Open source can have bugs too. It is more important that the thing is properly tested. And as far as I know the rules are pretty strict for medical software.
And as for windows, It wouldn't surprise me if they did use it for parts of the system. Probably the actual control software runs on some real-time OS, but there's more to complex systems like that than control software alone.
And you'd be wrong to assume that because of that the quality suffers. Using of the shelf components like MS windows in medical software greatly improves functionality of the system. I've heard of several examples where a windows based front-end complements control software written for some real time OS.
And don't forget about the generally relaxed attitude towards people with 'different' opinions; pragmatic government; sensible law for alcohol and drugs
... and you have Mozilla. Of course it doesn't (not yet at least) it's just a partial reimplementation of the wheel. Basically what they do is wrap a subset of the OS with their class library. Doing so they created an application framework. Application frameworks are very usefull for creating applications (duh) and there are several good ones available. I fail to see why this should be labeled an OS. If we label this as an OS be sure to also label Java, Mozilla and python as a OS.
Some technical remarks:
- what's the component model?
- what about securtity? I can just see people downloading this nice DML scripit that says it loves you:)
- what about applications? Surely the demo's look nice but there's more to applications than pretty screenshots. We just saw with mozilla how long it can take to develop a fully featured application (and believe me 2 and a half years is nothing).
- There's all this talk about object orientation, where's the language? At some point they actually recommend ansi C for the job!
Sorry for being so cynical but I really don't see the point of all this. Nor do I see any actual new stuff, just reinventions of the wheel. BTW did anyone notice what the faq says about opensource and what feature of the system is mentioned first? It's sort of conflicting.
I've been online since 1994, my very first email address is still active. I get some spam on all of my accounts but never so much that it gets annoying.
My impression is that trying to get rid of spam actually requires more energy than accepting the occasional viagra advertisement in your inbox. Somehow the people complaining about spam invariably are techie types. Normal users don't seem to care much.
However here's some free advice:
- get a yahoo/hotmail/whatever address and use it whenever you are required to leave your email address.
- when leaving your real address on a public site add a.nospamplease extension to it.
- use filters to get rid of annoying content
These are the only anti spam measures I take and they seem to work fine for me. It doesn't stop everything, but the remaining spam is nothing but a minor annoyance.
Re:"Java is the only language..."
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 2
This page: http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages.ht ml offers a nice overview of languages built on top of Java. Some of them (e.g. AspectJ and JPython) are very interesting. The JVM can already interoperate with COM (i.e. embedding java in visual basic is dead easy) so consequently all the languages on top of Java can use it as well. Assuming.Net builds on top of com, java.net interoperability is already there. No doubt Sun or someone else (voyager?) will fill in the missing pieces (if any) soon after.net is released.
Well it was precisely the package selection that pissed me off. Package descriptions are less than useful, particularly for packages that are less often used. Deciding whether you need it or not becomes very difficult when you are face with such descriptions. Besides mandrake could simply ask whether you have a modem and disable all modem packages. That's the user friendly way of doing things.
My problem with linux distributions (and not only mandrake) is that you don't really have much choice: either manually select packages you don't know (misstakes are usually fatal for succesful completion of the install) or accept the very crude selection mechanism provided to you.
i tried debian, it didn't recognize my network card (at least that's what I deduced from the cryptic messages). It's probably a nice distribution for expert users, but I wouldn't receommend it to other users. The apt-get install in it self is a nice system and perhaps it solves part of the problems.
no, but I am to lazy to bother spending too much time with immature software such as mandrake. I had it crash on me several times during the various attempts to install the bitch.
Package selection in mandrake is horrible, you either stick with the very crude selection mechanism, choose to let the install intelligently reduce the amount of packages or accept to browse through thousands of poorly documented packages with very cryptic descriptions. Neither is really an option so most users will choose to install everything out of fear of breaking dependencies. I foolishly tried to install 60%. Of course X wouldn't even start and I gave up on mandrake eventually.
Of course there are people who do need isdn apps but that's no reason to include every isdn tool known in a default installation on a computer that doesn't even have the hardware for operating an isdn connection.
So, my point is that most of the packages installed could hardly be described as essential. I just want the stuff needed to run such things as a browser, a texteditor, X, KDE and Gnome apps. I don't need a 100 Mbs of mostly badly desiged themes and other bullshit. I'm sure it can be done efficiently in under 500 megs but I'm not willing to spent much time figuring out what packages to install and what packages to leave behind. The installations are not particularly helpfull and given their immaturity it is usually not a good idea not to use the default settings since most likely your particular choice of settings has not been properly tested.
I tried out mandrake 7.2 just after it was released. It required 2.5 Gb. That's a lot. I'have no idea what they include in their distribution to get to that number but it is almost certain I won't ever use 95 % of it.
The problem is redundancy. For each type of application there are more than one implementation. Take editors for example, the average linux distribution will install at least half a dozen (and probably more) without even asking. Then you usually get both KDE and Gnome, half a dozen xterm apps, a bunch of shells, a bunch of filesystem browsers (all of them crap IMHO), and a zillion other apps. Not to mention apache is installed, an smtp server is launched, you can telnet, ftp and god knows what to your machine while all you wanted is a stupid firewall:).
I don't want all that, I want a tailored system that only includes what I need, configured in a simple way and preferably not running all sorts of server apps I won't use anyway. In the unlikely case I want to use emacs or vi, I'll install it myself. What the hell am I going to do with programs for faxing and ISDN? I don't have even have a modem! Why waste diskspace on useless apps such as Xroach. It's only a few kilobytes, I know, but all this bloat apparently manages to sum up to about 2.5 gigabytes.
None of the linux distributions I know off meet these requirements and I doubt any distribution will meet them anytime soon. Debian is too complicated, Mandrake is too bloated, Red hat too buggy, Corel is too annoying. It seems that all the parts for making a nice OS are available but nobody has managed to put them together in the right way. Perhaps we do need MS Linux:)
I tried browsing at -1 (everything visible) for a while. That became annoying. Then I swithced to 0, so you filter out everything that was moderated down. After a while I still had to browse to a shitload of first posts and flamebaits. So regretably I had to switch to +1.
I created the signature that apparently pisses off you so much to piss off these people that caused me to do this. It really works great because invariably the moderated down replies to my posts are either insulting or meaningless trolls.
There's been quite a lot of talk lately about PC and computer equipment being responsible for energy shortages. Seen in this context, the IMHO pointless and so far unsuccessful search for aliens seems a waste of energy. Computers are so much more energy efficient when suspended or turned off!
Web standards are rapidly replacing the X architecture as an alternative for thin clients. As such X has little or no future. However, very few applications build on X directly these days. On linux, many of the GUI applications rely on either QT, GTK or some other highlevel GUI API. Most of these libraries are portable (see the recent story on Gnome on win32). Any future architecture that runs these libraries will have a huge amount of applications readily available. So X or Wingui is not so relevant anymore. What is more relevant is the API people are writing to. For windows this will likely be the.net thingy, for linux it will be gtk and qt, for Java it currently is Swing, for the web it will be XML and HTML combined with stylesheets.
X won't go away on linux because people like to use it because of the distributed nature. However, for application developers this will not be a big issue since they don't have to deal with the X API directly. Performance wise it will not be an issue either because of Moore's law and implementation improvements. Performance is already very acceptable if you are on a modern PC. Any perceived sluggishness is usually caused by poor application design rather that the X server.
The initial reaction here seems to be that this is a bad idea. But what's wrong with bringing a object request broker architecture to an essentially monolithic kernel? It seems to me that if it can perform well, the added modularity might actually be a huge step forward and might be a nice alternative next to the existing module architecture (sort of a primitive object request broker). One of the immediate advantages is that C is no longer required (but still allowed) for doing kernel programming.
I really hate it when systemadministrators fuck up good machines like this. You can use the plugin on IE just as well. The default jvm included with netscape is just about the lousiest version out there (the IE version is way better than that) so I don't follow your argument. As far as standards are concerned netscape 4 implements the html 3 standard pretty well (not perfect though). It might even outcompete ie 3 in that area. However, the rest of the world has moved on and netscape 4 is pretty lousy at all the other relevant standards.
I agree that Netscape (or really mozilla) did the right thing by kicking out their crappy JVM. If they had done that four years ago, applets might have actually become popular.
Latex is a set of macros on top of a very archaic layout language called tex (its archaic because almost ayone would prefer to use the macros on top of it rather than just the core language). I suppose you could hack together a tex interpreter (I'm not aware of any though) that does what HTML does but it would be just that: a hack. It would probably be wise to create a set of webspecific macros then instead of using the latex macros which are tailored to printed documents rather than web documents.
However, the future lies in neither HTML or latex. Both tend to mix structure and layout information. Both have a fixed set of structural elements. The future lies in XML combined with separate stylesheets. The stylesheets define the layout, the XML the structure. As soon as browser developers get their act together and implement the standards in full and consistently, this could become a reality. For the mean time we can use HTML (or XHTML) in combination with stylesheets. Using IE 5 or Mozilla you can get a pretty consistent result already and this will only improve over the coming few years.
There's a nice proverb that summarizes my argument: if you have a hammer, every problem seems a nail. Latex is the proverbial hammer, web documents, IMHO, are not a suitable nail for it.
I agree, slamming good sofware engineering practices on top of a inherently flawed language makes no sense. Which is why there are no IDEs for perl. People coding perl think they're uber hackers and consequently think they don't need an IDE. People coding IDEs, are good software engineers or at least understand some of the concepts of SE and generally don't use perl for the same reason.
I gather you are one of the new generation of legacy code generators. The previous generation used (and continues to use!) cobol. I repeat perl is for the swine!
Linux users, perl users in particular, seem to dislike Java. Probably the stereo type Java hater uses linux with Gnome and hacks his way through life using perl. This whole 'article' breathes conservatism. The whole linux community breathes conservatism. Which is the main reason I keep uninstalling it. Every few months I am tricked into believing it has improved. Then I go ahead and install and see for myself and I see the same mess of patched together obsolete shit it has been for years (and yes, I've seen Gnome and KDE in their latest incarnations).
Java may suck for some, but luckily its success does not depend on those who think so. Java is particularly strong in the server market. In this market it is currently outcompeting the linux/perl combination (though ironically it is quite feasible to do a linux java combination, they complement each other quite nicely).
Just some things to ponder:
- Java is available on linux in several flavor (including a GPLed one).
- Java has a large base of professional IDEs and tools written in Java and consequently also available for linux (try finding commercial C/c++ IDEs for linux, or *gasp* a perl IDE).
- Programs written in Java work on any OS supporting Java (currently pretty much any OS) making java development on linux possible in organizations that don't traditionally use Java.
"but why exactly did netscape make Java for M18 a separate module?"
Netscape used to include their own vm. Doing so, they practically killed the whole concept of an applet because their VM was so crappy it would invariably crash after a certain amount of time. On linux, all you have to do to crash netscape 4 is load a few applets.
Luckily netscape is no longer in the business of making java virtual machines. Instead they use an API that allows third parties to plug in their VM. Netscape 6 optionally installs jre 1.3.0 (from Sun), which is probably one of the best JVM's available. However, mozilla does not do so. To run Java anyway on mozilla you have to install it manually and *gasp* read some documentation that tells you how to do so. M18 and the mozilla nightlies are not intended for end users so I don't think that's a big problem.
If you want a shrinkwrapped product, don't use the development version, wait for a release or download netscape 6. I wouldn't recommend the latter since it was released way to early and contains many bugs (many of which have been fixed in the nightlies already).
That the development versions are usable and indeed much better than the released netscape 6, is nice. I think it is a sign of some good work being done by the mozilla developers. However, you shouldn't make the mistake of treating the development versions as release versions by expecting documentation and shrinkwrapped plugins and stuff like that.
As a mozilla enthousiast I regret it that netscape released 6.0. I think they should have waited. You could argue that they had to release at some point but on the other hand they pissed off a lot of users by releasing this crappy excuse for a browser.
I use framemaker on a dayly basis for writing articles. Luckily I'm not working on linux, so I can continue to work with framemaker.
For those who don't know. Framemaker is a wordprocessor/dtp package for creating large, structured documents such as manuals or in my case, scientific articles. I know somebody who has written a few articles and a thesis with the linux beta. It was that good! I think he's going to be angry when he gets back from his holliday.
The framemaker way of working has been duplicated in KWord, so there's still some hope for the linux platform. Unfortunately, KWord lacks the portability framemaker has (currently is available on Mac, windows and solaris), also it is still a very immature product (0.something last time I checked).
You can stream fm radio quality sound using just 64 kbit. Many commercial radio stations are already available in the form of real audio or windows media streams. The upcoming generation of mobile phones will plenty of bandwidth available and will be connected to the internet (hint to mobile phone manufacturers: build in software for tuning in to streamed audio, this will be your desperately needed killer app).
So to answer your question, not only is there no point in doing so, it would be a waste of energy and resources to get these satelites up and running since by the time these things are operational, most people will have good alternatives available.
Satelite radio is a step backwards and it will come crashing down, just like iridium.
Freenet stores files under a unique name in a distributed filesystem (i.e. freenet). All you need to retrieve a file is it's name. It appears to me that this is Kahn's idea taken to the extreme. Freenet takes care of storing and retrieving objects with a unique identifier. The system could easily be extended with databases coupling relevant keywords to the identifier. Also it is safe, freenet is explicitly designed to hide the location of the files. Even the owner can't touch it after it has been put into freenet.
You are absolutely right. Somehow, I never need any documentation whatsoever installing one of the windows variants. My network card, video card, sound card are pretty much standard and are recognized by the windows installation without a glitch. As soon as I pop in a linux distribution (I tried debian, redhat and mandrake very recently) I start running in to trouble (network card is not recognized, I'm asked to enter refreshrates for a pnp monitor, soundcard (sb16!, probably the most standard soundcard) is not configured by default and so on). That's not a documentation problem, but simply the result of immature installation tools. Now I realize that installation is not a top priority at debian, but for a mainstream distribution like red hat, this is becoming pretty much unacceptable behavior. Mandrake tries to fix some of this but is rather buggy to say the least.
You can download the java spec from suns website, perhaps not as open as it could be but try to get document describing win32 in full
JSP has a freeware implementation
there are a lot of other opensource projects based on Java.
there are multiple vendors selling Java development tools as well as opensource projects providing such tools
there are dozens of other languages implemented on top of the JVM (check this site for a good overview. JPython is cool BTW!)
I hope this makes it clear for once and for all, Java is here to stay. It does most of what.NET promises to do in a few years yesterday, it runs on linux, open source for most of the essential software is available.
Slashdot Mirror
Open source can have bugs too. It is more important that the thing is properly tested. And as far as I know the rules are pretty strict for medical software.
And as for windows, It wouldn't surprise me if they did use it for parts of the system. Probably the actual control software runs on some real-time OS, but there's more to complex systems like that than control software alone.
And you'd be wrong to assume that because of that the quality suffers. Using of the shelf components like MS windows in medical software greatly improves functionality of the system. I've heard of several examples where a windows based front-end complements control software written for some real time OS.
And don't forget about the generally relaxed attitude towards people with 'different' opinions; pragmatic government; sensible law for alcohol and drugs
:)
Glad to be back in NL
... and you have Mozilla. Of course it doesn't (not yet at least) it's just a partial reimplementation of the wheel. Basically what they do is wrap a subset of the OS with their class library. Doing so they created an application framework. Application frameworks are very usefull for creating applications (duh) and there are several good ones available. I fail to see why this should be labeled an OS. If we label this as an OS be sure to also label Java, Mozilla and python as a OS.
:)
Some technical remarks:
- what's the component model?
- what about securtity? I can just see people downloading this nice DML scripit that says it loves you
- what about applications? Surely the demo's look nice but there's more to applications than pretty screenshots. We just saw with mozilla how long it can take to develop a fully featured application (and believe me 2 and a half years is nothing).
- There's all this talk about object orientation, where's the language? At some point they actually recommend ansi C for the job!
Sorry for being so cynical but I really don't see the point of all this. Nor do I see any actual new stuff, just reinventions of the wheel. BTW did anyone notice what the faq says about opensource and what feature of the system is mentioned first? It's sort of conflicting.
I've been online since 1994, my very first email address is still active. I get some spam on all of my accounts but never so much that it gets annoying.
.nospamplease extension to it.
My impression is that trying to get rid of spam actually requires more energy than accepting the occasional viagra advertisement in your inbox. Somehow the people complaining about spam invariably are techie types. Normal users don't seem to care much.
However here's some free advice:
- get a yahoo/hotmail/whatever address and use it whenever you are required to leave your email address.
- when leaving your real address on a public site add a
- use filters to get rid of annoying content
These are the only anti spam measures I take and they seem to work fine for me. It doesn't stop everything, but the remaining spam is nothing but a minor annoyance.
This page: http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages.ht ml offers a nice overview of languages built on top of Java. Some of them (e.g. AspectJ and JPython) are very interesting. The JVM can already interoperate with COM (i.e. embedding java in visual basic is dead easy) so consequently all the languages on top of Java can use it as well. Assuming .Net builds on top of com, java .net interoperability is already there. No doubt Sun or someone else (voyager?) will fill in the missing pieces (if any) soon after .net is released.
Well it was precisely the package selection that pissed me off. Package descriptions are less than useful, particularly for packages that are less often used. Deciding whether you need it or not becomes very difficult when you are face with such descriptions. Besides mandrake could simply ask whether you have a modem and disable all modem packages. That's the user friendly way of doing things.
My problem with linux distributions (and not only mandrake) is that you don't really have much choice: either manually select packages you don't know (misstakes are usually fatal for succesful completion of the install) or accept the very crude selection mechanism provided to you.
i tried debian, it didn't recognize my network card (at least that's what I deduced from the cryptic messages). It's probably a nice distribution for expert users, but I wouldn't receommend it to other users. The apt-get install in it self is a nice system and perhaps it solves part of the problems.
no, but I am to lazy to bother spending too much time with immature software such as mandrake. I had it crash on me several times during the various attempts to install the bitch.
Package selection in mandrake is horrible, you either stick with the very crude selection mechanism, choose to let the install intelligently reduce the amount of packages or accept to browse through thousands of poorly documented packages with very cryptic descriptions. Neither is really an option so most users will choose to install everything out of fear of breaking dependencies. I foolishly tried to install 60%. Of course X wouldn't even start and I gave up on mandrake eventually.
Of course there are people who do need isdn apps but that's no reason to include every isdn tool known in a default installation on a computer that doesn't even have the hardware for operating an isdn connection.
So, my point is that most of the packages installed could hardly be described as essential. I just want the stuff needed to run such things as a browser, a texteditor, X, KDE and Gnome apps. I don't need a 100 Mbs of mostly badly desiged themes and other bullshit. I'm sure it can be done efficiently in under 500 megs but I'm not willing to spent much time figuring out what packages to install and what packages to leave behind. The installations are not particularly helpfull and given their immaturity it is usually not a good idea not to use the default settings since most likely your particular choice of settings has not been properly tested.
I tried out mandrake 7.2 just after it was released. It required 2.5 Gb. That's a lot. I'have no idea what they include in their distribution to get to that number but it is almost certain I won't ever use 95 % of it.
:).
:)
The problem is redundancy. For each type of application there are more than one implementation. Take editors for example, the average linux distribution will install at least half a dozen (and probably more) without even asking. Then you usually get both KDE and Gnome, half a dozen xterm apps, a bunch of shells, a bunch of filesystem browsers (all of them crap IMHO), and a zillion other apps. Not to mention apache is installed, an smtp server is launched, you can telnet, ftp and god knows what to your machine while all you wanted is a stupid firewall
I don't want all that, I want a tailored system that only includes what I need, configured in a simple way and preferably not running all sorts of server apps I won't use anyway. In the unlikely case I want to use emacs or vi, I'll install it myself. What the hell am I going to do with programs for faxing and ISDN? I don't have even have a modem! Why waste diskspace on useless apps such as Xroach. It's only a few kilobytes, I know, but all this bloat apparently manages to sum up to about 2.5 gigabytes.
None of the linux distributions I know off meet these requirements and I doubt any distribution will meet them anytime soon. Debian is too complicated, Mandrake is too bloated, Red hat too buggy, Corel is too annoying. It seems that all the parts for making a nice OS are available but nobody has managed to put them together in the right way. Perhaps we do need MS Linux
I tried browsing at -1 (everything visible) for a while. That became annoying. Then I swithced to 0, so you filter out everything that was moderated down. After a while I still had to browse to a shitload of first posts and flamebaits. So regretably I had to switch to +1.
I created the signature that apparently pisses off you so much to piss off these people that caused me to do this. It really works great because invariably the moderated down replies to my posts are either insulting or meaningless trolls.
There's been quite a lot of talk lately about PC and computer equipment being responsible for energy shortages. Seen in this context, the IMHO pointless and so far unsuccessful search for aliens seems a waste of energy. Computers are so much more energy efficient when suspended or turned off!
LOL: please blink to clippy to continue
Web standards are rapidly replacing the X architecture as an alternative for thin clients. As such X has little or no future. However, very few applications build on X directly these days. On linux, many of the GUI applications rely on either QT, GTK or some other highlevel GUI API. Most of these libraries are portable (see the recent story on Gnome on win32). Any future architecture that runs these libraries will have a huge amount of applications readily available. So X or Wingui is not so relevant anymore. What is more relevant is the API people are writing to. For windows this will likely be the .net thingy, for linux it will be gtk and qt, for Java it currently is Swing, for the web it will be XML and HTML combined with stylesheets.
X won't go away on linux because people like to use it because of the distributed nature. However, for application developers this will not be a big issue since they don't have to deal with the X API directly. Performance wise it will not be an issue either because of Moore's law and implementation improvements. Performance is already very acceptable if you are on a modern PC. Any perceived sluggishness is usually caused by poor application design rather that the X server.
The initial reaction here seems to be that this is a bad idea. But what's wrong with bringing a object request broker architecture to an essentially monolithic kernel? It seems to me that if it can perform well, the added modularity might actually be a huge step forward and might be a nice alternative next to the existing module architecture (sort of a primitive object request broker). One of the immediate advantages is that C is no longer required (but still allowed) for doing kernel programming.
But then, i'm not a kernel hacker.
I really hate it when systemadministrators fuck up good machines like this. You can use the plugin on IE just as well. The default jvm included with netscape is just about the lousiest version out there (the IE version is way better than that) so I don't follow your argument. As far as standards are concerned netscape 4 implements the html 3 standard pretty well (not perfect though). It might even outcompete ie 3 in that area. However, the rest of the world has moved on and netscape 4 is pretty lousy at all the other relevant standards.
I agree that Netscape (or really mozilla) did the right thing by kicking out their crappy JVM. If they had done that four years ago, applets might have actually become popular.
Latex is a set of macros on top of a very archaic layout language called tex (its archaic because almost ayone would prefer to use the macros on top of it rather than just the core language). I suppose you could hack together a tex interpreter (I'm not aware of any though) that does what HTML does but it would be just that: a hack. It would probably be wise to create a set of webspecific macros then instead of using the latex macros which are tailored to printed documents rather than web documents.
However, the future lies in neither HTML or latex. Both tend to mix structure and layout information. Both have a fixed set of structural elements. The future lies in XML combined with separate stylesheets. The stylesheets define the layout, the XML the structure. As soon as browser developers get their act together and implement the standards in full and consistently, this could become a reality. For the mean time we can use HTML (or XHTML) in combination with stylesheets. Using IE 5 or Mozilla you can get a pretty consistent result already and this will only improve over the coming few years.
There's a nice proverb that summarizes my argument: if you have a hammer, every problem seems a nail. Latex is the proverbial hammer, web documents, IMHO, are not a suitable nail for it.
I agree, slamming good sofware engineering practices on top of a inherently flawed language makes no sense. Which is why there are no IDEs for perl. People coding perl think they're uber hackers and consequently think they don't need an IDE. People coding IDEs, are good software engineers or at least understand some of the concepts of SE and generally don't use perl for the same reason.
I gather you are one of the new generation of legacy code generators. The previous generation used (and continues to use!) cobol. I repeat perl is for the swine!
Linux users, perl users in particular, seem to dislike Java. Probably the stereo type Java hater uses linux with Gnome and hacks his way through life using perl. This whole 'article' breathes conservatism. The whole linux community breathes conservatism. Which is the main reason I keep uninstalling it. Every few months I am tricked into believing it has improved. Then I go ahead and install and see for myself and I see the same mess of patched together obsolete shit it has been for years (and yes, I've seen Gnome and KDE in their latest incarnations).
Java may suck for some, but luckily its success does not depend on those who think so. Java is particularly strong in the server market. In this market it is currently outcompeting the linux/perl combination (though ironically it is quite feasible to do a linux java combination, they complement each other quite nicely).
Just some things to ponder:
- Java is available on linux in several flavor (including a GPLed one).
- Java has a large base of professional IDEs and tools written in Java and consequently also available for linux (try finding commercial C/c++ IDEs for linux, or *gasp* a perl IDE).
- Programs written in Java work on any OS supporting Java (currently pretty much any OS) making java development on linux possible in organizations that don't traditionally use Java.
Quit whining and innovate.
"but why exactly did netscape make Java for M18 a separate module?"
Netscape used to include their own vm. Doing so, they practically killed the whole concept of an applet because their VM was so crappy it would invariably crash after a certain amount of time. On linux, all you have to do to crash netscape 4 is load a few applets.
Luckily netscape is no longer in the business of making java virtual machines. Instead they use an API that allows third parties to plug in their VM. Netscape 6 optionally installs jre 1.3.0 (from Sun), which is probably one of the best JVM's available. However, mozilla does not do so. To run Java anyway on mozilla you have to install it manually and *gasp* read some documentation that tells you how to do so. M18 and the mozilla nightlies are not intended for end users so I don't think that's a big problem.
If you want a shrinkwrapped product, don't use the development version, wait for a release or download netscape 6. I wouldn't recommend the latter since it was released way to early and contains many bugs (many of which have been fixed in the nightlies already).
That the development versions are usable and indeed much better than the released netscape 6, is nice. I think it is a sign of some good work being done by the mozilla developers. However, you shouldn't make the mistake of treating the development versions as release versions by expecting documentation and shrinkwrapped plugins and stuff like that.
As a mozilla enthousiast I regret it that netscape released 6.0. I think they should have waited. You could argue that they had to release at some point but on the other hand they pissed off a lot of users by releasing this crappy excuse for a browser.
I use framemaker on a dayly basis for writing articles. Luckily I'm not working on linux, so I can continue to work with framemaker.
For those who don't know. Framemaker is a wordprocessor/dtp package for creating large, structured documents such as manuals or in my case, scientific articles. I know somebody who has written a few articles and a thesis with the linux beta. It was that good! I think he's going to be angry when he gets back from his holliday.
The framemaker way of working has been duplicated in KWord, so there's still some hope for the linux platform. Unfortunately, KWord lacks the portability framemaker has (currently is available on Mac, windows and solaris), also it is still a very immature product (0.something last time I checked).
You can stream fm radio quality sound using just 64 kbit. Many commercial radio stations are already available in the form of real audio or windows media streams. The upcoming generation of mobile phones will plenty of bandwidth available and will be connected to the internet (hint to mobile phone manufacturers: build in software for tuning in to streamed audio, this will be your desperately needed killer app).
So to answer your question, not only is there no point in doing so, it would be a waste of energy and resources to get these satelites up and running since by the time these things are operational, most people will have good alternatives available.
Satelite radio is a step backwards and it will come crashing down, just like iridium.
Freenet stores files under a unique name in a distributed filesystem (i.e. freenet). All you need to retrieve a file is it's name. It appears to me that this is Kahn's idea taken to the extreme. Freenet takes care of storing and retrieving objects with a unique identifier. The system could easily be extended with databases coupling relevant keywords to the identifier. Also it is safe, freenet is explicitly designed to hide the location of the files. Even the owner can't touch it after it has been put into freenet.
You are absolutely right. Somehow, I never need any documentation whatsoever installing one of the windows variants. My network card, video card, sound card are pretty much standard and are recognized by the windows installation without a glitch. As soon as I pop in a linux distribution (I tried debian, redhat and mandrake very recently) I start running in to trouble (network card is not recognized, I'm asked to enter refreshrates for a pnp monitor, soundcard (sb16!, probably the most standard soundcard) is not configured by default and so on). That's not a documentation problem, but simply the result of immature installation tools. Now I realize that installation is not a top priority at debian, but for a mainstream distribution like red hat, this is becoming pretty much unacceptable behavior. Mandrake tries to fix some of this but is rather buggy to say the least.
- there are opensource implementations of the JVM
- You can download the java spec from suns website, perhaps not as open as it could be but try to get document describing win32 in full
- JSP has a freeware implementation
- there are a lot of other opensource projects based on Java.
- there are multiple vendors selling Java development tools as well as opensource projects providing such tools
- there are dozens of other languages implemented on top of the JVM (check this site for a good overview. JPython is cool BTW!)
I hope this makes it clear for once and for all, Java is here to stay. It does most of whatbe sure to read his lips :) How naive!