This is the same thing that Greenpeace tried to do to Apple. Despite having one of the best records in the industry, Greenpeace rated them "worst" because they didn't publish enough details or promise to do things in the future. Other companies which were in much worse shape but promised things in the future got better ratings. In other words, Greenpeace appears to value words over actions.
The Wii uses a small fraction of the electricity of the other two consoles. If all Wii sales had been PS3 or XBox360 sales, the environment would be a lot worse off.
"I really think Apple would increase their market share of all systems if they lowered their prices or at least had models that started at lower prices."
But is "market share of all systems" really that interesting to the industry? If you're a software developer, do you want to sell software to people who bargain-basement shop, or people who are willing to spend more? Apple is a very profitable company, the major third party apps on the platform appear to be profitable, and the community has a huge ecosystem of mom&pop software developers that manage to make a tidy profit.
It's kind of like a television station that has 60% market share of 20-35 year olds. Sure, that segment is a minority of the population and a somewhat arbitrary gauge of spending power, but nonetheless that television station could consider themselves wildly successful and will probably sell gobs of advertising.
I think the bottom line is that any software developer who hasn't ported to the Mac yet should probably figure out a path to do so if they want to make some money.
Due to its dynamic nature and intermediate bytecode, Java analysis tools seem to be especially adept at catching problems. In essence, they can not only analyze the source better (because of Java's simpler syntax), they can also much more easily analyze swaths of the object code and tie it to specific source file issues.
In particular, I've found FindBugs has an amazing degree of precision considering it's an automated tool. If it comes up with a "red" error, it's almost certainly something that should be changed. I'm not familiar with any C/C++ tool that comes close.
It's not a good business decision to have two similarly labelled products out, especially with software when that usually indicates that one is crippleware.
Yes, because it's worked so badly for Microsoft... RedHat had brand recognition. The ONLY reason they'd want to change the name is to dissociate themselves from negative connotations.
And... really. REALLY? You'd rather have the source for Outlook Server than have a 1-800 person tell you "Oh, yeah, just toggle the doohickey and it'll come right back up."
Personally, my understanding of the revenue model for companies like RedHat and other Linux distros was "Let's take the most difficult to install, use, and generally obtuse operating system in common use today, give it away for free, then charge people for support! Brilliant!"
Not that I don't like Linux myself, but I'm a geek. Even Ubuntu doesn't pass the mother test, let alone the grandmother test (she has an iMac).
Actually, it is not. Java lacks some fundamentally important constructs (e.g., multidimensional arrays) that mean that a lot of code simply cannot be written efficiently in Java no matter how you try. If you haven't run into that, it's simply because your needs are modest.
Actually, I'd say if you have, it's because your needs are extremely specialized. Considering our app is a massively distributed live collaboration system deployed in Iraq that handles gigabytes of data, I don't think our needs are "modest".
I can put together a high quality Linux desktop application in Monodevelop in minutes. In Java and Swing, it's impossible [for me] to put together a high quality desktop app at all.
I corrected your statement for you, kthx. I have two suggestions for you, if you care: 1. If you insist on sticking with Swing as you seem so intent on doing, try NetBeans application platform. 2. If you're willing to try an alternative to Swing, try Eclipse Rich Client platform. If you really like things like twiddling bits with slightly magnetized rusty spoons, by all means continue to try to code directly to Swing.
If you think that crap like Eclipse or NetBeans is "top-shelf", you really haven't used a good IDE in your life.
My personal favorite is IntelliJ IDEA, which I find more productive than any other IDE I've ever used. These include everything from THINK Pascal in the 80's to Visual Studio. And while I'm not comfortable in Eclipse, I know a lot of people who are very productive in it. At least Java is not hobbled by having one dominant IDE vendor creating a one-size-fits-all environment.
Finally, I'd like to point out that I asked why Java was more of a bloated pig than the C# platform, not why you find certain features better for your particular use case. It's fun to Java-bash on Slashdot, but I get the sense most folks who do it haven't actually done serious Java development in years.
Yes, but there is absolutely no evidence that open source is any better in this respect than commercial software (in fact the actual evidence points to it being little different in this respect). And when it DOES crash, a 1-800 number is often better than a pile of badly commented code.
It will, in the end, come down to a value proposition. The value proposition of freedom to modify code is very hard to quantify, so that will probably factor into the eventual success of open source not at all. The actual quality, usability, documentation, trainability, ease of install, compatibility with existing infrastructure (usually Microsoft), etc., will probably be the deciding factors, and I don't see open source having a clear-cut advantage in those metrics.
This graph is a good one but only goes up to 2004. Going to the data source and creating your own table shows that you're correct (RPM=revenue passenger mile=one paying passenger flying one mile). However, the graph does look bumpy lately, and I'm not sure how valuable extrapolation really is here.
I thought the same thing except that it sounded like Java to me. Java's definitely a language that's targeted more towards folks willing to think than just sit and hack, and is far more introspect-able, thus moving significantly more errors to code/analysis time rather than runtime. (And it has concurrency built in to the language and standard libraries.)
I remember the days when some folks thought that learning BASIC was a stain on a developers psyche that took years to heal. Now I feel the same way about C/C++.
At the risk of feeding the trolls, in what way is C# + Gtk# + MonoDevelop less of a bloated pig than Java? Java is actually a very fast, extremely productive platform to develop on with a top-shelf toolchain (in fact several).
Also the original poster is apparently confusing bandwidth with capacity. You're paying for a certain SPEED when you buy service, and the capacity per month is left ambiguous. I'm glad they're making it explicit. Hopefully they'll also clean up their warning system, too-- I have a friend to got banned from Comcast because his mail server kept trying and failing (after halfway) to download a large attachment over and over. The first month they warned him, so he cut way down on bandwidth figuring he'd downloaded one too many things. The second month they banned him, which is when we realized too late it was a bug in the mail client.
So you're saying that even thought the PS3 has been seriously outselling the XBox360 all year worldwide, that suddenly everyone's friends are going to be on Microsoft's service? The Blu-Ray addition is a stopgap measure on Microsoft's part to try to pull back into 2nd place in the console wars, but since they're way behind the curve there's no way they're going to be able to manufacture them as cheaply as Sony. I don't think the PS3 has anything to worry about from Microsoft-- it's the Wii that remains the console to beat and I don't see this changing the game much.
While system responsiveness is often a product of optimization, scalability rarely is. When a system can scale across orders of magnitude, it's because of a clean, maintainable architecture that allowed components to be completely revamped and swapped in, identified and eliminated high-polynomial (or worse) growth patterns, and allowed more developers to be spun up on it fast enough to keep up with demand.
On the other hand, if you spend all day pondering the ultimate architecture, you'll never ship and if you do you won't meet requirements. Learning where those tradeoffs are is all about experience and is why the engineers with over a decade of real world experience earn more.
Thank you! It's funny how on one hand the conventional wisdom on Slashdot tends toward the Libertarian until everyone expects pilots to be required to inform the government of all planned movements around the country...
"First, you have to prove that he was knowingly lying."
THEN you have to show that the lie was material to the case. If I testify in a copyright suit and blurt out "the Sun doesn't exist!" I'm not going to jail, because that's not material to the case.
JDK6u10 solves this. It lets the applet run in a separate process from the browser, and bootstraps the download such that it starts up very quickly. See here for more information.
Actually, I think the question of invented vs. discovered is one of the primary philosophical differences between those who think software should be patentable vs. those who don't. I personally think writing code can be creative and that algorithmic development is an inventive process. And since software has a direct translation into mathematics, it seems obvious to me that mathematics is a construct of the human mind (which may or may not actually mirror discovered phenomenon.)
I also think software, which is the result of this creative process, should be patentable if it is truly "non-obvious to one skilled in the art".
Well, to follow up on the parent poster's car metaphor, it's basically like saying they're not going to make any new parts for your car, so you can drive it just fine now but if you want to change anything at all in the future, you can't, and if anything breaks and you need to replace it, you're screwed.
My point is that instead of just blindly depending on some uncharacterized overcapacity to protect you from using data, there are algorithms that let you exactly quantize what resiliency you're willing to accept and how much capacity you have to trade for it. Saying holographic media is good for archival but not being able to characterize exactly what kind of damage it can take to how much of the disc without losing data is a contradiction in my book.
There were rumors posted at one point that Apple had offered to donate a core OS, but were turned down for not being completely open-source. Perhaps if those rumors had any truth, they could be fulfilled now. I'd sure rather have MacOS than linux or XP, given the choice, if I was a third world kid who wanted to learn something.
It doesn't even have to be a sniffer or anything. They could simply have put something in the power supplies such that some sort of signal (maybe from a satellite?) would trigger all the routers to turn off, or something in any of the ASIC that would fry them on command. Just as our carriers are rushing to Taiwan's defense, *poof* all C2, logistics, and situational awareness capabilities revert to the early 20th century.
Anytime you have a signal degradation that "looses definition uncritically" it means you could have packed more information in the signal such that the degradation would have lost data. Thus, if scratches in holographic media aren't losing bits, it just means it's because the signal is as yet very underutilized.
Incidentally, Forward Error Correction, as I mentioned earlier, can be used to achieve exactly the same effect on DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs. Imagine a RAID array algorithm where you split the physical disc in 3 sections and treat each section as its own disc in the array. You could, in theory, black out any 1/3 of the disc and not loose any data.
A scratch loses you data, period. Whether it's holographic or not, you're either trading capacity for recoverability or you're vulnerable to a scratch. There's no magic here. Even with Blu-Ray you could store the data using forward error correction in such a way that complete obliteration of 1/4 of the disc still yields 100% of your data-- you'll just reduce the storage capacity somewhat.
Presumably, however, holographic storage has so much dang storage available that it's not a problem to give some of it up to have enough redundancy to survive typical wear and tear. (And all optical media gets wear and tear just from being spun up and down in non-cleanroom environments.)
And if you're worried about the longevity of CDs and DVDs, scratches aren't really what you're worried about anyway. Most scratches are on the clear plastic and can be repaired. However, some discs were manufactured with chemicals that oxidizes the layers, some with defects in the seal, etc. So your typical "stamped" disc will last decades if free of defect, but less than a decade if it has one-- and there's almost no way of knowing ahead of time. I don't know what substrate the holographic image is being stored on, but we'll have to see if it's completely free of degradation over decades. I certainly wouldn't want to immediately dump important data into this format and throw away the originals yet.
So for now it just remains an expensive unproven alternative... we'll have to see where it goes, though.
Actually JDK6u10 promises to be pretty competitive with Flash while also providing the huge advantages of Java. They've completely re-implemented how Java interacts with the browser and cut the minimal initial bootstrap down to a little over a megabyte (for the first time it's invoked) and sped up initialization time immensely. In short, applets could actually start working rather well for once soon.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same thing that Greenpeace tried to do to Apple. Despite having one of the best records in the industry, Greenpeace rated them "worst" because they didn't publish enough details or promise to do things in the future. Other companies which were in much worse shape but promised things in the future got better ratings. In other words, Greenpeace appears to value words over actions.
The Wii uses a small fraction of the electricity of the other two consoles. If all Wii sales had been PS3 or XBox360 sales, the environment would be a lot worse off.
"I really think Apple would increase their market share of all systems if they lowered their prices or at least had models that started at lower prices."
But is "market share of all systems" really that interesting to the industry? If you're a software developer, do you want to sell software to people who bargain-basement shop, or people who are willing to spend more? Apple is a very profitable company, the major third party apps on the platform appear to be profitable, and the community has a huge ecosystem of mom&pop software developers that manage to make a tidy profit.
It's kind of like a television station that has 60% market share of 20-35 year olds. Sure, that segment is a minority of the population and a somewhat arbitrary gauge of spending power, but nonetheless that television station could consider themselves wildly successful and will probably sell gobs of advertising.
I think the bottom line is that any software developer who hasn't ported to the Mac yet should probably figure out a path to do so if they want to make some money.
Due to its dynamic nature and intermediate bytecode, Java analysis tools seem to be especially adept at catching problems. In essence, they can not only analyze the source better (because of Java's simpler syntax), they can also much more easily analyze swaths of the object code and tie it to specific source file issues.
In particular, I've found FindBugs has an amazing degree of precision considering it's an automated tool. If it comes up with a "red" error, it's almost certainly something that should be changed. I'm not familiar with any C/C++ tool that comes close.
It's not a good business decision to have two similarly labelled products out, especially with software when that usually indicates that one is crippleware.
Yes, because it's worked so badly for Microsoft... RedHat had brand recognition. The ONLY reason they'd want to change the name is to dissociate themselves from negative connotations.
(As I've mentioned before, "Funny" is -5 for me.)
And... really. REALLY? You'd rather have the source for Outlook Server than have a 1-800 person tell you "Oh, yeah, just toggle the doohickey and it'll come right back up."
Personally, my understanding of the revenue model for companies like RedHat and other Linux distros was "Let's take the most difficult to install, use, and generally obtuse operating system in common use today, give it away for free, then charge people for support! Brilliant!"
Not that I don't like Linux myself, but I'm a geek. Even Ubuntu doesn't pass the mother test, let alone the grandmother test (she has an iMac).
Java is actually a very fast,
Actually, it is not. Java lacks some fundamentally important constructs (e.g., multidimensional arrays) that mean that a lot of code simply cannot be written efficiently in Java no matter how you try. If you haven't run into that, it's simply because your needs are modest.
Actually, I'd say if you have, it's because your needs are extremely specialized. Considering our app is a massively distributed live collaboration system deployed in Iraq that handles gigabytes of data, I don't think our needs are "modest".
I can put together a high quality Linux desktop application in Monodevelop in minutes. In Java and Swing, it's impossible [for me] to put together a high quality desktop app at all.
I corrected your statement for you, kthx. I have two suggestions for you, if you care: 1. If you insist on sticking with Swing as you seem so intent on doing, try NetBeans application platform. 2. If you're willing to try an alternative to Swing, try Eclipse Rich Client platform. If you really like things like twiddling bits with slightly magnetized rusty spoons, by all means continue to try to code directly to Swing.
If you think that crap like Eclipse or NetBeans is "top-shelf", you really haven't used a good IDE in your life.
My personal favorite is IntelliJ IDEA, which I find more productive than any other IDE I've ever used. These include everything from THINK Pascal in the 80's to Visual Studio. And while I'm not comfortable in Eclipse, I know a lot of people who are very productive in it. At least Java is not hobbled by having one dominant IDE vendor creating a one-size-fits-all environment.
Finally, I'd like to point out that I asked why Java was more of a bloated pig than the C# platform, not why you find certain features better for your particular use case. It's fun to Java-bash on Slashdot, but I get the sense most folks who do it haven't actually done serious Java development in years.
Yes, but there is absolutely no evidence that open source is any better in this respect than commercial software (in fact the actual evidence points to it being little different in this respect). And when it DOES crash, a 1-800 number is often better than a pile of badly commented code.
It will, in the end, come down to a value proposition. The value proposition of freedom to modify code is very hard to quantify, so that will probably factor into the eventual success of open source not at all. The actual quality, usability, documentation, trainability, ease of install, compatibility with existing infrastructure (usually Microsoft), etc., will probably be the deciding factors, and I don't see open source having a clear-cut advantage in those metrics.
This graph is a good one but only goes up to 2004. Going to the data source and creating your own table shows that you're correct (RPM=revenue passenger mile=one paying passenger flying one mile). However, the graph does look bumpy lately, and I'm not sure how valuable extrapolation really is here.
I thought the same thing except that it sounded like Java to me. Java's definitely a language that's targeted more towards folks willing to think than just sit and hack, and is far more introspect-able, thus moving significantly more errors to code/analysis time rather than runtime. (And it has concurrency built in to the language and standard libraries.)
I remember the days when some folks thought that learning BASIC was a stain on a developers psyche that took years to heal. Now I feel the same way about C/C++.
"And Java is a bloated pig."
At the risk of feeding the trolls, in what way is C# + Gtk# + MonoDevelop less of a bloated pig than Java? Java is actually a very fast, extremely productive platform to develop on with a top-shelf toolchain (in fact several).
there would have been a dozen +5 Funny post
For what it's worth, I've gone into my preferences and set "Funny" to -5. It's amazing how much more palatable Slashdot is once you do this.
Also the original poster is apparently confusing bandwidth with capacity. You're paying for a certain SPEED when you buy service, and the capacity per month is left ambiguous. I'm glad they're making it explicit. Hopefully they'll also clean up their warning system, too-- I have a friend to got banned from Comcast because his mail server kept trying and failing (after halfway) to download a large attachment over and over. The first month they warned him, so he cut way down on bandwidth figuring he'd downloaded one too many things. The second month they banned him, which is when we realized too late it was a bug in the mail client.
So you're saying that even thought the PS3 has been seriously outselling the XBox360 all year worldwide, that suddenly everyone's friends are going to be on Microsoft's service? The Blu-Ray addition is a stopgap measure on Microsoft's part to try to pull back into 2nd place in the console wars, but since they're way behind the curve there's no way they're going to be able to manufacture them as cheaply as Sony. I don't think the PS3 has anything to worry about from Microsoft-- it's the Wii that remains the console to beat and I don't see this changing the game much.
While system responsiveness is often a product of optimization, scalability rarely is. When a system can scale across orders of magnitude, it's because of a clean, maintainable architecture that allowed components to be completely revamped and swapped in, identified and eliminated high-polynomial (or worse) growth patterns, and allowed more developers to be spun up on it fast enough to keep up with demand.
On the other hand, if you spend all day pondering the ultimate architecture, you'll never ship and if you do you won't meet requirements. Learning where those tradeoffs are is all about experience and is why the engineers with over a decade of real world experience earn more.
Thank you! It's funny how on one hand the conventional wisdom on Slashdot tends toward the Libertarian until everyone expects pilots to be required to inform the government of all planned movements around the country...
"First, you have to prove that he was knowingly lying."
THEN you have to show that the lie was material to the case. If I testify in a copyright suit and blurt out "the Sun doesn't exist!" I'm not going to jail, because that's not material to the case.
JDK6u10 solves this. It lets the applet run in a separate process from the browser, and bootstraps the download such that it starts up very quickly. See here for more information.
Actually, I think the question of invented vs. discovered is one of the primary philosophical differences between those who think software should be patentable vs. those who don't. I personally think writing code can be creative and that algorithmic development is an inventive process. And since software has a direct translation into mathematics, it seems obvious to me that mathematics is a construct of the human mind (which may or may not actually mirror discovered phenomenon.)
I also think software, which is the result of this creative process, should be patentable if it is truly "non-obvious to one skilled in the art".
Well, to follow up on the parent poster's car metaphor, it's basically like saying they're not going to make any new parts for your car, so you can drive it just fine now but if you want to change anything at all in the future, you can't, and if anything breaks and you need to replace it, you're screwed.
My point is that instead of just blindly depending on some uncharacterized overcapacity to protect you from using data, there are algorithms that let you exactly quantize what resiliency you're willing to accept and how much capacity you have to trade for it. Saying holographic media is good for archival but not being able to characterize exactly what kind of damage it can take to how much of the disc without losing data is a contradiction in my book.
There were rumors posted at one point that Apple had offered to donate a core OS, but were turned down for not being completely open-source. Perhaps if those rumors had any truth, they could be fulfilled now. I'd sure rather have MacOS than linux or XP, given the choice, if I was a third world kid who wanted to learn something.
It doesn't even have to be a sniffer or anything. They could simply have put something in the power supplies such that some sort of signal (maybe from a satellite?) would trigger all the routers to turn off, or something in any of the ASIC that would fry them on command. Just as our carriers are rushing to Taiwan's defense, *poof* all C2, logistics, and situational awareness capabilities revert to the early 20th century.
Anytime you have a signal degradation that "looses definition uncritically" it means you could have packed more information in the signal such that the degradation would have lost data. Thus, if scratches in holographic media aren't losing bits, it just means it's because the signal is as yet very underutilized.
Incidentally, Forward Error Correction, as I mentioned earlier, can be used to achieve exactly the same effect on DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs. Imagine a RAID array algorithm where you split the physical disc in 3 sections and treat each section as its own disc in the array. You could, in theory, black out any 1/3 of the disc and not loose any data.
A scratch loses you data, period. Whether it's holographic or not, you're either trading capacity for recoverability or you're vulnerable to a scratch. There's no magic here. Even with Blu-Ray you could store the data using forward error correction in such a way that complete obliteration of 1/4 of the disc still yields 100% of your data-- you'll just reduce the storage capacity somewhat.
Presumably, however, holographic storage has so much dang storage available that it's not a problem to give some of it up to have enough redundancy to survive typical wear and tear. (And all optical media gets wear and tear just from being spun up and down in non-cleanroom environments.)
And if you're worried about the longevity of CDs and DVDs, scratches aren't really what you're worried about anyway. Most scratches are on the clear plastic and can be repaired. However, some discs were manufactured with chemicals that oxidizes the layers, some with defects in the seal, etc. So your typical "stamped" disc will last decades if free of defect, but less than a decade if it has one-- and there's almost no way of knowing ahead of time. I don't know what substrate the holographic image is being stored on, but we'll have to see if it's completely free of degradation over decades. I certainly wouldn't want to immediately dump important data into this format and throw away the originals yet.
So for now it just remains an expensive unproven alternative... we'll have to see where it goes, though.
Actually JDK6u10 promises to be pretty competitive with Flash while also providing the huge advantages of Java. They've completely re-implemented how Java interacts with the browser and cut the minimal initial bootstrap down to a little over a megabyte (for the first time it's invoked) and sped up initialization time immensely. In short, applets could actually start working rather well for once soon.