I started using Maven about a month ago, just to see what all the fuss was about. There is a lot to it, and it can be overwhelming. But there is a good middle ground between roll-your-own-ant and Maven, and it's called Javagen Ant Modules (JAM) and it's here.
What I got from JAM that is useful to me:
dependency management automatically downloads library JARs for me during build.
common build.xml file and framework, so all my Maven projects have same basic structure.
Reduced learning curve so I could get going without learning everything about Maven all at once.
access to lots of cool Maven "plugins" like maven-eclipse that integrate the whole thing into my Eclipse3.0 setup.
Wow, that would be a cool project! Well, there are the beam bikes that have been ridden with success at the world championships in Kona, but I'm also talking about aero bars, which can be used in time trials, but not in road races. (Caveat: shorty bars that don't extend beyond the brake hoods can be used in UCI races.)
And even with the diamond, there is the all-important seat tube angle. Riding a 78 degree bike is a pretty different experience than a slack 72, and I'm not even sure if the former is legal in UCI races.
The bar is being raised and without money or sponsorship where does this leave the talented natural who can't meet the bar?
One one hand, the bar has always been raised. Rowing has been a popular sport for some time now. But what do you do if you are in the 99.9% of the world that cannot get access to a boathouse? You don't compete in rowing, that's what.
On the other hand, if you are able to meet the basic requirements to compete, talented amateurs rise up through the ranks and tend to get sponsorships. As an example, I started racing triathlon a few years ago, and used an old bike and cotton gear and no wetsuit. I couldn't shell out $1300 for race wheels, so that made me less competitive. I trained hard, read books, and starting finishing on the podium, and got ranked All-American. I read a book on how to get sponsorships, applied for a bunch of them, and got some for this season. One of those sponsors loans me $1300 race wheels for my big races in exchange for my being a billboard, so now I don't have to buy them. If I can go that little bit faster, I can win bigger races, get bigger sponsorships, and so on.
Incidentally, cycling deserves a lot of credit for sticking to its roots. The rules on bike frame geometry are strict and have kept much faster frame designs out of the peloton, mainly in deference to tradition, AFAIK.
A year and a half ago I proposed building a standalone server-type application using Java, and my client scoffed at me because "everyone knows Java is slow". It was 1.4.2 on rh8.0 running on standard dual xeons. It ran pretty fast, and then I profiled it. Repeatedly. I replaced some of the stock library routines with my own faster ones or ones I found on sourceforge, found the most monitor-contentious areas and tuned them, played around with different GC strategies for the given hardware, and ended up with something that is amazingly fast. Scaled to 400+ HTTP requests per second and over a thousand busy threads, per node. Some of the speed bumps came for free, like when NPTL threads came available in the 2.4 kernel.
I am starting on a new standalone server now doing something different, but I am going to stick with Java, and will be happy to see what 1.5 does for me.
But I have seen Java run slow before, and I will tell you this: in every instance it is due to someone writing some needlessly complicated J2EE application with layer upon bloaty layer of indirection. All the wishing in the world won't make one of those behemoths run fast, but it's not fair to blame Java. Maybe blame Sun for EJB's and their best practices, or blame BEA for selling such a pig.
I work for a very profitable meta search engine that processes up to 800 requests per second these days--- we just hit 50M searches per day on Monday. I use Sun1.4.2 across three dual xeons running Linux2.4.20smp, and have seen a single machine handle 330 requests per second, with over 1000 active threads all competing for synchro locks, and using most of a 1.5GB heap. 20ms response time, vmstat reporting 50% idle.
And in the near future, I can expect even better things without touching a line of code (upgrade to 2.4.21-hugemem kernel, 2.6.2 kernel, 1.5.0 JVM). So it's not too slow for me. It *was* a lot slower when I launched initially, but as traffic grew, I just kept profiling it to find the next bottleneck, and optimized accordingly.
No, they don't usually learn Hindi first. At least that's what I learned after spending two months there. First, don't lump Urdu in with Hindi--- they are gramatically equivalent but Urdu uses an Arabic script while Hindi uses Deva Nagari. Many poor people, which turns out to be a whole lot of India, learn only the language from their state. So the people cleaning your toilet in Maharashtra may not even speak Hindi because they only know Marathi. Their employers, who speak Hindi/Urdu but not Marathi, have a tough time talking to them. Further, India is made up of languages that are from entirely different language families. Dravidian languages like Tamil and Telugu aren't just funny accents on Indic languages like Hindi and Gujarathi and Punjabi. Lastly, the educated folks I spent time with in India spoke English at home and their children were learning it as a first language, with Hindi second, and Marathi third.
How far along has threading come on FreeBSD 5? MySQL suffers on FreeBSD due to this, and although I have heard promises of better things to come in 5, I haven't heard anything concrete.
Nothing beats a real bike, but a good indoor trainer gets close. Computrainer [http://www.computrainer.com] has 3D courses (real ones from TdF) integrated with CompuTrainer's feedback, and you can race your friends, etc. Lots of pro triathletes/cyclists swear by it. It's no toy.
>>>I'm happy with my 17" monitor, but what I first need is......a good chair, a table with enough space, paper and a good pen. The computer you can buy me a few months later when I finished my design.
No kidding! Oh, and can I have an ergo chair and a quiet place to plan my design? I'll take a P166 with 64MB of RAM so long as I can pick my own IDE. Only if I am forced to use bloated development tools will I need the fastest machine money can buy.
In high school when I interned for a few summers at the NSA, I marvelled at how many blind people were walking around the halls. I knew the DoD was an equal opportunity employer, but these guys had enough tags on their badges to indicate they were doing something far beyond quota-related employment. Then it dawned on me that they were hired not because they were disabled but because they were better able to listen than sighted people. In the land of the listeners, the blind man is king. I am not sure if they would have had to do any programming per se, but I imagine they would have had to operate some non-trivial hardware to do their jobs.
A San Francisco startup called Sonicity is building a business around this very topic. Check out some product information here.
I'm not vouching for them--- I just happened to read their tech papers a few weeks ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a nit, but everything is low weight in space warfare. Low mass on the other hand, might come in handy.
Even 0% would satisfy this poorly written boast, or maybe the developers wrote it that way on purpose....
What I got from JAM that is useful to me:
And even with the diamond, there is the all-important seat tube angle. Riding a 78 degree bike is a pretty different experience than a slack 72, and I'm not even sure if the former is legal in UCI races.
One one hand, the bar has always been raised. Rowing has been a popular sport for some time now. But what do you do if you are in the 99.9% of the world that cannot get access to a boathouse? You don't compete in rowing, that's what.
On the other hand, if you are able to meet the basic requirements to compete, talented amateurs rise up through the ranks and tend to get sponsorships. As an example, I started racing triathlon a few years ago, and used an old bike and cotton gear and no wetsuit. I couldn't shell out $1300 for race wheels, so that made me less competitive. I trained hard, read books, and starting finishing on the podium, and got ranked All-American. I read a book on how to get sponsorships, applied for a bunch of them, and got some for this season. One of those sponsors loans me $1300 race wheels for my big races in exchange for my being a billboard, so now I don't have to buy them. If I can go that little bit faster, I can win bigger races, get bigger sponsorships, and so on.
Incidentally, cycling deserves a lot of credit for sticking to its roots. The rules on bike frame geometry are strict and have kept much faster frame designs out of the peloton, mainly in deference to tradition, AFAIK.
I am starting on a new standalone server now doing something different, but I am going to stick with Java, and will be happy to see what 1.5 does for me.
But I have seen Java run slow before, and I will tell you this: in every instance it is due to someone writing some needlessly complicated J2EE application with layer upon bloaty layer of indirection. All the wishing in the world won't make one of those behemoths run fast, but it's not fair to blame Java. Maybe blame Sun for EJB's and their best practices, or blame BEA for selling such a pig.
Stuff I like in the Java world:
I work for a very profitable meta search engine that processes up to 800 requests per second these days--- we just hit 50M searches per day on Monday. I use Sun1.4.2 across three dual xeons running Linux2.4.20smp, and have seen a single machine handle 330 requests per second, with over 1000 active threads all competing for synchro locks, and using most of a 1.5GB heap. 20ms response time, vmstat reporting 50% idle.
And in the near future, I can expect even better things without touching a line of code (upgrade to 2.4.21-hugemem kernel, 2.6.2 kernel, 1.5.0 JVM). So it's not too slow for me. It *was* a lot slower when I launched initially, but as traffic grew, I just kept profiling it to find the next bottleneck, and optimized accordingly.
No, they don't usually learn Hindi first. At least that's what I learned after spending two months there. First, don't lump Urdu in with Hindi--- they are gramatically equivalent but Urdu uses an Arabic script while Hindi uses Deva Nagari. Many poor people, which turns out to be a whole lot of India, learn only the language from their state. So the people cleaning your toilet in Maharashtra may not even speak Hindi because they only know Marathi. Their employers, who speak Hindi/Urdu but not Marathi, have a tough time talking to them. Further, India is made up of languages that are from entirely different language families. Dravidian languages like Tamil and Telugu aren't just funny accents on Indic languages like Hindi and Gujarathi and Punjabi. Lastly, the educated folks I spent time with in India spoke English at home and their children were learning it as a first language, with Hindi second, and Marathi third.
Some PHP-based MVC frameworks are out there, too, with various levels of completeness/applicability:
Ambivalence [http://amb.sourceforge.net]
Phrame [http://phrame.sourceforge.net]
AloysCore [http://www.aloyscore.com/]
php.MVC [http://www.phpmvc.net/]
How far along has threading come on FreeBSD 5? MySQL suffers on FreeBSD due to this, and although I have heard promises of better things to come in 5, I haven't heard anything concrete.
Nothing beats a real bike, but a good indoor trainer gets close. Computrainer [http://www.computrainer.com] has 3D courses (real ones from TdF) integrated with CompuTrainer's feedback, and you can race your friends, etc. Lots of pro triathletes/cyclists swear by it. It's no toy.
>>>I'm happy with my 17" monitor, but what I first need is... ...a good chair, a table with enough space, paper and a good pen. The computer you can buy me a few months later when I finished my design.
No kidding! Oh, and can I have an ergo chair and a quiet place to plan my design? I'll take a P166 with 64MB of RAM so long as I can pick my own IDE. Only if I am forced to use bloated development tools will I need the fastest machine money can buy.
In high school when I interned for a few summers at the NSA, I marvelled at how many blind people were walking around the halls. I knew the DoD was an equal opportunity employer, but these guys had enough tags on their badges to indicate they were doing something far beyond quota-related employment. Then it dawned on me that they were hired not because they were disabled but because they were better able to listen than sighted people. In the land of the listeners, the blind man is king. I am not sure if they would have had to do any programming per se, but I imagine they would have had to operate some non-trivial hardware to do their jobs.
A San Francisco startup called Sonicity is building a business around this very topic. Check out some product information here. I'm not vouching for them--- I just happened to read their tech papers a few weeks ago.
anyone know how long one can play on these things before a recharge?
It took me a moment to figure out why none of the photographed cats would survive, and then the typo finally dawned on me.