eataTREE - Slashdot User

US Bans Sales of iPods To North Korea 269

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 29, 2006 @11:34AM from the kim-on-a-segway-would-be-cute dept.

gamer4Life writes "The United States has created their list of products banned from being exported to North Korea. This list includes iPods, plasma televisions and Segway electric scooters. U.S. intelligence officials who helped produce the Bush administration's list said Kim prefers Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac cars; Japanese and Harley Davidson motorcycles; Hennessy XO cognac from France and Johnny Walker Scotch whisky; Sony cameras and Japanese air conditioners."

French Parliament To Go Open Source 231

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @10:10PM from the desktops-and-all dept.

dhoyte writes, "Newsfactor.com reports that next June the French parliament will be switching from Microsoft to open source products such as Linux for desktops and servers and OpenOffice for day-to-day documents. They see it as a cost-cutting measure." The French have not settled on a Linux distribution yet. The article quotes an analyst voicing a note of caution: "'The evidence on the cost savings attributable to a switch to Linux has been mixed,' according to Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis at research group NPD. 'There has been some evidence that companies have to spend a good deal on training and support after you deploy...'"

Journal Journal: Slashdot moderation abuse. 1

Journal by Samuel Duncan on Thursday February 05, 2004 @11:49AM

After posting a few controversial comments to slashdot my karma went from good down to terrible within 2 hours. So I can't post here for a while.
This supports my opinion that privacy advocates and Java users are immature and incapable of a civilized discussions.

Comment "generics" (Score -1, Interesting) 602

by Samuel Duncan on Thursday February 05, 2004 @08:53AM (#8188196) Attached to: Java SDK 1.5 'Tiger' Beta Finally Released

While some people always propagate the use of generics/templates, I'm strictly set up against it.
While you get at first sight nice stuff like reusability etc. there are several reasons for avioding generics like an STD:

The type checking is much weaker thus introducing new potential holes for error to slip through.
You must make some assumptions about the used classes however verifying the correctness of these assumptions in nearly impossible.
The reusabilty "argument" is rubbish: that's what we have already OOP for. And when you now claim performance problems due to heavy stack/virtual methods use: that's an issue of the processor design not of the programming language. When you think that running serious software on system compatible to 30 year old rubbish is cool, then you must accept the performance of 30 year old waste in the same turn.
The above mentioned problems create new security holes. That's why the use of generics/templates in strictly forbidden in e.g. the banking sector.
Due to turing completeness of most template/generics systems the compiler is slowed down to 30 percent performance. More evil is that templates push the grammars into the Chomsky-0 type making secure (=100%) correctness checking impossible.
In old languages like Lisps the use of generics is usually strongly discouraged to users unless they are ultra-gurus due to the bad experiences. It's not clear why this should be different for Java or C++.

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