Huh? I can name three Java compilers: javac, jikes, and gjc. There are also several companies that make JVMs: Sun, Microsoft, IBM, and others. The Java standards are defined in the books The Java Programming Language and The Java Virtual Machine Specification.
The only difference I can see between Java and C++ is that there isn't a separate international entity that defines the standard. Sun, along with members of the Java Community Process, is in control of Java standards.
Microsoft has indeed been working on IE. Specifically, they're working on an update to IE 6 for Windows XP SP2. It will include a popup blocker and will remove some of the MIME type sniffing currently in IE.
Additionally, there will be newer versions of Internet Explorer, but previously they would be available only by updating the operating system (e.g. to Longhorn). Now the news seems to be that these new versions of IE will be available on older operating systems such as Windows XP.
... too little too late. I switch my whole family and all my friends to mozilla varients. I can't be bothered to switch them back:-)
Your family will still benefit from improvements made to Internet Explorer. There are many standards today that web developers avoid using because they won't work in Internet Explorer (e.g. transparent PNGs and CSS absolute positioning). If IE did support those standards, web designers could use them, and more pages would work properly in Mozilla. Additionally, web pages would tend to get smaller and load faster because the newer standards that IE doesn't implement are generally more efficient in using bandwidth than the older standards.
The bottom line is that everyone benefits from increased standards support in IE.
Here are some more suggestions for improved standards support in Internet Explorer:
Support for JPEG2000. This would allow better quality images with less bandwidth than the older JPEG standard.
Support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). This would allow web applications to draw high quality graphics without consuming as many resources as Java applets.
Showing animated GIFs at the frame rate specified. IE6 still slows down GIF frames that should be shown for less than 1/20 of a second, limiting the quality of animation.
Yep, I have one. When I have trouble sleeping, I just use one of the sleep programs, and I'm asleep in 20-30 minutes. A few times I haven't stayed completely asleep after the program ended, but at least I felt quite drowsy and not wired like I did before the program started.
unless they're using ActiveX you can change your browser personality in order to make it think you're using IE
There are several other reasons that a web page may not work in Mozilla, even if you set the user agent to spoof IE. One is the use of proprietary DOM, such as document.all, which Mozilla does not support. Another is if the server is misconfigured to send files (for example, WMV files) with an incorrect MIME type. Yet another is if the client-side JavaScript checks navigator.appName, which is not spoofed even if the user agent is spoofed.
What webmasters should do is design according to the web standards, not target one particular browser. That will ensure that the page will work for the largest possible audience, and will need less maitenance in the future. In my experience, webmasters generally do care if Mozilla users can't access their site, and if you point out specific problems and standards-based solutions to those problems, they will usually make their site accessible in Mozilla.
Mozilla has such a small share of the overall browser market (definately under 10% worldwide) that it's not going to have much of an effect on what junk webmasters are going to put on their servers. It's really what Internet Explorer (with around 90% share) accepts that has a large effect on what web developers write.
There's a flaw in your scenario. As your rocketman goes faster, space contracts more in the direction he is travelling. That means that Alpha Centauri gets closer to Earth, according to his frame of reference. He's able to get there in 6 months only because the dialation has contracted the distance from Earth to it to less than 6 light months.
Our plain old moon orbits the sun, too. The sun pulls on it with twice the force of the Earth. The Earth merely perturbs the moon's orbit around the sun enough to make it look wobbly. In fact I just found out that Earth's moon is unique in this respect by reading this page about planets and moons!
Certainly some people who claim that Mozilla is slow haven't used it for a significant time. If they try Mozilla 1.7, they'll find it significantly faster than versions from a year ago or more. Soon it will be time for people who tried Mozilla a while ago to try out Mozilla 1.7 or Firefox 0.9 and re-evaluate their opinion of it.
What's dramatic is not the speed increase itself, but the fact that it occurred in just a few months. This rate of speed increase is about 25% faster per year, and that certainly is a dramatic rate of speed increase.
What you're missing is that this speed increase occurred just in the few months since the release of Mozilla 1.6. Each release has been faster than the previous one, so that even if you don't notice a speed increase from one point version to the next, you would definately notice a huge increase from Mozilla 1.0 to Mozilla 1.7.
You might be interested to know that MMIX is the new 64-bit RISC processor version of MIX. There's even an assembler and simulator available so you can run code, and gcc even generates code for the processor.
My opinion of operator overloading is that it is absolutely bad. Let me be clear. It is always bad, under any circumstances, when used for any reason. It has exactly zero functional value, and, as opposed to other kinds of "syntactic sugar" it has a tendency to make code where it is used with any frequency into a confusing, unmaintainable minefield. When advocating for operator overloading you are basically advocating a programming style with 1 letter method names, only it's worse, because you're limited to a few "commonly used" letters.
Operator overloading does have functional value. When combined with templates, it allows you to write code that can work on built-in types such as doubles and also user-defined types. I have used this technique to write Gaussian elimination code in C++ that solves matrices of doubles and also matrices of integers mod n. Without overator overloading, I'd have to write much more code, either developing a type hierarchy for the built-in types and my user-defined types, or repeating the code for built-in types and replacing + with add calls.
And which of these two lines of code would you rather maintain?
a = divide(add(b, sqrt(subtract(multiply(4, multiply(a, c)), b)), times(2, c))
a = (b + sqrt(4 * a * c - b)) / (2 * c)
I agree that operator overloading can cause an unmaintainable mess when abused but when properly used it can make code much more maintainable.
How would that be? Most operators treat signed and unsigned ints exactly the same. The only ones I can think of the top of my head are the inequality operators (< <= > >=) and division (/). In graphics, you're going to be doing lots of bitwise operators and shifting, and the operations ~ & | ^ << >>> all act as if the operands are unsigned.
No, objects and references are completely different things.
Objects can vary in size, always live on the heap, and are always instances of a concrete (non-abstract) class.
References always have the same size, can live on the heap or on the stack, and can have any type (class or interface).
References are the things that point to objects. Every time you deal with an object you do it by way of a reference to the object. But that doesn't mean that objects and references are the same thing!
Nope, 2^31 elements. ints are always signed, and you cannot use negative indexes in Java arrays.
Re:I don't understand their QA process
on
Mozilla 1.6 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
why are releases made with known Major bugs, and what does it take for a bug to get seen to and not sit in Bugzilla, ignored
If the next release of Mozilla had to wait until all known major bugs were fixed, it might be years until that next release. The chances are that almost no one experiences or notices that particular bug, or even if someone else does notice it there are more serious bugs they experience. As you can see, no one has voted for the bug to be fixed and no one else has complained that it's a problem.
I've reported dozens of bugs over my three years of using Mozilla, and about half of those bugs (mainly the more serious ones that others have voted for) have been fixed. In one case, I fixed the bug myself just a week or two after I reported it. Unless you fix it yourself or get some indication that others think it's serious, it will likely be years before your pet bug is fixed. There are just too many other bugs that are more important.
Most companies still build IE only websites, some better ones build IE+Netscape
It's rare for me to visit a web site that doesn't work perfectly or near perfectly in Mozilla. Today I ran across one for the first time in about a year. It uses document.all for navigation, which means that users must be running IE or Opera and also must have JavaScript enabled for links to work. When the developers finally realize that over 20% of visitors can't navigate their site, I think they'll quickly fix it.
I've been running Mozilla on my 366 MHz Celeron with 256 MB RAM for two years, and I find it gives me the best browsing experience. What little Mozilla lacks in speed it more than makes up for by supporting more features and being less buggy than other browsers.
Re:Sends binary files as text/plain MIME type
on
2003: Year of Apache
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· Score: 1
Read the links in my other posts and you'll see that at least two browser developers agree with me that Apache is doing the wrong thing sending unknown file types as text/plain.
I think a better hotel analogy is if the hotel cash register in made by NEC and has been designed with the buttons too close together. When I'm overcharged, I could complain to that one hotel that the clerk was not careful enough pressing the keys. But what about the other poor saps at the other hotels that are also getting overcharged? Why not fix the problem at the source -- the design of the cash register itself? And if a couple of cash register experts agree the design should be fixed, I think there's an excellent case that the fault really does lie with the design.
Re:Sends binary files as text/plain MIME type
on
2003: Year of Apache
·
· Score: 1
So what would you say is 'correct' behavior for a file with no registered MIME type?
Slashdot Mirror
The only difference I can see between Java and C++ is that there isn't a separate international entity that defines the standard. Sun, along with members of the Java Community Process, is in control of Java standards.
Additionally, there will be newer versions of Internet Explorer, but previously they would be available only by updating the operating system (e.g. to Longhorn). Now the news seems to be that these new versions of IE will be available on older operating systems such as Windows XP.
The bottom line is that everyone benefits from increased standards support in IE.
What webmasters should do is design according to the web standards, not target one particular browser. That will ensure that the page will work for the largest possible audience, and will need less maitenance in the future. In my experience, webmasters generally do care if Mozilla users can't access their site, and if you point out specific problems and standards-based solutions to those problems, they will usually make their site accessible in Mozilla.
Why would Eolas settle for paying Opera 12.5 million US dollars?
Mozilla has such a small share of the overall browser market (definately under 10% worldwide) that it's not going to have much of an effect on what junk webmasters are going to put on their servers. It's really what Internet Explorer (with around 90% share) accepts that has a large effect on what web developers write.
There's a flaw in your scenario. As your rocketman goes faster, space contracts more in the direction he is travelling. That means that Alpha Centauri gets closer to Earth, according to his frame of reference. He's able to get there in 6 months only because the dialation has contracted the distance from Earth to it to less than 6 light months.
Our plain old moon orbits the sun, too. The sun pulls on it with twice the force of the Earth. The Earth merely perturbs the moon's orbit around the sun enough to make it look wobbly. In fact I just found out that Earth's moon is unique in this respect by reading this page about planets and moons!
Certainly some people who claim that Mozilla is slow haven't used it for a significant time. If they try Mozilla 1.7, they'll find it significantly faster than versions from a year ago or more. Soon it will be time for people who tried Mozilla a while ago to try out Mozilla 1.7 or Firefox 0.9 and re-evaluate their opinion of it.
What's dramatic is not the speed increase itself, but the fact that it occurred in just a few months. This rate of speed increase is about 25% faster per year, and that certainly is a dramatic rate of speed increase.
What you're missing is that this speed increase occurred just in the few months since the release of Mozilla 1.6. Each release has been faster than the previous one, so that even if you don't notice a speed increase from one point version to the next, you would definately notice a huge increase from Mozilla 1.0 to Mozilla 1.7.
Mozilla and Firefox use the same C++ codebase (with the exception of some #ifdefs), so the improvements were made to both browsers simultaneously.
Try the User Agent Switcher extension.
You might be interested to know that MMIX is the new 64-bit RISC processor version of MIX. There's even an assembler and simulator available so you can run code, and gcc even generates code for the processor.
Operator overloading does have functional value. When combined with templates, it allows you to write code that can work on built-in types such as doubles and also user-defined types. I have used this technique to write Gaussian elimination code in C++ that solves matrices of doubles and also matrices of integers mod n. Without overator overloading, I'd have to write much more code, either developing a type hierarchy for the built-in types and my user-defined types, or repeating the code for built-in types and replacing + with add calls.
And which of these two lines of code would you rather maintain?
a = divide(add(b, sqrt(subtract(multiply(4, multiply(a, c)), b)), times(2, c))
a = (b + sqrt(4 * a * c - b)) / (2 * c)
I agree that operator overloading can cause an unmaintainable mess when abused but when properly used it can make code much more maintainable.
How would that be? Most operators treat signed and unsigned ints exactly the same. The only ones I can think of the top of my head are the inequality operators (< <= > >=) and division (/). In graphics, you're going to be doing lots of bitwise operators and shifting, and the operations ~ & | ^ << >>> all act as if the operands are unsigned.
Objects can vary in size, always live on the heap, and are always instances of a concrete (non-abstract) class.
References always have the same size, can live on the heap or on the stack, and can have any type (class or interface).
References are the things that point to objects. Every time you deal with an object you do it by way of a reference to the object. But that doesn't mean that objects and references are the same thing!
Nope, 2^31 elements. ints are always signed, and you cannot use negative indexes in Java arrays.
I've reported dozens of bugs over my three years of using Mozilla, and about half of those bugs (mainly the more serious ones that others have voted for) have been fixed. In one case, I fixed the bug myself just a week or two after I reported it. Unless you fix it yourself or get some indication that others think it's serious, it will likely be years before your pet bug is fixed. There are just too many other bugs that are more important.
I've been running Mozilla on my 366 MHz Celeron with 256 MB RAM for two years, and I find it gives me the best browsing experience. What little Mozilla lacks in speed it more than makes up for by supporting more features and being less buggy than other browsers.
I think a better hotel analogy is if the hotel cash register in made by NEC and has been designed with the buttons too close together. When I'm overcharged, I could complain to that one hotel that the clerk was not careful enough pressing the keys. But what about the other poor saps at the other hotels that are also getting overcharged? Why not fix the problem at the source -- the design of the cash register itself? And if a couple of cash register experts agree the design should be fixed, I think there's an excellent case that the fault really does lie with the design.