Actually, a hell of a lot of really good engineering work does go into lego - and most regualtions-compliant kids toys in general. It's quite difficult to make toys that kids won't hurt themselves with - and, while they can still choke on lego, the whole choking-on-stuff thing tends to pass before you hit the lego recommended age ( and for before that, you have the unswallowable Duplo).
Designing safe kid's toys is not easy! Note that I am a qualified mechanical engineer, with experience of meeting safety requirements for a pedal car, so this isn't just me talking crap.
At the same time, I really think that kids these days are just too safe - all they seem to learn is how to be good little consumers...
Yes there was/is - "Main Frame", in the literal sense - it's the main frame of the computer, just as "mainframes" (large computer systems) in the modern usage have a "Main Frame" that is the (room-filling) CPU and core accessories. Monitors and keyboards are "peripherals" to the main frame (peripheral just means they're on the outskirts:-)
I have a couple of books from 1977 describing the revolutionary new "microprocessor based computers" that use the term "Main Frame" in this way, for the rack/box assembly of the cpu/core accessories, that in microprocessor systems was shrunk down to desk top size - but still called the "main frame" in the literature I have from the time of the orginal shrinkage.
Somewhere along the line, people started to use "mainframe" almost exclusively to mean the large systems.
Actually, some of the books I have from the time are quite fascinating - advocating "personal computer" designs with massive numbers of parrallel-running microprocessors because "time-slice task switching is so wasteful now that processors are so cheap". And "bit slice machines are the way forward".
I also have a Gameboy advance, and have no problems with my screen - the trick is to play in an area with lights, or, god forbid, natural daylight. Are you people all playing in darkened rooms, or something? The orginal gameboy sucked just as bad (or worse) if you played it with the light off...
mmph.. I only became aware of realsoft's linux plans relatively recently... didn't know how long the vapor was stirring about it. If it ever materialises, I'll buy it immediately...
Also, photogenics is still actively developing - each time I go back to the website, new cool stuff has been added, and Paul Nolan seems to be very receptive to any suggestions for "things that might be cool" - but, and from my linux-using perspective, unfortunately, Paul Nolan's expending most of his efforts on Photogenics on the next-gen Amiga computers - presumably as Amiga Inc. want it as a DPaint-style "killer app" to shift their new boxes, which might one day in the far future actually appear...
My art-wise background is the amiga demo scene, and photogenics makes such work incredibly easy. I find photoshop clunky and slow to use compared to most amiga-style paint packages - as I hinted, this may simply be since I learnt the amiga ones first, similar to the way a windows user will actually find KDE harder to use than someone who has never used a computer before...
The linux port of RealSoft (very cool raytracer) is supposedly to be commercially released soon. See realsoft.
Old Amiga people may recognise Realsoft as the makers of Real3D, an amiga raytacer that excelled at solid modelling and keyframe animation - it's especially good at glasses, liquids and crystals, since the light beams are modelled going through the whole material, rather than just surface effects, so you get real-looking stuff like caustics, working magnifying lenses, etc...
The new Realsoft version looks very, very cool...
For 2D static work, photogenics has been available for some time - it's really best for orignal composition, rather than image processing, and is, once again, a modernised version of an old amiga application. GIMP (and photoshop) both suck for orignal 2D work, IMHO. (then again, they both started out as "image manipulation" tools rather than bitmap-painting packages, and I did learn Amiga paint tools first...).
I agree that the state of 2D animation on linux isn't great - although, at least, we now have a decent lossless animation file format that (a) is open and (b) doesn't suck, in the form of the MNG superset of PNG - see libmng
AFAIK, Sun's JDK only segfaults on redhat 7, thanks to redhat's insistence on doing weird things to glibc. It's fine on on Mandrake 8 or Debian, as far as I can tell.
Well, fischertechnik is kinda like "technic lego" . It's more popular in europe than america. Most home robotics enthusiasts in the 80s in Ireland (where I am), England and Germany used fischertechnik kits to build their robots that they hooked up to their BBC Micros and C64s.
See www.techeducation.com for american distributors. They have a cool robot arm kit.
Re:I can tell you why *I* am not using Ruby.
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 1
An interesting language is F-Script, which is a smalltalk-like language with array-processing constructs like APL - so if you have an array of objects, it has an economical syntax for doing matrix operations consisting of messages on them.
Slashdot inserts spaces semi-randomly into long words to prevent a silly attack that some teeenagers think is clever - messing up the formatting of the tables making up the slashdot layout by using a really long, unbroken, sequence of characters - some browsers will make the page really, really wide to accomodate it. This could also be fixed by using a fully CSS compliant browser and some clever formatting rules, but a large proportion of non-white-noise slashdot users still use the old NS4 (upgrade to mozilla 0.9.2, people!)
Copyright was originally invented by early christian Irish monks in the dark ages -
(from www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/columba-l.html Columba went north and founded the church of Derry. Tradition has it that after founding several other monasteries, Columba copied St. Finnian's psalter without the permission of Finnian, and thus devalued the book. When Finnian took the matter to High King Dermott for judgement, Dermott judged in favor of Finnian, stating "to every cow its calf; to every book its copy" (I am borrowing this quote from Cathach Books in Dublin). Columba refused to hand over the copy, and Dermott forced the issue militarily. Columba's family and clan defeated Dermott at the battle of Cooldrevny in 561. Tradition further holds that St. Molaisi of Devenish, Columba's spiritual father, ordered Columba to bring the same number of souls to Christ that he had caused to die as pennance. In 563, Columba landed on Iona with 12 disciples, and founded a new monastery. After founding several more monasteries, confounding the local druids, and participating in another battle (this time against St. Comgall over who owned the church of Colethem), Columba died on June 9, 597.
.NET is an end-to-end environment geared towards producing subscription based software... (and preferably locking you into subscription to _microsoft_ software) It doesn't really make it easier or harder to code stuff on windows (except for they updated, and slightly more logical APIs, over win32's utter crud (CALLBACK anyone?)).
Technologies like XML and SOAP make it easier for companies to provide "services" over the internet - but, what if they provided a service and nobody came? To put it another way, what's the point in allowing people to "lease" software, if they're not going to use, because us Free Software people are giving it away for free? FreeBSD ports is a wonderful distribution system.
On possible solution is detailed by David Brin, in his book "The Transparent Society". Chpater one is available online here
It's well worth reading, and deals with the societal impact of pervasive surveillance technology, and what to do about it, once it's a given that it's implemented - how to _stop_ a Big-Brother like state arising - his solution is fairly simple - give _everyone_ the right to use public-access surveillance equipment. If the police can watch you, make sure that the citizens can watch the police, etc.
Well, I would concur - in those cases where those that say they know what they are talking about _don't provide evidence to back it up_ - Which I did. And I wouldn't say that a short (by non-AC standards) reply, without using my +1 bonus, is shouting particularly hard:-).
Fairly pointless responding to an AC, but I think you'll find that I do.
Anyway, the simple fact remains, MS have not exactly proven themselves trustworthy in the past.Usually, they supply a substandard product on other platforms (Mac IE seems to be a major exception), and then point at the product on windows and say "look how crappy $OUR_PRODUCT is on $NOT_OUR_PLATFORM, you should switch to $OUR_PLATFORM". This sort of circular logic, unfortunately, seems to sway a lot of people, who seem oblivious to the $NOT_OUR_PRODUCT possibilities, thanks, usually, to FUD and propoganda in MS-controlled media.
So far, they have a set of client side.NET (windows forms) classes that only work on windows, and a vaporware murmuring of any client-side support for other platforms (note that the may be willing to sacrfice some server side installations in order to maintain their desktop monopoly, but I doubt they'll expend much effort to get the client-side working to a non-sub-par level on other platforms - and if a third party does get, say, the linux.NET clone working better, then they'll simply up and change the APIs and/or data formats in the next "official" release - just like what happens to Wine, Samba, OS/2, MS Office clones, etc...)
It's already screwed up - C# itself might be "standardised", but without the full implementation of the.NET APIs it won't be very useful. And the forthcoming BSD-platform release will not include any client-side GUI support - MS is keeeping that bound to GDI on the windows platform, initially (they may be using Corel's wine-expertise to later bring client-side to BSD and thereby mac os x).
Indeed, it may be speculated that MS _need_ the server-side.NET on BSD, because Win2000 sure isn't up to the amount of traffic MS's own.NET servers will be able to take:-) - chances are, they'll use BSD servers identifying themselves as win2000 (they've done it before...)
So MS's plan seems to be Windows on the client, BSD on the server for real reliability, and Win2000 on the server for the real suckers...
See the discussions on this article for more details.
Remember, microsoft-man speak with forked tongue...
Wep, the GBA looks like a small GameGear - but my one's got a transluscent-blue Apple-style case - far more stylish:-) - here (ireland), anyway, they've got colour coordinated battery-packs, maglights, etc - and yo just know that there's rich-kids who just gotta have all the different colours... (transluscent blue, white, transluscent pink, purple, dark blue are the one's I've seen on sale.)
Actually, the different clours are genuinely useful, if you're playing multiplayer games regularly with the GBA - much less chance of walking off with the wrong GBA...
GBA is 16MHz ARM, combined with what's basically a miniaturised SNES gfx chip. It also includes a complete gameboy-colour-on-chip for backward compatibility...
It was never a good idea to put any gameboy in the back pocket of your jeans - the LCD screens tended to crack if you had a fat ass and/or tight pants...
Hmmm... just like they bet their future on OS/2 ?
Then again, you did say "virtually", which, of course, means "not really".:-)
Microsoft are not to be trusted. They have demonstrated themselves untrustworthy in a court of law. If you or I were to submit a doctored video tape as evidence, and get caught doing it, we wouldn't get off scot free. We'd be in jail.
It is very similar to Sun's approach to java. There is an established body that standardises java - sun. The subset of.NET that is standardised is not useful in the real world, just as ECMA's ECMAScript standard isn't particularly useful to web developers without the HTML dom.
You may be right there - but I doubt it would keep them all that honest.:-)
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of implementation inheritance in the first place. I prefer composition in most cases from a design standpoint.
I'm also not sure that it is very far ahead of what's already possible with the JVM. I've already used Rhino, Beanshell, DynamicJava and JPython. All of them interoperated pretty seamlessly through the common denominator of Java objects, and with RMI and/or CORBA, you even get a fair degree of language and network transparency.
Erm... I very much doubt.NET is faster than native-compiled java (see gcc 3.0). I also doubt it's faster than Amiga/Tao pseudo-native compiled java. It is possible that MS's CLR is better than sun's JVM at similar code (but I doubt it), but there is no good reason for _all_ JVMs to be that speed.
Anyway, any non-jit native compiled stuff rather defeats the purpose for many applications - such as "beaming" active objects between disparate mobile devices via serialization/externalization. Then again, you could implement a "compilation-server" scheme - but that means trusting the compilation server.
While C# does have a few nice features as a language, it's really not significantly different to Java - In fact, I wouldn't be suprised if you could write a C# to java-bytecode compiler, if you miss foreach that much..
Don'ty forget that some language features were deliberately left out of java. In a professional environment, where mixed-ability development teams are common, Java is very useful, because it is so unambiguous and deterministic (see recent java-in-realtime-systems discussions on java.sun.com)
What do you mean by "user defined events"? Are you thinking that Java still uses the ancient 1.0 event model? I've never had any problem defining arbitrary subclasses of java.util.EventObject and associated EventListener interfaces.
Unsafe code???
One of the things main people _like_ about java is the *lack* of unsafe code! That's why it's so popular on servers. There are few non-trivial systems in mainstream computing nearer to provably secure than Java 2. MS security has always sucked. They tend to make terrible decisions from a security standpoint.
In fact, it was MS's crappy-from-a-security-standpoint Java implementation that did most to tarnish java's security rep in the first place...
If most of your experience of Java is via MS's antiquated IE Java support, please go to http://java.sun.com/ and get an up to date Java VM. 1.3.1, or 1.4 beta. (personally, I like 1.4, 'cos it's finally got regular expressions).
To be honest, it sounds like you're, at best, taking everything MS says at face value. Ask IBM's OS/2 team how well that works. Ask SGI's Fahrenheit team. It's not like MS are some new kid on the block with a cool new product, who maybe deserves the benefit of the doubt. They have a history of nastiness.
Fool me once - shame on you. Fool me twice - shame on me.
Anyway. I still prefer proper languages like Scheme and CLisp.
Why is this -1? Admittedly, it's spelt badly, but let me take the liberty of paraphrasing it:
Why are some people willing to pay money for proprietary code, but fail to accept that the only fee requested by a developer could be that the code and its derivative works _stay_ available?
nce IBM websphere controls so much of the enterprise server space, if sun were to try to pull the Java-name-use-permission-withdrawal trick, IBM would probably say "so what?", buy our new new improved websphere with the "Beerva" language, which transparently runs all your old Java(tm) applications. HP were ready to this a while back with Chai (see, they'd even thought up a clever name), but sun agreed to play nicer, and they didn't bother.
J2EE is a set of APIs and their implementations for Java. Funny enough, it's implemented by several third -party vendors, most of whom had input into the spec at design-time.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, a hell of a lot of really good engineering work does go into lego - and most regualtions-compliant kids toys in general. It's quite difficult to make toys that kids won't hurt themselves with - and, while they can still choke on lego, the whole choking-on-stuff thing tends to pass before you hit the lego recommended age ( and for before that, you have the unswallowable Duplo).
Designing safe kid's toys is not easy! Note that I am a qualified mechanical engineer, with experience of meeting safety requirements for a pedal car, so this isn't just me talking crap.
At the same time, I really think that kids these days are just too safe - all they seem to learn is how to be good little consumers...
Yes there was/is - "Main Frame", in the literal sense - it's the main frame of the computer, just as "mainframes" (large computer systems) in the modern usage have a "Main Frame" that is the (room-filling) CPU and core accessories. Monitors and keyboards are "peripherals" to the main frame (peripheral just means they're on the outskirts :-)
I have a couple of books from 1977 describing the revolutionary new "microprocessor based computers" that use the term "Main Frame" in this way, for the rack/box assembly of the cpu/core accessories, that in microprocessor systems was shrunk down to desk top size - but still called the "main frame" in the literature I have from the time of the orginal shrinkage.
Somewhere along the line, people started to use "mainframe" almost exclusively to mean the large systems.
Actually, some of the books I have from the time are quite fascinating - advocating "personal computer" designs with massive numbers of parrallel-running microprocessors because "time-slice task switching is so wasteful now that processors are so cheap". And "bit slice machines are the way forward".
I also have a Gameboy advance, and have no problems with my screen - the trick is to play in an area with lights, or, god forbid, natural daylight. Are you people all playing in darkened rooms, or something? The orginal gameboy sucked just as bad (or worse) if you played it with the light off...
mmph.. I only became aware of realsoft's linux plans relatively recently... didn't know how long the vapor was stirring about it. If it ever materialises, I'll buy it immediately...
Also, photogenics is still actively developing - each time I go back to the website, new cool stuff has been added, and Paul Nolan seems to be very receptive to any suggestions for "things that might be cool" - but, and from my linux-using perspective, unfortunately, Paul Nolan's expending most of his efforts on Photogenics on the next-gen Amiga computers - presumably as Amiga Inc. want it as a DPaint-style "killer app" to shift their new boxes, which might one day in the far future actually appear...
My art-wise background is the amiga demo scene, and photogenics makes such work incredibly easy. I find photoshop clunky and slow to use compared to most amiga-style paint packages - as I hinted, this may simply be since I learnt the amiga ones first, similar to the way a windows user will actually find KDE harder to use than someone who has never used a computer before...
The linux port of RealSoft (very cool raytracer) is supposedly to be commercially released soon. See realsoft.
Old Amiga people may recognise Realsoft as the makers of Real3D, an amiga raytacer that excelled at solid modelling and keyframe animation - it's especially good at glasses, liquids and crystals, since the light beams are modelled going through the whole material, rather than just surface effects, so you get real-looking stuff like caustics, working magnifying lenses, etc...
The new Realsoft version looks very, very cool...
For 2D static work, photogenics has been available for some time - it's really best for orignal composition, rather than image processing, and is, once again, a modernised version of an old amiga application. GIMP (and photoshop) both suck for orignal 2D work, IMHO. (then again, they both started out as "image manipulation" tools rather than bitmap-painting packages, and I did learn Amiga paint tools first...).
I agree that the state of 2D animation on linux isn't great - although, at least, we now have a decent lossless animation file format that (a) is open and (b) doesn't suck, in the form of the MNG superset of PNG - see libmng
Not necessarily. See
www.restrooms.org/technique.html
AFAIK, Sun's JDK only segfaults on redhat 7, thanks to redhat's insistence on doing weird things to glibc. It's fine on on Mandrake 8 or Debian, as far as I can tell.
Well, fischertechnik is kinda like "technic lego" . It's more popular in europe than america. Most home robotics enthusiasts in the 80s in Ireland (where I am), England and Germany used fischertechnik kits to build their robots that they hooked up to their BBC Micros and C64s.
See www.techeducation.com for american distributors. They have a cool robot arm kit.
An interesting language is F-Script, which is a smalltalk-like language with array-processing constructs like APL - so if you have an array of objects, it has an economical syntax for doing matrix operations consisting of messages on them.
Slashdot inserts spaces semi-randomly into long words to prevent a silly attack that some teeenagers think is clever - messing up the formatting of the tables making up the slashdot layout by using a really long, unbroken, sequence of characters - some browsers will make the page really, really wide to accomodate it. This could also be fixed by using a fully CSS compliant browser and some clever formatting rules, but a large proportion of non-white-noise slashdot users still use the old NS4 (upgrade to mozilla 0.9.2, people!)
As you've just found out, links still work...
Copyright was originally invented by early christian Irish monks in the dark ages -
(from www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/columba-l.html
Columba went north and founded the church of Derry. Tradition has it that after founding several other monasteries, Columba copied St. Finnian's psalter without the permission of Finnian, and thus devalued the book. When Finnian took the matter to High King Dermott for judgement, Dermott judged in favor of Finnian, stating "to every cow its calf; to every book its copy" (I am borrowing this quote from Cathach Books in Dublin). Columba refused to hand over the copy, and Dermott forced the issue militarily. Columba's family and clan defeated Dermott at the battle of Cooldrevny in 561. Tradition further holds that St. Molaisi of Devenish, Columba's spiritual father, ordered Columba to bring the same number of souls to Christ that he had caused to die as pennance. In 563, Columba landed on Iona with 12 disciples, and founded a new monastery. After founding several more monasteries, confounding the local druids, and participating in another battle (this time against St. Comgall over who owned the church of Colethem), Columba died on June 9, 597.
.NET is an end-to-end environment geared towards producing subscription based software... (and preferably locking you into subscription to _microsoft_ software) It doesn't really make it easier or harder to code stuff on windows (except for they updated, and slightly more logical APIs, over win32's utter crud (CALLBACK anyone?)).
Technologies like XML and SOAP make it easier for companies to provide "services" over the internet - but, what if they provided a service and nobody came? To put it another way, what's the point in allowing people to "lease" software, if they're not going to use, because us Free Software people are giving it away for free? FreeBSD ports is a wonderful distribution system.
On possible solution is detailed by David Brin, in his book "The Transparent Society". Chpater one is available online here
It's well worth reading, and deals with the societal impact of pervasive surveillance technology, and what to do about it, once it's a given that it's implemented - how to _stop_ a Big-Brother like state arising - his solution is fairly simple - give _everyone_ the right to use public-access surveillance equipment. If the police can watch you, make sure that the citizens can watch the police, etc.
Well, I would concur - in those cases where those that say they know what they are talking about _don't provide evidence to back it up_ - Which I did. And I wouldn't say that a short (by non-AC standards) reply, without using my +1 bonus, is shouting particularly hard :-).
It could be argued, that IE _is_ the new platform, of course...
Fairly pointless responding to an AC, but I think you'll find that I do.
.Usually, they supply a substandard product on other platforms (Mac IE seems to be a major exception), and then point at the product on windows and say "look how crappy $OUR_PRODUCT is on $NOT_OUR_PLATFORM, you should switch to $OUR_PLATFORM". This sort of circular logic, unfortunately, seems to sway a lot of people, who seem oblivious to the $NOT_OUR_PRODUCT possibilities, thanks, usually, to FUD and propoganda in MS-controlled media.
.NET (windows forms) classes that only work on windows, and a vaporware murmuring of any client-side support for other platforms (note that the may be willing to sacrfice some server side installations in order to maintain their desktop monopoly, but I doubt they'll expend much effort to get the client-side working to a non-sub-par level on other platforms - and if a third party does get, say, the linux .NET clone working better, then they'll simply up and change the APIs and/or data formats in the next "official" release - just like what happens to Wine, Samba, OS/2, MS Office clones, etc...)
Anyway, the simple fact remains, MS have not exactly proven themselves trustworthy in the past
So far, they have a set of client side
It's already screwed up - C# itself might be "standardised", but without the full implementation of the .NET APIs it won't be very useful. And the forthcoming BSD-platform release will not include any client-side GUI support - MS is keeeping that bound to GDI on the windows platform, initially (they may be using Corel's wine-expertise to later bring client-side to BSD and thereby mac os x).
.NET on BSD, because Win2000 sure isn't up to the amount of traffic MS's own .NET servers will be able to take :-) - chances are, they'll use BSD servers identifying themselves as win2000 (they've done it before...)
Indeed, it may be speculated that MS _need_ the server-side
So MS's plan seems to be Windows on the client, BSD on the server for real reliability, and Win2000 on the server for the real suckers...
See the discussions on this article for more details.
Remember, microsoft-man speak with forked tongue...
s/Wep/Yep/
I have no idea what "Wep" means, but it should mean something. Try saying it aloud - "Wep!". It makes a great exclamation....
Wep, the GBA looks like a small GameGear - but my one's got a transluscent-blue Apple-style case - far more stylish :-) - here (ireland), anyway, they've got colour coordinated battery-packs, maglights, etc - and yo just know that there's rich-kids who just gotta have all the different colours... (transluscent blue, white, transluscent pink, purple, dark blue are the one's I've seen on sale.)
Actually, the different clours are genuinely useful, if you're playing multiplayer games regularly with the GBA - much less chance of walking off with the wrong GBA...
GBA is 16MHz ARM, combined with what's basically a miniaturised SNES gfx chip. It also includes a complete gameboy-colour-on-chip for backward compatibility...
It was never a good idea to put any gameboy in the back pocket of your jeans - the LCD screens tended to crack if you had a fat ass and/or tight pants...
Hmmm... just like they bet their future on OS/2 ? :-)
Then again, you did say "virtually", which, of course, means "not really".
Microsoft are not to be trusted. They have demonstrated themselves untrustworthy in a court of law. If you or I were to submit a doctored video tape as evidence, and get caught doing it, we wouldn't get off scot free. We'd be in jail.
It is very similar to Sun's approach to java. There is an established body that standardises java - sun. The subset of .NET that is standardised is not useful in the real world, just as ECMA's ECMAScript standard isn't particularly useful to web developers without the HTML dom.
Microsoft is a scientologist plot, anyway...
You may be right there - but I doubt it would keep them all that honest. :-)
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of implementation inheritance in the first place. I prefer composition in most cases from a design standpoint.
I'm also not sure that it is very far ahead of what's already possible with the JVM. I've already used Rhino, Beanshell, DynamicJava and JPython. All of them interoperated pretty seamlessly through the common denominator of Java objects, and with RMI and/or CORBA, you even get a fair degree of language and network transparency.
Erm... I very much doubt .NET is faster than native-compiled java (see gcc 3.0). I also doubt it's faster than Amiga/Tao pseudo-native compiled java. It is possible that MS's CLR is better than sun's JVM at similar code (but I doubt it), but there is no good reason for _all_ JVMs to be that speed.
Anyway, any non-jit native compiled stuff rather defeats the purpose for many applications - such as "beaming" active objects between disparate mobile devices via serialization/externalization. Then again, you could implement a "compilation-server" scheme - but that means trusting the compilation server.
While C# does have a few nice features as a language, it's really not significantly different to Java - In fact, I wouldn't be suprised if you could write a C# to java-bytecode compiler, if you miss foreach that much..
Don'ty forget that some language features were deliberately left out of java. In a professional environment, where mixed-ability development teams are common, Java is very useful, because it is so unambiguous and deterministic (see recent java-in-realtime-systems discussions on java.sun.com)
What do you mean by "user defined events"? Are you thinking that Java still uses the ancient 1.0 event model? I've never had any problem defining arbitrary subclasses of java.util.EventObject and associated EventListener interfaces.
Unsafe code???
One of the things main people _like_ about java is the *lack* of unsafe code! That's why it's so popular on servers. There are few non-trivial systems in mainstream computing nearer to provably secure than Java 2. MS security has always sucked. They tend to make terrible decisions from a security standpoint.
In fact, it was MS's crappy-from-a-security-standpoint Java implementation that did most to tarnish java's security rep in the first place...
If most of your experience of Java is via MS's antiquated IE Java support, please go to http://java.sun.com/ and get an up to date Java VM. 1.3.1, or 1.4 beta. (personally, I like 1.4, 'cos it's finally got regular expressions).
To be honest, it sounds like you're, at best, taking everything MS says at face value. Ask IBM's OS/2 team how well that works. Ask SGI's Fahrenheit team. It's not like MS are some new kid on the block with a cool new product, who maybe deserves the benefit of the doubt. They have a history of nastiness.
Fool me once - shame on you. Fool me twice - shame on me.
Anyway. I still prefer proper languages like Scheme and CLisp.
Why is this -1? Admittedly, it's spelt badly, but let me take the liberty of paraphrasing it:
Why are some people willing to pay money for proprietary code, but fail to accept that the only fee requested by a developer could be that the code and its derivative works _stay_ available?
nce IBM websphere controls so much of the enterprise server space, if sun were to try to pull the Java-name-use-permission-withdrawal trick, IBM would probably say "so what?", buy our new new improved websphere with the "Beerva" language, which transparently runs all your old Java(tm) applications. HP were ready to this a while back with Chai (see, they'd even thought up a clever name), but sun agreed to play nicer, and they didn't bother.
J2EE is a set of APIs and their implementations for Java. Funny enough, it's implemented by several third -party vendors, most of whom had input into the spec at design-time.