OK, let me see if I have this right. Crusoe sacrifices speed for longer battery life, but battery life is dominated by power requirements of the screen and hard drive so the gain is marginal.
I've seen customers (of my former company's defunct app server) access entity beans from client GUI apps. Passing objects by value led to much improved performance.
If you have one middle-tier JVM and the EJBs and all JSPs and servlets and session beans live in it, then entity beans aren't that bad.
But the same problems creep in again when you have multiple JVMs in the middle tier, e.g. with clustering. You might have a servlet communicating with lots of entity beans in different JVM located on different boxes.
The simplest approach to entity beans has one entity bean per row in a result set. This is pretty expensive, when you have a large result set, or more generally, a middle tier that has to work with lots of data from the database. The overhead of being able to access an entity bean remotely is simply not that important for every bit of data retrieved from a database.
Some app server vendors advise against this pure approach, and the resulting methodology ends up looking a lot like session beans anyway.
I prefer to use session beans to query the database and create lighter-weight, serializable objects encapsulating database state, (e.g. application specific objects or beans, or Maps). Then, instead of accessing entity beans remotely (using more bandwidth), I just pass the objects where needed. Having access to objects passed by value can save lots of round-trips to get data remotely.
Entity beans should probably be avoided. Stick with session beans.
Stateful session beans should probably be avoided. Stick with stateless if possible.
Given the above, I wouldn't even consider
container-managed persistence.
With these guidelines, it is quite simple to write fast, portable 3-tier applications. The tool
situation is also rapidly improving.
So, to answer the question, yes, J2EE has lived up to it's promise. I can't imagine doing any serious (maintainable!) middle-tier work in alternatives such as Perl, PHP, etc. It's reached critical mass, having lots of serious, deployed applications, good and improving tool support, and lots of developers who know J2EE and the products supporting it.
But we now know that technology is really about fads that come and go with increasing frequency. If I had spent the last five years windsurfing in Aruba, 1) I would be much, much happier and healthier, 2) I would have missed B2C, B2B, Java AWT, push technology, and Y2K. In another year you can probably forget about C# and COM. If you have a good solid understanding of computer science, and some experience in the real world, you should be able to pick up the new fads when you return.
A completely different issue is how prospective employers will view your n-year absence.
I agree with the other posters who advocate Java: JSP for generating pages, and servlets for middle-tier business logic. A minimal solution would be something like Tomcat (which is open source) with Apache. If you want to use EJB, then you'll need something bigger than Tomcat.
As for the database, I like Oracle. You could also consider keeping the database on SQL Server. Either way, you'll need a JDBC driver. Pure Java ("type 4") drivers are a pretty safe bet. WebLogic has (or had) one for SQL Server, and Oracle has a free JDBC driver for Oracle.
I really like that, Micro-soft. The guy sounds like T. Herman Zweibel, publisher emeritus of The Onion (e.g. see this). Come to think of it, there are quite a few resemblances.
If the idea is novel, then you are bound by your earlier agreement to sign the patent. If the idea is not novel, and you know of prior art, shouldn't you tell your IP lawyers about it?
You might also consider telling your nearest corporate officer of your non-novelty concern. By law (I think -- IANAL) they would then HAVE to investigate the prior art, and that could slow down or kill the patent. This may not be the desired outcome for the corporate officer.
(I was at a company where the CEO deliberately kept himself in the dark on prior art precisely to avoid IP quagmires of this sort.)
For some time now, I've been using this Dell typewriter. It's the
damndest thing. It's got keys sort of like my good old Underwood, but
you don't have to press very hard at all, and the thing is flat as a
board. And there are these strange keys with Ctrl and Alt on them, and
a bunch of others that say F1, F2 up to F12, and SysRq and what not,
and I don't know what on earth they're for. Mercy.
Also, no metal rods inside. Then, here's the strangest thing. The
keyboard is attached to the rest of the typewriter by this long piece
of rope and goes to this box, you see. The printing part is attached
to this box by another rope. And you aren't supposed to look at the
paper while you type. No sir. You look at this piece of glass that
looks JUST LIKE a piece of paper. Yup, that's also attached to the box with a big piece of rope.
Oh yeah, there's one more piece of rope going into the box, and it's
got this bar of soap sort of thing on the other end, but it isn't
soap, and it has two buttons on it. And when you move it around (on a
table, that is), this little arrow moves on the glass. When you press
buttons on the soap sort of thing, you can sometimes make things
happen, like printing the stuff you're typing onto a piece of paper.
Now you may be wondering how I ever figured out that this here Dell
thing is a typewriter. Heck, it was easy. If I try doing anything else
all I get is a BSOD.
The report predicts that Oracle won't be able to compete with the
widespread emergence of no-cost database and server software and will
be forced to open its applications. But the company will eventually
recover by transforming itself into a service/support vendor.
This is nonsense. For all practical purposes, Oracle is the only
choice for serious database applications. The long-term existence of
Sybase and Informix are in doubt. DB/2 is credible but doesn't have the
critical mass of developers and DBAs that Oracle does. ASPs are going
with Oracle. MS SQL Server is not a real threat. And that's just the
proprietary world.
In the open-source world, it looks like the only serious contender is
Postgres. (Yes, I know MySQL has transactions now. Go away.) Even if
it could compete technically, (maybe it can, I don't know), it has the
same problem as DB/2.
Oracle has nothing to worry about. In fact, it is probably on its way to
becoming a monopoly. And that's just for the DBMS itself. Are there
any open-source equivalents for Oracle's suite of applications?
Look, Forrester isn't going to get headlines for itself by saying, "Guess what, open source Postgres and MySQL isn't going to beat Oracle."
It would be interesting to see a report card on how Forrester and these other pimple-squeezers have done for accuracy over the years.
The posting says there is no "pure DOS", not that there is no command shell. I'd be very surprised if WinME had no command shell. Many of the postings are reacting to the absence of a command shell.
Daniel Dennett addressed this issue in his book "Consciousness Explained", (I think; it could have been some other Dennett book). If I remember this accurately, his answer is no. You perceive certain things as red and so do I. We both have certain associations with "red" (red meat (the food), Red Meat (the comic), RedHat, certain flowers, stop signs,...). This is what defines "red".
I wondered about the same thing when I was about ten, and remember discussing it with friends and they had wondered about it too. Many of the posters here had the same thought. Dennett says this same thought occurs to a surprisingly large number of people.
I haven't used Star Office since Sun took it over. But at the time, the font situation was pretty bad. The native Linux fonts look terrible under Star Office. The procedure for installing True Type fonts isn't trivial. And once it's done, some characters still didn't come out right on-screen, (sorry, but I don't remember which ones).
This is really a criticism of Linux distributions, not Star. (I was using RedHat 5.2 at the time). Decent looking fonts, (and the necessary servers), should be included with the distribution, at least as an install-time option. By the way, this also allows for a much better selection of fonts for Netscape. (Has RH 6.2 or other installation done this?)
I'm currently using NT + wingate on a dual-home machine. I use tzo to map my domain name to the ugly name assigned by mediaone. If I use the Linksys product, how does tzo fit into the picture? If they don't work together, what alternatives are there? What if I want to map two different domain names to a box on the other side of the Linksys?
4GLs aren't dead, but they have evolved. Tools such as SilverStream aim to generate complete applications with no or little programming. Allaire ColdFusion is an IDE and proprietary language requiring more programming. If you throw out the IDE, then you have things tools such as PHP. Approaching the problem from a standard language viewpoint, there is Java as a foundation for JSP and EJB.
Another consideration is that 4GLs were aimed at applications with simple architectures, usually no more complex than client/server, (there are certainly exceptions). The tools I've mentioned are geared toward multi-tier applications on the internet, with a browser front-end.
OK, let me see if I understand this. A child pornographer has collected a gigabyte worth of disgusting pictures. He took the pictures himself and copyrighted them. He encrypts the pictures with a weak encryption scheme and sells them to other perverts. The FBI wants to catch this sicko. Does the FBI violate DMCA if they decrypt the pictures?
From what should I infer your consciousness? I do, by the way, but all you have done is reply to a comment.
Assuming I am really a person, you and I give each other the benefit of the doubt. The guy I responded to is building a machine that is not a person. I am well aware of the can of worms we're in, and the Turing test. My only point is that the benefit of the doubt we extend to each other should probably not be extended to this guy's program, (for many definitions of consciousness).
Don't laugh when I say "I told you so" at the end of 2001 when the computer industry is in the doldrums because of the combination of the collapse of Microsoft and the collapse of the Internet industry due to stockholders demanding profits.
Well if Microsoft "collapsed", it would be the biggest boost to the software industry ever. But they aren't going to "collapse". They may get split up, but the OSs and applications are not going away. And even if they did "collapse", CA would buy them.
Also, don't confuse flaky dotcoms going out of business with the "collapse of the Internet industry". Same thing as above -- when Amazon goes out of business, several dozen competitors will take its place. My prediction is that Amazon gets bought by IBM mainly for its patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone explain how quantum physics researchers create entangled photons and can track the members of the pair?
What am I missing here?
Yes, someone has done this, (e.g. Chuck Close is a recent example). But this guy did it on a computer, so now he can patent it.
If you have one middle-tier JVM and the EJBs and all JSPs and servlets and session beans live in it, then entity beans aren't that bad.
But the same problems creep in again when you have multiple JVMs in the middle tier, e.g. with clustering. You might have a servlet communicating with lots of entity beans in different JVM located on different boxes.
Some app server vendors advise against this pure approach, and the resulting methodology ends up looking a lot like session beans anyway.
I prefer to use session beans to query the database and create lighter-weight, serializable objects encapsulating database state, (e.g. application specific objects or beans, or Maps). Then, instead of accessing entity beans remotely (using more bandwidth), I just pass the objects where needed. Having access to objects passed by value can save lots of round-trips to get data remotely.
- Entity beans should probably be avoided. Stick with session beans.
- Stateful session beans should probably be avoided. Stick with stateless if possible.
- Given the above, I wouldn't even consider
container-managed persistence.
With these guidelines, it is quite simple to write fast, portable 3-tier applications. The tool situation is also rapidly improving.So, to answer the question, yes, J2EE has lived up to it's promise. I can't imagine doing any serious (maintainable!) middle-tier work in alternatives such as Perl, PHP, etc. It's reached critical mass, having lots of serious, deployed applications, good and improving tool support, and lots of developers who know J2EE and the products supporting it.
A completely different issue is how prospective employers will view your n-year absence.
As for the database, I like Oracle. You could also consider keeping the database on SQL Server. Either way, you'll need a JDBC driver. Pure Java ("type 4") drivers are a pretty safe bet. WebLogic has (or had) one for SQL Server, and Oracle has a free JDBC driver for Oracle.
I really like that, Micro-soft. The guy sounds like T. Herman Zweibel, publisher emeritus of The Onion (e.g. see this). Come to think of it, there are quite a few resemblances.
I think it was Patty Smyth.
You might also consider telling your nearest corporate officer of your non-novelty concern. By law (I think -- IANAL) they would then HAVE to investigate the prior art, and that could slow down or kill the patent. This may not be the desired outcome for the corporate officer. (I was at a company where the CEO deliberately kept himself in the dark on prior art precisely to avoid IP quagmires of this sort.)
Also, no metal rods inside. Then, here's the strangest thing. The keyboard is attached to the rest of the typewriter by this long piece of rope and goes to this box, you see. The printing part is attached to this box by another rope. And you aren't supposed to look at the paper while you type. No sir. You look at this piece of glass that looks JUST LIKE a piece of paper. Yup, that's also attached to the box with a big piece of rope.
Oh yeah, there's one more piece of rope going into the box, and it's got this bar of soap sort of thing on the other end, but it isn't soap, and it has two buttons on it. And when you move it around (on a table, that is), this little arrow moves on the glass. When you press buttons on the soap sort of thing, you can sometimes make things happen, like printing the stuff you're typing onto a piece of paper.
Now you may be wondering how I ever figured out that this here Dell thing is a typewriter. Heck, it was easy. If I try doing anything else all I get is a BSOD.
This is nonsense. For all practical purposes, Oracle is the only choice for serious database applications. The long-term existence of Sybase and Informix are in doubt. DB/2 is credible but doesn't have the critical mass of developers and DBAs that Oracle does. ASPs are going with Oracle. MS SQL Server is not a real threat. And that's just the proprietary world.
In the open-source world, it looks like the only serious contender is Postgres. (Yes, I know MySQL has transactions now. Go away.) Even if it could compete technically, (maybe it can, I don't know), it has the same problem as DB/2.
Oracle has nothing to worry about. In fact, it is probably on its way to becoming a monopoly. And that's just for the DBMS itself. Are there any open-source equivalents for Oracle's suite of applications?
Look, Forrester isn't going to get headlines for itself by saying, "Guess what, open source Postgres and MySQL isn't going to beat Oracle." It would be interesting to see a report card on how Forrester and these other pimple-squeezers have done for accuracy over the years.
The posting says there is no "pure DOS", not that there is no command shell. I'd be very surprised if WinME had no command shell. Many of the postings are reacting to the absence of a command shell.
I wondered about the same thing when I was about ten, and remember discussing it with friends and they had wondered about it too. Many of the posters here had the same thought. Dennett says this same thought occurs to a surprisingly large number of people.
This is really a criticism of Linux distributions, not Star. (I was using RedHat 5.2 at the time). Decent looking fonts, (and the necessary servers), should be included with the distribution, at least as an install-time option. By the way, this also allows for a much better selection of fonts for Netscape. (Has RH 6.2 or other installation done this?)
By definition, an algorithm terminates.
So how feasible is it to combine MySQLs SQL parsing and query processing with Berkeley DBs storage layer?
I'm currently using NT + wingate on a dual-home machine. I use tzo to map my domain name to the ugly name assigned by mediaone. If I use the Linksys product, how does tzo fit into the picture? If they don't work together, what alternatives are there? What if I want to map two different domain names to a box on the other side of the Linksys?
Another consideration is that 4GLs were aimed at applications with simple architectures, usually no more complex than client/server, (there are certainly exceptions). The tools I've mentioned are geared toward multi-tier applications on the internet, with a browser front-end.
Will we ever find the memetic equivalent of DNA in natural or artificial neural nets? Do you think such a thing even exists?
OK, let me see if I understand this. A child pornographer has collected a gigabyte worth of disgusting pictures. He took the pictures himself and copyrighted them. He encrypts the pictures with a weak encryption scheme and sells them to other perverts. The FBI wants to catch this sicko. Does the FBI violate DMCA if they decrypt the pictures?
Assuming I am really a person, you and I give each other the benefit of the doubt. The guy I responded to is building a machine that is not a person. I am well aware of the can of worms we're in, and the Turing test. My only point is that the benefit of the doubt we extend to each other should probably not be extended to this guy's program, (for many definitions of consciousness).
If the neural net were answering your test questions perfectly it would be an excellent question answerer. How can you infer consciousness from that?
Well if Microsoft "collapsed", it would be the biggest boost to the software industry ever. But they aren't going to "collapse". They may get split up, but the OSs and applications are not going away. And even if they did "collapse", CA would buy them.
Also, don't confuse flaky dotcoms going out of business with the "collapse of the Internet industry". Same thing as above -- when Amazon goes out of business, several dozen competitors will take its place. My prediction is that Amazon gets bought by IBM mainly for its patents.