Oh, and here is the best write up (with sources) that I could find that contained information about Iraq switching it's oil reserves from the dollar to the Euro.
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/iraq.h tm l
Just read the internet, and you'll see that Iraq did indeed sell oil, and the oil for food program didn't begin until 1996. You'll also see how it's a miracle they even survived through the sanctions. Their oil production was severly limited, and a lot of oil was lost because of poorly maintained equipment that they couldn't get parts for. It's been estimated that a million children have died in Iraq due to unclean water because they couldn't import Chlorine. Compare that to the "terrorism" that has occured in the last decade, and I think it won't be hard for you to decide who the bad guys are.
Yeah, that last point he made was completely insane... It's almost like people forget that the number one arms buyer in the world, and Bush's closest friend, is Saudi Arabia, where most terrorists come from, and amputations are common punishment. Every time you buy a gallon of gas, you're funding an oppresive dictatorship, mostly thanks to Bush, his family, and his friends.
Besides, if someone showed up here killing and bombing trying to destroy Bush and our government, that would be viewed as terrorism as well, but for some reason a lot wacky conservatives don't see it being the same when we invade another country? I don't understand the double standard. When war is declared, there is no such thing as terrorism, it's friggen war! Don't expect people to jump out in front of your rifles like nice soldiers. If the world was under attack, and I could strap a nuclear weapon on my chest and destroy the alien invaders, you better believe I would, and it's called defending one's loved ones and society. Which is exactly what those Iraqi "terrorists" are trying to do. I can't blame them for wanting to control their own land. They're invaded, resistance in inevitable.
I think you're digging pretty deap. One of them even said something about "nuclear material", which we happen to know to be false. The others were full of speculation. So, what you're telling me is, I can choose between these three stories, only one of which that reports to have any information beyond speculation, and it brings up a topic we know to have been false. I'm not buying it.
Well, if you want to be the conservative conspiracy theorist, then I think this post deserves just the opposite. Here's the story I heard.
Iraq switched it's oil from USD to the Euro. The Euro soared to 2x the USD. Iraq made a LOT of money (twice as much as they would have). OPEC contemplated the same. Bush starts his campaign against Iraq on faked evidence without questioning it at all. He accuses Saddam of attacking his own people with mustard gas, but the people he attacked were the Kurds that Turkey attack every day, but are still our allies. He accuses Saddam of helping in 9/11 with no verifiable evidence to back it up. He accuses Saddam of developing and having biological weapons when the UN inspectors said otherwise. Most of Europe are pissed because he wants to attack and has never given a good reason other than "overthrow Saddam", which of itself is not a reason for war. Now we have "won" the war, the oil will be sold on the USD instead of the Euro, and the OPEC will think twice before any of it's members switch to the Euro.
If oil was traded in the Euro, every oil trader with USD in their bank would have to switch over to Euro, which would flood the market with USD, and make the Euro scarce. The biggest longterm effect would be us having to pay as much or more than the Europeans for our gas. This was very much over oil, but only because Saddam found a way to stick a knife in our side with it. I don't condone the use of violence for economical reasons. You'll have to admit, or be a small minority of people, that this war was economical, because that's what the history books will show, because no compelling evidence was shown for any other reason. I don't think many people are going to buy the "Liberation" since the Kurds won't get their own place to live, and will be killed, harassed, and oppressed by Turkey, Iran, and Iraq for many more years.
Well, on the issue of the kernel, you have to admit that the memory manager is at least twice as good as the old 2.2 memory manager. The SCSI code, I can't speak much for, but I assume it had something to do with efficiency of the drivers. All I know is that I couldn't patch the kernel with the promise SCSI driver that supported Promise Raid for quite some time on the 2.4 kernel. (I did manage to hack it statically into 2.2 even though it was binary.)
If think most people get the idea that XP is against pre-design and rewrites. It's just not true. XP just says you can't get all the design to begin with, that doesn't mean to not design to before hand, it means to design to be flexible to begin with. Now the "try the simplest thing that could work" mentality IMO, is the worst. Why not do it right to begin with, and move on to something else? If it needs to be changed, it'll be much easier than parsing through unreadable code that barely gets the job done. Rewrites happen when people do "the simplest thing possible" for so long that you really can't understand the code. It's better to rewrite code than it is to understand it. They also occur when such significant changes are being made to the way that something is done that there is actually not a single line of code that is useful anymore. There are reasons why this could be true, like the linux memory manager of 2.2 era. It was just not designed for how memory is used today, and it couldn't have been designed for it without a psychic developer. The API must have been pretty well designed to handle a change like that without headache.
I hope you are beginning to see the difference between design as you go and design before hand. They aren't the same kind of design. One consentrates on infrastructure, the other on the actual code. You can't change the infrastructure without significantly changing the entire source tree, and sometimes it's better to rewrite at least large sections of the code than it is to try to work in that infrastructure. It's always best to come up with the best infrastructure you can before you write any code.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just giving some scenarios where it isn't possible. Combining those two, I'm saying it's not always possible to start small then build up big and still end up with the same solution as design before hand. Most open source coders I've seen have been all about jumping into the code and solving a problem. They solve one narrow-minded version of the problem, thus they begin to think they should develop a framework as a blanket solution. They evolve code for doing one thing into code that does something that is quite different sometimes, and more times than not, not the best way to do the other thing.
Do that about eight times, and you have the same API for parsing xml as word files or something equally as ridiculous because they have code built on top that uses this API, and if they change it in one place, it ripples throughout the entire code base requiring extensive testing and often synergistic errors that unit tests can't catch for you. Even if you don't get errors, you'll end up with a system that has very little insight into anything but it's original domain.
You may think that compartmentalizing code would solve this, or maybe that you are just trying to make one program do three programs work, but that isn't always the case. In order to make a consistent feeling interface, that is consistent with the model, you have to actually design. Right now, Linux has a million small utility programs that use pipes to interact. If you think about it, a lot of the time, if they programs were actually integrated together, it would be much more efficient. Consider |grep blah |less. If I hit G to go to the end of the less, it will take forever for a significantly large file. Are you going to write a generic protocol over pipes to communicate stream positioning? Are you going to write one single program grepless to become the union of the two programs? Wouldn't be easier to just redesign an architecture involving filters, formatters, data sources, and pagers that are pluggable? Then it would be faster than running a protocol over pipes too. At some point you have to involve the file system, like the VAX did. You can seek to any line in a text file on a VAX, because it could indexed \n characters in text files with certain flags.
Haphazard programming without the discipline of design leads you to a psychotic system that is often beyond repair. You don't see a problem today, but your program will run into a dead end of functionality per code ratio. It takes exponentially longer to add functionality, and it's often much better to determine the purpose of your program, then design for the most general case, but code for the most specific.
Of course you probably don't have the experience I have of walking into projects that were done in VBA/Paradox that want to go multiuser. Some things just aren't technically feasible because of severely poor design. Complete lack of design that a lot of open source projects have will often lead to worse fates in a year than the startup projects that begin now to replace them. Basically, you can rewrite it, or someone else will for you. EXT2 would have never evolved into ReiserFS. The beauty of the Linux kernel though is that it has just enough architecture that obsolete parts get discarded and rewritten without disturbing the rest because it is modular. It gets better design all the time. The SCSI code was almost completely rewritten for 2.4. The memory manager was completely rewritten. The scheduler has since been replaced. Despite Alan Cox's claim that the Linux kernel evolved and wasn't designed, there is a lot of design in the kernel, and you'd be hard pressed to find much of the kernel that hasn't been rewritten at least once to improve this design.
Do keep in mind that the parts of the Linux kernel that have been rewritten are larger than some applications that people try to salvage. Blanket statements like "It's better to keep what you have than rewrite" is very wrong in a lot of situations,
I think that most people that agree that complete rewrites are not a good idea overlook a significant subset of problems that can be solved. The biggest issue is a fundamental design shift that would be better implemented in another language. You can't just keep tacking features onto a Perl/Shell script. In fact, it's never a good idea to just "tack" on a feature. You should look at overall performance and maintainance cost increases over optimal for your solution. Sometimes you need to replace an entire section of your software just because a library gets old and no one maintains it anymore.
Very occasionally, you'll get a set of additional feature requirements that make just about all your code obsolete. When design considerations don't take into account the proper scope of the problem, you don't have a choice. You can't turn a quick and dirty CGI shopping cart into one fit for Amazon or Ebay. Also, it's quite possible that you learned enough from the first pass, that now you can develop a much better design that actually is scalable (feature and performance wise). I don't like the average OSS phylosophy of "Evolutionary Programming". The amount of effort it takes to maintain a system is inversly proportional to the design that went into the system. If you just hack something together instead of thinking out the problem and designing an architecture and framework for your application, then there will be no end to the amount of work you'll spend maintaining it. A well designed system is much simpler than an evolved one, which makes it easier for other developers to contribute to, easier to fix problems, easier to incorperate new features that integrate.
Given this, a lot of people will hand a bucket of perl scripts and say "fix it" when it's just not feasible. Rewritting is necissary in a lot of cases. The only times you don't want to rewrite is when you can make a transition, and you have to keep up the old product until you get the new one out. Else, why sink time into something that will end up costing more time in the long run?
You forgot to mention the negative Helens that can cause mass exodus. For example, Barbara Streisand is about -1mH, which means that she will cause at least one man to sail for distant lands to get away from her.
Bah... there's a much simpler, more secure, and cheaper version still yet... It's called a smart card. That would fix most of these problems... basically, they have to steal the card from you as well as the PIN because it's challenge based. Fake fronts nor fake ATMs would foil this authentication, but don't underestimate a good old fashioned mugging and death threats. At least this would take the automation out of the process. Exactly how many people can you mug in a day?
Smart cards are generally very cheap too (should be less than 5$ or so in quantity), and anything with a serial port should be able to read them with just a conversion between TTLRS232 voltages (about 2$ in quantity).
The transition is already being made, but the hold up is getting the machines upgraded/replaced. I'm sure someone can make a dual mode slot replacement to phase them out.
The best thing you can do right now is go through the hassle of transferring money between accounts (only have an ATM card for one account on you at a time) and transfer money between them. That is unless you want to use a credit card, and just pay it via check every month instead... I don't think you can be held liable for fraud on CCs, or at least you won't if you get the right contract.
Wow! Cool music Legal Java Web-Start (So you can install it by clicking a link... just get a good version of Java from java.com) Free
That's the order in which I rank it's coolness. The bad of iRATE is the GUI. I wished I was good at making cool GUI's, but unfortunately, I probably couldn't do a whole lot better... They really, really need to get a decent winamp-ish look to it, then it would be the coolest thing ever!
BTW, I've listened to two songs while writting this, and I've liked both about as much as I hate normal radio... I expected a high probability of getting trash for the first few songs, but I didn't.
Also, SUN works with Gnome. They probably would have taken KDE if it weren't for the fact that they contribute to Gnome and have a greater influence to get things done that they want.
It all make perfect sense in several ways. I don't like that distrobutions don't standardize on some GUI, and that their isn't a greater level of compatibility between applications written for each. Choice is fine, just choose the distrobution that's optimized for your WM. Sure beats apt-get install gnome-some-obscure-name-for-package. The end user wants to choose a pretty OS that's usable, then install packages without worrying about what desktop they are for and if they have the libraries to run it.
Well, if we assume that there is an infinite amount of matter, then likewise there is probably an infinite amount of energy too. Since we have infinite matter and infinite energy and infinite places to dump what we don't want, I don't think entropy poses much of a threat. If there was a big bang, and that's all the mass in the universe, then there is a finite amount.
I guess it just seems obvious to me that there probably isn't an ends to the universe, and that if there was infinite mass, we would be torn apart by the gravitational pulls. In any case, I very much believe there is a finite mass to the universe. If there is a finite mass in an infinite space, the chances of finding said mass is 0.
This is only a joke anyhow. The problem with the logic isn't the amount of mass or the size of the universe. It's just the fact that we exist kind of places a restriction on us to be made of something. If we have mass, it's quite likely that we are going to be around other things with mass. If these conditions are suitable for life, it's quite likely that we aren't the only life forms. Douglas Adams liked to use the size of the universe to confuse smart people. In fact, the ultimate punishment in his series is a device that shows the person just how insignificant they are with relation to the infinite depths of the universe. If a butterfly flaps it's wings and causes a storm, that shuts off power, that makes the president think we are under attack and destroy the world, our good neighbors over at Vega could care less (and 100% of the universe is still intact with previous reasoning). It's impossible to effect any portion of the universe, because your effect is finite, the universe is infinite.
If matter cannot be created nor destroyed, then there is a finite amount of matter. Most scientific beliefs also say that the universe extends on in every direction infinitely. Therefore the probability of something existing at any point in the universe is m/(x*y*z)=m/inf=0. So any place you look in the universe, there is a 0% chance of finding life in it.
(I hope DNA forgives me for not being able to explain it properly.)
I have cable with all the programs I watch on it... I flip through channels occasionally to get a feel for if I would like a show or not, then I use BitTorrent to get it.
I have to say advertising is killing advertising. If advertising was like it was when I was a child, there wouldn't have been such a huge push for PVR. They were shorter, less obnoxious, and less frequent. Now Ted drops every 30th frame or something so he can get an extra 30s commercial per half hour. It's disgusting, and I would rather not even watch TV than to watch that kind of TV.
Considering there are about 10m of ads in an hour show, a season of your favorite show probably hits you with an hour or more of ads. That's an hour that you could have spent working. If you get paid 40$/h, most boxed set of series cost less than that. It's more effecient to just buy the boxed DVD set than to watch commercials.
The best service that someone could offer by the way of television is a VCD every week in the mail with a nice, pretty, thin case to put on a shelf after I watch it. I can watch it over and over, and they can market to the entire world. They might also want to start thinking iTunes for television shows using some kind of bittorrent technology.
I hate advertising so much that I practically refuse to buy anything that looks familiar. I'ld rather use the cheap Wal-Mart brand detergent after the All vs. Tide vs. Cheer detergent wars from a few years back. I think my -1 will at least offset someone elses +1. It would only take maybe 10% of the population with that kind of mentality to get the point across. If you have something good to say about your product attach it to it. I read the bottles of detergent when I'm shopping for detergent. Make a logical arguement, and I'll probably buy your brand. Annoy me when I'm trying to relax and suffer a penalty.
I will never buy Oxyclean, and I stopped buying Tide, too.
1> According to Christianity, God is perfect. If God were to make the program, it would work the way he wanted to begin with. 2> Assuming that God, like I, am not perfect, finding where one went wrong would be the first question. You don't blame the program for being faulty if you are all knowing and all powerful. You fix the problem. Fixing the problem surely isn't beyond God's power, is it? 3> Are you completely out of your head? Believing that the current physical properties to continue is not on the level of faith. Through out all recorded history, we have never seen pigs fly. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that pigs will never fly. Through out all recorded history (and most importantly my life) we have never seen a god. The only evidence you can dig up is a very very old book... and no two religions agree on very much at all. In fact, they disagree so much they shoot, kill, and terrorism each other and every one else.
4> Actually it is quite easy. I've seen it done with a toaster oven. You take standard chips like a PIC, ATMEL, etc. and you solder components on them... voila, you have a circuit. They even make these handy testing tools that clamp onto the very small pins of surface mount chips. Check out some ATMEL prototyping tools. My roomate does that kind of thing all the time. Right now he is hooking atmels up to WinBond voice synthesis and recognition chips... The same kind that come in newer cell phones.
Also, you can get nice software to design circuits and have ASIC chips made to your design. This is how watches are made. Sure it's expensive, but if I'm going to have surgery done for it, I'm not going to be skimping. You can usually get it less expensive if you happen to have a friend at an Electronics Engineering school.
Not to be mean, because it's part of human nature, but...
I hate people that say reading the book is sooo much better. The thing is, after they wade through the book until they go have blind, they don't want that suffering to have been for nothing... This is especially true with wordy writters that mimick the Bible, like Tolkein. Why can't people just admit that watching the movie is just a better experience, and they wasted those 40 hours squinting under a lamp. I can understand audio books, and I can understand reading when you can't do anything else, but I can't understand people that say that one dimensional experiences are better than multidimensional. Reading "and Frodo wept" is in no way as moving as actually seeing him cry and scream "Nooooo!". No amount of words can every describe some events in the same way a picture can.
Re:Still Not Real Clear on Design Patterns...
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J2EE Design Patterns
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Basically there are common themes in problems, and patterns help with the theme of the problem, not the problem itself. For example, I could want to centralize and pool objects for some reason. The design pattern to solve this kind of problem is basically to make constructors private and use "Factories" (static member functions) that return the objects using static data to keep track of them.
Pattern can be a misleading word because it has too many meanings. You could interpret design pattern as commonalities in design or as a design template (like sewing involves working off of a pattern). It's closer to the first definition than the second.
Just don't follow a pattern that you don't understand exactly how works. You'll end up with more problem than solution. That's why I usually don't like pattern books. Unless you read them like you would a chess book and try to figure out how/why it's a mate-in-2, then you aren't going to get any real benefit from them. Chances are if you can understand how/why, then you didn't need the book to begin with. There's a slim chance that you'll run into a problem and have not used a more optimal solution because you didn't read one of these books, but I don't think it's all that great. Design patterns should be taught in school as exercises for the common problems they'll run into, not really a place to start when trying to solve a problem.
The greating should actually be: "Happy Capitalistic Compulsory Consumerism month!"...and may you have a marry new year of frivolous letigation against your own or potential clients.
Any being that resorts to torture because his creation doesn't do what he wants is not devine nor perfect. Infact, it's very childish. I don't set my computer ablaze because my program has a bug. I don't insist that the program corrupted itself because I gave it the ability to be corrupt. And lastly, I don't claim to love anything then torture it when it doesn't love me back. I think I'm a better person than the Christian god, because I don't have to inflict my will on any other being. Even if Christianity is right, I don't want to have any part of that kind of "love". If a god wants me to believe or love him, giving me a book full of threats and contradiction is not a step in the right direction.
So... to answer your question, just about anyone that believes in that kind of thing has to be nutcase to begin with. Rational, logical thought is at odds with the popular definition of faith (unfounded belief). Rational people don't believe in the tooth fairy. Most rational people will say there is no convincing evidence yet that there is or is not a creator.
Most rational people wouldn't fight this if it was: Secure (More like smart cards) Anonymous (Vendor makes a transaction, Bank/Credit company signs transaction, you sign the signed transaction that the Bank/Credit company gives you the key for that Bank/Credit company... Must be several credit companies and banks so you can pick the ones you trust and assign them the keys you want.) Safe (Has this kind of thing been tested?) Convenient (I don't have to sleep with my hand on a magnetic pad to charge it do I?) Controlled (I should be able to control every aspect of the device... even turning it on and off. I don't want the government, enemies, or criminals using it to track me, but medical personell and family should be able to.)
This device is far, far from optimal. I don't even know if it's possible to make a smart enough device that I could trust. There would definately have to multiple vendors of said chip. In fact, I probably wouldn't trust it unless the spec was public and I could build my own.
That said, it holds a lot of promise. I would make mine determine blood alcohol level and keep me from starting my car. Of course my car would only start for me, and I wouldn't need a key for anything. I would store my diary on it, encrypted of course. I would put a buz function in it to alert me of my meetings. I would probably actually put it near my ear, so it could actually deliver voice. I would use it to sign email. I would have the possiblity of having multiple identities on my same chip. I would try to get enough storage for audio books for long flights, and even some porn! It should be able to pick up my voice, so it should be able to be used as a cell phone with some of those inexpensive, small, voice recognition chips they put in cell phones. (I like cancer!... actually you would probably install a lot of it on top of your head with some kind of stainless steal shielding.)
The more I think about it, the less I see this as needing to be internal. Why not just have a cell phone like PDA that requires you're thumb print and a password to sign transactions. Sure, it'll be expensive, but not if the government would stop trying to spy on everyone. If the government would stop crashing satelites into the atmosphere, this would probably have been possible with irridium.
Jakarta commons has a TFTP client. There are also TFTP servers out there too.
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/net/apidocs/in de x.html
Is the documentation.
A peice of advice for anyone that can't find an API that does what they want in Java: Go to jakarta.apache.org. Anything you can think of is there, and it's under the Apache License so you can use it anyhow you want.
Anyone who wants to do full text indexing should try Lucene. It's faster than any other indexer (I've tried them all, even the C coded ones) and it has no false positives. Lucene does more than indexing text too, so check it out if you ever need a library to handle indexing and searching.
We are talking about Java here. I could just use web-start. It's quite nice.
I spent 1 month looking at all the enterprise level technologies out there (You know... anything with distributed transactions, RMI of some sort, and security infrastructure). I spent 3 months learning J2EE. I spent 3 months looking at different frameworks. I eventually decided to go Web-Start. I really really wished there were books that compare the technologies out there based on performance, popularity (increases the number of jobs you can work at and the number of employees you can pick from), and time to completion (ease of use). Java almost has too much choice.
Here are some questions that should make my point.
How do you want to access your data? JDBC, JDO, Hibernate, CMP, or some weird object-database?
What reporting package do you want to use? Custom (using iText, FOP, or just plain AWT to the printer?) JasperReports JFreeReports or one of the plethora of commercial packages?
What kind of client do you want? HTTP, Web-Start, Standalone, or SOAP to Mozilla or.Net or Perl or etc. ?
If you go HTTP, what web framework do you want to use? JSP/Servlets directly, Struts, WebWork, or some conjured up Velocity template?
If you go Web-Start or Standalon, what GUI TK do you want to use? SWT, Swing, Thinlet, Luxor, Swixml, AWT (for 1.1 compatibility), etc.
Do you want MiddleWare? What kind? Session Beans, Message Beans, Message queue's and some custom apps... with or without SOAP? Would you like a nice XML-RPC to go with that? Maybe you want something a bit more network centered like Jini? Maybe you have to work with some old CORBA software.
Oh, BTW, what operating system do you want to run it on? (Linux, Mac, BSD, Unix) What application server? (JBoss, Jonas, Pramati, WebSphere, WebLogic, SunONE, JRun, Resin) What database server? (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2, McKoi, Hypersonic, Firebird, MS SQL) What JVM? (SUN, IBM, JRocket) Do you need charting for your reports? (JFreeCharts, bah... just search google for java charting)
My head hurts now, and I want to cry. When someone ends the madness, please wake me up and tell me what year it is, and which packages I should use, because if I look at them all, by the time I'm done, I'll have to start all over.
Why is plain old text not just plain old text?
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Effective XML
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· Score: 1
This is posted as "code" because obviously xml is not just plain old text. What's the html formated option for?!? extrans wouldn't work because/. likes to insert spaces randomly for good measure.
If only there were a native binary format, we wouldn't have this problem to begin with.
Is it too much to ask from the W3C for a binary encoded xml format? Maybe to make my point I'll start using one character tags in UTF-8 encoding. Put the popular tags in using 8 bits, and the unpopular tags in as 16 bits, then I'll just do xslt when anyone wants a copy.:) Also, by all means never put unneeded whitespace.
I bet that would shave a good 20-30% off file size and parse time. Too bad you wouldn't be able to read it because unicode a's are different than normal a's but they would look the same. <z><y><x>Title</x></y><w>Hel lo World!</w></z> is much smaller than <html> <head> <title>Title</title> </head> <body> Hello World! </body> </html>
Now if you really want to be naughty to improve performance of parsing you can require tags that give the offset of other tags. <z><a>026</a><a>040</a><b><c a="a"/></b><e a="g"/></z>
That way you can tell where tags begin without parsing the entire file if all you want is just one little peice.
I don't know if I can be annoying enough myself to actually get someone to make a binary xml counterpart standard, but I'm sure plenty of/.'ers can come up with seem neat ideas. You'd be amazed at what all you can actually call XML.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and here is the best write up (with sources) that I could find that contained information about Iraq switching it's oil reserves from the dollar to the Euro.
h tm l
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/iraq.
http://www.notinournames.org/iht/articles/vonspone ck-oil-revenues.html
Just read the internet, and you'll see that Iraq did indeed sell oil, and the oil for food program didn't begin until 1996. You'll also see how it's a miracle they even survived through the sanctions. Their oil production was severly limited, and a lot of oil was lost because of poorly maintained equipment that they couldn't get parts for. It's been estimated that a million children have died in Iraq due to unclean water because they couldn't import Chlorine. Compare that to the "terrorism" that has occured in the last decade, and I think it won't be hard for you to decide who the bad guys are.
Yeah, that last point he made was completely insane... It's almost like people forget that the number one arms buyer in the world, and Bush's closest friend, is Saudi Arabia, where most terrorists come from, and amputations are common punishment. Every time you buy a gallon of gas, you're funding an oppresive dictatorship, mostly thanks to Bush, his family, and his friends.
Besides, if someone showed up here killing and bombing trying to destroy Bush and our government, that would be viewed as terrorism as well, but for some reason a lot wacky conservatives don't see it being the same when we invade another country? I don't understand the double standard. When war is declared, there is no such thing as terrorism, it's friggen war! Don't expect people to jump out in front of your rifles like nice soldiers. If the world was under attack, and I could strap a nuclear weapon on my chest and destroy the alien invaders, you better believe I would, and it's called defending one's loved ones and society. Which is exactly what those Iraqi "terrorists" are trying to do. I can't blame them for wanting to control their own land. They're invaded, resistance in inevitable.
I think you're digging pretty deap. One of them even said something about "nuclear material", which we happen to know to be false. The others were full of speculation. So, what you're telling me is, I can choose between these three stories, only one of which that reports to have any information beyond speculation, and it brings up a topic we know to have been false. I'm not buying it.
Well, if you want to be the conservative conspiracy theorist, then I think this post deserves just the opposite. Here's the story I heard.
Iraq switched it's oil from USD to the Euro. The Euro soared to 2x the USD. Iraq made a LOT of money (twice as much as they would have). OPEC contemplated the same. Bush starts his campaign against Iraq on faked evidence without questioning it at all. He accuses Saddam of attacking his own people with mustard gas, but the people he attacked were the Kurds that Turkey attack every day, but are still our allies. He accuses Saddam of helping in 9/11 with no verifiable evidence to back it up. He accuses Saddam of developing and having biological weapons when the UN inspectors said otherwise. Most of Europe are pissed because he wants to attack and has never given a good reason other than "overthrow Saddam", which of itself is not a reason for war. Now we have "won" the war, the oil will be sold on the USD instead of the Euro, and the OPEC will think twice before any of it's members switch to the Euro.
If oil was traded in the Euro, every oil trader with USD in their bank would have to switch over to Euro, which would flood the market with USD, and make the Euro scarce. The biggest longterm effect would be us having to pay as much or more than the Europeans for our gas. This was very much over oil, but only because Saddam found a way to stick a knife in our side with it. I don't condone the use of violence for economical reasons. You'll have to admit, or be a small minority of people, that this war was economical, because that's what the history books will show, because no compelling evidence was shown for any other reason. I don't think many people are going to buy the "Liberation" since the Kurds won't get their own place to live, and will be killed, harassed, and oppressed by Turkey, Iran, and Iraq for many more years.
Well, on the issue of the kernel, you have to admit that the memory manager is at least twice as good as the old 2.2 memory manager. The SCSI code, I can't speak much for, but I assume it had something to do with efficiency of the drivers. All I know is that I couldn't patch the kernel with the promise SCSI driver that supported Promise Raid for quite some time on the 2.4 kernel. (I did manage to hack it statically into 2.2 even though it was binary.)
If think most people get the idea that XP is against pre-design and rewrites. It's just not true. XP just says you can't get all the design to begin with, that doesn't mean to not design to before hand, it means to design to be flexible to begin with. Now the "try the simplest thing that could work" mentality IMO, is the worst. Why not do it right to begin with, and move on to something else? If it needs to be changed, it'll be much easier than parsing through unreadable code that barely gets the job done. Rewrites happen when people do "the simplest thing possible" for so long that you really can't understand the code. It's better to rewrite code than it is to understand it. They also occur when such significant changes are being made to the way that something is done that there is actually not a single line of code that is useful anymore. There are reasons why this could be true, like the linux memory manager of 2.2 era. It was just not designed for how memory is used today, and it couldn't have been designed for it without a psychic developer. The API must have been pretty well designed to handle a change like that without headache.
I hope you are beginning to see the difference between design as you go and design before hand. They aren't the same kind of design. One consentrates on infrastructure, the other on the actual code. You can't change the infrastructure without significantly changing the entire source tree, and sometimes it's better to rewrite at least large sections of the code than it is to try to work in that infrastructure. It's always best to come up with the best infrastructure you can before you write any code.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just giving some scenarios where it isn't possible. Combining those two, I'm saying it's not always possible to start small then build up big and still end up with the same solution as design before hand. Most open source coders I've seen have been all about jumping into the code and solving a problem. They solve one narrow-minded version of the problem, thus they begin to think they should develop a framework as a blanket solution. They evolve code for doing one thing into code that does something that is quite different sometimes, and more times than not, not the best way to do the other thing.
Do that about eight times, and you have the same API for parsing xml as word files or something equally as ridiculous because they have code built on top that uses this API, and if they change it in one place, it ripples throughout the entire code base requiring extensive testing and often synergistic errors that unit tests can't catch for you. Even if you don't get errors, you'll end up with a system that has very little insight into anything but it's original domain.
You may think that compartmentalizing code would solve this, or maybe that you are just trying to make one program do three programs work, but that isn't always the case. In order to make a consistent feeling interface, that is consistent with the model, you have to actually design. Right now, Linux has a million small utility programs that use pipes to interact. If you think about it, a lot of the time, if they programs were actually integrated together, it would be much more efficient. Consider |grep blah |less. If I hit G to go to the end of the less, it will take forever for a significantly large file. Are you going to write a generic protocol over pipes to communicate stream positioning? Are you going to write one single program grepless to become the union of the two programs? Wouldn't be easier to just redesign an architecture involving filters, formatters, data sources, and pagers that are pluggable? Then it would be faster than running a protocol over pipes too. At some point you have to involve the file system, like the VAX did. You can seek to any line in a text file on a VAX, because it could indexed \n characters in text files with certain flags.
Haphazard programming without the discipline of design leads you to a psychotic system that is often beyond repair. You don't see a problem today, but your program will run into a dead end of functionality per code ratio. It takes exponentially longer to add functionality, and it's often much better to determine the purpose of your program, then design for the most general case, but code for the most specific.
Of course you probably don't have the experience I have of walking into projects that were done in VBA/Paradox that want to go multiuser. Some things just aren't technically feasible because of severely poor design. Complete lack of design that a lot of open source projects have will often lead to worse fates in a year than the startup projects that begin now to replace them. Basically, you can rewrite it, or someone else will for you. EXT2 would have never evolved into ReiserFS. The beauty of the Linux kernel though is that it has just enough architecture that obsolete parts get discarded and rewritten without disturbing the rest because it is modular. It gets better design all the time. The SCSI code was almost completely rewritten for 2.4. The memory manager was completely rewritten. The scheduler has since been replaced. Despite Alan Cox's claim that the Linux kernel evolved and wasn't designed, there is a lot of design in the kernel, and you'd be hard pressed to find much of the kernel that hasn't been rewritten at least once to improve this design.
Do keep in mind that the parts of the Linux kernel that have been rewritten are larger than some applications that people try to salvage. Blanket statements like "It's better to keep what you have than rewrite" is very wrong in a lot of situations,
I think that most people that agree that complete rewrites are not a good idea overlook a significant subset of problems that can be solved. The biggest issue is a fundamental design shift that would be better implemented in another language. You can't just keep tacking features onto a Perl/Shell script. In fact, it's never a good idea to just "tack" on a feature. You should look at overall performance and maintainance cost increases over optimal for your solution. Sometimes you need to replace an entire section of your software just because a library gets old and no one maintains it anymore.
Very occasionally, you'll get a set of additional feature requirements that make just about all your code obsolete. When design considerations don't take into account the proper scope of the problem, you don't have a choice. You can't turn a quick and dirty CGI shopping cart into one fit for Amazon or Ebay. Also, it's quite possible that you learned enough from the first pass, that now you can develop a much better design that actually is scalable (feature and performance wise). I don't like the average OSS phylosophy of "Evolutionary Programming". The amount of effort it takes to maintain a system is inversly proportional to the design that went into the system. If you just hack something together instead of thinking out the problem and designing an architecture and framework for your application, then there will be no end to the amount of work you'll spend maintaining it. A well designed system is much simpler than an evolved one, which makes it easier for other developers to contribute to, easier to fix problems, easier to incorperate new features that integrate.
Given this, a lot of people will hand a bucket of perl scripts and say "fix it" when it's just not feasible. Rewritting is necissary in a lot of cases. The only times you don't want to rewrite is when you can make a transition, and you have to keep up the old product until you get the new one out. Else, why sink time into something that will end up costing more time in the long run?
You forgot to mention the negative Helens that can cause mass exodus. For example, Barbara Streisand is about -1mH, which means that she will cause at least one man to sail for distant lands to get away from her.
Bah... there's a much simpler, more secure, and cheaper version still yet... It's called a smart card. That would fix most of these problems... basically, they have to steal the card from you as well as the PIN because it's challenge based. Fake fronts nor fake ATMs would foil this authentication, but don't underestimate a good old fashioned mugging and death threats. At least this would take the automation out of the process. Exactly how many people can you mug in a day?
Smart cards are generally very cheap too (should be less than 5$ or so in quantity), and anything with a serial port should be able to read them with just a conversion between TTLRS232 voltages (about 2$ in quantity).
The transition is already being made, but the hold up is getting the machines upgraded/replaced. I'm sure someone can make a dual mode slot replacement to phase them out.
The best thing you can do right now is go through the hassle of transferring money between accounts (only have an ATM card for one account on you at a time) and transfer money between them. That is unless you want to use a credit card, and just pay it via check every month instead... I don't think you can be held liable for fraud on CCs, or at least you won't if you get the right contract.
Wow, you must have struck a nerve... How can you get modded Troll when the subject is incorrect assumptions?
I'm so suprised no one said: "Duke Nukem will be out in time for Christmas."
Of course, I expected someone to say something about "closed source software is more secure" or windows has 5 9's of uptime.
Wow!
Cool music
Legal
Java Web-Start (So you can install it by clicking a link... just get a good version of Java from java.com)
Free
That's the order in which I rank it's coolness.
The bad of iRATE is the GUI. I wished I was good at making cool GUI's, but unfortunately, I probably couldn't do a whole lot better... They really, really need to get a decent winamp-ish look to it, then it would be the coolest thing ever!
BTW, I've listened to two songs while writting this, and I've liked both about as much as I hate normal radio... I expected a high probability of getting trash for the first few songs, but I didn't.
I'm waiting for the action figures.
Also, SUN works with Gnome. They probably would have taken KDE if it weren't for the fact that they contribute to Gnome and have a greater influence to get things done that they want.
It all make perfect sense in several ways. I don't like that distrobutions don't standardize on some GUI, and that their isn't a greater level of compatibility between applications written for each. Choice is fine, just choose the distrobution that's optimized for your WM. Sure beats apt-get install gnome-some-obscure-name-for-package. The end user wants to choose a pretty OS that's usable, then install packages without worrying about what desktop they are for and if they have the libraries to run it.
Well, if we assume that there is an infinite amount of matter, then likewise there is probably an infinite amount of energy too. Since we have infinite matter and infinite energy and infinite places to dump what we don't want, I don't think entropy poses much of a threat. If there was a big bang, and that's all the mass in the universe, then there is a finite amount.
I guess it just seems obvious to me that there probably isn't an ends to the universe, and that if there was infinite mass, we would be torn apart by the gravitational pulls. In any case, I very much believe there is a finite mass to the universe. If there is a finite mass in an infinite space, the chances of finding said mass is 0.
This is only a joke anyhow. The problem with the logic isn't the amount of mass or the size of the universe. It's just the fact that we exist kind of places a restriction on us to be made of something. If we have mass, it's quite likely that we are going to be around other things with mass. If these conditions are suitable for life, it's quite likely that we aren't the only life forms. Douglas Adams liked to use the size of the universe to confuse smart people. In fact, the ultimate punishment in his series is a device that shows the person just how insignificant they are with relation to the infinite depths of the universe. If a butterfly flaps it's wings and causes a storm, that shuts off power, that makes the president think we are under attack and destroy the world, our good neighbors over at Vega could care less (and 100% of the universe is still intact with previous reasoning). It's impossible to effect any portion of the universe, because your effect is finite, the universe is infinite.
If matter cannot be created nor destroyed, then there is a finite amount of matter. Most scientific beliefs also say that the universe extends on in every direction infinitely. Therefore the probability of something existing at any point in the universe is m/(x*y*z)=m/inf=0. So any place you look in the universe, there is a 0% chance of finding life in it.
(I hope DNA forgives me for not being able to explain it properly.)
I have cable with all the programs I watch on it... I flip through channels occasionally to get a feel for if I would like a show or not, then I use BitTorrent to get it.
I have to say advertising is killing advertising. If advertising was like it was when I was a child, there wouldn't have been such a huge push for PVR. They were shorter, less obnoxious, and less frequent. Now Ted drops every 30th frame or something so he can get an extra 30s commercial per half hour. It's disgusting, and I would rather not even watch TV than to watch that kind of TV.
Considering there are about 10m of ads in an hour show, a season of your favorite show probably hits you with an hour or more of ads. That's an hour that you could have spent working. If you get paid 40$/h, most boxed set of series cost less than that. It's more effecient to just buy the boxed DVD set than to watch commercials.
The best service that someone could offer by the way of television is a VCD every week in the mail with a nice, pretty, thin case to put on a shelf after I watch it. I can watch it over and over, and they can market to the entire world. They might also want to start thinking iTunes for television shows using some kind of bittorrent technology.
I hate advertising so much that I practically refuse to buy anything that looks familiar. I'ld rather use the cheap Wal-Mart brand detergent after the All vs. Tide vs. Cheer detergent wars from a few years back. I think my -1 will at least offset someone elses +1. It would only take maybe 10% of the population with that kind of mentality to get the point across. If you have something good to say about your product attach it to it. I read the bottles of detergent when I'm shopping for detergent. Make a logical arguement, and I'll probably buy your brand. Annoy me when I'm trying to relax and suffer a penalty.
I will never buy Oxyclean, and I stopped buying Tide, too.
1> According to Christianity, God is perfect. If God were to make the program, it would work the way he wanted to begin with.
2> Assuming that God, like I, am not perfect, finding where one went wrong would be the first question. You don't blame the program for being faulty if you are all knowing and all powerful. You fix the problem. Fixing the problem surely isn't beyond God's power, is it?
3> Are you completely out of your head? Believing that the current physical properties to continue is not on the level of faith. Through out all recorded history, we have never seen pigs fly. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that pigs will never fly. Through out all recorded history (and most importantly my life) we have never seen a god. The only evidence you can dig up is a very very old book... and no two religions agree on very much at all. In fact, they disagree so much they shoot, kill, and terrorism each other and every one else.
4> Actually it is quite easy. I've seen it done with a toaster oven. You take standard chips like a PIC, ATMEL, etc. and you solder components on them... voila, you have a circuit. They even make these handy testing tools that clamp onto the very small pins of surface mount chips. Check out some ATMEL prototyping tools. My roomate does that kind of thing all the time. Right now he is hooking atmels up to WinBond voice synthesis and recognition chips... The same kind that come in newer cell phones.
Also, you can get nice software to design circuits and have ASIC chips made to your design. This is how watches are made. Sure it's expensive, but if I'm going to have surgery done for it, I'm not going to be skimping. You can usually get it less expensive if you happen to have a friend at an Electronics Engineering school.
Not to be mean, because it's part of human nature, but...
I hate people that say reading the book is sooo much better. The thing is, after they wade through the book until they go have blind, they don't want that suffering to have been for nothing... This is especially true with wordy writters that mimick the Bible, like Tolkein. Why can't people just admit that watching the movie is just a better experience, and they wasted those 40 hours squinting under a lamp. I can understand audio books, and I can understand reading when you can't do anything else, but I can't understand people that say that one dimensional experiences are better than multidimensional. Reading "and Frodo wept" is in no way as moving as actually seeing him cry and scream "Nooooo!". No amount of words can every describe some events in the same way a picture can.
Basically there are common themes in problems, and patterns help with the theme of the problem, not the problem itself. For example, I could want to centralize and pool objects for some reason. The design pattern to solve this kind of problem is basically to make constructors private and use "Factories" (static member functions) that return the objects using static data to keep track of them.
Pattern can be a misleading word because it has too many meanings. You could interpret design pattern as commonalities in design or as a design template (like sewing involves working off of a pattern). It's closer to the first definition than the second.
Just don't follow a pattern that you don't understand exactly how works. You'll end up with more problem than solution. That's why I usually don't like pattern books. Unless you read them like you would a chess book and try to figure out how/why it's a mate-in-2, then you aren't going to get any real benefit from them. Chances are if you can understand how/why, then you didn't need the book to begin with. There's a slim chance that you'll run into a problem and have not used a more optimal solution because you didn't read one of these books, but I don't think it's all that great. Design patterns should be taught in school as exercises for the common problems they'll run into, not really a place to start when trying to solve a problem.
The greating should actually be: ...and may you have a marry new year of frivolous letigation against your own or potential clients.
"Happy Capitalistic Compulsory Consumerism month!"
Any being that resorts to torture because his creation doesn't do what he wants is not devine nor perfect. Infact, it's very childish. I don't set my computer ablaze because my program has a bug. I don't insist that the program corrupted itself because I gave it the ability to be corrupt. And lastly, I don't claim to love anything then torture it when it doesn't love me back. I think I'm a better person than the Christian god, because I don't have to inflict my will on any other being. Even if Christianity is right, I don't want to have any part of that kind of "love". If a god wants me to believe or love him, giving me a book full of threats and contradiction is not a step in the right direction.
So... to answer your question, just about anyone that believes in that kind of thing has to be nutcase to begin with. Rational, logical thought is at odds with the popular definition of faith (unfounded belief). Rational people don't believe in the tooth fairy. Most rational people will say there is no convincing evidence yet that there is or is not a creator.
Most rational people wouldn't fight this if it was:
Secure (More like smart cards)
Anonymous (Vendor makes a transaction, Bank/Credit company signs transaction, you sign the signed transaction that the Bank/Credit company gives you the key for that Bank/Credit company... Must be several credit companies and banks so you can pick the ones you trust and assign them the keys you want.)
Safe (Has this kind of thing been tested?)
Convenient (I don't have to sleep with my hand on a magnetic pad to charge it do I?)
Controlled (I should be able to control every aspect of the device... even turning it on and off. I don't want the government, enemies, or criminals using it to track me, but medical personell and family should be able to.)
This device is far, far from optimal. I don't even know if it's possible to make a smart enough device that I could trust. There would definately have to multiple vendors of said chip. In fact, I probably wouldn't trust it unless the spec was public and I could build my own.
That said, it holds a lot of promise. I would make mine determine blood alcohol level and keep me from starting my car. Of course my car would only start for me, and I wouldn't need a key for anything. I would store my diary on it, encrypted of course. I would put a buz function in it to alert me of my meetings. I would probably actually put it near my ear, so it could actually deliver voice. I would use it to sign email. I would have the possiblity of having multiple identities on my same chip. I would try to get enough storage for audio books for long flights, and even some porn! It should be able to pick up my voice, so it should be able to be used as a cell phone with some of those inexpensive, small, voice recognition chips they put in cell phones. (I like cancer!... actually you would probably install a lot of it on top of your head with some kind of stainless steal shielding.)
The more I think about it, the less I see this as needing to be internal. Why not just have a cell phone like PDA that requires you're thumb print and a password to sign transactions. Sure, it'll be expensive, but not if the government would stop trying to spy on everyone. If the government would stop crashing satelites into the atmosphere, this would probably have been possible with irridium.
Jakarta commons has a TFTP client. There are also TFTP servers out there too.
n de x.html
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/net/apidocs/i
Is the documentation.
A peice of advice for anyone that can't find an API that does what they want in Java: Go to jakarta.apache.org. Anything you can think of is there, and it's under the Apache License so you can use it anyhow you want.
Anyone who wants to do full text indexing should try Lucene. It's faster than any other indexer (I've tried them all, even the C coded ones) and it has no false positives. Lucene does more than indexing text too, so check it out if you ever need a library to handle indexing and searching.
We are talking about Java here. I could just use web-start. It's quite nice.
.Net or Perl or etc. ?
I spent 1 month looking at all the enterprise level technologies out there (You know... anything with distributed transactions, RMI of some sort, and security infrastructure). I spent 3 months learning J2EE. I spent 3 months looking at different frameworks. I eventually decided to go Web-Start. I really really wished there were books that compare the technologies out there based on performance, popularity (increases the number of jobs you can work at and the number of employees you can pick from), and time to completion (ease of use). Java almost has too much choice.
Here are some questions that should make my point.
How do you want to access your data?
JDBC, JDO, Hibernate, CMP, or some weird object-database?
What reporting package do you want to use?
Custom (using iText, FOP, or just plain AWT to the printer?)
JasperReports
JFreeReports
or one of the plethora of commercial packages?
What kind of client do you want?
HTTP, Web-Start, Standalone, or SOAP to Mozilla or
If you go HTTP, what web framework do you want to use?
JSP/Servlets directly, Struts, WebWork, or some conjured up Velocity template?
If you go Web-Start or Standalon, what GUI TK do you want to use?
SWT, Swing, Thinlet, Luxor, Swixml, AWT (for 1.1 compatibility), etc.
Do you want MiddleWare? What kind?
Session Beans, Message Beans, Message queue's and some custom apps... with or without SOAP? Would you like a nice XML-RPC to go with that? Maybe you want something a bit more network centered like Jini? Maybe you have to work with some old CORBA software.
Oh, BTW, what operating system do you want to run it on? (Linux, Mac, BSD, Unix) What application server? (JBoss, Jonas, Pramati, WebSphere, WebLogic, SunONE, JRun, Resin) What database server? (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2, McKoi, Hypersonic, Firebird, MS SQL) What JVM? (SUN, IBM, JRocket) Do you need charting for your reports? (JFreeCharts, bah... just search google for java charting)
My head hurts now, and I want to cry. When someone ends the madness, please wake me up and tell me what year it is, and which packages I should use, because if I look at them all, by the time I'm done, I'll have to start all over.
This is posted as "code" because obviously xml is not just plain old text. What's the html formated option for?!? extrans wouldn't work because /. likes to insert spaces randomly for good measure.
:) Also, by all means never put unneeded whitespace.
/.'ers can come up with seem neat ideas. You'd be amazed at what all you can actually call XML. :)
If only there were a native binary format, we wouldn't have this problem to begin with.
Is it too much to ask from the W3C for a binary encoded xml format? Maybe to make my point I'll start using one character tags in UTF-8 encoding. Put the popular tags in using 8 bits, and the unpopular tags in as 16 bits, then I'll just do xslt when anyone wants a copy.
I bet that would shave a good 20-30% off file size and parse time. Too bad you wouldn't be able to read it because unicode a's are different than normal a's but they would look the same.
<z><y><x>Title</x></y><w>Hel lo World!</w></z>
is much smaller than
<html>
<head>
<title>Title</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello World!
</body>
</html>
Now if you really want to be naughty to improve performance of parsing you can require tags that give the offset of other tags.
<z><a>026</a><a>040</a><b><c a="a"/></b><e a="g"/></z>
That way you can tell where tags begin without parsing the entire file if all you want is just one little peice.
I don't know if I can be annoying enough myself to actually get someone to make a binary xml counterpart standard, but I'm sure plenty of