The same thing that was in it for the fish I ate last night, the glory and honor of knowing that its life was spent in a meaningful way instead of wasted.
Look, you can harvest more stem cells that it is possible to use on the entire U.S. population if you just turn to freeway accidents for a supply source. Your body contains approximately 50 trillion cells, that's 50,000,000,000,000 cells depending on size, age, weight, etc. If you extract a measly 1,000 of these cells which can be transformed into adult stem cells, you have a cell culture wich you can grow outside of the body to any number you wish.
The main arguments for using embryonic stem cells have nothing to do with supply or demand, it has to do with the quality of the cell. Embryonic stem cells are a little bit different than adult stem cells, and you can't get a Swiss watch that was made in China.
Also, the idea of extracting cells without killing the host implies a misunderstanding. The cells and the host are the same thing. You're just cutting up an organisim into two different parts, and applying one part of an organisim to patch or repair another organisim. If you really want to analyze it in detail, you must not forget that this is the same mechanisim that is used for organ transplants and blood transfusions.
So, is it, "Bob, nobly donated a kidney to save his brother Ted." or "Madmen harvested a foreign kidney by slicing open the victim and then shoving it into Ted, an individual who exploits his familial ties to extend his live unnaturally at their detriment."
Now, keeping embryonic stem cells out of research has value to a very small portion of the population, the politicians. Politicians have the most to gain by keeping the issue public, but "on-the-fence". That way they can get votes by grossly misrepresenting the situation, money from the constituency to take a stand against this research, money from the lobbiests for considering the softening of their stance, press time for statements they make about the issue, and power from thier control over their created dilemma. They could even reverse their stance and they still gain enormous benefit from making this a "major" issue.
Meanwhile, issues that are likely to directly impact you (crime, environmental regulations, taxation, abuses of corporate powers, proper privacy legislation, eroding consumer protection) convienently take backstage to other people's abortions and embryos.
Every hamburger you eat was the direct product of a spinal injury to a cow.
Cruelty is not an absolute. Cruelty is directly based on intent. A physician operating on a patient is not cruel because he intends to assit the patient. Jack the Ripper operating on a patient is cruel because he intends to disembowl and kill his patient.
The researches intend to create a cure for spinal injuries. You apparently don't value a cure for spinal injuries and are viewing the action from your own personal standpoint, not one of a trained researcher. If you created a spinal injury in a cow, it would be cruel because no benefit could result in it. However, a resarcher performing the same operation isn't cruel, provided that he minimized the amount of suffering required, continues past the injuring of the animal, and diligently attempts to provide a cure.
If we took any other approach to determining cruelty, then all actions which could harm must be considered cruel. Immunizations (needle puncture) would be cruel, as would tonsilectomy, removing appendixes, heart valve bypasses, most of medicine, a good deal of entertainment, and even a bit of fashion (ear piercing).
There's no question on when life begins. Adults, teenagers, children, babies, fetuses, embryos, sperm , and egg are all alive.
It's all a question about when to give legal status to life.
Do you really want to endow an unborn fetus with the rights reserved to an adult? Be prepared for reckless endangerment lawsuits filed on behalf of the fetus against the mother, filed by a concerned party (the father). Which sounds improbable until you realized that it would be a very nasty move to make during a divorce.
Also, women's rights would suffer huge setbacks because smoking and drinking when pregnant would be akin to bodily harm on the fetus. Casual inspection of a woman isn't sufficent knowledge of whether she is pregnant, so officers that intend to enforce the law will have to demand pregnancy tests from all smokers and drinkers.
There's a million new legal possibilities for just giving fetuses rights, and none of them are very pretty. And a partial set of rights probably won't make any difference, as the right to live and continue living is the one right that will create the most nasty legal scenarios.
And if you give legal protection to fetuses, why stop there? I mean, sperm and egg are both living, and you've already broke the legal precedent that rights are to be given to autonomous independantly acting / thinking life.
Re:Seriously.
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Look, it's a giant troll posting thinly disguised as a news article!
BSD is great, but it's not the only game in town. Suggesting that it is what Linux should have been is nothing more than troll bait.
You have to place that key under the mat. You're actively thwarting your security for conveinence. If you feel that security needs tightening, you'll have the option of removing that key and not providing the conveinence anymore.
Some labs that care about USB security don't hook up the USB ports to the motherboard. That's a good simple solution, until you require a USB device. It used to be that you could get along without USB devices very easily, but with the (thank goodness) removal of legacy ports and protocols, it's getting harder to use this simple-minded solution. For example, my laptop doesn't even come with a PS/2 port, so it's a USB mouse and keyboard for me. Same goes for most printers these days too.
Now if I hacked my keyboard cable, there's not a method to unlock the system, unless my keyboard is a USB keyboard? That's making the same system less secure, but because of phyisical security considerations, you're arguing that it doesn't really matter?
Look, I am thrilled that Google is funding a large portion of corprate research at the moment. And I love that they are not cast (for right now) into the mold of a Big Evil Company (tm).
But this is stock information, and not much of it. Clicking on the link takes you to Yahoo finiancials. That's hardly innovative.
Not all new products will be thrilling, after all someone still needs to make brooms; however, with all of the muscle behind Google, I believe that they could have provided a more comprhensive analysis page instead of a hyperlink.
Worse yet, they cannot differenate between the person and the message.
Just this week my homeowner's association is attempting to determine if it should discredit a complaint by one of the residents because they are a realator who sometimes sells properties in this area.
I made the disingenous comment that perhaps we should look at the items outlined in the complaint and investigate them one by one to determine if they are real issues, are thing that can be changed, and if the budget can support changing them. Then someone else stood up and stated that we shouldn't really even bother with reading a report from a person with ulterior motives.
It's scary to contemplate, but I hear that Republican Congresses are comprised of human beings.
If that's so, then perhaps there's truth in the rumors. I personally am hoping that it's not proven true, as I feel somewhat better about humanity believing that our Congress has been invaded by aliens from another planet trying deperately to destory our world without launching into an expensive all-out war.
I use the following quote as evidence that we've already slipped to far:
Scientists will eventually figure out a way to go faster than the speed of light, I mean people used to believe that flight was impossible and look at us now!
If you want all viruses gone, then you just need to destroy all the hosts. It hardly matters if that host is biological or computer.
The problem with solutions that "just work" is they often don't solve anything, they just replace a problem with a new problem because they are not well thought out. That's where the catch phrase "just works" comes from, someone who didn't want to explain why, as the cure was worse than the disease.
Asking for every tool to have a gui is a silly as asking for every real-world tool to have a computer.
Machining tools benefit from computer interfaces, screwdrivers do not. Yet I have never seen anyone open a can of paint with a machining tool, but the screwdriver is flexible enough in design to do this task, even though it was not specifically designed to do it.
GUIs are great in many aspects, but they can be just as limiting in others. Pick the right tool for the job. Your build system is probably not even well defined by yourself, so don't take any risks in having a GUI define what you must do, it could be totally wrong.
Well, if your only talking about one file with a static format that won't change over time, then feel free to define the right format for the file and write your parser once.
But many programs are much more dynamic than UNIX's/etc/passwd file. For files that are likely to be needed in a new format at some time, XML coupled with XSL provides a flexible way to move you data programatically into the new format.
You could achieve the same effect with a combination of sed, awk, and sh scripts, but then the burdeon of verification that the scripts worked properly would lie on a human's shoulders, and odds would be high that eventually a mistake would be made.
Also XML provides a facility to pre-verify that the file is in correct format before it is consumed by its intended program. Certainly such things can be done without XML, but there are no gurantees that all programmers build this feature into their executables, and not all programs fail safely when partially configured correctly.
Now, using any kind of formatting you could desire, consider pulling the price of cheese out of document when you have no control over the department that's creating it. With XML you can, because you'll request the DTD of the document, and parse for the tag describing cheese, and it's interior tag describing the price. Sure you could do the same thing with a character delimited field, but when that new guy misformats the document shifting most fields to the right by one index, XML will die on an improperly defined document, while most other methods will read the quantity as the price.
Well, your impression is wrong, you desires are right, and you're ignoring a great tool to fix your problems.
XML was always meant to be human readable and human editable, that's why it isn't in a more compact binary format, and the tag names are typically full words describing the surrounding contents. Machine handling is very important too, and that's where the strict syntax comes into play.
XML isn't meant to be a programming language. Actually, in ant, XML is the configuration file, not a scripting language, although the configuration is one to define a target and it's associated actions, so I can see how the difference can be overlooked. Those that do use it as a programming language should properly be disposed of in a manner similar to your description.
Ant is the solution to your problems, assuming that you can solve your problems in house. Have part of the build verify the XML configuration files by verifying the XML files against their respective DTDs or XSDs. There's already an ant task for it, XmlValidate. It shouldn't be much of an issue to set up and use, unless you knowledge of XML does not extend into validation. But even then, you only have to set it up once to use it a thousand times.
Contrary to popular belief, GNU make is no lightweight. Sure, the make executable is lighter than and + a JVM, but the first thing the make executable calls will be a shell, and that will be calling a program, and you'll use many many programs to do anything that isn't trivial.
Worse yet, make runs each task in a new shell, so you'll have many many shells being created and destroyed. If your project grows to any considerable extent, you'll soon see ant's solution of one shell (the JVM) as a lightweight solution, even if the shell itself is bigger.
Ant does have a dependset task and an uptodate task for explicitly defining dependencies, in addition it has the condition task to bind several dependencies together in a logical manner.
But still, ant is no make. It's not ant's fault, but more a fault of the underlying reason that make is both powerful and problematic. Make leverages the power of it's shell and all the utilities that have been written explicitly to make shell scripting possible. Make (by itself) doesn't do a lot except call a bunch of programs using a reverse-chaining algorthim. It's the value of all those shell programs that give make it's lifting power.
Ant can call a platform's shell programs too, but then you run into difficulties in communicating rich information between the programs, and ant becomes just a funny, XML configured, JAVA version of make. That's why ant's logging capabilites far outstrip those of make, because it's logging facility can differentiate between errors, warnings, and informational messages, routing them to text files, xml files, databases, and web pages.
The best thing about using FORTRAN it that I don't need to read books about C. The best thing about C is that I don't need to read books about C++. The best thing about C++ is that I don't need to read books about JAVA. The best thing about Lisp is that I don't need to read books about Carly Fiona. The best thing about AWK is that I don't need to read books about Beowulf Clusters. The best thing about bash is that I don't need to read books about hot grits.
Ant-contrib offers a C / C++ build task, and I've used it with a lot of success for building the.so libraries that my JNI calls will use.
The documentation isn't great, actually (when I used it) it sucked, or more to the point, I couldn't find it. Finally I found an open source project that used the task successfully, and used thier build.xml file as a template for the compiling I had to do.
Mabye I'm being too harsh with respect to the documentation, since a quick look over at http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/cc.html seems much more comprehensible than I remember it a few years back.
I've used it with C and with C++ to build shared libraries on a Linux platform that were later bound to JAVA via a JNI interface.
Take a look at ant-contrib, they have a c/c++ compiler ant task. I'm not sure about other languages, but here's some other things I've done with Ant that aren't really JAVA centric.
I've used Ant to transform XML to other various things, including DocBook build systems to various HTML, PDF, TXT, etc. files.
I've used Ant to verify that documents conform to their appropriate DTDs / XSDs. Java developers take note! Next time you have an XML file driving some sort of configuration, validate it. It will save you a lot of time.
I've used Ant to wrap source code control systems for those who can't seem to remember various tagging and branching policies. I've also used it to automate the running of your unit tests pre-check-in, diallowing the check-in on failure.
And you can write your own tasks for Ant. I've only had a limited amount of experience with this, but I wrote a (rather simple) task to drive an (obsolete) in-house develpment workflow system (post check-in). We were going to write some extensions to have it install our database tables (via JDBC) but I left that group and the idea dissolved.
Finally, you can write custom loggers for Ant which become very useful when integrating Ant into other pre-existing systems or when performing custom reporting of the current build status. One such logger I wrote reported the current build state (running / completed), the last successful build, the output from the last 10 runs, where the build died (if it failed), and who to blame (from the last check-in) via dropping html files on a web server.
So, Ant is the build system of choice for JAVA, but you can certainly do other things with it. Just don't expect it to work like Make, because it's strengths and weaknesses are in differnt "places" than Make's strenghts and weaknesses.
We had to "prove our worth" to Microsoft so they would "consider if we were good enough" to obtain a job. This was in the height of the "puzzle" interviews. You had to solve puzzles while being yelled at about the time you were taking to think about the issue.
Mabye they didn't know it, but they were rewarding everyone that memorized the puzzles and punishing people who were thinking. Fortunately for me, these puzzles were the same kind that my dad used to challenge me with growing up, so I had memorized all of the answers. I know about the yelling because some of the "trick" questions I wanted to rework in my head to verify the memorized answer.
Second round of interviews consisted of my "Proving my worth to Microsoft." I replied that I didn't understand how I could prove my worth because I hadn't been given the opportunity to work for Microsoft. They got annoyed with my answer, and replied that "I had to prove my worth as a future employee to Microsoft, that is, 'What makes you think you are good enough to work for us?'" I told them about my past projects, and they indicated that they already had thousands of people who could program, so what made me think that I could program better that someone who worked for Microsoft? Basically it turned into 30 minutes of, yes that's good, and that's why we're talking to you right now, but that's not good enough, what else can you do (but it will never be as good as an employee we already have, because that's a Microsoft employee we're talking about!) The guy even implied that he brought a few patents into to the Microsoft coffers, and that (perhaps) if was was a good prospect, I'd have a few to chip in for good measure.
My third (and thankfully final) interview ended almost as soon as it began. About the second or third question was if I ever had used Linux. I said yes, and the pervading silence prompted me to try to back peddle a bit, saying that it came with free compilers that were useful to do my homework on a student's budget. Then silence for about five very long minutes before being barked at that "This interview is over, Get Out!"
Really, I'm glad they improved. I feared that other companies would follow Microsoft's lead. Microsoft was the only company that conjured up visions of an unhappy employment before I was even "worthy" of an on-site interview.
Funny thing is, they never asked me to code anything on a whiteboard. Mabye because my University's career placement center didn't have whiteboards available, but hey, there's always paper.
And when they do fail, it's usually not much of an event, unless the failure is one of large porportians.
When one of these large companies goes down, it brings a bit of the GNP down with it. The GNP doesn't really mean too much to the man on the street, as he's not holding any shares or likely to be employed by any of the fortune 100. But it does concern our government. That's because the goernment has become a branch of the corporations in an economic sense. So the government will bail out Fannie May, various Savings and Loans, and a few choice friends, allowing you to pay for it all over again.
I'm not totally against the government bailing out corporations when it provide more good to the people than non-interference. But it seems that the government is burning it's candle at both ends. It's promoting the well being of the corporation to the detriment of human rights, a stable workforce, and even jobs within our borders, and then acts the part of noble rescuer when these beasts fail, allowing us to pick up the check. It wouldn't be so bad if corporations didn't flaunt thier misdeads so blatantly.
Note that HP had a great calculator division which brought in over 6 millon a year and employed 30 people before it was cut in a move like this one. The decision was made on the grounds that nobody would notice lack of R & D for a few years. Now that it's many years later, people have noticed, and HP Calculators are a thing of historic glory.
Well after reading the article, I'd say that this does nothing to prove or disprove anything.
Taking a statictic on a person's opinion is not scientific in the least, heck it might not even be proper measurement.
I'm suprised that only 55% of women believed that they knew more about thier DVR than thier husbands. That number seems a bit low to me, after all, this isn't a compentency test, it's a test about belief. I'd wager that 100% of all women believe that they can navigate to and from the grocery store quicker than their husbands, even though they both live in the same house, know where the nearest grocery store is located, and probably would take the exact same route.
It doesn't even matter what the men thought, because it's still playing around with perception testing, which is interesting if you want to gather information about a perception. However, perceptive information isn't consistent amonst members within a population (even a very homogenous population) so I doubt this information will have any pratical application other than sensationalisim.
I tend to believe that Bill is worried about this.
But then again, he's worried about: 1. The production schedule for the new upcoming XBox. 2. The promotion of the.Net framework. 3. The traffic he's about to encounter on his drive to work. 4. What he's going to have for dinner tonight.
There's a million things that people consider. It is often a huge mistake to believe that they are worrying about anything remotely similar to what you are worrying about. Considering Bill's and Steve's spread of responsibilities, Firefox will only become an issue once it threatens a cornerstone of something bigger.
Netscape had browsers, but even more importantly, it had web servers. That's where the money was, and that's why IE became so important to MS. IE showed that MS was competing in Netscape's market.
You shouldn't have mentioned a "better type of oil", next time try, a "safer faster car to drive around the internet".
Oil is installed, but you never have to use it explicitly; that is, you still use the same car, just now it's trubocharged with this nifty oil. Implying that they now have two cars to drive around on the internet isn't nearly as confusing as inducing a mechanical analogy, and they understand that they actually have to use the "new car" explicitly.
Slashdot Mirror
The same thing that was in it for the fish I ate last night, the glory and honor of knowing that its life was spent in a meaningful way instead of wasted.
Look, you can harvest more stem cells that it is possible to use on the entire U.S. population if you just turn to freeway accidents for a supply source. Your body contains approximately 50 trillion cells, that's 50,000,000,000,000 cells depending on size, age, weight, etc. If you extract a measly 1,000 of these cells which can be transformed into adult stem cells, you have a cell culture wich you can grow outside of the body to any number you wish.
The main arguments for using embryonic stem cells have nothing to do with supply or demand, it has to do with the quality of the cell. Embryonic stem cells are a little bit different than adult stem cells, and you can't get a Swiss watch that was made in China.
Also, the idea of extracting cells without killing the host implies a misunderstanding. The cells and the host are the same thing. You're just cutting up an organisim into two different parts, and applying one part of an organisim to patch or repair another organisim. If you really want to analyze it in detail, you must not forget that this is the same mechanisim that is used for organ transplants and blood transfusions.
So, is it,
"Bob, nobly donated a kidney to save his brother Ted."
or
"Madmen harvested a foreign kidney by slicing open the victim and then shoving it into Ted, an individual who exploits his familial ties to extend his live unnaturally at their detriment."
Now, keeping embryonic stem cells out of research has value to a very small portion of the population, the politicians. Politicians have the most to gain by keeping the issue public, but "on-the-fence". That way they can get votes by grossly misrepresenting the situation, money from the constituency to take a stand against this research, money from the lobbiests for considering the softening of their stance, press time for statements they make about the issue, and power from thier control over their created dilemma. They could even reverse their stance and they still gain enormous benefit from making this a "major" issue.
Meanwhile, issues that are likely to directly impact you (crime, environmental regulations, taxation, abuses of corporate powers, proper privacy legislation, eroding consumer protection) convienently take backstage to other people's abortions and embryos.
Every hamburger you eat was the direct product of a spinal injury to a cow.
Cruelty is not an absolute. Cruelty is directly based on intent. A physician operating on a patient is not cruel because he intends to assit the patient. Jack the Ripper operating on a patient is cruel because he intends to disembowl and kill his patient.
The researches intend to create a cure for spinal injuries. You apparently don't value a cure for spinal injuries and are viewing the action from your own personal standpoint, not one of a trained researcher. If you created a spinal injury in a cow, it would be cruel because no benefit could result in it. However, a resarcher performing the same operation isn't cruel, provided that he minimized the amount of suffering required, continues past the injuring of the animal, and diligently attempts to provide a cure.
If we took any other approach to determining cruelty, then all actions which could harm must be considered cruel. Immunizations (needle puncture) would be cruel, as would tonsilectomy, removing appendixes, heart valve bypasses, most of medicine, a good deal of entertainment, and even a bit of fashion (ear piercing).
Cruelty requires an analysis of intent.
Or more likely, turn to the unemployment line.
So we'll pay to support someone who we payed to destroy.
There's no question on when life begins. Adults, teenagers, children, babies, fetuses, embryos, sperm , and egg are all alive.
It's all a question about when to give legal status to life.
Do you really want to endow an unborn fetus with the rights reserved to an adult? Be prepared for reckless endangerment lawsuits filed on behalf of the fetus against the mother, filed by a concerned party (the father). Which sounds improbable until you realized that it would be a very nasty move to make during a divorce.
Also, women's rights would suffer huge setbacks because smoking and drinking when pregnant would be akin to bodily harm on the fetus. Casual inspection of a woman isn't sufficent knowledge of whether she is pregnant, so officers that intend to enforce the law will have to demand pregnancy tests from all smokers and drinkers.
There's a million new legal possibilities for just giving fetuses rights, and none of them are very pretty. And a partial set of rights probably won't make any difference, as the right to live and continue living is the one right that will create the most nasty legal scenarios.
And if you give legal protection to fetuses, why stop there? I mean, sperm and egg are both living, and you've already broke the legal precedent that rights are to be given to autonomous independantly acting / thinking life.
Look, it's a giant troll posting thinly disguised as a news article!
BSD is great, but it's not the only game in town. Suggesting that it is what Linux should have been is nothing more than troll bait.
No, your analogy doesn't hold.
You have to place that key under the mat. You're actively thwarting your security for conveinence. If you feel that security needs tightening, you'll have the option of removing that key and not providing the conveinence anymore.
Some labs that care about USB security don't hook up the USB ports to the motherboard. That's a good simple solution, until you require a USB device. It used to be that you could get along without USB devices very easily, but with the (thank goodness) removal of legacy ports and protocols, it's getting harder to use this simple-minded solution. For example, my laptop doesn't even come with a PS/2 port, so it's a USB mouse and keyboard for me. Same goes for most printers these days too.
Now if I hacked my keyboard cable, there's not a method to unlock the system, unless my keyboard is a USB keyboard? That's making the same system less secure, but because of phyisical security considerations, you're arguing that it doesn't really matter?
Look, I am thrilled that Google is funding a large portion of corprate research at the moment. And I love that they are not cast (for right now) into the mold of a Big Evil Company (tm).
But this is stock information, and not much of it. Clicking on the link takes you to Yahoo finiancials. That's hardly innovative.
Not all new products will be thrilling, after all someone still needs to make brooms; however, with all of the muscle behind Google, I believe that they could have provided a more comprhensive analysis page instead of a hyperlink.
Worse yet, they cannot differenate between the person and the message.
Just this week my homeowner's association is attempting to determine if it should discredit a complaint by one of the residents because they are a realator who sometimes sells properties in this area.
I made the disingenous comment that perhaps we should look at the items outlined in the complaint and investigate them one by one to determine if they are real issues, are thing that can be changed, and if the budget can support changing them. Then someone else stood up and stated that we shouldn't really even bother with reading a report from a person with ulterior motives.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
It's scary to contemplate, but I hear that Republican Congresses are comprised of human beings.
If that's so, then perhaps there's truth in the rumors. I personally am hoping that it's not proven true, as I feel somewhat better about humanity believing that our Congress has been invaded by aliens from another planet trying deperately to destory our world without launching into an expensive all-out war.
I use the following quote as evidence that we've already slipped to far:
Scientists will eventually figure out a way to go faster than the speed of light, I mean people used to believe that flight was impossible and look at us now!
If you want all viruses gone, then you just need to destroy all the hosts. It hardly matters if that host is biological or computer.
The problem with solutions that "just work" is they often don't solve anything, they just replace a problem with a new problem because they are not well thought out. That's where the catch phrase "just works" comes from, someone who didn't want to explain why, as the cure was worse than the disease.
Asking for every tool to have a gui is a silly as asking for every real-world tool to have a computer.
Machining tools benefit from computer interfaces, screwdrivers do not. Yet I have never seen anyone open a can of paint with a machining tool, but the screwdriver is flexible enough in design to do this task, even though it was not specifically designed to do it.
GUIs are great in many aspects, but they can be just as limiting in others. Pick the right tool for the job. Your build system is probably not even well defined by yourself, so don't take any risks in having a GUI define what you must do, it could be totally wrong.
Well, if your only talking about one file with a static format that won't change over time, then feel free to define the right format for the file and write your parser once.
/etc/passwd file. For files that are likely to be needed in a new format at some time, XML coupled with XSL provides a flexible way to move you data programatically into the new format.
But many programs are much more dynamic than UNIX's
You could achieve the same effect with a combination of sed, awk, and sh scripts, but then the burdeon of verification that the scripts worked properly would lie on a human's shoulders, and odds would be high that eventually a mistake would be made.
Also XML provides a facility to pre-verify that the file is in correct format before it is consumed by its intended program. Certainly such things can be done without XML, but there are no gurantees that all programmers build this feature into their executables, and not all programs fail safely when partially configured correctly.
Now, using any kind of formatting you could desire, consider pulling the price of cheese out of document when you have no control over the department that's creating it. With XML you can, because you'll request the DTD of the document, and parse for the tag describing cheese, and it's interior tag describing the price. Sure you could do the same thing with a character delimited field, but when that new guy misformats the document shifting most fields to the right by one index, XML will die on an improperly defined document, while most other methods will read the quantity as the price.
Well, your impression is wrong, you desires are right, and you're ignoring a great tool to fix your problems.
XML was always meant to be human readable and human editable, that's why it isn't in a more compact binary format, and the tag names are typically full words describing the surrounding contents. Machine handling is very important too, and that's where the strict syntax comes into play.
XML isn't meant to be a programming language. Actually, in ant, XML is the configuration file, not a scripting language, although the configuration is one to define a target and it's associated actions, so I can see how the difference can be overlooked. Those that do use it as a programming language should properly be disposed of in a manner similar to your description.
Ant is the solution to your problems, assuming that you can solve your problems in house. Have part of the build verify the XML configuration files by verifying the XML files against their respective DTDs or XSDs. There's already an ant task for it, XmlValidate. It shouldn't be much of an issue to set up and use, unless you knowledge of XML does not extend into validation. But even then, you only have to set it up once to use it a thousand times.
Contrary to popular belief, GNU make is no lightweight. Sure, the make executable is lighter than and + a JVM, but the first thing the make executable calls will be a shell, and that will be calling a program, and you'll use many many programs to do anything that isn't trivial.
Worse yet, make runs each task in a new shell, so you'll have many many shells being created and destroyed. If your project grows to any considerable extent, you'll soon see ant's solution of one shell (the JVM) as a lightweight solution, even if the shell itself is bigger.
Ant does have a dependset task and an uptodate task for explicitly defining dependencies, in addition it has the condition task to bind several dependencies together in a logical manner.
But still, ant is no make. It's not ant's fault, but more a fault of the underlying reason that make is both powerful and problematic. Make leverages the power of it's shell and all the utilities that have been written explicitly to make shell scripting possible. Make (by itself) doesn't do a lot except call a bunch of programs using a reverse-chaining algorthim. It's the value of all those shell programs that give make it's lifting power.
Ant can call a platform's shell programs too, but then you run into difficulties in communicating rich information between the programs, and ant becomes just a funny, XML configured, JAVA version of make. That's why ant's logging capabilites far outstrip those of make, because it's logging facility can differentiate between errors, warnings, and informational messages, routing them to text files, xml files, databases, and web pages.
The best thing about using FORTRAN it that I don't need to read books about C.
The best thing about C is that I don't need to read books about C++.
The best thing about C++ is that I don't need to read books about JAVA.
The best thing about Lisp is that I don't need to read books about Carly Fiona.
The best thing about AWK is that I don't need to read books about Beowulf Clusters.
The best thing about bash is that I don't need to read books about hot grits.
Your statement is truthful, but lacks substance.
Ant-contrib offers a C / C++ build task, and I've used it with a lot of success for building the .so libraries that my JNI calls will use.
The documentation isn't great, actually (when I used it) it sucked, or more to the point, I couldn't find it. Finally I found an open source project that used the task successfully, and used thier build.xml file as a template for the compiling I had to do.
Mabye I'm being too harsh with respect to the documentation, since a quick look over at http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/cc.html seems much more comprehensible than I remember it a few years back.
Yes.
I've used it with C and with C++ to build shared libraries on a Linux platform that were later bound to JAVA via a JNI interface.
Take a look at ant-contrib, they have a c/c++ compiler ant task. I'm not sure about other languages, but here's some other things I've done with Ant that aren't really JAVA centric.
I've used Ant to transform XML to other various things, including DocBook build systems to various HTML, PDF, TXT, etc. files.
I've used Ant to verify that documents conform to their appropriate DTDs / XSDs. Java developers take note! Next time you have an XML file driving some sort of configuration, validate it. It will save you a lot of time.
I've used Ant to wrap source code control systems for those who can't seem to remember various tagging and branching policies. I've also used it to automate the running of your unit tests pre-check-in, diallowing the check-in on failure.
And you can write your own tasks for Ant. I've only had a limited amount of experience with this, but I wrote a (rather simple) task to drive an (obsolete) in-house develpment workflow system (post check-in). We were going to write some extensions to have it install our database tables (via JDBC) but I left that group and the idea dissolved.
Finally, you can write custom loggers for Ant which become very useful when integrating Ant into other pre-existing systems or when performing custom reporting of the current build status. One such logger I wrote reported the current build state (running / completed), the last successful build, the output from the last 10 runs, where the build died (if it failed), and who to blame (from the last check-in) via dropping html files on a web server.
So, Ant is the build system of choice for JAVA, but you can certainly do other things with it. Just don't expect it to work like Make, because it's strengths and weaknesses are in differnt "places" than Make's strenghts and weaknesses.
Don't worry, the Patriot Act will soon liberate you too. Just give it some time.
I detect an impending Google hire.
Then they improved.
When I interviewd, it was dehumanizing.
We had to "prove our worth" to Microsoft so they would "consider if we were good enough" to obtain a job. This was in the height of the "puzzle" interviews. You had to solve puzzles while being yelled at about the time you were taking to think about the issue.
Mabye they didn't know it, but they were rewarding everyone that memorized the puzzles and punishing people who were thinking. Fortunately for me, these puzzles were the same kind that my dad used to challenge me with growing up, so I had memorized all of the answers. I know about the yelling because some of the "trick" questions I wanted to rework in my head to verify the memorized answer.
Second round of interviews consisted of my "Proving my worth to Microsoft." I replied that I didn't understand how I could prove my worth because I hadn't been given the opportunity to work for Microsoft. They got annoyed with my answer, and replied that "I had to prove my worth as a future employee to Microsoft, that is, 'What makes you think you are good enough to work for us?'" I told them about my past projects, and they indicated that they already had thousands of people who could program, so what made me think that I could program better that someone who worked for Microsoft? Basically it turned into 30 minutes of, yes that's good, and that's why we're talking to you right now, but that's not good enough, what else can you do (but it will never be as good as an employee we already have, because that's a Microsoft employee we're talking about!) The guy even implied that he brought a few patents into to the Microsoft coffers, and that (perhaps) if was was a good prospect, I'd have a few to chip in for good measure.
My third (and thankfully final) interview ended almost as soon as it began. About the second or third question was if I ever had used Linux. I said yes, and the pervading silence prompted me to try to back peddle a bit, saying that it came with free compilers that were useful to do my homework on a student's budget. Then silence for about five very long minutes before being barked at that "This interview is over, Get Out!"
Really, I'm glad they improved. I feared that other companies would follow Microsoft's lead. Microsoft was the only company that conjured up visions of an unhappy employment before I was even "worthy" of an on-site interview.
Funny thing is, they never asked me to code anything on a whiteboard. Mabye because my University's career placement center didn't have whiteboards available, but hey, there's always paper.
And when they do fail, it's usually not much of an event, unless the failure is one of large porportians.
When one of these large companies goes down, it brings a bit of the GNP down with it. The GNP doesn't really mean too much to the man on the street, as he's not holding any shares or likely to be employed by any of the fortune 100. But it does concern our government. That's because the goernment has become a branch of the corporations in an economic sense. So the government will bail out Fannie May, various Savings and Loans, and a few choice friends, allowing you to pay for it all over again.
I'm not totally against the government bailing out corporations when it provide more good to the people than non-interference. But it seems that the government is burning it's candle at both ends. It's promoting the well being of the corporation to the detriment of human rights, a stable workforce, and even jobs within our borders, and then acts the part of noble rescuer when these beasts fail, allowing us to pick up the check. It wouldn't be so bad if corporations didn't flaunt thier misdeads so blatantly.
Note that HP had a great calculator division which brought in over 6 millon a year and employed 30 people before it was cut in a move like this one. The decision was made on the grounds that nobody would notice lack of R & D for a few years. Now that it's many years later, people have noticed, and HP Calculators are a thing of historic glory.
Well after reading the article, I'd say that this does nothing to prove or disprove anything.
Taking a statictic on a person's opinion is not scientific in the least, heck it might not even be proper measurement.
I'm suprised that only 55% of women believed that they knew more about thier DVR than thier husbands. That number seems a bit low to me, after all, this isn't a compentency test, it's a test about belief. I'd wager that 100% of all women believe that they can navigate to and from the grocery store quicker than their husbands, even though they both live in the same house, know where the nearest grocery store is located, and probably would take the exact same route.
It doesn't even matter what the men thought, because it's still playing around with perception testing, which is interesting if you want to gather information about a perception. However, perceptive information isn't consistent amonst members within a population (even a very homogenous population) so I doubt this information will have any pratical application other than sensationalisim.
I tend to believe that Bill is worried about this.
.Net framework.
But then again, he's worried about:
1. The production schedule for the new upcoming XBox.
2. The promotion of the
3. The traffic he's about to encounter on his drive to work.
4. What he's going to have for dinner tonight.
There's a million things that people consider. It is often a huge mistake to believe that they are worrying about anything remotely similar to what you are worrying about. Considering Bill's and Steve's spread of responsibilities, Firefox will only become an issue once it threatens a cornerstone of something bigger.
Netscape had browsers, but even more importantly, it had web servers. That's where the money was, and that's why IE became so important to MS. IE showed that MS was competing in Netscape's market.
Wrong type of analogy.
You shouldn't have mentioned a "better type of oil", next time try, a "safer faster car to drive around the internet".
Oil is installed, but you never have to use it explicitly; that is, you still use the same car, just now it's trubocharged with this nifty oil. Implying that they now have two cars to drive around on the internet isn't nearly as confusing as inducing a mechanical analogy, and they understand that they actually have to use the "new car" explicitly.