FWIW, other than as part of a knee-jerk "don't put scriptlets in JSP pages!" dogma, I've never understood why coding advice like the following (from the article at OnJava.com referred to in the parent):
Finally, EL expressions can be mixed with template text directly in the page. This comes in very handy when you're generating HTML elements and need to set an attribute to a dynamic value:
With JSP 1.2, you had to use JSTL's action to accomplish the same thing, ending up with a mix of elements of different types that was hard to understand:
I'll agree that MIT graduates are almost certainly among the brightest people, and that in the long run businesses do a lot better by hiring bright people versus people with specific knowledge of a particular technology (especially in software, where technologies can have a shelf life of 12- to 18-months).
But for developing production-quality software solutions, and in particular a content-management solution, I'm not sure they'd come anywhere near the "most-skilled" category. With a few years of job experience, perhaps...
because they expect (and often deserver (sic)) high salaries and the IT sector is very tight right now
Not troll'ing here, I swear...
What makes you say that they deserve high(er) salaries? I'll grant that they have a unique/distinct experience set, but I have a hard time understanding why that in and of itself necessarily correlates to a high $$ value in the eyes of the (now quite international) job market.
People tend to be quite unaware of the details of how their tax dollars are spent, though.
If you convey your viewpoint (be it neutral, biased, or whatever) to enough people, you might get a positive reaction, or at the least raise awareness to the point where meaningful discussion will take place.
I can't choose to stop paying my taxes if I decide not to use the government-offered service. I'd be thrown in jail and my assets would be siezed.
True enough, but you *can* choose to get involved in your government by going to town meetings, organizing community groups, interacting with your representatives, etc.
And, as far as local taxes go, you can always vote with your feet.
Actually, complaining about the "unfairness" of the government's ability to "sell below cost" is a bit of a red herring.
The "real" unfairness is the government's ability to compel subscription to (and/or investment in) the service via taxes, with which a private company truly can't compete.
However, insofar as the government is really just the unified voice of the people, as long as the populace consents to underwrite the service as a wise use of their tax dollars I don't see a whole lot wrong with it.
Now, there may come a day when Utahans (Utahites? Utahweenians?) will begin to question the application of their individual tax contributions towards high-speed Internet infrastructure projects (i.e. "Hey, my taxes just went up, and I don't even use the Internet! How about fixing the potholes on my street?"), but that's the normal course of government.
To avoid this sometimes hard-to-notice bug, a lot of people embed such things in strings using octal escapes, which take a max of three (octal) digits -- if you always use 3 digits for these, you never get screwed.
For example, to create a string containg a null character followed by the digits 1 thru 9, you'd say:
char z[] = "\000123456789" ;
which gives you a 10-character string followed by the trailing null (i.e., (11 == sizeof z) is true).
Re:prefabs are great
on
Pre-Fab Homes?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The first ever pre-fab homes were built by Thomas Edison for his own use.
FWIW, he also built some concrete houses in New Jersey (US).
The moment end-to-end encryption and authentication is enabled, either via tunnels or by just encrypting the IP payload, no authority trying to assert control over VoIP will be able to identify one application verses another e.g., VoIP verses HTTP verses SMTP.
Doesn't VoIP use RTP for the voice data? Your provider could easily identify & either block or otherwise impede the RTP packets, especially if they were offering a QOS VoIP solution and didn't want a level playing field (versus on open source, best effort solution).
And yes, sand for glass is pretty damn cheap, but in some places, it can be a lot easier to turn old glass into new glass than to find a... beach that isn't vanishing due to everyone driving down and taking sand and rocks for their gardens.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that beaches are vanishing due to "everyone driving down and taking sand and rocks for their gardens" -- do you have any data to back that up?
Doesn't natural movement of sand, beach erosion, storm effects, and even rising sea levels sound a little more probable?
So, you're saying, you want to be able to lie to your insurance company, and then the court, about how fast you were going?
Perhaps the poster is more simply saying that the black box & data are their property, and as such it is their decision re whether to use it in their defense.
In other words, that troublesome Fifth Amendment is tripping you up again -- "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself".
The instant information access, unless the book is in a fire or something, is what always makes books cool.
Don't underestimate the value of being able to search and cut-and-paste electronic media.
I can picture your Dad referring you to something neat in that precious stack of pages -- "You have to read this (flip, flip), I think it was on page ninety-something (flip, flip, scan, scan), no, wait, it must be here somewhere (flip, scan),..."
Not to mention the annoyance of the not-so-instant access when wanting to quote part of a printed book in another medium.
In all seriousness, I find the "I don't get 911 with VoIP" complaint a little weak.
I have one land line in my house, and attached to that is a cordless phone / answering machine combo that only works when the (grid) power is on. I imagine a lot of other people are in the same boat, and I don't think people obsess over the fact that if there's a power failure their phone won't work.
I imagine that the 911 problem is similarly lessened if you have a cell phone in addition to the phones in your house.
For example, Pennsylvania has this inane "self employment" tax for independent contractors and small business owners. It is above and beyond all the rest of the taxes that regular salaried employees pay...
Just to clarify, the "self employment tax" you refer to is more-or-less equivalent to FICA taxes that employee wages are subject to. So it's not really "above and beyond all the rest of the taxes... that employees pay", though as a self-employed person you do get the pleasure of paying *both* sides of the tax (employer and employee, roughly 7.65% each).
I work hard when I write code that talks to a database to NEVER use transactions or rollback...
In all seriousness, what do you do when *multiple* applications interact with your database information (never mind just multiple users)?
Do you "code" your hacks into every application? What do you do when you don't control the code of the other applications (e.g. third-party apps interact with the same tables)? How do you handle replication?
The article's a little short on data to answer your question, but using the article:
When she, her husband and son lived in a Tokyo apartment, the family paid 16,000 yen ($135) a month for electricity. Now, their bill has fallen by half and they receive about 2,000 yen from Tokyo Electric Power in return for the surplus electricity they generate.
and assuming that the electricity bill in Yoshikawa would resemble that of their old apartment in Tokyo, it looks like they could be saving about $85/month (~$1K/yr), with the solar panels "paying for themselves" in 18 years (neglecting a whole bunch of variables, of course).
I went through the same thing about 6 years ago, and though this sounds a bit odd my biggest regret was going into the merger with "too open" of a mind.
In my case, the purchasing company was bigger and (seemingly) more advanced than we were, and accordingly my initial approach was to bend over backwards to accomodate their requests, integrate with their technology, stay humble, allow that other folks may have solved the usual problems differently/better, give the benefit of the doubt, etc.
What I didn't appreciate at the time is that our organization was productive & successful (in our little niche) because over time we had acquired certain skills and chosen technologies and approaches that worked for us (and disregarded/discarded those that didn't), and that those were the things that made us an attractive acquisition. "Keeping an open mind" insofar as it entailed questioning or abandoning what had got us to the point of acquisition was therefore a mistake (IMHO).
In other words, do as much as you can to understand why your company was purchased, and try to maintain a "peer-to-peer" attitude with the acquiring company (if appropriate).
let's see...we've got the code, the specs, we know how it works because we wrote the specs....
In all seriousness, the key part of that probably turns into "we know how we wanted it to work because we wrote the (incomplete) UI-level specs..."
It's too easy to say that everything would be fine if only the users would write complete & accurate specs. In reality you're talking about an Human Resources department (for example) in a Fortune 500 company that wants to buy an "enterprise level" organization charting package. They're a bunch of non-technical folks (at least as far as developing software goes) who just want to produce organizational charts, NOT get involved in writing specifications, evaluting technologies (as they might have to if multiple bids come in to the RFP they had to send out), beta testing the software, devloping backup/redundancy plans, etc.
And, in practice, I've never seen a complete & accurate RFP that was worth the paper it was written on. And that goes for most "specifications", too, including the 1000+ page monsters produced by AT&T and Lucent in their heydays.
An inventor, who is an employee of someone else, makes an invention as an
employee on the employerâ(TM)s time, and perhaps uses some of the materials
that are supplied to him or her by the employer. Now that raises, in most
legal systems and in the United States, the possibility that the law will imply
certain rights in the patent to the employer. In the United States, we have
developed over time the law with respect to shop rightsâ"which could be based on estoppel theories, could be based on implied contract theoriesâ"for
deciding when we will give, as a matter of law, a royalty-free license to the
employer.
..., but I wouldn't expect this to be measured by whether you're using the company's computer,...
It certainly would be a major factor if and when a company tried to assert copyright ownership to software created by an employee, along with things like whether the software in question was developed during business hours.
Re:Short Story Recommendations?? (try updike)
on
A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 1
Speaking of John Updike, the "Rabbit" series (four books) is also very good.
And for short stories, have you read the "Prize Stories nnnn: The O. Henry Awards" series? It's published every year, and each has around 20 "of the best" short stories published the previous year.
Slashdot Mirror
But for developing production-quality software solutions, and in particular a content-management solution, I'm not sure they'd come anywhere near the "most-skilled" category. With a few years of job experience, perhaps...
What makes you say that they deserve high(er) salaries? I'll grant that they have a unique/distinct experience set, but I have a hard time understanding why that in and of itself necessarily correlates to a high $$ value in the eyes of the (now quite international) job market.
If you convey your viewpoint (be it neutral, biased, or whatever) to enough people, you might get a positive reaction, or at the least raise awareness to the point where meaningful discussion will take place.
And, as far as local taxes go, you can always vote with your feet.
The "real" unfairness is the government's ability to compel subscription to (and/or investment in) the service via taxes, with which a private company truly can't compete.
However, insofar as the government is really just the unified voice of the people, as long as the populace consents to underwrite the service as a wise use of their tax dollars I don't see a whole lot wrong with it.
Now, there may come a day when Utahans (Utahites? Utahweenians?) will begin to question the application of their individual tax contributions towards high-speed Internet infrastructure projects (i.e. "Hey, my taxes just went up, and I don't even use the Internet! How about fixing the potholes on my street?"), but that's the normal course of government.
For example, to create a string containg a null character followed by the digits 1 thru 9, you'd say: char z[] = "\000123456789" ; which gives you a 10-character string followed by the trailing null (i.e., (11 == sizeof z) is true).
Doesn't natural movement of sand, beach erosion, storm effects, and even rising sea levels sound a little more probable?
I really miss "back-ticking" when using cmd.exe, though, which is why I use cygwin/bash.
However, I do agree with you that with tab completion (along with an "MS_DOS Prompt from here" right-click explorer menu extension) it's bearable.
Do you use unxutils's sh.exe for a shell?
Is it really a zsh port?
If you were a ksh/bash user before, how painful was the switch to zsh, switching back-and-forth between them, etc.?
cygwin for the Windows-side of things, of course.
In other words, that troublesome Fifth Amendment is tripping you up again -- "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself".
I can picture your Dad referring you to something neat in that precious stack of pages -- "You have to read this (flip, flip), I think it was on page ninety-something (flip, flip, scan, scan), no, wait, it must be here somewhere (flip, scan), ..."
Not to mention the annoyance of the not-so-instant access when wanting to quote part of a printed book in another medium.
I have one land line in my house, and attached to that is a cordless phone / answering machine combo that only works when the (grid) power is on. I imagine a lot of other people are in the same boat, and I don't think people obsess over the fact that if there's a power failure their phone won't work.
I imagine that the 911 problem is similarly lessened if you have a cell phone in addition to the phones in your house.
In my case, the purchasing company was bigger and (seemingly) more advanced than we were, and accordingly my initial approach was to bend over backwards to accomodate their requests, integrate with their technology, stay humble, allow that other folks may have solved the usual problems differently/better, give the benefit of the doubt, etc.
What I didn't appreciate at the time is that our organization was productive & successful (in our little niche) because over time we had acquired certain skills and chosen technologies and approaches that worked for us (and disregarded/discarded those that didn't), and that those were the things that made us an attractive acquisition. "Keeping an open mind" insofar as it entailed questioning or abandoning what had got us to the point of acquisition was therefore a mistake (IMHO).
In other words, do as much as you can to understand why your company was purchased, and try to maintain a "peer-to-peer" attitude with the acquiring company (if appropriate).
In all seriousness, the key part of that probably turns into "we know how we wanted it to work because we wrote the (incomplete) UI-level specs..."
It's too easy to say that everything would be fine if only the users would write complete & accurate specs. In reality you're talking about an Human Resources department (for example) in a Fortune 500 company that wants to buy an "enterprise level" organization charting package. They're a bunch of non-technical folks (at least as far as developing software goes) who just want to produce organizational charts, NOT get involved in writing specifications, evaluting technologies (as they might have to if multiple bids come in to the RFP they had to send out), beta testing the software, devloping backup/redundancy plans, etc.
And, in practice, I've never seen a complete & accurate RFP that was worth the paper it was written on. And that goes for most "specifications", too, including the 1000+ page monsters produced by AT&T and Lucent in their heydays.
See the following for a discussion of "shop rights" and how it relates to "work for hire":
An excerpt:
And for short stories, have you read the "Prize Stories nnnn: The O. Henry Awards" series? It's published every year, and each has around 20 "of the best" short stories published the previous year.