Not everyone is dropping Java. Java is heavily used in enterprise systems. The JVM (virtual machine) is one of the most amazingly well engineered machines ever created.
I don't know where you just don't like the word Java, or whether you don't like the language, or whether you don't like Applets in the browser, or what. But the Java ecosystem is way larger than you imagine.
Yes, Java has its uses. But it's gotten a bad name because Sun/Oracle touted it as a web application platform but never bothered to provide the necessary security for executing untrusted code over the Internet. Worse, until very recently, there was no way to install just the Java runtime for desktop apps without also getting the browser plugin shoved down your throat – and if you removed it, it would be put back at the next security update. The fact that Oracle sees these security updates as a way to make a few bucks by foisting Ask Toolbar on users doesn't help, either. And the numerous patent lawsuits filed by Oracle are yet another strike against Java.
I know that everyone's hatred of Flash often gets in the way of facts and reality, but everything regarding Flash -- the SWF format, the AVM2 bytecode, the communication protocols -- has been open-sourced except for Adobe's Flash IDE.
Why, then, hasn't there been a strong open-source alternative to Adobe's Flash Player? I know that there is a GNU project already out there to run Flash, but by most accounts it sucks in terms of compatibility and performance. Is there some "secret sauce" that Adobe is holding back from the published documents? (I suspect any of Flash's DRM features must be undocumented, since the lack of public documentation is practically the definition of DRM.) Or are they of OOXML-style complexity so that it's virtually impossible for anyone without the resources of a major multinational corporation to implement? Or is it just laziness?
Or, for an example closer to home, back in the 90's IBM replaced their mainframe based E-Mail system (Profs) with Lotus Notes, arguably the worst possible system for E-Mail. Just, you know, because... And Profs was so much better than Lotus Notes, it wasn't even funny. I'd have qualified that with "For E-Mail," but really, anything you could shoe-horn into Lotus Notes could probably have been shoe-horned into Profs and been better. But you know, Lotus Notes was shiny.
Lotus Notes is probably the worst piece of software that has ever existed. It makes IE6 look like a masterpiece in comparison.
We already have the 'standard was the implementation' bullshit in Office Open XML. We don't need another in HTML/CSS.
Well, first of all, the 'implementation' of OOXML was not and is not open source, so it cannot be examined or freely used. For another thing, OOXML is more complicated by an order of magnitude than HTML/CSS.
Ideally, yes that's true. In practice, this would result in the one becoming a defacto standard, and whomever controls the one controls the standard. We are already kind of seeing this with WebKit.
It's true that WebKit is becoming a de facto standard, but I don't really see this as a problem. Some people say it's just like what happened with IE6, but there are several reasons why that was much more problematic:
IE6 was a poorly-documented, closed-source implementation.
It was controlled by one company. Everyone else was frozen out.
It only ran on one platform.
Microsoft actually had an incentive to not make IE too good, because they saw Web-based applications as a strategic threat to their Windows business.
WebKit doesn't have any of these problems. It's a free, open-source rendering engine that can and does run on just about any modern computing platform. Even though the official source tree is curated by Apple, there is major buy-in from other stakeholders including Google and Adobe, and any attempt by Apple to freeze others out would almost certainly result in a swift fork (just as happened with OpenOffice.org after the Oracle acquisition). The decade-long stagnation of the Web under the reign of IE6 was the result of a lot of very specific circumstances; it can't be replicated again, and certainly not with WebKit.
The W3C requires at least two implementations of a standard before it can become a Recommendation.
No one cares about the W3C any more. They've made themselves an irrelevant laughingstock by being years behind the times on updating the HTML and CSS standards. The result is that WebKit is the de facto standard now.
No, COBOL is magical, in that it supports handling of decimal arithmetic as integer, keeping track of the decimal place as a separate operation until the end. That is one of the main reasons that so many financial institutions used it -- no rounding. As far as I know, only PL/I is the only other language with this built in feature, even to this day.
According to Wikipedia, the following languages all support an accurate decimal data type in the standard libraries: Python, Ruby, Java, and Objective-C.
leverage the more dynamic cultures it's inherited and make itself more nimble and innovative
A hint to the recruiters and advertisers at Dice.com and EMC: Slashdot readers generally aren't very impressed by this sort of Bullshit Bingo. These phrases you're spewing are designed to sound impressive, but they don't actually mean much of anything – other than "I've got an MBA and I'm trying desperately to prove my worth."
People it hired 'need to be able to move fast and run
Translation: They exploit the hell out of their employees.
No different, except for the massive difference in operating costs. How much does a chopper pilot get paid, how much in dollar terms does the fuel cost, how much does the vehicle cost to build? How much does a drone cost in comparison?
Dorner is a multiple murderer with a $1 million bounty on his head. The authorities in this case aren't worried about the financial costs of bringing him in. Now, it's certainly true that in other cases the use of automated surveillance might enable the cops to go further than they would if they had to do things manually, but this isn't really a good test case for that.
This same article could have been written 5, 10, or probably 20 years ago. Marketdroids came up with the idea of inflating HDD size by exploiting the ambiguity between base-2 and base-10 a long time back.
No one ever uses that terminology in the real world (well, maybe a handful of standards-crazy Linux developers, but that's about it). There was an attempt to shove it down everyone's throat on Wikipedia a couple years ago and it was decisively beaten back. No one wanted this baby-talk in their articles. The Commodore 64 didn't have 64 "kibibytes" of RAM (I feel silly even typing that), it had 64 KILOBYTES of RAM. That's how prefixes have always been used in the IT world and always will be. The International System of Units can go to hell.
There are glitches: I can't get most video content, and Flash-only sites are inaccessible. However, this ended up being not a big issue.
One reason for this is that many YouTube videos play in HTML5 on Firefox. (If you find a video you can't play, try embedding it; this sometimes produces a workable version.)
Overall, the playback on HTML5 is better than Flash. There are fewer random slowdowns and stall-outs. On the downside, not every video is in HTML5.
If you're using Firefox, one problem is that they've been very tardy with H.264 support, for ideological reasons. However, they are going to start supporting it in Firefox 22 by default, at least on Windows 7 systems that already have the codecs built in. This should eliminate some of the compatibility issues that have been observed.
For way to many years it's been a mess. And these near-daily emergency patches now. WTF is broken in their development/testing process? I don't understand how it can stay so horrid, or why Adobe finds this acceptable...
Even Windows has gotten a lot more secure over the years. But Flash, seems more broken each day.
Anyone have any insight?
Adobe outsources most of their development process to India. That's a major contributing factor.
And replace it with what? The atrocity also known as HTML5 which is not write once run anywhere, is an absolute bear to code and despite the hype is nowhere near suitable for gaming yet?
It's true that for this one particular use-case, Flash may still have an edge against open technologies. But 99% of the Flash on the web is either ads or videos. We don't want to see the ads anyway, and HTML5 makes embedding videos without Flash in a standards-compliant fashion relatively easy. And remember, if your site relies upon Flash, no one with an iDevice will be able to use it correctly. And that's not going to change. In contrast, HTML5 videos work fine on both desktop browsers and portable devices.
If the only thing Flash is good for is some types of online gaming, then many users don't need it at all, and for those who do, it should be set by default to use a whitelist and only permit the plugin to be invoked on domains that are specifically authorized by the user.
Re:GIMP vs. Ps (If PS is free!)
on
The Book of GIMP
·
· Score: 1
Yeah PS is better, but those who say so pirate it 80% of the time! That is not really fair. If you had to actually pay $700 for it would it be worth your value then for its features?
Probably not, but when you can get Photoshop Elements for $99 (sometimes lower on sale) or Photoshop CS2 for free from Adobe's website, GIMP looks a lot less attractive.
I'm not really sure where ChromeOS is supposed to fit in. For people who want to do heavyweight stuff, it's no substitute for a full-fledged OS, and people who just want a content consumption device have mostly already switched to smartphones and tablets running iOS or Android. I sort of see where it fits into Google's marketing strategy – it's an OS for people to live their entire life "in the cloud" – but is there any actual demand for that? One thing we should have learned from the WinRT and WinPhone fiascos is that just because a company thinks a product is strategically important doesn't mean that its customers are going to agree.
When judging this move, I think it's important to keep in mind the intended user base of MacOS systems. These are not intended to run legacy, mission-critical business apps. In fact, Apple has never really cared that much about legacy support – backwards compatibility has always been a Windows thing. (Steve Ballmer seems to be forgetting why people stick with his company, but that's a different issue.) Macs are aimed primarily at home users, with a secondary but still strong user base among graphics arts professionals. For both of these demographics, the risks of leaving obsolete, bug-ridden versions of Java enabled far outweigh any potential benefits. Most of these people will never run any Java applications at all, and of the few who do, almost all will be able to use the up-to-date version of Java to do so. Yes, I know there are crappy "enterprise" apps that only work on 1.4.2 beta or some such nonsense, but Apple doesn't care about that – and frankly, they shouldn't. That isn't their target market. If you run a business you should be using Windows 7 for your desktops – it's designed from the ground up to be suitable for both home users and enterprises, and lets you control all the security stuff through group policy.
Except all the corporate java apps rely on Java 1.4,5, and 6. I use Java 6 for Android SDK. It wont run on anything else. Java 7 is terrible and not as good as the more stable and secure version 6 which is mature. Does Cisco WebEX use Java 7 yet? I use Java 6 for that as well.
You can still run that shit on Windows. Macs are aimed towards non-technical home users, and to a lesser extent graphical artists. Legacy compatibility has never been Apple's strong point.
If there are security vulnerabilities discovered in update 13 then it will likely be blocked as well.
As well it should be. People have been putting up with Oracle's lackadaisical approach to bug-fixing for far too long already. Playing nice hasn't worked, now it is time to haul out the big guns.
Translation: Firefox provides secure behavior by default; if you want to do insecure stuff with plugins, you can, but you have to explicitly tell it so in the configuration settings.
Pretty delusional to think Valve wouldn't have anticipated this kind of lawsuit.
I'm fairly certain they will have artfully closed any and all loopholes that could be used for this in their terms of agreement.
The cult of the contract isn't nearly as strong in Europe as it is in the United States.
Just because they wrote it in an agreement doesn't necessarily mean it will hold up in court.
But for what it's worth I think there's another point in OpenGL's favour, Microsoft have a long history of failing to provide graphics API stability, GDI, GDI+, WPF 2D/3D, DX, MDX, XNA, and so on - so many APIs over the years have come and gone with support disappearing to a large extent or even completely. It's one of Microsoft's developer weak points.
GDI hasn't gone away – it's still the core Win32 rendering API. Microsoft may be encouraging people to use its newer technologies, but GDI is still supported (even with hardware acceleration for the more commonly used features) and isn't going to be discontinued any time soon, seeing as that would break about 90% of Windows desktop applications. Well, maybe Steve Ballmer is stupid enough to try it, but I think he will be kicked out before then, and replaced with someone who understands what side Microsoft's bread is buttered on.
I don't doubt it's done in the driver. One reliable piece of code which has been tested to death which performs exactly as it says on the tin.
What color is the sky in your world?
Video card drivers are among the most unreliable pieces of software in widespread use. (This is one reason why WebGL is such a terrible idea – the last thing you want to do is expose this crappy code to completely untrusted data from the Internet.) If video card vendors can get 1 extra FPS in the latest twitch game by adding an unreliable hack, they'll do it. And there is no way to turn these hacks off.
One of the reasons why Vista got such a reputation for unreliability was that the video card vendors outright refused to rewrite their drivers for WDM. They kept pretending it just wasn't going to happen, and didn't finally do the update until after it was too late and Vista had already hit the stores.
So basically one business is being unfairly discriminated against by a government being protectionist. So the WTO says ok in that case you can rip off this completely separate business. WTF are they smoking?
This is nothing new. Google "chicken tax" – back in 1963, there was a trade war between the US and various European nations over tariffs they put on imported chicken. In retaliation, the US put a 25% tariff on several unrelated goods – including, most importantly, light trucks. Even though the original issues were resolved long ago, the 25% tariff on fully-assembled light trucks remains, which means that foreign manufacturers usually either build their truck plants inside the US or import the trucks in "complete knock down" form and assemble them in the US.
Anyway, remember that copyright is purely a legal construct – it's not part of customary international law, it's just a deal that the governments agreed to. If there were no treaties in the first place, Antigua would be perfectly within their rights to say that they would not have any copyright or patent laws at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone is dropping Java. Java is heavily used in enterprise systems. The JVM (virtual machine) is one of the most amazingly well engineered machines ever created. I don't know where you just don't like the word Java, or whether you don't like the language, or whether you don't like Applets in the browser, or what. But the Java ecosystem is way larger than you imagine.
Yes, Java has its uses. But it's gotten a bad name because Sun/Oracle touted it as a web application platform but never bothered to provide the necessary security for executing untrusted code over the Internet. Worse, until very recently, there was no way to install just the Java runtime for desktop apps without also getting the browser plugin shoved down your throat – and if you removed it, it would be put back at the next security update. The fact that Oracle sees these security updates as a way to make a few bucks by foisting Ask Toolbar on users doesn't help, either. And the numerous patent lawsuits filed by Oracle are yet another strike against Java.
I know that everyone's hatred of Flash often gets in the way of facts and reality, but everything regarding Flash -- the SWF format, the AVM2 bytecode, the communication protocols -- has been open-sourced except for Adobe's Flash IDE.
Why, then, hasn't there been a strong open-source alternative to Adobe's Flash Player? I know that there is a GNU project already out there to run Flash, but by most accounts it sucks in terms of compatibility and performance. Is there some "secret sauce" that Adobe is holding back from the published documents? (I suspect any of Flash's DRM features must be undocumented, since the lack of public documentation is practically the definition of DRM.) Or are they of OOXML-style complexity so that it's virtually impossible for anyone without the resources of a major multinational corporation to implement? Or is it just laziness?
Or, for an example closer to home, back in the 90's IBM replaced their mainframe based E-Mail system (Profs) with Lotus Notes, arguably the worst possible system for E-Mail. Just, you know, because... And Profs was so much better than Lotus Notes, it wasn't even funny. I'd have qualified that with "For E-Mail," but really, anything you could shoe-horn into Lotus Notes could probably have been shoe-horned into Profs and been better. But you know, Lotus Notes was shiny.
Lotus Notes is probably the worst piece of software that has ever existed. It makes IE6 look like a masterpiece in comparison.
We already have the 'standard was the implementation' bullshit in Office Open XML. We don't need another in HTML/CSS.
Well, first of all, the 'implementation' of OOXML was not and is not open source, so it cannot be examined or freely used. For another thing, OOXML is more complicated by an order of magnitude than HTML/CSS.
Ideally, yes that's true. In practice, this would result in the one becoming a defacto standard, and whomever controls the one controls the standard. We are already kind of seeing this with WebKit.
It's true that WebKit is becoming a de facto standard, but I don't really see this as a problem. Some people say it's just like what happened with IE6, but there are several reasons why that was much more problematic:
WebKit doesn't have any of these problems. It's a free, open-source rendering engine that can and does run on just about any modern computing platform. Even though the official source tree is curated by Apple, there is major buy-in from other stakeholders including Google and Adobe, and any attempt by Apple to freeze others out would almost certainly result in a swift fork (just as happened with OpenOffice.org after the Oracle acquisition). The decade-long stagnation of the Web under the reign of IE6 was the result of a lot of very specific circumstances; it can't be replicated again, and certainly not with WebKit.
The W3C requires at least two implementations of a standard before it can become a Recommendation.
No one cares about the W3C any more. They've made themselves an irrelevant laughingstock by being years behind the times on updating the HTML and CSS standards. The result is that WebKit is the de facto standard now.
No, COBOL is magical, in that it supports handling of decimal arithmetic as integer, keeping track of the decimal place as a separate operation until the end. That is one of the main reasons that so many financial institutions used it -- no rounding. As far as I know, only PL/I is the only other language with this built in feature, even to this day.
According to Wikipedia, the following languages all support an accurate decimal data type in the standard libraries: Python, Ruby, Java, and Objective-C.
leverage the more dynamic cultures it's inherited and make itself more nimble and innovative
A hint to the recruiters and advertisers at Dice.com and EMC: Slashdot readers generally aren't very impressed by this sort of Bullshit Bingo. These phrases you're spewing are designed to sound impressive, but they don't actually mean much of anything – other than "I've got an MBA and I'm trying desperately to prove my worth."
People it hired 'need to be able to move fast and run
Translation: They exploit the hell out of their employees.
No different, except for the massive difference in operating costs. How much does a chopper pilot get paid, how much in dollar terms does the fuel cost, how much does the vehicle cost to build? How much does a drone cost in comparison?
Dorner is a multiple murderer with a $1 million bounty on his head. The authorities in this case aren't worried about the financial costs of bringing him in. Now, it's certainly true that in other cases the use of automated surveillance might enable the cops to go further than they would if they had to do things manually, but this isn't really a good test case for that.
This same article could have been written 5, 10, or probably 20 years ago. Marketdroids came up with the idea of inflating HDD size by exploiting the ambiguity between base-2 and base-10 a long time back.
and by the same standards, 2^10 is a KiB
No one ever uses that terminology in the real world (well, maybe a handful of standards-crazy Linux developers, but that's about it). There was an attempt to shove it down everyone's throat on Wikipedia a couple years ago and it was decisively beaten back. No one wanted this baby-talk in their articles. The Commodore 64 didn't have 64 "kibibytes" of RAM (I feel silly even typing that), it had 64 KILOBYTES of RAM. That's how prefixes have always been used in the IT world and always will be. The International System of Units can go to hell.
There are glitches: I can't get most video content, and Flash-only sites are inaccessible. However, this ended up being not a big issue. One reason for this is that many YouTube videos play in HTML5 on Firefox. (If you find a video you can't play, try embedding it; this sometimes produces a workable version.) Overall, the playback on HTML5 is better than Flash. There are fewer random slowdowns and stall-outs. On the downside, not every video is in HTML5.
If you're using Firefox, one problem is that they've been very tardy with H.264 support, for ideological reasons. However, they are going to start supporting it in Firefox 22 by default, at least on Windows 7 systems that already have the codecs built in. This should eliminate some of the compatibility issues that have been observed.
For way to many years it's been a mess. And these near-daily emergency patches now. WTF is broken in their development/testing process? I don't understand how it can stay so horrid, or why Adobe finds this acceptable... Even Windows has gotten a lot more secure over the years. But Flash, seems more broken each day. Anyone have any insight?
Adobe outsources most of their development process to India. That's a major contributing factor.
And replace it with what? The atrocity also known as HTML5 which is not write once run anywhere, is an absolute bear to code and despite the hype is nowhere near suitable for gaming yet?
It's true that for this one particular use-case, Flash may still have an edge against open technologies. But 99% of the Flash on the web is either ads or videos. We don't want to see the ads anyway, and HTML5 makes embedding videos without Flash in a standards-compliant fashion relatively easy. And remember, if your site relies upon Flash, no one with an iDevice will be able to use it correctly. And that's not going to change. In contrast, HTML5 videos work fine on both desktop browsers and portable devices.
If the only thing Flash is good for is some types of online gaming, then many users don't need it at all, and for those who do, it should be set by default to use a whitelist and only permit the plugin to be invoked on domains that are specifically authorized by the user.
Yeah PS is better, but those who say so pirate it 80% of the time! That is not really fair. If you had to actually pay $700 for it would it be worth your value then for its features?
Probably not, but when you can get Photoshop Elements for $99 (sometimes lower on sale) or Photoshop CS2 for free from Adobe's website, GIMP looks a lot less attractive.
I wonder if the downfall of slashdot was when they started trying to run it like a business.
The downfall of everything is when they start trying to run it "like a business."
I'm not really sure where ChromeOS is supposed to fit in. For people who want to do heavyweight stuff, it's no substitute for a full-fledged OS, and people who just want a content consumption device have mostly already switched to smartphones and tablets running iOS or Android. I sort of see where it fits into Google's marketing strategy – it's an OS for people to live their entire life "in the cloud" – but is there any actual demand for that? One thing we should have learned from the WinRT and WinPhone fiascos is that just because a company thinks a product is strategically important doesn't mean that its customers are going to agree.
When judging this move, I think it's important to keep in mind the intended user base of MacOS systems. These are not intended to run legacy, mission-critical business apps. In fact, Apple has never really cared that much about legacy support – backwards compatibility has always been a Windows thing. (Steve Ballmer seems to be forgetting why people stick with his company, but that's a different issue.) Macs are aimed primarily at home users, with a secondary but still strong user base among graphics arts professionals. For both of these demographics, the risks of leaving obsolete, bug-ridden versions of Java enabled far outweigh any potential benefits. Most of these people will never run any Java applications at all, and of the few who do, almost all will be able to use the up-to-date version of Java to do so. Yes, I know there are crappy "enterprise" apps that only work on 1.4.2 beta or some such nonsense, but Apple doesn't care about that – and frankly, they shouldn't. That isn't their target market. If you run a business you should be using Windows 7 for your desktops – it's designed from the ground up to be suitable for both home users and enterprises, and lets you control all the security stuff through group policy.
Except all the corporate java apps rely on Java 1.4,5, and 6. I use Java 6 for Android SDK. It wont run on anything else. Java 7 is terrible and not as good as the more stable and secure version 6 which is mature. Does Cisco WebEX use Java 7 yet? I use Java 6 for that as well.
You can still run that shit on Windows. Macs are aimed towards non-technical home users, and to a lesser extent graphical artists. Legacy compatibility has never been Apple's strong point.
If there are security vulnerabilities discovered in update 13 then it will likely be blocked as well.
As well it should be. People have been putting up with Oracle's lackadaisical approach to bug-fixing for far too long already. Playing nice hasn't worked, now it is time to haul out the big guns.
Translation: Firefox provides secure behavior by default; if you want to do insecure stuff with plugins, you can, but you have to explicitly tell it so in the configuration settings.
Why is this a problem?
Pretty delusional to think Valve wouldn't have anticipated this kind of lawsuit. I'm fairly certain they will have artfully closed any and all loopholes that could be used for this in their terms of agreement.
The cult of the contract isn't nearly as strong in Europe as it is in the United States.
Just because they wrote it in an agreement doesn't necessarily mean it will hold up in court.
But for what it's worth I think there's another point in OpenGL's favour, Microsoft have a long history of failing to provide graphics API stability, GDI, GDI+, WPF 2D/3D, DX, MDX, XNA, and so on - so many APIs over the years have come and gone with support disappearing to a large extent or even completely. It's one of Microsoft's developer weak points.
GDI hasn't gone away – it's still the core Win32 rendering API. Microsoft may be encouraging people to use its newer technologies, but GDI is still supported (even with hardware acceleration for the more commonly used features) and isn't going to be discontinued any time soon, seeing as that would break about 90% of Windows desktop applications. Well, maybe Steve Ballmer is stupid enough to try it, but I think he will be kicked out before then, and replaced with someone who understands what side Microsoft's bread is buttered on.
I don't doubt it's done in the driver. One reliable piece of code which has been tested to death which performs exactly as it says on the tin.
What color is the sky in your world?
Video card drivers are among the most unreliable pieces of software in widespread use. (This is one reason why WebGL is such a terrible idea – the last thing you want to do is expose this crappy code to completely untrusted data from the Internet.) If video card vendors can get 1 extra FPS in the latest twitch game by adding an unreliable hack, they'll do it. And there is no way to turn these hacks off.
One of the reasons why Vista got such a reputation for unreliability was that the video card vendors outright refused to rewrite their drivers for WDM. They kept pretending it just wasn't going to happen, and didn't finally do the update until after it was too late and Vista had already hit the stores.
So basically one business is being unfairly discriminated against by a government being protectionist. So the WTO says ok in that case you can rip off this completely separate business. WTF are they smoking?
This is nothing new. Google "chicken tax" – back in 1963, there was a trade war between the US and various European nations over tariffs they put on imported chicken. In retaliation, the US put a 25% tariff on several unrelated goods – including, most importantly, light trucks. Even though the original issues were resolved long ago, the 25% tariff on fully-assembled light trucks remains, which means that foreign manufacturers usually either build their truck plants inside the US or import the trucks in "complete knock down" form and assemble them in the US.
Anyway, remember that copyright is purely a legal construct – it's not part of customary international law, it's just a deal that the governments agreed to. If there were no treaties in the first place, Antigua would be perfectly within their rights to say that they would not have any copyright or patent laws at all.