They haven't released a new version in a long time
They are busy working on 7.50, which has some failry major changes to the layout of the GUI. A preview version was made available a few weeks ago (search the opera.beta and opera.linux newsgroup archives for a link). The new version includes an RSS reader, a spell-checker, a cookie editor, an IRC client, the much-requested ability to apply their small screen rendering to hotlist panels to make just about any web-page a side-bar panel and lots of fixes and enhancements. The preview is alpha quality but it looks interesting, I expect a beta must be near.
Are you sure those different packages weren't just for ease of deployment (an.exe installer for Windows, RPM for Linux etc.)?
I have never known an issue in a (100% pure) Java program that relates to what platform it was compiled on. What platform it executes on, certainly, but not on what platform the build was done on. The compiler either produces valid byte code or it doesn't. There's no issue such as byte code being valid on Windows but not on Solaris.
If I compile with a 1.4 compiler on Windows it will run on a 1.4 VM on Windows, Solaris and Linux without recompilation. I may occasionally find that my threading or I/O behaves slightly differently because I haven't accounted for subtle differences inherent in the underlying OS (not as big an issue as when coding in a natively compiled language), but that's not because the byte code is not compatible across different platforms.
Java has binary portability (i.e. compile on Wintel and run that binary unchanged on Solaris), C's portability is at the source level (develop on Wintel recompile on Solaris). And even then it takes more discipline (not that programming discipline is a bad thing) to write portable C code than to write portable Java because of the abstractions you mention.
If you want to write a program that interacts with the system at a low level then Java is the wrong tool for the job. JNI is awful. It gives you the disadvantages of Java combined with the disadvantages of C/C++. If you find yourself needing to use it you should reconsider your choice of development platform.
Sort of the opposite of the "film trailer" for "Lucky Star" with Benicio Del Toro, which actually turned out to be a Mercedes advert directed by Michael Mann. Not sure if it appeared in the US, but it was shown in the UK a while back.
I was commenting on an apparent disregard for human life rather than the rights or wrongs of "regime change".
However, since you ask, it depends on who you mean by "we". If you mean the US, or in my case the UK, I don't think it would have made any difference at all, Saddam was not the international threat that Blair and Bush made out. If you mean the Iraqi people, then yes they are probably going to be better off in the long term, but whatever Bush and Blair may say now, they didn't go to war for some altruistic motive, to improve the lives of the Iraqi people, that was just a side-effect.
France was fully entitled to use their veto to prevent the US from stomping around in Iraq and they did so.
Actually it didn't go to a vote. France had indicated that they would probably veto and the US decided that it was better to go ahead without a vote than to lose a vote and then act anyway since this left them room to argue that they were enforcing the UN's will.
If it had gone to a vote Russia may have vetoed as well. Even ignoring vetoes it seemed likely that the majority of the Security Council would have been against it. Only the US, UK, Spain and Bulgaria were definitely in favour. The US may have been able to buy a couple of other votes with aid promises but they would still have probably come up short.
Actually ESA membership and EU membership are not identical. Switzerland is not part of the EU but is part of ESA (the same is true of Norway). On the otherhand, Luxembourg and Greece are in the EU but are not ESA members.
Why bother building what will certainly be an extremely expensive tunnel when one can simply build an airport or fairy dock?
Because international fairy freight doesn't have the same capacity as rail. Also, those little pixies are in short supply and have strong union representation which pushes the costs up.
Opera does this. If you try to go to a link with an '@' in it it brings up a 'Security Warning' dialog box that tells you 'you are about to go to an address containing a username' and asks if you want to continue. It's done this for a while I believe.
OpenOffice (the OpenOffice Impress part) can display PowerPoint presentations. I don't know how good it is with complex files because I rarely need to open PowerPoint files, but it's worked when I've used it.
The similarity between the comments is interesting but could be explained by the fact that both examples are related to Log4j and the comment could have been copied from there. That first example, exhibit A in the PDF, is the one with the most noticeable differences in coding style.
Ignoring differences that could be down to a source code formatter such as Jalopy, the JBoss programmer has declared almost all of his method parameters as final, which is not a common practice other than where it is explicitly required.
Also, the Geronimo programmer is declaring his method to throw an unchecked exception type (IllegalArgumentException), again an uncommon trait (the JBoss code does not make this declaration). If it had been a straight copy it would have compiled as it was, there would have been no reason to go back and make this change, which suggests a concious decision on the part of the Geronimo programmer rather than an idle copy/paste.
Finally, the Geronimo programmer seems to favour chaining method calls whereas the JBoss programmer prefers to use a temporary variable to store intermediate values.
The second example is more suspicious, but not that significant. The third is too small to make a judgement on, but it's worth noting that the Geronimo code has more arguments for the constructor.
Why is it that some government agency can say what some broadcaster puts on the air.
The ITC is not a government agency. From the ITC website:
As our name suggests, we're independent of the Government and of the broadcasters. We are funded by fees from our licensees, of which there are around 300 who between them hold nearly 600 licences.
When an advertisement lies, at least in the US, you have the right to sue for false advertisement.
In the UK, as you would expect, if you have been wronged in the eyes of the law you can sue. If you don't like the ITC's decision and you have good grounds, sue. We do however try to avoid the US disease of the lawsuit culture.
Wait a second, they are all controled by the ITC.
Half right. All commerical stations are controlled by the ITC. The BBC is self-regulating.
It's not the number of complaints that's important, it's the nature of the complaint. One complaint would have been sufficient. It's not a popularity contest.
As a silly and extreme example, if one person goes into a police station and accuses you of being a murderer the police will investigate. They won't wait until they get 100 complaints about you killing people.
If you do something wrong it's still wrong regardless of how many people complain.
Actually, I'm not familiar with any biological viruses that have proven beneficial, other than having the effect of strengthening the hosts immune system (which is observed in software systems as well, with improvements in virus detection systems).
Search code could be this way as well. Randomly change the code and have an external program measure the speed of the searches. If the searches are improving, the external program supports that virus line... if it's get slower, then it would kill it off.
You have pretty much just described a genetic algorithm. I can thoroughly recommend this book as a good starting point for learning about genetic algorithms.
I was making no comment about the evilness or otherwise of Red Hat, just providing some additional information that seemed relevant.
I believe the article I linked to mentions Fedora.
Not sure how you got modded informative, and at the risk of responding to a troll:
Since when have France and Germany been second/third world countries? I'm not sure how anybody could think they don't have nationwide telecommunications networks (never heard of Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom?)
Slashdot Mirror
They haven't released a new version in a long time
They are busy working on 7.50, which has some failry major changes to the layout of the GUI. A preview version was made available a few weeks ago (search the opera.beta and opera.linux newsgroup archives for a link). The new version includes an RSS reader, a spell-checker, a cookie editor, an IRC client, the much-requested ability to apply their small screen rendering to hotlist panels to make just about any web-page a side-bar panel and lots of fixes and enhancements. The preview is alpha quality but it looks interesting, I expect a beta must be near.
Are you sure those different packages weren't just for ease of deployment (an .exe installer for Windows, RPM for Linux etc.)?
I have never known an issue in a (100% pure) Java program that relates to what platform it was compiled on. What platform it executes on, certainly, but not on what platform the build was done on. The compiler either produces valid byte code or it doesn't. There's no issue such as byte code being valid on Windows but not on Solaris.
If I compile with a 1.4 compiler on Windows it will run on a 1.4 VM on Windows, Solaris and Linux without recompilation. I may occasionally find that my threading or I/O behaves slightly differently because I haven't accounted for subtle differences inherent in the underlying OS (not as big an issue as when coding in a natively compiled language), but that's not because the byte code is not compatible across different platforms.
Java has binary portability (i.e. compile on Wintel and run that binary unchanged on Solaris), C's portability is at the source level (develop on Wintel recompile on Solaris). And even then it takes more discipline (not that programming discipline is a bad thing) to write portable C code than to write portable Java because of the abstractions you mention. If you want to write a program that interacts with the system at a low level then Java is the wrong tool for the job. JNI is awful. It gives you the disadvantages of Java combined with the disadvantages of C/C++. If you find yourself needing to use it you should reconsider your choice of development platform.
Sort of the opposite of the "film trailer" for "Lucky Star" with Benicio Del Toro, which actually turned out to be a Mercedes advert directed by Michael Mann. Not sure if it appeared in the US, but it was shown in the UK a while back.
I was commenting on an apparent disregard for human life rather than the rights or wrongs of "regime change".
However, since you ask, it depends on who you mean by "we". If you mean the US, or in my case the UK, I don't think it would have made any difference at all, Saddam was not the international threat that Blair and Bush made out. If you mean the Iraqi people, then yes they are probably going to be better off in the long term, but whatever Bush and Blair may say now, they didn't go to war for some altruistic motive, to improve the lives of the Iraqi people, that was just a side-effect.
Bush conducted a war in which under ten thousand people were killed.
I guess Stalin was right.
Moore's response.
France was fully entitled to use their veto to prevent the US from stomping around in Iraq and they did so.
Actually it didn't go to a vote. France had indicated that they would probably veto and the US decided that it was better to go ahead without a vote than to lose a vote and then act anyway since this left them room to argue that they were enforcing the UN's will.
If it had gone to a vote Russia may have vetoed as well. Even ignoring vetoes it seemed likely that the majority of the Security Council would have been against it. Only the US, UK, Spain and Bulgaria were definitely in favour. The US may have been able to buy a couple of other votes with aid promises but they would still have probably come up short.
Actually ESA membership and EU membership are not identical. Switzerland is not part of the EU but is part of ESA (the same is true of Norway). On the otherhand, Luxembourg and Greece are in the EU but are not ESA members.
Why bother building what will certainly be an extremely expensive tunnel when one can simply build an airport or fairy dock?
Because international fairy freight doesn't have the same capacity as rail. Also, those little pixies are in short supply and have strong union representation which pushes the costs up.
Opera does this. If you try to go to a link with an '@' in it it brings up a 'Security Warning' dialog box that tells you 'you are about to go to an address containing a username' and asks if you want to continue. It's done this for a while I believe.
And Mandrake I believe, though it does give you a choice.
I for one welcome our new glibc2 overloads.
Rather than doing it completely randomly, it might be a good application for a genetic algorithm. You could evolve the (near-)perfect level.
OpenOffice (the OpenOffice Impress part) can display PowerPoint presentations. I don't know how good it is with complex files because I rarely need to open PowerPoint files, but it's worked when I've used it.
Not if he/she wanted to find pages about 'b'.
The similarity between the comments is interesting but could be explained by the fact that both examples are related to Log4j and the comment could have been copied from there. That first example, exhibit A in the PDF, is the one with the most noticeable differences in coding style.
Ignoring differences that could be down to a source code formatter such as Jalopy, the JBoss programmer has declared almost all of his method parameters as final, which is not a common practice other than where it is explicitly required.
Also, the Geronimo programmer is declaring his method to throw an unchecked exception type (IllegalArgumentException), again an uncommon trait (the JBoss code does not make this declaration). If it had been a straight copy it would have compiled as it was, there would have been no reason to go back and make this change, which suggests a concious decision on the part of the Geronimo programmer rather than an idle copy/paste.
Finally, the Geronimo programmer seems to favour chaining method calls whereas the JBoss programmer prefers to use a temporary variable to store intermediate values.
The second example is more suspicious, but not that significant. The third is too small to make a judgement on, but it's worth noting that the Geronimo code has more arguments for the constructor.
Why is it that some government agency can say what some broadcaster puts on the air.
The ITC is not a government agency. From the ITC website:
As our name suggests, we're independent of the Government and of the broadcasters. We are funded by fees from our licensees, of which there are around 300 who between them hold nearly 600 licences.
When an advertisement lies, at least in the US, you have the right to sue for false advertisement.
In the UK, as you would expect, if you have been wronged in the eyes of the law you can sue. If you don't like the ITC's decision and you have good grounds, sue. We do however try to avoid the US disease of the lawsuit culture.
Wait a second, they are all controled by the ITC.
Half right. All commerical stations are controlled by the ITC. The BBC is self-regulating.
It's not the number of complaints that's important, it's the nature of the complaint. One complaint would have been sufficient. It's not a popularity contest. As a silly and extreme example, if one person goes into a police station and accuses you of being a murderer the police will investigate. They won't wait until they get 100 complaints about you killing people. If you do something wrong it's still wrong regardless of how many people complain.
Actually, I'm not familiar with any biological viruses that have proven beneficial, other than having the effect of strengthening the hosts immune system (which is observed in software systems as well, with improvements in virus detection systems).
There was an example of a beneficial virus posted on Slashdot the other day.
Search code could be this way as well. Randomly change the code and have an external program measure the speed of the searches. If the searches are improving, the external program supports that virus line... if it's get slower, then it would kill it off.
You have pretty much just described a genetic algorithm. I can thoroughly recommend this book as a good starting point for learning about genetic algorithms.
Because we can?
I was making no comment about the evilness or otherwise of Red Hat, just providing some additional information that seemed relevant. I believe the article I linked to mentions Fedora.
Red Hat pulls plugs on Red Hat Linux product line.
Not sure how you got modded informative, and at the risk of responding to a troll:
Since when have France and Germany been second/third world countries? I'm not sure how anybody could think they don't have nationwide telecommunications networks (never heard of Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom?)