Never ceases to amaze me how much influence ideology has on technical matters. Some people behave as if ownership and proprietary licensing sanctifies a product. They really believe that the profit motive guarantees that quality is better and trustiness is higher. They feel comforted when there is a big organization backing the product. And not just any organization, but a for profit corporation that appears to hold the same values as they do. Non-profits are suspect. They wish to peddle their own products, grow their market, and increase market share and stock valuation, in a similar matter. That many customers might have different ideas is dismissed and ignored, or treated with suspicion and fear accompanied by shrill cries of theft, socialism, and treason against the American way. These feelings and motives trump mere technical merits as reason for choosing one product over another.
Unintentionally, MS has done much to disabuse people who hold such notions.
For lossy still images, JPEG2000, the successor to JPEG, is not widely used. JPEG is good enough.
For lossless still images, PNG was created to provide a free and superior replacement for the proprietary GIF format. The only reason GIF hung on was that it could do simple animations. MNG and APNG provide animations for PNG. APNG appears to have beat out MNG, but neither was soon enough to push GIF into complete oblivion. Still, PNG has mostly supplanted GIF.
Despite being the oldest and by far the worst quality of the major lossy audio formats, MP3 is still king, though Ogg Vorbis has claimed some niches. For instance, Vorbis is a popular format for sounds for computer games. One of the big problems Vorbis suffered was purely political. Microsoft went to war against the format, in part because it didn't have DRM. They would have also killed mp3 if it wasn't so popular. MS managed to squash Vorbis in the US so that it is very hard to find a music player that supports the format. For some players, I installed Rockbox to get support for Vorbis. For another, I learned that the same device was sold in the US and Europe, just with different ROMs. Flash the US device with the European ROM (which involved tricking the ROM installation program by switching ROM files after it did its check and before it did the install) and just like that the US device could play Vorbis. How MS bullied or bribed the manufacturer to omit Vorbis from the US ROM I don't know.
So, yeah, H 265 could easily fail to gain widespread adoption if the licensing terms are too onerous and greedy, no matter how much better it is compared to H.264. H.262 (MPEG-2) is still kicking around, as it's the format used for DVD video.
Star Trek: Renegades appears to be exactly that, a crowdfunded TV series. It's nowhere close to 22 episodes, may not ever reach that milestone, but it appears to be a fantastic success for a first try. In any case, advertising was the mainstay of TV revenues, before the advent of cable in the 1980s.
I am in the US. Thomas Jefferson seriously doubted whether copyright was a good idea. He accepted it with reservations, and only for lack of or time to work out better ways to promote progress. "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
Civil disobedience? I consider that a civic duty, actually. It is a powerful way to overturn bad laws. It worked for MLK, though he did spend some time in jail. If more people stood up for their rights, didn't accept the oppression and theft that many of powerful are always trying to impose through corruption, bribery, and general weakening of our social fabric, jail would be an empty threat. Aaron Swartz was protesting the use of copyright to steal and lock away research paid for by the public, and got caught up in another problem, the use of extreme law enforcement for purposes of extracting revenue from victims and powering the prison industrial complex, and scoring points for being tough on crime. Seems the pendulum is finally swinging back from "3 strikes" laws and mandatory minimum sentences, but it wasn't soon enough to save him. People are revolting against such things as these red light cameras. We were sold a bill of goods about their supposed safety benefits, but all along the real reason for the cameras was revenue. Don't get me wrong, red light cameras can make driving safer, if used responsibly. The problem is that it's too tempting for local authorities and their private camera operation contractors to cheat, by for instance shortening the yellow light even though that reduces safety to less than if no camera was present at all, to extract more revenue.
Get on that, you say? Indeed. I have thought about what would be needed. An important piece is proof of authorship, to make plagiarism difficult if not impossible. Free digital notaries could do that. Now, what would it take to set up a bunch of web sites to do digital notarizing? Shouldn't be too hard, just a technical matter, much like setting up any other web site such as Wikipedia, except this has to keep up with encryption research. I'd like to go even further and make digital signing more automatic. However, that is subject to maintaining privacy. Anyway, supposing we have systems for digitally notarizing works of art and science. Then we have the means to identify the correct people deserving of compensation. Any time money enters the picture, fraudsters jump in, seeking any and every way to cheat the system.
One patronage system we've had in place for years is higher education. It has however taken a beating in recent years, thanks to all this anti-intellectualism and budget cutting. Professors are expected to publish, can't just teach class, that's only half of what they're compensated for, research is the other half. But if higher education is being drowned in a bathtub, starved of cash by anti-government ideologues, it could get to the point where the system breaks down. Been heading that way in recent years.
It's called a boycott. We don't want to live like that, but it may be worth it for a while, to break a monopoly.
There are other options. We, the people, could rise up and demand that these laws be changed. That option is not likely while an easier option exists: we'll just ignore you and copy and share what we want. You can't stop it. You can cry about reality not working the way you want, giving only you and fellow artists and Big Media owners the ability to change a thing from not scarce to scarce and back at the toggle of a switch. You can wail and gnash your teeth about how artists will all starve to death if we the people won't play along and buy those ridiculous and horrendously wasteful physical packagings your peers seem to think must be forced upon the public even as we become more and more unwilling to countenance the waste. Or you could get busy building a business model that does work. Crowdfunding, patronage, endorsements, advertising, bundling with hardware are among those other business models.
I disagree that copying is antisocial. Copying is a natural right, and has a long history. It is only our current customs that push the idea that copying is harmful, and attempt to regulate it and restrict it by fiat. I agree that artists deserve some kind of compensation. Artists can be compensated in other ways. It is not necessary to try to clamp down on all copying for purposes of imposing a toll that ideally is used, in part, to pay artists. It's actually bad to restrict copying. Might as well argue that children should not receive the fruits of knowledge that our civilizations have produced over the millennia, without paying for the "privilege". Just because something is valuable doesn't mean it should be hoarded, and denied to the poor, most especially when the thing in question is not scarce, To allow, and worse, aid a few privileged, moralizing, greedy leeches to perpetuate a wholly artificial imposition of scarcity for what they claim is the good of artists and us all, but which claim is simply not true, is evil.
As to the other ways to compensate artists, there is patronage. Patronage has worked for centuries, and now, with modern technology we can do it so much better. We can crowdfund, which was impractical until very recently.
There's good reason to be skeptical of rules. Too often, rules are not honest. The usual tactic is to not give any explanation. When that won't fly, safety is the #1 excuse for a rule. But so often, it turns out that someone profits from a rule, and that is the real reason for it. Even when there are genuine safety concerns, there is often also a profit motive. That seems highly likely with this particular Disney rule. Why couldn't people use electronic devices or carry nail clippers on planes? Why did so many cities try red light cameras? Why can't people bring their own food and drink to the movie theaters? Why can't we play movies on our computers' DVD drives?
To say nothing of all the other crap they do, MS is still pushing DRM. Windows 10 is no change of direction on that point. If they want my business, they must rip out all the DRM. No more activation keys like they started in Windows 95, no more phoning home like they started in XP, and definitely no more policing of 3rd party media like they tried in Vista. No more Windows Genuine Advantage, OOXML and J++ and ActiveX and other deliberate attempts to sabotage standards, and file format and other lock ins. No more legal debacles like the stunt they tried with SCO.
Let MS admit they were wrong to go along with the sophistry of Big Media concerning piracy, and start behaving like a tech leader again. They tell Big Media how to handle tech, not the other way around. What a weak move that was, following those greedy fools of Big Media, and showing the tech savvy that they don't deserve any respect, don't have any sense of technology, which is supposed to be their core competence. RMS criticizes Torvalds for being just an engineer. That goes double for MS, in their efforts to be just an engineering company and agreeing to implement DRM. But they went further than that, really seemed to believe they could make DRM work for themselves, and when they at last got into politics, pushed for stronger intellectual property laws, not better ones. They're not even a decent engineering shop, they're little more than an abusive monopolist desperately clinging to a broken business model.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson
We would like to be perfectly safe, and not have to worry about being murdered for exposing corruption. But that ideal may be impossible. Instead, there will always be a need for patriots willing to risk everything. Oppressors must be constantly reminded that threats, even of death, cannot silence everyone. Journalists have to be willing to risk torture and death.
This particular oppressor and his lackeys were real stupid and cruel, to resort to such a spectacularly and gruesomely barbaric method of silencing a critic. Did they think the extremity of their punishment would cow everyone? Instead, it went viral and backfired on them big time. Or perhaps they were the kind of sick souls who wanted to see someone suffer horribly, who enjoy torture, and used this as an excuse. I hope they spend the rest of their lives in jail.
AMD Phenom II X4 945, 8G RAM, Radeon HD 5450, with HP branding. It's a Pavilion Elite HPE 210F if I recall correctly. It's about 6 years old now. Only thing I have replaced is the hard drive, twice. Original drive was a WD Caviar Green, and it failed in just 9 months. Next hard drive was a WD Caviar Black, and it failed in 4 years. I've had enough of WD, and the current drive is a Toshiba. There's some funny BIOS problem connected with the hard drives. Occasionally, the computer fails to detect any drives at all and waits on "press F10 to enter setup". More often it detects the drive but fails to boot, and Linux will drop me to an initramfs prompt. Most of the time, it boots as it should. Maybe this intermittent BIOS problem could have led to the early demise of my hard drives?
Anyway, yeah, I see no need for more power. I've become more interested in the other direction, very low power computers. I don't think I want to downgrade all the way to a Raspberry PI, but laptops are a pretty good balance. Have had good luck with a Giada i53, a mini desktop based on a laptop platform. Takes 30W max, and that only when running a game that requires intense 3D accelerated graphics, which its Intel HD Graphics 4000 is actually able to handle, does a little better than the Radeon HD 5450. When just editing text, it takes only 10W. Maybe I'll go for the Giada i57b, or maybe not. Main problem with these Giadas is that they are basically laptops without screens, keyboards, or mice, at higher prices than actual laptops that do have all that.
Pshaw, I still have a 350MHz Pentium II desktop, and a 133 MHz Pentium MMX (Oooo!) laptop with the maximum 96M RAM it can have. Okay, I don't run them as my main boxes, but I do still use them occasionally. The laptop needs 30 seconds to bring up Firefox 3.5, Stellarium is unusably slow, taking 5 minutes to come up. You might think a 133 MHz processor should be able to do better than that, but actually MHz is much less important than capabilities and, at that level, RAM. Below 256M, every megabyte counts. For instance, the Pentium II has a Riva TNT, the very oldest Nvidia graphics card that the Nouveau driver supports, and it smokes a 1GHz Pentium III with Intel integrated graphics (845G if I remember right).
Wait... I still have a working Apple ][+ and Commodore 64 in the closet! At least, they worked the last time I booted them up. Which might have been a decade ago?
Trimming the code bloat was one of the major reasons to fork Mozilla into Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey back in the day. They decided a browser should not also be an email client, HTML editor, news client, and IRC chat client. Seamonkey kept all that butwas rebranded as an "Internet suite".
Forbidding portable media didn't work well in the days of the floppy disk, and doesn't work now. Much better to talk to people, make sure no one has a justifiable grievance against an immediate supervisor. If someone sees something to blow a whistle about, give them a way to do so that isn't so damaging and doesn't have a bunch of organization men conflating treason to the nation with refusal to look the other way when they lie and cheat. We should be grateful to whistleblowers, not treat them with suspicion.
The first line of defense is not to make enemies in the first place. That goes for other nations as well as insiders.
Humidity is a problem, but it still worked in New York City.. There are old pictures of full clothes lines between high rise tenements there. Those lines were also useful for transporting small goods, such as a cup of sugar for the neighbor, or food for the infirm to save themselves a lot of stair climbing.
I don't think it's wrong to implement copyright. It does have a purpose: to enable artists to be properly compensated for their work
I appreciate what you're saying, but on this point I disagree. Yes, I think artists deserve compensation. But I think artists can be properly compensated through crowdfunding, patronage, and advertising, and that therefore copyright is unnecessary. On balance, I believe copyright does more harm than good, and therefore should be abolished. I realize it always hurts to lose something, particularly a means of income. It's partly a psychological problem. People cling to what they have and know, and resist loss. Some cling so hard they go into denial and insist they still have it when it has been lost for years.
Having said that, a form of copyright could still be viable. Piracy cannot be stopped. But what may still be possible is charging for performances to the public. Many restaurants do that when they play music for their customers. Such public activities are not invisible by their nature, so it is possible to track and regulate it. However, I would like to see this called something other than copyright. And I'm not convinced it's a good idea.
Crowdfunding is still in its infancy. It needs a lot of work, and I think the sooner we get busy on it, the better for everyone. I especially would rather not rely on private corporations to provide the forums and facilities for crowdfunding. But it's workable so long as there is competition. I hear that Kickstarter keeps a whopping 30% of the funds? Wouldn't 5% be more fair? And maybe they would lower their take if they had more competition. If ever any one corporation gets close to monopoly power in such a vital market, the government should step in, and if they don't because the regulators have been captured, the people must step up and demand action.
Why even have a powered dryer? Just amazes me how people are really sold on the things. Uses a lot of energy to speed up clothes drying, as if those who can afford a dryer can't afford enough clothes to give the wash time to dry on a rack. It's less wear and tear on clothes to hang them to dry, rather than tumble them some more. Now, some people complain that the clothes aren't all nice and soft and fluffy when dried that way. The powered dryer alone can't get the clothes soft either, have to use fabric softener. A lot of those fabric softener sheets use dangerous chemicals, such as phthalates. And there are fabric softeners that are meant to be added to the washer rather than the dryer.
I'd like to see a closet especially made for hanging wet clothes up to dry as well as clothes storage. I thought perhaps this closet could run the length of the house so that the ends could be opened to the outdoors to create a breezeway. Use screens of course, to keep bugs out. Put it on one side of the house, the side next to all the bedrooms. It would be a labor saver too. Instead of moving clothes from washing machine to dryer and then to storage, this system would have the user moving clothes just once, from washer to storage. Could put the laundry room at one end of the closet, or right in the middle. Since the closet is on an exterior wall, could make the entire outside wall open to outdoor air, for faster drying.
That's great. A stable, intuitive, responsive desktop is sorely needed. Linux desktop environments lack polish. Always missing features, configuration settings are confusing, and the file manager is too easy to crash. Why for instance is it such a pain to set colors in LXDE? Themes are icons and colors together, makes it difficult to have one without the other. In Openbox, I don't want the scroll wheel to flip between desktops, or "shade" and "unshade" windows if on the titlebar, and that's the first thing I turn off in that environment. Have to find and edit a text file to do that too. Too many times I'm scrolling a window and the mouse wanders off the page, and then suddenly I'm spinning through desktops or shading several open windows the next time I scroll.
It's fine that you realize that copying is inevitable and unstoppable, but you are still talking as if copying is immoral. It is copyright that is immoral. Copying is a natural right, and the way that the universe works. A radio broadcast or a concert or even just singing in the shower creates countless echoes of information. A shining light on a painting or written page bounces photons into the eyes of anyone looking that direction. Copyright is an entirely artificial restriction on these wholly natural processes. And for what purpose? To encourage the creation of more art. That is hardly the only way to encourage artistic endeavor. As to complaints that artists will starve without copyright, no, they won't. To support art, there is patronage, crowdfunding, performance, and endorsements, to name several other ways.
For copyright to really work, we are supposed to ignore all these echoes. See the movie at the theater, then buy it on DVD (or pirate it of course) if you want to see it again and your memory of it isn't satisfactory. The day may come when we all have inexpensive devices that augment our memory, allowing us to perfectly recall anything we see or hear and copy any of that we wish to another person or data repository, and then what of copyright? Copying has become so much easier to do over the past 40 years that copyright is already absurd now. With technology like that, copyright will be ridiculously archaic and worse than useless, it will be a major hindrance to the ability of its followers, if any, to function in society. For now, copyright blocks and slows the coming of the digital public library, a huge, huge improvement over the traditional library full of bound papers. The private bookstore is dying, and good riddance. Accepting copyright is like accepting a proposition that we should all use only one arm until the holders of the rights to use our other arms grant us permission, and each time we want to use our other arm, we have to ask for said permission and pay a fee. The industry has done an effective job of pushing the propaganda that copying is stealing, and hurts artists and is therefore unfair and immoral. They've confused the public with the seductive simplification that property is property and there is no difference between the physical and the intellectual variety. It's a simple, easy way to view the matter, but it is wrong, and the secret is out now. More and more people are seeing through their propaganda, ironically helped by the industry's clumsy, extreme, and harsh enforcement tactics that earned them the moniker "MAFIAA". For yet more reason why the industry is parasitic, a broad and extensive propaganda campaign, plus a terror campaign to scare the people who weren't fooled or who don't care, is just the sort of thing one could expect from parasites.
It's not just the future in which copyright doesn't work. It never has worked well, ever. Civilization would not have advanced to where it is today had ancient civilizations been able to lock down all information. No matter how much an ancient civilization wished to keep a new battle tactic or weapon secret, once used, their enemies would see it, and the survivors would not find it hard to understand and duplicate, or perhaps counter, or even improve.
No sir, I did not ridicule anyone. I pointed out that the parent seemed to put business people in a class apart and above, deserving of extra help and protections to compensate them for the risks they take and the work they do.
To say such a thing in our current climate is turning a blind eye to recent history. Who got bailed out in 2008? Not the homeowners. Who was so arrogant they said they didn't need policing? Wall Street. At the same time, who is denying there is a Climate Change problem and constantly accusing scientists of needing more policing? Big Oil for one. Businesses already get a lot of help. There is a problem with big businesses obtaining unfair advantage over small businesses. But I have not heard any complaining about that. Perhaps Big Media isn't reporting that, just like they don't report all kinds of other things. But it could also be that businesses close ranks and lobby as one on many issues, particularly when it comes to beating down pay and shrinking the middle class. If anything, we engage in too much corporate welfare. We have a lot of corruption, nepotism, greed, and crony capitalism. The Great Recession exposed only some of it.
So? You think running a successful business takes some kind of extra special skill set? Higher levels of skill, talent, and perseverance than earning a PhD, and/or making a discovery, advancing science? More than it take to create and play a hit song or write a best selling book? But it seems more and more that the most important things successful businesspeople have are connections, and the skills and willingness to finesse the legal system to bribe the powerful and cheat the most vulnerable.
Lots of things are tough. Doing the right thing is one of the them.
we would need to double the number of suitable planets every 50 years with the current rate. I don't see that as viable.
It isn't viable. The amount of space anyone can reach even at light speed grows by a polynomial amount, n^3. Population can grow at exponential rates (c^n for c>1). Exponential growth always passes up polynomial growth. Unless we discover some kind of travel that allows us to reach exponentially growing amounts of space or larger, something like instant teleportation via hyperspace, or a method of acceleration that can double an object's speed indefinitely and is not limited by light speed, we will always be constrained. Growth has always been limited by this fundamental fact. Life on Earth has had to make adaptations, "voluntarily" limit growth through a variety of strategies, as the alternative is mass starvation when resources are exhausted, which can be very destructive. I think life's strategies for detecting and responding to lack of further room and resources are not well appreciated, and so we've had Malthusian fearmongering. The Mote in God's Eye is an excellent example of that.
I think you don't give Mars dreamers enough credit. It's fun to think about, and do a bit of handwaving, but most everyone realizes colonizing Mars is an enormous challenge. Obviously, the first European colonies in the Americas were much easier. They already had breathable air and a tolerable climate. Life was already firmly established, all the colonists had to do was harness it. Even so, many colonies failed.
On Mars, we have to start life from scratch. One problem that as far as we know Mars does not have, is hostile natives. The absence of that petty little problem is no compensation for the huge problems we would have to solve to build a sustainable colony on Mars. We aren't capable of doing it now. That list of obstacles to setting up a steel foundry isn't even among the main problems. Can we establish an ecology? What about ionizing radiation, how do we handle that?
It's possible we may conclude that even if we can do it, Mars isn't worth inhabiting. Really, why inhabit Mars? By the time we can do it, we could probably also inhabit space for indefinite lengths of time, and if we can do that, why not head out of the solar system? Seems likely there will be many planets that are much better than Mars. Mars then is mostly an experiment, a trial. Where is humanity going? Are we headed towards a blissful future of peace, all our critical problems solved? If yes, how long can it last, millions of years? We may need 100,000 years to send a colony ship to another solar system. We have no civilization that has come anywhere close to lasting such an enormous length of time. But we can dream.
I've had interviews go wrong many times, for dumb and dishonest reasons. It comes down to the fact that the employers weren't actually interested in hiring, had too many candidates to consider. So they hoke up an excuse that you don't have enough experience in a bunch of narrowly defined areas, and you're out. Deep down they know perfectly well that you could do the job. But they manufacture some desired experience that you supposedly lack, and start thinking of you as a liar for even applying. Never mind that the whole hiring process is packed with deception from start to finish. Of course you should never outright lie, but spinning and twisting the facts is fine, even encouraged. They focus on superficial skills and miss the big picture. Overqualified is another fun reason for rejection. Why would an employer ever want to reject a candidate for being too smart? Yet a PhD is typically seen as a negative. The standard excuse is that the employee will get bored and leave, as if there aren't hundreds of other more compelling reasons anyone might leave. More like, there's a good deal of prejudice against geeks and nerds and smart people in general, which has been getting worse in recent years with the upswing in anti-intellectualism. When a job application takes a turn like that, when they start hunting for excuses not to consider people, you know the employer wasn't serious.
So I'm skeptical of this push to get more people into CS. On the one hand, maybe there should be a 4th "R", 'rogramming. Maybe programming is such a fundamental skill that it should have a place in elementary school. But with all the noise over H1Bs and the demonstrated facts that many employers really don't value, like, or trust engineers as a whole, not just the individuals among them that aren't competent, it's hard to be sure. They know they have to have some engineers, but they don't have to like it, and many don't. Very tiresome having to always watch your back, be ready to defend yourself, and not give them any openings they can use to drum you out. However, this attempt to reach people when very young is such a long play, beyond what such short-sighted companies can conceive, that perhaps it is genuinely meant.
What's hated is the waste of everyone's time on a bad job of exchanging information and ideas. Powerpoint is merely a tool often abused to that end, and made into either the scapegoat for why a presentation was bad or excuse for why it was good, or both at once.
And those are merely neutral and boring meetings. If you think that's the worst, you haven't been in a really nasty meeting. Meetings often have hidden agendas. Most of the time those agendas stay hidden, but sometimes they come out, and then chaos can ensue. Meetings are the premier place where office politics moves into a gallop, and truly ugly meetings have people getting trampled. An insecure boss takes over the meeting to browbeat and bully people, try to make them look dumb so he or she can feel less insecure. Or there's the arrogant boss who won't let anyone else get a word in, and insists on lecturing to everyone as if they're particularly slow and stupid children who don't get it. Or there's the rival groups trying to cut the others' throats. I've been in all those kinds of meetings. I have seen people unfairly sidelined and put on a fast track to the pink slip, because of how a meeting went. The boss decides that a person isn't competent, but can't just up and fire the presenter on the spot, doesn't have enough authority to do that. And also, the boss is often wrong, made a hasty judgment. He's all unhappy that the presenter's plan didn't give a seemingly credible path to the invention of perpetual motion in 6 months time. Meanwhile, the bullshit artist fools the boss again, often with pretty Powerpoint slides, and gets praise. The b. s. artist can't do the job either, and knows it, he's only trying to delay his own inevitable termination as long as possible, and if that means someone else takes the fall that time, so be it.
Compared to that, Powerpoint's contribution is trivial.
Java was a terrible resource pig when I last used it extensively, over a decade ago. Has that changed? Took lots of memory, and yes, it was slow.
Carefully optimized C++ will blow away Java,
Ok, seems that has not changed much.
As for that optimization benefit you extol, what's stopping the C++ compiler from querying the machine and making optimizations based on platform? Isn't that the whole point of a source code Linux distro like Gentoo?
Yeah, this story smells like Slashvertising. If, as claimed in another recent Slashvertisement for Java, it is such a simple language to understand, an easy language to program, one that lets programmers "get things done", why do employers strongly prefer programmers who have 5 or 10 or more years of experience in Java? It's a curly brace OOP language with tons and tons of its own libraries. It doesn't play nice with libraries written in other languages, it mostly ignores them. A lot of resources have been poured into enabling Java to inhabit a world of its own, and it seems now with hindsight that was not the best direction to go. One of the biggest improvements over C++ was the propaganda that unlike C++, Java doesn't use pointers. That's a misrepresentation. What they really mean is that Java ditched the ugly C pointer syntax. That, and this object code that is supposed to run on any platform, making Java super portable, especially designed for browsers, were the main selling points of Java. But that was 15 plus years ago. What has Java done lately? Stagnated while other languages press ahead with advances?
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Never ceases to amaze me how much influence ideology has on technical matters. Some people behave as if ownership and proprietary licensing sanctifies a product. They really believe that the profit motive guarantees that quality is better and trustiness is higher. They feel comforted when there is a big organization backing the product. And not just any organization, but a for profit corporation that appears to hold the same values as they do. Non-profits are suspect. They wish to peddle their own products, grow their market, and increase market share and stock valuation, in a similar matter. That many customers might have different ideas is dismissed and ignored, or treated with suspicion and fear accompanied by shrill cries of theft, socialism, and treason against the American way. These feelings and motives trump mere technical merits as reason for choosing one product over another.
Unintentionally, MS has done much to disabuse people who hold such notions.
For lossy still images, JPEG2000, the successor to JPEG, is not widely used. JPEG is good enough.
For lossless still images, PNG was created to provide a free and superior replacement for the proprietary GIF format. The only reason GIF hung on was that it could do simple animations. MNG and APNG provide animations for PNG. APNG appears to have beat out MNG, but neither was soon enough to push GIF into complete oblivion. Still, PNG has mostly supplanted GIF.
Despite being the oldest and by far the worst quality of the major lossy audio formats, MP3 is still king, though Ogg Vorbis has claimed some niches. For instance, Vorbis is a popular format for sounds for computer games. One of the big problems Vorbis suffered was purely political. Microsoft went to war against the format, in part because it didn't have DRM. They would have also killed mp3 if it wasn't so popular. MS managed to squash Vorbis in the US so that it is very hard to find a music player that supports the format. For some players, I installed Rockbox to get support for Vorbis. For another, I learned that the same device was sold in the US and Europe, just with different ROMs. Flash the US device with the European ROM (which involved tricking the ROM installation program by switching ROM files after it did its check and before it did the install) and just like that the US device could play Vorbis. How MS bullied or bribed the manufacturer to omit Vorbis from the US ROM I don't know.
So, yeah, H 265 could easily fail to gain widespread adoption if the licensing terms are too onerous and greedy, no matter how much better it is compared to H.264. H.262 (MPEG-2) is still kicking around, as it's the format used for DVD video.
Star Trek: Renegades appears to be exactly that, a crowdfunded TV series. It's nowhere close to 22 episodes, may not ever reach that milestone, but it appears to be a fantastic success for a first try. In any case, advertising was the mainstay of TV revenues, before the advent of cable in the 1980s.
I am in the US. Thomas Jefferson seriously doubted whether copyright was a good idea. He accepted it with reservations, and only for lack of or time to work out better ways to promote progress. "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
Civil disobedience? I consider that a civic duty, actually. It is a powerful way to overturn bad laws. It worked for MLK, though he did spend some time in jail. If more people stood up for their rights, didn't accept the oppression and theft that many of powerful are always trying to impose through corruption, bribery, and general weakening of our social fabric, jail would be an empty threat. Aaron Swartz was protesting the use of copyright to steal and lock away research paid for by the public, and got caught up in another problem, the use of extreme law enforcement for purposes of extracting revenue from victims and powering the prison industrial complex, and scoring points for being tough on crime. Seems the pendulum is finally swinging back from "3 strikes" laws and mandatory minimum sentences, but it wasn't soon enough to save him. People are revolting against such things as these red light cameras. We were sold a bill of goods about their supposed safety benefits, but all along the real reason for the cameras was revenue. Don't get me wrong, red light cameras can make driving safer, if used responsibly. The problem is that it's too tempting for local authorities and their private camera operation contractors to cheat, by for instance shortening the yellow light even though that reduces safety to less than if no camera was present at all, to extract more revenue.
Get on that, you say? Indeed. I have thought about what would be needed. An important piece is proof of authorship, to make plagiarism difficult if not impossible. Free digital notaries could do that. Now, what would it take to set up a bunch of web sites to do digital notarizing? Shouldn't be too hard, just a technical matter, much like setting up any other web site such as Wikipedia, except this has to keep up with encryption research. I'd like to go even further and make digital signing more automatic. However, that is subject to maintaining privacy. Anyway, supposing we have systems for digitally notarizing works of art and science. Then we have the means to identify the correct people deserving of compensation. Any time money enters the picture, fraudsters jump in, seeking any and every way to cheat the system.
One patronage system we've had in place for years is higher education. It has however taken a beating in recent years, thanks to all this anti-intellectualism and budget cutting. Professors are expected to publish, can't just teach class, that's only half of what they're compensated for, research is the other half. But if higher education is being drowned in a bathtub, starved of cash by anti-government ideologues, it could get to the point where the system breaks down. Been heading that way in recent years.
It's called a boycott. We don't want to live like that, but it may be worth it for a while, to break a monopoly.
There are other options. We, the people, could rise up and demand that these laws be changed. That option is not likely while an easier option exists: we'll just ignore you and copy and share what we want. You can't stop it. You can cry about reality not working the way you want, giving only you and fellow artists and Big Media owners the ability to change a thing from not scarce to scarce and back at the toggle of a switch. You can wail and gnash your teeth about how artists will all starve to death if we the people won't play along and buy those ridiculous and horrendously wasteful physical packagings your peers seem to think must be forced upon the public even as we become more and more unwilling to countenance the waste. Or you could get busy building a business model that does work. Crowdfunding, patronage, endorsements, advertising, bundling with hardware are among those other business models.
I disagree that copying is antisocial. Copying is a natural right, and has a long history. It is only our current customs that push the idea that copying is harmful, and attempt to regulate it and restrict it by fiat. I agree that artists deserve some kind of compensation. Artists can be compensated in other ways. It is not necessary to try to clamp down on all copying for purposes of imposing a toll that ideally is used, in part, to pay artists. It's actually bad to restrict copying. Might as well argue that children should not receive the fruits of knowledge that our civilizations have produced over the millennia, without paying for the "privilege". Just because something is valuable doesn't mean it should be hoarded, and denied to the poor, most especially when the thing in question is not scarce, To allow, and worse, aid a few privileged, moralizing, greedy leeches to perpetuate a wholly artificial imposition of scarcity for what they claim is the good of artists and us all, but which claim is simply not true, is evil.
As to the other ways to compensate artists, there is patronage. Patronage has worked for centuries, and now, with modern technology we can do it so much better. We can crowdfund, which was impractical until very recently.
There's good reason to be skeptical of rules. Too often, rules are not honest. The usual tactic is to not give any explanation. When that won't fly, safety is the #1 excuse for a rule. But so often, it turns out that someone profits from a rule, and that is the real reason for it. Even when there are genuine safety concerns, there is often also a profit motive. That seems highly likely with this particular Disney rule. Why couldn't people use electronic devices or carry nail clippers on planes? Why did so many cities try red light cameras? Why can't people bring their own food and drink to the movie theaters? Why can't we play movies on our computers' DVD drives?
Yeah. Don't blindly trust The Rules.
To say nothing of all the other crap they do, MS is still pushing DRM. Windows 10 is no change of direction on that point. If they want my business, they must rip out all the DRM. No more activation keys like they started in Windows 95, no more phoning home like they started in XP, and definitely no more policing of 3rd party media like they tried in Vista. No more Windows Genuine Advantage, OOXML and J++ and ActiveX and other deliberate attempts to sabotage standards, and file format and other lock ins. No more legal debacles like the stunt they tried with SCO.
Let MS admit they were wrong to go along with the sophistry of Big Media concerning piracy, and start behaving like a tech leader again. They tell Big Media how to handle tech, not the other way around. What a weak move that was, following those greedy fools of Big Media, and showing the tech savvy that they don't deserve any respect, don't have any sense of technology, which is supposed to be their core competence. RMS criticizes Torvalds for being just an engineer. That goes double for MS, in their efforts to be just an engineering company and agreeing to implement DRM. But they went further than that, really seemed to believe they could make DRM work for themselves, and when they at last got into politics, pushed for stronger intellectual property laws, not better ones. They're not even a decent engineering shop, they're little more than an abusive monopolist desperately clinging to a broken business model.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson
We would like to be perfectly safe, and not have to worry about being murdered for exposing corruption. But that ideal may be impossible. Instead, there will always be a need for patriots willing to risk everything. Oppressors must be constantly reminded that threats, even of death, cannot silence everyone. Journalists have to be willing to risk torture and death.
This particular oppressor and his lackeys were real stupid and cruel, to resort to such a spectacularly and gruesomely barbaric method of silencing a critic. Did they think the extremity of their punishment would cow everyone? Instead, it went viral and backfired on them big time. Or perhaps they were the kind of sick souls who wanted to see someone suffer horribly, who enjoy torture, and used this as an excuse. I hope they spend the rest of their lives in jail.
AMD Phenom II X4 945, 8G RAM, Radeon HD 5450, with HP branding. It's a Pavilion Elite HPE 210F if I recall correctly. It's about 6 years old now. Only thing I have replaced is the hard drive, twice. Original drive was a WD Caviar Green, and it failed in just 9 months. Next hard drive was a WD Caviar Black, and it failed in 4 years. I've had enough of WD, and the current drive is a Toshiba. There's some funny BIOS problem connected with the hard drives. Occasionally, the computer fails to detect any drives at all and waits on "press F10 to enter setup". More often it detects the drive but fails to boot, and Linux will drop me to an initramfs prompt. Most of the time, it boots as it should. Maybe this intermittent BIOS problem could have led to the early demise of my hard drives?
Anyway, yeah, I see no need for more power. I've become more interested in the other direction, very low power computers. I don't think I want to downgrade all the way to a Raspberry PI, but laptops are a pretty good balance. Have had good luck with a Giada i53, a mini desktop based on a laptop platform. Takes 30W max, and that only when running a game that requires intense 3D accelerated graphics, which its Intel HD Graphics 4000 is actually able to handle, does a little better than the Radeon HD 5450. When just editing text, it takes only 10W. Maybe I'll go for the Giada i57b, or maybe not. Main problem with these Giadas is that they are basically laptops without screens, keyboards, or mice, at higher prices than actual laptops that do have all that.
Pshaw, I still have a 350MHz Pentium II desktop, and a 133 MHz Pentium MMX (Oooo!) laptop with the maximum 96M RAM it can have. Okay, I don't run them as my main boxes, but I do still use them occasionally. The laptop needs 30 seconds to bring up Firefox 3.5, Stellarium is unusably slow, taking 5 minutes to come up. You might think a 133 MHz processor should be able to do better than that, but actually MHz is much less important than capabilities and, at that level, RAM. Below 256M, every megabyte counts. For instance, the Pentium II has a Riva TNT, the very oldest Nvidia graphics card that the Nouveau driver supports, and it smokes a 1GHz Pentium III with Intel integrated graphics (845G if I remember right).
Wait... I still have a working Apple ][+ and Commodore 64 in the closet! At least, they worked the last time I booted them up. Which might have been a decade ago?
Trimming the code bloat was one of the major reasons to fork Mozilla into Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey back in the day. They decided a browser should not also be an email client, HTML editor, news client, and IRC chat client. Seamonkey kept all that butwas rebranded as an "Internet suite".
Forbidding portable media didn't work well in the days of the floppy disk, and doesn't work now. Much better to talk to people, make sure no one has a justifiable grievance against an immediate supervisor. If someone sees something to blow a whistle about, give them a way to do so that isn't so damaging and doesn't have a bunch of organization men conflating treason to the nation with refusal to look the other way when they lie and cheat. We should be grateful to whistleblowers, not treat them with suspicion.
The first line of defense is not to make enemies in the first place. That goes for other nations as well as insiders.
Humidity is a problem, but it still worked in New York City.. There are old pictures of full clothes lines between high rise tenements there. Those lines were also useful for transporting small goods, such as a cup of sugar for the neighbor, or food for the infirm to save themselves a lot of stair climbing.
I don't think it's wrong to implement copyright. It does have a purpose: to enable artists to be properly compensated for their work
I appreciate what you're saying, but on this point I disagree. Yes, I think artists deserve compensation. But I think artists can be properly compensated through crowdfunding, patronage, and advertising, and that therefore copyright is unnecessary. On balance, I believe copyright does more harm than good, and therefore should be abolished. I realize it always hurts to lose something, particularly a means of income. It's partly a psychological problem. People cling to what they have and know, and resist loss. Some cling so hard they go into denial and insist they still have it when it has been lost for years.
Having said that, a form of copyright could still be viable. Piracy cannot be stopped. But what may still be possible is charging for performances to the public. Many restaurants do that when they play music for their customers. Such public activities are not invisible by their nature, so it is possible to track and regulate it. However, I would like to see this called something other than copyright. And I'm not convinced it's a good idea.
Crowdfunding is still in its infancy. It needs a lot of work, and I think the sooner we get busy on it, the better for everyone. I especially would rather not rely on private corporations to provide the forums and facilities for crowdfunding. But it's workable so long as there is competition. I hear that Kickstarter keeps a whopping 30% of the funds? Wouldn't 5% be more fair? And maybe they would lower their take if they had more competition. If ever any one corporation gets close to monopoly power in such a vital market, the government should step in, and if they don't because the regulators have been captured, the people must step up and demand action.
Why even have a powered dryer? Just amazes me how people are really sold on the things. Uses a lot of energy to speed up clothes drying, as if those who can afford a dryer can't afford enough clothes to give the wash time to dry on a rack. It's less wear and tear on clothes to hang them to dry, rather than tumble them some more. Now, some people complain that the clothes aren't all nice and soft and fluffy when dried that way. The powered dryer alone can't get the clothes soft either, have to use fabric softener. A lot of those fabric softener sheets use dangerous chemicals, such as phthalates. And there are fabric softeners that are meant to be added to the washer rather than the dryer.
I'd like to see a closet especially made for hanging wet clothes up to dry as well as clothes storage. I thought perhaps this closet could run the length of the house so that the ends could be opened to the outdoors to create a breezeway. Use screens of course, to keep bugs out. Put it on one side of the house, the side next to all the bedrooms. It would be a labor saver too. Instead of moving clothes from washing machine to dryer and then to storage, this system would have the user moving clothes just once, from washer to storage. Could put the laundry room at one end of the closet, or right in the middle. Since the closet is on an exterior wall, could make the entire outside wall open to outdoor air, for faster drying.
That's great. A stable, intuitive, responsive desktop is sorely needed. Linux desktop environments lack polish. Always missing features, configuration settings are confusing, and the file manager is too easy to crash. Why for instance is it such a pain to set colors in LXDE? Themes are icons and colors together, makes it difficult to have one without the other. In Openbox, I don't want the scroll wheel to flip between desktops, or "shade" and "unshade" windows if on the titlebar, and that's the first thing I turn off in that environment. Have to find and edit a text file to do that too. Too many times I'm scrolling a window and the mouse wanders off the page, and then suddenly I'm spinning through desktops or shading several open windows the next time I scroll.
As to responsiveness, where's Wayland?
It's fine that you realize that copying is inevitable and unstoppable, but you are still talking as if copying is immoral. It is copyright that is immoral. Copying is a natural right, and the way that the universe works. A radio broadcast or a concert or even just singing in the shower creates countless echoes of information. A shining light on a painting or written page bounces photons into the eyes of anyone looking that direction. Copyright is an entirely artificial restriction on these wholly natural processes. And for what purpose? To encourage the creation of more art. That is hardly the only way to encourage artistic endeavor. As to complaints that artists will starve without copyright, no, they won't. To support art, there is patronage, crowdfunding, performance, and endorsements, to name several other ways.
For copyright to really work, we are supposed to ignore all these echoes. See the movie at the theater, then buy it on DVD (or pirate it of course) if you want to see it again and your memory of it isn't satisfactory. The day may come when we all have inexpensive devices that augment our memory, allowing us to perfectly recall anything we see or hear and copy any of that we wish to another person or data repository, and then what of copyright? Copying has become so much easier to do over the past 40 years that copyright is already absurd now. With technology like that, copyright will be ridiculously archaic and worse than useless, it will be a major hindrance to the ability of its followers, if any, to function in society. For now, copyright blocks and slows the coming of the digital public library, a huge, huge improvement over the traditional library full of bound papers. The private bookstore is dying, and good riddance. Accepting copyright is like accepting a proposition that we should all use only one arm until the holders of the rights to use our other arms grant us permission, and each time we want to use our other arm, we have to ask for said permission and pay a fee. The industry has done an effective job of pushing the propaganda that copying is stealing, and hurts artists and is therefore unfair and immoral. They've confused the public with the seductive simplification that property is property and there is no difference between the physical and the intellectual variety. It's a simple, easy way to view the matter, but it is wrong, and the secret is out now. More and more people are seeing through their propaganda, ironically helped by the industry's clumsy, extreme, and harsh enforcement tactics that earned them the moniker "MAFIAA". For yet more reason why the industry is parasitic, a broad and extensive propaganda campaign, plus a terror campaign to scare the people who weren't fooled or who don't care, is just the sort of thing one could expect from parasites.
It's not just the future in which copyright doesn't work. It never has worked well, ever. Civilization would not have advanced to where it is today had ancient civilizations been able to lock down all information. No matter how much an ancient civilization wished to keep a new battle tactic or weapon secret, once used, their enemies would see it, and the survivors would not find it hard to understand and duplicate, or perhaps counter, or even improve.
No sir, I did not ridicule anyone. I pointed out that the parent seemed to put business people in a class apart and above, deserving of extra help and protections to compensate them for the risks they take and the work they do.
To say such a thing in our current climate is turning a blind eye to recent history. Who got bailed out in 2008? Not the homeowners. Who was so arrogant they said they didn't need policing? Wall Street. At the same time, who is denying there is a Climate Change problem and constantly accusing scientists of needing more policing? Big Oil for one. Businesses already get a lot of help. There is a problem with big businesses obtaining unfair advantage over small businesses. But I have not heard any complaining about that. Perhaps Big Media isn't reporting that, just like they don't report all kinds of other things. But it could also be that businesses close ranks and lobby as one on many issues, particularly when it comes to beating down pay and shrinking the middle class. If anything, we engage in too much corporate welfare. We have a lot of corruption, nepotism, greed, and crony capitalism. The Great Recession exposed only some of it.
So? You think running a successful business takes some kind of extra special skill set? Higher levels of skill, talent, and perseverance than earning a PhD, and/or making a discovery, advancing science? More than it take to create and play a hit song or write a best selling book? But it seems more and more that the most important things successful businesspeople have are connections, and the skills and willingness to finesse the legal system to bribe the powerful and cheat the most vulnerable.
Lots of things are tough. Doing the right thing is one of the them.
we would need to double the number of suitable planets every 50 years with the current rate. I don't see that as viable.
It isn't viable. The amount of space anyone can reach even at light speed grows by a polynomial amount, n^3. Population can grow at exponential rates (c^n for c>1). Exponential growth always passes up polynomial growth. Unless we discover some kind of travel that allows us to reach exponentially growing amounts of space or larger, something like instant teleportation via hyperspace, or a method of acceleration that can double an object's speed indefinitely and is not limited by light speed, we will always be constrained. Growth has always been limited by this fundamental fact. Life on Earth has had to make adaptations, "voluntarily" limit growth through a variety of strategies, as the alternative is mass starvation when resources are exhausted, which can be very destructive. I think life's strategies for detecting and responding to lack of further room and resources are not well appreciated, and so we've had Malthusian fearmongering. The Mote in God's Eye is an excellent example of that.
I think you don't give Mars dreamers enough credit. It's fun to think about, and do a bit of handwaving, but most everyone realizes colonizing Mars is an enormous challenge. Obviously, the first European colonies in the Americas were much easier. They already had breathable air and a tolerable climate. Life was already firmly established, all the colonists had to do was harness it. Even so, many colonies failed.
On Mars, we have to start life from scratch. One problem that as far as we know Mars does not have, is hostile natives. The absence of that petty little problem is no compensation for the huge problems we would have to solve to build a sustainable colony on Mars. We aren't capable of doing it now. That list of obstacles to setting up a steel foundry isn't even among the main problems. Can we establish an ecology? What about ionizing radiation, how do we handle that?
It's possible we may conclude that even if we can do it, Mars isn't worth inhabiting. Really, why inhabit Mars? By the time we can do it, we could probably also inhabit space for indefinite lengths of time, and if we can do that, why not head out of the solar system? Seems likely there will be many planets that are much better than Mars. Mars then is mostly an experiment, a trial. Where is humanity going? Are we headed towards a blissful future of peace, all our critical problems solved? If yes, how long can it last, millions of years? We may need 100,000 years to send a colony ship to another solar system. We have no civilization that has come anywhere close to lasting such an enormous length of time. But we can dream.
I've had interviews go wrong many times, for dumb and dishonest reasons. It comes down to the fact that the employers weren't actually interested in hiring, had too many candidates to consider. So they hoke up an excuse that you don't have enough experience in a bunch of narrowly defined areas, and you're out. Deep down they know perfectly well that you could do the job. But they manufacture some desired experience that you supposedly lack, and start thinking of you as a liar for even applying. Never mind that the whole hiring process is packed with deception from start to finish. Of course you should never outright lie, but spinning and twisting the facts is fine, even encouraged. They focus on superficial skills and miss the big picture. Overqualified is another fun reason for rejection. Why would an employer ever want to reject a candidate for being too smart? Yet a PhD is typically seen as a negative. The standard excuse is that the employee will get bored and leave, as if there aren't hundreds of other more compelling reasons anyone might leave. More like, there's a good deal of prejudice against geeks and nerds and smart people in general, which has been getting worse in recent years with the upswing in anti-intellectualism. When a job application takes a turn like that, when they start hunting for excuses not to consider people, you know the employer wasn't serious.
So I'm skeptical of this push to get more people into CS. On the one hand, maybe there should be a 4th "R", 'rogramming. Maybe programming is such a fundamental skill that it should have a place in elementary school. But with all the noise over H1Bs and the demonstrated facts that many employers really don't value, like, or trust engineers as a whole, not just the individuals among them that aren't competent, it's hard to be sure. They know they have to have some engineers, but they don't have to like it, and many don't. Very tiresome having to always watch your back, be ready to defend yourself, and not give them any openings they can use to drum you out. However, this attempt to reach people when very young is such a long play, beyond what such short-sighted companies can conceive, that perhaps it is genuinely meant.
What's hated is the waste of everyone's time on a bad job of exchanging information and ideas. Powerpoint is merely a tool often abused to that end, and made into either the scapegoat for why a presentation was bad or excuse for why it was good, or both at once.
And those are merely neutral and boring meetings. If you think that's the worst, you haven't been in a really nasty meeting. Meetings often have hidden agendas. Most of the time those agendas stay hidden, but sometimes they come out, and then chaos can ensue. Meetings are the premier place where office politics moves into a gallop, and truly ugly meetings have people getting trampled. An insecure boss takes over the meeting to browbeat and bully people, try to make them look dumb so he or she can feel less insecure. Or there's the arrogant boss who won't let anyone else get a word in, and insists on lecturing to everyone as if they're particularly slow and stupid children who don't get it. Or there's the rival groups trying to cut the others' throats. I've been in all those kinds of meetings. I have seen people unfairly sidelined and put on a fast track to the pink slip, because of how a meeting went. The boss decides that a person isn't competent, but can't just up and fire the presenter on the spot, doesn't have enough authority to do that. And also, the boss is often wrong, made a hasty judgment. He's all unhappy that the presenter's plan didn't give a seemingly credible path to the invention of perpetual motion in 6 months time. Meanwhile, the bullshit artist fools the boss again, often with pretty Powerpoint slides, and gets praise. The b. s. artist can't do the job either, and knows it, he's only trying to delay his own inevitable termination as long as possible, and if that means someone else takes the fall that time, so be it.
Compared to that, Powerpoint's contribution is trivial.
Java was a terrible resource pig when I last used it extensively, over a decade ago. Has that changed? Took lots of memory, and yes, it was slow.
Carefully optimized C++ will blow away Java,
Ok, seems that has not changed much.
As for that optimization benefit you extol, what's stopping the C++ compiler from querying the machine and making optimizations based on platform? Isn't that the whole point of a source code Linux distro like Gentoo?
Yeah, this story smells like Slashvertising. If, as claimed in another recent Slashvertisement for Java, it is such a simple language to understand, an easy language to program, one that lets programmers "get things done", why do employers strongly prefer programmers who have 5 or 10 or more years of experience in Java? It's a curly brace OOP language with tons and tons of its own libraries. It doesn't play nice with libraries written in other languages, it mostly ignores them. A lot of resources have been poured into enabling Java to inhabit a world of its own, and it seems now with hindsight that was not the best direction to go. One of the biggest improvements over C++ was the propaganda that unlike C++, Java doesn't use pointers. That's a misrepresentation. What they really mean is that Java ditched the ugly C pointer syntax. That, and this object code that is supposed to run on any platform, making Java super portable, especially designed for browsers, were the main selling points of Java. But that was 15 plus years ago. What has Java done lately? Stagnated while other languages press ahead with advances?