That, in fact, is the Microsoft strategy. There was a funny spoof years back, sort of a take off on Star Trek in which the enemy ship (Microsoft) prepares to attack. They don't deploy a photon blaster, rather the pod doors open, and a column of suits (replete with brief cases) emerges - oh no! - lawyers!
But at least in one case, very similar to Blackboard's situation (with prior art), Microsoft actually did the right thing. In their new version of Visual Studio, they had something called "Object Bench", and BlueJ developer, at first interested to see what Microsoft was doing, after exploring the screens a bit, realized it was very similar to BlueJ - a little _too_ similar, in fact! Worse, they were filing a patent!
Key word is "migration". Because over the long term, the Microsoft maintenance would be greater, further there's no vendor lock-in.
Interesting that the city of Vienna is already part way (100 servers) deployed on Red Hat (funny, Slashdot has a anti-Linux post, but no post on Vienna's success. Sure, they are probably much more capable of supporting Linux vs. Munich given their experience with AIX, and FreeBSD, but this is a win for Red Hat which could've gone to Microsoft. Oh yeah, that's why I read Digg more these days.)
I think what's going on here, with Birmingham, is a little wheeling/dealing, in which the city threatens to go with Linux, unless Microsoft comes to the table. And Microsoft blinked. Competition is good..
omniORB is indeed an excellent ORB - not sure exactly when they (AT&T) open sourced it, but then again, in '97 the open source wave hadn't kicked in much except for Linux, etc. I mean, I doubt that was a requirement back then, that it should have a FOSS implementation. Nowadays, different story. [Well, I'll be darned, you're right, it was open sourced in '97, and it supported 2.2. Kudos to Sai-Lai Lo and Olivetti]
And you forgot to mention that much of the J2EE standards and APIs have a grounding in CORBA, in fact I was just reading that JTS (Java Transaction Service) borrows much from OMG's Object Transaction Service, to name one example.
Too bad that with Web Services they are making the same mistakes all over again. Henning is a bit of a griper, surprised he didn't tout his zeroC CORBA-like app in the article, or maybe I missed it, for more interesting reading see Steve Vinoski's blog
Sign me another corporate hacker I guess. No fancy, glitzy buzzwordy smack for us, but hey, it gets the job done.
people also scoffed at google's little one-line blurb text ads when they came out. are they scoffing now?
Well, one thing is you will not read in the WSJ is about the next Google or Craig's List, until they hit it big. Instead, you will read about steel companies. WSJ is similar to Forbes, new ideas simply confuse them. The article was rather funny, with the author not hiding his utter confusion, mixed with a bit of contempt, about their business model. Buckmaster tries his best, explaining to the WSJ reporter in simple terms "You can't run a steel company the same way you run an internet company." Here and there the lightbulb goes off, for example when Buckmaster explains how taxes work to the reporter. But overall he doesn't get it.
There's also tornadoes. And hail. And the even earthquakes, eventually.
So yeah, I don't think we should short Detroit. Take the new Detroit airport for example, which is, in my opinion, a good example of a nice construction job. It is 1 mile long, very easy to navigate, with a shuttle running the length. It was a clean and easy migration to the new airport, no baggage or other technical snafus like in Denver, wasn't it. Now, I'm not sure of the details, but obviously Michigan had the vision and the skills to get the job done or find the right people.
As an aside, it is interesting to compare this airport with Logan Airport in Boston, which seems in a perpetual state of repair, like a building in, say Soviet Russia. They have the technical capability (Rte 128, MIT, Harvard, etc), why can't they build an airport? The "Big Dig" seems to be another fiasco, certainly as far as cost and planning.
Anyway, yes, they can certainly figure out how to build a data center in either of those places, probably Boston too, and in fact there are probably many smaller datacenters there to begin with, all with Disaster Recovery plans, etc.
Having said that, I wonder what the target audience is for this class. EJB strikes me as massive overkill for all but a tiny handful of projects.
Web programming in Java does not necessarily mean EJB. You can use POJOs (plain old Java objects), Hibernate, Spring, or other simpler solutions. Also note that EJB3.0 is significantly simpler to use than EJB2.0. And your comment about JSPs - JSPs are about as simple as it it gets. And if it was a general web programming class, I wouldn't foist a framework on them, whether Struts or Tapestry or Shale or Rails or.NET or the myriad others - - let them get the basics first, of HTTP GET/POST, HTML, etc.
So I would agree with the point that they keep the class as simple as possible. No frameworks, no EJBs, just keep it simple.
Every aspect of every conspiracy theory about 9/11 has been systematically debunked somewhere or another.
Right, on Popular Mechanics, Snopes, 911Myths, and the very convincing 911 Commission Report which did not even bother to investigate the WTC 7 collapse. And actually Snopes debunks most of the "rumours" by referring to the Commission report. And 911 Myths states stuff like "Our take". Yeah, very convincing, some unregistered site in the U.K.
If you actually read the research, the proponents for the "offical" conspiracy theory really end up being pretty muddled and confusing - because they have been given the conclusion, so they must build their facts & evidence based on that. That's bad science, so naturally they have a hard time. Speaking of the highly respected journal Popular Mechanics, there is an well written paper by 911 Research which points out the flaws in the article.
Since the WTC was structurally unique, comparisons to other buildings really don't have much bearing in the matter,
and while they anticipated the impact of a 707, they did not take into account the combined effect of impact and a full load of fuel;
Yep, that's the number one argument - engineers just "forgot" about the fuel? That's an interesting view of the engineering profession.
all of this, of course, assumes that the designers were correct when saying that the building could withstand a 707.
Timelines show that jets were scrambled in a timely manner when the situation was understood (within minutes of realizing the planes were hijacked and pinpointing their locations.)
Well, their story keeps changing there also. Apparently, at one point, they had the jets scrambled *away*, 150 miles out into the Atlantic!
In hearings last Friday, Sen. Dayton (D-MN) raised an obvious point: if the timeline of air defense response as promoted in the Kean Commission's best-selling book is correct, then the timeline presented repeatedly by NORAD during the last two years was completely wrong. Yet now no one at NORAD is willing to comment on their own timeline!
When the official story of 9/11 can be changed repeatedly without anyone ever being held accountable, we have no right to ever again expect honest government. Please read the following story and do your part to support Sen. Dayton for highlighting the contradiction, and to encourage the media to follow up.
9/11 conspiracy theories require thousands of conspirators--think of just what would be required to run drone planes into buildings, dispose of all the passengers, rig the buildings, fake everything so that the airlines wouldn't notice, and on, and on, and on.
You need to think a little more. They don't require many conspirators, just a few at the top, the rest obediently falling orders. The best example is the officer who was reprimanded by Cheney when he asked him, as the plane was approaching the Pentagon, whether "the orders still stood". Cheney chewed him out something to the effect that had he heard otherwise.
Also, be careful not to confuse disinformation with information. Switching planes? Red herring, like the "Arab Pilot Learns to Fly" story.
You'll never convince him otherwise, because his entire conception of self is wound up in the idea that he is the rare visionary, the one who cannot be fooled. To admit that he is wrong would require him to admit that he is profoundly wrong, not just gulled, but gullible.
Yes, so I'll stop bothering reading this thread, those stubborn folk just won't change their minds with scientific proofs under their very noses!
Wrong again, chickenhawk AC, that's another misconception. In fact, there's lot's of research. The planes are quite similar: 707 vs. 757
According to Hyman Brown, a University of Colorado civil engineering professor and the World Trade Center's construction manager, 1 and 2 World Trade Center were designed to survive an impact and resulting fires from a collision by the largest commercial aircraft at the time, a Boeing 707-340. 1 Contrary to widely promoted misconceptions, the 767-200s used on 9-11 were only slightly larger than 707s.
How does it feel to make an idiotic observation with no basis in reality?
I don't know, good question for you though. You really are a little nuts. But I guess anyone who has to keep coming up with such inane, impossible "reasons" for believeing the story that was fed to them, must be.
Cool, I think this is what the poster was interested in, folks who've actually made the switch successfully.
Furthermore, we could not port our C++ code to the umpteen platforms that marketing wanted to target.
See, here you have a requirement that was fulfilled by Java. That's a good reason. Also, you don't mention whether the system was completely rearchitected or not. Anyway, from the reasons given for this guy's question, I don't see a clear requirement, just somehow they think things will magically work better in Java. With many of the new libraries and frameworks like Boost and Qt there isn't the disparity as there once was, perhaps. I'd suggest they define their requirements, goals, develop a prototype (keeping in mind Alexander Cockburn's excellent advice on prototypes - if the prototype doesn't work, don't assume everything will magically work once it's in production!), and also, as you did, reuse the libraries as much as possible, using CORBA or some similar solution, until they can switch over completely.
The Eclipse IDE boosted our productivity considerably, and the product is very successful. So I guess it makes sense.
So what were you using before, vi? Emacs? Maybe if you had switched to Visual Studio (and Eclipse supports C++ too) you could've save alot of trouble;)
I agree with Joel but I can't help thinking that his attitude taken to the extreme is precisely what's wrong with Windows: millions of lines of legacy hacks, bugfixes and two-page functions that nobody really understands anymore and that few can fix or audit for security problems.
Exactly, there's a balance. Speaking of Windows, note that Windows was rewritten from scratch, when Dave Cutler from DEC was hired to write NT. Now certainly there are some vestiges of DOS, and OS/2, and it's a huge codebase, but it's not Windows 95/98/Me, that is clear.
Joel's article seems to be the defacto standard against rewriting software, but funnily enough, I think he's been proven completely wrong, in hindsight, by the very example he used to prove his point. Think of Mozilla? Mozilla originally started from the Netscape codebase, but they got a lot of flack from folks like Joel for rewriting it. Now it seems IE is the patchy codebase you describe Windows to be.
Good idea, wrong tool. From briefly reviewing the site, SWIG seems to start from the idea that an IDL is a bad thing. That makes me suspect of the rest of the project architecture. Abandoning the idea of an IDL might enable you to hack out a solution quickly, but the disadvantage is you've lost the loosely coupled design of CORBA. From Steve's article:
Utlimately, your take on mapping's place in middleware comes down to whether you accept the assertion - as I do - that enterprise computing systems tend toward diversity and heterogeneity. Those who understand and accept this assertion readily accept the need for mappings and the limitations they present. Those who continually strive to homogenize their computing systems, on the other hand, are essentially fighting a losing battle because they're swimming upstream against ever-advancing technology and ever changing business requirements. Change is, of course inevitable. Part of planning for change means making your middleware applications as loosely coupled and flexible as possible, and good mappings play an important part in achieving those goals.
Now, it might be fine for quickly whacking out a way to connect your favorite scripting language to C++, but for a commercial, production application I would go with a more proven, standardized solution such as CORBA. There are many excellent open source implementations (another good reason for using a standardized spec), such as omniorb.
Since then, Silverstein, the owner, has admitted he had the building "pulled".
False. "Pull" is not a demolitions industry term for explosive demolition; "shoot" is the term. "Pull" refers to mechanically demolishing the building using a wrecking ball of cables, etc.
Ah, straw man argument. These are Silverstein's words. He's not defining the term. That's what he said. Read it again.
Additionally, Silverstein was talking to the fire commander about the firefighters around WTC7 and their effort to do whatever it was they were doing: "pull [the effort]".
Haha. Nice try. If that makes any sense at all to you, fine. Wow, you people really have to try hard don't you?
Thanks for the meaningless correction - 1 plane hit each tower. Per design. I hope I didn't make a spelling mistake either. Typical on Slashdot - if you missed an apostrophe, look out, but the larger issue is entirely missed. Read that again. The buildings were designed to withstand a 707 crashing into it. The construction engineer (not some mindless Slashdot kiddie, this is the guy who built the bldgs) estimates they could withstand multiple planes. This is called overengineering. We don't certify our bldgs for more than one plane, but that won't stop people from trying, like they overclock their processors, drive to fast, etc.
Again, think about this. These bldgs were designed this way. As someone pointed out, if you think they simply forgot about the fuel, well, you don't know much about engineering. Check out the slides on the WTC collapse - just try to understand the material and forget about grammar and spelling mistakes.
No, actually I read this. I know, how unlike Slashdot. Read the sources. Facts. Basically, to believe the approved story of how the bldgs collapsed, you would need to disregard basic scientific principles. What the heck, I'll save you the trouble, see below. The key is "asymetry". To put it in a simpler terms, think of Jenga, as someone pointed out in another comment.
Building 7 was 5 times as tall as deep.
To bring this building down into its footprint required that all 58 perimeter columns and 25 core columns be destroyed simultaneously.
Any asymmetry in damage would cause asymmetric collapse:
the building would topple.
No combination of rubble impact damage, fires, or fuel tank explosions could have destroyed all columns simultaneously, as required to cause a vertical collapse.
Only controlled demolitions have achieved vertical collapses of upright steel structures.
The hijackers didn't care about this, so they simply exceeded the intended limitations, producing turns and speeds not normally seen in aircraft of that size. Thus, the result looked "extraordinary," because it was not safe, and never seen before.
Like I said, some interesting flying for a bunch of beginner pilots, some who were so bad they failed their certification test (in order to rent a plane). Remember too the "story" is they trained at small schools on Cessna's and the like - not 757. There's a difference. Think of driving a MG vs. a Hummer. Just a bit of a stretch. And while you could "ease" the plane down, and I've not seen the flight path, but I'm guessing he didn't have alot of maneuvering room to "ease" down. From WTC7 Research:
The complexity and precision of the approach maneuver are nearly impossible to reconcile with the official account that the plane was piloted by Hani Hanjour, an incompetent pilot of even single-engine prop-planes.
And further as someone pointed out, he nocked over some light poles - but kept his course. The simple point is, that's some impressive flying skills, no question. It's pushing it to say a beginner could hit a tower, 100 stories up, but it's just not credible for a rookie to hit the Pentagon. One more interesting item. They happened to hit the one section of the Pentagon that had been reinforced.
The only force acting on the tower was gravity (OK, maybe a little bit of wind). Gravity pulling straight down on several hundred thousand tons of steel and concrete... where would you expect it to go, other than straight down?
Really now. Think this through a little more carefully. Then read some of the papers written about this. We expect a bldg to crumble in place under controlled demolition, that's the purpose. When a plane hits it, it explodes, and so the "story" goes, the fire weakens the building unevenly, you'd expect it too weaken and topple. [If this isn't the case, we'd be saving _alot_ of money in demolitions - just set a little fire at the top of the bldg and voila! Wouldn't that be nice.]
Also, you're completely omitting the floors underneath the floors supposedly falling down. That's called friction. These buildings collapsed in 8-15 seconds. That's the time it would take to drop a beam off the top of the building for it to hit the ground - but that's assuming there's nothing underneath to slow it down. How is that possible? One way is controlled demoliton.
Before you waste your time with scholarsfor911truth goto this site and learn about the organization, members and multiple rebukings of thier "facts".
WTC7 is a good site too, and I would've posted that link too, but either they are futzing with their pages, they have some differences with their provider, or big brother is cracking down, either way their links were mucked up. I provided the scholars link mainly in deference to the Slashdot viewer, so rather than read they can watch the speeches of Prof. Jones and MIT's King, but admittedly I haven't reviewed the rest of the site so thanks for the tip. I see WTC7 respects the work by Jones - that's good. I did see he quibbles over whether "less than 10s" is not the same as 8 seconds, or something like that with his criticism of Morgan Reynolds.
But both have their flaws. The WTC7 is a little on the "rant" side, which takes away from their otherwise good message. Fact is, they need people like Morgan Reynolds, these are very credible people. Divide and conquer, and this will fall apart.
making it significantly less capable of bearing a large load, such as the upper half of a building.
Less, but this building was overengineered, or you might say, solidly built. Designed to take the impact of mulitple jets. So even at a estimate of the fire temps (650C), for this grade steel, it would still have carried a load 2-3 times what was necessary. NIST analyzed what few pieces of steel they could and none showed that the temps exceeded 600C.
I'm just telling you that they don't have to melt to make the building fall down, even neglecting the ballistic damage to the building
But did this building collapse like a building in which the steel melted? It collapsed in 10 seconds. Neatly, no bending, twisting, leaning, i.e. toppling over like you would expect. Check out some of the articles here, especially Prof. Jones of BYU, and the MIT prof.
I have now spent half an hour researching for a forum post when I should be doing related, but not related enough, research for my jobI won't even mention the amount of time frittered away on this stuff, totally unrelated to my job. Although I previously worked on something similar - researching engineering failures for court cases. Does this change my opinion either way of the Bush Admin? No I still consider them nefarious crooks, somewhat more sinister and dangerous than I originally did. Not the guy that caught the 7lb perch, the other guy, the paranoid one that sleeps in a bunker with an Italian made shotgun under his pillow. In the big scheme of things, will anyone be brought to justice for this? Doubtful. But from a, what was that course, "science, politics, ethics & technology" standpoint, it's quite fascinating.
Jenga. That's a great idea. This is all proven by playing Jenga! Brilliant! I didn't have a clue why the bldgs collapsed, but it's all made plain for me! Hmm, if I set the top bars on fire, nothing happens, but if I add a firecracker next to each bar, and a couple big ones at the base, I guess it would collapse mighty quick! Light 'em all *nearly* at once (just so the bar below is out of the way when bar above comes crashing down)
Seriously, take a break from playing Jenga, and read the links I provided above.
Yes, 50 floors of concrete & steel are heavy, so what holds the buildings up in the first place?
Plane lost in the fog, so I guess we'll assume it also ran out of fuel too? That's the thing here AC, too many "well if that then I guess maybe this". Controlled demolition. Simple. Occam's Razor. Do the research.
The videos are property of the companies they were confiscated from. It's up to those companies to publically release the videos, not the government.
Read that again. Videos were confiscated. How can the companies release them - they don't even have 'em.
What procedures were ignored?[NORAD]
Umm, like to defend our country, stuff like that. So no jets were scrambled. They Stood down. You don't find the least problem with that?
indicate that WTC7 also suffered severe structural damage, not just fire.This one's just funny. First MITs Eagar (see the PBS show, why the towers fell), who trotted out the theory for the twins collapse, was mystified, until someone told him that it had some diesel tanks, and thus a fire. Since then, Silverstein, the owner, has admitted he had the building "pulled". Same day. Fancy that. When it takes weeks and 3000lbs of explosives and experts to prepare a bldg for controlled demolition.
Now, seeing as how you are completely misinformed (Popular Mechanics? Do tell...) on these first few issues, I don't see that I should waste the time refuting the rest of your args - what's the point - it's futile right? - y'all will come up with another theory anyway, and disregard the plain facts as usual. Especially your "recycled steel" source, which starts off with a very credible "our take". Fact of the matter is, analysts were able to get a *few* peices of steel, and yes, it took a while to clear the site, but the fact of the matter is the area was completely closed off, and the steel *was* sent to India and China to be recycled. In fact, a driver who took a 1/2 hr extra on his lunch break was promptly fired, that's how serious they were about "tidying" up. Do the research, or at least read the work of people have, rather than regurgitating the govt approved "story".
I have no doubt it was reported a million times on Fox or wherever. But it's irrelevant. NORAD was ordered to stand down. In June, Cheney took control of NORAD away from the military for himself. And on Sept, they happened to be running a training exercise, such that the NORAD controllers were told to stand down. So they did nothing, apparently. Why? Do the research.
http://standdown.net/
Exactly! And probably the most paranoid folks in the *world* are people like Cheney, Perle, etc. Thus, the weird thing is, if theory #1 (crazy arabs) doesn't hold water, then theory #2 (controlled demolition) also implies that Cheney or someone, in their extremist paranoia, manifested the very nightmare as reality, the very nightmare that keeps them awake at night, to "spur" americans to action. (What I haven't seen much in these threads is Cheney's involvement in the PNAC, project for a new american century.) Yep, you are durn right about paranoia. It's a wicked one. Like some bizarre Philip K. Dick novel, these extremists have sucked us in to their own nightmarish world.
One more thing: do not confuse any theory that contradicts the govt approved theory as the work of a bunch of whackos. Do the research, read the links above, figure it out.
Exactly! And probably the most paranoid folks in the *world* are people like Cheney, Perle, etc. Thus, the weird thing is, if theory #1 (crazy arabs) doesn't hold water, then theory #2 (controlled demolition) also implies that Cheney or someone, in their extremist paranoia, manifested the very nightmare as reality, the very nightmare that keeps them awake at night, to "spur" americans to action. (What I haven't seen much in these threads is Cheney's involvement in the PNAC, project for a new american century.) Yep, you are durn right about paranoia. It's a wicked one. Like some bizarre Philip K. Dick novel, these extremists have sucked us in to their own nightmarish world.
On the other hand, landing a plane involves a ballet of speed, flaps, landing gear, drag, nose angle, angle of attack and half a dozen other variables. Doing everything perfectly in a landing is the *hardest* part of flying.
Certainly once you *get* the plane close to the ground, it might be easy. But certainly not a simple task to bring a what, massive plane like a 757 (were not talking a Cessna here) down to the ground. "Ease it to the ground", key word is "ease". Because obviously he needed to keep a certain minimum height to avoid buildings (that he didn't want to crash into), so this might've left very little maneuvering room to "ease" the plane down. Elsewhere I've read that these "rookie" pilots were able to maneuver these planes in some fantastically tight turns - beginners luck?
One of the many bizzare things about this "conspiracy" theory, besides how did WTC 7, and the others, neatly collapse, or what was Bush doing there reading while a major disaster was going on, was the idea that these terrorist wished to learn how to fly, but not to land. If this were such a well planned out, well rehearsed effort, you'd think they would've covered that detail?
It's the same reason Snopes is reasonably trusted -- debunking a claim doesn't take nearly the credibility it takes to make one.
Huh? Isn't Snopes in the business of debunking claims? Or did you misword your sentence: what I think you were trying to say is that it is easier (and requires less credibility) to make a claim, and it's harder to debunk it?
Whatever you meant, I think it has more to do with *who* made the claim. If we are told, let's say, that Silverstein, owner of the WTC bldgs., "pulled" them on purpose to collect the his insurance policy by Fox News we'd probably believe that over a bunch of web sites saying 19 arab crazys hijacked a plane with a box cutter, somehow managed to avoid NORAD, outflew fighter jets, hit the towers dead on, and the pentagon, and they exploded and collapsed.
As for Snopes, I like the site overall, but Mikkelson really fell down on the job as far as 911, especially with her bias (see the rather odd personal nicknames at the bottom of each article). Many of the "rumors" she has as false simply because that's what she read in the 911 Commission Report, which claimed to investigate every single scrap of evidence, yet somehow forgot to investigate why WTC 7 collapsed. Others that she has marked as unsubstantiated can easily be verified by querying Google to find severable reputable news services. Her source, whatever it is, says otherwise. And sometimes does not even include interesting, verified, reports - for example she has the govt certified report of the cheering Arabs, but stunningly neglects to mention the 6 Israeli agents who were seen cheering and "high fiving" as they filmed the towers burning, and were subsequently mysteriously released. So Forget Snopes. Start here, at this excellent site:
http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/index.html
[...] a kerosene fire could reach well past steel annealing temperatures and get to steel melting temperatures, depending on the specifics of fuel and air flow in the fire.
Sure, like in a blast furnace maybe?
As you could guess, the steel of an extreme building as the WTC is strained to the limit.
No way. All numbers below are estimates as I remember reading from the literatore, do the research for the exact figures, etc, but to put it simply, this building was soundly designed, a fire alone simply would not have collapsed the building. Period.
Couple things:
Yes, the fire could've weakened the steel. But this was high grade steel, certified to 3000C. A conservative estimate, is that the fire could get to 1200C. And this is ideal conditions, like in a blast furnace. Probably it was closer to 600C, judging from the smoke for example. Still that would not explain that the steel was *evaporated* in some places, nor the *molten* steel at the base of the towers.
Even at high temperatures, 800-1200C the steel could still support 2-3 times the load - that was the design.
these buildings were designed to withstand a hit from *multiple* 707s - faster, but smaller than 757s. Did the engineers simply forget about the fuel, or was that taken into consideration?
Even if the steel weakened, such that the floors collapsed, there are a couple other problems: (1) How did the building collapse in under 10s? This would only be possible if the floors underneath were *gone*, i.e. there was no friction, other than air friction (2) the WTC bldgs had a central core of 47 steel columns and concrete. This is entirely left out from some of the "theories" trotted out by the experts.
There's an article in Fire Engineering magazine that calls the investigation a "half baked farce". Pretty good assessment.
Slashdot Mirror
But at least in one case, very similar to Blackboard's situation (with prior art), Microsoft actually did the right thing. In their new version of Visual Studio, they had something called "Object Bench", and BlueJ developer, at first interested to see what Microsoft was doing, after exploring the screens a bit, realized it was very similar to BlueJ - a little _too_ similar, in fact! Worse, they were filing a patent!
Fortunately, MSFT has since apologized.
Interesting that the city of Vienna is already part way (100 servers) deployed on Red Hat (funny, Slashdot has a anti-Linux post, but no post on Vienna's success. Sure, they are probably much more capable of supporting Linux vs. Munich given their experience with AIX, and FreeBSD, but this is a win for Red Hat which could've gone to Microsoft. Oh yeah, that's why I read Digg more these days.)
I think what's going on here, with Birmingham, is a little wheeling/dealing, in which the city threatens to go with Linux, unless Microsoft comes to the table. And Microsoft blinked. Competition is good..
And you forgot to mention that much of the J2EE standards and APIs have a grounding in CORBA, in fact I was just reading that JTS (Java Transaction Service) borrows much from OMG's Object Transaction Service, to name one example.
Too bad that with Web Services they are making the same mistakes all over again. Henning is a bit of a griper, surprised he didn't tout his zeroC CORBA-like app in the article, or maybe I missed it, for more interesting reading see Steve Vinoski's blog
Sign me another corporate hacker I guess. No fancy, glitzy buzzwordy smack for us, but hey, it gets the job done.
Well, one thing is you will not read in the WSJ is about the next Google or Craig's List, until they hit it big. Instead, you will read about steel companies. WSJ is similar to Forbes, new ideas simply confuse them. The article was rather funny, with the author not hiding his utter confusion, mixed with a bit of contempt, about their business model. Buckmaster tries his best, explaining to the WSJ reporter in simple terms "You can't run a steel company the same way you run an internet company." Here and there the lightbulb goes off, for example when Buckmaster explains how taxes work to the reporter. But overall he doesn't get it.
There's also tornadoes. And hail. And the even earthquakes, eventually.
So yeah, I don't think we should short Detroit. Take the new Detroit airport for example, which is, in my opinion, a good example of a nice construction job. It is 1 mile long, very easy to navigate, with a shuttle running the length. It was a clean and easy migration to the new airport, no baggage or other technical snafus like in Denver, wasn't it. Now, I'm not sure of the details, but obviously Michigan had the vision and the skills to get the job done or find the right people.
As an aside, it is interesting to compare this airport with Logan Airport in Boston, which seems in a perpetual state of repair, like a building in, say Soviet Russia. They have the technical capability (Rte 128, MIT, Harvard, etc), why can't they build an airport? The "Big Dig" seems to be another fiasco, certainly as far as cost and planning.
Anyway, yes, they can certainly figure out how to build a data center in either of those places, probably Boston too, and in fact there are probably many smaller datacenters there to begin with, all with Disaster Recovery plans, etc.
Web programming in Java does not necessarily mean EJB. You can use POJOs (plain old Java objects), Hibernate, Spring, or other simpler solutions. Also note that EJB3.0 is significantly simpler to use than EJB2.0. And your comment about JSPs - JSPs are about as simple as it it gets. And if it was a general web programming class, I wouldn't foist a framework on them, whether Struts or Tapestry or Shale or Rails or .NET or the myriad others - - let them get the basics first, of HTTP GET/POST, HTML, etc.
So I would agree with the point that they keep the class as simple as possible. No frameworks, no EJBs, just keep it simple.
Every aspect of every conspiracy theory about 9/11 has been systematically debunked somewhere or another.
Right, on Popular Mechanics, Snopes, 911Myths, and the very convincing 911 Commission Report which did not even bother to investigate the WTC 7 collapse. And actually Snopes debunks most of the "rumours" by referring to the Commission report. And 911 Myths states stuff like "Our take". Yeah, very convincing, some unregistered site in the U.K.
If you actually read the research, the proponents for the "offical" conspiracy theory really end up being pretty muddled and confusing - because they have been given the conclusion, so they must build their facts & evidence based on that. That's bad science, so naturally they have a hard time. Speaking of the highly respected journal Popular Mechanics, there is an well written paper by 911 Research which points out the flaws in the article.
Since the WTC was structurally unique, comparisons to other buildings really don't have much bearing in the matter,
and while they anticipated the impact of a 707, they did not take into account the combined effect of impact and a full load of fuel;
Yep, that's the number one argument - engineers just "forgot" about the fuel? That's an interesting view of the engineering profession.
all of this, of course, assumes that the designers were correct when saying that the building could withstand a 707.
Timelines show that jets were scrambled in a timely manner when the situation was understood (within minutes of realizing the planes were hijacked and pinpointing their locations.)
Well, their story keeps changing there also. Apparently, at one point, they had the jets scrambled *away*, 150 miles out into the Atlantic!
9/11 conspiracy theories require thousands of conspirators--think of just what would be required to run drone planes into buildings, dispose of all the passengers, rig the buildings, fake everything so that the airlines wouldn't notice, and on, and on, and on.You need to think a little more. They don't require many conspirators, just a few at the top, the rest obediently falling orders. The best example is the officer who was reprimanded by Cheney when he asked him, as the plane was approaching the Pentagon, whether "the orders still stood". Cheney chewed him out something to the effect that had he heard otherwise.
Also, be careful not to confuse disinformation with information. Switching planes? Red herring, like the "Arab Pilot Learns to Fly" story.
You'll never convince him otherwise, because his entire conception of self is wound up in the idea that he is the rare visionary, the one who cannot be fooled. To admit that he is wrong would require him to admit that he is profoundly wrong, not just gulled, but gullible.
Yes, so I'll stop bothering reading this thread, those stubborn folk just won't change their minds with scientific proofs under their very noses!
How does it feel to make an idiotic observation with no basis in reality?
I don't know, good question for you though. You really are a little nuts. But I guess anyone who has to keep coming up with such inane, impossible "reasons" for believeing the story that was fed to them, must be.
Furthermore, we could not port our C++ code to the umpteen platforms that marketing wanted to target.
See, here you have a requirement that was fulfilled by Java. That's a good reason. Also, you don't mention whether the system was completely rearchitected or not. Anyway, from the reasons given for this guy's question, I don't see a clear requirement, just somehow they think things will magically work better in Java. With many of the new libraries and frameworks like Boost and Qt there isn't the disparity as there once was, perhaps. I'd suggest they define their requirements, goals, develop a prototype (keeping in mind Alexander Cockburn's excellent advice on prototypes - if the prototype doesn't work, don't assume everything will magically work once it's in production!), and also, as you did, reuse the libraries as much as possible, using CORBA or some similar solution, until they can switch over completely.
The Eclipse IDE boosted our productivity considerably, and the product is very successful. So I guess it makes sense.
So what were you using before, vi? Emacs? Maybe if you had switched to Visual Studio (and Eclipse supports C++ too) you could've save alot of trouble ;)
Exactly, there's a balance. Speaking of Windows, note that Windows was rewritten from scratch, when Dave Cutler from DEC was hired to write NT. Now certainly there are some vestiges of DOS, and OS/2, and it's a huge codebase, but it's not Windows 95/98/Me, that is clear.
Joel's article seems to be the defacto standard against rewriting software, but funnily enough, I think he's been proven completely wrong, in hindsight, by the very example he used to prove his point. Think of Mozilla? Mozilla originally started from the Netscape codebase, but they got a lot of flack from folks like Joel for rewriting it. Now it seems IE is the patchy codebase you describe Windows to be.
Now, it might be fine for quickly whacking out a way to connect your favorite scripting language to C++, but for a commercial, production application I would go with a more proven, standardized solution such as CORBA. There are many excellent open source implementations (another good reason for using a standardized spec), such as omniorb.
Sadly you're incorrect. NORAD Stand Down
False. "Pull" is not a demolitions industry term for explosive demolition; "shoot" is the term. "Pull" refers to mechanically demolishing the building using a wrecking ball of cables, etc.Ah, straw man argument. These are Silverstein's words. He's not defining the term. That's what he said. Read it again.
Additionally, Silverstein was talking to the fire commander about the firefighters around WTC7 and their effort to do whatever it was they were doing: "pull [the effort]".
Haha. Nice try. If that makes any sense at all to you, fine. Wow, you people really have to try hard don't you?
Again, think about this. These bldgs were designed this way. As someone pointed out, if you think they simply forgot about the fuel, well, you don't know much about engineering. Check out the slides on the WTC collapse - just try to understand the material and forget about grammar and spelling mistakes.
No, actually I read this. I know, how unlike Slashdot. Read the sources. Facts. Basically, to believe the approved story of how the bldgs collapsed, you would need to disregard basic scientific principles. What the heck, I'll save you the trouble, see below. The key is "asymetry". To put it in a simpler terms, think of Jenga, as someone pointed out in another comment.
Like I said, some interesting flying for a bunch of beginner pilots, some who were so bad they failed their certification test (in order to rent a plane). Remember too the "story" is they trained at small schools on Cessna's and the like - not 757. There's a difference. Think of driving a MG vs. a Hummer. Just a bit of a stretch. And while you could "ease" the plane down, and I've not seen the flight path, but I'm guessing he didn't have alot of maneuvering room to "ease" down. From WTC7 Research:
And further as someone pointed out, he nocked over some light poles - but kept his course. The simple point is, that's some impressive flying skills, no question. It's pushing it to say a beginner could hit a tower, 100 stories up, but it's just not credible for a rookie to hit the Pentagon. One more interesting item. They happened to hit the one section of the Pentagon that had been reinforced.
The only force acting on the tower was gravity (OK, maybe a little bit of wind). Gravity pulling straight down on several hundred thousand tons of steel and concrete... where would you expect it to go, other than straight down?
Really now. Think this through a little more carefully. Then read some of the papers written about this. We expect a bldg to crumble in place under controlled demolition, that's the purpose. When a plane hits it, it explodes, and so the "story" goes, the fire weakens the building unevenly, you'd expect it too weaken and topple. [If this isn't the case, we'd be saving _alot_ of money in demolitions - just set a little fire at the top of the bldg and voila! Wouldn't that be nice.]
Also, you're completely omitting the floors underneath the floors supposedly falling down. That's called friction. These buildings collapsed in 8-15 seconds. That's the time it would take to drop a beam off the top of the building for it to hit the ground - but that's assuming there's nothing underneath to slow it down. How is that possible? One way is controlled demoliton.
WTC7 is a good site too, and I would've posted that link too, but either they are futzing with their pages, they have some differences with their provider, or big brother is cracking down, either way their links were mucked up. I provided the scholars link mainly in deference to the Slashdot viewer, so rather than read they can watch the speeches of Prof. Jones and MIT's King, but admittedly I haven't reviewed the rest of the site so thanks for the tip. I see WTC7 respects the work by Jones - that's good. I did see he quibbles over whether "less than 10s" is not the same as 8 seconds, or something like that with his criticism of Morgan Reynolds.
But both have their flaws. The WTC7 is a little on the "rant" side, which takes away from their otherwise good message. Fact is, they need people like Morgan Reynolds, these are very credible people. Divide and conquer, and this will fall apart.
Less, but this building was overengineered, or you might say, solidly built. Designed to take the impact of mulitple jets. So even at a estimate of the fire temps (650C), for this grade steel, it would still have carried a load 2-3 times what was necessary. NIST analyzed what few pieces of steel they could and none showed that the temps exceeded 600C.
I'm just telling you that they don't have to melt to make the building fall down, even neglecting the ballistic damage to the building
But did this building collapse like a building in which the steel melted? It collapsed in 10 seconds. Neatly, no bending, twisting, leaning, i.e. toppling over like you would expect. Check out some of the articles here, especially Prof. Jones of BYU, and the MIT prof.
I have now spent half an hour researching for a forum post when I should be doing related, but not related enough, research for my jobI won't even mention the amount of time frittered away on this stuff, totally unrelated to my job. Although I previously worked on something similar - researching engineering failures for court cases. Does this change my opinion either way of the Bush Admin? No I still consider them nefarious crooks, somewhat more sinister and dangerous than I originally did. Not the guy that caught the 7lb perch, the other guy, the paranoid one that sleeps in a bunker with an Italian made shotgun under his pillow. In the big scheme of things, will anyone be brought to justice for this? Doubtful. But from a, what was that course, "science, politics, ethics & technology" standpoint, it's quite fascinating.
Jenga. That's a great idea. This is all proven by playing Jenga! Brilliant! I didn't have a clue why the bldgs collapsed, but it's all made plain for me! Hmm, if I set the top bars on fire, nothing happens, but if I add a firecracker next to each bar, and a couple big ones at the base, I guess it would collapse mighty quick! Light 'em all *nearly* at once (just so the bar below is out of the way when bar above comes crashing down)
Seriously, take a break from playing Jenga, and read the links I provided above.
Yes, 50 floors of concrete & steel are heavy, so what holds the buildings up in the first place?
Plane lost in the fog, so I guess we'll assume it also ran out of fuel too? That's the thing here AC, too many "well if that then I guess maybe this". Controlled demolition. Simple. Occam's Razor. Do the research.
Read that again. Videos were confiscated. How can the companies release them - they don't even have 'em. What procedures were ignored?[NORAD]
Umm, like to defend our country, stuff like that. So no jets were scrambled. They Stood down. You don't find the least problem with that?
indicate that WTC7 also suffered severe structural damage, not just fire.This one's just funny. First MITs Eagar (see the PBS show, why the towers fell), who trotted out the theory for the twins collapse, was mystified, until someone told him that it had some diesel tanks, and thus a fire. Since then, Silverstein, the owner, has admitted he had the building "pulled". Same day. Fancy that. When it takes weeks and 3000lbs of explosives and experts to prepare a bldg for controlled demolition.
Now, seeing as how you are completely misinformed (Popular Mechanics? Do tell...) on these first few issues, I don't see that I should waste the time refuting the rest of your args - what's the point - it's futile right? - y'all will come up with another theory anyway, and disregard the plain facts as usual. Especially your "recycled steel" source, which starts off with a very credible "our take". Fact of the matter is, analysts were able to get a *few* peices of steel, and yes, it took a while to clear the site, but the fact of the matter is the area was completely closed off, and the steel *was* sent to India and China to be recycled. In fact, a driver who took a 1/2 hr extra on his lunch break was promptly fired, that's how serious they were about "tidying" up. Do the research, or at least read the work of people have, rather than regurgitating the govt approved "story".
I have no doubt it was reported a million times on Fox or wherever. But it's irrelevant. NORAD was ordered to stand down. In June, Cheney took control of NORAD away from the military for himself. And on Sept, they happened to be running a training exercise, such that the NORAD controllers were told to stand down. So they did nothing, apparently. Why? Do the research. http://standdown.net/
Exactly! And probably the most paranoid folks in the *world* are people like Cheney, Perle, etc. Thus, the weird thing is, if theory #1 (crazy arabs) doesn't hold water, then theory #2 (controlled demolition) also implies that Cheney or someone, in their extremist paranoia, manifested the very nightmare as reality, the very nightmare that keeps them awake at night, to "spur" americans to action. (What I haven't seen much in these threads is Cheney's involvement in the PNAC, project for a new american century.) Yep, you are durn right about paranoia. It's a wicked one. Like some bizarre Philip K. Dick novel, these extremists have sucked us in to their own nightmarish world.
One more thing: do not confuse any theory that contradicts the govt approved theory as the work of a bunch of whackos. Do the research, read the links above, figure it out.
Exactly! And probably the most paranoid folks in the *world* are people like Cheney, Perle, etc. Thus, the weird thing is, if theory #1 (crazy arabs) doesn't hold water, then theory #2 (controlled demolition) also implies that Cheney or someone, in their extremist paranoia, manifested the very nightmare as reality, the very nightmare that keeps them awake at night, to "spur" americans to action. (What I haven't seen much in these threads is Cheney's involvement in the PNAC, project for a new american century.) Yep, you are durn right about paranoia. It's a wicked one. Like some bizarre Philip K. Dick novel, these extremists have sucked us in to their own nightmarish world.
Certainly once you *get* the plane close to the ground, it might be easy. But certainly not a simple task to bring a what, massive plane like a 757 (were not talking a Cessna here) down to the ground. "Ease it to the ground", key word is "ease". Because obviously he needed to keep a certain minimum height to avoid buildings (that he didn't want to crash into), so this might've left very little maneuvering room to "ease" the plane down. Elsewhere I've read that these "rookie" pilots were able to maneuver these planes in some fantastically tight turns - beginners luck?
One of the many bizzare things about this "conspiracy" theory, besides how did WTC 7, and the others, neatly collapse, or what was Bush doing there reading while a major disaster was going on, was the idea that these terrorist wished to learn how to fly, but not to land. If this were such a well planned out, well rehearsed effort, you'd think they would've covered that detail?
Huh? Isn't Snopes in the business of debunking claims? Or did you misword your sentence: what I think you were trying to say is that it is easier (and requires less credibility) to make a claim, and it's harder to debunk it?
Whatever you meant, I think it has more to do with *who* made the claim. If we are told, let's say, that Silverstein, owner of the WTC bldgs., "pulled" them on purpose to collect the his insurance policy by Fox News we'd probably believe that over a bunch of web sites saying 19 arab crazys hijacked a plane with a box cutter, somehow managed to avoid NORAD, outflew fighter jets, hit the towers dead on, and the pentagon, and they exploded and collapsed.
As for Snopes, I like the site overall, but Mikkelson really fell down on the job as far as 911, especially with her bias (see the rather odd personal nicknames at the bottom of each article). Many of the "rumors" she has as false simply because that's what she read in the 911 Commission Report, which claimed to investigate every single scrap of evidence, yet somehow forgot to investigate why WTC 7 collapsed. Others that she has marked as unsubstantiated can easily be verified by querying Google to find severable reputable news services. Her source, whatever it is, says otherwise. And sometimes does not even include interesting, verified, reports - for example she has the govt certified report of the cheering Arabs, but stunningly neglects to mention the 6 Israeli agents who were seen cheering and "high fiving" as they filmed the towers burning, and were subsequently mysteriously released. So Forget Snopes. Start here, at this excellent site: http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/index.html
Sure, like in a blast furnace maybe?
As you could guess, the steel of an extreme building as the WTC is strained to the limit.
No way. All numbers below are estimates as I remember reading from the literatore, do the research for the exact figures, etc, but to put it simply, this building was soundly designed, a fire alone simply would not have collapsed the building. Period.
Couple things:
There's an article in Fire Engineering magazine that calls the investigation a "half baked farce". Pretty good assessment.