I agree on all points. But it's worth mentioning a further difference: IBM's "dark side" was revealed under a previous management -- a very stupid management that refused to concede that PCs would ever challenge mainframes, and which had no conception of how their own technology would transform the workplace. I mean, you had senior managers, including the CEO, who refused to use email!
That all changed when the idiots ran the company into the ground, and got booted out by disgruntled stockholders. To be replaced by management that is always looking for the next big thing, and looking to cooperate with everybody in sight -- Java, Linux, whatever. For those of who grew up with an IBM that wouldn't tolerate aftermarket add-ons in any form, this change in philosophy seems unreal, even after all these years.
Now IBM is making noises about totally replacing Windows with Linux for in-house work. If this happens, I will be forced to take back every pessimistic post I've ever made about the future of desktop Linux. Which I will do with extreme pleasure!
But if you're not The Inventor Of XML then we don't have a simplistic tag for you. Without such a tag, you cease to exist for much of the world! We can't have that!
Yea its definitely not a comparison on languages. Its more a test on compilers.
So why choose one compiler for each language? That's a rhetorical question, the answer to which is that the writer didn't understand how important this distinction is. He simply downloads the free Java SDK as if that's the only Java runtime anybody would use. There are non-free runtimes from Sun and others that provide a much higher level of optimization. Probably they'll never catch up with native code, but no useful comparison of languages, compilers, or runtimes can ignore them.
This whole "language benchmark" is brainless on a bunch of different levels. As others have previously mentioned, the benchmarks don't even vaguely resemble what people actually do with these languages. Plus, a lot of programmers can afford to take the performance hit to get the particular features of the language. And last but not least, the benchmarker hasn't got the vaguest notion what of what he's actually measuring!
Well, if you've just spent $10K on a HD-capable plasma display, and you're desperate for programming that actually uses it, then I guess that's frustrating. But I, for one, am only mildly interested in watching high-resolution TV, and wouldn't spend that much money even if I could afford it. Of course the price will come down eventually, but given lackluster consumer response to HD products, that's years away. So as long as the economy remains soft, there are going to be more people like me than people like you.
On the other hand, HD is just one digital TV application. We've focused on HD because that's how its proponents have sold this big digital conversion. Which is sort of unfortunate, since a lot of consumers -- and all TV broadcasters -- have gone and spent a lot of money on HD hardware they'll never really get full use of. I hate to imagine what that'll do to the bottom line for small public and independent broadcasters. Assuming there are any left after the insane consolidation the FCC has allowed.
But for consumer without deep pockets, it's a really nice thing to see digital broadcasts services we can afford. Like stations that use their bandwidth to offer multiple Standard-Definition channels instead of one High-Definition channel. Or data services. Or interactive services. Or video on demand. Stuff like that will serve a lot more people than a few HD programs.
Which I mostly wouldn't watch even if I didn't have to spend a lot of money to do so. Since HD programming costs so much more to make, producers will be even more chickenshit about taking creative risks than they are now.
Jeez, I never even heard about that plan. How lame.
Every politician wants to be JFK, but none of them wants to do the most essential thing. Which is to get killed before your fuckups become common knowledge.
No sarcasm intended, simple statement of fact. Stop five people on the street and ask them where or what Europa is. Go ahead, I'll wait.
So, how many knew? Or cared about there being ice there? If you pointed this out, I'll bet at least one person said, "but we've got plenty of ice here!"
A robot probe to a minor moon nobody's heard of? That isn't gonna help get Dubya re-elected. It's like sitting in the left-hand seat for that carrier landing -- it doesn't actually make any sense, but it looks good on TV.
I tend to suspect that this "leak" is a way to test the water. Some people will say it just what the country needs, others will whine about the cost. If they flag wavers seem to predominate, he'll make the actual announcement. If the whining is louder, he'll say that it was just a tentative plan that the media blew out of proportion.
Either way, this just isn't going to happen. I mean, where's the money supposed to come from? And Dubya knows this, of course. He hopes to commit a few billion on "plans" that will come to nothing. But by the time this is obvious, somebody else will be President.
Except this might all backfire. This kind of blatant manipulation tends to feed people's cynicism. It's certainly feeding mine.
I agree, only more so. I won't buy any PDA device that has a keyboard. When the main input device is a stylus, I want to do everything with the stylus. I'm bad at Graffiti, but there's keyboards you can use with a stylus.
Having the handheld be capable of flash upgrades of the OS. I know older Palms could do this, and I'm assuming the current ones can as well . . . don't know about HandSpring or Sony devices.
Sony yes, Handspring no, at least not the older Visors. I remember the absence of flash memory was a matter of discussion when the first Visors came out.
Palm used to make OS upgrades available for free download as soon as they were released. Then I suppose they got tired of supporting all those screwed-up upgrades and started making them available to developers only. Really, non-developers shouldn't bother, unless there's software they want to run that's dependent on the new release. PalmOS is not like a desktop OS where there are a lot of new goodies that every user can play with. Mostly the upgrade consists of new APIs.
I suppose you also just ignore spam too. Congratulations on achieving online nirvana. Unfortunately, most of us are less englightened, and have to waste actual time when we are forced to deal with this sort of thing.
Oops, I'm fresh out of irony. Going to flame mode.
Everyone who uses Slashdot is into online discussion. And why not? You learn stuff, you meet people, you exercise the brain cells defending your point of view. So resources that facilitate online discussion -- web communities like Slashdot, Wikis, mailing lists -- are really valuable to us. But the usefullness of these resources can degrade really quickly, if you don't watch out. What do you need to watch out for? Irrelevent Crap.
Where does IC come from? There's spam, of course, but most online resources have gotten pretty good at filtering that out. Nowadays, most IC has one source: Assholes.
Note that simple stupidity is not Assholedom. We all do stupid stuff: post poorly thought-out opinions, get sloppy about keeping a conversation on topic, yada yada. What separates this from true Assholedom is ego. An Asshole never admits mistakes, never admits to being misinformed, never lets anybody else have the last word. Assholedom is stupidity that demands to be heard and bullies its way to maximum exposure.
In extreme cases, Assholedom degenerates into simple, mindless trolling. But it's more common for Assholes to maintain the illusion that they're actually contributing to the conversation. The standard excuse for such mid-level assholes is "if you don't want to read it, don't read it." I have no patience for that cop-out.
Somebody has to mention the home-brew alarm clock used by a heavy sleeper in John Varley's Millenium. Been a while since I read it, but there's something about an air-raid siren....
Using Windows and Linux. Economics limits the time I can spend using Macs. Doesn't mean I'm not interested in Mac developments -- especially when they're relevent to the non-Mac user.
Did you mean to reply to this post? You certainly didn't mean to reply to this post, which is what you did. Common mistake -- the Slashdot UI really needs a bit of work.
Unfortunately, I doubt that there's a simple rule to seperate the genuinely free (or request donation) from the "Free.. but we sold our souls to evilware. Yours too -- surprise!" crowd.
Omniweb 4.5 uses the WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks from Apple - the same technology used in Safari for rendering web pages.
Cool! It appears that Apple has decided to repay the KHTML community in kind, by promoting the general use of the KHTML component on their platform, not just in Safari. Good for them. Though the Webcore web page seems to say that OmniWeb has jumped the gun by using the current version of Webcore, which still lacks a stable public API.
Apple does seem to have gotten sloppy with terminology once again. They can't call a component "JavaScriptCore" -- technically and legally, "JavaScript" can only describe the Netscape implementation of the language. The generic term is ECMAScript. Anyone taking bets on how long before Time-Warner's lawyers notice the trademark infringment?
There's a lesson here for those of us stuck with Gecko, Opera, or the mysterious combination of undocumented engines that is Internet Explorer. You want standardization, you gotta have open-source components. W3C puts a lot of work in defining standards for HTML, CSS, and SVG. These standards have a lot of unbelievably cool features, with much more in the pipe. But nobody can use most of them, because they're not widely implemented. What's the point of working so hard to create good standards if nobody uses them?
We need a reference web engine that will drive standards-based web development, just as the reference implementation of Java, with all its flaws, drove the adoption of the Java platform. Microsoft probably wouldn't use it, but it would provide some small pressure for them to be more standards compliant. W3C could develop such a comonent from scratch, or they could use Gecko; but KHTML seems to have the code base that's closest to a real tipping point.
If you think of a car in terms of the metals and plastics that make up 90% of its weight, then yeah, it's mostly recyclable. (Though I recall having trouble disposing of an old Buick back in '86, when there was a scrap metal glut.) But there's other stuff -- tires, brake pads, the exotic metals in you anti-smog muffler -- that are difficult to recycle.
Tires are a particular problem -- 270 million tires are discarded every year. Except for truck tires, there's no market for retreads any more. Extracting the metal and rubber for reuse is not economically feasible. You can't throw them in landfills, because they don't compress, and they also tend to "float" above the other trash, destroying the landfill cover. They make dandy fuel, but nobody wants to live next to a tire incinerator. About the only thing you can do with them is grind them up for building material, a market that doesn't use more than a small fraction of them. Which is why a billion tires are stored illegally, causing groundwater pollution and breeding mosquitoes in the trapped water.
Also, as with computers, cost and laziness prevent proper recyling of car stuff. When you have a mechanic change your oil and other fluids, he sends it off to a recycling service -- for which he pays a fee. But lots of people change their own fluids, and avoid the hassle and cost by pouring their waste down a storm drain, where it kills wildlife and screws up the water supply.
I have to go back to the original topic and mention another aspect of electronic gadgets -- batteries. All batteries, especially rechargables, count as hazardous waste, and need to be recycled accordingly. But how many consumers even know about this? And even the ones that do won't find a convenient place to dump their old batteries.
Push ads? Push them where? You need an application to show an ad, unless you invade an existing application the way true spyware does. If Logitech applications are forcing you to look at ads, that's a problem with Logitech, not Backweb.
As for cookies: yes, we all know how they're used to invade your privacy. The question is, how do you prevent it? Scanning for "evil" cookies doesn't catch them soon enough to preserve your privacy -- unless you run the scanner continuously, which will destroy your system performance.
A site can't read or write a cookie unless your browser lets it. So the place to control cookie-related info is in your browser. If you don't trust cookies at all, you simply disable them. But most of us want some cookie functionality, so we forbid third-party cookies, or only allow specific sites to use them. Third-party cookies are assumed to be intrusive -- even if they're not in any adware database!
That means that Doubleclick and other such companies get to write cookies to our drives, but can't read them back. So when I run Ad-Aware and it complains about all those tracking cookies, it's complaining about an issues I've already dealt with.
After fixing things for some of these kids while there, a call would come in an hour later, ONE HOUR, same kid, same viruses, same spyware.
Hmm, I see a bright side to this. Some of us (especially me) are cynical about Linux's chances of replacing Windows on the desktop. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't like to see it happen.
Now, Windows is well-entrenched because it's what the current user base is used to. We can't get them to budge because we can't persuade them that the change is worth the effort. But if millions of college students are getting a thorough education in how totally insecure Windows is....
You may get some email from me, if you honestly know every single adware-tainted application there is. You must have downloaded a lot of crap to learn that!
Slashdot Mirror
That all changed when the idiots ran the company into the ground, and got booted out by disgruntled stockholders. To be replaced by management that is always looking for the next big thing, and looking to cooperate with everybody in sight -- Java, Linux, whatever. For those of who grew up with an IBM that wouldn't tolerate aftermarket add-ons in any form, this change in philosophy seems unreal, even after all these years.
Now IBM is making noises about totally replacing Windows with Linux for in-house work. If this happens, I will be forced to take back every pessimistic post I've ever made about the future of desktop Linux. Which I will do with extreme pleasure!
But if you're not The Inventor Of XML then we don't have a simplistic tag for you. Without such a tag, you cease to exist for much of the world! We can't have that!
This whole "language benchmark" is brainless on a bunch of different levels. As others have previously mentioned, the benchmarks don't even vaguely resemble what people actually do with these languages. Plus, a lot of programmers can afford to take the performance hit to get the particular features of the language. And last but not least, the benchmarker hasn't got the vaguest notion what of what he's actually measuring!
On the other hand, HD is just one digital TV application. We've focused on HD because that's how its proponents have sold this big digital conversion. Which is sort of unfortunate, since a lot of consumers -- and all TV broadcasters -- have gone and spent a lot of money on HD hardware they'll never really get full use of. I hate to imagine what that'll do to the bottom line for small public and independent broadcasters. Assuming there are any left after the insane consolidation the FCC has allowed.
But for consumer without deep pockets, it's a really nice thing to see digital broadcasts services we can afford. Like stations that use their bandwidth to offer multiple Standard-Definition channels instead of one High-Definition channel. Or data services. Or interactive services. Or video on demand. Stuff like that will serve a lot more people than a few HD programs.
Which I mostly wouldn't watch even if I didn't have to spend a lot of money to do so. Since HD programming costs so much more to make, producers will be even more chickenshit about taking creative risks than they are now.
Besides, consider the context: expedition to ice-planet Hoth, President Arnold... Lighten up!
Every politician wants to be JFK, but none of them wants to do the most essential thing. Which is to get killed before your fuckups become common knowledge.
So, how many knew? Or cared about there being ice there? If you pointed this out, I'll bet at least one person said, "but we've got plenty of ice here!"
Not a bad idea, but I think it'll have to wait for the Schwarzenegger administration.
I tend to suspect that this "leak" is a way to test the water. Some people will say it just what the country needs, others will whine about the cost. If they flag wavers seem to predominate, he'll make the actual announcement. If the whining is louder, he'll say that it was just a tentative plan that the media blew out of proportion.
Either way, this just isn't going to happen. I mean, where's the money supposed to come from? And Dubya knows this, of course. He hopes to commit a few billion on "plans" that will come to nothing. But by the time this is obvious, somebody else will be President.
Except this might all backfire. This kind of blatant manipulation tends to feed people's cynicism. It's certainly feeding mine.
I agree, only more so. I won't buy any PDA device that has a keyboard. When the main input device is a stylus, I want to do everything with the stylus. I'm bad at Graffiti, but there's keyboards you can use with a stylus.
Palm used to make OS upgrades available for free download as soon as they were released. Then I suppose they got tired of supporting all those screwed-up upgrades and started making them available to developers only. Really, non-developers shouldn't bother, unless there's software they want to run that's dependent on the new release. PalmOS is not like a desktop OS where there are a lot of new goodies that every user can play with. Mostly the upgrade consists of new APIs.
Oops, I'm fresh out of irony. Going to flame mode.
Everyone who uses Slashdot is into online discussion. And why not? You learn stuff, you meet people, you exercise the brain cells defending your point of view. So resources that facilitate online discussion -- web communities like Slashdot, Wikis, mailing lists -- are really valuable to us. But the usefullness of these resources can degrade really quickly, if you don't watch out. What do you need to watch out for? Irrelevent Crap.
Where does IC come from? There's spam, of course, but most online resources have gotten pretty good at filtering that out. Nowadays, most IC has one source: Assholes.
Note that simple stupidity is not Assholedom. We all do stupid stuff: post poorly thought-out opinions, get sloppy about keeping a conversation on topic, yada yada. What separates this from true Assholedom is ego. An Asshole never admits mistakes, never admits to being misinformed, never lets anybody else have the last word. Assholedom is stupidity that demands to be heard and bullies its way to maximum exposure.
In extreme cases, Assholedom degenerates into simple, mindless trolling. But it's more common for Assholes to maintain the illusion that they're actually contributing to the conversation. The standard excuse for such mid-level assholes is "if you don't want to read it, don't read it." I have no patience for that cop-out.
Somebody has to mention the home-brew alarm clock used by a heavy sleeper in John Varley's Millenium. Been a while since I read it, but there's something about an air-raid siren....
Skimping on the antipsychotics again? Now wise.
Did you mean to reply to this post? You certainly didn't mean to reply to this post, which is what you did. Common mistake -- the Slashdot UI really needs a bit of work.
Apple does seem to have gotten sloppy with terminology once again. They can't call a component "JavaScriptCore" -- technically and legally, "JavaScript" can only describe the Netscape implementation of the language. The generic term is ECMAScript. Anyone taking bets on how long before Time-Warner's lawyers notice the trademark infringment?
There's a lesson here for those of us stuck with Gecko, Opera, or the mysterious combination of undocumented engines that is Internet Explorer. You want standardization, you gotta have open-source components. W3C puts a lot of work in defining standards for HTML, CSS, and SVG. These standards have a lot of unbelievably cool features, with much more in the pipe. But nobody can use most of them, because they're not widely implemented. What's the point of working so hard to create good standards if nobody uses them?
We need a reference web engine that will drive standards-based web development, just as the reference implementation of Java, with all its flaws, drove the adoption of the Java platform. Microsoft probably wouldn't use it, but it would provide some small pressure for them to be more standards compliant. W3C could develop such a comonent from scratch, or they could use Gecko; but KHTML seems to have the code base that's closest to a real tipping point.
Tires are a particular problem -- 270 million tires are discarded every year. Except for truck tires, there's no market for retreads any more. Extracting the metal and rubber for reuse is not economically feasible. You can't throw them in landfills, because they don't compress, and they also tend to "float" above the other trash, destroying the landfill cover. They make dandy fuel, but nobody wants to live next to a tire incinerator. About the only thing you can do with them is grind them up for building material, a market that doesn't use more than a small fraction of them. Which is why a billion tires are stored illegally, causing groundwater pollution and breeding mosquitoes in the trapped water.
Also, as with computers, cost and laziness prevent proper recyling of car stuff. When you have a mechanic change your oil and other fluids, he sends it off to a recycling service -- for which he pays a fee. But lots of people change their own fluids, and avoid the hassle and cost by pouring their waste down a storm drain, where it kills wildlife and screws up the water supply.
I have to go back to the original topic and mention another aspect of electronic gadgets -- batteries. All batteries, especially rechargables, count as hazardous waste, and need to be recycled accordingly. But how many consumers even know about this? And even the ones that do won't find a convenient place to dump their old batteries.
As for cookies: yes, we all know how they're used to invade your privacy. The question is, how do you prevent it? Scanning for "evil" cookies doesn't catch them soon enough to preserve your privacy -- unless you run the scanner continuously, which will destroy your system performance.
A site can't read or write a cookie unless your browser lets it. So the place to control cookie-related info is in your browser. If you don't trust cookies at all, you simply disable them. But most of us want some cookie functionality, so we forbid third-party cookies, or only allow specific sites to use them. Third-party cookies are assumed to be intrusive -- even if they're not in any adware database!
That means that Doubleclick and other such companies get to write cookies to our drives, but can't read them back. So when I run Ad-Aware and it complains about all those tracking cookies, it's complaining about an issues I've already dealt with.
Now, Windows is well-entrenched because it's what the current user base is used to. We can't get them to budge because we can't persuade them that the change is worth the effort. But if millions of college students are getting a thorough education in how totally insecure Windows is....
You may get some email from me, if you honestly know every single adware-tainted application there is. You must have downloaded a lot of crap to learn that!