This makes me amazed at the speed with which information now travels. I remember trying to get on the net in high school back in 94. Nobody I knew, knew anything about it and there were no easy to install IP stacks for Win 3.1. I remember trying to decipher the articles in Boardwatch magazine and hunting the local BBS's for info.
It took me forever to finally get on (a Prodigy account) and then that was text. I used that to get info for my first Linux install and finally after switching to Netcom and getting X working, I was surfing the web with Netscape. What a pain.
I had no idea how to do this stuff and finding the info was extremely painful. It was like a bunch of secrets that took forever to find. The only person I talked to at the time that knew about Mosaic or anything was some random clerk in an OfficeDepot.
Today, we know the instant anything is released, we get the inner workings of expert groups. I know I take all this stuff for granted today, but it is still completely amazing how things have changed.
I've been using Idea for over a year now. Every time I download Eclipse and try to load existing projects, all hell breaks loose.
My projects in Idea can be migrated to any open environment, the build system is pure Ant with Ant tasks like XDoclet and Middlegen. Everything works from a command line the same way it works in Idea.
That being said, I use multiple output and source paths. Eclipse doesn't seem to get this very well. I really seems to want to control my build process. Unfortunatley that won't work well. I have packages with Classes in two seperate physical directories, one auto generated by Middlegen and Xdoclet and one hand coded. I have seperate output paths for my EJBs, Utility classes and Servlet stuff. These then all get packaged into an EAR.
When I can make sure Eclipse doesn't get in my way I'll probably switch. I can't use some of the EJB features in Idea cause it doesn't handle XDoclet or multiple paths for EJBs. It looks like Idea doesn't want to work with me on some of these advanced features, so I don't use them anyway.
We'll see who winds up winning, but I'm not sold on Eclipse yet.
iCalendar is a format for publishing calendar information. It's a file format. CAP is a wire protocal like IMAP that allows a Calendar client to talk to a Calendar server. Read the Guide to Internet Calendaring I linked to in my earlier post.
An example, a calendar client (CUA: Calendar User Agent) would connection to a calendar server (CS: Calendar Store). The CUA might request all information between two dates for user jdoe. This would be communicated via CAP to the CS. The CS would send the response as a CAP response that encapsulated the calender information in iCalendar format.
The Calendar Server from Sun doesn't support CAP. It has an interface for WCAP which is their "we need something now" attempt, but no clients support it. Sun's Calendar Server is almost as proprietary as Notes and Exchange as far as interfacing it.
There are several Calendaring/Groupware solutions that are purely web-based, but what happens when CAP clients appear? What if you need offline support or PDA synching? Also Sun's Calendar server is the only one that does synchronous calendaring, meaning it checks other schedules and allow you to pull in resources and people into meetings. None of the Open Source ones do this, they are based on iCal, iTip and iMip which only provide a way to publish individual calendars. There is no backend that can resolve conflicts or give a real-time availability to someone creating a new entry. Apple's solutiona and that Kroupware project for the German government are like this, they simply publish iCal files and have no conflict resolution.
In other words, if Sun's Calendar Server supported clients it might have a chance against Notes/Exchange. If the open-source ones were synchronous and supported clients they might have a chance.
Using LDAP address books in read mode has been in there for ages. I want to be able to update the LDAP server from Mozilla.
The standards exist, but no one has written the server. You can't really blame them since the Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) which is going to be the IMAP+SMTP of Calendaring, providing synchronous calendaring to clients is on it's 10th draft. Read this email if you have lost hope that the IETF would have calendaring anytime soon. Appearently draft 11 is coming soon and it will be the last one. So it looks like CAP will be finalized RSN. (Thank God, this thing was becoming like Duke Nukem Forever)
You could poke a stick at the OpenCap Server project and see if you get a response. But I haven't heard anything in months.
I don't know what's up with the Libical guys. The mail archive has been dead since December 16. Of course some of them are working on Free Association which is supposed to be a server and client. Since the mailing lists for libical seem dead I couldn't tell you what the status of CAP support currently is. My understanding was that they had been keeping up with the drafts, but since the 10th one was released about a month ago, I have no idea what the current status is.
Mozilla should be getting Calendaring in 1.4. IIRC, the calendaring uses libical. The College of Charleston computing dept has taken on enhancing the client (Go Cougars!). Hopefully they'll be putting CAP support in.
If anyone wants to know what it would take to write a calendar server and put an end to the Notes/Exchange duopoly in groupware, visit the Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group of the IETF. These are the guys that have brought you iCAL (RFC2445), iTIP (RFC2446), iMip (RFC2447), iCal Locating and LDAP (RFC2739) and the Guide to Internet Calendaring (RFC3283).
Read the iCalendar Guide then all the other documents at the site. Next go write the server. Then make sure Mozilla's Calendar client works with it, and email me so I can go replace exchange servers with it.
If you find a solution that does not use CAP, beat the authors with a ClueStick till they give in and write something that uses IETF protocols so we can interop with it.
Personally I'd really like to see the Cyrus IMAP server get a CAP piece put in. Combined with OpenLDAP and Mozilla as the client, it would be a Notes/Exchange killer.
While I'm sitting here making demands from the Open Source messaging community, why the hell doesn't Mozilla get SIEVE (RFC3028) support so we can have a standard for server-side email filtering rules, Cyrus supports it in the IMAP server. Oh, and I also want write support for LDAP address books in Mozilla.
To answer the original question, I think it's coming, slowly, but coming. Lord knows, I've only been waiting for 4 years or so.
That was my point. XDoclet allows the developer to control all of that by using JavaDoc tags in the code that will auto-generate the extra classes like BeanInfo and any XML needed. It's about the tools.
My best guess is that Sun thought the commercial tool developers would rise to the challenge. Just goes to show, that if you want something done right you have to do it yourself. The only tool that has addressed this in a portable, non-proprietary manner is XDoclet.
If you think the tools from Sun are better check out XDoclet. It will simplify all of your Java component coding.
If this follows Sun's other attempts at engineering in the Java API's it should work pretty well.
While EJBs and other API's have been a great way to create reusable components with lots of enterprise class features, the idea of writing 5 different classes where a lot of the information is repetitive then editing a global XML file or two was rediculous. Hopefully they'll take the XDoclet approach and include the meta information used to generate this stuff from a single file.
It's really the same thing with 'JavaBeans', which I remember playing with in '97, the concept was really great but the extra maintenance on BeanInfo classes and such was a complete PITA.
It seems to me that Sun has created a lot of flexibility and interoperability in their development kits, but they have never addressed the management of the complexity that it creates. The best thing the commercial world came up with was systems that were quick hacks tied to their development tools (WebSphere anyone?). The Open Source world has offered stuff like XDoclet, which has totally simplified these tasks, but it seems no one at Sun has noticed.
I think Sun thought the commercial community would come up with the same level of engineering that they had in formulating their API's, now I think they realize that that market is still open and not only is it important to compete with the well-regarded tools MS puts out, but theres $$ to be made.
Java should totally stomp.Net and C# for developing business systems, but the tools need to be on the same level. I guess you could say 'It's the tools, stupid!'. Maybe Sun will realize that decent development tools are the crack that MS has used to hook tons of developers and if equivilent tools were available to new Java developers (and experienced ones who hate tedium), the rate of adoption would pick up.
I'm not sure how you manage that. I've got a 1650^2 ft home with everything electric. The fridge is new, I have 3 computers running 24/7 and I don't use that much hot water. I go through your monthly usage in about 3 days. According to my power bill I use what you use per year in a month. The only old appliance in the house is the central AC/Heat. Everything else (except dishwasher, but that doesn't get used too often) is less than 5 years old.
Granted my house was built in '48 and added on in the 60's sometime. I also live in FL, which doesn't help much when it comes to keeping the AC turned off (it's already in the high 70's here). Quite frankly I'd kill to have your power bill.
This might actually work for Connectiva, given the large numbers of Confederates that emigrated to Brazil after the South lost the US Civil War. There was a National Geographic on this a few years ago. Pretty interesting read.
There's no way your running your whole house on 347W, unless you're using DC, even in that case I'm suspicious. Air conditioners alone use about 1500W per ton. A single ton air conditioner (1500sq ft house), a 17cu ft fridge (that's smaller than average) at 1260W, plus a recent computer (300W) and a couple of lights on (3x60W) puts you almost 3500W. So if all those things are running 24/7 your already at 20 cows.
Now add in for watching TV on a 25 in TV with your stereo and DVD, maybe add your cable box and a couple more lights. Your stove is probably 1500W or so, dinner will prolly cost you 1000W. I wouldn't plan on buying the adjacent lot and getting a small herd of cows anytime soon, and transporting cow shit to your composter probably won't save you any money.
Go reread your power bill, you might average 3000W an hour if you're home is really small/efficient and you don't have many electronics plugged in and running. The 1260W fridge I mentioned would use 11037kWh per year of use alone.
I asked a lawyer about this the other night. He said that WestLaw in particular offers laws with references to cases. Kind of a cross reference. They pay a lot of lawyers to sit around and write stuff to add value to their content. It's not simply a search engine for court records, there's a lot of value add. That's why WestLaw can charge $300 a month per lawyer.
I don't think it's the same thing as bottling up our case law and making it inaccessable. Anyone can create a competing service, but I think you'd have a lot of work cut out trying to match the value that WestLaw provides.
to help you quit... RTFA. They have 3 brands that each have a lower amount of nicotine kind of like the patch has 3 different levels to systematically lower the amount of nicotine you recieve.
It makes it so you choose whether or not to smoke, not to feed a nicotine addiction. This guy not only plans to make an ass-load of cash, but to give his customer's choice and reform the tobacco industry. Quite frankly, this guy should get the Nobel Peace Prize or something.
BTW, you can get cartons for ~$20 each online. So if anyone wants an easy way to quit, Drive Thru Smoke Shop
Actually it really just tells us about our Yale Professor here, as Quentin Tarantino pointed out in the movie 'Sleep With Me':
<snip> No, I don't, fucking boy meets girl, I don't give a shit about that. Fuck boy meets girl, fuck motorcycle movie. No, what is really being said? What's really being said, that's what you're talking about. 'Cause the whole idea, man, is subversion. You want subversion on a massive level. You know what one of the greatest fucking scripts ever written in the history of Hollywood is? Top Gun.
[Duane: Oh, come on.]
Top Gun is fucking great. What is Top Gun? You think it's a story about a bunch of fighter pilots.
[Duane: It's about a bunch of guys waving their dicks around.]
It is a story about a man's struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what Top Gun is about, man.
You've got Maverick, all right? He's on the edge, man. He's right on the fucking line, all right? And you've got Iceman, and all his crew. They're gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they're saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways.
[Duane: What about Kelly McGillis?]
Kelly McGillis, she's heterosexuality. She's saying: no, no, no, no, no, no, go the normal way, play by the rules, go the normal way. They're saying no, go the gay way, be the gay way, go for the gay way, all right? That is what's going on throughout that whole movie...
He goes to her house, all right? It looks like they're going to have sex, you know, they're just kind of sitting back, he's takin' a shower and everything. They don't have sex. He gets on the motorcycle, drives away. She's like, "What the fuck, what the fuck is going on here?" Next scene, next scene you see her, she's in the elevator, she is dressed like a guy. She's got the cap on, she's got the aviator glasses, she's wearing the same jacket that the Iceman wears. She is, okay, this is how I gotta get this guy, this guy's going towards the gay way, I gotta bring him back, I gotta bring him back from the gay way, so I'm do that through subterfuge, I'm gonna dress like a man. All right? That is how she approaches it.
Okay, now let me just ask you--I'm gonna digress for two seconds here. I met this girl Amy here, she's like floating around here and everything. Now, she just got divorced, right?...
All right, but the REAL ending of the movie is when they fight the MIGs at the end, all right? Because he has passed over into the gay way. They are this gay fighting fucking force, all right? And they're beating the Russians, the gays are beating the Russians. And it's over, and they fucking land, and Iceman's been trying to get Maverick the entire time, and finally, he's got him, all right? And what is the last fucking line that they have together? They're all hugging and kissing and happy with each other, and Ice comes up to Maverick, and he says, "Man, you can ride my tail, anytime!" And what does Maverick say? "You can ride mine!" Swordfight! Swordfight! Fuckin' A, man! </snip>
IMNSHO, this is Quentin's finest performance ever, better than his role in Pulp Fiction
The C & D is the legally accepted first step to mount a defense, and
The point is not that this is some sort of illegal tactic on the part of the PCI-SIG, nor is it out of the ordinary for going after someone who is beligerently attempting to gain from the trademark assigned to the holder.
If my neighbor hired someone to install a privacy fence and the contractor screwed up and placed part of it on my property, blocking my scenic view, I would have every legal right to call a lawyer and demand it was removed. However, my nieghbor might be a little pissed off at me, especially if he was unaware of my distress.
If I instead called him and told him the situation and asked him to do something about it in a polite and civil way, I do not surrender any legal right to my property.
The same point is valid here, it's a matter of civility and politeness, the C & D is effectively saying that they don't want this person to use the trademark or have any association with the PCI-SIG, that it is beligerently dilluting there trademark and they intend to take legal action if it is not stopped.
However, this is not the intent of the President of the PCI-SIG, as he stated in his reply. If the PCI-SIG grants Mr. Boemler the right to use the trademark, or came to some other agreement, they have in no way weakened their defense in any further violation of their trademark. It's the matter of using a butcher knife where a scalpel would serve better.
If anything they ought to take issue with the system that makes trademark holders have to behave this way to defend their trademark rights, not with the people who just do what the law tells them they must do.
Again, I reiterate that it is you who are not "cognizant" of the law. The PCI-SIG has no obligation to send a threat of legal action to defend their trademark. To do so shows ingratitude towards Mr. Boemler, who through his own time and funds, has furthered their interests and those of their members. A C & D is a threat of legal action and it is impolite to threaten your friends and allies with legal action before discussing the matter personaly first.
If you can't understand how this would be offensive, I fear for your ability to get along with other people. If your parents came and built a fence on your property as a 'suprise gift' and you didn't like it, would you call and ask them about removing it (while trying not to offend them), or would you call a lawyer?
No legal restraints were adjudicated by a court, no yelling and screaming was done...just a short letter asking them to quit using their trademark, drafted by a person who has a license to practice law.
The person licensed to practice law you cite, has the license to sue the pants off Mr. Boemler. Mr. Boemler is a private citizen who has done nothing but help these people and the community with his own time and resources and like many of us does not wish to be dragged into court, it's a hole for time and money. To have his (possibly first) contact with the PCI-SIG officials be armed tanks at the gate, rather than an ambassador is uncivil and offensive.
The problem with getting a letter from a lawyer is that most people, to be safe, will go to their own lawyer to formulate a response and handle the situation in the future. Why should Mr. Boemler be burdened with taking the time to explain the situation to his own representation and paying the legal costs? They are repaying his effort with a slap across the face.
Mr. Boemler even states this is what he is upset about. I guess you've never had a lawyer threaten you, either that, or you're sitting atop a pile of disposable cash that you have nothing better to do with but defend frivilous lawsuits.
The trademark holder does not have to send a C & D, they could have contacted Mr. Boemler and offered any number of resolutions, discussed the matter etc, etc.
Defense of a trademark does not mean you auto-spam with C & D letters. Defense means that you actively ensure that there are no violations, the C & D is only one method of defense.
Mr. Boemler and the rest of the public have good reason to feel an affront due to the fact that the trademark owner went straight to the C & D rather than exploring more civil methods of defending their trademark.
What you are suggesting would be like my having to get a restraining order against anyone I met, in case I didn't want to speak with them. Or better, like a previous poster mentioned, hiring someone to wake you up at 5:30 in the am screaming "YOU'RE WRONG!" instead of just replying here. (I really liked that one, my analogy wasn't so good.)
This is a monopoly. They have been found in violation of Anti-Trust laws and held up on appeal. The government has a legitimate reason to tell them how to conduct their business and every right to do so.
Simply because the Anti-Trust trial focused on the OS rather than Office software, does not mean that the government has no reason to impose restrictions to keep MS from shifting their monopoly power. MS's monopoly has been under government scrutiny for almost 10 years, but we still get a bunch of posts on here about how the government shouldn't be able to tell 'a company' what to do. Either the trolls are really busy or you guys decided to skip Economics 101 for Libratarian Fanaticism 101.
In order to maintain a capitalist system, we must have competition. Without healthy competition, we don't have capitalism. The government has an obligation to step into an otherwise free market to ensure that competition stays healthy. There is no magical 'Free Market Fairy' that is going to come along and restore health to the industry.
So yes, depending on the result of the States' AG cases and the DOJ's settlement, MS could very much be liable for making their document formats some sort of completely bastardized XML. If you want to know the probability, then you should go read the settlements, and the grievences in the new filings against MS.
I don't think any of the generic Servlet/JSP books are much more helpful than explaining the spec's from Sun. They introduce basic patterns and such, but don't do much to help with taking advantage of the architecture while maintaining portability. Tomcat 4.1.x has caching features that will break 'loosely' written code that would work using Jasper on Jetty. The spec doesn't say you can't do these things, but developers need better guidence on what to keep in mind while writing code that needs to be portable, versus just writing for a specific container.
My experience has been that Tomcat does things the 'right way' where others gloss over ambiguities in the spec. Having a detailed explination, with examples on how to write code 'the right way' so that Tomcat will be happy, makes the job of porting to other containers easier.
The 4.1.x stuff seems to be a refactoring of previous versions that continues to enforce best practices to insure data integrity and scalability. The problem is, I need to be able to figure this out without having to read through the source. I don't mind it when I run up against issues and need to understand what's happening internally (I've read a ton of the jakarta-commons and struts taglib source), but to have a 'developer's guide' that does more than cover the basics of JSP/servlet development would be very helpful.
Picked up that one yesterday. I bought it cause Rick Hightower (Java Tools for Extreme Programming) wrote the chapter on struts and ant/xdoclet. I haven't been able to go through the whole thing yet, but I need good reference info and insight into how the new Jasper2 engine handles caching of tag libs and some of the quirks that come up in JSP/Servlet development WRT insuring clean separation of data in the various scopes. I'm also very interested in seeing how struts and the JSTL should behave in the container.
I don't think this info is very well covered in the Tomcat docs, dealing with Tomcat development is not the same as the '.htaccess' file as one poster suggested. If your trying to work out why the other guy's JSP/custom taglib stuff isn't as portable as it should be between containers, you really need this type of info.
I'm dissapointed the reviewer sort of glossed over this book, he mentioned the architectural info in the last paragraph, and highlighted all the crap that's already talked about in the Tomcat docs.
I already read most of the open source J2EE/dev mailing lists and visit numerous authors blogs. Trying to tie all this stuff together, while figuring out where it's all headed and discerning the best practices is a bit of a daunting task. The differences between the Jasper and Jasper2 engines is a lot of info, combine with the state of Jakarta-Commons, the rise of Jelly and Maven, and AOP + XRAI coming down the pipe in XDoclet2 and you've got a lot of material to pour through that isn't well documented yet. (ok that's a little out of scope for these 2 books)
I need good books that really help me to formulate development methodologies that scale up and promote efficiency when doing full J2EE app development.
So does anyone have any reading recommendations that will help sort all this out? Should I get this book too, or stick with Mastering Tomcat Development?
Essentially your choices are Adobe Framemaker (~$800), Lyx (Open Source) and XMLmind (Freeware). There may be some others, but these are the ones I've looked at. These are the ones you can use like a WYSIWYG, but are more WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean). For more info on WYSIWYM, look at Lyx's site.
DocBook is a great spec, but the editors suck for the most part. Lyx can't import DocBook in reliably, and your Docbook is stored as a lyx file (latex I think). Lyx's Docbook stuff can be a bear to set up, even on a system like RedHat where most of the software comes installed. I only recommend Lyx to people who have experience with Lyx, to someone who just wants to write docs, it tends to be more trouble than it's worth.
Framemaker will probably do everything you want and be a godsend with lots of nice features, but you'll pay for it, $800 for Win/Mac and ~$1300 for Unix.
XMLmind is pretty cool, it does Docbook well but is a little slow, it has a little bit of a learning curve, but is prolly the best Docbook editor I've found for free. It's not Open Source though. It is written in Java, so you might have some speed issues, depending on the platform you run it on. I've been recommending XMLmind to everyone I know that asks about Docbook, it has a tree view of the DOM as well as a WYSIWYM view with stylesheets applied on the fly. It has property editors and a pretty smart insert tool that follows the DTD, only allowing you to insert allowed tags into other tags. It feels like more of a programmer's tool than Framemaker, but it should be fairly easy for most WYSIWYG users to adjust.
<rant> I don't understand why on God's green earth OpenOffice or Abiword or KOffice, or anyone else in the OpenSource world has neglected this area. It's been three years since the LDP went to DocBook, GNOME uses DocBook as their doc format. Why in the hell don't we have decent document writing tools when everyone is always screaming about the lack of documentation in the OpenSource world?
If we want more docs written, it needs to be easier to write them and shouldn't involve learning all about SGML or XML engines as well as a markup language to do it. DocBook is too big to keep in my head and I shouldn't have to think hard about how to write docs when my focus is the content I want to write for. Organizing technical info on a difficult subject is hard enough, stopping every five minutes to look up a DocBook tag or trying to better understand the structure is a huge barrier to getting the work done. </rant>
I'll agree with your points, I've been a RH fan since 5.2 (moved from Slackware).
However, my biggest complaint is that RH lacks the capabilities of 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. I've been using apt4rpm on all my RH boxes, but trying to move from RH 7.3 to 8.0 failed.
I looked around at what RH had to offer and what was available on the net, as it turns out, the only 'safe' way to upgrade a RH box from 7.x to 8.0 is to reboot with a bootdisk (install, kickstart, whatever) then perform the upgrade, then reboot to the working system.
This is unacceptable if you have a ton of racked boxes. I need to be able to remotely (scripted is even better) be able to upgrade those boxes, reboot and be ready to go. Having to physically install the media (even for an NFS kickstart) upgrade is a major PITA. It's one of the main reasons I'll never convince the deb-heads I work with to move to RH.
I really like RH, I do a lot of business and enterprise app development and deployment, and RH has consistently provided everything I need to do my job sanely. This one issue is really killing me though.
If the company in question has outstanding balances, I'd say your being shaken down.
The CEO isn't a CEO your worried about cause he's some random lucky guy who wound up as CEO one day. This guy is only thinking about his company, which, like most companies is having a less than spectacular year. The big fish will shake down the small fish if they can. I've had it happen a couple of times, they don't want to lose their ass, so they come up with BS reasons they aren't satisfied with your work and then shake you down on the invoice.
It's always something that would be difficult to contest, the more subtle, the better. This guy prolly would rather pay his lawyer a couple of hours (or has retainer hours to use up this quarter) in order to get you to come to an 'agreement' quietly over this 'delicate' matter, especially since he's questioning your professional integrity.
Make a business decision, figure out what's the best thing for your time and money. Talk to a lawyer to find out the odds and figure out how not to lose too much.
It sucks, but it's part of working for yourself. If you don't like it, hire a CEO of your own to handle these things. This is part of how they create their value for their company. Don't assume you can just work for honest clients either, too many sleezebags like this out there, it's best to make sure you can bill these expenses into your rate, and find someone who can deal with this waste of time for you.
So how about if we distribute a 'Free Alice' copy of DeCSS for the DVD version of Alice's Restaurant. Or if and when there's DVD-Audio version we distrubute the crack for that.
I think this would really be poinent. It would provide a bridge for those who have no idea what this battle is about, but know all about Alice's Restaurant, to support the cause. If we were loud enough about it, we could have everyone thinking about the DMCA next Thanksgiving when they play Alice's Restaurant on every radio station in the country. Maybe Alro Guthrie could do a special version? After all, we wouldn't have folk music if Intellectual Property had always been in the current state, and we sure as hell won't have any new folk music. Saving folk music would be good PR, after all, what's more wholesome than folk music?
Of course I think RXC should take the lead;-) Or maybe now that Perens is free from his master's he could do it. We really need someone high profile enough to lead the attack. I'll gladly take my place on the bench with the 'mother-rapers and father-killers' to support this one.
You do have to wonder about the effectiveness of this. Could we also bring reason to the war on drugs if we all sparked up joints outside the DEA offices in DC?
You can get, all the freedom you want, at Alice's Restaurant.
Slashdot Mirror
This makes me amazed at the speed with which information now travels. I remember trying to get on the net in high school back in 94. Nobody I knew, knew anything about it and there were no easy to install IP stacks for Win 3.1. I remember trying to decipher the articles in Boardwatch magazine and hunting the local BBS's for info.
It took me forever to finally get on (a Prodigy account) and then that was text. I used that to get info for my first Linux install and finally after switching to Netcom and getting X working, I was surfing the web with Netscape. What a pain.
I had no idea how to do this stuff and finding the info was extremely painful. It was like a bunch of secrets that took forever to find. The only person I talked to at the time that knew about Mosaic or anything was some random clerk in an OfficeDepot.
Today, we know the instant anything is released, we get the inner workings of expert groups. I know I take all this stuff for granted today, but it is still completely amazing how things have changed.
I've been using Idea for over a year now. Every time I download Eclipse and try to load existing projects, all hell breaks loose.
My projects in Idea can be migrated to any open environment, the build system is pure Ant with Ant tasks like XDoclet and Middlegen. Everything works from a command line the same way it works in Idea.
That being said, I use multiple output and source paths. Eclipse doesn't seem to get this very well. I really seems to want to control my build process. Unfortunatley that won't work well. I have packages with Classes in two seperate physical directories, one auto generated by Middlegen and Xdoclet and one hand coded. I have seperate output paths for my EJBs, Utility classes and Servlet stuff. These then all get packaged into an EAR.
When I can make sure Eclipse doesn't get in my way I'll probably switch. I can't use some of the EJB features in Idea cause it doesn't handle XDoclet or multiple paths for EJBs. It looks like Idea doesn't want to work with me on some of these advanced features, so I don't use them anyway.
We'll see who winds up winning, but I'm not sold on Eclipse yet.
iCalendar is a format for publishing calendar information. It's a file format.
CAP is a wire protocal like IMAP that allows a Calendar client to talk to a Calendar server. Read the Guide to Internet Calendaring I linked to in my earlier post.
An example, a calendar client (CUA: Calendar User Agent) would connection to a calendar server (CS: Calendar Store). The CUA might request all information between two dates for user jdoe. This would be communicated via CAP to the CS. The CS would send the response as a CAP response that encapsulated the calender information in iCalendar format.
Understand?
The Calendar Server from Sun doesn't support CAP. It has an interface for WCAP which is their "we need something now" attempt, but no clients support it. Sun's Calendar Server is almost as proprietary as Notes and Exchange as far as interfacing it.
There are several Calendaring/Groupware solutions that are purely web-based, but what happens when CAP clients appear? What if you need offline support or PDA synching? Also Sun's Calendar server is the only one that does synchronous calendaring, meaning it checks other schedules and allow you to pull in resources and people into meetings. None of the Open Source ones do this, they are based on iCal, iTip and iMip which only provide a way to publish individual calendars. There is no backend that can resolve conflicts or give a real-time availability to someone creating a new entry. Apple's solutiona and that Kroupware project for the German government are like this, they simply publish iCal files and have no conflict resolution.
In other words, if Sun's Calendar Server supported clients it might have a chance against Notes/Exchange. If the open-source ones were synchronous and supported clients they might have a chance.
Using LDAP address books in read mode has been in there for ages. I want to be able to update the LDAP server from Mozilla.
The standards exist, but no one has written the server.
You can't really blame them since the Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) which is going to be the IMAP+SMTP of Calendaring, providing synchronous calendaring to clients is on it's 10th draft. Read this email if you have lost hope that the IETF would have calendaring anytime soon. Appearently draft 11 is coming soon and it will be the last one. So it looks like CAP will be finalized RSN. (Thank God, this thing was becoming like Duke Nukem Forever)
You could poke a stick at the OpenCap Server project and see if you get a response. But I haven't heard anything in months.
I don't know what's up with the Libical guys. The mail archive has been dead since December 16. Of course some of them are working on Free Association which is supposed to be a server and client. Since the mailing lists for libical seem dead I couldn't tell you what the status of CAP support currently is. My understanding was that they had been keeping up with the drafts, but since the 10th one was released about a month ago, I have no idea what the current status is.
Mozilla should be getting Calendaring in 1.4. IIRC, the calendaring uses libical. The College of Charleston computing dept has taken on enhancing the client (Go Cougars!). Hopefully they'll be putting CAP support in.
If anyone wants to know what it would take to write a calendar server and put an end to the Notes/Exchange duopoly in groupware, visit the Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group of the IETF. These are the guys that have brought you iCAL (RFC2445), iTIP (RFC2446), iMip (RFC2447), iCal Locating and LDAP (RFC2739) and the Guide to Internet Calendaring (RFC3283).
Read the iCalendar Guide then all the other documents at the site. Next go write the server. Then make sure Mozilla's Calendar client works with it, and email me so I can go replace exchange servers with it.
If you find a solution that does not use CAP, beat the authors with a ClueStick till they give in and write something that uses IETF protocols so we can interop with it.
Personally I'd really like to see the Cyrus IMAP server get a CAP piece put in. Combined with OpenLDAP and Mozilla as the client, it would be a Notes/Exchange killer.
While I'm sitting here making demands from the Open Source messaging community, why the hell doesn't Mozilla get SIEVE (RFC3028) support so we can have a standard for server-side email filtering rules, Cyrus supports it in the IMAP server. Oh, and I also want write support for LDAP address books in Mozilla.
To answer the original question, I think it's coming, slowly, but coming. Lord knows, I've only been waiting for 4 years or so.
That was my point. XDoclet allows the developer to control all of that by using JavaDoc tags in the code that will auto-generate the extra classes like BeanInfo and any XML needed. It's about the tools.
My best guess is that Sun thought the commercial tool developers would rise to the challenge. Just goes to show, that if you want something done right you have to do it yourself. The only tool that has addressed this in a portable, non-proprietary manner is XDoclet.
If you think the tools from Sun are better check out XDoclet. It will simplify all of your Java component coding.
If this follows Sun's other attempts at engineering in the Java API's it should work pretty well.
.Net and C# for developing business systems, but the tools need to be on the same level. I guess you could say 'It's the tools, stupid!'. Maybe Sun will realize that decent development tools are the crack that MS has used to hook tons of developers and if equivilent tools were available to new Java developers (and experienced ones who hate tedium), the rate of adoption would pick up.
While EJBs and other API's have been a great way to create reusable components with lots of enterprise class features, the idea of writing 5 different classes where a lot of the information is repetitive then editing a global XML file or two was rediculous. Hopefully they'll take the XDoclet approach and include the meta information used to generate this stuff from a single file.
It's really the same thing with 'JavaBeans', which I remember playing with in '97, the concept was really great but the extra maintenance on BeanInfo classes and such was a complete PITA.
It seems to me that Sun has created a lot of flexibility and interoperability in their development kits, but they have never addressed the management of the complexity that it creates. The best thing the commercial world came up with was systems that were quick hacks tied to their development tools (WebSphere anyone?). The Open Source world has offered stuff like XDoclet, which has totally simplified these tasks, but it seems no one at Sun has noticed.
I think Sun thought the commercial community would come up with the same level of engineering that they had in formulating their API's, now I think they realize that that market is still open and not only is it important to compete with the well-regarded tools MS puts out, but theres $$ to be made.
Java should totally stomp
I'm not sure how you manage that. I've got a 1650^2 ft home with everything electric. The fridge is new, I have 3 computers running 24/7 and I don't use that much hot water. I go through your monthly usage in about 3 days. According to my power bill I use what you use per year in a month. The only old appliance in the house is the central AC/Heat. Everything else (except dishwasher, but that doesn't get used too often) is less than 5 years old.
Granted my house was built in '48 and added on in the 60's sometime. I also live in FL, which doesn't help much when it comes to keeping the AC turned off (it's already in the high 70's here). Quite frankly I'd kill to have your power bill.
This might actually work for Connectiva, given the large numbers of Confederates that emigrated to Brazil after the South lost the US Civil War. There was a National Geographic on this a few years ago. Pretty interesting read.
There's no way your running your whole house on 347W, unless you're using DC, even in that case I'm suspicious. Air conditioners alone use about 1500W per ton. A single ton air conditioner (1500sq ft house), a 17cu ft fridge (that's smaller than average) at 1260W, plus a recent computer (300W) and a couple of lights on (3x60W) puts you almost 3500W. So if all those things are running 24/7 your already at 20 cows.
Now add in for watching TV on a 25 in TV with your stereo and DVD, maybe add your cable box and a couple more lights. Your stove is probably 1500W or so, dinner will prolly cost you 1000W. I wouldn't plan on buying the adjacent lot and getting a small herd of cows anytime soon, and transporting cow shit to your composter probably won't save you any money.
Go reread your power bill, you might average 3000W an hour if you're home is really small/efficient and you don't have many electronics plugged in and running. The 1260W fridge I mentioned would use 11037kWh per year of use alone.
I asked a lawyer about this the other night. He said that WestLaw in particular offers laws with references to cases. Kind of a cross reference. They pay a lot of lawyers to sit around and write stuff to add value to their content. It's not simply a search engine for court records, there's a lot of value add. That's why WestLaw can charge $300 a month per lawyer.
I don't think it's the same thing as bottling up our case law and making it inaccessable. Anyone can create a competing service, but I think you'd have a lot of work cut out trying to match the value that WestLaw provides.
to help you quit... RTFA.
They have 3 brands that each have a lower amount of nicotine kind of like the patch has 3 different levels to systematically lower the amount of nicotine you recieve.
It makes it so you choose whether or not to smoke, not to feed a nicotine addiction. This guy not only plans to make an ass-load of cash, but to give his customer's choice and reform the tobacco industry. Quite frankly, this guy should get the Nobel Peace Prize or something.
BTW, you can get cartons for ~$20 each online. So if anyone wants an easy way to quit, Drive Thru Smoke Shop
Actually it really just tells us about our Yale Professor here, as Quentin Tarantino pointed out in the movie 'Sleep With Me':
<snip>
No, I don't, fucking boy meets girl, I don't give a shit about that. Fuck boy meets girl, fuck motorcycle movie. No, what is really being said? What's really being said, that's what you're talking about. 'Cause the whole idea, man, is subversion. You want subversion on a massive level. You know what one of the greatest fucking scripts ever written in the history of Hollywood is? Top Gun.
[Duane: Oh, come on.]
Top Gun is fucking great. What is Top Gun? You think it's a story about a bunch of fighter pilots.
[Duane: It's about a bunch of guys waving their dicks around.]
It is a story about a man's struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what Top Gun is about, man.
You've got Maverick, all right? He's on the edge, man. He's right on the fucking line, all right? And you've got Iceman, and all his crew. They're gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they're saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways.
[Duane: What about Kelly McGillis?]
Kelly McGillis, she's heterosexuality. She's saying: no, no, no, no, no, no, go the normal way, play by the rules, go the normal way. They're saying no, go the gay way, be the gay way, go for the gay way, all right? That is what's going on throughout that whole movie...
He goes to her house, all right? It looks like they're going to have sex, you know, they're just kind of sitting back, he's takin' a shower and everything. They don't have sex. He gets on the motorcycle, drives away. She's like, "What the fuck, what the fuck is going on here?" Next scene, next scene you see her, she's in the elevator, she is dressed like a guy. She's got the cap on, she's got the aviator glasses, she's wearing the same jacket that the Iceman wears. She is, okay, this is how I gotta get this guy, this guy's going towards the gay way, I gotta bring him back, I gotta bring him back from the gay way, so I'm do that through subterfuge, I'm gonna dress like a man. All right? That is how she approaches it.
Okay, now let me just ask you--I'm gonna digress for two seconds here. I met this girl Amy here, she's like floating around here and everything. Now, she just got divorced, right?...
All right, but the REAL ending of the movie is when they fight the MIGs at the end, all right? Because he has passed over into the gay way. They are this gay fighting fucking force, all right? And they're beating the Russians, the gays are beating the Russians. And it's over, and they fucking land, and Iceman's been trying to get Maverick the entire time, and finally, he's got him, all right? And what is the last fucking line that they have together? They're all hugging and kissing and happy with each other, and Ice comes up to Maverick, and he says, "Man, you can ride my tail, anytime!" And what does Maverick say? "You can ride mine!" Swordfight! Swordfight! Fuckin' A, man!
</snip>
IMNSHO, this is Quentin's finest performance ever, better than his role in Pulp Fiction
The C & D is the legally accepted first step to mount a defense, and
The point is not that this is some sort of illegal tactic on the part of the PCI-SIG, nor is it out of the ordinary for going after someone who is beligerently attempting to gain from the trademark assigned to the holder.
If my neighbor hired someone to install a privacy fence and the contractor screwed up and placed part of it on my property, blocking my scenic view, I would have every legal right to call a lawyer and demand it was removed. However, my nieghbor might be a little pissed off at me, especially if he was unaware of my distress.
If I instead called him and told him the situation and asked him to do something about it in a polite and civil way, I do not surrender any legal right to my property.
The same point is valid here, it's a matter of civility and politeness, the C & D is effectively saying that they don't want this person to use the trademark or have any association with the PCI-SIG, that it is beligerently dilluting there trademark and they intend to take legal action if it is not stopped.
However, this is not the intent of the President of the PCI-SIG, as he stated in his reply. If the PCI-SIG grants Mr. Boemler the right to use the trademark, or came to some other agreement, they have in no way weakened their defense in any further violation of their trademark. It's the matter of using a butcher knife where a scalpel would serve better.
If anything they ought to take issue with the system that makes trademark holders have to behave this way to defend their trademark rights, not with the people who just do what the law tells them they must do.
Again, I reiterate that it is you who are not "cognizant" of the law. The PCI-SIG has no obligation to send a threat of legal action to defend their trademark. To do so shows ingratitude towards Mr. Boemler, who through his own time and funds, has furthered their interests and those of their members. A C & D is a threat of legal action and it is impolite to threaten your friends and allies with legal action before discussing the matter personaly first.
If you can't understand how this would be offensive, I fear for your ability to get along with other people. If your parents came and built a fence on your property as a 'suprise gift' and you didn't like it, would you call and ask them about removing it (while trying not to offend them), or would you call a lawyer?
No legal restraints were adjudicated by a court, no yelling and screaming was done...just a short letter asking them to quit using their trademark, drafted by a person who has a license to practice law.
The person licensed to practice law you cite, has the license to sue the pants off Mr. Boemler. Mr. Boemler is a private citizen who has done nothing but help these people and the community with his own time and resources and like many of us does not wish to be dragged into court, it's a hole for time and money. To have his (possibly first) contact with the PCI-SIG officials be armed tanks at the gate, rather than an ambassador is uncivil and offensive.
The problem with getting a letter from a lawyer is that most people, to be safe, will go to their own lawyer to formulate a response and handle the situation in the future. Why should Mr. Boemler be burdened with taking the time to explain the situation to his own representation and paying the legal costs? They are repaying his effort with a slap across the face.
Mr. Boemler even states this is what he is upset about. I guess you've never had a lawyer threaten you, either that, or you're sitting atop a pile of disposable cash that you have nothing better to do with but defend frivilous lawsuits.
You're quite wrong on this point.
The trademark holder does not have to send a C & D, they could have contacted Mr. Boemler and offered any number of resolutions, discussed the matter etc, etc.
Defense of a trademark does not mean you auto-spam with C & D letters. Defense means that you actively ensure that there are no violations, the C & D is only one method of defense.
Mr. Boemler and the rest of the public have good reason to feel an affront due to the fact that the trademark owner went straight to the C & D rather than exploring more civil methods of defending their trademark.
What you are suggesting would be like my having to get a restraining order against anyone I met, in case I didn't want to speak with them. Or better, like a previous poster mentioned, hiring someone to wake you up at 5:30 in the am screaming "YOU'RE WRONG!" instead of just replying here. (I really liked that one, my analogy wasn't so good.)
I have been boycotting the RIAA, why do you think I've got so many MP3's!?
</sarcasm>
This is a monopoly. They have been found in violation of Anti-Trust laws and held up on appeal. The government has a legitimate reason to tell them how to conduct their business and every right to do so.
Simply because the Anti-Trust trial focused on the OS rather than Office software, does not mean that the government has no reason to impose restrictions to keep MS from shifting their monopoly power. MS's monopoly has been under government scrutiny for almost 10 years, but we still get a bunch of posts on here about how the government shouldn't be able to tell 'a company' what to do. Either the trolls are really busy or you guys decided to skip Economics 101 for Libratarian Fanaticism 101.
In order to maintain a capitalist system, we must have competition. Without healthy competition, we don't have capitalism. The government has an obligation to step into an otherwise free market to ensure that competition stays healthy. There is no magical 'Free Market Fairy' that is going to come along and restore health to the industry.
So yes, depending on the result of the States' AG cases and the DOJ's settlement, MS could very much be liable for making their document formats some sort of completely bastardized XML. If you want to know the probability, then you should go read the settlements, and the grievences in the new filings against MS.
I don't think any of the generic Servlet/JSP books are much more helpful than explaining the spec's from Sun. They introduce basic patterns and such, but don't do much to help with taking advantage of the architecture while maintaining portability. Tomcat 4.1.x has caching features that will break 'loosely' written code that would work using Jasper on Jetty. The spec doesn't say you can't do these things, but developers need better guidence on what to keep in mind while writing code that needs to be portable, versus just writing for a specific container.
My experience has been that Tomcat does things the 'right way' where others gloss over ambiguities in the spec. Having a detailed explination, with examples on how to write code 'the right way' so that Tomcat will be happy, makes the job of porting to other containers easier.
The 4.1.x stuff seems to be a refactoring of previous versions that continues to enforce best practices to insure data integrity and scalability. The problem is, I need to be able to figure this out without having to read through the source. I don't mind it when I run up against issues and need to understand what's happening internally (I've read a ton of the jakarta-commons and struts taglib source), but to have a 'developer's guide' that does more than cover the basics of JSP/servlet development would be very helpful.
Picked up that one yesterday. I bought it cause Rick Hightower (Java Tools for Extreme Programming) wrote the chapter on struts and ant/xdoclet. I haven't been able to go through the whole thing yet, but I need good reference info and insight into how the new Jasper2 engine handles caching of tag libs and some of the quirks that come up in JSP/Servlet development WRT insuring clean separation of data in the various scopes. I'm also very interested in seeing how struts and the JSTL should behave in the container.
I don't think this info is very well covered in the Tomcat docs, dealing with Tomcat development is not the same as the '.htaccess' file as one poster suggested. If your trying to work out why the other guy's JSP/custom taglib stuff isn't as portable as it should be between containers, you really need this type of info.
I'm dissapointed the reviewer sort of glossed over this book, he mentioned the architectural info in the last paragraph, and highlighted all the crap that's already talked about in the Tomcat docs.
I already read most of the open source J2EE/dev mailing lists and visit numerous authors blogs. Trying to tie all this stuff together, while figuring out where it's all headed and discerning the best practices is a bit of a daunting task. The differences between the Jasper and Jasper2 engines is a lot of info, combine with the state of Jakarta-Commons, the rise of Jelly and Maven, and AOP + XRAI coming down the pipe in XDoclet2 and you've got a lot of material to pour through that isn't well documented yet. (ok that's a little out of scope for these 2 books)
I need good books that really help me to formulate development methodologies that scale up and promote efficiency when doing full J2EE app development.
So does anyone have any reading recommendations that will help sort all this out? Should I get this book too, or stick with Mastering Tomcat Development?
I told them to use 8 track!
Essentially your choices are Adobe Framemaker (~$800), Lyx (Open Source) and XMLmind (Freeware). There may be some others, but these are the ones I've looked at. These are the ones you can use like a WYSIWYG, but are more WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean). For more info on WYSIWYM, look at Lyx's site.
DocBook is a great spec, but the editors suck for the most part. Lyx can't import DocBook in reliably, and your Docbook is stored as a lyx file (latex I think). Lyx's Docbook stuff can be a bear to set up, even on a system like RedHat where most of the software comes installed. I only recommend Lyx to people who have experience with Lyx, to someone who just wants to write docs, it tends to be more trouble than it's worth.
Framemaker will probably do everything you want and be a godsend with lots of nice features, but you'll pay for it, $800 for Win/Mac and ~$1300 for Unix.
XMLmind is pretty cool, it does Docbook well but is a little slow, it has a little bit of a learning curve, but is prolly the best Docbook editor I've found for free. It's not Open Source though. It is written in Java, so you might have some speed issues, depending on the platform you run it on. I've been recommending XMLmind to everyone I know that asks about Docbook, it has a tree view of the DOM as well as a WYSIWYM view with stylesheets applied on the fly. It has property editors and a pretty smart insert tool that follows the DTD, only allowing you to insert allowed tags into other tags. It feels like more of a programmer's tool than Framemaker, but it should be fairly easy for most WYSIWYG users to adjust.
<rant>
I don't understand why on God's green earth OpenOffice or Abiword or KOffice, or anyone else in the OpenSource world has neglected this area. It's been three years since the LDP went to DocBook, GNOME uses DocBook as their doc format. Why in the hell don't we have decent document writing tools when everyone is always screaming about the lack of documentation in the OpenSource world?
If we want more docs written, it needs to be easier to write them and shouldn't involve learning all about SGML or XML engines as well as a markup language to do it. DocBook is too big to keep in my head and I shouldn't have to think hard about how to write docs when my focus is the content I want to write for. Organizing technical info on a difficult subject is hard enough, stopping every five minutes to look up a DocBook tag or trying to better understand the structure is a huge barrier to getting the work done.
</rant>
But that's just my $.02
I'll agree with your points, I've been a RH fan since 5.2 (moved from Slackware).
However, my biggest complaint is that RH lacks the capabilities of 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. I've been using apt4rpm on all my RH boxes, but trying to move from RH 7.3 to 8.0 failed.
I looked around at what RH had to offer and what was available on the net, as it turns out, the only 'safe' way to upgrade a RH box from 7.x to 8.0 is to reboot with a bootdisk (install, kickstart, whatever) then perform the upgrade, then reboot to the working system.
This is unacceptable if you have a ton of racked boxes. I need to be able to remotely (scripted is even better) be able to upgrade those boxes, reboot and be ready to go. Having to physically install the media (even for an NFS kickstart) upgrade is a major PITA. It's one of the main reasons I'll never convince the deb-heads I work with to move to RH.
I really like RH, I do a lot of business and enterprise app development and deployment, and RH has consistently provided everything I need to do my job sanely. This one issue is really killing me though.
When will the Dreamcast Port get it?
I really want to try this out on my quad-proc Dreamcast.
</sarcasm>
If the company in question has outstanding balances, I'd say your being shaken down.
The CEO isn't a CEO your worried about cause he's some random lucky guy who wound up as CEO one day. This guy is only thinking about his company, which, like most companies is having a less than spectacular year. The big fish will shake down the small fish if they can. I've had it happen a couple of times, they don't want to lose their ass, so they come up with BS reasons they aren't satisfied with your work and then shake you down on the invoice.
It's always something that would be difficult to contest, the more subtle, the better. This guy prolly would rather pay his lawyer a couple of hours (or has retainer hours to use up this quarter) in order to get you to come to an 'agreement' quietly over this 'delicate' matter, especially since he's questioning your professional integrity.
Make a business decision, figure out what's the best thing for your time and money. Talk to a lawyer to find out the odds and figure out how not to lose too much.
It sucks, but it's part of working for yourself. If you don't like it, hire a CEO of your own to handle these things. This is part of how they create their value for their company. Don't assume you can just work for honest clients either, too many sleezebags like this out there, it's best to make sure you can bill these expenses into your rate, and find someone who can deal with this waste of time for you.
Sorry to hear about it, and good luck.
So how about if we distribute a 'Free Alice' copy of DeCSS for the DVD version of Alice's Restaurant. Or if and when there's DVD-Audio version we distrubute the crack for that.
;-) Or maybe now that Perens is free from his master's he could do it. We really need someone high profile enough to lead the attack. I'll gladly take my place on the bench with the 'mother-rapers and father-killers' to support this one.
I think this would really be poinent. It would provide a bridge for those who have no idea what this battle is about, but know all about Alice's Restaurant, to support the cause. If we were loud enough about it, we could have everyone thinking about the DMCA next Thanksgiving when they play Alice's Restaurant on every radio station in the country. Maybe Alro Guthrie could do a special version? After all, we wouldn't have folk music if Intellectual Property had always been in the current state, and we sure as hell won't have any new folk music. Saving folk music would be good PR, after all, what's more wholesome than folk music?
Of course I think RXC should take the lead
You do have to wonder about the effectiveness of this. Could we also bring reason to the war on drugs if we all sparked up joints outside the DEA offices in DC?
You can get, all the freedom you want, at Alice's Restaurant.