This was written just after I got to the barbers; I used one of his upstairs computers and couldn't see anything so I had to listen.
RE VIDEO: I don't think the video is complete; the lines were to slow at the cafes.
I'm upstairs at the moment and a lots going on, the barbers on the phone Parcel Force about other parcels he's waiting for and one has been delivered according to the force. "ec107847"2/z/7"17gb" was the number for one he was checking about others too. After I had been upstairs a couple of minutes a guy came up used a computer pretty much next to mine so I couldn't take more upstairs pictures or record anything, I doubt the mic would have picked up anything audible anyway.
OK after I got up there I heard the barber on the phone, then a guy with an eastern European accent started talking - the guy very likely went in the back way. The barber was explaining that there was a fee for one of his Parcel Force packages, I think it was a storage fee as it was a few days late or something, either that or duty. The guy thought he was talking about the Fed-Ex parcel and started arguing that he'd paid duty; it took a minute or two for the barber to explain.
He paid the fee and there was a lot of rustling, he was opening one of the boxes, there was more angry raised voices and the barber said something like "is it broken etc", the guy said something like its wrong/mistake I don't think he really understood the joke right away. There was more raised voices but not real arguing, the guy didn't suspect the barber of anything and didn't as far as I know explain what happen to him. Probably to keep his post office box if the barbers not in on it.
I went outside to see if I could get a picture of him leaving, he spent about 5 minutes arguing with one of the guys outside the shop, it looked like this guy may have been in on it, and it's fairly likely he knows something about the Romanian at least. I didn't manage to get any pictures, they were facing me the whole time and I couldn't get the camera out even across the road from them. They went back into the shop and must have left out the back door.
I think it's almost definitely the scammer and not someone working for him, his spoken English is as bad as his written and he opened the stuff in the shop.
Below images have been added for when thread is archived, Official Jean Climax Mug
Outside of shop just after I left, the scammer was inside at this time athough I'm sure he can't be seen through the window.
Seems like Collindale is the root of all internet fraud
Pixar movies are always not only amazing miracles of technology (though that is a great excuse for geeks to see each and every one of them), the always also have a great storyline behind that as well. And the storyline is what sets them apart, release after release.
And i am a huge anime fan myself - it's fun that there is blood and gore (impossible not to mention tentacle rape) etc and a lot of them are art in their own right.
But Pixar has a great story, every time, and then the story is well told. Despite all the high tech and geekery involved, that is one of the oldest skills in the world: the art of story-telling. A great story doesn't need to be targeted at a certain age group, and it doesn't need sex and explosions to make it work - it can stand by its own.
That's also the reason Pixar doesn't make more than 1 movie per year: They "can't find talented enough story tellers", according to Steve Jobs.
hmm... that means you are not counting the bums on the street - or anyone else without a telephone, meaning anyone without a home or not being able to afford a telephone.
nice way to cut out the poor...
i don't want to imply that is done on purpose in order to polish the unemployment numbers, but i am sure it's a side-effect no one really minds too much.
well, it may BEAT iris scanners as a tool to use on millions of people in an airport because you have 1000 people sitting and waiting for positive ID => e.g. if the number of people having trouble with these machines (teary eye, red eyes from flight, alcohol influence from intercontinental flight, drug influence, eylashes, or anything else that upsets the precious algorithms) is too large, the system becomes unpractical. in that sense, you can say "beat".
It's a little like the Sims - you create a virtual world that has real addresses, real airports, but is populated with imaginary people. We built them by taking a list of all the last names in the country and then adding first names at random. Then we had them take trips. We had a team of a dozen people who came up with scenarios. You introduce terrorists into your world, and then you start looking for ways to pick them out from the data.
so they actually pay some people to introduce fake personalities into the data and then try to pick them out. great! they assume they know exactly what the terrorist's data patterns are going to be, then they train their systems and people (even the terror-Sims they could only find with a whole lot of human help) to target that.
if i would have to place a bet on the outcome, it would seem like a perfect way to create a system which randomly and unpredictably targets normal citizens. it would also be a system which would make it very easy for real terrorists to go unnoticed... namely, once they know how it works, they can be sure to always be 100% unnoticed by avoiding all the things the system checks for.
i think the basic assumption, namely that there are terrorist data patterns, is flawed from the outset. TIA wasn't a fluke... argh... these people must be stopped...
Sure the Japanese are different, but so is every other country.
dude, you have not worked in germany.
the way criticism is delivered differs substantially.
america uses the hamburger tactic: criticism (the meat) is wrapped in sweet talk and encouragement (the bun). in germany, it's just the meat. in japan, just bun.
if you do something good in america, they will make you think you just achieved the greatest thing in the world, whereas in germany you get a dry "not bad" and that will be the end of it.
when there is a successful project, there will be own-shoulder-padding to no end in america whereas in germany they will focus on what hasn't worked and could be done better.
to americans, the germans just seem blunt to the point of being insulting... and to germans, the americans seem to be on prozac...
from what i have seen in aisa is that - for example - they will never say "no" to a higher-up, whereas in germany and america it's expected (at least in my industry) and managers rely on that as valuable feedback. e.g. in asia you will not point out problems that you see with your boss' suggestion. even if you know you can't possibly do it you will keep silent and try your best...
They would have to dump a truckload of money on me before I'd even think about moving to the US anymore.
i am hearing this more and more from scientist-friends. a lot of them would not want to come to the US for political reasons. fingerprinting, data sharing on flights, and third-reich terminology ("homeland", "axis of evil", "Total Information Awareness"...) are not helping. and visa restrictions are kicking out the ones who are already here.
the sad thing is that the majority of americans didn't even vote for bush.
i think, increasingly, parents rely on the schools to do the educating for them. that, or the TV. while that is totally unfair to the schools/teachers, it's also the way it is. teachers can try to do the best they can (and i know many who do) or give up.
Education in the USA is very "bad" (whatever that means) and has been for a long time. Yet the US leads worldwide spending on academic research by a far margin. The way the scientific system is set up means that there are great opportunities for scientists in the U.S. So i think the lack of great basic education is being more than made up for by 1) scientists who get through the higher education system despite the difficulties - top people who can actually make a career in science as opposed to other countries where science is just not funded well enough (Europe...). Case in point: A professor salary in europe would qualify you for housing benefits in San Francisco. So scientist in europe either do it out of love for science, or they come to the U.S.... which leads to
2) immigrants. If you are from, say, Europe, you will make at least twice as much money and get better equipment and more interesting projects in America. I am sure this is even more dramatic a difference if you come from China or SE Asia. You also get more recognition, more publications etc.
I think the biggest threat for science in the U.S. is currently the immigration law. I speak from personal experience here. It's a big hassle to deal with even if you are here perfectly legally, even if american businesses depend on you etc... I know many people with PhDs who are considering to leave because there is no room for them in the immigration law or there are really stupid restrictions (like: you can come but your wife stays home - which is what i am currently fighting with).
i think this is highly interesting. whenever i talk to americans about it, i get the feeling that american high school is hell - a place where the small get bullied, the ugly girls are outcasts, and generally there is mobbing, backstabbing, and most importantly everybody gets judged by an arbitrary and cruel standard. the dark side of the american dream.
while i am pretty sure that is not all true, in the place where i grew up (Austria, Europe) none of that was an issue. at all. sure, there were people who didn't do well in sports, and people who were uncool (like myself in my later teens for not smoking or drinking or getting any girls) but in general, those people had their place and were never terrorized. we were all part of the group. we had jocks and nerds, but they would hang out together.
i am sure part of the reason is that the class system is very different: you get a group of 25+ kids, call that a class, and they stay together for 5 years or so, teachers come by to teach classes, and there is very limited choice in subjects. e.g. you spend all your time with the same people. and there are lots of social activities with those people.
i don't think that explains it though. UK has the same system as america...
well i just tried that, and i get this message (which you can select for convenient copy-pasting): The sender address xxxx@xxxxxxxx.com was rejected by the server The server response was: 5.1.0... From address does not match authentication. You can try to send using a different server. All messages will use this server until you quit or change your network settings. and options to edit the message, to use another SMTP server, or to try again later.
i find that pretty comprehensive information. maybe you need to upgrade to Panther;)
my take on Mail.app is that it is getting better. it's always had beauty, and it looks like Apple is continuing to improve it. the latest release fixed all my problems with Mail.app - most prominently the bug where it would needlessly create (modal!) dialogs when it could not reach a server. the new version discreetly (but not too discreetly) displays a "connection interrupted" icon next to the account name and won't check that account again until you click the icon. nice. other nice features are threaded view for mails, and the clickable replied-to icon. if you replied to a message, Mail will display a little arrow next to the message. click the arrow and you get directly to your response. it's brilliant and simple.
i have the same problem with Retrospec backup software. one run and XP swaps out everything, system, applications, Explorer, etc.., so i have to wait >5 minutes before i can use the system again. This is with 1 G of physical RAM installed.
the solution would be a limit to the disk cache to a reasonable size. i can see that servers would want all RAM for caching, but desktops? probably not. there should be a limiting percentage, like 10% of RAM. 100M is plenty of disk cache for my use...
be sure to check if system properties->advanced->performance options->advanced->memory usage is set to "Programs".
Everything you say about the Thai internet/games-cafe scene is absolutely true, and fascinating in its own right. However, it really doesn't apply in any way to Japan. Japan is probably as similar to Thailand as the U.S. is to.. hmm... Soviet Russia. As in: Not at all.
I spent only three days in Japan so i am certainly no expert. But it was immediately obvious that there are no internet cafes (after much looking i settled for the Kinko's in Tokyo, but it really was pretty suckish), and there are tons of Arcades. I assume that ppl in Japan have money so they have a computer and DSL at home if they want internet, they can buy a PS2 and games, etc..
In Thailand, no one - especially not kids of playing age - can afford a fast computer to play the latest games. Or game consoles, for that matter. So they go to the internet cafe and play there, and they also have fast LANs and it's a lot more fun than sitting home alone. Playing is cheap at about 25c / hour or so (yeah they get better prices than the tourists...). Heck, if they had played Q3 i would have certainly tried to.. to... 0wn them... but CS/Ragnarok - well i didn't want to get clobbered by a bunch of teenagers...
ps: I spent some 12 months in Thailand. Great place.
I've been programming in Java and C++ for years, and in Java for years before learning C++. My productivity with Qt/C++ equals (and in most cases, exceeds) my productivity with Java. i guess we would need to go more in-depth to resolve this. maybe you just have a lot of experience with the Qt APIs? in that case, of course you would be more productive with C++/Qt. If you were an expert on Swing as well... i have my doubts.
Swing on Linux and Windows are still (as of JDK 1.4x) horrendously slow to start and horrendously slow to run.
i call BS on that. that is a myth. i deploy Swing apps on windows all year, and since about 1.4 i have not had any complaints about performance. most of the time, people are not aware that these are Java programs. i can believe that Swing is slow on Linux. there is no hardware acceleration for Swing on Linux to my knowledge. same goes for OS X though they are working on it.
There are two things that Java and the JVM are still slow at: Startup (which has to do largely with the JVM compiling all the system classes at every start of a java program instead of mapping a DLL), and memory use. In addition, deployment can be a pain since if you ship the entire JRE with your app, it adds 30M of deliverables. Not good.
For instance, if you want to write a small command line tool in Java, it's probably not a good idea - startup cost is too high, mem usage is too high, and deliverable size is too big. If, on the other hand, you write a client app in Swing, and target WinXP with 256M RAM, it's perfectly fine and a pleasure to work with:) People such as myself will be a little annoyed with the startup overhead of a few seconds, but overall they won't know it's a Java application. [not to mention the traditional Java stomping grounds such as servers]
A lot of people, scientist included, believe in the principle that there is such a thing as scientific proof. In reality though there are only scientific theories, applicable to certain situations and empirically shown to work assuming certain constraints.
In reality, scientific theory can connect cause and effect, but it can never explain the black box in the middle. The why.
Yet this is what motivates scientists. They want to explain the world. The question of why drives all science. Figuring things out. But many people, scientists included, make the mistake of confusing a working theory with fact. Scientists, with their scientific scrutiny should know more than anybody else that it is impossible to determine facts scientifically. Yet they try.
In order to do that, you need to believe in science. Because in the end, science is always assumption without proof. Scientific theories can only be proven wrong, never proven right. Scientific theories can be immensely useful but absolutely wrong (like Newton's laws).
Belief is therefore neccessary for science to work.
What we need is a MMO Peace sim for the Neo-Con so-called think tanks (think? tanks!). A complete political / economical earth simulation.
So they can find out that their first-strike / secure-the-oil - global strategies will end up having the whole world against them while not really achieving any of their original goals.
As it is, they play it out in real life. To the detriment of the U.S.A. and it's citizens, as in: Terrorist attacks are ever more likely, Americans are coming home in body bags, the economy is severely damaged, a few profiteers run with the money. It's a disaster.
That's why we need an MMO for political leadership. The best army in the world cannot make a flawed strategy work. Just think what they could do with good leadership!
there is a basic fallacy in this article which represents a sentiment that i hear over and over again: that the low-income countries are somehow low income because they have no environmental laws, exploit people in sweatshops, or do some other terrible thing that you would never get away with in the U.S.A.
that is flat out wrong.
think for yourself: if, say, Minnesota decided adopt indian or chinese law, or to just abandon all laws that cost businesses money - how much do you think they could cut costs? take (current costs), subtract (costs of environmental laws, health laws, children work laws, etc). how much is that? i would be surprised if it was more than 30%.
does that explain a salary difference between india/china and here of 1:100? not by a far cry.
the simple truth is - and this may be too frightening for us to admit - that there is NO reason. chances around the world are not equal. if you are born in china, and work as hard as you do now in your cushy american job, you get 1/100 the $ for it. this situation arose from historical events going back 10s of thousands of years - it has nothing to do with the here and the now.
i am not jumping to any conclusions about this, except one: there will be a general and broad tendency to even out the differences. people in developing nations will earn more $, and things there will get more expensive, while prices and wages here will remain the same or fall...
Qt vs Java/Swing
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
First, we need to clear up the confustion from the following statement: "Qt is positioned as superior alternative to Java".
Trolltech cannot possibly mean that. What they meant to say is: "Qt is an alternative to Java when it comes to cross platform client applications using a GUI". While Qt may do some non-GUI things, too, it's totally different from Java (clue: Qt is not a programming language) and from the Java platform (it doesn't come with a VM, it doesn't have its own bytecode, etc...). What remains is that it's an alternative to Java if you want to deploy applications across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Giving Trolltech the benefit of doubt, this is what they meant.
Having done client-side programming for many years, i can see that there is something to that. I once hoped that Qt would develop into a viable alternative because AWT/Swing was so slow.
However, since then Sun has done their homework and made Swing fast (indistinguishable from native, for the most part), and they are continuing to work on performance in release 1.5. There is still a lot of room for improvement. Things like Apple's library caching - where they pre-compile the native libraries and cache the machine code on the hard disk which makes a Java apps start as fast as a native apps, more hardware acceleration for Swing etc.
Once we get performance out of the way (i have not seen Qt, but i assume it's fast), there is nothing Qt could offer that Java didn't do better. For example, you don't have to deal with c++. Java is not perfect, but it's - yes we can say that in public - definitely more productive than c++, in the same way that c++ is more productive than asm machine code. Add to that extensive networking libraries, array bounds checking (buffer overflow exploits not possible in java, imagine that), garbage collection, serious instead of optional OO, and the list could go on and on, no recompiling, runs on more platforms than Qt, free deploy license...
IBM is the only company in the world that could realistically engage in a multi-front competitive battle with Microsoft.
true, but from an IBM perspective there is no reason to do so:
1 - does IBM want to be MS? no. 2 - would they have a good chance of winning if they tried? no. 3 - does IBM make bucketloads of money doing what they are doing right now? yes.
IBM has given up on dominating the OS market a long time ago. And it has since learned that there was no harm in that. MS' star is sinking and IBM can sit and wait and make money. IBM can take full advantage of the emerging linux market where MS can't...
regarding the article (which i have read, yes): i believe Gosling when he says they did the settlement to get out of the legal battle (with a serious victory, too). i also wonder: if they had not settled, what could they possibly have gained that's better than 400M+ in cash?
conspiracy theories, as usual, simply don't add up.
I am still somewhat confused as to whether it is an April Fool's joke or not... so i compiled a list of arguments. it goes like this:
Question: is this for real?
PRO: 1 - Google could do this. They already have the storage systems in place. And if you limit attachments and can spam the 1G might accumulate over, say, 5 years. Which means it will be a factor of 10 cheaper than nowadays per user.
2 - it's not outrageous enough. too close to something that might actually happen. but, see 3 and CON section on that.
3 - we wantsssssss it.... [hey strike that, that's not an argument.. but, it is, this is why everybody falls for it]
CON: 1 - Google has no motivation to do this. Google is neither evil (e.g. inventing a rouse to sucker in email users and then spam them while blocking spam from others, essentially taking over the entire spam business), nor a samaritan (offers free email purely out of the good of their heart).
2 - the press release is absolutely not serious. "Heck, yeah!" from the CEO? read other Google press releases and you will see they are far more toned down.
3 - it is April 1st (duh!). the press release is titled April 1st. Google has had an April 1st joke every (?) year...
CON wins in my book... this has got to be the biggest April Fool's Joke ever... reported in _all_ media.
if hardware is free [==cheap] then there will be a lot more ppl with the hardware [==the platform]. so you can sell more software. since software is produced once and copied for free [almost], it can be sold cheaper at larger volumes, much more so than physical goods.
this factor works against your argument that more people are required to build more and bigger applications (which is true as well though).
it's hard to predict the future.
particularly billg (of "640k should be enough for anyone"-fame) has never been very good at it. CEOs tend to see opportunities, and i think this is how billg's "vision" should be interpreted. wishful thinking of a CEO / CTO.
in addition: have you ever seen 50 cent on MTV holding a geek product in his hand? i thought so. this is pretty much when it was plain obvious and for anybody to see: the iPod is not a geek product.
_every_ teenager wants one. they don't know or care that the Nomad whatever or the Dell fuglybox exist. those things are geek products (geeks buy them, too).
Slashdot Mirror
**** spoiler ahead *******
goon "rhig"'s post from upstairs the barber shop:
Pixar movies are always not only amazing miracles of technology (though that is a great excuse for geeks to see each and every one of them), the always also have a great storyline behind that as well.
And the storyline is what sets them apart, release after release.
And i am a huge anime fan myself - it's fun that there is blood and gore (impossible not to mention tentacle rape) etc and a lot of them are art in their own right.
But Pixar has a great story, every time, and then the story is well told. Despite all the high tech and geekery involved, that is one of the oldest skills in the world: the art of story-telling. A great story doesn't need to be targeted at a certain age group, and it doesn't need sex and explosions to make it work - it can stand by its own.
That's also the reason Pixar doesn't make more than 1 movie per year: They "can't find talented enough story tellers", according to Steve Jobs.
hmm... that means you are not counting the bums on the street - or anyone else without a telephone, meaning anyone without a home or not being able to afford a telephone.
nice way to cut out the poor...
i don't want to imply that is done on purpose in order to polish the unemployment numbers, but i am sure it's a side-effect no one really minds too much.
[note: where i live, we count those guys, too]
well, it may BEAT iris scanners as a tool to use on millions of people in an airport because you have 1000 people sitting and waiting for positive ID => e.g. if the number of people having trouble with these machines (teary eye, red eyes from flight, alcohol influence from intercontinental flight, drug influence, eylashes, or anything else that upsets the precious algorithms) is too large, the system becomes unpractical.
in that sense, you can say "beat".
so they actually pay some people to introduce fake personalities into the data and then try to pick them out. great! they assume they know exactly what the terrorist's data patterns are going to be, then they train their systems and people (even the terror-Sims they could only find with a whole lot of human help) to target that.
if i would have to place a bet on the outcome, it would seem like a perfect way to create a system which randomly and unpredictably targets normal citizens. it would also be a system which would make it very easy for real terrorists to go unnoticed... namely, once they know how it works, they can be sure to always be 100% unnoticed by avoiding all the things the system checks for.
i think the basic assumption, namely that there are terrorist data patterns, is flawed from the outset. TIA wasn't a fluke... argh... these people must be stopped...
Sure the Japanese are different, but so is every other country.
dude, you have not worked in germany.
the way criticism is delivered differs substantially.
america uses the hamburger tactic: criticism (the meat) is wrapped in sweet talk and encouragement (the bun). in germany, it's just the meat. in japan, just bun.
if you do something good in america, they will make you think you just achieved the greatest thing in the world, whereas in germany you get a dry "not bad" and that will be the end of it.
when there is a successful project, there will be own-shoulder-padding to no end in america whereas in germany they will focus on what hasn't worked and could be done better.
to americans, the germans just seem blunt to the point of being insulting... and to germans, the americans seem to be on prozac...
from what i have seen in aisa is that - for example - they will never say "no" to a higher-up, whereas in germany and america it's expected (at least in my industry) and managers rely on that as valuable feedback. e.g. in asia you will not point out problems that you see with your boss' suggestion. even if you know you can't possibly do it you will keep silent and try your best...
They would have to dump a truckload of money on me before I'd even think about moving to the US anymore.
i am hearing this more and more from scientist-friends. a lot of them would not want to come to the US for political reasons. fingerprinting, data sharing on flights, and third-reich terminology ("homeland", "axis of evil", "Total Information Awareness"...) are not helping.
and visa restrictions are kicking out the ones who are already here.
the sad thing is that the majority of americans didn't even vote for bush.
I guess breeding is everything.
it's depressing when a teacher says that.
i think, increasingly, parents rely on the schools to do the educating for them. that, or the TV. while that is totally unfair to the schools/teachers, it's also the way it is. teachers can try to do the best they can (and i know many who do) or give up.
Education in the USA is very "bad" (whatever that means) and has been for a long time. Yet the US leads worldwide spending on academic research by a far margin. The way the scientific system is set up means that there are great opportunities for scientists in the U.S.
So i think the lack of great basic education is being more than made up for by
1) scientists who get through the higher education system despite the difficulties - top people who can actually make a career in science as opposed to other countries where science is just not funded well enough (Europe...). Case in point: A professor salary in europe would qualify you for housing benefits in San Francisco. So scientist in europe either do it out of love for science, or they come to the U.S.... which leads to
2) immigrants. If you are from, say, Europe, you will make at least twice as much money and get better equipment and more interesting projects in America. I am sure this is even more dramatic a difference if you come from China or SE Asia. You also get more recognition, more publications etc.
I think the biggest threat for science in the U.S. is currently the immigration law. I speak from personal experience here.
It's a big hassle to deal with even if you are here perfectly legally, even if american businesses depend on you etc... I know many people with PhDs who are considering to leave because there is no room for them in the immigration law or there are really stupid restrictions (like: you can come but your wife stays home - which is what i am currently fighting with).
i think this is highly interesting. whenever i talk to americans about it, i get the feeling that american high school is hell - a place where the small get bullied, the ugly girls are outcasts, and generally there is mobbing, backstabbing, and most importantly everybody gets judged by an arbitrary and cruel standard. the dark side of the american dream.
while i am pretty sure that is not all true, in the place where i grew up (Austria, Europe) none of that was an issue. at all. sure, there were people who didn't do well in sports, and people who were uncool (like myself in my later teens for not smoking or drinking or getting any girls) but in general, those people had their place and were never terrorized. we were all part of the group. we had jocks and nerds, but they would hang out together.
i am sure part of the reason is that the class system is very different: you get a group of 25+ kids, call that a class, and they stay together for 5 years or so, teachers come by to teach classes, and there is very limited choice in subjects. e.g. you spend all your time with the same people. and there are lots of social activities with those people.
i don't think that explains it though. UK has the same system as america...
well i just tried that, and i get this message (which you can select for convenient copy-pasting): ... From address does not match authentication.
;)
The sender address xxxx@xxxxxxxx.com was rejected by the server
The server response was: 5.1.0
You can try to send using a different server. All messages will use this server until you quit or change your network settings.
and options to edit the message, to use another SMTP server, or to try again later.
i find that pretty comprehensive information. maybe you need to upgrade to Panther
my take on Mail.app is that it is getting better. it's always had beauty, and it looks like Apple is continuing to improve it. the latest release fixed all my problems with Mail.app - most prominently the bug where it would needlessly create (modal!) dialogs when it could not reach a server. the new version discreetly (but not too discreetly) displays a "connection interrupted" icon next to the account name and won't check that account again until you click the icon. nice.
other nice features are threaded view for mails, and the clickable replied-to icon. if you replied to a message, Mail will display a little arrow next to the message. click the arrow and you get directly to your response. it's brilliant and simple.
i hear you.
i have the same problem with Retrospec backup software. one run and XP swaps out everything, system, applications, Explorer, etc.., so i have to wait >5 minutes before i can use the system again. This is with 1 G of physical RAM installed.
the solution would be a limit to the disk cache to a reasonable size. i can see that servers would want all RAM for caching, but desktops? probably not. there should be a limiting percentage, like 10% of RAM. 100M is plenty of disk cache for my use...
be sure to check if system properties->advanced->performance options->advanced->memory usage is set to "Programs".
hmm... did i mention this is extremely LAME?
Everything you say about the Thai internet/games-cafe scene is absolutely true, and fascinating in its own right. .. hmm... Soviet Russia. As in: Not at all.
However, it really doesn't apply in any way to Japan. Japan is probably as similar to Thailand as the U.S. is to
I spent only three days in Japan so i am certainly no expert. But it was immediately obvious that there are no internet cafes (after much looking i settled for the Kinko's in Tokyo, but it really was pretty suckish), and there are tons of Arcades. I assume that ppl in Japan have money so they have a computer and DSL at home if they want internet, they can buy a PS2 and games, etc..
In Thailand, no one - especially not kids of playing age - can afford a fast computer to play the latest games. Or game consoles, for that matter. So they go to the internet cafe and play there, and they also have fast LANs and it's a lot more fun than sitting home alone. Playing is cheap at about 25c / hour or so (yeah they get better prices than the tourists...).
Heck, if they had played Q3 i would have certainly tried to.. to... 0wn them... but CS/Ragnarok - well i didn't want to get clobbered by a bunch of teenagers...
ps: I spent some 12 months in Thailand. Great place.
I've been programming in Java and C++ for years, and in Java for years before learning C++. My productivity with Qt/C++ equals (and in most cases, exceeds) my productivity with Java.
:) People such as myself will be a little annoyed with the startup overhead of a few seconds, but overall they won't know it's a Java application.
i guess we would need to go more in-depth to resolve this. maybe you just have a lot of experience with the Qt APIs? in that case, of course you would be more productive with C++/Qt. If you were an expert on Swing as well... i have my doubts.
Swing on Linux and Windows are still (as of JDK 1.4x) horrendously slow to start and horrendously slow to run.
i call BS on that. that is a myth. i deploy Swing apps on windows all year, and since about 1.4 i have not had any complaints about performance. most of the time, people are not aware that these are Java programs.
i can believe that Swing is slow on Linux. there is no hardware acceleration for Swing on Linux to my knowledge. same goes for OS X though they are working on it.
There are two things that Java and the JVM are still slow at: Startup (which has to do largely with the JVM compiling all the system classes at every start of a java program instead of mapping a DLL), and memory use.
In addition, deployment can be a pain since if you ship the entire JRE with your app, it adds 30M of deliverables. Not good.
For instance, if you want to write a small command line tool in Java, it's probably not a good idea - startup cost is too high, mem usage is too high, and deliverable size is too big. If, on the other hand, you write a client app in Swing, and target WinXP with 256M RAM, it's perfectly fine and a pleasure to work with
[not to mention the traditional Java stomping grounds such as servers]
Ah, well, but what about the religion of science?
Do you -believe- in science?
A lot of people, scientist included, believe in the principle that there is such a thing as scientific proof. In reality though there are only scientific theories, applicable to certain situations and empirically shown to work assuming certain constraints.
In reality, scientific theory can connect cause and effect, but it can never explain the black box in the middle. The why.
Yet this is what motivates scientists. They want to explain the world. The question of why drives all science. Figuring things out. But many people, scientists included, make the mistake of confusing a working theory with fact. Scientists, with their scientific scrutiny should know more than anybody else that it is impossible to determine facts scientifically. Yet they try.
In order to do that, you need to believe in science. Because in the end, science is always assumption without proof. Scientific theories can only be proven wrong, never proven right. Scientific theories can be immensely useful but absolutely wrong (like Newton's laws).
Belief is therefore neccessary for science to work.
higher resolution will be more pleasant to look at and easier to read.
if you absolutely must have a quantitative parameter: you will tire sooner reading lower resolution.
What we need is a MMO Peace sim for the Neo-Con so-called think tanks (think? tanks!). A complete political / economical earth simulation.
So they can find out that their first-strike / secure-the-oil - global strategies will end up having the whole world against them while not really achieving any of their original goals.
As it is, they play it out in real life. To the detriment of the U.S.A. and it's citizens, as in: Terrorist attacks are ever more likely, Americans are coming home in body bags, the economy is severely damaged, a few profiteers run with the money. It's a disaster.
That's why we need an MMO for political leadership. The best army in the world cannot make a flawed strategy work. Just think what they could do with good leadership!
well, he got awarded $65M. however, Cohen went bankrupt right away. And in any case never had this kind of money.
there is a basic fallacy in this article which represents a sentiment that i hear over and over again: that the low-income countries are somehow low income because they have no environmental laws, exploit people in sweatshops, or do some other terrible thing that you would never get away with in the U.S.A.
that is flat out wrong.
think for yourself: if, say, Minnesota decided adopt indian or chinese law, or to just abandon all laws that cost businesses money - how much do you think they could cut costs? take (current costs), subtract (costs of environmental laws, health laws, children work laws, etc). how much is that? i would be surprised if it was more than 30%.
does that explain a salary difference between india/china and here of 1:100? not by a far cry.
the simple truth is - and this may be too frightening for us to admit - that there is NO reason. chances around the world are not equal. if you are born in china, and work as hard as you do now in your cushy american job, you get 1/100 the $ for it. this situation arose from historical events going back 10s of thousands of years - it has nothing to do with the here and the now.
i am not jumping to any conclusions about this, except one: there will be a general and broad tendency to even out the differences. people in developing nations will earn more $, and things there will get more expensive, while prices and wages here will remain the same or fall...
First, we need to clear up the confustion from the following statement:
"Qt is positioned as superior alternative to Java".
Trolltech cannot possibly mean that. What they meant to say is: "Qt is an alternative to Java when it comes to cross platform client applications using a GUI". While Qt may do some non-GUI things, too, it's totally different from Java (clue: Qt is not a programming language) and from the Java platform (it doesn't come with a VM, it doesn't have its own bytecode, etc...). What remains is that it's an alternative to Java if you want to deploy applications across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Giving Trolltech the benefit of doubt, this is what they meant.
Having done client-side programming for many years, i can see that there is something to that. I once hoped that Qt would develop into a viable alternative because AWT/Swing was so slow.
However, since then Sun has done their homework and made Swing fast (indistinguishable from native, for the most part), and they are continuing to work on performance in release 1.5. There is still a lot of room for improvement. Things like Apple's library caching - where they pre-compile the native libraries and cache the machine code on the hard disk which makes a Java apps start as fast as a native apps, more hardware acceleration for Swing etc.
Once we get performance out of the way (i have not seen Qt, but i assume it's fast), there is nothing Qt could offer that Java didn't do better.
For example, you don't have to deal with c++. Java is not perfect, but it's - yes we can say that in public - definitely more productive than c++, in the same way that c++ is more productive than asm machine code.
Add to that extensive networking libraries, array bounds checking (buffer overflow exploits not possible in java, imagine that), garbage collection, serious instead of optional OO, and the list could go on and on, no recompiling, runs on more platforms than Qt, free deploy license...
IBM is the only company in the world that could realistically engage in a multi-front competitive battle with Microsoft.
true, but from an IBM perspective there is no reason to do so:
1 - does IBM want to be MS? no.
2 - would they have a good chance of winning if they tried? no.
3 - does IBM make bucketloads of money doing what they are doing right now? yes.
IBM has given up on dominating the OS market a long time ago. And it has since learned that there was no harm in that. MS' star is sinking and IBM can sit and wait and make money. IBM can take full advantage of the emerging linux market where MS can't...
regarding the article (which i have read, yes): i believe Gosling when he says they did the settlement to get out of the legal battle (with a serious victory, too). i also wonder: if they had not settled, what could they possibly have gained that's better than 400M+ in cash?
conspiracy theories, as usual, simply don't add up.
forgot:
PRO:
gmai.google.com looks damn serious. no one would sell this as an AFJ. (unless they want the NYT to carry it)
=> still undecided. relax, sit back, and wait for tomorrow.
I am still somewhat confused as to whether it is an April Fool's joke or not... so i compiled a list of arguments. it goes like this:
Question: is this for real?
PRO:
1 - Google could do this. They already have the storage systems in place. And if you limit attachments and can spam the 1G might accumulate over, say, 5 years. Which means it will be a factor of 10 cheaper than nowadays per user.
2 - it's not outrageous enough. too close to something that might actually happen. but, see 3 and CON section on that.
3 - we wantsssssss it.... [hey strike that, that's not an argument.. but, it is, this is why everybody falls for it]
CON:
1 - Google has no motivation to do this. Google is neither evil (e.g. inventing a rouse to sucker in email users and then spam them while blocking spam from others, essentially taking over the entire spam business), nor a samaritan (offers free email purely out of the good of their heart).
2 - the press release is absolutely not serious. "Heck, yeah!" from the CEO? read other Google press releases and you will see they are far more toned down.
3 - it is April 1st (duh!). the press release is titled April 1st. Google has had an April 1st joke every (?) year...
CON wins in my book... this has got to be the biggest April Fool's Joke ever... reported in _all_ media.
if hardware is free [==cheap] then there will be a lot more ppl with the hardware [==the platform]. so you can sell more software.
since software is produced once and copied for free [almost], it can be sold cheaper at larger volumes, much more so than physical goods.
this factor works against your argument that more people are required to build more and bigger applications (which is true as well though).
it's hard to predict the future.
particularly billg (of "640k should be enough for anyone"-fame) has never been very good at it. CEOs tend to see opportunities, and i think this is how billg's "vision" should be interpreted. wishful thinking of a CEO / CTO.
in addition: have you ever seen 50 cent on MTV holding a geek product in his hand? i thought so. this is pretty much when it was plain obvious and for anybody to see: the iPod is not a geek product.
_every_ teenager wants one. they don't know or care that the Nomad whatever or the Dell fuglybox exist. those things are geek products (geeks buy them, too).