I would be very happy to have a device in my car that would tell me (and all those red light running morons) a traffic signal's current status and how much longer until the light changes status. While it wouldn't eliminate the more aggregious violators, it would give the law abiding drivers the needed information to plan their approach.
I've seen several cases where drivers, in heavy traffic congestion, were paying too much attention to the light above them to notice the stopped car in front of them.
I've also noticed lot of insane acceleration on the highways cutting through town when drivers see the green light a mile or so down the road. Many of them go from about 60 (the limit) to about 95 because (due to the road curvature before the light comes into view) they don't know how long the light has been green, and they smash the gas pedal in hopes that they can make it.
Knowing the light's status and timing with certainty from an adequate distance would at least allow more informed insanity (where slowing down or keeping a legal speed would be more likely to place you at the next green light safely -- for yourself and the other drivers).
When considered from the perspective of my TV viewing habits, this whole HDTV + copy protection gets to be rather funny.
I stopped watching most over the air broadcasts early in 2003. The shows have become less than mediocre, and I have lost my patience with the overabundance of unentertaining commercials (even if they were entertaining, the frequency with which the interrupt the primary mood and flow of the main show render them extremely annoying very quickly, usually after the first showing).
With the increasing frequency of the few good shows now being released on DVD, I can watch them at my leisure completely uninterrupted and at excellent quality. This further reduces my desire to watch even those shows over broadcast TV.
Even though I make a good living, I am quite miserly with my money. I have to spend time considering whether watching TV is worth even the few hundred dollars needed to buy a new analogue TV when my existing one dies. Spending thousands of dollars on an HDTV set is laughable. Nothing on TV or DVD is good enough to justify spending anywhere near that much on a mere viewing station (which is all a TV set really is).
This is where the media broadcasters become hilarious from my perspective. They want me to spend thousands of dollars on a viewing station that makes me endure the worst parts of broadcast TV (annoying commercials), won't let me store and watch the broadcasts at my leisure, and won't let me edit out the commercials (which is what I do with my VCR via the pause button on those occasions I actually watch and record broadcast TV).
So HDTV essentially boils down to being nothing more than an extraordinarily expensive DVD player minus all the benefits a DVD player provides, and minus most of the benefits that we currently have with analogue TV broadcasts (with transmission clarity being the only remaining benefit if you're willing to endure a high degree of even clearer crap).
Pardon me if I don't rush out to buy this garbage, and instead scratch my head wondering why anyone would want to buy into this. I already have better things to do with my time, so TV broadcasters have to provide an extreme incentive to pull me to the TV. Instead, they seem to be doing everything in their power to drive me away; so I shrug and do things other than watch TV.
This in turn saves me money on products I don't buy due to advertising exposure, even on those rare occasions where the advertising makes me aware of something that I would actually want.
The only downside is that legislation protecting these nearly worthless digital broadcasts would also adversely restrict the usefulness of other digital products that I would want.
For Mandrake 9.1, it was a simple matter of "urpmi mplayer" to get the basic MPlayer installed. Finding the Windows DLLs so MPlayer could play Sorenson QuickTime files (and presumably others) was harder, but doable through Google. Installing them so MPlayer could use them was reasonably easy (create/usr/lib/win32 and copy the DLLs there), though adding an import function to the GUI that would automatically extract and copy the files would have been better for the less technical users.
For those of us who got tired of doing so many source installs which required fighting with the install process, waiting for your distributor to do the integration work for you makes even something as notoriously difficult to install as MPlayer nearly painless.
"Secretaries shouldn't have to learn userland *nix just to type up a TPS cover sheet for their weekly memos."
You haven't installed OpenOffice.org in a while, have you? If you had, you would have seen the rotating ad that explicitly informs you that OO.o is ideal for all your TPS reports -- whether on Windows or Linux.
"Congratulations, you just gave them your phone number."
Not to mention that you've just willingly established a business relationship with them, thereby giving them explicit permission to call you regardless of whether you're on the DNC list.
"He makes a big effort to communicate that he is not critiquing java itself but what he infers from the circumstances around its development and rise to popularity."
He is trying to straddle the fence. In the beginning, he says that he doesn't like Java. At the end, he says that he isn't blaming Java itself. The end result, though, is the same. He is bashing Java not because of technical merits (or lack thereof), but because of circumstances that have nothing to do with the language, and that are largely irrelevant.
Paul Graham is largely on Crack about Java. Before I continue, let me get the required "I'm not defending a language because it's all I know.":
I've done extensive programming in more dialects of BASIC than I can remember, C, C++, Java, several assembler languages, COBOL (ick, ick, ick!), PHP, and I few I'm sure I'm forgetting.
1) Energetically hyped. I agree that the hype has gone too far, but enough of it has turned out to be true that dismissing it out of hand is doing yourself a disfavor.
2) Easy to use. This is, according to Graham, supposed to be a fault. However, Java's general ease of use does not compromise much of importance. The garbage collector is the only exception. Watching a program halt for seconds at a time while the garbage collection goes about its job is extremely annoying. However, the pauses tend to level out after the application has settled into its main loop for a while.
3) Java was originally designed to solve a particular problem (embedded devices). That is has expanded beyond its original role is not a bad thing. It expanded in this way because developers demanded it, not just to piss of Microsoft.
4) This is where he takes the first large hit from his Crack pipe. Many people, myself included, love Java. The core language is wonderfully designed and easy to use, and the extensive library of prewritten classes make a LOT of jobs very easy. If you understand its strengths and weaknesses, and use it appropriately, it's a thing of beauty.
5) I would hate any language I were forced to use. This is a red herring, and should never be included in a serious debate. It's complete nonsense to think that this is limited to Java. All corporate language mandates will be hated by most people.
6) The nice thing about Java is that the core language and the core classes were designed and written by a few highly competent people. The rest may or may not have been done by committee, but you are not forced to use the rest. In fact, you can unzip all the library JAR files, remove the classes you don't like, zip the remainder, and have a much slimmer Java that only has the stuff you want.
7) [sarcasm]Java provides a definition for accomplishing a wide variety of tasks. Shame on it....[/sarcasm]
8) Complete brain damage. "It's popular, so it must suck."
9) This argument is just insane. Java was designed to handle large problem domains, much of which characterizes large corporations. However, it's just as useable by we individuals who want to cleanly implement our own solutions to large (from our perspective) problem domains. He's just discarded the whole nature of OOP.
10) More brain damage. "I don't like the people who like it, so it must suck." He reasons 9 and 10 trash any sense of respect to which he may or may not be entitled.
11) This is pseudo relevant and somewhat justified. Java is controlled by SUN, a company with a history of abandoning products depending upon which way the wind blows. There is a certain risk in using Java, as SUN may at any time decide that Java is no longer a strategic product. However, gcc provides support for the core language and libraries. Only GUI applications run the risk of immediate obsolescence. Most others will merely turn into natively compiled applications, so the risk is mitigated.
12) More brain damage like 9 and 10. Guilt by association.
With the exception of 11 above, he is way out in left field. In fact, he is stationed in the parking lot of the ballfield in the next city. He has zero credibility in critiquing a language with which he has no experience, and this shows through glaringly.
Java is a tool. If you use your tools where they are appropriate, and you understand how to deploy them, you'll have a good chance at good results.
[parent likens a Documents directory to the home directory, saying a Documents directory is much better]
This argument has always fascinated me. For some reason, putting a subdirectory called Documents under the user's home directory is supposed to ease the user's burder of administration over simply storing documents in the user's home directory.
The user's home directory is the default location for all the user's files. So just selecting "save" from any application will automatically select the home directory as the target location. The user has to explicitly select the Documents directory in order to save the file there, but that additional nagivation requirement is somehow easier than no additional navigation requirement.
Having a Documents directory into which all documents are dumped is somehow easier than dumping all the same documents into the user's default directory (the home directory). It is somehow easier, according to the parent poster, to find a needed file out of an unorganized mess under the Documents directory than it is to find the same file in an unorganized mess from the home directory.
But then, this desktop system provides four different subdirectories to accomodate the four most common file types. And of course, users will not misfile documents anymore because users always understand that they have to navigate to the proper subdirectory for the type of document being used. Well that will just solve all of our tech problems.
And what happens when users have documents that don't neatly fit into one of those four categories? Assuming that the user actually used those subdirectories correctly, then one or more of those four subdirectories will become the default repository for EVERYTHING. If not, then the Documents directory base will serve just fine to store every single document the user ever makes. What do we get after a while? We get a Documents directory that serves the exact same purpose as a home directory: a default location to store all unorganized files the user will ever create?
What makes anyone think that a subdirectory will magically make a user capable of logically organizing files if the user weren't already capable of doing it?? In either case, a little education on how to create subdirectories and store files properly will be unavoidable. Thinking a Documents folder will solve the organization problems of the computer illiterate is incredibly naive at best.
An empty Documents folder is only easier to use for as long as it takes users to accumulate enough unorganized files to make the user's eyes scan the directory listing for more than a split second. After that, its additional usefulness is lost. The same is true of the default home directory. Only good organization practices by the user is going to prevent that. A self-cross-referencing file system that allows users to view files by content, negating the need to organize files on the filesystem, may be a good idea, but there is otherwise no way to keep the user from having to learn organization skills.
"Oh, you mean like with, say, modems, where 14.4kbps = 14,400bps, 28.8kbps = 28,800 bps, and so on?
Or Ethernet, where 10Mbps = 10,000,000bps, and 100Mbps = 100,000,000bps?"
No, that is not even remotely in the same universe as what is being discussed. A bit is the smallest unit of measurement, so 1000 bits is always 1000 bits. If hard drive manufacturers labeled capacity in bits, then there would be absolutely no margin for deception.
However, for ease of understanding among those in the industry, bit groupings with significant were labelled with special words. In computing, binary is the lowest system of measurement. To that end, powers of two are as significant to computing as powers of 10 are to human calculations.
1024 has a special significance. It is the power of two the crosses the human reference of groups of ten. 2 (the computing standard) raised to the power of 10 (the human standard) is 1024. Given this special relationship, a special term was assigned: Kilobyte. That is why a Kilobyte is 1024 bytes and not 1000 bytes. 1000 bytes has no special significance to computing, hence there is no need to assign it a special term.
Each of the subsequent terms (megabyte, gigabyte, terrabyte, etc.) all have this same crossover characteristic, and therefore are given special grouping names. This naming convention is standard throughout the computing industry, and is accepted as the norm (and which is why this new SI, or whatever it's called) nonsense is so repugnant (aside from the names just sounding stupid when pronounce).
HD manufactures had always abided by the standard terms when producing their hard drives up until the competition to product the highest capacity drive in the smallest space really took off. At that point, engineering was replaced with marketing. When the entire computing world was defining KB, MB in the normal powers of 2, hard drive manufactures started defining them in powers of 10 but not making that clear to buyers until the buyers started to notice for themselves.
Even when the common consumer talks to someone in the industry, the consumer has to be talked through the reasons why a 40 GB drive is not really 40 GB. Then this whole crappy mess has to be explained to them in similar way as I'm having to explain it to you.
When people actually understand what's happening, then they generally get angry because the HD manufactures are not telling the truth.
"Most people who say Java is unstable or slow are remembering their experience from the JDK 1.1 days. The current JDK 1.4 bears little resemblance to that in terms of performance and maturity."
Most people who say this haven't used Swing enough. I tried to convince myself that Swing was fast enough, since I was trying to push Java as an alternative to VB at the workplace, and for some tasks it was indeed fast enough.
When your GUI gets non trivial (try a large hierarchical table on one side of a split pane and dozens of moderately sized images [e.g. 160x160] on the other pane), resize times for the container widgets under Java get painfully slow while the resize times for the exact same layout under a native GUI change imperceptibly if at all.
That is just one of many examples. In general, as of JDK 1.4.1, Swing is still horrendously slow for most non-trivial applications. Printing is also nearly useless under Java. It's a hundred times worse than the worst part of Swing. I can't damn Java printing harshly enough. What were those guys at Sun smoking?!
All this takes place on 2.8 Ghz processors with 512MB of RAM. I had to accept that Java is useless for GUI programming, despite my strong desire to find otherwise.
We've decided to standardize on C++ and Borland's C++ Builder.
We were initially going to standardize on Java, but that is no longer an option given its horrendous lack of speed and its enormous system requirements.
We were then going to standardize on web applications using LAPP, but there are many things for which our users will not accept a browser based interface (anything that requires printing reports, for example).
We were then going to standardize on C++/Qt, but Qt's licensing fees are way too high for what it doesn't provide in comparison to C++ Builder. So now we're leaning heavily towards C++ Builder, and will standardize on it barring any show-stopping problems.
Having programmed in Java since version 1.0, there is no possible way that any sane person can say that any Java GUI is comparable in performance to the identical GUI written using native components.
SCO sent 1500 letters to large Linux-using companies intimating legal action if those companies did not pay SCO's extortion demands. If any of those companies are using Redhat Linux, then it seems to me that Redhat has been pulled into standing by SCO's interference with Redhat's business relationship with those companies.
"Slashdot is a P2P network. Every message put here is just as much copyrighted as the latest hit by Stupid Band of The Week, or that eBook you want to get your hands on.
Compulsory licencing will end up being a tax on speech."
This has absolutely nothing to do with compulsory licensing of music files. Even if it did, you have it backwards. Compulsory licensing does not require the copyright owner to pay others. Compulsory licensing requires distributors to pay copyright owners.
So if compulsory licensing were to hit Slashdot, then Slashdot would have to pay you for any of your posts that appeared here, unless you explicitly waived your right to receive payment for your posts.
"The EFF can push all they want but I seriously doubt filesharing will ever become legal, even under a compulsory licence."
File sharing has been perfectly legal for decades. We did this legally with modem-based BBSs in the 80s (maybe earlier), and we continue to do this legally with FTP and (more recently) software such as bit torrent.
I'm well aware that you meant sharing copyrighted music files, so I'm asking everyone to stop saying "file sharing" when referring to distributing music files. A more accurate term is music file sharing (or just music sharing).
If we keep referring to music sharing by the generic "file sharing" meme, then any laws that are passed to outlaw music sharing will likely, if unintentionally, cross over into other types of currently legal file sharing such as Free software distribution.
Remember, swapping music files is just one form of file sharing. There are other, and in my opinion far more important, types of file sharing that have nothing to do with illegal distribution of copyrighted music files. It's important to make that distinction.
I think this is great for Mandrake. Those of us who tend to buy our distributions will not have to worry about it, and those who merely download from Mandrake will be helping Mandrake recoup the cost of bandwidth.
And in both cases, Mandrake makes more money to continue developing its excellent distribution.
"If Microsoft is forced to pay off Eolas, doesn't that mean they've paid for the patent?"
No, that is just the penalty Microsoft has to pay for violating the patent. It does not give Microsoft future rights to use it.
Someone has mentioned that Microsoft is not being its normal blustery self and claiming the patent is invalid, or that Microsoft will obviously win in the end. Microsoft's reasoning could simply be to infuse in the mind of the technology public the strong validity of the claim, and then buy out Eolas and its patent. At that point, I.E. would be the only browser on the planet legally allowed to use plugins and a whole host of other technology.
Once again, this is nothing new or mind-bending. It's just another self-made computer hacker with high intelligence and a surprising lack of common sense (which, based upon many of the talkbacks, is shared by too much of the readership here).
The basic principle at play here is stupefying simple: if it's not your property, don't touch it.
Your intentions are completely and absolutely irrelevant. The fact that a business poorly secured its system(s) is also completely and absolutely irrelevant.
If you accidentally stumble upon an open sensitive link that you suspect shouldn't be open, and if you want to be nice, call or email the site operator and explain what happened. And then don't use the link again!
Discovering and using, without permission, a private internal proxy server to snoop around a site you know full well is not intended for you is quite obviously wrong.
The proxy setting did not just spontaneously set itself within this guy's system (due to a virus, trojan, or whatever). He explicitly set the proxy with the express purpose of breaching the private property of another, without that other's prior permission. And to make matters worse, he then intentionally rummaged through the system and much personal information.
There is nothing in this story that makes Adrian Lamo out to be anything other than a retarded crook.
My personal opinion is that he should be sentenced to 60 days in the county (or city) jail and fined a few thousand dollars. Maybe after having to shit with unsavory witnesses in a tiny enclosed space for a couple months, he will discover a stronger sense of respect for the privacy of others and of their property.
As part of my job, I have to frequently enter and move about the county jail. I don't know the exact dimensions of each cell, but it's close to 5x9. The toilet sits in a corner tucked between the bunk beds on either side of the cell and faces the surveillance camera. There is not even the illusion of privacy, and there are no ventilation ducts in the cells. To ventilate the cell from the stench of feces requires the steel, computer controlled door to be opened. And the doors are only opened periodically (for meals, scheduled exercise, inspections, etc.). The shower (most pods have only one) faces the public area of the pod, again eliminating any sense of privacy. And this all applies to the low security pods. The high security pod is a totally different (and much worse) story.
All county employees were given a full tour of the jail before opening day (the jail is less than two years old and is quite technically advanced), so I was able to inspect all areas of the jail, and I witness its daily operations on a daily basis as part of my systems support role. All things considered, it's an awful place to live.
It seems to me that Adrian's sense of values could only improve with a short stay in such a facility.
"Besides, if anyone truly believes that more security-related bugs are found in windows than in linux, they must not be subscribed to the debian-security mailing list. 23 new announcements in august alone."
All bugs in Linux, whether exploitable or not, whether severe or merely cosmetic, whether dangerous or merely annoying (or just plain non-optimal), are publicly announced and fixed at the time they are found.
Microsoft publicly announces only a small fraction of the known bugs and security problems found in its products. If Microsoft were to be as thorough in its security announcements and fixes, you would be inundated with 8 new announcements, if not more, per hour, every day, for the rest of your life.
The county for which I work is using PostgreSQL county-wide for image archiving, with a couple dozen simultaneous users hitting it nonstop for the last 7-8 months without so much as a hiccup or slowdown.
"By sending small bursts of packets at just the right frequency...."
That's not a problem. All you have to do is periodically adjust your shield harmonics to keep the attacker from adapting quickly enough to do any harm.
"Just because this hurts Microsoft, it doesn't make it a good thing by any stretch."
Most of us would indeed be angry if this happened to a good company. Although most of us will agree that this decision is a very bad thing on general principle, we're not going to pretend that it couldn't have happened to a company more deserving of bad things.
We will all welcome prior art that invalidates this patent, or a reform of the patent system so that trivial and well-known ideas, concepts, and implementations are no longer granted patents.
However, we're not going to ignore the silver lining of Microsoft's karma starting to come full circle. If this had happened to a company with a history of fair play, good customer relations, and great products, we would all be in indignant revolt. Since it happened to Microsoft, we're feeling great ambivilance.
Think of it as making the best of a bad situation.
"The chance of a patch wrecking Windows is dwarfed by the odds that an unpatched PC will get hit."
Yet my workplace has had several problems directly caused by Windows updates. It's not frequent, but it's happened far more often than it should. It would be different if the problems were intentional and documented (see Red Hat example below), but they weren't. We had to roll back the patches and intentionally leave ourselves vulnerable until the next patch that fixed the prior patch was released.
I have had only one Red Hat security fix that caused (minor) problems with one of the Linux systems (the web server). An Apache upgrade was made in which the configuration format for one option (I can't remember which one) was changed, making the current configuration non-functional. However, this was planned by the Apache Group and was documented in the upgrade RPM. A simple tweak to the configuration file brought the service back, and life went on.
"And for those saying they don't trust Microsoft to fix their systems, I have one question: If you don't trust this company, why did you give it your money?"
This is a bone-headed question. They gave Microsoft their money because they had to. Most people still don't know anything but Microsoft. They blindly hand over their money year after year because, thanks Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly position, they don't have a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I would be very happy to have a device in my car that would tell me (and all those red light running morons) a traffic signal's current status and how much longer until the light changes status. While it wouldn't eliminate the more aggregious violators, it would give the law abiding drivers the needed information to plan their approach.
I've seen several cases where drivers, in heavy traffic congestion, were paying too much attention to the light above them to notice the stopped car in front of them.
I've also noticed lot of insane acceleration on the highways cutting through town when drivers see the green light a mile or so down the road. Many of them go from about 60 (the limit) to about 95 because (due to the road curvature before the light comes into view) they don't know how long the light has been green, and they smash the gas pedal in hopes that they can make it.
Knowing the light's status and timing with certainty from an adequate distance would at least allow more informed insanity (where slowing down or keeping a legal speed would be more likely to place you at the next green light safely -- for yourself and the other drivers).
[sarcasm]
Microsoft not complying with a settlement order? Say it ain't so, as there is no precedent for such a thing.
[/sarcasm]
When considered from the perspective of my TV viewing habits, this whole HDTV + copy protection gets to be rather funny.
I stopped watching most over the air broadcasts early in 2003. The shows have become less than mediocre, and I have lost my patience with the overabundance of unentertaining commercials (even if they were entertaining, the frequency with which the interrupt the primary mood and flow of the main show render them extremely annoying very quickly, usually after the first showing).
With the increasing frequency of the few good shows now being released on DVD, I can watch them at my leisure completely uninterrupted and at excellent quality. This further reduces my desire to watch even those shows over broadcast TV.
Even though I make a good living, I am quite miserly with my money. I have to spend time considering whether watching TV is worth even the few hundred dollars needed to buy a new analogue TV when my existing one dies. Spending thousands of dollars on an HDTV set is laughable. Nothing on TV or DVD is good enough to justify spending anywhere near that much on a mere viewing station (which is all a TV set really is).
This is where the media broadcasters become hilarious from my perspective. They want me to spend thousands of dollars on a viewing station that makes me endure the worst parts of broadcast TV (annoying commercials), won't let me store and watch the broadcasts at my leisure, and won't let me edit out the commercials (which is what I do with my VCR via the pause button on those occasions I actually watch and record broadcast TV).
So HDTV essentially boils down to being nothing more than an extraordinarily expensive DVD player minus all the benefits a DVD player provides, and minus most of the benefits that we currently have with analogue TV broadcasts (with transmission clarity being the only remaining benefit if you're willing to endure a high degree of even clearer crap).
Pardon me if I don't rush out to buy this garbage, and instead scratch my head wondering why anyone would want to buy into this. I already have better things to do with my time, so TV broadcasters have to provide an extreme incentive to pull me to the TV. Instead, they seem to be doing everything in their power to drive me away; so I shrug and do things other than watch TV.
This in turn saves me money on products I don't buy due to advertising exposure, even on those rare occasions where the advertising makes me aware of something that I would actually want.
The only downside is that legislation protecting these nearly worthless digital broadcasts would also adversely restrict the usefulness of other digital products that I would want.
"Can someone please tell me what SCO really stands for?"
I believe it's "Stinking Crap Outlet".
For Mandrake 9.1, it was a simple matter of "urpmi mplayer" to get the basic MPlayer installed. Finding the Windows DLLs so MPlayer could play Sorenson QuickTime files (and presumably others) was harder, but doable through Google. Installing them so MPlayer could use them was reasonably easy (create /usr/lib/win32 and copy the DLLs there), though adding an import function to the GUI that would automatically extract and copy the files would have been better for the less technical users .
For those of us who got tired of doing so many source installs which required fighting with the install process, waiting for your distributor to do the integration work for you makes even something as notoriously difficult to install as MPlayer nearly painless.
"Secretaries shouldn't have to learn userland *nix just to type up a TPS cover sheet for their weekly memos."
You haven't installed OpenOffice.org in a while, have you? If you had, you would have seen the rotating ad that explicitly informs you that OO.o is ideal for all your TPS reports -- whether on Windows or Linux.
"Congratulations, you just gave them your phone number."
Not to mention that you've just willingly established a business relationship with them, thereby giving them explicit permission to call you regardless of whether you're on the DNC list.
"He makes a big effort to communicate that he is not critiquing java itself but what he infers from the circumstances around its development and rise to popularity."
He is trying to straddle the fence. In the beginning, he says that he doesn't like Java. At the end, he says that he isn't blaming Java itself. The end result, though, is the same. He is bashing Java not because of technical merits (or lack thereof), but because of circumstances that have nothing to do with the language, and that are largely irrelevant.
Paul Graham is largely on Crack about Java. Before I continue, let me get the required "I'm not defending a language because it's all I know.":
I've done extensive programming in more dialects of BASIC than I can remember, C, C++, Java, several assembler languages, COBOL (ick, ick, ick!), PHP, and I few I'm sure I'm forgetting.
1) Energetically hyped. I agree that the hype has gone too far, but enough of it has turned out to be true that dismissing it out of hand is doing yourself a disfavor.
2) Easy to use. This is, according to Graham, supposed to be a fault. However, Java's general ease of use does not compromise much of importance. The garbage collector is the only exception. Watching a program halt for seconds at a time while the garbage collection goes about its job is extremely annoying. However, the pauses tend to level out after the application has settled into its main loop for a while.
3) Java was originally designed to solve a particular problem (embedded devices). That is has expanded beyond its original role is not a bad thing. It expanded in this way because developers demanded it, not just to piss of Microsoft.
4) This is where he takes the first large hit from his Crack pipe. Many people, myself included, love Java. The core language is wonderfully designed and easy to use, and the extensive library of prewritten classes make a LOT of jobs very easy. If you understand its strengths and weaknesses, and use it appropriately, it's a thing of beauty.
5) I would hate any language I were forced to use. This is a red herring, and should never be included in a serious debate. It's complete nonsense to think that this is limited to Java. All corporate language mandates will be hated by most people.
6) The nice thing about Java is that the core language and the core classes were designed and written by a few highly competent people. The rest may or may not have been done by committee, but you are not forced to use the rest. In fact, you can unzip all the library JAR files, remove the classes you don't like, zip the remainder, and have a much slimmer Java that only has the stuff you want.
7) [sarcasm]Java provides a definition for accomplishing a wide variety of tasks. Shame on it....[/sarcasm]
8) Complete brain damage. "It's popular, so it must suck."
9) This argument is just insane. Java was designed to handle large problem domains, much of which characterizes large corporations. However, it's just as useable by we individuals who want to cleanly implement our own solutions to large (from our perspective) problem domains. He's just discarded the whole nature of OOP.
10) More brain damage. "I don't like the people who like it, so it must suck." He reasons 9 and 10 trash any sense of respect to which he may or may not be entitled.
11) This is pseudo relevant and somewhat justified. Java is controlled by SUN, a company with a history of abandoning products depending upon which way the wind blows. There is a certain risk in using Java, as SUN may at any time decide that Java is no longer a strategic product. However, gcc provides support for the core language and libraries. Only GUI applications run the risk of immediate obsolescence. Most others will merely turn into natively compiled applications, so the risk is mitigated.
12) More brain damage like 9 and 10. Guilt by association.
With the exception of 11 above, he is way out in left field. In fact, he is stationed in the parking lot of the ballfield in the next city. He has zero credibility in critiquing a language with which he has no experience, and this shows through glaringly.
Java is a tool. If you use your tools where they are appropriate, and you understand how to deploy them, you'll have a good chance at good results.
[parent likens a Documents directory to the home directory, saying a Documents directory is much better]
This argument has always fascinated me. For some reason, putting a subdirectory called Documents under the user's home directory is supposed to ease the user's burder of administration over simply storing documents in the user's home directory.
The user's home directory is the default location for all the user's files. So just selecting "save" from any application will automatically select the home directory as the target location. The user has to explicitly select the Documents directory in order to save the file there, but that additional nagivation requirement is somehow easier than no additional navigation requirement.
Having a Documents directory into which all documents are dumped is somehow easier than dumping all the same documents into the user's default directory (the home directory). It is somehow easier, according to the parent poster, to find a needed file out of an unorganized mess under the Documents directory than it is to find the same file in an unorganized mess from the home directory.
But then, this desktop system provides four different subdirectories to accomodate the four most common file types. And of course, users will not misfile documents anymore because users always understand that they have to navigate to the proper subdirectory for the type of document being used. Well that will just solve all of our tech problems.
And what happens when users have documents that don't neatly fit into one of those four categories? Assuming that the user actually used those subdirectories correctly, then one or more of those four subdirectories will become the default repository for EVERYTHING. If not, then the Documents directory base will serve just fine to store every single document the user ever makes. What do we get after a while? We get a Documents directory that serves the exact same purpose as a home directory: a default location to store all unorganized files the user will ever create?
What makes anyone think that a subdirectory will magically make a user capable of logically organizing files if the user weren't already capable of doing it?? In either case, a little education on how to create subdirectories and store files properly will be unavoidable. Thinking a Documents folder will solve the organization problems of the computer illiterate is incredibly naive at best.
An empty Documents folder is only easier to use for as long as it takes users to accumulate enough unorganized files to make the user's eyes scan the directory listing for more than a split second. After that, its additional usefulness is lost. The same is true of the default home directory. Only good organization practices by the user is going to prevent that. A self-cross-referencing file system that allows users to view files by content, negating the need to organize files on the filesystem, may be a good idea, but there is otherwise no way to keep the user from having to learn organization skills.
"Oh, you mean like with, say, modems, where 14.4kbps = 14,400bps, 28.8kbps = 28,800 bps, and so on?
Or Ethernet, where 10Mbps = 10,000,000bps, and 100Mbps = 100,000,000bps?"
No, that is not even remotely in the same universe as what is being discussed. A bit is the smallest unit of measurement, so 1000 bits is always 1000 bits. If hard drive manufacturers labeled capacity in bits, then there would be absolutely no margin for deception.
However, for ease of understanding among those in the industry, bit groupings with significant were labelled with special words. In computing, binary is the lowest system of measurement. To that end, powers of two are as significant to computing as powers of 10 are to human calculations.
1024 has a special significance. It is the power of two the crosses the human reference of groups of ten. 2 (the computing standard) raised to the power of 10 (the human standard) is 1024. Given this special relationship, a special term was assigned: Kilobyte. That is why a Kilobyte is 1024 bytes and not 1000 bytes. 1000 bytes has no special significance to computing, hence there is no need to assign it a special term.
Each of the subsequent terms (megabyte, gigabyte, terrabyte, etc.) all have this same crossover characteristic, and therefore are given special grouping names. This naming convention is standard throughout the computing industry, and is accepted as the norm (and which is why this new SI, or whatever it's called) nonsense is so repugnant (aside from the names just sounding stupid when pronounce).
HD manufactures had always abided by the standard terms when producing their hard drives up until the competition to product the highest capacity drive in the smallest space really took off. At that point, engineering was replaced with marketing. When the entire computing world was defining KB, MB in the normal powers of 2, hard drive manufactures started defining them in powers of 10 but not making that clear to buyers until the buyers started to notice for themselves.
Even when the common consumer talks to someone in the industry, the consumer has to be talked through the reasons why a 40 GB drive is not really 40 GB. Then this whole crappy mess has to be explained to them in similar way as I'm having to explain it to you.
When people actually understand what's happening, then they generally get angry because the HD manufactures are not telling the truth.
"Most people who say Java is unstable or slow are remembering their experience from the JDK 1.1 days. The current JDK 1.4 bears little resemblance to that in terms of performance and maturity."
Most people who say this haven't used Swing enough. I tried to convince myself that Swing was fast enough, since I was trying to push Java as an alternative to VB at the workplace, and for some tasks it was indeed fast enough.
When your GUI gets non trivial (try a large hierarchical table on one side of a split pane and dozens of moderately sized images [e.g. 160x160] on the other pane), resize times for the container widgets under Java get painfully slow while the resize times for the exact same layout under a native GUI change imperceptibly if at all.
That is just one of many examples. In general, as of JDK 1.4.1, Swing is still horrendously slow for most non-trivial applications. Printing is also nearly useless under Java. It's a hundred times worse than the worst part of Swing. I can't damn Java printing harshly enough. What were those guys at Sun smoking?!
All this takes place on 2.8 Ghz processors with 512MB of RAM. I had to accept that Java is useless for GUI programming, despite my strong desire to find otherwise.
We've decided to standardize on C++ and Borland's C++ Builder.
We were initially going to standardize on Java, but that is no longer an option given its horrendous lack of speed and its enormous system requirements.
We were then going to standardize on web applications using LAPP, but there are many things for which our users will not accept a browser based interface (anything that requires printing reports, for example).
We were then going to standardize on C++/Qt, but Qt's licensing fees are way too high for what it doesn't provide in comparison to C++ Builder. So now we're leaning heavily towards C++ Builder, and will standardize on it barring any show-stopping problems.
Having programmed in Java since version 1.0, there is no possible way that any sane person can say that any Java GUI is comparable in performance to the identical GUI written using native components.
SCO sent 1500 letters to large Linux-using companies intimating legal action if those companies did not pay SCO's extortion demands. If any of those companies are using Redhat Linux, then it seems to me that Redhat has been pulled into standing by SCO's interference with Redhat's business relationship with those companies.
"Slashdot is a P2P network. Every message put here is just as much copyrighted as the latest hit by Stupid Band of The Week, or that eBook you want to get your hands on.
Compulsory licencing will end up being a tax on speech."
This has absolutely nothing to do with compulsory licensing of music files. Even if it did, you have it backwards. Compulsory licensing does not require the copyright owner to pay others. Compulsory licensing requires distributors to pay copyright owners.
So if compulsory licensing were to hit Slashdot, then Slashdot would have to pay you for any of your posts that appeared here, unless you explicitly waived your right to receive payment for your posts.
"The EFF can push all they want but I seriously doubt filesharing will ever become legal, even under a compulsory licence."
File sharing has been perfectly legal for decades. We did this legally with modem-based BBSs in the 80s (maybe earlier), and we continue to do this legally with FTP and (more recently) software such as bit torrent.
I'm well aware that you meant sharing copyrighted music files, so I'm asking everyone to stop saying "file sharing" when referring to distributing music files. A more accurate term is music file sharing (or just music sharing).
If we keep referring to music sharing by the generic "file sharing" meme, then any laws that are passed to outlaw music sharing will likely, if unintentionally, cross over into other types of currently legal file sharing such as Free software distribution.
Remember, swapping music files is just one form of file sharing. There are other, and in my opinion far more important, types of file sharing that have nothing to do with illegal distribution of copyrighted music files. It's important to make that distinction.
I think this is great for Mandrake. Those of us who tend to buy our distributions will not have to worry about it, and those who merely download from Mandrake will be helping Mandrake recoup the cost of bandwidth.
And in both cases, Mandrake makes more money to continue developing its excellent distribution.
"If Microsoft is forced to pay off Eolas, doesn't that mean they've paid for the patent?"
No, that is just the penalty Microsoft has to pay for violating the patent. It does not give Microsoft future rights to use it.
Someone has mentioned that Microsoft is not being its normal blustery self and claiming the patent is invalid, or that Microsoft will obviously win in the end. Microsoft's reasoning could simply be to infuse in the mind of the technology public the strong validity of the claim, and then buy out Eolas and its patent. At that point, I.E. would be the only browser on the planet legally allowed to use plugins and a whole host of other technology.
Once again, this is nothing new or mind-bending. It's just another self-made computer hacker with high intelligence and a surprising lack of common sense (which, based upon many of the talkbacks, is shared by too much of the readership here).
The basic principle at play here is stupefying simple: if it's not your property, don't touch it.
Your intentions are completely and absolutely irrelevant. The fact that a business poorly secured its system(s) is also completely and absolutely irrelevant.
If you accidentally stumble upon an open sensitive link that you suspect shouldn't be open, and if you want to be nice, call or email the site operator and explain what happened. And then don't use the link again!
Discovering and using, without permission, a private internal proxy server to snoop around a site you know full well is not intended for you is quite obviously wrong.
The proxy setting did not just spontaneously set itself within this guy's system (due to a virus, trojan, or whatever). He explicitly set the proxy with the express purpose of breaching the private property of another, without that other's prior permission. And to make matters worse, he then intentionally rummaged through the system and much personal information.
There is nothing in this story that makes Adrian Lamo out to be anything other than a retarded crook.
My personal opinion is that he should be sentenced to 60 days in the county (or city) jail and fined a few thousand dollars. Maybe after having to shit with unsavory witnesses in a tiny enclosed space for a couple months, he will discover a stronger sense of respect for the privacy of others and of their property.
As part of my job, I have to frequently enter and move about the county jail. I don't know the exact dimensions of each cell, but it's close to 5x9. The toilet sits in a corner tucked between the bunk beds on either side of the cell and faces the surveillance camera. There is not even the illusion of privacy, and there are no ventilation ducts in the cells. To ventilate the cell from the stench of feces requires the steel, computer controlled door to be opened. And the doors are only opened periodically (for meals, scheduled exercise, inspections, etc.). The shower (most pods have only one) faces the public area of the pod, again eliminating any sense of privacy. And this all applies to the low security pods. The high security pod is a totally different (and much worse) story.
All county employees were given a full tour of the jail before opening day (the jail is less than two years old and is quite technically advanced), so I was able to inspect all areas of the jail, and I witness its daily operations on a daily basis as part of my systems support role. All things considered, it's an awful place to live.
It seems to me that Adrian's sense of values could only improve with a short stay in such a facility.
I'd love to read it, but the site's been slashdotted.
"Besides, if anyone truly believes that more security-related bugs are found in windows than in linux, they must not be subscribed to the debian-security mailing list. 23 new announcements in august alone."
All bugs in Linux, whether exploitable or not, whether severe or merely cosmetic, whether dangerous or merely annoying (or just plain non-optimal), are publicly announced and fixed at the time they are found.
Microsoft publicly announces only a small fraction of the known bugs and security problems found in its products. If Microsoft were to be as thorough in its security announcements and fixes, you would be inundated with 8 new announcements, if not more, per hour, every day, for the rest of your life.
"Shouldn't Spiderman be prounounced more like Goldman?"
;)
Spiderman isn't his last name. It's not like Phil Spiderman (or Phil Spidermn, as you're suggesting). He's a spider man. Goldman isn't a gold man.
And also, Spider-Man isn't Jewish, so it just wouldn't work.
The county for which I work is using PostgreSQL county-wide for image archiving, with a couple dozen simultaneous users hitting it nonstop for the last 7-8 months without so much as a hiccup or slowdown.
"By sending small bursts of packets at just the right frequency...."
That's not a problem. All you have to do is periodically adjust your shield harmonics to keep the attacker from adapting quickly enough to do any harm.
"Just because this hurts Microsoft, it doesn't make it a good thing by any stretch."
Most of us would indeed be angry if this happened to a good company. Although most of us will agree that this decision is a very bad thing on general principle, we're not going to pretend that it couldn't have happened to a company more deserving of bad things.
We will all welcome prior art that invalidates this patent, or a reform of the patent system so that trivial and well-known ideas, concepts, and implementations are no longer granted patents.
However, we're not going to ignore the silver lining of Microsoft's karma starting to come full circle. If this had happened to a company with a history of fair play, good customer relations, and great products, we would all be in indignant revolt. Since it happened to Microsoft, we're feeling great ambivilance.
Think of it as making the best of a bad situation.
"The chance of a patch wrecking Windows is dwarfed by the odds that an unpatched PC will get hit."
Yet my workplace has had several problems directly caused by Windows updates. It's not frequent, but it's happened far more often than it should. It would be different if the problems were intentional and documented (see Red Hat example below), but they weren't. We had to roll back the patches and intentionally leave ourselves vulnerable until the next patch that fixed the prior patch was released.
I have had only one Red Hat security fix that caused (minor) problems with one of the Linux systems (the web server). An Apache upgrade was made in which the configuration format for one option (I can't remember which one) was changed, making the current configuration non-functional. However, this was planned by the Apache Group and was documented in the upgrade RPM. A simple tweak to the configuration file brought the service back, and life went on.
"And for those saying they don't trust Microsoft to fix their systems, I have one question: If you don't trust this company, why did you give it your money?"
This is a bone-headed question. They gave Microsoft their money because they had to. Most people still don't know anything but Microsoft. They blindly hand over their money year after year because, thanks Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly position, they don't have a choice.