Blue LEDs are so old now, White LEDs replaced them. Yes I have Blue LEDs in my gear, but only because I don't replace good gear until it needs replacing. I'm betting colour changing LEDs or panels will be next, like in some mood lights, but brighter.
I don't understand why anyone still uses Limewire and Gnutella; Bittorrent, it's much more efficient for sharers and leechers, is well know to have large legitimate uses, has many client and tracker programs, and allows more secure communications.
I'm over 40 and can hear that, Ouch. I used to do computer repair (here in the UK) and the line flyback on faulty 50Hz PAL computer monitors used to be so painful that I had to buy ear plugs! Luckily modern monitors and TVs can run at higher line flyback frequencies now, so I use a 100Hz CRT monitor at home, but I can still hear some lower frequency CRT monitors at work.
I have a suggestion, for those who what to pay the artist/group directly, anonymously mail cash notes or a saleable item, as a donation, and make sure you don't provide any reference back to you i.e. no name, phone number, address, email address, IM name, cheques, money orders etc.
Garbage, that's what most food is now, and a lot of the more expensive food is inadequate too e.g. excessive carbohydrates and nasty ingredients (e.g. Soy) in many so called health foods and sports foods, especially 'celebrity' branded foods! You need to also look at specialist and 'organic' sections and check the labels on everying (even for the 'organic' food), if you want good quality. This can be more costly, but can be cheaper too, given you are often not paying for all the extra junk in and around convenience foods e.g. sugars, acids, poor quality fats, grains, hydrogenated fats, flavourings, excessive and harmful packaging etc.!
e.g. out of curiousity I looked at an expensive, so called anti-allergy food in a health food section of a supermarket, it included hydrogenated fats, talk about misleading! You will find many supplements also contain hydrogenated fats, even some pricey ones in health food shops, talk about stupid!
Some key things wrong with much food and drink are:
* Excess carbohydrates - causes obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, mineral difficency etc.
* Negligable fibre - too little to moderate and assist digestion, this can make obesity and digestive problems more likely, it may even make some cancers more likely.
* Heat extracted oils - so little or no antoxidants, so they more easily go rancid and cause free radical damage e.g. heart disease.
* The wide use of Soya - this anti-food contains many nasty chemicals which don't break down with cooking, long fermentation is required for this.
* The wide use of many additives e.g. artifical preservatives and colours which are not safe, some ingredients are approved in some countries and banned in others, there can be numerous side effects from these, including increased cancer risk.
* The wide use of Hydrogenated fats - can causes systemic damage and is proven to dramatically increase heath disease risk above a certain level i.e. damage is still done, but less obvious at lower levels.
* Artificial sweeteners - these are steadily being revealed as having inadequate approvals processes and often cancer risk (An recent Italian study dramatically proved this for Aspartame) and excitotoxic risk (e.g. overloads and kills receptor cells in the body, including the brain).
* Soft drinks (Sodas and squashes) - the mix of ingredients tend to be very acidic, carbonated (for soft drinks), often contain lots of nasty additives and contain excessive carbohydrates or artificial sweeteners, this can cause allergies, obesity, mineral deficiencies and contribute to cancer!
* Pesticides in many foods, these can be neurotoxic and can disrupt body processes, especially if they accumulate.
When you mix harmful ingredients it has been proven, for some commonly used mixtures, that the harm is multiplied, not just additive, so the risk maybe worse than many people think!
The body can resist a certain amount of abuse (this varies with peoples genetics and epigenetics), but eventually the diseases appear e.g. high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, digestive malfunctions, various cancers, neurological diseases etc. basically most if not all the Western Diseases!
The Western 'Health' industry needs all these sick people to keep them in business, as do many 'Health' Charities and Government 'Health' Departments, with paid staff and/or researchers, so it is not unusual to see hypocritical behaviour, which is not compatible with genuine health and disease prevention!
... and the world food market is designed to provide manufactured food which makes them too sick to care or think clearly, but still provide customers for the (un)health care industry.:-P
Bullshit
Votes mean nothing when the populous is hoodwinked or more accurately apathetic because the politicians say one thing at election time then after election, bring in new stuff the voters never agreed too! Most politicians seem to care more power than the general populous (they should serve), so they will add in as many restrictive measures as they can find convenient excuses to get away with, common excuses are terrorism, extra-national legislation, other countries demands and loud trade lobbies e.g. US and other Corporations, sometimes even this is too much for some wiser politicians and the measures get at least partially derailed!
e.g. the (illegal) invasion of Iraq, so that the UK and USA had a live testing ground for military weapons, got favourable access to the oil, and got lucrative infrastructure contracts, all at the cost of British and US soldiers lives, the lives of Iraqi civilians, and a massive cost to the tax payers in the UK and USA!
e.g. the arrogant attempt by US and international media interests to corrupt the already ridiculous data retention measures proposed by the EU.
e.g. the lobbying by mainly US corporations to bring in bogus software patent legislation across the EU.
No choices about these abuses was offered to the general populous in any of the EU countries (to my knowledge).
In the UK I have more confidence in the House of Lords (a check to the House of Commons) making sensible decisions, because they are not chasing power, than the current elected government! For F**k sake, Tony Blair's wife had to stick the boot in recently, because he is such an.
1. Java is not a magic bullet, like any language it needs skill and reasoning to use properly, that is not in dispute.
2. Objective-C is a native 'C' compiler based language with no defined security model, thus has many flaws which VM and GC based languages, like Java, lack.
3. I don't care about super computing mathematics, that is a niche activity; all out speed is not my target, reliablity, security, development speed and good enough processing speed are very important to me, my employer and their clients.
Developer time is pretty critical, I don't have the luxury of loads of time to hunt down nasty pointer and buffer overflow bugs, data type glitches or write vast amounts of wrapper code to secure some dated language, a client can lose serious money in that time, I need the language to be secure so that I can concentrate on getting new features and bug fixes out fast, with minimal surprises. The Java compiler and virtual machine has several levels of built-in security, which can be further tightened using code and/or properties files, this prevents most of the classic bugs and security issues of less secure (native) runtime environments. The JVM also automatically profiles running code and compiles busy sections to machine code, so that you can get pragmatic speed optimisation almost for free! Garbage collection is not a significant concern in Java 1.5 and can be greatly reduced with minimal extra design/coding effort. As a bonus the range of support libraries for Java is truely vast and due to the standard file format you don't have the dialect, compiler, linker or make issues of C, C++ etc, even Java version differences can be worked around by using free third party libraries.
As for Java applications: (most are multi-platform and some are multi-lingual too)
That is a pathetic cheap hit and plain wrong, plenty of desktop applications exist for GC based languages now, there are many.Net and Java applications which work fine on the desktop, even for minority platforms like OS-X (it supports Java and has Cocoa support in Java). I've made usable, powerful and secure desktop apps in Java, if you can't do this, then you either don't know Java properly or haven't tried.
Objective-C is a backwater language with poor security which, for some strange reason, only Apple prefer over other more mainstream and IMHO more productive languages. IMHO Objective-C is pointless to learn unless your are an Apple OS-X
owner/developer or a language nerd. I've seen lots of Apple fan boy hype, but the reality is that Apple are a niche player and don't have that great products once you get past all the hype, even their security and performance benefits were and are proven hype.
As another poster said, Windows XP in unusable in non-administrator mode (too much software requires admin rights), however there are plenty of things you can do to reduce your risk:
* Have a hard to guess admin password of over 14 characters, the length is supposed to make a better password hash.
* Use a proper NAT firewall router (this applies to ALL OS) to block port attacks given that a restricted user account is no protection again port attacks (system account).
* Use a proper software firewall (not Microsofts' joke) with excellent egress filtering at application level e.g. Agnitum Firewall Pro, NOT Zone Alarm or Norton!
* Have some good antivirus software, but don't expect it to protect you against zero day attacks.
* Never ever run Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, given that these are inherently insecure, because they support Active-X; use more secure web browser and email software instead. Other programs and services exist for Windows updates e.g. Bigfix (www.bigfix.com)and windiz update (Firefox extension).
* Run any link launched 'server' applications in a separate restricted account with CPUA (http://www.joeware.net/win/free/tools/cpau.htm), RunAs is useless for running most applications!
* Run untrusted in a restricted account with CPUA.
As for speedups, always prefer applications which use the minimum or no Active-X/COM component e.g. avoid most Symantec programs, but use Norton Windoctor from CD to clean up registry crud, use advanced mode and select your own fixes (Windoctor can be wrong). The (Executive Software) 'lite' defragger in XP is a sick joke, buy a copy of PerfectDisk, IMHO it is the best, it is fast, can defrag without file size gaps and can defrag system files, Executive Software, Symantec and O&O are not in the same league.
* Lastly don't allow any untrustworthy person physical access to your machine unless you keep all you critical data in a encrypted profile, given it is trivial to reset an admin password in NT OS's.
I agree about the appalling delays e.g. for my Firefox 1.0.7 (with lots of extension, no themes) it can takes 10 seconds at 100% CPU for a new window to appear, so is damned annoying for (wanted) popup windows!... this on a normally very fast WinXP SP2 (no swap file) AMD64/3500 939 pin 2GB RAM PC. I hope Firefox 1.5 fixes this stupid behaviour e.g. with much smarter cacheing of XUL and extension data.
I had a problem with Azureus crashing the OS, it wasn't the Jave it was some brain damaged swt OpenGL JNI code in a plugin, because the idiots insisted on unsafe swt code instead of safe fast well tested Java 3D code, which uses the faster Direct 3D API on windows! So I will never allow that POS swt code and plugin on my PC again!
So how long before there is a class action suit against the RIAA, the MPAA and their agents, by all their victims, for extortion, defamation (e.g. libel) and related offenses etc.?
Yes and No, having a dynamic library systen that only supports one version of a library is sooo stupid, it can break apps and you have no idea why it happens, I've seen this happen in Windows, may times! In AmigaDOS it was easy to centrally support multiple versions of a dynamic library and the Apps could request the appropriate version of the library, why don't other OS's support this?
Actually Newton probably doesn't deserve that since the Greeks are now known to have used Calculus.
Much was lost from the library of Alexandria (partly due to early Christian terrorists) which we are now seeing via indirect sources to e.g. Plastic Surgery (Arabic books), sophisticated astronomical 'Newtonian' clocks and precision gearing (an amazing geared Greek clock was found on the sea bed recently).
Much is not new, just rediscovered.
Agreed about development speed and libraries.
I'm porting some Java to C for a small memory legacy project and it's painful: the lack of a GC, exceptions, persistance, boundary and null protection make it like going back to the dark ages, using C++ would make little difference.
I'm having to write my own C code because so many of the C database libraries are poorly written (e.g. SQLite and GNU db) e.g. use too much memory, use the wrong data types, too many #defines, are not easily portable, have no caching and fail to pass 'lint' compiler checks.
People my complain about minor Java portability issues, but they forget just how bad C and C++ were!
What competition? Many Java applications are not web based!
I hope not.
IMO Eclipse was a BIG mistake in part because it uses SWT, IMO SWT is a load of IBM cruft used by few applications (unlike Swing), also the interface and window sequence are counter intuitive!
Usabilitity is very important for developers since like other designers (e.g. graphic artists) they often have to do more complex tasks than most other users e.g. if I want to manipulate a picture I would use Paintshop Pro rather than the disgusting GIMP interface.
I use Borland JBuilder because Borland actually designed the interface to stay usable with lots of features, unlike Eclipse and NetBeans. I hope NetBeans apply this lesson and add enterprise level project support so that I have a realistic alternative Swing IDE.
You want to seriously worry about heat with that many drives so close together, especially if they are IBM or Hitachi drives (I HATE THEM SO ARGGG!!!!)
Me I'm running RAID 0+1 with four 300GB Seagate 7200.8 SATA, quiet, fast, cool and SAFE, because an October 2004 250GB Hitachi 7K250 SATA BOOT drive was completely trashed early this year (at under 40C temp), data recovery pro. said no hope of data recovery!
Yes you can do it, but it is an arkward action for an expanded control panel on the start bar and IMHO would get really annoying when you want to make many changes or are hunting for the right applet. BTW it is not always practical to log out or use user switching, due to system/task constraints. The system should (optionally) always prompt you when you attempt to access restricted resources.
Most programs need some rights customisation to work correctly, DropMyRights is S**t, because you can't specify a user account.
I use Runas to run some less trusted 'server' apps in a restricted customised user acount in XP SP2, but it annoys me that I have to manually type in the user's password everytime, because runas won't accept the password as a command line parameter i.e. a really stupid restriction.
What would help is if Microsoft stopped being cretins i.e. fixed Runas, and enabled the Advanced button in the Shortcut tab for non-exe shortcuts (e.g. cmd, bat) so that I could get at the "Run with different credentials" option in the "Advanced properties" dialog!
BS, all OSes have security issues, often unknown ones, don't expect the OS to be safe, assume it isn't and use multiple hardware/software layers to protect the machine e.g NAT firewall routers, software firewalls, secure/security software and secure practices.
Even these measures may not help you if technical deception is used e.g. pollution of DNS servers or DNS clients.
I think you'd be shocked to find that an AMD64/939 (1024MB L2 cache) on an NVIDIA NForce 3/4 motherboard already thrashs the Apple G5 server, it could easily be worse for Apple if AMD64x2/939 (1024MB L2 cache) was used, especially for server apps!
The only thing the AMD64(x2) (desktop) needs at the moment is support for more and faster memory e.g. support for 4GB+ of RAM.
As for workstation applications, people want to see the same application on different platforms (to avoid lock-in), even if not fully optimised, it tends to give a more useful illustration of performance. IMHO the fact that the (free) compilers for the Apple platform are sub-optimal is IBM and Apple's fault, you should not expect third party developers to hand optimise for a minority platform.
Face it Apple is just hype, the empty victory of style over performance and economy, even their mythical security is falling to bits, from the inside e.g. Tiger issues!
Slashdot Mirror
Blue LEDs are so old now, White LEDs replaced them. Yes I have Blue LEDs in my gear, but only because I don't replace good gear until it needs replacing. I'm betting colour changing LEDs or panels will be next, like in some mood lights, but brighter.
I don't understand why anyone still uses Limewire and Gnutella; Bittorrent, it's much more efficient for sharers and leechers, is well know to have large legitimate uses, has many client and tracker programs, and allows more secure communications.
I'm over 40 and can hear that, Ouch. I used to do computer repair (here in the UK) and the line flyback on faulty 50Hz PAL computer monitors used to be so painful that I had to buy ear plugs! Luckily modern monitors and TVs can run at higher line flyback frequencies now, so I use a 100Hz CRT monitor at home, but I can still hear some lower frequency CRT monitors at work.
I have a suggestion, for those who what to pay the artist/group directly, anonymously mail cash notes or a saleable item, as a donation, and make sure you don't provide any reference back to you i.e. no name, phone number, address, email address, IM name, cheques, money orders etc.
Wrong! A capacitor stores energy (voltage) as an electrostatic charge. An inductor stores energy (current), briefly, in a magnetic field.
Garbage, that's what most food is now, and a lot of the more expensive food is inadequate too e.g. excessive carbohydrates and nasty ingredients (e.g. Soy) in many so called health foods and sports foods, especially 'celebrity' branded foods! You need to also look at specialist and 'organic' sections and check the labels on everying (even for the 'organic' food), if you want good quality. This can be more costly, but can be cheaper too, given you are often not paying for all the extra junk in and around convenience foods e.g. sugars, acids, poor quality fats, grains, hydrogenated fats, flavourings, excessive and harmful packaging etc.! e.g. out of curiousity I looked at an expensive, so called anti-allergy food in a health food section of a supermarket, it included hydrogenated fats, talk about misleading! You will find many supplements also contain hydrogenated fats, even some pricey ones in health food shops, talk about stupid! Some key things wrong with much food and drink are: * Excess carbohydrates - causes obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, mineral difficency etc. * Negligable fibre - too little to moderate and assist digestion, this can make obesity and digestive problems more likely, it may even make some cancers more likely. * Heat extracted oils - so little or no antoxidants, so they more easily go rancid and cause free radical damage e.g. heart disease. * The wide use of Soya - this anti-food contains many nasty chemicals which don't break down with cooking, long fermentation is required for this. * The wide use of many additives e.g. artifical preservatives and colours which are not safe, some ingredients are approved in some countries and banned in others, there can be numerous side effects from these, including increased cancer risk. * The wide use of Hydrogenated fats - can causes systemic damage and is proven to dramatically increase heath disease risk above a certain level i.e. damage is still done, but less obvious at lower levels. * Artificial sweeteners - these are steadily being revealed as having inadequate approvals processes and often cancer risk (An recent Italian study dramatically proved this for Aspartame) and excitotoxic risk (e.g. overloads and kills receptor cells in the body, including the brain). * Soft drinks (Sodas and squashes) - the mix of ingredients tend to be very acidic, carbonated (for soft drinks), often contain lots of nasty additives and contain excessive carbohydrates or artificial sweeteners, this can cause allergies, obesity, mineral deficiencies and contribute to cancer! * Pesticides in many foods, these can be neurotoxic and can disrupt body processes, especially if they accumulate. When you mix harmful ingredients it has been proven, for some commonly used mixtures, that the harm is multiplied, not just additive, so the risk maybe worse than many people think! The body can resist a certain amount of abuse (this varies with peoples genetics and epigenetics), but eventually the diseases appear e.g. high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, digestive malfunctions, various cancers, neurological diseases etc. basically most if not all the Western Diseases! The Western 'Health' industry needs all these sick people to keep them in business, as do many 'Health' Charities and Government 'Health' Departments, with paid staff and/or researchers, so it is not unusual to see hypocritical behaviour, which is not compatible with genuine health and disease prevention!
... and the world food market is designed to provide manufactured food which makes them too sick to care or think clearly, but still provide customers for the (un)health care industry. :-P
Bullshit Votes mean nothing when the populous is hoodwinked or more accurately apathetic because the politicians say one thing at election time then after election, bring in new stuff the voters never agreed too! Most politicians seem to care more power than the general populous (they should serve), so they will add in as many restrictive measures as they can find convenient excuses to get away with, common excuses are terrorism, extra-national legislation, other countries demands and loud trade lobbies e.g. US and other Corporations, sometimes even this is too much for some wiser politicians and the measures get at least partially derailed! e.g. the (illegal) invasion of Iraq, so that the UK and USA had a live testing ground for military weapons, got favourable access to the oil, and got lucrative infrastructure contracts, all at the cost of British and US soldiers lives, the lives of Iraqi civilians, and a massive cost to the tax payers in the UK and USA! e.g. the arrogant attempt by US and international media interests to corrupt the already ridiculous data retention measures proposed by the EU. e.g. the lobbying by mainly US corporations to bring in bogus software patent legislation across the EU. No choices about these abuses was offered to the general populous in any of the EU countries (to my knowledge). In the UK I have more confidence in the House of Lords (a check to the House of Commons) making sensible decisions, because they are not chasing power, than the current elected government! For F**k sake, Tony Blair's wife had to stick the boot in recently, because he is such an.
1. Java is not a magic bullet, like any language it needs skill and reasoning to use properly, that is not in dispute.
2. Objective-C is a native 'C' compiler based language with no defined security model, thus has many flaws which VM and GC based languages, like Java, lack.
3. I don't care about super computing mathematics, that is a niche activity; all out speed is not my target, reliablity, security, development speed and good enough processing speed are very important to me, my employer and their clients.
Developer time is pretty critical, I don't have the luxury of loads of time to hunt down nasty pointer and buffer overflow bugs, data type glitches or write vast amounts of wrapper code to secure some dated language, a client can lose serious money in that time, I need the language to be secure so that I can concentrate on getting new features and bug fixes out fast, with minimal surprises. The Java compiler and virtual machine has several levels of built-in security, which can be further tightened using code and/or properties files, this prevents most of the classic bugs and security issues of less secure (native) runtime environments. The JVM also automatically profiles running code and compiles busy sections to machine code, so that you can get pragmatic speed optimisation almost for free! Garbage collection is not a significant concern in Java 1.5 and can be greatly reduced with minimal extra design/coding effort. As a bonus the range of support libraries for Java is truely vast and due to the standard file format you don't have the dialect, compiler, linker or make issues of C, C++ etc, even Java version differences can be worked around by using free third party libraries.
As for Java applications:
(most are multi-platform and some are multi-lingual too)
"DBVisualiser" A multi-platform database tool
http://www.dbvis.com/products/dbvis
"Force Field Explorer" A computational chemistry and molecular engineering tool
http://dasher.wustl.edu/ffe
"Azureus" A multi-platform Bittorrent P2P client/server
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus/
"Eclipse" A multi-platform IDE and GUI framework
http://www.eclipse.org/
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
"Net Beans" A multi-platform IDE and GUI framework
http://www.netbeans.org/
Many of Borlands development product e.g. JBuilder, C++Builder, C#Builder etc., all multi-platform.
http://www.borland.com/us/
Numerous graphics, video, audio and graphical modelling and visualisation tools.
Various GUI charting libraries (Free & commercial), including Crystal Reports...
Loads of web servers, web frameworks and order types of servers: Tomcat, Web Sphere etc.
Loads of XML Tools and libraries, both free & commercial!
That is a pathetic cheap hit and plain wrong, plenty of desktop applications exist for GC based languages now, there are many .Net and Java applications which work fine on the desktop, even for minority platforms like OS-X (it supports Java and has Cocoa support in Java). I've made usable, powerful and secure desktop apps in Java, if you can't do this, then you either don't know Java properly or haven't tried.
Objective-C is a backwater language with poor security which, for some strange reason, only Apple prefer over other more mainstream and IMHO more productive languages. IMHO Objective-C is pointless to learn unless your are an Apple OS-X
owner/developer or a language nerd. I've seen lots of Apple fan boy hype, but the reality is that Apple are a niche player and don't have that great products once you get past all the hype, even their security and performance benefits were and are proven hype.
As another poster said, Windows XP in unusable in non-administrator mode (too much software requires admin rights), however there are plenty of things you can do to reduce your risk:
* Have a hard to guess admin password of over 14 characters, the length is supposed to make a better password hash.
* Use a proper NAT firewall router (this applies to ALL OS) to block port attacks given that a restricted user account is no protection again port attacks (system account).
* Use a proper software firewall (not Microsofts' joke) with excellent egress filtering at application level e.g. Agnitum Firewall Pro, NOT Zone Alarm or Norton!
* Have some good antivirus software, but don't expect it to protect you against zero day attacks.
* Never ever run Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, given that these are inherently insecure, because they support Active-X; use more secure web browser and email software instead. Other programs and services exist for Windows updates e.g. Bigfix (www.bigfix.com)and windiz update (Firefox extension).
* Run any link launched 'server' applications in a separate restricted account with CPUA (http://www.joeware.net/win/free/tools/cpau.htm), RunAs is useless for running most applications!
* Run untrusted in a restricted account with CPUA.
As for speedups, always prefer applications which use the minimum or no Active-X/COM component e.g. avoid most Symantec programs, but use Norton Windoctor from CD to clean up registry crud, use advanced mode and select your own fixes (Windoctor can be wrong). The (Executive Software) 'lite' defragger in XP is a sick joke, buy a copy of PerfectDisk, IMHO it is the best, it is fast, can defrag without file size gaps and can defrag system files, Executive Software, Symantec and O&O are not in the same league.
* Lastly don't allow any untrustworthy person physical access to your machine unless you keep all you critical data in a encrypted profile, given it is trivial to reset an admin password in NT OS's.
I agree about the appalling delays e.g. for my Firefox 1.0.7 (with lots of extension, no themes) it can takes 10 seconds at 100% CPU for a new window to appear, so is damned annoying for (wanted) popup windows! ... this on a normally very fast WinXP SP2 (no swap file) AMD64/3500 939 pin 2GB RAM PC. I hope Firefox 1.5 fixes this stupid behaviour e.g. with much smarter cacheing of XUL and extension data.
I had a problem with Azureus crashing the OS, it wasn't the Jave it was some brain damaged swt OpenGL JNI code in a plugin, because the idiots insisted on unsafe swt code instead of safe fast well tested Java 3D code, which uses the faster Direct 3D API on windows! So I will never allow that POS swt code and plugin on my PC again!
So how long before there is a class action suit against the RIAA, the MPAA and their agents, by all their victims, for extortion, defamation (e.g. libel) and related offenses etc.?
Yes and No, having a dynamic library systen that only supports one version of a library is sooo stupid, it can break apps and you have no idea why it happens, I've seen this happen in Windows, may times! In AmigaDOS it was easy to centrally support multiple versions of a dynamic library and the Apps could request the appropriate version of the library, why don't other OS's support this?
Actually Newton probably doesn't deserve that since the Greeks are now known to have used Calculus. Much was lost from the library of Alexandria (partly due to early Christian terrorists) which we are now seeing via indirect sources to e.g. Plastic Surgery (Arabic books), sophisticated astronomical 'Newtonian' clocks and precision gearing (an amazing geared Greek clock was found on the sea bed recently). Much is not new, just rediscovered.
Agreed about development speed and libraries. I'm porting some Java to C for a small memory legacy project and it's painful: the lack of a GC, exceptions, persistance, boundary and null protection make it like going back to the dark ages, using C++ would make little difference. I'm having to write my own C code because so many of the C database libraries are poorly written (e.g. SQLite and GNU db) e.g. use too much memory, use the wrong data types, too many #defines, are not easily portable, have no caching and fail to pass 'lint' compiler checks. People my complain about minor Java portability issues, but they forget just how bad C and C++ were!
What competition? Many Java applications are not web based! I hope not. IMO Eclipse was a BIG mistake in part because it uses SWT, IMO SWT is a load of IBM cruft used by few applications (unlike Swing), also the interface and window sequence are counter intuitive! Usabilitity is very important for developers since like other designers (e.g. graphic artists) they often have to do more complex tasks than most other users e.g. if I want to manipulate a picture I would use Paintshop Pro rather than the disgusting GIMP interface. I use Borland JBuilder because Borland actually designed the interface to stay usable with lots of features, unlike Eclipse and NetBeans. I hope NetBeans apply this lesson and add enterprise level project support so that I have a realistic alternative Swing IDE.
You want to seriously worry about heat with that many drives so close together, especially if they are IBM or Hitachi drives (I HATE THEM SO ARGGG!!!!) Me I'm running RAID 0+1 with four 300GB Seagate 7200.8 SATA, quiet, fast, cool and SAFE, because an October 2004 250GB Hitachi 7K250 SATA BOOT drive was completely trashed early this year (at under 40C temp), data recovery pro. said no hope of data recovery!
Yes you can do it, but it is an arkward action for an expanded control panel on the start bar and IMHO would get really annoying when you want to make many changes or are hunting for the right applet. BTW it is not always practical to log out or use user switching, due to system/task constraints. The system should (optionally) always prompt you when you attempt to access restricted resources.
This RunAs-like program, mentioned on the site, looks useful http://www.joeware.net/win/free/tools/cpau.htm Thanks!
Most programs need some rights customisation to work correctly, DropMyRights is S**t, because you can't specify a user account. I use Runas to run some less trusted 'server' apps in a restricted customised user acount in XP SP2, but it annoys me that I have to manually type in the user's password everytime, because runas won't accept the password as a command line parameter i.e. a really stupid restriction. What would help is if Microsoft stopped being cretins i.e. fixed Runas, and enabled the Advanced button in the Shortcut tab for non-exe shortcuts (e.g. cmd, bat) so that I could get at the "Run with different credentials" option in the "Advanced properties" dialog!
BS, all OSes have security issues, often unknown ones, don't expect the OS to be safe, assume it isn't and use multiple hardware/software layers to protect the machine e.g NAT firewall routers, software firewalls, secure/security software and secure practices. Even these measures may not help you if technical deception is used e.g. pollution of DNS servers or DNS clients.
I think you'd be shocked to find that an AMD64/939 (1024MB L2 cache) on an NVIDIA NForce 3/4 motherboard already thrashs the Apple G5 server, it could easily be worse for Apple if AMD64x2/939 (1024MB L2 cache) was used, especially for server apps!
The only thing the AMD64(x2) (desktop) needs at the moment is support for more and faster memory e.g. support for 4GB+ of RAM.
As for workstation applications, people want to see the same application on different platforms (to avoid lock-in), even if not fully optimised, it tends to give a more useful illustration of performance. IMHO the fact that the (free) compilers for the Apple platform are sub-optimal is IBM and Apple's fault, you should not expect third party developers to hand optimise for a minority platform.
Face it Apple is just hype, the empty victory of style over performance and economy, even their mythical security is falling to bits, from the inside e.g. Tiger issues!
Brick roads make a perfect ice rink in freezing weather i.e. very dangerous, I cursed naive estate designers for this when cycling in icy weather!