> Then consider the history, the Dutch are a bunch of merchants and farmers. Now don't get upset, I myself am proud to be Dutch, and most of my family are midwestern farmers.
While generally true, the Dutch do happen to have kicked out the Spainiards while they happened to be contending the sovereignity of the Netherlands.. but generally, I agree, and all I wanted to say is that the simple reasoning of arming a population to stop crime is simply not working, it is more like there is a relation between level of violence in general and amount of weapons floating around in society, but you can quite debate which causes which.
You could for that matter expand the statistics to include northwest europe (which has a variety of arms control laws, but generally don't allow weapons on the street and don't give out concealed gun permits to civilians, and the statistics seem to still hold.
Ah, and theres always the nice, but little sayign bit of my own experience. While I travel the part of Europe between Greece in the south, Sweden in the north, the UK in the west, and eastern Germany in the east quite a lot, I have never once worried about someone pointing a gun at me, and it never happened. Worried about someone carryign a knife? at times, yes.
While having lived for less then 6 months in Austin, Texas, I got a gun pointed at me once by a mugger, and saw the same happen 2 more times but not involving myself. Of course no statistics there of any value, but it does brign the argument across in a very individual way I can tell you.
Last I checked, I am allowed to carry around a knife that is clearly intended as a weaon in SPain, while I'm not in say the Netherlands. This is the country of Spain on the continent of EUrope, ha nothign to do with Mexico or Columbia really.
In the countryside, I can walk around with a gun legally there as well, while I cannot without lots of paperwork and only within limited boundaries in the Netherlands for example.
Is it the same as in the USA? definitely not, and if you would have cared to read, and for example go read the CIA factbook on things like crime rate, you may see that the rest of what I said is true as well according to them at least.
I suggest you do so indeed. the Netherlands is covered with what would be considered urban area for approx 1/3d, and the population density is a lot higher on average then that of the USA. Our standard of living is indeed a little bit lower then in the USA but only marginally.
So, in this specific case, the argument you make doesn't seem to apply really.
Also, when makign that argument, it would eb a good idea to consider that for as far as Europe is concerned, we have more people livign on a smaller area, so the population density argument only works when you are arguing that a lower population density results in more crime.
Additionally, when lookign within Europe, SPain has a lower population density and a lower standard of livign then the Netherlands. Criminals can easily cross the borders between states and go to a 'safer' place. Regardless, Spain has a much higher crime rate, and also a higher rate of violent crime then the rest of western EUrope.
Btw, I'm not arguing that less weapons automatically result in less violent crime, but the opposite argument seems to hold as little truth.
Weapons as part of daily life is a cultural thing in both the USA and SPain, and both happen to be relatively violent societies also.
Conclusion seems simple, it has all to do with culture, and nothign whatsoever with crime.
Then of course there is the just as valid soundign argument of needign weapons to fight a possible tyranic government..
First of all, I'll ask you, what good will your semi automatic assault riffle do against jetfighters and attack helis? Then, I suggest you take a look at what people needed to overthrow such governments, and specifically look at the following places: India Rumania Russia Poland France
In all those places (and many more) revolutions took place to overthrow tyranic governments. In all those places those revolutions succeeded, and in none of those places people had a 'right to carry arms'.
That such a right was considered important at the time of foudning the USA is understandable, but reality has shown that the reasoning behind it is flawed by now.
This just begs for a response. 'Everywhere that I know' happens to also include that part of the world thats not inside the USA (yet) ?
If it is then you are absolutely and completely wrong.
In quite a few places in Europe, icluding the part where I happen to live (the Netherlands), police is taught to shoot to kill ONLY if they had no other options whatsoever, and are taught to STOP what is going on usign the least amount of force possible.
Incidentely (check the CIA world fact book on it if you like) we also have: 1. less people killed in general 2. less people killed by police use of violence 3. less policemen killed by violence 4. less robbery with use of violence 5. lower crime rate in general then the USA.
And yes, we also have banned weapons from daily life, tho it is very well possible to have one for sports or hunting.
Interestingly, Spain follows a lot closer the rules as they are in the USA, and also turns out having by far the highest rate of violent robberies and people gettign killed by violence of all of western EUrope (actually, only Poland and some parts of eastern EUrope come close to it, and don't surpass it yet)
The point is that there is a statistical relationship between amount of violence and how a society deals with weapons.
That relation nowhere shows that places that have weapons readily available to civilians are safer, rather, it shows the exact opposite.
You may feel safer havign your conceiled gun permit, but realize it is tjust that, you FEEL safer, in fact you are not.
I again suggest reading up a bit on the numbers, the CIA factbook is a nice patriotic source for the Americans among you who say this is all just the bs from the anti-gun lobby.
Actually.. those who were responsible should have to pay them back at least 3 times, and from their personal account.
That a company takes the damage when things go wrong is understandable, but when people have intentionally screwed things up, they should be held personally accountable.
It amazes me that it seems acceptable to politicians that individual citizens can be put out of their life savings by an organisation like the RIAA over possibly endangering their income, while big corporations can rip of the citizens and the responsible people just walk away.
Your poitn seems to be that when you have 512mb total (regardless of what part of it is ram) and you try to use 513mb, you run out of memory. Of course that is true.
The problem is that 1mb swap is a lot cheaper then 1mb ram. Ie, for a certain oprice, you could afford 512mb ram, or 256mb ram and 8gb swap.
> Ummm, okay. That may be correct, but you've given nothing to go on
It has been a few years since I did any substantial JAVA project (2001 or thereabout) but the first thing that comes to mind is runtime vs compiletime type-checking.
> There are many conditions that Java will at least catch that most "proper" languages never do, and go unnoticed until someone has root access to your box.
I'd restate that a bit, JAVA doesn't provide things like real pointers in most cases, and as a result doesn't provide the functionality that allows for things like buffer overflows etc.
At any rate, the result is as you say, it is a lot harder to make JAVA code that can be abused for compromising a system.
This comes with a price however, it also means JAVA doesn't give the functionality where it would be needed either.
> I think I can correctly ascertain from that, you've never used IDEA or Eclipse for editing a Java program of any substantial size. The comment does not make sense in context.
I did use Eclipse, but again, this has been a few years ago.
At any rate, my statement makes no sense to most JAVA programmers because you nromally don't get to deal with different runtime environments and compilers. SUN does a good job there in ensuring all official JAVA implementations look exactly alike from the point of view of the programmer and IDE.
This is different when you have independent implementations of compilers and runtime environments such as with C and C++
Again, this comes at a price, there is no real competition among providers of JAVA runtime environments.
> I've never heard anybody make this complaint. Probably because they never get errors from the compiler. Their only source is the IDE which not only tells them what the error is, but will also suggest how to fix it and can do the fix automatically.
I think your assertion is correct, see above for why it is that way imho.
> IDEA is kind of like having a junior programmer/code monkey at my disposal. He makes suggestions on how to fix the simplistic issues of my code, and I choose whether or not to sign off on one or to do a more intelligent fix myself.
Which is fine when you are a senior programmer. The result I have often seen however is that it allows hiding lack of understanding untill it is way too late to fix things properly. Also, it allows for sloppyness and more or less rewards it.
Knowing what conditions can be caused by doing a certain call, and as a result knowing what exceptions it can cause, is a very good thing when you are debugging code, and generally helps understandign what your code is doing. I personally prefer an environment that forces me to have that knowledge. If the automated fixes really save me so much time that it becomes relevant, I consider myself to be too sloppy with my code.
THe one thign I really wonder about is this:
Approx 10 years ago, I was workign at IBM and we just got this nice OS/2 version that came with a JAVA runtime. At the time, the same arguments were being made regardign portability and the better development environments that were possible.
10 years later, I still have to see a single complex and widely employed JAVA application.
Where JAVA does seem to do well is in corporate environments where rapid development is a major issue. It also seems to do well for complex, server-side applications and for small web-based client-side applets.
I assume there is a reason why complex JAVA applications only happen in environments that are very well defined and are controllable, and doesn't happen for the average end-user application. It has been tried, but so far such effords resulted in badly performing, and functionally lacking applications (Corel office comes to mind), and the complexity of installing such applications seems to keep people away from them as well (Freenet for example)
At any rate, JAVA is a usefull tool, and SUN did a good job at design wi
> SPF, for instance, fights forgery, which happens to make it easier to identify the real origins of spam. Finding the real origins of spam makes it easier to make policy decisions for filtering and blocking common sources of spam.
Yes, and SPF is definitely a step in the right direction.
> Spam is about consent, not content.
Yes, but about your consent, not that of your ISP.
Well, I am writing a short series of articles about this very subject. you can follow them on my website (mentioned at the top of this post)
I agree that it will not be easy to make everyone switch at once, but that is true for many of the proposed solutions. Port 25 blocking just doesn't happen to have this problem, but I think in the end risking their common carrier status is a too high price for ISPs when they can get another solution that actually works. Why do ISPs risk common carrier status? Because it is based on the principe that they provide transport and do not interfer with what is done by their customers unless either the customer itself asks them explicitly, or they are explicitly made aware of illegal activity. Filtering to suppress an undesirable (to them) form of traffic kinda contradicts that and would turn them more into the equivalent of a content provider.
There are quite some conditions that C++ and any other proper language catches at compiletime while they are only caught at runtime in Java. what you say may be true, but is partially the result of the language being broken, and in part it is indeed an accomplishment of it being more rigid in some things.
Also, if you put enough compiler-like intelligence in your IDE, then the same is possible with C++, and I have no doubt it has been done. I prefer my compiler telling me whats wrong thop. It has a better idea because it is actually doing the compilation, and the errors I will get are specific to the current implementation of the compiler that I am using.
Getting the same type of errors from two different things is just confusing, people will see it as two different things while in fact they are the same thing.
> unpack it to your solaris, HP-UX, linux, bsd, even windows. start it. it runs. more?
I don't doubt your statement that it will run given you have the proper JVM on those platforms, but lets see... BSD?
The only option at all in that case is to get a developers licence for the source distribution, and only when you happen to run FreeBSD.
Additionally, you need a Linux JVM + Linux compatibility to be able to bootstrap the build..
Half a day later (given your compilation works out at all) you may have a native working JVM that you cannot use on anything else then the box you built it on, making it pretty useless for anything other then development.
Running another BSD? bad luck.
Today its BSD, tomorrow another platform. Matter of fact is that the biggest problem for portability of Java is Sun's insane restrictions on use of the source code, not some technical problems of Java.
Take a peek at this. The problem is not just making Java apps portable, that is quite doable in fact. The problem is first of all the portability of the JVM, and second, the fact that so many people end up using OS specific extentions/apis, which removes the portability quite efficiently.
Hate to reply to my own posts, but wanted to add the results..
First of all, I noticed that I had already tried this (the kernel config I used for testing the nvidia module had them disabled)
Second, it doesn't solve the instability issues. THe 2 ways I found to prevent them are the 2 I mentioned in my earlier post, either use the linux-threads port or revert to libc_r.
Too bad since 5.2.x does a much better job supporting the rest of my hardware (ata-133 and s-ata controllers, bc gigabit ethernet controller etc)
> Nuclear terrorism may be a valid threat, but nuclear war is a thing of the past.
Maybe true when thinking about cold-war era scale wars, but with a few more nuclear powers out there, some of which are not that stable politically (Pakistan comes to mind) and some not caring about how much peopel die in their hunger for control (North Korea comes to mind) I'd say the chance on actual nuclear war has increased.
If this will trigger global nuclear war is to be seen, but humans never invented a more effective weapon without also using it.
To me the later falls under the catagory of 'common use'. Its how languages develop, and while it would be nice if there was solid logic to how a language develops, the level of irregularity in most languages suggests there is no such thing really. In other words, its defined by use, and if you think a certain use is incorrect, use what you consider to be the correct one. Denouncing it does little when compared to overwhelming it with a better alternative.
I'm not a native speaker of the English language and don't mind corrections here and there, but attacking people and calling them names over it is something entirely different.
Oh, and.. nothing against anti-virii crusades, but often it is irrelevant compared to the rest of the message.
When people start attacking you on grammar or spelling while your message is quite understandable, it usually points at those people not being smart enough to come up with a real argument as to why they dislike your message.
No it was definitely not, the roots of TV development are in the USA and the UK and the first moving picture transmision took place in the USA. Nazi Germany was however a very early adaptor of state television and pioneered its use as a medium for (dis)information and propaganda. They were most definitely the first in Europe to have national TV broadcasts with regular programming (possibly the first in the world) and did the first large scale TV coverage ever of a big sporting event (1936 olympics)
As in many things, they didn't invent, but did a very good job at making it practical and using it. (they didn't invent rockets or liquid fuel rockets or jet engines or submarines or such either, but they made them practical in production and use)
Then about games and learning history... those who read my posts probably know that I like playing Enemy Territory. I'm pretty confident that the people involved in map-making for that game learned quite a bit of history on the way, esp. seeing the practise of using real events as inspiration for many of the better maps out there.
Now that the source code is available, people are developing mods that create a much more historically inspired setup (Price of Peace mod) and again I bet the makers are learning a bit of history on the way...
For as far as players go.. at times its usefull to ubnderstand a bit of the military issues from the time of the secodn world war, but I doubt you will gain any historical knowledge by just playing unless you are already interested in that history anyway.
Interestingly, I currently run 5.x on my main server and 4.9 on my workstation.
I'm not running 4.9 out of conservatism or anything like that, but simply for the reason that I don't have time to bother with the current issues regarding the nvidia drivers and multi-threading.
My server runs 5.x because its rock solid and does a good job taking advantage of the smp hardware.
Once I don't have to bother with the linux-threads port to get a working form of kernel scheduling for threads with the nvidia driver or have to stick to libc_r, I'll switch back to 5.x on my workstation. (and yes, I know I'm stuck with libc_r now when using 4.9, but at least I don't have to bother keeping it that way while recompiling updates and such)
(oh, and why not use the xfree nvidia driver? because I want opengl for playing enemy territory and the like... not very important really, but good opengl support itself is important for other desktop uses)
Because many early 90s non PC machines are in fact pretty fast and for quite a few uses it matters if such a machine takes 3 secs instead of 3 minutes to boot for example.
Also, there exist other things then PCs that are currently doing important jobs. You may even find that there are still clusters of vaxen from the late 80s doing pretty relevant stuff at government agencies.
There can be very good reasons to not want to use pentium technology or anythign equivalent in specific cases. This has to do with predictability of state of a piece of hardware. When you are in an environment where you simply must reduce failure chance beyond the reasonable (think nuclear power and weapons controls and similar) you want a hardwired cpu instead of oen that runs on microcode, and you do not want fancy stuff like out of order execution, you want to be able to tell exactly the electrical and logical state of your hardware in any conceivable condition.
There is a lot more to computing then the latest fashionable bits of PC hardware, and I'd actually think that outside scientific stuff that needs computer power, most of the important computing is done on equipment that could be considered hopelessly outdated when compared to what you can buy as a consumer.
Well, my ISP already holds me responsible for how my connection is used, and will cut it off when detecting a problem that I fail to fix in a reasonable time.
The problem with using the outbound smtp server of your ISP when having your own domain is that it stands in the way of any attempt to fix another major problem in SMTP, that of being able to use a fake sender address. Besides, why would one expect an ISP to be responsible for mail from domains that they don't controll?
In my opinion the ONLY solution is fixing or replacing the SMTP protocol. Trying to 'patch' it just results in major inconvenience and delay of any real solution.
comcast may not allow it but they are not the only player in town. (and the ISP I am using explicitly allows it for example) so I really doubt you will see a 'blanket solution anytime soon.
Besides, whats next? blocking all traffic to known p2p related ports? and then filter USENET?
People should start thinking a lot more about the consequences of 'solutions' they propose, esp those involved in spam prevention have a strong tendency to go for measures that are way worse then the problem they try to solve while missing the obvious (the smtp protocol being broken)
Slashdot Mirror
> Then consider the history, the Dutch are a bunch of merchants and farmers. Now don't get upset, I myself am proud to be Dutch, and most of my family are midwestern farmers.
While generally true, the Dutch do happen to have kicked out the Spainiards while they happened to be contending the sovereignity of the Netherlands.. but generally, I agree, and all I wanted to say is that the simple reasoning of arming a population to stop crime is simply not working, it is more like there is a relation between level of violence in general and amount of weapons floating around in society, but you can quite debate which causes which.
You could for that matter expand the statistics to include northwest europe (which has a variety of arms control laws, but generally don't allow weapons on the street and don't give out concealed gun permits to civilians, and the statistics seem to still hold.
Ah, and theres always the nice, but little sayign bit of my own experience. While I travel the part of Europe between Greece in the south, Sweden in the north, the UK in the west, and eastern Germany in the east quite a lot, I have never once worried about someone pointing a gun at me, and it never happened. Worried about someone carryign a knife? at times, yes.
While having lived for less then 6 months in Austin, Texas, I got a gun pointed at me once by a mugger, and saw the same happen 2 more times but not involving myself. Of course no statistics there of any value, but it does brign the argument across in a very individual way I can tell you.
Last I checked, I am allowed to carry around a knife that is clearly intended as a weaon in SPain, while I'm not in say the Netherlands. This is the country of Spain on the continent of EUrope, ha nothign to do with Mexico or Columbia really.
In the countryside, I can walk around with a gun legally there as well, while I cannot without lots of paperwork and only within limited boundaries in the Netherlands for example.
Is it the same as in the USA? definitely not, and if you would have cared to read, and for example go read the CIA factbook on things like crime rate, you may see that the rest of what I said is true as well according to them at least.
I suggest you do so indeed. the Netherlands is covered with what would be considered urban area for approx 1/3d, and the population density is a lot higher on average then that of the USA. Our standard of living is indeed a little bit lower then in the USA but only marginally.
So, in this specific case, the argument you make doesn't seem to apply really.
Also, when makign that argument, it would eb a good idea to consider that for as far as Europe is concerned, we have more people livign on a smaller area, so the population density argument only works when you are arguing that a lower population density results in more crime.
Additionally, when lookign within Europe, SPain has a lower population density and a lower standard of livign then the Netherlands. Criminals can easily cross the borders between states and go to a 'safer' place. Regardless, Spain has a much higher crime rate, and also a higher rate of violent crime then the rest of western EUrope.
Btw, I'm not arguing that less weapons automatically result in less violent crime, but the opposite argument seems to hold as little truth.
Weapons as part of daily life is a cultural thing in both the USA and SPain, and both happen to be relatively violent societies also.
Conclusion seems simple, it has all to do with culture, and nothign whatsoever with crime.
Then of course there is the just as valid soundign argument of needign weapons to fight a possible tyranic government..
First of all, I'll ask you, what good will your semi automatic assault riffle do against jetfighters and attack helis? Then, I suggest you take a look at what people needed to overthrow such governments, and specifically look at the following places:
India
Rumania
Russia
Poland
France
In all those places (and many more) revolutions took place to overthrow tyranic governments. In all those places those revolutions succeeded, and in none of those places people had a 'right to carry arms'.
That such a right was considered important at the time of foudning the USA is understandable, but reality has shown that the reasoning behind it is flawed by now.
> BTW, all cops, everywhere that I know
This just begs for a response. 'Everywhere that I know' happens to also include that part of the world thats not inside the USA (yet) ?
If it is then you are absolutely and completely wrong.
In quite a few places in Europe, icluding the part where I happen to live (the Netherlands), police is taught to shoot to kill ONLY if they had no other options whatsoever, and are taught to STOP what is going on usign the least amount of force possible.
Incidentely (check the CIA world fact book on it if you like) we also have:
1. less people killed in general
2. less people killed by police use of violence
3. less policemen killed by violence
4. less robbery with use of violence
5. lower crime rate in general then the USA.
And yes, we also have banned weapons from daily life, tho it is very well possible to have one for sports or hunting.
Interestingly, Spain follows a lot closer the rules as they are in the USA, and also turns out having by far the highest rate of violent robberies and people gettign killed by violence of all of western EUrope (actually, only Poland and some parts of eastern EUrope come close to it, and don't surpass it yet)
The point is that there is a statistical relationship between amount of violence and how a society deals with weapons.
That relation nowhere shows that places that have weapons readily available to civilians are safer, rather, it shows the exact opposite.
You may feel safer havign your conceiled gun permit, but realize it is tjust that, you FEEL safer, in fact you are not.
I again suggest reading up a bit on the numbers, the CIA factbook is a nice patriotic source for the Americans among you who say this is all just the bs from the anti-gun lobby.
Actually.. those who were responsible should have to pay them back at least 3 times, and from their personal account.
That a company takes the damage when things go wrong is understandable, but when people have intentionally screwed things up, they should be held personally accountable.
It amazes me that it seems acceptable to politicians that individual citizens can be put out of their life savings by an organisation like the RIAA over possibly endangering their income, while big corporations can rip of the citizens and the responsible people just walk away.
Your poitn seems to be that when you have 512mb total (regardless of what part of it is ram) and you try to use 513mb, you run out of memory. Of course that is true.
The problem is that 1mb swap is a lot cheaper then 1mb ram. Ie, for a certain oprice, you could afford 512mb ram, or 256mb ram and 8gb swap.
> Ummm, okay. That may be correct, but you've given nothing to go on
It has been a few years since I did any substantial JAVA project (2001 or thereabout) but the first thing that comes to mind is runtime vs compiletime type-checking.
> There are many conditions that Java will at least catch that most "proper" languages never do, and go unnoticed until someone has root access to your box.
I'd restate that a bit, JAVA doesn't provide things like real pointers in most cases, and as a result doesn't provide the functionality that allows for things like buffer overflows etc.
At any rate, the result is as you say, it is a lot harder to make JAVA code that can be abused for compromising a system.
This comes with a price however, it also means JAVA doesn't give the functionality where it would be needed either.
> I think I can correctly ascertain from that, you've never used IDEA or Eclipse for editing a Java program of any substantial size. The comment does not make sense in context.
I did use Eclipse, but again, this has been a few years ago.
At any rate, my statement makes no sense to most JAVA programmers because you nromally don't get to deal with different runtime environments and compilers. SUN does a good job there in ensuring all official JAVA implementations look exactly alike from the point of view of the programmer and IDE.
This is different when you have independent implementations of compilers and runtime environments such as with C and C++
Again, this comes at a price, there is no real competition among providers of JAVA runtime environments.
> I've never heard anybody make this complaint. Probably because they never get errors from the compiler. Their only source is the IDE which not only tells them what the error is, but will also suggest how to fix it and can do the fix automatically.
I think your assertion is correct, see above for why it is that way imho.
> IDEA is kind of like having a junior programmer/code monkey at my disposal. He makes suggestions on how to fix the simplistic issues of my code, and I choose whether or not to sign off on one or to do a more intelligent fix myself.
Which is fine when you are a senior programmer. The result I have often seen however is that it allows hiding lack of understanding untill it is way too late to fix things properly. Also, it allows for sloppyness and more or less rewards it.
Knowing what conditions can be caused by doing a certain call, and as a result knowing what exceptions it can cause, is a very good thing when you are debugging code, and generally helps understandign what your code is doing. I personally prefer an environment that forces me to have that knowledge. If the automated fixes really save me so much time that it becomes relevant, I consider myself to be too sloppy with my code.
THe one thign I really wonder about is this:
Approx 10 years ago, I was workign at IBM and we just got this nice OS/2 version that came with a JAVA runtime. At the time, the same arguments were being made regardign portability and the better development environments that were possible.
10 years later, I still have to see a single complex and widely employed JAVA application.
Where JAVA does seem to do well is in corporate environments where rapid development is a major issue. It also seems to do well for complex, server-side applications and for small web-based client-side applets.
I assume there is a reason why complex JAVA applications only happen in environments that are very well defined and are controllable, and doesn't happen for the average end-user application. It has been tried, but so far such effords resulted in badly performing, and functionally lacking applications (Corel office comes to mind), and the complexity of installing such applications seems to keep people away from them as well (Freenet for example)
At any rate, JAVA is a usefull tool, and SUN did a good job at design wi
> SPF, for instance, fights forgery, which happens to make it easier to identify the real origins of spam. Finding the real origins of spam makes it easier to make policy decisions for filtering and blocking common sources of spam.
Yes, and SPF is definitely a step in the right direction.
> Spam is about consent, not content.
Yes, but about your consent, not that of your ISP.
Well, I am writing a short series of articles about this very subject. you can follow them on my website (mentioned at the top of this post)
I agree that it will not be easy to make everyone switch at once, but that is true for many of the proposed solutions. Port 25 blocking just doesn't happen to have this problem, but I think in the end risking their common carrier status is a too high price for ISPs when they can get another solution that actually works. Why do ISPs risk common carrier status? Because it is based on the principe that they provide transport and do not interfer with what is done by their customers unless either the customer itself asks them explicitly, or they are explicitly made aware of illegal activity. Filtering to suppress an undesirable (to them) form of traffic kinda contradicts that and would turn them more into the equivalent of a content provider.
There are quite some conditions that C++ and any other proper language catches at compiletime while they are only caught at runtime in Java. what you say may be true, but is partially the result of the language being broken, and in part it is indeed an accomplishment of it being more rigid in some things.
Also, if you put enough compiler-like intelligence in your IDE, then the same is possible with C++, and I have no doubt it has been done. I prefer my compiler telling me whats wrong thop. It has a better idea because it is actually doing the compilation, and the errors I will get are specific to the current implementation of the compiler that I am using.
Getting the same type of errors from two different things is just confusing, people will see it as two different things while in fact they are the same thing.
> unpack it to your solaris, HP-UX, linux, bsd, even windows. start it. it runs. more?
I don't doubt your statement that it will run given you have the proper JVM on those platforms, but lets see... BSD?
The only option at all in that case is to get a developers licence for the source distribution, and only when you happen to run FreeBSD.
Additionally, you need a Linux JVM + Linux compatibility to be able to bootstrap the build..
Half a day later (given your compilation works out at all) you may have a native working JVM that you cannot use on anything else then the box you built it on, making it pretty useless for anything other then development.
Running another BSD? bad luck.
Today its BSD, tomorrow another platform. Matter of fact is that the biggest problem for portability of Java is Sun's insane restrictions on use of the source code, not some technical problems of Java.
Take a peek at this. The problem is not just making Java apps portable, that is quite doable in fact. The problem is first of all the portability of the JVM, and second, the fact that so many people end up using OS specific extentions/apis, which removes the portability quite efficiently.
Hate to reply to my own posts, but wanted to add the results..
First of all, I noticed that I had already tried this (the kernel config I used for testing the nvidia module had them disabled)
Second, it doesn't solve the instability issues. THe 2 ways I found to prevent them are the 2 I mentioned in my earlier post, either use the linux-threads port or revert to libc_r.
Too bad since 5.2.x does a much better job supporting the rest of my hardware (ata-133 and s-ata controllers, bc gigabit ethernet controller etc)
It already loads, but it crashes at random during opengl use.
Thanks for the suggestion tho, will give it a trey to see if it fixes the crashes.
> Nuclear terrorism may be a valid threat, but nuclear war is a thing of the past.
Maybe true when thinking about cold-war era scale wars, but with a few more nuclear powers out there, some of which are not that stable politically (Pakistan comes to mind) and some not caring about how much peopel die in their hunger for control (North Korea comes to mind) I'd say the chance on actual nuclear war has increased.
If this will trigger global nuclear war is to be seen, but humans never invented a more effective weapon without also using it.
They will care in the end because it endangers their status as common carrier. Losing that is bound to cause them a lot more headaches and money.
To me the later falls under the catagory of 'common use'. Its how languages develop, and while it would be nice if there was solid logic to how a language develops, the level of irregularity in most languages suggests there is no such thing really. In other words, its defined by use, and if you think a certain use is incorrect, use what you consider to be the correct one. Denouncing it does little when compared to overwhelming it with a better alternative.
I'm not a native speaker of the English language and don't mind corrections here and there, but attacking people and calling them names over it is something entirely different.
Oh, and.. nothing against anti-virii crusades, but often it is irrelevant compared to the rest of the message.
When people start attacking you on grammar or spelling while your message is quite understandable, it usually points at those people not being smart enough to come up with a real argument as to why they dislike your message.
> I don't think TV was a Nazi invention.
No it was definitely not, the roots of TV development are in the USA and the UK and the first moving picture transmision took place in the USA. Nazi Germany was however a very early adaptor of state television and pioneered its use as a medium for (dis)information and propaganda. They were most definitely the first in Europe to have national TV broadcasts with regular programming (possibly the first in the world) and did the first large scale TV coverage ever of a big sporting event (1936 olympics)
As in many things, they didn't invent, but did a very good job at making it practical and using it.
(they didn't invent rockets or liquid fuel rockets or jet engines or submarines or such either, but they made them practical in production and use)
Then about games and learning history... those who read my posts probably know that I like playing Enemy Territory. I'm pretty confident that the people involved in map-making for that game learned quite a bit of history on the way, esp. seeing the practise of using real events as inspiration for many of the better maps out there.
Now that the source code is available, people are developing mods that create a much more historically inspired setup (Price of Peace mod) and again I bet the makers are learning a bit of history on the way...
For as far as players go.. at times its usefull to ubnderstand a bit of the military issues from the time of the secodn world war, but I doubt you will gain any historical knowledge by just playing unless you are already interested in that history anyway.
I use both 4.x and 5.x
Interestingly, I currently run 5.x on my main server and 4.9 on my workstation.
I'm not running 4.9 out of conservatism or anything like that, but simply for the reason that I don't have time to bother with the current issues regarding the nvidia drivers and multi-threading.
My server runs 5.x because its rock solid and does a good job taking advantage of the smp hardware.
Once I don't have to bother with the linux-threads port to get a working form of kernel scheduling for threads with the nvidia driver or have to stick to libc_r, I'll switch back to 5.x on my workstation. (and yes, I know I'm stuck with libc_r now when using 4.9, but at least I don't have to bother keeping it that way while recompiling updates and such)
(oh, and why not use the xfree nvidia driver? because I want opengl for playing enemy territory and the like... not very important really, but good opengl support itself is important for other desktop uses)
Because many early 90s non PC machines are in fact pretty fast and for quite a few uses it matters if such a machine takes 3 secs instead of 3 minutes to boot for example.
A 486DX has a builtin math copro.
Also, there exist other things then PCs that are currently doing important jobs. You may even find that there are still clusters of vaxen from the late 80s doing pretty relevant stuff at government agencies.
There can be very good reasons to not want to use pentium technology or anythign equivalent in specific cases. This has to do with predictability of state of a piece of hardware. When you are in an environment where you simply must reduce failure chance beyond the reasonable (think nuclear power and weapons controls and similar) you want a hardwired cpu instead of oen that runs on microcode, and you do not want fancy stuff like out of order execution, you want to be able to tell exactly the electrical and logical state of your hardware in any conceivable condition.
There is a lot more to computing then the latest fashionable bits of PC hardware, and I'd actually think that outside scientific stuff that needs computer power, most of the important computing is done on equipment that could be considered hopelessly outdated when compared to what you can buy as a consumer.
Well, my ISP already holds me responsible for how my connection is used, and will cut it off when detecting a problem that I fail to fix in a reasonable time.
The problem with using the outbound smtp server of your ISP when having your own domain is that it stands in the way of any attempt to fix another major problem in SMTP, that of being able to use a fake sender address. Besides, why would one expect an ISP to be responsible for mail from domains that they don't controll?
In my opinion the ONLY solution is fixing or replacing the SMTP protocol. Trying to 'patch' it just results in major inconvenience and delay of any real solution.
comcast may not allow it but they are not the only player in town. (and the ISP I am using explicitly allows it for example) so I really doubt you will see a 'blanket solution anytime soon.
Besides, whats next? blocking all traffic to known p2p related ports? and then filter USENET?
People should start thinking a lot more about the consequences of 'solutions' they propose, esp those
involved in spam prevention have a strong tendency to go for measures that are way worse then the problem they try to solve while missing the obvious (the smtp protocol being broken)