What version of Visual Studio are you comparing against? Visual Studio 2005 (which is the basis for the free Express versions, so you can try it out without risking any cash) has all of the features you claim are lacking.
First of all, the free versions are lacking many of the advanced features, including support for refactoring.
Secondly, while I haven't tried VS2005 for C#, I'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding the kind of features he's talking about:
with C# the IDE will catch syntax errors, auto-complete for you if you wish (use ctrl+space to bring up intellisense), stub out methods and interface implementations (ctrl+F10 to open the SmartTag-like dropdown), allow you to easily refactor code into methods or wrap variables into Properties, declare "using" tags if you reference something from an assembly in the project references without declaring its namespace (you can alternatively tell it to use the fully-qualifed namespace if you don't want to add it to your "using" list), etc.
Will it do the following things that eclipse does:
* Given a line of code with an undeclared identifier, give you a menu option to automatically declare that identifier? * When a method call doesn't match the types of existing versions of that method, does it automatically offer to create a new overload of the method with the types you specified, or add missing parameters to an existing overload? * When cutting and pasting code, will it automatically add any namespace imports that are necessary to support that code? * If code in a method can throw an exception that isn't handled, can it automatically add a declaration that the method will throw that exception? Automatically wrap the method in a try/catch block customized for the exception type? * Can it automatically generate interfaces with declarations that match selected methods from an existing class? Superclasses? * Will it extract selected statements into a new method, automatically declaring any necessary parameters and determining the appropriate return value?
I have heard people say that these features are available before, but they normally suggest you need additional plugins to achieve them (e.g. resharper). These features are all available with a default install of eclipse.
Not the mention the huge size of projects compared to how much actual code is present. When it takes me minutes to transfer a project of only a thousand or two lines onto a flash drive, there's a problem.
Say what? Examining an average project in my workspace, I have 4.2K of eclipse settings files, 55K of source files and 72K of compiled binaries. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and if 4.2K of extra data is taking "minutes" to copy to your flash drive, you probably need a better flash drive.
Even disabling some of the heavier features, I find it hard to get any work done when not using it on a system with 4 GB of ram and two processors.
That's odd... it works fine for me on a 1GB system with a single celeron processor. Yes, it eats a lot of memory (I tend to find about 300MB, compared with about 100MB for VS), but if it's all you're doing with a box I don't see any reason you'd need more than 1GB for it.
So what you're saying is that yes the site does contain copyrighted materials for which no permission been obtained, and hence it does infringe on the works of some authors?
The site in question is a hosting service for e-books. How would you feel if somebody pulled your website because somebody else using the same ISP happened to have hosted somebody else's copyright works there, and your site happened to mention one of the authors of those works? This is what has happened here.
Ignoring a takedown notice that falls short of the technical requirements but that identifies the work infringed, the infringing content, and provides contact information has the legal result that the flawed takedown notice may be used to prove the service provider's knowledge of infringement, and thus have the same effect on liability, as if it were a flawless takedown notice (see 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(B)(ii)).
However the penalty of perjury per 512(c)(3)(B)(vi) does not stand due to the lack of a statement of truth. A loophole?
...about creating a simple system. It goes like this: you upload a document. It then returns a copy of the document with a datestamp and a cryptographic signature of both. You keep this signed copy for later reference.
Because the system is run by a third party with no interest in the ongoing litigation, it would likely be trusted by a court.
There's also a nontrivial chance it would earn the person who set it up some reasonable expert witness fees.
Apparently you can (used to be able to?) mail yourself a copy of the design / code / idea etc.. registered post, that will get you a nice date stamped master to use if you need to, (I think you may be better mailing it to your solicitor and asking them to hold it) don't open it when you get it back though....
This is not legal advice and IANAL.
Clearly not. This is known as "poor man's copyright", and is generally considered to be useless (due to the fact that it's trivially easy to game the system to claim earlier authorship than really happened: just send yourself an empty, unsealed envelope, then later put whatever you want in it).
register the copyright of the work with the US Copyright office (or the copuyright office in your country, I assume you're in the US because I'm an Americentric bastard).
Which is probably why you don't realise that most other countries don't have a copyright registration system.
Feeling "damaged" or "mocked" by this hasn't even entered into my mind, until you suggested the notion. Look, I was *delighted* that VH1 chose to use this!
Well, exactly: that's the point. That you haven't been damaged by it means that they probably didn't infringe on your copyright. The damage to the market for the work is one of the criteria for determining whether or not it's fair use. They seem to pass 2 out of the 4: it's transformative in nature, and it doesn't damage the original market.
What this means is that the fact they used your clip is, legally speaking, irrelevant. You just have to accept that they did and move on (which is clearly what you've done). It can't now affect whether or not you using their clip is legal.
As it happens, I'm pretty sure your use of their clip is legal. It's non-commercial, transformative, and I can't see how it would damage the original market for their work. But, the thing is, there's no necessity for either Viacom or YouTube to determine whether it is fair use or not. In order to get it taken down, Viacom only have to assert ownership, which they have. Once that is done, YouTube are allowed to make a determination whether it's fair use or not, but by doing so they run the risk of being wrong which would mean they actually become liable for the copyright infringement. Of course they're not going to do this.
Complain about the DMCA: that's the problem here. The safe harbor requirements don't go far enough, and Viacom should have been required to certify that they believed the clip was not fair use. But they weren't, so don't blame either Viacom or YouTube. They're just doing what the law says they should.
This is what always confuses me about the American economy. Your salaries seem to, on average, be fairly similar to ours. Cost of accomodation is similar, if not cheaper. Food and drink, similar. Technology, a little cheaper. Cars, similar. Fuel for cars, substantially cheaper. Entertainment, substantially cheaper (and I mean substantially: CDs, $19 rather than £13 at RRP; DVDs, $15 rather than £13; paperback books, $7 rather than £7). So, all in all, you can (on average) afford way more stuff than we can. Yet you complain about the cost of things every bit as much as we do.
I guess I have a hard drive full of porn. Who knew?
Come on. This is Slashdot. 90% of us have hard drives full of porn. The other 10% archive it off onto permanent storage rather than keeping it on their hard disks.
The BSD project has it available under EITHER license. EITHER/OR.
This isn't exactly true, though. Some of the files are available under a dual license. Others, it seems, aren't.
Look at the copyright notice being removed from, e.g., ath5k_hw.c:
* Copyright (c) 2006-2007 Nick Kossifidis
* Copyright (c) 2007 Jiri Slaby
* - * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any - * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above - * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies. - * - * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES - * WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF - * MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR - * ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES - * WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN - * ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF - * OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE. - *
Honestly, I can't complain, as long as the copyright notices are kept, and unchanged, it is acceptable (someone posted thsi further down).
No, the BSD license specifically states (quoting from the diff in question):
- * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any - * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above - * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
(emphasis mine)
Note that "this permission notice" is exactly what was being removed.
The contributor being the author of the wireless module makes this article a bit short on common sense.
First check the author of the patch, its Jiri Slaby.
Then check the copyright notice on top of the source files, there is a copyright to... Jiri Slaby.
Yes, but there's also copyrights to Reyk Floeter, Nick Kossifidis, and Sam Leffler, along with possibly others that weren't quoted in the diffs. Have these other contributors agreed to the change?
That's strange. All my Java programs, nearly all of them large Swing programs, start up in less than one second. Without any OS caching.
One second is way too long for process startup, IMO. A process should be able to be running within a tenth of a second, to be useful in many circumstances.
Timings of a C-based hello-world program:
Jules@minerva ~/My Documents/projects/eclipse/jzx/bin $ time./test Hello, world
real 0m0.047s
Python-based equivalent:
Jules@minerva ~/My Documents/projects/eclipse/jzx/bin $ time python test.py Hello, world
real 0m0.109s
Java-based equivalent:
Jules@minerva ~/My Documents/projects/eclipse/jzx/bin $ time java Test Hello, world
real 0m0.266s...
Jules@minerva ~/My Documents/projects/eclipse/jzx/bin $ java -version java version "1.6.0_01" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_01-b06) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0_01-b06, mixed mode, sharing)
Why is Java the slowest of all three of these? A quarter second startup time for a trivial CLI program on a modern computer with a multi-gigahertz processor, a surplus of RAM and Java already in the cache (because two existing Java programs were already running on the machine) is unacceptable. The job Java has to do is substantially simpler than Python's job, which included compiling the source to bytecode prior to running it. It makes Java implausible for writing high-performance CLI programs, which you often need to run hundreds of times to perform certain jobs.
Based on the abstract, LISTSERV would seem to be prior art. As I recall LISTSERV could indeed respond to commands in the content of messages, forwarding messages lacking valid commands to the list operator.
Right, so LISTSERV meets the vaguest description in the patent. It also meets claim 1, and also a few other claims scattered around the patent. What it doesn't do, though, is meet claim 30, which is almost certainly the important one (expanding references to other claims):
A method for automatically processing a non-interactive electronic message using a computer, comprising the steps of:
(a) receiving the electronic message from a source;
(b) interpreting the electronic message using a rule base and case base knowledge engine; and
b1) producing a case model of the electronic message including (i) a set of attributes for identifying specific features of the electronic message; and (ii) message text;
(b2) detecting at least one of text, combinations of text, and patterns of text of the electronic message using character matching;
(b3) flagging the attributes of the case model which are detected in the electronic message;
(b4) comparing the flagged attributes of the case model with stored attributes of stored case models of the case base;
(b5) comparing the text of the case model with stored text of the stored case models of the case base; and
(b6) assigning a score to each stored case model which is compared with the case model, the score increasing when at least one of the attributes and the text match the stored case model and the score not increasing when at least one of the attributes and the text do not match the stored case model; and
(c) retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source when the classification step indicates that the electronic message can be responded to automatically.
That's the prior art you need to find. Not junk related to claim 1. This is what the defendants in this case are doing, and this is what is claimed by the patent.
I am not going to go through all 66 claims since the first 20 or so are so silly as to make it not worth my time examining all of them in detail.
The earliest claims in a patent are almost always silly. They're the claims that were added by lawyers. You have to look later on to find what the original inventer claimed as theirs.
Checking my svk tree (converted from cvs), I notice that in 1994 the "man procmailex" manpage included with the procmail distro already contains a dynamic E-mail-me-the-file-I-ask-for example.
Which isn't what this patent is about. This patent is about running a message through a text classification algorithm to determine what kind of message it's likely to be, pulling a canned response from a database if it matches a known category and sending that response, otherwise flagging it for human attention. Did the example do all of these things? If not, it isn't useful prior art.
Can Swing please be replaced with something that doesn't suck in terms of performance?
So you don't like the packaged class library. Have you considered using an external library (e.g. SWT) to achieve the same thing, rather than complaining about the packaged one?
The only open source java project worth noting these days is GCJ.
Anything deriving from Sun's JVM is over. Done. Good riddance.
Right. Because all we really need is an implementation of the language that's mostly compatible with a five year old version, and which as of the latest released version doesn't yet support generics, a critical improvement to the language definition that was made nearly 3 years ago now.
Haven't you heard? Java 2.0 is out. It broke source but not binary compatability. It's called Scala.
It doesn't appeal to most of the people who want a better Java. It's a language that takes a totally different direction, which is a good thing, but it's not even approximately the same thing as Java with a cleaned-up class library.
The thing needed most by Java, IMHO, is not more features, but a thorough cleanup of the runtime classlib.
Agreed. There are huge problems with the Java classlib as it stands, and these problems account for most of the issues that Java has. The biggest one is the huge list of dependencies typical classes, including some of the most basic classes in the library, have.
For instance, all classes depend on java.lang.Class. java.lang.Class depends on (among others) java.io.InputStream, java.net.URL, sun.reflect.ConstantPool (!) and java.util.Map (and presumably an implementation of that interface). java.net.URL in turn depends on java.net.InetAddress, java.net.URLStreamHandler, java.net.URLStreamHandlerFactory, java.util.Hashtable (note: not a Map implementation, so all Java programs have to load at least two implementations of this basic function). Basic I/O features (System.in, System.out) are mixed in the same class as configuration file management (System.setProperties, which depends on java.util.Properties).
The biggest problem that Java has, and it's a problem it has always had, is that Java programs take too long to start. This is directly because of this dependency problem. I say: strip it down to layers. Define a core set of classes, no more than 20 or so of them, that must always be there. Add new functions on top of those in small increments. Basic classes must not depend on more advanced ones.
Yes, this will break backwards compatibility. The old library can be retained for applications that need it, but it's time for a clean break for new ones.
What happens if the user stores their multimedia content on a file server, and then tries to play them on a laptop by streaming the data across the local network ?
Unless we're talking uncompressed content, chances are the 12MB/s (96Mb/s) that is the limited speed most people have been reporting will be adequate. Assuming you're not trying to do anything else at the same time.
E.g., I regularly stream both audio and backup images from a remote file server to my workstation, so I can listen to music while waiting for the backup disk to fill up so I can switch it to the next one... glad I'm still on XP, here.
Slashdot Mirror
What version of Visual Studio are you comparing against? Visual Studio 2005 (which is the basis for the free Express versions, so you can try it out without risking any cash) has all of the features you claim are lacking.
First of all, the free versions are lacking many of the advanced features, including support for refactoring.
Secondly, while I haven't tried VS2005 for C#, I'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding the kind of features he's talking about:
with C# the IDE will catch syntax errors, auto-complete for you if you wish (use ctrl+space to bring up intellisense), stub out methods and interface implementations (ctrl+F10 to open the SmartTag-like dropdown), allow you to easily refactor code into methods or wrap variables into Properties, declare "using" tags if you reference something from an assembly in the project references without declaring its namespace (you can alternatively tell it to use the fully-qualifed namespace if you don't want to add it to your "using" list), etc.
Will it do the following things that eclipse does:
* Given a line of code with an undeclared identifier, give you a menu option to automatically declare that identifier?
* When a method call doesn't match the types of existing versions of that method, does it automatically offer to create a new overload of the method with the types you specified, or add missing parameters to an existing overload?
* When cutting and pasting code, will it automatically add any namespace imports that are necessary to support that code?
* If code in a method can throw an exception that isn't handled, can it automatically add a declaration that the method will throw that exception? Automatically wrap the method in a try/catch block customized for the exception type?
* Can it automatically generate interfaces with declarations that match selected methods from an existing class? Superclasses?
* Will it extract selected statements into a new method, automatically declaring any necessary parameters and determining the appropriate return value?
I have heard people say that these features are available before, but they normally suggest you need additional plugins to achieve them (e.g. resharper). These features are all available with a default install of eclipse.
Not the mention the huge size of projects compared to how much actual code is present. When it takes me minutes to transfer a project of only a thousand or two lines onto a flash drive, there's a problem.
Say what? Examining an average project in my workspace, I have 4.2K of eclipse settings files, 55K of source files and 72K of compiled binaries. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and if 4.2K of extra data is taking "minutes" to copy to your flash drive, you probably need a better flash drive.
Even disabling some of the heavier features, I find it hard to get any work done when not using it on a system with 4 GB of ram and two processors.
That's odd... it works fine for me on a 1GB system with a single celeron processor. Yes, it eats a lot of memory (I tend to find about 300MB, compared with about 100MB for VS), but if it's all you're doing with a box I don't see any reason you'd need more than 1GB for it.
So what you're saying is that yes the site does contain copyrighted materials for which no permission been obtained, and hence it does infringe on the works of some authors?
The site in question is a hosting service for e-books. How would you feel if somebody pulled your website because somebody else using the same ISP happened to have hosted somebody else's copyright works there, and your site happened to mention one of the authors of those works? This is what has happened here.
Ignoring a takedown notice that falls short of the technical requirements but that identifies the work infringed, the infringing content, and provides contact information has the legal result that the flawed takedown notice may be used to prove the service provider's knowledge of infringement, and thus have the same effect on liability, as if it were a flawless takedown notice (see 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(B)(ii)).
However the penalty of perjury per 512(c)(3)(B)(vi) does not stand due to the lack of a statement of truth. A loophole?
Well, yeah. You're about as likely to find someone saying "who's this guy pretending to be Wil Wheaton?"
...about creating a simple system. It goes like this: you upload a document. It then returns a copy of the document with a datestamp and a cryptographic signature of both. You keep this signed copy for later reference.
Because the system is run by a third party with no interest in the ongoing litigation, it would likely be trusted by a court.
There's also a nontrivial chance it would earn the person who set it up some reasonable expert witness fees.
Apparently you can (used to be able to?) mail yourself a copy of the design / code / idea etc.. registered post, that will get you a nice date stamped master to use if you need to, (I think you may be better mailing it to your solicitor and asking them to hold it) don't open it when you get it back though. ...
This is not legal advice and IANAL.
Clearly not. This is known as "poor man's copyright", and is generally considered to be useless (due to the fact that it's trivially easy to game the system to claim earlier authorship than really happened: just send yourself an empty, unsealed envelope, then later put whatever you want in it).
register the copyright of the work with the US Copyright office (or the copuyright office in your country, I assume you're in the US because I'm an Americentric bastard).
Which is probably why you don't realise that most other countries don't have a copyright registration system.
Feeling "damaged" or "mocked" by this hasn't even entered into my mind, until you suggested the notion. Look, I was *delighted* that VH1 chose to use this!
Well, exactly: that's the point. That you haven't been damaged by it means that they probably didn't infringe on your copyright. The damage to the market for the work is one of the criteria for determining whether or not it's fair use. They seem to pass 2 out of the 4: it's transformative in nature, and it doesn't damage the original market.
What this means is that the fact they used your clip is, legally speaking, irrelevant. You just have to accept that they did and move on (which is clearly what you've done). It can't now affect whether or not you using their clip is legal.
As it happens, I'm pretty sure your use of their clip is legal. It's non-commercial, transformative, and I can't see how it would damage the original market for their work. But, the thing is, there's no necessity for either Viacom or YouTube to determine whether it is fair use or not. In order to get it taken down, Viacom only have to assert ownership, which they have. Once that is done, YouTube are allowed to make a determination whether it's fair use or not, but by doing so they run the risk of being wrong which would mean they actually become liable for the copyright infringement. Of course they're not going to do this.
Complain about the DMCA: that's the problem here. The safe harbor requirements don't go far enough, and Viacom should have been required to certify that they believed the clip was not fair use. But they weren't, so don't blame either Viacom or YouTube. They're just doing what the law says they should.
Has anyone considered that, with [...] the demise of hip hop
Hip hop's dead? Nobody told me!
This is what always confuses me about the American economy. Your salaries seem to, on average, be fairly similar to ours. Cost of accomodation is similar, if not cheaper. Food and drink, similar. Technology, a little cheaper. Cars, similar. Fuel for cars, substantially cheaper. Entertainment, substantially cheaper (and I mean substantially: CDs, $19 rather than £13 at RRP; DVDs, $15 rather than £13; paperback books, $7 rather than £7). So, all in all, you can (on average) afford way more stuff than we can. Yet you complain about the cost of things every bit as much as we do.
But the entire package comes with license information that states it is covered under both.
Do you have a link to this license grant? I haven't seen it, only the individual source files.
I guess I have a hard drive full of porn. Who knew?
Come on. This is Slashdot. 90% of us have hard drives full of porn. The other 10% archive it off onto permanent storage rather than keeping it on their hard disks.
IT ISN'T BSD LICENSED SOURCE.
The BSD project has it available under EITHER license. EITHER/OR.
This isn't exactly true, though. Some of the files are available under a dual license. Others, it seems, aren't.
Look at the copyright notice being removed from, e.g., ath5k_hw.c:
* Copyright (c) 2006-2007 Nick Kossifidis
* Copyright (c) 2007 Jiri Slaby
*
- * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
- * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
- * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
- *
- * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
- * WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
- * MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR
- * ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
- * WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
- * ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
- * OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
- *
No mention of a GPL dual license in there.
Honestly, I can't complain, as long as the copyright notices are kept, and unchanged, it is acceptable (someone posted thsi further down).
No, the BSD license specifically states (quoting from the diff in question):
- * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
- * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
- * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
(emphasis mine)
Note that "this permission notice" is exactly what was being removed.
The contributor being the author of the wireless module makes this article a bit short on common sense.
... Jiri Slaby.
First check the author of the patch, its Jiri Slaby.
Then check the copyright notice on top of the source files, there is a copyright to
Yes, but there's also copyrights to Reyk Floeter, Nick Kossifidis, and Sam Leffler, along with possibly others that weren't quoted in the diffs. Have these other contributors agreed to the change?
One second is way too long for process startup, IMO. A process should be able to be running within a tenth of a second, to be useful in many circumstances.
Timings of a C-based hello-world program:
Python-based equivalent:
Java-based equivalent:
Why is Java the slowest of all three of these? A quarter second startup time for a trivial CLI program on a modern computer with a multi-gigahertz processor, a surplus of RAM and Java already in the cache (because two existing Java programs were already running on the machine) is unacceptable. The job Java has to do is substantially simpler than Python's job, which included compiling the source to bytecode prior to running it. It makes Java implausible for writing high-performance CLI programs, which you often need to run hundreds of times to perform certain jobs.
Right, so LISTSERV meets the vaguest description in the patent. It also meets claim 1, and also a few other claims scattered around the patent. What it doesn't do, though, is meet claim 30, which is almost certainly the important one (expanding references to other claims):
That's the prior art you need to find. Not junk related to claim 1. This is what the defendants in this case are doing, and this is what is claimed by the patent.
I am not going to go through all 66 claims since the first 20 or so are so silly as to make it not worth my time examining all of them in detail.
The earliest claims in a patent are almost always silly. They're the claims that were added by lawyers. You have to look later on to find what the original inventer claimed as theirs.
Checking my svk tree (converted from cvs), I notice that in 1994 the "man procmailex" manpage included with the procmail distro already contains a dynamic E-mail-me-the-file-I-ask-for example.
Which isn't what this patent is about. This patent is about running a message through a text classification algorithm to determine what kind of message it's likely to be, pulling a canned response from a database if it matches a known category and sending that response, otherwise flagging it for human attention. Did the example do all of these things? If not, it isn't useful prior art.
Can Swing please be replaced with something that doesn't suck in terms of performance?
So you don't like the packaged class library. Have you considered using an external library (e.g. SWT) to achieve the same thing, rather than complaining about the packaged one?
The only open source java project worth noting these days is GCJ.
Anything deriving from Sun's JVM is over. Done. Good riddance.
Right. Because all we really need is an implementation of the language that's mostly compatible with a five year old version, and which as of the latest released version doesn't yet support generics, a critical improvement to the language definition that was made nearly 3 years ago now.
Haven't you heard? Java 2.0 is out. It broke source but not binary compatability. It's called Scala.
It doesn't appeal to most of the people who want a better Java. It's a language that takes a totally different direction, which is a good thing, but it's not even approximately the same thing as Java with a cleaned-up class library.
The thing needed most by Java, IMHO, is not more features, but a thorough cleanup of the runtime classlib.
Agreed. There are huge problems with the Java classlib as it stands, and these problems account for most of the issues that Java has. The biggest one is the huge list of dependencies typical classes, including some of the most basic classes in the library, have.
For instance, all classes depend on java.lang.Class. java.lang.Class depends on (among others) java.io.InputStream, java.net.URL, sun.reflect.ConstantPool (!) and java.util.Map (and presumably an implementation of that interface). java.net.URL in turn depends on java.net.InetAddress, java.net.URLStreamHandler, java.net.URLStreamHandlerFactory, java.util.Hashtable (note: not a Map implementation, so all Java programs have to load at least two implementations of this basic function). Basic I/O features (System.in, System.out) are mixed in the same class as configuration file management (System.setProperties, which depends on java.util.Properties).
The biggest problem that Java has, and it's a problem it has always had, is that Java programs take too long to start. This is directly because of this dependency problem. I say: strip it down to layers. Define a core set of classes, no more than 20 or so of them, that must always be there. Add new functions on top of those in small increments. Basic classes must not depend on more advanced ones.
Yes, this will break backwards compatibility. The old library can be retained for applications that need it, but it's time for a clean break for new ones.
What happens if the user stores their multimedia content on a file server, and then tries to play them on a laptop by streaming the data across the local network ?
Unless we're talking uncompressed content, chances are the 12MB/s (96Mb/s) that is the limited speed most people have been reporting will be adequate. Assuming you're not trying to do anything else at the same time.
E.g., I regularly stream both audio and backup images from a remote file server to my workstation, so I can listen to music while waiting for the backup disk to fill up so I can switch it to the next one... glad I'm still on XP, here.