I don't know or necessarily care about even-order harmonics, and I'm even a musician (barely).
It's funny. From my experience, I've found that very few audiophiles are musicians and very few musicians are audiophiles. You'd think there would be a lot of overlap but there really isn't. I'm guessing that both groups have very different goals and agendas when listening to a song. Being a musician, as long as the sound isn't so offensive that it hurts my ears, I'll listen to anything. I listen to the song more than the recording of the song I guess.
I don't know where you live but around here, every school's CS program still requires at least a semester of COBOL. Mine required a year of COBOL, two quarters of System 370 Assembler, and one quarter of an operating systems class that spent well over 50% of it's time on mainframe technologies (MVS, JCL, VSAM, etc). Mainframe programmers are a dime a dozen here in the midwest. Hell, there are two companies in my area that employ 1000+ mainframe developers each. Maybe more. Hell, I bet mine employs 400+.
Also, I don't know what machines you consider to be "dumbed down" from the mainframe. The big iron isn't any harder to maintain than anything else. It's just alien to those of us that grew up around PC's, DOS, Windows, etc. From what I've seen, in many ways it's easier to maintain cause if you get in over your head, the next thing you know, you've got 10 IBM techs wizzing into the building, fixing your screwup, and flying out a few hours later.
I might need a piece of software like this for palm's e-book format. I bought a handful of palm's e-books a while back. They appear to use the credit card number you purchased the book with as a security key (scary huh? I hope it's a secure one-way hash). However, I've long since lost the card mine were purchased with and don't have record of the number anywhere. Unless customer service will cut me new copies for free, I'm going to have no way to read the books again.
At this point I'm assuming customer service will help me. But if they were to go out of business, I would have no way of reading the stuff ever again without cracking their encryption (illegal under the DCMA and if anybody ever gets their shit together, difficult to the point of being nearly impossible). It makes me angry. I paid good money for the stuff. I own it. I have a right to read it.
Actually, ya know what? I think I'm done buying e-books until somebody starts selling them in an open, unencrypted format. Screw this crap. I'm a customer, not a thief. The hell if I'm giving my business to a company that can't figure that out.
While COBOL is still the dominant language on the mainframe, keep in mind it's not the only language available. Last I knew, IBM had a C++ compiler for OS390 (VisualAge?), a java VM, even a J2EE application server(WebSphere). You can quite easily find XML parsers for C++ or Java. Of course, I know it's hard to obtain additional software licenses and get stuff installed on the mainframe in most companies...
But, haven't you ever met the kind of department head who comes in and says, "No Sir, I don't like it", changes everything and then departs before the fecal matter hits the impeller? Stuff happens.
If the company is big enough to use a mainframe, this just isn't going to happen. They're going to need a hugely compelling reason to switch off of the mainframe because it's almost assuredly going to be a multi million dollar project spaning months or years. Even CTO's generally have to have a project like that approved by a bunch of different people. How's he going to sell it?
There's no dilema here. You have just as much opportunity as Disney does to create animated works based on these classic tales. The fact that you don't doesn't mean Copyright is broken, it means you have failed to take advantage of the same opportunities afforded to all.
Aye, but you don't have the right to create animated works based on Disney's classic tales, even those that are nearing 100 years old and clearly a part of our culture. There's the problem.
I have a problem with companies that are perfectly willing to take from the public domain but unwilling to give back to it. It's greedy and wrong.
Then, of course, there's Microsoft's AC and AC2 which STILL can't deal with more than one session over a firewall/NAT or ICS (their own freaking product)... multiple ports over one IP is too hard I gues.
1) While AC is published by Microsoft, it is created by Turbine Games in Massachusets. They are a completely separate entity from MS.
2) AC worked fine over NAT, you just had to tell each client to use a separate port. It was right there on the main setup screen.
3) AC2 is still beta. I'm sure you can find far more important features that are still missing. NAT support will be there.
I'm forced to use Windows 2000 on my work laptop. At home I use MacOS X primarily. I don't know which I would consider my "main" machine but these days I've been spending a lot more time computing at work than home so I may have answered windows had I answered this poll.
Occasionally I fiddle around with Linux or FreeBSD at home. I like them both a lot but my mac really is the better tool for most of what I do.
Assuming Microsoft does actually want to clean up their act, which I'm highly skeptical about, . ..
Ok, lets be realistic here. When it comes to security, I don't think there's a question of whether or not Microsoft wants windows to be secure. The question is, are they able to make it secure.
You can argue that MS is evil due to their business practices. You can argue that they are incapable of producing anything other than bug riddled, insecure pieces of bloatware. But lets get real. It's not like they intentionally put the security holes into their products just to hurt their users. All of this makes for extremely bad press and I'm sure MS would like nothing more for it to go away.
I have several 9 gig U160 IBM and MAxtor drives that are rock solid and I am betting will run for another 5 years.
It's stupid to bet anything on the life of a hard drive.
The heads are so close to the platters that a smoke particle can't fit between them. If you were to put a fingerprint on the disk, it would hit the head as it spun by. On top of that, they're spinning extremely fast, (7400rpm pretty much being the norm these days with 10krpm drives out there). Assuming the disk is 3.5" in diameter and travelling at 7400rpm, the outside edge of the disk is travelling at around 75mph. What is gonna happen when that head collides with the disc due to a mechanical failure? Everything is gonna be hosed - stick your foot out onto the road while you're doing 75 in your car sometime.
I once heard an analogy regarding this whole mechanism. I don't remember the exact numbers or wording but gist was that a hard drive head reading data was analagous to a 747 flying at 500mph 1 centimeter off the ground and counting every blade of grass that passes underneath. Something like that...
These are delicate machines with many moving parts. The only parts of a PC that I've found to be less reliable than hard drives are CD-ROM drives and CPU fans....
Backup everything. Backup often. (Well, that or get cocky and lose all your data, no skin off my back)
.....We've had problems with just about every manufacturer (Quantum, Seagate, Fuji, WD, etc...) except one: Maxtor....
Does your mileage vary?
My ex-roomate had two 8GB Maxtors fail on him when we built his PII a few years back. The first one failed within a day of use. He called Maxtor who were very helpful on the phone and sent an advance replacement. The replacement drive lasted a little over a year.
Regardless of brand, there are only two types of hard drives out there: 1) A hard drive that has crashed 2) A hard drive that is about to
I think we're slowly reaching the end of magnetic media's life as our primary secondary storage mechanism. There are just too many delicate moving parts requiring extreme precision to even function due to the density of data we're storing. I think we'll see more and more solid state storage solutions replace hard drives and more optical solutions used for backup.
Re:I'd like to have another look, but..
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Apple doesn't care very much about European customers. So it's quite hard here to find any store in your neighborhood at all you can have a look at MacOS X in.
(Let alone pricing outside the US, which is just horrible)
Is it that they don't care or is it that European vendors don't care to carry them? Maybe my perspective is skewed living in the States but it seems that Apple must care about foreign customers given the great lengths they've taken building internationalization right into OS X.
Also, international pricing is a tricky thing with tarrifs, exchange rates, etc. Has apple shown disinterest in foreign customers in other ways?
Memory Hog? That hasn't been my experience. I was just ripping a CD with iTunes while I was mucking around in terminal, system preferences, and the network utility. Ok, I obviously wasn't doing anything very memory intensive but still, I had tons of physical RAM available. I found that having lots of RAM was more important for OS 9 than 10.
With OS 9, the virtual memory was so crappy I never wanted it turned on. I would keep my mac maxed out in ram and have virtual memory completely disabled. I'd also have to crank up the memory allocated to the indivudual apps I was using quite frequently. This combination ate soooo much RAM.
With X, my memory problems have pretty much disappeared. I ripped out most of my RAM and threw it into my PC. I don't think I'd want to run with less than 256 but I don't see much of a performance gain when I crank it up to 512MB or a gig under normal use.
From my experience, OS 10.0 and the beta were extremely slow. However, 10.1 and 10.1.5 were tons faster. 10.2 is noticably faster again.
At this point, I consider it to be a pretty zippy OS. Go to a mac store or a Comp USA and test drive them. The interface feels good and responsive. People that complain about it being slow might be running it on a slow machine, might not have played with it since 10.0, etc. Or perhaps little transistions and such like the genie effect make it feel slow to some people that aren't used to them.
My personal machine is a B&W G3 that I've upgraded to a G4 550. It has 256MB of ram and a rage orion (rage 128). 10.2 runs fine on it. I have very few complaints. (If I don't buy a Tibook soon I'll be putting a Radeon into it though. The video leaves a little bit to be desired).
This is flat-out wrong. USB ports were included on PCs years before the iMac came out. There just wasn't any OS support for them until Win98 came out. People, please check your facts before posting something as if it is fact.
Ok, you're probably right. I'm probably getting the availability of peripherials confused with the availablility of ports. Also, I'm probably remembering stuff based on my own personal upgrade path between my macs and PCs.
Regardless, I do feel that apple was the company that did more to bring USB off the drawing table and to market than anybody. When the iMac was released, USB was the only way to hook anything up to it. USB exploded. Even long after I finally had USB ports on my PC, I had trouble finding devices that used them. The idea that apple is somehow going to do an about face and not support USB 2.0 or that they grudgingly supported USB in the first place is absurd. Apple loves USB.
I don't think Firewire was ever really meant to compete with USB either. I think it was meant specifically for a few high speed applications (external drives and dv). You don't see apple making firewire mice or keyboards. It's not what the format was made for.
What I want is an FM radio with MP3 recorder and programmable recording. So I can record, say, Talk of the Nation on NPR in the morning and listen to it in the afternoon. Why doesn't anybody make this yet??? Tivo for NPR. It would be great for saving stuff to listen to while driving, for those times when I want to actually use the time to learn something.
Sony makes one. It's a boombox type device with detachable speakers, rips CD's automatically the first time you play them and has a 20 gig drive. Runs about a grand I think...
as for usb 2, it competes too much with firewire, an existing mac standard interface, ading it would only complicate the device. it dosent make business sense for apple although it would be a nice feature.
Um, USB was brought to market and standardized largely by Apple. You could by a mac with USB ports off the shelf probably 2 years before you could find it built into a new PC. We'll see both USB 2 and Firewire 2 on future macs, guaranteed...
Actually, while normally outrageously expensive, apple memory happens to be pretty cheap right now. You can double the ram in any system for $40. Bumping the TiBook from 512MB of RAM to a gig of RAM for $40 sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. Bumping the 256MB iBook to 512MB for $40 doesn't sound bad either.
Working for an industry that isnt helping to destroy the world?
In fairness, the oil industry has come a long way in the last 10 years, especially in Alaska. Plus, the computer modelling sofware has done great things to reduce the damage. They can take seismic readings and drill test wells at only the most promising locations. This has increased their hit rate from 1 in 10 test wells to like 1 in 3. At least that's what they say on the TV...
In addition, they now use ice roads instead of plowing down to the tundra. Instead of drilling wells straight down to oil or gas deposits, they'll locate a drilling facility between several deposites and drill horizontally, lessening their footprint on the tundra. All good advances.
Also, when it comes to depletion of fossile fuels, there are actually a few geologists who swear that fossil fuels are replenishing themselves very quickly and that we might be mistaken concerning their origin. Of course, these guys right now are largely considered to be complete nutcases but a couple of them have pretty impressive credentials so I'm reserving judgement myself.
Oh, and of course, I still believe we need to dump this fossil fuel stuff and invest in cleaner, renewable energy sources regardless. Burning stuff for energy is so outdated.
I've seen a few shows on TV recently that featured some really wicked looking oil and gas exploration software. Stuff that let geologists view layers of terrain collected by seismic data in 3d, moving around in realtime... If that's the kind of stuff you're into, I can understand why java isn't an option for display right now.
However, java is exactly what you need. You can scale it across processors on the big iron or run it on the desktop without recompiling.
Have you considered only writing your display logic in C++ and using java for the backend number crunching? For raw floating point math, I've read that java is barely slower than native code at this point. It's my understanding that talking to the OS so you can get to the hardware is where you take the major performance hits using java. If you could do your raw crunching in multi-threaded java code, you could then deliver the data through one of many different mechanisms to your display logic and have that be the only code that you need to port from OS to OS...
Another thing you could possibly look at is licensing 3rd party libraries made for cross-platform development. From your post, the only thing I know you're definitely having trouble porting is thread-related code. I'm sure there are multi-platform threading libraries for C++ out there somewhere.
I'm not sure what active directory is but I do know that using Jaguar, my machine can browse my windows network and connect to any shared folders very easily.
I also have it sharing folders out to the windows machines though it doesn't give out a listing of what's shared (probably for security reasons). You have to tell it what username, password and share you want to access.
You either didn't read my post well or you're choosing to not respond to my argument. I said, there is a correlation but it is not as simple as code size goes up = bad, code size goes down = good. Some good practices may increase code size where other ones may decrease it. You end up with a valueless measure.
Gee, thanks for the references. "the literature" is so much more specific than "the software literature". I'm sure everybody knows exaclty which works you're talking about now. There can't be more than what, 5-10 books written on the subject of software development.
Any argument that says code size is relevant is inherantly flawed. Difficulty of both writing and maintaining code increases and decreases with many factors. From my personal experience, the number of lines in your source code is not one of those factors. Major factors I've found include but are not limited to the following:
1) How well the problem is defined and communicated by the people demanding the software. (HUGE deal - probably more important than anything else I've encountered regarding the success of a programming endevor) 2) The inherent complexity of said problem. 3) How well that problem is divided into managable and intuitive smaller taks by the software architect. 4) How well the system is documented outside the source 5) How well complex areas of the code are documented within the source 6) How much planning is put into development enviroments and development processes (choice of IDE's, build environments, test enviroments, source management, etc.)
There is an obvious correlation between code size and several of these factors. However, correlation is not causation and good design in some of these areas may make code larger while other may make it smaller.
I have worked with applications that have had comparatively small codebases but were extremely hard to manage due to how poorly that code was broken up and documented. The codebase I currently work with on a day to day bases is enormous. I don't know how many lines of code it surely spans thousands of lines of code. It is the easiest code I've ever worked with in terms of maintenance and extension. Did it take us longer to create than the original code? Maybe a little but the cost savings to the business in maintenance and extension will be huge.
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I don't know or necessarily care about even-order harmonics, and I'm even a musician (barely).
It's funny. From my experience, I've found that very few audiophiles are musicians and very few musicians are audiophiles. You'd think there would be a lot of overlap but there really isn't. I'm guessing that both groups have very different goals and agendas when listening to a song. Being a musician, as long as the sound isn't so offensive that it hurts my ears, I'll listen to anything. I listen to the song more than the recording of the song I guess.
I don't know where you live but around here, every school's CS program still requires at least a semester of COBOL. Mine required a year of COBOL, two quarters of System 370 Assembler, and one quarter of an operating systems class that spent well over 50% of it's time on mainframe technologies (MVS, JCL, VSAM, etc). Mainframe programmers are a dime a dozen here in the midwest. Hell, there are two companies in my area that employ 1000+ mainframe developers each. Maybe more. Hell, I bet mine employs 400+.
Also, I don't know what machines you consider to be "dumbed down" from the mainframe. The big iron isn't any harder to maintain than anything else. It's just alien to those of us that grew up around PC's, DOS, Windows, etc. From what I've seen, in many ways it's easier to maintain cause if you get in over your head, the next thing you know, you've got 10 IBM techs wizzing into the building, fixing your screwup, and flying out a few hours later.
I might need a piece of software like this for palm's e-book format. I bought a handful of palm's e-books a while back. They appear to use the credit card number you purchased the book with as a security key (scary huh? I hope it's a secure one-way hash). However, I've long since lost the card mine were purchased with and don't have record of the number anywhere. Unless customer service will cut me new copies for free, I'm going to have no way to read the books again.
At this point I'm assuming customer service will help me. But if they were to go out of business, I would have no way of reading the stuff ever again without cracking their encryption (illegal under the DCMA and if anybody ever gets their shit together, difficult to the point of being nearly impossible). It makes me angry. I paid good money for the stuff. I own it. I have a right to read it.
Actually, ya know what? I think I'm done buying e-books until somebody starts selling them in an open, unencrypted format. Screw this crap. I'm a customer, not a thief. The hell if I'm giving my business to a company that can't figure that out.
While COBOL is still the dominant language on the mainframe, keep in mind it's not the only language available. Last I knew, IBM had a C++ compiler for OS390 (VisualAge?), a java VM, even a J2EE application server(WebSphere). You can quite easily find XML parsers for C++ or Java. Of course, I know it's hard to obtain additional software licenses and get stuff installed on the mainframe in most companies...
But, haven't you ever met the kind of department head who comes in and says, "No Sir, I don't like it", changes everything and then departs before the fecal matter hits the impeller? Stuff happens.
If the company is big enough to use a mainframe, this just isn't going to happen. They're going to need a hugely compelling reason to switch off of the mainframe because it's almost assuredly going to be a multi million dollar project spaning months or years. Even CTO's generally have to have a project like that approved by a bunch of different people. How's he going to sell it?
There's no dilema here. You have just as much opportunity as Disney does to create animated works based on these classic tales. The fact that you don't doesn't mean Copyright is broken, it means you have failed to take advantage of the same opportunities afforded to all.
Aye, but you don't have the right to create animated works based on Disney's classic tales, even those that are nearing 100 years old and clearly a part of our culture. There's the problem.
I have a problem with companies that are perfectly willing to take from the public domain but unwilling to give back to it. It's greedy and wrong.
Then, of course, there's Microsoft's AC and AC2 which STILL can't deal with more than one session over a firewall/NAT or ICS (their own freaking product)... multiple ports over one IP is too hard I gues.
1) While AC is published by Microsoft, it is created by Turbine Games in Massachusets. They are a completely separate entity from MS.
2) AC worked fine over NAT, you just had to tell each client to use a separate port. It was right there on the main setup screen.
3) AC2 is still beta. I'm sure you can find far more important features that are still missing. NAT support will be there.
I'm forced to use Windows 2000 on my work laptop. At home I use MacOS X primarily. I don't know which I would consider my "main" machine but these days I've been spending a lot more time computing at work than home so I may have answered windows had I answered this poll.
Occasionally I fiddle around with Linux or FreeBSD at home. I like them both a lot but my mac really is the better tool for most of what I do.
Yeah yeah... think of how much porn you could fit on one of those... blah blah blah...
Assuming Microsoft does actually want to clean up their act, which I'm highly skeptical about, . . .
Ok, lets be realistic here. When it comes to security, I don't think there's a question of whether or not Microsoft wants windows to be secure. The question is, are they able to make it secure.
You can argue that MS is evil due to their business practices. You can argue that they are incapable of producing anything other than bug riddled, insecure pieces of bloatware. But lets get real. It's not like they intentionally put the security holes into their products just to hurt their users. All of this makes for extremely bad press and I'm sure MS would like nothing more for it to go away.
They're not using the same controls. It's a full blown, free moving 3D title now.
I have several 9 gig U160 IBM and MAxtor drives that are rock solid and I am betting will run for another 5 years.
It's stupid to bet anything on the life of a hard drive.
The heads are so close to the platters that a smoke particle can't fit between them. If you were to put a fingerprint on the disk, it would hit the head as it spun by. On top of that, they're spinning extremely fast, (7400rpm pretty much being the norm these days with 10krpm drives out there). Assuming the disk is 3.5" in diameter and travelling at 7400rpm, the outside edge of the disk is travelling at around 75mph. What is gonna happen when that head collides with the disc due to a mechanical failure? Everything is gonna be hosed - stick your foot out onto the road while you're doing 75 in your car sometime.
I once heard an analogy regarding this whole mechanism. I don't remember the exact numbers or wording but gist was that a hard drive head reading data was analagous to a 747 flying at 500mph 1 centimeter off the ground and counting every blade of grass that passes underneath. Something like that...
These are delicate machines with many moving parts. The only parts of a PC that I've found to be less reliable than hard drives are CD-ROM drives and CPU fans....
Backup everything. Backup often. (Well, that or get cocky and lose all your data, no skin off my back)
.....We've had problems with just about every manufacturer (Quantum, Seagate, Fuji, WD, etc...) except one: Maxtor....
Does your mileage vary?
My ex-roomate had two 8GB Maxtors fail on him when we built his PII a few years back. The first one failed within a day of use. He called Maxtor who were very helpful on the phone and sent an advance replacement. The replacement drive lasted a little over a year.
Regardless of brand, there are only two types of hard drives out there:
1) A hard drive that has crashed
2) A hard drive that is about to
I think we're slowly reaching the end of magnetic media's life as our primary secondary storage mechanism. There are just too many delicate moving parts requiring extreme precision to even function due to the density of data we're storing. I think we'll see more and more solid state storage solutions replace hard drives and more optical solutions used for backup.
Apple doesn't care very much about European customers. So it's quite hard here to find any store in your neighborhood at all you can have a look at MacOS X in.
(Let alone pricing outside the US, which is just horrible)
Is it that they don't care or is it that European vendors don't care to carry them? Maybe my perspective is skewed living in the States but it seems that Apple must care about foreign customers given the great lengths they've taken building internationalization right into OS X.
Also, international pricing is a tricky thing with tarrifs, exchange rates, etc. Has apple shown disinterest in foreign customers in other ways?
Memory Hog? That hasn't been my experience. I was just ripping a CD with iTunes while I was mucking around in terminal, system preferences, and the network utility. Ok, I obviously wasn't doing anything very memory intensive but still, I had tons of physical RAM available. I found that having lots of RAM was more important for OS 9 than 10.
With OS 9, the virtual memory was so crappy I never wanted it turned on. I would keep my mac maxed out in ram and have virtual memory completely disabled. I'd also have to crank up the memory allocated to the indivudual apps I was using quite frequently. This combination ate soooo much RAM.
With X, my memory problems have pretty much disappeared. I ripped out most of my RAM and threw it into my PC. I don't think I'd want to run with less than 256 but I don't see much of a performance gain when I crank it up to 512MB or a gig under normal use.
From my experience, OS 10.0 and the beta were extremely slow. However, 10.1 and 10.1.5 were tons faster. 10.2 is noticably faster again.
At this point, I consider it to be a pretty zippy OS. Go to a mac store or a Comp USA and test drive them. The interface feels good and responsive. People that complain about it being slow might be running it on a slow machine, might not have played with it since 10.0, etc. Or perhaps little transistions and such like the genie effect make it feel slow to some people that aren't used to them.
My personal machine is a B&W G3 that I've upgraded to a G4 550. It has 256MB of ram and a rage orion (rage 128). 10.2 runs fine on it. I have very few complaints. (If I don't buy a Tibook soon I'll be putting a Radeon into it though. The video leaves a little bit to be desired).
This is flat-out wrong. USB ports were included on PCs years before the iMac came out. There just wasn't any OS support for them until Win98 came out. People, please check your facts before posting something as if it is fact.
Ok, you're probably right. I'm probably getting the availability of peripherials confused with the availablility of ports. Also, I'm probably remembering stuff based on my own personal upgrade path between my macs and PCs.
Regardless, I do feel that apple was the company that did more to bring USB off the drawing table and to market than anybody. When the iMac was released, USB was the only way to hook anything up to it. USB exploded. Even long after I finally had USB ports on my PC, I had trouble finding devices that used them. The idea that apple is somehow going to do an about face and not support USB 2.0 or that they grudgingly supported USB in the first place is absurd. Apple loves USB.
I don't think Firewire was ever really meant to compete with USB either. I think it was meant specifically for a few high speed applications (external drives and dv). You don't see apple making firewire mice or keyboards. It's not what the format was made for.
What I want is an FM radio with MP3 recorder and programmable recording. So I can record, say, Talk of the Nation on NPR in the morning and listen to it in the afternoon. Why doesn't anybody make this yet??? Tivo for NPR. It would be great for saving stuff to listen to while driving, for those times when I want to actually use the time to learn something.
Sony makes one. It's a boombox type device with detachable speakers, rips CD's automatically the first time you play them and has a 20 gig drive. Runs about a grand I think...
as for usb 2, it competes too much with firewire, an existing mac standard interface, ading it would only complicate the device. it dosent make business sense for apple although it would be a nice feature.
Um, USB was brought to market and standardized largely by Apple. You could by a mac with USB ports off the shelf probably 2 years before you could find it built into a new PC. We'll see both USB 2 and Firewire 2 on future macs, guaranteed...
Actually, while normally outrageously expensive, apple memory happens to be pretty cheap right now. You can double the ram in any system for $40. Bumping the TiBook from 512MB of RAM to a gig of RAM for $40 sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. Bumping the 256MB iBook to 512MB for $40 doesn't sound bad either.
Working for an industry that isnt helping to destroy the world?
In fairness, the oil industry has come a long way in the last 10 years, especially in Alaska. Plus, the computer modelling sofware has done great things to reduce the damage. They can take seismic readings and drill test wells at only the most promising locations. This has increased their hit rate from 1 in 10 test wells to like 1 in 3. At least that's what they say on the TV...
In addition, they now use ice roads instead of plowing down to the tundra. Instead of drilling wells straight down to oil or gas deposits, they'll locate a drilling facility between several deposites and drill horizontally, lessening their footprint on the tundra. All good advances.
Also, when it comes to depletion of fossile fuels, there are actually a few geologists who swear that fossil fuels are replenishing themselves very quickly and that we might be mistaken concerning their origin. Of course, these guys right now are largely considered to be complete nutcases but a couple of them have pretty impressive credentials so I'm reserving judgement myself.
Oh, and of course, I still believe we need to dump this fossil fuel stuff and invest in cleaner, renewable energy sources regardless. Burning stuff for energy is so outdated.
I've seen a few shows on TV recently that featured some really wicked looking oil and gas exploration software. Stuff that let geologists view layers of terrain collected by seismic data in 3d, moving around in realtime... If that's the kind of stuff you're into, I can understand why java isn't an option for display right now.
However, java is exactly what you need. You can scale it across processors on the big iron or run it on the desktop without recompiling.
Have you considered only writing your display logic in C++ and using java for the backend number crunching? For raw floating point math, I've read that java is barely slower than native code at this point. It's my understanding that talking to the OS so you can get to the hardware is where you take the major performance hits using java. If you could do your raw crunching in multi-threaded java code, you could then deliver the data through one of many different mechanisms to your display logic and have that be the only code that you need to port from OS to OS...
Another thing you could possibly look at is licensing 3rd party libraries made for cross-platform development. From your post, the only thing I know you're definitely having trouble porting is thread-related code. I'm sure there are multi-platform threading libraries for C++ out there somewhere.
I'm not sure what active directory is but I do know that using Jaguar, my machine can browse my windows network and connect to any shared folders very easily.
I also have it sharing folders out to the windows machines though it doesn't give out a listing of what's shared (probably for security reasons). You have to tell it what username, password and share you want to access.
What exactly are you trying to do?
You either didn't read my post well or you're choosing to not respond to my argument. I said, there is a correlation but it is not as simple as code size goes up = bad, code size goes down = good. Some good practices may increase code size where other ones may decrease it. You end up with a valueless measure.
Gee, thanks for the references. "the literature" is so much more specific than "the software literature". I'm sure everybody knows exaclty which works you're talking about now. There can't be more than what, 5-10 books written on the subject of software development.
Any argument that says code size is relevant is inherantly flawed. Difficulty of both writing and maintaining code increases and decreases with many factors. From my personal experience, the number of lines in your source code is not one of those factors. Major factors I've found include but are not limited to the following:
1) How well the problem is defined and communicated by the people demanding the software. (HUGE deal - probably more important than anything else I've encountered regarding the success of a programming endevor)
2) The inherent complexity of said problem.
3) How well that problem is divided into managable and intuitive smaller taks by the software architect.
4) How well the system is documented outside the source
5) How well complex areas of the code are documented within the source
6) How much planning is put into development enviroments and development processes (choice of IDE's, build environments, test enviroments, source management, etc.)
There is an obvious correlation between code size and several of these factors. However, correlation is not causation and good design in some of these areas may make code larger while other may make it smaller.
I have worked with applications that have had comparatively small codebases but were extremely hard to manage due to how poorly that code was broken up and documented. The codebase I currently work with on a day to day bases is enormous. I don't know how many lines of code it surely spans thousands of lines of code. It is the easiest code I've ever worked with in terms of maintenance and extension. Did it take us longer to create than the original code? Maybe a little but the cost savings to the business in maintenance and extension will be huge.