dcminter

"...they'll face problems as silly as people thinking that their printer didn't need to be plugged in (to the wall) to print things or that you can un-send email..." They're wrong, but there's no law …

Rhino being Java based it's a lot easier to get it running under Tomcat.

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." --Brian Kernighan …

(1.) Google. (2.) Speak to friends and colleagues. (3.) More Google. (4.) Then I crack open the source code (if available). (5.) Then I hit the bookshelf, including Safari Online. (6.) If I still have…

Doesn't look like it's a generally applicable process, and the article is somewhat lacking in detail, but I still found it interesting. "Dad's Army" was a 60s/70s sitcom made by the BBC, fondly rememb…

Sun marketing materials always seem to go to painful lengths to avoid mentioning Eclipse so perhaps I'm overly sensitive to it. Anecdata: I use Eclipse. Most professional Java devs I know use that or …

All this (very clever by the way) reminds me of an idea I had a while back that plays to the internet's true strengths: Create a rendering algorithm such as this but with the fitness function calculat…

Corporate marketing (11 NetBeans mentions and none of Eclipse? Riiight), not that interesting, not new, not especially hacker-ish.

Can you cite a specific example where the condition is NOT ambiguous and the Java compiler WILL produce an error? The example you cite is incorrect (see my post later) - you can compile code of this f…

Your two Java points - the first one: Amen. The latter - not true: public static String foo(final boolean b) { if( b ) { return "Yes"; } else { return "No"; } } Compiles just fine.

Reminds me of the amusingly named "Carlill v. the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company" case in contract law (though nothing like as blatant): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v._Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_... …

Hmm. I can spot an Orlowski article from the title these days; he's made something of a career of detracting from popular organisations (Google, Wikipedia, etc.) and persons. I dislike the approach pa…

A discussion of that report with friends yesterday led on to Stanislav Petrov ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov ) whose name I couldn't remember at the time and thus via that Wikipedia…

I find obscure failure modes fascinating - for the similarly obsessed, try out the RISKS digests: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks

Definitely looks pretty; it's very slick - but I disagree with the article; actually I didn't find it as usable as a mere text box. Now, that's anecdotal, but without usability testing rather than o…

I rather like Joel Spolsky's observation that when one is hiring one is not selecting from the population of programmers, but rather from the population of programmers without jobs . A very different…

randrews' comment ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=339190 ) about the "Kill Your Blog" article is a sentiment I agree with. Amongst other reasons I write a blog to hone my writing skills, but t…

It's an idea that an acquaintance of mine already had. It strikes me as a good one too: http://www.niggle.co.uk/

I saw that figure in the Economist and was astonished by it: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=... "A study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, released last mont…

You're probably right. But it makes me uncomfortable that this is the FSF's official line, not just Stallman's private rant.

The Linux kernel is not the entire environment. The set of GNU licensed tools and applications is not the entire environment. Gnu + Linux is not the entire environment. Those who care are aware of the…

I believe this is the home page of one of the researchers: http://www.ilsb.tuwien.ac.at/~tajmar/ Link to a pertinent paper: http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0603033v1 …

Ack. Good results but not yet so impressive that it's a Google killer. I gave it a quick spin and it gave better results than most prospective giant killers, but still not notably better than the gian…

Thank you, that was courteous. I agree that we agree and certainly that was an off the cuff opinion not a rigorous analysis.

This is not correct. Unless you think that female bowerbirds are just shallow...?

XML processing in a typical Java application tends to take place up front, being used to build runtime representations of the same information. XML exposure over the longer term will tend to be in the…