I enjoyed the first freakanomics, but they guy does seem to have a big head... each chapter starts with some quote by somebody else about how great the author is.
A few things that were informative were also spun as revolutionary, such as the idea that a real estate agent or other agent in a transaction does not have the same incentives as the person they represent...
I wonder how this will affect Apple - on the Mac, Apple is responsible for implementing the JVM - and without a doubt they have a number of things implemented that are unique to the Mac, such as the implementation of Swing. This seems like it could be considered a derivative work, despite the "classpath exception"... I wonder if they will end up having to put any of their Mac-specific stuff under the GPL?
I moved to southern Germany (Bavaria, in a small town about an hour from Munich) about 5 years ago, and there are some really nice things about it. It is clean, safe, and beautiful in a way that nowhere in the U.S. is. We have 2 small children and I can't think of a better place to raise them.
I did't leave the U.S. because of any dislike of the U.S. The differences, big and small, between any two countries, are so numerous, that you spend years noticing and talking about them. A few notable things: 1. In the U.S., you have to generally either pay for an expensive private school, or buy an expensive house to be in a good school district, to ensure that your kids get a quality education. In general, the disparities between the haves and the have-nots here are not as vast, so these kinds of issues don't cause so much stress. 2. Similar issue for crime and safety. As far as where you live in the U.S., trying to buy your house in a place that is safe is also hard. I have a fairly nice house in the U.S., but still, one of my brothers was robbed at gunpoint on my streetcorner there. In bavaria, I accidentally left my bike unlocked on a busy street for a week, and it was still there when I went back to get it. 3. I never liked the way there are so many places and things that are dirty and ugly in the U.S. That always bugged me even as a kid, even before I had been outside of the country, I guess I'm a little compulsive. The ugliness of strip malls, cookie-cutter subdivisions, billboards, mobile homes, ratty power and phone lines, trash, "fake" things like a ghetto apartment complex called "Innsbrook Estates" (actually, Innsbruck has some pretty ugly stuff built during a socialist era, so maybe the name is OK), You have pockets of niceness in the U.S., but you can never go more than 1 mile without encountering ugliness. In Germany you have to try pretty hard to find ugliness. 4. I guess because Germany is a bit more homogeneous, you don't have the political correctness that is rampant in the U.S. still. I've come to see that while Germans do not have all of the constitutional freedoms that are guaranteed in the U.S. (for example, Germany does not have an absolute freedom of speech, and the church is supported by the state), there is a culture of libertarianism when it comes to personal behavior that makes you feel more free. There are coed naked saunas. You can buy and drink beer anyhere, anyplace, anytime. And nobody thinks any of it is a big deal.
But no matter how many pros you list about non-US countries, there are a few undeniable facts: the U.S. is the center of the world in many ways, politically, culturally, and economically. There are exciting things going on in the U.S. Most of the cool startups, successful businesses, prestigious universities, cool technologies, etc etc - are there. Of all the places people want to move to, from other places in the world, the U.S. is still #1, because it is still the land of opportunity. I think that perhaps the chaos and inequality in the U.S is the flip side of the coin. In the U.S., you can be poor as dirt and have nobody care about you or take care of you (look at some new orleans footage from katrina, of the darwinian processes at work), or you can become the next Bill Gates.
So I think it is hard for me to say to everyone to leave the U.S. and go to Germany or anywhere else - places are different, and leaving gives you a new appreciation for how some some things can be done better, and also for things that really are great about the U.S.
SN should really stand for "sucker node"... 90% of these are going to be machines without a firewall, the owners of which are clueless (like, say, my grandma), that are being suckered into forwarding everyone elses traffic.
Interestingly, Bavarian is almost closer to English than standard German is, for example, "ich" becomes closer to "I", "eins" becomes closer to "one", nicht becomes closer to not. That being said it is still pretty tough.
I'm pretty sure that the thee/thou/thine is not indicitave of the plural, but is rather the informal. It corresponds roughly with the German dich/du/deine, and we all know about it because God is addressed informally, rather than formally, in the Germanic biblical tradition.
But interestingly, German does not distinguish between you (formal, singular) and you (formal, plural), but it does distinguish between you (informal, singular) and you (informal, plural).
But whether our word "you" comes from the formal or informal, I don't know.
Growing up in the south, but not being originally from there, y'all is a very convenient word, but I alwas feel like a poser using it. And the P.C. police might castrate you for using the (northern), sexist, "you guys", if you are within 30 miles of UNC or Duke.
"yous" is pretty convenient if you don't mind sounding retarded. I personally often need to distinguish between singular and plural salmon, sheep, and trout, so "salmons", "sheeps", and "trouts" works great.
Even as adults, if we can allow ourselves to relax and accept a foreign language without mentally pausing every other word to register that it's foreign, mastering a new one isn't as bad as you think.
I find that with learning German, a good German beer definitely helps me to relax in this manner.
I'm not so sure how normal 1 language is. An incredibly large amount of the world has been colonized, and so in many countries there is a local language and a colonial language. In many places with multiple tribal languages, there is very often a "trade" language as well. I'm thinking specifically of parts of Africa here, but I think it applies to much of the developing world. English has become a "trade" language for much of the (developing and developed) world as well.
It is like the old joke: what do you call someone who speaks serveral languages: a polyglot. What do you call someone who speaks one language: an American.
I think your comment about a single language applies quite well to the U.S., but not well abroad.
One final note: in many places, the local dialect is different enough to "mentally" be a different language. This showed up as the "ebonics" controversy in the U.S. a few years back, but the reality is that in places like in Bavaria, Germany, the Bavarian dialect is so strong and has so many different words, that people have to learn Bavarian at home and High-German in school, (not to mention English). And people speak the Bavarian dialect at home and perhaps the High-German at work, school, or in other situations. People wouldn't laugh so hard about (or be so sensitive about) ebonics if it wasnt a race/class issue. Bavaria has a lot of money and technology, people make fun of their dialect, but they are proud and don't give a shit.
And there is only one thing to say about this nonsense about one language: Esperanto.
now what we need is a p2p tool that will allow us to easily find and download all the mp3s for the playlist of a given station. then microsoft AND the radio stations will sue.
Niggers always want credit for some shit they're supposed to do. They'll brag about stuff a normal man just does. They'll say something like, "Yeah, well I take care of my kids." You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker. "I ain't never been to jail." Whaddya want? A cookie? You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!
I respectfully disagree. I've used C++ for many years before I switched to Java, and C++ itself generally removed the need for function pointers. Thats one of the thing any object oriented language does, because an object basically has a set of function pointers. The only time I ever really needed function pointers in C++ was to call some API function that required one.
STL is generally unnecessary in Java because of the Collections API. Things like sorting - hey, an interface like IComparer or IComparable works very nicely as a replacement for function pointers.
In every case you use a function pointer, you can declare an interface with that signature. It is completely equivalent in terms of functionality, but in my opinion it makes it clearer what is going on. A function object is simply equivalent to an object with a single method, no?
Now, a delegate or a function pointer is less code, I concede, but I would argue that this is not really a burden except when adding lots of button click handlers by hand. In the case of GUIs, usually a GUI builder will relieve you of this tedious task. In the case of a parser, I'm still having trouble imagining that the better design would really use function pointers over interfaces.
One of the guidelines taught to people moving from C to C++ is that any time you write a switch statement - stop and think, could you do this in an object-oriented way, with polymorphism? Now, not all cases are better handled using polymorphism, but a large proportion are. I'll venture to assert the same thing about function pointers. Again, not all cases, but most of them.
Right, I mean most of the things you mention are possible with Java, but you have to kind of put together your own set of tools. SWT if you want native GUIs, tools to create an EXE, tools to help you with JNI, etc. But the problem is if what you want is a windows app, and you want it right away, as a Java developer I'm sorry to say that C# makes that easier. But that has been where Microsoft has traditionally shined: giving you a complete set of nicely integrated tools and technologies.
Now, for larger projects, the overhead of putting together these tools becomes not as important, and the cross-platform capabilities and nice selection of quality open source libraries (Hibernate, etc) led us to choose Java over.Net.
But I do wish that Sun would really address these things and make them less painful. Or maybe realistically I should hope for nice Eclipse plugins to make it easier.
Maybe I'm not completely understanding what you are doing, but I'm not convinced that simply using the observer design pattern, with say, an interface "ParserObserver".
function objects? Ever heard of classes or interfaces?
Ok, I'll admit, for button click handlers and the like, delegates reduce the amount of code nicely, but for almost everything else, using interfaces and classes is far more elegant.
I say we get the Nielsen folks in on this. They should take a pool of people who keep diaries about which OS they boot at which time on which day. That's the only way to really know...
Ok, so if it is over the total life of the asset, is the asset the PC or the software? With a lot of software, like NT, you might not know what its "lifetime" is - MS decides when to stop supporting it, for example. I wonder whether more or less "forced" upgrades are included in MS TCO calculations.
Also, the lifetime of a PC is pretty short. Fortunately for MS TCO calculations, the planning of most corporations is pretty shortsighted, shorter than the useful lifespan of a typical PC or piece of software. However, the true effects of an OSS choice versus an MS choice over say, 10 years, are not constant. Of course there could easily be a higher overall cost up front for OSS.
Somebody needs to create a calculation that goes beyond the lifetime of a PC or a piece of software, and give it a nice catchy abbreviation. Then the OSS folks could bandy that around and counter the TCO BS.
You know, Native Americans always consider the impact of their IT purchases on the 7th generation down the line...
Slashdot Mirror
So if an unmanned drone is running Windows and gets shot down, does the DOD have to buy another Windows license for the drone that replaces it?
Well if someone had asked me to revise the book, that would be the first thing I would have removed, so I'm not surprised...
I enjoyed the first freakanomics, but they guy does seem to have a big head... each chapter starts with some quote by somebody else about how great the author is.
A few things that were informative were also spun as revolutionary, such as the idea that a real estate agent or other agent in a transaction does not have the same incentives as the person they represent...
I wonder how this will affect Apple - on the Mac, Apple is responsible for implementing the JVM - and without a doubt they have a number of things implemented that are unique to the Mac, such as the implementation of Swing. This seems like it could be considered a derivative work, despite the "classpath exception"... I wonder if they will end up having to put any of their Mac-specific stuff under the GPL?
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6134584.html?ta g=zdfd.newsfeed
I moved to southern Germany (Bavaria, in a small town about an hour from Munich) about 5 years ago, and there are some really nice things about it. It is clean, safe, and beautiful in a way that nowhere in the U.S. is. We have 2 small children and I can't think of a better place to raise them.
I did't leave the U.S. because of any dislike of the U.S. The differences, big and small, between any two countries, are so numerous, that you spend years noticing and talking about them. A few notable things:
1. In the U.S., you have to generally either pay for an expensive private school, or buy an expensive house to be in a good school district, to ensure that your kids get a quality education. In general, the disparities between the haves and the have-nots here are not as vast, so these kinds of issues don't cause so much stress.
2. Similar issue for crime and safety. As far as where you live in the U.S., trying to buy your house in a place that is safe is also hard. I have a fairly nice house in the U.S., but still, one of my brothers was robbed at gunpoint on my streetcorner there. In bavaria, I accidentally left my bike unlocked on a busy street for a week, and it was still there when I went back to get it.
3. I never liked the way there are so many places and things that are dirty and ugly in the U.S. That always bugged me even as a kid, even before I had been outside of the country, I guess I'm a little compulsive. The ugliness of strip malls, cookie-cutter subdivisions, billboards, mobile homes, ratty power and phone lines, trash, "fake" things like a ghetto apartment complex called "Innsbrook Estates" (actually, Innsbruck has some pretty ugly stuff built during a socialist era, so maybe the name is OK), You have pockets of niceness in the U.S., but you can never go more than 1 mile without encountering ugliness. In Germany you have to try pretty hard to find ugliness.
4. I guess because Germany is a bit more homogeneous, you don't have the political correctness that is rampant in the U.S. still. I've come to see that while Germans do not have all of the constitutional freedoms that are guaranteed in the U.S. (for example, Germany does not have an absolute freedom of speech, and the church is supported by the state), there is a culture of libertarianism when it comes to personal behavior that makes you feel more free. There are coed naked saunas. You can buy and drink beer anyhere, anyplace, anytime. And nobody thinks any of it is a big deal.
But no matter how many pros you list about non-US countries, there are a few undeniable facts: the U.S. is the center of the world in many ways, politically, culturally, and economically. There are exciting things going on in the U.S. Most of the cool startups, successful businesses, prestigious universities, cool technologies, etc etc - are there. Of all the places people want to move to, from other places in the world, the U.S. is still #1, because it is still the land of opportunity. I think that perhaps the chaos and inequality in the U.S is the flip side of the coin. In the U.S., you can be poor as dirt and have nobody care about you or take care of you (look at some new orleans footage from katrina, of the darwinian processes at work), or you can become the next Bill Gates.
So I think it is hard for me to say to everyone to leave the U.S. and go to Germany or anywhere else - places are different, and leaving gives you a new appreciation for how some some things can be done better, and also for things that really are great about the U.S.
SN should really stand for "sucker node" ... 90% of these are going to be machines without a firewall, the owners of which are clueless (like, say, my grandma), that are being suckered into forwarding everyone elses traffic.
Interestingly, Bavarian is almost closer to English than standard German is, for example, "ich" becomes closer to "I", "eins" becomes closer to "one", nicht becomes closer to not. That being said it is still pretty tough.
But interestingly, German does not distinguish between you (formal, singular) and you (formal, plural), but it does distinguish between you (informal, singular) and you (informal, plural).
But whether our word "you" comes from the formal or informal, I don't know.
Growing up in the south, but not being originally from there, y'all is a very convenient word, but I alwas feel like a poser using it. And the P.C. police might castrate you for using the (northern), sexist, "you guys", if you are within 30 miles of UNC or Duke.
"yous" is pretty convenient if you don't mind sounding retarded. I personally often need to distinguish between singular and plural salmon, sheep, and trout, so "salmons", "sheeps", and "trouts" works great.
I find that with learning German, a good German beer definitely helps me to relax in this manner.
It is like the old joke: what do you call someone who speaks serveral languages: a polyglot. What do you call someone who speaks one language: an American.
I think your comment about a single language applies quite well to the U.S., but not well abroad.
One final note: in many places, the local dialect is different enough to "mentally" be a different language. This showed up as the "ebonics" controversy in the U.S. a few years back, but the reality is that in places like in Bavaria, Germany, the Bavarian dialect is so strong and has so many different words, that people have to learn Bavarian at home and High-German in school, (not to mention English). And people speak the Bavarian dialect at home and perhaps the High-German at work, school, or in other situations. People wouldn't laugh so hard about (or be so sensitive about) ebonics if it wasnt a race/class issue. Bavaria has a lot of money and technology, people make fun of their dialect, but they are proud and don't give a shit.
And there is only one thing to say about this nonsense about one language: Esperanto.
now what we need is a p2p tool that will allow us to easily find and download all the mp3s for the playlist of a given station. then microsoft AND the radio stations will sue.
Perhaps a quote from Chris Rock is in order:
Niggers always want credit for some shit they're supposed to do. They'll brag about stuff a normal man just does. They'll say something like, "Yeah, well I take care of my kids." You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker. "I ain't never been to jail." Whaddya want? A cookie? You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!
I respectfully disagree. I've used C++ for many years before I switched to Java, and C++ itself generally removed the need for function pointers. Thats one of the thing any object oriented language does, because an object basically has a set of function pointers. The only time I ever really needed function pointers in C++ was to call some API function that required one.
STL is generally unnecessary in Java because of the Collections API. Things like sorting - hey, an interface like IComparer or IComparable works very nicely as a replacement for function pointers.
In every case you use a function pointer, you can declare an interface with that signature. It is completely equivalent in terms of functionality, but in my opinion it makes it clearer what is going on. A function object is simply equivalent to an object with a single method, no?
Now, a delegate or a function pointer is less code, I concede, but I would argue that this is not really a burden except when adding lots of button click handlers by hand. In the case of GUIs, usually a GUI builder will relieve you of this tedious task. In the case of a parser, I'm still having trouble imagining that the better design would really use function pointers over interfaces.
One of the guidelines taught to people moving from C to C++ is that any time you write a switch statement - stop and think, could you do this in an object-oriented way, with polymorphism? Now, not all cases are better handled using polymorphism, but a large proportion are. I'll venture to assert the same thing about function pointers. Again, not all cases, but most of them.
Right, I mean most of the things you mention are possible with Java, but you have to kind of put together your own set of tools. SWT if you want native GUIs, tools to create an EXE, tools to help you with JNI, etc. But the problem is if what you want is a windows app, and you want it right away, as a Java developer I'm sorry to say that C# makes that easier. But that has been where Microsoft has traditionally shined: giving you a complete set of nicely integrated tools and technologies. Now, for larger projects, the overhead of putting together these tools becomes not as important, and the cross-platform capabilities and nice selection of quality open source libraries (Hibernate, etc) led us to choose Java over .Net.
But I do wish that Sun would really address these things and make them less painful. Or maybe realistically I should hope for nice Eclipse plugins to make it easier.
Maybe I'm not completely understanding what you are doing, but I'm not convinced that simply using the observer design pattern, with say, an interface "ParserObserver".
function objects? Ever heard of classes or interfaces? Ok, I'll admit, for button click handlers and the like, delegates reduce the amount of code nicely, but for almost everything else, using interfaces and classes is far more elegant.
I say we get the Nielsen folks in on this. They should take a pool of people who keep diaries about which OS they boot at which time on which day. That's the only way to really know...
Ok, so if it is over the total life of the asset, is the asset the PC or the software? With a lot of software, like NT, you might not know what its "lifetime" is - MS decides when to stop supporting it, for example. I wonder whether more or less "forced" upgrades are included in MS TCO calculations. Also, the lifetime of a PC is pretty short. Fortunately for MS TCO calculations, the planning of most corporations is pretty shortsighted, shorter than the useful lifespan of a typical PC or piece of software. However, the true effects of an OSS choice versus an MS choice over say, 10 years, are not constant. Of course there could easily be a higher overall cost up front for OSS. Somebody needs to create a calculation that goes beyond the lifetime of a PC or a piece of software, and give it a nice catchy abbreviation. Then the OSS folks could bandy that around and counter the TCO BS. You know, Native Americans always consider the impact of their IT purchases on the 7th generation down the line...