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Why not use an existing and available metadata standard, such as the jpeg2000 metadata standard, or the EXIF standard that embeds the metadata into the image file?

These standards are already available, are already being used in cameras and imaging software,
and are documented well enough that support can be implemented into your open-source imagebrowser or other app. There is no reason to add (now redundant) metadata layer to the filesystem or image database when the required metadata is already included in the image file itself in a easy to extract manner.

There are some interesting and informative articles pertaining to image metadata located at the TASI website and an article about accessing jpeg metadata using java (not really java specific) over at Sun's Java site.

Perhaps Microsoft is working within the existing standards while selling it as their own creation. If they are, it would not be the first time, and that would still be much more desirable than if they were rolling their own non-compatible, propietary standard.

Sun's Java Desktop System seems to be doing quite well.

10,000 to the United India Insurance Company, 500,000 to 1,000,000 per year to the China Standard Software Co, and approval from the UK government for a 5 year purchase agreement.

Downloadable Java applets seem to be doing quite well on the internet, including for games, custom user interfaces, security applications, etc.

At the company I work at, one of our main design tools is a java application that you just copy from the server (essentially download) and run. The developers came from another company where they were doing the same thing.

NASA is using Java to control the Mars Rovers, and track satellites.

More and more tools built by Computer Science researchers are in Java, like this Bayesian Network tool, or are switching from other languages to Java, like this static program verification tool.

In short, I think you completely missed it with your answer.

Sun's Java Desktop System seems to be doing quite well.

10,000 to the United India Insurance Company, 500,000 to 1,000,000 per year to the China Standard Software Co, and approval from the UK government for a 5 year purchase agreement.

Downloadable Java applets seem to be doing quite well on the internet, including for games, custom user interfaces, security applications, etc.

At the company I work at, one of our main design tools is a java application that you just copy from the server (essentially download) and run. The developers came from another company where they were doing the same thing.

NASA is using Java to control the Mars Rovers, and track satellites.

More and more tools built by Computer Science researchers are in Java, like this Bayesian Network tool, or are switching from other languages to Java, like this static program verification tool.

In short, I think you completely missed it with your answer.

Sun's Java Desktop System seems to be doing quite well.

10,000 to the United India Insurance Company, 500,000 to 1,000,000 per year to the China Standard Software Co, and approval from the UK government for a 5 year purchase agreement.

Downloadable Java applets seem to be doing quite well on the internet, including for games, custom user interfaces, security applications, etc.

At the company I work at, one of our main design tools is a java application that you just copy from the server (essentially download) and run. The developers came from another company where they were doing the same thing.

NASA is using Java to control the Mars Rovers, and track satellites.

More and more tools built by Computer Science researchers are in Java, like this Bayesian Network tool, or are switching from other languages to Java, like this static program verification tool.

In short, I think you completely missed it with your answer.

Sun's Java Desktop System seems to be doing quite well.

10,000 to the United India Insurance Company, 500,000 to 1,000,000 per year to the China Standard Software Co, and approval from the UK government for a 5 year purchase agreement.

Downloadable Java applets seem to be doing quite well on the internet, including for games, custom user interfaces, security applications, etc.

At the company I work at, one of our main design tools is a java application that you just copy from the server (essentially download) and run. The developers came from another company where they were doing the same thing.

NASA is using Java to control the Mars Rovers, and track satellites.

More and more tools built by Computer Science researchers are in Java, like this Bayesian Network tool, or are switching from other languages to Java, like this static program verification tool.

In short, I think you completely missed it with your answer.

Java, really, was most-likely designed to co-opt more than just one language. It's more than likely that the developers looked at great Smalltalk features (which was co-opting the idea of objects first introduced in the original OO language, Simula 67, created, oddly enough, in 1967, one could claim) such as the bytecode compilation, but now you DO see the co-opting of C++ with, ta-da, Java Generics and Enumerated Data types (as of Java 1.5, http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/re leases/j2se15/). And as far as garbage collection, well, other languages had this feature. But, really, who cares? Java is a great language (I don't know about C#, as I know, pretty-much, nothing about it yet because I haven't found a way to even write them in linux and don't know if I even want to) and that's pretty much the most important feature of Java (co-opted from all other great languages, haha).

I used PhotoMesa before they wanted money for it, but you can still download a free trial. It's written in Java "but" it is well-written and feels very fast.

There's an article on Sun's Java website about PhotoMesa.

Java supports both checked and unchecked throwables: the latter with the class Error.

Unchecked exceptions should be derived from the RuntimeException class. Generally subclasses of Error are not meant to be caught ("An Error is a subclass of Throwable that indicates serious problems that a reasonable application should not try to catch" - from the Javadoc for Error).

you don't want to declare that every method doing division throws DivideByZero

That doesn't throw an exception/error at all, it returns NaN.

there's a bunch of things like IOException that IMHO should have been Errors

IOException is something that needs to be checked. It can occur because of low disk space, broken network connections (including NFS mounts), bad character coding, etc. Even FileNotFoundException is a subclass of it.

...uhmm

Go here and when you done, go here and get it.

When you are done playing, come back and see if your post makes sense.

...uhmm

Go here and when you done, go here and get it.

When you are done playing, come back and see if your post makes sense.

Sun Java Desktop

And will help Scripting and dynamic bytecode generation tools Yet another cool feature in Tiger :)

This is a new feature Reachability of host

Implemented using ICMP & echo !

No idea if Sun has changed the language specification to allow 64-bit array indices, but they seem to have added 64-bit optimizations to some versions of the Java VM, according to these release notes for JDK 1.5. I will refrain from assuming that 64-bit array indices are allowed if you turn 64-bitness on. I noticed, though, that there seems to be a compile time switch that needs to be used for this, not just a run-time switch. This implies byte-code optimizations, at the very least.

I've seen some really complex explinations in this thread. It's really not that complicated. If an argument is of a certain type, the supplied value must be of that type. End of story.

So, let's think about inheritance. All ArrayList objects are List objects. However, not all List objects are also ArrayList objects. If you declare a variable as List, all anyone knows is that it is simply a List object, even if its initialized as ArrayList. You can, however, test for the type of the value ( getClass().getName() , instanceof , etc.) and then cast appropriately. So, if you are certain that your List variable contains a value of type ArrayList, you can down-cast it to ArrayList and pass it in.

By the way, at the risk of being too specific, here's a pointer when you're using the Java Collections Framework. Usually, you want to use the interface classes for your arguments and return values. Use List, Set, etc. for arguments and returns, not their implementations. The whole point of an interface is you don't care how it's implementing, you just care about what is implemented. In certain cases, you do care about the implementation. For example, TreeMap sorts the entries by key, where as LinkedHashMap guarantees the results will be kept in the same order as they were added. These properties are useful in some cases, but in general, use the base class whenever possible.

So, in summary remember or learn inheritence rules and the distinction between the type of a variable and the type of a variable's value.

I've seen some really complex explinations in this thread. It's really not that complicated. If an argument is of a certain type, the supplied value must be of that type. End of story.

So, let's think about inheritance. All ArrayList objects are List objects. However, not all List objects are also ArrayList objects. If you declare a variable as List, all anyone knows is that it is simply a List object, even if its initialized as ArrayList. You can, however, test for the type of the value ( getClass().getName() , instanceof , etc.) and then cast appropriately. So, if you are certain that your List variable contains a value of type ArrayList, you can down-cast it to ArrayList and pass it in.

By the way, at the risk of being too specific, here's a pointer when you're using the Java Collections Framework. Usually, you want to use the interface classes for your arguments and return values. Use List, Set, etc. for arguments and returns, not their implementations. The whole point of an interface is you don't care how it's implementing, you just care about what is implemented. In certain cases, you do care about the implementation. For example, TreeMap sorts the entries by key, where as LinkedHashMap guarantees the results will be kept in the same order as they were added. These properties are useful in some cases, but in general, use the base class whenever possible.

So, in summary remember or learn inheritence rules and the distinction between the type of a variable and the type of a variable's value.

I've seen some really complex explinations in this thread. It's really not that complicated. If an argument is of a certain type, the supplied value must be of that type. End of story.

So, let's think about inheritance. All ArrayList objects are List objects. However, not all List objects are also ArrayList objects. If you declare a variable as List, all anyone knows is that it is simply a List object, even if its initialized as ArrayList. You can, however, test for the type of the value ( getClass().getName() , instanceof , etc.) and then cast appropriately. So, if you are certain that your List variable contains a value of type ArrayList, you can down-cast it to ArrayList and pass it in.

By the way, at the risk of being too specific, here's a pointer when you're using the Java Collections Framework. Usually, you want to use the interface classes for your arguments and return values. Use List, Set, etc. for arguments and returns, not their implementations. The whole point of an interface is you don't care how it's implementing, you just care about what is implemented. In certain cases, you do care about the implementation. For example, TreeMap sorts the entries by key, where as LinkedHashMap guarantees the results will be kept in the same order as they were added. These properties are useful in some cases, but in general, use the base class whenever possible.

So, in summary remember or learn inheritence rules and the distinction between the type of a variable and the type of a variable's value.

I've seen some really complex explinations in this thread. It's really not that complicated. If an argument is of a certain type, the supplied value must be of that type. End of story.

So, let's think about inheritance. All ArrayList objects are List objects. However, not all List objects are also ArrayList objects. If you declare a variable as List, all anyone knows is that it is simply a List object, even if its initialized as ArrayList. You can, however, test for the type of the value ( getClass().getName() , instanceof , etc.) and then cast appropriately. So, if you are certain that your List variable contains a value of type ArrayList, you can down-cast it to ArrayList and pass it in.

By the way, at the risk of being too specific, here's a pointer when you're using the Java Collections Framework. Usually, you want to use the interface classes for your arguments and return values. Use List, Set, etc. for arguments and returns, not their implementations. The whole point of an interface is you don't care how it's implementing, you just care about what is implemented. In certain cases, you do care about the implementation. For example, TreeMap sorts the entries by key, where as LinkedHashMap guarantees the results will be kept in the same order as they were added. These properties are useful in some cases, but in general, use the base class whenever possible.

So, in summary remember or learn inheritence rules and the distinction between the type of a variable and the type of a variable's value.

It's a great start, but it would be nice if the generics were worked into more libraries - for example, in the Swing model classes, it would be nice to be able avoid casts by taking Integers out of a DefaultComboBoxModel<Integer> .

But hopefully it's just a matter of time (or of Beta 2).

I'm a full-time developer, whose Java work typically pays the bills. I have a 1GHz Powerbook that I use; it's the only real UI-friendly computer I even turn on these days (the servers at clients' sites & in my closet don't count). I do all my day-to-day development on my Powerbook, with a CVS server running elsewhere that does the "official" builds, backups, etc etc.

Overall, I've never noticed a performance problem when compiling large applications. As a barometer, I just did an "ant clobber dist" on a current project (around 200 classes, plus 50 JSP pages, etc etc), and it built a distributable in 18 seconds. Not too shabby. Overall, Java compiler performance shouldn't be a concern in purchasing a laptop; if your build takes too long, it's more likely the fault of a poor build process than a slow compiler!

Anyway, Java integration into Mac OS X is the best in the industry. It's amazing -- Apple's OS is more Java-aware than Sun's :) Full graphical Java applications run fast, Java Web Start is built in, and the OS ships with a built-in Java Application Server, JBoss. The only downer is that JVM releases typically lag Sun by 4 - 6 months, but that's acceptable in my mind; it takes that long to shake the "D'oh!" bugs out of a VM anyway.

Finally, if you're going to do lots of development at a desk, I'd also strongly recommend plunking down the $2K for an Apple Flatscreen. Yeah yeah, it's expensive... but you'll be more productive with a great external monitor. And if you're going to be buying that much hardware, you might as well look into joining the Apple Developer Connection, as you might be able to get 12 - 20 % off of hardware purchases (especially if you can claim Student status somehow).

HTH,

--Mid

the JDK 1.5 compiler is 100% compatible with JDK 1.4

Unfortunately, you're wrong.

To use the new language features, you have to use the "-source 1.5" switch with javac from 1.5.0. That makes javac create bytecode that can only be used with JDK1.5 (see the javac docs).

:-)

You can try out most of the new features (since they are largely compiler changes) using this preview compiler. It requires a minor amount of fiddling with the scripts, and the new coolness is your reward.

Our open source SwingSet toolkit for making the Swing components database-enabled/aware will now be much easier to install/distribute. Hooray!

On other platforms, each Java application consumes some system memory, so you might end up using more memory than you need to when running multiple Java applications. Other languages, such as C or C++, solve this problem using what's called shared libraries. Apple developed an innovative new technology that allows Java code to be shared across multiple applications. This reduces the amount of memory that Java applications normally use. And it fits right into Sun's Hot Spot VM, allowing Mac OS X to remain compatible with standard Java. In addition, Apple has given this implementation to Sun so the company can deploy it on other platforms. It's just one example of how Apple supports standards and shares ideas to benefit all.

Here is a more detailed look at what 1.5 has to offer.

Some of my favorites:

- Autoboxing and Auto-unboxing of Primitive Types
- Enhanced for loop
- Enumerated types
- Formatted Output
- Concurrency Utilities
- Improved Diagnostic Ability
- Desktop Client

J2SE(TM) 1.5.0 New Features
J2SE 1.5 In A Nutshell>

J2SE(TM) 1.5.0 New Features
J2SE 1.5 In A Nutshell>

Actually, 1.5 beta has been available for a few months now, but the link wasn't on the main java.sun.com page.

Here are some highly unscientific benchmarks of startup time I just ran on my Athlon XP 2000+ under Mandrake 9.2:

[sasha@jupiter tmp]$ time -p /usr/java/1.4/bin/java HelloWorld
Hello World!
real 0.30
user 0.22
sys 0.03

[sasha@jupiter tmp]$ time -p /usr/java/1.5/bin/java HelloWorld
Hello World!
real 0.17
user 0.16
sys 0.02

These are relatively consistent over multiple runs.

I'm fine with it, I'll be smiling when I hear of entire subcontinents being nuked, while Sun Microsystems and Halliburton look in fear, as they will have no other choice, except to go back to the remaining non glowing US residents ready and willing to name their price for their jobs. Probably would take care of some of the folks here too. Sure wouldnt mind walking into an interview and being guaranteed that the elitcorps have zero advantage.

Java 2 Micro Edition (or J2ME) is supported on a ton of devices and comes on pretty much any new mobile phone you can buy today.

Most of the wireless providers also have developer programs and will help distribute your J2ME game as well as handling billing and some customer support (for a small %).

I made a blackjack MIDlet for J2ME, and it was pretty easy to use. There's a ton of documentation and free tools out there and I never ran into a problem that I couldn't find the answer to. Of course, it's Java, so if you don't like Java you won't like J2ME, but I liked it.

Subject says it all really, but 1.5 contains some substantial additions to the language, some much needed library additions, and in general is full of goodies:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/index.jsp

Let's see what Gosling has done:

He created a commercial Emacs clone, which didn't particularly ingratiate him to the open source community.

He created a commercial window system called NeWS and tried to kill X11 with it, but that was a commercial failure, never really worked anyway, and was largely based on other people's technology.

Then he built a simplistic language for programming consumer devices, but that project failed miserably as well. Only when they put it out on the Internet for free, claimed that they were going to make it "open", and promised to create a browser based application delivery platform did it take off--not because there was anything technical novel about it, but because people wanted to believe in browser-based programming (sadly, Sun has pretty much failed to deliver on all of that). Most of the hard work to make Java a success was done by the JIT developers and IBM.

These days, he seems to be porting over code highlighting and some other features from Emacs to NetBeans.

Sorry, but if this is a "personality story", maybe someone can explain to me why I should be excited about it. At Sun, Guy Steele would be my vote for one of the most competent people they have. But Gosling? Why?

You can see official AMD benchmark results of various programs running on Windows XP 32-bit edition vs. Windows XP 64-bit edition beginning on page 36 of this PDF. The results have three columns: time in seconds on WinXP 32-bit w/ 32-bit executable, time in seconds on WinXP 64-bit with 32-bit executable, and time in seconds on WinXP 64-bit with 64-bit executable.

hmmmm. Maybe you could tell me which sun box I should be looking at. Their workstations look mighty familiar to me. Or maybe you were just refering to exhausting hot air inside the box.

Sun does sell some machines that run Solaris and have x86 processors in them. They sell one Athlon (Mobile Athlon, actually -- it's in a blade server) and several dual Xeon systems. (See here.) So it's not as if the x86 version of Solaris is totally the ugly stepchild of the Sun family.

Plus, yeah, it's helpful to get into assembly to write good context switch code and MMU stuff and whatnot, but how much of the scheduling and scalability is really based on platform-specific optimizations? I think most of it is due to choosing a good design and good algorithms. Especially these days, when raw CPU is no longer the problem because CPUs are so fast. My point is that I think lots of the value in the Solaris kernel translates to any architecture -- like a fully pre-emptable kernel, and design decisions that minimize contention for locks and things like that.

A layout that looks good on my system has buttons cramped in the corner on somebody else's.

File name extensions are very archaic technology.

No shit, but metadata in the filesystem is just as wrong when you can (read as "should") use magic to determine filetype.

For extended and user-configured information, filesystem metadata *is* the right way, but only if it is impossible to include that data in the file itself (the id3 tags in mp3 files is a good example of how this *should* be done).

Filesystem dependant metadata is useful only to those who use the same filesystem, is too easily seperable from the file itself, and is can be altered while bypassing security implementations that the user might be expecting to notify him of such changes (md5sums, etc), and thus should be reserved for information that is only of interest to a particular user or for use on a specific computer.

Your jpeg already contains a metadata format that can record the resolution, date, and a thumbnail, plus a "comment" segment where you can include your "family album", "outdoor" and "Mount fuji" requirements. Nomatter where you copy this file to, no matter what filesystem it is written to, this data will follow your file and save you a lot of vendor-induced worry. Here is the spec.

I never fail to be baffled at the degree of inertia in the IT world.

I never fail to be astounded by people's willingness to believe the hype. Microsoft is very poor at assesing the needs of their users, but very adept at convincing users of a need that does not actually exist. WinFS is yet another attempt at lock-in and does not address anything that has not been addressed before in a more apropriate manner.

"Throughput computing"..where the performance is measured not individually but in aggregate.
See their media kit available at
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/thro ug hputcomputing/ for more details.

However, I believe the whole idea is nothing new. AFAIK, there are only two ways of increasing the performance of a processor (Operations Per Second) - either increase the IPC (Instructions per cycle) by increasing parallelism or decrease the cycle time by increasing the clock Rate (Ghz).

Each method has its limits and follows the law of diminishing returns - for e.g. increasing the clock rate implies increasing the number of stages in the pipeline...and after say 10000 stages, the penalties imposed due to flushing the pipeline might compensate for the increased GhZ. Similarly if you manage to place 100000 cores on a chip, scheduling amongst these cores and providing realtime access to the memory for all these cores will become the bottleneck. Hence, I take statements like "how to kill the x86" with a pinch of salt.

Finally, it will the fabcrication (physical) technology that decides which one of these dies. For e.g. if tomorrow someone is able to come up with a process that enables 100Ghz chips at the (think extensions of SOI etc) decreasing the cycle time will win. Similarly, if someone comes out with femto (10^-15 ) metre fabrication technology, then parallelism will win.

Firstly, internally, Microsoft uses SQL Server and Exchange pretty much exclusively for their respective purposes (for both development and enterprise). Exchange is perfectly capable of handling all of microsoft's employee's email around the globe.

Secondly, if there are no MS products in use at Sun, how do you recon they develop and test their Java software?

As far as support, MS, IBM, Sun, and most telecoms favour SIP with SIMPLE for IM. I've no idea what the other entrenched IM players, AOL and Yahoo, want.

Sun includes (and advertises) a Jabber client (Gaim) in the Java Desktop System.

As far as support, MS, IBM, Sun, and most telecoms favour SIP with SIMPLE for IM. I've no idea what the other entrenched IM players, AOL and Yahoo, want.

Sun includes (and advertises) a Jabber client (Gaim) in the Java Desktop System.

As far as support, MS, IBM, Sun, and most telecoms favour SIP with SIMPLE for IM. I've no idea what the other entrenched IM players, AOL and Yahoo, want.

Sun includes (and advertises) a Jabber client (Gaim) in the Java Desktop System.

A ZDNet article says Java made communicating between multiple software pieces very flexible and James Gosling, inventor of Java, spent considerable time helping develop the system. Sun also describes how the same application was used for the Pathfinder mission back in 1997.

someObject.addMouseListener(new MouseAdapter() {
public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) {
...//Event listener implementation goes here...
}
});

This is not about binary vs. open source drivers. It is about companies being able to have one source code base for their open source drivers. Companies (and users) should be able to write a driver once and not have to worry about whether it compiles on 2.4, 2.4.15, 2.6, or whatever kernel may be popular at the moment.

With so many x86 operating systems out there, making a solid linux DDI has the advantage that other operating systems (BSD, Solaris and others), can create a compatible interface layer. At the moment, any driver is free to call any function in the kernel, making this impossible. Everyone is talking about creating Windows device driver wrappers, when linux doesn't even allow source level wrappers. All those other OSes should be able to leverage existing open source drivers without painstakingly porting them and making them harder to maintain. This has nothing to do with binary drivers, but with basic common sense.

Here's a link to backup your statement about Sun/IBM.

Sun/Wal-Mart RFID testing center

I thought Wal-Mart's desire was to have the tags on individual items in the future, but due to cost and vendor push back, they settled on tags at the pallet level.

Found this article that indicates that MS is certainly not the only player in the Wal-Mart RFID game. Sun Microsystems opens RFID Test Center to Help Suppliers Meet Requirements from Wal-Mart. According to this article, the testing is aimed at tags at the pallet, case, and item level.

As for the registers, that's a separate issue. The OS driving the register may crash and I think the original poster was worried about attacks via virus's passed due to OS flaws and the systems being networked.

OK OK OK - it's not the dev tools but it's something they are really using.

Greetz

Makes me think of the SunPCI card I used to have at work. We were working on sun workstations running solaris but our computers contained SunPCI cards.
These were basicelly PCs on a card. You just had to type "sunpci" in your terminal and the SunPCI card would boot with windows and it would display in a Xwindows window. It would use a 2GB file on the sun hardrive for its hardrive.
It was uselfull for e-mail and words and stuff like that. We didn't have to clutter our desk with a PC. and it worked in hardware so in didn't use all the processing power to run 2 OSs at the same time.
I wonder if you could run these cards on Linux.

> Illegally? How so?

Microsoft added a message to Windows that gave a warning about incompatibility with DR-DOS. But Microsoft's own testing had shown DR-DOS's compatibility to be essentially perfect. The message was a lie, intended to defraud the public.

Microsoft also added intentional (and encrypted) incompatibilities to Windows 95, while keeping DR-DOS out of the Windows 95 test program. It was a deliberate act of sabotage.

But there are more recent examples of Microsoft's criminal activity:

Sabotage:

> "Strategic Objective [is to] kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market" -- Microsoft Pricing Proposal for VJ++ 6.0

Fraud:

> "As i [sic] told charlesf [Fitzgerald] on the phone, at this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps." -- Armstrong Decl., Ex. 23.

Extortion:

> Gates wrote, "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office...."

> In Waldman's words: Sounds like we give them the HTML control for nothing except making IE the "standard browser for Apple?" I think they should be doing this anyway. Though the language of the agreement uses the word "encourage," I think that the spirit is that Apple should be using it everywhere and if they don't do it, then we can use Office as a club.

Almost every one of Microsoft's "victories" has involved similar illegal behavior.

The sabotage of Java alone has delayed the introduction of e-commerce by years, resulting in a loss of as much as $100 billion per year for the U.S. economy. And when you take that much wealth out of the world, people die.

Bill Gates doesn't deserve a Knighthood. He deserves to be in jail.