Java technology is a portfolio of products that are based on the power of networks and the idea that the same software should run on many different kinds of systems and devices.
Java is the name of a language and a virtual machine, in much the same way that "Python" is both the name of a language and the interpreter that executes it. Now, if Java can eventually run on the Parrot VM, then you could make a pretty strong case that "Java" is more closely associated with the language than the VM. As a sysadmin, I'm currently more interested in "java" the application.
Also, i've never seen IE automatically install ANYTHING, when it's fully patched, without the user pressing "yes,"
I was helping my sister clean the malware off her computer when I got a popup asking if I wanted to install some random spyware thingy. I clicked "No". Another box popped up asking if I was sure. I almost clicked "Yes" before I read the fine print, which was along the lines of:
You have chosen not to take advantage of our great offer. If you really don't want to get these great features, click "No". If you've changed your mind and would like to install the program anyway, click "Yes".
I learned two things that day: 1) people don't necessarily install malware because they're stupid, and 2) hell ain't hot enough for some of these jerks.
The tree-view is currently the best implementation of this - I'd love to see innovations related to some kind of multi-demensional tree-like view that's easy to use and not necessarily 3D or too much animation (I've been trying to think of some but not come up with anything yet).
Here's what I'd like to see: a tree view that is mostly hierarchical, but where the current directory's contents are arranged in more than one column. Imagine the case where you're digging to/usr/share/doc and suddenly a thousand little entries open and the tree suddenly becomes 5 times taller than your monitor. In stead of exploding vertically, I'd like it to expand into a bordered box (almost like a small browser window). You'd still get all of the hierarchical and breadcrumb advantages of tree navigation, but without finding yourself staring at "a, aa, ab, add, ade... autoconf" in an endless vertical column.
Alternatively, upon hovering over a directory name, open a tooltip-style pop window with the names of contained directories in a tabular format, and allow users to click on one of those names to move into it (and close the popup window).
I like hierarchical browsers, but I hate digging through shallow, wide subtrees. Anything that makes this process faster gets my vote.
My favorite part is where they say that the collection "will be registered with the United States Copyright Office". If it's copyrighted, then it must by legitimate, right?
It doesn't enjoy the popularity and mindshare that GNU/Linux enjoys. People in the server world sometimes prefer it, but outside of this world Open Source = Linux (and, usually, = Red Hat), and FreeBSD is unheard of.
I think you could say the same of any non-Windows/Mac OS. Unless, that is, this really is the year of Linux On The Desktop.;-)
Fewer drivers are available (especially those available as binary modules for Linux).
This is somewhat true, but the counterargument is that most FreeBSD drivers support every bit of functionality that a piece of hardware can offer. For example, if your NIC has a built-in PRNG, then FreeBSD will probably use it as a hardware accelerator for rand(). Linux is pretty good about this, too, but generally speaking when FreeBSD says that they support something, they mean all of it.
Many applications developed for the GNU system won't work on a vanilla FreeBSD system. While this is the applications' fault, it still is a disadvantage for FreeBSD.
If by "many applications" you mean "some commercial programs", then I'd have to agree. If you meant that as a general statement, then I'd have to vehemently disagree. I ran FreeBSD with a KDE desktop as my personal workstation for a long time, and don't remember any specific apps that I could use under Linux that weren't available in FreeBSD.
It also has fewer binary packages available than Debian GNU/Linux.
According to apt-cache, my Debian/unstable system has 16725 installable packages. There are 11236 Makefiles in my/usr/ports on the FreeBSD server next to me. Debian wins, but I wouldn't call it a landslide.:)
The ports system really is the killer app for me. I love (and depend on) the ability to compile the options I need into an application. I like Debian a lot, but it's a pain in the neck to maintain your own version of a package with non-Debian-standard build options.
IPv6 is irrelevent right now outside of lab environments and isolated networks (cell phone providers, etc.).
I run it as a first-class transport on my network. All of the major services I provide are available over IPv6, including DNS, SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, SSH, and Kerberos; the notable exception being Jabber because I haven't had the chance to upgrade it yet.
More to the point, I'm actually seeing traffic on those services. They're not just some toy implementation floating out in space, but real websites that are getting hits every day and a mailserver that's seeing an increasing amount of IPv6 traffic.
You may not be using it yet, and that's perfectly fine, but don't take that to mean that noone is.
Well, you can still get one from a strange country;-).
Hah! I didn't realize you were quoting.:)
Also, you don't realize the translucent shimmering text is already possible as early as Word 2000, and it might even be in Word 97. WordArt can be translucent, and regular text can be shimmering (it's in text effects or something on the Font dialog).
Lesson: never try to make fun of fictional Microsoft bloat. There is no such thing.
BTW, it doesn't really require 64MB RAM and a 233MHz Pentium II - look at this thread - one 20MHz Pentium I with 32MB RAM, and one 63MHz Pentium Overdrive with 18MB RAM(!)
Youch - that had to hurt! Well, I'm sure that Office 2019 won't really require 128GB of memory. You'll probably be able to open Word with only 32GB, but you won't get the translucent, shimmering text.
Girls are like Internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.
Nice. On the other hand, I do hope the ones you like hold out for more than $17. Now that you mention it, I dated quite a few.edu's when I was in college. I almost married a.com, but ended up with a.net. I'm a lucky guy!
sh : echo $HOME Perl : % perl -le 'print/home/pixel'
So, these languages get graded partly on how small a null program can be. I particularly like the Perl example of printing an environmental variable; you can pretty well figure out how they messed that one up, but it's still sloppy.
To say that one language is better than another based on a score assigned to these tests is not very defensible.
MS Office 2019, req. 8 Ghz CPU 6 GB RAM , rec. 12Ghz CPU/ 16GB RAM.
Yeah, right. Windows XP, released in '03, recommends 128MB of RAM and a 300MHz CPU. Now, we all know that "Moore's Law" isn't, but it has been a fairly accurate predictor. Using that rule of thumb to extrapolate from 2003 to 2019:
16 years equals about 10 "generations", or a 2^10 multiplier. That equates to 128GB of memory and a 300GHz CPU. If that sounds crazy, consider that 1MB of memory and a 7MHz CPU were pretty normal and widely used in 1988. I doubt that we'll actually see near-terahertz CPUs (is that even possible), but don't doubt that we'll have multi-CPU systems with the equivalent performance.
I bought my 485 15 years ago, and just finished building this awesome "desktop environment" called "KDE 0.2.7" on an operating system called "Gentoo Linux". I tell yeah, this will be the year for Linux on the desktop. This latest version even supports a mouse!
Yessir, the build took a while, but now I'm ready to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor. Wonder if that LAN party next week will use token ring or thinnet?
Of course, I would actually like to just vote online & have it be nice & secure, but that ain't gonna happen.
I'd do everything I can to make sure it doesn't. When you go to a polling station to vote, you're in a reasonably private environment. Are you sure you want your employer, or wife, or neighbor kid to be able to watch you vote? Are you 100% sure that your computer isn't compromised? Your ISP's inline proxy server?
I know too much about computers to ever feel safe about voting through an open system, and I'm too cynical about human nature to trust that voting in a non-secure place wouldn't be abused.
Almost by definition any GUI app spends all its time waiting for the user to press a button
You could say the same for the wide majority of modern applications. My web server sits there idling until a request comes in. My KPilot is bored until I press the HotSync button on my Palm. PostgreSQL doesn't do much unless someone is running a query.
I'd never claim that there's no need for assembler, mainly in the exact types of places that you mention. However, I would contest the idea that it still has a reasonable existence outside of those tiny niches. Assembler is great for tweaking the inside of a tight loop, but that's about it.
businesses relying too much on levels and levels of crud (bought for big $$ from the companies employing people who have not learned assembly in college, not to mention high school;-) )
Do not get me started on that topic - we just don't have the time to go there.;-) Any time I hear someone say "middleware", I feel the urge to run screaming.
One of the things I like about high-level languages like Python is that I recently found the need to interpret barcodes in images on our system. The end result was maybe 40 lines of Python. The idea of trying to do the same task in assembler (or even C) is, to me, completely unthinkable. Furthermore, since I was making calls to the Python Image Library, I doubt that the "low-level versions" would've been any more time or space efficient. Finally, I can migrate that work to a new OS or hardware platform just by copying my little Python script. If I wrote a barcode reader in Intel assembler and my boss called me to the server room to show off a new Sun server, I think I'd just keel over dead and never get back up.
On my Debian/unstable machine,/bin/busybox is 144652 bytes in length. Embedded in that single program is the functionality 203 shell commands, for an average size of 713 bytes per command.
It's written in C and runs well on my Linux and BSD servers on Intel and Alpha hardware. To me, this proves yet again that good organization and solid algorithm design buy you a lot more than huge amounts of low-level optimization.
What if the receipt is a barcode representation of an encrypted version of the person's vote, and the readers for such a receipt were only available in certain areas and were strictly limited to being accessed by one person at a time?
You'd get to take home your receipt. If the guy you voted for in a close election loses, you could go alone to the "verification booth" with your receipt to verify that your vote got interpreted they way you wanted.
Misuse of high level languages such as visual basic, as well as off the shelf components for everything, has led to a level of code bloat in todays applications that is inexcusable.
You, sir, are insane. Much of my job involves pushing around regular expressions and hash tables (aka associative arrays aka dictionaries). I know several flavors of assembler on distinct hardware platforms (x86, 68k, 6502, MIPS) so I say this out of experience rather than fear of the unknown: I'd rather swallow my own tongue than write anything non-trivial in a low-level language.
Seriously, a lot of people who know what they're doing have provided a huge library of functionality for me to pick and choose from. If I need to write a GUI app, I'll do it in Python with GTK or QT bindings. I am competent to build it in assembler, but why? It wouldn't be portable, it'd shave a very small amount of size from the end product (most of the project's resources are likely to be spent in the GUI libraries and not the core of the program), and would take 20 times longer than necessary.
There are a very few areas where low-level languages make sense. I haven't touched any of them in years.
And just like everyone else, you're convinced that you're in the upper 5% of people who only need to worry about other people screwing up, not when you screw up.
In a measurable way, yes. I'm in the segment of society that has already survived and learned from their own screwups. Example: I have no desire whatsoever to push my driving abilities to their theoretical limits. I go into corners slower than I think I could handle. I slow down when it's raining. I leave a reasonable space between the car in front of me and my own.
I keep my car well maintained. I haven't had any tickets or accidents. Statistically speaking, if I'm in an accident, it is very likely to be the fault of the other person. I do not claim to be an excellent driver, but I do claim to take all of the steps in my control to keep myself out of the situations where I'd have to depend on top-notch driving to avoid danger.
I do think we have a chronic cowardice problem in the US.
The biggest safety issue for the occupants of an SUV is that some drivers overestimate the abilities of their vehicles and do stupid things in them that they wouldn't attempt in a smaller vehicle ("The water barely covers the bridge - we can make it!" or "I have 4 wheel drive, so I should be able to accelerate through this corner.").
So, it sounds to me like a selfishness and cowardice issue on the part of the SUV driver - I would rather two other people die in a car to car collision than I die.
Frankly, I'd rather 10 other people die than me, and I'll bet 99.9% of the population feels the same way if it comes down to it. My wife isn't married to the people in the other car. My children don't call them "daddy". My mom doesn't worry about them, and my sisters didn't grow up with them. That's not to say that I would never sacrifice my life in any situation, but boy, there better be one heck of a payoff for the people I'd be saving for me to consider it (ie taking a bullet for the President, protecting my family, etc.).
That's exactly what people are saying about SUVs. Who cares if they're safer for the occupants - not everyone can afford to drive one so noone should.
Of course, that's generally recognized as the party line of people who want to do away with SUVs for more political reasons (bad for the environment, conspicuous display of wealth gap). Still, people are using that exact reason to explain why noone should be allowed to drive them.
I suppose it's entirely possible that Mickey-D's in America or [colloquial name] in [your country] actually does have revolting crap food that consists of four-fifths fat, one-tenth sugar and one-tenth salt.
Nah, they're pretty much the same in the US as Australia, although my sample set of the latter is limited to a few stores in Perth. I'm with you - I really don't think it's that bad. Fine dining? No, but when I have 15 minutes to eat (or I'm in a town where I don't know any restaurants), it's always a safe fallback. Some of their food is actually really good, like their steak-egg-and-cheese breakfast bagels. I love those things.
there is pretty much no difference to install/configure than xfree 4.4
Sure there is: xfree comes installed by default on any distro not released very recently, while many of the above posters are talking about steps they took to build it. Surprise: official packages shipped with a distro are easier to install and configure than hand-rolled packages, since the former have usually been patched to use the same directory layout and other build options as the old xfree packages and the latter have not.
The code should be almost identical, as you say, but an end-user's build process will probably be substantially different from a distro's, and there lies the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Not according to Sun:
Java is the name of a language and a virtual machine, in much the same way that "Python" is both the name of a language and the interpreter that executes it. Now, if Java can eventually run on the Parrot VM, then you could make a pretty strong case that "Java" is more closely associated with the language than the VM. As a sysadmin, I'm currently more interested in "java" the application.
I was helping my sister clean the malware off her computer when I got a popup asking if I wanted to install some random spyware thingy. I clicked "No". Another box popped up asking if I was sure. I almost clicked "Yes" before I read the fine print, which was along the lines of:
I learned two things that day: 1) people don't necessarily install malware because they're stupid, and 2) hell ain't hot enough for some of these jerks.
Here's what I'd like to see: a tree view that is mostly hierarchical, but where the current directory's contents are arranged in more than one column. Imagine the case where you're digging to /usr/share/doc and suddenly a thousand little entries open and the tree suddenly becomes 5 times taller than your monitor. In stead of exploding vertically, I'd like it to expand into a bordered box (almost like a small browser window). You'd still get all of the hierarchical and breadcrumb advantages of tree navigation, but without finding yourself staring at "a, aa, ab, add, ade ... autoconf" in an endless vertical column.
Alternatively, upon hovering over a directory name, open a tooltip-style pop window with the names of contained directories in a tabular format, and allow users to click on one of those names to move into it (and close the popup window).
I like hierarchical browsers, but I hate digging through shallow, wide subtrees. Anything that makes this process faster gets my vote.
If you follow that procedure on every server you maintain, then I wonder how you found time to write. :)
Anyone know how to get sprayed coffee out of a keyboard?
(this post © 2004 Just Some Guy)
I think you could say the same of any non-Windows/Mac OS. Unless, that is, this really is the year of Linux On The Desktop. ;-)
Fewer drivers are available (especially those available as binary modules for Linux).
This is somewhat true, but the counterargument is that most FreeBSD drivers support every bit of functionality that a piece of hardware can offer. For example, if your NIC has a built-in PRNG, then FreeBSD will probably use it as a hardware accelerator for rand(). Linux is pretty good about this, too, but generally speaking when FreeBSD says that they support something, they mean all of it.
Many applications developed for the GNU system won't work on a vanilla FreeBSD system. While this is the applications' fault, it still is a disadvantage for FreeBSD.
If by "many applications" you mean "some commercial programs", then I'd have to agree. If you meant that as a general statement, then I'd have to vehemently disagree. I ran FreeBSD with a KDE desktop as my personal workstation for a long time, and don't remember any specific apps that I could use under Linux that weren't available in FreeBSD.
It also has fewer binary packages available than Debian GNU/Linux.
According to apt-cache, my Debian/unstable system has 16725 installable packages. There are 11236 Makefiles in my /usr/ports on the FreeBSD server next to me. Debian wins, but I wouldn't call it a landslide. :)
The ports system really is the killer app for me. I love (and depend on) the ability to compile the options I need into an application. I like Debian a lot, but it's a pain in the neck to maintain your own version of a package with non-Debian-standard build options.
bsdweb5$ java -version
java version "1.4.2-p6"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build
1.4.2-p6-root_31_mar_2004_13_50)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-p6-root_31_mar_2004_13_50, mixed mode)
Installation required the byzantine procedure of typing portinstall java/jdk14. What Java support is FreeBSD supposedly missing?
I run it as a first-class transport on my network. All of the major services I provide are available over IPv6, including DNS, SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, SSH, and Kerberos; the notable exception being Jabber because I haven't had the chance to upgrade it yet.
More to the point, I'm actually seeing traffic on those services. They're not just some toy implementation floating out in space, but real websites that are getting hits every day and a mailserver that's seeing an increasing amount of IPv6 traffic.
You may not be using it yet, and that's perfectly fine, but don't take that to mean that noone is.
Hah! I didn't realize you were quoting. :)
Also, you don't realize the translucent shimmering text is already possible as early as Word 2000, and it might even be in Word 97. WordArt can be translucent, and regular text can be shimmering (it's in text effects or something on the Font dialog).
Lesson: never try to make fun of fictional Microsoft bloat. There is no such thing.
Youch - that had to hurt! Well, I'm sure that Office 2019 won't really require 128GB of memory. You'll probably be able to open Word with only 32GB, but you won't get the translucent, shimmering text.
Girls are like Internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.
Nice. On the other hand, I do hope the ones you like hold out for more than $17. Now that you mention it, I dated quite a few .edu's when I was in college. I almost married a .com, but ended up with a .net. I'm a lucky guy!
So, these languages get graded partly on how small a null program can be. I particularly like the Perl example of printing an environmental variable; you can pretty well figure out how they messed that one up, but it's still sloppy.
To say that one language is better than another based on a score assigned to these tests is not very defensible.
Yeah, right. Windows XP, released in '03, recommends 128MB of RAM and a 300MHz CPU. Now, we all know that "Moore's Law" isn't, but it has been a fairly accurate predictor. Using that rule of thumb to extrapolate from 2003 to 2019:
16 years equals about 10 "generations", or a 2^10 multiplier. That equates to 128GB of memory and a 300GHz CPU. If that sounds crazy, consider that 1MB of memory and a 7MHz CPU were pretty normal and widely used in 1988. I doubt that we'll actually see near-terahertz CPUs (is that even possible), but don't doubt that we'll have multi-CPU systems with the equivalent performance.
Yessir, the build took a while, but now I'm ready to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor. Wonder if that LAN party next week will use token ring or thinnet?
I'd do everything I can to make sure it doesn't. When you go to a polling station to vote, you're in a reasonably private environment. Are you sure you want your employer, or wife, or neighbor kid to be able to watch you vote? Are you 100% sure that your computer isn't compromised? Your ISP's inline proxy server?
I know too much about computers to ever feel safe about voting through an open system, and I'm too cynical about human nature to trust that voting in a non-secure place wouldn't be abused.
You could say the same for the wide majority of modern applications. My web server sits there idling until a request comes in. My KPilot is bored until I press the HotSync button on my Palm. PostgreSQL doesn't do much unless someone is running a query.
I'd never claim that there's no need for assembler, mainly in the exact types of places that you mention. However, I would contest the idea that it still has a reasonable existence outside of those tiny niches. Assembler is great for tweaking the inside of a tight loop, but that's about it.
businesses relying too much on levels and levels of crud (bought for big $$ from the companies employing people who have not learned assembly in college, not to mention high school ;-) )
Do not get me started on that topic - we just don't have the time to go there. ;-) Any time I hear someone say "middleware", I feel the urge to run screaming.
One of the things I like about high-level languages like Python is that I recently found the need to interpret barcodes in images on our system. The end result was maybe 40 lines of Python. The idea of trying to do the same task in assembler (or even C) is, to me, completely unthinkable. Furthermore, since I was making calls to the Python Image Library, I doubt that the "low-level versions" would've been any more time or space efficient. Finally, I can migrate that work to a new OS or hardware platform just by copying my little Python script. If I wrote a barcode reader in Intel assembler and my boss called me to the server room to show off a new Sun server, I think I'd just keel over dead and never get back up.
It's written in C and runs well on my Linux and BSD servers on Intel and Alpha hardware. To me, this proves yet again that good organization and solid algorithm design buy you a lot more than huge amounts of low-level optimization.
You'd get to take home your receipt. If the guy you voted for in a close election loses, you could go alone to the "verification booth" with your receipt to verify that your vote got interpreted they way you wanted.
What would the holes in this be?
You, sir, are insane. Much of my job involves pushing around regular expressions and hash tables (aka associative arrays aka dictionaries). I know several flavors of assembler on distinct hardware platforms (x86, 68k, 6502, MIPS) so I say this out of experience rather than fear of the unknown: I'd rather swallow my own tongue than write anything non-trivial in a low-level language.
Seriously, a lot of people who know what they're doing have provided a huge library of functionality for me to pick and choose from. If I need to write a GUI app, I'll do it in Python with GTK or QT bindings. I am competent to build it in assembler, but why? It wouldn't be portable, it'd shave a very small amount of size from the end product (most of the project's resources are likely to be spent in the GUI libraries and not the core of the program), and would take 20 times longer than necessary.
There are a very few areas where low-level languages make sense. I haven't touched any of them in years.
Without hesitation, yes.
In a measurable way, yes. I'm in the segment of society that has already survived and learned from their own screwups. Example: I have no desire whatsoever to push my driving abilities to their theoretical limits. I go into corners slower than I think I could handle. I slow down when it's raining. I leave a reasonable space between the car in front of me and my own.
I keep my car well maintained. I haven't had any tickets or accidents. Statistically speaking, if I'm in an accident, it is very likely to be the fault of the other person. I do not claim to be an excellent driver, but I do claim to take all of the steps in my control to keep myself out of the situations where I'd have to depend on top-notch driving to avoid danger.
I do think we have a chronic cowardice problem in the US.
I agree with everything at the end of your post.
So, it sounds to me like a selfishness and cowardice issue on the part of the SUV driver - I would rather two other people die in a car to car collision than I die.
Frankly, I'd rather 10 other people die than me, and I'll bet 99.9% of the population feels the same way if it comes down to it. My wife isn't married to the people in the other car. My children don't call them "daddy". My mom doesn't worry about them, and my sisters didn't grow up with them. That's not to say that I would never sacrifice my life in any situation, but boy, there better be one heck of a payoff for the people I'd be saving for me to consider it (ie taking a bullet for the President, protecting my family, etc.).
Of course, that's generally recognized as the party line of people who want to do away with SUVs for more political reasons (bad for the environment, conspicuous display of wealth gap). Still, people are using that exact reason to explain why noone should be allowed to drive them.
Nah, they're pretty much the same in the US as Australia, although my sample set of the latter is limited to a few stores in Perth. I'm with you - I really don't think it's that bad. Fine dining? No, but when I have 15 minutes to eat (or I'm in a town where I don't know any restaurants), it's always a safe fallback. Some of their food is actually really good, like their steak-egg-and-cheese breakfast bagels. I love those things.
Sure there is: xfree comes installed by default on any distro not released very recently, while many of the above posters are talking about steps they took to build it. Surprise: official packages shipped with a distro are easier to install and configure than hand-rolled packages, since the former have usually been patched to use the same directory layout and other build options as the old xfree packages and the latter have not.
The code should be almost identical, as you say, but an end-user's build process will probably be substantially different from a distro's, and there lies the difference.