Who cares about a stupid badge communicator? WHERE THE HELL ARE OUR PHASERS GODDAMMIT!!! Looks like the research community needs to focus on the important things.
It seems like the root problem for almost all of these issues is that the JVM is not integrated into the OS. A separate JVM is launched for every application. If Java was the standard desktop toolkit then wouldn't it be possible to integrate a JVM into the OS runtime? This would greatly reduce the startup overhead, the memory usage per app, and also allow a faster GUI toolkit implementation.
When it comes to memory usage welcome to the real world of tradeoffs. I would rather pay more cash for extra memory than waste time while my apps crash because they use languages that don't protect developers from their own mistakes.
Real companies have heterogeneous server environments. This is an ugly fact, but a fact nonetheless. If you are saying that there is a cost benefit to buying new homogeneous hardware rather than reusing older hardware then I think the real problem is your software isn't cross-platform.
Real web apps don't need desktop integration; they are accessed from the browser. I think most users would rather have additional tool features than have a development team spend time packaging an app for the myriad GUI managers out there.
I don't think you have ever used an Application Server. This J2EE hosting environment provides a standard platform with many different implementations (both commercial and GPL). It runs on Linux, all the Unixes that I know of and Windows to boot. It does just about anything you would ever want to do from a web-based app.
I'm not sure what limitations you are referring to when it comes to cross-platform. I haven't seen any demand for floating-point number crunching or even fast disk access. Instead I see the need for forms, data source access (like databases and directories), email access, network access, etc. Access to these components is streamlined by standard Java libraries and implemented universally by Application Servers.
It sounds like you haven't done much server-side web development. One big benefit of Java is that you can write and package applications that will run on multiple server platforms with virtually no modification. For real companies this is a substantial benefit; it means that you aren't locked into a single vendor for your infrastructure.
The absolute best you can hope for with C++ is the ability to recompile successfully on a different server. If the developers actually have access to your platform then you have a chance that their packaging will compile successfully; but this has not been my experience. And since the number of cross-platform libraries is limited a lot of wheels have to be re-invented.
Please moderate this story as both "Redundant" and "Flamebait" (definitely not clever enough to be a "Troll"). What, we're not allowed to moderate stories? Sounds like Slashdot needs a patch...
Personally I prefer complicated gadgets that do lots of things, like PCs and smartphones. So I definitely agree with your sentiment. However the iPod was designed for only one purpose; playing music. The color screen wouldn't add enough for this single purpose to mitigate the loss in battery life.
This is an excellent question. How about Web Services Dynamic Discovery? Sure, it's vaporware at this point and it was proposed by the Beast. OTOH it has a good chance to be an open standard and it isn't limited to file and print sharing.
Maybe the reason they have more cheap used games than other places is that a lot of their stock is stolen? Maybe this indicates a more general problem.
Be careful what you wish for. I give Nintendo full props for inventing or popularizing the gamepad, but better designs now exist. The original NES gamepads were so square they hurt your hands after no more than a few hours of gameplay.
The Genesis pads were quite nice. I never did get the hang of the Playstation pads with their plethora of equally sized buttons, although they are pretty comfortable and they did come up with the dual analog stick paradigm. The N64 pads would have been nice if they didn't have two different left hand positions, and the DreamCast controllers were innovative but uncomfortable. The XBox controllers are OK, but the best gamepad is the one that comes with the GameCube. It has two analog sticks and a d-pad, differently sized buttons, and it just feels right in your hand.
There are some PC gamepads that don't suck as well. I am pretty happy with my WingMan RumblePad. Dual analog sticks + 6 right-thumb buttons = Robotron + Street Fighter with the same pad!
And "name-value pairs"? How do attributes figure into that? Well.. Cruddily, that's how!
In the sense that an attribute is a named data value that is part of another named data value.
XML allows for a lot more than ASCII.. Which is the reason a fully compliant XML parser is enormously bloated.
I have yet to see an XML document that didn't use a plaintext encoding. I'm sure XML parsers can handle other plaintext encodings; this prevents me from worrying about a trivial detail of implementation.
No one is twisting your arm to use existing XML parsers if they are too bloated for your tastes. The openness and ubiquity of the XML standard means that there very likely is a more targeted solution for your need.
Maybe you could detail what you hate about XML and which other widely accepted standards address these issues.
The advanced technology I see on a regular basis is in the communications field; phones, computers, etc. These technologies greatly increase the speed and accuracy of the promulgation of information.
Technology increases stress by quickening the pace of change. Executives now think they have the information to constantly reorganize and implement new processes. Uncertain working conditions and processes definitely increase stress levels for workers.
OTOH technology makes many jobs easier. Computer, phone and broadband technology allow me to work from home, decreasing stress caused by a long commute (especially in the crummy weather we have in the Bay Area right now). These technologies also allow me to attend to personal business without worrying about missing any critical issues at work. And the Net gives me access to needed information which reduces the uncertainty in an unfamiliar task.
You said it! I'm sure we'll all regret using a standard format for hierarchically arranged tuples of name-value pairs. I only have to use this type of data in maybe 99% of my projects.
And the output files sure are difficult to understand if you've never seen any markup language before and don't have a file viewer that understands ASCII text.
Instead why doesn't everyone just make up their own format that is uniquely tailored for the individual application? You can leave off the attribute names since the recipient of the data should just know what they are anyway. And you can use a binary encoding to really add efficiency to the process. And developers love the challenge of trying to figure out new data formats on top of interpreting the data itself.
Bingo! Give this man a cigar. It's all about the payback for Sun's open letter. Otherwise this isn't really news; IBM has been asking for more control over Java for years now. It just looks better if IBM uses "Open Source" as the rationale.
The gravitational patterns around a black hole are like that of a star until you get very close to it. Just imagine what would happen if a star passed within the planetary space of the Sun. All the planetary orbits would be perturbed. Earth would probably freeze or burn.
If by some astronomical chance the Earth collided with this black hole the planet would be torn apart first by the differential effect of gravity from the black hole. As an object gets closer to a massive gravity sink it orbits more and more quickly, so the close part of the Earth would be torn from the far part. This process would continue until nothing but gas and sand was left.
Then this material would rub against itself while orbiting the black hole at high speed, giving off all kinds of EM energy. Eventually the orbits of this debris would decay and would slip inside the event horizon. The contents of that sphere cannot be explained by physics.
So to answer your question, I think what would probably happen is that first most people would die of starvation as all plants die from the extreme heat/cold. Then most of the remaining survivors would die of asphyxiation as the atmosphere gets ripped off the planet. Then if anyone was left they would be ripped into a fog of dead cells.
But the bright side is we would probably have plenty of time since we would almost certainly detect a black hole years before it contacted our system. We would see the perturbations caused by its gravity, and black holes cause all kinds of interesting EM radiation when they get close to matter.
If the US pushes an agenda that the rest of the world disagrees with then they will be ignored. No one is going to buy the recommendations of a committee that is obviously in the pocket of the US commercial software industry.
If in the worst case this committee secures funding for enforcement and UN troops start showing up with BSA agents to perform audits then that will most likely just accelerate a shift to open-source.
Sony markets heavily to the older crowd, and I believe they were the first ones to successfully sell a $300 console.
That said by the time you are old enough to buy any video game you want you may find that your gaming needs are satisfied by emulators:) I used to play video games for hours a day; now my very limited gaming time is spent on MAME, where I can finish a game (or more accurately a game can finish me) in mere seconds.
Pimentel based his research on the economics of burning a relatively pure form of ethanol in a conventional combustion engine.
An article above from nature.com clearly states that this new technology uses a relatively watery ethanol as an input. The watery ethanol avoids a purification step that uses a lot of energy.
Additionally the article states that the energy efficiency of using the produced hydrogen in a fuel cell is about 60% compared with 20% achieved by burning ethanol in a combustion engine.
IIRC another website states that Pimentel thinks it takes about 129% of the produced energy to create ethanol. This new technology should change the equation so that producing ethanol creates usable energy.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone actually makes a motherboard with integrated tube-based sound! Sounds like you would need an air conditioner to keep that bastard cool...
Who cares about a stupid badge communicator? WHERE THE HELL ARE OUR PHASERS GODDAMMIT!!! Looks like the research community needs to focus on the important things.
It seems like the root problem for almost all of these issues is that the JVM is not integrated into the OS. A separate JVM is launched for every application. If Java was the standard desktop toolkit then wouldn't it be possible to integrate a JVM into the OS runtime? This would greatly reduce the startup overhead, the memory usage per app, and also allow a faster GUI toolkit implementation.
When it comes to memory usage welcome to the real world of tradeoffs. I would rather pay more cash for extra memory than waste time while my apps crash because they use languages that don't protect developers from their own mistakes.
The same thing used to happen on 60 Minutes in the States. For all I know it still does; I don't watch it anymore.
Real companies have heterogeneous server environments. This is an ugly fact, but a fact nonetheless. If you are saying that there is a cost benefit to buying new homogeneous hardware rather than reusing older hardware then I think the real problem is your software isn't cross-platform.
Real web apps don't need desktop integration; they are accessed from the browser. I think most users would rather have additional tool features than have a development team spend time packaging an app for the myriad GUI managers out there.
I don't think you have ever used an Application Server. This J2EE hosting environment provides a standard platform with many different implementations (both commercial and GPL). It runs on Linux, all the Unixes that I know of and Windows to boot. It does just about anything you would ever want to do from a web-based app.
I'm not sure what limitations you are referring to when it comes to cross-platform. I haven't seen any demand for floating-point number crunching or even fast disk access. Instead I see the need for forms, data source access (like databases and directories), email access, network access, etc. Access to these components is streamlined by standard Java libraries and implemented universally by Application Servers.
It sounds like you haven't done much server-side web development. One big benefit of Java is that you can write and package applications that will run on multiple server platforms with virtually no modification. For real companies this is a substantial benefit; it means that you aren't locked into a single vendor for your infrastructure.
The absolute best you can hope for with C++ is the ability to recompile successfully on a different server. If the developers actually have access to your platform then you have a chance that their packaging will compile successfully; but this has not been my experience. And since the number of cross-platform libraries is limited a lot of wheels have to be re-invented.
Please moderate this story as both "Redundant" and "Flamebait" (definitely not clever enough to be a "Troll"). What, we're not allowed to moderate stories? Sounds like Slashdot needs a patch...
I took basically the same class at UC Berkeley. It must be a UC thing.
Personally I prefer complicated gadgets that do lots of things, like PCs and smartphones. So I definitely agree with your sentiment. However the iPod was designed for only one purpose; playing music. The color screen wouldn't add enough for this single purpose to mitigate the loss in battery life.
This is an excellent question. How about Web Services Dynamic Discovery? Sure, it's vaporware at this point and it was proposed by the Beast. OTOH it has a good chance to be an open standard and it isn't limited to file and print sharing.
Maybe the reason they have more cheap used games than other places is that a lot of their stock is stolen? Maybe this indicates a more general problem.
The website doesn't mention the extra-burly bike option for Critical Mass rides. Or the extra-large stash box attachment for holding your weed.
This product fills the gap for those who don't really want the portability of a laptop or the low price and ergonomics of a desktop.
That what a heroic effort!
Be careful what you wish for. I give Nintendo full props for inventing or popularizing the gamepad, but better designs now exist. The original NES gamepads were so square they hurt your hands after no more than a few hours of gameplay.
The Genesis pads were quite nice. I never did get the hang of the Playstation pads with their plethora of equally sized buttons, although they are pretty comfortable and they did come up with the dual analog stick paradigm. The N64 pads would have been nice if they didn't have two different left hand positions, and the DreamCast controllers were innovative but uncomfortable. The XBox controllers are OK, but the best gamepad is the one that comes with the GameCube. It has two analog sticks and a d-pad, differently sized buttons, and it just feels right in your hand.
There are some PC gamepads that don't suck as well. I am pretty happy with my WingMan RumblePad. Dual analog sticks + 6 right-thumb buttons = Robotron + Street Fighter with the same pad!
And "name-value pairs"? How do attributes figure into that? Well.. Cruddily, that's how!
In the sense that an attribute is a named data value that is part of another named data value.
XML allows for a lot more than ASCII.. Which is the reason a fully compliant XML parser is enormously bloated.
I have yet to see an XML document that didn't use a plaintext encoding. I'm sure XML parsers can handle other plaintext encodings; this prevents me from worrying about a trivial detail of implementation.
No one is twisting your arm to use existing XML parsers if they are too bloated for your tastes. The openness and ubiquity of the XML standard means that there very likely is a more targeted solution for your need.
Maybe you could detail what you hate about XML and which other widely accepted standards address these issues.
The advanced technology I see on a regular basis is in the communications field; phones, computers, etc. These technologies greatly increase the speed and accuracy of the promulgation of information.
Technology increases stress by quickening the pace of change. Executives now think they have the information to constantly reorganize and implement new processes. Uncertain working conditions and processes definitely increase stress levels for workers.
OTOH technology makes many jobs easier. Computer, phone and broadband technology allow me to work from home, decreasing stress caused by a long commute (especially in the crummy weather we have in the Bay Area right now). These technologies also allow me to attend to personal business without worrying about missing any critical issues at work. And the Net gives me access to needed information which reduces the uncertainty in an unfamiliar task.
You said it! I'm sure we'll all regret using a standard format for hierarchically arranged tuples of name-value pairs. I only have to use this type of data in maybe 99% of my projects.
And the output files sure are difficult to understand if you've never seen any markup language before and don't have a file viewer that understands ASCII text.
Instead why doesn't everyone just make up their own format that is uniquely tailored for the individual application? You can leave off the attribute names since the recipient of the data should just know what they are anyway. And you can use a binary encoding to really add efficiency to the process. And developers love the challenge of trying to figure out new data formats on top of interpreting the data itself.
Bingo! Give this man a cigar. It's all about the payback for Sun's open letter. Otherwise this isn't really news; IBM has been asking for more control over Java for years now. It just looks better if IBM uses "Open Source" as the rationale.
C: They have crazy beards that require hedge shears to trim.
Thanks for reminding me why I program in Java. I can't believe the wide variety of syntax used to generate a one line program.
The gravitational patterns around a black hole are like that of a star until you get very close to it. Just imagine what would happen if a star passed within the planetary space of the Sun. All the planetary orbits would be perturbed. Earth would probably freeze or burn.
If by some astronomical chance the Earth collided with this black hole the planet would be torn apart first by the differential effect of gravity from the black hole. As an object gets closer to a massive gravity sink it orbits more and more quickly, so the close part of the Earth would be torn from the far part. This process would continue until nothing but gas and sand was left.
Then this material would rub against itself while orbiting the black hole at high speed, giving off all kinds of EM energy. Eventually the orbits of this debris would decay and would slip inside the event horizon. The contents of that sphere cannot be explained by physics.
So to answer your question, I think what would probably happen is that first most people would die of starvation as all plants die from the extreme heat/cold. Then most of the remaining survivors would die of asphyxiation as the atmosphere gets ripped off the planet. Then if anyone was left they would be ripped into a fog of dead cells.
But the bright side is we would probably have plenty of time since we would almost certainly detect a black hole years before it contacted our system. We would see the perturbations caused by its gravity, and black holes cause all kinds of interesting EM radiation when they get close to matter.
If the US pushes an agenda that the rest of the world disagrees with then they will be ignored. No one is going to buy the recommendations of a committee that is obviously in the pocket of the US commercial software industry.
If in the worst case this committee secures funding for enforcement and UN troops start showing up with BSA agents to perform audits then that will most likely just accelerate a shift to open-source.
Sony markets heavily to the older crowd, and I believe they were the first ones to successfully sell a $300 console.
:) I used to play video games for hours a day; now my very limited gaming time is spent on MAME, where I can finish a game (or more accurately a game can finish me) in mere seconds.
That said by the time you are old enough to buy any video game you want you may find that your gaming needs are satisfied by emulators
Pimentel based his research on the economics of burning a relatively pure form of ethanol in a conventional combustion engine.
An article above from nature.com clearly states that this new technology uses a relatively watery ethanol as an input. The watery ethanol avoids a purification step that uses a lot of energy.
Additionally the article states that the energy efficiency of using the produced hydrogen in a fuel cell is about 60% compared with 20% achieved by burning ethanol in a combustion engine.
IIRC another website states that Pimentel thinks it takes about 129% of the produced energy to create ethanol. This new technology should change the equation so that producing ethanol creates usable energy.