$30 for 1.5mbps down for 6 months is the best deal I could find recently. After that the price goes up around $5-$10 (though you can probably find a similar new deal..). This deal is offered by Netvision, the largest local ISP.
There's a very simple rule that you can follow to avoid these kinds of scams: If you have a secret of any kind, never use it for any purpose other than what it's intended for.
This is the same for passwords, PIN numbers, credit card numbers, etc. Never use a password for something other than logging in. Never use a PIN number for something other than getting money out of an ATM, etc.
On the other hand, if it's a project you're doing anyway, I could understand taking less. In that case part of your pay is the satisfaction you get.
I disagree with this view. Following your logic, developers who enjoy their work should be paid less. IMHO those who enjoy their work usually produce better results. If anything, they should be paid more.
Java itself as a technology is a solution in search of a problem. Yeah, it is everywhere. Should it be? Is it really the correct solution to most of the problems? No, not by a long shot.
That is like saying that C++ is a solution in search of a problem. Java is a generic programming language. It fixes most of (all?) of C++'s horrible flaws, is much simpler, and is much more cross-platform than C++ will ever be.
In addition, Java's level of abstraction allows developers to focus on the bigger picture like design and architecture, instead of nitpicking on whether to make this integer signed or unsigned, or whether that method should be made virtual or not. It never ceases to amaze me how Java developers usually focus their conversations on things like which design pattern to use, whereas C++ developers talk about how a particular compiler implements this obscure specialized template / multiple inheritence / any other malfunctioning C++ feature.
The problem Java solves is 'how do I write higher-quality software in less time'.
03:50:22.169661 10.0.0.52.1397 > www.msn.com.http: S 2535664221:2535664221(0) wi
n 16384 (DF)
03:50:22.199661 www.msn.com.http > 10.0.0.52.1397: S 3601141750:3601141750(0) ac
k 2535664222 win 65535 (DF)
03:50:22.209661 10.0.0.52.1397 > www.msn.com.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
03:50:22.209661 10.0.0.52.1397 > www.msn.com.http: P 1:391(390) ack 1 win 17520
(DF)
03:50:22.269661 www.msn.com.http > 10.0.0.52.1397: . ack 391 win 65146
These look like perfectly valid TCP handshakes. I did notice that when refreshing a site, IE reuses the previous connection, but that's legal (assuming it used Connection: KeepAlive in the HTTP header. I didn't verify that.)
The samples were taken on my network's gateway, which is a Linux box, hence impartial:)
A nice site a friend of mine used for this purpose is Google Sets. You enter the names of items in a set, and it tries to discover other items from the same set. For example, you can enter 'yellow', 'blue', and 'red', and it will offer more colors.
Strange as it may seem, my friend entered 'zero 7' and 'air' as bands he liked, and found out about other, similar bands he never knew existed.
Re:AAAAAAAAArgh -- missing the point sooo badly
on
Java Gets Templates
·
· Score: 1
Suppose I want to write a generalised summation method, which adds up all the elements in a list, whether those are int, float, SomeComplexNumberType or whatever...
I believe Java generics don't support primitive types, only classes and interfaces.
Should I write another method called add that has several versions, for each type I'd like to add up? Or maybe it should be addTo?
The problem you pose is real: We should have a standard way of adding to instances of a certain type. However, IMHO the best solution isn't to add operator overloading, but rather to standardize an addition interface:
interface Addable { public void add(Object other); }
And of course you can also make it generic to avoid downcasts..:) This is similar in concept to Comparable, and doesn't resort to operator overloading, which is, to Java, nothing but syntactic sugar.
Re:Good, but need to avoid a few problems
on
Java Gets Templates
·
· Score: 1
I've experienced the exact same problem you're describing when using C++. However, I believe there are two important differences between Java and C++ that will reduce its effect with Java:
STL usually requires relatively simple things from template types: equality/comparability operators, copy construction, etc. These issues are already addressed in Java: All Objects support equality (using equals()), there's an interface for comparing objects (Comparable), and copy construction is simply not needed because of simpler memory allocation.
In my experience, C++ tend to use templates where an interface would suffice. Sometimes this is a symptom of premature optimization (everybody knows templates are so much more efficient than inheritence with its virtual calls..). Other times, its caused by lack of understanding. Usually, however, it's because of the dreadful tendency of C++ programmers to use the minimal number of classes necessary, and using an interface would entail writing a whole new class to accomodate it..
Anyway, Java already has a long tradition of using interfaces properly (it even has its own keyword:), and I believe Java programmers better understand its proper use. Hence, overusing templates is less likely to occur in Java.
The experiment does not violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which prohibits the exact measurement of both the position and velocity of a particle. The laser pulse does not reveal the position of the electron, just its velocity.
Phew.. I was really scared there for a minute! I mean, God only knows what would happen if we started violating physical law.. all hell could break loose!
And _nobody_ has ever woken up in real life and realized their assets were worthless and they'd wasted years of their life.
This is the most Insightful comment I've seen in/. for a long time, so I can't understand why it's been modded as Funny. It is truly Zen, and this realization is exactly what drives many monks to give up their earthly possessions and pursue a life of sprituality.
It reminds me of a nice, western koan (a Zen-riddle): A family sat down one evening for a game of Monopoly. As the hours passed the parents were doing fine, but the young boy was slowly heading towards bankruptcy. Time and again he landed on hoteled streets that belonged to his father, at first causing him to pay the rent from his own money, and later forcing him to auction off his own streets. The boy was becoming very upset, shouting at the board whenever he landed on another heavily-populated street, shifting uneasily in his chair. Eventually the little money he had scraped to save aside was taken away by his tycoon father, and he was left with nothing. Dumbfounded, he looked at the board, then at his parents. He realized suddenly it was all but a game; he had neither lost nor gained a thing throughout it. A big smile spread on his face, and he got up, and ran joyfully to his room.
How clever of you. You've managed to take the whiz-bang GUI interface of Windows where you can 'do everything with a simple click', and reduce it to the mechanism Linux users have been using for several years now: Keyboard Shortcuts.
However, this is just a poor excuse for a great mechanism, which Windows still lacks. For instance, what if you're in the middle of working on something, and just want to have a quick look at a web page? Win-D, i, Enter, Browse, Close,... uh oh.. those other 27 windows you arranged so lovingly on your desktop are all minimized, with no easy way to restore!
I've been living with this sort of pain for a couple of months now. At first, I thought about getting an ergonomic keyboard. When I started doing some research, however, the view held by almost everyone (including my doctor) was that ergonomic keyboards are a waste of money. It's much more important to be aware of how you type and not keep your hands in a dangerous posture etc., than to use a specially-shaped keyboard.
The
RSI page has a lot more info on the subject. Good luck!
For those working in the comfy Java world, there's
JProbe Threadalyzer
. It can detect deadlocks, race-conditions, and other such niceties, and display them visually.
I, for one, don't want to live in a country where my driving (or any other aspect of my life, for that matter), is continuously being monitored and policed by the government. IMHO such a system belongs in the sort of dark regimes that are known for their invasion of privacy, not in a democracy.
One thing people tend to forget/ignore, is that citizens should always have the ability to break the law, but be deterred from doing it because of society's retribution. If you give that up, you get a society like Singapore where the crime rates are apparently lower, but you can be thrown in jail for trying to 'smuggle' bubble gum into the country.. Is this really the sort of place you want to raise your children in?
Performance? If you're worried about performance, then you have not used a recent copy of Java.
But if you do get into a performance problem in a particular section of your program (from the sound of it it'll probably be an algorithm-related part), you can always implement that part in C and call it from Java using JNI. This still leaves most of your program cross-platform, while solving the performance bottleneck.
I agree. Here's why using C++ properly doesn't incur much of a performance penalty: The only difference performance-wise when using 'basic' C++ (i.e. classes, inheritance, perhaps operator overloading) is during method calls to class instances, because the this pointer must be passed as an extra argument to the method. This means an extra push instruction on the caller side. Adding this extra instruction isn't much of an overhead.
The next additional overhead involves virtual methods. A call to a virtual method costs much more than to a normal method, because there's a memory lookup involved into the vtable.
The nice thing about C++ is that you opt-in to these extra features. Don't use virtual methods if you don't need them. And if you do need them but can't live with the overhead, sometimes you can use templates instead, which use up more memory but are just as efficient as normal classes.
Don't forget the 90-10 rule. 90% of the program time is spent running 10% of the code. Even if you build your entire program using virtual functions, at the end you can profile it, find those 10% (usually less than that, according to my experience) and optimize them using improved algorithms, time-memory tradeoffs, inlining, and other such methods. I find it hard to believe you'll regret using C++ over C because of the performance hit.
I really like Java as a language but I never use it because it gives me no practical advanatage.
I fail to see where you're coming from. I've done several small-to-medium-sized projects using C++ before I switched to Java, and since then I've never looked back. Just the small fact that memory-leaks (and thus related bugs) are reduced by 99% makes the move worthwhile, not to mention actual, readable documentation of the standard library, useable exceptions, OO support for esoteric things like database access, and being truly cross-platform. If these aren't practical advantages I don't know what is, and I can safely say Java has significantly reduced my organization's time-to-market, and increased the quality of software.
I'm really starting to hate Sun lately actually. I don't see them as any better than MS. They're just a big corporation trying to make their big cheif richer than he already is.
This displays such a glaring disconnect from reality, I'm not even going to touch that. I'll just give one example: MS has iron-clad claws dug into the.NET platform and C#. They solely develop it, and neither you nor anyone else has a say in how it's developed. Java, on the other hand, is led by Sun, but is devleoped by many organizations such as IBM, Oracle, and Apache. Part of the process is a public review, in which you get a say in how the platform is developed.
Java is an excellent language but since the actually design Sun has yet to produce anything of value.
Apparently you have not been watching the JSRs very closely. It's enough to look at the development of the J2SE from 1.1 to 1.4: Swing, Collections, Proxy, and now Logging, Preferences, Assertions, scalable IO for creating large servers, and the list goes on. All this was done in the most mainstream part of Java, and I'm not even getting into the unbelievable strides taken in the development of e.g. J2EE and J2ME.
They haven't done anything to help open source or any communities.
Once again you display shameless ignorance. Just a few weeks ago Sun agreed to change the JCP as demanded by Apache, so that open-source implementations of various Java standards (including J2EE) can be created. Do you honestly see MS doing something even remotely as helpful as this?
In the future, I suggest not falling into MS well-oiled hype machine, and checking out the facts for yourself.
Ever since I saw The Matrix I wanted to see two things happen in my lifetime: The ability to become a Kung Foo master in under 30 seconds, and the ability to stay in shape while exerting little or no effort ("Why are my muscles so weak?", "You've never really used them, Neo.." (please excuse my prob. crappy transcription)).
What exactly is it.NET does that Java doesn't? Your only evidence that even comes close to answering this question is compile once, run anywhere, which clearly shows your understanding of both Java and.NET is pathetic. Java is compiled once, as in into bytecode, and can be run anywhere, as in Windows, Linux, all flavors of UNIX, Mainframe, your PDA, and your cell phone (again, using the originally compiled code)..NET, on the other hand, is supported on a real plethora of platforms: WinNT, Win2K, WinXP,... incredible indeed. Also,.NET compiles to a binary called a PE, which is only supported on Windows. Not exactly run anywhere.
Okay, so your poor excuse for an example doesn't really work out. But even if you think that.NET is technologically superior to Java (which it clearly isn't, read Gartner if you don't want to take my word for it), there are other factors which should be considered when comparing the two platforms: Java is led by Sun, but is developed by a great many organizations, including IBM, Oracle, and even Apache, which represents the interests of the Open Source community. Propositions for development are opened for the developer community for comments, which means you can participate in developing the platform you use. Finally, software components that are built on top of Java (databases, messaging products, application servers, and many others) have standard APIs which are defined by the entire community, and each vendor can create an implementation of these APIs and compete with other vendors. You can see the effects of this happy coexistance in the application server markets, where you have WebLogic, IBM, Oracle, and JBoss all competing for market share. I'm not quite certain, but I'll assume you can figure out on your own what this competition does to product quality.
Compare this to the M$ world... One company, one product in each genre (COM+ as the app server, MSMQ as the messaging product), zero customer ability to change vendors, and bam!, you're locked in. If I'm not happy with IBM's MQSeries product, I can switch to another with zero code changes. I can even switch to an open source implementation if I'm so inclined. What to you do if MSMQ isn't everything you hoped it would be?
Slashdot Mirror
$30 for 1.5mbps down for 6 months is the best deal I could find recently. After that the price goes up around $5-$10 (though you can probably find a similar new deal..). This deal is offered by Netvision, the largest local ISP.
This is the same for passwords, PIN numbers, credit card numbers, etc. Never use a password for something other than logging in. Never use a PIN number for something other than getting money out of an ATM, etc.
I disagree with this view. Following your logic, developers who enjoy their work should be paid less. IMHO those who enjoy their work usually produce better results. If anything, they should be paid more.
That is like saying that C++ is a solution in search of a problem. Java is a generic programming language. It fixes most of (all?) of C++'s horrible flaws, is much simpler, and is much more cross-platform than C++ will ever be.
In addition, Java's level of abstraction allows developers to focus on the bigger picture like design and architecture, instead of nitpicking on whether to make this integer signed or unsigned, or whether that method should be made virtual or not. It never ceases to amaze me how Java developers usually focus their conversations on things like which design pattern to use, whereas C++ developers talk about how a particular compiler implements this obscure specialized template / multiple inheritence / any other malfunctioning C++ feature.
The problem Java solves is 'how do I write higher-quality software in less time'.
Here's a tcpdump for www.microsoft.com, on an XP box:
03:47:16.259661 10.0.0.52.1328 > www.us.microsoft.com.http: S 2485226999:2485226 999(0) win 16384 (DF)
03:47:16.279661 www.us.microsoft.com.http > 10.0.0.52.1328: S 631604626:63160462 6(0) ack 2485227000 win 65535 (DF)
03:47:16.289661 10.0.0.52.1328 > www.us.microsoft.com.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (D F)
03:47:16.289661 10.0.0.52.1328 > www.us.microsoft.com.http: P 1:398(397) ack 1 w in 17520 (DF)
03:47:16.339661 www.us.microsoft.com.http > 10.0.0.52.1328: . ack 398 win 65139
And here's for www.msn.com:
03:50:22.169661 10.0.0.52.1397 > www.msn.com.http: S 2535664221:2535664221(0) wi n 16384 (DF)
03:50:22.199661 www.msn.com.http > 10.0.0.52.1397: S 3601141750:3601141750(0) ac k 2535664222 win 65535 (DF)
03:50:22.209661 10.0.0.52.1397 > www.msn.com.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (DF) 03:50:22.209661 10.0.0.52.1397 > www.msn.com.http: P 1:391(390) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
03:50:22.269661 www.msn.com.http > 10.0.0.52.1397: . ack 391 win 65146
These look like perfectly valid TCP handshakes. I did notice that when refreshing a site, IE reuses the previous connection, but that's legal (assuming it used Connection: KeepAlive in the HTTP header. I didn't verify that.)
The samples were taken on my network's gateway, which is a Linux box, hence impartial :)
But don't take my word for it. Try it yourself!
Strange as it may seem, my friend entered 'zero 7' and 'air' as bands he liked, and found out about other, similar bands he never knew existed.
I believe Java generics don't support primitive types, only classes and interfaces.
Should I write another method called add that has several versions, for each type I'd like to add up? Or maybe it should be addTo?
The problem you pose is real: We should have a standard way of adding to instances of a certain type. However, IMHO the best solution isn't to add operator overloading, but rather to standardize an addition interface:
And of course you can also make it generic to avoid downcasts..Anyway, Java already has a long tradition of using interfaces properly (it even has its own keyword :), and I believe Java programmers better understand its proper use. Hence, overusing templates is less likely to occur in Java.
Phew.. I was really scared there for a minute! I mean, God only knows what would happen if we started violating physical law.. all hell could break loose!
This is the most Insightful comment I've seen in /. for a long time, so I can't understand why it's been modded as Funny. It is truly Zen, and this realization is exactly what drives many monks to give up their earthly possessions and pursue a life of sprituality.
It reminds me of a nice, western koan (a Zen-riddle): A family sat down one evening for a game of Monopoly. As the hours passed the parents were doing fine, but the young boy was slowly heading towards bankruptcy. Time and again he landed on hoteled streets that belonged to his father, at first causing him to pay the rent from his own money, and later forcing him to auction off his own streets. The boy was becoming very upset, shouting at the board whenever he landed on another heavily-populated street, shifting uneasily in his chair. Eventually the little money he had scraped to save aside was taken away by his tycoon father, and he was left with nothing. Dumbfounded, he looked at the board, then at his parents. He realized suddenly it was all but a game; he had neither lost nor gained a thing throughout it. A big smile spread on his face, and he got up, and ran joyfully to his room.
However, this is just a poor excuse for a great mechanism, which Windows still lacks. For instance, what if you're in the middle of working on something, and just want to have a quick look at a web page? Win-D, i, Enter, Browse, Close, ... uh oh.. those other 27 windows you arranged so lovingly on your desktop are all minimized, with no easy way to restore!
Geez.
The RSI page has a lot more info on the subject. Good luck!
For those working in the comfy Java world, there's JProbe Threadalyzer . It can detect deadlocks, race-conditions, and other such niceties, and display them visually.
One thing people tend to forget/ignore, is that citizens should always have the ability to break the law, but be deterred from doing it because of society's retribution. If you give that up, you get a society like Singapore where the crime rates are apparently lower, but you can be thrown in jail for trying to 'smuggle' bubble gum into the country.. Is this really the sort of place you want to raise your children in?
But if you do get into a performance problem in a particular section of your program (from the sound of it it'll probably be an algorithm-related part), you can always implement that part in C and call it from Java using JNI. This still leaves most of your program cross-platform, while solving the performance bottleneck.
The next additional overhead involves virtual methods. A call to a virtual method costs much more than to a normal method, because there's a memory lookup involved into the vtable.
The nice thing about C++ is that you opt-in to these extra features. Don't use virtual methods if you don't need them. And if you do need them but can't live with the overhead, sometimes you can use templates instead, which use up more memory but are just as efficient as normal classes.
Don't forget the 90-10 rule. 90% of the program time is spent running 10% of the code. Even if you build your entire program using virtual functions, at the end you can profile it, find those 10% (usually less than that, according to my experience) and optimize them using improved algorithms, time-memory tradeoffs, inlining, and other such methods. I find it hard to believe you'll regret using C++ over C because of the performance hit.
I fail to see where you're coming from. I've done several small-to-medium-sized projects using C++ before I switched to Java, and since then I've never looked back. Just the small fact that memory-leaks (and thus related bugs) are reduced by 99% makes the move worthwhile, not to mention actual, readable documentation of the standard library, useable exceptions, OO support for esoteric things like database access, and being truly cross-platform. If these aren't practical advantages I don't know what is, and I can safely say Java has significantly reduced my organization's time-to-market, and increased the quality of software.
I'm really starting to hate Sun lately actually. I don't see them as any better than MS. They're just a big corporation trying to make their big cheif richer than he already is.
This displays such a glaring disconnect from reality, I'm not even going to touch that. I'll just give one example: MS has iron-clad claws dug into the .NET platform and C#. They solely develop it, and neither you nor anyone else has a say in how it's developed. Java, on the other hand, is led by Sun, but is devleoped by many organizations such as IBM, Oracle, and Apache. Part of the process is a public review, in which you get a say in how the platform is developed.
Java is an excellent language but since the actually design Sun has yet to produce anything of value.
Apparently you have not been watching the JSRs very closely. It's enough to look at the development of the J2SE from 1.1 to 1.4: Swing, Collections, Proxy, and now Logging, Preferences, Assertions, scalable IO for creating large servers, and the list goes on. All this was done in the most mainstream part of Java, and I'm not even getting into the unbelievable strides taken in the development of e.g. J2EE and J2ME.
They haven't done anything to help open source or any communities.
Once again you display shameless ignorance. Just a few weeks ago Sun agreed to change the JCP as demanded by Apache, so that open-source implementations of various Java standards (including J2EE) can be created. Do you honestly see MS doing something even remotely as helpful as this?
In the future, I suggest not falling into MS well-oiled hype machine, and checking out the facts for yourself.
I'm thinking, one out of two ain't so bad...
Okay, so your poor excuse for an example doesn't really work out. But even if you think that .NET is technologically superior to Java (which it clearly isn't, read Gartner if you don't want to take my word for it), there are other factors which should be considered when comparing the two platforms: Java is led by Sun, but is developed by a great many organizations, including IBM, Oracle, and even Apache, which represents the interests of the Open Source community. Propositions for development are opened for the developer community for comments, which means you can participate in developing the platform you use. Finally, software components that are built on top of Java (databases, messaging products, application servers, and many others) have standard APIs which are defined by the entire community, and each vendor can create an implementation of these APIs and compete with other vendors. You can see the effects of this happy coexistance in the application server markets, where you have WebLogic, IBM, Oracle, and JBoss all competing for market share. I'm not quite certain, but I'll assume you can figure out on your own what this competition does to product quality.
Compare this to the M$ world... One company, one product in each genre (COM+ as the app server, MSMQ as the messaging product), zero customer ability to change vendors, and bam!, you're locked in. If I'm not happy with IBM's MQSeries product, I can switch to another with zero code changes. I can even switch to an open source implementation if I'm so inclined. What to you do if MSMQ isn't everything you hoped it would be?