No, google bought a virtual machine that didn't need java, and created a transcoder so that java classes could be translated to dalvik classes. No need for java on the phone, which is what pisses off Oracle - Java ME for the cell phone is not free, and they're losing all the cell-phone market that used to license it to Android.
The next step is to make a transcoder for php, python, and javascript - then devs can say goodbye forever to Java, and good riddance.
First, Android runs dalvik, not java. The dalvik runtime will eventually support transcoded javascript, php, python, etc.,
Second, Oracle is pissed off because google doesn't have to buy a java license - and neither does any other cell phone manufacturer who runs the dalvik vm.
Third, java is a piece of bloated shit. Just switching to dalvik enabled them to save both memory and cpu cycles.
Java is dying. This is just another nail in an already-bloated smelly corpse. Get over it.
Re:I think Google should solve this the easy way
on
The Case For Oracle
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Wouldnt hurt them one bit. You don't have to continue to enable someone who is suing you. While they're at it, maybe they can get Oracle to confess as to what they're really afraid of - a generalized implementation of map-reduce that would render Oracle database products redundant.
Oracle is killing Java. And that's a "GOOD THING!" Maybe people will be forced to learn a real programming language instead of Java's interpreted training wheels crap.
[1] Java is a bloated piece of crap.
[2] The runtime takes a lot more memory than dalvik
[3] Java performance sux
[4] Java is so 1995
Seriously, it's about time someone killed it off - who better than Oracle. Thank you Mr. Ellison!
Heyt OraKILL - dalvik is not java
on
The Case For Oracle
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What a bunch of morons.
Dalvik (what android runs) is not Java
From Ellison's personal journal:
[X] Screw over Google
[X] Screw over the Java brand (oops, didn't see that one. Oh well, it was Sun shit anyway).
[X] Screw over the MySQL brand (it's just a flesh wound, and hey, they can always use Oracle)
[X] Screw over sparc brand (hardware's a PITA anyway, the real loot is in software)
[X] Screw over openSolaris (that one felt GOOD!!! Eat your heart out, Balmer. Bet ye killing the KIN wasn't half the fun)
[_] Screw over OpenOffice.
[_] Find something else to buy and break. Hmmm, Novell's for sale...
I don't knock Apple's success - just the crap that they throw out there as "the best" when it's not - like the recent Antennagate, but if you look back, Apple has a LOOONG history of crapware products, which is why they went from owning 20% of the PC market to near-bankruptcy.
This is not the "New Apple". The iPad is crippleware, plain and simple. If you like your new AOL-style walled garden, that's fine - but don't tell us we can't make fun of you, just like we did to gran'pa. Because Apple now wants to sell to the "ignorant hicks", not the "technical elite." Or even the moderately competent. If you have trouble doing anything more complex than turning a computer on and off, you're the ideal Apple customer.
My laptop is dead silent when running linux - the fan doesn't come on. In more than 3 years, I've run out of juice twice - and one of those times was because I forgot to turn it off and we had a power failure. Seriously, do you think people are going to be glued to their iPad for 10 hours at a time, every day?
FWIW, 17" laptops suck compared to desktops.
Really? It runs apache, an ftp server, 2 database servers, and I can serve up php web pages fast enough with it to saturate the 100 mbps connection to my desktop. How does that make it "suck"? Oh wait - it doesn't. I'm using it right now in two-screen mode, plugged into one of my 26" lcds running 1920x1200. And the keyboard is full-sized - even has the number keypad.
So really, how does it suck compared to crippleware like the iPad, which will give you Gorilla Arm if you try to use it 10 hours a day because it lacks a decent keyboard?
That's one of the advantages of not being locked into a single hardware vendor. Something apple fans wouldn't know about - your choices are seriously limited in comparison.
And no, the latest Oracle lawsuit over Android won't make a difference - except to help kill off java by pissing off even more people.
The article doesn't say the iPad is the best in terms of accessibility - it says
Given a bit of time, it may become the most accessible and least expensive assistive computing device ever made.
Also:
The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has commended Apple for including VoiceOver capability in the iPad allowing just about everything displayed on the screen to be read aloud. This enables blind users to use the device as soon as it's taken out of the box, and proves that touchscreen devices need not be a limitation to the blind.
Yes, linux also does text-to-speech (go into kde | accessibility | text-to-speech | enable text-to-speech system). and it also does braille - something the iPad doesn't do.
Also, linux has other standard accessibility features - sticky keys, slow keys, bounce keys, etc.
Ditto for zooming - people forget you can zoom the whole desktop in Linux, not just a browser window, and you're not normally limited to a tiny 1024x756 9" display, so people with reduced visual acuity are going to find a linux laptop's larger display a LOT more accessible.
Or, again from the article. from using an add-in app to give more icons:
The increased size of the icons alone, can make it easier to use for users with impaired sight. For others, the ability to get 64 icons on the screen at one time, increasing the number from the iPhone's 16 icons, will be quite a welcome addition.
Are you serious - this is a "noteworthy item"? All it does is highlight that the original design is flawed.
What other OS limits you to 16 icons on the desktop? Or even 64 for that matter (I have none - I like a clean desktop), but if you DO want desktop icons, with linux you can also make them any size you want. And unlike the iPad pinch-to-zoom, which requires 2 fingers, you just grab a corner of any desktop widget and drag, so you can mix-n-match scaling
If you REALLY want to interact directly with the screen, you can use a light pen, you can buy one of the hundreds of laptops or desktops that come with a touchscreen and install linux on them - you haven't needed a special driver for touch screens since Windows 3.1. Or just buy a second touch screen device.
So yes, everything the iPad can do in terms of accessibility, linux can do, and then some... there are simply some things that a DVD-case-sized display simply can't handle.
It's funny because my 3-4-year-old laptop is nowhere near obsolete. Most hardware nowadays will work fine until you drive over it, leave it out in the rain, or give it away. The iPad, on the other hand, was obsolete before it left the design area - it can't render many modern web sites properly, it has puny video, memory, and cpu specs, limited expandability, and a lousy interface (touch screens suck when used for more than a few minutes at a time).
Want to make a device that isn' obsolete before you even build it? Make it so it has decent peripheral access, decent graphics (not something from 1994), a multi-tasking OS, and can actually, you know, surf the web - including flash. I mean really, when was the last time you saw a laptop w/o a cam?
It's what people want. They don't want anb oversized iPhone that doesn't make phone calls.
Guess which one weighs less per square inch of screen display:-).
Why turn it off? Just close the lid - suspend works fine under linux.
The drives have sensors rated for 300g - and *I* can replace them - who do you think added the second internal? It takes less than a minute.
I don't have to get fingerprints on the screen - I've got a touchpad and a FULL-SIZED keyboard (17" makes a big difference). And I can plug in an external keyboard and mouse if I want to - PLUS I have a Remote Control
My secondary video out right now is 1920x1200, not 1024x576. It's actually plugged into one of my 1920x1200 26" lcds as a second screen so I can code.
It's also running a web server, ftp server, etc., and it can saturate a 100mbps connection. Can your iPad do that?
It's not a truck, just a middle-of-the-road 3 or 4-year-old laptop with some extra ram and a second hd. And umlike Apple, it all "just works" all over the Internet. The iPad is for, as one of my friends would say, "people with more money than brains." It does nothing well.
The iPad does nothing well. For a device that is touted as "consuming internet media content", it has a walled internet. Jobs is re-inventing aol. There are lots of sites that just don't work on an ipad or iphone, but they work fine on the more open competition.
So what DOES the ipad do better? It can't even surf the web properly. It can't run more than 90% of the computer programs out there. It *can* let you pay $5 to download a 500-meg "iPad" version of a dead-tree magazine, it can let you scratch it's glass because unlike laptops it doesn't protect it's screen when not in use, even Jobs couldn't use it properly when he was demoing it. You'll end up with Gorilla Arm.
Except that Apple, because they are now marketing to high school kids and soccer moms, is no longer seen as a "status" product. Or even "high tech".
It's a lifestyle brand for well-to-do yuppies.
Are you sh*tting me? Have you watched their commercials? They abandoned that market 2 years ago. Want to impress someone, pull out the latest Droid or an Evo. Apple is last year's story.
What world are you living in. People bitched a *LOT*.
Also, the iApp market is too small to take seriously. The average iPhone user spends $13.47 a year on apps - and that includes a lot of people who spend $0. Those that spend, most get the same "must-have" apps as everyone else, which is why more than 99% of all developers don't even earn back their $150 dev kit cost. When I point the numbers out to potential customers who are dreaming of making money by writing for the iPhone, they aren't happy, but they abandon the idea.
It's going to be the same with the iPad - the machine is too limited in functionality, too small a niche market, to be worth even bothering with. You have two choices as a developer - maintain two copies of your code, or spend the time developing a second app for the larger non-iOS market. Gee, that's not too hard a decision...
Let's face it - Apple stopped being a product for professionals, and is now the "high school punks and soccer moms" product. They certainly can no longer portray their customers as hip, high-tech, plugged-in, affluent influence-makers. The shine is gone - again.
My laptop delivers a much better experience. For one thing, it has a MUCH bigger screen, and can display HD without downscaling to 1024x676 - which is crap. I can also plug it into my plasma and watch in 1920x1980 - even if you use the video out cable for the ipad, you're STILL watching it at 1024x576. I also have 640 gigs of storage on twin internal drives, 4 usb ports, I can run flash, I have a real keypad... I don't have to hold it to work with it, the screen is big enough (17") that I won't go blind trying to read it, and others can watch at the same time, and I can install anything I want on it - like linux.
Let us know when your iPad can do all that. Heck, let us know when you can run Flash.
The author admits it - the iPad is overpriced crap. If it were $200, sure, for a crippleware device, but not for a premium. Why can't he just come out and admit it - the iPad will be rendered totally obsolete by all the new pads coming out within the next year, just like many of the new smartphones are better than apple's latest iphone?
Riiight - and California is SO flush with money that they're going to spend $10k to $20k to extradite someone so that they can appear for trial. I don't think so - and unless you're notified that they're charging you, it's all unconstitutional. So they notify you, you go to your local police station and "turn yourself in" - actually, you say "I'm here, I'm willing to appear in court, but I'm not paying the travel costs. I demand both extradition and formal discovery of all evidence." The cops will say "We don't want either the paperwork or the expense - we'll call them and see if they'll foot the bill." And since California won't spend $20k to collect $5k, you can demand the charges be dropped.
It's not like anyone's going to California any more anyway - the state has been losing population for the last few years, and that's not about to change this decade.
In my original post, I didn't even mention phone calls, because the question is "do you need the consent of someone else to record a conversation", and the answer is no, not if you're part of the conversation. The other person is talking with you - they have NO reasonable expectation that you will not hear the conversation - you're one of the parties to the conversation. However, what's NOT allowed is for you to hang around two people who are having a conversation that doesn't involve you, and recording it without their consent.
In this case, the person doing the recording was part of the group, so the recording was ruled to be legal, both by the original court and the appeals court.
The law is different for videos. Video recording generally needs the informed consent of ALL parties involved. That's why you see signs in stores warning you about video surveillance - your continuing to stay in the store is implied informed consent. Stores that don't post signage are breaking the law, and the video is inadmissible (something that most people don't know). Same if the signs are too small to be noticed, or posted in an obscure manner.
If you called California from TN and recorded the conversation without the consent of the other party, you could be charged under CA law. If you were convicted, CA could request that TN extradite you to CA. I do not know of any case where one state has refused another state's extradition request.
Absolutely false - they need to extradite you first, THEN you have a trial. Not going to happen too often. So if you're in a one-party jurisdiction, record away, now that federal law outweighs the 2-party state laws for inter-state communications.
Even Apple's own site doesn't say that it OUTPUTS 1280x720. Read it carefully - the best it can output is 1024x576. This isn't a limitation of the vga connector - current vga connectors can handle 1920x1024 and 1920x1200. It's a limitation of the hardware. It's easier to downscale the intermediate frames in video than it is to render them full-size. This is why the iPad doesn't put out full-sized video - it simply doesn't have either the cpu or the internal bandwidth. It can't even handle flash, ffs. Compared to today's smartphones, the iPad is so 2006.
You need to look at the container format for video - it's a lot easier to downscale than it is to render, because the information is stored in delta blocks. If you know that a certain area of the screen contains a block that is less than a certain size, (say 2 pixels on a side) you don't have to decode it to downscale it - just skip over that block. This is a simplification, but the fact is that it is MUCH less cpu-intensive to downscale intermediate frames since you don't have to decode the full image, render it internally, then downscale it - the downscaling is almost free in comparison to how you'd do it with, say, a series of jpegs.
It's also the reason why you can get 50/1 compression. Now if you know ahead of time that you're downscaling and that you can throw away any delta blocks that either (a) contain less than a certain amount of change info, or (b) are less than a certain size, you just read the header for the intermediate frame, then pick ONLY those blocks that you need to decode. The rest don't have info you were going to throw away anyways.
An (somewhat) analogous situation would be a gzipped file containing many files, 1% of which are full images, 3% are files that contain information that you would need to reconstruct intermediate images between keyframes, and the other 96% contain information that if you bothered to decode it, it would be thrown away anyway because it concerns changes in a block too small to make a difference. So you only extract and decode 4% of the files.
UPscaling is a different matter, obviously, but to upscale, you're starting with even less data, so upscaling from, say, 400x300 is not a big deal. But downscaling, because of the nature of Iframes, you can cheat a heck of a lot and people won't notice. So no, the iPad simply doesn't have the guts to handle full resolution hd, just like it hasn't go the guts to handle flash. It's severely underpowered for a modern device, which is the only reason it has "such great battery life".
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No, google bought a virtual machine that didn't need java, and created a transcoder so that java classes could be translated to dalvik classes. No need for java on the phone, which is what pisses off Oracle - Java ME for the cell phone is not free, and they're losing all the cell-phone market that used to license it to Android.
The next step is to make a transcoder for php, python, and javascript - then devs can say goodbye forever to Java, and good riddance.
First, Android runs dalvik, not java. The dalvik runtime will eventually support transcoded javascript, php, python, etc.,
Second, Oracle is pissed off because google doesn't have to buy a java license - and neither does any other cell phone manufacturer who runs the dalvik vm.
Third, java is a piece of bloated shit. Just switching to dalvik enabled them to save both memory and cpu cycles.
Java is dying. This is just another nail in an already-bloated smelly corpse. Get over it.
Wouldnt hurt them one bit. You don't have to continue to enable someone who is suing you. While they're at it, maybe they can get Oracle to confess as to what they're really afraid of - a generalized implementation of map-reduce that would render Oracle database products redundant.
Oracle is killing Java. And that's a "GOOD THING!" Maybe people will be forced to learn a real programming language instead of Java's interpreted training wheels crap.
Pick one ... heck, pick all of them ...
[1] Java is a bloated piece of crap.
[2] The runtime takes a lot more memory than dalvik
[3] Java performance sux
[4] Java is so 1995
Seriously, it's about time someone killed it off - who better than Oracle. Thank you Mr. Ellison!
What a bunch of morons.
Dalvik (what android runs) is not Java
From Ellison's personal journal:
[X] Screw over Google ...
[X] Screw over the Java brand (oops, didn't see that one. Oh well, it was Sun shit anyway).
[X] Screw over the MySQL brand (it's just a flesh wound, and hey, they can always use Oracle)
[X] Screw over sparc brand (hardware's a PITA anyway, the real loot is in software)
[X] Screw over openSolaris (that one felt GOOD!!! Eat your heart out, Balmer. Bet ye killing the KIN wasn't half the fun)
[_] Screw over OpenOffice.
[_] Find something else to buy and break. Hmmm, Novell's for sale
I don't knock Apple's success - just the crap that they throw out there as "the best" when it's not - like the recent Antennagate, but if you look back, Apple has a LOOONG history of crapware products, which is why they went from owning 20% of the PC market to near-bankruptcy.
This is not the "New Apple". The iPad is crippleware, plain and simple. If you like your new AOL-style walled garden, that's fine - but don't tell us we can't make fun of you, just like we did to gran'pa. Because Apple now wants to sell to the "ignorant hicks", not the "technical elite." Or even the moderately competent. If you have trouble doing anything more complex than turning a computer on and off, you're the ideal Apple customer.
My laptop is dead silent when running linux - the fan doesn't come on. In more than 3 years, I've run out of juice twice - and one of those times was because I forgot to turn it off and we had a power failure. Seriously, do you think people are going to be glued to their iPad for 10 hours at a time, every day?
Really? It runs apache, an ftp server, 2 database servers, and I can serve up php web pages fast enough with it to saturate the 100 mbps connection to my desktop. How does that make it "suck"? Oh wait - it doesn't. I'm using it right now in two-screen mode, plugged into one of my 26" lcds running 1920x1200. And the keyboard is full-sized - even has the number keypad.
So really, how does it suck compared to crippleware like the iPad, which will give you Gorilla Arm if you try to use it 10 hours a day because it lacks a decent keyboard?
That's one of the advantages of not being locked into a single hardware vendor. Something apple fans wouldn't know about - your choices are seriously limited in comparison.
And no, the latest Oracle lawsuit over Android won't make a difference - except to help kill off java by pissing off even more people.
The article doesn't say the iPad is the best in terms of accessibility - it says
Also:
Yes, linux also does text-to-speech (go into kde | accessibility | text-to-speech | enable text-to-speech system). and it also does braille - something the iPad doesn't do.
Also, linux has other standard accessibility features - sticky keys, slow keys, bounce keys, etc.
Ditto for zooming - people forget you can zoom the whole desktop in Linux, not just a browser window, and you're not normally limited to a tiny 1024x756 9" display, so people with reduced visual acuity are going to find a linux laptop's larger display a LOT more accessible.
Or, again from the article. from using an add-in app to give more icons:
Are you serious - this is a "noteworthy item"? All it does is highlight that the original design is flawed. What other OS limits you to 16 icons on the desktop? Or even 64 for that matter (I have none - I like a clean desktop), but if you DO want desktop icons, with linux you can also make them any size you want. And unlike the iPad pinch-to-zoom, which requires 2 fingers, you just grab a corner of any desktop widget and drag, so you can mix-n-match scaling
If you REALLY want to interact directly with the screen, you can use a light pen, you can buy one of the hundreds of laptops or desktops that come with a touchscreen and install linux on them - you haven't needed a special driver for touch screens since Windows 3.1. Or just buy a second touch screen device.
So yes, everything the iPad can do in terms of accessibility, linux can do, and then some ... there are simply some things that a DVD-case-sized display simply can't handle.
In Soviet Russia, post removes Attorney General!
Wait ... didn't that also happen to some AG named Elliott something-or-other in New York when details of his "hooker dates" leaked?
So move your servers to Kanuckistan. Welcome to the Great White North - soon to be the Great Green North, thanks to global warming.
It's funny because my 3-4-year-old laptop is nowhere near obsolete. Most hardware nowadays will work fine until you drive over it, leave it out in the rain, or give it away. The iPad, on the other hand, was obsolete before it left the design area - it can't render many modern web sites properly, it has puny video, memory, and cpu specs, limited expandability, and a lousy interface (touch screens suck when used for more than a few minutes at a time).
Want to make a device that isn' obsolete before you even build it? Make it so it has decent peripheral access, decent graphics (not something from 1994), a multi-tasking OS, and can actually, you know, surf the web - including flash. I mean really, when was the last time you saw a laptop w/o a cam?
It's what people want. They don't want anb oversized iPhone that doesn't make phone calls.
Guess which one weighs less per square inch of screen display :-).
Why turn it off? Just close the lid - suspend works fine under linux.
The drives have sensors rated for 300g - and *I* can replace them - who do you think added the second internal? It takes less than a minute.
I don't have to get fingerprints on the screen - I've got a touchpad and a FULL-SIZED keyboard (17" makes a big difference). And I can plug in an external keyboard and mouse if I want to - PLUS I have a Remote Control
My secondary video out right now is 1920x1200, not 1024x576. It's actually plugged into one of my 1920x1200 26" lcds as a second screen so I can code.
It's also running a web server, ftp server, etc., and it can saturate a 100mbps connection. Can your iPad do that?
It's not a truck, just a middle-of-the-road 3 or 4-year-old laptop with some extra ram and a second hd. And umlike Apple, it all "just works" all over the Internet. The iPad is for, as one of my friends would say, "people with more money than brains." It does nothing well.
The iPad does nothing well. For a device that is touted as "consuming internet media content", it has a walled internet. Jobs is re-inventing aol. There are lots of sites that just don't work on an ipad or iphone, but they work fine on the more open competition.
So what DOES the ipad do better? It can't even surf the web properly. It can't run more than 90% of the computer programs out there. It *can* let you pay $5 to download a 500-meg "iPad" version of a dead-tree magazine, it can let you scratch it's glass because unlike laptops it doesn't protect it's screen when not in use, even Jobs couldn't use it properly when he was demoing it. You'll end up with Gorilla Arm.
Except that Apple, because they are now marketing to high school kids and soccer moms, is no longer seen as a "status" product. Or even "high tech".
Are you sh*tting me? Have you watched their commercials? They abandoned that market 2 years ago. Want to impress someone, pull out the latest Droid or an Evo. Apple is last year's story.
What world are you living in. People bitched a *LOT*.
Also, the iApp market is too small to take seriously. The average iPhone user spends $13.47 a year on apps - and that includes a lot of people who spend $0. Those that spend, most get the same "must-have" apps as everyone else, which is why more than 99% of all developers don't even earn back their $150 dev kit cost. When I point the numbers out to potential customers who are dreaming of making money by writing for the iPhone, they aren't happy, but they abandon the idea.
It's going to be the same with the iPad - the machine is too limited in functionality, too small a niche market, to be worth even bothering with. You have two choices as a developer - maintain two copies of your code, or spend the time developing a second app for the larger non-iOS market. Gee, that's not too hard a decision ...
Let's face it - Apple stopped being a product for professionals, and is now the "high school punks and soccer moms" product. They certainly can no longer portray their customers as hip, high-tech, plugged-in, affluent influence-makers. The shine is gone - again.
Apple's market share of the smartphone DROPPED last quarter - and it will continue to drop. Who's #1? Android.
Let us know when your iPad can do all that. Heck, let us know when you can run Flash.
The author admits it - the iPad is overpriced crap. If it were $200, sure, for a crippleware device, but not for a premium. Why can't he just come out and admit it - the iPad will be rendered totally obsolete by all the new pads coming out within the next year, just like many of the new smartphones are better than apple's latest iphone?
This is the last straw. Compared to Apple, Microsoft is starting to look pretty benign.
It's not like anyone's going to California any more anyway - the state has been losing population for the last few years, and that's not about to change this decade.
In this case, the person doing the recording was part of the group, so the recording was ruled to be legal, both by the original court and the appeals court.
The law is different for videos. Video recording generally needs the informed consent of ALL parties involved. That's why you see signs in stores warning you about video surveillance - your continuing to stay in the store is implied informed consent. Stores that don't post signage are breaking the law, and the video is inadmissible (something that most people don't know). Same if the signs are too small to be noticed, or posted in an obscure manner.
Absolutely false - they need to extradite you first, THEN you have a trial. Not going to happen too often. So if you're in a one-party jurisdiction, record away, now that federal law outweighs the 2-party state laws for inter-state communications.
For them, this just affirms "business as usual".
Even Apple's own site doesn't say that it OUTPUTS 1280x720. Read it carefully - the best it can output is 1024x576. This isn't a limitation of the vga connector - current vga connectors can handle 1920x1024 and 1920x1200. It's a limitation of the hardware. It's easier to downscale the intermediate frames in video than it is to render them full-size. This is why the iPad doesn't put out full-sized video - it simply doesn't have either the cpu or the internal bandwidth. It can't even handle flash, ffs. Compared to today's smartphones, the iPad is so 2006.
It's also the reason why you can get 50/1 compression. Now if you know ahead of time that you're downscaling and that you can throw away any delta blocks that either (a) contain less than a certain amount of change info, or (b) are less than a certain size, you just read the header for the intermediate frame, then pick ONLY those blocks that you need to decode. The rest don't have info you were going to throw away anyways.
An (somewhat) analogous situation would be a gzipped file containing many files, 1% of which are full images, 3% are files that contain information that you would need to reconstruct intermediate images between keyframes, and the other 96% contain information that if you bothered to decode it, it would be thrown away anyway because it concerns changes in a block too small to make a difference. So you only extract and decode 4% of the files.
UPscaling is a different matter, obviously, but to upscale, you're starting with even less data, so upscaling from, say, 400x300 is not a big deal. But downscaling, because of the nature of Iframes, you can cheat a heck of a lot and people won't notice. So no, the iPad simply doesn't have the guts to handle full resolution hd, just like it hasn't go the guts to handle flash. It's severely underpowered for a modern device, which is the only reason it has "such great battery life".