... and I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I just HAD to add this -
It keeps the distractions of the day away (and yes, bosses can be hugely distracting from productivity. Put it in writing and send it in an email. If you can't express it clearly and concisely, AND read it over a couple of times so that it's not just a "stream of (un)conscous ramblings" why should I have to (a) waste my time reading it, and (b) come off looking worse than I am because YOU interrupted my work with stupidity that could have been avoided if you had been doing YOUR job properly and as a result the code is sub-optimal or I introduced a bug.
The sad truth - management mostly can't manage, or we would already be doing this, as well as mostly telecommuting. We have the technology - if the porn industry can leverage it properly, why can't we? Are we all THAT STUPID?
(./me looks around at the majority of slashdot users who are still using Windows)
It's always about CYA and putting in the hours "on the clock" instead of when we're most productive.
Hint: You want better code, and more of it? FLEX-TIME, and I mean REAL flex-time. I find the most productive hours for me are after 10 at night - it's so much easier to get into an all-night coding session than when it's sunny outside and the body is crying "let me go enjoy LIFE!!!"
Seriously - let people code at the hours their body says are best for them, and develop better management techniques to measure, administer, and coordinate the work. One week, I might be "into it" in the evenings, another, days - you can't tell your brain when to be at its best.
All of which shows one thing: you can't even read your own examples properly - they back up the claim that java is an interpreted language.
applications are delivered in bytecode, which is compiled to native machine code just prior to execution
The RUNTIME does the compiling, same as the old visual basic or the original pascal interpreters. Your class files are not compiled code - they are pcode.
Pcode is not compiled code, it is source that has been "compiled" to pcode. Quoting what you admit are the dumbest sources around is underwhelming.
Get over it already. Java is not a compiled language - it is interpreted. When you use a 3rd-party product to output a stand-alone executable, you can not call it a Java program - it doesn't conform to the java spec.
Proof that god must love idiot because he made so many of them.
Definition of interpreted language from wikipedia:
In computer programming, an interpreted language is a programming language whose programs are not directly executed by the host cpu but rather executed (or said to be interpreted) by a software program known as an interpreter. The source code of the program is often translated to a form that is more convenient to interpret, which may be some form of machine language for a virtual machine.
Java is an interpreted language
The JIT is run EVERY time you run the program - while the program is being interpreted. A true compiler is run only once, and the stand-alone executable is run without the need for an interpreter. And why am I arguing with someone who can't even read?
Of course we punish people for commiting crimes they didn't know were committing! Haven't you heard? Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Actually, it's a fine excuse, and used all the time in court. It's hard to get a criminal conviction without mens rea - the criminal intent.
What happens with a transsexual who is also a believer?
Should the church consider it okay for her to marry a man, since she is legally a woman, even though genetically she is XY? Or is this a "same-sex wedding" in god's eyes?
I will assume they became a transsexual before they became a believer, as I doubt a (strong) believer would undergo 'gender reassignment'.
You would assume wrong in many cases. While people are born gender-incongruent, the environmental pressures to deny it, to suppress it, and to conform to "norms" are strong. Transsexuals don't see surgery as changing their sex so much as affirming their sex and correcting a mistake. For anyone to say to a transsexual woman "you're a man" is not just an insult, it was also never true.
Firstly, what the state says doesn't enter into it. Do they have XY? They are a man, end of story, regardless of what they do with surgery and hormones. As you said, God sees the hidden places and formed us in the womb. I also doubt he very much likes 'gender reassignment' for this reason.
... and we now know that the part of the brain that controls your gender identity is associated with a specific area of your brain, and that a gene in m2f transsexuals doesn't activate fully in the presence of testosterone, leading to less or no functional differentiation in that part of the brain from the default female configuration, and results in gender incongruity - and it starts in the womb in the 1st trimester. Transsexuals are born, not made, and it all has to do with prenatal hormones and the fetus' genetic makeup.
It literally is the case of "a woman's brain in a man's body."
You wouldn't like it. But worse, you wouldn't like being forced to conform to something you aren't. And yet christians are always telling other christians that they cannot get a sex change, it's wrong, they need to "pray it away". Of course, it can't be done - they were MADE that way. It would be like asking someone to pray to change their skin or eye color.
Here's something to think of. If you know 100 people, then you probably know at least 5 who either have struggled with, or are currently struggling with their gender, at least some of the time. If you're like most people, you've run into several thousand people over the course of your life, so you've certainly interacted with at least one male-to-female transsexual without even knowing it, and you accepted that they were a woman. You may have even felt a twinge of lust in your heart.
I would not marry a transsexual.
If she didn't tell you, how would you know?
Seriously... if she didn't tell you, how WOULD you know? Do you think you can tell just by looking at one? By talking to them? Transsexuals aren't all 6'2" with hands the size of basketballs and size 13 shoes.
And why should she tell you? Do you feel you need to disclose that you had your appendix taken out at 13, or that you had a broken bone set at 17, or that you had a cavity filled at 15, or laser eye surgery at 25, or a measles vaccination when you were a kid? Should she disclose to you that she was raped and beaten by the last man she was in love with when she told him? Or that her family rejects her because they put their religious dogma over any family ties? Or that they put up with years of being bullied in school?
This is actually a topic of debate - the whole "when do you tell" question. But what I am asking is, how would you know, and what would you do if, after you were married, you found out that the person you love had had a sex change? "What god has joined, let no man put asunder."
You may find it difficult to explain to building security just what you were doing under the receptionist's desk with a bolt cutter, three screwdrivers of various sizes and shapes, as well as a bag full of wireless cards. They may also find it a bit odd that you chose to field-strip several of their computers instead of just waiting patiently for the meeting you were supposed to attend.
Are you kidding? Cube farms are great places for doing all that, and more. And you only need one screwdriver.
And ignoring all the workarounds that others have mentioned for BIOS, the fact that there's often a hardcoded, manufacturer-specific default password for BIOS that lives alongside the user-specified BIOS password.
Oh, good. In that case I've got a skid full of old Thinkpads to sell you. Surely, since getting past BIOS passwords is trivial, they'll be worth a lot to you.
It IS trivial. IBM tells you how to do it. The instructions are in the field service manual. I found them last week while looking to see what types of replacement batteries I can use (turns out that pretty much anything that ends in 1220 is fine).
However, those thinkpads probably aren't even worth the shipping charges. The only reason I want to boot this one up is because it's handy to run a copy of dbase5 for dos on it when I feel nostalgic.
Maybe you missed the part with the wire cage. You need some bigger equipment here to get into the case. Also you wont ever plug in an ethernet card in while the system is running. Turn a system off and you got a sysadmin there faster than you can unpack your tools. Mouse and keyboard are connected via PS/2. Printer is connected via Ethernet.
No, I didn't. Maybe you missed the part with the wire cutters.
Also, you CAN sove an ethernet card into a PCI slot while the system is running. Same as you can with a hard drive. YMMV, but guess what - the onboard controller initializes the device without the need of the system bios. People do this all the time with flaky hard drives that they NEED to get data off of but that are so flaky that if they are present at boot-up, they prevent the system from booting.
And the printer being on the ethernet gives yet another point of attack. Snip, snip, splice splice.
Also tampering with a screwdriver on a laptop takes more time than you have in an office. Walking away with it might work, but wont go unnoticed.
Less than a minute. Or have you not opened up a laptop in the last few years? They're a lot easier to work on than desktops when it comes to things like swapping hard drives, installing ram, or changing the wireless card.
Also, walking away with a laptop is easy - just bring in a similar make and model dead laptop, then complain - "My laptop is dead." They'll check it out, realize it really is dead, and there won't be a laptop officially missing for a day or two. And at that point, who did the swap... you, or someone else?
Also if you intend to take pictures with your cellphone it might be hard to do that because phones with cameras are in a box at the entrance to the building.
So we go old-school - a FILM camera, just for that Kodak moment.
You cannot depend on technology to replace trust in the people around you. If you can't trust them, they shouldn't be working there in the first place, and you have bigger problems than you realize.
The JIT is a runtime, same as any other runtime. It INTERPRETS the code - in this case class files. Get over it already.
and any time you state that Java is not compiled, and thus can not be optimized
There's a difference between optimizing for the runtime, and optimizing machine code. Go get an education, and a couple of decades of experience, and you'll know the difference. Then again, you may be incapable of learning. However, if you need MORE proof, look at the people who are working on chips to directly run java, without the need for a JVM to interpret the class files.
It's trivial to re-enable a serial port that has been disabled in the bios. You can use debug to write to the bios data area under windows, or you can write a small program to do it for you. I used to reassign serial ports on the fly that way - 4 ports and 2 interrupts is not a good situation, but 4 ports and 1 shared interrupt IS good.
Your "bios blocked with an unremovable admin password" is also bs - while you sometimes have to open the cover and short out a couple of pins for a few seconds, sometimes it's possible to do it entirely in software as well - but you miss the point - the bios is read at startup, but I can monkey with it as much as I want afterwards.
also, serial cards are cheap. So are ethernet cards. So plug all the ports you want with epoxy, and people will still get the data out. Or they can just take a picture with their cell phone.
The keyboard and mouse are connected to the USB ports on the back of the case, inside the wire cage where users can't get at them. If it's a notebook computer then they're built in and don't need to plug in anywhere. People have thought of this kind of thing before, you know. It's not a new concept that just popped up today on Slashdot.
... and a pair of wire cutters fixes that. snip, splice, done. Or just take the keyboard apart and the wires are nicely exposed (if you've ever tried to wash a keyboard, you've taken it apart to see how munged up you ended up making it, so you know the wiring is dead simple where it connects).
A notebook - even if you plug all the usb AND the card reader, my mini philips screwdriver will have the hd out in seconds - it's a LOT easier to remove and replace than a desktop. I'll also reconnect the wireless (it's just one wire, after all, and nowadays even if you rip it out it's field-serviceable and replacements are cheap). Pop the hd into the second drive bay on my laptop, make an image of it with dd, and I'm good:-)
If someone has physical access, you cannot stop them from getting the data if they really want it.
I never said it couldn't be optimized. However, when the JIT is doing this, and caching the resulting native instructions, it is still acting as an interpreter - because Java is not a compiled language, it's interpreted at runtime. That's the basis of its' security model. The security manager has to verify not only that the class file is valid, that the opcodes that are present in the class file are valid opcodes, but also that they are valid IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT, that there is one and only one execution path that can result from that particular sequence of opcodes (fully deterministic).
The only "massively ignorant statements" were from you. Java's security model is entirely dependent on code NOT being in final compiled to native machine code form when the runtime gets it, but in pcode that it can verify. The verifier is designed and written once - for the pcode that is being presented to the virtual machine. Doing all this means that, at the absolute best, any java application will have more overhead than one that is truly compiled once and then distributed as a binary - but which then loses the ability to verify the code, and as such, is obviously no longer a Java application, since it no longer conforms to the specification (and Oracle/Sun will sue you if you try to call it a Java app).
Again - your class file is translated to pcode, an intermediate representation between your source and any final output compiled to native code that the JIT emits. The original idea was that a custom cpu would be made that COULD run the pcode natively, in which case it could be called compiled, but that idea was abandoned early on when the set-top box market hat Java was originally targeted at collapsed. The terminology stuck, unfortunately.
Re:your first sentence is technically flawed
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Ubuntu on a Dime
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You're the one who said "Lastly, Novell, and by association all versions of SuSe, lost my support when they made deals with the devil."
I merely pointed out your hypocrisy by asking you what cpu and motherboard you ran, since it couldn't be from intel or amd, or have chipsets from either one, since they also do business with Microsoft (It's called WinTel for a reason) and that Intel is a large contributer to the linux kernel.
You then went off on a tangent trying to justify your choice over opensuse, rather than admit that you had inappropriately slandered Novell.
That said, I don't think Adam nor Eve knew what they did was wrong or sinful.
And this is one of the reasons I finally rejected christianity - when man's laws are both more compassionate, more just, and more reasonable than gods, god can take a long walk off a short peer. We do not condemn people for doing things they didn't know were wrong. You didn't know the mushrooms were poisonous, we don't throw you in jail for murder. You didn't know that the brakes would fail, we don't hold you responsible for killing someone with your Toyota. You didn't know that the person was allergic to peanut butter, we don't charge you with assault with a deadly weapon for spreading their jam with the same knife.
Or, to paraphrase you, it doesn't change that an outside analysis shows that god is unjust, imperfect, a lousy father and a miserable pr*ck.
But let's look at another question. Another slashdotter was unable (actually, refused, after I answered EVERY prior objection) to answer this one:
What happens with a transsexual who is also a believer?
Should the church consider it okay for her to marry a man, since she is legally a woman, even though genetically she is XY? Or is this a "same-sex wedding" in god's eyes?
Or should she only be allowed to marry a woman, since she is genetically XY? It might "look" like a lesbian relationship, but god knows better (he sees the hidden places and all that)?
And no, male-to-female transsexuals are not eunuchs - they can have (multiple) orgasms, same as any other woman, so no "they can't marry either one, because they are eunuchs".
Or to put it on a personal basis - would YOU marry a transsexual (either male-to-female or female-to-male)? If not, why not? If so, why so.
"I sense the force has a strong hold on this one, master!"
When will you slashtards realize that OS X is way less locked down than windows?
I see the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field claims another victim. Call me when I can buy a copy and install it on the hardware of my choice without Apple claiming I'm violating their license, even though I bought a full retail copy off the shelf.
Apple OSX is even more locked in than Microsoft Windows. Get over it, or I'll throw another chair at you!
.if you're that worried, don't have USB ports or fill them with epoxy and/or physically cut the connections.
It must suck to be stuck using that old dot-matix printer hanging off the Centronix parallel port. And that serial mouse - a null-modem cable will let me suck the data out of your box just fine. That old-style keyboard plug? Hate to have to buy a new keyboard... and not be able to plug it in.
My bad. The many announcements that 20xx is the Year of the Linux Desktop just sort of run together anymore.
Ignore them, Unfortunately, it will never happen, for the simple reason that the average user is lazy, brain-dead, and thinks Windows is the computer.
And her boss is even worse.
It's not even a question of there being "too much choice". The vast majority don't care. They're used to crap. Take it away from them and they're lost. They'd rather click through 10 screens to hit-or-miss change some setting rather than type a command. That's "too complicated."
And don't believe that devs are any different. The majority of users on slashdot run windows.
People looking for an alternative already have one - another proprietary system, even MORE locked-in.
The only thing that will happen is that linux will continue to make inroads where the consumer doesn't see it as an operating system, or just doesn't see it - smart phones, servers, data appliances, controllers, etc. The desktop - the desktop is lost. People aren't goingto switch from the "free" copy of windows that came with their computer.
You'll probably have to anyway - if the drive is one of those Maxtorgates (craptastic Seagate drives made in the former Maxtor factory - the reason Maxtor went bankrupt) you'll be sending it back. Again. And again. And again. And don't think buying two to make a RAID1 is a good idea. I bought two. Both defective within 24 hours. RMAd them, bought 2 more from a different place, different batch - same story. 14 drives so far, out of those first 2. I've spent enough in shipping back returns to buy another drive.
Seagate Technology is selling a device that enables movies stored on hard drives to be played on television sets for $130.
I can buy an LG Blu-ray player that plays back movies stored on external hard drives and usb keys for a buck less. Seagate must be stocking up on K-Y jelly.
Slashdot Mirror
But I can just see the next lawsuit when they claim the MRI or the CAT scan made them unable to work ...and turned them into brain-eating zombies.
Let the "You just RickRolled me you insensitive b*tch" contest begin!
It keeps the distractions of the day away (and yes, bosses can be hugely distracting from productivity. Put it in writing and send it in an email. If you can't express it clearly and concisely, AND read it over a couple of times so that it's not just a "stream of (un)conscous ramblings" why should I have to (a) waste my time reading it, and (b) come off looking worse than I am because YOU interrupted my work with stupidity that could have been avoided if you had been doing YOUR job properly and as a result the code is sub-optimal or I introduced a bug.
The sad truth - management mostly can't manage, or we would already be doing this, as well as mostly telecommuting. We have the technology - if the porn industry can leverage it properly, why can't we? Are we all THAT STUPID?
(./me looks around at the majority of slashdot users who are still using Windows)
I guess it's a rhetorical question.
It's always about CYA and putting in the hours "on the clock" instead of when we're most productive.
Hint: You want better code, and more of it? FLEX-TIME, and I mean REAL flex-time. I find the most productive hours for me are after 10 at night - it's so much easier to get into an all-night coding session than when it's sunny outside and the body is crying "let me go enjoy LIFE!!!"
Seriously - let people code at the hours their body says are best for them, and develop better management techniques to measure, administer, and coordinate the work. One week, I might be "into it" in the evenings, another, days - you can't tell your brain when to be at its best.
The RUNTIME does the compiling, same as the old visual basic or the original pascal interpreters. Your class files are not compiled code - they are pcode.
Pcode is not compiled code, it is source that has been "compiled" to pcode. Quoting what you admit are the dumbest sources around is underwhelming.
Get over it already. Java is not a compiled language - it is interpreted. When you use a 3rd-party product to output a stand-alone executable, you can not call it a Java program - it doesn't conform to the java spec.
Proof that god must love idiot because he made so many of them.
Definition of interpreted language from wikipedia:
Java is an interpreted language
The JIT is run EVERY time you run the program - while the program is being interpreted. A true compiler is run only once, and the stand-alone executable is run without the need for an interpreter. And why am I arguing with someone who can't even read?
Actually, it's a fine excuse, and used all the time in court. It's hard to get a criminal conviction without mens rea - the criminal intent.
You would assume wrong in many cases. While people are born gender-incongruent, the environmental pressures to deny it, to suppress it, and to conform to "norms" are strong. Transsexuals don't see surgery as changing their sex so much as affirming their sex and correcting a mistake. For anyone to say to a transsexual woman "you're a man" is not just an insult, it was also never true.
It literally is the case of "a woman's brain in a man's body."
You wouldn't like it. But worse, you wouldn't like being forced to conform to something you aren't. And yet christians are always telling other christians that they cannot get a sex change, it's wrong, they need to "pray it away". Of course, it can't be done - they were MADE that way. It would be like asking someone to pray to change their skin or eye color.
Here's something to think of. If you know 100 people, then you probably know at least 5 who either have struggled with, or are currently struggling with their gender, at least some of the time. If you're like most people, you've run into several thousand people over the course of your life, so you've certainly interacted with at least one male-to-female transsexual without even knowing it, and you accepted that they were a woman. You may have even felt a twinge of lust in your heart.
If she didn't tell you, how would you know?
Seriously ... if she didn't tell you, how WOULD you know? Do you think you can tell just by looking at one? By talking to them? Transsexuals aren't all 6'2" with hands the size of basketballs and size 13 shoes.
And why should she tell you? Do you feel you need to disclose that you had your appendix taken out at 13, or that you had a broken bone set at 17, or that you had a cavity filled at 15, or laser eye surgery at 25, or a measles vaccination when you were a kid? Should she disclose to you that she was raped and beaten by the last man she was in love with when she told him? Or that her family rejects her because they put their religious dogma over any family ties? Or that they put up with years of being bullied in school?
This is actually a topic of debate - the whole "when do you tell" question. But what I am asking is, how would you know, and what would you do if, after you were married, you found out that the person you love had had a sex change? "What god has joined, let no man put asunder."
Are you kidding? Cube farms are great places for doing all that, and more. And you only need one screwdriver.
It IS trivial. IBM tells you how to do it. The instructions are in the field service manual. I found them last week while looking to see what types of replacement batteries I can use (turns out that pretty much anything that ends in 1220 is fine).
However, those thinkpads probably aren't even worth the shipping charges. The only reason I want to boot this one up is because it's handy to run a copy of dbase5 for dos on it when I feel nostalgic.
There's a difference between optimizing for the runtime, and optimizing machine code. Go get an education, and a couple of decades of experience, and you'll know the difference. Then again, you may be incapable of learning. However, if you need MORE proof, look at the people who are working on chips to directly run java, without the need for a JVM to interpret the class files.
Really. Just grow up.
It's trivial to re-enable a serial port that has been disabled in the bios. You can use debug to write to the bios data area under windows, or you can write a small program to do it for you. I used to reassign serial ports on the fly that way - 4 ports and 2 interrupts is not a good situation, but 4 ports and 1 shared interrupt IS good.
Your "bios blocked with an unremovable admin password" is also bs - while you sometimes have to open the cover and short out a couple of pins for a few seconds, sometimes it's possible to do it entirely in software as well - but you miss the point - the bios is read at startup, but I can monkey with it as much as I want afterwards.
also, serial cards are cheap. So are ethernet cards. So plug all the ports you want with epoxy, and people will still get the data out. Or they can just take a picture with their cell phone.
A notebook - even if you plug all the usb AND the card reader, my mini philips screwdriver will have the hd out in seconds - it's a LOT easier to remove and replace than a desktop. I'll also reconnect the wireless (it's just one wire, after all, and nowadays even if you rip it out it's field-serviceable and replacements are cheap). Pop the hd into the second drive bay on my laptop, make an image of it with dd, and I'm good :-)
If someone has physical access, you cannot stop them from getting the data if they really want it.
s/promoted/porn/gi;
People really would be "all a-twitter about twitter."
@pr0n1: "Tweet me, honeybuns!"
@pr0n1: ""(Cheesy music)"
@pr0n1: "Oh, that feels SOOOO good."
@pr0n2: "who's your daddy NOW, b*tch?"
@pronAdserver "K-Y lube - up close and personal!"
I never said it couldn't be optimized. However, when the JIT is doing this, and caching the resulting native instructions, it is still acting as an interpreter - because Java is not a compiled language, it's interpreted at runtime. That's the basis of its' security model. The security manager has to verify not only that the class file is valid, that the opcodes that are present in the class file are valid opcodes, but also that they are valid IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT, that there is one and only one execution path that can result from that particular sequence of opcodes (fully deterministic).
The only "massively ignorant statements" were from you. Java's security model is entirely dependent on code NOT being in final compiled to native machine code form when the runtime gets it, but in pcode that it can verify. The verifier is designed and written once - for the pcode that is being presented to the virtual machine. Doing all this means that, at the absolute best, any java application will have more overhead than one that is truly compiled once and then distributed as a binary - but which then loses the ability to verify the code, and as such, is obviously no longer a Java application, since it no longer conforms to the specification (and Oracle/Sun will sue you if you try to call it a Java app).
Again - your class file is translated to pcode, an intermediate representation between your source and any final output compiled to native code that the JIT emits. The original idea was that a custom cpu would be made that COULD run the pcode natively, in which case it could be called compiled, but that idea was abandoned early on when the set-top box market hat Java was originally targeted at collapsed. The terminology stuck, unfortunately.
You're the one who said "Lastly, Novell, and by association all versions of SuSe, lost my support when they made deals with the devil."
I merely pointed out your hypocrisy by asking you what cpu and motherboard you ran, since it couldn't be from intel or amd, or have chipsets from either one, since they also do business with Microsoft (It's called WinTel for a reason) and that Intel is a large contributer to the linux kernel.
You then went off on a tangent trying to justify your choice over opensuse, rather than admit that you had inappropriately slandered Novell.
And this is one of the reasons I finally rejected christianity - when man's laws are both more compassionate, more just, and more reasonable than gods, god can take a long walk off a short peer. We do not condemn people for doing things they didn't know were wrong. You didn't know the mushrooms were poisonous, we don't throw you in jail for murder. You didn't know that the brakes would fail, we don't hold you responsible for killing someone with your Toyota. You didn't know that the person was allergic to peanut butter, we don't charge you with assault with a deadly weapon for spreading their jam with the same knife.
Or, to paraphrase you, it doesn't change that an outside analysis shows that god is unjust, imperfect, a lousy father and a miserable pr*ck.
But let's look at another question. Another slashdotter was unable (actually, refused, after I answered EVERY prior objection) to answer this one:
What happens with a transsexual who is also a believer?
Should the church consider it okay for her to marry a man, since she is legally a woman, even though genetically she is XY? Or is this a "same-sex wedding" in god's eyes?
Or should she only be allowed to marry a woman, since she is genetically XY? It might "look" like a lesbian relationship, but god knows better (he sees the hidden places and all that)?
And no, male-to-female transsexuals are not eunuchs - they can have (multiple) orgasms, same as any other woman, so no "they can't marry either one, because they are eunuchs".
Or to put it on a personal basis - would YOU marry a transsexual (either male-to-female or female-to-male)? If not, why not? If so, why so.
Just-In-Time compilation means just that - it interprets the class file. So JITs are also interpreters.
Any time you're dealing with a class file, it's NOT compiled code - it's pcode.
"I sense the force has a strong hold on this one, master!"
I see the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field claims another victim. Call me when I can buy a copy and install it on the hardware of my choice without Apple claiming I'm violating their license, even though I bought a full retail copy off the shelf.
Apple OSX is even more locked in than Microsoft Windows. Get over it, or I'll throw another chair at you!
It must suck to be stuck using that old dot-matix printer hanging off the Centronix parallel port. And that serial mouse - a null-modem cable will let me suck the data out of your box just fine. That old-style keyboard plug? Hate to have to buy a new keyboard ... and not be able to plug it in.
Don't worry, you're still a dummy, since you don't know that "the year of linux on the desktop" means more than just you.
Ignore them, Unfortunately, it will never happen, for the simple reason that the average user is lazy, brain-dead, and thinks Windows is the computer.
And her boss is even worse.
It's not even a question of there being "too much choice". The vast majority don't care. They're used to crap. Take it away from them and they're lost. They'd rather click through 10 screens to hit-or-miss change some setting rather than type a command. That's "too complicated."
And don't believe that devs are any different. The majority of users on slashdot run windows.
People looking for an alternative already have one - another proprietary system, even MORE locked-in.
The only thing that will happen is that linux will continue to make inroads where the consumer doesn't see it as an operating system, or just doesn't see it - smart phones, servers, data appliances, controllers, etc. The desktop - the desktop is lost. People aren't goingto switch from the "free" copy of windows that came with their computer.
Or plug it in before booting ... since it detects drives as they are plugged in and unplugged.
Or boot linux off it, and load Windows in a vm if you really really need windows.
And $100 is expensive.
But there's more:
I can buy an LG Blu-ray player that plays back movies stored on external hard drives and usb keys for a buck less. Seagate must be stocking up on K-Y jelly.
If the end result is a Java class file, then it is NOT compiled code, it is byte code. Get over it. It needs further translation before it can be run.