It looks like you are connecting to shareaza using a gnutella client that doesn't support the new protocol. So basically what you are observing here is that the original gnutella (i.e. 0.4 and 0.6) is indeed not a very efficient protocol. Gnutella 2 actually compresses some of the protocol traffic which significantly boosts the efficiency of the ultrapeers.
I've heard a lot of strange things in my 28 years on this planet. Running netscape 4.x for stability reasons however is new to me. I can't begin to imagine the stuff you missed out on the past half decade or so. The phoenix nightlies I run, last longer than any version of netscape 4.x ever did on my machines.
The approach of using dreamweaver or otherwise include netscape 4.x code doesn't scale up. It is much more cost effective to tell netscape 4.x users to go f*ck themselves (and most of them seriously need to get a clue by now). If only netscape 4 didn't bother to interpret css, it would be much easier for webdevelopers. I've converted my sites to XHTML 1.0 strict in the past year so netscape 4 should be able to process the html. Unfortunately it messes up badly trying to do stuff like css positioning. It's beyond hopeless trying to work around that since it requires a totally different approach to modeling your page. I refuse to do browser detection and only test in IE 6 and mozilla (not in that order, phoenix is my primary browser). Working like this I can use like 98% of the standards and safely assume things work in most common browsers. I never tested or saw my sites in Safari. Yet I'm fully confident that either it will display everything as intended or it still has some undiscovered bugs that will be fixed in the near future. Unfortunately IE 6 doesn't support some of the cooler things like "position: float". However, telling IE 6 users to go f*ck themselves would effectively eliminate 80-90% of the visitors:-( so I reluctantly refrain from using such features. I don't care about IE 5.5 and lower anymore (and nor does MS I should add, see the register for details:-) but if it works in those browsers that's fine with me.
I'd be very pleased if slashdot dropped the table layout. As long time proponents of open standards, OSS, and generally cool nerdy stuff (i.e. stuff that matters) it is disgraceful that they are actually still whoring themselves supporting obsolete proprietary netscape shit. Even the original netscape developers turned their backs on that stuff and chose not to support layers in mozilla!
If you're still on netscape 4, you're probably better of using netscape 3. As I remember it was always more stable and it does a much better job of rendering XHTML since it doesn't understand CSS at all. Alternatively you can install opera (if your os supports it). I've found it to be quite fast on an old windows 95 machine with only 16 MB. And it even renders my sites correctly:-).
I have actually heard a high placed member of the Bush administration threaten to attack 'un-authorized' satelite links. If you're a war reporter in Baghdad, that pretty much means you're a target unless you conform to the Bush propaganda. There currently is no independent journalist in Baghdad. My guess is that it will take years before we hear about the real collateral damage, just like with the previous gulf war.
Assuming that these data streams have something in common you'd probably spend a week or so developing a generic, maintainable solution using e.g. SAX and reuse that in each particular case. The adhoc solution of using regular expressions probably saves you time on the short term, but on the long term you'll probably keep reinventing the wheel.
However, this is all beside the point since we've now established that there's nothing wrong with XML but that it's just the tools to manipulate it which are still lacking in certain ways. I'd be the first to agree that the SAX and DOM APIs are a bit overkill for some situations. However, concluding from that that XML is not a good solution goes too far IMHO.
Not only is it a standard, it appears to be the only widely accepted standard. Not using it currently boils down to going back to the hacked together, generally incompatible data formats of the past. Reinventing the wheel still is a popular way of passing time but it has never been very productive.
People often fail to see the point of widely adopted standards but the bottom line is that it makes it easier to reuse functionality that confirms to the standard. There are now both SAX and DOM based parsers for most common programming languages. Basically if you spend some time figuring out how these APIs work you can work with XML from almost any language.
That is not the problem. What is a problem is that everybody is introducing their own xml based languages and in many cases forget to publish the appropriate xml schema/dtd.
Now the guy who is complaining here is a perl programmer who has to process data that is passed to him in XML form. His point is that it easier for him to throw together a bunch of regular expressions to do his thing than it is to use some off the shelf validating parser with a generic DOM/SAX based API. Good for him that is job is so simple that a bunch of regular expressions do the trick for him. I'd hate to maintain his code though and I suspect he doesn't have much reuse beyond the odd copy paste.
The amount of bandwidth is not that large. I just did a quick check on my spam folder. The median size of a message is something like 6KB. About one third is larger than 10KB and the largest (an exception) was like 200KB. At 100 messages/user/day we are talking about 600KB. Maybe a whopping 1 MB on a bad day. In any case you won't find back that kind of bandwidth on your ISP bill. If you do, change ISP.
For mobile users, I'd suggest using serverside filtering (e.g. Spamassasin) and IMAP (only download the headers). That should eliminate most of the performance problems
This could be done very easily by combining limewire with e.g. the aglet tools (a mobile agents api) from IBM. For normal users the use would be limited but you can easily create private gnutella networks (for example set up a network with some research colleagues). Mobile agents and grid computing are both solutions in search of a problem. Combined they might actually find some use somewhere.
Actually Gregor Kiczalez (AOP inventor) comes from a Lisp background and first experimented with AOP in CLOS (which he helped create as well).
The problem with lisp is that it never really escaped from the computer labs. There are some nice lisp applications (e.g. emacs) but it's very much a niche language. That's why AspectJ was created: to draw attention of normal C++/Java programmers to AOP.
Interestingly the inventor of the hungarian notation (Charles Simonyi) has recently teamed up with Gregor Kiczalez (inventor of AOP) to start a new company.
Actually new paradigms like this are extremely usefull because we are rapidly approaching the ceiling of what we can do using modern technology. There are now many companies developing/maintaining software systems that have multiple millions of lines of code (of which an increasing amount is either Java or C++). Typically these large systems are a nightmare to maintain and require the fulltime attention of extremely large development teams (up to 1000 programmers) to keep them up to date. Any technique that can help factor out logical units of behavior into nice maintainable modules of code is extremely useful to these companies because that allows them to put more programmers on creating new functionality rather than maintaining existing code.
This situation has caused researchers to go and look for alternatives to the traditional OO and procedural paradigms. Particularly IBM has contributed a lot in this research area (e.g. multi dimensional separation of concerns and subject oriented programming). However, none of these approaches ever made it out of the labs into the real world. In 1997 Kiczalez et al. from Xerox labs published a paper on AOP at Ecoop '97. At the time they were using CLOS (an OO lisp dialect) for the handfull of toy examples in the paper. Kiczalez had the vision that if he was ever going to get real life experience with real AOP systems he would have to have a compiler that was usable by regular programmers. Hence the AspectJ project was born. For more than three years the aspectJ project has worked with a rapidly growing community to create a compiler. Some time ago the 1.0 version was released and since then there have been updates to improve the compiler, integrate into popular development tools and resolve some minor language issues.
AspectJ extends on what Java developers already know (you can compile your existing java code with it) and adds useful AOP features to the Java language. At 1.0, the compiler is stable, the language has been tuned by experts to be useful in day to day programming and you can actually make very nice systems with it.
However, AspectJ is currently also a very powerful language that maybe offers programmers too much power (just like C++ is a lethal weapon in the hands of those who do not understand it). So yes, it is easy to create spagheti code. However it is also easy to convert existing spagheti code to nicely modularized code where existing techniques would make that very hard to do. You just need to understand what you are doing.
AOP is still new. Good design patterns for it have yet to emerge. It is currently unclear how to model an aspect in UML, development methodology has yet to adjust to using this new technique and this is only the first implementation of a new paradigm. It's not designed to be perfect but to be usable with existing Java code. Other AOP implementations exist and are in various state of development/usability but AspectJ currently is the most mature of these approaches.
Still curious? Download the compiler and browse through the examples.
The US government is currently waging "a war against terror". Billions of dollars are allocated for this war which mostly consists of intelligence gathering. Then there is a "war on drugs" which is also costing billions of dollars annually. This war on drugs also involves massive attempts to gather intelligence. Probably more people are making a living tapping other people in the US then are tapped in the Netherlands.
I don't see how the US government would be doing all of this without violating peoples constitutional rights on an enormous scale. Probably the US government no longer bothers to go by the book when it comes to wiretapping. If I lived in the US that would worry me.
The people who created ant would probably disagree. Shell scripts have their use in some places. Mixing configuration and functionality however is a stupid idea. You create all sorts of dependencies and basically is the primary reason UNIX sysadmins are so expensive.
Is this a serious question? You actually still are on java 1.1? That allows me to draw two conclusions: you don't care about performance and you don't require advanced graphics manipulation. Otherwise you would have long ago kicked out the MS JVM and started using the Java 2D library to manipulate your graphics. Of course it is never too late..Net has the same problem as Java currently: no operating system comes installed with it (including windows XP)..Net has an additional problem: it's only available for windows and comes with lots of strings attached. Good, mature Java implementations are available on all major platforms.
SUN's Java has the added advantage for you that it will probably run your existing apps (barring the MS/J++ crap you probably put in them).
Actually the pathetic attempts of the linux community at trying to come up with a good alternative for outlook are the living proof of how much better outlook was all along. Versions of outlook before the 2000 version and outlook express had severe security issues that could be addressed easily by installing virusscanners (irresponsible not to do on a windows PC), using the patches (also irresponsible not to do) and configuring the software properly.
I've never been affected by an email virus. I know several people who were affected by a virus. One of them was a computer scientist who actually believed that the sender of a particular email was in love with him, had no virus scanner and double clicked the exe file. If my sister does that, I understand because she is clueless about computers. I would however silenty swear at the incompetence of her sysadmin (not me). If a computer scientist does that I silently think "you stupid idiot, didn't your mummy tell you not to accept candy from stangers?".
Freedom of speech is not theft. Besides you don't have to listen. And the amount of resources you lose over spam is negligable. Try calculating the associated cost in terms of KB/month for the spam you receive and compare that to your ISP bill and the amount of bandwidth you use anyway. I strongly suspect that one of these numbers is absolutely dwarfed by the other. Any ISP claiming that spam is taking 50% of their bandwidth should get a clue and install the appropriate software to address the problem. Probably they can save even more by hiring more competent staff.
Your time is precious too, I know. There are plenty of client and serverside solutions that eliminate virtually all spam on your PC. I just installed a spam assassin pop3 proxy on one of my windows machines. Together with the spamnet plugin I already use in Outlook, that eliminates something like 98% of the spam.
Somehow, the people complaining the most about spam are either busy and ignorant business people or unix sysadmins who should know how to fix the problem at the root. I spent way more time reading about spam and its alleged severely negative consequences for world peace and economy on slashdot than I have actually spent time separating spam from real mail during the ten or so years I have used email (and I receive lots of both spam and mail). Until half a year ago I didn't use any automated spam removal which implied that I had to use the delete key up to ten times a day while I was processing email anyway. If spam bothers you, you may need to consider that that may be a symptom of a bigger problem you have. Probably there's a lot of other stuff that bothers you, maybe your social life sucks too. Who knows? Deal with these problems and you'll be a happier person.
If some kids can earn a few dollars because some nut is willing to pay them for the privilege of using their bandwidth I have no problems with that.
Intel is behaving a bit like IBM when the PC was invented. IBM had all the pieces and managed to lose their position as a market leader in no time, mostly because they didn't understand the market they were in.
Intel currently owns the market for low end workstations and servers. If you need a web server or a cad station you get a nice P4 with some memory. This is also the market where the need for 64 bit will first come. At some point in time some people will want to put 8 GB of memory in their machine. AMD will be able to deliver that in a few months, Intel won't.
My guess is that Intel is really not that stupid (if they are, sell your intel shares) and has a product anyway but wants to recover their investment on their 32 bit architecture before they introduce the 64 bit enhanced version of their P4. The current P4 compares quite favorably to AMDs products and AMD has had quite a bit of trouble keeping pace with Intel. AMD needs to expand their market whereas Intel needs to focus on making as much money as they can while AMD is struggling. This allows them to do R&D and optimize their products and ensure that they have good enough yields when the market for 64 bit processors has some volume. Then suddenly you need 64 bit to read your email and surf the web and Intel just happens to have this P5 with some 64 bit support. In the end, Intel will as usual be considered a safe choice.
I've seen studies (on large industrial systems) where the average amount of code written per day actually drops below 1 line of code during maintenance (and most development today is maintenance). Writing new code is fun but maintaining old code is hard and typically requires lots of research. Inexperienced programmers always find this hard to believe whereas I've heard several senior software architects confirm that this was probably correct for their organizations.
I installed it once on a PII233 with 64 MB (just to see what would happen). It worked (and reasonably fast too). I even got office XP going (lots of swapping though).
Debian doesn't write most of the source packages. All this shows is that what microsoft produces by itself is pretty much equal (in terms of size) to a full blown debian distribution representing the collective efforts of thousands of individuals and organizations.
Hey, it's just a prototype/demo application that conforms to the standard. If you don't like it write your own in your favorite language (and feel free to borrow as much as you like from the source code).
Besides, this kind of thing would typically be used in a web application environment, where C typically is not the language of choice (mostly because core dumps are not acceptable in a server environment). And guess what, sun happens to produce some of the most popular tools and techniques for web applications (mostly Java based).
It seems that your sysadmins need to get a clue. Don't blame their victims.
Setup the server in such a way that client computers can easily access files on it (e.g. by running samba). Running stuff locally is almost always faster so there must be something preventing the developers from doing so effectively (I suspect an overzealous attitude towards windows clients). Remove that cause and your problems are gone.
The sysadmins are costing your company money at the moment because they prevent a development team from working with the tools they need in an effective way.
I'd have to agree. Using ascii to store highly complex structured information is rather foolish. It results in all sorts of problems with respect to consistency, correctness, etc.
We have much better ways of storing and editing structured information these days.
You really should check out Jedit. It has plugins for all the things you mention and much more.
To highlight a few things:
syntax colouring for at least 60 languages built in (could be more by now)
Plugin support for nearly every programming related task you can think of (debugging, style checking, refactoring (was not finished last time I checked)?, code completion, code fragment insertion, project management, catching output from console, testing, ant integration,...).
Even without plugins it is still a good editor that can support various keybindings of other popular editors (vi and emacs I think)
Understandably, people are biased against java client software. However, Jedit is worth the 10 seconds it takes to launch it. Aside from emacs, I don't think there are many editors which are that extensible and have that many extensions.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like you are connecting to shareaza using a gnutella client that doesn't support the new protocol. So basically what you are observing here is that the original gnutella (i.e. 0.4 and 0.6) is indeed not a very efficient protocol. Gnutella 2 actually compresses some of the protocol traffic which significantly boosts the efficiency of the ultrapeers.
I've heard a lot of strange things in my 28 years on this planet. Running netscape 4.x for stability reasons however is new to me. I can't begin to imagine the stuff you missed out on the past half decade or so. The phoenix nightlies I run, last longer than any version of netscape 4.x ever did on my machines.
:-( so I reluctantly refrain from using such features. I don't care about IE 5.5 and lower anymore (and nor does MS I should add, see the register for details :-) but if it works in those browsers that's fine with me.
:-).
The approach of using dreamweaver or otherwise include netscape 4.x code doesn't scale up. It is much more cost effective to tell netscape 4.x users to go f*ck themselves (and most of them seriously need to get a clue by now). If only netscape 4 didn't bother to interpret css, it would be much easier for webdevelopers. I've converted my sites to XHTML 1.0 strict in the past year so netscape 4 should be able to process the html. Unfortunately it messes up badly trying to do stuff like css positioning. It's beyond hopeless trying to work around that since it requires a totally different approach to modeling your page. I refuse to do browser detection and only test in IE 6 and mozilla (not in that order, phoenix is my primary browser). Working like this I can use like 98% of the standards and safely assume things work in most common browsers. I never tested or saw my sites in Safari. Yet I'm fully confident that either it will display everything as intended or it still has some undiscovered bugs that will be fixed in the near future. Unfortunately IE 6 doesn't support some of the cooler things like "position: float". However, telling IE 6 users to go f*ck themselves would effectively eliminate 80-90% of the visitors
I'd be very pleased if slashdot dropped the table layout. As long time proponents of open standards, OSS, and generally cool nerdy stuff (i.e. stuff that matters) it is disgraceful that they are actually still whoring themselves supporting obsolete proprietary netscape shit. Even the original netscape developers turned their backs on that stuff and chose not to support layers in mozilla!
If you're still on netscape 4, you're probably better of using netscape 3. As I remember it was always more stable and it does a much better job of rendering XHTML since it doesn't understand CSS at all. Alternatively you can install opera (if your os supports it). I've found it to be quite fast on an old windows 95 machine with only 16 MB. And it even renders my sites correctly
I have actually heard a high placed member of the Bush administration threaten to attack 'un-authorized' satelite links. If you're a war reporter in Baghdad, that pretty much means you're a target unless you conform to the Bush propaganda. There currently is no independent journalist in Baghdad. My guess is that it will take years before we hear about the real collateral damage, just like with the previous gulf war.
google bases itself mostly on news sources from the US and US allies. Hardly unbiased.
Assuming that these data streams have something in common you'd probably spend a week or so developing a generic, maintainable solution using e.g. SAX and reuse that in each particular case. The adhoc solution of using regular expressions probably saves you time on the short term, but on the long term you'll probably keep reinventing the wheel.
However, this is all beside the point since we've now established that there's nothing wrong with XML but that it's just the tools to manipulate it which are still lacking in certain ways. I'd be the first to agree that the SAX and DOM APIs are a bit overkill for some situations. However, concluding from that that XML is not a good solution goes too far IMHO.
Not only is it a standard, it appears to be the only widely accepted standard. Not using it currently boils down to going back to the hacked together, generally incompatible data formats of the past. Reinventing the wheel still is a popular way of passing time but it has never been very productive.
People often fail to see the point of widely adopted standards but the bottom line is that it makes it easier to reuse functionality that confirms to the standard. There are now both SAX and DOM based parsers for most common programming languages. Basically if you spend some time figuring out how these APIs work you can work with XML from almost any language.
That is not the problem. What is a problem is that everybody is introducing their own xml based languages and in many cases forget to publish the appropriate xml schema/dtd.
Now the guy who is complaining here is a perl programmer who has to process data that is passed to him in XML form. His point is that it easier for him to throw together a bunch of regular expressions to do his thing than it is to use some off the shelf validating parser with a generic DOM/SAX based API. Good for him that is job is so simple that a bunch of regular expressions do the trick for him. I'd hate to maintain his code though and I suspect he doesn't have much reuse beyond the odd copy paste.
The amount of bandwidth is not that large. I just did a quick check on my spam folder. The median size of a message is something like 6KB. About one third is larger than 10KB and the largest (an exception) was like 200KB. At 100 messages/user/day we are talking about 600KB. Maybe a whopping 1 MB on a bad day. In any case you won't find back that kind of bandwidth on your ISP bill. If you do, change ISP.
For mobile users, I'd suggest using serverside filtering (e.g. Spamassasin) and IMAP (only download the headers). That should eliminate most of the performance problems
This could be done very easily by combining limewire with e.g. the aglet tools (a mobile agents api) from IBM. For normal users the use would be limited but you can easily create private gnutella networks (for example set up a network with some research colleagues). Mobile agents and grid computing are both solutions in search of a problem. Combined they might actually find some use somewhere.
Actually Gregor Kiczalez (AOP inventor) comes from a Lisp background and first experimented with AOP in CLOS (which he helped create as well).
The problem with lisp is that it never really escaped from the computer labs. There are some nice lisp applications (e.g. emacs) but it's very much a niche language. That's why AspectJ was created: to draw attention of normal C++/Java programmers to AOP.
Interestingly the inventor of the hungarian notation (Charles Simonyi) has recently teamed up with Gregor Kiczalez (inventor of AOP) to start a new company.
Actually new paradigms like this are extremely usefull because we are rapidly approaching the ceiling of what we can do using modern technology. There are now many companies developing/maintaining software systems that have multiple millions of lines of code (of which an increasing amount is either Java or C++). Typically these large systems are a nightmare to maintain and require the fulltime attention of extremely large development teams (up to 1000 programmers) to keep them up to date. Any technique that can help factor out logical units of behavior into nice maintainable modules of code is extremely useful to these companies because that allows them to put more programmers on creating new functionality rather than maintaining existing code.
This situation has caused researchers to go and look for alternatives to the traditional OO and procedural paradigms. Particularly IBM has contributed a lot in this research area (e.g. multi dimensional separation of concerns and subject oriented programming). However, none of these approaches ever made it out of the labs into the real world. In 1997 Kiczalez et al. from Xerox labs published a paper on AOP at Ecoop '97. At the time they were using CLOS (an OO lisp dialect) for the handfull of toy examples in the paper. Kiczalez had the vision that if he was ever going to get real life experience with real AOP systems he would have to have a compiler that was usable by regular programmers. Hence the AspectJ project was born. For more than three years the aspectJ project has worked with a rapidly growing community to create a compiler. Some time ago the 1.0 version was released and since then there have been updates to improve the compiler, integrate into popular development tools and resolve some minor language issues.
AspectJ extends on what Java developers already know (you can compile your existing java code with it) and adds useful AOP features to the Java language. At 1.0, the compiler is stable, the language has been tuned by experts to be useful in day to day programming and you can actually make very nice systems with it.
However, AspectJ is currently also a very powerful language that maybe offers programmers too much power (just like C++ is a lethal weapon in the hands of those who do not understand it). So yes, it is easy to create spagheti code. However it is also easy to convert existing spagheti code to nicely modularized code where existing techniques would make that very hard to do. You just need to understand what you are doing.
AOP is still new. Good design patterns for it have yet to emerge. It is currently unclear how to model an aspect in UML, development methodology has yet to adjust to using this new technique and this is only the first implementation of a new paradigm. It's not designed to be perfect but to be usable with existing Java code. Other AOP implementations exist and are in various state of development/usability but AspectJ currently is the most mature of these approaches.
Still curious? Download the compiler and browse through the examples.
The US government is currently waging "a war against terror". Billions of dollars are allocated for this war which mostly consists of intelligence gathering. Then there is a "war on drugs" which is also costing billions of dollars annually. This war on drugs also involves massive attempts to gather intelligence. Probably more people are making a living tapping other people in the US then are tapped in the Netherlands.
I don't see how the US government would be doing all of this without violating peoples constitutional rights on an enormous scale. Probably the US government no longer bothers to go by the book when it comes to wiretapping. If I lived in the US that would worry me.
The people who created ant would probably disagree. Shell scripts have their use in some places. Mixing configuration and functionality however is a stupid idea. You create all sorts of dependencies and basically is the primary reason UNIX sysadmins are so expensive.
It would be fun to see them embarras themselves trying to enforce this.
Is this a serious question? You actually still are on java 1.1? That allows me to draw two conclusions: you don't care about performance and you don't require advanced graphics manipulation. Otherwise you would have long ago kicked out the MS JVM and started using the Java 2D library to manipulate your graphics. Of course it is never too late. .Net has the same problem as Java currently: no operating system comes installed with it (including windows XP). .Net has an additional problem: it's only available for windows and comes with lots of strings attached. Good, mature Java implementations are available on all major platforms.
SUN's Java has the added advantage for you that it will probably run your existing apps (barring the MS/J++ crap you probably put in them).
Actually the pathetic attempts of the linux community at trying to come up with a good alternative for outlook are the living proof of how much better outlook was all along. Versions of outlook before the 2000 version and outlook express had severe security issues that could be addressed easily by installing virusscanners (irresponsible not to do on a windows PC), using the patches (also irresponsible not to do) and configuring the software properly.
I've never been affected by an email virus. I know several people who were affected by a virus. One of them was a computer scientist who actually believed that the sender of a particular email was in love with him, had no virus scanner and double clicked the exe file. If my sister does that, I understand because she is clueless about computers. I would however silenty swear at the incompetence of her sysadmin (not me). If a computer scientist does that I silently think "you stupid idiot, didn't your mummy tell you not to accept candy from stangers?".
Freedom of speech is not theft. Besides you don't have to listen. And the amount of resources you lose over spam is negligable. Try calculating the associated cost in terms of KB/month for the spam you receive and compare that to your ISP bill and the amount of bandwidth you use anyway. I strongly suspect that one of these numbers is absolutely dwarfed by the other. Any ISP claiming that spam is taking 50% of their bandwidth should get a clue and install the appropriate software to address the problem. Probably they can save even more by hiring more competent staff.
Your time is precious too, I know. There are plenty of client and serverside solutions that eliminate virtually all spam on your PC. I just installed a spam assassin pop3 proxy on one of my windows machines. Together with the spamnet plugin I already use in Outlook, that eliminates something like 98% of the spam.
Somehow, the people complaining the most about spam are either busy and ignorant business people or unix sysadmins who should know how to fix the problem at the root. I spent way more time reading about spam and its alleged severely negative consequences for world peace and economy on slashdot than I have actually spent time separating spam from real mail during the ten or so years I have used email (and I receive lots of both spam and mail). Until half a year ago I didn't use any automated spam removal which implied that I had to use the delete key up to ten times a day while I was processing email anyway. If spam bothers you, you may need to consider that that may be a symptom of a bigger problem you have. Probably there's a lot of other stuff that bothers you, maybe your social life sucks too. Who knows? Deal with these problems and you'll be a happier person.
If some kids can earn a few dollars because some nut is willing to pay them for the privilege of using their bandwidth I have no problems with that.
Intel is behaving a bit like IBM when the PC was invented. IBM had all the pieces and managed to lose their position as a market leader in no time, mostly because they didn't understand the market they were in.
Intel currently owns the market for low end workstations and servers. If you need a web server or a cad station you get a nice P4 with some memory. This is also the market where the need for 64 bit will first come. At some point in time some people will want to put 8 GB of memory in their machine. AMD will be able to deliver that in a few months, Intel won't.
My guess is that Intel is really not that stupid (if they are, sell your intel shares) and has a product anyway but wants to recover their investment on their 32 bit architecture before they introduce the 64 bit enhanced version of their P4. The current P4 compares quite favorably to AMDs products and AMD has had quite a bit of trouble keeping pace with Intel. AMD needs to expand their market whereas Intel needs to focus on making as much money as they can while AMD is struggling. This allows them to do R&D and optimize their products and ensure that they have good enough yields when the market for 64 bit processors has some volume. Then suddenly you need 64 bit to read your email and surf the web and Intel just happens to have this P5 with some 64 bit support. In the end, Intel will as usual be considered a safe choice.
I've seen studies (on large industrial systems) where the average amount of code written per day actually drops below 1 line of code during maintenance (and most development today is maintenance). Writing new code is fun but maintaining old code is hard and typically requires lots of research. Inexperienced programmers always find this hard to believe whereas I've heard several senior software architects confirm that this was probably correct for their organizations.
I installed it once on a PII233 with 64 MB (just to see what would happen). It worked (and reasonably fast too). I even got office XP going (lots of swapping though).
Debian doesn't write most of the source packages. All this shows is that what microsoft produces by itself is pretty much equal (in terms of size) to a full blown debian distribution representing the collective efforts of thousands of individuals and organizations.
Hey, it's just a prototype/demo application that conforms to the standard. If you don't like it write your own in your favorite language (and feel free to borrow as much as you like from the source code).
Besides, this kind of thing would typically be used in a web application environment, where C typically is not the language of choice (mostly because core dumps are not acceptable in a server environment). And guess what, sun happens to produce some of the most popular tools and techniques for web applications (mostly Java based).
It seems that your sysadmins need to get a clue. Don't blame their victims.
Setup the server in such a way that client computers can easily access files on it (e.g. by running samba). Running stuff locally is almost always faster so there must be something preventing the developers from doing so effectively (I suspect an overzealous attitude towards windows clients). Remove that cause and your problems are gone.
The sysadmins are costing your company money at the moment because they prevent a development team from working with the tools they need in an effective way.
I'd have to agree. Using ascii to store highly complex structured information is rather foolish. It results in all sorts of problems with respect to consistency, correctness, etc.
We have much better ways of storing and editing structured information these days.
To highlight a few things:
Understandably, people are biased against java client software. However, Jedit is worth the 10 seconds it takes to launch it. Aside from emacs, I don't think there are many editors which are that extensible and have that many extensions.