To further the issue.. Look at metalergy. As an EE undergrad, we learned about annealing. By very very carefully controlling the temperature and pressure of a substance, you can very slowly pureify it. Specifically if you melt a layer of a crystal, there are certain properties of the impurities (such as melting point) that will cause the impurities to stay in the liquid portion and shy away from the solid portion.. Thus by slowly moving the heated/liquidied portion throughout the material, you can purify to 20 9's.
Earth produces pure diamonds. How else if not by similar very slow and constant processes.
The catalysts for life too may very well be certain processes which require tremendous time and energy, progressing in a very natural (but to us unrecognized) manner.
We see all sorts of amazing phenomena in nature (self sustained fusion, material purification/separation). Hell, even the synthesis of oil is a natural process that has very little to do w/ dead dinosaurs.
The basic tenent, however, that if there is a natural process for evolution, then it must be reproduceable in our time.. If we can purify nuclear material, we can figure out ameno acid construction.
If not, then creationism is the only practical alternative. Forgot God, think of a programmer.. He takes unordered matter and organizes it through complex catylists into a self-organized and functioning entity.. There was an organizer prior to the programmer; namely the computer engineer.. And before him was the material-scientists and theoretical mathmetitions, etc. But to a self-contined, organized system that is a batch cron task (or a SIM avatar) there is no recognition of the origins of the diverse network of matter inside it's universe.
The practicality of creationism is the recognition of a pattern that is NOT random.
I'm not advocating one mechanism or another (catalytic random organization v.s. engineered synthesis). I am personally agnostic (which means you can 'never' 'know' so there's no value in asking). But the persuance of evolution as a potential solution could lead to breakthroughs in science (unless it is an incorrect hypothesis). The persuance of creationism, alternatively would mean we need to look in different ways for 'truth'.. Meaning ultimately the drug companies are right.. Random trying out of existing engineered life-forms is the only way to progress.
Why? Because if the music on iTMS doesn't have DRM, then it would be much easier for you to purchase music from iTMS and play it on any player out there.
Right idea, wrong direction.
It isn't that the music is selling the iPod, the iPod is selling the music. Apple is doing just fine w/ the iPod, DRM or not.. BUT, the clever part is that by having the iTunes player exclusively operate w/ their store-front, they have verticle integration. Similar to an MS platform. They can leverage one revenue stream against another.
If apple didn't have DRM in two forms, one that an iPod player is tied to a PC, and that iTunes is tied to the player + PC, then it would be easy for someone to use non-iTunes software, thereby breaking the vertical integration.
iTunes may or may not be lucrative (relative to profits from the iPod). But it's a stable platform of lock-in. Once you have $50 worth of iTunes (call it $25 of profit; less than the likely $100 of profit for a high-end iPod), then a person will be hesitant to throw all that away by moving to another PC software package (which doesn't support the DRM).
Throw in gift certificates / parental allowances for music purchases etc, and your invested interest grows and grows until lockin is inevetable.
Their store-front (visa v iTunes player) is like the AOL desktop of the 90's or IE/firefox toolbar or the google-task bar or of course the immensely lucrative stock windows desktop. It's real-estate as in central manhattan.
Is it possible that dark matter isn't additional matter at all, it's just a fourth force?
I suppose it could, but that wold be kind of like formulating geometry for the first time based entirely on a blurry photograph. I meant we have these huge super colliders which have given us pretty accurate measuements of the currently known forces. We've even fund that he weak and electro-magnetic fields perfectly align at certain temperatures. So without a way of testing, it still serves us best to fiddle with new theories. That is unless we can ever solve any of these damn string theory equatons.
Of course having sex with a leather spiked shoe would be considered normal in a Christian society right? (read as common male fetishes that I never uderstood)
It's a game. And more importantly, a business. They will do whatever they need to to keep maximum profitabiliy.
No, its a role playing game. And what they are talking about is censorship of role playing themes. When a GM disallows a popular theme in a fantasy genre, you find yourself another GM.
If you think patents are bad, just imagine what the trade secrets would look like if they weren't around. Getting in the door to Pfizer would be like crossing Checkpoint Charlie.
So what? Are people allowed to just stroll into data centers? Military compounds? Financial records offices? Sensitive data is just that.
And if you're planning on rewriting all of contract law (which is what you'd need, to get rid of non-competes and NDAs), then I'll take a little of whatever you're smoking
Why not? The government does it all the time. It forces multi-billion dollar re-writes of large segments of society because some jerks think they know what's best (for us or for their cofers).
Software patents suck. I'll agree with that; whoever let that one go through should be run out of Washington on a rail. Business process patents suck.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander? What fundamentally is different between writing software and inventing a toaster oven? The concept of money had so little to do with what people did 230 years ago (when patent law was written into the constitution). Franklen was an inventor, I'm sure invention was a hot topic back in the day with other noteable people... So they threw that straight into the constitution. That's it.. It seemed to work for them (just like slavery), so they wrote it in with all their other great ideas.
Do you think that "rewriting the law" was easy when they got rid of slavery? Hell the country went to war over it; one side (which had the luxury of not beingn negatively affected) stated the moral need to outload slavery. The other side, said it would undermine their livelihood; which was true.. So forgive me if I don't sympathise with the upheaval involved with righting past wrongs.
Patents were never a good idea, and as other's have posted, it is inherently evil.. The government can physically put me in jail for performing a life-saving action (creating my own medicine to save the life of a child). Granted this is a contrived case, but patent law is be extended at an exponential rate, soon life-sustaniing practices will start to become litigiously infringed on (because of disputes between cross patent holders).
And as for the rapid growth in this past century. Most of it came from war. When you have a monopsony (single payer, especially one willing to pay any sized bill), your incentives are all over the place. The space race, the advancement of airplane engines/car engines/jet engines. The advanement of chemistry during world war II was incredible. Nylon. All these things were not the prowess of patents. But the war-dollar funded advancment of survival.
What good is a patent on plutonium, if there can be only two producers and one buyer? But failing a patent, are we somehow without an over-abundance of this prohibitively expensive material?
If there is a public need for something.. There will be public funding (one way or another).
What patents promote is waste. A person that thinks that they'll win the lottory one day will waste an entire life's savings buying lottory tickets. That money could have been put into 5% CD's and literally earned millions of low-tax dollars. But no, they put thousands of dollars into lottoy tickets; hundreds of billions over an entire state.
A company that researches towards a patent, is one that is performing exhaustive research instead of intelligent research. By definition, Intelligent research is one that is performed intellectually.. And how expensive is intellect?
So what about the classic argument that it costs too much to approve of a new drug? The simple answer.. It doesn't have to.. It does because over the past 100 years, the government has found that people are willing to pay as much as they do; so the government mainains coersive requirements. If no company would risk spending 5 billion on a new drug's certification, then the government would have to rethink the process. Both government and the
Umm.. no.. It had 64bit memory addressing and 64bit long-word ALU capability. The 64bit long-word ALU have very little performance pentalty over the 32bit counter-parts (all pipes/stages were wide enough to operate on 64bit data). The CPU was timed to meet 64bit delay requirements, but multiplation and friends necessarily run slower on 64 v.s. 32bit operations. Instructions were still 32bit and it was still optimized for 32bit execution. If it were optimized for 64bit execution, then, like it does for 16,8,4,1bit operations, you'd have to emulate those operations as well. The basic word was still (like in almost all modern CPU's) 32bits.
The alpha was no more operationally 64bit than the AMD-64..
Damn shame, that. If they'd poured as much money into Alpha as they did into Itanic, they'd have a platform that would whomp all over everything currently in the marketplace.
I don't know that I agree. The alpha was a particular set of optimizations. Dual register files, branch-prediction hints. pure 32bit (sub-32 bit data access had to be emulated through a multi-step process). Deep pipeline (for it's day).
But at the same time, they purposefully witheld adding out-of-order execution (plays havoc w/ their highly optimized register configuration). Sparc had similar problems with their rolling register-stack.
I studied the alpha prior to the announcement that their new version would have out-of-order, so I don't know if they ever did go that route.
The point is that by adding all of the techniques that were employed by modern CPUs (aside from slightly higher speed memory), they would not have maintained much of an advantage. Their performance would be comparable to the AMD-64, but not much faster.
I'd still love to see the alpha kept alive, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, except it's price (for general work-station use).
And related to this: GARBAGE IN-GARBAGE OUT. A computer is not a thinking machine, it's only as smart as the data and programs you put into it.
Try giving someone verbal directions of how to get somewhere to someone.. It's exactly the same problem. You are no more or less likely to get the desired result than if you were communicating to a sufficiently advanced computer program.
The key problem is lack of shared context between the knowledge source and the querier.
There is usually an impeedence mismatch between any two sides of an interaction. Even when both perfectly speek the same protocol (e.g. RMI, CORBA, HTTP) without a translation, there is still "filtered" information which is lost by the sender or erroneously implied by the recipient. Sometimes this lost[/extra] information makes for subtle problems in random situations.
Say in human conversation there is a vocabulary word which differs in a particular region of the country.. So you're driving and you ask for directions. You both speak the King's English, but both of you have no idea that one of the key words in his directions has a different meaning to the two of you.
Then, at worst, you have two completely incompatible API's (e.g. different languages, differents paradigms of how to give directions, different degrees of memory retention).
Often also is the assymetry of capability and analysis of capability. Some things are easy to say, but hard to hear [properly]. It's second nature to give the directions for which you use to get to work, but it can be too overwhelming the first some someone hears it. It's the classic phrase "Skiing is easy", spoken by a seasoned skiier (who may have had special circumstances for when they learned to skii).
These impeedences are inherent, and thus there is little point in trying to resolve them. It requires effort on all party sides.. Software makers do their best to provide consistent and "intuitive" (as defined as consistent with the known context of the most common user) interfaces. But there is simply too much which can't be directly related to life-styles outside of computers (the only sure way of removing the learning curve). The McDonalds kiosk is the perfect example of full Software-side Context adaptation.. A natural human phenomena is to see food and grab it. So you make a display that has pictures of food items.. And the cashier points to the food item that the customer has conveyed (in human API). It probably requires the cashier to manually type in the dollar amount, which is a minor degree of deviation from human context. But this second part is really the point... It is too hard to adapt something more complex than shopping-carts into a human-computer interface.
Thus, you really really need a target audience when constructing such a book. You will simply not succeed in writing a general case. Too much would be redundant for casual users. And it would be too long if you provided both fundamentals and common useage techniques. The lenght would disuade absolute beginners (or people that think they know what they're doing).
The idea might be something like wikipedia.. But with front-ends sufficient.... Namely, "Moms" wikipedia links (in the order you think is appropriate), "dads work" wikipedia links, etc.
The key here is that the deficient end of the API physically employs their experience tree towards a topic; that's the only way of memorizing.. Encyclopedias are nexuses for research and tend to generate tangential analysis.. And it is in this tangency that enough human experience will occur that long term memory will be tickled.
If all you provide is a bulleted list of links that can fit on a single page.. Then the browser will not feel overwhelmed initially.. You benifit from the peer-review already found in these online sources... And they can take things at their own pace; returning to the starting point at times of their choosing.
It doesn't matter how we did it, the the West (led by the US) won.
*cough* bullshit.. *cough* As a US military brat.. I can confidently say that the cold was is still raging. At what point did we install a southern Baptist president in the Kremlin? At what point did China bow down to our military prowess and disarm? At what point did Cuba become an active friendly trading partner? At what point did Venesueala renounce communism. At what point did our second-to-none military expense demilitarize (as end-of-wars always do).
The above comments suggest that a Regan/BushII era US government would not be able to define cold victory.
In fact, by what metric do you define the ending, MUCH LESS, the winning of the cold war?
The cold war is the defacto-state-of-war that the US maintained after World War II. It was the fool-me-once,... fool-me-twice sort of lesson we learned between WWI and WWII (as we did de-militarize after WWI; we had no way of funding it).
The cold war is similar to the hundred-years war between England and France.
BUT, the way we've framed the cold war, half of the earth is our enemy. The fact that the Kremlen took a 10 year haitis (note that they're back) is irrelevant.. There has been zero change to the US military stance due to that 10 year unnofficial state of bankruptsy in the former USSR (and subsequent divestiture of real-estate and social entitlement).
I don't really have an opinion on the topic of Europe; they're rather irrelevant from my perspective. But don't echo the patriotic bullshit that congressmen would love to have you believe happened on their watch (both democrats and republicans like to make this unsubstantiated claim).
Furthermore, there is the idiocy that prevails that concept of "freedom since the berlin wall collapse".. Again, this was an artifact of the USSR giving up real-estate and social entitlements.. The satelyte states were simply costing too much. The republic wasn't cohesive enough, so Russia-proper rethought and retooled. But nationals are indeed regaining power, and their military might (coupled with allegences to China) make them an ever more formidable opponent. And I say opponent because the US and Russia are going back to cold-war days of rabid UN disagreement. And on issues of military (which this falsely named war on terrorism will surely procure) will eventually trigger a stand-still between old enemies.
See if we won any sort of war then.
The only reason we can "claim" that we won a war, is because there are no battles to disprove that to J-Q-public. But if there ever was a blocade of military ships, I would be curious to see the US reaction. Nuclear power still precludes us from directly fireing on said ships. And the nukes on all sides were never decommissioned by my last count.
Still, it's better that the general public doesn't feel the same degree of tension. Tense public causes tense politicians causes itchy trigger fingers. But what I don't like is the uncautious arrogance that has replaced fear in American eyes.. We believe that we can bully any other country (though we don't call it bullying; because we're the good guys right?), and that they have to give in, because "we're #1" (as if that ever stopped any challenger in history).
And it is the arrogance that I fight. The general arrogance of the US public, and the arrogance of this thread.
The other possibility is that iPod users are less technically savy.
Take two users of equal economic status (cash strapped; lets say college students).
One is technically savy, so they see that they can manage with a much cheaper MP3 player or simply use the desktop available to them at most locations (if you're a nerd and always in front of the computer, why would you need a portable?).
The other is a business or art student that wants something light cheap, cool (read status-symbol-esk). THey probably also own a powerbook for the same reason.
or increase clock speed), and adds in DDR2 (667MHz and 800MHz) which some people say will increase performance by between 5% and 15%.
And I've read other reviews that show an actual decrease in performance by moving to DDR2. Sorry for not providing the research here, but I'll simply say with that caveat that I've heard that DDR2 has greater latency, so the extra "bursting" speed is barely able to compensate. Note that memory clock speed has almost nothing to do with performance, and often times, you get the exact same core memory of the slower speed technology, just strapped on with a higher-speed BUS. The result? Same memory with many many more "wait" cycles, but really fast burst (of 4 successive clocks to fill a cache-line). That's the difference between "value" memory and over-priced memory.
But what is significant is that if you compare said value to premium memory for simple DDR, you still don't see a tremendous performance boost.
Dude... The words FX and value should never go together.. Just like Intel's EE editions.
You most definitely do NOT get your value from the incremental extra performance the extra cache (and BUS) provides.
The point of this line of CPU's is called sucker takers. Those that want something similar in performance to tomorrows CPU's from today's CPUs.
It's like getting extra performance out of an economy car by putting expensive booster rockets on it.. Yes, technically it goes faster, but only by putting yester-year's over-priced technology on it (e.g. large caches, more pins).
Don't get me wrong, the FX and EE line are great for certain types of applications. But value has almost nothing to do with it. Most applications can better have the money spent elsewhere; HD-RAID, 10k RPM drives, more memory (to disable swap file), instant-on, optimally recompiled software (in the Linux/BSD world), using a 64bit OS (to utilize the hidden registers and more optimal virtual memory archetecture), and in this case, a MUCH more expensive vid card ($500 vid cards are insane, until you compare that to deciding between a $300 CPU and $1000 CPU). The idea that 'the CPU is a black-box' hurts purchasing decisions, because we ask the question, 'how much money for the fastest possible black-box?' CPU companies can get really creative at answering that question; and they'll love you for it.
That being said, AMD has held a tremendous $ + heat + PWR + performance edge over Intel for a long long while (though not always in every category). The real issue is that very recently, they've been able to match Intel's stability, though definitely not in terms of 3'rd party hardware integration stability. Historically motherboard driver support has sucked ass (MB makers don't devote as many resources to maintaining their AMD lines as they have less volume). Likewise for video card vendors (though I can't tell if this is the fault of the MB or the vid card). All too often, I read message boards where the same vid card is rock-solid on an intel board, with a caveat of 'yeah, it crashes on this or that AMD-based board'. This isn't AMD's direct fault, and the success of AMD's current line has helped MB manufacturers devote more resources.
And if you're dealing with servers, it's probably more cost effective to go with the opteron line (though a price premium definitely exists there as well). More often than not, a server application is multi-tasked/mult-threaded, and would rather have a greater number of slower CPUs and even more interestingly, independent memory banks for each CPU. Here the extra money is more proportionate to greater performance. But definitely not for video gaminig of photo-shopping. (What are two dual core CPU's going to do for the 2 or 3 threads of video conversion?)
Science can't tell you what the purpose of life is, or if a war is just or not.
Ha! but in fact, science does tell us if war is just or not.. In fact, most every war waged this century had more to do with the scientific method than religion. Logical constructs of use-cases. Quantitatively weighing the human cost against the abstract political gain.
War is a math problem, just like effective memory compaction.
Any given "moral" issue can be socialogically deconstructed. And just like inconsistencies between quantum and reletevism, current gaps in our understanding of social moral delemmas are only a PHD thesis away.
Since you're trying to use semantics. Then I will try to as well. Science is certainly a philosophy.. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=philosoph y However it is definitely not a theology http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=theology. Atheism, on the other hand is a theology in that it is defined as a philosophy about theology; namely that the sacred is not present in the philosophy (except recursively from the definition).
The definitions I've linked to are very primative (especially about atheism and theology), but I wanted a consistent reference point.
As the philosophy of science is largely technical (the process of deduction, successive validation of ever more accurate mathmatical descriptions of physical phenomena, perfecting the a knowledge of cause and effect, etc.), it is in itself not a theology.
Now there is nothing in the scientific method to preclude dogma. The the laws of Gallelao, the laws of Neuton, the laws of Maxwell, the laws of Einstein, the laws of whatever great thinker in the future that puts these guys in their place. A dogma of a particular period of time is held against heresy, and we label the successful deviants as forward thinking; other's we debase as "cracks". Just as in religion (Saints and heretics)
But this is because the very thing that develops Religion is intrinsic to human nature... The need for "nomos" (defining truth). Once we think we find it, we are internally terrified by anything that threatens it. Even those that presumably welcome if not seek change are at a profound level really just re-seeking the same stable truth that they find present in the merely slight changes of venue.
It is important, therefore, to distinguish Theology from what we normally think of as Religion. Religion is the socialization of theology. There is a likewise socialization of science. The presentation of this article as an answer to ID is a perfect manefestation of this socialization of Science. I'm not sure what the best word to describe this process is; you choose to call it religion, but I and other posters believe this is in error.
I do, however, agree with your underlying principle - that science has a common root with religion; the thing I and some authors call nomos. More importantly it is something which transcends the particulars of the philosophy, and intrinsicly fights for a life of it's own.
As a slight tangent, but to further the parallel. Philosophy involves a logical method. And there are many great thinkers who have applied this logical method to Theology. The allusive ontological proof; the logical deduction of God, is a perfect example. This proof holds that there exists a set of axioms which validate the empiracal aspect of God. In my opinion, they are all crap. But no more can be said about the Big Bang or of evolution as the source of diversity on Earth. (Though I personally don't believe in the evidence of the Big Bang, but I do believe in the evidence of evolution).
Put in another way, those that apply logic to Theology, are taking certain humanly important (sacrad) phenomena and treating them as axioms. It is perfectly permissable to apply the scientific method to this process to discover and eliminate logical strains. I feel that the ontological proof is largely moot, but more interestingly are proofs of morality. But now we're into the social sciences. So again, we're merely trading our starting points; our axioms.
Ruby allows you to name the temporaries which is nicer.
Java is less elegant, but no less powerful (using things like apache-commons) for (int item :
Collections.sort(
CollectionUtils.tranform(
CollectionUtils.select(
Arrays.asList(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11),
filter),
transformer),
comparator)) {
stream.writeln("Hello " + item); }
Where filter, transformer and comparator need to be separately instantiated but are of standard interfaces. Often, a class will define appropriate query/mutating tools alongside it; making the above seamless. And it is often that an object intrinsicly extends such services (such as Comparable).
Moreover, you have greater control in the Java world (and by extension.Net) because the intermediate sets can be internally unique, ordered, event-triggering, read-only, auto-generating, etc. It's harder to do this in many other languages, or at least the principle of least surprise does not come into play in such languages (tied variables in perl can be upsetting if not feature-incomplete).
If by "change the way you program", you guys mean that now you'll start using this paradigm, then good for you. Of course, if all you want to do is see how many items in a set match, then you're introducing a world of hurt using this technique.. E.G. a non-exhaustive scan/search is much more efficient than instantiating/processing intermediate sets (even if you're transparently deferring that thinking to the database layer). Not that every use of such a syntax produces such temporary data. But I find that in the rare circumstances that I do operate on data in Java in such a way, there are concerns. While I am new to LINQ, I doubt these concerns are obviated. I'm sure that set-based data access isn't manditory; you can always revert to procedural programming when it is more clear/scaleable.
Oh, and a there are a good few bugs related to conflicting definitions early on in the codebase. The scope of 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' and the scope of 'Kill all the unbelievers in the land I have given to you' really need to be more clearly defined.
Dude, that's easy.. "Kill" is subjective, of course, just like the "fair use" clause in copyright law. And the subjectiveness is to be resolved by a "reasonable body". And of course, by reason, what we mean is "what could a judge get away with if he ruled one way or another". The judge that was in charge when that particular law was famously written (not that it was profound or original or anything) was Mosus.
Mosus was the judge and jury of his day.. And many a rabbi has used "case law" to affirm 'morality' ever since.. I wouldn't even notice such a peculiarity except for one of the few times when the books of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John refer to Mosus.. Specifically in discussion of divorse (an issue which provides me perverse joy in realizing that 60% of all proselytizing Christians are going to hell over by disobeying). Mosus "ruled" that divorse was 'legal' and hense moral. Jesus later repealed that law, stating that the moral authority was unduelly coersed.
Thus, morality is officially a humanly judicial act. You may famously ask yourself "What would (insert your favorite blasphemous idol here) do?", and that's great, until you realize that you know about as much of what an alleged omnipotent/omnicient/omnipresent being would do as an ant knows about filling out the deductions on your tax form.
So you have two choices.. Wait to have a psychadellic experience which would solidify your sense of truth, or accept that whether an effective omnicient/omnipotent power is dropping your clues out there or not, you have to rely on what your God-given senses provide to you (including the horribly under-recognized sense of memory).
Course that makes it hard for a governing body to convince people that Anarchy is really a bad idea. So on that thread.. Praise be to God. (My new Pascal philosophy)
For the same reason people sky-dive. There is an experience associated w/ loud music that is almost identical to roller-coasters or other laughter-inducing exhileration.
If something isn't making you laugh/scream/cheer, it probably isn't thrilling you.
Why would you spend $30 to watch the same crap that you can get on a CD unless it had a unique sense of enthrallment?
While you may not care for the thrill of volume, you're probably in the minority (especially dependent on the genre).
I go to dance clubs exclusively for the reason that cops don't knock on my appartment door that way; e.g. volume.
That being said, as a sibling of two 90% deaf people (from birth), I'm very conscious about loud noises. I will actually cover my ears during concerts so that I can regulate just how loud the volume is. Moreover, if I nearly completely cut off the sound for long enough, my ears soften to the volume level and I can uncover my ears slightly and have the same "thrill" but at 1/5 the volume.. I have to continuously cycle through this starvation of sound so that I don't need full volume most of the time; and can still achieve periodic thrill.
Obviously I'm being anal about it; trying to have my cake and eat it too. But it works. The problem is this sort of attention to detail wouldn't be labeled as 'cool', so it would never fly for the general public.
Your examples of number manipulation is contrived and very scripting-language centric.. As a VB, Perl (Ruby), Python user, one would be very familiar with "opaque" data types.. And in fact, the process of manipulating said opaque types is half of the power of the system.
Perl easily converts between raw UNIX data structures (passed in and out of c-functions) to strings to integers and back.. You can increment file-names for goodness sakes.
Such practice is so wrought with potential error. In Perl for example. there are rare cases when you have to perform the following:
sub foo {... return $res . ""; }
To make sure that you've removed all the magic from the scalar.
The process of converting back and forth between strings and integers is far too prevalent in these languages.. But the very nature of Perl is "Practical EXTRACTION and REPORT Language" and thus is warranted.
Java, on the other hand treats inputs like inputs and outputs like outputs. You perform explicit filtration in both directions. And there are very clear operations that differentiate themselves.
Whenever you're performing conversions, these are the tools of the trade (as far as J2SE is concerned). Integer.parseInt(String) is loosely deprecated.. NumberFormat is strongly prefered since it is far more flexible.
When using the Formatter classes, you get i18n almost for free (most libraries that use them wrap some sort of ResourceBundle).
Larry Wall famously said that similar things should look similar and different things should look different.
When you're performing arithmetic, you shouldn't have to worry about accidently changing from a short to an int to a long to a double to a string to a ref to a magic token and back. But in perl, passing a scalar around can do just that (as the object is muteable), and become a nightmare in complicated routines.
In Java, numerics and strings are immuteable on purpose.. It is focused 1'st and foremost on processing; input/output only secondarily. Nothing wrong with the perl-and-friends focus; that's their main job.
Just to make sure we're on the same page.. Java 1.5 provides behind the scene conversion between primative and Number objects. So Integer i; int j;
j = i + j + 1; works just fine. Though it's really just syntactic sugar for:
j = i.intValue() + j + 1;
Next, you may have an argument as to whether the entire Math and Random library should have been built in to Number.
Thereby facilitating obscure stuff like:
int i; i.nextGausian();
I think it's perfectly acceptible to pass a Number into a Math or Random library, since they really are conceptually separate entities.. Number should only contain material relevant to the identification of a particular number. The processing of that number is the job of some other entity.
Plus by making it a native compiled language it will end most of the major limitaions of Java.
Don't see how compiling Java to assembly solves any problems dude. In fact it just adds new ones (3rd party library upgrades require recompiling the entire tree).
If you're talking about client-applications, then either you should move to a backgrounded web-service w/ an HTML front-end, or you're talking about a monolythic application like IntelliJ-IDEA/eclipse where startup speed is a non-factor and normal execution performance is perfectly acceptible (so long as you have 768Meg minimum on the machine).
I liked your post, it was amusing. Just a few nit-picks though.
Cripple the syntax of C++
It's not fair to say this, because at the time of Java, C++ SUCKED!! If you used 3 different compilers, your C++ WOULD NOT COMPILE on all 3. gcc (g++ or whatever it was called back then), sunCC, and MC C++ are three main ones that come to mind. Hell, C++ was originally a HACK to C. I remember running the "CC" SUN compiler which literally could spit out the intermediate C code. Remember directives like extern "C" { } or whatever the hell that was.. It just told the pre-processor to skip that section when translating C++ symbols.
I grew up through the normal CIS channels.. BASIC -> Pascal -> Lisp -> C -> C++. After my time in school Java became popular in CIS circles; Perl never caught on in Academics; I'm sure because it wasn't elegant and was too hard for many professors/TAs to learn [well]. But I remember all to well the shere joy of programming in Java compared to C++ (both language and runtime environment). And believe me, I've had to do my fair share of time back in "c" land.. I never saw C++ as a main-stay.. I've only heard about it in the Windows world.
In fact, two words really put the API issue in its place: 1. Perl 2. CPAN.
I agree that CPAN is an EXCELLENT resource.. Primarily because even small-time crooks like me can post code there. Java doesn't have as well centralized a public upload. Moreover CPAN has excellent unit-test/code-style and versioning management/enforcement. That being said www.ibiblio.org/maven is a credible competator. Many commerical sites post their public jars there... And extraction of jars is trivial compared to extraction of CPAN modules.. Often, you have to be root to extract/install CPAN modules (unless you wish to deploy user-owned instances of perl). The download time for a jar is all you need, compared to the sometimes HOUR-LONG compile-time of a CPAN module (since it almost always has c-code).
Most of the success of CPAN was due to putting thing perl-wrappers around existing C-libraries. So of course CPAN grew overnight.. Java, libraries are almost exclusively "100% pure" (as they're called).. There are plenty of CPAN 100% pure libraries, but I think if you stripped out all the non-pure libraries, CPAN wouldn't be as impressive. What is impressive about the Java world is that just about all the functionality of the CPAN library is found in the java world. You don't see as many libraries, because many functions are aggregated together or come as stock (which perl does more and more of).
This isn't to disparage CPAN in any way; I love that resource.
put it on a VM to cripple performance
Yeah yeah.. I have to respond to this even though you seeded your response. An incredible strength of runtime compilation is the support of multi-megabyte memory-resident libraries. Re-organizing only the code that is used into compact sections.
I think the point the original poster was making is that tecnically JSPs are not part of J2SE, they are part of J2EE
Except that most of J2EE got rolled into Java 1.5. Moreover, 'most' of J2EE was as easily accessible as any other 3'rd party JAR which makes J2EE as ubiquitous as a CPAN module for perl. Especially when you use auto-download tools like maven.
If a 5-7% sales tax will make you or break you, I'd say that you already can't afford what you're buying.
5% is a pretty good profit margin these days. Take the past 15 years of computer-related development; most of which operated in tax-free status.. All of which HIGHLY competative, either losing money or at best hoping for 5% profit.. Now throw a shock to the system, suck 5% right off the top in one year. Take people that are 95% in debt (meaning they are currently able to make minimum payments, but their only ability to make new purchases is solely dependent on credit-line increases). Now throw 5% to the cost of a non-trivial fraction of what they purchase.
Incidently, I count the 5% profit margin topic because a 7% increase in price will have between 1 and 5% reduction in revenue due to reduced sales (depending on the elasticity of demand for the product).
Also, factor a sudden spike in the price of goods into inflation.. We're talking about a projected growth of % of GDP for online goods and services with or without a tax increase. That fraction now increased in price and reduced in revenue; favoring inflation, but hurting fundamentals (velocity of money, savings rates, etc).
But again, the short-term for municipalities can only be good.. And the strength of a state lasts as long as the term of the elected representative.
Our government needs refactoring.. There are tons of books on the topic.. The Federal government is the largest US land holder. It is the largest umbrella organization, employs the most people. None of this is legitimate in the constitution.. The Federal Government was supposed to be small such that we DO have monolitic super-sized state governments and micro-status small state governments. The reason we were only allowed to tax imports/exports was because the government really only needed to pay for international diplomacy and a federal military.. BUT, the federal military was never allowed to be a standing military; only one used during "declared wars". We've not declared war since WW II, and consequently we've not stood down our military down since WW II (the only time in our history we've had a standing military w/ no officially declared war).
Essentially WW II changed America; screw September 11'th, that just changed the mind set of a simpleton (so he could go back on most of his 2000 campaign promises). The cold war created the modern US beuracracy. We need to declare peace, and disband the current US government. Then maybe we can deal with that other near WW II related task; the great-depression's new-deal.
I have no problem with the federal government dictating everything about money and how it's used.. I just don't want the Federal government to touch the money. (the conflict of interest)
The US constitution was designed with the idea of a lack of trust of government. We elected representatives not so we can pick a good candidate, but so we can get rid of a bad one. We gave no single individual control over everything, we gave competing institutions the ability to strip control away once abuse was discovered.
But what happened was that the institutions fought for more control; using national disasters as justifications for their new-found control.. All 3 branches did so. Judiciaries essentially wrote their own laws by making judicial orders of conduct. Ledgislatures wrote new powers to themselves.. And the executives declared everything national security and thereby unknowable and untouchable (thanks again to cold war).
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We are currently in a dual-party system where each represents drunken uniform power. Deviation from the wishes of the central party has such reprecusions that it is unheard-of anymore. You simply can not get to an elected office w/o expousing uniform mindset. The fact that we have two parties is merely a way of addressing public discontent. But the more power the party gains (in all 3 branches), the more control it has over our minutely lives with WHICH to cause discontent.
An ideal system is one that is hierarchical in scope; just like a good application. Each scope should not contain any fascet that does not directly relate to it's scope. In this, complexities, complications, bugs, redresses are directly related to the function of that tier of operation.
If the federal government deals with the ability of US citizens to live and move between the borders of states and the country.. Then all it's ledgislation and legal rulings should be definable in those terms.. The construction of a baseball stadium has NOTHING to do with these terms.. Realistically nor does the maintanance of an interstate highway or regional school systems. And again, probably is completely unrelated to hurricane relief (historically it hasn't anyway). Bush has all but declared war on Iraq, so technically its raising of funds for that purpose are constitutionally correct (though his actions are morally questionable at best). Historically, we have a lot of precedence in attacking countries that give our citizens abroad trouble (tripoli, etc). For those that say "but what about my state? How can I afford public schools, retirement funds, etc".. My answer is that California, Rhode Island and Delaware are doing pretty well, thank you very much. And that's pretty much the run of them.
Be cheap software available to help retailers work this out.
But now you're talking about commercial software riding inside of open-source platforms. The two simply don't mix. The concept of a deployable shopping-cart, for example doesn't work, if you are now forced to ship proprietary code (which has licenses that restricts you from doing so).
Language-use is also significant.. There are web sites written in Lisp/scheme-whatever.. I highly doubt it is a trivial matter to "plug-in" commercial software to such sites..
Business software has historically been a windows-centric or expensive enterprise-platform solution. quick-books, etc. What about very low-cost, medium-volume web services? Now their ability to charge money for their service is contingent apon them finding an integration solution that didn't use to be needed.
Yes there will be a wealth of solutions, but not immediately, so many companies will be in non-compliance for some time to come. And most will be forced to rewrite their aplications (another 2000 switchover).
All this to facilitate a tax on the poor (sales tax). I've lived in sales-tax-free states all my life and am frustrated by the need to have clunky sales taxes applied going forward; it's just a step backwards.
Slashdot Mirror
To further the issue.. Look at metalergy. As an EE undergrad, we learned about annealing. By very very carefully controlling the temperature and pressure of a substance, you can very slowly pureify it. Specifically if you melt a layer of a crystal, there are certain properties of the impurities (such as melting point) that will cause the impurities to stay in the liquid portion and shy away from the solid portion.. Thus by slowly moving the heated/liquidied portion throughout the material, you can purify to 20 9's.
Earth produces pure diamonds. How else if not by similar very slow and constant processes.
The catalysts for life too may very well be certain processes which require tremendous time and energy, progressing in a very natural (but to us unrecognized) manner.
We see all sorts of amazing phenomena in nature (self sustained fusion, material purification/separation). Hell, even the synthesis of oil is a natural process that has very little to do w/ dead dinosaurs.
The basic tenent, however, that if there is a natural process for evolution, then it must be reproduceable in our time.. If we can purify nuclear material, we can figure out ameno acid construction.
If not, then creationism is the only practical alternative. Forgot God, think of a programmer.. He takes unordered matter and organizes it through complex catylists into a self-organized and functioning entity.. There was an organizer prior to the programmer; namely the computer engineer.. And before him was the material-scientists and theoretical mathmetitions, etc. But to a self-contined, organized system that is a batch cron task (or a SIM avatar) there is no recognition of the origins of the diverse network of matter inside it's universe.
The practicality of creationism is the recognition of a pattern that is NOT random.
I'm not advocating one mechanism or another (catalytic random organization v.s. engineered synthesis). I am personally agnostic (which means you can 'never' 'know' so there's no value in asking). But the persuance of evolution as a potential solution could lead to breakthroughs in science (unless it is an incorrect hypothesis). The persuance of creationism, alternatively would mean we need to look in different ways for 'truth'.. Meaning ultimately the drug companies are right.. Random trying out of existing engineered life-forms is the only way to progress.
Why? Because if the music on iTMS doesn't have DRM, then it would be much easier for you to purchase music from iTMS and play it on any player out there.
Right idea, wrong direction.
It isn't that the music is selling the iPod, the iPod is selling the music. Apple is doing just fine w/ the iPod, DRM or not.. BUT, the clever part is that by having the iTunes player exclusively operate w/ their store-front, they have verticle integration. Similar to an MS platform. They can leverage one revenue stream against another.
If apple didn't have DRM in two forms, one that an iPod player is tied to a PC, and that iTunes is tied to the player + PC, then it would be easy for someone to use non-iTunes software, thereby breaking the vertical integration.
iTunes may or may not be lucrative (relative to profits from the iPod). But it's a stable platform of lock-in. Once you have $50 worth of iTunes (call it $25 of profit; less than the likely $100 of profit for a high-end iPod), then a person will be hesitant to throw all that away by moving to another PC software package (which doesn't support the DRM).
Throw in gift certificates / parental allowances for music purchases etc, and your invested interest grows and grows until lockin is inevetable.
Their store-front (visa v iTunes player) is like the AOL desktop of the 90's or IE/firefox toolbar or the google-task bar or of course the immensely lucrative stock windows desktop. It's real-estate as in central manhattan.
Is it possible that dark matter isn't additional matter at all, it's just a fourth force?
I suppose it could, but that wold be kind of like formulating geometry for the first time based entirely on a blurry photograph. I meant we have these huge super colliders which have given us pretty accurate measuements of the currently known forces. We've even fund that he weak and electro-magnetic fields perfectly align at certain temperatures. So without a way of testing, it still serves us best to fiddle with new theories. That is unless we can ever solve any of these damn string theory equatons.
Of course having sex with a leather spiked shoe would be considered normal in a Christian society right? (read as common male fetishes that I never uderstood)
It's a game. And more importantly, a business. They will do whatever they need to to keep maximum profitabiliy.
No, its a role playing game. And what they are talking about is censorship of role playing themes. When a GM disallows a popular theme in a fantasy genre, you find yourself another GM.
If you think patents are bad, just imagine what the trade secrets would look like if they weren't around. Getting in the door to Pfizer would be like crossing Checkpoint Charlie.
So what? Are people allowed to just stroll into data centers? Military compounds? Financial records offices? Sensitive data is just that.
And if you're planning on rewriting all of contract law (which is what you'd need, to get rid of non-competes and NDAs), then I'll take a little of whatever you're smoking
Why not? The government does it all the time. It forces multi-billion dollar re-writes of large segments of society because some jerks think they know what's best (for us or for their cofers).
Software patents suck. I'll agree with that; whoever let that one go through should be run out of Washington on a rail. Business process patents suck.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander? What fundamentally is different between writing software and inventing a toaster oven? The concept of money had so little to do with what people did 230 years ago (when patent law was written into the constitution). Franklen was an inventor, I'm sure invention was a hot topic back in the day with other noteable people... So they threw that straight into the constitution. That's it.. It seemed to work for them (just like slavery), so they wrote it in with all their other great ideas.
Do you think that "rewriting the law" was easy when they got rid of slavery? Hell the country went to war over it; one side (which had the luxury of not beingn negatively affected) stated the moral need to outload slavery. The other side, said it would undermine their livelihood; which was true.. So forgive me if I don't sympathise with the upheaval involved with righting past wrongs.
Patents were never a good idea, and as other's have posted, it is inherently evil.. The government can physically put me in jail for performing a life-saving action (creating my own medicine to save the life of a child). Granted this is a contrived case, but patent law is be extended at an exponential rate, soon life-sustaniing practices will start to become litigiously infringed on (because of disputes between cross patent holders).
And as for the rapid growth in this past century. Most of it came from war. When you have a monopsony (single payer, especially one willing to pay any sized bill), your incentives are all over the place. The space race, the advancement of airplane engines/car engines/jet engines. The advanement of chemistry during world war II was incredible. Nylon. All these things were not the prowess of patents. But the war-dollar funded advancment of survival.
What good is a patent on plutonium, if there can be only two producers and one buyer? But failing a patent, are we somehow without an over-abundance of this prohibitively expensive material?
If there is a public need for something.. There will be public funding (one way or another).
What patents promote is waste. A person that thinks that they'll win the lottory one day will waste an entire life's savings buying lottory tickets. That money could have been put into 5% CD's and literally earned millions of low-tax dollars. But no, they put thousands of dollars into lottoy tickets; hundreds of billions over an entire state.
A company that researches towards a patent, is one that is performing exhaustive research instead of intelligent research. By definition, Intelligent research is one that is performed intellectually.. And how expensive is intellect?
So what about the classic argument that it costs too much to approve of a new drug? The simple answer.. It doesn't have to.. It does because over the past 100 years, the government has found that people are willing to pay as much as they do; so the government mainains coersive requirements. If no company would risk spending 5 billion on a new drug's certification, then the government would have to rethink the process. Both government and the
Re:Alpha was 64-bit you nincompoop
Umm.. no.. It had 64bit memory addressing and 64bit long-word ALU capability. The 64bit long-word ALU have very little performance pentalty over the 32bit counter-parts (all pipes/stages were wide enough to operate on 64bit data). The CPU was timed to meet 64bit delay requirements, but multiplation and friends necessarily run slower on 64 v.s. 32bit operations. Instructions were still 32bit and it was still optimized for 32bit execution. If it were optimized for 64bit execution, then, like it does for 16,8,4,1bit operations, you'd have to emulate those operations as well. The basic word was still (like in almost all modern CPU's) 32bits.
The alpha was no more operationally 64bit than the AMD-64..
Damn shame, that. If they'd poured as much money into Alpha as they did into Itanic, they'd have a platform that would whomp all over everything currently in the marketplace.
I don't know that I agree. The alpha was a particular set of optimizations. Dual register files, branch-prediction hints. pure 32bit (sub-32 bit data access had to be emulated through a multi-step process). Deep pipeline (for it's day).
But at the same time, they purposefully witheld adding out-of-order execution (plays havoc w/ their highly optimized register configuration). Sparc had similar problems with their rolling register-stack.
I studied the alpha prior to the announcement that their new version would have out-of-order, so I don't know if they ever did go that route.
The point is that by adding all of the techniques that were employed by modern CPUs (aside from slightly higher speed memory), they would not have maintained much of an advantage. Their performance would be comparable to the AMD-64, but not much faster.
I'd still love to see the alpha kept alive, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, except it's price (for general work-station use).
And related to this: GARBAGE IN-GARBAGE OUT. A computer is not a thinking machine, it's only as smart as the data and programs you put into it.
Try giving someone verbal directions of how to get somewhere to someone.. It's exactly the same problem. You are no more or less likely to get the desired result than if you were communicating to a sufficiently advanced computer program.
The key problem is lack of shared context between the knowledge source and the querier.
There is usually an impeedence mismatch between any two sides of an interaction. Even when both perfectly speek the same protocol (e.g. RMI, CORBA, HTTP) without a translation, there is still "filtered" information which is lost by the sender or erroneously implied by the recipient. Sometimes this lost[/extra] information makes for subtle problems in random situations.
Say in human conversation there is a vocabulary word which differs in a particular region of the country.. So you're driving and you ask for directions. You both speak the King's English, but both of you have no idea that one of the key words in his directions has a different meaning to the two of you.
Then, at worst, you have two completely incompatible API's (e.g. different languages, differents paradigms of how to give directions, different degrees of memory retention).
Often also is the assymetry of capability and analysis of capability. Some things are easy to say, but hard to hear [properly]. It's second nature to give the directions for which you use to get to work, but it can be too overwhelming the first some someone hears it. It's the classic phrase "Skiing is easy", spoken by a seasoned skiier (who may have had special circumstances for when they learned to skii).
These impeedences are inherent, and thus there is little point in trying to resolve them. It requires effort on all party sides.. Software makers do their best to provide consistent and "intuitive" (as defined as consistent with the known context of the most common user) interfaces. But there is simply too much which can't be directly related to life-styles outside of computers (the only sure way of removing the learning curve). The McDonalds kiosk is the perfect example of full Software-side Context adaptation.. A natural human phenomena is to see food and grab it. So you make a display that has pictures of food items.. And the cashier points to the food item that the customer has conveyed (in human API). It probably requires the cashier to manually type in the dollar amount, which is a minor degree of deviation from human context. But this second part is really the point... It is too hard to adapt something more complex than shopping-carts into a human-computer interface.
Thus, you really really need a target audience when constructing such a book. You will simply not succeed in writing a general case. Too much would be redundant for casual users. And it would be too long if you provided both fundamentals and common useage techniques. The lenght would disuade absolute beginners (or people that think they know what they're doing).
The idea might be something like wikipedia.. But with front-ends sufficient.... Namely, "Moms" wikipedia links (in the order you think is appropriate), "dads work" wikipedia links, etc.
The key here is that the deficient end of the API physically employs their experience tree towards a topic; that's the only way of memorizing.. Encyclopedias are nexuses for research and tend to generate tangential analysis.. And it is in this tangency that enough human experience will occur that long term memory will be tickled.
If all you provide is a bulleted list of links that can fit on a single page.. Then the browser will not feel overwhelmed initially.. You benifit from the peer-review already found in these online sources... And they can take things at their own pace; returning to the starting point at times of their choosing.
It doesn't matter how we did it, the the West (led by the US) won.
... fool-me-twice sort of lesson we learned between WWI and WWII (as we did de-militarize after WWI; we had no way of funding it).
*cough* bullshit.. *cough*
As a US military brat.. I can confidently say that the cold was is still raging. At what point did we install a southern Baptist president in the Kremlin? At what point did China bow down to our military prowess and disarm? At what point did Cuba become an active friendly trading partner? At what point did Venesueala renounce communism. At what point did our second-to-none military expense demilitarize (as end-of-wars always do).
The above comments suggest that a Regan/BushII era US government would not be able to define cold victory.
In fact, by what metric do you define the ending, MUCH LESS, the winning of the cold war?
The cold war is the defacto-state-of-war that the US maintained after World War II. It was the fool-me-once,
The cold war is similar to the hundred-years war between England and France.
BUT, the way we've framed the cold war, half of the earth is our enemy. The fact that the Kremlen took a 10 year haitis (note that they're back) is irrelevant.. There has been zero change to the US military stance due to that 10 year unnofficial state of bankruptsy in the former USSR (and subsequent divestiture of real-estate and social entitlement).
I don't really have an opinion on the topic of Europe; they're rather irrelevant from my perspective. But don't echo the patriotic bullshit that congressmen would love to have you believe happened on their watch (both democrats and republicans like to make this unsubstantiated claim).
Furthermore, there is the idiocy that prevails that concept of "freedom since the berlin wall collapse".. Again, this was an artifact of the USSR giving up real-estate and social entitlements.. The satelyte states were simply costing too much. The republic wasn't cohesive enough, so Russia-proper rethought and retooled. But nationals are indeed regaining power, and their military might (coupled with allegences to China) make them an ever more formidable opponent. And I say opponent because the US and Russia are going back to cold-war days of rabid UN disagreement. And on issues of military (which this falsely named war on terrorism will surely procure) will eventually trigger a stand-still between old enemies.
See if we won any sort of war then.
The only reason we can "claim" that we won a war, is because there are no battles to disprove that to J-Q-public. But if there ever was a blocade of military ships, I would be curious to see the US reaction. Nuclear power still precludes us from directly fireing on said ships. And the nukes on all sides were never decommissioned by my last count.
Still, it's better that the general public doesn't feel the same degree of tension. Tense public causes tense politicians causes itchy trigger fingers. But what I don't like is the uncautious arrogance that has replaced fear in American eyes.. We believe that we can bully any other country (though we don't call it bullying; because we're the good guys right?), and that they have to give in, because "we're #1" (as if that ever stopped any challenger in history).
And it is the arrogance that I fight. The general arrogance of the US public, and the arrogance of this thread.
The other possibility is that iPod users are less technically savy.
Take two users of equal economic status (cash strapped; lets say college students).
One is technically savy, so they see that they can manage with a much cheaper MP3 player or simply use the desktop available to them at most locations (if you're a nerd and always in front of the computer, why would you need a portable?).
The other is a business or art student that wants something light cheap, cool (read status-symbol-esk). THey probably also own a powerbook for the same reason.
or increase clock speed), and adds in DDR2 (667MHz and 800MHz) which some people say will increase performance by between 5% and 15%.
And I've read other reviews that show an actual decrease in performance by moving to DDR2. Sorry for not providing the research here, but I'll simply say with that caveat that I've heard that DDR2 has greater latency, so the extra "bursting" speed is barely able to compensate. Note that memory clock speed has almost nothing to do with performance, and often times, you get the exact same core memory of the slower speed technology, just strapped on with a higher-speed BUS. The result? Same memory with many many more "wait" cycles, but really fast burst (of 4 successive clocks to fill a cache-line). That's the difference between "value" memory and over-priced memory.
But what is significant is that if you compare said value to premium memory for simple DDR, you still don't see a tremendous performance boost.
Dude... The words FX and value should never go together.. Just like Intel's EE editions.
You most definitely do NOT get your value from the incremental extra performance the extra cache (and BUS) provides.
The point of this line of CPU's is called sucker takers. Those that want something similar in performance to tomorrows CPU's from today's CPUs.
It's like getting extra performance out of an economy car by putting expensive booster rockets on it.. Yes, technically it goes faster, but only by putting yester-year's over-priced technology on it (e.g. large caches, more pins).
Don't get me wrong, the FX and EE line are great for certain types of applications. But value has almost nothing to do with it. Most applications can better have the money spent elsewhere; HD-RAID, 10k RPM drives, more memory (to disable swap file), instant-on, optimally recompiled software (in the Linux/BSD world), using a 64bit OS (to utilize the hidden registers and more optimal virtual memory archetecture), and in this case, a MUCH more expensive vid card ($500 vid cards are insane, until you compare that to deciding between a $300 CPU and $1000 CPU). The idea that 'the CPU is a black-box' hurts purchasing decisions, because we ask the question, 'how much money for the fastest possible black-box?' CPU companies can get really creative at answering that question; and they'll love you for it.
That being said, AMD has held a tremendous $ + heat + PWR + performance edge over Intel for a long long while (though not always in every category). The real issue is that very recently, they've been able to match Intel's stability, though definitely not in terms of 3'rd party hardware integration stability. Historically motherboard driver support has sucked ass (MB makers don't devote as many resources to maintaining their AMD lines as they have less volume). Likewise for video card vendors (though I can't tell if this is the fault of the MB or the vid card). All too often, I read message boards where the same vid card is rock-solid on an intel board, with a caveat of 'yeah, it crashes on this or that AMD-based board'. This isn't AMD's direct fault, and the success of AMD's current line has helped MB manufacturers devote more resources.
And if you're dealing with servers, it's probably more cost effective to go with the opteron line (though a price premium definitely exists there as well). More often than not, a server application is multi-tasked/mult-threaded, and would rather have a greater number of slower CPUs and even more interestingly, independent memory banks for each CPU. Here the extra money is more proportionate to greater performance. But definitely not for video gaminig of photo-shopping. (What are two dual core CPU's going to do for the 2 or 3 threads of video conversion?)
Science can't tell you what the purpose of life is, or if a war is just or not.
Ha! but in fact, science does tell us if war is just or not.. In fact, most every war waged this century had more to do with the scientific method than religion. Logical constructs of use-cases. Quantitatively weighing the human cost against the abstract political gain.
War is a math problem, just like effective memory compaction.
Any given "moral" issue can be socialogically deconstructed. And just like inconsistencies between quantum and reletevism, current gaps in our understanding of social moral delemmas are only a PHD thesis away.
Since you're trying to use semantics. Then I will try to as well. Science is certainly a philosophy.. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=philosoph y However it is definitely not a theology http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=theology. Atheism, on the other hand is a theology in that it is defined as a philosophy about theology; namely that the sacred is not present in the philosophy (except recursively from the definition).
The definitions I've linked to are very primative (especially about atheism and theology), but I wanted a consistent reference point.
As the philosophy of science is largely technical (the process of deduction, successive validation of ever more accurate mathmatical descriptions of physical phenomena, perfecting the a knowledge of cause and effect, etc.), it is in itself not a theology.
Now there is nothing in the scientific method to preclude dogma. The the laws of Gallelao, the laws of Neuton, the laws of Maxwell, the laws of Einstein, the laws of whatever great thinker in the future that puts these guys in their place. A dogma of a particular period of time is held against heresy, and we label the successful deviants as forward thinking; other's we debase as "cracks". Just as in religion (Saints and heretics)
But this is because the very thing that develops Religion is intrinsic to human nature... The need for "nomos" (defining truth). Once we think we find it, we are internally terrified by anything that threatens it. Even those that presumably welcome if not seek change are at a profound level really just re-seeking the same stable truth that they find present in the merely slight changes of venue.
It is important, therefore, to distinguish Theology from what we normally think of as Religion. Religion is the socialization of theology. There is a likewise socialization of science. The presentation of this article as an answer to ID is a perfect manefestation of this socialization of Science. I'm not sure what the best word to describe this process is; you choose to call it religion, but I and other posters believe this is in error.
I do, however, agree with your underlying principle - that science has a common root with religion; the thing I and some authors call nomos. More importantly it is something which transcends the particulars of the philosophy, and intrinsicly fights for a life of it's own.
As a slight tangent, but to further the parallel. Philosophy involves a logical method. And there are many great thinkers who have applied this logical method to Theology. The allusive ontological proof; the logical deduction of God, is a perfect example. This proof holds that there exists a set of axioms which validate the empiracal aspect of God. In my opinion, they are all crap. But no more can be said about the Big Bang or of evolution as the source of diversity on Earth. (Though I personally don't believe in the evidence of the Big Bang, but I do believe in the evidence of evolution).
Put in another way, those that apply logic to Theology, are taking certain humanly important (sacrad) phenomena and treating them as axioms. It is perfectly permissable to apply the scientific method to this process to discover and eliminate logical strains. I feel that the ontological proof is largely moot, but more interestingly are proofs of morality. But now we're into the social sciences. So again, we're merely trading our starting points; our axioms.
Any way you dice it LINQ provides an interesting new approach (for procedural or OOP languages)
.. 50);
.Net) because the intermediate sets can be internally unique, ordered, event-triggering, read-only, auto-generating, etc. It's harder to do this in many other languages, or at least the principle of least surprise does not come into play in such languages (tied variables in perl can be upsetting if not feature-incomplete).
/processing intermediate sets (even if you're transparently deferring that thinking to the database layer). Not that every use of such a syntax produces such temporary data. But I find that in the rare circumstances that I do operate on data in Java in such a way, there are concerns. While I am new to LINQ, I doubt these concerns are obviated. I'm sure that set-based data access isn't manditory; you can always revert to procedural programming when it is more clear/scaleable.
Not seeing how this is innovative for OO languages. It's just new syntactic sugar for callbacks (or lambdas, if you're a sissy).
In Perl (also available in python/ruby)
print "hi $_\n" for sort { $a $b } map {$_ + 1} grep { $_ > 5 } ( 1
Ruby allows you to name the temporaries which is nicer.
Java is less elegant, but no less powerful (using things like apache-commons)
for (int item :
Collections.sort(
CollectionUtils.tranform(
CollectionUtils.select(
Arrays.asList(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11),
filter),
transformer),
comparator))
{
stream.writeln("Hello " + item);
}
Where filter, transformer and comparator need to be separately instantiated but are of standard interfaces. Often, a class will define appropriate query/mutating tools alongside it; making the above seamless. And it is often that an object intrinsicly extends such services (such as Comparable).
Moreover, you have greater control in the Java world (and by extension
If by "change the way you program", you guys mean that now you'll start using this paradigm, then good for you. Of course, if all you want to do is see how many items in a set match, then you're introducing a world of hurt using this technique.. E.G. a non-exhaustive scan/search is much more efficient than instantiating
Oh, and a there are a good few bugs related to conflicting definitions early on in the codebase. The scope of 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' and the scope of 'Kill all the unbelievers in the land I have given to you' really need to be more clearly defined.
Dude, that's easy.. "Kill" is subjective, of course, just like the "fair use" clause in copyright law. And the subjectiveness is to be resolved by a "reasonable body". And of course, by reason, what we mean is "what could a judge get away with if he ruled one way or another". The judge that was in charge when that particular law was famously written (not that it was profound or original or anything) was Mosus.
Mosus was the judge and jury of his day.. And many a rabbi has used "case law" to affirm 'morality' ever since.. I wouldn't even notice such a peculiarity except for one of the few times when the books of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John refer to Mosus.. Specifically in discussion of divorse (an issue which provides me perverse joy in realizing that 60% of all proselytizing Christians are going to hell over by disobeying). Mosus "ruled" that divorse was 'legal' and hense moral. Jesus later repealed that law, stating that the moral authority was unduelly coersed.
Thus, morality is officially a humanly judicial act. You may famously ask yourself "What would (insert your favorite blasphemous idol here) do?", and that's great, until you realize that you know about as much of what an alleged omnipotent/omnicient/omnipresent being would do as an ant knows about filling out the deductions on your tax form.
So you have two choices.. Wait to have a psychadellic experience which would solidify your sense of truth, or accept that whether an effective omnicient/omnipotent power is dropping your clues out there or not, you have to rely on what your God-given senses provide to you (including the horribly under-recognized sense of memory).
Course that makes it hard for a governing body to convince people that Anarchy is really a bad idea. So on that thread.. Praise be to God. (My new Pascal philosophy)
For the same reason people sky-dive. There is an experience associated w/ loud music that is almost identical to roller-coasters or other laughter-inducing exhileration.
If something isn't making you laugh/scream/cheer, it probably isn't thrilling you.
Why would you spend $30 to watch the same crap that you can get on a CD unless it had a unique sense of enthrallment?
While you may not care for the thrill of volume, you're probably in the minority (especially dependent on the genre).
I go to dance clubs exclusively for the reason that cops don't knock on my appartment door that way; e.g. volume.
That being said, as a sibling of two 90% deaf people (from birth), I'm very conscious about loud noises. I will actually cover my ears during concerts so that I can regulate just how loud the volume is. Moreover, if I nearly completely cut off the sound for long enough, my ears soften to the volume level and I can uncover my ears slightly and have the same "thrill" but at 1/5 the volume.. I have to continuously cycle through this starvation of sound so that I don't need full volume most of the time; and can still achieve periodic thrill.
Obviously I'm being anal about it; trying to have my cake and eat it too. But it works. The problem is this sort of attention to detail wouldn't be labeled as 'cool', so it would never fly for the general public.
Your examples of number manipulation is contrived and very scripting-language centric.. As a VB, Perl (Ruby), Python user, one would be very familiar with "opaque" data types.. And in fact, the process of manipulating said opaque types is half of the power of the system.
...
Perl easily converts between raw UNIX data structures (passed in and out of c-functions) to strings to integers and back.. You can increment file-names for goodness sakes.
Such practice is so wrought with potential error. In Perl for example. there are rare cases when you have to perform the following:
sub foo
{
return $res . "";
}
To make sure that you've removed all the magic from the scalar.
The process of converting back and forth between strings and integers is far too prevalent in these languages.. But the very nature of Perl is "Practical EXTRACTION and REPORT Language" and thus is warranted.
Java, on the other hand treats inputs like inputs and outputs like outputs. You perform explicit filtration in both directions. And there are very clear operations that differentiate themselves.
InputStream, Reader, InputSource (horribly named XML-input-stream), Writer, ObjectWriter, OutputStream, NumberFormat, DateFormat, MessageFormat.
Whenever you're performing conversions, these are the tools of the trade (as far as J2SE is concerned). Integer.parseInt(String) is loosely deprecated.. NumberFormat is strongly prefered since it is far more flexible.
When using the Formatter classes, you get i18n almost for free (most libraries that use them wrap some sort of ResourceBundle).
Larry Wall famously said that similar things should look similar and different things should look different.
When you're performing arithmetic, you shouldn't have to worry about accidently changing from a short to an int to a long to a double to a string to a ref to a magic token and back. But in perl, passing a scalar around can do just that (as the object is muteable), and become a nightmare in complicated routines.
In Java, numerics and strings are immuteable on purpose.. It is focused 1'st and foremost on processing; input/output only secondarily. Nothing wrong with the perl-and-friends focus; that's their main job.
Just to make sure we're on the same page.. Java 1.5 provides behind the scene conversion between primative and Number objects. So
Integer i;
int j;
j = i + j + 1;
works just fine. Though it's really just syntactic sugar for:
j = i.intValue() + j + 1;
Next, you may have an argument as to whether the entire Math and Random library should have been built in to Number.
Thereby facilitating obscure stuff like:
int i;
i.nextGausian();
I think it's perfectly acceptible to pass a Number into a Math or Random library, since they really are conceptually separate entities.. Number should only contain material relevant to the identification of a particular number. The processing of that number is the job of some other entity.
i.add(j) is just too annoying to me.
Complex c1,c2;
c1 = ComplexMath.mult(c1,c2);
Suites me just fine.
Plus by making it a native compiled language it will end most of the major limitaions of Java.
Don't see how compiling Java to assembly solves any problems dude. In fact it just adds new ones (3rd party library upgrades require recompiling the entire tree).
If you're talking about client-applications, then either you should move to a backgrounded web-service w/ an HTML front-end, or you're talking about a monolythic application like IntelliJ-IDEA/eclipse where startup speed is a non-factor and normal execution performance is perfectly acceptible (so long as you have 768Meg minimum on the machine).
I liked your post, it was amusing. Just a few nit-picks though.
Cripple the syntax of C++
It's not fair to say this, because at the time of Java, C++ SUCKED!! If you used 3 different compilers, your C++ WOULD NOT COMPILE on all 3. gcc (g++ or whatever it was called back then), sunCC, and MC C++ are three main ones that come to mind. Hell, C++ was originally a HACK to C. I remember running the "CC" SUN compiler which literally could spit out the intermediate C code. Remember directives like extern "C" { } or whatever the hell that was.. It just told the pre-processor to skip that section when translating C++ symbols.
I grew up through the normal CIS channels.. BASIC -> Pascal -> Lisp -> C -> C++. After my time in school Java became popular in CIS circles; Perl never caught on in Academics; I'm sure because it wasn't elegant and was too hard for many professors/TAs to learn [well]. But I remember all to well the shere joy of programming in Java compared to C++ (both language and runtime environment). And believe me, I've had to do my fair share of time back in "c" land.. I never saw C++ as a main-stay.. I've only heard about it in the Windows world.
In fact, two words really put the API issue in its place: 1. Perl 2. CPAN.
I agree that CPAN is an EXCELLENT resource.. Primarily because even small-time crooks like me can post code there. Java doesn't have as well centralized a public upload. Moreover CPAN has excellent unit-test/code-style and versioning management/enforcement. That being said www.ibiblio.org/maven is a credible competator. Many commerical sites post their public jars there... And extraction of jars is trivial compared to extraction of CPAN modules.. Often, you have to be root to extract/install CPAN modules (unless you wish to deploy user-owned instances of perl). The download time for a jar is all you need, compared to the sometimes HOUR-LONG compile-time of a CPAN module (since it almost always has c-code).
Most of the success of CPAN was due to putting thing perl-wrappers around existing C-libraries. So of course CPAN grew overnight.. Java, libraries are almost exclusively "100% pure" (as they're called).. There are plenty of CPAN 100% pure libraries, but I think if you stripped out all the non-pure libraries, CPAN wouldn't be as impressive. What is impressive about the Java world is that just about all the functionality of the CPAN library is found in the java world. You don't see as many libraries, because many functions are aggregated together or come as stock (which perl does more and more of).
This isn't to disparage CPAN in any way; I love that resource.
put it on a VM to cripple performance
Yeah yeah.. I have to respond to this even though you seeded your response. An incredible strength of runtime compilation is the support of multi-megabyte memory-resident libraries. Re-organizing only the code that is used into compact sections.
I think the point the original poster was making is that tecnically JSPs are not part of J2SE, they are part of J2EE
Except that most of J2EE got rolled into Java 1.5. Moreover, 'most' of J2EE was as easily accessible as any other 3'rd party JAR which makes J2EE as ubiquitous as a CPAN module for perl. Especially when you use auto-download tools like maven.
If a 5-7% sales tax will make you or break you, I'd say that you already can't afford what you're buying.
5% is a pretty good profit margin these days. Take the past 15 years of computer-related development; most of which operated in tax-free status.. All of which HIGHLY competative, either losing money or at best hoping for 5% profit.. Now throw a shock to the system, suck 5% right off the top in one year. Take people that are 95% in debt (meaning they are currently able to make minimum payments, but their only ability to make new purchases is solely dependent on credit-line increases). Now throw 5% to the cost of a non-trivial fraction of what they purchase.
Incidently, I count the 5% profit margin topic because a 7% increase in price will have between 1 and 5% reduction in revenue due to reduced sales (depending on the elasticity of demand for the product).
Also, factor a sudden spike in the price of goods into inflation.. We're talking about a projected growth of % of GDP for online goods and services with or without a tax increase. That fraction now increased in price and reduced in revenue; favoring inflation, but hurting fundamentals (velocity of money, savings rates, etc).
But again, the short-term for municipalities can only be good.. And the strength of a state lasts as long as the term of the elected representative.
Our government needs refactoring.. There are tons of books on the topic.. The Federal government is the largest US land holder. It is the largest umbrella organization, employs the most people. None of this is legitimate in the constitution.. The Federal Government was supposed to be small such that we DO have monolitic super-sized state governments and micro-status small state governments. The reason we were only allowed to tax imports/exports was because the government really only needed to pay for international diplomacy and a federal military.. BUT, the federal military was never allowed to be a standing military; only one used during "declared wars". We've not declared war since WW II, and consequently we've not stood down our military down since WW II (the only time in our history we've had a standing military w/ no officially declared war).
Essentially WW II changed America; screw September 11'th, that just changed the mind set of a simpleton (so he could go back on most of his 2000 campaign promises). The cold war created the modern US beuracracy. We need to declare peace, and disband the current US government. Then maybe we can deal with that other near WW II related task; the great-depression's new-deal.
I have no problem with the federal government dictating everything about money and how it's used.. I just don't want the Federal government to touch the money. (the conflict of interest)
The US constitution was designed with the idea of a lack of trust of government. We elected representatives not so we can pick a good candidate, but so we can get rid of a bad one. We gave no single individual control over everything, we gave competing institutions the ability to strip control away once abuse was discovered.
But what happened was that the institutions fought for more control; using national disasters as justifications for their new-found control.. All 3 branches did so. Judiciaries essentially wrote their own laws by making judicial orders of conduct. Ledgislatures wrote new powers to themselves.. And the executives declared everything national security and thereby unknowable and untouchable (thanks again to cold war).
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We are currently in a dual-party system where each represents drunken uniform power. Deviation from the wishes of the central party has such reprecusions that it is unheard-of anymore. You simply can not get to an elected office w/o expousing uniform mindset. The fact that we have two parties is merely a way of addressing public discontent. But the more power the party gains (in all 3 branches), the more control it has over our minutely lives with WHICH to cause discontent.
An ideal system is one that is hierarchical in scope; just like a good application. Each scope should not contain any fascet that does not directly relate to it's scope. In this, complexities, complications, bugs, redresses are directly related to the function of that tier of operation.
If the federal government deals with the ability of US citizens to live and move between the borders of states and the country.. Then all it's ledgislation and legal rulings should be definable in those terms.. The construction of a baseball stadium has NOTHING to do with these terms.. Realistically nor does the maintanance of an interstate highway or regional school systems. And again, probably is completely unrelated to hurricane relief (historically it hasn't anyway). Bush has all but declared war on Iraq, so technically its raising of funds for that purpose are constitutionally correct (though his actions are morally questionable at best). Historically, we have a lot of precedence in attacking countries that give our citizens abroad trouble (tripoli, etc). For those that say "but what about my state? How can I afford public schools, retirement funds, etc".. My answer is that California, Rhode Island and Delaware are doing pretty well, thank you very much. And that's pretty much the run of them.
States can
Be cheap software available to help retailers work this out.
But now you're talking about commercial software riding inside of open-source platforms. The two simply don't mix. The concept of a deployable shopping-cart, for example doesn't work, if you are now forced to ship proprietary code (which has licenses that restricts you from doing so).
Language-use is also significant.. There are web sites written in Lisp/scheme-whatever.. I highly doubt it is a trivial matter to "plug-in" commercial software to such sites..
Business software has historically been a windows-centric or expensive enterprise-platform solution. quick-books, etc. What about very low-cost, medium-volume web services? Now their ability to charge money for their service is contingent apon them finding an integration solution that didn't use to be needed.
Yes there will be a wealth of solutions, but not immediately, so many companies will be in non-compliance for some time to come. And most will be forced to rewrite their aplications (another 2000 switchover).
All this to facilitate a tax on the poor (sales tax). I've lived in sales-tax-free states all my life and am frustrated by the need to have clunky sales taxes applied going forward; it's just a step backwards.