Wouldn't this qualify as an Ex Post Facto law and be forbidden by the constitution (in the US, anyway)?
Nope. That refers to criminal, not civil law (the Supreme Court decided so in 1798, so you can't even say that it wasn't founder's intent;-). The idea is that you can't put someone in jail for something which wasn't a crime when they did it. However, things like retroactive tax cuts (and increases) happen all the time.
Wonder what he meant by that. Did he mean unemployment? Accidental deaths? Failed corporations?
I think he's referring to labor unrest, more than anything else. Early attempts at unions (unions were a direct result of industrialization) were often met with violence on both the part of the workers and the factory owners. The factory owners often had government help in cracking skulls.
Getting mangled by the rather unsafe machines used at the dawn of the industrial revolution or things like the Triangle Factory Fire in New York (many women burned to death in a shirt factory in NYC because the doors were barred to prevent people from leaving before their shifts ended.) also produced some rather high body counts.
First of all, I don't think all of Darwin is Open Source. The important (i.e. proprietary) parts will be closed source.
I know that actually checking facts before posting is a rare art, but how about checking out http://www.publicsource.apple.com/
Darwin is certainly open source, and getting it to build cross-platform is certainly possible. What isn't open source is Quartz/QuickTime/etc.; the graphics layer built on top of Darwin. Apple considers those bits its crown jewels. Some people here think that Apple should just give them away. How would Apple make money, then?
Being selfish is to be expected, but refusing to support defective products like the powerbook 5300 is purely irresponsible. Apple made an enemy of me several years ago, and I can't see the good in a company that would do that to a customer (and a student who would have potentially bought a lot more of their stuff, at that!).-- end rant
Whoa; I had the exact opposite experience with my defective PowerBook 5300. That poor computer went to the repair shop 9 times in 19 months. I didn't pay for a single repair (good thing, because I was a starving grad student at the time); Apple paid for every one.
My 5300 finally up and died (I tried to wake it from sleep and it never woke up again) and when I called Apple to complain, they did the Right Thing. I can't talk about what they did (I signed a letter saying I wouldn't discuss it in public), but you clearly didn't persue your problem properly.
In my experience, Apple is a decent company. My computer died 7 MONTHS after the warranty ended, and they were still taking care of me. I just bought a new iMac DV (while I happen to love portable computers, you end up paying a $1000 premium for portability, and I decided it was no longer worth it. But I miss working and websurfing on the couch;-), which will be a kick-ass *NIX workstation sometime this summer...they've got me as a customer for life.
It would be great if we could use Mac's code. They should release their code as an open source product. I believe that MAC is taking their user interfaces seriously and that this is something that Linux is missing. Go Open Mac!
And how would Apple (not Mac or MAC) make money if the source code for the GUI is open? The entire Apple business model is centered around getting people to buy Apple hardware (Macs) because the user experience is vastly better than other platforms.
Before anyone points out Red Hat or other companies can give away their source code, remember that their business model is built around SERVICE. The products they are selling are fundamentally hard to use for the average person.
Anyone who doesn't believe me should sit their grandmother (or pick another computer-illiterate person in your life) down with a copy of Red Hat that's been downloaded (no manuals, remember, we're paying for that support) and then sit that person down with a Mac. See which one they get the hang of first. Imagine which one will generate more support phone calls.
The open source business model is profits through obscurity. Apple has been fighting obscure computing for 20 years. There's zero chance that Apple will open source the MacOS GUI.
Open sourcing the underlying OS (Darwin) makes sense, because it is basically Yet Another BSD Flavor. It's a commodity. Just like Linux.
Obviously both countries would very much like to be part of the UN, as they are, already.
Are you serious? By and large, America isn't exactly thrilled about the UN. The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Jesse Helms) just gave a speech at the UN, where he said that if the UN tries to push around the US, the US will QUIT the UN. How that would actually work, I'm not sure (with UN headquarters in the US and all). The US currently owes the UN something like $1Billion in back dues. The Republicans in Congress won't pay for "family planning" programs sponsored by the UN, because many of the support abortion.
Jesse is a putz, but he's got a point. I'm not so sure that I want other countries to have any say over how I live my life and how my government functions. (I wish the US would keep its nose out of other countries, too...)
She was being pressured to perjure herself for the President by Ms. Lewinsky (the "talking points" memo) and wanted evidence of her own honesty to fall back on if she was going to have to testify truthfully in court against these people.
Weren't the talking points were written by Linda Tripp? Didn't "truthful" Linda Tripp say that Wiley looked like she enjoyed Clinton's attentions? And didn't "truthful" Linda Tripp lie to Monica Lewinsky? And didn't she lie to Starr about making copies of the tapes? And didn't she lie to Starr about playing the tapes for other people? I'm sure there were a few other things that I'm forgetting. She's an awful, self-righteous woman who just can't imagine what it is that she has done wrong.
I don't think you understand what my problem with Linda Tripp is. It has nothing to do with politics and has everything to do with using and betraying someone else. I hope someone befriends you for the explicit purpose of taping your private conversations and selling them to make a quick buck.
It's remarkable that of all the people you mention, Nixon, Lewinsky, Clinton and Tripp, LT is the only one who is "evil." Yours is a strange belief system.
I didn't think it needed to be said about anyone else. But since you care what I think, here you go:
Nixon was an amazingly evil man. Besides plotting to cover up a stupid break-in (it's not like Nixon wouldn't have won anyway), he ruined lives as a "Commie hunter." He decided that the Jews in the Commerce Department were making up false data to make him look bad and ordered a list drawn up of all of the Jews in the government (even though Kissenger was his confidant, Nixon was pretty clearly an antisemite. He just considered Kissenger a "good Jew."). Drawing up an "enemies list" is a pretty astounding thing for a president to do. Phillip Roth nailed him and all of the scumbags he surrounded himself with in "Our Gang." (It's been 10 years since I read the book; I might have the title wrong).
Lewinsky is either a fool or a slut. You decide which is worse. As someone who is virtually the same age as Lewinsky, I'm insulted by people who think that she was too young to know better. What, you don't find out that it's wrong to fool around with married men until you're 22? Did she not know he was married?
Clinton is a guy who just doesn't know how to keep his damn pants zipped. Neither could Martin Luther King, Jr. I don't think it makes either one a bad guy.
Clinton is not an honorable man, but I don't think Americans want an honorable man for president. Clinton isn't even a good Democrat, because a good Democrat would have resigned and given Gore a year to run the country and the ability to run for president as an incumbent. But Clinton cares more about himself. As a human being, he leaves a lot to be desired. As a president, he's somewhere in the middle of the pack. Evil? Nah.
As for Clinton's perjury, it was about as bad as Bill Gates' perjury when he testified on video for the anti-trust trial. If you think one is guilty, then you probably think the other is guilty as well.
With re to a personal vendetta against Clinton in the OIC, keep in mind about half the lawyers in Starr's office were Democrats. But professional prosecutors pursue regardless of party.
So why was Fiske (the original special prosecutor) forced to resign by Republicans?
Whether or not the original intent of Starr and his office was personal, the end result certainly was. Remember, Starr didn't HAVE to persue the whole adultery thing. It didn't relate to his ongoing investigations. I can't imagine what Clinton and Lewinsky have to do with a land deal in Arkansas or with firing travel office employees or with missing billing records from the 80s. But they were looking for _something_, and they knew that _anybody_ would deny under oath that they were having an affair, if that testimony was going to be seen by his wife. So, they had perjury and "obstruction" and there you go.
If Kennith Starr ever had ANYTHING on Clinton that wasn't Zippergate-related, why didn't any of that appear in his report to the House? Why hasn't a final report been submitted yet? Why wasn't Clinton indicted? Starr went after a lot of peons, hoping that they'd "flip" the big guy. Never happened. Now, this is either because Clinton has amazing mental powers that have made these people into his zombie servants or THERE ISN'T ANYTHING THERE. While the first option would be really cool, I just don't think it's true.
Now we're way off topic from taping a conversation with a phone drone. But you wanted to know.
I'm just curious, did you ever inform the LinuxOne sales drone that you were recording that conversation? If not, you could get into some serious, serious trouble. Remember President Nixon?
Nixon didn't get into trouble for making tapes. He got into trouble because he didn't TURN OVER the tapes when suppoenaed. The tapes had been installed in the White House by LBJ, and LBJ had told Nixon that he had found them handy. (As an aside, the LBJ tapes were released a few years ago.) Nixon kept the system in place, and probably discussed illegal cover-up operations for Watergate with aides while the tape was rolling.
When Nixon did turn over the tapes, 18 minutes was somehow erased, and he tried to blame his secretary (she would have had to have folded herself up like a contortionist to accidently erase the tapes). This was pretty much the beginning of the end for Nixon.
Now, that evil woman Linda Tripp, she's in trouble for making tapes, because Maryland is one of the few US states where both parties must agree when being recorded. No matter what you think of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, remember that Tripp made those tapes so she could get a book deal out of a friend's confidences. She only turned them over to the feds when she found out that what she had done was illegal, and Kennith Starr was getting desperate to get SOMETHING on Clinton. There was a meeting of the sleezes, so to speak.
Taping a LinuxOne rep to demonstrate their lack of good faith isn't hardly in the same category.
C++ templates are expanded at compile-time to produce classes.
C++ templates, as I understand them, can be used for ANYTHING, not just the types of data held in containers. GJ (Generic Java) only applies to types.
GJ isn't "expanded;" it's reduced. Once the type check has been done by the compiler, a cast is inserted in place of the generic type. This removes the explosive expansion which results from templates. One of the reasons this works is that everything in Java is a subtype of Object. You can't do that in C++, since it isn't a singly rooted hierarchy.
If you'd like to do some actual research to go with your opinion, look at http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/wadler/pizza/gj/in dex.html
Ok, once again, how big are the programs you are writing?
Well, I've built a messaging/app-server in pure Java, and a GUI that sat on top of it (very cool; each user had multiple "rooms" with active objects whose code resided on the server. You could go into other rooms, if you had permission, interact with the objects in there. All of the objects could communicate via a simple message passing API. It was great.). Total size? Couldn't tell you off the top of my head (it's been 18 months since I last worked on it), but probably in the 200KLOC range for the server and the client.
I just finished work as part of a team doing EJB development. There's probably about 100KLOC in that project. I've built client-side tools to work with the EJB server. That's probably another 10KLOC of Java.
I also write small java projects on the side for my own personal happiness. If you're a fantasy baseball fan, I've got just the toy for you...
As a grad school research project, I hacked the 1.0.2 JVM on Solaris to modify how it downloads class files to applets. I used to be able to recite the class file format and the size of the opcodes in my sleep.
If you were to clearly explain to me why C++ is NOT becoming Java, I could probably explain to you why they are the same.
You probably meant why Java is NOT becoming C++. That's the question I'll answer.
The short answer is: someone thought about Java before they released it (AWT doesn't count; it was a hack written in a weekend when Java was retargeted to icky applets). Java has garbage collection. Java has a singly rooted hierarchy and single inheritance. Interfaces rock for separating implementation from, well, interface. Java doesn't have operator overloading, and never will. Java has built-in threading support. Java has built-in weak reference support. Java has excellent dynamic object code loading support. Since the language was built around these concepts (weak references were hidden in the original JDK releases, but they were there), they fit together nearly seemlessly.
The Java language spec added ONE new feature since its original release: inner classes. They are great. Anonoymous inner classes are lambda expressions, something I missed dearly from Lisp.
If generic programming comes to Java, it is going to work right, and not have nine billion different implementors each with their own incompatible ideas.
For anything that you code in Java, I can reproduce easily in C++ using the same sematics.
Well, duh. They're both Turing-complete languages. Anything that can be coded in Java can (in theory) be done on a Commodore 64 in CBM BASIC or any other Turing Machine equivalent. Doesn't mean I'd want to do that.
Java is getting to be more and more like C++. For example, templates will probably be added to the next version. And the reason why these new features are being added is cuz there actually missed by C++ programmes that write Java. I had to write Java once, and I would not go back. It's buggy, it's slow and it's not PORTABLE. Write once, run everywhere, right! Write once, DEBUG everywhere is more like it.
What JDK did you use? How long ago? I've been writing Java professionally for 2.5 years, and in grad school for another year. You're talking bollocks.
The "templates" that are being added to Java are not the C++ templates. They are Generic Programming. Sun has a ton of info on them on their site. All of the headaches that templates bring to C++ aren't present. What they do add to Java is the ability to type-check casts of generic objects at compile-time rather than run-time. The actual class files generated are virtually identical to class files generated with JDK 1.0.x to JDK 1.3.
If you don't understand why Java is NOT becoming like C++, you clearly don't understand either C++ or Java.
How do you use IE4.5 with/.? I get posts cut off in threaded mode. That's one of the few things that keeps me on Netscape 4.7 for the Mac. I've switched over to IE5 on my icky NT box at work, because Netscape would just stop working after a while and require me to log in and out again before it would work. If IE5.0 for Mac is half as good as the demos seem, Netscape will be gone from my system very quickly.
I'm using M13 under NT right now, and even though it doesn't render Apple's home page correctly (the tabs are off to the right), everything else seems pretty good. Bookmark editing is broken, but I can surf without crashes (so far).
If you are doing any Java2D or Java3D or Drag and Drop, you need Java2.
If you want to do any sort of fat client development in Java, Java2 is very useful. Of course, very few people are doing this, and those that are are doing so for in-house apps.
MTBE is a gas additive that many (not all) refineries used to make gas that will meet California's strict polution requirements. (BTW, some other poster said that Europe had tighter regulations than the US for air polution. Bull hockey. Cars built for the European market are required to go through mondo work before they are allowed to run in the US.) Adding MTBE to gas in California is one of the reasons gas prices are so high in the Bay Area.
Unfortunately, the MTBE is leaking out of the underground gas storage tanks used by gas stations and into groundwater and reseviors. Furthermore, there are some studies which show MTBE to be a carcinogen. Oops.
The benefit to society for proprietary software is a lot less clear. The fact that open source software has become a viable alternative despite unfavourable treatment from the governments, leads me to suspect that, in fact, the legislative interference has set back the quality and development of software, probably by many years. Certainly the Microsoft tyranny would never had been possible if they had not been backed by legislation.
Government hasn't helped out Open Source Software? What is the color of the sky in your world?
Let's take a quick poll: how much of the work that has gone in the GNU toolset or Linux (or sendmail or browsers or...) has been funded, either directly or indirectly, by various governments? Public universities with high-speed network connections, government research labs, univerity research labs with huge government grants, and other organizations that are feeding at the public trough have been the backbone of Free Software. To pretend otherwise is delusional.
As for your other point, if you think that the work that I do as a professional is not worth compensation, don't use it. You are a thief, plain and simple, if you use the fruits of someone else's labor without compensating them as they wish to be compensated. It doesn't matter what books you've read that can justify being a thief.
It's like roulette: I can't predict where the ball will land on the next spin, but I can say with absolute certainty that if I stay in the casino for long enough I will eventually lose all my money.
No, it isn't even remotely the same. Roulette is a bounded system with a limited, known set of variables. Over time, the ball should end up (on average) in each space the same number of times. I forget the exact details, but the reason the house wins at roulette (and why you shouldn't waste your money at it) is that there are N spaces on the board and N-2 spaces on the wheel, or the other way around.
Weather has lots of particles and lots of factors that we can't even begin to understand. For a long time, it was global cooling which was supposed to be the end result of pollution. Now it's global warming. It is certainly true that the average temperatures that have been measured recently have been higher, but what's causing it? Is it a permanent thing or is it temporary? Considering we have about 200 years of hard data which we are using to predict 4 billion years, there's a bit of inaccuracy here.
As for the election, the most accurate thing that can be stated is that more people INTENDED to vote for Gore. The problem is that they didn't do it correctly.
The Federal Elections Commission has a proposal to impute a value to a web page that engages in political speech. It gives a *large* monetary value to a page, and it counts against the $1000 limit. That should effectively silence political speech on the web, because violating the limit results in boocoo fines and jail terms.
If this is true, I'll start creating the Pat Buchannan WWW FanBoy Page. Nuking his ability to raise funds by creating a big pro-Buchannan site would be a wonderful thing. And I'd have the FCC to thank! Go figure!
-jon
Re:These benchmarks disagree... I disagre...
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Java Success Stories
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This is completely useless information. For one thing, we don't know which JDK K&P used (and different JVMs can have orders of magnitude different performance on the same hardware). We don't know which OS is running. Most importantly, we don't have the &*^&$^% source code! How can we judge the quality of the results without any information on the data?
I'd also like to point out that in the Real World, people don't write programs that implement Markov chaining. They write programs that suck data out of databases, display data on-screen, and communicate over networks. If Java is a poor performer on this one test, it doesn't make it a poor performer on real-world applications. ByteMarks, anyone?
ONE responsibility does NOT negate the other. It is perfectly legitamate for more than one person to have some degree of accountability over something. Indeed, it is frankly stupid to pretend that everything happens in isolation, and that all "blame" should be heaped onto a single scapegoat.
Primitive tribes tried that with real goats, and it got them exactly nowhere. Denial ain't your friend.
Just an off-topic point. No one "blamed" the scapegoat for their sins. The scapegoat recieved their sins and was then sent off in the wilderness. It's more of a martyr than anything else. A second goat was then slaughtered as a sin offering to God. Personally, it sounds like the scapegoat got the better part of the deal. Check Leviticus chap. 16 for the details.
Somehow, the concept has been corrupted in modern English. Now we blame the scapegoat for our sins, rather than use the scapegoat to "absorb" our sins. And we tend to kill the scapegoat rather than give him his freedom. Details...
. They've ported 1.1.x to at least three platforms I can think of (AIX, Linus & OS/2) and their implementations have been superior to Sun's. And Jikes, their java compiler, is already open sourced which may help with the porting.
JDKs for BSD are the least of the Java2 problems. Right, but the problem is that NO ONE BESIDES SUN has finished a port of 1.2 (aka Java2). IBM has a beta for AIX, but Sun's already on a beta of 1.3!
IMHO, writing a fast and reliable JVM is proving to be a heck of a lot harder than anyone anticipated.
Sun screwed up Java licences out of the gate. They should have been selling exclusive platform franchises to the highest bidders, with specific commitments of support from Sun and specific commitments of implementation from franchisees. If a franchisee didn't execute, they'd lose their franchise, and their code would be transferred to the next holder of that platform's franchise. If Sun failed, the fee paid to the franchisee would be refunded. Seems simple enough.
Instead, Sun did silly things, like license 5 companies to write JVMs for the Mac (Netscape, Roaster, Metrowerks, Microsoft, and Apple). None of them did a good job of it, because Sun gave them some god-awful work to base it on (Sun's own Mac JDK 1.0.2, written by people who never used Macs or written a Mac program). Apple's JVM team has been re-writing everything from scratch, putting them over a year behind Sun's Java progress. Most of the other licencees have now given up (Roaster, Netscape, Metrowerks). One of the licencees (Microsoft) has tried to screw Sun. Obviously, this has not been a successful licensing program.
Meanwhile, the only vendor for Java2 remains Sun. While Sun talks about "write once, run anywhere" the only two platforms Sun actually cares about are Solaris (obviously) and Win32 (because its the common one). I wonder how "helpful" Sun has been for IBM, Apple, and others who have been trying to get Java2 support completed. The FreeBSD people should just get at the back of the line...
You do realize that you are by far and away the rare case. The iMac isn't expandible via expansion slots, because normal people don't bother. Back in the Quadra days, Apple did a survey and found out that almost ALL NuBus slots were empty. There are a few people who actually filled them in, but the vast majority of people bought those machines without intending to buy NuBus cards.
The iMac is a consumer toster. I don't worry if my kitchen appliances need to be upgraded. I buy new ones. This is a good thing. It makes computers cheaper.
Apple is selling the low-end 350MHz iMac for $999. The most expensive iMac (iMac DV Special Edition) is $1500. Apple hasn't come within half a grand of a $2000 iMac. If you think $500 is a rounding error (only 33% of the price of the system!), I'd be happy for you to send $500 my way...
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Nope. That refers to criminal, not civil law (the Supreme Court decided so in 1798, so you can't even say that it wasn't founder's intent ;-). The idea is that you can't put someone in jail for something which wasn't a crime when they did it. However, things like retroactive tax cuts (and increases) happen all the time.
-jon
It's only stupid to someone who doesn't have any ideas of his own.
-jon
Take a look at what the Israelis are doing in the Negev; there are farms in the middle of a desert.
-jon
I think he's referring to labor unrest, more than anything else. Early attempts at unions (unions were a direct result of industrialization) were often met with violence on both the part of the workers and the factory owners. The factory owners often had government help in cracking skulls.
Getting mangled by the rather unsafe machines used at the dawn of the industrial revolution or things like the Triangle Factory Fire in New York (many women burned to death in a shirt factory in NYC because the doors were barred to prevent people from leaving before their shifts ended.) also produced some rather high body counts.
-jon
I know that actually checking facts before posting is a rare art, but how about checking out http://www.publicsource.apple.com/
Darwin is certainly open source, and getting it to build cross-platform is certainly possible. What isn't open source is Quartz/QuickTime/etc.; the graphics layer built on top of Darwin. Apple considers those bits its crown jewels. Some people here think that Apple should just give them away. How would Apple make money, then?
-jon
A movie isn't going to fix what ails the show. Here's the problem in a nutshell:
In the Critic-Simpsons crossover, they make fun of "Football in the Groin."
A few weeks ago, on the Simpsons ski trip episode, they devoted 20 seconds of screen time to Homer being hit in the groin.
When you become what you used to parody, it's time to call it quits.
-jon
Whoa; I had the exact opposite experience with my defective PowerBook 5300. That poor computer went to the repair shop 9 times in 19 months. I didn't pay for a single repair (good thing, because I was a starving grad student at the time); Apple paid for every one.
My 5300 finally up and died (I tried to wake it from sleep and it never woke up again) and when I called Apple to complain, they did the Right Thing. I can't talk about what they did (I signed a letter saying I wouldn't discuss it in public), but you clearly didn't persue your problem properly.
In my experience, Apple is a decent company. My computer died 7 MONTHS after the warranty ended, and they were still taking care of me. I just bought a new iMac DV (while I happen to love portable computers, you end up paying a $1000 premium for portability, and I decided it was no longer worth it. But I miss working and websurfing on the couch ;-), which will be a kick-ass *NIX workstation sometime this summer...they've got me as a customer for life.
-jon
And how would Apple (not Mac or MAC) make money if the source code for the GUI is open? The entire Apple business model is centered around getting people to buy Apple hardware (Macs) because the user experience is vastly better than other platforms.
Before anyone points out Red Hat or other companies can give away their source code, remember that their business model is built around SERVICE. The products they are selling are fundamentally hard to use for the average person.
Anyone who doesn't believe me should sit their grandmother (or pick another computer-illiterate person in your life) down with a copy of Red Hat that's been downloaded (no manuals, remember, we're paying for that support) and then sit that person down with a Mac. See which one they get the hang of first. Imagine which one will generate more support phone calls.
The open source business model is profits through obscurity. Apple has been fighting obscure computing for 20 years. There's zero chance that Apple will open source the MacOS GUI.
Open sourcing the underlying OS (Darwin) makes sense, because it is basically Yet Another BSD Flavor. It's a commodity. Just like Linux.
-jon
Are you serious? By and large, America isn't exactly thrilled about the UN. The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Jesse Helms) just gave a speech at the UN, where he said that if the UN tries to push around the US, the US will QUIT the UN. How that would actually work, I'm not sure (with UN headquarters in the US and all). The US currently owes the UN something like $1Billion in back dues. The Republicans in Congress won't pay for "family planning" programs sponsored by the UN, because many of the support abortion.
Jesse is a putz, but he's got a point. I'm not so sure that I want other countries to have any say over how I live my life and how my government functions. (I wish the US would keep its nose out of other countries, too...)
-jon
Weren't the talking points were written by Linda Tripp? Didn't "truthful" Linda Tripp say that Wiley looked like she enjoyed Clinton's attentions? And didn't "truthful" Linda Tripp lie to Monica Lewinsky? And didn't she lie to Starr about making copies of the tapes? And didn't she lie to Starr about playing the tapes for other people? I'm sure there were a few other things that I'm forgetting. She's an awful, self-righteous woman who just can't imagine what it is that she has done wrong.
I don't think you understand what my problem with Linda Tripp is. It has nothing to do with politics and has everything to do with using and betraying someone else. I hope someone befriends you for the explicit purpose of taping your private conversations and selling them to make a quick buck.
It's remarkable that of all the people you mention, Nixon, Lewinsky, Clinton and Tripp, LT is the only one who is "evil." Yours is a strange belief system.
I didn't think it needed to be said about anyone else. But since you care what I think, here you go:
Nixon was an amazingly evil man. Besides plotting to cover up a stupid break-in (it's not like Nixon wouldn't have won anyway), he ruined lives as a "Commie hunter." He decided that the Jews in the Commerce Department were making up false data to make him look bad and ordered a list drawn up of all of the Jews in the government (even though Kissenger was his confidant, Nixon was pretty clearly an antisemite. He just considered Kissenger a "good Jew."). Drawing up an "enemies list" is a pretty astounding thing for a president to do. Phillip Roth nailed him and all of the scumbags he surrounded himself with in "Our Gang." (It's been 10 years since I read the book; I might have the title wrong).
Lewinsky is either a fool or a slut. You decide which is worse. As someone who is virtually the same age as Lewinsky, I'm insulted by people who think that she was too young to know better. What, you don't find out that it's wrong to fool around with married men until you're 22? Did she not know he was married?
Clinton is a guy who just doesn't know how to keep his damn pants zipped. Neither could Martin Luther King, Jr. I don't think it makes either one a bad guy.
Clinton is not an honorable man, but I don't think Americans want an honorable man for president. Clinton isn't even a good Democrat, because a good Democrat would have resigned and given Gore a year to run the country and the ability to run for president as an incumbent. But Clinton cares more about himself. As a human being, he leaves a lot to be desired. As a president, he's somewhere in the middle of the pack. Evil? Nah.
As for Clinton's perjury, it was about as bad as Bill Gates' perjury when he testified on video for the anti-trust trial. If you think one is guilty, then you probably think the other is guilty as well.
With re to a personal vendetta against Clinton in the OIC, keep in mind about half the lawyers in Starr's office were Democrats. But professional prosecutors pursue regardless of party.
So why was Fiske (the original special prosecutor) forced to resign by Republicans?
Whether or not the original intent of Starr and his office was personal, the end result certainly was. Remember, Starr didn't HAVE to persue the whole adultery thing. It didn't relate to his ongoing investigations. I can't imagine what Clinton and Lewinsky have to do with a land deal in Arkansas or with firing travel office employees or with missing billing records from the 80s. But they were looking for _something_, and they knew that _anybody_ would deny under oath that they were having an affair, if that testimony was going to be seen by his wife. So, they had perjury and "obstruction" and there you go.
If Kennith Starr ever had ANYTHING on Clinton that wasn't Zippergate-related, why didn't any of that appear in his report to the House? Why hasn't a final report been submitted yet? Why wasn't Clinton indicted? Starr went after a lot of peons, hoping that they'd "flip" the big guy. Never happened. Now, this is either because Clinton has amazing mental powers that have made these people into his zombie servants or THERE ISN'T ANYTHING THERE. While the first option would be really cool, I just don't think it's true.
Now we're way off topic from taping a conversation with a phone drone. But you wanted to know.
-jon
Nixon didn't get into trouble for making tapes. He got into trouble because he didn't TURN OVER the tapes when suppoenaed. The tapes had been installed in the White House by LBJ, and LBJ had told Nixon that he had found them handy. (As an aside, the LBJ tapes were released a few years ago.) Nixon kept the system in place, and probably discussed illegal cover-up operations for Watergate with aides while the tape was rolling.
When Nixon did turn over the tapes, 18 minutes was somehow erased, and he tried to blame his secretary (she would have had to have folded herself up like a contortionist to accidently erase the tapes). This was pretty much the beginning of the end for Nixon.
Now, that evil woman Linda Tripp, she's in trouble for making tapes, because Maryland is one of the few US states where both parties must agree when being recorded. No matter what you think of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, remember that Tripp made those tapes so she could get a book deal out of a friend's confidences. She only turned them over to the feds when she found out that what she had done was illegal, and Kennith Starr was getting desperate to get SOMETHING on Clinton. There was a meeting of the sleezes, so to speak.
Taping a LinuxOne rep to demonstrate their lack of good faith isn't hardly in the same category.
-jon
C++ templates are Generic Programming.
C++ templates are expanded at compile-time to produce classes.
C++ templates, as I understand them, can be used for ANYTHING, not just the types of data held in containers. GJ (Generic Java) only applies to types.
GJ isn't "expanded;" it's reduced. Once the type check has been done by the compiler, a cast is inserted in place of the generic type. This removes the explosive expansion which results from templates. One of the reasons this works is that everything in Java is a subtype of Object. You can't do that in C++, since it isn't a singly rooted hierarchy.
If you'd like to do some actual research to go with your opinion, look at http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/wadler/pizza/gj/in dex.html
Ok, once again, how big are the programs you are writing?
Well, I've built a messaging/app-server in pure Java, and a GUI that sat on top of it (very cool; each user had multiple "rooms" with active objects whose code resided on the server. You could go into other rooms, if you had permission, interact with the objects in there. All of the objects could communicate via a simple message passing API. It was great.). Total size? Couldn't tell you off the top of my head (it's been 18 months since I last worked on it), but probably in the 200KLOC range for the server and the client.
I just finished work as part of a team doing EJB development. There's probably about 100KLOC in that project. I've built client-side tools to work with the EJB server. That's probably another 10KLOC of Java.
I also write small java projects on the side for my own personal happiness. If you're a fantasy baseball fan, I've got just the toy for you...
As a grad school research project, I hacked the 1.0.2 JVM on Solaris to modify how it downloads class files to applets. I used to be able to recite the class file format and the size of the opcodes in my sleep.
If you were to clearly explain to me why C++ is NOT becoming Java, I could probably explain to you why they are the same.
You probably meant why Java is NOT becoming C++. That's the question I'll answer.
The short answer is: someone thought about Java before they released it (AWT doesn't count; it was a hack written in a weekend when Java was retargeted to icky applets). Java has garbage collection. Java has a singly rooted hierarchy and single inheritance. Interfaces rock for separating implementation from, well, interface. Java doesn't have operator overloading, and never will. Java has built-in threading support. Java has built-in weak reference support. Java has excellent dynamic object code loading support. Since the language was built around these concepts (weak references were hidden in the original JDK releases, but they were there), they fit together nearly seemlessly.
The Java language spec added ONE new feature since its original release: inner classes. They are great. Anonoymous inner classes are lambda expressions, something I missed dearly from Lisp.
If generic programming comes to Java, it is going to work right, and not have nine billion different implementors each with their own incompatible ideas.
For anything that you code in Java, I can reproduce easily in C++ using the same sematics.
Well, duh. They're both Turing-complete languages. Anything that can be coded in Java can (in theory) be done on a Commodore 64 in CBM BASIC or any other Turing Machine equivalent. Doesn't mean I'd want to do that.
-jon
Java is getting to be more and more like C++. For example, templates will probably be added to the next version. And the reason why these new features are being added is cuz there actually missed by C++ programmes that write Java. I had to write Java once, and I would not go back. It's buggy, it's slow and it's not PORTABLE. Write once, run everywhere, right! Write once, DEBUG everywhere is more like it.
What JDK did you use? How long ago? I've been writing Java professionally for 2.5 years, and in grad school for another year. You're talking bollocks.
The "templates" that are being added to Java are not the C++ templates. They are Generic Programming. Sun has a ton of info on them on their site. All of the headaches that templates bring to C++ aren't present. What they do add to Java is the ability to type-check casts of generic objects at compile-time rather than run-time. The actual class files generated are virtually identical to class files generated with JDK 1.0.x to JDK 1.3.
If you don't understand why Java is NOT becoming like C++, you clearly don't understand either C++ or Java.
-jon
I'm using M13 under NT right now, and even though it doesn't render Apple's home page correctly (the tabs are off to the right), everything else seems pretty good. Bookmark editing is broken, but I can surf without crashes (so far).
-jon
If you are doing any Java2D or Java3D or Drag and Drop, you need Java2.
If you want to do any sort of fat client development in Java, Java2 is very useful. Of course, very few people are doing this, and those that are are doing so for in-house apps.
-jon
MTBE is a gas additive that many (not all) refineries used to make gas that will meet California's strict polution requirements. (BTW, some other poster said that Europe had tighter regulations than the US for air polution. Bull hockey. Cars built for the European market are required to go through mondo work before they are allowed to run in the US.) Adding MTBE to gas in California is one of the reasons gas prices are so high in the Bay Area.
Unfortunately, the MTBE is leaking out of the underground gas storage tanks used by gas stations and into groundwater and reseviors. Furthermore, there are some studies which show MTBE to be a carcinogen. Oops.
-jon
Government hasn't helped out Open Source Software? What is the color of the sky in your world?
Let's take a quick poll: how much of the work that has gone in the GNU toolset or Linux (or sendmail or browsers or...) has been funded, either directly or indirectly, by various governments? Public universities with high-speed network connections, government research labs, univerity research labs with huge government grants, and other organizations that are feeding at the public trough have been the backbone of Free Software. To pretend otherwise is delusional.
As for your other point, if you think that the work that I do as a professional is not worth compensation, don't use it. You are a thief, plain and simple, if you use the fruits of someone else's labor without compensating them as they wish to be compensated. It doesn't matter what books you've read that can justify being a thief.
-jon
No, it isn't even remotely the same. Roulette is a bounded system with a limited, known set of variables. Over time, the ball should end up (on average) in each space the same number of times. I forget the exact details, but the reason the house wins at roulette (and why you shouldn't waste your money at it) is that there are N spaces on the board and N-2 spaces on the wheel, or the other way around.
Weather has lots of particles and lots of factors that we can't even begin to understand. For a long time, it was global cooling which was supposed to be the end result of pollution. Now it's global warming. It is certainly true that the average temperatures that have been measured recently have been higher, but what's causing it? Is it a permanent thing or is it temporary? Considering we have about 200 years of hard data which we are using to predict 4 billion years, there's a bit of inaccuracy here.
As for the election, the most accurate thing that can be stated is that more people INTENDED to vote for Gore. The problem is that they didn't do it correctly.
-jon
-jon
If this is true, I'll start creating the Pat Buchannan WWW FanBoy Page. Nuking his ability to raise funds by creating a big pro-Buchannan site would be a wonderful thing. And I'd have the FCC to thank! Go figure!
-jon
I'd also like to point out that in the Real World, people don't write programs that implement Markov chaining. They write programs that suck data out of databases, display data on-screen, and communicate over networks. If Java is a poor performer on this one test, it doesn't make it a poor performer on real-world applications. ByteMarks, anyone?
-jon
Primitive tribes tried that with real goats, and it got them exactly nowhere. Denial ain't your friend.
Just an off-topic point. No one "blamed" the scapegoat for their sins. The scapegoat recieved their sins and was then sent off in the wilderness. It's more of a martyr than anything else. A second goat was then slaughtered as a sin offering to God. Personally, it sounds like the scapegoat got the better part of the deal. Check Leviticus chap. 16 for the details.
Somehow, the concept has been corrupted in modern English. Now we blame the scapegoat for our sins, rather than use the scapegoat to "absorb" our sins. And we tend to kill the scapegoat rather than give him his freedom. Details...
-jon
JDKs for BSD are the least of the Java2 problems. Right, but the problem is that NO ONE BESIDES SUN has finished a port of 1.2 (aka Java2). IBM has a beta for AIX, but Sun's already on a beta of 1.3!
IMHO, writing a fast and reliable JVM is proving to be a heck of a lot harder than anyone anticipated.
Sun screwed up Java licences out of the gate. They should have been selling exclusive platform franchises to the highest bidders, with specific commitments of support from Sun and specific commitments of implementation from franchisees. If a franchisee didn't execute, they'd lose their franchise, and their code would be transferred to the next holder of that platform's franchise. If Sun failed, the fee paid to the franchisee would be refunded. Seems simple enough.
Instead, Sun did silly things, like license 5 companies to write JVMs for the Mac (Netscape, Roaster, Metrowerks, Microsoft, and Apple). None of them did a good job of it, because Sun gave them some god-awful work to base it on (Sun's own Mac JDK 1.0.2, written by people who never used Macs or written a Mac program). Apple's JVM team has been re-writing everything from scratch, putting them over a year behind Sun's Java progress. Most of the other licencees have now given up (Roaster, Netscape, Metrowerks). One of the licencees (Microsoft) has tried to screw Sun. Obviously, this has not been a successful licensing program.
Meanwhile, the only vendor for Java2 remains Sun. While Sun talks about "write once, run anywhere" the only two platforms Sun actually cares about are Solaris (obviously) and Win32 (because its the common one). I wonder how "helpful" Sun has been for IBM, Apple, and others who have been trying to get Java2 support completed. The FreeBSD people should just get at the back of the line...
-jon
The iMac is a consumer toster. I don't worry if my kitchen appliances need to be upgraded. I buy new ones. This is a good thing. It makes computers cheaper.
-jon
What is the color of the sky in your world?
Apple is selling the low-end 350MHz iMac for $999. The most expensive iMac (iMac DV Special Edition) is $1500. Apple hasn't come within half a grand of a $2000 iMac. If you think $500 is a rounding error (only 33% of the price of the system!), I'd be happy for you to send $500 my way...
-jon