Not science eh, then please exlplain the reason that the ice caps on Mars are melting. It's been a pretty steady decline in ice according to the rover that we have had over there for the last 8 years. I'm sure Global Warming is a problem over there with all the gas guzzling martians pumping out CO2, eh?
Oh no! We had better send your post out to the entire global community of climatologists! How could they have missed this, and forgotten that solar radiation changed?
They haven't, of course. Generally speaking, when the vast majority of experts in a subject come to a consensus, and a Slashdot poster expresses a contrary view, I'd go with the experts.
Re:3 Word Summary of Practical Mono
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Practical Mono
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· Score: 2, Insightful
uhh no. Java sucks.
Nothing like a good reasoned technical comment to educate Slashdot readers, eh?
Yes, the world is going to warm a couple of degrees, and sea levels will rise a few feet. No, this will not be the apocalypse. Simply put, adaption is cheap, while prevention is hideously expensive at the moment. In twenty years, it will not be.
You need to research more. It is highly probable that in 20 years many aspects of climate change will be irreversible and at the point of positive feedback. How much CO2 we emit in 20 years won't matter much if there is already around 500 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. By that time, there could be more heat absorption by areas previously covered by reflective ice, and many areas previously under permafrost could be releasing methane.... in which case the sea rise is going to be rather more than a couple of feet.
Seems like we're lucky to be alive, considering how a 2 degree climate difference will mean the end of the world.
You probably meant this ironically, but you are actually right. The population of the world was a fraction of it's current size when the climate was significantly different from what it was now. Hundreds of millions live in areas which would be hugely changed by even minor climate change. It would be the end of their world.
Extra dimensions aren't evidence for string theory. String theory needs extra dimensions to work, but extra dimensions don't need String theory to explain them. Extra dimensions would simply mean that String theory could be right, but so could a large number of other ideas.
The biological theory of evolution is not. It is very specific and it DOES only apply to living systems.
It isn't specific. That is simply how it has been mostly used before we understood what we do now about 'life' and what a vague and often meaningless term it is.
To be sure, many things change through time. However, the evolution of the solar system is not ment to be handled by the theory of evolution in biology.
Who is talking about the solar system?
That theory is ment only to adress why there is such diversity amongst living things. Thus, it only applies to living things.
That is the way it is mostly used.
But what is a living thing? Is a virus living? Perhaps. Does it evolve? Absolutely. Evolution has been clearly shown in recent years in individual RNA strands in laboratory experiments (they have been able to evolve things like resistance to ethidium bromide poisoning of their replication). Are individual RNA strands alive? Almost certainly not by most definitions. Do they evolve? Absolutely.
Maybe you are stuck with the idea that evolution has to involve nucleic acids. A perfectly feasible proposal for evolution of non-living systems - that may have been the precursors to life on earth - has been put forward by Cairns-Smith, involving competition and replication of patterns on clay minerals. It may not have happened, but it is a respectable idea. Are clay crystals alive? Almost everyone would say not. Could they possibly evolve - complete with competition for resources, mutation and natural selection? It is certainly a possibility.
I am sorry. The theory of evolution does not apply to origins of life. Those really are the facts, no matter what else you may want them to be.
I'm sorry, but this is only true if you think that there is some magic moment when non-life becomes life. This isn't the case, no matter how much you want it to be.
As our understanding life grows, the division between life and non-life has become meaningless, so any restriction of evolution to life also becomes meaningless.
Obviously not everything evolves, not by a long way. However, the range of things that can evolve would seem to be much more than what most people would call 'life'.
Anytime you talk about the origen of life, you CANNOT be talking about evolution. The reason being that ToE in biology only applies to living things. Thus, it cannot adress anything before life or the event of the formation of life. It simply does not adress these points. Those are the facts.
No they aren't. Evolution is a general principle, and life is a very vague term. There is no reason why things that we consider 'non-life' should not evolve in interesting ways. Life is nothing special - it is simply particularly complex chemistry and physics. There is no sudden point at which non-life becomes life, and no point at which evolution suddenly starts to work.
For example, perhaps life started in parallel out of the "primordial soup" of organic compounds in the atmosphere, and also deep in the trenches with the H2S consuming bacteria, while at the same time getting some help from the odd comet.
Life only had one origin because all life, no matter what it consumes, is virtually identical in terms of its fundamental chemistry - the DNA for example. This does not mean that life did not originate many times; just that one form dominated to the exclusion of others.
The article keeps refering to a survey on the "origin and development of life". They need to separate out "origin" and "development" - they do not likely have the same explanation.
They absolutely do. This is one of the last remaining areas where people try to think of life as in some way special. Life isn't. It is just chemistry and physics. You get complexity and even arguably forms of evolution and development in things that we would not consider alive. It is a continuum.
We started to real that life was nothing special a few years ago when the first biological chemical - Urea - was made artificially. At that point we discovered that life was made up of no more than chemistry with no magic ingredients. Then we discovered evolution by natural selection, and so life changes by itself with no magic designer. There is no reason to think that we won't soon discover some of the many ways that life can start, and then we will find there is no magic creator.
"Not only can they live under immense pressures deep in the ocean, tubeworms living around volcanoes and vents can tolerate a wide range of temperatures."
The immense pressure is often mentioned, but is largely completely irrelevant, as it is not like these creatures have to be built to resist pressure - water can move throughout their bodies. The thing that is really awesome is the temperature range.
With Java 1.6 and beyond (especially with Matisse) I expect Client-side Java to really take off.
I expect it will take off, but largely without anyone noticing. The recent Sun/Microsoft co-operation seems to have paid off in terms of the quality and integration of Swing with the Vista GUI. Although I personally have no objections to the Java 1.5 standard look and feel, Swing under Vista should be totally indistinguishable from native apps and fully integrated. There will be many Java apps around with no-one being able to tell.
Of course, this makes things more complex for developers, trying to choose between client-side and web applications!
When you go around making statements like that, its highly likely that "Java is pretty fast" statements should be taken with a grain of salt!
Why exactly? Memory use has nothing to do with speed. 8MB for an optimising high-performance VM, full-featured GUI library and a full-featured application like JEdit IS small! If you look at an equivalent non-Java application like Kate, it can require tens of megabytes.
I generally take comments which are simply opinions not backed up by evidence with a pinch of salt.
Java will ALWAYS be slower than native code. It takes time to translate java bytecode into native machine code. This cannot be optimised away.
Apart from the fact that there is nothing to prevent Java being compiled directly to native code (there are many such compilers), the process of translating to native code is fast.
Look at it this way. You have a C program supplied as source code. It takes a few seconds to compile, then runs at native speed. Does that few seconds mean that C can never run at native speed? Of course not. You now have a Java program supplied as byte code. It takes a few seconds after starting to translate to machine code then runs at native speed. Does that few seconds mean that Java can never run at native speed? Of course not. Most Java apps run for far more than a few seconds - often for weeks or months server side. The few seconds it takes to optimise are totally insignificant.
It also depends what you mean by 'native code'. Different compilers can produce different qualities of native code. The Java Hotspot optimiser has the ability to profile and re-optimise native code at runtime, taking avantage of highly-processor specific features, so it could well be faster than a pre-compiled C binary that is targetted at a general class of processors.
Java is certianly no less memory hungry than it origininally was, the only difference is that 10 years ago, the average machine had about 16MB of RAM, so java using 8MB was rediculous. Nowadays we have 512MB-1GB in the average machine, so 8MB is almost unnoticed.
This would be true if Java did not run perfectly well on small memory devices, which often have only a few tens of kilobytes.
*Encourages taking the OO pradigm to rediculous levels. (I have seen people put all their "utility" methods in seperate classes, just so they don't end up with unused code in their application.)
This is odd, as most people I know who really understand OOP say that Java has far too little OOP. Code can be just as used or unused in utility classes as in superclasses - this is irrelevant to the argument. Inheritance is simply a different way of packaging functionality.
*Non-Free (A fully featured Free implementation is a while off.)
This is not an issue for a large number of developers. GNU Classpath and Kaffe do a reasonable job and are totally free. This is simply a political issue you have with many implementations, it has nothing to do with the language itself (free implementations can be certified as Java without losing their 'freeness').
*Java applications *never* conform to any OS's standard look, no matter what OS you run them on. (Linux java sort-of uses Gtk, Windows (sun) java uses its own widgets, Mac java uses Aqua, but does not conform to Apples UIG.)
Sorry, wrong. If you use SWT Java applications ARE the OS's standard look, because the use the OSes standard GUI. Mac Java does conform to Apple's UIG. Guess why? Apple wrote the version of Swing for their systems. On Vista, Swing is going to pixel-by-pixel identical to native apps - as Microsoft have realised the importance of Java client side and are helping with this.
*Java applications cannot take advantage of OS-specific features, so often OS-specific "helper" apps are written, reducing the application's portability.
Like what? Both Swing and SWT have full OS integration, allowing you to use things like drag-and-drop, directX etc. The Java Native Desktop Integration API allows full use of features such as system editors, browsers, file system etc.
I've heard that since I started at the University in '98. Java is still dead slow.
Why do people say this? No modern benchmark shows Java as slow. This is false.
And, 8MB IS nothing on modern machines. Things have changed a little since 1998, you know!
For desktop applications: The interfaces are slow, quirky and isn't responsive enough.
Sorry, no. This simply is false and without foundation. I challenge you to open a modern Java app line JEdit on a modern VM and find anything slow or unresponsive about it.
The fscking garbage collector grows slow over time.
No, it doesn't. When this happens, it is a feature of inefficient memory use in code, not the garbage collector. I have batch processing code in Java that handles millions of objects, and the GC is fine.
With java, you have to send a signal to get the VM to do a threaddump, or connect a debugger to the debug-port.. except that you often don't have access to the source code since you're "just" a server admin.
All this can be done with modern tools that automatically connect to server apps, like Eclipse or NetBeans.
And you not having the access to the source code is Java's fault? Sounds like a management problem.
Bah! I hate java.
I would suggest you hate your work situation and the quality of code you have been given to deal with. This is nothing to do with Java.
Java, Flash etc are platform dependent. Try to use the same install package on MAC OS and Windows.
I do this routinely - on MacOS/X, Windows and Linux. No problems at all.
A typical flash swf has more then 100kb. Compare that to a 1kb ajax code and tell me what is large...
Sorry, I don't get the point. Firstly 100kb is totally insignificant on modern machines. Secondly, 100kb of flash won't look small compared to 100kb of AJAX, and the way things are going, that won't take long to appear!
You can name it whatever you want, or dont name it at all. But the web is changing and I just love it!;)
I really don't things are changing much. I have seen supposedly 'Web 2.0' things like Wikis around for years, and they have had surprising little impact. There will be a few sites like Google Maps and Wikipedia that will have an impact, but most organisation neither want nor need these ways of working - they are struggling to keep information under control, not open it up to vast amounts of user interactivity.
The event handling framework is quite complex (you can do practically anything with it) and the fact that each java class behaves almost like a dynamically linked library in more static languages will keep the start-up performance forever behind.
You might think so, but it really doesn't. Try the following: Install a significant Java application like JEdit or Moneydance. Time it's startup. I typically get start-up times of 3-4 seconds. That is faster than most KDE apps on the same machine!
The memory usage hasn't shrank since I was introduced to java. The extra hit that comes from the VM and GC is major pain in small applications but negligible in bigger ones.
I don't find this. I can start up trivial Java apps in just a few megabytes, and even Swing apps like JEdit can run in 8MB. That is nothing on modern machines. As for the GC being a major pain - it can be finely tuned these days, so much so that real-time APIs can be implemented even on standard VMs.
My impression is that performance and memory efficiency has improved significantly since Java 1.4.x.
Applets, Flash, ActiveX, XUL and others are heavy load, platform dependent, bloated components that crippled the user experience.
Applets, Flash and XUL and not platform dependent, and aren't large.
For an instance, flash or java wouldn't let one use the simple "back" button of his browser.
Neither does AJAX. You don't get back to the previous page state that way. Many users find this confusing.
Those technologies are much more of a glue then a real solution.
It is the other way around - the web page was a glue connecting applets etc.
AJAX is practically free from dependencies, really light and transparent.
And means you have to download visible code to the client.
Web 2.0 may be a little vague but is getting clearer every day. Check this out.
Actually, it think it is getting more confused every day! As that very article you quote says:
" But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means"
I think Web 2.0 is nothing more than an arbitrary label for whatever is the latest fashion in web design. If your users can hack your website, it is apparently web 2.0:)
Although very simples, AJAX represent a very important step: its the first ever functionality that actually allows a web page to function more like a traditional app.
The first ever.... apart from Applets, Flash, ActiveX...
Now, web 2.0 is not about changing what the web represents, that much is already established. The web 2.0 is about improving usability and response time
Actually, the term 'web 2.0' is so vague it is meaningless. I am not sure anyone can clearly say what it is about.
You are wrong. Java client-side development is far from dead - it is growing, and at the end of last year overtook MS WinForms as the most popular client-side development platform in North America. There are even 'shrink-wrapped' commercial Java applications based on Swing that are amongst the best in their class (the financial package Moneydance is a good example).
Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.
Easy to say, but wrong. AWT was not poor performance because it was the native GUI. Swing went through years of poor performance, but.... got better. Now it is hardware accelerated.
It is easy to take cheap shots at a technology by on recycling common myths based on the way things were 4 or 5 years ago. However, to post facts it is a good idea to actually try the technology as it is now. Swing on Java 1.5 is neither memory hungry or slow.
OK. We have to push the asteroids away. Is that any harder than space colonization?
Yes, it is. Space colonisation can be a gradual process; virtually self-funding if we start mining water and minerals from the right places in the solar system. We could start to build a moonbase right now if we wanted, and then on to Mars. The asteroid belt might be a good place to go, as there are lots of resources (water, metal, hydrocarbons).
Also, how large are these supervolcanoes? Was Krakatoa that damaging? If not, how many more times powerful than Krakatoa are they?
Very, very large - we are talking of at least hundreds of times larger than Krakatoa. Krakatoa ejected 25 cubic kilometers of rock. The Toba eruption of 70,000 years ago ejected nearly 3000 cubic kilometres, and the most recent (600,000 years ago) eruption of Yellowstone Park ejected so much that most of the area of the USA was covered in ash.
Initially damage the entire Northern US? How fast can it project magma?
The magma is projected into the atmosphere as ash, which can cover a significant area of the planet within days or weeks. The stuff left in the atmosphere would probably create a more-or-less instant Ice Age.
Except that if they burn up in the atmosphere, they're not likely to melt the crust.
It doesn't work like that. If there is enough dust, then it will not just burn up in the atmosphere, it will burn away the atmosphere, and then start to melt the crust.
Also, if we blow up asteroids far enough away from earth, the explosions might deflect pieces away.
No, that won't work either. If you are dealing with a huge mass, the energy to defect it away if it is close enormous. Explosions are a waste of time. A long, slow push is the only practical way.
And who are the lucky few to get taken to space colonies? They wouldn't be the leaders who failed to predict/act on natural disasters in the first place?
I am not talking about evacuation. I am talking about starting space colonies soon, perhaps in the next few decades, as insurance against disasters that could be centuries or millenia away.
And a few days notice wouldn't be enough time to evacuate the area?
Something like a supervolcano would initially devastate an area the size of, say, the Northern states of the USA. Where would you evacuate that number of people to? Eventually, the effects would be felt across the entire globe.
And would you be able to get everyone except tens of millions of people off of the planet to elsewhere?
No.
And a supervolcano would seem to be something we could detect.
Actually, no, it isn't. Even a relatively minor eruption around the area of, say, Yellowstone Park, could indicate the start of days or weeks of mass vulcanism. We may have only days notice of this.
You believe that we can lift almost the entire human population from earth, but can't deflect Ceres?
I was not talking about evacuating the planet - that would be silly. My point is that it is wise to have off-planet colonies just in case.
Also, if the radioactive fragments are small enough, they'll burn up in the atmosphere. True, there will be some radioactivity.
Sorry, but it doesn't work like that. You get the same energy transferred to the Earth by the collision of even small fragments as you would by the entire asteroid. It doesn't matter if they burn up or not.
It's unlikely that any tsunami would wipe out most of the planet (try hitting Columbia, SC).
No, but one could kill tens of millions.
Same with a volcanic eruption.
A supervolcano would not wipe out most of the planet, but would be a global disaster. There have been massive lava flows in the past that may well have wiped out most life. (250 million years ago)
Do any of these "resource rich" asteroids have water on them?
Yes.
Also, any asteroid the size of Ceres or larger should not be too hard to detect early, and anything smaller should not be too hard too bludgeon.
Anything the size of ceres or larger would basically melt the entire crust of the planet, and there would be nothing we could do about it.
If we can get a mission to the asteroid belt, we should be able to get nuclear weapons there as well.
Nuclear weapons would not be much use. What they would most likely do is fragment the asteroid so you end up with a lot of radioactive fragments that would still hit us. You need to push the asteroid away gently, which would take a long time (years).
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Not science eh, then please exlplain the reason that the ice caps on Mars are melting. It's been a pretty steady decline in ice according to the rover that we have had over there for the last 8 years. I'm sure Global Warming is a problem over there with all the gas guzzling martians pumping out CO2, eh?
Oh no! We had better send your post out to the entire global community of climatologists! How could they have missed this, and forgotten that solar radiation changed?
They haven't, of course. Generally speaking, when the vast majority of experts in a subject come to a consensus, and a Slashdot poster expresses a contrary view, I'd go with the experts.
uhh no. Java sucks.
Nothing like a good reasoned technical comment to educate Slashdot readers, eh?
Yes, the world is going to warm a couple of degrees, and sea levels will rise a few feet. No, this will not be the apocalypse. Simply put, adaption is cheap, while prevention is hideously expensive at the moment. In twenty years, it will not be.
You need to research more. It is highly probable that in 20 years many aspects of climate change will be irreversible and at the point of positive feedback. How much CO2 we emit in 20 years won't matter much if there is already around 500 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. By that time, there could be more heat absorption by areas previously covered by reflective ice, and many areas previously under permafrost could be releasing methane.... in which case the sea rise is going to be rather more than a couple of feet.
Seems like we're lucky to be alive, considering how a 2 degree climate difference will mean the end of the world.
You probably meant this ironically, but you are actually right. The population of the world was a fraction of it's current size when the climate was significantly different from what it was now. Hundreds of millions live in areas which would be hugely changed by even minor climate change. It would be the end of their world.
Extra dimensions aren't evidence for string theory. String theory needs extra dimensions to work, but extra dimensions don't need String theory to explain them. Extra dimensions would simply mean that String theory could be right, but so could a large number of other ideas.
Evolution IS a broad concept.
The biological theory of evolution is not. It is very specific and it DOES only apply to living systems.
It isn't specific. That is simply how it has been mostly used before we understood what we do now about 'life' and what a vague and often meaningless term it is.
To be sure, many things change through time. However, the evolution of the solar system is not ment to be handled by the theory of evolution in biology.
Who is talking about the solar system?
That theory is ment only to adress why there is such diversity amongst living things. Thus, it only applies to living things.
That is the way it is mostly used.
But what is a living thing? Is a virus living? Perhaps. Does it evolve? Absolutely. Evolution has been clearly shown in recent years in individual RNA strands in laboratory experiments (they have been able to evolve things like resistance to ethidium bromide poisoning of their replication). Are individual RNA strands alive? Almost certainly not by most definitions. Do they evolve? Absolutely.
Maybe you are stuck with the idea that evolution has to involve nucleic acids. A perfectly feasible proposal for evolution of non-living systems - that may have been the precursors to life on earth - has been put forward by Cairns-Smith, involving competition and replication of patterns on clay minerals. It may not have happened, but it is a respectable idea. Are clay crystals alive? Almost everyone would say not. Could they possibly evolve - complete with competition for resources, mutation and natural selection? It is certainly a possibility.
I am sorry. The theory of evolution does not apply to origins of life. Those really are the facts, no matter what else you may want them to be.
I'm sorry, but this is only true if you think that there is some magic moment when non-life becomes life. This isn't the case, no matter how much you want it to be.
As our understanding life grows, the division between life and non-life has become meaningless, so any restriction of evolution to life also becomes meaningless.
Obviously not everything evolves, not by a long way. However, the range of things that can evolve would seem to be much more than what most people would call 'life'.
Excellent post!
Anytime you talk about the origen of life, you CANNOT be talking about evolution. The reason being that ToE in biology only applies to living things. Thus, it cannot adress anything before life or the event of the formation of life. It simply does not adress these points. Those are the facts.
No they aren't. Evolution is a general principle, and life is a very vague term. There is no reason why things that we consider 'non-life' should not evolve in interesting ways. Life is nothing special - it is simply particularly complex chemistry and physics. There is no sudden point at which non-life becomes life, and no point at which evolution suddenly starts to work.
For example, perhaps life started in parallel out of the "primordial soup" of organic compounds in the atmosphere, and also deep in the trenches with the H2S consuming bacteria, while at the same time getting some help from the odd comet.
Life only had one origin because all life, no matter what it consumes, is virtually identical in terms of its fundamental chemistry - the DNA for example. This does not mean that life did not originate many times; just that one form dominated to the exclusion of others.
The article keeps refering to a survey on the "origin and development of life". They need to separate out "origin" and "development" - they do not likely have the same explanation.
They absolutely do. This is one of the last remaining areas where people try to think of life as in some way special. Life isn't. It is just chemistry and physics. You get complexity and even arguably forms of evolution and development in things that we would not consider alive. It is a continuum.
We started to real that life was nothing special a few years ago when the first biological chemical - Urea - was made artificially. At that point we discovered that life was made up of no more than chemistry with no magic ingredients. Then we discovered evolution by natural selection, and so life changes by itself with no magic designer. There is no reason to think that we won't soon discover some of the many ways that life can start, and then we will find there is no magic creator.
"Not only can they live under immense pressures deep in the ocean, tubeworms living around volcanoes and vents can tolerate a wide range of temperatures."
The immense pressure is often mentioned, but is largely completely irrelevant, as it is not like these creatures have to be built to resist pressure - water can move throughout their bodies. The thing that is really awesome is the temperature range.
With Java 1.6 and beyond (especially with Matisse) I expect Client-side Java to really take off.
I expect it will take off, but largely without anyone noticing. The recent Sun/Microsoft co-operation seems to have paid off in terms of the quality and integration of Swing with the Vista GUI. Although I personally have no objections to the Java 1.5 standard look and feel, Swing under Vista should be totally indistinguishable from native apps and fully integrated. There will be many Java apps around with no-one being able to tell.
Of course, this makes things more complex for developers, trying to choose between client-side and web applications!
When you go around making statements like that, its highly likely that "Java is pretty fast" statements should be taken with a grain of salt!
Why exactly? Memory use has nothing to do with speed. 8MB for an optimising high-performance VM, full-featured GUI library and a full-featured application like JEdit IS small! If you look at an equivalent non-Java application like Kate, it can require tens of megabytes.
I generally take comments which are simply opinions not backed up by evidence with a pinch of salt.
Java will ALWAYS be slower than native code. It takes time to translate java bytecode into native machine code. This cannot be optimised away.
Apart from the fact that there is nothing to prevent Java being compiled directly to native code (there are many such compilers), the process of translating to native code is fast.
Look at it this way. You have a C program supplied as source code. It takes a few seconds to compile, then runs at native speed. Does that few seconds mean that C can never run at native speed? Of course not. You now have a Java program supplied as byte code. It takes a few seconds after starting to translate to machine code then runs at native speed. Does that few seconds mean that Java can never run at native speed? Of course not. Most Java apps run for far more than a few seconds - often for weeks or months server side. The few seconds it takes to optimise are totally insignificant.
It also depends what you mean by 'native code'. Different compilers can produce different qualities of native code. The Java Hotspot optimiser has the ability to profile and re-optimise native code at runtime, taking avantage of highly-processor specific features, so it could well be faster than a pre-compiled C binary that is targetted at a general class of processors.
Java is certianly no less memory hungry than it origininally was, the only difference is that 10 years ago, the average machine had about 16MB of RAM, so java using 8MB was rediculous. Nowadays we have 512MB-1GB in the average machine, so 8MB is almost unnoticed.
This would be true if Java did not run perfectly well on small memory devices, which often have only a few tens of kilobytes.
*Encourages taking the OO pradigm to rediculous levels. (I have seen people put all their "utility" methods in seperate classes, just so they don't end up with unused code in their application.)
This is odd, as most people I know who really understand OOP say that Java has far too little OOP. Code can be just as used or unused in utility classes as in superclasses - this is irrelevant to the argument. Inheritance is simply a different way of packaging functionality.
*Non-Free (A fully featured Free implementation is a while off.)
This is not an issue for a large number of developers. GNU Classpath and Kaffe do a reasonable job and are totally free. This is simply a political issue you have with many implementations, it has nothing to do with the language itself (free implementations can be certified as Java without losing their 'freeness').
*Java applications *never* conform to any OS's standard look, no matter what OS you run them on. (Linux java sort-of uses Gtk,
Windows (sun) java uses its own widgets, Mac java uses Aqua, but does not conform to Apples UIG.)
Sorry, wrong. If you use SWT Java applications ARE the OS's standard look, because the use the OSes standard GUI. Mac Java does conform to Apple's UIG. Guess why? Apple wrote the version of Swing for their systems. On Vista, Swing is going to pixel-by-pixel identical to native apps - as Microsoft have realised the importance of Java client side and are helping with this.
*Java applications cannot take advantage of OS-specific features, so often OS-specific "helper" apps are written, reducing the application's portability.
Like what? Both Swing and SWT have full OS integration, allowing you to use things like drag-and-drop, directX etc. The Java Native Desktop Integration API allows full use of features such as system editors, browsers, file system etc.
AWT had poor performance because JNI is a piece of shit.
Er, no. AWT did not use JNI. JNI was not released until years after Java first appeared with AWT.
It was also buggy as shit.
No it wasn't - AWT was simply not very portable, but it worked fine. It worked according to its specification.
Java's desktop footprint is largely the business desktop, where application selection is done by fiat.
And this is relevant how?
"That is nothing on modern machines."
.. except that you often don't have access to the source code since you're "just" a server admin.
I've heard that since I started at the University in '98. Java is still dead slow.
Why do people say this? No modern benchmark shows Java as slow. This is false.
And, 8MB IS nothing on modern machines. Things have changed a little since 1998, you know!
For desktop applications:
The interfaces are slow, quirky and isn't responsive enough.
Sorry, no. This simply is false and without foundation. I challenge you to open a modern Java app line JEdit on a modern VM and find anything slow or unresponsive about it.
The fscking garbage collector grows slow over time.
No, it doesn't. When this happens, it is a feature of inefficient memory use in code, not the garbage collector. I have batch processing code in Java that handles millions of objects, and the GC is fine.
With java, you have to send a signal to get the VM to do a threaddump, or connect a debugger to the debug-port
All this can be done with modern tools that automatically connect to server apps, like Eclipse or NetBeans.
And you not having the access to the source code is Java's fault? Sounds like a management problem.
Bah! I hate java.
I would suggest you hate your work situation and the quality of code you have been given to deal with. This is nothing to do with Java.
Java, Flash etc are platform dependent. Try to use the same install package on MAC OS and Windows.
;)
I do this routinely - on MacOS/X, Windows and Linux. No problems at all.
A typical flash swf has more then 100kb. Compare that to a 1kb ajax code and tell me what is large...
Sorry, I don't get the point. Firstly 100kb is totally insignificant on modern machines. Secondly, 100kb of flash won't look small compared to 100kb of AJAX, and the way things are going, that won't take long to appear!
You can name it whatever you want, or dont name it at all. But the web is changing and I just love it!
I really don't things are changing much. I have seen supposedly 'Web 2.0' things like Wikis around for years, and they have had surprising little impact. There will be a few sites like Google Maps and Wikipedia that will have an impact, but most organisation neither want nor need these ways of working - they are struggling to keep information under control, not open it up to vast amounts of user interactivity.
The event handling framework is quite complex (you can do practically anything with it) and the fact that each java class behaves almost like a dynamically linked library in more static languages will keep the start-up performance forever behind.
You might think so, but it really doesn't. Try the following: Install a significant Java application like JEdit or Moneydance. Time it's startup. I typically get start-up times of 3-4 seconds. That is faster than most KDE apps on the same machine!
The memory usage hasn't shrank since I was introduced to java. The extra hit that comes from the VM and GC is major pain in small applications but negligible in bigger ones.
I don't find this. I can start up trivial Java apps in just a few megabytes, and even Swing apps like JEdit can run in 8MB. That is nothing on modern machines. As for the GC being a major pain - it can be finely tuned these days, so much so that real-time APIs can be implemented even on standard VMs.
My impression is that performance and memory efficiency has improved significantly since Java 1.4.x.
Applets, Flash, ActiveX, XUL and others are heavy load, platform dependent, bloated components that crippled the user experience.
:)
Applets, Flash and XUL and not platform dependent, and aren't large.
For an instance, flash or java wouldn't let one use the simple "back" button of his browser.
Neither does AJAX. You don't get back to the previous page state that way. Many users find this confusing.
Those technologies are much more of a glue then a real solution.
It is the other way around - the web page was a glue connecting applets etc.
AJAX is practically free from dependencies, really light and transparent.
And means you have to download visible code to the client.
Web 2.0 may be a little vague but is getting clearer every day. Check this out.
Actually, it think it is getting more confused every day! As that very article you quote says:
" But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means"
I think Web 2.0 is nothing more than an arbitrary label for whatever is the latest fashion in web design. If your users can hack your website, it is apparently web 2.0
Although very simples, AJAX represent a very important step: its the first ever functionality that actually allows a web page to function more like a traditional app.
The first ever.... apart from Applets, Flash, ActiveX...
Now, web 2.0 is not about changing what the web represents, that much is already established. The web 2.0 is about improving usability and response time
Actually, the term 'web 2.0' is so vague it is meaningless. I am not sure anyone can clearly say what it is about.
Yet almost nobody uses them any more. Why?
.... got better. Now it is hardware accelerated.
You are wrong. Java client-side development is far from dead - it is growing, and at the end of last year overtook MS WinForms as the most popular client-side development platform in North America. There are even 'shrink-wrapped' commercial Java applications based on Swing that are amongst the best in their class (the financial package Moneydance is a good example).
Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.
Easy to say, but wrong. AWT was not poor performance because it was the native GUI. Swing went through years of poor performance, but
It is easy to take cheap shots at a technology by on recycling common myths based on the way things were 4 or 5 years ago. However, to post facts it is a good idea to actually try the technology as it is now. Swing on Java 1.5 is neither memory hungry or slow.
OK. We have to push the asteroids away. Is that any harder than space colonization?
Yes, it is. Space colonisation can be a gradual process; virtually self-funding if we start mining water and minerals from the right places in the solar system. We could start to build a moonbase right now if we wanted, and then on to Mars. The asteroid belt might be a good place to go, as there are lots of resources (water, metal, hydrocarbons).
Also, how large are these supervolcanoes? Was Krakatoa that damaging? If not, how many more times powerful than Krakatoa are they?
Very, very large - we are talking of at least hundreds of times larger than Krakatoa. Krakatoa ejected 25 cubic kilometers of rock. The Toba eruption of 70,000 years ago ejected nearly 3000 cubic kilometres, and the most recent (600,000 years ago) eruption of Yellowstone Park ejected so much that most of the area of the USA was covered in ash.
Initially damage the entire Northern US? How fast can it project magma?
The magma is projected into the atmosphere as ash, which can cover a significant area of the planet within days or weeks. The stuff left in the atmosphere would probably create a more-or-less instant Ice Age.
Except that if they burn up in the atmosphere, they're not likely to melt the crust.
It doesn't work like that. If there is enough dust, then it will not just burn up in the atmosphere, it will burn away the atmosphere, and then start to melt the crust.
Also, if we blow up asteroids far enough away from earth, the explosions might deflect pieces away.
No, that won't work either. If you are dealing with a huge mass, the energy to defect it away if it is close enormous. Explosions are a waste of time. A long, slow push is the only practical way.
And who are the lucky few to get taken to space colonies? They wouldn't be the leaders who failed to predict/act on natural disasters in the first place?
I am not talking about evacuation. I am talking about starting space colonies soon, perhaps in the next few decades, as insurance against disasters that could be centuries or millenia away.
And a few days notice wouldn't be enough time to evacuate the area?
Something like a supervolcano would initially devastate an area the size of, say, the Northern states of the USA. Where would you evacuate that number of people to? Eventually, the effects would be felt across the entire globe.
And would you be able to get everyone except tens of millions of people off of the planet to elsewhere?
No.
And a supervolcano would seem to be something we could detect.
Actually, no, it isn't. Even a relatively minor eruption around the area of, say, Yellowstone Park, could indicate the start of days or weeks of mass vulcanism. We may have only days notice of this.
You believe that we can lift almost the entire human population from earth, but can't deflect Ceres?
I was not talking about evacuating the planet - that would be silly. My point is that it is wise to have off-planet colonies just in case.
Also, if the radioactive fragments are small enough, they'll burn up in the atmosphere. True, there will be some radioactivity.
Sorry, but it doesn't work like that. You get the same energy transferred to the Earth by the collision of even small fragments as you would by the entire asteroid. It doesn't matter if they burn up or not.
It's unlikely that any tsunami would wipe out most of the planet (try hitting Columbia, SC).
No, but one could kill tens of millions.
Same with a volcanic eruption.
A supervolcano would not wipe out most of the planet, but would be a global disaster. There have been massive lava flows in the past that may well have wiped out most life. (250 million years ago)
Do any of these "resource rich" asteroids have water on them?
Yes.
Also, any asteroid the size of Ceres or larger should not be too hard to detect early, and anything smaller should not be too hard too bludgeon.
Anything the size of ceres or larger would basically melt the entire crust of the planet, and there would be nothing we could do about it.
If we can get a mission to the asteroid belt, we should be able to get nuclear weapons there as well.
Nuclear weapons would not be much use. What they would most likely do is fragment the asteroid so you end up with a lot of radioactive fragments that would still hit us. You need to push the asteroid away gently, which would take a long time (years).