I work for a company (www.gx.nl) that sells its own cms. Let me just summarize that we are more worried about other CMS companies than open source alternatives right now. OSS CMSs are just not that competitive right now. The reason for this is that there's more to a cms than installing the software on a server. That is the really easy part. The difficult part is actually developing the site to the customers specification (look and feel, dynamic functionality etc.), migrating his old content and integrating with backend systems. Then you also need to make it really easy for them to edit the content & layout and on top of that you need to continue to support their installation.
This requires expertise and technical solutions. We provide both. Most of our customers do not actually care about what the software is or how it works. They just give us specifications and expect a working site that they can add content to effortlessly: that's what they pay us for. They neither have the expertise nor the desire to hand tailor some OSS system. License cost compared to development cost is negligable so most cost conscious customers will gladly cough up the license fees if they are convinced that it will cut down the total cost, especially if a nice support contract is bundled.
Often we find that a customer is actually using some tailor made system (sometimes based on OSS components). Usually the reason they are coming to us is the lack of flexibility, soaring maintenance cost of their existing software.
Well the effect wasn't any different for my friend: he lost all his data. As far as I am aware there are no rules and the PC has been a MS dominated platform since the early eighties. Dataloss bugs are bad and if they are known, they should be solved. Red hat has declined to do so.
That's pretty bad. I recommended FC2 to a windows fanboy some time back. Now he won't touch linux ever again because he encountered this bug (and lost his windows partition). He was furious when he discovered this had been a known issue for a long time. I can't really blame him.
RTFM is nice if you know the thing is going to nuke your ntfs partition (which in my friend's case would be the end of his attempt to install the distribution). The point is that most endusers don't expect things to blow up in their face on something as crucial as the installer. IMHO Red Hat should have fixed this before they released their distro. It's pretty embarrassing that they actually know this thing might end up nuking your ntfs partition and still give it full thumbs up. This is bad for their image as a supplier of well tested, reliable software.
I think the rumours alone warrant a recount. If only just to disprove them. The fact that nobody seems to be interested in disproving what are very serious allegations is more worrysome then any outcome of the election.
99% of security bugs are about exploiting buffer overflows. It doesn't matter how stupid a Java programmer is because as long as he sticks to Java he will not create a buffer overflow.
By your definition the programmers of, amongst others, sendmail, the linux kernel, ssh, apache, bind are incompetent and the compiler didn't protect us from them for the long list of bugs which are still being found in these programs.
Before eclipse, netbeans was the only free IDE that could compete with its commercial counterparts. The 1.x and 2.x versions were pretty OK compared to other free IDEs. The 1.x generation was the first time I preferred an IDE over an editor/compiler combination. Especially the GUI editor was one of my favorites (and having done swing programming manually, I am very critical of such tools).
Then eclipse came and especially in its 2.x version and 3.x version showed the weaknesses in netbeans (usability & GUI performance). Fast forward to 2004. I'm using eclipse 3.0.1 on a daily basis with some plugins and I'm reasonably happy with it. Performance is a bit sluggish on my (soon to be replaced) 1Ghz pIII but acceptable on smaller projects.
I disliked all of the netbeans 3.x stuff, including 3.6 which I only gave a brief glance. But I tried netbeans 4.0 beta the other day and I liked what I saw. Out of the box it supports a lot of stuff that eclipse simply does not support (basically all the j2ee stuff, ant integration, xml, html). You can get most of these things in eclipse by installing commercial plugins but if you want everything for free it's pretty hard to find e.g. jsp support, good servlet container integration (more than the pathetic tomcat start/stop support in some eclipse plugins), etc. The netbeans people already had most of this in the 2.x and 3.x generations and the functionality has been much improved since then. Also the features are well integrated: you can create a jsp file from a template, use autocompletion to hook it up to your java stuff and deploy it to tomcat with the debugger attached. Doing the same in eclipse requires a lot of manual intervention since eclipse 3.0.1 doesn't understand tomcat, jsp, deployment descriptors and debugging a running tomcat server. It resorts to plaintext editors for most of these things.
Also, to my surprise, netbeans was very fast on my old pc at work. It effortlessly handled large projects which eclipse is having problems with on the same machine. This is definately progress from 3.x. Browsing in 3000+ loc java files in eclipse is a pain but netbeans seems to handle this much better. IMHO the whole swing vs swt performance debate is over, neither party won. Eclipse is not faster for the same tasks in netbeans and both are resource hogs.
Not all is well though. Eclipse has much better refactoring support and seems to have the better java editor. In the end, a java programmer spends lots of time editing java code and that is what eclipse is very good at. All the other stuff is nice to have but not essential for powerusers like me.
In addition, some interesting tools are under development at eclipse which will again level the playing field for eclipse. The webtools project for instance intends to bring lots of j2ee goodies to eclipse.
You are probably right. Historically, fundamentalists have shown great resistance to any kind of scientific evidence, facts etc. There is no scientific proof they are wrong. It's just that there's no scientific proof that they are right either.
The latter is more relevant (for a scientist) because science is about disproving hypotheses until you run out of ways to do so or until they are proven irrelevant.
Creationism, being a slightly rediculous hyphothesis to begin with, clearly falls in the latter category: it is an irrelevant theory because it has been carefully constructed to support what the bible says instead of what we observe in scientific research. Worse, it is constantly being adjusted (as we learn more) by so called creationists to convince non scientists that it is in fact a scientifically sound theory. Some of these creationists even have scientific careers though I wouldn't trust many of them to pull off something like cloning a sheep.
Creationists derive their legitimacy from the very thing they are arguing against: science. They have their own little journals, professors, they take part in bonafide research projects and it can be quite hard to see the difference for non scientists. However, science has nothing to do with believes other than proving that what you believe is not supported by facts. Don't show you are right but demonstrate that you have done everything to prove your hypothesis wrong and maybe a scientist will believe you.
Science provides loads of facts and means to observe facts. Only if you ignore those facts, creationism makes sense. Scientific theories have to be consistent with everything we observe.
The creationist hyphothesis posed here was that because there are two different types of eyes in nature they cannot have the same ancestor (which from a darwinistic point of view is convenient rather than necessary). The motivation for this hypothesis comes not from any facts which need explaining but from the notion that something as complex as the eye must have been invented rather than evolved. This notion developed itself as creationsists were examining darwinian predictions which seemed so improbable that they would support the overall hypothesis that in fact darwinism is nonsense.
By showing that in fact there was a creature which at least had the building blocks for constructing both types of eyes, this hyphothesis has been proven wrong. Either the observation that there was such a creature is wrong or the hyphothesis is wrong. Both facts cannot be right at the same time. Case closed for the scientists.
Of course it is tempting (for a non creationist) to extrapolate the conclusion that in fact creatinism itself is nonsense (rather than darwinism). It's certainly true that many other creationist myths have been disproven in a similar way. However, as creationists are likely to point out: the observation could be wrong as well. And even if it's right it is all part of a bigger plan. Creationists never run out of explanations, no matter what the facts are.
There's a lot maybes in your reply and some vague references. Granted, I didn't provide any references either but given the huge amount material out there, it is actually quite easy to prove that george bush has lied about a great deal of topics relevant to this election: I can afford to be lazy in this respect and you can't because Bush is on the defensive here.
The point is, Bush supporters don't care that Bush lies. Worse they want to believe the lies (because if the lies are true they are not stupid for believing them). I think Bush was the first president to be compared to a monkey so convincingly (during the 2000 campaign already). Also Russia, Germany, France and the UK (and many other US allies) have all been embarrased by high ranking politicians making remarks about George Bush competence as a president (recently in the UK for instance). Aside from Reagan who was ridiculed abroad on a much smaller scale I don't think any foreign leader has ever had to endure such an embarrassing, widespread doubt about his competence.
Your last paragraph is characteristic of the Bush campaign: in denial of obvious things, a few vague references (one of them is so obvously engineered to look convincing that you'd have to be a fool to believe anything on that page) and no facts whatsoever. Trying to portray slahdotters as potentially less educated/smart than the average US population is bordering on being insulting. But maybe you are just speculating.
It's no secret that Bush portrays Kerry as overly intellectual & liberal: he's said so explicitly. So what's your point anyway? Is the assumption that a slashdot audience, which may safely be assumed to consist mostly of well educated males between 20 and 40, is pro Kerry so far fetched? I don't think so. There's a lot of evidence in the form of polls, hordes of scientists (including some nobel prize winners) supporting Kerry, demographics on where the republican party supporters come from, etc. So IMHO that provides some factual basis for the theory that Kerry is likely to appeal to well educated, non Fox watching, slashdot reading citizens.
I agree It's dangerous to put things black and white. However, I do notice that most arguments for Bush in threads like these attack the pro Kerry attitude instead of giving us sound arguments about why we're supposedly wrong about Bush & Kerry.
Bush has had to deal with some specific and very serious accusations. He's accused of being a poor leader, a liar, a proxy for some dark neocon movement, of having a low iq and many other traits we're not looking for in the next president of the USA. Before Bush I don't think it would have been very polite or appropriate to attack someone like that. However, given his lack of a good response to any of these accusations (he has chosen the way of misrepresenting rather than addressing issues) I don't think that it is very surprising that people who bother to inform themselves about stuff that matters are mostly pro Kerry.
Maybe a slashdot poll on this matter would be nice. I have a feeling that Bush would loose badly (even if only american slashdotters would vote) but please prove me wrong.
10% is more than enough (in fact todays marketshare is apparently already enough) to convince any site developer depending on advertisement revenue or ecommerce revenue that he shouldn't lose those precious customers. It's enough for customers to complain if the site they bought from Leet Hackers Inc. doesn't work in some browsers (and users complain, loudly).
10% matters enough that MS has started to convert www.microsoft.com to something that is quite nearly xhtml compliant and renders fine in mozilla. Even they realize that some of their customers use something else than IE.
The only sites I am aware of that don't work in mozilla tend to be targeted to windows users (typically authored by inexperienced developers and painfull to browse even in IE), older frontpage stuff or legacy stuff like 1st generation banking sites (most decent banks have since fixed their software and if yours hasn't: vote with your money). You're not missing much these days if you browse mozilla (and you miss a lot if you browse IE).
Sure, MS won the browser war but they lost the war over webstandards. Nobody uses their proprietary extensions and the technical roadmap for the internet is now drawn by others because MS has effectively stopped developing their browser. And now their marketshare will start to shrink unless they do something.
It's especially infuriating if you consider that Donald Rumsfeld probably sold these WMDs to Saddam Hussein personally in the early eighties. The US were Saddams best friend when he used his WMDs (compliments of Ronnie Reagan) on his own population in the early eighties and Donald Rumsfeld and other supporters of the neocon movement were involved much more than they would like to admit right now.
On the other hand, the mono developers did have full access to all the research papers from sun that have been published on JIT compilation, garbage collection, dynamic compilation etc. It was clear from the beginning that JIT compilation was the only way to make mono perform. You could say that SUN did the hard work for them.
I haven't seen any decisive language feature that gives C# any edge over Java. Most of it is syntactic sugar which is nice to have but not really that important if you have code completion & refactoring tools.
But indeed it is impressive that mono's performance is that good already.
If you'd know what dynamic compilation is, you'd fully expect the opposite. I'm only surprised by the difference in numbers. GCJ is doing much worse than I expected. From the looks of it, the only times it comes close to competing is when executing simplistic numerical benchmarks (which are presumably easy to optimize). What you are seeing here is that runtime optimization actually works when doing real-life complicated stuff.
The use of the word interpreter is really suggestive. A compiler is nothing more than a static interpreter. The only two differences with a JIT compiler is that it permanently stores the results of the interpretation and that it has much less information to predict the performance of the code it is generating. A static compiler will do well on simplistic programs whereas a run-time optimizing jit compiler will be able to always match the performance of a static compiler (simply by running the same optimizations) or beat it (by applying optimizations to address observed performance bottlenecks in the running program). Of course this costs some computation time but you can take that into account as well when deciding to optimize or not.
In simplistic scenarios such as simple benchmarks, there won't be much to gain from run-time optimization. So performance is about equal with a slight advantage for the static compiler because it is not wasting resources on figuring out how to optimize the program. Despite this GCJ's performance is disappointing even on these kinds of benchmarks.
Re:Every political story on Slashdot has a Dem. sl
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's hard not to be slightly biased to the democrats. As a european I find it mind boggling that a guy like Bush can become president, basically do everything his opponents feared he would do (and much worse) and still convince about half of the electorate that he's doing an ok job. Clinton lied about a woman, Bush lied about a lot more.
Personally I think America really deserves another four years of Bush (and the associated prolonged economical problems). They've been arrogant, dominant and foolish. Four years ought to be enough to at least double the deficit, kill what's left of US industry and alienate the rest of the world insofar that has not been accomplished yet. Unfortunately, that would likely affect other countries (such as my own) so it would be better for me and my fellow non US world citizens if Kerry were to win.
If you are planning to vote Nader, just remember that neither Bush nor Nader needs your vote. Nader doesn't expect to win and Bush will cheer you as a disgruntled democrat that won't put any votes in Kerry's pocket. It's as simple as that.
This election is about selecting the next US president. You have four options: not voting at all, voting Nader, voting Bush and voting Kerry. Three of those options will help Bush more than Kerry, so really there's only two choices: Bush or Kerry. You can support Bush by not voting, by voting for Nader (which is essentially the same thing) or by voting for Bush directly. You can only support Kerry by voting for him. If enough people get off their ass to vote (whatever they want to vote) on the election day, Kerry will easily win this election. All the current polls take into account a siginificant number of mostly poorly educated americans not voting. Bush depends on those people staying at home because these are mostly potential democratic votes.
I know what conservative is and Bush is quite the opposite. I also know what liberal is and it is quite different from radical communism (which is what Bush seems to believe). Yet, somehow in the perception of the republican party (which used to be a liberal conservative party) this has all become distorted. Kerry is being accused of being too liberal whereas Bush et al. choose to label themselves neocons. In fact Bush et al. push a radical right wing agenda which has little to do with keeping things as they are or were in the past (i.e. what you'd expect from a conservative party). Conservatism is motivated from the idea that things are fine as they are now (or were fine a couple of years back) and that politics should strive to keep things as fine as they are.
Liberalism instead is about personal freedom and values which underly the french revolution and the US constitution. Values like freedom of speech & religion for example. Or things like separation of state, church and law. The patriot act has a severe impact on freedom of speech and personal freedom. Also the radical christian right agenda has featured prominently in domestic policies the past four years. Christianity is now the defacto state religion of the USA.
Under the pretense of a war on terrorism, fair trial has been denied to thousands of US citizens (who were locked away for wearing beards and resembling Osama Bin Laden too much). Also the US has placed itself above the law by violating international laws (by not adhering to rules outlined in the Geneva convention) as well as frustrating the attempts to form an international court of law.
Liberalism is an idea very alien to neocons, to the point where they regard it as an apparently insulting label for democrats). Neocons are against personal choice and in favour of limiting freedom under the pretense of protecting it.
Labeling Kerry as a liberal conservatist would be a fairly accurate IMHO. He's nowhere near the radical socialist some neocon republicans believe him to be. International relations alone should be a reason to vote for him. IMHO diplomatic relations with europe, russia and the middle east would improve nearly as much as that they have deteriorated (which is a lot) over the past few years as soon as Kerry enters the white house.
Neocons are entitled to their opinion of course but I don't believe that many conservative americans are fully aware of what neoconservatism is all about.
BTW. I should disclose that I'm a European. I don't have the right to vote in the US. We'll know the outcome in a couple of months.
This is not my idea of KISS and I don't agree with most of your points.
Point 5 is downright idiotic. HTML is not executable by it self and unless you use a very old version of outlook (in which case you are asking for trouble), any javascript, vbscript or whatever will not be executed. Most virus mails are formatted as plaintext btw. The virus is almost always an attachment.
Wireless is not very secure out of the box but you can lock it down pretty effectively. I'd say the whole point of wireless is to 'introduce additional ways your system/data can be accessed'.
Point 2 is nice for performance but a good firewall takes care of security equally well.
Point 3 is a no brainer.
Point 4 is what everybody seems to be saying these days. If you keep your software up to date you are reasonably safe however.
Point 6 is not necessary as long as you use a firewall.
I tackle security in a more pragmatic fashion. I don't like removing features for security reasons. The key is to be conscious of what is running on your PC and to keep that under control. I ran without a firewall (not even NAT) & virusscanners throughout all the major virus and worms outbreaks over the past few years. None of them affected me because I knew how to configure outlook, shutdown services, etc. It's really that simple.
These days I use thunderbird (because I like its features) and I find that the winxp sp2 firewall is unobtrusive enough that I can tolerate it running in the background. I still don't have a virusscanner for performance reasons. This is small but calculated risk. I'm aware of several open ports on my machine but that's because I installed software which needs those ports to function. Again this is a calculated risk, the bottom line is that those ports are open because I want them open.
I can afford to do this because I know what I'm doing. Ordinary users should rely on firewalls, virusscanners and spyware checkers to stay safe.
I think the reverse question is more relevant. Why exactly are you sticking with obsolete stuff like CVS? Maybe you have valid reasons (i.e. maybe there's something that should be implemented in subversion)?
I use subversion on a daily basis and I find it is much less a PITA than CVS which we still use for older projects (we never did a migrate but just started using subversion for the new stuff).
Fast & painless merges, branches & tags, transactional commits, versionmanaged file & directory names are some of the advantages are some of the reasons you should be adopting subversion.
Seems to be really write once run anywhere where I work. We develop on win32, we deploy to sun, HP, & wintel (basically any server environment capable of running java). Also we support both 1.3 & 1.4 generation VMs. I'm not sure where this bullshit about write once run anywhere comes from. You'd have to be very thick to still compare things to the long discontinued Microsoft VM which is what I assume you are referring to (last version released around 1998?). We depend on some post 1.3 APIs so we don't support 1.2 and earlier. IMHO java compatibility between platforms is much better than e.g. compatibility between different versions of gcc on the same machine & OS. There are some well documented differences with older versions and some commercial J2EE application servers are buggy (we generally prefer tomcat/jboss for this reason).
The reason people don't bother with w3c compliant webpages is that there is no obvious advantage. Slashdot works fine in all modern browsers and aside from some bandwidth that could be saved by going fully XHTML/CSS there is little to be gained (well there are a number of advantages but they're obviously lost on the editors). With data it is different, just look at how quickly RSS & ATOM are being adopted. There's an obvious advantage because having a feed on your site makes it easier for readers to learn about new content on your site. It doesn't matter that there are multiple competing standards because the tools that matter are standards neutral (most feed readers can handle most RSS and ATOM variants). If there is a sufficiently large enough group of people using a particular (open) format, it is worthwhile to program functionality to do stuff with this data.
The RSS world is also spawning some interesting semantic things such as track back links and perma links. Not all of these things will survive but there already are these mini semantic webs emerging. These networks are growing in size and scope. People write tools to search and navigate them in various and sometimes unexpected ways. Whenever one tool involves multiple networks, effectively a larger one emerges.
IMHO the semantic web is not something that will be released by some big software company or standards body like the w3c but rather something that will emerge out of the chaos of different standards, formats that are out there today. There will not be some monolithic onthology that explains everything but rather there will be many domain specific, simple onthologies that may be abstracted from by tools so that relations between datasets may be established and explored without requiring much changes to the data. Where meaningful relations exist, tools and standards will emerge to exploit these relations.
Ten years ago I had a 80 MB harddrive in a 486, I think you are about a factor 10 wrong here since my current pc came with a 80GB drive two years ago. The pc before that had 40GB (I bought it in 2000) and before that 4GB ('97), before that 210MB ('95). If I'd buy one now it would be 160/200 GB so that would be about twice what you'd get two years ago. See the trend?
So if you extrapolate to 2004, 100x 200 GB is about 20TB in 2014. 2010 I'd expect about 5TB. The 1TB harddisks should appear around 2007/2008. That is all assuming the growth trend remains the same which is debatable.
It didn't last a full 24 hours on my machine (a windows box). I installed it on a whim last night. At first I was rather pleased with it but then the error messages started appearing (both icq and msn). Also the GTK library for windows is very buggy. I had some problems with tooltips that just wouldn't disappear and the attempt at antialiasing made the GTK widgets stand out as notably blurry compared to the rest of the desktop.
So I am back using miranda-im which does a much better job in being both less intrusive and more feature rich. I've been using it for more than a year and it seems very stable. I was wrong in assuming gaim would offer similar stability.
Nobody forces you to install extensions. The point of firefox is that you get a minimal amount of sane defaults and then add the stuff you need through extensions.
Re:Excellent work - how about an SFTP client? :)
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FTP Client For Firefox
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· Score: 3, Informative
sftp would probably require some modifications to the necko component that takes care of all network stuff in mozilla. Try filezilla (windows only) if you need a decent sftp client.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a company (www.gx.nl) that sells its own cms. Let me just summarize that we are more worried about other CMS companies than open source alternatives right now. OSS CMSs are just not that competitive right now. The reason for this is that there's more to a cms than installing the software on a server. That is the really easy part. The difficult part is actually developing the site to the customers specification (look and feel, dynamic functionality etc.), migrating his old content and integrating with backend systems. Then you also need to make it really easy for them to edit the content & layout and on top of that you need to continue to support their installation.
This requires expertise and technical solutions. We provide both. Most of our customers do not actually care about what the software is or how it works. They just give us specifications and expect a working site that they can add content to effortlessly: that's what they pay us for. They neither have the expertise nor the desire to hand tailor some OSS system. License cost compared to development cost is negligable so most cost conscious customers will gladly cough up the license fees if they are convinced that it will cut down the total cost, especially if a nice support contract is bundled.
Often we find that a customer is actually using some tailor made system (sometimes based on OSS components). Usually the reason they are coming to us is the lack of flexibility, soaring maintenance cost of their existing software.
I think that is the problem they are trying to address.
Well the effect wasn't any different for my friend: he lost all his data. As far as I am aware there are no rules and the PC has been a MS dominated platform since the early eighties. Dataloss bugs are bad and if they are known, they should be solved. Red hat has declined to do so.
That's pretty bad. I recommended FC2 to a windows fanboy some time back. Now he won't touch linux ever again because he encountered this bug (and lost his windows partition). He was furious when he discovered this had been a known issue for a long time. I can't really blame him.
RTFM is nice if you know the thing is going to nuke your ntfs partition (which in my friend's case would be the end of his attempt to install the distribution). The point is that most endusers don't expect things to blow up in their face on something as crucial as the installer. IMHO Red Hat should have fixed this before they released their distro. It's pretty embarrassing that they actually know this thing might end up nuking your ntfs partition and still give it full thumbs up. This is bad for their image as a supplier of well tested, reliable software.
I think the rumours alone warrant a recount. If only just to disprove them. The fact that nobody seems to be interested in disproving what are very serious allegations is more worrysome then any outcome of the election.
99% of security bugs are about exploiting buffer overflows. It doesn't matter how stupid a Java programmer is because as long as he sticks to Java he will not create a buffer overflow.
By your definition the programmers of, amongst others, sendmail, the linux kernel, ssh, apache, bind are incompetent and the compiler didn't protect us from them for the long list of bugs which are still being found in these programs.
Before eclipse, netbeans was the only free IDE that could compete with its commercial counterparts. The 1.x and 2.x versions were pretty OK compared to other free IDEs. The 1.x generation was the first time I preferred an IDE over an editor/compiler combination. Especially the GUI editor was one of my favorites (and having done swing programming manually, I am very critical of such tools).
Then eclipse came and especially in its 2.x version and 3.x version showed the weaknesses in netbeans (usability & GUI performance). Fast forward to 2004. I'm using eclipse 3.0.1 on a daily basis with some plugins and I'm reasonably happy with it. Performance is a bit sluggish on my (soon to be replaced) 1Ghz pIII but acceptable on smaller projects.
I disliked all of the netbeans 3.x stuff, including 3.6 which I only gave a brief glance. But I tried netbeans 4.0 beta the other day and I liked what I saw. Out of the box it supports a lot of stuff that eclipse simply does not support (basically all the j2ee stuff, ant integration, xml, html). You can get most of these things in eclipse by installing commercial plugins but if you want everything for free it's pretty hard to find e.g. jsp support, good servlet container integration (more than the pathetic tomcat start/stop support in some eclipse plugins), etc. The netbeans people already had most of this in the 2.x and 3.x generations and the functionality has been much improved since then. Also the features are well integrated: you can create a jsp file from a template, use autocompletion to hook it up to your java stuff and deploy it to tomcat with the debugger attached. Doing the same in eclipse requires a lot of manual intervention since eclipse 3.0.1 doesn't understand tomcat, jsp, deployment descriptors and debugging a running tomcat server. It resorts to plaintext editors for most of these things.
Also, to my surprise, netbeans was very fast on my old pc at work. It effortlessly handled large projects which eclipse is having problems with on the same machine. This is definately progress from 3.x. Browsing in 3000+ loc java files in eclipse is a pain but netbeans seems to handle this much better. IMHO the whole swing vs swt performance debate is over, neither party won. Eclipse is not faster for the same tasks in netbeans and both are resource hogs.
Not all is well though. Eclipse has much better refactoring support and seems to have the better java editor. In the end, a java programmer spends lots of time editing java code and that is what eclipse is very good at. All the other stuff is nice to have but not essential for powerusers like me.
In addition, some interesting tools are under development at eclipse which will again level the playing field for eclipse. The webtools project for instance intends to bring lots of j2ee goodies to eclipse.
You are probably right. Historically, fundamentalists have shown great resistance to any kind of scientific evidence, facts etc. There is no scientific proof they are wrong. It's just that there's no scientific proof that they are right either.
The latter is more relevant (for a scientist) because science is about disproving hypotheses until you run out of ways to do so or until they are proven irrelevant.
Creationism, being a slightly rediculous hyphothesis to begin with, clearly falls in the latter category: it is an irrelevant theory because it has been carefully constructed to support what the bible says instead of what we observe in scientific research. Worse, it is constantly being adjusted (as we learn more) by so called creationists to convince non scientists that it is in fact a scientifically sound theory. Some of these creationists even have scientific careers though I wouldn't trust many of them to pull off something like cloning a sheep.
Creationists derive their legitimacy from the very thing they are arguing against: science. They have their own little journals, professors, they take part in bonafide research projects and it can be quite hard to see the difference for non scientists. However, science has nothing to do with believes other than proving that what you believe is not supported by facts. Don't show you are right but demonstrate that you have done everything to prove your hypothesis wrong and maybe a scientist will believe you.
Science provides loads of facts and means to observe facts. Only if you ignore those facts, creationism makes sense. Scientific theories have to be consistent with everything we observe.
The creationist hyphothesis posed here was that because there are two different types of eyes in nature they cannot have the same ancestor (which from a darwinistic point of view is convenient rather than necessary). The motivation for this hypothesis comes not from any facts which need explaining but from the notion that something as complex as the eye must have been invented rather than evolved. This notion developed itself as creationsists were examining darwinian predictions which seemed so improbable that they would support the overall hypothesis that in fact darwinism is nonsense.
By showing that in fact there was a creature which at least had the building blocks for constructing both types of eyes, this hyphothesis has been proven wrong. Either the observation that there was such a creature is wrong or the hyphothesis is wrong. Both facts cannot be right at the same time. Case closed for the scientists.
Of course it is tempting (for a non creationist) to extrapolate the conclusion that in fact creatinism itself is nonsense (rather than darwinism). It's certainly true that many other creationist myths have been disproven in a similar way. However, as creationists are likely to point out: the observation could be wrong as well. And even if it's right it is all part of a bigger plan. Creationists never run out of explanations, no matter what the facts are.
There's a lot maybes in your reply and some vague references. Granted, I didn't provide any references either but given the huge amount material out there, it is actually quite easy to prove that george bush has lied about a great deal of topics relevant to this election: I can afford to be lazy in this respect and you can't because Bush is on the defensive here.
The point is, Bush supporters don't care that Bush lies. Worse they want to believe the lies (because if the lies are true they are not stupid for believing them). I think Bush was the first president to be compared to a monkey so convincingly (during the 2000 campaign already). Also Russia, Germany, France and the UK (and many other US allies) have all been embarrased by high ranking politicians making remarks about George Bush competence as a president (recently in the UK for instance). Aside from Reagan who was ridiculed abroad on a much smaller scale I don't think any foreign leader has ever had to endure such an embarrassing, widespread doubt about his competence.
Your last paragraph is characteristic of the Bush campaign: in denial of obvious things, a few vague references (one of them is so obvously engineered to look convincing that you'd have to be a fool to believe anything on that page) and no facts whatsoever. Trying to portray slahdotters as potentially less educated/smart than the average US population is bordering on being insulting. But maybe you are just speculating.
It's no secret that Bush portrays Kerry as overly intellectual & liberal: he's said so explicitly. So what's your point anyway? Is the assumption that a slashdot audience, which may safely be assumed to consist mostly of well educated males between 20 and 40, is pro Kerry so far fetched? I don't think so. There's a lot of evidence in the form of polls, hordes of scientists (including some nobel prize winners) supporting Kerry, demographics on where the republican party supporters come from, etc. So IMHO that provides some factual basis for the theory that Kerry is likely to appeal to well educated, non Fox watching, slashdot reading citizens.
I agree It's dangerous to put things black and white. However, I do notice that most arguments for Bush in threads like these attack the pro Kerry attitude instead of giving us sound arguments about why we're supposedly wrong about Bush & Kerry.
Bush has had to deal with some specific and very serious accusations. He's accused of being a poor leader, a liar, a proxy for some dark neocon movement, of having a low iq and many other traits we're not looking for in the next president of the USA. Before Bush I don't think it would have been very polite or appropriate to attack someone like that. However, given his lack of a good response to any of these accusations (he has chosen the way of misrepresenting rather than addressing issues) I don't think that it is very surprising that people who bother to inform themselves about stuff that matters are mostly pro Kerry.
Maybe a slashdot poll on this matter would be nice. I have a feeling that Bush would loose badly (even if only american slashdotters would vote) but please prove me wrong.
10% is more than enough (in fact todays marketshare is apparently already enough) to convince any site developer depending on advertisement revenue or ecommerce revenue that he shouldn't lose those precious customers. It's enough for customers to complain if the site they bought from Leet Hackers Inc. doesn't work in some browsers (and users complain, loudly).
10% matters enough that MS has started to convert www.microsoft.com to something that is quite nearly xhtml compliant and renders fine in mozilla. Even they realize that some of their customers use something else than IE.
The only sites I am aware of that don't work in mozilla tend to be targeted to windows users (typically authored by inexperienced developers and painfull to browse even in IE), older frontpage stuff or legacy stuff like 1st generation banking sites (most decent banks have since fixed their software and if yours hasn't: vote with your money). You're not missing much these days if you browse mozilla (and you miss a lot if you browse IE).
Sure, MS won the browser war but they lost the war over webstandards. Nobody uses their proprietary extensions and the technical roadmap for the internet is now drawn by others because MS has effectively stopped developing their browser. And now their marketshare will start to shrink unless they do something.
It's especially infuriating if you consider that Donald Rumsfeld probably sold these WMDs to Saddam Hussein personally in the early eighties. The US were Saddams best friend when he used his WMDs (compliments of Ronnie Reagan) on his own population in the early eighties and Donald Rumsfeld and other supporters of the neocon movement were involved much more than they would like to admit right now.
On the other hand, the mono developers did have full access to all the research papers from sun that have been published on JIT compilation, garbage collection, dynamic compilation etc. It was clear from the beginning that JIT compilation was the only way to make mono perform. You could say that SUN did the hard work for them.
I haven't seen any decisive language feature that gives C# any edge over Java. Most of it is syntactic sugar which is nice to have but not really that important if you have code completion & refactoring tools.
But indeed it is impressive that mono's performance is that good already.
If you'd know what dynamic compilation is, you'd fully expect the opposite. I'm only surprised by the difference in numbers. GCJ is doing much worse than I expected. From the looks of it, the only times it comes close to competing is when executing simplistic numerical benchmarks (which are presumably easy to optimize). What you are seeing here is that runtime optimization actually works when doing real-life complicated stuff.
The use of the word interpreter is really suggestive. A compiler is nothing more than a static interpreter. The only two differences with a JIT compiler is that it permanently stores the results of the interpretation and that it has much less information to predict the performance of the code it is generating. A static compiler will do well on simplistic programs whereas a run-time optimizing jit compiler will be able to always match the performance of a static compiler (simply by running the same optimizations) or beat it (by applying optimizations to address observed performance bottlenecks in the running program). Of course this costs some computation time but you can take that into account as well when deciding to optimize or not.
In simplistic scenarios such as simple benchmarks, there won't be much to gain from run-time optimization. So performance is about equal with a slight advantage for the static compiler because it is not wasting resources on figuring out how to optimize the program. Despite this GCJ's performance is disappointing even on these kinds of benchmarks.
It's hard not to be slightly biased to the democrats. As a european I find it mind boggling that a guy like Bush can become president, basically do everything his opponents feared he would do (and much worse) and still convince about half of the electorate that he's doing an ok job. Clinton lied about a woman, Bush lied about a lot more.
Personally I think America really deserves another four years of Bush (and the associated prolonged economical problems). They've been arrogant, dominant and foolish. Four years ought to be enough to at least double the deficit, kill what's left of US industry and alienate the rest of the world insofar that has not been accomplished yet. Unfortunately, that would likely affect other countries (such as my own) so it would be better for me and my fellow non US world citizens if Kerry were to win.
If you are planning to vote Nader, just remember that neither Bush nor Nader needs your vote. Nader doesn't expect to win and Bush will cheer you as a disgruntled democrat that won't put any votes in Kerry's pocket. It's as simple as that.
This election is about selecting the next US president. You have four options: not voting at all, voting Nader, voting Bush and voting Kerry. Three of those options will help Bush more than Kerry, so really there's only two choices: Bush or Kerry. You can support Bush by not voting, by voting for Nader (which is essentially the same thing) or by voting for Bush directly. You can only support Kerry by voting for him. If enough people get off their ass to vote (whatever they want to vote) on the election day, Kerry will easily win this election. All the current polls take into account a siginificant number of mostly poorly educated americans not voting. Bush depends on those people staying at home because these are mostly potential democratic votes.
http://www.compiere.org/ Compiere might offer some things you could use.
I know what conservative is and Bush is quite the opposite. I also know what liberal is and it is quite different from radical communism (which is what Bush seems to believe). Yet, somehow in the perception of the republican party (which used to be a liberal conservative party) this has all become distorted. Kerry is being accused of being too liberal whereas Bush et al. choose to label themselves neocons. In fact Bush et al. push a radical right wing agenda which has little to do with keeping things as they are or were in the past (i.e. what you'd expect from a conservative party). Conservatism is motivated from the idea that things are fine as they are now (or were fine a couple of years back) and that politics should strive to keep things as fine as they are.
Liberalism instead is about personal freedom and values which underly the french revolution and the US constitution. Values like freedom of speech & religion for example. Or things like separation of state, church and law. The patriot act has a severe impact on freedom of speech and personal freedom. Also the radical christian right agenda has featured prominently in domestic policies the past four years. Christianity is now the defacto state religion of the USA.
Under the pretense of a war on terrorism, fair trial has been denied to thousands of US citizens (who were locked away for wearing beards and resembling Osama Bin Laden too much). Also the US has placed itself above the law by violating international laws (by not adhering to rules outlined in the Geneva convention) as well as frustrating the attempts to form an international court of law.
Liberalism is an idea very alien to neocons, to the point where they regard it as an apparently insulting label for democrats). Neocons are against personal choice and in favour of limiting freedom under the pretense of protecting it.
Labeling Kerry as a liberal conservatist would be a fairly accurate IMHO. He's nowhere near the radical socialist some neocon republicans believe him to be. International relations alone should be a reason to vote for him. IMHO diplomatic relations with europe, russia and the middle east would improve nearly as much as that they have deteriorated (which is a lot) over the past few years as soon as Kerry enters the white house.
Neocons are entitled to their opinion of course but I don't believe that many conservative americans are fully aware of what neoconservatism is all about.
BTW. I should disclose that I'm a European. I don't have the right to vote in the US. We'll know the outcome in a couple of months.
This is not my idea of KISS and I don't agree with most of your points.
Point 5 is downright idiotic. HTML is not executable by it self and unless you use a very old version of outlook (in which case you are asking for trouble), any javascript, vbscript or whatever will not be executed. Most virus mails are formatted as plaintext btw. The virus is almost always an attachment.
Wireless is not very secure out of the box but you can lock it down pretty effectively. I'd say the whole point of wireless is to 'introduce additional ways your system/data can be accessed'.
Point 2 is nice for performance but a good firewall takes care of security equally well.
Point 3 is a no brainer.
Point 4 is what everybody seems to be saying these days. If you keep your software up to date you are reasonably safe however.
Point 6 is not necessary as long as you use a firewall.
I tackle security in a more pragmatic fashion. I don't like removing features for security reasons. The key is to be conscious of what is running on your PC and to keep that under control. I ran without a firewall (not even NAT) & virusscanners throughout all the major virus and worms outbreaks over the past few years. None of them affected me because I knew how to configure outlook, shutdown services, etc. It's really that simple.
These days I use thunderbird (because I like its features) and I find that the winxp sp2 firewall is unobtrusive enough that I can tolerate it running in the background. I still don't have a virusscanner for performance reasons. This is small but calculated risk. I'm aware of several open ports on my machine but that's because I installed software which needs those ports to function. Again this is a calculated risk, the bottom line is that those ports are open because I want them open.
I can afford to do this because I know what I'm doing. Ordinary users should rely on firewalls, virusscanners and spyware checkers to stay safe.
I think the reverse question is more relevant. Why exactly are you sticking with obsolete stuff like CVS? Maybe you have valid reasons (i.e. maybe there's something that should be implemented in subversion)?
I use subversion on a daily basis and I find it is much less a PITA than CVS which we still use for older projects (we never did a migrate but just started using subversion for the new stuff).
Fast & painless merges, branches & tags, transactional commits, versionmanaged file & directory names are some of the advantages are some of the reasons you should be adopting subversion.
Seems to be really write once run anywhere where I work. We develop on win32, we deploy to sun, HP, & wintel (basically any server environment capable of running java). Also we support both 1.3 & 1.4 generation VMs. I'm not sure where this bullshit about write once run anywhere comes from. You'd have to be very thick to still compare things to the long discontinued Microsoft VM which is what I assume you are referring to (last version released around 1998?). We depend on some post 1.3 APIs so we don't support 1.2 and earlier. IMHO java compatibility between platforms is much better than e.g. compatibility between different versions of gcc on the same machine & OS. There are some well documented differences with older versions and some commercial J2EE application servers are buggy (we generally prefer tomcat/jboss for this reason).
The reason people don't bother with w3c compliant webpages is that there is no obvious advantage. Slashdot works fine in all modern browsers and aside from some bandwidth that could be saved by going fully XHTML/CSS there is little to be gained (well there are a number of advantages but they're obviously lost on the editors).
With data it is different, just look at how quickly RSS & ATOM are being adopted. There's an obvious advantage because having a feed on your site makes it easier for readers to learn about new content on your site. It doesn't matter that there are multiple competing standards because the tools that matter are standards neutral (most feed readers can handle most RSS and ATOM variants). If there is a sufficiently large enough group of people using a particular (open) format, it is worthwhile to program functionality to do stuff with this data.
The RSS world is also spawning some interesting semantic things such as track back links and perma links. Not all of these things will survive but there already are these mini semantic webs emerging. These networks are growing in size and scope. People write tools to search and navigate them in various and sometimes unexpected ways. Whenever one tool involves multiple networks, effectively a larger one emerges.
IMHO the semantic web is not something that will be released by some big software company or standards body like the w3c but rather something that will emerge out of the chaos of different standards, formats that are out there today. There will not be some monolithic onthology that explains everything but rather there will be many domain specific, simple onthologies that may be abstracted from by tools so that relations between datasets may be established and explored without requiring much changes to the data. Where meaningful relations exist, tools and standards will emerge to exploit these relations.
Ten years ago I had a 80 MB harddrive in a 486, I think you are about a factor 10 wrong here since my current pc came with a 80GB drive two years ago. The pc before that had 40GB (I bought it in 2000) and before that 4GB ('97), before that 210MB ('95). If I'd buy one now it would be 160/200 GB so that would be about twice what you'd get two years ago. See the trend?
So if you extrapolate to 2004, 100x 200 GB is about 20TB in 2014. 2010 I'd expect about 5TB. The 1TB harddisks should appear around 2007/2008. That is all assuming the growth trend remains the same which is debatable.
It didn't last a full 24 hours on my machine (a windows box). I installed it on a whim last night. At first I was rather pleased with it but then the error messages started appearing (both icq and msn). Also the GTK library for windows is very buggy. I had some problems with tooltips that just wouldn't disappear and the attempt at antialiasing made the GTK widgets stand out as notably blurry compared to the rest of the desktop.
So I am back using miranda-im which does a much better job in being both less intrusive and more feature rich. I've been using it for more than a year and it seems very stable. I was wrong in assuming gaim would offer similar stability.
Nobody forces you to install extensions. The point of firefox is that you get a minimal amount of sane defaults and then add the stuff you need through extensions.
sftp would probably require some modifications to the necko component that takes care of all network stuff in mozilla. Try filezilla (windows only) if you need a decent sftp client.