It's unfortunately all too common for a business to not give a crap about a paying customer. I found that out with LiveJournal. Post public info, get your entire account and all postings ever made deleted without notice, and the anonymous moderators say "Do what we say without question or be permanently banned, even if you haven't broken the TOS". Meanwhile, a troll with a free account gets a free pass to ignore the TOS for some reason.
The reason they don't care, of course, is that most users don't care either. I mean, the fact that WoW is intrusive spyware with e-mail monitoring abilities doesn't seem to faze anyone. Homophobic policy decisions probably didn't cause anyone to unsubscribe either. DRM that removes your legal first-sale rights didn't seem to stop anyone paying $50 for the game. Why would abusive moderation applied to other people make a difference?
Same with FARK. Anonymous moderators have the power to make invisible edits and permanently ban people, with no right of appeal--and waddya know, it leads to abusive behavior.
The problem is, 99% of people don't give a crap until it happens to them.
So if Java I/O is so fast and it's a compiled language, why does it take an order of magnitude longer to start up than any other language runtime except Smalltalk or C#? What could it possibly be doing that other language runtimes don't have to do?
And I'm not just talking about 5 liner scripts. I mentioned Rails, which does database persistence, XML, and the other web application things a J2EE environment does--and starts up 10x faster than any J2EE setup I've seen.
Sure, Java threading is good. The point is, you don't necessarily need 50 threads in Ruby, because you can afford to start more than 1 process.
So am I to take it you're admitting that Java is totally unsuited to desktop applications and the embedded applications it was supposedly designed for? Isn't that rather a sad reflection on the language?
(I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who would like to be able to write useful desktop and mobile code in something other than the crappy languages I'm stuck with at the moment. Java's slothfulness at starting up means it isn't a very good option, and I'd like to see that change. Saying "La la la there is no problem because I run everything on the server" isn't really a very helpful response.)
So ANT is badly designed, that doesn't discount the point. I also mentioned J2EE environments vs Rails, and you'll get the same Java speed problems if you try "Hello World". Face it, Java startup is goddamn slow, and trying to deny it doesn't make the problem go away.
Java's a speed demon compared to almost all other programming languages out there.
Depends what you mean by "speed". For example, compare how long it takes to fire up ANT, compared to Ruby's Rant. Both are build tools offering roughly equivalent functionality.
Results:
$ time ant
Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!
Build failed
real 0m1.233s
user 0m0.188s
sys 0m0.043s
$ time rant
rant: [ERROR] No Rantfile found, looking for:
Rantfile, rantfile, root.rant
rant aborted!
real 0m1.071s
user 0m0.089s
sys 0m0.015s
Ruby's an interpreted language, and it's one of the slowest in its class. (Slower than Python or Perl). It's loading in all the libraries as source code and interpreting them. Yet it still wipes the floor with Java at speed of startup. And that's before you actually start building anything--the first time I used Rant, it was so much faster than ANT that I thought I must have done something wrong.
Try launching a major Java GUI application, and you can profile the application startup speed with a manual stopwatch. Try launching a J2EE setup, and compare it with starting up Ruby on Rails.
Java isn't going to lose its well-deserved reputation for slowness until some major work is done on startup speeds.
Find the app in Synaptic, double click it, hit apply, and it's installed--complete with helpful icon in the start menu.
MP3 is supported just fine.
Not sure what you mean by "funny stuff", so I won't comment on that... and
USB thumb drive. To dismount, right click the icon towards the right of the kicker and choose the thumb drive, and it dismounts. Just like Windows does it, in fact.
VIA released source for all the hardware on the M10000. It's gradually being cleaned up and integrated into Linux. For example, 2.6 currently supports the hardware RNG and hardware accelerated X11, and the MPEG hardware is supported in mplayer. Sensors work, ethernet works, Firewire and USB work, all with open source drivers. They do a much better job than most other vendors at supporting Linux.
(If you know of a motherboard with SATA that'll take a CPU that can be passively cooled and has open source drivers for everything, I'd like to hear about it, as I plan to build a bigger server this year.)
You forget that the military personnel have all taken an oath to defend the US Constitution. If ordered to fire on American civilians, many of them will refuse.
Tell that to the Branch Davidians, the students at Kent State, people in LA during the riots, poor black people from New Orleans, and so on.
Opera browses the web just fine. It just doesn't browse things which are almost web sites but not quite, because they are broken and don't follow web standards.
First Google hit on WebCalendar is a web-based calendar in PHP that understands the iCal/vCal format, so can share info with iCal on the Mac. The Mac will sync with your phone.
Hey, Blizzard could have chosen to ban all the real-world stuff and ban all the Christian guilds. That would have been just as acceptable. Sounds like that's what you would have preferred, so why not lobby them?
What was pissing people off was banning some real-world social preferences but not others.
Triple coax from the roof to the living room, for satellite dish and local antenna. (I had to arrange extra coax myself, and it was a pain.)
Hookups in the bathrooms for Toto washlets.
Passive motion / IR sensors in every room to switch lights off after a while if there's nobody in the room, and turn down the heating or AC.
Bath with thermostatic control and fill sensor. Set temperature, it fills itself and then chimes when it's ready.
Panel in house that indicates outdoor temperature, weather forecast for the day, whether there's something in the mailbox and whether the mailbox flag is up. Option to have the mailbox chime.
I actually wouldn't mind DRM e-books, if the price was significantly lower. An e-book I can't resell has to be no more expensive than buying the paperback second hand, and ideally cheaper than that.
I'd also like an e-book reader with e-ink display--but it has to have search, which the upcoming Sony reader lacks.
What I have always wanted is a web calendar that I can sync with my desktop calendaring app (preferably via an open standard.) It'd be especially nice if it was acccessible via my cellphone, too.
Just FYI, you can have 100% of what you want today, with a Mac and a copy of WebCalendar.
vCal is also the basis of the sync protocol (SyncML) used to sync calendar events between calendars. For example, it's what iSync uses to sync my calendar to my Palm PDA and Sony Ericsson cell phone.
vCal files can also contain multiple events and be published to a web page for people to subscribe to. That's how my events show up on my wife's calendar, and vice versa.
vCal can also be used to publish free time information for people who might want to book an appointment with you.
I dunno, I like "art" games like "Ico", quirky games like "Katamari Damacy" and "Stretch Panic". If they were developed for a Windows PC, I wouldn't see them.
It's like this: Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a big campaign to unify Linux, called UnitedLinux, and another one called LSB. Both pushed the sucktastic late 90s/early 2000s RPM as the required package management tool. That was why I mentioned RPM as the kind of crap that gets pushed when decisions are made for corporate or marketing reasons, rather than technical reasons.
You seem to be under the impression that IBM procurement buy from the provider that offers the best pricing. I've had RAM purchases refused because the approved vendor's price was too high, gone to Best Buy, and spent my own money to get RAM at a quarter of the price.
The problems went away when I switched from RedHat to another distribution, so it wasn't the hardware.
Take a look at http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?i d=73097 as an example of RedHat's attitude to RPM problems. There was a known problem with RPM trashing the database and locking up, and the problem stayed unfixed for several major revisions. Maybe they've got the bugs out by now, I'll decide once I've been running SLES for a couple of years... but the user interface is still horrible.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also a poor craftsman who bangs in nails using a screwdriver.
It's unfortunately all too common for a business to not give a crap about a paying customer. I found that out with LiveJournal. Post public info, get your entire account and all postings ever made deleted without notice, and the anonymous moderators say "Do what we say without question or be permanently banned, even if you haven't broken the TOS". Meanwhile, a troll with a free account gets a free pass to ignore the TOS for some reason.
The reason they don't care, of course, is that most users don't care either. I mean, the fact that WoW is intrusive spyware with e-mail monitoring abilities doesn't seem to faze anyone. Homophobic policy decisions probably didn't cause anyone to unsubscribe either. DRM that removes your legal first-sale rights didn't seem to stop anyone paying $50 for the game. Why would abusive moderation applied to other people make a difference?
Same with FARK. Anonymous moderators have the power to make invisible edits and permanently ban people, with no right of appeal--and waddya know, it leads to abusive behavior.
The problem is, 99% of people don't give a crap until it happens to them.
So if Java I/O is so fast and it's a compiled language, why does it take an order of magnitude longer to start up than any other language runtime except Smalltalk or C#? What could it possibly be doing that other language runtimes don't have to do?
And I'm not just talking about 5 liner scripts. I mentioned Rails, which does database persistence, XML, and the other web application things a J2EE environment does--and starts up 10x faster than any J2EE setup I've seen.
Sure, Java threading is good. The point is, you don't necessarily need 50 threads in Ruby, because you can afford to start more than 1 process.
So am I to take it you're admitting that Java is totally unsuited to desktop applications and the embedded applications it was supposedly designed for? Isn't that rather a sad reflection on the language?
(I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who would like to be able to write useful desktop and mobile code in something other than the crappy languages I'm stuck with at the moment. Java's slothfulness at starting up means it isn't a very good option, and I'd like to see that change. Saying "La la la there is no problem because I run everything on the server" isn't really a very helpful response.)
So ANT is badly designed, that doesn't discount the point. I also mentioned J2EE environments vs Rails, and you'll get the same Java speed problems if you try "Hello World". Face it, Java startup is goddamn slow, and trying to deny it doesn't make the problem go away.
Depends what you mean by "speed". For example, compare how long it takes to fire up ANT, compared to Ruby's Rant. Both are build tools offering roughly equivalent functionality.
Results:
$ time antBuildfile: build.xml does not exist!
Build failed
real 0m1.233s
user 0m0.188s
sys 0m0.043s
$ time rant
rant: [ERROR] No Rantfile found, looking for:
Rantfile, rantfile, root.rant
rant aborted!
real 0m1.071s
user 0m0.089s
sys 0m0.015s
Ruby's an interpreted language, and it's one of the slowest in its class. (Slower than Python or Perl). It's loading in all the libraries as source code and interpreting them. Yet it still wipes the floor with Java at speed of startup. And that's before you actually start building anything--the first time I used Rant, it was so much faster than ANT that I thought I must have done something wrong.
Try launching a major Java GUI application, and you can profile the application startup speed with a manual stopwatch. Try launching a J2EE setup, and compare it with starting up Ruby on Rails.
Java isn't going to lose its well-deserved reputation for slowness until some major work is done on startup speeds.
(And yes, I'm using Java 1.5.0.)
I have none of those problems with Debian.
Find the app in Synaptic, double click it, hit apply, and it's installed--complete with helpful icon in the start menu.
MP3 is supported just fine.
Not sure what you mean by "funny stuff", so I won't comment on that... and
USB thumb drive. To dismount, right click the icon towards the right of the kicker and choose the thumb drive, and it dismounts. Just like Windows does it, in fact.
Tell that to TiVo and DirecTV. My DirecTiVo takes well over a minute.
The difficult bit was persuading George W Bush to swap the silver spoon for a gold one.
Well, my M10000 has 181 days of uptime... and it's only that low because I powered it down to rearrange some cabling. It has never locked up.
On the other hand, a friend went through hell with nForce.
Also, you start off talking about VIA under Linux, then suddenly switch to talking about Asus under Windows as if that's relevant. Huh?
VIA released source for all the hardware on the M10000. It's gradually being cleaned up and integrated into Linux. For example, 2.6 currently supports the hardware RNG and hardware accelerated X11, and the MPEG hardware is supported in mplayer. Sensors work, ethernet works, Firewire and USB work, all with open source drivers. They do a much better job than most other vendors at supporting Linux.
(If you know of a motherboard with SATA that'll take a CPU that can be passively cooled and has open source drivers for everything, I'd like to hear about it, as I plan to build a bigger server this year.)
Similarly, English people can be directly and personally blamed for many of the same things, because they voted Tony Blair back in.
Tell that to the Branch Davidians, the students at Kent State, people in LA during the riots, poor black people from New Orleans, and so on.
Opera browses the web just fine. It just doesn't browse things which are almost web sites but not quite, because they are broken and don't follow web standards.
First Google hit on WebCalendar is a web-based calendar in PHP that understands the iCal/vCal format, so can share info with iCal on the Mac. The Mac will sync with your phone.
www.washlet.com
I hear it's an almost religious experience.
Hey, Blizzard could have chosen to ban all the real-world stuff and ban all the Christian guilds. That would have been just as acceptable. Sounds like that's what you would have preferred, so why not lobby them?
What was pissing people off was banning some real-world social preferences but not others.
Ethernet to every room.
Spare cables to every room.
Triple coax from the roof to the living room, for satellite dish and local antenna. (I had to arrange extra coax myself, and it was a pain.)
Hookups in the bathrooms for Toto washlets.
Passive motion / IR sensors in every room to switch lights off after a while if there's nobody in the room, and turn down the heating or AC.
Bath with thermostatic control and fill sensor. Set temperature, it fills itself and then chimes when it's ready.
Panel in house that indicates outdoor temperature, weather forecast for the day, whether there's something in the mailbox and whether the mailbox flag is up. Option to have the mailbox chime.
Server closet with good ventilation.
I actually wouldn't mind DRM e-books, if the price was significantly lower. An e-book I can't resell has to be no more expensive than buying the paperback second hand, and ideally cheaper than that.
I'd also like an e-book reader with e-ink display--but it has to have search, which the upcoming Sony reader lacks.
Just FYI, you can have 100% of what you want today, with a Mac and a copy of WebCalendar.
vCal is also the basis of the sync protocol (SyncML) used to sync calendar events between calendars. For example, it's what iSync uses to sync my calendar to my Palm PDA and Sony Ericsson cell phone.
vCal files can also contain multiple events and be published to a web page for people to subscribe to. That's how my events show up on my wife's calendar, and vice versa.
vCal can also be used to publish free time information for people who might want to book an appointment with you.
So yeah, you're wrong.
Oh yeah, I hate LVM too. Far too much complexity for the functionality offered. I just stick with raidtools.
I dunno, I like "art" games like "Ico", quirky games like "Katamari Damacy" and "Stretch Panic". If they were developed for a Windows PC, I wouldn't see them.
It's like this: Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a big campaign to unify Linux, called UnitedLinux, and another one called LSB. Both pushed the sucktastic late 90s/early 2000s RPM as the required package management tool. That was why I mentioned RPM as the kind of crap that gets pushed when decisions are made for corporate or marketing reasons, rather than technical reasons.
You seem to be under the impression that IBM procurement buy from the provider that offers the best pricing. I've had RAM purchases refused because the approved vendor's price was too high, gone to Best Buy, and spent my own money to get RAM at a quarter of the price.
The problems went away when I switched from RedHat to another distribution, so it wasn't the hardware.
i d=73097 as an example of RedHat's attitude to RPM problems. There was a known problem with RPM trashing the database and locking up, and the problem stayed unfixed for several major revisions. Maybe they've got the bugs out by now, I'll decide once I've been running SLES for a couple of years... but the user interface is still horrible.
Take a look at http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?