As someone who was a sys admin up until two weeks ago, and who has the misfortune of trying to use various software products on Dell 18" LCDs (around 1200x1000 native resolution) and a Dell laptop with a 15" screen (1600x1200 native resolution) I can testify to Toshiba and Apple's wisdom in keeping the native screen resolutions down.
On the Dell under Windows, running Photoshop or Illustrator from Adobe were difficult as the font sizes are hard coded and cannot be changed by raising the DPI and this made the tiny palettes almost impossible to read. Some of Corel's software would not work with a raised DPI (Corel Capture particularly) as the sizes of the Windows were hard coded and the higher DPI meant that some of the fields and buttons were no longer visible.
Obviously, as Apple's 17" Notebook has the same resolution. The weight, however, was made to compete with other PC notebooks, but I suppose this will mostly be used as a Desktop replacement anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
I have just read the conclusions at the end of the PDF and have the following comments to make although I'm not a lawyer.
Almost the whole basis of this professors's doubt about the GPL and the LGPL are based on doubts over legal responsibilities (The German word is "Haftung") i.e. who can you sue if your OpenOffice crashes and ruins your document. He makes some vaild points (the only ones I can make out as far as I can see) about the fact that under German law you cannot disclaim legal responsibility for a product you "sell" or provide in the market. He tries to claim that anyone involved in an GPL'ed software can be made responsible for the workings of the software.
What the good professor doesn't mention, but many other people on the Heise forums do mention, is that Microsoft's EULAa suffer from this exact problem in that the EULAs try to free Microsoft from any legal culpability as to the workings of it's software.
I personally think that the GPL should be proven in court. It should be so that it can finally be taken seriously by governments and Professors who get funded by Microsoft (This was indirectly funded by Microsoft) to undermine the GPL.
There have been numerous OS's that didn't and don't require you to have "esoteric" knowledge to install software. Should we do a little run through?:
MacOS (The original), Amiga, Atari, OS/2 for instance, right up to the morder day with Mac OSX, Linux (there are many distros and applications that require nothing more than double cklicking) right up and including my Nokia phone running Symbian.
Re:REGISTER_GLOBALS and why fixing is not fixing
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 1
I see your point but still don't agree that that was the right approach. Why wasn't it fixed in that the overwriting of preexisting variables was disabled or something along those lines?
Darl, the tough guy act and road rage
on
Darl McBride Interview
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Reading Darl McBride interviews always have a siilar effect on one. Mostly the first reaction is simple utter jaw dropping amazment at the guy's bravado and his ability to make statements contradicting himself on statements he had made only a few weeks or days before. The second is usually the suppresion of the wish to throttle the guy.
While one should perhaps send UUNet an email questioning their journalistic integrity in asking only innocuous questions and failing to point out SCO's self contradictions, it is interesting to note the increase from Darl, the man's man, as time goes by and absolutely nothing happens or is heard from by IBM.
Darl very neatly contradicted himself in this interview claiming that "IBM is desperate to buy us out", when he can be quoted in nurmerous sources as having said a few weeks ago that "If a solution involves IBM buying us out then that's fine by us".
Another clue is provided by his incredible machismo in his statement that "IBM threw Novell out into the traffic and Novell got run over by the bus".
After reading these statements (The Novell one borders on libel I would think but IANAL) I think the picture is slowly starting to come into focus:
It is indeed a scam intended to raise SCO's ratings on the stock market. A scam that relies on day traders and the usual absolute cluelessness of analysts in general. SCO needs the publicity in order to keep pumping those stocks. The reason Darl is becoming more and more shrill and profane in every interview is obviously because the guy is terrified by the fact that IBM is simply ignoring him for the most part. Claiming to know what IBM is "desperate" to buy or not would require insider information that I'm pretty sure he doesn't have. Not only this but while SCO's stock is very high compared to it's real worth at the moment, eventually SCO is going to run out of things to say that don't cross the border into libel cases, When that happens SCO's stock is going to start sinking. He as much as acknowledges this in saying that a court case is not going to happen tomorrow and IBM can afford to wait and let SCO run out of money as the case slowly rumbles on towards an actual case in court.
I would say that if anyone is desperate, it's SCO, not IBM.
REGISTER_GLOBALS and why fixing is not fixing
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 1
I wrote in another post further down about the problems being incurred as PHP attempts to become all things to all men (and women). From CGI through Apache and IIS module through to commandline scripting tool a la the many other languages that already exist there. All this is fine and I've used PHP successfully from the development of small dynamic websites through commandline scripts on windows to return lists of files on a server and move them if needed through to a massively complicated "web application" called Ariadne -http://www.ariadne.nl that turned out to be so overly complex for no obvious reason that I wasted months trying to figure out how it worked (Java would have really been simpler and cleaner for that one).
But what alwaqys got me was the argumentation behind the decsision to turn off register_globals by default. (This is also partly a repsonse to another post further down) The logic went that variables could be spoofed by an end user in order to gain access to "private" data as the variables are automatically created by PHP. I'm by no means an expert on security matters, but AFAIK there are different approaches to security in a language. One is security by design as it exists in Java (and by all accounts works extremely well), another is security in the actual software design. This means in php that you don't use the same php file for all your sensitive database connect statements and front end html output for example and that you don't use things like if ($goodboy) OpenForBusiness(); etc.
Chopping off this only served to irritate web scripters and only marginally improved security because most scripters simply turned the auto variable creation back on and security by limiting features is not an answer IMO. You can still crack that $HTTP_POST_VARS[goodboy] or $_POST[goodboy] by bruteforce methods if you think you have something to gain by this.
If I understand this completely wrong please correct me, but I simply see php as becoming another Perl and we already have that.
PHP fragmentation, lack of cohesion
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've been using PHP since the 3.0 days and always loved it's speed in development for small dynamic sites. There is truly nothing simpler (IMO) for small sites. Why on earth did PHP ever become so popular as compared to Perl/CGI? It was the simplicity.
Most people accepted the changes from PHP3 to PHP4 without complaining as PHP4 brought simple session support and other needed features. Thousands of developers wrote scripts for small pages and uses, and those scripts got placed on help sites etc all across the web.
The changes above 4.06 where register_globals got turned off by default and -from a simple beginners point of view- to 4.2 where a stunning array of new arrays were added for sessions, post and get variables. Those things broke almost everybodies scripts, and all those thousands of scripts across the web no longer worked as is. Due to this a lot of ISP's no longer upgraded regularly.
At the same time PHP started jumping on the "web application" gravy train, something for which PHP with it's awkward OO support (no automatic calling of parent constructors etc), lack of stateful session support etc was not designed to do. The makers of Zend decided to go the whole hog and redo OO support, add hundreds of seldom used features but ignore problems with backward compatibility and language simplicity.
Congratulations. Now we have a language that is slowly matching JSP in complexity (as all the 1337 "application developers are saying"), is nowhere nearly as well integrated in in true web applications as JSP is (great, it can support Java classes, how many will simply use Java then?) and is leaving the roots of it's enormous success behind.
Take a lesson from Perl's "failure" in web site popularity. Don't keep on adding features for the love of it.
Why do Americans see only themselves?
on
Does Google = God?
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
This article makes me wonder. Since 9/11 it seems so many Americans think the whole world has nothing better to do than sit around and make big plans on WMD against America. Why does this moron devote a whole lengthy paragraph building up people's fears? Some of us have lives you know!
That some nation or corporation or group of nations and corporations will go to the moon and mars is not really in question.
Sooner or later, someone will go there.
Be it due to reasons of national pride or corporate greed, someone will go there. The dream of reaching out to the stars, exploring and living on strange worlds for fun and/or profit is huge in mankind.
From a rational, cost conscious point of view, there is no real reason for humans to go to space. If the exploration of space is purely for scientific and commercial reasons we could quite merrily abandon the thought of humans having much to do in space in the future. The Voyager/Viking/Cassini etc probes couldn't have done what they did if they'ld had humans on board. The satelites that make speech across the globe possible would not be there now if the launchers that put them there needed humans to unpack and jumpstart them in orbit. And even equating exploration and discovery of the new world in the 15th and 16th centuries is not really valid here, as mostly they were commercial ventures exploring routes to get to India, nationalistic competition with other empires at the time, and scientif exploration then required humans as robots of that time didn't have very fast CPU's.
But from a human emotional point of view, the wish to set foot on, personally explore and perhaps even live on other worlds is great and will eventually happen.
But it's going to take time.
Re:It is of course complete and utter bollocks.
on
Linux Usage in the UK
·
· Score: 1
I think you overestimate middle management worldwide. I don't think it's a particularly English problem.
The problem is more likely that middle management is frightened of change as it relates to their careers and employment. A lot, if not most of them, grew up with Windows and perhaps one of the traditional Unices so to speak and have difficulty understanding how anything else could be better. They are used to the traditional high prices of the Microsoft monopoly and specialist Solaris/AIX support costs involved there. I can understand that fear quite well.
If a project using Linux backfires on them, it can cost them their jobs.
However, I think one could say congratulations to Linux in general for being able to alleviate many of these fears.
As some who just lost his job
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Although I worried like hell about finding another job, the hours that I was working up until now were killing. 12 to 14 hour days regularly 7AM to 7PM with a boss that got upset if I applied for overtime. This was so bloody exhausting that I might very well have had a breakdown if I hadn't been canned.
This is in Switzerland, and you'ld be surprised at how many workers here in Europe will do this in order to hold on to their jobs.
I prefer the idea of iChat AV over MSN Messenger 6, but I like Apple's simplicity in UI design in general, which is why I have a Mac. But the MS chat will no doubt be good enough for most of the people out there (most of whom have no idea that MacOSX even exists, much less that there is something like iCHat AV etc) and will obviously work with more , and cheaper, hardware. I think the majority of PC users will be happy enough with the quality provided by MS Chat, and it will server to bind PC users even more into the MSN/Microsoft fold.
I personally think that Apple made a mistake by limiting iChat users to AIM/ICQ/.Mac but I presume that Yahoo had some legal barriers that made it unwise to enter. I think that OSX hackers will probably hack this thing eventually that it will accept other hardware Cams, such as USB types, as they seem to be quite a resourceful bunch, but the lack of AIM/MS IM/Yahoo compatibility is something that will continue to hinder decent Audio/Video Chatting over the internet.
IMO, Java is extremely slow and very much open to exploits
Microsoft's Java was by no means slow - it was the fastestof all the JVM's out there for a long time- but it had the same problems with security and vulnerablities that almost all Microsoft's other software has. Sun's JVM, on the other hand, has never had much in the way of vulnerablities but has traditionally been slower on Windows than, surprise, Microsoft's JVM.
These days, however, if you're runnig any PC that has been built in the last two years i.e. over 800MHz, then I defy you to call Java slow on the desktop.
But with an attitude like yours, you wouldn't know any different, now would you?
The green-screen applications of yesteryear were bulletproof compared to those run on PCs.
I often ask myself how much productivity has been wasted in the computing world over the last one and a half decades by making software use GUI's that neither add anything to the usabilty of the software nor make it any more stable.
I just made a post on you paying for this with your taxes, and now realise that the biggest, by far the biggest iraony in this "deal" is that Microsoft gets tax breaks like there's no tomorrow.
I read with humour, the angry pro MS crowd who regularly vent their anger here on/. about the bias here, because those very same people fail to see the irony in paying for this deal indirectly with their taxes, and this to a company that hasn't exactly been paying huge dollops of taxes on it's yearly multi billion income.
If your country ever does collapse, it will be because you have a government that thinks it can generate money from thin air, very much like the horde of dotbomb failures did.
I use a 667MHz Powerbook with a G4 that is nowhere near as fast as modern P4's and the PPC 970, but I love this machine and I love this OS. I also have a Dell laptop with a 2GHz P4 and WinXP and an old 450MHz K6-2 that runs Debian. I use all of them but mostly prefer this Mac and OSX.
What mostly surprises me is that so many people feel this desperate burning need to flame computers that are not the same as the ones they have, and operating systems they do not use. Is there a genuine need to diss the PPC 970, when it seems that it is truly -at the very least- in the same performance area as Intels modern CPU's? Why? No one is forcing you, as a x86 Linux, *BSD or Windows user to buy a Mac. Yet you feel the need, now that the CPU is in the same region performance wise to complain about the prices. And again, no one is forcing you to pay those prices or to buy a Mac if you prefer x86 machines.
The x86 machines I have, in one case -the Dell laptop- outperforms my Mac by a healthy margin, yet I find the Dell to have pretty poor workmanship and although I actually find WindowsXP the best Windows version I have ever used, and quite stable to boot, I don't like the way the OS seems to lack a sense of continuity.
I paid more for this Mac than I would ever have paid for a PC laptop of the same performance, but the look, feel and feeling of "good design" is what made me buy this Mac. I don't regret that money at all.
Would I diss x86 if it were slower and more pricy than a similar PPC? No. There are the advantages of larger choice and lower prices that still count and shouldn't be laughed at.
Java is, despite it's large and unavoidable negative sides, a very adaptable language. The fact that it is used in server side J2EE applications and on tiny symbian phones, means adaptability to me. I severely doubt that Microsoft's.Net will ever fit on Smartcards or be considered as reliable and secure by the industry.
Java has been sorely neglected by Sun over the past few years on the Desktop, which is to be frank, the only thing that most computer users ever see or think about. The comments about Swing not fitting in with.Net forms on windows is true but, that is mainly because very few Java developers have ever used the Windows look and feel in Swing, not because it doesn't exist. And the speed disadvantages of Java are becoming less and less relevant with time as computers become ever faster.
But the duscussion had a good point. Java needs a set of entry level standard IDE's and tools to enable VB coders and beginners to easiyl develop GUIs and other simple classes.
My time recently with a company that bought 15 Microsoft Navision licences has shown me a number of things about so called business software.
Navision has a peculiar interface and is highly dependant on the individual navision partner adapting the interface to your company's needs. Navsion has a number of strengths such as being very simple to install, very fast and fairly robust. But the user interface is limited in that for any given user the interface becomes a mess in a few seconds as the user has to open many tables and masks in order to view and operate on data.
The other big problem with Navision is that the design of the software is a huge mess. The software is divided into tables, forms, reports and code units, and all of these objects can have code in Navision's proprietry C-Side language hidden away that one cannot see (no indication whatsoever) or edit unless one has an expensive developer's licence. There is no IDE to indicate the relationships between the various tables and forms and reports and code editing is done in a notepad kind of environment. Only the visual Tables, forms and reports can be created with a GUI, the rest is all notepad.
What happened in our company is possibly quite widespread. As time goes on the users need more functionality and the Navision partner adds this functionality, but because there is no form of version control or logging, the code becomes more and complicated with time and the Navision partner has to spend more time checking what his own previous code additions actually do. In short it becomes a huge mess, with no one knowing exactly what object does what.
The price tag of around $65000 plus yearly maintenace and licencing for around $20000 do make a good example of how much money actually goes into these applications. The fact that they do not fit all that well into a business's operation without modification mean that there should be some other choice, such as developing these applications with an outsourced custom company. Using OSS software would cut many costs and the company could define the interface and functionality it wants without having to be restricted by absurd licencing.
This should be a real opportunity for all the unemployed OSS people out there.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who was a sys admin up until two weeks ago, and who has the misfortune of trying to use various software products on Dell 18" LCDs (around 1200x1000 native resolution) and a Dell laptop with a 15" screen (1600x1200 native resolution) I can testify to Toshiba and Apple's wisdom in keeping the native screen resolutions down.
On the Dell under Windows, running Photoshop or Illustrator from Adobe were difficult as the font sizes are hard coded and cannot be changed by raising the DPI and this made the tiny palettes almost impossible to read. Some of Corel's software would not work with a raised DPI (Corel Capture particularly) as the sizes of the Windows were hard coded and the higher DPI meant that some of the fields and buttons were no longer visible.
Obviously, as Apple's 17" Notebook has the same resolution. The weight, however, was made to compete with other PC notebooks, but I suppose this will mostly be used as a Desktop replacement anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
I have just read the conclusions at the end of the PDF and have the following comments to make although I'm not a lawyer.
Almost the whole basis of this professors's doubt about the GPL and the LGPL are based on doubts over legal responsibilities (The German word is "Haftung") i.e. who can you sue if your OpenOffice crashes and ruins your document. He makes some vaild points (the only ones I can make out as far as I can see) about the fact that under German law you cannot disclaim legal responsibility for a product you "sell" or provide in the market. He tries to claim that anyone involved in an GPL'ed software can be made responsible for the workings of the software.
What the good professor doesn't mention, but many other people on the Heise forums do mention, is that Microsoft's EULAa suffer from this exact problem in that the EULAs try to free Microsoft from any legal culpability as to the workings of it's software.
I personally think that the GPL should be proven in court. It should be so that it can finally be taken seriously by governments and Professors who get funded by Microsoft (This was indirectly funded by Microsoft) to undermine the GPL.
Dear Cabal,
There have been numerous OS's that didn't and don't require you to have "esoteric" knowledge to install software. Should we do a little run through?:
MacOS (The original), Amiga, Atari, OS/2 for instance, right up to the morder day with Mac OSX, Linux (there are many distros and applications that require nothing more than double cklicking) right up and including my Nokia phone running Symbian.
I see your point but still don't agree that that was the right approach. Why wasn't it fixed in that the overwriting of preexisting variables was disabled or something along those lines?
Reading Darl McBride interviews always have a siilar effect on one. Mostly the first reaction is simple utter jaw dropping amazment at the guy's bravado and his ability to make statements contradicting himself on statements he had made only a few weeks or days before. The second is usually the suppresion of the wish to throttle the guy.
While one should perhaps send UUNet an email questioning their journalistic integrity in asking only innocuous questions and failing to point out SCO's self contradictions, it is interesting to note the increase from Darl, the man's man, as time goes by and absolutely nothing happens or is heard from by IBM.
Darl very neatly contradicted himself in this interview claiming that "IBM is desperate to buy us out", when he can be quoted in nurmerous sources as having said a few weeks ago that "If a solution involves IBM buying us out then that's fine by us".
Another clue is provided by his incredible machismo in his statement that "IBM threw Novell out into the traffic and Novell got run over by the bus".
After reading these statements (The Novell one borders on libel I would think but IANAL) I think the picture is slowly starting to come into focus:
It is indeed a scam intended to raise SCO's ratings on the stock market. A scam that relies on day traders and the usual absolute cluelessness of analysts in general. SCO needs the publicity in order to keep pumping those stocks. The reason Darl is becoming more and more shrill and profane in every interview is obviously because the guy is terrified by the fact that IBM is simply ignoring him for the most part. Claiming to know what IBM is "desperate" to buy or not would require insider information that I'm pretty sure he doesn't have. Not only this but while SCO's stock is very high compared to it's real worth at the moment, eventually SCO is going to run out of things to say that don't cross the border into libel cases, When that happens SCO's stock is going to start sinking. He as much as acknowledges this in saying that a court case is not going to happen tomorrow and IBM can afford to wait and let SCO run out of money as the case slowly rumbles on towards an actual case in court.
I would say that if anyone is desperate, it's SCO, not IBM.
I wrote in another post further down about the problems being incurred as PHP attempts to become all things to all men (and women). From CGI through Apache and IIS module through to commandline scripting tool a la the many other languages that already exist there. All this is fine and I've used PHP successfully from the development of small dynamic websites through commandline scripts on windows to return lists of files on a server and move them if needed through to a massively complicated "web application" called Ariadne -http://www.ariadne.nl that turned out to be so overly complex for no obvious reason that I wasted months trying to figure out how it worked (Java would have really been simpler and cleaner for that one).
But what alwaqys got me was the argumentation behind the decsision to turn off register_globals by default. (This is also partly a repsonse to another post further down) The logic went that variables could be spoofed by an end user in order to gain access to "private" data as the variables are automatically created by PHP. I'm by no means an expert on security matters, but AFAIK there are different approaches to security in a language. One is security by design as it exists in Java (and by all accounts works extremely well), another is security in the actual software design. This means in php that you don't use the same php file for all your sensitive database connect statements and front end html output for example and that you don't use things like if ($goodboy) OpenForBusiness(); etc.
Chopping off this only served to irritate web scripters and only marginally improved security because most scripters simply turned the auto variable creation back on and security by limiting features is not an answer IMO. You can still crack that $HTTP_POST_VARS[goodboy] or $_POST[goodboy] by bruteforce methods if you think you have something to gain by this.
If I understand this completely wrong please correct me, but I simply see php as becoming another Perl and we already have that.
I've been using PHP since the 3.0 days and always loved it's speed in development for small dynamic sites. There is truly nothing simpler (IMO) for small sites. Why on earth did PHP ever become so popular as compared to Perl/CGI? It was the simplicity.
Most people accepted the changes from PHP3 to PHP4 without complaining as PHP4 brought simple session support and other needed features. Thousands of developers wrote scripts for small pages and uses, and those scripts got placed on help sites etc all across the web.
The changes above 4.06 where register_globals got turned off by default and -from a simple beginners point of view- to 4.2 where a stunning array of new arrays were added for sessions, post and get variables. Those things broke almost everybodies scripts, and all those thousands of scripts across the web no longer worked as is. Due to this a lot of ISP's no longer upgraded regularly.
At the same time PHP started jumping on the "web application" gravy train, something for which PHP with it's awkward OO support (no automatic calling of parent constructors etc), lack of stateful session support etc was not designed to do. The makers of Zend decided to go the whole hog and redo OO support, add hundreds of seldom used features but ignore problems with backward compatibility and language simplicity.
Congratulations. Now we have a language that is slowly matching JSP in complexity (as all the 1337 "application developers are saying"), is nowhere nearly as well integrated in in true web applications as JSP is (great, it can support Java classes, how many will simply use Java then?) and is leaving the roots of it's enormous success behind.
Take a lesson from Perl's "failure" in web site popularity. Don't keep on adding features for the love of it.
This article makes me wonder. Since 9/11 it seems so many Americans think the whole world has nothing better to do than sit around and make big plans on WMD against America. Why does this moron devote a whole lengthy paragraph building up people's fears? Some of us have lives you know!
That some nation or corporation or group of nations and corporations will go to the moon and mars is not really in question.
Sooner or later, someone will go there.
Be it due to reasons of national pride or corporate greed, someone will go there. The dream of reaching out to the stars, exploring and living on strange worlds for fun and/or profit is huge in mankind.
From a rational, cost conscious point of view, there is no real reason for humans to go to space. If the exploration of space is purely for scientific and commercial reasons we could quite merrily abandon the thought of humans having much to do in space in the future. The Voyager/Viking/Cassini etc probes couldn't have done what they did if they'ld had humans on board. The satelites that make speech across the globe possible would not be there now if the launchers that put them there needed humans to unpack and jumpstart them in orbit. And even equating exploration and discovery of the new world in the 15th and 16th centuries is not really valid here, as mostly they were commercial ventures exploring routes to get to India, nationalistic competition with other empires at the time, and scientif exploration then required humans as robots of that time didn't have very fast CPU's.
But from a human emotional point of view, the wish to set foot on, personally explore and perhaps even live on other worlds is great and will eventually happen.
But it's going to take time.
I think you overestimate middle management worldwide. I don't think it's a particularly English problem.
The problem is more likely that middle management is frightened of change as it relates to their careers and employment. A lot, if not most of them, grew up with Windows and perhaps one of the traditional Unices so to speak and have difficulty understanding how anything else could be better. They are used to the traditional high prices of the Microsoft monopoly and specialist Solaris/AIX support costs involved there. I can understand that fear quite well.
If a project using Linux backfires on them, it can cost them their jobs.
However, I think one could say congratulations to Linux in general for being able to alleviate many of these fears.
Because when I was a child I dreamed of one day standing on Mars. That's why.
Without dreams and hope life is nothing.
No wonder the commies were so popular.
Although I worried like hell about finding another job, the hours that I was working up until now were killing. 12 to 14 hour days regularly 7AM to 7PM with a boss that got upset if I applied for overtime. This was so bloody exhausting that I might very well have had a breakdown if I hadn't been canned.
This is in Switzerland, and you'ld be surprised at how many workers here in Europe will do this in order to hold on to their jobs.
I suppose that, in your inestimable wisdom, that applies to the whole of Europe?
What a wise, well educated, nice, polite person you are.
I prefer the idea of iChat AV over MSN Messenger 6, but I like Apple's simplicity in UI design in general, which is why I have a Mac. But the MS chat will no doubt be good enough for most of the people out there (most of whom have no idea that MacOSX even exists, much less that there is something like iCHat AV etc) and will obviously work with more , and cheaper, hardware. I think the majority of PC users will be happy enough with the quality provided by MS Chat, and it will server to bind PC users even more into the MSN/Microsoft fold.
I personally think that Apple made a mistake by limiting iChat users to AIM/ICQ/.Mac but I presume that Yahoo had some legal barriers that made it unwise to enter. I think that OSX hackers will probably hack this thing eventually that it will accept other hardware Cams, such as USB types, as they seem to be quite a resourceful bunch, but the lack of AIM/MS IM/Yahoo compatibility is something that will continue to hinder decent Audio/Video Chatting over the internet.
Those under windows that have web contents activated will have the pleasure of this virus running automatically.
IMO, Java is extremely slow and very much open to exploits
Microsoft's Java was by no means slow - it was the fastestof all the JVM's out there for a long time- but it had the same problems with security and vulnerablities that almost all Microsoft's other software has. Sun's JVM, on the other hand, has never had much in the way of vulnerablities but has traditionally been slower on Windows than, surprise, Microsoft's JVM.
These days, however, if you're runnig any PC that has been built in the last two years i.e. over 800MHz, then I defy you to call Java slow on the desktop.
But with an attitude like yours, you wouldn't know any different, now would you?
The green-screen applications of yesteryear were bulletproof compared to those run on PCs.
I often ask myself how much productivity has been wasted in the computing world over the last one and a half decades by making software use GUI's that neither add anything to the usabilty of the software nor make it any more stable.
I just made a post on you paying for this with your taxes, and now realise that the biggest, by far the biggest iraony in this "deal" is that Microsoft gets tax breaks like there's no tomorrow.
/. about the bias here, because those very same people fail to see the irony in paying for this deal indirectly with their taxes, and this to a company that hasn't exactly been paying huge dollops of taxes on it's yearly multi billion income.
I read with humour, the angry pro MS crowd who regularly vent their anger here on
If your country ever does collapse, it will be because you have a government that thinks it can generate money from thin air, very much like the horde of dotbomb failures did.
Why, you are silly. Indirectly you pay for this with your taxes. You are supporting a huge corporation that truly has no need of government handouts.
Congratulations.
It is exactly RMS' single mindedness that will save the day, and if you have to say GNU/Linux, so what.
I use a 667MHz Powerbook with a G4 that is nowhere near as fast as modern P4's and the PPC 970, but I love this machine and I love this OS. I also have a Dell laptop with a 2GHz P4 and WinXP and an old 450MHz K6-2 that runs Debian. I use all of them but mostly prefer this Mac and OSX.
What mostly surprises me is that so many people feel this desperate burning need to flame computers that are not the same as the ones they have, and operating systems they do not use. Is there a genuine need to diss the PPC 970, when it seems that it is truly -at the very least- in the same performance area as Intels modern CPU's? Why? No one is forcing you, as a x86 Linux, *BSD or Windows user to buy a Mac. Yet you feel the need, now that the CPU is in the same region performance wise to complain about the prices. And again, no one is forcing you to pay those prices or to buy a Mac if you prefer x86 machines.
The x86 machines I have, in one case -the Dell laptop- outperforms my Mac by a healthy margin, yet I find the Dell to have pretty poor workmanship and although I actually find WindowsXP the best Windows version I have ever used, and quite stable to boot, I don't like the way the OS seems to lack a sense of continuity.
I paid more for this Mac than I would ever have paid for a PC laptop of the same performance, but the look, feel and feeling of "good design" is what made me buy this Mac. I don't regret that money at all.
Would I diss x86 if it were slower and more pricy than a similar PPC? No. There are the advantages of larger choice and lower prices that still count and shouldn't be laughed at.
Each to his own.
But envy seems to be a common sin here.
Java is, despite it's large and unavoidable negative sides, a very adaptable language. The fact that it is used in server side J2EE applications and on tiny symbian phones, means adaptability to me. I severely doubt that Microsoft's .Net will ever fit on Smartcards or be considered as reliable and secure by the industry.
.Net forms on windows is true but, that is mainly because very few Java developers have ever used the Windows look and feel in Swing, not because it doesn't exist. And the speed disadvantages of Java are becoming less and less relevant with time as computers become ever faster.
Java has been sorely neglected by Sun over the past few years on the Desktop, which is to be frank, the only thing that most computer users ever see or think about. The comments about Swing not fitting in with
But the duscussion had a good point. Java needs a set of entry level standard IDE's and tools to enable VB coders and beginners to easiyl develop GUIs and other simple classes.
My time recently with a company that bought 15 Microsoft Navision licences has shown me a number of things about so called business software.
Navision has a peculiar interface and is highly dependant on the individual navision partner adapting the interface to your company's needs. Navsion has a number of strengths such as being very simple to install, very fast and fairly robust. But the user interface is limited in that for any given user the interface becomes a mess in a few seconds as the user has to open many tables and masks in order to view and operate on data.
The other big problem with Navision is that the design of the software is a huge mess. The software is divided into tables, forms, reports and code units, and all of these objects can have code in Navision's proprietry C-Side language hidden away that one cannot see (no indication whatsoever) or edit unless one has an expensive developer's licence. There is no IDE to indicate the relationships between the various tables and forms and reports and code editing is done in a notepad kind of environment. Only the visual Tables, forms and reports can be created with a GUI, the rest is all notepad.
What happened in our company is possibly quite widespread. As time goes on the users need more functionality and the Navision partner adds this functionality, but because there is no form of version control or logging, the code becomes more and complicated with time and the Navision partner has to spend more time checking what his own previous code additions actually do. In short it becomes a huge mess, with no one knowing exactly what object does what.
The price tag of around $65000 plus yearly maintenace and licencing for around $20000 do make a good example of how much money actually goes into these applications. The fact that they do not fit all that well into a business's operation without modification mean that there should be some other choice, such as developing these applications with an outsourced custom company. Using OSS software would cut many costs and the company could define the interface and functionality it wants without having to be restricted by absurd licencing.
This should be a real opportunity for all the unemployed OSS people out there.