Kraftwerk, Can, Pere Ubu... If we're going to talk about krautrock
route, then let's not forget Neu and Faust. Lovely music. It's good to see
their infulence is still around in the likes of Stereolab and Tortoise.
I've written elsewhere in this thread about where I stand on this issue, so I'll not repeat all that here.
Frequency range for vinyl is, as you say, 10Hz to 30,000Hz. The frequency range for CD is 20Hz to 21,400Hz. The is beacuse the sampling rate for CDs is 42,800Hz, and seeing as you need the first half of the sound wave to be low in one sample, and the second half of the wave to be high in the next sample, you can only fit waves with a frequency of lower than half the sampling rate into a digital medium. Whats more, the effective top end is often lower than this, becuase you need massive amounts of filtering to avoid aliasing from frequencies higher than half the sampling rate. These produce an ugly high pitched beat frequency over the top of the music without the filtering.
DAT tape does slightly better, with a sampling rate of 48,000Hz, giving a top end of 24,000Hz, but all that means it doesn't match upto vinyl either. For best results, you'd use half track stereo on half inch open reel tape, running at 30 inches per second, but that another story...
I feel the same way myself. I've never bought a CD or a CD player, and collect all my music on lovely black vinyl. There are several reasons for this.
First. They are, after nearly twenty years of sales to recoup the initial investment costs, cheaper than CDs. I've only ever once spent over ten pounds sterling on a record, and that was for a brand new triple album (remixes of old Can songs, storming record, much recomended). Every CD I ever see is at least 12 or 13 pounds sterling. This just shows up the music industry as the profiteering scum they are.
Second. I've been fortunate enough to get hold of a couple of early 60s record players with their matching tone arms, in mint condition. This means I get a truly gorgeous sound out of my records, and I've yet to meet a CD player that is as pleasing to listen to. Not only did the hi-fi industry make things to last in those days, they made things so that they could be repaired too. Not a sinlge "no user servicable parts inside" notice anywhere, but several "make sure to turn off the mains before removing this panel" instead. The spare parts are still available, so if they ever need to be repaired, they can be. Can't please a technology geek better than that.
Third. A lot of the material I want to collect is from the late 60s to early 70s, and long since deleted. So I spend many hours leafing through the racks at second hand record shops, finding most of the things I want too.
Absolutely. I'm a Englishman who's lived in Scotland for ten years. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine had cable TV. One day I was idly watching some random channel, along with a different friend. On came the most disturbing program I've ever come across, which came from the US, called "The World's Scariest Police Shootouts". Real life footage of cops shooting people. We were stunned, literally unable to move as we watched the terrifying scenes unfold. At least until there was an advert break, when we snapped back into reality, and turned the fucker off.
Given the range between "Topless Darts", which comes from the UK, and a program such as I describe above, I know which one is a damn sight more healthy.
However, this shouldn't be taken as advocating censorship. I'm against censorship in any form, whether its self-censorhip out of fear of fundamentalist goons and/or court cases, or censorship imposed by the state. Both of the TV programs I mention are of dubious value, but I'm glad that I've gotten to see both ends of a scale that would draw the attention of censors.
The point is, police shooting people passed for entertainment in the states, enough to make an entire series of programs. I checked it out later, and could only find that single episode shown in Europe. "Topless Darts" is still going strong...
I'm no doctor either, but I seem to recall that too much vitamin A is not such a good plan since it causes some weird bone disease. Uh hell, I might as well tell as much as my drug addled brain can handle...
There was a failed expedition to the North Pole in the early 1900s. The guys doing it realised it was going to fail, and did the sensible thing and turned back. Then the weather got really bad, so they weren't able to move, and they started running out of food. So they cut the huskies up and ate them, the one losing his teeth being allowed the eat the liver, since it was much softer then the rest of the meat. Liver has rather a lot of vitamin A in it, and it started up this weird bone disease, where extra layers of bone get laid down in a pattern a bit like a honeycomb. The other guys died, but he survived, and eventually made it to something closer to civilisation.
Of course, I can't remember the name of the disease, the guys, the exact date, or even if it's vitamin E rather than vitamin A, but there's some genuine memory in there somewhere.
Mother Theresa of Calcutta died on the same day as Princess Diana. It was the only upside to the day afterwards. After a day's worth of hideous persistent news coverage we gave up, got a shitload of booze, and stayed drunk until normal service was resumed, about another two days later, I seem to recall.
Whilst I hate the fscking monarchy with a passion, at least Diana nee Spencer only ever used her position to push one agenda, a worthwhile one at that, against the abandonment of landmines after wars have reached settlement. Mother Theresa, on the other hand, used her position to push the agenda of the Catholic Church, no contraception, no abortion... well, I guess you know the rest...
The free ISP I used to use was freenet, http://www.freenet.co.uk.
Phone 0845 353 0000, say "guest" for both the username and password, and it immediately starts up a PPP connection. They don't even demand CLI, so if you value your anonymity, prefix the phone number with 141, which withholds your number from them.
This really worked like a charm for me, so I went around telling other people I know about them, and as far as I know, some of those people have never used anybody else. It was also real handy for folk who had just got a computer and wanted to see the internet immediately, without having to think up fake names and addresses for registration.
I'm now living with a longtime demon user, so I've not used this in a while, but checking out their documentation makes everything look exactly the same. They have a nice "Expert" section for geeks clued up enough to manually configure their system.
World war one had nothing to do with Russia at all. The revolution had been preceded by popular uprisings in 1905 and 1910. It managed to stay out of the war altogether, and at the time was still a feudal nation. Nobody wanted what Russia had, so Germany never bothered fighting them.
World war two, on the other hand, was after the revolution, and had successfully bootstrapped its industry, at the cost of millions of lives and the gulags. There was something to be had from Russia then, and it was Germany's decision to fight them, that helped them lose.
Yeah, queer geeks do exist. I'm a bisexual male. I don't have any of those stereotypical campy traits, but I'm fairly upfront abut my sexuality, and those that do have a problem are welcome to it, its not my problem after all, but theirs.
The problems women face in the computing industry are very different to those that queers face. The heterosexual assumption means that I can talk to a bigot on a technical subject, and in practice, there is no reason for the subject of my sexuality to come up, so I won't even know they are a bigot, unless they come out with an irrelevent bigoted remark. This is not the case for women. Except for online media, there is no way to hide being a woman, and sexism is so ingrained in this society that bigots often don't even realise that they are being sexist, or if they do, think that this is acceptable behaviour.
Slashdot is, as may surprise the more we-geeks-are-not-like-you type of poster, just an aspect of the rest of our society. So while there are overtly homophobic remarks made on Slashdot, they are greatly outnumbered by overtly sexist ones.
Either way round, this is bigotry, pure and simple. The question those male, single and straight geeks need to really answer is "How do we stamp out bigotry in computing?" rather than "How do we attract women to computing?". I can't be sure, but I suspect that stamping out bigotry of all kinds would be much more successful in attracting women into computing, than any attempt to stress those skills and roles that women are supposed to be good at. That sort of stereotyping does more harm than good, all it really achieves is to make the sexism even more visible, and even more of a reason to stay as far away as possible.
Oooh. White labels. None of those, but I do have two slightly different versions of "1987", one with "Doctorin' The Tardis", and one without. I always liked their sense of style, all that genuinely clever, and musically interesting self referential stuff with "Build A Fire" on "The White Room".
More recently, they released "F**k The Millennium", backed with a cover of "What Time Is Love" by a brass band, which sounds strange, but when I saw the brass band themselves, they did a load of different old acid tunes, in a remarkably effective manner. The dancefloor went wild. I doubt I'll ever see the like again...
I remember, about a decade ago, when IBM were the corporation for geeks to hate. Then Apple pulled their stupid patent case concerning the mouse, and took over that posistion breifly. Finally, in the early nineties, everybody suddenly noticed Microsoft, and just how scummy they were.
IBM, after their many year long anti-trust case, seem to have reformed. They are giving the code away, not under their own license, but under the one and only GPL. They can't claim it back. That shows a lot of understanding, and the will to play this game on our terms.
The hope here, is that now Chairman Bill is out of the hotseat at Microsoft, the other people with power there will follow the example of IBM, and clean up their act.
OK, a lot off topic, but I don't know anything at all about journaling file systems, except from the phrase "they're cool and we want one" being bandied about the office...
Not the Micheal Smith that appears within the pages of "Stanger in a Strange Land" I hope. If it is, then watch out for the mouthy idiot that follows him around...
LeGuin has always been a fine writer, but like you, I think "The Disposessed" is her best. One of my all time favourites in fact.
Iain M Banks is another good one, as is Ken MacLeod, but I'm biased on those two, since they're locals (I live in Edinburgh, Scotland), and I occaisonally get to meet them in the pub, alongside a few of the other ancient folk from the University SF society.
All three make a lovely change from the very tired cyber-corporate-capitalism-gone-mad-punk which less talented individuals pump out without bothering to rub any braincells together.
Of course, William Burroughs beats all of them, but is very questionably SF. Some people think his work is high art, I'm of the opinion its hardboiled pulp SF.
This happenned a little earlier in this discussion, I held off then, but this time I thought I'd join in. It warms my heart to see fellow anarcho-socialists come out of the woodwork. A significant proportion of Slashdot posters tend towards anarcho-capitalism, "libertarianism", with it's flawed defence of lassaiz faire market economics. It doesn't matter if this is a "free" market or otherwise. Traditional communism, as shown by historical events, is merely state capitalism, imposing only a slightly different form of market economics. The problem with both these forms, as well as the current form of western market economics, is the collusion between government and business to protect the power and wealth that they hold.
The recent action by the RIAA and the Norwegian state, show how effective, and just how deep, this collusion is. The question remains, what do we do about? The first thing we do is say that it is wrong. We say this to everybody. We defend this position, and work on our exposition. It is our responsibility to answer our critics, and those who would like to become better informed, coming to us to hear what we have to say about the subject. Sometimes people listen and are convinced. This falls short of suddennly politicising the masses and deposing global capitalism, but it is a neccessary stage. The longest journey, does indeed, start with the first step.
I sort of disagree. Being so wrapped up in our hate of those we oppose, to the point of not thinking about anything else, doesn't make for a healthy life.
However, hate is a reasonable response to racists, or any other sort of bigot. We can hate them because they are wrong. They must be allowed to express those views, and be condemned and hated for it. If they get violent about it, I have no sympathy when their heads get stomped.
Well, RMS himself disagrees with using the expression "Open Source", and prefers "Free Software", and has described why quite a few times, not least in the O'Reilly book "Open Sources". I, for one, agree with him, and with his reasoning.
So I guess the question becomes would RMS be annoyed if he was awarded this? Would he think it only shows his point hasn't gotten through? Would it encourage him to try to hammer it home more forcefully?
Who invented the term "Open Source" anyway? Since this is the first of these awards, it should go to the inventor of the term. At least those of us that dislike it would have somebody to point the finger at.
Re:GPL too entrenched to subvert in court?
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 1
Face it, you have to look *really* hard to find a loophole in the GPL and those loopholes are usually based on semantics
Semantics are what words mean. All debate and discussion is based on semantics, in this case, what the words in the GPL actually mean. Waiving aside what the words mean, as if it doesn't matter, is both stupid and wrong. It does matter, especially when you discuss ethics, and especially when you try to craft a document that can stand up unambiguously in court. The GPL is such a document, and we need it to preserve our freedom, and the freedom of our code.
Ha, only sport I ever got into at university was target shooting. To put this in context, I live in the UK, with its sensible policy of gun control. Strangely, about 60 to 70 percent of the shooting club was made up of computer science students.
On topic though, I didn't sleep with a woman until a few years after I left university. But then again, I was too into men to realise I was bisexual all along. It's still easier to find men to sleep with too.
You must be deliberately doing something stupid if you have this problem. Well... OK, I've once had trouble with WORA, but it was when I was too keen on using a nifty feature in the libraries, rather than doing the obvious Right Thing. Even then it was just another example of how good code comes out of solid engineering considerations, rather than applying the latest buzzy technology.
Which is Java all over. It's not the greatest language in the world, but it is s a very conservative piece of engineering. And it shows, the fact that WORA ever works at all ever is a demonstration of such. This is an accomplishment, and respect goes out to Joy, et. al. for doing it.
Sun are being evil and crap though, RMS is right. He nearly always is. I resent the fact that I can't work on the Classpath project because I've looked at the sources Sun has opened (but not freed, this is the best example I've seen on why it important to make the distinction), contaminating myself with Sun's intellectual property in the process.
Steady on there, the initial poster was asking for some precision. For sure, "Exceptionally" in this context means large, but still doesn't answer the "How much larger?" question with any precision.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't that be "Bite me!"?
Kraftwerk, Can, Pere Ubu... If we're going to talk about krautrock route, then let's not forget Neu and Faust. Lovely music. It's good to see their infulence is still around in the likes of Stereolab and Tortoise.
Hey, you know it's real name was the "trash80". Doesn't sound like a complete and utter idiot to me...
I've written elsewhere in this thread about where I stand on this issue, so I'll not repeat all that here.
Frequency range for vinyl is, as you say, 10Hz to 30,000Hz. The frequency range for CD is 20Hz to 21,400Hz. The is beacuse the sampling rate for CDs is 42,800Hz, and seeing as you need the first half of the sound wave to be low in one sample, and the second half of the wave to be high in the next sample, you can only fit waves with a frequency of lower than half the sampling rate into a digital medium. Whats more, the effective top end is often lower than this, becuase you need massive amounts of filtering to avoid aliasing from frequencies higher than half the sampling rate. These produce an ugly high pitched beat frequency over the top of the music without the filtering.
DAT tape does slightly better, with a sampling rate of 48,000Hz, giving a top end of 24,000Hz, but all that means it doesn't match upto vinyl either. For best results, you'd use half track stereo on half inch open reel tape, running at 30 inches per second, but that another story...
I feel the same way myself. I've never bought a CD or a CD player, and collect all my music on lovely black vinyl. There are several reasons for this.
First. They are, after nearly twenty years of sales to recoup the initial investment costs, cheaper than CDs. I've only ever once spent over ten pounds sterling on a record, and that was for a brand new triple album (remixes of old Can songs, storming record, much recomended). Every CD I ever see is at least 12 or 13 pounds sterling. This just shows up the music industry as the profiteering scum they are.
Second. I've been fortunate enough to get hold of a couple of early 60s record players with their matching tone arms, in mint condition. This means I get a truly gorgeous sound out of my records, and I've yet to meet a CD player that is as pleasing to listen to. Not only did the hi-fi industry make things to last in those days, they made things so that they could be repaired too. Not a sinlge "no user servicable parts inside" notice anywhere, but several "make sure to turn off the mains before removing this panel" instead. The spare parts are still available, so if they ever need to be repaired, they can be. Can't please a technology geek better than that.
Third. A lot of the material I want to collect is from the late 60s to early 70s, and long since deleted. So I spend many hours leafing through the racks at second hand record shops, finding most of the things I want too.
Fourth. Ever tried skinning up on a CD? :-)
Absolutely. I'm a Englishman who's lived in Scotland for ten years. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine had cable TV. One day I was idly watching some random channel, along with a different friend. On came the most disturbing program I've ever come across, which came from the US, called "The World's Scariest Police Shootouts". Real life footage of cops shooting people. We were stunned, literally unable to move as we watched the terrifying scenes unfold. At least until there was an advert break, when we snapped back into reality, and turned the fucker off.
Given the range between "Topless Darts", which comes from the UK, and a program such as I describe above, I know which one is a damn sight more healthy.
However, this shouldn't be taken as advocating censorship. I'm against censorship in any form, whether its self-censorhip out of fear of fundamentalist goons and/or court cases, or censorship imposed by the state. Both of the TV programs I mention are of dubious value, but I'm glad that I've gotten to see both ends of a scale that would draw the attention of censors.
The point is, police shooting people passed for entertainment in the states, enough to make an entire series of programs. I checked it out later, and could only find that single episode shown in Europe. "Topless Darts" is still going strong...
I'm no doctor either, but I seem to recall that too much vitamin A is not such a good plan since it causes some weird bone disease. Uh hell, I might as well tell as much as my drug addled brain can handle...
There was a failed expedition to the North Pole in the early 1900s. The guys doing it realised it was going to fail, and did the sensible thing and turned back. Then the weather got really bad, so they weren't able to move, and they started running out of food. So they cut the huskies up and ate them, the one losing his teeth being allowed the eat the liver, since it was much softer then the rest of the meat. Liver has rather a lot of vitamin A in it, and it started up this weird bone disease, where extra layers of bone get laid down in a pattern a bit like a honeycomb. The other guys died, but he survived, and eventually made it to something closer to civilisation.
Of course, I can't remember the name of the disease, the guys, the exact date, or even if it's vitamin E rather than vitamin A, but there's some genuine memory in there somewhere.
Mother Theresa of Calcutta died on the same day as Princess Diana. It was the only upside to the day afterwards. After a day's worth of hideous persistent news coverage we gave up, got a shitload of booze, and stayed drunk until normal service was resumed, about another two days later, I seem to recall.
Whilst I hate the fscking monarchy with a passion, at least Diana nee Spencer only ever used her position to push one agenda, a worthwhile one at that, against the abandonment of landmines after wars have reached settlement. Mother Theresa, on the other hand, used her position to push the agenda of the Catholic Church, no contraception, no abortion... well, I guess you know the rest...
The free ISP I used to use was freenet, http://www.freenet.co.uk.
Phone 0845 353 0000, say "guest" for both the username and password, and it immediately starts up a PPP connection. They don't even demand CLI, so if you value your anonymity, prefix the phone number with 141, which withholds your number from them.
This really worked like a charm for me, so I went around telling other people I know about them, and as far as I know, some of those people have never used anybody else. It was also real handy for folk who had just got a computer and wanted to see the internet immediately, without having to think up fake names and addresses for registration.
I'm now living with a longtime demon user, so I've not used this in a while, but checking out their documentation makes everything look exactly the same. They have a nice "Expert" section for geeks clued up enough to manually configure their system.
World war one had nothing to do with Russia at all. The revolution had been preceded by popular uprisings in 1905 and 1910. It managed to stay out of the war altogether, and at the time was still a feudal nation. Nobody wanted what Russia had, so Germany never bothered fighting them.
World war two, on the other hand, was after the revolution, and had successfully bootstrapped its industry, at the cost of millions of lives and the gulags. There was something to be had from Russia then, and it was Germany's decision to fight them, that helped them lose.
Yeah, queer geeks do exist. I'm a bisexual male. I don't have any of those stereotypical campy traits, but I'm fairly upfront abut my sexuality, and those that do have a problem are welcome to it, its not my problem after all, but theirs.
The problems women face in the computing industry are very different to those that queers face. The heterosexual assumption means that I can talk to a bigot on a technical subject, and in practice, there is no reason for the subject of my sexuality to come up, so I won't even know they are a bigot, unless they come out with an irrelevent bigoted remark. This is not the case for women. Except for online media, there is no way to hide being a woman, and sexism is so ingrained in this society that bigots often don't even realise that they are being sexist, or if they do, think that this is acceptable behaviour.
Slashdot is, as may surprise the more we-geeks-are-not-like-you type of poster, just an aspect of the rest of our society. So while there are overtly homophobic remarks made on Slashdot, they are greatly outnumbered by overtly sexist ones.
Either way round, this is bigotry, pure and simple. The question those male, single and straight geeks need to really answer is "How do we stamp out bigotry in computing?" rather than "How do we attract women to computing?". I can't be sure, but I suspect that stamping out bigotry of all kinds would be much more successful in attracting women into computing, than any attempt to stress those skills and roles that women are supposed to be good at. That sort of stereotyping does more harm than good, all it really achieves is to make the sexism even more visible, and even more of a reason to stay as far away as possible.
Oooh. White labels. None of those, but I do have two slightly different versions of "1987", one with "Doctorin' The Tardis", and one without. I always liked their sense of style, all that genuinely clever, and musically interesting self referential stuff with "Build A Fire" on "The White Room".
More recently, they released "F**k The Millennium", backed with a cover of "What Time Is Love" by a brass band, which sounds strange, but when I saw the brass band themselves, they did a load of different old acid tunes, in a remarkably effective manner. The dancefloor went wild. I doubt I'll ever see the like again...
Yeah, they do seem to get the idea.
I remember, about a decade ago, when IBM were the corporation for geeks to hate. Then Apple pulled their stupid patent case concerning the mouse, and took over that posistion breifly. Finally, in the early nineties, everybody suddenly noticed Microsoft, and just how scummy they were.
IBM, after their many year long anti-trust case, seem to have reformed. They are giving the code away, not under their own license, but under the one and only GPL. They can't claim it back. That shows a lot of understanding, and the will to play this game on our terms.
The hope here, is that now Chairman Bill is out of the hotseat at Microsoft, the other people with power there will follow the example of IBM, and clean up their act.
OK, a lot off topic, but I don't know anything at all about journaling file systems, except from the phrase "they're cool and we want one" being bandied about the office...
Not the Micheal Smith that appears within the pages of "Stanger in a Strange Land" I hope. If it is, then watch out for the mouthy idiot that follows him around...
LeGuin has always been a fine writer, but like you, I think "The Disposessed" is her best. One of my all time favourites in fact.
Iain M Banks is another good one, as is Ken MacLeod, but I'm biased on those two, since they're locals (I live in Edinburgh, Scotland), and I occaisonally get to meet them in the pub, alongside a few of the other ancient folk from the University SF society.
All three make a lovely change from the very tired cyber-corporate-capitalism-gone-mad-punk which less talented individuals pump out without bothering to rub any braincells together.
Of course, William Burroughs beats all of them, but is very questionably SF. Some people think his work is high art, I'm of the opinion its hardboiled pulp SF.
This happenned a little earlier in this discussion, I held off then, but this time I thought I'd join in. It warms my heart to see fellow anarcho-socialists come out of the woodwork. A significant proportion of Slashdot posters tend towards anarcho-capitalism, "libertarianism", with it's flawed defence of lassaiz faire market economics. It doesn't matter if this is a "free" market or otherwise. Traditional communism, as shown by historical events, is merely state capitalism, imposing only a slightly different form of market economics. The problem with both these forms, as well as the current form of western market economics, is the collusion between government and business to protect the power and wealth that they hold.
The recent action by the RIAA and the Norwegian state, show how effective, and just how deep, this collusion is. The question remains, what do we do about? The first thing we do is say that it is wrong. We say this to everybody. We defend this position, and work on our exposition. It is our responsibility to answer our critics, and those who would like to become better informed, coming to us to hear what we have to say about the subject. Sometimes people listen and are convinced. This falls short of suddennly politicising the masses and deposing global capitalism, but it is a neccessary stage. The longest journey, does indeed, start with the first step.
I sort of disagree. Being so wrapped up in our hate of those we oppose, to the point of not thinking about anything else, doesn't make for a healthy life.
However, hate is a reasonable response to racists, or any other sort of bigot. We can hate them because they are wrong. They must be allowed to express those views, and be condemned and hated for it. If they get violent about it, I have no sympathy when their heads get stomped.
Yeah, the British spooks did invent Diffie-Helman and RSA in the '70s, but at GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters), not Bletchley Park.
Well, RMS himself disagrees with using the expression "Open Source", and prefers "Free Software", and has described why quite a few times, not least in the O'Reilly book "Open Sources". I, for one, agree with him, and with his reasoning.
So I guess the question becomes would RMS be annoyed if he was awarded this? Would he think it only shows his point hasn't gotten through? Would it encourage him to try to hammer it home more forcefully?
Who invented the term "Open Source" anyway? Since this is the first of these awards, it should go to the inventor of the term. At least those of us that dislike it would have somebody to point the finger at.
Face it, you have to look *really* hard to find a loophole in the GPL and those loopholes are usually based on semantics
Semantics are what words mean. All debate and discussion is based on semantics, in this case, what the words in the GPL actually mean. Waiving aside what the words mean, as if it doesn't matter, is both stupid and wrong. It does matter, especially when you discuss ethics, and especially when you try to craft a document that can stand up unambiguously in court. The GPL is such a document, and we need it to preserve our freedom, and the freedom of our code.
Ha, only sport I ever got into at university was target shooting. To put this in context, I live in the UK, with its sensible policy of gun control. Strangely, about 60 to 70 percent of the shooting club was made up of computer science students.
On topic though, I didn't sleep with a woman until a few years after I left university. But then again, I was too into men to realise I was bisexual all along. It's still easier to find men to sleep with too.
Solipsistic sig file. Neat. Give my regards to Elson Roa, and don't forget "Aim Here!".
Tom, please keep your own foaming at the mouth to yourself. It is a constant nuisance, and has no place anywhere.
You must be deliberately doing something stupid if you have this problem. Well... OK, I've once had trouble with WORA, but it was when I was too keen on using a nifty feature in the libraries, rather than doing the obvious Right Thing. Even then it was just another example of how good code comes out of solid engineering considerations, rather than applying the latest buzzy technology.
Which is Java all over. It's not the greatest language in the world, but it is s a very conservative piece of engineering. And it shows, the fact that WORA ever works at all ever is a demonstration of such. This is an accomplishment, and respect goes out to Joy, et. al. for doing it.
Sun are being evil and crap though, RMS is right. He nearly always is. I resent the fact that I can't work on the Classpath project because I've looked at the sources Sun has opened (but not freed, this is the best example I've seen on why it important to make the distinction), contaminating myself with Sun's intellectual property in the process.
Steady on there, the initial poster was asking for some precision. For sure, "Exceptionally" in this context means large, but still doesn't answer the "How much larger?" question with any precision.