No, they don't. 'Inspired' and 'exciting' are nothing more than distractions from getting done what needs to be done.
I think you are just playing with words. Having a user interface and environment that is not boring and dull, and where employees feel that they are respected and comfortable is a well-established way to improve productivity.
Now in cubicle land where people do real work... Well, compare the average big corporation's IT department with the aforementioned "pleasant and stimulating environments".
I fail to see how this is a justification for bad design. "Pleasand and stimulating" isn't about nice fluffy environments (or "Hooters"). It is about having a user interface where things are easy to find. Where menus are consistent. Where icons are designed by experts so that they are both easy on the eye and intuitive. Where the general operating environment does not make the user feel like they are struggling or being intimidated.
A good environment is exactly as you describe:
No dependency Hell, no willy-nilly everything is different and needs its own paradigm, no lack of interoperability.
However this does not mean:
Use the IDE that embraces the architecture most fully, that everyone else uses, and everything fits.
Having a good pleasant working GUI environment has no connection to 'using the architecture most fully' or using the system 'that everyone else uses'.
A decent paycheck trumps any kind of pleasant and stimulating.
I suspect that many would disagree with you. They would value good working conditions above extra pay.
'Inspired' and 'Exciting' are bullshit terms that are meaningless in this context. Intuitiveness and consistency makes people more productive.
Not at all. 'intuitive' and 'consistent' makes things easy to use, 'inspired' and 'exciting' makes people want to use them. All these factors contribute to productivity.
So Pine, Lynx and Emacs/Vi don't help people become productive?
Not in general, no. Users can get used to their obscure interfaces (although I have been a Vi user for decades, and you can still hear my console beeping as I keep pressing Esc to make sure I am in the right mode), but this takes time, and there is cross-training required between these apps. Most Mac apps have a well-designed common user interface, so even novice users find them intuitive.
For a select few, these apps can be highly productive, but not for the average user.
Got any empirical evidence to back up that (patently absurd) claim?
None at all. But then I am sure it is totally absurd to suggest that employees who sit and work with a dull, miserable and boring environment all day are going to provide exactly the same productivity as employees who are working in a pleasant and stimulating environment.
Terms you might wish to look up before posting further rants are 'ergonomics' and 'congitive psychology'.
The problem with fancy GUIs is that they often use more of the system's resources, i.e. RAM and CPU. Personally, I rather use a boring but fast app than a applesque peice of software...
The problem is not about the GUI being 'fancy', but the GUI being well designed. I doubt that the Mac GUI uses any more resources that that of Windows XP, but in terms of aesthetic design and usability, it is years ahead.
But the answer truely is that software doesn't need to be pretty to be functional. Most of the time all the eye-candy crap just gets in the way or slows it down.
These days eye-candy certainly won't slow things down. A PC that can play Doom III can certainly display a few icons.
Design is part of functionality. Attractive and well-designed software can make people more productive.
As for his other claims -- boring and uninspired. What is he asking for? Is he asking for more bells & whistles? What makes a software "boring"? More innovation? What is he looking for a Windows software to do but can't find?
It is about design skills. The Mac has always employed good designers, both for the user interface and the computer design. Maybe it is just me, but after nearly 30 years of using computers, there is something about sitting down in front of the latest Mac computers and operating systems that makes me want to use them. They look good - they are attractive. I have never felt this about any version of Windows (and I have used them all).
Does it work? Does it make me more productive? That's what I want to know. Everything else is secondary, especially how "inspired" and "exciting" it is.
Inspired and exciting design makes people more productive.
Video games do propel technology. But open source propels it further, IMHO.
I disagree, as I have always found open source software more efficient on lower specification technology. One of the reasons I promote its use is that it allows for longer hardware update cycles.
On the other hand, Video games are always requiring upgrades: I have been running Linux on machines that have a lower processor and memory spec that some of the video cards I recently had to purchase to run a game!
No. You're mistaken. In the hypothetical, the distance between the two is observed to not change.
The distance is always observed to change. You are inventing some strange electromagnetic force that is not needed, to explain an effect that does not occur.
You say: They both orbit the large object at the same distance from the centre of the large object at the same speed. Hence, the observerd distance between the two orbiters never changes.
This is an assumption that is wrong. In nature this does not happen. Unless the smaller objects are precisely symmetrically placed around the larger one, they will always start to drift together because of gravity (and even the symmetrical situation is unstable). This is why moons and planets form.
But, since they're travelling at the same speed, how can they possibly keep that same distance apart if they are gravitationally attracted to one another?!
Here is a hint. Big things, lots of gravity. Small things, not very much gravity at all.
You are also mistaken that the distance between two very small objects orbiting a larger one does not change due to gravity. Of course it does. This is how planets and moons form from lots of small things (dust grains) orbiting larger bodies (Stars and planets).
This is a debate for scientific people only (no environmentalists or homosexuals).
Well, I'm gay and a scientist. I guess I could be at least 1/2 right then.
Sure it does. The scientific method is all about asking "is this hypothesis true?" to which you'll most likely get a yes/no answer.
This is not the scientific method at all. You don't get yes no answers. You set up hypotheses and then devise statistical procedures to test the hypotheses. You don't get yes or no answers from these tests. You get probabilities. There are nominal probabilities at which a hypothesis is traditionally considered to be accepted or rejected, but any good scientist realises that this is still a matter of chance and it requires subsequent experiments to back up the findings. Assuming, of course, you have put forward a sensible hypothesis, and used sensible statistical tests...
But when each question costs billions of dollars, how likely are you to ask a simple yes or no question like that?
The billions of dollars aren't about single questions (although I don't see where that figure comes from - the Mars rovers disn't cost). The money is spent to provide information about as many questions and hypotheses as possible. Each spacecraft is usually crammed full of dozens of experiments, all competing for space, power, field of view of sensors etc. They are good value for money.
Sort of like how Titan didnt answer whther there are really methane lakes currently on the surface or not.
It showed there aren't large methane seas, which was one theory.
And like how the Mars probes havent told us if there is/was life.
That wasn't the point of Spirit and Opportunity. That was the point of Beagle, unfortunately.
In fact whether there was water is still disputed.
Not really. The discovery of hematite by the Mars Rovers is pretty conclusive. Combine that with the satellite studies that have shown water combined with CO2 in the ice caps, and there is no real dispute at all.
We need to be sending better probes out there that can do some real science.
They are doing real science. Science doesn't provide yes/no answers. It is about gathering data and doing experiments. We are doing more of that now than ever.
Space probes havent advanced in decades.
Considering the amazing Spirit and Opportunity missions and the pictures coming back from Cassini/Huygens as compared with brief visits to the outer planets from Voyager, I find that an very odd statement.
He referred to the agreement after the fuss about Open Office and The Java Trap... effectively making Open Office dependent on Sun proprietary closed-Java. An agreement was reached whereby Java code added to Open Office would always be compilable with gcj.
I have been trying to trace that agreement - do you have and reference to it?
Sun developers have already broken that agreement multiple times, and have used the "agreement" itself as an excuse to radically increase the use of Java into areas that were previously out-of-bounds.
Do you have links to back this up? I have been following the development of Open Office 2, and I have seen no 'radical' increase. It was there for Base and media playing, and one or two other things, but not much else.
Essentially, they lied... repeatedly. Hardly a first for Sun developers, of course... but galling for anyone who views Open Office as a way to escape from Microsoft Office. We have no interest in jumping into Sun Office instead.
Considering that (apart from Base) only minor aspects of Open Office 2 require Java, isn't this a rather extreme position? Especially as the GNU Classpath team are actively working to allow the use of gcj?
The very fact that Sun and its cronies go around pimping the CDDL as OSI approved is the very reason why no-one has ever trusted the OSI as anything other than a rubber-stamping organization run by self-publicizers.
Thanks for being honest about this. At least it reveals your extreme point of view, and probably indicates that further discussion is pointless.
You know damned well that the wizards and the database were all reliant on Java..
As that is exactly what I said, it is fair to assume that I knew it. This still does not make the product 'near-useless' in any sense.
Within a couple of months, OpenOffice won't even start without some form of Java available... mark my words.
Even the strongest open source proponents don't believe this. You may want to look at the developers mailing lists and websites at OpenOffice.org. The bits that will and won't require Java are clearly defined, and work to allow those bits that do to detect and with with open source Java versions is on-going, and includes contributions by Stallman.
[The use of gcj for OO is not being written by Sun]
Completely irrelevant. You seem to have great difficulty sticking to the point.
You said that Sun had promised that OO2 would run with gcj. The gcj connection is nothing to do with Sun. This suggests your statement about Sun's promise is irrelevant, and off the point.
[You were being selective]
Of course I was selective, you stupid fucking asshole.
My hypothetical sexual preferences don't seem relevant here:)
I wrote: "both of these are tied to Java"... had I include OpenSolaris I would have been incorrect, wouldn't I?
You were incorrect because you were selective.
Let's summarise:
Post 1: 'Sun aren't on the open source bandwagon'. Post 2: 'Yes they are, look at products A, B and C'. Post 3: 'A and B are tied to Java'.
Any reader would assume that Post 3 was still on the same subject as Post 1. It is then fair for someone to respond that the supposed criticism of tieing to Java was incomplete because it did not address all the products A, B and C: product C is very significant and reinforces the point about Sun supporting Open Source.
[OpenSolaris has been certified as Open Source by the OSI]
What's "open" about projects which wall off their code under different licenses every time? We can thank Sun for creating Yet Another License that does nothing that half a dozen licenses already do... except, of course, create a nice little pool of Sun-owned code that can be given patent protection... and used as an excuse to sue others.
The patent protection is because the source is being licensed retrospectively. Solaris code has been around for a long time and uses non-Sun patents. The only way to release that source is via a license that recognises this. The alternative would be to re-write substantial parts of it.
Of course, developers are now free to do exactly that.
You may disapprove of the license. That is fair enough, but then you must also disapprove of the Open Source Initiative. They approved the license. They are the ones who define "open source". They are the ones who you should complain to.
You need to understand more about stocks. The dollar value can not be considered in isolation of many other facts. Such as liquidity and market capitalization.
I know - it was a flippant simplification. However, software should be able to take into account some of these factors and provide some guidance.
But that doesn't justify it for starting more than 5 minutes and consuming more than 2 GB of memory for moderately complex app.
It doesn't. From the WebLogic website: "Efficient Weblogic installations typically use between 128-384MB heap size per processor."
I don't mean bare Apache, but Apache with its impressive list of modules. IMO Apache has much broader range of functionality than Tomcat. And even in serving of simple pages is Apache 5-10x faster than Tomcat.
Actually, it isn't. Tomcat 5.5 benchmarks pretty much the same as the latest Apache for most web serving purposes.
I don't have direct experience with NB, but Java Studio Creator is built upon it and it takes around 300 MB only for opening an empty IDE.
Java Studio Creator is a lot more than NetBeans. It includes an active database and a substantial application server.
No, they grab memory because of bloat, as I wrote above about WebLogic. And as for "high performance", excuse me, but I am LOL. This beast serves pages as fast as would Apache on ten times less powerful HW, even without caching.
No, they grab memory because of cacheing.
I don't know where you come up with these 'ten times' figures, but this is obviously not true, as WebLogic is used in some of the fastest websites.
Linux scales, because it is efficiently written, those Java monsters are not!
Well, I am afraid this is just not true either. Java application servers are used because they scale. This is how very high-performance sites such as E-Bay, and various stock markets work. They can hit thousands of transactions per second.
I think it's time to end this discussion, because it could be neverending. You are a Java fan, I respect it. I'm a fan of efficient and elegant programs, so my short experience with Java, in which I'm currently forced to develop, is a bit disgusting (and I was trying to like it really hard).
I'm a fan of lots of technologies. But most of all I am a fan of accuracy. What I object to is arbitrary and incorrect statements such as 'Tomcat is 5x-10x slower than Apache' or 'Java doesn't scale'.
I would even argue with someone who said 'Windows 2000 Server is slow', even though I dislike Windows.
OO2.x is near-useless without Java, and is becoming moreso.
No. Some parts of Open Office 2 require Java. Most parts don't. The wizards and the Base application do.
However, you can use the virtually all of the word processor, the spreadsheet, the drawing program and the presentation software without any JRE installed. By no stretch of the imagination could this be called 'near-useless'.
If this were not the case, there would not be an option in Open Office 2 to turn off use of Java.
The Sun OO developers have already broken their promise to ensure that OO Java code runs with gcj... so we know how much that agreement was worth.
The use of gcj for OO is not being written by Sun. I said that the use of gcj should be complete by the time that OO 2 was out of beta. I did not say that this was being done by Sun. I believe it is being done by the GNU Classpath project.
[You ignore the third product I mentioned - OpenSolaris. This is not tied to Java.]
No-one said that it was, you bloody fool.
You were being selective. I provided evidence that sun had contributed open source products. You picked the products you wanted to make a political point about Java. Ignoring the other products does not give a true picture. Arguing that some of these products are tied to Java does not detract from the fact that others aren't. Open Office 1.x has been one of the most significant desktop applications for Linux. Almost everyone who has Linux on the desktop uses it.
It's just a shame Sun decided to play its usual game of having a different license for every single project. We wouldn't want any of that "open" nature of "open source" coming to the fore, now would we.
OpenSolaris has been certified as Open Source by the OSI. Open Office is LGPL.
You may have reason to dislike these licenses, or the fact that they are different, but there is no doubt that they are "open".
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No, they don't. 'Inspired' and 'exciting' are nothing more than distractions from getting done what needs to be done.
I think you are just playing with words. Having a user interface and environment that is not boring and dull, and where employees feel that they are respected and comfortable is a well-established way to improve productivity.
Now in cubicle land where people do real work... Well, compare the average big corporation's IT department with the aforementioned "pleasant and stimulating environments".
I fail to see how this is a justification for bad design. "Pleasand and stimulating" isn't about nice fluffy environments (or "Hooters"). It is about having a user interface where things are easy to find. Where menus are consistent. Where icons are designed by experts so that they are both easy on the eye and intuitive. Where the general operating environment does not make the user feel like they are struggling or being intimidated.
A good environment is exactly as you describe:
No dependency Hell, no willy-nilly everything is different and needs its own paradigm, no lack of interoperability.
However this does not mean:
Use the IDE that embraces the architecture most fully, that everyone else uses, and everything fits.
Having a good pleasant working GUI environment has no connection to 'using the architecture most fully' or using the system 'that everyone else uses'.
A decent paycheck trumps any kind of pleasant and stimulating.
I suspect that many would disagree with you. They would value good working conditions above extra pay.
'Inspired' and 'Exciting' are bullshit terms that are meaningless in this context. Intuitiveness and consistency makes people more productive.
Not at all. 'intuitive' and 'consistent' makes things easy to use, 'inspired' and 'exciting' makes people want to use them. All these factors contribute to productivity.
So Pine, Lynx and Emacs/Vi don't help people become productive?
Not in general, no. Users can get used to their obscure interfaces (although I have been a Vi user for decades, and you can still hear my console beeping as I keep pressing Esc to make sure I am in the right mode), but this takes time, and there is cross-training required between these apps. Most Mac apps have a well-designed common user interface, so even novice users find them intuitive.
For a select few, these apps can be highly productive, but not for the average user.
However, I still can't see how that's an issue specific to "Windows software".
It is specific to Windows software because it as NOT traditionally attracted designers, hence the title of the article.
Ah, yes, but how many people have machines that can run Doom3?
Fair enough - I should have said Doom 2!
However, when design starts to hinder functionality (taking too much to do its job due to being pretty), it's worse than a bad but simple design.
Macs have had better design that PCs since they were introduced more than 20 years ago. Even the earliest Macs still have some appeal.
Tell that to the safety manager at the average factory or machine shop.
This is a reasonable point, but I would suggest it is off-topic, as we are talking about using computers.
Got any empirical evidence to back up that (patently absurd) claim?
None at all. But then I am sure it is totally absurd to suggest that employees who sit and work with a dull, miserable and boring environment all day are going to provide exactly the same productivity as employees who are working in a pleasant and stimulating environment.
Terms you might wish to look up before posting further rants are 'ergonomics' and 'congitive psychology'.
The problem with fancy GUIs is that they often use more of the system's resources, i.e. RAM and CPU. Personally, I rather use a boring but fast app than a applesque peice of software...
The problem is not about the GUI being 'fancy', but the GUI being well designed. I doubt that the Mac GUI uses any more resources that that of Windows XP, but in terms of aesthetic design and usability, it is years ahead.
But the answer truely is that software doesn't need to be pretty to be functional. Most of the time all the eye-candy crap just gets in the way or slows it down.
These days eye-candy certainly won't slow things down. A PC that can play Doom III can certainly display a few icons.
Design is part of functionality. Attractive and well-designed software can make people more productive.
Yes, which explains why Flash has made the web more useful... Oh wait, it hasn't.
Flash is not a design. It is a tool for creating designs. You can get very good and truly awful Flash presentations.
As for his other claims -- boring and uninspired. What is he asking for? Is he asking for more bells & whistles? What makes a software "boring"? More innovation? What is he looking for a Windows software to do but can't find?
It is about design skills. The Mac has always employed good designers, both for the user interface and the computer design. Maybe it is just me, but after nearly 30 years of using computers, there is something about sitting down in front of the latest Mac computers and operating systems that makes me want to use them. They look good - they are attractive. I have never felt this about any version of Windows (and I have used them all).
Does it work? Does it make me more productive? That's what I want to know. Everything else is secondary, especially how "inspired" and "exciting" it is.
Inspired and exciting design makes people more productive.
Video games do propel technology. But open source propels it further, IMHO.
I disagree, as I have always found open source software more efficient on lower specification technology. One of the reasons I promote its use is that it allows for longer hardware update cycles.
On the other hand, Video games are always requiring upgrades: I have been running Linux on machines that have a lower processor and memory spec that some of the video cards I recently had to purchase to run a game!
No. You're mistaken. In the hypothetical, the distance between the two is observed to not change.
The distance is always observed to change. You are inventing some strange electromagnetic force that is not needed, to explain an effect that does not occur.
You say:
They both orbit the large object at the same distance from the centre of the large object at the same speed. Hence, the observerd distance between the two orbiters never changes.
This is an assumption that is wrong. In nature this does not happen. Unless the smaller objects are precisely symmetrically placed around the larger one, they will always start to drift together because of gravity (and even the symmetrical situation is unstable). This is why moons and planets form.
But, since they're travelling at the same speed, how can they possibly keep that same distance apart if they are gravitationally attracted to one another?!
Here is a hint. Big things, lots of gravity. Small things, not very much gravity at all.
You are also mistaken that the distance between two very small objects orbiting a larger one does not change due to gravity. Of course it does. This is how planets and moons form from lots of small things (dust grains) orbiting larger bodies (Stars and planets).
This is a debate for scientific people only (no environmentalists or homosexuals).
Well, I'm gay and a scientist. I guess I could be at least 1/2 right then.
[Science doesn't provide yes/no answers.]
Sure it does. The scientific method is all about asking "is this hypothesis true?" to which you'll most likely get a yes/no answer.
This is not the scientific method at all. You don't get yes no answers. You set up hypotheses and then devise statistical procedures to test the hypotheses. You don't get yes or no answers from these tests. You get probabilities. There are nominal probabilities at which a hypothesis is traditionally considered to be accepted or rejected, but any good scientist realises that this is still a matter of chance and it requires subsequent experiments to back up the findings. Assuming, of course, you have put forward a sensible hypothesis, and used sensible statistical tests...
But when each question costs billions of dollars, how likely are you to ask a simple yes or no question like that?
The billions of dollars aren't about single questions (although I don't see where that figure comes from - the Mars rovers disn't cost). The money is spent to provide information about as many questions and hypotheses as possible. Each spacecraft is usually crammed full of dozens of experiments, all competing for space, power, field of view of sensors etc. They are good value for money.
Sort of like how Titan didnt answer whther there are really methane lakes currently on the surface or not.
It showed there aren't large methane seas, which was one theory.
And like how the Mars probes havent told us if there is/was life.
That wasn't the point of Spirit and Opportunity. That was the point of Beagle, unfortunately.
In fact whether there was water is still disputed.
Not really. The discovery of hematite by the Mars Rovers is pretty conclusive. Combine that with the satellite studies that have shown water combined with CO2 in the ice caps, and there is no real dispute at all.
We need to be sending better probes out there that can do some real science.
They are doing real science. Science doesn't provide yes/no answers. It is about gathering data and doing experiments. We are doing more of that now than ever.
Space probes havent advanced in decades.
Considering the amazing Spirit and Opportunity missions and the pictures coming back from Cassini/Huygens as compared with brief visits to the outer planets from Voyager, I find that an very odd statement.
He referred to the agreement after the fuss about Open Office and The Java Trap... effectively making Open Office dependent on Sun proprietary closed-Java. An agreement was reached whereby Java code added to Open Office would always be compilable with gcj.
I have been trying to trace that agreement - do you have and reference to it?
Sun developers have already broken that agreement multiple times, and have used the "agreement" itself as an excuse to radically increase the use of Java into areas that were previously out-of-bounds.
Do you have links to back this up? I have been following the development of Open Office 2, and I have seen no 'radical' increase. It was there for Base and media playing, and one or two other things, but not much else.
Essentially, they lied... repeatedly. Hardly a first for Sun developers, of course... but galling for anyone who views Open Office as a way to escape from Microsoft Office. We have no interest in jumping into Sun Office instead.
Considering that (apart from Base) only minor aspects of Open Office 2 require Java, isn't this a rather extreme position? Especially as the GNU Classpath team are actively working to allow the use of gcj?
The very fact that Sun and its cronies go around pimping the CDDL as OSI approved is the very reason why no-one has ever trusted the OSI as anything other than a rubber-stamping organization run by self-publicizers.
Thanks for being honest about this. At least it reveals your extreme point of view, and probably indicates that further discussion is pointless.
You know damned well that the wizards and the database were all reliant on Java..
:)
As that is exactly what I said, it is fair to assume that I knew it. This still does not make the product 'near-useless' in any sense.
Within a couple of months, OpenOffice won't even start without some form of Java available... mark my words.
Even the strongest open source proponents don't believe this. You may want to look at the developers mailing lists and websites at OpenOffice.org. The bits that will and won't require Java are clearly defined, and work to allow those bits that do to detect and with with open source Java versions is on-going, and includes contributions by Stallman.
[The use of gcj for OO is not being written by Sun]
Completely irrelevant. You seem to have great difficulty sticking to the point.
You said that Sun had promised that OO2 would run with gcj. The gcj connection is nothing to do with Sun. This suggests your statement about Sun's promise is irrelevant, and off the point.
[You were being selective]
Of course I was selective, you stupid fucking asshole.
My hypothetical sexual preferences don't seem relevant here
I wrote: "both of these are tied to Java"... had I include OpenSolaris I would have been incorrect, wouldn't I?
You were incorrect because you were selective.
Let's summarise:
Post 1: 'Sun aren't on the open source bandwagon'.
Post 2: 'Yes they are, look at products A, B and C'.
Post 3: 'A and B are tied to Java'.
Any reader would assume that Post 3 was still on the same subject as Post 1. It is then fair for someone to respond that the supposed criticism of tieing to Java was incomplete because it did not address all the products A, B and C: product C is very significant and reinforces the point about Sun supporting Open Source.
[OpenSolaris has been certified as Open Source by the OSI]
What's "open" about projects which wall off their code under different licenses every time? We can thank Sun for creating Yet Another License that does nothing that half a dozen licenses already do... except, of course, create a nice little pool of Sun-owned code that can be given patent protection... and used as an excuse to sue others.
The patent protection is because the source is being licensed retrospectively. Solaris code has been around for a long time and uses non-Sun patents. The only way to release that source is via a license that recognises this. The alternative would be to re-write substantial parts of it.
Of course, developers are now free to do exactly that.
You may disapprove of the license. That is fair enough, but then you must also disapprove of the Open Source Initiative. They approved the license. They are the ones who define "open source". They are the ones who you should complain to.
According to theories about digit occurrence,
I too can recite 83,431 digits of Pi:
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111...
You need to understand more about stocks. The dollar value can not be considered in isolation of many other facts. Such as liquidity and market capitalization.
I know - it was a flippant simplification. However, software should be able to take into account some of these factors and provide some guidance.
But that doesn't justify it for starting more than 5 minutes and consuming more than 2 GB of memory for moderately complex app.
It doesn't. From the WebLogic website:
"Efficient Weblogic installations typically use between 128-384MB heap size per processor."
I don't mean bare Apache, but Apache with its impressive list of modules. IMO Apache has much broader range of functionality than Tomcat. And even in serving of simple pages is Apache 5-10x faster than Tomcat.
Actually, it isn't. Tomcat 5.5 benchmarks pretty much the same as the latest Apache for most web serving purposes.
I don't have direct experience with NB, but Java Studio Creator is built upon it and it takes around 300 MB only for opening an empty IDE.
Java Studio Creator is a lot more than NetBeans. It includes an active database and a substantial application server.
No, they grab memory because of bloat, as I wrote above about WebLogic. And as for "high performance", excuse me, but I am LOL. This beast serves pages as fast as would Apache on ten times less powerful HW, even without caching.
No, they grab memory because of cacheing.
I don't know where you come up with these 'ten times' figures, but this is obviously not true, as WebLogic is used in some of the fastest websites.
Linux scales, because it is efficiently written, those Java monsters are not!
Well, I am afraid this is just not true either. Java application servers are used because they scale. This is how very high-performance sites such as E-Bay, and various stock markets work. They can hit thousands of transactions per second.
I think it's time to end this discussion, because it could be neverending. You are a Java fan, I respect it. I'm a fan of efficient and elegant programs, so my short experience with Java, in which I'm currently forced to develop, is a bit disgusting (and I was trying to like it really hard).
I'm a fan of lots of technologies. But most of all I am a fan of accuracy. What I object to is arbitrary and incorrect statements such as 'Tomcat is 5x-10x slower than Apache' or 'Java doesn't scale'.
I would even argue with someone who said 'Windows 2000 Server is slow', even though I dislike Windows.
OO2.x is near-useless without Java, and is becoming moreso.
No. Some parts of Open Office 2 require Java. Most parts don't. The wizards and the Base application do.
However, you can use the virtually all of the word processor, the spreadsheet, the drawing program and the presentation software without any JRE installed. By no stretch of the imagination could this be called 'near-useless'.
If this were not the case, there would not be an option in Open Office 2 to turn off use of Java.
The Sun OO developers have already broken their promise to ensure that OO Java code runs with gcj... so we know how much that agreement was worth.
The use of gcj for OO is not being written by Sun. I said that the use of gcj should be complete by the time that OO 2 was out of beta. I did not say that this was being done by Sun. I believe it is being done by the GNU Classpath project.
[You ignore the third product I mentioned - OpenSolaris. This is not tied to Java.]
No-one said that it was, you bloody fool.
You were being selective. I provided evidence that sun had contributed open source products. You picked the products you wanted to make a political point about Java. Ignoring the other products does not give a true picture. Arguing that some of these products are tied to Java does not detract from the fact that others aren't. Open Office 1.x has been one of the most significant desktop applications for Linux. Almost everyone who has Linux on the desktop uses it.
It's just a shame Sun decided to play its usual game of having a different license for every single project. We wouldn't want any of that "open" nature of "open source" coming to the fore, now would we.
OpenSolaris has been certified as Open Source by the OSI. Open Office is LGPL.
You may have reason to dislike these licenses, or the fact that they are different, but there is no doubt that they are "open".