That sounds great. However, I always wondered why people don't buy a hot-swappable raid box and a couple of hot-swappable drive holders & drives. Run your disks just like you would run tapes on your backup rotation (nightly incrementals, weekly checkpoints, and monthly full backups would require...what...roughly 15 tapes would get you a couple of months worth of backups? Access times would be much faster. Costs would be much cheaper. As disk drive costs drop further, larger capacity drives can be purchased for less than the per GB cost of DLTs. I just don't understand DLTs. They don't have the shelf life of hard drives...they aren't as reliable...they do have superior throughput (although a decent RAID setup can take care of that if throughput is your bottleneck).
Do the major backup systems (Legato & IBM's sol'n...can't remember the name) not support such a setup? Can't NFS or whatever be used to present the disk drives as if they were tape drives? It seems to be a far superior solution for most corporate backup needs.
In fact, NT was probably a better desktop OS than any Unix descendant until MacOS X. Don't you mean NeXT instead of MacOS X? Really, aside from the OS9 emulation layer, there isn't really that much new in OSX that wasn't in NeXT.
Yeah, me too. I actually have very acute hearing...the sound a TV makes drives me batty. I'm an audiophile, and with my test discs & a great set of headphones, I can hear 8Hz-22kH. But damn it! I have trouble discerning a single voice among a crowd.
eh?/.'ers can't listen to jazz? I can understand the stereotype with respect to pickup lines (even if I disagree with it)...but to music? Haven't there been enough studies done on the links between music & math with respect to brain development? Haven't you realized that there is a fair share of musicians among the computer literate crowd? Come on, now!
OK. I'm finding lots of good subthreads here. This one here rocks. I'm going to have to look up the guys I don't recognize from the 2 previous parent posts.
I couldn't agree more about Herbie. He really progressed the genre of jazz the way few others did. In my mind, perhaps only Miles can surpass him in terms of his influence on the genre. His stuff rocks. His 70s funk/fusion stuff is great. The older stuff is fantastic, too. Hell, I even like hsi foray into pop music. Great stuff.
And Oscar Peterson...one of my favorite pianists. Great stuff. Looks like I've got a nice list of bands to look for on my p2p networks...
Hmm...Weasels Ripped My Flesh is definitely a good one in my book. But, just for some contrast, one of my favorite Miles Davis albums has to be Sketches of Spain. Nothing like Zappa, and it might even be a little too orchestral to be considered true jazz. But to hear Miles pumping that trumpet on the opening...I am almost brought to tears just thinking about it!
I like your choices...Sonic Youth (remember when they were Psonic Youth?), Fugazi, Radiohead, Portishead, Massive Attack (gonna have to listen to Autechre...not familiar with them). But they're not Jazz. Widespread Panic is much closer to the jazz genre. And the Jazz Mandolin Project is jazz music through and through. JMP is nothing like DMB, Phish, GD, and the rest of the folk-inspired jam bands (nor is WP, but you can definitely tell the folk roots, too). I'm talking explicitly here about the jam bands that draw primarily from jazz. The jam band genre, with its long and winding improvisations, have much to borrow from jazz, even if most of the more popular ones show far more folk roots (with the 4-4 timing and the 12-bar blues).
I'm not speaking here of jam bands with jazz influences...I'm speaking of jam bands that are essentially jam jazz bands. The jam band genre is expanding a great deal these days now that Jerry Garcia is gone. From what I see of the jazz world, this is where a lot of the interesting work is being done in jazz within the US. Outside of the US, I think you really need to look to France for the cutting edge jazz.
It's all good, though. That's what makes music so wonderful. It's got a basic common language, but every style and every piece can be so different if the artists let it.
When I am new to a music form, I tend to seek out the opinions of "experts" with that music form in order to start my collection. I'd love to see this same question asked with other music forms. Rap, house music, world music, jam bands, alternative music....let's see a string of these questions.
If the music labels would only wake up and realize that people that engage in P2P filesharing actually buy *more* music, they might realize that this is the perfect application for (illegal) downloading of copyrighted material. Want to expose yourself to some of this music? Download a bunch of mp3s. Buy what you like (some of the liner notes on these jazz albums are fantastic), and delete the rest. After all, you don't want the RIAA on your butt when they come to arrest 1/6 of the population!
The problem with American jazz is that in America, jazz has lost its commercial appeal. Some of the best attended jazz performances these days are in France. The French jazz scene is far better than that in the US. Even if you are interested in American performers, they tend to spend a great deal of time in France.
If you want fluff, go ahead and listen to Kenny G and Yanni. They may be the future of jazz, but that doesn't make them good. Let me give you a parallel: rock has turned the way of Brittany. That doesn't make her a good musician, though. It just means that she is marketable.
Want the future of (good, imho,) jazz in the US scene? I think bands like Widespread Panic and the Jazz Mandolin Project are where it's at. The jam band scene has borrowed a great deal from jazz over the past 35 years. The jam band scene seems to me to be showing their jazz influences much in the way that the jam bands from the 60s and 70s showed their influences from folk music.
But if your site depends heavily upon css, NS 4.x very often will definitely not present it correctly. I.e. "Many things on the site will *not* work". That is far different than what NetBank is saying (and I guess they make sparing use of css).
"Let them access the site if they want to"...."tell them that since Netscape 4 is so old...[they] should *really* upgrade their browser"....hmmm...you've never worked in marketing before, have you? Telling the customers they are wrong...forcing them to upgrade...showing them your site when you know damn well it won't look good....
Yeah, that's it...just tell the customer he is wrong and out of date then show him an embarrassingly ugly site. OK.
Yes I do know what I'm talking about. Please compare to modern carriers. Here's a link. Summarizing from the webpage:
The Nimitz class (10 ships): approx 97,000 tons displacement, 85 aircraft.
Enterprise class (1 ship): 89,600 tons, 85 aircraft.
John F. Kennedy (1 ship): 82,000 tons, 85 aircraft.
Kitty Hawk class (1 ship): 82,000 tons, 85 aircraft.
From here, you'll find that the Kuznetsov carries between 40 and 60 aircraft.
Look, my only point is you need about 80 aircraft to both protect your fleet and project ait power. Only the US aircraft carriers can do this. It's that simple.
Oh yeah. And on that thought line, the simulation might soon realize the Genie is out of the bottle, and the simulation needs to be shut down. Send in George Bush, create an international New World Order that quickly leads to chaos and self-destruction a la Armageddon at the hands of nuclear-armed terrorists and trigger-happy superpowers.
Now that I think about it, GW's election sure did seem like a glitch--a poorly patched error in the Matrix. I mean, were you guys watching the preliminary results in Florida? I was--I saw Florida as the one potential swing state with more than 5 electoral college votes. I was living in Scotland at the time, so I stayed up late monitoring the results there. The results appeared to favor Gore pretty strongly. Then, all of a sudden, around 3-4am in Scotland (GMT+0), it seemed like it all switch very suddenly. Could this have been the Matrix putting in a glitch to initiate the self-destruct sequence? I don't know, but this entire Bush presidency has me thinking "deja vu" all the time (to Kennedy's alleged rigging of the Illinois results in 1960 to the McCarthy era to Hitler ascension, so many of the modern events seem like they've already happened before).
I think you're missing one significant possibility. In order to carry off the simulation, the computer need only simulate one person's consciousness. The computer doesn't need to simulate everything (you know, "if a tree falls and nobody hears it, did it really fall?"). It only needs to simulate one person's consciousness. Everything else is a simulation vis-a-vis that one person's consciousness. The computer doesn't need to simulate 6 billion people's consciousness--it only needs to present the facade of 6 billion people to the one consciousness it is simulating. This makes the problem much easier.
Now, in the theme of the Matrix, we're all connected together within the simulation, no? Well, we already know that many (most?) of the people in the world are actually programs--hence when other "people" suddenly transform into Agent Smith. Well, a finite number of computers could simulate the consciousnesses of a finite number of people that then are able to interact within the simulation. The only parts that need to be simulated are the ones that enter the consciousness of the "real" people.
The simulation doesn't need to simulate everything--it can merely tell the conscious beings that the rest happened--in the form of a newspaper or television report. The other events don't actually have to occur or be simulated.
One view I've investigated from time to time is that there are two supreme beings (maybe more, but for the sake of simplicity, let's assume it's two). Now, the first supreme being creates a simulation for the other supreme being to figure out. The other supreme being then has to "start from scratch"--to figure things out on their own (think of Adam & Eve being thrown out of paradise). Once the other being has "figured out the riddle"--i.e. figured out that they, themselves, are indeed superhuman, sort of like Neo), the riddle becomes solved and a new riddle is set forth, this time placing the first being in the simulation. This goes back and forth, with a more advanced simulation/riddle being constructed each time.
Of course, I had investigated all these items years before watching the Matrix. Perhaps I, like the W* brothers, are on to something--the world is a sham, and we need to figure out some way, within the confines of the simulation, to awaken the consciousnesses of all the "real" beings in the simulation. What better way to make people aware of such a setup that making a fictional movie with obvoius holes in it (like the power thingie)? This way, the simulation can authorize, or even endorse, the release of the movie, since they think it might be useful as a way of further suppressing the truth from the "real" beings ("no, no, you've got it wrong...that can't be real...the Law of Thermodynamics makes such a thing impossible" could be used to perpetuate the Matrix).
Oh yes, if only beauty made the aircraft carrier effective. I don't know how else to put this, but you need about 35 aircraft to provide 24-hour air support for a single aircraft carrier fleet group. This Russian carrier is roughly the same size as the French & British carrriers. While the more recent Soviet/Russian aircraft are excellent machines, with superior flight envelopes to anything the US has, the Russians are still unable to project air power from their aircraft carriers.
The only country that has deployed these mini-aircraft carriers for their sole air support in a significant combat mission is the UK (in the Falklands). Even against a relatively weak counter force, the UK was still unable to project air power during that conflict. At this stage, the only reason the UK & France keep these things around is to assist with other operations (either land-based or in conjuction with allied forces, as in Iraq or Afghanistan).
Yep. That's because they didn't have to provide air support for their own aircraft carrier.
The same goes for the Russian aircraft carriers.
Experience shows that you really need >60 aircraft to provide both air cover for your carrier and the power to project air power over land. The Brits had an awful time in the Falklands, where they realized they all of the air power provided by their aircraft carriers just to provide air cover for their fleet. As a result, the relatively weak Argentinian air force was able to knock out several large British ships. It was a complete embarrassment for the UK--although they won the war they realized they were no longer able to project their might around the globe. Oddly enough, that time coincided with the ascension of the UK as the 51st state of the USA.
Except that the whole reason for the ramp was to make the aircraft carrier smaller and less expensive. If you have a bigger aircraft carrier, the room for the flight deck isn't as critical.
Harriers are complete wastes of money. Less effective than Apaches and A-10s against tanks, and they can't carry enough ordinance to be effective at air support, fighting, or bombing rolls. In the UK's attempt to build the end-all, be-all jet, they made a jet that is completely useless, with only 4000 lbs payload (under normal configuration) of ordinance (compared with 4x that or more for competing aircraft) and a much smaller flight envelope than any jet aircraft in the sky.
When it comes down to it, actual experience in a number of conflicts has demonstrated that small aircraft carriers are ineffective at anything other than self defence. Since ships are otherwise sitting ducks to air attacks, I guess this is a decent role for them, but I really feel they are a "committee"-type solution to the problem (trying to be all things to all people, and ending up failing on them all).
This is exactly why British aircraft carriers are completely ineffective. By going for a smaller (and cheaper) aircraft carrier, they have reduced the number of aircraft from around 90 to around 40. Recent conflicts have shown that it takes about 30-40 aircraft simply to provide adequate air support for one aircraft carrier. The result? You can provide air cover for your fleet, but you can't project air power. The aircraft carriers dispatched to the Falklands were never fully engaged in combat, and their air cover was even suspect (that, and a bug in their defence software didn't recognize the Argentinian Exocets as enemy targets).
Trust me, smaller aircraft carriers result in wasted money. The only country able to project significant air power from a mobile platform is the US, and this is only because they spend so f'ing much on each carrier.
I think your sig says it all. "Sun's only Java compiler engineer". I bet IBM has a slew of Java compiler engineers. I think IBM is putting a lot more resourcees behind Java than Sun is able. I'm not saying this as a negative--in fact, I see it as a positive. Sun is acting exactly as I would hope--they're maintaining very high standards for the quality of the APIs while encouraging and maintaining active development on many different aspects of the language and the platform.
Yes, I agree about Java (the language) vs. C#. In my viewpoint, Java fixes many of the "problems" from C++, and C# fixes many of the problems from Java. While v1.5 of Java will add support for generics, the solution is a kludge, and still has many drawbacks compared to C++ & C# (Java missed on this aspect).
But if you want the capabilities of an application server (which.NET is supposed to provide), Java delivers more functionality than.NET even promises. The rich APIs are wonderful, too. There is tons of active development in the JCPs, too.
Let's say that IBM has already hijacked Java development (it has). Look at the JCPs that are being released these days. IBM's name is all over them. Despite Sun's control over the standard, they really no longer control the direction for the language. All they control is the rubber stamp that gets attached to libraries that go through the JCP process.
Also, are you suggesting Java become subsumed into.NET, or that.NET gets subsumed into Java? Java (the platform) is more complete and feature-rich than.NET. Java (the language) may be analogous to C#. But Java (the platform) is more analogous to.NET as a whole, only Java is more complete and feature-rich and is available today.
Really? Funny that. Banking is one of the industries that has adopted Java the most. The application server market (what transaction processing systems have evolved into today) are split about 80%/20% between Java (BEA, IBM, and others) and Microsoft. Java dominates transaction processing systems for all new development. It is also a very common choice for legacy software integration.
Hell, I'm in Houston. I'd trade for Portland, too. Oh well. I guess that's the life when you're married to a geologist (ain't too many jobs outside of Houston). Den Hague would be very nice, but the wife won't stand for Shell--nepotism and an old-boys network make it tough for American women to succeed there.
If you find a way to make it to Portland, let me know. I'll join you.
I'll trade! You come over here to the States, and I'll go live in the Netherlands. You're not in Amsterdam, are you? I much prefer the countryside, or at least outside of Amsterdam/Rotterdam.
Yeah, you pay more. Look at your costs--most of the cost difference in Europe is due to the VAT. In the UK, you pay the VAT + an additional 15%. Things are just more expensive in the UK than in the rest of Europe.
Does anyone here have any real world experience running Subversion? It has lofty goals, and I've d/l'ed the PC version to play with, but how does it handle 100s of programmers retrieving the latest version for a rather large project? I'm really interested--I love the TortoiseCVS interface, and probably won't change the version control without something similar (there's a subversion version of Tortoise, so I'm happy with that). And any change in version control systems must at least improve upon CVS.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds great. However, I always wondered why people don't buy a hot-swappable raid box and a couple of hot-swappable drive holders & drives. Run your disks just like you would run tapes on your backup rotation (nightly incrementals, weekly checkpoints, and monthly full backups would require...what...roughly 15 tapes would get you a couple of months worth of backups? Access times would be much faster. Costs would be much cheaper. As disk drive costs drop further, larger capacity drives can be purchased for less than the per GB cost of DLTs. I just don't understand DLTs. They don't have the shelf life of hard drives...they aren't as reliable...they do have superior throughput (although a decent RAID setup can take care of that if throughput is your bottleneck).
Do the major backup systems (Legato & IBM's sol'n...can't remember the name) not support such a setup? Can't NFS or whatever be used to present the disk drives as if they were tape drives? It seems to be a far superior solution for most corporate backup needs.
In fact, NT was probably a better desktop OS than any Unix descendant until MacOS X.
Don't you mean NeXT instead of MacOS X? Really, aside from the OS9 emulation layer, there isn't really that much new in OSX that wasn't in NeXT.
Yeah, me too. I actually have very acute hearing...the sound a TV makes drives me batty. I'm an audiophile, and with my test discs & a great set of headphones, I can hear 8Hz-22kH. But damn it! I have trouble discerning a single voice among a crowd.
eh? /.'ers can't listen to jazz? I can understand the stereotype with respect to pickup lines (even if I disagree with it)...but to music? Haven't there been enough studies done on the links between music & math with respect to brain development? Haven't you realized that there is a fair share of musicians among the computer literate crowd? Come on, now!
OK. I'm finding lots of good subthreads here. This one here rocks. I'm going to have to look up the guys I don't recognize from the 2 previous parent posts.
I couldn't agree more about Herbie. He really progressed the genre of jazz the way few others did. In my mind, perhaps only Miles can surpass him in terms of his influence on the genre. His stuff rocks. His 70s funk/fusion stuff is great. The older stuff is fantastic, too. Hell, I even like hsi foray into pop music. Great stuff.
And Oscar Peterson...one of my favorite pianists. Great stuff. Looks like I've got a nice list of bands to look for on my p2p networks...
Hmm...Weasels Ripped My Flesh is definitely a good one in my book. But, just for some contrast, one of my favorite Miles Davis albums has to be Sketches of Spain. Nothing like Zappa, and it might even be a little too orchestral to be considered true jazz. But to hear Miles pumping that trumpet on the opening...I am almost brought to tears just thinking about it!
I like your choices...Sonic Youth (remember when they were Psonic Youth?), Fugazi, Radiohead, Portishead, Massive Attack (gonna have to listen to Autechre...not familiar with them). But they're not Jazz. Widespread Panic is much closer to the jazz genre. And the Jazz Mandolin Project is jazz music through and through. JMP is nothing like DMB, Phish, GD, and the rest of the folk-inspired jam bands (nor is WP, but you can definitely tell the folk roots, too). I'm talking explicitly here about the jam bands that draw primarily from jazz. The jam band genre, with its long and winding improvisations, have much to borrow from jazz, even if most of the more popular ones show far more folk roots (with the 4-4 timing and the 12-bar blues).
I'm not speaking here of jam bands with jazz influences...I'm speaking of jam bands that are essentially jam jazz bands. The jam band genre is expanding a great deal these days now that Jerry Garcia is gone. From what I see of the jazz world, this is where a lot of the interesting work is being done in jazz within the US. Outside of the US, I think you really need to look to France for the cutting edge jazz.
It's all good, though. That's what makes music so wonderful. It's got a basic common language, but every style and every piece can be so different if the artists let it.
When I am new to a music form, I tend to seek out the opinions of "experts" with that music form in order to start my collection. I'd love to see this same question asked with other music forms. Rap, house music, world music, jam bands, alternative music....let's see a string of these questions.
If the music labels would only wake up and realize that people that engage in P2P filesharing actually buy *more* music, they might realize that this is the perfect application for (illegal) downloading of copyrighted material. Want to expose yourself to some of this music? Download a bunch of mp3s. Buy what you like (some of the liner notes on these jazz albums are fantastic), and delete the rest. After all, you don't want the RIAA on your butt when they come to arrest 1/6 of the population!
OK. I really tried to stop laughing. But I can't.
The problem with American jazz is that in America, jazz has lost its commercial appeal. Some of the best attended jazz performances these days are in France. The French jazz scene is far better than that in the US. Even if you are interested in American performers, they tend to spend a great deal of time in France.
If you want fluff, go ahead and listen to Kenny G and Yanni. They may be the future of jazz, but that doesn't make them good. Let me give you a parallel: rock has turned the way of Brittany. That doesn't make her a good musician, though. It just means that she is marketable.
Want the future of (good, imho,) jazz in the US scene? I think bands like Widespread Panic and the Jazz Mandolin Project are where it's at. The jam band scene has borrowed a great deal from jazz over the past 35 years. The jam band scene seems to me to be showing their jazz influences much in the way that the jam bands from the 60s and 70s showed their influences from folk music.
But if your site depends heavily upon css, NS 4.x very often will definitely not present it correctly. I.e. "Many things on the site will *not* work". That is far different than what NetBank is saying (and I guess they make sparing use of css).
"Let them access the site if they want to"...."tell them that since Netscape 4 is so old...[they] should *really* upgrade their browser"....hmmm...you've never worked in marketing before, have you? Telling the customers they are wrong...forcing them to upgrade...showing them your site when you know damn well it won't look good....
Yeah, that's it...just tell the customer he is wrong and out of date then show him an embarrassingly ugly site. OK.
- The Nimitz class (10 ships): approx 97,000 tons displacement, 85 aircraft.
- Enterprise class (1 ship): 89,600 tons, 85 aircraft.
- John F. Kennedy (1 ship): 82,000 tons, 85 aircraft.
- Kitty Hawk class (1 ship): 82,000 tons, 85 aircraft.
From here, you'll find that the Kuznetsov carries between 40 and 60 aircraft.Look, my only point is you need about 80 aircraft to both protect your fleet and project ait power. Only the US aircraft carriers can do this. It's that simple.
Oh yeah. And on that thought line, the simulation might soon realize the Genie is out of the bottle, and the simulation needs to be shut down. Send in George Bush, create an international New World Order that quickly leads to chaos and self-destruction a la Armageddon at the hands of nuclear-armed terrorists and trigger-happy superpowers.
Now that I think about it, GW's election sure did seem like a glitch--a poorly patched error in the Matrix. I mean, were you guys watching the preliminary results in Florida? I was--I saw Florida as the one potential swing state with more than 5 electoral college votes. I was living in Scotland at the time, so I stayed up late monitoring the results there. The results appeared to favor Gore pretty strongly. Then, all of a sudden, around 3-4am in Scotland (GMT+0), it seemed like it all switch very suddenly. Could this have been the Matrix putting in a glitch to initiate the self-destruct sequence? I don't know, but this entire Bush presidency has me thinking "deja vu" all the time (to Kennedy's alleged rigging of the Illinois results in 1960 to the McCarthy era to Hitler ascension, so many of the modern events seem like they've already happened before).
I think you're missing one significant possibility. In order to carry off the simulation, the computer need only simulate one person's consciousness. The computer doesn't need to simulate everything (you know, "if a tree falls and nobody hears it, did it really fall?"). It only needs to simulate one person's consciousness. Everything else is a simulation vis-a-vis that one person's consciousness. The computer doesn't need to simulate 6 billion people's consciousness--it only needs to present the facade of 6 billion people to the one consciousness it is simulating. This makes the problem much easier.
Now, in the theme of the Matrix, we're all connected together within the simulation, no? Well, we already know that many (most?) of the people in the world are actually programs--hence when other "people" suddenly transform into Agent Smith. Well, a finite number of computers could simulate the consciousnesses of a finite number of people that then are able to interact within the simulation. The only parts that need to be simulated are the ones that enter the consciousness of the "real" people.
The simulation doesn't need to simulate everything--it can merely tell the conscious beings that the rest happened--in the form of a newspaper or television report. The other events don't actually have to occur or be simulated.
One view I've investigated from time to time is that there are two supreme beings (maybe more, but for the sake of simplicity, let's assume it's two). Now, the first supreme being creates a simulation for the other supreme being to figure out. The other supreme being then has to "start from scratch"--to figure things out on their own (think of Adam & Eve being thrown out of paradise). Once the other being has "figured out the riddle"--i.e. figured out that they, themselves, are indeed superhuman, sort of like Neo), the riddle becomes solved and a new riddle is set forth, this time placing the first being in the simulation. This goes back and forth, with a more advanced simulation/riddle being constructed each time.
Of course, I had investigated all these items years before watching the Matrix. Perhaps I, like the W* brothers, are on to something--the world is a sham, and we need to figure out some way, within the confines of the simulation, to awaken the consciousnesses of all the "real" beings in the simulation. What better way to make people aware of such a setup that making a fictional movie with obvoius holes in it (like the power thingie)? This way, the simulation can authorize, or even endorse, the release of the movie, since they think it might be useful as a way of further suppressing the truth from the "real" beings ("no, no, you've got it wrong...that can't be real...the Law of Thermodynamics makes such a thing impossible" could be used to perpetuate the Matrix).
Oh yes, if only beauty made the aircraft carrier effective. I don't know how else to put this, but you need about 35 aircraft to provide 24-hour air support for a single aircraft carrier fleet group. This Russian carrier is roughly the same size as the French & British carrriers. While the more recent Soviet/Russian aircraft are excellent machines, with superior flight envelopes to anything the US has, the Russians are still unable to project air power from their aircraft carriers.
The only country that has deployed these mini-aircraft carriers for their sole air support in a significant combat mission is the UK (in the Falklands). Even against a relatively weak counter force, the UK was still unable to project air power during that conflict. At this stage, the only reason the UK & France keep these things around is to assist with other operations (either land-based or in conjuction with allied forces, as in Iraq or Afghanistan).
Yep. That's because they didn't have to provide air support for their own aircraft carrier.
The same goes for the Russian aircraft carriers.
Experience shows that you really need >60 aircraft to provide both air cover for your carrier and the power to project air power over land. The Brits had an awful time in the Falklands, where they realized they all of the air power provided by their aircraft carriers just to provide air cover for their fleet. As a result, the relatively weak Argentinian air force was able to knock out several large British ships. It was a complete embarrassment for the UK--although they won the war they realized they were no longer able to project their might around the globe. Oddly enough, that time coincided with the ascension of the UK as the 51st state of the USA.
Except that the whole reason for the ramp was to make the aircraft carrier smaller and less expensive. If you have a bigger aircraft carrier, the room for the flight deck isn't as critical.
Harriers are complete wastes of money. Less effective than Apaches and A-10s against tanks, and they can't carry enough ordinance to be effective at air support, fighting, or bombing rolls. In the UK's attempt to build the end-all, be-all jet, they made a jet that is completely useless, with only 4000 lbs payload (under normal configuration) of ordinance (compared with 4x that or more for competing aircraft) and a much smaller flight envelope than any jet aircraft in the sky.
When it comes down to it, actual experience in a number of conflicts has demonstrated that small aircraft carriers are ineffective at anything other than self defence. Since ships are otherwise sitting ducks to air attacks, I guess this is a decent role for them, but I really feel they are a "committee"-type solution to the problem (trying to be all things to all people, and ending up failing on them all).
This is exactly why British aircraft carriers are completely ineffective. By going for a smaller (and cheaper) aircraft carrier, they have reduced the number of aircraft from around 90 to around 40. Recent conflicts have shown that it takes about 30-40 aircraft simply to provide adequate air support for one aircraft carrier. The result? You can provide air cover for your fleet, but you can't project air power. The aircraft carriers dispatched to the Falklands were never fully engaged in combat, and their air cover was even suspect (that, and a bug in their defence software didn't recognize the Argentinian Exocets as enemy targets).
Trust me, smaller aircraft carriers result in wasted money. The only country able to project significant air power from a mobile platform is the US, and this is only because they spend so f'ing much on each carrier.
I think your sig says it all. "Sun's only Java compiler engineer". I bet IBM has a slew of Java compiler engineers. I think IBM is putting a lot more resourcees behind Java than Sun is able. I'm not saying this as a negative--in fact, I see it as a positive. Sun is acting exactly as I would hope--they're maintaining very high standards for the quality of the APIs while encouraging and maintaining active development on many different aspects of the language and the platform.
Yes, I agree about Java (the language) vs. C#. In my viewpoint, Java fixes many of the "problems" from C++, and C# fixes many of the problems from Java. While v1.5 of Java will add support for generics, the solution is a kludge, and still has many drawbacks compared to C++ & C# (Java missed on this aspect).
.NET is supposed to provide), Java delivers more functionality than .NET even promises. The rich APIs are wonderful, too. There is tons of active development in the JCPs, too.
But if you want the capabilities of an application server (which
Let's say that IBM has already hijacked Java development (it has). Look at the JCPs that are being released these days. IBM's name is all over them. Despite Sun's control over the standard, they really no longer control the direction for the language. All they control is the rubber stamp that gets attached to libraries that go through the JCP process.
.NET, or that .NET gets subsumed into Java? Java (the platform) is more complete and feature-rich than .NET. Java (the language) may be analogous to C#. But Java (the platform) is more analogous to .NET as a whole, only Java is more complete and feature-rich and is available today.
Also, are you suggesting Java become subsumed into
Really? Funny that. Banking is one of the industries that has adopted Java the most. The application server market (what transaction processing systems have evolved into today) are split about 80%/20% between Java (BEA, IBM, and others) and Microsoft. Java dominates transaction processing systems for all new development. It is also a very common choice for legacy software integration.
Hell, I'm in Houston. I'd trade for Portland, too. Oh well. I guess that's the life when you're married to a geologist (ain't too many jobs outside of Houston). Den Hague would be very nice, but the wife won't stand for Shell--nepotism and an old-boys network make it tough for American women to succeed there.
If you find a way to make it to Portland, let me know. I'll join you.
I'll trade! You come over here to the States, and I'll go live in the Netherlands. You're not in Amsterdam, are you? I much prefer the countryside, or at least outside of Amsterdam/Rotterdam.
Yeah, you pay more. Look at your costs--most of the cost difference in Europe is due to the VAT. In the UK, you pay the VAT + an additional 15%. Things are just more expensive in the UK than in the rest of Europe.
Does anyone here have any real world experience running Subversion? It has lofty goals, and I've d/l'ed the PC version to play with, but how does it handle 100s of programmers retrieving the latest version for a rather large project? I'm really interested--I love the TortoiseCVS interface, and probably won't change the version control without something similar (there's a subversion version of Tortoise, so I'm happy with that). And any change in version control systems must at least improve upon CVS.