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To emphasize previous comments with a picture, Rick Jore lost in a 2004 race for the Montana House due to seven contested ballots. I personally prefer paper & pen, but it must be conceded that one advantage of electronic ballots is unambiguous interpretation of voter choice.

Yea, some commercial breweries add rice and/or corn to their beer while brewing (referred to as double-mashing) in order to cheaply increase alcohol content, but at the price of good taste and ultimately good beer. That's where stuff like Bud come from. I'm a homebrewer, and if you want to find out more out homebrewing, check out my website http://fatbear.webhop.org/

Cheers.

Hi this is the same method used to play movies on Commodore 128 with the SCPU running Wings OS http://wings.webhop.org/ Greg Nacu took out the frames out of the movies with Quicktime and extracted the wav file. He wrote a program in C for Wings OS which calls the jpeg rendered for every frame and the wav player for the audio. We have movies on Commodore now :) Check it out

I've been told that all programs can be traced back to a copy & paste of Hello, World. In this limited case, I actually believe what I've been told. The first open/free code was that very same Hello, World example in the first coding manual, wherever it is now, and there are likely a handfull of possible "ultimate parents" of every application that's out there.

Really, though, when's the last time you started a piece of code to be used in production from a completely blank text file? I've even got a VIm macro that shoves in...

public class fileName
{
} .. whenever I try to edit a Java file that doesn't exists. My ADO.NET code was likely originally stolen from the MSDN help files (will likely only work if you've got the .NET SDK installed). My Java networking code likely started somewhere in Mr. Harold's Java IO book from O'Reilly. My Swing code came, in large part I imagine, from The Java Tutorial.

Are any of these sources the "father" of my crappy shareware app, much less my "professional code"? Of course not. Nor would they want to be!

Then you can even reply directly to a post without having to cut the appropriate parts out of the digest listing. I hate that.

Made with Java and available for Windows and MacOS X. Should also work in Linux, but I don't see a download for that version.

I like OS X. I use it on my home PC every day.

But perhaps you missed the OpenSSH exploit that was "fixed" by the 10.2.8 update that was later pulled for various reasons.

Why wasn't this a big deal? Well, it appears that 3% of the market brings with it only 3% (if that) of the l33+ h4X0rZ, and even if a hacker wrote something, well, there aren't that many OS X boxes server-side with SSH turned on -- not nearly as many as there are Win2k boxes with MS SQL Server!

Rock solid software is nearly oxymoronic. After working for three different companies and even releasing my releasing my own trialware, I've yet to see anything past some well written versions of Hello, World! that fits that bill. And if you're not rock solid, well, by defn you're a little flaky. I've been impressed with OS X so far, but be careful not to give out your IP when you post that it's unhackable.

(As an aside, I've heard it said that Windows was initially written without a network in mind (makes sense... how often was your box online when you had 3.1 installed?) and the some security holes -- even more importantly, the whole "insecure mindset" people sometimes get from Windows -- are left over from legacy code that hasn't been refactored. Security is something of a mindset thing. OS X, and this is probably your point, took a server-side OS (*BSD) and rebuilt on top of that. It's by design a better network OS, though a previous poster's ref to Win98 "Lite" is a good counterexample of how "insecurity through incest" can be easy to fix.)

The first version of 1.4.1 for OS X was obviously shooting for enterprise users. Headless apps worked well, and there was even a new way of opening apps that wouldn't create icons on the dock to support headless apps in a seamless, usre friendly fashion.

As a shareware client app developer who targets the Mac, I've been watching Apple's JVM from a different angle. 1.3.1 was a nice VM, and with the Aqua look and feel I've had some comments that assumed my Java application was native.

Now as a client app maker, I was looking forward to Java 1.4.1 on OS X for, of all things, mousewheel support. I got that, but I also got a number of issues with any look and feel *other* than Aqua. Menus didn't paint correctly at times, text sometimes didn't paint the way I expected in JTextAreas, and after a few checks I decided it was better to continue to shoot for the 1.3.1 VM rather than rip my code apart to get around OS X-specific quirks. Headless apps might have worked great, but Swing, Java's "de facto GUI toolset of choice" didn't. Comments about JBuilder (it seems the most popular client apps in Java other than Limewire are Java IDEs for all those headless app makers) in this thread help support that.

If you didn't catch that, I said I targetted 1.3.1 even after the 1.4.1 release. That's right, Apple had enough problems in 1.4.1 (my spin) that they left two nearly mutually exclusive JVMs on each OS X system after upgrade. New Macs wouldn't ship with just 1.4.1. Developer tools allowed and allow developers to force applications to run under just 1.3.1 if they'd prefer. Apple wasn't (isn't?) quite ready to put all the eggs in one basket. Aside -- I wonder if Panther will ship with just 1.4.1?

From what I've seen of this VM after a few minutes of testing suggest that I might be able to release a new version of my app that uses the latest VM installed, which would be great. That said, the Kunststoff Look & Feel, a relatively trivial extension of the standard Swing Metal (or "Java") Look & Feel still ain't happy out of the box. A few lines from its song when running my app under 1.4.1, new update, below:

apple.awt.EventQueueExceptionHandler Caught Throwable :
java.awt.image.RasterFormatException: y lies outside raster
at sun.awt.image.IntegerInterleavedRaster.createWrita bleChild(IntegerInterleavedRaster.java:462)
at sun.awt.image.IntegerInterleavedRaster.createChild (IntegerInterleavedRaster.java:516)
at com.incors.plaf.FastGradientPaintContext$Gradient. getRaster(FastGradientPaintContext.java:53)
at com.incors.plaf.FastGradientPaintContext$Gradient. access$100(FastGradientPaintContext.java:37)
at com.incors.plaf.FastGradientPaintContext.getRaster (FastGradientPaintContext.java:142)
at apple.awt.CSurfaceData.setupPaint(CSurfaceData.jav a:718)

Fwiw, here are the versions of the old 1.4.1 and the new:
prompt% java -version
java version "1.4.1_01"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-39)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-14, mixed mode)

prompt% java -version
java version "1.4.1_01"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-69.1)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-24, mixed mode)

Interesting to note that Apple is still behind. 1.4.1_02 and 1.4.1_05 have been released by Sun for some time now. Not a big deal, but a little evidence that, though OS X's "built-in" Java support is the best you'll find in an OS, it's hardly "latest and greatest".

Swing (Sun's tech that lets you create GUIs the same xplat) stinks. But even Sun admits it, and (see the same link) they are doing something about it. Swing is no longer "a way for database apps to display debugging information in X11".

I'm still hoping for a Swing replacement from Sun that'll ship with its java virtual machines, but until then we have IBM's SWT which ties the widgets much more closely to native counterparts and Apple's attempts to merge Swing directly to native GUI widgets. We're nowhere close to Windows.Forms yet, but Swing's not so bad that you can't get the hang [notice I didn't say Swing] of things quickly.

The point being that you have options. Once you get the hang of Window Managers (doesn't take long) and creating some sort of Model for everything (from sorting tables to adding new values to lists), you can do complicated layouts that work xplat more quickly in the text editor of your choice than you could hack up a static UI (ie, that doesn't resize well) in the Visual Basic IDE -- which, as everyone knows, is really what makes VB GUIs "so easy".

(Aside: Even more importantly would be a standards-compliant parallel to what Microsoft's Web Forms does for IE... a quick, smart widget toolkit for the web. A "JWeb Forms" for JSP would do a lot to enable smart web-enabled UIs to Java web services.)

And there's nothing about Java that stops it from being a great client-side language short of Swing. Moore's Law and clever JIT VMs have pretty much done away with any show-stopping speed issues. Another hurdle is the fact that Java only compiles to bytecodes, making [even commercial] apps trivial to decompile, but if you look at VB 7 (aka, VB.NET) and C#, Java's most closely related competitors, they've got the same problems.

And sure, Java is more "Write once, test everywhere" than "... run everywhere", but you're not going to find an easier port from one platform to the next than Java. It commoditzes the user's operating system, and that's a great thing.

And heck, I'm using it. At least I'm putting my money where the keyboard is.