Re:Absolutely the best Java book I've read
on
Effective Java
·
· Score: 2
Here's the Gosling quote from the back cover, which I get a big kick out of every time:
I sure wish I had had this book ten years ago. Some might think that I don't need any Java books, but I need this one."
-James Gosling, Fellow and Vice President, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Easily one of the top five Java books ever, along with Thinking in Java (2nd. ed., Eckel) and Concurrent Programming in Java (2nd. ed., Lea)
Fascinating summation, thanks for taking the time. Biblical scholarship is one of those things that I'd probably find fascinating if I weren't an atheist and didn't already have a few too many hobbies.;)
Right you are! I've read a few of Neil Postman's books, and the "Gutenberg would have been horrified" bit came to mind, so I Googled and found that quote.
I'm not much of a fan of TOS, but this stuff is really quite awful, even by TOS standards. Sure, it's impressive enough that a bunch of amateurs can put together a project of this scope, but... Geez, did they even watch the footage before they cut it together?
The Commodore's long-winded speech in the teaser is the lowlight (so far) of the awful acting; the pink monster isn't even funny, let alone believable...
I suppose now's the time to plug my friend's independent superhero comedy short, Dial "A" for Alphaman, which is vastly more professionally acted, directed and shot. If you need some DV edited or a music video shot, call Mike!
Gutenberg printed Bibles in Latin; it was Martin Luther who translated them into German and printed them for "ordinary" people. Here's a fun quote from Neil Postman's Technopoly:
"Gutenberg, for example, was by all accounts a devout Catholic who would have been horrified to hear that accursed heretic Luther describe printing as 'God's highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.' Luther understood, as Gutenberg did not, that the mass-produced book, by placing the Word of God on every kitchen table, makes each Christian his own thrologian -- one might even say his own priest.... In the struggle between unity and diversity of relgious belief, the press favored the latter, and we can assume that this possibility never occured to Gutenberg."
Next time you need something nitpicked to death, you know who to call.;)
The MS JVM wasn't compliant. It didn't include RMI or JNI, rather it had MS-developed, Windows-specific, incompatible versions of same. They also added JavaDoc doclets that actually had an effect on compiled code, therefore producing class files that were incompatible with compliant JVMs and in contravention of the JLS.
Sun's position was that under the terms of their agreement, MS should ship a compliant JVM (including RMI and JNI) or terminate the agreement.
It's not OSS at all. Symbian is still a proprietary, closed-source OS. Here's an announcement from April about their "opening" of code.
What the Reuters article says is that MS wouldn't release the SmartPhone OS code to Sendo but Symbian would.
IMO, this is a terrible mistake on MS' part. They refused to release code to one of the first licensees of a brand new, untried OS for a market segment that demands vendor differentiation more than any other.
The language is called Logo, and the triangle is commonly called a "turtle." Some Logo implementations included a software driver that would let you control a real robot containing a real pen via a hardware (usually serial) interface.
Logo is a more intereresting language than most people think...
My post was in answer to someone's idea that to avoid being spidered by spambots, one could simply remove the pages on one's site which contain email addresses from the Google index by means of a robots.txt file.
My point (perhaps not articulated clearly enough) was that this wouldn't help if those pages were linked from any other part of your site, because the spambots, once they found their way to the "public" part of your site, would quickly spider the non-Googled part, and with it your email addresses.
The only reliable solution, aside from joining the email-address-spamproofing arms race, would be to completely exclude one's site from search engines.
Nope. The whole point of robots.txt is to ask search engines to refrain from spidering parts of your site that they normally would because they're linked to.
A non-robots.txt-respecting spider will simply follow all the links on every page. Once they somehow find some way onto your site (perhaps via Google), they can harvest whatever they want.
I hadn't thought of that... It's a good point, but still the technical, economic and legal feasibility of this kind of license enforcement are all (currently) pretty minimal.
Plus, with enough monitors in a building, IMO it would become really hard to separate out a signal from just one of them.
No, it's not really possible, even using Tempest, Van Eck phreaking or optical emanations. With varying degrees of success, people with enough money and patience can detect what you're running on your computer, but they certainly can't tell whether you've legally licensed it--At least not without a warrant to conduct a physical search for evidence of licensing.
Wow! It looks like cburley is guilty of the kind of FUD Distribution that the linux-o-philes hate.
FUD doesn't just mean bullshit, it dereferences to "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt," denoting the psychological tactics that organizations use in an attempt to prevent others from using competing products. In no case does cburley appear to be spreading FUD, so please use a different, less specific term. "Bullshit" works for me, but follow your heart.
Now for the fun part.
If you're not going to fully support the software you make, there are plenty of jobs at Target to fill your "free" time.
Exactly what do you expect, for nothing? Someone writes and distributes software of her own free will, and has the courtesy to make that software Free. Do you propose that she should be obliged to provide support for that software? If not obliged, then at least expected? When you download warez, who do you suppose owes you help with the product? Certainly not the original author of the software, who in exchange for the purchaser's licence fee, often promises some degree of support. If you don't expect support for warez, why would you expect support for Free software? It just doesn't make sense. Distribution does not imply obligation, but receiving payment does. The foundation of contract law is mutual benefit, and Free software authors don't directly benefit (apart from warm fuzzies and possible reputation enhancement) when someone downloads their software.
"free, ad-hoc" support. What a joke. Ad-hoc support is always inconsistant, frequently self-contradictory, and usually way over the help-seekers head.
Again, what the hell do you expect for free? Most geeks try to maximize cluon flux when helping people solve problems. It's also great to give people answers that challenge them a little. Helping people to clarify their goal, and suggesting a plan of attack can, in the long run, be much more helpful than "edit this file, search for Foo, replace it with Bar, killall -HUP foobard..."
cburley seems to be hopelessly engrained into thinking that software support=source code access
No, his point was that getting effective support from anyone other than the original vendor is close to impossible, because only the original vendor--the sole entity with access to the code--knows for certain how the product works.
If cburley's attitude was taken to the process of changing the air-filter on my car, I'd be an expert at rebuilding Honda engines by now - which is NOT what I want to do with my time; I want my system to work, reliably, with little fuss, and not have to learn Linux Kernel programming to keep my system working.
Your analogy is absurd. Cars, like operating systems, are generally engineered with best practices like modularity in mind. Changing an air filter is fairly easy, requiring a few simple skills like using a screwdriver. Likewise, swapping some part of an operating system for another part can be as easy as a few clicks in a graphical package management tool. Obviously, cars and operating systems are complex enough that to make some types of changes requires expert knowledge. Compiling a kernel can be pretty tricky, but it's certainly easier than adjusting your valves, for instance.
One thing that's interesting about the analogy is that while all cars are more or less equally complex, in the same general ways, operating systems (and by extension, distributions) actually compete in areas like ease of installation, ease of use and ease of administration.
"Choice D" is what everyone who buys commercial software products does. You PAY for the product (!= free, as in speech OR Stolen Beer) and get support from that company, if at all. Software support for choices A thru C is shotty, unreliable and teduous at best.
So you'd rather forfeit the choice? Go right ahead--I'll keep getting the software I rely on for free, legally.
SCENARIO 1: 1) Linux Distributions that are "free" (as in your friend's Beer) do not come with support, but you can give it away.
SCENARIO 2: 1) Big software company gets someone into a management position who is a rabid Linux user/coder/penguine fetishist and convinces the company that they should have a Linux Distro
SCENARIO 3: 1) Group of Linux coders/penguine fetishists get together and form a company to make and distribute their own brand of Linux
In your first scenario, the users get what they've paid for, and intuitively know that they can't expect free, perfectly reliable support. They have the option of either toughing it out online, or purchasing a support contract from a third party. If no third party offers a support contract for the particular distro, maybe it will cease to exist. Oh well, big deal. There are hundreds of others to choose from, some quite well supported by third parties.
Your second scenario has only one example that I know of--Corel. They failed, but who cares? Xandros might yet succeed, and the Debian project is still chugging right along, providing "orphaned" Corel Linux users with all the updated software they need.
The third scenario, in which a bunch of geeks form a company to create an incompatible distribution, is just one example of how companies can naturally fail in an open, free, non-monopolistic market. Incompatibility is a bad idea for a young company--if they go that route they probably deserve to fail. If you're early on the scene, like Red Hat and Slackware were, you have the chance to create de facto standards that other vendors adhere to. Wow, capitalism at work!
Support for open-source products is so poor, inconsistent and unreliable that one should consider it virually non-existent.
In conclusion; if I use something that someone has made, whether I paid for it was given to me as a gift (as open-source is), I would expect that "someone" to help me fix it, and in a manner that I would understand.
Guess what... All software, Free and proprietary, comes with NO WARRANTY. Your use of the software is at your own risk, and the distributor of the software, whether a multi-billion dollar company or a 21-year-old Finnish university student, is under no obligation to ensure that the software is suitable for your purposes. Perhaps, in exchange for some cash, the distributor might be willing to put you on hold for half an hour, and then read to you from a FAQ. Maybe, if the distributor has time, they might give you an answer that leads you to a much deeper understanding of your problem and of the software in question. Maybe, if the distributor doesn't have the time, you might take a peek at the source code... Oh wait, you can't. Suit yourself.
It would seem to me that in essence, you're advocating additional restrictions on people who want to write software and give it away!
Thou Shalt Not Release Unless Thy Documentation Is Complete And Useful To Non-Technical Users! Thou Shalt Be Nice To Newbies Who Don't Read The FAQ!
Give me a break! It's free software! If you think the docs suck, write your own! If the software sucks, patch it, live with it, or don't use it! If the maintainer is an ass, fork it!
Don't bitch and moan that someone is not being generous enough... Maybe they don't have time to do it properly, and maybe they don't feel like answering simple questions. Who are we to try to compel them?
I have categorically stopped buying CDs unless I download and listen to the artist/album first.
Not so much out of principle, but practicality. When I hear a song I like on the radio, I fire up my favourite P2P client and download everything I can find by the artist. If I like a significant fraction of the songs, I figure out which album has a bunch of good songs on it, and buy the CD.
I don't like how 128kbps sounds, and I can only play audio CDs in the car--both make it impractical for me to really make good use of downloaded music, except as background noise while using the computer.
I don't know why I'm responding to a nameless troll, but anyway... I added that bit not to brag (anybody can spend money), but as a testimonial to the device's utility.
No, it's not completely useless to me. With my latest box, I've tried hard to remove all the legacy stuff (call it a fetish), and I've almost entirely succeeded:
New:
Mouse and Keyboard are USB, plugged into the "main" USB ports.
Keyboard has two USB ports built-in, for ad hoc hot-plugging.
Graphics tablet and joystick are plugged into one of those "extra" USB risers that came with the motherboard, an ABit KR7A-RAID.
Legacy:
Audio is still analog (stereo). Not for long.
Unfortunately, our digital camera is ancient and only works with the serial port. So I could *almost* use the reviewed motherboard, but not quite.
My buddy who does video editing would kill for six
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Easily one of the top five Java books ever, along with Thinking in Java (2nd. ed., Eckel) and Concurrent Programming in Java (2nd. ed., Lea)
Fascinating summation, thanks for taking the time. Biblical scholarship is one of those things that I'd probably find fascinating if I weren't an atheist and didn't already have a few too many hobbies. ;)
Right you are! I've read a few of Neil Postman's books, and the "Gutenberg would have been horrified" bit came to mind, so I Googled and found that quote.
I'm not much of a fan of TOS, but this stuff is really quite awful, even by TOS standards. Sure, it's impressive enough that a bunch of amateurs can put together a project of this scope, but... Geez, did they even watch the footage before they cut it together?
The Commodore's long-winded speech in the teaser is the lowlight (so far) of the awful acting; the pink monster isn't even funny, let alone believable...
I suppose now's the time to plug my friend's independent superhero comedy short, Dial "A" for Alphaman, which is vastly more professionally acted, directed and shot. If you need some DV edited or a music video shot, call Mike!
Next time you need something nitpicked to death, you know who to call. ;)
Cash is money in the bank, the "wettest" of all liquid assets. They spend the rest of their revenue on operations.
Here you go: Missing RIAA figures shoot down "piracy" canard, which is based in turn on RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy by George Ziemann
I submitted this very interesting piece yesterday but it was rejected.
The MS JVM wasn't compliant. It didn't include RMI or JNI, rather it had MS-developed, Windows-specific, incompatible versions of same. They also added JavaDoc doclets that actually had an effect on compiled code, therefore producing class files that were incompatible with compliant JVMs and in contravention of the JLS.
Sun's position was that under the terms of their agreement, MS should ship a compliant JVM (including RMI and JNI) or terminate the agreement.
It's not OSS at all. Symbian is still a proprietary, closed-source OS. Here's an announcement from April about their "opening" of code.
What the Reuters article says is that MS wouldn't release the SmartPhone OS code to Sendo but Symbian would.
IMO, this is a terrible mistake on MS' part. They refused to release code to one of the first licensees of a brand new, untried OS for a market segment that demands vendor differentiation more than any other.
This identical question has already been answered in the original article.
Hey, for those Ask Slashdot-style question stories in non-AS categories, could you guys please try to remember to put a question mark in the title?
An announcement of a Perl binding for Cocoa is somewhat interesting to me, but in general AS's aren't.
Too much of a good thing might not end up also being a good thing?! Huh, I've never thought of it that way before. +1, Insightful!
Cute reductio ad absurdum anyway.
The language is called Logo, and the triangle is commonly called a "turtle." Some Logo implementations included a software driver that would let you control a real robot containing a real pen via a hardware (usually serial) interface.
Logo is a more intereresting language than most people think...
Wow, I've been waiting for The Authority On Recommended Uses Of Technology to come around. Thanks!
If you truly were Himself, wouldn't you spell it "defence?"
My post was in answer to someone's idea that to avoid being spidered by spambots, one could simply remove the pages on one's site which contain email addresses from the Google index by means of a robots.txt file.
My point (perhaps not articulated clearly enough) was that this wouldn't help if those pages were linked from any other part of your site, because the spambots, once they found their way to the "public" part of your site, would quickly spider the non-Googled part, and with it your email addresses.
The only reliable solution, aside from joining the email-address-spamproofing arms race, would be to completely exclude one's site from search engines.
Nope. The whole point of robots.txt is to ask search engines to refrain from spidering parts of your site that they normally would because they're linked to.
A non-robots.txt-respecting spider will simply follow all the links on every page. Once they somehow find some way onto your site (perhaps via Google), they can harvest whatever they want.
I hadn't thought of that... It's a good point, but still the technical, economic and legal feasibility of this kind of license enforcement are all (currently) pretty minimal.
Plus, with enough monitors in a building, IMO it would become really hard to separate out a signal from just one of them.
No, it's not really possible, even using Tempest, Van Eck phreaking or optical emanations. With varying degrees of success, people with enough money and patience can detect what you're running on your computer, but they certainly can't tell whether you've legally licensed it--At least not without a warrant to conduct a physical search for evidence of licensing.
One thing that's interesting about the analogy is that while all cars are more or less equally complex, in the same general ways, operating systems (and by extension, distributions) actually compete in areas like ease of installation, ease of use and ease of administration.
So you'd rather forfeit the choice? Go right ahead--I'll keep getting the software I rely on for free, legally. In your first scenario, the users get what they've paid for, and intuitively know that they can't expect free, perfectly reliable support. They have the option of either toughing it out online, or purchasing a support contract from a third party. If no third party offers a support contract for the particular distro, maybe it will cease to exist. Oh well, big deal. There are hundreds of others to choose from, some quite well supported by third parties.Your second scenario has only one example that I know of--Corel. They failed, but who cares? Xandros might yet succeed, and the Debian project is still chugging right along, providing "orphaned" Corel Linux users with all the updated software they need.
The third scenario, in which a bunch of geeks form a company to create an incompatible distribution, is just one example of how companies can naturally fail in an open, free, non-monopolistic market. Incompatibility is a bad idea for a young company--if they go that route they probably deserve to fail. If you're early on the scene, like Red Hat and Slackware were, you have the chance to create de facto standards that other vendors adhere to. Wow, capitalism at work!
This is such an obviously specious claim that I won't bother to dignify it with a response.It would seem to me that in essence, you're advocating additional restrictions on people who want to write software and give it away!
Thou Shalt Not Release Unless Thy Documentation Is Complete And Useful To Non-Technical Users! Thou Shalt Be Nice To Newbies Who Don't Read The FAQ!
Give me a break! It's free software! If you think the docs suck, write your own! If the software sucks, patch it, live with it, or don't use it! If the maintainer is an ass, fork it!
Don't bitch and moan that someone is not being generous enough... Maybe they don't have time to do it properly, and maybe they don't feel like answering simple questions. Who are we to try to compel them?
I have categorically stopped buying CDs unless I download and listen to the artist/album first.
Not so much out of principle, but practicality. When I hear a song I like on the radio, I fire up my favourite P2P client and download everything I can find by the artist. If I like a significant fraction of the songs, I figure out which album has a bunch of good songs on it, and buy the CD.
I don't like how 128kbps sounds, and I can only play audio CDs in the car--both make it impractical for me to really make good use of downloaded music, except as background noise while using the computer.
I don't know why I'm responding to a nameless troll, but anyway... I added that bit not to brag (anybody can spend money), but as a testimonial to the device's utility.
Bugger it all... Continued:
...for six^W the ability to plug in six^Weight IDE RAID ports.
New:
Mouse and Keyboard are USB, plugged into the "main" USB ports.
Keyboard has two USB ports built-in, for ad hoc hot-plugging.
Graphics tablet and joystick are plugged into one of those "extra" USB risers that came with the motherboard, an ABit KR7A-RAID.
Legacy:
Audio is still analog (stereo). Not for long.
Unfortunately, our digital camera is ancient and only works with the serial port. So I could *almost* use the reviewed motherboard, but not quite.
My buddy who does video editing would kill for six