OK, interesting point. So you are saying that because there are trillions of living creatures having a bad time, we should not care about the ones that we deliberately inflict pain upon?
We were talking about the pain not the killing. Killing a spider that way (which I normally don't do, I throw them out or leave them be as they catch flies) is very quick and has little to do with pain.
It may be all the rage, but I almost never use zoom and/or rotate. Normally I take some time to setup my application right, and after that I use it only if a document (e.g. a webpage) misbehaves. Once the character size is correct, I use the scroll bars. Now, the auto-rotate of camera's, PDA's, photo frames etc., that's something I find truly useful. I wish I had it for my LCD screen.
Am I the only one that thinks that rotate and zoom are both rather pointless things to optimize? I've got a MS 4000 keyboard at work, and while it is a brilliant keyboard, I've literally *never* used the zoom function on it and you cannot reprogram it to do scrolling.
I cannot help with the no OCR, but at my home situation, I always just strip off the added protection. Easiest thing is to download one of the 10/20 dollar shareware programs that do this. Once you've got the password, converting the pdf is a breezer, especially if you've one of those programs that simply add an item to the right click on the PDF in explorer... Bugger that copy protection BS. If you can read it you can copy it.
I use suspend to RAM on my desktop and mobile computer. My mobile computer can last up to at least a week when I suspend to RAM, so it can't cost that much power. On my desktop everything spins down when I do it, even the fan of the CPU and power supply. I'm thinking of moving to hibernate on my Vista laptop since 1) it's hasn't got oodles of memory, so saving is a good possibility and 2) it does not rely on or drain the battery. On my 8 GB linux desktop, hibernate does not work and it would take too long anyway.
But better hardware and driver support are needed. IMHO, this market will be much more secure when a non-used computer starts to stop using that much power when it's not needed. Both my laptop and desktop are using this for the CPU (down-clocking by a rather large margin), but many other components should stop using juice while not needed. It should not be necessary to switch of the CPU entirely, that has too much drawbacks (backups at night, administration, services etc).
My 2.7 GHz desktop CPU is now running at a nice 35 degrees using a stock fan, no way you can bake an egg on that:) And it will run on a SSD with a Western Digital Green Edition drive in the near future to make it even better. Power use *will* go down.
Besides that, there are more and more plans on storing energy efficiently. If the difference would be huge, maybe we could distribute more power using the grids between countries and even continents (you'd probably need super-conductivity for that to work). Because if it's night over here...
Ah, fair enough. I did not directly see if your article was trying to criticize the parent or trying to mock Sun, and I mistakenly assumed the latter. Sorry about that:) Not all those hardware ventures of Sun regarding Java were a success (and that's probably an understatement).
I'm saying that closures in Java are not really enterprise, because in enterprise development (development with a sufficiently large body of developers really) you've got a big mix of experienced and less experienced programmers. These less experienced programmers generally don't go to the polls and/or Java forums. It's highly unlikely their votes are counted, as they normally would not even be aware of "closures". You tend to build applications and keep maintaining them for a long time, so the focus is on maintainability.
I won't go into the Ruby on Rails thing because I think it was too much hype. I can understand EE programmers wanting to do things easier, but easier is not always equal better. There is a reason why it *was* all the hype.
As I said, I'm a pretty big proponent of the 1.4 to 1.5 changes. If I weren't you might call me reactionary. Now you just use it to propel your argument. Lets not call each other names. As for the familiarity: I've got a mixed group of about 20 developers around me, and I don't know anyone that uses closures, and most will not even know about them.
As said, I do know what closures are and I can program in them, but I dislike the syntax and the general idea of building them into Java, where they are less needed and difficult to integrate right.
Sorry to say it, but I've followed your links and I do think he's completely wrong (the he being Neil Gafter). Java is supposed to be maintainable first. I do think that all Java programmers will understand closures. And I don't think you should add to the platform each time someone shouts that he needs to have feature X, because closures will not be the end of it.
See, that's what I mean when I say that Java becomes a "legacy platform". You're afraid of new things because you view them as threats to maintainability.
There is no simple answer to that, but I will try. This stage is always passed as languages develop. For some time, new features are considered "academic" and "radical" and "not buying much" and "hard to understand". This was the case with non-deterministic garbage collecting not so long ago, with OOP back in the days of Simula, and with structured programming replacing GOTO even before then. But if the feature is actually useful, it is developed and polished, efficient implementation approaches are devised, and eventually it becomes mainstream.
Now back to closures. At this point, they are mainstream. If you look at the top 10 languages (let's assume those are "mainstream") according to TPCI, you'll see that all those either have closures already in some shape or form, or are planning to get them in the next major version (C++0x), with two exceptions: C and Java. Why C won't ever have them is fairly obvious, I think - apart from being essentially preserved as is, it also frowns upon such high-level constructs with non-transparent implementations. So we can safely say that out of mainstream high-level programming languages, Java is the only one which does not have closures, and does not plan to add them either. That's a clear mark of not getting along with times.
I mean, think about it: today, Visual Basic, the language traditionally labeled as one for the "less bright" programmers, has lambdas/closures!
Yes, of course closures won't be the end of it, just like OOP wasn't. Evolution of language design keeps going on, and I strongly suspect that typeclasses will be the next big thing, for example. But that doesn't mean one shouldn't try to keep up.
I don't care if they are main stream. They are not sufficiently OO, they are not required in any way and in general they are very difficult to read. If every language must include constructs that are present in every other language, then we get a mess of languages that all try and do all things. That's not a healthy situation at all.
And I will need to understand what is going on while doing it. I've seen lots of code *in presentations* on closures that I don't directly understand, and I've got +10 years of programming experience on a university level.
I'm not sure what you mean by "programming experience on a university level", but if anything, it seems to be an indication of how bad things are. If you ever had exposure to Scheme in the uni, you should have absolutely no troubles understanding how closures in any language works. On the other hand, if the only thing you've ever dealt with is Java (and maybe C/C++), then you really missed a lot more than you know about.
Ok, that was a bit too short. I've had languages, parsing techniques and programming classes in my CS study at university. Besides that I have 10 years of design/programming experience. Most of that time was spent in the core Java language (and cryptography). I try out many languages including scripting languages that include closures. I find them very strong, and very difficult to read (thus to maintain). Especially Lua I found extremely strong for such a small language, and completely wrong for enterprise development.
In general, the pressure to add things to a language is huge, but shoul
"Where's the need for a email client to spawn 8 or 16 threads?"
Eh? That's one application that definitely needs threads, or at least a split up into parts that can run separately (e.g. Java can run Runnables within the same hardware thread, which is more light-weight).
It's not so much the speed up as doing multiple things in the background. E.g. it's stupid if user has to wait for getting messages from the server, or code for parsing/filtering messages is not multi-threaded.
But an email client is almost too easy to split into threads, and many of the clients are already multi-threaded (e.g. you scroll or even write a message while mail is retrieved).
The problem with the actual article is is that it doesn't say *anything*. This is another Slashdot joke, and it is starting to get irritating. The discussion can be fun none-the-less, but I presume this is the firehose effect? Or can we just squarely blame the editors?
Java is supposed to be everywhere, from the start. The fact that you can also implement the VM as hardware (and you can still buy dedicated hardware AFIAK for enterprise servers) is mainly a side effect. So I don't think this compares.
You can basically implement any VM in hardware actually, and emulate any hardware using a VM. So, eh, basically, what's your point?
Using a profiler? Just use a RAM drive for anything that you write, especially log files. I've seen that for more complex situations, logging to a RAM drive really helps. If possible, put the whole thing in RAM and see the speedup. Note that if information is read once, it is normally in the RAM already because of disk caching, so running an application (with the same config) twice and making sure you log/write into RAM drive already does the trick.
Thousands of bugs? They must have tested it against their office suite:)
But seriously, Microsoft must have loads of legacy code lying around, so thousands of bugs are to be expected. Office just happens one of them (and the number of Word related crashes on my office computer is just about hopeless).
I would be more impressed if they released a free and open static code analyzer to include for their compilers that may also compile to native code (e.g. Visual C++).
That said, I'll be nice and applaud this effort. But if anywhere possible, use managed code (scripting or a secure VM) instead of relying on this kind of analysis. With this rate, it will take centuries to get rid of all the buffer overflows and other rather inexcusable code out there. I would be very amazed if this tool would (help to) remove all those kind of vulnerabilities.
This article scores an 11 on the inflammatory headline, shame on the editors for letting this get through. Slashdot seems to be getting worse (which is certainly kind of amazing).
Sorry to say it, but I've followed your links and I do think he's completely wrong (the he being Neil Gafter). Java is supposed to be maintainable first. I do think that all Java programmers will understand closures. And I don't think you should add to the platform each time someone shouts that he needs to have feature X, because closures will not be the end of it.
In that respect it is good that Sun kept such a close watch on the Java language and VM. And I don't want to have the libraries written in multiple languages. I need to be able to browse the (open sourced) runtime when debugging. And I will need to understand what is going on while doing it. I've seen lots of code *in presentations* on closures that I don't directly understand, and I've got +10 years of programming experience on a university level. In general, the pressure to add things to a language is huge, but should be contained - it's always easy to say: hey, we're missing this and that, please add!
Let Microsoft be the one that does to try it all. It's great to try and understand each of the.NET runtime languages when trying to browse through the mess they call an API.
Also, your source is a blog that points to a twitter page as source. Yeah, whatever. The JDK 1.7 will be out sometime next year (2010), so who knows what will happen in the mean time.
"From a national-security perspective, I think the best thing that could be done is to create a counter-espionage bot to seek out and destroy infections of Conflicker. But maybe I'm off on this."
This is not a generic solution to the problem. I would suspect that Conficker will try and stay in power of a PC once infected. It's protection is in all probability much higher than that of the original computer. It's therefore to be expected that it is much harder to reinfect the computer. Maybe the authors of Conficker were not *that* brilliant though.
But maybe I'm off on this, but you are restating a solution that has been proposed earlier, and dismissed if only for legal reasons.
"I've used Java, on and off, since 1996 (which is not too long after it was released). CAn't say I ever liked it. Always felt like trying to write software in a straight jacket. Lots of restrictions, no benefits. Ignore Java, C# is better."
Half of our department is switching over to Java. It's easier and faster to write applications in Java than C++, and most of all, it's really maintainable. As long as you don't have too much unmanaged code in there, Java is very reliable.
C# can do much the same thing as Java, but now you're in the MS straight jacket. That jacket is very expensive and keeps updating itself. It's not very portable (don't ever trust MS making promises on portability). Updates are quick and expensive and because the language keeps updating itself, maintainability is much out of the Window. C# also has a lot of non-OO constructs as well as properties, operator overloading, unmanaged code etc. etc. It's like D, it's trying to do everything (integrated SQL statements, vars, the list goes on).
With C++ people always say that a good programmer will manage to escape memory leaks and such. I've never met this programmer. One programmer who did say he could wrote an array class. Even after 2 other programmers took a look, it still had serious memory related errors. If you ever use C++, please at least use a static code analyzer.
OK, ranting aside, YES, Java restricts you. And for a good reason. If you ever meet a language that claims that it has no restrictions, be cautious, because you will have big problems some years down the road.
Yep, runs like a charm, really really fast processor and cost me next to nothing (~70 euro). Mine was sold as a "X2 dual core black edition" but it definitely has got an AMD 10 inside. Nice wattage (65W TDP) too, now idling along at half speed. The rest of my money is being spend on memory (8GB 1066MHz, 150 euro) and SSD (60 GB Vertex around the same). The motherboard was 90 euro, all solid caps and everything (but firewire) build in. So cheap I bought a high end power supply as well.
Brilliant speed and silence on a budget, but look out that you don't inadvertently buy an AMD 8 instead.
And they can have it! I've still got one lying around. That said: that TDP is becoming the norm nowadays. Gosh, that was certainly the loudest processor fan I've ever used. Got it traded in for a x64 as soon as it became affordable.
I've skimmed through the article (can't claim I've read it because I skipped the mathematics). But there is nothing in there that defined "will" let alone "free will" in the sense you would define it for humans. There is a piece of text at the end that laments of mathematics not getting into newspapers. Well, using this slightly inflammatory title may help.
They define (strong) free [will] as:
To say that Aâ(TM)s choice of x, y, z is free means more precisely that it is not determined by (i.e., is not a function of) what has happened at earlier times (in any inertial frame). Our theorem is the surprising consequence that particle aâ(TM)s response must be free in exactly the same sense, that it is not a function of what has happened earlier (with respect to any inertial frame).
But in my opinion of free is that you can make your own choice based on the information available to you. Proving that there is no theoretical/statistical way of influencing a decision is the worst thing you could do. Proving that everything "below" is just randomly moving in every direction without being steered could make it harder to prove human free will instead of easier.
I really would like to believe in human free will, but the scary thing is that I don't get to this conclusion when studying science. Oh well, it certainly *feels* and if that is all a scam, it's certainly a darn good one:)
Really? The fun of life is in my opinion is that it is never the same. If it is, make it change. E.g. the sun is shining here now, I've got no idea about the exact weather, but I'm going to find out now:)
"If the certificate isn't properly signed, a warning like the one you were presented with should throw a dialog box in the web browser."
*Nothing* from a web site should throw a dialog in a web browser. Dialogs are annoying things that block your entire application. They make it all to easy to create denial of service attacks (just keep throwing dialog boxes). They are also easy to click away by mistake (just hitting enter in an entirely different application seems to do it).
I love the way FF3 shows you that something is wrong with the certificate. The page is very clear and the user only gets a dialog box after clicking on a button himself. The same with remembering passwords, the bar on the top is much better than a dialog.
It would be great if FF3 became entirely dialog free. I don't think it is already the case, but they are definitely working on it. The one for extensions is still there, but at least you cannot just click it away since it waits 3 seconds for the Install button to become available.
IMHO, dialog boxes (especially "modal" ones, the ones you/have/ to click away) are a useful tool, but they are used in way too many occasions.
I would not worry about the problem when 1) onlinebanking.capitalone.com is working as it should be and 2) when the certificates of onlinebanking.capitalone.com and the misconfigured servicing.capitalone.com match.
Also, the top level domain is the same, you it seems far fetched that the DNS is configured incorrectly. That is, IF you are using internet from a relatively safe location, otherwise your routing and DNS may be attacked quite easily.
It's fixed, but that does not make it a non-story. And although this seems to have been fixed quite quickly, the response of the person at the bank makes me wonder if everything is all right down there.
Anyway, US banks are trying to do things way too cheaply: they should use 2 factor authentication (for transactions as well), as lot of EU banks do. Much, much safer than having only username + password. That kind of authentication would probably be considered criminal neglect over here in the Netherlands.
Switzerland is not known to be too welcoming to outsiders though. Maybe it has changed, but I doubt it. It's a very nice, very clean place to live in, but for many people it may be a bit too clean, if you know what I mean. Got to visit my Swiss relatives soon, come to think of it (marrying in does work).
Slashdot Mirror
OK, interesting point. So you are saying that because there are trillions of living creatures having a bad time, we should not care about the ones that we deliberately inflict pain upon?
We were talking about the pain not the killing. Killing a spider that way (which I normally don't do, I throw them out or leave them be as they catch flies) is very quick and has little to do with pain.
It may be all the rage, but I almost never use zoom and/or rotate. Normally I take some time to setup my application right, and after that I use it only if a document (e.g. a webpage) misbehaves. Once the character size is correct, I use the scroll bars. Now, the auto-rotate of camera's, PDA's, photo frames etc., that's something I find truly useful. I wish I had it for my LCD screen.
Am I the only one that thinks that rotate and zoom are both rather pointless things to optimize? I've got a MS 4000 keyboard at work, and while it is a brilliant keyboard, I've literally *never* used the zoom function on it and you cannot reprogram it to do scrolling.
I cannot help with the no OCR, but at my home situation, I always just strip off the added protection. Easiest thing is to download one of the 10/20 dollar shareware programs that do this. Once you've got the password, converting the pdf is a breezer, especially if you've one of those programs that simply add an item to the right click on the PDF in explorer... Bugger that copy protection BS. If you can read it you can copy it.
I use suspend to RAM on my desktop and mobile computer. My mobile computer can last up to at least a week when I suspend to RAM, so it can't cost that much power. On my desktop everything spins down when I do it, even the fan of the CPU and power supply. I'm thinking of moving to hibernate on my Vista laptop since 1) it's hasn't got oodles of memory, so saving is a good possibility and 2) it does not rely on or drain the battery. On my 8 GB linux desktop, hibernate does not work and it would take too long anyway.
But better hardware and driver support are needed. IMHO, this market will be much more secure when a non-used computer starts to stop using that much power when it's not needed. Both my laptop and desktop are using this for the CPU (down-clocking by a rather large margin), but many other components should stop using juice while not needed. It should not be necessary to switch of the CPU entirely, that has too much drawbacks (backups at night, administration, services etc).
My 2.7 GHz desktop CPU is now running at a nice 35 degrees using a stock fan, no way you can bake an egg on that :) And it will run on a SSD with a Western Digital Green Edition drive in the near future to make it even better. Power use *will* go down.
Besides that, there are more and more plans on storing energy efficiently. If the difference would be huge, maybe we could distribute more power using the grids between countries and even continents (you'd probably need super-conductivity for that to work). Because if it's night over here...
Ah, fair enough. I did not directly see if your article was trying to criticize the parent or trying to mock Sun, and I mistakenly assumed the latter. Sorry about that :) Not all those hardware ventures of Sun regarding Java were a success (and that's probably an understatement).
I'm saying that closures in Java are not really enterprise, because in enterprise development (development with a sufficiently large body of developers really) you've got a big mix of experienced and less experienced programmers. These less experienced programmers generally don't go to the polls and/or Java forums. It's highly unlikely their votes are counted, as they normally would not even be aware of "closures". You tend to build applications and keep maintaining them for a long time, so the focus is on maintainability.
I won't go into the Ruby on Rails thing because I think it was too much hype. I can understand EE programmers wanting to do things easier, but easier is not always equal better. There is a reason why it *was* all the hype.
As I said, I'm a pretty big proponent of the 1.4 to 1.5 changes. If I weren't you might call me reactionary. Now you just use it to propel your argument. Lets not call each other names. As for the familiarity: I've got a mixed group of about 20 developers around me, and I don't know anyone that uses closures, and most will not even know about them.
As said, I do know what closures are and I can program in them, but I dislike the syntax and the general idea of building them into Java, where they are less needed and difficult to integrate right.
Sorry to say it, but I've followed your links and I do think he's completely wrong (the he being Neil Gafter). Java is supposed to be maintainable first. I do think that all Java programmers will understand closures. And I don't think you should add to the platform each time someone shouts that he needs to have feature X, because closures will not be the end of it.
See, that's what I mean when I say that Java becomes a "legacy platform". You're afraid of new things because you view them as threats to maintainability.
There is no simple answer to that, but I will try. This stage is always passed as languages develop. For some time, new features are considered "academic" and "radical" and "not buying much" and "hard to understand". This was the case with non-deterministic garbage collecting not so long ago, with OOP back in the days of Simula, and with structured programming replacing GOTO even before then. But if the feature is actually useful, it is developed and polished, efficient implementation approaches are devised, and eventually it becomes mainstream.
Now back to closures. At this point, they are mainstream. If you look at the top 10 languages (let's assume those are "mainstream") according to TPCI, you'll see that all those either have closures already in some shape or form, or are planning to get them in the next major version (C++0x), with two exceptions: C and Java. Why C won't ever have them is fairly obvious, I think - apart from being essentially preserved as is, it also frowns upon such high-level constructs with non-transparent implementations. So we can safely say that out of mainstream high-level programming languages, Java is the only one which does not have closures, and does not plan to add them either. That's a clear mark of not getting along with times.
I mean, think about it: today, Visual Basic, the language traditionally labeled as one for the "less bright" programmers, has lambdas/closures!
Yes, of course closures won't be the end of it, just like OOP wasn't. Evolution of language design keeps going on, and I strongly suspect that typeclasses will be the next big thing, for example. But that doesn't mean one shouldn't try to keep up.
I don't care if they are main stream. They are not sufficiently OO, they are not required in any way and in general they are very difficult to read. If every language must include constructs that are present in every other language, then we get a mess of languages that all try and do all things. That's not a healthy situation at all.
And I will need to understand what is going on while doing it. I've seen lots of code *in presentations* on closures that I don't directly understand, and I've got +10 years of programming experience on a university level.
I'm not sure what you mean by "programming experience on a university level", but if anything, it seems to be an indication of how bad things are. If you ever had exposure to Scheme in the uni, you should have absolutely no troubles understanding how closures in any language works. On the other hand, if the only thing you've ever dealt with is Java (and maybe C/C++), then you really missed a lot more than you know about.
Ok, that was a bit too short. I've had languages, parsing techniques and programming classes in my CS study at university. Besides that I have 10 years of design/programming experience. Most of that time was spent in the core Java language (and cryptography). I try out many languages including scripting languages that include closures. I find them very strong, and very difficult to read (thus to maintain). Especially Lua I found extremely strong for such a small language, and completely wrong for enterprise development.
In general, the pressure to add things to a language is huge, but shoul
"Where's the need for a email client to spawn 8 or 16 threads?"
Eh? That's one application that definitely needs threads, or at least a split up into parts that can run separately (e.g. Java can run Runnables within the same hardware thread, which is more light-weight).
It's not so much the speed up as doing multiple things in the background. E.g. it's stupid if user has to wait for getting messages from the server, or code for parsing/filtering messages is not multi-threaded.
But an email client is almost too easy to split into threads, and many of the clients are already multi-threaded (e.g. you scroll or even write a message while mail is retrieved).
The problem with the actual article is is that it doesn't say *anything*. This is another Slashdot joke, and it is starting to get irritating. The discussion can be fun none-the-less, but I presume this is the firehose effect? Or can we just squarely blame the editors?
Java is supposed to be everywhere, from the start. The fact that you can also implement the VM as hardware (and you can still buy dedicated hardware AFIAK for enterprise servers) is mainly a side effect. So I don't think this compares.
You can basically implement any VM in hardware actually, and emulate any hardware using a VM. So, eh, basically, what's your point?
Using a profiler? Just use a RAM drive for anything that you write, especially log files. I've seen that for more complex situations, logging to a RAM drive really helps. If possible, put the whole thing in RAM and see the speedup. Note that if information is read once, it is normally in the RAM already because of disk caching, so running an application (with the same config) twice and making sure you log/write into RAM drive already does the trick.
Thousands of bugs? They must have tested it against their office suite :)
But seriously, Microsoft must have loads of legacy code lying around, so thousands of bugs are to be expected. Office just happens one of them (and the number of Word related crashes on my office computer is just about hopeless).
I would be more impressed if they released a free and open static code analyzer to include for their compilers that may also compile to native code (e.g. Visual C++).
That said, I'll be nice and applaud this effort. But if anywhere possible, use managed code (scripting or a secure VM) instead of relying on this kind of analysis. With this rate, it will take centuries to get rid of all the buffer overflows and other rather inexcusable code out there. I would be very amazed if this tool would (help to) remove all those kind of vulnerabilities.
This article scores an 11 on the inflammatory headline, shame on the editors for letting this get through. Slashdot seems to be getting worse (which is certainly kind of amazing).
Sorry to say it, but I've followed your links and I do think he's completely wrong (the he being Neil Gafter). Java is supposed to be maintainable first. I do think that all Java programmers will understand closures. And I don't think you should add to the platform each time someone shouts that he needs to have feature X, because closures will not be the end of it.
In that respect it is good that Sun kept such a close watch on the Java language and VM. And I don't want to have the libraries written in multiple languages. I need to be able to browse the (open sourced) runtime when debugging. And I will need to understand what is going on while doing it. I've seen lots of code *in presentations* on closures that I don't directly understand, and I've got +10 years of programming experience on a university level. In general, the pressure to add things to a language is huge, but should be contained - it's always easy to say: hey, we're missing this and that, please add!
Let Microsoft be the one that does to try it all. It's great to try and understand each of the .NET runtime languages when trying to browse through the mess they call an API.
Also, your source is a blog that points to a twitter page as source. Yeah, whatever. The JDK 1.7 will be out sometime next year (2010), so who knows what will happen in the mean time.
"From a national-security perspective, I think the best thing that could be done is to create a counter-espionage bot to seek out and destroy infections of Conflicker. But maybe I'm off on this."
This is not a generic solution to the problem. I would suspect that Conficker will try and stay in power of a PC once infected. It's protection is in all probability much higher than that of the original computer. It's therefore to be expected that it is much harder to reinfect the computer. Maybe the authors of Conficker were not *that* brilliant though.
But maybe I'm off on this, but you are restating a solution that has been proposed earlier, and dismissed if only for legal reasons.
"I've used Java, on and off, since 1996 (which is not too long after it was released). CAn't say I ever liked it. Always felt like trying to write software in a straight jacket. Lots of restrictions, no benefits. Ignore Java, C# is better."
Half of our department is switching over to Java. It's easier and faster to write applications in Java than C++, and most of all, it's really maintainable. As long as you don't have too much unmanaged code in there, Java is very reliable.
C# can do much the same thing as Java, but now you're in the MS straight jacket. That jacket is very expensive and keeps updating itself. It's not very portable (don't ever trust MS making promises on portability). Updates are quick and expensive and because the language keeps updating itself, maintainability is much out of the Window. C# also has a lot of non-OO constructs as well as properties, operator overloading, unmanaged code etc. etc. It's like D, it's trying to do everything (integrated SQL statements, vars, the list goes on).
With C++ people always say that a good programmer will manage to escape memory leaks and such. I've never met this programmer. One programmer who did say he could wrote an array class. Even after 2 other programmers took a look, it still had serious memory related errors. If you ever use C++, please at least use a static code analyzer.
OK, ranting aside, YES, Java restricts you. And for a good reason. If you ever meet a language that claims that it has no restrictions, be cautious, because you will have big problems some years down the road.
Yep, runs like a charm, really really fast processor and cost me next to nothing (~70 euro). Mine was sold as a "X2 dual core black edition" but it definitely has got an AMD 10 inside. Nice wattage (65W TDP) too, now idling along at half speed. The rest of my money is being spend on memory (8GB 1066MHz, 150 euro) and SSD (60 GB Vertex around the same). The motherboard was 90 euro, all solid caps and everything (but firewire) build in. So cheap I bought a high end power supply as well.
Brilliant speed and silence on a budget, but look out that you don't inadvertently buy an AMD 8 instead.
And they can have it! I've still got one lying around. That said: that TDP is becoming the norm nowadays. Gosh, that was certainly the loudest processor fan I've ever used. Got it traded in for a x64 as soon as it became affordable.
I've skimmed through the article (can't claim I've read it because I skipped the mathematics). But there is nothing in there that defined "will" let alone "free will" in the sense you would define it for humans. There is a piece of text at the end that laments of mathematics not getting into newspapers. Well, using this slightly inflammatory title may help.
They define (strong) free [will] as:
To say that Aâ(TM)s choice of x, y, z is free means
more precisely that it is not determined by (i.e.,
is not a function of) what has happened at earlier
times (in any inertial frame). Our theorem is the
surprising consequence that particle aâ(TM)s response
must be free in exactly the same sense, that it is
not a function of what has happened earlier (with
respect to any inertial frame).
But in my opinion of free is that you can make your own choice based on the information available to you. Proving that there is no theoretical/statistical way of influencing a decision is the worst thing you could do. Proving that everything "below" is just randomly moving in every direction without being steered could make it harder to prove human free will instead of easier.
I really would like to believe in human free will, but the scary thing is that I don't get to this conclusion when studying science. Oh well, it certainly *feels* and if that is all a scam, it's certainly a darn good one :)
Really? The fun of life is in my opinion is that it is never the same. If it is, make it change. E.g. the sun is shining here now, I've got no idea about the exact weather, but I'm going to find out now :)
"If the certificate isn't properly signed, a warning like the one you were presented with should throw a dialog box in the web browser."
*Nothing* from a web site should throw a dialog in a web browser. Dialogs are annoying things that block your entire application. They make it all to easy to create denial of service attacks (just keep throwing dialog boxes). They are also easy to click away by mistake (just hitting enter in an entirely different application seems to do it).
I love the way FF3 shows you that something is wrong with the certificate. The page is very clear and the user only gets a dialog box after clicking on a button himself. The same with remembering passwords, the bar on the top is much better than a dialog.
It would be great if FF3 became entirely dialog free. I don't think it is already the case, but they are definitely working on it. The one for extensions is still there, but at least you cannot just click it away since it waits 3 seconds for the Install button to become available.
IMHO, dialog boxes (especially "modal" ones, the ones you /have/ to click away) are a useful tool, but they are used in way too many occasions.
It seems to have been fixed already.
I would not worry about the problem when 1) onlinebanking.capitalone.com is working as it should be and 2) when the certificates of onlinebanking.capitalone.com and the misconfigured servicing.capitalone.com match.
Also, the top level domain is the same, you it seems far fetched that the DNS is configured incorrectly. That is, IF you are using internet from a relatively safe location, otherwise your routing and DNS may be attacked quite easily.
It's fixed, but that does not make it a non-story. And although this seems to have been fixed quite quickly, the response of the person at the bank makes me wonder if everything is all right down there.
Anyway, US banks are trying to do things way too cheaply: they should use 2 factor authentication (for transactions as well), as lot of EU banks do. Much, much safer than having only username + password. That kind of authentication would probably be considered criminal neglect over here in the Netherlands.
Switzerland is not known to be too welcoming to outsiders though. Maybe it has changed, but I doubt it. It's a very nice, very clean place to live in, but for many people it may be a bit too clean, if you know what I mean. Got to visit my Swiss relatives soon, come to think of it (marrying in does work).