I can't remember my IP address as a goddamned dotted quad, and you want me to remember 8 colon-separated 16-bit values in HEX with the leading zeros suppressed! Bite me.
The Pro-Trim paint roller! Paint your desktop in infinate high-tech colors, including Red, which is the actual color of Mars!
The Red Devil Smokehouse Grill! Cook burgers on your desktop with real artificial flavor! Artificial, like the Moon Landing!
Epil Stop & Spray! Keep hair from growing on your desktop! Like it doesn't grow on the surface of Mars!
Donut Smart! Make mini donuts on your desktop! They look like actual spaceships that may have visited Mars from another galaxy! Just add water! Mmm...donuts...
Big Mouth Billy Bass! Put a singing fish on your desktop, inspired by the fish that might have existed on Mars at one point!
These and other "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters" available from:
www.AsSeenOnTV.com
(or if that gets/.ted)
www.RonCo.com
Order in the next 15 minutes and get a FREE slashdot plug! Now, the publicity tool utilized by shills everywhere to promote lame, uninteresting products can be yours at no cost!
Order now and we'll also include an excuse for why the latest version of Slash broke the "search" functionality!
Wow, thank god/. "editors" aren't in the habit of posting "news" like this over and over and over and over again, and thank god they can spot shills in an instant, there'd be REAL POTENTIAL FOR ABUSES, WOULDN'T THERE!
Two problems: first, practically, the burden of proof is on you if the FCC comes knocking and anything about your 802.11 equipment is not 'stock.' Second, all the ERP guidelines are assuming you're not messing up anybody else's service (the must not cause interference and must accept interference bit). If you mess up somebody else's service and you get caught, especially with modified equipment, the results may very well be extremely unpleasant.
All I'm getting at is that these are fun uses for wireless equipment, and wireless neighborhood LANs are a pretty cool concept, this is just Space Patrol walkie-talkies for your computer once you get past shouting distance. Anybody considering this stuff for electronic billboards or linking their office buildings or whatever has to understand that that is like using a CB to dispatch a taxi service; it might work most of the time, but it's not your dedicated spectrum, and any steps you take to improve the quality (including but not limited to amps and antennae) might be illegal. Licensed and/or microwave equipment is pricier, but offers many advantages over a small piece of shared spectrum.
I bow to your pedanticism, and congratulate you on reading the CFR from end to end as you're implying. The article referred to said something like "hang a higher-gain antenna off the back" which implies an illegal modification to me. As long as you read CFR 47, do you remember reading in there somewhere in part 15 about modification to equipment, including class B digital equipment, and what the end-user/consumer can and can't do? Oh. And even in your cite, are you confident that if you rig up what's described in that article and the FCC comes knocking that you can demonstrate that you're employing transmitting antennas with directional gain less than 6dbi, or greater than 6 dBi and ensuring that the maximum peak output power of the intentional radiator is reduced by 1 dB for every 3 dB that the directional gain of the antenna exceeds 6 dBi? Oh.
May I suggest you re-read 15.209? Are you quite positive that if they start measuring microvolts of RF around your equipment to apply 15.209 you're still compliant? Oh. And even if you say "but I bought this antenna from Lucent" (or whoever) to pass the buck to whoever certified your equipment to be part 15 compliant will they say "oh, well it must be okay! Bye!" Oh.
My guess is, if somebody's cell phones or electron microscope are flaking out in your neighborhood and the fcc and proxies go sniffing around and notice 802.11 equipment with yagis hanging off the flagpole and decide you're a good scapegoat, at best you'll just get your 802.11 equipment confiscated, at worst they'll take all your electronics, search your house, call in other agencies, and fine you, and you can cite the CFR, Constitution, Blackstone's Commentaries and the menu at McDonalds and it won't help.
Sometimes a general statement is more accurate than selective citations, implications of ignorance, and rhetorical "by whose definition?" sort of questions. In any event, you should not try to bolster your arguments with cites that only support your somewhat narrow and amateur (pun intended) armchair lawyer interpretations unless you're damn sure you're dealing with somebody totally ignorant. I grant you it works with several folks on here, but I don't roll over.
Might I suggest you make sure know what you're talking about and don't just do a cfr search for antenna before you suggest that I read the actual rules?
Okay, I'll give it a go, since I'm so stupid. Maybe, just maybe, THEY'RE SELLING AN ANTENNA THAT IS STILL COMPLIANT WITH FCC REGS. Possibly, the Lucent device and others are shipping with absolute jokes of antennas (reckon?) and Lucent (and other mfg) are trying to bleed their customers out of another $50 bucks. Just as Radio Shack can sell replacement antennas for HTs, Lucent can sell replacement antennas, because the burden is on them to comply with the FCC regs for that sort of device. If you go screwing around with it, the burden of compliance is on YOU, but seeing as you're such an RF engineering expert, by all means, modify away. Thanks for explaining the difference between an amplifier and an antenna, by the way, you are quite the scholarly one. Not even thrown off by the fact that they start with the same letter, eh?
I'm not planning on dredging up the information for the 2.4 gig equipment in question which is available elsewhere for an AC, but generally unlicensed equipment gets a secondary allocation which means it's not supposed to interfere with the primary service AT ALL and to that end the FCC usually limits effective radiated power which I think in the 2.4ghz band for part b digital devices is about 9dbi. In other words, if you tag on a transmitting parabolic dish fed with ladder line so you're ending up with 30-60dbi of "directionalizing" you are certainly not part 15 compliant and possibly screwing up other devices sharing the same spectrum.
But higher-gain antennas are illegal modifications to that sort of device. The rationale is if 12 of you in the same apartment decide to wireless wan yourselves to 12 separate friends across the street with you high-gain antennas or amplifiers, at least one pair of you, and possibly more, will experience service degredation. Just like the CB syndrome, where people using legal equipment got stomped on by the many using illegally modified equipment. It gotten to the point where the FCC only brings enforcement against CB ops in cases of interference to other services, and even then only against stationary operators, 'cause you can't bust everybody with 18 wheels, a brick and a firestick.
Except it's that Hemos guy who's marked for a silly, dumbed down article that is not news for nerds, not even news, except for the clueless who would just screw up both theory and practice and badmouth "linux" or perhaps "redhat" and never look beyond the M$ curtain again.
Furthermore, anybody who wants to promote non-M$ products that seems to think that a sysadmin not having to know or learn anything about "NIS, NFS, DNS, DHCP," etc. is some sort of advantage isn't doing a service to anybody but M$. I'm quite happy with M$ having a monopoly on clueless sysadmins with their three-week cram certs.
Hemos, I look forward to submitting my article to you, "How to Start a Car Rental Company for Peanuts" which describes how to start a car rental company assuming you already have a bunch of cars and can buy previous model year cars for a fraction of what they're worth. (from the watch-out-enterprise-rent-a-car-your[sic if you please]-going-down dept.)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20869&cid=2216 865
So thanks again, michael. I'm looking forward to you posting two articles I'm working on: "Null Modem Networking" about using PPPD to connect two LINUX COMPUTERS without using ETHERNET! (from the creative-uses-for-db9-connectors dept) and "Look Ma, No Power Supply!" about using BATTERIES to power COMPUTERS without using power from an outlet. (from the no-more-alternating-current-for-me-thanks dept.) Oooh! Cookie for whoever figures out those posers first! Put on your thinking caps, you're in for some brain busting tonight!
Casinos do this (scan the crowd for known cheats) banks and supermarkets do this (photos of people passing bad checks) and the federal government does this (posts pictures of suspected criminals in post offices). Oh? Seems we lost our lease on our "right to privacy" decades ago, eh? If inappropriate action is taken as a result of a human or software made match, you have legal recourses, but that's about it.
If you walk into borders, you're pretty much consenting to video monitoring, and they can do pretty much whatever they want with that data.
Where things become dangerous is if they match up their data with other data. So as long as nobody's building state or federal level databases of photos of people, such as criminals, motor vehicle operators, gun owners, landowners, registered voters, people under IRS investigation, and public school children there's not much danger. Especially if none of those databases also contain fingerprints, SSN, address, employer information, and medical records. Oh, wait...
Speaking of gun owners, Americans, remember that the 2nd amendment safeguards all the others, and the difference between a citizen and a subject is arms ownership. I recommend you get your photo in the gun owner database as soon as possible and jump through whatever hoops your state makes you, the reason those hoops are there is because those who want the option to take away your freedom know that they can't if you're in a position to offer resistance. Disarming a populace is the first step towards subjugating it. Don't think the process of law or the Constitution will help you, think about Ruby Ridge and Waco. See if you can find who said "Here I stand with my bayonet, there you stand with your law. We'll see which prevails." Think about how "IRS agents" are armed by the federal government with ABSOLUTELY NO AUTHORITY. The IRS is armed (well armed, they ordered about $1,200,000.00 worth of pistols and shotguns just in 1998! for their CUSTOMER SERVICE AGENTS!) under the unconstitutional USC provisions chapters 61 to 80 creating and arming the BATF. The IRS is not even a government agency under USC Title 5 section 10 1, Government Organizations and Employees, but they got you and me outgunned and take our money without our permission...isn't that robbery? Think about how well-armed those living under dictatorships generally are. Think about how well-armed victims of genocide were. Think about how well-armed you need to be.
America may not be a dictatorship (yet) but all the machinery is in place to make it one. You owe yourself a last resort, at least the option to take up arms against oppression. If the executive branch of the federal decides to basically suspend the constitution with the support of the judicial, take over the media, garnish all your wages and take away all your privacy in the wake of a supposed "terrorist attack" in the interest of "national security" don't come crying to me, I told you so. When the masked men in black knock down your door and drag you to prison or the execution camps for your thoughtcrime you'll have a difficult time resisting even if you had the foresight to get a "sporting purposes" rifle or shotgun, let alone a single-edged less than 12 inch bread knife that the law allows you. Not to mention, not arming yourself for defense with the best tools available to you is cowardly, stupid, and selfish. When a masked federal sniper kills your wife because they suspect you're a drug dealer, I really hope your central station alarm system helps. I hope your local police assert that they have jurisdiction and not the federal government (I'm sorry, had to take a break and laugh). I hope you feel good that YOU listened to the statists, socialists and pacifists who don't give a damn about your life and liberty when they said "guns are bad. guns kill kids, guns kill people, etc." Especially listen to the ones who are themselves surrounded by armed individuals in public who say you shouldn't be, the ones who back up their power with arms, the ones who can equip themselves with firepower that you can't legally, because they have the money to (fun fact: corporations are not prohibited from owning "assault weapons." As a matter of fact, corporations can buy "machine guns" and "destructive devices" by paying an unconstitutional excise and receiving an unconstitutional license. So, your bank potentially has you outgunned. Your employer potentially has you outgunned. Oh, and the company reposessing your car after your banker and employer decide to illegally give your money to the federal government just based on an IRS agent request potentially has you outgunned). I can't believe the sheeple who look at a few tragic cases and then listen to those politically motivated to say "only trust people with power and money to own guns, you poor powerless people just kill kids." Like at Waco? The government that does their best to cover up the identity of the Ruby Ridge sniper so that he doesn't have to face punishment for at the very least civil wrongful death? The federal government that illegally extricates elian gonzalez with federal agents armed with automatic weapons, just because the president at the time says to do so? If that photo of elian being taken away at gunpoint didn't convince you we are a hairsbreadth away from a police state, nothing will.
So if you value liberty and freedom at all, if you think the Constitution means anything, arm yourself while you can as best you can. The 2nd amendment has been gutted, the 4th has been damaged beyond belief, the 8th is being attacked, the 9th is all but ignored, the 10th has been under systematic attack since the war between the states, and was basically repealed shortly before world war 2, and the 1st amendment is in grave danger, especially the last two provisions.
The Niemoller quote is not really apropos, you're essentially putting some sort of parallel between shoplifters and Communists, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Slippery slope you're on there.
That is pretty cool, just not as practical as it might be, and I'm guessing a bit expensive. Cool display units in small quantities are generally extremely bad deals, most good deals on project displays are pulls, obsolete or weird surplus/seconds lots, but you don't want to go selling that kind of stuff to people. ICs have interesting economics also, I recollect for some simplex repeater project I thought was cool way back in my active ham days an IC required (I think a 30 second digital recorder) could be sourced from Radio Shack for about $25 and was also available from a supplier for like $100 plus $7 shipping for 1-25. That wasn't the price break, if you sent a MO for $107 they'd send you however many you wanted up to 25. The real pricing didn't start until you wanted 501 or more.
One of the lessons I learned hard way is when you're trying to produce anything destined for retail is "if you didn't buy by the pallet you paid too much" and I'm starting to think "if you didn't buy a truckload you paid too much" is the better way to put it. Chips and boards is made in a whole 'nother hemisphere from where I is, and I know they don't float 'em across individually in pie tins. The guy I'm going to get the best deal from is the guy who unloaded the big-ass container ship in CA, and he's not going to pop open a tote for me when I call him and say "yeah, I'd like to buy 50 Morimoto GNR2010X's." He's going to call me unkind names and hang up. This seems like common sense, but then you read in your local paper about the guy going into businss selling custom lcd rearview mirrors for trucks, with his superclever wireless ccd camera that goes infrared at night, where he casually mentions they generally cost $1000 installed. Um, I don't own a trucking company, but the trucking industry cried like bitches when the gubbernment here told them they had to apply $150 (the industry said, which means it was probably really $20) worth of reflective tape to their trailers so that it was less likely that motorists would plow into them and DIE if a truck jackknifed in bad weather. If a trailer doesn't have $150 margin to spare over say, a year, to legitimately keep people from dying, what the hell makes you think there's $1000 of margin for you to mount some junk you bought from x10.com on there to keep them from bashing the loading dock as hard?
All that aside, my current short-term solutions for mp3s are an old thinkpad and patch cable on top of my Aiwa, which is also impractical and expensive, but at least I can read my email on it, and a chopped and hacked iopener that has mp3 duty when it's not the breakfast table/tv room xterm.
I just deleted several paragraphs describing the media appliance I've been working on because a) somebody will steal my ideas b) nobody helpful will read it anyway c) I might not be done before December as I was planning to be d) somebody else might come out with the same thing or better as I'm working on before me e) all of the above.
Let's just say mine has an ethernet port too, can do Ogg (you know kids, patented technology doesn't make it BAD as such), and doesn't require specific server software, but it works well with several things. It should start at about $60-80 (maybe less, $80 is worst case), is mainstream enough for average humans, but is quite hackable. I'm not your average vapor-spewing crackpot, either. I have reason to believe I have even less personality and am less likable, but I can do deals.
Actually, that's a funny story, too. I hit the preview button, and this fine Slash software here dumped me back to the front page, and in the course of copying/pasting what I had put in this fine "comment" form I think either I screwed up my URL or this fine Slash software did. Considering there's a brace of invalid characters in the url I'm more inclined to blame Slash (the software, not the Guns 'n' Roses guy) than myself. But then, just because Slash (n. gnr) has horrible bugs doesn't mean it works correctly.
Hey/. editors, I realize you're all really busy, what with your exhaustive testing of this code, extensive grammar and spelling checks for your one-sentence editorial comments on every article, modding people you disagree with down to -1 right before stories are archived (that one's not sarcastic), putting in incredibly useful links to keywords in everything2, and justifying to whomever the hell is paying for this mess (I assume still some abstraction of VA "fill up the red toner before you print the company financials" Linux) that you're not doing more harm than good, but please be more careful about what slips past your "editors" and perhaps come up with some better form of selecting what gets published on your site.
I'm feeling generous, so here are some suggestions, free of charge:
Wow! Cool! How 1337! Impressive! Free cookie to whoever does this first! DSL! Dribbly willie!
Oh, but wait, everybody has known you can do this for years, it's even been mentioned on/. before, it's still a stupid idea because you have to at the very least get equipment and an internet connection. If you can get both for $40 a month without paying for a dry pair and you'd prefer to roll your own, congratulations! you're stupid! Put a big chalkmark on your back, I have a kit for you to turn a Tivo into a Linux box without a keyboard or network interface when I meet you! Only $200!
Telcos that sell unprovisioned lines sell them with basically a gaurantee of continuty. You see, kids, the way some alarms work is something triggers it, and it completes a CIRCUIT to a central station, hence the term ALARM CIRCUIT. Circuit, like circular, like the file this article belongs in. Any signaling, *DSL, ISDN, touch tones, morse code or smoke signals that happen to work are a bonus. If they feel like putting a bandpass filter on your unprovisioned line, they'll do so, and your only real recourse is to stop paying for the line.
If you're calling your RBOC as Alarms Inc. and appear legit, you can buy dry pairs until you're bankrupt. Keep in mind that years ago businesses replaced their many strands of analog and low-bandwidth copper with fewer strands of digial and high-bandwidth fiber and copper, and all that telco copper doesn't just disappear, it degrades, slowly. Furthermore, they'll string twine and tin cans for you if you're willing to pay for it, the idea of the telco being "out" of anything is pretty absurd. Anyway, if you're calling as Joe Retard dba BlockStackers Intergastric and you've never dealt with the business office before you'll get "we're sold out of copper wires" and "we don't make those anymore" which if you believe makes you as big a mark as michael. If you start reading off a script ("duh, do youse have dry pairs? alarm circuits? local data lines?") you'll get more responses you deserve ("naw, all our pairs are wet. alarm circuits? what alarm circuits? we're out of local data lines, all we have left are long distance analog lines")
So to summarize, the article is stupid, about a concept that is old and stupid. Kudos, michael the slashdot editor.
What might be cool, or at least cooler, is if some enterprising souls cut the telco out of the loop completely, stringing wire house to house and using their DSL and 802.11 equipment to form a neighborhood network that could share an internet connection or two with NAT of some flavor. You could tack some functionality onto a dhcp server so you get assigned forwarded ports based on your assigned IP so everybody can still use their real/windows media players and set up Q3 servers. You could apply traffic shaping so bandwidth is efficiently distributed. Then, you could give it a clever name, like Dorknet or iTimewaste. Then, you could set up voice over IP so people wouldn't have to rely on local telco for telephony. Then, you could offer emergency services on the REAL number, 912.
912 operator: Dorknet 912, please state the nature of the emergency.
Ron Schlub: My house is on fire!
912 operator: Oh. Make sure you get your DSL and 802.11 equipment out of the house, we need it back if you're not using it.
...and...
912 operator: Dorknet 912, please state the nature of the emergency.
Joe Schmoe: I've cut my hand, I'm bleeding all over the place!
912 operator: Yeah, try not to bleed near the phone, those VoIP bridges are expensive.
So thanks again, michael. I'm looking forward to you posting two articles I'm working on: "Null Modem Networking" about using PPPD to connect two LINUX COMPUTERS without using ETHERNET! (from the creative-uses-for-db9-connectors dept) and "Look Ma, No Power Supply!" about using BATTERIES to power COMPUTERS without using power from an outlet. (from the no-more-alternating-current-for-me-thanks dept.) Oooh! Cookie for whoever figures out those posers first! Put on your thinking caps, you're in for some brain busting tonight!
Considering my job description has "programmer" in it, and I got paid on schedule last week, I'd say there's strong circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction. I should probably qualify "programmer" with "mostly Java," and then perhaps you'd feel even better about trying to make me sound foolish.
Anyway, at&t I believe had a product called cfront which according to my about 1989 C class was "a practical tool for coding in C++ because it actually generates C code" and I believe back in the day g++ did something similar except that it did two passes of preprocessing (preprocessing to something the C preprocessor would understand) instead of using C as an itermediary language. It's possible both were abominable to some degree, I never used either.
About that time, there were a few ANSI C compilers (and one interpreter) floating around the math department on floppies, all of which were copyright one guy (not the same guy), which leads me to the conclusion that writing an ANSI C compiler, at least for DOS, must be fairly easy, as I would define fairly easy. Not trivial, not really easy, but fairly easy. Getting bent out of shape about subjective statements is a little silly anyway.
Congratulations on cross-compiling something to DOS from a linux install of gcc, I guess that makes you a "programmer."
McDrTaco seems to be confused
on
The New Athlons
·
· Score: 1
He already made an abortive attempt at a game machine (http://cmdrtaco.net/jubei/) and n'er athlon ner duron nor itanium will help it, gigahertz notwithstanding. Unless that was one of those editorial comments that wasn't in his voice but in the voice of the 'anonymous reader.'
McDrTaco has stated he doesn't read/., and I can think of many reasons why one wouldn't want to. It appears now he doesn't read his own website. Which reinforces my believe the real CmdrTaco was replaced with the current doppleganger sometime in late 1999 early 2000.
I really liked his ideas about Texas Hold'em, Canasta and Honeymoon Bridge. My granddad used to say "do it according to Hoyle's or don't do it" and I understand now he was referring to the physics of the universe! Wow!
PHBs, CIOs, CTOs, and those sorts won't buy Bluetooth "less cable at the desktop" and short-range networking because it difficult to justify and not corporate-flashy. "Wireless Ethernet" sells (even if that isn't strictly what it is) because the CIOs and CTOs are familiar (they think) with the technology and can explain the advantages to the Head Suit In Charge (bring your laptop to meetings and not fumble with cat5, etc.) As with so many other things, the general-purpose standard will be adopted and will be subject to Procrustean adaptation to things it's not suited for, despite the existance of something 'better.'
How is Rob & friends going to pay for multiple servers and their salaries if you're going to go and deprive them of their revenue stream? You bastid, after all/. has done for you, you're blocking the whole reason it exists! Take heed,/. editors and management, maybe you should think about closing up the source of "Slash" and trying to make a living selling it, this guy's figured out a way to screw up your whole business model.
'Slashdot Journal System
Form Error!
There was an error in your submission; please get a new form and try again.' and some 'Key 4353h43ewadsf error' and formatting crap with/boxes.
"Welcome to Slashdot's new cluster" eh? Congratulations, I'm surprised it works at all. Thanks for using us peons for your alpha testing on a production server, we have nothing better to do. This is a shining example of the Peter Principle in action, not only have you folks risen to maximal incompetence editorially, but also code-wise. This is some shameful code, and shameful project management. You guys are selling advertising on this site, the least you could do is thoroughly test it first, and I don't mean "put it on a public server and hope our user peons find all the bugs in it." I think it was Linus who said something like "with enough eyes all bugs are shallow" but you'd need an infinate number of eyes to navigate the spaghetti of Perl that backs this thing. Larry Wall should modify the Artistic License specifically prohibiting whoever coded most of this from ever using Perl again. If this mess was deployed on a public website by any self-respecting company, basically everybody associated with the project would be fired in short order. Imagine Amazon pulling this sort of shit..."Please help us test our new server and beta storefront code, MoronHaven. Submit bugs to moron@moronhaven.tld" And then, the moronhaven project managers and coders saying shit like "But boss, we tested it. We had the beta server online for weeks, and nobody sent in any bug reports!" "But boss, ordering appliances is a new feature for Amazon, you shouldn't expect it to work at first!" "Thanks for trying to order something from Amazon! We realize this code is garbage and much of it doesn't work, but look at the feature list we wrote for it! Isn't it great! Click here to report a bug. Oops! You get an error when you click there, too, eh? Thank god we didn't code our email clients, those still work!"
Go ahead, mod this down, I never cared and never will. Assuming this even gets posted. I noticed if I hit 'preview' I tend to get an error when I try to post, so I won't hit preview. Rob&friends obviously never hit 'preview' or they would have noticed it in their exhaustive tests of this new "software." Of course, they only post comments when somebody points out they're taking heat (like the Anne What'shername troll) but obviously occasionally things hit close to home.
But then the only way to tell here and k5 apart would be correct spelling/grammar (at k5), original content (at k5) and first post posts (here). I think the/. "editorial staff" is trying to maintain their stranglehold on poor decisions on submitted articles, they don't trust the masses to maintain their 60% crap ratio. Don't clue them in, I like the "if you don't like slashdot go start your own site," it's lead to some very innovative and well-managed sites that have to work harder to attract eyeballs that are used to/. This is after all just a "post links to other sites' articles with one-liner editorial commentary" and as Rob has admitted the only reason/. is the biggest is 'cause they were first.
Oh yippie, "invalid form key" from submit button. Nice code you got here, kids.
...when the latest unregisted version opera browser does the same thing. I clicked through an OSDN (or whatever it's called nowadays) ad for webhosting that appeared on k5 (hurricane?) and Opera spit out a "check out company x" ad. I remember when Opera was the alternative browser, now it id's itself as IE5x and spits ads at you.
An activex Java applet engine is silly, but that's what MS wants, so they can co-opt part of the Java developer base. Sun's Java plugin uses NS API. Most of Java is open enough that you can run Java code and code in Java without using anything Sun. Cool high-profile things are happening with Java, and the only thing funny about that is how prejudiced programmers are language bigoting themselves out of jobs. Java is the best thing the open source movement has going for it, the only winner if Java loses is MS.
Java comes damn close to doing everything. That's one of its weaknesses, actually, Sun overwhelms you with solutions. Java is appropriate to application servers, embedded devices, GUI environments, parallel applications, distributed environments, and any combination of any or all of these. Lots of the hard work has been done for you (JFC, servlets, enterprise beans), and much of the OO extra rope to hang yourself (like MI and structs) from C++ have been removed or made safer. Not all PHBs are totally ignorant, there's reasons Java rubs many of them the right way, and most of those reasons can be quantified on the balance sheet.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't remember my IP address as a goddamned dotted quad, and you want me to remember 8 colon-separated 16-bit values in HEX with the leading zeros suppressed! Bite me.
Maybe you'd also like:
/.ted)
/. "editors" aren't in the habit of posting "news" like this over and over and over and over again, and thank god they can spot shills in an instant, there'd be REAL POTENTIAL FOR ABUSES, WOULDN'T THERE!
The Pro-Trim paint roller! Paint your desktop in infinate high-tech colors, including Red, which is the actual color of Mars!
The Red Devil Smokehouse Grill! Cook burgers on your desktop with real artificial flavor! Artificial, like the Moon Landing!
Epil Stop & Spray! Keep hair from growing on your desktop! Like it doesn't grow on the surface of Mars!
Donut Smart! Make mini donuts on your desktop! They look like actual spaceships that may have visited Mars from another galaxy! Just add water! Mmm...donuts...
Big Mouth Billy Bass! Put a singing fish on your desktop, inspired by the fish that might have existed on Mars at one point!
These and other "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters" available from:
www.AsSeenOnTV.com
(or if that gets
www.RonCo.com
Order in the next 15 minutes and get a FREE slashdot plug! Now, the publicity tool utilized by shills everywhere to promote lame, uninteresting products can be yours at no cost!
Order now and we'll also include an excuse for why the latest version of Slash broke the "search" functionality!
Wow, thank god
http://www.desktoprovers.com/ thing? How cool, something similar is over $25 at Radio Shack.
Two problems: first, practically, the burden of proof is on you if the FCC comes knocking and anything about your 802.11 equipment is not 'stock.' Second, all the ERP guidelines are assuming you're not messing up anybody else's service (the must not cause interference and must accept interference bit). If you mess up somebody else's service and you get caught, especially with modified equipment, the results may very well be extremely unpleasant.
All I'm getting at is that these are fun uses for wireless equipment, and wireless neighborhood LANs are a pretty cool concept, this is just Space Patrol walkie-talkies for your computer once you get past shouting distance. Anybody considering this stuff for electronic billboards or linking their office buildings or whatever has to understand that that is like using a CB to dispatch a taxi service; it might work most of the time, but it's not your dedicated spectrum, and any steps you take to improve the quality (including but not limited to amps and antennae) might be illegal. Licensed and/or microwave equipment is pricier, but offers many advantages over a small piece of shared spectrum.
I bow to your pedanticism, and congratulate you on reading the CFR from end to end as you're implying. The article referred to said something like "hang a higher-gain antenna off the back" which implies an illegal modification to me. As long as you read CFR 47, do you remember reading in there somewhere in part 15 about modification to equipment, including class B digital equipment, and what the end-user/consumer can and can't do? Oh. And even in your cite, are you confident that if you rig up what's described in that article and the FCC comes knocking that you can demonstrate that you're employing transmitting antennas with directional gain less than 6dbi, or greater than 6 dBi and ensuring that the maximum peak output power of the intentional radiator is reduced by 1 dB for every 3 dB that the directional gain of the antenna exceeds 6 dBi? Oh.
May I suggest you re-read 15.209? Are you quite positive that if they start measuring microvolts of RF around your equipment to apply 15.209 you're still compliant? Oh. And even if you say "but I bought this antenna from Lucent" (or whoever) to pass the buck to whoever certified your equipment to be part 15 compliant will they say "oh, well it must be okay! Bye!" Oh.
My guess is, if somebody's cell phones or electron microscope are flaking out in your neighborhood and the fcc and proxies go sniffing around and notice 802.11 equipment with yagis hanging off the flagpole and decide you're a good scapegoat, at best you'll just get your 802.11 equipment confiscated, at worst they'll take all your electronics, search your house, call in other agencies, and fine you, and you can cite the CFR, Constitution, Blackstone's Commentaries and the menu at McDonalds and it won't help.
Sometimes a general statement is more accurate than selective citations, implications of ignorance, and rhetorical "by whose definition?" sort of questions. In any event, you should not try to bolster your arguments with cites that only support your somewhat narrow and amateur (pun intended) armchair lawyer interpretations unless you're damn sure you're dealing with somebody totally ignorant. I grant you it works with several folks on here, but I don't roll over.
Might I suggest you make sure know what you're talking about and don't just do a cfr search for antenna before you suggest that I read the actual rules?
Okay, I'll give it a go, since I'm so stupid. Maybe, just maybe, THEY'RE SELLING AN ANTENNA THAT IS STILL COMPLIANT WITH FCC REGS. Possibly, the Lucent device and others are shipping with absolute jokes of antennas (reckon?) and Lucent (and other mfg) are trying to bleed their customers out of another $50 bucks. Just as Radio Shack can sell replacement antennas for HTs, Lucent can sell replacement antennas, because the burden is on them to comply with the FCC regs for that sort of device. If you go screwing around with it, the burden of compliance is on YOU, but seeing as you're such an RF engineering expert, by all means, modify away. Thanks for explaining the difference between an amplifier and an antenna, by the way, you are quite the scholarly one. Not even thrown off by the fact that they start with the same letter, eh?
I'm not planning on dredging up the information for the 2.4 gig equipment in question which is available elsewhere for an AC, but generally unlicensed equipment gets a secondary allocation which means it's not supposed to interfere with the primary service AT ALL and to that end the FCC usually limits effective radiated power which I think in the 2.4ghz band for part b digital devices is about 9dbi. In other words, if you tag on a transmitting parabolic dish fed with ladder line so you're ending up with 30-60dbi of "directionalizing" you are certainly not part 15 compliant and possibly screwing up other devices sharing the same spectrum.
But higher-gain antennas are illegal modifications to that sort of device. The rationale is if 12 of you in the same apartment decide to wireless wan yourselves to 12 separate friends across the street with you high-gain antennas or amplifiers, at least one pair of you, and possibly more, will experience service degredation. Just like the CB syndrome, where people using legal equipment got stomped on by the many using illegally modified equipment. It gotten to the point where the FCC only brings enforcement against CB ops in cases of interference to other services, and even then only against stationary operators, 'cause you can't bust everybody with 18 wheels, a brick and a firestick.
Except it's that Hemos guy who's marked for a silly, dumbed down article that is not news for nerds, not even news, except for the clueless who would just screw up both theory and practice and badmouth "linux" or perhaps "redhat" and never look beyond the M$ curtain again.
6 865
Furthermore, anybody who wants to promote non-M$ products that seems to think that a sysadmin not having to know or learn anything about "NIS, NFS, DNS, DHCP," etc. is some sort of advantage isn't doing a service to anybody but M$. I'm quite happy with M$ having a monopoly on clueless sysadmins with their three-week cram certs.
Hemos, I look forward to submitting my article to you, "How to Start a Car Rental Company for Peanuts" which describes how to start a car rental company assuming you already have a bunch of cars and can buy previous model year cars for a fraction of what they're worth. (from the watch-out-enterprise-rent-a-car-your[sic if you please]-going-down dept.)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20869&cid=221
So thanks again, michael. I'm looking forward to you posting two articles I'm working on: "Null Modem Networking" about using PPPD to connect two LINUX COMPUTERS without using ETHERNET! (from the creative-uses-for-db9-connectors dept) and "Look Ma, No Power Supply!" about using BATTERIES to power COMPUTERS without using power from an outlet. (from the no-more-alternating-current-for-me-thanks dept.) Oooh! Cookie for whoever figures out those posers first! Put on your thinking caps, you're in for some brain busting tonight!
Casinos do this (scan the crowd for known cheats) banks and supermarkets do this (photos of people passing bad checks) and the federal government does this (posts pictures of suspected criminals in post offices). Oh? Seems we lost our lease on our "right to privacy" decades ago, eh? If inappropriate action is taken as a result of a human or software made match, you have legal recourses, but that's about it.
If you walk into borders, you're pretty much consenting to video monitoring, and they can do pretty much whatever they want with that data.
Where things become dangerous is if they match up their data with other data. So as long as nobody's building state or federal level databases of photos of people, such as criminals, motor vehicle operators, gun owners, landowners, registered voters, people under IRS investigation, and public school children there's not much danger. Especially if none of those databases also contain fingerprints, SSN, address, employer information, and medical records. Oh, wait...
Speaking of gun owners, Americans, remember that the 2nd amendment safeguards all the others, and the difference between a citizen and a subject is arms ownership. I recommend you get your photo in the gun owner database as soon as possible and jump through whatever hoops your state makes you, the reason those hoops are there is because those who want the option to take away your freedom know that they can't if you're in a position to offer resistance. Disarming a populace is the first step towards subjugating it. Don't think the process of law or the Constitution will help you, think about Ruby Ridge and Waco. See if you can find who said "Here I stand with my bayonet, there you stand with your law. We'll see which prevails." Think about how "IRS agents" are armed by the federal government with ABSOLUTELY NO AUTHORITY. The IRS is armed (well armed, they ordered about $1,200,000.00 worth of pistols and shotguns just in 1998! for their CUSTOMER SERVICE AGENTS!) under the unconstitutional USC provisions chapters 61 to 80 creating and arming the BATF. The IRS is not even a government agency under USC Title 5 section 10 1, Government Organizations and Employees, but they got you and me outgunned and take our money without our permission...isn't that robbery? Think about how well-armed those living under dictatorships generally are. Think about how well-armed victims of genocide were. Think about how well-armed you need to be.
America may not be a dictatorship (yet) but all the machinery is in place to make it one. You owe yourself a last resort, at least the option to take up arms against oppression. If the executive branch of the federal decides to basically suspend the constitution with the support of the judicial, take over the media, garnish all your wages and take away all your privacy in the wake of a supposed "terrorist attack" in the interest of "national security" don't come crying to me, I told you so. When the masked men in black knock down your door and drag you to prison or the execution camps for your thoughtcrime you'll have a difficult time resisting even if you had the foresight to get a "sporting purposes" rifle or shotgun, let alone a single-edged less than 12 inch bread knife that the law allows you. Not to mention, not arming yourself for defense with the best tools available to you is cowardly, stupid, and selfish. When a masked federal sniper kills your wife because they suspect you're a drug dealer, I really hope your central station alarm system helps. I hope your local police assert that they have jurisdiction and not the federal government (I'm sorry, had to take a break and laugh). I hope you feel good that YOU listened to the statists, socialists and pacifists who don't give a damn about your life and liberty when they said "guns are bad. guns kill kids, guns kill people, etc." Especially listen to the ones who are themselves surrounded by armed individuals in public who say you shouldn't be, the ones who back up their power with arms, the ones who can equip themselves with firepower that you can't legally, because they have the money to (fun fact: corporations are not prohibited from owning "assault weapons." As a matter of fact, corporations can buy "machine guns" and "destructive devices" by paying an unconstitutional excise and receiving an unconstitutional license. So, your bank potentially has you outgunned. Your employer potentially has you outgunned. Oh, and the company reposessing your car after your banker and employer decide to illegally give your money to the federal government just based on an IRS agent request potentially has you outgunned). I can't believe the sheeple who look at a few tragic cases and then listen to those politically motivated to say "only trust people with power and money to own guns, you poor powerless people just kill kids." Like at Waco? The government that does their best to cover up the identity of the Ruby Ridge sniper so that he doesn't have to face punishment for at the very least civil wrongful death? The federal government that illegally extricates elian gonzalez with federal agents armed with automatic weapons, just because the president at the time says to do so? If that photo of elian being taken away at gunpoint didn't convince you we are a hairsbreadth away from a police state, nothing will.
So if you value liberty and freedom at all, if you think the Constitution means anything, arm yourself while you can as best you can. The 2nd amendment has been gutted, the 4th has been damaged beyond belief, the 8th is being attacked, the 9th is all but ignored, the 10th has been under systematic attack since the war between the states, and was basically repealed shortly before world war 2, and the 1st amendment is in grave danger, especially the last two provisions.
The Niemoller quote is not really apropos, you're essentially putting some sort of parallel between shoplifters and Communists, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Slippery slope you're on there.
That is pretty cool, just not as practical as it might be, and I'm guessing a bit expensive. Cool display units in small quantities are generally extremely bad deals, most good deals on project displays are pulls, obsolete or weird surplus/seconds lots, but you don't want to go selling that kind of stuff to people. ICs have interesting economics also, I recollect for some simplex repeater project I thought was cool way back in my active ham days an IC required (I think a 30 second digital recorder) could be sourced from Radio Shack for about $25 and was also available from a supplier for like $100 plus $7 shipping for 1-25. That wasn't the price break, if you sent a MO for $107 they'd send you however many you wanted up to 25. The real pricing didn't start until you wanted 501 or more.
One of the lessons I learned hard way is when you're trying to produce anything destined for retail is "if you didn't buy by the pallet you paid too much" and I'm starting to think "if you didn't buy a truckload you paid too much" is the better way to put it. Chips and boards is made in a whole 'nother hemisphere from where I is, and I know they don't float 'em across individually in pie tins. The guy I'm going to get the best deal from is the guy who unloaded the big-ass container ship in CA, and he's not going to pop open a tote for me when I call him and say "yeah, I'd like to buy 50 Morimoto GNR2010X's." He's going to call me unkind names and hang up. This seems like common sense, but then you read in your local paper about the guy going into businss selling custom lcd rearview mirrors for trucks, with his superclever wireless ccd camera that goes infrared at night, where he casually mentions they generally cost $1000 installed. Um, I don't own a trucking company, but the trucking industry cried like bitches when the gubbernment here told them they had to apply $150 (the industry said, which means it was probably really $20) worth of reflective tape to their trailers so that it was less likely that motorists would plow into them and DIE if a truck jackknifed in bad weather. If a trailer doesn't have $150 margin to spare over say, a year, to legitimately keep people from dying, what the hell makes you think there's $1000 of margin for you to mount some junk you bought from x10.com on there to keep them from bashing the loading dock as hard?
All that aside, my current short-term solutions for mp3s are an old thinkpad and patch cable on top of my Aiwa, which is also impractical and expensive, but at least I can read my email on it, and a chopped and hacked iopener that has mp3 duty when it's not the breakfast table/tv room xterm.
I just deleted several paragraphs describing the media appliance I've been working on because a) somebody will steal my ideas b) nobody helpful will read it anyway c) I might not be done before December as I was planning to be d) somebody else might come out with the same thing or better as I'm working on before me e) all of the above.
Let's just say mine has an ethernet port too, can do Ogg (you know kids, patented technology doesn't make it BAD as such), and doesn't require specific server software, but it works well with several things. It should start at about $60-80 (maybe less, $80 is worst case), is mainstream enough for average humans, but is quite hackable. I'm not your average vapor-spewing crackpot, either. I have reason to believe I have even less personality and am less likable, but I can do deals.
Actually, that's a funny story, too. I hit the preview button, and this fine Slash software here dumped me back to the front page, and in the course of copying/pasting what I had put in this fine "comment" form I think either I screwed up my URL or this fine Slash software did. Considering there's a brace of invalid characters in the url I'm more inclined to blame Slash (the software, not the Guns 'n' Roses guy) than myself. But then, just because Slash (n. gnr) has horrible bugs doesn't mean it works correctly.
I'm feeling generous, so here are some suggestions, free of charge:
Wow! Cool! How 1337! Impressive! Free cookie to whoever does this first! DSL! Dribbly willie!
/. before, it's still a stupid idea because you have to at the very least get equipment and an internet connection. If you can get both for $40 a month without paying for a dry pair and you'd prefer to roll your own, congratulations! you're stupid! Put a big chalkmark on your back, I have a kit for you to turn a Tivo into a Linux box without a keyboard or network interface when I meet you! Only $200!
Oh, but wait, everybody has known you can do this for years, it's even been mentioned on
Telcos that sell unprovisioned lines sell them with basically a gaurantee of continuty. You see, kids, the way some alarms work is something triggers it, and it completes a CIRCUIT to a central station, hence the term ALARM CIRCUIT. Circuit, like circular, like the file this article belongs in. Any signaling, *DSL, ISDN, touch tones, morse code or smoke signals that happen to work are a bonus. If they feel like putting a bandpass filter on your unprovisioned line, they'll do so, and your only real recourse is to stop paying for the line.
If you're calling your RBOC as Alarms Inc. and appear legit, you can buy dry pairs until you're bankrupt. Keep in mind that years ago businesses replaced their many strands of analog and low-bandwidth copper with fewer strands of digial and high-bandwidth fiber and copper, and all that telco copper doesn't just disappear, it degrades, slowly. Furthermore, they'll string twine and tin cans for you if you're willing to pay for it, the idea of the telco being "out" of anything is pretty absurd. Anyway, if you're calling as Joe Retard dba BlockStackers Intergastric and you've never dealt with the business office before you'll get "we're sold out of copper wires" and "we don't make those anymore" which if you believe makes you as big a mark as michael. If you start reading off a script ("duh, do youse have dry pairs? alarm circuits? local data lines?") you'll get more responses you deserve ("naw, all our pairs are wet. alarm circuits? what alarm circuits? we're out of local data lines, all we have left are long distance analog lines")
So to summarize, the article is stupid, about a concept that is old and stupid. Kudos, michael the slashdot editor.
What might be cool, or at least cooler, is if some enterprising souls cut the telco out of the loop completely, stringing wire house to house and using their DSL and 802.11 equipment to form a neighborhood network that could share an internet connection or two with NAT of some flavor. You could tack some functionality onto a dhcp server so you get assigned forwarded ports based on your assigned IP so everybody can still use their real/windows media players and set up Q3 servers. You could apply traffic shaping so bandwidth is efficiently distributed. Then, you could give it a clever name, like Dorknet or iTimewaste. Then, you could set up voice over IP so people wouldn't have to rely on local telco for telephony. Then, you could offer emergency services on the REAL number, 912.
912 operator: Dorknet 912, please state the nature of the emergency.
Ron Schlub: My house is on fire!
912 operator: Oh. Make sure you get your DSL and 802.11 equipment out of the house, we need it back if you're not using it.
...and...
912 operator: Dorknet 912, please state the nature of the emergency.
Joe Schmoe: I've cut my hand, I'm bleeding all over the place!
912 operator: Yeah, try not to bleed near the phone, those VoIP bridges are expensive.
So thanks again, michael. I'm looking forward to you posting two articles I'm working on: "Null Modem Networking" about using PPPD to connect two LINUX COMPUTERS without using ETHERNET! (from the creative-uses-for-db9-connectors dept) and "Look Ma, No Power Supply!" about using BATTERIES to power COMPUTERS without using power from an outlet. (from the no-more-alternating-current-for-me-thanks dept.) Oooh! Cookie for whoever figures out those posers first! Put on your thinking caps, you're in for some brain busting tonight!
Considering my job description has "programmer" in it, and I got paid on schedule last week, I'd say there's strong circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction. I should probably qualify "programmer" with "mostly Java," and then perhaps you'd feel even better about trying to make me sound foolish.
Anyway, at&t I believe had a product called cfront which according to my about 1989 C class was "a practical tool for coding in C++ because it actually generates C code" and I believe back in the day g++ did something similar except that it did two passes of preprocessing (preprocessing to something the C preprocessor would understand) instead of using C as an itermediary language. It's possible both were abominable to some degree, I never used either.
About that time, there were a few ANSI C compilers (and one interpreter) floating around the math department on floppies, all of which were copyright one guy (not the same guy), which leads me to the conclusion that writing an ANSI C compiler, at least for DOS, must be fairly easy, as I would define fairly easy. Not trivial, not really easy, but fairly easy. Getting bent out of shape about subjective statements is a little silly anyway.
Congratulations on cross-compiling something to DOS from a linux install of gcc, I guess that makes you a "programmer."
He already made an abortive attempt at a game machine (http://cmdrtaco.net/jubei/) and n'er athlon ner duron nor itanium will help it, gigahertz notwithstanding. Unless that was one of those editorial comments that wasn't in his voice but in the voice of the 'anonymous reader.'
/., and I can think of many reasons why one wouldn't want to. It appears now he doesn't read his own website. Which reinforces my believe the real CmdrTaco was replaced with the current doppleganger sometime in late 1999 early 2000.
McDrTaco has stated he doesn't read
I really liked his ideas about Texas Hold'em, Canasta and Honeymoon Bridge. My granddad used to say "do it according to Hoyle's or don't do it" and I understand now he was referring to the physics of the universe! Wow!
PHBs, CIOs, CTOs, and those sorts won't buy Bluetooth "less cable at the desktop" and short-range networking because it difficult to justify and not corporate-flashy. "Wireless Ethernet" sells (even if that isn't strictly what it is) because the CIOs and CTOs are familiar (they think) with the technology and can explain the advantages to the Head Suit In Charge (bring your laptop to meetings and not fumble with cat5, etc.) As with so many other things, the general-purpose standard will be adopted and will be subject to Procrustean adaptation to things it's not suited for, despite the existance of something 'better.'
Gee, that means you're rejecting things like
3 .6 ;sz=468x60
/. has done for you, you're blocking the whole reason it exists! Take heed, /. editors and management, maybe you should think about closing up the source of "Slash" and trying to make a living selling it, this guy's figured out a way to screw up your whole business model.
http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/N2613.osdn/B4166
How is Rob & friends going to pay for multiple servers and their salaries if you're going to go and deprive them of their revenue stream? You bastid, after all
I think I can distill the rant down as follows:
"Worst upgrade ever."
'Slashdot Journal System /boxes.
Form Error!
There was an error in your submission; please get a new form and try again.' and some 'Key 4353h43ewadsf error' and formatting crap with
"Welcome to Slashdot's new cluster" eh? Congratulations, I'm surprised it works at all. Thanks for using us peons for your alpha testing on a production server, we have nothing better to do. This is a shining example of the Peter Principle in action, not only have you folks risen to maximal incompetence editorially, but also code-wise. This is some shameful code, and shameful project management. You guys are selling advertising on this site, the least you could do is thoroughly test it first, and I don't mean "put it on a public server and hope our user peons find all the bugs in it." I think it was Linus who said something like "with enough eyes all bugs are shallow" but you'd need an infinate number of eyes to navigate the spaghetti of Perl that backs this thing. Larry Wall should modify the Artistic License specifically prohibiting whoever coded most of this from ever using Perl again. If this mess was deployed on a public website by any self-respecting company, basically everybody associated with the project would be fired in short order. Imagine Amazon pulling this sort of shit..."Please help us test our new server and beta storefront code, MoronHaven. Submit bugs to moron@moronhaven.tld" And then, the moronhaven project managers and coders saying shit like "But boss, we tested it. We had the beta server online for weeks, and nobody sent in any bug reports!" "But boss, ordering appliances is a new feature for Amazon, you shouldn't expect it to work at first!" "Thanks for trying to order something from Amazon! We realize this code is garbage and much of it doesn't work, but look at the feature list we wrote for it! Isn't it great! Click here to report a bug. Oops! You get an error when you click there, too, eh? Thank god we didn't code our email clients, those still work!"
Go ahead, mod this down, I never cared and never will. Assuming this even gets posted. I noticed if I hit 'preview' I tend to get an error when I try to post, so I won't hit preview. Rob&friends obviously never hit 'preview' or they would have noticed it in their exhaustive tests of this new "software." Of course, they only post comments when somebody points out they're taking heat (like the Anne What'shername troll) but obviously occasionally things hit close to home.
But then the only way to tell here and k5 apart would be correct spelling/grammar (at k5), original content (at k5) and first post posts (here). I think the
Oh yippie, "invalid form key" from submit button. Nice code you got here, kids.
...when the latest unregisted version opera browser does the same thing. I clicked through an OSDN (or whatever it's called nowadays) ad for webhosting that appeared on k5 (hurricane?) and Opera spit out a "check out company x" ad. I remember when Opera was the alternative browser, now it id's itself as IE5x and spits ads at you.
An activex Java applet engine is silly, but that's what MS wants, so they can co-opt part of the Java developer base. Sun's Java plugin uses NS API. Most of Java is open enough that you can run Java code and code in Java without using anything Sun. Cool high-profile things are happening with Java, and the only thing funny about that is how prejudiced programmers are language bigoting themselves out of jobs. Java is the best thing the open source movement has going for it, the only winner if Java loses is MS.
Java comes damn close to doing everything. That's one of its weaknesses, actually, Sun overwhelms you with solutions. Java is appropriate to application servers, embedded devices, GUI environments, parallel applications, distributed environments, and any combination of any or all of these. Lots of the hard work has been done for you (JFC, servlets, enterprise beans), and much of the OO extra rope to hang yourself (like MI and structs) from C++ have been removed or made safer. Not all PHBs are totally ignorant, there's reasons Java rubs many of them the right way, and most of those reasons can be quantified on the balance sheet.