the very things that make J2EE and Relational Databases suitable for Enterprise scale applications are the very things that act as road bumps on workgroup scale and on web scale applications. Simply put, relational databases will get squeezed on both sides.
--Sam Ruby
Read the rest in Sam Ruby: Dare Takes a Look at CouchDB
if Hibernate fulfills your needs, you never needed a SQL database in the first place - what you needed was ACID persistence. Why not just use something like Berkeley DB JE, which doesn't have the overhead of a query language at all - and is significantly faster because of it.
--John Snelson on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 28 Nov 2007 12:51:32
Java applets were dead in 1997. Everyone knows that.
--Frank D. Greco on the wwwac mailing list, Wednesday, 10 Oct 2007 23:53:18
Once you make your fist 100G, and you actually have health and dental insurance for everyone - THEN think about managing your own servers, but not before. Don't waste any time on hosting issues, work on your SITE
--Edward Potter on the "NYPHP Talk" mailing list, Wednesday, 26 Dec 2007 10:02:29
C: All the power of Assembler with all the ease of use of Assembler.
C++: All the power of C with all the ease of use of C.
Java: All the ease of use of C++ minus the power of C.
--Colin Strasser on the wwwac mailing list, Sunday, 4 Oct 2007 14:51:54
Since Java is the coin of the realm at my big company I decided to finally learn it.
Working with it I feel like I am falling through a time warp back in time. 20 or 30 years
I know I just started but it seem to be a language without much beauty or style.
--Scott Wickham on the wwwac mailing list, Sunday, 4 Oct 2007 13:46:30
The feeding frenzy over John Kerry’s botched joke showed that many people in the news media are still willing to be played like a fiddle.
--Paul Krugman
Read the rest in Limiting the Damage
On the government level, which is to say NASA, the space culture is one of risk aversion and budget preservation: all budgets are spent but most projects are cancelled. Space technology is moving forward at a very slow rate, with propulsion systems, for example, little changed from 40 years ago. Moore's Law has described many things, but serious space advancements aren't among them. The result is that hard-won knowledge has retired with the men and women who developed it and we are substantially LESS able to go to the Moon today as a nation than we were 30 years ago.
--Mark Stephens
Read the rest in I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Revolution, Not Evolution | PBS
after dropping over 2 G's on a Rev A Core Duo Intel iMac less than 2 years ago, there's no way I'm going to spend a comparable amount just so I can run Java 6 in 64-bit mode.
--Luke deGruchy on the java dev mailing list, Wednesday, 19 Dec 2007 21:14:25
It’s a lot of work getting your head around some of these deeper, darker parts of QuickTime. Not only are they harder to find documentation and sample code for, but they often lack convenient all-in-one API calls, requiring you instead to build up structures of QuickTime “atoms” by yourself.
--Chris Adamson
Read the rest in Rebooting Java Media, Act II: Development
After years and years of Microsoft promising that this set of frameworks was The Next Great Thing™, I've given up. I just don't have the time.
They're like the boyfriend who keeps coming back and saying, "Really, baby, I went to counseling, and I'm better now, just give me one more chance..." I don't want to be one of those chicks on Sally Jesse saying, "But I love him!"
I've lived through Microsoft's COM and Active-anydamnthing and MFC, and hearing how each one was going to really make it easier for programmers, finally. And, it keeps being bullshit. Now it's .Net and C# and soon it'll be Avalon, and I just can't believe people are buying it.
--Wil Shipley
Read the rest in On Being and Deliciousness, with Wil Shipley
the single-minded focus on particular massacres, and the hasty application of the term "genocide", is exploited to justify military intervention which occurs only when it suits United States geopolitical purposes and which on balance makes bad situations worse. Prevention of an imaginary "genocide" in Kosovo was the pretext for the United States to establish the precedent of unauthorized military intervention, convert NATO to a new mission of "humanitarian intervention", and thereby reaffirm U.S. supremacy in Europe after the end of the Cold War. When no "weapons of mass destruction" are found, "humanitarian intervention" to overthrow the "genocidal" Saddam Hussein becomes the retroactive excuse for the invasion of Iraq. And what next...?
--Diana Johnstone
Read the rest in Alexander Cockburn: Storm Over Brockes' Fakery
But it's always said, "The business is dying! The business is dying!" I don't think so. There's too many good musicians around for the music business to be sagging. There's so many different styles and facets of the 360-degree musical sphere to listen to. From tribal to classical music, it's all there. If the bottom was to sag out of that, for God's sake, help us all.
--Jimmy Page, 1975
Read the rest in Led Zeppelin '75
Good apps, once built, tend to be in production for an astonishingly long time. Which means that they have to be maintained for an astonishingly long time. Which means that maintainability is important. There are a lot of things that go into maintainability, but I suggest that the biggies are object-orientation, MVC architecture, code readability, and code size (less is more, a lot more).
This is PHP’s Achilles’ heel, of course. Yes, it is possible to write clean, object-oriented, modular, MVC-style PHP applications. But most people don’t; the majority of apps that I’ve seen have spaghetti PHP code wrapped around spaghetti SQL embedded in spaghetti HTML. Also, a lot of the people who really understand O-O and MVC and maintainability would rather work in Java or Rails.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · Comparing Frameworks
Never underestimate the value of observability, especially during development.
--Greg Guerin on the java-dev mailing list, Sunday, 25 Nov 2007 12:14:59
A partnership seldom takes place between equals. As a result, the more powerful side is tempted to squeeze the other party. The weaker side, for its part, will begrudgingly accept such deals and try to get what it can. Bad idea. Bad karma. Bad practicality. If the partnership is a win-lose deal, it will blow up because concrete walls and barbed wire cannot hold a partnership together. Only mutually beneficial results can. In the long, the bitter seed of resentment planted at the start of a partnership will grow into a giant, destructive weed.
--Guy Kawasaki,
Read the rest in The Art of Partnering
Both Eclipse and NetBeans are supporting the basics, in particular autocompletion of JSF tags and EL expressions. For the purpose of JSF development, neither IDE seemed particularly slick to me; procedures for achieving common tasks seemed haphazard, unflexible, or unintuitive. At this point, I prefer Eclipse, but not by a huge margin. To gain parity, NetBeans needs to support resource bundles, make a wizard for adding genuine JSF (and not just JSP) pages, and rig its visual editor to handle non-Creator pages.
--Cay Horstmann
Read the rest in Cay Horstmann's Blog: JSF Support in Eclipse Europa and NetBeans 6.0m10
We often judge a program to be the most elegant if it can do as much as possible in the fewest lines of code. Instead I ask you do judge if the user can do the most possible work with the fewest features. Think of it as the Zen of UI Design.
--Joshua Marinacci
Read the rest in Joshua Marinacci's Blog: Please: think of the users!
There's nothing wrong with offshoring per se, but I think it's a LOT more challenging than most people will admit.
It severely magnifies a whole slew of problems that are inherent in technology development projects regardless of who's doing them. These problems are magnified by outsourcing of any kind, and moreso by offshoring. It's hard to keep a team in sync, motivated, and communicating. Little things like complete lack of physical presence, time zone offsets, and language barriers often compound, and the members of the dev team that face them tend to start drifting away from the efforts of the rest of the team. In your case, this would be the entire tech team, and you'll likely see the result of any drift between the tech team and your business goals.
--Adam Fields on the WWWAC mailing list, Friday, 30 Nov 2007 09:25:49
it's hard to find good developers no matter where you go. The implicit assumption in off-shoring is that you can get *more* developers for the same amount of money as domestic developers, and that more developers produce more work.
I'm here to tell you that more developers may very well produce *less* output unless you are very, very diligent, and your developers are top notch. If you are an expert technology manager you *might* be able to eek a benefit from an off-shore team. If you are less than expert, your project may quite possibly end up being more expensive, of less quality, and development will take longer.
--Jesse Erlbaum on the WWWAC mailing list, Friday, 30 Nov 2007 18:27:04
Fork is not a dirty word. Forks are almost always good things, if they are viewed in the right light. The purpose of a fork is to explore new ideas. Forks either succeed or fail. If they succeed, they either replace the original, or they merge back in, or they become an independent entity.
--Rich Bowen on the wp-hackers mailing list, Wednesday, 08 Mar 2006 09:38:37
When a company gets into trouble, all management wants to do is to use PR to fix the PR problem. Instead they should be doing something to fix the underlying problem that is causing the PR problem.
--Laura Ries
Read the rest in The Origin of Brands Blog: Dude, Dell’s got a problem.
SSL won't solve every security problem. If you download a Trojan'ed executable over a bidirectionally authenticated SSL connection, with super-reliable root certificates, you've still downloaded a Trojan'ed executable that will still compromise the machine it's run on. The only thing SSL did is ensure integrity (you got the exact Trojan'ed executable the provider sent), confidentiality (no one else could tell what Trojan'ed executable you got), and direct authenticity (the provider you got the Trojan from is certified by its CA).
--Greg Guerin on the java-dev mailing list, Sunday, 25 Nov 2007 12:14:59
One basic philosophy of HCD is to listen to users, to take their complaints and critiques seriously. Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests can lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem. Their software gets more complex and less understandable with each revision. Activity-Centered philosophy tends to guard against this error because the focus is upon the Activity, not the Human. As a result, there is a cohesive, well-articulated design model. If a user suggestion fails to fit within this design model, it should be discarded. Alas, all too many companies, proud of listening to their users, would put it in.
Here, what is needed is a strong, authoritative designer who can examine the suggestions and evaluate them in terms of the requirements of the activity. When necessary, it is essential to be able to ignore the requests. This is the goal to cohesion and understandability. Paradoxically, the best way to satisfy users is sometimes to ignore them.
--Donald Norman
Read the rest in Don Norman's jnd.org / Human
Although private enterprise is welcome to build and maintain their own infrastructure, there comes a point where the private enterprise intersects the public at large, and we have ample precedent for the public good coming ahead of the bottom line. For example, a shopping mall can't put up a sign that say "wheelchairs stay out" - in fact there's a host of laws the specifically pertain to a place of "public accommodation" and these laws are to protect, among other things, public access to private property.
--Martin Focazio on the WWWAC mailing list, Friday, 10 Aug 2007 13:20:33
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
--Mark Twain, 1916
Read the rest in The Mysterious Stranger
The thing I found quite dramatic was how fast you can code if you get rid of project managers, marketeers, junior programmers, and every other kind of colleague who has their own ideas on what to do next. In fact, not having paying customers helps a lot too
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 7 Apr 2005 17:44:12
we suffer amnesia during the time it takes to make a decision, even a little one, such as what cursor key to press next. This decision interval is equivalent to the time it takes to find a mouse, leading people to believe that cursor keys are faster because their subjective experience is faster, even though stopwatch studies, including my own, consistently find cursor keys about half as fast as the mouse.
--Bruce Tognazzini
Read the rest in Slashing Subjective Time
perhaps all databases will simply become hybrid databases, offering multiple interfaces for the same data - an XML view, a relational view, etc. When working with XML and relational, of course, the XML view will be easier.
Regardless, it's not just XML and relational, but various feeds and files and many other kinds of data that need to be integrated in many, many systems. XQuery is really well designed for this kind of integration. So far, I don't know another language that is.
--Jonathan Robie on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 19 Oct 2007 11:37:28
Netbeans provides some syntax highlighting and code completion for the language, but it's barely better than notepad when compared to the authoring tools being offered by Adobe. To take on the competition, Netbeans will need timeline driven animation and Matise-like component layout from day one. On day two, we need vector drawing tools to compete with Illustrator and Expression
--Bryan Young
Read the rest in Scruffles.net: JavaFX in Perspective
An international watch list seems like a sensible precaution for reviewing visa and immigration requests. Keeping terrorists out of the country is a worthwhile goal, and it makes sense for the government to keep a master list of individuals with documented links to terrorist activities. However, the list would be more useful if it were a lot shorter. It seems unlikely there are anywhere close to 750,000 people plotting terrorist acts around the world. A list that large ensures a high false-positive rate, wastes law-enforcement resources, and ensures that border control officials will not take the watch list as seriously as they should when an actual terrorist shows up.
--Timothy B. Lee
Read the rest in Bloated terrorist list may contribute to security problems
Generally an optimization done without hints is ten times better than one that has to be switched on by the user, because only a tiny fraction of users will ever work out how to turn the knobs.
--Michael Kay on the xsl-list mailing list, Saturday, 10 Nov 2007 17:06:51
“Rip, mix, burn” is a great metaphor for what people want to do with their media in the Web 2.0 era. And when Apple says “rip, mix, burn”, what you should hear in the abstract is “capture, edit, export”. JMF’s biggest problem is that it can barely do the first (and pretty much only on Windows), and can’t do the second at all.
--Chris Adamson
Read the rest in Rebooting Java Media, Act II: Development
What made Apple stand out was Steve's uncompromising vision, which often runs counter to prevailing wisdom, but yields "insanely great" new products.
--Tim O'Reilly
Read the rest in Yahoo's Revival Meeting
1. Would you be willing to give up your right of privacy in your telephone conversations, would you allow the telephone company to charge you extra for carrying conversations between you and your bank, and sell information gathered to anyone they choose?
2. If the phone company were allowed to wiretap every conversation over their system, and degrade at will whatever circuits they wished to, would that be an improvement?
I ask these questions because, if common carriage is bad for the Net, why then, it must also be bad for old fashioned telephone service. And trucking, and water borne transport, etc..
--Jay Sulzberger on the wwwac mailing list, Sunday, 4 Oct 2007 12:13:04 -0400
Sun got distracted and IBM took the Java lead away.
--Jose Cornado on the java-dev mailing list, Saturday, 27 Oct 2007 09:33:34
There is a good ugly code and there is bad ugly code. Good ugly code is not "elegant", whatever that means, but it works well and isn't full of holes. Diebold is the poster child for bad ugly code, which they have fought mightily to conceal under the tattered "trade secrets" excuse. As if- they were shipping shoddy code, and they knew it. I wonder where they got the idea that no one would notice, because hiding the code doesn't hide what it does.
--Carla Schroder
Read the rest in What's So Precious About Bad Software?
true concurrency support -- the ability to run pieces of a program on multiple processors -- is hard in a dynamic language. Although they both have threads, neither Python nor Ruby is able to actually allocate those threads to multiple processors. The threading is just for code organization and to handle blocking operations. Ruby and Python are prevented from using multiple cores because they both suffer from the global interpreter lock problem.
--Bruce Eckel
Read the rest in Python 3K or Python 2.9?
We've definitely drunk the kool-aid at this point. Building resource-oriented applications will be the Rails default before too long. By Rails 2.0, we'll have the new scaffold_resource be the default scaffolder. Indoctrinate good RESTful practices to people even before they know or care as to why it matters.
--David Heinemeier Hansson on the rest-discuss mailing list, Monday, 27 Nov 2006 19:13:54
In 2001 (!), JSF was envisioned as "Swing for the Web", a standard framework for delivering high quality web applications. I remember asking Amy Fowler at the 2002 Java One whether it will include professionally designed components similar to those in Swing, and she said "of course". Unfortunately, in 2007, we still don't have a standard set of widgets that is needed in practice, such as tabs, breadcrumbs, header/footer, menus, etc. etc. We also have no standard way of plugging third-party component sets into visual tools. JSR 314 promises JSF 2.0 by April 2008, with a huge laundry list of desirable features. A standard widget set is not among them.
--Cay Horstmann
Read the rest in Cay Horstmann's Blog: JSF Support in Eclipse Europa and NetBeans 6.0m10
The greatest fallacy of the new generation of scripting languages (IMHO) is that they are not aligned with where computing is headed towards - Multicore, Multithreaded architectures. Intel, Sun, IBM and AMD are all committed to multicore computing as their primary future strategy. What the hell is the Global Interpreter Lock still doing in Python and why in the name of heavens can it not be recursive ? Guido even refuses to acknowledge this as a problem and tells us to write non-multithreaded code. It is easier to write code that way, but that is not where the future is headed, unless he has a release of “Quantum Python” planned some time soon ;-) Ruby has the same fundamental problem - Only one ruby thread can be scheduled into the run queue at any instant.
--Ananth Shrinivas
Read the rest in Java != Slow « Thermal Noise
it's difficult to see what purpose is served by a domestic no-fly list. If government officials have concrete evidence that an American person is engaged in terrorist-related activities, then the government should be doing a lot more than putting that individual on a no-fly list. They should be actively investigating the individual, tapping his phone, reading his email, monitoring his financial transactions, and generally gathering the evidence required to either clear his name, deport him, or arrest him.
If, on the other hand, the government doesn't have enough evidence of terrorist ties to justify starting an investigation against an individual, then it's unreasonable, not to mention a waste of law enforcement resources, to ban him from flying on airplanes or subject him to heightened scrutiny every time he goes to an airport.
--Timothy B. Lee
Read the rest in Bloated terrorist list may contribute to security problems
As several people have noticed at my talks over the past few months, I no longer carry a Mac laptop. As much as I love the Mac's eye candy, it really hasn't been keeping up as a developer's machine - their attention has clearly been elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Solaris folks have made huge strides in Solaris's usability on a laptop with recent Nevada builds: the latest Gnome is quite lovely. Firefox, Thunderbird and Lightning kick ass. The new installer is totally slick. The nwam (network automagic) service makes network hassles almost totally disappear. And Java, NetBeans and Glassfish go like the wind! It's amazing how fast things run.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in James Gosling: on the Java Road
There's a Java oriented software conference called No Fluff Just Stuff that's been going on for the past six years. When I first started going, I was one of the only guys carrying a Mac. Over the last couple years, Macs have sprung up like weeds, and more importantly, nearly all the presenters were carrying them.
This year, the Mac were still there, but the first thing most presenters did was fire up Parallels and flip over to XP/Vista or Linux. That's not going to sell many Macs when they are just being used as stylish Windows machines...
--Wilhelm Fitzpatrick on the java-dev mailing list, Friday, 26 Oct 2007 13:35:04
Apple is a company that values secrecy above absolutely everything else, including profit, reputation and goodwill.
--Brendon McLean on the Java-Dev Mailing List mailing list, Wednesday, 17 Oct 2007 14:12:54
Engineers know that you have to choose version numbers early during development, and that you have to maintain a consistent numbering scheme long-term over a series of releases. Marketing people think you can dream up a version number while drafting a press release three days before the product ships.
--Michael Kay on the jdom-interest mailing list, Wednesday, 12 Sep 2007 09:21:50
I call the biggest misconception about Java concurrency "The Law of Greek Driving," which I will be describing in my newsletter in detail. The Java memory model is quite clear about what you can and cannot do, and like Greek driving, the laws are also quite clear here. You may not exceed the speed limit, you have to wear a seat belt, stop at stop signs, etc. However, the available JVMs are more forgiving than they need to be. Similarly, in Greece and Crete where I live, you are unlikely to be caught or fined for breaking traffic laws, which leads to bad driving. At stop signs, it's wise to slow down but not stop completely because you risk being rear-ended by a Cretan. The laws are strict but often aren't enforced.
In the same way, the Java memory model rules are not always enforced or obeyed by the JVMs. Your concurrent code may seem correct and may test out on all available JVMs and hardware but might still be incorrect. As hardware changes, the JVM manufacturers might be forced to apply the rules more strictly, in which case your code might break. Anyone using multiple threads must have a solid understanding of what is and isn't allowed. Even the best test may fail to flush out one's mistakes.
--Heinz Kabutz
Read the rest in Becoming a Better Programmer: A Conversation With Java Champion Heinz Kabutz
In the summer of 1997 I was contacted by a stranger out of the blue with a kind of random offer. During the previous school year Nate Oostendorp (who now works with SourceForge, Inc. while working on his Masters) had coded a Space Invaders clone. He wrote a Java sprite library, and I wrote the game and illustrated the alien armada. This guy had an old DEC Alpha Multia 166, and a client that wanted to remake the game with popcorn instead of aliens. So I drew the popcorn up, replaced the gifs, and he mailed me my first non x86 box since the 286 I got in middle school. (Later Sun sent me legal threats forcing me to take the game offline since it was called Java Invaders, and clearly this was an evil crime against the universe. My hatred for Java has never died since that moment.)
--Rob Malda
Read the rest in Slashdot | A Brief History of Slashdot Part 1, Chips & Dips
In order to make the American Afghan War appear 'just', it becomes imperative to completely block out access to information on the true human costs of this war. The actions of the Bush-Rumsfeld-Rice trio speak eloquently to these efforts: calling-in major U.S news networks to give them their marching orders, buying up all commercial satellite imagery available to the general public, sending Powell off to Qatar to lecture the independent Al Jazeera news network, and lastly, when that failed targeting the Kabul office of Al Jazeera and scoring a direct missile hit on it. In mid-October, Duncan Campbell reported how the Pentagon was spending millions of dollars to prevent western media from buying highly accurate civilian satellite pictures of the effects of the U.S bombing. The Pentagon decision was taken on October 11th after reports of heavy civilian casualties from overnight [10/11] bombing of Darunta near Jalalabad. The Pentagon bought exclusive rights to all Ikonos satellite pictures from the Denver-based Space Imaging Inc.27 Lastly, as has been pointed out, the major U.S corporate media have devoted only sparse moments to the topic of civilian casualties, obeying the Bush-Pentagon directives.
--Marc Herold
Read the rest in
A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan:
A Comprehensive Accounting
Linux was created to service the home desktop personal computer, and the PC is here to stay. For those who were looking for some excitement and enjoyment in using their computer, the defacto operating system just doesn't cut it. We want to tinker, we want control, we want power over everything. Or alternatively we believe in some sort of freedom or some combination of the above. So we use Linux. That is certainly how I got involved in Linux; I wanted something to use on the home desktop PC.
However, the desktop PC is crap. It's rubbish. The experience is so bloated and slowed down in all the things that matter to us. We all own computers today that were considered supercomputers 10 years ago. 10 years ago we owned supercomputers of 20 years ago.. and so on. So why on earth is everything so slow? If they're exponentially faster why does it take longer than ever for our computers to start, for the applications to start and so on? Sure, when they get down to the pure number crunching they're amazing (just encode a video and be amazed). But in everything else they must be unbelievably slower than ever.
Computers of today may be 1,000 times faster than they were a decade ago, yet the things that matter are slower.
--Ashton Mills
Read the rest in Interview with Con Kolivas part 1: computing is boring | APC Magazine
Much talk has been given to Service Pack 1 and how this update should address many of the issues users have with Vista, but I simply don't agree. Will SP1 eliminate the ridiculous Microsoft licensing schemes? Will SP1 drop the price on the higher-end versions? Will SP1 eliminate the need for users to buy a new computer just to use the faulty OS? SP1 will do nothing but fix the holes and issues we currently know about and create even more.
--Don Reisinger
Read the rest in Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself | Tech news blog
Even using Hibernate (or JPA, or JDO, or Castor JDO, or Toplink, or any of the other ORM tools available), mapping problems don't go away, however -- they just move into configuration files. What's more, there's no avoiding the feeling that you're pushing round pegs into square holes. For example, if you're trying to create a nicely-stratified inheritance model, mapping it to a table or set of tables involves weighing one ugly trade-off against another. Weighing query performance against violation of normal form ends up pitting DBA against developer at some point.
The problem here is that it's hard to get really excited about building a rich domain model (a la Martin Fowler or Eric Evans's respective books) if you're then going to have to either compromise it in order to match an existing database schema, compromise the database's ability to carry out its operations to support the object model, or both.
--Ted Neward
Read the rest in The busy Java developer's guide to db4o: Introduction and overview
With the Intel switch finished, Apple no longer sells a machine capable of running pre-2001 Mac software. 17 years of executable Mac history gone. Does anyone care?
--Chris Adamson
Read the rest in Classic Goes Out with Nary a Whisper
The Duopoly did not invent email, the WWWW, ssh, voip, rsync, storing data elsewhere, running a business with a web front, etc.. But now the Duopoly is moving to claim that each and every one of these things is a separate "service" which the Duopoly alone can provide. If your so-called "Net connection" does not allow you to run an httpd on port 80, then you do not actually have a Net connection. You have something else, and if that something else were the only thing available in 1988, there would be no World Wide Web, because every httpd would either be owned and run by the Duopoly, or, more likely, there would be nothing even close to the WWW, just "interactive TV". Remember that was the dream of the Duopoly back then. Luckily, back then we had freedom of the Net, which means that we can, with perfect legality, invent and deploy and use what applications we want on our Net, so long as we pay for the passage of our bits.
--Jay Sulzberger on the WWWAC mailing list, Monday, 1 Oct 2007 21:05:10 -0400
A single-app database is fairly easy to evolve, a multi-app database is more difficult. A lot of OR mapping frameworks seem to assume that the object model should drive the data model and that it's the only thing accessing the db. In real organizations this is rarely the case, or at least it would be rarely the case if the object developers were mature enough to understand that their work needs to fit into the rest of the overall IT infrastructure.
--Scott Ambler on the agile-data mailing list, Monday, 1 Oct 2007 12:30:35
The American people weren't just failed by a President -- they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress -- a coequal branch of government -- that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day.
--Barack Obama
Read the rest in Glenn Greenwald - Political Blogs and Opinions
The last time I used views was over 10 years ago on DB2. Then I moved to using light weight relational DB's like MySQL - which lacked the features of an enterprise database, but also lacked the high hardware requirements of one. Now MySQL is slowly approaching the features of enterprise databases, but it's a different time. Memory and CPU are a lot cheaper now than 10 years ago.
--Gary Mort on the NYPHP Talk mailing list, Friday, 28 Sep 2007 15:12:44
I'm a former reporter, so maybe I'm picky, but I've found that I can't listen to this "embedded" stuff. When NPR brings an "embedded" reporter on the air, I change the channel. In the newspaper, I just don't bother reading the stories with "embedded" bylines. What's the point? With all due respect to these brave people, what they're doing isn't journalism. It's better written than Tommy Franks' press conference material, but it has exactly the same amount of credibility. I was in the trade press, so you could say (and you'd be right) that I'm used to a lower standard of independence than, say, a metro daily reporter, but this stuff makes the trade press look like Izzy Stone.
--Ted Kuster
Read the rest in Poynter Online - Forums
The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes, which is why DC feels like a prison from which it is impossible to escape unless one wants to spend four hours on the Beltway. We clearly need to institute comprehensive road tolls combined with a congestion pricing scheme. Plus, of course, a carbon tax to compensate for the negative externalities drivers are imposing on those of us who use primarily mass transit.
--Brad Delong
Read the rest in Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi
Do I recommend Windows Vista [for everyone]? Not a snowball’s chance in… I’m waiting on Apple to release Mac OS X Leopard. As far as I’m concerned at this point, Microsoft is taking a huge hit. The future of Windows, in my opinion, is inside a Virtual Machine or Boot Camp on a Mac.
--Chris Pirillo
Read the rest in Vista Rants ~ Chris Pirillo
Unfortunately Java has a bad rep on the desktop because it spent many years cursed with terrible performance and hideous GUIs. It seems that too many people were burned by their early experiences of Java to believe that those problems just don’t exist any more, but it’s true, they don’t. The JVM is blazingly fast now, almost as fast as native code. For GUIs, we have Eclipse RCP which is a great framework built on a sane GUI library, SWT. Even Swing sucks a lot less these days than it used to. Eclipse RCP hasn’t made a big splash yet in rich internet applications or in the kind of widely downloaded consumer apps that get reviewed in magazines, but it is rapidly colonizing the landscape for internal corporate applications, particularly in banks, which is the vertical I work in.
--Neil Bartlett
Read the rest in Neil’s point
be careful when assuming that threads are the right solution. We came to threads through a series of steps, like the temperature being turned up on a frog in a pan of water. People assume that you "must have threads to do concurrency properly." But threads are fraught with problems and notoriously difficult -- some experts even say impossible -- to get right (hey, the GIL might be your friend a lot more than you know). Yes, with processes you don't get everything you get with threads, but you can use multicores and multiple machines right now and write robust code because the OS is protecting you by not allowing you to share memory. That's a good thing!
--Bruce Eckel
Read the rest in Reply to Guido's Reply
if you want to play in the bazaar and not the cathedral, you need to be open to the hoi polloi every once in a blue moon.
--Doug Stewart on the wp-hackers mailing list, Wednesday, 26 Sep 2007 07:07:01
What's the real reason for closed, proprietary code? Embarrassment.
Sure, we are drowned in tides of twaddle about precious IP, Trade Sekkrits, Sooper Original Algorithms that must not be exposed to eyes of mere mortals, and all manner of silly excuses. But that's all a smokescreen to cover up the real reason: to hide code of such poor quality that even PHBs know to be embarrassed. Exhibit A: Windows itself. Which proves it takes more than throwing billions of dollars and thousands of programmers at a software project to build something that is actually good.
--Carla Schroder
Read the rest in What's So Precious About Bad Software?
Hypocrisy, my friends, is the most obvious of political sins — and the people will punish it. We were elected to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private initiative. We increased the size of government in the false hope that we could bribe the public into keeping us in office. We lost our principles and our majority, and there is no way to recover our majority without recovering our principles first.
--Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona
Read the rest in McCain Tells Conservatives G.O.P.’s Defeat Was Payback for Losing ‘Our Principles’
If you're asking what is the process for determining what Wikipedia says on a subject, then we know the answer: it's a democratic process moderated by benevolant dictators. We also know that the process is imperfect; but I for one believe that it's nevertheless as good as or better than the process for determining what appears in other more traditionally authoritative media such as academic papers, history books, and newspapers.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 29 Jan 2007 00:08:41
While Vista was originally touted by Microsoft as the operating system savior we've all been waiting for, it has turned out to be one of the biggest blunders in technology. With a host of issues that are inexcusable and features that are taken from the Mac OS X and Linux playbook, Microsoft has once again lost sight of what we really want.
--Don Reisinger
Read the rest in Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself | Tech news blog
There really is this child-like need in American mainstream political discourse constantly to believe that we are fault-free and that when there is hostility directed at us from other parts of the world, it is always baffling and unjustified and crazy and malicious. And the accompanying cartoon-like belief is that anyone who has hostility towards the U.S. is some demented, crazed, Hitler-like monster.
It really ought not be that difficult to understand that a country which rules the world by military force; invades, bombs and occupies other countries far more than anyone else; overthrows other countries' governments -- including their democratically elected ones -- and openly debates what other governments it should change; and issues endless lectures to the world about the evils of tyranny and nuclear weapons while constantly violating those sermons (and encouraging our allies to do so) with actions, is going to trigger rather intense and substantial hostility around the world, particularly in those regions where we are doing the invading, bombing, occupying and controlling. As George Washington explained quite clearly a couple hundred years ago, that is precisely why it is so ill-advised to engage in that behavior.
The idea that we are the source of all Good in the world and that all anti-American anger is irrational is just the opposite side of the same Manichean coin that holds that the U.S. is the principal source of evil in the world. But while the latter form of irrational moralism is relegated to the fringes (at least in American politics), the former predominates in virtually all political discussions. On an individual level, most people have little difficulty understanding that a refusal to recognize one's own faults is one of the most self-destructive attributes a person can possess. But when it comes to the U.S. collectively, recognizing America's faults -- the actions we take to trigger anti-American animus -- is virtually prohibited.
--Glenn Greenwald
Read the rest in Glenn Greenwald - Political Blogs and Opinions
One thing that I found particularly annoying though, is that Vista automatically assumes that all setup programs (application installers) should be run with administrator privileges. So, when you try to run such a program, you get a UAC prompt and you have only two choices: either to agree to run this application as administrator or to disallow running it at all. That means that if you downloaded some freeware Tetris game, you will have to run its installer as administrator, giving it not only full access to all your file system and registry, but also allowing e.g. to load kernel drivers! Why Tetris installer should be allowed to load kernel drivers?
--Joanna Rutkowska
Read the rest in invisiblethings' blog: Running Vista Every Day!
The media has simply become a branch of the war effort. What has entirely disappeared from television is anything remotely resembling a consistently dissenting voice. Every major channel now employs retired generals, former CIA agents, terrorism experts and known neoconservatives as "consultants" who speak a revolting jargon designed to sound authoritative but in effect supporting everything done by the US, from the UN to the sands of Arabia. Only one major daily newspaper (in Baltimore) has published anything about US eavesdropping, telephone tapping and message interception of the six small countries that are members of the Security Council and whose votes are undecided. There are no antiwar voices to read or hear in any of the major medias of this country, no Arabs or Muslims (who have been consigned en masse to the ranks of the fanatics and terrorists of this world), no critics of Israel, not on Public Broadcasting, not in The New York Times, the New Yorker, US News and World Report, CNN and the rest. When these organisations mention Iraq's flouting of 17 UN resolutions as a pretext for war, the 64 resolutions flouted by Israel (with US support) are never mentioned. Nor is the enormous human suffering of the Iraqi people during the past 12 years mentioned. Whatever the dreaded Saddam has done Israel and Sharon have also done with American support, yet no one says anything about the latter while fulminating about the former. This makes a total mockery of taunts by Bush and others that the UN should abide by its own resolutions.
--Edward Said
Read the rest in Al - Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Who is in charge?
We have a serious problem. Whenever I try to pitch Linux to anyone under 30, the question I get is: "Will it work with my iPod?". We are not yet as a community making the painful compromises need to achieve widespread desktop market share. Until we do, we will get locked out of more hardware.
--Eric S. Raymond
Read the rest in Open source guru advocates ideological shift | The Register
sometimes it is a good thing not to try to solve all problems at once, in particular in API design.
--Stefan Haustein on the whatwg mailing list, Tuesday, 14 Nov 2006 14:29:44
UAC and a few other somewhat invasive security measures are not about protecting customers; they're about protecting Microsoft from negative publicity.
--Scot Finnie
Read the rest in The Trouble with Vista
Java is Slow and Solaris is Slow are complaints that belong to the previous century.
--Ananth Shrinivas
Read the rest in Java != Slow « Thermal Noise
I'll probably never be able to create a correct threaded program in C++ or Java, despite years of study. It's just too hard.
--Bruce Eckel
Read the rest in Python 3K or Python 2.9?
I like Jonathan Schwartz a lot, but I think that unless some drastic changes are made to Java, the move to JAVA as Sun's ticker symbol is going to be as relevant as changing it to COBOL. I'm using Java less and less as time goes by, not more - the heyday of the language and platform has come and gone, and IMHO, it's going to continue to fade from relevance with increasing speed.
--Russell Beattie
Read the rest in RussellBeattie.com
JavaFX compares very nicely to Flex and XAML when ignoring their sister technologies. Feature for feature it compares nicely. Without the rest of the package, of course, it's all pretty academic. Assuming Sun is really serious about taking on Adobe and Microsoft, they still have a lot of work ahead of them
--Bryan Young
Read the rest in Scruffles.net: JavaFX in Perspective
A Flash presentation isn’t that much different than a Java applet, except that:
- It uses a different runtime
- It loads a lot faster
- It has rich multimedia support
- People like it
--Chris Adamson
Read the rest in Java SE Media (Or Not) at JavaOne
An intelligent consumer knows as much as the people making the decisions. That's the last thing any business wants
--Henry Harteveldt, Vice President, Forrester Research
Read the rest in Wired News: Casting Net For Better Airfares
PHP’s original claim to fame was that it was the quick-and-dirty way to get a Web app on the air. There’s no point trying to sweep the “dirty” bit under the carpet; a lot of those quickie PHP apps are butt-ugly. One of the reasons Rails is interesting is that it’s quick and clean.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · Comparing Frameworks
We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining why these people should die. They died because of 11 September, we may say, because of President Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction", because of human rights abuses, because of our desperate desire to "liberate" them all. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I'll bet we are told President Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We shan't mention the pilot, of course.
--Robert Fisk
Read the rest in Argument
Even worse than that, while I obviously like to see Linux run on 1024 CPUs and 1000 hard drives, I loathe the fact that to implement that we have to kill performance on the desktop. What's that? Kill performance? Yes, that's what I mean.
If we numerically quantify it with all the known measurable quantities, performance is better than ever. Yet all it took was to start up an audio application and wonder why on earth if you breathed on it the audio would skip. Skip! Jigabazillion bagigamaherz of CPU and we couldn't play audio?
Or click on a window and drag it across the screen and it would spit and stutter in starts and bursts. Or write one large file to disk and find that the mouse cursor would move and everything else on the desktop would be dead without refreshing for a minute.
I felt like crying.
I even recall one bug report we tried to submit about this and one developer said he couldn't reproduce the problem on his quad-CPU 4GB RAM machine with 4 striped RAID array disks... think about the sort of hardware the average user would have had four years ago. Is it any wonder the desktop sucked so much?
--Con Kolivas
Read the rest in Interview with Con Kolivas part 1: computing is boring | APC Magazine
If the best thing you can do for your stock is change the ticker symbol, you're in trouble.
--Dave Kellogg
Read the rest in Blogger: Mark Logic CEO Blog
the more entrenched a technology is, the harder it is to displace it with something better. Remember the 3.5inch floppy? It disappeared in the end, but not until there was a technology that was about 500 times better, and even then it took at least five years between obsolescence and extinction.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 10 Jun 2007 18:53:17
We hear a lot in the media these days about America’s obesity epidemic. A third of Americans, we are told, are “obese,” and two-thirds are “overweight.” Hundreds of thousands purportedly are dying each year from weighing too much, while countless others suffer from scores of “obesity related” diseases. Obesity has been blamed for everything from dragging down the economy to global warming. Most recently, we’ve heard that obesity is “contagious.”
The problem with these assertions is that they are based mostly on arbitrary definitions and fuzzy statistical conjectures. Although Americans have indeed grown heavier over the past three decades (the average American weighs about 8 to 12 pounds more than in 1980), it is not clear that this weight gain is putting them in any imminent danger. The primary reason so many Americans are “overweight” and “obese” is because these terms are defined at unjustifiably low levels of body mass. For example, under our current definitions, George Bush and Michael Jordan are overweight, while Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mel Gibson are obese. These standards were not based on any scientific evidence linking body mass to health, but were created by insurance actuaries and medical professionals with financial ties to the weight loss industry.
--J. Eric Oliver, University of Chicago
Read the rest in Freakonomics Quorum: What is the Right Way to Think About the Obesity Epidemic? - Freakonomics - Opinion
Unfortunately, just because the USPTO is a laughing stock among programmers does not mean that its influence is not strong elsewhere. Venture capitalists still look to pupported IP when evaluating companies, and researchers are frequently rated by how many patents they get.
--Rick Jelliffe on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 7 Jun 2005 09:34:24 +1000
JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet, and a brand that's inseparably a part of Sun (and our profitability). And so next week, we're going to embrace that reality by changing our trading symbol, from SUNW to JAVA. This is a big change for us, capitalizing on the extraordinary affinity our teams have invested to build, introducing Sun to new investors, developers and consumers. Most know Java, few know Sun - we can bring the two one step closer.
To be very clear, this isn't about changing the company name or focus - we are Sun, we are a systems company, and we will always be a derivative of the students that created us, Stanford University Network is here to stay. But we are no longer simply a workstation company, nor a company whose products can be limited by one category - and Java does a better job of capturing exactly that sentiment than any other four letter symbol. Java means limitless opportunity - for our software, systems, storage, service and microelectronics businesses. And for the open source communities we shepherd. What a perfect ticker.
--Jonathan Schwartz, CEO SUNW JAVA
Read the rest in Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog
It is undoubtedly true that America’s failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia. But there are a couple of further points that need weighing. One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam — this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred.
--David C. Hendrickson, Colorado College
Read the rest in Historians Question Bush’s Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq
Then there’s the Internet problem. When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, going online is fast and satisfying. But otherwise, you have to use AT&T’s ancient EDGE cellular network, which is excruciatingly slow. The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo. two minutes. You almost ache for a dial-up modem.
--David Pogue
Read the rest in The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype
If you distribute a Java application that imports LGPL libraries, it's easy to comply with the LGPL. Your application's license needs to allow users to modify the library, and reverse engineer your code to debug these modifications. This doesn't mean you need to provide source code or any details about the internals of your application. Of course, some changes the users may make to the library may break the interface, rendering the library unable to work with your application. You don't need to worry about that -- people who modify the library are responsible for making it work.
--David Rurner, Attorney, Free Software Foundation
Read the rest in The LGPL and Java
It would be even better if the government was required to pay fair wages to soldiers during war time — i.e., if combat pay was market-determined and soldiers could opt to leave whenever they wanted, like most jobs. If that were the case, the cost to the government would skyrocket and more accurately reflect the true costs of war, leading to a truer assessment of whether the benefits of military action outweigh the costs.
--Steven D. Levitt
Read the rest in Restore the Draft? What a Bad Idea - Freakonomics - Opinion
pirated software is often easier to obtain and set up than making a legitimate purchase.
A friend of my father obtained a legitimate copy of Windows XP from a local guy who sells custom computers. He tried to install it but he was confused by the different serial codes, authorization keys, and verification checks to pass through. My father, who is quite good with computers, tried to help. When they finally had it all sorted out on which number went where, it turned out that the length of one of the serial codes didn't match the length of the input fields. They tried calling a customer service number, but, after working their way through 1-800 numbers and option menus, the net result was that the situation was not solvable with automated service and there were no live operators available because it was late Friday night. They tried to persist in figuring it out themselves, but were stopped cold when some maximum limit of install attempts was reached and it refused any further action. Eventually, a few days later with the help of the guy who originally provided the copy of Windows, it all got sorted out and my dad's friend can enjoy his legitimate copy of Windows.
This was an extreme case, but when you consider that he could have downloaded and installed a cracked version within hours, you start to get a sense of what I mean by "freer than free". To do it the legitimate way, say by buying online or having to trudge out to a brick-and-mortar store, he would get no more convenience than obtaining a pirated copy. At worst, getting an illegal copy would take much less time than the couple of days he actually experienced in doing things the legal way.
--Dave Gutteridge
Read the rest in Windows Is Free (A TLUG Article)
legislators should see the SCO fiasco as a warning of the risks of expanding intellectual property law without concern for the implications. The steady erosion of fair use rights and the ceaseless expansion of copyright duration pose a grave threat to innovation in the United States. In order to prevent intellectual property law from being abused to stall technological progress, the government must stop giving in to the selfish demands of the intellectual property cartels and start listening to the needs of consumers.
--Ryan Paul
Read the rest in Requiem for a legal disaster: a retrospective analysis of SCO v. Novell: Page 4
Do not confuse Computer Science—the study of the properties of computing machines—with Software Development, the employment of humans to build computing machines. The relationship between Computer Science and Software Development parallels the relationship between Engineering, the hard science of the behaviour of constructions, and Project Management, the employment of humans to construct engineered artefacts.
--Reg Braithwaite
Read the rest in raganwald: Which theory fits the evidence?
IL protects only against modifications of higher integrity objects. It’s perfectly ok for the Low IL process to read e.g. files, even if they are marked as Medium or High IL. In other words, if somebody exploits IE running in Protected Mode (at Low IL), she will be able to read (i.e. steal) all user’s data.
This is not an implementation bug, this is a design decision and it’s cleverly called the “read-up policy”. If we think about it for a while, it should become clear why Microsoft decided to do it that way. First, we should observe, that what Microsoft is most concerned about, is malware which permanently installs itself in the system and that could later be detected by some anti-malware programs. Microsoft doesn’t like it, because it’s the source of all the complains about how insecure Windows is and also the A/V companies can publish their statistics about how many percent of computers is compromised, etc… All in all, a very uncomfortable situation, not only for Microsoft but also for all those poor users, who now need to try all the various methods (read buy A/V programs) to remove the malware, instead just focus on their work…
On the other hand, imagine a reliable exploit (i.e. not crashing a target too often) which, after exploiting e.g. IE Protected Mode process, steals all the user’s DOC and XLS files, sends them back somewhere and afterwards disappears in an elegant fashion. Our user, busy with his every day work, does not even notice anything, so he can continue working undisturbed and focus on his real job. The A/V programs do not detect the exploit (why should they? – after all there’s no signature for it nor the shellcode uses any suspicious API) so they do not report the machine as infected – because, after all it’s not infected. So, the statistics look better and everybody is generally happier. Including the competition, who now has access to stolen data ;)
--Joanna Rutkowska
Read the rest in invisiblethings' blog: Running Vista Every Day!
high-definition is turning out to be the laser disc of the video business today. It’s taking up a very, very small percentage of the market, and I don’t know if we will see it grow. Most people are happy with their standard-def DVDs and don’t want to replace their movies.
--Bill Lustig
Read the rest in DVD Sales - Report
perfect markets assume perfect information. The more readily available the information about a market, the better the market will function. Conversely, where reliable information is difficult to obtain or non-existent markets are more likely to function imperfectly and/or be manipulated by those with greater access to or control of the information. This is true because the operation of markets is predicated on the idea that both buyers and sellers are rational actors, but rational actors behave rationally not based on the actual facts but on the facts as they perceive them. If the facts are distorted, so will the behavior. Distort the facts enough and the behavior becomes irrational despite appearing rational to the actors themselves.
--Chris Kaminski on the WWWAC mailing list, Sat, 16 Aug 2003
People sometimes use the fact that there are controversies in science to disparage all of science or to neglect the fact that there’s also a lot of consensus in science. Sometimes people on the margins that are critiquing the mainstream can be right. You have to have permeable walls in science. But that doesn’t mean the critics of today are going to be the mainstream of tomorrow.
--Sheldon Krimsky
Read the rest in Big People on Campus
It’s a given in many circles that decoding and playing compressed media in Java would be a performance nightmare that would peg the CPU at 100% and drop frames. The IBM toolkit proves that’s simply not true. Whether it’s Moore’s Law speeding up CPU’s or better JVM’s speeding up Java performance, there’s really no need to be afraid of an all-Java media engine anymore.
--Chris Adamson
Read the rest in Rebooting Java Media, Act II: Development
Mac users love their machines; Windows users put up with their machines because they don't believe there's anything really better.
It's depressing, really, because it's like dealing with victims of abuse: "Seriously, there's a better world out there, and you deserve it! You don't have to put up with this! You can leave! Mac will treat you right!" And their response is right out of the textbooks: "Why would I trust Mac? I don't think anything can be good after this."
I wish I were joking above, but these are almost exact quotes from like a dozen conversations I've had.
--Wil Shipley
Read the rest in On Being and Deliciousness, with Wil Shipley
When a programmer complains about “politics,” they mean—very precisely—any situation in which personal considerations outweigh technical considerations. Nothing is more infuriating than when a developer is told to use a certain programming language, not the best one for the task at hand, because the boss likes it. Nothing is more maddening than when people are promoted because of their ability to network rather than being promoted strictly on merit. Nothing is more aggravating to a developer than being forced to do something that is technically inferior because someone higher than them in the organization, or someone better-connected, insists on it.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in A Field Guide to Developers
my friend Ira in Yokohama, Japan pays less than $30 per month for 100-megabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home Internet service. Well it turns out that in Japan such plans can cost as little as $10 per month, which is less than what our telephone companies claim it costs simply to maintain their billing infrastructure. If it costs $10 per month per subscriber for our telephone companies to stay in business without even pushing electrons over the wires, how can they charge that little for 100-mbps Internet service in Japan? What do they know that we don't know?
--Mark Stephens
Read the rest in I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Game Over | PBS
Tooling has come of age. It takes the NetBeans and Eclipse folks months, not years, to bring us plugins for Ruby, Swing UI frameworks, etc. etc. We yawn when we see another NetBeans demo. There was a time when we all longingly looked at Microsoft's Visual Studio, but those days are gone.
--Cay Horstmann
Read the rest in Cay Horstmann's Blog
It’s not necessarily the case that Microsoft is smarter than anybody in the Java world. But you can get a lot more done when you don’t have to reach consensus with 20+ other vendors, and when you don’t particularly care about offering backwards compatibility. As the old joke has it, “How many Microsoft programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, they just redefine darkness as the standard.” Now that’s agility! By contrast, innovation in Java moves at a glacial pace because of the JCP and because Sun obsesses over backwards compatibility almost to a fault.
--Neil Bartlett
Read the rest in Neil’s point
The easy problem is when the machine is down. The hard problem is when the machine is slow.
--Randy Shoup, eBay
Architecture & Design 2007, 2007-07-27
Mr. Putin's government is unique in history. This Kremlin is part oligarchy, with a small, tightly connected gang of wealthy rulers. It is partly a feudal system, broken down into semi-autonomous fiefdoms in which payments are collected from the serfs, who have no rights. Over this there is a democratic coat of paint, just thick enough to gain entry into the G-8 and keep the oligarchy's money safe in Western banks.
But if you really wish to understand the Putin regime in depth, I can recommend some reading. No Karl Marx or Adam Smith. Nothing by Montesquieu or Machiavelli, although the author you are looking for is of Italian descent. But skip Mussolini's "The Doctrine of Fascism," for now, and the entire political science section. Instead, go directly to the fiction department and take home everything you can find by Mario Puzo. If you are in a real hurry to become an expert on the Russian government, you may prefer the DVD section, where you can find Mr. Puzo's works on film. "The Godfather" trilogy is a good place to start, but do not leave out "The Last Don," "Omerta" and "The Sicilian."
--Garry Kasparov
Read the rest in OpinionJournal
There are sections of the Bible that I think are absolutely brilliant and poetically unrivaled, and there are sections of the Bible which are the sheerest barbarism, yet profess to prescribe a divinely mandated morality—where do I start? Books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus and First and Second Kings and Second Samuel—half of the kings and prophets of Israel would be taken to The Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity if these events took place in our own time.
--Sam Harris
Read the rest in God Debate: Sam Harris vs. Rick Warren - Newsweek Beliefs
At eBay.com, vertical scaling is just not in our vocabulary.
--Dan Pritchett, eBay
Architecture & Design 2007, 2007-07-27
Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn't engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn't write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn't use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we'd reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.
It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation -- and not focusing on specific plots.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.
--Bruce Schneier
Read the rest in Wired News: Refuse to be Terrorized
programmers who can communicate their ideas clearly are going to be far, far more effective than programmers who can only really communicate well with the compiler. It is crucial for documenting code, it is crucial for writing specifications and technical design documents that other people can review, and it’s crucial even for those meetings where you sit around discussing how to do something best: brilliant programmers who have trouble explaining their ideas just can’t make as much of a contribution.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Sorting Resumes
Java is your intellectual middle-ground between static, platform dependent, crashable, dead-end C++ and unpopular, dynamically configurable, idealistic Smalltalk.
--Paul Cunningham on the java-dev mailing list, Friday, 20 Jul 2007 01:52:43
Finally admitting that EJBs have cost the world enormously, the EJB3 team took lessons from Hibernate and Spring, but not enough to really fix the problem. Most people seem to find that Hibernate and Spring are still simpler and more straightforward than EJB3, so the lack of a rush back to a technology that had such a heavy cost in the past shouldn’t be a surprise.
--Bruce Eckel
Read the rest in Hybridizing Java
The majority of technology mergers tend to be disappointments because of the difficulties inherent in merging disparate businesses that have evolved along different lines. You can substantially more than double the complexity of a technology business by doubling the size. Sales can be lost, pricing can be sacrificed and integration can be less than elegant.
--Jonathan H. Cohen
Read the rest in The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Gretchen Morgenson: Just Don't Say 'Synergy' to a Hewlett Investor
it totally allows forking, and there will be forking. Which presents the problem of how we keep the Java promise of compatibility. We'll use a business/legal approach, rather than a technical approach. Which is to say, you can take the code, you can change the code, you can compile the code, you can publish the code, you can sell the code, no permission required. But you can't call it Java or use the coffee-cup logo without going through all the same processes you have to now: pass the appropriate TCK and secure the copyright clearance. So for businesspeople who want to be sure that they're running real compatible un-forked Java, the Java brand - the name "Java" and the coffee-cup logo - is the stamp of approval to look for.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in InfoQ: Sun open sources Java SE, ME, and Glassfish under GPLv2
When Gosling designed Java, I felt that we got the best thinking on practical language design at the time (ok, except for synchronized and labeled breaks—perfection eludes even the demigods). Scala brings back that feeling, and it makes other languages that should not be named (such as Groovy) look rather amateurish.
--Cay Horstmann
Read the rest in Cay Horstmann's Blog
My own view is that the web is simply becoming a distributed API, browsers are run-time environments. The basic material of desktop applications is a window. A kind of virtual screen used to share the limited resources of a single physical screen. This window is empty and the modern operating systems provide an API to _draw_ content on it. A web browser is more like a structured window. It offers a single API used to structure content rendered into the window. Hence a browser is a kind of window++ and the DOM is an incarnation of the composite pattern.
--Didier PH Martin on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 10 Aug 2005 08:17:33
If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes.
But the government doesn't want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war.
It wants peace. But what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela -- new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?
--President Hugo Chavez (translated)
Read the rest in President Hugo Chavez Delivers Remarks at the U.N. General Assembly
Apple is happy to support MPEG-4, which has known patent encumberance and unknown submarine patents, while Apple is not happy to support Ogg Theora/Vorbis which has no known patent encumberance. This has to be very clear to everybody.
--Silvia Pfeiffer on the whatwg mailing list, Monday, 25 Jun 2007 10:16:36
The fact that a corporation owns and monopolizes an important piece of the process of electing a President is un-American. They are much more willing to spread Cho Seung-Hui’s message to the vast majority of the American people than the messages of our Presidential candidates. Then again NBC did get to put their peacock on every frame of Cho’s school shooter recruitment video. Very al-jazeera of them.
--Kevin Bondelli
Read the rest in KevinBondelli.com
the whole RFC process is obsolete. In fact, it never would have worked at all, if not for the fact that in the early days, nobody cared about the Internet. So the IETF could have their meetings and write their RFCs in a vacuum that was free of commercial interest. Once the Internet became a commercial phenomenon, you can see that the IETF's productivity basically went to zero because the vendors were all trying to pack the working groups with their people to make sure that their existing implementations got selected as the standard. That's pretty much what happened with IPSEC, for example. IETF nearly converged on an IPSEC standard several times until Cisco and other large vendors began making rumblings about "we won't support this" and "we hold patents on that" to try to keep the market divided.
--Marcus Ranum
Read the rest in Interview with Marcus Ranum
Bin Laden - still at large and operating within the territory of Pakistan, an alleged ally which Cheney recently visited - both justified the 9/11 attack on those grounds but has a theology that doesn't require such a casus belli. But now he doesn't even need the theology. We have, alas, made more terrorists by our bungling in Iraq than Bin Laden could have dreamed of just six years ago.
--Andrew Sullivan
Read the rest in The Daily Dish: Palmetto Punditry
Every step the Democrats in Congress have taken to force the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq has failed. Time and again, President Bush beats them into submission with charges of failing to "support the troops."
Why do the Democrats allow this to happen? Because they let the president define what "supporting the troops" means. His definition is brutally misleading. Consider what his policies are doing to the troops.
No U.S. forces have ever been compelled to stay in sustained combat conditions for as long as the Army units have in Iraq. In World War II, soldiers were considered combat-exhausted after about 180 days in the line. They were withdrawn for rest periods. Moreover, for weeks at a time, large sectors of the front were quiet, giving them time for both physical and psychological rehabilitation. During some periods of the Korean War, units had to fight steadily for fairly long periods but not for a year at a time. In Vietnam, tours were one year in length, and combat was intermittent with significant break periods.
In Iraq, combat units take over an area of operations and patrol it daily, making soldiers face the prospect of death from an IED or small arms fire or mortar fire several hours each day. Day in and day out for a full year, with only a single two-week break, they confront the prospect of death, losing limbs or eyes, or suffering other serious wounds. Although total losses in Iraq have been relatively small compared to most previous conflicts, the individual soldier is risking death or serious injury day after day for a year. The impact on the psyche accumulates, eventually producing what is now called "post-traumatic stress disorders." In other words, they are combat-exhausted to the point of losing effectiveness. The occasional willful killing of civilians in a few cases is probably indicative of such loss of effectiveness. These incidents don't seem to occur during the first half of a unit's deployment in Iraq.
After the first year, following a few months back home, these same soldiers are sent back for a second year, then a third year, and now, many are facing a fourth deployment! Little wonder more and more soldiers and veterans are psychologically disabled.
--Lieutenant General William E. Odom
Read the rest in Nieman Watchdog > Commentary > 'Supporting the troops' means withdrawing them
We won't be able to put everything out there. For example, in our commercial product, we have integration with Jazelle. Obviously, we cannot put that code into open source. So in the open source version, we will take out some of the pieces that have third party IP, that we don't have the right to open source. Whereas with the commercial product, in some cases, we already have some of those commercial relationships in place that allow us to include those pieces
--Eric Chu, Sun Microsystems
Read the rest in Sun GPLs Java, targets mobile phones
I remember back when Matisse was first announced and the first demos came out, that many editors, myself included, were singing the praises of Matisse. It was going to revolutionize Java desktop development, with its incredible ease of use, and its simplification of doing complex form layouts and such.
However, today, as far as I can tell, that has not happened. Even I, one of the people originally singing its praises, have found that I don't actually use it. Oh sure, I will use it for quickly mocking up a UI as a "proof of concept" screenshot of what a UI on an application will look like. But when it comes down to writing the app, I don't actually use it. Instead, I use JGoodies Forms, or MiGLayout, or some other relatively easy to use layout manager that I can code by hand.
--Michael Urban
Read the rest in Has Matisse Really Changed Anything? ...
The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.
--George Orwell
Read the rest in Glenn Greenwald
We started with Java applets right? What happened to those? (They're actually making a slow comeback with many of the original issues fixed.) Flash did Java applets right. In fact they did it so right, I imagine Flash adherents will be offended with just comparing the two.
The folks at Macromedia (now Adobe) saw some amazing shortcomings in other web-based execution systems and simply did it right. Java applets were fantastic with major shortcomings (huge Java runtime, poor performance, clunky and ugly interface, etc). Flash fixed all or most of those. And Flash does cross-platform so much better than Java ever did.
If it sounds like I am more or less writing off Java despite Sun's recent announcement of Java FX to directly compete with AIR and Silverlight, well I am. Adobe is far more focused than Sun on this market segment and there are just as many Flash developers as Java developers.
--Marc Stephens
Read the rest in I, Cringely . The Pulpit . An AIR of Invisibility | PBS
It’s utterly damning that the two most prominent Desktop Java applications are developer tools — NetBeans and Eclipse — as if there’s no value in Java applications beyond the audience of fellow Java developers.
--Chris Adamson
Read the rest in Rebooting Java Media, Act I: Setup
Steve Jobs and Apple release a product crippled with proprietary software and digital restrictions: crippled, because a device that isn't under the control of its owner works against the interests of its owner. We know that Apple has built its operating system, OS X, and its web browser Safari, using GPL-covered work—it will be interesting to see to what extent the iPhone uses GPLed software.
--Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF
Read the rest in FSF
Write simple straightforward code and then, if the performance is still not "good enough", optimize. But implicit in the concept of "good enough" is that you need to have clear performance metrics. Without them, you'll never know when you're done optimizing. You'll also need a realistic, repeatable, testing program in place to determine if you're meeting your metrics. Once you can test the performance of your program under actual operating conditions, then it's OK to start tweaking, because you'll know if your tweaks are helping or not. But assuming "Oh, gee, I think if I change this, it will go faster" is usually counterproductive in Java programming.
Because Java code is dynamically compiled, realistic testing conditions are crucial. If you take a class out of context, it will be compiled differently than it will in your application, which means performance must be measured under realistic conditions. So performance metrics should be tied to indices that have business value -- transactions per second, mean service time, worst-case latency -- factors that your customers will perceive. Focusing on performance characteristics at the micro level is often misleading and difficult to test, because it's hard to make a realistic test case for some small bit of code that you've taken out of context.
--Brian Goetz
Read the rest in Writing Better Code: A Conversation With Sun Microsystems Technology Evangelist Brian Goetz
I think they should stop trying to link every bit of the grid together. I stopped New York, Vermont and New England from linking up by threatening to sue, and they rethought it. If that had happened, New England would have gone out last night. The idea that bigger is better and that we need a national grid is just foolish.
--Howard Dean
Read the rest in Which Party Gets the Blame? They Agree: It's the Other One
Maven 2.0 is proof that good intentions, hard work and an open source community can still lead to all kinds of wrong.
--Assaf Arkin
Read the rest in Labnotes » Introducing Buildr, or how we cured our Maven blues
Five years ago, no one in the top 200 Web sites was using standards.. Today it is half of the top 200 Web pages.
--Chris Wilson, Microsoft
Read the rest in » What’s next for Internet Explorer? Microsoft opens up (a little) | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com
Like some of his US counterparts Mr Blair raised the prospect of ecstatic cheering in the streets of Iraqi cities and described the conflict as "a war of liberation". At their joint press conference last week President Bush stated emphatically: "We will liberate you." He managed to make it seem like a threat. Evidently that is how some Iraqis perceive it as well, which is not that surprising when the uninvited agents of their liberation bomb their buildings and kill innocent civilians. It is possible that when the regime falls there will be celebrations amid the rubble, but these will be muted if it appears that in the short term Iraq will be managed by a US-based administration.
--Steve Richards
Read the rest in The seven hurdles Blair must pass to save his premiership
Apache is a massive umbrella under which much that is rubbish shelters with much that is utterly fantastic.
--Nic James Ferrier on the rest-discuss mailing list, Tuesday, 12 Jun 2007 21:40:10
Maybe it’s just because I’m a grizzled 25-year veteran, but my feeling is that in the real world in the long term, maintainability is a really really big deal, the biggest of all.
Out there in the wild woolly “Web 2.0” world, maybe getting it built quick is all that matters, because after you’ve knocked ’em dead and been acquired, you can use the money from the Yahoo! buy-out to rebuild everything right the second time. In the enterprise though, I kind of suspect that smart developers and smart managers know that for real apps, the big development cost starts to happen after they’re delivered.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · Comparing Frameworks
If you need one rule to follow, make it this: don't introduce new behaviors for existing controls. Don't make a checkbox act like a push button or a slider act like a scroll bar. That will confuse users. If you need new behavior, make a new control.
--Scott Stevenson
Read the rest in Theocacao: The Year in Mac Development
Other people have blogged about the amazing missed opportunity represented by the Java One scheduling system. This system is a constant reminder of how bad a user interface can be. It's both an assault and an insult that says "we care so little about your experience that we are going to force you to go through this time-wasting process." Even worse, it shouts out that creating good user experiences is actually much too hard using Swing, no matter how much effort Sun has put into arguing otherwise. If Swing was easy, why would this awful scheduling system have been inflicted on tens of thousands of the language's staunchest advocates -- subliminally telling them not to use Swing -- for the past few years?
--Bruce Eckel
Read the rest in Java One, Day Four
Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn't engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn't write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn't use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we'd reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.
It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation -- and not focusing on specific plots.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.
--Bruce Schneier
Read the rest in Wired News: Refuse to be Terrorized
Multimedia support has always been a weakness in Java. JavaFX is the neon sign pointing out one of Sun's often ignored weakesses.
--Bryan Young
Read the rest in Scruffles.net: JavaFX in Perspective
These days, Accessibility is all the rage. I wish I could say it was actually driven by §508 Requirements, W3C Standards, and an all-in-all good faith effort to allow “differently abled” people to access content. But it hasn’t. As long as we, the majority, can access content, that’s all that really matters.
Fortunately, the mobile revolution has forced us to go Accessible. Now that we need to access content with our “differently abled” smartphone gadgets, we need that content to be Accessible. Bonus for the “differently able” people, I suppose.
--Alex Papadimoulis
Read the rest in Accessibility
Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.
--Cindy Sheehan
Read the rest in Daily Kos: "Good Riddance Attention Whore"
How it is that Apple remains, after all these years, so much better at user interface than anyone else in the industry, even the smart folks at Palm, is something of a mystery to me, but it seems to be the case. (Is it really all Steve's doing?)
--Henry Norr
Read the rest in Macworld Expo 2007: Reflections on the Keynote
So the JVM may not be the most innovative kid on the block any more, but it will still be the first choice for a large number of developers, simply because we can see that Microsoft is still playing the same old lock-in game they have always played. Microsoft has previous, and they cannot be trusted with something this important. Neither can Sun, of course. Sun is just another big corporation that ultimately only cares about its shareholders, and it would absolutely play the same game Microsoft does if it were in a similar position. That’s why Java really needed to be open-sourced: in the event that Sun turns evil, a fork of Java can live on under a different name. The CLR may get ever more advanced, but at least we know we can bet our businesses on the JVM.
--Neil Bartlett
Read the rest in Neil’s point
The thing that bothers me about faith-based altruism is that it is contaminated with religious ideas that have nothing to do with the relief of human suffering. So you have a Christian minister in Africa who's doing really good work, helping those who are hungry, healing the sick. And yet, as part of his job description, he feels he needs to preach the divinity of Jesus in communities where literally millions of people have been killed because of interreligious conflict between Christians and Muslims. It seems to me that that added piece causes unnecessary suffering. I would much rather have someone over there who simply wanted to feed the hungry and heal the sick.
--Sam Harris
Read the rest in God Debate: Sam Harris vs. Rick Warren - Newsweek Beliefs
The challenge of software patents ultimately comes down to the question of what does it mean to "own" an idea? To my way of thinking, ideas cannot exist in a vacuum; the invention of the computer could not have existed in the form that it did without the invention of the vacuum tube, the Jacquard loom, alternating current, ad nauseum. Patents existed originally as a mechanism for governments (specifically the English Government) to insure that certain industries (the mechanized weaving and textiles industry) couldn't be exported to competing countries during the early 19th century, and such patents included the notion that people could be detained or even killed to protect such state secrets.
As such, patents have always been anticompetitive, though they are usually presented as exactly the opposite. This has become even more exacerbated by the ability to buy or sell patents as if they were any other asset. If a person working for a company receives a patent, they are usually obligated to sign over that patent to the company (by the argument that the employee was being paid for such work, thus reducing innovation to the level of all other forms of labor). If they leave that company, those patents will not leave with them unless they had been very canny in negotiations. Indeed, if a person is fired from a company, they may not even be compensated beyond their previously earned salary for their innovation, while the company in question is able to make millions off of that and similar patents.
--Kurt Cagle on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 6 Jun 2005 16:41:24
Flash is a more significant rival for Desktop Java than is generally understood. It is quite remarkable that the abililty to create Flash applications is so desirable that Adobe can charge hundreds of dollars a copy for its development tools, while Sun can hardly give theirs away (woo hoo, at least IBM can give theirs away). Why? Largely because it handles media so well. And this is serving to grow a generation of web-based JavaScript/ActionScript developers who see Java as “your father’s programming language”, much like C++ was for some of us who picked up Java 10 years ago.
--Chris Adamson
Read the rest in Rebooting Java Media, Act I: Setup
We lost sight of the developer community toward the latter part of the 1990s, and we made a very bad decision about our commitment to Solaris (running on non-Sun) hardware, which we have now completely recovered. Probably we weren't paying attention to the open-source community with Java as closely as we should have been. We weren't paying attention to the smallest companies in the world; we were paying attention to the largest companies in the world.
--Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems
Read the rest in The education of Jonathan Schwartz
We're not making any pro