I like Java, but the fact is that every end-user GUI desktop application I have ever seen written in Java is perceptibly slower than similar apps written in compiled languages, at least in terms of GUI rendering and responsiveness. It's seldom enough to be a problem, but it's there, and anyone can see it.
Claiming that Java is across the board as fast or faster than native code has probably done more to damage its reputation than anything else. It's like those absurd anti-marijuana ads that claim all sorts of serious, permanent brain damage will happen the moment you smoke a joint. It's baloney, and it makes you question the reliability of the source. (To be fair, I don't think anyone has used Java safely and then gone on to disregard the warnings about heroin, but there have been incidents of Ruby use.)
It would be more productive to emphasize Java's many benefits than to deny the existence of the performance hit that comes along with some of them. As a trivial example, take array bounds checking. It makes code safer and more reliable, but there is simply no way to check every array reference for validity every time it's used without chewing up CPU cycles. Instead of denying the undeniable, why not point out that the relatively minor performance hit is more than amply compensated for by greater reliability?
Java is a pretty good language with a lot of strengths and some weaknesses. It is not, however, the second coming.
Maybe because if the IDE reformats all your code you wind up with the entire file as a diff when you check it in to your source code control system?
One would presume that one of these days, someone will bother to come up with a syntax-aware version of diff that doesn't care about newlines and other irrelevant whitespace.
showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope
On my planet, this is called "ambition". It's a highly desirable quality in an employee.
keeping unusual work hours
All programmers and independent contractors are obviously spies, right?
unreported contacts with foreign nationals
Like what, eating at El Torito three nights in a row? Or joining the Swedish-American friendship organization so you can schmooze all those hot Swedish exchange students?
attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know
Like trying to get on the ACL for that groovy large-format inkjet printer, even though you're "only" an English major?
unexplained absences
Of course, there are never any of those among university students.
Fucking morons. If the people in charge of our national security are this dimwitted, foreign spies are the least of our problems.
Let me get this right -- these AVVO folks decided it would be a good idea to base their business model on saying things about attorneys that might not be complimentary?
This is quite possibly the first time anyone thought they could make money by being sued constantly. Anyone who thought that the dot-com bubble used up all of the reservoirs of stupidity may now rest assured that fresh reserves have been discovered.
Don't forget software, which is, after all, the entire point of the hardware. If you are switching from a PC to a Mac, you need to replace all of your software. (Or run Windows on the Mac, which kind of defeats the purpose.) That's a very different proposition than choosing your first computer.
Apple could be giving away Macs for free, and I'd still end up spending about five grand replacing the software that I use regularly.
If true, this guy just obsoleted the submarine. But by the same token, I don't think we'd be hearing about it if it were true. Any number of security agencies would have pounced on him by now.
If they are using public records to compile the list, then how "secret" is the information expected to be?
Actually, this is pretty typical of privacy issues that have arisen in recent years. There has always been shit-tons of information about you that was public information, but it was scattered through paper files in dozens or hundreds of offices, and collecting any of it, much less all of it, was such an expensive and time-consuming task that the very difficulty involved provided a great deal of protection.
It's still a pain to collect information on people, but what has changed is that once you do go to that trouble, you can resell the information easily via the net, and now it is suddenly very, very profitable to do so. Entrepreneurs are doing the hard work to gather the info and making it very easy to obtain for a relatively modest fee.
The question we really need to be asking is if the things that have traditionally been public information ought to remain public now that the information is much easier to obtain than when it was originally decided to make it public. Bear in mind that the reason so much information is public is so the public can keep an eye on the activities of the government and to make it difficult for misdeeds by government officials harder to hide. Can we still accomplish this goal without making everyone's home address and bus schedule available to any random stalker or psycho with a credit card and a public library terminal?
Most of the time, I don't care about the LEDs, but lately there have been more and more products with those incredibly bright blue LEDs in them. The cheap pair of speakers I got to use with my laptop are a case in point -- one blaringly bright light on the right-hand speaker that was so annoying that I finally put a piece of electrical tape over it. I had a WiFi card with the same issue, though in this case, it would blink it's blue LED klieg light if it wasn't getting a signal. It was enough of a distraction that I finally replaced it.
Some kind of equivalent to -q would be nice for those exceptional cases.
Will such massive databases make us all act like politicians?
Actually, the presence of archived messages on mailing lists and Usenet from my teens -- some twenty years ago -- ensures that I would never even consider running for office. I'm not sure this is unique to net culture, though. It's not like raking public figures over the coals for their 'youthful indiscretions' is anything new. Politicians have always been worth the effort. What's new is that it's so easy now that it becomes worth the effort for ordinary people. Every time I have a job interview, I am always dreading a visit from the Ghost of Usenet Postings Past.
And I don't want to find one day that my own freedoms are being limited in an attempt to avoid offending some minority group.
You're pretty safe as far as that goes. Historically, the main danger lies in offending the minority. Then there is nothing to protect you but the majority's high-mindedness and sense of fair play. Good luck with that.
I'm sure there will be a steady stream of eager users for stalker.google.com long before it emerges from beta.
I'm guessing that it's cluelessness on the part of Google management, but I hope someone there gives some thought to what will happen to their "do no evil" public image when the body count from their negligence first crests over three digits.
Well, speaking as an American, I'm glad the EU is spanking Microsoft, since our government is so completely bought and paid for by corporate interests that there is no longer any meaningful regulation of anticompetitive behavior here. In any event, I don't view Microsoft as an American company in any meaningful sense. If a foreign power had damaged US productivity and parasitically drained off as much capital from US businesses as Microsoft has, it would be construed as an act of war. Microsoft helps America only in the sense that it helps itself to lots of American money it could not access if American regulators still gave a shit about competition.
As far as I'm concerned, the EU hasn't gone far enough. But to be fair, and to avoid attributing to EU regulators a moral high ground they don't in fact possess, I have my doubts that the EU would have gone as far as it has if Microsoft was a European company. On the other hand, it's questionable whether, say, French agricultural subsidies affect nearly as many people as Windows.
Those of you old enough to remember, and yet who can't even recall MSDOS 4.0, will immediately know what I mean.
For those of you who are too young, MSDOS 4.0 was a tremendous flop. MSDOS 3.3 was used pretty much continuously from its release in 1987 until it MSDOS 5.0 came out in 1991, and even then, I ran into machines running v.3.3 for years afterwards. Version 4.0 was buggy and bloated while adding virtually nothing in the way of useful features, and the market reacted with a resounding yawn.
Microsoft, it should be remembered, was the dominant OS vendor in 1987, but it was not a monopoly yet. There were still plausible alternatives (then as now, technically superior). Microsoft is the dominant OS vendor in 2007, but its monopoly is crumbling, and all it will take is one gigantic screwup for competitors to move in. Vista is a gigantic screwup, just like MSDOS 4.0.
This could be good news for Linux, great news for Apple, and freaking fantastic news for ODF, especially if MS takes as long to recover from Vista as they did from DOS 4.
Considering the amounts of money involved, I suspect the only thing that is going to change is that American drug companies will send their own people into the field in Indonesia to collect their own samples.
Well, it's a bit more than that. It's plainly structured data, and that's what's interesting. If you plot random data in a graphic, it looks very different than if you load a program or a structured datafile into video RAM. These plots, or at least parts of them, look very much like programs. Now, I wouldn't read anything more into it than that it is indeed structured, any more than I could distinguish between a graphical representation of a word processor versus a billing package, but it is definitely not, as some skeptics here have suggested, random in its appearance.
Apple, of course, has a long history of trying to steamroll other companies' trademarks, not the least of which would be the "Apple" name itself. In general, it has worked pretty well for them, so I don't anticipate any change in their policies. I expect that Cisco will probably relent after extracting a settlement from Apple. In the long run, though, I also expect that iWhatever will eventually be successfully challenged, probably by some relatively small company with more stubbornness than sense. (To be fair, as much as I dislike IP laws in general, if I was selling an iWidget, and I finally ended up in a smoky room full of attorneys saying, "Here's $5 million. Now shut the fuck up," I'd probably shut the fuck up.
The main reason the iWhatever branding strategy is shaky is that it amounts to claiming a trademark on a letter of the alphabet. Intel tried that strategy with numbers and it failed, which is why the 80586 came to be known as the Pentium, and this was with a company with pockets so deep they could hold a bushel of Apples.;)
The problem with the "plaintiff pays" model is that even with entirely legitimate complaints, hardly anyone would be able to risk suing a company with deep pockets. Been wronged by Behemoth Industries? Are you sure you can win the case? If you're not 100% sure, you could get stuck with several million dollars in attorneys' fees. Even if the courts were 99% accurate in their judgments, do you want to risk the 1% chance that you'll end up as a pauper for life?
Just as an aside, you might also want to consider that your complaints about "illiterate people from the streets" would carry more weight if you used complete sentences, correct punctuation, and proper capitalization.
Computer scientists and election experts such as Roy Saltman disagree with the idea of going back to paper ballots. "If you insist on paper you're tying elections to an old technology," he told internetnews.com.
Yes, except that it was an old technology that worked. I wonder if Saltman thinks it's archaic to cut butter with a knife instead of trying to cut it with an iPod. Computers are not the right tool for every job.
Even if electronic voting wasn't an inherently bad idea, the current sorry state of most software would make it inadvisable.
"Among the provisions of the Police and Justice Bill 2006, which gained Royal Assent on Wednesday, is a clause that makes it an offense to impair the operation of any computer system. Other clauses prohibit preventing or hindering access to a program or data held on a computer, or impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer."
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever.
I like Java, but the fact is that every end-user GUI desktop application I have ever seen written in Java is perceptibly slower than similar apps written in compiled languages, at least in terms of GUI rendering and responsiveness. It's seldom enough to be a problem, but it's there, and anyone can see it.
Claiming that Java is across the board as fast or faster than native code has probably done more to damage its reputation than anything else. It's like those absurd anti-marijuana ads that claim all sorts of serious, permanent brain damage will happen the moment you smoke a joint. It's baloney, and it makes you question the reliability of the source. (To be fair, I don't think anyone has used Java safely and then gone on to disregard the warnings about heroin, but there have been incidents of Ruby use.)
It would be more productive to emphasize Java's many benefits than to deny the existence of the performance hit that comes along with some of them. As a trivial example, take array bounds checking. It makes code safer and more reliable, but there is simply no way to check every array reference for validity every time it's used without chewing up CPU cycles. Instead of denying the undeniable, why not point out that the relatively minor performance hit is more than amply compensated for by greater reliability?
Java is a pretty good language with a lot of strengths and some weaknesses. It is not, however, the second coming.
Maybe because if the IDE reformats all your code you wind up with the entire file as a diff when you check it in to your source code control system?
One would presume that one of these days, someone will bother to come up with a syntax-aware version of diff that doesn't care about newlines and other irrelevant whitespace.
failing to report overseas travel
Since when do you have to report overseas travel?
showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope
On my planet, this is called "ambition". It's a highly desirable quality in an employee.
keeping unusual work hours
All programmers and independent contractors are obviously spies, right?
unreported contacts with foreign nationals
Like what, eating at El Torito three nights in a row? Or joining the Swedish-American friendship organization so you can schmooze all those hot Swedish exchange students?
attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know
Like trying to get on the ACL for that groovy large-format inkjet printer, even though you're "only" an English major?
unexplained absences
Of course, there are never any of those among university students.
Fucking morons. If the people in charge of our national security are this dimwitted, foreign spies are the least of our problems.
Let me get this right -- these AVVO folks decided it would be a good idea to base their business model on saying things about attorneys that might not be complimentary?
This is quite possibly the first time anyone thought they could make money by being sued constantly. Anyone who thought that the dot-com bubble used up all of the reservoirs of stupidity may now rest assured that fresh reserves have been discovered.
Don't forget software, which is, after all, the entire point of the hardware. If you are switching from a PC to a Mac, you need to replace all of your software. (Or run Windows on the Mac, which kind of defeats the purpose.) That's a very different proposition than choosing your first computer.
Apple could be giving away Macs for free, and I'd still end up spending about five grand replacing the software that I use regularly.
If true, this guy just obsoleted the submarine. But by the same token, I don't think we'd be hearing about it if it were true. Any number of security agencies would have pounced on him by now.
To a certain extent, yes. But I can spy on my kids just fine without any help from the government.
If they are using public records to compile the list, then how "secret" is the information expected to be?
Actually, this is pretty typical of privacy issues that have arisen in recent years. There has always been shit-tons of information about you that was public information, but it was scattered through paper files in dozens or hundreds of offices, and collecting any of it, much less all of it, was such an expensive and time-consuming task that the very difficulty involved provided a great deal of protection.
It's still a pain to collect information on people, but what has changed is that once you do go to that trouble, you can resell the information easily via the net, and now it is suddenly very, very profitable to do so. Entrepreneurs are doing the hard work to gather the info and making it very easy to obtain for a relatively modest fee.
The question we really need to be asking is if the things that have traditionally been public information ought to remain public now that the information is much easier to obtain than when it was originally decided to make it public. Bear in mind that the reason so much information is public is so the public can keep an eye on the activities of the government and to make it difficult for misdeeds by government officials harder to hide. Can we still accomplish this goal without making everyone's home address and bus schedule available to any random stalker or psycho with a credit card and a public library terminal?
Most of the time, I don't care about the LEDs, but lately there have been more and more products with those incredibly bright blue LEDs in them. The cheap pair of speakers I got to use with my laptop are a case in point -- one blaringly bright light on the right-hand speaker that was so annoying that I finally put a piece of electrical tape over it. I had a WiFi card with the same issue, though in this case, it would blink it's blue LED klieg light if it wasn't getting a signal. It was enough of a distraction that I finally replaced it.
Some kind of equivalent to -q would be nice for those exceptional cases.
Will such massive databases make us all act like politicians?
Actually, the presence of archived messages on mailing lists and Usenet from my teens -- some twenty years ago -- ensures that I would never even consider running for office. I'm not sure this is unique to net culture, though. It's not like raking public figures over the coals for their 'youthful indiscretions' is anything new. Politicians have always been worth the effort. What's new is that it's so easy now that it becomes worth the effort for ordinary people. Every time I have a job interview, I am always dreading a visit from the Ghost of Usenet Postings Past.
And I don't want to find one day that my own freedoms are being limited in an attempt to avoid offending some minority group.
You're pretty safe as far as that goes. Historically, the main danger lies in offending the minority. Then there is nothing to protect you but the majority's high-mindedness and sense of fair play. Good luck with that.
Yeah, well, when your country is taken over by paranoid chimps, don't come running for sympathy to me.
Inconsistencies abound and everything is a special case.
You should switch to bash and the GNU tools.
Oh, wait.
I'm sure there will be a steady stream of eager users for stalker.google.com long before it emerges from beta.
I'm guessing that it's cluelessness on the part of Google management, but I hope someone there gives some thought to what will happen to their "do no evil" public image when the body count from their negligence first crests over three digits.
The whole idea of changing the rules then penalizing you from actions in the past should be banned.
It was banned. The Constitution explicitly prohibits ex post facto laws.
Of course, the Constitution explicitly prohibits a lot of stuff that the government does with impunity these days.
Well, speaking as an American, I'm glad the EU is spanking Microsoft, since our government is so completely bought and paid for by corporate interests that there is no longer any meaningful regulation of anticompetitive behavior here. In any event, I don't view Microsoft as an American company in any meaningful sense. If a foreign power had damaged US productivity and parasitically drained off as much capital from US businesses as Microsoft has, it would be construed as an act of war. Microsoft helps America only in the sense that it helps itself to lots of American money it could not access if American regulators still gave a shit about competition.
As far as I'm concerned, the EU hasn't gone far enough. But to be fair, and to avoid attributing to EU regulators a moral high ground they don't in fact possess, I have my doubts that the EU would have gone as far as it has if Microsoft was a European company. On the other hand, it's questionable whether, say, French agricultural subsidies affect nearly as many people as Windows.
Two words: MSDOS 4.0.
Those of you old enough to remember, and yet who can't even recall MSDOS 4.0, will immediately know what I mean.
For those of you who are too young, MSDOS 4.0 was a tremendous flop. MSDOS 3.3 was used pretty much continuously from its release in 1987 until it MSDOS 5.0 came out in 1991, and even then, I ran into machines running v.3.3 for years afterwards. Version 4.0 was buggy and bloated while adding virtually nothing in the way of useful features, and the market reacted with a resounding yawn.
Microsoft, it should be remembered, was the dominant OS vendor in 1987, but it was not a monopoly yet. There were still plausible alternatives (then as now, technically superior). Microsoft is the dominant OS vendor in 2007, but its monopoly is crumbling, and all it will take is one gigantic screwup for competitors to move in. Vista is a gigantic screwup, just like MSDOS 4.0.
This could be good news for Linux, great news for Apple, and freaking fantastic news for ODF, especially if MS takes as long to recover from Vista as they did from DOS 4.
Considering the amounts of money involved, I suspect the only thing that is going to change is that American drug companies will send their own people into the field in Indonesia to collect their own samples.
Well, it's a bit more than that. It's plainly structured data, and that's what's interesting. If you plot random data in a graphic, it looks very different than if you load a program or a structured datafile into video RAM. These plots, or at least parts of them, look very much like programs. Now, I wouldn't read anything more into it than that it is indeed structured, any more than I could distinguish between a graphical representation of a word processor versus a billing package, but it is definitely not, as some skeptics here have suggested, random in its appearance.
An anonymous reader writes:
Yeah, an anonymous reader who just happens to work for Sony.
But why should the job title "e-mail designer" even exist?
Because it sounds better than "spammer".
Apple, of course, has a long history of trying to steamroll other companies' trademarks, not the least of which would be the "Apple" name itself. In general, it has worked pretty well for them, so I don't anticipate any change in their policies. I expect that Cisco will probably relent after extracting a settlement from Apple. In the long run, though, I also expect that iWhatever will eventually be successfully challenged, probably by some relatively small company with more stubbornness than sense. (To be fair, as much as I dislike IP laws in general, if I was selling an iWidget, and I finally ended up in a smoky room full of attorneys saying, "Here's $5 million. Now shut the fuck up," I'd probably shut the fuck up.
;)
The main reason the iWhatever branding strategy is shaky is that it amounts to claiming a trademark on a letter of the alphabet. Intel tried that strategy with numbers and it failed, which is why the 80586 came to be known as the Pentium, and this was with a company with pockets so deep they could hold a bushel of Apples.
The problem with the "plaintiff pays" model is that even with entirely legitimate complaints, hardly anyone would be able to risk suing a company with deep pockets. Been wronged by Behemoth Industries? Are you sure you can win the case? If you're not 100% sure, you could get stuck with several million dollars in attorneys' fees. Even if the courts were 99% accurate in their judgments, do you want to risk the 1% chance that you'll end up as a pauper for life?
Just as an aside, you might also want to consider that your complaints about "illiterate people from the streets" would carry more weight if you used complete sentences, correct punctuation, and proper capitalization.
Computer scientists and election experts such as Roy Saltman disagree with the idea of going back to paper ballots. "If you insist on paper you're tying elections to an old technology," he told internetnews.com.
Yes, except that it was an old technology that worked. I wonder if Saltman thinks it's archaic to cut butter with a knife instead of trying to cut it with an iPod. Computers are not the right tool for every job.
Even if electronic voting wasn't an inherently bad idea, the current sorry state of most software would make it inadvisable.
"Among the provisions of the Police and Justice Bill 2006, which gained Royal Assent on Wednesday, is a clause that makes it an offense to impair the operation of any computer system. Other clauses prohibit preventing or hindering access to a program or data held on a computer, or impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer."
Two words: Windows XP.