I develop Java/J2EE apps on a Dell and our test and production environments are AIX. Other than filenames, which can be stored in a persistence layer, there's rarely any changes that have to be made between environments. I guess one answer is, use the appropriate tool for the job.
I see a lot of pissing and moaning about Java not being truly portable, but unless you are using bleeding-edge libraries like non-blocking I/O (JDK 1.4.x revisions have had all kinds of inconsistencies with this), you are very unlikely to run into problems. I've been doing this for 3 years now, and NIO was the only thing to give me problems.
In the USA, currency forgery can be conspiracy too, and it doesn't even have to be more than one person. Legal conspiracy can be _one_ or more persons, as ridiculous as that sounds.
We used SMB shares in college to share all kinds of stuff. So when are they gonna throw Bill in jail? It's express purpose is peer to peer file sharing. I just read the law and according to it's language, it would be a completely legitimate bust. In other words, I'm pretty sure that no competent technical person was consulted during the drafting of this bill.
The wikipedia entry is not horribly convincing to me, not the least of which is that it contradicts its own definition, being:
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves paying returns to investors out of the money raised from subsequent investors, rather than from profits generated by any real business."
From the examples given, the only difference seems to be that
1) the iron fist of government makes participation compulsory. 2) lack of funds can be supplemented via the iron fist of government. 3) you don't expect huge returns (making the supposed difference one of degree rather than type)
none of these points is contradictory to the fundamental attribute of a ponzi scheme, that a ponzi scheme pays out what current investors pay in (the flaws of which are obvious.) All it demonstrates is that a bad system can stay afloat longer if you can force an entire country to put money into it when it starts to sink.
We're already trillions in debt, so reserves aren't going to pay it if we have a lot of people taking out. So either other tax revenues are taken, and have to be repaid by raised taxes, or a special tax will have to be enacted, which will raise taxes. It just moves debt from one side of the equation to the other.
So, like the state lottery, gambling, and capital punishment, the difference appears to be that it's not wrong when the government does it.
I'm glad someone mentioned that SS is a Ponzi scheme. I'm not a supporter of Bush's proposal, but to all the people who say there's nothing wrong with the current system, then how come if I tried to run a private business on the same principles I'd be thrown into federal prison?
But then, look at how many in the slashdot crowd have free ipod ads in their sigs.
Conviction rates for what accused crimes? I think the breakdown is important. If, hypothetically, for some cultural reason one group of people tended to put up more resistance to police actions, the result could be more arrests, less convictions for that group.
For example, let's say a white person gets pulled over for speeding. The speeder apologizes, and gets a ticket, goes on their way. A latino driver gets pulled over for speeding, and, feeling threatened, acts belligerent. The confrontation escalates until the cop arrests the uncooperative driver. Taken to trial, the charge is only speeding, and the driver gets off for whatever reason. Just comparing race and arrests is not sufficiently fine grained enough to get meaningful interpretations.
Same for death penalty, unless you review the details of the crimes. If a white person killed someone by handgun but a black person killed someone with a machete, the horrific nature of the killing might get them the death penalty where the white person did not. I really don't know, I'm playing devil's advocate here.
server to server. We're using Apache SOAP libraries, and Oracle SOAP Transport (everything uses SAX), all in Java. You don't notice it on individual transactions unless load is high, you just have a much lower system throughput than a less wordy protocol.
Unless I am misunderstanding you, I think you are incorrect.
In the case that XML is just wrapped around proprietary data that's not markup and/or not even string data (I guess like JPGs or something), then this discussion is not even relevant because you have control over your content. Just take your binary data, gzip it, uuencode it, and dump it into a CDATA in your XML file. if you don't have control over the content, it's still irrelevant because it has nothing to do with the XML format in the first place. That's like complaining that text files on your hard drive are bloaty because the filesystem doesn't compress it for you.
This discussion is for people who DO use XML in the proper manner, and have found it bloaty, which it is. Just GZipping XML reduces its size massively, so clearly there is a benefit to doing so. Correct XML is in bad need of compression, but XML wrapped around proprietary formatting could be compressed more or less in the proprietary format itself, avoiding the problem entirely.
I totally drank the XML kool-aid, so don't interpret this as saying that I hate XML or anything. I really love it. However, you don't really get an appreciation of just how slow and bloaty XML is until you see it used in real life a few times. I sometimes wonder if these guys have ever built a system on something that wasn't a top-notch research bed.
I'm not seeing in the article where he submits a solution to the problem, he just said as computers and networks get faster, the bloat won't be slow anymore. There's a very good chance I'll be using the same infrastructure in 3 years, so that is a non-solution for me, and I suspect many other people too.
It's pretty clear to me he's out of touch. Everyone is clamoring for problems they have right now, and he wants everyone to wait for universal gigabit ethernet and 10Ghz CPUs.
I'll tell you what, I've been a PC user all my life, messed around with macintosh only a little. I always felt like I was overpaying, or I had to jump up to the next pricier level machine to get the features I wanted. Or, if I couldn't get those features, I'd rather have a pared down machine that cost less. But Apple never provided this. Now they have, so there was really no excuse anymore and I bought a Mac Mini.
I still however, have a lot of friends who are semi-bigoted against the macintosh. I mentioned the Mac Mini to one of them, and the FIRST thing he said, I kid you not:
"You can get a PC laptop for 500 dollars now. Why buy an Apple?"
You will never, ever win against these people. There will always be something.
They don't have to outright call for internal laws to be changed, they have representation through lobbyists. Yeah, it's illegal, but that doesn't really matter if you use soft money funneled through charities. You might recall president Clinton and Al Gore getting burned on the Buddhist temple findraising, having to give back quite a bit of money when it was found it came from foreign sources.
I'm not being facetious, it's 100% true. I really have no clue if China prevents that kind of interference in their own government by foreign lobbyists, but I suspect that that there it's really, REALLY illegal.
I'd like to second this. I'm working for an international company that shall remain nameless. We have hundreds of independent "sites" across the world that periodically need to update their client software. With a recent build, the size of the files transferred has jumped from about 15 megabytes to over 200 (this includes a lot of metadata.) So we started looking at other ways of reducing the download from the main server (and maybe dump some back on the client.) We're currently looking at Microsoft BITS and Bitorrent protocols to build our solution on top of.
Bittorrent and co. has several completely legitimate uses. I wonder how many companies are using it and haven't told anyone. It's not like we go around advertizing how we build our internal apps.
I'm using a Linksys Dual-Band A+G (supports a,b, andg) card, model WPC-55AG. It uses the Atheros chipset (that's important.) Here's a link to the specs: Link
For the drivers I use MADWIFI, which is a wrapper around a proprietary kernel module. It works as good as any Linux wifi driver I've seen. It only works on the mentioned Atheros chipset cards. link
This is what I do, and it works pretty good. Some people have more trouble than others getting it going, but the good news is, there is now plenty of tutorials on how to do it. The only issues I've had are that the transfer rate is not as good in Linux as in Windows, and the driver's default settings are more susceptible to interference. I spend a lot of time in a coffee shop with a shitty AP (though running b, not a), and I have a shell script that bumps up the retry and s/n ratio tolerances, everything now works fine. You get a moderate amount of attention running Linux in public places if you are running a crazy desktop manager.
Everything you have said I agree with 100%. With the release of OS X and the promotion of context menus to first class citizen, I am a happy camper with OS X. Keep in mind though, prior to OS X context menus required a third-party driver+mouse and user-created macros to support anything, and it didn't work right half the time. I know, I had one of those kensington two-button mac mouses. Wasn't worth the money.
As for the UI guidelines, they don't seem to rigidly follow them anymore, and brushed metal is massively overused. I don't think they've made a commitment to their new sliding popup windows. New iTunes still uses the old ones. I can see why. If you make a mistake on something, you can move a free-floating popup out of the way to see what you did, but the sliding ones...:-(
This, plus the lack of sloppy focus, they are mere quibbles. Since the release of OS X my respect for the Macintosh has skyrocketed. I have just purchased a Mac Mini, which will replace a crusty ol' blue and white G3 400.
I find that funny, because a great deal of macintosh software requires you to use a mouse, because from the beginning all macintoshes came with them (unlike the PC where a user theoretically might not have a mouse, even using windows.) None of that stuff is represented in the menus at all, which is worse yet.
Furthermore, what's wrong with context menus? If you slap the option on the menu or in a button you are wasting real estate, you have to grey it out until you happen to hit the item it's used on. With context menus, you KNOW what the item it's used on is, becuase you already right-clicked it.
You can have your opinion on this, but I strongly disagree. As to why Apple sticks with the single mouse button, I think the answer is solely "trademark".
And this is old news to me. This phone, out of the factory, has a Java runtime, and the ability to upload ringtones and pictures. By "benefit" of verison wireless branding, JRE is replaced with BREW, and every F*cking thing you might want to do with it costs money.
When I bought it, not a god damn thing said "this phone has a reduced featureset from factory specifications", nor anything that said "all 'features' have exorbitant fees." Why would I assume a feature cost me more money? I thought that crap was to get me to buy the phone in the first place.
It's pretty clear their business model is to deceive people into buying their crippled products and then nickel and dime their customers.
One other note: I bought Verizon's GPRS cable, which was advertized to work with WinXP for 20 dollars. I was using Win2k at the time, which worked fine. By the time I upgraded the OS, I would discover that the software did not in fact work with XP, but worked with a "pre-release" of XP at time of product release. I ended up having to buy the product again, which was a completely different set of software by this point of time (which is probably why I couldn't exchange it, plus it cost 40 now), so I assume that everyone who ever bought the first kit with XP was basically screwed. Thanks again Verizon.
I'd like to second this. The Albigensian Crusade was essentially the Catholic church not being able to peacably suppress the Cathar movement (not recognizing papal authority and opposing "get out of purgatory early" type-payments), and so instead just killing everyone.
The local bishoprics' authority in these regions were suspended, lords excommunicated, and entire villages wiped out, genocide-style. An appointed Papal legate during one of these "battles" was the one who originated the phrase "kill them all, let God sort them out".
The crusade wasn't defensive, and it wasn't even against (arguably) "non-christians". I might mention the later sacking of Constantinople wasn't defensive either, it was just there, and they even were christians, but maybe not christian "enough".
I _realize_ I'm kind of being an asshole for saying this, but I'm a J2EE developer, and I don't have to worry about bugs in ASP _or_ PHP. Comparatively, J2EE's just nice like that.
I visited a Buddhist temple in Japan in 1993 that had a similar effect if you stood in one place and clapped. I don't think it was intentional. It was obvious people had been doing it for years though, because the varnish was worn off the floor in that area, and the wood was ground into a smooth indentation from all the people standing there trying it.
I have personally found even lower-resolution 3D pictures to look much nicer than high-res 2D pictures. Combine something like this with stereoscopic glasses and it would be like "being there". I wonder if Mr. Ross has considered this.
The problem here is just what you said: "school districts will take almost anyone they can get."
Our system has two flaws, which are related. One, supply and demand: teacher supply is high, so wages are low. Tons of people want to be teachers. I've seen people almost literally fight for substitute teacher jobs, so they have an "in" when a job opening comes up for a full time position.
The second problem is, there are tons of lousy teachers. Some of the stupidest people I know want to be K-12 teachers. I am not kidding. NOTE: if you are a teacher and you are not stupid, I am not talking about you.
These are related because there is a low barrier of entry to be a teacher. Tons of people want to do it are able to get a degree.
In my mind this guarantees you get a glut of low-quality teachers, and good teachers' wages drop. Good money drives bad money out of circulation, as the theory goes. Many people who would make good teachers will do something else where they are respected and well paid.
The obvious solution is to make it more difficult to get a teaching degree, and have mandatory testing of skills. Both these measures are rabidly opposed by the teacher unions. It's unfortunate, because it would drive up both wages and quality of teachers.
To kind of tie this back into the topic generally, I have seen Japanese schools, and they are not all they are cracked up to be. They look better on paper than they do in real life. underachievers are cut loose, something that's not acceptable in the USA. The best things we could take from Japanese schools are administrative, in my opinion.
The best part is, you can PROVE target="whatever" isn't valid anymore simply by using the W3C's site validator! I had no idea target was deprecated until I tried to validate some pages I did using XHTML-STRICT, and they failed.
An example of how to use the target attribute with XHTML-STRICT via DTD modules, so you get the benefit of both:
Slashdot Mirror
The name's Spiderman...Joel Spiderman, attorney at law.
I develop Java/J2EE apps on a Dell and our test and production environments are AIX. Other than filenames, which can be stored in a persistence layer, there's rarely any changes that have to be made between environments. I guess one answer is, use the appropriate tool for the job. I see a lot of pissing and moaning about Java not being truly portable, but unless you are using bleeding-edge libraries like non-blocking I/O (JDK 1.4.x revisions have had all kinds of inconsistencies with this), you are very unlikely to run into problems. I've been doing this for 3 years now, and NIO was the only thing to give me problems.
In the USA, currency forgery can be conspiracy too, and it doesn't even have to be more than one person. Legal conspiracy can be _one_ or more persons, as ridiculous as that sounds.
Most americans have real crap to worry about, instead of vague, likely to be overturned P2P legislation in a state they are not even a citizen in.
We used SMB shares in college to share all kinds of stuff. So when are they gonna throw Bill in jail? It's express purpose is peer to peer file sharing. I just read the law and according to it's language, it would be a completely legitimate bust. In other words, I'm pretty sure that no competent technical person was consulted during the drafting of this bill.
The wikipedia entry is not horribly convincing to me, not the least of which is that it contradicts its own definition, being:
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves paying returns to investors out of the money raised from subsequent investors, rather than from profits generated by any real business."
From the examples given, the only difference seems to be that
1) the iron fist of government makes participation compulsory.
2) lack of funds can be supplemented via the iron fist of government.
3) you don't expect huge returns (making the supposed difference one of degree rather than type)
none of these points is contradictory to the fundamental attribute of a ponzi scheme, that a ponzi scheme pays out what current investors pay in (the flaws of which are obvious.) All it demonstrates is that a bad system can stay afloat longer if you can force an entire country to put money into it when it starts to sink.
We're already trillions in debt, so reserves aren't going to pay it if we have a lot of people taking out. So either other tax revenues are taken, and have to be repaid by raised taxes, or a special tax will have to be enacted, which will raise taxes. It just moves debt from one side of the equation to the other.
So, like the state lottery, gambling, and capital punishment, the difference appears to be that it's not wrong when the government does it.
I'm glad someone mentioned that SS is a Ponzi scheme. I'm not a supporter of Bush's proposal, but to all the people who say there's nothing wrong with the current system, then how come if I tried to run a private business on the same principles I'd be thrown into federal prison?
But then, look at how many in the slashdot crowd have free ipod ads in their sigs.
Conviction rates for what accused crimes? I think the breakdown is important. If, hypothetically, for some cultural reason one group of people tended to put up more resistance to police actions, the result could be more arrests, less convictions for that group.
For example, let's say a white person gets pulled over for speeding. The speeder apologizes, and gets a ticket, goes on their way. A latino driver gets pulled over for speeding, and, feeling threatened, acts belligerent. The confrontation escalates until the cop arrests the uncooperative driver. Taken to trial, the charge is only speeding, and the driver gets off for whatever reason. Just comparing race and arrests is not sufficiently fine grained enough to get meaningful interpretations.
Same for death penalty, unless you review the details of the crimes. If a white person killed someone by handgun but a black person killed someone with a machete, the horrific nature of the killing might get them the death penalty where the white person did not. I really don't know, I'm playing devil's advocate here.
server to server. We're using Apache SOAP libraries, and Oracle SOAP Transport (everything uses SAX), all in Java. You don't notice it on individual transactions unless load is high, you just have a much lower system throughput than a less wordy protocol.
Unless I am misunderstanding you, I think you are incorrect.
In the case that XML is just wrapped around proprietary data that's not markup and/or not even string data (I guess like JPGs or something), then this discussion is not even relevant because you have control over your content. Just take your binary data, gzip it, uuencode it, and dump it into a CDATA in your XML file. if you don't have control over the content, it's still irrelevant because it has nothing to do with the XML format in the first place. That's like complaining that text files on your hard drive are bloaty because the filesystem doesn't compress it for you.
This discussion is for people who DO use XML in the proper manner, and have found it bloaty, which it is. Just GZipping XML reduces its size massively, so clearly there is a benefit to doing so. Correct XML is in bad need of compression, but XML wrapped around proprietary formatting could be compressed more or less in the proprietary format itself, avoiding the problem entirely.
I totally drank the XML kool-aid, so don't interpret this as saying that I hate XML or anything. I really love it. However, you don't really get an appreciation of just how slow and bloaty XML is until you see it used in real life a few times. I sometimes wonder if these guys have ever built a system on something that wasn't a top-notch research bed.
I'm not seeing in the article where he submits a solution to the problem, he just said as computers and networks get faster, the bloat won't be slow anymore. There's a very good chance I'll be using the same infrastructure in 3 years, so that is a non-solution for me, and I suspect many other people too.
It's pretty clear to me he's out of touch. Everyone is clamoring for problems they have right now, and he wants everyone to wait for universal gigabit ethernet and 10Ghz CPUs.
I'll tell you what, I've been a PC user all my life, messed around with macintosh only a little. I always felt like I was overpaying, or I had to jump up to the next pricier level machine to get the features I wanted. Or, if I couldn't get those features, I'd rather have a pared down machine that cost less. But Apple never provided this. Now they have, so there was really no excuse anymore and I bought a Mac Mini.
I still however, have a lot of friends who are semi-bigoted against the macintosh. I mentioned the Mac Mini to one of them, and the FIRST thing he said, I kid you not:
"You can get a PC laptop for 500 dollars now. Why buy an Apple?"
You will never, ever win against these people. There will always be something.
They don't have to outright call for internal laws to be changed, they have representation through lobbyists. Yeah, it's illegal, but that doesn't really matter if you use soft money funneled through charities. You might recall president Clinton and Al Gore getting burned on the Buddhist temple findraising, having to give back quite a bit of money when it was found it came from foreign sources. I'm not being facetious, it's 100% true. I really have no clue if China prevents that kind of interference in their own government by foreign lobbyists, but I suspect that that there it's really, REALLY illegal.
I'd like to second this. I'm working for an international company that shall remain nameless. We have hundreds of independent "sites" across the world that periodically need to update their client software. With a recent build, the size of the files transferred has jumped from about 15 megabytes to over 200 (this includes a lot of metadata.) So we started looking at other ways of reducing the download from the main server (and maybe dump some back on the client.) We're currently looking at Microsoft BITS and Bitorrent protocols to build our solution on top of.
Bittorrent and co. has several completely legitimate uses. I wonder how many companies are using it and haven't told anyone. It's not like we go around advertizing how we build our internal apps.
For the drivers I use MADWIFI, which is a wrapper around a proprietary kernel module. It works as good as any Linux wifi driver I've seen. It only works on the mentioned Atheros chipset cards. link
This is what I do, and it works pretty good. Some people have more trouble than others getting it going, but the good news is, there is now plenty of tutorials on how to do it. The only issues I've had are that the transfer rate is not as good in Linux as in Windows, and the driver's default settings are more susceptible to interference. I spend a lot of time in a coffee shop with a shitty AP (though running b, not a), and I have a shell script that bumps up the retry and s/n ratio tolerances, everything now works fine. You get a moderate amount of attention running Linux in public places if you are running a crazy desktop manager.
Everything you have said I agree with 100%. With the release of OS X and the promotion of context menus to first class citizen, I am a happy camper with OS X. Keep in mind though, prior to OS X context menus required a third-party driver+mouse and user-created macros to support anything, and it didn't work right half the time. I know, I had one of those kensington two-button mac mouses. Wasn't worth the money.
:-(
As for the UI guidelines, they don't seem to rigidly follow them anymore, and brushed metal is massively overused. I don't think they've made a commitment to their new sliding popup windows. New iTunes still uses the old ones. I can see why. If you make a mistake on something, you can move a free-floating popup out of the way to see what you did, but the sliding ones...
This, plus the lack of sloppy focus, they are mere quibbles. Since the release of OS X my respect for the Macintosh has skyrocketed. I have just purchased a Mac Mini, which will replace a crusty ol' blue and white G3 400.
I find that funny, because a great deal of macintosh software requires you to use a mouse, because from the beginning all macintoshes came with them (unlike the PC where a user theoretically might not have a mouse, even using windows.) None of that stuff is represented in the menus at all, which is worse yet.
Furthermore, what's wrong with context menus? If you slap the option on the menu or in a button you are wasting real estate, you have to grey it out until you happen to hit the item it's used on. With context menus, you KNOW what the item it's used on is, becuase you already right-clicked it.
You can have your opinion on this, but I strongly disagree. As to why Apple sticks with the single mouse button, I think the answer is solely "trademark".
And this is old news to me. This phone, out of the factory, has a Java runtime, and the ability to upload ringtones and pictures. By "benefit" of verison wireless branding, JRE is replaced with BREW, and every F*cking thing you might want to do with it costs money.
When I bought it, not a god damn thing said "this phone has a reduced featureset from factory specifications", nor anything that said "all 'features' have exorbitant fees." Why would I assume a feature cost me more money? I thought that crap was to get me to buy the phone in the first place.
It's pretty clear their business model is to deceive people into buying their crippled products and then nickel and dime their customers.
One other note: I bought Verizon's GPRS cable, which was advertized to work with WinXP for 20 dollars. I was using Win2k at the time, which worked fine. By the time I upgraded the OS, I would discover that the software did not in fact work with XP, but worked with a "pre-release" of XP at time of product release. I ended up having to buy the product again, which was a completely different set of software by this point of time (which is probably why I couldn't exchange it, plus it cost 40 now), so I assume that everyone who ever bought the first kit with XP was basically screwed. Thanks again Verizon.
I'd like to second this. The Albigensian Crusade was essentially the Catholic church not being able to peacably suppress the Cathar movement (not recognizing papal authority and opposing "get out of purgatory early" type-payments), and so instead just killing everyone.
The local bishoprics' authority in these regions were suspended, lords excommunicated, and entire villages wiped out, genocide-style. An appointed Papal legate during one of these "battles" was the one who originated the phrase "kill them all, let God sort them out".
The crusade wasn't defensive, and it wasn't even against (arguably) "non-christians". I might mention the later sacking of Constantinople wasn't defensive either, it was just there, and they even were christians, but maybe not christian "enough".
I _realize_ I'm kind of being an asshole for saying this, but I'm a J2EE developer, and I don't have to worry about bugs in ASP _or_ PHP. Comparatively, J2EE's just nice like that.
I visited a Buddhist temple in Japan in 1993 that had a similar effect if you stood in one place and clapped. I don't think it was intentional. It was obvious people had been doing it for years though, because the varnish was worn off the floor in that area, and the wood was ground into a smooth indentation from all the people standing there trying it.
I have personally found even lower-resolution 3D pictures to look much nicer than high-res 2D pictures. Combine something like this with stereoscopic glasses and it would be like "being there". I wonder if Mr. Ross has considered this.
BAD money drives GOOD money out of circulation. Woops.
The problem here is just what you said: "school districts will take almost anyone they can get."
Our system has two flaws, which are related. One, supply and demand: teacher supply is high, so wages are low. Tons of people want to be teachers. I've seen people almost literally fight for substitute teacher jobs, so they have an "in" when a job opening comes up for a full time position.
The second problem is, there are tons of lousy teachers. Some of the stupidest people I know want to be K-12 teachers. I am not kidding. NOTE: if you are a teacher and you are not stupid, I am not talking about you.
These are related because there is a low barrier of entry to be a teacher. Tons of people want to do it are able to get a degree.
In my mind this guarantees you get a glut of low-quality teachers, and good teachers' wages drop. Good money drives bad money out of circulation, as the theory goes. Many people who would make good teachers will do something else where they are respected and well paid.
The obvious solution is to make it more difficult to get a teaching degree, and have mandatory testing of skills. Both these measures are rabidly opposed by the teacher unions. It's unfortunate, because it would drive up both wages and quality of teachers.
To kind of tie this back into the topic generally, I have seen Japanese schools, and they are not all they are cracked up to be. They look better on paper than they do in real life. underachievers are cut loose, something that's not acceptable in the USA. The best things we could take from Japanese schools are administrative, in my opinion.
The best part is, you can PROVE target="whatever" isn't valid anymore simply by using the W3C's site validator! I had no idea target was deprecated until I tried to validate some pages I did using XHTML-STRICT, and they failed.
An example of how to use the target attribute with XHTML-STRICT via DTD modules, so you get the benefit of both:
How to use the TARGET module with XHTML
Agreed, original poster is right, and granparent post is wrong. "Informative", indeed.