"the key to success is to have a 'relentless commitment to a modular computer architecture that makes it possible for the people who build the applications to also be responsible for running and deploying those systems within a common IT framework.'"
This works well sometimes. The developer supporting their own application. For other things it makes more sense to divide the role. My experience is that the more complex and customised the software, and the more quickly it is changing, the more important you have people who know the internals as they are currently. However in other circumstances, having ex-developers or professional support staff is often preferable. eg. if there's no current development work, you're going to need support staff (preferably ex-developers, but this may not be an option).
You just keep thinking like that. One day you'll believe you don't have any right to sunshine, water, or air either because you're just licensing it and what gives you the right.
The fact is you bought a physical item because it contains their intellectual property. You should be able to do whatever you like with that physical copy PROVIDED you're not onselling the content. Why should the creator have control over every copy of their creation? Profits, yes. Control, no. If it's a physical item fair enough as there's limited use of that item at any given time. If they're trying to undersell the original provider fair enough that's wrong. (In my honest opinion they should be permitted to sell, then owe the original sale price to the original distributor. ie. sell your pirate DVD for $5, get caught and owe the full $70 per copy to the company).
Also your argument about paying so little doesn't hold water. You pay so little because it's a mass market. It doesnt' cost USD250M per movie to produce a copy. That's a one off cost that must be absorbed in the price of the movie over hundreds of thousands or millions of copies and theatre tickets. The other problem is that even when you've bought a copy the companies try to charge you for the same thing in a different format (which obviously doesn't cost millions to produce).
Hell a few TV sets with moving content would do it for most of the ADHD cattle out there. Oh look it's my favourite show....oh now it's moved to that screen over there, I think I'll follow...oooohh look a pretty shiny thing. I want to take that home. I'll just add that to my trolley.
The medical establishment is broken for the same reason that the patent, copyright and general legal systems are broken: It's steeped in hundreds of years of tradition and evolved in an environment that has changed dramatically in the last hundred years. Yes the surgeons have kept up with the technology but the culture of the medical establishment is absolutely and unforgivably antiquated.
First of all long shifts are counter-productive. I don't want a doctor, no matter how good, looking at me at the end of a 14 hour (or LONGER) shift.
Secondly, societies need to decide if they want to take care of the ill or not. It's costly and the user pays system is unworkable here because the sickest people are the least likely to be able to afford care. This is what we should be paying taxes for.
Thirdly while willing to adopt tools and medical gadgetry the medical industry has been unwilling to adopt medical diagnosis via computer even as a backup to looking through books. Even the legal profession is ahead of the medical establishment when it comes to this as you can get compurerised searchable caselaw. Even the best doctor hasn't seen every medical condition and won't have heard of the rarer ones so I'd like to see a standard system where a doctor could put in symptoms and look up a database of matching possible illnesses and other symptoms to check for. I would not want this system to replace the doctor's judgement but I do want it to be an integral part of the process.
Forthly, the idea of longer internships and learning periods meaning more experience is a nonesense. You don't need 16 years of mostly 14 hour sleep deprived days to pick up the information you need. There needs to be a system similar to one used by pilots where basic accreditation as a pilot gives you the ability to fly a light aircraft in clear weather and then you progress through ratings for rough weather/low visibility, night flying, commercial flying, with ratings for each type of aircraft. Doctors need something similar. The license to treat a basic set of things, with accreditation/endorsement to treat increasingly serious and difficult diseases (and refer them on to a different doctor or work with an accredited doctor). This is pretty much what we have in terms of medical specialisation, but it needs to be applied to the basics. There also needs to be a strict limit of no more than 8 hours a shift except in a declared emergency. If that means we need more doctors that's what we should be getting with a quicker system in place for learning to treat minor conditions once they've been diagnosed.
Lastly, the medical profession seems to attract money hungry egomaniacs (particularly specialists). I've seen unforgivable behaviour from doctors such as prescribing upping the dosage of a medication that was causing seizures when this was clearly a contraindication. (In the end my fiancee went from having no grand mal seizures to two a day and if I hadn't diagnosed her instead of her specialist I suspect she'd be dead). Except in the most extreme circumstances doctors generally aren't held accountable because if you sue good luck finding someone to ever treat you again. Doctors who've been through all the hoops usually think of themselves as incredible fantastic people above the rest of us which quite frankly amazes me as they see things that cut others down in their prime every day. Basically most doctors need their ego deflated a little. Unfortunately the medical institution does nothing for this. It tends to be a highly political pecking order you have to work within to succeed where testing is a lot more subjective than it's made out to be (and therefore dissenters will quickly be punished severly).
Basically you just drag and drop components onto a Java Swing form, and write a handful of lines of code to run that form and have it spit itself out in the form of HTML and CSS.
It's quick and dirty and not standards compliant. It uses absolute positioning and puts everything in its own DIV. At this stage it's a hack and a proof of concept with the concept being to convert existing application layouts to another GUI layout such as HTML/CSS.
>I>Meanwhile, this article is basically Dvorak saying, "Man. Programming is HARD. It has to be a problem with the language."
No, this man may be a troll but he's saying something quite valid. He's saying that programming an interface using CSS is more complex, less intuitive and harder to understand than it should be. He's not trying to program an algorithm here, just position GUI elements.
I agree with him here to an extent. A good language/standard would allow for simple things to be done using a simplified subset of the language while the truely hard and fancy stuff would require more work.
There are plenty of difficult/complex things you need complex/difficult code to achieve. If your code is complex and difficult for the most basic thing your average coder doesn't stand a chance on something harder.
On the other hand, planes aren't normally flown on a crowded piece of tar at a distance of a few metres to tens of metres away from other cars/inanimate objects/schoolchildren.
No instead they're flown above schools and school children and houses and businesses such as shopping centres.
Also while the general idea is to try to keep 500ft of distance between planes, not only are there intentional exceptions to this rule (airshows, military training etc.), but planes do often come close together at airports, and not just on the runway.
Consider also that the size of a plane varies more than your average road vehicles. From your small light plane to your Airbus A380. Hopefully you're aware of what happens when one of these comes down in a crowded place or slams into a building.
Finally consider the helicopter. They're so unstable in a hover it takes every effort and concentration of the pilot to keep it steady. It takes a lot more skill to be a good helicopter pilot than a good private aircraft pilot. In fact it takes weeks to months for a beginning helicopter pilot to get good at this. Yet these machines are flown quite close together in convoy.
Most people can't even be expected to react quickly to outside events if they're talking on the phone while driving. Why would we expect anything more if they're not even focusing their eyes on the road, much less their brains.
Have you ever seen the workload a beginner pilot takes on. He's constantly on the radio to ground, has one hand on the yoke or stick, both feet at rudder pedals and his other hand controls throttle and every other instrument that has to be regulated (mixture, prop) and to tune radios and transponder etc. All while flying a small aircraft which if it gets too slow will happily stall and if you're not high enough to recover fall out of the sky, and keeping an eye out for traffic.
Granted this is one reason why flying a plane is harder than driving a car, however what we need is better training so that drivers can cope with distractions, rather than assuming that everyone is a moron who can't multitask. The bottom line is something's always going to be there to distract you. Whether its a cell phone, a radio, the spouse and kids or stuff shifting in the back that you thought you'd secured.
It's beyond darwinian. He's prepared to take out smart people in other cars.
Wrong. Purely Darwinian. Survival of the fittest based on prevailing environment. Environment full of idiots that shouldn't be driver. Person most able to avoid said idiots most likely to contribute to the gene pool. Of course if not for the never ending supply of idiots eventually there would be no idiots, and the ability to avoid them would no longer be a successful survival trait. In the real world you'll eventually reach an equilibrium where idiots are born and die at a roughly fixed rate. Assuming that not everyone turns into an idiot, the increase in probability of survival based on the idiot avoidance survival trait will be proportional to where that equilibrium is reached.
Category in the freedb is subjective. I suspect that fact alone could be used to argue that it is a creative work.
This just prooves copyright is a mess. I believe we should be changing this so that copyright cases allow authors/artists to claim some portion of profit or potential profit made from a derivative work, but not restrict its use. That's certainly not how it works now though.
Not anyone outside the US... and not anyone *inside*
Your faith in humanity is both funny and sad. Watch people, companies and countries with no understanding of the issues lap it up. One thing you can count on is a high level human stupidity as the sample size of your group increases.
1200 machines with one having a problem each day means each machine averages 3.28 years between problems. Granted that's not great but it's not excrement either. Surely if you're in charge of so many machines you understand that a small failure rate with a large enough number of machines still means high frequency of failure.
First, let me say that you seem to have a tendency to respond to what you think I wrote, not what I actually did.
Let me say you have a tendancy to word things so as to imply other things, then back down when confronted with facts.
What I have actually said is that issues with JRE updates are rare.
I say bollox to that.
Java is one of the most backward-compatible systems ever produced.
It's one of the most widely used systems that has been designed with backward compatibility in mind, I grant you that.
Nothing you have said and no links you have provided have demonstrated otherwise.
Yes typically if someone wants to be stubborn nothing convinces them to change their opinion.
You seem to be considering matters of how to access JREs or how to package applets as if they were somehow related to the Java language and compatibility. They aren't.
Wait a second there and get your straw man out of my face. You are claiming that Java (I presume that includes the runtime) is "one of the most backward compatible systems ever produces" then you takl about Java the language separately as if that's all you were ever speaking off. The grand parent didn't go into language syntax, he said JREs broke. Make up your mind what you're arguing and stop trying to employ such obvious sophistry.
You have provided a very minor list of issues that may occur when people upgrade from Java 1.3 (released 6 years ago!) with Java 1.5.
Shall I go and chase down every change between minor versions that caused something to break? I've demonstrated my point which is that it's not all that rare. If Sun thought it was important enough to produce a document, and most sane developers feel the need to retest with new JREs I'd say compatibility is an issue.
Go find some 1.0.2 code from the.com bust and try and run that without any kind of change. If it's complex I'd give you even odds it breaks.
That minor list simply emphasises how few programs are going to break, and the minor matters involved.
I think if I went and pulled down 1000 examples you'd claim they're only minor. The word fanboy comes to mind.
realise you are not in a position to give a personal example, but that does not help the debate. Until you can give some specific reason, I can't see any point in continuing....and yet you do continue.
If anything, this conversation has helped prove my point
Only if you're in the habit of ignoring problems and hoping they'll go away.
that the suggestion made by a poster a while back that 'all your old aplications do not work at all anymore when users install the new JRE' is utter nonsense. (note the use of the word 'all' - not 'some', or 'a very few', but 'all'!)
I think you know perfectly well that all was an exaggeration. Java is designed with the intent of backward compatibility. However many many apps do break. You just dismiss it as so rare no one should bother worrying about it.
Summary of this debate. You spot a post where someone points out Java isn't always compatible between releases and that this can cause a headache. You say I've rarely seen things break. I say I have seen things break quite a bit and provide what examples I'm free to. You insist these are minor and choose to ignore them.
Good luck. I live in the real world. If I depend on something, I expect some breakage between versions and test and fix accordingly. I think that's a much better solution than yours which is to tell people its rare. Not just for Java. For any software btw not just Java: Every version of Windows breaks some apps. I'm not saying don't use any piece of software but I am saying don't pretend change doesn't break things no matter how well done.
Getting your adolescent friends to second your opinion or creating a second account to bolster yourself is completely juvenile.
For your info I'm over 30, have a bachelor and masters, and have been doing this for some years...all of which has no bearing on the truth of what I've said of course.
Look I've seen code break. You haven't. I don't care if you get a team of 30 coders with a combined experience of 900 years to tell me their apps haven't broken. I've seen apps break, and not only when the code's compiled for a later JRE. We've had to develop specific workarounds and re-release stuff due to this. I can't show you because I'm bound by an employment contract and I'm not about to embarass my employer even if I wasn't. That you don't believe me doesn't make an inkling of difference to my life. Enjoy your fantasy.
If you are going to reply at all the first thing I challenge you to do is explain this migration guide by Sun for Java 1.3 to 5.0: http://java.sun.com/j2se/JM_White_Paper_R6A.pdf...complete with a whole section on runtime issues
The above links very clearly show installing the latest JRE is not sufficient to run all your old code. With many Java applications, you can't just remove all older versions of a JRE and upgrade to the latest.
I also recall that if your code is applet based, the tags used to invoke the JRE changed after Microsoft dumped their custom JVM due to the legal action between Sun and MS.
The bottom line is that you're calling anyone who has seen anything break due to a newer JRE a fool and a liar based on your "30 years of experience". I know for a fact that this is false. Your arrogance is astounding and your insistance on this makes me wonder what you've been doing for 30 years since I know of no complex environment where the runtime backward compatibility is so fantastic that you don't need to test a new version to be sure it works for your application.
This is quite laughable. Both of these links have nothing to do with the fantasy that you are trying to propogate.
The "fantasy" I'm trying to propogate? You're truely dillusional and brainwashed if you believe that upgrading or changing your JRE can't break your apps. Have fun living in your fantasy. A credibility raiting from a fool is of no interest or consequence to me.
The GP complained that he'd seen Java apps break. You said you hadn't and that you couldn't imagine more complex apps. You were definitely implying he was a liar. This isn't a court of law so burdens of proof don't apply here. To me your intent was very clear.
In your latest post again you insist that because you haven't in your very limited experience seen Java apps break, that it's rare. It's not.
Google for the following phrase: java 1.5 breaks application
That's just the tip of the iceberg and I'm not going to do any more work proving that things have broken because with your attitude I don't see you admitting to a mistake.
Guess what happens if you use any 3rd party product that is in any way incompatible. You need to get another version of that product.
Now you're obviously not interested in reality. In your mind because you haven't had the displeasure of working on something that's been badly broken by a JRE release all is good. Enjoy living your fantasy but don't force it down other people's throats or belittle them when they point out that they've seen it happen.
It is great the way that posters assume things! I work on substantial Java applications daily - apps with hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. You called the GP a liar because his experience didn't match yours. How dare you then come back and point the finger at someone making assumptions you hypocrite!
There are very complex Java applications that run unchanged on different versions of Java - JBoss, NetBeans for example. These are app servers and IDEs - it is hard to think of apps that are more complex
I have never seen a single app break between Java 1.4 and 1.5.
Well I have. "It works for me on my machine so stuff you" is nonesense that no professional should be uttering, let alone calling a perfect stranger a liar because they've seen something you haven't.
Explain my experience then. I'm either lying (and I happen to know for a fact that I'm not, and would gladly prove it if it didn't require breaking my contract and if I thought it would sway you one bit).
JBoss and Netbeans are just two technologies. Most of my experience happens to be with Eclipse though I have used Netbeans, and Weblogic though I've also used Tomcat and JBoss. So what. There are more technologies out there that neither of us have used than you could shake a stick at and to make the assumption that no applications have broken just because you haven't seen it is both arrogant and ignorant.
What do you do when your users complain there's a bug you can't reproduce? Shut your eyes, put your hands over your ears and shout "la la la la la" at the top of your voice?/. stupidity never ceases to amaze me.
Well you've obviously never written anything in a complex Java environment. I've seen apps I've worked on break in 1.5 where they worked fine in 1.4.2_08. This caused our team huge headaches because it was an applet problem that had already been installed on a lot of client machines, some external to the organisation I worked for.
I don't know the GP from a bar of soap, but if you're going to call someone a liar how about you check your facts first.
Sorry but you're talking overly optimistic nonesense.
Times have changed. When your country pulled out of its earlier problems, the technology to spy on individuals and extinguish any dissent was very primitive compared to what exists today. Yes technology puts much more power in the hands of the individual but unfortunately the same rings truer of government.
Secondly what suggestion do you have for a non-US citizen to fix your country. We can't vote and its not our place to say how it's run except for the unfortunate fact that America sets trends and even has the power to enforce some of those trends economically and failing that with military force.
Unfortunately, the future is bleaker than you think and it will take something extraordinary to change that.
Actually the meaning is closer to: Divide your code/project into small pieces that do specific things, work on the pieces that are most important first, and plan on going through several versions before you have something complete that you're happy with.
Or simpler still: Break the problem down into smaller pieces, and don't settle for your first attempt at a solution in code.
In other words the exact same thing that's been said over and over again in computer science classes since the 60s.
As I said in another post, when someone starts speaking like this - saying something simple in as complex and vague a way as possible - its time to hide your wallet.
No the developers made a mistake taking jobs where unpaid overtime is expected. But since that's the norm in the video game industry I guess I'm saying they picked the wrong job.
Slashdot Mirror
use both your PC and your telus email account to send tons of fake spam, or even better spam complaining about how telus sucks
Sounds like an excellent way to get sued to me.
you could also try contacting the credit card company to see what they can do on their end
Better idea.
"the key to success is to have a 'relentless commitment to a modular computer architecture that makes it possible for the people who build the applications to also be responsible for running and deploying those systems within a common IT framework.'"
This works well sometimes. The developer supporting their own application. For other things it makes more sense to divide the role. My experience is that the more complex and customised the software, and the more quickly it is changing, the more important you have people who know the internals as they are currently. However in other circumstances, having ex-developers or professional support staff is often preferable. eg. if there's no current development work, you're going to need support staff (preferably ex-developers, but this may not be an option).
You just keep thinking like that. One day you'll believe you don't have any right to sunshine, water, or air either because you're just licensing it and what gives you the right.
The fact is you bought a physical item because it contains their intellectual property. You should be able to do whatever you like with that physical copy PROVIDED you're not onselling the content. Why should the creator have control over every copy of their creation? Profits, yes. Control, no. If it's a physical item fair enough as there's limited use of that item at any given time. If they're trying to undersell the original provider fair enough that's wrong. (In my honest opinion they should be permitted to sell, then owe the original sale price to the original distributor. ie. sell your pirate DVD for $5, get caught and owe the full $70 per copy to the company).
Also your argument about paying so little doesn't hold water. You pay so little because it's a mass market. It doesnt' cost USD250M per movie to produce a copy. That's a one off cost that must be absorbed in the price of the movie over hundreds of thousands or millions of copies and theatre tickets. The other problem is that even when you've bought a copy the companies try to charge you for the same thing in a different format (which obviously doesn't cost millions to produce).
Hell a few TV sets with moving content would do it for most of the ADHD cattle out there. Oh look it's my favourite show....oh now it's moved to that screen over there, I think I'll follow...oooohh look a pretty shiny thing. I want to take that home. I'll just add that to my trolley.
;-)
Perhaps I should patent this and make a bundle
The medical establishment is broken for the same reason that the patent, copyright and general legal systems are broken: It's steeped in hundreds of years of tradition and evolved in an environment that has changed dramatically in the last hundred years. Yes the surgeons have kept up with the technology but the culture of the medical establishment is absolutely and unforgivably antiquated.
First of all long shifts are counter-productive. I don't want a doctor, no matter how good, looking at me at the end of a 14 hour (or LONGER) shift.
Secondly, societies need to decide if they want to take care of the ill or not. It's costly and the user pays system is unworkable here because the sickest people are the least likely to be able to afford care. This is what we should be paying taxes for.
Thirdly while willing to adopt tools and medical gadgetry the medical industry has been unwilling to adopt medical diagnosis via computer even as a backup to looking through books. Even the legal profession is ahead of the medical establishment when it comes to this as you can get compurerised searchable caselaw. Even the best doctor hasn't seen every medical condition and won't have heard of the rarer ones so I'd like to see a standard system where a doctor could put in symptoms and look up a database of matching possible illnesses and other symptoms to check for. I would not want this system to replace the doctor's judgement but I do want it to be an integral part of the process.
Forthly, the idea of longer internships and learning periods meaning more experience is a nonesense. You don't need 16 years of mostly 14 hour sleep deprived days to pick up the information you need. There needs to be a system similar to one used by pilots where basic accreditation as a pilot gives you the ability to fly a light aircraft in clear weather and then you progress through ratings for rough weather/low visibility, night flying, commercial flying, with ratings for each type of aircraft. Doctors need something similar. The license to treat a basic set of things, with accreditation/endorsement to treat increasingly serious and difficult diseases (and refer them on to a different doctor or work with an accredited doctor). This is pretty much what we have in terms of medical specialisation, but it needs to be applied to the basics. There also needs to be a strict limit of no more than 8 hours a shift except in a declared emergency. If that means we need more doctors that's what we should be getting with a quicker system in place for learning to treat minor conditions once they've been diagnosed.
Lastly, the medical profession seems to attract money hungry egomaniacs (particularly specialists). I've seen unforgivable behaviour from doctors such as prescribing upping the dosage of a medication that was causing seizures when this was clearly a contraindication. (In the end my fiancee went from having no grand mal seizures to two a day and if I hadn't diagnosed her instead of her specialist I suspect she'd be dead). Except in the most extreme circumstances doctors generally aren't held accountable because if you sue good luck finding someone to ever treat you again. Doctors who've been through all the hoops usually think of themselves as incredible fantastic people above the rest of us which quite frankly amazes me as they see things that cut others down in their prime every day. Basically most doctors need their ego deflated a little. Unfortunately the medical institution does nothing for this. It tends to be a highly political pecking order you have to work within to succeed where testing is a lot more subjective than it's made out to be (and therefore dissenters will quickly be punished severly).
If you program in Java and have access to Netbeans try my little hacked piece of software here:
r ter.html
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/javaGUIConve
Basically you just drag and drop components onto a Java Swing form, and write a handful of lines of code to run that form and have it spit itself out in the form of HTML and CSS.
It's quick and dirty and not standards compliant. It uses absolute positioning and puts everything in its own DIV. At this stage it's a hack and a proof of concept with the concept being to convert existing application layouts to another GUI layout such as HTML/CSS.
>I>Meanwhile, this article is basically Dvorak saying, "Man. Programming is HARD. It has to be a problem with the language."
No, this man may be a troll but he's saying something quite valid. He's saying that programming an interface using CSS is more complex, less intuitive and harder to understand than it should be. He's not trying to program an algorithm here, just position GUI elements.
I agree with him here to an extent. A good language/standard would allow for simple things to be done using a simplified subset of the language while the truely hard and fancy stuff would require more work.
There are plenty of difficult/complex things you need complex/difficult code to achieve. If your code is complex and difficult for the most basic thing your average coder doesn't stand a chance on something harder.
On the other hand, planes aren't normally flown on a crowded piece of tar at a distance of a few metres to tens of metres away from other cars/inanimate objects/schoolchildren.
No instead they're flown above schools and school children and houses and businesses such as shopping centres.
Also while the general idea is to try to keep 500ft of distance between planes, not only are there intentional exceptions to this rule (airshows, military training etc.), but planes do often come close together at airports, and not just on the runway.
Consider also that the size of a plane varies more than your average road vehicles. From your small light plane to your Airbus A380. Hopefully you're aware of what happens when one of these comes down in a crowded place or slams into a building.
Finally consider the helicopter. They're so unstable in a hover it takes every effort and concentration of the pilot to keep it steady. It takes a lot more skill to be a good helicopter pilot than a good private aircraft pilot. In fact it takes weeks to months for a beginning helicopter pilot to get good at this. Yet these machines are flown quite close together in convoy.
Most people can't even be expected to react quickly to outside events if they're talking on the phone while driving. Why would we expect anything more if they're not even focusing their eyes on the road, much less their brains.
Have you ever seen the workload a beginner pilot takes on. He's constantly on the radio to ground, has one hand on the yoke or stick, both feet at rudder pedals and his other hand controls throttle and every other instrument that has to be regulated (mixture, prop) and to tune radios and transponder etc. All while flying a small aircraft which if it gets too slow will happily stall and if you're not high enough to recover fall out of the sky, and keeping an eye out for traffic.
Granted this is one reason why flying a plane is harder than driving a car, however what we need is better training so that drivers can cope with distractions, rather than assuming that everyone is a moron who can't multitask. The bottom line is something's always going to be there to distract you. Whether its a cell phone, a radio, the spouse and kids or stuff shifting in the back that you thought you'd secured.
It's beyond darwinian. He's prepared to take out smart people in other cars.
Wrong. Purely Darwinian. Survival of the fittest based on prevailing environment. Environment full of idiots that shouldn't be driver. Person most able to avoid said idiots most likely to contribute to the gene pool. Of course if not for the never ending supply of idiots eventually there would be no idiots, and the ability to avoid them would no longer be a successful survival trait. In the real world you'll eventually reach an equilibrium where idiots are born and die at a roughly fixed rate. Assuming that not everyone turns into an idiot, the increase in probability of survival based on the idiot avoidance survival trait will be proportional to where that equilibrium is reached.
Category in the freedb is subjective. I suspect that fact alone could be used to argue that it is a creative work.
This just prooves copyright is a mess. I believe we should be changing this so that copyright cases allow authors/artists to claim some portion of profit or potential profit made from a derivative work, but not restrict its use. That's certainly not how it works now though.
Who is going to want to buy this stuff?
Not anyone outside the US... and not anyone *inside*
Your faith in humanity is both funny and sad. Watch people, companies and countries with no understanding of the issues lap it up. One thing you can count on is a high level human stupidity as the sample size of your group increases.
1200 machines with one having a problem each day means each machine averages 3.28 years between problems. Granted that's not great but it's not excrement either. Surely if you're in charge of so many machines you understand that a small failure rate with a large enough number of machines still means high frequency of failure.
First, let me say that you seem to have a tendency to respond to what you think I wrote, not what I actually did.
.com bust and try and run that without any kind of change. If it's complex I'd give you even odds it breaks.
...and yet you do continue.
Let me say you have a tendancy to word things so as to imply other things, then back down when confronted with facts.
What I have actually said is that issues with JRE updates are rare.
I say bollox to that.
Java is one of the most backward-compatible systems ever produced.
It's one of the most widely used systems that has been designed with backward compatibility in mind, I grant you that.
Nothing you have said and no links you have provided have demonstrated otherwise.
Yes typically if someone wants to be stubborn nothing convinces them to change their opinion.
You seem to be considering matters of how to access JREs or how to package applets as if they were somehow related to the Java language and compatibility. They aren't.
Wait a second there and get your straw man out of my face. You are claiming that Java (I presume that includes the runtime) is "one of the most backward compatible systems ever produces" then you takl about Java the language separately as if that's all you were ever speaking off. The grand parent didn't go into language syntax, he said JREs broke. Make up your mind what you're arguing and stop trying to employ such obvious sophistry.
You have provided a very minor list of issues that may occur when people upgrade from Java 1.3 (released 6 years ago!) with Java 1.5.
Shall I go and chase down every change between minor versions that caused something to break? I've demonstrated my point which is that it's not all that rare. If Sun thought it was important enough to produce a document, and most sane developers feel the need to retest with new JREs I'd say compatibility is an issue.
Go find some 1.0.2 code from the
That minor list simply emphasises how few programs are going to break, and the minor matters involved.
I think if I went and pulled down 1000 examples you'd claim they're only minor. The word fanboy comes to mind.
realise you are not in a position to give a personal example, but that does not help the debate. Until you can give some specific reason, I can't see any point in continuing.
If anything, this conversation has helped prove my point
Only if you're in the habit of ignoring problems and hoping they'll go away.
that the suggestion made by a poster a while back that 'all your old aplications do not work at all anymore when users install the new JRE' is utter nonsense. (note the use of the word 'all' - not 'some', or 'a very few', but 'all'!)
I think you know perfectly well that all was an exaggeration. Java is designed with the intent of backward compatibility. However many many apps do break. You just dismiss it as so rare no one should bother worrying about it.
Summary of this debate. You spot a post where someone points out Java isn't always compatible between releases and that this can cause a headache. You say I've rarely seen things break. I say I have seen things break quite a bit and provide what examples I'm free to. You insist these are minor and choose to ignore them.
Good luck. I live in the real world. If I depend on something, I expect some breakage between versions and test and fix accordingly. I think that's a much better solution than yours which is to tell people its rare. Not just for Java. For any software btw not just Java: Every version of Windows breaks some apps. I'm not saying don't use any piece of software but I am saying don't pretend change doesn't break things no matter how well done.
Here you go. Get your info straight from Sun. See the section on runtime errors.
http://java.sun.com/j2se/JM_White_Paper_R6A.pdf [sun.com]
Getting your adolescent friends to second your opinion or creating a second account to bolster yourself is completely juvenile.
For your info I'm over 30, have a bachelor and masters, and have been doing this for some years...all of which has no bearing on the truth of what I've said of course.
Look I've seen code break. You haven't. I don't care if you get a team of 30 coders with a combined experience of 900 years to tell me their apps haven't broken. I've seen apps break, and not only when the code's compiled for a later JRE. We've had to develop specific workarounds and re-release stuff due to this. I can't show you because I'm bound by an employment contract and I'm not about to embarass my employer even if I wasn't. That you don't believe me doesn't make an inkling of difference to my life. Enjoy your fantasy.
...complete with a whole section on runtime issues
1 921&messageID=42128216 00.html2 494&messageID=2042086d =4783788d =6204839
If you are going to reply at all the first thing I challenge you to do is explain this migration guide by Sun for Java 1.3 to 5.0:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/JM_White_Paper_R6A.pdf
More references. Again not the best. Wish I could show you my good example but see above.
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=73
http://www.codecomments.com/archive251-2005-5-498
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=43
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_i
http://helpdesk.wisc.edu/page.php?id=2891
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t18329.html
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_i
The above links very clearly show installing the latest JRE is not sufficient to run all your old code. With many Java applications, you can't just remove all older versions of a JRE and upgrade to the latest.
I also recall that if your code is applet based, the tags used to invoke the JRE changed after Microsoft dumped their custom JVM due to the legal action between Sun and MS.
The bottom line is that you're calling anyone who has seen anything break due to a newer JRE a fool and a liar based on your "30 years of experience". I know for a fact that this is false. Your arrogance is astounding and your insistance on this makes me wonder what you've been doing for 30 years since I know of no complex environment where the runtime backward compatibility is so fantastic that you don't need to test a new version to be sure it works for your application.
This is quite laughable. Both of these links have nothing to do with the fantasy that you are trying to propogate.
The "fantasy" I'm trying to propogate? You're truely dillusional and brainwashed if you believe that upgrading or changing your JRE can't break your apps. Have fun living in your fantasy. A credibility raiting from a fool is of no interest or consequence to me.
The GP complained that he'd seen Java apps break. You said you hadn't and that you couldn't imagine more complex apps. You were definitely implying he was a liar. This isn't a court of law so burdens of proof don't apply here. To me your intent was very clear.
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In your latest post again you insist that because you haven't in your very limited experience seen Java apps break, that it's rare. It's not.
Google for the following phrase:
java 1.5 breaks application
You get such links as:
http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2006/qa1474.html
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=47
That's just the tip of the iceberg and I'm not going to do any more work proving that things have broken because with your attitude I don't see you admitting to a mistake.
Guess what happens if you use any 3rd party product that is in any way incompatible. You need to get another version of that product.
Now you're obviously not interested in reality. In your mind because you haven't had the displeasure of working on something that's been badly broken by a JRE release all is good. Enjoy living your fantasy but don't force it down other people's throats or belittle them when they point out that they've seen it happen.
It is great the way that posters assume things! I work on substantial Java applications daily - apps with hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
/. stupidity never ceases to amaze me.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. You called the GP a liar because his experience didn't match yours. How dare you then come back and point the finger at someone making assumptions you hypocrite!
There are very complex Java applications that run unchanged on different versions of Java - JBoss, NetBeans for example. These are app servers and IDEs - it is hard to think of apps that are more complex
I have never seen a single app break between Java 1.4 and 1.5.
Well I have. "It works for me on my machine so stuff you" is nonesense that no professional should be uttering, let alone calling a perfect stranger a liar because they've seen something you haven't.
Explain my experience then. I'm either lying (and I happen to know for a fact that I'm not, and would gladly prove it if it didn't require breaking my contract and if I thought it would sway you one bit).
JBoss and Netbeans are just two technologies. Most of my experience happens to be with Eclipse though I have used Netbeans, and Weblogic though I've also used Tomcat and JBoss. So what. There are more technologies out there that neither of us have used than you could shake a stick at and to make the assumption that no applications have broken just because you haven't seen it is both arrogant and ignorant.
What do you do when your users complain there's a bug you can't reproduce? Shut your eyes, put your hands over your ears and shout "la la la la la" at the top of your voice?
Well you've obviously never written anything in a complex Java environment. I've seen apps I've worked on break in 1.5 where they worked fine in 1.4.2_08. This caused our team huge headaches because it was an applet problem that had already been installed on a lot of client machines, some external to the organisation I worked for.
I don't know the GP from a bar of soap, but if you're going to call someone a liar how about you check your facts first.
...and if you say yes to that, how about the lives, liberties or freedom of your loved ones?
Sorry but you're talking overly optimistic nonesense.
Times have changed. When your country pulled out of its earlier problems, the technology to spy on individuals and extinguish any dissent was very primitive compared to what exists today. Yes technology puts much more power in the hands of the individual but unfortunately the same rings truer of government.
Secondly what suggestion do you have for a non-US citizen to fix your country. We can't vote and its not our place to say how it's run except for the unfortunate fact that America sets trends and even has the power to enforce some of those trends economically and failing that with military force.
Unfortunately, the future is bleaker than you think and it will take something extraordinary to change that.
Actually the meaning is closer to:
Divide your code/project into small pieces that do specific things, work on the pieces that are most important first, and plan on going through several versions before you have something complete that you're happy with.
Or simpler still: Break the problem down into smaller pieces, and don't settle for your first attempt at a solution in code.
In other words the exact same thing that's been said over and over again in computer science classes since the 60s.
As I said in another post, when someone starts speaking like this - saying something simple in as complex and vague a way as possible - its time to hide your wallet.
n order to energize the evolution of computer games we need to synergize on the vertical slices... WTF?
Translation: In order to make video games evolve/progress, we need to get everyone to work on improving one thing at a time.
When someone starts saying something very simple in a very complex and vague way, keep a firm hold of your wallet.
No the developers made a mistake taking jobs where unpaid overtime is expected. But since that's the norm in the video game industry I guess I'm saying they picked the wrong job.