"First off, proprietary extensions are not in the practical standard. The practical standard currently is what can be reasonably expected to look good on Netscape 4.x, IE4 and IE5 (ambitious developers include Netscape 3.x, IE3 and Opera)."
Yes and no, most serious webdevelopers maintain browser specific versions of their sites and those contain the propietary stuff.
"How? If they've been developing their sites right, leaving them alone will work just fine with Mozilla."
The right way would be to stick to HTML 3.0 (as far as I know that's the only thing supported by all browsers in a reasonably consistent way). Many webdevelopers don't wish to restrict themselves that much.
"No, because using any MS-proprietary XSL tricks wouldn't work on any of the "standard" browsers other than IE5, so it won't be in the practical standard."
IE's marketshare is going to convince a lot of developers to use those features, or rather it will be hard to convince the developers using these features now to stop using them.
"but I suspect that Mozilla based browsers will spread faster than you think."
I hope so, but I don't think it will survive on just its technical merits. Most users are hardly aware of what they are running, they sure aint going to worry about some 'standard' compatible browser.
Still I think MS has one disadvantage: ie only is stable on their OS. Basically their weakspot is the embedded machines. According to many marketing research those things are going to make the PC obsolete. Mozilla can operate on these things, IE can't (not yet).
sgml is too complex, at least the people who developed XML thought so.
LaTex is useless as an output format (you don't want to edit the output anyway). Lets go straight to postscript/pdf.
Otherwise I agree that SGML is very useful for some purposes. But basically the domain you mentioned (technical documentation) is the only domain it is really used.
"By saying they are "unproven", you're admitting they have yet to fail. "
You got me here:) What I was trying to say is that so far OSS seems to be succesfull in other areas than the desktop. I have a strong feeling that the commercial software software industry wants to move on to making higher level software. By that I mean they are starting to realize that the market for lower level software like operating systems or simple mail servers is satisfied. Microsoft, apple or sun is not going to win any customers by rewriting the kernels of their operating system (though arguably that would be a good thing in some cases) because most users simply don't care about what powers their wordprocessors and webbrowsers. What is a profitable area is the stuff that runs ontop of an operating system though even there you see that some applications are so common that they no longer offer the fat profit margins they used to have. Software is subject to inflation, it gets less profitable over time. Nobody is willing to spend 100s of dollars on an OS that just runs your system, it needs to have something extra to be worth that amount of money. The same applies to a lot of other programs. Take development tools for instance. Nobody is paying money for just a compiler, in many cases you get the compiler for free. What brings in the money for development tool producing companies is the stuff that runs on top of the compiler (i.e. the IDE, debugger and prefab components).
The trend I'm seeing is that the stuff that has dropped below a certain profit level is open sourced. In a way OSS has increased the inflation speed by 'attacking' products that are still profitable.
This view I presented here sort of contradicts the accepted view on this site that OSS software is going to dominate everything. From where I'm standing, OSS gets to implement and reinvent the stuff that is no longer profitable enough. In many cases the reinvented version is better than the original so I see it as a good thing.
Now, seeing how lynx is very useful on more than occasion, here's how I use it:
fetching pages for perl to munch on (lynx -source...)
Q&D downloads of files when I don't know the URL (if I DO know the URL, wget is much better fot this)
I'm telnetted into someone else's box over a modem, and running a GUI browser is truly rude
many other uses which I can't think of right now
(1) You call perl progress? Even basic has a more readable syntax. Anyway, downloading stuff is something is not a unique feature of lynx. (2)I don't see how lynx helps you find something that you forgot the URL of unless it has an integrated search engine. In any case you're probably better of with a ftp client. (3) Try running your browser locally, the idea of thin client is not that you remotely run a network client. (4) I can't think of any useful uses either.
I think the only real situation where lynx would offer any advatages over a GUI browser would be if you were on a computer to slow to run a GUI. I noticed surfing the web is not in your list.
Also you mentioned progress in relation to a lot of technology that lynx doesn't support. We can discuss them in great length but I don't feel like it right now. I'll simply conclude with stating that lynx doesn't offer any replacements and is definitely not something that can be qualified as progress.
Lynx is just a gopher client with some addons. Gopher is as good as dead, the world moved on about five years ago.
Now would the biased person who moderated me down please restore my karma, I think his moderation skills are a bit 'overrated'. I think moderation is slipping anyway, I noticed a lot less postings actually are moderated. Perhaps it would help if more moderation points were given to people. I only get 5 or so every few weeks.
I think we need to focus on the word standard here. From my point of view there are two standards: - the stuff that w3c poors out: the formal standard - that what people actually use: the practical standard.
Right now the practical standard is a mixture of HTML 3.0 and HTML 4.0 with lots of propietary extensions. Mozilla will be fully HTML 4.0 compliant, that's different from the current practical standard. So that means more work for web developers. If it's backward compatible with some extensions, that means even less motivation to abandon them.
I think the HTML spec is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned as soon as possible. For me that would be when I could use XML, XSL and stylesheets. Then I could use XSL to provide backwards compatibility. Unfortunately MS is doing everything to let XML, XSL and stylesheets go the same way as HTML: they are providing propietary extensions. So again the practical standard will deviate from the formal standard. The only hope for preventing this is a quick (within months) acceptation of mozilla by a large share of the web community (I'm thinking 40% or more of the web users here). Just looking at the figures of usage of the latest generation of browsers will show you that that is not going to happen (sorry don't have those figures readily available so please post them if you have them).
Perhaps the development wouldn't stop on the Gimp if adobe released photoshop but it would cause most of its more serious users to abandon it. 100$ is nothing for a tool you use to make a living on.
The main motivation for creating the Gimp was because there wasn't a good pixel editing program on Linux. If that reason is taken away, what exactly is the motivation for creating it? Providing a free alternative?
Propietary software won't damage linux but will establish it as a mainstream OS. I don't see that as a wrong thing.
In fact the coming of/need for propietary software signals an important thing: the partial failure of OSS. Apparently OSS can't serve the need of normal users in providing programs to run on the OS (wordprocessors, programming environments, spreadsheets, browsers). Though there are OSS variants of all the things I mentioned they all have propietary counterparts that are better. If you want to create documents you can use TeX, if you want a handy tool to use to create your document you'll need to obtain a propietary one.
I realize I'm pissing of a lot of people here by claiming that OSS partially failed. But I fail to see its success on the desktop (I'm not talking about server applications). Sure there are a lot of projects (the gimp, K office, mozilla) but they are all unproven (unlike linux itself and the lower level stuff that runs on it).
they 'support' jdk 1.2. Does this mean they've actually provided a full java 2 platform for linux?
If so that would be great, if not I'm not going to bother with it. One of the previous version's biggest annoyances was that you were stuck with jdk 1.1. Which is why it quickly found it's way to the garbage can (sorry, no/dev/null on winnt). I was impressed with it's way of connecting beans though.
Why does evrybody seem to assume the whole world will be jumping on mozilla as soon as its released. They won't, you'll just be coding another version of your page for yet another browser. The fact that the new browser actually implements a standard doesn't matter. There's just too many netscape 3 and 4, ie 3,4 and 5 browsers still in use. And I leave out the people who are running other browsers (opera, lynx, hotjava). Mozilla will be yet another not fully backwards compatible browser.
For the whole world to abandon the current non standard HTML versions will take years. As long as that doesn't happen we'll be coding for more than one version of HTML. Unless you are prepared to dump the majority of your potentially visitors of course.
One way of solving this is to automate the process of supporting multiple versions of HTML instead of handcoding them. For that to be possible the server would have to be able to make a distinction between the different browsers and apply the right transformations (XSL?) to a page.
Does anybody have an idea when K-office will be finished. Last time I checked things looked promising. I'm particularly interested in K-Office, I'm a framemaker user right now but I'm not really happy with its interface.
I would like to propose the name lince :)
on
Linux on Palm
·
· Score: 2
Very cool that linux also runs on a palm. Now the next problem is what type of applications to run on it. It will probably take some time before small enough productivity apps are developed. Also there is the problem of supporting all the mostly propietary communication stuff that usually runs on top of a palm computer.
If you put it like that you are right. But you should consider that even free software under the GPL license has restrictions: namely that I can't use it to create something new and keep the changes propietary. That is a restriction of freedom that other licenses don't have.
Not that I want to start a discussion on that, I just wanted to show that there is no real freedom. I personally would have no objections in excluding certain people or groups of people in this world from using my software. I see that as a form of freedom (free to choose who may and may not use the software). By doing so you can make a political statement with your creations. To confuse you even more, limiting the freedom of use may increase the level of freedom other individuals experience.
I don't like dogmatic discussions. Which is one of the reasons I'm not a Richard Stallman fan.
The whole idea of OSS is that OSS software is open to anybody, that includes countries like China. They can do as they see fit. If they want to make linux their official OS, whatever they mean by that, it is their legal right to do so.
Perhaps it is a good thing to realize that if you are giving your software away under GPL like licenses, you enable governments of countries like Iran, China and Iraque to use your software in any way they want to. If you don't want that, don't release it under GPL. After all any software you write can be used against you or somebody else.
Things like encryption are considered to be weapons by the US government. While this on it self is rediculous, it is good to realize that your software may be used in ways you don't appreciate. An OSS database for instance can be used to create and maintain a database of enemies of the public republic of china.
I'm not a license expert but wouldn't it be possible to exclude certain parties of using your software in a license. I.e. would it be possible to state in the license that you don't want government institutions of the republic of china to use this software? I'm sure many people don't like the idea of supporting certain regimes.
Communism on it self wasn't a bad idea, it's major flaw, according to me, is that it rules out things like greed and selfishness which of course doesn't work in practice since every person on this planet is in principle selfish and will ultimately favor his/her own interests above the common interest. It's exactly those things that converted the newly formed communistic states earlier this century in ordinary dictatorship. The communistic idealism is used as a tool to repress the people of those states. The motivations for the communistic revolution were not evil, the result of it was.
What most americans don't seem to realize is that they live in a society where information is controlled by the big media corporations. In the recent 'war' in bosnia, iraque and kosovo, CNN wasn't exactly critical, they broadcasted pretty much anything the US army threw at them.
I'm not saying that the situation is the same as in china but I'm simply stating that you are not as free as you would like to think. Your government is pretty successful in manipulating the publics opinion. You're free to think whatever you want, the government simply tries to influence what you want by spreading their version of the truth through the media.
As for linux becoming the official OS of a communist country, I'm not surpised. The OSS model is sort of communistic itself and since it works very well it is good publicity for communism in general. Also the chinese will probably appreciate the fact that they won't be accused of illegal copying of software if they use OSS software.
I agree that the hype has taken disproportional sizes at some time. But that aplies to almost any technology of the past few years: www, linux, windows, XML, visual basic, corba, activeX,.....
All these things have been hyped and got lots of ill informed media attention. Also all of them have survived the hype stage (well perhaps activeX didn't). In my opinion Java is getting past the hype stage too and I expect such a thing to be recognized by people posting on a site dominated by technology news. It's a bit disappointing to see the same shittyy arguments used over and over again. I don't mind a little well funded criticism but just whining "Java is slow, use xxx instead, you #@!@##" fals into the troll category as far as I'm concerned.
You got a good point here, but still a removable harddisk offers some advantages over a fixed harddrive (as long as the price of the player is so much higher as the cost of a harddrive) that make it worth it.
People keep saying that; perhaps I'm overlooking the obvious, but I sure don't see this."
OK, I can't put any examples out of my big hat and I'm to lazy to go and search for it. But considering the huge amounts of investments made by SUN, IBM and others on getting Java to work on any platform you can name, they must expect some return on their investment. You do the math, but that tells me Java is increasingly succesfull on the server.
"So if JIT is the solution, why do we need this beast at all? "
As I explained later on in my post, a dynamic compiler like hotspot can do something a static compiler (typically used for C) namely using information gathered at runtime to perform optimizations. This is a major advantage on architectures that require the compiler to optimize the instruction stream for the processor. Further more Java and threads are a good combination (one of the reasons for Java's success on the server). And MAJC is very good for running multithreaded stuff.
"If you're looking for paralleism in the instruction stream, we call that pipelining."
VLIW chips like MAJC and IA-64 do the pipelining in software (at least discovering paralellism and optimizing the instruction stream). It's not new I know. I just explained why a dynamic compiler has an advantage over static compilers in doing so.
"In short, all the claims they make about benefitting from multi-threading can be equally applied to other CPUs. What's left is marketing spew, positioning this as "Java-optimized". Which sure isn't going to help them in the market I know."
The market you are working in is changin rapidly. With fast chips getting dirt cheap, the rules of the game are changing. Coding everything in assembler is not really an option anymore because that slows down time to market. Similarly, more and more is implemented in C++ rather than C on many embedded platforms. I work together with Axis (a swedish company building embedded machines) for my research and I know their main problem is the fact that they have to maintain a huge source tree of C++ code (100K+ LOC). This slows them down in introducing new products.
So because of this, Java will become an option in your market too.
"In short, all the claims they make about benefitting from multi-threading can be equally applied to other CPUs."
I don't see that, the article was quite convincing in comparing IA-64 and MAJC. Only time will tell which is the faster processor since neither is available at this moment. Something tells me IA-64 will be a major disappointment. Maybe SUN will screw up on MAJC but the architecture doesn't sound half bad. More likely is that intel and motorola will 'borrow' some of the ideas for this processor in their next generation CPUs.
As has been pointed out before, Linux is not yet a good math on high end server platforms because it lacks certain features. Probably this will be resolved in due time but for now linux is not competing in that area.
"Price/ performance for Sun hardware"
Hardware and OS licenses are only small portion of the cost on big servers. These things have to be maintained by expensive staff and they have to run expensive, tailored software. If price performance of the hardware/OS was the only consideration, they would have been out of business long time ago.
On the long term I can see Linux replacing Solaris. Obviously all the UNIX giants (Sun, IBM, SGI) know this and are generally cooperative towards Linux (at least more then a certain Redmond based company).
why not make the harddrive arbitrary. Now a 13GB hardrive might be possible but who knows what size of hardrive we will be able to buy next year. I'd love to plug in a 50 GB harddrive when one comes available (assuming 2 1/2 inch and whatever interface the current drive is using, IDE?)
Java is not slow because it executes slower than natively compiled code. In fact natively compiling Java code doesn't help you much since the execution speed is not the main cause for its slowness. Benchmarks actually show hotspot and IBMs VM faster then native compilers for Java.
The real reason that Java is slower has to do with how Java manages objects and memory. Unlike languages like C/C++, Java uses a more dynamic form of memory management. This makes allocations slower and also the deallocation process (by the garbage collector) is slower. Then there are several other issues that also slow down java.
But none of them has to do with the fact that Java is interpreted (or rather JIT compiled). Theoreticially, if it weren't for these issues, Java would be faster than C/C++ since dynamic compilers like hotspot can do something that static compilers like the ones used for C and C++ cannot do: using runtime information to steer the optimizations.
I do agree with the poster that eventually most of the current problems with Java will either be solved or won't be so much of a problem because of cheaper, faster hardware. Eventually Moore's law will solve this issue.
Also I saw somebody whine about the performance of 3d graphics in Java. Apparently this person is not aware of the fact that Java only provides an API for the 3d rendering. The actual rendering happens natively. The advantage of this is that you can write renderer and OS independent 3d graphics applications.
If you still have doubts about the use of interpreted languages in 3D applications, both quake 3 and unreal use an intrepreted scripting language. I think John Carmack even played with the idea to include a Java vm in quake.
Ps. Why is it that everytime the word Java is dropped on this site, the anti MS FUD people start spreading fud and other ill informed arguments about it Java. I mean, this is a site about technical subjects, most people posting here are obviously techies too and yet they manage to poor out all this bullshit about a subject that gets plenty of media attention. Most of the arguments broad forward in this post have been used before in postings on other stories. And despite this if Java is in the news again tomorrow or so, the whining will start all over again. It is a bit depressing that some people are stuck on their current, rather mediocre, knowledge level. I have learned a great deal since I started reading slashdot nearly a year ago.
Sure the porting process would be faster, but it would scare of a lot of potential processing power. As you well know, there are several organizations doing distributed computing, so a new client is competing with all of those organizations. To be successful it will have to be friendly to its users. Windows users like programs with a gui. Personally I would prefer it to minimize into the traybar where it doesn't bother me. Alternatively i would like to run it as a service, that way it wouldn't bother me at all.
1) you seem to have a double standard: on one side you want people to recognize your electronic signature but on the other side you are not prepared to receive electronic confirmations of stuff you signed. Odd.
2) You use a very primitive email reader (one that only displays ASCII), while this isprobably good enough for most applications, the majority of users uses a more advanced mail client (one that allows HTML layout). So from my point of view you're blocking progress by demanding that everything sent to you is in ancient ascii. Really if HTML is such a big problem to you, use an email client with lynx embedded (if it doesn't exist you may develop it yourself) or something but don't bother the rest of the world with whining that you can't read HTML.
That's the part I disagreed with. I do agree with you that this way of notifying leaves to much room for abuse by bigger companies. Email is rather popular these days but many people still don't check their email on a daily or even weekly basis.
Also I have a big doubt about the type of encryption used for the signatures. I don't like the idea that somebody can crack the encrypted signature and can start using my signature. And that is something that is going to happen if they use 56 bit encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
"First off, proprietary extensions are not in the practical standard. The practical standard currently is what can be reasonably expected to look good on Netscape 4.x, IE4 and IE5 (ambitious developers include Netscape 3.x, IE3 and Opera)."
Yes and no, most serious webdevelopers maintain browser specific versions of their sites and those contain the propietary stuff.
"How? If they've been developing their sites right, leaving them alone will work just fine with Mozilla."
The right way would be to stick to HTML 3.0 (as far as I know that's the only thing supported by all browsers in a reasonably consistent way). Many webdevelopers don't wish to restrict themselves that much.
"No, because using any MS-proprietary XSL tricks wouldn't work on any of the "standard" browsers other than IE5, so it won't be in the practical standard."
IE's marketshare is going to convince a lot of developers to use those features, or rather it will be hard to convince the developers using these features now to stop using them.
"but I suspect that Mozilla based browsers will spread faster than you think."
I hope so, but I don't think it will survive on just its technical merits. Most users are hardly aware of what they are running, they sure aint going to worry about some 'standard' compatible browser.
Still I think MS has one disadvantage: ie only is stable on their OS. Basically their weakspot is the embedded machines. According to many marketing research those things are going to make the PC obsolete. Mozilla can operate on these things, IE can't (not yet).
sgml is too complex, at least the people who developed XML thought so.
LaTex is useless as an output format (you don't want to edit the output anyway). Lets go straight to postscript/pdf.
Otherwise I agree that SGML is very useful for some purposes. But basically the domain you mentioned (technical documentation) is the only domain it is really used.
"AOL by itself can tip the balance back to 50%+ for Mozilla."
That is under the assumption that all their users (who are notoriously clueless) are going to install the new browser.
"By saying they are "unproven", you're admitting they have yet to fail. "
:) What I was trying to say is that so far OSS seems to be succesfull in other areas than the desktop. I have a strong feeling that the commercial software software industry wants to move on to making higher level software. By that I mean they are starting to realize that the market for lower level software like operating systems or simple mail servers is satisfied. Microsoft, apple or sun is not going to win any customers by rewriting the kernels of their operating system (though arguably that would be a good thing in some cases) because most users simply don't care about what powers their wordprocessors and webbrowsers. What is a profitable area is the stuff that runs ontop of an operating system though even there you see that some applications are so common that they no longer offer the fat profit margins they used to have.
You got me here
Software is subject to inflation, it gets less profitable over time. Nobody is willing to spend 100s of dollars on an OS that just runs your system, it needs to have something extra to be worth that amount of money. The same applies to a lot of other programs. Take development tools for instance. Nobody is paying money for just a compiler, in many cases you get the compiler for free. What brings in the money for development tool producing companies is the stuff that runs on top of the compiler (i.e. the IDE, debugger and prefab components).
The trend I'm seeing is that the stuff that has dropped below a certain profit level is open sourced. In a way OSS has increased the inflation speed by 'attacking' products that are still profitable.
This view I presented here sort of contradicts the accepted view on this site that OSS software is going to dominate everything. From where I'm standing, OSS gets to implement and reinvent the stuff that is no longer profitable enough. In many cases the reinvented version is better than the original so I see it as a good thing.
Now, seeing how lynx is very useful on more than occasion, here's how I use it:
...)
fetching pages for perl to munch on (lynx -source
Q&D downloads of files when I don't know the URL (if I DO know the URL, wget is much better fot this)
I'm telnetted into someone else's box over a modem, and running a GUI browser is truly rude
many other uses which I can't think of right now
(1) You call perl progress? Even basic has a more readable syntax. Anyway, downloading stuff is something is not a unique feature of lynx.
(2)I don't see how lynx helps you find something that you forgot the URL of unless it has an integrated search engine. In any case you're probably better of with a ftp client.
(3) Try running your browser locally, the idea of thin client is not that you remotely run a network client.
(4) I can't think of any useful uses either.
I think the only real situation where lynx would offer any advatages over a GUI browser would be if you were on a computer to slow to run a GUI. I noticed surfing the web is not in your list.
Also you mentioned progress in relation to a lot of technology that lynx doesn't support. We can discuss them in great length but I don't feel like it right now. I'll simply conclude with stating that lynx doesn't offer any replacements and is definitely not something that can be qualified as progress.
Lynx is just a gopher client with some addons. Gopher is as good as dead, the world moved on about five years ago.
Now would the biased person who moderated me down please restore my karma, I think his moderation skills are a bit 'overrated'. I think moderation is slipping anyway, I noticed a lot less postings actually are moderated. Perhaps it would help if more moderation points were given to people. I only get 5 or so every few weeks.
I think we need to focus on the word standard here. From my point of view there are two standards:
- the stuff that w3c poors out: the formal standard
- that what people actually use: the practical standard.
Right now the practical standard is a mixture of HTML 3.0 and HTML 4.0 with lots of propietary extensions. Mozilla will be fully HTML 4.0 compliant, that's different from the current practical standard. So that means more work for web developers. If it's backward compatible with some extensions, that means even less motivation to abandon them.
I think the HTML spec is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned as soon as possible. For me that would be when I could use XML, XSL and stylesheets. Then I could use XSL to provide backwards compatibility. Unfortunately MS is doing everything to let XML, XSL and stylesheets go the same way as HTML: they are providing propietary extensions. So again the practical standard will deviate from the formal standard. The only hope for preventing this is a quick (within months) acceptation of mozilla by a large share of the web community (I'm thinking 40% or more of the web users here). Just looking at the figures of usage of the latest generation of browsers will show you that that is not going to happen (sorry don't have those figures readily available so please post them if you have them).
I hope I'm not right but fear that I am.
Perhaps the development wouldn't stop on the Gimp if adobe released photoshop but it would cause most of its more serious users to abandon it. 100$ is nothing for a tool you use to make a living on.
The main motivation for creating the Gimp was because there wasn't a good pixel editing program on Linux. If that reason is taken away, what exactly is the motivation for creating it? Providing a free alternative?
Propietary software won't damage linux but will establish it as a mainstream OS. I don't see that as a wrong thing.
In fact the coming of/need for propietary software signals an important thing: the partial failure of OSS. Apparently OSS can't serve the need of normal users in providing programs to run on the OS (wordprocessors, programming environments, spreadsheets, browsers). Though there are OSS variants of all the things I mentioned they all have propietary counterparts that are better.
If you want to create documents you can use TeX, if you want a handy tool to use to create your document you'll need to obtain a propietary one.
I realize I'm pissing of a lot of people here by claiming that OSS partially failed. But I fail to see its success on the desktop (I'm not talking about server applications). Sure there are a lot of projects (the gimp, K office, mozilla) but they are all unproven (unlike linux itself and the lower level stuff that runs on it).
Speaking of the JDK, according to this (from the faq) link:
e nt0553?OpenDocument&p=1&BCT=1&Footer=1
/dev/null on winnt). I was impressed with it's way of connecting beans though.
http://www7.software.ibm.com/vad.nsf/Data/Docum
they 'support' jdk 1.2. Does this mean they've actually provided a full java 2 platform for linux?
If so that would be great, if not I'm not going to bother with it. One of the previous version's biggest annoyances was that you were stuck with jdk 1.1. Which is why it quickly found it's way to the garbage can (sorry, no
Why does evrybody seem to assume the whole world will be jumping on mozilla as soon as its released. They won't, you'll just be coding another version of your page for yet another browser. The fact that the new browser actually implements a standard doesn't matter. There's just too many netscape 3 and 4, ie 3,4 and 5 browsers still in use. And I leave out the people who are running other browsers (opera, lynx, hotjava). Mozilla will be yet another not fully backwards compatible browser.
For the whole world to abandon the current non standard HTML versions will take years. As long as that doesn't happen we'll be coding for more than one version of HTML. Unless you are prepared to dump the majority of your potentially visitors of course.
One way of solving this is to automate the process of supporting multiple versions of HTML instead of handcoding them. For that to be possible the server would have to be able to make a distinction between the different browsers and apply the right transformations (XSL?) to a page.
try telnet
Jezus, People still think text based stuff is all they'll ever need. Crawl out of your holes and stop blocking progress.
does that mean it runs all the low level stuff that provides the protocol stacks and such?
Does anybody have an idea when K-office will be finished. Last time I checked things looked promising. I'm particularly interested in K-Office, I'm a framemaker user right now but I'm not really happy with its interface.
Very cool that linux also runs on a palm. Now the next problem is what type of applications to run on it. It will probably take some time before small enough productivity apps are developed. Also there is the problem of supporting all the mostly propietary communication stuff that usually runs on top of a palm computer.
If you put it like that you are right. But you should consider that even free software under the GPL license has restrictions: namely that I can't use it to create something new and keep the changes propietary. That is a restriction of freedom that other licenses don't have.
Not that I want to start a discussion on that, I just wanted to show that there is no real freedom. I personally would have no objections in excluding certain people or groups of people in this world from using my software. I see that as a form of freedom (free to choose who may and may not use the software). By doing so you can make a political statement with your creations. To confuse you even more, limiting the freedom of use may increase the level of freedom other individuals experience.
I don't like dogmatic discussions. Which is one of the reasons I'm not a Richard Stallman fan.
why
The whole idea of OSS is that OSS software is open to anybody, that includes countries like China. They can do as they see fit. If they want to make linux their official OS, whatever they mean by that, it is their legal right to do so.
Perhaps it is a good thing to realize that if you are giving your software away under GPL like licenses, you enable governments of countries like Iran, China and Iraque to use your software in any way they want to. If you don't want that, don't release it under GPL. After all any software you write can be used against you or somebody else.
Things like encryption are considered to be weapons by the US government. While this on it self is rediculous, it is good to realize that your software may be used in ways you don't appreciate. An OSS database for instance can be used to create and maintain a database of enemies of the public republic of china.
I'm not a license expert but wouldn't it be possible to exclude certain parties of using your software in a license. I.e. would it be possible to state in the license that you don't want government institutions of the republic of china to use this software? I'm sure many people don't like the idea of supporting certain regimes.
Communism on it self wasn't a bad idea, it's major flaw, according to me, is that it rules out things like greed and selfishness which of course doesn't work in practice since every person on this planet is in principle selfish and will ultimately favor his/her own interests above the common interest. It's exactly those things that converted the newly formed communistic states earlier this century in ordinary dictatorship. The communistic idealism is used as a tool to repress the people of those states. The motivations for the communistic revolution were not evil, the result of it was.
What most americans don't seem to realize is that they live in a society where information is controlled by the big media corporations. In the recent 'war' in bosnia, iraque and kosovo, CNN wasn't exactly critical, they broadcasted pretty much anything the US army threw at them.
I'm not saying that the situation is the same as in china but I'm simply stating that you are not as free as you would like to think. Your government is pretty successful in manipulating the publics opinion. You're free to think whatever you want, the government simply tries to influence what you want by spreading their version of the truth through the media.
As for linux becoming the official OS of a communist country, I'm not surpised. The OSS model is sort of communistic itself and since it works very well it is good publicity for communism in general. Also the chinese will probably appreciate the fact that they won't be accused of illegal copying of software if they use OSS software.
I agree that the hype has taken disproportional sizes at some time. But that aplies to almost any technology of the past few years: www, linux, windows, XML, visual basic, corba, activeX,.....
All these things have been hyped and got lots of ill informed media attention. Also all of them have survived the hype stage (well perhaps activeX didn't). In my opinion Java is getting past the hype stage too and I expect such a thing to be recognized by people posting on a site dominated by technology news. It's a bit disappointing to see the same shittyy arguments used over and over again. I don't mind a little well funded criticism but just whining "Java is slow, use xxx instead, you #@!@##" fals into the troll category as far as I'm concerned.
You got a good point here, but still a removable harddisk offers some advantages over a fixed harddrive (as long as the price of the player is so much higher as the cost of a harddrive) that make it worth it.
"Java ... is quite succesfull on the server
People keep saying that; perhaps I'm overlooking the obvious, but I sure don't see this."
OK, I can't put any examples out of my big hat and I'm to lazy to go and search for it. But considering the huge amounts of investments made by SUN, IBM and others on getting Java to work on any platform you can name, they must expect some return on their investment. You do the math, but that tells me Java is increasingly succesfull on the server.
"So if JIT is the solution, why do we need this beast at all? "
As I explained later on in my post, a dynamic compiler like hotspot can do something a static compiler (typically used for C) namely using information gathered at runtime to perform optimizations. This is a major advantage on architectures that require the compiler to optimize the instruction stream for the processor. Further more Java and threads are a good combination (one of the reasons for Java's success on the server). And MAJC is very good for running multithreaded stuff.
"If you're looking for paralleism in the instruction stream, we call that pipelining."
VLIW chips like MAJC and IA-64 do the pipelining in software (at least discovering paralellism and optimizing the instruction stream). It's not new I know. I just explained why a dynamic compiler has an advantage over static compilers in doing so.
"In short, all the claims they make about benefitting from multi-threading can be equally applied to other CPUs. What's left is marketing spew, positioning this as "Java-optimized". Which sure isn't going to help them in the market I know."
The market you are working in is changin rapidly. With fast chips getting dirt cheap, the rules of the game are changing. Coding everything in assembler is not really an option anymore because that slows down time to market. Similarly, more and more is implemented in C++ rather than C on many embedded platforms. I work together with Axis (a swedish company building embedded machines) for my research and I know their main problem is the fact that they have to maintain a huge source tree of C++ code (100K+ LOC). This slows them down in introducing new products.
So because of this, Java will become an option in your market too.
"In short, all the claims they make about benefitting from multi-threading can be equally applied to other CPUs."
I don't see that, the article was quite convincing in comparing IA-64 and MAJC. Only time will tell which is the faster processor since neither is available at this moment. Something tells me IA-64 will be a major disappointment. Maybe SUN will screw up on MAJC but the architecture doesn't sound half bad. More likely is that intel and motorola will 'borrow' some of the ideas for this processor in their next generation CPUs.
As has been pointed out before, Linux is not yet a good math on high end server platforms because it lacks certain features. Probably this will be resolved in due time but for now linux is not competing in that area.
"Price/ performance for Sun hardware"
Hardware and OS licenses are only small portion of the cost on big servers. These things have to be maintained by expensive staff and they have to run expensive, tailored software. If price performance of the hardware/OS was the only consideration, they would have been out of business long time ago.
On the long term I can see Linux replacing Solaris. Obviously all the UNIX giants (Sun, IBM, SGI) know this and are generally cooperative towards Linux (at least more then a certain Redmond based company).
why not make the harddrive arbitrary. Now a 13GB hardrive might be possible but who knows what size of hardrive we will be able to buy next year. I'd love to plug in a 50 GB harddrive when one comes available (assuming 2 1/2 inch and whatever interface the current drive is using, IDE?)
Lets get rid of a few misconceptions here:
Java is not slow because it executes slower than natively compiled code. In fact natively compiling Java code doesn't help you much since the execution speed is not the main cause for its slowness. Benchmarks actually show hotspot and IBMs VM faster then native compilers for Java.
The real reason that Java is slower has to do with how Java manages objects and memory. Unlike languages like C/C++, Java uses a more dynamic form of memory management. This makes allocations slower and also the deallocation process (by the garbage collector) is slower. Then there are several other issues that also slow down java.
But none of them has to do with the fact that Java is interpreted (or rather JIT compiled). Theoreticially, if it weren't for these issues, Java would be faster than C/C++ since dynamic compilers like hotspot can do something that static compilers like the ones used for C and C++ cannot do: using runtime information to steer the optimizations.
I do agree with the poster that eventually most of the current problems with Java will either be solved or won't be so much of a problem because of cheaper, faster hardware. Eventually Moore's law will solve this issue.
Also I saw somebody whine about the performance of 3d graphics in Java. Apparently this person is not aware of the fact that Java only provides an API for the 3d rendering. The actual rendering happens natively. The advantage of this is that you can write renderer and OS independent 3d graphics applications.
If you still have doubts about the use of interpreted languages in 3D applications, both quake 3 and unreal use an intrepreted scripting language. I think John Carmack even played with the idea to include a Java vm in quake.
Ps. Why is it that everytime the word Java is dropped on this site, the anti MS FUD people start spreading fud and other ill informed arguments about it Java. I mean, this is a site about technical subjects, most people posting here are obviously techies too and yet they manage to poor out all this bullshit about a subject that gets plenty of media attention. Most of the arguments broad forward in this post have been used before in postings on other stories. And despite this if Java is in the news again tomorrow or so, the whining will start all over again. It is a bit depressing that some people are stuck on their current, rather mediocre, knowledge level. I have learned a great deal since I started reading slashdot nearly a year ago.
Sure the porting process would be faster, but it would scare of a lot of potential processing power. As you well know, there are several organizations doing distributed computing, so a new client is competing with all of those organizations. To be successful it will have to be friendly to its users. Windows users like programs with a gui. Personally I would prefer it to minimize into the traybar where it doesn't bother me. Alternatively i would like to run it as a service, that way it wouldn't bother me at all.
I have a few problems with your post:
1) you seem to have a double standard: on one side you want people to recognize your electronic signature but on the other side you are not prepared to receive electronic confirmations of stuff you signed. Odd.
2) You use a very primitive email reader (one that only displays ASCII), while this isprobably good enough for most applications, the majority of users uses a more advanced mail client (one that allows HTML layout). So from my point of view you're blocking progress by demanding that everything sent to you is in ancient ascii. Really if HTML is such a big problem to you, use an email client with lynx embedded (if it doesn't exist you may develop it yourself) or something but don't bother the rest of the world with whining that you can't read HTML.
That's the part I disagreed with. I do agree with you that this way of notifying leaves to much room for abuse by bigger companies. Email is rather popular these days but many people still don't check their email on a daily or even weekly basis.
Also I have a big doubt about the type of encryption used for the signatures. I don't like the idea that somebody can crack the encrypted signature and can start using my signature. And that is something that is going to happen if they use 56 bit encryption.