Just an FYI, MSVC 7.0 allows you to do some of the optimizations you mention. First, it allows "whole program" optimization - that is, the code is optimized not just a compilation unit at a time, but the entire project is examined and optimized based on interactions between compilation units. Second, it allows you to build a special, tooled version of your app that you run against your use cases (unit tests, regression suites, etc). This process spits out all kinds of heuristics to a log file that can then be passed to a secondary compile where more optimizations can be done. I believe they call this "profile guided optimizations". Of course a JIT can still choose the best assembly for the currently running processor.
The first thing I thought was "I guess the slashdot editors couldn't figure out how to get their soundcards working under linux either". If they had, surely they never would have posted that to the front page.
I think when working on a large project that many different people (different abilities, different styles) may touch it is important to choose a language that provides some guidelines for usage syntactically. Java has all kinds of problems, but it forces you to do things a certain way and the community is widespread enough, that for the things it doesn't force you to do a certain way, the community has come up with de facto standards (or patterns of usage). Something like perl can be abused by the idiots on the team to a much greater extent (imho). Now, if the hacker realizes that everyone can't be as great as he is, then he may also understand why his company can't go out and standardize on perl. But like Paul suggests, most hackers are baffled by the idiots.
I am also confused by what Paul says about the tools a hacker uses at home being better. Why does there have to be a set of tools thats perfect for all circumstances? Maybe those tools are better in an environment where everyone is a great hacker, but at work everyone is not, so if those same tools can be abused by the lesser hackers more than other tools, maybe those other tools are better for the work environment. Yes I use different tools at home than at work, but I wouldn't trust the idiots with the tools I use at home. Maybe I am just influenced by the fact that I've had to maintain code written by idiots...
I remember reading in Andy Grove's book (something like Only the Paranoid Survive), that they thought their "Intel Inside" campaign was simply going to bias the customers to only want "Intel Inside" and be weary if they bought a computer that didn't have intel inside. Well, this did occur to some extent, but it came with a little surprise - when someone's computer didn't work, they called Intel instead of the PC manufacturer (bypass the pesky middleman, I guess). At the time, Intel didn't have the infrastructure to handle this since they were used to simply dealing with PC manufactueres and certainly not your average consumer. I wonder if Sun is ready to have my grandma call them up when her microwave stops functioning?
one that i noticed in the movie, but wasn't on that page yet, was when spidey was lowering mj at the end of the film. the slit in her dress was tied together (i suppose so the wind didn't cause it to flap open). when she meets john to embrace, the slit is free again...
As far as SWT versus swing its all about trade-offs. They take two different approaches, and neither approach can be said to be superior 100% of the time. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're obsessed with a native OS look-n-feel, then I'd go with SWT. If you're obsessed with your app looking identically on each OS, or you want broader OS support for your app, go with swing.
If I am writing a desktop app, I like for that app to be as tightly integrated with that desktop as possible. Maybe I want the win32 version of my app to leverage an existing activeX control (possible through SWT, but frowned upon by the JAVA purist). To some of us, its is worth the little extra effort to take advantage of these things on the platforms that they're available on. Remember, almost by definition, swing has to appeal to the least-common-denominator. Besides if I wanted to absolutely make sure my app was avaialble on every platform I'd probably go the web-app direction, and not with swing or SWT.
I love JAVA (develop with it professionally), but it is an "lsd" solution. Well, it is if you insist on being a purist. Just do a search on all the hacks out there to use environment variables from JAVA. The purist says, "don't use them, not all platforms have them." I like having the majority of my business logic in JAVA, but I also like giving my customers an application that takes full advantage of the platform they're on, be it linux, mswindows, or macosx.
They do have something special up their sleeves. The next version of their OS is going to be massively integrated with search capabilities. Like Dashboard, they'll be watching your every move and displaying search results that they believe pertain to your current task. Imagine a search box on the task bar - the average user will never go back to google as long as their search tech is halfway decent...
Its interesting to think about it in the other direction as well. Take ST:TNG's Data for example. He was a human playing an android, and I never felt creeped out by him even though he had yellow eyes and yellow-green skin. Maybe it was because deep down I knew he was human. However, I do remember being slightly "creeped out" by Jude Law in AI. Maybe he's just a better actor or maybe they CG'd his face. The question is, short of wearing a mask, can a good human actor make us forget he's a human? Can you think of some really good performances where you were able to forget? Maybe by understanding the elements of the performances that really creeped us out we'll better understand what subtle elements need to be present to convince us the other way.
From Trilogy's (who recently off-shored *all* their development to India) evaluation of the product: "The approach is unique and addresses problems such as supporting the nuances and idiosyncrasies of Windows implementations..." Sounds like they've successfully cloned MS's self-modifying code algorithms:)
Re:Thanks, unions, government, and greedy employee
on
Train Your Own Replacement
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have nothing to back this up with (but would be interested in seeing actual numbers) other than my experience, which tells me in some thirty years we've gone from a world of a handful of millionaires to a world with a handful of billionaires. People who made 100k thrity years ago are now making 1mil. I just don't see the same order of magnitude increases on the low end. It's the relative gap that I was refering to in the original post. Who cares if the poor make 15k a year now instead of 2 or 3k, when the wage of the wealthy is increasing 10x, 100x, or even 1000x times. At the same time poor went from paying 15 cents of tax per dollar (on average) to close to 20, and the wealthy went from paying around 30 to around 25 (I don't rememeber the exact numbers, but its the trend that's important anyway). As if the trends weren't sad enough, American's have been fooled into thinking that capitalism is simply working as designed and that the wealthy deserve everything they've earned. What we seem to forget is that we have a right to tax their earnings and disperse the wealth.
Re:Thanks, unions, government, and greedy employee
on
Train Your Own Replacement
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Sure - let the CEOS rake it in as long as we the people can decide how much of their profits we can feed back in to the economy via government programs we deem worthwhile. The problem is, the CEOs continue to pay their salaries by finding ways to pay a lower and lower wage. At the same time, they are also politically controlling the tax rate so that the tax burden is shifting from them to the middle and lower classes. We're all going to quickly be in position where we're all making a lot less, and any relief we're receiving via entitlements is increasingly funded out of percentages of our own paychecks. As far as I can tell, the only real disagreeable part of all this is that we don't get a say - or at least no real say. Think of the peoples ability to raise taxes on the rich as a safety valve. When too much wealth begins to accumulate in the upper echelons, the people can adjust the tax rate to stimulate the circulation of the cash. As the wealth becomes more evenly dispersed, enough people will be happy with their wages and taxes will begin to adjust again. This is why capitalism requires democracy to work correctly. Unfortunatly, without campaign reform this safety valve is broken and the poor will keep getting poorer and the rich, richer. When democracy is broken, capitalism is broken...
Don't we all just feel like a bunch of peasants fighting over table scraps? I know I sure do. My problem with offshoring isn't the Indians getting the job, its that I see the divide between the rich and middle class becoming ever greater. We're heading toward a world where a few rich and powerful people manipulate the world's governments for their own benefit, while the majority of the worlds population is left out in the cold. Yes, in the short term, a few Indians lives are being made better (until the jobs go to China, etc), but in the long term all we've done is lessened the value of the middle class (gobally) while making the rich, richer (and more powerful).
But its not just competition between workers that will cause a wage increase. As one Indian noted above, his salary is considered a fortune. What I think we'll have in India pretty soon is too many dollars chasing too few and low quality goods. New goods and services will seek out those dollars, Indians will acquire a taste for those goods, and the cost of living for middle class Indians will begin to rise. As a friend of mine said after returning from a trip to India (where he did some golfing), "a box of good golf balls costs the same there as here, only few people golf there since its previously been too expensive." In other words, the Indian who considers his salary a fortune has taken up golf yet...
I read this once before and I had a thought. I imagine a large piece of terraforming is going to be genetically engineering different plants and animals to be better suited to the more harsh environment. Further, I think that we are only going to become more and more skilled at manipulating the blueprints of life. I think a neat idea that arises out of this is genetically engineering an entire ecosystem for the martian environment. Why couldn't we also create an animal, derived from humans, with comparable intelligence and dexterity? In other words, we create the martians. Sooner or later another asteroid is going to come along and destroy all the knowledge we've accummulated, and for all we know the universe would be back to a relative square one with regard to intelligent life. I think we owe it the universe (and ourselves) to create a more robust intelligent life form to carry our legacy and knowledge forward.
So, that's a really long way of saying that, while humans might not be able to breath the atmosphere on mars, maybe we could create a human derivative that could. Think of it as human species diversification. I believe terraforming is really only half the solution, and we need to attack the problem on both fronts and with an open mind.
I'd be all for them doing what they want with their money as long as it didn't mean they were using it to buy my politicians and rig the game. You have to have a functioning democracy (or republic) to keep the greed in check. If we only had some campaign reform I wouldn't care what they did with their money because the electorate would truly be able to decide how much they owe us (taxes) for letting them prosper. We the people should have some control over the distribution of wealth, but that control is being stripped away. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that "oh well, its their money - let them do what they want."
I agree - coding well isn't easy, but my CS degree really only half prepared me for being able to code well. Yea I learned a lot of theory and understand more-or-less exactly what's going on on that processor, and this has enabled me to write some pretty clever code. But I've also learned that cleverly written code (code that's "better" in a purely acedemic sense) can be some of the worst code. It reminds me of that aweful hacker creed: "it was difficult to write, it should be difficult to read." Its sad, but true for most of the "software developers" I've met. They'll write terribly clever code, but in the end they've done a disservice to the project's long-term viability. I saw another quote this week (off the UNO website, off slashdot earlier this week) [paraphrase]: "the code will get written once, but read many, many times - if you make it easy to read you and others will benefit in the long-run." (you get the gist)
It is sad what we've allowed to happen to software engineering - a disgrace really.
i am confused. i consider format standardization as being different than software commoditization. software is not sugar, and is infinitly (well almost) differentiable. people said the browser had been commoditized, but if that were true then i wouldn't care if i had to use ie, but i do care (i gotta have tabs).
now i think we're a little biased here on slashdot because we want operating systems to be a commodity. but even if linux and windows shared the same executable format (100% compatible), they still wouldn't be a commodity. windows (or linux) might incorporate some wizbang feature that improved usability, or maybe one's more secure or faster, or scales better. even if they're both free, that doesn't make them a commodity - any more than if they both cost $99. if it did, then noone would be buying macs.
at any rate, i believe standardization is a good thing. it means that different software products will be able to compete based on features (stability, speed, memory footprint, etc, etc), but the real questions is, once standardization is achieved which model will produce better(this requires knowing what people want - not a strength of the OSS movement) software: opensource or proprietary? just because proprietary software has avoided facing us under the terms of standardization doesn't mean they are incapable of doing so.
i've been doing some reading about constitutional law and how the supreme court has interpretted pieces of the constitution down through the years. it is interesting to see how things like the "equal protection" clause were interpretted to mandate suffrage for women and blacks. anyway, i've been wondering (and hoping someone out there can add some insight), why can't something like "seperation of church and state" be applied to how corporations adversly affect the legal system. if the purpose of "seperation of church and state" was to keep politicians from being in the pocket of the religious groups, why wouldn't this apply to keep politicians from being in the pocket of the corporations. some might argue that the founding father's had corporate corruption in their day and chose not to mention it in the constitution. but was the churches power so immense that everything paled in comparision - and was therefore not mentioned in the constitution. could they have known that the churches influence would simply be replaced by that of multi-national corporations. admittedly, i haven't given this a lot of thought but hopefully someone out there that knows more about this kind of stuff (a lawyer, a judge?) could shed some light on it...i understand that there are people who believe in strict translation of the consitution but from what i've read that's much less in vogue these days.
there are two tabbed panes - one uses the windows control, the other is a custom "branded" control that does look different. many of the controls in the org.eclipse.widget.custom (might be off on the name) package are those created specifically to give eclipse a "branded look". i don't exactly buy their reason for doing this, but with a little poking around eclipse.org you should be able to find an explaination...
i agree that it is unfortunate that swt requires additional libraries. however, i agree with swt's philosophy of using native widgets so that the user experience is consistent. on linux we're used to every app looking different, but most windows users are used to a little consistency (and i prefer it, and apparently so does redhat). swings look-n-feels are mostly a joke - i can always tell a swing app by appearance even with the native os look and feel because it is not identical. you're a self-proclaimed java purist - well, i am a user interface purist. here is my question. sun's official stance is that swing should be used because it allows all java applications to look and act the same across all platforms. why would i want that? i *want* my application to act the same as other apps on the platform - not the same on all platforms. further, i also want my application to take advantage of the theme support of the platform. for example, i've created several custom swt controls and they all used swt's facilities for querying the system "selection" color, so when someone changes that color in the window manager's settings my custom controls (along with the other builtin swt controls) instantly reflect the change. the disconnection that exists in swing in this regard is absolutely unacceptable in my opinion.
I agree. what changed? the underlying ui code? it looks just as ugly as ever...i suppose its skinnable so i can wrap it in something prettier - perhaps something written by a 14 year old with a lot of time on his hands...
so, you want to raise 100000 in capital to fund a team in india that develops software they give away for free. hum...what you're talking about is called charity - both to the indians you employ and to the world that uses your software. i am a little unclear as to where step #4 profit fits in;) now, if only i could write-off the time i spend workin on open source projects...
Slashdot Mirror
setting reference to null in java is stupid, stop saying it...
Just an FYI, MSVC 7.0 allows you to do some of the optimizations you mention. First, it allows "whole program" optimization - that is, the code is optimized not just a compilation unit at a time, but the entire project is examined and optimized based on interactions between compilation units. Second, it allows you to build a special, tooled version of your app that you run against your use cases (unit tests, regression suites, etc). This process spits out all kinds of heuristics to a log file that can then be passed to a secondary compile where more optimizations can be done. I believe they call this "profile guided optimizations". Of course a JIT can still choose the best assembly for the currently running processor.
The first thing I thought was "I guess the slashdot editors couldn't figure out how to get their soundcards working under linux either". If they had, surely they never would have posted that to the front page.
I think when working on a large project that many different people (different abilities, different styles) may touch it is important to choose a language that provides some guidelines for usage syntactically. Java has all kinds of problems, but it forces you to do things a certain way and the community is widespread enough, that for the things it doesn't force you to do a certain way, the community has come up with de facto standards (or patterns of usage). Something like perl can be abused by the idiots on the team to a much greater extent (imho). Now, if the hacker realizes that everyone can't be as great as he is, then he may also understand why his company can't go out and standardize on perl. But like Paul suggests, most hackers are baffled by the idiots.
I am also confused by what Paul says about the tools a hacker uses at home being better. Why does there have to be a set of tools thats perfect for all circumstances? Maybe those tools are better in an environment where everyone is a great hacker, but at work everyone is not, so if those same tools can be abused by the lesser hackers more than other tools, maybe those other tools are better for the work environment. Yes I use different tools at home than at work, but I wouldn't trust the idiots with the tools I use at home. Maybe I am just influenced by the fact that I've had to maintain code written by idiots...
I remember reading in Andy Grove's book (something like Only the Paranoid Survive), that they thought their "Intel Inside" campaign was simply going to bias the customers to only want "Intel Inside" and be weary if they bought a computer that didn't have intel inside. Well, this did occur to some extent, but it came with a little surprise - when someone's computer didn't work, they called Intel instead of the PC manufacturer (bypass the pesky middleman, I guess). At the time, Intel didn't have the infrastructure to handle this since they were used to simply dealing with PC manufactueres and certainly not your average consumer. I wonder if Sun is ready to have my grandma call them up when her microwave stops functioning?
one that i noticed in the movie, but wasn't on that page yet, was when spidey was lowering mj at the end of the film. the slit in her dress was tied together (i suppose so the wind didn't cause it to flap open). when she meets john to embrace, the slit is free again...
As far as SWT versus swing its all about trade-offs. They take two different approaches, and neither approach can be said to be superior 100% of the time. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're obsessed with a native OS look-n-feel, then I'd go with SWT. If you're obsessed with your app looking identically on each OS, or you want broader OS support for your app, go with swing.
If I am writing a desktop app, I like for that app to be as tightly integrated with that desktop as possible. Maybe I want the win32 version of my app to leverage an existing activeX control (possible through SWT, but frowned upon by the JAVA purist). To some of us, its is worth the little extra effort to take advantage of these things on the platforms that they're available on. Remember, almost by definition, swing has to appeal to the least-common-denominator. Besides if I wanted to absolutely make sure my app was avaialble on every platform I'd probably go the web-app direction, and not with swing or SWT.
I love JAVA (develop with it professionally), but it is an "lsd" solution. Well, it is if you insist on being a purist. Just do a search on all the hacks out there to use environment variables from JAVA. The purist says, "don't use them, not all platforms have them." I like having the majority of my business logic in JAVA, but I also like giving my customers an application that takes full advantage of the platform they're on, be it linux, mswindows, or macosx.
They do have something special up their sleeves. The next version of their OS is going to be massively integrated with search capabilities. Like Dashboard, they'll be watching your every move and displaying search results that they believe pertain to your current task. Imagine a search box on the task bar - the average user will never go back to google as long as their search tech is halfway decent...
Its interesting to think about it in the other direction as well. Take ST:TNG's Data for example. He was a human playing an android, and I never felt creeped out by him even though he had yellow eyes and yellow-green skin. Maybe it was because deep down I knew he was human. However, I do remember being slightly "creeped out" by Jude Law in AI. Maybe he's just a better actor or maybe they CG'd his face. The question is, short of wearing a mask, can a good human actor make us forget he's a human? Can you think of some really good performances where you were able to forget? Maybe by understanding the elements of the performances that really creeped us out we'll better understand what subtle elements need to be present to convince us the other way.
From Trilogy's (who recently off-shored *all* their development to India) evaluation of the product: :)
"The approach is unique and addresses problems such as supporting the nuances and idiosyncrasies of Windows implementations..." Sounds like they've successfully cloned MS's self-modifying code algorithms
I have nothing to back this up with (but would be interested in seeing actual numbers) other than my experience, which tells me in some thirty years we've gone from a world of a handful of millionaires to a world with a handful of billionaires. People who made 100k thrity years ago are now making 1mil. I just don't see the same order of magnitude increases on the low end. It's the relative gap that I was refering to in the original post. Who cares if the poor make 15k a year now instead of 2 or 3k, when the wage of the wealthy is increasing 10x, 100x, or even 1000x times. At the same time poor went from paying 15 cents of tax per dollar (on average) to close to 20, and the wealthy went from paying around 30 to around 25 (I don't rememeber the exact numbers, but its the trend that's important anyway). As if the trends weren't sad enough, American's have been fooled into thinking that capitalism is simply working as designed and that the wealthy deserve everything they've earned. What we seem to forget is that we have a right to tax their earnings and disperse the wealth.
Sure - let the CEOS rake it in as long as we the people can decide how much of their profits we can feed back in to the economy via government programs we deem worthwhile. The problem is, the CEOs continue to pay their salaries by finding ways to pay a lower and lower wage. At the same time, they are also politically controlling the tax rate so that the tax burden is shifting from them to the middle and lower classes. We're all going to quickly be in position where we're all making a lot less, and any relief we're receiving via entitlements is increasingly funded out of percentages of our own paychecks. As far as I can tell, the only real disagreeable part of all this is that we don't get a say - or at least no real say. Think of the peoples ability to raise taxes on the rich as a safety valve. When too much wealth begins to accumulate in the upper echelons, the people can adjust the tax rate to stimulate the circulation of the cash. As the wealth becomes more evenly dispersed, enough people will be happy with their wages and taxes will begin to adjust again. This is why capitalism requires democracy to work correctly. Unfortunatly, without campaign reform this safety valve is broken and the poor will keep getting poorer and the rich, richer. When democracy is broken, capitalism is broken...
Don't we all just feel like a bunch of peasants fighting over table scraps? I know I sure do. My problem with offshoring isn't the Indians getting the job, its that I see the divide between the rich and middle class becoming ever greater. We're heading toward a world where a few rich and powerful people manipulate the world's governments for their own benefit, while the majority of the worlds population is left out in the cold. Yes, in the short term, a few Indians lives are being made better (until the jobs go to China, etc), but in the long term all we've done is lessened the value of the middle class (gobally) while making the rich, richer (and more powerful).
But its not just competition between workers that will cause a wage increase. As one Indian noted above, his salary is considered a fortune. What I think we'll have in India pretty soon is too many dollars chasing too few and low quality goods. New goods and services will seek out those dollars, Indians will acquire a taste for those goods, and the cost of living for middle class Indians will begin to rise. As a friend of mine said after returning from a trip to India (where he did some golfing), "a box of good golf balls costs the same there as here, only few people golf there since its previously been too expensive." In other words, the Indian who considers his salary a fortune has taken up golf yet...
to things they can't stop: here
I read this once before and I had a thought. I imagine a large piece of terraforming is going to be genetically engineering different plants and animals to be better suited to the more harsh environment. Further, I think that we are only going to become more and more skilled at manipulating the blueprints of life. I think a neat idea that arises out of this is genetically engineering an entire ecosystem for the martian environment. Why couldn't we also create an animal, derived from humans, with comparable intelligence and dexterity? In other words, we create the martians. Sooner or later another asteroid is going to come along and destroy all the knowledge we've accummulated, and for all we know the universe would be back to a relative square one with regard to intelligent life. I think we owe it the universe (and ourselves) to create a more robust intelligent life form to carry our legacy and knowledge forward.
So, that's a really long way of saying that, while humans might not be able to breath the atmosphere on mars, maybe we could create a human derivative that could. Think of it as human species diversification. I believe terraforming is really only half the solution, and we need to attack the problem on both fronts and with an open mind.
I'd be all for them doing what they want with their money as long as it didn't mean they were using it to buy my politicians and rig the game. You have to have a functioning democracy (or republic) to keep the greed in check. If we only had some campaign reform I wouldn't care what they did with their money because the electorate would truly be able to decide how much they owe us (taxes) for letting them prosper. We the people should have some control over the distribution of wealth, but that control is being stripped away. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that "oh well, its their money - let them do what they want."
isn't India also considered "centrally planned" (i don't know - I am asking)? I believe I've heard it referred to as democratic-communist.
I agree - coding well isn't easy, but my CS degree really only half prepared me for being able to code well. Yea I learned a lot of theory and understand more-or-less exactly what's going on on that processor, and this has enabled me to write some pretty clever code. But I've also learned that cleverly written code (code that's "better" in a purely acedemic sense) can be some of the worst code. It reminds me of that aweful hacker creed: "it was difficult to write, it should be difficult to read." Its sad, but true for most of the "software developers" I've met. They'll write terribly clever code, but in the end they've done a disservice to the project's long-term viability. I saw another quote this week (off the UNO website, off slashdot earlier this week) [paraphrase]: "the code will get written once, but read many, many times - if you make it easy to read you and others will benefit in the long-run." (you get the gist)
It is sad what we've allowed to happen to software engineering - a disgrace really.
i am confused. i consider format standardization as being different than software commoditization. software is not sugar, and is infinitly (well almost) differentiable. people said the browser had been commoditized, but if that were true then i wouldn't care if i had to use ie, but i do care (i gotta have tabs).
now i think we're a little biased here on slashdot because we want operating systems to be a commodity. but even if linux and windows shared the same executable format (100% compatible), they still wouldn't be a commodity. windows (or linux) might incorporate some wizbang feature that improved usability, or maybe one's more secure or faster, or scales better. even if they're both free, that doesn't make them a commodity - any more than if they both cost $99. if it did, then noone would be buying macs.
at any rate, i believe standardization is a good thing. it means that different software products will be able to compete based on features (stability, speed, memory footprint, etc, etc), but the real questions is, once standardization is achieved which model will produce better(this requires knowing what people want - not a strength of the OSS movement) software: opensource or proprietary? just because proprietary software has avoided facing us under the terms of standardization doesn't mean they are incapable of doing so.
would you like one lump or two.
i've been doing some reading about constitutional law and how the supreme court has interpretted pieces of the constitution down through the years. it is interesting to see how things like the "equal protection" clause were interpretted to mandate suffrage for women and blacks. anyway, i've been wondering (and hoping someone out there can add some insight), why can't something like "seperation of church and state" be applied to how corporations adversly affect the legal system. if the purpose of "seperation of church and state" was to keep politicians from being in the pocket of the religious groups, why wouldn't this apply to keep politicians from being in the pocket of the corporations. some might argue that the founding father's had corporate corruption in their day and chose not to mention it in the constitution. but was the churches power so immense that everything paled in comparision - and was therefore not mentioned in the constitution. could they have known that the churches influence would simply be replaced by that of multi-national corporations. admittedly, i haven't given this a lot of thought but hopefully someone out there that knows more about this kind of stuff (a lawyer, a judge?) could shed some light on it...i understand that there are people who believe in strict translation of the consitution but from what i've read that's much less in vogue these days.
there are two tabbed panes - one uses the windows control, the other is a custom "branded" control that does look different. many of the controls in the org.eclipse.widget.custom (might be off on the name) package are those created specifically to give eclipse a "branded look". i don't exactly buy their reason for doing this, but with a little poking around eclipse.org you should be able to find an explaination...
i agree that it is unfortunate that swt requires additional libraries. however, i agree with swt's philosophy of using native widgets so that the user experience is consistent. on linux we're used to every app looking different, but most windows users are used to a little consistency (and i prefer it, and apparently so does redhat). swings look-n-feels are mostly a joke - i can always tell a swing app by appearance even with the native os look and feel because it is not identical. you're a self-proclaimed java purist - well, i am a user interface purist. here is my question. sun's official stance is that swing should be used because it allows all java applications to look and act the same across all platforms. why would i want that? i *want* my application to act the same as other apps on the platform - not the same on all platforms. further, i also want my application to take advantage of the theme support of the platform. for example, i've created several custom swt controls and they all used swt's facilities for querying the system "selection" color, so when someone changes that color in the window manager's settings my custom controls (along with the other builtin swt controls) instantly reflect the change. the disconnection that exists in swing in this regard is absolutely unacceptable in my opinion.
I agree. what changed? the underlying ui code? it looks just as ugly as ever...i suppose its skinnable so i can wrap it in something prettier - perhaps something written by a 14 year old with a lot of time on his hands...
so, you want to raise 100000 in capital to fund a team in india that develops software they give away for free. hum...what you're talking about is called charity - both to the indians you employ and to the world that uses your software. i am a little unclear as to where step #4 profit fits in ;) now, if only i could write-off the time i spend workin on open source projects...