The old, broken APEX player I sold for $70 or whatever on ebay allowed direct seek to title and chapter points IF you turned off the designer's play. It had tons of great features for really watching dvds, and not just allowing one's self to be led around.
But I would never, ever buy another one. APEX's quality is so terrible that I hated watching movies on it. VCDs looked worse than usual. I cursed the appearance of a bright red in a film, because it was destined to bleed all over the damn screen. It was, in general, worth even less than the paltry $100 I spent on it, and far less than the $70 I sold it for.
I'm now running a Pioneer DV-37. Doesn't have your fancy disk functions, but greens don't decompose, reds don't bleed and sound channels stay right where they're supposed to. Sometimes I do pine for the feature set of that hunk of crap APEX player, but within the first five minutes of Sanjuro I'm over it.
There's no proof that cryonics works -- that it is possible to reanimate a frozen human body. There's tons of proof that it does not work, that cellular matter gets "freezer burn" pretty quickly and destroys the precious protein chains and complex chemicals that make up life. Yes, even if it's really, really cold. If cryo tecnology can't keep whitefish safe from stinking on a trip to the midwest, how's it supposed to keep you intact for the thousand years it takes them to figure out the solution to cryonic's unfreezing, protein restructuring woes?
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old. That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
These poor idiots...willing to believe in life-after-death simply because it has a clever sci fi spin. Reminds me of an Orson Scott Card novel...if it doesn't make sense, invent physics where it does. Suckered in by the guarantee that "some day" they'll be able to fix everything when globally we can't even fix hunger, joblessness or disease. And even in the event that a cure becomes available, how's the frozen stiff supposed to pay for it? I laugh at the impossible thought of thousands of hopeful, foolish Faye Valentines, indentured to their doctors and their gift of immortality.
If you truly believe in science, learn Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit. Don't place your trust on ice.
I used to buy the 64 oz soda when i worked on a non union cable plow clean up crew in college (go scabs!). A two hour drive followed by 13 in the hot sun -- you get damn thirsty. Now, I didn't really drink 64 oz of soda...with no bathrooms around, that's a bit crazy. But for 64 cents, i could fill it up 3/4 of the way with ice and get about 32 oz of soda that would be at least marginally cold until well past lunch time.
Yeah, if there was an 80 oz, i would have drank it. Beats filling up that damn coolers.
It's not that Swing apps don't work in a browser -- more than Swing apps will only work in a browser under certain conditions which are not easily met by average anonymous user X.
Maybe in a year or so, when all those XP homes have downloaded WebStart and/or NS 6.2+. Until then, I need my AWT to make fancy wavy backgrounds in my shout out pages.
Um, because sometimes morons write a huge codebase in VB using lots of string functions without considering whether strings are mutable or not? And then these guys pack up their certifications into their Saabs and leave to consult, so that us non-degree, sub 50k lackeys can support them as the application "scales."
The particular algorithm I'm thinking of used a simple little array of shorts to store character codes which i then reorganized into a windows string. It was a damn elegant function that I've used all over the place...that's far and away my most included module..NET "objectizes" the array and "objectizes" the shorts themselves. Suddenly, what had compiled into an itty bitty algy was a massive movement.
And, to be honest, I don't really have to do this crap anymore with VB.Net. The StringSaver, or whatever MS called their ripoff of Java's StringBuffer class, does it all for me, no doubt faster than its recompilation of my code but slower than the one I built myself.
VB ain't so bad if you don't make dumb mistakes like "adding" + string(s) + "and using Variants everywhere". But it's still a sloppy coder's dream. Give me Java any day of the week...except those days when I have to access the API!
Well, technically people are upgrading to VB.NET, which is wholly incompatible with VB 6.0. They are so different, and VB.NET is so unready as a passable alternative for application development, that I'm sure there's room in this space for somebody e.g. Borland to make a killing selling non-webservice, non-CLR based "Visual" development environments.
A few things I've "recompiled" into VB.NET (it really is recompilation, nothing looks the same as VB.NET is a real object oriented language, or as close as it comes from redmond's "think/market-tank") look nothing like the originals. Tight loops I spent hours optimizing run five times slower. Stuff I didn't optimize is even slower than before. But I can kind of sign off on this -- it's so nice to finally have real constructors, etc.
Normally, when somebody says "Upgrade Java," I wholeheartedly agree. But what Harold (a good writer, two of his books sit on my desk falling apart) suggests is in many ways just foolish.
Removing deprecated methods may seem like a good idea, but a lot of the deprecated methods, Thread.stop() especially, are essential parachutes. If a thread stops responding in a manner that's untestable, or if it's within an anonymous class, you need that method...deprecated, dangerous or not. Similarly, making the language more long winded does not really help us. The appreviations in java can be counted on two hands, and they're all things we use pretty often. What's next, extending String.valueOf() to UnicodeTextualString.returnTheValueOfThisInteger() ?
Primitive types are nice to have around because they optimize sweetly and can be trusted as the the fastest part of an app. Relying on machine speed to clean up the bloat of using too many objects is what's going to make CLR kill Java in the benchmarks (that I guess we're technically not supposed to do anymore).
Ditching the AWT means ditching all browser support. NO! Furthermore, XML is not the darling of the planet that it purports to be. I like my tiny, efficient serialized objects; easily compressed and not very human readable. I don't want to conv to Base64 and serialize to XML. Why burn those extra cycles just for some ostensible "human readability" when no humans will ever need to read it other than those of us who understand deserialization?
There are so many things broken with java -- complexity of class structures, taglibs, the inconvenience of formatting and calendar classes, EJBs, stupid JDBC bugs -- I find it troublesome that Harold's biggest issue is the spelling of InetAddress. He knows damn well why it can't be InternetAddress...that's used in javax.mail.internet for a totally different task! He wrote the damn book that taught me that package!
No, I'm not talking about warez...but perhaps, if software can't be used without agreeing to the license, shouldn't the seller provide an unlicensed demo? I mean, you aren't required to buy a car just because you test drive it, nor are you required to buy a screwdriver just for taking it off the shelf at Sears.
Software, however, comes with no such luck. You can't try it out at the shop (Apple Store excluded). You can't open it, discover it's shit (*cough* daikatana *cough* *cough* windows xp), and return it. You are required to guess whether you need it, shell out $50-$400 for it, and sign away your rights to share it, sell it, fix it, critize it and in some cases, even use it for its intended purpose, as well as the company's liabilities for their own mistakes.
Can you imagine buying a hammer and having to sign a form saying you won't use it to hammer anything unapproved by Stanley tools?
Not that you'd be buying Stanley tools, what with their moving all their plants to China and Israel and their corp office to Bermuda to avoid taxes, unamerican shitheads.
Hey, i'm a c-grade audiophile -- the sort that understands the need for silver core cabling but can't afford the price. I'm also the first son of a 27 year cable technician and have been technically using digital cable for 5 years. I did most of the wiring on this guy's TV after he munged it pretty heavy. The fact remains that, even with 4 megabit to deal with, digital cable can't quite cut through the mustard of inferior compression (yes, MPEG-2...that dandy of DVD...is terrible at low bandwidths). I greatly prefer the analog signal.
It should be noted, however, that I also prefer my heavily combed SVHS and LaserDiscs to DVD and have all my old blues and rock albums on both LP and CD. My ideal amplifier is a discrete tube system -- digital amping is for pussies.
We go to my chum's house for all our wrestling pay per views. He has digital cable and what I like to consider is the world's finest tube TV, SONY's 40 inch XBR. It's huge and does good interpolation and comb filtering to make your LQ broadcasts look HQ.
We have come to realise, in every high motion scene, how much digital sucks. Words on screen have no bandwidth to display sharply, flying bodies are turned into blocky messes and gradual swaths of colour are graduated in the ugliest fashion. Blacks aren't black.
Furthermore, the interruption of the signal for any reason means clicking audio and ugly block breaks. We've missed a lot of important, not to be repeated events and phrases due to these breaks. In an analog signal, a break results in a picture that is still visible, sound which may be obscured by fuzz but which is audible, because you don't have to wait for the next "frame" to begin before you can start viewing. And this is over a cable line...digital broadcast signals will only mean a still worse situation.
Every time we miss something, or catch an ugly jagged edge, or have what should be a crisp beautiful colour destroyed by the "high bandwidth" compression, we just turn to my big-TV friend, who pays more for cable every month than I do on my school payments, and say "Dude, digital sucks." He agrees.
(Yes, we are those lamos who order these stupid things -- we're five skilled college grads who like wrestling, f*ck off)
Incidentally, I used to have a special seating system set up in my school apartment for playing gran turismo (a game I excelled at until i moved in with my girlfriend and suddenly lost all time to play). It consisted of an old Chevrolet AstroVan seat (price: $6 at Gary's U-pull-it) screwed into a carpetted plywood board on lockable casters, two pedals and a suspended steering wheel. We'd roll it in front of the shitty RCA TV and take turns smoking the competition. Afterwards, it would roll back up against the wall, for easy storage of dirty dishes.
I have not used a floppy disk in nearly 6 years -- I haven't had one in my computer since my 486 66 died. But on several occasions, I've wished I had one.
Most recently, I could have used one yesterday. I found myself on a state university campus with my mac laptop. The one wireless network doesn't allow open wireless, and don't "support" macintoshes so they wouldn't give me a wireless password. Their wired network is set to boot off a Novell network and won't give out ips unless the OS was downloaded from the server. Furthermore, the only mac they had was not networked.
The presentation I was about to give was stuck in that macintosh due to the archaic, bigotted network. I had to read from the opened laptop, with lights blaring down on the screen. I did not look poised and lost my place every time I scrolled.
What I wouldn't have given for a simple, archaic floppy drive...or even a slow, snail's pace serial card to null the file over to an nt box.
Floppies are good for one thing: last resort. They're airbags on the info highway.
Automatically uses the API to interact with the machine? Yeah, they've got this for Mac...it's called AppleScript and it's been around for roughly 20 years.
Don't be scared by the name "script"...there are visual tools for ascript and the language itself is so simple my mom could do it.
well, 26 actually, plus some unbilled. I'm actually going to make it, though living in Wynantskill means I have to start cycling now to get there on time;)
i think the turn out would have been better if it hadn't been at starbucks. i personally hate everything about starbucks.
I signed up to be our host here in tech valley but i don't think i'm going to be able to make it! It seems a certain wife has planned certain activities I may not be able to get out of without enraging certain unliked and vindictive legal relatives.
I never much liked the theory of dark matter. "Our calculations indicate a bunch of stuff we don't observe...must be invisible stuff." Uh, yeah. It's the ether, guys, and planets spontaneously generate from it.
Seriously, though, when a calculation doesn't match up with oberservable fact, you're supposed to adjust the calculations (chaos theory, heisenberg, quantum mechanics), not invent something. And there's a theory right now, explained in the latest scientific american (you ARE a subscriber, right? If not, drop the $35 per year, it makes you a better person), that does just that -- adjusts gravitational constants unchanged since Newton's days when matter moves very quickly. I kind of like it...it makes more sense to me than this "hey, 95% of the galaxy is invisible and undetectable and that's why things spin in wierd directions!" crap.
Dark Matter. Feh. In another 70 years it'll rank with phrenology, dowsing and psychoanalysis.
Alton Brown, Food Network's answer to "I wonder what would happen if we created a genetic crossbreed of Mr. Wizard, Joel Hodgson and Julia Childs," is one of the funniest and most educating men I've ever had the pleasure to learn cooking from.
However, I find his books to be fairly frenetic in their design, though well written and paced. They're all over the place with Quark textboxes and asides and footnotes, like his MTV-cut cooking show, with tiny margins that remind me of the Principia Discordia more than a book about the science of food. The information presented (especially on the chemistry of foods) is invaluable, but I feel that the brokenness of it strains out a lot of the flavour of the information. Call me a perfectionist, but I prefer my recipes in perfectly structured orders with explanations of what constitutes a perfect rise or the consistancy of an ideal soufflee.
For this reason, I prefer Alton's professor and nemesis of food artisans everywhere, Shirley Corriher. Her book "Cookwise: the hows and whys of successful cooking" has lead to more delicious meals, more perfect loaves, and more satisfied coos from a well fed wife then any book I've ever dealt with, Joy of Cooking included. It's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for aspiring chefs...elegantly written and full of more hints for cooking and living than the large print and simple illustrations would suggest.
However, though I felt a bit let down from Alton's literary style, I still make a point to be at home by 9 every Wednesday for Alton's program. It's entertaining, interesting, and the wife totally thinks he's sexy -- an opinion from whose association I can occasionally gleam a modest amount of appreciation. I even purchased glasses like his.
It was the Speed Racer GTI commercial that roped me into purchasing my Passat (I am much too large a personality for such a tiny car as the GTI). In fact, there's a Trixie action figure half melted in my warm air duct...
I live in Tech Valley, (Wynantskill, actually) and I can tell you a few of the reasons why it's so popular:
1) Though taxes are high, the cost of living and operating are low -- at least 20-30% lower than in NYC. Which means you can offer an employee less money and it'll be worth more to them. Insurance is also cheaper.
2) Tons of infrastructure. A lot of big fat unfettered pipes and buildings waiting to be filled.
3) Nice setting. Those pictures of your corporate headquarters at the top of a rolling green hill surrounded by trees sure beat the arrow-pointing-to-an-office-floor stuff some people have to deal with. We've got nice sprawl for your employees, too (not a good thing if you, as i do, live on the street leading to the sprawl, but there you are).
4) RPI. RPI graduates tons of brilliant tech youths with experience in wierd technology. RPI honors and grad students create all sorts of brilliant tech advances, and when they get their sheepskins they'll need some place to hole out for 20-30 years. A wise tech company grabs them while they're young and cheap...we have a dozen consulting companies around for this reason; hell, even Microsoft has a recruitment office here.
5) Dude, you're 2 hours from Canada, 2 hours from the City, 2 hours from the shore, Cape Cod in the summer, Vermont in the winter...it's nice in NY man.
That's kind of a wierd thing. I used to use Genera CAD myself, a slightly inferior product for $10k less. It had a graphics mode and a command mode...but the command mode was primarily for managing files, not for artistry, and was only command line so that people who had two cards, one for graphics and one for text, could perform functions on one monitor while working on the other. The GUI existed, but was very clean...Level 3, the product I did most of my work in, had a sort of preliminary right click menu and a series of commands one could execute using f keys, "terminal" entries, etc. Alternatively, there was a graphical command "search" interface that was pretty nice when you had to use a command you'd never used before...more API like than anything.
The thing that bothered lots of CAD users when CAD moved to Windows (3.x) was that the clean graphical interface was replaced by big ugly icons that get in the way. A row of 30x30 icons along with a title bar and menu bar takes more than a tenth of your screen away at 640x480; is there any wonder that a professional CAD user, who already knows all the shorthand commands from the "command" days, would be pissed that he was losing this precious real estate to functions he'd never use?
This is the goddamn stupidest thing I have heard in weeks.
The first machines I used in school were Commodores and all of the software was set up to boot from floppy. There was a "command line," but we only used three of those commands: LOAD *,8,1 LIST RUN SUMMERGAMES I have a more detailed OS experience at a cash machine.
My house had macintoshes since I was very young. I learned how to program using Pascal to program "Core Wars" bots on my Classic SE. I used to write reports in AppleWorks and my earliest online experience was a graphical CompuServe.
I didn't learn DOS until midway through high school...and didn't learn un*x until college. For years, the only commands i knew, the only commands I needed, were cd, ls, cat, pico, man and pine. Did I learn how to actually think, with all these GUIs doing shit for me and such a limited shell vocabulary? Well, I've an MA in Rhetorical Theory and a BS in Software Engineering, and they certainly didn't come in a bag of Doritos.
Any idiot can be taught to bang away commands at a shell, same as any idiot can be taught to click away at a screen. Intelligence comes from the ability to combine your banging or clicking into a useful string of actions that produces results. A shell command line may feel more elite and productive because it doesn't have any pretty picutres, but it's certainly not proof of intellect...CAD programs have been using GUIs forever and nobody claims that architects can't think.
However, to look at some of the perl code I've seen, I would make that assertation of certain sysadmins. One line simplicity, indeed. Until you try and debug it!
I've had a number of people complaining about spam email originating from our server. A quick look at these emails from somebody who knows "a little something" about email shows that the email was an almost guaranteed forgery...the mail servers that relayed the message had nothing to do with us, besides which the user does not exist on our servers and the domain they sent from belongs to developers I know wouldn't fool with this stuff.
And yet, the damage has been done. These users don't trust me as a provider even when I explain how we lock down our server & prevent spam. They don't trust our domains, which means they block the ip -- an ip which may be mapped to 50 or more virtual sites. And all of this because our domain was the root of it all...a simple forgery that no email client really checks for validity because internet mail is designed to bounce anonymously from server to server. I've gotten spam that was "sent" from my own email address...which is silly, because why should I trust a company's services when they try to convince me _I'm_ marketing to myself?
What email needs is a set up like SSL -- a trusted third party to verify the validity of an email from a key generated by the sender when the receiver gets the mail. If the sender proves to be a spammer, the third party drops support...and charges a large fee for breaching a contract. We need this to occur without unwieldy programs (PGP) or user eductation...just some way to get a lock in the corner of a user's screen to let them know for a fact that user X sent message Y, and that if it was unwanted they have a recourse.
This new "Secure mail" could become popular very quickly, as many companies that communicate solely over email could use the security that nobody can send an email as ceo@trustycorp.com without the server's permission. The key is ease...SSL may have its problems (certs kind of expensive, monopoly of cert providers due to reliance on deals with certain monopolistic browsers, slowwww responses) but it has become a mainstay of secure communications for people who understand it (unlike my wife, who despite a BS in chemical anthropology believes that submitting her credit card via SSL over WEP 802.11b means a guy with a ham radio can read her number, so she places orders via cordless phone instead). Mail hasn't significantly changed in ten years...maybe it's time for smail!
Actually, even this is silly. True five nines availability on a widely distributed network would mean that an application was available at all times on all segments of the network. Which would mean that your uptime depends not only on your redundancy on one side of a pipe, but on your overall reduncancy as well, so that when a pipe goes down you're still accessible. Since when a pipe goes down in your host you probably lose other resources as well (such as power or alternate pipelines), this means multiple datahouses owned by multiple vendors. Each of these has to have a perfect backup of all data and be running the same versions of all software. Really, the only true redunancy would be so heavily distributed that each local network would basically have to have its own server. This isn't so crazy -- technically, DNS and email do this. However, we all know that for an end user even DNS and email can have perceived outtages.
And this is why 5 9s is foolish. Sure, you're redundant behind the pipe, but if you lose the pipe you can't blame your datacenter when you charged a customer for uninterrupted service. Technically, if their modem disconnects them for a few hours you've broken contract.
Besides, who needs it? If yahoo is unreachible from my desk, I wait and reconnect. It doesn't matter if the downtime was my fault or theirs...the effect on my user experience was the same. Any services I might have used, or products purchased, I will use or purchase at a later time. After all, I don't refrain from buying shoes just because the mall is closed!
Actually, I just completed doing this. I took a sociolinguistics class as a postgrad, and took all my notes on my palmtop pc, a cassiopeia, because I was too lazy to . I found out a couple things:
1) The urge to play games was immense, because nobody (save the folks behind you) can tell what you're really doing on there.
2) Input is not that bad. I use the Fitaly keypad and was getting upwards of 20 wpm after a few days. Character recognition was terrible in the basic setup. But what really helps after a while is the word suggestion -- especially since a lot of the class was learning and applying new terms.
3) I didn't feel out of place or nerdy, except that I was taking notes and many others weren't. I was regarded as more of an outcast for not having a cell phone.
4) When my stylus broke, I was sort of fucked. Same with power outages -- once I played games for three hours before class and missed a day's worth of notes. I was late with a paper because I had totally drained the batteries and couldn't charge it fast enough to print.
5) The incompatibility with PalmOS made it impossilbe to "note pass" digitally. I understand there's a $30 program that lets you interchange, but it seems costly just to send "Prof's a goober" to another techno loser. I have seen people swap notes via palm to palm connections, but it often took so long to negociate that I wonder if copying by hand might be easier.
6) Because nobody knew how to use my pc, when I passed it around to get people's email addresses I would usually have to enter them myself. Everybody understands a pen.
For what it's worth, the palm made it so nice to study up for tonight's big test, post my notes online and print out flash cards (word macro to search for bolded text, copy out the text after it, repeat for each card).
Slashdot Mirror
The old, broken APEX player I sold for $70 or whatever on ebay allowed direct seek to title and chapter points IF you turned off the designer's play. It had tons of great features for really watching dvds, and not just allowing one's self to be led around.
But I would never, ever buy another one. APEX's quality is so terrible that I hated watching movies on it. VCDs looked worse than usual. I cursed the appearance of a bright red in a film, because it was destined to bleed all over the damn screen. It was, in general, worth even less than the paltry $100 I spent on it, and far less than the $70 I sold it for.
I'm now running a Pioneer DV-37. Doesn't have your fancy disk functions, but greens don't decompose, reds don't bleed and sound channels stay right where they're supposed to. Sometimes I do pine for the feature set of that hunk of crap APEX player, but within the first five minutes of Sanjuro I'm over it.
Dumb.
There's no proof that cryonics works -- that it is possible to reanimate a frozen human body. There's tons of proof that it does not work, that cellular matter gets "freezer burn" pretty quickly and destroys the precious protein chains and complex chemicals that make up life. Yes, even if it's really, really cold. If cryo tecnology can't keep whitefish safe from stinking on a trip to the midwest, how's it supposed to keep you intact for the thousand years it takes them to figure out the solution to cryonic's unfreezing, protein restructuring woes?
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old. That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
These poor idiots...willing to believe in life-after-death simply because it has a clever sci fi spin. Reminds me of an Orson Scott Card novel...if it doesn't make sense, invent physics where it does. Suckered in by the guarantee that "some day" they'll be able to fix everything when globally we can't even fix hunger, joblessness or disease. And even in the event that a cure becomes available, how's the frozen stiff supposed to pay for it? I laugh at the impossible thought of thousands of hopeful, foolish Faye Valentines, indentured to their doctors and their gift of immortality.
If you truly believe in science, learn Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit. Don't place your trust on ice.
I used to buy the 64 oz soda when i worked on a non union cable plow clean up crew in college (go scabs!). A two hour drive followed by 13 in the hot sun -- you get damn thirsty. Now, I didn't really drink 64 oz of soda...with no bathrooms around, that's a bit crazy. But for 64 cents, i could fill it up 3/4 of the way with ice and get about 32 oz of soda that would be at least marginally cold until well past lunch time.
Yeah, if there was an 80 oz, i would have drank it. Beats filling up that damn coolers.
It's not that Swing apps don't work in a browser -- more than Swing apps will only work in a browser under certain conditions which are not easily met by average anonymous user X.
Maybe in a year or so, when all those XP homes have downloaded WebStart and/or NS 6.2+. Until then, I need my AWT to make fancy wavy backgrounds in my shout out pages.
Um, because sometimes morons write a huge codebase in VB using lots of string functions without considering whether strings are mutable or not? And then these guys pack up their certifications into their Saabs and leave to consult, so that us non-degree, sub 50k lackeys can support them as the application "scales."
.NET "objectizes" the array and "objectizes" the shorts themselves. Suddenly, what had compiled into an itty bitty algy was a massive movement.
The particular algorithm I'm thinking of used a simple little array of shorts to store character codes which i then reorganized into a windows string. It was a damn elegant function that I've used all over the place...that's far and away my most included module.
And, to be honest, I don't really have to do this crap anymore with VB.Net. The StringSaver, or whatever MS called their ripoff of Java's StringBuffer class, does it all for me, no doubt faster than its recompilation of my code but slower than the one I built myself.
VB ain't so bad if you don't make dumb mistakes like "adding" + string(s) + "and using Variants everywhere". But it's still a sloppy coder's dream. Give me Java any day of the week...except those days when I have to access the API!
Well, technically people are upgrading to VB .NET, which is wholly incompatible with VB 6.0. They are so different, and VB.NET is so unready as a passable alternative for application development, that I'm sure there's room in this space for somebody e.g. Borland to make a killing selling non-webservice, non-CLR based "Visual" development environments.
A few things I've "recompiled" into VB.NET (it really is recompilation, nothing looks the same as VB.NET is a real object oriented language, or as close as it comes from redmond's "think/market-tank") look nothing like the originals. Tight loops I spent hours optimizing run five times slower. Stuff I didn't optimize is even slower than before. But I can kind of sign off on this -- it's so nice to finally have real constructors, etc.
Normally, when somebody says "Upgrade Java," I wholeheartedly agree. But what Harold (a good writer, two of his books sit on my desk falling apart) suggests is in many ways just foolish.
) ?
Removing deprecated methods may seem like a good idea, but a lot of the deprecated methods, Thread.stop() especially, are essential parachutes. If a thread stops responding in a manner that's untestable, or if it's within an anonymous class, you need that method...deprecated, dangerous or not. Similarly, making the language more long winded does not really help us. The appreviations in java can be counted on two hands, and they're all things we use pretty often. What's next, extending String.valueOf() to UnicodeTextualString.returnTheValueOfThisInteger(
Primitive types are nice to have around because they optimize sweetly and can be trusted as the the fastest part of an app. Relying on machine speed to clean up the bloat of using too many objects is what's going to make CLR kill Java in the benchmarks (that I guess we're technically not supposed to do anymore).
Ditching the AWT means ditching all browser support. NO! Furthermore, XML is not the darling of the planet that it purports to be. I like my tiny, efficient serialized objects; easily compressed and not very human readable. I don't want to conv to Base64 and serialize to XML. Why burn those extra cycles just for some ostensible "human readability" when no humans will ever need to read it other than those of us who understand deserialization?
There are so many things broken with java -- complexity of class structures, taglibs, the inconvenience of formatting and calendar classes, EJBs, stupid JDBC bugs -- I find it troublesome that Harold's biggest issue is the spelling of InetAddress. He knows damn well why it can't be InternetAddress...that's used in javax.mail.internet for a totally different task! He wrote the damn book that taught me that package!
No, I'm not talking about warez...but perhaps, if software can't be used without agreeing to the license, shouldn't the seller provide an unlicensed demo? I mean, you aren't required to buy a car just because you test drive it, nor are you required to buy a screwdriver just for taking it off the shelf at Sears.
Software, however, comes with no such luck. You can't try it out at the shop (Apple Store excluded). You can't open it, discover it's shit (*cough* daikatana *cough* *cough* windows xp), and return it. You are required to guess whether you need it, shell out $50-$400 for it, and sign away your rights to share it, sell it, fix it, critize it and in some cases, even use it for its intended purpose, as well as the company's liabilities for their own mistakes.
Can you imagine buying a hammer and having to sign a form saying you won't use it to hammer anything unapproved by Stanley tools?
Not that you'd be buying Stanley tools, what with their moving all their plants to China and Israel and their corp office to Bermuda to avoid taxes, unamerican shitheads.
Hey, i'm a c-grade audiophile -- the sort that understands the need for silver core cabling but can't afford the price. I'm also the first son of a 27 year cable technician and have been technically using digital cable for 5 years. I did most of the wiring on this guy's TV after he munged it pretty heavy. The fact remains that, even with 4 megabit to deal with, digital cable can't quite cut through the mustard of inferior compression (yes, MPEG-2...that dandy of DVD...is terrible at low bandwidths). I greatly prefer the analog signal.
It should be noted, however, that I also prefer my heavily combed SVHS and LaserDiscs to DVD and have all my old blues and rock albums on both LP and CD. My ideal amplifier is a discrete tube system -- digital amping is for pussies.
We go to my chum's house for all our wrestling pay per views. He has digital cable and what I like to consider is the world's finest tube TV, SONY's 40 inch XBR. It's huge and does good interpolation and comb filtering to make your LQ broadcasts look HQ.
We have come to realise, in every high motion scene, how much digital sucks. Words on screen have no bandwidth to display sharply, flying bodies are turned into blocky messes and gradual swaths of colour are graduated in the ugliest fashion. Blacks aren't black.
Furthermore, the interruption of the signal for any reason means clicking audio and ugly block breaks. We've missed a lot of important, not to be repeated events and phrases due to these breaks. In an analog signal, a break results in a picture that is still visible, sound which may be obscured by fuzz but which is audible, because you don't have to wait for the next "frame" to begin before you can start viewing. And this is over a cable line...digital broadcast signals will only mean a still worse situation.
Every time we miss something, or catch an ugly jagged edge, or have what should be a crisp beautiful colour destroyed by the "high bandwidth" compression, we just turn to my big-TV friend, who pays more for cable every month than I do on my school payments, and say "Dude, digital sucks." He agrees.
(Yes, we are those lamos who order these stupid things -- we're five skilled college grads who like wrestling, f*ck off)
Try www.oem-car-parts.com and www.car-part.com.
Incidentally, I used to have a special seating system set up in my school apartment for playing gran turismo (a game I excelled at until i moved in with my girlfriend and suddenly lost all time to play). It consisted of an old Chevrolet AstroVan seat (price: $6 at Gary's U-pull-it) screwed into a carpetted plywood board on lockable casters, two pedals and a suspended steering wheel. We'd roll it in front of the shitty RCA TV and take turns smoking the competition. Afterwards, it would roll back up against the wall, for easy storage of dirty dishes.
I have not used a floppy disk in nearly 6 years -- I haven't had one in my computer since my 486 66 died. But on several occasions, I've wished I had one.
Most recently, I could have used one yesterday. I found myself on a state university campus with my mac laptop. The one wireless network doesn't allow open wireless, and don't "support" macintoshes so they wouldn't give me a wireless password. Their wired network is set to boot off a Novell network and won't give out ips unless the OS was downloaded from the server. Furthermore, the only mac they had was not networked.
The presentation I was about to give was stuck in that macintosh due to the archaic, bigotted network. I had to read from the opened laptop, with lights blaring down on the screen. I did not look poised and lost my place every time I scrolled.
What I wouldn't have given for a simple, archaic floppy drive...or even a slow, snail's pace serial card to null the file over to an nt box.
Floppies are good for one thing: last resort. They're airbags on the info highway.
Automatically uses the API to interact with the machine? Yeah, they've got this for Mac...it's called AppleScript and it's been around for roughly 20 years.
Don't be scared by the name "script"...there are visual tools for ascript and the language itself is so simple my mom could do it.
well, 26 actually, plus some unbilled. I'm actually going to make it, though living in Wynantskill means I have to start cycling now to get there on time ;)
i think the turn out would have been better if it hadn't been at starbucks. i personally hate everything about starbucks.
I signed up to be our host here in tech valley but i don't think i'm going to be able to make it! It seems a certain wife has planned certain activities I may not be able to get out of without enraging certain unliked and vindictive legal relatives.
Drink a latte for your megabyte, please!
I never much liked the theory of dark matter. "Our calculations indicate a bunch of stuff we don't observe...must be invisible stuff." Uh, yeah. It's the ether, guys, and planets spontaneously generate from it.
Seriously, though, when a calculation doesn't match up with oberservable fact, you're supposed to adjust the calculations (chaos theory, heisenberg, quantum mechanics), not invent something. And there's a theory right now, explained in the latest scientific american (you ARE a subscriber, right? If not, drop the $35 per year, it makes you a better person), that does just that -- adjusts gravitational constants unchanged since Newton's days when matter moves very quickly. I kind of like it...it makes more sense to me than this "hey, 95% of the galaxy is invisible and undetectable and that's why things spin in wierd directions!" crap.
Dark Matter. Feh. In another 70 years it'll rank with phrenology, dowsing and psychoanalysis.
Alton Brown, Food Network's answer to "I wonder what would happen if we created a genetic crossbreed of Mr. Wizard, Joel Hodgson and Julia Childs," is one of the funniest and most educating men I've ever had the pleasure to learn cooking from.
However, I find his books to be fairly frenetic in their design, though well written and paced. They're all over the place with Quark textboxes and asides and footnotes, like his MTV-cut cooking show, with tiny margins that remind me of the Principia Discordia more than a book about the science of food. The information presented (especially on the chemistry of foods) is invaluable, but I feel that the brokenness of it strains out a lot of the flavour of the information. Call me a perfectionist, but I prefer my recipes in perfectly structured orders with explanations of what constitutes a perfect rise or the consistancy of an ideal soufflee.
For this reason, I prefer Alton's professor and nemesis of food artisans everywhere, Shirley Corriher. Her book "Cookwise: the hows and whys of successful cooking" has lead to more delicious meals, more perfect loaves, and more satisfied coos from a well fed wife then any book I've ever dealt with, Joy of Cooking included. It's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for aspiring chefs...elegantly written and full of more hints for cooking and living than the large print and simple illustrations would suggest.
However, though I felt a bit let down from Alton's literary style, I still make a point to be at home by 9 every Wednesday for Alton's program. It's entertaining, interesting, and the wife totally thinks he's sexy -- an opinion from whose association I can occasionally gleam a modest amount of appreciation. I even purchased glasses like his.
It was the Speed Racer GTI commercial that roped me into purchasing my Passat (I am much too large a personality for such a tiny car as the GTI). In fact, there's a Trixie action figure half melted in my warm air duct...
I live in Tech Valley, (Wynantskill, actually) and I can tell you a few of the reasons why it's so popular:
1) Though taxes are high, the cost of living and operating are low -- at least 20-30% lower than in NYC. Which means you can offer an employee less money and it'll be worth more to them. Insurance is also cheaper.
2) Tons of infrastructure. A lot of big fat unfettered pipes and buildings waiting to be filled.
3) Nice setting. Those pictures of your corporate headquarters at the top of a rolling green hill surrounded by trees sure beat the arrow-pointing-to-an-office-floor stuff some people have to deal with. We've got nice sprawl for your employees, too (not a good thing if you, as i do, live on the street leading to the sprawl, but there you are).
4) RPI. RPI graduates tons of brilliant tech youths with experience in wierd technology. RPI honors and grad students create all sorts of brilliant tech advances, and when they get their sheepskins they'll need some place to hole out for 20-30 years. A wise tech company grabs them while they're young and cheap...we have a dozen consulting companies around for this reason; hell, even Microsoft has a recruitment office here.
5) Dude, you're 2 hours from Canada, 2 hours from the City, 2 hours from the shore, Cape Cod in the summer, Vermont in the winter...it's nice in NY man.
That's kind of a wierd thing. I used to use Genera CAD myself, a slightly inferior product for $10k less. It had a graphics mode and a command mode...but the command mode was primarily for managing files, not for artistry, and was only command line so that people who had two cards, one for graphics and one for text, could perform functions on one monitor while working on the other. The GUI existed, but was very clean...Level 3, the product I did most of my work in, had a sort of preliminary right click menu and a series of commands one could execute using f keys, "terminal" entries, etc. Alternatively, there was a graphical command "search" interface that was pretty nice when you had to use a command you'd never used before...more API like than anything.
The thing that bothered lots of CAD users when CAD moved to Windows (3.x) was that the clean graphical interface was replaced by big ugly icons that get in the way. A row of 30x30 icons along with a title bar and menu bar takes more than a tenth of your screen away at 640x480; is there any wonder that a professional CAD user, who already knows all the shorthand commands from the "command" days, would be pissed that he was losing this precious real estate to functions he'd never use?
This is the goddamn stupidest thing I have heard in weeks.
The first machines I used in school were Commodores and all of the software was set up to boot from floppy. There was a "command line," but we only used three of those commands:
LOAD *,8,1
LIST
RUN SUMMERGAMES
I have a more detailed OS experience at a cash machine.
My house had macintoshes since I was very young. I learned how to program using Pascal to program "Core Wars" bots on my Classic SE. I used to write reports in AppleWorks and my earliest online experience was a graphical CompuServe.
I didn't learn DOS until midway through high school...and didn't learn un*x until college. For years, the only commands i knew, the only commands I needed, were cd, ls, cat, pico, man and pine. Did I learn how to actually think, with all these GUIs doing shit for me and such a limited shell vocabulary? Well, I've an MA in Rhetorical Theory and a BS in Software Engineering, and they certainly didn't come in a bag of Doritos.
Any idiot can be taught to bang away commands at a shell, same as any idiot can be taught to click away at a screen. Intelligence comes from the ability to combine your banging or clicking into a useful string of actions that produces results. A shell command line may feel more elite and productive because it doesn't have any pretty picutres, but it's certainly not proof of intellect...CAD programs have been using GUIs forever and nobody claims that architects can't think.
However, to look at some of the perl code I've seen, I would make that assertation of certain sysadmins. One line simplicity, indeed. Until you try and debug it!
I've had a number of people complaining about spam email originating from our server. A quick look at these emails from somebody who knows "a little something" about email shows that the email was an almost guaranteed forgery...the mail servers that relayed the message had nothing to do with us, besides which the user does not exist on our servers and the domain they sent from belongs to developers I know wouldn't fool with this stuff.
And yet, the damage has been done. These users don't trust me as a provider even when I explain how we lock down our server & prevent spam. They don't trust our domains, which means they block the ip -- an ip which may be mapped to 50 or more virtual sites. And all of this because our domain was the root of it all...a simple forgery that no email client really checks for validity because internet mail is designed to bounce anonymously from server to server. I've gotten spam that was "sent" from my own email address...which is silly, because why should I trust a company's services when they try to convince me _I'm_ marketing to myself?
What email needs is a set up like SSL -- a trusted third party to verify the validity of an email from a key generated by the sender when the receiver gets the mail. If the sender proves to be a spammer, the third party drops support...and charges a large fee for breaching a contract. We need this to occur without unwieldy programs (PGP) or user eductation...just some way to get a lock in the corner of a user's screen to let them know for a fact that user X sent message Y, and that if it was unwanted they have a recourse.
This new "Secure mail" could become popular very quickly, as many companies that communicate solely over email could use the security that nobody can send an email as ceo@trustycorp.com without the server's permission. The key is ease...SSL may have its problems (certs kind of expensive, monopoly of cert providers due to reliance on deals with certain monopolistic browsers, slowwww responses) but it has become a mainstay of secure communications for people who understand it (unlike my wife, who despite a BS in chemical anthropology believes that submitting her credit card via SSL over WEP 802.11b means a guy with a ham radio can read her number, so she places orders via cordless phone instead). Mail hasn't significantly changed in ten years...maybe it's time for smail!
Actually, even this is silly. True five nines availability on a widely distributed network would mean that an application was available at all times on all segments of the network. Which would mean that your uptime depends not only on your redundancy on one side of a pipe, but on your overall reduncancy as well, so that when a pipe goes down you're still accessible. Since when a pipe goes down in your host you probably lose other resources as well (such as power or alternate pipelines), this means multiple datahouses owned by multiple vendors. Each of these has to have a perfect backup of all data and be running the same versions of all software. Really, the only true redunancy would be so heavily distributed that each local network would basically have to have its own server. This isn't so crazy -- technically, DNS and email do this. However, we all know that for an end user even DNS and email can have perceived outtages.
And this is why 5 9s is foolish. Sure, you're redundant behind the pipe, but if you lose the pipe you can't blame your datacenter when you charged a customer for uninterrupted service. Technically, if their modem disconnects them for a few hours you've broken contract.
Besides, who needs it? If yahoo is unreachible from my desk, I wait and reconnect. It doesn't matter if the downtime was my fault or theirs...the effect on my user experience was the same. Any services I might have used, or products purchased, I will use or purchase at a later time. After all, I don't refrain from buying shoes just because the mall is closed!
but their server is down.
Actually, I just completed doing this. I took a sociolinguistics class as a postgrad, and took all my notes on my palmtop pc, a cassiopeia, because I was too lazy to . I found out a couple things:
1) The urge to play games was immense, because nobody (save the folks behind you) can tell what you're really doing on there.
2) Input is not that bad. I use the Fitaly keypad and was getting upwards of 20 wpm after a few days. Character recognition was terrible in the basic setup. But what really helps after a while is the word suggestion -- especially since a lot of the class was learning and applying new terms.
3) I didn't feel out of place or nerdy, except that I was taking notes and many others weren't. I was regarded as more of an outcast for not having a cell phone.
4) When my stylus broke, I was sort of fucked. Same with power outages -- once I played games for three hours before class and missed a day's worth of notes. I was late with a paper because I had totally drained the batteries and couldn't charge it fast enough to print.
5) The incompatibility with PalmOS made it impossilbe to "note pass" digitally. I understand there's a $30 program that lets you interchange, but it seems costly just to send "Prof's a goober" to another techno loser. I have seen people swap notes via palm to palm connections, but it often took so long to negociate that I wonder if copying by hand might be easier.
6) Because nobody knew how to use my pc, when I passed it around to get people's email addresses I would usually have to enter them myself. Everybody understands a pen.
For what it's worth, the palm made it so nice to study up for tonight's big test, post my notes online and print out flash cards (word macro to search for bolded text, copy out the text after it, repeat for each card).