For one, a brain teaser I can answer after about 1 second isn't really a brain teaser. Since I'm definitely not smarter than anyone who already passed through the rest of the SpaceX interview process, this would be too easy.
Second, brain teasers are stupid, I agree with Musk there. I can only imagine maybe I'm overcome by anxiety talking to Elon Musk himself, not just the CEO of a company I would like to work for, but a billionaire genius. So maybe thanks to interview anxiety I am unable to come up with the obvious answer that moment - would that make me a worse software engineer? I'm interviewing for an engineering position, not a PR gig.
Well - she looks absolutely perfect for Mr. McAfee. Hot, but also crazy and tougher than nails. As you'd have to be to be with the guy. The picture alone tells a great story IMO.
I am sure he could have all the model-looking gfs he wants but a normal woman wouldn't last a week with crazy man.
I agree completely. I have been able to adapt to any wonky project structure with Eclipse, been using it for years.
Secondly, you are right that no-one cares about NetBeans - it's IDEA vs Eclipse and that's that. I never got into IDEA but I concede it's a fine IDE, on par with Eclipse, and with some advantages over Eclipse and some drawbacks. The main reason I am not switching is that it doesn't have that one killer feature over Eclipse, so I stick with what's free.
Third, the post above has to be taken with a grain of salt because they guy likes text editors. I know these people are out there, but if you use any of the new IDEs - Eclipse / IDEA / NetBeans - and you don't realize that these make Java development about at least 50% faster over a text editor then you can't judge any IDE. The amount of automatization when generating code in the IDE is simply staggering and there is no way anyone who has ever used these features can go back to text editors and say they are just as good.
Keep in mind that this was a targeted attack which makes it a lot easier.
- The FBI could send the user something that they know he'll open. The_FBI_is_onto_you.exe or whatever - As soon as a piece of malware is running, it can disable AV programs - AV programs do not know the signature of this FBI software - it's not out in the wild, it's not spreading, it's not infecting others.
It's clear that despite the user being able to use some Italian hacked proxy servers he wasn't very careful. Either he was pretty dumb about opening attachments or the FBI is pretty clever in planting them, either technically or with social engineering. What's certain is that the FBI won't tell us how they did it...
"Oh noes, now they are tracing down people who send out bombing threats via their computers, where will it all end?"
Simple, it will end where we stop it. And we will stop it where it doesn't make sense. [*]
It's common sense. The world is not all black and white and privacy is not absolute on or off. Would you rather say oh, well he blew up that high school but at least we made sure his privacy rights were held in the highest regard? That's BS.
Breaking and entering into a private computer system has a good analogy in the real world - breaking and entering into an apartment is a similar thing. It has been possible to do for the FBI since forever, but only if they obtain a court warrant. So they can't just come barging into your house on a whim. Same is true for breaking into your computer. So this isn't something new, it's just a tried and true procedure being applied to a new technology.
You know, they have no excuse - what's to stop them from uploading premiership games on iTunes and charging $2 for each game? Costs them nothing, and I would gladly pay.
In addition, distribute it through TVUPlayer / Joost. Well I guess that's the big idea behind Joost anyway. It will happen, the sooner the better. Hopefully idiotic cable / sat packages where I don't watch 99% of what I pay for are on their way out.
I think here's where developers that think of developers first are really shooting themselves in the foot.
The requirement is simple: I want to install any software on any distro. It shall work like it does and has done forever on the Mac. Because that's a superior system - apps are largely contained in their folders. Most Mac apps you can drag install to another machine/hard disk. That's the way it should be. Windows is kind of stupid with the central registry but still way better than Linux!
The task for developers is not to whine and moan and say how that's too much to ask - as they do even here in this discussion - the task for developers is to find a way to do it. Don't tell me it can't be done - of course it can be done. Anything can be done.
For example, it could work like a JVM - a mapper that maps all the packages on all different distributions to a common standard so programs can find whatever system libraries they need. Bundle it with a system that allows multiple parallel versions of the same framework - like OS X does, you can just steal it from there - and you have a solution. Then, all you have to do is write X different mappers for X different distributions, e.g. do the work only once instead of a thousand times.
I don't really understand how anyone can defend a system whereby software installation is dependent on the underlying flavor of the OS one uses - that's just totally retarded, sorry. I am saying that even as a developer. It's not acceptable.
I have a feeling though that the reasons that this isn't already implemented in all distris is not technological but rather political. Looking at the other comments, it appears that not everyone is convinced that this is needed.
I love Ruby. I did a RoR project, learning Ruby and RoR at the same time, got the whole thing up and working in 3 odd weeks. I was impressed with the elegance of the Ruby API and even more so with the supreme elegance of the Ruby on Rails API - it's awesome. It's what's Java with its mess of backwards compatible and not-well-thought-out and clunky APIs can only dream of. [Note: I am a professional Java dev]. Things that should only take a line of code, do. Unlike Java where they take 2 classes, a thread and one listener.
The main problem is that there is no proper IDE for it. By which I mean, something on par with the java development tools in Eclipse or IntelliJ for Java. Sure there's some stuff out there that does mild syntax highlighting, things like that - beefed up text editors.
But if I have a project consisting of 50 CVS modules and tens of thousands of classes, I don't want to be either hand-editing all of them or doing a text-grep search or alternately perhaps better not rename a method at all. I am used to refactoring and call tree hierarchy views, I use them every day and multiple times a day. Refactoring has made a significant contribution to improving code quality. If I don't like something, I change it - the IDE takes care of finding all affected files and making all the changes.
There are also numerous other benefits which mean I don't have to define variables in Java (IDE does it), don't have to look up API docs (popups with that appear, with all possible methods etc), and most importantly whenever I make a tiny change somewhere in some file the live compiler tells me if that breaks anything else. Huge time savings. Without this it would easily take 5 times as long and some things would be just impractical to do.
Ruby proponents easily get defensive and proclaim that Ruby's so good that all you need is a text editor. Sadly, that's absolutely not true and these people have never used refactoring. Or written large pieces of software. If you have done both and still think it's not needed please explain to me how you deal with the complexity: How do I rename a method, then?
Me too. I have a Nokia N73 - it has an excellent web browser, first time I have seen that. It also has a large and pretty screen. However, in all other regards, this phone has the same usability as the 4 or 5 year old 6600 I had before. Progress? We've heard of it. There's a long delay for bringing up most functions, Symbian/60 interface is clunky to say the least.
I paid over $500 for this phone and it's a huge disappointment as a smart phone. As soon as I can get my hands on an iPhone it's a goner.
The positive aspect is that it will hopefully wake Nokia et al from their slumber and do some real user interface research. Make it work, and make it fast. The basic Nokias of old were excellent in terms of user interface - much simpler of course. But symbian is a usability disaster. And may in fact be the reason Apple is doing the iPhone in the first place. Windows Mobile is equally bad but then no one expected any different.
Very true. Acer's top of the line laptops are pretty good, while the cheap low end systems are c-r-a-p. I had both: I had a high-end Acer which was flawless (TM803), went to a budget Acer (TM4600) which basically didn't work and I had to get rid of after overheating, two fried HDs and one fried mainboard, and now a TM8204 which works just fine.
The Acer Service Center which I was a frequent visitor at with the 4600 offers extended warranties. The extended warranty for the "business line" is half the price of the budget line. That alone says it all.
I want to emphasize this: Balanced means biased in most cases. If the truth is black, a balanced review will be grey. That's not what we want - we want an unbiased review which calls black black and white white.
Given that there are at least three complete show-stoppers in the basic functionality of the Zune - DLL install, no WMP support, no PlaysForSure(OrSoYouThought) support - I agree with the assessment hat it is a sub-par MP3 player with some other functions which have been rendered useless for one or the other reason.
The uninstaller is so good it almost makes up for that U3 crapware. Almost. If we now replaced the giant orange LCD light with a much smaller and less intrusive one, it would be perfect!
The browser needs to run in a sandbox that it can't get out of. Then the only exploits would be ones that get you out of the sandbox and presumably could be closed easily. That's the only security concept that can work because the number of attack vectors is minimized.
Otherwise - rendering libraries have bugs, can be made to overflow etc. So even a look-don't-touch kind of browser would be vulnerable.
I find it pretty convenient to be able to download stuff, including installers. In fact, I couldn't really imagine the internet without that. Browsers can be made secure, but there is more to it than just saying "it can't change anything on my system".
This results in a paradox as far as the intentions of the software are concerned: In order to ensure that one does not get annoying popups and so on, one must install a pirated copy of Windows. The pirated copy has all that annoyance removed and just works, whereas the paid-for legal copy just doesn't work and insists on annoying paying customers.
I really wonder what this is all about anyway?! It's almost impossible to buy a new computer without a genuine copy of windows, and surely that must be where 99.9% of all Windows installs happen these days.
This is pretty childish, but here it goes. SWT is what Swing should have been, only Sun didn't invent it first. Sun went the wrong way when they chose "pluggable look and feel" over "looks native on every platform" and they still don't get it.
You might think that a pluggable look and feel (PLAF) is more general - true. But in reality, in real-life apps, you don't want to shock users with your "different but good-looking" GUI. Instead, you want to look exactly the same as all other apps on that OS. In the real world, the PLAF makes the Swing code so complex as to be almost unusable / unfixable, costs an insane amount of engineering resources which explains why it performs well only on Windows, and remains largely unused. The thing which it is used for most often, namely to look like a native GUI, it does a pretty bad job at. Each new version of the Windows GUI demands a new Java GUI to keep pace.
Had Sun spent all half the engineering time it spent on Swing on SWT instead, it would be perfect now. I just hope they include it as an official GUI framework in one of the next releases.
You are not allowed to create your own Java and your own Java distributable unless it's Java certified. This prevents malicious entities from destroying the Java platform by fragmenting it. It's worked on Microsoft.
No, the drop-off won't be sudden. There is tons of oil in the ground, it's just getting ever more difficult/expensive to get it out. Therefore, the prices will just increase steadily and at the same time because the prices go up, people will use less and less. This is what the OPEC is trying to prevent - they are trying to keep the prices down because they know very well that the prices will go up no matter what. They want to prevent people from switching to something else while they still have oil to sell. I have worked in the oil industry - the technology to get oil out of the ground is pretty incredible and getting ever more sophisticated. We are talking Billions of Dollars of investment for a single well. Previously unattractive oil-mud gets interesting once oil passes a certain price. The times where you just dig a hole in the ground and wait for oil to splurt out are long over. The turning point is reached when it costs a barrel of oil to get a barrel out - at that time, there is still oil in the ground, it's just not economical to retrieve it. Until then, prices will increase steadily.
Oil is running out - this time for real. All the oil companies have renamed themselves in recent years - suddenly they are all "energy" companies. The clearest signal comes from BP - formerly "British Petroleum", new name "Beyond Petroleum". No, I am not making this up. It doesn't exactly take a genius to figure out what's going on.
Disney animation is filthy: No ideas, No ideas, and no ideas, and the rot goes all the way up to the top. A desperate situation.
Pixar on the other hand is the white knight. They can do no wrong. Their blockbusters are not just blockbusters, they are seriously good movies. If anybody can save Disney animation, it's John Lasseter. I am willing to bet money on this, and I actually am by keeping the DIS shares I got for my PIXR. Pixar knows a little secret that many in Hollywood have forgotten: A story makes a movie.
The rest of Disney, I don't know about, but if Steve Jobs drags them into the forefront of the digital media revolution then I would say they have a leg up on everyone else. Especially since the others are torn between stalling, denying, and suing their own customers.
Disney is in much better shape than yesterday: Animation unit basically restored to glory, and at the forefront of digital media. There is huge growth potential in it. Of course, potential is just that, and they could just as well stupidly throw it all away. Though I would think that the majority share Steve Jobs holds prevents that.
Can you explain to me, from an accomplished software engineer's perspective, what's so bad about modular components that can be reused in multiple applications?
Yes. It's fairly obvious.
- The components are very old and therefore contain a lot of cruft - They are not particularly suited to the task (how is browsing your desktop like browsing the internet?)
To cite a current and perfect example to prove both points: WMF contains executable code. This may have been a good idea - a long time ago. It's also totally unsuited to the task of browsing the internet.
Reusing code is generally a good idea, but like everything in programming, it really depends on the circumstances. To reuse old crufty code is often more trouble than it's worth. To reuse code that doesn't fit the application is also a bad idea.
IE is a good example of all of this: Trying to fuse things that should not be fused - maybe even for political reasons, like trying to extend the windows desktop into the internet - and then try to patch it up with lots of duct tape where it's bound to break (the completely failed attempt to provide security via different zones).
What I would like to see is Mr. Negroponte going out there to a prototype poor 3rd world village and living there for a few months. That would really be all it takes.
BillG is absolutely right in funding malaria research - that's something that a big global sponsor can actually do for the people. That is helping.
Throwing hardware around and providing - for chrissake! - a crank because there's frequent power outages or no power in these areas is just silly.
It reminds me of a classic true story from my home country: When the Empress of Austria asked her staff why people are unhappy, they replied: "Your Highness, the people are starving". "Why are the people starving?" "Your Highness, because the people have no bread." To which the Empress famously replied: "Let them eat cake, then."
She didn't mean that as a joke - she was just so far removed from reality that she thought cake around the country was probably just as plentiful as in her palace.
The laptop strikes me as a similar idea.
Let me point out the most obvious flaw: There is no internet in remote villages, and if there were, it would be expensive and no one could afford it. So don't introduce this gadget without making available free internet in the 3rd world at the same time.
The intent - providing a good education to _everyone_ - is certainly noble but the execution, frankly, is retarded. I can't help but thinking this was inspired by Diamond Age's learning book - the little computer AI that can teach kids everything they could possibly want to know. Only without the AI or the educational content or even the capability of storing educational content. I would view this differently if these came with 100G of storage and filled to the brim with the best educational software this world has to offer, starting with english learning software. Then it would have value.
They probably thought they can just use the net as storage but that just doesn't work and besides somebody still has to produce and make available the content. For free.
Huh? I thought dumb, macho-programmer-posturing was a thing of the past?! Sissy programmers?
"If you allocate it, you are responsible for it"
Um, yes, that was what we mean by "manually" having to take care of memory management. It's 2005.
"It's really that simple"
Um, yeah, all you have to do is write programs without bugs. It's really that simple. Jesus! How did such a non-statement get modded to informative?
Now why again should I have to manage memory allocation manually when the system can do it and can actually do a better job of it? Aren't computers supposed to rid us of mundane, repetitive tasks?
I use features in my IDE (Eclipse) every day that are not available in XCode. I refactor project-wide. I rename things _all the time_. The IDE does it for me. I change method signatures. The IDE does it all. I never compile anything - the IDE keeps everything compiled in the background which means errors are immediately displayed after every line of code I type. I look at the calling chains for methods all the time. And there are about a zillion other features.
The ease with which I can make previously scary project wide changes mean that I am able to improve the architecture on the go. So not only do I save huge amounts of time with these features, I also write better code as a result of it.
There is no excuse for XCode. It sucks. The only people - and this probably includes all Apple employees - that think different here are people who have never used a modern IDE. Don't tell me how great XCode is if you have not spent some significant time with either Eclipse, IDEA, or VS.Net. You have no credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have thought so.
For one, a brain teaser I can answer after about 1 second isn't really a brain teaser. Since I'm definitely not smarter than anyone who already passed through the rest of the SpaceX interview process, this would be too easy.
Second, brain teasers are stupid, I agree with Musk there. I can only imagine maybe I'm overcome by anxiety talking to Elon Musk himself, not just the CEO of a company I would like to work for, but a billionaire genius. So maybe thanks to interview anxiety I am unable to come up with the obvious answer that moment - would that make me a worse software engineer? I'm interviewing for an engineering position, not a PR gig.
Well - she looks absolutely perfect for Mr. McAfee. Hot, but also crazy and tougher than nails. As you'd have to be to be with the guy. The picture alone tells a great story IMO.
I am sure he could have all the model-looking gfs he wants but a normal woman wouldn't last a week with crazy man.
I agree completely. I have been able to adapt to any wonky project structure with Eclipse, been using it for years.
Secondly, you are right that no-one cares about NetBeans - it's IDEA vs Eclipse and that's that. I never got into IDEA but I concede it's a fine IDE, on par with Eclipse, and with some advantages over Eclipse and some drawbacks. The main reason I am not switching is that it doesn't have that one killer feature over Eclipse, so I stick with what's free.
Third, the post above has to be taken with a grain of salt because they guy likes text editors. I know these people are out there, but if you use any of the new IDEs - Eclipse / IDEA / NetBeans - and you don't realize that these make Java development about at least 50% faster over a text editor then you can't judge any IDE. The amount of automatization when generating code in the IDE is simply staggering and there is no way anyone who has ever used these features can go back to text editors and say they are just as good.
I agree with assumption 1.
Keep in mind that this was a targeted attack which makes it a lot easier.
- The FBI could send the user something that they know he'll open. The_FBI_is_onto_you.exe or whatever
- As soon as a piece of malware is running, it can disable AV programs
- AV programs do not know the signature of this FBI software - it's not out in the wild, it's not spreading, it's not infecting others.
It's clear that despite the user being able to use some Italian hacked proxy servers he wasn't very careful. Either he was pretty dumb about opening attachments or the FBI is pretty clever in planting them, either technically or with social engineering. What's certain is that the FBI won't tell us how they did it...
"Oh noes, now they are tracing down people who send out bombing threats via their computers, where will it all end?"
Simple, it will end where we stop it. And we will stop it where it doesn't make sense. [*]
It's common sense. The world is not all black and white and privacy is not absolute on or off. Would you rather say oh, well he blew up that high school but at least we made sure his privacy rights were held in the highest regard? That's BS.
Breaking and entering into a private computer system has a good analogy in the real world - breaking and entering into an apartment is a similar thing. It has been possible to do for the FBI since forever, but only if they obtain a court warrant. So they can't just come barging into your house on a whim. Same is true for breaking into your computer. So this isn't something new, it's just a tried and true procedure being applied to a new technology.
You know, they have no excuse - what's to stop them from uploading premiership games on iTunes and charging $2 for each game? Costs them nothing, and I would gladly pay.
In addition, distribute it through TVUPlayer / Joost. Well I guess that's the big idea behind Joost anyway. It will happen, the sooner the better. Hopefully idiotic cable / sat packages where I don't watch 99% of what I pay for are on their way out.
There's a sligtht difference in the products though.
PS3: Thinly veiled attempt to shove BluRay down the masses' throat. Would be $300 cheaper otherwise.
iPhone: Phone people actually want to use. First innovative phone since the color screen. Same price as other smart phones.
I think here's where developers that think of developers first are really shooting themselves in the foot.
The requirement is simple: I want to install any software on any distro. It shall work like it does and has done forever on the Mac. Because that's a superior system - apps are largely contained in their folders. Most Mac apps you can drag install to another machine/hard disk. That's the way it should be. Windows is kind of stupid with the central registry but still way better than Linux!
The task for developers is not to whine and moan and say how that's too much to ask - as they do even here in this discussion - the task for developers is to find a way to do it. Don't tell me it can't be done - of course it can be done. Anything can be done.
For example, it could work like a JVM - a mapper that maps all the packages on all different distributions to a common standard so programs can find whatever system libraries they need. Bundle it with a system that allows multiple parallel versions of the same framework - like OS X does, you can just steal it from there - and you have a solution.
Then, all you have to do is write X different mappers for X different distributions, e.g. do the work only once instead of a thousand times.
I don't really understand how anyone can defend a system whereby software installation is dependent on the underlying flavor of the OS one uses - that's just totally retarded, sorry. I am saying that even as a developer. It's not acceptable.
I have a feeling though that the reasons that this isn't already implemented in all distris is not technological but rather political. Looking at the other comments, it appears that not everyone is convinced that this is needed.
IDE Support.
I love Ruby. I did a RoR project, learning Ruby and RoR at the same time, got the whole thing up and working in 3 odd weeks. I was impressed with the elegance of the Ruby API and even more so with the supreme elegance of the Ruby on Rails API - it's awesome. It's what's Java with its mess of backwards compatible and not-well-thought-out and clunky APIs can only dream of. [Note: I am a professional Java dev]. Things that should only take a line of code, do. Unlike Java where they take 2 classes, a thread and one listener.
The main problem is that there is no proper IDE for it. By which I mean, something on par with the java development tools in Eclipse or IntelliJ for Java. Sure there's some stuff out there that does mild syntax highlighting, things like that - beefed up text editors.
But if I have a project consisting of 50 CVS modules and tens of thousands of classes, I don't want to be either hand-editing all of them or doing a text-grep search or alternately perhaps better not rename a method at all. I am used to refactoring and call tree hierarchy views, I use them every day and multiple times a day. Refactoring has made a significant contribution to improving code quality. If I don't like something, I change it - the IDE takes care of finding all affected files and making all the changes.
There are also numerous other benefits which mean I don't have to define variables in Java (IDE does it), don't have to look up API docs (popups with that appear, with all possible methods etc), and most importantly whenever I make a tiny change somewhere in some file the live compiler tells me if that breaks anything else. Huge time savings. Without this it would easily take 5 times as long and some things would be just impractical to do.
Ruby proponents easily get defensive and proclaim that Ruby's so good that all you need is a text editor. Sadly, that's absolutely not true and these people have never used refactoring. Or written large pieces of software. If you have done both and still think it's not needed please explain to me how you deal with the complexity: How do I rename a method, then?
Me too. I have a Nokia N73 - it has an excellent web browser, first time I have seen that. It also has a large and pretty screen. However, in all other regards, this phone has the same usability as the 4 or 5 year old 6600 I had before. Progress? We've heard of it. There's a long delay for bringing up most functions, Symbian/60 interface is clunky to say the least.
I paid over $500 for this phone and it's a huge disappointment as a smart phone. As soon as I can get my hands on an iPhone it's a goner.
The positive aspect is that it will hopefully wake Nokia et al from their slumber and do some real user interface research. Make it work, and make it fast. The basic Nokias of old were excellent in terms of user interface - much simpler of course. But symbian is a usability disaster. And may in fact be the reason Apple is doing the iPhone in the first place. Windows Mobile is equally bad but then no one expected any different.
Very true. Acer's top of the line laptops are pretty good, while the cheap low end systems are c-r-a-p. I had both: I had a high-end Acer which was flawless (TM803), went to a budget Acer (TM4600) which basically didn't work and I had to get rid of after overheating, two fried HDs and one fried mainboard, and now a TM8204 which works just fine.
The Acer Service Center which I was a frequent visitor at with the 4600 offers extended warranties. The extended warranty for the "business line" is half the price of the budget line. That alone says it all.
I want to emphasize this: Balanced means biased in most cases. If the truth is black, a balanced review will be grey. That's not what we want - we want an unbiased review which calls black black and white white.
Given that there are at least three complete show-stoppers in the basic functionality of the Zune - DLL install, no WMP support, no PlaysForSure(OrSoYouThought) support - I agree with the assessment hat it is a sub-par MP3 player with some other functions which have been rendered useless for one or the other reason.
My Cruzer Micro didn't have the uninstall option in the U3 Launchpad software. However, there is an excellent uninstaller on the SanDisk website:1 415
http://www.sandisk.com/Retail/Default.aspx?CatID=
The uninstaller is so good it almost makes up for that U3 crapware. Almost. If we now replaced the giant orange LCD light with a much smaller and less intrusive one, it would be perfect!
The browser needs to run in a sandbox that it can't get out of. Then the only exploits would be ones that get you out of the sandbox and presumably could be closed easily. That's the only security concept that can work because the number of attack vectors is minimized.
Otherwise - rendering libraries have bugs, can be made to overflow etc. So even a look-don't-touch kind of browser would be vulnerable.
I find it pretty convenient to be able to download stuff, including installers. In fact, I couldn't really imagine the internet without that. Browsers can be made secure, but there is more to it than just saying "it can't change anything on my system".
This results in a paradox as far as the intentions of the software are concerned: In order to ensure that one does not get annoying popups and so on, one must install a pirated copy of Windows. The pirated copy has all that annoyance removed and just works, whereas the paid-for legal copy just doesn't work and insists on annoying paying customers.
I really wonder what this is all about anyway?! It's almost impossible to buy a new computer without a genuine copy of windows, and surely that must be where 99.9% of all Windows installs happen these days.
This is pretty childish, but here it goes. SWT is what Swing should have been, only Sun didn't invent it first. Sun went the wrong way when they chose "pluggable look and feel" over "looks native on every platform" and they still don't get it.
You might think that a pluggable look and feel (PLAF) is more general - true. But in reality, in real-life apps, you don't want to shock users with your "different but good-looking" GUI. Instead, you want to look exactly the same as all other apps on that OS. In the real world, the PLAF makes the Swing code so complex as to be almost unusable / unfixable, costs an insane amount of engineering resources which explains why it performs well only on Windows, and remains largely unused. The thing which it is used for most often, namely to look like a native GUI, it does a pretty bad job at. Each new version of the Windows GUI demands a new Java GUI to keep pace.
Had Sun spent all half the engineering time it spent on Swing on SWT instead, it would be perfect now. I just hope they include it as an official GUI framework in one of the next releases.
What differentiates Java from open source?
You are not allowed to create your own Java and your own Java distributable unless it's Java certified. This prevents malicious entities from destroying the Java platform by fragmenting it. It's worked on Microsoft.
Should not Win boot on Mac?
Windows needs a BIOS to run. OS X intel can do either BIOS or EFI. EFI is basically a complete replacement for the over-20-year-old BIOS.
The new Intel macs are all based on EFI.
Windows (any version) doesn't support EFI.
=> Windows doesn't run on Mac. Hence the contest, and the $12k.
... and I can't wait for Rob Enderle's response on that one!
/. despite the fact that everybody knows his shtick by now.
These two have totally cornered the market for "crazy talk that makes money if it only pisses off enough people who feel strongly".
Dvorak is a master of deception - he still gets on
No, the drop-off won't be sudden. There is tons of oil in the ground, it's just getting ever more difficult/expensive to get it out. Therefore, the prices will just increase steadily and at the same time because the prices go up, people will use less and less. This is what the OPEC is trying to prevent - they are trying to keep the prices down because they know very well that the prices will go up no matter what. They want to prevent people from switching to something else while they still have oil to sell.
I have worked in the oil industry - the technology to get oil out of the ground is pretty incredible and getting ever more sophisticated. We are talking Billions of Dollars of investment for a single well. Previously unattractive oil-mud gets interesting once oil passes a certain price. The times where you just dig a hole in the ground and wait for oil to splurt out are long over.
The turning point is reached when it costs a barrel of oil to get a barrel out - at that time, there is still oil in the ground, it's just not economical to retrieve it. Until then, prices will increase steadily.
Oil is running out - this time for real. All the oil companies have renamed themselves in recent years - suddenly they are all "energy" companies. The clearest signal comes from BP - formerly "British Petroleum", new name "Beyond Petroleum". No, I am not making this up. It doesn't exactly take a genius to figure out what's going on.
Disney animation is filthy: No ideas, No ideas, and no ideas, and the rot goes all the way up to the top. A desperate situation.
Pixar on the other hand is the white knight. They can do no wrong. Their blockbusters are not just blockbusters, they are seriously good movies. If anybody can save Disney animation, it's John Lasseter. I am willing to bet money on this, and I actually am by keeping the DIS shares I got for my PIXR. Pixar knows a little secret that many in Hollywood have forgotten: A story makes a movie.
The rest of Disney, I don't know about, but if Steve Jobs drags them into the forefront of the digital media revolution then I would say they have a leg up on everyone else. Especially since the others are torn between stalling, denying, and suing their own customers.
Disney is in much better shape than yesterday: Animation unit basically restored to glory, and at the forefront of digital media. There is huge growth potential in it. Of course, potential is just that, and they could just as well stupidly throw it all away. Though I would think that the majority share Steve Jobs holds prevents that.
Can you explain to me, from an accomplished software engineer's perspective, what's so bad about modular components that can be reused in multiple applications?
Yes. It's fairly obvious.
- The components are very old and therefore contain a lot of cruft
- They are not particularly suited to the task (how is browsing your desktop like browsing the internet?)
To cite a current and perfect example to prove both points: WMF contains executable code. This may have been a good idea - a long time ago. It's also totally unsuited to the task of browsing the internet.
Reusing code is generally a good idea, but like everything in programming, it really depends on the circumstances. To reuse old crufty code is often more trouble than it's worth. To reuse code that doesn't fit the application is also a bad idea.
IE is a good example of all of this: Trying to fuse things that should not be fused - maybe even for political reasons, like trying to extend the windows desktop into the internet - and then try to patch it up with lots of duct tape where it's bound to break (the completely failed attempt to provide security via different zones).
This project is just wrong on so many levels.
What I would like to see is Mr. Negroponte going out there to a prototype poor 3rd world village and living there for a few months. That would really be all it takes.
BillG is absolutely right in funding malaria research - that's something that a big global sponsor can actually do for the people. That is helping.
Throwing hardware around and providing - for chrissake! - a crank because there's frequent power outages or no power in these areas is just silly.
It reminds me of a classic true story from my home country: When the Empress of Austria asked her staff why people are unhappy, they replied:
"Your Highness, the people are starving".
"Why are the people starving?"
"Your Highness, because the people have no bread."
To which the Empress famously replied: "Let them eat cake, then."
She didn't mean that as a joke - she was just so far removed from reality that she thought cake around the country was probably just as plentiful as in her palace.
The laptop strikes me as a similar idea.
Let me point out the most obvious flaw: There is no internet in remote villages, and if there were, it would be expensive and no one could afford it. So don't introduce this gadget without making available free internet in the 3rd world at the same time.
The intent - providing a good education to _everyone_ - is certainly noble but the execution, frankly, is retarded. I can't help but thinking this was inspired by Diamond Age's learning book - the little computer AI that can teach kids everything they could possibly want to know. Only without the AI or the educational content or even the capability of storing educational content.
I would view this differently if these came with 100G of storage and filled to the brim with the best educational software this world has to offer, starting with english learning software. Then it would have value.
They probably thought they can just use the net as storage but that just doesn't work and besides somebody still has to produce and make available the content. For free.
Huh? I thought dumb, macho-programmer-posturing was a thing of the past?! Sissy programmers?
"If you allocate it, you are responsible for it"
Um, yes, that was what we mean by "manually" having to take care of memory management. It's 2005.
"It's really that simple"
Um, yeah, all you have to do is write programs without bugs. It's really that simple. Jesus! How did such a non-statement get modded to informative?
Now why again should I have to manage memory allocation manually when the system can do it and can actually do a better job of it? Aren't computers supposed to rid us of mundane, repetitive tasks?
This is developer ignorance speaking.
.Net. You have no credibility.
I use features in my IDE (Eclipse) every day that are not available in XCode. I refactor project-wide. I rename things _all the time_. The IDE does it for me. I change method signatures. The IDE does it all. I never compile anything - the IDE keeps everything compiled in the background which means errors are immediately displayed after every line of code I type. I look at the calling chains for methods all the time. And there are about a zillion other features.
The ease with which I can make previously scary project wide changes mean that I am able to improve the architecture on the go. So not only do I save huge amounts of time with these features, I also write better code as a result of it.
There is no excuse for XCode. It sucks. The only people - and this probably includes all Apple employees - that think different here are people who have never used a modern IDE. Don't tell me how great XCode is if you have not spent some significant time with either Eclipse, IDEA, or VS