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1. Java the language. The syntax, types, etc. Basically anything in The Java Language Specification
   
2. Java the Virtual Machine. The bytecodes, class file format, frames, stacks, etc, as described in The Java Virtual Machine Specification It's worth noting that there are 130+ languages that can be compiled to java bytecode!
   
3. Java the platform. The libraries, windowing toolkits, native interface support. Whatever you might call an API. These are of the use what you need, ignore what you don't class. Interestingly, doing a "import " will not increase the size of your code beyond those classes you actually use. Unlike, say MFC, where referencing just one function means you have to pull the entire DLL into your program.
   

yerricide is extremely wrong, as this article about SuSE and TurboLinux bundling Java and this article about Mandrake Linux with Java and several other distribution agreements as listed here on Sun's Java on Linux page.

yerricide is extremely wrong, as this article about SuSE and TurboLinux bundling Java and this article about Mandrake Linux with Java and several other distribution agreements as listed here on Sun's Java on Linux page.

yerricide is extremely wrong, as this article about SuSE and TurboLinux bundling Java and this article about Mandrake Linux with Java and several other distribution agreements as listed here on Sun's Java on Linux page.

I will agree with you completely if you can explain to me why our "professional in the industry" insists on teaching like this because "that's how it's done in the industry".

That isn't how it's done in industry. Frankly I don't understand why anyone should introduce Java via GUI programming and even worse JavaBeans. If you want to see what real Java code looks like, look around Sun's site for the example programs used in the Java tutorial(the only source you need to learn Java) and take a gander at those.

You may also search on Google for Open Source Java applications, there are lots of them.

Grabel's Law

I will agree with you completely if you can explain to me why our "professional in the industry" insists on teaching like this because "that's how it's done in the industry".

That isn't how it's done in industry. Frankly I don't understand why anyone should introduce Java via GUI programming and even worse JavaBeans. If you want to see what real Java code looks like, look around Sun's site for the example programs used in the Java tutorial(the only source you need to learn Java) and take a gander at those.

You may also search on Google for Open Source Java applications, there are lots of them.

Grabel's Law

I originally wasn't going to write a response to this, thinking that the whole premise was ludicrous. There doesn't have to be linux support for Java, you just write java and it runs on any platform. There is a large amount of Open Source support for Java, from the Giant Java Tree, to the Java, Jakarta, and XML Apache projects. There is even an Open Source application server called Enhyra that supports pretty much everything you would expect from an enterprise class J2EE server. And if you don't like open source, then BEA's WebLogic server runs fine on Linux.

So why is there an impression that the Linux community doesn't support Java? One thing I will say is that if you are a Java supporter, you probably aren't a strong Linux supporter. That is because Java is platform independent. A Java developer doesn't care what platform they are on. Before people respond to this with the typical FUD that Java isn't cross, platform, bear in mind that all of the open source projects above run on all the platforms I've ever used them on, without any recompilation. Xerces worked on Win2K and linux. Tomcat worked on Win2K, linux, and Solaris. I don't know about weblogic, since I haven't tries moving the binaries over (I just used the rpm on linux, install on Win2K). Development in Java is development in Java. If you do it right (meaning don't setLayout(null)), it'll work. If you're server side, you have no worries.

That being said, Blackdown supports JDK1.3, the latest release of the JDK on any other platform. It seems that the majority of the OS developers I know from the projects I listed use linux as their development machine. And let's face it, Java is giving linux a lot of credibility in the server side market because it's sinking in that spending 20,000 on a single Sparc if better spent on a cluster of linux machines running (insert appserver du jour here).

Finally, you can go ahead and say that it isn't making any headway on the desktop. Well, that's true, but it isn't making headway on any platform's desktop. Linux is no exception.

You can try to say that it isn't making headway in the embedded market, but with the KVM for larger embedded devices (>40K RAM), and real-time specification fromt the community development, you'd be wrong.

I'm surprised that JDJ would print such tripe. I'm not surprised that Slashdot twisted it even farther and threw in a bunch of FUD.

Java was a great idea let down by a flawed implementation and a flawed corporate strategy IMHO. What I think is that whilst the language itself isn't really going anywhere fast, the idea behind it will live on.

Java is used by almost every major player in every major industry in the U.S. and beyond. Personal Java runs on the myriad embedded systems with their own JVM and even American Express credit cards. Java servlets and JSP run myriad websites from mail.com to First Union . Enterprise Java Beans and it's associate web server platforms has spawned a cottage industry of server platform developers that include IBM, Bea, Allaire and more. Java ships with a free fully functional CORBA orb which allows for rapid development of robust, multi-tiered distributed applications.

Simply because all the C hackers and Perl users on Slashdot aren't using Java does not mean that it isn't going anywhere fast. I haven't seen a new Linux app coded in Lisp or Smalltalk in a while, this doesn't mean they are dead.

And it seems as though Microsoft have learned the lesson from this that Sun didn't, so I expect C# to go places Java never will.

C# will be a Microsoft only language which already puts it behind Java in places it can go. Standardization of the syntax of the language is useless if all the underlying DCOM/COM+/.NET infrastructure exists only on Windows.

On the other hand, I recently wrote a testing tool for a multibillion dollar corporation that sells SCM software to several Fortune five hundred companies, over the summer and noticed that Java is almost Write Once Run Anywhere as originally promised by Sun. The company I worked for supports six different platforms and is considering supporting Linux as a seventh. Their languages of choice for building tools for cross-platform development were Perl and Java. The chances of them switching all that to C# and losing over 50 per cent of their customers? ZERO

Of course the actual apps were written in Motif/MFC depending on the platform



Grabel's Law

Java was a great idea let down by a flawed implementation and a flawed corporate strategy IMHO. What I think is that whilst the language itself isn't really going anywhere fast, the idea behind it will live on.

Java is used by almost every major player in every major industry in the U.S. and beyond. Personal Java runs on the myriad embedded systems with their own JVM and even American Express credit cards. Java servlets and JSP run myriad websites from mail.com to First Union . Enterprise Java Beans and it's associate web server platforms has spawned a cottage industry of server platform developers that include IBM, Bea, Allaire and more. Java ships with a free fully functional CORBA orb which allows for rapid development of robust, multi-tiered distributed applications.

Simply because all the C hackers and Perl users on Slashdot aren't using Java does not mean that it isn't going anywhere fast. I haven't seen a new Linux app coded in Lisp or Smalltalk in a while, this doesn't mean they are dead.

And it seems as though Microsoft have learned the lesson from this that Sun didn't, so I expect C# to go places Java never will.

C# will be a Microsoft only language which already puts it behind Java in places it can go. Standardization of the syntax of the language is useless if all the underlying DCOM/COM+/.NET infrastructure exists only on Windows.

On the other hand, I recently wrote a testing tool for a multibillion dollar corporation that sells SCM software to several Fortune five hundred companies, over the summer and noticed that Java is almost Write Once Run Anywhere as originally promised by Sun. The company I worked for supports six different platforms and is considering supporting Linux as a seventh. Their languages of choice for building tools for cross-platform development were Perl and Java. The chances of them switching all that to C# and losing over 50 per cent of their customers? ZERO

Of course the actual apps were written in Motif/MFC depending on the platform



Grabel's Law

Java was a great idea let down by a flawed implementation and a flawed corporate strategy IMHO. What I think is that whilst the language itself isn't really going anywhere fast, the idea behind it will live on.

Java is used by almost every major player in every major industry in the U.S. and beyond. Personal Java runs on the myriad embedded systems with their own JVM and even American Express credit cards. Java servlets and JSP run myriad websites from mail.com to First Union . Enterprise Java Beans and it's associate web server platforms has spawned a cottage industry of server platform developers that include IBM, Bea, Allaire and more. Java ships with a free fully functional CORBA orb which allows for rapid development of robust, multi-tiered distributed applications.

Simply because all the C hackers and Perl users on Slashdot aren't using Java does not mean that it isn't going anywhere fast. I haven't seen a new Linux app coded in Lisp or Smalltalk in a while, this doesn't mean they are dead.

And it seems as though Microsoft have learned the lesson from this that Sun didn't, so I expect C# to go places Java never will.

C# will be a Microsoft only language which already puts it behind Java in places it can go. Standardization of the syntax of the language is useless if all the underlying DCOM/COM+/.NET infrastructure exists only on Windows.

On the other hand, I recently wrote a testing tool for a multibillion dollar corporation that sells SCM software to several Fortune five hundred companies, over the summer and noticed that Java is almost Write Once Run Anywhere as originally promised by Sun. The company I worked for supports six different platforms and is considering supporting Linux as a seventh. Their languages of choice for building tools for cross-platform development were Perl and Java. The chances of them switching all that to C# and losing over 50 per cent of their customers? ZERO

Of course the actual apps were written in Motif/MFC depending on the platform



Grabel's Law

Java was a great idea let down by a flawed implementation and a flawed corporate strategy IMHO. What I think is that whilst the language itself isn't really going anywhere fast, the idea behind it will live on.

Java is used by almost every major player in every major industry in the U.S. and beyond. Personal Java runs on the myriad embedded systems with their own JVM and even American Express credit cards. Java servlets and JSP run myriad websites from mail.com to First Union . Enterprise Java Beans and it's associate web server platforms has spawned a cottage industry of server platform developers that include IBM, Bea, Allaire and more. Java ships with a free fully functional CORBA orb which allows for rapid development of robust, multi-tiered distributed applications.

Simply because all the C hackers and Perl users on Slashdot aren't using Java does not mean that it isn't going anywhere fast. I haven't seen a new Linux app coded in Lisp or Smalltalk in a while, this doesn't mean they are dead.

And it seems as though Microsoft have learned the lesson from this that Sun didn't, so I expect C# to go places Java never will.

C# will be a Microsoft only language which already puts it behind Java in places it can go. Standardization of the syntax of the language is useless if all the underlying DCOM/COM+/.NET infrastructure exists only on Windows.

On the other hand, I recently wrote a testing tool for a multibillion dollar corporation that sells SCM software to several Fortune five hundred companies, over the summer and noticed that Java is almost Write Once Run Anywhere as originally promised by Sun. The company I worked for supports six different platforms and is considering supporting Linux as a seventh. Their languages of choice for building tools for cross-platform development were Perl and Java. The chances of them switching all that to C# and losing over 50 per cent of their customers? ZERO

Of course the actual apps were written in Motif/MFC depending on the platform



Grabel's Law

The software at that link is System V Release 2, and as far as I know there is no way to get that legally for free. You can get current System V Release 4 for free (depending on how you plan to use it) from places like SCO and Sun.

SysVR2 is about 15 years too late to be "original Unix", though. You can get binary versions of much earlier systems -- Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Edition research Unix -- free for personal use, with Supnik's simulator at DEC's ftp site.

If you want to get early Unix source, and some versions other than those above, you can get a suitable Unix source license for free from SCO.

For information on early Unix, you could start with The UNIX Heritage Society, or perhaps Dennis Ritchie's home page.

JavaBeans address much of your issue, along with all those ready-built COM/ActiveX components you see for sale in the back of DDJ.

I don't know of anything like this for Unix yet, but Bonobo might be promising. It takes a lot of time for something like this to reach a critical mass, though.

27. Does StarOffice run on Linux PPC/PowerMac/Alpha computers?

StarOffice needs a Computer with SPARC or Intel processor, but does not run on a Mac or Alpha PC.

ApplixWare has always been fairly popular among the FreeBSD crowd (and others, I'm sure, but that's where I've heard the most about it), simply because it bothered to support other {U,Li}n[iu]xen than Linux/x86. It's also significantly less bloated than, say, StarOffice.

It'd be nice if they let their current version float out there for free (Free is probably too much to hope for), but I guess that's unlikely as that would compete with Anyware Office.

I'm pretty sure I've seen Anyware Office, actually, a while ago. With some significant feature addition, it would be usable, and as long as they don't fall victim to creeping featuritis, it should run fairly quickly on newer JVMs. I have to wonder about how successful it'll be, especially since it's hard to even remember *snicker* Corel's offering...

> There aren't any public companies selling BSD

What about this one? I seem to remember this little company used to sell a BSD before they went to SysV.

• LIMS-related pages
• Sun Solutions Clinical IS
• LIMSource (platforms not listed)

• LIMS products
• NetLab (Unix server)
• Saric (BioCare)
• Triple G (Ultra LIS)
• Medasys (Nuclear Medicine Acquisition, Processing and Communications System)
• eHealth Engines
• Technidata (TDLIMS)

Not true. You have the option of getting a Solaris 8 CD containing the source code. Go check Sun's site if you don't believe me.

Refusing to run unsigned code is far from being a new concept in the computing world. There seems (as usual) to be a lot of heat and shouting here on Slashdot about this because it is Microsoft pre-announcing that they may use this feature in a future OS.

Lots of other platforms and vendors have done this in the past and will continue to move in this direction in the future.

Sun's Trusted Solaris 1.x released over 5 years ago had a feature in a similar vain that meant the system failed to boot if all of the critical software (TCB - Trusted Computing Base) didn't verify its checksums (this was checksums rather than proper digital signatures but the end goal is the same).

Java has stuff like this as well.

Please people stop and think about the technical issues and goals before mouthing off and assuming just because it was announced by Microsoft that is is a bad thing technically.

If the article had s/Microsoft/Linux/g what then would have been the thread of converstation in Slashdot ? I guess it would have gone something along the lines of Linux making leaps and bounds in security something that Microsoft doesn't care about and would never implement because it was too useful and would get in the way of lame user doing any work.

This is good progress for Security on their platform.

See: http://java.sun.com/produc ts/ java-media/2D/index.html

-- michael

-Peter

StarOffice Schedule Server? (scheduling across the network requires installing a server which is on a CD-ROM)

StarOffice Schedule Server? (scheduling across the network requires installing a server which is on a CD-ROM)

As a user, I might not care. I want good software. I like Free Software for well discussed reasons (see gnu.org), but I wont get into that now.

Now, consider being a developer. I want to write applications which need more power than a Palm offers me. Alternatives I can buy: devices with Epoc or Windows CE. Let's concentrate on Windows.

Development tools for Windows CE are, hm, not cheap, it's costly to get information about the system, the API is different to everything I know from before. This even counts for Windows for Desktop developers, to a certain degree.

I can use PersonalJava. This might work, but there might be application-specific reasons for not using Java.

Alternative: I can put Linux on my iPAQ. Whow, what opportunities does that offer: I can use plain X. I can use PocketLinux with Microwindows and Java. I can use embedded Qt.

Every of these possibilities has counterparts on Desktops. I have access to documentation. I can use tools I know from before. So it's easier to write applications.

Wait a minute. Applications. Wasn't that the user cares about?

I just bought me an iPAQ, and I'm looking forward to putting Linux on it. This Windows CE stuff is so closed, I can't even sync the build-in calendars with my Linux-system (why use a standard format, when you can use outlook). The Palm is much more open here.

To put it very easy: Linux on iPAQ = Openness of PalmOS + Power of a "Windows powered" device.

To sum up my aborted post, Cray has been evolving from the single processor Cray-1, to the Multi-processor Cray YMP, to the massively distributed T3E. Seymour and Cray Computer Corp. (spun off of CRI in the late 80's or so) failed because they couldn't push as much performance through a smaller number of processors. Eventually the physical laws of silicon (Seymour even tried GaAs to get more performance) take over, and you must expand the number of processing units to get greater and greater performance.

The T3E is a 3D toroidal-constructed system. SGI's Origin uses the Hypercube. Sun uses whatever Cray's Business Unit did back in the day before SGI sold the Starfire, renamed the Sun UltraEnterprise 10000, to Sun (SMP I guess). The model works. That's not disputed.

The High-End market that Cray and Hitachi serves is fairly stagnant (growing slightly more than inflation) at around 1 Billion USD/year (IIRC). It doesn't grow 40% per year like standard PCs, handhelds, or the streaming video & porn market. The pie is only so big, so IBM and Sun choose the bigger market; they're exploiting the internet. ASCI projects don't make much money. They're done for the press they receive. I've heard of companies exploiting Cray's extreme I/O bandwidth for file archivers to tape robots, but that's about it for general purpose. You wouldn't buy an SV1 or a Hitachi to run Apache, that's for sure.

As Durinia pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, Ford and other auto companies still use Cray Vector machines, as well as other research labs, etc. Vector use isn't dead in the US. It's just not the centerpiece, I guess.

I was intending to do something like this, but since its already done I will just add a couple of things...

A wide range of system configurations, changeable without system or user program reorganization. Windows: Only three reboots to install a sound card! Linux: Exchange anything but the kernel without rebooting Microkernels: 8-D

Well I take this to mean 'hot plug' (since dorking with the system/modules is 'system reorganization') which as far as I'm aware linux doesn't support but Win 2k if your HW supports it, AIX, and Solaris do.

Hierarchical structures of information for system administration and decentralization of user activities. Not entirely sure what they mean by this...
I think they mean NDS, Active Directory (which is basically LDAP with a bunch of support) and of course LDAP if you are willing to spend the time to get it to support all the cool stuff NDS does .

The first one, actually -- the position for the second is still open.

Unfortunately, the 'dot in .com' position was already taken :(

Check it out here. Polling places use computers and a private network to relay vote tallys. I also heard that they use a touch screen computer display to actually cast their ballots, but I havn't seen any reports confirming this.

Also, California is apparently running non-binding on-line voting demonstrations.

To avoid repetition, I scrolled through all the posts to see if anyone else had mentioned this... and I've come to the conclusion that either: 1) nobody from california reads slashdot or 2) nobody from california that reads slashdot voted. This year, california implemented electronic voting. The story is H ere

Electronic voting powered by Java...taking place at the normal polling place, not over the web, using a pseudo-smart card technology. Great Stuff.

• JRE for Windows
• Linux
• Sorry, couldn't find Mac.

• JRE for Windows
• Linux
• Sorry, couldn't find Mac.

Sun has an ad campaign of "We are the DOT in DOT COM".

Hey 1.4Ghz means that the buttons on Java GUIs will go up and down almost in *real-time*. Wow. those wierdos in the Java development camp will be dancing in the air!

While I can't vouch for the rest of the country, California voters are pretty much immune to widespread electronic voter fraud. When Cali. residents cast their votes on Tuesday, those votes will be piped through a brand new Java based statewide election reporting system. This system, developed in part by the company I work for, is brand new from the ground up and has undergone full code audits from several parties to verify that no "illicit" code is hiding inside. You still don't trust the code? Well, it's your right to be paranoid, but I regularly have lunch with the guys who wrote the new software and I can tell you my mind will be at ease.

You can get more info here: http://java.sun.com/features/ 200 0/11/calvoter.html

What is all this Beowulf crap? For highly-available systems, clustering usually means server fail-over. It means an active-standby configuration with a shared disk. If the active server dies, the standby mounts the disk, starts up the app, and carries on.

For examples of shrink-wrapped versions, see Sun Cluster, Veritas Cluster Server, and a Linux based one, Turbo Linux Cluster Server.

A lot of services have to be active-standby; only one server can be doing the job at a time. Any database falls into this category, including SQL-based, LDAP, and mail stores. This is where the above products would get used. For services that can be active-active, like web servers, DNS, mail relays, some form of load balancing is better and cheaper.

There are distributed databases on the horizon, but few of them are ready for primetime. These would feel more like a Beowulf cluster.

I'm not trying to tell you that calling Beowulf a cluster is wrong, but limiting clustering to just Beowulf is.

Now you can patch the source the same way you would patch some Open Source OS.

Questions? :-)

What I meant was a more open license being used for Java would be a good thing, and I would support them in this, even if they preventing forking by means similar to the ones you name (registation and certification.)

Anywhere, here is java's future in action:

http://java.sun.com/features/2000/10/jcp.html?fron tpage-banner

They appear to be reaching out to the various interests involved in Java programming to approve changes in a congressional manner. I don't know if I should demand better representation, or less taxes.

-Ben

In case someone hasn't already posted this, you can download the source from http://www.sun.com/communitysource. Sorry if this is already common knowledge.

Interestingly, the virtual machine is written in C, not C++.

The class loading functionality (at least the low level parts of it) appears to be implemented by src/share/javavm/runtime/classload.c.

So, we're left wondering which of [Java the Language and Java bytecode/JVM], if any, or both, Sun plans to "open source"...

The language and the bytecode are already open, in the sense that you are free to create an open source compiler and JVM (c.f. kaffe.org for an effort already well underway).

The software Sun makes available for download, OTOH, is most definitely not Open Source (at least, not yet).

-y

I think this is a great idea if they do it. Javadocs are cool, but sometimes, you have to go find the source to figure out how ther *^&$ thing *really* works.

• Sun already includes the public source for the class library with the JDK
• Depending on one vendor's internals is a bad thing
• You should be counting on the Java Language Specification, not the vendor's implementation
• Good automated test cases should keep you safe

Also, I've seen 'fixes' people have put in that later break things worse when stepping up the VM. Just switching to IBM's VM, or from 1.1.x to 1.3.x should not cause any problems.

For an example of vendor-specific class sources, compare java.lang.String.valueOf( int ) in Sun's 1.1.x and IBM's 1.1.x. Some would recommend going with Integer.toString( int ) instead as an 'optimization'. However, it makes the code less clear and less reuseable, and, more importantly, in IBM's VM doing that is actually slower. And even in Sun's VM doing the 'optimized' thing is not significantly faster. So why then do some recommend that 'optimization'??? Because they looked into the Sun 1.1.x sources and decided to change their application's code based on their examination of the Sun sources.

Everyone who for a second believes that IPv6 is going to leave anyone out in the cold when it comes time to upgrade hasn't read a SINGLE document describing it. Here is a link for you. Click it. Now. Don't tell me I didn't warn you. That link is a semitechnical overview of IPv6, but for some more important details, see the RFC describing the new sockets system.

One thing I want you to get absolutely sure is that IPv6 is fully backward compatible with v4 AND you can switch an individual host or router from v4 to v6 without cutting out any of your v4 customers. From the first link:

Ease of transition is a key point in the design of IPng. It is not something [that] was added in at the end. IPng is designed to interoperate with IPv4. Specific mechanisms (embedded IPv4 addresses, pseudo-checksum rules, etc.) were built into IPng to support transition and compatibility with IPv4. It was designed to permit a gradual and piecemeal deployment with a minimum of dependencies.

BTW, another poster made a comment about how 'IPv6 is dead till it ships in a microsoft stack. When it does, IPv6 will be real instantly.' What kind of idiocy!?! Did IPv4 just suddenly become important because Microsoft added it to Win95?!? And besides, with something as important as the IP, no one company (or two, even MS + Cisco have their limits) can dictate what and how it will be. Why don't you go and write some applications that use IPv6 in a way that people want and can't be done in IPv4. Then, and only then, does it become real.


--------

He's right. Learning some things will definitely help the way you think about things. The incredibly strong typing of something like pascal will definitely kick your *ss if you've been doing nothing but C for a while, and I think that's actually a Good Thing. Learning Eiffel if you already know smalltalk is a very different experience.

Even something like Algol will probably change your views and get you closer to the hardware in many respects (not that you can get Algol to run on most machines anymore....;-)

What about Ada? Programming by Contract really will teach you something serious about how you actually interact with the rest of your application, and while you'll curse it ("I KNOW what I'm trying to do and it's correct, dammit!") you'll be happier for learning it. Older, but happier.

And as long as the languages keep coming, there'll pretty much never be a chance to really run out.

My list would include:

• C
• C++
• Pascal& lt;/a>
• Lisp (anything but eLisp)
• Python
• Perl
• Smalltalk
• ML
• prolog&l t;/a>
• Eiffel
• Ada
• a RISC Assembler
• Cobol (those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it)
• Java
• BASIC (the non-Visual kind).

For some reason Debian puts NEdit in the non-free section. That means it doesn't come on the CDs. I was doing an install for a friend on his laptop, and NEdit is his favorite editor too, so this was kindof annoying; now he's got to get a NIC working in order to download it. So maybe you could look into making it truly free software? I wish I knew what the objection is...probably something silly.

I also don't like the use of Motif. Not that Motif is getting in the way, it's just a minor nit for the usual reasons (lack of themability, having to load a library that I don't use for much else, or use a statically linked version which wastes memory). I do love the fact that it runs on other platforms like Solaris, but now that Sun is going to be using Gnome I guess that means GTK will always be available also.

I have a lot of trouble with shortcut keys lately; in older versions they used to work perfectly, but now it seems that it takes time to notice that the control key is down; for instance I usually have to press control-C several times to successfully copy to the clipboard. Sometimes I've even seen it insert control characters into the text when I press the keys, like control-S comes out as or something like that; but this is an intermittent problem which often goes away if I close NEdit and start a new copy. The not-noticing-control-C problem does not go away.

I love the column selection features; that and indent/outdent and macros are the major things I want to have in a code editor beyond the usual features. It's just a little quirky compared to other editors like SlickEdit or most Windows code editors that indent/outdent is not done with tab/shift-tab, and drag-n-drop is done with the middle mouse button. I can deal with these quirks but I'd rather be able to customize them.

A means to choose a character encoding and thereby switch to an appropriate font would be nice. I sometimes use NEdit to practice my Russian, and have to manually change the font to Cronyx Fixed, which is KOI8 encoded. (But I don't want to use that font all the time, because it is not as easy on the eyes as Lucida.) Fortunately NEdit allows me to type 8-bit characters (I use xrus to switch the keyboard into that mode), otherwise it would not have been possible at all. But there is that dialog where the default fonts are set; it would be nice if I could also set fonts to use for various other encodings, in an extensible way (like add an encoding, add a font to go with it, instead of only having a fixed set of encodings). Then have an easy-to-access menu to choose an encoding while editing, from the known set.

I hope NEdit continues to improve and asymptotically approach a bug-free state. Good luck to you with it.

The say "part" of the low score? Winstone would seem to be precisely the sort of benchmarks that optimizers hate. I used to have some peripheral involvement with HotS pot Java VM, and nothing upset the development team more than benchmarks that didn't reflect real-world uses of their product. And HotSpot is very similar to TransMeta -- both selectively compile interpreted code into optimized native code. See the Hotspot Benchmarking Q+A.

__________

The say "part" of the low score? Winstone would seem to be precisely the sort of benchmarks that optimizers hate. I used to have some peripheral involvement with HotS pot Java VM, and nothing upset the development team more than benchmarks that didn't reflect real-world uses of their product. And HotSpot is very similar to TransMeta -- both selectively compile interpreted code into optimized native code. See the Hotspot Benchmarking Q+A.

__________

Star Office can do this. And it should be able to do a good job of importing your current slides.

http://www.sun.com/staroffice

"Sun recently acknowledged a problem involving an external memory cache on its UltraSPARC II microprocessor module. Under certain conditions, the problem has been triggering system failures and frequent server reboots at customer locations over the past 18 months. "

NOTE: UltraSPARC II == PROCESSOR ; Solaris == OPERATING SYSTEM

Granted, Solaris has his own share of bugs, and SunSolve is the site where they're documented, and where public patches are available. If you happen to have a support agreement, you can even access the knowledge database used by their engineers to determine a resolution for the issues you're running into.
The bottom line is that you're comparing a badly-mangled OS release such as RedHat 7.0 to a enterprise-class operating system environment (yes, Solaris is *that* reliable), and using a *HARDWARE* problem on Sun's processors as an excuse to defend your rush-job and say "Hey, our stuff is free, and we have it out in the open, so you can't really complain that much. We still rule and whatnot".
Sun made customers sign an NDA like any other company would, when it came to resolving some of the issues they run into. I'd sign one if it meant that I'd have stellar support (which companies like Sun have, and EMC makes it a standard) and my problem would be resolved.
Now, when you start shipping your own hardware, provide support for both hardware and software, and have tens of thousands of corporate customers, then you can start pointing fingers at Sun and whatnot. Until then, make sure your people take the time to release a decent product, and at least take the time to read the articles you quote on your 'Open Letters'.

P.S. - Oh yah... for the record,I did buy a copy of RH 6.2, and attempted to work with 7 as well... Only to go back to Debian on my intel boxes, and Solaris 7 and 8 on my Sparcs.

Didn't sun just release the Sun Grid Engine just the other week? It does the same thing, run distributed compute intensive jobs on idle systems. Of course, you can download the stuff now... no need to wait, and they promise that they will release it under an open source license in the near future.

Sun have done a system very simular to this, and as far as I know it is far cooler ;)
For those who are interested it is called Jini. And you can get to their site here.

This class is used to generate native system input events for the purposes of test automation, self-running demos, and other applications where control of the mouse and keyboard is needed. The primary purpose of Robot is to facilitate automated testing of Java platform implementations.

When you want to play back the user's actions, disable logging, and then call dispatchEvent() with each of the deserialized events. That should give you a play-by-play exact copy of everything the user did (including moving the mouse...)

This won't work if you have multiple windows unless you're creative... so be creative with it.

Standard disclaimer that this doesn't represent professional advice and I've never tried it, but it might work...

(Also, an AC mentioned java.awt.RobotThis class is used to generate native system input events for the purposes of test automation, self-running demos, and other applications where control of the mouse and keyboard is needed. The primary purpose of Robot is to facilitate automated testing of Java platform implementations.)