Depends on if you're looking at letters of law or spirits of law.
By the letter of the law, people who host roms are giving away software which has not been released freely, and for which the copyright has not expired. I mean, it's only been 10-15 years since the SNES games were made and sold for $49.99. 15 year old books can't be given away for free.
However, by the spirit of the law... I don't see downloading ROMs as hurting someone. It isn't physically stealing, it's copyright infringement. No one is being deprived of a good or service. All of the money that has been spent on development, production, and marketing has already been spent. No additional money or effort is being spent by the copyright owners, and the games are no longer offered for sale. To me, that signals product abandonment.
This might change after the retro services offered by the Wii.
Right, and people don't realize - no matter how complex the security lockout on the door, the pirates go in throught the window.
Which of these is harder to pirate?
Scenario 1:
10 Start game 20 Check to see if key is legit 30 if key = legit, goto 50 40 echo "key is not legit"; stop 50 Play game
Scenario 2:
10 Start game 20 Really complicated check to see if game is legit, key is activated, disc is inserted 30 - 800 (really complicated and annoying security checks) 810 if key = legit, goto 830 820 echo "key is not legit, and we have contacted the FBI"; stop 830 Play game
The Pirates simply take out all the crap between "Start game" and "Play game", using decompilers and jump tracers and a bunch of crap that I don't know how it works, but get the general idea. They don't "defeat" the security. They just sidestep it. But the rest of us still have to deal with "you're not connected to the interweb tubes, you can't play this game".
~Wx
PS Yes, starforce supposedly is impossible to break. Except that it gets its grubby hands in to your computer and causes massive problems, including hardware failures, system instability, and blue screens.
The key here is to lower your expectations. (well, not you, but the public).
I've been a tech for years now, and for a while I was a ground-pounder (on-site service). No matter where I was, home, office, or elsewise - people ask "What's a good computer to buy?". Appearantly, when you do it for a living, people value your opinion. Even though the shop I worked for sold (relatively solid) computers, I always gave the same answer:
"Figure out what features you want, then pay the lowest price you can to get those features. Plan for the computer to have problems and don't expect any service from the retailer or the manufacturer for free."
That's it.
It saves you from paying too much or too little, and it saves you from the shock of "it's going to cost how much?!? What about the warranty?!?".
If your feature list is "I need to get onto the interweb tubes", then.. pretty much anything will work for you. If your wishlist is a Micro-UXGA TFT 1900x1200 screen and a Centrino setup, then look at those models. If your wishlist is "looks good on the coffee table and is powerful and easy to use", then there's nothing wrong with buying a Mac.
But, expect it to break, and expect to pay someone to fix it. Software, hardware, whatever. If it never has a problem, congratulations you won the lottery. They're all made from the same parts, folks*
~Wx
*the SOLE exception to this is computers with those magical letters on them - IBM. Granted, one: I haven't worked with post-Lenovo IBM, and two: IBM sells a lot less computers than dell and they cost a lot, but in my time of hands on groundpounder tech work, I never once saw an IBM thinkpad with a hardware problem. I'm sure they existed, but... those computers just wouldn't give up.
As has been noted around here: If Macs cost $500, people would expect eMachine or Packard Bell or HP's level of service.
When you charge $2200 for something that everyone else charges $1700 for; and you parade yourself on being the company that "really gets computer users" (commercial with old fogie representing windows crashing and young hip guy representing a Mac and how well it works), you're held to a higher standard.
Other companies make PC's and sell PC's.
Apple claims to make better PC's. If they're not better, then Apple is feeding the public bullshit (and using the same shovel to hoarde the profits).
If backup solutions haven't kept up with hard drive sizes... maybe it's time to migrate your backup solution to Hard drive?
We have a pretty good setup. Our backup system is 2 servers - one running linux and one running windows - each attached to our 12TB backup array, through SAS (serial attached scsi, i think). Basically, we have 2 2U chassis with 12x500GB hard drives in the front of them, and scsi connectors in the back. Anyway, all the backups (the SAN, staff desktop machines, and servers) are run through those 2 servers to the 2 backup arrays, which are raid 5.
Nightly, a series of scripts crawls through the backups, checking MD5 sums, deleting files, and replacing them with hard links. I think. At least, our server admin had talked about doing that, but I'm not sure we ever got into enough of a space crunch to sprun it to fruition.
Anyway, weekly, the backups are dumped to tape, using a GFS backup logic (essentially, the further back you go, the fewer backup sets are available). We have an autoloading tape system which uses LTO-3 400GB raw / 800GB compressed tapes. It might take the better part of 36 hours to write to several tapes, but so what? The most recent are on hard drive. If someone wants a file that they deleted 3 months ago, we're going to have to find it and pull it from tape, and there isn't an expectation of immediate retreival with that (we have to put our foot down somewhere).
This situation works for our department, with a staff of about 10, about 50 smaller and 20 larger servers, and our san, which is 5TB I think. The total cost of the backup system was about $75k, and we got it when 500GB drives were brand new. The SAS arrays are gateway, the tape autoloader and the servers are dell.
If it were, there would be no laws governing search and siezure, chain of evidence, entrapment, or a number of other long-standing and well-established laws that we respect, if not revere.
These laws are necesary to ensure that the government does not run roughshod over the civil liberties of its citizens.
Of course, it's harder to get interesting date numbers when you've got 8 digits to work with, two of them can't take many values and two or three more only change values very infrequently. 2011-11-02 20:11:11.02 is coming up, I guess.
2011-11-02_20-11-11_02
Or something. I don't usually deal with fractions of a second (as most of the shell scripts that I have the mangle the date command into fancy-schmancy variables don't run more than once per second). But I always dealt with a logical division in DATE vs TIME by using an underscore. It's a perfectly legal character in Linux, Solaris, and Tru/64 at a minimum, plus Windows I guess. Anyway, I always followed the idea LARGEST-TIME-INTERVAL.....SMALLEST-TIME-INTERVAL, as in YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS.
When I worked at a computer store (in the US), we did a lot of recovering people's data from an otherwise dead-ish machine. We'd pull the hard drive out and plug it into a machine that existed for this purpose (well, for backups, virus scans, and driver downloads). Anyway, I always stored data I'd backed up in the format D:\CustBackups\YYYY-MM-DD because if you store it day first, or even month first, and sort alphabetically, it gets to be a jumbled mess.
YYYY-MM-DD sorts alphabetically into chronological order. If you use dd-mm-yy, sorting alphabetically is going to put 04-08-2006-blahblah right next to 04-07-2006-blahblah when these files were created a month apart. At least mm-dd-yy solves this problem 330 days at a time, but YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.
It will be curious to see what the Core 2 Duo proc (and related intel procs) does. According to reviews I've read (and Maximum PC who's 2006 dream machine contains a Core 2 Duo), the processor is amazing. Under full tilt, it doesn't overheat even with passive cooling, which is a major departure from my Pentium 4 - watercooled to keep the noise down.
It's called an API, and it's not a new concept. There may be a different term when it's hardware-software as opposed to software-middleware, but there it is.
You build your hardware always such that the newer ones understand the older instructions, just using supersets. Unfortunately it means every X years you have to start from scratch to get rid of the absurd backwards "if such and such then do this kludge".
But it's a good concept. If published, it allows for open drivers (or whatever), as long as you know "when I put bits in here, this is what it does with them, and the application is going to give me the bits in such and such order", you can figure it out (well, I mean, I can't and YOU may not be able to, but someone can).
Again, I point out. THIS ISN'T THE CHOICE. IT'S MY JOB TO SUPPORT IT ON LINUX.
That's why they hire me. They want to run bumfuck linux distro, and then when stuff doesn't work, they want me to fix it.
People saying "Oh, just use a Mac", or "If your code breaks between releases, it's your fault" aren't recognizing that while this all may be true, it won't change the situation! I have to deal with it as is!
And honestly, if it's part of your job to support java, you don't seem to be doing too well at it.
Emphasis on the "part of". I have to support pretty much everything. My official title is Computer Systems Engineer, Linux Support or something along those lines. I support labs of 60+ machines running linux, a remote login load balanced cluster of 20 machines, and am partially responsible for the department's infrastructure. I support servers, desktops, workstations, clusters, etc. I build, repair, and maintain. I have to support Dec's, Compaq alphas, x86 intels, and powermacs. I work in FreeBSD, Digital Unix, Tru/64 Unix, and a multitude of varieties of Linux. I have to be able to support everything from openoffice to printing support via cups or lpd to pine on mac OSX to postfix to apache to GCC to samba to custom backup software to CVS to (of all things on God's Green Earth) EDT+.
I don't have time to become an expert in Java. There are some good ideas in this slashdot discussion, I'm going to use those going forward, but I'm going to do what I can with Java and just try to live with it the best I can. There's always a more pressing crisis.
I can't help you with the questions as to why certain versions of Java are suited for certain things. I just repeat what I'm told. Remember, these are University professors - the more brilliant they are, the touchier they get about changes to their environment.
Most of the problems are from a sysadmin point of view, yes. It's just more complicated since I don't develop in java - I'm not sure how to test it, exactly, to see that everything is working. So, at first, I'd install the JDK and... if it didn't do what the professor wanted, I'd troubleshoot it on an individual basis.
The reason that I'm so miffed about install locations is more to do with two things: One, there were a large number of people in a small ammt of time in my job before me, so there's 12 different ways that everything's done, and Two, I have to support it on a huge variety of systems - RedHat / Fedora, Mandriva, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Digital Unix, Tru/64 Unix, Solaris, and probably some I've forgotten. Oh, Irix, but I think all of those are recently phased out, thank god. I've been transitioning the DEC-loyalists to Linux, one box at a time, but... It's hard to keep track, ya know? I mean, my linuxen usually don't have an/opt. The Tru/64 boxes I work on never seem to even have a path set beyond/bin and the korn shell. It's just.. can be frustrating. I'm working on standardizing, since I plan on being there for a while.
Also, I dropped this: . Can you pick it up for me?
----
Yeah, exactly. You've hit on all the major points.
I will look into that redhat thing. THAT would save a lot of headaches. I don't particularly like redhat, and they do some things a bit wonky, but at least it's relatively consistant. Also, the suggestion about $JAVA_HOME is brilliant, I can't believe I haven't thought of it. I'm probably going to do that tomorrow.
If you go back and read:
JDK/Java SDK is for development. Comes with Javac. You need this for J2EE and for development. JRE is included in the JDK or is available as a standalone download. The JRE is the runtime env, it only includes the VM. J2EE is a specification, you almost never want the J2EE install from Sun since, by itself, it doesn't give you anything. You need an application server, such as Websphere, Geronimo, JBoss, Weblogic, etc. The application server includes the J2EE libraries. It does not always include a JDK.
I mean... I know you know what you're talking about, but wow. That's really confusing, and that's better than I've ever seen it explained anywhere. Basically, I install JDK. The way I decided (call me wierd) what contained the most stuff was by looking at the filesizes of the downloads - i.e. JRE is only a few megs, JDK is bigger, and J2EE is really big. It's odd that the big one doesn't include anything, though. Must be the graphical installer. But, yeah, my standard ritual is to install the JDK package. After that, some people want J2EE.
And, you also hit it on the head with your last bit. I *KNEW* that if I developed in Java, this would all make sense (or, if it doesn't make sense, it would be self evident as to what did what, skipping the why). Ugh.
Yeah, exactly. You've hit on all the major points.
I will look into that redhat thing. THAT would save a lot of headaches. I don't particularly like redhat, and they do some things a bit wonky, but at least it's relatively consistant. Also, the suggestion about $JAVA_HOME is brilliant, I can't believe I haven't thought of it. I'm probably going to do that tomorrow.
If you go back and read:
JDK/Java SDK is for development. Comes with Javac. You need this for J2EE and for development. JRE is included in the JDK or is available as a standalone download. The JRE is the runtime env, it only includes the VM. J2EE is a specification, you almost never want the J2EE install from Sun since, by itself, it doesn't give you anything. You need an application server, such as Websphere, Geronimo, JBoss, Weblogic, etc. The application server includes the J2EE libraries. It does not always include a JDK.
I mean... I know you know what you're talking about, but wow. That's really confusing, and that's better than I've ever seen it explained anywhere. Basically, I install JDK. The way I decided (call me wierd) what contained the most stuff was by looking at the filesizes of the downloads - i.e. JRE is only a few megs, JDK is bigger, and J2EE is really big. It's odd that the big one doesn't include anything, though. But, yeah, my standard ritual is to install the JDK package. After that, some people want J2EE.
And, you also hit it on the head with your last bit. I *KNEW* that if I developed in Java, this would all make sense (or, if it doesn't make sense, it would be self evident as to what did what, skipping the why). Ugh.
I can tell you this: I don't program in Java, but I do have to install and support it as part of my job, and I can't think of a more odd set of install criteria than the Java installers.
For one, we use primarialy redhat-based linux installs for desktop and server, including Fedora, RHEL, and Centos. Sun Java, for reasons that I've never fully understood (something to do with the licensing, and it makes my brain hurt to figure it out) cannot be distributed with Linux distros. Or, that's what I thought, but then I heard that Mepis comes with java installed and working. See? Wierd already. But, at any rate, when you install a RH-based Linux install, you get the gnu java. Since I support University professors, most of them have been using Sun's java, and the GNU has (appearantly) enough querks that they don't like using it (same with the g77 fortran, but that's a different story).
So, at that point, you need to install Java. Which one? Nobody knows. People want to be able to use java plugins in their web browser (more on that in a sec), they want to be able to compile java, and they want to be able to run java apps in some sort of java environment. I think. But which one do you install? Java_jdk, Java_Jre, or Java_j2ee? Some of them include functionality replicated in the others, but there's no like clear-cut FAQ on the java website to tell you which (like, a simple four-column by X row table with the distros across the top and the expected functionality down the left side, and X's or O's, or green and red squares, to indicate which versions include which functionality). If you independantly read the descriptions, it's a LOT of buzzwords, and very short on substance.
Then, there's the "where does it install" question. They distribute as binaries, so you just kind of chmod u+x file;./file and cross your fingers. Sometimes it's/usr/java/bin/java, sometimes, it's/usr/bin/java, sometimes it's/usr/local/java, sometimes it's/usr/local/bin/java, sometimes it's/opt/SUNWappserver/java/bin/java. Who knows? Good thing all Unix and Linux distro's use exactly the same order in their $PATH and the same file structure and organization. Not to mention, you kind of have to trust that it installs libraries and whatever else in all the correct spots, and is familiar with every linux distro from RHEL to Bob's Discount Linux to create a bazillion symlinks.
Then, you've got to figure out which one to run. "which java" can yeild any one of 50 outputs, and that's if you don't let users set their own shells and rc scripts. Not to mention, you may end up chasing symlinks down for an hour to find the exact binary (/usr/java ->/etc/alternatives/java ->/usr/bin/java ->/usr/local/java/bin/java etc). Oh, and some of the installers are command line and some are X windows required. And I've had trouble with the J2EE 1.4 installer claiming it was out of diskspace on a partition with 60 GB free, aside from all that.
Then, you have to get it so the plugins run in the web browser. How do you do this? Well, you.... google. There's a file somewhere called libjavaplugin_oji.so, but it could be anywhere. Then you've got to find your firefox or mozilla installation, which could also be anywhere depending on whether you're using the default install, whether the user has run updates, whether the version is a self-compiled version, and what linux distro you're using. Then you have to symlink the object into the plugins folder. What? Come on. You've got to be kidding. There's not a "Download this 4 meg file and stick it here" option? Nope, it relys on 1500 libraries. Oh, and every time you run a full update that also catches firefox, it's going to break (thanks yum). And when you need to update java? Good luck. Here's hoping there's a binary update that knows what it's doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why my god is the Scientific Method, and my religion the study of our suroundings.
There's only two classifications of things in my religion.
1.) Things we understand.
2.) Things we don't understand yet.
There isn't a "3.) Things we will never understand and aren't meant to understand, and must take on faith".
~X
Oh, now that's not even fair. They're still not spending any money or development resources on it.
Sigh. I guess this makes me take back what I said, but damn.
Depends on if you're looking at letters of law or spirits of law.
By the letter of the law, people who host roms are giving away software which has not been released freely, and for which the copyright has not expired. I mean, it's only been 10-15 years since the SNES games were made and sold for $49.99. 15 year old books can't be given away for free.
However, by the spirit of the law... I don't see downloading ROMs as hurting someone. It isn't physically stealing, it's copyright infringement. No one is being deprived of a good or service. All of the money that has been spent on development, production, and marketing has already been spent. No additional money or effort is being spent by the copyright owners, and the games are no longer offered for sale. To me, that signals product abandonment.
This might change after the retro services offered by the Wii.
~Will
Right, and people don't realize - no matter how complex the security lockout on the door, the pirates go in throught the window.
Which of these is harder to pirate?
Scenario 1:Scenario 2:The Pirates simply take out all the crap between "Start game" and "Play game", using decompilers and jump tracers and a bunch of crap that I don't know how it works, but get the general idea. They don't "defeat" the security. They just sidestep it. But the rest of us still have to deal with "you're not connected to the interweb tubes, you can't play this game".
~Wx
PS Yes, starforce supposedly is impossible to break. Except that it gets its grubby hands in to your computer and causes massive problems, including hardware failures, system instability, and blue screens.
WGA is a little harder, but it's day will come.
Lemme get you a time warp.
http://windizupdate.com/
Blazzamo!
~Wx
Dear Pirates:
http://windizupdate.com/
Please send beer. Thank you.
The key here is to lower your expectations. (well, not you, but the public).
I've been a tech for years now, and for a while I was a ground-pounder (on-site service). No matter where I was, home, office, or elsewise - people ask "What's a good computer to buy?". Appearantly, when you do it for a living, people value your opinion. Even though the shop I worked for sold (relatively solid) computers, I always gave the same answer:
"Figure out what features you want, then pay the lowest price you can to get those features. Plan for the computer to have problems and don't expect any service from the retailer or the manufacturer for free."
That's it.
It saves you from paying too much or too little, and it saves you from the shock of "it's going to cost how much?!? What about the warranty?!?".
If your feature list is "I need to get onto the interweb tubes", then.. pretty much anything will work for you. If your wishlist is a Micro-UXGA TFT 1900x1200 screen and a Centrino setup, then look at those models. If your wishlist is "looks good on the coffee table and is powerful and easy to use", then there's nothing wrong with buying a Mac.
But, expect it to break, and expect to pay someone to fix it. Software, hardware, whatever. If it never has a problem, congratulations you won the lottery. They're all made from the same parts, folks*
~Wx
*the SOLE exception to this is computers with those magical letters on them - IBM. Granted, one: I haven't worked with post-Lenovo IBM, and two: IBM sells a lot less computers than dell and they cost a lot, but in my time of hands on groundpounder tech work, I never once saw an IBM thinkpad with a hardware problem. I'm sure they existed, but... those computers just wouldn't give up.
As has been noted around here: If Macs cost $500, people would expect eMachine or Packard Bell or HP's level of service.
When you charge $2200 for something that everyone else charges $1700 for; and you parade yourself on being the company that "really gets computer users" (commercial with old fogie representing windows crashing and young hip guy representing a Mac and how well it works), you're held to a higher standard.
Other companies make PC's and sell PC's.
Apple claims to make better PC's. If they're not better, then Apple is feeding the public bullshit (and using the same shovel to hoarde the profits).
~Wx
NVidia is calling; they want to show you their NForce chipset, which has included optical digital hardware based sound for like 4 years now.
And for the extra $1000, I'll deal with the wires, thankyouverymuch.
website.org:
. one
o two
r three
g four
(enter) five
website + ctl+shift+enter:
ctl one
shift two
enter three
Thankyou.
~Wx
If backup solutions haven't kept up with hard drive sizes... maybe it's time to migrate your backup solution to Hard drive?
We have a pretty good setup. Our backup system is 2 servers - one running linux and one running windows - each attached to our 12TB backup array, through SAS (serial attached scsi, i think). Basically, we have 2 2U chassis with 12x500GB hard drives in the front of them, and scsi connectors in the back. Anyway, all the backups (the SAN, staff desktop machines, and servers) are run through those 2 servers to the 2 backup arrays, which are raid 5.
Nightly, a series of scripts crawls through the backups, checking MD5 sums, deleting files, and replacing them with hard links. I think. At least, our server admin had talked about doing that, but I'm not sure we ever got into enough of a space crunch to sprun it to fruition.
Anyway, weekly, the backups are dumped to tape, using a GFS backup logic (essentially, the further back you go, the fewer backup sets are available). We have an autoloading tape system which uses LTO-3 400GB raw / 800GB compressed tapes. It might take the better part of 36 hours to write to several tapes, but so what? The most recent are on hard drive. If someone wants a file that they deleted 3 months ago, we're going to have to find it and pull it from tape, and there isn't an expectation of immediate retreival with that (we have to put our foot down somewhere).
This situation works for our department, with a staff of about 10, about 50 smaller and 20 larger servers, and our san, which is 5TB I think. The total cost of the backup system was about $75k, and we got it when 500GB drives were brand new. The SAS arrays are gateway, the tape autoloader and the servers are dell.
~Will
The law is NOT about the search for truth.
If it were, there would be no laws governing search and siezure, chain of evidence, entrapment, or a number of other long-standing and well-established laws that we respect, if not revere.
These laws are necesary to ensure that the government does not run roughshod over the civil liberties of its citizens.
Hello, Dun Malg. This is my friend Civilization 4. CIV, meat Dun Malg.
The housing market has to implode first.
5.. 4.. 3..
As well as one could ever expect a windows cd to ever work, I'd imangine.
I heard if you play a windows CD backwards, you hear Satanic music.
That's not the half of it though; if you play it forward, it installs Windows!
~Wx
Of course, it's harder to get interesting date numbers when you've got 8 digits to work with, two of them can't take many values and two or three more only change values very infrequently. 2011-11-02 20:11:11.02 is coming up, I guess.
2011-11-02_20-11-11_02
Or something. I don't usually deal with fractions of a second (as most of the shell scripts that I have the mangle the date command into fancy-schmancy variables don't run more than once per second). But I always dealt with a logical division in DATE vs TIME by using an underscore. It's a perfectly legal character in Linux, Solaris, and Tru/64 at a minimum, plus Windows I guess. Anyway, I always followed the idea LARGEST-TIME-INTERVAL.....SMALLEST-TIME-INTERVAL, as in YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS.
~X
When I worked at a computer store (in the US), we did a lot of recovering people's data from an otherwise dead-ish machine. We'd pull the hard drive out and plug it into a machine that existed for this purpose (well, for backups, virus scans, and driver downloads). Anyway, I always stored data I'd backed up in the format D:\CustBackups\YYYY-MM-DD because if you store it day first, or even month first, and sort alphabetically, it gets to be a jumbled mess.
YYYY-MM-DD sorts alphabetically into chronological order. If you use dd-mm-yy, sorting alphabetically is going to put 04-08-2006-blahblah right next to 04-07-2006-blahblah when these files were created a month apart. At least mm-dd-yy solves this problem 330 days at a time, but YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.
~X
It will be curious to see what the Core 2 Duo proc (and related intel procs) does. According to reviews I've read (and Maximum PC who's 2006 dream machine contains a Core 2 Duo), the processor is amazing. Under full tilt, it doesn't overheat even with passive cooling, which is a major departure from my Pentium 4 - watercooled to keep the noise down.
~X
It's called an API, and it's not a new concept. There may be a different term when it's hardware-software as opposed to software-middleware, but there it is.
You build your hardware always such that the newer ones understand the older instructions, just using supersets. Unfortunately it means every X years you have to start from scratch to get rid of the absurd backwards "if such and such then do this kludge".
But it's a good concept. If published, it allows for open drivers (or whatever), as long as you know "when I put bits in here, this is what it does with them, and the application is going to give me the bits in such and such order", you can figure it out (well, I mean, I can't and YOU may not be able to, but someone can).
Again, I point out. THIS ISN'T THE CHOICE. IT'S MY JOB TO SUPPORT IT ON LINUX.
That's why they hire me. They want to run bumfuck linux distro, and then when stuff doesn't work, they want me to fix it.
People saying "Oh, just use a Mac", or "If your code breaks between releases, it's your fault" aren't recognizing that while this all may be true, it won't change the situation! I have to deal with it as is!
I love my job, but Java gives me headaches!
And honestly, if it's part of your job to support java, you don't seem to be doing too well at it.
Emphasis on the "part of". I have to support pretty much everything. My official title is Computer Systems Engineer, Linux Support or something along those lines. I support labs of 60+ machines running linux, a remote login load balanced cluster of 20 machines, and am partially responsible for the department's infrastructure. I support servers, desktops, workstations, clusters, etc. I build, repair, and maintain. I have to support Dec's, Compaq alphas, x86 intels, and powermacs. I work in FreeBSD, Digital Unix, Tru/64 Unix, and a multitude of varieties of Linux. I have to be able to support everything from openoffice to printing support via cups or lpd to pine on mac OSX to postfix to apache to GCC to samba to custom backup software to CVS to (of all things on God's Green Earth) EDT+.
I don't have time to become an expert in Java. There are some good ideas in this slashdot discussion, I'm going to use those going forward, but I'm going to do what I can with Java and just try to live with it the best I can. There's always a more pressing crisis.
~Wx
I can't help you with the questions as to why certain versions of Java are suited for certain things. I just repeat what I'm told. Remember, these are University professors - the more brilliant they are, the touchier they get about changes to their environment.
Most of the problems are from a sysadmin point of view, yes. It's just more complicated since I don't develop in java - I'm not sure how to test it, exactly, to see that everything is working. So, at first, I'd install the JDK and
The reason that I'm so miffed about install locations is more to do with two things: One, there were a large number of people in a small ammt of time in my job before me, so there's 12 different ways that everything's done, and Two, I have to support it on a huge variety of systems - RedHat / Fedora, Mandriva, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Digital Unix, Tru/64 Unix, Solaris, and probably some I've forgotten. Oh, Irix, but I think all of those are recently phased out, thank god. I've been transitioning the DEC-loyalists to Linux, one box at a time, but... It's hard to keep track, ya know? I mean, my linuxen usually don't have an
~Wx
Also, I dropped this: . Can you pick it up for me?
//grumble preview grumble
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Yeah, exactly. You've hit on all the major points.
I will look into that redhat thing. THAT would save a lot of headaches. I don't particularly like redhat, and they do some things a bit wonky, but at least it's relatively consistant. Also, the suggestion about $JAVA_HOME is brilliant, I can't believe I haven't thought of it. I'm probably going to do that tomorrow.
If you go back and read:
JDK/Java SDK is for development. Comes with Javac. You need this for J2EE and for development. JRE is included in the JDK or is available as a standalone download. The JRE is the runtime env, it only includes the VM. J2EE is a specification, you almost never want the J2EE install from Sun since, by itself, it doesn't give you anything. You need an application server, such as Websphere, Geronimo, JBoss, Weblogic, etc. The application server includes the J2EE libraries. It does not always include a JDK.
I mean... I know you know what you're talking about, but wow. That's really confusing, and that's better than I've ever seen it explained anywhere. Basically, I install JDK. The way I decided (call me wierd) what contained the most stuff was by looking at the filesizes of the downloads - i.e. JRE is only a few megs, JDK is bigger, and J2EE is really big. It's odd that the big one doesn't include anything, though. Must be the graphical installer. But, yeah, my standard ritual is to install the JDK package. After that, some people want J2EE.
And, you also hit it on the head with your last bit. I *KNEW* that if I developed in Java, this would all make sense (or, if it doesn't make sense, it would be self evident as to what did what, skipping the why). Ugh.
Thanks a million, seriously!
~Wx
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Yeah, exactly. You've hit on all the major points.
I will look into that redhat thing. THAT would save a lot of headaches. I don't particularly like redhat, and they do some things a bit wonky, but at least it's relatively consistant. Also, the suggestion about $JAVA_HOME is brilliant, I can't believe I haven't thought of it. I'm probably going to do that tomorrow.
If you go back and read:
JDK/Java SDK is for development. Comes with Javac. You need this for J2EE and for development. JRE is included in the JDK or is available as a standalone download. The JRE is the runtime env, it only includes the VM. J2EE is a specification, you almost never want the J2EE install from Sun since, by itself, it doesn't give you anything. You need an application server, such as Websphere, Geronimo, JBoss, Weblogic, etc. The application server includes the J2EE libraries. It does not always include a JDK.
I mean... I know you know what you're talking about, but wow. That's really confusing, and that's better than I've ever seen it explained anywhere. Basically, I install JDK. The way I decided (call me wierd) what contained the most stuff was by looking at the filesizes of the downloads - i.e. JRE is only a few megs, JDK is bigger, and J2EE is really big. It's odd that the big one doesn't include anything, though. But, yeah, my standard ritual is to install the JDK package. After that, some people want J2EE.
And, you also hit it on the head with your last bit. I *KNEW* that if I developed in Java, this would all make sense (or, if it doesn't make sense, it would be self evident as to what did what, skipping the why). Ugh.
Thanks a million, seriously!
~Wx
I can tell you this: I don't program in Java, but I do have to install and support it as part of my job, and I can't think of a more odd set of install criteria than the Java installers.
./file and cross your fingers. Sometimes it's /usr/java/bin/java, sometimes, it's /usr/bin/java, sometimes it's /usr/local/java, sometimes it's /usr/local/bin/java, sometimes it's /opt/SUNWappserver/java/bin/java. Who knows? Good thing all Unix and Linux distro's use exactly the same order in their $PATH and the same file structure and organization. Not to mention, you kind of have to trust that it installs libraries and whatever else in all the correct spots, and is familiar with every linux distro from RHEL to Bob's Discount Linux to create a bazillion symlinks.
/etc/alternatives/java -> /usr/bin/java -> /usr/local/java/bin/java etc). Oh, and some of the installers are command line and some are X windows required. And I've had trouble with the J2EE 1.4 installer claiming it was out of diskspace on a partition with 60 GB free, aside from all that.
.... google. There's a file somewhere called libjavaplugin_oji.so, but it could be anywhere. Then you've got to find your firefox or mozilla installation, which could also be anywhere depending on whether you're using the default install, whether the user has run updates, whether the version is a self-compiled version, and what linux distro you're using. Then you have to symlink the object into the plugins folder. What? Come on. You've got to be kidding. There's not a "Download this 4 meg file and stick it here" option? Nope, it relys on 1500 libraries. Oh, and every time you run a full update that also catches firefox, it's going to break (thanks yum). And when you need to update java? Good luck. Here's hoping there's a binary update that knows what it's doing.
For one, we use primarialy redhat-based linux installs for desktop and server, including Fedora, RHEL, and Centos. Sun Java, for reasons that I've never fully understood (something to do with the licensing, and it makes my brain hurt to figure it out) cannot be distributed with Linux distros. Or, that's what I thought, but then I heard that Mepis comes with java installed and working. See? Wierd already. But, at any rate, when you install a RH-based Linux install, you get the gnu java. Since I support University professors, most of them have been using Sun's java, and the GNU has (appearantly) enough querks that they don't like using it (same with the g77 fortran, but that's a different story).
So, at that point, you need to install Java. Which one? Nobody knows. People want to be able to use java plugins in their web browser (more on that in a sec), they want to be able to compile java, and they want to be able to run java apps in some sort of java environment. I think. But which one do you install? Java_jdk, Java_Jre, or Java_j2ee? Some of them include functionality replicated in the others, but there's no like clear-cut FAQ on the java website to tell you which (like, a simple four-column by X row table with the distros across the top and the expected functionality down the left side, and X's or O's, or green and red squares, to indicate which versions include which functionality). If you independantly read the descriptions, it's a LOT of buzzwords, and very short on substance.
Then, there's the "where does it install" question. They distribute as binaries, so you just kind of chmod u+x file;
Then, you've got to figure out which one to run. "which java" can yeild any one of 50 outputs, and that's if you don't let users set their own shells and rc scripts. Not to mention, you may end up chasing symlinks down for an hour to find the exact binary (/usr/java ->
Then, you have to get it so the plugins run in the web browser. How do you do this? Well, you
ON TOP OF THAT, on o