Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate

No, it's pretty simple: Skyrim. Seriously, it's the game of the year.

Anybody do any Java development? When I learned Java as a CS major, they sort of skipped over the part where you actually produce something that can be deployed and installed on someone's computer, so while I flatter myself that I can program, I can't seem to actually work as a programmer even for free.I've written a little bioinformatics application and the problem I have is that it only runs on my computer. I thought NetBeans would build an application which I could distribute, it certainly claims that it's doing that, but what it produces won't run on any other machine, it just crashes the VM with a NoClassDefinitionException.Midway through the project I realized that I was producing code for Java 7, but that Java 6 had a broader install base, so I refactored for 6. At one point, I tracked a bug to the fact that there were a lot of classes that NetBeans never actually recompiled in Java 6.I thought all I'd have to do was compile my classes and the NetBeans application toolkit into a distributable jar, and that jar does run on my computer just like it should, but it doesn't run anywhere else. NoClassDef exceptions usually have something to do with "classpath", but what would NetBeans be doing to my computer's classpath, and how do I get my eventual end-users to be able to run this code?

Maybe I'm myself unclear on what the problem is. In the broad strokes, the problem is that my jar runs fine on my computer, and on my wife's Mac once I found the hidden switch to turn Java 6 on, but what people (who don't really have the troubleshooting skills to tell me much about what's going on) tell me is that they download the zip archive, extract it, and then try to run the jar file but nothing happens. I'm fairly sure they have the right version of Java to run it.Can I ask you to try running my program? It can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/bootsie/downloads/list"Bootsie.zip" is meant to be the distributable, and there's an additional archive of data files if you'd like to actually run it on something (it performs a statistical analysis of a certain kind of population genetics data that the entomologists I know need to do.)

Thanks, PaulK! That's actually a bit of a relief. I'll try to get more information about what's going wrong with the end users (actually, at this point it's more like "end user".)Thanks for your input. If you don't mind me asking, when/if you develop desktop Java applications, how do you usually distribute them?

Anybody else here at Reason Rally? Its pissing down!

As long as he doesn't need to use WiFi, sure!It's amazing to me that Linux hasn't solved their wireless internet problem in the 15-odd years I've been looking at Linux distros. Just the other day I grabbed an old PPC version of Ubuntu to pop on my old iBook G4, hoping to do something useful with it. Everything worked great except that there was zero support for the AirPort. Well, that was basically the one thing I needed to have working, so goodbye Ubuntu.Linux: still not ready for prime time.

Well, right. If you buy the right wireless card, they'll have made linux drivers for it. Or maybe you can use NDIS-Wrapper to wrap up the Windows binary you need and, if you're lucky, the card will work.Neither of those things is true for my old Mac, unfortunately. But, I mean, I've built an off-the-shelf PC with an off-the-shelf wireless PCI card from Best Buy, and had every version of Linux refuse to see it. The sorry state of affairs in Linux wireless card support, to my understanding, stems from Linus' refusal to allow his kernel to be polluted by something as quotidian as a wireless driver.As much as Linux claims to be about open-source, it's every bit as much about saying "no, sorry, you can't do that, because of our strong ideological commitment to a contradictory principle."

Did they surgically implant it? I assumed Cheney just ate it.

usasciencefestival.orgAnybody else down here for this?

I have to sort of echo everybody else and ask you why it has to be according to the Book of Genesis, and not just according to the physical and scientific evidence? Well, I guess I'd cheat - I'd make up the evidence that I needed, ignore the evidence that I couldn't explain, and accuse everybody who didn't believe me of being part of a huge conspiracy to conceal the truth. In other words I'd do exactly what creationists do.It's worked on, like, more than 50% of Americans. Why not stick with the winning strategy? Ok, without being any more glib, I guess what you'd need - since you're talking about explaining the history and diversity of life on Earth - is a good, and broad, education in biology. There's no substitute for knowing what you're talking about, it's not "optional", you really can't contribute to science or even really use it until you actually know it. Math and science aren't just something you can say "well, we'll get a guy for that." If you're going to do this, you have to be the one who knows about living things.So, you have to study biology. You have to know the organelles of the cell, you have to know how cells produce proteins from DNA, you have to know what proteins do, you have to know what kind of chemical reactions carbon is capable of, you have to know why, and how, we classify organisms into different groups and you have to know those groups. How are you going to explain the origin of species if you don't know what species there even are?And if you're going to go through all of the time and expense to study all that, you might as well do it at a university and get a bachelor's degree out of it. There's no reason why the fact that you're not a biologist now should prevent you from doing the work to become one in the future.

Post deleted.Edited by crashfrog, : removed