I don't mean this as a troll at all. It's just the main thing that enamored me with Java 8 or 9 years ago was that I found myself getting projects done much faster in Java than in C++. Since then, however, I've found Python, which I'm even more productive in. For big projects, where strongly defined interfaces help control complexity, C# is now an option.
So given that we have Python (for fast code) and C# (for big systems), do people really prefer Java for new projects anymore?
For instance: How many people are presently incarcerated without having had a fair trial (not counting any Guantanamo Bay style prisoners of course, that's a different story).
It's funny, I was actually thinking about the other side of the injustice that court settlements encourage: failure to fully prosecute people for crimes. With a settlment, especially a plea bargain, never get the satisfaction or the social benefit of the guilty being fully punished for their crimes.
Worse yet, we lose the notion of a person being specifically innocent or guilty. As the parent alluded to, plea bargains / settlments encourage a justice in which people are rarely treated as exactly guilty or innocent, but rather innocent-ish or guilty-ish. Punishment ceases to be a binary thing, but ends up being applied with a sliding scale depending on how strong the prosecution's/plaintiff's case appears (which translates into bargaining power during settlement/plea negotiations).
Equally bad, perhaps, is that it masks the problems of a system in which the current legal processes / rules lead to such expensive lawsuits / criminal proceedings that only rich individuals or corporations can typically experience a fully fair day in court. And as the RIAA has shown, in civil cases a rich plaintiff gets something far beyond a fair day in court.
Has anyone figured out a way, either a simple tweak or radical change, to provide civil/criminal justice without these attendant problems?
I believe Colbert's straight-talking sensibilities...
You realize that pretty much whenever person A says something that person B agrees with, person B judges person A to be a "straight-talker", right? Basically whether or not one judges Colbert to be a straight-talker depends on whether or not he agrees with Colbert.
Greasy marketing doesn't necessarily imply an inferior product. It could be that three college comp. eng. buddies developed the card, and the only marketing talent they could afford was that guy Jeff who used to hit on everyone while drunk at a frat party.
The nice thing about network card performance claims is that they're pretty straight-forward to emperically test, once the hardware is out. I expect Toms Hardware will do a good job testing its claims, like they did with the recently released physics accelerator cards.
First, as a side note, who the hell cares whether an application you want/need arrived on a platform 10 years ago, or 10 minutes ago? If it's there when you want/need it, isn't that enough? If you're in a position to choose an OS based on how often its set of apps is updated, rather than the set of apps it has, then you're basically unconcerned with your ability to actually use the computer for a given purpose. In that case, I think none of us really cares about satisfying your concerns.
So I'm going to skip that silly concern and move to the more reasonable one: Does Linux have the apps that excite a person? It depends on what category of software you care about:
If games are the only category of software you find exciting, then yeah, Windows beats Linux hands down. (Yes, yes, I know there are some fun Linux games. But we all know which OS is the first to get FEAR, HL-2, etc. And regarding Cedega: it helps, but it's not perfect.)
But for applications I care about, I'm like a kid in a candy store:
- Music performance / production? JACK, plus all of the *free* synthesizers, audio effects, digital recorders, sequencers, drum machines, mixers, etc. that are available for it.
- Programming? Heck, what more could I want? All for FREE. Languages? Python, C/C++, Objective-C, Java, C#, Perl, Scheme, Lisp, ADA, etc. GUIs: Qt, Gtk, Qt-designer, Glade, wxWidgets, etc. IDEs? Eclipse, KDevelop, Emacs (for those so inclined), etc. Database development? MySQL, PostgreSQL, BerkelyDB, etc.
- DVD writing? Last I checked, Windows XP Pro doesn't even support this natively. I always had to install some stupid 3rd party app from Roxio or someone else. On Linux there are LOTS of tools for this, although k3b is my personal favorite.
- Music playing? OK, Linux lacks a good iTMS client, which kind of blows. But it DOES have an almost goofily large collection of music rippers, players, and streamers. Oh, and stream recorders, for those who want to time-shift their listening of streamed music.
- Web/email? This one is too obvious, so I'm not even going to bother.
One advantage Fedora has over Ubuntu is that Fedora releases a multi-disk set of packages. I work with computers that can't connect to the Internet, and I've found that the Fedora CDs almost always have all the packages I need. That's a huge benefit for those computers.
I guess I could be saved by utility that analysis the entire set of packages I'd need in order to install a given package on my computer. If I had a utility like that, I could walk over to an Internet-connected computer, download those packages onto a CD-R, and then install them on the computer that can't connect to the Internet. Or.... Ubuntu could start putting together CD/DVD sets that contained a larger fraction of popular packages than they can fit on one CD. Either development would let me kick Fedora out of the picture.
I know this is a little off topic, so it's fair to mod me down. But anyway...
Is it hard to setup any play with virtualization? For instance, I use Ubuntu Dapper Drake, and if it doesn't take very long I'd love to give one of the Edgy Eft snapshots a try. I just don't want to hose my existing setup. Does it take much time for a newbie like me to get virtualization working to the point where I can try something like that?
Working for the DOD is worthwhile exactly in proporion to how much of a force for good it is. This unfortunately fluctuates more often than its workers can afford to change jobs.
Navy Research Labs (NRL) and/or Army Research Labs (ARL) might be what you're looking for.
Regarding your desire to avoid sponsors: anywhere that you're going for DoD money, whether your at a university or in a lab, you're going to have to suck it up and try to get funding. On the bright side, once you have good relationships with sponsors, I'm told that getting money each year takes less time than the last year did.
NSF and DARPA money are reliably low-pressure. Sometimes money from MITRE is also low-pressure. NRL money can often be low pressure, depending on the program and sponsor in question.
Long story short, I think DoD labs can maybe offer the low-pressure you're looking for, if you can hook up with the right sponsors. Also, working as a civil servant, you'll have job security, vacation, and even pay levels that are better than most corporate research positions offer.
I know this is kind of off-topic, but since we're talking about Python anyway...
The reason I thought to make that joke about Python in the parent posting is that in reality, I really *am* tons more productive in Python than in Java or C++. I found that when I went from C++ to Java, I got maybe a 1/3 reduction in the time it took to complete comparable projects. My Python projects probably take only 50% as long to complete as comparable work in C++.
Have you guys had similar experiences?
I suspect it has to do with the following issues: (1) I don't need to think about deleting objects properly, in most cases. (2) When debugging, most things have a string representation that I can
print with very little programming effort. (3) A very useful set of of built-in container types: dictionaries, lists,
sets, etc. And unlike C++'s STL, it takes very little code to use them.
To be fair to C++/Java, as my codebases get bigger, I do sometimes start to wish that Python cleanly supports the notion of "interfaces", so that I can use them to document what methods I need a class to provide. But in general those problems get shaken out pretty early in testing anyway, so it's not that big a deal to not have explicit interfaces.
I think a fiscally conservative politician is a myth. The last several years have proved it.
That may be over-reaching. It's probably more fair to conclude that the current political structure results in fiscal irresponsible spending. My suspicion is that a number of politicians are fiscally conservative, but find themselves unable to get the rest of congress to play along.
There's a spectrum of views that are called liberal or conservative. We probably only disagree on a subset of what you think we disagree on. Maybe that makes me more of a conservative libertarian, I'm not sure.
For example, I don't think government ought to pass laws regarding what consenting adults do in private in most cases. And if drug use can remain truly a personal issue (and doesn't result in people driving while high, robbing people for crack money, etc.), I'd be happy to erase the drug control laws as well.
The areas that we disagree on probably center more around (a) my not wanting to be forced to use my tax money / military for things that I consider morally wrong, and (b) wanting to have the ability to bring my children up in a reasonably safe environment, and (c) me having the freedom to teach my children about right and wrong even if politically powerful groups disagree with my understanding of right and wrong.
So when I object to Liberalism, I'm not objecting to people having personal freedoms like the b-j example you gave. I'm objecting to the practice of some of the other concepts that have become loaded onto that word, namely those practices that restricted my freedom in areas (a) - (c) mentioned above.
I'm a pretty strong social and fiscal conservative. As you may guess, this also means I believe in the rule of law.
It's painful to consider, but I'm actually considering voting Democrat in the upcoming elections to help put the Democrats in the majority of at least one, but ideally two, houses of Congress. I don't want to enable them to pursue liberal agendas, but maybe at least they'll have the balls to keep the President under the rule of law via impeachment. Apparently the Republican Congress/Senate that I voted for last time is unwilling to perform their duties in this area. I'm going to want to take a shower after I leave the voting booths this time.:/
Bentley is a business school. This is basically them saying, "Wahhhh... we wish IT people know our line of business... wahhhhh...."
Duh, or COURSE they wish IT people knew their line of business. So why don't we start looking at the courses they'd like CS majors to NOT take in order to make time for the business courses. Databases? Obvious nope. Programming languages or operating systems? Not a great idea if you want them to pick up new platforms / languages quickly. Algorithms? Don't hire that person to a project where you need advanced warning that something won't scale well. Computer graphics? OK, maybe that one is rarely necessary, but that's just one course.
My point is whether or not the author knows it, they're asking to eat their cake and (still) have it too. They want someone to study the line of business more, but ignore the dumbing-down effect that has on their IT skills. Taken to that extreme, you may as well just offer a few extra "IT" courses within the business department, and let those people be your company's IT staff. Which in most cases is moronic for well-known reasons.
I think you're worried about the opposite effect of what actually happened:
Suppose you have two stacks built of different components, and they benchmark the performance of the stack. (Which is what happened, apparently.)
What they CANNOT say is, "The difference in the stacks' performances is attributable to their different database engines". Because for all we know, it was some other component of the stack that really caused the difference in performance. However, the article didn't make this mistake.
What the article DID say is, "There's a difference in the stacks' performances. We know because we measured it." That IS valid reasoning.
Nothing disgusts me more then watching or reading something I know has been censored.
This is about people who want to filter what they see, or what their kids see. No one's trying to make you, a presumably emancipated adult, see something filtered.
Furthermore if I created a work of art I would find it supremely offensive to have some clensing squad go over it and take out the stuff that might offend people, chances are if it offends someone it was put there for that reason.
Do you also think it should be illegal for someone to leave the livingroom when a TV show has gory scenes? From a creativity / art standpoint, this is no different: using either technique a person avoids seeing what he doesn't want to see. The only differences between the two scenarios are legal and commercial, not artistic or experiential.
I think we're beating aroud the bush for another topic: whether or not there's any benefit in a person restricting what he watches. I suspect from your tone that you think people should be exposed to as much as possible, even if it affects their character in negative ways. Many religious people are more on guard than that in order to protect their character and to avoid illiciting evil thoughts in their minds.
Case in point: porn. When a married guy watches it repeatedly, it can be damaging to his wife. The guy jerks off more often, so is less likely to be horny when his wife is. He might even start picking up some ideas like, "Those women seem to like giving BJs, so what's wrong with my wife, the selfish b**ch?" In a case like this, most grown-up husbands would say, "You know, it's not fair to my wife for me to do this. It's probably better that I avoid watching porn." So in general, there's a case to be made for being selective about what one watches.
Now given that, is it so crazy to think that people might want to, for the sake of efficiency, hire someone to apply a content filter that they themselves selected?
I can only several reasons that the government patenting something might be fair:
1) If a non-American entity (person, company, etc.) wants to use the technology, then it would basically be the American people selling the right to use the patented technology to non-Americans. In that way, Americans, who funded the research, win.
2) In some sense, something that benefits the Navy does benefit Americans in general. When the Navy licenses a patented technology to a private company, this (hopefully) causes some money to move from that private entity to a public one (the U.S. govt.) That basically co-funds something that all taxpayers were having to chip in on the payment of (that is, the cost of government / national defense).
3) Suppose that even if a technology has been made available for free, no one can afford to commercialize it if more than one company will be doing the commercialization. This might happen, for example, if the market is very small. For example, if there are just two competitors and 10 companies that might build the device, then each of those 10 companies facies great risk. So granting an exclusive license to use the patented technology could be the only way to get even one company to build the device in that situation.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mean this as a troll at all. It's just the main thing that enamored me with Java 8 or 9 years ago was that I found myself getting projects done much faster in Java than in C++. Since then, however, I've found Python, which I'm even more productive in. For big projects, where strongly defined interfaces help control complexity, C# is now an option.
So given that we have Python (for fast code) and C# (for big systems), do people really prefer Java for new projects anymore?
It's funny, I was actually thinking about the other side of the injustice that court settlements encourage: failure to fully prosecute people for crimes. With a settlment, especially a plea bargain, never get the satisfaction or the social benefit of the guilty being fully punished for their crimes.
Worse yet, we lose the notion of a person being specifically innocent or guilty. As the parent alluded to, plea bargains / settlments encourage a justice in which people are rarely treated as exactly guilty or innocent, but rather innocent-ish or guilty-ish. Punishment ceases to be a binary thing, but ends up being applied with a sliding scale depending on how strong the prosecution's/plaintiff's case appears (which translates into bargaining power during settlement/plea negotiations).
Equally bad, perhaps, is that it masks the problems of a system in which the current legal processes / rules lead to such expensive lawsuits / criminal proceedings that only rich individuals or corporations can typically experience a fully fair day in court. And as the RIAA has shown, in civil cases a rich plaintiff gets something far beyond a fair day in court.
Has anyone figured out a way, either a simple tweak or radical change, to provide civil/criminal justice without these attendant problems?http://www.ubuntu.com/download :)
Sorry, just kidding. I'll catch up with you when school's back in session. I think we're in the same quantum phsyics section.
You claim to know the "Fun Hu" technique? Teach it to me immediately, or I will kill your master just as I killed his other students.!
Greasy marketing doesn't necessarily imply an inferior product. It could be that three college comp. eng. buddies developed the card, and the only marketing talent they could afford was that guy Jeff who used to hit on everyone while drunk at a frat party.
The nice thing about network card performance claims is that they're pretty straight-forward to emperically test, once the hardware is out. I expect Toms Hardware will do a good job testing its claims, like they did with the recently released physics accelerator cards.
First, as a side note, who the hell cares whether an application you want/need arrived on a platform 10 years ago, or 10 minutes ago? If it's there when you want/need it, isn't that enough? If you're in a position to choose an OS based on how often its set of apps is updated, rather than the set of apps it has, then you're basically unconcerned with your ability to actually use the computer for a given purpose. In that case, I think none of us really cares about satisfying your concerns.
So I'm going to skip that silly concern and move to the more reasonable one: Does Linux have the apps that excite a person? It depends on what category of software you care about:
If games are the only category of software you find exciting, then yeah, Windows beats Linux hands down. (Yes, yes, I know there are some fun Linux games. But we all know which OS is the first to get FEAR, HL-2, etc. And regarding Cedega: it helps, but it's not perfect.)
But for applications I care about, I'm like a kid in a candy store:
- Music performance / production? JACK, plus all of the *free* synthesizers, audio effects, digital recorders, sequencers, drum machines, mixers, etc. that are available for it.
- Programming? Heck, what more could I want? All for FREE. Languages? Python, C/C++, Objective-C, Java, C#, Perl, Scheme, Lisp, ADA, etc. GUIs: Qt, Gtk, Qt-designer, Glade, wxWidgets, etc. IDEs? Eclipse, KDevelop, Emacs (for those so inclined), etc. Database development? MySQL, PostgreSQL, BerkelyDB, etc.
- DVD writing? Last I checked, Windows XP Pro doesn't even support this natively. I always had to install some stupid 3rd party app from Roxio or someone else. On Linux there are LOTS of tools for this, although k3b is my personal favorite.
- Music playing? OK, Linux lacks a good iTMS client, which kind of blows. But it DOES have an almost goofily large collection of music rippers, players, and streamers. Oh, and stream recorders, for those who want to time-shift their listening of streamed music.
- Web/email? This one is too obvious, so I'm not even going to bother.
One advantage Fedora has over Ubuntu is that Fedora releases a multi-disk set of packages. I work with computers that can't connect to the Internet, and I've found that the Fedora CDs almost always have all the packages I need. That's a huge benefit for those computers.
I guess I could be saved by utility that analysis the entire set of packages I'd need in order to install a given package on my computer. If I had a utility like that, I could walk over to an Internet-connected computer, download those packages onto a CD-R, and then install them on the computer that can't connect to the Internet. Or.... Ubuntu could start putting together CD/DVD sets that contained a larger fraction of popular packages than they can fit on one CD. Either development would let me kick Fedora out of the picture.
I know this is a little off topic, so it's fair to mod me down. But anyway...
Is it hard to setup any play with virtualization? For instance, I use Ubuntu Dapper Drake, and if it doesn't take very long I'd love to give one of the Edgy Eft snapshots a try. I just don't want to hose my existing setup. Does it take much time for a newbie like me to get virtualization working to the point where I can try something like that?
Working for the DOD is worthwhile exactly in proporion to how much of a force for good it is. This unfortunately fluctuates more often than its workers can afford to change jobs.
Navy Research Labs (NRL) and/or Army Research Labs (ARL) might be what you're looking for.
Regarding your desire to avoid sponsors: anywhere that you're going for DoD money, whether your at a university or in a lab, you're going to have to suck it up and try to get funding. On the bright side, once you have good relationships with sponsors, I'm told that getting money each year takes less time than the last year did.
NSF and DARPA money are reliably low-pressure. Sometimes money from MITRE is also low-pressure. NRL money can often be low pressure, depending on the program and sponsor in question.
Long story short, I think DoD labs can maybe offer the low-pressure you're looking for, if you can hook up with the right sponsors. Also, working as a civil servant, you'll have job security, vacation, and even pay levels that are better than most corporate research positions offer.
I know this is kind of off-topic, but since we're talking about Python anyway...
The reason I thought to make that joke about Python in the parent posting is that in reality, I really *am* tons more productive in Python than in Java or C++. I found that when I went from C++ to Java, I got maybe a 1/3 reduction in the time it took to complete comparable projects. My Python projects probably take only 50% as long to complete as comparable work in C++.
Have you guys had similar experiences?
I suspect it has to do with the following issues:
(1) I don't need to think about deleting objects properly, in most cases.
(2) When debugging, most things have a string representation that I can
print with very little programming effort.
(3) A very useful set of of built-in container types: dictionaries, lists,
sets, etc. And unlike C++'s STL, it takes very little code to use them.
To be fair to C++/Java, as my codebases get bigger, I do sometimes start to wish that Python cleanly supports the notion of "interfaces", so that I can use them to document what methods I need a class to provide. But in general those problems get shaken out pretty early in testing anyway, so it's not that big a deal to not have explicit interfaces.
Thoughts?
There's a spectrum of views that are called liberal or conservative. We probably only disagree on a subset of what you think we disagree on. Maybe that makes me more of a conservative libertarian, I'm not sure.
For example, I don't think government ought to pass laws regarding what consenting adults do in private in most cases. And if drug use can remain truly a personal issue (and doesn't result in people driving while high, robbing people for crack money, etc.), I'd be happy to erase the drug control laws as well.
The areas that we disagree on probably center more around (a) my not wanting to be forced to use my tax money / military for things that I consider morally wrong, and (b) wanting to have the ability to bring my children up in a reasonably safe environment, and (c) me having the freedom to teach my children about right and wrong even if politically powerful groups disagree with my understanding of right and wrong.
So when I object to Liberalism, I'm not objecting to people having personal freedoms like the b-j example you gave. I'm objecting to the practice of some of the other concepts that have become loaded onto that word, namely those practices that restricted my freedom in areas (a) - (c) mentioned above.
I'm a pretty strong social and fiscal conservative. As you may guess, this also means I believe in the rule of law.
:/
It's painful to consider, but I'm actually considering voting Democrat in the upcoming elections to help put the Democrats in the majority of at least one, but ideally two, houses of Congress. I don't want to enable them to pursue liberal agendas, but maybe at least they'll have the balls to keep the President under the rule of law via impeachment. Apparently the Republican Congress/Senate that I voted for last time is unwilling to perform their duties in this area. I'm going to want to take a shower after I leave the voting booths this time.
Their corporate search product is called Windows Genuine Advantage. :)
Bentley is a business school. This is basically them saying, "Wahhhh... we wish IT people know our line of business... wahhhhh...."
Duh, or COURSE they wish IT people knew their line of business. So why don't we start looking at the courses they'd like CS majors to NOT take in order to make time for the business courses. Databases? Obvious nope. Programming languages or operating systems? Not a great idea if you want them to pick up new platforms / languages quickly. Algorithms? Don't hire that person to a project where you need advanced warning that something won't scale well. Computer graphics? OK, maybe that one is rarely necessary, but that's just one course.
My point is whether or not the author knows it, they're asking to eat their cake and (still) have it too. They want someone to study the line of business more, but ignore the dumbing-down effect that has on their IT skills. Taken to that extreme, you may as well just offer a few extra "IT" courses within the business department, and let those people be your company's IT staff. Which in most cases is moronic for well-known reasons.
I think you're worried about the opposite effect of what actually happened:
Suppose you have two stacks built of different components, and they benchmark the performance of the stack. (Which is what happened, apparently.)
What they CANNOT say is, "The difference in the stacks' performances is attributable to their different database engines". Because for all we know, it was some other component of the stack that really caused the difference in performance. However, the article didn't make this mistake.
What the article DID say is, "There's a difference in the stacks' performances. We know because we measured it." That IS valid reasoning.
Do you also think it should be illegal for someone to leave the livingroom when a TV show has gory scenes? From a creativity / art standpoint, this is no different: using either technique a person avoids seeing what he doesn't want to see. The only differences between the two scenarios are legal and commercial, not artistic or experiential.
I think we're beating aroud the bush for another topic: whether or not there's any benefit in a person restricting what he watches. I suspect from your tone that you think people should be exposed to as much as possible, even if it affects their character in negative ways. Many religious people are more on guard than that in order to protect their character and to avoid illiciting evil thoughts in their minds.
Case in point: porn. When a married guy watches it repeatedly, it can be damaging to his wife. The guy jerks off more often, so is less likely to be horny when his wife is. He might even start picking up some ideas like, "Those women seem to like giving BJs, so what's wrong with my wife, the selfish b**ch?" In a case like this, most grown-up husbands would say, "You know, it's not fair to my wife for me to do this. It's probably better that I avoid watching porn." So in general, there's a case to be made for being selective about what one watches.
Now given that, is it so crazy to think that people might want to, for the sake of efficiency, hire someone to apply a content filter that they themselves selected?
Perhaps a Notary Public could simply stamp something like that with the date?
I can only several reasons that the government patenting something might be fair:
1) If a non-American entity (person, company, etc.) wants to use the technology, then it would basically be the American people selling the right to use the patented technology to non-Americans. In that way, Americans, who funded the research, win.
2) In some sense, something that benefits the Navy does benefit Americans in general. When the Navy licenses a patented technology to a private company, this (hopefully) causes some money to move from that private entity to a public one (the U.S. govt.) That basically co-funds something that all taxpayers were having to chip in on the payment of (that is, the cost of government / national defense).
3) Suppose that even if a technology has been made available for free, no one can afford to commercialize it if more than one company will be doing the commercialization. This might happen, for example, if the market is very small. For example, if there are just two competitors and 10 companies that might build the device, then each of those 10 companies facies great risk. So granting an exclusive license to use the patented technology could be the only way to get even one company to build the device in that situation.