Yeah there is. They can only force independent application developers to rewrite their apps so many times.
They are not interested in independent application developers - they want the corporate developer. Microsoft frequently introduce new versions of products that require significant re-writes to remain compatible.
J2ME has a childish UI library that assumes 1D screen with no layout.
Nonsense. FIrstly, screens are 2D! Secondly, there are loads of GUI toolkits for J2ME, some open source. The latest J2ME version includes a 3d-game api.
And lack of native code/regular filesystem access? Argh!
Why would you want native code access on a secure VM designed to run portable binaries?
You are right - its no where near, and will never be until, like Java, all aspects of.Net are under multi-organisation control and available for hundreds of platforms.
But it will be: C# offers exactly what Sun/Java lacks: the freedom to do with it whatever you want, and the freedom for big companies to contribute to the same piece of software without getting lawyers involved and without having one contributor benefit disproportionately.
You seem to have little or understanding of how Java is developed. Java is controlled by the Java Community Process (JCP). Changes to Java are submitted to the process and voted on. There are no lawyers and no disproportionate benefit. (For example, some major new technologies for Java have been approved in spite of objections from companies as large as IBM and Oracle). If you personally want to suggest an extension to java formally, join the JCP - its free for individuals.
Of course, anyone can add non-core extensions to Java (and thousands do) if you use your own namespace. It would be pretty stupid if you could ship Java with your own personal version of java.util.Date that was incompatible. You are totally free to ship my.org.Date.
I seriously doubt this. For example, where are the enterprise libraries of.Net? I can't see them on the DotGNU website, and Mono state clearly they have no plans to implement them for now.
This is what seriously worries me. There is nothing to stop Microsoft from continually adding (or pre-announcing) new extensions to their.Net and forcing DotGNU and Mono to keep playing catch-up. Microsoft are in a hugely powerful position to control other.Net implementations by changing things arbitrarily.
Collaborative systems like Java and parrot involve discussions amongst many organisations and people about what extensions and libraries are to be added.
Like it or not, don't ignore C# / dotNet. It likely has more users than Sun got in 10 years, anyone have numbers to share on that?
Yes. This is nonsense.
As far as I can see on most USA job searches new C# jobs count for less than 1/3 the number of new Java jobs. In non-USA job markets (where there is usually a stronger desire to be independent from Microsoft) the ratio seems to be about 10 java jobs for every C# job.
The phrase you should have used is 'has a lot less users'.
This is using open source to provide free marketing for Microsoft. First, take a microsoft technology (.Net), then spend a lot of time and effort duplicating a subset of.Net, which will never be a complete implementation as Microsoft haven't given out all the libraries. Microsoft then have cut-down versions of '.Net' distributed on a range of systems, with no effort required from them, and they can say 'for the real, full, professional.Net experience come to Windows'. I view the.Net clones as persisting the (wrong) impression that open source software is an amateurish attempt to copy professional software.
There are better ways. Why not use Java? Its free, and there are many Java clones that are full-featured and run on Pocket-PC and PalmOS.
If you don't like Java.. why not actually be innovative and develop a new portable bytecode and languages to run on it? If not a new bytecode, why not help the work on parrot? Why not show that in VM technology open source coders can do more than simply play catch-up with Microsoft?
There is a big difference between 'usable' and 'widely used'. Linux has only been widely accepted at management level as a significant server system for a few years, and its desktop presence only really started to take off with the introduction of Open Office 1.0 in 2002.
There is also a big difference between 'people that can run linux to various extents' and people who are skilled enough to be employed to maintain corporate desktops and servers.
what sucks is that those are old versions of java. i want to write in j2 and i dont want to even bother with the older stuff.
The point about.Net is that that aren't even any old versions around on 90% of machines. There is nothing there at all. Maybe in 20 years time, when everyone in the world has upgraded to XP,.Net apps could work. Or maybe, Linux desktops will change all this.
couldnt work out a deal in the recent settlement to get a new version of java bundled in. it would have helped java in the long haul.
Firstly, many companies, such as Dell, are pre-installing Java.
Secondly, pre-installation is increasingly irrelevant. Virtually all the interesting app development is server side, where Java is not only dominant, but growing. For client side apps, the java VM is just one click away on http://www.java.net.
The W3C is not a standards body. It is a vendor consortia.
Nonsense. To quote from the W3C: "You've heard it: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) creates Web standards." It is a standards body.
Its is not a vendor consortium. It includes such obvious non-vendors as The Library of Congress, the Universities of Southampton and Helsinki and the United States Navy.
With.NET's browser apps, if they can just keep most of their current customers for the time being and transition them over to this, lock-in is assured.
Absolutely not, except for a very restricted market which is pure Windows intranets,.Net apps face worse problems than Java applets. Unless you have the absolute latest Windows machines, you need to download runtimes for.Net. There are millions of machines with Java runtimes pre-installed. Also, in future versions of Windows, Explorer will be integrated. You won't be able to download Explorer with XAML for Windows 98 or Windows ME. Finally, if you really want.Net power you need Windows application servers, which form a very small and static part of the app server market.
The future is not in specialised extensions to current web interfaces which will not be present in anything more than a fraction of all users' browsers for a long time, but new web coding frameworks that allow developers to easily code complex interfaces and make best use of existing web standards, and other front-ends such as WAP..Net WebForms and now Java ServerFaces are such frameworks.
I'm not sure I agree with you about basic support training. Recently I had to add a new users to a RedHat machine. It was/usr/sbin/adduser, followed by passwd. I had to add users to a customized Win2000 server. I found the icon eventually. It was probably something like start/control panel/system/adminstrative tools, and then something about local accounts. Almost everything under recent versions of windows seems to require a non-inutitive path through GUI tools (different in each Windows version), or else a registry edit, whereas the equivalent procedures under Linux are one or two command line statements.
I would add that Linux admins are usually well able to figure out (eventually) how to configure Windows because they tend to be adaptable. However, put a Windows admin in front of Linux.....
Why build a base on the moon to get a craft to Mars?
The moon has low gravity and no atmosphere, and experiences strong radiation. Its a good place to practise building a place for people to live off-Earth. After all, mars has very little atmosphere, low gravity and lots of radiation. The advantage of the Moon is that the colony would only be a couple of days travel away from Earth in case of problems.
The moon isn't anything like Mars
it is - see the comments above.
you can't grow your own food without a big nuclear reactor.
Yes you can - there is loads of solar energy.
and the methods for using local materials are extremely different.
No better or worse than Mars.
We can't learn anything about living on Mars by living on the moon, except maybe how people respond to being so far away from Earth.
We can learn a lot about setting up solar/nuclear powered habitats, how to grow food by solar energy and hydroponics in closed systems and indeed how people respond to distance from Earth. And, its only a few days away.... and the Moon is a pretty awesome resource.
where they can hold thier ground (linux admins are highly paid and rare.)
I don't know the figures about payment or numbers of Linux admins, but there is are good reason why Linux admins should be highly paid.
Firstly, Linux as a widely used system is new, much newer than Windows. This means that either Linux admins are self-taught (so flexible and intelligent) or general Unix administrators who have added Linux to their skillset (so experienced).
If you employ a Linux admin, you are getting someone who is adaptable and who will usually actively self-train to cope with changes, unlike the MSCE-qualified Windows admins.
It certainly does. There is this myth that Microsoft products do not require training. This is just not true. The transitions from NT4 to Win2K or XP, for example, are significant, especially for administrators. For users, the change between different MS Office versions have often been highly troublesome, both in terms of interfaces and add-on/script migration. These are expensive matters. A significant issue for corporate clients of Microsoft is that the licencing and support enforces upgrades.
My point is that over a 5-10 year period, the training requirements enforced by Microsoft licencing combined with OS changes could well be much worse than the cost of migration and training for a Linux desktop; a decision which allows a break from the hardware/software upgrade cycle, and can lead to significant cost savings in the long term.
Linux will increase significantly in viability against Microsoft systems because it has rapidly increasing support from companies who have the resources to ensure that it does: Companies like Sun, Novell, HP and RedHat are putting huge resources into making Linux an even better desktop system.
You say the Java development kit for Linux gives the end-user the right to "freely distribute the run-time with your apps." Others complain that they must download the whole Java environment from Sun, it can't come with their favorite distro. So which is it?
These are not exclusive options. The java runtime is totally freely distributable with your apps.
The thing is that some distros have particular licences that don't allow things like the java development kit or runtime to be included (for one thing, they are not GPL and they are binary-only).
Many distros do ship with Java - SuSE and RedHat enterprise for example.
Is the run-time freely distributable, or not?
Yes, but it depends what you mean by 'free'. Its not distributable if you decide you are only going to ship open-source software.
And if the Java run-time is not freely re-distributable, then why should anyone code in Java?
Because its a good platform for code. This may seem a strange thing to say, but there actually was a software industry before open source!
Anyway, when you compile using GCC, you are most likely producing Intel or AMD binaries. Intel and AMD chips are not freely distributable, so why compile for them?
Except the nanobots would have no natural predators (assuming they aren't organic).
When you are dealing with things on the scale of nanobots, the term 'organic' is meaningless: its all just atoms. What would stop the nanobots attacking each other?
but if they turn every living organism in to gray goo
Not very likely. Organisms can be very different. Some are warm, others are cold. Some thrive at very high pressures. Its going to be extremely hard to design anything that could cope with this variety.
You gave the example of viruses, but they are almost always very specific.
As for 'no one but sun improving it'; that's just nonsense. Lots of companies are working on improving the quality of VMs, including HP, IBM and BEA. Features are added to Java by the JCP commitee, not by Sun.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but your DNA itself does NOT describe how you end up after development.
I agree with you, but its a matter of translation into RNA and then proteins; there is no compression of information, and no encryption: its a simple mapping.
DNA is base4 and has a finite length. There is a finite amount of stuff it can describe.
I would have thought that the length is potentially infinite.
Is it specific to your job or can you be sacked no matter what line of work you're in?
Its not specific.
Things should change in a few years, with the European Human Rights Act coming into effect, but there will still be exclusion for some areas, such as religious organisations. I could be a highly competent and respected teacher in a school, and the school gets taken over by some religious group and I get sacked. All perfectly legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah there is. They can only force independent application developers to rewrite their apps so many times.
They are not interested in independent application developers - they want the corporate developer. Microsoft frequently introduce new versions of products that require significant re-writes to remain compatible.
There was no need to broaden the search.
.NET jobs is virtually non-existent on job search engines.
.Net still has not had a huge impact in the commercial coding environment.
The number of COBOL and FORTRAN
Visual Basic.Net job ads occur with frequency about 1/3 of C# jobs.
The plain fact is that
J2ME has a childish UI library that assumes 1D screen with no layout.
Nonsense. FIrstly, screens are 2D! Secondly, there are loads of GUI toolkits for J2ME, some open source. The latest J2ME version includes a 3d-game api.
And lack of native code/regular filesystem access? Argh!
Why would you want native code access on a secure VM designed to run portable binaries?
I suspect it's not up to Java levels yet.
.Net are under multi-organisation control and available for hundreds of platforms.
You are right - its no where near, and will never be until, like Java, all aspects of
But it will be: C# offers exactly what Sun/Java lacks: the freedom to do with it whatever you want, and the freedom for big companies to contribute to the same piece of software without getting lawyers involved and without having one contributor benefit disproportionately.
You seem to have little or understanding of how Java is developed. Java is controlled by the Java Community Process (JCP). Changes to Java are submitted to the process and voted on. There are no lawyers and no disproportionate benefit. (For example, some major new technologies for Java have been approved in spite of objections from companies as large as IBM and Oracle). If you personally want to suggest an extension to java formally, join the JCP - its free for individuals.
Of course, anyone can add non-core extensions to Java (and thousands do) if you use your own namespace. It would be pretty stupid if you could ship Java with your own personal version of java.util.Date that was incompatible. You are totally free to ship my.org.Date.
"DotGNU will be a complete replacement for .NET.."
.Net? I can't see them on the DotGNU website, and Mono state clearly they have no plans to implement them for now.
.Net and forcing DotGNU and Mono to keep playing catch-up. Microsoft are in a hugely powerful position to control other .Net implementations by changing things arbitrarily.
I seriously doubt this. For example, where are the enterprise libraries of
This is what seriously worries me. There is nothing to stop Microsoft from continually adding (or pre-announcing) new extensions to their
Collaborative systems like Java and parrot involve discussions amongst many organisations and people about what extensions and libraries are to be added.
Quite a number of them can't handle C++. Java is much easier thing to search for
Job search engines are designed for this: Imagine a job search that could not cope with C++!!
Like it or not, don't ignore C# / dotNet. It likely has more users than Sun got in 10 years, anyone have numbers to share on that?
Yes. This is nonsense.
As far as I can see on most USA job searches new C# jobs count for less than 1/3 the number of new Java jobs. In non-USA job markets (where there is usually a stronger desire to be independent from Microsoft) the ratio seems to be about 10 java jobs for every C# job.
The phrase you should have used is 'has a lot less users'.
This is using open source to provide free marketing for Microsoft. First, take a microsoft technology (.Net), then spend a lot of time and effort duplicating a subset of .Net, which will never be a complete implementation as Microsoft haven't given out all the libraries. Microsoft then have cut-down versions of '.Net' distributed on a range of systems, with no effort required from them, and they can say 'for the real, full, professional .Net experience come to Windows'. I view the .Net clones as persisting the (wrong) impression that open source software is an amateurish attempt to copy professional software.
There are better ways. Why not use Java? Its free, and there are many Java clones that are full-featured and run on Pocket-PC and PalmOS.
If you don't like Java.. why not actually be innovative and develop a new portable bytecode and languages to run on it? If not a new bytecode, why not help the work on parrot? Why not show that in VM technology open source coders can do more than simply play catch-up with Microsoft?
There is a big difference between 'usable' and 'widely used'. Linux has only been widely accepted at management level as a significant server system for a few years, and its desktop presence only really started to take off with the introduction of Open Office 1.0 in 2002.
There is also a big difference between 'people that can run linux to various extents' and people who are skilled enough to be employed to maintain corporate desktops and servers.
what sucks is that those are old versions of java. i want to write in j2 and i dont want to even bother with the older stuff.
.Net is that that aren't even any old versions around on 90% of machines. There is nothing there at all. Maybe in 20 years time, when everyone in the world has upgraded to XP, .Net apps could work. Or maybe, Linux desktops will change all this.
The point about
couldnt work out a deal in the recent settlement to get a new version of java bundled in. it would have helped java in the long haul.
Firstly, many companies, such as Dell, are pre-installing Java.
Secondly, pre-installation is increasingly irrelevant. Virtually all the interesting app development is server side, where Java is not only dominant, but growing. For client side apps, the java VM is just one click away on http://www.java.net.
The W3C is not a standards body. It is a vendor consortia.
Nonsense. To quote from the W3C:
"You've heard it: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) creates Web standards."
It is a standards body.
Its is not a vendor consortium. It includes such obvious non-vendors as The Library of Congress, the Universities of Southampton and Helsinki and the United States Navy.
With .NET's browser apps, if they can just keep most of their current customers for the time being and transition them over to this, lock-in is assured.
.Net apps face worse problems than Java applets. Unless you have the absolute latest Windows machines, you need to download runtimes for .Net. There are millions of machines with Java runtimes pre-installed. Also, in future versions of Windows, Explorer will be integrated. You won't be able to download Explorer with XAML for Windows 98 or Windows ME. .Net power you need Windows application servers, which form a very small and static part of the app server market.
.Net WebForms and now Java ServerFaces are such frameworks.
Absolutely not, except for a very restricted market which is pure Windows intranets,
Finally, if you really want
The future is not in specialised extensions to current web interfaces which will not be present in anything more than a fraction of all users' browsers for a long time, but new web coding frameworks that allow developers to easily code complex interfaces and make best use of existing web standards, and other front-ends such as WAP.
I'm not sure I agree with you about basic support training. Recently I had to add a new users to a RedHat machine. It was /usr/sbin/adduser, followed by passwd. I had to add users to a customized Win2000 server. I found the icon eventually. It was probably something like start/control panel/system/adminstrative tools, and then something about local accounts. Almost everything under recent versions of windows seems to require a non-inutitive path through GUI tools (different in each Windows version), or else a registry edit, whereas the equivalent procedures under Linux are one or two command line statements.
I would add that Linux admins are usually well able to figure out (eventually) how to configure Windows because they tend to be adaptable. However, put a Windows admin in front of Linux.....
Actually, Gödel only proved the incompleteness of Arithmetics.
No - it is more general than that. To quote Nagel and Newman:
"He proved it impossible to establish the internal logical consistency of a very large class of deductive systems.."
Arithmetic was only one example of this.
Why build a base on the moon to get a craft to Mars?
The moon has low gravity and no atmosphere, and experiences strong radiation. Its a good place to practise building a place for people to live off-Earth. After all, mars has very little atmosphere, low gravity and lots of radiation. The advantage of the Moon is that the colony would only be a couple of days travel away from Earth in case of problems.
The moon isn't anything like Mars
it is - see the comments above.
you can't grow your own food without a big nuclear reactor.
Yes you can - there is loads of solar energy.
and the methods for using local materials are extremely different.
No better or worse than Mars.
We can't learn anything about living on Mars by living on the moon, except maybe how people respond to being so far away from Earth.
We can learn a lot about setting up solar/nuclear powered habitats, how to grow food by solar energy and hydroponics in closed systems and indeed how people respond to distance from Earth. And, its only a few days away.... and the Moon is a pretty awesome resource.
where they can hold thier ground (linux admins are highly paid and rare.)
I don't know the figures about payment or numbers of Linux admins, but there is are good reason why Linux admins should be highly paid.
Firstly, Linux as a widely used system is new, much newer than Windows. This means that either Linux admins are self-taught (so flexible and intelligent) or general Unix administrators who have added Linux to their skillset (so experienced).
If you employ a Linux admin, you are getting someone who is adaptable and who will usually actively self-train to cope with changes, unlike the MSCE-qualified Windows admins.
Maybe it makes sense over a five or ten year span
It certainly does. There is this myth that Microsoft products do not require training. This is just not true. The transitions from NT4 to Win2K or XP, for example, are significant, especially for administrators. For users, the change between different MS Office versions have often been highly troublesome, both in terms of interfaces and add-on/script migration. These are expensive matters. A significant issue for corporate clients of Microsoft is that the licencing and support enforces upgrades.
My point is that over a 5-10 year period, the training requirements enforced by Microsoft licencing combined with OS changes could well be much worse than the cost of migration and training for a Linux desktop; a decision which allows a break from the hardware/software upgrade cycle, and can lead to significant cost savings in the long term.
Linux will increase significantly in viability against Microsoft systems because it has rapidly increasing support from companies who have the resources to ensure that it does: Companies like Sun, Novell, HP and RedHat are putting huge resources into making Linux an even better desktop system.
You say the Java development kit for Linux gives the end-user the right to "freely distribute the run-time with your apps." Others complain that they must download the whole Java environment from Sun, it can't come with their favorite distro. So which is it?
These are not exclusive options. The java runtime is totally freely distributable with your apps.
The thing is that some distros have particular licences that don't allow things like the java development kit or runtime to be included (for one thing, they are not GPL and they are binary-only).
Many distros do ship with Java - SuSE and RedHat enterprise for example.
Is the run-time freely distributable, or not?
Yes, but it depends what you mean by 'free'. Its not distributable if you decide you are only going to ship open-source software.
And if the Java run-time is not freely re-distributable, then why should anyone code in Java?
Because its a good platform for code. This may seem a strange thing to say, but there actually was a software industry before open source!
Anyway, when you compile using GCC, you are most likely producing Intel or AMD binaries. Intel and AMD chips are not freely distributable, so why compile for them?
Except the nanobots would have no natural predators (assuming they aren't organic).
When you are dealing with things on the scale of nanobots, the term 'organic' is meaningless: its all just atoms. What would stop the nanobots attacking each other?
But with genetic engineering we can make a dog grow an orange.
Trust me, I'm a biochemist. This is wrong.
but if they turn every living organism in to gray goo
Not very likely. Organisms can be very different. Some are warm, others are cold. Some thrive at very high pressures. Its going to be extremely hard to design anything that could cope with this variety.
You gave the example of viruses, but they are almost always very specific.
Here is a start:
http://www.javootoo.com/
Don't be intentionaly stupid
I'm often stupid, but never intentionally.
As for 'no one but sun improving it'; that's just nonsense. Lots of companies are working on improving the quality of VMs, including HP, IBM and BEA. Features are added to Java by the JCP commitee, not by Sun.
get a clue - find out the facts before you post.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but your DNA itself does NOT describe how you end up after development.
I agree with you, but its a matter of translation into RNA and then proteins; there is no compression of information, and no encryption: its a simple mapping.
DNA is base4 and has a finite length. There is a finite amount of stuff it can describe.
I would have thought that the length is potentially infinite.
You can get sacked for being gay?
yes
Where do you live?
UK
Is it specific to your job or can you be sacked no matter what line of work you're in?
Its not specific.
Things should change in a few years, with the European Human Rights Act coming into effect, but there will still be exclusion for some areas, such as religious organisations. I could be a highly competent and respected teacher in a school, and the school gets taken over by some religious group and I get sacked. All perfectly legal.