Actually the guy is not against OO programming. In an IEEE article he makes a strong appeal for using script languages like TCL to script complex OO components. His company even has made a Java implementation of TCL for this purpose.
I think you can find a link to this article on the companies website www.scriptics.com
I suppose that's 30K lines of C code. The Java version of the same program would be much smaller (10k lines is more likely). Especially if you know the API's well and don't reinvent the wheel.
Also the code will be much cleaner since it doesn't contain strange macros (which by the way are not checked by the compiler for typing errors).
The real reason MS killed their Java products is because Sun succesfully prevented them from making it an MS specific language. When they realized that, they realized that they were competing against their own stuff (activeX, VB, Windows). So killing J++ probably was a healthy business decision from their perspective. After all what have they to gain from supporting a 100% cross platform language?
Unfortunately they are not able to innovate. VB still is based upon a crappy language called Basic. MS' first product was a basic compiler (they did not invent the language). All they did from then was add features to it that they saw in other, more promising languages. They added subroutines and even some OO like stuff but it is still Basic, a crappy scripting language.
Just because you can't do a rm -rf / doesn't mean you're safe, for most users a rm -rf ~/* is bad enough.
Security is not entirely an OS responsibility. The main reason why there are no activeX viruses for Unix is because on Unix there's no such thing as a downloadable activeX component. Not providing certain functionality indeed is a form of security but not a very elegant one.
Java provides its own platform and cannot count on OS level services (though it can use them if they are present). Security is something that was done very nicely in Java.
C++ is a rather limited language from a OO perspective. It provides a lot of poorly implemented OO features, most of which were done a lot better in Java. The only real advantage C++ has over Java is performance and being close to the hardware. The disadvantages list is a lot longer: longer code, crappy memory&thread management, no security features,.. I don't want to start a flaming war over Java performance (I'm sure somebody else already mentioned this topic and ignored all previous postings on this topic) but I'll just simply state that yes C++ is faster and no I don't care about that.
"It's not a done deed, it's a whole lot of hype coming from Sun Microsystems. If you think it's a true cross-platform initiative, please tell me where on an official site I can download the JVM for:"
There's no such thing as an official version. most major platforms have more than one version of the JDK. The specs are open, if you need to build a java version for any of the operating systems you mentioned you can do so your self.
You can't expect SUN to support every platform out there. BTW. I heard they are working on Linux support so that should solve your problem since BSD is able to run Linux binaries.
"The coffee fumes coming off that vaporware smell nice, but it's just plain not enough in the real world."
Conservatism in any form is appalling. You're a developer (I suppose) so open your mind a bit. Sure Java performance and availability on some platforms is less than desirable at the moment but with JDK 1.2 most cross platform problems are a thing of the past and if there are problems (usually due to bugs in a certain JDK implementation) they can be worked around. Usually getting a Java program to work on more than one platform poses very few problems and the porting effort is zero or very close to zero.
Anyway, I think the differences between all the versions of UNIX are bigger than the differences between Java virtual machines.
The top 10.com domains with the most distinct certificates found by the September SSL survey, run 213 Netscape servers [out of a total of 341 sites], against 42 Microsoft [of which 28 are in the microsoft.com domain], and 24 Apache. Equally notable is their choice of operating systems, where both NT and Linux, strongly represented in the SSL Survey as a whole have a relatively small share. Just 57 sites run NT, with the most common Unix systems according to signatures detected in the tcp/ip characteristics, being Solaris and AIX. Only one site was detected as running Linux.
This shows that on the really big servers netscape servers still rule. When you scrap the ms domains from the survey apache has a larger marketshare (scrapping ms is a good idea since price/performance/support probably did not play a role in choosing a webserver there).
The survey also tells us that both IIS and Apache saw a rise in marketshare for smaller SSL based stuff.
The last line is sort of interesting too since it shows that linux does not play a big role as a webserver platform for very large sites.
To add to this: HZ is a measure for frequency. It is equivalent to the SIS unit 1/s (s is second) or one per second. A MegaHerz MHZ is 1000000*1/s or 1000000HZ. GigaHerz just adds a factor 10^3. Simple
Right, and according to the article, SUN will have a beta ready before the end of the year. That's quite a good development speed they are keeping up there. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact they are developing in Java.
35 million lines of code sounds like a lot. But it makes a difference whether this code in one gigantic application or whether this amount of code is distributed over a lot of relatively independent components. If the latter is the case, it may very well be managable.
Software projects in defense industry are characterized by conservative design. Often the so called layers architecture is applied even when its not appropriate. Without knowing anything about the star wars project, this allows me to conclude that 25 million lines of code written like this probably is a mess. It's just not fair to compare that to win2000 which is based upon a very sound component model: COM.
If you want to make a comparison, take the source code of an entire linux distribution into mind rather than just the kernel. So ESR's main argument for discarding win2000 as a failure are not sound. Even though I don't like MS business practices, I cannot help but note that a lot of users of the release candidate versions of win2000 are generally happy with it.
Probably the major management consultancies' argument that you should wait until the first service pack is released is good advice. It applies to nearly every software package that you should wait until it has proven itself in practice before adopting it on a large scale.
I have to give ESR credit for the argument that ms software is taking an increasingly large marketshare of the system integrators since hardware prices are dropping. I have to add though that win2000 is not targeted at the bottom of the market but at more expensive workstations and servers.
It seems like ESR is using FUD practices to promote the virtues of OSS. While I don't think there's anything wrong with OSS, I'm not convinced that it will take over the whole software industry.
Radioactive dust from chernobyl settled down in northern Scandinavia (a few thousand kilometers north of chernobyl within the polar circle). The effects of the disaster were measurable (and still are) in most of norther europe.
Nuclear disasters like chernobyl affect large geographical areas and just the ukrainian government's assurance that everything is OK is not enough for me (I live in southern sweden). With the current economic situation in eastern europe, I fear that safety does not always come first as it should.
Chernobyl is a relatively old plant. The only reason it is still used is because there is not enough money to replace it. All this has disaster written all over it. Its only a matter of time before one of the eastern european plants meets with an accident.
"We do have the right as citizens to create militias, but it's the crazies and the bad media coverage that will eventually ruin that for us."
Unfortunately america is full of uneducated lunatics. And unfortunately those people tend to group in militia.
I think you are mistaking your right of free speech and your right to form a political party with the right to form a private army. Hitler, a german guy, did both in the thirties and the results were very bad for individual freedom.
"(NOTE: I AM NOT IN A MILITIA, NOR DO I EVER INTEND TO JOIN ONE.)"
Good for you, but a lot of other people are and I don't symphatize with any of them. I would sleep a lot better if their guns were taken away from them. People in militias are people who are plainly to stupid and ignorant to join a political party and use their constitutional right to change the system in a civilized way. Stupid people and guns is a deadly combination. Usually in a civil war intellectuals and smart people are the first to die when militia take control (look at places like Serbia and Rwanda if you don't believe me).
My government (in the netherlands in case you wonder) should protect me from this kind of people, that's what I vote for and that's why I pay my taxes.
"It's only a matter of time, and everybody (ie., people other than slashdotters, tech-junkies, and other members of their species;-) ) will be aware of the defiencies of MS products and the availability of better, cheaper alternatives."
Interestingly this is exactly how the author of the article described FUD: just wait and everything will get better!
The way I see it is that OSS works for software commodities, that is software that has been around long enough to loose its initial attractiveness. Once this attractiveness is lost people are no longer willing to pay enormous amounts of money for it.
Categories of software that can be classified as such are operating systems, word-processors, spreadsheets and so on. Interestingly this also applies to serverside stuff: mail servers, ftp servers, webservers and even database servers.
Companies selling software in the above list all use the same tactic: they somehow add value to the default functionality of the product thus making it special: ms bundles all sorts of stuff with their OS (which is still dos), they also bundle all their office stuff in one integrated package which in its turn mixes very well with the before mentioned OS. IBM and Oracle add management tools to their databases. Webservers are made attractive by offering management tools and integrating it with other stuff. The same applies to mailservers and ftp servers.
OSS is moving into new territories. The desktop, ms greatest added value to their OS, is becoming a commodity. So OSS will take over that too. MS has long realized this and has started to integrate all sorts of stuff in their OS. So far this tactic is working very well since the most used argument not to migrate to linux (on the desktop) is that windows applications just integrate better and are more feature rich. In due time this tactic will no longer work since OSS can provide users with the same level of integration (KDE) and functionality (many companies are working on or pondering linux version of their products).
What I hope I showed with this is that OSS is not suitable for all software, only the commodity software. Luckily, increasingly more software falls in that category.
This is a clear symptom of technocracy & bureaucracy. Both America and europe are changing from democracies into technocracies. The difference being that in the latter form you can still vote but it does not really matter what you vote. I'm very worried about this trend, since it will ultimately limit our freedom.
This decision (or attempt to do so) is late, intel launched the PIII months ago, by the time the decision will be taken (if ever) intel will be busy producing its next generation of cpu's.
It's also a technocratic decision since nobody (as far as I know) is asking for this decision. The EU people decided on its own (most likely with the help of some lobbying, amd?) that it might be a good idea to do this.
BTW. I think the trend of both the EU and the US changing into technocracies is caused by free market. So I don't think it would be a good idea to just let the market decide.
The free market serves only one interest: making as much money as you can. Free speech, privacy and human right are not a free market concern. Early this century we had free market, the results were horrible: big companies stressing their employers to the limit. Then we got labour movements, socialism and communism. After communism collapsed, capitalism became a little more socialistic (at least where I live).
Pure communism and pure capitalism are both a bad thing since they both suffer from the same problem: people are greedy and will try to abuse the system to suit their own needs. In the case of communism this leads to a repressive regime. In the case of capitalism it also leads to a repressive regime (taiwan, singapore, south korea).
"If people are really in a tizzy about this, they won't buy the chips"
One problem: most people lack the technical skills to make a well founded technical judgement of what this chip has to offer. Most users are not aware of the differences between a PII, a PII and a K7.
Personally I'm not so worried about this ID thing, there are other, easier ways to identify somebody. So, I think the EU is overreacting a little.
I think it is very well posible that the NSA made a deal about this ID with intel. At least I can't think of a good technical reason to introduce it and I refuse to believe that those intel guys are that clueless. So seen in this light, the european reaction is not so stupid.
If you design and create a tool that is harmfull like a virus or something, you are responsible for what happens to it. That means that publishing it on a mailinglist makes you responsible for the fact that it may fall in the hands of someone not so noble as you (i.e. someone that uses it to harm others).
Creating a weapon is one thing but freely distributing is another thing. You can't put a box of grenades out on the street and then leave claiming that everybody is responsible for his own deeds because you put that box of grenades there. If some kid plays with one of the grenades and accidentally blows itself to pieces, you can be blamed for that.
So, if you create harmful software (software whose only use is to harm others), you should license and distribute it in such a way that harmful use is prevented. The license should explicitly forbid using it in a harmfull way, not just provide a disclaimer. And it should definitely not be made available for anonymous download.
If you do the above, you can claim that you did what you could to prevent harmful use of the software.
I'd agree with you if it weren't for one thing: java's graphics performance is very poor. If you look at Hotjava for instance you see that it loads and parses pages nice and fast. It even manages to render them within a reasonable amount of time. But when you start scrolling down you notice that it's a bit slow with updating the screen. Smooth scrolling like ie does is impossible with Java at this moment (I exepect this to improve in future JDK's).
Otherwise Java would probably be a very nice choice: - it is very suitable for parsing (just check out the XML parsers for Java, they're probably the best (speed & quality) parsers you can find at this moment) - Porting is nearly trivial to platforms with a good java implementation. Unfortunately linux, apple and beos all have pretty lousy support for Java at this moment (in terms of performance, compatibility and stability). - a great deal has been invested in allowing java programs to integrate with the native platform without sacrificing platform independence (drag & drop, printing, GUI, cut/copy/paste, sound, 3d,...). Probably it is really hard to duplicate this effort in a C/C++ project. - The java API provides many things that can be reused in the browser.
The main arguments in favor of a Java browser are: - reuse of lots of existing stuff - platform independence - development speed - easy integration with different platforms
The main arguments against its usage would be: - poor graphics performance - lack of good Java implementations on some platforms - high memory usage, Java programs tend to use a lot of memory (despite the small code base)
Taiwan was/is a dictatorship. I'm not sure about the current political situation but only a few years ago they had a dictator. I think taiwan is the ultimate capitalist country, lots of money that gets distributed over its people very unevenly.
Places like hong kong, korea and taiwan are semi democratic. On paper the people get to elect a president but the country is really ruled by the big corporations that are owned by the same old families that have ruled for centuries.
What will happen in china is that there will be a few geographical spots where lots of money will be made: Hong Kong, Bejing and a few other places. The rest of the country will serve as a resource of cheap labor. Probably keeping the communist/dictator political model is more beneficial on the longer term for the chinese so I don't think it will go away.
The chinese made a clear choice at the beginning of this decade, they didn't want the chaos that currently exists in eastern europe. And somehow I think that was the right choice. The people in russia gained freedom of speech but lost everything else (including their dignity). The chinese have nothing to gain from chaos.
From a human rights perspective, I think it will be interesting to see what happens in the poor and uneducated regions in china. Places like Tibet are not fun places to be at the moment.
Probably china will be the first capitalistic/communist state. Communist in the sense of ideology not economics and capitalist underneath. It is the ultimate failure of communism.
OK, your making pretty much the same point I did: Mozilla uses a ms com like orb but ms did not invent it.
About the technical advantages of COM, sure it is convenient that you make a COM component of anything. This includes Java classes (through a bridge).
But why would people want to use RMI when they have COM? Apart from its platform independence, RMI can do some stuff COM cannot: download classes from a remote spot, serialize objects over a network connection and some other stuff. All this at the cost of language independence.
Likewise, JINI can use the same mechanisms to do cool stuff you simply cannot do with COM.
So a language dependency has the great advantage that you can do language specific stuff.
"Microsoft are big and considered evil, but they really do have some pretty neat technologies, and they manage to integrate them well into the windows api (giving them away free)."
I don't really think discussing companies in terms of good and evil makes much sense and of course MS did some neat stuff. I don't think COM is neat, though. A lot of win32 programmers seem to be really impressed with it but from where I'm standing its just a very simple ORB with lots of stuff strapped on top of it. I've seen much more impressive stuff like CORBA and voyager and considering this, MS could have pulled out something more advanced if they had taken the time to do the research & development instead of hacking a simple RPC mechanism on top of OLE.
Of course even a simple ORB allows you to do some neat distributed programming but that's not the point.
That's exactly the reason why the mozilla team used a COM like orb. It's relatively simple to implement, small, fast and provides what they need. I'm sure if rpc would have been in the requirements they would have chosen something more heavier: CORBA.
And they are right, it is. IE 5 is not HTML 4.0 compliant, does not conform to the XML 1.0 standard, makes a mess out of CSS 1.0, not to mention CSS 2.0, has a proprietary version of XSL.
The fact that netscape does not implement those standards is not relevant because it does not claim to do so.
I never said netscape was a good program, worse, I'm using ie 5 right now for the simple reason its better than ns 4.
"Uh. Yeah, you can not COMPONENTISE things, not reuse code and not add advanced features if you want to. "messy" is what I'd call netscape."
Agreed, they're both messy programs. But just wrapping your code in activeX doesn't make it any better. MS stuff has way to many dependencies on the lower level OS hence its poor security.
BTW. strange senctence: you cannot... unless you want to.
As far as I know mozilla is crossplatform which means it is definately not based on COM. Probably they use some sort of ORB that resembles COM. At this point I would like to point out that MS did not invent COM, it's just a classical example of their embrace and extend policy. COM in it self is not evil but the stuff they put on top of it at MS is.
"Standard support is the BEST of any browser currently out there"
Big deal they first wiped out the competition and only then could they claim to offer the best support for standards. Just wait two months or so, then mozilla comes out.
"Java is limited cause it's sand boxed, and already there are efforts to extend it with signatures."
As far as I know signatures/certificates are in JDK 1.1 and newer version. Java operates in a sandbox by default. With the use of certificates you can allow applets outside the sandbox. I think Java's certificate model is a bit more sophisticated then ie's security model.
"It looks like just a long list box, but there are advanced features, there are at least 5 different dialogs each with their own dialogs and settings especially for Java. IE allows a flexible range of customization and settings - MUCH more so that Netscape."
With the default settings, ie is very insecure since vbscript and activex stuff are enabled then. Netscape doesn't support these things and doesn't need the complex dialogs to turn them of.
"Security in some windows components are broken, which cause IE uses, makes IE broken (it's hard to draw the line where IE ends and other things start - ala COM)."
That's what we call a messy program. Netscape proves that you don't have to do things that way to make a browser so IE's insecurity is inexcusable.
You'd be a terrible person to work with. Suppose we'd be writing a report together. And I'm not using TeX, are you going to put me in position where I either remove all the gibberish from a stupid ascii file and then do the layout manually or will you let me print your document and let me figure out how to integrate the printed version with the document. Duh.
Postscript is not a format that's very suitable for editing. TeX is particularly lousy for exchanging documents. Basically all the exports to other wordprocessor fileformats are A one way, no way to read back an rtf file and maintain the layout B pretty lousy (HTML, rtf, wordperfect)
"That's what I do with my physics labs; of course, it's physics with other geeks who know what Postscript actually is, but..."
I know what postscript is and I know its only good for forwarding it to the printer (if your lucky enough to have a postscript printer). I found that ghostscript reads most but not all posscript so in most cases it is possible to get a printed version of the document.
Your wysiwig screen may contain all sorts of stuff that won't make it to the paper (outlines of graphic frames, paragraph break characters, table cell borders, etc.). I is rather convenient to be able to switch to a screen that just shows what is going to be printed.
"I have liked WP ever since I first used it (WP5.1)"
hmm. I have had long sessions with wp5.1 where I tried to fix the layout after changing the printerdriver. I had this star lc 20 printer in those days, the driver for that printer sucked.
I never really liked the 6.0 dos version (my computer was too slow for it). Later when I got a computer with win 3.1, I tried some of the windows versions. They were rather poor at that time.
Eventually I installed word 6.0. Which was still a bit flaky. After that came word 95 which is the best word version I encountered. Word 97 is too bloated. Last year I installed framemaker. If you want consistent layout and a friendly GUI, framemaker is a good compromise.
My main problem with framemaker is that the user interface is a bit primitive compared to word and wordperfect. Basically it's apple interface ported too windows. As a result it is a bit flaky in the look and feel. But, hey, it works and it doesn't mess my generally complex documents up.
"So what? In my experience, perl does a much better job than BASIC:o)"
Proponents of both languages claim it gets their job done quickly. Opponents of both languages claim that programming in them results in very messy code.
"Sorry... I meant "when I'm too lazy to use the command-line ftp to get files"
You're weird. On the one hand you choose to use an archaic and primitive tool like lynx and on the other hand you are too lazy to use a commandline tool.
"lynx doesn't really have to progress, in the usual sense of the word, in order to remain functional."
Well I just pointed out that it lacks functionality (your list of technologies) so that makes it less functional. But I got the answer I wanted: even you don't actually use lynx what it was made for: browse the web.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the guy is not against OO programming. In an IEEE article he makes a strong appeal for using script languages like TCL to script complex OO components. His company even has made a Java implementation of TCL for this purpose.
I think you can find a link to this article on the companies website www.scriptics.com
I suppose that's 30K lines of C code. The Java version of the same program would be much smaller (10k lines is more likely). Especially if you know the API's well and don't reinvent the wheel.
Also the code will be much cleaner since it doesn't contain strange macros (which by the way are not checked by the compiler for typing errors).
The real reason MS killed their Java products is because Sun succesfully prevented them from making it an MS specific language. When they realized that, they realized that they were competing against their own stuff (activeX, VB, Windows). So killing J++ probably was a healthy business decision from their perspective. After all what have they to gain from supporting a 100% cross platform language?
Unfortunately they are not able to innovate. VB still is based upon a crappy language called Basic. MS' first product was a basic compiler (they did not invent the language). All they did from then was add features to it that they saw in other, more promising languages. They added subroutines and even some OO like stuff but it is still Basic, a crappy scripting language.
bullshit
.. I don't want to start a flaming war over Java performance (I'm sure somebody else already mentioned this topic and ignored all previous postings on this topic) but I'll just simply state that yes C++ is faster and no I don't care about that.
Just because you can't do a rm -rf / doesn't mean you're safe, for most users a rm -rf ~/* is bad enough.
Security is not entirely an OS responsibility. The main reason why there are no activeX viruses for Unix is because on Unix there's no such thing as a downloadable activeX component. Not providing certain functionality indeed is a form of security but not a very elegant one.
Java provides its own platform and cannot count on OS level services (though it can use them if they are present). Security is something that was done very nicely in Java.
C++ is a rather limited language from a OO perspective. It provides a lot of poorly implemented OO features, most of which were done a lot better in Java. The only real advantage C++ has over Java is performance and being close to the hardware. The disadvantages list is a lot longer: longer code, crappy memory&thread management, no security features,
"It's not a done deed, it's a whole lot of hype coming from Sun Microsystems. If you think it's a true cross-platform initiative, please tell me where on an official site I can download the JVM for:"
There's no such thing as an official version. most major platforms have more than one version of the JDK. The specs are open, if you need to build a java version for any of the operating systems you mentioned you can do so your self.
You can't expect SUN to support every platform out there. BTW. I heard they are working on Linux support so that should solve your problem since BSD is able to run Linux binaries.
"The coffee fumes coming off that vaporware smell nice, but it's just plain not enough in the real world."
Conservatism in any form is appalling. You're a developer (I suppose) so open your mind a bit. Sure Java performance and availability on some platforms is less than desirable at the moment but with JDK 1.2 most cross platform problems are a thing of the past and if there are problems (usually due to bugs in a certain JDK implementation) they can be worked around. Usually getting a Java program to work on more than one platform poses very few problems and the porting effort is zero or very close to zero.
Anyway, I think the differences between all the versions of UNIX are bigger than the differences between Java virtual machines.
From the netcraft survey
.com domains with the most distinct certificates found by the September SSL survey, run 213 Netscape servers [out of a total of 341 sites], against 42 Microsoft [of which 28 are in the microsoft.com domain], and 24 Apache. Equally notable is their choice of operating systems, where both NT and Linux, strongly represented in the SSL Survey as a whole have a relatively small share. Just 57 sites run NT, with the most common Unix systems according to signatures detected in the tcp/ip characteristics, being Solaris and AIX. Only one site was detected as running Linux.
The top 10
This shows that on the really big servers netscape servers still rule. When you scrap the ms domains from the survey apache has a larger marketshare (scrapping ms is a good idea since price/performance/support probably did not play a role in choosing a webserver there).
The survey also tells us that both IIS and Apache saw a rise in marketshare for smaller SSL based stuff.
The last line is sort of interesting too since it shows that linux does not play a big role as a webserver platform for very large sites.
To add to this: HZ is a measure for frequency. It is equivalent to the SIS unit 1/s (s is second) or one per second. A MegaHerz MHZ is 1000000*1/s or 1000000HZ. GigaHerz just adds a factor 10^3.
Simple
Right, and according to the article, SUN will have a beta ready before the end of the year. That's quite a good development speed they are keeping up there. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact they are developing in Java.
35 million lines of code sounds like a lot. But it makes a difference whether this code in one gigantic application or whether this amount of code is distributed over a lot of relatively independent components. If the latter is the case, it may very well be managable.
Software projects in defense industry are characterized by conservative design. Often the so called layers architecture is applied even when its not appropriate. Without knowing anything about the star wars project, this allows me to conclude that 25 million lines of code written like this probably is a mess. It's just not fair to compare that to win2000 which is based upon a very sound component model: COM.
If you want to make a comparison, take the source code of an entire linux distribution into mind rather than just the kernel. So ESR's main argument for discarding win2000 as a failure are not sound. Even though I don't like MS business practices, I cannot help but note that a lot of users of the release candidate versions of win2000 are generally happy with it.
Probably the major management consultancies' argument that you should wait until the first service pack is released is good advice. It applies to nearly every software package that you should wait until it has proven itself in practice before adopting it on a large scale.
I have to give ESR credit for the argument that ms software is taking an increasingly large marketshare of the system integrators since hardware prices are dropping. I have to add though that win2000 is not targeted at the bottom of the market but at more expensive workstations and servers.
It seems like ESR is using FUD practices to promote the virtues of OSS. While I don't think there's anything wrong with OSS, I'm not convinced that it will take over the whole software industry.
Radioactive dust from chernobyl settled down in northern Scandinavia (a few thousand kilometers north of chernobyl within the polar circle). The effects of the disaster were measurable (and still are) in most of norther europe.
Nuclear disasters like chernobyl affect large geographical areas and just the ukrainian government's assurance that everything is OK is not enough for me (I live in southern sweden). With the current economic situation in eastern europe, I fear that safety does not always come first as it should.
Chernobyl is a relatively old plant. The only reason it is still used is because there is not enough money to replace it. All this has disaster written all over it. Its only a matter of time before one of the eastern european plants meets with an accident.
"We do have the right as citizens to create militias, but it's the crazies and the bad media coverage that will eventually ruin that for us."
Unfortunately america is full of uneducated lunatics. And unfortunately those people tend to group in militia.
I think you are mistaking your right of free speech and your right to form a political party with the right to form a private army. Hitler, a german guy, did both in the thirties and the results were very bad for individual freedom.
"(NOTE: I AM NOT IN A MILITIA, NOR DO I EVER INTEND TO JOIN ONE.)"
Good for you, but a lot of other people are and I don't symphatize with any of them. I would sleep a lot better if their guns were taken away from them. People in militias are people who are plainly to stupid and ignorant to join a political party and use their constitutional right to change the system in a civilized way. Stupid people and guns is a deadly combination. Usually in a civil war intellectuals and smart people are the first to die when militia take control (look at places like Serbia and Rwanda if you don't believe me).
My government (in the netherlands in case you wonder) should protect me from this kind of people, that's what I vote for and that's why I pay my taxes.
"It's only a matter of time, and everybody (ie., people other than slashdotters, tech-junkies, and other members of their species ;-) ) will be aware of the defiencies of MS products and the availability of better, cheaper alternatives."
Interestingly this is exactly how the author of the article described FUD: just wait and everything will get better!
The way I see it is that OSS works for software commodities, that is software that has been around long enough to loose its initial attractiveness. Once this attractiveness is lost people are no longer willing to pay enormous amounts of money for it.
Categories of software that can be classified as such are operating systems, word-processors, spreadsheets and so on. Interestingly this also applies to serverside stuff: mail servers, ftp servers, webservers and even database servers.
Companies selling software in the above list all use the same tactic: they somehow add value to the default functionality of the product thus making it special: ms bundles all sorts of stuff with their OS (which is still dos), they also bundle all their office stuff in one integrated package which in its turn mixes very well with the before mentioned OS. IBM and Oracle add management tools to their databases. Webservers are made attractive by offering management tools and integrating it with other stuff. The same applies to mailservers and ftp servers.
OSS is moving into new territories. The desktop, ms greatest added value to their OS, is becoming a commodity. So OSS will take over that too. MS has long realized this and has started to integrate all sorts of stuff in their OS. So far this tactic is working very well since the most used argument not to migrate to linux (on the desktop) is that windows applications just integrate better and are more feature rich. In due time this tactic will no longer work since OSS can provide users with the same level of integration (KDE) and functionality (many companies are working on or pondering linux version of their products).
What I hope I showed with this is that OSS is not suitable for all software, only the commodity software. Luckily, increasingly more software falls in that category.
This is a clear symptom of technocracy & bureaucracy. Both America and europe are changing from democracies into technocracies. The difference being that in the latter form you can still vote but it does not really matter what you vote. I'm very worried about this trend, since it will ultimately limit our freedom.
This decision (or attempt to do so) is late, intel launched the PIII months ago, by the time the decision will be taken (if ever) intel will be busy producing its next generation of cpu's.
It's also a technocratic decision since nobody (as far as I know) is asking for this decision. The EU people decided on its own (most likely with the help of some lobbying, amd?) that it might be a good idea to do this.
BTW. I think the trend of both the EU and the US changing into technocracies is caused by free market. So I don't think it would be a good idea to just let the market decide.
The free market serves only one interest: making as much money as you can. Free speech, privacy and human right are not a free market concern. Early this century we had free market, the results were horrible: big companies stressing their employers to the limit. Then we got labour movements, socialism and communism. After communism collapsed, capitalism became a little more socialistic (at least where I live).
Pure communism and pure capitalism are both a bad thing since they both suffer from the same problem: people are greedy and will try to abuse the system to suit their own needs. In the case of communism this leads to a repressive regime. In the case of capitalism it also leads to a repressive regime (taiwan, singapore, south korea).
"If people are really in a tizzy about this, they won't buy the chips"
One problem: most people lack the technical skills to make a well founded technical judgement of what this chip has to offer. Most users are not aware of the differences between a PII, a PII and a K7.
Personally I'm not so worried about this ID thing, there are other, easier ways to identify somebody. So, I think the EU is overreacting a little.
I think it is very well posible that the NSA made a deal about this ID with intel. At least I can't think of a good technical reason to introduce it and I refuse to believe that those intel guys are that clueless. So seen in this light, the european reaction is not so stupid.
Right!
If you design and create a tool that is harmfull like a virus or something, you are responsible for what happens to it. That means that publishing it on a mailinglist makes you responsible for the fact that it may fall in the hands of someone not so noble as you (i.e. someone that uses it to harm others).
Creating a weapon is one thing but freely distributing is another thing. You can't put a box of grenades out on the street and then leave claiming that everybody is responsible for his own deeds because you put that box of grenades there. If some kid plays with one of the grenades and accidentally blows itself to pieces, you can be blamed for that.
So, if you create harmful software (software whose only use is to harm others), you should license and distribute it in such a way that harmful use is prevented. The license should explicitly forbid using it in a harmfull way, not just provide a disclaimer. And it should definitely not be made available for anonymous download.
If you do the above, you can claim that you did what you could to prevent harmful use of the software.
I'd agree with you if it weren't for one thing: java's graphics performance is very poor. If you look at Hotjava for instance you see that it loads and parses pages nice and fast. It even manages to render them within a reasonable amount of time. But when you start scrolling down you notice that it's a bit slow with updating the screen. Smooth scrolling like ie does is impossible with Java at this moment (I exepect this to improve in future JDK's).
...). Probably it is really hard to duplicate this effort in a C/C++ project.
Otherwise Java would probably be a very nice choice:
- it is very suitable for parsing (just check out the XML parsers for Java, they're probably the best (speed & quality) parsers you can find at this moment)
- Porting is nearly trivial to platforms with a good java implementation. Unfortunately linux, apple and beos all have pretty lousy support for Java at this moment (in terms of performance, compatibility and stability).
- a great deal has been invested in allowing java programs to integrate with the native platform without sacrificing platform independence (drag & drop, printing, GUI, cut/copy/paste, sound, 3d,
- The java API provides many things that can be reused in the browser.
The main arguments in favor of a Java browser are:
- reuse of lots of existing stuff
- platform independence
- development speed
- easy integration with different platforms
The main arguments against its usage would be:
- poor graphics performance
- lack of good Java implementations on some platforms
- high memory usage, Java programs tend to use a lot of memory (despite the small code base)
the page says they used rh 5.2
Taiwan was/is a dictatorship. I'm not sure about the current political situation but only a few years ago they had a dictator. I think taiwan is the ultimate capitalist country, lots of money that gets distributed over its people very unevenly.
Places like hong kong, korea and taiwan are semi democratic. On paper the people get to elect a president but the country is really ruled by the big corporations that are owned by the same old families that have ruled for centuries.
What will happen in china is that there will be a few geographical spots where lots of money will be made: Hong Kong, Bejing and a few other places. The rest of the country will serve as a resource of cheap labor. Probably keeping the communist/dictator political model is more beneficial on the longer term for the chinese so I don't think it will go away.
The chinese made a clear choice at the beginning of this decade, they didn't want the chaos that currently exists in eastern europe. And somehow I think that was the right choice. The people in russia gained freedom of speech but lost everything else (including their dignity). The chinese have nothing to gain from chaos.
From a human rights perspective, I think it will be interesting to see what happens in the poor and uneducated regions in china. Places like Tibet are not fun places to be at the moment.
Probably china will be the first capitalistic/communist state. Communist in the sense of ideology not economics and capitalist underneath. It is the ultimate failure of communism.
OK, your making pretty much the same point I did:
Mozilla uses a ms com like orb but ms did not invent it.
About the technical advantages of COM, sure it is convenient that you make a COM component of anything. This includes Java classes (through a bridge).
But why would people want to use RMI when they have COM? Apart from its platform independence, RMI can do some stuff COM cannot: download classes from a remote spot, serialize objects over a network connection and some other stuff. All this at the cost of language independence.
Likewise, JINI can use the same mechanisms to do cool stuff you simply cannot do with COM.
So a language dependency has the great advantage that you can do language specific stuff.
"Microsoft are big and considered evil, but they really do have some pretty neat technologies, and they manage to integrate them well into the windows api (giving them away free)."
I don't really think discussing companies in terms of good and evil makes much sense and of course MS did some neat stuff. I don't think COM is neat, though. A lot of win32 programmers seem to be really impressed with it but from where I'm standing its just a very simple ORB with lots of stuff strapped on top of it. I've seen much more impressive stuff like CORBA and voyager and considering this, MS could have pulled out something more advanced if they had taken the time to do the research & development instead of hacking a simple RPC mechanism on top of OLE.
Of course even a simple ORB allows you to do some neat distributed programming but that's not the point.
That's exactly the reason why the mozilla team used a COM like orb. It's relatively simple to implement, small, fast and provides what they need. I'm sure if rpc would have been in the requirements they would have chosen something more heavier: CORBA.
"The original post said IE was bad at standards."
... unless you want to.
And they are right, it is. IE 5 is not HTML 4.0 compliant, does not conform to the XML 1.0 standard, makes a mess out of CSS 1.0, not to mention CSS 2.0, has a proprietary version of XSL.
The fact that netscape does not implement those standards is not relevant because it does not claim to do so.
I never said netscape was a good program, worse, I'm using ie 5 right now for the simple reason its better than ns 4.
"Uh. Yeah, you can not COMPONENTISE things, not reuse code and not add advanced features if you want to. "messy" is what I'd call netscape."
Agreed, they're both messy programs. But just wrapping your code in activeX doesn't make it any better. MS stuff has way to many dependencies on the lower level OS hence its poor security.
BTW. strange senctence: you cannot
As far as I know mozilla is crossplatform which means it is definately not based on COM. Probably they use some sort of ORB that resembles COM. At this point I would like to point out that MS did not invent COM, it's just a classical example of their embrace and extend policy. COM in it self is not evil but the stuff they put on top of it at MS is.
"Standard support is the BEST of any browser currently out there"
Big deal they first wiped out the competition and only then could they claim to offer the best support for standards. Just wait two months or so, then mozilla comes out.
"Java is limited cause it's sand boxed, and already there are efforts to extend it with signatures."
As far as I know signatures/certificates are in JDK 1.1 and newer version. Java operates in a sandbox by default. With the use of certificates you can allow applets outside the sandbox. I think Java's certificate model is a bit more sophisticated then ie's security model.
"It looks like just a long list box, but there are advanced features, there are at least 5 different dialogs each with their own dialogs and settings especially for Java. IE allows a flexible range of customization and settings - MUCH more so that Netscape."
With the default settings, ie is very insecure since vbscript and activex stuff are enabled then.
Netscape doesn't support these things and doesn't need the complex dialogs to turn them of.
"Security in some windows components are broken, which cause IE uses, makes IE broken (it's hard to draw the line where IE ends and other things start - ala COM)."
That's what we call a messy program. Netscape proves that you don't have to do things that way to make a browser so IE's insecurity is inexcusable.
You'd be a terrible person to work with. Suppose we'd be writing a report together. And I'm not using TeX, are you going to put me in position where I either remove all the gibberish from a stupid ascii file and then do the layout manually or will you let me print your document and let me figure out how to integrate the printed version with the document. Duh.
Postscript is not a format that's very suitable for editing. TeX is particularly lousy for exchanging documents. Basically all the exports to other wordprocessor fileformats are
A one way, no way to read back an rtf file and maintain the layout
B pretty lousy (HTML, rtf, wordperfect)
"That's what I do with my physics labs; of course, it's physics with other geeks who know what Postscript actually is, but..."
I know what postscript is and I know its only good for forwarding it to the printer (if your lucky enough to have a postscript printer). I found that ghostscript reads most but not all posscript so in most cases it is possible to get a printed version of the document.
Your wysiwig screen may contain all sorts of stuff that won't make it to the paper (outlines of graphic frames, paragraph break characters, table cell borders, etc.). I is rather convenient to be able to switch to a screen that just shows what is going to be printed.
"I have liked WP ever since I first used it (WP5.1)"
hmm. I have had long sessions with wp5.1 where I tried to fix the layout after changing the printerdriver. I had this star lc 20 printer in those days, the driver for that printer sucked.
I never really liked the 6.0 dos version (my computer was too slow for it). Later when I got a computer with win 3.1, I tried some of the windows versions. They were rather poor at that time.
Eventually I installed word 6.0. Which was still a bit flaky. After that came word 95 which is the best word version I encountered. Word 97 is too bloated. Last year I installed framemaker. If you want consistent layout and a friendly GUI, framemaker is a good compromise.
My main problem with framemaker is that the user interface is a bit primitive compared to word and wordperfect. Basically it's apple interface ported too windows. As a result it is a bit flaky in the look and feel. But, hey, it works and it doesn't mess my generally complex documents up.
and what do you use to share your documents with your classmates?
:(
damn should 've used the preview
and what do you use to share our documents with your classmates?
"So what? In my experience, perl does a much better job than BASIC :o)"
Proponents of both languages claim it gets their job done quickly. Opponents of both languages claim that programming in them results in very messy code.
"Sorry... I meant "when I'm too lazy to use the command-line ftp to get files"
You're weird. On the one hand you choose to use an archaic and primitive tool like lynx and on the other hand you are too lazy to use a commandline tool.
"lynx doesn't really have to progress, in the usual sense of the word, in order to remain functional."
Well I just pointed out that it lacks functionality (your list of technologies) so that makes it less functional. But I got the answer I wanted: even you don't actually use lynx what it was made for: browse the web.