My company develops applications for the wireless Internet -- phone, PDA, what-have-you. The general consensus among the developers here is the Mitsubishi T255 is the best WAP phone out there. The screen is HUGE. Predictive text input, 7.1 oz with battery. This Geek.com
review might help.
Re:What about hang overs?
on
Beer In Space
·
· Score: 2
Yakking in space? Very common. Off the top of my head I know that Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8, was quite sick for a while, and Fred Haise, lunar module pilot for the ill-fated Apollo 13, was sick early on. NASA of course has researched this and has a relatively technical paper on what is known as
vestibular alterations, or space sickness.
The cleanup is to vacuum up the gunk. I'm eating my breakfast right now so I don't want to get into details.
Shuttle astronauts have an amazing menu to choose from.
This story isn't of much interest. Let's see why, and what the slashdot community is saying in response.
As noted before, Java has been available on tiny platforms before, probably starting with the Dallas Semiconductor iButton, right up to the JavaCard-containing American Express Blue. In fact, Amex is even running a contest challenging developers to create new applications.
Java as a tool for embedded systems has been around for a while and continues to grow. From satellite phones, to the Sega Dreamcast, to the new DoCoMo i-mode phones, Java is in those tiny devices with limited speed, memory, and UI components.
Java primitive type sizes are specified by the language, not the native platform. So an integer is always 32-bits. That's what makes the code so easily mobile. C/C++ programmers: what is the size and sign of the expression 1000*UINT64?
Java can't be small because the libraries require so much space? The libraries are not the JVM. Java the APIs run from the full enterprise suite, which includes EJBs, messages, directory services, etc, to the standard, which includes all the UI, to the micro edition,which drops Swing and (in some cases, because of lack of hardware support) floating point, down the the tiny javacard APIs which are stripped to the bare essentials. Each is targetted towards a different environment, and given the limited UI capabilities of things like the Palm, you wouldn't want Swing anyway, because you've only got 160 pixels square for drawing.
As for the merits of OneEighty Software's technology itself, I'm extremely suspicious. Nothing new here, and its appearance on Sun's Java marketing area doesn't make it more credible.
The first Java story to come along on slashdot since the "why linux users diss Java" story. That feature demonstrated just how far out of touch CmdrTaco and the slashdot cabal are with the Java community, and this one merely reiterates that.
The real story on Java now is in server-side, XML handling, the recent release of Sun's MID profile for PalmOS, the results of the community process elections, and of course Java the continued adoption of Java technology for the wireless services industry.
I've worked in a war room environment. I've worked in cubicle farms. I've worked where I even had my own (small, windowless) office.
My productivity is terrible in an environment where there are distractions. I just can't work attentively, I have a very hard time tuning out things going on around me.
Sometimes I want to listen to music on my headphones. Sometimes I want as near to silence as I can get (but not by stuffing plugs in my ears).
Yes, when I have more privacy there is more opportunity to surf, dawdle, etc, but when I have less privacy, I just get more watchful when I am dawdling.
What's awful is that, like any other hot management trend, it will get imposed on all programmers and all teams, because studies show "it works". And for political reasons it will either stick, in which case failure to show productivity gains will be blamed on something else, or it will become the scapegoat for failures whether or not it contributed.
But what will never ever happen is management treating each programmer, architect, designer, engineer, etc. like the unique individual he or she is.
"any serious OO programmer knows that an OO language without multiple-implementation inheritance is a crippled husk of a language." I guess Smalltalk is not a serious OO language? But C++ and Perl, which do allow multiple inheritance, would be considered real OO languages? Seriously though, would someone please moderate Socializing Agent's post down to "Flamebait"?
ISS/Shuttle Orbital tracking
on
ISS Gets Wings
·
· Score: 2
Why should I adopt wireless for my home PC when I've already got the wires running into my house, thanks to the phone companies, power companies, cable companies, and the government (for subsidizing the companies to wire the country) for whatever connection I might need? On the other hand, in Japan and Asia, more people access the Internet via wireless than wired, somewhere near 18 million users, or 1 of every 3 cellphone users
The 4th generation wireless devices will be powerful, high bandwith (up to 2Mbps), XML-based, and, sorry CmdTaco, run Java. It's not time to bail, it's time to rethink your target.
It has been re-incarnated as J. Essentially APL without the need for a special keyboard/character set. It looks like fun, if you're into that kind of thing.
A plug for Nathan Myers' book, Java Programming on Linux Mr. Myers' gave a talk to my local Java users group, and, as you can see from the web page, he's an extremely experienced Unix developer. He even knew the answer to my question about Java complaining about missing fonts in X.
When we speak of Java we could be talking about any of three areas, thanks to Sun's marketing. Each of them is independent and should ge discussed independently.
Java the platform. The libraries, windowing toolkits, native interface support. Whatever you might call an API. These are of the use what you need, ignore what you don't class. Interestingly, doing a "import " will not increase the size of your code beyond those classes you actually use. Unlike, say MFC, where referencing just one function means you have to pull the entire DLL into your program.
Consistently mentioned when I ask programmers what they like about Java are the following:
Exceptions
Garbage collection and memory management
Interfaces
Object oriented
Threads
GUI
Built-in networking support
Strong typing and specified widening/casting
extensively specified operator precedence/evaluation order
Extensive libraries included as part of the language
cross-platform portability
primitive type sizes are specified and platform-independent
primitive type conversions in expressions are specified by the language
No messy signed/unsigned/short/long/double issues. Question: in C++ what size/signedness is the result of this: uint64*1000?
For folks that think they need multiple inheritance, they haven't understood interfaces and inner classes yet.
I'm not even going to address the "issues" CmdrTaco rants about because they don't directly address the language as a tool, only his personal political attitudes.
The questioner is under the delusion that there is an actual warranty or guarantee on commercial software. This is clearly not that case, and asking that one be imposed on open source or other free software is simply compounding the error. There was another slashdot discussion on UCITA and warranties. The gist is that no software is warranted for any reason and the shrink wrap agreements on all of them say pretty much the same thing.
However, what the questioner is looking for is not a warranty but someone on which to put the burden of responsibility for problems. This of course is exactly what free-as-in-speech software is NOT about. Trying to go back to the author or the company that sold you the software and saying "Your software doesn't work, fix it or we'll sue you/use harsh language in a public forum" is exactly the problem that can't be solved with legal shackles.
Using free software means that you as the user are taking responsibility for its use and the consequences of your actions. The old dodge of pointing fingers at the other vendor when your customers come with complaints is what the questioner looking for. To be able to say, "We have this GPA on the software we use, it can't be our fault you are having problems" is just a dodge.
Free-as-in-speech software is about taking responsibility for your product, not about finding a way to cover your ass when you ship a buggy product.
Thank you James! Zen Buddhism does get lumped with neopaganism and other forms of occult mysticism because a) it's poorly understood by most people and b) Discordians and other related types appropriate bits of 'Beat Zen', which is itself a misinterpretation of the Zen tradition.
As soon as I saw 'webmonkey' and 'Razorfish' I knew where this was going. I've got to join the chorus singing "design for standards, usability, and accessability" and just nod my head and smile at the pixel perfectionists. As I've said for years, the Web is NOT a book or magazine, and treating it like some jumped-up animated version of said media is a dead end.
Cases in point:
When the photographic process was invented, it was treated as just a new kind of painting or drawing. Fortunately there were experimental people who realized that it was a new medium with new rules.
When moving pictures were first invented, early films were made of stage plays. One camera, mounted in front of the center of the stage, never moving. Thankfully directors and cinematographers figured out rather quickly that this is horribly boring.
25 years from now we'll be saying that when the web was invented people treated it like a book or magazine, or maybe a little like TV. I predict that 25 years from now we'll consider these concepts quaint early forays by curmudgeonly glue-stained and Xacto-nicked designers.
You are allowed to change Squeak, write extensions to Squeak, build an application in Squeak, and include some or all of Squeak with your products. You may distribute all of these things along with Squeak, or portions of Squeak, for free or for money. However, you must distribute these things under a license that protects Apple in the way described in this license.
If you modify any of the methods of class objects (or their relationships) that come with Squeak (as opposed to building on top of the classes in the release), you must post the modifications on a web site or otherwise make them available for free to others, just as has been done with Squeak. The same is true if you port Squeak to another machine or operating system - you must post your port on a web site or otherwise make it available for free to others under the same license terms.
Not to sound like an old codger (OK, well, just a little) but when I was taking college programming courses we didn't even have that kind of choice. My first class was FORTRAN and we wrote our programs on punch cards and submitted them to the operator, who ran them, and handed back our printouts. Yes really. After that I was programming on TI 990s in Pascal. My assembly language class used a simulator written by a former grad student as his PhD project. Just so you are clear, none of these later environments were graphical -- strictly character-cell full-screen was the state of the art. So kwitcherbellyachin' and get to coding.
There's a little company in Portland, OR, called Qsent that has some interesting products out and in the pipeline. One, IQradio, allows you to input a location and radio programming you are interested in an get the stations in that area that have the programming. Another will allow you to hail a taxi/limo/whatever from your Palm or telephone.
AOL's web service is built on hordes of proxies caching pages for the clients inside their network. Their implementation is broken in that it doesn't properly obey the HTTP cache-control headers, meaning that if you have page that you want to expire or never be cached, you're fucked. There's no way to make AOL's proxies obey your desires. Our customer support group was trained to tell AOL users how to force a clean reload. Ugh.
Slashdot Mirror
My company develops applications for the wireless Internet -- phone, PDA, what-have-you. The general consensus among the developers here is the Mitsubishi T255 is the best WAP phone out there. The screen is HUGE. Predictive text input, 7.1 oz with battery. This Geek.com review might help.
"Not Real" languages: Tcl, Haskell, Lisp, Scheme, BASIC, LOGO, Eiffel, Smalltalk, COBOL, Ada. More at Programming Languages for the Java Virtual Machine
Yakking in space? Very common. Off the top of my head I know that Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8, was quite sick for a while, and Fred Haise, lunar module pilot for the ill-fated Apollo 13, was sick early on. NASA of course has researched this and has a relatively technical paper on what is known as vestibular alterations, or space sickness.
The cleanup is to vacuum up the gunk. I'm eating my breakfast right now so I don't want to get into details.
Shuttle astronauts have an amazing menu to choose from.
The Sega Dreamcast already does Java. For that matter, the Sega Web site is powered by Java.
- As noted before, Java has been available on tiny platforms before, probably starting with the Dallas Semiconductor iButton, right up to the JavaCard-containing American Express Blue. In fact, Amex is even running a contest challenging developers to create new applications.
- Java as a tool for embedded systems has been around for a while and continues to grow. From satellite phones, to the Sega Dreamcast, to the new DoCoMo i-mode phones, Java is in those tiny devices with limited speed, memory, and UI components.
- Java primitive type sizes are specified by the language, not the native platform. So an integer is always 32-bits. That's what makes the code so easily mobile. C/C++ programmers: what is the size and sign of the expression 1000*UINT64?
- Java can't be small because the libraries require so much space? The libraries are not the JVM. Java the APIs run from the full enterprise suite, which includes EJBs, messages, directory services, etc, to the standard, which includes all the UI, to the micro edition,which drops Swing and (in some cases, because of lack of hardware support) floating point, down the the tiny javacard APIs which are stripped to the bare essentials. Each is targetted towards a different environment, and given the limited UI capabilities of things like the Palm, you wouldn't want Swing anyway, because you've only got 160 pixels square for drawing.
As for the merits of OneEighty Software's technology itself, I'm extremely suspicious. Nothing new here, and its appearance on Sun's Java marketing area doesn't make it more credible.The first Java story to come along on slashdot since the "why linux users diss Java" story. That feature demonstrated just how far out of touch CmdrTaco and the slashdot cabal are with the Java community, and this one merely reiterates that.
The real story on Java now is in server-side, XML handling, the recent release of Sun's MID profile for PalmOS, the results of the community process elections, and of course Java the continued adoption of Java technology for the wireless services industry.
I've worked in a war room environment. I've worked in cubicle farms. I've worked where I even had my own (small, windowless) office.
My productivity is terrible in an environment where there are distractions. I just can't work attentively, I have a very hard time tuning out things going on around me.
Sometimes I want to listen to music on my headphones. Sometimes I want as near to silence as I can get (but not by stuffing plugs in my ears).
Yes, when I have more privacy there is more opportunity to surf, dawdle, etc, but when I have less privacy, I just get more watchful when I am dawdling.
What's awful is that, like any other hot management trend, it will get imposed on all programmers and all teams, because studies show "it works". And for political reasons it will either stick, in which case failure to show productivity gains will be blamed on something else, or it will become the scapegoat for failures whether or not it contributed.
But what will never ever happen is management treating each programmer, architect, designer, engineer, etc. like the unique individual he or she is.
"any serious OO programmer knows that an OO language without multiple-implementation inheritance is a crippled husk of a language." I guess Smalltalk is not a serious OO language? But C++ and Perl, which do allow multiple inheritance, would be considered real OO languages? Seriously though, would someone please moderate Socializing Agent's post down to "Flamebait"?
The NASA Human Spaceflight Orbital Tracking will show you the current position, while the Skywatch Page will calculate sightings and passes based on your location.
Why should I adopt wireless for my home PC when I've already got the wires running into my house, thanks to the phone companies, power companies, cable companies, and the government (for subsidizing the companies to wire the country) for whatever connection I might need? On the other hand, in Japan and Asia, more people access the Internet via wireless than wired, somewhere near 18 million users, or 1 of every 3 cellphone users
The 4th generation wireless devices will be powerful, high bandwith (up to 2Mbps), XML-based, and, sorry CmdTaco, run Java. It's not time to bail, it's time to rethink your target.
It has been re-incarnated as J. Essentially APL without the need for a special keyboard/character set. It looks like fun, if you're into that kind of thing.
A plug for Nathan Myers' book, Java Programming on Linux Mr. Myers' gave a talk to my local Java users group, and, as you can see from the web page, he's an extremely experienced Unix developer. He even knew the answer to my question about Java complaining about missing fonts in X.
- Exceptions
- Garbage collection and memory management
- Interfaces
- Object oriented
- Threads
- GUI
- Built-in networking support
- Strong typing and specified widening/casting
- extensively specified operator precedence/evaluation order
- Extensive libraries included as part of the language
- cross-platform portability
- primitive type sizes are specified and platform-independent
- primitive type conversions in expressions are specified by the language
- No messy signed/unsigned/short/long/double issues. Question: in C++ what size/signedness is the result of this: uint64*1000?
For folks that think they need multiple inheritance, they haven't understood interfaces and inner classes yet.I'm not even going to address the "issues" CmdrTaco rants about because they don't directly address the language as a tool, only his personal political attitudes.
yerricide is extremely wrong, as this article about SuSE and TurboLinux bundling Java and this article about Mandrake Linux with Java and several other distribution agreements as listed here on Sun's Java on Linux page.
Gopher started at the University of Minnesota, it was given the name Gopher after the school mascot, the Golden Gopher.
The questioner is under the delusion that there is an actual warranty or guarantee on commercial software. This is clearly not that case, and asking that one be imposed on open source or other free software is simply compounding the error. There was another slashdot discussion on UCITA and warranties. The gist is that no software is warranted for any reason and the shrink wrap agreements on all of them say pretty much the same thing.
However, what the questioner is looking for is not a warranty but someone on which to put the burden of responsibility for problems. This of course is exactly what free-as-in-speech software is NOT about. Trying to go back to the author or the company that sold you the software and saying "Your software doesn't work, fix it or we'll sue you/use harsh language in a public forum" is exactly the problem that can't be solved with legal shackles.
Using free software means that you as the user are taking responsibility for its use and the consequences of your actions. The old dodge of pointing fingers at the other vendor when your customers come with complaints is what the questioner looking for. To be able to say, "We have this GPA on the software we use, it can't be our fault you are having problems" is just a dodge.
Free-as-in-speech software is about taking responsibility for your product, not about finding a way to cover your ass when you ship a buggy product.
Thank you James! Zen Buddhism does get lumped with neopaganism and other forms of occult mysticism because a) it's poorly understood by most people and b) Discordians and other related types appropriate bits of 'Beat Zen', which is itself a misinterpretation of the Zen tradition.
Please, neopaganism has nothing to with Zen.
As soon as I saw 'webmonkey' and 'Razorfish' I knew where this was going. I've got to join the chorus singing "design for standards, usability, and accessability" and just nod my head and smile at the pixel perfectionists. As I've said for years, the Web is NOT a book or magazine, and treating it like some jumped-up animated version of said media is a dead end.
Cases in point:
When the photographic process was invented, it was treated as just a new kind of painting or drawing. Fortunately there were experimental people who realized that it was a new medium with new rules.
When moving pictures were first invented, early films were made of stage plays. One camera, mounted in front of the center of the stage, never moving. Thankfully directors and cinematographers figured out rather quickly that this is horribly boring.
25 years from now we'll be saying that when the web was invented people treated it like a book or magazine, or maybe a little like TV. I predict that 25 years from now we'll consider these concepts quaint early forays by curmudgeonly glue-stained and Xacto-nicked designers.
Ooops. That's http://www.medinexpro.com/.
Hint: Think cross-platform. Distributed, robust,
and fully HCFA-compliant:
Medinex Office and your JVM and you're good to go.
You are allowed to change Squeak, write extensions to Squeak, build an application in Squeak, and include some or all of Squeak with your products. You may distribute all of these things along with Squeak, or portions of Squeak, for free or for money. However, you must distribute these things under a license that protects Apple in the way described in this license.
If you modify any of the methods of class objects (or their relationships) that come with Squeak (as opposed to building on top of the classes in the release), you must post the modifications on a web site or otherwise make them available for free to others, just as has been done with Squeak. The same is true if you port Squeak to another machine or operating system - you must post your port on a web site or otherwise make it available for free to others under the same license terms.
Not to sound like an old codger (OK, well, just a little) but when I was taking college programming courses we didn't even have that kind of choice. My first class was FORTRAN and we wrote our programs on punch cards and submitted them to the operator, who ran them, and handed back our printouts. Yes really. After that I was programming on TI 990s in Pascal. My assembly language class used a simulator written by a former grad student as his PhD project. Just so you are clear, none of these later environments were graphical -- strictly character-cell full-screen was the state of the art. So kwitcherbellyachin' and get to coding.
There's a little company in Portland, OR, called Qsent that has some interesting products out and in the pipeline. One, IQradio, allows you to input a location and radio programming you are interested in an get the stations in that area that have the programming. Another will allow you to hail a taxi/limo/whatever from your Palm or telephone.
AOL's web service is built on hordes of proxies caching pages for the clients inside their network. Their implementation is broken in that it doesn't properly obey the HTTP cache-control headers, meaning that if you have page that you want to expire or never be cached, you're fucked. There's no way to make AOL's proxies obey your desires. Our customer support group was trained to tell AOL users how to force a clean reload. Ugh.
Well these aren't the VLT pics but the HST made
these photos at about the same time. And I believe this site is more slashdot-ready.
s