What gets me is the number of Americans that actually expected the world to come begging the US for forgiveness after Iraq -- talk about a hero complex. So Saddam is gone (maybe). Goodie. Silver lining around a very large, black cloud I say.
Learn your history, jackass. France has never asked the US for military support, ever. Britain has, repeatedly, and the US has given it after being attacked (or arranging to be attacked). France has benefited from that twice by facing the same enemy, but it has never asked.
Beyond that, why should we Europeans be stuck with a positioning system that we do not control and that that buffoon in the White House can turn off at a whim? Why should we have to settle for second-hand scraps, or second-best anything?
Errrr.... The value of a currency is what you pay for a unit of it in another currency. So what could possibly be the difference between the AUD or the Euro going up and the $ going down? It's the same thing....
Clever. Doesn't sound very environmentally friendly, though.....
As for the inkjet-printed money, I'm not going to worry too much about it either. The fakes you can make that way are by necessity very bad fakes -- modern money has visible security threads, smooth printing transitions that even high-end inkjets cannot produce, raised print, watermarks, holograms, UV-reactive threads and probably a whole host of other security measures that are confidential. Right now, counterfeiting lives more by the grace of people not checking whether money is real than by being able to make perfect fakes.
will they each exchange the half-notes for real ones?
Unlikely, I'd say. For starters, over here at least, banks won't exchange damaged money for new money at all -- you have to take it to the central bank. And I would imagine they redeem your cash based on their ability te retrieve the serial number of the damaged paper (so they can mark the bill as destroyed, you understand).
Actually, I wouldn't be too sure of that if I were you. There is already European jurisprudence that dictates that industry-wide shutout of a party from a resource vital to that parties business is not permissible (the McGill case, as I recall).
I would imagine easyCiname will be asking the court for an enforced license on all the movies produced by companies involved in the MPAA.
That aside, I think the MPAA may have shot itself in the foot with this one. If they've really refused industry-wide custom to easyCinema to protect their market, that's abuse of kartel-position -- very much forbidden under European law and with the potential of making the MPAA cannon-fodder for the Commission.
Great. Now muggers and pick pockets will be able to use technology to identify prime targets.
Actually, that's doubtful. RTLZ (don't bother clicking, it's in Dutch) reported today that the ECB is talking to Hitachi about ultra-small (invisible to the naked eye), ultra-lightweight (can't feel them either) chips to be embedded in notes in the future to prevent counterfeiting. However, these chips have nothing to do with RFID or any other wireless techniques or technologies -- these chips would just store an irremovable, 38-digit serial number that could be read with a special flatbed scanner (which would have to cover the bill; no remotely-operable affair).
Your college actually tests you with questions where you can look the answer up in the book instead of asking you questions whereby you have to apply what you find in books to formulate the answer yourself? Jeez, if they make it THAT easy it's their own fault if they get cheats, I say.
Although, on the other hand, I suppose a collage test would be a cut-and-paste affair.....
Most of those 8 steps don't have to be repeated, however. Everything before step 6 is a one-time thing, in fact. As for finding the device and mounting it, that's part of the Unix way of looking at devices -- rather than the Windows way of having drive letters and that being the end of it, under Unix you can connect a device, file system, whatever accessible medium, anywhere in your directory structure. That makes for a rather flexible way of doing things.
Beyond that, there is also a hotplugging project that should reduce the USB/FireWire/PCMCIA mounting process to the same one-step process it is in Windows: plug it in and go. However, I have not yet had the chance to try it out yet. Soon, but not yet.
The state of Java now is pure and simply...just bloat.
Since you indicate yourself that you believe only in the Holy Grail of C and C++ and will not touch anything else, I am going to suggest to you that you are not in any real position to judge.
You might say that memory, disk, and GHz are cheap now.
Rather, I'd say that the demands to which you code are no more universal than your insights into the absolute and relative value of Java (or any other language).
Well my response is...so are your coding skillz!
I have my opinion of people who deliberately replace "s"es with "z"s and think this says good things about them. As for your skills, if you truly think that coding in C is the only way to write "fast" programs and that everybody who does not code in C must by consequence be a poor developer, I am already underwhelmed. Even without having seen any of your work. And I assure you that your standing as a programmer from the stone age does nothing to alleviate this.
The one thing I've realized over the years is that the more time you spend programming in these high level languages, the more real experience you lose where you could be coding smaller and more efficiently nearer to the core.
Your "experience" is fa from universal, I assure you. What you are seeing is a lack of experience and possibly the adverse effects of what passes for computing science education in a lot of places -- it is not related absolutely to the use of any particular language per se, nor does the use of any particular language in and of itself mean that you cannot learn that which you consider to be "hardcore" programming (for what that's worth). Much though I appreciate Edsger Dijkstra's wit, the assertion that using any particular language must necessarily taint a person forever is nonsense.
Well, maybe they are, but at the expense of expertise in programming?
Don't confuse "expertise in programming" with "expertise in one particular language". The best programs arise from competent design and following implementation in a language, not from design towards a specific language from the beginning.
I mean come on, if you can't handle pointers, can you really call yourself a programmer?
There's an unofficial motto at the CS department at my alma mater: "the best CS engineers are made from those people who come here never having seen a computer in their entire lives". Being a "programmer" doesn't live in having a reflex that causes you to combine the Shift-key and the 8-key, but in being able to grasp the concepts and apply them to the situation you find.
Programming is a skill and an art. It is a good bit like architectural design.
The first of those statements is true (and that is an enormously bad thing, make no mistake), the second is patently not. If architecture was like programming, we'd clap all architects in jail because their buildings would collapse so often. Programming is indeed an art -- there are so few people who do it well. Programming on the other hand is nowhere near mature enough to be called anything as well-founded and scientifically based as architecture. We have nowhere near the level of sophistication and scientific backing, let alone the level of reliable education that supports architecture, to pat ourselves on the back to that extent.
Do you "want" to live in a double-wide home, or one that was designed to be functional, strong, and beautiful?
The latter. Thank god I need not rely on a programmer to build it for me.
Take a look at JSR 121 over at the JCP, which is slated for the upcoming Tiger release (Java 1.5).
It's actually interesting to see the development of the JVM, separately from the rest of the platform. Essentially it is parallelling the development of hardware-based computers, moving from being a unitask environment to finally being a multitasking environment under a managing OS.
Want to prove it to yourself? Replace 'ls' some day with a Java version of it.
Actually, I'd be willing to bet you considerable amounts of money (Euro's instead of dollars even, they're currently worth more) that the performance you are perceiving in that test is not Java pur sang but to a far greater extent the load time of the JVM (which, for a job as simple and involved code as limited as for 'ls', is undoubtedly quite significant). The JVM has a nasty tendency, you see, to preload lots of classes -- which, often, don't get used in small programs and so are deadweight. I was playing around with the JNI the other day under JDK1.4.1 on Linux and just wrote a simple "Hello World" -- a C program that embeds the JVM (pretty much what the actual "java" command does), loads a class (two, since the VM must load java.lang.Object in response to my loading my own class), creates an instance, calls a method, ends. Now, I can't claim a perceived performance of "instantaneous" like with a compiled C program, but certainly fast enough that you'd miss it if you blinked. Much faster than the "java" command, which loads a whole slew of stuff.
Also, as another anekdotal hint towards preloading overhead, I was also playing around recently with java.math.BigInteger and wrote a program that calculates, for input n, the nth Fibonacci number. This is done recursively and it creates a new BigInteger object in each recursive call, plus two to start out with. I also put the "input-calculation" part in a loop, so I have a pretty good idea of performance minus startup overhead. And that, I can assure you, is preceived as instantaneous up until F-number 5500 and "fast" up until 17000-20000 (depends on the person). After that it slacks off until you reach 45065 (where I hit the maximum recursion depth) -- which I assure you will be "slow" pretty much everywhere. By comparison, Mathematica crawls when calculating number 50. And there's no perceived difference with Python, but my Python implementation doesn't do F-numbers beyond 998.
Well, the nasty-but-I-suspect-true answer is that it has a lot to do with the programmers. Many people complain about Java programs being slow -- but by comparison, I have both seen and written programs in Java that were not slow. And I have also seen plenty of code where objects were created all over the place where you just have to ask "why?". And why the programmer didn't bother caching one object and reusing, since that was also possible...
That aside, there's also the factor of perception (which is probably more important even than badly written code). You have to keep in mind that people's perception of the overall "speed" of a program is mostly dictated by the "speed" of the slowest part of that program. There's a small office suite out there on SourceForge somewhere which is pretty decent (word processor, basic spreadsheet, presentation package) and it performs rather nicely if you consider absolute numbers. But its perceived speed is bad because the JVM takes a relatively long time to get started.
What do you mean you cannot purchase goods with it anymore?
Errr... I don't see how I can put it any clearer than that... Over here, whenever we've had a new currency introduced to replace an old one (e.g euro for guilder or the new fl.100 note for the old one) there has been a short transition period after which the old currency has simply stopped being legal tender. After the transition, stores no longer accept the old stuff and except to the Dutch Central Bank it's just paper with some pretty printing on it.
If it's possible to exchange it at the central bank, why wouldn't a seller accept it as payment?
Because it is no longer currency as backed by the (in this case) Kingdom of The Netherlands. Any and all persons are beholden in this country to accept the official currency of the land as legal tender in a monetary exchange, but they are not beholden to accept anything else -- and most people don't. Of course it's not forbidden: a shopkeeper CAN agree to an exchange for another object that he deems of value (printed paper that used to be money, for instance) just as much as you can agree with me to swap your bicycle for my walkman. But most people do insist upon payment with official money.
I hate to step on your ranting here, but -- I'm very sorry -- THAT doesn't require any special kind of geekiness to know. Anybody who saw Generations would have been able to tell you that much.
It survived the crippling space-time warping conditions near a temporal rift, despite not being completely outfitted, staffed and being under the command of an inept captain?
No no, that is not correct -- "old" money is not legal tender anymore. You can often exchange it for legal tender at face value at the central bank (up to a certain point) but you cannot purchase goods for it anymore.
As for the "national-to-Euro" echange that happened here in the Zone, there is also a time limit on exchanges. For old Dutch Guilders, you can exchange the coins until 01/01/2007 and notes until 01/01/2032. After those dates, they're just pieces of metal and prettily-printed bits of paper.
You're right, that is stupid -- there's absolutely no point in introducing new currency for security reasons if you're not going to replace the old currency....
Although, about the counterfeiting, I wouldn't be too sure it isn't rampant. After all, the U.S. Secret Service was founded to combat counterfeiting at a time when the amount of counterfeit money was estimated to be a third of the total portion of money available.
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What gets me is the number of Americans that actually expected the world to come begging the US for forgiveness after Iraq -- talk about a hero complex. So Saddam is gone (maybe). Goodie. Silver lining around a very large, black cloud I say.
Learn your history, jackass. France has never asked the US for military support, ever. Britain has, repeatedly, and the US has given it after being attacked (or arranging to be attacked). France has benefited from that twice by facing the same enemy, but it has never asked.
Beyond that, why should we Europeans be stuck with a positioning system that we do not control and that that buffoon in the White House can turn off at a whim? Why should we have to settle for second-hand scraps, or second-best anything?
Errrr.... The value of a currency is what you pay for a unit of it in another currency. So what could possibly be the difference between the AUD or the Euro going up and the $ going down? It's the same thing....
Clever. Doesn't sound very environmentally friendly, though.....
As for the inkjet-printed money, I'm not going to worry too much about it either. The fakes you can make that way are by necessity very bad fakes -- modern money has visible security threads, smooth printing transitions that even high-end inkjets cannot produce, raised print, watermarks, holograms, UV-reactive threads and probably a whole host of other security measures that are confidential. Right now, counterfeiting lives more by the grace of people not checking whether money is real than by being able to make perfect fakes.
Unlikely, I'd say. For starters, over here at least, banks won't exchange damaged money for new money at all -- you have to take it to the central bank. And I would imagine they redeem your cash based on their ability te retrieve the serial number of the damaged paper (so they can mark the bill as destroyed, you understand).
Actually, I wouldn't be too sure of that if I were you. There is already European jurisprudence that dictates that industry-wide shutout of a party from a resource vital to that parties business is not permissible (the McGill case, as I recall).
I would imagine easyCiname will be asking the court for an enforced license on all the movies produced by companies involved in the MPAA.
That aside, I think the MPAA may have shot itself in the foot with this one. If they've really refused industry-wide custom to easyCinema to protect their market, that's abuse of kartel-position -- very much forbidden under European law and with the potential of making the MPAA cannon-fodder for the Commission.
Actually, that's doubtful. RTLZ (don't bother clicking, it's in Dutch) reported today that the ECB is talking to Hitachi about ultra-small (invisible to the naked eye), ultra-lightweight (can't feel them either) chips to be embedded in notes in the future to prevent counterfeiting. However, these chips have nothing to do with RFID or any other wireless techniques or technologies -- these chips would just store an irremovable, 38-digit serial number that could be read with a special flatbed scanner (which would have to cover the bill; no remotely-operable affair).
I'm sure you didn't. We, the humans of the Earth (i.e. Sol-3) on the other hand, did.
Your college actually tests you with questions where you can look the answer up in the book instead of asking you questions whereby you have to apply what you find in books to formulate the answer yourself? Jeez, if they make it THAT easy it's their own fault if they get cheats, I say.
Although, on the other hand, I suppose a collage test would be a cut-and-paste affair.....
How old is your kernel? Or, more to the point, which kernel is it?
Most of those 8 steps don't have to be repeated, however. Everything before step 6 is a one-time thing, in fact. As for finding the device and mounting it, that's part of the Unix way of looking at devices -- rather than the Windows way of having drive letters and that being the end of it, under Unix you can connect a device, file system, whatever accessible medium, anywhere in your directory structure. That makes for a rather flexible way of doing things.
Beyond that, there is also a hotplugging project that should reduce the USB/FireWire/PCMCIA mounting process to the same one-step process it is in Windows: plug it in and go. However, I have not yet had the chance to try it out yet. Soon, but not yet.
Yes, but that period wasn't allowed to extend past the first half year. Now, it's Euro's all the way.
Great. Another "back-in-my-day" ranter....
The state of Java now is pure and simply...just bloat.Since you indicate yourself that you believe only in the Holy Grail of C and C++ and will not touch anything else, I am going to suggest to you that you are not in any real position to judge.
You might say that memory, disk, and GHz are cheap now.Rather, I'd say that the demands to which you code are no more universal than your insights into the absolute and relative value of Java (or any other language).
Well my response is...so are your coding skillz!I have my opinion of people who deliberately replace "s"es with "z"s and think this says good things about them. As for your skills, if you truly think that coding in C is the only way to write "fast" programs and that everybody who does not code in C must by consequence be a poor developer, I am already underwhelmed. Even without having seen any of your work. And I assure you that your standing as a programmer from the stone age does nothing to alleviate this.
The one thing I've realized over the years is that the more time you spend programming in these high level languages, the more real experience you lose where you could be coding smaller and more efficiently nearer to the core.Your "experience" is fa from universal, I assure you. What you are seeing is a lack of experience and possibly the adverse effects of what passes for computing science education in a lot of places -- it is not related absolutely to the use of any particular language per se, nor does the use of any particular language in and of itself mean that you cannot learn that which you consider to be "hardcore" programming (for what that's worth). Much though I appreciate Edsger Dijkstra's wit, the assertion that using any particular language must necessarily taint a person forever is nonsense.
Well, maybe they are, but at the expense of expertise in programming?Don't confuse "expertise in programming" with "expertise in one particular language". The best programs arise from competent design and following implementation in a language, not from design towards a specific language from the beginning.
I mean come on, if you can't handle pointers, can you really call yourself a programmer?There's an unofficial motto at the CS department at my alma mater: "the best CS engineers are made from those people who come here never having seen a computer in their entire lives". Being a "programmer" doesn't live in having a reflex that causes you to combine the Shift-key and the 8-key, but in being able to grasp the concepts and apply them to the situation you find.
Programming is a skill and an art. It is a good bit like architectural design.The first of those statements is true (and that is an enormously bad thing, make no mistake), the second is patently not. If architecture was like programming, we'd clap all architects in jail because their buildings would collapse so often. Programming is indeed an art -- there are so few people who do it well. Programming on the other hand is nowhere near mature enough to be called anything as well-founded and scientifically based as architecture. We have nowhere near the level of sophistication and scientific backing, let alone the level of reliable education that supports architecture, to pat ourselves on the back to that extent.
Do you "want" to live in a double-wide home, or one that was designed to be functional, strong, and beautiful?The latter. Thank god I need not rely on a programmer to build it for me.
Take a look at JSR 121 over at the JCP, which is slated for the upcoming Tiger release (Java 1.5).
It's actually interesting to see the development of the JVM, separately from the rest of the platform. Essentially it is parallelling the development of hardware-based computers, moving from being a unitask environment to finally being a multitasking environment under a managing OS.
Actually, I'd be willing to bet you considerable amounts of money (Euro's instead of dollars even, they're currently worth more) that the performance you are perceiving in that test is not Java pur sang but to a far greater extent the load time of the JVM (which, for a job as simple and involved code as limited as for 'ls', is undoubtedly quite significant). The JVM has a nasty tendency, you see, to preload lots of classes -- which, often, don't get used in small programs and so are deadweight. I was playing around with the JNI the other day under JDK1.4.1 on Linux and just wrote a simple "Hello World" -- a C program that embeds the JVM (pretty much what the actual "java" command does), loads a class (two, since the VM must load java.lang.Object in response to my loading my own class), creates an instance, calls a method, ends. Now, I can't claim a perceived performance of "instantaneous" like with a compiled C program, but certainly fast enough that you'd miss it if you blinked. Much faster than the "java" command, which loads a whole slew of stuff.
Also, as another anekdotal hint towards preloading overhead, I was also playing around recently with java.math.BigInteger and wrote a program that calculates, for input n, the nth Fibonacci number. This is done recursively and it creates a new BigInteger object in each recursive call, plus two to start out with. I also put the "input-calculation" part in a loop, so I have a pretty good idea of performance minus startup overhead. And that, I can assure you, is preceived as instantaneous up until F-number 5500 and "fast" up until 17000-20000 (depends on the person). After that it slacks off until you reach 45065 (where I hit the maximum recursion depth) -- which I assure you will be "slow" pretty much everywhere. By comparison, Mathematica crawls when calculating number 50. And there's no perceived difference with Python, but my Python implementation doesn't do F-numbers beyond 998.
Well, the nasty-but-I-suspect-true answer is that it has a lot to do with the programmers. Many people complain about Java programs being slow -- but by comparison, I have both seen and written programs in Java that were not slow. And I have also seen plenty of code where objects were created all over the place where you just have to ask "why?". And why the programmer didn't bother caching one object and reusing, since that was also possible...
That aside, there's also the factor of perception (which is probably more important even than badly written code). You have to keep in mind that people's perception of the overall "speed" of a program is mostly dictated by the "speed" of the slowest part of that program. There's a small office suite out there on SourceForge somewhere which is pretty decent (word processor, basic spreadsheet, presentation package) and it performs rather nicely if you consider absolute numbers. But its perceived speed is bad because the JVM takes a relatively long time to get started.
Which you haven't had to do for nearly 60 years now -- think about it.
Errr... I don't see how I can put it any clearer than that... Over here, whenever we've had a new currency introduced to replace an old one (e.g euro for guilder or the new fl.100 note for the old one) there has been a short transition period after which the old currency has simply stopped being legal tender. After the transition, stores no longer accept the old stuff and except to the Dutch Central Bank it's just paper with some pretty printing on it.
If it's possible to exchange it at the central bank, why wouldn't a seller accept it as payment?
Because it is no longer currency as backed by the (in this case) Kingdom of The Netherlands. Any and all persons are beholden in this country to accept the official currency of the land as legal tender in a monetary exchange, but they are not beholden to accept anything else -- and most people don't. Of course it's not forbidden: a shopkeeper CAN agree to an exchange for another object that he deems of value (printed paper that used to be money, for instance) just as much as you can agree with me to swap your bicycle for my walkman. But most people do insist upon payment with official money.
Well, I can't very well be responsible for THAT.
"Why it isn't switching but branching out"
I hate to step on your ranting here, but -- I'm very sorry -- THAT doesn't require any special kind of geekiness to know. Anybody who saw Generations would have been able to tell you that much.
It survived the crippling space-time warping conditions near a temporal rift, despite not being completely outfitted, staffed and being under the command of an inept captain?
No no, that is not correct -- "old" money is not legal tender anymore. You can often exchange it for legal tender at face value at the central bank (up to a certain point) but you cannot purchase goods for it anymore.
As for the "national-to-Euro" echange that happened here in the Zone, there is also a time limit on exchanges. For old Dutch Guilders, you can exchange the coins until 01/01/2007 and notes until 01/01/2032. After those dates, they're just pieces of metal and prettily-printed bits of paper.
You're right, that is stupid -- there's absolutely no point in introducing new currency for security reasons if you're not going to replace the old currency....
Although, about the counterfeiting, I wouldn't be too sure it isn't rampant. After all, the U.S. Secret Service was founded to combat counterfeiting at a time when the amount of counterfeit money was estimated to be a third of the total portion of money available.