Yesterday Iran threatened to stop the flow of oil in response to new sanctions being floated by the US. Who wants to predict how that would affect solar?
Also, what effect is the explosion of shale oil operations in the US having on technologies like solar?
Maybe a decade ago, but with the emergence of systems like BookSurge it is now very possible for someone to self-publish a book that is indistinguishable from a professional produced product from a publisher. If you know what you are doing, you can get your book to your audience.
Didn't have the same experience. I had a great agent, no problems at all, but the extra layer of indirection between myself and the publisher was problematic. I would not suggest that authors get an agent first.
This is awful advice. Write the book you feel passionate about, try to find a publisher, if you can't find one, make your own investment in some thing like BookSurge to get it into your audience's hands.
I have published four books with O'Reilly, and I have had brief encounters with other publishers. As a book consumer interested in cloud computing, Java, scripting languages, I look to Manning, Prag, and O'Reilly most of the time, and I'm also impressed with books from AW. Here are my experiences, maybe they might help:
When I wrote Jakarta Commons Cookbook, I had no agent, I worked directly with a great editor, Brett McLaughlin. Brett has since moved on from animal books and is now focused on books in the Heads First series. I would have never finished my book was it not for Brett's attention and guidance. If you are new to the book writing process, you will want to find an editor who knows your technology and who believes in the idea behind your book. I had maybe 5 reviewers, the book sold something in the range of 6-7k. While the publisher didn't view this as a success, I was satisfied with the sales and exposure, and I enjoyed the writing process. This book was written in Word, to properly insert XREF (cross references between sections and chapters) I had to load the entire book into Word and then run some hefty macros. I was constantly freezing the machine and Word was much more a nuisance that a helpful tool.
The second book I wrote as "Maven: A Developer's Notebook". To say it didn't go so well would be a dramatic understatement. I was less that satisfied with the book writing process, there were too many reviewers. Part of the problem with this book was that the book covered Maven 1 which was already on its way out. Maven 2 was released the same week that this book on Maven 1 was released. Sales were not very good; in fact, less than six months after printing, a number of people (myself included) were recommending that people avoid purchasing this book. I didn't actively seek out this second book, that should have been the first warning sign, I was recruited by my editor to help smooth out the writing. This book was written in Word using the O'Reilly macros, we had endless problems with Word. I had an agent for this book from Studio B, and the only time I spoke with my agent was during the contract negotiations. Studio B is "ok", but I don't think you need an agent to write a book, maybe someone can convince me otherwise?
The third book I helped to write was also something that my editor suggested. Jim Elliott was updating Harnessing Hibernate, and they wanted someone to write some chapters on Spring integration. This was my first exposure to using XMLMind and editing DocBook directly. Jim is one of the brightest authors I have ever worked with, and his colleague Ryan Fowler and I quickly started to use the DocBook XML from the first edition to update the book for a Second Edition printing. The writing process was a bit prolonged because two of us had some big distracting "life events" during the writing process. I'm proud of the end-product, and writing the book in DocBook was an eye opening experience. I would suggest that you get into the "craft" of book writing, code the book in DocBook using something like XMLMind, learn how to create and index, learn what it takes to create a book with all of the necessary markup. Writing a book is an entirely different beast from throwing some words into a Word Processor, and there's something to be said for understanding the entire process from start to finish.
The fourth book is an almost entirely different beast. Because of my experience with Jakarta Commons Cookbook and Maven: A Developer's Notebook I didn't want to be involved with a book that wasn't open source from the very beginning. The fourth book I'm involved with is Maven: The Definitive Guide, it is a comprehensive reference for Maven. This book is available for free from http://books.sonatype.com/ and you can also purchase a printed copy from O'Reilly. The book is an open source project on GitHub, the book is covered under a creative commons license, and we've attracted a
I was planning a trip to Jupiter next week, and I was just on the phone with Sprint asking them if they had any coverage near the Big Spot. Good to know that the people at VLA are on the job.
We lost one of your ultra-secret, 1.2 billion dollar stealth planes on a routine mission in the Pacific. The nation was wondering if you would consider replacing this one for free. We've given you just about all the extra money we had saved up for years and years, and we've taken out serious loans to be able to pay for increasingly flamboyant and unnecessary toys. I'm only asking for this freebie because it is getting more and more difficult to convince people that we really need to be spending money on weapons like this when an insurgent army can bring us to our knees in the middle of Iraq. Plus, people are starting to wonder if 1.2 billion dollars would be better spent teaching more intelligence analysts how to speak Arabic, Urdu, and Pashto, and I really think that 1.2 billion would go a long way toward helping us really fight terrorism.
This isn't a bad thing, if we didn't have a skyrocketing national debt, if we weren't spending an "out of control" amount of money on the war, and if we actually had some fiscal discipline, maybe then we should start thinking about spending a few hundred billion dollars on a Mars mission.
But, look at the government's involvement in space exploration, it has been an absolute disaster. Almost 40 years from the Moon mission, and we can't even get the shuttle into orbit without screwing up a thermal blanket. We need to get rid of the government monopoly on space, and we need to reduce our spending to get ready for the looming disaster - Social Security.
Institutions of higher learning need to get out of the business of using automated software to check for plagarism. If we've reached a point where it is impossible for a professor to grade each paper...if we've reach a system of education where a robot is the first line of defense against cheating, then we need to begin a reevaluation of the whole concept of "higher learning". A student attends a University to learn, not to attain a grade. It isn't plagarism that is the problem, it is the blind adherence to a failed incentive - the grade. Take the grades out of higher learning, reduce class sizes, and create a situation where the instructor and the instructed can develop a mutual relationship based on trust.
It is ironic that the idea of using a program to "sniff" plagarism was borne in an environment that prides itself on a strong Honor Code (the University of Virginia by the Physics department). An Honor Code exists not to emphasize the need for enforcement, but to encourage an atmosphere of trust. Plagarism sniffing robots are akin to placing closed circuit TV cameras in every classroom, you might catch some people cheating, but, in doing so, you've destroyed a sense of trust necessary for true learning.
Putting a transfer rate on the eye brain interlink seems tenuous at best. Our brains don't transfer "bits", they use a compression technology that is more about conceptual patterns and less about adjacent colors, and I'm fairly certain (at least in my case) that our brains lose more information than the average internet link. But, why make the comparison, is it just to continue a long line of "we're just computers".
We're not, we're much more complex, but this isn't going to stop the likes of "futurists" like Kurzweil from writing a riiculous treatise on how we're not using the full "bandwidth" of our "brain interface". Maybe some neo-futurist therapists will adopt this study to claim that our feelings can be understood by applying network troubleshooting technologies to our minds. Never? Stranger things have been done, look up the book "Quantum Mind".
Me? Yuck, ethernet is for connecting computers, it shouldn't be compared to the eye brain interface.
So, we've suffered through the start of some real trouble. The US government doesn't really get data security issues, we've lost information on millions of veterans, and now someone compromised information about the nations nuclear workers.
At this point, we need a real solution, we need accountability. Just like Sarbanes-Oxley for public corpoations, we need to appoint someone to be accountable for data security in the government. Every sensitive database, every record room needs a security officer who is ultimately responsible for data security. We need an office of information security, just like we have an office of management and budget, and we need to make data security negligence a criminal offense.
Call your representative, ask them to make data security a priority.
Funny, I didn't know Mike McCurry Totally Sold Out
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
·
· Score: 1
Strange isn't it? Mike McCurry goes from being a press secretary in the Clinton White House, to being a telecom industry mouthpiece. I wonder how much money they are paying McCurry to totally bend the facts to fit the telecommunications agenda? I didn't know he was such a sell out until that CNN piece.
I've had a great experience with Turion 64 chips in a laptop. High frame rate on graphics-intensive applications and, in general, good responsiveness even when running a whole boat load of RAM and CPU-heavy apps like Eclipse and Server JVM. I've used these chips from the ML-26 to the ML-44, and the cost/benefit analysis of AMD Turions versus the alternative just makes more sense. For the dollar, it seems like I can get 30% more performance in the apps I care to run.
But, Turion 64 on a desktop, not quite so fast, if performance is important to you, why go to all the trouble to install a mobile CPU? Either turn the thing off at night or drive less.
It makes perfect sense to standardize on both. Scripting languages will always be more appropriate for text processing and other tasks like validation and system administration.
But, from what I've seen, it is important to standardize an organization on one of each. Letting people go off and just write System X in new technology Y might be enjoyable, but it does end up in a great deal of duplication and expense. For example, one environment I've seen has a great deal of Actionscript, a great deal or Ruby, more Perl than I'd ever want to see, and some J2EE applications. This usually occurs when an organization lacks a sufficient level of oversight over architectural decisions.
Just pray that neither side wins. Writing only Java is as silly as writing in a different language every single day.
Most standards are relatively meaningless. Indentation, Spaces not Tabs, "All class names must be descriptive", "Comments are required" - really this is all hand waving. Let individual groups figure out what's best for them. And stop thinking like a boss, or you'll find yourself with no one to manage pretty quick.
is Slashdot going to start promoting everyone's new photo sharing website? Like most, I clicked on this, tried to sign up, and "We only support IE6". (Me dragging Riya to Recycle Bin, Empty Recycle Bin)
We should be able to find a technical solution to this without having to get the government involved in what amounts to censorship. I'm not saying we don't have a problem, but I am confident that the last thing we want is to have hundreds of additional employees at the FCC regulating traffic on the internet and sending nasty letters to people asking them to conform or be disconnected.
Think about what would happen if the FCC were running around sending letters to people about computers that might be sending traffic they've deemed as disruptive? Couldn't the administrators at the FCC just use that as a pretext to monitor for P2P traffic? No thanks, Big Brother.
I guess I haven't seen a convincing argument either way.
Eventually, there will be some level of shared governance by an independent, multi-national group. The make up of that group is up in the air, will it be headed by jurists, executives, or administrators? Will we need to set up a multinational to deal with these issues, or can they be handled by an existing body like the WTO or the UN? Ultimately, this isn't an issue of the US saying "No, we won't relinquish control." If that does happen, we may see the internet fragment into many pieces.
In the mean time, anyone is free to use an alternate Root DNS or create a separate Root DNS: http://www.opennic.unrated.net/
Reading too far into what is simply a bad product design. It's like people can't come to term with the fact that Apple was involved with a product that suffers from usability issues.
Some certifications are worth it. I've had good luck hiring people with Cisco certifications. Other certifications are not worth paying any attention to from a hiring standpoint - the Java certifications. In general, certification is valuable when used as a self-diagnostic tool. And, unfortunately, they are essential during any sort of economic downturn. Whenever there is a surplus of technical workers, hiring managers will start to require certain certifications just to reduce the applicant pool. Anyone who tried to find development work in late 2001, early 2002 will testify to this.
Where I think certifications help is in establishing a common bod of knowledge for a specific domain. While experts might laugh at the LPI Linux certs, they did create a series of comprehensive materials that people can read to learn the core subject area for Linux. One of the most helpful books for someone starting in Linux is the O'Reilly LPI cert book.
I used to hold certifications in contempt, but I've found that contrary to what many people say, they have a net positive effect. I wouldn't recommend that someone take certification tests for any other reason than self-assessment.
Grabbing delayed stock quotes from various sites is nothing new. Why does everyone drool and hoot every time Google adds yet another feature. Why not the same level of excitement when Forbes.com provides quotes or Yahoo. What's so extraordinary that it merited a Slashdot story?
Is Slashdot selling ad space for Google? And, if so, how much does one have to pay to get featured as a Slashdot story.
Actually there is something that is the natural progrssion from Ant - Maven. Maven is useful because it abstracts common build process across multiple projects by using plug-ins. Maven 1.0.2 is somewhat klunky, and work is progressing on Maven 2, but if you are looking for more information, take a look at Maven Project and buy Maven: A Developer's Notebook.
And, to be fair to Ant, recent versions of Ant 1.6 have added mechanisms to reuse build logic. Really, go check for yourself on the Ant project page.
Maven sits at a higher level than Ant, where Ant is really just a system for defining targets and dependencies between targets, Maven abstracts build logic across all project by way of plugins. So, instead of telling your 10 separate web application projects how to compile, test, and generate a WAR file, you simply describe each project in a common Project Object Model (POM), you then invoke something like the WAR plug-in, which takes your project's model and generates a WAR file. Long story short, in Ant you need to give each project explicit instructions for every task in your build.xml file. In Maven, you rely on common logic shared by all projects.
Confusing? Well it's not something you should rush into. IF you would like more information about Maven, take a look at Maven: A Developer's Notebook, Vincent Massol and I just finished this bok in March of this year and it was released last month. It is a good introduction to Maven.
And, if you were wondering, the developers are doing a better job at project documentation for Maven 2.0. It is shaping up well.
Slashdot Mirror
Yesterday Iran threatened to stop the flow of oil in response to new sanctions being floated by the US. Who wants to predict how that would affect solar? Also, what effect is the explosion of shale oil operations in the US having on technologies like solar?
Maybe a decade ago, but with the emergence of systems like BookSurge it is now very possible for someone to self-publish a book that is indistinguishable from a professional produced product from a publisher. If you know what you are doing, you can get your book to your audience.
Didn't have the same experience. I had a great agent, no problems at all, but the extra layer of indirection between myself and the publisher was problematic. I would not suggest that authors get an agent first.
This is awful advice. Write the book you feel passionate about, try to find a publisher, if you can't find one, make your own investment in some thing like BookSurge to get it into your audience's hands.
I have published four books with O'Reilly, and I have had brief encounters with other publishers. As a book consumer interested in cloud computing, Java, scripting languages, I look to Manning, Prag, and O'Reilly most of the time, and I'm also impressed with books from AW. Here are my experiences, maybe they might help:
When I wrote Jakarta Commons Cookbook, I had no agent, I worked directly with a great editor, Brett McLaughlin. Brett has since moved on from animal books and is now focused on books in the Heads First series. I would have never finished my book was it not for Brett's attention and guidance. If you are new to the book writing process, you will want to find an editor who knows your technology and who believes in the idea behind your book. I had maybe 5 reviewers, the book sold something in the range of 6-7k. While the publisher didn't view this as a success, I was satisfied with the sales and exposure, and I enjoyed the writing process. This book was written in Word, to properly insert XREF (cross references between sections and chapters) I had to load the entire book into Word and then run some hefty macros. I was constantly freezing the machine and Word was much more a nuisance that a helpful tool.
The second book I wrote as "Maven: A Developer's Notebook". To say it didn't go so well would be a dramatic understatement. I was less that satisfied with the book writing process, there were too many reviewers. Part of the problem with this book was that the book covered Maven 1 which was already on its way out. Maven 2 was released the same week that this book on Maven 1 was released. Sales were not very good; in fact, less than six months after printing, a number of people (myself included) were recommending that people avoid purchasing this book. I didn't actively seek out this second book, that should have been the first warning sign, I was recruited by my editor to help smooth out the writing. This book was written in Word using the O'Reilly macros, we had endless problems with Word. I had an agent for this book from Studio B, and the only time I spoke with my agent was during the contract negotiations. Studio B is "ok", but I don't think you need an agent to write a book, maybe someone can convince me otherwise?
The third book I helped to write was also something that my editor suggested. Jim Elliott was updating Harnessing Hibernate, and they wanted someone to write some chapters on Spring integration. This was my first exposure to using XMLMind and editing DocBook directly. Jim is one of the brightest authors I have ever worked with, and his colleague Ryan Fowler and I quickly started to use the DocBook XML from the first edition to update the book for a Second Edition printing. The writing process was a bit prolonged because two of us had some big distracting "life events" during the writing process. I'm proud of the end-product, and writing the book in DocBook was an eye opening experience. I would suggest that you get into the "craft" of book writing, code the book in DocBook using something like XMLMind, learn how to create and index, learn what it takes to create a book with all of the necessary markup. Writing a book is an entirely different beast from throwing some words into a Word Processor, and there's something to be said for understanding the entire process from start to finish.
The fourth book is an almost entirely different beast. Because of my experience with Jakarta Commons Cookbook and Maven: A Developer's Notebook I didn't want to be involved with a book that wasn't open source from the very beginning. The fourth book I'm involved with is Maven: The Definitive Guide, it is a comprehensive reference for Maven. This book is available for free from http://books.sonatype.com/ and you can also purchase a printed copy from O'Reilly. The book is an open source project on GitHub, the book is covered under a creative commons license, and we've attracted a
I was planning a trip to Jupiter next week, and I was just on the phone with Sprint asking them if they had any coverage near the Big Spot. Good to know that the people at VLA are on the job.
Dear insane military-industrial complex,
We lost one of your ultra-secret, 1.2 billion dollar stealth planes on a routine mission in the Pacific. The nation was wondering if you would consider replacing this one for free. We've given you just about all the extra money we had saved up for years and years, and we've taken out serious loans to be able to pay for increasingly flamboyant and unnecessary toys. I'm only asking for this freebie because it is getting more and more difficult to convince people that we really need to be spending money on weapons like this when an insurgent army can bring us to our knees in the middle of Iraq. Plus, people are starting to wonder if 1.2 billion dollars would be better spent teaching more intelligence analysts how to speak Arabic, Urdu, and Pashto, and I really think that 1.2 billion would go a long way toward helping us really fight terrorism.
This isn't a bad thing, if we didn't have a skyrocketing national debt, if we weren't spending an "out of control" amount of money on the war, and if we actually had some fiscal discipline, maybe then we should start thinking about spending a few hundred billion dollars on a Mars mission.
But, look at the government's involvement in space exploration, it has been an absolute disaster. Almost 40 years from the Moon mission, and we can't even get the shuttle into orbit without screwing up a thermal blanket. We need to get rid of the government monopoly on space, and we need to reduce our spending to get ready for the looming disaster - Social Security.
Institutions of higher learning need to get out of the business of using automated software to check for plagarism. If we've reached a point where it is impossible for a professor to grade each paper...if we've reach a system of education where a robot is the first line of defense against cheating, then we need to begin a reevaluation of the whole concept of "higher learning". A student attends a University to learn, not to attain a grade. It isn't plagarism that is the problem, it is the blind adherence to a failed incentive - the grade. Take the grades out of higher learning, reduce class sizes, and create a situation where the instructor and the instructed can develop a mutual relationship based on trust.
It is ironic that the idea of using a program to "sniff" plagarism was borne in an environment that prides itself on a strong Honor Code (the University of Virginia by the Physics department). An Honor Code exists not to emphasize the need for enforcement, but to encourage an atmosphere of trust. Plagarism sniffing robots are akin to placing closed circuit TV cameras in every classroom, you might catch some people cheating, but, in doing so, you've destroyed a sense of trust necessary for true learning.
Putting a transfer rate on the eye brain interlink seems tenuous at best. Our brains don't transfer "bits", they use a compression technology that is more about conceptual patterns and less about adjacent colors, and I'm fairly certain (at least in my case) that our brains lose more information than the average internet link. But, why make the comparison, is it just to continue a long line of "we're just computers".
We're not, we're much more complex, but this isn't going to stop the likes of "futurists" like Kurzweil from writing a riiculous treatise on how we're not using the full "bandwidth" of our "brain interface". Maybe some neo-futurist therapists will adopt this study to claim that our feelings can be understood by applying network troubleshooting technologies to our minds. Never? Stranger things have been done, look up the book "Quantum Mind".
Me? Yuck, ethernet is for connecting computers, it shouldn't be compared to the eye brain interface.
Here's an interview with someone in the middle of integrating Google Web Toolkit (GWT) with a Spring MVC application. In the interview Michael Podrazik provides some insight and tips for people interested in starting out with GWT.
So, we've suffered through the start of some real trouble. The US government doesn't really get data security issues, we've lost information on millions of veterans, and now someone compromised information about the nations nuclear workers.
At this point, we need a real solution, we need accountability. Just like Sarbanes-Oxley for public corpoations, we need to appoint someone to be accountable for data security in the government. Every sensitive database, every record room needs a security officer who is ultimately responsible for data security. We need an office of information security, just like we have an office of management and budget, and we need to make data security negligence a criminal offense.
Call your representative, ask them to make data security a priority.
Strange isn't it? Mike McCurry goes from being a press secretary in the Clinton White House, to being a telecom industry mouthpiece. I wonder how much money they are paying McCurry to totally bend the facts to fit the telecommunications agenda? I didn't know he was such a sell out until that CNN piece.
I've had a great experience with Turion 64 chips in a laptop. High frame rate on graphics-intensive applications and, in general, good responsiveness even when running a whole boat load of RAM and CPU-heavy apps like Eclipse and Server JVM. I've used these chips from the ML-26 to the ML-44, and the cost/benefit analysis of AMD Turions versus the alternative just makes more sense. For the dollar, it seems like I can get 30% more performance in the apps I care to run.
But, Turion 64 on a desktop, not quite so fast, if performance is important to you, why go to all the trouble to install a mobile CPU? Either turn the thing off at night or drive less.
Pick Two
One from - Java, C#
One from - Ruby, Python, Perl
It makes perfect sense to standardize on both. Scripting languages will always be more appropriate for text processing and other tasks like validation and system administration.
But, from what I've seen, it is important to standardize an organization on one of each. Letting people go off and just write System X in new technology Y might be enjoyable, but it does end up in a great deal of duplication and expense. For example, one environment I've seen has a great deal of Actionscript, a great deal or Ruby, more Perl than I'd ever want to see, and some J2EE applications. This usually occurs when an organization lacks a sufficient level of oversight over architectural decisions.
Just pray that neither side wins. Writing only Java is as silly as writing in a different language every single day.
Most standards are relatively meaningless. Indentation, Spaces not Tabs, "All class names must be descriptive", "Comments are required" - really this is all hand waving. Let individual groups figure out what's best for them. And stop thinking like a boss, or you'll find yourself with no one to manage pretty quick.
is Slashdot going to start promoting everyone's new photo sharing website? Like most, I clicked on this, tried to sign up, and "We only support IE6". (Me dragging Riya to Recycle Bin, Empty Recycle Bin)
We should be able to find a technical solution to this without having to get the government involved in what amounts to censorship. I'm not saying we don't have a problem, but I am confident that the last thing we want is to have hundreds of additional employees at the FCC regulating traffic on the internet and sending nasty letters to people asking them to conform or be disconnected.
Think about what would happen if the FCC were running around sending letters to people about computers that might be sending traffic they've deemed as disruptive? Couldn't the administrators at the FCC just use that as a pretext to monitor for P2P traffic? No thanks, Big Brother.
I guess I haven't seen a convincing argument either way.
Eventually, there will be some level of shared governance by an independent, multi-national group. The make up of that group is up in the air, will it be headed by jurists, executives, or administrators? Will we need to set up a multinational to deal with these issues, or can they be handled by an existing body like the WTO or the UN? Ultimately, this isn't an issue of the US saying "No, we won't relinquish control." If that does happen, we may see the internet fragment into many pieces.
In the mean time, anyone is free to use an alternate Root DNS or create a separate Root DNS: http://www.opennic.unrated.net/
emacs
Reading too far into what is simply a bad product design. It's like people can't come to term with the fact that Apple was involved with a product that suffers from usability issues.
Some certifications are worth it. I've had good luck hiring people with Cisco certifications. Other certifications are not worth paying any attention to from a hiring standpoint - the Java certifications. In general, certification is valuable when used as a self-diagnostic tool. And, unfortunately, they are essential during any sort of economic downturn. Whenever there is a surplus of technical workers, hiring managers will start to require certain certifications just to reduce the applicant pool. Anyone who tried to find development work in late 2001, early 2002 will testify to this.
Where I think certifications help is in establishing a common bod of knowledge for a specific domain. While experts might laugh at the LPI Linux certs, they did create a series of comprehensive materials that people can read to learn the core subject area for Linux. One of the most helpful books for someone starting in Linux is the O'Reilly LPI cert book.
I used to hold certifications in contempt, but I've found that contrary to what many people say, they have a net positive effect. I wouldn't recommend that someone take certification tests for any other reason than self-assessment.
Grabbing delayed stock quotes from various sites is nothing new. Why does everyone drool and hoot every time Google adds yet another feature. Why not the same level of excitement when Forbes.com provides quotes or Yahoo. What's so extraordinary that it merited a Slashdot story?
Is Slashdot selling ad space for Google? And, if so, how much does one have to pay to get featured as a Slashdot story.
Actually there is something that is the natural progrssion from Ant - Maven. Maven is useful because it abstracts common build process across multiple projects by using plug-ins. Maven 1.0.2 is somewhat klunky, and work is progressing on Maven 2, but if you are looking for more information, take a look at Maven Project and buy Maven: A Developer's Notebook.
And, to be fair to Ant, recent versions of Ant 1.6 have added mechanisms to reuse build logic. Really, go check for yourself on the Ant project page.
Maven sits at a higher level than Ant, where Ant is really just a system for defining targets and dependencies between targets, Maven abstracts build logic across all project by way of plugins. So, instead of telling your 10 separate web application projects how to compile, test, and generate a WAR file, you simply describe each project in a common Project Object Model (POM), you then invoke something like the WAR plug-in, which takes your project's model and generates a WAR file. Long story short, in Ant you need to give each project explicit instructions for every task in your build.xml file. In Maven, you rely on common logic shared by all projects.
Confusing? Well it's not something you should rush into. IF you would like more information about Maven, take a look at Maven: A Developer's Notebook, Vincent Massol and I just finished this bok in March of this year and it was released last month. It is a good introduction to Maven.
And, if you were wondering, the developers are doing a better job at project documentation for Maven 2.0. It is shaping up well.