Do a Sun Java Certified Programmer exam. As far as looking for jobs goes, it won't count for much on your CV, although it may help you get past a phone screen. It must be said though, that doing the study to pass the exam will give you a taste of the core language and give you some idea of what you want to learn next, which, by the way, isn't too difficult.
You go to Sun's website, book an exam voucher, do the study, and then book and sit the test through your local Prometric test centre.
As far as studying for it goes, there's a ton of material, including free exam test batteries on the Web.
My grandmother was a Hungarian refugee, who fled the 1956 Revolution. Those of you who know your history will know that prior to 1956, Hungary was a repressive basketcase that in some ways, was even worse than Albania.
She emigrated, but took years to get used to the fact that she wasn't living under a repressive regime. She used to think that the authorities were spying on her through her phone and television. Sounds funny now, until you realize what people had to endure back in the old country, when people used to get dragged off in the middle of the night over the slightest pretext -- after that, it's not so hard to blame people for being a bit weird.
Kinda puts this conversation into perspective, doesn't it?
One of the golden rules of cracking/stealing online, is to avoid cracking machines, or ripping people off in your own country.
Assuming that the authorities are making at least a token effort and regularly take the 'low hanging fruit' off the streets, I imagine it would skew the remaining pool of scum and villainry towards people who actually know what they're doing and have some idea of how to avoid getting caught.
Russia and China also have a major attitude problem viz the West in general, and the US in particular, so it's little surprise they're not doing anything to rein in rampant online criminality affecting us, originating from within their borders.
Based on this, and considering the pool of potential victims who are 1) online, 2) naiive, 3) have the same language and culture, and 4) have something worth stealing is concentrated in the US... then it's little wonder that most of the abuse _appears_ to originate from the US. Just because the US is full of bots doesn't mean the criminal shitheads behind it are necessarily based in the US!
Beyond that, you see weaponized systems evolving for storability, robustness, mobility and fast turnaround, because they're the sorts of things you want in long range ballistic missiles.
For satellite launch systems, you don't need to use dangerous storable propellants or rapid turnaround, but you do want to maximise payload mass.
Interestingly, the Soviets had a lot more trouble than the US in miniaturizing their nuclear weapons designs, so they built bigger rockets, at one stage, building the R7 (which became Soyuz). It is a serious launcher (around 7 metric tons to LEO), can be assembled, have its payload integrated and rolled out to the launch pad in a couple of days; lousy for a weapon, but happily for the Soviet manned space programme, really good for a satellite or manned launcher.
But getting back on topic, if you want to see what their intentions really are, then look at what kinds of rockets they're building: if they're using solids or storable liquid engines, then odds are, they're looking at building something that can be turned into a weapon. If they're using LOX/kerosene or cryogenic engines (WAY down the track), that's a totally different story.
There are so many problems with this proposals it's ridiculous.
First of all, the ISS is very carefully designed to operate in low earth orbit in it's present inclination. One good reasons is thermal issues: rejecting waste heat and ensuring it doesn't get too hot or cold is important. If you were to build a space station to go into a different orbit, you would have to redesign the entire space station accordingly.
Not to mention that there are very good reasons why the station is in low earth orbit. LEO is relatively cheap to get to (launching to higher orbits costs more), not to mention the fact that the magnetosphere still shields the astronauts from much of the radiation from the solar wind, cosmic rays from elsewhere, etc.
Lots of useful science can be done in its present orbit. While the current inclination doesn't give good coverage of Earth's poles, it's still better than nothing.
There's another reason why moving the ISS would be impractical: the amount of delta-V required to get the thing into lunar orbit would be phenomenal. Not to mention the expense and complexity of resupplying the station in lunar orbit.
And just about every non-offical GTK+/Gnome application I've ever used. You can build crap in any language. The difference with Java is that the barrier is somewhat lower than with C/GTK+. Try downloading some earlier releases of GRIP and then watch your eyeballs bleed.
You can take this further and then look at all the pre-pubescent, putrefacting garbage out there written in PHP. The lower the technical barriers to entry, the more poorly-designed, awkward garbage gets written on it.
The truth is, most people know squat about writing reliable programs with decent, half usable UIs. Java/Swing and C/GTK+ have at least one thing in common: it's relatively easy for weekend hobby coders to push out crap, but it takes a lot more clue and skill to build stuff that's good looking and usable.
Coming from CmdrTaco, that's a tad harsh (flamebait?), especially in light of the fact that a LOT of Open Source activity these days centres around people building stuff in Java.
I'd go as far as to claim that a lot of know-how on how to design decent web frameworks, GUI toolkits happened in the Java world (well, TBH, there's Smalltalk too, but who, these days, is building anything substantial in Smalltalk?). The reason why we're not still stuck with crap like EJB 1.1, Topkink, etc, is because a huge army of very smart Open Source hackers are building excellent stuff, which in turn, have become defacto standards (to wit, Hibernate to EJB3, Spring, Struts 2, Seam, Tapestry).
Nine times out of ten, the Open Source alternative is faster, smaller, and more reliable. It'll be nice to finally see that happen to the JVM itself, once momentum builds behind IcedTea/ClassPath.
I work building proprietary, boring business apps in Java, however one of the big pleasures of my job is that there's just about always a very good Open Source implementation of any application server, database, library, GUI framework, whatever, that you can think of. The only missing piece that I can really see at this point standing in the way of making the entire stack 100% Open Source from top to bottom is the JVM. This is particularly important to the RMS long-hair crowd who've agonised for years about the Java Trap.
It may not always be a major issue. Future generations of nuclear reactors are likely to be designed specifically to operate at extremely high temperatures, good for producing enough process heat to thermochemically generate lots of hydrogen relatively cheaply.
While there *are* a large proportion of successful projects in large open source incubator sites like the Apache Jakarta project or Tigris and the like, I doubt merely arranging for having a piece of software adopted under the Apache Jakarta umbrella is a guarantee that it'll be an open source smash hit. It's not unusual for private companies to dump their old projects as open source, particularly on a big incubator, hoping that they'll take off by themselves. It doesn't always happen. Just count the number of XML binding frameworks on the Jakarta site, for instance. I have no hard numbers, but I'll bet that half this stuff barely gets used.
For every Velocity and Subversion out there, there's a ton of projects out there that are sadly abandoned or ignored, either because they never made the cut in the first place, they have critical flaws which prevent them from being adopted, or they're made obsolete. What happened to Scarab, for instance? Even now, a lot of people I know use Bugzilla (free, crappy, but works), and JIRA (non-free but excellent if you have the budget for a license).
Having a browse through these incubator sites makes for interesting archaeology though. A current Java server-side developer might wince when looking through some of the stuff that's still up there, especially when other people have come up with better ways of doing things, e.g. Spring and WebWork than the older and clunkier projects that occasionally still find their homes on these sites.
Having a bunch of old and abandoned projects doesn't really matter for these guys; their large number of big hits more than makes up for the also-rans.
$3.5 billion dollars? Think of how much cocaine and blowjobs that sort of money can buy.
No wonder the record industry is feeling so ripped off.
Re:Every Technologies has +/-s. Just be aware of t
on
SVG On the Rise
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I saw Dean Jackson's presentation at the OzeWAI 2002 Conference [ozewai.org]. From what I could see, he was using Mac OSX, and Python XSLT tools to produce his PowerPoint like SVG slides. In this format, one should be able to configure completely different behaviour, look and feels for any of the desired end media formats. Without a file format based in structured markup, this becomes much more difficult to address. For this purpose, this is far more flexible.
A tool that does this, and lots more is JackSVG. It takes in an XML file and gives you a self-contained SVG presentation. It's cool - check it out.
I have to heartily agree that while the free market is the most efficient way we know of to allocate scarce resources, it's the civilising influence of government that ensures that everyone behaves themselves, and preserves social conditions necessary to ensure social stability and thus, the existence and smooth functioning of the free market at large.
The old Eastern Bloc happens to be an excellent example of what happens when governments are not strong enough to enforce the rule of law and make everybody play fair.
You cannot have a free market and foreign investment without a certain degree of government intervention. Otherwise you see the situation prevalent in the more-backwards parts of the world where businessmen find it cheaper and more convenient to use unethical means to dispose of the competition than follow the rules.
Russia is an excellent example. Quite a few people have been rubbed out by their business competitors because the government is either unable or unwilling to impose a sufficent level of rule-of-law. I believe that just the other day,
a regional governer got shot in the back of the head in broad daylight, apparently an organised hit by disgruntled businessmen. Check out the photo.
Grid computing and clustering technologies are on opposite ends of the parallel computing scale.
On one hand, you have a grid, which is a framework meant to aggregate computing capacity and peripherals from potentially widely-separated machines, taking into account things like unreliable and insecure networks, resource metering, multiple domains of control, etc.
On the other hand, you have a bunch of beige boxes tightly integrated via a system-area network. Latency between the nodes is far lower, compared to your average grid technology, and you don't have to solve any of the security or accountability problem either.
Each calls for a different style of application development too. In systems where IPC is really expensive, you want to minimise it as much as possible. Not all apps that are written to run on a Beowulf cluster will necessarily port straight over to a grid framework. However, for apps that can be made to run well on a grid, the potential computing power available is far, far greater.
As both a Java and C# coder, I'd like to comment on two of the points raised in the article: primitive types as classes, and the class loading mechanism.
ERH makes some excellent points in the article, which happens to touch on a couple of issues I've felt is mediocre in Java, but moderately cool in the.NET Common Language Runtime - things that could do well in being transplanted into the Java language and runtime.
The.NET CLR, being a relatively recent creation has naturally gotten the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. Two area that it seems to do better than Java is of course, class versioning/loading and the issue of primitive types in Java.
For those of you who aren't familiar with C#, it implements it's primitive types as "value types" (as opposed to the familiar reference types we know and love from both Java and C#). Value types are passed by value (but can be boxed if you need to take a reference to an instance of a value type). The.NET CLR type system imposes some restrictions on what you can do with value types (I can't remember what they are offhand, sorry), but they enable value type instances to take up a very little space, making them virtually as efficient (time and space wise) as the "atomic" primitive types currently in Java. Would the introduction of primitive types as classes be so inefficient as other posters are claiming. I think not.
In the.NET CLR, you don't have no bloody CLASSPATH, but you do have two types of assemblies (private and shared), assembly probing (standard "protocol" for searching for dependancies of a given module), a powerful way of tweaking module loading through user-written configuration files, and a neat versioning model.
I highly recommend all haters of Java's class loading mechanism take a look at how the Microsoft people have done it. This is seriously good work.
Slashdot Mirror
Do a Sun Java Certified Programmer exam. As far as looking for jobs goes, it won't count for much on your CV, although it may help you get past a phone screen. It must be said though, that doing the study to pass the exam will give you a taste of the core language and give you some idea of what you want to learn next, which, by the way, isn't too difficult.
You go to Sun's website, book an exam voucher, do the study, and then book and sit the test through your local Prometric test centre.
As far as studying for it goes, there's a ton of material, including free exam test batteries on the Web.
My grandmother was a Hungarian refugee, who fled the 1956 Revolution. Those of you who know your history will know that prior to 1956, Hungary was a repressive basketcase that in some ways, was even worse than Albania.
She emigrated, but took years to get used to the fact that she wasn't living under a repressive regime. She used to think that the authorities were spying on her through her phone and television. Sounds funny now, until you realize what people had to endure back in the old country, when people used to get dragged off in the middle of the night over the slightest pretext -- after that, it's not so hard to blame people for being a bit weird.
Kinda puts this conversation into perspective, doesn't it?
One of the golden rules of cracking/stealing online, is to avoid cracking machines, or ripping people off in your own country.
Assuming that the authorities are making at least a token effort and regularly take the 'low hanging fruit' off the streets, I imagine it would skew the remaining pool of scum and villainry towards people who actually know what they're doing and have some idea of how to avoid getting caught.
Russia and China also have a major attitude problem viz the West in general, and the US in particular, so it's little surprise they're not doing anything to rein in rampant online criminality affecting us, originating from within their borders.
Based on this, and considering the pool of potential victims who are 1) online, 2) naiive, 3) have the same language and culture, and 4) have something worth stealing is concentrated in the US... then it's little wonder that most of the abuse _appears_ to originate from the US. Just because the US is full of bots doesn't mean the criminal shitheads behind it are necessarily based in the US!
"All documents can be found at NIST's WTC page, which read like a porn magazine for finite element junkies"
Guess we should try not to get the pages stuck together huh?
The technology is dual-use -- up to a point.
Beyond that, you see weaponized systems evolving for storability, robustness, mobility and fast turnaround, because they're the sorts of things you want in long range ballistic missiles.
For satellite launch systems, you don't need to use dangerous storable propellants or rapid turnaround, but you do want to maximise payload mass.
Interestingly, the Soviets had a lot more trouble than the US in miniaturizing their nuclear weapons designs, so they built bigger rockets, at one stage, building the R7 (which became Soyuz). It is a serious launcher (around 7 metric tons to LEO), can be assembled, have its payload integrated and rolled out to the launch pad in a couple of days; lousy for a weapon, but happily for the Soviet manned space programme, really good for a satellite or manned launcher.
But getting back on topic, if you want to see what their intentions really are, then look at what kinds of rockets they're building: if they're using solids or storable liquid engines, then odds are, they're looking at building something that can be turned into a weapon. If they're using LOX/kerosene or cryogenic engines (WAY down the track), that's a totally different story.
There are so many problems with this proposals it's ridiculous.
First of all, the ISS is very carefully designed to operate in low earth orbit in it's present inclination. One good reasons is thermal issues: rejecting waste heat and ensuring it doesn't get too hot or cold is important. If you were to build a space station to go into a different orbit, you would have to redesign the entire space station accordingly.
Not to mention that there are very good reasons why the station is in low earth orbit. LEO is relatively cheap to get to (launching to higher orbits costs more), not to mention the fact that the magnetosphere still shields the astronauts from much of the radiation from the solar wind, cosmic rays from elsewhere, etc.
Lots of useful science can be done in its present orbit. While the current inclination doesn't give good coverage of Earth's poles, it's still better than nothing.
There's another reason why moving the ISS would be impractical: the amount of delta-V required to get the thing into lunar orbit would be phenomenal. Not to mention the expense and complexity of resupplying the station in lunar orbit.
And just about every non-offical GTK+/Gnome application I've ever used. You can build crap in any language. The difference with Java is that the barrier is somewhat lower than with C/GTK+. Try downloading some earlier releases of GRIP and then watch your eyeballs bleed.
You can take this further and then look at all the pre-pubescent, putrefacting garbage out there written in PHP. The lower the technical barriers to entry, the more poorly-designed, awkward garbage gets written on it.
The truth is, most people know squat about writing reliable programs with decent, half usable UIs. Java/Swing and C/GTK+ have at least one thing in common: it's relatively easy for weekend hobby coders to push out crap, but it takes a lot more clue and skill to build stuff that's good looking and usable.
Coming from CmdrTaco, that's a tad harsh (flamebait?), especially in light of the fact that a LOT of Open Source activity these days centres around people building stuff in Java.
I'd go as far as to claim that a lot of know-how on how to design decent web frameworks, GUI toolkits happened in the Java world (well, TBH, there's Smalltalk too, but who, these days, is building anything substantial in Smalltalk?). The reason why we're not still stuck with crap like EJB 1.1, Topkink, etc, is because a huge army of very smart Open Source hackers are building excellent stuff, which in turn, have become defacto standards (to wit, Hibernate to EJB3, Spring, Struts 2, Seam, Tapestry).
Nine times out of ten, the Open Source alternative is faster, smaller, and more reliable. It'll be nice to finally see that happen to the JVM itself, once momentum builds behind IcedTea/ClassPath.
I work building proprietary, boring business apps in Java, however one of the big pleasures of my job is that there's just about always a very good Open Source implementation of any application server, database, library, GUI framework, whatever, that you can think of. The only missing piece that I can really see at this point standing in the way of making the entire stack 100% Open Source from top to bottom is the JVM. This is particularly important to the RMS long-hair crowd who've agonised for years about the Java Trap.
It may not always be a major issue. Future generations of nuclear reactors are likely to be designed specifically to operate at extremely high temperatures, good for producing enough process heat to thermochemically generate lots of hydrogen relatively cheaply.
While there *are* a large proportion of successful projects in large open source incubator sites like the Apache Jakarta project or Tigris and the like, I doubt merely arranging for having a piece of software adopted under the Apache Jakarta umbrella is a guarantee that it'll be an open source smash hit. It's not unusual for private companies to dump their old projects as open source, particularly on a big incubator, hoping that they'll take off by themselves. It doesn't always happen. Just count the number of XML binding frameworks on the Jakarta site, for instance. I have no hard numbers, but I'll bet that half this stuff barely gets used.
For every Velocity and Subversion out there, there's a ton of projects out there that are sadly abandoned or ignored, either because they never made the cut in the first place, they have critical flaws which prevent them from being adopted, or they're made obsolete. What happened to Scarab, for instance? Even now, a lot of people I know use Bugzilla (free, crappy, but works), and JIRA (non-free but excellent if you have the budget for a license).
Having a browse through these incubator sites makes for interesting archaeology though. A current Java server-side developer might wince when looking through some of the stuff that's still up there, especially when other people have come up with better ways of doing things, e.g. Spring and WebWork than the older and clunkier projects that occasionally still find their homes on these sites.
Having a bunch of old and abandoned projects doesn't really matter for these guys; their large number of big hits more than makes up for the also-rans.
$3.5 billion dollars? Think of how much cocaine and blowjobs that sort of money can buy.
No wonder the record industry is feeling so ripped off.
The old Eastern Bloc happens to be an excellent example of what happens when governments are not strong enough to enforce the rule of law and make everybody play fair.
You cannot have a free market and foreign investment without a certain degree of government intervention. Otherwise you see the situation prevalent in the more-backwards parts of the world where businessmen find it cheaper and more convenient to use unethical means to dispose of the competition than follow the rules.
Russia is an excellent example. Quite a few people have been rubbed out by their business competitors because the government is either unable or unwilling to impose a sufficent level of rule-of-law. I believe that just the other day, a regional governer got shot in the back of the head in broad daylight, apparently an organised hit by disgruntled businessmen. Check out the photo.
Yes, relevant but wrong. Sorry :)
Grid computing and clustering technologies are on opposite ends of the parallel computing scale.
On one hand, you have a grid, which is a framework meant to aggregate computing capacity and peripherals from potentially widely-separated machines, taking into account things like unreliable and insecure networks, resource metering, multiple domains of control, etc.
On the other hand, you have a bunch of beige boxes tightly integrated via a system-area network. Latency between the nodes is far lower, compared to your average grid technology, and you don't have to solve any of the security or accountability problem either.
Each calls for a different style of application development too. In systems where IPC is really expensive, you want to minimise it as much as possible. Not all apps that are written to run on a Beowulf cluster will necessarily port straight over to a grid framework. However, for apps that can be made to run well on a grid, the potential computing power available is far, far greater.
ERH makes some excellent points in the article, which happens to touch on a couple of issues I've felt is mediocre in Java, but moderately cool in the .NET Common Language Runtime - things that could do well in being transplanted into the Java language and runtime.
The .NET CLR, being a relatively recent creation has naturally gotten the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. Two area that it seems to do better than Java is of course, class versioning/loading and the issue of primitive types in Java.
For those of you who aren't familiar with C#, it implements it's primitive types as "value types" (as opposed to the familiar reference types we know and love from both Java and C#). Value types are passed by value (but can be boxed if you need to take a reference to an instance of a value type). The .NET CLR type system imposes some restrictions on what you can do with value types (I can't remember what they are offhand, sorry), but they enable value type instances to take up a very little space, making them virtually as efficient (time and space wise) as the "atomic" primitive types currently in Java. Would the introduction of primitive types as classes be so inefficient as other posters are claiming. I think not.
In the .NET CLR, you don't have no bloody CLASSPATH, but you do have two types of assemblies (private and shared), assembly probing (standard "protocol" for searching for dependancies of a given module), a powerful way of tweaking module loading through user-written configuration files, and a neat versioning model.
I highly recommend all haters of Java's class loading mechanism take a look at how the Microsoft people have done it. This is seriously good work.
MSDN: How the Runtime Locates Assemblies