but it doesn't necessarily deselect things that are not useful but not particularly harmful either.
Yes it does. Because of mutations, genes are constantly tested to see if they are important. Useless genes fizzle away after a relatively short length of time. If you see DNA in a cell, its there because its useful for something.
The big point is that bits of DNA have to be useful, but not necessarily useful to *us*. It may be parasitic, and useful to itself.
From what I hear about DNA, there is massive amounts of "junk" we carry around, and that we have to support by caloric intake.
True.
However that "junk" can really be thought of as a self-decompressing self-decrypting program that comes into affect essentially at birth and at various other times.
Er no. Its just DNA. There is certainly nothing to do with compression or encryption going on.
If you think about it computationally, there is a "limit" to the amount of "stuff" you can describe with DNA.
This is getting bizzare.
The fascinating thing is how it bootstraps, self-decompresses, self-decrypts, and self-modifies.
You are confusing DNA with some sort of compressed InstallShield program!
Being gay frees psople from the normal constraints of society
I expressed this badly. What I meant was that gay people (like many who are subject to rejection and oppression) often feel that they don't have to conform to the constraints of society.
This is nothing to do with being gay. In past centuries, and in some societies, it has been fashionable for straight men to act effeminate. There are also some gay traditions in which homosexual men act far more 'masculine' than men usually do in straight society.
The reason why some gay men act effeminate is because being gay frees people from the normal constraints of society: they feel they have the freedom to act effeminate. Society and peer pressure constrains straight male behaviour.
For gay men like me, these days, in an increasingly civilised society, its not such a big deal. I can't yet marry a partner and its legal for me to be sacked because I am gay, but its not too bad.
But within my lifetime, it has been a very big deal. Forty years ago, I would have been imprisoned as a criminal. Isn't that a big deal?
For Alan Turing it was such a big deal it lead to his death.
Think of all that we lost; all he could have given us, because in his time it was a big deal.
I have to download and install things like Swing even if I don't want them.
Oh come on. This is just silly. If I download GCC, I get huge amounts of things I don't want, like cross-compiling for ARM processors. Where is the option to disable these?
Nothing else in my system works that way so I can't understand why Java does.
There is a very simple and easy to understand reason why Java does this. Java is a standard set of libraries and functions. Java includes things like Swing because that is part of what other developer's Java programs expect to be on your machine.
What is the point of installing a system called 'Java' if you can't download java programs and run them?
....it could force everyone to use Windows for the backend servers' OS....
I think you have very little idea about the attitude of IT professionals with 15-20 years experience; the sort of people who implement SAP solutions. We are not the sort of people who can be forced to do anything. We trust no-one. If a company does not supply vendor-independent products and solutions they are history as far as we are concerned.
What would Microsoft have done with it? SAP is widely used, and profitable, but does not match Microsoft's language and operating system strategy: SAP has always been a strongly cross-platform systems and in recent years has including significant support for Java.
It would have been astonishing for Microsoft to end up supporting J2EE applications for Sap on RedHat, at least for existing SAP users. Any move to close down the portability or application language support for an acquired SAP would surely have led to serious monopoly issues.
SWT/IBM desktop, JDesktop/Sun, Windows J++/MFC Desktop, and then The standard Swing desktop. Java not fragmented? That's 4 different desktops. Not including AWT.
Firstly, its 3. JDesktop/Sun is not a separate GUI toolkit - it uses Swing. You are confusing 'Desktop' with 'GUI'.
Its not fragmented, because (1) noone uses J++ anymore, (2) Swing and SWT can now be used together - you don't have to make a choice.
But now Sun releases another API for the desktop that, while different in purpose, is not compatible with SWT. Great. not to mention the fact that it uses GNOME
This is all wrong. Its an API to integrate with system services. Its completely compatible with SWT and Swing: you can use the desktop components under Swing or SWT. So what if it uses GNOME? Do you need Sun to provide everything for you?
It makes Java a more unified platform by providing a new API that gives portable access to some useful system services.
Can someone please explain something to me, as I feel I am being stupid.
When some Linux developers are so keen and eager to download all kinds of software, do they complain so much about downloading a free Java development environment from Sun? Its free to download, free to use, and you can freely distribute the run-time with your apps.
I remember when, years ago, Linux people did not like to have pre-installed systems, and preferred to have the freedom to set things up for themselves. Have things really got so bad that Linux developers insist on having everything pre-installed?
Is there some major lack of internet connections and/or CD-writers for 'enterprise Linux guys', so that they can't download the Java development kit at work and take it home? I mean, it only has to be done once....
Getting the initial VM load off the system AND sharing some classes will be huge for most apps. Specifically things like a Java calculator, notepad, ping program, or other small programs.
The basic usage of the Java 1.4 VM isn't huge - its around 8 MB.
Unless you use Swing, which is a critical component for writing desktop apps unless you resort to non-standard libraries.
Why can't slashdotters be up to date?
SWT is good, but sometimes its useful to have a consistent look and feel across all platforms (saves on user guides, for example).
Swing isn't slow anymore. It was really dreadful and unusable years ago, but there were major performance enhancements under Java 1.4, and Under 1.5 the native code for your apps is cached on disk. Next time you start, you are running Swing as compiled code.
I am thinking anything is better than Java in the hands of Sun.
Why? Sun have kept the core of Java and the bytecode stable while opening up parts of the spec so that other companies have been able to offer a variety of APIs. What is your problem? You don't have to use any of these APIs if you don't want to. You can write as many Swing or SWT apps as you like. You can even combine them into one program. If you have an issue with what Sun has done, you can write your own alternative.
How long before we start seeing Java worms? It's only a matter of time. How will we blame Microsoft for them? They'll be cross platform worms.
Nonsensical FUD.
Java has security manager features that have been tested and refined over a decade. Java was designed from the core to protect against such problems - every memory access and every class loaded is validated.
The only redeeming feature is that with the performance that Java provides, propogation of such worms will likely be a bit slower than the usual Windows type.
More FUD based on no evidence. Java has not been slow for years.
Had Java used native widgets, it might fit in better.
Java can use native widgets easily: IBM's SWT toolkit does just that.
Had Java used widgets that didn't look like a throwback to Motif it might have been slightly better.
Then don't use these widgets. Use any of hundreds of Swing look and feels, or use versions of SWT that use GTK, or Windows, or Aqua.
Instead Java UIs tend to be a usability nightmare.
There is nothing intrinsic about a Java UI that is a usability problem. With any Java GUI you can design your own buttons, add your own accelerators, menus, colours, tooltips. I think you are confusing the bad design of some particular applications with what is potentially possible using a GUI toolkit. Its like saying that GTK is bad in general because you have seen some badly designed GTK apps.
Even Eclipse, which is far and away the best app I've seen in Java has nowhere near the visual polish as its GNOME, KDE, Aqua, or Win32 equivalents.
This does not make sense: Eclipse uses GTK, aqua and Win32. It uses those native widgets! Eclipse is a native GUI program.
I never really liked Java beacuse it runs so slow in the current virtual machines.
It doesn't.
It hasn't run slow for years, since reasonable JIT/hotspot acceleration arrived in Java 1.3 many years ago.
To quote from "Performance of Java vs C++" by J.P.Lewis:
"Java is now nearly equal to C++ on low-level and numeric benchmarks. This should not be surprising: Java is a compiled language (albeit JIT compiled)."
The paper then goes on to investigate why the myth of Java slow speed persists.
Java's memory footprint is currently too large to allow numerous java programs of a moderate complexity (and size) to be running simultaneously on the desktop.
By default the 1.4 JVM allows a default maximum (note 'maximum' of 64MB per application, but there is no reason why an app needs to use anything near that. The full Swing GUI demo (a pretty complex app with memory-hogging features) from Java 1.4 runs comfortably in 32MB. New machines are purchased with around 512MB of memory. That is enough to run more than 10 copies of this app.
If you use something like SWT; a portable GUI library with native code bindings you can run Java apps GUI with memory requirements a lot smaller (Swing is a memory pig). You can run many more GUI apps. If you don't require a GUI, Java apps can require memory requirements of the order of single figures of megabytes, including the VM for each app.
How many Java apps do you want to run - 10, 20, 30, 40?
Microsoft will be cleaning Java's clock with.NET.
Why? For now.NET is simply an alternative desktop development environment. Microsoft have a very low presence in the mid-range and high-end server market. Unless a full-featured (not just Mono) enterprise-level.Net is released to the Unix market.Net will have very little impact on the server side, which is where Java has a dominant and growing presence.
If Java starts to grow on the desktop as well,.Net is in trouble.
The antiquity of the hardware is one issue (I'd rather have a cluster of multi-proc Opterons (which, I realize, Sun makes) over one big Sun sparc box any day - when you look at the amount of processing I can do per $ there is NO comparison).
If you have done numerical work or any serious multi-tasking I think you would find that its vastly easier and more productive to run that code on a scalable multiprocessor system than on a cluster. I'm not sure you can make the point about antiquated hardware when Solaris runs on AMD chips, and as for price, Solaris is about to be open sourced. Now that should stir things up for Linux!
The other is the fact that the Linux distros - I prefer SuSE at work, Debian at home - come with far more capable software. What good is Solaris 9 to me if I need to patch every single piece of software with the GNU or other equivalent out of sunfreeware.org, when I can get the same software out of the box with SuSE and have it supported?
I understand the point you are making, but I think the philosophy of Unixen like Solaris is that you are a grown-up Unix sysadmin and not only are you prepared to install software yourself, you actually want to so as to configure the machine the way you want. Unix is for 'real sysadmins', not switch-on-and-go non-IT-literate people to use.
I've been drinking quite a bit of wine tonight - so I hope I haven't made a fool of myself.:) No offense intended, but use the best OS that meets your needs and for me, that's Linux over Solaris any day.
Heh - absolutely no offense taken. I do the same myself sometimes:)
Their server OSs allow fullblown GUI logins for tens of users, which comapares relatively favorably to Linux (where you can only have tens of users, if they all have a full GUI, or you can have more, if they're on the command line).
No. Linux can handle rather a lot of logins with the GUI. There is little overhead for the GUI - it simply requires increased network traffic for the X protocol. We are not talking tens of connections.. think of hundreds.
Windows Terminal services is nowhere near as efficient. Its even recommended that you don't run too many DOS or Win16 apps via that service. I mean, honestly! Talk about sloppy.
Basically, you're a fucking idiot.
I do appreciate well-argued debate.
I admit I had forgotten Terminal Services on Windows server systems, and that I was making a cheap joke. Foolish of me, perhaps, but not particularly idiotic or sex-related.
However, something to note is that Multics and then UNIX has never had any kind of restriction on the numbers of logins (only the effect on performance). Even the smallest installation allows you run any number of remote GUIs and console-based connections. Its so typical of Microsoft that they will start to allow two connections on one of their cutting-edge systems and will label this 'innovation'.
Slashdot Mirror
but it doesn't necessarily deselect things that are not useful but not particularly harmful either.
Yes it does. Because of mutations, genes are constantly tested to see if they are important. Useless genes fizzle away after a relatively short length of time. If you see DNA in a cell, its there because its useful for something.
The big point is that bits of DNA have to be useful, but not necessarily useful to *us*. It may be parasitic, and useful to itself.
From what I hear about DNA, there is massive amounts of "junk" we carry around, and that we have to support by caloric intake.
True.
However that "junk" can really be thought of as a self-decompressing self-decrypting program that comes into affect essentially at birth and at various other times.
Er no. Its just DNA. There is certainly nothing to do with compression or encryption going on.
If you think about it computationally, there is a "limit" to the amount of "stuff" you can describe with DNA.
This is getting bizzare.
The fascinating thing is how it bootstraps, self-decompresses, self-decrypts, and self-modifies.
You are confusing DNA with some sort of compressed InstallShield program!
Being gay frees psople from the normal constraints of society
I expressed this badly. What I meant was that gay people (like many who are subject to rejection and oppression) often feel that they don't have to conform to the constraints of society.
they try to act like they were girlies,
This is nothing to do with being gay. In past centuries, and in some societies, it has been fashionable for straight men to act effeminate. There are also some gay traditions in which homosexual men act far more 'masculine' than men usually do in straight society.
The reason why some gay men act effeminate is because being gay frees people from the normal constraints of society: they feel they have the freedom to act effeminate. Society and peer pressure constrains straight male behaviour.
so he was gay. big deal.
For gay men like me, these days, in an increasingly civilised society, its not such a big deal. I can't yet marry a partner and its legal for me to be sacked because I am gay, but its not too bad.
But within my lifetime, it has been a very big deal. Forty years ago, I would have been imprisoned as a criminal. Isn't that a big deal?
For Alan Turing it was such a big deal it lead to his death.
Think of all that we lost; all he could have given us, because in his time it was a big deal.
I remember the same things being said about C++ in the 1980s.
You have to keep up-to-date in the IT industry. What was true a couple of years ago is now out-of-date.
I have to download and install things like Swing even if I don't want them.
Oh come on. This is just silly. If I download GCC, I get huge amounts of things I don't want, like cross-compiling for ARM processors. Where is the option to disable these?
Nothing else in my system works that way so I can't understand why Java does.
There is a very simple and easy to understand reason why Java does this. Java is a standard set of libraries and functions. Java includes things like Swing because that is part of what other developer's Java programs expect to be on your machine.
What is the point of installing a system called 'Java' if you can't download java programs and run them?
....it could force everyone to use Windows for the backend servers' OS....
I think you have very little idea about the attitude of IT professionals with 15-20 years experience; the sort of people who implement SAP solutions. We are not the sort of people who can be forced to do anything. We trust no-one. If a company does not supply vendor-independent products and solutions they are history as far as we are concerned.
Am I the only one who read that as Microsoft merging with the DOJ?
Didn't you realise that had already happened?
What would Microsoft have done with it? SAP is widely used, and profitable, but does not match Microsoft's language and operating system strategy: SAP has always been a strongly cross-platform systems and in recent years has including significant support for Java.
It would have been astonishing for Microsoft to end up supporting J2EE applications for Sap on RedHat, at least for existing SAP users. Any move to close down the portability or application language support for an acquired SAP would surely have led to serious monopoly issues.
SWT/IBM desktop, JDesktop/Sun, Windows J++/MFC Desktop, and then The standard Swing desktop. Java not fragmented? That's 4 different desktops. Not including AWT.
Firstly, its 3. JDesktop/Sun is not a separate GUI toolkit - it uses Swing. You are confusing 'Desktop' with 'GUI'.
Its not fragmented, because (1) noone uses J++ anymore, (2) Swing and SWT can now be used together - you don't have to make a choice.
But now Sun releases another API for the desktop that, while different in purpose, is not compatible with SWT. Great. not to mention the fact that it uses GNOME
This is all wrong. Its an API to integrate with system services. Its completely compatible with SWT and Swing: you can use the desktop components under Swing or SWT. So what if it uses GNOME? Do you need Sun to provide everything for you?
It makes Java a more unified platform by providing a new API that gives portable access to some useful system services.
Now if they could make it so you don't have to start up a separate VM for every application...because it takes too much memory AND too much time.
They have. You can.
and you can sometimes see unpainted gray areas, at least temporarily. They make a bad impression.
That has not been the case for years. If you see it, its bad coding by the developer.
They should instead work on fleshing out AWT to include the missing widgets,
IBM have done exactly that. Its called SWT.
Can someone please explain something to me, as I feel I am being stupid.
When some Linux developers are so keen and eager to download all kinds of software, do they complain so much about downloading a free Java development environment from Sun? Its free to download, free to use, and you can freely distribute the run-time with your apps.
I remember when, years ago, Linux people did not like to have pre-installed systems, and preferred to have the freedom to set things up for themselves. Have things really got so bad that Linux developers insist on having everything pre-installed?
Is there some major lack of internet connections and/or CD-writers for 'enterprise Linux guys', so that they can't download the Java development kit at work and take it home? I mean, it only has to be done once....
Getting the initial VM load off the system AND sharing some classes will be huge for most apps. Specifically things like a Java calculator, notepad, ping program, or other small programs.
The basic usage of the Java 1.4 VM isn't huge - its around 8 MB.
Unless you use Swing, which is a critical component for writing desktop apps unless you resort to non-standard libraries.
Why can't slashdotters be up to date?
SWT is good, but sometimes its useful to have a consistent look and feel across all platforms (saves on user guides, for example).
Swing isn't slow anymore. It was really dreadful and unusable years ago, but there were major performance enhancements under Java 1.4, and Under 1.5 the native code for your apps is cached on disk. Next time you start, you are running Swing as compiled code.
I am thinking anything is better than Java in the hands of Sun.
Why? Sun have kept the core of Java and the bytecode stable while opening up parts of the spec so that other companies have been able to offer a variety of APIs. What is your problem? You don't have to use any of these APIs if you don't want to. You can write as many Swing or SWT apps as you like. You can even combine them into one program. If you have an issue with what Sun has done, you can write your own alternative.
How long before we start seeing Java worms? It's only a matter of time. How will we blame Microsoft for them? They'll be cross platform worms.
Nonsensical FUD.
Java has security manager features that have been tested and refined over a decade. Java was designed from the core to protect against such problems - every memory access and every class loaded is validated.
The only redeeming feature is that with the performance that Java provides, propogation of such worms will likely be a bit slower than the usual Windows type.
More FUD based on no evidence. Java has not been slow for years.
Mono is an open implementation of .net
.Net, not supported by Microsoft, the creator of .Net.
Key fact:
Mono is an open implementation of a subset of
Had Java used native widgets, it might fit in better.
Java can use native widgets easily: IBM's SWT toolkit does just that.
Had Java used widgets that didn't look like a throwback to Motif it might have been slightly better.
Then don't use these widgets. Use any of hundreds of Swing look and feels, or use versions of SWT that use GTK, or Windows, or Aqua.
Instead Java UIs tend to be a usability nightmare.
There is nothing intrinsic about a Java UI that is a usability problem. With any Java GUI you can design your own buttons, add your own accelerators, menus, colours, tooltips. I think you are confusing the bad design of some particular applications with what is potentially possible using a GUI toolkit. Its like saying that GTK is bad in general because you have seen some badly designed GTK apps.
Even Eclipse, which is far and away the best app I've seen in Java has nowhere near the visual polish as its GNOME, KDE, Aqua, or Win32 equivalents.
This does not make sense: Eclipse uses GTK, aqua and Win32. It uses those native widgets! Eclipse is a native GUI program.
I never really liked Java beacuse it runs so slow in the current virtual machines.
It doesn't.
It hasn't run slow for years, since reasonable JIT/hotspot acceleration arrived in Java 1.3 many years ago.
To quote from "Performance of Java vs C++" by J.P.Lewis:
"Java is now nearly equal to C++ on low-level and numeric benchmarks. This should not be surprising: Java is a compiled language (albeit JIT compiled)."
The paper then goes on to investigate why the myth of Java slow speed persists.
Java's memory footprint is currently too large to allow numerous java programs of a moderate complexity (and size) to be running simultaneously on the desktop.
.NET.
.NET is simply an alternative desktop development environment. Microsoft have a very low presence in the mid-range and high-end server market. Unless a full-featured (not just Mono) enterprise-level .Net is released to the Unix market .Net will have very little impact on the server side, which is where Java has a dominant and growing presence.
.Net is in trouble.
By default the 1.4 JVM allows a default maximum (note 'maximum' of 64MB per application, but there is no reason why an app needs to use anything near that. The full Swing GUI demo (a pretty complex app with memory-hogging features) from Java 1.4 runs comfortably in 32MB.
New machines are purchased with around 512MB of memory. That is enough to run more than 10 copies of this app.
If you use something like SWT; a portable GUI library with native code bindings you can run Java apps GUI with memory requirements a lot smaller (Swing is a memory pig). You can run many more GUI apps. If you don't require a GUI, Java apps can require memory requirements of the order of single figures of megabytes, including the VM for each app.
How many Java apps do you want to run - 10, 20, 30, 40?
Microsoft will be cleaning Java's clock with
Why? For now
If Java starts to grow on the desktop as well,
The antiquity of the hardware is one issue (I'd rather have a cluster of multi-proc Opterons (which, I realize, Sun makes) over one big Sun sparc box any day - when you look at the amount of processing I can do per $ there is NO comparison).
:) No offense intended, but use the best OS that meets your needs and for me, that's Linux over Solaris any day.
:)
If you have done numerical work or any serious multi-tasking I think you would find that its vastly easier and more productive to run that code on a scalable multiprocessor system than on a cluster. I'm not sure you can make the point about antiquated hardware when Solaris runs on AMD chips, and as for price, Solaris is about to be open sourced. Now that should stir things up for Linux!
The other is the fact that the Linux distros - I prefer SuSE at work, Debian at home - come with far more capable software. What good is Solaris 9 to me if I need to patch every single piece of software with the GNU or other equivalent out of sunfreeware.org, when I can get the same software out of the box with SuSE and have it supported?
I understand the point you are making, but I think the philosophy of Unixen like Solaris is that you are a grown-up Unix sysadmin and not only are you prepared to install software yourself, you actually want to so as to configure the machine the way you want. Unix is for 'real sysadmins', not switch-on-and-go non-IT-literate people to use.
I've been drinking quite a bit of wine tonight - so I hope I haven't made a fool of myself.
Heh - absolutely no offense taken. I do the same myself sometimes
OK - "You are a skeptic."
... again".
I agree with you. The story should have been
titled "Atlantis discovered at last
And windows TS (Terminal Server) supports many concurrent login and hosted applications.
Yes, I had forgotten. Note to self: think before you post.
Hey ...., that's just for XP.
So? XP is supposed to be cutting-edge.
Their server OSs allow fullblown GUI logins for tens of users, which comapares relatively favorably to Linux (where you can only have tens of users, if they all have a full GUI, or you can have more, if they're on the command line).
No. Linux can handle rather a lot of logins with the GUI. There is little overhead for the GUI - it simply requires increased network traffic for the X protocol. We are not talking tens of connections.. think of hundreds.
Windows Terminal services is nowhere near as efficient. Its even recommended that you don't
run too many DOS or Win16 apps via that service. I mean, honestly! Talk about sloppy.
Basically, you're a fucking idiot.
I do appreciate well-argued debate.
I admit I had forgotten Terminal Services on Windows server systems, and that I was making a cheap joke. Foolish of me, perhaps, but not particularly idiotic or sex-related.
However, something to note is that Multics and then UNIX has never had any kind of restriction on the numbers of logins (only the effect on performance). Even the smallest installation allows you run any number of remote GUIs and console-based connections. Its so typical of Microsoft that they will start to allow two connections on one of their cutting-edge systems and will label this 'innovation'.