It's true as long as your application stays within the domain it was intended to run in. There are version issues : For example using classes introduced in 1.4 obviously breaks previous JRE's. More insidious is when the behavior of objects changes between versions, although it is almost (ALMOST!) due to a developer misusing and object and depending on non standard behavior from it.
However, in my experience the promise of write once/run anywhere holds pretty true. Until you start getting on different types of computer devices. The differences between the various smart phone platforms, for example, means that write once/run anywhere in the microedition world is a complete dream. The code is still incredibly easily ported from one phone to another, but the gotchas and differences in form factor, input method, etc.. are really hard to overcome without platform dependent tweaks and the like.
On the desktop side, with packages like SWT Java runs very reliably across platforms (and fast!). Just look at Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) on the various platforms it runs on. Same code, great results on every platform I've tried it on.
A competitive advantage is all about value. Can you produce a better product, and for how much? The reason that Japenese did so well in the auto markets is that they not only produced BETTER cars, but did it for less.
In this case India is showing that they have a competitive advantage in programming. They can produce code at the required level and do it for FAR less than the American programmer.
It is not, however, a race to the bottom. The Indian salary will not remain static. As the number of jobs and the complexity of the problems increase (remember, workers are a market just like anything else) the salary will begin to rise. As the rest of the economy begins to feel the benefits of this economic boon in India, more and more IT workers will begin to do other things. Eventually the global market will achieve Equilibrium and the competitive advantage will close.
We talk about how these theories are untested, well we've seen the results of this same phenemenon in auto manufacturing. After all, remember all of those car building jobs we 'lost' two decades ago? Well, they're coming back in droves. The Japanese auto makers are now turning to American labor to build those same cars, as the Japanese workers salary has now surpassed the American auto workers salary.. factor in the cost of shipping those cars across the ocean and American labor makes a ton of sense for that field.
Of course, you almost never hear about that outside of economic nerd circles.. I guess we all just like to whine.. A LOT.
The fact that Titanic remains the highest grossing film in history would seem to corroborate that.
Just because YOU don't like a movie (and hell, I don't like it either) doesn't mean it's not a great movie.. There are a LOT of people that rank Titanic as the best movie they've ever seen after all.
"Our customers that are buying [UNIX] from us today, we generally don't have a problem with," McBride said. "We have some former customers that have left that are running on Linux, and they are in the crosshairs."
So basically they are targetting former customers? Are they seriously trying to keep their few remaining licensees in line with these kind of scare tactics? It seems like they are saying 'stay with us or we'll sue'.
However, this has been brought up with our lawyers in response to SCO. According to our counsel, to really have any chance of winning we'd need to be able to show that SCO has direct knowledge that their claims are false. At this point, SCO is attempting to assert rights and claims that it BELEIVES it has (apparently). As such, until the courts decide one way or the other they can pretty much get away with this.
What would be gold would be a company memo, high ranking employee, or anything that could clearly show that this is all made up or based on very thin evidence.... which is pretty unlikely to turn up.
I have some experience in this. The answer is that the 'talk of drugs' has to be evidence of drug posession or trafficking. The general rule, if they find something on your machine that could be used as material (key word) evidence in court they can keep the machine for as long as there is a case in which it could be used (otherwise they have 180 days I beleive).
Contrary to what most of the ill-informed Slashdotters are posting here, there are a variety of property rights that you have in cases like these. While I've never had machines siezed, I have two very good friends that are District Attorneys. I've worked with them as technical consult on a few computer crime cases. In 3 of the 5 cases (2 of which involved the feds) the machines where back in their owners hands in less than 4 weeks. These where all pretty clear cut cases that involved those machines being hacked and used for illegal purposes.
One thing to note, the warrants generally apply to searches involving very specific goals. They actually can't wantonly search every file on your computer (in theory anyways) looking to turn up evidence of some other crime. This is actually a pretty entertaining legal fight...
For those keeping score, the other 2 cases where clear (and I mean CRYSTAL clear) violations of law. 1 resulted in a plea bargain, and the other is awaiting trial. So from MY experience (take it for what it's worth), the experience is not nearly as draconian as your seeing here. While it does suck to have your equipment taken (i'm assuming), these people really don't want to sit on it for years. They want to do there job, gather evidence, and move on with life.
***beginning rant**** As with most things, the government is neither as onerous or interested in you as popular culture wants us to beleive. it's really a far to disparate collection of little agencies to effectively do that. It CAN really screw people, but for the most part people really do get treated fairly. My perception of government has really changed as I've become more and more involved with various portions of it. But I guess fear mongering is really more entertaining at the end of the day. *sighs* ****/end rant*****
I often wonder, however, if those ads are effective only in the context of Google (or any search engine really). After all, those ads look more like search results than anything else. Sure they have a slightly different look, but more than once I've clicked on an ad thinking it was a search result.. It just 'flows that way'.
Putting those ads on any other site likely lowers their effectiveness greatly. For example, putting a text ad in the corner of Slashdots page probably does very little. Now putting that same ad in line with the Slashdot STORIES, with a similiar (albeit slightly different) look would probably be quit effective...
He's more than a kernel hacker, he's an open source leader. Part of his role in the community is to set direction, identify problem areas, and do all of those other things that leaders do.
By Linus coming out and focusing on the desktop (even if just in words) he's effectively pointing the collective effort of the open source community more and more to that end.
If you could do all of that, and deliver a package with the neccesary weight, size, and other various launch/flight/deployment constraints.. then you would be (by far) the best robot designer on the planet. Ohh ya, and be able to do all of those things reliably on an alien world millions of miles away.
These are smart people (I've had the privilige of working with two of them), that are well aware of all of those possibilities. The realities of design have to come into play at some point, and that's how these things really come about.
They've really stumbled onto something interesting. The martian soil in this area appears to have a really strange consistency... they've talked about it before, it looks like mud...
I hope it doesn't get stuck, it'd suck to have to call a tow truck (or a martian redneck with a winch) to get it out:)
This is not forced confiscation, it's voluntary. There is definitely a lot threats being thrown around "Give us the CD's or we'll bring the police next time", but it's a far leap from RIAA 'commandos' busting in on these guys with guns blazing. It's simply not that.
Hell, I would argue that the repo-man is doing something far more malicious here and that's been going on for years (theres even a TV show about it).
What fantastic leap of logic are you using here? If the RIAA decides to do random home inspections, you only need to tell them 'NO' and 'get off of my property' and they are more or less legally obligated to 'go away'.
Your falling into the trap of thinking that wealth is finite, or at least constrained at its current levels. This is simply not true. The amount of wealth in the world can (and does) grow. In terms of overall 'wealth' (see a good economics text for a description of what exactly wealth is:) ) there is many many times more wealth today than just 100 years ago. The same will likely hold true moving forward (there is likely some limit to how far this can grow, but no economists can even begin to agree on what that limit is).
The point of this is that as India becomes more wealthy, they will begin to contribute more and more in terms of innovation and products back into the overall economy. This will do two very important things. 1) Create new markets for companies (including those in the US). After all, the workers in India will have more wealth and will begin buying more products. 2)Create demand for more services within India itself (once again, more wealth to spread around) which will drive the costs of employment up towards U.S. levels. In the end, the amount of overall wealth has increased, and the amount of wealth within the United States is at worst basically unaffected and more likely actually increased because of the new markets that have been opened up.
There are ways to defeat this. Closed trade policies are the quickest. By adopting protectionist policies the U.S. can effectively isolate itself from these new markets, likewise India could do the same in an effort to protect it's new found wealth. The governments role SHOULD be to protect equal OPPORTUNITIES for trade between India and the U.S. (thus encouraging growth in both countries), rather than attempting to protect the RESULTS of that trade.
This is one case where everyone can hope to win, rather than having exactly 1 winner and a bunch of losers.
They could you explain to me why American auto industry growth has been extremely high over the last 5 years. Numerous new automotive plants have been opened throughout the country.
It turns out that it's cheaper for Honda/Toyota/etc.. to simply build the cars over here rather than import them.
We've had some bad moments, but 'most morally reprehensible' is incredibly ignorant. The ONE example you could come up with actually shows how incredibly good our system of government is (as is the oil example cited in the article above). Through a series of checks and balances these crazy ideas never saw the light of day. Just because a few people in goverment planned it, the proof is in action and both of these cases resulted in neither.
I can come up with thousands of instances of my government doing truly good works across the globe. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Have we had some really bad moments? You bet.. hell we've had some true monsters run this country for brief periods (Lyndon Johnson most recently). Yet, overall, our record is actually pretty damn good. We do look out for our own best interests most of the time (as does your country, whichever that is), but after all that is the job of government.
It's to bad that hating my country is so fashionable right now. We're actually a pretty good bunch. But people always need an enemy, and I guess we'll be it for awhile.
I've lived in Europe (Aviano Italy to be exact), and in that part of the world I saw the same driving habits, distractions, and issues that we face here. I've travelled throughout Europe, and it seemed to me like it was simply more of the same.
The issue isn't so much with the law, after all you really shouldn't be checking e-mail while driving. The issue (if you would pay one lick of attention) has everything to do with the overly broad nature of it. With the fact that I can't use a laptop as a passenger, my GPS system (which is a god-send for those of us dealing with huge traffic problems) would be worthless in California, or any number of USEFUL driving aids are now basically illegal under this law.
The fundamental idea is a sound one, and I've seen very few people argue against it. We don't want distracted drivers after all. But the end result is more far reaching than I think any rationale person would find reasonable. That's the issue..
Instead of bashing the US (I realize how fashionable that is right now), how about pulling your head our of your arse and actually try some reading comprehension.
Those are the MAXIMUM penalties. Maximums, as a general rule, are quite stiff. They generally involve multiple offenses and come only after multiple convictions.
She won't be facing anything remotely CLOSE to those penalties. Probably something in the range of a few hundred dollars and short unsupervised probation. If she continues to violate the law, the penalties will increase.
Before you post some apparently 'insightful' gibberish about how "this country is screwed up beyond help", at least take the time to understand the legal system that it uses.
Think about this, while spam is a minor annoyance for you.. for some of us it is EXPENSIVE. As part of my job I maintain my companies customer support software. We provide e-mail support, and are currently running into HUGE problems with spam. For every 10 legitimate support requests we receive, we probably receive an additional 4 or 5 spam e-mails. For us 1 false positive is simply not tolerable, so our spam filtering can't be very aggressive.
I have a few methods of dealing with this (challenge response on messages marked as spam by our filters is the most effective), but it's taken a lot of time (and therefore $$$) and time to resolve it. In the end this makes our products more expensive, and takes me away from adding new product features and providing better support for our customers.
Steal - To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
The owner of a copyright is in effect the owner of that property. They get to grant the right or permission for someone to own a copy of that particular work. If you take that work without permission or right, you are stealing.
Thief - One who steals, especially by stealth.
If someone steals, then they are a thief. If you download something that you don't have right or permission to download then you are stealing and thus are a thief.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true as long as your application stays within the domain it was intended to run in. There are version issues : For example using classes introduced in 1.4 obviously breaks previous JRE's. More insidious is when the behavior of objects changes between versions, although it is almost (ALMOST!) due to a developer misusing and object and depending on non standard behavior from it.
However, in my experience the promise of write once/run anywhere holds pretty true. Until you start getting on different types of computer devices. The differences between the various smart phone platforms, for example, means that write once/run anywhere in the microedition world is a complete dream. The code is still incredibly easily ported from one phone to another, but the gotchas and differences in form factor, input method, etc.. are really hard to overcome without platform dependent tweaks and the like.
On the desktop side, with packages like SWT Java runs very reliably across platforms (and fast!). Just look at Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) on the various platforms it runs on. Same code, great results on every platform I've tried it on.
A competitive advantage is all about value. Can you produce a better product, and for how much? The reason that Japenese did so well in the auto markets is that they not only produced BETTER cars, but did it for less.
In this case India is showing that they have a competitive advantage in programming. They can produce code at the required level and do it for FAR less than the American programmer.
It is not, however, a race to the bottom. The Indian salary will not remain static. As the number of jobs and the complexity of the problems increase (remember, workers are a market just like anything else) the salary will begin to rise. As the rest of the economy begins to feel the benefits of this economic boon in India, more and more IT workers will begin to do other things. Eventually the global market will achieve Equilibrium and the competitive advantage will close.
We talk about how these theories are untested, well we've seen the results of this same phenemenon in auto manufacturing. After all, remember all of those car building jobs we 'lost' two decades ago? Well, they're coming back in droves. The Japanese auto makers are now turning to American labor to build those same cars, as the Japanese workers salary has now surpassed the American auto workers salary.. factor in the cost of shipping those cars across the ocean and American labor makes a ton of sense for that field.
Of course, you almost never hear about that outside of economic nerd circles.. I guess we all just like to whine.. A LOT.
Funny, but the median income in the United States has risen quite a bit over the last 50 years (even after taking inflation into account).
The rich ARE getting richer, true. The gap bewteen the richest and the poorest is growing..true.
Yet the poor are getting richer too.. and oh ya, the middle class are SIGNIFICANTLY better off than just two decades ago.
The fact that Titanic remains the highest grossing film in history would seem to corroborate that.
Just because YOU don't like a movie (and hell, I don't like it either) doesn't mean it's not a great movie.. There are a LOT of people that rank Titanic as the best movie they've ever seen after all.
Ever seen 'Platoon'?
So basically they are targetting former customers? Are they seriously trying to keep their few remaining licensees in line with these kind of scare tactics? It seems like they are saying 'stay with us or we'll sue'.
Unbeleivable.
IANAL:)
However, this has been brought up with our lawyers in response to SCO. According to our counsel, to really have any chance of winning we'd need to be able to show that SCO has direct knowledge that their claims are false. At this point, SCO is attempting to assert rights and claims that it BELEIVES it has (apparently). As such, until the courts decide one way or the other they can pretty much get away with this.
What would be gold would be a company memo, high ranking employee, or anything that could clearly show that this is all made up or based on very thin evidence.... which is pretty unlikely to turn up.
The spirit of what he's saying is absolutely correct, simply substitute 'static' with 'strong' and the point still holds.
Jeez, it's good to issue a correction, but the error was in name only, the concept he was trying to express is still perfectly valid.
I have some experience in this. The answer is that the 'talk of drugs' has to be evidence of drug posession or trafficking. The general rule, if they find something on your machine that could be used as material (key word) evidence in court they can keep the machine for as long as there is a case in which it could be used (otherwise they have 180 days I beleive).
Contrary to what most of the ill-informed Slashdotters are posting here, there are a variety of property rights that you have in cases like these. While I've never had machines siezed, I have two very good friends that are District Attorneys. I've worked with them as technical consult on a few computer crime cases. In 3 of the 5 cases (2 of which involved the feds) the machines where back in their owners hands in less than 4 weeks. These where all pretty clear cut cases that involved those machines being hacked and used for illegal purposes.
One thing to note, the warrants generally apply to searches involving very specific goals. They actually can't wantonly search every file on your computer (in theory anyways) looking to turn up evidence of some other crime. This is actually a pretty entertaining legal fight...
For those keeping score, the other 2 cases where clear (and I mean CRYSTAL clear) violations of law. 1 resulted in a plea bargain, and the other is awaiting trial. So from MY experience (take it for what it's worth), the experience is not nearly as draconian as your seeing here. While it does suck to have your equipment taken (i'm assuming), these people really don't want to sit on it for years. They want to do there job, gather evidence, and move on with life.
***beginning rant****
As with most things, the government is neither as onerous or interested in you as popular culture wants us to beleive. it's really a far to disparate collection of little agencies to effectively do that. It CAN really screw people, but for the most part people really do get treated fairly. My perception of government has really changed as I've become more and more involved with various portions of it. But I guess fear mongering is really more entertaining at the end of the day. *sighs*
****/end rant*****
I often wonder, however, if those ads are effective only in the context of Google (or any search engine really). After all, those ads look more like search results than anything else. Sure they have a slightly different look, but more than once I've clicked on an ad thinking it was a search result.. It just 'flows that way'.
Putting those ads on any other site likely lowers their effectiveness greatly. For example, putting a text ad in the corner of Slashdots page probably does very little. Now putting that same ad in line with the Slashdot STORIES, with a similiar (albeit slightly different) look would probably be quit effective...
He's more than a kernel hacker, he's an open source leader. Part of his role in the community is to set direction, identify problem areas, and do all of those other things that leaders do.
By Linus coming out and focusing on the desktop (even if just in words) he's effectively pointing the collective effort of the open source community more and more to that end.
Wow, a monday morning robot designer..
If you could do all of that, and deliver a package with the neccesary weight, size, and other various launch/flight/deployment constraints.. then you would be (by far) the best robot designer on the planet. Ohh ya, and be able to do all of those things reliably on an alien world millions of miles away.
These are smart people (I've had the privilige of working with two of them), that are well aware of all of those possibilities. The realities of design have to come into play at some point, and that's how these things really come about.
They've really stumbled onto something interesting. The martian soil in this area appears to have a really strange consistency... they've talked about it before, it looks like mud...
I hope it doesn't get stuck, it'd suck to have to call a tow truck (or a martian redneck with a winch) to get it out:)
This is not forced confiscation, it's voluntary. There is definitely a lot threats being thrown around "Give us the CD's or we'll bring the police next time", but it's a far leap from RIAA 'commandos' busting in on these guys with guns blazing. It's simply not that.
Hell, I would argue that the repo-man is doing something far more malicious here and that's been going on for years (theres even a TV show about it).
No... if they had something that was YOURS then it would be legal. This is not unlike the Repo man who takes a car that no longer belongs to you.
What fantastic leap of logic are you using here? If the RIAA decides to do random home inspections, you only need to tell them 'NO' and 'get off of my property' and they are more or less legally obligated to 'go away'.
Lets try being rationale, geez.
That is just a brilliant analogy for Slashdot, well done.
I think your wrong.
Your falling into the trap of thinking that wealth is finite, or at least constrained at its current levels. This is simply not true. The amount of wealth in the world can (and does) grow. In terms of overall 'wealth' (see a good economics text for a description of what exactly wealth is:) ) there is many many times more wealth today than just 100 years ago. The same will likely hold true moving forward (there is likely some limit to how far this can grow, but no economists can even begin to agree on what that limit is).
The point of this is that as India becomes more wealthy, they will begin to contribute more and more in terms of innovation and products back into the overall economy. This will do two very important things. 1) Create new markets for companies (including those in the US). After all, the workers in India will have more wealth and will begin buying more products. 2)Create demand for more services within India itself (once again, more wealth to spread around) which will drive the costs of employment up towards U.S. levels. In the end, the amount of overall wealth has increased, and the amount of wealth within the United States is at worst basically unaffected and more likely actually increased because of the new markets that have been opened up.
There are ways to defeat this. Closed trade policies are the quickest. By adopting protectionist policies the U.S. can effectively isolate itself from these new markets, likewise India could do the same in an effort to protect it's new found wealth. The governments role SHOULD be to protect equal OPPORTUNITIES for trade between India and the U.S. (thus encouraging growth in both countries), rather than attempting to protect the RESULTS of that trade.
This is one case where everyone can hope to win, rather than having exactly 1 winner and a bunch of losers.
They could you explain to me why American auto industry growth has been extremely high over the last 5 years. Numerous new automotive plants have been opened throughout the country.
It turns out that it's cheaper for Honda/Toyota/etc.. to simply build the cars over here rather than import them.
But I guess that doesn't count as 'coming back'.
We've had some bad moments, but 'most morally reprehensible' is incredibly ignorant. The ONE example you could come up with actually shows how incredibly good our system of government is (as is the oil example cited in the article above). Through a series of checks and balances these crazy ideas never saw the light of day. Just because a few people in goverment planned it, the proof is in action and both of these cases resulted in neither.
I can come up with thousands of instances of my government doing truly good works across the globe. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Have we had some really bad moments? You bet.. hell we've had some true monsters run this country for brief periods (Lyndon Johnson most recently). Yet, overall, our record is actually pretty damn good. We do look out for our own best interests most of the time (as does your country, whichever that is), but after all that is the job of government.
It's to bad that hating my country is so fashionable right now. We're actually a pretty good bunch. But people always need an enemy, and I guess we'll be it for awhile.
Nice troll..
I've lived in Europe (Aviano Italy to be exact), and in that part of the world I saw the same driving habits, distractions, and issues that we face here. I've travelled throughout Europe, and it seemed to me like it was simply more of the same.
The issue isn't so much with the law, after all you really shouldn't be checking e-mail while driving. The issue (if you would pay one lick of attention) has everything to do with the overly broad nature of it. With the fact that I can't use a laptop as a passenger, my GPS system (which is a god-send for those of us dealing with huge traffic problems) would be worthless in California, or any number of USEFUL driving aids are now basically illegal under this law.
The fundamental idea is a sound one, and I've seen very few people argue against it. We don't want distracted drivers after all. But the end result is more far reaching than I think any rationale person would find reasonable. That's the issue..
Instead of bashing the US (I realize how fashionable that is right now), how about pulling your head our of your arse and actually try some reading comprehension.
Those are the MAXIMUM penalties. Maximums, as a general rule, are quite stiff. They generally involve multiple offenses and come only after multiple convictions.
She won't be facing anything remotely CLOSE to those penalties. Probably something in the range of a few hundred dollars and short unsupervised probation. If she continues to violate the law, the penalties will increase.
Before you post some apparently 'insightful' gibberish about how "this country is screwed up beyond help", at least take the time to understand the legal system that it uses.
There are 'sects' that still practice polygamy. They are certainly not mainstream, but they are most definitely 'mormom'.
Besides, there are MUCH bigger things in the Mormom doctrine to make fun of:) South Park did a great job of it a few episodes back..
What a terrible attitude.
Think about this, while spam is a minor annoyance for you.. for some of us it is EXPENSIVE. As part of my job I maintain my companies customer support software. We provide e-mail support, and are currently running into HUGE problems with spam. For every 10 legitimate support requests we receive, we probably receive an additional 4 or 5 spam e-mails. For us 1 false positive is simply not tolerable, so our spam filtering can't be very aggressive.
I have a few methods of dealing with this (challenge response on messages marked as spam by our filters is the most effective), but it's taken a lot of time (and therefore $$$) and time to resolve it. In the end this makes our products more expensive, and takes me away from adding new product features and providing better support for our customers.
Spam sucks...period.
The dictionary game is fun.
Steal - To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
The owner of a copyright is in effect the owner of that property. They get to grant the right or permission for someone to own a copy of that particular work. If you take that work without permission or right, you are stealing.
Thief - One who steals, especially by stealth.
If someone steals, then they are a thief. If you download something that you don't have right or permission to download then you are stealing and thus are a thief.
All definitions courtesy of dictionary.com.