In case anyone thinks spineboy isn't being honest...
I've got a VW Jetta TDI and I consistantly get > 50 MPG (average about 52 MPG) in mostly highway driving. Also, around here diesel is 20 cents cheaper than regular.
The cynic in me immediately jumped on that line...
The real reason to avoid portability is that portable software can be run on non-Windows platforms. Customers don't pay Microsoft for non-Windows platforms.
Similarly, something this is also almost always ignored when comparing languages is the actual cost of developing something using the libraries available to that language.
Back in the dark ages (late 80's) I learned to program in Basic, then Pascal, then ADA, then C, then C++ through high school and college. It must of been 8 years of part-time messing around with code before I wrote my first GUI (I luv that MFC!!!).
Two days after picking up a Java book, I was doing (crappy but they worked) GUIs in Java.
Two days after that I had database access through JDBC.
Then is was XML parsing.
Then is socket communication.
Then J2EE...
With every one of these libraries, a critic could potentially have a complaint that "Sun's implementation of X isn't nearly as good as library Y". However, they are available for free to any developer who has Java, they are documented in a thousand books about java, and the Javadoc web pages make sure there is a common way to access the knowledge necessary to learn new features.
That, I think, is Java's greatest strength. Sure, Qt, Fox, MFC, GTK, Win32, or whatever may be a better (in your opinion) GUI library, but Swing is available to anyone who programs Java on just about any platform. I bet there are some custom ODBC-like drivers that squeeze the last ounce of performance out of your database system, but I bet I can have database access implemented in Java befor you have managed to get the purchase request for your ODBC library past the financial people.
So, leave the arguments on who can leverage the last performance boost out of a language to the Comp. Sci. PhDs and researchers. If you, like me, are working in a business environment where success is measured in getting a working product out the door that meets the client's requirements, focus on the libraries you have available rather than the language. By that metric, Java comes out near the top.
In fact, though the OS is NT, the language used to program the ship was state-of-the-art Java. It was very simple to create the stealth ship; they just used the method call:
My one problem with the mascot is the hair. Fine lines don't always scale well. It may end up looking like a fuzzy helmet when scaled to be a polo shirt logo, for example. Also, how will it look when printed in monotone?
Actually, my subconscious lament was that around here the clearence is MORE important than skill. My advice to the recent graduation was that most people who have a clearance got it through the military.
In other words, you can send a guy with a clearance to a week of J2EE training, but you can't send a guy with J2EE skills to a week of clearance training.
Anyway, its a little like Lake Woebegon around here; all of my friends and I are above average;-)
Here's some job advice for the recent computer graduate in today's economy.
1. Join the military and get into an intelligence specialty. If you plan on working with computers after you get out, I suggest Navy or Air Force though I know a great sys admin who was a Marine.
2. Get and keep a security clearance. Don't let it lapse. Don't do drugs or, God forbid, marry a non-U.S. citizen. Always pretend that you agree with everything George says and repeat after me: "Hanging is too good for anyone from France".
3. Earn 35% more (at least) once you get out and you don't even need to have any skills or a degree. Your job will be safe from outsourcing, there's a thousand Beltway Bandits begging for your resume, and headhunters are tracking down kids straight out of the military (as long as they have a ticket). It's like the dot com bubble!
Okay, so I'm going off topic, but I remember this great little newstand in Wallingford in Seattle, WA that had row after row of Amiga floppy disks filled with freeware and shareware (sold by FredFish or something like that?). This was in the early 90's. If I remember correctly they were $3 apiece. Not free, but still a pretty good bargain and a great deal (about the same price as a ChinaFirst lunch special) for a destitute college student with a five-year old A1000 and no CDROM or modem.
The only reason I bring this up now, is that I remember what it was like to not have access to the latest and greatest computer, but still have access to a thousand different applications. To have a library support the same thing (through a kiosk or checked-out CDs) could be the leg up for the next generation of computer scientists.
Actually, Clear Channel's complaints don't upset me in the slightest.
Whether or not they are competitors from the FCC's point of view is a resonable question. FM radio is liscensed in the 88 to 108 Mhz range (so that's what those numbers on the dial stand for, I seriously never knew). Sattelite radio is licensed in the 2.48 to 2.8 Ghz range. (*)
Sure, from the users point of view they both are just "radio", but Clear Channel is running its radio in the cheap seats under a government sponsered and enforced monopoly. To unregulate Clear Channel just because new technology exists is like saying that we should end highway regulations because airplanes exist.
Here's another take on it. Cell phones are in the 800 Mhz range. That's between FM and Sattelite radio. Do you want the FCC to try and enforce restrictions on cell phone communication just because Clear Channel fears a competitor 1.6 GHz higher up the spectrum. Imagine the consequences, "I'm sorry Mr. Stern, you have been banned from the use of cellular communication." How would he order hookers from his car. He'd have to stop and use a pay phone.
Okay, so that is a little off topic, and I realize that your point is that there should be absolutly no regulation. I think, however, the regualation is necessary for a public domain resource (like radio spectrum) but that regulation should take local realities into account. From that point of view, Clear Channel is just turning to the government to try and squelch a competitor.
So if St. Helens was the equivalent to 40 coal-fired power plants, does this mean that Mt. Pinatubo was the equivalent to the output of over 400 hundred coal-fired power plants?
Does this mean that the 1566 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. is equal to four explosions from Mt. Pinantubo every year?
Buddy, you aren't doing a very good job of reassuring me...
Shut up, shut up, shut up!!! I'm not listening. La la la la la la. Reagan told me the forests were causing pollution and Cheney told me that it was the volcanoes fault. You're just a big fat stupidhead. I'm telling mommy.
Yes, but this autumn the Arctic ice sheet will begin to grow again and the Antarctic ice sheet will begin to melt. It's because they are in different hemispheres...
A scientist would ask the question: is the average size of the ice sheets increasing or decreasing when measured over a long enough time frame to take seasonal fluctuation into account?
The problem I have with almost all scientific quotes that can be uttered in a single sentence is that the more you know, the more wrong they are. Or, at least, the more open to interpretation they are. I am willing to be that no scientist worth the title would issue the statement "We have only 20 years worth of oil reserves left" without following that statement with 20 pages of caveats, explainations, footnotes, counterpoints, and documented assumptions.
Since I am not a scientist, for me, the closest analogy is the popular media's coverage of Linux. For those of you here on/. who are fans of Linux, think back to every mainstream newspaper or news program article you've encountered in the last ten years that was just plain wrong. You knew it was wrong because you have enough of a background in computers to know that the blanket statements targeted towards a general audience can never reflect the nuance of experience because that audience does not have the domain knowledge to understand anything more than the superficial concepts. I am sure that the same filter applies to almost all popular reporting on scientific issues.
BTW, I never have thought of greens as anti-human. Most of the environmentalists I know are parents who love (at least a portion of) humanity very much.
A development team I was on used to get into the same arguments on spaces vs. tabs, brace placement, etc.. We solved it with Jalopy.
Now we just need a "Jalopy for variable names". You check your files out of CVS, run a JFVN script and all the Hungarian notation that you want can automatically get appended or prepended to your variables. When you're ready to check your files back in, simply run the standard script and all the Hungarian decorations get stripped back off...
It doesn't take a huge amount of space to store location:
180 degrees = 8 bits 60 minutes = 7 bits 60 seconds = 7 bits 512 fractions of a second = 9 bits north or south / east or west = 1 bit
= 1 32 bit integer
So 2 32 bit integers to store your location within centimeters of accuracy (assuming you could even measure at that level of detail).
You could pack the information into a single 32 bit integer and get your location down to a square approximately 611 meters on a side.
Ignoring Big Brother arguments for a moment (if you are really are worried about this, then your first line of defense is encryption; NOT complaining on/. about the march of technology) there are times when a mobile computer user (laptop, palm pilot, cell phone) might be interested in knowing the location of information. What business trip was I on when I wrote that email? What pizza joints are near my hotel? Where is my coworking calling from?
I would NOT, however, ever purchase a laptop/palm pilot/cell phone that didn't allow me to turn this feature off. It would be even better if I could set the level of accuracy of the information that I project: anonymous, nation, state, or exact lat/lon position.
This may be going off on a tangent, but there are various levels of anonyminity (sp?). For example, here on/. we are more likely to take care when posting using our "name" than we are when we click the "Post Anonymously" button.
For identifying individuals. The trust level isn't black or white. Post anonymously and no one is likely to take you seriously. Post using the/. name and at least you have a vested interest in protecting your/. reputation and Karma. Post using your full name and email address and phone number and you are probably going to take more care in what you say.
The same scale works with geographic information. If a browser, for example, allowed you to post anonymously, by nation, by state (or other political sub-boundary), or by lat/lon coordinates you would be trading anonyminity for trust at whatever level you chose to post at.
I can't imagine a software libre project ever forcing its users to identify thier lat/lon coordinates before allowing access to the internet, but that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be occasions where it might be useful to do so.
The benefit of a native solution is that you don't have to worry about mapping your XML to some other data structure. You just insert the data as XML and retrieve it as XML. You also gain a lot of flexibility through the semi-structured nature of XML and the schema independent model used by Xindice.
This is especially valuable when you have very complex XML structures that would be difficult or impossible to map to a more structured database.
Is this ever really true? Is there an XML structure that CAN NOT be implemented in a RDBMS? Or are there simply difficult and/or inefficent ways of storing XML data in an RDBMS?
Let's rephrase the question. What requests does one make of an XML database that are difficult or impossible to make of a RDBMS?
Are you trying to determine Elements that contain a given Attribute value or name? Are you trying to return Text nodes that contain a particular search string? Or, are you simply storing small Blobs of XML data organized through some higher level data?
As a starting point for discussion (and having not researched XML databases) here's is a simple table structure:
[ElementMapper] ParentID ChildID
[Element] ID Tag
[AttributeMapper] ParentE lemID AttributeID
[Attribute] ID Name Value
[Text] ID ParentID Value
So is an XML database is optimized to convert things like:
<address type="business"> <street>1234 Main Street</street> </address>
into:
[Element] ID Tag 1 address 2 street
[ElementMapping] ParentID ChildID 1 2
[Attribute] ID Name Value 3 type business
[AttributeMapper] ParentElemID AttributeID 1 3
[Text] ID ParentID Value 4 2 1234 Main Street
I'm no SQL expert, but I suppose as this gets complicated the performance of the SQL queries required to answer questions like (in pseudo-code) SELECT Address WHERE Street Contains "Main Street" becomes difficult. So, is that what XML databases are supposed to solve? Are they simply RDBMS that have been optimized to handle these types of queries?
Any game in the $20 - $30 range is discount/Walmart (think "Deer Hunter 3")
Any game in the less than $20 range is remainders bin.
Even if Sony (or any other company) could make a profit at $25 for a new game, they would still charge > $30 otherwise the market would assume that this is a Walmart-targeted game...
Slashdot Mirror
In case anyone thinks spineboy isn't being honest...
I've got a VW Jetta TDI and I consistantly get > 50 MPG (average about 52 MPG) in mostly highway driving. Also, around here diesel is 20 cents cheaper than regular.
The cynic in me immediately jumped on that line...
The real reason to avoid portability is that portable software can be run on non-Windows platforms. Customers don't pay Microsoft for non-Windows platforms.
Similarly, something this is also almost always ignored when comparing languages is the actual cost of developing something using the libraries available to that language.
Back in the dark ages (late 80's) I learned to program in Basic, then Pascal, then ADA, then C, then C++ through high school and college. It must of been 8 years of part-time messing around with code before I wrote my first GUI (I luv that MFC!!!).
Two days after picking up a Java book, I was doing (crappy but they worked) GUIs in Java.
Two days after that I had database access through JDBC.
Then is was XML parsing.
Then is socket communication.
Then J2EE...
With every one of these libraries, a critic could potentially have a complaint that "Sun's implementation of X isn't nearly as good as library Y". However, they are available for free to any developer who has Java, they are documented in a thousand books about java, and the Javadoc web pages make sure there is a common way to access the knowledge necessary to learn new features.
That, I think, is Java's greatest strength. Sure, Qt, Fox, MFC, GTK, Win32, or whatever may be a better (in your opinion) GUI library, but Swing is available to anyone who programs Java on just about any platform. I bet there are some custom ODBC-like drivers that squeeze the last ounce of performance out of your database system, but I bet I can have database access implemented in Java befor you have managed to get the purchase request for your ODBC library past the financial people.
So, leave the arguments on who can leverage the last performance boost out of a language to the Comp. Sci. PhDs and researchers. If you, like me, are working in a business environment where success is measured in getting a working product out the door that meets the client's requirements, focus on the libraries you have available rather than the language. By that metric, Java comes out near the top.
In fact, though the OS is NT, the language used to program the ship was state-of-the-art Java. It was very simple to create the stealth ship; they just used the method call:
this.setVisby(false);
Interestingly, most lye in the U.S. is supplied by Acme Chemical. Their motto: "All your base are belong to us."
My one problem with the mascot is the hair. Fine lines don't always scale well. It may end up looking like a fuzzy helmet when scaled to be a polo shirt logo, for example. Also, how will it look when printed in monotone?
Actually, my subconscious lament was that around here the clearence is MORE important than skill. My advice to the recent graduation was that most people who have a clearance got it through the military.
;-)
In other words, you can send a guy with a clearance to a week of J2EE training, but you can't send a guy with J2EE skills to a week of clearance training.
Anyway, its a little like Lake Woebegon around here; all of my friends and I are above average
Here's some job advice for the recent computer graduate in today's economy.
1. Join the military and get into an intelligence specialty. If you plan on working with computers after you get out, I suggest Navy or Air Force though I know a great sys admin who was a Marine.
2. Get and keep a security clearance. Don't let it lapse. Don't do drugs or, God forbid, marry a non-U.S. citizen. Always pretend that you agree with everything George says and repeat after me: "Hanging is too good for anyone from France".
3. Earn 35% more (at least) once you get out and you don't even need to have any skills or a degree. Your job will be safe from outsourcing, there's a thousand Beltway Bandits begging for your resume, and headhunters are tracking down kids straight out of the military (as long as they have a ticket). It's like the dot com bubble!
Okay, so I'm going off topic, but I remember this great little newstand in Wallingford in Seattle, WA that had row after row of Amiga floppy disks filled with freeware and shareware (sold by FredFish or something like that?). This was in the early 90's. If I remember correctly they were $3 apiece. Not free, but still a pretty good bargain and a great deal (about the same price as a ChinaFirst lunch special) for a destitute college student with a five-year old A1000 and no CDROM or modem.
The only reason I bring this up now, is that I remember what it was like to not have access to the latest and greatest computer, but still have access to a thousand different applications. To have a library support the same thing (through a kiosk or checked-out CDs) could be the leg up for the next generation of computer scientists.
Actually, Clear Channel's complaints don't upset me in the slightest.
Whether or not they are competitors from the FCC's point of view is a resonable question. FM radio is liscensed in the 88 to 108 Mhz range (so that's what those numbers on the dial stand for, I seriously never knew). Sattelite radio is licensed in the 2.48 to 2.8 Ghz range. (*)
Sure, from the users point of view they both are just "radio", but Clear Channel is running its radio in the cheap seats under a government sponsered and enforced monopoly. To unregulate Clear Channel just because new technology exists is like saying that we should end highway regulations because airplanes exist.
Here's another take on it. Cell phones are in the 800 Mhz range. That's between FM and Sattelite radio. Do you want the FCC to try and enforce restrictions on cell phone communication just because Clear Channel fears a competitor 1.6 GHz higher up the spectrum. Imagine the consequences, "I'm sorry Mr. Stern, you have been banned from the use of cellular communication." How would he order hookers from his car. He'd have to stop and use a pay phone.
Okay, so that is a little off topic, and I realize that your point is that there should be absolutly no regulation. I think, however, the regualation is necessary for a public domain resource (like radio spectrum) but that regulation should take local realities into account. From that point of view, Clear Channel is just turning to the government to try and squelch a competitor.
So if St. Helens was the equivalent to 40 coal-fired power plants, does this mean that Mt. Pinatubo was the equivalent to the output of over 400 hundred coal-fired power plants?
Does this mean that the 1566 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. is equal to four explosions from Mt. Pinantubo every year?
Buddy, you aren't doing a very good job of reassuring me...
Shut up, shut up, shut up!!! I'm not listening. La la la la la la. Reagan told me the forests were causing pollution and Cheney told me that it was the volcanoes fault. You're just a big fat stupidhead. I'm telling mommy.
Yes, but this autumn the Arctic ice sheet will begin to grow again and the Antarctic ice sheet will begin to melt. It's because they are in different hemispheres...
A scientist would ask the question: is the average size of the ice sheets increasing or decreasing when measured over a long enough time frame to take seasonal fluctuation into account?
The problem I have with almost all scientific quotes that can be uttered in a single sentence is that the more you know, the more wrong they are. Or, at least, the more open to interpretation they are. I am willing to be that no scientist worth the title would issue the statement "We have only 20 years worth of oil reserves left" without following that statement with 20 pages of caveats, explainations, footnotes, counterpoints, and documented assumptions.
/. who are fans of Linux, think back to every mainstream newspaper or news program article you've encountered in the last ten years that was just plain wrong. You knew it was wrong because you have enough of a background in computers to know that the blanket statements targeted towards a general audience can never reflect the nuance of experience because that audience does not have the domain knowledge to understand anything more than the superficial concepts. I am sure that the same filter applies to almost all popular reporting on scientific issues.
Since I am not a scientist, for me, the closest analogy is the popular media's coverage of Linux. For those of you here on
BTW, I never have thought of greens as anti-human. Most of the environmentalists I know are parents who love (at least a portion of) humanity very much.
A development team I was on used to get into the same arguments on spaces vs. tabs, brace placement, etc.. We solved it with Jalopy.
Now we just need a "Jalopy for variable names". You check your files out of CVS, run a JFVN script and all the Hungarian notation that you want can automatically get appended or prepended to your variables. When you're ready to check your files back in, simply run the standard script and all the Hungarian decorations get stripped back off...
Sound like a good SourceForge project?
How many people actually USE the "platform independence" of Java?
Every Applet on the web...
Whether there are very many useful Applets is a different question.
It doesn't take a huge amount of space to store location:
/. about the march of technology) there are times when a mobile computer user (laptop, palm pilot, cell phone) might be interested in knowing the location of information. What business trip was I on when I wrote that email? What pizza joints are near my hotel? Where is my coworking calling from?
180 degrees = 8 bits
60 minutes = 7 bits
60 seconds = 7 bits
512 fractions of a second = 9 bits
north or south / east or west = 1 bit
= 1 32 bit integer
So 2 32 bit integers to store your location within centimeters of accuracy (assuming you could even measure at that level of detail).
You could pack the information into a single 32 bit integer and get your location down to a square approximately 611 meters on a side.
Ignoring Big Brother arguments for a moment (if you are really are worried about this, then your first line of defense is encryption; NOT complaining on
I would NOT, however, ever purchase a laptop/palm pilot/cell phone that didn't allow me to turn this feature off. It would be even better if I could set the level of accuracy of the information that I project: anonymous, nation, state, or exact lat/lon position.
This may be going off on a tangent, but there are various levels of anonyminity (sp?). For example, here on /. we are more likely to take care when posting using our "name" than we are when we click the "Post Anonymously" button.
/. name and at least you have a vested interest in protecting your /. reputation and Karma. Post using your full name and email address and phone number and you are probably going to take more care in what you say.
For identifying individuals. The trust level isn't black or white. Post anonymously and no one is likely to take you seriously. Post using the
The same scale works with geographic information. If a browser, for example, allowed you to post anonymously, by nation, by state (or other political sub-boundary), or by lat/lon coordinates you would be trading anonyminity for trust at whatever level you chose to post at.
I can't imagine a software libre project ever forcing its users to identify thier lat/lon coordinates before allowing access to the internet, but that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be occasions where it might be useful to do so.
Is this ever really true? Is there an XML structure that CAN NOT be implemented in a RDBMS? Or are there simply difficult and/or inefficent ways of storing XML data in an RDBMS?
Let's rephrase the question. What requests does one make of an XML database that are difficult or impossible to make of a RDBMS?
Are you trying to determine Elements that contain a given Attribute value or name? Are you trying to return Text nodes that contain a particular search string? Or, are you simply storing small Blobs of XML data organized through some higher level data?
As a starting point for discussion (and having not researched XML databases) here's is a simple table structure:
[ElementMapper]
ParentID
ChildID
[Element]
ID
Tag
[AttributeMapper]
ParentE lemID
AttributeID
[Attribute]
ID
Name
Value
[Text]
ID
ParentID
Value
So is an XML database is optimized to convert things like:
<address type="business">
<street>1234 Main Street</street>
</address>
into:
[Element]
ID Tag
1 address
2 street
[ElementMapping]
ParentID ChildID
1 2
[Attribute]
ID Name Value
3 type business
[AttributeMapper]
ParentElemID AttributeID
1 3
[Text]
ID ParentID Value
4 2 1234 Main Street
I'm no SQL expert, but I suppose as this gets complicated the performance of the SQL queries required to answer questions like (in pseudo-code) SELECT Address WHERE Street Contains "Main Street" becomes difficult. So, is that what XML databases are supposed to solve? Are they simply RDBMS that have been optimized to handle these types of queries?
Why are manhole covers round?
Because the manhole is round.
I grew up in dairy country. When I hear cows I think dairy...
Anyway, I was mostly trying to make a joke. Peace.
Wrong. You don't need to get up every morning to milk the cabbages, do you?
Off topic, but to be realistic.
Any game in the $30 - $50 range is normal.
Any game in the $20 - $30 range is discount/Walmart (think "Deer Hunter 3")
Any game in the less than $20 range is remainders bin.
Even if Sony (or any other company) could make a profit at $25 for a new game, they would still charge > $30 otherwise the market would assume that this is a Walmart-targeted game...
add quote from Miracle Max:
"He's only mostly (70%) dead..."