What would have happened if Microsoft did the same thing?
What an odd question; we know exactly what did happen. They added classes into the java.* package hierarchy (expressly forbidden by the licence), Sun sued and won, and MS threw their toys out of their pram and went home to create.NET.
Had MS not broken their licence (say, by adding classes to com.microsoft like they should have done), or Sun not sued, then maybe things would've been different, but they did and they did, so they're not.
Nothing (that I'm aware of) prevented or prevents MS from shipping a compliant JVM, incidentally; they just decided that they didn't want to.
I think most people around here believe that having a complete, open source implementation of the latest version of the Java specs would be extremely beneficial to Java and the Java community as a whole
Go on then, get coding.
Oh, you want Sun to do it for you? Well yes, that would be nice, but they don't want to. You may not agree with their decision, but you have to respect it; it's their code, after all, and they can do with it as they please. On that point I realise that I disagree with RMS; I think that true freedom includes the freedom to restrict what use others make of my creations. I also think that they're free to ignore my creations and create their own alternatives (and no, I don't support software patents at all).
That said, what little I do release tends to go out under a BSD licence.
Any code that exploits a new API won't run on an older runtime.
How could it? You're using a library/class that didn't exist!
And now, with Java 5.0, it's even worse, as, by default, javac produces bytecode that won't run on a 1.4 JVM, regardless of what platform APIs are used.
And any Java programmer worthy of the title will know how to change that. Anyone doing anything half-way complex will most likely be using ant, in which case it's a simple change to specify the targetted version (and something that the docs recommend you do, iirc)
Trying to install and run Java applications ranges from a pain to a nightmare on every single platform.
If that's true, then either you or your app vendor is doing something wrong. I've installed a large number of Java apps on Windows and Linux machines, and while it's true that a few years ago it could be a pain, these days it's no different to installing anything else. (In fact, the only one that I remember being painful was JBuilder 4 under Linux, and that's because the installer relied on a hard-coded path to a tool which was wrong on my distro, and then tried to uncompress an archive in the cwd, which for the CD install was on the CD...)
In fact, these days installing and/or running a Java app is generally as easy as installing the JDK or JRE if you don't already have it (one download, one installer to run) and launching a jar file (which under Windows at least is associated with javaw, and so Just Works).
If you DISTRIBUTE your changes, you must also make your source changes available.
It's a subtle distinction, but you don't have to supply the source; you have to supply the source on request. That request could well be an FTP, HTTP or CVS connection, for example, but the implication of what you said is that you have to ship source with binaries, which is not the case. (Of course it's often easier to do so, but it's your choice).
With multicore+hyperthreaded CPUs coming out very soon
Eh? I already have a multicore CPU, and don't consider myself to be an early adopter by any means. If you mean specifically "CPUs with multiple cores and hyperthreading support", then
a) I believe they're already available (although I'm not in the market at the moment so am not really keeping up with it) b) HT was never that big a deal, performance-wise
In addition, there's already a hideously powerful SIMD engine in most gaming systems loosely called "the video card". With the advent of DirectX 10 hardware which lets the card GPU write it's intermediate calculations back to main memory rather than forcing it all out to the frame buffer, a whole bunch of physics processing can suddenly be done through the GPU.
(Ggrrrr - the posseive is "its", not "it's"!)
That's all very well, but don't forget that that SIMD engine is already busy rendering scenes. I'd hate to have to choose between nice visuals anda decent frame rate, good Physics and a decent frame rate, or nice visuals and good physics and a sucky frame rate.
Lastly, the API to talk to these cards is single-vendor and proprietary.
Well, that certainly didn't help 3DFX; Glide has long since been consigned to the history books. However, graphics accelerator cards very much have not; it's all-but impossible to buy a PC these days without some form of hardware acceleration support.
I'm not saying that this card will necessarily be a success, or even that Physics accelerator cards will be. However, if this card proves useful, it will no doubt pave the way for other companies to produce competing products. Then you may well get the situation you had with graphics accelerators - eventually, someone will realise that it's in their interest to produce a standard API (quite possibly MS, in DirectX 11 or 12), and the whole thing may well snowball.
The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines several as meaning "some... fewer than many" and many as "a large number of".
Given that, I think it's fair to assume that three is not too large a number to be "several"; certainly, about that many is what I generally mean when I say "several". Working on that basis, then, supporting "several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes" means supporting about three orders of magnitude more processes. Three orders of magnitude is 1000 (=10^3). If we up "several" to four or five, we have 10,000 or 100,000.
Perhaps the OS can support that many concurrent processes (although I admit to having my doubts), but I'd be amazed if any hardware it runs on does.
Technically, you're correct - there's nothing in ODF that prevents accessibility features from being added to the tools that manipulate it.
However, that's cold comfort to someone who needs them now, only to find that none currently exist. The fact of the matter is that a move to ODF will mean a loss of accessibility features, until and unless those features are made available.
At some point you realize: "Hmm, I can either pay for this with 15 minutes of work, or spend 2 hours looking for a crack that might be loaded with spyware. Then I'll probably have to spend a day to reinstall Windows."
I have it on good authority (from a friend, of course...) that most cracks are easy to be had and perfectly safe to use.
Oh, and very few people earn enough in 15 minutes to buy a game or DVD (not that DVDs require cracks).
Freedom fighters my arse; they're vigilantes at best, and if they really did hack a network to launch the attack, they're criminals, not much better than those they were targetting.
a) some people are genuinely offended by porn; few are so moved by slashdot b) it's unprofessional (most people consider porn to be a personal, private thing) c) it's in direct contravention of my company's policies d) it's a damn sight more embarrassing if a client happens to catch sight of it e) some women genuinely feel threatened by it f) in some areas it's legally grey or even outright illegal
Basically, because society publicly takes a somewhat dim view of porn (no matter what people individually may think of it privately).
Well, I'm not the OP, but I personally think that anyone who's willing to carry a pager or otherwise make themselves available out of hours without charging a significant sum of money for the privilege is a fool.
I've reread his comment, and to be honest, I can't see where you get the impression that he thinks any differently. I appreciate that a lot of employers seek to tip the balance of the relationship in their favour, but that doesn't mean that they all do.
Proprietary image editing software doesn't keep you locked in to it's own formats, so publishers of such software have to compete on product quality rather than relying on you being forced to keep buying their latest versions.
True story: my company (a large telecoms) still uses Office 2000. We appear to manage to have avoided being forced to upgrade.
While I agree with most of your comments, I'm a little perplexed by your use of the past tense with regards to Postgres. Sure, it's not as popular as MySQL, but it's in no way dead...
Remembering that the slashdot audience is primarily composed of programmers, sysadmins and other geeks*, I really suspect that you're asking the wrong people that question. Most of us here will be using Word as "a glorified typewriter with a handy spellchecker" because that's all we need from it. You might have a better response about Excel, but I think you'll be out of luck with regards to Word, Powerpoint, etc.
(* Note that I said primarily; please don't take me to task because not only geeks read slashdot, or because you personally are not a geek but are a regular - I didn't say that no non-geek reads the site, just that most of us are geeks...)
Well, while he certainly does his best to point out all the good things about Apple that are relevant to the discussion at hand, he also rips them a new one about the actual problem - "Apple applies a stunningly ridiculous and inappropriate amount of thermal paste... this is an utterly stupid amount of paste to be applying. I'm just dumbfounded that this made it through whatever QA is in place" (emphasis mine)
Hardly the words of someone trying to make light of the situation. So he's a self-confessed Apple advocate; in this case, he certainly seems to me to be advocating that they sort their shit out.
In Windows there are NO logs, no clues, NOTHING to indicate what the problem might be.
When Windows crashes, it writes an error log and a memory dump to the disk. Under XP, check the Startup and Recovery settings (My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery settings)
Also, Windows logs a lot of information to the event logs. The event log viewer is in the Administrative Tools. By default, when Windows crashes, it logs information about the crash there (in the System log).
No offence, but given that you appear not to know about the crash dump or event logs suggests that either you don't know enough to correctly diagnose the problem, or you're running one of the 9x series of Windows, in which case frankly your only sensbile option is to throw it away and install something based on NT; 9x is a joke.
You do realise that Starcraft is still insanely popular, don't you? They have televised tournaments in Korea - people not only play the game for money, but other people (lots of other people!) watch them.
Not too shabby for a game that's what, 7, 9 years old?
Unfortunately, your model breaks down in the face of binary star systems. In fact, in all gravitational systems the bodies involved actually orbit one another. For example, while the Moon orbits the Earth, the Earth also orbits the Moon. The Earth is so much more massive than the Moon, however, that the centre of the orbital motion (the centre of mass of the Earth-Moon system) is actually within the Earth itself. However, it is *not* at the Earth's centre; the Earth "wobbles" due to its orbiting the Moon.
Similarly, the centre of mass of the solar system is within the Sun, but still the Sun has a wobble due to its orbiting of the rest of the bodies in the system. That's more complex, of course, as with so many bodies, they tend to be at different points around it. Also the Sun is so much more massive than the other solar bodies as to render the effect essentially negligible.
The effect tends to be more noticeable in binary star systems as the two stars tend to be more closely matched in terms of mass. In that case, the centre of mass of the system is more nearly half-way between them. They both orbit something, but that something is a point of empty space.
Incidentally, this effect is how we've detected some extra-solar planets - particularly massive ones orbiting relatively small stars cause a noticeable wobble.
Slashdot Mirror
What would have happened if Microsoft did the same thing?
.NET.
What an odd question; we know exactly what did happen. They added classes into the java.* package hierarchy (expressly forbidden by the licence), Sun sued and won, and MS threw their toys out of their pram and went home to create
Had MS not broken their licence (say, by adding classes to com.microsoft like they should have done), or Sun not sued, then maybe things would've been different, but they did and they did, so they're not.
Nothing (that I'm aware of) prevented or prevents MS from shipping a compliant JVM, incidentally; they just decided that they didn't want to.
I think most people around here believe that having a complete, open source implementation of the latest version of the Java specs would be extremely beneficial to Java and the Java community as a whole
Go on then, get coding.
Oh, you want Sun to do it for you? Well yes, that would be nice, but they don't want to. You may not agree with their decision, but you have to respect it; it's their code, after all, and they can do with it as they please. On that point I realise that I disagree with RMS; I think that true freedom includes the freedom to restrict what use others make of my creations. I also think that they're free to ignore my creations and create their own alternatives (and no, I don't support software patents at all).
That said, what little I do release tends to go out under a BSD licence.
Any code that exploits a new API won't run on an older runtime.
How could it? You're using a library/class that didn't exist!
And now, with Java 5.0, it's even worse, as, by default, javac produces bytecode that won't run on a 1.4 JVM, regardless of what platform APIs are used.
And any Java programmer worthy of the title will know how to change that. Anyone doing anything half-way complex will most likely be using ant, in which case it's a simple change to specify the targetted version (and something that the docs recommend you do, iirc)
Trying to install and run Java applications ranges from a pain to a nightmare on every single platform.
If that's true, then either you or your app vendor is doing something wrong. I've installed a large number of Java apps on Windows and Linux machines, and while it's true that a few years ago it could be a pain, these days it's no different to installing anything else. (In fact, the only one that I remember being painful was JBuilder 4 under Linux, and that's because the installer relied on a hard-coded path to a tool which was wrong on my distro, and then tried to uncompress an archive in the cwd, which for the CD install was on the CD...)
In fact, these days installing and/or running a Java app is generally as easy as installing the JDK or JRE if you don't already have it (one download, one installer to run) and launching a jar file (which under Windows at least is associated with javaw, and so Just Works).
You have been misinformed.
If you DISTRIBUTE your changes, you must also make your source changes available.
It's a subtle distinction, but you don't have to supply the source; you have to supply the source on request. That request could well be an FTP, HTTP or CVS connection, for example, but the implication of what you said is that you have to ship source with binaries, which is not the case. (Of course it's often easier to do so, but it's your choice).
This isn't our fault necessarily
Of course it is. It's your fault for asking, and their fault for agreeing.
It's not solely your fault, but that doesn't mean that it isn't partly your fault.
Many (I'd venture perhaps to say 'most') people find aspects of Windows annoying or obnoxious, but in general it's "good enough."
I'd agree with that, but I'd go further - most likely those same people would have exactly the same attitude towards/experience of Linux or OS X.
No OS is perfect. Some are better at certain tasks than others, but none is superior at all tasks. None are without flaws.
With multicore+hyperthreaded CPUs coming out very soon
Eh? I already have a multicore CPU, and don't consider myself to be an early adopter by any means. If you mean specifically "CPUs with multiple cores and hyperthreading support", then
a) I believe they're already available (although I'm not in the market at the moment so am not really keeping up with it)
b) HT was never that big a deal, performance-wise
In addition, there's already a hideously powerful SIMD engine in most gaming systems loosely called "the video card". With the advent of DirectX 10 hardware which lets the card GPU write it's intermediate calculations back to main memory rather than forcing it all out to the frame buffer, a whole bunch of physics processing can suddenly be done through the GPU.
(Ggrrrr - the posseive is "its", not "it's"!)
That's all very well, but don't forget that that SIMD engine is already busy rendering scenes. I'd hate to have to choose between nice visuals anda decent frame rate, good Physics and a decent frame rate, or nice visuals and good physics and a sucky frame rate.
Lastly, the API to talk to these cards is single-vendor and proprietary.
Well, that certainly didn't help 3DFX; Glide has long since been consigned to the history books. However, graphics accelerator cards very much have not; it's all-but impossible to buy a PC these days without some form of hardware acceleration support.
I'm not saying that this card will necessarily be a success, or even that Physics accelerator cards will be. However, if this card proves useful, it will no doubt pave the way for other companies to produce competing products. Then you may well get the situation you had with graphics accelerators - eventually, someone will realise that it's in their interest to produce a standard API (quite possibly MS, in DirectX 11 or 12), and the whole thing may well snowball.
The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines several as meaning "some... fewer than many" and many as "a large number of".
Given that, I think it's fair to assume that three is not too large a number to be "several"; certainly, about that many is what I generally mean when I say "several". Working on that basis, then, supporting "several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes" means supporting about three orders of magnitude more processes. Three orders of magnitude is 1000 (=10^3). If we up "several" to four or five, we have 10,000 or 100,000.
Perhaps the OS can support that many concurrent processes (although I admit to having my doubts), but I'd be amazed if any hardware it runs on does.
Technically, you're correct - there's nothing in ODF that prevents accessibility features from being added to the tools that manipulate it.
However, that's cold comfort to someone who needs them now, only to find that none currently exist. The fact of the matter is that a move to ODF will mean a loss of accessibility features, until and unless those features are made available.
At some point you realize: "Hmm, I can either pay for this with 15 minutes of work, or spend 2 hours looking for a crack that might be loaded with spyware. Then I'll probably have to spend a day to reinstall Windows."
I have it on good authority (from a friend, of course...) that most cracks are easy to be had and perfectly safe to use.
Oh, and very few people earn enough in 15 minutes to buy a game or DVD (not that DVDs require cracks).
Well of course, the justification will be that you are in fact being paid in kind, by the reduction in price of the movie.
Of course, while the overall bandwidth costs for a centralised movie download service would be significant, cost per movie would not...
You mean you ethanol has uses other than drinking?!
Freedom fighters my arse; they're vigilantes at best, and if they really did hack a network to launch the attack, they're criminals, not much better than those they were targetting.
A few possible reasons:
a) some people are genuinely offended by porn; few are so moved by slashdot
b) it's unprofessional (most people consider porn to be a personal, private thing)
c) it's in direct contravention of my company's policies
d) it's a damn sight more embarrassing if a client happens to catch sight of it
e) some women genuinely feel threatened by it
f) in some areas it's legally grey or even outright illegal
Basically, because society publicly takes a somewhat dim view of porn (no matter what people individually may think of it privately).
Well, I'm not the OP, but I personally think that anyone who's willing to carry a pager or otherwise make themselves available out of hours without charging a significant sum of money for the privilege is a fool.
I've reread his comment, and to be honest, I can't see where you get the impression that he thinks any differently. I appreciate that a lot of employers seek to tip the balance of the relationship in their favour, but that doesn't mean that they all do.
That's true, but I guarantee that they'd have a fail-safe method to shut those doors, forming a watertight seal.
About the only conclusion we can draw is that on reflection, it was a pretty silly analogy.
Proprietary image editing software doesn't keep you locked in to it's own formats, so publishers of such software have to compete on product quality rather than relying on you being forced to keep buying their latest versions.
True story: my company (a large telecoms) still uses Office 2000. We appear to manage to have avoided being forced to upgrade.
If you need to use PuTTY, then the answer is almost certainly "no, it doesn't".
(Oh, and as for your sig - in binary, 10+10 = 100, not 1000.)
While I agree with most of your comments, I'm a little perplexed by your use of the past tense with regards to Postgres. Sure, it's not as popular as MySQL, but it's in no way dead...
document wizard,
Yes, although rarely.
VBA scripting
Yes.
object insertion
Yes.
cross-referencing
Yes.
Ever used these features? No? That's probably why they're not in OpenOffice.
Just because *you* don't use a feature, or know anyone else that does, doesn't mean that no-one uses it.
Remembering that the slashdot audience is primarily composed of programmers, sysadmins and other geeks*, I really suspect that you're asking the wrong people that question. Most of us here will be using Word as "a glorified typewriter with a handy spellchecker" because that's all we need from it. You might have a better response about Excel, but I think you'll be out of luck with regards to Word, Powerpoint, etc.
(* Note that I said primarily; please don't take me to task because not only geeks read slashdot, or because you personally are not a geek but are a regular - I didn't say that no non-geek reads the site, just that most of us are geeks...)
Perhaps because sufficient pressure was not originally applied?
Well, while he certainly does his best to point out all the good things about Apple that are relevant to the discussion at hand, he also rips them a new one about the actual problem - "Apple applies a stunningly ridiculous and inappropriate amount of thermal paste... this is an utterly stupid amount of paste to be applying. I'm just dumbfounded that this made it through whatever QA is in place" (emphasis mine)
Hardly the words of someone trying to make light of the situation. So he's a self-confessed Apple advocate; in this case, he certainly seems to me to be advocating that they sort their shit out.
In Windows there are NO logs, no clues, NOTHING to indicate what the problem might be.
When Windows crashes, it writes an error log and a memory dump to the disk. Under XP, check the Startup and Recovery settings (My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery settings)
Also, Windows logs a lot of information to the event logs. The event log viewer is in the Administrative Tools. By default, when Windows crashes, it logs information about the crash there (in the System log).
No offence, but given that you appear not to know about the crash dump or event logs suggests that either you don't know enough to correctly diagnose the problem, or you're running one of the 9x series of Windows, in which case frankly your only sensbile option is to throw it away and install something based on NT; 9x is a joke.
You do realise that Starcraft is still insanely popular, don't you? They have televised tournaments in Korea - people not only play the game for money, but other people (lots of other people!) watch them.
Not too shabby for a game that's what, 7, 9 years old?
Unfortunately, your model breaks down in the face of binary star systems. In fact, in all gravitational systems the bodies involved actually orbit one another. For example, while the Moon orbits the Earth, the Earth also orbits the Moon. The Earth is so much more massive than the Moon, however, that the centre of the orbital motion (the centre of mass of the Earth-Moon system) is actually within the Earth itself. However, it is *not* at the Earth's centre; the Earth "wobbles" due to its orbiting the Moon.
Similarly, the centre of mass of the solar system is within the Sun, but still the Sun has a wobble due to its orbiting of the rest of the bodies in the system. That's more complex, of course, as with so many bodies, they tend to be at different points around it. Also the Sun is so much more massive than the other solar bodies as to render the effect essentially negligible.
The effect tends to be more noticeable in binary star systems as the two stars tend to be more closely matched in terms of mass. In that case, the centre of mass of the system is more nearly half-way between them. They both orbit something, but that something is a point of empty space.
Incidentally, this effect is how we've detected some extra-solar planets - particularly massive ones orbiting relatively small stars cause a noticeable wobble.