Java is terse in comparison to languages like Pascal, Ada, Eiffel, etc it might not be terse in comparison with Perl or Brainfuck but that isn't exactly a bar that people should want to go under.
C syntax languages are all terse the have ternary operators, ++, += and all those character saving devices but not comprehension saving devices.
Now I'm sure you've got another witty response that shows how Java is a massive verbose language in comparison with Pascal, Ada or Eiffel... I'd love to see it to help me improve my clear lack of understanding in language design.
To put this into some form of perspective, strange here on Slashdot I know, but in reality for most people internet became a potential reality around 1998 (AOL going onto the internet from its walled garden) or at best 1996. So maybe another way to look at this study would be
From zero to 80% in 10/12/15 years, how the US has embraced email
Sure lots of the people here on Slashdot might have had an email account in the 80s, but that is an insignificant minority. I actually think that it is pretty impressive at 80% penetration given some of the literacy issues in the US education system.
Those aren't Robots they are Daleks and Hawking is the Master, the voice, the control, the brain the size of a planet, the being based in the UK, everything points to it.
As someone whose first programming language was Ada, and who knows of several universities around the same time who chose Ada as a teaching language, I can say with certainty that you are completely wrong.
First off those strict rules help you because you spend miles less time debugging stuff you don't understand, once it compiles it will tend to run and the compiler gives helpful messages about what you are doing wrong (often including suggestions on how to fix it). With Java, and especially C and C++, let alone scripting languages the beginner spends much more time debugging non-operational code than writing the code in the first place. This tends to mean that these people focus on "getting an executable" rather than "getting it running".
Ada is a brilliant language to teach newbies in (again I've personally done this) as you can explain the abstract concepts and then have the compiler make sure they are doing it right rather than have them say "it compiles but it keeps falling over, why?".
Ada's issues are due to the mentality of lots of (IMO) unprofessional engineers who focus on the number of characters over the operational viability of a system.
And for a final point. Take a look at the complex code the guy wrote, if that was in Java, C, C++, Scala, Ruby, Perl, LISP or what ever do you think that you'd have a chance of understanding it?
So what you are saying is that its a talking shop, its a bunch of arguments and therefore its basically pointless.
arguing that theism has been undermined by scientific discoveries is a major part of scholarship
That isn't scholarship, its pointing out the bloody obvious. Yet you claim that Einstein couldn't have grasped these complex points.... Philosophy of religion is pointless, it came out of arguments between religions, it then involved the concept of atheism and all it has ever achieved is more hot air than a republican party convention.
Name a single decent achievement from philosophy of religion.
Putting aside the fact that other notable Nobel Prize winners have managed to demonstrate brilliance in multiple fields (Currie for instance) this really is a crock. It is a classic insular mind argument that only the "blessed" are smart enough to understand all the complexities of religion, that it takes a huge amount of study to truly "understand the mind of god" and to understand the arguments of religion.
The reality is, as has been proven by science for thousands of years, philosophy of religion is a subject which is continually being undermined by science. Whether it be the concepts around how different religions consider the creation of man or on the position of the earth in the universe, philosophy of religion can argue all it likes that Abramic religions say "God did it directly" and "at the centre" but it is science who can say "Evolved from a common ancestor of today's apes" and "Just in some back-water solar system in a back-water galaxy".
It is science that questions religion, always has and always will, and it will be the "philosophers of religion" who condemn science for the presumption of argument whether than be condemning Socrates to death, Galileo to torture or Darwin to infamy.
Philosophy is an arts subject, its a purely academic subject, its certainly not "a full time job"
What makes you think that Einstein didn't think long and hard about his position? Given the number of people who tried to claim him as a theist and his rebuttals (including this letter) he comes across as someone who is extremely well read on the subject and has a huge advantage over those who limit themselves to a philosophical discussion on religion. Religion is not a testable scientific proposition and Einstein was (at the time) the man who saw further than all others on how the Universe operated and thus had greater insight about the universe around us than anyone who simply studied religion.
To imply that Einstein didn't think about his position and wasn't well read on the subject certainly appears to go against both his education and background as well as the writings and arguments he made on the topic.
If I want to know what is wrong with me, I ask a doctor not someone who studies the philosophy of illness, if I want to know what governs the universe then I'll ask a scientist over people who study the philosophy of religion. Einstein is an authority on what makes the universe tick, much more so than people who study religion.
So maybe the question is what authority do philosophers of religion have when talking about what created and governs the universe?
not trained in the philosophy of religion So to be clear here, what you are saying is that you have to be trained in religion to have an opinion on it? Surely this rules out 99% of theists out there today, pretty odd that they can't have a view.
The flip side of this is that no-one (theist or atheist) should have an opinion on science unless correctly trained. That no-one can have an opinion on the Law unless fully trained in the law and become a politician unless trained in politics.
Its a bit childish to refer to Einstein and saying "yeah see, proves it" but using his arguments (that religion is not rational for instance) certainly shouldn't be ruled out just because he was only a Nobel Prize winning physicist who revolutionised mankind's view of the universe. Philosophy of religion is the study of only a limited domain and it is a domain that has been reduced over the centuries by science, the best way to understand why religion is bunk is to read science books because they explain the universe much more effectively than "man with beard did it".
Enlightenment is the antidote to religion, and you don't get much more enlightened than Einstein.
But the point here is that the freedom that OSS gives you does require you to trust the whole distribution chain. In this case there was an added muppet who did something they shouldn't have thus rendering everything downstream insecure. OSS is great but it required great developers, given that it has take well over a year to get the advisory out it shows that the many eyes piece didn't work here, mainly because the eyes were looking at the original source not the botched packaging job.
The "easy to use" Linux box in the house uses Ubuntu and has this issue and like many people I didn't even think to check that the OpenSSL wasn't the REAL OpenSSL it was OpenSSL with muppet extensions. Maybe there needs to be some form of extension that warns that a package has been modified from its original source code and that the modification was done by "K. Frog" so you can determine whether to trust that package or look back to the source.
Or some sort of voting system on contributors (how very Web 2.0) so you can see how the people who touched your package were rated with the biggest weighting being given to the last person through the code (hand edited by Linus = 5 stars, hand edited by James Gosling = 5 stars, hand edited by the bloke who wrote clippy = 2 stars, hand edited by a bloke who removed a seed generator = 0 stars).
Having the code is great, but this makes me want to know much more about who last edited that code.
1. Little bits, I mean really little, like even smaller than the republican vote in Greenwich Village 2. Time is just another dimension, space is a different set of dimensions. Like you and your girlfriend/wife/partner/online bot perspectives on what constitutes romantic 3. Electric charge is those new Visa swipe pay things, its all done by electricity to charge you
Glad I could help. My other works include explaining relativity using your relatives and energy v entropy using only the medium of mime.
First off the article talked about Snort, which I can't quite see my wife using it then moved on to talk about the development lifecycle not a major part of her internet and PC experience. The NSA files, while useful, are huge (the Mac OSX 10.3 one is 2.5MB) and I can't see the everyday user trawling through that. Its only for Vista that it is really viable as it says use the MS settings as these follow the NSA guidelines.
So in summary the only everyday users who could do this are those using Vista.... an unusual plug for Redmond from Slashdot.
Last week at JavaOne there was a presentation on the LHC and Mars and simply put they just stunned me at how interesting this stuff was and I leapt back on the net to find out more. The Royal Institute in the UK has the Christmas Lectures which always amazed me as a child.
But at school? Apart from one teacher science was always a dull subject, it was numbers in a way that made Maths seem exciting and it just never covered where all this science was leading to. Its no wonder that there are a shortage of scientists and engineers out there when the school system turns the most exciting subjects into the dullest ones.
So sure some of these presentations are beyond the level of kids at school, but isn't it sometimes worth blowing their minds to make them realise why they are doing what they are doing? Science is a stunning thing, can we please stop making it dull.
Hang on I know this one... its inventing the Telephone? or is it TV? Anaesthetics? Hell I give up its a massive list
In conjunction with alcohol however the Scots are most famous for drinking the brewing is just the process you have to do to get to being drunk. Waiting to distil a decent malt is just a waste of time when their are cans of Special available.
Now that is genius. Aber for anyone who doesn't know is one of the coldest, wettest, windiest and bleakest places in the UK, its okay in the summer but these students and their prof have just come up with a reason to be on a tropical island for three months "you never know when it might actually arrive".
Cheap booze, great weather, women in bikinis and no threats from the druids... brilliant.
Genius... your suggestion is for them to get a phone that uses a WiFi connection (no SIM, no EDGE) and use a VOIP client over WiFi to solve their INTERNET CONNECTION PROBLEM
What next? Suggesting to a drowning man that he should use a boat without a bottom to rescue himself?
You'll not have internet access for 10 days? Sorry I live in a first world country with pretty strong competition in the internet market, I didn't realise it there were still countries with government enforced monopolies that destroy competition and provide crappy service... are you in Soviet Russia;)
My last experience was moved in, plugged in, phoned up.... "it will be 24 hours before you are connected".... hung up... looked at flashing lights on the box... connected.... got shouted at for not helping unpack.
1) Government declares an unwinable war against a changing opponent and people listen - Nope, most brits were against Iraq and almost everyone (even some in government) think it was the wrong target in retrospect. 2) Government demonstrates effective control over people - nope they can't even hold onto CDs 3) Government enforces complete control of society and the media - Nope, they get slated everywhere 4) Abandonment of the rule of law when they choose - nope they can't even get the detention extension they want
Ahh but there are CCTV cameras which catch bugger all information. Maybe the CCTV cameras should go but lets be clear this isn't about liberty and security its purely a cost control mechanism, its a free market decision in otherwords.
Go and read 1984 before talking about dystopia and ask yourself where you can find a country that actively spys on its citizens and where senior people state they are above the rule of law.
Now I know people on Slashdot will be on rant alert over this but lets assume that the idea of this is to reduce piracy, personally this is much easier for me. The number of times I want to play a game offline for 10 days is pretty low... in fact I can't remember when I've wanted to play a game and not been online within 24 hours either way. What I do hate however is that I can rip my DVDs and songs and have them working on my laptop but with the games I have to bring a bunch of CDs.
If this means I can play all of the games on my laptop without having to carry the CDs then I'm happy with it.
Seriously this is Slashdot, what is the issue on requiring an Internet connection? Slashdot is a site where people will boldly post that internet access is a basic human right, while healthcare is a private concern.
At $100 per user it runs at double the cost of Google Apps Premier Edition (the one with support and more storage, 25GB per user for mail for instance) and you still have to buy all your own hardware and infrastructure and do the support.
In most companies email and collaboration is managed by a central team (no matter how small), so shifting it into a SaaS model is just a small step away. That is the competition for MS, not old school hosted solutions.
I nominate Steve Balmer and Bill Gates, in the last month they have done more to promote the concept of alternative operating systems than anyone else in the market. Bill by saying the next Windows is out next year and Steve by saying that Vista is a work in progress. Without the sterling work of these two men in hampering Microsoft it would be much harder for Open Source software in the corporate world.
The thing about all these devices that I never understood is who is the market? Business types who have smartphones? Geeks who have.... smartphones?
Personally I prefer my watch to be mechanical (automatic of course) as that demonstrates decent engineering, and when I want to know the weather, traffic, news or whatever I pull out my phone.
iPod 1 is a 30GB model that includes video, but the battery lasts for only around 3 hours. iPod 2 is a nano so once the first one dies then the second one plays podcasts and musics for the rest of the flight.
Laptop 1 is my "exec" laptop. The word, excel, PPT one that I have to use most of the time for my job. Latop 2 is a very nice developer laptop which I use to prevent myself getting PPT death.
I fly long haul most of the time is the last thing you need to know, 10 hours on a plane needs serious IT support.
Its ticket which has an ELECTRONICALLY readable code, often a 3D barcode. The printed information on it is VERY easy to fix, the barcode is much harder as it has to tie back to a specific transaction.
A human check of the card is of minor value, the second check is just for secondary screening which would be much better handled either at the gate (most effective) or at the start of the queue.
Slashdot Mirror
Java is terse in comparison to languages like Pascal, Ada, Eiffel, etc it might not be terse in comparison with Perl or Brainfuck but that isn't exactly a bar that people should want to go under.
C syntax languages are all terse the have ternary operators, ++, += and all those character saving devices but not comprehension saving devices.
Now I'm sure you've got another witty response that shows how Java is a massive verbose language in comparison with Pascal, Ada or Eiffel... I'd love to see it to help me improve my clear lack of understanding in language design.
To put this into some form of perspective, strange here on Slashdot I know, but in reality for most people internet became a potential reality around 1998 (AOL going onto the internet from its walled garden) or at best 1996. So maybe another way to look at this study would be
From zero to 80% in 10/12/15 years, how the US has embraced email
Sure lots of the people here on Slashdot might have had an email account in the 80s, but that is an insignificant minority. I actually think that it is pretty impressive at 80% penetration given some of the literacy issues in the US education system.
Why not? Or does Ada magically make complex algorithms more comprehensible?
ds ths rd ok? it cn b dffclt 2 ndrstnd a trs lngg
or
Does this read ok? It can be difficult understand a terse language?
That is the difference between Ada and the likes of C and Java. Sure a good coder could build it but will it be as comprehensible? No it won't.
Those aren't Robots they are Daleks and Hawking is the Master, the voice, the control, the brain the size of a planet, the being based in the UK, everything points to it.
As someone whose first programming language was Ada, and who knows of several universities around the same time who chose Ada as a teaching language, I can say with certainty that you are completely wrong.
First off those strict rules help you because you spend miles less time debugging stuff you don't understand, once it compiles it will tend to run and the compiler gives helpful messages about what you are doing wrong (often including suggestions on how to fix it). With Java, and especially C and C++, let alone scripting languages the beginner spends much more time debugging non-operational code than writing the code in the first place. This tends to mean that these people focus on "getting an executable" rather than "getting it running".
Ada is a brilliant language to teach newbies in (again I've personally done this) as you can explain the abstract concepts and then have the compiler make sure they are doing it right rather than have them say "it compiles but it keeps falling over, why?".
Ada's issues are due to the mentality of lots of (IMO) unprofessional engineers who focus on the number of characters over the operational viability of a system.
And for a final point. Take a look at the complex code the guy wrote, if that was in Java, C, C++, Scala, Ruby, Perl, LISP or what ever do you think that you'd have a chance of understanding it?
So what you are saying is that its a talking shop, its a bunch of arguments and therefore its basically pointless.
arguing that theism has been undermined by scientific discoveries is a major part of scholarship
That isn't scholarship, its pointing out the bloody obvious. Yet you claim that Einstein couldn't have grasped these complex points.... Philosophy of religion is pointless, it came out of arguments between religions, it then involved the concept of atheism and all it has ever achieved is more hot air than a republican party convention.
Name a single decent achievement from philosophy of religion.
Any branch of philosophy is now a full-time job.
Putting aside the fact that other notable Nobel Prize winners have managed to demonstrate brilliance in multiple fields (Currie for instance) this really is a crock. It is a classic insular mind argument that only the "blessed" are smart enough to understand all the complexities of religion, that it takes a huge amount of study to truly "understand the mind of god" and to understand the arguments of religion.
The reality is, as has been proven by science for thousands of years, philosophy of religion is a subject which is continually being undermined by science. Whether it be the concepts around how different religions consider the creation of man or on the position of the earth in the universe, philosophy of religion can argue all it likes that Abramic religions say "God did it directly" and "at the centre" but it is science who can say "Evolved from a common ancestor of today's apes" and "Just in some back-water solar system in a back-water galaxy".
It is science that questions religion, always has and always will, and it will be the "philosophers of religion" who condemn science for the presumption of argument whether than be condemning Socrates to death, Galileo to torture or Darwin to infamy.
Philosophy is an arts subject, its a purely academic subject, its certainly not "a full time job"
What makes you think that Einstein didn't think long and hard about his position? Given the number of people who tried to claim him as a theist and his rebuttals (including this letter) he comes across as someone who is extremely well read on the subject and has a huge advantage over those who limit themselves to a philosophical discussion on religion. Religion is not a testable scientific proposition and Einstein was (at the time) the man who saw further than all others on how the Universe operated and thus had greater insight about the universe around us than anyone who simply studied religion.
To imply that Einstein didn't think about his position and wasn't well read on the subject certainly appears to go against both his education and background as well as the writings and arguments he made on the topic.
If I want to know what is wrong with me, I ask a doctor not someone who studies the philosophy of illness, if I want to know what governs the universe then I'll ask a scientist over people who study the philosophy of religion. Einstein is an authority on what makes the universe tick, much more so than people who study religion.
So maybe the question is what authority do philosophers of religion have when talking about what created and governs the universe?
not trained in the philosophy of religion
So to be clear here, what you are saying is that you have to be trained in religion to have an opinion on it? Surely this rules out 99% of theists out there today, pretty odd that they can't have a view.
The flip side of this is that no-one (theist or atheist) should have an opinion on science unless correctly trained. That no-one can have an opinion on the Law unless fully trained in the law and become a politician unless trained in politics.
Its a bit childish to refer to Einstein and saying "yeah see, proves it" but using his arguments (that religion is not rational for instance) certainly shouldn't be ruled out just because he was only a Nobel Prize winning physicist who revolutionised mankind's view of the universe. Philosophy of religion is the study of only a limited domain and it is a domain that has been reduced over the centuries by science, the best way to understand why religion is bunk is to read science books because they explain the universe much more effectively than "man with beard did it".
Enlightenment is the antidote to religion, and you don't get much more enlightened than Einstein.
First off I'm a big OSS supporter, yada, yada
But the point here is that the freedom that OSS gives you does require you to trust the whole distribution chain. In this case there was an added muppet who did something they shouldn't have thus rendering everything downstream insecure. OSS is great but it required great developers, given that it has take well over a year to get the advisory out it shows that the many eyes piece didn't work here, mainly because the eyes were looking at the original source not the botched packaging job.
The "easy to use" Linux box in the house uses Ubuntu and has this issue and like many people I didn't even think to check that the OpenSSL wasn't the REAL OpenSSL it was OpenSSL with muppet extensions. Maybe there needs to be some form of extension that warns that a package has been modified from its original source code and that the modification was done by "K. Frog" so you can determine whether to trust that package or look back to the source.
Or some sort of voting system on contributors (how very Web 2.0) so you can see how the people who touched your package were rated with the biggest weighting being given to the last person through the code (hand edited by Linus = 5 stars, hand edited by James Gosling = 5 stars, hand edited by the bloke who wrote clippy = 2 stars, hand edited by a bloke who removed a seed generator = 0 stars).
Having the code is great, but this makes me want to know much more about who last edited that code.
1. Little bits, I mean really little, like even smaller than the republican vote in Greenwich Village
2. Time is just another dimension, space is a different set of dimensions. Like you and your girlfriend/wife/partner/online bot perspectives on what constitutes romantic
3. Electric charge is those new Visa swipe pay things, its all done by electricity to charge you
Glad I could help. My other works include explaining relativity using your relatives and energy v entropy using only the medium of mime.
First off the article talked about Snort, which I can't quite see my wife using it then moved on to talk about the development lifecycle not a major part of her internet and PC experience. The NSA files, while useful, are huge (the Mac OSX 10.3 one is 2.5MB) and I can't see the everyday user trawling through that. Its only for Vista that it is really viable as it says use the MS settings as these follow the NSA guidelines.
So in summary the only everyday users who could do this are those using Vista.... an unusual plug for Redmond from Slashdot.
Last week at JavaOne there was a presentation on the LHC and Mars and simply put they just stunned me at how interesting this stuff was and I leapt back on the net to find out more. The Royal Institute in the UK has the Christmas Lectures which always amazed me as a child.
But at school? Apart from one teacher science was always a dull subject, it was numbers in a way that made Maths seem exciting and it just never covered where all this science was leading to. Its no wonder that there are a shortage of scientists and engineers out there when the school system turns the most exciting subjects into the dullest ones.
So sure some of these presentations are beyond the level of kids at school, but isn't it sometimes worth blowing their minds to make them realise why they are doing what they are doing? Science is a stunning thing, can we please stop making it dull.
And what is Scotland most famous for?
Hang on I know this one... its inventing the Telephone? or is it TV? Anaesthetics? Hell I give up its a massive list
In conjunction with alcohol however the Scots are most famous for drinking the brewing is just the process you have to do to get to being drunk. Waiting to distil a decent malt is just a waste of time when their are cans of Special available.
Now that is genius. Aber for anyone who doesn't know is one of the coldest, wettest, windiest and bleakest places in the UK, its okay in the summer but these students and their prof have just come up with a reason to be on a tropical island for three months "you never know when it might actually arrive".
Cheap booze, great weather, women in bikinis and no threats from the druids... brilliant.
Genius... your suggestion is for them to get a phone that uses a WiFi connection (no SIM, no EDGE) and use a VOIP client over WiFi to solve their INTERNET CONNECTION PROBLEM
What next? Suggesting to a drowning man that he should use a boat without a bottom to rescue himself?
You'll not have internet access for 10 days? Sorry I live in a first world country with pretty strong competition in the internet market, I didn't realise it there were still countries with government enforced monopolies that destroy competition and provide crappy service... are you in Soviet Russia ;)
My last experience was moved in, plugged in, phoned up.... "it will be 24 hours before you are connected".... hung up... looked at flashing lights on the box... connected.... got shouted at for not helping unpack.
Ummm lets do that 1984 Checklist
1) Government declares an unwinable war against a changing opponent and people listen - Nope, most brits were against Iraq and almost everyone (even some in government) think it was the wrong target in retrospect.
2) Government demonstrates effective control over people - nope they can't even hold onto CDs
3) Government enforces complete control of society and the media - Nope, they get slated everywhere
4) Abandonment of the rule of law when they choose - nope they can't even get the detention extension they want
Ahh but there are CCTV cameras which catch bugger all information. Maybe the CCTV cameras should go but lets be clear this isn't about liberty and security its purely a cost control mechanism, its a free market decision in otherwords.
Go and read 1984 before talking about dystopia and ask yourself where you can find a country that actively spys on its citizens and where senior people state they are above the rule of law.
Now I know people on Slashdot will be on rant alert over this but lets assume that the idea of this is to reduce piracy, personally this is much easier for me. The number of times I want to play a game offline for 10 days is pretty low... in fact I can't remember when I've wanted to play a game and not been online within 24 hours either way. What I do hate however is that I can rip my DVDs and songs and have them working on my laptop but with the games I have to bring a bunch of CDs.
If this means I can play all of the games on my laptop without having to carry the CDs then I'm happy with it.
Seriously this is Slashdot, what is the issue on requiring an Internet connection? Slashdot is a site where people will boldly post that internet access is a basic human right, while healthcare is a private concern.
I wonder how many Americans would agree that the quote-unquote "intellectual elite" should run the country.
All eight of them
At $100 per user it runs at double the cost of Google Apps Premier Edition (the one with support and more storage, 25GB per user for mail for instance) and you still have to buy all your own hardware and infrastructure and do the support.
In most companies email and collaboration is managed by a central team (no matter how small), so shifting it into a SaaS model is just a small step away. That is the competition for MS, not old school hosted solutions.
I nominate Steve Balmer and Bill Gates, in the last month they have done more to promote the concept of alternative operating systems than anyone else in the market. Bill by saying the next Windows is out next year and Steve by saying that Vista is a work in progress. Without the sterling work of these two men in hampering Microsoft it would be much harder for Open Source software in the corporate world.
The thing about all these devices that I never understood is who is the market? Business types who have smartphones? Geeks who have.... smartphones?
Personally I prefer my watch to be mechanical (automatic of course) as that demonstrates decent engineering, and when I want to know the weather, traffic, news or whatever I pull out my phone.
Seriously, what is the point?
iPod 1 is a 30GB model that includes video, but the battery lasts for only around 3 hours. iPod 2 is a nano so once the first one dies then the second one plays podcasts and musics for the rest of the flight.
Laptop 1 is my "exec" laptop. The word, excel, PPT one that I have to use most of the time for my job. Latop 2 is a very nice developer laptop which I use to prevent myself getting PPT death.
I fly long haul most of the time is the last thing you need to know, 10 hours on a plane needs serious IT support.
Its ticket which has an ELECTRONICALLY readable code, often a 3D barcode. The printed information on it is VERY easy to fix, the barcode is much harder as it has to tie back to a specific transaction.
A human check of the card is of minor value, the second check is just for secondary screening which would be much better handled either at the gate (most effective) or at the start of the queue.