After seeing that benchmark, I got very curious cause I thought it was VERY odd. I read up on the web and noticed that several had commented that the test is VERY favorable for Perl and Awk due to it's "heavy use of associative arrays and strings". I can't comment that because I don't have the source code for any of those but I do know that the results are very weird.
So.. I decided to write my own little - very simple - test just to get a ball park feel of language speeds. A small app that has two nested loops and calls a method, passing two integers as parameters and returning an integer as the result. I wrote a C, a Perl and Java version and compiled and ran these. My machine is an Athlon 500 with 128 megs of ram running a Microsoft OS. The Perl in use is ActiveState's 5.005_003, the Java VM is JDK 1.3.0_01-beta and I compiled the C app with both gcc and Visual C++ (no difference in speed for those). The result is that the Java app is fastest with a run time of 3 seconds and that includes loading java.exe, granted it's only a marginal overhead. The C comes at a very close 2nd with 4 seconds. The Perl version was so slow that I had to decrease it's iterations to 100 times less than those of the C and Java version. Then it took 7 seconds. I guess it would have taken 700 seconds otherwise but I couldn't wait that long.
Now I know this proves very little. For example, that Java is faster than C probably only shows that the HotSpot could optimize the code VERY well as it ran and thus be faster. I know that a normal Java app wouldn't do this well compared to C.. But in this simple case, it did BETTER. Perl.. well.. the app ran so slowly that I decided to INLINE the method call.. Get rid of it and just say $x = $i * $j; instead. It STILL takes 300 seconds - 100 times slower than the Java version.
The *ONLY* thing this proves is that benchmarks can be tilted in any direction you want. Unfortunately I can't post the sourcecode because it triggers the "junk" filter. I can email them to whoever wants them tho.. There's nothing special in them anyway and anyone could do the same test to see themselves quite quickly.
I have a very hard time believing that benchmark. I'd like to know what virtual machine was used and if the Java coder who wrote the implementation had any idea of what he was doing.
For non-graphical applications, Java tends to be quite close to C++ in speed. I'm talking about stuff like math and those kinds of things. They are JITted to almost the exact same code that a C++ app would have been compiled to in the first place. I also have a hard time understanding how Perl would be faster than C++ and AWK almost as fast as C++. There must be something seriously screwy in some of those implementations.
I'm sure there are plenty of benchmarks to show very different results. For example, many CGI benchmarks show Perl and Java to be very similar in speed and only slightly slower than C based CGI programs. Go figure..
About not being able to pay a 18x decrease.. Well.. If your response time on the web server is 0.1 seconds, does it matter if it's 18 times slower than the optimal? Especially, if the code is now much easier to maintain and extend.. As long as the application is fast enough, it doesn't matter IMHO.
How does Perl compare to C with respect to speed? It's damn slow. How does Java compare to C with respect to speed? It's damn slow. What are the advantages then?
The advantage for both Perl and Java over C is that you can *write* code much faster in those langauges and still be sure that you don't have stray pointers and memory leaks, potential unchecked buffers etc. This means that you have more time to concentrate on writing good logic and using good algorithms, which in turn means that in the end, you end up with a much "better" application that works just as well. What you lost in speed of execution you gained in a nice architecture and with good algorithms.
Of course a really kick-ass C coder is just as productive in C, but those coders are extremely hard to find and very expensive. So in the real world with tight deadlines where computers are cheaper than coders, Java and Perl will give you a better run for your money that C will.
That's not to say that C and C++ doesn't have it's places - it does. I wouldn't code a game in Perl, for example, nor would I code an operating system in Java. But I would also never code an e-commerce site in C (actually I have, but that was in 1996:) Use the right tool for the right job.
BTW.. Perl's real strength from a purely language point of view is probably it's close relation to regular expressions, which makes string handling very easy to do and extremely hard to read for other coders who are reading your code. You can do more in one line of Perl (string handling) than you can with 1000 lines of C code in many cases.
Offtopic? How was the parent post offtopic? I also just (30 seconds ago) saw a post on the advertisements in games that was "redundant" even though it was a perfectly good post about Wipeout and in-game ads. As far as I could tell, nobody had mentioned it before that. Moderation used to be bad and misplaced but now it's downright WRONG.
Now.. go ahead and moderate *THIS* post as "offtopic" because this one (my post) really is offtopic.
.. the US Army could buy some books about foreign cultures so they could understand them better. That way, when there's an accident and they have to land on Chinese territory, they don't have to make all the beginner mistakes and act all "i-want-it-all-and-i-want-it-now" and *demand* back their soldiers *now*.
Anyone who knows even a little bit about Chinese culture understands that that's the last thing you should do. The Chinese have a 5000 year old culture. Their culture isn't "fast" in the sense that the US fast food culture is. Things happen slowly and a 24h waiting when absolutely nothing at all happens in cases like this is perfectly normal. Added to that the fact that Chinese fear losing face, you can't just jump in their face and *demand* things - especially with a time limit of *now*. What happens then is that they have to refuse if only so they wouldn't look like they were walked over. It's no wonder the American pilots are still there. It's much to the fault of the clumsy behavior of the US side of the "negotiations". Frankly, I'm pretty amazed over how badly it had been handled so far.
That said, it's pretty clear that the Americans aren't at fault for the accident. The only reason I can see would be if the Chinese would have come so close that the US pilot would have lost his temper and did some kind of of "get off my skin" move, which the Chinese pilot didn't notice before it was too late. Who knows.. maybe he was looking at a map or something. I'm just saying that the diplomacy is very clumsy.
What blame are they placing on Microsoft products? The only thing I found was some font problems with the PDF reader, which isn't a Microsoft product but an Adobe product. I couldn't find *ANYTHING* that would have suggested that Microsoft's products were in any way responsible for any of the problems. If you find something, please, share it with us.
Am I from the US? Nope.. Finland. But if the USA is like you say it is ("our entire system of political philosophy is based on the concept that government is essentially evil and oppressive and must be carefully limited by the people to restrain its power") then I think it's a little funny to call it "land of the free". Sounds pretty opressed to me...
The whole idea of the government being hostile sounds totally ludicrous to me, but maybe I'm just lucky living in a place where the police DOESN'T fill people with 42 bullet holes and nobody is jerked around because of their skin color and nobody is attacking demonstrators. And imagine that this country is such WITHOUT a constitution that guarantees guns for everyone...
If I feel bad, I'll pull the courtains. They won't look in tho cause that's not why the camera is there. It's there to film the street to keep it safe. If I notice it's drifting and looking / spying into my house, I'll pull the courtains and then complain. Still, someone can just as easily sit down outside my house and look in with a video camera or binoculars and there's nothing I can do about that either. Unless it's illegal, which I don't know if it is.
However, if I'm just watching TV or surfing the net or whatever at home, I couldn't care less if someone is watching or not.
Cameras on the streets is a totally different thing from cameras in my bed- / bathroom. Streets are public places. My bathroom is not. Don't compare apples to oranges.
I'm not familiar with boiling frogs but I don't doubt for a second that you are.
The George Washington quote.. Well, I think it's irresponsible NOT to put up cameras to allow criminals to be more easily identified and caught.
As far as traveling and seeing the world goes, I was talking about Europe and you mention ONE COUNTRY you have been to in Europe. I've been to 35 countries, including most in western Europe, Canada and USA in North America, Singapore, Malaysia and China in Asia, Gambia, Senegal and Morocco in Africa and I can say that of these, the only places I could imagine living in is Canada, Finland (where I live), Sweden and The Netherlands. I wouldn't want to live in Germany either, but I also wouldn't want to live in the USA and have my (future) kids shot up in school or by some gunman in McDonalds. Otherwise, the USA seems to be ok.
I don't want some country vs country fight though. I'm just saying that your "extensive traveling" and supposed knowledge of the world doesn't impress me one bit. Except for Japan.. I've always wanted to go there.. What's it like (except damn expensive)?
By "first step" you mean there is a second step that is comming. This assumes that there is some dark force (a bunch of people) that want to push a 1984-esque society. In countries with functioning democracy, this won't happen. If such a society comes, the cameras that are actually used for spying and controlling people follow right after. As long as there is a non-hostile government, cameras are a good thing.
You say "as long as I remain in America, I choose to fight for a country which remains free, in a state of constantly shifting balance between free, wonderful chaos and security".
Cameras that help catching criminals make your country - or any other - no less free than the police makes it less free. They are on YOUR SIDE, can't you understand that? It's no first step to anything.
And btw.. throwing around empty slogans like "land of the free, home of the brave" makes you look pretty silly. You do realize that most of Europe is more free than the USA and people all over the world are just as brave as the Americans. Right? I mean, people will just laugh at you when you say stuff like that and sing the national anthem with the hand on your heart.
... they are not used to *spy* on people but for security. They are used to catch criminals and prevent crimes. And don't start quoting Thomas Jefferson to me because the "trading freedom" quote is as full of shit as the 2nd ammendment (guns) in the US constitution. We all know how well *THAT* has worked out for the USA.
There are already security cameras everywhere and when you're walking downtown, on a subway station or in a store, they are watching you. How many here have suffered from some kind of misuse from security cameras? How many have benefitted from them? Probably everyone has benefitted from them in form of added security on subway stations late at night etc.
Sometimes I can't believe how much paranoia there is on Slashdot. I mean, really.. What do you think they will do to you? Send you videotapes with you picking your nose and ask for money? Just because "Enemy Of The State" says the state is out to get you doesn't mean it's so. You know, the state is *YOU* after all; all people. So relax a little and breathe. Nobody is out to get you.
Here's a link to balance out the paranoia in the Slashdot article:
Microsoft's Java VM was *the* best and *the* fastest until Sun got to version 1.1.8. After that, Sun was ahead in the game and the only contest left was between IBM and Sun. The only things missing from Microsoft's implementation were RMI and JNI. Lack of RMI was a little odd since it could easily be implemented 100% in Java code and therefore be added later to the VM simply by adding the missing classes to the classpath. There was also no real good reason to drop RMI. As far as JNI goes, Microsoft truly had a MUCH better technology, and Sun itself had gone from one implementation to another. These two parts of the Java spec; RMI and JNI, are the only valid complaints about their VM IMHO. Complaining about bugs is bogus because Sun's own VM was in MUCH worse shape. Netscape's VM always was a joke and still is (the one bundled with the 4.x series browsers).
Point 1 about HTML editors.. tsetem replies "I prefer VIM anyday". Point 4, installations, tsetem replies "rpm -Uvh or rpm -Fvh".
Hello? This is the whole point!! Do you realize how completely clueless 99.99% of all users out there are? They can't use the clipboard in a word processor and it takes them 30 seconds to find a scrollbar. Do you think they want to type "rpm -Uvh" in some shell? That's the whole point that the original poster was making - that it's not just the COST of software that matters.
Do you have any idea what the cost of getting these 99.99% of clueless users to the skill level where they could do anything productive with Linux - at it's current state? License costs are totally meaningless in that perspective. Mac OS X is pretty close to what a USABLE UNIX should be. I'm sure most users could switch to that without any big learning curve. But Gnome and tcsh on Linux, not a chance!
Windows XP is scheduled for the autumn I think, and probably won't slip as much as Win2K since it's not as radical an upgrade as Win2K was..NET, well, that one is definitely tougher. The first beta of VisualStudio.NET is out, but it's definitely a *BETA*. My guess is at least 12 more months until anything substantial happens on that front.
My guess is also that in 12 months, nothing *substantial* will have happened in the "market shares" of open source vs. closed source.
I started wondering about the lack of Windows ME and I found an answer to the question in a message by Jerry Baker in a Mozilla newsgroup:
FROM: Jerry Baker
DATE: 07/15/2000 07:39:03
SUBJECT: Properly reporting Windows Me
Well, Windows Me has been released to manufacturing and is supposed to
go gold in September. I`m just curious if we want to setup
/mozilla/netwerk/protocol/http/src/nsHTTPHandler .c pp to recognize it.
Some might say that Mozilla should just continue reporting it as Win98,
but I don`t think so. Just as Win98 was really just an upgraded Win95,
so ME is to Win98. It is a different OS and should be reported so that
people widhing to detect the presence of this OS can find it (such as
measuring its adoption rate, etc.).
The real question comes down to how to report it. It looks like Mozilla
is trying to provide UA compatibility with IE where possible (a good
thing), but IE has an interesting take on Windows Me. The info I have so
far shows IE reporting Windows Me as
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)
To me that seems ridiculous. Should Mozilla go ahead and follow MS`s
previous "standard" and report it as "Windows ME", or use Netscape`s
"standard" and report it as "WinME"?
What do you think?
--
Jerry Baker
PGP Key:
http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&s ea rch=0xD0AEE429
Look, I'm not making these stats up. I'm not the one who coded the app that collects the stats but you do have a point that the lack of ME is weird.
I assume it's not under "other" because that share is so low. These all come from the user agent strings so whatever a browser under Win ME would identify itself with, that's what would show up here. Anyone with Windows ME who can tell us? I would also not be completely surprised if the guys who wrote the stat app just thought that ME is basically 98 SP2 and decided to combine the stats under "Windows 98".
Also, if anyone else have similar stats, I'd like to see those too - if nothing else but to compare how "average" our stats are.
The company I work for hosts a *large* number of sites for all kinds of companies - both B2B and B2C. For the record, the sites are in Finland *mostly* but they should reflect pretty good global market shares as well.. The combined stats from all those sites are as follows:
(btw, like for Slashdot polls, if it doesn't add up to 100%, it's due to rounding errors)
Windows 98 64.17%
Windows 95 18.18%
Windows NT 15.92%
Macintosh 0.95%
Linux 0.33%
Windows 3.1 0.23%
other 0.19%
Misc Unix 0.05%
I think these stats show a couple of things:
1) Windows OS's have a HUGE lead over anything else. Macintosh is lower in Finland than it is in the USA, I'm sure, but then you'd think Linux is higher here than over in the USA...
2) IE has a HUGE lead over Netscape and anyone else, with almost 90% market share
3) IE 5 has a surprising amount of users - I was expecting IE 4 to have a much higher number relative to IE 5. I think this shows that people are actually upgrading their version 4 IE browsers to IE 5 themselves and not just sticking with what came with the OS - otherwise we'd see more IE 4's.
4) Mozilla + Netscape 6 are completely marginal at this point, though I'm sure they will slowly grow. At this point, there are even more Netscape 3 users than there are Netscape 6 users! Even IE 6, which only has had a beta out for about two weeks is higher than Netscape 6 right now.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm pretty surprised at the huge Microsoft domination in these stats; both OS wise and browser wise. Considering security problems like today, it's a little scary, because Joe Sixpack will NOT install security patches. At least the stats seem to show that users do update their browsers every now and then..
and a few days ago, 4.77 appeared on Netscape's FTP sites even though Netscape 6 (don't even get me started!) was released.. Oh.. And Netscape 6 is actually at 6.01 now.. Yes, you guessed it.. a security patch release. I'm sure I left out some 4.x versions, but notice that only a couple of those are feature releases (4.5, 4.7 and 4.06 if memory serves). For many of those releases, way more than one bug has been patched. So to claim that this is a Microsoft-only problem is just plain wrong.
The guy goes "Modify the source to do all sorts of decryption and hacking" and gets modded up for "insightful". Hello?!
It doesn't matter if the source is available or not. A worm or virus that gains access to the system - any system - can do anything it wants. Period. There's absolutely no difference if it's Windows or Linux, except that on Windows (especially the non-NT variants) code would more easily be run under an account that has more access to the machine (administrator, system etc.). On Linux and other UNIX's, typically, the worm would be executed under some non-root account and have only limited access to do harm. On a properly set up Win NT box, it's basically the same tho.
The emphasis is on MICROSOFT. I can go to a store TODAY and buy a Toshiba bluetooth PCMCIA card and plug it into my laptop and install the drivers for it and it will work fine with my Nokia 6210 phone with bluetooth (it's an add-on). I couldn't care less if Microsoft supports it or not. Just like Microsoft doesn't have to support my Sony monitor - as long as Sony has drivers for it that works with Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
After seeing that benchmark, I got very curious cause I thought it was VERY odd. I read up on the web and noticed that several had commented that the test is VERY favorable for Perl and Awk due to it's "heavy use of associative arrays and strings". I can't comment that because I don't have the source code for any of those but I do know that the results are very weird.
So.. I decided to write my own little - very simple - test just to get a ball park feel of language speeds. A small app that has two nested loops and calls a method, passing two integers as parameters and returning an integer as the result. I wrote a C, a Perl and Java version and compiled and ran these. My machine is an Athlon 500 with 128 megs of ram running a Microsoft OS. The Perl in use is ActiveState's 5.005_003, the Java VM is JDK 1.3.0_01-beta and I compiled the C app with both gcc and Visual C++ (no difference in speed for those). The result is that the Java app is fastest with a run time of 3 seconds and that includes loading java.exe, granted it's only a marginal overhead. The C comes at a very close 2nd with 4 seconds. The Perl version was so slow that I had to decrease it's iterations to 100 times less than those of the C and Java version. Then it took 7 seconds. I guess it would have taken 700 seconds otherwise but I couldn't wait that long.
Now I know this proves very little. For example, that Java is faster than C probably only shows that the HotSpot could optimize the code VERY well as it ran and thus be faster. I know that a normal Java app wouldn't do this well compared to C.. But in this simple case, it did BETTER. Perl.. well.. the app ran so slowly that I decided to INLINE the method call.. Get rid of it and just say $x = $i * $j; instead. It STILL takes 300 seconds - 100 times slower than the Java version.
The *ONLY* thing this proves is that benchmarks can be tilted in any direction you want. Unfortunately I can't post the sourcecode because it triggers the "junk" filter. I can email them to whoever wants them tho.. There's nothing special in them anyway and anyone could do the same test to see themselves quite quickly.
I have a very hard time believing that benchmark. I'd like to know what virtual machine was used and if the Java coder who wrote the implementation had any idea of what he was doing.
For non-graphical applications, Java tends to be quite close to C++ in speed. I'm talking about stuff like math and those kinds of things. They are JITted to almost the exact same code that a C++ app would have been compiled to in the first place. I also have a hard time understanding how Perl would be faster than C++ and AWK almost as fast as C++. There must be something seriously screwy in some of those implementations.
I'm sure there are plenty of benchmarks to show very different results. For example, many CGI benchmarks show Perl and Java to be very similar in speed and only slightly slower than C based CGI programs. Go figure..
About not being able to pay a 18x decrease.. Well.. If your response time on the web server is 0.1 seconds, does it matter if it's 18 times slower than the optimal? Especially, if the code is now much easier to maintain and extend.. As long as the application is fast enough, it doesn't matter IMHO.
How does Perl compare to C with respect to speed? It's damn slow. How does Java compare to C with respect to speed? It's damn slow. What are the advantages then?
:) Use the right tool for the right job.
The advantage for both Perl and Java over C is that you can *write* code much faster in those langauges and still be sure that you don't have stray pointers and memory leaks, potential unchecked buffers etc. This means that you have more time to concentrate on writing good logic and using good algorithms, which in turn means that in the end, you end up with a much "better" application that works just as well. What you lost in speed of execution you gained in a nice architecture and with good algorithms.
Of course a really kick-ass C coder is just as productive in C, but those coders are extremely hard to find and very expensive. So in the real world with tight deadlines where computers are cheaper than coders, Java and Perl will give you a better run for your money that C will.
That's not to say that C and C++ doesn't have it's places - it does. I wouldn't code a game in Perl, for example, nor would I code an operating system in Java. But I would also never code an e-commerce site in C (actually I have, but that was in 1996
BTW.. Perl's real strength from a purely language point of view is probably it's close relation to regular expressions, which makes string handling very easy to do and extremely hard to read for other coders who are reading your code. You can do more in one line of Perl (string handling) than you can with 1000 lines of C code in many cases.
Offtopic? How was the parent post offtopic? I also just (30 seconds ago) saw a post on the advertisements in games that was "redundant" even though it was a perfectly good post about Wipeout and in-game ads. As far as I could tell, nobody had mentioned it before that. Moderation used to be bad and misplaced but now it's downright WRONG.
Now.. go ahead and moderate *THIS* post as "offtopic" because this one (my post) really is offtopic.
.. the US Army could buy some books about foreign cultures so they could understand them better. That way, when there's an accident and they have to land on Chinese territory, they don't have to make all the beginner mistakes and act all "i-want-it-all-and-i-want-it-now" and *demand* back their soldiers *now*.
Anyone who knows even a little bit about Chinese culture understands that that's the last thing you should do. The Chinese have a 5000 year old culture. Their culture isn't "fast" in the sense that the US fast food culture is. Things happen slowly and a 24h waiting when absolutely nothing at all happens in cases like this is perfectly normal. Added to that the fact that Chinese fear losing face, you can't just jump in their face and *demand* things - especially with a time limit of *now*. What happens then is that they have to refuse if only so they wouldn't look like they were walked over. It's no wonder the American pilots are still there. It's much to the fault of the clumsy behavior of the US side of the "negotiations". Frankly, I'm pretty amazed over how badly it had been handled so far.
That said, it's pretty clear that the Americans aren't at fault for the accident. The only reason I can see would be if the Chinese would have come so close that the US pilot would have lost his temper and did some kind of of "get off my skin" move, which the Chinese pilot didn't notice before it was too late. Who knows.. maybe he was looking at a map or something. I'm just saying that the diplomacy is very clumsy.
What blame are they placing on Microsoft products? The only thing I found was some font problems with the PDF reader, which isn't a Microsoft product but an Adobe product. I couldn't find *ANYTHING* that would have suggested that Microsoft's products were in any way responsible for any of the problems. If you find something, please, share it with us.
Am I from the US? Nope.. Finland. But if the USA is like you say it is ("our entire system of political philosophy is based on the concept that government is essentially evil and oppressive and must be carefully limited by the people to restrain its power") then I think it's a little funny to call it "land of the free". Sounds pretty opressed to me...
The whole idea of the government being hostile sounds totally ludicrous to me, but maybe I'm just lucky living in a place where the police DOESN'T fill people with 42 bullet holes and nobody is jerked around because of their skin color and nobody is attacking demonstrators. And imagine that this country is such WITHOUT a constitution that guarantees guns for everyone...
If I feel bad, I'll pull the courtains. They won't look in tho cause that's not why the camera is there. It's there to film the street to keep it safe. If I notice it's drifting and looking / spying into my house, I'll pull the courtains and then complain. Still, someone can just as easily sit down outside my house and look in with a video camera or binoculars and there's nothing I can do about that either. Unless it's illegal, which I don't know if it is.
However, if I'm just watching TV or surfing the net or whatever at home, I couldn't care less if someone is watching or not.
Cameras on the streets is a totally different thing from cameras in my bed- / bathroom. Streets are public places. My bathroom is not. Don't compare apples to oranges.
"Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
U.S. Gov't-in-Exile: http://www.USGovernment-in-Exile.org"
Clicking on the last link is all I have to do to know that you're a fruitcake.
I'm not familiar with boiling frogs but I don't doubt for a second that you are.
The George Washington quote.. Well, I think it's irresponsible NOT to put up cameras to allow criminals to be more easily identified and caught.
As far as traveling and seeing the world goes, I was talking about Europe and you mention ONE COUNTRY you have been to in Europe. I've been to 35 countries, including most in western Europe, Canada and USA in North America, Singapore, Malaysia and China in Asia, Gambia, Senegal and Morocco in Africa and I can say that of these, the only places I could imagine living in is Canada, Finland (where I live), Sweden and The Netherlands. I wouldn't want to live in Germany either, but I also wouldn't want to live in the USA and have my (future) kids shot up in school or by some gunman in McDonalds. Otherwise, the USA seems to be ok.
I don't want some country vs country fight though. I'm just saying that your "extensive traveling" and supposed knowledge of the world doesn't impress me one bit. Except for Japan.. I've always wanted to go there.. What's it like (except damn expensive)?
Cameras is different from phone tapping. Why? Because cameras are in public places. Phones are private. Don't compare apples to oranges.
And as far as human nature goes, I have a much more faith in humans than you do.
By "first step" you mean there is a second step that is comming. This assumes that there is some dark force (a bunch of people) that want to push a 1984-esque society. In countries with functioning democracy, this won't happen. If such a society comes, the cameras that are actually used for spying and controlling people follow right after. As long as there is a non-hostile government, cameras are a good thing.
You say "as long as I remain in America, I choose to fight for a country which remains free, in a state of constantly shifting balance between free, wonderful chaos and security".
Cameras that help catching criminals make your country - or any other - no less free than the police makes it less free. They are on YOUR SIDE, can't you understand that? It's no first step to anything.
And btw.. throwing around empty slogans like "land of the free, home of the brave" makes you look pretty silly. You do realize that most of Europe is more free than the USA and people all over the world are just as brave as the Americans. Right? I mean, people will just laugh at you when you say stuff like that and sing the national anthem with the hand on your heart.
There are already security cameras everywhere and when you're walking downtown, on a subway station or in a store, they are watching you. How many here have suffered from some kind of misuse from security cameras? How many have benefitted from them? Probably everyone has benefitted from them in form of added security on subway stations late at night etc.
Sometimes I can't believe how much paranoia there is on Slashdot. I mean, really.. What do you think they will do to you? Send you videotapes with you picking your nose and ask for money? Just because "Enemy Of The State" says the state is out to get you doesn't mean it's so. You know, the state is *YOU* after all; all people. So relax a little and breathe. Nobody is out to get you.
Here's a link to balance out the paranoia in the Slashdot article:
CCTV gives an arresting sight!(in this window)
CCTV gives an arresting sight! (in a new window)
Microsoft's Java VM was *the* best and *the* fastest until Sun got to version 1.1.8. After that, Sun was ahead in the game and the only contest left was between IBM and Sun. The only things missing from Microsoft's implementation were RMI and JNI. Lack of RMI was a little odd since it could easily be implemented 100% in Java code and therefore be added later to the VM simply by adding the missing classes to the classpath. There was also no real good reason to drop RMI. As far as JNI goes, Microsoft truly had a MUCH better technology, and Sun itself had gone from one implementation to another. These two parts of the Java spec; RMI and JNI, are the only valid complaints about their VM IMHO. Complaining about bugs is bogus because Sun's own VM was in MUCH worse shape. Netscape's VM always was a joke and still is (the one bundled with the 4.x series browsers).
Point 1 about HTML editors.. tsetem replies "I prefer VIM anyday". Point 4, installations, tsetem replies "rpm -Uvh or rpm -Fvh".
Hello? This is the whole point!! Do you realize how completely clueless 99.99% of all users out there are? They can't use the clipboard in a word processor and it takes them 30 seconds to find a scrollbar. Do you think they want to type "rpm -Uvh" in some shell? That's the whole point that the original poster was making - that it's not just the COST of software that matters.
Do you have any idea what the cost of getting these 99.99% of clueless users to the skill level where they could do anything productive with Linux - at it's current state? License costs are totally meaningless in that perspective. Mac OS X is pretty close to what a USABLE UNIX should be. I'm sure most users could switch to that without any big learning curve. But Gnome and tcsh on Linux, not a chance!
Windows XP is scheduled for the autumn I think, and probably won't slip as much as Win2K since it's not as radical an upgrade as Win2K was. .NET, well, that one is definitely tougher. The first beta of VisualStudio.NET is out, but it's definitely a *BETA*. My guess is at least 12 more months until anything substantial happens on that front.
My guess is also that in 12 months, nothing *substantial* will have happened in the "market shares" of open source vs. closed source.
I started wondering about the lack of Windows ME and I found an answer to the question in a message by Jerry Baker in a Mozilla newsgroup:
r .c pp to recognize it.
s ea rch=0xD0AEE429
FROM: Jerry Baker
DATE: 07/15/2000 07:39:03
SUBJECT: Properly reporting Windows Me
Well, Windows Me has been released to manufacturing and is supposed to
go gold in September. I`m just curious if we want to setup
/mozilla/netwerk/protocol/http/src/nsHTTPHandle
Some might say that Mozilla should just continue reporting it as Win98,
but I don`t think so. Just as Win98 was really just an upgraded Win95,
so ME is to Win98. It is a different OS and should be reported so that
people widhing to detect the presence of this OS can find it (such as
measuring its adoption rate, etc.).
The real question comes down to how to report it. It looks like Mozilla
is trying to provide UA compatibility with IE where possible (a good
thing), but IE has an interesting take on Windows Me. The info I have so
far shows IE reporting Windows Me as
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)
To me that seems ridiculous. Should Mozilla go ahead and follow MS`s
previous "standard" and report it as "Windows ME", or use Netscape`s
"standard" and report it as "WinME"?
What do you think?
--
Jerry Baker
PGP Key:
http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&
Look, I'm not making these stats up. I'm not the one who coded the app that collects the stats but you do have a point that the lack of ME is weird.
I assume it's not under "other" because that share is so low. These all come from the user agent strings so whatever a browser under Win ME would identify itself with, that's what would show up here. Anyone with Windows ME who can tell us? I would also not be completely surprised if the guys who wrote the stat app just thought that ME is basically 98 SP2 and decided to combine the stats under "Windows 98".
Also, if anyone else have similar stats, I'd like to see those too - if nothing else but to compare how "average" our stats are.
What I meant was that Netscape 5.x is caused by the user agent string of Mozilla, which is what you said (Mozilla/5.0 ....).
Netscape 5.x is what is in the user agent string of Mozilla.
The company I work for hosts a *large* number of sites for all kinds of companies - both B2B and B2C. For the record, the sites are in Finland *mostly* but they should reflect pretty good global market shares as well.. The combined stats from all those sites are as follows:
(btw, like for Slashdot polls, if it doesn't add up to 100%, it's due to rounding errors)
Browsers:
MSIE 5.x 75.79%
MSIE 4.x 13.67%
Netscape 4.x 9.28%
MSIE 3.x 0.44%
Netscape 3.x 0.36%
Netscape 5.x 0.22%
MSIE 6.x 0.15%
other 0.09%
Netscape 6.x 0.01%
Operating systems:
Windows 98 64.17%
Windows 95 18.18%
Windows NT 15.92%
Macintosh 0.95%
Linux 0.33%
Windows 3.1 0.23%
other 0.19%
Misc Unix 0.05%
I think these stats show a couple of things:
1) Windows OS's have a HUGE lead over anything else. Macintosh is lower in Finland than it is in the USA, I'm sure, but then you'd think Linux is higher here than over in the USA...
2) IE has a HUGE lead over Netscape and anyone else, with almost 90% market share
3) IE 5 has a surprising amount of users - I was expecting IE 4 to have a much higher number relative to IE 5. I think this shows that people are actually upgrading their version 4 IE browsers to IE 5 themselves and not just sticking with what came with the OS - otherwise we'd see more IE 4's.
4) Mozilla + Netscape 6 are completely marginal at this point, though I'm sure they will slowly grow. At this point, there are even more Netscape 3 users than there are Netscape 6 users! Even IE 6, which only has had a beta out for about two weeks is higher than Netscape 6 right now.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm pretty surprised at the huge Microsoft domination in these stats; both OS wise and browser wise. Considering security problems like today, it's a little scary, because Joe Sixpack will NOT install security patches. At least the stats seem to show that users do update their browsers every now and then..
Yeah. I know.. I was just thinking that too.. Weird how people have such selective memories. Netscape.. let's see:
4.0
4.01
4.02
4.03
4.04
4.04a
4.05
4.06
4.07
4.08
4.5
4.51
4.7
4.71
4.72
4.73
4.74
4.75
4.76
and a few days ago, 4.77 appeared on Netscape's FTP sites even though Netscape 6 (don't even get me started!) was released.. Oh.. And Netscape 6 is actually at 6.01 now.. Yes, you guessed it.. a security patch release. I'm sure I left out some 4.x versions, but notice that only a couple of those are feature releases (4.5, 4.7 and 4.06 if memory serves). For many of those releases, way more than one bug has been patched. So to claim that this is a Microsoft-only problem is just plain wrong.
The guy goes "Modify the source to do all sorts of decryption and hacking" and gets modded up for "insightful". Hello?!
It doesn't matter if the source is available or not. A worm or virus that gains access to the system - any system - can do anything it wants. Period. There's absolutely no difference if it's Windows or Linux, except that on Windows (especially the non-NT variants) code would more easily be run under an account that has more access to the machine (administrator, system etc.). On Linux and other UNIX's, typically, the worm would be executed under some non-root account and have only limited access to do harm. On a properly set up Win NT box, it's basically the same tho.
The emphasis is on MICROSOFT. I can go to a store TODAY and buy a Toshiba bluetooth PCMCIA card and plug it into my laptop and install the drivers for it and it will work fine with my Nokia 6210 phone with bluetooth (it's an add-on). I couldn't care less if Microsoft supports it or not. Just like Microsoft doesn't have to support my Sony monitor - as long as Sony has drivers for it that works with Windows.