I think I know what you're doing - purposely trolling in order to incite a flamewar, driving up hits and thus ad impressions.
It won't work though; surely the vast majority of your readership browses with Firefox and some sort of adblocking system.
I mean it can't be that you genuinely believe that arguably the most often-used language for enterprise and commercial web development work "doesn't matter"; a 30 second search on any popular job website would dissuade you of that infantile notion.
I write decent Visual Basic code and I am quite adept with OOP, but still find writing Java code quite hard. Is it the case for Java folks out there too?
Well I can only speak for myself, but no, I don't find Java hard. Then again I've used a variety of different languages casually, academically and professionally over the last 25 years and I've never had much trouble picking up a new one (that sounds rather grander than it really is - for much of the first 11 years of that I was only programming very occasionally indeed; my professional work began a little over 9 years ago)
Also as others have said VB is no more dying than C or C++ are; there will be plenty of work at least maintaining existing code for a good few years. You can still find COBOL jobs if you look hard enough (and Fujitsu has released COBOL.NET!)
Oh and throw in there a spec to allow easy integration of those languages into JSP and some other areas to make them peers to Java itself in the enterprise world.
Now I don't doubt that you'll see a fair amount of Java code in JSPs, but that doesn't mean that it's right or desirable. The correct thing to do is to write a tag, which presumably can be written in any language that can be compiled to JVM bytecode.
To be honest I think that the ability to use scriptlets in JSPs is a bad thing that I'd rather see removed than extended to include other languages.
I've had Firefox 3 crash a number of times trying to use the Java-based automatic driver finder on Nvidia's website (running on Windows Server 2008 Standard). Apart from that I've not seen any problems on the other machines I've used it on (but then I've not tried that applet on them either)
How long can it be until Microsoft says that you're not allowed to _continue_ to run XP?
Eternity, if they don't want to be absolutely raped in court. The very most they can do is stop producing updates. I'd be extremely surprised if they could even switch off the activation servers for a long time without landing in very hot water, if not in the US then certainly in Europe.
Why would you read Slashdot unless you were a hardcore geek?
Well, I'm probably not what you'd call a hardcore geek. I'm a professional programmer, but I mainly do Java for a web agency.
On the other hand, I have compiled from source the Linux kernel, gcc and associated libraries, upgraded from libc5 to glibc2 by hand, hand-hacked modeline entries in an XF86Config file because my monitor wasn't correctly recognised, to name but a few of the things I've done over the years in the name of tweaking my machine.
But you know what? I really can't be bothered any more. I want my machine to just work. I don't mind tweaking the odd thing here and there, but my days of compiling large chunks of the OS from source are well and truly over. I simply don't have time for that crap any more.
So while I'm perfectly capable of doing geeky stuff on my computer, it has long since lost its appeal. I have more important things to do.
A trojan is a piece of software that appears to be benign or otherwise safe or desirable, but in fact is malign. It may or may not also act as advertised.
A virus is a piece of software that piggy-backs on other executables, "infecting" them with its own code and modifying them so that when they are launched, the virus code is also run. They spread by searching for and infecting other executables on the machine.
A worm is self-propagating, and does not require user intervention. It actively seeks out and exploits a given vulnerability or vulnerabilities, using them to covertly gain access to the machine.
Of the three broad types of malware, the only one that does not require the user to manually run it is a worm.
And if a program requests the root password and the user gives it, is this the OS's fault?
No, of course not - but you'd be amazed at the number of people who blame Windows even for such social engineering tricks, or believe that if we only all switched to Linux malware would be a thing of the past. The weakest link in any computer system is the user, and there's little or nothing an OS can do to protect itself from a naive or malicious user armed with the root/admin password. While this is a non-story, it does at least demonstrate that the same is true of other OSes than Windows.
Do you have any figures to back that claim up? Most servers are looked after by admins, and any admin worth their salt will at least put their machines behind a firewall, opening up only those ports that are absolutely necessary.
Yes, some will be vulnerable, but as another poster points out the number will be utterly insignificant compared to the number of networked clients running Windows. The target simply isn't big enough to be worth the effort.
I think Google is a good example of a company that hasn't done that.
Google hasn't done that, but people are doing it to Google. Just try searching for information or reviews of pretty much any product at all and see how many price comparison websites you get. I've all-but given up trying to find information about popular products with Google.
They don't do pop-ups or flashing ads or other irritating things that Myspace and Facebook are doing.
I don't use MySpace, but I've never seen a popup or a flashing ad on Facebook. In fact the only ads I've seen (other than those in applications, which are down to the app devs) are text-based with perhaps a small accompanying image.
yeah it had nothing to do with MS hastling distributors
You're right, it didn't. Netscape 4 wiped the floor with IE 3, was on a par feature-wise with IE 4 (but a lot less stable) and was utterly outclassed by IE5.
I rant about this on here a lot, but MS did not kill Netscape, Netscape killed Netscape. Bundling IE with Windows may have killed it eventually, but it killed itself long before that happened. Netscape 4 was a slow, buggy, crash-prone piece of crap, and I speak as someone who has never and will never use IE as their primary browser. I used Netscape 4 right up until around M13 of Mozilla.
Quite apart from that, throwing the existing source away and starting again for Netscape 5 was what finally did it - no new releases in the time MS got IE 4 and 5 (and 6?) out the door, and you wonder why it died?
MS hassling distributors may well be holding Firefox back, but it certainly did not kill Netscape. It didn't get the chance to.
By the terms in the GPL, they are required to make that source available to him (not us non-owners).
Yes, exactly - it is the GPL that requires them to make the source available, not copyright law. If you refuse to make the source available to those who are entitled to it, then you lose the right to distribute the software that the GPL grants you. You are then violating copyright law.
There is nothing in copyright law that requires anyone to provide the source; the GPL does that. Quite the opposite in fact - copyright law says that you can't provide the source (or binary) without the copyright holder's permission. Copyright law is the stick the GPL uses to smack violators, nothing more.
The courts did not convict MS of anti-trust abuse over Java. Sun sued them for breach of the terms of their licence (they included their own proprietary classes in the java.* hierarchy instead of putting them in e.g. com.microsoft.*) and won.
Apart from that you're right, MS licenced the source from Sun. I don't recall it being particularly buggy at the time either, although obviously as soon as the court case happened they dropped support for it.
Word format documents probably hold 80% of the world's knowledge.
You have got to be kidding. I don't pretend to know what percentage of the world's knowledge is in.doc format, but I'd be amazed if you weren't at least an order of magnitude out.
Just think of all the knowledge that is in text fields in databases, on web sites in HTML, in PDFs (extremely popular especially online, even MS offer documents in PDF), and of course *printed out on paper*.
Get into assembler and you can learn the principles that still underlie today's PCs. You very quickly learn why buffer overflows are bad when you see your assembly program write too much data and stomp all over its return address.
Ah, happy days - trying to work out wtf my assembly program to fade-wipe the screen on a Spectrum was instead covering it with random blocks of flashing colours...
Perhaps worse, very few PCs now come equipped with the tools needed to write some code. Even Ubuntu, a geek's operating system by any normal measure, has no obvious desktop coding environment - if you don't know that python's hiding away on the command line, you won't find it and even GCC's not installed by default. As for Windows or OS X...
Windows doesn't come with any coding tools by default (and I can imagine the cries of "monopoly abuse!" if it did...), but you can download free (as in beer) Express editions of Visual C++.NET, C# and VB.NET from the Microsoft website. (Not to mention your choice of other languages and environments from third party vendors)
Just because we were spoilt in the old days (I cut my teeth on Sinclair BASIC on the Speccy) doesn't mean that it's impossible to code for free these days.
Your argument is like saying that Microsoft Windows is an open standard because both HP and Dell ship it.
If HP and Dell rewrote parts of Windows to better suit their own needs then you'd have a point. As it is, neither IBM nor BEA (now Oracle unfortunately) simply slapped a logo on Sun's JDK and shipped it with their own products.
It's not that they won't bother, it's that most of them simply don't understand the issue. The number of people who genuinely believe that if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide is simply staggering.
In a very real sense, your wife and kids are punished if you're sent to jail (or executed) too. I suspect that very few people would argue that no-one should ever be jailed though.
It's of course a biosphere, just like the economy and government. It naturally converges on an optimal condition, that being that it contains correct information.
While I agree that for the most part, and on average, it will converge to have correct information (at least as that is understood by the majority), you're ignoring the short-term damage that malicious individuals can do, especially in less well-visited articles.
The reason is of course that force is the only way to have authority.
Well, I would say that force is the only way to impose that authority on an unwilling person. It's perfectly possible to have authority over someone because they willingly give it to you. It's when they decide to fight that you have to be able to fight back harder.
Yes it is, as whether true or not it could well cause people to take their business elsewhere. Now if it's true then the guy should be in the clear, but until it's been judged one way or the other it's perfectly reasonable for the court to tell the guy to stop saying it until that judgement has been reached.
All of a sudden I'm breaking the law for my opinion?
Yes, that's how libel and slander laws have always worked. You're entitled to your opinion, but if it's damaging to someone's reputation and/or business and you make it public, you'd better be able to back it up with some proof.
Well I don't know if it's the legal definition (assuming there is one), but the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines road rage as "anger or violence between drivers, often caused by difficult driving conditions".
Personally I think the defining characteristic is that an interaction takes place - e.g. the other driver is aware of what you're doing or saying, you get into a fight, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I know what you're doing - purposely trolling in order to incite a flamewar, driving up hits and thus ad impressions.
It won't work though; surely the vast majority of your readership browses with Firefox and some sort of adblocking system.
I mean it can't be that you genuinely believe that arguably the most often-used language for enterprise and commercial web development work "doesn't matter"; a 30 second search on any popular job website would dissuade you of that infantile notion.
I write decent Visual Basic code and I am quite adept with OOP, but still find writing Java code quite hard. Is it the case for Java folks out there too?
Well I can only speak for myself, but no, I don't find Java hard. Then again I've used a variety of different languages casually, academically and professionally over the last 25 years and I've never had much trouble picking up a new one (that sounds rather grander than it really is - for much of the first 11 years of that I was only programming very occasionally indeed; my professional work began a little over 9 years ago)
Also as others have said VB is no more dying than C or C++ are; there will be plenty of work at least maintaining existing code for a good few years. You can still find COBOL jobs if you look hard enough (and Fujitsu has released COBOL.NET!)
Oh and throw in there a spec to allow easy integration of those languages into JSP and some other areas to make them peers to Java itself in the enterprise world.
Now I don't doubt that you'll see a fair amount of Java code in JSPs, but that doesn't mean that it's right or desirable. The correct thing to do is to write a tag, which presumably can be written in any language that can be compiled to JVM bytecode.
To be honest I think that the ability to use scriptlets in JSPs is a bad thing that I'd rather see removed than extended to include other languages.
I've had Firefox 3 crash a number of times trying to use the Java-based automatic driver finder on Nvidia's website (running on Windows Server 2008 Standard). Apart from that I've not seen any problems on the other machines I've used it on (but then I've not tried that applet on them either)
but can you folks even bother educating yourself about what 7 is supposed to be before bashing it?
You really must be new here. Basing MS is what passes for reasoned discussion on /.
How long can it be until Microsoft says that you're not allowed to _continue_ to run XP?
Eternity, if they don't want to be absolutely raped in court. The very most they can do is stop producing updates. I'd be extremely surprised if they could even switch off the activation servers for a long time without landing in very hot water, if not in the US then certainly in Europe.
Why would you read Slashdot unless you were a hardcore geek?
Well, I'm probably not what you'd call a hardcore geek. I'm a professional programmer, but I mainly do Java for a web agency.
On the other hand, I have compiled from source the Linux kernel, gcc and associated libraries, upgraded from libc5 to glibc2 by hand, hand-hacked modeline entries in an XF86Config file because my monitor wasn't correctly recognised, to name but a few of the things I've done over the years in the name of tweaking my machine.
But you know what? I really can't be bothered any more. I want my machine to just work. I don't mind tweaking the odd thing here and there, but my days of compiling large chunks of the OS from source are well and truly over. I simply don't have time for that crap any more.
So while I'm perfectly capable of doing geeky stuff on my computer, it has long since lost its appeal. I have more important things to do.
That is exactly what a trojan is!
A trojan is a piece of software that appears to be benign or otherwise safe or desirable, but in fact is malign. It may or may not also act as advertised.
A virus is a piece of software that piggy-backs on other executables, "infecting" them with its own code and modifying them so that when they are launched, the virus code is also run. They spread by searching for and infecting other executables on the machine.
A worm is self-propagating, and does not require user intervention. It actively seeks out and exploits a given vulnerability or vulnerabilities, using them to covertly gain access to the machine.
Of the three broad types of malware, the only one that does not require the user to manually run it is a worm.
And if a program requests the root password and the user gives it, is this the OS's fault?
No, of course not - but you'd be amazed at the number of people who blame Windows even for such social engineering tricks, or believe that if we only all switched to Linux malware would be a thing of the past. The weakest link in any computer system is the user, and there's little or nothing an OS can do to protect itself from a naive or malicious user armed with the root/admin password. While this is a non-story, it does at least demonstrate that the same is true of other OSes than Windows.
Interesting. Care to provide any examples?
Do you have any figures to back that claim up? Most servers are looked after by admins, and any admin worth their salt will at least put their machines behind a firewall, opening up only those ports that are absolutely necessary.
Yes, some will be vulnerable, but as another poster points out the number will be utterly insignificant compared to the number of networked clients running Windows. The target simply isn't big enough to be worth the effort.
I think Google is a good example of a company that hasn't done that.
Google hasn't done that, but people are doing it to Google. Just try searching for information or reviews of pretty much any product at all and see how many price comparison websites you get. I've all-but given up trying to find information about popular products with Google.
They don't do pop-ups or flashing ads or other irritating things that Myspace and Facebook are doing.
I don't use MySpace, but I've never seen a popup or a flashing ad on Facebook. In fact the only ads I've seen (other than those in applications, which are down to the app devs) are text-based with perhaps a small accompanying image.
yeah it had nothing to do with MS hastling distributors
You're right, it didn't. Netscape 4 wiped the floor with IE 3, was on a par feature-wise with IE 4 (but a lot less stable) and was utterly outclassed by IE5.
I rant about this on here a lot, but MS did not kill Netscape, Netscape killed Netscape. Bundling IE with Windows may have killed it eventually, but it killed itself long before that happened. Netscape 4 was a slow, buggy, crash-prone piece of crap, and I speak as someone who has never and will never use IE as their primary browser. I used Netscape 4 right up until around M13 of Mozilla.
Quite apart from that, throwing the existing source away and starting again for Netscape 5 was what finally did it - no new releases in the time MS got IE 4 and 5 (and 6?) out the door, and you wonder why it died?
MS hassling distributors may well be holding Firefox back, but it certainly did not kill Netscape. It didn't get the chance to.
By the terms in the GPL, they are required to make that source available to him (not us non-owners).
Yes, exactly - it is the GPL that requires them to make the source available, not copyright law. If you refuse to make the source available to those who are entitled to it, then you lose the right to distribute the software that the GPL grants you. You are then violating copyright law.
There is nothing in copyright law that requires anyone to provide the source; the GPL does that. Quite the opposite in fact - copyright law says that you can't provide the source (or binary) without the copyright holder's permission. Copyright law is the stick the GPL uses to smack violators, nothing more.
The courts did not convict MS of anti-trust abuse over Java. Sun sued them for breach of the terms of their licence (they included their own proprietary classes in the java.* hierarchy instead of putting them in e.g. com.microsoft.*) and won.
Apart from that you're right, MS licenced the source from Sun. I don't recall it being particularly buggy at the time either, although obviously as soon as the court case happened they dropped support for it.
Word format documents probably hold 80% of the world's knowledge.
You have got to be kidding. I don't pretend to know what percentage of the world's knowledge is in .doc format, but I'd be amazed if you weren't at least an order of magnitude out.
Just think of all the knowledge that is in text fields in databases, on web sites in HTML, in PDFs (extremely popular especially online, even MS offer documents in PDF), and of course *printed out on paper*.
80% of the world's knowledge in .doc? Rubbish.
they can be introduced any time, and they always seem to be used to sneak in unfavorable laws... Why are they allowed?
I think you just answered your own question there.
Get into assembler and you can learn the principles that still underlie today's PCs. You very quickly learn why buffer overflows are bad when you see your assembly program write too much data and stomp all over its return address.
Ah, happy days - trying to work out wtf my assembly program to fade-wipe the screen on a Spectrum was instead covering it with random blocks of flashing colours...
Perhaps worse, very few PCs now come equipped with the tools needed to write some code. Even Ubuntu, a geek's operating system by any normal measure, has no obvious desktop coding environment - if you don't know that python's hiding away on the command line, you won't find it and even GCC's not installed by default. As for Windows or OS X...
Windows doesn't come with any coding tools by default (and I can imagine the cries of "monopoly abuse!" if it did...), but you can download free (as in beer) Express editions of Visual C++.NET, C# and VB.NET from the Microsoft website. (Not to mention your choice of other languages and environments from third party vendors)
Just because we were spoilt in the old days (I cut my teeth on Sinclair BASIC on the Speccy) doesn't mean that it's impossible to code for free these days.
Your argument is like saying that Microsoft Windows is an open standard because both HP and Dell ship it.
If HP and Dell rewrote parts of Windows to better suit their own needs then you'd have a point. As it is, neither IBM nor BEA (now Oracle unfortunately) simply slapped a logo on Sun's JDK and shipped it with their own products.
It's not that they won't bother, it's that most of them simply don't understand the issue. The number of people who genuinely believe that if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide is simply staggering.
In a very real sense, your wife and kids are punished if you're sent to jail (or executed) too. I suspect that very few people would argue that no-one should ever be jailed though.
It's of course a biosphere, just like the economy and government. It naturally converges on an optimal condition, that being that it contains correct information.
While I agree that for the most part, and on average, it will converge to have correct information (at least as that is understood by the majority), you're ignoring the short-term damage that malicious individuals can do, especially in less well-visited articles.
The reason is of course that force is the only way to have authority.
Well, I would say that force is the only way to impose that authority on an unwilling person. It's perfectly possible to have authority over someone because they willingly give it to you. It's when they decide to fight that you have to be able to fight back harder.
"Shady and morally bankrupt" is defamatory?
Yes it is, as whether true or not it could well cause people to take their business elsewhere. Now if it's true then the guy should be in the clear, but until it's been judged one way or the other it's perfectly reasonable for the court to tell the guy to stop saying it until that judgement has been reached.
All of a sudden I'm breaking the law for my opinion?
Yes, that's how libel and slander laws have always worked. You're entitled to your opinion, but if it's damaging to someone's reputation and/or business and you make it public, you'd better be able to back it up with some proof.
Well I don't know if it's the legal definition (assuming there is one), but the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines road rage as "anger or violence between drivers, often caused by difficult driving conditions".
Personally I think the defining characteristic is that an interaction takes place - e.g. the other driver is aware of what you're doing or saying, you get into a fight, etc.