Any count related to bugs, also, needs to take into account the fact that on Windows, you have billions of users any of whom could find and report a bug. On Linux, bugs are more likely to go undiscovered for a longer period of time, simply because there aren't as many people trying to hit them.
The claim that "billions of users" can "find and report" bugs is completely absurd. "Find", maybe if you take a very broad definition of that term. But "report"? Huh? Ask your mother if she knows how to "report" a bug to Microsoft, though.
I think it would be interesting to actually compare the number of people who have submitted a bug report to IE say than to Mozilla. I would guess the latter number is larger.
Clearly not all bugs are findable by ordinary users anyway. Ask your mom if she's ever found a buffer overflow bug. Or a race condition bug.
Your assertion that bugs last longer in Linux because more people are trying to find bugs on windows contains two big assumptions. I recall a secruity bug study that found bugs in linux last substantially less long, so I certainly question the conclusion. But I also dispute that there are fewer people looking for bugs in Linux. End users, maybe, but they are dramatically ineffective at producing actionable information than developers looking for bugs, which I assert give Linux a big edge.
I really don't think it matters how many bugs get "found" under a broad definition. If you get the BSOD on windows, you've found the bug, I suppose, but so what. How does that help unless you report it and somebody who can fix it takes action on your report. The conclusion of the article seems to be that Linux has dramatically lower levels of bugs, so your conclusions directly conflict with theirs.
The rate of bug finding really isn't enough to conclude anything. A bad bug find-and-fix process will lower the number of bugs found, but having better software that actually has fewer bugs also lowers the number of bugs found.
There are two variables here: the rate of bug creation and the rate of bug finding. I suspect that open source is break even or only slightly better at the first factor but much better at the second (many more eyeballs looking).
Groovy is simply another syntax for manipulating bytecode classes. You can build EJB beans in whatever mix of Java and groovy that you like. Groovy can extend (subclass) existing blah.class files and then compile the result back to a subblah.class file. At the bytecode level, bytecode produced by compiling java is interchangeable (to the JVM) from bytecode produced by compiling groovy. This means java or groovy can use bytecode procuded from java or groovy or existing bytecode.
Java is strongly typed and reference based. There is no way to avoid declaring the type of a reference and naming the type of object during instantiation in such a language. Groovy is weakly typed, so you can just say:
reference = new ReferenceDescripor(Widget.class)
You're also showing a couple of casts going on (ComponentModel and Widget), probably as a result of inheritance or interfaces. I don't know why they've chosen to design at this level of abstraction. If there is a compelling reason to do so, you would have just ruled out PHP. Perl can do it, but you're going to be using a lot of funny symbols and @ISA attributes and your code wouldn't be as readable. Python would be clean, but that's what I said.
In groovy, this would be much shorter and cleaner.
True for jython, false for groovy. Read about groovy beans.
Among python, perl, and PHP, only python has superior language syntax to Java, and groovy leapfrogs python. Groovy's syntax is probably second only to ruby in term of OO purity and clarity. Perl's CPAN libraries are the only one competitive with Java's libraries (and java wins narrowly even over perl). When you give groovy syntax to java, you will have an absolutley lethal combination.
Goovy's benefits from complete bytecode equivalence to Java cannot be overstated. Groovy simply reuses the entire java class library set.
One other major innovation is the hierarchical syntax using closures that makes it superior to everything else for processing markup like HTML and XML. Java was strong on XML to begin with, with groovy it becomes dominant.
The only big problem with groovy now is that it isn't quite ready. I expect that in a year it will begin to be a compelling solution, especially when combined with the lightweight, containers and frameworks (things like Spring and Hibernate) that emphasize Aspect Oriented Programming, Inversion of Control, and heavy use of XML configuration.
JSP with Oracle isn't remotely capable of this project with the resources given.
Nothing you have said remotely justifies this claim. In fact, given the enormous numbers of enterprise systems using this architecture, it's pretty amazing you would make such a claim.
Let me make a guess about this situation: the Oracle systems existed first and supported a client-server app. Then somebody said "lets do web" and you tacked on java, probably without using a good MVC approach. Boom, you hit the OO-RDBMS impedance mismatch and combined it with disasterous coupling of business logic with everything else. Even without knowing the facts, I'm willing to guess that your success is probably a result of allowing your web site design to drive your data model (which is probably not the situation the previous crew was probably in).
My experience based on developing enterprise systems (and I can do it in all of the technologies you have mentioned) is that the most critical piece is 1) having a good RDBMS data model and 2) avoiding coupling among SQL, business logic, and presentation. If you are in an environment where business requirements don't change often, you can survive doing poorly on #2 if you do well on #1. Technology choice does not affect the first much factor much. However, MySQL lacking views and stored procedures actually makes it one of the few RDBMS thatforce sacrifices in the data model since you need such features to do certain things well like implementing sub-entities in the same table and many denormalizations.
By the way, my experience, is that MySQL is poor for even moderate problems of enterprise systems. For a class of problems comparable to running a site like Slashdot, it is a reasonable solution, though in every case if the enterprise has an Oracle license already I would use that and if not I would use PostGres or Firebird first. I expect I will add Derby to that list soon.
I'm not quite as down on PHP. It is one web tool among many and it competes well in many ways. I would predict that somebody well versed in JSP, especially somebody with strong taglibs experience, would outproduce somebody in PHP, but I certainly think it would be a fair fight.
Which rebuts my claim: the fact that his procedure is "well documented" or the fact that it is "automated"? I dispute neither, by the way.
Since I'm comparing his front page to his "all nonpartisan polls" page, which also is "well documented" and "automated", I fail to see your point.
I even explained the difference: his main results page relies heavily on Zogby. Among the various (over a dozen) polls, Zogby produces a picture that is usually more favorable to Kerry than the rest. I do not assert Zogby does this intentionally nor that he chose Zogby for this reason. Incidentally, Zogby was biased for Bush in 2000.
Among all the pictures you can get from looking at the nonpartisan polls, his particular procedure gives one of the most Kerry favorable pictures. The effect, intended or not is a bias for Kerry. At least relative to the other polls -- it remains to be seen if it is a bias relative to reality. This is a problem with polls, they really are only as good as there margin of error for two reasons: random sampling involves variation sample to sample even where there is none, and since no sampling methodology is truly uniformly random, some amount of bias creeps in, which tends to be repeated among all polls using this methodology.
I have no doubt that he has "done his best at designing an unbiased system". So has every other pollster and electoral college predictor. The fact that some always present Kerry or Bush slightly higher or lower than EACH OTHER, means some of them have not succeeded. There is no way to assess whose poll is "unbiased" until the election. Zogby was highly biased for Bush in the last election, by the way. I suspect they have overcorrected.
Well, if you compare his site to RealClearPolitics, you'll notice the wide divergence between them, his site showing a much larger bias towards Kerry.
Why use another site? Simply compare his front page to his own Averaged Nonpartisan Polls page. He has taken in all the polls, selected the ones he likes best (usually Zogby, one of the ones whose statistical bias favors Kerry the most compared to the others) and created his front page accordingly. His front page presents the best case situation for Kerry, not the most likely scenario.
His averaged nonpartisan poll is much more consistent with the other sites out there that attempt to predict the electoral college like:
Daily Thoughts has Bush 259 Kerry 238 with 41 tossup electors in 4 states
Tradesports has Bush 259 Kerry 252 with Ohio and Iowa tossups (and Bush slightly ahead)
I think this election probably goes for Bush, but it's very close and the odds are probably 3-2 Bush. Kerry could win if he gets Ohio and Wisconsin. Most pollsters have Florida for Bush.
Yes I read the article. Drivel all around. The guy measured whether people agreed with his own views and dressed it up an fauz elitist propaganda.
Then I read the post above who made a separate claim about how democrats are smart and republicans are dumb. I responded to that point on its own merits without reference to the article because it is a separate point. Obvoiusly I confused you in the process. So until you become unconfused, please keep your "moron" accusations to yourself.
That's what Kerry is objecting to. The information used to justify the war was known to be false, but was presented as being true.
Intelligence is a game of continual conflicting information and risk assessment. You trumptet this information as "known to be false". That is a gross overstatement. It was discredited over time. Kerry had access to all the same information Bush had, yet he expects Bush to be able to navigate through it while he holds himself to a different standard and snipes only when he gets more information.
Kerry didn't lead, he followed, then whined, then said he would have gone somewhere different, but says he made the right decisions at the time. He is an incoherent flip-flopper. He says "help is on the way", but voted against the $87 billion help package.
Kerry says we need a global test, but when we passed such a global test in Gulf War 1 he opposed it and when we failed the global test in Kosovo and Bosnia, he supported military action. He is an incoherent flip-flopper who can only lead with the benefit of hindsight.
Here's the one that sticks out like a sore thumb: "48% incorrectly believe that evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda have been found, [and] 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq."
In fact, the study authors have their facts wrong. The 9/11 commission concluded ONLY that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not cooperate with regard to the 9/11 attacks. The commission DID CONCLUDE that there were links between Iraq and Al Qaeda in direct contradiction to the assertions of the makers of this study. Source: usa today. The primary link is so well known that it is getting rediculous to assert it doesn't exist: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Also, there were quantities of Sarin gas that were discovered in artillery shells. While this is not WMD on the scale predicted, it is enough to refute the absolutist position taken by this study that no WMD have been found in Iraq. Source: newsmax.
Kerry supporters have got more going on in the brain-use department than Bush supporters
Bzzt. Sorry, you lose. Democrats are generally supported more by the less affluent blue-collar minimum wage earners, and Republicans are supported more more by the affluent, white collar, high wage earners. These traits correlates positively (though somewhat weakly) with "brain-use": education and intelligence.
Though your statement is objectively false, it is amazingly typical of the democratic faux elitist mind set. You define being smart in terms with agreeing with your own views and ignore objective measures in favor of your own self-affirming circular reasoning.
voters supporting Kerry as being more in tune with the events and world attitudes surrounding the war in Iraq.
Measuring being "in tune with the events" implies that there is an objective way to decide WHICH EVENTS are "the" events. There is not and suggesting otherwise is a bunch of crap. Give me a break. This was a study that measured people's correlation with the study makers views.
As a study in propaganda, I love the use of the term "world attitudes". I wasn't aware that planets had minds that were capable of forming attitudes. Who exactly defines what the "world attitude" is? It's awfully presumptious, to define any particular attitude as the "world attitude". There is also an implicit value judgement that the "world attitude", whatever this means, is the correct one, or is one that you should be "in tune with". The US couldn't possibly be in the right if it ignores the "world attitude" could it?
Kerry supporters love to conclude that because we know NOW that Iraq had no WMD's in hand that Bush "made incorrect judgments before the war" (quoting the study). That does not follow -- based on the information available AT THE TIME, he assessed the risk and was unwilling to gamble on the "No WMD" option. Kerry supported the authorization of force, so he too agreed the risk was unacceptable. Only Kerry now wants it both ways because we have better information. The only reason we got that better information was because we removed Saddam and put in 1500 inspectors for a year.
You cannot be intellectually honest and retroactively change your assessment of risk. Bush took the only course of action that guaranteed we would know Iraq would not provide WMD to terrorists.
If Kerry were in a situation where the risk was 50% that a rouge regime had WMD and the risk was 50% they would cooperate with Al Qaeda, what would Kerry do if France and Germany didn't agree? I'm not willing to risk giving the presidency to someone who wants for foreign powers to lead when uncertainty and risk are in play.
Using technicalities to change the results of an election? That's so wrong.
I agree, which is what SCOFL did, not KH. She read the law, which defines what the "results" are. SCOFL threw it out the window based on their dislike of the election result and contrary to the US Constitution which says the legislature's power to define the election process is absolute.
The FL law says count the punchcards with an optical machine. That means if you punch the card in such a way that it doesn't register that you did not vote. That is the election result. No amount of attempting to wish this away can change the fact that this is the law. The "results" of the election are the numbers produced by the vote counting machines. Gore was the one trying to change them based on technicalities that had no basis in the election results. He wanted improperly punched ballots to count, contrary to the legislature's directive.
Now I'm off to petition for Nader to get off the ballot.
Your hypocracy is just amazing. A "democrat" who doesn't support a candidate and so tries to suppress his right to be on the ballot. There's no democracy in your world.
You are obviously a biased democrat. I see that you are maligning Katherine Harris, among others.
Katherine Harris's determinations during the 2000 election were the correct interpretation of the law. She did nothing other than apply the law exactly as it was written, saying that a vote is a legal vote only if it occurs via the procedure established by the legislature, to which the US Constitution grants the plenary power for determining the process for selecting the states electors, which need not even be a public vote.
If you recall, her views were upheld by the lower court's democratic judges, and were only overturned by the Florida Supreme Court (whose decisions were vacated by SCOTUS and exposed as nonsensical). When the issue went to the US Supreme Court, three of the justices above were prepared to overrule SCOFL on this point and reinstate her original position, but the per curium opinion resolved the case on the equal protection issue without addressing whether her interpretation of the statute was correct. It's kind of unfortunate that SCOFL tried to completely take over the electoral process with their stupid standardless statewide manual recount, because otherwise, Harris could have been proven correct in her application of the law.
I believe that the Florida Supreme Court's ruling that Harris abused her discretion by following the law as written is one of the worst examples I have ever seen of judicial activism for partisan purposes. There was NO basis in law whatsoever for their actions and what SCOFL did was truly disgusting partisan legislating from the bench to try to steal an election.
Oh, and Bush wins even without Florida. Though I believe the electoral college futures market is the best predictor. They say Bush will win Florida. While Rassmussen has it as a tossup.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were in violation of something like 17 different gun laws. Please explain what the impact of changing this number to either 18 or 16 or 0 or 342 would have had. Oh, and their neighbor reported them multiple times to the police, by the way.
Most people don't realize this, but Harris and Kleibold's real goal was to detonate a butane/propane cannister in their caffeteria and kill the several hundred people, but their ignition device failed. It is continually amazing to me that anybody thinks that regulating one particular mechanism or another for mass killing is effective.
I think Americans need to decide whether they want political discourse that is dominated by the Michael Moore's and Ann Coulters of the world, or whether they want an actual discussion of issues that matter. I recall the Cheyney-Liebermann debate from 4 years ago was a very high quality discussion of the issues, with little propaganda and mud slinging.
Is Moore a paragon of unassailable objective truth? Hell no. But he's a lot better than those of opposing idiology.
This is contemptible. A liar is a liar, whether he or she wears red or blue. People on BOTH sides need to reject bogus propaganda from their own side. People in the middle need to reject it from all sides.
In addition, don't burn bridges for your co-workers.
I agree. Be classy. People will remember how you left. If your real motivation is to screw the company, do it with a smile while being polite -- put in two weeks notice, actually do your work, and quietly try to recruit other key people to leave too. This way, your coworkers will remember that you were a good guy (whether they follow you or not).
To people who choose not to use a gui based desktop at all, I say get a life and at least update your tech skills to 1980. I'm a CLI lover, but if you don't ever use a windows environment by choice I can safely say your behavior is so outside the mainstream to sustain my "you baffle me" comment.
As to files on machines that don't have a GUI, fine. I edit such files using jEdit. If the file is on a machine that I can access via the network, then I can edit the files there via jEdit (using the FTP/SFTP plugin). For example, I have a linux firewall with no GUI (and no monitor). When I need to edit files on it, I use jEdit from my PC to edit those files in place via sftp. If the box doesn't have networking, I wouldn't use it to edit files at all (since I would have to create every character by hand every time). Instead I would create it on a machine with jEdit and transfer it using disk, CD, or RS-232 as needed. If we are talking about writing code, this is ESPECIALLY important, since I will probably be reproducing that code on multiple machines and so from a configuration management point of view I want not to have data islands.
That's six "always" conditions. From a reliability point of view, "always check" isn't very reliable. You're advocating a system that relies and requires inspection (check this, check that) to achieve quality. That is a well known anti-pattern in quality engineering.
If this is true, why then is Swing so slow while running?
My favorite text editor is jEdit, which is a swing app. I don't find it slow at all. I use it constantly, typically with 15 to 20 files open for editing.
I'm completely baffled by people who still use vi and emacs. Yuck. Alt-Meta-No-Way. ZZ
Second, you obviously aren't using Ant to automate your java buid and deploy process. If you were, the version control, compile, test, document, and deploy steps are a single click. Instead, you make it sound like you are making ad hoc changes to your production code. Bad. Oh, and finding bugs at build time instead of "in the field" is a good thing, not a bad thing.
You've got to be kidding when you say java isn't good for web applications. What exactly is wrong with JSP and servlets? There are several dozen very high quality application server components written in java over at the Apache Jakarta project. I suppose that all the people out there using Oracle and IBM tools to run their intranet enterprise apps on web based java platforms don't know what they are doing?
But the reason it is uncool is because, outside of stuff written just for Java monkeys, there is no Free software to speak of written in it. Free software is written in C (65%), C++ (25%), and Python and Perl (all but the last 1%). Free Software coders have avoided Java for lots of reasons, including its not-really-portability, its bad performance, its hasty and stupid language and library design, its corporate 0wnedness, and their own resistance to hype and idiotic jargon.
Bullshit. There are 12436 projects on sourceforge.net in the java language folder. C and C++ each have barely more (13254 and 13440 respectively). PHP is fourth with 9201 followed by perl with 5321. Your percentages are crap. Java is more than double the popularity of perl there.
Where did most open source Xtreme programming innovation happen? java (JUnit, Ant, Maven, etc...) Who has the best open source MS Office file format compatibility? java (POI) Who has the best open source search engine? java (Lucene) Who has the best open source MVC middleware solutions? java (Struts and/or Velocity) Who has the best XML tools? java Who has the best gui test editor? java (jEdit) [and yes, vi and emacs both SUCK] Who has the best foss XForms implementation? java Who has the best open source SVG implementation? java (Batik) Most actively developed open source IDE? java (eclipse)
Frankly, most of the real innovation that is being done in the open source community is being done in java. Stroll on over to Apache Jakarta project and look around for a while.
I'd count "choosing technology which does not require paying attention to useless details" as a more valuable skill and one that increases productivity more.
Since errors happen when there are more details than capacity to attend to them, we should strive to both eliminate details and increase attention capacity. The details in question here that are demanding attention are useless waste that should be eliminated.
If you love paying attention to details for its own sake, take up chess.
As JIT technology matures for these languages (like psycho has for Python), statements like the above become less and less true.
The same advances also make java faster, but this is beside the point since I'm not actually knocking these languages for being slow -- I personally don't care that much about CPU speed so much as speed of development and clarity and reusability. In fact, I love perl, python, and ruby and I'm not a language snob. I was just pointing out hypocracy in others who throw mud at java and then use a slower language. In fact, I've used both jython and jruby and groovy for various tasks at work.
What are you doing with pointers that you have to spend any time at all debugging them?
What are you doing with pointers that you don't have to spend any time at all debugging them?
The three common failure modes are improperly initializing a pointer, bogus pointer arithmetic, and mistakenly assigning one pointer to another when the referenced structures are different. These situations usually don't appear to runtime and then often produce non-repeatable behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Any count related to bugs, also, needs to take into account the fact that on Windows, you have billions of users any of whom could find and report a bug. On Linux, bugs are more likely to go undiscovered for a longer period of time, simply because there aren't as many people trying to hit them.
The claim that "billions of users" can "find and report" bugs is completely absurd. "Find", maybe if you take a very broad definition of that term. But "report"? Huh? Ask your mother if she knows how to "report" a bug to Microsoft, though.
I think it would be interesting to actually compare the number of people who have submitted a bug report to IE say than to Mozilla. I would guess the latter number is larger.
Clearly not all bugs are findable by ordinary users anyway. Ask your mom if she's ever found a buffer overflow bug. Or a race condition bug.
Your assertion that bugs last longer in Linux because more people are trying to find bugs on windows contains two big assumptions. I recall a secruity bug study that found bugs in linux last substantially less long, so I certainly question the conclusion. But I also dispute that there are fewer people looking for bugs in Linux. End users, maybe, but they are dramatically ineffective at producing actionable information than developers looking for bugs, which I assert give Linux a big edge.
I really don't think it matters how many bugs get "found" under a broad definition. If you get the BSOD on windows, you've found the bug, I suppose, but so what. How does that help unless you report it and somebody who can fix it takes action on your report. The conclusion of the article seems to be that Linux has dramatically lower levels of bugs, so your conclusions directly conflict with theirs.
The rate of bug finding really isn't enough to conclude anything. A bad bug find-and-fix process will lower the number of bugs found, but having better software that actually has fewer bugs also lowers the number of bugs found.
There are two variables here: the rate of bug creation and the rate of bug finding. I suspect that open source is break even or only slightly better at the first factor but much better at the second (many more eyeballs looking).
Java is strongly typed and reference based. There is no way to avoid declaring the type of a reference and naming the type of object during instantiation in such a language. Groovy is weakly typed, so you can just say:You're also showing a couple of casts going on (ComponentModel and Widget), probably as a result of inheritance or interfaces. I don't know why they've chosen to design at this level of abstraction. If there is a compelling reason to do so, you would have just ruled out PHP. Perl can do it, but you're going to be using a lot of funny symbols and @ISA attributes and your code wouldn't be as readable. Python would be clean, but that's what I said.
In groovy, this would be much shorter and cleaner.
True for jython, false for groovy. Read about groovy beans.
Among python, perl, and PHP, only python has superior language syntax to Java, and groovy leapfrogs python. Groovy's syntax is probably second only to ruby in term of OO purity and clarity. Perl's CPAN libraries are the only one competitive with Java's libraries (and java wins narrowly even over perl). When you give groovy syntax to java, you will have an absolutley lethal combination.
Goovy's benefits from complete bytecode equivalence to Java cannot be overstated. Groovy simply reuses the entire java class library set.
One other major innovation is the hierarchical syntax using closures that makes it superior to everything else for processing markup like HTML and XML. Java was strong on XML to begin with, with groovy it becomes dominant.
The only big problem with groovy now is that it isn't quite ready. I expect that in a year it will begin to be a compelling solution, especially when combined with the lightweight, containers and frameworks (things like Spring and Hibernate) that emphasize Aspect Oriented Programming, Inversion of Control, and heavy use of XML configuration.
JSP with Oracle isn't remotely capable of this project with the resources given.
Nothing you have said remotely justifies this claim. In fact, given the enormous numbers of enterprise systems using this architecture, it's pretty amazing you would make such a claim.
Let me make a guess about this situation: the Oracle systems existed first and supported a client-server app. Then somebody said "lets do web" and you tacked on java, probably without using a good MVC approach. Boom, you hit the OO-RDBMS impedance mismatch and combined it with disasterous coupling of business logic with everything else. Even without knowing the facts, I'm willing to guess that your success is probably a result of allowing your web site design to drive your data model (which is probably not the situation the previous crew was probably in).
My experience based on developing enterprise systems (and I can do it in all of the technologies you have mentioned) is that the most critical piece is 1) having a good RDBMS data model and 2) avoiding coupling among SQL, business logic, and presentation. If you are in an environment where business requirements don't change often, you can survive doing poorly on #2 if you do well on #1. Technology choice does not affect the first much factor much. However, MySQL lacking views and stored procedures actually makes it one of the few RDBMS thatforce sacrifices in the data model since you need such features to do certain things well like implementing sub-entities in the same table and many denormalizations.
By the way, my experience, is that MySQL is poor for even moderate problems of enterprise systems. For a class of problems comparable to running a site like Slashdot, it is a reasonable solution, though in every case if the enterprise has an Oracle license already I would use that and if not I would use PostGres or Firebird first. I expect I will add Derby to that list soon.
I'm not quite as down on PHP. It is one web tool among many and it competes well in many ways. I would predict that somebody well versed in JSP, especially somebody with strong taglibs experience, would outproduce somebody in PHP, but I certainly think it would be a fair fight.
Which rebuts my claim: the fact that his procedure is "well documented" or the fact that it is "automated"? I dispute neither, by the way.
Since I'm comparing his front page to his "all nonpartisan polls" page, which also is "well documented" and "automated", I fail to see your point.
I even explained the difference: his main results page relies heavily on Zogby. Among the various (over a dozen) polls, Zogby produces a picture that is usually more favorable to Kerry than the rest. I do not assert Zogby does this intentionally nor that he chose Zogby for this reason. Incidentally, Zogby was biased for Bush in 2000.
Among all the pictures you can get from looking at the nonpartisan polls, his particular procedure gives one of the most Kerry favorable pictures. The effect, intended or not is a bias for Kerry. At least relative to the other polls -- it remains to be seen if it is a bias relative to reality. This is a problem with polls, they really are only as good as there margin of error for two reasons: random sampling involves variation sample to sample even where there is none, and since no sampling methodology is truly uniformly random, some amount of bias creeps in, which tends to be repeated among all polls using this methodology.
I have no doubt that he has "done his best at designing an unbiased system". So has every other pollster and electoral college predictor. The fact that some always present Kerry or Bush slightly higher or lower than EACH OTHER, means some of them have not succeeded. There is no way to assess whose poll is "unbiased" until the election. Zogby was highly biased for Bush in the last election, by the way. I suspect they have overcorrected.
Why use another site? Simply compare his front page to his own Averaged Nonpartisan Polls page. He has taken in all the polls, selected the ones he likes best (usually Zogby, one of the ones whose statistical bias favors Kerry the most compared to the others) and created his front page accordingly. His front page presents the best case situation for Kerry, not the most likely scenario.
His averaged nonpartisan poll is much more consistent with the other sites out there that attempt to predict the electoral college like:
I think this election probably goes for Bush, but it's very close and the odds are probably 3-2 Bush. Kerry could win if he gets Ohio and Wisconsin. Most pollsters have Florida for Bush.
Yes I read the article. Drivel all around. The guy measured whether people agreed with his own views and dressed it up an fauz elitist propaganda.
Then I read the post above who made a separate claim about how democrats are smart and republicans are dumb. I responded to that point on its own merits without reference to the article because it is a separate point. Obvoiusly I confused you in the process. So until you become unconfused, please keep your "moron" accusations to yourself.
That's what Kerry is objecting to. The information used to justify the war was known to be false, but was presented as being true.
Intelligence is a game of continual conflicting information and risk assessment. You trumptet this information as "known to be false". That is a gross overstatement. It was discredited over time. Kerry had access to all the same information Bush had, yet he expects Bush to be able to navigate through it while he holds himself to a different standard and snipes only when he gets more information.
Kerry didn't lead, he followed, then whined, then said he would have gone somewhere different, but says he made the right decisions at the time. He is an incoherent flip-flopper. He says "help is on the way", but voted against the $87 billion help package.
Kerry says we need a global test, but when we passed such a global test in Gulf War 1 he opposed it and when we failed the global test in Kosovo and Bosnia, he supported military action. He is an incoherent flip-flopper who can only lead with the benefit of hindsight.
Here's the one that sticks out like a sore thumb: "48% incorrectly believe that evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda have been found, [and] 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq."
In fact, the study authors have their facts wrong. The 9/11 commission concluded ONLY that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not cooperate with regard to the 9/11 attacks. The commission DID CONCLUDE that there were links between Iraq and Al Qaeda in direct contradiction to the assertions of the makers of this study. Source: usa today. The primary link is so well known that it is getting rediculous to assert it doesn't exist: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Also, there were quantities of Sarin gas that were discovered in artillery shells. While this is not WMD on the scale predicted, it is enough to refute the absolutist position taken by this study that no WMD have been found in Iraq. Source: newsmax.
Kerry supporters have got more going on in the brain-use department than Bush supporters
Bzzt. Sorry, you lose. Democrats are generally supported more by the less affluent blue-collar minimum wage earners, and Republicans are supported more more by the affluent, white collar, high wage earners. These traits correlates positively (though somewhat weakly) with "brain-use": education and intelligence.
Though your statement is objectively false, it is amazingly typical of the democratic faux elitist mind set. You define being smart in terms with agreeing with your own views and ignore objective measures in favor of your own self-affirming circular reasoning.
voters supporting Kerry as being more in tune with the events and world attitudes surrounding the war in Iraq.
Measuring being "in tune with the events" implies that there is an objective way to decide WHICH EVENTS are "the" events. There is not and suggesting otherwise is a bunch of crap. Give me a break. This was a study that measured people's correlation with the study makers views.
As a study in propaganda, I love the use of the term "world attitudes". I wasn't aware that planets had minds that were capable of forming attitudes. Who exactly defines what the "world attitude" is? It's awfully presumptious, to define any particular attitude as the "world attitude". There is also an implicit value judgement that the "world attitude", whatever this means, is the correct one, or is one that you should be "in tune with". The US couldn't possibly be in the right if it ignores the "world attitude" could it?
Kerry supporters love to conclude that because we know NOW that Iraq had no WMD's in hand that Bush "made incorrect judgments before the war" (quoting the study). That does not follow -- based on the information available AT THE TIME, he assessed the risk and was unwilling to gamble on the "No WMD" option. Kerry supported the authorization of force, so he too agreed the risk was unacceptable. Only Kerry now wants it both ways because we have better information. The only reason we got that better information was because we removed Saddam and put in 1500 inspectors for a year.
You cannot be intellectually honest and retroactively change your assessment of risk. Bush took the only course of action that guaranteed we would know Iraq would not provide WMD to terrorists.
If Kerry were in a situation where the risk was 50% that a rouge regime had WMD and the risk was 50% they would cooperate with Al Qaeda, what would Kerry do if France and Germany didn't agree? I'm not willing to risk giving the presidency to someone who wants for foreign powers to lead when uncertainty and risk are in play.
Using technicalities to change the results of an election? That's so wrong.
I agree, which is what SCOFL did, not KH. She read the law, which defines what the "results" are. SCOFL threw it out the window based on their dislike of the election result and contrary to the US Constitution which says the legislature's power to define the election process is absolute.
The FL law says count the punchcards with an optical machine. That means if you punch the card in such a way that it doesn't register that you did not vote. That is the election result. No amount of attempting to wish this away can change the fact that this is the law. The "results" of the election are the numbers produced by the vote counting machines. Gore was the one trying to change them based on technicalities that had no basis in the election results. He wanted improperly punched ballots to count, contrary to the legislature's directive.
Now I'm off to petition for Nader to get off the ballot.
Your hypocracy is just amazing. A "democrat" who doesn't support a candidate and so tries to suppress his right to be on the ballot. There's no democracy in your world.
You are obviously a biased democrat. I see that you are maligning Katherine Harris, among others.
Katherine Harris's determinations during the 2000 election were the correct interpretation of the law. She did nothing other than apply the law exactly as it was written, saying that a vote is a legal vote only if it occurs via the procedure established by the legislature, to which the US Constitution grants the plenary power for determining the process for selecting the states electors, which need not even be a public vote.
If you recall, her views were upheld by the lower court's democratic judges, and were only overturned by the Florida Supreme Court (whose decisions were vacated by SCOTUS and exposed as nonsensical). When the issue went to the US Supreme Court, three of the justices above were prepared to overrule SCOFL on this point and reinstate her original position, but the per curium opinion resolved the case on the equal protection issue without addressing whether her interpretation of the statute was correct. It's kind of unfortunate that SCOFL tried to completely take over the electoral process with their stupid standardless statewide manual recount, because otherwise, Harris could have been proven correct in her application of the law.
I believe that the Florida Supreme Court's ruling that Harris abused her discretion by following the law as written is one of the worst examples I have ever seen of judicial activism for partisan purposes. There was NO basis in law whatsoever for their actions and what SCOFL did was truly disgusting partisan legislating from the bench to try to steal an election.
Oh, and Bush wins even without Florida. Though I believe the electoral college futures market is the best predictor. They say Bush will win Florida. While Rassmussen has it as a tossup.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were in violation of something like 17 different gun laws. Please explain what the impact of changing this number to either 18 or 16 or 0 or 342 would have had. Oh, and their neighbor reported them multiple times to the police, by the way.
Most people don't realize this, but Harris and Kleibold's real goal was to detonate a butane/propane cannister in their caffeteria and kill the several hundred people, but their ignition device failed. It is continually amazing to me that anybody thinks that regulating one particular mechanism or another for mass killing is effective.
I think Americans need to decide whether they want political discourse that is dominated by the Michael Moore's and Ann Coulters of the world, or whether they want an actual discussion of issues that matter. I recall the Cheyney-Liebermann debate from 4 years ago was a very high quality discussion of the issues, with little propaganda and mud slinging.
Is Moore a paragon of unassailable objective truth? Hell no. But he's a lot better than those of opposing idiology.
This is contemptible. A liar is a liar, whether he or she wears red or blue. People on BOTH sides need to reject bogus propaganda from their own side. People in the middle need to reject it from all sides.
In addition, don't burn bridges for your co-workers.
I agree. Be classy. People will remember how you left. If your real motivation is to screw the company, do it with a smile while being polite -- put in two weeks notice, actually do your work, and quietly try to recruit other key people to leave too. This way, your coworkers will remember that you were a good guy (whether they follow you or not).
To people who choose not to use a gui based desktop at all, I say get a life and at least update your tech skills to 1980. I'm a CLI lover, but if you don't ever use a windows environment by choice I can safely say your behavior is so outside the mainstream to sustain my "you baffle me" comment.
As to files on machines that don't have a GUI, fine. I edit such files using jEdit. If the file is on a machine that I can access via the network, then I can edit the files there via jEdit (using the FTP/SFTP plugin). For example, I have a linux firewall with no GUI (and no monitor). When I need to edit files on it, I use jEdit from my PC to edit those files in place via sftp. If the box doesn't have networking, I wouldn't use it to edit files at all (since I would have to create every character by hand every time). Instead I would create it on a machine with jEdit and transfer it using disk, CD, or RS-232 as needed. If we are talking about writing code, this is ESPECIALLY important, since I will probably be reproducing that code on multiple machines and so from a configuration management point of view I want not to have data islands.
That's six "always" conditions. From a reliability point of view, "always check" isn't very reliable. You're advocating a system that relies and requires inspection (check this, check that) to achieve quality. That is a well known anti-pattern in quality engineering.
If this is true, why then is Swing so slow while running?
My favorite text editor is jEdit, which is a swing app. I don't find it slow at all. I use it constantly, typically with 15 to 20 files open for editing.
I'm completely baffled by people who still use vi and emacs. Yuck. Alt-Meta-No-Way. ZZ
We have replaced several Java apps at my job with Perl. It runs faster, uses less resources, and is simple to modify (no compilation needed).
e x.jsp
Actually, all three points are probably misinformed.
First, java is faster than perl according to nearly every benchmark I've ever seen. For example:
http://www.caucho.com/articles/benchmark.xtp
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/craps.php
Second, you obviously aren't using Ant to automate your java buid and deploy process. If you were, the version control, compile, test, document, and deploy steps are a single click. Instead, you make it sound like you are making ad hoc changes to your production code. Bad. Oh, and finding bugs at build time instead of "in the field" is a good thing, not a bad thing.
You've got to be kidding when you say java isn't good for web applications. What exactly is wrong with JSP and servlets? There are several dozen very high quality application server components written in java over at the Apache Jakarta project. I suppose that all the people out there using Oracle and IBM tools to run their intranet enterprise apps on web based java platforms don't know what they are doing?
You seem to be thinking of java development as applet development. That is 7 years out of date. Go check out the following pages to see java in action on the web:
http://www.homedepot.com/prel80/HDUS/EN_US/pg_ind
http://www.delta.com/home/index.jsp
What is wrong with all you people? The classpath is no different than the path you use in good old bash.
You need classes because you've got code that depends on them? Good, put them on your classpath so that they can be found.
But the reason it is uncool is because, outside of stuff written just for Java monkeys, there is no Free software to speak of written in it. Free software is written in C (65%), C++ (25%), and Python and Perl (all but the last 1%). Free Software coders have avoided Java for lots of reasons, including its not-really-portability, its bad performance, its hasty and stupid language and library design, its corporate 0wnedness, and their own resistance to hype and idiotic jargon.
Bullshit. There are 12436 projects on sourceforge.net in the java language folder. C and C++ each have barely more (13254 and 13440 respectively). PHP is fourth with 9201 followed by perl with 5321. Your percentages are crap. Java is more than double the popularity of perl there.
Where did most open source Xtreme programming innovation happen? java (JUnit, Ant, Maven, etc...)
Who has the best open source MS Office file format compatibility? java (POI)
Who has the best open source search engine? java (Lucene)
Who has the best open source MVC middleware solutions? java (Struts and/or Velocity)
Who has the best XML tools? java
Who has the best gui test editor? java (jEdit) [and yes, vi and emacs both SUCK]
Who has the best foss XForms implementation? java
Who has the best open source SVG implementation? java (Batik)
Most actively developed open source IDE? java (eclipse)
Frankly, most of the real innovation that is being done in the open source community is being done in java. Stroll on over to Apache Jakarta project and look around for a while.
I'd count "choosing technology which does not require paying attention to useless details" as a more valuable skill and one that increases productivity more.
Since errors happen when there are more details than capacity to attend to them, we should strive to both eliminate details and increase attention capacity. The details in question here that are demanding attention are useless waste that should be eliminated.
If you love paying attention to details for its own sake, take up chess.
As JIT technology matures for these languages (like psycho has for Python), statements like the above become less and less true.
The same advances also make java faster, but this is beside the point since I'm not actually knocking these languages for being slow -- I personally don't care that much about CPU speed so much as speed of development and clarity and reusability. In fact, I love perl, python, and ruby and I'm not a language snob. I was just pointing out hypocracy in others who throw mud at java and then use a slower language. In fact, I've used both jython and jruby and groovy for various tasks at work.
What are you doing with pointers that you have to spend any time at all debugging them?
What are you doing with pointers that you don't have to spend any time at all debugging them?
The three common failure modes are improperly initializing a pointer, bogus pointer arithmetic, and mistakenly assigning one pointer to another when the referenced structures are different. These situations usually don't appear to runtime and then often produce non-repeatable behavior.