Wow, you're right- guess I was confused. It all seems so simple now!
My understanding of CARP is that the burden of proof is shunted onto the webcaster- that if you cannot prove by keeping detailed logs that you are not broadcasting RIAA content, then the law assumes you've been streaming Britney Spears to everybody. Also, while the RIAA doesn't touch the profits of an indie band, for some reason the money goes through them and then they hand any that isn't theirs to some government agency that is supposed to redistribute the money to non-RIAA copyright holders. I'm not sure where I read that. Probably someone's Slashdot post.
It was a bad joke anyway. I'm sure this band isn't streaming the music themselves.
The RIAA will sue you because you're not paying them for the rights to stream your own music. The lawyer will let you run your stream for a few more days until the final court order comes in saying that you owe $800,000 in CARP fees to the RIAA. Then you can allow the corporation to go into Chapter 11 while you regroup and form a new band.
Also buy some heroin for your lead singer so that he gets all moody and suicidal. This is an absolute requirement if he/she is not pretty enough to shoot into space. People love bands with junkie lead singers.
What about it? It's about China censoring their citizens. It has nothing to do with Americans censoring their citizens.
Maybe you read it too fast.
"The Weekly Standard writes that despite expectations, the Chinese Government has been very successful in suppressing free internet access for their citizens. Key to this success was the assistance of Cisco, who built a giant firewall tailored to the state's needs, Yahoo (who helpfully censors search results and monitors online chats), and other Western companies."
Manufacturers clamor for market dominance in the bionic eye market, and come up with a hodgepodge of several dozen incompatible technologies. The Justice Department demands the ability to remotely observe what people are looking at, and pressures manufacturers to secretly include key escrow technologies in their circuitry. Copyright-holding corporations realize that the junction between the optic nerve and the CCD chip is ripe for targeting, since you can effectively close off the "analog hole" by sticking an agent in there that enforces copyrights on all visual images passing through. They lobby intensively and as a result the government steps in and mandates that within X years all vision should be digital and incorporate some approved form of copy-protection. This is hailed by the corporate press as a "victory for the consumer" because of the expected abundance of pay-per-see content, even though the early adopters get struck blind by the mandated copy protection- making their eyes worthless, although they are still prized by a small minority for their ability to boot up free operating systems.
Manufacturers continue to trip over each other in their efforts to corner the market, and come up with even more incompatible formats. Consumers who purchase the systems find that the left eye from manufacturer X (about to go out of business) and right eye from manufacturer Y (about to go out of business) both want to be in charge of what you're looking at. Getting different components to cooperate is next to impossible. When one eye breaks, you have to get them both replaced because everything is incompatible with everything else and every model is discontinued or obsoleted as soon as it comes out. People start to write scathing reviews about how the industry and Congress both need to get their act together.
Meanwhile, consumers look at this fiasco and rightly conclude that their eyes are working fine, and that there is no reason to throw them out.
Hum, keep in mind that this is a RADIO telescope array. So you can't "see" further with it, you can "listen" better...
What are you talking about? There are lots of radio images around. Whether it's "audio" or "video" depends only on whether you're using a point detector (like a radio receiver or a photodiode for visual light) or a spread out detector (like a lens or an array of point detectors).
I'm going to improve my Hello World and make it even better than yours. Right now mine only takes advantage of Singleton, Factory and Strategy. I'm going to add even more patterns to it: Composite, Proxy, Bridge, Prototype, Adapter, Decorator, and Builder. Maybe Flyweight, if I can figure out a use for it.
It will be the most flexible, configurable Hello World anyone ever wrote. Nobody will ever need to write another one. That would be "reinventing the wheel".
I wrote the following about GoF patterns in some Slashdot thread a few months ago, but it is more relevant to this thread so I'm going to be a lameass and cut/paste it. (In fact, your handle rings a bell. Maybe you were even in that thread and have read this before. I can't remember.)
Of course those GoF patterns can make life hell for the maintenance developer or app framework user, when people turn it into a contest to see how many design patterns they can fit into a single project. The overall "Design Patterns" philosophy is really "how can I defer as many decisions as possible from compile time to run time?" This makes the code very flexible, but the flexibility is wasted when a consultant writes code using lots of patterns to puff up his ego and then leaves without leaving adequate comments or documentation. Without insight into how the system works, the configurability and flexibility that these patterns offer is lost. The system hardens into an opaque black box. Deferring decisions to runtime makes code hard to read. Inheritance trees can get fairly deep, work is delegated off in clever but unintuitive ways to weird generic objects, and finding the code you're looking for is impossible, because when you're looking for the place where stuff actually happens, you eventually come across a polymorphic wonder like
object.work();
and the trail ends there. Simply reading the code doesn't tell you what it does; the subtype of object isn't determined until runtime. You basically need a debugger.
You can take a really simple program and screw it up with aggressive elegance like this. Here is Hello World in Java:
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, world!");
} }
But this isn't elegant enough. What if we want to print some other string? Or what if we want to do something else with the string, like draw "Hello World" on a canvas in Times Roman? We'd have to recompile. By fanatically applying patterns, we can defer to runtime all the decisions that we don't want to make at compile time, and impress later consultants with all the patterns we managed to cram into our code:
public interface MessageStrategy {
public void sendMessage(); }
public abstract class AbstractStrategyFactory {
public abstract MessageStrategy createStrategy(MessageBody mb); }
public class MessageBody {
Object payload;
public Object getPayload() {
return payload;
}
public void configure(Object obj) {
payload = obj;
}
public void send(MessageStrategy ms) {
ms.sendMessage();
} }
public class DefaultFactory extends AbstractStrategyFactory {
private DefaultFactory() {;}
static DefaultFactory instance;
public static AbstractStrategyFactory getInstance() {
if (instance==null) instance = new DefaultFactory();
return instance;
}
public MessageStrategy createStrategy(final MessageBody mb) {
return new MessageStrategy() {
MessageBody body = mb;
public void sendMessage() {
Object obj = body.getPayload();
System.out.println((String)obj);
}
};
} }
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
MessageBody mb = new MessageBody();
mb.configure("Hello World!");
AbstractStrategyFactory asf = DefaultFactory.getInstance();
MessageStrategy strategy = asf.createStrategy(mb);
mb.send(strategy);
} }
Look at the clean separation of data and logic. By overapplying patterns, I can build my reputation as a fiendishly clever coder, and force clients to hire me back since nobody else knows what all this elegant crap does. Of course, if the specifications were to change, the HelloWorld class itself would require recompilation. But not if we are even more clever and use XML to get our data and to encode the actual implementation of what is to be done with it. XML may not always be a good idea for every project, but everyone agrees that it's definitely cool and and should be used wherever possible to create elegant configuration nightmares.
Audiophiles are always fun. They can sound a lot like proponents of alternative medicine. A few quotes from the Audiophile BS page:
"These cables deliver big time! The sound is surprsingly smooth and spacious, with particularly sweet upper octaves."
"Special wooden resonator disks made in Asia from a special tree, only found in one area. Placing these under EACH of your components, at strategic locations will remove 'unwanted resonances', and DRAMATIC improval tonal quality. The difference is astounding. These disks of wood sell for around $100 to $400 EACH (depending on size)."
"Harmonic textures ebbed and flowed with startling dynamic nuances and the sort of liquidity and purity one only comes to associate with world-class audio products."
"By using the $450 gold plated RCA stereo jumper cables for all line-level connections, and the newly available $1200 gold plated XYZ speaker wires, we were able to achieve a distinct improvement in highs and the deepest rich bass lows I have ever heard. A massive improvement over ordinary old copper."
Recently I got a pair of Acoustic Research 226PS bookshelf speakers and tried hooking them up with the lamp cord. The sound was dull and flat, better than the old speakers but it let the flaws in the wire [!] be heard.
"Rendition of harmonic colors was suave and smooth, with a believable sugar coating."
"Spatial detail was painted with a fine brush that readily resolved massed voices and the air around individual instruments."
"I just got through spray painting my dual BlackLight discs with flat colors. I did one side in classic forest green & the other in black. My impressions were very much like my brothers but with contradictory results. I liked black since it lowered the noise floor & increased channel separation even more which only further enhanced dynamics & detail simultaneously. He liked green because it's effect is very soothingly smooth. imagry transitions from channel to channel seemlessly, without huge sacrifices (eg: noise-floor raises about +10dB to around -110dB). It simply paints better between speakers."
"The Equilibre ($8,475) - nominally a 60-watt stereo amp."
"I found myself happily out of week-end work around the house lately and decided to replace the bubble wrap around my speaker cable; the air had leaked out of most of the pockets and it seemed like a good idea at the time... when it was done the effort proved worthwhile; bass was noticeably tighter and better delineated, more air around instruments in a clearer soundstage, voices somehow more expressive."
I came up with one for Sony's SACD: "It felt like I had crawled into a warm and inviting sonic womb, where my fair use rights were gone."
The webpage link you sent seems to do a lot of bashing concerning Hovind's credentials. However, his credentials mean absolutely nothing. Do you happen to remember Darwin's backround?! Attacking someone's credentials just shows that you can't argue against their viewpoints, so you try to make them look bad by attacking them as a person.
True. However a lot of creationists are sporting PhDs from what look like "prestigious nonaccredited universities". Having a diploma from Inkjet University says something about your credibility.
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."
This is not to suggest that Einstein's opinion on something as subjective as religion should be taken more seriously than anyone else's. All religious opinions are equally worthless.
Nevermind that you can make it damn near fool-proof and crash resistant (like nuclear warheads that'll withstand impacts the rest of the airframe won't), environmentalist propaganda would paint pictures of meltdowns in the sky and the scattering of nuclear material everywhere.
Oh please. Even if the reactor is made 100% safe so that a skyscraper impact spreads no radiation, how do you prevent the plane from being hijacked and flown to an "axis of evil" nation that wants to get its hands on the plutonium? A nuclear plane could fly around the world many times without refueling, so this is an issue even for domestic flights. A nuclear-powered commuter flight from Boston to New York would easily be in range of North Korea. How are you going to guarantee that this won't be a problem? With computer-enforcement of no-fly zones? Or by arming pilots?
The tight export controls on a nuclear plane would be just one of the many headaches that an aerospace manufacturer would face, and while those caused by "tree-hugger" sensibilities are among them, there are many others. Ideology aside, safety and nonproliferation are serious problems that need to be addressed in any project of this nature. Nuclear planes are not cost-effective to manufacture. And unlike nuclear submarines, they do not solve any compelling problem that is left unaddressed by their conventional counterpart. Even the military, which comissioned the manufacture of nuclear submarines during the Cold War and was not as affected by "environmental propaganda", never did the same for the nuclear airplane.
You can easily make a Tesla coil if you have an old busted TV to rip apart. In general, the older and bigger the TV is, the better. And color TVs are better than black and white. This won't be a *great* Tesla coil, but it will throw a spark a few inches long and you can do all the standard Tesla coil tricks with it (St. Elmo's fire, etc.) without investing too much time or money.
Yank the flyback transformer out of the TV, and discard all its primary windings. Keep the big high voltage secondary winding (the one with the zillions of turns). It's usually encased in rubber and may look like a big rubber wheel. Its main lead has really thick insulation and connects to the side of the picture tube (where it looks like a stethoscope). The other lead (the ground) won't be as heavily insulated.
The only other parts you need are two NPN power transistors (2N3055), two 5W power resistors (20 ohm and 200 ohm), some wire, and a good supply of DC current (12-24 V). The circuit is a piece of cake. The first time I did it, I put the whole thing together with alligator clips.
This circuit has two primary windings around the flyback transformer core. The power winding is 8 turns, with a tap in the middle. The feedback winding is smaller (4 turns), also with a tap in the middle. The power winding leads connect to the collector leads on the transistors, with the center tap going to the +24 V DC power source. The feedback winding leads connect to the gate leads, with the center tap there going to +2-3 V DC (connect the resistors in series across the DC power to get the lower voltage in between). The emitter leads are grounded. As current flows through one transistor, the changing field in the core induces a voltage in the feedback windings that turns that transistor off and the other one on. Then current flows the other way, and the same thing happens in reverse. So the circuit tunes itself to the proper frequency. But it also means that the first time you power it up you run a 50-50 chance of connecting the leads to the wrong transistor gates, in which case you get a stable DC circuit. So if it doesn't work the first time, try exchanging the gate leads.
This circuit is fairly well known, and doing a Google search for "flyback" and "Tesla" I found a schematic for it right away. The guy mentions on that page that the transistors get really hot and he is not kidding- they do. Don't leave it running for more than a minute without a heat sink. The RF noise generated by Tesla coils is incredible so expect to generate some interference. They make lots of smelly ozone. And if you let a spark go through paper, you can start a fire so be careful.
If you're lucky you can get 20-30 kV, which throws a purple spark a couple inches. (I only got about 4 kV out of mine- the spark was about a half inch long.) Pick up a neon bulb when you're at Radio Shack- these light up if they're around. The effect on a candle flame is interesting. Don't stick your bare finger near it because the spark does hurt if it hits unprotected skin. But if you hold a metal object and use that to touch it, you don't feel a thing (it's high frequency AC). Cool tricks include having sparks jump from the coil to a metal object in your hand, having sparks jump from a metal object in your other hand to ground (even a lousy ground), and having fluorescent tubes glow softly if you hold them in your other hand. If you touch one terminal of a fluorescent to ground then it will glow brightly between that end and the place you are holding it, like there are Orcs nearby.
10. Deleting all deprecated methods- what is the point of removing them? So the JVM libraries load a few milliseconds faster? Yet in the same article he suggests replacing primitives with objects, and pulls out Moore's Law as a rationale. The change is pointless.
9. Changing InetAddress to "InternetAddress", and changing "java.sql" to "javax.sql"- this just creates busywork. Why don't we just go through the English language and change the spelling of all the words so they're more consistent with how they're pronounced? That would make even more sense and make English easier to learn. If you disagree it's because you're lazy.
8. Eliminate primitive data types- This is a bad idea, and the article admits it- with the two words: Moore's Law. When you hear someone advocating some feature and they start talking about Moore's Law, you know right away it's a stupid idea. Each Object in Java incurs a 16-byte overhead from the JVM implementation. So a byte would use 17 bytes. And immutability for thread safety? Yeah, what about "i++"? How does equals() work? How does == work? Newbies already have this problem with strings (e.g. when they write if (option=="Y"). Now they'll have it with ints, floats, etc. And immutability for thread safety- oh man! The reason java.lang.Integer, java.lang.Boolean, etc. are so useless is that they're immutable. All they're good for is when you need to pass a primitive to a method that only takes Objects. A more rational way to deal with this is to introduce templates into the language. This is a big fix to a non-problem, designed to make OO aestheticians happy in their ivory towers. For anyone writing real code, this would be a disaster.
7. Extend chars to four bytes- breaking just about every program out there- so we can cram Linear B into the charset? \u00000046\u00000075\u00000063\u0000006B that!
6. Fix threads- see # 10. Yes, as far as I can see there are some good points here, but none justifying an upgrade breaking compatibility. As far as an object having multiple locks for different operations- this is easily doable without mangling the language syntax. Just add "getXSyncObject()", "getYSyncObject()", etc. to your object and have it return different lock objects for operations X and Y, and then synchronize on the objects returned by those methods.
5. Convert file formats to XML- "I want XML and I want Sun to do it for me!" I can guarantee you that any XML format dreamed up by Sun/JCP committees will be about as detailed, useless, and version-fragile as the default binary serialization we have now. Write your own serialization mechanisms that return XML you write yourself. Stop being lazy.
4. Ditch the AWT- Do this and I will HUNT YOU DOWN AND STRANGLE YOU. We never use Swing at our company because a "Hello World" in it loads 20 megs of classes. Everything uses AWT and our programs can actually run for more than an hour without crashing. (Although Sun has not been maintaining the AWT at all since Swing came out.)
3. Rationalize the collections- What's the point of doing this? They seem rational enough to me. More busywork. See #9.
2. Redesign I/O- This has been done already in 1.4.
1. Class loading- Actually, once you realize that a classloader defines its own namespace, this can become a useful feature. I don't see why it should be removed simply because some people don't understand it.
About the most useless and long commentary i've seen in a while.
His post was articulate and brought up a good rebuttal to each of the points in this article. It deserved its 5 much more than yours did.
I think most compilers can produce java 1.1 compliant code. So why don't you just compile under 1.2, write everything normally and just don't use the dnd stuff if a Class.forName on some DnD specific class fails?
Good question. The reason we're still using a 1.1 compiler is because we have to avoid anything that will break on MRJ (Mac OS 9). Some entire APIs are new in 1.2, like DnD, java.lang.ref, Swing, etc. Avoiding and segregating use of those is easy. But just about all the APIs that were present in 1.1 have gained new classes, methods, and fields in 1.2. Some of them are quite convenient, too, and of course our IDEs are running Java 2 so they appear in our autocompletion dialogs and we're tempted to use them all the time. With the build scripts running the 1.1.8 compiler every night, we catch a trickle of Java 2 methods continuously instead of having to contend with a shitstorm of them right before release.
To all the people whining about how crappy hotmail is:
Read aloud: "It's a free service, I get what I paid for".
I agree with your main point about paying for good email service. But Hotmail being free doesn't mean we can't complain about it. What if a car pulled up next to your kid on a dark street and someone inside offered him an unwrapped candy bar? Would you think that was OK if the candy bar was free?
Since Microsoft has been jockeying for position as a corporate entity that will keep track of all our personal information for us with this Passport crap, the fact that they can't even keep the existence of a Passport account a secret is certainly worthy of some concern. I had a Hotmail account in 1998. The amount of spam I got in that account skyrocketed after Microsoft took over. I also have a Hotmail account that I opened in 2000 as an experiment (containing a random 4-digit number). I told no one about it, nor did I send mail from it. It was immediately pelted with spam. Once a month I log in to keep it alive, and delete about 500 offers for penis enlargement, teenage sluts, and "credit repair software". Some of these emails even visibly display (in the To or CC field) the 100 Hotmail accounts nearest to mine alphabetically! I mean, come on, how hard is that to detect? How does this crap get past their filters? There is no excuse for it. Yet these clowns want me to tie my personal information to my Passport account.
The FREE part is irrelevant. They are trying to extend this fiasco into a system with some serious privacy implications. Getting a Passport is optional (and free, as you point out), but considering this is Microsoft, it could easily become "optional as in eating". If we are going to eventually be forced to use their crappy services as they take over one useful resource after another (rumors are they recently bought Yahoo), we have every right to scream about their ineptitude.
Reflection is a nice feature in Java except they made it a pain in the ass to use. I work on a product that is a Java application running on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac (both OSX and Mac OS 9). Because we are still supporting Mac OS 9, we cannot use a Java 2 compiler at all- so we are squeezing the entire tree through Sun's 1.1.8 compiler every night. (So we're still writing Java 1.1 code! In this day and age! If you call any Java 2 method, like add() on a Vector, it breaks the nightly build.)
Now there are some things that our customers want that absolutely require Java 2, like drag and drop. If you are running Mac OS 9, drag and drop won't work in our program. Sorry. But we have it working for everybody else on all other platforms- by using reflection to access the DnD classes! And the code looks horrible. One line of ordinary code balloons to five lines of incomprehensible gibberish when you use reflection.
The way I see it there are two primary uses for reflection. One is the use that Sun originally intended- for people writing IDEs, bean containers, debuggers, profilers, etc. The other is for people like us, who are compiling against a fossilized version of the JDK but need to introduce some forward-compatibility and access classes we know are usually there but we can't compile against statically. Sun's attitude is always to tell all customers to upgrade to their latest and greatest version of Java. (Sun's inability to take on the backward-compatibility issue from either a design or a policy perspective is really annoying. It's what killed the whole applet idea. And now their JDK 1.4 compiler is spitting out classes with version numbers that make old software freak out. I still have to find the compiler switch that turns that off.)
I think it would be cool if Java had a "reflection" keyword with which you could declare a block of code as being dynamically and not statically compiled- so you could write ordinary code in there and the compiler would break it down during a preprocessing step into the required Class/Method/Field gibberish and let you catch something like an "UnsupportedApiException" in a catch block underneath. Of course, the chance of that happening is zero, and even if it did happen, the 1.1.8 compiler wouldn't understand it anyway. Does anyone know if Sun has any plans for introducing a standard for compiler extensions? It strikes me as a move that would involve relinquishing too much control.
Well, when you compare Java to C, you have to be careful to avoid apples-to-oranges comparisons because there's Java the language and Java the platform (i.e. the JVM). In Java, the JVM has a standard way to catch null pointer dereferences that has its hooks embedded in the language syntax. (C# is the same way- although they toot their horn about "language independence" it's all marketing- it's really the same type of setup as Java with the same kind of blurred distinction between the language and the CLR.) C and C++ are platform-agnostic languages. They don't come with baggage like a pseudo-OS, the way Java and C# do, and so while it's possible to catch a null pointer dereference in the form of a SIGSEGV signal on a POSIX system, that's really a feature of the OS, not the language. The language doesn't get in the way of this, but that's because it has left the behavior undefined in the first place so that POSIX is free to define it using a process signal mechanism.
by tarpit I mean a program that responds to incorrect and invalid requests verrry sllowwwly. Someting on the rate of one character per second, just long enough to keep them from timing out, but still tieing up the connection for minutes on end.
This is no solution; it just escalates the war by one more level. This type of behavior is easily detectable by scumware, even with no human intervention, and the spammer can just reset the connection and move on.
Really, they just want you to have a Microsoft Passport.
It's incredible the way they're making having a Passport a prerequisite to using most of their software and yet they let even an unadvertised box fill up with penis enlargement and credit repair offers. Hotmail is a glimpse of what you, the consumer, can expect in terms of quality and service once the entire economy has been Microsoft-Passported.
Slashdot Mirror
I would rather have 10 people with $100,000 trying influence legislation than 100,000 people with $10.
Ha! Caught you, troll!
I'm not as impressed. Tic tac toe was probably invented even earlier, and it easily meets your definition of "mathematical perfection".
Wow, you're right- guess I was confused. It all seems so simple now!
My understanding of CARP is that the burden of proof is shunted onto the webcaster- that if you cannot prove by keeping detailed logs that you are not broadcasting RIAA content, then the law assumes you've been streaming Britney Spears to everybody. Also, while the RIAA doesn't touch the profits of an indie band, for some reason the money goes through them and then they hand any that isn't theirs to some government agency that is supposed to redistribute the money to non-RIAA copyright holders. I'm not sure where I read that. Probably someone's Slashdot post.
It was a bad joke anyway. I'm sure this band isn't streaming the music themselves.
Step 1: Hire a good lawyer.
Step 2: Incorporate.
The RIAA will sue you because you're not paying them for the rights to stream your own music. The lawyer will let you run your stream for a few more days until the final court order comes in saying that you owe $800,000 in CARP fees to the RIAA. Then you can allow the corporation to go into Chapter 11 while you regroup and form a new band.
Also buy some heroin for your lead singer so that he gets all moody and suicidal. This is an absolute requirement if he/she is not pretty enough to shoot into space. People love bands with junkie lead singers.
What about it? It's about China censoring their citizens. It has nothing to do with Americans censoring their citizens.
Maybe you read it too fast.
"The Weekly Standard writes that despite expectations, the Chinese Government has been very successful in suppressing free internet access for their citizens. Key to this success was the assistance of Cisco, who built a giant firewall tailored to the state's needs, Yahoo (who helpfully censors search results and monitors online chats), and other Western companies."
Reading news like this makes me glad I'm an American...
Then read this.
Manufacturers clamor for market dominance in the bionic eye market, and come up with a hodgepodge of several dozen incompatible technologies. The Justice Department demands the ability to remotely observe what people are looking at, and pressures manufacturers to secretly include key escrow technologies in their circuitry. Copyright-holding corporations realize that the junction between the optic nerve and the CCD chip is ripe for targeting, since you can effectively close off the "analog hole" by sticking an agent in there that enforces copyrights on all visual images passing through. They lobby intensively and as a result the government steps in and mandates that within X years all vision should be digital and incorporate some approved form of copy-protection. This is hailed by the corporate press as a "victory for the consumer" because of the expected abundance of pay-per-see content, even though the early adopters get struck blind by the mandated copy protection- making their eyes worthless, although they are still prized by a small minority for their ability to boot up free operating systems.
Manufacturers continue to trip over each other in their efforts to corner the market, and come up with even more incompatible formats. Consumers who purchase the systems find that the left eye from manufacturer X (about to go out of business) and right eye from manufacturer Y (about to go out of business) both want to be in charge of what you're looking at. Getting different components to cooperate is next to impossible. When one eye breaks, you have to get them both replaced because everything is incompatible with everything else and every model is discontinued or obsoleted as soon as it comes out. People start to write scathing reviews about how the industry and Congress both need to get their act together.
Meanwhile, consumers look at this fiasco and rightly conclude that their eyes are working fine, and that there is no reason to throw them out.
Hum, keep in mind that this is a RADIO telescope array. So you can't "see" further with it, you can "listen" better...
What are you talking about? There are lots of radio images around.
Whether it's "audio" or "video" depends only on whether you're using a point detector (like a radio receiver or a photodiode for visual light) or a spread out detector (like a lens or an array of point detectors).
Oh you think you're so smart, do you...
I'm going to improve my Hello World and make it even better than yours. Right now mine only takes advantage of Singleton, Factory and Strategy. I'm going to add even more patterns to it: Composite, Proxy, Bridge, Prototype, Adapter, Decorator, and Builder. Maybe Flyweight, if I can figure out a use for it.
It will be the most flexible, configurable Hello World anyone ever wrote. Nobody will ever need to write another one. That would be "reinventing the wheel".
I wrote the following about GoF patterns in some Slashdot thread a few months ago, but it is more relevant to this thread so I'm going to be a lameass and cut/paste it. (In fact, your handle rings a bell. Maybe you were even in that thread and have read this before. I can't remember.)
Of course those GoF patterns can make life hell for the maintenance developer or app framework user, when people turn it into a contest to see how many design patterns they can fit into a single project. The overall "Design Patterns" philosophy is really "how can I defer as many decisions as possible from compile time to run time?" This makes the code very flexible, but the flexibility is wasted when a consultant writes code using lots of patterns to puff up his ego and then leaves without leaving adequate comments or documentation. Without insight into how the system works, the configurability and flexibility that these patterns offer is lost. The system hardens into an opaque black box.
Deferring decisions to runtime makes code hard to read. Inheritance trees can get fairly deep, work is delegated off in clever but unintuitive ways to weird generic objects, and finding the code you're looking for is impossible, because when you're looking for the place where stuff actually happens, you eventually come across a polymorphic wonder like
object.work();
and the trail ends there. Simply reading the code doesn't tell you what it does; the subtype of object isn't determined until runtime. You basically need a debugger.
You can take a really simple program and screw it up with aggressive elegance like this. Here is Hello World in Java:
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, world!");
}
}
But this isn't elegant enough. What if we want to print some other string? Or what if we want to do something else with the string, like draw "Hello World" on a canvas in Times Roman? We'd have to recompile. By fanatically applying patterns, we can defer to runtime all the decisions that we don't want to make at compile time, and impress later consultants with all the patterns we managed to cram into our code:
public interface MessageStrategy {
public void sendMessage();
}
public abstract class AbstractStrategyFactory {
public abstract MessageStrategy createStrategy(MessageBody mb);
}
public class MessageBody {
Object payload;
public Object getPayload() {
return payload;
}
public void configure(Object obj) {
payload = obj;
}
public void send(MessageStrategy ms) {
ms.sendMessage();
}
}
public class DefaultFactory extends AbstractStrategyFactory {
private DefaultFactory() {;}
static DefaultFactory instance;
public static AbstractStrategyFactory getInstance() {
if (instance==null) instance = new DefaultFactory();
return instance;
}
public MessageStrategy createStrategy(final MessageBody mb) {
return new MessageStrategy() {
MessageBody body = mb;
public void sendMessage() {
Object obj = body.getPayload();
System.out.println((String)obj);
}
};
}
}
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
MessageBody mb = new MessageBody();
mb.configure("Hello World!");
AbstractStrategyFactory asf = DefaultFactory.getInstance();
MessageStrategy strategy = asf.createStrategy(mb);
mb.send(strategy);
}
}
Look at the clean separation of data and logic. By overapplying patterns, I can build my reputation as a fiendishly clever coder, and force clients to hire me back since nobody else knows what all this elegant crap does. Of course, if the specifications were to change, the HelloWorld class itself would require recompilation. But not if we are even more clever and use XML to get our data and to encode the actual implementation of what is to be done with it. XML may not always be a good idea for every project, but everyone agrees that it's definitely cool and and should be used wherever possible to create elegant configuration nightmares.
I came up with one for Sony's SACD:
"It felt like I had crawled into a warm and inviting sonic womb, where my fair use rights were gone."
The webpage link you sent seems to do a lot of bashing concerning Hovind's credentials. However, his credentials mean absolutely nothing. Do you happen to remember Darwin's backround?! Attacking someone's credentials just shows that you can't argue against their viewpoints, so you try to make them look bad by attacking them as a person.
True. However a lot of creationists are sporting PhDs from what look like "prestigious nonaccredited universities". Having a diploma from Inkjet University says something about your credibility.
As long as we're trading Einstein quotes...
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."
This is not to suggest that Einstein's opinion on something as subjective as religion should be taken more seriously than anyone else's. All religious opinions are equally worthless.
Nevermind that you can make it damn near fool-proof and crash resistant (like nuclear warheads that'll withstand impacts the rest of the airframe won't), environmentalist propaganda would paint pictures of meltdowns in the sky and the scattering of nuclear material everywhere.
Oh please. Even if the reactor is made 100% safe so that a skyscraper impact spreads no radiation, how do you prevent the plane from being hijacked and flown to an "axis of evil" nation that wants to get its hands on the plutonium? A nuclear plane could fly around the world many times without refueling, so this is an issue even for domestic flights. A nuclear-powered commuter flight from Boston to New York would easily be in range of North Korea. How are you going to guarantee that this won't be a problem? With computer-enforcement of no-fly zones? Or by arming pilots?
The tight export controls on a nuclear plane would be just one of the many headaches that an aerospace manufacturer would face, and while those caused by "tree-hugger" sensibilities are among them, there are many others. Ideology aside, safety and nonproliferation are serious problems that need to be addressed in any project of this nature. Nuclear planes are not cost-effective to manufacture. And unlike nuclear submarines, they do not solve any compelling problem that is left unaddressed by their conventional counterpart. Even the military, which comissioned the manufacture of nuclear submarines during the Cold War and was not as affected by "environmental propaganda", never did the same for the nuclear airplane.
You can easily make a Tesla coil if you have an old busted TV to rip apart. In general, the older and bigger the TV is, the better. And color TVs are better than black and white. This won't be a *great* Tesla coil, but it will throw a spark a few inches long and you can do all the standard Tesla coil tricks with it (St. Elmo's fire, etc.) without investing too much time or money.
Yank the flyback transformer out of the TV, and discard all its primary windings. Keep the big high voltage secondary winding (the one with the zillions of turns). It's usually encased in rubber and may look like a big rubber wheel. Its main lead has really thick insulation and connects to the side of the picture tube (where it looks like a stethoscope). The other lead (the ground) won't be as heavily insulated.
The only other parts you need are two NPN power transistors (2N3055), two 5W power resistors (20 ohm and 200 ohm), some wire, and a good supply of DC current (12-24 V). The circuit is a piece of cake. The first time I did it, I put the whole thing together with alligator clips.
This circuit has two primary windings around the flyback transformer core. The power winding is 8 turns, with a tap in the middle. The feedback winding is smaller (4 turns), also with a tap in the middle. The power winding leads connect to the collector leads on the transistors, with the center tap going to the +24 V DC power source. The feedback winding leads connect to the gate leads, with the center tap there going to +2-3 V DC (connect the resistors in series across the DC power to get the lower voltage in between). The emitter leads are grounded.
As current flows through one transistor, the changing field in the core induces a voltage in the feedback windings that turns that transistor off and the other one on. Then current flows the other way, and the same thing happens in reverse. So the circuit tunes itself to the proper frequency. But it also means that the first time you power it up you run a 50-50 chance of connecting the leads to the wrong transistor gates, in which case you get a stable DC circuit. So if it doesn't work the first time, try exchanging the gate leads.
This circuit is fairly well known, and doing a Google search for "flyback" and "Tesla" I found a schematic for it right away. The guy mentions on that page that the transistors get really hot and he is not kidding- they do. Don't leave it running for more than a minute without a heat sink. The RF noise generated by Tesla coils is incredible so expect to generate some interference. They make lots of smelly ozone. And if you let a spark go through paper, you can start a fire so be careful.
If you're lucky you can get 20-30 kV, which throws a purple spark a couple inches. (I only got about 4 kV out of mine- the spark was about a half inch long.) Pick up a neon bulb when you're at Radio Shack- these light up if they're around. The effect on a candle flame is interesting. Don't stick your bare finger near it because the spark does hurt if it hits unprotected skin. But if you hold a metal object and use that to touch it, you don't feel a thing (it's high frequency AC). Cool tricks include having sparks jump from the coil to a metal object in your hand, having sparks jump from a metal object in your other hand to ground (even a lousy ground), and having fluorescent tubes glow softly if you hold them in your other hand. If you touch one terminal of a fluorescent to ground then it will glow brightly between that end and the place you are holding it, like there are Orcs nearby.
They can have my gun^H^H^HWALKIE TALKIE when they pry it out of my cold dead hands!
10. Deleting all deprecated methods- what is the point of removing them? So the JVM libraries load a few milliseconds faster? Yet in the same article he suggests replacing primitives with objects, and pulls out Moore's Law as a rationale. The change is pointless.
9. Changing InetAddress to "InternetAddress", and changing "java.sql" to "javax.sql"- this just creates busywork. Why don't we just go through the English language and change the spelling of all the words so they're more consistent with how they're pronounced? That would make even more sense and make English easier to learn. If you disagree it's because you're lazy.
8. Eliminate primitive data types- This is a bad idea, and the article admits it- with the two words: Moore's Law. When you hear someone advocating some feature and they start talking about Moore's Law, you know right away it's a stupid idea. Each Object in Java incurs a 16-byte overhead from the JVM implementation. So a byte would use 17 bytes. And immutability for thread safety? Yeah, what about "i++"? How does equals() work? How does == work? Newbies already have this problem with strings (e.g. when they write if (option=="Y"). Now they'll have it with ints, floats, etc. And immutability for thread safety- oh man! The reason java.lang.Integer, java.lang.Boolean, etc. are so useless is that they're immutable. All they're good for is when you need to pass a primitive to a method that only takes Objects. A more rational way to deal with this is to introduce templates into the language. This is a big fix to a non-problem, designed to make OO aestheticians happy in their ivory towers. For anyone writing real code, this would be a disaster.
7. Extend chars to four bytes- breaking just about every program out there- so we can cram Linear B into the charset? \u00000046\u00000075\u00000063\u0000006B that!
6. Fix threads- see # 10. Yes, as far as I can see there are some good points here, but none justifying an upgrade breaking compatibility. As far as an object having multiple locks for different operations- this is easily doable without mangling the language syntax. Just add "getXSyncObject()", "getYSyncObject()", etc. to your object and have it return different lock objects for operations X and Y, and then synchronize on the objects returned by those methods.
5. Convert file formats to XML- "I want XML and I want Sun to do it for me!" I can guarantee you that any XML format dreamed up by Sun/JCP committees will be about as detailed, useless, and version-fragile as the default binary serialization we have now. Write your own serialization mechanisms that return XML you write yourself. Stop being lazy.
4. Ditch the AWT- Do this and I will HUNT YOU DOWN AND STRANGLE YOU. We never use Swing at our company because a "Hello World" in it loads 20 megs of classes. Everything uses AWT and our programs can actually run for more than an hour without crashing. (Although Sun has not been maintaining the AWT at all since Swing came out.)
3. Rationalize the collections- What's the point of doing this? They seem rational enough to me. More busywork. See #9.
2. Redesign I/O- This has been done already in 1.4.
1. Class loading- Actually, once you realize that a classloader defines its own namespace, this can become a useful feature. I don't see why it should be removed simply because some people don't understand it.
About the most useless and long commentary i've seen in a while.
His post was articulate and brought up a good rebuttal to each of the points in this article. It deserved its 5 much more than yours did.
I think most compilers can produce java 1.1 compliant code. So why don't you just compile under 1.2, write everything normally and just don't use the dnd stuff if a Class.forName on some DnD specific class fails?
Good question.
The reason we're still using a 1.1 compiler is because we have to avoid anything that will break on MRJ (Mac OS 9). Some entire APIs are new in 1.2, like DnD, java.lang.ref, Swing, etc. Avoiding and segregating use of those is easy. But just about all the APIs that were present in 1.1 have gained new classes, methods, and fields in 1.2. Some of them are quite convenient, too, and of course our IDEs are running Java 2 so they appear in our autocompletion dialogs and we're tempted to use them all the time.
With the build scripts running the 1.1.8 compiler every night, we catch a trickle of Java 2 methods continuously instead of having to contend with a shitstorm of them right before release.
I guess it shows that I last wrote machine code on DOS.
To all the people whining about how crappy hotmail is:
Read aloud:
"It's a free service, I get what I paid for".
I agree with your main point about paying for good email service. But Hotmail being free doesn't mean we can't complain about it. What if a car pulled up next to your kid on a dark street and someone inside offered him an unwrapped candy bar? Would you think that was OK if the candy bar was free?
Since Microsoft has been jockeying for position as a corporate entity that will keep track of all our personal information for us with this Passport crap, the fact that they can't even keep the existence of a Passport account a secret is certainly worthy of some concern. I had a Hotmail account in 1998. The amount of spam I got in that account skyrocketed after Microsoft took over. I also have a Hotmail account that I opened in 2000 as an experiment (containing a random 4-digit number). I told no one about it, nor did I send mail from it. It was immediately pelted with spam. Once a month I log in to keep it alive, and delete about 500 offers for penis enlargement, teenage sluts, and "credit repair software". Some of these emails even visibly display (in the To or CC field) the 100 Hotmail accounts nearest to mine alphabetically! I mean, come on, how hard is that to detect? How does this crap get past their filters? There is no excuse for it. Yet these clowns want me to tie my personal information to my Passport account.
The FREE part is irrelevant. They are trying to extend this fiasco into a system with some serious privacy implications. Getting a Passport is optional (and free, as you point out), but considering this is Microsoft, it could easily become "optional as in eating". If we are going to eventually be forced to use their crappy services as they take over one useful resource after another (rumors are they recently bought Yahoo), we have every right to scream about their ineptitude.
Reflection is a nice feature in Java except they made it a pain in the ass to use. I work on a product that is a Java application running on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac (both OSX and Mac OS 9). Because we are still supporting Mac OS 9, we cannot use a Java 2 compiler at all- so we are squeezing the entire tree through Sun's 1.1.8 compiler every night. (So we're still writing Java 1.1 code! In this day and age! If you call any Java 2 method, like add() on a Vector, it breaks the nightly build.)
Now there are some things that our customers want that absolutely require Java 2, like drag and drop. If you are running Mac OS 9, drag and drop won't work in our program. Sorry. But we have it working for everybody else on all other platforms- by using reflection to access the DnD classes! And the code looks horrible. One line of ordinary code balloons to five lines of incomprehensible gibberish when you use reflection.
The way I see it there are two primary uses for reflection. One is the use that Sun originally intended- for people writing IDEs, bean containers, debuggers, profilers, etc. The other is for people like us, who are compiling against a fossilized version of the JDK but need to introduce some forward-compatibility and access classes we know are usually there but we can't compile against statically. Sun's attitude is always to tell all customers to upgrade to their latest and greatest version of Java. (Sun's inability to take on the backward-compatibility issue from either a design or a policy perspective is really annoying. It's what killed the whole applet idea. And now their JDK 1.4 compiler is spitting out classes with version numbers that make old software freak out. I still have to find the compiler switch that turns that off.)
I think it would be cool if Java had a "reflection" keyword with which you could declare a block of code as being dynamically and not statically compiled- so you could write ordinary code in there and the compiler would break it down during a preprocessing step into the required Class/Method/Field gibberish and let you catch something like an "UnsupportedApiException" in a catch block underneath. Of course, the chance of that happening is zero, and even if it did happen, the 1.1.8 compiler wouldn't understand it anyway. Does anyone know if Sun has any plans for introducing a standard for compiler extensions? It strikes me as a move that would involve relinquishing too much control.
Well, when you compare Java to C, you have to be careful to avoid apples-to-oranges comparisons because there's Java the language and Java the platform (i.e. the JVM). In Java, the JVM has a standard way to catch null pointer dereferences that has its hooks embedded in the language syntax. (C# is the same way- although they toot their horn about "language independence" it's all marketing- it's really the same type of setup as Java with the same kind of blurred distinction between the language and the CLR.)
C and C++ are platform-agnostic languages. They don't come with baggage like a pseudo-OS, the way Java and C# do, and so while it's possible to catch a null pointer dereference in the form of a SIGSEGV signal on a POSIX system, that's really a feature of the OS, not the language. The language doesn't get in the way of this, but that's because it has left the behavior undefined in the first place so that POSIX is free to define it using a process signal mechanism.
by tarpit I mean a program that responds to incorrect and invalid requests verrry sllowwwly. Someting on the rate of one character per second, just long enough to keep them from timing out, but still tieing up the connection for minutes on end.
This is no solution; it just escalates the war by one more level. This type of behavior is easily detectable by scumware, even with no human intervention, and the spammer can just reset the connection and move on.
They just want you to look at their banner ads.
Really, they just want you to have a Microsoft Passport.
It's incredible the way they're making having a Passport a prerequisite to using most of their software and yet they let even an unadvertised box fill up with penis enlargement and credit repair offers. Hotmail is a glimpse of what you, the consumer, can expect in terms of quality and service once the entire economy has been Microsoft-Passported.
So yet another thing for American's to use to absolve themselves of responsibility for screwing up. Whatever. I say bullshit.
Huh? What? This is just the result of a statistical study.
You're still thinking about the fast food lawsuit guy.