Slashdot Mirror
Domain: chiralsoftware.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to chiralsoftware.net.
Comments · 92
-
Contempo.biz - in beta, supports TZs, remindersHello, I just wanted to point out: http://contempo.biz/ is a new calendar product in early beta stages right now. Slashdot is welcome to give it a try, and take a look at some of the features. Go to the site. You will need an authcode to create an account; the authcode is "cherrycoke" (I prefer diet actually, but the code is just "cherrycoke"). Anyway, after a few Slashdotters sign up I'll probably turn off that auth code. Also I will delete signups with invalid info. Anyway, it has a few new features:
- SMS reminders for events - ok, a few others have this, but it's integrated all over the place
- Pure CSS layout - no AJAX, so all pages can be bookmarked. However that means you'll want to use Firefox
- Print envelopes directly from the website - I have never seen another site with this feature
- Timezone integration everywhere - today's meetings are spread around timezones, so it is important to be able to print a calendar or make meetings in any timezone
- A whole bunch of stuff coming in the future which I won't even go into right now.
-
Sensational, and meaninglessI'm sure all of us on Slashdot can see that these numbers have little meaning, because:
- You find where you look. If people started looking for security flaws in NetBSD and stopped looking everywhere, surprise, we would find thousands of flaws in NetBSD and none anywhere else, telling us... nothing
- More people looking will (generally) mean more holes are found.
- The definition of a security vulnerability changes over time, and depends on the vendor. One man's feature is another man's vulnerability.
One bad thing is that software is getting more complicated and secure design methodologies are lagging behind. We've had secure development environments like Java for a long time now, and we have known for the past decade that large pieces of software developed in unsafe languages (C) can never be safe, and yet... we continue to use these unsafe tools. Until tools and design methodology change, we're going to keep having more holes as software systems get bigger.
Someday that will change. People will (eventually) shift to "safe" languages, where "safe" means no unchecked memory access, bounds checking on arrays, type safety, etc. The more we get to that the fewer vulnerabilities we will be seeing.---------------
Drag-and-drop file upload in your browser -
A plug for my company here(Warning, company promotion here.)
The device detection problem is a big one. Tim is right on this. URLs are how we identify sites that we want to go to, not how we identify content. There should be one URL for all content types and the site should do the right thing for the device.
That's a complicated problem. There are about 1,000 different mobile devices currently in use. Keeping track of them, and the different types of content they need, is tough.
Most devices can handle one of four different types of content:
- Full HTML: desktop computers, etc
- Mobile XHTML: newer phones
- WML: older or mid-range phones
- cHTML: DoCoMo i-mode phones in Japan
- Screen size: How big should images be
- Image types: PNG, GIF, JPEG, or WBMP?
- Media types: can it play videos, etc?
- Java types: MIDP1, MIDP2, DoJa, or perhaps even J2SE?
Creating another domain shifts more work to users (in the form of marketing the other URL, remembering it, using it). Users shouldn't have to do work. Tools should do work.
Anyway, if Slashdot ever wants to get a license to our software to have a mobile Slashdot you can read on the phone, contact us: info@chiralsoftware.net.
-
What is NASA doing with our money, anyway?Doesn't this whole thing seem like a waste? The shuttles will be permanently grounded in 2010 because its flight certification will expire, and it is generally agreed that it would be ridiculously expensive to get it re-certified. We're half-way through 2005, so they have 4.5 years left of flying. It seems like they have a tough time getting more than a few flights a year out of them. So, being optimistic, they might get another fifteen flights out of these shuttles. They have so far lost aprox. one in fifty flights, so there's a real chance that one of these fifteen (optimistic) flights might not even make which would a) be a tragic and senseless loss of life and b) terminate the program immediately, meaning we get even fewer than fifteen flights out of it.
Does any of this make financial sense? The shuttle was sold on the premise that it would be... a shuttle, ie, something that makes routine flights and therefore makes it cheap to get big things up into orbit. The goal was to have each shuttle able to fly every couple of weeks. The reality has been far from that, and it can only get things into low orbits, and it's insanely expensive and dangerous. Rather than fixing these safety problems, wouldn't it have made more sense to just put these things in a museum and get some big off-the-shelf Russian rocket certified for lifting humans?
I guess my question is, why are they dragging out the misery and financial waste that is the shuttle program?
--------------
WAP server software -
FoolishStealth startups are bad for one obvious reason, which is that they prevent getting customer feedback about the product and they delay getting the product out into the market. That's a good enough reason to never do a "stealth startup".
But there's a second and even more important reason why stealth startups are foolish. It shows that the management has delusions of grandeur. It shows arrogance, self-importance and being out of touch with the real situation. The real situation of a startup is trying to do R&D and marketing and sales starting from nothing and trying to do it on the tightest budget possible. That's the reality. The delusion that these "stealth startup" guys fall into is that what they are doing is as magnificent as discovering the Philosopher's Stone, and therefore the normal rules of business and finance don't apply. These guys are doomed.
---------------
Mobile web applications -
Yeah but they're still borderline-unusableThey may cost $300, which may be the price threshold for ubiquitous home consumer electronics, but they're still five to ten times more difficult to use. What's a firewall? Why do computers get viruses? What's a service pack? What's a folder/directory? Why are there so many folders on my computer? What is a file? What is a drivers and why do I need one? When you think of it in those terms, you'll see, the PC is far from being ready to be a ubiquitous piece of home electronics.
No, the PC will never catch up with the mobile phone.
-
As someone who develops Java desktop apps...I would like to see three things:
First, it seems like KDE/Qt has more momentum than GTK on the desktop. Qt apps look better and are more integrated with eachother. Suse is the dominant desktop Linux distro and Suse is KDE-oriented. I'm glad that Java is going to be using native GTK for rendering, but what I would really like to see is native Qt. Maybe they could create some kind of interface to make it easier to plug in different rendering systems? Maybe they could open source Java and let the community take care of it? Maybe they don't care because desktop Linux is only about 5% of the market anyway? But still, it's something I would like to see.
The second thing they need is a "SwingLite", or some easier way to do common things. For example, it is very common to need a text field that allows the user to enter a number, but not text. Should be easy, right? This is the code I have to use to do it:
formattedTextField.setFormatterFactory(new DefaultFormatterFactory(new NumberFormatter(NumberFormat.getIntegerInstance()
That's just wrong. I should be able to say:) ));formattedTextField.setFormat("d+");
or maybe:formattedTextField.setFormat(FormattedTextField.I
The above example, involving two different factory classes to just get the field to accept integers only, puts a high burden of knowledge on the programmer, and Swing is full of stuff like that. It's great that the power is there because I can write my own hierarchy of text formatting factories and objects that enforces correctly-entered Sandhi rules, but that doesn't come up very often, and what does come up very often is having to enter a plain old number, date, currency value, that kind of thing. And I'm just using this one example, but this kind of over-design is all over the place in Swing.N TEGER_ONLY);The final problem that they have is putting emphasis on plugable look and feel. Application developers shouldn't get to decide the look and feel of their apps. That should be determined by the desktop environment. Pluggable look and feel is not a feature; it is a bug. It should be deprecated and removed.
----------
Educational software -
It's about propulsion, propulsion, propulsionI'm sure we could learn many useful things from a sample return from Mars, and we might even make some breakthrough discovery, such as discovering microbes, but is this an optimal way to spend money? It seems like there are two very important technologies that we need to develop more of in order for our space efforts to "scale": better propulsion technologies and better autonomous vehicle technologies. Any expenditures that don't help those two goals is just a one-shot benefit, rather than a real contribution to making us a space-capable species.
On the propulsion question, it seems like their plan is to get enough fuel to achieve Mars escape velocity up to Earth escape velocity to get it to the surface of Mars in the first place. It sounds like this is heading towards being just an enormous amount of rocket fuel moving back and forth. I don't see any real advancement in science in us trucking around gargantuan loads of the same old fuels. Sure, it's very expensive and takes a lot of resources, but it's still just rocket science, something we've been doing for decades.
It also doesn't get us any closer to manned missions. It seems like to do a manned Mars mission you need to get enough fuel to the surface of Mars to a) support all the surface activities there and b) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface and c) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface. Yes, b) and c) are the same; I don't think anyone would propose sending astronauts over there without a backup lift-off plan. But anyway, when you add up all the fuel in a, b, and c, plus crew habitations and science gear, you end up needing many tons of stuff on the surface of Mars, and it costs something like $10,000/pound to get stuff off of Earth so just the fuel costs alone are going to be mind boggling, and in the end we haven't developed anything new. Just more big rockets.
It seems to me that the whole thing is a pointless waste unless we develop methods of producing fuel on Mars itself, so round-trips can become a more routine thing and we can start thinking about larger probes even further afield.
NB, I am not a rocket scientist.
-----------
Educational software -
Scroll bars!Hello Editors, there is a thing on the right side of your browser! Use it before you post a new story to see if that story has already been posted today!
---------
Educational software -
Re:If this isn't a joke, it means Java 1.5 arrives
By the way, the Mac Mini was the most brilliant move Apple has done to get more developers to experiment with the Mac. Hmm, let's see, it costs $600 (out the door), it uses all my existing peripherals, it takes up negligible space on my desk... I'll take one! I'll probably buy one just so that I can make sure that this new educational learning application runs smoothly on OS X 10.4. This Mac Mini could result in a lot more Mac software.
-
Re:If this isn't a joke, it means Java 1.5 arrivesI think the problem is that if you look on the Sun Swing tutorials, they all have a line in them that sets the app to "default look and feel." So everyone puts those lines in his Java app. "Default" must be the correct setting, right? Wrong! Default look and feel means the Java default look and feel, as opposed to the platform-dependent look and feel. The Java LnF is ugly ugly ugly and it works differently from all the other apps on your system. I never adjust the LnF; I'll use whatever the JRE wants to give me. Sun makes a big deal about plugable LnF and being able to switch LnF. I think that's a bug, not a feature. Your app should run with whatever LnF the host environment wants to impose on it, and it should be difficult or impossible to change this.
I'll be putting up some screenshots of my app in the next couple of weeks. If I can find someone who has OS 10.4 I'll even put up some Mac screenshots. I'm very curious to see if Mac users will think of it as a Mac desktop app; I would take that as a compliment, of course.
From what I can tell, there are two things holding Java back from desktop apps. First is that Swing itself is hard to use and cumbersome. It is too powerful and not intuitive enough to program in. Yes it has some great features but there should be simpler, more direct ways of doing common things. Second, Java is closed source. This is a problem because we need forks of the JRE. We need a Qt fork, which does all the rendering in Qt. We need a GTK fork, a Mac fork, etc. These would all have the same language and run the same software but they would use native rendering, which is the only way you're going to get real native LnF, which is the only way you're going to get people to think of Java apps as "just like any other app".
-
If this isn't a joke, it means Java 1.5 arrives?
It looks like Apple is still stuck in 1.4-land for now but apparently Tiger is going to ship with 1.5. Can anyone confirm this? If so it's going to be a help to those of us with Java 1.5 applications.
-
Momentum vs. business commitmentsI used to be a Gnome user, just like I used to be a Redhat desktop user. Now I'm a Suse user, and I use KDE on my desktop.
It seems like KDE is a better system than Gnome. KDE is starting to approach the ideal of what a desktop should be: everything is integrated and seemless. It's like NeXTStep. As I type this under KDE, a spell checker automatically does its thing, and I can write my own KDE app that also has spell checking, or an embedded browser, or any of the other KDE components, due to KDE's object-oriented structure. This is great and it's the way computers should be. It's object-oriented thinking, which is natural to humans, unlike computer-think procedural thinking. I think that programming languages have a big influence on how programmers think about problems.
It seems like KDE is the right way to go, and yet Gnome has the business momentum from Redhat and Sun. Is the "rightness" of KDE going to eventually dominate the business commitments of Gnome? Or will they eventually merge to some extent?
I'm very happy with KDE and have already ordered my Suse 9.3, which should be shipping in about a week.
Memorize easily using flashcards, under Windows or Linux, coming April 28th.
-
This sounds like the start of a Simpsons episodeSkinner: "Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend."
Lisa: "But isn't that a bit shortsited? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?"
Skinner: "No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards."
Lisa: "But aren't the snakes even worse?"
Skinner: "Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat."
Lisa: "But then we're stuck with gorillas!"
Skinner: "No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death."
----------------
Create a WAP server -
Well, that's wonderful!I'm glad they are developing a biodegradable disk for a format that doesn't really exist yet, but what about some biodegradable disks that we can actually use? How about somehow coming up with a plain old cornstarch or recycled plastic CD-R that I could buy today? Is there such a thing? We already use 100% post-consumer recycled paper, but we would like to use recycled or biomass CD-Rs, too. Any sources for these? Or are we just going to read Slashdot articles about them but never buy them?
------------
Create a WAP server -
It shipped last weekIf you pre-ordered it directly from the Suse website, they shipped it late last Friday. I got mine on Tuesday. It looks like it's going to be a great system. 9.1 was already excellent. They do still need to smooth out the UI differences between Qt and non-Qt apps, so that, for example, OpenOffice will work the same way that everything else works. It looks like they are moving in that direction. I really think that KDE/Qt is far beyond Windows XP and is up there with Mac OS X, but the problem is that non-KDE apps break the seamless experience aspect of it. Have fun.
------------
Create a WAP server -
Untrusted dataWe're going to get burned over and over and over and then we will get burned some more by processing untrusted data (stuff off the net) using any language that has unsafe memory operations. This isn't just a Microsoft problem; we've seen the same problems in zlib (PNG), resulting in vulnerabilities in almost all Linux/Unix apps that handle graphics. We're going to keep seeing these problems until we start handling all unsafe data as if it's got a contagious disease, which means handling it in an isolated environment like a VM.
---------
WAP software -
Do it Sun! We want a fork!Forks are good! Forks mean difference and diversity. Difference and diversity means exploration of new ways of doing things. Maybe someone will fork Java and add in a totally new way of doing graphics rendering, or disk access, or network access, or maybe someone will make the JVM into a Linux kernel module or something that runs directly on hardware without an OS, or it will run on other OSes (OpenBSD for example). There are so many possiblities including possibilities that no one has thought of right now. All of these are forks to some degree and who knows what the result of them will be.
The reason why forks are not dangerous is because people will still want to write "standard" Java code, no matter how many different strange Java-esque things there are.
Linux is horribly forked. There are dozens of different distros, on dozens of different hardware platforms. There are many different kernels, and the different distros often have their own kernels with their own patches and changes. And here is a perfect example of a fork in Linux which has come back to help all of Linux: Because Linux was forkable, the NSA chose Linux to be the basis of its secure operating system, SELinux. SELinux is so strange and different from regular Linux that it wasn't compatible. It was a true fork, creating a different set of APIs that were mutually incompatible in many ways. The openness of Linux allowed this innovation to occur. It was something that Linus hadn't thought of years before it happened (I'm guessing). And yet it happened. And now, guess what, the work that was done in SELinux has been rolled into 2.6!
So, we had open source software, which allowed a fork, which allowed for totally innovative, off-the-wall creative development, which turned out to be cooler than people would have expected, which then ended up getting un-forked back into the main codebase!
If Sun open sources Java in the right way, that is exactly the kind of thing that will happen with Java, too. It's hard to prove this argument, because I can't say exactly what those innovative forks are going to be, becase they're things that people haven't thought of, but that's what will happen.
So do it Sun!
-------------
WAP news -
Please, these aren't tobacco adsI appreciate this guy's point, but:
- The publishing business is rough. You have to do what you have to do. I read Maxim magazine. They have a huge circulation, are very popular, they get plenty of advertisers, and yet they have to run cigarette ads because they buy some of the most expensive ad slots. What can you do? Ads ultimately are just offering consumers a choice. And these aren't tobacco ads; MS just uses some very agressive/slightly illegal marketing tactics. This isn't selling a product which is known to be addictive and cause cancer.
- What's wrong with Microsoft? They make some truly great software (Office) which runs fine on Linux. I'm a 100% Linux desktop user, and guess what, I buy Microsoft software to run on my Linux box! I don't have a Windows partition either.
- We're all techies here, right? We all believe that technology products should be evaluated on their merits. Does that somehow not apply to Microsoft products? If Microsoft ____ is the best solution for a given application, shouldn't we acknowledge that? Again, this is from a 100% Linux desktop user, who has been a 100% Linux desktop user for years, even back in the old painful days when the best browser was Netscape 4.something. Now I have Mozilla, IE and Konqueror to choose from, all on one desktop, and I chose based on their merits.
-----------
WAP news -
Don't fear the forkEveryone is so afraid of forks. I think a fork would be great. How about KDE-Java, which is a Java distro for writing KDE apps? Why shouldn't I be able to write Qt apps in a safe, easy-to-use language like Java? Sure, it's a fork and that QtJava app won't work on any other Java, but that exists already. I'm told that a bunch of OSX apps are actually written in Java and the system has good support for that. What would be bad is tampering with the java.* packages, but there is no need to. Just make a Jaav distro with a trolltech.* tree built in and ship that with KDE... that would be great. Another option would be a Java fork that implements Swing using Qt for its rendering, instead of using X calls directly. That would also be a fork, because it would introduce a dependency on the Qt libraries into Java, but Java apps wouldn't change.
These are just some examples of what Open Source Java could bring, and why forking is good.
----------
Create a WAP server -
No more swap!I admit that I don't fully understand all the issues of swap, but here are some observations:
- Generational garbage collectors, such as the one used in the JVM, screw up swap. It seems like there is a conflict between what the OS is trying to do with swap and what the JVM is trying to do with GC. I would rather let the GC win in this so the application runs fast.
- Memory is cheap these days. I just started up OpenOffice, widely regarded as a hog of a process, and it takes 27mb. Huge, you say? That's about $2 worth of memory these days.
- Does swap actually make things faster? The concensus these days seems to be "if your process is swapping you need more memory." Therefore... why swap?
----------
WAP software -
This poor suffering disucssionPeople on
-----------
WAP software -
Effective Javaby Joshua Bloch is the best programming book I have ever read in any language. It goes into detail about exceptions and how to use them properly. It sounds like it covers everything which this book covers, but it's brilliant. It's also a thin book. It is the only computer science book I have ever read multiple times, and gotten something out of it every time I have read it. Anyone else who has read this book is invited to chime in here...
-----------
WAP software -
Sun doesn't know how to approach thisRolling your own desktop distro is a subtle thing. Sun has always been a hardware company, and so they have always had control over the hardware their OS runs on. They have never yet had to deal with the tangled mess that is PC hardware, with conflicts, obscure devices, and all the rest of it. And the one thing missing most from the Sun Java desktop is Java. Where are all the Java apps? Sun should be all over this: "The Sun Java Desktop is a collection of apps, protocols and file formats which let you run your desktop environment anywhere that runs Java. We have partnered with Suse and Redhat to provide an environment which we certify is Sun Java Desktop compatible, but any Java 1.4 environment will work." What about doing that? But Sun is not doing that. Is anyone? Yes. But if you look at their website, you see that they are backed by American investors, but not Sun! What's going on? Sun should buy them and make that the cornerstone of the Java desktop.
In future, if Sun really wants something it can call the Sun Java Desktop, it would have all the applications in Java, and a Java runtime which is perfectly integrated into the OS, like OS X's Java environment.
-----------
WAP Apache software -
Wrong viewThe problem with looking for solutions to the energy problem is that there isn't a solution. There are a whole bunch of small solutions that, when added up together, will be the solution. One plant producing 500 barrels/day is 1/10,000th of the solution. One thousand such plants is 1/10th of the solution. Add in a few nuclear reactors, some solar panels, wind turbines, more efficient cars, biodiesel, 100% electric cars with lithium batteries, telecommuting, maybe even a Segway, and it starts adding up to a solution to the energy problem. If we did all of those things in parallel, within a few years, OPEC would be sweating and we would not have to spend billions of dollars a year on oil, and then billions more on trying to keep our oil suppliers stable and friendly.
I also hear people say "the oil industry has too much power here for anything to change." This is also the wrong view. Sure, the oil industry does have a lot of power, but the result of their machinations is that our entire economy is dependent on a commodity which we must import from politically unstable and hostile parts of the world which are far away. There are plenty of other powerful industries in the US that have nothing to do with oil that must see this as a hazardous situation, one which should be remedied by moving the US to having multiple energy options to choose from, including cost-competitive domestic solutions. Is the oil industry in the US more powerful than all the other non-oil industries? I don't think so.
------------
Create a WAP server -
"This being 2004...""This being 2004, you should know not to open a file from an untrusted source." WRONG! This is exactly the mindset that has resulted in the security problems that plague computers today. Operating environments should have the ability to fully contain and isolate any process. Operating environments should have the ability to run hostile code with complete safety. The smart thing to do is to start regarding ALL code as hostile. One side effect of that is that failures of non-hostile code will be contained, too, making for a more reliable system.
How can such a goal be attained? There are many ways available now. The most obvious one is a VM system with security policies, such as the JVM. That's not the only one, though. Another method is a capabilities-based system, so when a process starts, it has only a defined set of capabilities to work with. OpenBSD has a similar, but more limited system called systrace. The TrustedBSD project and SELinux have similar aims, and SELinux is being integrated into mainstream Linux distros. Another way to run untrusted things is with user-mode Linux, which I believe is integrated with Linux 2.6
The editor is right, though, that on currently-used systems like OSX and MS Windows, you have to be careful what you click on. But the problem is that we have come to accept that as "the way things are", when there is no reason for that to be the case. You should be able to run hostile code, see what it does, laugh at it, and delete it without any harm. The technology to do that exists, and has existed for years, but we have come to accept broken products and systems that don't allow that.
---------
WAP news -
AwesomeExchange is probably MS' best and most important product that has no Open Source equivalent. I am aware of Kolab and some other works-in-progress, but none of these are even close to Exchange yet. Exchange has more than its fair share of security problems, but what it does, it does well. Now with Connector being released GPL, that will have two consequences: The free downloadable version of Evolution will be able to use Exchange's features, and hopefully other OS tools like Koffice/Kmail will pick up those abilities, too. Also, having an open source client side might help them in getting an open source server side move faster. Now I just wish that Evolution would be properly integrated with KDE. They are doing it with OOo...
I'm a full-time desktop Linux user, and not just for coding, but for every aspect of business, so all this stuff matters to me. This week is going to be a great week in Desktop Linux: Suse 9.1 and Crossover 3 are both coming out at about the same time, and both are huge improvements over what came before.
-------
WAP news -
YesIt is possible. They could create a virus/worm section in the appdb, but I'm guessing that doesn't fit with the image they're going for.
-----------
WAP news -
Wireless interface
Maybe I should create a wireless interface to it...
-
TextMaker is goodI've used their word processor. It works very well. It loads fast and feels very polished. The only problem is that it still uses a proprietary file format (MS
However, the next version of TextMaker is supposed to support
-------------
Create a WAP server -
Lamest security claim of the century?What good is a directional beam if it hits some radio-reflective object and bounces somewhere else? Also, even if the beam is 99% directional, sensitive or very close receivers could still pick up the 1% that leaks. A security system that is 99% effective is not much better than a system which is 10% effective. Without solid encryption and authentication built-in to the protocol, directional broadcasting is useless. With solid encryption and authentication built-in to the protocol, directional broadcasting doesn't add anything.
The one place where this could have some good security uses is for undetectable transmission, which is probably interesting to the military.
Of course, directional broadcasting has a whole set of real benefits, such as getting more bandwidth by allowing more transmitters in the same region, minimizing interference, minimizing radiation output, etc. But to call this a security feature? I guess the "everything good is a security feature" is the parallel to "everything bad is terrorist" idea which seems popular lately.
-----------
Create a WAP server -
Koffice vs. OpenofficeI use OOo all the time, and find it to be very powerful, more powerful than MS Office in many ways. If it had better KDE integration it would be perfect... fortunately, KDE integration is on its way, and it will be fantastic, giving serious competition to anything else (including OSX) on the desktop. It makes sense to drop Koffice from Knoppix, and it will make even more sense once the KDE/OOo integration is ready.
----------
Create a WAP site -
Sun, oh Sun, what has happened to you?Yesterday I was helping my friend get set up with a Java application she needs. She's a fairly experienced Windows user. She needed to install the Sun JRE 1.4 to get this thing to work. She needed help from me, and a bit of exploring on java.sun.com, to find out which is the right file for her to download to get this thing working. If Sun wants MS Windows users to upgrade to be able to run Java apps easily and painlessly, there needs to be a big link right on java.sun.com saying "Windows users, click here to download Java for your system." Such a link does not exist and the user has to figure out "do I want NetBeans (no), do I need a SDK (no), do I need J2ME (no), do I need the JRE (yes)". Ridiculous. How is she supposed to understand the Java technology family in order to know how to navigate this? Is Sun trying to kill Java? Is there some secret Microsoft/SCO/Knights Templar conspiracy infiltrating in Sun? Ok, probably no on that last one...
And now the Sun "Java" Desktop, which presumably comes with Java built in, but does that mean you can double-click on a
Sun, what are you thinking?
Maybe expecting Sun to move from the world of big servers, where expecting users to write a shell script is perfectly acceptable, to the world of desktops, where users should be able to do everything just by clicking in an obvious place and without having to understand the difference between an ELF file and a JAR, is too much to ask.
An authentic Java desktop would be, in my opinion, one in which all the work gets done in Java. That means a Java office suite, a Java window manager, a Java file explorer. This is completely doable, and Java is a fantastic environment for doing those things (I know, you will flame me saying Java sucks, Java is slow, etc, sorry, that isn't true anymore). I would love to see such a desktop environment, and it would have fantastic security and portability advantages. A real Java-based OS is the only thing that has a real chance of competing with Linux, I believe (ok, I will get majorly flamed for that, but it's true).
I think that if Sun is serious about this, the way forward is:
- Partner up with Suse/Novell. They are going to win in the desktop by producing a real-world desktop distro. In fact I'm using it right now and it's great.
- Open-source Java, or give enough assistance to existing OS java projects such as Kaffe and GNU Classpath to make them viable real-world usable Java implementations. Sun thinks this is irrelevant; it's not. Getting something truly open source is a key step to making something ubiquitous.
- Develop some real-world Java apps. As someone else on
Ok, that's enough ranting, sure to stir up many heated flames about how much Java sucks, and Scott hasn't called me anytime recently to ask for business advice, so I'll leave off here.
-------
Create a WAP server -
Re:Skype?Skype for Linux is on its way, and it can't be here soon enough for me. If you look on their site in the jobs section, they are looking for a Linux/QT programmer. Older versions of Skype ran under Wine, but apparently they are now doing some code relocation/decryption thing that breaks with Wine, so we just have to wait for the official Linux client. And if it's Qt, it will look good and integrate nicely with Suse 9.1 which is also almost here...
----------
Create a WAP server -
A very cool book about the TransitIf you would like to read a book that is a brilliant mix of great writing, science, philosophy, conspiracies and the Transit of Venus, as witnessed in Africa, I highly recommend "Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon. It does take a while to get through it and you need to have Google and a dictionary handy to understand some of the more obscure references in it, but it is both funny and sad and very worth reading. Basically, Mason and Dixon, the two cartographers behind the Mason Dixon Line, are dispatched to various places in the world to make various observations, and the most interesting is their assignment to South Africa to observe the Transit.
------------
Create a WAP server -
Windows and Linux examples, yesOf course there is malware for Windows and Linux because both are written in unsafe languages which manipulate memory directly and often cast objects to (void *) and use containers (pointers to regions of memory) which don't know their own size. I know I've posted on this before here on
----------
Create a WAP server -
You do not want to use this for coolingThis is a hydrocarbon with a bunch of floruine in it. It's similar enough to many general anesthetics that I would imagine it could be used as one in its gas form. If the molecule is small enough to be absorbed in the lungs and carried through the blood-brain barrier, I'm guessing it would be a GA. Not something I want in my computer case.
------------
Create a WAP server -
StunningI have pre-ordered my Suse 9.1 and I can't wait to try it out. From what I can see in these screen shots, it looks like it is far ahead of MS Windows in many areas of usability. It looks like Steve Jobs should be taking a close look at some of the features. It also looks like it comes with more built-in stuff (things like OCR) than either MS Windows or OSX. Hopefully Amazon will hurry up with my package.
----------
Create a WAP server -
Respect for one's customers...Gregory Nemitz, president of Orbital Development, said: "The MoonCrash Project would probably be attractive to some bored rich guy, who is tired of playing with his radio-controlled model airplanes and wants to move up to the next level."
Wow, that doesn't seem like the right tone for someone trying to sell a $6mil unnecessary luxury product.
--------
WAP server software -
It could have happenedIf software patents had existed thirty or forty years ago, there would be patents on the for loop, linked lists, the subroutine, use of buffers, storing text in the form of a sequence of bytes (an invention called a "string"), use of APIs, re-use of code in a form called a "library", the process of merging multiple files of executable code together known as "linking", and many other things, and the process of taking a file containing "source code" and turning it into executable (a novel invention known as "compiling"). All of these things would be patented. Non-commercial software could not exist because there's just no way to write a program without strings, lists and loops, unless your program just consists of a long list of NOOP instructions. But of course NOOP could have been patented too. In fact all these inventions are much more patentable than the stuff that is getting patented now, because when these software constructs were developed, they really were completely novel and non-obvious, unlike things like one-click ordering.
--------
Create a WAP server -
Maybe someone will finally answer my question...I send a lot of things to
--------
WAP hosting -
TcpflowIt has already been mentioned here, but tcpflow is great. It captures a tcp session into a file. Sometimes if I just can't figure out what is going on with a web application, the best way to really see what the client is getting in real life is to tcpflow it and capture a session. Sometimes that shows up the bug. Tcpdump is good but it puts out individual packets which are hard to piece together. Tcpflow does all of that. Of course, it isn't so useful for protocols other than tcp.
-------
Create a WAP server -
It's the same old saw"Security is about patches." That statement implies the belief that security flaws are inevitable, an inherent part of having software. This simply isn't true. We should not accept such thinking. If a product doesn't have security holes the day it is released, it still won't have security holes a thousand years from now, patches or not. The question is, how do we ship products without holes? The reasons we have security holes in products are not because developers are stupid or careless, or because the business side of the company wants to ship the product now. No, the reason we have holes is because we're still using horrible software development tools which make security problems almost inevitable. Humans just can't think like C compilers and if we write a long enough program in plain old C, we end up with buffer overflows and lack of bounds checking on things. If we used safer tools like Java, which don't have buffers and which store data in structures which know their own size (collections), the vast majority of vulnerabilities would never even be created. If a user sends malicious input to a Java process, we know that no matter how broken the Java is, that malicious input can't stomp on memory and be executed, no matter what, because the JVM and the bytecode verifier don't allow it to. That is the kind of assurance that software should have.
It is always possible to make security problems at the design level, like forgetting to check an account balance before allowing a withdrawal in bank software, but humans are very good at thinking in those ways, and those kinds of problems are rare.
---------
Create a WAP server -
It must be askedThis being
--------
WAP hosting -
Open sourcing Java is less likelyMy first reaction when I saw the news of the settlement was that this will probably kill any attempts to open source Java. The settlement includes patent cross licensing. What are the terms of this cross licensing? I have no idea, and the terms will probably never be published, but Sun's lawyers would have to spend a lot of time going through that agreement before they can open source anything now. The case they have to worry about is if the Java(tm) implementation contains something covered under a patent which falls under this cross-licensing agreement, especially if some little bit of Microsoft's technology has crept into the Java implementation somehow. Given the very broad patents that are being granted by the US PTO these days, it would not be surprising at all if Sun's lawyers said "we just can't be sure there isn't something from MS in here among these million lines of code."
If we want an open source Java, I think the right thing to pursue is Kaffe, gcj, and Gnu CLASSPATH. I would love it if Sun did open source Java and such an action may be the best way to ensure Java's long-term survival, but somehow I have a feeling that Scott and the Sun lawyers won't have the guts or the will to take the risks and do this.
--------
Create a WAP server -
Maybe Theo could help?OpenBSD has had "W^X" for quite a while now, and it sounds like that is what Bill is talking about. It is a great idea. There is just no reason for a program to ever modify its own executable code, with a very few exceptions such as Java's JIT compiler. For once it sounds like he is talking about security that protects his customers, not "security" such as DRM which reduces the capabilities of the product.
--------
Create a WAP server -
Electric cars, I hopeThe technology is all there. AC Propulsion just took a trip from LA to Vegas in a lithium-battery car. That's all the range we need for a practical car. They did it using thousands of off-the-shelf mobile device lithium batteries. How much would it cost if automotive-size lithium batteries were mass-produced? I'm guessing prices would be competitive with the price of a new ICE car, except that electric drivers won't ever have to worry about gas going to $3/gal.
Also I hope that cities start being designed to be anti-car, meaning they are designed to be accessed on foot or by public transit systems. If you've ever been to Singapore you know what I'm talking about.
---------
Create a wireless web site -
What about an open source search engine instead?There seem to be too many social networking sites these days. How many can one person possibly belong to? What would be cool is an open source search engine, although I don't know if that project is still active. One thing to consider is that open source works well for "products" like GNU/Linux but does not work as well for services like a social networking site. Even a service like our beloved Slashdot may use open source software but it is a commercially-operated ad-sponsored business.
---------
Create your wireless web site -
Performance must be testedHave you ever tested the performance difference between a package and something built from source with all the right optimization flags? I would be surprised if there is much of a performance difference, if any. And even if there is a measurable performance difference, how much does that matter in your application? Are these computers so overloaded that a 10% (or even a 50%) difference in application speed will matter? I was just looking at Penguincomputing and a basic dual Opteron server starts at about $2500.
It seems like computer people tend to think about performance while business people think about reliability.
---------------
Create a WAP server -
I vote yesIf you're going to do any formatting at all, especially for the LDP, it should be in CSS. This is why:
- All the main Linux browsers today support CSS.
- CSS looks better than the old style of using nested tables and spacer graphics.
- CSS is accessible. A CSS page looks ok on Lynx, whereas any other formatting system doesn't work on Lynx.
- Users who don't like formatting or CSS can turn it off and still access the sites.
- CSS formatted pages can be viewed on some wireless devices and can be transformed for all wireless devices. Ever need to look something up so you could get the computer on the net?
- It's easy to do. Just create the CSS sheets and then put in the link at the beginning of the documents and it should mostly work.