...which is #52 here talked about JavaFX and its prospects for a bit. One of the guys had just gotten back from JavaOne and was talking about the vibe he was getting about JavaFX. Larry Ellison apparently commented favorably about it, so, whatever that means.
RIA Weekly is a good podcast - Michael Cote is a savvy guy and he always has good discussions with his cohosts/interviewees. AAAA+ would buy again.
Re:rock or a UAV
on
Wired for War
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> And yet it is only ever been a Western country that has used nukes on people.
Yup. That was before those taboos were developed, since the weapons had just been created.
A more troubling NBC usage (since it's more recent) is Iran vs Iraq, where chem weapons were a standard weapon. I bet you that's what folks in Israel are more concerned about too.
> No one wins in afghanistan. [... ] > The way you be nice to these people is to leave them the fuck alone > and let them stew in their own pathetic juices.
I think we're trying to choose the "least bad" option by fighting in Afghanistan. The problem is that Al-Qaeda will use that safe haven to regroup, buy (or be given) a nuke, and move it into Seattle via a container ship. Combat in Afghanistan isn't what anyone wants to do, but it's what we're doing to follow the threat.
Re:rock or a UAV
on
Wired for War
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> This was asked about nuclear weapons.
We (Western cultures) have developed strong taboos around certain weapons classes - e.g., nuclear/bio/chem. I think a troubling question is "what happens when we come up against an enemy that doesn't have these taboos?"
More on info warfare
on
Wired for War
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Colin Gray's Another Bloody Century talks about the information warfare side of things and concludes that despite the hype, it's not a huge deal yet. He also talks about the inevitability of space warfare. It's a good book and after reading it you can why he made it onto the Air Force reading list (albeit with another book, "Modern Strategy").
It must be strange times to be in the Air Force - I read somewhere that the USAF turned out more unmanned than manned aircraft last year. Seems like a sea-change for them; something along the same lines as converting from the "big bomber carrying nukes" role.
Actually, if you've got a long commute or like to jog and listen to stuff, the whole ETL archives are pretty good. Some of the ones featuring starry eyed (and heavily government subsidized) green-tech folks are kind of tedious, but, most are good stuff.
....that is, those autogenerated blogs on free sites that just contain a mishmash of keywords - or a bunch of stolen content. Those lie fallow because there's no real blogger behind them.
I used to blog technical stuff once or twice a week... now I twitter the little stuff and save blog entries for something more involved, like using setrlimit on Mac OS X. Hard to boil that down to 140 characters... unless it's "setrlimit apparently not working, but the server's running Linux, so, meh".
I wrote a Tetris game in Java...
on
Tetris Turns 25
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It was a great exercise, and among other things it taught me that just because I had skimmed through Game Programming Gems I didn't really know how to code up a game.
For more indepth reading...
on
SQL in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...try Stephane Faroult's The Art of SQL. I've read both that and his "Refactoring SQL Applications"; I think I got a little more out of the former.
But anyhow, in both books he has a distinct and lively writing style and includes lots of anecdotes. His style kind of reminds me of Betrand Meyer... for those who have read Meyer's 1000 page tome "Object Oriented Software Construction".
> if the enemy can thoroughly trounce the image and capability of the military on the web,
Another variant on this "lawfare", where you use the laws of a country against them. Boumediene v. Bush is prime fodder for this.
Along the lines of what you were saying, Robert Coram's book about Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Bud Day talks about how the North Vietnamese would show the POWs videos from back home to show that resistance was hopeless - e.g., John Kerry's testimony before the Senate. Same kind of thing... "mediafare" or something.
...it shows a breakdown of commits by language; interesting stuff. Of course, the sample is limited to the projects they're tracking, and the metric - number of commits - is affected by the source code mgmt tool's idioms. Still, nice AJAXy-ness.
> Hint: they're extremely expensive to manufactuer and not really portable.
Colin Gray talks about the possibility of a terrorist using a nuke in Another Bloody Century. He thought it was more likely that a terrorist would buy or be given a nuke to use rather than fabricating it due to the difficulties that you mention. He also says that nukes have a certain cultural taboo that make even a small detonation A Big Deal.
That's a great book; he talks about how cyber warfare being overhyped and also where he thinks space warfare will go. Interesting stuff.
...how about making those divs/viewports/things-containing-the-checkboxes a little bigger here? There are 30 checkboxes and you can only see two at a time; I feel like a Cylon!
> Now can you kindly get out of my search results?
So true! scribd is like applets used to be - when your browser freezes and no useful content comes up for 5 seconds, you know you've hit scribd and you quickly ctrl-w that tab.
Steve Ballmer just did a session at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar where he was asked about the Yahoo acquisition. He said something to the effect of "I still think it was a good idea". Who knows, maybe you're right...
...included a BSD-licensed open source utility I worked on - PMD. I recall getting some nice emails and phone calls from them saying they were packaging it up, and they sent in some bugfixes and new rules and whatnot. They bought a couple of copies of my PMD book, too, which was nice.
Generally, I thought they were a good example of how a software company could bundle up and enhance open source software, contribute back, and still turn a profit. Selling that part of the business for $58M, sounds like it worked out OK for them...
Slashdot Mirror
...which is #52 here talked about JavaFX and its prospects for a bit. One of the guys had just gotten back from JavaOne and was talking about the vibe he was getting about JavaFX. Larry Ellison apparently commented favorably about it, so, whatever that means.
RIA Weekly is a good podcast - Michael Cote is a savvy guy and he always has good discussions with his cohosts/interviewees. AAAA+ would buy again.
> And yet it is only ever been a Western country that has used nukes on people.
Yup. That was before those taboos were developed, since the weapons had just been created.
A more troubling NBC usage (since it's more recent) is Iran vs Iraq, where chem weapons were a standard weapon. I bet you that's what folks in Israel are more concerned about too.
> No one wins in afghanistan. [... ]
> The way you be nice to these people is to leave them the fuck alone
> and let them stew in their own pathetic juices.
I think we're trying to choose the "least bad" option by fighting in Afghanistan. The problem is that Al-Qaeda will use that safe haven to regroup, buy (or be given) a nuke, and move it into Seattle via a container ship. Combat in Afghanistan isn't what anyone wants to do, but it's what we're doing to follow the threat.
> This was asked about nuclear weapons.
We (Western cultures) have developed strong taboos around certain weapons classes - e.g., nuclear/bio/chem. I think a troubling question is "what happens when we come up against an enemy that doesn't have these taboos?"
Colin Gray's Another Bloody Century talks about the information warfare side of things and concludes that despite the hype, it's not a huge deal yet. He also talks about the inevitability of space warfare. It's a good book and after reading it you can why he made it onto the Air Force reading list (albeit with another book, "Modern Strategy").
It must be strange times to be in the Air Force - I read somewhere that the USAF turned out more unmanned than manned aircraft last year. Seems like a sea-change for them; something along the same lines as converting from the "big bomber carrying nukes" role.
...Mari Baker was on the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast a few months ago; she gave an pretty interesting talk.
Actually, if you've got a long commute or like to jog and listen to stuff, the whole ETL archives are pretty good. Some of the ones featuring starry eyed (and heavily government subsidized) green-tech folks are kind of tedious, but, most are good stuff.
....that is, those autogenerated blogs on free sites that just contain a mishmash of keywords - or a bunch of stolen content. Those lie fallow because there's no real blogger behind them.
I used to blog technical stuff once or twice a week... now I twitter the little stuff and save blog entries for something more involved, like using setrlimit on Mac OS X. Hard to boil that down to 140 characters... unless it's "setrlimit apparently not working, but the server's running Linux, so, meh".
...seven years ago; JNLP-enabled launcher and code and whatnot are here.
It was a great exercise, and among other things it taught me that just because I had skimmed through Game Programming Gems I didn't really know how to code up a game.
...try Stephane Faroult's The Art of SQL. I've read both that and his "Refactoring SQL Applications"; I think I got a little more out of the former.
But anyhow, in both books he has a distinct and lively writing style and includes lots of anecdotes. His style kind of reminds me of Betrand Meyer... for those who have read Meyer's 1000 page tome "Object Oriented Software Construction".
> They can't compete; cut the dead weight.
Surely you jest! Think of the jobs! It's bailout time.
Folks may be familiar with the open source EC2 "clone" (or whatever) Eucalyptus. The latest version even has Elastic Block Storage support. Is anyone using it in anger?
> my programming skills will go the way of cobol and fortran
Nah, those Perl skills will translate to Ruby, and those C skills to, well, anything. Take heart!
> if the enemy can thoroughly trounce the image and capability of the military on the web,
Another variant on this "lawfare", where you use the laws of a country against them. Boumediene v. Bush is prime fodder for this.
Along the lines of what you were saying, Robert Coram's book about Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Bud Day talks about how the North Vietnamese would show the POWs videos from back home to show that resistance was hopeless - e.g., John Kerry's testimony before the Senate. Same kind of thing... "mediafare" or something.
...it shows a breakdown of commits by language; interesting stuff. Of course, the sample is limited to the projects they're tracking, and the metric - number of commits - is affected by the source code mgmt tool's idioms. Still, nice AJAXy-ness.
> Hint: they're extremely expensive to manufactuer and not really portable.
Colin Gray talks about the possibility of a terrorist using a nuke in Another Bloody Century. He thought it was more likely that a terrorist would buy or be given a nuke to use rather than fabricating it due to the difficulties that you mention. He also says that nukes have a certain cultural taboo that make even a small detonation A Big Deal.
That's a great book; he talks about how cyber warfare being overhyped and also where he thinks space warfare will go. Interesting stuff.
...how about making those divs/viewports/things-containing-the-checkboxes a little bigger here? There are 30 checkboxes and you can only see two at a time; I feel like a Cylon!
...'FBI Most Wanted' Concentration. Pretty clever!
Bah!
> They're now pawns of the government, just like the banks.
No way man! Their CEOs will fight back to keep the company viable! Oh wait... to quote Pete Hoekstra:
Some numbers and more analysis are on Planet Gore.
> Now can you kindly get out of my search results?
So true! scribd is like applets used to be - when your browser freezes and no useful content comes up for 5 seconds, you know you've hit scribd and you quickly ctrl-w that tab.
...from the article:
So, make sure to strip out those TODOs before checking in the code. Bah!
> Yahoo
Steve Ballmer just did a session at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar where he was asked about the Yahoo acquisition. He said something to the effect of "I still think it was a good idea". Who knows, maybe you're right...
> Remember, when there's high inflation, the real value of debt goes down
Kind of hard on folks on a fixed income though - elderly folks, etc. Any savings that they scraped together gets eroded.
...included a BSD-licensed open source utility I worked on - PMD. I recall getting some nice emails and phone calls from them saying they were packaging it up, and they sent in some bugfixes and new rules and whatnot. They bought a couple of copies of my PMD book, too, which was nice.
Generally, I thought they were a good example of how a software company could bundle up and enhance open source software, contribute back, and still turn a profit. Selling that part of the business for $58M, sounds like it worked out OK for them...
> the financial crises was caused by just about anyone
Except for folks who bought within their means and paid their mortgages on time. Sadly, they will now end up paying for everything else.