The billions of dollars of advertising that got managers and HR people to take Java classes because it was the way of the future.
Yes, anything thats made by a company and marketed is evil because we're all communist hippies who think all software should be free as in beer.
All the things that don't live up to their billing: AWT, Swing, keep trying.
I was never impressed with AWT or Swing, and therefore don't usually use Java for projects requiring a GUI, rather (as I think is most often the case) use Java mainly for websites. Given that this topic is about the use of an O-R mapping tool for Java, of which there are many (I personally prefer JDO-based tools), and which have little to do with GUIs, lets leave Java's Swing/AWT out of this.
Anyone else feel like the "write once run anywhere" philosophy just reduced java to the lowest common denominator of functionality?
I don't know where you're coming from here. Excluding swing which I'm not defending, I honestly don't have any idea how you can make such a statement about java.
Other languages popular here are popular because they bend to the programmers will. With Java it is the programmer who must bend.
How a programming language bends to someones will is beyond me sorry. In any case, the Java Community process is all about users requirements being implemented, and Java 1.5 addresses the major shortcomings I had always felt existed in the language, as do the O-R mapping tools such as the one this topics about address the shortcomings of EJBs. When exactly was the last time C/C++ bent to anybody's will in such ways?
Java is and has been all about marketing. Marketing isn't well liked here.
I answered this already. However, Java is clearly not _all_ about marketing. Personally, whenever I begin a new programming project, whatever kind it is, I look at what language to program in, and more and more end up choosing Java over C/C++/.NET/PHP/Perl, purely on the basis of which language and tools best fit my needs. Maybe my company uses Java due to this marketing, but I (when doing private projects) don't.
To me, java is like ms-windows. It is usable, but only after you go out and get someone else's add-ons that should have been included in the first place.
Like another poster noted, Java has been often accused of including too much, but that it includes not enough is a rather original argument.
Oh, and I hate java because it isn't LISP.
Sorry, but you're comparing apples and oranges here. LISP is adheres more to a completely different programming paradigm (functional programming) as opposed to Java/C/C++ and all the other OO languages. You can prefer one paradigm or the other but that doesn't make Java a bad language or worse than LISP or worthy of hate as you put it. I personally have used both Java and LISP but, being used to procedural/OO languages, never felt comfortable programming LISP.
This all begs the question - why wait until theres no alternative before coming up with the robot idea? If it saves money anyway, and reduces the need for the shuttle, surely they should have looking into this long ago as an alternative to humans on both hubble and the space station.
What you say is indeed true. However the bone we were picking was with the way the article represented the results - as if the technique not only allowed recordings to be made from old fragile discs without harming them, but also that it made better quality recordings than could be made using normal methods of reading the discs.
The article provided two WAVs - one taken from an original recording and one from their new method, and stated that the latter was better quality. This is the point we are disputing. I agree that the technology may still have merit given that it may allow reproduction from otherwise unreadable discs, however the quality of its readings will still have to be greatly improved if these reproductions are to have much value.
That would explain it nicely, however do you have any references for this?
I read the paper published by the researchers and it contained this, which seems to be saying they don't know the cause of the 'lame pulsing sound':
A background continuous noise (hiss) is present in the optical sample. The hiss is also slightly modulated by a signal at about 4 Hz. The origin of this is not completely known but it may be related to the particular differentiation algorithm, imaging fluctuations in the edge finding process, or to a latent physical feature of the record itself. A hiss signal is also present in the groove shape data before differentiation which may underlie the signal heard in the differentiated audio clip.
While the news release makes what they're doing sound impressive, theres little to be proud of inventing a complicated expensive method to create something worse than a simple computer program can achieve.
The 'lame pulsing background noise' or whatever you call it is really quite bad. I haven't tried putting the original through Cool Edit but it wouldn't surprise me it all if it does produce better results as the parent claims.
Perhaps the technique will be improved, but the article should have been a bit more honest about the current state of the technology - its claimed results really don't match what you hear when you listen to the wavs. Reminds me of some wavs Microsoft supplied demonstrating the superiority of wma to some other format. Despite being samples picked by Microsoft to suite wma, the wma's sounded much _worse_ than the other format's. But their marketing obviously realised the simple fact that 99% of the readers wouldn't bother listening to the samples, but just assume that since the samples were there, the corresponding write-up must be credible.
I was thinking more about the Indian/Russian scramjet missile which afaik already works and is faster than anything else in the world. Heres a few links I was able to quickly google:
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/India/Mis si le/ http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001 /12/1 2/140853.shtml
As I said in my message, I'm aware these aren't _vehicles_, however I've always thought of them as the state of the art in this area rather than what NASA is doing. Perhaps someone can explain how what NASA is doing is more difficult/advanced.
In any case, I just thought these things warranted mention (especially given the fact that nuclear armed missiles in the hands of a not-too-stable-state flying faster than anything the US has - and thus presumably rendering the planned missile system helpless - imho warrent attention).
I like this quote from the Mission Information - 'No vehicle has ever flown at hypersonic speeds powered by an air-breathing scramjet engine.'
Aren't they forgetting a few other countries here - India.... Russia? Didn't even Australia get something flying?
Maybe they haven't technically flown a _vehicle_, and maybe I'm slightly mistaken here, but I find it almost typical of NASA to so completely ignore these other countries who in this case actually got there first and are possibly (?) more advanced than NASA in this area.
Of course if your world view is limited to America and the occassional country it chooses to bomb, then the statement is in its way correct:).
You never considered the possibility that there might just be some basis for that belief other than Intel marketing? That while AMDs are not so bad now, older versions would for example melt if you removed the cooling (whereas Intels even back then would simply slow down).
Also, I suspect AMD possibly suffers from the poor reputations of previous Intel competitors who truly did have unreliable, inferior products. I for one had trouble for a while remembering which of AMD and Cyrix was the one to avoid, thus for the average consumer choosing the always reliable Intel makes some sense.
AMD still needs some time to build up the reputation Intel has. If they can continue building reliable products without cutting too many corners as they have done in the past to keep up in the race against the giant, they may eventually obtain such a reputation, but such things take time.
If you read the whole article, you'd see that they actually used both the infrared AND the red filter for the pictures. So they had their infrared for their science as well as the red for the photos to show the public. However they mucked up in producing the photos for the public, using the infrared instead of the red. Nothing to do with science vs public interest, rather a simple mistake.
Didn't we just have such a review?
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J2EE Design Patterns
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I remember commenting on some other topic regarding J2EE design patterns recently.
Like I sort of said that time, the design patterns are mostly just workarounds for a bad system. My advice is 'use JDO' and avoid all these problems (this is coming from someone working on both a JDO and a J2EE system right now).
I do in fact have one such EJB design patterns book, and its crazy the lengths they go to to make a broken system work....
- Its too costly to make calls to an EJB's individual get methods - make a value object for each EJB!
- Don't like making all these extra objects, and coping with the extra maintenance required, and writing all the methods to transfer values between the EJBs and these objects? Transfer the information using a hashmap!
- Don't like the loss of all the advantages of using OO programming languages and entity beans instead of SQL which comes from passing everything with hashmaps? etc etc
Enough to make any experienced _object oriented_ programmer pull their hair out. Of course, if you prefer using the buzzwords of 'EJB design patterns' to the practicality of JDO then go ahead, code an EJB application - enjoy developing in an environment where the deployment required to test any changes is 5 minutes plus for any decent sized EJB project, where your $10,000s EJB server can't work out how to handle basic relations in the right order, and where you have to code half of your queries in SQL anyway (i.e. see the 'Data Access Command beans' pattern which the book no doubt has) as the system is so slow and not powerful enough.
If Java is 'useless for complex applications' without EJB, then I'd say Java is pretty much useless based on my experiences with EJB. Luckily however, theres also a thing called JDO which does what EJBs should do, but a lot better and simpler.
To answer those that say C# is no better than Java, I'd personally choose developing a GUI with C# + Visual Studio over Swing any day. C#'s XML handling I also find a lot nicer that any of the DOM/JAXB etc alternatives available with Java. And C#s auto-boxing and unboxing also relieves some Java-annoyance. Theres three rather improvements which have impressed me, but there are also others:).
As a language I find C# has a few such nice improvements on Java with very few drawbacks. This has to be of course balanced with the fact that Java is a lot more mature (i.e. theres a lot more tools out there that use Java) and is not Microsoft controlled.
Also, look out for future versions of both languages. Java 1.5 is including some really nice improvements (i.e. generics for one), as is the next.NET version. Nothing wrong with a bit of choice and competition:).
Read the other replies to parent's comment - the explanation is not as simple as this poster assumes. All of the other articles in the given issue are also paid content, however are still listed under the given issue rather than having been 'disappeared'.
Its been well explained in many other comments that the article wasn't simply innocently removed due to its age, or removed to a paid area of the website, for the simple reason that all of the other articles in the given issue are still shown (all requiring payment to read the full articles, however they are listed and the opening paragraphs are shown).
However this particular article has been completely removed from all record on the Time website. The only rational explanation is that this is a deliberate attempt to pretend it never existed. Thats not a conspiracy theory, just common sense.
Its also got nothing to do with the copyright holder's rights - sure they have the 'right' to remove their own article from their own website, thats not whats under debate.
Also if you think, as you assert so readily, that the US media is not censored/controlled in any way, then whats your explanation for what happened here? Most posters aren't claiming this removal must be due to direct governmental intervention - that would be a conspiracy theory - however at some level this story has clearly been censored. Even if the censorship has been done for purely financial reasons, it still amounts to censorship.
I've also done one Struts app, however a rather large one with many complex dynamic forms. I found Struts 1.0 required numerous horrible hacks to work with such things, and if I were to go back now I would most definitely use struts less if at all.
Struts 1.1 tries to solve some of its problems but generally fails.
Let me just mention one as an example - you have to manually write a form bean for every form/form-set. As this is really annoying (I personally coded an automatic form-bean class generator to avoid this manual repitition). Struts 1.1 attempts to 'solve' this problem by allowing 'dynamic' xml-defined form beans. However, these lose the value of compile-time checking, thus despite still requiring additional work do little more than the request object for 90% of use cases. Neither of these form beans handle 'dynamic' forms (i.e. one which has say n-checkboxes, were n is defined by some session variable).
I also found using Struts for layout horrible when forms got complex (issues when mixing template tags with JSP). Given that Struts only makes sense on large, complex projects (given its huge overhead and learning curve), and that as soon as the forms/project get complex its found to be lacking, I find it hard to imagine many scenarios where it makes sense.
To summarise, I found Struts somewhat like J2EE - trys but ultimately fails to provide much needed functionality (I agree fully with the need to get away from spaghetti JSP - theres no reason writing websites should be significantly different and harder (as it currently is) than writing console apps from the developers perspective).
Struts doesn't perhaps fail as miserably as J2EE - whereas your post mentions if you don't use the struts framework you will end inventing one yourself, poorly, and I partly agree, I know from personal experience that many of the J2EE-like solutions I wrote before learning J2EE were in many ways superior in design to J2EE (yes I know this sounds arrogant, but anyone with experience in a large J2EE project knows that EJBs fail in virtually all their goals -> the 'patterns' such as mentioned in the reviewed book are workarounds which lose pretty much all the advantages the EJB were supposed to provide in the first place). Obviously my hackups lacked the industrial strength, robustness, transaction control etc of J2EE, however the architechtural design was good, and theres no reason J2EE shouldn't have been designed better.
Re:Is Microsoft really behind .NET?
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Mono 2.8 Released
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· Score: 1
Microsoft failed to put.NET in WinXP SP1 even though.NET was at that stage already version 1.0 (or even 1.1 - I'm not sure).
I also have very similar concerns about how much Microsoft is behind some aspects of.NET. Consider that they were planning calling their next version of Windows.NET, but dropped this naming, partly because everyone is so confused as to what.NET is.
Why I think this war is a bad idea
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
Heres an essay from my website regarding why I do not believe this war is a good idea - see the website for facts backing up the essay, plus a more viewer friendly version of the argument -
1. Such a war can only lead to an increase in terrorism. The Iraqis, arabs and muslims around the world will see such a war not only as a war on Islam, but also for what it largely is about - an imperialistic grab for oil. Anyone doubting this need only consider Iraq's history. The CIA played a hand in overthrowing the government in Iraq in 1963 which led to Saddam's party and thus Saddam himself coming to power. The reason was that the government had moved to nationalise oil (exactly the same thing also happened in Iran). Going back further also gives a long history of the colonial power Britain treating Iraq atrociously in order to control their oil.
Anyone still doubting that oil is a motive behind the war need only consider the Bush Administration's deep ties with the oil industry, read about the English and US oil companies already lobbying over who gets to drill the Iraqi oil (Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world), read the report submitted to Dick Cheney suggesting the use of military force in Iraq because the US needs the oil, or consider that a result of the war in Afghanistan was the US finally getting to build a pipeline through the country, or that high oil prices are currently threatening the US economy and could be reliably kept significantly lower if the US were to control Iraq's oil.
2. There are no proven links between Saddam and the Al-Qaeda. The best intelligence agencies (those of the US and Britain) in the world have been working flat out to try and find one, yet both reported no link (despite this fact, both Bush and Blair repeatedly cite information discredited by their own intelligence agencies as evidence of a link - if they are so convinced of the case for war they shouldn't need to lie in presenting it). British intelligence reports that even the possibility of a substantial link is unlikely, given that Osama is in ideological conflict with Saddam (in a recent tape Osama termed Saddam and his regime 'infidels').
3. Before the UN sanctions Saddam had created a country with the one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East. At least for his own people he had thus done a better job than most other Middle Eastern leaders, and now we're supposed to be saving his people from him? I'm not saying Saddam is all good, far from it, but he is also not the evil tyrant Bush depicts him to be (i.e. he did not gas his own people as Bush repeatedly claims).
Worth also noting is that the reason an estimated 5000-6000 children die due to starvation and lack of water and medication in Iraq every week is not Saddam or even solely the UN sanctions, but the fact that the US and UK have blocked the efforts of the oil-for-food program. The two successive UN leaders of the oil-for-food program resigned due to this fact, saying that Saddam had done his best to provide his people with food, and calling what the US and UK were doing 'genocide'. If the US and UK have pursued a genocidal policy at the cost of 1.5 million Iraqi lives over the past 10 years, can we believe their claim to now be taking war to the people of Iraq for their own good?
4. The threat that Iraq poses to us is tiny. Iraq probably still has some 'weapons of mass destruction' of course, but an insignificant amount which pales in comparison to that of many other countries (including of course the US and Britain, but also less stable places such as Syria and the nuclear states of North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel).
Saddam has never been a threat to or threatened the US. This brings into question not only the motives for the war but also whether there is any right by international law to initiate one. Saddam's army was pathetic in the Gulf War and is much weaker now. Even CIA Director George Tenet beli
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
There will be civilian casualties, but not many, as they are bad PR.
I am against the war, but not because of the civilian casualties. The UN sanctions have killed 1.5 million Iraqis - if the war kills a few thousand more but puts a stop to the sanctions that would be justifiable.
Heres an essay from my website regarding why I do not believe this war is a good idea - see the website for facts backing up the essay, plus a more viewer friendly version of the argument -
1. Such a war can only lead to an increase in terrorism. The Iraqis, arabs and muslims around the world will see such a war not only as a war on Islam, but also for what it largely is about - an imperialistic grab for oil. Anyone doubting this need only consider Iraq's history. The CIA played a hand in overthrowing the government in Iraq in 1963 which led to Saddam's party and thus Saddam himself coming to power. The reason was that the government had moved to nationalise oil (exactly the same thing also happened in Iran). Going back further also gives a long history of the colonial power Britain treating Iraq atrociously in order to control their oil.
Anyone still doubting that oil is a motive behind the war need only consider the Bush Administration's deep ties with the oil industry, read about the English and US oil companies already lobbying over who gets to drill the Iraqi oil (Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world), read the report submitted to Dick Cheney suggesting the use of military force in Iraq because the US needs the oil, or consider that a result of the war in Afghanistan was the US finally getting to build a pipeline through the country, or that high oil prices are currently threatening the US economy and could be reliably kept significantly lower if the US were to control Iraq's oil.
2. There are no proven links between Saddam and the Al-Qaeda. The best intelligence agencies (those of the US and Britain) in the world have been working flat out to try and find one, yet both reported no link (despite this fact, both Bush and Blair repeatedly cite information discredited by their own intelligence agencies as evidence of a link - if they are so convinced of the case for war they shouldn't need to lie in presenting it). British intelligence reports that even the possibility of a substantial link is unlikely, given that Osama is in ideological conflict with Saddam (in a recent tape Osama termed Saddam and his regime 'infidels').
3. Before the UN sanctions Saddam had created a country with the one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East. At least for his own people he had thus done a better job than most other Middle Eastern leaders, and now we're supposed to be saving his people from him? I'm not saying Saddam is all good, far from it, but he is also not the evil tyrant Bush depicts him to be (i.e. he did not gas his own people as Bush repeatedly claims).
Worth also noting is that the reason an estimated 5000-6000 children die due to starvation and lack of water and medication in Iraq every week is not Saddam or even solely the UN sanctions, but the fact that the US and UK have blocked the efforts of the oil-for-food program. The two successive UN leaders of the oil-for-food program resigned due to this fact, saying that Saddam had done his best to provide his people with food, and calling what the US and UK were doing 'genocide'. If the US and UK have pursued a genocidal policy at the cost of 1.5 million Iraqi lives over the past 10 years, can we believe their claim to now be taking war to the people of Iraq for their own good?
4. The threat that Iraq poses to us is tiny. Iraq probably still has some 'weapons of mass destruction' of course, but an insignificant amount which pales in comparison to that of many other countries (including of course the US and Britain, but also less stable places such as Syria and the nuclear states of North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel).
I was considering reading the book you mention, however looking at the reviews on amazon.com, I saw this -
What's even more annoying, however, is the "Guide"'s cheerleading of the International Monetary Fund. Just about every major public intellectual -- including Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Joseph Stiglitz, Milton Friedman, men who come from all sides of the globalization debate -- find the IMF a disastrous organization, one that should be radically reformed if not shut down completely. Many critics of the IMF accuse the organization of "root canal economics" -- especially with its advocacy of high interest rates and tax increases during harsh downturns. Critics also point out that the IMF is obsessed with balanced budgets at all costs which, time and time again, have deepened and prolonged economic recovery in many Third World nations. Yet, the "Guide" blindly praises IMF policy, never once mentioning its failures or shortcomings, and this diminishes the book's central argument -- that all of Latin America's problems are self-inflicted.
Also, and perhaps more significant, the book totally skips over covert CIA operations in Central and South America. There is barely any mention of the 1972 coup against President Allende of Chile, nor is there any reference to the Iran-Contra scandal. And the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala is barely mentioned in passing, as if undermining a country's democracy and leading it into a 36-year civil war is some sort of minor event. As well, the "Guide" says nothing about America's endless war on drugs -- certainly a relevant and controversial issue.
These gaps, combined with the erroneous historical facts, deflate the book as a whole. The authors, it seems, have consciously avoided certain topics -- tough topics -- just so their thesis remains perfectly in tact. As a result, the book lacks fairness, balance and objectivity.
Now, any book trying to put the blame for Latin America's woes on the Latin Americans as opposed to outside meddling, which completely fails to address the main cases of outside meddling, cannot claim to have seriously addressed the question. So I don't honestly see much point in reading such a book.
I don't mind reading books with a point of view / agenda, however a book which just completely ignores the main arguments/evidence against its own thesis is a waste of time (please correct me if the review is totally wrong).
That said, I think the thesis might have some truth, however the US's policy of exploitation over the past century is nevertheless largely to blame. The sad fact of L.A. is that the people have never been given the chance to show what they could achieve due to US meddling. It is hypocritical and unfair to blame a people for their problems when so many of their attempts to improve their situation have been thwarted by us.
Talk about propaganda. The lie is put to it by Che Guevarra who wrote about how strict the Arbenz dictatorship was, only some kinds of Stalinists were allowed (and not Che's which is why Che complained).
i thought i'd take a bit of time to read guevara's book 'back on the road' - see if i could confirm what you say.
however, what i find is a guevara who is in guatemala at the time of arbenz' overthrow, who however is still quite non-political, and certainly by no measure a hardened marxist/communist. these views come much later, and are in fact largely shaped by resentment at the us he feels after the us overthrow of arbenz.
i also read him claiming that the population is united with arbenz against the militia which the us creates to overthrow him. he also has no problem understanding that the us is only in there to support the united fruit company rather than any idealogical ideals or to fight the russians or any other such rubbish.
che's general opinion is of guatemalas hopes being crushed by the us, an opinion well born out by the historical truth commission in 99 - 'A U.N. sponsored truth commission report has concluded that the United States gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayan people during the most brutal armed conflict in Latin America history - Guatemala's 36-year civil war [1960-1996]. The report of the independent Historical Clarification Commission... contradicts years of official denial about the torture, kidnapping and execution of thousands of civilians in a war that the commission estimates killed more than 200,000 Guatemalans.' reports the New York Times.
in short, i hardly see che guevara as someone you can use to support your claims.
given what the following us advisor said at the time, i cannot understand how you manage to so rewrite history to see arbenz as evil, and the US and dictators before and after him as relatively good. the US went in there to defend business interests and in doing so destroyed a country - i don't see how you can support any other reading of the history (but i AM willing to consider your views if you can back them up)...
Charles R. Burrows of the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs writes 'Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail.'
why is no us-media reporting on iran's attempts to sue the us for its support of iraq during the iran-iraq war (in particular, its supply of chemical/biological weapons, and its destruction of iranian oil rigs)?
or why the cnn (which another post saw fit to describe as 'leftist'???) saw fit to censor journalists during the gulf and afghanistan wars, reminding them to only provide pro-us reportage?
or as an example of british media - the major newspaper guardian published a front page story called 'blood on his hands' with a picture of tony blair with blood on his hands, relating to blair's support of the war and also the us+uk responsibility in the deaths of 1.5 million iraqis due to lack of water,food,medication to date (see this link for information on exactly how heavy the responsibility rests on us+uk shoulders rather than saddam's). find me a major us newspaper with a picture of bush with blood on his hands as front page story, or something similar. or any story from aclaimed journalist john pilger for that matter.
or why the cnn+times was forced to withdraw a story of nerve gas usage in vietnam by the us miliary, an unprecedented case of media censorship??
or how many major us newspapers interested themselves in the reports on bush's election stealing? a bbc link is bbc article but i haven't found anything in a major us paper on this.
how about the investigations into pre-sept 11 shares sales, or the alleged meeting between bin laden and the cia shortly before sept 11? all major stories in europe, obviously not important enough to warrant mention in the free-press of the us. or fox news pulling (without explanation) of its revelation into the huge israeli spy ring in the us, which was not covered by a single other paper?
look i'm not sure what to say to all that. let me just say that i've read a fair bit and researched a fair bit about the events in these countries, and the stuff you're saying doesn't quite fit anything i've read.
now, i'm not saying you're wrong. but i'd appreciate if you could provide some form of references to back up these claims, as i really find them rather extraordinary.
ignoring the confusion of russian's / soviets with communists in general, the main news to me is your attribution of everything to communists, i.e. 'soviets' attacking various countries, castro creating the sandinistras. i would be interested in more information regarding this stuff.
pretty much everything i've read views the russians as having virtually no influence in the affairs of these countries - any leftist leaning groups in the area being products of the countries themselves and having little or no affiliation with the ussr or even cuba (typically only making contact with the ussr after the usa sanctions them etc and they are forced to turn to someone else for help, however the role of the ussr in these cases being very secondary).
also, the idea of allende enforcing his rule with storm-troopers from germany sounds interesting. can you provide me with more information on that? i find it rather surprising given that allende only came along in the 70s, a wee while after the time of ww-ii and all that.
btw, i don't mean to sound critical. its just what you say is all rather strange and thus i'd be really interested to see more information if you can provide it.
sounds like you've got a pretty realist view there. sad but true. if you're right about chavez (and you're in a better position to judge) then thats a pity. i hope the situation can improve at least somewhat.
Slashdot Mirror
The billions of dollars of advertising that got managers and HR people to take Java classes because it was the way of the future.
Yes, anything thats made by a company and marketed is evil because we're all communist hippies who think all software should be free as in beer.
All the things that don't live up to their billing: AWT, Swing, keep trying.
I was never impressed with AWT or Swing, and therefore don't usually use Java for projects requiring a GUI, rather (as I think is most often the case) use Java mainly for websites. Given that this topic is about the use of an O-R mapping tool for Java, of which there are many (I personally prefer JDO-based tools), and which have little to do with GUIs, lets leave Java's Swing/AWT out of this.
Anyone else feel like the "write once run anywhere" philosophy just reduced java to the lowest common denominator of functionality?
I don't know where you're coming from here. Excluding swing which I'm not defending, I honestly don't have any idea how you can make such a statement about java.
Other languages popular here are popular because they bend to the programmers will. With Java it is the programmer who must bend.
How a programming language bends to someones will is beyond me sorry. In any case, the Java Community process is all about users requirements being implemented, and Java 1.5 addresses the major shortcomings I had always felt existed in the language, as do the O-R mapping tools such as the one this topics about address the shortcomings of EJBs. When exactly was the last time C/C++ bent to anybody's will in such ways?
Java is and has been all about marketing. Marketing isn't well liked here.
I answered this already. However, Java is clearly not _all_ about marketing. Personally, whenever I begin a new programming project, whatever kind it is, I look at what language to program in, and more and more end up choosing Java over C/C++/.NET/PHP/Perl, purely on the basis of which language and tools best fit my needs. Maybe my company uses Java due to this marketing, but I (when doing private projects) don't.
To me, java is like ms-windows. It is usable, but only after you go out and get someone else's add-ons that should have been included in the first place.
Like another poster noted, Java has been often accused of including too much, but that it includes not enough is a rather original argument.
Oh, and I hate java because it isn't LISP.
Sorry, but you're comparing apples and oranges here. LISP is adheres more to a completely different programming paradigm (functional programming) as opposed to Java/C/C++ and all the other OO languages. You can prefer one paradigm or the other but that doesn't make Java a bad language or worse than LISP or worthy of hate as you put it. I personally have used both Java and LISP but, being used to procedural/OO languages, never felt comfortable programming LISP.
This all begs the question - why wait until theres no alternative before coming up with the robot idea? If it saves money anyway, and reduces the need for the shuttle, surely they should have looking into this long ago as an alternative to humans on both hubble and the space station.
What you say is indeed true. However the bone we were picking was with the way the article represented the results - as if the technique not only allowed recordings to be made from old fragile discs without harming them, but also that it made better quality recordings than could be made using normal methods of reading the discs.
The article provided two WAVs - one taken from an original recording and one from their new method, and stated that the latter was better quality. This is the point we are disputing. I agree that the technology may still have merit given that it may allow reproduction from otherwise unreadable discs, however the quality of its readings will still have to be greatly improved if these reproductions are to have much value.
Heres the link to the PDF and some more samples they provide:
http://www-cdf.lbl.gov/%7Eav/
I read the paper published by the researchers and it contained this, which seems to be saying they don't know the cause of the 'lame pulsing sound':
A background continuous noise (hiss) is present in the optical sample. The hiss is also slightly modulated by a signal at about 4 Hz. The origin of this is not completely known but it may be related to the particular differentiation algorithm, imaging fluctuations in the edge finding process, or to a latent physical feature of the record itself. A hiss signal is also present in the groove shape data before differentiation which may underlie the signal heard in the differentiated audio clip.
While the news release makes what they're doing sound impressive, theres little to be proud of inventing a complicated expensive method to create something worse than a simple computer program can achieve.
The 'lame pulsing background noise' or whatever you call it is really quite bad. I haven't tried putting the original through Cool Edit but it wouldn't surprise me it all if it does produce better results as the parent claims.
Perhaps the technique will be improved, but the article should have been a bit more honest about the current state of the technology - its claimed results really don't match what you hear when you listen to the wavs. Reminds me of some wavs Microsoft supplied demonstrating the superiority of wma to some other format. Despite being samples picked by Microsoft to suite wma, the wma's sounded much _worse_ than the other format's. But their marketing obviously realised the simple fact that 99% of the readers wouldn't bother listening to the samples, but just assume that since the samples were there, the corresponding write-up must be credible.
I was thinking more about the Indian/Russian scramjet missile which afaik already works and is faster than anything else in the world. Heres a few links I was able to quickly google:
s si le/1 /12/1 2/140853.shtml
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/India/Mi
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/200
As I said in my message, I'm aware these aren't _vehicles_, however I've always thought of them as the state of the art in this area rather than what NASA is doing. Perhaps someone can explain how what NASA is doing is more difficult/advanced.
In any case, I just thought these things warranted mention (especially given the fact that nuclear armed missiles in the hands of a not-too-stable-state flying faster than anything the US has - and thus presumably rendering the planned missile system helpless - imho warrent attention).
I like this quote from the Mission Information - 'No vehicle has ever flown at hypersonic speeds powered by an air-breathing scramjet engine.'
.... Russia? Didn't even Australia get something flying?
:).
Aren't they forgetting a few other countries here - India
Maybe they haven't technically flown a _vehicle_, and maybe I'm slightly mistaken here, but I find it almost typical of NASA to so completely ignore these other countries who in this case actually got there first and are possibly (?) more advanced than NASA in this area.
Of course if your world view is limited to America and the occassional country it chooses to bomb, then the statement is in its way correct
You never considered the possibility that there might just be some basis for that belief other than Intel marketing? That while AMDs are not so bad now, older versions would for example melt if you removed the cooling (whereas Intels even back then would simply slow down).
Also, I suspect AMD possibly suffers from the poor reputations of previous Intel competitors who truly did have unreliable, inferior products. I for one had trouble for a while remembering which of AMD and Cyrix was the one to avoid, thus for the average consumer choosing the always reliable Intel makes some sense.
AMD still needs some time to build up the reputation Intel has. If they can continue building reliable products without cutting too many corners as they have done in the past to keep up in the race against the giant, they may eventually obtain such a reputation, but such things take time.
If you read the whole article, you'd see that they actually used both the infrared AND the red filter for the pictures. So they had their infrared for their science as well as the red for the photos to show the public. However they mucked up in producing the photos for the public, using the infrared instead of the red. Nothing to do with science vs public interest, rather a simple mistake.
I remember commenting on some other topic regarding J2EE design patterns recently.
....
Like I sort of said that time, the design patterns are mostly just workarounds for a bad system. My advice is 'use JDO' and avoid all these problems (this is coming from someone working on both a JDO and a J2EE system right now).
I do in fact have one such EJB design patterns book, and its crazy the lengths they go to to make a broken system work
- Its too costly to make calls to an EJB's individual get methods - make a value object for each EJB!
- Don't like making all these extra objects, and coping with the extra maintenance required, and writing all the methods to transfer values between the EJBs and these objects? Transfer the information using a hashmap!
- Don't like the loss of all the advantages of using OO programming languages and entity beans instead of SQL which comes from passing everything with hashmaps? etc etc
Enough to make any experienced _object oriented_ programmer pull their hair out. Of course, if you prefer using the buzzwords of 'EJB design patterns' to the practicality of JDO then go ahead, code an EJB application - enjoy developing in an environment where the deployment required to test any changes is 5 minutes plus for any decent sized EJB project, where your $10,000s EJB server can't work out how to handle basic relations in the right order, and where you have to code half of your queries in SQL anyway (i.e. see the 'Data Access Command beans' pattern which the book no doubt has) as the system is so slow and not powerful enough.
If Java is 'useless for complex applications' without EJB, then I'd say Java is pretty much useless based on my experiences with EJB. Luckily however, theres also a thing called JDO which does what EJBs should do, but a lot better and simpler.
:).
.NET version. Nothing wrong with a bit of choice and competition :).
To answer those that say C# is no better than Java, I'd personally choose developing a GUI with C# + Visual Studio over Swing any day. C#'s XML handling I also find a lot nicer that any of the DOM/JAXB etc alternatives available with Java. And C#s auto-boxing and unboxing also relieves some Java-annoyance. Theres three rather improvements which have impressed me, but there are also others
As a language I find C# has a few such nice improvements on Java with very few drawbacks. This has to be of course balanced with the fact that Java is a lot more mature (i.e. theres a lot more tools out there that use Java) and is not Microsoft controlled.
Also, look out for future versions of both languages. Java 1.5 is including some really nice improvements (i.e. generics for one), as is the next
Read the other replies to parent's comment - the explanation is not as simple as this poster assumes. All of the other articles in the given issue are also paid content, however are still listed under the given issue rather than having been 'disappeared'.
Its been well explained in many other comments that the article wasn't simply innocently removed due to its age, or removed to a paid area of the website, for the simple reason that all of the other articles in the given issue are still shown (all requiring payment to read the full articles, however they are listed and the opening paragraphs are shown).
However this particular article has been completely removed from all record on the Time website. The only rational explanation is that this is a deliberate attempt to pretend it never existed. Thats not a conspiracy theory, just common sense.
Its also got nothing to do with the copyright holder's rights - sure they have the 'right' to remove their own article from their own website, thats not whats under debate.
Also if you think, as you assert so readily, that the US media is not censored/controlled in any way, then whats your explanation for what happened here? Most posters aren't claiming this removal must be due to direct governmental intervention - that would be a conspiracy theory - however at some level this story has clearly been censored. Even if the censorship has been done for purely financial reasons, it still amounts to censorship.
I've also done one Struts app, however a rather large one with many complex dynamic forms. I found Struts 1.0 required numerous horrible hacks to work with such things, and if I were to go back now I would most definitely use struts less if at all.
Struts 1.1 tries to solve some of its problems but generally fails.
Let me just mention one as an example - you have to manually write a form bean for every form/form-set. As this is really annoying (I personally coded an automatic form-bean class generator to avoid this manual repitition). Struts 1.1 attempts to 'solve' this problem by allowing 'dynamic' xml-defined form beans. However, these lose the value of compile-time checking, thus despite still requiring additional work do little more than the request object for 90% of use cases. Neither of these form beans handle 'dynamic' forms (i.e. one which has say n-checkboxes, were n is defined by some session variable).
I also found using Struts for layout horrible when forms got complex (issues when mixing template tags with JSP). Given that Struts only makes sense on large, complex projects (given its huge overhead and learning curve), and that as soon as the forms/project get complex its found to be lacking, I find it hard to imagine many scenarios where it makes sense.
To summarise, I found Struts somewhat like J2EE - trys but ultimately fails to provide much needed functionality (I agree fully with the need to get away from spaghetti JSP - theres no reason writing websites should be significantly different and harder (as it currently is) than writing console apps from the developers perspective).
Struts doesn't perhaps fail as miserably as J2EE - whereas your post mentions if you don't use the struts framework you will end inventing one yourself, poorly, and I partly agree, I know from personal experience that many of the J2EE-like solutions I wrote before learning J2EE were in many ways superior in design to J2EE (yes I know this sounds arrogant, but anyone with experience in a large J2EE project knows that EJBs fail in virtually all their goals -> the 'patterns' such as mentioned in the reviewed book are workarounds which lose pretty much all the advantages the EJB were supposed to provide in the first place). Obviously my hackups lacked the industrial strength, robustness, transaction control etc of J2EE, however the architechtural design was good, and theres no reason J2EE shouldn't have been designed better.
Microsoft failed to put .NET in WinXP SP1 even though .NET was at that stage already version 1.0 (or even 1.1 - I'm not sure).
.NET. Consider that they were planning calling their next version of Windows .NET, but dropped this naming, partly because everyone is so confused as to what .NET is.
I also have very similar concerns about how much Microsoft is behind some aspects of
Heres an essay from my website regarding why I do not believe this war is a good idea - see the website for facts backing up the essay, plus a more viewer friendly version of the argument -
1. Such a war can only lead to an increase in terrorism. The Iraqis, arabs and muslims around the world will see such a war not only as a war on Islam, but also for what it largely is about - an imperialistic grab for oil. Anyone doubting this need only consider Iraq's history. The CIA played a hand in overthrowing the government in Iraq in 1963 which led to Saddam's party and thus Saddam himself coming to power. The reason was that the government had moved to nationalise oil (exactly the same thing also happened in Iran). Going back further also gives a long history of the colonial power Britain treating Iraq atrociously in order to control their oil.
Anyone still doubting that oil is a motive behind the war need only consider the Bush Administration's deep ties with the oil industry, read about the English and US oil companies already lobbying over who gets to drill the Iraqi oil (Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world), read the report submitted to Dick Cheney suggesting the use of military force in Iraq because the US needs the oil, or consider that a result of the war in Afghanistan was the US finally getting to build a pipeline through the country, or that high oil prices are currently threatening the US economy and could be reliably kept significantly lower if the US were to control Iraq's oil.
2. There are no proven links between Saddam and the Al-Qaeda. The best intelligence agencies (those of the US and Britain) in the world have been working flat out to try and find one, yet both reported no link (despite this fact, both Bush and Blair repeatedly cite information discredited by their own intelligence agencies as evidence of a link - if they are so convinced of the case for war they shouldn't need to lie in presenting it). British intelligence reports that even the possibility of a substantial link is unlikely, given that Osama is in ideological conflict with Saddam (in a recent tape Osama termed Saddam and his regime 'infidels').
3. Before the UN sanctions Saddam had created a country with the one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East. At least for his own people he had thus done a better job than most other Middle Eastern leaders, and now we're supposed to be saving his people from him? I'm not saying Saddam is all good, far from it, but he is also not the evil tyrant Bush depicts him to be (i.e. he did not gas his own people as Bush repeatedly claims).
Worth also noting is that the reason an estimated 5000-6000 children die due to starvation and lack of water and medication in Iraq every week is not Saddam or even solely the UN sanctions, but the fact that the US and UK have blocked the efforts of the oil-for-food program. The two successive UN leaders of the oil-for-food program resigned due to this fact, saying that Saddam had done his best to provide his people with food, and calling what the US and UK were doing 'genocide'. If the US and UK have pursued a genocidal policy at the cost of 1.5 million Iraqi lives over the past 10 years, can we believe their claim to now be taking war to the people of Iraq for their own good?
4. The threat that Iraq poses to us is tiny. Iraq probably still has some 'weapons of mass destruction' of course, but an insignificant amount which pales in comparison to that of many other countries (including of course the US and Britain, but also less stable places such as Syria and the nuclear states of North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel).
Saddam has never been a threat to or threatened the US. This brings into question not only the motives for the war but also whether there is any right by international law to initiate one. Saddam's army was pathetic in the Gulf War and is much weaker now. Even CIA Director George Tenet beli
There will be civilian casualties, but not many, as they are bad PR. I am against the war, but not because of the civilian casualties. The UN sanctions have killed 1.5 million Iraqis - if the war kills a few thousand more but puts a stop to the sanctions that would be justifiable. Heres an essay from my website regarding why I do not believe this war is a good idea - see the website for facts backing up the essay, plus a more viewer friendly version of the argument -
1. Such a war can only lead to an increase in terrorism. The Iraqis, arabs and muslims around the world will see such a war not only as a war on Islam, but also for what it largely is about - an imperialistic grab for oil. Anyone doubting this need only consider Iraq's history. The CIA played a hand in overthrowing the government in Iraq in 1963 which led to Saddam's party and thus Saddam himself coming to power. The reason was that the government had moved to nationalise oil (exactly the same thing also happened in Iran). Going back further also gives a long history of the colonial power Britain treating Iraq atrociously in order to control their oil.
Anyone still doubting that oil is a motive behind the war need only consider the Bush Administration's deep ties with the oil industry, read about the English and US oil companies already lobbying over who gets to drill the Iraqi oil (Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world), read the report submitted to Dick Cheney suggesting the use of military force in Iraq because the US needs the oil, or consider that a result of the war in Afghanistan was the US finally getting to build a pipeline through the country, or that high oil prices are currently threatening the US economy and could be reliably kept significantly lower if the US were to control Iraq's oil.
2. There are no proven links between Saddam and the Al-Qaeda. The best intelligence agencies (those of the US and Britain) in the world have been working flat out to try and find one, yet both reported no link (despite this fact, both Bush and Blair repeatedly cite information discredited by their own intelligence agencies as evidence of a link - if they are so convinced of the case for war they shouldn't need to lie in presenting it). British intelligence reports that even the possibility of a substantial link is unlikely, given that Osama is in ideological conflict with Saddam (in a recent tape Osama termed Saddam and his regime 'infidels').
3. Before the UN sanctions Saddam had created a country with the one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East. At least for his own people he had thus done a better job than most other Middle Eastern leaders, and now we're supposed to be saving his people from him? I'm not saying Saddam is all good, far from it, but he is also not the evil tyrant Bush depicts him to be (i.e. he did not gas his own people as Bush repeatedly claims).
Worth also noting is that the reason an estimated 5000-6000 children die due to starvation and lack of water and medication in Iraq every week is not Saddam or even solely the UN sanctions, but the fact that the US and UK have blocked the efforts of the oil-for-food program. The two successive UN leaders of the oil-for-food program resigned due to this fact, saying that Saddam had done his best to provide his people with food, and calling what the US and UK were doing 'genocide'. If the US and UK have pursued a genocidal policy at the cost of 1.5 million Iraqi lives over the past 10 years, can we believe their claim to now be taking war to the people of Iraq for their own good?
4. The threat that Iraq poses to us is tiny. Iraq probably still has some 'weapons of mass destruction' of course, but an insignificant amount which pales in comparison to that of many other countries (including of course the US and Britain, but also less stable places such as Syria and the nuclear states of North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel).
Saddam
Now, any book trying to put the blame for Latin America's woes on the Latin Americans as opposed to outside meddling, which completely fails to address the main cases of outside meddling, cannot claim to have seriously addressed the question. So I don't honestly see much point in reading such a book.
I don't mind reading books with a point of view / agenda, however a book which just completely ignores the main arguments/evidence against its own thesis is a waste of time (please correct me if the review is totally wrong).
That said, I think the thesis might have some truth, however the US's policy of exploitation over the past century is nevertheless largely to blame. The sad fact of L.A. is that the people have never been given the chance to show what they could achieve due to US meddling. It is hypocritical and unfair to blame a people for their problems when so many of their attempts to improve their situation have been thwarted by us.
Talk about propaganda. The lie is put to it by Che Guevarra who wrote about how strict the Arbenz dictatorship was, only some kinds of Stalinists were allowed (and not Che's which is why Che complained).
... contradicts years of official denial about the torture, kidnapping and execution of thousands of civilians in a war that the commission estimates killed more than 200,000 Guatemalans.' reports the New York Times.
...
i thought i'd take a bit of time to read guevara's book 'back on the road' - see if i could confirm what you say.
however, what i find is a guevara who is in guatemala at the time of arbenz' overthrow, who however is still quite non-political, and certainly by no measure a hardened marxist/communist. these views come much later, and are in fact largely shaped by resentment at the us he feels after the us overthrow of arbenz.
i also read him claiming that the population is united with arbenz against the militia which the us creates to overthrow him. he also has no problem understanding that the us is only in there to support the united fruit company rather than any idealogical ideals or to fight the russians or any other such rubbish.
che's general opinion is of guatemalas hopes being crushed by the us, an opinion well born out by the historical truth commission in 99 - 'A U.N. sponsored truth commission report has concluded that the United States gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayan people during the most brutal armed conflict in Latin America history - Guatemala's 36-year civil war [1960-1996]. The report of the independent Historical Clarification Commission
in short, i hardly see che guevara as someone you can use to support your claims.
given what the following us advisor said at the time, i cannot understand how you manage to so rewrite history to see arbenz as evil, and the US and dictators before and after him as relatively good. the US went in there to defend business interests and in doing so destroyed a country - i don't see how you can support any other reading of the history (but i AM willing to consider your views if you can back them up)
Charles R. Burrows of the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs writes 'Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail.'
again, these quotes are referenced on my website
maybe you're right ....
but can you perhaps explain a few things to me?
why is no us-media reporting on iran's attempts to sue the us for its support of iraq during the iran-iraq war (in particular, its supply of chemical/biological weapons, and its destruction of iranian oil rigs)?
or why the cnn (which another post saw fit to describe as 'leftist'???) saw fit to censor journalists during the gulf and afghanistan wars, reminding them to only provide pro-us reportage?
or as an example of british media - the major newspaper guardian published a front page story called 'blood on his hands' with a picture of tony blair with blood on his hands, relating to blair's support of the war and also the us+uk responsibility in the deaths of 1.5 million iraqis due to lack of water,food,medication to date (see this link for information on exactly how heavy the responsibility rests on us+uk shoulders rather than saddam's). find me a major us newspaper with a picture of bush with blood on his hands as front page story, or something similar. or any story from aclaimed journalist john pilger for that matter.
or why the cnn+times was forced to withdraw a story of nerve gas usage in vietnam by the us miliary, an unprecedented case of media censorship??
or how many major us newspapers interested themselves in the reports on bush's election stealing? a bbc link is bbc article but i haven't found anything in a major us paper on this.
how about the investigations into pre-sept 11 shares sales, or the alleged meeting between bin laden and the cia shortly before sept 11? all major stories in europe, obviously not important enough to warrant mention in the free-press of the us. or fox news pulling (without explanation) of its revelation into the huge israeli spy ring in the us, which was not covered by a single other paper?
look i'm not sure what to say to all that. let me just say that i've read a fair bit and researched a fair bit about the events in these countries, and the stuff you're saying doesn't quite fit anything i've read.
now, i'm not saying you're wrong. but i'd appreciate if you could provide some form of references to back up these claims, as i really find them rather extraordinary.
ignoring the confusion of russian's / soviets with communists in general, the main news to me is your attribution of everything to communists, i.e. 'soviets' attacking various countries, castro creating the sandinistras. i would be interested in more information regarding this stuff.
pretty much everything i've read views the russians as having virtually no influence in the affairs of these countries - any leftist leaning groups in the area being products of the countries themselves and having little or no affiliation with the ussr or even cuba (typically only making contact with the ussr after the usa sanctions them etc and they are forced to turn to someone else for help, however the role of the ussr in these cases being very secondary).
also, the idea of allende enforcing his rule with storm-troopers from germany sounds interesting. can you provide me with more information on that? i find it rather surprising given that allende only came along in the 70s, a wee while after the time of ww-ii and all that.
btw, i don't mean to sound critical. its just what you say is all rather strange and thus i'd be really interested to see more information if you can provide it.
sounds like you've got a pretty realist view there. sad but true. if you're right about chavez (and you're in a better position to judge) then thats a pity. i hope the situation can improve at least somewhat.
hi,
well its good to hear from some people in a position to know more than the limited amount we can find out through the papers.
my e-mail address should be on the website, but its mike@bevin.de .
woops - i got the links to my website wrong! i meant this. (is it not possible to fix your own posts?)