And their "big secret" is......the emperor has no clothes and their balance sheet is entirely made up. They simply make up the number they want and use alchemy, I mean, custom derivatives traded over the counter with SPVs (special purpose vehicles).
Their technology is 100% proprietary and in house, at the programming language (Slang), database (SecDB) and networking levels (yep, even custom screen editors, no IDEs for Goldman) for added obfuscation. They brag internally about how much they spend on technology, the bulk of which is spent on training people just out of school on their proprietary system. It is almost impossible to audit.
It doesn't matter whether it is Obama, Bill Cosby, or any other black individual.
Just because there is a popular cultural reference involved, it doesn't suddenly make it kosher to use a black man in face paint. If the Joker were originally black, he would have gotten forgotten long ago as a racist symbol, and we probably wouldn't even be having the discussion to begin with.
Now, as a free speech advocate, and defender of fair use, I do believe that copyright is entirely the wrong grounds here, and I don't advocate its being yanked, even for the hate speech it (perhaps even unknowingly) is.
But please understand the symbolism of racist imagery, even if you have a hard time relating to it yourself personally.
Not quite. She did what any judge in her circumstances *could have* done. She asked the DOJ and the states to come up with a new settlement, and unfortunately, the shift from Reno to Ashcroft happened. All of a sudden, you have the DOJ saying, "let's just have Microsoft write their own punishment instead of breaking them up" and the states having to decide which is more important, sucking up to the new administration (not to mention the skyrocketing court costs and their burdens to the taxpayer) or getting a pound of flesh. Don't blame the judge, blame the regime change.
It's a basic rule of employment, accept the money, play by the rules.
Maybe for you. Actually, I am quite nauseated by the sheer number of people who think this way and accept (and by omission, condone) the unethical behavior of their employers. What's interesting is that these are frequently the same people who frequently complain that corporations are "evil."
While I acknowledge that I've made my share of mistakes in previous jobs, my individuality and sense of free will (hallucinatory or otherwise) have enabled me to make conscious decisions about my choice of employer. For me, ethics has been a very important part of those decisions.
In fact, I was asked during an interview with a manager what was important to me in choosing a job: I told the interviewer flat-out that the most important thing was ethics. Well, when I had a follow-up with my recruiter, it turns out that the interviewer had been flabbergasted by that response. Nobody had ever given him such an answer before. And, as it turns out, not only did it make an impression, it also landed me the job.
Being ethical first does pay, contrary to the popular belief that money and ethics are mutually exclusive. Ask yourself this: would you be willing to accept a 5% pay cut if you knew that you could trust your employer? Hell, Microsoft, Enron, the Bush Administration, or the RIAA could offer me a job tomorrow promising to double my salary, and I would turn it down flat.
But then again, maybe most people are just too complacent to think a bit outside the box and realize that more conscionable options actually do exist.
First, I want to respond to the notion that generics in Java are "mythical." They are indeed very real; it is a legitimate JSR already developed by the Java community. I can assert (no pun intended) that the capability for generics has been in the Java compiler since 1.3, but has been stubbed out for several years to avoid rolling out significant language changes in short amounts of time (thereby breaking people or getting them too frustrated at keeping up with change).
It's a simple switch to the compiler to turn it on, and you can preview them at your leisure here.
Now, in response to the above thread, the type system in Java was a deliberate choice, not "a bug." Sure, it's ugly. Sure, it's inconsistent. Howevever, it's been extremely successful--it was more in appearance like C++, so that businesses were more quick to adopt it. Smalltalk and Lisp have been around for decades, but how many businesses out there use them?
Anonymous Brave Guy is correct, generics are NOT templates, or even close to their "power." A lot of people are really into power. One can stockpile their home with bigger and bigger armaments; personally, I'd rather not live with a few live grenades under my pillow.
You see, I have also been in the receiving end of having to debug C++ templates. You can only lose so many brain cells doing this intricate exercise before realizing that what efficiency and elegance was gained during development was lost many times over during maintenance. It's very sad but true.
I've seen C macros used and abused to redefine the language until it wasn't even C anymore, and I've seen C++ templates overload the syntax of operators until a pointer wasn't a pointer anymore and you have no idea what you are looking at or even what
&A->foo
means. The real question is, why would anyone in their right mind want to, especially when so many easier options exist?
I agree with the bulk of this comment, and with the mod. However, I am stunned with the following statement:
But even with all the layoffs in the last couple of years, extremely bright "star" engineers are still hard to find. For an example, look at all the engineering openings at Google. You'd think that in a down economy with lots of engineers out of work, they'd be able to hire people as quickly as they wanted to. If they wanted just anybody, that might be true. But they're also feeding off the top of the food chain; they only want very good engineers who are still very hard to find.
In what universe is this true? I know top, top, talented people who are still unemployed (and we're talking about people whose names at least 25% of Slashdot would instantly recognize). Referral bonuses have gone the same way as all my underwater stock options. And for myself, I was unemployed for months in Silicon Valley, and the only way I could find a job was to relocate to the East Coast and take a 25% pay cut. And no, I'm not a spring chicken, dot-commer, or college graduate either; I have almost 10 years of industry experience, at least half of which has been with Fortune 500 companies.
Back when I was unemployed, a recruiter told me: "you know, the shift of power has gone from the recruiters, to the candidates, and now it is in the hands of the hiring companies." It is true: a company can pretty much hire anyone they want, or hold out as long as they want until an ideal candidate comes by instead of merely a talented one.
The publicly displayed job listings of a larger corporation is rarely indicative of what is really occurring at the company--how many of those listings are hopelessly out of date? And how many resumes does HR sift through, file, or toss in the "in case of emergency, break glass" cabinet?
Disclaimer: my opinions are my own and do not represent any company or organization.
I worked as a JDK developer at Sun for a certain length of time (let us just say more than three years to continue to protect my anonymity). And no, I no longer work for Sun.
To respond to this menu (assuming that it is real), first look at the executive summary and sender information: this memo represents the opinion of a single person who is representing a specific group of people, in order to push a specific agenda: JDK conformance with the SDF, which is probably some sort of new program or committee body within Sun (or any industry-wide standard--anyone know what this is?). Now in order to "sell" people on this agenda, it is necessary to build up a case for Java to fall in line with it.
Now, let us continue to assume that this is legit and examine the case presented independent of the context, though keeping in mind that that is what this memo is about, not some "corporate-wide" opportunity for someone at Sun to bash its own technology. This isn't news: it's "dog bites man" at best. Java has bugs, Solaris has bugs, communication at Sun needs to improve, etc.
First of all, the "will not fix" problem is clearly an internal communication problem here (and a big misunderstanding on the part of the author of the memo). JDK engineers don't just close things as "will not fix" willy-nilly, or because they don't have the resources, or because they don't see them as serious enough bugs. I can recall on many occasions that engineers have been pulled aside, sometimes even during weekends or during critical projects, to work on critical Solaris bugs. Solaris has been (and I would imagine will continue to be) one of Sun's most critical software projects. Entire JDK releases have even been delayed at times because of serious Solaris issues. Solaris is important, period, and JDK engineers have a very clear grasp of this, contrary to what this memo may suggest. Simply listing a bunch of "will not fix" bugs doesn't mean anything. A "will not fix" typically means "read the fine print in order to figure out what is going on with this bug and why it won't be fixed." Every bug report has an "evaluation" section, and listed there (if the engineer is doing his or her job) is the reason for closing the bug out. Many such bugs are simply no longer applicable: discontinuing support of older versions of Solaris or motif are some possible examples. Other examples may be ludicrous or ambitious enhancements which will probably never realistically see the light of day: "support Java on the Commodore 64". Looking at this list, it's fairly easy to speculate where many of these bugs fell. I see a pattern of things here which were backward-incompatable that were probably closed as "will not fix" because the new behavior is seen as more "correct" than the old behavior. This is further evidenced by item 4 in the following section, as well as other such remarks throughout the memo (more on that item later).
Item 1 on the list appears to, again, be a communication problem. The author of the memo shows a lack of familarity with Sun's internal support process (including the Sun-on-Sun initiative). This could be a legitimate cross-management communication issue or perhaps just ignorance on the part of the author. This is evidenced by a number of things, not least of which is the mention of JDK 1.1.5 and Netscape running together which "has not changed for years." Anyone who has downloaded Netscape in the past 5 years knows that to be just plain wrong.
Item 2 is both flamebait on one hand, and on the other hand is entirely true. Memory footprint is an ongoing problem for the JDK, something which is addressed and paid attention to in every release. Yes, Java has warts. Engineers take these problems very seriously and are constantly struggling to improve performance. Solaris is no exception.
Item 3 again shows lack of familiarity, this time with the Java Community Process (JCP). The examples cited predate JCP 2.0 and are not relevant to the current state of the JDK on Solaris. How emerging technologies evolve as extensions and find their way (if relevant) into the JDK has been long since made clear by the JCP. The "lack of modularity" example of TogetherJ is an example of JDK modularity, not extension modularity, which makes it more relevant to Item 4, not Item 3.
Item 4 seems like the real meat of this person's complaints with Java, the appearance of Java being an "unstable platform." While backward compatability across versions is a legitimate complaint, it is scarecly a complaint about Java so much as it is an industry-wide problem having to do with the nature of software, though middle-ware is particularly vulnerable to this problem (something is broken, but somebody relies on the broken behavior, then you fix the broken behavior, the already-broken person then complains). The author seems confused about the difference between "major" and "minor" versions of the JDK, and in all of the examples cited these are differences between "major" versions of the JDK (so-called "feature" releases), and not "minor" versions of the JDK. While it is idiosyncratic of the JDK to never evolve beyond "1.x", it is not (to my knowledge) widely misunderstood among Java developers and managers, especially after the 1.2 JDK experience, that evolutions in the second digit are feature releases. The *third* digit is the minor version, wherein backward compatability is most guaranteed. These kinds of releases are called "maintenance releases." Furthermore, there is an underscore "_01," etc., which represents "patch releases," which are purely critical bug-fixes.
There isn't enough time in the day to have a full discussion of how to resolve the backward-compatability problem, but there isn't a single person I know of who complains that they can't put a 10 inch vinyl record into a CD player. Any decent software engineer knows that when a new release of some underlying technology comes out, it should be treated as a *new product* and should not be expected to run everything 100% the same as it did in the previous version. Anyone who makes the decision to blindly ship with a new technology without first running their product through a new quality lifecycle is just asking for trouble. Aside from JDK 1.2, personally I have found Java to be surprisingly backward-compatable for larger GUI projects, certainly compared to the world of Win32 development. Of course, experiences are likely to vary among developers on this, so I would gladly be sympathetic if someone wanted to flame me with their top "Java horror story".
Overall, I would say that this memo isn't informed enough to build a case against Java on these grounds. I have a number of complaints with the technology's shortcomings, with Sun in general, with Solaris, etc., but none of the items presented here really hit the mark.
CNN and Time Magazine are both owned by AOL, the same company that produced the film. While it's nice to have reviews from media companies, always keep an eye on who is spinning what and when... That aside, I did enjoy the film.
Movies: Only attend matinees, if you MUST see it in a theatre.
MPAA still gets a cut; even if not directly, the cost is offset in the feature price.
DVD's: Only buy used. Period. It's not that difficult to find a pawn shop, or ebay, or whatever.
Music: Only buy used. Again, it's not that hard to find your favorite artists.
Sorry, somebody originally had to buy it in the first place, which means that MPAA or RIAA still got its share. Creating a demand in the secondary market is only going to stimulate a surge in supply in the primary market.
Wanna support the artist? Go see their show, buy their ts-shirt or cd AT THE SHOW.
Sorry, the RIAA gets its cut here as well, at least from the CD sales (the T-shirt sales and concert tickets will vary depending on the artist's contract).
You are missing out on another thing: even if somehow the distribution channel is completely bypassed, that means that the artist didn't get paid either.
The problem with both RIAA and MPAA is that neither one consists of a single corporation, but that they are "trusts" which have succeeded in sustaining oligopoly power.
A boycott truly means: never watching movies outside of independent films, and never listening to music outside of independent music. Most of us (myself included here) are all consumerist victims to the mass market.
I've seen this same response at least three times in this thread. This is a paranoid reaction to this verdict. The verdict simply says:
ElcomSoft did not violate DMCA
The verdict does NOT say:
The DMCA is a constitutional law
The DMCA is not subject to future challenges
The DMCA can or cannot be used to try future cases
There is no legal precedent one way or the other. The verdict only says that in this instance, ElcomSoft is not guilty of violating this law, period. It does, however, raise interesting questions about when it can be applied...
Also, keep in mind that this is the first and only time anyone has ever attempted to try someone under this law.
I returned three (count them, three) different Sony walkman MP3 players because they all had TERRIBLE skipping problems when playing MP3s. Also during this ordeal, the store's display model Sony boom box had an entirely different set of problems where it would start ignoring some (about 50%) of the MP3s on a disc. The end result is that I ended up buying a Philips MP3 walkman that I've yet to experience any sort of problem with. Sure, Sony has very beautiful products, but they tend to IGNORE THE PRIMARY FUNCTION OF THESE PRODUCTS in favor of style.
I wouldn't trust them with any cutting-edge media device, period.
"Free markets" are neither democratic nor utilitarian, and democracy always inevitably votes itself out of office. And what is a democracy anyway--four wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Government, as Henry David Thoreau likes to point out, is an expedient. In the interests of a free market it is sometimes necessary to change the rules of that market--it doesn't do this out of maliciousness (though sometimes it does), it does this for a variety of reasons: pollution, corruption, decline in public health, and in this particular case, market stagnation.
Analog televisions and the standards associated with them are outdated, to say the least. What frequently happens in your beloved "free market" system is that the first successful marketing campaign wins, displaces all of the competition, cultivates its own "standards" (frequently to the detriment of competitors) and then collects money for as long as it wants. Any "new" technology that threatens its existing business model ("free money") is ruined through trust-building, monopoly or oligopoly power, and political lobbying. Suddenly it is in the industry's best interest to collect this free money from consumers, and not in the industry's best interest to provide consumers with new options.
So, what happens? We, the consumers, catch on that something is rotten, and we petition the government to address these problems.
Now, you are more than welcome to live in your own ideal "free market" community, but I prefer to have free public toilets, public freeways that are not private toll roads, subsidized education and transporation, the FDC, and subsidized health care. I'd rather not have humanity end up like the Eloi and the Morlocks, thank you very much.
I've waited all my life for these films to be made. I can wait two or three more years to own them together as a set. These films were (and will continue to be) vastly popular. Special Editions of them will be available easily for the theater lifespans of the trilogy: it makes good accounting sense to the producers. I look forward to picking them all up, complete as a set, discounted, used, long after all the frenzy dies down.
Just like those contractors in "Return of the Jedi" who were working on the Death Star when it blew up: they got what they deserved. If you don't believe me, just ask Kevin Smith.
About a half a year ago MCI WorldCom was our long distance carrier. Around that time my partner was interested in getting a cell phone. One day we received an ad from them for a free cell phone with the commitment of subscribing to their service for a year. It seemed like a decent deal, everybody was doing such a promotion, and life was dandy. So we called them up and said sure.
We gave them my work address to mail the phones to, since we have had problems in the past with people stealing packages from our front porch.
So weeks go by, the phones never show up.
My partner calls them up, gets put on hold for almost an hour. Finally, she gets somebody to talk to, and tells them what happened. Turns out they had the wrong address written down. They get the correct address from her. Seems fine.
Except the phones still don't show up. She calls again, and, after being on hold for such a long time again, it turns out that they still had the exact same wrong address.
This goes on for weeks, weeks pass into months. Eventually she gets sick of it and tells them we don't want the phone anymore.
Except that then they decide to start sending us bills for phones we've never received. One day I walked in on a conversation with her screaming at them, telling them she will report them to the Better Business Bureau. You have to understand, she's a kind and gentle soul and rarely (if ever) have I seen her so riled.
At some point the experience makes us change our long distance carrier: screw them if they are going to get any of our money.
So far, the latest bit in the whole saga is that we recently received a bill for long distance calls made on this phone to strange places we've never even heard of. Evidently somebody got ahold of the phone and is using it to make several hundreds of dollars worth of calls. All this time with missing phones, and the idiots at MCI haven't even suspended the service.
So she calls them and tells them about it.
At this point, if they are losing money, it's their own fault, and we certainly don't owe them a dime.
I'll never use MCI for anything again, and I would encourage others to do likewise. And I'd rather have a catheter the size of a garden hose than work there.
CNN is reporting that "Iowa, Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Kansas, Utah, Minnesota, and West Virginia - as well as Washington, D.C." are pursuing further litigation.
> Nor could you play the game in hardware
> mode if your card doesn't support 32-bit color,
> even though the game box
> prominently proclaims support for 16-bit.
Their mistake is that they shouldn't claim to support such an antique piece of hardware. I'm sure their recommended system is quite different from their supported system. Sounds like you need to upgrade.
> Most crippling of all, if you have
> an Intel, S3 or SiS video card or video chipset,
> your game won't run at all
> (similar problems have also been reported with
> several other video chipsets,
> such as ATI Rage cards).
Once again, you seriously need to upgrade your system. Intel has no business whatsoever making video chips. Both S3 and SiS are dinosaurs, many of the companies that supported them either went out of business or moved on to something else. I can't speak for ATI Rage, since I haven't had any firsthand experience with it.
I've noticed that many people with more decent hardware have already responded and submitted reviews. Good luck in getting the next game to work on your system, but please refrain from posting further reviews like this one until you've actually spent some money on your machine.
And to those of you who are bickering about the inability to return the item to the store, here's a bit of scoop on that. Retailers regard video games in particular as disposable merchandise. Compared to that $300 copy of Windows or that $1500 copy of Adobe Illustrator, your $50 game purchase isn't worth the hassle. Keep it up and they will discontinue distribution of PC video games completely.
That's why the console market is so much more successful (and will always be more successful) than the PC market. You can guarantee quality against a stable platform without the added hassle of having to worry about differences in hardware, drivers, or shoddy operating systems.
I've adopted a strategy of never buying PC video games unless I know of at least one other person who has gotten the game to run on a similar system, or unless I'm willing to suck a $50 loss to take the risk whether it will run on my machine or not.
Hopefully, that situation will improve (part of my job is in trying to improve this very thing). Until then, try not to blame the retailer, try not to blame the studio, try not to blame the publisher, and try to become as informed a consumer as possible before spending that $50 on an impulse purchase.
--Ear Phantom
I am appalled at most of the readers on this/. post. Racism in the tech industry is very real, is very serious, and most importantly, falls into a category of problems where the potential damage done to its victims through neglect outweighs the potential damage done through abuse and fraud.
First of all, Indians and Asians, though they may still be minorities, do not have the stigmas or problems that blacks and Hispanics do in this country, so pointing at them and saying "see, there's no racism here" is hardly relevant. The fact that these two groups (blacks and Hispanics) are underrepresented in higher income occupations is very serious, and it does not better the situation by shouting out allegations of "reverse discrimination" before their case has even been heard in a court of law. Is the fear that their complaints may actually be justified so overwhelming that it has to be covered up by the web of denial? Please, that is for the justice system to determine. And just remember that every jurer on every court faces that denial as well, which makes their struggles all the more challenging.
Microsoft aside, we face an even bigger problem that 1) blacks and Hispanics live in poorer neighborhoods, 2) blacks and Hispanics are more likely to have undereducated parents, 3) blacks and Hispanics are more likely to go to public versus private schools, 4) living in poorer neighborhoods directly implies substandard educational facilities, 5) computer science is more likely to be taught in college preporatory classes, which are more likely to exclude blacks and Hispanics due to the substandard elementary school facilities, 6) blacks and Hispanics are less likely to make it to college in the first place, 7) get real--show me a list of computer jobs where "bachelors degree" is not a requirement.
And even if one or two are lucky enough to make it through all of those obstacles, they face an even bigger challenge in getting noticed for jobs, promotions, benefits, etc., consciously or unconsciously.
Their case is worth hearing out, we owe them that much.
40 acres and a mule? I'd rather have 40,000 stock options...
I quote, from the article:
"So, write a program that can decode Minesweeper for any size board, and you will join the pantheon of mathematical greats, alongside Euler and Pythagoras."
Wrong! Just because something is NP or NP-complete, that does not make it suddenly impossible to solve. Any bozo who's taken a course in AI can write a heuristic to solve it.
Solving it in a deterministic way in polynomial time, now that's a different story...
Slashdot Mirror
And their "big secret" is... ...the emperor has no clothes and their balance sheet is entirely made up. They simply make up the number they want and use alchemy, I mean, custom derivatives traded over the counter with SPVs (special purpose vehicles).
Their technology is 100% proprietary and in house, at the programming language (Slang), database (SecDB) and networking levels (yep, even custom screen editors, no IDEs for Goldman) for added obfuscation. They brag internally about how much they spend on technology, the bulk of which is spent on training people just out of school on their proprietary system. It is almost impossible to audit.
A black man in face paint is a racist symbol, period. I wish it weren't the case, but yes, it is true.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackface
It doesn't matter whether it is Obama, Bill Cosby, or any other black individual.
Just because there is a popular cultural reference involved, it doesn't suddenly make it kosher to use a black man in face paint. If the Joker were originally black, he would have gotten forgotten long ago as a racist symbol, and we probably wouldn't even be having the discussion to begin with.
Now, as a free speech advocate, and defender of fair use, I do believe that copyright is entirely the wrong grounds here, and I don't advocate its being yanked, even for the hate speech it (perhaps even unknowingly) is.
But please understand the symbolism of racist imagery, even if you have a hard time relating to it yourself personally.
"I drink your milkshake!"
Not quite.
She did what any judge in her circumstances *could have* done. She asked the DOJ and the states to come up with a new settlement, and unfortunately, the shift from Reno to Ashcroft happened. All of a sudden, you have the DOJ saying, "let's just have Microsoft write their own punishment instead of breaking them up" and the states having to decide which is more important, sucking up to the new administration (not to mention the skyrocketing court costs and their burdens to the taxpayer) or getting a pound of flesh.
Don't blame the judge, blame the regime change.
--Ear Phantom
Maybe for you. Actually, I am quite nauseated by the sheer number of people who think this way and accept (and by omission, condone) the unethical behavior of their employers. What's interesting is that these are frequently the same people who frequently complain that corporations are "evil."
While I acknowledge that I've made my share of mistakes in previous jobs, my individuality and sense of free will (hallucinatory or otherwise) have enabled me to make conscious decisions about my choice of employer. For me, ethics has been a very important part of those decisions.
In fact, I was asked during an interview with a manager what was important to me in choosing a job: I told the interviewer flat-out that the most important thing was ethics. Well, when I had a follow-up with my recruiter, it turns out that the interviewer had been flabbergasted by that response. Nobody had ever given him such an answer before. And, as it turns out, not only did it make an impression, it also landed me the job.
Being ethical first does pay, contrary to the popular belief that money and ethics are mutually exclusive. Ask yourself this: would you be willing to accept a 5% pay cut if you knew that you could trust your employer? Hell, Microsoft, Enron, the Bush Administration, or the RIAA could offer me a job tomorrow promising to double my salary, and I would turn it down flat.
But then again, maybe most people are just too complacent to think a bit outside the box and realize that more conscionable options actually do exist.
Now, in response to the above thread, the type system in Java was a deliberate choice, not "a bug." Sure, it's ugly. Sure, it's inconsistent. Howevever, it's been extremely successful--it was more in appearance like C++, so that businesses were more quick to adopt it. Smalltalk and Lisp have been around for decades, but how many businesses out there use them?
Anonymous Brave Guy is correct, generics are NOT templates, or even close to their "power." A lot of people are really into power. One can stockpile their home with bigger and bigger armaments; personally, I'd rather not live with a few live grenades under my pillow.
You see, I have also been in the receiving end of having to debug C++ templates. You can only lose so many brain cells doing this intricate exercise before realizing that what efficiency and elegance was gained during development was lost many times over during maintenance. It's very sad but true.
I've seen C macros used and abused to redefine the language until it wasn't even C anymore, and I've seen C++ templates overload the syntax of operators until a pointer wasn't a pointer anymore and you have no idea what you are looking at or even what
means. The real question is, why would anyone in their right mind want to, especially when so many easier options exist?In what universe is this true? I know top, top, talented people who are still unemployed (and we're talking about people whose names at least 25% of Slashdot would instantly recognize). Referral bonuses have gone the same way as all my underwater stock options. And for myself, I was unemployed for months in Silicon Valley, and the only way I could find a job was to relocate to the East Coast and take a 25% pay cut. And no, I'm not a spring chicken, dot-commer, or college graduate either; I have almost 10 years of industry experience, at least half of which has been with Fortune 500 companies. Back when I was unemployed, a recruiter told me: "you know, the shift of power has gone from the recruiters, to the candidates, and now it is in the hands of the hiring companies." It is true: a company can pretty much hire anyone they want, or hold out as long as they want until an ideal candidate comes by instead of merely a talented one. The publicly displayed job listings of a larger corporation is rarely indicative of what is really occurring at the company--how many of those listings are hopelessly out of date? And how many resumes does HR sift through, file, or toss in the "in case of emergency, break glass" cabinet?
The RIAA is not just limiting their lawsuits to children, but evidently the elderly as well: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3092854.s tm
--Ear Phantom
Disclaimer: my opinions are my own and do not represent any company or organization.
I worked as a JDK developer at Sun for a certain length of time (let us just say more than three years to continue to protect my anonymity). And no, I no longer work for Sun.
To respond to this menu (assuming that it is real), first look at the executive summary and sender information: this memo represents the opinion of a single person who is representing a specific group of people, in order to push a specific agenda: JDK conformance with the SDF, which is probably some sort of new program or committee body within Sun (or any industry-wide standard--anyone know what this is?). Now in order to "sell" people on this agenda, it is necessary to build up a case for Java to fall in line with it.
Now, let us continue to assume that this is legit and examine the case presented independent of the context, though keeping in mind that that is what this memo is about, not some "corporate-wide" opportunity for someone at Sun to bash its own technology. This isn't news: it's "dog bites man" at best. Java has bugs, Solaris has bugs, communication at Sun needs to improve, etc.
First of all, the "will not fix" problem is clearly an internal communication problem here (and a big misunderstanding on the part of the author of the memo). JDK engineers don't just close things as "will not fix" willy-nilly, or because they don't have the resources, or because they don't see them as serious enough bugs. I can recall on many occasions that engineers have been pulled aside, sometimes even during weekends or during critical projects, to work on critical Solaris bugs. Solaris has been (and I would imagine will continue to be) one of Sun's most critical software projects. Entire JDK releases have even been delayed at times because of serious Solaris issues. Solaris is important, period, and JDK engineers have a very clear grasp of this, contrary to what this memo may suggest. Simply listing a bunch of "will not fix" bugs doesn't mean anything. A "will not fix" typically means "read the fine print in order to figure out what is going on with this bug and why it won't be fixed." Every bug report has an "evaluation" section, and listed there (if the engineer is doing his or her job) is the reason for closing the bug out. Many such bugs are simply no longer applicable: discontinuing support of older versions of Solaris or motif are some possible examples. Other examples may be ludicrous or ambitious enhancements which will probably never realistically see the light of day: "support Java on the Commodore 64". Looking at this list, it's fairly easy to speculate where many of these bugs fell. I see a pattern of things here which were backward-incompatable that were probably closed as "will not fix" because the new behavior is seen as more "correct" than the old behavior. This is further evidenced by item 4 in the following section, as well as other such remarks throughout the memo (more on that item later).
Item 1 on the list appears to, again, be a communication problem. The author of the memo shows a lack of familarity with Sun's internal support process (including the Sun-on-Sun initiative). This could be a legitimate cross-management communication issue or perhaps just ignorance on the part of the author. This is evidenced by a number of things, not least of which is the mention of JDK 1.1.5 and Netscape running together which "has not changed for years." Anyone who has downloaded Netscape in the past 5 years knows that to be just plain wrong.
Item 2 is both flamebait on one hand, and on the other hand is entirely true. Memory footprint is an ongoing problem for the JDK, something which is addressed and paid attention to in every release. Yes, Java has warts. Engineers take these problems very seriously and are constantly struggling to improve performance. Solaris is no exception.
Item 3 again shows lack of familiarity, this time with the Java Community Process (JCP). The examples cited predate JCP 2.0 and are not relevant to the current state of the JDK on Solaris. How emerging technologies evolve as extensions and find their way (if relevant) into the JDK has been long since made clear by the JCP. The "lack of modularity" example of TogetherJ is an example of JDK modularity, not extension modularity, which makes it more relevant to Item 4, not Item 3.
Item 4 seems like the real meat of this person's complaints with Java, the appearance of Java being an "unstable platform." While backward compatability across versions is a legitimate complaint, it is scarecly a complaint about Java so much as it is an industry-wide problem having to do with the nature of software, though middle-ware is particularly vulnerable to this problem (something is broken, but somebody relies on the broken behavior, then you fix the broken behavior, the already-broken person then complains). The author seems confused about the difference between "major" and "minor" versions of the JDK, and in all of the examples cited these are differences between "major" versions of the JDK (so-called "feature" releases), and not "minor" versions of the JDK. While it is idiosyncratic of the JDK to never evolve beyond "1.x", it is not (to my knowledge) widely misunderstood among Java developers and managers, especially after the 1.2 JDK experience, that evolutions in the second digit are feature releases. The *third* digit is the minor version, wherein backward compatability is most guaranteed. These kinds of releases are called "maintenance releases." Furthermore, there is an underscore "_01," etc., which represents "patch releases," which are purely critical bug-fixes.
There isn't enough time in the day to have a full discussion of how to resolve the backward-compatability problem, but there isn't a single person I know of who complains that they can't put a 10 inch vinyl record into a CD player. Any decent software engineer knows that when a new release of some underlying technology comes out, it should be treated as a *new product* and should not be expected to run everything 100% the same as it did in the previous version. Anyone who makes the decision to blindly ship with a new technology without first running their product through a new quality lifecycle is just asking for trouble. Aside from JDK 1.2, personally I have found Java to be surprisingly backward-compatable for larger GUI projects, certainly compared to the world of Win32 development. Of course, experiences are likely to vary among developers on this, so I would gladly be sympathetic if someone wanted to flame me with their top "Java horror story".
Overall, I would say that this memo isn't informed enough to build a case against Java on these grounds. I have a number of complaints with the technology's shortcomings, with Sun in general, with Solaris, etc., but none of the items presented here really hit the mark.
CNN and Time Magazine are both owned by AOL, the same company that produced the film. While it's nice to have reviews from media companies, always keep an eye on who is spinning what and when...
That aside, I did enjoy the film.
Movies: Only attend matinees, if you MUST see it in a theatre.
MPAA still gets a cut; even if not directly, the cost is offset in the feature price.
DVD's: Only buy used. Period. It's not that difficult to find a pawn shop, or ebay, or whatever.
Music: Only buy used. Again, it's not that hard to find your favorite artists.
Sorry, somebody originally had to buy it in the first place, which means that MPAA or RIAA still got its share. Creating a demand in the secondary market is only going to stimulate a surge in supply in the primary market.
Wanna support the artist? Go see their show, buy their ts-shirt or cd AT THE SHOW.
Sorry, the RIAA gets its cut here as well, at least from the CD sales (the T-shirt sales and concert tickets will vary depending on the artist's contract).
You are missing out on another thing: even if somehow the distribution channel is completely bypassed, that means that the artist didn't get paid either.
The problem with both RIAA and MPAA is that neither one consists of a single corporation, but that they are "trusts" which have succeeded in sustaining oligopoly power.
A boycott truly means: never watching movies outside of independent films, and never listening to music outside of independent music. Most of us (myself included here) are all consumerist victims to the mass market.
Sorry, we can't beat them using these tactics.
ElcomSoft did not violate DMCA
The verdict does NOT say:
There is no legal precedent one way or the other. The verdict only says that in this instance, ElcomSoft is not guilty of violating this law, period. It does, however, raise interesting questions about when it can be applied...
Also, keep in mind that this is the first and only time anyone has ever attempted to try someone under this law.
I returned three (count them, three) different Sony walkman MP3 players because they all had TERRIBLE skipping problems when playing MP3s. Also during this ordeal, the store's display model Sony boom box had an entirely different set of problems where it would start ignoring some (about 50%) of the MP3s on a disc.
The end result is that I ended up buying a Philips MP3 walkman that I've yet to experience any sort of problem with.
Sure, Sony has very beautiful products, but they tend to IGNORE THE PRIMARY FUNCTION OF THESE PRODUCTS in favor of style.
I wouldn't trust them with any cutting-edge media device, period.
"Free markets" are neither democratic nor utilitarian, and democracy always inevitably votes itself out of office. And what is a democracy anyway--four wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Government, as Henry David Thoreau likes to point out, is an expedient. In the interests of a free market it is sometimes necessary to change the rules of that market--it doesn't do this out of maliciousness (though sometimes it does), it does this for a variety of reasons: pollution, corruption, decline in public health, and in this particular case, market stagnation.
Analog televisions and the standards associated with them are outdated, to say the least. What frequently happens in your beloved "free market" system is that the first successful marketing campaign wins, displaces all of the competition, cultivates its own "standards" (frequently to the detriment of competitors) and then collects money for as long as it wants. Any "new" technology that threatens its existing business model ("free money") is ruined through trust-building, monopoly or oligopoly power, and political lobbying. Suddenly it is in the industry's best interest to collect this free money from consumers, and not in the industry's best interest to provide consumers with new options.
So, what happens? We, the consumers, catch on that something is rotten, and we petition the government to address these problems.
Now, you are more than welcome to live in your own ideal "free market" community, but I prefer to have free public toilets, public freeways that are not private toll roads, subsidized education and transporation, the FDC, and subsidized health care. I'd rather not have humanity end up like the Eloi and the Morlocks, thank you very much.
I've waited all my life for these films to be made. I can wait two or three more years to own them together as a set.
These films were (and will continue to be) vastly popular. Special Editions of them will be available easily for the theater lifespans of the trilogy: it makes good accounting sense to the producers.
I look forward to picking them all up, complete as a set, discounted, used, long after all the frenzy dies down.
Just like those contractors in "Return of the Jedi" who were working on the Death Star when it blew up: they got what they deserved. If you don't believe me, just ask Kevin Smith.
About a half a year ago MCI WorldCom was our long distance carrier. Around that time my partner was interested in getting a cell phone. One day we received an ad from them for a free cell phone with the commitment of subscribing to their service for a year. It seemed like a decent deal, everybody was doing such a promotion, and life was dandy. So we called them up and said sure.
We gave them my work address to mail the phones to, since we have had problems in the past with people stealing packages from our front porch.
So weeks go by, the phones never show up.
My partner calls them up, gets put on hold for almost an hour. Finally, she gets somebody to talk to, and tells them what happened. Turns out they had the wrong address written down. They get the correct address from her. Seems fine.
Except the phones still don't show up. She calls again, and, after being on hold for such a long time again, it turns out that they still had the exact same wrong address.
This goes on for weeks, weeks pass into months. Eventually she gets sick of it and tells them we don't want the phone anymore.
Except that then they decide to start sending us bills for phones we've never received. One day I walked in on a conversation with her screaming at them, telling them she will report them to the Better Business Bureau. You have to understand, she's a kind and gentle soul and rarely (if ever) have I seen her so riled.
At some point the experience makes us change our long distance carrier: screw them if they are going to get any of our money.
So far, the latest bit in the whole saga is that we recently received a bill for long distance calls made on this phone to strange places we've never even heard of. Evidently somebody got ahold of the phone and is using it to make several hundreds of dollars worth of calls. All this time with missing phones, and the idiots at MCI haven't even suspended the service.
So she calls them and tells them about it.
At this point, if they are losing money, it's their own fault, and we certainly don't owe them a dime.
I'll never use MCI for anything again, and I would encourage others to do likewise. And I'd rather have a catheter the size of a garden hose than work there.
CNN is reporting that "Iowa, Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Kansas, Utah, Minnesota, and West Virginia - as well as Washington, D.C." are pursuing further litigation.
> Nor could you play the game in hardware > mode if your card doesn't support 32-bit color, > even though the game box > prominently proclaims support for 16-bit. Their mistake is that they shouldn't claim to support such an antique piece of hardware. I'm sure their recommended system is quite different from their supported system. Sounds like you need to upgrade. > Most crippling of all, if you have > an Intel, S3 or SiS video card or video chipset, > your game won't run at all > (similar problems have also been reported with > several other video chipsets, > such as ATI Rage cards). Once again, you seriously need to upgrade your system. Intel has no business whatsoever making video chips. Both S3 and SiS are dinosaurs, many of the companies that supported them either went out of business or moved on to something else. I can't speak for ATI Rage, since I haven't had any firsthand experience with it. I've noticed that many people with more decent hardware have already responded and submitted reviews. Good luck in getting the next game to work on your system, but please refrain from posting further reviews like this one until you've actually spent some money on your machine. And to those of you who are bickering about the inability to return the item to the store, here's a bit of scoop on that. Retailers regard video games in particular as disposable merchandise. Compared to that $300 copy of Windows or that $1500 copy of Adobe Illustrator, your $50 game purchase isn't worth the hassle. Keep it up and they will discontinue distribution of PC video games completely. That's why the console market is so much more successful (and will always be more successful) than the PC market. You can guarantee quality against a stable platform without the added hassle of having to worry about differences in hardware, drivers, or shoddy operating systems. I've adopted a strategy of never buying PC video games unless I know of at least one other person who has gotten the game to run on a similar system, or unless I'm willing to suck a $50 loss to take the risk whether it will run on my machine or not. Hopefully, that situation will improve (part of my job is in trying to improve this very thing). Until then, try not to blame the retailer, try not to blame the studio, try not to blame the publisher, and try to become as informed a consumer as possible before spending that $50 on an impulse purchase. --Ear Phantom
First of all, Indians and Asians, though they may still be minorities, do not have the stigmas or problems that blacks and Hispanics do in this country, so pointing at them and saying "see, there's no racism here" is hardly relevant. The fact that these two groups (blacks and Hispanics) are underrepresented in higher income occupations is very serious, and it does not better the situation by shouting out allegations of "reverse discrimination" before their case has even been heard in a court of law. Is the fear that their complaints may actually be justified so overwhelming that it has to be covered up by the web of denial? Please, that is for the justice system to determine. And just remember that every jurer on every court faces that denial as well, which makes their struggles all the more challenging.
Microsoft aside, we face an even bigger problem that 1) blacks and Hispanics live in poorer neighborhoods, 2) blacks and Hispanics are more likely to have undereducated parents, 3) blacks and Hispanics are more likely to go to public versus private schools, 4) living in poorer neighborhoods directly implies substandard educational facilities, 5) computer science is more likely to be taught in college preporatory classes, which are more likely to exclude blacks and Hispanics due to the substandard elementary school facilities, 6) blacks and Hispanics are less likely to make it to college in the first place, 7) get real--show me a list of computer jobs where "bachelors degree" is not a requirement.
And even if one or two are lucky enough to make it through all of those obstacles, they face an even bigger challenge in getting noticed for jobs, promotions, benefits, etc., consciously or unconsciously.
Their case is worth hearing out, we owe them that much. 40 acres and a mule? I'd rather have 40,000 stock options...
I quote, from the article: "So, write a program that can decode Minesweeper for any size board, and you will join the pantheon of mathematical greats, alongside Euler and Pythagoras." Wrong! Just because something is NP or NP-complete, that does not make it suddenly impossible to solve. Any bozo who's taken a course in AI can write a heuristic to solve it. Solving it in a deterministic way in polynomial time, now that's a different story...