An interpreter will always have problems competing with native code. Also the machine model used by the VM tends to be somewhat simplistic compared to the real hardware model.
Your mention of COM+ is not so relevant as it is just one of many ways of breaking up and combing apps.
Researchers argue over the best way to tackle these problems and there doesn't seem to be a clear set of rules about how these kinds of systems should be built and maintained.
However, the manufacturers have been shipping multiple processors for a long time now, and they can work quite nicely -- suprisingly enough even together with older languages.
C++ is more mature and has had the benefit of years of hardcore development. Java is still a young language and C# is still an infant.
When Java was created, wasn't it supposed to be a tool for easing the deployment of front-end applications? Why is so much effort now being spent on running it on the backend, which is typically much more resource bound? However, running Java on a backend is a good way of selling more expensive hardware. It uses a lot of resources on the front-end too, but generally, the resources there are cheaper.
Banks have existing solutions for internet banking. Some of which are quite secure (not very, but more so than many other forms of banking including ATMs). Banks would rather we did everything via the Internet because it would mean less branches and thus, less staff. We the customers, aren't doing it.
My own Bank warns me about using the latest patches to IE before I login. Internally, they use and seem to prefer Mozilla.
The last point is that we aren't talking about just Win 2006 or whatever, it also means new computers. The platform is promised to be secure, but it can only be so if the boundary between the trusted and untrusted modes is carefully controlled. A bank wouldn't be in the business of rolling anything out on such a platform untill they feel comfortable with it.
Here we are talking about apps with a high transaction load and the risk of severely upset customers when it can't hack it and the loss of $$$$.
Java works, but my feeling is they should stop playing with the language and try t consolidate it. C++ sufferred a long time because of its rapid growth in the early nineties, but eventually it settled down. There are things that Java is good at, but getting the last ounce of performance isn't one of them. I am also sick of the deployment issues of apps requiring individually tweeked VMs. That is one issue which really needs sorting.
The main execution environment was AIX and Solaris. The compilers were Xlc and gpp respectively.They were using STL and a little Rogue Wave, otherwise most of the classes were home built.
The thing is that they tried Java, and they were dissappointed, even with top-level help, it didn't perform. They went back to C++. The high-performance front-ends, they also coded in C++ and they were users of QT.
Why a Large Bank Junked Java
on
Preview of Java 1.5
·
· Score: 4, Informative
We see yet another evoloution of Java, another run-time-environemnt, each of which is subtly incompatible with the rest.
I am working with a large bank at the moment, one of the largest in the world and they have largely junked Java, except for running browser applets.
They liked Java, the class libraries were great but, sorry, it is too slow. I'm not talking about incompetent coders. They even had Sun in looking at some of the apps. The end result was a customised virtual machine - but it was still too slow and the incompatibilities were a killer. The VM had to work identically across the bank's generations of systems from different vendors. One gotcha, IIRC, was synchronisation, making it difficult to run a JVM across processors and to exploit them properly for performance.
End result was a switch back to C++ for back end apps. Java could still be used but only for non-critical front-end stuff. The bank may consider C#, but it seems that Java has had its day.
Maybe this sounds like a troll, but Sun should release their control of the Standard. This will slow things down, think how long it takes to get stuff into C++, but that stability gives everyone room to think as to whether a change is really necessary.
I don't like the idea of C# but at least MS handed it over to ECMA.
as long as you do it on a private road. Anything that impinges upon my safety, and that means driving on the public highway should be regulated.
In other parts of the EU, such as Germany, the insurance company and the vehicle licensing authority communicate. If you have a taxed car, it is impossible to have it without minimum insurance. In the UK, AFAIK, you only need an insurance certificate to show when you renew the road tax, and it need not be for the entire period. This is often abused. The police can easily check that a car is road taxed, but without a real police check where all papers must be produced, it is impossible to see if the vehicle was insured.
Cameras are sometimes useful, but in the end having a police force that can stop cars to check the papers is even better.
If you increase the power output of your engine beyond the street spec, you normally have to declair it to the insurers. A major mod like an after market turbo vhargers is rather obvious but an ECU tends to be less so. Chipping should be declared, but often isn't. However, a non-standard ECU would be rather obvious to an insurance claims adjuster after an accident.
The original V1 was more revolutionary and had to be easily mass produced. It was developed in just a couple of years.
To produce something now would be easier, particularly if the resulting vehicle was smaller.
I agree that the FAA might be an interesting obstacle. I wonder what kind of waiver R/C enthusiasts have with some of them flying four-engined bomber replicas and also now jets.
There should be a lot of the Williams engines knocking around, only one user, slightly dented, etc, but in Bagdhad. I didn't say how many pieces though!
The lunch is optional. Many production companies try to squeeze on some of the unnecessary overheads - this includes extras, particularly food and drink.
Easy, your id no can be used to access your registration with the tax authority (Finanzamt). In Germany, you pay tax to the church that you belong to (Can I put 'Open Source' as my religion) which is collected by the tax authority to benefit the church. Incidentally, this is the Scientologists beef, they aren't recognised to be ablt to do this.
It means that although the id card doesn't carry religion, it is relatively easy to determine this from the files and possible for a possible future government to overstamp the id.
No, I am being overtly legalistic. IANAL, but I have helped the drafting of some laws.
The GPL doesn't make anything free. But if someone chooses to redistribute it, they must supply the source and the software can be further distributed without restriction. If I take, for example, Linux, I am perfectly within my rights to modify it extensively and then not pass it on. As long as I don't pass the modified code outside my organisation, I am fine. I can give binaries to my (internal) users without problems and any secrets can remain in house.
In the case of our friends at SCO, they are accusing IBM of disclosing their technology as part of a Linux distribution. This wouldn't be Itanic code, this is something that they claimed IBM had already released and took from AIX.
If the release that SCO makes includes their code from the existing Linux release, then they are defacto acknowledging the license. If they unpick their code and seperate it, there could be some possibility of keeping it proprietary, but that is all. Putting propietary code into the kernel and distributing it, isn't easy.
In the case of standard libraries, in effect these are already defined by whether or not they are part of a Linux distribution. If I write my own glibc, replacing the distributed glibc, I agree, it is possible to kjeep this propietary. However, this would have to be an integral part of my distribution.
The 'standard' clause allows me to use GPL code linked against a libc that comes with Solaris as binary only. Neither Solaris nor libc has to be there in source form. If The Linux kernel has no private libaries that can be replaces. The GNU tool chain on top of Linux (specifically, glibc) could be replaced. However, this would be very difficult, because the kernel is open, as are the libraries that are nottmally distributed with it.
I was developing with an MSDN Universal subscription. The trouble was that the packaging was screwed. Everytime it wants to validate that you have the software, it decided that it isn't valid. The solution was to reinstall... and then reinstall. Updates were almost impossible as the disk IDs were also screwed.
The GPL does not give an obligation to redistribute but it does ensure that if you do distribute it, you must give away the sources as well.
Here we are talking about a hardware port of the OS. I don't believe that this is possible without the result being subject to the GPL.
I agree that a linking to propietary libc isn't a problem for the GPL, but it had better look nothing like glibc. However this is for applications, not OS components and the licensed parts must be as you say, standard components of the target OS.
I mean if Colonel Sanders was suing someone claiming they leaked his "secret blend of herbs and spices", it doesn't mean he's going to stop selling chicken.
If Colonel Sanders was selling you a chicken, he was not selling you the recipe, just the product. Any Linux distribution carries a large obligation to redistribute.
You could sell something that runs on top of a Linux kernel without any GPL restriction. For example, Oracle. However, when you make a distribution of the entire system, it is usual to make sure that everything is GPL'ed. Mostly because it isn't easy to distribute non-GPL'ed software with GPLed software. If you have modded the kernel (which I presume they have though), it really is an oxymoron. The kernel is GPLed. There are some ways by which you can sneak some binary drivers in, but that is small. It would be impossible to slip platform support in without GPLing it. There is no middle way unless they remove their technolgy from the distribution.
If SCO accept the GPL on the kernel, which they must to redistribute it, they cannot object to the presence of their propietary technology within the kernel. By distributing their technology, by definition, it is now GPLed (this doesn't even exclude patents, but everyone has a licence to use the technology).
It is a little like the news from Muhammed Saeed al-Sahhaf in Baghdad. What planet are these guys living on if one moment they sue someone for allegedely leaking their technology and the next coming out with a release built on the open software technology that they are challenging others about. I mean, well anyone can do a distro even with propietary code. However, there is something called taste and something that has a bad smell amongst the community.
Privacy International give their Big Brother awards for contributions to the destruction of privacy. Shouldn't the FSF or someone make awards for the contribution to closing software.
As for your points about burning CDs, I agree. The new XCDRoast and cdrtools work very well and the author of XCDRoast complains that RH is lagging and he gets the complaints. Personally, this seems to be about right. RH is definitely making more problems by distributing some old releases.
Actually, the same with Rome except their scriptoriums (libraries) were somewhat more efficient. In the end they still had a vast number of clerks. The clerks were almost all slaves, so they weren't necesssarily the best motivated.
Lets look at Red Hat economics. I can copy the ISOs for free over the Internet. If I buy them, I get some books and the feeling that that I'm supporting someone.
I bought LOTR:FOTR Extended Edition on DVD. It wasn't cheap but I get all the extras that make it a nice package. I could have d/led a very good screener of the EE from the P2P networks, but I paid the money and I have the warm fuzzy feeling that PJ and the team may have made a cent out of me. Many DVDs have no extras.
Back in the old days of the long-playing record, we bought albums. A record with good art-work, and interesting inserts. With the art-work shrunk down to CD size and the insert size reduced, does it really seem worth it. The artists make almost nothing, so I am just paying a promotion machine.
So we end up in a situation where the public is often sold an inadequate product and they are revolting. I agree, they should drop their prices if they can't sell at $15, especially by offering downloadable MP3s (or Oggs).
Journalism is supposed to be about the truth.
In an ideal world, yes. However, this is normally reserved for scientific journals not newspapers. The thing is that some papers are a little more relaxed about bias than others, particularly if it is the direction of the 'party line'. Alteration of photographs happened on a regular basis in the former USSR.
What is important that the reader has alternative viewpoints available and knows how to evaluate them. I expect reporting to be subjective and hope to find a consensus view.
A journalist writes a story and illustrates that story with pictures. The standards vary according to the editor and publisher. Even two newspapers owned by the same publisher may have different standards. Rupert Murdoch owns both the Sun and The Times. Both are biased but in one the standards for the truth seem to be somewhat more flexible. The only check is the law of libel and whether they will upset advertisers or lose readers.
I'm sorry, but a photo doesn't meen that much. Where I put the photo with regards to an apparently unrelated headline or another photo can slant the news.
Sorry, a photograph, as in silver nitrate can be manipulated in the dark-room so why is anyone suprised about digital manipulation. The only difference is the process is faster and less smelly.
As regards journalisitic integrity, I'm sorry but there is none. Most journalists give the reports that their employers want, i.e. "Is there anyone here who has been raped who speaks English?". Of course they only tell the truth but it is a keyhole view of the truth. Both the original photo and the presentation can change the perceived meaning 100%.
If you have moved between the US and Europe, you will have found out about the joys of region encoding. You can buy a portable DVD player, but it won't play DVDs from different regions unless you got it modded.
Region coding is a joke. Many shops in Europe sell modified players for a small extra fee, and they openly advertise this. One even sold their mod-chipped player to NASA for the ISS.
I don't buy them because I can't afford them anymore, I must use my money for food.
You make a good point. The MPAA and the RIAA are screaming about falling profits and blaiming it on piracy, but they seem to forget that the economy has problems. As you say, food is a necessity, a DVD or movie ticket isn't.
The normal behaviour if you wish to retain market share is to make your product more affordable. They haven't.
Slashdot Mirror
My own Bank warns me about using the latest patches to IE before I login. Internally, they use and seem to prefer Mozilla.
The last point is that we aren't talking about just Win 2006 or whatever, it also means new computers. The platform is promised to be secure, but it can only be so if the boundary between the trusted and untrusted modes is carefully controlled. A bank wouldn't be in the business of rolling anything out on such a platform untill they feel comfortable with it.
Java works, but my feeling is they should stop playing with the language and try t consolidate it. C++ sufferred a long time because of its rapid growth in the early nineties, but eventually it settled down. There are things that Java is good at, but getting the last ounce of performance isn't one of them. I am also sick of the deployment issues of apps requiring individually tweeked VMs. That is one issue which really needs sorting.
The thing is that they tried Java, and they were dissappointed, even with top-level help, it didn't perform. They went back to C++. The high-performance front-ends, they also coded in C++ and they were users of QT.
I am working with a large bank at the moment, one of the largest in the world and they have largely junked Java, except for running browser applets.
They liked Java, the class libraries were great but, sorry, it is too slow. I'm not talking about incompetent coders. They even had Sun in looking at some of the apps. The end result was a customised virtual machine - but it was still too slow and the incompatibilities were a killer. The VM had to work identically across the bank's generations of systems from different vendors. One gotcha, IIRC, was synchronisation, making it difficult to run a JVM across processors and to exploit them properly for performance.
End result was a switch back to C++ for back end apps. Java could still be used but only for non-critical front-end stuff. The bank may consider C#, but it seems that Java has had its day.
Maybe this sounds like a troll, but Sun should release their control of the Standard. This will slow things down, think how long it takes to get stuff into C++, but that stability gives everyone room to think as to whether a change is really necessary.
I don't like the idea of C# but at least MS handed it over to ECMA.
How about just running a local Kazaa supernode (or ed2K server)? It has go to be cheaper than the bandwidth (untill you get caugh by the RIAA/MPAA).
In other parts of the EU, such as Germany, the insurance company and the vehicle licensing authority communicate. If you have a taxed car, it is impossible to have it without minimum insurance. In the UK, AFAIK, you only need an insurance certificate to show when you renew the road tax, and it need not be for the entire period. This is often abused. The police can easily check that a car is road taxed, but without a real police check where all papers must be produced, it is impossible to see if the vehicle was insured.
Cameras are sometimes useful, but in the end having a police force that can stop cars to check the papers is even better.
If you increase the power output of your engine beyond the street spec, you normally have to declair it to the insurers. A major mod like an after market turbo vhargers is rather obvious but an ECU tends to be less so. Chipping should be declared, but often isn't. However, a non-standard ECU would be rather obvious to an insurance claims adjuster after an accident.
To produce something now would be easier, particularly if the resulting vehicle was smaller.
I agree that the FAA might be an interesting obstacle. I wonder what kind of waiver R/C enthusiasts have with some of them flying four-engined bomber replicas and also now jets.
There should be a lot of the Williams engines knocking around, only one user, slightly dented, etc, but in Bagdhad. I didn't say how many pieces though!
The lunch is optional. Many production companies try to squeeze on some of the unnecessary overheads - this includes extras, particularly food and drink.
It means that although the id card doesn't carry religion, it is relatively easy to determine this from the files and possible for a possible future government to overstamp the id.
The GPL doesn't make anything free. But if someone chooses to redistribute it, they must supply the source and the software can be further distributed without restriction. If I take, for example, Linux, I am perfectly within my rights to modify it extensively and then not pass it on. As long as I don't pass the modified code outside my organisation, I am fine. I can give binaries to my (internal) users without problems and any secrets can remain in house.
In the case of our friends at SCO, they are accusing IBM of disclosing their technology as part of a Linux distribution. This wouldn't be Itanic code, this is something that they claimed IBM had already released and took from AIX.
If the release that SCO makes includes their code from the existing Linux release, then they are defacto acknowledging the license. If they unpick their code and seperate it, there could be some possibility of keeping it proprietary, but that is all. Putting propietary code into the kernel and distributing it, isn't easy.
In the case of standard libraries, in effect these are already defined by whether or not they are part of a Linux distribution. If I write my own glibc, replacing the distributed glibc, I agree, it is possible to kjeep this propietary. However, this would have to be an integral part of my distribution.
The 'standard' clause allows me to use GPL code linked against a libc that comes with Solaris as binary only. Neither Solaris nor libc has to be there in source form. If The Linux kernel has no private libaries that can be replaces. The GNU tool chain on top of Linux (specifically, glibc) could be replaced. However, this would be very difficult, because the kernel is open, as are the libraries that are nottmally distributed with it.
I was developing with an MSDN Universal subscription. The trouble was that the packaging was screwed. Everytime it wants to validate that you have the software, it decided that it isn't valid. The solution was to reinstall ... and then reinstall. Updates were almost impossible as the disk IDs were also screwed.
Here we are talking about a hardware port of the OS. I don't believe that this is possible without the result being subject to the GPL.
I agree that a linking to propietary libc isn't a problem for the GPL, but it had better look nothing like glibc. However this is for applications, not OS components and the licensed parts must be as you say, standard components of the target OS.
You could sell something that runs on top of a Linux kernel without any GPL restriction. For example, Oracle. However, when you make a distribution of the entire system, it is usual to make sure that everything is GPL'ed. Mostly because it isn't easy to distribute non-GPL'ed software with GPLed software. If you have modded the kernel (which I presume they have though), it really is an oxymoron. The kernel is GPLed. There are some ways by which you can sneak some binary drivers in, but that is small. It would be impossible to slip platform support in without GPLing it. There is no middle way unless they remove their technolgy from the distribution.
If SCO accept the GPL on the kernel, which they must to redistribute it, they cannot object to the presence of their propietary technology within the kernel. By distributing their technology, by definition, it is now GPLed (this doesn't even exclude patents, but everyone has a licence to use the technology).
Privacy International give their Big Brother awards for contributions to the destruction of privacy. Shouldn't the FSF or someone make awards for the contribution to closing software.
As for your points about burning CDs, I agree. The new XCDRoast and cdrtools work very well and the author of XCDRoast complains that RH is lagging and he gets the complaints. Personally, this seems to be about right. RH is definitely making more problems by distributing some old releases.
Actually, the same with Rome except their scriptoriums (libraries) were somewhat more efficient. In the end they still had a vast number of clerks. The clerks were almost all slaves, so they weren't necesssarily the best motivated.
I bought LOTR:FOTR Extended Edition on DVD. It wasn't cheap but I get all the extras that make it a nice package. I could have d/led a very good screener of the EE from the P2P networks, but I paid the money and I have the warm fuzzy feeling that PJ and the team may have made a cent out of me. Many DVDs have no extras.
Back in the old days of the long-playing record, we bought albums. A record with good art-work, and interesting inserts. With the art-work shrunk down to CD size and the insert size reduced, does it really seem worth it. The artists make almost nothing, so I am just paying a promotion machine.
So we end up in a situation where the public is often sold an inadequate product and they are revolting. I agree, they should drop their prices if they can't sell at $15, especially by offering downloadable MP3s (or Oggs).
What is important that the reader has alternative viewpoints available and knows how to evaluate them. I expect reporting to be subjective and hope to find a consensus view.
A journalist writes a story and illustrates that story with pictures. The standards vary according to the editor and publisher. Even two newspapers owned by the same publisher may have different standards. Rupert Murdoch owns both the Sun and The Times. Both are biased but in one the standards for the truth seem to be somewhat more flexible. The only check is the law of libel and whether they will upset advertisers or lose readers.
Sorry, a photograph, as in silver nitrate can be manipulated in the dark-room so why is anyone suprised about digital manipulation. The only difference is the process is faster and less smelly.
As regards journalisitic integrity, I'm sorry but there is none. Most journalists give the reports that their employers want, i.e. "Is there anyone here who has been raped who speaks English?". Of course they only tell the truth but it is a keyhole view of the truth. Both the original photo and the presentation can change the perceived meaning 100%.
Region coding is a joke. Many shops in Europe sell modified players for a small extra fee, and they openly advertise this. One even sold their mod-chipped player to NASA for the ISS.
Thanks for that tip. I can see myself spending some serious money there. I just need to convince the Mrs over the necessity of the purchase!!!!