it's not multi platform and can not be included in the base FF code.
There's no technical reason why it can not be included. Particularly not because "it's not multi platform". There are plenty of differences between the various platform builds, and the ifdef's are all there to make something like this activex support happen in Firefox proper.
Whether it's a good idea or not is an entirely different question... I for one don't ever expect to see any mozilla browser support activex.
J2EE is, by design, an enourmously complex API. I work with J2EE everyday, but almost no one I work with is good at more than about 50% of it.
Is it practically possible to learn the stuff in any other way besides doing it for a living, moving on up slowly from basic J2SE? Anyone here taken the leap, and how?
No, it's not. But that's not to say that you should not begin learning the API. J2EE covers HTTP...Server side web programming...Databases...Weird databases...Transactions...Distributed transactions...Distributed computing...Web services...Generated code...Annotated code...A ton of other stuff that I can't think of just this second.
That's a lot! No one can be very good at any of this stuff, nevermind all of this stuff. The best you can do is dig in and solve some real problems that you have. You wont learn much from reading Sun's tutorials unless you can honestly say, "oh wow! I never though of doing it this way..." and you can never say that unless you actually tried to something some other way. (Side note: Sun's documentation is notorious for being way way way over-the-top in terms of academic "correctness" vis a vis practically solving a problem.)
what should one concentrate on, and roughly in what order?
I would recomend starting with common tools, like Ant, log4j, Struts, Eclipse. Then move on to the actual API and specs of topics like JDBC, Servlet/Jsp, JMS, and familiarizing yourself with various EJB containers.
what does the new release of Java mean in the context of J2EE programming?
In reality? Nothing. It takes J2EE vendors a very long time to catch up with the latest and greatest JVM. At work, I'm still using 1.3.2. Even when container vendors release products that real companies buy, The differences between 1.3 and 1.4 and 1.5 are not that huge for a developer. There are lots of nice improvements, but nothing that you'll have a hard time with.
The bottom line is that if you can get good at a select few APIs, and are really really good at the tools, you'll have no problem ramping up on any of the other areas of J2EE.
It's not such a big deal in Opera, because it saves what pages you're looking at
If I understand you correctly, there is a way to do this in mozilla as well. Set the pref browser.startup.page to the integer '2', and mozilla/firefox/et al will start up on the page last loaded.
Methinks old Walt would not have approved of fart jokes
One of the funiest bits in Nemo was a fart joke. The one when Bruce (the great white) blew up all the submarine mines which sent bubbles up to two pelicans on the surface.
Then I tried to upgrade to the 2.6 kernel.... and I gave up.
Perhaps this is poorly documented, but here is how I did it without any problems at all:
#emerge gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.1
#cd/usr/src/linux-2.6.1-gentoo
#make menuconfig
(choose options)
#make bzImage && make modules && make modules_install
#mount/dev/hda1(boot partition)/boot/
#cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage/boot/bzImage-2.6
#vi/boot/grub/grub.conf
(copy-paste your old kernel entry to a new one, changing it's label to "2.6" or whatever.)
I rebooted and was presented with "2.6" in my grub menu, and it worked fine. My new Sony DV camera and firewire Pioneer DVD burner work like a charm.
I've seen this argument and I've always thought that it makes sense. Until I tried to RTFify a medium-sized Word document that was less that 5 MB. The resultant rtf was over 200 MB.
Lesson? A compressed, teplated, styled document format sometimes makes more sense than an inline marked up format. And if you are using Windows, what other format fits that bill besides.doc?
You say that your 2 biggest problems with the current setup are cost and performance. A rewrite in a new language will not necasarily solve either problem. If you want to tackle cost, look at free/cheap app servers. If you want to tackle performance, look at the code. Why are you using hundreds of kilobytes of ram for each user? That's a huge red flag and an indication that perhaps your application is either not optimal, or legitimately doing some major leg work for each user. Either way, a rewrite won't fix those problems unless you understand what they are.
Think of the risks that a rewrite introduces:
you break existing business logic with the new implementation
you build a system that is slower than the existing one
you take way too long to finish it, all the while you have to pay your existing licences
Typically, the argument for a rewrite is that the cost of implementing new functional requirements is higher than the cost of just implementing them in a brand new system. Have you tried optimization? How are you maintaining session state? Do you know what it would take to get your app running in a free container? Have you looked at free/cheap caching APIs?
Further, java may not be the out-of-the-box fastest platform, but there is no reason whatever that it can't scale in an environment designed for it. Yes, you may need to have many smaller machines because of jvm memory issues, but that's exactly what you should want. The ideal situation is when you can say, 'if we need to support 10x the current users, we just need to drop in 10x more app servers.' It's called 'scaling linearly.'
"Informative"? oh, please. All.net is is an i18n'ed compiler with an extensive class library. Don't get me wrong, I used it for some time writing a tcp server app, and it's pretty cool and all, but it doesn't matter what language you use, it takes serious training to use the platform to any degree of real usefulness outside of the simplest, example-style apps.
The.NET Framework excels at interoperability
... with itself only*. Have you ever tried to get nmake and make to coexist? It's a nightmare. Generate.net wrappers to export standard c++ code to a c# app? 'Easy' doesn't come to mind.
My gut feeling is that.net should be applauded for what it is: a comprehesnive (finally!) win32 class library with compilers that work "pretty much the same" for each supported language. This was, no doubt, no trivial accomplishment, but "interoperability" is a far, far cry from what.net really provides.
* - True enough, there is good support for wsdl, and web services in general, but this should be not be rocket science for any platform.
...and they still can't make an sqlplus client that supports readline.
Do you need sophisticated, automated input? Use sqlloader. Need sophisticated, automated output? Use rman. Need sophisticated, automated schema management? Use sqlplus.
Oracle comes with gobs of very powerful tools, and sqlplus is just not designed to do what you think it should be doing. It seems like you are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's like complaining that climbing a fire escape is hard when you live on the third flool. Use the stairs.
BTW, if your doing SW development with oracle, use tora(free) or toad($$$). Both these tools make poking around and doing arbitrary queries a snap. Or, take your pick of the thousands of jdbc-based apps that live on sourceforge.
Maybe now that PCs have increased in power by several magnitudes since Be last tried this, Microsoft may actually be able to pull it off.
I'm curious how a FS using a RDBMS will ensure integral file copies without halving the disk space requirements. the rollback segment must be as large as the largest potential copy, no?
i.e., a 100 GB drive now becomes a 50GB drive with all the benefits of a perfectly atomic, error-free, transaction-enabled FS.
Are you insane? I don't care for Windows, but it is the most advanced mouseless UI there is. You can do everything without even having a mouse plugged in at all. The same cannot be said for gnome/kde or X in general. Granted, Windows is decidedly not a CLI, like your ssh sessions, but it's still the best there is if you don't like to use a mouse.
I recall reading something about how some beta of windows 95 or NT 3.x failed a DOD acceptance test because a lot of it depended on the mouse, so Microsoft spent considerable time making it work fine in case of mouse failure.
modern IDEs like IntelliJ make it very easy to construct iterators and such [Ctrl-j itar..]
While it's cool that IDE's make stuff like this easy, it's really not much more than fancy copy-n-paste style coding, which can get dangerous. Have you ever found a copy-n-paste bug that exists in hundreds of methods?
The sort of iterating that for(type t : collection) { } provides really *does* belong in the compiler, since it's what 99.9% of all iterations need to accomplish.
Kubrick typically prints the entire film negative, giving you a 4:3 aspect ratio, i.e., "not widescreen". Almost everyone else cuts off the top and bottom of the film to give you 16:9.
You make a good point, but keep in mind that "what the director intended you to see" does not always mean "widescreen."
Not everyone is still using QWERTY, but here are some reasons.
I switched to dvorak after I injured my neck (possibly due in part to RSI from over-using QWERTY layouts, but that's another story). so I swapped caps lock for control and spent a few out-of-work weeks learning dvorak.
(These are a few concrete issues that are incredibly annoying, but since I've only used software to re-map keys, some of these issues will not impact folks that buy a bona fide dvorak keyboard.)
- since I was learning from scratch, I was able to learn to touch-type from the start. this makes it easy to type things that you type a lot, like "import com.foo.bar", but extremely hard to type abstract things like good passwords like 5165D0+ or whatever (which you can't see as you type)
- some software does not work with dvorak at all. I can't get any windows login screen to use dvorak. cygwin's X also seems to be hard-coded to use QWERTY
- some software seems to double-dvorak your input. I seem to remember ssh'ing from a dvorak-set OSX box to a dvorak-set solaris box and I got QWERTY output. wierd, and annoying.
- no one will be able to use your computer (this may be a pro to some folks.)
- some apps (mostly bad, in-house apps) have non-OS methods of determining what key you typed
- I still can't always find "f":)
All in all, it's been great for me. I type signifigantly faster, fell less pain from typing a lot, shortcuts are generely easier to type with dvorak, plus it's 133t to add an xmodmap to your.bash_profile...
Uhm, this requires a *ton* of thought. The scenario of "a township setting up communication infrastructure" is 180 degrees from "an isp offers cool new service". The asker's town should absolutely seek legal advice on this. Since they are an elected government, they have an obligation to every citizen that a corporation does not have.
When they shut down quake servers because of bandwidth issues, all of a sudden all those "it's their network, they can do what they want!" arguments are completely moot. The network will be (I think) de facto owned equally by all. In any case, a government should not simply "lay down a TOS" without completely understanding what that means.
Read about the legality of putting in public toilets in NYC for a quasi-similar issue. I'm sure an amatuer can find other good case law, too.
er, the indentation got lost in my post, but that wasn't the point. the point was that using sun's style this code is 10 lines while VS formats it to be 17 lines, presenting you with much less code per screen.
having a standard formatting implemented by the IDE
this might be the least worst thing to do, but VS has terrible default formatting. I forget the name of the style, but this is what you get by default:
namespace Foo { public class Bar { void Bar() { if (foo) { bar(0); } else { bar(1); } } } }
combine this with the all the toolbars and help viewers that are on by default, and you can effectively read about 4 lines of code at once.
apros pos of slashdot, I would emphatically recommend setting up some sort of photo repository application *now*. and test it. make sure it easy to upload pictures with one hand, because once the baby comes, you'll no longer have the use of both hands. unless you are both orphans or live with your entire family, a lot of people will be *dying* to see pictures, and they will not stop asking you for them. it's very easy to set it up now, and it will well worth it, come november.
apros pos of parenthood in general:
get sleep now
go see movies now
help your wife with keeping healthy. read about nutrition and excercise, and do it as a team.
have a birth plan
say goodbye to all your friends:)
have a strategy for childcare. you probably wont be able to arrange specifics this far in advance, but you have to start narrowing it down.
if you have any long-term non-family related tasks to do, DO THEM NOW. for example, forget about learning c# in 9 months.
find a parents support group near you. there are millions of things that you will need to do that currently you have no idea how to do. if you're in the SF Bay Area (or don't mind filtering through local info), check out the berkeley parents network.
have fun! don't sweat it too much. people have been doing this for a pretty long time with moderate success, and half the parents are in the bottom 50 percentile!
having both worked on disaster recovery plans and having worked in a data center in the world trade center that was completely destroyed, I can say that the best recovery plans are extremely simple.
break it down into procedures that you can take based on real problems, not causes. some things to consider:
internet connectivity down (switch to backup colo)
unrecoverable db (drive to offsite backup storage and get backup data)
app servers fried (engage hot standby boxes)
all of the above (shit, it's going to be a long night)
etc. I've seen too many recovery plans that are focused on the cause, rather than solutions which is really what these plans are all about. if you really need to, you can cross reference the plans with potential causes. this seems to satisfy the cio types who stay up late wondering 'what happens if _____'.
of course, a backup plan is totally useless if the 'course of action' section is not possible to carry out, due to bad backup practices or lack of failover equipment. having a disaster recovery plan is no substitute for good policy and an adequate hardware/isp budget.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
It works quite well, actually.
There's no technical reason why it can not be included. Particularly not because "it's not multi platform". There are plenty of differences between the various platform builds, and the ifdef's are all there to make something like this activex support happen in Firefox proper.
Whether it's a good idea or not is an entirely different question... I for one don't ever expect to see any mozilla browser support activex.
Is it practically possible to learn the stuff in any other way besides doing it for a living, moving on up slowly from basic J2SE? Anyone here taken the leap, and how?
No, it's not. But that's not to say that you should not begin learning the API. J2EE covers HTTP...Server side web programming...Databases...Weird databases...Transactions...Distributed transactions...Distributed computing...Web services...Generated code...Annotated code...A ton of other stuff that I can't think of just this second.
That's a lot! No one can be very good at any of this stuff, nevermind all of this stuff. The best you can do is dig in and solve some real problems that you have. You wont learn much from reading Sun's tutorials unless you can honestly say, "oh wow! I never though of doing it this way..." and you can never say that unless you actually tried to something some other way. (Side note: Sun's documentation is notorious for being way way way over-the-top in terms of academic "correctness" vis a vis practically solving a problem.)
what should one concentrate on, and roughly in what order?
I would recomend starting with common tools, like Ant, log4j, Struts, Eclipse. Then move on to the actual API and specs of topics like JDBC, Servlet/Jsp, JMS, and familiarizing yourself with various EJB containers.
what does the new release of Java mean in the context of J2EE programming?
In reality? Nothing. It takes J2EE vendors a very long time to catch up with the latest and greatest JVM. At work, I'm still using 1.3.2. Even when container vendors release products that real companies buy, The differences between 1.3 and 1.4 and 1.5 are not that huge for a developer. There are lots of nice improvements, but nothing that you'll have a hard time with.
The bottom line is that if you can get good at a select few APIs, and are really really good at the tools, you'll have no problem ramping up on any of the other areas of J2EE.
If I understand you correctly, there is a way to do this in mozilla as well. Set the pref browser.startup.page to the integer '2', and mozilla/firefox/et al will start up on the page last loaded.
One of the funiest bits in Nemo was a fart joke. The one when Bruce (the great white) blew up all the submarine mines which sent bubbles up to two pelicans on the surface.
Perhaps this is poorly documented, but here is how I did it without any problems at all:
#emerge gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.1 /usr/src/linux-2.6.1-gentoo
/dev/hda1(boot partition) /boot/
/boot/bzImage-2.6
/boot/grub/grub.conf
(copy-paste your old kernel entry to a new one, changing it's label to "2.6" or whatever.)
#cd
#make menuconfig
(choose options)
#make bzImage && make modules && make modules_install
#mount
#cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage
#vi
I rebooted and was presented with "2.6" in my grub menu, and it worked fine. My new Sony DV camera and firewire Pioneer DVD burner work like a charm.
I've seen this argument and I've always thought that it makes sense. Until I tried to RTFify a medium-sized Word document that was less that 5 MB. The resultant rtf was over 200 MB.
Lesson? A compressed, teplated, styled document format sometimes makes more sense than an inline marked up format. And if you are using Windows, what other format fits that bill besides .doc?
Think of the risks that a rewrite introduces:
you break existing business logic with the new implementation
you build a system that is slower than the existing one
you take way too long to finish it, all the while you have to pay your existing licences
Typically, the argument for a rewrite is that the cost of implementing new functional requirements is higher than the cost of just implementing them in a brand new system. Have you tried optimization? How are you maintaining session state? Do you know what it would take to get your app running in a free container? Have you looked at free/cheap caching APIs?
Further, java may not be the out-of-the-box fastest platform, but there is no reason whatever that it can't scale in an environment designed for it. Yes, you may need to have many smaller machines because of jvm memory issues, but that's exactly what you should want. The ideal situation is when you can say, 'if we need to support 10x the current users, we just need to drop in 10x more app servers.' It's called 'scaling linearly.'
The .NET Framework excels at interoperability
My gut feeling is that .net should be applauded for what it is: a comprehesnive (finally!) win32 class library with compilers that work "pretty much the same" for each supported language. This was, no doubt, no trivial accomplishment, but "interoperability" is a far, far cry from what .net really provides.
* - True enough, there is good support for wsdl, and web services in general, but this should be not be rocket science for any platform.
Do you need sophisticated, automated input? Use sqlloader. Need sophisticated, automated output? Use rman. Need sophisticated, automated schema management? Use sqlplus.
Oracle comes with gobs of very powerful tools, and sqlplus is just not designed to do what you think it should be doing. It seems like you are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's like complaining that climbing a fire escape is hard when you live on the third flool. Use the stairs.
BTW, if your doing SW development with oracle, use tora(free) or toad($$$). Both these tools make poking around and doing arbitrary queries a snap. Or, take your pick of the thousands of jdbc-based apps that live on sourceforge.
I read somewhere that they are the same thing. right?
I'm curious how a FS using a RDBMS will ensure integral file copies without halving the disk space requirements. the rollback segment must be as large as the largest potential copy, no?
i.e., a 100 GB drive now becomes a 50GB drive with all the benefits of a perfectly atomic, error-free, transaction-enabled FS.
Are you insane? I don't care for Windows, but it is the most advanced mouseless UI there is. You can do everything without even having a mouse plugged in at all. The same cannot be said for gnome/kde or X in general. Granted, Windows is decidedly not a CLI, like your ssh sessions, but it's still the best there is if you don't like to use a mouse.
I recall reading something about how some beta of windows 95 or NT 3.x failed a DOD acceptance test because a lot of it depended on the mouse, so Microsoft spent considerable time making it work fine in case of mouse failure.
the tricky part would be implementing a javascript spell checker to complete the masquerade.
While it's cool that IDE's make stuff like this easy, it's really not much more than fancy copy-n-paste style coding, which can get dangerous. Have you ever found a copy-n-paste bug that exists in hundreds of methods?
The sort of iterating that for(type t : collection) { } provides really *does* belong in the compiler, since it's what 99.9% of all iterations need to accomplish.
Kubrick typically prints the entire film negative, giving you a 4:3 aspect ratio, i.e., "not widescreen". Almost everyone else cuts off the top and bottom of the film to give you 16:9.
You make a good point, but keep in mind that "what the director intended you to see" does not always mean "widescreen."
I switched to dvorak after I injured my neck (possibly due in part to RSI from over-using QWERTY layouts, but that's another story). so I swapped caps lock for control and spent a few out-of-work weeks learning dvorak.
(These are a few concrete issues that are incredibly annoying, but since I've only used software to re-map keys, some of these issues will not impact folks that buy a bona fide dvorak keyboard.)
- since I was learning from scratch, I was able to learn to touch-type from the start. this makes it easy to type things that you type a lot, like "import com.foo.bar", but extremely hard to type abstract things like good passwords like 5165D0+ or whatever (which you can't see as you type) :)
- some software does not work with dvorak at all. I can't get any windows login screen to use dvorak. cygwin's X also seems to be hard-coded to use QWERTY
- some software seems to double-dvorak your input. I seem to remember ssh'ing from a dvorak-set OSX box to a dvorak-set solaris box and I got QWERTY output. wierd, and annoying.
- no one will be able to use your computer (this may be a pro to some folks.)
- some apps (mostly bad, in-house apps) have non-OS methods of determining what key you typed
- I still can't always find "f"
All in all, it's been great for me. I type signifigantly faster, fell less pain from typing a lot, shortcuts are generely easier to type with dvorak, plus it's 133t to add an xmodmap to your .bash_profile...
less ~/scripts/browser-is-hanging.sh
#!/bin/bash
# killall -9 mosaic-bin
# killall -9 netscape-bin
# killall -9 mozilla-bin
# killall -9 phoenix-bin
killall -9 thunderbird-bin
Uhm, this requires a *ton* of thought. The scenario of "a township setting up communication infrastructure" is 180 degrees from "an isp offers cool new service". The asker's town should absolutely seek legal advice on this. Since they are an elected government, they have an obligation to every citizen that a corporation does not have.
When they shut down quake servers because of bandwidth issues, all of a sudden all those "it's their network, they can do what they want!" arguments are completely moot. The network will be (I think) de facto owned equally by all. In any case, a government should not simply "lay down a TOS" without completely understanding what that means.
Read about the legality of putting in public toilets in NYC for a quasi-similar issue. I'm sure an amatuer can find other good case law, too.
if that doesn't work for some reason, you could easily code a cgi front-end to xmms-shell, which seems to do what you want.
er, the indentation got lost in my post, but that wasn't the point. the point was that using sun's style this code is 10 lines while VS formats it to be 17 lines, presenting you with much less code per screen.
this might be the least worst thing to do, but VS has terrible default formatting. I forget the name of the style, but this is what you get by default:
combine this with the all the toolbars and help viewers that are on by default, and you can effectively read about 4 lines of code at once.apros pos of parenthood in general:
break it down into procedures that you can take based on real problems, not causes. some things to consider:
etc. I've seen too many recovery plans that are focused on the cause, rather than solutions which is really what these plans are all about. if you really need to, you can cross reference the plans with potential causes. this seems to satisfy the cio types who stay up late wondering 'what happens if _____'.
of course, a backup plan is totally useless if the 'course of action' section is not possible to carry out, due to bad backup practices or lack of failover equipment. having a disaster recovery plan is no substitute for good policy and an adequate hardware/isp budget.
now, which will be more annoying: people's mobile phones ringing, or the projectionist who left the default Windows sound theme on?