I've read the book after seeing the movie, and they are clearly at odds, from my point of view and what we know about Heinlein and Verhoeven.
I think that the movie was ironic, in a very subtle and interesting way.
However, I have first hand evidence that many people perceived Starship Troopers as a nice action flick with some patriotic background. Clearly I found this disturbing. It seems so obvious to me that the movie was a satire of the "Shoot first, ask questions later" doctrine that many Americans seem to favor (even if the characters are from Buenos Ares, the society they live in is totally American) and how the behavior can be easily manipulated by the Man.
So I wondered if I wasn't fooling myself into thinking that the movie was ironic when it wasn't. How disturbing! Now I'm thinking that Verhoeven tried some kind of a double movie: In the US, Starship Troopers is just a nice action flick. In Europe (and maybe elsewhere, don't know), it is a "brilliant satire". I guess that it simplified the problem of financing the movie.
Anyway, Starship Troopers is, from my point of view, one of the best SF movie of the last decade, as good as Gattaca or Galaxy Quest.
I'm also pretty sure that the sequel will be a piece of crap.
Microsoft isn't yet marking memory nonexcutable by default on the good old x86 processors that we all use.
That's good, cause you can't do that, you know. The non-executable bit on memory pages is not supported by the x86 architecture, unlike pretty much any other architecture. This was only fixed in 64 bit offerings.
Basically, it provides you with a simple GPS module that communicates with your mobile through Bluetooth. Map and directions are provided by an online service and appear on the screen of your mobile. Neat!
Another problem--we don't have wireless power yet. Some of these devices pull power off of a USB cable, which is easier to carry than the power brick. But until someone figures out how to do broadcast power, a truly wireless solution may never be possible. Powering them from a tether is ironic, considering that these devices are called "wireless."
Uh? So really there is no point in all those wireless thingies, right?
Anyway, I thought that the physics of ultrawideband were not done yet. We may well not see an actual UWB for another 5 years. Remember USB, Bluetooth? They were years late! Is Intel hyping vaporware?
That's so wrong. A few projects out there are out of the grasp of a single human, that's for sure (Mozilla, the Linux kernel, OpenOffice...). Many are not very well documented.
But the thing is that most projects are fairly small. I routinely hack, modify and fix open source projects for my own goals. At first I was it bit terrified by the idea of reading the code source of Postgresql or some graphic library, but after the first few sucessfull attempts, it gets pretty easy. Sure, understanding everything in a project takes time, but learning enough to actually meet your goal is usually a one or two days problem (YMMV).
Long story short, if you have a motivation or a bucket of money, it can done in a reasonable amount of time.
Well, your best bet is to read the source code of my project, it's in one of the classes. Otherwise, they must be used in a transaction and I think that Postgresql supports only one binary cursor at the same time.
Disclaimer: I use Postgresql and the JDBC driver everyday at work and at home. And I've actually read the source code. And I actually like it nevertheless.
The JDBC drivers are clearly not the main focus of the PostgreSQL community. Here are a few nasties: -- Very very bad documentation. There is no way to known which features are implemented and which ones aren't. -- On the same line, the driver claims to be JDBC3 compliant, which is simply not true. -- When you post a request on the JDBC list, there is always some guy with a 3-month old patch that could solve your problems. It seems that very little development is actually happening. -- The driver is a pain to compile: You must compile Postgresql at the same time, otherwise it won't work. -- There is some kind of support for Postgresql distinctive features, but you must read (and fix) the code to make them work. -- SLOW! DOG SLOW! For example, there is no support for prepared statements (it's my understanding that Postgresql does not support those anyway) -- Some smaller weirdness, but well I guess that every package as those.
Otherwise, I've never have an actual reliability problem with the driver. Once you have all the workarounds, it simply works.
"Well go fix it then!". First, someone is already working on that, I guess he could use a little exposure (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jxdbcon/).
Second, for my pet project (WKB4J , Boost your Java GIS now!), I just retrieve the raw results using a binary cursor and my queries are about 15 times faster. I agree that this is a particular case.
During my computer science degree, a Chinese friend of mine had a copy of "Modern Operating Systems" by Tanenbaum. In the US, it costs about $100 brand new. In China, it costs $2. And guess what: the cover is in Chinese, but everything else is in Chinese. I guess you can get the same deal in India as well.
Well, technically an IDE flash drive and a CF card are exactly the same thing, since a CF card uses IDE to communicate with everything else. I bet you already have one of those, but an IDE adapter for CF card can be had for less than $10. It's just a a few plugs and resistors.
I guess that IDE flash drive are more expensive because people don't know this and because CF is pretty much a commodity item by now. It probably outsell IDE flash drives 1 to 100.
Sorry, Bluetooth can be secured. All connexions can use 128 bit encryption and challenge-response authentication with a user-defined pin-code. The problem is that in many cases, you cannot change the pin-code of the device, because your device doesn't have a suitable human interface. For example, BT headset don't have keyboards, so the pin-code is defined once and for all in the factory, and usually all devices of a given model have the same pin-code, like 00000 or 12345.
That's clearly a weakness but there is no obvious solution.
First Orange is a network operator, not a cell phone manufacturer. Second, the phone is made by HTC and resold in a few countries by different operators. Orange had no say in the design. Now it seems that they neuteured the phone by preventing the user from installing unsigned software while not working with developers to provide them with a easy way to sign their apps.
"With Symbian you get a rock solid phone and software, far more than MS can possibly provide."
Sure.
"Symbian phones have far better security and their OS isn't bloated, as opposite to MS its in pathetic (toy) OSes."
Sorry to disappoint you, but that's wrong. Windows Smartphone Edition is potentially a lot more secure than Symbian. Symbian got almost no security built in. It's just that everything is written correctly (and it can run Java). Windows SE, being a scaled down version of their main OS, has a lot of security features built in. However, it seems that they are not really well implemented. When this phone was launched in Europe (at least 8 months ago), users found that you could bypass the protections that prevented you from installing any program (yes, ANY program) by waiting for 15 minutes on the right screen !
"The only problem is: System.exit(). Because that closes the VM and exits all other programs on the same VM as well."
Then there is no problem left, because this one was solved in Java 1.1! It's called the SecurityManager. It assigns rights to applications according to some arbitrary rules. It can handle different applications running at the same time in a single JVM. Usually, rules are assigned according to the origin of the program: applets run in some kind of a sandbox while local applications get full access.
Of course you can program you own SecurityManager in order set your own rules but unless you are looking for a very specific security model, the default one is good enough.
Now there is some more fundamental problems with JVM sharing but since Apple did it in their implementation of Java, Sun should be able to sort it out.
See my homepage for a nice article of mine about JVM sharing.
This idea is complete BS. There is no technical way is reach an adequate level of security using anything contactless to actually pay for something. Even with badass security measures like EMV (think personalized certificate in your smarcard, coming to a wallet near you very soon), there is still perfectly reasonable concerns, like "How am I sure that I'm actually talking with the right card/reader and not the one 2 meters away."
Now contactless cards can be very useful in one situation: identification. All those metro passes could be contactless because money isn't actually withdrawn from your account: the system just makes sure that you're you and that your account allows you to access this area. Also, from the point of view of an hacker, there is no way to make money by impersonating the backend system. They could try to make new cards, but the GSM system proves that you can actually prevent this from happening.
Now it seems that credit card companys are willing to take the risk. Fine, but who's gonna pay for fraud? Well, the user of course, and that means you and me.
Finally, the article is kind of vague. I'm not actually sure that they will allow you to pay wirelessly. I'm thinking that Visa and Phillips are actually building a contactless card/reader combination, but that the journalist elaborated mindlessly over this idea, as usual. Also he seems to be rolling contactless cards with application cards, which is an orthogonal feature altogether
Hum... I know exactly what I'm talking about. I was merely expressing the fact that sales rep usually look upon you when you ask this very question.
Futhermore, what is fair-sized? In Europe, the comic-book section of a bookstore comparable to your standard issue, mall-sized B&N will be longer more than 50 feet. Usually, it's at least twice as big as the SF section. Last time I checked, my local Borders offered two shelves, stuck between "funny books" and Archie.
and they suck because American comics are considered as childish, dumb and cheap. Honestly, I don't know why but I'm sure some people have theories.
So the whole business is seen as unattractive and people buying them are labbelled as dorks. Go to a Borders or BN and ask for the "Graphic Novels" Section, you will see the look they give you.
In Europe, comics are an art form. It's big business and therefore it attracts lots of creative people like writers and graphic artists. So there is some pretty strong competition going on.
There're books for every age but there're all pretty good. Usually, parents read comics too, so they can detect crap quite easily. Also, it takes a lot more work to produce a volume. Profilic artists release two or three books PER YEAR. Books are also a lot more expensive (goes from $8 to $20), bigger (A4 is the norm), with a good paper quality and a hardcover. Such a book usually survives for 30 years.
I own a few american comics : the first Alien VS Predator, some Star Wars stuff... The stories, the graphics, the colors can't compare to some middle-quality european comics.
Of course, we do have our fair share of garbage too. Stories running for 20 books (at $12 at pop).. Computer generate drawings...
Finally, anecdotal evidence makes me think that the talent is there (the absolutely amazing Strangers In Paradise serie (www.strangersinparadise.com), strip comics, Will Eisner (The Spirit and some other books), movies...), but it isn't promoted.
Anyway, Europe's situation 50 years ago was similar to the US' situation today, so there is hope.
I know of one company that did even worse than using stock photo images (which I have no problem with). For their 'Testimonials' (which by the way make the Microsoft "ad" look "Trustworthy") they took PORN pics from some web site, cropped them and just kept the face! They didn't looked good when someone started posting the real pics in their forum.
This wonderful article from Wired (the mag, not the website) shows that fiber is already part of the sales pitch of any modern realtor. Way to go, Korea!
This study is shit. It was based on voluntary user input and it was heavily advertized on some hardcore Linux websites, so it isn't reprensentative at all. This explains vi vs. emacs, Gnome vs. KDE, Debian vs. the world...
The industry produces seriously flawed studies. This goes to prove that the open-source world can too !
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I've read the book after seeing the movie, and they are clearly at odds, from my point of view and what we know about Heinlein and Verhoeven.
I think that the movie was ironic, in a very subtle and interesting way.
However, I have first hand evidence that many people perceived Starship Troopers as a nice action flick with some patriotic background. Clearly I found this disturbing. It seems so obvious to me that the movie was a satire of the "Shoot first, ask questions later" doctrine that many Americans seem to favor (even if the characters are from Buenos Ares, the society they live in is totally American) and how the behavior can be easily manipulated by the Man.
So I wondered if I wasn't fooling myself into thinking that the movie was ironic when it wasn't. How disturbing! Now I'm thinking that Verhoeven tried some kind of a double movie: In the US, Starship Troopers is just a nice action flick. In Europe (and maybe elsewhere, don't know), it is a "brilliant satire". I guess that it simplified the problem of financing the movie.
Anyway, Starship Troopers is, from my point of view, one of the best SF movie of the last decade, as good as Gattaca or Galaxy Quest.
I'm also pretty sure that the sequel will be a piece of crap.
Sure, but nobody uses segmented memory anymore... All modern OSes (Windows 2K, Linux, BSD, Solaris... ) use paged memory. So my point is still valid.
Microsoft isn't yet marking memory nonexcutable by default on the good old x86 processors that we all use.
That's good, cause you can't do that, you know. The non-executable bit on memory pages is not supported by the x86 architecture, unlike pretty much any other architecture. This was only fixed in 64 bit offerings.
WayFinder.
Basically, it provides you with a simple GPS module that communicates with your mobile through Bluetooth. Map and directions are provided by an online service and appear on the screen of your mobile. Neat!
Uh? So really there is no point in all those wireless thingies, right?
Anyway, I thought that the physics of ultrawideband were not done yet. We may well not see an actual UWB for another 5 years. Remember USB, Bluetooth? They were years late! Is Intel hyping vaporware?
That's so wrong. A few projects out there are out of the grasp of a single human, that's for sure (Mozilla, the Linux kernel, OpenOffice...). Many are not very well documented.
But the thing is that most projects are fairly small. I routinely hack, modify and fix open source projects for my own goals. At first I was it bit terrified by the idea of reading the code source of Postgresql or some graphic library, but after the first few sucessfull attempts, it gets pretty easy. Sure, understanding everything in a project takes time, but learning enough to actually meet your goal is usually a one or two days problem (YMMV).
Long story short, if you have a motivation or a bucket of money, it can done in a reasonable amount of time.
Well, your best bet is to read the source code of my project, it's in one of the classes. Otherwise, they must be used in a transaction and I think that Postgresql supports only one binary cursor at the same time.
David
Is this some kind of a sick joke?
Disclaimer: I use Postgresql and the JDBC driver everyday at work and at home. And I've actually read the source code. And I actually like it nevertheless.
The JDBC drivers are clearly not the main focus of the PostgreSQL community. Here are a few nasties:
-- Very very bad documentation. There is no way to known which features are implemented and which ones aren't.
-- On the same line, the driver claims to be JDBC3 compliant, which is simply not true.
-- When you post a request on the JDBC list, there is always some guy with a 3-month old patch that could solve your problems. It seems that very little development is actually happening.
-- The driver is a pain to compile: You must compile Postgresql at the same time, otherwise it won't work.
-- There is some kind of support for Postgresql distinctive features, but you must read (and fix) the code to make them work.
-- SLOW! DOG SLOW! For example, there is no support for prepared statements (it's my understanding that Postgresql does not support those anyway)
-- Some smaller weirdness, but well I guess that every package as those.
Otherwise, I've never have an actual reliability problem with the driver. Once you have all the workarounds, it simply works.
"Well go fix it then!". First, someone is already working on that, I guess he could use a little exposure (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jxdbcon/).
Second, for my pet project (WKB4J , Boost your Java GIS now!), I just retrieve the raw results using a binary cursor and my queries are about 15 times faster. I agree that this is a particular case.
David
During my computer science degree, a Chinese friend of mine had a copy of "Modern Operating Systems" by Tanenbaum. In the US, it costs about $100 brand new. In China, it costs $2. And guess what: the cover is in Chinese, but everything else is in Chinese. I guess you can get the same deal in India as well.
I agree that there is no direct mapping between US and EU diplomas. Heck, there is no harmonization between EU countries (but they are working on it).
However, for France, the equivalent to a Master's degree is a Maitrise+(DEA or DESS).
Well, technically an IDE flash drive and a CF card are exactly the same thing, since a CF card uses IDE to communicate with everything else. I bet you already have one of those, but an IDE adapter for CF card can be had for less than $10. It's just a a few plugs and resistors.
I guess that IDE flash drive are more expensive because people don't know this and because CF is pretty much a commodity item by now. It probably outsell IDE flash drives 1 to 100.
Sorry, Bluetooth can be secured. All connexions can use 128 bit encryption and challenge-response authentication with a user-defined pin-code. The problem is that in many cases, you cannot change the pin-code of the device, because your device doesn't have a suitable human interface. For example, BT headset don't have keyboards, so the pin-code is defined once and for all in the factory, and usually all devices of a given model have the same pin-code, like 00000 or 12345.
That's clearly a weakness but there is no obvious solution.
No.
Orange belongs to France Telecom and HTC stands for High Tech Computer Corp, a Taiwanese company. No relation what so ever.
Bollocks!
First Orange is a network operator, not a cell phone manufacturer. Second, the phone is made by HTC and resold in a few countries by different operators. Orange had no say in the design. Now it seems that they neuteured the phone by preventing the user from installing unsigned software while not working with developers to provide them with a easy way to sign their apps.
"With Symbian you get a rock solid phone and software, far more than MS can possibly provide."
Sure.
"Symbian phones have far better security and their OS isn't bloated, as opposite to MS its in pathetic (toy) OSes."
Sorry to disappoint you, but that's wrong. Windows Smartphone Edition is potentially a lot more secure than Symbian. Symbian got almost no security built in. It's just that everything is written correctly (and it can run Java). Windows SE, being a scaled down version of their main OS, has a lot of security features built in. However, it seems that they are not really well implemented. When this phone was launched in Europe (at least 8 months ago), users found that you could bypass the protections that prevented you from installing any program (yes, ANY program) by waiting for 15 minutes on the right screen !
"The only problem is: System.exit(). Because that closes the VM and exits all other programs on the same VM as well."
Then there is no problem left, because this one was solved in Java 1.1! It's called the SecurityManager. It assigns rights to applications according to some arbitrary rules. It can handle different applications running at the same time in a single JVM. Usually, rules are assigned according to the origin of the program: applets run in some kind of a sandbox while local applications get full access.
Of course you can program you own SecurityManager in order set your own rules but unless you are looking for a very specific security model, the default one is good enough.
Now there is some more fundamental problems with JVM sharing but since Apple did it in their implementation of Java, Sun should be able to sort it out.
See my homepage for a nice article of mine about JVM sharing.
This idea is complete BS. There is no technical way is reach an adequate level of security using anything contactless to actually pay for something. Even with badass security measures like EMV (think personalized certificate in your smarcard, coming to a wallet near you very soon), there is still perfectly reasonable concerns, like "How am I sure that I'm actually talking with the right card/reader and not the one 2 meters away."
Now contactless cards can be very useful in one situation: identification. All those metro passes could be contactless because money isn't actually withdrawn from your account: the system just makes sure that you're you and that your account allows you to access this area. Also, from the point of view of an hacker, there is no way to make money by impersonating the backend system. They could try to make new cards, but the GSM system proves that you can actually prevent this from happening.
Now it seems that credit card companys are willing to take the risk. Fine, but who's gonna pay for fraud? Well, the user of course, and that means you and me.
Finally, the article is kind of vague. I'm not actually sure that they will allow you to pay wirelessly. I'm thinking that Visa and Phillips are actually building a contactless card/reader combination, but that the journalist elaborated mindlessly over this idea, as usual. Also he seems to be rolling contactless cards with application cards, which is an orthogonal feature altogether
Hum... I know exactly what I'm talking about. I was merely expressing the fact that sales rep usually look upon you when you ask this very question.
Futhermore, what is fair-sized? In Europe, the comic-book section of a bookstore comparable to your standard issue, mall-sized B&N will be longer more than 50 feet. Usually, it's at least twice as big as the SF section. Last time I checked, my local Borders offered two shelves, stuck between "funny books" and Archie.
and they suck because American comics are considered as childish, dumb and cheap. Honestly, I don't know why but I'm sure some people have theories.
So the whole business is seen as unattractive and people buying them are labbelled as dorks. Go to a Borders or BN and ask for the "Graphic Novels" Section, you will see the look they give you.
In Europe, comics are an art form. It's big business and therefore it attracts lots of creative people like writers and graphic artists. So there is some pretty strong competition going on.
There're books for every age but there're all pretty good. Usually, parents read comics too, so they can detect crap quite easily.
Also, it takes a lot more work to produce a volume. Profilic artists release two or three books PER YEAR. Books are also a lot more expensive (goes from $8 to $20), bigger (A4 is the norm), with a good paper quality and a hardcover. Such a book usually survives for 30 years.
I own a few american comics : the first Alien VS Predator, some Star Wars stuff... The stories, the graphics, the colors can't compare to some middle-quality european comics.
Of course, we do have our fair share of garbage too. Stories running for 20 books (at $12 at pop).. Computer generate drawings...
Finally, anecdotal evidence makes me think that the talent is there (the absolutely amazing Strangers In Paradise serie (www.strangersinparadise.com), strip comics, Will Eisner (The Spirit and some other books), movies...), but it isn't promoted.
Anyway, Europe's situation 50 years ago was similar to the US' situation today, so there is hope.
I know of one company that did even worse than using stock photo images (which I have no problem with). For their 'Testimonials' (which by the way make the Microsoft "ad" look "Trustworthy") they took PORN pics from some web site, cropped them and just kept the face! They didn't looked good when someone started posting the real pics in their forum.
Anyway, everybody knows that Clément Ader was the first to fly a plane, in 1890, way before the Wright brothers.
This wonderful article from Wired (the mag, not the website) shows that fiber is already part of the sales pitch of any modern realtor. Way to go, Korea!
This study is shit. It was based on voluntary user input and it was heavily advertized on some hardcore Linux websites, so it isn't reprensentative at all. This explains vi vs. emacs, Gnome vs. KDE, Debian vs. the world...
The industry produces seriously flawed studies. This goes to prove that the open-source world can too !
Why do you think Java is such a big hit in (future) consumer embedded devices ?
Use the SourceForge page instead http://brix-os.sourceforge.net/