In the real world, programs that I write will run orders of magnitude faster than ones that you write. Of course, this may not matter to you, writing simple web or dialog box code that interfaces with a db containing a few thousand items(or less). But my code can scale to processing millions, even billions of items. Can you say that? Of course not...
That is half of being a Real Professional(TM). Don't forget... "The programs I write are architected elegantly, so that they are easy to extend or modify as the problem changes." That one is just as valuable as being efficient.
I'm not claiming amazing wizardry, either, but it's certainly beyond your grasp or the grasp of anyone who claims a bachelors in CS is a waste of someones time.
A BS is CS is is a waste of time if you can crack open Knuth and actually apply it. I've seen too many CS graduates that couldn't and music majors who could blow most CS degree holders out of the water. In my experience, gifted programmers are born, not made.
Currently there are at least 5 really significant players in the linux industry: RH, Novell-SuSE, United Linux, Debian, and Gentoo. Gentoo fills an important niche, but will never likely play a broader role.
By terminating your retail products while simultaneously throwing your weight behind Fedora, you seem to want to create a two headed distribution - a fully free community based distribution that maps extremely closely with a fully supported commercial distribution. Essentially your trying to appeal to both the enterprise customer and the Debian user.
Do you expect that either SuSE or UL will try to align themselves closely with Debian in order to create the same synergy?
Do you expect that in a few years the landscape will have only two big players - RH+Fedora alliance and another commercial+community alliance?
I could see going down to a 2 to 3 inch square device. Much smaller than that and it becomes difficult to handle. The "small" CD size convenient. Maybe do DVD encoding on that size disk?. You could probably push it and go to media the size of a compact flash card, but that is it from an ergonomics standpoint.
I would like to see a media that protects the record surface, rather than it being exposed as in a cd or dvd.
According to the article, current CPUs put out about 100 Watts as heat. How much is that? Can anyone give me a decent comparison to an ordinary houshold object that would allow me to fathom how much power that is?
2 weeks ago: "we do not support the Linux platform but you can try and run it"
This was defined as: "MICROSOFT IS RIPPING LINUX OUT OF VIRTUAL PC!"
Today: "we do not support the Linux platform but you can try and run it" which is now being defined as "YOU CAN STILL RUN LINUX!"
Can someone explain this to me because I am totally confused.
Easy!
Two Weeks Ago in Redmond: We've removed Linux from the list of officially supported applications.
Two Weeks Ago on Slashdot: The sky is falling!
Yesterday in Redmond: We've removed Linux from the list of officially supported applications. It still works. We checked a couple of major distributions. We just won't answer the phone if you call to ask us stuff like "How do I make my sound work in Linux." Furthermore, if the Linux community does find a bug, they can submit it to our bug tracking tool.
Today on Slashdot: The sky is falling! No, it's not! Yes, it is!
A player is worth money if he can "put fannies in the seats", regardless of his effect on wins and losses. This is why home run hitters get so much attention in baseball, even though the line drive hitter who rarely strikes out is more valuable as far as winning games.
What staggered me about the list was that CEO's as a body weren't included. Yes, the CEO's of underperforming companies are horribly overpaid, but you can't tell me that Michael Eisner actually did work equal in value to $700 *million*. Honestly, I rather doubt that its possible for anyone to do work worth 700 million... Eisner is on the high side, but all corporate executives tend to earn well beyond what they are worth.
In a market system, by definition people are worth exactly what they are able to convince someone to pay them. Let me explain further...
Corporations exist for the sole purpose of making money for their shareholders. They do this in one of two ways: 1) paying dividends and 2) increasing stock price. Shareholders elect a Board of Directors for the purpose of supervising the corporation on their behalf. Among other tasks, the Board of Directors hires the CEO and other senior management.
With every candidate for CEO, the Board has to make a prediction. If candidate A only costs $10 million but the market will react to the hiring in a neutral manner, whereas candidate B costs $700 million but the market will bid up the price of the stock by $5 per share, then candidate B is clearly the candidate the Board must hire. To do otherwise would be to not live up to their responsibilities to the shareholders.
The amount of money involved is staggering, but the shareholders could care less what the CEO makes. The shareholders only care about the value of their own portfolio.
it might also be a sign that half the population feels quite secure in their current form of government, and don't feel the need to.
You're right on the money.
In the USA and Canada, at least, there is broad consensus on the structure of government and its relationship with the people. Ideas such as "abolition of private property" or "state sanctioning of a particular religion" are far outside the platforms of any non-fringe political movement.
We have a few parties whose platforms tend to be slightly right or left of center. If half the people don't vote, it means that the details where those platforms differ don't matter to them. They know that, the morning after the election, they'll still be able to go to the church they want to go to, and that they still aren't in grave risk of being arrested and held without trial.
The fallacy of expecting 100% voter turnout is the idea that 100% of the voters have an issue important to them which will be decided in that election.
I remember when the PeeCees had EGA or lowly CGA (which looked terrible, by the way) or even no graphics at all other than the graphics characters available to MS-DOS. PeeCee graphics cards were expensive to get even rudimentary high-res and color (16 if you were lucky) whereas "home" computers like the Amiga and ST had higher resoltiom, greater colour depth and some hardware acceleration (blitting). These machines were never taker seriously because their advanced graphics and sound capabilities were considered frivolous in the busness world.
That's right. There was only one video standard that was actually considered useful "in the real world", and not for games. HERCULES! I actually ran windows on hercules for a while.
If you actually read the patent application, you'll see that they are patenting something much more narrow than you think.
IBM is attempting to patent a UI hack that will detect a signon request from a website or other application, and superimpose their master signon dialog. They are NOT attempting to patent the ideas that are covered by Keychain or Mozilla's autofill. By superimposing their own "widget" exactly where the application specific logon would be, this master signon system preserves the flow of the application UI.
By comparison, the Keychain and autofill solutions can be more intrusive, and can be less secure. IBM's master signon would be entered every time I need to signon. I'd only need to remember one password. By comparison, Keychain and autofill don't require one to log into each application. An office worker can walk away from their desk without locking their screen saver and someone can use their accounts.
The Keychain has been around since System 7 Pro, which dates back to October of 1993 or thereabouts. Whether Apple patented it or back then not, I don't think they'll have any choice but to contest this IBM patent attempt-- because if it goes through, Apple will have to pay licensing fees to IBM to continue using Keychain in OS X.
Not quite true. As has already been pointed out, the issue of a patent by the USPTO does not mean that the patent is enforcable. Apple might very well be able to prove that their Keychain was prior art.
Second, I'd bet money right now that Apple and IBM have some sort of "No first use" treaty.
In all likelihood, IBM is not patenting the idea of storing all one's passwords in one place and automatically using a master password to retrieve them. IBM is more than likely patenting one fine grained aspect of that idea, which may indeed be new and original work.
Surely anyone who can remember more than the last 10 years knows that the temperature is rising?
Its so blatent, every year here in the UK we get more and more extreme weather. The "hottest day on record" has happened just about every summer for at least the past 5 years running, each time a little hotter.
Actually, the climate models that I have seen predict that Ireland, Great Britain, and Northern Europe will become much colder due to global warming. The reason is that Gulf Current currently pumps tremendous amounts of heat from the Carribean to Northern Europe. Global Warming actally "shuts off" this flow, making the climate there much more like the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Some scientists have claimed to see evidence of this occuring in prior hot cycles.
The more we study climate, the more we find evidence of cycles of various duration. The one year cycle of the seasons is most obvious, and the 7 year cycle of El Nino is well known, but there are also 20-30 year cycles, 60 year cycles, 100 year cycles, 500 year cycles, etc. Don't forget that in Tudor England, there were high quality vineyards. Then a cooling trend kicked in and drove that industry south. A thousand years ago Lief Ericson settled Greenland and explored some of the coast of North America, but a cooling trend destryed the farms he had settled and Europeans wouldn't be back until 1492.
I think you said synchronous when you meant symmetric. At least by the terms I'm familiar with, consumer DSL, cable, and even 56K dialup are assymetric, providing more dowload bandwidth and less upload bandwidth. Commercial DSL products, frame realy, T[123], etc connections are typically symmetric, providing equal bandwidth in both directions.
While you may morally object to hunting (as is your right) it is a legal activity virtually everywhere.
Before someone twists this, let me clarify. Most every legal jurisdiction in the North America and Europe recognizes that hunting is a legal activity. Therefore, it is acknoweldged that people may own the equipment and paraphanalia to do so. That does not imply that hunting is not a regulated activity. One can not shoot pigeons in New York City whenever one pleases, but a New York City resident does have the ability, subject to certain regulation, to own a shotgun which he uses to hunt quail in a suitably location during the appropriate season.
Yup, it would be difficult. Especially at high altitude, as the plane undergoes severe decompression. There's a very good reason not to allow guns on aircraft, as firing a gun in an aircraft cabin will likely lead to an imminent crash.
That's right. And on 9/11 we could be morning the loss of life of 250 people on 4 planes instead of about 3,000 people in two 110 story office towers and a section of the pentagon.
Don't use Symantec Internet Security 2004. It's not a violation of anyone's rights unless it's mandated by the government.
The twist is that federal laws require filtering software on internet connections provided at libraries. The primary purpose of this law is to prevent minors from accessing pornography.
Given that there are relatively few vendors of this sort of software, it is likely that many libraries are using this software. It is also likely that many of these libraries don't have the budget to purchase a competing product. Therefore we can reasonably expect that the government (taxpayer funded libraries) is engaged in viewpoint discrimination.
Consequently, libraries are faced with limited choices. First, they could expend extra money and time to purchase another product - which is resources that could otherwise be spent inproving other services. Second, they could turn off internet access altogether, further limiting the access of poor people to the net. Third, they could face a costly lawsuit. No good can come of this.
Think about it: NRA and other gun sites are about how to find weapons and use them. Anti Gun sites arent, in fact they discourage their use. what theyre trying to block is not the advocacy of gun rights, its the advocacy of GUNS THEMSELVES.
Read the article. The sites blocked include the NRA's lobbying site. That most certainly falls under the category of "advocacy of gun rights". This certainly falls under the umbrella of "view point discrimination" and goverment supported entities, including libraries, have no business using this software.
Furthermore, you unfairly characterize the activities of the NRA. Most of the non-lobbying work of the NRA is promoting the sports of hunting and target shooting. While you may morally object to hunting (as is your right) it is a legal activity virtually everywhere. Target shooting is an internationally recognized sport, and is included in both the summer and winter olympics. The NRA also supports the hobby of collecting guns of historical and cultural interest.
Topics that I have never seen in an NRA publication include: how to illegally acquire a gun, how to convert a gun to automatic operation, how to manufacture illegal ammunition, etc.
You are more likely to find a decent, upstanding, honest politician handing out generous donations to the needy whilst generally being nice to mankind and all other animals than you are to find the Enterprise rushing around space.
Just for fun, I'm going to be excessively pedantic. The first space shuttle, which was used for testing purposes and was not intended to travel into space, was named Enterprise. At various times it has been suggested that refitting the space shuttle Enterprise might be reasonable and cost effective way to bolster the fleet. Therefore the possibility that we may "find the Enterprise rushing around space" in the next few years is not unreasonable.
Re:Languages need novices, novices need good books
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
At least the novice developers can use it. Look at Visual Basic... anyon[e] can pick it up and get started... Now a large number of those first projects are garbage apps, but at least they give a starting point.
The idea of a novice picking up J2EE is fscking hilarious. J2EE is a framework for Enterprise applications. Almost by definition, these apps are outside the purview of a novice, at least without careful hand-holding by a guru.
Novices - using any language or environment - don't write applications with scalable components, a robust transactional system, a complex persistence mechanism, a high quality messge substrate, and a directory system.
One might as well complain that an F-15C air superiority fighter is inferior to a Cessna 172 because a beginner can fly a Cessna with very little training. If one needs to shoot down a Mig-29, the Cessna is not going to cut it. J2EE developers need to come to the environment after deveoping a sound foundation in other technologies, up to and including RMI and CORBA.
Are you really going to look through (and understand) every line of code in RH9?... Open Source by itself doesn't solve your distrust problems.
Very true - Open Source does NOT guarantee security. Using closed source, however, means that you have to trust the entity producing the software. Open Source means that the software can be independantly audited.
Slashdot Mirror
Karma Whore :)
Plus, why all the <br> tags? And didn't your mommy teach you to use xhtml? Use <br /> instead.
I'm not claiming amazing wizardry, either, but it's certainly beyond your grasp or the grasp of anyone who claims a bachelors in CS is a waste of someones time.
A BS is CS is is a waste of time if you can crack open Knuth and actually apply it. I've seen too many CS graduates that couldn't and music majors who could blow most CS degree holders out of the water. In my experience, gifted programmers are born, not made.Currently there are at least 5 really significant players in the linux industry: RH, Novell-SuSE, United Linux, Debian, and Gentoo. Gentoo fills an important niche, but will never likely play a broader role.
By terminating your retail products while simultaneously throwing your weight behind Fedora, you seem to want to create a two headed distribution - a fully free community based distribution that maps extremely closely with a fully supported commercial distribution. Essentially your trying to appeal to both the enterprise customer and the Debian user.
Do you expect that either SuSE or UL will try to align themselves closely with Debian in order to create the same synergy?
Do you expect that in a few years the landscape will have only two big players - RH+Fedora alliance and another commercial+community alliance?
I could see going down to a 2 to 3 inch square device. Much smaller than that and it becomes difficult to handle. The "small" CD size convenient. Maybe do DVD encoding on that size disk?. You could probably push it and go to media the size of a compact flash card, but that is it from an ergonomics standpoint.
I would like to see a media that protects the record surface, rather than it being exposed as in a cd or dvd.
According to the article, current CPUs put out about 100 Watts as heat. How much is that? Can anyone give me a decent comparison to an ordinary houshold object that would allow me to fathom how much power that is?
God made big men and little men, and Mr. Colt made them all equal.
Easy!
A player is worth money if he can "put fannies in the seats", regardless of his effect on wins and losses. This is why home run hitters get so much attention in baseball, even though the line drive hitter who rarely strikes out is more valuable as far as winning games.
In a market system, by definition people are worth exactly what they are able to convince someone to pay them. Let me explain further...
Corporations exist for the sole purpose of making money for their shareholders. They do this in one of two ways: 1) paying dividends and 2) increasing stock price. Shareholders elect a Board of Directors for the purpose of supervising the corporation on their behalf. Among other tasks, the Board of Directors hires the CEO and other senior management.
With every candidate for CEO, the Board has to make a prediction. If candidate A only costs $10 million but the market will react to the hiring in a neutral manner, whereas candidate B costs $700 million but the market will bid up the price of the stock by $5 per share, then candidate B is clearly the candidate the Board must hire. To do otherwise would be to not live up to their responsibilities to the shareholders.
The amount of money involved is staggering, but the shareholders could care less what the CEO makes. The shareholders only care about the value of their own portfolio.
it might also be a sign that half the population feels quite secure in their current form of government, and don't feel the need to.
You're right on the money.
In the USA and Canada, at least, there is broad consensus on the structure of government and its relationship with the people. Ideas such as "abolition of private property" or "state sanctioning of a particular religion" are far outside the platforms of any non-fringe political movement.
We have a few parties whose platforms tend to be slightly right or left of center. If half the people don't vote, it means that the details where those platforms differ don't matter to them. They know that, the morning after the election, they'll still be able to go to the church they want to go to, and that they still aren't in grave risk of being arrested and held without trial.
The fallacy of expecting 100% voter turnout is the idea that 100% of the voters have an issue important to them which will be decided in that election.
If you actually read the patent application, you'll see that they are patenting something much more narrow than you think.
IBM is attempting to patent a UI hack that will detect a signon request from a website or other application, and superimpose their master signon dialog. They are NOT attempting to patent the ideas that are covered by Keychain or Mozilla's autofill. By superimposing their own "widget" exactly where the application specific logon would be, this master signon system preserves the flow of the application UI.
By comparison, the Keychain and autofill solutions can be more intrusive, and can be less secure. IBM's master signon would be entered every time I need to signon. I'd only need to remember one password. By comparison, Keychain and autofill don't require one to log into each application. An office worker can walk away from their desk without locking their screen saver and someone can use their accounts.
Not quite true. As has already been pointed out, the issue of a patent by the USPTO does not mean that the patent is enforcable. Apple might very well be able to prove that their Keychain was prior art.
Second, I'd bet money right now that Apple and IBM have some sort of "No first use" treaty.
In all likelihood, IBM is not patenting the idea of storing all one's passwords in one place and automatically using a master password to retrieve them. IBM is more than likely patenting one fine grained aspect of that idea, which may indeed be new and original work.
Great essay!
I think you said synchronous when you meant symmetric. At least by the terms I'm familiar with, consumer DSL, cable, and even 56K dialup are assymetric, providing more dowload bandwidth and less upload bandwidth. Commercial DSL products, frame realy, T[123], etc connections are typically symmetric, providing equal bandwidth in both directions.
While you may morally object to hunting (as is your right) it is a legal activity virtually everywhere.
Before someone twists this, let me clarify. Most every legal jurisdiction in the North America and Europe recognizes that hunting is a legal activity. Therefore, it is acknoweldged that people may own the equipment and paraphanalia to do so. That does not imply that hunting is not a regulated activity. One can not shoot pigeons in New York City whenever one pleases, but a New York City resident does have the ability, subject to certain regulation, to own a shotgun which he uses to hunt quail in a suitably location during the appropriate season.
Don't use Symantec Internet Security 2004. It's not a violation of anyone's rights unless it's mandated by the government.
The twist is that federal laws require filtering software on internet connections provided at libraries. The primary purpose of this law is to prevent minors from accessing pornography.
Given that there are relatively few vendors of this sort of software, it is likely that many libraries are using this software. It is also likely that many of these libraries don't have the budget to purchase a competing product. Therefore we can reasonably expect that the government (taxpayer funded libraries) is engaged in viewpoint discrimination.
Consequently, libraries are faced with limited choices. First, they could expend extra money and time to purchase another product - which is resources that could otherwise be spent inproving other services. Second, they could turn off internet access altogether, further limiting the access of poor people to the net. Third, they could face a costly lawsuit. No good can come of this.
Read the article. The sites blocked include the NRA's lobbying site. That most certainly falls under the category of "advocacy of gun rights". This certainly falls under the umbrella of "view point discrimination" and goverment supported entities, including libraries, have no business using this software.
Furthermore, you unfairly characterize the activities of the NRA. Most of the non-lobbying work of the NRA is promoting the sports of hunting and target shooting. While you may morally object to hunting (as is your right) it is a legal activity virtually everywhere. Target shooting is an internationally recognized sport, and is included in both the summer and winter olympics. The NRA also supports the hobby of collecting guns of historical and cultural interest.
Topics that I have never seen in an NRA publication include: how to illegally acquire a gun, how to convert a gun to automatic operation, how to manufacture illegal ammunition, etc.
The problem with the nebula is the static discharging gas. Our shields would be useless.
At least the novice developers can use it. Look at Visual Basic ... anyon[e] can pick it up and get started ... Now a large number of those first projects are garbage apps, but at least they give a starting point.
The idea of a novice picking up J2EE is fscking hilarious. J2EE is a framework for Enterprise applications. Almost by definition, these apps are outside the purview of a novice, at least without careful hand-holding by a guru.
Novices - using any language or environment - don't write applications with scalable components, a robust transactional system, a complex persistence mechanism, a high quality messge substrate, and a directory system.
One might as well complain that an F-15C air superiority fighter is inferior to a Cessna 172 because a beginner can fly a Cessna with very little training. If one needs to shoot down a Mig-29, the Cessna is not going to cut it. J2EE developers need to come to the environment after deveoping a sound foundation in other technologies, up to and including RMI and CORBA.
Are you really going to look through (and understand) every line of code in RH9? ... Open Source by itself doesn't solve your distrust problems.
Very true - Open Source does NOT guarantee security. Using closed source, however, means that you have to trust the entity producing the software. Open Source means that the software can be independantly audited.