You completely miss my point - this is not a historical view - there ARE now (at this very time) people in dozens of countries who consider themselves "Americans"
And they use "American" - like most words in the English language it does just fine with more than one meaning.
don't ask a Thai or Somali who they think are "Americans" - ask a Columbian
I think most residents of Columbia, South Carolina; the District of Columbia; and British Columbians would agree with my usage. As would most Colombians (note the "o" not a "u" after the "l") for that matter. Yes I'm being pedantic but YOUR argument is based on pedantry after all so we have to be consistent.
I've had it with freaking USian... It's the United States of America
I totally agree with your larger point about USian but I have to say you do a piss poor job of arguing it. The different areas know as North America, Central America et al. did not get those names after America the country but before. The America that we are the united states of refers to the entire "new world". You argument about the English is silly since it's not refering to the language the speak but the fact that they live in the country of England which is also where the language comes from and thus the language is "English" because like English people it comes from England. (I realise at this point you could get REALLY pedantic and say that "English" to the Angles so an archaic "English" language precedes the nation)
The real argument against "USian" is that it is pedantic, silly, sounds ugly and nobody in the real world uses it. And if we are being so pedantic that we reject "American" on logical gounds "USian" is just as wrong for just as valid a logical reason since it would also refer to citizens of the United States of Mexico (and there are probably other "united states of _____ " out there).
it's sort of the worst sort of cultural imperialism - taking someone's identity.
I'm curious does USian also refer to citizens of the United States of Mexico? Or are you commiting the worst sort of cultural imperialism by taking someone's identity?
twenty-fucking-five different ways to conjugate shit.
I realize this is not conjugating the verb "to shit" but declining the noun - I only get 10 not 25. spucatum spucati spucato spucato spucata spucatorum spucatis spucata spucatis
Not to mention that because English has had so many other languages influence it and stems from such a large variety of parent languages,
umm... In other words it has a lot of baggage.
Let me make myself clear. All that baggage is what makes English so rich. You can fit a lot of great stuff in all that baggage. I'm not saying Latin is better than English, I really don't know enough Latin to make such a judgement (I'm just beginning to learn it). I *like* English, I know English, I speak English, I think in English - it's my native toungue and the only one I am fluent in. Latin is a very difficult language, it is particularly difficult for English speakers because, as you point out, it is based on inflection rather than on word order. I'm just saying that that difference is not "baggage" any more than all the myriad of possible word orders is in English (which would probably be hard to learn confusing "baggage" to a roman)
Why would anyone want to miss the fucking and the fighting? That was the best part of school! Lewis evidently thought so - just check out the part about the Bloods and the Tarts in "Surprised by Joy."
It is made fairly clear that Lewis did not particularly enjoy this part of school. He makes clear that his non-judgmental tone in "Suprised by Joy" was NOT becuase he thought it was OK but because it had no attraction for him and he did not want to engage in "empty polemics against enemies I have not met in battle"
Lewis isn't entirely shy about his opinion of homosexuality though, "Fairy" Hardcastle in That Hideous Strength is a rather brutal satire on lesbianism.
the first (few?) hundred pages being long rants did, while originally rather entertaining, get rather boring after awhile.
I can see that, in fact it was my first impression of the book as well. I have found that I have enjoyed the book more now that I am older and I have read some of his other books. I see "That Hideous Strenth" as an illustration of Lewis' social and political thinking, especially "The Abolition of man" (see my other post above).
As a hard core Tolkien fan I also was intrigued by the Tie-in with middle earth.
I think Lewis would probably think HS is too old to start Latin. Little kids find the necessary memorization a lot easier (or at least less boring, though, still... it IS boring.) than older kids. Also I don't know that English has less excess baggage. In fact listening to foriegn friends who had to learn English as a second language I get the impression that English has more baggage.
though he has a rather nasty habit of starting a series well and then having each successive book get worse and worse (lucky if you can read through the third one. . ..)
In your particular situation of being pissed at the local school district for banning Lewis' religiously inspired books you may enjoy "That Hideous Strength" more on a second reading. The whole book is a commentary lampooning & warning against the kind of thinking that goes into such a decision.
Narnia has been banned from my local school district do to 'religious' content... Liberals/can/ go to far at times.:
Lewis got his revenge on these idiots in advance through his withering commentary on exactly this kind of thinking in the book "The Abolition of Man". (As well as his description of Eustace's parents and the school they sent him to.) The Abolition of Man should be required reading for the school administrators that made this decision (or ALL school administrators for that matter).
Lewis on the students of this type of education:
That is their day's lesson in English, though of English they have learned nothing. Another portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to understand.
Lewis on the administrators:
It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so.... It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.
Apple didn't purchase Claris. It was always a subsidiary of Apple. The name Claris is probably a play on the name of Apple's unnoficial mascot Clarus the dog cow. When Apple spun off it's application software as the Claris subsidiary they renamed Appleworks to ClarisWorks. When they restructured Claris into Filemaker inc. they brought all the software (except Filemaker) back to Apple and changed the name of ClarisWorks back to AppleWorks.
Some of the developers that used to be at Apple and/or Claris may have moved on to Gobe but that is the only connection.
No it isn't. "Breaking" means exactly what it says. Furthermore, allowing your machine to exchange radio signals with someone else's machine is not "entering" by any stretch of the imagination.
Come on we have to be consistent. Whenever the congress wants to make new laws regarding "computer crime" we say NO, the existing laws sufficiently cover the new situation. If that is the case we have to apply it consistently. The article does not go into enough depth for us to really know exactly what he did. I'm not willing to judge whether he is guilty or innocent on the slender story that was posted. In general though "no security" may be a good defense on the electronic equivalent of "breaking and entering" the online equivelent to an open door posted "come on in." and that only because that is essentially how the network responds to his querry.
But "bad security" no matter how woefully insufficient is sufficient to let someone know they are not welcome and that any intrusion is illegal. Entering the system in that case is and should be illegal no matter how noble your professed intentions. The article does not have enough info to let us know which is the case here. Computer "security experts" that access networks that have ANY level of security, even security that is laughably easy to bypass, should be treated by the law exactly how it would treat a car mechanic checking for and entering unlocked cars in the mall parking lot. The situation is EXACTLY equivalent. A computer experts professional curiosity is no more defense than a locksmiths or mechanics professional curiosity. "I just wanted to see how it works" would be no defense in any field other than computers and it is really no defense in our field either.
Well going around wiggling peoples door handles checking to see which ones are unlocked is usually frowned upon too. I'm sure crappy locks DO exist but we still don't expect locksiths to wander around our neighborhood performing such unsolicited "security checks." Nor do we expect car mechanics to perform "security checks" of every car in a parking lot. Arresting such "security experts" for "wiggling the locks" in the physical realm would be uncontroversial, and is after all one component of assuring the security of homes and cars.
That being said, it seems that the court is being obnoxious considering the fact that he did demo the security flaws to a court official and a local reporter. But the article seemed to indicate that that demo was NOT the occurance he was being charged with. It was the breach of security that happened before, when he first "wiggled the lock". If this is the case, and they were able to track him down without the evidence he provided during his demo, well he can console himself with the thought that his arrest and jail time is a more complete test of the courts security system which includes not only usernames and passwords but social restraints like laws & prison time. As a concerned security expert he will be happy that although one aspect of their security was weak (the wireless LAN) his test revealed that initial failure was somwhat compensated for by those other methods.
Actually that's about right
on
Switch Different
·
· Score: 3, Funny
3,520 is on the small side but would be enough to be considered a legion. (that is: between 3000 to 6000 infantrymen & another 100 to 200 cavalrymen) from dictionary.com
...Rhapsody was actually Gil Amelio's strategy where all applications would need to be rewritten as "yellow box" applications. "Yellow box" referred to the combination of OpenStep with Apple technologies and allowed applications to run under Rhapsody (which ran on both Apple and Intel hardware) as well as allowing applications to run under Windows(!) using libraries to be available licence free to developers.
Of course "Yellow Box" was Steve's technology from NeXT but it was Gil Amelio's business strategy. Once Gil was ousted Steve started working on and pushing Carbon becuase ithe big software developers were never going to completely rewrite their apps in OpenStep/Cocoa. Rhapsody for Intel and Windows was never mentioned again.
That was just good business at the time. Gil Amelio's plan was overambitious, vague and confusing. Job's believed that Apple needed M$ good will so he wasn't going to challenge them in their own market & he dropped the patent infringement lawsuit with that patent cross licensing agreement and stock sale.
I'm just intrigued about the possibiilty that part of Gil's original business plan might be plausible now that the situation has changed. Apple is profitable even in a tech sector downturn. Their OS strategy is solid and finally bearing fruit. Apple seems less overeager to stay in Bill Gates good graces (witness the quiet dropping of the patent swapping deal, the griping over Office v.X sales and the slap-in-the-face "Switch" ad campaign). Now might be the time to revive Rhapsody for Windows. It would increase the number of apps available for the Mac because by writing for the Mac in Cocoa a developer gets Windows and Unix for free. Apple could possibly make money from selling the IDE for windows or if their greedy a licensing fee for Cocoa on other platforms (have to be careful with that, don't want to kill it by being too greedy). And if it is successful it undermines Microsofts monopoly in the same way that java threatened to by making the OS irrelevant and having someone else own a layer between the OS and the application.
Of course if Apple pursues a plan that is so potentially threatening to M$ they will need to prepare to lose Office on the Mac in retaliation. Hmm... Maybe working with Sun to develop StarOffice using Cocoa (for windows & UNIX?) is a good first project!
There's no way a JVM is going to make an app such as OpenOffice as smooth to use as a native version.... They'd better work on a native version
But I'm betting it WILL be a native version. It will be a Cocoa app, just using Java as the programming language rather than Objective C. All the windowing, and UI widgets etc. will be Cocoa/Quartz/Aqua being invoked by a few lines of Java.
But why use Java instead of Objective C? It may just be Sun wanting to "eat their own dog food" or simply having more programmers familiar with Java than with Objective C.
But perhaps there is a more intriguing possiblity. Cocoa is just the upgraded OpenStep which could run as a layer on top of windows, and Solaris. It was a cross platform solution that handled all the platform specific UI (as well as a bunch of other stuff) so a simple recompile was all that was needed to get your app running on windows, NeXT, and Solaris (& maybe others?). Apple was originally going to keep things that way and add support for Java so you could build (semi)native windows/mac/solaris apps using Java & Cocoa without even a recompile. Only the Java bit is running under the JVM, the UI & all the other Cocoa stuff is native.
This plan was 'steved' when Steve Jobs took over. That was probably the smart thing to do, they needed to focus on getting their own house in order first.
But now they have everything basically ship shape on the Mac side, maybe they are revisiting the idea of Cocoa as a cross platform API. Apple and Sun working together on StarOffice seems like a perfect oppurtunity to revive the old OpenStep on windows & Solaris. Maybe I'm just being clueless, after all Sun has their own approach for Java's cross platform UI. But it doesn't seem to be that great and isn't very popular. Maybe they are considering OpenStep/Cocoa as a better solution to getting Java used on the desktop, especially if Apple has already done (almost) all the work to develop it.
World+dog (including me) agree that Java's GUI is so-so,
Yes, but from what I understand Apple has provided hooks for Java to use all of the Cocoa API's in fact they bill Java as being coequal to Objective C for building Cocoa apps. In that case the GUI is not really java, java is just being used to invoke the native cocoa/quartz/aqua GUI. They could use Objective C instead but I would imagine that Sun would like to show off a Java app that surpasses peoples expectations (including the dog's) Also I'd imagine you can find more programmers at Sun that are proficient with Java than are proficient with Objective C.
Hitler was, I admit, an extreme case. But if I were looking for his parallel in today's world, I wouldn't look in the middle east.
Doesn't seem like a bad place to start looking, Middle easterners themselves seem to see parallels. - To quote the Egyptian government supported newspaper Al-Akhbar:
"Thus, the Jews are accursed - the Jews of our time, those who preceded them and those who will come after them,
if any Jews come after them."
"With regard to the fraud of the Holocaust... Many French studies have proven that this is no more than a fabrication, a lie, and a fraud!! That is, it is a 'scenario' the plot of which was carefully tailored, using several faked photos completely unconnected to the truth. Yes, it is a film, no more and no less. Hitler himself, whom they accuse of Nazism, is in my eyes no more than a modest 'pupil' in the world of murder and bloodshed. He is completely innocent of the charge of frying them in the hell of his false Holocaust!!"
"The entire matter, as many French and British scientists and researchers have proven, is nothing more than a huge Israeli plot aimed at extorting the German government in particular and the European countries in general. But I, personally and in light of this imaginary tale, complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart, 'If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief [without] their evil and sin.'"
I know about GNUstep... that is the Cocoa(OpenStep) API's and objective C language NOT the gui/window manager. The GUI in OS X is Aqua and based on the Quartz (Apple homegrown Display PDF technology). Neither of these are open source nor are they part of GNUStep.
Maybe I think too highly of humanity, but I'm betting there would be a lot less aggression in the world if there was no poverty.
I hate to say it but you DO think too highly of humanity. Aggression does not seem to be confined to the poor.
Furthermore to the degree that poverty is a technological problem we pretty much HAVE solved it. The problem of poverty is not technological but political and behavioural. On the individual basis you can teach a man to fish, but you can't MAKE him fish. If he figures he can just mooch off of other people that already have fish he will stay poor no matter how much charity he receives. In the political realm societies that ensure political & (perhaps even more importantly) individual freedom, (including property rights) always seem to become wealthy, those that suppress either individual or political freedom eventually become mired in poverty. Without pursuing an imperialist crusade (complete with airborne lasers) you cannot make other countries, societies and cultures adopt the behaviours that lead them to be stable and prosperous. I'm not advocating such an imperialist course (in fact I oppose such a course). I'm just pointing out that most poverty in the world is the indirect yet inevitable result of policial and social structures of the nations suffering that poverty.
I think to be fair you must concede that Apple is doing a pretty decent job of supporting many open standards. Aside from the windowing system everything else is pretty open, Mach kernel, BSD userland, GCC 3.1 compiler, CUPS printing. Their networking which used to be totally proprietary (Appletalk) is now based on standards (TCP/IP & ZeroConf). In multimedia that favorite gripe of Linux users - the default use Sorensen codec - is changing to default use of MPEG 4.
Yes, the GUI of OS X programs is not compatible with other Unices. Still the authors point is that having a mass market desktop (which dwarfs the Linux desktop in sheer numbers) that can run Unix software and is (mostly) using open standards and file formats is a net gain for Linux and Unix. It is a whole new world of users (that would exist in any event) that can now use UNIX software and can interoperate using open standards.
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You completely miss my point - this is not a historical view - there ARE now (at this very time) people in dozens of countries who consider themselves "Americans"
And they use "American" - like most words in the English language it does just fine with more than one meaning.
don't ask a Thai or Somali who they think are "Americans" - ask a Columbian
I think most residents of Columbia, South Carolina; the District of Columbia; and British Columbians would agree with my usage. As would most Colombians (note the "o" not a "u" after the "l") for that matter. Yes I'm being pedantic but YOUR argument is based on pedantry after all so we have to be consistent.
I've had it with freaking USian... It's the United States of America
I totally agree with your larger point about USian but I have to say you do a piss poor job of arguing it. The different areas know as North America, Central America et al. did not get those names after America the country but before. The America that we are the united states of refers to the entire "new world". You argument about the English is silly since it's not refering to the language the speak but the fact that they live in the country of England which is also where the language comes from and thus the language is "English" because like English people it comes from England. (I realise at this point you could get REALLY pedantic and say that "English" to the Angles so an archaic "English" language precedes the nation)
The real argument against "USian" is that it is pedantic, silly, sounds ugly and nobody in the real world uses it. And if we are being so pedantic that we reject "American" on logical gounds "USian" is just as wrong for just as valid a logical reason since it would also refer to citizens of the United States of Mexico (and there are probably other "united states of _____ " out there).
it's sort of the worst sort of cultural imperialism - taking someone's identity.
I'm curious does USian also refer to citizens of the United States of Mexico? Or are you commiting the worst sort of cultural imperialism by taking someone's identity?
twenty-fucking-five different ways to conjugate shit.
I realize this is not conjugating the verb "to shit" but declining the noun - I only get 10 not 25.
spucatum
spucati
spucato
spucato
spucata
spucatorum
spucatis
spucata
spucatis
Not to mention that because English has had so many other languages influence it and stems from such a large variety of parent languages,
umm... In other words it has a lot of baggage.
Let me make myself clear. All that baggage is what makes English so rich. You can fit a lot of great stuff in all that baggage. I'm not saying Latin is better than English, I really don't know enough Latin to make such a judgement (I'm just beginning to learn it). I *like* English, I know English, I speak English, I think in English - it's my native toungue and the only one I am fluent in. Latin is a very difficult language, it is particularly difficult for English speakers because, as you point out, it is based on inflection rather than on word order. I'm just saying that that difference is not "baggage" any more than all the myriad of possible word orders is in English (which would probably be hard to learn confusing "baggage" to a roman)
Why would anyone want to miss the fucking and the fighting? That was the best part of school! Lewis evidently thought so - just check out the part about the Bloods and the Tarts in "Surprised by Joy."
It is made fairly clear that Lewis did not particularly enjoy this part of school. He makes clear that his non-judgmental tone in "Suprised by Joy" was NOT becuase he thought it was OK but because it had no attraction for him and he did not want to engage in "empty polemics against enemies I have not met in battle"
Lewis isn't entirely shy about his opinion of homosexuality though, "Fairy" Hardcastle in That Hideous Strength is a rather brutal satire on lesbianism.
Do they use Greek Mythology as part of school work or assignments? If so, I smell a double standard that may need exploration.
Maybe Lewis can get back into the classrom with "Til We Have Faces"
the first (few?) hundred pages being long rants did, while originally rather entertaining, get rather boring after awhile.
I can see that, in fact it was my first impression of the book as well. I have found that I have enjoyed the book more now that I am older and I have read some of his other books. I see "That Hideous Strenth" as an illustration of Lewis' social and political thinking, especially "The Abolition of man" (see my other post above).
As a hard core Tolkien fan I also was intrigued by the Tie-in with middle earth.
Inspired my Lewis I took Latin in HS;
I think Lewis would probably think HS is too old to start Latin. Little kids find the necessary memorization a lot easier (or at least less boring, though, still... it IS boring.) than older kids. Also I don't know that English has less excess baggage. In fact listening to foriegn friends who had to learn English as a second language I get the impression that English has more baggage.
though he has a rather nasty habit of starting a series well and then having each successive book get worse and worse (lucky if you can read through the third one. . . .)
In your particular situation of being pissed at the local school district for banning Lewis' religiously inspired books you may enjoy "That Hideous Strength" more on a second reading. The whole book is a commentary lampooning & warning against the kind of thinking that goes into such a decision.
Lewis got his revenge on these idiots in advance through his withering commentary on exactly this kind of thinking in the book "The Abolition of Man". (As well as his description of Eustace's parents and the school they sent him to.) The Abolition of Man should be required reading for the school administrators that made this decision (or ALL school administrators for that matter).
My apologies, I saw your other post right after posting. *wipes egg off face*. Needless to say, the confusing name confused me.
Apple didn't purchase Claris. It was always a subsidiary of Apple. The name Claris is probably a play on the name of Apple's unnoficial mascot Clarus the dog cow. When Apple spun off it's application software as the Claris subsidiary they renamed Appleworks to ClarisWorks. When they restructured Claris into Filemaker inc. they brought all the software (except Filemaker) back to Apple and changed the name of ClarisWorks back to AppleWorks.
Some of the developers that used to be at Apple and/or Claris may have moved on to Gobe but that is the only connection.
No it isn't. "Breaking" means exactly what it says. Furthermore, allowing your machine to exchange radio signals with someone else's machine is not "entering" by any stretch of the imagination.
Come on we have to be consistent. Whenever the congress wants to make new laws regarding "computer crime" we say NO, the existing laws sufficiently cover the new situation. If that is the case we have to apply it consistently. The article does not go into enough depth for us to really know exactly what he did. I'm not willing to judge whether he is guilty or innocent on the slender story that was posted. In general though "no security" may be a good defense on the electronic equivalent of "breaking and entering" the online equivelent to an open door posted "come on in." and that only because that is essentially how the network responds to his querry.
But "bad security" no matter how woefully insufficient is sufficient to let someone know they are not welcome and that any intrusion is illegal. Entering the system in that case is and should be illegal no matter how noble your professed intentions. The article does not have enough info to let us know which is the case here. Computer "security experts" that access networks that have ANY level of security, even security that is laughably easy to bypass, should be treated by the law exactly how it would treat a car mechanic checking for and entering unlocked cars in the mall parking lot. The situation is EXACTLY equivalent. A computer experts professional curiosity is no more defense than a locksmiths or mechanics professional curiosity. "I just wanted to see how it works" would be no defense in any field other than computers and it is really no defense in our field either.
Well going around wiggling peoples door handles checking to see which ones are unlocked is usually frowned upon too. I'm sure crappy locks DO exist but we still don't expect locksiths to wander around our neighborhood performing such unsolicited "security checks." Nor do we expect car mechanics to perform "security checks" of every car in a parking lot. Arresting such "security experts" for "wiggling the locks" in the physical realm would be uncontroversial, and is after all one component of assuring the security of homes and cars.
That being said, it seems that the court is being obnoxious considering the fact that he did demo the security flaws to a court official and a local reporter. But the article seemed to indicate that that demo was NOT the occurance he was being charged with. It was the breach of security that happened before, when he first "wiggled the lock". If this is the case, and they were able to track him down without the evidence he provided during his demo, well he can console himself with the thought that his arrest and jail time is a more complete test of the courts security system which includes not only usernames and passwords but social restraints like laws & prison time. As a concerned security expert he will be happy that although one aspect of their security was weak (the wireless LAN) his test revealed that initial failure was somwhat compensated for by those other methods.
3,520 is on the small side but would be enough to be considered a legion. (that is: between 3000 to 6000 infantrymen & another 100 to 200 cavalrymen)
from dictionary.com
To Quote O'Rielly.com's MacDev Center: Of course "Yellow Box" was Steve's technology from NeXT but it was Gil Amelio's business strategy. Once Gil was ousted Steve started working on and pushing Carbon becuase ithe big software developers were never going to completely rewrite their apps in OpenStep/Cocoa. Rhapsody for Intel and Windows was never mentioned again.
That was just good business at the time. Gil Amelio's plan was overambitious, vague and confusing. Job's believed that Apple needed M$ good will so he wasn't going to challenge them in their own market & he dropped the patent infringement lawsuit with that patent cross licensing agreement and stock sale.
I'm just intrigued about the possibiilty that part of Gil's original business plan might be plausible now that the situation has changed. Apple is profitable even in a tech sector downturn. Their OS strategy is solid and finally bearing fruit. Apple seems less overeager to stay in Bill Gates good graces (witness the quiet dropping of the patent swapping deal, the griping over Office v.X sales and the slap-in-the-face "Switch" ad campaign). Now might be the time to revive Rhapsody for Windows. It would increase the number of apps available for the Mac because by writing for the Mac in Cocoa a developer gets Windows and Unix for free. Apple could possibly make money from selling the IDE for windows or if their greedy a licensing fee for Cocoa on other platforms (have to be careful with that, don't want to kill it by being too greedy). And if it is successful it undermines Microsofts monopoly in the same way that java threatened to by making the OS irrelevant and having someone else own a layer between the OS and the application.
Of course if Apple pursues a plan that is so potentially threatening to M$ they will need to prepare to lose Office on the Mac in retaliation. Hmm... Maybe working with Sun to develop StarOffice using Cocoa (for windows & UNIX?) is a good first project!
Apples page for using Cocoa with java
There's no way a JVM is going to make an app such as OpenOffice as smooth to use as a native version.... They'd better work on a native version
But I'm betting it WILL be a native version. It will be a Cocoa app, just using Java as the programming language rather than Objective C. All the windowing, and UI widgets etc. will be Cocoa/Quartz/Aqua being invoked by a few lines of Java.
But why use Java instead of Objective C? It may just be Sun wanting to "eat their own dog food" or simply having more programmers familiar with Java than with Objective C.
But perhaps there is a more intriguing possiblity. Cocoa is just the upgraded OpenStep which could run as a layer on top of windows, and Solaris. It was a cross platform solution that handled all the platform specific UI (as well as a bunch of other stuff) so a simple recompile was all that was needed to get your app running on windows, NeXT, and Solaris (& maybe others?). Apple was originally going to keep things that way and add support for Java so you could build (semi)native windows/mac/solaris apps using Java & Cocoa without even a recompile. Only the Java bit is running under the JVM, the UI & all the other Cocoa stuff is native.
This plan was 'steved' when Steve Jobs took over. That was probably the smart thing to do, they needed to focus on getting their own house in order first. But now they have everything basically ship shape on the Mac side, maybe they are revisiting the idea of Cocoa as a cross platform API. Apple and Sun working together on StarOffice seems like a perfect oppurtunity to revive the old OpenStep on windows & Solaris. Maybe I'm just being clueless, after all Sun has their own approach for Java's cross platform UI. But it doesn't seem to be that great and isn't very popular. Maybe they are considering OpenStep/Cocoa as a better solution to getting Java used on the desktop, especially if Apple has already done (almost) all the work to develop it.
World+dog (including me) agree that Java's GUI is so-so,
Yes, but from what I understand Apple has provided hooks for Java to use all of the Cocoa API's in fact they bill Java as being coequal to Objective C for building Cocoa apps. In that case the GUI is not really java, java is just being used to invoke the native cocoa/quartz/aqua GUI. They could use Objective C instead but I would imagine that Sun would like to show off a Java app that surpasses peoples expectations (including the dog's) Also I'd imagine you can find more programmers at Sun that are proficient with Java than are proficient with Objective C.
Doesn't seem like a bad place to start looking, Middle easterners themselves seem to see parallels. - To quote the Egyptian government supported newspaper Al-Akhbar: - Al-Akhbar (Egypt), April 29, 2002.
emphasis mine
And more examples from other countries
I know about GNUstep... that is the Cocoa(OpenStep) API's and objective C language NOT the gui/window manager. The GUI in OS X is Aqua and based on the Quartz (Apple homegrown Display PDF technology). Neither of these are open source nor are they part of GNUStep.
Arghh... My Eyes!! The goggles do Nothing!
Maybe I think too highly of humanity, but I'm betting there would be a lot less aggression in the world if there was no poverty.
I hate to say it but you DO think too highly of humanity. Aggression does not seem to be confined to the poor.
Furthermore to the degree that poverty is a technological problem we pretty much HAVE solved it. The problem of poverty is not technological but political and behavioural. On the individual basis you can teach a man to fish, but you can't MAKE him fish. If he figures he can just mooch off of other people that already have fish he will stay poor no matter how much charity he receives. In the political realm societies that ensure political & (perhaps even more importantly) individual freedom, (including property rights) always seem to become wealthy, those that suppress either individual or political freedom eventually become mired in poverty. Without pursuing an imperialist crusade (complete with airborne lasers) you cannot make other countries, societies and cultures adopt the behaviours that lead them to be stable and prosperous. I'm not advocating such an imperialist course (in fact I oppose such a course). I'm just pointing out that most poverty in the world is the indirect yet inevitable result of policial and social structures of the nations suffering that poverty.
Nobody - starved - under communism ?
I think to be fair you must concede that Apple is doing a pretty decent job of supporting many open standards. Aside from the windowing system everything else is pretty open, Mach kernel, BSD userland, GCC 3.1 compiler, CUPS printing. Their networking which used to be totally proprietary (Appletalk) is now based on standards (TCP/IP & ZeroConf). In multimedia that favorite gripe of Linux users - the default use Sorensen codec - is changing to default use of MPEG 4.
Yes, the GUI of OS X programs is not compatible with other Unices. Still the authors point is that having a mass market desktop (which dwarfs the Linux desktop in sheer numbers) that can run Unix software and is (mostly) using open standards and file formats is a net gain for Linux and Unix. It is a whole new world of users (that would exist in any event) that can now use UNIX software and can interoperate using open standards.