This is the Matrix standard of proof, which is as extreme as you can get. Nothing can be proven to that level.
This is comparable to the Kent Hovind standard of proof. Kent Hovind (who declared bankruptcy in 1996) has a standing offer of $250,000 to "anyone who can give any empirical evidence (scientific proof) for evolution" and creationists jabber about this unclaimed award all the time. In the fine print it turns out that to get the money you must produce proof "beyond reasonable doubt" that God does not exist.
>>Could this be part of the elusive 'dark matter' talked about so much lately?
>Yes.
I vote no. Stars are luminous and dark matter is not luminous by definition. This could be said to be part of the "missing matter", but not the "dark matter". Argumentum ad lexicon, QED.
Anyway, isn't dark matter supposed to be a hypothesized explanation for why stars in spiral arms are orbiting the centers of galaxies more quickly than can be accounted for by the observed abundance of luminous matter? I'm not familiar with the gravitational properties of a ring-shaped mass distribution, but a ring of stars surrounding the outer rim of the galaxy seems to be in the wrong place to have any explanatory power for the high orbit velocities of stars that are well within the ring. You want to find something heavy that's within their orbits.
> This IS science. The only thing you can "prove" is that the universe exists NOW
Oh, yeah? Prove it.
You're demanding an absurd standard of proof. "The universe exists" has already been proven for a long time to the satisfaction of the majority of the scientific community.
That's how "proof" in science works. (In other areas such as law, "proof" is held to a different standard.) You come up with a hypothesis that explains the evidence, write a paper, and the paper gets distributed for peer review. If the hypothesis is coherently written and your logic and methodology is found to be acceptable by these people, it gets published in a journal. Once it's in a journal it is subject to verification or rebuttal by other groups who also have access to physical evidence and can test your hypothesis via experimentation or observation.
The idea is that while one scientist may fool himself for a long time, and a large number of scientists may fool themselves for a short time, it's very rare that a large number of scientists will be fooled for a long time. (Although once in a while it occasionally happens.) This technique was developed only in recent centuries and has worked extremely well.
By this standard it has been conclusively proven many times that the universe does indeed exist. If you want to seriously promote within the scientific community the theory that the universe might not exist, you should gather the evidence you're using, write a paper explaining how this evidence supports your theory, and submit it to a journal for peer review.
What the hell does the theory of evolution have to do with the age of the universe?!
All scientific theories that somehow contradict the Genesis story of a young earth get lumped together into one big bad theory which then has the label "evolution" slapped on it. The falsity of this theory is part of a creationist's religious beliefs.
This is why cosmologists and astrophysicists always find themselves having to defend biological evolution of all things. Although a scientist is ill-prepared for the fight, because in his line of work, logic and reason are actually useful for constructing persuasive arguments. This is a debate against people who believe the world was created by magic, so logic and reason have already gone out the window.
The debate wouldn't be worth wasting time on at all were it not for the fact that school boards in the U.S. are disproportionally loaded with these twits. We need another Sputnik pretty badly right about now.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong mister IAAB, but ATG&C are paired with another. I don't remember which is paired with which, but let's say that A and T are paired, and G and C are paired. This would mean that A-T mean the same thing, and G-C mean the same thing, which results in you only having base-2.
Let me club you on the head with some ASCII art:
AAAAATTTATTTAAAAAAAAA TTTTTAAATAAATTTTTTTTT
According to your argument, this sequence contains no information.
No, whoever modded it as a troll was correct (except I wasn't really trolling). I hadn't done my homework on the MS tool I was talking about- it does a mapping from the Java 2 API to the.NET API and converts your Java code to C#. (I was thinking it went to J#.) So the post has a major factual error.
Still the original point is the same, that this is much more difficult to do with Java than with the VB->VB.net conversion which is relatively trivial.
When trying to connect to an address of form 1.2.3.4, the program would halt for some twenty-thirty seconds before proceeding.
IIRC this was a problem with Sun's implementation of InetAddress.getByName() on Windows. When passed a string containing a dotted numeric quad, it stupidly tried to do a DNS lookup on it instead of simply filling in the four bytes and handing you an InetAddress. Because who knows- maybe someone registered "192.168.1.23" as a domain name! (Which would be akin to registering "microsoft.com" with a Cyrillic "o", but never mind.) Then of course your thread stalled inside InetAddress for half a minute while it waited for the DNS timeout. This makes me suspect that Sun's code was waiting for the successful DNS response and ignoring the failure response that actually arrived. Probably the same moron was responsible for both bugs. Editing the hosts file became the standard workaround.
I don't know when it got fixed but there's code in there to check for a dotted quad now.
MS has a porting tool that is supposed to work with 99% of all Java code. It probably won't work well with obscure API's or JNI, but I here it is indeed pretty magical.
You're right, that tool ports code from Java to C# (not J#, like I was thinking) so the API limitation isn't an issue for end users. (Although the porting tool is still more difficult for MS to implement than the one for VB.) Actually, the porting tool sounds like a quick way to learn C# and the.NET framework. Although you might end up writing code that's similar to a porting tool if you learn C# that way.
Swing is a nice GUI API, IMO.
Oh the API itself is wonderful (if unnecessarily complicated). There's a lot of things you can do with it because it has so many features. But unless you spend the majority of time tweaking your GUI code (instead of doing other stuff) what you end up with is ugly defaults. Ever see a Swing GUI programmed by a physicist or engineer? UGH. Swing practically demands a dual major in comp sci and art. And the performance stinks because there are too many classes to load and initialize. The text editing stuff is the most overengineered part. Documents create too many objects. And Swing apps don't look like other apps on the system. Even if you use the Windows L&F they still stick out. Try changing your XP skin and seeing how your "Windows" Swing apps react.
I've seen good Swing applications, but they are as rare as good MS products.
I like IntelliJ IDEA. Well done Swing apps can be quite impressive. In the way that a 747 built out of Legos is impressive.
The biggest problem with UI design in Java is that it's done by a programmer that only cares about functionality (a lot like me) and not by an artist (like the Mac UI).
Are all Mac programmers artists?
Swing isn't what makes apps slow. GC doesn't make Java slow. Poor programming habbits are the #1 cause of sluggish UIs.
Actually, all three of those things can contribute.
>Java code is harder to port to.NET than VB- not >because Java is conceptually further away >from.NET than VB is (it definitely is not) but >because it comes from a different vendor (Sun)
Ever heard of J# ? Java 1.1 on.NET that is; by Microsoft.
Sure. In fact I just got my J# CD in the mail from MS a few weeks ago (they didn't have it ready in time for the Visual Studio.NET release). It doesn't implement the Java 2.0 class libraries. J# only implements the API in JDK 1.1.4, because that's the version of Java for which they have a license from Sun. Most Java code by now is using stuff that wasn't in 1.1.4. Therefore Java is difficult to port to J#, and that's ultimately because Java is from a different vendor.
VB and VB.net don't have this problem, because VB.net presumably has all the features of VB that are compatible with.NET, and both are under the control of MS. So the VB.net conversion is relatively easy for Microsoft to successfully automate.
Stupid thing to declare things out loud without research; that's not a nerd.
Feh, such talk is cheap when it's coming from an AC.:)
I'm sure the people using my code will have more of an idea than I of what they want to use it for; however, I'm equally sure that they will have less of an idea than I of how my code works.
If they can read it (either because you've provided the source, or you wrote it in a language that is easy to decompile and you didn't obfuscate it), they can in principle gain insights into how your code works that even you do not possess. I have to apply bug fixes to other people's code all the time. Half the time I'm fixing something where it's obvious that the author didn't know what they were doing.
The whole idea behind encapsulation is to allow people to treat your code as a black box -- they don't need to know how your code works. Inheritance breaks this -- people need to know how your code works in order to know which functions need to be overridden.
You don't work at Sun Microsystems by any chance, do you? Actually this reminds me of a certain marketing manager who used to work at my company. He decided one day (probably after reading one of those stupid magazines they read on the can) that a search function on a website is a sign that the website is badly organized. So you know what he did? He directed the webmaster to remove the search function! He even threatened to fire her if it ever came back! The phones started ringing off the hook because our customers were pissed off and confused, but that "fixed" the problem as far as he was concerned. Thankfully he left the company within a year to sabotage some other company, and our site is now searchable again.
Encapsulation is a great way to place limits on complexity, and it works well in large projects- up to a point. To insist that it will always work and to deny that there will ever be any circumstances where someone might need to pry your black box open strikes me as rigid and ideological. To go so far as to lock the black box is ridiculous.
The best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray. If someone is trying to override your functions, it means that the encapsulated code isn't working correctly- either you have a bug, the code conforms to what is now an outdated specification, or some aspect of its behavior needs to be changed. The most common behavior will be to leave the encapsulation intact. People will generally try to honor it and play by the rules with some sort of workaround. But sometimes it needs to be broken. Life isn't perfect.
In any case, if you're writing a class that is designed to be subclassed, the accessible superclass methods are part of the interface and should be documented just like any other interface methods. If the class is not designed to be subclassed, then just say so in the documentation and let me worry about it from there!
Hell, why can't you just compile the Java to a CLR and be done with it?
This is sort of what J# is, except J# uses the.NET framework and not the standard JRE libraries. To compile a Java program to IL code you'd need a bunch of.NET assemblies exposing the same public API as the JRE libraries, and I'm sure there would be legal obstacles to that happening. Also, both languages use a single inheritance model. Java objects extend java.lang.Object and.NET objects extend System.Object.
There's an obvious market for CLR-JVM integration. I think tools are probably under development to do this kind of thing. I guess in theory you could implement a JVM directly from within a CLR. But the simplest way I can think of to do it would be to just use C++. A CLR could execute some "managed C++" that instantiates a JVM using the JNI invocation API. The communication would then take place through a JNI/managed C++ layer. Sun says you can't have two JVMs running in a single process, but there's no rule that says that a JVM and a CLR can't share one! Except there's probably some fundamental limit on how much bloat you can cram into a single process.:)
Inheritance and overriding functions is different: It allows other people to insert their code in the middle of my code. If I want to have people doing that, I'll allow them to pass me a function pointer; but in most cases I want to be able to make internal assumptions about how my code works without having inheritors break them.
Smart. That way, the client programmers (your frigging users BTW) will pay the extra $$$ to buy the source from you so they can work around the implicit assumptions you made that turned out to be inappropriate, wrong, or moronic. If you were designing cars I bet you'd have the hood welded shut too. Ever consider your users might have more of an idea down the road what changes need to be made than you do at the moment?
I wrote a program that reads in a JAR file and spits out a copy that clears the ACC_PRIVATE and ACC_FINAL bits on all the class, field, and method declarations. It can also be used as a classloader that doctors the class definition bytes before handing them over to the JVM's primordal classloader. It was a lot of fun actually, but I think JDK 1.4 broke it.
It seems to be that companies are moving from VB to.NET, not that Java developers are moving to.NET.
This is not surprising at all and it's what I've been hearing from everybody. Java code is harder to port to.NET than VB- not because Java is conceptually further away from.NET than VB is (it definitely is not) but because it comes from a different vendor (Sun). That makes it harder for MS to write a good porting tool. And people generally chose Java in the first place because they wanted to deploy their stuff on Unix and Linux servers (thus avoiding the vendor lock-in and security issues associated with Windows) while still being free to develop on their Windows laptops- on which the OS choice is a relatively minor project consideration. So there is that.
The migration path from Java to.NET isn't as trivial as the VB->VB.net migration. J# gives you Java-like syntax. But while syntax seems like a major issue from a beginner's perspective because it's the first thing you have to learn, it's minor compared to library support. You eventually invest more time learning the library than the syntax. The.NET framework is a completely different animal than the Java libraries that you've learned and that your Java programs have been compiled against. And seriously, who would want to use J# for a new project when C# is available?
VB and VB.net are both MS creations and MS is exerting pressure on the VB community to switch. A VB programmer can practically feel Microsoft's bayonet in his back pushing him down the VB.net migration path. And the porting tools are relatively straightforward for MS to implement, since they control both technologies. So if you program VB (ASP or not) for a living, I think you'd better learn VB.net ASAP.
If you're a Java programmer, however, it isn't as clear. The best arguments I can think of for learning.NET are:
-The obvious conceptual similarity to Java means that you've already mastered at least the fundamentals- even if you still have a lot of studying ahead to learn the.NET framework APIs.
-Java is generally considered inadequate for Windows client applications. (Unless you're developing on Linux using SWT/gcj and cross compiling to generate a Win32 EXE, or you're just compiling against the SWT library using javac and distributing a JAR and DLL. SWT does give your Java program that nice "C++ feel" you always wanted.) This isn't really Java's fault, it's Sun's for providing horrible GUI APIs like Swing/AWT. They make it way too obvious to everybody that you implemented your program with Java. Even though MS marketing still has its head stuck up its ass with this "XML web services" hype, the relative ease of writing simple desktop applications for Windows is a major thing that.NET brings to the table. Actually, that was a nice thing about J++/WFC a few years ago. Having to choose between VB or C++ w/MFC just sucked. (Although there are certainly alternatives: Python/Tkinter, Mozilla/XUL, etc.)
-Java/J2EE skills (and server programming skills in general) may turn out to be insufficient for paying the rent/mortgage (tech slump, telecommuters from Calcutta, etc.), and not many people (yet) have.NET on their resumes. Although.NET will quickly succumb to this too. But a programmer who knows both is that much more employable than one who knows only Java. Still, and this cannot be emphasized enough, companies want expertise in their field. Knowing a programming language isn't enough- you should also know the gritty details about a specific industry (trucking, pharmaceuticals, retail, online pornography, accountancy, whatever). If you're a nervously employed Java programmer, learning.NET might not help you as much as becoming an expert in whatever your company does- even if that is the boring part of your job. By gaining industry expertise, you help yourself stick out from all the $7/hr people in India who are itching to replace you.
you are obviously hoping that no one reads the actual article. the study was over 3 yr. before the current economic slump. nowhere does it mention anything due to a slump.
nice troll!
That was not a troll. (I have a bad feeling YOUR post is a troll but I'll bite anyway since you bring up a good observation.)
The OP had a valid point. Labor costs are a higher percentage of the TOC for Linux as opposed to Windows, so when labor is cheap as it is now, Linux becomes cheap. You have a valid point too. You're saying the study may have determined that Linux is cheaper by looking at a period of time where labor costs are high. Taken together, these two points would indicate that nowadays Linux is even cheaper than is suggested by this study.
If it was a big yellow civil defense counter (victoreen), then you damn well better not register anything from any radation source you have laying around, otherwise you are in big trouble.
That was pretty much our assessment when we couldn't get it to work. I typed "Victoreen" into images.google.com to see what I recognized- it was a Victoreen model 715. And now the picture reminds me- the units were Roentgens/hr (on the "X1" setting- the switch had X100, X10, X1, and X0.1 positions).
I had it ten years ago- it's in my parents' house somewhere. It was originally marketed to the general public during the early sixties, right after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Maybe someone else has seen one. It was heavy and yellow, with a handle that hung over the dial. It had three sensitivity settings- 100, 10, and 1 of some unit that I can't remember- maybe mrad/hour. (Radiation dosage units are confusing as hell.)
Either it didn't work at all, or the sensitivity was ridiculously low. I stuck a cobalt-60 source (one of those orange disks you see in highschool and college labs) right underneath it on its finest setting and the needle didn't even budge! Either they didn't understand radiation well back then, or someone was making a fortune during the Cuban Missile Crisis selling fake Geiger counters.
A neutrino changing its flavor means that the neutrino experiences time. Of course I don't mean "experiences" subjectively, with a consciousness- I mean in the sense that a neutrino can in theory be used as a sort of clock. This effectively rules out the possibility that neutrinos are massless particles.
In relativity, "proper time" in a moving or stationary frame of reference refers to the time as measured by a clock that is stationary relative to that frame. Your watch always gives you the proper time for your frame of reference- and one of the implicit rules is that proper time always proceeds normally. You will never look down at your watch and see the hands spinning around or standing completely still because that would be silly. Massless particles like the photon travel at the speed of light- and in fact a massless particle can ONLY travel at the speed of light. (With exceptions for travel through water, glass, etc.) It makes no sense to talk about the proper time experienced by a photon, because when v=c the denominator in the time dilation equation vanishes. A photon can spend a billion years traveling from a remote galaxy to a telescope here, but from the photon's own "point of view" the travel time was zero. A photon does not experience proper time.
Now that we've caught neutrinos changing their flavor during their travel, we know that they do experience the passage of proper time, which means they have mass, albeit a very small one. This has some implications for the Standard Model (although I don't know what they are).
Neutrinos have also been shown to be impervious to humor of all kinds, as has been proven here time and again.
Why do writers insist on making Top Ten list that start at #1. It ruins the suspense in an otherwise great article. And that's what Physics is all about... suspense.
Do what I do- as I read down the list, I dynamically reassign the numbers to suspenseful ones by use of a special algorithm:
There is a difference between observation and experimentation. If for example a cosmologist actually created a black hole, in a repeatable and controlled way, then that would be a scientific experiment. Cosmologists are largely observers, though.
Are you implying that astronomy is somehow less than a science?
The only example of a meteorological "experiment" I can think of would be cloud seeding. But please, see this page at Colorado State: The Importance of Natural Variability [colostate.edu].
From that link: nonetheless the bottom line in examining potential human-caused effects is: are these effects large enough in magnitude to be extricated from the `noise' of the natural variability of the system?
This is a well defined statistical problem, and there are methods used in all observational sciences to evaluate the probability of a null hypothesis. Rarely do your conclusions simply fall in your lap from the evidence without your having to do some work to separate them out from the noise and to sufficiently demonstrate that you are in fact not drawing your conclusions from the noise itself. This is done even in fields like medicine. I still fail to see your point.
Ahah, you spotted the point that I left out. In addition to being controlled, experiments have to be repeatable. I can repeat the experiment with the flies and cyanide gas (to a limit, they aren't exactly the same flies). But it's impossible to repeat an atmospheric experiment.
People like to come up with bad definitions of what "science" is, and yours is no better than most I've seen. It has too many false negatives.
Nobody has produced a black hole in a lab, but that doesn't mean that black holes cannot exist. "It has to be repeatable" effectively rules out geology, astronomy, paleontology, and meteorology as "sciences". In fact most of the astronomical and historical sciences fail to meet your narrow definition. Hypotheses from all of these fields can be validated by collecting whatever evidence is available, even if the data doesn't come from a repeatable tabletop experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the Matrix standard of proof, which is as extreme as you can get. Nothing can be proven to that level.
This is comparable to the Kent Hovind standard of proof. Kent Hovind (who declared bankruptcy in 1996) has a standing offer of $250,000 to "anyone who can give any empirical evidence (scientific proof) for evolution" and creationists jabber about this unclaimed award all the time. In the fine print it turns out that to get the money you must produce proof "beyond reasonable doubt" that God does not exist.
>>Could this be part of the elusive 'dark matter' talked about so much lately?
>Yes.
I vote no. Stars are luminous and dark matter is not luminous by definition. This could be said to be part of the "missing matter", but not the "dark matter". Argumentum ad lexicon, QED.
Anyway, isn't dark matter supposed to be a hypothesized explanation for why stars in spiral arms are orbiting the centers of galaxies more quickly than can be accounted for by the observed abundance of luminous matter? I'm not familiar with the gravitational properties of a ring-shaped mass distribution, but a ring of stars surrounding the outer rim of the galaxy seems to be in the wrong place to have any explanatory power for the high orbit velocities of stars that are well within the ring. You want to find something heavy that's within their orbits.
> This IS science. The only thing you can "prove" is that the universe exists NOW
Oh, yeah? Prove it.
You're demanding an absurd standard of proof. "The universe exists" has already been proven for a long time to the satisfaction of the majority of the scientific community.
That's how "proof" in science works. (In other areas such as law, "proof" is held to a different standard.) You come up with a hypothesis that explains the evidence, write a paper, and the paper gets distributed for peer review. If the hypothesis is coherently written and your logic and methodology is found to be acceptable by these people, it gets published in a journal. Once it's in a journal it is subject to verification or rebuttal by other groups who also have access to physical evidence and can test your hypothesis via experimentation or observation.
The idea is that while one scientist may fool himself for a long time, and a large number of scientists may fool themselves for a short time, it's very rare that a large number of scientists will be fooled for a long time. (Although once in a while it occasionally happens.) This technique was developed only in recent centuries and has worked extremely well.
By this standard it has been conclusively proven many times that the universe does indeed exist. If you want to seriously promote within the scientific community the theory that the universe might not exist, you should gather the evidence you're using, write a paper explaining how this evidence supports your theory, and submit it to a journal for peer review.
What the hell does the theory of evolution have to do with the age of the universe?!
All scientific theories that somehow contradict the Genesis story of a young earth get lumped together into one big bad theory which then has the label "evolution" slapped on it. The falsity of this theory is part of a creationist's religious beliefs.
This is why cosmologists and astrophysicists always find themselves having to defend biological evolution of all things. Although a scientist is ill-prepared for the fight, because in his line of work, logic and reason are actually useful for constructing persuasive arguments. This is a debate against people who believe the world was created by magic, so logic and reason have already gone out the window.
The debate wouldn't be worth wasting time on at all were it not for the fact that school boards in the U.S. are disproportionally loaded with these twits. We need another Sputnik pretty badly right about now.
Let me club you on the head with some ASCII art:According to your argument, this sequence contains no information.
No, whoever modded it as a troll was correct (except I wasn't really trolling). I hadn't done my homework on the MS tool I was talking about- it does a mapping from the Java 2 API to the .NET API and converts your Java code to C#. (I was thinking it went to J#.) So the post has a major factual error.
Still the original point is the same, that this is much more difficult to do with Java than with the VB->VB.net conversion which is relatively trivial.
When trying to connect to an address of form 1.2.3.4, the program would halt for some twenty-thirty seconds before proceeding.
IIRC this was a problem with Sun's implementation of InetAddress.getByName() on Windows. When passed a string containing a dotted numeric quad, it stupidly tried to do a DNS lookup on it instead of simply filling in the four bytes and handing you an InetAddress. Because who knows- maybe someone registered "192.168.1.23" as a domain name! (Which would be akin to registering "microsoft.com" with a Cyrillic "o", but never mind.) Then of course your thread stalled inside InetAddress for half a minute while it waited for the DNS timeout. This makes me suspect that Sun's code was waiting for the successful DNS response and ignoring the failure response that actually arrived. Probably the same moron was responsible for both bugs. Editing the hosts file became the standard workaround.
I don't know when it got fixed but there's code in there to check for a dotted quad now.
Does this violate the DMCA?
No, the DMCA only forbids reverse engineering where the intent is to create unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work.
This is not an issue with the Statue of Liberty because works created in the 1870s are now in the public domain.
MS has a porting tool that is supposed to work with 99% of all Java code. It probably won't work well with obscure API's or JNI, but I here it is indeed pretty magical.
.NET framework. Although you might end up writing code that's similar to a porting tool if you learn C# that way.
You're right, that tool ports code from Java to C# (not J#, like I was thinking) so the API limitation isn't an issue for end users. (Although the porting tool is still more difficult for MS to implement than the one for VB.) Actually, the porting tool sounds like a quick way to learn C# and the
Swing is a nice GUI API, IMO.
Oh the API itself is wonderful (if unnecessarily complicated). There's a lot of things you can do with it because it has so many features. But unless you spend the majority of time tweaking your GUI code (instead of doing other stuff) what you end up with is ugly defaults. Ever see a Swing GUI programmed by a physicist or engineer? UGH. Swing practically demands a dual major in comp sci and art.
And the performance stinks because there are too many classes to load and initialize. The text editing stuff is the most overengineered part. Documents create too many objects. And Swing apps don't look like other apps on the system. Even if you use the Windows L&F they still stick out. Try changing your XP skin and seeing how your "Windows" Swing apps react.
I've seen good Swing applications, but they are as rare as good MS products.
I like IntelliJ IDEA. Well done Swing apps can be quite impressive. In the way that a 747 built out of Legos is impressive.
The biggest problem with UI design in Java is that it's done by a programmer that only cares about functionality (a lot like me) and not by an artist (like the Mac UI).
Are all Mac programmers artists?
Swing isn't what makes apps slow. GC doesn't make Java slow. Poor programming habbits are the #1 cause of sluggish UIs.
Actually, all three of those things can contribute.
>Java code is harder to port to
>because Java is conceptually further away
>from
>because it comes from a different vendor (Sun)
Ever heard of J# ? Java 1.1 on
Sure. In fact I just got my J# CD in the mail from MS a few weeks ago (they didn't have it ready in time for the Visual Studio
VB and VB.net don't have this problem, because VB.net presumably has all the features of VB that are compatible with
Stupid thing to declare things out loud without research; that's not a nerd.
Feh, such talk is cheap when it's coming from an AC.
You seem to be obsessed with the idea that I'm evil. Why?
Sorry, I didn't realize that's how I was coming across!
I guess I shouldn't have compared you to our marketing manager- that was uncalled for.
I'm sure the people using my code will have more of an idea than I of what they want to use it for; however, I'm equally sure that they will have less of an idea than I of how my code works.
If they can read it (either because you've provided the source, or you wrote it in a language that is easy to decompile and you didn't obfuscate it), they can in principle gain insights into how your code works that even you do not possess. I have to apply bug fixes to other people's code all the time. Half the time I'm fixing something where it's obvious that the author didn't know what they were doing.
The whole idea behind encapsulation is to allow people to treat your code as a black box -- they don't need to know how your code works. Inheritance breaks this -- people need to know how your code works in order to know which functions need to be overridden.
You don't work at Sun Microsystems by any chance, do you? Actually this reminds me of a certain marketing manager who used to work at my company. He decided one day (probably after reading one of those stupid magazines they read on the can) that a search function on a website is a sign that the website is badly organized. So you know what he did? He directed the webmaster to remove the search function! He even threatened to fire her if it ever came back! The phones started ringing off the hook because our customers were pissed off and confused, but that "fixed" the problem as far as he was concerned. Thankfully he left the company within a year to sabotage some other company, and our site is now searchable again.
Encapsulation is a great way to place limits on complexity, and it works well in large projects- up to a point. To insist that it will always work and to deny that there will ever be any circumstances where someone might need to pry your black box open strikes me as rigid and ideological. To go so far as to lock the black box is ridiculous.
The best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray. If someone is trying to override your functions, it means that the encapsulated code isn't working correctly- either you have a bug, the code conforms to what is now an outdated specification, or some aspect of its behavior needs to be changed. The most common behavior will be to leave the encapsulation intact. People will generally try to honor it and play by the rules with some sort of workaround. But sometimes it needs to be broken. Life isn't perfect.
In any case, if you're writing a class that is designed to be subclassed, the accessible superclass methods are part of the interface and should be documented just like any other interface methods. If the class is not designed to be subclassed, then just say so in the documentation and let me worry about it from there!
Hell, why can't you just compile the Java to a CLR and be done with it?
.NET framework and not the standard JRE libraries. To compile a Java program to IL code you'd need a bunch of .NET assemblies exposing the same public API as the JRE libraries, and I'm sure there would be legal obstacles to that happening. Also, both languages use a single inheritance model. Java objects extend java.lang.Object and .NET objects extend System.Object.
:)
This is sort of what J# is, except J# uses the
There's an obvious market for CLR-JVM integration. I think tools are probably under development to do this kind of thing. I guess in theory you could implement a JVM directly from within a CLR. But the simplest way I can think of to do it would be to just use C++. A CLR could execute some "managed C++" that instantiates a JVM using the JNI invocation API. The communication would then take place through a JNI/managed C++ layer. Sun says you can't have two JVMs running in a single process, but there's no rule that says that a JVM and a CLR can't share one! Except there's probably some fundamental limit on how much bloat you can cram into a single process.
Inheritance and overriding functions is different: It allows other people to insert their code in the middle of my code. If I want to have people doing that, I'll allow them to pass me a function pointer; but in most cases I want to be able to make internal assumptions about how my code works without having inheritors break them.
Smart. That way, the client programmers (your frigging users BTW) will pay the extra $$$ to buy the source from you so they can work around the implicit assumptions you made that turned out to be inappropriate, wrong, or moronic. If you were designing cars I bet you'd have the hood welded shut too. Ever consider your users might have more of an idea down the road what changes need to be made than you do at the moment?
I wrote a program that reads in a JAR file and spits out a copy that clears the ACC_PRIVATE and ACC_FINAL bits on all the class, field, and method declarations. It can also be used as a classloader that doctors the class definition bytes before handing them over to the JVM's primordal classloader. It was a lot of fun actually, but I think JDK 1.4 broke it.
It seems to be that companies are moving from VB to .NET, not that Java developers are moving to .NET.
.NET than VB- not because Java is conceptually further away from .NET than VB is (it definitely is not) but because it comes from a different vendor (Sun). That makes it harder for MS to write a good porting tool. And people generally chose Java in the first place because they wanted to deploy their stuff on Unix and Linux servers (thus avoiding the vendor lock-in and security issues associated with Windows) while still being free to develop on their Windows laptops- on which the OS choice is a relatively minor project consideration. So there is that.
.NET isn't as trivial as the VB->VB.net migration. J# gives you Java-like syntax. But while syntax seems like a major issue from a beginner's perspective because it's the first thing you have to learn, it's minor compared to library support. You eventually invest more time learning the library than the syntax. The .NET framework is a completely different animal than the Java libraries that you've learned and that your Java programs have been compiled against. And seriously, who would want to use J# for a new project when C# is available?
.NET are:
.NET framework APIs.
.NET brings to the table. Actually, that was a nice thing about J++/WFC a few years ago. Having to choose between VB or C++ w/MFC just sucked. (Although there are certainly alternatives: Python/Tkinter, Mozilla/XUL, etc.)
.NET on their resumes. Although .NET will quickly succumb to this too. But a programmer who knows both is that much more employable than one who knows only Java. Still, and this cannot be emphasized enough, companies want expertise in their field. Knowing a programming language isn't enough- you should also know the gritty details about a specific industry (trucking, pharmaceuticals, retail, online pornography, accountancy, whatever). If you're a nervously employed Java programmer, learning .NET might not help you as much as becoming an expert in whatever your company does- even if that is the boring part of your job. By gaining industry expertise, you help yourself stick out from all the $7/hr people in India who are itching to replace you.
This is not surprising at all and it's what I've been hearing from everybody. Java code is harder to port to
The migration path from Java to
VB and VB.net are both MS creations and MS is exerting pressure on the VB community to switch. A VB programmer can practically feel Microsoft's bayonet in his back pushing him down the VB.net migration path. And the porting tools are relatively straightforward for MS to implement, since they control both technologies. So if you program VB (ASP or not) for a living, I think you'd better learn VB.net ASAP.
If you're a Java programmer, however, it isn't as clear. The best arguments I can think of for learning
-The obvious conceptual similarity to Java means that you've already mastered at least the fundamentals- even if you still have a lot of studying ahead to learn the
-Java is generally considered inadequate for Windows client applications. (Unless you're developing on Linux using SWT/gcj and cross compiling to generate a Win32 EXE, or you're just compiling against the SWT library using javac and distributing a JAR and DLL. SWT does give your Java program that nice "C++ feel" you always wanted.) This isn't really Java's fault, it's Sun's for providing horrible GUI APIs like Swing/AWT. They make it way too obvious to everybody that you implemented your program with Java. Even though MS marketing still has its head stuck up its ass with this "XML web services" hype, the relative ease of writing simple desktop applications for Windows is a major thing that
-Java/J2EE skills (and server programming skills in general) may turn out to be insufficient for paying the rent/mortgage (tech slump, telecommuters from Calcutta, etc.), and not many people (yet) have
you are obviously hoping that no one reads
the actual article. the study was over 3 yr.
before the current economic slump.
nowhere does it mention anything due to
a slump.
nice troll!
That was not a troll. (I have a bad feeling YOUR post is a troll but I'll bite anyway since you bring up a good observation.)
The OP had a valid point. Labor costs are a higher percentage of the TOC for Linux as opposed to Windows, so when labor is cheap as it is now, Linux becomes cheap. You have a valid point too. You're saying the study may have determined that Linux is cheaper by looking at a period of time where labor costs are high. Taken together, these two points would indicate that nowadays Linux is even cheaper than is suggested by this study.
If it was a big yellow civil defense counter (victoreen), then you damn well better not register anything from any radation source you have laying around, otherwise you are in big trouble.
That was pretty much our assessment when we couldn't get it to work. I typed "Victoreen" into images.google.com to see what I recognized- it was a Victoreen model 715. And now the picture reminds me- the units were Roentgens/hr (on the "X1" setting- the switch had X100, X10, X1, and X0.1 positions).
The manual for this thing was pretty scary.
I had it ten years ago- it's in my parents' house somewhere. It was originally marketed to the general public during the early sixties, right after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Maybe someone else has seen one. It was heavy and yellow, with a handle that hung over the dial. It had three sensitivity settings- 100, 10, and 1 of some unit that I can't remember- maybe mrad/hour. (Radiation dosage units are confusing as hell.)
Either it didn't work at all, or the sensitivity was ridiculously low. I stuck a cobalt-60 source (one of those orange disks you see in highschool and college labs) right underneath it on its finest setting and the needle didn't even budge! Either they didn't understand radiation well back then, or someone was making a fortune during the Cuban Missile Crisis selling fake Geiger counters.
A neutrino changing its flavor means that the neutrino experiences time. Of course I don't mean "experiences" subjectively, with a consciousness- I mean in the sense that a neutrino can in theory be used as a sort of clock. This effectively rules out the possibility that neutrinos are massless particles.
In relativity, "proper time" in a moving or stationary frame of reference refers to the time as measured by a clock that is stationary relative to that frame. Your watch always gives you the proper time for your frame of reference- and one of the implicit rules is that proper time always proceeds normally. You will never look down at your watch and see the hands spinning around or standing completely still because that would be silly.
Massless particles like the photon travel at the speed of light- and in fact a massless particle can ONLY travel at the speed of light. (With exceptions for travel through water, glass, etc.) It makes no sense to talk about the proper time experienced by a photon, because when v=c the denominator in the time dilation equation vanishes. A photon can spend a billion years traveling from a remote galaxy to a telescope here, but from the photon's own "point of view" the travel time was zero. A photon does not experience proper time.
Now that we've caught neutrinos changing their flavor during their travel, we know that they do experience the passage of proper time, which means they have mass, albeit a very small one. This has some implications for the Standard Model (although I don't know what they are).
Neutrinos have also been shown to be impervious to humor of all kinds, as has been proven here time and again.
ISP 1 is no good, places needlessly restrictive filters on all your traffic.
ISP 2 routes all your packets through ISP 1!
Why do writers insist on making Top Ten list that start at #1. It ruins the suspense in an otherwise great article. And that's what Physics is all about ... suspense.
Do what I do- as I read down the list, I dynamically reassign the numbers to suspenseful ones by use of a special algorithm:
suspenseful(X) = 11 - X
Hellooo, suspense! It's back!
He could be from New Jersey. We always called it coke or soda.
Never heard of "pop" until I met some people from Chicago. They thought "soda" was weird.
There is a difference between observation and experimentation. If for example a cosmologist actually created a black hole, in a repeatable and controlled way, then that would be a scientific experiment. Cosmologists are largely observers, though.
Are you implying that astronomy is somehow less than a science?
The only example of a meteorological "experiment" I can think of would be cloud seeding. But please, see this page at Colorado State: The Importance of Natural Variability [colostate.edu].
From that link:
nonetheless the bottom line in examining potential human-caused effects is: are these effects large enough in magnitude to be extricated from the `noise' of the natural variability of the system?
This is a well defined statistical problem, and there are methods used in all observational sciences to evaluate the probability of a null hypothesis. Rarely do your conclusions simply fall in your lap from the evidence without your having to do some work to separate them out from the noise and to sufficiently demonstrate that you are in fact not drawing your conclusions from the noise itself. This is done even in fields like medicine. I still fail to see your point.
Ahah, you spotted the point that I left out. In addition to being controlled, experiments have to be repeatable. I can repeat the experiment with the flies and cyanide gas (to a limit, they aren't exactly the same flies). But it's impossible to repeat an atmospheric experiment.
People like to come up with bad definitions of what "science" is, and yours is no better than most I've seen. It has too many false negatives.
Nobody has produced a black hole in a lab, but that doesn't mean that black holes cannot exist. "It has to be repeatable" effectively rules out geology, astronomy, paleontology, and meteorology as "sciences". In fact most of the astronomical and historical sciences fail to meet your narrow definition. Hypotheses from all of these fields can be validated by collecting whatever evidence is available, even if the data doesn't come from a repeatable tabletop experiment.
I read the article too fast! Damn.