The Richard Stallmans of the world have long wanted Java to be an open source language, while Sun Microsystems has said that they want to be the single point of control for the language. The biug lawsuit between Sun and Microsoft was about Microsoft making unauthorised changes to the language spec. Through the Java Community Process, Sun has allowed developers at large to make suggestions and improvements to the language if Sun approved of them. Sun controls the specification of the language and the reference JVM implimentation. The battle isn't about the JVM being open source, it's about the language specification. Sun's fear is that by opening the specification, someone's going to say "You know, I've always felt the language should have pointers", and the language will fall into Creeping Featurism the way C++ did. The recent (1.5) introduction of template-like behavior, at the demands of the "more features" crowd is already a step in that direction. No matter how you slice it, it seems we're doomed to a Java with more and more new features (remove run-time array bounds checking for performance, anyone?) and more and more fragmentation.
Thanks for the response. I'm not seriously advocating the destruction of the shuttle, but I am saying the design was flawed at the beginning and is outdated now.
> What focus on complete reusability? The external tank is disposable.
Read what I said again: "complete re-usability and quick turnaround for the lander"
>...even raindrops become fierce impactors. I'll continue to call that "delicate".
>...it's a huge task to make sure that they're all A) intact, and B) securely attached. Hence my fondness for something more like sprayed-on ablatives, as opposed to a custom made 3D jigsaw puzzle.
> It's called a stage...why you'd want to use a *manned* craft...
Manned is what I meant, (hence the point about "safely from the ground") I thought that was clear.
>...shuttle usually doesn't deal with such missions... Pulling a number out of my ass, something like 50% of the missions are either satelite launches, or DoD related, i.e. spy satelites.
I'll reiterate my point about LEO being (almost) functionally useless for a reusable craft. Aynthing short of geosynchronous is just ridiculous. What we really need to do is get to the Lagrange points. Hell, I want to mine the asteroid belt;-)
The shuttle's mission & purpose has been fataly compromised since before it left the drawing board. In an effort to do too many things at once, it became a vehicle that doesn't do anything well. It incorperated some good ideas (SRBs, external fuel tank) but the focus on complete re-usability and quick turnaround for the lander was just wrong-headed. The reliance on the tiles alone, without any ablative shielding, make the craft fragile to the point of being delicate. The fact that we built a re-usable space vehicle that can't even reach geosynchronous orbit is just laughable. Why use a vehicle in LEO to launch a satelite when it can be done more cheaply and safely from the ground? The next "re-usable" spacecraft we build had better be able to reach the Lagrange points, or it's not worth building at all.
From TFA: "Perhaps the recommendations to bring a firearm for protection against four legged predators goes a bit far."
Far from the city lights, I've had two run-ins with coyotes while stargazing. I don't live in bear country; but maybe having something that says "nothing to see here, move along" wouldn't be a bad idea.
In my VAX/VMS days, we'd type these incredible "FOO/INPUT=BAR/OUTPUT=BAZ/NOEVERLASTINGGOBSTOPPER/COKEBOTTLE/SINCE=10-17-82" type commands, and when the DCL prompt came back, we'd scream "It Loves It!!!!!".
The problem is the spammers are operating through zombie PC nets and open proxies. The actual (end) senders of the spam are usually unaware that they're sending it. Meanwhile, spamvertising is an inherently low margin operation. By costing the spamvertised site more hosting costs, you're taking away thier incentive to hire the criminal spammers who we can't catch anyways.
Imagine if drug dealers were invisible, but drug buyers glowed in the dark.
The difference, in this case, is that the decision to use RSS or Atom will be made by the website operators, not the end consumers. The consumers will use what the webmasters use. And I'm thinking that the webmasters will be attracted to the features rather than the ubiquity of a particular format.
As a geek, I'd love to see a hydrogen/fusion based economy, as I know it would be unlimited and clean-burning.
However, as a geek, I know that the Dark Ages were as much caused by the change in the fuel economy from wood to coal as the retreat of the Roman Empire.
Likewise, I believe that the Great Depression was caused by the shift from a coal-based fuel econmy to an oil-based econmy.
Let's face it - General Motors, Exxon, the Edisons, and all thier suppliers, rely on the current fuel econmy. We can pretend that our economy is based on bricks of shiny yellow metal, but it's really based on BTUs.
A shift to what would, essentially, be a free energy economy (picture a non-polluting, low-maintenance power plant supplying your house or your block) would have a greater impact than a return of the Black Death.
The Third World is probably in a far better position to take advantage of a fusion/hydrogen economy than the US and Europe, as they don't have the existing oil-based infrastructure.
I welcome the change, but I hope that I don't have to live to see the fallout.
Thank you for the look at the fetid underbelly of what the problem really is. I wish I had some "Incredibly insightful" mod points to throw your way.
I can't give the USPTO (or is it the process itself?) the free pass, however. Simply too much prior art, at least in the software field, gets by them. Had they been behaving this way in the early 1900s, Ford Motor Company would have gotten a patent for "A Method Of Forming Molten Metal", or some equally silly thing.
I can't give Amazon and/or Bezos a free pass either, they're rapaciously whoring ridiculous patents, and they know it.
Last year a German teenager named Sven Jaschan released the Sasser worm, one of the costliest acts of sabotage in the history of the Internet. It crippled computers around the world, closing businesses, halting trains and grounding airplanes. Skip to next paragraph
Related More Columns by John Tierney Readers Forum: John Tierney's Columns
Which of these punishments does he deserve?
A) A 21-month suspended sentence and 30 hours of community service.
B) Two years in prison.
C) A five-year ban on using computers.
D) Death.
E) Something worse.
If you answered A, you must be the German judge who gave him that sentence last week.
If you answered B or C, you're confusing him with other hackers who have been sent to prison and banned from using computers or the Internet. But those punishments don't seem to have deterred hackers like Mr. Jaschan from taking their place.
I'm tempted to say that the correct answer is D, and not just because of the man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.
Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes - one in 500 hackers - would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.
I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They're probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.
So that leaves us with E: something worse than death. Something that would approximate the millions of hours of tedium that hackers have inflicted on society.
Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who didn't manage to hurt anyone on his airplane but has been annoying travelers ever since. When I join the line of passengers taking off their shoes at the airport, I get little satisfaction in thinking that the man responsible for this ritual is sitting somewhere by himself in a prison cell, probably with his shoes on.
He ought to spend his days within smelling range of all those socks at the airport. In an exclusive poll I once conducted among fellow passengers, I found that 80 percent favored forcing Mr. Reid to sit next to the metal detector, helping small children put their sneakers back on.
The remaining 20 percent in the poll (meaning one guy) said that wasn't harsh enough. He advocated requiring Mr. Reid to change the Odor-Eaters insoles of runners at the end of the New York City Marathon.
What would be the equivalent public service for Internet sociopaths? Maybe convicted spammers could be sentenced to community service testing all their own wares. The number of organ-enlargement offers would decline if a spammer thought he'd have to appear in a public-service television commercial explaining that he'd tried them all and they just didn't work for him.
Convicted hackers like Mr. Jaschan could be sentenced to a lifetime of removing worms and viruses, but the computer experts I consulted said there would be too big a risk that the hackers would enjoy the job. After all, Mr. Jaschan is now doing just that for a software security firm.
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The Richard Stallmans of the world have long wanted Java to be an open source language, while Sun Microsystems has said that they want to be the single point of control for the language. The biug lawsuit between Sun and Microsoft was about Microsoft making unauthorised changes to the language spec. Through the Java Community Process, Sun has allowed developers at large to make suggestions and improvements to the language if Sun approved of them. Sun controls the specification of the language and the reference JVM implimentation. The battle isn't about the JVM being open source, it's about the language specification. Sun's fear is that by opening the specification, someone's going to say "You know, I've always felt the language should have pointers", and the language will fall into Creeping Featurism the way C++ did. The recent (1.5) introduction of template-like behavior, at the demands of the "more features" crowd is already a step in that direction. No matter how you slice it, it seems we're doomed to a Java with more and more new features (remove run-time array bounds checking for performance, anyone?) and more and more fragmentation.
> ...when Yahoo becomes a worthwhile place to visit...
Please stop putting your finger on the problem.
Thank you.
> What focus on complete reusability? The external tank is disposable.
Read what I said again: "complete re-usability and quick turnaround for the lander"
> ...even raindrops become fierce impactors.
I'll continue to call that "delicate".
> ...it's a huge task to make sure that they're all A) intact, and B) securely attached.
Hence my fondness for something more like sprayed-on ablatives, as opposed to a custom made 3D jigsaw puzzle.
> It's called a stage...why you'd want to use a *manned* craft...
Manned is what I meant, (hence the point about "safely from the ground") I thought that was clear.
> ...shuttle usually doesn't deal with such missions...
Pulling a number out of my ass, something like 50% of the missions are either satelite launches, or DoD related, i.e. spy satelites.
I'll reiterate my point about LEO being (almost) functionally useless for a reusable craft. Aynthing short of geosynchronous is just ridiculous. What we really need to do is get to the Lagrange points. ;-)
Hell, I want to mine the asteroid belt
The shuttle's mission & purpose has been fataly compromised since before it left the drawing board. In an effort to do too many things at once, it became a vehicle that doesn't do anything well. It incorperated some good ideas (SRBs, external fuel tank) but the focus on complete re-usability and quick turnaround for the lander was just wrong-headed. The reliance on the tiles alone, without any ablative shielding, make the craft fragile to the point of being delicate. The fact that we built a re-usable space vehicle that can't even reach geosynchronous orbit is just laughable. Why use a vehicle in LEO to launch a satelite when it can be done more cheaply and safely from the ground? The next "re-usable" spacecraft we build had better be able to reach the Lagrange points, or it's not worth building at all.
My $0.02
Yeah, and those Peltiers would be even more efficient if they didn't have those Athlons strapped to them...
Far from the city lights, I've had two run-ins with coyotes while stargazing. I don't live in bear country; but maybe having something that says "nothing to see here, move along" wouldn't be a bad idea.
"frisson" is French, meaning a surge of excited fear.
He's just trolling. He has a pathological need to pop up every once in a while and say "You know I invented Ethernet, don't you?"
Manoeuver??!!?? Aye, we can wallow like a garbage scow before a warp-driven starship!
Too bad the mods missed this. Funny.
That's no subwoofer, it's a small moon!
In my VAX/VMS days, we'd type these incredible "FOO /INPUT=BAR /OUTPUT=BAZ /NOEVERLASTINGGOBSTOPPER /COKEBOTTLE /SINCE=10-17-82" type commands, and when the DCL prompt came back, we'd scream "It Loves It!!!!!".
Absolutely. You'll find that most of them are running Office 97 for the same reason - eats up less of the laptop.
Imagine if drug dealers were invisible, but drug buyers glowed in the dark.
That's a good point. I was thinking of the stand-alone aggregators, and ignoring the recent trend to include RSS into the browser.
The difference, in this case, is that the decision to use RSS or Atom will be made by the website operators, not the end consumers. The consumers will use what the webmasters use. And I'm thinking that the webmasters will be attracted to the features rather than the ubiquity of a particular format.
Oddly enough, the Atom Wiki favors Atom.
Due to a strange mis-wiring in thier brains, women are only able to watch one television show at a time.
A shocking handicap, I know, but true.
However, as a geek, I know that the Dark Ages were as much caused by the change in the fuel economy from wood to coal as the retreat of the Roman Empire.
Likewise, I believe that the Great Depression was caused by the shift from a coal-based fuel econmy to an oil-based econmy.
Let's face it - General Motors, Exxon, the Edisons, and all thier suppliers, rely on the current fuel econmy. We can pretend that our economy is based on bricks of shiny yellow metal, but it's really based on BTUs.
A shift to what would, essentially, be a free energy economy (picture a non-polluting, low-maintenance power plant supplying your house or your block) would have a greater impact than a return of the Black Death.
The Third World is probably in a far better position to take advantage of a fusion/hydrogen economy than the US and Europe, as they don't have the existing oil-based infrastructure.
I welcome the change, but I hope that I don't have to live to see the fallout.
I can't give the USPTO (or is it the process itself?) the free pass, however. Simply too much prior art, at least in the software field, gets by them. Had they been behaving this way in the early 1900s, Ford Motor Company would have gotten a patent for "A Method Of Forming Molten Metal", or some equally silly thing.
I can't give Amazon and/or Bezos a free pass either, they're rapaciously whoring ridiculous patents, and they know it.
I don't think you're being fair. I mean, the War On Poverty worked out OK, didn't it?
Linux is Communism.
File sharing is Terrorism.
Encryption is Treason.
Microsoft Word has had this function for years. Just set your font color to "white".
Last year a German teenager named Sven Jaschan released the Sasser worm, one of the costliest acts of sabotage in the history of the Internet. It crippled computers around the world, closing businesses, halting trains and grounding airplanes.
Skip to next paragraph
Related More Columns by John Tierney
Readers
Forum: John Tierney's Columns
Which of these punishments does he deserve?
A) A 21-month suspended sentence and 30 hours of community service.
B) Two years in prison.
C) A five-year ban on using computers.
D) Death.
E) Something worse.
If you answered A, you must be the German judge who gave him that sentence last week.
If you answered B or C, you're confusing him with other hackers who have been sent to prison and banned from using computers or the Internet. But those punishments don't seem to have deterred hackers like Mr. Jaschan from taking their place.
I'm tempted to say that the correct answer is D, and not just because of the man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.
Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes - one in 500 hackers - would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.
I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They're probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.
So that leaves us with E: something worse than death. Something that would approximate the millions of hours of tedium that hackers have inflicted on society.
Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who didn't manage to hurt anyone on his airplane but has been annoying travelers ever since. When I join the line of passengers taking off their shoes at the airport, I get little satisfaction in thinking that the man responsible for this ritual is sitting somewhere by himself in a prison cell, probably with his shoes on.
He ought to spend his days within smelling range of all those socks at the airport. In an exclusive poll I once conducted among fellow passengers, I found that 80 percent favored forcing Mr. Reid to sit next to the metal detector, helping small children put their sneakers back on.
The remaining 20 percent in the poll (meaning one guy) said that wasn't harsh enough. He advocated requiring Mr. Reid to change the Odor-Eaters insoles of runners at the end of the New York City Marathon.
What would be the equivalent public service for Internet sociopaths? Maybe convicted spammers could be sentenced to community service testing all their own wares. The number of organ-enlargement offers would decline if a spammer thought he'd have to appear in a public-service television commercial explaining that he'd tried them all and they just didn't work for him.
Convicted hackers like Mr. Jaschan could be sentenced to a lifetime of removing worms and viruses, but the computer experts I consulted said there would be too big a risk that the hackers would enjoy the job. After all, Mr. Jaschan is now doing just that for a software security firm.
The
I assert, without proof, that they are obviously Irreducably Complex, and therefore must have been created.
So there.