Moderators seem to be confusing Informative with Offtopic. What does Gosling talking about security have to do with Sun implementing generics? While sun was adding generics to Java, Gosling was building IDE components. Why blame him for Sun's reluctance to alter the JVM?
As far as how Sun implemented generics, the decision was purely political. Even Sun knows their solution is technically inferior. That doesn't make it wrong. They weighed the pros and cons and arrived at a different solution than you did, not because you know something they don't, but because they weighted the results differently.
Entire books can be written on the problems with the educational system, so I won't start something I can't finish. Rather (in typical/. fashion), I'll nitpick on petty details:
My first point (cheating) is based on the emphasis of memorization. Memorization isn't knowledge (as many teachers would have you believe). Taking credit for a unique idea is cheating, but that isn't the only form of copying discouraged in an academic environment. In order to test your memorization capacity, reference material is rarely allowed in a test environment (even though its use is usually encouraged in the workplace).
My comment about standardized tests was poorly worded. This was another way at taking a jab at the importance of memorization. I was also trying to point out (unsuccessfully) the numerous subjects that involve regurgitating facts to the teacher (An example taken from 'Hackers and Painters': Week 1: "The Civil War was caused by 3 things..." Week 3: The test question: "Name three things that caused the civil war:")
My third comment *was* a typical/. anti-establishment comment, but it wasn't as negative as it sounds. The real world is actually pretty fair when it comes to rewarding risk. My only complaint is that the educational system hasn't found a good way to mimic the real world. If the goal is to prepare us for the real world (one could argue that this isn't the goal), it should at least try to mimic the real world's value of risk takers.
In my opinion, I feel that by requiring students to take English, Calculus, Physics, and all the other basics not only requires some sort of literacy (No, C comments are not writing!) but teaches the student how to learn rather than merely teaching a trade.
I agree that this is a worthy goal (and the primary goal of many schools), but most schools also teach you other things that end up holding people back later in life: - Copying is cheating - If you can't take a standardized test for it, then it isn't really knowledge - Everyone starts with an A, and works their way backwards the less they conform
Every day the value of a college education goes down a bit (I suppose that's the point of the story). Every day the cost goes up a little. While having a degree may help a person become more inquisitive and learn to learn, every day it seems there is less and less value for the time & money in a college education. There are better ways to improve yourself. It is however, a pretty good way to improve a resume.
Other than the hardware invloved (readers and the tags themselves), I was under the impression that RFIDs were just like bar codes. Don't they just store a serial number and require a more advanced system to look up any data involved? If so, what would this middleware do?
Isn't it funny that there is so little quality scifi on TV that most fans will watch every episode of a show they don't like, just to give it a chance? I've done this with a few shows including firefly. It wasn't until just before I found out the series was being canceled that I began to like it. After watching it all again on DVD I figured out that I was loosing a good deal of the character development because Fox wouldn't show the episodes in order.
BTW, the solution I've found for my hunger for scifi was to bump up my netflix subscription and start renting tv shows. That way I can watch them in order from the beginning at my own pace. I've rediscovered quite a few good shows that I never got into before because they were several seasons into the story when I heard about them.
So because you can communicate between two languages using COM already, there is no reason to have.net? That's a hell of a leap. You assume that the only reason.net was created was to provide a common runtime for multiple languages. That was just a nice side effect. The real goal was to move Windows into a managed environment. They would have used Java bytecode as the foundation for that environment had Sun let them extend it to be platform specific. Luckily they didn't, and a entirely new platform was created.
You didn't even read the text you quoted. It refers specificly to.net libraries. Of course you still have to write extra code to access COM..Net DLLs can be accessed by any.Net language easily.
Re:Why should "cross platform" always mean Java/.N
on
Ars Technica Tours Mono
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Are you going to have a project where each member of the team is going to program in a different language? Are you going to have an open source project which accepts patches in 10 different languages?
Maybe you will, but not likely. What's more likely is VB programmers using a.net library and not having to worry about what language it was written in. The alternatives are to either write the library for every language (SVG rendering for VB, C, C++, Python, Javascript, etc), or to write your libraries in one language and try to maintain wrappers for each other language (GTK# ??).
Personally I think the.net approach is a good one. This is why (IMO) JNI sucks. I shouldn't have to write C code to access extra keys on my keyboard. It just adds more complication to my Java program to have to maintain C code along with it. In.net, all languages have access to roughly the same features (although there are some language specific feature differences they aren't API based). If C# has access to the keyboard, then everything else in.net will too. So.net isn't encouraging you to use multiple languages... it's encouraging you to use the language of your choice.
You can buy mine! It really sounded fascinating when I started. The screen shots look cool, and my series 1 tivo is getting a little old. It sounded like a good idea.
The last time I touched it, I was walking down a dependency chain trying to get my DVD playback working. Once I got to the end of the dependencies, I forgot where I started. I love computers as much as the next guy, but who wants to spend a Saturday afternoon researching the best model of IR receiver for Linux? Or why nvidia's drivers want me to recompile the kernel?
MythTv is for people who want to play in linux. period. If you want a working product, then buy a tivo. If you want to read your email, buy a laptop and put it next to your livingroom chair. That should free up your Saturday afternoon for writing some software (much more fulfilling IMHO).
There's no value in being vaguely similar - Mono has to be fully compatible to have any value over other platforms. The fact that Mono C Sharp programs look like Dotnet C Sharp programs means nothing if the code doesn't actually run - it might as well have a different bytecode, language and CLR too.
True, if the goal were compatibility with Microsoft's.Net. In Miguel's post he provides two alternatives. One is a direct port of Avalon (which you seem to favor). The other is a rewrite.
A direct port would allow Microsoft programs to run on other programs, but it would always be behind and could never be better than the Microsoft implementation (it would be a lot like wine). A direct port *will* happen. Its just a matter of time. But then again, why *just* emulate windows. Its not like the Linux desktop is going to be littered with Avalon programs, no matter how compatible they are.
A separate implementation would give the world an entirely new UI framework rather than bindings to GTK, Cocoa, KDE, or whatever. Why not just use the gtk bindings? Because its been a while since gtk was written, and now we know better ways. We also have access to more powerful hardware. In order to keep up with Quartz and Avalon, we will need to do better than tacking on transparency to GTK, or adding pre-rendered SVG graphics. Maybe we could do better than Avalon, maybe not. At the very least, we have a cross-platform UI framework in native.net. Best case, we have a successor to GTK and KDE that can compete with Avalon on any platform.
Thanks for clearing things up. The original story was very trollish (lets pretend trollish is a word). These project don't bring Java any closer to being like ActiveX than it already was. JDIC is just a set of Java wrappers around JNI calls (like BrowserLauncher). It has the same security restrictions as any other Java code making JNI calls (once authorized to use JNI, your not in a sandbox anymore). The same can be said of SWT, but you don't see any comparisons between SWT and ActiveX.
That said, I think JDIC is a great idea. Sun's boiled down least common denominator approach to UI has cost them any chance of being accepted on the client side (no matter what speed improvements are made). Even SWT doesn't completely integrate with the OS. This project is a good start.
Microsoft released.net as a standard to get better support for it. It doesn't hurt them in any way because.net isn't all that revolutionary (nice, but not revolutionary). Avalon is just the Windows-specific API for creating rich UIs (like cocoa# will be for the mac). Avalon is Microsoft's way of making sure Windows will stay the preferred environment for.net development. You can still code GTK# or cocoa# applications. You could even code winforms if you want.
If the community were smart, they would take Miguel's suggestion, and start on a competitive stack. Perhaps something that extends SVG to allow binding to.net and a friendlier syntax for reusable components.
Back before dictionaries you could spell words how you liked, and that was how spelling evolved. Nowadays, you spell like the rest of us, or people will think - rightly or wrongly - that you're an idiot.
You're right. People must think I'm an idiot. That's why the post was rated '+5 Insightful'. Thanks for the stunningly ironic post about how to not look like an idiot.
In that case I agree with the article (and disagree with the/. summary). Martin Fowler summarizes the differences in attitudes here. I personally prefer a directing attitude, and think it's the best way for the industry to proceed. I can understand how people might prefer using enabling tools, but for every person who can handle the responsibility, there are five others who can't (and we can't just leave them behind).
First of all, if it weren't worth talking about, there wouldn't be so many comments here.
Although I can't read the article (/.ed already), I won't let that stop me from disagreeing with the premise. While ignorant developers may have directly caused more individual security problems, the long-term solution isn't to blame the programmers and consider the issue solved. It's a lot more realistic and efficient to fix the programming tools than the programmers (even if the tools can already be used securely).
Saying that security issues will go away by educating developers is like saying America's obesity problems will be solved by telling all fat people to work out. Its just not practical or constructive on a large scale. (On a small scale, of course, a developer can educate himself just as an obese person can loose weight - with hard work and dedication).
So rather than criticizing our co-workers (who probably don't care what we think anyway), why don't we identify ways to isolate these people from situations where they could cause harm?
including one that does the low-level desktop integration like Icons, system trays etc. Can't remember the name of that offhand, but it's something like JDNC.
I think your oversimplifying a bit. Companies aren't patenting DNA sequences. Their patenting the result of years of cross breading. Sure, everything has DNA, and at the most basic level, they are patenting a living organism, but you should really look at this from a more practical point of view:
How did Monsanto make it's latest crop of corn seed? Through lots of lab work and cross breeding. Did they start with a block of carbon and re-arrange the atoms until they had some really good corn? No, they started with corn, and cross-bred until they had better corn. If someone were to steal that recipe, would they do it by starting with a block of carbon? No, they would buy some corn from Monsanto, and plant it.
There is a lot of stupid patents out there. There is no good effect to patenting math, simple business practices, or software. But genetic manipulation of life requires a great deal of dedication and work, yet can be reproduced afterwards by anyone with a cup full of dirt and access to the finished product. This is exactly the type of situation patents were designed for!
It sounds like you just don't know how to use swing. Any API you use for GUI development requires some adapting to. Swing has its issues, but the issues you're pointing out here are personal shortcomings.
Listener leaks are due to bad programming. I really don't want to take the time to explain solutions here. You can do some research on your own. Most listener leaks will be from inter-screen communication. Try minimizing problems using an event bus or a mediator.
The thread safety issue you describe doesn't have as much to do with thread safety as it does the single-threaded nature of Java. Most GUI apis use a single thread for event processing. Your issue with Swing seems to be that Swing paints itself on the event thread. I'm not sure how you solved the problem with synchronize blocks. Maybe you should look into SwingUtilities.invokeLater() and.invokeAndWait(). Its an extra 2 lines of code per event.
Yes there are better solutions than Swing, but C/C++ are not among the choices.
Now, here are a few *good* reasons to hate Swing:
- The look and feel will NEVER look the same as the native platform - Swing's complexity make difficult things easy, but simple things are much more difficult than they should be. SWT fixed this by layering complex parts of the API on top of simpler ones (JFace sits above SWT providing extra functionality for more advanced uses. - Sun expected third party vendors to extend Swing and finish the job, but no one wants to use third party tools because of vendor lock in (something Sun promised us wouldn't be an issue with Java). As a result, most components that could be improved upon with very little effort are left untouched by Sun. At how many companies will I have to implement a table sorter, or type ahead combobox, or formatted text field (one that works, not that JFormmattedTextField crap)
Even if there were a market for disposable DVDs, it wouldn't (as the story implies) destroy the existing market. Raising prices of regular DVDs would not effect the rental market. Studios have charged high rates on VHS rentals for years. Some tapes were selling for $130+ to video stores for 6 months before being released to the general public for $13. It wasn't until DVD came out that home collectors made is feasible to price initial releases at low prices.
Raising prices on DVD won't crush the video rental market. History has proven that Blockbuster can make money renting out a $130 video. Raising prices will kill the home collector market. The rental market would stay constant, and the result would be a net loss for the studios.
I don't know about this "convergence" thing. I have 5 remote controls for 5 different products, and I'll be damned if I can find a way to successfully use just for all!
That's a good example of how the hype over convergence is jumping the gun. We can't even solve the remote control problem. Everyone has a solution, but each solution brings with it more problems.
Over the next few years, companies will brag about convergence for stockholder support. But under the covers they will just be cramming two unrelated products into the same plastic shell, or allowing two very specific devices to talk to each other about very specific things. It really isn't any different than the over-hyped race to release the PDA, digital audio, the tablet PC, or any other new technology. We have years (if not decades) of hype to wade through before this one pans out.
Java UIs are pretty fast if you use the proper tools (SWT as opposed to SWING). A quick comparison of NetBeans (Swing) to Eclipse (SWT) should bear this out.
A quick comparison between Eclipse and IDEA would show that Swing is faster than SWT. That's the problem with anecdotal evidence: it doesn't tell the whole story.
Link it to map quest. Driving directions could be visual.
Turn left here: [picture of the intersection]
Render them together, and you could have a 3d rendering of the trip (made up of 2d images used as a textures). On star could send them to your heads-up-display (you have one, right?)
Re:State of the art?
on
Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: 1, Informative
You are a troll.
Ice Age was Fox.
Shrek compares very well to Pixar's movies at the time (Nemo was 2 years later, compare it to Monster's Inc.)
Antz compares well (in animation - not story) to Bug's Life. Shrek compares well to Monster's Inc. I haven't seen Shrek 2 yet, but the trailer doesn't look much different than Pixar's trailer (in technology at least).
Slashdot Mirror
Moderators seem to be confusing Informative with Offtopic. What does Gosling talking about security have to do with Sun implementing generics? While sun was adding generics to Java, Gosling was building IDE components. Why blame him for Sun's reluctance to alter the JVM?
As far as how Sun implemented generics, the decision was purely political. Even Sun knows their solution is technically inferior. That doesn't make it wrong. They weighed the pros and cons and arrived at a different solution than you did, not because you know something they don't, but because they weighted the results differently.
Entire books can be written on the problems with the educational system, so I won't start something I can't finish. Rather (in typical /. fashion), I'll nitpick on petty details:
/. anti-establishment comment, but it wasn't as negative as it sounds. The real world is actually pretty fair when it comes to rewarding risk. My only complaint is that the educational system hasn't found a good way to mimic the real world. If the goal is to prepare us for the real world (one could argue that this isn't the goal), it should at least try to mimic the real world's value of risk takers.
My first point (cheating) is based on the emphasis of memorization. Memorization isn't knowledge (as many teachers would have you believe). Taking credit for a unique idea is cheating, but that isn't the only form of copying discouraged in an academic environment. In order to test your memorization capacity, reference material is rarely allowed in a test environment (even though its use is usually encouraged in the workplace).
My comment about standardized tests was poorly worded. This was another way at taking a jab at the importance of memorization. I was also trying to point out (unsuccessfully) the numerous subjects that involve regurgitating facts to the teacher (An example taken from 'Hackers and Painters': Week 1: "The Civil War was caused by 3 things..." Week 3: The test question: "Name three things that caused the civil war:")
My third comment *was* a typical
In my opinion, I feel that by requiring students to take English, Calculus, Physics, and all the other basics not only requires some sort of literacy (No, C comments are not writing!) but teaches the student how to learn rather than merely teaching a trade.
I agree that this is a worthy goal (and the primary goal of many schools), but most schools also teach you other things that end up holding people back later in life:
- Copying is cheating
- If you can't take a standardized test for it, then it isn't really knowledge
- Everyone starts with an A, and works their way backwards the less they conform
Every day the value of a college education goes down a bit (I suppose that's the point of the story). Every day the cost goes up a little. While having a degree may help a person become more inquisitive and learn to learn, every day it seems there is less and less value for the time & money in a college education. There are better ways to improve yourself. It is however, a pretty good way to improve a resume.
Other than the hardware invloved (readers and the tags themselves), I was under the impression that RFIDs were just like bar codes. Don't they just store a serial number and require a more advanced system to look up any data involved? If so, what would this middleware do?
Isn't it funny that there is so little quality scifi on TV that most fans will watch every episode of a show they don't like, just to give it a chance? I've done this with a few shows including firefly. It wasn't until just before I found out the series was being canceled that I began to like it. After watching it all again on DVD I figured out that I was loosing a good deal of the character development because Fox wouldn't show the episodes in order.
BTW, the solution I've found for my hunger for scifi was to bump up my netflix subscription and start renting tv shows. That way I can watch them in order from the beginning at my own pace. I've rediscovered quite a few good shows that I never got into before because they were several seasons into the story when I heard about them.
So because you can communicate between two languages using COM already, there is no reason to have .net? That's a hell of a leap. You assume that the only reason .net was created was to provide a common runtime for multiple languages. That was just a nice side effect. The real goal was to move Windows into a managed environment. They would have used Java bytecode as the foundation for that environment had Sun let them extend it to be platform specific. Luckily they didn't, and a entirely new platform was created.
You didn't even read the text you quoted. It refers specificly to .net libraries. Of course you still have to write extra code to access COM. .Net DLLs can be accessed by any .Net language easily.
Are you going to have a project where each member of the team is going to program in a different language? Are you going to have an open source project which accepts patches in 10 different languages?
.net library and not having to worry about what language it was written in. The alternatives are to either write the library for every language (SVG rendering for VB, C, C++, Python, Javascript, etc), or to write your libraries in one language and try to maintain wrappers for each other language (GTK# ??).
.net approach is a good one. This is why (IMO) JNI sucks. I shouldn't have to write C code to access extra keys on my keyboard. It just adds more complication to my Java program to have to maintain C code along with it. In .net, all languages have access to roughly the same features (although there are some language specific feature differences they aren't API based). If C# has access to the keyboard, then everything else in .net will too. So .net isn't encouraging you to use multiple languages... it's encouraging you to use the language of your choice.
Maybe you will, but not likely. What's more likely is VB programmers using a
Personally I think the
Where can I buy a MythTV box?
You can buy mine! It really sounded fascinating when I started. The screen shots look cool, and my series 1 tivo is getting a little old. It sounded like a good idea.
The last time I touched it, I was walking down a dependency chain trying to get my DVD playback working. Once I got to the end of the dependencies, I forgot where I started. I love computers as much as the next guy, but who wants to spend a Saturday afternoon researching the best model of IR receiver for Linux? Or why nvidia's drivers want me to recompile the kernel?
MythTv is for people who want to play in linux. period. If you want a working product, then buy a tivo. If you want to read your email, buy a laptop and put it next to your livingroom chair. That should free up your Saturday afternoon for writing some software (much more fulfilling IMHO).
There's no value in being vaguely similar - Mono has to be fully compatible to have any value over other platforms. The fact that Mono C Sharp programs look like Dotnet C Sharp programs means nothing if the code doesn't actually run - it might as well have a different bytecode, language and CLR too.
.Net. In Miguel's post he provides two alternatives. One is a direct port of Avalon (which you seem to favor). The other is a rewrite.
.net. Best case, we have a successor to GTK and KDE that can compete with Avalon on any platform.
True, if the goal were compatibility with Microsoft's
A direct port would allow Microsoft programs to run on other programs, but it would always be behind and could never be better than the Microsoft implementation (it would be a lot like wine). A direct port *will* happen. Its just a matter of time. But then again, why *just* emulate windows. Its not like the Linux desktop is going to be littered with Avalon programs, no matter how compatible they are.
A separate implementation would give the world an entirely new UI framework rather than bindings to GTK, Cocoa, KDE, or whatever. Why not just use the gtk bindings? Because its been a while since gtk was written, and now we know better ways. We also have access to more powerful hardware. In order to keep up with Quartz and Avalon, we will need to do better than tacking on transparency to GTK, or adding pre-rendered SVG graphics. Maybe we could do better than Avalon, maybe not. At the very least, we have a cross-platform UI framework in native
Thanks for clearing things up. The original story was very trollish (lets pretend trollish is a word). These project don't bring Java any closer to being like ActiveX than it already was. JDIC is just a set of Java wrappers around JNI calls (like BrowserLauncher). It has the same security restrictions as any other Java code making JNI calls (once authorized to use JNI, your not in a sandbox anymore). The same can be said of SWT, but you don't see any comparisons between SWT and ActiveX.
That said, I think JDIC is a great idea. Sun's boiled down least common denominator approach to UI has cost them any chance of being accepted on the client side (no matter what speed improvements are made). Even SWT doesn't completely integrate with the OS. This project is a good start.
Microsoft released .net as a standard to get better support for it. It doesn't hurt them in any way because .net isn't all that revolutionary (nice, but not revolutionary). Avalon is just the Windows-specific API for creating rich UIs (like cocoa# will be for the mac). Avalon is Microsoft's way of making sure Windows will stay the preferred environment for .net development. You can still code GTK# or cocoa# applications. You could even code winforms if you want.
.net and a friendlier syntax for reusable components.
If the community were smart, they would take Miguel's suggestion, and start on a competitive stack. Perhaps something that extends SVG to allow binding to
Back before dictionaries you could spell words how you liked, and that was how spelling evolved. Nowadays, you spell like the rest of us, or people will think - rightly or wrongly - that you're an idiot.
You're right. People must think I'm an idiot. That's why the post was rated '+5 Insightful'. Thanks for the stunningly ironic post about how to not look like an idiot.
In that case I agree with the article (and disagree with the /. summary). Martin Fowler summarizes the differences in attitudes here. I personally prefer a directing attitude, and think it's the best way for the industry to proceed. I can understand how people might prefer using enabling tools, but for every person who can handle the responsibility, there are five others who can't (and we can't just leave them behind).
First of all, if it weren't worth talking about, there wouldn't be so many comments here.
Although I can't read the article (/.ed already), I won't let that stop me from disagreeing with the premise. While ignorant developers may have directly caused more individual security problems, the long-term solution isn't to blame the programmers and consider the issue solved. It's a lot more realistic and efficient to fix the programming tools than the programmers (even if the tools can already be used securely).
Saying that security issues will go away by educating developers is like saying America's obesity problems will be solved by telling all fat people to work out. Its just not practical or constructive on a large scale. (On a small scale, of course, a developer can educate himself just as an obese person can loose weight - with hard work and dedication).
So rather than criticizing our co-workers (who probably don't care what we think anyway), why don't we identify ways to isolate these people from situations where they could cause harm?
including one that does the low-level desktop integration like Icons, system trays etc. Can't remember the name of that offhand, but it's something like JDNC.
It's JDIC
I think your oversimplifying a bit. Companies aren't patenting DNA sequences. Their patenting the result of years of cross breading. Sure, everything has DNA, and at the most basic level, they are patenting a living organism, but you should really look at this from a more practical point of view:
How did Monsanto make it's latest crop of corn seed? Through lots of lab work and cross breeding. Did they start with a block of carbon and re-arrange the atoms until they had some really good corn? No, they started with corn, and cross-bred until they had better corn. If someone were to steal that recipe, would they do it by starting with a block of carbon? No, they would buy some corn from Monsanto, and plant it.
There is a lot of stupid patents out there. There is no good effect to patenting math, simple business practices, or software. But genetic manipulation of life requires a great deal of dedication and work, yet can be reproduced afterwards by anyone with a cup full of dirt and access to the finished product. This is exactly the type of situation patents were designed for!
It sounds like you just don't know how to use swing. Any API you use for GUI development requires some adapting to. Swing has its issues, but the issues you're pointing out here are personal shortcomings.
.invokeAndWait(). Its an extra 2 lines of code per event.
Listener leaks are due to bad programming. I really don't want to take the time to explain solutions here. You can do some research on your own. Most listener leaks will be from inter-screen communication. Try minimizing problems using an event bus or a mediator.
The thread safety issue you describe doesn't have as much to do with thread safety as it does the single-threaded nature of Java. Most GUI apis use a single thread for event processing. Your issue with Swing seems to be that Swing paints itself on the event thread. I'm not sure how you solved the problem with synchronize blocks. Maybe you should look into SwingUtilities.invokeLater() and
Yes there are better solutions than Swing, but C/C++ are not among the choices.
Now, here are a few *good* reasons to hate Swing:
- The look and feel will NEVER look the same as the native platform
- Swing's complexity make difficult things easy, but simple things are much more difficult than they should be. SWT fixed this by layering complex parts of the API on top of simpler ones (JFace sits above SWT providing extra functionality for more advanced uses.
- Sun expected third party vendors to extend Swing and finish the job, but no one wants to use third party tools because of vendor lock in (something Sun promised us wouldn't be an issue with Java). As a result, most components that could be improved upon with very little effort are left untouched by Sun. At how many companies will I have to implement a table sorter, or type ahead combobox, or formatted text field (one that works, not that JFormmattedTextField crap)
why are Swing widgets "lightweight" if they are a full implementation rather than a thin wrapper
The term 'Lightweight' refers to the interaction with the operating system, not the size of the source code.
Even if there were a market for disposable DVDs, it wouldn't (as the story implies) destroy the existing market. Raising prices of regular DVDs would not effect the rental market. Studios have charged high rates on VHS rentals for years. Some tapes were selling for $130+ to video stores for 6 months before being released to the general public for $13. It wasn't until DVD came out that home collectors made is feasible to price initial releases at low prices.
Raising prices on DVD won't crush the video rental market. History has proven that Blockbuster can make money renting out a $130 video. Raising prices will kill the home collector market. The rental market would stay constant, and the result would be a net loss for the studios.
The whole conspiracy theory just doesn't add up.
On the other hand, it's important to distinguish between a language and an API.
Microsoft has released both the language and the core APIs as standards. 'Core' doesn't include winforms, but that's what gtk# is for.
I don't know about this "convergence" thing. I have 5 remote controls for 5 different products, and I'll be damned if I can find a way to successfully use just for all!
That's a good example of how the hype over convergence is jumping the gun. We can't even solve the remote control problem. Everyone has a solution, but each solution brings with it more problems.
Over the next few years, companies will brag about convergence for stockholder support. But under the covers they will just be cramming two unrelated products into the same plastic shell, or allowing two very specific devices to talk to each other about very specific things. It really isn't any different than the over-hyped race to release the PDA, digital audio, the tablet PC, or any other new technology. We have years (if not decades) of hype to wade through before this one pans out.
Java UIs are pretty fast if you use the proper tools (SWT as opposed to SWING). A quick comparison of NetBeans (Swing) to Eclipse (SWT) should bear this out.
A quick comparison between Eclipse and IDEA would show that Swing is faster than SWT. That's the problem with anecdotal evidence: it doesn't tell the whole story.
Link it to map quest. Driving directions could be visual.
Turn left here: [picture of the intersection]
Render them together, and you could have a 3d rendering of the trip (made up of 2d images used as a textures). On star could send them to your heads-up-display (you have one, right?)
You are a troll.
Ice Age was Fox.
Shrek compares very well to Pixar's movies at the time (Nemo was 2 years later, compare it to Monster's Inc.)
Antz compares well (in animation - not story) to Bug's Life. Shrek compares well to Monster's Inc. I haven't seen Shrek 2 yet, but the trailer doesn't look much different than Pixar's trailer (in technology at least).
Maybe your just a troll.