There are 4 "nationwide" networks in the US including AT&T
All four of which have incompatible handsets, either due to differing technology, differing spectrum, or just plain lock-in.
In Europe, I could change providers by simply changing the SIM card in my phone. In the US, that THEORETICALLY works for AT&T/T-Mobile if all you want is voice (and you can find an unlocked handset), but not for data.
So no, I cannot vote with my feet. I cannot take the four iPhones on my plan to any other provider. If I could, I would have left AT&T years ago, but that is not an option.
You realize that it's possible to make the same exact argument about the price of gasoline, or milk, or houses, or whatever, right?
Gasoline and milk are commodities, traded on a commodity market. So no, you can't make the same argument. You can however make an entirely different market about why the pricing for them is nuts, but it's not the same argument.
Speaking as someone who bought a house recently, anyone buying a house right now is probably overpaying for one.:)
Yes, because it would be much worse to KNOW you had a bunch of useless fobs as opposed to NOT knowing you had a bunch of useless fobs because the company kept the keys without telling you and someone stole them.:)
Is that the worthless corporate scumbags who own the company I work for (and force us to use RSA keyfobs) thought very hard about what to do about this spectacular failure on RSA's part, and came up with this solution: Get new keyfobs from RSA!
RSA's only job was to be trustworthy. None of their technology is a trade secret, and once they produce the fobs there's no need to interact with RSA whatsoever. There IS NO technology to steal on their networks.
And yet they kept the keys. The only purpose served by keeping those keys is allowing someone to decrypt their customers encrypted traffic. The keys are completely unnecessary for any other reason once the fobs have been made. If they're doing their job right, it wouldn't matter if terrorists came in and held a gun to the CEO's head, nevermind if their network was secure. The key fobs do not depend on them in any way to function once they're produced.
Their only job was to be trustworthy, and they have failed spectacularly.
So I'm expecting raises and bonuses all around for the execs, while a couple worker drones (who probably questioned keeping the keys in the first place) get axed. SNAFU.
I am deliberately ignoring the 'it's really just math'
Except you really can't.
In Gottschalk v. Benson (1972), the United States Supreme Court ruled that a patent for a process should not be allowed if it would "wholly pre-empt the mathematical formula and in practical effect would be a patent on the algorithm itself"
Quicksort is rather clever... And I agree, if anything in comp sci ever was patentable, that probably would be the best example. But it was discovered in 1960, long before this crazy notion of software patents existed. And at the time, it was rightly recognized as math, which isn't patentable.
And it's just further example of "You can't create a new algorithm, Knuth (or, in this case, Hoare) already published them all.":)
To the extent developers feel otherwise, I haven't seen a calm, and rationale counter-argument.
Let's turn this around a bit... Can you actually come up with an example of a "software innovation" that's honestly worthy of being patented? I've yet to see one, or at least one that was involved with a lawsuit.
Unfortunately for us President Don Young and President Ernest Hollings showed a rare bit of bipartisan cooperation in creating the TSA. Apparently Presidents McCain and Hollings then went further in pushing to federalize the screeners at airports.
Man, looking back, we had a lot more presidents than I remember... o.O
Nintendo doesn't even allow you to redownload online purchases on a replacement system.
Not true. My coworker just had his Wii stolen. He called Nintendo and they locked out his old Wii and moved all his purchases to the new one.
... the Playstations have used CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays.
All of which were modified in a proprietary fashion to make them not function on other devices. The systems also were designed to not work with standard discs.
Also, Blu-ray WAS a proprietary Sony format at the time PS3 was announced. In many ways it still is.
Nintendo's been supporting SD cards since the Gamecube. Their game discs have been no more or less proprietary than Sony's since then. No one cares about the game disc media. They do care when they have to shell out $120 for save game/DLC storage when they have a pile of perfectly good Micro SDHC cards that every other device out there seems to use.
It's been known since last June that the Vita would use NGV memory cards due to size, weight, lack of noise, and other factors.
Size? Lack of noise? What? Have you ever even handled a Micro SDHC card? I hadn't until I bought one for my wife's Nook Tablet last week. Holy hell that thing is tiny! I'd normally throw away a piece of plastic that small. Sony's line is complete BS.
The only difference with this story is that Slashdot has posted a summary slanting it in a certain direction, because this site hates Sony.
No, the only difference is Sony wants me to pay $120 for something that would cost me $30-60 on another system. Oh, and that thing that costs half or less would work with ANY system, whereas the Sony solution is only a Sony solution.
Okay, let me offer a counter example. Apologies to our I.T. guys if you end up reading this, if so you can probably figure out who I am from the stories, but I'll try to keep things are vague as possible to protect the innocent. As a whole, any of the actual people I've dealt with from IT have been professional, competent, and generally willing to help. The problem I have seems to be with policies--specifically policies that ignore established needs or workflows in an interest of enforcing a one-size-fits-all solution to very different shaped problems.
My group develops software. This is completely custom written software to support research and development for a very large government organization. My group has always been ahead of the curve technology-wise compared to the other groups in this lab. We built the first network in the building, we were the first group to have a dedicated internet connection, we built the first e-mail server, I'm even told that the head of my group owned the.gov for our parent organization for a while because he bothered to register it. We relinquished control over all of these things as they became "important," mainly because we wanted to do research, not manage a network and e-mail for thousands of users outside of our department. We kept our own internal mail server which we used for internal team communication, build status updates, etc. We also kept our own internal network, as honestly managing our network would be a nightmare for IT; I could go into detail but that's a comment all on its own, just suffice to say things change often enough that not having root access on our boxes and our switches would make it so we can't do our jobs.
About a year after I was brought on, I.T. decided to implement a directive by Congress (so not really their fault) to unify all e-mail service in our organization by taking away our e-mail. So we lost our own routable subdomain and got put in the same top-level.gov as everyone else. We also lost SMTP access and had it replaced by Notes. This was a bit of surprise for us, as I.T. only supported Notes on Windows and 80% of us didn't have Windows boxes. Now that we're required to use Notes for e-mail, we just don't e-mail anymore. It's too slow, too clunky, too full of internal organizational spam, and we can't even get I.T. to do simple things like add mailing list addresses for us so we can do team-wide messages. We have to keep our own individual address books on our machine updated with mailing lists for team members... That was my first interaction with our I.T. department, and coming off of 6 years of doing I.T. while I was in school, it really shocked and surprised me.
Next, I.T. created a separate "Lab" network from the "Admin" network and pushed for all our simulation related hardware to be put on that network. On the surface, this made a lot of sense. Our Linux servers don't need connectivity to the H.R. departments Windows workstations. Segregation seemed like a good idea. But then we were told the "Lab" network was not to be used for any "Admin" purposes. Like what? Like e-mail. Using e-mail from the "Lab" network is expressly forbidden. Later we found out downloading files from the web is apparently also forbidden, as is reading blogs. Our entire infrastructure is built upon open-source/GPL'd software. We need to be able to get crap from Sourceforge, nevermind from the freakin' fedora repositories. How are we supposed to find tech support and/or documentation on our libraries if we can't read the developer blogs? But our cries fell on deaf ears "Why are you the only group complaining about this?" "We're the only group on YOUR network that develops on Linux. The other group has refused to switch to your network after hearing about our experiences." So after six months of debating, they promised to at least un-block blogs. But after three months of trying to unblock blogs, they couldn't figure out how. So now, two years later, we have to get creative to be able to read developer blogs.
You may have your tin foil hat on too tight. The suit has more to do with Google trying to circumvent Sun's license by making a "clean room" implementation of JVM for mobile use. Sun was never happy about Google doing an end run on their sale of embedded Java.
That's pretty much exactly what I said, though. They're using patents to prevent competition.
And it's kind of hard to say Sun was "never happy" when they published press releases congratulating Google on releasing Android and promised Android support in NetBeans.
That said, nothing prevents us from wondering "what if" Google had based their JVM on OpenJDK....
It would suck. The JVM is a lumbering undead monstrosity. I say this as someone who's livelihood depends on it on a daily basis and (unfortunately) spends about 70% of his time writing Java code, now. It's just bad. There are significant, low-level design differences between the Dalvik JVM and the Java JVM that make it a significantly better choice for mobile development.
Sometimes Google suffers from NIH (Not invented here). I think Google would came up with any excuse to have their own JVM, since the creator of the JVM would have the most control of the development space.
I don't believe Google invented Dalvik. And I know they didn't write the initial version of Android. And, again, the Sun JVM is terrible for mobile development.
Bending the truth a little to make a point are we? They didn't break loops. There was a bug in the hot spot compiler that would incorrectly optimize the loops produced by the JVM. THIS WAS FIXED IN A PATCH that was released shortly after the initial release of Java 7.
They broke loops in our app, and in Apache's stuff. Granted, I only care about the first one... They shouldn't have shipped it broken. They were informed about it and stuck their fingers in their ears and said "LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING" and shipped anyway.
Of all the modern programming languages in popular use today, Java is the most backward compatible.
And I'm listing that as a negative, not a positive. So much of the legacy Java 1.1 stuff is just BAD and completely broken, but it stays around and causes problems for everyone. So many APIs are completely braindead, and yet we can't fix them because that may break someone's code from 1996!
To be fair, as a fellow C++ guy, I would be remiss if we perpetuated a false image of C++ code always being backward compatible or working unmodified on different platforms or even using different compilers on the same platform.
It was never my intention to give that image of C++. On the bright side, C++ in fact breaks backwards compatibility where it makes sense, as seen with C++11.
With regards to Flex, it looks nice and it has potential. It still will be a jack of all trades and a master of none.
Flex is a much nicer way to make nice looking client-server apps than I've ever had to deal with before. There's some idiosyncrasies with scoping in ActionScript, but I've learned to deal with them. And it's getting me paid, so I'm happy.:)
Oh, and Flex actually has closures... Which was one of those features Sun/Oracle punted on in Java 7. So nice...
Hey chief, where did I complain about Java not being open? I complained about Sun (and now Oracle) being terrible godawful maintainers of it, and using patents to prevent other people from providing a useful implementation.
And I can apparently get paid a lot more to develop Flex than Java at this point in time.
There are plenty of public domain books that are available on Nook for free. But I usually find myself plenty willing to pay a measly dollar for a readable, corrected copy of a book than a bad OCR job that someone slapped up there.
I've never seen a public domain book in the Nook store with a cost attached that was published by B&N, so I'm not sure why you're blaming B&N. It's the publisher who put it in the store who decides the price, or lack thereof.
Does that mean that Oracle is actually suing Google to be more open in their implementation rather than shut it down?
No, that's not it at all. It has nothing to do with openness and everything to do with ensuring that there can never be a JVM that competes with the one Oracle bought from Sun.
Do we know why they won't open source the compliance tools? Does that effectively prevent other implementations of Java from existing? Do we know why Oracle wants that?
Yes, yes, and yes. Your second question is the answer to the first. As far as your third question... Oracle doesn't want competing Java implementations because they don't want to compete with another Java implementation. There's nothing deeper to it than that.
The sad part of all this is Sun was a pretty lackluster steward of Java (too unwilling to break backwards compatibility with bytecode written in 1996 to fix problems in the language), but Oracle has been downright harmful to Java since taking it over. For their first major JVM release, they punted all the important features for Java 7 to a later release and then shipped with a (known) bug that broke loops. Let me repeat that again:
THEY. BROKE. LOOPS.
A world where Oracle has the only legal implementation of Java is a world where Java is on its way to being a dead language.
Unfortunately for my shop, its not like we can rewrite millions of lines of code as C#, either, as Mono has a whole different patent minefield...
Yes, the article is about contractors as in large companies (L-3 Communications, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc.) who bid for contracts and then provide warm bodies to fulfil those contracts. Said warm bodies are employees of the company who has the contract, and the company bills the government a fixed rate for each employee that was negotiated ahead of time in the contract, generally.
Yes, the amount they charge the government is outrageous. However, it has to be MORE than they're paying the person as they have to cover the cost of paying everyone in the company who DOESN'T work billable hours for a contract (like HR, Admins, etc.) and still make a profit. So maybe it doesn't need to be triple, but double may not be unreasonable.
The government (in theory) sees a benefit in that these individuals are not in Federal employee unions and do not get put on the Federal benefit programs, becoming a long-term liability. They're also easier to get rid of/downsize, which is essentially impossible for Federal employees. This DOES include Federal employees guilty of assaulting superiors, they generally do just get reassigned at the worst.
Now this theory falls apart a bit in that the "good old" Federal benefits pretty much don't exist anymore for new hires, so the cost savings for not hiring people directly is negligible to non-existant now.
I think the real reason is exactly as the author suspected: They don't show up as employees in the budget, so a politician can proudly trumpet they've reduced the size of the payroll.
In my office we believe that we're paid for out of the "office supplies" budget. Seems appropriate.:)
I expect people not to hijack planes if they want to keep off our "I don't care if you die like a diseased dog in a ditch" list. That's pretty much what I expect.
No, I think the first organized demonstrations were in January of '09. I wouldn't know for sure, though--I wasn't particularly interested. The passage of the bank bailout bills was definitely the event that lead to the eventual formation of the Tea Party Movement. The problem was, the new guy was even worse in that regard.:)
I didn't. I lumped in "Free to Play" games in with the "Games that Suck" games.
Well, then you're just wrong. DDO, LotRO, LoL... those are not games that suck. They're also games that have managed to be very successful with the F2P model.
You just made that up. To be "fair here" the "Tea Party movement was vocally against a black guy in the White House from the beginning.
Several hundred people gathered on the Capitol steps yesterday to protest the "B word" -- the ongoing bailout, by the federal government, of mismanaged banks, poorly run auto makers, homeowners who can't pay their mortgages and state officials who can't control their spending.
"These are people who believe in limited federal and state government, but who think government has overstepped its limited role in our lives," said foundation President Matthew Brouillette.
Speakers and participants denounced both Republicans, such as former President George Bush and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, and Democrats, such as President Barack Obama and Gov. Ed Rendell.
They disliked Mr. Bush's action last fall to give federal money to banks that made poisonous home loans. They also criticized Mr. Obama for spending additional billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up General Motors and Chrysler, to help overleveraged homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure and to help deficit-ridden states with his $787 billion economic stimulus program.
Emphasis obviously mine.
I can keep digging up news reports and speech transcripts all day of the original Tea Party rallies and how they all dealt primarily with the need to reduce government spending, and anger over the billions of dollars being given to the people in charge of the companies that fucked up the economy in the first place.
Can you honestly back up your claims of racism with any evidence? Any at all? I know it's easy to just dismiss people you disagree with as bigots, but it's not very productive.
Oh I agree 100% that drones should be the ultimate goal, but we don't seem to be headed that way. we really don't have any drones, either those being shown or those being shown as being in the pipe, that could really go head to head with even an F15 much less one of the new Su series or MiGs. It really doesn't help to have 1000 drones if what it ends up is another turkey shoot.
You're really thinking about this wrong. A drone doesn't have to go head-to-head with an F15. It just doesn't. It also doesn't matter if it's a turkey shoot when the turkeys outnumber you 50-to-1 and have FREAKING MISSILES.
If it were me I'd kill the new Ford AC if it can't get done in a year, kill any new carriers, and start designing a drone carrier of the future.
We don't need a drone carrier. Deploy them via ICBM or something and treat them as disposable resources. Yes, I'm serious.
Also kill the F35 (any way you look it it like the F22 it is simply too expensive for too little performance) and be spending that money instead not only on the most cutting edge air superiority drones we can come up with but also work our asses off on ground to air missile defense to make sure if our enemies DO end up with much better fighters they simply won't be able to capitalize by using them to rule the skies.
The F-35 is not an air superiority fighter. Get that out of your head. Air defense is a secondary mission for it, just like the Falcon and Hornet.
Why have fixed SAM emplacements when you can have mobile missiles on UASes?
Again look att WWII, specifically the start. The Wildcat couldn't turn like the Zero, and it sure as hell couldn't beat it on speed, yet we dominated them almost from the start, why? Because you had American manufacturers coming from the automobile industry building "flying trucks" that were reliable as hell and took insane amounts of punishment, and you had pilots like O' Hare and Flatley taking their own time and initiative to come up with air to air tactics that maximized our strengths and minimized the aircraft's weaknesses. We just don't think "outside the box" anymore, and ultimately i think that is gonna hurt us down the line.
You criticize the existing military for not "thinking outside the box" and yet you're the one guilty of wanting to prepare to fight the last war, here. Flying trucks are not a viable design. They made sense when engagements were point blank range dogfights with.50-caliber machine guns, but now we fight with missiles. You can't build an aircraft to survive that.
You should be able to watch the videos for free and then take a CLEP test.
Why?
Or at best get your credit from a junior college. It's not like they've given you a value superior to a junior college if you watch a lecture.
You could still go to a junior college. Or, if the online courses are cheaper and you can't make time in your schedule to go to a junior college, they'd provide a better value.
You are against professors charging money for value.
That's funny, back when I worked in education the professors in my department got paid for teaching online classes... So how am I against that, exactly?
And how does this prevent professors from teaching their normal classes which, we both agree, provide a superior value?
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All four of which have incompatible handsets, either due to differing technology, differing spectrum, or just plain lock-in.
In Europe, I could change providers by simply changing the SIM card in my phone. In the US, that THEORETICALLY works for AT&T/T-Mobile if all you want is voice (and you can find an unlocked handset), but not for data.
So no, I cannot vote with my feet. I cannot take the four iPhones on my plan to any other provider. If I could, I would have left AT&T years ago, but that is not an option.
Gasoline and milk are commodities, traded on a commodity market. So no, you can't make the same argument. You can however make an entirely different market about why the pricing for them is nuts, but it's not the same argument.
Speaking as someone who bought a house recently, anyone buying a house right now is probably overpaying for one. :)
Yes, because it would be much worse to KNOW you had a bunch of useless fobs as opposed to NOT knowing you had a bunch of useless fobs because the company kept the keys without telling you and someone stole them. :)
You're not bursting my bubble. I'm well aware that they're for two-factor authentication. However, we happened to use that for a VPN login. :)
Is that the worthless corporate scumbags who own the company I work for (and force us to use RSA keyfobs) thought very hard about what to do about this spectacular failure on RSA's part, and came up with this solution: Get new keyfobs from RSA!
RSA's only job was to be trustworthy. None of their technology is a trade secret, and once they produce the fobs there's no need to interact with RSA whatsoever. There IS NO technology to steal on their networks.
And yet they kept the keys. The only purpose served by keeping those keys is allowing someone to decrypt their customers encrypted traffic. The keys are completely unnecessary for any other reason once the fobs have been made. If they're doing their job right, it wouldn't matter if terrorists came in and held a gun to the CEO's head, nevermind if their network was secure. The key fobs do not depend on them in any way to function once they're produced.
Their only job was to be trustworthy, and they have failed spectacularly.
So I'm expecting raises and bonuses all around for the execs, while a couple worker drones (who probably questioned keeping the keys in the first place) get axed. SNAFU.
That's funny, until I rooted it, my Motorola Backflip would ONLY let me use one search... Bing.
What are these guys smoking?
They thought of all these solutions, and in the end it just made more sense to make the solar panels larger than do anything complicated.
Don't forget these rovers were designed for a 90 day mission.
And Westerns were just Samurai movies...
Except you really can't.
Quicksort is rather clever... And I agree, if anything in comp sci ever was patentable, that probably would be the best example. But it was discovered in 1960, long before this crazy notion of software patents existed. And at the time, it was rightly recognized as math, which isn't patentable.
And it's just further example of "You can't create a new algorithm, Knuth (or, in this case, Hoare) already published them all." :)
Let's turn this around a bit... Can you actually come up with an example of a "software innovation" that's honestly worthy of being patented? I've yet to see one, or at least one that was involved with a lawsuit.
Unfortunately for us President Don Young and President Ernest Hollings showed a rare bit of bipartisan cooperation in creating the TSA. Apparently Presidents McCain and Hollings then went further in pushing to federalize the screeners at airports.
Man, looking back, we had a lot more presidents than I remember... o.O
Not true. My coworker just had his Wii stolen. He called Nintendo and they locked out his old Wii and moved all his purchases to the new one.
All of which were modified in a proprietary fashion to make them not function on other devices. The systems also were designed to not work with standard discs.
Also, Blu-ray WAS a proprietary Sony format at the time PS3 was announced. In many ways it still is.
Nintendo's been supporting SD cards since the Gamecube. Their game discs have been no more or less proprietary than Sony's since then. No one cares about the game disc media. They do care when they have to shell out $120 for save game/DLC storage when they have a pile of perfectly good Micro SDHC cards that every other device out there seems to use.
Size? Lack of noise? What? Have you ever even handled a Micro SDHC card? I hadn't until I bought one for my wife's Nook Tablet last week. Holy hell that thing is tiny! I'd normally throw away a piece of plastic that small. Sony's line is complete BS.
No, the only difference is Sony wants me to pay $120 for something that would cost me $30-60 on another system. Oh, and that thing that costs half or less would work with ANY system, whereas the Sony solution is only a Sony solution.
Okay, let me offer a counter example. Apologies to our I.T. guys if you end up reading this, if so you can probably figure out who I am from the stories, but I'll try to keep things are vague as possible to protect the innocent. As a whole, any of the actual people I've dealt with from IT have been professional, competent, and generally willing to help. The problem I have seems to be with policies--specifically policies that ignore established needs or workflows in an interest of enforcing a one-size-fits-all solution to very different shaped problems.
My group develops software. This is completely custom written software to support research and development for a very large government organization. My group has always been ahead of the curve technology-wise compared to the other groups in this lab. We built the first network in the building, we were the first group to have a dedicated internet connection, we built the first e-mail server, I'm even told that the head of my group owned the .gov for our parent organization for a while because he bothered to register it. We relinquished control over all of these things as they became "important," mainly because we wanted to do research, not manage a network and e-mail for thousands of users outside of our department. We kept our own internal mail server which we used for internal team communication, build status updates, etc. We also kept our own internal network, as honestly managing our network would be a nightmare for IT; I could go into detail but that's a comment all on its own, just suffice to say things change often enough that not having root access on our boxes and our switches would make it so we can't do our jobs.
About a year after I was brought on, I.T. decided to implement a directive by Congress (so not really their fault) to unify all e-mail service in our organization by taking away our e-mail. So we lost our own routable subdomain and got put in the same top-level .gov as everyone else. We also lost SMTP access and had it replaced by Notes. This was a bit of surprise for us, as I.T. only supported Notes on Windows and 80% of us didn't have Windows boxes. Now that we're required to use Notes for e-mail, we just don't e-mail anymore. It's too slow, too clunky, too full of internal organizational spam, and we can't even get I.T. to do simple things like add mailing list addresses for us so we can do team-wide messages. We have to keep our own individual address books on our machine updated with mailing lists for team members... That was my first interaction with our I.T. department, and coming off of 6 years of doing I.T. while I was in school, it really shocked and surprised me.
Next, I.T. created a separate "Lab" network from the "Admin" network and pushed for all our simulation related hardware to be put on that network. On the surface, this made a lot of sense. Our Linux servers don't need connectivity to the H.R. departments Windows workstations. Segregation seemed like a good idea. But then we were told the "Lab" network was not to be used for any "Admin" purposes. Like what? Like e-mail. Using e-mail from the "Lab" network is expressly forbidden. Later we found out downloading files from the web is apparently also forbidden, as is reading blogs. Our entire infrastructure is built upon open-source/GPL'd software. We need to be able to get crap from Sourceforge, nevermind from the freakin' fedora repositories. How are we supposed to find tech support and/or documentation on our libraries if we can't read the developer blogs? But our cries fell on deaf ears "Why are you the only group complaining about this?" "We're the only group on YOUR network that develops on Linux. The other group has refused to switch to your network after hearing about our experiences." So after six months of debating, they promised to at least un-block blogs. But after three months of trying to unblock blogs, they couldn't figure out how. So now, two years later, we have to get creative to be able to read developer blogs.
nt
Are you suggesting the JVM should be used to run Scala, Jython, and JRuby on a mobile platform?
Refusing to fix broken, braindead APIs sounds more like a mark of senility than maturity to me. :)
That's pretty much exactly what I said, though. They're using patents to prevent competition.
And it's kind of hard to say Sun was "never happy" when they published press releases congratulating Google on releasing Android and promised Android support in NetBeans.
It would suck. The JVM is a lumbering undead monstrosity. I say this as someone who's livelihood depends on it on a daily basis and (unfortunately) spends about 70% of his time writing Java code, now. It's just bad. There are significant, low-level design differences between the Dalvik JVM and the Java JVM that make it a significantly better choice for mobile development.
I don't believe Google invented Dalvik. And I know they didn't write the initial version of Android. And, again, the Sun JVM is terrible for mobile development.
They broke loops in our app, and in Apache's stuff. Granted, I only care about the first one... They shouldn't have shipped it broken. They were informed about it and stuck their fingers in their ears and said "LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING" and shipped anyway.
And I'm listing that as a negative, not a positive. So much of the legacy Java 1.1 stuff is just BAD and completely broken, but it stays around and causes problems for everyone. So many APIs are completely braindead, and yet we can't fix them because that may break someone's code from 1996!
It was never my intention to give that image of C++. On the bright side, C++ in fact breaks backwards compatibility where it makes sense, as seen with C++11.
Flex is a much nicer way to make nice looking client-server apps than I've ever had to deal with before. There's some idiosyncrasies with scoping in ActionScript, but I've learned to deal with them. And it's getting me paid, so I'm happy. :)
Oh, and Flex actually has closures... Which was one of those features Sun/Oracle punted on in Java 7. So nice...
Hey chief, where did I complain about Java not being open? I complained about Sun (and now Oracle) being terrible godawful maintainers of it, and using patents to prevent other people from providing a useful implementation.
And I can apparently get paid a lot more to develop Flex than Java at this point in time.
And see a frost piss post...
There are plenty of public domain books that are available on Nook for free. But I usually find myself plenty willing to pay a measly dollar for a readable, corrected copy of a book than a bad OCR job that someone slapped up there.
I've never seen a public domain book in the Nook store with a cost attached that was published by B&N, so I'm not sure why you're blaming B&N. It's the publisher who put it in the store who decides the price, or lack thereof.
No, that's not it at all. It has nothing to do with openness and everything to do with ensuring that there can never be a JVM that competes with the one Oracle bought from Sun.
Yes, yes, and yes. Your second question is the answer to the first. As far as your third question... Oracle doesn't want competing Java implementations because they don't want to compete with another Java implementation. There's nothing deeper to it than that.
The sad part of all this is Sun was a pretty lackluster steward of Java (too unwilling to break backwards compatibility with bytecode written in 1996 to fix problems in the language), but Oracle has been downright harmful to Java since taking it over. For their first major JVM release, they punted all the important features for Java 7 to a later release and then shipped with a (known) bug that broke loops.
Let me repeat that again:
THEY. BROKE. LOOPS.
A world where Oracle has the only legal implementation of Java is a world where Java is on its way to being a dead language.
Unfortunately for my shop, its not like we can rewrite millions of lines of code as C#, either, as Mono has a whole different patent minefield...
Glad I'm the 'C++' guy and I'm learning Flex. :)
You're thinking independent 1099 types. :)
Yes, the article is about contractors as in large companies (L-3 Communications, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc.) who bid for contracts and then provide warm bodies to fulfil those contracts. Said warm bodies are employees of the company who has the contract, and the company bills the government a fixed rate for each employee that was negotiated ahead of time in the contract, generally.
Yes, the amount they charge the government is outrageous. However, it has to be MORE than they're paying the person as they have to cover the cost of paying everyone in the company who DOESN'T work billable hours for a contract (like HR, Admins, etc.) and still make a profit. So maybe it doesn't need to be triple, but double may not be unreasonable.
The government (in theory) sees a benefit in that these individuals are not in Federal employee unions and do not get put on the Federal benefit programs, becoming a long-term liability. They're also easier to get rid of/downsize, which is essentially impossible for Federal employees. This DOES include Federal employees guilty of assaulting superiors, they generally do just get reassigned at the worst.
Now this theory falls apart a bit in that the "good old" Federal benefits pretty much don't exist anymore for new hires, so the cost savings for not hiring people directly is negligible to non-existant now.
I think the real reason is exactly as the author suspected: They don't show up as employees in the budget, so a politician can proudly trumpet they've reduced the size of the payroll.
In my office we believe that we're paid for out of the "office supplies" budget. Seems appropriate. :)
I expect people not to hijack planes if they want to keep off our "I don't care if you die like a diseased dog in a ditch" list. That's pretty much what I expect.
No, I think the first organized demonstrations were in January of '09. I wouldn't know for sure, though--I wasn't particularly interested. The passage of the bank bailout bills was definitely the event that lead to the eventual formation of the Tea Party Movement. The problem was, the new guy was even worse in that regard. :)
Well, then you're just wrong. DDO, LotRO, LoL... those are not games that suck. They're also games that have managed to be very successful with the F2P model.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09067/954066-454.stm/
To quote the article:
Emphasis obviously mine.
I can keep digging up news reports and speech transcripts all day of the original Tea Party rallies and how they all dealt primarily with the need to reduce government spending, and anger over the billions of dollars being given to the people in charge of the companies that fucked up the economy in the first place.
Can you honestly back up your claims of racism with any evidence? Any at all? I know it's easy to just dismiss people you disagree with as bigots, but it's not very productive.
You're really thinking about this wrong. A drone doesn't have to go head-to-head with an F15. It just doesn't. It also doesn't matter if it's a turkey shoot when the turkeys outnumber you 50-to-1 and have FREAKING MISSILES.
We don't need a drone carrier. Deploy them via ICBM or something and treat them as disposable resources. Yes, I'm serious.
The F-35 is not an air superiority fighter. Get that out of your head. Air defense is a secondary mission for it, just like the Falcon and Hornet.
Why have fixed SAM emplacements when you can have mobile missiles on UASes?
You criticize the existing military for not "thinking outside the box" and yet you're the one guilty of wanting to prepare to fight the last war, here. Flying trucks are not a viable design. They made sense when engagements were point blank range dogfights with .50-caliber machine guns, but now we fight with missiles. You can't build an aircraft to survive that.
Why?
You could still go to a junior college. Or, if the online courses are cheaper and you can't make time in your schedule to go to a junior college, they'd provide a better value.
That's funny, back when I worked in education the professors in my department got paid for teaching online classes... So how am I against that, exactly?
And how does this prevent professors from teaching their normal classes which, we both agree, provide a superior value?