FYI, JDK 1.4 will include a COM bridge on Windows.
Are you sure? As of JavaOne only a few weeks ago, the COM bridge was being released unsupported under the SCSL. It's kind of a kludgey hack, and it's only to allow COM to call Java, not the other way around. It gets hairy because every thread in every apartment in COM that wants to access a Java class has to create a separate instance of the Java runtime. It's not very practical, and from what I saw in the session I went to on it, many more developers were interested in the other way around - Java programs being able to call COM objects.
Very good point about the authenticators. However, I'd expect Sun to attempt to match Microsoft almost feature-for-feature, including remote authentication.
While Sun or Oracle or BEA might very well release a competing product, I don't expect they'll be open sourcing it or putting it directly into any spec, such as J2EE, although I might be wrong.
With all due respect to the Ximian folks, I hope they don't undertake an effort to rebuild.NET/Java from the ground up. It would be much better if they joined the large ranks of open source developers working on projects surrounding the Java platform, for example by working on better Java integration with Gnome.
Ximian's roots aren't just in Open Source, but in Free Software, so I can understand why they wouldn't work on anything related to Java so long as Sun owns the spec. After all, GNOME only started over a licensing spat in the first place. Java might be "free enough" for a lot of us, but I certainly don't disrespect those for whom it isn't. I don't think Sun will be GPLing or otherwise releasing Java technology to the community at large any time soon. They make far too much money licensing their source to partners and charging for compatibility suite compliance.
The new universal runtime takes (obviously) a very substantial amount of ideas from java and expands on them
What exactly does it expand on?
- You can pretty much write in the language of your choice on top of it.
No, actually you can write in one of the supported langauges on top of it, all of the useful ones of which have corresponding projects that target the JVM. Nothing I've seen about the CLI or the CLR suggests to me that it's got anything over Java. IL is just JVM bytecode warmed over. There's nothing about JVM bytecode that inherently ties it to the Java Language - just judge from the ports of Perl, Python, Scheme, etc. As long as a language can understand the Java object model, it can compile/reconstruct JVM bytecode, thus enabling it both inherit from Java libraries and allow inheritance from its own libraries. There's no particular reason, for example, why C# can't be compiled to JVM bytecode, since the object models are easily mappable between the two.
- C# introduces some ideas that are, imho, an improvement over java such as boxing, where for example, a native type such as an integer is transparently converted to the object type without the need for function calls.
Wow, now there's a feature, because those wrapper types are so painful to call -
Integer a = new Integer(int);
Never mind that explicit object encapsulation of primitives provides some uses of its own - protecting against accidental casting comes to mind.
- A huge cool aspect is that the runtime seemlessly allows interaction between none runtime and raw code. Thus, you can implement parts of your c++ code in the same module to run in the runtime environment and other parts to be 'raw'-- but they can still call each other without the need of special interface layers (aka JNI). Thus your handy dandy super duper collection of anyting in the world could run on top the runtime, thus being garbage collected, and the rest of your code could run 'raw' outside of it.
Yes, but all the data types you want to transfer between your 'raw' elements and your 'safe' code have to be part of the managed extensions Microsoft has introduced, so you're still going to end up rewriting large sections of code. Besides that, all of the overhead of JNI is still there, it's just abstracted by the runtime.
- COM developers are going to like this runtime a lot. It introduces 'revolutionary' (sarcasam) ideas such as searching in the current directory for a COM object and not requiring really gross GUIDs to load interfaces and libraries.
So it's finally catching up to Java in this regard? Whoopee. I will admit that the abstraction layer that allows old COM objects to plug in to.NET seamlessly are nice, but there are similar projects to make it work for Java on Win32 platforms, too.
The obvious attraction of some of these features is enough for any developer to say hmmmmmmmmmmm
No, actually they're enough to make any Java developer say "yawnnnnnn...."
Nobody ever said that we should be copying.NET from the ground up. What we should be doing is making it possible to talk to.NET's Web Services, which should be possible, since SOAP 1.1, WSDL, and UDDI are open protocols, and are probably going to make up the W3C XML-RPC spec when it's finished. The rest of it's fluff - I don't think anybody's going to worry about making Web Forms work on Linux, for example. C# and the CLR have nothing to do with Web Services - they're just an attempt to steal Java's thunder on WORA. The Java community is already working on Web Services APIs for Java - JAX-RPC and JAXM. That's where Open Source developers should be concentrating, too.
The most important thing besides getting tools that speak the wire protocols is creating something to compete with Microsoft for authentication services. This is where Microsoft expects to control the whole ball of wax. If they are the only authenticators, they can charge for every transaction. If Ximian is smart, they'll release an authentication framework as soon as they can, hopefully not long after Hailstorm is in the water (since before is likely a hopeless cause at this point).
We're obviously in the minority... and I wonder if he'll get added to spam lists now, like I do every time I post a story critical of anti-spam activists.
jamie is on your side. It's just that you're both wrong. You may have a right to free speech, but you don't have a right to force the television news to broadcast your message, and you don't have a right to force me to listen to you. With the ORBkins, it's like having a news director at the TV station - yes, sometimes important things don't get covered (at which point some people will complain, and perhaps something will get done), but most of the time, it's just raving loonies who get ignored, and no one but the loonies gives a damn.
Until it's government mandated, or public institutions start requiring its use, there's no censorship issue involved. When the Southern Poverty Law Center maintains and publicizes a list of suspected hate groups, that's not a violation of civil liberties (although if they're wrong it might be libel). When the FBI does it, it's a different issue.
All those nice run-time optimizations being applied to Java work for C++ too, if anybody would bother.
You apparently don't understand what I mean, because those optimizations are impossible for any staticly-compiled language. The HotSpot compiler can see the entire inheritance structure that is in place for that runtime session, and finalize those methods that will not be overridden. Better yet, if it finds out later that it was wrong, it can dynamically replace the finalizd method with a non-finalized version.
Of course, since C++ is generally tons faster, nobody has yet.
C++ is not that much faster in situations where operation is computation bound, rather than I/O or graphics hardware bound.
So, have they bothered with a 'select'-like statement, or is it still 3000+ threads for a server with 3000 cllients [sic]?
3000 threads is only the case on systems like Linux where the thread model is one-to-one. Solaris, for example, has a many-to-many thread model that allows for very nice threaded operation. When you get right down to it, Linux isn't really set up for good lightweight threaded execution. The 1.4 revision of the JRE for Linux starts to address those problems, as do the new I/O libraries and some of SGI's work on KIO.
As for worrying about all that icky memory stuff. I want to worry about it. My programs are faster and better designed for it.
I personally have my doubts that you of all programmers on the planet has memory management down to an art. Nonetheless, I think the great number of memory-leaking C++ programs and libraries out there testify that you are rare if having to worry about memory management makes your programs better. The garbage collector in Java is admittedly the weakest part of the platform still, but it's a tricky problem, and it is being tackled steadily. The gc in J2SE 1.4 is reportedly much more efficient than its predecessors.
It also makes me extremely nervous that Sun still has such tight control of it.
Sun can't make a single change to the language or API specs outside of the Java Community Process these days. They are responsible for the official implentations of the J2SE on Windows, Linux/x86, and Solaris. They are the administrators of compatibility testing, and they own the trademark. So basically, the only difference between them and Linus Torvalds is that they require passing a compatibility suite before you can use their trademark. That and they can't change anything without community input. Gosh, that's tight-fisted control!
Not to be nitpicky, but you mention providing marketable skills & performance isn't the issue. If Java is a slow performer, wouldn't it tend to hurt students more learning a language that is slow, and klunky? Last I checked, there were plenty of jobs available for C & C++ programmers. I have a feeling that Java may be a fad, and C/C++ will be around and fall back in favor unless Java really takes off.
Java lets you do some cool stuff, and it lets you do some really klunky stuff, but it isn't designed for performance. Any industry that is CPU bound (Simulation, number crunching, gaming, local applications, etc.) needs to be coded to run fast. Industries that are network bound (ISP's, ASP's, Portals, etc.) don't really care about how much the CPU is choking because the network is the bottleneck. I have a feeling, once the network is no longer the bottleneck, Java either better get fast quick, or it's going to be going back to C/C++ for speed.
Java's not slow and klunky. I don't know when the last time you looked at Java was (it must have been years ago), but it is fast and getting faster. There are some optimization tricks you can do to code at runtime that can't work with a static compiler.
C++ lets you do some really klunky stuff, too - more, I would argue. There's no cure for incompetent programming.
Java isn't just taking off, it's already taken off. The base of Java developers and companies using Java for enterprise-critical applications is growing in direct proportion to C++'s falloff rate. Java isn't a fad, it's the language of the future. You can bury your head in the sand all you want, but that's the way it is. I'm sure lots of COBOL programmers thought C was just a fad, too.
Java's making huge inroads in graphics performance and I/O speed, which is where it's always been slowest, especially in the upcoming Merlin release (J2SE 1.4). I won't pretend that you could write Quake III in Java yet, but you could probably write Quake I. Computation speed has never really been the problem. After all, even Fortran has great number-crunching capability, but nobody would use it for serious enterprise-type applications.
Java's great strengths are binary portability, syntactic simplicity, and standard, supported APIs for everything under the sun. C++ doesn't even have an ABI standard that everyone plays with yet, let alone standard networking, graphics, and GUI libraries. Any industry that doesn't want portable, maintainable, extensible code is better off out of business.
Obligatory flamebait disclaimer: I don't think C and C++ are going away, or that Java is the One True Language. However, it is ridiculous to assert that Java is slow, poorly adopted, or unsuited to real-world applications in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Very serious companies like Oracle, Sybase, IBM, Macromedia/Allaire, Borland and of course Sun, are banking lots of money on Java's success, recognizing that it's a mature, robust, stable, fast language for very serious development.
Every time there is a discussion on Java, the same complaints come up:
Java is slow.
Java doesn't allow me direct memory access, pointer manipulation, templated classes, overloaded operators (insert favorite C++ feature here).
The syntax is not rich enough.
Guess what, folks - most of that hasn't been true for the past couple of years, and it's getting better all the time. The stuff that you're not and won't be allowed to do is prohibited for the most part because it's dangerous and counter-productive. Java, like any widely-adopted language, does not simply cater to the 31337 hax0r.
Java is approaching C++ speeds for execution time. Java benefits from some runtime compilation techniques that a static compiler can't accomplish, such as finalizing and inlining methods that aren't being overridden by an inheriting class and dynamically re-compiling "hot" methods. Many of the optimization tricks for static compilers, such as loop unrolling, are being brought into the HotSpot server compiler. Changes in the I/O libraries and the 2D libraries are providing a speed boost of 40-100% in J2SE 1.4 (now in Beta) Swing-based GUI applications over v1.2. The 2D layer in v1.4 uses native hardware acceleration for local apps and remote X calls for apps on remote terminals.
The litany of things Java abstracts away - direct memory manipulation, pointers, overloaded operators, multiple inheritance - all can be very dangerous for the naive programmer. The fact that C++ not only allows, but often makes you think about these things, is what I consider the bad thing.
Templates are coming to Java, probably in 1.5. Generics, as they're being called in JavaSpeak, however, have one important difference - they are 100% type-safe. You will only be able to template Objects, not primitives.
Java's syntax provides one blessed thing that C, C++, and especially Perl and some other newer languages don't - readability. There's none of this C++ -> nonsense, or Perl's $/@ crap. Thank god there is no such thing as preprocessor directives. Syntactic simplicity is as much a reason for Java's rapid adoption as anything else. The cleanest-written code is the most maintable code. Considering the commenting habits of most programmers, being able to tell what the code's doing from the code itself is a godsend. Sometimes there should be only one way to do something, because it reinforces the right way of doing it.
I've helped teach a class for the AP and IB CS exams, and I'll tell you what they're about more than anything else - algorithms. That certainly doesn't benefit more from C/C++ than it does from Java. Hell, if that were the concern, we'd use Haskell! The point is, the class's focus isn't on pointer arithmetic, code optimization, or any other topic that makes C++ a more natural choice than Java. As a matter of fact, having to consider those things make C++ an obstacle to understanding, rather than an aid. I'm glad the College Board is changing the language to Java - it's the right thing to do for the level of understanding they're trying to teach.
You have some BSD code in some of your products and gladly adhere to the BSD license, don't you?
<flamebait>
Of course they do - there's no work involved in adhering to the BSD license. It's a perfect fit for a company whose attitude toward "intellectual property" (a misbegotten term if ever there was one) is roughly, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine."
</flamebait>
Seriously, though, Microsoft knows that BSD-licensed stuff will just keep on keepin' on (ripe for their picking) for a while, since it's still under the radar for the most part. It's GPL-licensed software (which they can't co-opt without giving their users the code) that they fear. Of course, the GPL is about freedom for the user, which is what Microsoft really fears above all.
Standard BSD disclaimer: I don't have any problem with the BSD license. Even the FSF defines it as a Free Software license. If an author wants to release their code into the wild and has no qualms regarding what happens after that, more power to that author. I just wanted to point out that Microsoft doesn't care about user freedoms, only their own freedom to use and subsequently lock up any code they see, and the BSD license plays right into that, for better or for worse. Now flame away...
Re:Java -- more real than you think
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Wheel mice are on the list of features for J2SE 1.4 (Merlin), and I think DnD might be on the list, too (but don't quote me - it's been weeks since I was browsing the documentation).
Whenever you're speaking in this forum, it might be a good idea not to appropriate the term Free Software, complete with capitalization, and then claim that it's got nothing to do with the GPL. The term Free Software (as opposed to free software) connotes a very particular meaning among/.ers in the know.
The GPL protects the software commons in a way that the BSD license cannot do. Period. The BSD license can not prevent someone from hijacking the code from the user downstream. If Linus had released the Linux kernel under a BSD license, we could already have IBM Linux*, Sun Linux*, and a thousand other locked-up codebases, not talking with eachother, and with nothing making it possible to bridge the gap because none of them would have to share their changes with anybody. Actually, Linux development probably would have suffered crib death, because who needed another UNIX workalike except the FSF-inspired community? Same thing goes for all of the GNU tools, which is probably more significant to the issue of interoperability.
Please note: I am not flaming the BSD license - release your software under whatever license you want. But don't pretend the GPL hasn't been a significant factor in the development of Free Software (in the RMS definition of the term), because it couldn't have happened without it. It might not be a cause, but it's certainly a catalyst, just as cheap hardware probably wasn't a cause. I personally think the initial cause was frustration with vendor lock-in in a supposedly "open" system like UNIX. The achievement of critical mass is a much thornier question.
I think Caldera's never really been happy with having to be more-or-less compatible with everyone else's Linux distribution, anyway. They've always struck me as a company that would be quite glad to be able to lock in their market segment.
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*I don't actually think IBM and Sun would have released versions of Linux in this scenario. They're just examples of heavyweight players that could have taken the community's freely-provided code and hijacked it to make it incompatible with everyone else's.
I'm surprised no one mentioned the comments on OSS in other countries. The quote sounded rather ominous to me:
He said Microsoft was particularly concerned about the inroads that the open-source idea was making in other countries.
"It's happening very, very broadly in a way that is troubling to us," he said. "I could highlight a dozen countries around the world who have open-source initiatives."
This makes OSS sound like a health epidemic in a third world country. What does MS mean by they are "concerned" about OSS in other countries? It sounds ominous and egotistical (not a surprise really) It doesn't sound like they're just referring to companies in other countries, but governments. Government software is one area where in my mind there should be a mandate for open source.
What Microsoft's "concerned" with is that they're not getting to rape these countries with outrageous license fees anymore. In some countries, where the average yearly salary is considerably less than a license for Windows 2000 Advanced Server with enough CALs to run a proper network environment, what kind of sense does it make not to use Free Software?
Strangely enough, Microsoft would actually prefer these countries steal Windows, in the hope that someday they'll be able to capitalize on them as customers when they do have enough money. When they're not dependent on Microsoft in any way, that's when Bill loses!
The problem is that searching does not scale on Gnutella. On any medium-to-large-size GnutellaNet, the packets generated by sending a search request quickly overwhelms the available bandwidth, so that soon the entire network is saturated with nothing but searches. The article we discussed in this story spelled it out quite clearly mathematically. A GnutellaNet eventually segments because it simply can't meet the demand for searches. So your GnutellaNet where you found 1832 instances of Beatles.mp3 was probably only one of hundreds or thousands of GnutellaNets worldwide, none of which can talk to eachother. Not very scalable P2P, is it?
...we're gonna have problems. Let's hope one of the directions for the project is to add some self-organizing behavior so that we can set up a hierarchy dynamically. That would eliminate the problem of search propagation.
I realize it's a difficult problem, but it would be very cool. Imagine an OpenNap or Gnutella network that was like a Hydra - you shut down one directory node, and the network re-organizes to anoint another one. Just try to shut down that kind of network!
Too bad we can't do it like SMB browser elections - it's too easy to hijack the process. Besides, the packet waste with a browser election (or just the NMB protocal in general) is phenomenal.
Disclaimer: this is slightly off-topic, since I'm discussing residence hall raids in the U.S., not Taiwan.
The reason residence hall rooms get raided more easily than private homes is not so much because they are government institutions, per se. It actually comes down to a conjunction of two legal principles: lanlord/lessee agreements and in loco parentis.
Basically, since the student living in a residence hall has a "lease" with the college/university (leaving aside for the moment the compulsory nature of these "leases," especially for freshmen), they agree as a condition of their lease to allow the landlord (the college) access to their room for any reason at any time. Thus, when the institution finds it expedient to bypass the normal warrant procedures, they can. Anyone renting an apartment most likely has a similar situation, even if it's not explicitly in their lease agreement. The property owner, not the occupant, retains their Constitutional rights protecting them from unwarranted search and seizure. They can grant permission to law enforcement without the lessee's consent, and often do just as a method of reducing their legal liability by cooperating with the authorities.
The other legal doctrine involved, in loco parentis (in capacity of parent), gives schools most of the legal authority of parents over students under the age of 21, and moreso under 18. This doctrine applies in high schools, too, for example. In loco parentis is fading into the background, however, in favor of the legal arguments under landlord/lessee agreements, as above.
Note, however, that many (not all, perhaps not even most) schools do not violate student privacy so flagrantly as a matter of policy. At the University of Oklahoma, for example, the campus police (actually Oklahoma State Patrol officers) in my experience always abided by normal warrant/probable cause procedures, and the administration did not give them carte blanche to enter rooms.
Of course, the obligatory "Dammit Jim, I'm an engineer, not a lawyer!" statement applies here...
There are some successful examples of very big Pure Java applications running cross-platform. Borland's JBuilder and TogetherSoft's Together are two very notable examples.
JNI doesn't necessarily mean platform-dependance, just that you have to provide equivalent functionality for the other platforms you support, whether that's in Pure Java or using JNI calls. For example, you could use JNI methods to write log information to the Event Log on Windows NT/2000, or normal Java I/O to write to standard text-based log files on any UNIX-compatible system. That doesn't mean you're platform-dependent.
(Note very carefully - I'm not saying Java is truly platform-independent; just cross-platform capable without a ton of porting work or a complete recompile.)
You disagrree with what I say, so I'm automatically a troll? I hope to God you're not a moderator...
As a matter of fact, I have followed this case, from the start. Have you? You seem to be a little confused. There is not now, nor was there ever any evidence that any violent behavior was being solicited, actively or otherwise. Period. If there was, this would be an open and shut case, now wouldn't it? They certainly never said, "This is a list of doctors we want killed." The only arguments for a "threat" were the "political climate" and the feeling of being threatened expressed by the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs' mere perception of it as a threat, and nothing more, convinced the jury to award them $109 million and order the web site shut down. There was no basis for the judgment or the award, and the Circuit Court has quite rightly set the record straight.
Whether they included convicted murderers among their number or not doesn't enter into it. Free speech is free speech - anyone can exercise it, to the degree the Constitution allows. The speech itself cannot be demonstrated to be an overt threat or solicitation to murder. So instead you want to use the straw man argument of "But they associate with criminals, so they must be trying to encourage criminality." Perhaps it's base to rejoice in the death of a person, no matter what evils they've done, and perhaps it's immoral to publish so many details of an individual's private life. I certainly wouldn't stoop to such tactics, nor would most Pro-Lifers. But it's not illegal. Of course, I guess opinions from Pro-Lifers don't matter - we're just trolls, right?
Warning: I'm about to fly my self-righteous flag - the karma loss doesn't concern me.
Violence breeds violence. Exposure to violent media may not cause violence, but I'm certain it makes it easier to condone certain kinds of violence: revenge killings, capital punishment and other kinds of retributive justice, and so on. Are the people behind the Nuremberg Files any different?
Is a society that sends the message that the extermination of innocent lives is acceptable, no matter the well-intentioned reason, any different?
Please note: I do not condone the Nuremberg Files as moral, nor the killing of abortionists. That's my whole point, though - when a society says that it's okay to kill under any circumstance (except maybe self-defense - that's a boundary case), it's poisioned the well. Abortion is just such a poison.
The difference, I think, lies in the credibility of the inference. The inference that moviegoers would not run in panic spontaneously seems on its face (prima facie) to hold more water than the inference that no abortionist on the list would ever have been shot if this website hadn't existed, and thus that the website incited their murder. There are fewer external factors that can cause one than the other, knowing what we do about normal human behavior, sociopathy, and psychopathy.
You can't prove that. For a more detailed explanation, see my post here. There are other, perfectly legal reasons to have posted the information they did. Just because you infer a certain intent doesn't make that legally proveable.
My feelings of being threatened do not constitute a legal basis for calling something a threat. I might be mentally ill, suffering from paranoia. Whether someone feels threatened is not the proper litmus test to apply.
You're also missing the point - the web site never advocated physical harm of any kind to these abortionists or their families. The use of Wanted poster and Most Wanted List-style layouts doesn't make them overtly threatening - the FBI doesn't advocate the killing of its Ten Most Wanted. The name of the site (The Nuremberg Files), its motif, and so on, were to draw parallels between the Holocaust and abortion - a perfectly legal and valid act of political speech. There are other purposes to publishing so many details of daily schedules and so on, as well - to insure, for example, that these abortionists were picketed by protesters everywhere they went, in front of their neighbors, the parents of their children's friends, etc. Those activities are also protected free speech, despite efforts to throttle them at nearly every level.
It is not possible to prove conclusively that the intent of the site was ever to solicit harm in any way, "context" be damned. Absent that necessary legal proof, there is no basis for suppressing the site or for granting such an obscenely large cash award.
Interesting, incidentally, that you would pick butchers as your stand-ins for abortionists in your scenario. Poetic.
Interesting point. I'm still not sure that there aren't ways to obtain residence addresses by legal means, though. Law enforcement, for example, needs ways to find where someone physically lives, not just where they get their mail.
Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre has the potential for immediate, causal effects of demonstrable harm. People would not run in panic, most likely causing some to be trampled or otherwise injured, if you never yelled "Fire!"
In this case, however, you cannot prove that any harm came to any abortionist because of direct action by the website, or that any who were harmed would not have been harmed had the website not existed. For the "FIRE!" analogy to work, any harmful action in question must be conclusively shown to be a direct result of the speech.
They asked for the doctors to be murdered, but left out the nickel.
They absolutely did no such thing. Whatever else you may say about the site, they were very careful to never use the words "murder" or "reward." That's what the whole case turned upon - whether without those words the site constituted a threat. They did cross out the name of one doctor the same day he was murdered rather than simply remove it, but that's the closest they ever came to solicitng, condoning or encouraging murder.
So sites that publish the corporate addresses of companies they want picketed, for example, shuld be suppressed? That doesn't make any sense. The simple fact of the matter is that this is a group that wants these "doctors" to stop offering these "reproductive services." You might find their tactics distasteful (I do, too, despite my obvious bias), but they were publishing information that was either publicly available or gathered by legal means. That was never even the issue. The issue was always whether the website itself constituted a threat, as you quite correctly point out.
The original court hearing the case agreed with your reasoning, even going so far as to say that merely feeling threatened was enough to prove it was a threat. That's a dangerous precendent in any case, one that could have an enormous chilling effect on free speech.
I personally doubt that the Supreme Court will hear the case. The current Court isn't all that fond of First Amendment cases anyway, and one this politically loaded isn't one that either the right- or left-wingers on the Court will want to touch all that badly. There's no conflicting Circuit opinions to resolve here, so they'll most likely leave it alone.
Addresses are publicly-accessible information, as are criminal and driving records in most states - hell, the USPS sells mailing lists to junk-mail advertisers. Credit cards, on the other hand, are not.
Unpleasant, perhaps, but hardly a boundary case for free-speech considerations.
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FYI, JDK 1.4 will include a COM bridge on Windows.
Are you sure? As of JavaOne only a few weeks ago, the COM bridge was being released unsupported under the SCSL. It's kind of a kludgey hack, and it's only to allow COM to call Java, not the other way around. It gets hairy because every thread in every apartment in COM that wants to access a Java class has to create a separate instance of the Java runtime. It's not very practical, and from what I saw in the session I went to on it, many more developers were interested in the other way around - Java programs being able to call COM objects.
Very good point about the authenticators. However, I'd expect Sun to attempt to match Microsoft almost feature-for-feature, including remote authentication.
While Sun or Oracle or BEA might very well release a competing product, I don't expect they'll be open sourcing it or putting it directly into any spec, such as J2EE, although I might be wrong.
With all due respect to the Ximian folks, I hope they don't undertake an effort to rebuild .NET/Java from the ground up. It would be much better if they joined the large ranks of open source developers working on projects surrounding the Java platform, for example by working on better Java integration with Gnome.
Ximian's roots aren't just in Open Source, but in Free Software, so I can understand why they wouldn't work on anything related to Java so long as Sun owns the spec. After all, GNOME only started over a licensing spat in the first place. Java might be "free enough" for a lot of us, but I certainly don't disrespect those for whom it isn't. I don't think Sun will be GPLing or otherwise releasing Java technology to the community at large any time soon. They make far too much money licensing their source to partners and charging for compatibility suite compliance.
The new universal runtime takes (obviously) a very substantial amount of ideas from java and expands on them
What exactly does it expand on?
- You can pretty much write in the language of your choice on top of it.
No, actually you can write in one of the supported langauges on top of it, all of the useful ones of which have corresponding projects that target the JVM. Nothing I've seen about the CLI or the CLR suggests to me that it's got anything over Java. IL is just JVM bytecode warmed over. There's nothing about JVM bytecode that inherently ties it to the Java Language - just judge from the ports of Perl, Python, Scheme, etc. As long as a language can understand the Java object model, it can compile/reconstruct JVM bytecode, thus enabling it both inherit from Java libraries and allow inheritance from its own libraries. There's no particular reason, for example, why C# can't be compiled to JVM bytecode, since the object models are easily mappable between the two.
- C# introduces some ideas that are, imho, an improvement over java such as boxing, where for example, a native type such as an integer is transparently converted to the object type without the need for function calls.
Wow, now there's a feature, because those wrapper types are so painful to call -
Integer a = new Integer(int);Never mind that explicit object encapsulation of primitives provides some uses of its own - protecting against accidental casting comes to mind.
- A huge cool aspect is that the runtime seemlessly allows interaction between none runtime and raw code. Thus, you can implement parts of your c++ code in the same module to run in the runtime environment and other parts to be 'raw'-- but they can still call each other without the need of special interface layers (aka JNI). Thus your handy dandy super duper collection of anyting in the world could run on top the runtime, thus being garbage collected, and the rest of your code could run 'raw' outside of it.
Yes, but all the data types you want to transfer between your 'raw' elements and your 'safe' code have to be part of the managed extensions Microsoft has introduced, so you're still going to end up rewriting large sections of code. Besides that, all of the overhead of JNI is still there, it's just abstracted by the runtime.
- COM developers are going to like this runtime a lot. It introduces 'revolutionary' (sarcasam) ideas such as searching in the current directory for a COM object and not requiring really gross GUIDs to load interfaces and libraries.
So it's finally catching up to Java in this regard? Whoopee. I will admit that the abstraction layer that allows old COM objects to plug in to .NET seamlessly are nice, but there are similar projects to make it work for Java on Win32 platforms, too.
The obvious attraction of some of these features is enough for any developer to say hmmmmmmmmmmm
No, actually they're enough to make any Java developer say "yawnnnnnn...."
Nobody ever said that we should be copying .NET from the ground up. What we should be doing is making it possible to talk to .NET's Web Services, which should be possible, since SOAP 1.1, WSDL, and UDDI are open protocols, and are probably going to make up the W3C XML-RPC spec when it's finished. The rest of it's fluff - I don't think anybody's going to worry about making Web Forms work on Linux, for example. C# and the CLR have nothing to do with Web Services - they're just an attempt to steal Java's thunder on WORA. The Java community is already working on Web Services APIs for Java - JAX-RPC and JAXM. That's where Open Source developers should be concentrating, too.
The most important thing besides getting tools that speak the wire protocols is creating something to compete with Microsoft for authentication services. This is where Microsoft expects to control the whole ball of wax. If they are the only authenticators, they can charge for every transaction. If Ximian is smart, they'll release an authentication framework as soon as they can, hopefully not long after Hailstorm is in the water (since before is likely a hopeless cause at this point).
Maybe you missed it -
We're obviously in the minority... and I wonder if he'll get added to spam lists now, like I do every time I post a story critical of anti-spam activists.
jamie is on your side. It's just that you're both wrong. You may have a right to free speech, but you don't have a right to force the television news to broadcast your message, and you don't have a right to force me to listen to you. With the ORBkins, it's like having a news director at the TV station - yes, sometimes important things don't get covered (at which point some people will complain, and perhaps something will get done), but most of the time, it's just raving loonies who get ignored, and no one but the loonies gives a damn.
Until it's government mandated, or public institutions start requiring its use, there's no censorship issue involved. When the Southern Poverty Law Center maintains and publicizes a list of suspected hate groups, that's not a violation of civil liberties (although if they're wrong it might be libel). When the FBI does it, it's a different issue.
All those nice run-time optimizations being applied to Java work for C++ too, if anybody would bother.
You apparently don't understand what I mean, because those optimizations are impossible for any staticly-compiled language. The HotSpot compiler can see the entire inheritance structure that is in place for that runtime session, and finalize those methods that will not be overridden. Better yet, if it finds out later that it was wrong, it can dynamically replace the finalizd method with a non-finalized version.
Of course, since C++ is generally tons faster, nobody has yet.
C++ is not that much faster in situations where operation is computation bound, rather than I/O or graphics hardware bound.
So, have they bothered with a 'select'-like statement, or is it still 3000+ threads for a server with 3000 cllients [sic]?
3000 threads is only the case on systems like Linux where the thread model is one-to-one. Solaris, for example, has a many-to-many thread model that allows for very nice threaded operation. When you get right down to it, Linux isn't really set up for good lightweight threaded execution. The 1.4 revision of the JRE for Linux starts to address those problems, as do the new I/O libraries and some of SGI's work on KIO.
As for worrying about all that icky memory stuff. I want to worry about it. My programs are faster and better designed for it.
I personally have my doubts that you of all programmers on the planet has memory management down to an art. Nonetheless, I think the great number of memory-leaking C++ programs and libraries out there testify that you are rare if having to worry about memory management makes your programs better. The garbage collector in Java is admittedly the weakest part of the platform still, but it's a tricky problem, and it is being tackled steadily. The gc in J2SE 1.4 is reportedly much more efficient than its predecessors.
It also makes me extremely nervous that Sun still has such tight control of it.
Sun can't make a single change to the language or API specs outside of the Java Community Process these days. They are responsible for the official implentations of the J2SE on Windows, Linux/x86, and Solaris. They are the administrators of compatibility testing, and they own the trademark. So basically, the only difference between them and Linus Torvalds is that they require passing a compatibility suite before you can use their trademark. That and they can't change anything without community input. Gosh, that's tight-fisted control!
Not to be nitpicky, but you mention providing marketable skills & performance isn't the issue. If Java is a slow performer, wouldn't it tend to hurt students more learning a language that is slow, and klunky? Last I checked, there were plenty of jobs available for C & C++ programmers. I have a feeling that Java may be a fad, and C/C++ will be around and fall back in favor unless Java really takes off.
Java lets you do some cool stuff, and it lets you do some really klunky stuff, but it isn't designed for performance. Any industry that is CPU bound (Simulation, number crunching, gaming, local applications, etc.) needs to be coded to run fast. Industries that are network bound (ISP's, ASP's, Portals, etc.) don't really care about how much the CPU is choking because the network is the bottleneck. I have a feeling, once the network is no longer the bottleneck, Java either better get fast quick, or it's going to be going back to C/C++ for speed.
Obligatory flamebait disclaimer: I don't think C and C++ are going away, or that Java is the One True Language. However, it is ridiculous to assert that Java is slow, poorly adopted, or unsuited to real-world applications in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Very serious companies like Oracle, Sybase, IBM, Macromedia/Allaire, Borland and of course Sun, are banking lots of money on Java's success, recognizing that it's a mature, robust, stable, fast language for very serious development.
Every time there is a discussion on Java, the same complaints come up:
Guess what, folks - most of that hasn't been true for the past couple of years, and it's getting better all the time. The stuff that you're not and won't be allowed to do is prohibited for the most part because it's dangerous and counter-productive. Java, like any widely-adopted language, does not simply cater to the 31337 hax0r.
I've helped teach a class for the AP and IB CS exams, and I'll tell you what they're about more than anything else - algorithms. That certainly doesn't benefit more from C/C++ than it does from Java. Hell, if that were the concern, we'd use Haskell! The point is, the class's focus isn't on pointer arithmetic, code optimization, or any other topic that makes C++ a more natural choice than Java. As a matter of fact, having to consider those things make C++ an obstacle to understanding, rather than an aid. I'm glad the College Board is changing the language to Java - it's the right thing to do for the level of understanding they're trying to teach.
You have some BSD code in some of your products and gladly adhere to the BSD license, don't you?
<flamebait>Of course they do - there's no work involved in adhering to the BSD license. It's a perfect fit for a company whose attitude toward "intellectual property" (a misbegotten term if ever there was one) is roughly, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine."
</flamebait>Seriously, though, Microsoft knows that BSD-licensed stuff will just keep on keepin' on (ripe for their picking) for a while, since it's still under the radar for the most part. It's GPL-licensed software (which they can't co-opt without giving their users the code) that they fear. Of course, the GPL is about freedom for the user, which is what Microsoft really fears above all.
Standard BSD disclaimer: I don't have any problem with the BSD license. Even the FSF defines it as a Free Software license. If an author wants to release their code into the wild and has no qualms regarding what happens after that, more power to that author. I just wanted to point out that Microsoft doesn't care about user freedoms, only their own freedom to use and subsequently lock up any code they see, and the BSD license plays right into that, for better or for worse. Now flame away...
Wheel mice are on the list of features for J2SE 1.4 (Merlin), and I think DnD might be on the list, too (but don't quote me - it's been weeks since I was browsing the documentation).
Whenever you're speaking in this forum, it might be a good idea not to appropriate the term Free Software, complete with capitalization, and then claim that it's got nothing to do with the GPL. The term Free Software (as opposed to free software) connotes a very particular meaning among /.ers in the know.
The GPL protects the software commons in a way that the BSD license cannot do. Period. The BSD license can not prevent someone from hijacking the code from the user downstream. If Linus had released the Linux kernel under a BSD license, we could already have IBM Linux*, Sun Linux*, and a thousand other locked-up codebases, not talking with eachother, and with nothing making it possible to bridge the gap because none of them would have to share their changes with anybody. Actually, Linux development probably would have suffered crib death, because who needed another UNIX workalike except the FSF-inspired community? Same thing goes for all of the GNU tools, which is probably more significant to the issue of interoperability.
Please note: I am not flaming the BSD license - release your software under whatever license you want. But don't pretend the GPL hasn't been a significant factor in the development of Free Software (in the RMS definition of the term), because it couldn't have happened without it. It might not be a cause, but it's certainly a catalyst, just as cheap hardware probably wasn't a cause. I personally think the initial cause was frustration with vendor lock-in in a supposedly "open" system like UNIX. The achievement of critical mass is a much thornier question.
I think Caldera's never really been happy with having to be more-or-less compatible with everyone else's Linux distribution, anyway. They've always struck me as a company that would be quite glad to be able to lock in their market segment.
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*I don't actually think IBM and Sun would have released versions of Linux in this scenario. They're just examples of heavyweight players that could have taken the community's freely-provided code and hijacked it to make it incompatible with everyone else's.
I'm surprised no one mentioned the comments on OSS in other countries. The quote sounded rather ominous to me:
He said Microsoft was particularly concerned about the inroads that the open-source idea was making in other countries. "It's happening very, very broadly in a way that is troubling to us," he said. "I could highlight a dozen countries around the world who have open-source initiatives."
This makes OSS sound like a health epidemic in a third world country. What does MS mean by they are "concerned" about OSS in other countries? It sounds ominous and egotistical (not a surprise really) It doesn't sound like they're just referring to companies in other countries, but governments. Government software is one area where in my mind there should be a mandate for open source.
What Microsoft's "concerned" with is that they're not getting to rape these countries with outrageous license fees anymore. In some countries, where the average yearly salary is considerably less than a license for Windows 2000 Advanced Server with enough CALs to run a proper network environment, what kind of sense does it make not to use Free Software?
Strangely enough, Microsoft would actually prefer these countries steal Windows, in the hope that someday they'll be able to capitalize on them as customers when they do have enough money. When they're not dependent on Microsoft in any way, that's when Bill loses!
The problem is that searching does not scale on Gnutella. On any medium-to-large-size GnutellaNet, the packets generated by sending a search request quickly overwhelms the available bandwidth, so that soon the entire network is saturated with nothing but searches. The article we discussed in this story spelled it out quite clearly mathematically. A GnutellaNet eventually segments because it simply can't meet the demand for searches. So your GnutellaNet where you found 1832 instances of Beatles.mp3 was probably only one of hundreds or thousands of GnutellaNets worldwide, none of which can talk to eachother. Not very scalable P2P, is it?
I meant to say phenomenal if it were applied to a large-scale network like the whole Internet - thank god for firewalls and ping timeouts!
...we're gonna have problems. Let's hope one of the directions for the project is to add some self-organizing behavior so that we can set up a hierarchy dynamically. That would eliminate the problem of search propagation. I realize it's a difficult problem, but it would be very cool. Imagine an OpenNap or Gnutella network that was like a Hydra - you shut down one directory node, and the network re-organizes to anoint another one. Just try to shut down that kind of network! Too bad we can't do it like SMB browser elections - it's too easy to hijack the process. Besides, the packet waste with a browser election (or just the NMB protocal in general) is phenomenal.
Disclaimer: this is slightly off-topic, since I'm discussing residence hall raids in the U.S., not Taiwan.
The reason residence hall rooms get raided more easily than private homes is not so much because they are government institutions, per se. It actually comes down to a conjunction of two legal principles: lanlord/lessee agreements and in loco parentis.
Basically, since the student living in a residence hall has a "lease" with the college/university (leaving aside for the moment the compulsory nature of these "leases," especially for freshmen), they agree as a condition of their lease to allow the landlord (the college) access to their room for any reason at any time. Thus, when the institution finds it expedient to bypass the normal warrant procedures, they can. Anyone renting an apartment most likely has a similar situation, even if it's not explicitly in their lease agreement. The property owner, not the occupant, retains their Constitutional rights protecting them from unwarranted search and seizure. They can grant permission to law enforcement without the lessee's consent, and often do just as a method of reducing their legal liability by cooperating with the authorities.
The other legal doctrine involved, in loco parentis (in capacity of parent), gives schools most of the legal authority of parents over students under the age of 21, and moreso under 18. This doctrine applies in high schools, too, for example. In loco parentis is fading into the background, however, in favor of the legal arguments under landlord/lessee agreements, as above.
Note, however, that many (not all, perhaps not even most) schools do not violate student privacy so flagrantly as a matter of policy. At the University of Oklahoma, for example, the campus police (actually Oklahoma State Patrol officers) in my experience always abided by normal warrant/probable cause procedures, and the administration did not give them carte blanche to enter rooms.
Of course, the obligatory "Dammit Jim, I'm an engineer, not a lawyer!" statement applies here...
There are some successful examples of very big Pure Java applications running cross-platform. Borland's JBuilder and TogetherSoft's Together are two very notable examples.
JNI doesn't necessarily mean platform-dependance, just that you have to provide equivalent functionality for the other platforms you support, whether that's in Pure Java or using JNI calls. For example, you could use JNI methods to write log information to the Event Log on Windows NT/2000, or normal Java I/O to write to standard text-based log files on any UNIX-compatible system. That doesn't mean you're platform-dependent.
(Note very carefully - I'm not saying Java is truly platform-independent; just cross-platform capable without a ton of porting work or a complete recompile.)
You disagrree with what I say, so I'm automatically a troll? I hope to God you're not a moderator...
As a matter of fact, I have followed this case, from the start. Have you? You seem to be a little confused. There is not now, nor was there ever any evidence that any violent behavior was being solicited, actively or otherwise. Period. If there was, this would be an open and shut case, now wouldn't it? They certainly never said, "This is a list of doctors we want killed." The only arguments for a "threat" were the "political climate" and the feeling of being threatened expressed by the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs' mere perception of it as a threat, and nothing more, convinced the jury to award them $109 million and order the web site shut down. There was no basis for the judgment or the award, and the Circuit Court has quite rightly set the record straight.
Whether they included convicted murderers among their number or not doesn't enter into it. Free speech is free speech - anyone can exercise it, to the degree the Constitution allows. The speech itself cannot be demonstrated to be an overt threat or solicitation to murder. So instead you want to use the straw man argument of "But they associate with criminals, so they must be trying to encourage criminality." Perhaps it's base to rejoice in the death of a person, no matter what evils they've done, and perhaps it's immoral to publish so many details of an individual's private life. I certainly wouldn't stoop to such tactics, nor would most Pro-Lifers. But it's not illegal. Of course, I guess opinions from Pro-Lifers don't matter - we're just trolls, right?
Warning: I'm about to fly my self-righteous flag - the karma loss doesn't concern me.
Violence breeds violence. Exposure to violent media may not cause violence, but I'm certain it makes it easier to condone certain kinds of violence: revenge killings, capital punishment and other kinds of retributive justice, and so on. Are the people behind the Nuremberg Files any different?
Is a society that sends the message that the extermination of innocent lives is acceptable, no matter the well-intentioned reason, any different?
Please note: I do not condone the Nuremberg Files as moral, nor the killing of abortionists. That's my whole point, though - when a society says that it's okay to kill under any circumstance (except maybe self-defense - that's a boundary case), it's poisioned the well. Abortion is just such a poison.
The difference, I think, lies in the credibility of the inference. The inference that moviegoers would not run in panic spontaneously seems on its face (prima facie) to hold more water than the inference that no abortionist on the list would ever have been shot if this website hadn't existed, and thus that the website incited their murder. There are fewer external factors that can cause one than the other, knowing what we do about normal human behavior, sociopathy, and psychopathy.
You can't prove that. For a more detailed explanation, see my post here. There are other, perfectly legal reasons to have posted the information they did. Just because you infer a certain intent doesn't make that legally proveable.
My feelings of being threatened do not constitute a legal basis for calling something a threat. I might be mentally ill, suffering from paranoia. Whether someone feels threatened is not the proper litmus test to apply.
You're also missing the point - the web site never advocated physical harm of any kind to these abortionists or their families. The use of Wanted poster and Most Wanted List-style layouts doesn't make them overtly threatening - the FBI doesn't advocate the killing of its Ten Most Wanted. The name of the site (The Nuremberg Files), its motif, and so on, were to draw parallels between the Holocaust and abortion - a perfectly legal and valid act of political speech. There are other purposes to publishing so many details of daily schedules and so on, as well - to insure, for example, that these abortionists were picketed by protesters everywhere they went, in front of their neighbors, the parents of their children's friends, etc. Those activities are also protected free speech, despite efforts to throttle them at nearly every level.
It is not possible to prove conclusively that the intent of the site was ever to solicit harm in any way, "context" be damned. Absent that necessary legal proof, there is no basis for suppressing the site or for granting such an obscenely large cash award.
Interesting, incidentally, that you would pick butchers as your stand-ins for abortionists in your scenario. Poetic.
Interesting point. I'm still not sure that there aren't ways to obtain residence addresses by legal means, though. Law enforcement, for example, needs ways to find where someone physically lives, not just where they get their mail.
That's a ridiculously weak connection.
Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre has the potential for immediate, causal effects of demonstrable harm. People would not run in panic, most likely causing some to be trampled or otherwise injured, if you never yelled "Fire!"
In this case, however, you cannot prove that any harm came to any abortionist because of direct action by the website, or that any who were harmed would not have been harmed had the website not existed. For the "FIRE!" analogy to work, any harmful action in question must be conclusively shown to be a direct result of the speech.
They asked for the doctors to be murdered, but left out the nickel.
They absolutely did no such thing. Whatever else you may say about the site, they were very careful to never use the words "murder" or "reward." That's what the whole case turned upon - whether without those words the site constituted a threat. They did cross out the name of one doctor the same day he was murdered rather than simply remove it, but that's the closest they ever came to solicitng, condoning or encouraging murder.
So sites that publish the corporate addresses of companies they want picketed, for example, shuld be suppressed? That doesn't make any sense. The simple fact of the matter is that this is a group that wants these "doctors" to stop offering these "reproductive services." You might find their tactics distasteful (I do, too, despite my obvious bias), but they were publishing information that was either publicly available or gathered by legal means. That was never even the issue. The issue was always whether the website itself constituted a threat, as you quite correctly point out.
The original court hearing the case agreed with your reasoning, even going so far as to say that merely feeling threatened was enough to prove it was a threat. That's a dangerous precendent in any case, one that could have an enormous chilling effect on free speech.
I personally doubt that the Supreme Court will hear the case. The current Court isn't all that fond of First Amendment cases anyway, and one this politically loaded isn't one that either the right- or left-wingers on the Court will want to touch all that badly. There's no conflicting Circuit opinions to resolve here, so they'll most likely leave it alone.
Addresses are publicly-accessible information, as are criminal and driving records in most states - hell, the USPS sells mailing lists to junk-mail advertisers. Credit cards, on the other hand, are not.
Unpleasant, perhaps, but hardly a boundary case for free-speech considerations.