Slashdot Mirror
Java on Handheld Devices?
superfred queries: "I work for a Java-based software company, and have been tasked with researching Java on handhelds...I've managed to dig up information on which handhelds support Java (most of the major ones do), but what puzzles me, is if any company is actually *using* this for any reason (besides Java-based handhelds/phones). The Palm OS has apparently supported Java since the Palm V, but has anyone written any software to take advantage of it? Are there any major software developers working on Java applications for handhelds? It seems like a great deal of effort has been used in getting Java on these platforms, but nothing's really utilizing it."
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
OOh ooh! I know! A beowolf cluster of Palm III's running a virtual machine that uses java to play a game of pong! And not just any Pong. Pong with smaller paddles!
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
...a beowulf cluster of these
have seen (C++, etc).
compared to C++ you're right, but java really isn't
the clean language it's hyped up to be.
for a nice clean language that fits in the embedded niche,
you should check out Limbo, which
is a genuinely clean language (designed by the same
group that designed C).
the crucial thing about Limbo, though, is that, unlike Java,
it doesn't try to solve all portability problems in the language
itself. The Inferno OS effortlessly solves all
the problems that Java struggles over. It runs fast, packing
lots of functionality into a small footprint (1MB RAM is sufficient
to run significant GUI apps), and provides some extremely
powerful primitives for composing distributed applications.
we had a little distributed app that a colleague had
knocked up over a couple of days (two files, 800 lines of code total).
it implemented a "shared piece of paper" - i.e. all users
see anything that anyone draws on the app.
talking to someone that had tried to do a similar thing in
Java on a PalmOS based device, they were amazed - they'd
taken months to do the same thing, and it was slow, big,
and didn't provide as much functionality.
the real plus side is just how beautiful the environment
is to program in. it gives you power and doesn't make you
pay for it via huge and convoluted API interfaces.
(and that's why it's fast and small too).