Also Ironic, that they haven't actually done anything about the incident, to make sure the kid is okay;
Yes, they did: the bullies have been suspended from school and assigned to community service.
On the penal side, they're accused of private violence, insult, defamation, assault and menaces.
It is interesting to note that the kid's family withdrew the suit against Google, and the trial is now going on only because other parties enlisted themselves as "civil parties" (that is, victims of a crime who are seeking for a refund - sorry, I don't know the exact english term for that).
And the fact that it won't look at what's on the clipboard, and use those dimensions when I go to file->new.
Why should it do that? How should a user know of such a hidden behaviour? It's completely counterintuitive.
When I open a dialog box, I expect it to contain the same settings it had the last time I closed it, I don't want my program to overwrite them with “guessed values” without even telling me.
To paste the current selection into a new image in gimp, just do Edit / Paste as / New image. I don't know how it could get any easier than that, surely not by mimicking a program designed 20 years ago for single-button mice.
In southern Italy, people often receive jobs from politicians, and in return they offer their vote, and those of their family and friends, for all the subsequent elections. Forever, as long as they keep their job: they just make a phone call before every election, and after that they know who they have to vote for.
Of course those politicians won’t need to bother with morality, or even basic acceptable behaviour - in fact, their mandate can very well be a complete disaster: I’ve seen roads falling apart, sea water coming out from the water taps, complete darkness after sunset because the town has no money to pay the electricity bills, kids attending to lessons standing up because there are not enough chairs. That doesn’t matter at all - the same politicians get reelected over and over again.
If they happen to do something *very* bad AND get caught (an unlikely event, but if you multiply the probability by the number of corrupt politicians, you’ll see that happen), it’s no problem for them: Italy has *very* friendly laws for the punishment of white collar crimes (guess who makes the laws - they do), and they usually won’t spend a single day in prison. After they’re done with justice, they get elected again with no difficulty, while the judges who prosecuted them will usually have more problems, because they will be targeted as “politically motivated” and be hindered in every possible way in their careers.
Now suppose those politicians are in good relationships with, let’s say, shady entrepreneurs who provide them with money, jobs for their electors, or even convenient ready-made “vote packs”. Would they invest public finances in fighting them? No way. Its much more effective, from an electoral standpoint, to fight more easily identified (and much less powerful) enemies such as illegal immigrants, or to start building useless public structures that don’t even need to be completed: what's important to them are the jobs for the construction workers, and the public contracts for the shady entrepreneurs who own the businesses of concrete and earth-movement.
- There is nothing "non-standard" in QT and GTK. Every single linux distribution since 1994 will provide them. If you manage to find one that doesn't, you're free to distribute the libraries with your application (or link statically), as everybody does on Windows.
- GTK has broken backwards compatibility just ONCE in 11 years, when switching from gtk 1.2 to gtk 2.0. Applications based on gtk 1 continue to run flawlessly in current distributions.
- QT has broken backwards compatibility 3 times since 1991. The last time it has done so, during the 3.3 -> 4.0 switch, it provided a compile-time source compatibility layer. I no longer have 2.x apps around, but I can assure that 3.x applications keep running with no problem.
- Both QT and GTK are used under Windows and other operating systems so at least some developers find them attractive (see Google Earth, Paint Shop Pro, PowerDVD, Virtualbox, Skype, Firefox, Gimp, Inkscape, Pidgin).
- QT offers out of the box a state-of-the-art UI designer (I don't know about GTK+, but I guess the situation won't be different).
If you really think Linux is great, then please don't spread FUD, it hurts the platform.
Actually, Windows 3.1 required to be "shut down", otherwise it left tons of temporary files in C:\DOS (at least in Standard Mode).
DOS required to be shut down, too, if you used SmartDrive (which, IIRC, was active by default at least since MS DOS 5.0, as it improved performance quite a bit). What you had to do was to press CTRL + ALT + DEL before turning off the system, to let SmartDrive write back to disk the dirty blocks in its cache. It would display a short message during the operation, then reboot the computer. This behaviour was recommended in the DOS user's manual.
Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K
on
KDE 4.3 Released
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· Score: 1
In languages using latin-based alphabets, the pronunciation of every letter can change completely from country to country, so there is no point in preferring a letter over another one in order to achieve an "international" transliteration.
If you want that, you'll have to either use IPA, or define a different transliteration scheme from Japanese to each language with a latin-based alphabet.
In English, there's no problem, because there is no doubt about the pronunciation of a starting C followed by an A.
Many other latin-based languages, such as Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian, have no K and use C instead, except for loan words.
No. It does not run on the same hardware as Windows, there is no way I can substitute my copy of Windows with a copy of Mac OS, so it is not a competing good by any definition.
PCs and Macs are competing goods.
Are you also saying that google chrome is not a viable competing good?
I'd say it is not, because it's being given away for free, so it's not in the same market, because a "market" implies a "sale".
Currently, nobody would buy Chrome OS in place of Windows, if they had to pay for it.
How is it MS fault Apple/Google cannot produce competing goods - they have the money to do it.
They would lose it all if they tried to. That's because the sunk costs in producing a drop-in replacement for Windows are too high. So MS has a natural monopoly. The only possible "competition" for Windows comes from free software, because it requires no initial investment.
It's not a coincidence if OSX contains a lot of free software code (and Apple dropped their in-house effort, "copland").
Being the most popular is not enough to be conisdered a monopoly. I think Wii is the most popular game console (it could be PS3 or Xbox depending on which report you read) - does that make Nintendo a monopoly? No.
In fact, no gaming console enjoys a 90% market share as Windows does.
Competition works there, and that's why "the most popular game consoles" have always been made by different manufacturers in the last 30 years. At any given point in time, there are even different "most popular game consoles" in different territories. How does it compare to Windows' case?
While MS did some bad things in the past (using their power to ensure retailers only sold their OS) this has pretty much gone the way of the doe-doe bird.
In the dimension where I live, the EU is constantly fining Microsoft for multiple abuses of dominant position. Today.
Linx, OS-X, Chrome(yet to be proven) are all viable products.
Again, Linux is free. No company could live just by selling it, the same way as MS does with Windows.
(I hope this changes soon.)
Are you sure Google will not somehow extend Android's app store to Chrome OS?
That would result in something more than an "OS for a browser appliance".
It would be an alternative channel for developers to sell (some kinds of) applications to end users, not involving any passage through a copy of Windows.
The *only* weak point? When did Java get anything that works at all like a function pointer (delegates)?
Java does not have them because it enforces object-oriented code design. Which will make any project bigger than a VB form much easier to understand and maintain.
Their equivalents are anonymous inner classes. They're equivalently ugly, too.
When did it get unsigned integer types (uint16/32/64)?
Java explicitly left them out because they're not usually needed and make the arithmetic rules much more complicated. If you want a bigger integer, use a wider one, don't rely on the sign bit to carry information for you.
Just knowing that unsigned types exist, but ignoring the intricacies of the rules that their existence implies, will lead to more bugs in software, which is what Java tries to avoid.
When did it get stack-allocated pass-by-reference data types (structs)?
A "struct" is a class without methods. There's no need to complicate and uglify the language by adding second-citizenship classes. One of the core points in Java is that the programmer needs not to be aware of how the objects he uses are allocated (stack? Heap? A programmer shouldn't worry about the architecture of the VM). The only reason to use them would be *performance*, but Java happens to be more than three times faster than Mono with its current design, so if you really care about performance, you should switch to Java without even thinking about stack and heap considerations.
Then there's all the unsafe stuff that C# supports and Java doesn't, although in my years with both languages I've very rarely felt a need for any of that, and never actually used it. Would amke porting C/C++ to C# a lot easier than porting to Java, though...
The whole "unsafe" concept is crap. It breaks every advantage of using a VM. Unsafe code can’t be trusted, so it relies on the underlying operating system for protection, and badly-written unsafe code can trigger bugs everywhere, even in the "safe" code that is using it. It even breaks some assumptions which can be used to improve the performance of the VM.
That's why "unsafe" code cannot be run by default on.NET. Only signed applications can use it (as it happens with JNI in Java).
"Unsafe" was only added to.NET to support the abomination called "managed C++", which was fortunately rejected by developers even though MS silently made it the default option for "C++" projects in Visual Studio.
You even say that you never used it, so I really don't see your point, should a language implement every possible feature, even an unuseful and harmful one like "unsafe", just for the sake of it?
To interoperate C++ code with Java, we have JNI, which in the end serves exactly the same purposes of "unsafe", but without masquerading dangerous, potentially buggy code as safe, managed code.
Let's not forget LINQ though, that's actually well-worth mentioning. Any equivalent in Java yet?
Not having this feature does not prevent Java to be the vastly preferred choice in the enterprise world, where C# has a very low adoption rate.
Evidently many people who actually work with enterprise software do not really care about it.
C++ programmers and Java programmers can all feel quite at home after only a short time in C#. It was designed that way. Saying that, coming to it only knowing C/C++, it didn't take much longer for me to develop an initial familiarity with Java. In fact, pretty much by definition, and for obvious reasons of programmer portability, most strongly typed, high-level programming languages are remarkably similar.
The only thing Java and C++ had in common were the C syntax and the object orientation.
In (the original) Java, compared to C++:
- Code is meant to be byte-compiled;
- There is no preprocessor;
- There are no pointers, and no pointers to function in particular;
- No explicit memory management is possible, and there are no destructors;
- You cannot declare isolated functions/procedures;
- There is no distinction between class declaration and class implementation;
- Multiple inheritance is forbidden;
- There are no templates;
- Many of the more "academic" access modifiers are missing;
- There is full reflection of types and code;
- There is a mapping between the file system and the code namespace;
- Even the basic types change: there are no signed integers.
Notice how almost all of these points apply to C# as well.
So C++ and Java are two completely different languages. A Java developer *can* be comfortable with C++, because he can build himself something vaguely similar to a Java environment by selectively using a subset of the features of C++, and relying on a good external development platform like Qt. But the other way around is not true.
On the other hand, C# and Java are *very* similar: the most striking evidence of that is the fact that the whole Java syntax can be closely mapped to C# equivalents. C# brings additional features such as delegates, properties, operator overloading and output variables, but these are a little more than syntactic sugar if we consider that the overall design and the language philosophy are completely copied from Java.
Even the standard library, and its organization, are strikingly similar to Java's ones (and have nothing to do with the C++ ones).
To say that C# is identical to Java, though, is bollocks.
Initially C# was almost a Java ripoff, with minor feature additions. But after that, the languages evolved separately.
In particular, Java abandoned its elegant and simple design, trying in its turn to steal some of the features that were eventually added to C#, and as a result it became an ugly hircocervus upsetting both some of the old users, who had to learn new concepts, and many of the new users, who found that the new features were crippled because of backward compatibility. It'll probably get even uglier when new paradigm-changing features such as closures will be added.
But C#, too, is suffering from the kitchen-sink syndrome now.
There are some pretty significant differences, and in many cases I prefer C#'s implementation.
I find Java's syntax more self-documenting, for example for the absence of properties and operator overloading. But Java has some rough edges because of backward compatibility.
I don’t understand why Sun does not introduce a new version of Java retaining bytecode backward compatibility but *without* source-level compatibility. By giving the source files a new extension, say.javapp, one could even mix old code and new code without problems. That would remove the only weak point Java has when compared to C#.
Is this performance improvement because of UDF or does write caching happen to get enabled on UDF-formatted drives?
Isn’t write caching always on when you choose to use the “safely remove hardware” icon for a device? I don’t know if caching gets more aggressive on UDF-formatted volumes, but I have no particular reason to think so.
The UDF page on Wikipedia says "Philips provides source code and binaries for a UDF verifier that examines media for UDF compliance" and has a link to Philips.
Yes, the only problem is that Philips wants to know everything about you down to your blood group before letting you download it:(.
Sorry, my bad. I had not read your post well, and had replaced "drivers" with "sound cards". Please disregard me.
Linux driver won’t keep working across kernel versions, across gcc versions, when changing some kernel configuration options,...
Having a PC emulator written in Java means to be able to run any previously-written x86 code on any Java-enabled machine out there, forever. And don’t forget about mobile devices, too. JPC needs not to be run in a browser, it can be run standalone, and has already been ported to high-end phones - I, for one, think that running Windows 3.1 on a phone is quite cool. Running old games might even be funny.
Perhaps JPC could be ported to an xlet and, say, ran off a bluray disc or a dvb-t transmission. OK, I hate both of them, but the point is that achieving platform-independence opens up many possibilities.
It’s not less useful than the many old-systems emulators available on the net - and those get quite a lot of followers.
I’d say that it can be useful for:
- preservation (and enjoyment:D) of ancient software;
- interoperability with not-so-ancient software.
With the current 3GPP specification SMS can also be concatenated, contain pictures and sounds, configure your phone’s browser, contain "push" links etc.
99% of this functionality is crap and was made obsolete by MMS, but phones still have to support it.
I don’t know if Accenture sucks, but Microsoft itself was involved in first person in the development of the project (they were proud to announce this until now).
The fact that not even Microsoft’s involvement was able to make the system meet its requirements looks *very* indicative to me.
I use FAT on my usb keys only because I want to be able to use them from Windows machines.
But in Windows Vista+ you can also format USB flash drives to UDF (you’ll have to use the command line FORMAT tool, the GUI frontend won’t show UDF as an option).
When formatted in UDF, the drive’s performance improves dramatically: on my usb key, untarring the linux kernel and then deleting it changed from taking a few hours to taking a few minutes.
UDF can be read/written under Linux and, unlike NTFS, it natively supports all UNIX features (including extended attributes), so for example you could boot Linux straight from a Windows-accessible USB drive without creating ext3 images on it, and without using userspace file system drivers.
So it could be a nice solution for Linux/Windows interoperability... but sadly Windows stops liking UDF file systems if Linux creates files on them (I don’t know what exactly makes Windows upset; when it happens, Windows’ CHKDSK says the file system is OK).
Slashdot Mirror
Also Ironic, that they haven't actually done anything about the incident, to make sure the kid is okay;
Yes, they did: the bullies have been suspended from school and assigned to community service.
On the penal side, they're accused of private violence, insult, defamation, assault and menaces.
It is interesting to note that the kid's family withdrew the suit against Google, and the trial is now going on only because other parties enlisted themselves as "civil parties" (that is, victims of a crime who are seeking for a refund - sorry, I don't know the exact english term for that).
And the fact that it won't look at what's on the clipboard, and use those dimensions when I go to file->new.
Why should it do that? How should a user know of such a hidden behaviour? It's completely counterintuitive.
When I open a dialog box, I expect it to contain the same settings it had the last time I closed it, I don't want my program to overwrite them with “guessed values” without even telling me.
To paste the current selection into a new image in gimp, just do Edit / Paste as / New image. I don't know how it could get any easier than that, surely not by mimicking a program designed 20 years ago for single-button mice.
I guess the Windows version of the framework is somehow "extended".
What a surprise, who would have thought it.
Strange, my copy of Windows came with neither Paint Shop Pro nor Photoshop.
It’s more common for them to be “transferred to new assignments” when they do their job too well.
In southern Italy, people often receive jobs from politicians, and in return they offer their vote, and those of their family and friends, for all the subsequent elections. Forever, as long as they keep their job: they just make a phone call before every election, and after that they know who they have to vote for.
Of course those politicians won’t need to bother with morality, or even basic acceptable behaviour - in fact, their mandate can very well be a complete disaster: I’ve seen roads falling apart, sea water coming out from the water taps, complete darkness after sunset because the town has no money to pay the electricity bills, kids attending to lessons standing up because there are not enough chairs. That doesn’t matter at all - the same politicians get reelected over and over again.
If they happen to do something *very* bad AND get caught (an unlikely event, but if you multiply the probability by the number of corrupt politicians, you’ll see that happen), it’s no problem for them: Italy has *very* friendly laws for the punishment of white collar crimes (guess who makes the laws - they do), and they usually won’t spend a single day in prison. After they’re done with justice, they get elected again with no difficulty, while the judges who prosecuted them will usually have more problems, because they will be targeted as “politically motivated” and be hindered in every possible way in their careers.
Now suppose those politicians are in good relationships with, let’s say, shady entrepreneurs who provide them with money, jobs for their electors, or even convenient ready-made “vote packs”. Would they invest public finances in fighting them? No way. Its much more effective, from an electoral standpoint, to fight more easily identified (and much less powerful) enemies such as illegal immigrants, or to start building useless public structures that don’t even need to be completed: what's important to them are the jobs for the construction workers, and the public contracts for the shady entrepreneurs who own the businesses of concrete and earth-movement.
Do you know a cell phone manufacturer that is more "open" than Nokia?
You can already run your own application on your own phone, officially and for free.
Just use the Open Signed Online service.
The default value for TEMP was C:\DOS.
- There is nothing "non-standard" in QT and GTK. Every single linux distribution since 1994 will provide them. If you manage to find one that doesn't, you're free to distribute the libraries with your application (or link statically), as everybody does on Windows.
- GTK has broken backwards compatibility just ONCE in 11 years, when switching from gtk 1.2 to gtk 2.0. Applications based on gtk 1 continue to run flawlessly in current distributions.
- QT has broken backwards compatibility 3 times since 1991. The last time it has done so, during the 3.3 -> 4.0 switch, it provided a compile-time source compatibility layer. I no longer have 2.x apps around, but I can assure that 3.x applications keep running with no problem.
- Both QT and GTK are used under Windows and other operating systems so at least some developers find them attractive (see Google Earth, Paint Shop Pro, PowerDVD, Virtualbox, Skype, Firefox, Gimp, Inkscape, Pidgin).
- QT offers out of the box a state-of-the-art UI designer (I don't know about GTK+, but I guess the situation won't be different).
If you really think Linux is great, then please don't spread FUD, it hurts the platform.
Actually, Windows 3.1 required to be "shut down", otherwise it left tons of temporary files in C:\DOS (at least in Standard Mode).
DOS required to be shut down, too, if you used SmartDrive (which, IIRC, was active by default at least since MS DOS 5.0, as it improved performance quite a bit). What you had to do was to press CTRL + ALT + DEL before turning off the system, to let SmartDrive write back to disk the dirty blocks in its cache. It would display a short message during the operation, then reboot the computer. This behaviour was recommended in the DOS user's manual.
In languages using latin-based alphabets, the pronunciation of every letter can change completely from country to country, so there is no point in preferring a letter over another one in order to achieve an "international" transliteration.
If you want that, you'll have to either use IPA, or define a different transliteration scheme from Japanese to each language with a latin-based alphabet.
In English, there's no problem, because there is no doubt about the pronunciation of a starting C followed by an A.
Many other latin-based languages, such as Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian, have no K and use C instead, except for loan words.
No. It does not run on the same hardware as Windows, there is no way I can substitute my copy of Windows with a copy of Mac OS, so it is not a competing good by any definition.
PCs and Macs are competing goods.
I'd say it is not, because it's being given away for free, so it's not in the same market, because a "market" implies a "sale".
Currently, nobody would buy Chrome OS in place of Windows, if they had to pay for it.
They would lose it all if they tried to. That's because the sunk costs in producing a drop-in replacement for Windows are too high. So MS has a natural monopoly. The only possible "competition" for Windows comes from free software, because it requires no initial investment.
It's not a coincidence if OSX contains a lot of free software code (and Apple dropped their in-house effort, "copland").
In fact, no gaming console enjoys a 90% market share as Windows does.
Competition works there, and that's why "the most popular game consoles" have always been made by different manufacturers in the last 30 years. At any given point in time, there are even different "most popular game consoles" in different territories. How does it compare to Windows' case?
In the dimension where I live, the EU is constantly fining Microsoft for multiple abuses of dominant position. Today.
Again, Linux is free. No company could live just by selling it, the same way as MS does with Windows.
(I hope this changes soon.)
Are you sure Google will not somehow extend Android's app store to Chrome OS?
That would result in something more than an "OS for a browser appliance".
It would be an alternative channel for developers to sell (some kinds of) applications to end users, not involving any passage through a copy of Windows.
Java does not have them because it enforces object-oriented code design. Which will make any project bigger than a VB form much easier to understand and maintain.
Their equivalents are anonymous inner classes. They're equivalently ugly, too.
Java explicitly left them out because they're not usually needed and make the arithmetic rules much more complicated. If you want a bigger integer, use a wider one, don't rely on the sign bit to carry information for you.
Just knowing that unsigned types exist, but ignoring the intricacies of the rules that their existence implies, will lead to more bugs in software, which is what Java tries to avoid.
When did it get stack-allocated pass-by-reference data types (structs)?
A "struct" is a class without methods. There's no need to complicate and uglify the language by adding second-citizenship classes. One of the core points in Java is that the programmer needs not to be aware of how the objects he uses are allocated (stack? Heap? A programmer shouldn't worry about the architecture of the VM). The only reason to use them would be *performance*, but Java happens to be more than three times faster than Mono with its current design, so if you really care about performance, you should switch to Java without even thinking about stack and heap considerations.
Then there's all the unsafe stuff that C# supports and Java doesn't, although in my years with both languages I've very rarely felt a need for any of that, and never actually used it. Would amke porting C/C++ to C# a lot easier than porting to Java, though...
The whole "unsafe" concept is crap. It breaks every advantage of using a VM. Unsafe code can’t be trusted, so it relies on the underlying operating system for protection, and badly-written unsafe code can trigger bugs everywhere, even in the "safe" code that is using it. It even breaks some assumptions which can be used to improve the performance of the VM. .NET. Only signed applications can use it (as it happens with JNI in Java). .NET to support the abomination called "managed C++", which was fortunately rejected by developers even though MS silently made it the default option for "C++" projects in Visual Studio.
That's why "unsafe" code cannot be run by default on
"Unsafe" was only added to
You even say that you never used it, so I really don't see your point, should a language implement every possible feature, even an unuseful and harmful one like "unsafe", just for the sake of it?
To interoperate C++ code with Java, we have JNI, which in the end serves exactly the same purposes of "unsafe", but without masquerading dangerous, potentially buggy code as safe, managed code.
Not having this feature does not prevent Java to be the vastly preferred choice in the enterprise world, where C# has a very low adoption rate.
Evidently many people who actually work with enterprise software do not really care about it.
C++ programmers and Java programmers can all feel quite at home after only a short time in C#. It was designed that way. Saying that, coming to it only knowing C/C++, it didn't take much longer for me to develop an initial familiarity with Java. In fact, pretty much by definition, and for obvious reasons of programmer portability, most strongly typed, high-level programming languages are remarkably similar.
The only thing Java and C++ had in common were the C syntax and the object orientation.
In (the original) Java, compared to C++:
- Code is meant to be byte-compiled;
- There is no preprocessor;
- There are no pointers, and no pointers to function in particular;
- No explicit memory management is possible, and there are no destructors;
- You cannot declare isolated functions/procedures;
- There is no distinction between class declaration and class implementation;
- Multiple inheritance is forbidden;
- There are no templates;
- Many of the more "academic" access modifiers are missing;
- There is full reflection of types and code;
- There is a mapping between the file system and the code namespace;
- Even the basic types change: there are no signed integers.
Notice how almost all of these points apply to C# as well.
So C++ and Java are two completely different languages. A Java developer *can* be comfortable with C++, because he can build himself something vaguely similar to a Java environment by selectively using a subset of the features of C++, and relying on a good external development platform like Qt. But the other way around is not true.
On the other hand, C# and Java are *very* similar: the most striking evidence of that is the fact that the whole Java syntax can be closely mapped to C# equivalents. C# brings additional features such as delegates, properties, operator overloading and output variables, but these are a little more than syntactic sugar if we consider that the overall design and the language philosophy are completely copied from Java.
Even the standard library, and its organization, are strikingly similar to Java's ones (and have nothing to do with the C++ ones).
To say that C# is identical to Java, though, is bollocks.
Initially C# was almost a Java ripoff, with minor feature additions. But after that, the languages evolved separately.
In particular, Java abandoned its elegant and simple design, trying in its turn to steal some of the features that were eventually added to C#, and as a result it became an ugly hircocervus upsetting both some of the old users, who had to learn new concepts, and many of the new users, who found that the new features were crippled because of backward compatibility. It'll probably get even uglier when new paradigm-changing features such as closures will be added.
But C#, too, is suffering from the kitchen-sink syndrome now.
There are some pretty significant differences, and in many cases I prefer C#'s implementation.
I find Java's syntax more self-documenting, for example for the absence of properties and operator overloading. But Java has some rough edges because of backward compatibility.
.javapp, one could even mix old code and new code without problems. That would remove the only weak point Java has when compared to C#.
I don’t understand why Sun does not introduce a new version of Java retaining bytecode backward compatibility but *without* source-level compatibility. By giving the source files a new extension, say
He has already done that with Java, after Sun released it under the GPL.
Before that, he deprecated Java like he’s doing with Mono now.
But in Windows Vista+
Oh, c'mon. If you mean Windows 7, say Windows 7.
Sorry, I meant "Windows Vista or higher".
Is this performance improvement because of UDF or does write caching happen to get enabled on UDF-formatted drives?
Isn’t write caching always on when you choose to use the “safely remove hardware” icon for a device? I don’t know if caching gets more aggressive on UDF-formatted volumes, but I have no particular reason to think so.
The UDF page on Wikipedia says "Philips provides source code and binaries for a UDF verifier that examines media for UDF compliance" and has a link to Philips.
Yes, the only problem is that Philips wants to know everything about you down to your blood group before letting you download it :( .
Sorry, my bad. I had not read your post well, and had replaced "drivers" with "sound cards". Please disregard me. ...
Linux driver won’t keep working across kernel versions, across gcc versions, when changing some kernel configuration options,
Yes,they do.
(Not that I expect the source code of a x86-to-jvm bytecode recompiler to be very readable...)
Having a PC emulator written in Java means to be able to run any previously-written x86 code on any Java-enabled machine out there, forever. And don’t forget about mobile devices, too. JPC needs not to be run in a browser, it can be run standalone, and has already been ported to high-end phones - I, for one, think that running Windows 3.1 on a phone is quite cool. Running old games might even be funny. :D) of ancient software;
Perhaps JPC could be ported to an xlet and, say, ran off a bluray disc or a dvb-t transmission. OK, I hate both of them, but the point is that achieving platform-independence opens up many possibilities.
It’s not less useful than the many old-systems emulators available on the net - and those get quite a lot of followers.
I’d say that it can be useful for:
- preservation (and enjoyment
- interoperability with not-so-ancient software.
With the current 3GPP specification SMS can also be concatenated, contain pictures and sounds, configure your phone’s browser, contain "push" links etc.
99% of this functionality is crap and was made obsolete by MMS, but phones still have to support it.
I don’t know if Accenture sucks, but Microsoft itself was involved in first person in the development of the project (they were proud to announce this until now).
The fact that not even Microsoft’s involvement was able to make the system meet its requirements looks *very* indicative to me.
I use FAT on my usb keys only because I want to be able to use them from Windows machines.
But in Windows Vista+ you can also format USB flash drives to UDF (you’ll have to use the command line FORMAT tool, the GUI frontend won’t show UDF as an option).
When formatted in UDF, the drive’s performance improves dramatically: on my usb key, untarring the linux kernel and then deleting it changed from taking a few hours to taking a few minutes.
UDF can be read/written under Linux and, unlike NTFS, it natively supports all UNIX features (including extended attributes), so for example you could boot Linux straight from a Windows-accessible USB drive without creating ext3 images on it, and without using userspace file system drivers.
So it could be a nice solution for Linux/Windows interoperability... but sadly Windows stops liking UDF file systems if Linux creates files on them (I don’t know what exactly makes Windows upset; when it happens, Windows’ CHKDSK says the file system is OK).
You might find your ca. 2001 Linux soundcard drivers (or, heck, even applications) don't work well with your ca. 2007 distro, as well.
Fud. Theres no specific reason for them not to work.