Says the max memory allocatable is 2048M? 2 gigs is a lot of memory, but I'm not sure this is as much memory as I want though.
This is a JVM issue, not a language issue. There is nothing in the language spec limiting memory support to 2GB anymore than Windows C language programs are limited to 2GB of memory.
There is no real reason why Sun (or any other JVM provider) couldn't and doesn't provide a 64 bit JVM that can access more than 4GB of memory.
Having said that, it would be nice if there was a command line option on startup that could set the JVM memory limit to some percentage of the physical RAM available on the system (i.e. something like java -Xmxp 50 -- would start the JVM up with a memory limit of 50% of the physical ram on the machine). Today you would need to write an OS specific script/wrapper program to determine the available memory and then launch the JVM.
I strongly concur with the recommendation of Age of Renaissance. It is an excellent multi-player game. Even better, it actually plays well with 3-6 players. You don't need to fill out all the factions to have a good game. Most multi-player games fall short if you don't have the maximum number of players.
Just out of curiousity, how much work is involved in translating, say, KDE? Looking at the stats for translation status in the KDE GUI [kde.org], it looks as though there are about 53,300 phrases (?) that need to be translated into any given language. Now, my question is, how many of those are repeats?
One other important thing to realize, is that just because the word "File" is used in several places, in some other languages a different word may be required based on the usage context.
As far as work effort is required, it is very tedious and difficult even for a human translator unless the development team has put a lot of effort into it. For example, if all you have is an isolated word which has several different meanings in English - now you really need to see how it is being used in the application to make the correct translation. What really needs to be provided to translators is the text to translate, limits as to how long the translated string can be (if applicable), and a description of how/when the phrase or word is used.
Then the next problem is that virtually all of your developers/testers are not fluent in the translated language and have no way of determining the accuracy of the translated text. Another problem is that there are numerous differing dialects of several common languages. Both of these problems can make your product look bad in the eyes of a customer who uses it in a different region / language than the original development team used.
Re:Right...
on
Perl & XML
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
With XML, I need a text editor (or print-out) and some common sense.
Actually you still need the same thing you would need with the binary format. You need the documentation as to what the tags mean. Try looking at XML produced by commercial software sometimes. Just because SAP calls the tag "ITEM" doesn't mean it refers to a part number or something you can pick up at the store. And looking at the schema or DTD probably won't help you figure out the tags mean either.
Finally parsing XML is easy when the document produced by an external system exactly mirrors your internal representation, unfortunately if you are interfacing XML documents with external systems this will almost never be the case.
Don't get me wrong, XML has its uses - just the exchange of data between disparate systems isn't one of them.
Anyone who is using XML for B2B communications. Where I work we are looking at individual XML documents on the order of 1.2MB. Fortunately zlib/gzip manages about 20 to 1 compression ratio on these types or it would be almost impossible to move the volume of data required.
I can use with a packet sniffer when trying to debug something.
Why are you using a packet sniffer to debug XML documents? Why not set up a proxy or mod the application to log the documents prior to processing/after generating them?
Why Is This an Interesting Article?
on
Apache and XML
·
· Score: 3
Seriously, other than one small paragraph mentioning Apache (immediately after a larger paragraph mentioning several commercial projects), this article seems to be in the standard "XML is great / XML will revolutionize everything" mode. There really is no substance to the article at all.
"Amazing it is, that the US government has been just as naive, believing that a closed source product only did what the package said it would do. I wonder how much insight MS/Sun/Oracle/others have into what's going on behind those closed doors. "
While there may be select individuals from these companies who have the appropriate security clearances and background investigations to be allowed supervised access to these systems for troubleshooting / technical support, no cryptography / software from any of these companies is responsible for protecting classified information. The job of providing cryptographic algorithms and hardware (and yes they are generally hardware implementations) is solely the responsibility of the NSA.
Then of course the classified networks are physically separate from unclassified networks, so all the hackers that "forced" the Army to switch their web server from NT to Mac OS had no capability to actually compromise any National Security information.
Slashdot Mirror
Says the max memory allocatable is 2048M? 2 gigs is a lot of memory, but I'm not sure this is as much memory as I want though.
This is a JVM issue, not a language issue. There is nothing in the language spec limiting memory support to 2GB anymore than Windows C language programs are limited to 2GB of memory.
There is no real reason why Sun (or any other JVM provider) couldn't and doesn't provide a 64 bit JVM that can access more than 4GB of memory.
Having said that, it would be nice if there was a command line option on startup that could set the JVM memory limit to some percentage of the physical RAM available on the system (i.e. something like java -Xmxp 50 -- would start the JVM up with a memory limit of 50% of the physical ram on the machine). Today you would need to write an OS specific script/wrapper program to determine the available memory and then launch the JVM.
I strongly concur with the recommendation of Age of Renaissance. It is an excellent multi-player game. Even better, it actually plays well with 3-6 players. You don't need to fill out all the factions to have a good game. Most multi-player games fall short if you don't have the maximum number of players.
Just out of curiousity, how much work is involved in translating, say, KDE? Looking at the stats for translation status in the KDE GUI [kde.org], it looks as though there are about 53,300 phrases (?) that need to be translated into any given language. Now, my question is, how many of those are repeats?
One other important thing to realize, is that just because the word "File" is used in several places, in some other languages a different word may be required based on the usage context.
As far as work effort is required, it is very tedious and difficult even for a human translator unless the development team has put a lot of effort into it. For example, if all you have is an isolated word which has several different meanings in English - now you really need to see how it is being used in the application to make the correct translation. What really needs to be provided to translators is the text to translate, limits as to how long the translated string can be (if applicable), and a description of how/when the phrase or word is used.
Then the next problem is that virtually all of your developers/testers are not fluent in the translated language and have no way of determining the accuracy of the translated text. Another problem is that there are numerous differing dialects of several common languages. Both of these problems can make your product look bad in the eyes of a customer who uses it in a different region / language than the original development team used.
With XML, I need a text editor (or print-out) and some common sense.
Actually you still need the same thing you would need with the binary format. You need the documentation as to what the tags mean. Try looking at XML produced by commercial software sometimes. Just because SAP calls the tag "ITEM" doesn't mean it refers to a part number or something you can pick up at the store. And looking at the schema or DTD probably won't help you figure out the tags mean either.
Finally parsing XML is easy when the document produced by an external system exactly mirrors your internal representation, unfortunately if you are interfacing XML documents with external systems this will almost never be the case.
Don't get me wrong, XML has its uses - just the exchange of data between disparate systems isn't one of them.
So who cares about compression.
Anyone who is using XML for B2B communications. Where I work we are looking at individual XML documents on the order of 1.2MB. Fortunately zlib/gzip manages about 20 to 1 compression ratio on these types or it would be almost impossible to move the volume of data required.
I can use with a packet sniffer when trying to debug something.
Why are you using a packet sniffer to debug XML documents? Why not set up a proxy or mod the application to log the documents prior to processing/after generating them?
Seriously, other than one small paragraph mentioning Apache (immediately after a larger paragraph mentioning several commercial projects), this article seems to be in the standard "XML is great / XML will revolutionize everything" mode. There really is no substance to the article at all.
"Amazing it is, that the US government has been just as naive, believing that a closed source product
only did what the package said it would do. I wonder how much insight MS/Sun/Oracle/others
have into what's going on behind those closed doors. "
While there may be select individuals from these companies who have the appropriate security clearances and background investigations to be allowed supervised access to these systems for troubleshooting / technical support, no cryptography / software from any of these companies is responsible for protecting classified information. The job of providing cryptographic algorithms and hardware (and yes they are generally hardware implementations) is solely the responsibility of the NSA.
Then of course the classified networks are physically separate from unclassified networks, so all the hackers that "forced" the Army to switch their web server from NT to Mac OS had no capability to actually compromise any National Security information.