News flash: Technology pundit seemingly insults open source, Slashdot up in arms. None of them actually read the article. Story at 11.
The article does not say "open source doesn't handle errors as well as closed source". What the article does say is "like most commercial software developers, many open source programmers are just plain lazy about proper error handling. But we're supposed to be better than that...".
I don't see a problem with this statement. The fact is, most open-source software sucks donkey balls. Petreley is merely saying it's time to put your money where your mouth is -- if you want open source to be considered better than closed source software, it better stop being so danged flaky.
This goes for everybody else who responded to me as well:
READ THE ARTICLE BEFORE POSTING.
Image quality is worse in Q3 due to the optimizations. If you do the Quack3 rename, the image quality gets better and the frame rate gets worse.
You're telling me that you're okay with a graphics card manufacturer deliberating reducing the image quality of Q3A in order to get better frame rates, when it just-so-happens that Q3A framerates are an important benchmark? And not giving you any indication (other than reduced quality) that this is happening, nor any way to change it?
This is benchmark manipulation more than trying to give customers benefits. They know perfectly well that Quake 3 is used as a benchmark, so they artificially inflated their scores.
This is nothing new, and I don't think the fact that they're catering to a real program rather than an artificial benchmark makes it any less reprehensible.
These are hardly the first reports of Xbox instability -- it has been rumored to crash frequently since the pre-E3 days.
If you want a semi-scientific study, you need to compare it against Nintendo's GameCube, which is slated to launch three days later and is also present in kiosks. I have heard zero (0) reports of GameCube crashes, which may or may not be due to reporting bias (in other words, people may just not feel it necessary to point out GC crashes, while Xbox crashes are a Big Deal).
So, we have 250,000 geeks at our disposal. Let's get some reports from the field. Go to a Toys R Us. How many Xboxes? How many of them were crashed or out of order? How many GameCubes? How many of them were crashed/OOO?
What I want to do with a device like this is use it as a game console. Load MAME and a bunch of other emulators on it, download 34 gigs of roms, and sit it next to my GameCube and Dreamcast.
The S-Video output makes it absolutely perfect for this sort of usage (although I agree it is pretty ugly...).
Oh yes, and we all know how many thirteen-year-old videogame addicts are stuck on the Dvorak layout;-).
Seriously, I've never understood the myth about QWERTY sucking due to how spread out the common letters are. It's *good* that it has the common keys so spread out, because it means you use different fingers to hit them in sequence. I've only seen one study which claimed the Dvorak keyboard layout was measurably better, and interestingly enough it was by a Mr. Dvorak...
The story that QWERTY was invented to slow down typists is a myth. It was indeed invented to reduce jams, but it had nothing to do with slowing down typists. Jams occurred when adjacent or nearly adjacent hammers struck in quick succession, so QWERTY was designed so that successive keys would likely be well apart from one another. That's the whole reason. It actually helps *speed up* typing, because you're likely to alternate hands and use different fingers between successive keys. Maybe Dvorak is a little better, but it's certainly not a crushing defeat for QWERTY.
"[Java] has since dwindled into a niche of server-side programming"
Since when is the #1 most used language a 'niche'? Java provides an awful lot of the power behind the Internet.
"JSP only came about because ASP did"
Okay, I'll give you that one. JSP sucks. Servlets, however, kick ass over all of the alternatives.
"Sun had XML for years (in fact, Sun employees did invent XML) before Microsoft finally ponied up a strategy for using it with.NET"
You've got to be kidding me. I was using XML in Java before Microsoft even announced.Net. The fact that Microsoft has turned XML into a dog-and-pony show does not imply that Sun didn't know what they were doing.
"Jxta came about because of Napster, but I don't see any applications using it yet.."
Oh, and there are presumably a ton using.Net? I'm familiar with several teams taking advantage of JXTA, by the way. It's a new product, most of its uses haven't hit the market yet (and most are in server-side stuff that will never be seen by end users, so it's tough to point to anyway).
"t's true, Java smart cards have been in the works for a while, but I don't think McNealy originally created them for a national ID system."
"In the works?" This is not vaporware. Java smart cards are a real product, available today. For a while now, actually. Sun didn't claim they invented them for their ID system, nor anything resembling that. You just made that up right now.
"But so far, they have failed to produce anything that lives up to their numerous claims"
What claims have they failed to live up to? Cross-platform functionality? I regularly move code between Windows, Solaris, and Linux without recompiling. Performance? I've written Java programs which outperform their C++ predecessors. Please elaborate me on which specific promises they have failed to fulfill.
I'm not saying Java is the best thing ever. There are some things about it which piss me off, and if I were designing it today I'd make a few changes. But I'd quit programming and become a hermit if I had to go back to C++ -- I just won't do it. Java is much better than what came before, and I will be using it for a long time to come.
"what would bw the american opinion if some american guy does something bad in, say China, and the chinese government says to the US: 'Give us this guy or we bomb you'?"
This wouldn't happen. China would request a peaceful extradition, and we would hand the guy over. Nobody threatened to bomb anybody until the response was "we're not handing this guy over, despite the mounds of evidence that proves he killed 6,000 people".
Handing somebody over for criminal proceedings is called extradition. There are treaties governing it. It happens all the time. Nobody freaks out about it (well, except the guy getting extradited).
They didn't sue Microsoft for using Java, they sued Microsoft for using a non-compliant version of Java.
Microsoft could have simply added in the missing features and removed JDirect, and everybody would have been happy. Instead they made it about 'innovation' and 'eliminating all other forms of life' and moaned like it was all Sun's fault that they couldn't obey a simple contract.
I know that you supposedly can't trademark a proper name
Where do people keep getting this idea from? McDonald's. Wendy's. Samuel Adams. Warner Brothers. Ford. Chef Boyardee (yes, he was a real person, although he spelled his name differently). The list goes on...
Everybody named Wendy does not get to sue the fast food chain just because they happen to share the name. An unrelated Mr. Sam Adams does not get to put the beer company out of business. Trademarks are only infringed when there is the potential for 'consumer confusion', and trust me that Mr. Serious is the only one confused about this. He's probably doing this just for the publicity, unless he has a very stupid lawyer.
It's important to keep in mind that the money doesn't just vanish. It's not like NASA has a huge furnace that they shovel money into while they work on the spacecraft.
Most of the money ends up paying people's salaries and buying components from aerospace/electronics companies. A portion of it will end up right back in your hands as the recipients spend their money on other things and it circulates back to you. Government projects like this usually create value, rather than destroy it, because these people might not have jobs or be producing anything without taxpayer dollars, and there wouldn't be as much money in circulation. Generally, everybody benefits.
I beg to disagree. You have to dump the waste heat in order to recycle the steam - and where are you going to dump the waste heat in space? There's no matter to convect it away, so you're left with radiation as your only possibility.
Keep in mind that space isn't 'cold' in the normal, conversational sense. You could expose your arm to outer space for a minute or two, and it would be absolutely fine, not frozen instantly as most people would assume. Outer space isn't significantly different from a vacuum in a laboratory here on earth, and a vacuum is the universe's most perfect insulator. Here's proof that things don't freeze instantly in space.
Until someone comes up with a way of dramatically improving the efficiency of heat radiation (e.g. a heat-powered laser), the satellite is stuck with the heat for very long periods of time. Sure, you could shut the reactor off and wait a few weeks, then power it up for another four seconds, then shut it off and wait a few weeks again... but somehow a thermoelectric solution just seems a lot more straightforward. Plus, we actually know how to build those.
Excellent point, but I'd actually replace "not a good idea" with "not possible".
A traditional nuclear reactor is, after all, just a glorified steam generator -- and the steam is a waste product which is dumped back into the environment.
You can't do that in a satellite (even assuming you could miniaturize everything else) because you'd need a replenishing source of water. Easy enough on earth, impossible in space. It'd be pretty equivalent to making a coal-fired satellite, which is a pretty funny mental image;-).
Check the article: "SOURCE: Applied Digital Solutions, Inc."
That's right, this is not a Yahoo article, despite what the Slashdot summary says. It's a press release by the company in question. It really scares me to see glaring, repeated factual inaccuracies in press releases by tech companies...
I had similar thoughts, but a micron is a one-dimensional measure. Certainly couldn't be measuring surface area, let alone volume, and 10 microns is *really* small for a device like this in any case.
It mainly scares me because this is a press release, rather than an article, and the quote is by their *chief scientist* who hopefully should know better. You'd think a press release would get proofread, but maybe not...
I assumed the release was just written by a clueless person when I saw "10 micron amps". Poor fool just meant "10 microamps".
Then later down I see a quote by the *chief scientist* saying that they plan to develop a battery "capable of generating 3 volts of electricity with 10 microns".
Maybe I'm just an idiot, but the only definition I know of "micron" is a unit of linear measure. I have no idea how this would relate to anything electrical. I'm still cautiously assuming they meant "microamps", but does anyone have any other ideas?
Yep, my wife has something like 12GB of MP3s on her machine. 99.9% of them are ripped from CDs we own.
The remaining 0.1% she snagged from the net solely to avoid buying an entire CD for the one song she was interested in (nevermind the dozens of CDs we *did* buy for the one or two songs we care about...). And they accuse *us* of piracy. Brilliant.
So, you've got photographer B deliberately imitating photographer A's work as closely as possible, yet he didn't actually *copy* photographer A's photograph. Still guilty.
A similar example would be if author B really liked author A's work, so he produced an identical story. Same plot, same characters, same pretty damned near everything save for some slight wording differences. This is a pretty clear case of copyright violation, even though the copy wasn't exactly the same.
In both cases, artist A did the work, and artist B (one way or another) copied it and thereby profited from it. Copyright law exists to prevent other people from profiting off of your work without your permission.
IANAL, but I'm pretty confident that that's how a judge would rule in these two cases.
Then they'd get a pretty nasty surprise when they found out that chicken sandwiches aren't copyrightable. The recipe, however, might be protectable as a trade secret, but you would have to prove that A) you had used reasonable means to protect your trade secret and B) Jack in the Box still stole it.
Folks, PLEASE HAVE A BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF IP LAW before acting like you know what you're talking about. This is a copyright issue, plain and simple. If Apple wants to defend the work of its artists, it's damn well able to do that.
I shudder to think of a world in which everybody can just copy anything they like without regard to the rights of the original author. I make a living writing software, and I'm pretty happy that nobody can just appropriate it and sell it as their own.
Hmmm. Your putative "exactly 3 things" OS would be pretty damned useless, as it wouldn't have a filesystem, or networking, or a command shell, or a graphical shell, or nearly everything else we've come to expect from our OSes.
And don't try to say that things like filesystem and networking are covered under "access to hardware". Unless you're accustomed to accessing your disk/network at the sector/packet level, the OS is taking care of a lot more than "access to the hardware".
I'm not disagreeing with your basic point that we need to better distinguish between 'the OS' and 'the applications running on the OS', but your view of a super-simple OS is unrealistic. We expect operating systems to provide a ton of functionality, quite a bit of which is not covered in your list.
I'd even go so far as to say that if you started developing a Windows competitor today (and no, Linux doesn't count in its present form) and left out something like native multimedia support, you'd be crazy. Things like JPEG decompression libraries and MPEG support belong in the OS's runtime library so that you don't have fifty programs running around with the same code embedded in them. Likewise with rich audio libraries, 3D APIs, and so on...
"Show me one article or statement by NRA policy-makers that say anything remotely like that."
Ooookay. Policymakers? I don't give a rat's ass what the official policy is if the members obviously feel differently. How about ESR saying that the skies would be safer if the passengers were armed? I defy you to tell me that that is not plain lunacy. And I've heard some NRA members who happen to be friends of mine echo eerily similar sentiments. I never said "NRA policymakers dictate lunacy", I just said that the "NRA is a bunch of lunatics". You've done nothing to dissuade me from that opinion.
"Just because you personally think the right to keep & bear arms is an unimportant one and the freedom from unreasonable search & seizure isn't doesn't mean that you're right."
First: I never said the right to keep and bear arms is an unimportant one. I said that I favor gun control. Gun control does not mean "nobody should own guns", it means "the second ammendment was written two hundred years ago and we need to be a little rational about things". For instance, I consider the fact that there are more guns than people in this country a tad ridiculous.
Second: as for me not being right, I never said I was. I just offered my opinion. You're welcome to disagree with me, as I clearly said in my post. You obviously do, fine. I also said I voted for politicians who supported my views, and I would of course encourage you to do the same. You were the one who brought the idea of absolute 'rightness' into it, not me.
"They have squashed our constitutional right... Most of you stood idley by."
Oh yes, characterize us as lazy just because we don't want everybody and his cousin walking around with deadly weapons.
I did not stand "idley" by. I voted for politicians who support gun control, because I think the NRA is a bunch of raving lunatics who always talk about how great everything would be if only we were all prepared to kill one another at a moments' notice. Well, sorry, I happen to rather strenuously disagree with you on that point, and I voted that way. You're welcome to your opinion, but please don't mistake opposition for apathy.
I continue to disagree with.class ->.exe being the way to go. After all, native compilation *is* available (there are a bunch of native compilers for java) and for all intents and purposes nobody uses them. I certainly don't. If native compilers were so very desireable, they'd be a lot more popular.
As for VM sharing, you're absolutely right that multiple VMs are a huge memory sink, and it really sucks. However, research on solving this problem has been in progress for years and is scheduled to be included in version 1.5 (it was originally targetted at 1.4, which is currently in beta, but was pushed back). For the record, I don't understand the difficulty but the people working on the project seem to feel that fixing this issue is a hell of a lot more involved than it would sound at first blush. I don't know the details.
And yes, the VMs are pretty frickin' amazing right now, aren't they? I honestly never thought we'd reach the point where they were even close to native compilation, let alone beating all but the best C compilers...
I submit this example: Microsoft Word is a C++ application, and it sucks ass on a 700MHz PIII machine with 256MB RAM.
The fact that a particular program runs poorly is not an indication that the language in which it is written sucks. I get great performance out of Java. (And, Forte runs fine on my 128MB 400MHz PII, but I'm not going to argue with you about that...)
Slashdot Mirror
News flash: Technology pundit seemingly insults open source, Slashdot up in arms. None of them actually read the article. Story at 11.
The article does not say "open source doesn't handle errors as well as closed source". What the article does say is "like most commercial software developers, many open source programmers are just plain lazy about proper error handling. But we're supposed to be better than that...".
I don't see a problem with this statement. The fact is, most open-source software sucks donkey balls. Petreley is merely saying it's time to put your money where your mouth is -- if you want open source to be considered better than closed source software, it better stop being so danged flaky.
This goes for everybody else who responded to me as well:
READ THE ARTICLE BEFORE POSTING.
Image quality is worse in Q3 due to the optimizations. If you do the Quack3 rename, the image quality gets better and the frame rate gets worse.
You're telling me that you're okay with a graphics card manufacturer deliberating reducing the image quality of Q3A in order to get better frame rates, when it just-so-happens that Q3A framerates are an important benchmark? And not giving you any indication (other than reduced quality) that this is happening, nor any way to change it?
I stand by my original view.
This is benchmark manipulation more than trying to give customers benefits. They know perfectly well that Quake 3 is used as a benchmark, so they artificially inflated their scores.
This is nothing new, and I don't think the fact that they're catering to a real program rather than an artificial benchmark makes it any less reprehensible.
These are hardly the first reports of Xbox instability -- it has been rumored to crash frequently since the pre-E3 days.
If you want a semi-scientific study, you need to compare it against Nintendo's GameCube, which is slated to launch three days later and is also present in kiosks. I have heard zero (0) reports of GameCube crashes, which may or may not be due to reporting bias (in other words, people may just not feel it necessary to point out GC crashes, while Xbox crashes are a Big Deal).
So, we have 250,000 geeks at our disposal. Let's get some reports from the field. Go to a Toys R Us. How many Xboxes? How many of them were crashed or out of order? How many GameCubes? How many of them were crashed/OOO?
Should be very easy to spot a trend.
What I want to do with a device like this is use it as a game console. Load MAME and a bunch of other emulators on it, download 34 gigs of roms, and sit it next to my GameCube and Dreamcast.
The S-Video output makes it absolutely perfect for this sort of usage (although I agree it is pretty ugly...).
Oh yes, and we all know how many thirteen-year-old videogame addicts are stuck on the Dvorak layout ;-).
Seriously, I've never understood the myth about QWERTY sucking due to how spread out the common letters are. It's *good* that it has the common keys so spread out, because it means you use different fingers to hit them in sequence. I've only seen one study which claimed the Dvorak keyboard layout was measurably better, and interestingly enough it was by a Mr. Dvorak...
The story that QWERTY was invented to slow down typists is a myth. It was indeed invented to reduce jams, but it had nothing to do with slowing down typists. Jams occurred when adjacent or nearly adjacent hammers struck in quick succession, so QWERTY was designed so that successive keys would likely be well apart from one another. That's the whole reason. It actually helps *speed up* typing, because you're likely to alternate hands and use different fingers between successive keys. Maybe Dvorak is a little better, but it's certainly not a crushing defeat for QWERTY.
"[Java] has since dwindled into a niche of server-side programming"
.NET"
.Net. The fact that Microsoft has turned XML into a dog-and-pony show does not imply that Sun didn't know what they were doing.
.Net? I'm familiar with several teams taking advantage of JXTA, by the way. It's a new product, most of its uses haven't hit the market yet (and most are in server-side stuff that will never be seen by end users, so it's tough to point to anyway).
Since when is the #1 most used language a 'niche'? Java provides an awful lot of the power behind the Internet.
"JSP only came about because ASP did"
Okay, I'll give you that one. JSP sucks. Servlets, however, kick ass over all of the alternatives.
"Sun had XML for years (in fact, Sun employees did invent XML) before Microsoft finally ponied up a strategy for using it with
You've got to be kidding me. I was using XML in Java before Microsoft even announced
"Jxta came about because of Napster, but I don't see any applications using it yet.."
Oh, and there are presumably a ton using
"t's true, Java smart cards have been in the works for a while, but I don't think McNealy originally created them for a national ID system."
"In the works?" This is not vaporware. Java smart cards are a real product, available today. For a while now, actually. Sun didn't claim they invented them for their ID system, nor anything resembling that. You just made that up right now.
"But so far, they have failed to produce anything that lives up to their numerous claims"
What claims have they failed to live up to? Cross-platform functionality? I regularly move code between Windows, Solaris, and Linux without recompiling. Performance? I've written Java programs which outperform their C++ predecessors. Please elaborate me on which specific promises they have failed to fulfill.
I'm not saying Java is the best thing ever. There are some things about it which piss me off, and if I were designing it today I'd make a few changes. But I'd quit programming and become a hermit if I had to go back to C++ -- I just won't do it. Java is much better than what came before, and I will be using it for a long time to come.
"what would bw the american opinion if some american guy does something bad in, say China, and the chinese government says to the US: 'Give us this guy or we bomb you'?"
This wouldn't happen. China would request a peaceful extradition, and we would hand the guy over. Nobody threatened to bomb anybody until the response was "we're not handing this guy over, despite the mounds of evidence that proves he killed 6,000 people".
Handing somebody over for criminal proceedings is called extradition. There are treaties governing it. It happens all the time. Nobody freaks out about it (well, except the guy getting extradited).
They didn't sue Microsoft for using Java, they sued Microsoft for using a non-compliant version of Java.
Microsoft could have simply added in the missing features and removed JDirect, and everybody would have been happy. Instead they made it about 'innovation' and 'eliminating all other forms of life' and moaned like it was all Sun's fault that they couldn't obey a simple contract.
I know that you supposedly can't trademark a proper name
Where do people keep getting this idea from? McDonald's. Wendy's. Samuel Adams. Warner Brothers. Ford. Chef Boyardee (yes, he was a real person, although he spelled his name differently). The list goes on...
Everybody named Wendy does not get to sue the fast food chain just because they happen to share the name. An unrelated Mr. Sam Adams does not get to put the beer company out of business. Trademarks are only infringed when there is the potential for 'consumer confusion', and trust me that Mr. Serious is the only one confused about this. He's probably doing this just for the publicity, unless he has a very stupid lawyer.
It's important to keep in mind that the money doesn't just vanish. It's not like NASA has a huge furnace that they shovel money into while they work on the spacecraft.
Most of the money ends up paying people's salaries and buying components from aerospace/electronics companies. A portion of it will end up right back in your hands as the recipients spend their money on other things and it circulates back to you. Government projects like this usually create value, rather than destroy it, because these people might not have jobs or be producing anything without taxpayer dollars, and there wouldn't be as much money in circulation. Generally, everybody benefits.
"Trivial?"
I beg to disagree. You have to dump the waste heat in order to recycle the steam - and where are you going to dump the waste heat in space? There's no matter to convect it away, so you're left with radiation as your only possibility.
Keep in mind that space isn't 'cold' in the normal, conversational sense. You could expose your arm to outer space for a minute or two, and it would be absolutely fine, not frozen instantly as most people would assume. Outer space isn't significantly different from a vacuum in a laboratory here on earth, and a vacuum is the universe's most perfect insulator. Here's proof that things don't freeze instantly in space.
Until someone comes up with a way of dramatically improving the efficiency of heat radiation (e.g. a heat-powered laser), the satellite is stuck with the heat for very long periods of time. Sure, you could shut the reactor off and wait a few weeks, then power it up for another four seconds, then shut it off and wait a few weeks again... but somehow a thermoelectric solution just seems a lot more straightforward. Plus, we actually know how to build those.
Excellent point, but I'd actually replace "not a good idea" with "not possible".
;-).
A traditional nuclear reactor is, after all, just a glorified steam generator -- and the steam is a waste product which is dumped back into the environment.
You can't do that in a satellite (even assuming you could miniaturize everything else) because you'd need a replenishing source of water. Easy enough on earth, impossible in space. It'd be pretty equivalent to making a coal-fired satellite, which is a pretty funny mental image
I find it amusing that you completely missed my point.
It isn't a story.
It's a press release.
Thank you for playing.
Check the article: "SOURCE: Applied Digital Solutions, Inc."
That's right, this is not a Yahoo article, despite what the Slashdot summary says. It's a press release by the company in question. It really scares me to see glaring, repeated factual inaccuracies in press releases by tech companies...
I had similar thoughts, but a micron is a one-dimensional measure. Certainly couldn't be measuring surface area, let alone volume, and 10 microns is *really* small for a device like this in any case.
It mainly scares me because this is a press release, rather than an article, and the quote is by their *chief scientist* who hopefully should know better. You'd think a press release would get proofread, but maybe not...
I assumed the release was just written by a clueless person when I saw "10 micron amps". Poor fool just meant "10 microamps".
Then later down I see a quote by the *chief scientist* saying that they plan to develop a battery "capable of generating 3 volts of electricity with 10 microns".
Maybe I'm just an idiot, but the only definition I know of "micron" is a unit of linear measure. I have no idea how this would relate to anything electrical. I'm still cautiously assuming they meant "microamps", but does anyone have any other ideas?
Yep, my wife has something like 12GB of MP3s on her machine. 99.9% of them are ripped from CDs we own.
The remaining 0.1% she snagged from the net solely to avoid buying an entire CD for the one song she was interested in (nevermind the dozens of CDs we *did* buy for the one or two songs we care about...). And they accuse *us* of piracy. Brilliant.
Much better example, thank you.
So, you've got photographer B deliberately imitating photographer A's work as closely as possible, yet he didn't actually *copy* photographer A's photograph. Still guilty.
A similar example would be if author B really liked author A's work, so he produced an identical story. Same plot, same characters, same pretty damned near everything save for some slight wording differences. This is a pretty clear case of copyright violation, even though the copy wasn't exactly the same.
In both cases, artist A did the work, and artist B (one way or another) copied it and thereby profited from it. Copyright law exists to prevent other people from profiting off of your work without your permission.
IANAL, but I'm pretty confident that that's how a judge would rule in these two cases.
Then they'd get a pretty nasty surprise when they found out that chicken sandwiches aren't copyrightable. The recipe, however, might be protectable as a trade secret, but you would have to prove that A) you had used reasonable means to protect your trade secret and B) Jack in the Box still stole it.
Folks, PLEASE HAVE A BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF IP LAW before acting like you know what you're talking about. This is a copyright issue, plain and simple. If Apple wants to defend the work of its artists, it's damn well able to do that.
I shudder to think of a world in which everybody can just copy anything they like without regard to the rights of the original author. I make a living writing software, and I'm pretty happy that nobody can just appropriate it and sell it as their own.
Hmmm. Your putative "exactly 3 things" OS would be pretty damned useless, as it wouldn't have a filesystem, or networking, or a command shell, or a graphical shell, or nearly everything else we've come to expect from our OSes.
And don't try to say that things like filesystem and networking are covered under "access to hardware". Unless you're accustomed to accessing your disk/network at the sector/packet level, the OS is taking care of a lot more than "access to the hardware".
I'm not disagreeing with your basic point that we need to better distinguish between 'the OS' and 'the applications running on the OS', but your view of a super-simple OS is unrealistic. We expect operating systems to provide a ton of functionality, quite a bit of which is not covered in your list.
I'd even go so far as to say that if you started developing a Windows competitor today (and no, Linux doesn't count in its present form) and left out something like native multimedia support, you'd be crazy. Things like JPEG decompression libraries and MPEG support belong in the OS's runtime library so that you don't have fifty programs running around with the same code embedded in them. Likewise with rich audio libraries, 3D APIs, and so on...
"Show me one article or statement by NRA policy-makers that say anything remotely like that."
Ooookay. Policymakers? I don't give a rat's ass what the official policy is if the members obviously feel differently. How about ESR saying that the skies would be safer if the passengers were armed? I defy you to tell me that that is not plain lunacy. And I've heard some NRA members who happen to be friends of mine echo eerily similar sentiments. I never said "NRA policymakers dictate lunacy", I just said that the "NRA is a bunch of lunatics". You've done nothing to dissuade me from that opinion.
"Just because you personally think the right to keep & bear arms is an unimportant one and the freedom from unreasonable search & seizure isn't doesn't mean that you're right."
First: I never said the right to keep and bear arms is an unimportant one. I said that I favor gun control. Gun control does not mean "nobody should own guns", it means "the second ammendment was written two hundred years ago and we need to be a little rational about things". For instance, I consider the fact that there are more guns than people in this country a tad ridiculous.
Second: as for me not being right, I never said I was. I just offered my opinion. You're welcome to disagree with me, as I clearly said in my post. You obviously do, fine. I also said I voted for politicians who supported my views, and I would of course encourage you to do the same. You were the one who brought the idea of absolute 'rightness' into it, not me.
"They have squashed our constitutional right ... Most of you stood idley by."
Oh yes, characterize us as lazy just because we don't want everybody and his cousin walking around with deadly weapons.
I did not stand "idley" by. I voted for politicians who support gun control, because I think the NRA is a bunch of raving lunatics who always talk about how great everything would be if only we were all prepared to kill one another at a moments' notice. Well, sorry, I happen to rather strenuously disagree with you on that point, and I voted that way. You're welcome to your opinion, but please don't mistake opposition for apathy.
I continue to disagree with .class -> .exe being the way to go. After all, native compilation *is* available (there are a bunch of native compilers for java) and for all intents and purposes nobody uses them. I certainly don't. If native compilers were so very desireable, they'd be a lot more popular.
As for VM sharing, you're absolutely right that multiple VMs are a huge memory sink, and it really sucks. However, research on solving this problem has been in progress for years and is scheduled to be included in version 1.5 (it was originally targetted at 1.4, which is currently in beta, but was pushed back). For the record, I don't understand the difficulty but the people working on the project seem to feel that fixing this issue is a hell of a lot more involved than it would sound at first blush. I don't know the details.
And yes, the VMs are pretty frickin' amazing right now, aren't they? I honestly never thought we'd reach the point where they were even close to native compilation, let alone beating all but the best C compilers...
I submit this example: Microsoft Word is a C++ application, and it sucks ass on a 700MHz PIII machine with 256MB RAM.
The fact that a particular program runs poorly is not an indication that the language in which it is written sucks. I get great performance out of Java. (And, Forte runs fine on my 128MB 400MHz PII, but I'm not going to argue with you about that...)