That has to be the lamest set of supposedly "anti-java" rants I've ever seen. I could probably find some random luser off the street to do better than that.
Anyway: 1) irrelevant 2) false (perhaps he's thinking of the JDK? false for that, too) 3) misguided 4) misguided and irrelevant (can't do that in C or C++ either, and what's wrong with "if.. else if.." etc?) 5) One.java file per class (not counting inner classes) is a lot??
What, Mandrake doesn't ship with the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc)? How do you rebuild your kernel?
(For those that don't get it, gcj -- the GNU Compiler for Java -- is part of the gcc. And it'll compile java source and/or bytecode to native code, as well as source to bytecode.)
Re:Biggest announcement? Ha!
on
.NET for Apache
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· Score: 2
Anyone who's read even the basics can see that.NET is definately going to be a powerhouse.
Well, sure, it's following in J2EE's footsteps, which is already pretty widespread. Of course, it remains to be seen whether.NET will ever actually catch up with J2EE. It might on those platforms where Microsoft's monopoly can be leveraged. Or not. As you point out, any valid browser will work, whether those webservices are delivered by Java (on the server) or by.NET.
Interesting. I post that at my default score and it gets modded down twice as "overrated". I guess there are a couple of.NET zealots(*) out there with mod points tonight. They could at least have picked something imaginative like "troll" or "flamebait", but I guess "overrated" tends to be safer from meta-moderation.
((*) Anyone who has seen the Microsoft double-page ad in the last few issues of InfoWorld will understand why I'm using this word.)
Oh well, since I can't mod it back up, I'll quote it here for the benefit of anyone reading at >=1 and wondering what all the comments are to: [quote]
I daresay [Java]'s every bit as proprietary as.NET,
Oh? Is there an equivalent to the Java Community Process for.NET? Can I download compilers that target.NET (ie, the CLR) from Microsoft for free (gratis) like I can the Java SDK from Sun?
Java may be, strictly speaking, proprietary, but it is nowhere near "every bit" as such as anything from Microsoft.
[/quote] As it turns out, you can download some (EULA-limited) compiler from Microsoft. Doesn't matter, my main point was about the JCP (Java Community Process).
Well, that is what I meant by my first point, about the Java Community Process (JCP).
Unfortunately the.NET zealots seem to have ignored that and picked on my second point -- apparently you can download some sort of.NET compiler from MSFT. (But, does its EULA let me write GPL'd code with it? Sun's does.)
Nah, the real announcement is that Microsoft has finally faced up to the insecurity of IIS and is discontinuing it in favor of Apache. They will provide (for a modest licensing fee, this is Microsoft) a tool to convert ASPs to JSPs.
(And if anyone really believes that, please contact me about this money in a Nigerian bank I need help with transferring...)
Your links say the opposite.
on
.NET for Apache
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Funny, those links don't seem to have much to do with Java scalability, they just shows how SQL Server scales much worse than any of the DBMSs mentioned.
Of course, this was at least partly due to the crappy Microsoft JDBC driver (which they couldn't even get to stay up for 8 hours).
Why am I not surprised that in a test of the Microsoft JDBC driver vs.NET that Microsofts own technology might do better?
These studies just point out that you're better off going with a non-Microsoft solution.
I daresay [Java]'s every bit as proprietary as.NET,
Oh? Is there an equivalent to the Java Community Process for.NET? Can I download compilers that target.NET (ie, the CLR) from Microsoft for free (gratis) like I can the Java SDK from Sun?
Java may be, strictly speaking, proprietary, but it is nowhere near "every bit" as such as anything from Microsoft.
Indeed, very old trick. (For my sins, in my earlier days I used to help PhD psych students run statistical analyses on their survey data.)
A variation on this is to give the respondant a die (ie, half a pair of dice), tell them to pick a number between one and six, and every time they roll that number, intentionally give a false answer on the survey. Thus, looking at any individual survey response, you don't know whether it's true or false, but you can factor in the 16.7% false responses into the statistical analysis.
Sure, that can be computerized, but as someone above pointed out, how does the respondant know he can trust it? The above old technique is entirely under the respondant's control.
Oh, well, if we're going to descend to ancient hardware blinkenlights stories... (which model PDP-11, BTW?)
The Burroughs B6700 (and similar models) was a 48-bit word (96-bit double) stack oriented mainframe. The main panel had an array of 12 by 16 lights showing the bits in the top two words (double words) in the current stack. At idle, those would light up with the Burroughs "B" logo.
Of course the challenge was to come up with code that would load those registers with some interesting pattern and keep it there long enough for the operators to notice.
The term "life zone" dates back forty years or so. Short for "life as we know it zone", if you like. Roughly speaking it's the distance from the primary star at which a planet has a reasonable chance of having liquid water, depending of course on the planet's gravity and composition.
Of course they knew a lot less about the solar system in those days -- we now can reasonably suspect that liquid water can exist in places like below the ice on Europa. Furthermore, "life as we know it" now has a much larger meaning than it did then -- back then we were unaware of the rich life around deep ocean geothermal vents, or the stuff found within rocks, and so on.
But yes, in general the term "life" is used to mean "CHON-chemistry based, self-replicating complex structures using a DNA/RNA based blueprint coding scheme". (Some folks waive the "self-replicating" part to allow viruses to be considered life.)
There may well be other basis for what could be called life, but since we don't know what they are, it makes it rather hard to define the parameters within which to look for them, or how to recognize such "life as we don't know it" when we see it.
Talk to the computer vision people. MPEG and JPEG compession work in part by throwing out a lot of information that the human vision system won't miss. Applying current machine vision algorithms to such data doesn't work at all well due to compression artifacts.
Consider the latest digitally-produced Star Wars episode. If that were stored in uncompressed form, it'd take about three terabytes. (Assuming 2k by 3k frames, 24 fps, and two hour running time.)
Good points about Venus and Mars which orbit at the edges of the "life zone".
One possibly critical datum missing from that analysis relates to Earth's history. Earth has a relatively thin crust and the combination of tectonic motion, subduction, and vulcanism recycles elements back to the atmosphere after they'd been locked up in rocks. (Actually you do hint at this in your last para.)
Mars seems to be small enough that it has solidified down far enough that there's no more cycling of the crust and thus the oxygen and hydrogen locked in the rocks stays there, also any free hydrogen (from the ultraviolet lysis of water) escapes to space before it can recombine, thus Mars now has a very thin atmosphere.
Venus may be large enough, although that isn't certain. It certainly seems to have continental masses but I don't know about any active volcanism. It's heavy enough to retain atmosphere though -- too much of it, as you point out.
It's possible that the reason Earth escaped Venus's fate has less to do with the distance from the Sun and more to do with the formation of our Moon. Current theory is that late in the formation of the solar system, the proto-earth was smacked by a Mars-size protoplanet which literally splashed a good chunk of the proto-Earth into space, some of which condensed to form the Moon. This has several implications. The lightest elements would have boiled away in significant quantity, so there's just less of them around to form a thick atmosphere (hence less runaway greenhouse). The medium light-weight elements (that form crust, particularly continental crust) were greatly reduced, some of them forming the Moon (so in one sense, the Moon is the 8th continent), meaning that tectonic circulation has an easier time of it. (The heat from that impact might also have some effect there, although I think that would be dissipated by now.)
All of which leads to the (somewhat depressing) conclusion that Earth is habitable only because of a really unlikely sequence of events (much more unlikely than merely forming at the right size in the right place). OTOH, observation of our own solar system and some of the very strange (to us) places on Earth that life survives and thrives indicate that there could be a lot of places that primitive life exists. Star Trek's "Class M" planets are probably pretty darned rare, though.
(Oh, BTW, Mercury isn't in "tidal lock" like the Moon is with Earth, but in a 3:2 tidal resonance with the Sun.)
Actually we do know that there was life then, there is (micro) fossil evidence to that effect (at least going back to somewhere between 2 and 3 billion years ago). There's also geologic evidence of some pretty major impacts and geologic upheavals since then.
What we don't know for sure is whether those impacts/upheavals were enough to sterilize the planet or left a few isolated pockets of life from which it re-emerged.
The probability of life may be high, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the probability of intelligent, tool-using life is equally high.
Taking your 30,000 year figure for example, that's only 0.00001% of the time that there has been life on this planet. As a duration for a technological species capable of communicating across interstellar distances, that is incredibly optimistic -- our track record is barely a century so far, and that's being generous.
Within the last few years, some scientists (don't recall at the moment whether they were biologists, climatologists or planetologists, or some combination thereof) have speculated that large asteroid impact events early in Earth's history (say in the range 1 to 3.5 billion years ago) were sufficient to pretty much sterilize the planet, only to have life re-form after things cooled off a bit.
Because -- for English speakers, anyway -- "missing" vowel sounds are only inserted between letters that cannot be pronounced together. Thus the natural pronounciation of "SCSI" puts the vowel between the C and the second S. The "cs" combo is rare in English (we use "x" or "cks" for that sound) but "sc" is common (scare, scarf, scam, score, scum...).
If the coiners of the acronym really wanted it pronounced "sexy", they should have come up with some "E" word between "Small" and "Computer".
BEEP is pretty clearly pronounced how it sounds. Just so long as nobody confuses it with ping (or PNG, for that matter).
Interesting how... when discussing an alternative to MS, the first... alternative to be discussed is Linux.... Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task.
Oh? When did Apple announce MacOS X availability for the x86 architecture? Considering that all those desktops are running Windows, replacing them with Linux is minimal cost, but replacing with MacOS would require replacing all the hardware, too.
I agree, Apple's approach to the UI layered on top of a Unix makes for a very nice desktop. Too bad it's only available on very proprietary hardware. Locking one's self into Apple may not be quite as bad as locking in to Microsoft -- but it's still locking yourself in. Mink-lined handcuffs are still handcuffs.
Re:Don't you ever stop giving people ideas?
on
LEDs for the Blind
·
· Score: 1
Holding the handle of the tuning fork between your teeth is mostly harmless, and serves the purpose. What you don't want to do is touch the vibrating ends (tines?) of the fork to your teeth.
Imagine a hammer beating on them 440 times a second...
Sure, if you're talking about growing juveniles (piglets) to adults, you've got to provide protein. That's a somewhat different kind of growth than the sort obese folks worry about.
Well, that's a tautology. If it's poisonous, it isn't food.
OTOH, there are plenty of things that can get mistaken for food that will do really nasty things to you.
Rhubarb leaves, for example. High in oxalic acid. Oxalic acid, in the presence of calcium ions (such as within the cells of your body), forms needle-like insoluble crystals of calcium oxalate. Ouch.
Or Amanita mushrooms. Pretty. Might even taste good sauteed in a little butter. But you'll feel really sick for a day or so, then seem to get better. And totally collapse a day or two after that because the toxin has destroyed your liver.
Then there's natural contaminants of things that really are foods. The aflatoxin in those slightly moldy peanuts is a really potent carcinogen...
Fact, the average human adult exhales a bit under a pound of carbon a day (as CO2).
Fact, energy balance must take into account not merely black body radiation at 98.6F or even conductive loss to the atmosphere, but also thermal losses from heating up the thousand or so cubic feet of air one inhales/exhales every day and the couple of litres of liquid peed/sweated out. This will vary by ambient temperature, of course.
Fact, it takes energy to convert that pound of butter into something that can get stored in fat cells in the body. It takes yet more energy to convert that stored fat into something that the muscles/brain/organs can use for fuel. It also takes energy to convert 3500 Calories' worth of sugar to a form the body can use -- but not nearly as much.
Even when in ketosis unless you have a super fast metabolism the body only burns as much fuel as it needs per day.
True but oversimplified.
Humans are neither chemistry sets nor simple heat engines. The calculation of "as much fuel as it needs per day" must also include the calculation of how much energy is required to convert stored fat into ketones, etc, that the body burns for its other energy needs.
Part of the whole point of the Atkins and similar low-carb diets is to switch the body to really inefficient metabolic pathways so that actual caloric requirement goes up even if the "total work" (in the simple mechanical analysis) stays the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, now it's 2 "overrated" and a "flamebait" -- even though none of the 8 responses is a flame.
;-)
Go ahead, waste your mod points.
That has to be the lamest set of supposedly "anti-java" rants I've ever seen. I could probably find some random luser off the street to do better than that.
.. else if .." etc?) .java file per class (not counting inner classes) is a lot??
Anyway:
1) irrelevant
2) false (perhaps he's thinking of the JDK? false for that, too)
3) misguided
4) misguided and irrelevant (can't do that in C or C++ either, and what's wrong with "if
5) One
Mandrake cometh without it.
What, Mandrake doesn't ship with the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc)? How do you rebuild your kernel?
(For those that don't get it, gcj -- the GNU Compiler for Java -- is part of the gcc. And it'll compile java source and/or bytecode to native code, as well as source to bytecode.)
Anyone who's read even the basics can see that .NET is definately going to be a powerhouse.
.NET will ever actually catch up with J2EE. It might on those platforms where Microsoft's monopoly can be leveraged. Or not. As you point out, any valid browser will work, whether those webservices are delivered by Java (on the server) or by .NET.
Well, sure, it's following in J2EE's footsteps, which is already pretty widespread. Of course, it remains to be seen whether
((*) Anyone who has seen the Microsoft double-page ad in the last few issues of InfoWorld will understand why I'm using this word.)
Oh well, since I can't mod it back up, I'll quote it here for the benefit of anyone reading at >=1 and wondering what all the comments are to:
[quote] [/quote]
As it turns out, you can download some (EULA-limited) compiler from Microsoft. Doesn't matter, my main point was about the JCP (Java Community Process).
Well, that is what I meant by my first point, about the Java Community Process (JCP).
.NET zealots seem to have ignored that and picked on my second point -- apparently you can download some sort of .NET compiler from MSFT. (But, does its EULA let me write GPL'd code with it? Sun's does.)
Unfortunately the
Thank you for expanding on my original point.
Nah, the real announcement is that Microsoft has finally faced up to the insecurity of IIS and is discontinuing it in favor of Apache. They will provide (for a modest licensing fee, this is Microsoft) a tool to convert ASPs to JSPs.
(And if anyone really believes that, please contact me about this money in a Nigerian bank I need help with transferring...)
Funny, those links don't seem to have much to do with Java scalability, they just shows how SQL Server scales much worse than any of the DBMSs mentioned.
.NET that Microsofts own technology might do better?
Of course, this was at least partly due to the crappy Microsoft JDBC driver (which they couldn't even get to stay up for 8 hours).
Why am I not surprised that in a test of the Microsoft JDBC driver vs
These studies just point out that you're better off going with a non-Microsoft solution.
I daresay [Java]'s every bit as proprietary as .NET,
.NET? Can I download compilers that target .NET (ie, the CLR) from Microsoft for free (gratis) like I can the Java SDK from Sun?
Oh? Is there an equivalent to the Java Community Process for
Java may be, strictly speaking, proprietary, but it is nowhere near "every bit" as such as anything from Microsoft.
Indeed, very old trick. (For my sins, in my earlier days I used to help PhD psych students run statistical analyses on their survey data.)
A variation on this is to give the respondant a die (ie, half a pair of dice), tell them to pick a number between one and six, and every time they roll that number, intentionally give a false answer on the survey. Thus, looking at any individual survey response, you don't know whether it's true or false, but you can factor in the 16.7% false responses into the statistical analysis.
Sure, that can be computerized, but as someone above pointed out, how does the respondant know he can trust it? The above old technique is entirely under the respondant's control.
Oh, well, if we're going to descend to ancient hardware blinkenlights stories... (which model PDP-11, BTW?)
The Burroughs B6700 (and similar models) was a 48-bit word (96-bit double) stack oriented mainframe. The main panel had an array of 12 by 16 lights showing the bits in the top two words (double words) in the current stack. At idle, those would light up with the Burroughs "B" logo.
Of course the challenge was to come up with code that would load those registers with some interesting pattern and keep it there long enough for the operators to notice.
Intentionally so.
The term "life zone" dates back forty years or so. Short for "life as we know it zone", if you like. Roughly speaking it's the distance from the primary star at which a planet has a reasonable chance of having liquid water, depending of course on the planet's gravity and composition.
Of course they knew a lot less about the solar system in those days -- we now can reasonably suspect that liquid water can exist in places like below the ice on Europa. Furthermore, "life as we know it" now has a much larger meaning than it did then -- back then we were unaware of the rich life around deep ocean geothermal vents, or the stuff found within rocks, and so on.
But yes, in general the term "life" is used to mean "CHON-chemistry based, self-replicating complex structures using a DNA/RNA based blueprint coding scheme". (Some folks waive the "self-replicating" part to allow viruses to be considered life.)
There may well be other basis for what could be called life, but since we don't know what they are, it makes it rather hard to define the parameters within which to look for them, or how to recognize such "life as we don't know it" when we see it.
No one needs a terabyte disk.
;)
Talk to the computer vision people. MPEG and JPEG compession work in part by throwing out a lot of information that the human vision system won't miss. Applying current machine vision algorithms to such data doesn't work at all well due to compression artifacts.
Consider the latest digitally-produced Star Wars episode. If that were stored in uncompressed form, it'd take about three terabytes. (Assuming 2k by 3k frames, 24 fps, and two hour running time.)
Nice troll, though
Good points about Venus and Mars which orbit at the edges of the "life zone".
One possibly critical datum missing from that analysis relates to Earth's history. Earth has a relatively thin crust and the combination of tectonic motion, subduction, and vulcanism recycles elements back to the atmosphere after they'd been locked up in rocks. (Actually you do hint at this in your last para.)
Mars seems to be small enough that it has solidified down far enough that there's no more cycling of the crust and thus the oxygen and hydrogen locked in the rocks stays there, also any free hydrogen (from the ultraviolet lysis of water) escapes to space before it can recombine, thus Mars now has a very thin atmosphere.
Venus may be large enough, although that isn't certain. It certainly seems to have continental masses but I don't know about any active volcanism. It's heavy enough to retain atmosphere though -- too much of it, as you point out.
It's possible that the reason Earth escaped Venus's fate has less to do with the distance from the Sun and more to do with the formation of our Moon. Current theory is that late in the formation of the solar system, the proto-earth was smacked by a Mars-size protoplanet which literally splashed a good chunk of the proto-Earth into space, some of which condensed to form the Moon. This has several implications. The lightest elements would have boiled away in significant quantity, so there's just less of them around to form a thick atmosphere (hence less runaway greenhouse). The medium light-weight elements (that form crust, particularly continental crust) were greatly reduced, some of them forming the Moon (so in one sense, the Moon is the 8th continent), meaning that tectonic circulation has an easier time of it. (The heat from that impact might also have some effect there, although I think that would be dissipated by now.)
All of which leads to the (somewhat depressing) conclusion that Earth is habitable only because of a really unlikely sequence of events (much more unlikely than merely forming at the right size in the right place). OTOH, observation of our own solar system and some of the very strange (to us) places on Earth that life survives and thrives indicate that there could be a lot of places that primitive life exists. Star Trek's "Class M" planets are probably pretty darned rare, though.
(Oh, BTW, Mercury isn't in "tidal lock" like the Moon is with Earth, but in a 3:2 tidal resonance with the Sun.)
Actually we do know that there was life then, there is (micro) fossil evidence to that effect (at least going back to somewhere between 2 and 3 billion years ago). There's also geologic evidence of some pretty major impacts and geologic upheavals since then.
What we don't know for sure is whether those impacts/upheavals were enough to sterilize the planet or left a few isolated pockets of life from which it re-emerged.
The probability of life may be high, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the probability of intelligent, tool-using life is equally high.
Taking your 30,000 year figure for example, that's only 0.00001% of the time that there has been life on this planet. As a duration for a technological species capable of communicating across interstellar distances, that is incredibly optimistic -- our track record is barely a century so far, and that's being generous.
Within the last few years, some scientists (don't recall at the moment whether they were biologists, climatologists or planetologists, or some combination thereof) have speculated that large asteroid impact events early in Earth's history (say in the range 1 to 3.5 billion years ago) were sufficient to pretty much sterilize the planet, only to have life re-form after things cooled off a bit.
Because -- for English speakers, anyway -- "missing" vowel sounds are only inserted between letters that cannot be pronounced together. Thus the natural pronounciation of "SCSI" puts the vowel between the C and the second S. The "cs" combo is rare in English (we use "x" or "cks" for that sound) but "sc" is common (scare, scarf, scam, score, scum ...).
If the coiners of the acronym really wanted it pronounced "sexy", they should have come up with some "E" word between "Small" and "Computer".
BEEP is pretty clearly pronounced how it sounds. Just so long as nobody confuses it with ping (or PNG, for that matter).
Interesting how ... when discussing an alternative to MS, the first ... alternative to be discussed is Linux. ... Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task.
Oh? When did Apple announce MacOS X availability for the x86 architecture? Considering that all those desktops are running Windows, replacing them with Linux is minimal cost, but replacing with MacOS would require replacing all the hardware, too.
I agree, Apple's approach to the UI layered on top of a Unix makes for a very nice desktop. Too bad it's only available on very proprietary hardware. Locking one's self into Apple may not be quite as bad as locking in to Microsoft -- but it's still locking yourself in. Mink-lined handcuffs are still handcuffs.
Holding the handle of the tuning fork between your teeth is mostly harmless, and serves the purpose. What you don't want to do is touch the vibrating ends (tines?) of the fork to your teeth.
Imagine a hammer beating on them 440 times a second...
Sure, if you're talking about growing juveniles (piglets) to adults, you've got to provide protein. That's a somewhat different kind of growth than the sort obese folks worry about.
Food is not poisonous.
Well, that's a tautology. If it's poisonous, it isn't food.
OTOH, there are plenty of things that can get mistaken for food that will do really nasty things to you.
Rhubarb leaves, for example. High in oxalic acid. Oxalic acid, in the presence of calcium ions (such as within the cells of your body), forms needle-like insoluble crystals of calcium oxalate. Ouch.
Or Amanita mushrooms. Pretty. Might even taste good sauteed in a little butter. But you'll feel really sick for a day or so, then seem to get better. And totally collapse a day or two after that because the toxin has destroyed your liver.
Then there's natural contaminants of things that really are foods. The aflatoxin in those slightly moldy peanuts is a really potent carcinogen...
Nice analysis, but incomplete. (Too simple).
Fact, the average human adult exhales a bit under a pound of carbon a day (as CO2).
Fact, energy balance must take into account not merely black body radiation at 98.6F or even conductive loss to the atmosphere, but also thermal losses from heating up the thousand or so cubic feet of air one inhales/exhales every day and the couple of litres of liquid peed/sweated out. This will vary by ambient temperature, of course.
Fact, it takes energy to convert that pound of butter into something that can get stored in fat cells in the body. It takes yet more energy to convert that stored fat into something that the muscles/brain/organs can use for fuel. It also takes energy to convert 3500 Calories' worth of sugar to a form the body can use -- but not nearly as much.
Even when in ketosis unless you have a super fast metabolism the body only burns as much fuel as it needs per day.
True but oversimplified.
Humans are neither chemistry sets nor simple heat engines. The calculation of "as much fuel as it needs per day" must also include the calculation of how much energy is required to convert stored fat into ketones, etc, that the body burns for its other energy needs.
Part of the whole point of the Atkins and similar low-carb diets is to switch the body to really inefficient metabolic pathways so that actual caloric requirement goes up even if the "total work" (in the simple mechanical analysis) stays the same.