Java's class library is primarily Java code, whereas Python wraps native libraries for much of this work. Both methods have their pros and cons, but it means Python can be prone to more issues regarding different system libraries, etc. Since Java provides it's own virtual platform with most of the code in Java, you don't have these issues as often,
I feel sorry for the sibling post that actually bought this explanation
Simply put, you're wrong. Java wraps native libraries just as often as other programming languages. This is why the Java Developer Kit instructs you not to use the sun.* (now com.sun.*) packages; they are the OS-specific Java Native Interface classes Sun's Java Runtime Environment uses to make API calls to the operating system.
Hell, you certainly couldn't have forgotten the old "Write Once, Test Everywhere" mantra for Java? While it has gotten better, problems between Java and system libraries are the source of this kind of issue.
Here's the thing: During a deletion debate, trolls^Heditors will come out of the woodwork and claim that one or more of the sources used on the page are themselves not notable and therefore the article doesn't meet notability requirements.
However, Java manages to screw up language features, too.
Generics and the way they were implemented in Java 5 is the most obvious example. Rather than creating generics and adding full-blown support for them down the chain, they were implemented by erasing the generic type information at compile time, so that generics could be used with anything expecting non-generics.
Generics is one of the things that.NET 2.0 got right, with both compile-time and run-time support. Even if it did mean implementing a second set of collections.
Having said that, Java has also obsoleted some of their collections (Java doesn't deprecate classes, only makes them obsolete). For instance, the Vector and Stack classes are obsolete. The Dictionary interface and its Hashtable implementation are obsolete.
Now, to address the parts of your post that are flat our wrong:
Why is Java powering a huge part of Google (GMail, GWT, Android, etc.)
Android, check. GWT, kinda check (it's a Java library, so why you included it in this list, I'll never know). GMail... [Citation needed].
No, seriously. Google has the largest installation of Python in the world. To the point where, in 2005, they hired Guido van Rossum, the guy who wrote Python. He still works there today.
Since Python has been Google's primary language for the last decade or so, I'm not just going to take your word for it that GMail runs on Java.
Why is Java powering... Twitter
It isn't; Twitter uses Scala. So, while Twitter uses a JVM, they don't use the Java language. Also, Twitter's downtime was notorious in the past and isn't the example I would choose to use.
Just because a story appears on Slashdot front page does not mean that you have to click "Read More" and then have to come up with something to comment. Go ahead and skip an article if you don't find it interesting. No seriously, go ahead. No one is going to stop you. You won't get an achievement saying "Did not comment on articlezor!"
Even better, click the - button next to the topic name and choose a reason that you did so ("stupid" is on the list). If enough people do so, the article will fall far enough that people can't read it. It's already low enough to hide the article summary until you click the topic name...
I can remember once in the last 20 years that I had an honest-to-goodness virus on one of my computers. This was back in the DOS days, and I got it while pirating Novell Netware Lite.
To this day, I still keep some form of on-access anti-virus program running when using Windows, just in case.
That and, as someone else mentioned earlier, I rarely use all of my computer's processing power, so I can afford the slight performance hit an on-access scanner takes.
But I can think of some reasons that might apply: "as windows resize, the top left corner is the anchor from which all resizing is done, therefore putting elements there minimizes gratuitous movement of those elements" could easily be a factor in a reasonable decision along these lines. Or "as left-to-right/top-to-bottom readers, our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left, so putting critical controls there makes sense".
And, of course, there are counter-arguments: ""as left-to-right/top-to-bottom readers, our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left. Closing and resizing are the least common tasks to do to a window, therefore they should not be in the top left corner." additionally, for non-OSX users: "close/resize should be far away from menus to minimize the chance of accidentally closing a window when clicking on the menu."
There was a point where the _publishers_ rejected them
Most notably, Vivendi (which owned Sierra) and LucasArts rejected them. I'm not sure what Vivendi's motivation was (perhaps their growing console game market), but in the early 2000s, LucasArts had a new CEO that seemed bent on milking Star Wars for all it was worth. At the same time, the second Sam and Max game (subtitled Freelance Police) was canceled, despite being somewhere around 80% complete.
That didn't stop other companies from making adventure games, though. Particularly European companies; their games would would then be brought across the pond by companies like The Adventure Company or Dreamcatcher Interactive (these two eventually merged into a single company). More recently, former LucasArts employees have been spinning out to form other companies that are making adventure games. TellTale Games and Autumn Moon Entertainment to name two.
It was only a year or two ago where LucasArts got (another) new CEO that is interested in reviving their adventure game business. Hence the remakes of Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, plus the licensing of the Monkey Island name to TellTale Games for Tales of Monkey Island, which takes place as if it were Monkey Island 6. No, that isn't a typo. It's set directly after the non-existent Monkey Island 5.
The personal computer is a stereo, a TV, a typewriter, a calculator, and serves infinite other random functions. But I mean, who would want one of those? Oh sorry I guess you keep yours in your pocket.
The point of a personal computer is to run one or more arbitrary programs. The original killer app was the Spreadsheet, but we've gone beyond that now. Each user's needs are different, too.
Windows is the dominant OS in the personal computing arena simply because that's what the most programs that users need and/or are familiar with.
You know that note you made for Jaguar? The same thing applies for Panther. And since the window for that started 3 weeks before Panther was released, your math is probably wrong.
OS X path: 129+ 0+129 (at most - some users could upgrade for $20)+129 (at most - some users could upgrade for $20)+129+X+29 = 545+X, if I'm adding correctly.
Having used Expose a far bit, I find it far easier to use than the taskbar or Alt+Tab. Being able to see a window's contents makes it far easier to find a specific window. That's why Windows Vista/7 have taskbar window previews now. Now imagine if you could see them all at once, instead of just one at a time. That's Expose.
Win+Tab shows you part of each window, albeit not the entire thing unless it's the front-most window. Alt-Tab now shows miniature versions of each window, just like the taskbar hover does now. Also, Alt-Tab in Windows 7 makes all the windows except the current selection show only their window outline.
Windows 2000 had the search indexing service (albeit not enabled by default).
Okay, let me rephrase. Realtime indexed search. That's what I was talking about that Windows didn't have until Vista, and OS X had several years earler.
You think the indexing service isn't realtime? The indexing service has to do a full drive scan once the first time it's enabled (it uses the NTFS Sequence Number to find the files it missed after that point), but while it's service is running, it uses the NTFS 5.0 change journal to track changes. Do I really need to mention that the change journal is updated in real time by file system operations?
Oh, and before you say "oh these are new features," this information is from the Indexing Service 3.0 documentation, which was included in the initial release of Windows 2000 ("Indexing Service 3.0 ships as part of all versions of Windows 2000." -- Microsoft December 2000 security bulletin).
Microsoft did add some new features for its desktop search products, the first of which launched as part of the MSN Toolbar Suite in 2004. The indexer now supports more meta-data types, and the client is now a single search box instead of the old Search dialog specifying what kind of data you're searching for (file name, contents, meta-data, etc...).
You can boot multiple OSes from the Windows bootloader.
It's possible, but it's extremely difficult to set up, and nowhere near as easy as Boot Camp.
It is rather unfortunate that Vista didn't include a GUI editor for its new bootloader. I guess that's why EasyBCD was invented, although it hasn't been updated since sometime in 2008 (but apparently still work on Windows 7).
Yes it is an "OS" feature, just like being able to view tifs, jpgs, bmps without downloading additional software. PDFs are ubiquitous and cross-platform, and if two of three major "OSes" (numerous Linux distros, MacOSX) can do it, Win7 should do it as well. Win7 does have XPS support by default, but this is not a suitable alternative to typesetting, archiving, and sharing documents as no one uses it!
Yup, because clearly Adobe wouldn't sue over that.
After all, Adobe didn't threaten to sue Microsoft for wanting to implement the (at the time, pending ISO standardization) PDF file format in Office 2007. Oh wait, yes they did!
The Xbox 360 Arcade has always come with a built-in 256MB flash. This was announced before it even came out. The model it replaced, the Xbox 360 Core, didn't have a hard drive.
Whoops, I meant to go back and reply to some of your other points after previewing, but hit Submit instead of preview.
Cameras are USB UVC devices
There are cameras other than the EyeToy that work on the PS3?
Wired headsets are USB audio compliant.
The 360's headsets plug directly into the controller. Unfortunately, this means they probably have a proprietary connector.
Wireless headsets are Bluetooth
Since Xbox 360 wireless controllers are Bluetooth, I'm assuming wireless headphones are too.
Standard USB keyboards/mice work fine
Same applies to the 360.
Having said that, I own all three of the modern systems, but the Wii and PS3 are the only ones I paid for. The PS3 was a recent purchase... a used 60GB model, whose HDD I immediately upgraded to 320GB*.
*That's approximately... 298GiB? Stupid HDD manufacturers using 1000 numbering instead of 1024 like OSes do.
The internal hard drive is SATA and nothing (other than maybe power/thermal limits - is the stock hard drive 5400 RPM or 7200?) restricts you from putting a bigger one in.
Except the shitty-quality screws Sony uses in the HDD caddy. Chances are you'll strip one minimum while changing the HDD.
It's analogous to chain mail armor; it's effective against old weapons like broadswords and crap, but completely useless against guns. Today's malware are the equivalent of heavy artillary and most antivirus software is akin to chain mail or even leather armor.
Actually, it's more like a siege engine, with the first line of defense being whether the user chooses whether or not to open the gates. Of course, the user controls whether to open and shut the gates...
Of course, even if the gates are closed, the siege engine may still break through the wall via a security hole.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel sorry for the sibling post that actually bought this explanation
Simply put, you're wrong. Java wraps native libraries just as often as other programming languages. This is why the Java Developer Kit instructs you not to use the sun.* (now com.sun.*) packages; they are the OS-specific Java Native Interface classes Sun's Java Runtime Environment uses to make API calls to the operating system.
Hell, you certainly couldn't have forgotten the old "Write Once, Test Everywhere" mantra for Java? While it has gotten better, problems between Java and system libraries are the source of this kind of issue.
Yes, I have.
Here's the thing: During a deletion debate, trolls^Heditors will come out of the woodwork and claim that one or more of the sources used on the page are themselves not notable and therefore the article doesn't meet notability requirements.
Given Wikipedia's propensity to delete articles as non-notable, I consider this a very, very bad idea.
Getters and Setters/Properties are the difference between setting an arbitrary value (public variable) versus validating a variable being set.
Disclaimer: I work as a Java developer.
Java is freer than .NET, I'll grant you that.
However, Java manages to screw up language features, too.
Generics and the way they were implemented in Java 5 is the most obvious example. Rather than creating generics and adding full-blown support for them down the chain, they were implemented by erasing the generic type information at compile time, so that generics could be used with anything expecting non-generics.
Generics is one of the things that .NET 2.0 got right, with both compile-time and run-time support. Even if it did mean implementing a second set of collections.
Having said that, Java has also obsoleted some of their collections (Java doesn't deprecate classes, only makes them obsolete). For instance, the Vector and Stack classes are obsolete. The Dictionary interface and its Hashtable implementation are obsolete.
Now, to address the parts of your post that are flat our wrong:
Android, check. GWT, kinda check (it's a Java library, so why you included it in this list, I'll never know). GMail... [Citation needed].
No, seriously. Google has the largest installation of Python in the world. To the point where, in 2005, they hired Guido van Rossum, the guy who wrote Python. He still works there today.
Since Python has been Google's primary language for the last decade or so, I'm not just going to take your word for it that GMail runs on Java.
It isn't; Twitter uses Scala. So, while Twitter uses a JVM, they don't use the Java language. Also, Twitter's downtime was notorious in the past and isn't the example I would choose to use.
So, in other words, Microsoft is encouraging a monoculture rather than a Mono culture?
So, now Google will be able to tell that my power level is over 9000!?
Even better, click the - button next to the topic name and choose a reason that you did so ("stupid" is on the list). If enough people do so, the article will fall far enough that people can't read it. It's already low enough to hide the article summary until you click the topic name...
I can remember once in the last 20 years that I had an honest-to-goodness virus on one of my computers. This was back in the DOS days, and I got it while pirating Novell Netware Lite.
To this day, I still keep some form of on-access anti-virus program running when using Windows, just in case.
That and, as someone else mentioned earlier, I rarely use all of my computer's processing power, so I can afford the slight performance hit an on-access scanner takes.
I think what you meant to say is
"Stick a fork in it, it's done!"
And, of course, there are counter-arguments:
""as left-to-right/top-to-bottom readers, our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left. Closing and resizing are the least common tasks to do to a window, therefore they should not be in the top left corner."
additionally, for non-OSX users:
"close/resize should be far away from menus to minimize the chance of accidentally closing a window when clicking on the menu."
The term for this is "win-win situation."
Most notably, Vivendi (which owned Sierra) and LucasArts rejected them. I'm not sure what Vivendi's motivation was (perhaps their growing console game market), but in the early 2000s, LucasArts had a new CEO that seemed bent on milking Star Wars for all it was worth. At the same time, the second Sam and Max game (subtitled Freelance Police) was canceled, despite being somewhere around 80% complete.
That didn't stop other companies from making adventure games, though. Particularly European companies; their games would would then be brought across the pond by companies like The Adventure Company or Dreamcatcher Interactive (these two eventually merged into a single company). More recently, former LucasArts employees have been spinning out to form other companies that are making adventure games. TellTale Games and Autumn Moon Entertainment to name two.
It was only a year or two ago where LucasArts got (another) new CEO that is interested in reviving their adventure game business. Hence the remakes of Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, plus the licensing of the Monkey Island name to TellTale Games for Tales of Monkey Island, which takes place as if it were Monkey Island 6. No, that isn't a typo. It's set directly after the non-existent Monkey Island 5.
You seriously expect Adobe to port Photoshop to the iPad after Apple snubbed them over Flash?
The point of a personal computer is to run one or more arbitrary programs. The original killer app was the Spreadsheet, but we've gone beyond that now. Each user's needs are different, too.
Windows is the dominant OS in the personal computing arena simply because that's what the most programs that users need and/or are familiar with.
I'm assuming you mean in some way other than money, considering Microsoft is still one of the richer corporations in the world.
You know that note you made for Jaguar? The same thing applies for Panther. And since the window for that started 3 weeks before Panther was released, your math is probably wrong.
OS X path: 129+ 0+129 (at most - some users could upgrade for $20)+129 (at most - some users could upgrade for $20)+129+X+29 = 545+X, if I'm adding correctly.
Win+Tab shows you part of each window, albeit not the entire thing unless it's the front-most window.
Alt-Tab now shows miniature versions of each window, just like the taskbar hover does now. Also, Alt-Tab in Windows 7 makes all the windows except the current selection show only their window outline.
You think the indexing service isn't realtime? The indexing service has to do a full drive scan once the first time it's enabled (it uses the NTFS Sequence Number to find the files it missed after that point), but while it's service is running, it uses the NTFS 5.0 change journal to track changes. Do I really need to mention that the change journal is updated in real time by file system operations?
Oh, and before you say "oh these are new features," this information is from the Indexing Service 3.0 documentation, which was included in the initial release of Windows 2000 ("Indexing Service 3.0 ships as part of all versions of Windows 2000." -- Microsoft December 2000 security bulletin).
Microsoft did add some new features for its desktop search products, the first of which launched as part of the MSN Toolbar Suite in 2004. The indexer now supports more meta-data types, and the client is now a single search box instead of the old Search dialog specifying what kind of data you're searching for (file name, contents, meta-data, etc...).
It is rather unfortunate that Vista didn't include a GUI editor for its new bootloader. I guess that's why EasyBCD was invented, although it hasn't been updated since sometime in 2008 (but apparently still work on Windows 7).
Yup, because clearly Adobe wouldn't sue over that.
After all, Adobe didn't threaten to sue Microsoft for wanting to implement the (at the time, pending ISO standardization) PDF file format in Office 2007. Oh wait, yes they did!
Last time I checked, the 360 itself supports USB mouse and keyboard.
Which means the developer decided not to support it, or you just never tried it.
The Xbox 360 Arcade has always come with a built-in 256MB flash. This was announced before it even came out.
The model it replaced, the Xbox 360 Core, didn't have a hard drive.
Whoops, I meant to go back and reply to some of your other points after previewing, but hit Submit instead of preview.
There are cameras other than the EyeToy that work on the PS3?
The 360's headsets plug directly into the controller. Unfortunately, this means they probably have a proprietary connector.
Since Xbox 360 wireless controllers are Bluetooth, I'm assuming wireless headphones are too.
Same applies to the 360.
Having said that, I own all three of the modern systems, but the Wii and PS3 are the only ones I paid for. The PS3 was a recent purchase... a used 60GB model, whose HDD I immediately upgraded to 320GB*.
*That's approximately... 298GiB? Stupid HDD manufacturers using 1000 numbering instead of 1024 like OSes do.
Except the shitty-quality screws Sony uses in the HDD caddy. Chances are you'll strip one minimum while changing the HDD.
Actually, it's more like a siege engine, with the first line of defense being whether the user chooses whether or not to open the gates. Of course, the user controls whether to open and shut the gates...
Of course, even if the gates are closed, the siege engine may still break through the wall via a security hole.
Well, duh. Any report that says Norton Internet Security is the best anti-virus is going to be called a big fat lie. See? I just called it one!