You know, this is both false and needlessly condemnable. When I was in school not four years ago, protesters used to glut the lobby of the student union twice a year trying to Free Tibet. Clinton tried to use the cessation of human rights violations in Tibet as incentive to bring China into most favored nation status. And both sides have been toying with the idea of removing trade restriction with Cuba if Castro should step down. Everybody is worried about China's human rights...but there are only three ways to affect another nation's policy: through espionage, through economic sanctions or through the threat of force. Nobody wants to start a war with China...because, well, we would lose a lot of OUR people. Double standard? Maybe, but no worse than a war that killed over six thousand civilians in Afghanistan, or one that killed nine thousand in Iraq, both for very nobel causes and to prevent human right violations.
The "Left" has been caterwauling about Israel's occupation of Palestine because Israel seems incapable of compromise. The Israeli military and extremist groups are at least as violent and intolerant as their Palestinian counterparts. It's not like blaming a rape victim for being raped...it's like two schoolboys fighting, each blaming the other for starting it. If I punch you and take your hat, do I get to keep your hat just because you punch me back?
The sad fact of Israel is, unless they stop being a military power and start being a friendly nation, they'll never gain the respect and recognition of their peers. And they need that! The whole terrorism issue besides, Israel is a nation that was basically invented in the 20th Century, living in an area that's hated them for thousands of years. Diplomacy might heal the rift...further violence never will, it will only result in the eventual irradication of the state of Israel and the detruction of the important religious areas therein.
Oh. If where you come from "intellectual honesty" means "creating straw man arguments," I suggest you move.
Well, considering they can't teach that sort of history in Chinese schools, maybe they just forgot?
Re:No need to re-invent the wheel
on
Open Maps?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Here, here. But I think it's obvious this guy was more interested in the anti-commercial aspects of his project than in the technical ones...otherwise he'd have realized that raster maps -- which are just scanned images with coordinates added to the corners -- are far more readily available than vector maps, which are usually created BY HAND from raster maps. Which is what he's probably going to have to do if he doesn't just buy one outright: sit down with a copy of ArcInfo ($1500) and go line by line over a high def map, then cross reference the street info on another layer. A chore, for sure, but you only have to do it once. There are quite a few independent GIS consultants who will do the job for you for a fraction of the cost of said program...expect to pay $800 or so for the street map made from scratch.
Any way you look at it, it will be cheaper to buy the info if you want vectors AND street info. Get the town board behind you on this project! Get citizen support, the cost will be like $1 per resident I'm sure, well worth it. With these two in hand, you can get really good maps made up...and like I mentioned, you only need them made once (though you should update it once every six months or so along with new development).
Of course, you could get REALLY lucky, and discover somebody's already made really detailed digital maps of your area. The state and/or county probably have quite a bit, as might the USGS. Data from the USGS is free (though sometimes you have to pay for the bandwidth or media to get it), and many states have programs that provide free data IF AND ONLY IF you promise to give them any digitized maps you product (sound familiar? it's GPL for maps!). Here's the list for my county...you can also search that site for detailed (1 meter) orthoimagery that puts Terraserver to shame and 1:24 000 contour maps.
Hence why I used the term "sufficiently." Welcome to the English language, where adverbs can be used to alter the meaning of adjectives! It's truly wonderful!
The multiple downloads are to INSTALL the ONE program binary. You know how Windows has an Installer and Uninstaller built in? How Macintosh has an Install program which grants system rights? And how Redhat uses RPMs?
There are three INSTALLER binaries right there. Run them, and they install exactly the same shit on each of those three systems...plus a system specific batch file or program icon to start the JVM, and some even install a general purpose JVM if needed.
This is an important distinction. The code is all the same...but it's installed and run in a way that agrees with your operating system. It would be like offering a single chassis for all cars...with different body styles added on depending where you wanted to drive.
Incidentally, Sun's website apparently detects what platform you're currently visiting from and offers you downloads based on your current system. No, I didn't know that either...but I went to the main website, and all of the downloads *I* was offered were for Mac OS X. Guess what system I'm using?
Thanks. TBH, I map them to a constant called "S" in any class where I access files. Making this commonly used item into a short, easy to remember, easy to type variable helps ensure that I won't get lazy and start using "/" everywhere (since it usually works anyway, even on a mac!).
Well, not every product manager wants to devote a few hundred hours of optimization time to bring window refresh rates down by a few hundred milliseconds. I remember when the NetBeans team was optimizing speed; it took month as every single widget and window had to be mapped to a new MVC refresh scheme (vs the "Object, Refresh Thyself" scheme used previously). Java 1.5 should help a lot in making ALL Java UIs faster. It purports to offload a lot of the graphics refresh onto hardware, which is pretty tough to do considering the whole purpose of Java is to run everywhere (and therefore Sun has to write a general purpose fast windowing system that can sit on top of umpteen different desktops, a daunting task made easier with OpenGL).
With any luck...luck that Sun NEEDS to compete with the.NET CLR, very nearly cross platform thanks to Mono...a GUI written in 1.5 shouldn't feel any different from a native GUI. I'd love to see 1.5 EMBARASS Microsoft with speed and simplicity...even though I like.NET, a little cutthroat competition never hurt anybody...at least, not anybody as large as Microsoft.
damn, I'll have to actually make sure the shit I'm selling actually works!
Can you fathom the difference in complexity between testing something once, and testing it on N platforms? Generally speaking, if I have a java program I've compiled that will run on a Windows system, it will run everywhere else I could run it. That means I only have to test it once -- how many times -- once before giving it to the QA team. Now, they'll do their blast testing on their own systems...and very rarely will I have a platform specific issue. This means that supporting additional platforms is nearly free. Which means that if somebody really wanted our software but ran some obscure system...we could sell it to them without having to go buy a copy, and be almost entirely sure there won't be a problem.
then what in the hell are you doing developing software for it?
Please. This isn't 1972. Do you REALLY know everything about the hardware your users have? Chances are, no, you don't, you probably don't even know what set of vector instructions the processor will be using. You use abstraction layers to access said hardware. Well, Java takes that a step further...it abstracts the most basic function of the chip, along with giving you a single general access API Framework to do everything from write to the screen to operating a server. I suppose you could get all this from a makefile with a few thousand apocryphal branching options, or from some interpretted scripting language, but why?
nice to know the MS view of software development is still alive and well
Yeah, funny how Sun, IBM, and most of the other big guys have caught the bug. You know why? Because it works, dumbass.
Read a book like "Java Performance Tuning." The main reason Java UIs seem slow is that developers are using them in a very sloppy fashion. If you do it right...preload your graphics class, pool and reuse objects where possible and handle refreshes on your own, your UI can be jetspeed. Check out Jalbum or Eclipse or any of the hundreds of really fast Java programs out there and you'll see what I mean.
If you wrote a GUI in any other language and expected it to refresh every object in the background every time you changed something in the foreground, you'd see a performance hit, too.
You still have to test on different platforms. Oh, and if you'll notice, *they still have two binaries*
No...they have one binary, two installers. The installer for every system is different, because every system handles the installation of software in a different way. The binary -- freenet.jar -- is the same for every system, in fact the Windows version comes with instructions on how to run the same version minus the pretty Windows widgets on any UNIX like system. And while you SHOULD test on different platforms before claiming to support them, most of the time Java just works -- unlike C, which often suffers from problems like reliance on the Endian nature of integers, etc. Sure, you can make C that runs everywhere on the planet, but it is NOT as easy as writing Java in the same way. All you have to do in Java is refrain from using native{} blocks, refrain from using external libraries that use native{} blocks, and use file and user settings from Preferences and System.
What's wrong with PDF, EPS or any of the other well documented, well supported formats?
And where are the high quality, easy to use, free-as-in-beer client programs for this theoretical format going to come from?
Part of the reason PDF got so big is that Adobe pimps the hell out of it, to sell Acrobat. No open standard could ever get this level of popularity...not without another, bigger organization behind it (like Apple for AAC)
Actually, it was for sending out newsletters and the front page of online newspapers. The unsubscribe link actually worked...and that's why I wrote it in Java (which is what our message digest and database connections were written in and I didn't want to port them or bridge them).
No. "Pure C" has no GUI and the end result is hopelessly tied to the platform it was compiled for, the files it was linked to, etc. Need both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of your program? Compile twice. Want a version that's tailored to a specific piece of hardware? Compile it again.
With Java, the "platform" stays the same no matter where you install it. The underlying code that the platform runs is differenct everywhere, but you don't have to worry about that. The JIT compiler optimizes what you write and in a best case does as good a job as if you'd hand coded it. In the real world, it's still quite efficient as of Java 1.4...and graphics routines will be heavily accelerated in 1.5.
Ever notice when you download large Java apps you have a choice of (by platform) installers?
Yeah. Want to know why? Because the Install Anywhere program they use to GENERATE the installer binaries tries to make it as easy as possible to INSTALL them. It's the same Java file once it's put wherever it's going. That's the purpose of Install Anywhere...to bridge the biggest question mark between systems, which is "how do I start this friggin' thing." Install Anywhere makes a batch file, a shell script, a stub program, or whatever it needs to do to get your JAR file to run whereever it can...and it's really easy to use. There's even a free-as-in-beer version.
Oh, and some -- very few, actually -- big Java programs do feature utilities that only run on certain hardware, but generally it does so just to improve usability on those systems. For example, if a system doesn't support Java's Drag and Drop for whatever reason, a stub program might be used to facillitate that. There are a few advanced graphics libraries which are platform specific, because they require patented code that only compiles on certain systems. Freenet has a little program that gives access to the program from the Windows System tray, which Java can't access. But this okay -- because the program is a C++ program which ACCESSES Java. If the C program dies, or isn't there, Java still works. It's just a fancy spoiler on a safe little compact car.
The big difference between C and Java is that, if you know all of the options on a target system, you can create a C program that will run well on it. If you don't know them all, you have to output and test a binary for every possible configuration -- or ask the target system's users to compile them for you (okay for free software but not so cool if you're trying to get the less savvy users). If you know NONE of the options on a target system, you can write a Java program that will at least run...and, if the JRE developer for that system did his job, will probably run with passable performance.
Actually, I thought this was the whole point to the new Mac Office 2004...to bind together all of your data into a single project, shared by other members of your team.
I haven't used it yet...my copy deleted my home directory...but I hear it's a breath of fresh air. I have high hopes...Office.X kicked the shit out of Office XP.
And it should -- office for the mac isn't written by the office team, but by a company contracted by MS and given the rights to their file format. Hence why they don't have an analog to Access and use Entourage instead of Outlook (Access and Outlook being two BIG tie-ins for Windows servers).
Not as well as SharpDevelop, of course. That system is SICK fast. In fact, it's too fast. I'm used to VS.NET taking five minutes to compile...SharpDevelop compiles my shit nearly instantly. I thought it was broken!
Hey. If I write a word doc and send it to you, can you open it in your copy of Word?
Sure you can. If it's any of the versions written in the past 5 years. And if I save it as an older version, SANS cool new features, the past 10 years. Which means hundreds of millions of computers can open that document
That makes it a standard. Not an open standard, but a standard just the same. In fact, the reason most people would give for why they use Office is that it's an "Industry Standard."
Lots of closed standards become popular. GIF, MP3, AVI, PDF -- the list goes on. On the other hand, relatively few of the open source standards have really taken off. There's a simple reason for that: unless there is a strong marketting force for your product, nobody will find out about it, nobody will use it, and therefore nobody will care what format it's in.
The sufficiently complex applications *I* have written in Java -- including a mass mail server and a database migration utility -- have worked just FINE on every arbitrary Java installation I've seen. I wrote them on a PC, moved them to a Sun server , and still run them on my Mac. The trick is to write them in pure Java...no native libraries, and when you need a file separator, get it from Preferences...don't assume / (or \, or : for that matter)!
Now, the difference between Java and GLIB/GDK/GTK is that you only need ONE binary. That's one less thing to worry about supporting...one less thing to have to TEST everywhere. Furthermore, I've rarely seen a Java UI crash unexpectedly. GTK crashes all the time on "beta" systems...like Windows.
Popular musicians have rarely played anything but the bare minimum. The reason for this is that a simplistic rhythm is easier to remember. If it's easier to remember, there's more of a chance it'll get stuck in your head, and then you'll have to buy the record.
Of course, much of today's music is so simple that it's just saccarine. Any bit of cleverness inside that simplicity is so much more visible because of it. That's why, despite my moral misgivings, I can't get that newest Britney song out of my fucking head. I'm just so excited that it doesn't have the same old beat!
The reason most sites have 30 second samples is that 30 seconds is generally the maximum time that can be used without the artist's explicit consent. Actually, it's "30 seconds or no more than 10% of the song," but that doesn't stop sites from providing the entire album "Short music for short people" for free.
Then wonder why the radio plays nothing they like. Here's a hint: you wouldn't listen to it even if they did!
I'm very lucky to have a good idependent radio station (WEQX). However, I understand that there's a huge army of listeners who don't want to hear them play the obscure cuts off of Blood Sugar Sex Magic or Armed Forces...they just want to hear Stacy's Mom or I Believe in a Thing Called Love.
Good radio stations are those that have the gaul to play something other than what you want to hear -- and other than what the Industry pays them to play -- while still playing what you want 80% of the time. Bad radio stations play whatever they feel like. It's why I can't listen to college radio all the time...I'm sick of shows where some pretentious twit plays thirty sucky songs in a row and I'm supposed to like it just because it's independent. Hey, I like indie rock too. I just don't feel the need to like the thousands of really shitty indie rock bands who seem to think that quality production, good lyrics and melody are institutions to be rebelled against.
You know, I don't know what planet you're from. But I'm from Earth...where, going back several hundred years, folk songs have always been simplistic, melodic, and above all, short. Come on, man? "Camptown ladies, sing this song: Doo dah, doo dah."
Yes, more complex music existed from composers whose job it was to rise beyond the simplicity of the common man. It was their job to do so, because they were being paid by the rich! If Beethoven had been composing music to be played by memory on an untuned lyre, he wouldn't have written hour long symphonies.
By middleman, he's referring to the brick and morter stores and distributors who add about $7 per CD. The RIAA gets their cut from the publisher's cut -- and the publisher's cut is larger than the artist's because the artist gave them permission to in the contract. Stupid, I know. There are more and more independent labels distributing on iTunes these days, labels who give their artists an even bigger cut of the proceeds -- with nothing handed back to the RIAA!
Besides, one might argue that with the Big 5, the publisher deserves a larger cut than with an Independent. The publisher is doing all of the work for promotion and production of the record -- with an indepedent artist, they have to do their own promotion and hire their own producers. Consider a record to be a business venture...if you're a sole proprieter, you can expect to take the lion's share of the reward but you won't be able to grow very far due to the assumption of risk. If you're a corporation, there's less personal risk, more potential for growth, but alas, you have to share your profits with the shareholders.
Not everybody wants their vocals to sound like Justin Timberlake or Scott Stapp. Some of us enjoy listening to people with interesting voices, like Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, John Lee Hooker, Les Claypool, Jack Black, Jack White, Ronnie James Dio, Dave Gutter, Aesop Rock...
Metallica never got much airplay in the 1980s when they were at their peak. Black Sabbath never really got any at all. When hip-hop was in its truly rebellious stage, it existed solely as traded tapes. That's still how the best of the underground gets passed along.
The only thing ClearChannel has a say in is what music gets on ClearChannel stations, what bands play at ClearChannel venues. Who needs them? When Aesop Rock can sell 100,000 copies of an Indie record with nothing but college airplay and nineteen out of twenty true music fans not knowing him from Adam, where's the problem? It's not like popularity is going to make your favorite band any better!
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You know, this is both false and needlessly condemnable. When I was in school not four years ago, protesters used to glut the lobby of the student union twice a year trying to Free Tibet. Clinton tried to use the cessation of human rights violations in Tibet as incentive to bring China into most favored nation status. And both sides have been toying with the idea of removing trade restriction with Cuba if Castro should step down. Everybody is worried about China's human rights...but there are only three ways to affect another nation's policy: through espionage, through economic sanctions or through the threat of force. Nobody wants to start a war with China...because, well, we would lose a lot of OUR people. Double standard? Maybe, but no worse than a war that killed over six thousand civilians in Afghanistan, or one that killed nine thousand in Iraq, both for very nobel causes and to prevent human right violations.
The "Left" has been caterwauling about Israel's occupation of Palestine because Israel seems incapable of compromise. The Israeli military and extremist groups are at least as violent and intolerant as their Palestinian counterparts. It's not like blaming a rape victim for being raped...it's like two schoolboys fighting, each blaming the other for starting it. If I punch you and take your hat, do I get to keep your hat just because you punch me back?
The sad fact of Israel is, unless they stop being a military power and start being a friendly nation, they'll never gain the respect and recognition of their peers. And they need that! The whole terrorism issue besides, Israel is a nation that was basically invented in the 20th Century, living in an area that's hated them for thousands of years. Diplomacy might heal the rift...further violence never will, it will only result in the eventual irradication of the state of Israel and the detruction of the important religious areas therein.
Oh. If where you come from "intellectual honesty" means "creating straw man arguments," I suggest you move.
Well, considering they can't teach that sort of history in Chinese schools, maybe they just forgot?
Here, here. But I think it's obvious this guy was more interested in the anti-commercial aspects of his project than in the technical ones...otherwise he'd have realized that raster maps -- which are just scanned images with coordinates added to the corners -- are far more readily available than vector maps, which are usually created BY HAND from raster maps. Which is what he's probably going to have to do if he doesn't just buy one outright: sit down with a copy of ArcInfo ($1500) and go line by line over a high def map, then cross reference the street info on another layer. A chore, for sure, but you only have to do it once. There are quite a few independent GIS consultants who will do the job for you for a fraction of the cost of said program...expect to pay $800 or so for the street map made from scratch.
Any way you look at it, it will be cheaper to buy the info if you want vectors AND street info. Get the town board behind you on this project! Get citizen support, the cost will be like $1 per resident I'm sure, well worth it. With these two in hand, you can get really good maps made up...and like I mentioned, you only need them made once (though you should update it once every six months or so along with new development).
Of course, you could get REALLY lucky, and discover somebody's already made really detailed digital maps of your area. The state and/or county probably have quite a bit, as might the USGS. Data from the USGS is free (though sometimes you have to pay for the bandwidth or media to get it), and many states have programs that provide free data IF AND ONLY IF you promise to give them any digitized maps you product (sound familiar? it's GPL for maps!). Here's the list for my county...you can also search that site for detailed (1 meter) orthoimagery that puts Terraserver to shame and 1:24 000 contour maps.
Hey. There's lots of money in theft. Just ask the mob...or anybody in China!
Hence why I used the term "sufficiently." Welcome to the English language, where adverbs can be used to alter the meaning of adjectives! It's truly wonderful!
-1, Confused.
The multiple downloads are to INSTALL the ONE program binary. You know how Windows has an Installer and Uninstaller built in? How Macintosh has an Install program which grants system rights? And how Redhat uses RPMs?
There are three INSTALLER binaries right there. Run them, and they install exactly the same shit on each of those three systems...plus a system specific batch file or program icon to start the JVM, and some even install a general purpose JVM if needed.
This is an important distinction. The code is all the same...but it's installed and run in a way that agrees with your operating system. It would be like offering a single chassis for all cars...with different body styles added on depending where you wanted to drive.
Incidentally, Sun's website apparently detects what platform you're currently visiting from and offers you downloads based on your current system. No, I didn't know that either...but I went to the main website, and all of the downloads *I* was offered were for Mac OS X. Guess what system I'm using?
Thanks. TBH, I map them to a constant called "S" in any class where I access files. Making this commonly used item into a short, easy to remember, easy to type variable helps ensure that I won't get lazy and start using "/" everywhere (since it usually works anyway, even on a mac!).
Well, not every product manager wants to devote a few hundred hours of optimization time to bring window refresh rates down by a few hundred milliseconds. I remember when the NetBeans team was optimizing speed; it took month as every single widget and window had to be mapped to a new MVC refresh scheme (vs the "Object, Refresh Thyself" scheme used previously). Java 1.5 should help a lot in making ALL Java UIs faster. It purports to offload a lot of the graphics refresh onto hardware, which is pretty tough to do considering the whole purpose of Java is to run everywhere (and therefore Sun has to write a general purpose fast windowing system that can sit on top of umpteen different desktops, a daunting task made easier with OpenGL).
.NET CLR, very nearly cross platform thanks to Mono...a GUI written in 1.5 shouldn't feel any different from a native GUI. I'd love to see 1.5 EMBARASS Microsoft with speed and simplicity...even though I like .NET, a little cutthroat competition never hurt anybody...at least, not anybody as large as Microsoft.
With any luck...luck that Sun NEEDS to compete with the
damn, I'll have to actually make sure the shit I'm selling actually works!
Can you fathom the difference in complexity between testing something once, and testing it on N platforms? Generally speaking, if I have a java program I've compiled that will run on a Windows system, it will run everywhere else I could run it. That means I only have to test it once -- how many times -- once before giving it to the QA team. Now, they'll do their blast testing on their own systems...and very rarely will I have a platform specific issue. This means that supporting additional platforms is nearly free. Which means that if somebody really wanted our software but ran some obscure system...we could sell it to them without having to go buy a copy, and be almost entirely sure there won't be a problem.
then what in the hell are you doing developing software for it?
Please. This isn't 1972. Do you REALLY know everything about the hardware your users have? Chances are, no, you don't, you probably don't even know what set of vector instructions the processor will be using. You use abstraction layers to access said hardware. Well, Java takes that a step further...it abstracts the most basic function of the chip, along with giving you a single general access API Framework to do everything from write to the screen to operating a server. I suppose you could get all this from a makefile with a few thousand apocryphal branching options, or from some interpretted scripting language, but why?
nice to know the MS view of software development is still alive and well
Yeah, funny how Sun, IBM, and most of the other big guys have caught the bug. You know why? Because it works, dumbass.
unusably slow UI.
Read a book like "Java Performance Tuning." The main reason Java UIs seem slow is that developers are using them in a very sloppy fashion. If you do it right...preload your graphics class, pool and reuse objects where possible and handle refreshes on your own, your UI can be jetspeed. Check out Jalbum or Eclipse or any of the hundreds of really fast Java programs out there and you'll see what I mean.
If you wrote a GUI in any other language and expected it to refresh every object in the background every time you changed something in the foreground, you'd see a performance hit, too.
You still have to test on different platforms. Oh, and if you'll notice, *they still have two binaries*
No...they have one binary, two installers. The installer for every system is different, because every system handles the installation of software in a different way. The binary -- freenet.jar -- is the same for every system, in fact the Windows version comes with instructions on how to run the same version minus the pretty Windows widgets on any UNIX like system. And while you SHOULD test on different platforms before claiming to support them, most of the time Java just works -- unlike C, which often suffers from problems like reliance on the Endian nature of integers, etc. Sure, you can make C that runs everywhere on the planet, but it is NOT as easy as writing Java in the same way. All you have to do in Java is refrain from using native{} blocks, refrain from using external libraries that use native{} blocks, and use file and user settings from Preferences and System.
What's wrong with PDF, EPS or any of the other well documented, well supported formats?
And where are the high quality, easy to use, free-as-in-beer client programs for this theoretical format going to come from?
Part of the reason PDF got so big is that Adobe pimps the hell out of it, to sell Acrobat. No open standard could ever get this level of popularity...not without another, bigger organization behind it (like Apple for AAC)
Actually, it was for sending out newsletters and the front page of online newspapers. The unsubscribe link actually worked...and that's why I wrote it in Java (which is what our message digest and database connections were written in and I didn't want to port them or bridge them).
No. "Pure C" has no GUI and the end result is hopelessly tied to the platform it was compiled for, the files it was linked to, etc. Need both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of your program? Compile twice. Want a version that's tailored to a specific piece of hardware? Compile it again.
With Java, the "platform" stays the same no matter where you install it. The underlying code that the platform runs is differenct everywhere, but you don't have to worry about that. The JIT compiler optimizes what you write and in a best case does as good a job as if you'd hand coded it. In the real world, it's still quite efficient as of Java 1.4...and graphics routines will be heavily accelerated in 1.5.
Ever notice when you download large Java apps you have a choice of (by platform) installers?
Yeah. Want to know why? Because the Install Anywhere program they use to GENERATE the installer binaries tries to make it as easy as possible to INSTALL them. It's the same Java file once it's put wherever it's going. That's the purpose of Install Anywhere...to bridge the biggest question mark between systems, which is "how do I start this friggin' thing." Install Anywhere makes a batch file, a shell script, a stub program, or whatever it needs to do to get your JAR file to run whereever it can...and it's really easy to use. There's even a free-as-in-beer version.
Oh, and some -- very few, actually -- big Java programs do feature utilities that only run on certain hardware, but generally it does so just to improve usability on those systems. For example, if a system doesn't support Java's Drag and Drop for whatever reason, a stub program might be used to facillitate that. There are a few advanced graphics libraries which are platform specific, because they require patented code that only compiles on certain systems. Freenet has a little program that gives access to the program from the Windows System tray, which Java can't access. But this okay -- because the program is a C++ program which ACCESSES Java. If the C program dies, or isn't there, Java still works. It's just a fancy spoiler on a safe little compact car.
The big difference between C and Java is that, if you know all of the options on a target system, you can create a C program that will run well on it. If you don't know them all, you have to output and test a binary for every possible configuration -- or ask the target system's users to compile them for you (okay for free software but not so cool if you're trying to get the less savvy users). If you know NONE of the options on a target system, you can write a Java program that will at least run...and, if the JRE developer for that system did his job, will probably run with passable performance.
I can't wait to use ElOffice "Palabra." Not to mention their spreadsheet programa, "Excelente!"
Actually, I thought this was the whole point to the new Mac Office 2004...to bind together all of your data into a single project, shared by other members of your team.
I haven't used it yet...my copy deleted my home directory...but I hear it's a breath of fresh air. I have high hopes...Office.X kicked the shit out of Office XP.
And it should -- office for the mac isn't written by the office team, but by a company contracted by MS and given the rights to their file format. Hence why they don't have an analog to Access and use Entourage instead of Outlook (Access and Outlook being two BIG tie-ins for Windows servers).
Not as well as SharpDevelop, of course. That system is SICK fast. In fact, it's too fast. I'm used to VS.NET taking five minutes to compile...SharpDevelop compiles my shit nearly instantly. I thought it was broken!
Hey. If I write a word doc and send it to you, can you open it in your copy of Word?
Sure you can. If it's any of the versions written in the past 5 years. And if I save it as an older version, SANS cool new features, the past 10 years. Which means hundreds of millions of computers can open that document
That makes it a standard. Not an open standard, but a standard just the same. In fact, the reason most people would give for why they use Office is that it's an "Industry Standard."
Lots of closed standards become popular. GIF, MP3, AVI, PDF -- the list goes on. On the other hand, relatively few of the open source standards have really taken off. There's a simple reason for that: unless there is a strong marketting force for your product, nobody will find out about it, nobody will use it, and therefore nobody will care what format it's in.
WTF are you talking about?
The sufficiently complex applications *I* have written in Java -- including a mass mail server and a database migration utility -- have worked just FINE on every arbitrary Java installation I've seen. I wrote them on a PC, moved them to a Sun server , and still run them on my Mac. The trick is to write them in pure Java...no native libraries, and when you need a file separator, get it from Preferences...don't assume / (or \, or : for that matter)!
Now, the difference between Java and GLIB/GDK/GTK is that you only need ONE binary. That's one less thing to worry about supporting...one less thing to have to TEST everywhere. Furthermore, I've rarely seen a Java UI crash unexpectedly. GTK crashes all the time on "beta" systems...like Windows.
Popular musicians have rarely played anything but the bare minimum. The reason for this is that a simplistic rhythm is easier to remember. If it's easier to remember, there's more of a chance it'll get stuck in your head, and then you'll have to buy the record.
Of course, much of today's music is so simple that it's just saccarine. Any bit of cleverness inside that simplicity is so much more visible because of it. That's why, despite my moral misgivings, I can't get that newest Britney song out of my fucking head. I'm just so excited that it doesn't have the same old beat!
The reason most sites have 30 second samples is that 30 seconds is generally the maximum time that can be used without the artist's explicit consent. Actually, it's "30 seconds or no more than 10% of the song," but that doesn't stop sites from providing the entire album "Short music for short people" for free.
Then wonder why the radio plays nothing they like. Here's a hint: you wouldn't listen to it even if they did!
I'm very lucky to have a good idependent radio station (WEQX). However, I understand that there's a huge army of listeners who don't want to hear them play the obscure cuts off of Blood Sugar Sex Magic or Armed Forces...they just want to hear Stacy's Mom or I Believe in a Thing Called Love.
Good radio stations are those that have the gaul to play something other than what you want to hear -- and other than what the Industry pays them to play -- while still playing what you want 80% of the time. Bad radio stations play whatever they feel like. It's why I can't listen to college radio all the time...I'm sick of shows where some pretentious twit plays thirty sucky songs in a row and I'm supposed to like it just because it's independent. Hey, I like indie rock too. I just don't feel the need to like the thousands of really shitty indie rock bands who seem to think that quality production, good lyrics and melody are institutions to be rebelled against.
You know, I don't know what planet you're from. But I'm from Earth...where, going back several hundred years, folk songs have always been simplistic, melodic, and above all, short. Come on, man? "Camptown ladies, sing this song: Doo dah, doo dah."
Yes, more complex music existed from composers whose job it was to rise beyond the simplicity of the common man. It was their job to do so, because they were being paid by the rich! If Beethoven had been composing music to be played by memory on an untuned lyre, he wouldn't have written hour long symphonies.
By middleman, he's referring to the brick and morter stores and distributors who add about $7 per CD. The RIAA gets their cut from the publisher's cut -- and the publisher's cut is larger than the artist's because the artist gave them permission to in the contract. Stupid, I know. There are more and more independent labels distributing on iTunes these days, labels who give their artists an even bigger cut of the proceeds -- with nothing handed back to the RIAA!
Besides, one might argue that with the Big 5, the publisher deserves a larger cut than with an Independent. The publisher is doing all of the work for promotion and production of the record -- with an indepedent artist, they have to do their own promotion and hire their own producers. Consider a record to be a business venture...if you're a sole proprieter, you can expect to take the lion's share of the reward but you won't be able to grow very far due to the assumption of risk. If you're a corporation, there's less personal risk, more potential for growth, but alas, you have to share your profits with the shareholders.
Hey, I went to hear him sing.
Not everybody wants their vocals to sound like Justin Timberlake or Scott Stapp. Some of us enjoy listening to people with interesting voices, like Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, John Lee Hooker, Les Claypool, Jack Black, Jack White, Ronnie James Dio, Dave Gutter, Aesop Rock...
Metallica never got much airplay in the 1980s when they were at their peak. Black Sabbath never really got any at all. When hip-hop was in its truly rebellious stage, it existed solely as traded tapes. That's still how the best of the underground gets passed along.
The only thing ClearChannel has a say in is what music gets on ClearChannel stations, what bands play at ClearChannel venues. Who needs them? When Aesop Rock can sell 100,000 copies of an Indie record with nothing but college airplay and nineteen out of twenty true music fans not knowing him from Adam, where's the problem? It's not like popularity is going to make your favorite band any better!