Actually, I can't remember one time that RMS has done that. What RMS seems to take pride in is the idea of the GPL, and the free software movement. I've never heard him need to point out to people that he in fact has written some useful software in his old days. And that is not his claim to fame either. RMS is the undisputed leading thinker and creator of the free software movement, and that is his "clame to fame", although I don't think he cares much for fame, only for his ideology.
Besides, I don't think RMS does much programming these days. His schedule is so busy from travelling all around the world, that hardly anyone could blame him for that. (And when it comes to the matter of things: I generally don't judge people purely from their programming ability. (But if you do: then RMS should certainly be one of your heros. But so should many others, and there would be nothing special left about RMS.))
The true idiots are the blind followers constantly praising him, and the raging lynch-mob constantly trying to take him out. Why can't people just be a little bit more calm and uninvolved, the matter of free software is a philosophical battle, and should be fought without needing to resort to ugly tactics.
(and on the subject of kicking his ass: RMS doesn't look like a particulary strong or violent person, so I don't think he is going to kick you very hard, if he decides to kick you back...)
Just about the only good app I can think about that kept this motto is Windows Notepad.
Except that notepad doesn't really do anything really well. It doesn't edit large files. It doesn't work well for editing human-readable text as it doesn't have wordwrap. It doesn't work for editing programming languages, as it doesn't handle indented code very well. And it's general lack of features make it almost unusable to anyone having tried a different text-editor.
...that the best solution to this problem is that your fellow developers are in an office across the hall, and that you can walk into their office and talk to them about the changes.
But that doesn't scale... So you've got to modularize the project so that each team works against their own baseline. Any changes that you do to another teams part, must be given to them, for them to check out, and integrate themselves. The important thing is communication, it often happens that they are working on fixing the same problem, but in another and better way, and can give you back their fix instead.
So when you're having problems with your revision control system, what you are really experiencing most of the time, is problems with communication.
Ideally, all developers should be in the same building, they should work at (mostly) the same time (normal office hours), and they should all be friends, and keep a list of each others telephone-numbers, and eat lunch at the same time. Development should be split into projects (having 10-50 people on each project) that are mosty independent. All the people on the project should meet weekly, and discuss their project, important changes, etc... On each project there can be one or more teams, each consisting of four to eight people, who should have offices really close to each other. On each team, development should be split into sub-teams, consisting of 1-3 persons (depending on difficulty and experience), who should share an office, and thus communicate even further. And just as important: this should not be formalized (at least not too much). People should rotate around somewhat, not being stuck with the same people all the time, to get them to know other parts of the project, and other people to communicte with.
The important lesson I am trying to give is that the most beneficial communication, is often the informal. While having a tool help you with managing deltas is surely helpful, it can't solve every problem in the world. You need to work together, but you also need to modularize, and most importantly, you all need to be friends...
Actually, interactive learning tools aren't all that bad when it comes to teaching a complex gui. But to actually make it better than a book involves a lot of effort. I have recently tried a really well-designed tool for learning Microsoft Excel. But it was only, say 10% better than having a good book, and the effort involved in creating it must have been a lot more.
Flash, powerpoint, etc... comes to mind. It's the same story. They can be used for an advantage, but I would have to agree that most of the time they are only distracting.
The advantage of interactive learning tools is that people who are not computer-literate often see everything on a computer as a game, and enjoys interacting with it, whereas they find a technical book boring. If you are offering a real course, for really interested students, it doesn't matter much, but if you're trying to get your customers/employees/etc to learn something against their will, it might be easier to force them through something many of them would consider at least somewhat fun.
Personally, I would prefer a well-written book to anything on the web (reading from a computer screen is terrible, and switching back and forth between windows to try out examples is counterproductive).
On the other hand, if you are offering a course, then you need to communicate with the students (and they with each other). A mailing list combined with a web-based archive (or a web-log/wiki/etc kind of thingy combined with automatical mailings about changes) might be a good idea. The problem is that they kind of limit your conversation to text and hyperlinks, but so does any distance-learning tool.
"One of the reasons we are looking forward to having the GNU system finally available from the GNU Project is that it will be only free software," Stallman added.
Doesn't Debian only include Free (as in speech) software???
Yes, it does! Now re-read your quote... Notice the phrase "One of" at the start at the sentence?
There you've got it! Stallman didn't say it was the reason. Because (as both you and he has already noticed) there already exists operating system kernels that are free software.
So Stallman must think there are other reasons to looking forward to HURD as well. Don't know what they are? Well, does the phrase "features" ring a bell? HURD is designed from the top down as a collection of daemons running in user-space (well, sort of), that provides the normal operating services. This means extending the HURD with new functionality is much easier than extending something like the Linux kernel. Since this is a pretty new concept, it remains to be proven whether this i something people really want (they will not want it if it has bad performance, but the promises for stability, maintenance and new features are great...).
Yes it does. Put the dbms server inside the corporate network. Put the web-server on the outside. All you need is one application-level proxy so the webserver can access the dbms-server. Obviously, that is not entirely physically disconnected, but good enough for almost any purpose I can think of.
C# was said to be one of the worst lanuages that Microsoft developed
By whom?
So it begs the question. Why would anyone want to compile this lanuage on linux?
Obviosly because they are not the same people who said it was one of the worst lan(g)uages that Microsoft developed.
Homework #1: Learn to think!
Is it not possible just to run the Open Source equivilant in some other lanuage, perhaps one with a little more respectability (saying that only knowing majorities opinion.)
I failed to see more than one criticism, as #1 and #2 looked very similar to me.
The idea that you can somehow separate language and run-time environment is of course partly true, but for most people not very realistic.
Case in point: the standard C library. Most of the stuff here (with the exception of the varargs mechanism) is not part of the C language. Yet very few people would even consider using something entirely different, even though many (of the most used) parts of the standard C library really sucks (e.g. stdio is slow, malloc/free is more unreliable and slower than region-based memory management, there are plenty of functions that are not reentrant, etc...)
Similarly, few people would develop java programs without at least the support of the classes in java.lang.*, java.util.*, java.io.*, java.net.*, java.awt.*, javax.swing.*, and so on. While it is possible (and probably easier than in the C case), most people just won't do it, for much the same reason as they wouldn't do it in C.
And the reason for that is simple. You loose portability, you loose common knowledge, you end up with libraries less debugged and less trustworthy than the well-tried counterparts, you do a lot of unecessary work that could be better spent at your application, etc...
Now, if this was a comparison of what was the "best language" (without qualification), then I would consider your critiscism appropriate. But it wasn't. This was a small survey to see whether it would be useful to write a game in java. And that meant using standard off-the-shelf compilers and libraries. If you wanted to implement your own run-time libraries, you could just as well implement your own language.
As mentioned above, this wasn't a comparison of java vs. C++. It was a comparison of the run-time speed of MSVC++ 6.0SP5 versus Intel C++ 5.0 versus JDK 1.4.0 server versus JDK 1.4.0 client versus Excelsior JET Professional 2.1 versus IBM JDK 1.3.0, with an eye towards game-programming, and taking into account factors such as readability of the tweaked (optimized) code, developer time, portability and robustness of the different platforms. Considering that, it would be quite stupid to not take run-time libraries into account.
Yup, that is exactly the point. Languages running on CLR are trivially similar. However, elsewhere in the world, there are languages that is very different from that. Eiffel uses multiple inheritance in interesting ways. Eiffel# does not. C++ has STL. It isn't well supported by the CLR. As far as I know, there are no dynamically typed languages targetting the CLR yet (such as Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Prolog, etc). Very different languages, such as Haskell, APL-derivatives, etc, really need a different runtime. Module systems other than those similar to C#'s module system (e.g. Standard ML) will never be well supported. The list goes on.
And certainly, not every useful computer language has for- or while-loops (pure functional lanuages doesn't have that). Or variables (forth-dialects doesn't have that (well-depending on viewpoint obviously, they do have global variables)). Most old languages such as C, doesn't have exceptions. On the other hand, most languages have something similar to procedure calls, but they vary widely, some are based on an idealized model of a machine, some on unification, some on term-rewriting, and they can often have very different semantics.
Conclusion: Computer languages are not similar. Most mainstream languages are, and those running on the CLR even more so. Don't forget what you loose, but don't forget the advantages either...
One might be tempted to get down to common sense. If the spreadsheet contains mostly data, and few formulas, and the primary purpose of its existence is to present those data in some form, then it's data. On the other hand, if the spreadsheet contains mostly formulas, macro-commands, etc, and the primary purpose of the spreadsheet is to plug in data to do analyses, etc, then it's a program.
Unfortunately, common sense works very badly when it comes to regulation. Your best bet is to explain your situation to them, and maybe the press, politicians, etc, if you think you are being treated unfairly. It might not work for you, but maybe for the next guy:-(
I really hate it when programs I have to use are entirely GUI-based. I want to automate as much as possible, and having the ability to create a simple shell-script for doing what I want is really useful. Not that I don't appreciate having a nice gui, I really do.
But whenever you add functionality to a program, ask yourself the question: "Could this be thought to be even remotely useful for someone to use from a shell script?" If the answer to that question is "yes", then make it available from the command-line as well. An example of software that really doesn't follow this guideline is most installation programs. Most sysadmins do not appreciate sitting in front of 10's or 100's of computers pushing "Next" and "Finish".
Secondly, follow GUI-guidelines wherever you can. Winamp (and most other mp3-players) are completely ridiculous. A gui built for usability would have larger buttons, standard focus mechanisms, less distracting eye-candy, etc...
Third, document your program, and not just for the beginner. It's when you want to see if the program can really help you with some esoteric stuff that you really need documentation.
Fourth, and most importantly: Make sure your programs do something useful. The world doesn't need another Visual Basic CD-player. Personally I need efficient theorem-provers, but that is kind of a hard problem to solve. But even simple things can have remarkable usefullness, e.g. the first visual text-editor/wordprocessor, spreadsheet, web-browser, etc... I believe there is still room for innovation.
Ahh, yes, this has actually bothered me since I first tried linux 1.1.59. Running heavy loads was ok, but heavy loads with lots of disk access would grind the machine to a halt. Modern machines with large amounts of ram makes the problem less visible though.
I believe this article is actually quite unbiased, considering the source it came from. It admits that CLR is probably better than JVM for implementing other languages than C# or Java, but that it's far from the holy grail MS makes it sound like.
Then it goes on to say that surely the JVM can be extended if this proves to be a selling point for.NET (which is probably true, but it kind of makes you wonder why sun haven't already done it).
Well, it does make a lot of sense to use an intermideate language, and compile this at run-time (or load-time). First of all, this allows you to put much more semantic information into the program, which can be used by the execution unit or the loader. Examples of such information can be simple interfaces (components), specifications (components), correctness proofs (read about proof-carrying code by doing a google search), safeness (java has a security model, you know), debugging information, etc...
Second, it allows you to have platform independent code. This is clearly useful in a lot of cases. And while you can do that with an interpreter, compiling to a binary format at least allows some optimisations to be carried out beforehand.
Third, it can even lead to reduced load-time, as an AST (such as in Oberon) is much smaller than compiled native code, and since disk-access is slow and modern processors fast, you can get the native code into memory faster than you can with just loading the native code itself. You can also avoid to check all references to external libraries (or classes, in the case of java) untill they are actually used, which can lead to huge performance benefits for large programs where most code will never run in typical use (although most java implementations doesn't do that, aiming for security instead of speed).
While you might not like Java, the idea of using an intermideate language is still a useful idea. And even if it is not useful for you, it's still useful for a hell of a lot of other developers.
C# provides the ability to write unsafe code. In unsafe code it is possible to declare and operate on pointers, to perform conversions between pointers and integral types, to take the address of variables, and so forth.
One of the most annoying aspects of java is that you can't do that. Java is the perfect lock-yourself-in language. If you want to escape, the only standard mechanism is JNI, which is completely useless (the verbosity and ease of failure when using JNI is mind-boggling, when I tried to use it a year ago, I eventually had to write a tool for generating JNI. What should have been a simple foreign function interface is really a complete mess.)
If C# offers mostly the same as Java, but with added features for real-world programming, such as the ability to add a dirty hack where it's needed, without going through all the torture and pain that Java makes you suffer, then I and many other developers will be much more happy to use C# than Java.
If all you care about is security, you wouldn't be using Java anyway, and you would certainly not download executable code over the web (applets). And if all you want is applets, then by all means, go ahead and use Java. But for people looking for something to use for enterprise-wide programming systems, having to integrate lots of legacy code, I'll bet C# will make a strong contender just because of this feature.
True, making it simple to do unsafe things is potentially dangerous. But making it unecessarily complex to do simple things also adds complexity, which isn't good for security either.
One of the great things about the X Window System is that it is network transparent. It would be stupid to ditch framemaker, simply because you can't run it locally on linux. Have a dedicated machine (SGI/Sun/whatever) simply for running framemaker, and let your users run it remotely. Problem solved, money saved;-)
Alternately, use Citrix Metaframe, and run framemaker on a windows server. That would probably be more expensive, less convenient, and so on. But if you need users to access other windows applications as well, it is a whole lot better than giving each user two machines, and having you administer them both.
Well, not that this book is going to make any newcomer to lisp understand much more of it. But Grahams book has been, and is, the greatest introduction to what lisp is all about (after you've learned the basics, which can be taught from e.g Grahams other book (Ansi Common Lisp)). It is quite sad that On Lisp has been unavailable for such a long time.
I would much prefer a paper version myself, but at least making it available makes a lot of sense. I hope various lisp-vendors (Franz, Xanalys) sponsor him somewhat to avoid the losses...
This is just like the requirements for a basic security clearance. It's not like you can't ever have tasted alcohol (few responsible people haven't).
They look up your police records and military records, interview you, and some of your (earlier) employers, family, and so on, to try to determine if you are a responsible person. If you aren't, then they won't risk the lives of other astronauts, important space research, huge amounts of money, etc, just to get you into space.
This is nothing but common sence. You shouldn't trust untrustworthy people. I fail to see the logic behind allowing Osama bin Laden on the space shuttle just because he has enough money.
Most experts in any other field of programming also have a low opinion of Numerical Recipes. It's quite obvious upon reading it that the authors doesn't exactly value good coding style, good explanations of the algorithms involved, commenting their code, or even using descriptive variable names.
The book is completely unusable for learning numerical analysis, and it's unusable as a recipe source, as the code is copyrighted. Coupled with the fact that actual numerical analysts doesn't like it either, the popularity of the book is quite astonishing... (anyone have any idea why?)
Well, feel free to reverse engineer it (e.g. translate to another language) if you want to. There's no one who is going to stop you, since the binary code is in the public domain. But no legal twistery can force them to give you the source code unless they choose to do so. It's the binary that's in the public domain. Period.
Simply ask yourself the question: "what is the most used resources now?" That should give you the answer.
However, I have some ideas as well...
More copy-machines needed everywhere. Staplers, binders, that sort of thing.
Computer rooms overloaded during peak hours. Need more computer rooms. Stuff them with old computers, people needing a fast one will do so outside peak hours anyway.
Most universities have more than enough bandwith, but if it is low, block common file-sharing programs as actual work should get priority.
Make sure competent people are running the machines, better invest something in salaries than in more machines (when half of them doesn't work, that can become expensive). Add quotas for everything, especially disk/printer usage, morons with large mp3-collections or morons that print every web-page they see should not be allowed to make life harder for other. Many students are competent. Pay them to run the network as part-time jobs. Install every imaginable kind of scientific open-source software. Get licenses for mathematica, matlab, spss, etc...
Have different labs for different users. Standarizing on just one platform (whether it is Windows, Unix, or Mac) is not going to make everybody happy.
Make a queue-system for making it easier to find an available machine, add a time-limit (not too short to get useful work done) if every machine is occupied.
Put up some web-kiosks around campus at various places. That should give easy access to information when you don't need anything more than a quick browse of assignments on the course homepage, or checking your email. Put a printer there as well, but preferably with very strict quotas to avoid too much maintenance (say: max 3 pages per login session).
Don't bother about students in dorms wanting access for free. They should either pay you the same they would have paid to a commercial provider, or shut up. If they can afford a computer, they can afford to pay for bandwith as well.
Make sure you invest in something that will benefit everyone, not those screaming loudest.
It's obviously you who are confused. Releasing the source code to something has nothing to do with releasing the binary code to it when it comes to copyright law.
Please come back to the discussion once you have read something more than the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, but I think it's obvious that it must be related to lines of code... (ducks before somebody throws something through the air)
Besides, I don't think RMS does much programming these days. His schedule is so busy from travelling all around the world, that hardly anyone could blame him for that. (And when it comes to the matter of things: I generally don't judge people purely from their programming ability. (But if you do: then RMS should certainly be one of your heros. But so should many others, and there would be nothing special left about RMS.))
The true idiots are the blind followers constantly praising him, and the raging lynch-mob constantly trying to take him out. Why can't people just be a little bit more calm and uninvolved, the matter of free software is a philosophical battle, and should be fought without needing to resort to ugly tactics.
(and on the subject of kicking his ass: RMS doesn't look like a particulary strong or violent person, so I don't think he is going to kick you very hard, if he decides to kick you back...)
Except that notepad doesn't really do anything really well. It doesn't edit large files. It doesn't work well for editing human-readable text as it doesn't have wordwrap. It doesn't work for editing programming languages, as it doesn't handle indented code very well. And it's general lack of features make it almost unusable to anyone having tried a different text-editor.
But that doesn't scale... So you've got to modularize the project so that each team works against their own baseline. Any changes that you do to another teams part, must be given to them, for them to check out, and integrate themselves. The important thing is communication, it often happens that they are working on fixing the same problem, but in another and better way, and can give you back their fix instead.
So when you're having problems with your revision control system, what you are really experiencing most of the time, is problems with communication.
Ideally, all developers should be in the same building, they should work at (mostly) the same time (normal office hours), and they should all be friends, and keep a list of each others telephone-numbers, and eat lunch at the same time. Development should be split into projects (having 10-50 people on each project) that are mosty independent. All the people on the project should meet weekly, and discuss their project, important changes, etc... On each project there can be one or more teams, each consisting of four to eight people, who should have offices really close to each other. On each team, development should be split into sub-teams, consisting of 1-3 persons (depending on difficulty and experience), who should share an office, and thus communicate even further. And just as important: this should not be formalized (at least not too much). People should rotate around somewhat, not being stuck with the same people all the time, to get them to know other parts of the project, and other people to communicte with.
The important lesson I am trying to give is that the most beneficial communication, is often the informal. While having a tool help you with managing deltas is surely helpful, it can't solve every problem in the world. You need to work together, but you also need to modularize, and most importantly, you all need to be friends...
Flash, powerpoint, etc... comes to mind. It's the same story. They can be used for an advantage, but I would have to agree that most of the time they are only distracting.
The advantage of interactive learning tools is that people who are not computer-literate often see everything on a computer as a game, and enjoys interacting with it, whereas they find a technical book boring. If you are offering a real course, for really interested students, it doesn't matter much, but if you're trying to get your customers/employees/etc to learn something against their will, it might be easier to force them through something many of them would consider at least somewhat fun.
Personally, I would prefer a well-written book to anything on the web (reading from a computer screen is terrible, and switching back and forth between windows to try out examples is counterproductive).
On the other hand, if you are offering a course, then you need to communicate with the students (and they with each other). A mailing list combined with a web-based archive (or a web-log/wiki/etc kind of thingy combined with automatical mailings about changes) might be a good idea. The problem is that they kind of limit your conversation to text and hyperlinks, but so does any distance-learning tool.
Yes, it does! Now re-read your quote... Notice the phrase "One of" at the start at the sentence?
There you've got it! Stallman didn't say it was the reason. Because (as both you and he has already noticed) there already exists operating system kernels that are free software.
So Stallman must think there are other reasons to looking forward to HURD as well. Don't know what they are? Well, does the phrase "features" ring a bell? HURD is designed from the top down as a collection of daemons running in user-space (well, sort of), that provides the normal operating services. This means extending the HURD with new functionality is much easier than extending something like the Linux kernel. Since this is a pretty new concept, it remains to be proven whether this i something people really want (they will not want it if it has bad performance, but the promises for stability, maintenance and new features are great...).
Yes it does. Put the dbms server inside the corporate network. Put the web-server on the outside. All you need is one application-level proxy so the webserver can access the dbms-server. Obviously, that is not entirely physically disconnected, but good enough for almost any purpose I can think of.
By whom?
So it begs the question. Why would anyone want to compile this lanuage on linux?
Obviosly because they are not the same people who said it was one of the worst lan(g)uages that Microsoft developed.
Homework #1: Learn to think!
Is it not possible just to run the Open Source equivilant in some other lanuage, perhaps one with a little more respectability (saying that only knowing majorities opinion.)
Homework #2: learn to spell as well...
The idea that you can somehow separate language and run-time environment is of course partly true, but for most people not very realistic.
Case in point: the standard C library. Most of the stuff here (with the exception of the varargs mechanism) is not part of the C language. Yet very few people would even consider using something entirely different, even though many (of the most used) parts of the standard C library really sucks (e.g. stdio is slow, malloc/free is more unreliable and slower than region-based memory management, there are plenty of functions that are not reentrant, etc...)
Similarly, few people would develop java programs without at least the support of the classes in java.lang.*, java.util.*, java.io.*, java.net.*, java.awt.*, javax.swing.*, and so on. While it is possible (and probably easier than in the C case), most people just won't do it, for much the same reason as they wouldn't do it in C.
And the reason for that is simple. You loose portability, you loose common knowledge, you end up with libraries less debugged and less trustworthy than the well-tried counterparts, you do a lot of unecessary work that could be better spent at your application, etc...
Now, if this was a comparison of what was the "best language" (without qualification), then I would consider your critiscism appropriate. But it wasn't. This was a small survey to see whether it would be useful to write a game in java. And that meant using standard off-the-shelf compilers and libraries. If you wanted to implement your own run-time libraries, you could just as well implement your own language.
As mentioned above, this wasn't a comparison of java vs. C++. It was a comparison of the run-time speed of MSVC++ 6.0SP5 versus Intel C++ 5.0 versus JDK 1.4.0 server versus JDK 1.4.0 client versus Excelsior JET Professional 2.1 versus IBM JDK 1.3.0, with an eye towards game-programming, and taking into account factors such as readability of the tweaked (optimized) code, developer time, portability and robustness of the different platforms. Considering that, it would be quite stupid to not take run-time libraries into account.
And certainly, not every useful computer language has for- or while-loops (pure functional lanuages doesn't have that). Or variables (forth-dialects doesn't have that (well-depending on viewpoint obviously, they do have global variables)). Most old languages such as C, doesn't have exceptions. On the other hand, most languages have something similar to procedure calls, but they vary widely, some are based on an idealized model of a machine, some on unification, some on term-rewriting, and they can often have very different semantics.
Conclusion: Computer languages are not similar. Most mainstream languages are, and those running on the CLR even more so. Don't forget what you loose, but don't forget the advantages either...
Unfortunately, common sense works very badly when it comes to regulation. Your best bet is to explain your situation to them, and maybe the press, politicians, etc, if you think you are being treated unfairly. It might not work for you, but maybe for the next guy :-(
But whenever you add functionality to a program, ask yourself the question: "Could this be thought to be even remotely useful for someone to use from a shell script?" If the answer to that question is "yes", then make it available from the command-line as well. An example of software that really doesn't follow this guideline is most installation programs. Most sysadmins do not appreciate sitting in front of 10's or 100's of computers pushing "Next" and "Finish".
Secondly, follow GUI-guidelines wherever you can. Winamp (and most other mp3-players) are completely ridiculous. A gui built for usability would have larger buttons, standard focus mechanisms, less distracting eye-candy, etc...
Third, document your program, and not just for the beginner. It's when you want to see if the program can really help you with some esoteric stuff that you really need documentation.
Fourth, and most importantly: Make sure your programs do something useful. The world doesn't need another Visual Basic CD-player. Personally I need efficient theorem-provers, but that is kind of a hard problem to solve. But even simple things can have remarkable usefullness, e.g. the first visual text-editor/wordprocessor, spreadsheet, web-browser, etc... I believe there is still room for innovation.
Well, you'd better write your own kernel as well. Come to think about, what is stored in the microcode for the P6? Better make your own computer...
Ahh, yes, this has actually bothered me since I first tried linux 1.1.59. Running heavy loads was ok, but heavy loads with lots of disk access would grind the machine to a halt. Modern machines with large amounts of ram makes the problem less visible though.
Then it goes on to say that surely the JVM can be extended if this proves to be a selling point for .NET (which is probably true, but it kind of makes you wonder why sun haven't already done it).
Second, it allows you to have platform independent code. This is clearly useful in a lot of cases. And while you can do that with an interpreter, compiling to a binary format at least allows some optimisations to be carried out beforehand.
Third, it can even lead to reduced load-time, as an AST (such as in Oberon) is much smaller than compiled native code, and since disk-access is slow and modern processors fast, you can get the native code into memory faster than you can with just loading the native code itself. You can also avoid to check all references to external libraries (or classes, in the case of java) untill they are actually used, which can lead to huge performance benefits for large programs where most code will never run in typical use (although most java implementations doesn't do that, aiming for security instead of speed).
While you might not like Java, the idea of using an intermideate language is still a useful idea. And even if it is not useful for you, it's still useful for a hell of a lot of other developers.
One of the most annoying aspects of java is that you can't do that. Java is the perfect lock-yourself-in language. If you want to escape, the only standard mechanism is JNI, which is completely useless (the verbosity and ease of failure when using JNI is mind-boggling, when I tried to use it a year ago, I eventually had to write a tool for generating JNI. What should have been a simple foreign function interface is really a complete mess.)
If C# offers mostly the same as Java, but with added features for real-world programming, such as the ability to add a dirty hack where it's needed, without going through all the torture and pain that Java makes you suffer, then I and many other developers will be much more happy to use C# than Java.
If all you care about is security, you wouldn't be using Java anyway, and you would certainly not download executable code over the web (applets). And if all you want is applets, then by all means, go ahead and use Java. But for people looking for something to use for enterprise-wide programming systems, having to integrate lots of legacy code, I'll bet C# will make a strong contender just because of this feature.
True, making it simple to do unsafe things is potentially dangerous. But making it unecessarily complex to do simple things also adds complexity, which isn't good for security either.
Alternately, use Citrix Metaframe, and run framemaker on a windows server. That would probably be more expensive, less convenient, and so on. But if you need users to access other windows applications as well, it is a whole lot better than giving each user two machines, and having you administer them both.
I would much prefer a paper version myself, but at least making it available makes a lot of sense. I hope various lisp-vendors (Franz, Xanalys) sponsor him somewhat to avoid the losses...
They look up your police records and military records, interview you, and some of your (earlier) employers, family, and so on, to try to determine if you are a responsible person. If you aren't, then they won't risk the lives of other astronauts, important space research, huge amounts of money, etc, just to get you into space.
This is nothing but common sence. You shouldn't trust untrustworthy people. I fail to see the logic behind allowing Osama bin Laden on the space shuttle just because he has enough money.
The book is completely unusable for learning numerical analysis, and it's unusable as a recipe source, as the code is copyrighted. Coupled with the fact that actual numerical analysts doesn't like it either, the popularity of the book is quite astonishing... (anyone have any idea why?)
Well, feel free to reverse engineer it (e.g. translate to another language) if you want to. There's no one who is going to stop you, since the binary code is in the public domain. But no legal twistery can force them to give you the source code unless they choose to do so. It's the binary that's in the public domain. Period.
However, I have some ideas as well...
Please come back to the discussion once you have read something more than the GPL.