Not just CPU - but of course it also helps some in making the speed disadvantage less noticable. I have this old texture filler that I coded some years ago to test the speed of Java graphics and on JDK 1.1.4 (or.3 or whatever) it ran with about 8 frames per sec on a given texture on a given polygon on a given app on a given computer. Microsoft's jview clocked around 12 fps.. Then with JDK 1.2.0, it dropped to around 3 (!!) on some color models, but I wrote another version that used a color model without any alpha channel and the speed was now somewhere around 8 fps. Meanwhile, JDK 1.1.8 was clocking up to 15 fps. With 1.2.2, it's up to 17 and 1.3.0 is almost at 20 fps. This is still with the same machine, same texture, same app.. The computer I use for this is my IBM 390 laptop that has a Pentium 233MHz MMX. On my AMD K7 / 500 Mhz, I get over 45 frames per second using 1.3.0.
The speedup is directly visible in apps that use GUI's - Swing in particular.
Interesting, guess linux should be rewritten in Java.
Uhh... Use the right tool for the right job. I'm not, of course, saying everything should be done in Java. I'm just saying that for many things, Java is great and it has it's place - as does many other languages and technologies.
I just read an article where Linus Torvalds says his siblings and grandparents use Windows cause it has better support for the apps they need. Fair enough. He doesn't jump out the window cause of it or start crying that Linux is the only way to go. The same attitude might be smart when dealing with languages and software platforms. A professional software engineer uses the best tools for the job.
Obviously it's fast enough for the couple hundred thousand or so (millions?) of Java coders and companies that use it every day in mission critical applications all over the world.
Seriously, I doubt you have any real world experience with Java if that's still your take on it. Yeah, three years ago, it wasn't fast enough. Things have dramatically changed since then.
Anyone can code a crappy app in C and say "woah! look, it sucks! it's slow!". That doesn't prove that C would be slow - it proves that the code sucks. In the same way, an amateur not knowing what he or she is doing with Java can see slow apps. If you know what you're doing, the situation is different.
I don't know about the rest of you here but I'm getting very tired of the same old "Java is slow" and "I've never seen any real apps in Java" myths here on Slashdot. The very fact that someone claims that shows that they are not in the industry and have no idea what's going on in the Real World (tm).
That's because I'm not a troll. Just because one doesn't dance to the usual Slashdot mass-hysteria beat doesn't make one a troll.
While a tool can be used for illegal purposes, the illegal acts are not the responsibility of the toolmaker, but rather the actor. The kid trading Metallica over napster is the drug-dealer, not the guy who coded it.
True enough. I'm by no means saying that Linus Torvalds should be jailed because some cracker was running Linux when cracking into some computer on the net. This is why I said "sole (or biggest) purpose is to help other people engage in illegal activities". I for one think that Napster fits this description very well and many others seem to agree.
I'm probably missing something here so please answer my question:
If I write a piece of software which sole (or biggest) purpose is to help other people engage in illegal activities then why should I not be as liable for it as a drug dealer is for the drugs he sells?
Bad quality (bugs) software is one thing and is merely a question of quality tolerance. Writing crime-assisting software is quite another.
I'm not sure how much convergence is good. For some stuff, sure, but lets take the PDA - cellular phone for example. I'm perfectly happy with my Nokia 8210 as a phone. It's zippo-lighter sized and has everything I would ever want from a phone. I don't miss a single feature. When I go out, it's so small and light that I hardly even know it's with me. Now for a PDA, I use the Palm IIIx. It's just large enough to make writing and reading possible on it. If it was a phone, it would be way too bulky. Separation in this case is a good thing. Now when I want to get online with the Palm to check email, surf, ssh someplace or whatever, I just place the two next to eachother on the table and they connect using IR.
Having said all this, of course it would be nicer if the Palm would use GPRS and talk directly to my GSM network and get on the net that way. Still, as a phone, it would be way too large to be acceptable.
This leaves us, I think, to see that physical integration is not as important as interoperability. I think that's the big word for the next couple of years of gadget evolution. Technologies like bluetooth and Jini will be very important.
I just came back to Finland from something of a nightmarish project in Singapore. Me and a fellow coder wrote almost 1MB of code in a month (and even documented a large part of it in the same time). I spent some 330 hours coding during that month and quite often I would hit this very problem for whatever reasons, stress, fear, anxiety, lack of sleep. Since we were under a very tight deadline, I had to figure out a way to get around it and I actually came across something that worked for me. Hopefully someone else will find this useful.
Finding myself unable to code, I started writing the code in english on paper. I would sit down in a corner of the room and start writing in english. "check the user permissions. if the guy is an admin, show this and that screen. for each line in the screen, make sure it's bla bla." and so on. Once I was done and saw that I had something that could work, I took the text, pasted it into the existing source code and started translating it to code (Java in this case). Maybe it won't work for everyone, but it did wonders for me and I was able to overcome my block several times this way.
Ok.. Let's say I put a pig into a space shuttle set to land on auto pilot and watch it come down in Florida. Have I now proved that pigs came to this planet from space? Have I proved ANYTHING? I don't think so. Am I missing something?
If the EU (or say.. Asia) suddenly decided to shut down all nodes of the Internet in their area, would the US companies get their emails to the coders in India? Would they get their emails through to Paris? Why is it that so many Americans cannot think of the world in anything but a US centric way?
I live in Finland but am currently in Singapore, coding the back end for the site of a dot-com startup. You would be amazed how little thought the USA gets here in the daily life. I doubt that many people (normal citizens) would even notice / care if the USA dropped off the Internet. Sure some stock brokers would suffer from lack of fast & good information about Wall Street but in the end of the day, there would be no catastrophy.
Doing a traceroute on servers in Finland, I see that the traffic is currently being routed through the USA (up to 30 hops to many sites!) so I'm gussing I would have a hard time reaching some Finnish servers.. However, I dial up to my Finnish ISP using my GSM cellular phone and a Palm IIIx daily anyway, so I could still get my email and access Finnish sites.. No prob..
The USA is not the beginning, center nor end of the world.
I don't know... I consider myself pretty objective in the matter as I've traditionally been something of a Netscape fan but recently switched over to using IE after finding it much more stable, fast and usable. I still use Netscape Communicator for email and newsgroups but the browser just isn't comparable to IE anymore. I will use whichever product is better and I don't look at the MS vs. Netscape thing as politically as lots of other people seem to do.
Seeing WASP blast both Microsoft, Netscape and Mozilla, I'm beginning to wonder how realistic they are. Microsoft has always justified their non-100%-compliance with schedules. "We have to release software and most people don't care if we have a 100% perfect CSS-3 float model.". Mozilla has been trying to get it right for two years now. They have a beta 1 but quite frankly it looks more like an alpha. In the past two years, new standards have emerged and many of the old ones that Mozilla promised to support are more or less obsolete. It seems the standards bodies, as slow as they are, are still much faster in coming up with new standards than the software companies & entities are in implementing them.
The WASP asks ("demands" is more like it) Netscape to pull NS4 off the market. How the hell do you pull a browser off the market? Netscape still allows you to download NS2 and 3 from their web and ftp sites! A billion software libraries around the world has NS4 available for download. It's not like a lot of (new) people download NS4 today anyway. For good or bad, most new people on the net just use whatever came with the machine; IE4 or IE5. I see this as another sign of how unrealistic WASP is.
Anyone can wave a flag and say "do the right thing! support standards!" but when it comes down to implementation, it takes lots of coders, lots of money and lots of time. If 99% of the world couldn't care less about the last 10% of the standards being supported, the software companies won't go that last 10% if it means that it will cost a lot more and take lots more time to get the software out the door. It's that simple..
Web developers will always write for the least common denominator. Today, it more or less means "whatever NS4 and IE4 supports half-decently". That's a lot better than it was two years ago. With NS6 and IE5.5, two years from now, the least common denominator will have taken a couple more steps into the right direction.
I for one think that the WASP should have a reality check...
Helicopters in space is not really anything new. A company called Rotary Rocket Company (http://www.rotaryrocket.com) is already working on a privately funded rocket that lands using rotating helicopter-like blades that are powered by rocket engines in the tips of the blades. On the site, you can see some footage from the test flights. So far, I don't think they have done any rocket-engine powered flights - just basic translational flights with the blade system. Personally I'm not so sure they will ever make it to space, but it's still interesting.. They have some original ideas there..
Re:*This* is a load of crap
on
IE For FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
bsd doesn't suck, it's proven to be better than linux (or else yahoo, hotmail, cdrom, etc... would use linux
:) Oh, but how about the 100000 sites that run Linux? Don't they prove that Liunx is better than BSD? No? Didn't think so.. Maybe it's just a BIT more complex than that.:)
Oh please! There's no contest! For loading pages, they might be fairly even (not that it matters on fast connections anyway) but for rendering pages, IE is *MUCH MUCH MUCH* faster.
Even a Netscape coder working on Mozilla answered a question regarding Mozilla's speed vs IE's speed with:
"When is Mozilla going to be faster than IE? Probably never.. Why? Because of the full standards support."
So yeah, while Mozilla is going to have better support for standards than the current IE versions, as far as speed goes - there's no question about which browser is the fastest one at the moment.
BTW, the new IE for Mac OS X seems to be very solid both in terms of speed and standards support! This is good news because it further forces Mozilla into harder competition and it gives some hope that maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is going to release a browser that supports standards after all.. at some point...
applets? who cares about applets? the important thing is that there's a working virtual machine for the operating system so you can run Java APPLICATIONS.
Well, here's my setup, which I'm extremely happy with:
- Palm IIIx with OS3.3 upgrade for IR -> modem support - Nokia 8210 GSM cellphone, which is about Zippo lighter sized and has a built in modem and IR port - Qualcomm pdQSuite web browser for surfing.. works great, no proxies or proprietary services needed $44.95 - MultiMail for email - supports SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 (free with voluntary $10 registration fee) - PalmVNC for remote control of Win 9x, NT and several UNIX's - TopGun SSH when you just feel like you have to get shell access while you're sailing, in a train, subway, bus or rollerblading
I don't know.. Maybe it's just me, but where I live (Finland), the American fear for your own government is a big joke. "We need guns so we can stand up against the government." Oh please! In a civilized country, you don't fear your own government or police. I've read comments here that go along the lines of "If guns are outlawed, only cops will have guns." that were written with the notion that it would be a BAD thing. A society where only cops - the law enforcement - has guns, to me, seems like an ideal society. After all, the state is *US* and we elect the government that make the laws that the police enforces. There's nothing to fear.
Another thing.. It's interesting to see how pro gunners compare the murder rates of DC (where guns are outlawed) against the murder rates of other US cities to prove that guns reduce crime. How about comparing the crime rates in the USA (where guns are generally freely available to any nutcase) to Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden or Australia? Similar societies, different types of gun laws and gun attitudes.
Ok, so we have a VNC browser but how about a decent web browser? The only ones I know of, Proxy Web and AvantGo both use a proxy to pre-format the content. What I'd like to see is a browser that operates entirely on it's own. It could be a simple text-only bare-bones browser as long as it's reliable and works well without having to rely on the proxy of another company.
Does anyone know of any browser like that for Palm? (I use a Palm IIIx and the IR link to a Nokia 8210 phone that I use as the modem)
I know of a few WAP browsers but as long as there are more WAP browsers than WAP sites, I think I'll wait. In any case, WAP has got to be the worst example of reinventing the wheel ever. Why didn't they just agree on a subset of HTML anyway - you know.. HTML, BODY, HEAD, TITLE, P, BR, B, I, U, A, IMG, FORM, INPUT and SELECT for instance. Or if you have to include tables, then forbid the use of COLSPAN and ROWSPAN and nested tables, which would make table rendering SO much simpler. But no.. they had to invent a new language. *sigh*
> They want to share music! What's wrong with that?
They are giving away music that they don't have the right to give away. I have a hard time understanding how someone can so stupid that they don't understand that this is wrong.
Copying is stealing because you are getting access to something that has a price without paying that price. Sure it's not as bad as stealing a car, but it's still stealing. And whatever term you want to use is actually irrelevant since it's still wrong and illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it support SSL? AFAIK, SSL in Mozilla is supported through the Netscape-Sun Alliance developed PSM system right now. Is it used here too or?
Not just CPU - but of course it also helps some in making the speed disadvantage less noticable. I have this old texture filler that I coded some years ago to test the speed of Java graphics and on JDK 1.1.4 (or .3 or whatever) it ran with about 8 frames per sec on a given texture on a given polygon on a given app on a given computer. Microsoft's jview clocked around 12 fps.. Then with JDK 1.2.0, it dropped to around 3 (!!) on some color models, but I wrote another version that used a color model without any alpha channel and the speed was now somewhere around 8 fps. Meanwhile, JDK 1.1.8 was clocking up to 15 fps. With 1.2.2, it's up to 17 and 1.3.0 is almost at 20 fps. This is still with the same machine, same texture, same app.. The computer I use for this is my IBM 390 laptop that has a Pentium 233MHz MMX. On my AMD K7 / 500 Mhz, I get over 45 frames per second using 1.3.0.
The speedup is directly visible in apps that use GUI's - Swing in particular.
Uhh... Use the right tool for the right job. I'm not, of course, saying everything should be done in Java. I'm just saying that for many things, Java is great and it has it's place - as does many other languages and technologies.
I just read an article where Linus Torvalds says his siblings and grandparents use Windows cause it has better support for the apps they need. Fair enough. He doesn't jump out the window cause of it or start crying that Linux is the only way to go. The same attitude might be smart when dealing with languages and software platforms. A professional software engineer uses the best tools for the job.
*yawn*
Obviously it's fast enough for the couple hundred thousand or so (millions?) of Java coders and companies that use it every day in mission critical applications all over the world.
Seriously, I doubt you have any real world experience with Java if that's still your take on it. Yeah, three years ago, it wasn't fast enough. Things have dramatically changed since then.
Anyone can code a crappy app in C and say "woah! look, it sucks! it's slow!". That doesn't prove that C would be slow - it proves that the code sucks. In the same way, an amateur not knowing what he or she is doing with Java can see slow apps. If you know what you're doing, the situation is different.
I don't know about the rest of you here but I'm getting very tired of the same old "Java is slow" and "I've never seen any real apps in Java" myths here on Slashdot. The very fact that someone claims that shows that they are not in the industry and have no idea what's going on in the Real World (tm).
That's because I'm not a troll. Just because one doesn't dance to the usual Slashdot mass-hysteria beat doesn't make one a troll.
While a tool can be used for illegal purposes, the illegal acts are not the responsibility of the toolmaker, but rather the actor. The kid trading Metallica over napster is the drug-dealer, not the guy who coded it.
True enough. I'm by no means saying that Linus Torvalds should be jailed because some cracker was running Linux when cracking into some computer on the net. This is why I said "sole (or biggest) purpose is to help other people engage in illegal activities". I for one think that Napster fits this description very well and many others seem to agree.
Like someone here said, it's not black and white.
I'm probably missing something here so please answer my question:
If I write a piece of software which sole (or biggest) purpose is to help other people engage in illegal activities then why should I not be as liable for it as a drug dealer is for the drugs he sells?
Bad quality (bugs) software is one thing and is merely a question of quality tolerance. Writing crime-assisting software is quite another.
I'm not sure how much convergence is good. For some stuff, sure, but lets take the PDA - cellular phone for example. I'm perfectly happy with my Nokia 8210 as a phone. It's zippo-lighter sized and has everything I would ever want from a phone. I don't miss a single feature. When I go out, it's so small and light that I hardly even know it's with me. Now for a PDA, I use the Palm IIIx. It's just large enough to make writing and reading possible on it. If it was a phone, it would be way too bulky. Separation in this case is a good thing. Now when I want to get online with the Palm to check email, surf, ssh someplace or whatever, I just place the two next to eachother on the table and they connect using IR.
Having said all this, of course it would be nicer if the Palm would use GPRS and talk directly to my GSM network and get on the net that way. Still, as a phone, it would be way too large to be acceptable.
This leaves us, I think, to see that physical integration is not as important as interoperability. I think that's the big word for the next couple of years of gadget evolution. Technologies like bluetooth and Jini will be very important.
It's a hole alright, but a *Netscape* hole, not a Java hole. It's a faulty and buggy implementation, that's all. No need to blame Java for it.
Finding myself unable to code, I started writing the code in english on paper. I would sit down in a corner of the room and start writing in english. "check the user permissions. if the guy is an admin, show this and that screen. for each line in the screen, make sure it's bla bla." and so on. Once I was done and saw that I had something that could work, I took the text, pasted it into the existing source code and started translating it to code (Java in this case). Maybe it won't work for everyone, but it did wonders for me and I was able to overcome my block several times this way.
Ok.. Let's say I put a pig into a space shuttle set to land on auto pilot and watch it come down in Florida. Have I now proved that pigs came to this planet from space? Have I proved ANYTHING? I don't think so. Am I missing something?
I'd like to turn the question around.
If the EU (or say.. Asia) suddenly decided to shut down all nodes of the Internet in their area, would the US companies get their emails to the coders in India? Would they get their emails through to Paris? Why is it that so many Americans cannot think of the world in anything but a US centric way?
I live in Finland but am currently in Singapore, coding the back end for the site of a dot-com startup. You would be amazed how little thought the USA gets here in the daily life. I doubt that many people (normal citizens) would even notice / care if the USA dropped off the Internet. Sure some stock brokers would suffer from lack of fast & good information about Wall Street but in the end of the day, there would be no catastrophy.
Doing a traceroute on servers in Finland, I see that the traffic is currently being routed through the USA (up to 30 hops to many sites!) so I'm gussing I would have a hard time reaching some Finnish servers.. However, I dial up to my Finnish ISP using my GSM cellular phone and a Palm IIIx daily anyway, so I could still get my email and access Finnish sites.. No prob..
The USA is not the beginning, center nor end of the world.
I don't know... I consider myself pretty objective in the matter as I've traditionally been something of a Netscape fan but recently switched over to using IE after finding it much more stable, fast and usable. I still use Netscape Communicator for email and newsgroups but the browser just isn't comparable to IE anymore. I will use whichever product is better and I don't look at the MS vs. Netscape thing as politically as lots of other people seem to do.
Seeing WASP blast both Microsoft, Netscape and Mozilla, I'm beginning to wonder how realistic they are. Microsoft has always justified their non-100%-compliance with schedules. "We have to release software and most people don't care if we have a 100% perfect CSS-3 float model.". Mozilla has been trying to get it right for two years now. They have a beta 1 but quite frankly it looks more like an alpha. In the past two years, new standards have emerged and many of the old ones that Mozilla promised to support are more or less obsolete. It seems the standards bodies, as slow as they are, are still much faster in coming up with new standards than the software companies & entities are in implementing them.
The WASP asks ("demands" is more like it) Netscape to pull NS4 off the market. How the hell do you pull a browser off the market? Netscape still allows you to download NS2 and 3 from their web and ftp sites! A billion software libraries around the world has NS4 available for download. It's not like a lot of (new) people download NS4 today anyway. For good or bad, most new people on the net just use whatever came with the machine; IE4 or IE5. I see this as another sign of how unrealistic WASP is.
Anyone can wave a flag and say "do the right thing! support standards!" but when it comes down to implementation, it takes lots of coders, lots of money and lots of time. If 99% of the world couldn't care less about the last 10% of the standards being supported, the software companies won't go that last 10% if it means that it will cost a lot more and take lots more time to get the software out the door. It's that simple..
Web developers will always write for the least common denominator. Today, it more or less means "whatever NS4 and IE4 supports half-decently". That's a lot better than it was two years ago. With NS6 and IE5.5, two years from now, the least common denominator will have taken a couple more steps into the right direction.
I for one think that the WASP should have a reality check...
Helicopters in space is not really anything new.
A company called Rotary Rocket Company (http://www.rotaryrocket.com) is already working on a privately funded rocket that lands using rotating helicopter-like blades that are powered by rocket engines in the tips of the blades. On the site, you can see some footage from the test flights. So far, I don't think they have done any rocket-engine powered flights - just basic translational flights with the blade system. Personally I'm not so sure they will ever make it to space, but it's still interesting.. They have some original ideas there..
bsd doesn't suck, it's proven to be better than linux (or else yahoo, hotmail, cdrom, etc... would use linux
:) Oh, but how about the 100000 sites that run Linux? Don't they prove that Liunx is better than BSD? No? Didn't think so.. Maybe it's just a BIT more complex than that. :)
IE is not faster than netscape
Oh please! There's no contest! For loading pages, they might be fairly even (not that it matters on fast connections anyway) but for rendering pages, IE is *MUCH MUCH MUCH* faster.
Even a Netscape coder working on Mozilla answered a question regarding Mozilla's speed vs IE's speed with:
"When is Mozilla going to be faster than IE? Probably never.. Why? Because of the full standards support."
So yeah, while Mozilla is going to have better support for standards than the current IE versions, as far as speed goes - there's no question about which browser is the fastest one at the moment.
BTW, the new IE for Mac OS X seems to be very solid both in terms of speed and standards support! This is good news because it further forces Mozilla into harder competition and it gives some hope that maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is going to release a browser that supports standards after all.. at some point...
applets? who cares about applets? the important thing is that there's a working virtual machine for the operating system so you can run Java APPLICATIONS.
Because low power means low power CONSUMPTION which in turn means that the device runs longer on one set of batteries.
Well, here's my setup, which I'm extremely happy with:
- Palm IIIx with OS3.3 upgrade for IR -> modem support
- Nokia 8210 GSM cellphone, which is about Zippo lighter sized and has a built in modem and IR port
- Qualcomm pdQSuite web browser for surfing.. works great, no proxies or proprietary services needed $44.95
- MultiMail for email - supports SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 (free with voluntary $10 registration fee)
- PalmVNC for remote control of Win 9x, NT and several UNIX's
- TopGun SSH when you just feel like you have to get shell access while you're sailing, in a train, subway, bus or rollerblading
What more could I ask for?
Another thing.. It's interesting to see how pro gunners compare the murder rates of DC (where guns are outlawed) against the murder rates of other US cities to prove that guns reduce crime. How about comparing the crime rates in the USA (where guns are generally freely available to any nutcase) to Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden or Australia? Similar societies, different types of gun laws and gun attitudes.
What do you think space ship use as fuel? Gasoline? Think again.
Ok, so we have a VNC browser but how about a decent web browser? The only ones I know of, Proxy Web and AvantGo both use a proxy to pre-format the content. What I'd like to see is a browser that operates entirely on it's own. It could be a simple text-only bare-bones browser as long as it's reliable and works well without having to rely on the proxy of another company.
Does anyone know of any browser like that for Palm? (I use a Palm IIIx and the IR link to a Nokia 8210 phone that I use as the modem)
I know of a few WAP browsers but as long as there are more WAP browsers than WAP sites, I think I'll wait. In any case, WAP has got to be the worst example of reinventing the wheel ever. Why didn't they just agree on a subset of HTML anyway - you know.. HTML, BODY, HEAD, TITLE, P, BR, B, I, U, A, IMG, FORM, INPUT and SELECT for instance. Or if you have to include tables, then forbid the use of COLSPAN and ROWSPAN and nested tables, which would make table rendering SO much simpler. But no.. they had to invent a new language. *sigh*
They are in the same place as the hugely popular Perl applications.
> They want to share music! What's wrong with that?
They are giving away music that they don't have the right to give away. I have a hard time understanding how someone can so stupid that they don't understand that this is wrong.
Copying is stealing because you are getting access to something that has a price without paying that price. Sure it's not as bad as stealing a car, but it's still stealing. And whatever term you want to use is actually irrelevant since it's still wrong and illegal.
doh, never mind.. that only applied to fax and calls. email you have to excplicitly forbid.
I read the text and it said the opposite. That you can NOT send spam unless the user has said it's ok. The submitted story is backwards!