Enable hot deploy where it will shorten the development feedback loop or support frameworks that enable hot deploy. This priority should be much higher on the Java side than it is now.
Amen to that. I think on-the-fly reinterpration of code is the biggest thing that Rails (or just about any other interpreted scripting language) provides that is a severe handicap for Java. I configure tomcat on my dev system to continuously rescan bytecode files for changes, but what is really needed is an easy, standardized way to make minor modifications to classes on production appserver without having to bring the whole thing down. I know some Java appservers support things like this, but I said "easy and standardized" meaning it can be done via an ant task that figures out exactly what classes have been changed, then notifies the appserver of this so that they get reloaded efficiently.
Use less XML and more convention. Conventions don't rule out configuration because you can use conventions to specify meaningful defaults and configuration to override convention. Using this approach, as Rails does, you get the best of both worlds: concise code with less repetition without sacrificing flexibility.
I think the introduction of annotations with Java 1.5 also does a great job of cutting back on the amount of configuration files necessary. In addition, they leverage Java's biggest advantage over competing languages*- typesafety.
*yes, C# has typesafety as well, but that's basically the same language.
Work to incorporate more scripting languages, including BeanShell (see Resources), for exploring Java classes during the debugging process.
Eclipse's debugger does pretty much all I need, although things do get difficult when AOP or other bytecode modification is being used.
Besides the good base app choices there's solid driver support, ease of install, damn good UI, and great marketing.
I don't know about everyone else here, but I'm holding off for Vista- I hear the marketing in that OS is going to KICK ASS.
Seriously, that's a pretty a strange criterium to judge software by (on slashdot, anyways...).
I don't object to DRM on moral grounds...
on
Sun Spearheads Open DRM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...I object to it on consumerist grounds. DRM just doesn't provide enough value for what I'm paying for.
Despite owning a Mac, I have yet to buy anything on iTMS but will still happily buy dinosaur digital audio (a.k.a. "Compact Discs").
Why? Compact discs provide me with several things that DRMed digital audio can't:
A pre-burned hard copy backup (that lasts long- the dye in CD-R's starts to go after a few years).
Some nice cover art/liner notes
Complete control of the data itself
Considering that a digital album costs about the same as a CD on Amazon, the decision is a no-brainer.
I can easily imagine a time when the only remaining stronghold of Clearchannel clone stations and their ilk is the morning commute. They might be trying to "monopolise" newer mediums like webradio and podcasting, but it just can't happen because there's no scarcity of broadcast bandwidth (as is the case with radio spectrum).
If you buy the Long Tail theory, it looks like the media market will become only more diverse as we increase our global bandwidth capacity.
I did the same sort of thing to punish my Gateway Solo. I had been using it for shipment tracking for my, um... business, when it triggered a false alarm and told UPS to jettison the valuable, um... cargo for no reason.
Of course, it was in my lair, not my office, and the wall was made of carbonite, not drywall.
Hahahahaha. Eat that Windoze scum! Now my concubine can serve me and my extraterrestrial band can entertain me while you decorate my chamber wall!
Pretty thin article- if you were expecting a detailed argument for why OpenLDAP is better/easier to manage than ActiveDirectory, you'll have to look somewhere else.
He basically just summarized the history of NIS and OpenLDAP, then gave us a link to some documentation for setting up OpenLDAP. Have fun editing slapd.conf, kids!
I was expecting that he'd at least mention Redhat Directory Server, which is the most interesting recent development as far as easy-to-manage Linux identity servers go.
Yeah, I thought the website would allow me to control a junk (presumably owned by the webmaster), but it turned out to be something involving toy trains instead.
Lame. I wanted to commit the REAL kind of piracy over the Internet for once!
My dyslexic eyes first read "Mozilla's Deer Park" as "Mozilla's Dark Peer". I was pretty disappointed when I corrected myself. Having a P2P darknet with a XUL frontend would be pretty badass, after all.
I still have this question: if they do manage to get it free, how long until it just gets stuck again?
From the pictures it looks like Opportunity is entering a Martian dune sea, which will offer many more opportunities (npi) to get stuck once more. Do they have a plan to identify/avoid soft spots like this one in the future?
Re:Is the space elevator a bit premature?
on
Space Elevator Update
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I totally agree. Designing the layout of the instrument panel and cockpit of a time machine won't get you any closer to having a time machine. Similarly, designing a crawler for a space elevator won't get you any closer to having a space elevator. In both cases, the key "enabling" technology- whether it be time travel or high-strength nanomaterials- just isn't there.
Furthermore, I don't think the government or non-profit "angel" investors (i.e. Paul Allen) need to throw tons of money into research of nanomaterials simply because it's not a high-risk venture.
Even if an R&D operation fails to develop nanomaterials with the tensile strength necessary to build a space elevator- but they still manage to create something with 10% of the target strength- they shouldn't have any trouble turning a profit because there are so many other uses for such a technology. For once I can say with honesty: Good 'ol capitalism should solve this problem for us.
This isn't the first instance that soft tissue of a prehistoric animal has been found. There have been many discoveries of frozen mastodons, and even some attempts to clone them, but no successes that I've heard of. I'm sure cloning/breeding a mastodon is a trivial matter compared to cloning an 70 million year old animal that has no relative species alive today to use as surrogate mothers. So, I'm not expecting to ride on a tethered T-rex at the state fair anytime soon.
Seriously, cars have high gasoline consumption for one (or both) of two reasons:
1. They are big 2. They are fast
Bigger, faster cars do more damage to the roads and kill more people each year, so it makes sense that their drivers should have to pay more in gas taxes.
Like California needs any more laws that encourage people to drive bigger cars- they already have the loophole described in this article.
Seriously, the main reason streaming exists is so that the content provider can force you to watch/hear commercials and make it harder to watch/listen to the same 'cast twice.
I think if we could timeshift every piece of media we watch at will, timeshifting will be the rule rather than the exception. After all, why the hell should we adjust our life to the schedule of a broadcaster?
PodCasting/streamripping/TiVoing are just hacks that allow timeshifting despite the fact that most of our media is streamed. Combine all this with Bittorrent and it'll be a lethal combination for the content industry as we know it.
In the future, I can imagine having a MythTV-based PVR that I can tell which shows I want to watch. It would then search the net for.torrent files for these shows, and if it can't find them, it'll record the show into an.avi and publish a torrent for everyone else's enjoyment.
One of the things that bothers me about search based networks (bittorrent, eDonkey, Gnutella, Kazaa, napster, etc.) is that you already have to know what you're looking for before you find it. Anything that requires you to type a search query to find a music file is useless as a tool for serendipitous "surfing" that allows you to stumble on new music.
This problem partially undercuts a major argument of file sharing proponents- that file sharing exposes people to music that they wouldn't have considered buying before.
If I can have a "buddy list" of people whose music libraries you can casually browse through, I'll be much more likely to experiment with new music because there'll be less fear of encountering music that 5u><0r5. I understand there is already some filesharing software that offers this functionality, but bundling it with a IM application that people already use heavily and like to leave open as much as possible is a good way to build a user base fast. In fact, I can see Joe User types switching from AIM to GAIM once they find out it has secure file sharing capabilities.
Also, if communities like AudioScrobbler or MusicMobs could be integrated into GAIM, it would extend its use to being a tool for finding people who have similar music interests that you can add to your buddy list.
Even if they do get this laser working the way it's supposed to, it will still be insanely expensive to have 747's aloft circling the "trouble areas" of the world 24/7. Due to range limitations, it might be impossible to take out a missile launched from the center of Iran or China without leaving international airspace. Also, these 747's better have some pretty good countermeasures onboard to prevent the enemy from just shooting them down before an attack. Anyways, even if the entire system works as advertised, a "rogue state" could still get the nuke to the U.S. using a ship, submarine, or simply stashed away in one of the million cargo containers that arrive here each day. If highly-enriched uranium is used to make the bomb (that's the route Iran is taking), a simple lead shield would make the bomb undetectable without entirely dissasembling the cargo.
For a very detailed analysis of the technical hurdles blocking the completion of a missile defense shield, check out this article.
Surely doing *something* is better than doing nothing at all.
Not if "something" hurts our economy while doing nothing to curb global greenhouse gas emissions. Globalization and the current incarnation of the Kyoto Protocol should be mutually exclusive. If we don't apply the same pollution-control standards to *all* WTO countries, then the multinationals will just move their manufacturing operations to the countries where the Kyoto standards are weakest so that they can keep producing as much CO2 as they feel like.
I'm all for preventing global warming, but the Kyoto protocal is worthless unless the same standards apply to everyone.
I wouldn't worry about it. Back in WWII, the military considered outsourcing the job of missile guidance to stoner pigeons. However, they abandoned the effort for no particular reason. I'm assuming it was because the missile pilots' union protested. So, all you have to do is protest...or make yourself a more desireable employee by accepting hemp seeds as payment.
Yeah, this would make you quite the hit with the ladies:
Me: Hi there! I haven't seen you before. Come here often? Hot Broad: No, but apparently you do. Nice beer gut. Me: Oh no- That's my brain bag. Haven't you noticed my overwhelming intellectual presence yet? So what encoding do you prefer- big endian or little endian? Hey, where are you going? I haven't even gotten your high-order digits yet- come back!
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that. I think on-the-fly reinterpration of code is the biggest thing that Rails (or just about any other interpreted scripting language) provides that is a severe handicap for Java. I configure tomcat on my dev system to continuously rescan bytecode files for changes, but what is really needed is an easy, standardized way to make minor modifications to classes on production appserver without having to bring the whole thing down. I know some Java appservers support things like this, but I said "easy and standardized" meaning it can be done via an ant task that figures out exactly what classes have been changed, then notifies the appserver of this so that they get reloaded efficiently.
I think the introduction of annotations with Java 1.5 also does a great job of cutting back on the amount of configuration files necessary. In addition, they leverage Java's biggest advantage over competing languages*- typesafety.
*yes, C# has typesafety as well, but that's basically the same language.
Eclipse's debugger does pretty much all I need, although things do get difficult when AOP or other bytecode modification is being used.
Besides the good base app choices there's solid driver support, ease of install, damn good UI, and great marketing.
I don't know about everyone else here, but I'm holding off for Vista- I hear the marketing in that OS is going to KICK ASS.
Seriously, that's a pretty a strange criterium to judge software by (on slashdot, anyways...).
...I object to it on consumerist grounds. DRM just doesn't provide enough value for what I'm paying for.
Despite owning a Mac, I have yet to buy anything on iTMS but will still happily buy dinosaur digital audio (a.k.a. "Compact Discs"). Why? Compact discs provide me with several things that DRMed digital audio can't:
Considering that a digital album costs about the same as a CD on Amazon, the decision is a no-brainer.
I can easily imagine a time when the only remaining stronghold of Clearchannel clone stations and their ilk is the morning commute. They might be trying to "monopolise" newer mediums like webradio and podcasting, but it just can't happen because there's no scarcity of broadcast bandwidth (as is the case with radio spectrum).
If you buy the Long Tail theory, it looks like the media market will become only more diverse as we increase our global bandwidth capacity.
I did the same sort of thing to punish my Gateway Solo. I had been using it for shipment tracking for my, um... business, when it triggered a false alarm and told UPS to jettison the valuable, um... cargo for no reason.
Of course, it was in my lair, not my office, and the wall was made of carbonite, not drywall.
Hahahahaha. Eat that Windoze scum! Now my concubine can serve me and my extraterrestrial band can entertain me while you decorate my chamber wall!
Of course he's got nothing to hide...
*cough,cough*
Pretty thin article- if you were expecting a detailed argument for why OpenLDAP is better/easier to manage than ActiveDirectory, you'll have to look somewhere else.
He basically just summarized the history of NIS and OpenLDAP, then gave us a link to some documentation for setting up OpenLDAP. Have fun editing slapd.conf, kids!
I was expecting that he'd at least mention Redhat Directory Server, which is the most interesting recent development as far as easy-to-manage Linux identity servers go.
Yeah, I thought the website would allow me to control a junk (presumably owned by the webmaster), but it turned out to be something involving toy trains instead.
Lame. I wanted to commit the REAL kind of piracy over the Internet for once!
The RvB PSA on teh topic is particularly appropriate, but I can't find a link to it right now.
If you're thinking of what I'm thinking of, it was John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory at Penny Arcade, not RvB.
My dyslexic eyes first read "Mozilla's Deer Park" as "Mozilla's Dark Peer". I was pretty disappointed when I corrected myself. Having a P2P darknet with a XUL frontend would be pretty badass, after all.
Oh well, time to RTFA.
I still have this question: if they do manage to get it free, how long until it just gets stuck again?
From the pictures it looks like Opportunity is entering a Martian dune sea, which will offer many more opportunities (npi) to get stuck once more. Do they have a plan to identify/avoid soft spots like this one in the future?
I totally agree. Designing the layout of the instrument panel and cockpit of a time machine won't get you any closer to having a time machine. Similarly, designing a crawler for a space elevator won't get you any closer to having a space elevator. In both cases, the key "enabling" technology- whether it be time travel or high-strength nanomaterials- just isn't there.
Furthermore, I don't think the government or non-profit "angel" investors (i.e. Paul Allen) need to throw tons of money into research of nanomaterials simply because it's not a high-risk venture.
Even if an R&D operation fails to develop nanomaterials with the tensile strength necessary to build a space elevator- but they still manage to create something with 10% of the target strength- they shouldn't have any trouble turning a profit because there are so many other uses for such a technology. For once I can say with honesty: Good 'ol capitalism should solve this problem for us.
This isn't the first instance that soft tissue of a prehistoric animal has been found. There have been many discoveries of frozen mastodons, and even some attempts to clone them, but no successes that I've heard of.
I'm sure cloning/breeding a mastodon is a trivial matter compared to cloning an 70 million year old animal that has no relative species alive today to use as surrogate mothers. So, I'm not expecting to ride on a tethered T-rex at the state fair anytime soon.
Seriously, cars have high gasoline consumption for one (or both) of two reasons:
1. They are big
2. They are fast
Bigger, faster cars do more damage to the roads and kill more people each year, so it makes sense that their drivers should have to pay more in gas taxes.
Like California needs any more laws that encourage people to drive bigger cars- they already have the loophole described in this article.
Maybe because:
.torrent files for these shows, and if it can't find them, it'll record the show into an .avi and publish a torrent for everyone else's enjoyment.
1. There aren't that many P2P streaming stations.
and
2. Streaming is overrated.
Seriously, the main reason streaming exists is so that the content provider can force you to watch/hear commercials and make it harder to watch/listen to the same 'cast twice.
I think if we could timeshift every piece of media we watch at will, timeshifting will be the rule rather than the exception. After all, why the hell should we adjust our life to the schedule of a broadcaster?
PodCasting/streamripping/TiVoing are just hacks that allow timeshifting despite the fact that most of our media is streamed. Combine all this with Bittorrent and it'll be a lethal combination for the content industry as we know it.
In the future, I can imagine having a MythTV-based PVR that I can tell which shows I want to watch. It would then search the net for
I too support people killing themselves. But, really - couldn't we find a more effective method?
Well, when it comes to unicycle-related methods of facilitating suicide,
Microsoft's way ahead of Trevor. Now THAT's innovation!
Paint it red and turn it into a Batphone.
Seriously, I always wondered how Alfred carried that thing around when it had a cord attached to it. A cellular batphone could make much more sense.
I have no idea.
It appears ratbot and roborat are already taken.
I'm sure DirectTV and Comcast have some in the works.
One of the things that bothers me about search based networks (bittorrent, eDonkey, Gnutella, Kazaa, napster, etc.) is that you already have to know what you're looking for before you find it. Anything that requires you to type a search query to find a music file is useless as a tool for serendipitous "surfing" that allows you to stumble on new music.
This problem partially undercuts a major argument of file sharing proponents- that file sharing exposes people to music that they wouldn't have considered buying before.
If I can have a "buddy list" of people whose music libraries you can casually browse through, I'll be much more likely to experiment with new music because there'll be less fear of encountering music that 5u><0r5. I understand there is already some filesharing software that offers this functionality, but bundling it with a IM application that people already use heavily and like to leave open as much as possible is a good way to build a user base fast. In fact, I can see Joe User types switching from AIM to GAIM once they find out it has secure file sharing capabilities.
Also, if communities like AudioScrobbler or MusicMobs could be integrated into GAIM, it would extend its use to being a tool for finding people who have similar music interests that you can add to your buddy list.
1000 miles is right.
Even if they do get this laser working the way it's supposed to, it will still be insanely expensive to have 747's aloft circling the "trouble areas" of the world 24/7. Due to range limitations, it might be impossible to take out a missile launched from the center of Iran or China without leaving international airspace. Also, these 747's better have some pretty good countermeasures onboard to prevent the
enemy from just shooting them down before an attack.
Anyways, even if the entire system works as advertised, a "rogue state" could still get the nuke to the U.S. using a ship, submarine, or simply stashed away in one of the million cargo containers that arrive here each day. If highly-enriched uranium is used to make the bomb (that's the route Iran is taking), a simple lead shield would make the bomb undetectable without entirely dissasembling the cargo.
For a very detailed analysis of the technical hurdles blocking the completion of a missile defense shield, check out this article.
Surely doing *something* is better than doing nothing at all.
Not if "something" hurts our economy while doing nothing to curb global greenhouse gas emissions.
Globalization and the current incarnation of the Kyoto Protocol should be mutually exclusive. If we don't apply the same pollution-control standards to *all* WTO countries, then the multinationals will just move their manufacturing operations to the countries where the Kyoto standards are weakest so that they can keep producing as much CO2 as they feel like.
I'm all for preventing global warming, but the Kyoto protocal is worthless unless the same standards apply to everyone.
See this week's Foxtrot.
Although, if that Stephen Hawking shoot-em-up he's working on ever gets released, maybe whether or not we have Doom3 on Mac will be a moot question.
I wouldn't worry about it. Back in WWII, the military considered outsourcing the job of missile guidance to stoner pigeons. However, they abandoned the effort for no particular reason. I'm assuming it was because the missile pilots' union protested. So, all you have to do is protest...or make yourself a more desireable employee by accepting hemp seeds as payment.
Yeah, this would make you quite the hit with the ladies:
Me: Hi there! I haven't seen you before. Come here often?
Hot Broad: No, but apparently you do. Nice beer gut.
Me: Oh no- That's my brain bag. Haven't you noticed my overwhelming intellectual presence yet?
So what encoding do you prefer- big endian or little endian?
Hey, where are you going? I haven't even gotten your high-order digits yet- come back!