Apple was actively pushing the firewire specs back when, and is in part responsible to its widespread proliferation. Further, a LOT of devices in the imaging/video market are dependent on firewire, so this sounds like mental masturbation at best. Firewire is going to be around for a long time...
I think anyone seriously considering such a move should attend at least 10 UN sessions throughout their full excruciating length in order to get a sense of the beaurocratic monster this organization has become. If that doesn't immediately relegate this ridiculous proposal into the shredder, then I don't know what will...
Winston Churchill is being quoted as having said this about the U.N.: Use it when possible, ignore it when necessary. I believe this is a statement in itself;-)
I'm not even sure that this is going to be feasible in the U.S. anytime soon, but in places like Japan where there is access to affordable and real 'broadband' access, IPTV might be able compete with traditional TV right now!
A specious argument, a dance does not serve to appease a group of amok stormtroopers - LOL.
Seriously, the point I was trying to make here is that an ancient dance performed/preserved by a robot is in the same leaque with plastic flowers. They almost look the same and can be perfumed to smell similarly - but they never will be considered a flower. As usual, in our Westernized (i.e. analytical) frame of thinking we don't see the inherent meaning of what is considered cultural heritage. If it needs a robot to be preserved, then it's already lost - got it?
Okay, IDNRTFA - but the sheer idea of something like this is a testimony of where we are heading on this planet. A dance is a cultural heritage that should be preserved by human beings, not by robots, otherwise it loses its meaning. If nothing else - the thought of 'dancing robots' really freaks me out - and I'm definitely not a Luddite - just something sick about this...
Okay, I don't want to be Mr. Cassandra here, but after having been going with the punches in this industry for the last decade or so I need to tell you that this is a first taste of what's to come. Obviously, there have been many threads on./ about how the IT market has fallen apart and that many of us having a hard time finding a job (and keeping it!). I myself was let go again last week and I can tell you, it's ugly out there.
Before you go out there trying to get your 'career' in gear and finding a company you're loyal to for a good part of your life, I would recommend you read a book called 'Poor Dad, Rich Dad' (or the other way around). It basically teaches you to create value for yourself and not to focus on a particular skill set. This will not only help you prepare to structure your ambitions and your career but will also leave you with a more sane prospective regarding the current job market. Bottomline is: we are all cogs in a big machine and we are replacable (as you soon will find out) - only by creating value for yourself and by seeing work as an 'opportunity to learn and to get one step closer to your own plans' will you be able to deal properly with the frustrations of finding a gig (or internship) in the IT industry. Don't trust any promises made by any corporation out there - you are selling them time of your life and nothing else - they will treat you like a spare part that can easily be substitured for a newer, cheaper one. BTW, no - I am not depressed about all this - once you see the light and accept reality for what it is, it's actually a healthy prospective (and it's kind of Darwinian;-)
I know this is a bit offtopic, but I wanted to chime in here to pass along a philosophy that's been keeping me going since the market fell apart.
Re:So if it takes a few weeks to learn...
on
Hibernate in Action
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not true. It took me a LOT more time learnng how to write good JDBC code, that didn't break in an enterprise enviornment. Had I had access to Hibernate back then, my life would have been infinitely easier. Finally, Gavin actually offered a cash price for anyone writing manual JDBC code which would be faster than Hibernate - so far nobody has come to collect it.
Best thing since sliced bread
on
Hibernate in Action
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I have used Hibernate on the last two J2EE projects I've worked on and can attest to its simplicity and power. Although it'll take you a few weeks to really get the hang of how things work under the hood, it's well worth the learning curve. And it's ridiculously simple compared with EJB - that's for sure. My latest project even involved storing CLOBs to an Oracle Rack cluser - it took a bit of tweaking and research, but we saved ourselves hundreds of lines of codes and it performs without a glitch.
Okay, I haven't RTFA, but the poster should also have made mention of Spring, which works hand in hand with Hibernate. Spring basically is an Inversion Of Control (IOC) framework, that allows you to define Hibernate transaction and session contexts. Spring also offers a great MVC layer, but one does not have to use that. If one chooses to just use Spring as an addition to Hibernate, one can look at Spring's additional functionalities as needed. Spring also offers Oracle BLOB/CLOB support by offering a customized OracleClobHandler - Oracle ONLY supports its propietary CLOB objects and won't accept java.sql.Clob objects via Hibernate.
Generally, Hibernate is very non-intrusive and gives you the opportunity to write JDBC code alongside with your Hibernate code (which is super-elegant and abstracted the way it should have been done a long time ago). So, it can be slowly folced into an existing project without having to refactor any legacy code.
The Hibernate user group is a bit rude to be quite frank - I've tried to post some questions in the dev group and got pretty angry replies. The 'beginner' group was not very helpful, so I had to google for answers. Of course there's the book, and I would strongly recommend to get it, since it is one of the major revenue sources for those Hibernate contributors. We want open source, but we can't expect to get everything for free, right?;-)
My first exposure to Hibernate was through the Appfuse framework, which is an excellent J2EE kickstart project, complete with ant built, Xdoclet, Hibernate, Spring, the works. I was even able to use XDoclet tags inside my Java beans, relieving me of having to write my Hibernate definition files by hand! It really doesn't get much easier than that. For anyone wanting to give Hibernate/Spring a try, I recommend to download the latest version of appfuse and give it a try - it's a liberating experience. The biggest kick I got was being able to seamlessly switch my project from Oracle over to MySQL by simply changing a few environment variables - I mean, how cooler can it get?:-)
Btw, it's 'Uebermensch' - not Ubermensch. If you guys are giving me a hard time for misspelling 'Baroque' then have the curtesy to properly spell my language as well;-)
There was some movement in that area back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Basically, they played Barock music while feeding people foreign language words. This really seemed to speed up retention by several factors. Anyway, I think that the current learning methods are completely antiquated and new techniques are desparetely needed. Top that with a disfunctional school system here in the U.S. and articles like this sound a bit like Science Fiction.
I mean, with all the taxes I'm paying for all those federal agencies including local police departments - how come nobody is even trying to track these people down? Spamming is illegal, right? And hijacking computers is most likely not exactly something the average computer user would want to be exposed to? So, how come we all have to setup a friggin' fortress including the proverbial moat in order to keep one's computer clean? Another example how inefficient those federal agencies are out there. And the companies who condoning all this spam and pertinent IP traffic are not exactly innocent either. All this is really disgusting - if I wasn't a software engineer, I would probably just pull the plug and start reading books. Sorry for letting steam here, but I just get disgusted reading articles like this...
Can you imagine the kind of crap the marketing/sales weenies are going to give the techies running this site? I mean, getting slashdotted is a sales drone's moist dream - and instead of learning about the product we see yet another proof that PHP is insecure and broken.
Anyway, I don't want to be a sysadmin on that site today...
Looks like Arnold turns into the Terminator regarding the State's wasting of taxpayer's money on Windoooz licenses. I'm not a replublican, but he's got my vote on this one.
Seriously, one can say a lot about Arnold being a Republican and all, but at least he's not one of those party-line drones I see on Fox and MSNBC all the time. Alongside with people like McCain (and few others who's name I don't remember) he represents the few remaining people who have their own personal convictions but don't engage in 'scorch-the-earth' practices daemonizing anyone who disagrees with them. Anyway, back to the real world, I have some taxes to accrue (which can be wasted on killing brown people in poor countries)....
Okay, I only skimmed the article (what's that STFA?) but this sounds like BIG news. If this holds true, existing hardware could be used for quantum computing - a very interesting possibility.
Well, it's a long way from the science lab to everyday use, but I hope those guys can create something acutally usable throughout commercial computing.
Well, judging from the first few comments, this is a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing because a commercial company is bothering to support Linux in the first place - forget about the quality of the player (e.g. lack of DeCSS, etc.) but focus on the statement this makes. But it's of course a bad thing as well because this might be the beginning of a trend of having commercial software being stuffed down our throats with each distro. But you know guys - you can't have it both ways: Either Linux remains a 'geek OS' or we'll have to deal with the Macromedia's and RealPlayer's of this world. Always be careful what you wish for;-)
I tend to agree on this one. This is one of those possible 'monkey-wrench' scenarios where a public rejection (or at least dialog of IE security flaws) might result in the embrace of other OS alternatives (i.e. Linux). Maybe this will also cause many driver and software companies to more seriously support Linux/Unix platforms. I for instance am writing this email on a Windoooz box because my hobby happens to be video editing. There's simply no way I would be able to get all the tools I need for Unix. Right next to me is an 1997 Dell tank of a computer which happily runs RH 9.0 - my step-son (13 years old) was surprised how 'fast' it runs - LOL - need I say more??
You know, I think you might be on to something here. What if we would have bred them according to intelligence as opposed to preferences for 'shiny fur' or 'pointy ears'? Maybe I'd be playing chess with wuffi by now - and he'd probably beat my butt badly - LOL
Seriously - this opens a whole new can of worms! Considering genetic engineering and future advances in related fields - would it be possible to develop super-animals with a certain amount of intelligence and self awareness? some might laugh now, but many of the things we take for granted (like writing this email right now) would have been deemed ridiculous 100 years from now...
Dogs often get trained in German. The reason for this is that the German language sounds a bit more commanding (even I admit that and I'm German myself;-) and that people don't want to accidentally trigger responses/actions while having a conversation with a friend (at least that's what they tell me here in L.A.). If it comes to training sentences I think that English might serve that purpose a bit better - being a programmer I realize how much easier it is to structure a command in English as opposed to German, which puts the verb at the end of the sentence very often. Then again, for simple sentences there's not much difference between German and English (fetch the stick - bring den Stecken). Finally, there is one major difference between English and German - German sound a lot more like ra-ta-ta-ta-ta whereas English (especially British English) is a more like dadadadadada. There are distinct pauses between words in German, which might make things easier for dogs to understand (especially if Sean Connery is training that dog - LMAO:-))
I just saw something on Deutsche Welle (in Los Angeles actually) and that dog indeed picked out a bunch of items among dozens littered across the floor on verbal request. What's interesting is that the canine still used his nose (not his eyes) to identify the object. Looks like his brain is correlating verbal commands with smells - contrary to how human beings would solve this problem.
Anyway, I never bought into that whole 'humans are unique' bullcrap - countless reports have proven that several species elicit signs of abstract thinking, verbal communication (whales, dolphins in particular), emotions like sadness (chimpanzees and other primates), anger, tendency for rape (chimpanzees again - why am I not surprised? LOL), etc.. Why are we still so full of ourselves and continue to describe ourselves as the crown of evolution while we decimate other species and commit atrocities unknown to any other species on this planet. I hope this dog doesn't smarten up too much - once he realizes how screwed up his 'masters' are - he's probably reconsidering that whole loyalty issue;-)
Thanks for pointing out that I was right after all - of course if you're wrong, I might still be right, unless this is your opinion, in that case we're both right;-)
... shouldn't they have done this 4 or 5 years ago? Why now? We could all run Java based browsers and applications if those guys would have put their thinking caps on half a decade ago. Just my personal opinion - as usual, I could be wrong;-)
Guess I'm coming a bit late to this discussion, but as someone who spent months working on a commercial P2P distribution network, I can't help but getting depressed reading news clips like this. So, after years of back and forth, law suits, and killing off of small innovators, it's all come down to behemoths like Sony and McDonalds? This is really sick - just another proof that the new territory has been fully occupied by the usual suspects - the large corporate conglomerates who can bribe and push themselves into a market niche. F...ing depressing - why would I ever come up with anything innovative anymore and try to realize it? I know there are some exceptions out there (Yahoo or Google for instance - who were started by guys like us) - but the rest of the Web.... just take a look around - we have to lock our systems up not to be inundated with pop-ups and banners, viruses, and tons of spam. I know there is still a lot of good stuff out there, but most of the time it feels like just another commercial outlet. I sometimes miss the feeling I had back when in 1997 (although I do appreciate the better browsers, bandwidth and systems of today;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Apple was actively pushing the firewire specs back when, and is in part responsible to its widespread proliferation. Further, a LOT of devices in the imaging/video market are dependent on firewire, so this sounds like mental masturbation at best. Firewire is going to be around for a long time...
I think anyone seriously considering such a move should attend at least 10 UN sessions throughout their full excruciating length in order to get a sense of the beaurocratic monster this organization has become. If that doesn't immediately relegate this ridiculous proposal into the shredder, then I don't know what will... Winston Churchill is being quoted as having said this about the U.N.: Use it when possible, ignore it when necessary. I believe this is a statement in itself ;-)
I'm not even sure that this is going to be feasible in the U.S. anytime soon, but in places like Japan where there is access to affordable and real 'broadband' access, IPTV might be able compete with traditional TV right now!
A specious argument, a dance does not serve to appease a group of amok stormtroopers - LOL. Seriously, the point I was trying to make here is that an ancient dance performed/preserved by a robot is in the same leaque with plastic flowers. They almost look the same and can be perfumed to smell similarly - but they never will be considered a flower. As usual, in our Westernized (i.e. analytical) frame of thinking we don't see the inherent meaning of what is considered cultural heritage. If it needs a robot to be preserved, then it's already lost - got it?
Okay, IDNRTFA - but the sheer idea of something like this is a testimony of where we are heading on this planet. A dance is a cultural heritage that should be preserved by human beings, not by robots, otherwise it loses its meaning. If nothing else - the thought of 'dancing robots' really freaks me out - and I'm definitely not a Luddite - just something sick about this...
Okay, I don't want to be Mr. Cassandra here, but after having been going with the punches in this industry for the last decade or so I need to tell you that this is a first taste of what's to come. Obviously, there have been many threads on ./ about how the IT market has fallen apart and that many of us having a hard time finding a job (and keeping it!). I myself was let go again last week and I can tell you, it's ugly out there.
;-)
Before you go out there trying to get your 'career' in gear and finding a company you're loyal to for a good part of your life, I would recommend you read a book called 'Poor Dad, Rich Dad' (or the other way around). It basically teaches you to create value for yourself and not to focus on a particular skill set. This will not only help you prepare to structure your ambitions and your career but will also leave you with a more sane prospective regarding the current job market. Bottomline is: we are all cogs in a big machine and we are replacable (as you soon will find out) - only by creating value for yourself and by seeing work as an 'opportunity to learn and to get one step closer to your own plans' will you be able to deal properly with the frustrations of finding a gig (or internship) in the IT industry. Don't trust any promises made by any corporation out there - you are selling them time of your life and nothing else - they will treat you like a spare part that can easily be substitured for a newer, cheaper one. BTW, no - I am not depressed about all this - once you see the light and accept reality for what it is, it's actually a healthy prospective (and it's kind of Darwinian
I know this is a bit offtopic, but I wanted to chime in here to pass along a philosophy that's been keeping me going since the market fell apart.
Not true. It took me a LOT more time learnng how to write good JDBC code, that didn't break in an enterprise enviornment. Had I had access to Hibernate back then, my life would have been infinitely easier. Finally, Gavin actually offered a cash price for anyone writing manual JDBC code which would be faster than Hibernate - so far nobody has come to collect it.
I have used Hibernate on the last two J2EE projects I've worked on and can attest to its simplicity and power. Although it'll take you a few weeks to really get the hang of how things work under the hood, it's well worth the learning curve. And it's ridiculously simple compared with EJB - that's for sure. My latest project even involved storing CLOBs to an Oracle Rack cluser - it took a bit of tweaking and research, but we saved ourselves hundreds of lines of codes and it performs without a glitch. ;-) :-)
Okay, I haven't RTFA, but the poster should also have made mention of Spring, which works hand in hand with Hibernate. Spring basically is an Inversion Of Control (IOC) framework, that allows you to define Hibernate transaction and session contexts. Spring also offers a great MVC layer, but one does not have to use that. If one chooses to just use Spring as an addition to Hibernate, one can look at Spring's additional functionalities as needed. Spring also offers Oracle BLOB/CLOB support by offering a customized OracleClobHandler - Oracle ONLY supports its propietary CLOB objects and won't accept java.sql.Clob objects via Hibernate.
Generally, Hibernate is very non-intrusive and gives you the opportunity to write JDBC code alongside with your Hibernate code (which is super-elegant and abstracted the way it should have been done a long time ago). So, it can be slowly folced into an existing project without having to refactor any legacy code.
The Hibernate user group is a bit rude to be quite frank - I've tried to post some questions in the dev group and got pretty angry replies. The 'beginner' group was not very helpful, so I had to google for answers. Of course there's the book, and I would strongly recommend to get it, since it is one of the major revenue sources for those Hibernate contributors. We want open source, but we can't expect to get everything for free, right?
My first exposure to Hibernate was through the Appfuse framework, which is an excellent J2EE kickstart project, complete with ant built, Xdoclet, Hibernate, Spring, the works. I was even able to use XDoclet tags inside my Java beans, relieving me of having to write my Hibernate definition files by hand! It really doesn't get much easier than that. For anyone wanting to give Hibernate/Spring a try, I recommend to download the latest version of appfuse and give it a try - it's a liberating experience. The biggest kick I got was being able to seamlessly switch my project from Oracle over to MySQL by simply changing a few environment variables - I mean, how cooler can it get?
Btw, it's 'Uebermensch' - not Ubermensch. If you guys are giving me a hard time for misspelling 'Baroque' then have the curtesy to properly spell my language as well ;-)
Sorry, I'm German and I'm used to spelling it 'Barock'. My bad :-P
There was some movement in that area back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Basically, they played Barock music while feeding people foreign language words. This really seemed to speed up retention by several factors. Anyway, I think that the current learning methods are completely antiquated and new techniques are desparetely needed. Top that with a disfunctional school system here in the U.S. and articles like this sound a bit like Science Fiction.
I mean, with all the taxes I'm paying for all those federal agencies including local police departments - how come nobody is even trying to track these people down? Spamming is illegal, right? And hijacking computers is most likely not exactly something the average computer user would want to be exposed to? So, how come we all have to setup a friggin' fortress including the proverbial moat in order to keep one's computer clean? Another example how inefficient those federal agencies are out there. And the companies who condoning all this spam and pertinent IP traffic are not exactly innocent either. All this is really disgusting - if I wasn't a software engineer, I would probably just pull the plug and start reading books. Sorry for letting steam here, but I just get disgusted reading articles like this...
Can you imagine the kind of crap the marketing/sales weenies are going to give the techies running this site? I mean, getting slashdotted is a sales drone's moist dream - and instead of learning about the product we see yet another proof that PHP is insecure and broken.
Anyway, I don't want to be a sysadmin on that site today...
Looks like Arnold turns into the Terminator regarding the State's wasting of taxpayer's money on Windoooz licenses. I'm not a replublican, but he's got my vote on this one. Seriously, one can say a lot about Arnold being a Republican and all, but at least he's not one of those party-line drones I see on Fox and MSNBC all the time. Alongside with people like McCain (and few others who's name I don't remember) he represents the few remaining people who have their own personal convictions but don't engage in 'scorch-the-earth' practices daemonizing anyone who disagrees with them. Anyway, back to the real world, I have some taxes to accrue (which can be wasted on killing brown people in poor countries)....
Welcome to Windows Quantum 2006! We crash several ways at the same time!
Okay, I only skimmed the article (what's that STFA?) but this sounds like BIG news. If this holds true, existing hardware could be used for quantum computing - a very interesting possibility. Well, it's a long way from the science lab to everyday use, but I hope those guys can create something acutally usable throughout commercial computing.
Well, judging from the first few comments, this is a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing because a commercial company is bothering to support Linux in the first place - forget about the quality of the player (e.g. lack of DeCSS, etc.) but focus on the statement this makes. But it's of course a bad thing as well because this might be the beginning of a trend of having commercial software being stuffed down our throats with each distro. But you know guys - you can't have it both ways: Either Linux remains a 'geek OS' or we'll have to deal with the Macromedia's and RealPlayer's of this world. Always be careful what you wish for ;-)
... next time I read the newest Playboy mag at home - LOL
I tend to agree on this one. This is one of those possible 'monkey-wrench' scenarios where a public rejection (or at least dialog of IE security flaws) might result in the embrace of other OS alternatives (i.e. Linux). Maybe this will also cause many driver and software companies to more seriously support Linux/Unix platforms. I for instance am writing this email on a Windoooz box because my hobby happens to be video editing. There's simply no way I would be able to get all the tools I need for Unix. Right next to me is an 1997 Dell tank of a computer which happily runs RH 9.0 - my step-son (13 years old) was surprised how 'fast' it runs - LOL - need I say more??
You know, I think you might be on to something here. What if we would have bred them according to intelligence as opposed to preferences for 'shiny fur' or 'pointy ears'? Maybe I'd be playing chess with wuffi by now - and he'd probably beat my butt badly - LOL Seriously - this opens a whole new can of worms! Considering genetic engineering and future advances in related fields - would it be possible to develop super-animals with a certain amount of intelligence and self awareness? some might laugh now, but many of the things we take for granted (like writing this email right now) would have been deemed ridiculous 100 years from now...
Dogs often get trained in German. The reason for this is that the German language sounds a bit more commanding (even I admit that and I'm German myself ;-) and that people don't want to accidentally trigger responses/actions while having a conversation with a friend (at least that's what they tell me here in L.A.). If it comes to training sentences I think that English might serve that purpose a bit better - being a programmer I realize how much easier it is to structure a command in English as opposed to German, which puts the verb at the end of the sentence very often. Then again, for simple sentences there's not much difference between German and English (fetch the stick - bring den Stecken). Finally, there is one major difference between English and German - German sound a lot more like ra-ta-ta-ta-ta whereas English (especially British English) is a more like dadadadadada. There are distinct pauses between words in German, which might make things easier for dogs to understand (especially if Sean Connery is training that dog - LMAO :-))
I just saw something on Deutsche Welle (in Los Angeles actually) and that dog indeed picked out a bunch of items among dozens littered across the floor on verbal request. What's interesting is that the canine still used his nose (not his eyes) to identify the object. Looks like his brain is correlating verbal commands with smells - contrary to how human beings would solve this problem. ;-)
Anyway, I never bought into that whole 'humans are unique' bullcrap - countless reports have proven that several species elicit signs of abstract thinking, verbal communication (whales, dolphins in particular), emotions like sadness (chimpanzees and other primates), anger, tendency for rape (chimpanzees again - why am I not surprised? LOL), etc.. Why are we still so full of ourselves and continue to describe ourselves as the crown of evolution while we decimate other species and commit atrocities unknown to any other species on this planet. I hope this dog doesn't smarten up too much - once he realizes how screwed up his 'masters' are - he's probably reconsidering that whole loyalty issue
Thanks for pointing out that I was right after all - of course if you're wrong, I might still be right, unless this is your opinion, in that case we're both right ;-)
... shouldn't they have done this 4 or 5 years ago? Why now? We could all run Java based browsers and applications if those guys would have put their thinking caps on half a decade ago. Just my personal opinion - as usual, I could be wrong ;-)
Guess I'm coming a bit late to this discussion, but as someone who spent months working on a commercial P2P distribution network, I can't help but getting depressed reading news clips like this. So, after years of back and forth, law suits, and killing off of small innovators, it's all come down to behemoths like Sony and McDonalds? This is really sick - just another proof that the new territory has been fully occupied by the usual suspects - the large corporate conglomerates who can bribe and push themselves into a market niche. F...ing depressing - why would I ever come up with anything innovative anymore and try to realize it? I know there are some exceptions out there (Yahoo or Google for instance - who were started by guys like us) - but the rest of the Web.... just take a look around - we have to lock our systems up not to be inundated with pop-ups and banners, viruses, and tons of spam. I know there is still a lot of good stuff out there, but most of the time it feels like just another commercial outlet. I sometimes miss the feeling I had back when in 1997 (although I do appreciate the better browsers, bandwidth and systems of today ;-)