...is they don't make you look like a wage slave.
http://www.spireusa.com/
They are very well thought out and built and have excellent customer service.
I've had my bag for 5 years and it looks almost like new. One of the buckles finally broke so I called them direct -- no questions asked they sent me a new one.
Eh, they're just copyin' Apple again. The last time this suffix was popular was around the time the movie FX came out. Remember the Apple IIfx? "Wicked Fast" said the Jobinator, IIRC.
Re:the slashdot story is mis-interpreting the post
on
LGPL is Viral for Java
·
· Score: 1
Wrong.:-D If you knew Java, you'd know that a jar is the equivalent of a "binary"; that is object code. What is described here, is exactly that -- using a _*jar* file from another peice of code.
Hey, don't be so-postmodern!* Seriously, words aren't responsible for how they are used. It is descriptive, evocative, and in common usage. What other word captures the mechanism so well? Yes, its analagous to disease, but it is also directly analagous to the way many kinds of ways that information self-replicate and spread.
And anyway, or own fear of viruses is certainly anthropomorphic, and -- knowing just enough about micorbiology to be dangerous -- may be more neccessary to genetic processes than we think.
(*See "State of the Onion" post.)
Great point. I wonder if the reason that Apple is so into boasting about performance -- and they did this at the G4 launch, though I think they have a much better case here -- is just that that is what people nag on them so much about. They just want to say "no I ain't". No matter how many times they try to tell people that size doesn't matter..
OTOneH, Better if other people do your bragging for you. OTOtherH, I also rememeber a time in the early nineties when Apple hardware was very competitve with Wintel, but people only looked at Mhz; I can understand them wanting to inocluate themselves against that.
But isn't it funny, no one talks about Mhz when Opeteron is mentioned..
Re:Science v. Common Sense
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
LMAO! That was awesome! Do I get credit for setting you up?
Science v. Common Sense
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
More proof of the ungoing schism between science and common sense.
Right, but then you a confusing and basically arbitrary line between different appraches. Just think, "How confusing is it going to be to try explaining this to a new Java programmer."
"Let's see, if both my accessors are the same I can use this form; otherwise I have to use that form."
Again, I'm not saying these problems aren't surmountable -- personally I would _love_ to see a better answer. I'm just saying that there are a lot of subtleties.
Well said -- I just meant that its not as big an issue for me in my day to day coding expereince..but you are absolutly right that your example is cleaner.
"I hope this doesn't come off as rude, but this is a pet peeve of mine, so let me put it in a very concrete way, given the current economic climate. If I was looking to hire someone, and as part of the hiring process asked them to pick the "best" way to write the above, and they answered "if(x == 5)" and you answered what you just said, they would get the job.:-D"
I should say to be clear, all other things being equal. Its most importnat that you are a good coder, as working as part of an XP team can be trained...
Politely disagree; in this case I think if(x==5) is clearly the "best" way.
These cultural musings are very interesting and its fun to think about different rationales for doing things, but yea, there is a "best" way, or to nuance what I'm saying a bit more, a "preferred" way. And this is the "preferred" way, precisely because it is what most programmer's would expect. Any funny little idiosynchraies you introduce create cognitive dissonance and make the work for the rest of your team that much harder and less fulfilling.
Paraphrasing Kent Beck IIRC, software syntax is not the place to express your creativity and independence. In particular, agile software development techniques such as Extreme Programming don't leave any place at all for people to pretend that there are not standards, and no such thing as the best way.
I hope this doesn't come off as rude, but this is a pet peeve of mine, so let me put it in a very concrete way, given the current economic climate. If I was looking to hire someone, and as part of the hiring process asked them to pick the "best" way to write the above, and they answered "if(x == 5)" and you answered what you just said, they would get the job.:-D
"Also, it's statically typed. It's so fucking annoying to have to typecast everything - I know I have a damn String - quit holding my fucking hand!"
Yea, you "know" you have a String...until you don't. Maybe you're superman, but I'm mortal -- and by the way, good practices demand a little humility, and assuming that you are _not_ perfect.
Java's strong typing has been a huge productivity enhancement for everyone I've worked with. Just knowing that typically when you compile something, its actually going to run without a single error has been a revelation for me.
In my mind, this is _exactly_ the kind of thing that should be avoided in Java and that has sown so much confusions and monkey-business in the C++ community. Yea, you _should_ be defining those interfaces and abstract classes. That's why they call it OO.:D
AC, I agree that the current approach is a PITA. I would also be very happy to see a more terse way to express properties. But what you are doing in your example, is throwing the baby out w/ the bathwater.
Note that you now don't have anyway to specify access and protection! I had given a little thought to better ways to handle this, and even had an interesting brief email exchange w/ a C# engineer about it. For the protection aspects you could do something like [this is just a quick idea I cam up with:]
property access String name;
where access is one of {read, write, readwrite}
But note taht right away you have a problem -- no way to assign protection levels to the various access, which is really a cross-product. What happens for example if you want the getter to be public, but the setter to be private?
Also, note that you would also need semantics to handle overriding the property accessors. You could just say that the property access defines an equivalent to the getter and setter methods, but that can get weird and confusing very quickly. Think about the situation where you have an interface defining getters and setters and then you implement it by just providing the one-line property definition. That would not be very transperent TSTL.
All this is just to say that it is a noble goal, but not as trivial as it sounds at first glance. IMO, the C# "solution" is particularly ugly, and qualifies strongly for the "syntactic sugar" label.
FInally, as in my other note, good IDEs like IntelliJ provide very convenient ways to auto-generate these things. I care much less about this issue now that I am not having to type all this stuff out by hand!
Sorry, I should have been clearer; let's say one "best" way. You know like on the SAT, when they ask you what is the one best word and two or three of them sort of fit?
In this case, the one righ (ok, best) case is always nearly always the simplest, least obsfucated and, most importantly, the most expected. In this case, that is clearly:
Ya, its funny, enumerators were always one of the first things to gome up when people were griping, and has been the source of a lot of discussion re: workarounds. IIRC, Gosling wanted this in from the beginning, but they ran out of time..
..Thought C# has some nice innovations, one of my big problems with it is that so many of its new 'features' are so much syntactic sugar.
One of the big things I appreciate about Java is that there is typically onyl one right way to do something; a big change from C++ for example.
Plus, modern IDEs like IntelliJ make it very easy to construct iterators and such [Ctrl-j itar..]
That said, I don't think that the majority of the Java improvements are really sytactic sugar; things like generics will be very positve improvements.
And its very important that Sun keeps up these improvements -- as long as they continue to be well thought out. Ideally we will continue to have a fairly state-of-the art language without any fluff.
You've missed my point. If not misleading it is completely useless. Yea, you can read the numbers but then why have the chart? The only reason is to create a incorrect impression of relative performance. See Tufte...
If you go to the better hardware sites, you will see that they use performance comparison charts with a zero-baseline.
Classic bad/intentionaslly misleading graphics on the AMD site. The graphs typically cut off 80% of the lefthand side of the chart values, making a 10% difference look like a 100% difference to the causual user. If you design a graph like this you can arbitraily make the difference look as large as you like -- completely meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, they're just copyin' Apple again. The last time this suffix was popular was around the time the movie FX came out. Remember the Apple IIfx? "Wicked Fast" said the Jobinator, IIRC.
Wrong. :-D If you knew Java, you'd know that a jar is the equivalent of a "binary"; that is object code. What is described here, is exactly that -- using a _*jar* file from another peice of code.
Hey, don't be so-postmodern!* Seriously, words aren't responsible for how they are used. It is descriptive, evocative, and in common usage. What other word captures the mechanism so well? Yes, its analagous to disease, but it is also directly analagous to the way many kinds of ways that information self-replicate and spread. And anyway, or own fear of viruses is certainly anthropomorphic, and -- knowing just enough about micorbiology to be dangerous -- may be more neccessary to genetic processes than we think. (*See "State of the Onion" post.)
Sorry,
Cleaner Link to ABQ Journal Story
Great point. I wonder if the reason that Apple is so into boasting about performance -- and they did this at the G4 launch, though I think they have a much better case here -- is just that that is what people nag on them so much about. They just want to say "no I ain't". No matter how many times they try to tell people that size doesn't matter.. OTOneH, Better if other people do your bragging for you. OTOtherH, I also rememeber a time in the early nineties when Apple hardware was very competitve with Wintel, but people only looked at Mhz; I can understand them wanting to inocluate themselves against that. But isn't it funny, no one talks about Mhz when Opeteron is mentioned..
LMAO! That was awesome! Do I get credit for setting you up?
More proof of the ungoing schism between science and common sense.
Me, I'm on the side of science.
true..better code-folding tools would help here..
Right, but then you a confusing and basically arbitrary line between different appraches. Just think, "How confusing is it going to be to try explaining this to a new Java programmer."
"Let's see, if both my accessors are the same I can use this form; otherwise I have to use that form."
Again, I'm not saying these problems aren't surmountable -- personally I would _love_ to see a better answer. I'm just saying that there are a lot of subtleties.
Oh, totally agree. I was assuming a single line, or in a for statement for example. In that context it is the best way, but in another..
Well said -- I just meant that its not as big an issue for me in my day to day coding expereince..but you are absolutly right that your example is cleaner.
"I hope this doesn't come off as rude, but this is a pet peeve of mine, so let me put it in a very concrete way, given the current economic climate. If I was looking to hire someone, and as part of the hiring process asked them to pick the "best" way to write the above, and they answered "if(x == 5)" and you answered what you just said, they would get the job. :-D"
I should say to be clear, all other things being equal. Its most importnat that you are a good coder, as working as part of an XP team can be trained...
Politely disagree; in this case I think if(x==5) is clearly the "best" way.
:-D
These cultural musings are very interesting and its fun to think about different rationales for doing things, but yea, there is a "best" way, or to nuance what I'm saying a bit more, a "preferred" way. And this is the "preferred" way, precisely because it is what most programmer's would expect. Any funny little idiosynchraies you introduce create cognitive dissonance and make the work for the rest of your team that much harder and less fulfilling.
Paraphrasing Kent Beck IIRC, software syntax is not the place to express your creativity and independence. In particular, agile software development techniques such as Extreme Programming don't leave any place at all for people to pretend that there are not standards, and no such thing as the best way.
I hope this doesn't come off as rude, but this is a pet peeve of mine, so let me put it in a very concrete way, given the current economic climate. If I was looking to hire someone, and as part of the hiring process asked them to pick the "best" way to write the above, and they answered "if(x == 5)" and you answered what you just said, they would get the job.
Java's strong typing has been a huge productivity enhancement for everyone I've worked with. Just knowing that typically when you compile something, its actually going to run without a single error has been a revelation for me.
In my mind, this is _exactly_ the kind of thing that should be avoided in Java and that has sown so much confusions and monkey-business in the C++ community. Yea, you _should_ be defining those interfaces and abstract classes. That's why they call it OO. :D
AC, I agree that the current approach is a PITA. I would also be very happy to see a more terse way to express properties. But what you are doing in your example, is throwing the baby out w/ the bathwater.
Note that you now don't have anyway to specify access and protection! I had given a little thought to better ways to handle this, and even had an interesting brief email exchange w/ a C# engineer about it. For the protection aspects you could do something like [this is just a quick idea I cam up with:]
property access String name;
where access is one of {read, write, readwrite}
But note taht right away you have a problem -- no way to assign protection levels to the various access, which is really a cross-product. What happens for example if you want the getter to be public, but the setter to be private?
Also, note that you would also need semantics to handle overriding the property accessors. You could just say that the property access defines an equivalent to the getter and setter methods, but that can get weird and confusing very quickly. Think about the situation where you have an interface defining getters and setters and then you implement it by just providing the one-line property definition. That would not be very transperent TSTL.
All this is just to say that it is a noble goal, but not as trivial as it sounds at first glance. IMO, the C# "solution" is particularly ugly, and qualifies strongly for the "syntactic sugar" label.
FInally, as in my other note, good IDEs like IntelliJ provide very convenient ways to auto-generate these things. I care much less about this issue now that I am not having to type all this stuff out by hand!
Sorry, I should have been clearer; let's say one "best" way. You know like on the SAT, when they ask you what is the one best word and two or three of them sort of fit?
In this case, the one righ (ok, best) case is always nearly always the simplest, least obsfucated and, most importantly, the most expected. In this case, that is clearly:
1. x++.
I'd be delighted to address more compex examples.
Ya, its funny, enumerators were always one of the first things to gome up when people were griping, and has been the source of a lot of discussion re: workarounds. IIRC, Gosling wanted this in from the beginning, but they ran out of time..
Arghhhh..I give up..Enough wasting my time on /. :D
You've missed my point. If not misleading it is completely useless. Yea, you can read the numbers but then why have the chart? The only reason is to create a incorrect impression of relative performance. See Tufte... If you go to the better hardware sites, you will see that they use performance comparison charts with a zero-baseline.
Classic bad/intentionaslly misleading graphics on the AMD site. The graphs typically cut off 80% of the lefthand side of the chart values, making a 10% difference look like a 100% difference to the causual user. If you design a graph like this you can arbitraily make the difference look as large as you like -- completely meaningless.