas of what is "right" or "wrong". Of course sometimes (Enron, WorldCom) it can be pretty clear...
It just struck me as odd that the two movies the guy is talking about made just a little bit of money. from http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice-alltime/rank.htm l
#5 Spider-Man $403,820,726 #13 Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones $298,843,836
That was my initial reaction too. But think about it this way - does the fact that the movies cited made a lot of money make the theft any less wrong? The law should not discriminate for or against people based on their wealth. If you believe Chernin that a theft took place then it doesn't matter whether the movies made or lost money. Its still theft.
On the other hand if you don't believe it was theft then the amount that the films made is also irrelevant to the argument.
Either way the box office take of Star Wars is not the issue.
I know somebody who had his phone line shut off, went completly VoIP and cell. He had to pay about 2 bucks a month NOT to be connected.
Okay, I don't get it. How does he end up paying $2/month not to be connected? Who is charging him this? Does he get a bill from AT&T every month for two bucks? He should just not pay it...
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I'd genuinely like to know what you mean.
wonder what these people actually accomplished in college. I can't think of any well-regarded discipline that doesn't require an understanding of logic, reasoning, and argument.
In theory this is what you'd expect. In practice you should take a look at some of what is being taught.
Even painting is a logical process, in a way. The art just doesn't spew from some magical fountain, does it?
Sadly there are many people who believe exactly that. Its often labelled divine inspiration or intuition or some other ill-defined process, but it amounts to the magical fountain.
An artist's knowledge and vocabulary will be different, but their reasoning and insight, in principle, isn't too far removed from that of a scientist.
There is some rational argument that the cognitive processes involved with science are different from those involved with art (left brain vs. right brain at its crudest). And a lot of artists don't have the slightest clue how to deal with real logic. Its ironic that it is the scientist who has the "absent minded professor" stereotype, when it is so often the artists who can't deal with simple real world operations. I have posted elsewhere of the Duke graduate who couldn't even do simple combinations of percentages.
I do agree that everyone should have a balanced education. But let me sound off for a moment on one of my pet peeves: EVERYONE should have a balanced education, not just those in the sciences or engineering! It continually annoys me that "geeks" are made to feel sheepish about any lack of "breadth" they may have, while those in the humanities are free to boast about their complete lack of knowledge of science and mathematics, apparently feeling no shame about it.
Preach it, brother.
I once worked with a Duke graduate with a Masters in, if I recall, English. She was very smart and well read, but when I asked her what 25% of 45% was she replied 70%. This level of ignorance, this lack of even the most basic grasp of maths is frightening.
I would have loved a course like this. But, I still think it may be solving the wrong problem. My experience is that there are fewer engineers who could do with a dose of liberal arts (though there are plenty) than there are liberal arts students who desperately need at least some basic grounding in science and math.
I have met countless Americans with liberal arts backgrounds who have tremendously difficulty dealing with even the most basic concepts of logic, reasoning, argument and math. This can seriously damage your career.
There are relatively few engineers who would admit with pride that they don't read books or go see films. There are plenty of liberal artists who seem only too happy to flaunt their ignorance of basic math and science.
So I like this course a lot, but I'd rather see something working in the other direction.
Would this also work with email virus? I think it would since the virus would also have a defined patern to it and the program would pick it up after the first one. Could this be made part of the STMP protocol or built into the backbone layer of the network?
I would assume it would work against viruii for just the reason you give, althought you'd want to run some experiments to confirm that.
I don't however, think you want to bury this in the backbone. An important part of this is that it is personalized. Each person needs to gather the statistics for their particular incoming email. If you have a centralized system it would become much easier for the spammers to craft emails that defeat the learnt patterns. If each individual users has a separate set of individually learnt filters it becomes impossible to craft emails that can get through more than a tiny percentage of them.
Since each word is treated as a token and everything else is not, I'm sure that spammer would quickly figure out that a spam like this just might work:
Enlarge !-- elephant -- penis [etc..]
which would show the message but hide the balancing words, so it could be possible to change the delta into your favor.
The techniques Paul uses can be extended to cope with this problem. The math is a little more complex but is definetly a known science. Any decent textbook on pattern recognition will give you solutions to this problem.
To just have an encrypted filesystem, and make the user type the password when it boots? Less points of failure, less expensive, and less trouble.
But that doesn't solve the problem that this is aimed to solve, which is either the laptop is stolen while on (and therefore decrypted) or the user walks away from the machine (leaving it decrypted).
As the article said, this could have a real application for people in busy semi-open areas (like a trading floor) who have to sometimes go away from their machines - even traders sometimes have to answer the call of nature or the boss.
This simply automates the encryption process once user and machine are separated by a specific physical distance. I particularly like the fact that it auto-decrypts when the user returns, although the potential exploits involving a detatched body part returning are rather disturbing...
the spam should be written as a 'multipart/alternative' with an html version of the spam as the primary alternate. The text version contains an innocuous message intended to pass the statistical spam filter. The spam message is entirely contained as an/image/ within the html.
Yes this would make it more difficult to spot, but notice that he examines the headers as well as the content of the spam. Looking at Mr. Graham's examples a lot of the key words that his filter finds are parts of the header, so you have a good chance that the probabalistic filters can still rule these out.
The second point, also made in Paul's article, is that part of what you want to do is push up the costs and difficulty of sending spam. Pushing out a million HTML images is much more costly to the spammer than sending out a million text messages. The more costs we can force spammers to bear the less economical it will become to spam, thus reducing the amount of spam.
How To Promote Your Own Site Clearly there is some awareness out there as to how to manipulate the search rankings, and following are a few methods that I think are common:.... In no way am I promoting any method that encourages false search rank increases.
Is it just me or is there something just slightly contradictory about these statements?
ave these guys never heard of The Interface Hall of Shame [iarchitect.com]? You should NEVER EVER utilize color in an interface where color correction is required. The UI hinders the user's ability to faithfully adjust colors.
Exactly my reaction, except digging a little deeper I found the application is skinnable, meaning it could be muted to an acceptable level. However if they really want to go head-to-head in the professional market they should change their web site and default skin to something more appropriate.
If they can't get even this most obvious and important UI issue right it is hard to trust them on the rest of the product. It looks very unprofessional. The product names do not help here either.
I also didn't see anything in the feature list which suggested this application is capable of editing web enabled video (QT, Real and/or WMV)
They support QuickTime, and Ogg Vorbis audio support is nice. I assume they support all the QT audio formats as well.
I agree that Sun offering a Linux server is genuinely big news. I imagine that the engineering costs of maintaining Solaris are pretty enormous, and Sun would like to reduce them. It makes sense for Sun to leverage the excellent work of the Open Source community by building on top of Linux instead of maintaining their own parallel development team working on a very similar set of core UNIX-esque services.
Which leads to an interesting question. What are the real differences between Linux and Solaris as server OSes? I know Solaris has a good reputation for clustering and high server-side throughput. Are there other Solaris features that could be migrated into a server distribution of Linux?
I don't want to start an OS flame war - I am genuinely interested in the facts.
Why does every company have to become $100M+ in size. Why can't they grow the market that they serve now?
Actually the answer is quite simple. Whether you think it is sensible or not is up to you.
ActiveState are a Venture Capital financed company. This is the list of their investors:
Greg Aasen, Kevin Huscroft, PMC-Sierra; Matt Dion, Crystal Decisions; Haig Farris, Fractal Capital Corp; Paul Lee, Don Matrick, Electronic Arts; Amos Michelson, CREO Products Inc; Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly & Associates; Hadar Pedhazur, Opticality Ventures; Michael Tiemann, Red Hat
I don't know how much money was put into the company, but a good guess is the $10 million - $40m range; perhaps more. The basic math of VC funding is something like this:
1 in 10 VC-financed companies make it. Therefore 9 in 10 fail. To break even a VC has to make 10 times their investment back. Therefore for a $25m investment the company has to be sold (through IPO or merger) for at least $250 million. To attract investor money that otherwise goes to the stock market or bonds or whereever you need to do better than break even. You need to have 2-3 times returns at least. So you need to be able to invest $25m and get back $500-$750 million at the "liquidity event".
You want to sell a company for $500 million? You're going to need to be making profit and have revenues in the $100m/year range.
Venture Capital is a high-risk high-reward deal, where the vast majority of investments fail. The handful that succeed have to succeed big in order to support any VC money at all.
If a company wants to start small and grow slowly it should not take VC money; there are lots of other sources of financing, but they will be for much smaller amounts. Once you've taken VC money, don't start moaning when the investors want you to live up to the other end of the bargain. They give you $25 million, you give them back a company with huge revenues.
And they used continuous tones, or drones similar to those used by bagpipes, to indicate continuous states like loops where many nested operations may take place. "The use of a continuous tone can indicate that the program is inside the loop," said Vickers.
Interesting. Back when I first got into computing I used a BBC Micro. This was a primitive machine by today's standards, with no fan (the 2MHz 6502 CPU didn't get hot), no disk drive of any sort, basically nothing to make any noise except the CPU. In a quiet room you could hear the processor humming. It would change pitch as a program ran - you could tell when you hit an infinite loop because the pitch would change to a continuous whine. It was actually useful - and used - for debugging. Fun days,
Real authors of novels don't just sit down and blurt out whatever comes into their head at any given moment. Don't assume that the immediacy of the blog format will substitute for good preparation and planning.
Not so. Like all art forms there are authors who do in fact just sit down and write, and those who plan meticulously and then re-edit through many drafts before they are ready to "go live". And of course lots of authors somewhere in between these two extremes.
There really are artistic "idiot savants": by all accounts Mozart was like this - essentially a gibbering fool in life but also capable of apparently spontaneously creating some of the most moving and complex music ever written. At the opposite end of the spectrum was Beethoven who also created astounding - and astoundingly beautiful - music yet who sweated over every note and constantly re-wrote and fine-tuned his creations.
Related to this is the Parry People Mover which has been developed by a small company in Wales. This is designed as a light urban tansit system using flywheel to run the "people movers". The flywheels in these lightweight cars are recharged by either onboard LPG internal combustion engines or by electric motors fed from recharging points at stations.
They have been trialed on the Welsh Highland Railway and on the island of Mauritius omngst several other schemes - a quick Google search will turn up a lot more information about some of the trials.
While not a total success it is good to see innovation in this area.
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. Godel, Escher and Basch by Douglas Hofstader. This is profound investigation into the fundamental theories that underly computer science. After reading this book everything else is just work. If you can understand Hofstader you have all the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings you need to really understand software.
The real joy is this book is not just meaningful it is also enormous fun. Hofstader covers some complex mathemetical ground (Turing machines, Cantorization, Godel's incompleteness theory) wrapped up in erudite and thought-provoking tales of the relationship of computer science, language, art and music.
JBoss doesn't have nearly the performance you need for a solid, production container. JBoss for testing and development is WONDERFUL, but for production, you're best to go with either BEA's Weblogic, or IBM's WebSphere.
I've heard conflicting opinions about the relative performance and stability of JBoss compared with WebLogic and other commercial EJB containers. This is not meant as a flame, its an honest question. Can you point to any (even sorta) independent testing that compares these products head-to-head?
I'd be very interested as my organization is currently building a large EJB system and we are considering which container platform to adopt.
This is such an obvious troll. What a shame it got modded up. Just a few of the more glaring errors:
C, a language that provides no security features such as garbage collection
In what sense is garbage collection a security feature? That makes no sense.
It is a very sad fact, but logically Microsoft's programmers are smarter than those in open source, simply because they're able to earn more money
That's not true at all. As someone who makes their living programming I can tell you that there are plenty of dumb commercial programmers and plenty of smart open source programmers. And vice versa. If you really wanted to be "logical" you'll understand that money earnt is not the same as skill. Plenty of people do highly skilled work without payment - ever heard of a hobby?
go for an operating system controlled by one company, who knows what their code does, and how to fix it if it goes wrong. The only option, in that case, is Microsoft.
Since GPU Shader is not Turing complete, the language need not be, I thought it was very logical. No further explanation is needed,
Sorry but you are wrong. Simply restating your opinion does not constitute a rebuttal.
The Cg language is - as far as I can tell from reading the spec. - fully Turing compatible. Is it possible you don't know what Turing compatible is?
To be Turing compatible a language needs to support branching and looping. Okay its not quite that simple but this is the essential bit. Cg has both the if and the for () statements.
At best you could argue that some of the profiles currently supported, like dx8vs, don't support conditional branching. However even in this case the ?: operator is supported which means that this profile of the language (probably) is Turing complete.
Even if you disagree that the dx8vs profile is Turing complete, the Cg language defintely is because it does support the if conditional branch.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it so difficult for companies to do the right thing, even if it will cultivate a more positive image for them in the long run, at a limited expense?
In Palm's case its almost certainly because they are rapidly running out of money. Look at their most recent 10K filing, which shows their cash reserves have fallen steadily over the last three years:
June 2000: $1,062,128
June 2001: $ 513,769
June 2002: $ 278,547
(all figures in thousands of dollars).
I would guess that Palm are very reluctant to dip further into these dwindling cash reserves to fund a recall or other scheme. They believe the short term PR nightmare is better than the risk of running out of money.
The real world is usually more complex and messy than simple ideas of what is "right" or "wrong". Of course sometimes (Enron, WorldCom) it can be pretty clear...
It just struck me as odd that the two movies the guy is talking about made just a little bit of money. from http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice-alltime/rank.htm l
#5 Spider-Man $403,820,726
#13 Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones $298,843,836
That was my initial reaction too. But think about it this way - does the fact that the movies cited made a lot of money make the theft any less wrong? The law should not discriminate for or against people based on their wealth. If you believe Chernin that a theft took place then it doesn't matter whether the movies made or lost money. Its still theft.
On the other hand if you don't believe it was theft then the amount that the films made is also irrelevant to the argument.
Either way the box office take of Star Wars is not the issue.
Damn fine until you realize you can't block popups or have tabs.
Download.com gives this list of popup killers for IE. Seems like you can block popups quite easily.
Tabs is a little harder, but you might like to try BroadPage.
See, it wasn't that hard?
I know somebody who had his phone line shut off, went completly VoIP and cell. He had to pay about 2 bucks a month NOT to be connected.
Okay, I don't get it. How does he end up paying $2/month not to be connected? Who is charging him this? Does he get a bill from AT&T every month for two bucks? He should just not pay it...
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I'd genuinely like to know what you mean.
wonder what these people actually accomplished in college. I can't think of any well-regarded discipline that doesn't require an understanding of logic, reasoning, and argument.
In theory this is what you'd expect. In practice you should take a look at some of what is being taught.
Even painting is a logical process, in a way. The art just doesn't spew from some magical fountain, does it?
Sadly there are many people who believe exactly that. Its often labelled divine inspiration or intuition or some other ill-defined process, but it amounts to the magical fountain.
An artist's knowledge and vocabulary will be different, but their reasoning and insight, in principle, isn't too far removed from that of a scientist.
There is some rational argument that the cognitive processes involved with science are different from those involved with art (left brain vs. right brain at its crudest). And a lot of artists don't have the slightest clue how to deal with real logic. Its ironic that it is the scientist who has the "absent minded professor" stereotype, when it is so often the artists who can't deal with simple real world operations. I have posted elsewhere of the Duke graduate who couldn't even do simple combinations of percentages.
I do agree that everyone should have a balanced education. But let me sound off for a moment on one of my pet peeves: EVERYONE should have a balanced education, not just those in the sciences or engineering! It continually annoys me that "geeks" are made to feel sheepish about any lack of "breadth" they may have, while those in the humanities are free to boast about their complete lack of knowledge of science and mathematics, apparently feeling no shame about it.
Preach it, brother.
I once worked with a Duke graduate with a Masters in, if I recall, English. She was very smart and well read, but when I asked her what 25% of 45% was she replied 70%. This level of ignorance, this lack of even the most basic grasp of maths is frightening.
I would have loved a course like this. But, I still think it may be solving the wrong problem. My experience is that there are fewer engineers who could do with a dose of liberal arts (though there are plenty) than there are liberal arts students who desperately need at least some basic grounding in science and math.
I have met countless Americans with liberal arts backgrounds who have tremendously difficulty dealing with even the most basic concepts of logic, reasoning, argument and math. This can seriously damage your career.
There are relatively few engineers who would admit with pride that they don't read books or go see films. There are plenty of liberal artists who seem only too happy to flaunt their ignorance of basic math and science.
So I like this course a lot, but I'd rather see something working in the other direction.
Would this also work with email virus? I think it would since the virus would also have a defined patern to it and the program would pick it up after the first one.
Could this be made part of the STMP protocol or built into the backbone layer of the network?
I would assume it would work against viruii for just the reason you give, althought you'd want to run some experiments to confirm that.
I don't however, think you want to bury this in the backbone. An important part of this is that it is personalized. Each person needs to gather the statistics for their particular incoming email. If you have a centralized system it would become much easier for the spammers to craft emails that defeat the learnt patterns. If each individual users has a separate set of individually learnt filters it becomes impossible to craft emails that can get through more than a tiny percentage of them.
Since each word is treated as a token and everything else is not, I'm sure that spammer would quickly figure out that a spam like this just might work:
Enlarge !-- elephant -- penis [etc..]
which would show the message but hide the balancing words, so it could be possible to change the delta into your favor.
The techniques Paul uses can be extended to cope with this problem. The math is a little more complex but is definetly a known science. Any decent textbook on pattern recognition will give you solutions to this problem.
To just have an encrypted filesystem, and make the user type the password when it boots? Less points of failure, less expensive, and less trouble.
But that doesn't solve the problem that this is aimed to solve, which is either the laptop is stolen while on (and therefore decrypted) or the user walks away from the machine (leaving it decrypted).
As the article said, this could have a real application for people in busy semi-open areas (like a trading floor) who have to sometimes go away from their machines - even traders sometimes have to answer the call of nature or the boss.
This simply automates the encryption process once user and machine are separated by a specific physical distance. I particularly like the fact that it auto-decrypts when the user returns, although the potential exploits involving a detatched body part returning are rather disturbing...
the spam should be written as a 'multipart/alternative' with an html version of the spam as the primary alternate. The text version contains an innocuous message intended to pass the statistical spam filter. The spam message is entirely contained as an /image/ within the html.
Yes this would make it more difficult to spot, but notice that he examines the headers as well as the content of the spam. Looking at Mr. Graham's examples a lot of the key words that his filter finds are parts of the header, so you have a good chance that the probabalistic filters can still rule these out.
The second point, also made in Paul's article, is that part of what you want to do is push up the costs and difficulty of sending spam. Pushing out a million HTML images is much more costly to the spammer than sending out a million text messages. The more costs we can force spammers to bear the less economical it will become to spam, thus reducing the amount of spam.
From the article:
....
How To Promote Your Own Site
Clearly there is some awareness out there as to how to manipulate the search rankings, and following are a few methods that I think are common:
In no way am I promoting any method that encourages false search rank increases.
Is it just me or is there something just slightly contradictory about these statements?
ave these guys never heard of The Interface Hall of Shame [iarchitect.com]? You should NEVER EVER utilize color in an interface where color correction is required. The UI hinders the user's ability to faithfully adjust colors.
Exactly my reaction, except digging a little deeper I found the application is skinnable, meaning it could be muted to an acceptable level. However if they really want to go head-to-head in the professional market they should change their web site and default skin to something more appropriate.
If they can't get even this most obvious and important UI issue right it is hard to trust them on the rest of the product. It looks very unprofessional. The product names do not help here either.
I also didn't see anything in the feature list which suggested this application is capable of editing web enabled video (QT, Real and/or WMV)
They support QuickTime, and Ogg Vorbis audio support is nice. I assume they support all the QT audio formats as well.
I agree that Sun offering a Linux server is genuinely big news. I imagine that the engineering costs of maintaining Solaris are pretty enormous, and Sun would like to reduce them. It makes sense for Sun to leverage the excellent work of the Open Source community by building on top of Linux instead of maintaining their own parallel development team working on a very similar set of core UNIX-esque services.
Which leads to an interesting question. What are the real differences between Linux and Solaris as server OSes? I know Solaris has a good reputation for clustering and high server-side throughput. Are there other Solaris features that could be migrated into a server distribution of Linux?
I don't want to start an OS flame war - I am genuinely interested in the facts.
Why does every company have to become $100M+ in size. Why can't they grow the market that they serve now?
Actually the answer is quite simple. Whether you think it is sensible or not is up to you.
ActiveState are a Venture Capital financed company. This is the list of their investors:
Greg Aasen, Kevin Huscroft, PMC-Sierra; Matt Dion, Crystal Decisions; Haig Farris, Fractal Capital Corp; Paul Lee, Don Matrick, Electronic Arts; Amos Michelson, CREO Products Inc; Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly & Associates; Hadar Pedhazur, Opticality Ventures; Michael Tiemann, Red Hat
I don't know how much money was put into the company, but a good guess is the $10 million - $40m range; perhaps more. The basic math of VC funding is something like this:
1 in 10 VC-financed companies make it. Therefore 9 in 10 fail. To break even a VC has to make 10 times their investment back. Therefore for a $25m investment the company has to be sold (through IPO or merger) for at least $250 million. To attract investor money that otherwise goes to the stock market or bonds or whereever you need to do better than break even. You need to have 2-3 times returns at least. So you need to be able to invest $25m and get back $500-$750 million at the "liquidity event".
You want to sell a company for $500 million? You're going to need to be making profit and have revenues in the $100m/year range.
Venture Capital is a high-risk high-reward deal, where the vast majority of investments fail. The handful that succeed have to succeed big in order to support any VC money at all.
If a company wants to start small and grow slowly it should not take VC money; there are lots of other sources of financing, but they will be for much smaller amounts. Once you've taken VC money, don't start moaning when the investors want you to live up to the other end of the bargain. They give you $25 million, you give them back a company with huge revenues.
No, please take a moment to look at the name of the original poster too.
Done that?
Thank you.
And they used continuous tones, or drones similar to those used by bagpipes, to indicate continuous states like loops where many nested operations may take place. "The use of a continuous tone can indicate that the program is inside the loop," said Vickers.
Interesting. Back when I first got into computing I used a BBC Micro. This was a primitive machine by today's standards, with no fan (the 2MHz 6502 CPU didn't get hot), no disk drive of any sort, basically nothing to make any noise except the CPU. In a quiet room you could hear the processor humming. It would change pitch as a program ran - you could tell when you hit an infinite loop because the pitch would change to a continuous whine. It was actually useful - and used - for debugging. Fun days,
"lug", noun:
1) Idiot who posts so fast he mis-spells "luck" as "lug".
2) Fool who should learn to use the Preview button.
Of course, knowing my lug, my code would come out sounding like a fucking Britney Spears song. Arghhh...
Real authors of novels don't just sit down and blurt out whatever comes into their head at any given moment. Don't assume that the immediacy of the blog format will substitute for good preparation and planning.
Not so. Like all art forms there are authors who do in fact just sit down and write, and those who plan meticulously and then re-edit through many drafts before they are ready to "go live". And of course lots of authors somewhere in between these two extremes.
There really are artistic "idiot savants": by all accounts Mozart was like this - essentially a gibbering fool in life but also capable of apparently spontaneously creating some of the most moving and complex music ever written. At the opposite end of the spectrum was Beethoven who also created astounding - and astoundingly beautiful - music yet who sweated over every note and constantly re-wrote and fine-tuned his creations.
Roger Arrick has put up a web page... and Slashdot has taken it down again.
Related to this is the Parry People Mover which has been developed by a small company in Wales. This is designed as a light urban tansit system using flywheel to run the "people movers". The flywheels in these lightweight cars are recharged by either onboard LPG internal combustion engines or by electric motors fed from recharging points at stations.
They have been trialed on the Welsh Highland Railway and on the island of Mauritius omngst several other schemes - a quick Google search will turn up a lot more information about some of the trials.
While not a total success it is good to see innovation in this area.
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. Godel, Escher and Basch by Douglas Hofstader. This is profound investigation into the fundamental theories that underly computer science. After reading this book everything else is just work. If you can understand Hofstader you have all the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings you need to really understand software.
The real joy is this book is not just meaningful it is also enormous fun. Hofstader covers some complex mathemetical ground (Turing machines, Cantorization, Godel's incompleteness theory) wrapped up in erudite and thought-provoking tales of the relationship of computer science, language, art and music.
Truly one of the great works of our field.
Heading deeper off-topic. Sorry.
JBoss doesn't have nearly the performance you need for a solid, production container. JBoss for testing and development is WONDERFUL, but for production, you're best to go with either BEA's Weblogic, or IBM's WebSphere.
I've heard conflicting opinions about the relative performance and stability of JBoss compared with WebLogic and other commercial EJB containers. This is not meant as a flame, its an honest question. Can you point to any (even sorta) independent testing that compares these products head-to-head?
I'd be very interested as my organization is currently building a large EJB system and we are considering which container platform to adopt.
This is such an obvious troll. What a shame it got modded up. Just a few of the more glaring errors:
C, a language that provides no security features such as garbage collection
In what sense is garbage collection a security feature? That makes no sense.
It is a very sad fact, but logically Microsoft's programmers are smarter than those in open source, simply because they're able to earn more money
That's not true at all. As someone who makes their living programming I can tell you that there are plenty of dumb commercial programmers and plenty of smart open source programmers. And vice versa. If you really wanted to be "logical" you'll understand that money earnt is not the same as skill. Plenty of people do highly skilled work without payment - ever heard of a hobby?
go for an operating system controlled by one company, who knows what their code does, and how to fix it if it goes wrong. The only option, in that case, is Microsoft.
Er... or Apple?
Like I said, blatant troll.
Since GPU Shader is not Turing complete, the language need not be, I thought it was very logical. No further explanation is needed,
Sorry but you are wrong. Simply restating your opinion does not constitute a rebuttal.
The Cg language is - as far as I can tell from reading the spec. - fully Turing compatible. Is it possible you don't know what Turing compatible is?
To be Turing compatible a language needs to support branching and looping. Okay its not quite that simple but this is the essential bit. Cg has both the if and the for () statements.
At best you could argue that some of the profiles currently supported, like dx8vs, don't support conditional branching. However even in this case the ?: operator is supported which means that this profile of the language (probably) is Turing complete.
Even if you disagree that the dx8vs profile is Turing complete, the Cg language defintely is because it does support the if conditional branch.