Wow. So it does. I wonder when the classloader started supporting / I am certain that it didn't in the murky days of old. Personally, it seems a little confusing to me to use / since I would easily mistake it for a path and be tempted to throw.class on the end.
I am glad you mention this kind of in-fill planning. I happen to live in an area of Denver, CO that is a beneficiary of exactly this kind of wise policy. I live in a new multi-use apartment building that was built on a site that used to be abandoned industrial wharehouses. Not only has the density increased in this neighborhood, but the older businesses have been revitalized by the influx of residences and several historic buildings (which couldn't be condemned) have been re-occupied.
The problem in Denver, though, is that while the city of Denver has had a good zoning policy for several years, the outlying counties are extremely sprawl-centric, often attracting developers who would rather not include retail space or are put off by the smaller lot-sizes.
Our neighboring city of Boulder has seen an interesting backlash to the "green zone" type of policy you mentioned also. What has happened is that places just outside of the green zone have experienced a kind of "super-sprawl" where huge residential developments pop up with virtually no services. These people actually have an easier time commuting by car into the center of town because the freeway goes through the relatively empty green zone.
The bottom line around here is that the only way wise urban planning policies are going to help is if all of the counties start cooperating. Unfortunately this seems unlikely given the current political climate.
The biggest problem I have found with these types of advocacy groups is that no one is proposing sensible plans for transitioning away from car-centric urban development.
I am all for living car-free, (In fact I have gone out of my way to organize my life so I only drive about once a week), but the fact of the matter is that we are currently saddled with ugly, sprawling, single-use zoned cities. With the possible exception of places in China, nobody is building large metropolitan areas from the ground up. What we really need are feasible intermediate steps to gradually eliminate the sprawl and the dependency on cars.
Intermediate steps need to have both the short term benefits as well as moving cities towards the goal of reducing auto-dependence.
The best debugger I have ever used is Log4j. There is really no substitute for a good logging subsystem and grep. The chainsaw log viewer that is part of Log4j is also an excellent tool that can be used instead of grep.
I have also found that an interactive scripting language can be very handy. I use Jython for peeking into the state of Java objects and manually working with them. In my experience, this kind of manipulation can provide much better insight into the runtime behaviour of your code than an interactive debugger can. It can even be used to probe objects for which you do not have the code.
Of course, for non-Java development, there are usually analogs to these tools (syslog, perl, etc)
..being vegetarian (or gay) doesn't make you more of a pacifist.
Actually, I have an interesting experience with this. While I am neither gay nor pacifist, I was surprised to find after becoming vegetarian, that I experienced a signifigant decrease in agressive emotions and an increased sympathy for pacifist attitudes.
I think claiming a direct relationship between vegetarianism and pacifism is certainly a stretch, but it seems valid to claim that being vegetarian does indicate a tendency towards pacifism.
From my own experience, I would definitly say that being vegetarian does make me more of a pacifist.
"His team found that, though most dogs shared a common gene pool, genetic diversity was highest in East Asia, suggesting that dogs have been domesticated there the longest."
I thought this was an interesting point considering the fact that east asia is a part of the world where some people eat dogs.
I wonder if there is any relationship between these facts.
It is fairly common for many types of bacteria to swap genes. I don't think it is very common that you can observe such a concrete trait being transferred from one species to another.
Second, most people programming in scientific computing are not... programmers. They learned FORTRAN and as long as they can get their stuff done in FORTRAN, they're not gonna learn C...
I am not a scientist, but I know a few. My observations are that much new scientific programming is done in Perl. It seems to me that Perl has become popular among non-programming scientists for the same reason that FORTRAN became popular 30 years ago: It is easy to get stuff done. I don't think this trend has anything to do with computation speed or available libraries. It is strictly about the ease of use for "pragmatic" users.
I don't want to endorse or dismiss either language, as I don't regularly use them. However, I have observed (anecdotally) a strong concentration of Perl users among scientists.
IANAM, but I wonder what would have happened if who ever actually bound and transcribed the first copies of the Qur'an had declared publishing rights and refused to allow the distribution of low cost copies or even public prayer.
This is exactly what the Church of Scientology does. All of their religeous documents are copyrighted and strictly controlled.
Future theologans should have a great time comparing pre-IP-law religions with post-IP-law ones.
the passengers of any plane hijacked will gladly give their lives to get the plane out of the hands of the hijackers.
From my point of view, this is the ultimate in security. Air marshals are a huge step forward, but the only way people ever really feel safe is when they know that the guy sitting next to them is on their side. An individual is much more likely to rush a hijacker if they know there are 10 guys right behind him. Strict security scans actually degrade this confidence because people see their fellow passengers interrogated and start to wonder "which passenger here is a terrorist? Who will really back me up?"
Don't forget how much the record companies are going to be hurt.
If they manage to make legitimate purchases of content so inconvenient that otherwise honest consumers are diven to "priacy", record sales will really start to drop.
Sorry I don't have a good link or anything, I am regurgitating something I heard on TLC.
The evidence for the 25k date is mostly linguistic. Studies of native american languages indicate a diffusion from south to north. Based on caclulations of how fast nomadic cultures can spread their linguistic ideas, people would have had to have been living in south america long before the 13k date.
I am sure you can find the details with a quick search of the web (or the library).
However, it is not so great when you are trying to build powerful RPC mechanisms like SOAP on top of it. It's the latter where HTTP will slowly loose favor.
If it weren't for the draconian firewall/proxy policies out there, we would be able to use a truely excellent (and standard) RPC protocol that already exists, IIOP (Internet Inter-Orb Protocol, the language of CORBA).
I have written many CORBA apps only to find that the users were trapped behind an HTTP-only firewall or proxy server. The internet could be a much richer place if we just learned to treat non-HTTP protocols like first class citizens.
IIOP is fully capable of doing everything that web services need including high transaction rates, callbacks, and most importantly authentication. The only advantage that systems like.Net and SOAP have over IIOP is that the wire protocol is XML based and therefore easy to for humans to comprehend.
Programming for PCs is only a small fraction of the whole pie.. by small I mean out of "100 million or so PCs shipped each year; (there are) 6 billion processors that go into embedded systems " - Jack Ganssle [embedded.com] Just check your Palm, cellphone, microwave, car, sound card, video card, stereo, fridge, ac unit, gas pump, coke machine, etc.. if you don't believe me;)
While the number of devices running embedded systems is certainly far greater than the number of apps written for PCs (or other "multipurpose computers"), I am sure the amount of code is not proportional to this relationship. It would be interesting to see some hard statistics about lines of code written (or programmer hours if you prefer) for embedded systems vs app programming.
The embedded market is enormous and C/C++ aren't going away anytime soon.
C was designed as a multipurpose, flexible software->hardware interface language. As far as I can see, it has yet to be improved upon for that purpose. Any software that requires direct hardware manipulation (embedded systems, OSes, etc) is written primarily in C because it is the best tool for the job. I am not even a C programmer and I can see this.
Thank you for the excellent, clear and thorough explanation of how the syndication model works.
I think that as time goes on and it becomes easier to get unauthorized copies of shows soon after the first run, the value of syndication will go down and the value of offering DVD's will go up.
Of course this devaluation of syndication packages is exactly what the studios are afraid of.
The author would probably assert that censorship will continue to occur in China until a stable economy and strong middle class break open China to democracy, at which point it will end.
The assumption here is that a democracy and free speech are inseparable. I don't think this is strictly true. While some types of speech cannot be hindered without destroying the democracy (like the ability to vote), others might be restricted without bringing the democratic system down.
We have seen some types of speech restricted in western culture without democracy ceasing to function. On issues like pornography and evolution, people have actually voted in favor of censorship. Such censorship weakens us culturally to be sure, but the fact that it is possible to vote on the issues is evidence that democracy can continue to function without complete freedom of speech.
So it may be possible for China to shift to a more democratic system without necessarily releasing its grip on information (at least not completely). We might merely see a shift from censorship of political issues to censorship of social issues like porn and cloning.
Just to be clear, I should say that I am a strong supporter of both free speech and democracy.
if and only if Sun wakes up and makes the JDK open source!
I hope that Sun sees that huge benefit this will bring them in their coming fight against.Net. I think there are large factions of anti-M$ folks out there that are also against Java partly because it is not truely free software. If Sun opened the JDK, then they would suddenly be huge srides ahead of.Net instead of the few steps that they are now. What Java really needs to beat.Net is folks like GNU and Ximian working for it instead of on projects (like Mono) that reproduce what Java already has.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. So it does. I wonder when the classloader started supporting / I am certain that it didn't in the murky days of old. Personally, it seems a little confusing to me to use / since I would easily mistake it for a path and be tempted to throw .class on the end.
java -cp . org.jxul.xulrunner.Main
Judging by the confusion in other posts, I am betting some others are in the same boat.
I am glad you mention this kind of in-fill planning. I happen to live in an area of Denver, CO that is a beneficiary of exactly this kind of wise policy. I live in a new multi-use apartment building that was built on a site that used to be abandoned industrial wharehouses. Not only has the density increased in this neighborhood, but the older businesses have been revitalized by the influx of residences and several historic buildings (which couldn't be condemned) have been re-occupied.
The problem in Denver, though, is that while the city of Denver has had a good zoning policy for several years, the outlying counties are extremely sprawl-centric, often attracting developers who would rather not include retail space or are put off by the smaller lot-sizes.
Our neighboring city of Boulder has seen an interesting backlash to the "green zone" type of policy you mentioned also. What has happened is that places just outside of the green zone have experienced a kind of "super-sprawl" where huge residential developments pop up with virtually no services. These people actually have an easier time commuting by car into the center of town because the freeway goes through the relatively empty green zone.
The bottom line around here is that the only way wise urban planning policies are going to help is if all of the counties start cooperating. Unfortunately this seems unlikely given the current political climate.
The biggest problem I have found with these types of advocacy groups is that no one is proposing sensible plans for transitioning away from car-centric urban development.
I am all for living car-free, (In fact I have gone out of my way to organize my life so I only drive about once a week), but the fact of the matter is that we are currently saddled with ugly, sprawling, single-use zoned cities. With the possible exception of places in China, nobody is building large metropolitan areas from the ground up. What we really need are feasible intermediate steps to gradually eliminate the sprawl and the dependency on cars.
Intermediate steps need to have both the short term benefits as well as moving cities towards the goal of reducing auto-dependence.
The best debugger I have ever used is Log4j. There is really no substitute for a good logging subsystem and grep. The chainsaw log viewer that is part of Log4j is also an excellent tool that can be used instead of grep.
I have also found that an interactive scripting language can be very handy. I use Jython for peeking into the state of Java objects and manually working with them. In my experience, this kind of manipulation can provide much better insight into the runtime behaviour of your code than an interactive debugger can. It can even be used to probe objects for which you do not have the code.
Of course, for non-Java development, there are usually analogs to these tools (syslog, perl, etc)
Actually, I have an interesting experience with this. While I am neither gay nor pacifist, I was surprised to find after becoming vegetarian, that I experienced a signifigant decrease in agressive emotions and an increased sympathy for pacifist attitudes.
I think claiming a direct relationship between vegetarianism and pacifism is certainly a stretch, but it seems valid to claim that being vegetarian does indicate a tendency towards pacifism.
From my own experience, I would definitly say that being vegetarian does make me more of a pacifist.
I thought this was an interesting point considering the fact that east asia is a part of the world where some people eat dogs.
I wonder if there is any relationship between these facts.
It is fairly common for many types of bacteria to swap genes. I don't think it is very common that you can observe such a concrete trait being transferred from one species to another.
I am not a scientist, but I know a few. My observations are that much new scientific programming is done in Perl. It seems to me that Perl has become popular among non-programming scientists for the same reason that FORTRAN became popular 30 years ago: It is easy to get stuff done. I don't think this trend has anything to do with computation speed or available libraries. It is strictly about the ease of use for "pragmatic" users.
I don't want to endorse or dismiss either language, as I don't regularly use them. However, I have observed (anecdotally) a strong concentration of Perl users among scientists.
Just imagine the slashdot effect if they did note that a link had pornographic content.
This is exactly what the Church of Scientology does. All of their religeous documents are copyrighted and strictly controlled.
Future theologans should have a great time comparing pre-IP-law religions with post-IP-law ones.
'I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.'
So the VCR will victimize only a tiny fraction but scare the shit out of the rest.
I would say that is exactly what happened.
I was really hoping that Y2K was going to do the trick. But alas, someone got the word out too soon.
Somebody is beginning to see what web services are really for.
From my point of view, this is the ultimate in security. Air marshals are a huge step forward, but the only way people ever really feel safe is when they know that the guy sitting next to them is on their side. An individual is much more likely to rush a hijacker if they know there are 10 guys right behind him. Strict security scans actually degrade this confidence because people see their fellow passengers interrogated and start to wonder "which passenger here is a terrorist? Who will really back me up?"
If they manage to make legitimate purchases of content so inconvenient that otherwise honest consumers are diven to "priacy", record sales will really start to drop.
The evidence for the 25k date is mostly linguistic. Studies of native american languages indicate a diffusion from south to north. Based on caclulations of how fast nomadic cultures can spread their linguistic ideas, people would have had to have been living in south america long before the 13k date.
I am sure you can find the details with a quick search of the web (or the library).
If it weren't for the draconian firewall/proxy policies out there, we would be able to use a truely excellent (and standard) RPC protocol that already exists, IIOP (Internet Inter-Orb Protocol, the language of CORBA).
I have written many CORBA apps only to find that the users were trapped behind an HTTP-only firewall or proxy server. The internet could be a much richer place if we just learned to treat non-HTTP protocols like first class citizens.
IIOP is fully capable of doing everything that web services need including high transaction rates, callbacks, and most importantly authentication. The only advantage that systems like .Net and SOAP have over IIOP is that the wire protocol is XML based and therefore easy to for humans to comprehend.
While the number of devices running embedded systems is certainly far greater than the number of apps written for PCs (or other "multipurpose computers"), I am sure the amount of code is not proportional to this relationship. It would be interesting to see some hard statistics about lines of code written (or programmer hours if you prefer) for embedded systems vs app programming.
C was designed as a multipurpose, flexible software->hardware interface language. As far as I can see, it has yet to be improved upon for that purpose. Any software that requires direct hardware manipulation (embedded systems, OSes, etc) is written primarily in C because it is the best tool for the job. I am not even a C programmer and I can see this.
Of course nowdays, thanks to the DMCA, creating such a device would be illegal!
I think that as time goes on and it becomes easier to get unauthorized copies of shows soon after the first run, the value of syndication will go down and the value of offering DVD's will go up.
Of course this devaluation of syndication packages is exactly what the studios are afraid of.
The assumption here is that a democracy and free speech are inseparable. I don't think this is strictly true. While some types of speech cannot be hindered without destroying the democracy (like the ability to vote), others might be restricted without bringing the democratic system down.
We have seen some types of speech restricted in western culture without democracy ceasing to function. On issues like pornography and evolution, people have actually voted in favor of censorship. Such censorship weakens us culturally to be sure, but the fact that it is possible to vote on the issues is evidence that democracy can continue to function without complete freedom of speech.
So it may be possible for China to shift to a more democratic system without necessarily releasing its grip on information (at least not completely). We might merely see a shift from censorship of political issues to censorship of social issues like porn and cloning.
Just to be clear, I should say that I am a strong supporter of both free speech and democracy.
You mean someone has to pay for tax breaks? Somebody better tell mr Bush!
Wimp! I have 220+ in my queue. Maybe there should be a slashdot poll on how many movies are in your netflix queue.
I hope that Sun sees that huge benefit this will bring them in their coming fight against .Net. I think there are large factions of anti-M$ folks out there that are also against Java partly because it is not truely free software. If Sun opened the JDK, then they would suddenly be huge srides ahead of .Net instead of the few steps that they are now. What Java really needs to beat .Net is folks like GNU and Ximian working for it instead of on projects (like Mono) that reproduce what Java already has.