Understanding the ins and outs of J2EE is not the hard part of enterprise development. Understanding things like async messaging, transactions, and multithreaded logic are what makes enterprise development difficult. Switching to.NET because you don't 'get' J2EE will not magically make you understand these complex ideas.
If this book does a better job of explaining those concepts using.NET examples, then fine. But it's not learning the particular technology that's the hard part...it's learning the theory that drives it.
Microsoft doesn't play nice in the industry, but they are, like it or not, the de facto standard out there.
Microsoft may be the defacto standard for client side apps. But on the server side it holds no such title, and enterprise development is supposed to be what DCOM is all about. Things like J2EE and CORBA have way more of a hold on enterprise development than anything that Microsoft has ever put out. There's a big difference between a single-user desktop operating system and a multi-user scalable enterprise platform. From what I've seen, Microsoft has only been sucessful with the former.
I've done tests myself that prove my tap water contains Dihydrogen Monoxide, but the government won't do anything about it. They say it's naturally occuring. Never mind that it kills 350 children under the age of six every year, and countless others who frequent beaches and lakes where industrial plants dump the stuff.
I'm no scientist, but it's obvious to me that we need stricter envrionmental controls to regulate this kind of thing. Multinationals are going to destroy the planet unless we do something.
Anyone who's bothered to do the research into it knows that DeBeers is about as evil as a multinational can get. Somehow I doubt that they are going to play nice with another industry that wants to use thier bread and butter product for making something that doesn't cost $100,000 a gram.
As I see it, there are one of only two outcomes here:
#1) Someone finds a way to make cheap diamonds, and DeBeers goes after them (in more ways than just the legal route) to make sure that #2 happens.
which brings me to
#2) Nobody finds a way to make cheap diamonds, and DeBeers can triple their prices. Of course, the diamond supply is already kept artifically low to drive up prices, so meeting this new demand won't be a problem at all (it'll just cost you the price of a small car to buy a CPU.)
I don't like this one bit...nope...not one bit. As if Microsoft's monopoly wasn't bad enough.
Oddly, some of the foremost security guys (Bruce Schneier, for example) state very explicitly that Open Source software is far better security-wise than any closed source software (read Windows).
Why would that be odd? Makes perfect sense to me...
"...you can really start to view the games industry as a marketing arm of the film industry or of the music industry."
Damn straight. Sid Meier said that "A game is a series of interesting choices." And Sid is right. The problem with games made from other media like books, movies, and TV shows is that those mediums are non-interactive and therefore contain no choices. So in a game like The Matrix, choices get reduced to the level of "how do I accomplish my pre-defined mission in the most effecient manner", which is hardly interesting.
Writers, who create books, movies, and TV shows, want to tell a story. A story has a linear progression from setup to conflict to resolution. It is the conflict and it's eventual resolution that makes it interesting. But a game does not need to have conflict (ex. Animal Crossing, The Sims) because, like Sid said, it's the choices that make the game interesting. Relying on a movie franchise to make your game interesting is like relying on a leather bound cover to make your novel worth reading.
It all depends on what you want to do once you graduate. If all you want is to me a coder, and maybe move on to management later, there's no reason to get a Ph.D.
However, if you want to work on real Computer Science, like in a research lab somewhere, go ahead and get it. But software development today doesn't have too much do with the theoretical Computer Science they teach in most Doctoral programs. You'd learn more working on a real-world project.
Funny. That's not what the Founding Fathers said. You'd think an orginization devoted to defending the Bill of Rights would have at least read it's user manual.
Mobile phones and computers are very different animals. First and foremost a phone is a phone. It's not a laptop. It's not a gameboy. It's a phone...you call people with it.
Because of this, people have an expectation that thier phones will have a very high degree of reliability and security. They see mobile phones as an appliance like microwaves, dishwashers, and radios...and any modern appliance that crashed twice a day would be totally unacceptable to most (especially non-techie) consumers. How many people here thing that this brand-new SDK, having never been battle tested in the real world, has managed to fix all of the reliability and security bugs found in all other Microsoft products? Anyone?
Besides there's already One True Platform for mobile development. It's mature, reliable, secure, and included on just about every device being produced today.
So, Microsoft, explain to me exactly why I should even bother with this?
The entire concept of running any decent-sized orginization on a single platform is crazy. Commercial vendors will always want to lock you into their platform. But heed these words well:
Salesmen have to sell whatever they're given.
Most companies will simply shoehorn all thier products into whatever market they can get thier hands on, just so they can compete. But any engineer worth his salt knows that things work best when you use the right tool for the right job.
The real issue here is that people are lazy. So when someone comes along with a song and dance about how all thier support problems are going to be solved by the One True Platform, they swallow the bullshit. Lazy IT people never follow up to figure out if that's actually true. And even if they do, and lazy managers ignore the IT people to make it look like they're 'managing' something by pretending to save money.
I think this is a perfect time to start a dicussion on the topic of shorting stocks.
For everyone who doesn't know, shorting (a.k.a selling short) is when you sell a stock that you don't own in ancitipation of buying it back later (hopefully at a lower price). Basically, the way it works is your stock broker borrows the stock from someone who owns it. The broker lends it to you, so that you can sell it. At some point, when you decide that you want to cash out, you "cover your short" by buying the stock so that your broker can give it back to whoever they borrowed it from.
Shorting is more risky than buying because:
1) There's a limited return, but no limited loss
2) The original owner of the stock can decide to sell, and if your broker can't find a replacement, you might be forced to sell before you're ready.
However, shorting is a very important highly underrated method of investing. Shorting keeps stock prices in check by allowing investors to "vote with thier wallets" without being shareholders of the company. Lower prices mean that people lose less money when stocks tank, and it also means that investors can buy into stocks at a more reasonable price, making them more acessable to everyone.
Some people think shorting is wrong, even immoral, but I argue that if more people had seen short selling as a viable investment strategy during the.com boom, it would have made the bust much less painful. The buyers would have lost less money because they could buy in at a lower price, and the short sellers would have been rewarded for seeing that Pets.com was going nowhere fast.
And just in case you're wondering....
I do not, have not, and will not own shares of, or short interest in, SCO Group Inc.
When's the last time you hired a programmer because they could type 100 words a minute? Does a sysadmin who types twice as fast as another accomplish twice as much?
The limiting factor in Information Technology is, and always will be, the speed of human thought. Being able to type faster is not an advantage. I can only type 35 words a minute that has always been plenty.
Or maybe it's just that I think before I code. If the developers and sysadmins in China don't do the same, it won't matter what language they use because all their products will be worthless.
Stay tuned for these other breaking developments...
- Scientists discover it's really cold in Siberia. - U.S. Justice Department admits life not fair. - FDA Bombshell: Eating too much can make you fat.
all this and Andy Rooney, tonight on 60 minutes.
Re:Shocking development, government lies.
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There is a big difference (in legal terms) between lying in a speech and lying under oath. Lying in a speech called a campaign promise. Lying under oath is called perjury. Little "details" like that are what make the Rule of Law work. If you start ignoring them, the whole system falls apart.
Java has a very rigid security system, which works well on phones because users view them as a hardware device (a phone!) and not a software platform, and so they must be reliable and secure.
However, I would think that this would prevent you from replacing all the menus with your own code. Instead, you might want to get her something like this
What about posthumans, do they deserve rights? And how do you square your argument that humans are superior...
My whole point is that humans are not superior. We're just lucky. And we should take advantage of our current position while we can, because when "posthumans" or aliens or whatever else comes down the line, there's no promise that they will see us as anything more than an infection on the planet.
And if they reciprocated? What of humans who do not believe in rights...
"Government comes from the consent of the governed." The Bill of Rights (and every other document forming a governing body) is a contract between the people and the government, clearly defining the relationship between the two. You, as an individual do not have a choice to accept or decline this agreement because the group has made that decision for you, but the agreement exists nontheless.
Animals and plants, on the other hand, are incapable of entering into such an agreement, simply because they cannot understand it. Even if they could, we would have no confirmation of it because we cannot understand them. Becuase of this, we cannot expect any privileges we grant to them to be reciprocated. Humans, on the other hand, can be told thier rights and can be told that they are expected to respect the rights of others. Whether they actually do or not is another story, but this is what seperates us from every other creature on the planet. We can differentiate between right and wrong. If posthumans have this capability, we will expect the same from them.
Actually, I've used both. A lot. And every time I got a new version I thought. OK...this is going to be the GUI designer that doesn't suck.
And it sucked.
Sure. If you never muck with the generated code, they work great. The problem is that you have to change the code in order to get some stuff to work, because the GUI designers are always one version behind the programming libraries. That's why those GUI designers generate code and not a resource file or a complied class. They know that you're going to have to tweak it from time to time.
Code wizards are way more trouble than they're worth anyway. Especially with GUI designers, the code they generate is totally un-maintainable. I've had GUI designers barf on me just because I reformmated the comments in my code, and once that happens, you might as well throw all your GUI code out and start over.
Sure, writing it from scratch takes longer. But it takes a whole lot less time than re-writing the entire user interface when your boss says "move that button over there".
We can just use our position on the food chain to kill all the animals we want for whatever reason we have. But what happens when we've 'won' and killed them off?
Who says "winning" consists of killing off all the other species on the planet? We'd all starve to death, for one. I'm not suggesting that we exterminate everything that isn't human for whatever short term gain that might provide for us. Quite the contrary. Doing so would kill us off just as fast as any asteroid or virus. What I'm saying is that we should not afford any special status or rights to animals, plants, and the environment in general, because they certianly will not return the favor.
Then, should part of humanity move upward above the rest, wouldn't they continue with that rule - and thus group the lower part with the animals, to be used and abused?
My entire argument is based on the survival of the human species, so segregating humanity into arbitrary groups and treating them differently would be out of the question. If you're a human, you deserve human rights. If you're not, then you don't. Simple as that.
You can't win at the game of life. You can't even tie. All you can do is delay the inevetable Extinction of your species for as long as possible. Sucessful species have been taking advantage of unsucessful ones for billions of years, and there's no reason we should stop now.
Slashdot Mirror
Understanding the ins and outs of J2EE is not the hard part of enterprise development. Understanding things like async messaging, transactions, and multithreaded logic are what makes enterprise development difficult. Switching to .NET because you don't 'get' J2EE will not magically make you understand these complex ideas.
.NET examples, then fine. But it's not learning the particular technology that's the hard part...it's learning the theory that drives it.
If this book does a better job of explaining those concepts using
Microsoft doesn't play nice in the industry, but they are, like it or not, the de facto standard out there.
Microsoft may be the defacto standard for client side apps. But on the server side it holds no such title, and enterprise development is supposed to be what DCOM is all about. Things like J2EE and CORBA have way more of a hold on enterprise development than anything that Microsoft has ever put out. There's a big difference between a single-user desktop operating system and a multi-user scalable enterprise platform. From what I've seen, Microsoft has only been sucessful with the former.
I've done tests myself that prove my tap water contains Dihydrogen Monoxide, but the government won't do anything about it. They say it's naturally occuring. Never mind that it kills 350 children under the age of six every year, and countless others who frequent beaches and lakes where industrial plants dump the stuff.
I'm no scientist, but it's obvious to me that we need stricter envrionmental controls to regulate this kind of thing. Multinationals are going to destroy the planet unless we do something.
You bastard! You stole my post earlier today!
Ah well, take it. Thanks to sleep deprivation, there's plenty more where that came from.
Anyone who's bothered to do the research into it knows that DeBeers is about as evil as a multinational can get. Somehow I doubt that they are going to play nice with another industry that wants to use thier bread and butter product for making something that doesn't cost $100,000 a gram.
As I see it, there are one of only two outcomes here:
#1) Someone finds a way to make cheap diamonds, and DeBeers goes after them (in more ways than just the legal route) to make sure that #2 happens.
which brings me to
#2) Nobody finds a way to make cheap diamonds, and DeBeers can triple their prices. Of course, the diamond supply is already kept artifically low to drive up prices, so meeting this new demand won't be a problem at all (it'll just cost you the price of a small car to buy a CPU.)
I don't like this one bit...nope...not one bit. As if Microsoft's monopoly wasn't bad enough.
Oddly, some of the foremost security guys (Bruce Schneier, for example) state very explicitly that Open Source software is far better security-wise than any closed source software (read Windows).
Why would that be odd? Makes perfect sense to me...
"...you can really start to view the games industry as a marketing arm of the film industry or of the music industry."
Damn straight. Sid Meier said that "A game is a series of interesting choices." And Sid is right. The problem with games made from other media like books, movies, and TV shows is that those mediums are non-interactive and therefore contain no choices. So in a game like The Matrix, choices get reduced to the level of "how do I accomplish my pre-defined mission in the most effecient manner", which is hardly interesting.
Writers, who create books, movies, and TV shows, want to tell a story. A story has a linear progression from setup to conflict to resolution. It is the conflict and it's eventual resolution that makes it interesting. But a game does not need to have conflict (ex. Animal Crossing, The Sims) because, like Sid said, it's the choices that make the game interesting. Relying on a movie franchise to make your game interesting is like relying on a leather bound cover to make your novel worth reading.
Fine with me. So long as you also provide the list to Habitat for Humanity
It all depends on what you want to do once you graduate. If all you want is to me a coder, and maybe move on to management later, there's no reason to get a Ph.D.
However, if you want to work on real Computer Science, like in a research lab somewhere, go ahead and get it. But software development today doesn't have too much do with the theoretical Computer Science they teach in most Doctoral programs. You'd learn more working on a real-world project.
Funny. That's not what the Founding Fathers said. You'd think an orginization devoted to defending the Bill of Rights would have at least read it's user manual.
Natural Rights/Human Rights- Rights granted by virtue of existence
Some people would argue (including the Founding Fathers), that Human Rights are granted by a Higher Power and not simply by the virtue of existence.
I'm not one of those people, but for a complete discussion, you must at least consider it.
Mobile phones and computers are very different animals. First and foremost a phone is a phone. It's not a laptop. It's not a gameboy. It's a phone...you call people with it.
Because of this, people have an expectation that thier phones will have a very high degree of reliability and security. They see mobile phones as an appliance like microwaves, dishwashers, and radios...and any modern appliance that crashed twice a day would be totally unacceptable to most (especially non-techie) consumers. How many people here thing that this brand-new SDK, having never been battle tested in the real world, has managed to fix all of the reliability and security bugs found in all other Microsoft products? Anyone?
Besides there's already One True Platform for mobile development. It's mature, reliable, secure, and included on just about every device being produced today.
So, Microsoft, explain to me exactly why I should even bother with this?
The entire concept of running any decent-sized orginization on a single platform is crazy. Commercial vendors will always want to lock you into their platform. But heed these words well:
Salesmen have to sell whatever they're given.
Most companies will simply shoehorn all thier products into whatever market they can get thier hands on, just so they can compete. But any engineer worth his salt knows that things work best when you use the right tool for the right job.
The real issue here is that people are lazy. So when someone comes along with a song and dance about how all thier support problems are going to be solved by the One True Platform, they swallow the bullshit. Lazy IT people never follow up to figure out if that's actually true. And even if they do, and lazy managers ignore the IT people to make it look like they're 'managing' something by pretending to save money.
Of course the difference is that in New York, they power will eventually come back on.
Illuminates nothing! I can't see anything but dark in those screenshots. Turn up the gamma, guys!
I think this is a perfect time to start a dicussion on the topic of shorting stocks.
.com boom, it would have made the bust much less painful. The buyers would have lost less money because they could buy in at a lower price, and the short sellers would have been rewarded for seeing that Pets.com was going nowhere fast.
For everyone who doesn't know, shorting (a.k.a selling short) is when you sell a stock that you don't own in ancitipation of buying it back later (hopefully at a lower price). Basically, the way it works is your stock broker borrows the stock from someone who owns it. The broker lends it to you, so that you can sell it. At some point, when you decide that you want to cash out, you "cover your short" by buying the stock so that your broker can give it back to whoever they borrowed it from.
Shorting is more risky than buying because:
1) There's a limited return, but no limited loss
2) The original owner of the stock can decide to sell, and if your broker can't find a replacement, you might be forced to sell before you're ready.
However, shorting is a very important highly underrated method of investing. Shorting keeps stock prices in check by allowing investors to "vote with thier wallets" without being shareholders of the company. Lower prices mean that people lose less money when stocks tank, and it also means that investors can buy into stocks at a more reasonable price, making them more acessable to everyone.
Some people think shorting is wrong, even immoral, but I argue that if more people had seen short selling as a viable investment strategy during the
And just in case you're wondering....
I do not, have not, and will not own shares of, or short interest in, SCO Group Inc.
"This could be justification for a YRO for animals."
Hmmmm. Yeah, that would be a great idea except for the fact that COWS CAN'T READ!
When's the last time you hired a programmer because they could type 100 words a minute? Does a sysadmin who types twice as fast as another accomplish twice as much?
The limiting factor in Information Technology is, and always will be, the speed of human thought. Being able to type faster is not an advantage. I can only type 35 words a minute that has always been plenty.
Or maybe it's just that I think before I code. If the developers and sysadmins in China don't do the same, it won't matter what language they use because all their products will be worthless.
This just in: They make stuff in China.
Stay tuned for these other breaking developments...
- Scientists discover it's really cold in Siberia.
- U.S. Justice Department admits life not fair.
- FDA Bombshell: Eating too much can make you fat.
all this and Andy Rooney, tonight on 60 minutes.
There is a big difference (in legal terms) between lying in a speech and lying under oath. Lying in a speech called a campaign promise. Lying under oath is called perjury. Little "details" like that are what make the Rule of Law work. If you start ignoring them, the whole system falls apart.
Java has a very rigid security system, which works well on phones because users view them as a hardware device (a phone!) and not a software platform, and so they must be reliable and secure.
However, I would think that this would prevent you from replacing all the menus with your own code. Instead, you might want to get her something like this
What about posthumans, do they deserve rights? And how do you square your argument that humans are superior...
My whole point is that humans are not superior. We're just lucky. And we should take advantage of our current position while we can, because when "posthumans" or aliens or whatever else comes down the line, there's no promise that they will see us as anything more than an infection on the planet.
And if they reciprocated? What of humans who do not believe in rights...
"Government comes from the consent of the governed." The Bill of Rights (and every other document forming a governing body) is a contract between the people and the government, clearly defining the relationship between the two. You, as an individual do not have a choice to accept or decline this agreement because the group has made that decision for you, but the agreement exists nontheless.
Animals and plants, on the other hand, are incapable of entering into such an agreement, simply because they cannot understand it. Even if they could, we would have no confirmation of it because we cannot understand them. Becuase of this, we cannot expect any privileges we grant to them to be reciprocated. Humans, on the other hand, can be told thier rights and can be told that they are expected to respect the rights of others. Whether they actually do or not is another story, but this is what seperates us from every other creature on the planet. We can differentiate between right and wrong. If posthumans have this capability, we will expect the same from them.
Actually, I've used both. A lot. And every time I got a new version I thought. OK...this is going to be the GUI designer that doesn't suck.
And it sucked.
Sure. If you never muck with the generated code, they work great. The problem is that you have to change the code in order to get some stuff to work, because the GUI designers are always one version behind the programming libraries. That's why those GUI designers generate code and not a resource file or a complied class. They know that you're going to have to tweak it from time to time.
Code wizards are way more trouble than they're worth anyway. Especially with GUI designers, the code they generate is totally un-maintainable. I've had GUI designers barf on me just because I reformmated the comments in my code, and once that happens, you might as well throw all your GUI code out and start over.
Sure, writing it from scratch takes longer. But it takes a whole lot less time than re-writing the entire user interface when your boss says "move that button over there".
We can just use our position on the food chain to kill all the animals we want for whatever reason we have. But what happens when we've 'won' and killed them off?
Who says "winning" consists of killing off all the other species on the planet? We'd all starve to death, for one. I'm not suggesting that we exterminate everything that isn't human for whatever short term gain that might provide for us. Quite the contrary. Doing so would kill us off just as fast as any asteroid or virus. What I'm saying is that we should not afford any special status or rights to animals, plants, and the environment in general, because they certianly will not return the favor.
Then, should part of humanity move upward above the rest, wouldn't they continue with that rule - and thus group the lower part with the animals, to be used and abused?
My entire argument is based on the survival of the human species, so segregating humanity into arbitrary groups and treating them differently would be out of the question. If you're a human, you deserve human rights. If you're not, then you don't. Simple as that.
You can't win at the game of life. You can't even tie. All you can do is delay the inevetable Extinction of your species for as long as possible. Sucessful species have been taking advantage of unsucessful ones for billions of years, and there's no reason we should stop now.