Bah! These guys have been spamming mailing
lists all over creation with basically
this same spiel; it's an advertisement for
their product, which is nothing more nor
less than a standard OODMS. They write in terms
of "serializing change commands" as if this is a major win or sea change somehow, but it's not radically
different from plain old pointer-swizzling,
page mapping OO databases. The only reason
this is at all unusual is that, of course,
page-mapping can't be done in Java, so most
decently-performing OODMBSs up until now have
been for Smalltalk, C++, or other OO languages. Big. hairy, freaking deal.
I'm not saying it's not a worthwhile product -- might be nice for all I know -- but it's not some
kind of technical or intellectual revolution. It's
a minor technical achievement, of the level of
an undergraduate term project.
I've got a whole drawer full of them. It's
oddly satisfying to pry them off with a penknife
and toss them in the drawer, knowing you'll never need 'em.
>... I don't have or use any form of banking system. I live strictly by GREEN CASH ALONE and have nothing at all to do with any financial institute in any form.
Cool. If this gets out, I bet he'll have LOTS of friends who want to come over and play -- say, dig in the yard, play hide and seek in Dad's bedroom...
This is my favorite sentence from the article: And if he pulls it off, the limelight-shy inventor could remake cyberspace all over again.
That's rich. If Tim is so shy why is he a one-man buzzword factory?
Makefiles
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This story reminds me of the old saw that there
is only one Makefile; everyone edits it for their own projects. There is grain of truth in that.
>And if the methods are there because they have to be to implement an interface, but they return some "Not Yet Implemented" error or exception?
If you read the article you'll see that for this part of the testing they don't care at all what the methods do, only that they're there. Other tests would confirm the functionality.
But anyway, my original question was answered nicely by several of the respondents above: my scheme doesn't check for additions, only omissions, and furthermore in most languages it
doesn't really check for signatures, either, especially return types.
This is not a troll, but I'm struggling to try to understand why these guys had to work so hard to accomplish what they needed. By their own account, they were driven towards this because they wanted to write API conformance tests -- tests that pass if an API is implemented, regardless of whether it works or not. They wanted, I guess, to see a test pass for each API from the specification that was actually implemented, so they could compute a percentage.
While I can understand what they wanted to do, I guess I don't see why they didn't do this the much easier and (to me, anyway) more obvious way: you write code that uses the API, and if it compiles, then the API is implemented. You write one tiny test class for each API. You have each JUnit test run a compiler over one single class, this proofing each API. This isn't exactly rocket science: you have a directory full of probe-class source code, a single method that tries the compile, and then any number of TestCases that each try to compile one class and pass if they succeed. This is hard?
If you use the unpublished APIs to "javac," you could do this at lightning speed. Alternatively, you could just use a Java parser like the one that comes with ANTLR (since you don't actually need to generate any code) and do it even faster.
No, I'm not saying that at all. The
ambiguity in Blade Runner, left open to interpretation, makes the
story more interesting, because it's central to the story. In this case though, it doesn't matter what the answer is, and there's no way to tell what it is anyway, and you're not sure whether the author wants you to wonder about it or not. That's not interesting, that's just annoying. It is, as I said, bad writing.
As other folks have pointed out, this guy's writing is heavy on irrelevant details, and weak on character development (i.e., salient details.) One thing I never figured out on reading 0wnz0r3d (sp?) was
which of the two main characters were gay, if either was. It's not the most important detail, but it seems relevant to character development - yet I don't think it's answerable based on the text.
> Place a small bucket inside the toilet tank. Put a submersible pump in there, run the water to the CPU coolers, bring the water back and drain it over the bucket in the tank.
OK, this takes care of the terminal in my powder room. How about the rest of the network? Maybe I
could have a toilet installed in my office. Come
to think of it that's not such a bad idea...
When Sachs was a boy, kids could get their hands on basically anything. When I was a lad, things were
a bit more restrictive, but not much (this is thirty years ago or so.) But now, chemistry sets can't contain much of anything -- it's really sad. I'd like to buy one for my daughter when she's a bit older, but really, what's the point? We've
gotten so overprotective as a society that we've
lost something in the bargain.
I'm sure Wrox has plenty of books that suck, as any publisher does, but both of the ones that I own (Michael Kay's "XSLT Programmer's Reference," and the collaborative work "Professional Java Servlets 2.3") are first-rate, best-of-breed books. I wouldn't lump
them in with the "24 Hours" folks at all.
> Or pretty much any non-O'Reilly book.
Here I'm really going to argue with you. O'Reilly really used to be the cream of the crop, but they
peaked some time ago. They're publishing as much crap as crop these days. Meanwhile, stalwart Addison-Wesley and relative newcomer Manning Publications have been producing books of unimpeachable quality.
> What happens when within 5 minutes I can gain most any knowledge I desire? Well..it kinda breaks down the walls, that is what it does.
Uh, no. Within 5 minutes, you can google for any facts you desire. Knowledge takes work. Want to find a French dictionary? Easy. Want to speak French? Hard. There are many things beyond the basics that need to be taught rather than simply googled.
I absolutely see your point, and I'm definitely a free-speech advocate, but I'm also a somewhat old geezer who remembers the days before "convergence" was a buzzword. The fact that my work-related computing choices are tied up with the entertainment industry's policies at all, is
galling to me. There are days when I wish
they'd come up with a fool-proof, unbreakable way to keep commercial music and video inseparably
tied to special industry-approved hardware, and
then leave my computers the f2k alone.
You've got an excellent point. I don't disagree with you at all. Now come over and explain it to my wife -- she's ordering new living room furniture right after Christmas!
There's a very odd contrast between this post and the one at the top of the list about the perfect gift being a job. I've seen several incarnations of this "don't buy anything for a day" drive this year: this Christmas one, and another one dedicated to reducing consumer waste. Kids, if we don't buy anything, where are the jobs going to come from?
Does anyone remember a Quake 2 movie in which the protagonist has a bit of, uh, trouble readjusting to civilian life? Funny stuff. I'd love to see B. J. Blaskovicz mowing the lawn.
Everyone seems to be equating the release of the
app with the release of the source -- i.e., the
"What about vaporware" question in many posts. Isn't the ransom just for the source, not the app
itself? The ransom might take the form of a payment
for the app itself -- i.e., "If enough people buy
my app, I'll release the source under the GPL,"
vaguely like Id does with previous-generation games. This sounds like a nice idea. Most folks won't
pay cash money for a crappy app, so the ransom
model equates to "if the app is good enough for
people to want the source, I'll release it!"
Well, both. Realize that the classical equations of motion for a three-body problem -- i.e., the earth, moon, and sun -- can't be solved exactly in a closed form; you can only approximate them (either by simplification or by using discrete simulation.)
Now, a protein has a LOT more than three particles in it. Even if we take the vastly oversimplified approach of modeling it as a strand of amino-acid "pearls", then there are hundreds of bodies. Each amino acid is actually made up of a dozen or more atoms, and each atom consists of many electrons, protons, and neutrons. The interactions are complex: to a reasonable approximation, the large-scale forces look like classical electrostatic interactions, but there are definitely quantum contributions that, again, can only be approximated, not solved exactly.
Note that computations like what Folding@Home does are only approximations. The protein folding problem can't be solved exactly -- you can only model it, and your model is only as good as your scientific knowledge.
This is not a very good analogy. A (virtual) machine executes (byte)code. DNA is a set of instructions for creating proteins -- not a set of instructions for proteins to execute.*
Perhaps you might say DNA is code, and proteins are objects? I think DNA is like a C header file, really -- it specifies the structural information, but leaves out the mechanics, which come from physics.
In any event, the mechanisms by which DNA is used to create proteins are actually very well understood already. Understanding what proteins do after they're created -- i.e., fold up, catalyze chemical reations -- now that's another story. But that doesn't mean we don't understand how DNA is used to create them.
* Well, the purpose of some proteins is to transcribe DNA and thereby build other proteins, but that's not what most proteins do.
I've read articles about the technology behind these -- it's pretty amazing. The pictures were not "beamed" back to earth -- they were taken on film and the film parachuted back.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah! These guys have been spamming mailing lists all over creation with basically this same spiel; it's an advertisement for their product, which is nothing more nor less than a standard OODMS. They write in terms of "serializing change commands" as if this is a major win or sea change somehow, but it's not radically different from plain old pointer-swizzling, page mapping OO databases. The only reason this is at all unusual is that, of course, page-mapping can't be done in Java, so most decently-performing OODMBSs up until now have been for Smalltalk, C++, or other OO languages. Big. hairy, freaking deal.
I'm not saying it's not a worthwhile product -- might be nice for all I know -- but it's not some kind of technical or intellectual revolution. It's a minor technical achievement, of the level of an undergraduate term project.
Great idea! Parse out the URLs, plug 'em into some boilerplate, and automatically submit it as a story to Slashdot! They'll never try THAT again!
I've got a whole drawer full of them. It's oddly satisfying to pry them off with a penknife and toss them in the drawer, knowing you'll never need 'em.
Cool. If this gets out, I bet he'll have LOTS of friends who want to come over and play -- say, dig in the yard, play hide and seek in Dad's bedroom...
This is my favorite sentence from the article:
And if he pulls it off, the limelight-shy inventor could remake cyberspace all over again.
That's rich. If Tim is so shy why is he a one-man buzzword factory?
A modern-day analogy might be the line
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
that opens XSL stylesheets -- NOBODY ever types that by hand.
>And if the methods are there because they have to be to implement an interface, but they return some "Not Yet Implemented" error or exception?
If you read the article you'll see that for this part of the testing they don't care at all what the methods do, only that they're there. Other tests would confirm the functionality.
But anyway, my original question was answered nicely by several of the respondents above: my scheme doesn't check for additions, only omissions, and furthermore in most languages it doesn't really check for signatures, either, especially return types.
While I can understand what they wanted to do, I guess I don't see why they didn't do this the much easier and (to me, anyway) more obvious way: you write code that uses the API, and if it compiles, then the API is implemented. You write one tiny test class for each API. You have each JUnit test run a compiler over one single class, this proofing each API. This isn't exactly rocket science: you have a directory full of probe-class source code, a single method that tries the compile, and then any number of TestCases that each try to compile one class and pass if they succeed. This is hard?
If you use the unpublished APIs to "javac," you could do this at lightning speed. Alternatively, you could just use a Java parser like the one that comes with ANTLR (since you don't actually need to generate any code) and do it even faster.
No, I'm not saying that at all. The ambiguity in Blade Runner, left open to interpretation, makes the story more interesting, because it's central to the story. In this case though, it doesn't matter what the answer is, and there's no way to tell what it is anyway, and you're not sure whether the author wants you to wonder about it or not. That's not interesting, that's just annoying. It is, as I said, bad writing.
As other folks have pointed out, this guy's writing is heavy on irrelevant details, and weak on character development (i.e., salient details.) One thing I never figured out on reading 0wnz0r3d (sp?) was which of the two main characters were gay, if either was. It's not the most important detail, but it seems relevant to character development - yet I don't think it's answerable based on the text.
> Place a small bucket inside the toilet tank. Put a submersible pump in there, run the water to the CPU coolers, bring the water back and drain it over the bucket in the tank.
OK, this takes care of the terminal in my powder room. How about the rest of the network? Maybe I could have a toilet installed in my office. Come to think of it that's not such a bad idea...
Is it just me, or does the name of the web site make you less likely to want to read an article of this nature?
When Sachs was a boy, kids could get their hands on basically anything. When I was a lad, things were a bit more restrictive, but not much (this is thirty years ago or so.) But now, chemistry sets can't contain much of anything -- it's really sad. I'd like to buy one for my daughter when she's a bit older, but really, what's the point? We've gotten so overprotective as a society that we've lost something in the bargain.
I'm sure Wrox has plenty of books that suck, as any publisher does, but both of the ones that I own (Michael Kay's "XSLT Programmer's Reference," and the collaborative work "Professional Java Servlets 2.3") are first-rate, best-of-breed books. I wouldn't lump them in with the "24 Hours" folks at all.
> Or pretty much any non-O'Reilly book.
Here I'm really going to argue with you. O'Reilly really used to be the cream of the crop, but they peaked some time ago. They're publishing as much crap as crop these days. Meanwhile, stalwart Addison-Wesley and relative newcomer Manning Publications have been producing books of unimpeachable quality.
Uh, no. Within 5 minutes, you can google for any facts you desire. Knowledge takes work. Want to find a French dictionary? Easy. Want to speak French? Hard. There are many things beyond the basics that need to be taught rather than simply googled.
But I agree with your basic thesis.
I absolutely see your point, and I'm definitely a free-speech advocate, but I'm also a somewhat old geezer who remembers the days before "convergence" was a buzzword. The fact that my work-related computing choices are tied up with the entertainment industry's policies at all, is galling to me. There are days when I wish they'd come up with a fool-proof, unbreakable way to keep commercial music and video inseparably tied to special industry-approved hardware, and then leave my computers the f2k alone.
- Read a book!
- Go outside!
- Participate in democracy!
- Volunteer for charity!
This guys may be the best thing that's happened to western civilization since before Ed Sullivan sucked our collective brains out.You've got an excellent point. I don't disagree with you at all. Now come over and explain it to my wife -- she's ordering new living room furniture right after Christmas!
There's a very odd contrast between this post and the one at the top of the list about the perfect gift being a job. I've seen several incarnations of this "don't buy anything for a day" drive this year: this Christmas one, and another one dedicated to reducing consumer waste. Kids, if we don't buy anything, where are the jobs going to come from?
Does anyone remember a Quake 2 movie in which the protagonist has a bit of, uh, trouble readjusting to civilian life? Funny stuff. I'd love to see B. J. Blaskovicz mowing the lawn.
Everyone seems to be equating the release of the app with the release of the source -- i.e., the "What about vaporware" question in many posts. Isn't the ransom just for the source, not the app itself? The ransom might take the form of a payment for the app itself -- i.e., "If enough people buy my app, I'll release the source under the GPL," vaguely like Id does with previous-generation games. This sounds like a nice idea. Most folks won't pay cash money for a crappy app, so the ransom model equates to "if the app is good enough for people to want the source, I'll release it!"
Now, a protein has a LOT more than three particles in it. Even if we take the vastly oversimplified approach of modeling it as a strand of amino-acid "pearls", then there are hundreds of bodies. Each amino acid is actually made up of a dozen or more atoms, and each atom consists of many electrons, protons, and neutrons. The interactions are complex: to a reasonable approximation, the large-scale forces look like classical electrostatic interactions, but there are definitely quantum contributions that, again, can only be approximated, not solved exactly.
Note that computations like what Folding@Home does are only approximations. The protein folding problem can't be solved exactly -- you can only model it, and your model is only as good as your scientific knowledge.
Perhaps you might say DNA is code, and proteins are objects? I think DNA is like a C header file, really -- it specifies the structural information, but leaves out the mechanics, which come from physics.
In any event, the mechanisms by which DNA is used to create proteins are actually very well understood already. Understanding what proteins do after they're created -- i.e., fold up, catalyze chemical reations -- now that's another story. But that doesn't mean we don't understand how DNA is used to create them.
* Well, the purpose of some proteins is to transcribe DNA and thereby build other proteins, but that's not what most proteins do.
I've read articles about the technology behind these -- it's pretty amazing. The pictures were not "beamed" back to earth -- they were taken on film and the film parachuted back.