the point is that if you are a new developer or program manager, working on a new project, and you see that the JDK tools already have an XML parser and a logging library, you're not going to even bother to look for alternatives.
Just like nobody looks for alternatives to M$ Office or M$ IE, because its already bundled by OEMs onto just about every P4 box going out the door...
its take developers of considerable experience, and influence over their manager / respect from their manager, to introduce tools to a development environment that on the surface seem redundant to the tools already at hand. right now, many of us have that experience, and the awareness of the better tools, but in a year that might not be the case...
The irony being that in their early days, when SunOS was only a minor-varient away from being pure BSD (thanks, B.Joy), they WERE actually giving away the OS and its features (like NFS), hoping on always being ahead of the competitors in speed to encourage the hardware sales that kept the company on top during the late 80s to mid-90s.
Things were slowly changing by 1991 with SunOS 4, then with 5/2 they had to definitely switch to a "buy it only" since they themselves paid so much for getting SystemV in the first place...
of course, just about every single one of us Sun users at the time were furious with the switch...Sun boxes to me are still crippled in speed because of SystemV's overhead compared to BSD, and the speed of BSD x86 boxes over SCO & other SystemV-based x86 releases just rubs our noses in it even more...
Yes, many Jakarta contributors are from Sun, particularly with regard to Tomcat/Catalina. But many are not.
Outside of Tomcat, IBM has been the biggest commercial vendor contributing to Apache, including core items Xerces, SOAP, and Log4J, and in each case Sun has refused to let Apache be the de facto standard (inspite of that being what i believe most java developers want), and has instead put out alternative APIs which its embedded with the JDK, thus locking everybody w/ 1.4 down to a standard that now has little room to grow.
And in some cases the 1.4 bundled version is inferior to the Apache effort (yes, Crimson was/is better than Xerces 1.x because of IBM's redundant i18n overhead, but its NOT better than 2.0; and jdk1.4 logging is definitely not nearly as good as log4j).
But as M$ has shown, people will stick with whats bundled, even if inferior, 'cause "its just easier that way"...
...& all java developers will suffer.
Also, yes Tomcat is the "reference implementation" and all that, but that's because Sun has also released the code for watchdog, which is the standards-compliance testing tool for Servlets. What Apache and O'Reilly want to see is a similar effort to release the standards-compliance tests for other J2EE software specifications like EJB, and they consider it hypocritical for Sun to hold onto those tests in exchange for as much money as they charge for them.
When the SS seized the illuminati bbs machine, they took everything on that disk and read it all, including all the email sitting on it (i believe the bbs had a fidonet connection, giving it some limited degree of network email), some of which hadn't actually been read by the recipients (and in the end, never was because the BBS disk was never totally restored to the new system).
Seems the court at that time decided that reading email that had already been delivered to the target machine was not "intercepting the email" even if the intendent recipient hadn't read it yet, therefore wiretapping rules didn't apply.
yes, it would be nice if the gov or the courts acknowledged email as a private form of conversation/transaction, where its rights are with the sender and recipient and not with the site hosting the machine its sitting on, but I don't see that happening anytime soon...
Again, just 20 minutes into the future, the series Max Headroom had a bit where there was an annual festival called "Skyfall", that in the city had sort of replaced the Mardi Gras as the big thing of the year.
The highlight of the celebration was that each of the networks and others would intentionally down their retired satalites on the same night each year, producing an intentional light show of shooting stars (as seen from earth).
Silliness abound (inspired by the Skylab incident) about people walking around with metalic umbrellas and the like...
And then turns around and announces that being a cold, unresponsive company that doesn't take phone calls was actually financially viable and profitable, thus influencing many other companies to perhaps stop talking to people over the phone in order to better profit themselves...
yeah...its not so much that they bought it, its that they so terribly mismanaged it once they had it. Ditto Compaq's handling of the better DEC features (like, say, the Alpha chip).
Seems any big sale that crosses hardware or software genres tends to result in mismanagement by the buyer who really has no clue on how to utilize what they've bought, 'cause they're always so worried about cutting into the existing business gravy train...
There's four words that should tell anybody that buying a version of Unix, however much the "standard" version, will in no way shape or form affect M$'s dominance of the free world:
Uh...this is Disney we're talking about, not the BBC (infamous for ditching and wiping tons of Dr. Who footage over the years making "director's cuts" next to impossible for many stories that need one).
Disney doesn't throw much of anything away. Given how much footage of the making of, say, Snow White and Fantasia is still around 60+ years later for their respective DVDs, I'm not surprised in the slightest that extra Tron footage exists. Whether or not its interesting is up to the viewer, of course...but I'd never be suprised @ Disney keeping things around.
Walt kinda made it a policy not to throw anything away, as "all good ideas will eventually find a home". See the making-of for Toy Story 2 to see that attitude still in action...but it was around back in the 40s as well, when some of the footage drawn for Pinnochio and left out eventually ended up intact in Bambi, including much of the forest fire sequence.
Ok, so who on Job's "team" keeps doing that sort of thing?...Job's last big thing, the NeXT also had a graphics engine driven by what was originally just printing technology, Display Postscript (also from Adobe). I sense a pattern here...
I thought PDF was a format of Adobe's, which open software had only been able to decode through reverse engineering (xpdf comes to mind, plus FOP from apache/xml, or the very basic plaintext-to-pdf format in gedit). Yes, acroread is freely downloadable, but generating PDF is not free officially, and acroread is still limited on the platforms it supports, being both closed source and Motif based (last I saw, Motif was still officially closed source on non-free platforms).
Occasionally, that can work to one's advantage...Unreal comes to mind, where the first buggy versions couldn't play on 75-85% of the hardware out there just for speed reasons...but they got smart and didn't increase the requirements of the engine when unreal tournament came out, a year later (fixing other bugs in the process), by which time the average hardware was able to play it as well and it sold like crazy...
No, it wasn't vaporware, but it is possible to time a game's development so that though slow in "beta" modes, its fast enough for the next-gen hardware when the release actually happens.
on authentic pronunciation, they even went as far as the dialog coach heavily reviewing the appendices of RotK and other notes scattered throughout Chris's compilations of JRRs notes and drafts.
For instance, I have to learn a new pronunciation. All this time we have being saying "palanTIR" instead of the Old English stress on the first syllable. Just as the word was about to be committed to the soundtrack, a correction came from Andrew Jack, the Dialect Coach; he taught me a Norfolk accent for Restoration, and for LOTR he supervises accents, languages and all things vocal. Palantir, being strictly of elvish origin should follow Tolkien's rule that the syllable before a double consonant should be stressed - "paLANTir" making a sound which is close to "lantern."
Talk about picky...when director's license wasn't changing things for the film media, the care for accuracy is astounding at times...
Yeah, but suppose we reach the point where M$ has altered its Windows license agreement again to the point that they state that you are in legal violation of the license if you remove it or replace it with Linux, or configure it oddly by adding third party products to certain parts of it that THEY consider an OS (and by extention, may be considered part of the "computer network" or "computer" as an OEM might define it, especially if.NET is considered by them to be part of the OS and therefore part of the "computer network"), such as replacing IIS with Apache 2.0...
Then basic system manipluation of YOUR box becomes illegal, because Windows has declared YOUR box part of ITS computer.NETwork. The vocabulary here is restrictive to individual rights.
whether they use a PC or not. Combine this "passport required to use their gaming network" with this recent article and you get M$ requiring passport for every net-saavy XBox user out there...so you don't have to be a Windows, MSN, or.NET user alone to be "required" to use passport -- they're going to get you to sign on any way they can get away with...
I found that out when I was trying to make a "view source" link to a.jsp file that was a soft-link to the jsp with the suffix of html. Apache sent "text/plain", as appropriate. Netscape and Mozilla viewed it just fine, just as I wanted them to.
I.E. noticed that it looked awfully like HTML and rendered it as HTML, effectively hiding all the embedded java and jsp tags that I wanted to show.
Its just the games that have changed. Everquest is no more addictive than Quake, which is no more addictive than Civilization, which is no more addictive than Nethack, which is nore more addictive than Zork, which is no more addictive than TinyMud, which is no more addictive than pac man, which is no more addictive than space invaders, which is no more addictive than combat, which is no more addictive than pong. Each had their addicts that had the journals, the "Wired"s of their day, all claiming we'd all end up "game-heads" by the end of the century...
well, the century is over, the games are still around, and so is society. Unfortunately, so is Wired.
And its not so much a psychological "mystery" as so many have tried to paint it as. If it was, then Psychology Today would still be arguing about it like they did over the Pac Man fascination.
Yes, a gamer can be in a "zone" where nothing but the game matters during that time, but that "zone" as an ASC is the same kind of zone that anybody gets when concentration on a single topic is at a high (literally and figuratively). Its the same zone that hackers get (see "Peopleware"), its the same zone a musician gets when the music takes over his body and spirit, its the same zone an author gets. Sometimes the zone is productive, sometimes its an escape. But the zone is the same.
Basically its like this. Reality sucks. Its hard. Its painful. Its a fucking bitch at times. For geek guys, its full of bitches. Games are fun. Games have rules that don't change. Games have NPCs whose behaviour can be relied on.
So play games 'cause its easier than reality. People suck 'cause they and their expectations are always different from one day to the next. Games don't change. 'til you download a new update. when YOU want to, not when "they" do it.
And you keep playing games because games stay fun and reality never improves. (now mind you, the fact that you never do anything to change your reality because your always playing games doesn't help, of course, but when you're playing games, you can't see that).
And they knew this 25 years ago when Pong hit the streets. Hell, you think Thompson and Ritchie would have gone to so much fucking trouble making an O/S for an empty computer to play Space War was done for the "intellectual excercise of it"? Hell no. They were addicts who needed a fix. They just managed to get better and keep up with reality as well, as most of us do. Usually its because you finally get bored with games, and you keep thinking "the new games suck...they aren't nearly as good as the games I used to play".
Irrellevant Postscript: Back in "the day", I was a moria addict...'til i got a D in English 102. I saved the graveyard scene (you could do that, at least on vax-moria), and modified it so that it said "Rest In Peace : My English Grade" in the tombstone.
The Japanese have the idea of computer-generated celebraties in their fiction for quite a while now. The most well-known I can think of is the "Eve" character in the anime film Megazone 23 pt 1. That character was supposedly so "good" that the citizens didn't even know she wasn't real.
Disney could eventually use this to lead to a 100% cashless park (increasing patron safety in the long run -- less need for cash might lead to less to gain for purse-snatching).
Yes, we all agree that this network may be risky for transfering credit card info around, but they could over time move to a "disney dollar" card, where you pre-load the disney card with your credit card as you enter or on the phone or whatever, then use that disney card within the park grounds to buy whatever. Disney can then provide insurance against fraud against that card instead of worrying about being libel against Visa and AmEx in the case of number theft over the airwaves...
The other advantage is that Disneys own systems could authorize the sale over the Disney card instead of having to send out to a Visa/MC/AmEx authorizer off site-- it would be considerably faster that way (since the system could be built up front to support the average # of visitors on site), especially during holiday seasons...
Just a thought...
Re:I liked this better the first time
on
Freedom or Power Redux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
who the hell marked that offtopic? that's 1) on-topic, 2) a brilliant comparison, and 3) hilarious...
Actually, to follow up, entry 2.6 answers the question "Was Ada designed by a committee?" with the short answer "Ada was designed by a team, not a committee, and any sports fan knows there is a big difference."
To which my response is that when the military or the government are involved, there is no difference -- the government is not a sports organization in the slightest.
Slashdot Mirror
well, duh...but you'd be surprised just how stupid and dilbert-like some companies and project teams can be...
the point is that if you are a new developer or program manager, working on a new project, and you see that the JDK tools already have an XML parser and a logging library, you're not going to even bother to look for alternatives.
Just like nobody looks for alternatives to M$ Office or M$ IE, because its already bundled by OEMs onto just about every P4 box going out the door...
its take developers of considerable experience, and influence over their manager / respect from their manager, to introduce tools to a development environment that on the surface seem redundant to the tools already at hand. right now, many of us have that experience, and the awareness of the better tools, but in a year that might not be the case...
The irony being that in their early days, when SunOS was only a minor-varient away from being pure BSD (thanks, B.Joy), they WERE actually giving away the OS and its features (like NFS), hoping on always being ahead of the competitors in speed to encourage the hardware sales that kept the company on top during the late 80s to mid-90s.
Things were slowly changing by 1991 with SunOS 4, then with 5/2 they had to definitely switch to a "buy it only" since they themselves paid so much for getting SystemV in the first place...
of course, just about every single one of us Sun users at the time were furious with the switch...Sun boxes to me are still crippled in speed because of SystemV's overhead compared to BSD, and the speed of BSD x86 boxes over SCO & other SystemV-based x86 releases just rubs our noses in it even more...
Yes, many Jakarta contributors are from Sun, particularly with regard to Tomcat/Catalina. But many are not.
Outside of Tomcat, IBM has been the biggest commercial vendor contributing to Apache, including core items Xerces, SOAP, and Log4J, and in each case Sun has refused to let Apache be the de facto standard (inspite of that being what i believe most java developers want), and has instead put out alternative APIs which its embedded with the JDK, thus locking everybody w/ 1.4 down to a standard that now has little room to grow.
And in some cases the 1.4 bundled version is inferior to the Apache effort (yes, Crimson was/is better than Xerces 1.x because of IBM's redundant i18n overhead, but its NOT better than 2.0; and jdk1.4 logging is definitely not nearly as good as log4j).
But as M$ has shown, people will stick with whats bundled, even if inferior, 'cause "its just easier that way"...
...& all java developers will suffer.
Also, yes Tomcat is the "reference implementation" and all that, but that's because Sun has also released the code for watchdog, which is the standards-compliance testing tool for Servlets. What Apache and O'Reilly want to see is a similar effort to release the standards-compliance tests for other J2EE software specifications like EJB, and they consider it hypocritical for Sun to hold onto those tests in exchange for as much money as they charge for them.
the part which they lost.
When the SS seized the illuminati bbs machine, they took everything on that disk and read it all, including all the email sitting on it (i believe the bbs had a fidonet connection, giving it some limited degree of network email), some of which hadn't actually been read by the recipients (and in the end, never was because the BBS disk was never totally restored to the new system).
Seems the court at that time decided that reading email that had already been delivered to the target machine was not "intercepting the email" even if the intendent recipient hadn't read it yet, therefore wiretapping rules didn't apply.
yes, it would be nice if the gov or the courts acknowledged email as a private form of conversation/transaction, where its rights are with the sender and recipient and not with the site hosting the machine its sitting on, but I don't see that happening anytime soon...
The highlight of the celebration was that each of the networks and others would intentionally down their retired satalites on the same night each year, producing an intentional light show of shooting stars (as seen from earth).
Silliness abound (inspired by the Skylab incident) about people walking around with metalic umbrellas and the like...
And then turns around and announces that being a cold, unresponsive company that doesn't take phone calls was actually financially viable and profitable, thus influencing many other companies to perhaps stop talking to people over the phone in order to better profit themselves...
Seems any big sale that crosses hardware or software genres tends to result in mismanagement by the buyer who really has no clue on how to utilize what they've bought, 'cause they're always so worried about cutting into the existing business gravy train...
Novel Unix System V
Disney doesn't throw much of anything away. Given how much footage of the making of, say, Snow White and Fantasia is still around 60+ years later for their respective DVDs, I'm not surprised in the slightest that extra Tron footage exists. Whether or not its interesting is up to the viewer, of course...but I'd never be suprised @ Disney keeping things around.
Walt kinda made it a policy not to throw anything away, as "all good ideas will eventually find a home". See the making-of for Toy Story 2 to see that attitude still in action...but it was around back in the 40s as well, when some of the footage drawn for Pinnochio and left out eventually ended up intact in Bambi, including much of the forest fire sequence.
Ok, so who on Job's "team" keeps doing that sort of thing?...Job's last big thing, the NeXT also had a graphics engine driven by what was originally just printing technology, Display Postscript (also from Adobe). I sense a pattern here...
I thought PDF was a format of Adobe's, which open software had only been able to decode through reverse engineering (xpdf comes to mind, plus FOP from apache/xml, or the very basic plaintext-to-pdf format in gedit). Yes, acroread is freely downloadable, but generating PDF is not free officially, and acroread is still limited on the platforms it supports, being both closed source and Motif based (last I saw, Motif was still officially closed source on non-free platforms).
Occasionally, that can work to one's advantage...Unreal comes to mind, where the first buggy versions couldn't play on 75-85% of the hardware out there just for speed reasons...but they got smart and didn't increase the requirements of the engine when unreal tournament came out, a year later (fixing other bugs in the process), by which time the average hardware was able to play it as well and it sold like crazy...
No, it wasn't vaporware, but it is possible to time a game's development so that though slow in "beta" modes, its fast enough for the next-gen hardware when the release actually happens.
McKellen has this to say in his grey book diary:
Talk about picky...when director's license wasn't changing things for the film media, the care for accuracy is astounding at times...
On right now, all day and all night...
Then basic system manipluation of YOUR box becomes illegal, because Windows has declared YOUR box part of ITS computer .NETwork. The vocabulary here is restrictive to individual rights.
whether they use a PC or not. Combine this "passport required to use their gaming network" with this recent article .NET user alone to be "required" to use passport -- they're going to get you to sign on any way they can get away with...
and you get M$ requiring passport for every net-saavy XBox user out there...so you don't have to be a Windows, MSN, or
...and our privacy rights be damned...
I found that out when I was trying to make a "view source" link to a .jsp file that was a soft-link to the jsp with the suffix of html. Apache sent "text/plain", as appropriate. Netscape and Mozilla viewed it just fine, just as I wanted them to.
I.E. noticed that it looked awfully like HTML and rendered it as HTML, effectively hiding all the embedded java and jsp tags that I wanted to show.
bastards...
does that mean last night's "Kenny Dies" south park was actually right about something?
Its just the games that have changed. Everquest is no more addictive than Quake, which is no more addictive than Civilization, which is no more addictive than Nethack, which is nore more addictive than Zork, which is no more addictive than TinyMud, which is no more addictive than pac man, which is no more addictive than space invaders, which is no more addictive than combat, which is no more addictive than pong. Each had their addicts that had the journals, the "Wired"s of their day, all claiming we'd all end up "game-heads" by the end of the century...
well, the century is over, the games are still around, and so is society. Unfortunately, so is Wired.
And its not so much a psychological "mystery" as so many have tried to paint it as. If it was, then Psychology Today would still be arguing about it like they did over the Pac Man fascination.
Yes, a gamer can be in a "zone" where nothing but the game matters during that time, but that "zone" as an ASC is the same kind of zone that anybody gets when concentration on a single topic is at a high (literally and figuratively). Its the same zone that hackers get (see "Peopleware"), its the same zone a musician gets when the music takes over his body and spirit, its the same zone an author gets. Sometimes the zone is productive, sometimes its an escape. But the zone is the same.
Basically its like this. Reality sucks. Its hard. Its painful. Its a fucking bitch at times. For geek guys, its full of bitches. Games are fun. Games have rules that don't change. Games have NPCs whose behaviour can be relied on.
So play games 'cause its easier than reality. People suck 'cause they and their expectations are always different from one day to the next. Games don't change. 'til you download a new update. when YOU want to, not when "they" do it.
And you keep playing games because games stay fun and reality never improves. (now mind you, the fact that you never do anything to change your reality because your always playing games doesn't help, of course, but when you're playing games, you can't see that).
And they knew this 25 years ago when Pong hit the streets. Hell, you think Thompson and Ritchie would have gone to so much fucking trouble making an O/S for an empty computer to play Space War was done for the "intellectual excercise of it"? Hell no. They were addicts who needed a fix. They just managed to get better and keep up with reality as well, as most of us do. Usually its because you finally get bored with games, and you keep thinking "the new games suck...they aren't nearly as good as the games I used to play".
Irrellevant Postscript: Back in "the day", I was a moria addict...'til i got a D in English 102. I saved the graveyard scene (you could do that, at least on vax-moria), and modified it so that it said "Rest In Peace : My English Grade" in the tombstone.
The Japanese have the idea of computer-generated celebraties in their fiction for quite a while now. The most well-known I can think of is the "Eve" character in the anime film Megazone 23 pt 1. That character was supposedly so "good" that the citizens didn't even know she wasn't real.
In other words, they've already moved mostly into that direction...so much for me thinking originally... ;-)
Yes, we all agree that this network may be risky for transfering credit card info around, but they could over time move to a "disney dollar" card, where you pre-load the disney card with your credit card as you enter or on the phone or whatever, then use that disney card within the park grounds to buy whatever. Disney can then provide insurance against fraud against that card instead of worrying about being libel against Visa and AmEx in the case of number theft over the airwaves...
The other advantage is that Disneys own systems could authorize the sale over the Disney card instead of having to send out to a Visa/MC/AmEx authorizer off site-- it would be considerably faster that way (since the system could be built up front to support the average # of visitors on site), especially during holiday seasons...
Just a thought...
who the hell marked that offtopic? that's 1) on-topic, 2) a brilliant comparison, and 3) hilarious...
*sigh*
To which my response is that when the military or the government are involved, there is no difference -- the government is not a sports organization in the slightest.