I don't want Google keeping lists of everything I personally have searched for. I'd be less likely to use it. Plus, what's the point? That's something I would expect from a shady.NET operation like MSN, but not Google.
A better idea would be: I type in a search term, and at at the top of the search results page, I get one of those little graphs showing me the history of the search term I typed in over the past several weeks/months/years. I bet they could do this, or at least provide it as an option, and I think it would have some real usefulness.
People always want to talk about string theory at the drop of a hat. But there is so much fascinating stuff in physics that holds a possibility of actually being true.:)
Maybe string theory enters into the picture on the Planck scale, or when you're going to talk about individual gravitons, but it's completely irrelevant as far as this experiment goes. Gravitational waves are a classical phenomenon, predicted by GR (which is a classical theory). They have not been detected as of yet because they are so weak. The coupling coefficient is c^4/(8*pi*G), which is really large. So space time is elastic, but it is extremely stiff. It takes a lot of force to warp it even a tiny bit. The earth emits something on the order of 1 watt of gravitational radiation as it orbits the sun. Jupiter emits something like 30 watts. (Don't ask me for a source on those numbers- I think I read them on the Internet somewhere.) But any laboratory source won't emit anything that can be measured. Gravitational waves are even more esoteric than neutrinos, since we know how to detect neutrinos that we have created. The only sources of gravitational waves that are even remotely detectable are binary star systems, where two neutron stars are in a close orbit. The orbital periods of some of these systems have been determined to be decreasing in a manner characteristic of energy loss from gravitational radiation.
Personally I've always thought it's a bit premature to be speculating on the stringlike nature of gravitons when we can't even detect gross macroscopic things like gravity waves or even gravitomagnetism. It's as if we're blind snails wanting to talk about photons.
Godfather and LOTR shared one important attribute: they began life as a book, not a movie. While I think LOTR is probably the stronger book (except in regard to character development), the Godfather was easier to turn into a movie. You didn't need to read the book to be familiar with the setting in the Godfather movies. LOTR had to brief the audience on elementary information before it could even start. And it's extremely movie-resistant material- the story is just too intricate to fit into nine hours. (It might be suited to a series- but then you'd lose the budget.) Movies and mobsters, on the other hand, always go together.
Citizen Kane: Oh eat me. If anyone hasn't seen Citizen Kane then they shouldn't read this spoiler: at the end you find out the whole movie has been about a sled! At the end, when Welles has painted his movie into a corner by hyping up this "Rosebud" concept, and it's time for him to deliver and tell us who or what Rosebud is, he has nothing left to offer but... uh... uh... a sled! Citizen Kane did try some new cinematic and narrative tricks, but those are impressive mostly because they were new and original at the time the movie was made.
Strangelove: THE classic Cold War movie. It captured on film the paranoia and illogical thinking of the entire period. The literate, subversive, and cynical humor was the kind you rarely see in movies. 500 years from now, the Cold War will be remembered more because of Dr. Strangelove than anything else. But people don't want to be reminded of the real world's problems when they go to the movies. And since nobody cares about the Cold War anymore, the movie's perceived relevance has dropped. And it certainly never appealed to all types. Many people were profoundly offended by it when it first came out and even today certain personality types don't "get" any of the jokes in Dr. Strangelove. LOTR, for its part, certainly caters to a certain personality type but I haven't met anyone yet who hasn't at least enjoyed it, regardless of whether they thought it was a good movie or not.
An adult that went to see a KIDS MOVIE is making generalizations of people watching tv? Isn't there some cliche about a pot and a kettle?
"KIDS MOVIE"? You obviously haven't seen it, so why are you shooting off your mouth about pots and kettles? Anyone who brings their kids to this movie should be dragged into family court. I saw several teary-eyed kids below the age of 10 being led out of the theater midway through by their idiot parents who had assumed it was a kids' movie.
Re:Plug & Play port 5000(correction to correct
on
WinXP Security Flaw
·
· Score: 2
I was right the first time, sorry.:) SSDP (Simple Service Discovery Protocol) lives on port 5000.
According to http:// www.eeye.com/html/Research/Advisories/AD20011220.html this particular vulnerability exists on port 1900, not 5000.
5000 is a different vulnerability.:)
We ran into this several months ago when we were testing some server software that we wrote. We were using port 5000 as a default. As soon as XP came out, we tested the software on it and found that we could not bind a server to port 5000 at all because it was taken. So naturally, we wondered, what in XP is listening on port 5000?
Turns out that Microsoft picked the same port for its Plug and Play architecture, which listens on it for a connection coming (presumably) through the local TCP/IP stack. The protocol is XML (maybe SOAP, can't remember). You can receive and send configuration information by using that port (the schema is somewhere on microsoft.com) and it occurred to me even then that this looked like a potential security hole. But, I thought, this is too blatantly obvious and surely Microsoft is not so stupid as to allow access to the PnP internals from nonlocal IPs. Right? So we simply moved our software's default port setting to another port and forgot about it.
Predictions:
The scandal will flow off MS in a day or two, like water off a duck's back.
The downloadable security patch will be bundled with the latest updates to Microsoft's digital rights management crap.
Every script kiddie will have a tool within the week that scans IP ranges on port 5000 in search of the machines that have remained unpatched.
The guy who publicized the flaw will be tried in a secret military tribunal as a cyberterrorist.
This is a minor nitpick, really.
Amphetamines like Ritalin displace norepinepherine and dopamine from the vesicles within neurons that store them, so that these two neurotransmitters flow into synapses more readily. Ritalin has a mechanism of action similar to any other amphetamine.
Caffeine targets a completely different system entirely (it blocks adenosine receptors). Unlike Ritalin, caffeine is qualitatively different from the amphetamines with regard to things like dose response, habituation effects, etc.
You really think that's a cop calling? I always figured it was just another hired hand in a basement somewhere, maybe working off his hours of "community service". You can usually tell who it is by the attitude. They act like they've pulled you over when you pick up the phone. And they do really weird stuff like making fun of you to the guy next to them. Whoever it is doesn't do it for a living. It could be some lowlife working off hours of community service. Next time one calls I'll ask.
I disagree. Spammers are soooo much more annoying than phone solicitors.
-Phone solicitors don't immediately engage in sex talk with your 7 year old when he picks up the phone.
-Coming home from a long vacation doesn't usually mean you're going to have to sift through a blizzard of thousands of phone solicitation calls. (Interspersed by warnings from the phone company about how you're getting too many phone calls and would you like to buy more space?)
-When a huge amount of phone solicitations overwhelm the phone company and force them to invest in additional infrastructure, the cost is passed to the phone solicitors, not to you.
-If you have an unlisted number, and a phone solicitor calls, it doesn't automatically mean that the gig is up and the number is no good anymore.
-There actually exist phone solicitors who are not running scams.
-You don't get hundreds of phone solicitations in the space of 24 hours.
-Phone solicitors don't try to fool you by pretending to be people you know.
-Phone solicitors don't call you and offer to sell you a CD of the phone numbers they're calling.
-Phone company operators aren't kept awake at the phone company at 3 AM clearing wayward phone solicitations out of the equipment after a torrent of wrongly dialed phone solicitations.
-You don't get the same phone call from the same solicitor five times in a row in immediate succession, unless he has an organic brain disorder.
-While they can sometimes block the number from appearing at all, phone solicitors don't intentionally send forged numbers to your Caller ID box.
-If you tell a phone solicitor to take your phone number off his list, he doesn't immediately sell your number to all the other phone solicitors in town. ("It works, someone picked up the phone!") This is because we have laws dictating that phone solicitors cannot do this. -And you can at least be rude to a phone solicitor. In fact, a phone solicitation from the PBA offers the quick-thinking solicitee a rare opportunity to safely tell off a cop. And you can do stuff like this:
ME: Hello?
PHONE SOLICITOR: (bubbly female voice) Hello, do you subscribe to the <name of local newspaper> ME: Uh, no...
PHONE SOLICITOR: Oh my GOD! How do you get your news?
ME: Well, if you must know, the government implanted a chip in my brain, and now God and aliens just beam all that news right into my head. Why, isn't the chip in your brain working?
PHONE SOLICITOR: Uhh, OK, ummm... goodbye!
Why is it that every time someone mentions a project that is to be done in C++ (the CUSTOMER wants it that way!) some idiot comes along and without even asking if there might be reasons for C++ says, 'Use Java'. Bleh! Don't you have some applet to write ? Go away! Yes, but customers can be stupid. They want things written in languages that they saw an article about in their latest management newsletters. Or they demand web pages that have the look and feel of Windows applications (which needlessly introduces mind-rotting amounts of JavaScript). Some customers have valid reasons for wanting a specific language or technology. Some are just demanding the latest fad. You can't let a customer dictate your technical decisions on what is the best tool for a specific job. Would you want your doctor to only prescribe you the drugs you saw commercials for on TV?
We wrote a scientific application suite in Java because almost half our customers insisted on using Macs. The other half wanted it to run on Windows. And a few wanted to run it on Linux. People complain that Java is slow for stuff like that, and it is if you don't pay attention to what you're writing, but a good programmer can put together an efficient algorithm without too much trouble. Java has worked out quite well for us.
-Top level page: "Enter your geographic location (North America, Africa,...)"
-Next page: "Select connection speed: 56K / T1" (usually Flash demo in background is either a closeup on a handshake or someone smiling at a computer)
-Your search for support OR repair generated 0 hits. Click here to search within these results.
-Your search for buy AND [name of company's flagship product] generated 0 hits. Click here to search within these results.
-"Below are the results of your search, ranked in order of their complete uselessness to you and the profit we can make off you if you buy something."
-"Select one of the following: "I am a..."
small business
medium business
large business
-"Redirecting... whoops, that page doesn't exist! Why don't you tell us all about it! Redirecting you to our Customer Care Division..."
-"Uh oh, looks like your browser doesn't support JavaScript! This site is best viewed with a browser that supports JavaScript and cookies."
The FBI is warning again that a supernova may explode and send a massive number of energetic neutrinos toward U.S. interests worldwide, possibly this week, and that the world's neutrino telescopes should be on the highest alert.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said the warning -- the second this month -- was based on credible information, described by others as coming from sources outside the solar system. The information did not specify the type of supernova or whether the progenitor star would have a binary companion, Ashcroft said.
Ashcroft tried to walk a fine line between giving the public prompt and necessary warnings and not causing panic.
The alert "gives people a basis for continuing to live their lives the way they would otherwise live them, with this elevated sense of alertness or vigilance that comes from knowing that the planet could be vaporized any second," Ashcroft told a news conference.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said the previous supernova warning may have helped avert an explosion. Ashcroft said the absence of a supernova should not lull people "into a false sense of indifference."
"It's important for the American people to understand that these (alerts) are to be taken seriously," said Ashcroft, who canceled plans to travel Monday to Toronto to address a conference of near-earth asteroid experts.
Officials said the warning was based in part on intelligence that terrorists may set off a supernova within 1000 light years of the earth, in the aftermath of the Afghan bombings by U.S. and British forces.
"There certainly is intelligence that causes you to be concerned, and possibly that al-Qaida may be behind it," said one senior U.S. official, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
Ashcroft said that all neutrino observatories were advised to go on the highest alert. Federal agencies, meanwhile, were increasing security and authorities were boosting their efforts to keep suspected neutrinos from entering U.S. airspace- either by coming down from above or by emerging from the ground after a trip through the center of the earth.
Okay, if you do 400 experiments, you can expect 1 would be in the 1-in-400 bin on the tail of the histogram. I'm sure the Standard Model has endured way more than 400 tests.
Not via this specific experiment it hasn't! You're comparing apples and oranges. That 400-1 test is the probability that this given experiment turned out the way it did by pure chance. If they repeat the experiment and get the same results then you will have a P-value of 160,000 to 1 to explain.
P.S. If a neutrino is chargeless, how do you "fire" one at something?
Well, it isn't like loading a gun with bullets and then shooting them. Accelerating an existing neutrino is pretty hard. Usually what you do is create them when you fire them.
A trivial example would be putting cobalt-60 (beta emitter) in a solenoid. Electrons fly out one end and the antineutrinos come out the other.
This is an excellent idea. But why should we pay for it, when Microsoft is already screaming this message loud and clear?
OTOH, if IBM wants to really smash M$, they'll incorporate your idea into their slick TV ad campaign. But they won't. IBM has proven time and time again that it can't market its way out of a paper bag.
"Unless you have no past or current unhappy employees," says Bob Krueger, vice president of the BSA, "you're only one phone call away from being the target of a BSA investigation. This is not a traffic ticket."
When scientis finally decide what light is, waves or photons, they will realize that it is neither. Everybody already knows that photons (and leptons, hadrons, etc.) are neither particles nor waves. They're entities that exhibit characteristics of both. Particles and waves are only the closest analogues we have from ordinary everyday experience.
Argument From Incredulity is no argument at all
on
Dark Matter Measurements
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
We have three methods to calculate the mass of the universe. Two are based on electromagnetic interactions. Those two agree. The other is based on observations of gravitational interactions. It gives a result 10X as large for the total amount of matter. Therefore 90% of the universe is made of particles that interact gravitationally but not electromagnetically. The only way to observe them is to observe their gravitational effects. Like, duh. Why is this such a difficult concept to grasp? It's an empirical observation.
Keep in mind that if something only couples gravitationally, it's going to be extremely hard to see. You're prejudiced by your own experience with the world, which is mostly based on electromagnetism- meaning interactions with photons (real and virtual). Get rid of electrodynamics, and most concepts and phenomena you're familiar with- atomic physics, chemistry, biology, optics, materials science, friction, pressure, radiation, viscosity, resistance, reflection, transparency, iridescence, impenetrability- all this stuff goes out the window! Your ass would sink through your chair, right through the ground, until you reached the center of the earth with everything else. Don't underestimate the importance of photon-mediated interactions. Everything else is gravitation, beta decay, and the strong nuclear force. Of those three, only gravitation operates over non-microscopic distances. And it is very weak. There could be up to several tons of dark matter in the room with you right now. You would never know it's there.
Of course, the mass could be ordinary matter that we're just not seeing. Many people like the idea of lots of Jupiter-sized objects. Lots of black holes might also work (although a black hole can feed off either kind of matter).
They withhold a bunch of useful features from the free versions, but you can write patches and implement them yourself using their Opentools API. It's not really an "API"- they just left a portion of the internal classes unobfuscated and gave them public modifiers, so you can monkey with them. The documentation sucks- it's basically a bunch of javadocs that are riddled here and there with 404s so you have to use System.out.println() and reflection to figure out how to do certain things. And it's a bit overengineered from running on top of Swing. But it does let you alter the IDE and add stuff to it. I added a "delete dependency cache" button to my toolbar to get around their annoying "rebuild doesn't really rebuild" bug, and a split pane view for viewing two source code files at once. Their class-structure tree and their debugger seem to be off limits to customization, however.
How about "If I can't read it with a non-MS editor then it sucks?"
First of all, any IDE that generates a mountain of horsesh8t and then sends your cursor to the "insert your code here" point is IMHO garbage. One thing I like about Java (compared to, say, MS Visual anything) is the way that the "generated code" is hidden in superclasses. MS sticks it in your face. (Well, Sun does it too in Forte for Java, but that's why nobody uses it.)
Collapsible code regions sounds like a bad idea, like the "design time objects" that MS encourages you to use in Visual Studio. With those, you're basically editing gibberish that's being presented to you as text (with "cool looking" COM-based GUIs embedded within the text). But whooo, you don't have to scroll over that collapsed code now! I've had to migrate an app away from ASP where the code monkeys used design time objects and I believe their sole purpose is to make porting away from NT impossible. Any ASP that was inflicted with these warts had to be completely rewritten from scratch.
In any case, an IDE with cool right-clicks in it seems like a really poor reason to introduce vendor lock-in with such a nasty vendor. How easy is it to maintain these thin clients? Can they be migrated to other platforms or are you essentially editing closed-format object code (being viewed as source) with that IDE? When choosing a technology on which to base a project, you should look at the longer-term strategy, like ease of maintenance, adherence to standards, etc. MS is hoping they can offer you an IDE with some flashy toys in it and fool you into going down their one-way street.
Maybe I'd try it out anyway, but it would mean installing IIS, which I would like to avoid. Which is pointless, because it's probably running on half the computers in the office without anyone knowing anyway. How about "right-click discover patches for latest security holes"? Now THAT would be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want Google keeping lists of everything I personally have searched for. I'd be less likely to use it. Plus, what's the point? That's something I would expect from a shady .NET operation like MSN, but not Google.
A better idea would be: I type in a search term, and at at the top of the search results page, I get one of those little graphs showing me the history of the search term I typed in over the past several weeks/months/years. I bet they could do this, or at least provide it as an option, and I think it would have some real usefulness.
Sorry, but your posting isn't going to help much if you just toss around technical terms without explaining them.
So... you must be new here? Welcome to Slashdot.
People always want to talk about string theory at the drop of a hat. But there is so much fascinating stuff in physics that holds a possibility of actually being true. :)
Maybe string theory enters into the picture on the Planck scale, or when you're going to talk about individual gravitons, but it's completely irrelevant as far as this experiment goes. Gravitational waves are a classical phenomenon, predicted by GR (which is a classical theory). They have not been detected as of yet because they are so weak. The coupling coefficient is c^4/(8*pi*G), which is really large. So space time is elastic, but it is extremely stiff. It takes a lot of force to warp it even a tiny bit. The earth emits something on the order of 1 watt of gravitational radiation as it orbits the sun. Jupiter emits something like 30 watts. (Don't ask me for a source on those numbers- I think I read them on the Internet somewhere.) But any laboratory source won't emit anything that can be measured. Gravitational waves are even more esoteric than neutrinos, since we know how to detect neutrinos that we have created. The only sources of gravitational waves that are even remotely detectable are binary star systems, where two neutron stars are in a close orbit. The orbital periods of some of these systems have been determined to be decreasing in a manner characteristic of energy loss from gravitational radiation.
Personally I've always thought it's a bit premature to be speculating on the stringlike nature of gravitons when we can't even detect gross macroscopic things like gravity waves or even gravitomagnetism. It's as if we're blind snails wanting to talk about photons.
Godfather and LOTR shared one important attribute: they began life as a book, not a movie. While I think LOTR is probably the stronger book (except in regard to character development), the Godfather was easier to turn into a movie. You didn't need to read the book to be familiar with the setting in the Godfather movies. LOTR had to brief the audience on elementary information before it could even start. And it's extremely movie-resistant material- the story is just too intricate to fit into nine hours. (It might be suited to a series- but then you'd lose the budget.) Movies and mobsters, on the other hand, always go together.
Citizen Kane: Oh eat me. If anyone hasn't seen Citizen Kane then they shouldn't read this spoiler: at the end you find out the whole movie has been about a sled! At the end, when Welles has painted his movie into a corner by hyping up this "Rosebud" concept, and it's time for him to deliver and tell us who or what Rosebud is, he has nothing left to offer but... uh... uh... a sled! Citizen Kane did try some new cinematic and narrative tricks, but those are impressive mostly because they were new and original at the time the movie was made.
Strangelove: THE classic Cold War movie. It captured on film the paranoia and illogical thinking of the entire period. The literate, subversive, and cynical humor was the kind you rarely see in movies. 500 years from now, the Cold War will be remembered more because of Dr. Strangelove than anything else. But people don't want to be reminded of the real world's problems when they go to the movies. And since nobody cares about the Cold War anymore, the movie's perceived relevance has dropped. And it certainly never appealed to all types. Many people were profoundly offended by it when it first came out and even today certain personality types don't "get" any of the jokes in Dr. Strangelove. LOTR, for its part, certainly caters to a certain personality type but I haven't met anyone yet who hasn't at least enjoyed it, regardless of whether they thought it was a good movie or not.
...and the woman in the row behind me says "What a shitty ending!"
People like that are the reason Hollywood movies are 100% predictable.
An adult that went to see a KIDS MOVIE is making generalizations of people watching tv? Isn't there some cliche about a pot and a kettle?
"KIDS MOVIE"? You obviously haven't seen it, so why are you shooting off your mouth about pots and kettles? Anyone who brings their kids to this movie should be dragged into family court. I saw several teary-eyed kids below the age of 10 being led out of the theater midway through by their idiot parents who had assumed it was a kids' movie.
I was right the first time, sorry. :) SSDP (Simple Service Discovery Protocol) lives on port 5000.
According to http: // www .eeye.com/html/Research/Advisories/AD20011220.html this particular vulnerability exists on port 1900, not 5000.
:)
5000 is a different vulnerability.
We ran into this several months ago when we were testing some server software that we wrote. We were using port 5000 as a default. As soon as XP came out, we tested the software on it and found that we could not bind a server to port 5000 at all because it was taken. So naturally, we wondered, what in XP is listening on port 5000?
Turns out that Microsoft picked the same port for its Plug and Play architecture, which listens on it for a connection coming (presumably) through the local TCP/IP stack. The protocol is XML (maybe SOAP, can't remember). You can receive and send configuration information by using that port (the schema is somewhere on microsoft.com) and it occurred to me even then that this looked like a potential security hole. But, I thought, this is too blatantly obvious and surely Microsoft is not so stupid as to allow access to the PnP internals from nonlocal IPs. Right? So we simply moved our software's default port setting to another port and forgot about it.
Predictions:
The scandal will flow off MS in a day or two, like water off a duck's back.
The downloadable security patch will be bundled with the latest updates to Microsoft's digital rights management crap.
Every script kiddie will have a tool within the week that scans IP ranges on port 5000 in search of the machines that have remained unpatched.
The guy who publicized the flaw will be tried in a secret military tribunal as a cyberterrorist.
This is a minor nitpick, really.
Amphetamines like Ritalin displace norepinepherine and dopamine from the vesicles within neurons that store them, so that these two neurotransmitters flow into synapses more readily. Ritalin has a mechanism of action similar to any other amphetamine.
Caffeine targets a completely different system entirely (it blocks adenosine receptors). Unlike Ritalin, caffeine is qualitatively different from the amphetamines with regard to things like dose response, habituation effects, etc.
I dug around in Google's new USENET cache and found the first post of Godwin's Law.
You really think that's a cop calling? I always figured it was just another hired hand in a basement somewhere, maybe working off his hours of "community service".
You can usually tell who it is by the attitude. They act like they've pulled you over when you pick up the phone. And they do really weird stuff like making fun of you to the guy next to them. Whoever it is doesn't do it for a living. It could be some lowlife working off hours of community service. Next time one calls I'll ask.
I disagree. Spammers are soooo much more annoying than phone solicitors.
-Phone solicitors don't immediately engage in sex talk with your 7 year old when he picks up the phone.
-Coming home from a long vacation doesn't usually mean you're going to have to sift through a blizzard of thousands of phone solicitation calls. (Interspersed by warnings from the phone company about how you're getting too many phone calls and would you like to buy more space?)
-When a huge amount of phone solicitations overwhelm the phone company and force them to invest in additional infrastructure, the cost is passed to the phone solicitors, not to you.
-If you have an unlisted number, and a phone solicitor calls, it doesn't automatically mean that the gig is up and the number is no good anymore.
-There actually exist phone solicitors who are not running scams.
-You don't get hundreds of phone solicitations in the space of 24 hours.
-Phone solicitors don't try to fool you by pretending to be people you know.
-Phone solicitors don't call you and offer to sell you a CD of the phone numbers they're calling.
-Phone company operators aren't kept awake at the phone company at 3 AM clearing wayward phone solicitations out of the equipment after a torrent of wrongly dialed phone solicitations.
-You don't get the same phone call from the same solicitor five times in a row in immediate succession, unless he has an organic brain disorder.
-While they can sometimes block the number from appearing at all, phone solicitors don't intentionally send forged numbers to your Caller ID box.
-If you tell a phone solicitor to take your phone number off his list, he doesn't immediately sell your number to all the other phone solicitors in town. ("It works, someone picked up the phone!") This is because we have laws dictating that phone solicitors cannot do this.
-And you can at least be rude to a phone solicitor. In fact, a phone solicitation from the PBA offers the quick-thinking solicitee a rare opportunity to safely tell off a cop. And you can do stuff like this:
ME: Hello?
PHONE SOLICITOR: (bubbly female voice) Hello, do you subscribe to the <name of local newspaper>
ME: Uh, no...
PHONE SOLICITOR: Oh my GOD! How do you get your news?
ME: Well, if you must know, the government implanted a chip in my brain, and now God and aliens just beam all that news right into my head. Why, isn't the chip in your brain working?
PHONE SOLICITOR: Uhh, OK, ummm... goodbye!
I can't get rid of this thing!
They must have assumed you'd know that they meant interactions mediated by virtual photons.
Why is it that every time someone mentions a project that is to be done in C++ (the CUSTOMER wants it that way!) some idiot comes along and without even asking if there might be reasons for C++ says, 'Use Java'. Bleh! Don't you have some applet to write ? Go away!
Yes, but customers can be stupid. They want things written in languages that they saw an article about in their latest management newsletters. Or they demand web pages that have the look and feel of Windows applications (which needlessly introduces mind-rotting amounts of JavaScript). Some customers have valid reasons for wanting a specific language or technology. Some are just demanding the latest fad. You can't let a customer dictate your technical decisions on what is the best tool for a specific job. Would you want your doctor to only prescribe you the drugs you saw commercials for on TV?
We wrote a scientific application suite in Java because almost half our customers insisted on using Macs. The other half wanted it to run on Windows. And a few wanted to run it on Linux. People complain that Java is slow for stuff like that, and it is if you don't pay attention to what you're writing, but a good programmer can put together an efficient algorithm without too much trouble. Java has worked out quite well for us.
-Top level page: "Enter your geographic location (North America, Africa, ...)"
..."
-Next page: "Select connection speed: 56K / T1" (usually Flash demo in background is either a closeup on a handshake or someone smiling at a computer)
-Your search for support OR repair generated 0 hits. Click here to search within these results.
-Your search for buy AND [name of company's flagship product] generated 0 hits. Click here to search within these results.
-"Below are the results of your search, ranked in order of their complete uselessness to you and the profit we can make off you if you buy something."
-"Select one of the following: "I am a
small business
medium business
large business
-"Redirecting... whoops, that page doesn't exist! Why don't you tell us all about it! Redirecting you to our Customer Care Division..."
-"Uh oh, looks like your browser doesn't support JavaScript! This site is best viewed with a browser that supports JavaScript and cookies."
The FBI is warning again that a supernova may explode and send a massive number of energetic neutrinos toward U.S. interests worldwide, possibly this week, and that the world's neutrino telescopes should be on the highest alert.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said the warning -- the second this month -- was based on credible information, described by others as coming from sources outside the solar system. The information did not specify the type of supernova or whether the progenitor star would have a binary companion, Ashcroft said.
Ashcroft tried to walk a fine line between giving the public prompt and necessary warnings and not causing panic.
The alert "gives people a basis for continuing to live their lives the way they would otherwise live them, with this elevated sense of alertness or vigilance that comes from knowing that the planet could be vaporized any second," Ashcroft told a news conference.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said the previous supernova warning may have helped avert an explosion. Ashcroft said the absence of a supernova should not lull people "into a false sense of indifference."
"It's important for the American people to understand that these (alerts) are to be taken seriously," said Ashcroft, who canceled plans to travel Monday to Toronto to address a conference of near-earth asteroid experts.
Officials said the warning was based in part on intelligence that terrorists may set off a supernova within 1000 light years of the earth, in the aftermath of the Afghan bombings by U.S. and British forces.
"There certainly is intelligence that causes you to be concerned, and possibly that al-Qaida may be behind it," said one senior U.S. official, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
Ashcroft said that all neutrino observatories were advised to go on the highest alert. Federal agencies, meanwhile, were increasing security and authorities were boosting their efforts to keep suspected neutrinos from entering U.S. airspace- either by coming down from above or by emerging from the ground after a trip through the center of the earth.
Okay, if you do 400 experiments, you can expect 1 would be in the 1-in-400 bin on the tail of the histogram. I'm sure the Standard Model has endured way more than 400 tests.
Not via this specific experiment it hasn't! You're comparing apples and oranges. That 400-1 test is the probability that this given experiment turned out the way it did by pure chance. If they repeat the experiment and get the same results then you will have a P-value of 160,000 to 1 to explain.
P.S. If a neutrino is chargeless, how do you "fire" one at something?
Well, it isn't like loading a gun with bullets and then shooting them. Accelerating an existing neutrino is pretty hard. Usually what you do is create them when you fire them.
A trivial example would be putting cobalt-60 (beta emitter) in a solenoid. Electrons fly out one end and the antineutrinos come out the other.
Does it still riddle your code with "do not edit" regions?
This is an excellent idea. But why should we pay for it, when Microsoft is already screaming this message loud and clear?
OTOH, if IBM wants to really smash M$, they'll incorporate your idea into their slick TV ad campaign. But they won't. IBM has proven time and time again that it can't market its way out of a paper bag.
"Unless you have no past or current unhappy employees," says Bob Krueger, vice president of the BSA, "you're only one phone call away from being the target of a BSA investigation. This is not a traffic ticket."
When scientis finally decide what light is, waves or photons, they will realize that it is neither.
Everybody already knows that photons (and leptons, hadrons, etc.) are neither particles nor waves. They're entities that exhibit characteristics of both. Particles and waves are only the closest analogues we have from ordinary everyday experience.
We have three methods to calculate the mass of the universe. Two are based on electromagnetic interactions. Those two agree. The other is based on observations of gravitational interactions. It gives a result 10X as large for the total amount of matter. Therefore 90% of the universe is made of particles that interact gravitationally but not electromagnetically. The only way to observe them is to observe their gravitational effects. Like, duh. Why is this such a difficult concept to grasp? It's an empirical observation.
Keep in mind that if something only couples gravitationally, it's going to be extremely hard to see. You're prejudiced by your own experience with the world, which is mostly based on electromagnetism- meaning interactions with photons (real and virtual). Get rid of electrodynamics, and most concepts and phenomena you're familiar with- atomic physics, chemistry, biology, optics, materials science, friction, pressure, radiation, viscosity, resistance, reflection, transparency, iridescence, impenetrability- all this stuff goes out the window! Your ass would sink through your chair, right through the ground, until you reached the center of the earth with everything else. Don't underestimate the importance of photon-mediated interactions. Everything else is gravitation, beta decay, and the strong nuclear force. Of those three, only gravitation operates over non-microscopic distances. And it is very weak. There could be up to several tons of dark matter in the room with you right now. You would never know it's there.
Of course, the mass could be ordinary matter that we're just not seeing. Many people like the idea of lots of Jupiter-sized objects. Lots of black holes might also work (although a black hole can feed off either kind of matter).
They withhold a bunch of useful features from the free versions, but you can write patches and implement them yourself using their Opentools API. It's not really an "API"- they just left a portion of the internal classes unobfuscated and gave them public modifiers, so you can monkey with them. The documentation sucks- it's basically a bunch of javadocs that are riddled here and there with 404s so you have to use System.out.println() and reflection to figure out how to do certain things. And it's a bit overengineered from running on top of Swing. But it does let you alter the IDE and add stuff to it. I added a "delete dependency cache" button to my toolbar to get around their annoying "rebuild doesn't really rebuild" bug, and a split pane view for viewing two source code files at once. Their class-structure tree and their debugger seem to be off limits to customization, however.
How about "If I can't read it with a non-MS editor then it sucks?"
First of all, any IDE that generates a mountain of horsesh8t and then sends your cursor to the "insert your code here" point is IMHO garbage. One thing I like about Java (compared to, say, MS Visual anything) is the way that the "generated code" is hidden in superclasses. MS sticks it in your face. (Well, Sun does it too in Forte for Java, but that's why nobody uses it.)
Collapsible code regions sounds like a bad idea, like the "design time objects" that MS encourages you to use in Visual Studio. With those, you're basically editing gibberish that's being presented to you as text (with "cool looking" COM-based GUIs embedded within the text). But whooo, you don't have to scroll over that collapsed code now! I've had to migrate an app away from ASP where the code monkeys used design time objects and I believe their sole purpose is to make porting away from NT impossible. Any ASP that was inflicted with these warts had to be completely rewritten from scratch.
In any case, an IDE with cool right-clicks in it seems like a really poor reason to introduce vendor lock-in with such a nasty vendor. How easy is it to maintain these thin clients? Can they be migrated to other platforms or are you essentially editing closed-format object code (being viewed as source) with that IDE? When choosing a technology on which to base a project, you should look at the longer-term strategy, like ease of maintenance, adherence to standards, etc. MS is hoping they can offer you an IDE with some flashy toys in it and fool you into going down their one-way street.
Maybe I'd try it out anyway, but it would mean installing IIS, which I would like to avoid. Which is pointless, because it's probably running on half the computers in the office without anyone knowing anyway. How about "right-click discover patches for latest security holes"? Now THAT would be useful.