If you could operate a nation under purely idealist moral principles, then you would be right. We shouldn't deal with the Saudis because they don't adhere to our code of moral conduct. The going theory for a long time is that we HAVE to support the Saudis because all of the alternatives possible in Saudi Arabia are so much worse than the Al Saud family that it would be a terrible event for 1) America 2) Western Civilization as a whole if they were to fall from power.
While I'd like to see a nice democratic government in Saudi Arabia too, the reality is that a large minority in their country is made up of radical Wahabi muslims who are fomenting rebellion in Saudi Arabia (and it's not a nice democratic government they want to form, I assure you). These people are partially responsible for the spread of fundamentalist Wahabi-style Islam around the Islamic world. Watch the PBS Frontline documentary that aired on Friday if you can find it showing again - it gave some fabulous insights into this process.
The moral is that it's not just black and white. It's hard to run around playing favorites in the world and figuring out who is good and who is bad for their own people. It's substantially easier to figure out who is good and bad for your own nation-state, and that's how most countries conduct foreign policy. Honestly, in a lot of ways, I feel bad for the Al Saud family. They can't really modernize the country any more which needs to be done before democratization is an option, because so many of the people seem to be rabidly against modernization. On the other hand, they have fundamentalist clerics and radicals who desperately oppose all attempts at modernization. They have handed greater power to these groups as part of their attempt to broker a peaceful "middle-ground". They have in turn alienated all the liberal academics and others. They look at what happened to Iran under the Shah, and I don't think they want to be the Shah.
Just my 2 cents. I have no good solution to the Saudi problem, it's actually substantially harder to solve than the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which in the end is motivated mostly by economic concerns and nationalism and can be easily solved via some redistricting, establishment of a Palestinian nation, and economic aid to the Palestinians (well, it can be easily solved if you get the two sides to stop shooting for long enough, and you throw out the radicals on both sides who oppose any middle ground solutions).
You can't really do much to fight fundamentalism other than start with young children and make sure they get a proper secular education. This doesn't eliminate fundamentalism, but it greatly reduces its hold. We should make be funding public education programs in Pakistan and other countries dominated by fundamentalist madrassahs as the only option for education, not to mention food and clothing for young children whose parent can't afford to raise them. And as for the Saudis themselves, maybe we should let the Al Saud family fall, but there better be contingency plans and a UN peacekeeping force ready to go in and force democracy at gunpoint because it won't just happen magically.
If you (or the client) are determined to go pure C/C++, Qt already provides almost everything you are asking about, except serial port support. So you have two choices: Go with Qt all the way and find a third party library or isolate dependencies to make your own mini-library to handle serial port access. Or go with one of the other perhaps more comprehensive toolkits mentioned here (ACE, etc.) which I know little about.
Incidentally, I really like Qt, and it's great for commercial projects but as a Free library apps you really want to be cross-platform but can't afford to pay their Windows licensing fees for, I have become increasingly fond of wxWindows.
It has it's quirks, yes, but its greatest stregth IMHO is a very nice, well supported Python API. I swear it's at least 3-4 times faster to build a GUI in wxPython than in anything I've seen in C++, even using GUI RAD tools (which only get you so far before you start having to hack at source). Just my opinion, anyway.
Sorry, dude, Linux is fully supported and the Linux JDK is distributed by Sun. You must be thinking of 2 or 3 years ago when the Blackdown JDK was originally built with support from Sun but by outside developers. Who still work on the JDK as far as I know, but there is an in-house team at Sun as well (and I haven't seen any of the parallel track Blackdown-Sun releases since JDK 1.2.2).
Re:And the eBay stupidity begins...
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XBox Released
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· Score: 1
LOL. Some people are just amazingly dumb. I mean, the first auction was mildly deceptive, but it was still spelled out right there. The second one wasn't even really deceptive, it CLEARLY stated at least two times that you were bidding on the box as a collector's item only. Worth, maybe 20 or 30 dollars to a hardcore collector. Maybe more. Not 400 dollars, though. Morons.
Mostly indirect, but most of the effort to confirm or dispute parts of the rag-tag-whole that is known as the Standard Model hangs around neutrino research. Mostly because neutrinos are still quite a big question mark for EXACTLY this reason (they are hard and expensive to find and detect).
Nobody is going to be building "neutrino guns" or "neutrino death rays" any time soon, and this is basic research, not applied research. But if inconsistencies or discrepancies in the Standard Model are discovered that relate to neutrino behavior it is possible that will eventually lead us to a Grand High Pooba Ultimate Theory of Everything. Or at least get us a couple of steps closer.
Such understanding may allow us to make big spaceships that cross the galaxy in months rather than millenia or smash planets with large pseudo-scientific beam weapons. Err.. well, maybe not, but I'm quite sure we haven't seen an end to the totally inconceivable but infinitely useful devices that come out of better scientific understanding, and basic research comes into the picture somewhere. My point is that rather being some weird peripheral piece of basic research, neutrino detection work is hot on the trail of figuring stuff out that WILL change our understanding of the universe and therefore will likely result in very cool devices and gadgets 50 years from now that we can't even imagine today.
Well, my guess is that nobody would tolerate that in a commercial position. I mean, we all have our limits and we can all lose our tempers with a sufficient amount of stupidity thrust on us. But you can't go around losing your temper every time you get a dumb question from somebody who didn't RTFM. My favorite strategy is just to repeatedly refer them to the written material, or if they repeatedly refuse, to ignore their requests. This tends to make you more friends than just flaming away at everybody, and works in the corporate world too.
Thats nice and all, I think its good to give back. Its interesting though to continually see all the failures that OSS has strung up. VA looks like its next.
Huh? Oh, you mean the companies with stupid/non-existant business models that failed. Some of them were based around Open Source software, just like many were based around running web-sites. The fact that lots of companies tanked does not mean that a) It's impossible to make money using the web or that b) Open Source development necessarily produces sucky software.
It just means that sticking a buzzword in a business plan does not make a business model. Period. I support Open Source software because it provides more value for an experienced, skilled developer than closed source software, for a large variety of reasons, amongst them the "share-and-let-share" community. I am also a business person, and I started a company that makes closed source software (though we have contributed back money and source code to some of the Open Source projects we've used).
Also, I'm not sure that point a is necessarily true. There are profitable hardware companies out there, and there's no reason that couldn't be done with Linux. The question is ultimately What value do they add? If it is negligible, then somebody will just buy cheaper commodity hardware elsewhere.
And did anybody except for REALLY gullible financiers EVER think that a community site of any sort could really be a profit-machine??? The only market value would be in owning a chunk of the Linux community, but really that ephemeral community is not made up of the same people that spend millions in corporate dollars (for the most part - I suppose I've spent quite a bit in my time, but my company bought Dell Linux boxes rather than VA since they offered us a better deal).
Business will continue to be business, and Open Source will continue to thrive, it just may be a little less of a catchy buzzword, and supported more by large companies and private individuals with fewer bright, flaming startups. Ironically, big iron companies seem better able to make money by strategically giving away IP as Open Source for the market foothold it gives them, which in turn drives up other parts of their business (Sun and IBM both fall into this category in different ways - okay, Sun barely Gets It, but they still follow this basic strategy).
Sorry, obviously I didn't mean to imply that citizens alone were protected by US law while in US borders. As for the second point, such is the nature of the Internet - the information isn't getting "sent" or pushed on users, they are packets with HTTP responses. As for sending them, the sending of the packets is COMPLETELY LEGAL in the US, where they are sent. If France doesn't like those packets, then they are more than free to filter them like China does in their Great Firewall.
Bug the shit out of them? Dude, they'd just think they were getting crazy hits and then they'd NEVER give the domain back. Furthermore, these pr0n people usually make money PER hit because there are tons of links to other pr0n sites and banner ads and all that crap.
I realize bombing them with script requests would just be toasting their bandwidth, but they'd think they were getting more viewers. Best thing to do would be NOT to visit their page to discourage this sort of despicable squatting.
Your point is moot. Your point is that the French can pass any laws they want. For example, the French can pass a law that says "American pig dogs that fly on the Space Shuttle are subject to execution at will". Then they can try to enforce that when some American astronaut enters France.
Likewise, they can arrest Yahoo executives.
I am not denying the factuality of this statement. I'm simply pointing out that it is morally wrong, to an extreme degree. Yes, the US government has done the same thing on a few occasions, namely with Dmitry Sklyarov and the DMCA. I think this is an OUTRAGEOUS misapplication of the law as well and I despise the people here who are doing it.
If the French government persists in trying to regulate the actions of other country's citizens while those citizens are not even in France, then the French are going to find themselves the most hated people in the globalized world (I know, I know, other countries hate the US, but we don't try to prosecute people for not following our standard of moral conduct in other countries, unless the crimes are of a massive or violent nature).
Obviously you are illiterate. Read what I wrote before spouting irrational euro-commie-drivel-speak. Every company has to abide by local laws, I said nothing to the contrary, and I support that entirely.
Just stop trying to enforce your laws in my borders. If I wanted to live by French laws I would live in France. I appreciate your right to national sovereignty, now appreciate mine. If you don't like the stuff on the Internet that's hosted in other countries DON'T LOOK AT IT. If you really don't like it, lobby your government to make international treaties that will bind everyone to live by your rules. If nobody wants to live by your rules, though, don't be too surprised.
Oh please. I've been to France and received an overwhelmingly unpleasant reception there, unlike any other country I've ever visited (not that I've been to _that_ many, but enough to identify the real wankers, like yourselves). If you don't want people to bash the French, you shouldn't be such assholes to people visiting your country. Arrogancy? It is arrogant to assert that a nation has the right and duty to regulate its own citizens or those in its own borders, but not people in other countries?
My friend, that is not arrogancy, that is reason. You prove yourself nothing more than another whiny Frenchman when you jump up to call me arrogant, yet it is your country trying to regulate what my country's citizens can do in our own borders.
No, I have no problems with the principle of governments regulating their own citizens activities in their own country's borders. The US government CAN pass laws about what I may and may not download. Luckily, and due to the spilled blood of many Americans, our government doesn't try to run around telling us what we can and can not look at too often. And the nice thing about the Internet is that even when they do, it's pretty easy to ignore it.
Hmm, I've found Evolution to be far more stable and usable than KMail. In particular, Evolution's IMAP support is superb. KMail, despite claims to the contrary, does not seem to be happy with large IMAP folders at all, and I have watched it crash and burn once or twice, but it was really the extremely slow startup time while rechecking the entirety of my large IMAP folders. It's just too damned slow on startup. I have used it just fine with POP in the past though, I just think it has a ways to go on the back end support before it is as good as Evolution.
Are you just talking out of your ass? The whole point is that Yahoo complied LONG LONG ago with any French site they have (presumably www.yahoo.fr or something along those lines). The whole point is that the moronic French judiciary wants to apply French law to www.yahoo.com and other Yahoo owned sites that are located ANYWHERE as long as they are accessible by French citizens. As mentioned elsewhere, that is not a reasonable definition of legality, and if every site had to comply with the laws of every country just because it was accessible from said countries, there would be nothing left of the web, or it would be entirely segmented by geographical location to prevent violating laws somewhere.
So basically, the French can blow it out there asses or try to sue Yahoo interests in France, but that will likely lead to Yahoo AND every other significant internet entity ceasing to do business in France, and I think that would be fine. It would teach the whiny French a lesson about the real world.
Mod parent up. The entire point is that the French judicial system does not understand that any site on the Internet is reachable by anybody anywhere. If they don't like that, they are free to cut all links to the outside world and shut the fuck up, being happy with their isolationist splendor. If on the other hand, they want to deal with the world in real-world-land, they can accept that they can only regulate companies actions in their own country and only have say over the assets of companies located physically in their country. If the servers aren't hosted in the country, they have no say, but they can tell their citizens not to go there or even make it illegal for their citizens to buy those items. They'll just find it impossible to enforce. Or work out an international treaty banning such items, in the same way international treaties exist against slavery, child porn, etc.
That practically makes me cry. Things like this make me so thankful for Free Software. Why the hell would you ever kill off a product that people DO want and use? I suppose a large piece of enterprise software junk that nobody is going to use does the world no good if open sourced, but something like a nice Java IDE could make so many people happy and create such a positive net effect on so many.
I'll keep downloading MP3s. Yes, there are reasonable arguments to be made that getting artists rewarded for people listening to their music is a good thing. I would go along with that. The reality is that infinite music ON DEMAND, any song you want can be found, and once found can be played over and over again until you are sick to hell of it is TOO DAMNED GOOD for people to give up.
So instead of whining about it, the RIAA should play by the rules of capitalism and figure out a way to capitalize on it. The P2P networks are not defeatable in a meaningful way. They will always be ahead of the RIAA, which will hire squadrons of monkeys to track everybody's IP addresses and file complaints with ISPs until stealth P2P comes around, etc.etc.etc.
This is just stupid. Napster did the RIAA a HUGE service. They showed them where the market is. So open a god-damned for-subscription service where I can share music in the same way I did with Napster. I'd be willing to pay a subscription fee, say 10 dollars a month, plus say 25 to 50 cents per song I download in order to reward artists for making music I like. That's what it's worth to me, and I think a lot of others who like downloading and controlling the music they listen to would feel the same way. It's really no different from radio, except the money is coming from me instead of from advertisers and I have control rather than the station managers.
If you don't like this business model, come up with another one that's palatable. But don't try to sue us back to the Stone Age or to put the genie back in the bottle. He won't go back in. The internet isn't going away. Deal with it. Furthermore, though two wrongs don't make a right, the reality is that the second wrong here is not screwing anybody out of any money. CD sales have generally been up, and people will still buy CDs especially of lesser known artists to support them.
I'm sorry, but while in the abstract it may not be "right" for me to download lots of MP3s, it's not "right" for me to pay 15 dollars for a CD with one song I might or might not want, and it's not "right" that 30-40 cents of every CD goes to the artists who make the music, and as I said above, this is a capitalist world and a capitalist society, and if you aren't selling something, somebody else will come up with a way to provide it, and if they can provide it for free, people will take it. And if you try to use the legal system to suppress that, the technology will improve until it's unregulatable - these aren't physical goods, and they can't be thought of as such.
Some decent advice here...
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Java IDEs?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, the advice of the other posters here is decent. I have tried most of the IDEs and Java-aware editors out there. Let me preface this by saying that I have both used these tools and managed development organizations that have used them in heterogeneous environments at my company. In the end, I still use emacs about 95% of the time for editing Java source code. As far as using UML tools, others have recommended Together Control Center and in my opinion this is a superior product to Rational Rose, but this really only comes into play in the design phase of a project with sufficient complexity to merit it, and doesn't really speak to your question (though I think proper use of UML and design documentation do improve developer productivity in the long term).
Lemme give a quick run down of what Java IDEs I have knowledge of:
Kawa: A nice, relatively clean IDE, syntax highlighting, add-on modules for stuff like EJB/servlet debugging and nice things like that. It may have a different name these days, I tried it over a year ago for a while.
JBuilder: This is old faithful amongst Java IDEs. It's not that fast, but it has a lot of features, and a lot of nice modules (I like the JxBeauty plug in, makes quick reformatting really easy). Also has great JSP editing support, with dual mode syntax highlighting (a MUST if you are doing serious JSP work, i.e. HTML and Java syntax highlighting in the same file). I've never seen it do autoindenting, which I can't stand (nothing else I've seen does as good a job at this as Emacs). But as an IDE is the best package I know of. Has improved a lot since 3.0, but I've only tried each successive version a few times. 5.0 is installed on my box and I used it for JSP editing for a while, but not much else, and I don't do JSP work anymore.
Netbeans/Forte: I have seen people who swore by this. Actually, only one guy, and I fired him (not because he swore by Netbeans, which I consider a slow bloated piece of dog turd, but because he was incompetent). I really disliked it and found that I had uninstalled it within a day. YMMV depending on your tolerance for REALLY slow REALLY laggy Swing apps (and this was on a PIII 750 with 256 megs of RAM)
I've also tried some editors that are nicely Java-aware but don't include the other IDE features. jEdit, Textpad and Emacs are my favorites. Nothing beats a nice, well configured emacs, IMHO. It actually can be configured as more or less a full IDE with automatic compiler and debugger invocation, but I just use it for the slick editing capabilities and the nice color configurable syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, etc. Only weakness is that the dual-major-mode JSP highlighting hacks I've seen out there are all pretty weak and annoying to use. JBuilder is easier on the eyes and brain if you are doing JSP work.
That's about it for my experience. I have come back to emacs every time, since ultimately it's more work than it's worth in terms of any productivity I'd gain to use an IDE. The reality is that if you know the command line tools for your development platform (i.e. javac, jdb if you need to debug, and java for the VM) and you have a good build tool (I HIGHLY recommend Ant for pure Java apps, then using emacs and the command line, you are just as productive if not more so than the dude down the hall with the IDE. Once the stuff you are working on has become part of a large application with its own build structure, etc. making your build system and your IDE work together is really not feasible.
Most importantly, what I really STRONGLY don't recommend is forcing everyone in the company to use the same IDE. This will have a hugely negative impact on developer productivity if you have people who like and prefer to use emacs and command line tools. Offer official training and support for a "preferred" environment if you want, whatever that environment may be, but don't force it on people who are comfortable and productive in a different environment, unless you really want to piss them off AND you can afford the several weeks of down time while they familiarize themselves with the new environment.
On the subject of integrated debuggers, etc., sometimes they are useful, sometimes they are not. Occasionally I have to turn to the debugger, but as apps get more complicated, if you have threaded anything, etc. it becomes difficult and poor practice to rely too much on the debugger. It's a tool, know when it's appropriate, whether you use one on the command line or embedded in your IDE of choice.
And if you are building GUI apps, I highly recommend getting an IDE with some decent RAD tools in it (the IBM Java IDE as I recall had better tools than JBuilder). If you are just hacking JSPs and Servlets, productivity is primarily limited by developer competence and coordination between development and design staff (that's the hugest one in my experience), not by anything fundamental to the IDE or editor you are using.
Ya know, I think the whole broadband industry wouldn't survive without piracy (not like they're doing so well anyway). Downloading MP3s, downloading warez, downloading divx movies - these comprise a large portion of bandwidth traffic and justification for broadband access. Just look at the usage of an average college network as a model for what people do with broadband access. Let's say 20-30% of those packets fall into these categories (this primarily based on the massive size of this type of content - and yes, I've seen college network segments where this was clearly the case, like my roommate who was running a 10 gig MP3 server open to the Harvard network when I was a senior - he was sucking down a lot of bandwidth. Can you then argue that broadband access is "for a large part" supported by copyright infringement?
If 30% isn't enough, then I suppose 80% is? Or 90%? Where do you draw the line? If 50% of the material transmitted via some mechanism is illegal, is the mechanism then illegal? I don't get it.
Sorry, but your post makes no sense. If some architectural features of the ARM processor are patented, then they certainly may not be implemented in another product. Mind you, trying to draw a line between "implementation" and "description" here seems VERY blurry. Is source code speech? An appeals court said so the other day, with regards to DeCSS.
But that argument, I would think, is moot here since you can NOT patent an interface. If you could, then Sun would have patented all of their Java interfaces. Hell, it's not even clear how far copyright applies to something.
So a reverse-engineered "work-alike" product is by no means necessarily infringing on a patent. It MAY be infringing on the patent, if it uses the patented mechanism (if it does not, it clearly does not violate the patent, even if it achieves the same results, i.e. can simulate/run ARM instructions). Furthermore, as mentioned above, it has to be established that the source code (which any HDL code basically is) is an implementation rather than a description. I don't know how this line is meaningfully drawn, but it's clear that it is pretty hard to convince a court in the US that something distributed for free in source form violates a patent (or else organizations like Fraunhofer would have tried to squelch the many free MP3 codec implementations out there).
If you want the exact wording from US Patent Law, see the USPTO summary document. An infringer is someone who "makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention". Are you "making" an invention by writing an accurate description of it in an HDL? What about an accurate description in pseudocode? Are you making it when you encode it into an FPGA and deploy or sell a full product using it? Or are you just learning about it and testing a design for compatibility with it? The law just doesn't deal well with software/firmware/things on the boundary between digital information and physical stuff.
Agreed. The really unfortunate part is that we have such great machines everywhere now, they are practically ubiquitous. The problem is the pipe - the promise of broadband is still a bit half baked. I'm not saying broadband sucks or anything, I have a cable pipe at home and I'm running a 100Mbps LAN and 11Mbps WLAN in my home - who would have thought of that 5 years ago? I'm just saying that the next round of killer apps require a more reliable, much higher bandwidth infrastructure, and a better last-mile solution that is lower in marginal deployment cost.
If this makes no sense at all, forgive me - but my vision here is that high resolution, high quality, full motion video streams are capable of being supported by modern desktop hardware. But we still don't have the kind of pipes we need to push this data around. I still don't have a high quality, easy to use, secure, ultra-reliable videophone setup on my desktop. I can trade pictures and MP3s, perhaps the killer app of the last 2-3 years but the DMCA and heavyhanded industry tactics have greatly suppressed this revolution. Also annoying ISP policies regarding running "servers" in the home have made it harder to move toward a fully network-aware home, with remotely accessible services. I think these are all potential killer apps, limited by the pipe and legal morass rather than desktop hardware right now (if anybody has a Tivo and has played with running httpd and downloading extracted MPEG streams, you know how fscking cool this is and how many people would LOVE to play with such a toy, share shows with friends, archive and edit video on their computer, etc.).
Or maybe another type of application will come along - interactive, immersive VR? I don't know, again, there's pretty damned good hardware there. Quake3 and other modern FPS games show a huge amount of possibilities for this stuff. But it's still only used in games. I haven't yet had a "virtual meeting" with a vendor on eBay to negotiate prices, or anything like that.
These are just my stupid futurist ideas. Some of the applications are really waiting on the pipe, not the hardware. There may be other apps just waiting on the law. I don't know if there are any apps waiting on the hardware, but who knows, somebody might come up with something.
The Semantic Web is an application waiting on standardization, infrastructure and software that I think has the potential to become REALLY cool (yeah, I know, Tim Berners-Lee is somewhat disliked by a lot of the/. crowd, and he's pushing Semantic Web stuff out his ass, but I'm still a believer). I don't think that requires any more pipe or hardware to build out the infrastructure and, like the WWW, is a technology that becomes fundamentally more useful as it is more widely adopted and more information is accessible in RDF/Ontology format.
"freeware" is a blanket term that usually refers to any program in binary form or source code that is given away. In other words the "free" in "freeware" means free-as-in-beer, or stuff you don't pay for. For that reason it is extremely general and nonspecific. Both "Open Source" and "Free Software" are much more specific than "freeware". These days, the word freeware has come mostly to refer to software that is available for free in executable binary format only and is closed source.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'd like to see a nice democratic government in Saudi Arabia too, the reality is that a large minority in their country is made up of radical Wahabi muslims who are fomenting rebellion in Saudi Arabia (and it's not a nice democratic government they want to form, I assure you). These people are partially responsible for the spread of fundamentalist Wahabi-style Islam around the Islamic world. Watch the PBS Frontline documentary that aired on Friday if you can find it showing again - it gave some fabulous insights into this process.
The moral is that it's not just black and white. It's hard to run around playing favorites in the world and figuring out who is good and who is bad for their own people. It's substantially easier to figure out who is good and bad for your own nation-state, and that's how most countries conduct foreign policy. Honestly, in a lot of ways, I feel bad for the Al Saud family. They can't really modernize the country any more which needs to be done before democratization is an option, because so many of the people seem to be rabidly against modernization. On the other hand, they have fundamentalist clerics and radicals who desperately oppose all attempts at modernization. They have handed greater power to these groups as part of their attempt to broker a peaceful "middle-ground". They have in turn alienated all the liberal academics and others. They look at what happened to Iran under the Shah, and I don't think they want to be the Shah.
Just my 2 cents. I have no good solution to the Saudi problem, it's actually substantially harder to solve than the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which in the end is motivated mostly by economic concerns and nationalism and can be easily solved via some redistricting, establishment of a Palestinian nation, and economic aid to the Palestinians (well, it can be easily solved if you get the two sides to stop shooting for long enough, and you throw out the radicals on both sides who oppose any middle ground solutions).
You can't really do much to fight fundamentalism other than start with young children and make sure they get a proper secular education. This doesn't eliminate fundamentalism, but it greatly reduces its hold. We should make be funding public education programs in Pakistan and other countries dominated by fundamentalist madrassahs as the only option for education, not to mention food and clothing for young children whose parent can't afford to raise them. And as for the Saudis themselves, maybe we should let the Al Saud family fall, but there better be contingency plans and a UN peacekeeping force ready to go in and force democracy at gunpoint because it won't just happen magically.
Incidentally, I really like Qt, and it's great for commercial projects but as a Free library apps you really want to be cross-platform but can't afford to pay their Windows licensing fees for, I have become increasingly fond of wxWindows.
It has it's quirks, yes, but its greatest stregth IMHO is a very nice, well supported Python API. I swear it's at least 3-4 times faster to build a GUI in wxPython than in anything I've seen in C++, even using GUI RAD tools (which only get you so far before you start having to hack at source). Just my opinion, anyway.
Sorry, dude, Linux is fully supported and the Linux JDK is distributed by Sun. You must be thinking of 2 or 3 years ago when the Blackdown JDK was originally built with support from Sun but by outside developers. Who still work on the JDK as far as I know, but there is an in-house team at Sun as well (and I haven't seen any of the parallel track Blackdown-Sun releases since JDK 1.2.2).
LOL. Some people are just amazingly dumb. I mean, the first auction was mildly deceptive, but it was still spelled out right there. The second one wasn't even really deceptive, it CLEARLY stated at least two times that you were bidding on the box as a collector's item only. Worth, maybe 20 or 30 dollars to a hardcore collector. Maybe more. Not 400 dollars, though. Morons.
Nobody is going to be building "neutrino guns" or "neutrino death rays" any time soon, and this is basic research, not applied research. But if inconsistencies or discrepancies in the Standard Model are discovered that relate to neutrino behavior it is possible that will eventually lead us to a Grand High Pooba Ultimate Theory of Everything. Or at least get us a couple of steps closer.
Such understanding may allow us to make big spaceships that cross the galaxy in months rather than millenia or smash planets with large pseudo-scientific beam weapons. Err.. well, maybe not, but I'm quite sure we haven't seen an end to the totally inconceivable but infinitely useful devices that come out of better scientific understanding, and basic research comes into the picture somewhere. My point is that rather being some weird peripheral piece of basic research, neutrino detection work is hot on the trail of figuring stuff out that WILL change our understanding of the universe and therefore will likely result in very cool devices and gadgets 50 years from now that we can't even imagine today.
Well, my guess is that nobody would tolerate that in a commercial position. I mean, we all have our limits and we can all lose our tempers with a sufficient amount of stupidity thrust on us. But you can't go around losing your temper every time you get a dumb question from somebody who didn't RTFM. My favorite strategy is just to repeatedly refer them to the written material, or if they repeatedly refuse, to ignore their requests. This tends to make you more friends than just flaming away at everybody, and works in the corporate world too.
Huh? Oh, you mean the companies with stupid/non-existant business models that failed. Some of them were based around Open Source software, just like many were based around running web-sites. The fact that lots of companies tanked does not mean that a) It's impossible to make money using the web or that b) Open Source development necessarily produces sucky software.
It just means that sticking a buzzword in a business plan does not make a business model. Period. I support Open Source software because it provides more value for an experienced, skilled developer than closed source software, for a large variety of reasons, amongst them the "share-and-let-share" community. I am also a business person, and I started a company that makes closed source software (though we have contributed back money and source code to some of the Open Source projects we've used).
Also, I'm not sure that point a is necessarily true. There are profitable hardware companies out there, and there's no reason that couldn't be done with Linux. The question is ultimately What value do they add? If it is negligible, then somebody will just buy cheaper commodity hardware elsewhere.
And did anybody except for REALLY gullible financiers EVER think that a community site of any sort could really be a profit-machine??? The only market value would be in owning a chunk of the Linux community, but really that ephemeral community is not made up of the same people that spend millions in corporate dollars (for the most part - I suppose I've spent quite a bit in my time, but my company bought Dell Linux boxes rather than VA since they offered us a better deal).
Business will continue to be business, and Open Source will continue to thrive, it just may be a little less of a catchy buzzword, and supported more by large companies and private individuals with fewer bright, flaming startups. Ironically, big iron companies seem better able to make money by strategically giving away IP as Open Source for the market foothold it gives them, which in turn drives up other parts of their business (Sun and IBM both fall into this category in different ways - okay, Sun barely Gets It, but they still follow this basic strategy).
Sorry, obviously I didn't mean to imply that citizens alone were protected by US law while in US borders. As for the second point, such is the nature of the Internet - the information isn't getting "sent" or pushed on users, they are packets with HTTP responses. As for sending them, the sending of the packets is COMPLETELY LEGAL in the US, where they are sent. If France doesn't like those packets, then they are more than free to filter them like China does in their Great Firewall.
That's what I already said. You agree with me 100% obviously. :)
I realize bombing them with script requests would just be toasting their bandwidth, but they'd think they were getting more viewers. Best thing to do would be NOT to visit their page to discourage this sort of despicable squatting.
typing "p0rn" when you mean "porn" != clever || cool
...suck a turd
Yeah, everyone knows it's really called pr0n.
Likewise, they can arrest Yahoo executives.
I am not denying the factuality of this statement. I'm simply pointing out that it is morally wrong, to an extreme degree. Yes, the US government has done the same thing on a few occasions, namely with Dmitry Sklyarov and the DMCA. I think this is an OUTRAGEOUS misapplication of the law as well and I despise the people here who are doing it.
If the French government persists in trying to regulate the actions of other country's citizens while those citizens are not even in France, then the French are going to find themselves the most hated people in the globalized world (I know, I know, other countries hate the US, but we don't try to prosecute people for not following our standard of moral conduct in other countries, unless the crimes are of a massive or violent nature).
Just stop trying to enforce your laws in my borders. If I wanted to live by French laws I would live in France. I appreciate your right to national sovereignty, now appreciate mine. If you don't like the stuff on the Internet that's hosted in other countries DON'T LOOK AT IT. If you really don't like it, lobby your government to make international treaties that will bind everyone to live by your rules. If nobody wants to live by your rules, though, don't be too surprised.
My friend, that is not arrogancy, that is reason. You prove yourself nothing more than another whiny Frenchman when you jump up to call me arrogant, yet it is your country trying to regulate what my country's citizens can do in our own borders.
No, I have no problems with the principle of governments regulating their own citizens activities in their own country's borders. The US government CAN pass laws about what I may and may not download. Luckily, and due to the spilled blood of many Americans, our government doesn't try to run around telling us what we can and can not look at too often. And the nice thing about the Internet is that even when they do, it's pretty easy to ignore it.
Hmm, I've found Evolution to be far more stable and usable than KMail. In particular, Evolution's IMAP support is superb. KMail, despite claims to the contrary, does not seem to be happy with large IMAP folders at all, and I have watched it crash and burn once or twice, but it was really the extremely slow startup time while rechecking the entirety of my large IMAP folders. It's just too damned slow on startup. I have used it just fine with POP in the past though, I just think it has a ways to go on the back end support before it is as good as Evolution.
So basically, the French can blow it out there asses or try to sue Yahoo interests in France, but that will likely lead to Yahoo AND every other significant internet entity ceasing to do business in France, and I think that would be fine. It would teach the whiny French a lesson about the real world.
Mod parent up. The entire point is that the French judicial system does not understand that any site on the Internet is reachable by anybody anywhere. If they don't like that, they are free to cut all links to the outside world and shut the fuck up, being happy with their isolationist splendor. If on the other hand, they want to deal with the world in real-world-land, they can accept that they can only regulate companies actions in their own country and only have say over the assets of companies located physically in their country. If the servers aren't hosted in the country, they have no say, but they can tell their citizens not to go there or even make it illegal for their citizens to buy those items. They'll just find it impossible to enforce. Or work out an international treaty banning such items, in the same way international treaties exist against slavery, child porn, etc.
Bastards.
So instead of whining about it, the RIAA should play by the rules of capitalism and figure out a way to capitalize on it. The P2P networks are not defeatable in a meaningful way. They will always be ahead of the RIAA, which will hire squadrons of monkeys to track everybody's IP addresses and file complaints with ISPs until stealth P2P comes around, etc.etc.etc.
This is just stupid. Napster did the RIAA a HUGE service. They showed them where the market is. So open a god-damned for-subscription service where I can share music in the same way I did with Napster. I'd be willing to pay a subscription fee, say 10 dollars a month, plus say 25 to 50 cents per song I download in order to reward artists for making music I like. That's what it's worth to me, and I think a lot of others who like downloading and controlling the music they listen to would feel the same way. It's really no different from radio, except the money is coming from me instead of from advertisers and I have control rather than the station managers.
If you don't like this business model, come up with another one that's palatable. But don't try to sue us back to the Stone Age or to put the genie back in the bottle. He won't go back in. The internet isn't going away. Deal with it. Furthermore, though two wrongs don't make a right, the reality is that the second wrong here is not screwing anybody out of any money. CD sales have generally been up, and people will still buy CDs especially of lesser known artists to support them.
I'm sorry, but while in the abstract it may not be "right" for me to download lots of MP3s, it's not "right" for me to pay 15 dollars for a CD with one song I might or might not want, and it's not "right" that 30-40 cents of every CD goes to the artists who make the music, and as I said above, this is a capitalist world and a capitalist society, and if you aren't selling something, somebody else will come up with a way to provide it, and if they can provide it for free, people will take it. And if you try to use the legal system to suppress that, the technology will improve until it's unregulatable - these aren't physical goods, and they can't be thought of as such.
Lemme give a quick run down of what Java IDEs I have knowledge of:
Kawa: A nice, relatively clean IDE, syntax highlighting, add-on modules for stuff like EJB/servlet debugging and nice things like that. It may have a different name these days, I tried it over a year ago for a while.
JBuilder: This is old faithful amongst Java IDEs. It's not that fast, but it has a lot of features, and a lot of nice modules (I like the JxBeauty plug in, makes quick reformatting really easy). Also has great JSP editing support, with dual mode syntax highlighting (a MUST if you are doing serious JSP work, i.e. HTML and Java syntax highlighting in the same file). I've never seen it do autoindenting, which I can't stand (nothing else I've seen does as good a job at this as Emacs). But as an IDE is the best package I know of. Has improved a lot since 3.0, but I've only tried each successive version a few times. 5.0 is installed on my box and I used it for JSP editing for a while, but not much else, and I don't do JSP work anymore.
Netbeans/Forte: I have seen people who swore by this. Actually, only one guy, and I fired him (not because he swore by Netbeans, which I consider a slow bloated piece of dog turd, but because he was incompetent). I really disliked it and found that I had uninstalled it within a day. YMMV depending on your tolerance for REALLY slow REALLY laggy Swing apps (and this was on a PIII 750 with 256 megs of RAM)
I've also tried some editors that are nicely Java-aware but don't include the other IDE features. jEdit, Textpad and Emacs are my favorites. Nothing beats a nice, well configured emacs, IMHO. It actually can be configured as more or less a full IDE with automatic compiler and debugger invocation, but I just use it for the slick editing capabilities and the nice color configurable syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, etc. Only weakness is that the dual-major-mode JSP highlighting hacks I've seen out there are all pretty weak and annoying to use. JBuilder is easier on the eyes and brain if you are doing JSP work.
That's about it for my experience. I have come back to emacs every time, since ultimately it's more work than it's worth in terms of any productivity I'd gain to use an IDE. The reality is that if you know the command line tools for your development platform (i.e. javac, jdb if you need to debug, and java for the VM) and you have a good build tool (I HIGHLY recommend Ant for pure Java apps, then using emacs and the command line, you are just as productive if not more so than the dude down the hall with the IDE. Once the stuff you are working on has become part of a large application with its own build structure, etc. making your build system and your IDE work together is really not feasible.
Most importantly, what I really STRONGLY don't recommend is forcing everyone in the company to use the same IDE. This will have a hugely negative impact on developer productivity if you have people who like and prefer to use emacs and command line tools. Offer official training and support for a "preferred" environment if you want, whatever that environment may be, but don't force it on people who are comfortable and productive in a different environment, unless you really want to piss them off AND you can afford the several weeks of down time while they familiarize themselves with the new environment.
On the subject of integrated debuggers, etc., sometimes they are useful, sometimes they are not. Occasionally I have to turn to the debugger, but as apps get more complicated, if you have threaded anything, etc. it becomes difficult and poor practice to rely too much on the debugger. It's a tool, know when it's appropriate, whether you use one on the command line or embedded in your IDE of choice.
And if you are building GUI apps, I highly recommend getting an IDE with some decent RAD tools in it (the IBM Java IDE as I recall had better tools than JBuilder). If you are just hacking JSPs and Servlets, productivity is primarily limited by developer competence and coordination between development and design staff (that's the hugest one in my experience), not by anything fundamental to the IDE or editor you are using.
Again, YMMV and these are just my opinions.
If 30% isn't enough, then I suppose 80% is? Or 90%? Where do you draw the line? If 50% of the material transmitted via some mechanism is illegal, is the mechanism then illegal? I don't get it.
But that argument, I would think, is moot here since you can NOT patent an interface. If you could, then Sun would have patented all of their Java interfaces. Hell, it's not even clear how far copyright applies to something.
So a reverse-engineered "work-alike" product is by no means necessarily infringing on a patent. It MAY be infringing on the patent, if it uses the patented mechanism (if it does not, it clearly does not violate the patent, even if it achieves the same results, i.e. can simulate/run ARM instructions). Furthermore, as mentioned above, it has to be established that the source code (which any HDL code basically is) is an implementation rather than a description. I don't know how this line is meaningfully drawn, but it's clear that it is pretty hard to convince a court in the US that something distributed for free in source form violates a patent (or else organizations like Fraunhofer would have tried to squelch the many free MP3 codec implementations out there).
If you want the exact wording from US Patent Law, see the USPTO summary document. An infringer is someone who "makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention". Are you "making" an invention by writing an accurate description of it in an HDL? What about an accurate description in pseudocode? Are you making it when you encode it into an FPGA and deploy or sell a full product using it? Or are you just learning about it and testing a design for compatibility with it? The law just doesn't deal well with software/firmware/things on the boundary between digital information and physical stuff.
If this makes no sense at all, forgive me - but my vision here is that high resolution, high quality, full motion video streams are capable of being supported by modern desktop hardware. But we still don't have the kind of pipes we need to push this data around. I still don't have a high quality, easy to use, secure, ultra-reliable videophone setup on my desktop. I can trade pictures and MP3s, perhaps the killer app of the last 2-3 years but the DMCA and heavyhanded industry tactics have greatly suppressed this revolution. Also annoying ISP policies regarding running "servers" in the home have made it harder to move toward a fully network-aware home, with remotely accessible services. I think these are all potential killer apps, limited by the pipe and legal morass rather than desktop hardware right now (if anybody has a Tivo and has played with running httpd and downloading extracted MPEG streams, you know how fscking cool this is and how many people would LOVE to play with such a toy, share shows with friends, archive and edit video on their computer, etc.).
Or maybe another type of application will come along - interactive, immersive VR? I don't know, again, there's pretty damned good hardware there. Quake3 and other modern FPS games show a huge amount of possibilities for this stuff. But it's still only used in games. I haven't yet had a "virtual meeting" with a vendor on eBay to negotiate prices, or anything like that.
These are just my stupid futurist ideas. Some of the applications are really waiting on the pipe, not the hardware. There may be other apps just waiting on the law. I don't know if there are any apps waiting on the hardware, but who knows, somebody might come up with something.
The Semantic Web is an application waiting on standardization, infrastructure and software that I think has the potential to become REALLY cool (yeah, I know, Tim Berners-Lee is somewhat disliked by a lot of the /. crowd, and he's pushing Semantic Web stuff out his ass, but I'm still a believer). I don't think that requires any more pipe or hardware to build out the infrastructure and, like the WWW, is a technology that becomes fundamentally more useful as it is more widely adopted and more information is accessible in RDF/Ontology format.
"freeware" is a blanket term that usually refers to any program in binary form or source code that is given away. In other words the "free" in "freeware" means free-as-in-beer, or stuff you don't pay for. For that reason it is extremely general and nonspecific. Both "Open Source" and "Free Software" are much more specific than "freeware". These days, the word freeware has come mostly to refer to software that is available for free in executable binary format only and is closed source.