...Massive amounts of drooling drivel with this floating about: Bravo. Soon you will not need me at all...
Well to be honest I never needed you for anything, do not need you now, and will never require your helpful assistance in the future: there are better nutcases then you available to laugh at, far more intelligent programmers to hire and just plain sane people to talk to.
Actually there is very little demand for your brand if insanity in general, perheaps you should consider an employment opportunity hauling sacks of Arabica or Colombian beans, that kind of contact with coffee might be better for you then with what seems to be corroding your brains now.
Copious amounts of meaningless drivel... some more even more meningless and irellevant drivel... followed by some meaningless, irellevant and illogical drivel.... followed by: I know it's late in the game to realize this, IgnoramusMaximus, but you posted this story on slashdot, where it, followed by this thread, was linked from the front page, and viewed by literally hundreds of thousands of other people. Short of an interview on 60 minutes, your embarrassment cannot be further increased. But by all means, seek solace from your support group
I am not sure what alternative Slashdot you are reading but you should take a look on this one at the replies from other people to this revealing expose of Java Worshipper's Brunt Beans, some of them users of your favourite The-Holiest-Of-Tongues, who all seem to come equipped with an instrument you appear to lack: a functioning brain. Since you dont have the ability to even read your own posts, or perheaps you just spout them in some feverish religious trance, discussion with you is like talking to a member of a cult of illiterates, whatever you were told at the Holy Temple Of Cappucino is the Only and Ultimate Truth. In one thing I can agree with you absolutely, anyone reading this thread will draw conclusions to your sanity, and they will not be favourable ones.
Ahahahahahahahaha, yeah right." *leaves to buy SC2 and have lots of fun with it*
Yes and he ends up a consumer-sheep-drone who deserves to have anal probes installed by the corporations/securocrats for his own "good". You on the other hand retain integrity and self-respect. And "fun" is all relative, if such things as SC2 are such a big deal to him... small things amuse small minds, I say.
Since when did universities not own what their students did?
Traditionally the discoveries were published and became part of common pool of knowledge. Parenting and copyrighting of data disovered by students/faculty is a recent (late 20th century) phenomenon.
So the corporation gets to charge for it for twenty years to make its investment back.
That is not right for many reasons. The corporation needs all of the other discoveries made before to make theirs (they do not pay for their use). The corporation while it might indeed invest some sum, is likely to make a windfall far greater then the investment at the expense of everyone, since the greed motivated research is conducted by corporations but they are quite happy to leave the even more expensive research that does not bring immediate commercial payoff to the taxpayers and wait until they can take that and use it for their benefit (and then charge the people who allowed them to get there - talk about laughing all the way to the bank!). This travesty continues in that as soon as the corporation manages to make some movement forward they patent it and then the same taxpayer funded research institutions which enabled that move in the first place are obstructed and barred from advancing for 20 years (or more if the corporation has clever lawyers/lobbysts). The nonsense expands in that other corporations, after making the same or greater amounts of investment are also left in the cold, and this of course makes the entire process incredibly inefficient and unfair to everyone but the winners of this patent casino. Note that the other corporations will have to recoup their costs and thus all the products from all firms (those who did or did not win the patent) must now be priced to recover the multiply over-priced cost of research - consumers/taxpayers get hit here from all directions.
One cannot. Patents do not (currently) cover data in any way, though there's a really scary question about the copyrighting of databases - currently not possible, but the Supreme Court is being boneheaded lately
All of the disoveries are information and thus "data". All the artificial hair-splitting into "patents" and "copyright" has to do with ways of applying greed not with the fundamental properties of what is being dealt with here, which is information.
If the corporation is discovering the knowledge, then putting it into the public domain by patenting it
Think this through in more detail: corporations are producing new pieces of information using a huge mountain of public knowledge. Their activity in essence is like a cutting a path in a jungle off of a network of roads built by others. The jungle (the total information about the universe) is not feasible to be owned by anyone anymore then the Sun is. In order to get to their little path (or more like a tiny step in a path for thats all they can do in one go) one has to traverse the highways and roads and tributaries made by all those generations before them. And what the corporations do after making this tiny step? They turn around and put a road block + tollbooth to charge anyone (including those who stand independently right behind them in that travel) a fee. In essence they are obstructionists who under a pretense of cutting the path are really after traveling it alone and owning as much of it as they can. Others are then forced to cut round-about ways to get around the roadblocks. This whole process in my view is becoming so overrun by thieves, crooks and opportunists that the feverish (and increasing) activity of building barriers and tollbooths has replaced the advance in pursuit of knowledge. The grease of greed is clogging the arteries of science.
Sure the roadblocks can be removed in some time (usually after so many round about ways have been cut around them as to render them meaningless) but this entire process is designed only to further greed under the guise of "motivating" progress. Many a study shows that the so called "incentiv
However, I think it's unjustified to point this frustration at Java itself. It's the people who write the applications that way that are at fault
I am not really targetting Java itself, rather I aim for its deluded disciples. Java is like any other computer language of the last 6 decades of computing: newer in design, lofty in goals, heady in promise and when push comes to shove it turns out to be merely different. Old problems swapped for new problems. The Princess in the photo turns out to be an aging house-wife skilled in using Photoshop. That does not mean that Java is useless, I am sure it has places where it can be the best tool for the job but they are far fewer then the Roaming Caffeinated Monks would like us to believe
I think the problem is that you've been lumbered with the wrong Java advocates
Well not really. Simply I was around long enough to remember when "downloadable applets" advocates were the only advocates, Sun included. People who are doing this evil to me now are merely victims themselves, they were bamboozled into developing the java-based e-commerce with the downloadable components but it took them 4-9 years of development to get to the point where they are deploying this stuff. Remember, big companies move very slowly and banks in particular move slower and more carefully yet. So I am basically a victim of a bomb made by the Frappucino Friars set to blow up in my face 9 years after being planted.
Anyone who says Perl, PHP, or Python (i.e., 2-tier CGI type) architectures can hang with the likes of J2EE is instantly labelling themselves as someone who's done exactly zero server side development for anything but the most trivial of web applications... credibility..
I did my share of Perl and PHP custom apps, some quite extensive. I never found a need for J2EE but then again, none of my customers run massive e-commerce themselves, so I am willing to let others who did Fortune 100 e-commerce apps with 100 million transactions-per-second speak to such things. For small scale apps I will stand my ground, PHP in particular is quite useful and Perl can be made to work, heck, Slashdot is a Perl application and I dont think it can exactly be qualified as "small-scale" or "trivial".
Rather, we should demand better VM support for GUI applications as well
Not really. At least not in the context I am having to run them. Web-browser launched apps are an abomination from support, mainenance and security perspective. I simply do not want any such abominations, be they made in Java, ActiveX, C# or some other way.
C++ (particularly in embedded applications) is horribly costly and difficult to debug due to its lack of any sort of runtime environment.
I am willing to concede that in some proprietary embedded systems where the whole thing (machine code, memory architecture etc) is designed to support only Java VM this might work quite well. This however does not translate to be universal across all platforms and is plainly not true in traditional OS environments. Also a tear comes to my eye when I recall the way I and some friends of mine were developing software for embedded systems that were equipped with a 9600baud serial interface as the only way to communicate with the user. As I recall we had no issues. A project I was briefly involved in (OpenWRT) is an embedded Linux running in 4MB of Flash memory on a wireless router box with no hardware display and yet we have a complete environment with all sorts of debugging capabilities. I guess as they say, to a bad dancer a tutu can be a hindrance.
And yes you pay some bloat for the runtime environment,...
This is a classic trade-off which all slightly infatuated ( [un?]fortunately it is impossible to inhale Java-the-language or some would) with their pet toy programmers are willing to make for others. The users of apps they write in particular. I have a Newsflash from the user front for you: "Errr.. No. We are not willing to accept more bloat in order to make your life easier".
where processor power is cheaper than developer time
Particularly when it is you who pays for the development and someone else pays for the CPU power.... and the development through purchase of the product. I love Java math! (to be fair this is also the VB and any other make-life-easier-for-programmers-at-the-expense-of -users system math and it actually works as long as you are developing your own apps for internal use, then you merely shuffle costs around)
Developers can write shitty apps in any language. Flaming a platform because people buy shitty apps developed on it is not justified for this reason.
Well to be honest, Java is not any worse then any of the other ideas people had to "improve" things in computing, it has pros and quite number of cons. My reaction is mostly social, and its the Java advocates' own doing: they hyped and screamed and yelled about Java so loud that some people started to use the thing in precisely the way they were told to by the Java Monks. Unfortunately for me and many others it turned out that the Monks were sufferring from the cranial-rectal syndrome and the use of Java they recommended (GUIs launched from browsers, AWT/Swing UI etc) performed abysmally for many reasons. Smart Java users moved on and applied the system to server-side J2EE etc. (which sadly removed much of the oh-so-much-hyped feature-set from common use, but I am feeling magnamonious and will let it slide). What gets my goat is dudes like Fearureless who go on and basically blame the Banks or me or anyone else but the Java platform and its evangelists for creating this lovely mess for me in the first place. Some others are much wiser and simply advise me to wait a bit to let the Banks realise their mistake and move on.
You seem to be confused between browser plugins and server applications.
No I am not, it is simply quite amusing that some people cannot grasp a simple desire of mine and most other sysadmins in the field: we do not want any plug-ins of any sort. They are nothing but a never-ending maintenance nightmare, versioning nightmare and security nightmare. What I am willing to accept is transmission of plain HTML data generated (I dont really care by what, Java, PHP, COBOL or what not) on the server and rendered by a standards-compliant web browser. Thats the optimal way to conduct e-commerce from my (the end-user's) perspective.
VB apps...Remember - one app developed by Joe VB Hacker is not the same as one J2EE banking app.
You cannot be serious here or you have not worked with any medium sized corporation. Virtually every one is full of various home-grown VB apps dealing mostly with SQL back ends or locally running Access DBs etc. There is a huge number of these apps all over, the main advantage of VB for business was that they could hire a VB monkey on a 3-month term and get some silly app done. You are thinking major applications only. Java is slowly displacing some of these apps, but not due to its technical advantages but to the simple fact that being a current Great Fad (as VB once was) it is tought to people in every 2-bit school and bookshelves are full of "Teach Yourself Java While Sleeping in 2 Hours" books. Again some people confuse this clever use of the zealotry by the corporations to get cheap labor with some divine abilities of the language. From the commercial perspective, VB and Java have a lot in common, Java being better and improved rendition but essentially meant to fullfill the same task: a 3-month term Java monkey dragging-and-dropping some goofey applet together cheap. Cheap being the operative word here.
Agreed - you stay with the VB kids until you gain some understanding, and leave the enterprise development for the big boys, OK?
Thats rather presumptious on your part. You see you assumed that Java is some Divinely-Ultimate solution to Problems Of Earth Shattering Importance and everyone who is not immediately falling on his knees in worship is somehow childlish (I let you ponder your attitude in this context). I keep my customers very happy by being precisely this type of very-hard-sell that I am because they rode out many a crazy fad their competitors got caught in. My customers have a lot of fun watching their rivals squirm and bleed extraordinary sums of money trying to repair damage caused by one crew of religious fanatics with.... a proven strategy of importing another even more wacky set of Priests of the next "Big Thing"! Never ending comedy, I tell you. All the while my customers laugh all the way to the bank. And so do I;)
All of this stuff is concocted-on-the-spot mumbo jumbo intended to obfuscate the obvious and common sense things: One: Saddam had no intention/capability/motivation to use these weapons (if they existed in any useful condition after all those successful UN controls, outside the fantasy world of Tom Clancy and people like you, made up hear-say baldedash from Rush Limbaugh not withstading). Two: many other people/countries have superior capabilites and are equally or more hostile to the US; and: Three: the neocons believed there were great spoils of war to be had, both financial and ideological and that is the true reason people are dying there by the bucket from real as opposed to imaginary weapons. Not to mention the massive increase in support for the cause of the Jihadists.
I just wonder if there ever was any single printer of the 4 or 5 LJ series which ever failed.
One of my customers has one (LJ4) which started to paper jam after only a few milion pages (not sure how many because the counter rolled over or something). They had two so they took the one with less usage and are using that now for the main invoice printer (10-20 pages an hour). The other one will get fixed and probably will last another decade.
The thing is, when mixed with water, the unseen tear gas remaining on your skin will sort of "activate", with lack for a better word, and the feeling is somewhat similar to having boiling water poured all over you.
This sort of thing is precisely why the traditional bio/chem weapons are next to useless. Chemicals will linger and change properties to affect your own troops instead of the enemy in quick moving combat, they will disperse and go into ground water or get absorbed by enviroment in other ways, they affect unpredictable areas due to athmospheric action, they have very narrow or upredictably wide effect radius and can move with wind back to your own combat line etc etc etc. In short, a battlefield commander will find suitable conditions for deployment if such thing in 0.0001% of combat situations, while you have to log this crap around adding logistical problems to your own troops. But boy, are they ever useful to rally the other side's brainwashed population to arms with the cry of (in high shrill pitch voice with saliva spraying from horribly twisted in panic mouths) Doubliooo emmmM Deeeees!
It's true that the high-speed tank movement of WWII made chemical weapons mostly obselete.
No, what made it obsolete is that it is completely uncontrollable and counter-productive weapon. A chemical will have all sorts of undesirable effects like lingering where its not supposed to and affecting your own troops, but most times it will disperse or react with the environment rendering it useless for any combat purposes. Bio weapons screw up both the enemy and your own troops. In neither case these have wide spread effects because the curse of chem/bio weapons is delivery which is extremely difficult to achieve. They simply do not work well.
So if Saddam was in breach of the agreements, it wasn't really that bad, yes?
Saddam was in breach of the agreements (maybe, sorta, possibly) and he was a bad dude. In the future, he might have gotten hold of the genetic weapons. This put together still makes no case for war. You see, the evil tyrant that he was, he was in no shape of form more dangerous or hell-bent on using this shit then any other wacko out there. As a matter of fact, Saddam had way more to lose then some others b y doing so and he was a sworn enemy of the Al-Queida style Jihadists. Anyone with a modicum of undertstanding of the situation and some common sense would tell you (as all the experienced State Department dudes were telling anyone who listened) that combination made for a contained, controllable tin pot dictator whose regime might have with some skill been preassured into making reforms. Whichever way you slice it, what US has done was in the most likelyhood the stupidest of all options.
Shazam! bioweapon of the future would always be unavailable to him, correct?
Brainwash alert! Yes it might have been and it would have changed little because Saddam was not bent of destruction of his ass more the that of USA. Use of such weapon is only available to terrorists, whose, I repeat for the slow in comprehension, he was a sworn, mortal enemy.
Tell me I'm wrong. This report was filed in January of 2003. 2 months before the "evil" George Bush began the war.
It could be filed two years before for all its importance. Not only this report is a lot of "maybe-coulda-woulda", it is also quite silly that otherwise intelligent people are so easilly fooled by all of this Iraq WMD talk. VX is known to be possessed by just about any two-bit country on the planet, including places like Serbia. Anthrax is produced from cow dung. A few nutcases were able to make it in a bathtub in England. Etc. Etc. If Saddam was truly bent on using this (rather awkward and unreliable weapon), he would have done so looong ago. Actually he did in 1980s on the Kurds and probably like every military before him, decided the thing was useless. Did you ever wonder why during WWII noone used chemical weapons on the battlefield? All sides had them. They are just extremely useless things in combat. Additionally, Iraq had no capability to produce nuclear technology in any meaningful way for a foreseeable future due to constant oversight.
Truly frightening bio-weapons are of genetic nature and at this point in time beyond reach of the terrorists. This will unforunately change in not so remote future and because of the nature of the technology they will become the primary, cheap and widely available weapon of unspeakable terror.
If you would like to know who has killed thousands of innocent Iraqis, look to Saddam Hussein. Look at the mass graves. (link, link, and link) Look at the torture he has inflicted. (link, link, link)
A point of caution. While I am not in a position to know the extent of Saddam's doings you should keep this in mind; Histories are written and Villains are made by the Victors. All of the links you quoted are provided by organizations who are sworn enemies of the Bathists and who all are known to make stuff up when it suits them. Some of the mass graves listed here turned out to be graves from the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war. The war itself was actively encouraged and financed by the USA. While it is quite likely that Saddams torture chambers, bullets and chemical weapons killed thens of thousands, that happened over period of twenty years while the Iraq war alone produced around 10000 casaulties (both military and civilian). One has to mention that the first Gulf War prodcued over 150000 dead Iraqi soldiers and civilians, bulk of them killed on the famous slauther on the "Highway of Death" over which they were withdrawing from Kuwait when the war was essentially over.
I am personally not sure who killed more Iraqis in total, Saddam on his own, Saddam aided by the US when he was an "ally" or US by itself.
So, It's me that promised people that it is impossible to write bad code in Java?
Oh no no no. That was merely some spiritual twin of yours who showed up with claims like "sacrifice a litte performance for reliablity and security"
And the rest is history.
However, rudimentary common sense does allow us a little leeway in identifying bad arguments. See my earlier posts.
I looked, and I looked, and then I looked some more and only found things like "it performs as well as native apps" followed by "sometimes it performs as well" followed by "on some benchmarks even now it performs as well" followed by "When you finally get them right, native code can(sic!) outperform...". But your common sense? Must have left for holidays on the island of Java never to be seen again (and I cant truly say I blame it)
This is a sadly ironic statement for you. This is because not only does Java sometimes win performance
Oh! Here it is again, I could swear it was steadily outperforming the native code until the native code was sometimes outperformed on some benchmarks by it.
Or availability of experience and tools used to make those apps....Java has no problems there
Clearly! With people of your reasoning abilities behind it, there is no telling what coffee-pot it will be brewing in next! Now thats a scary thought..
Although I cannot be bothered at the moment to answer any of these clearly unnecessary and ridiculous criticisms of my unimpeachable ideas, rest assured I am absolutely correct and you are wrong. Good day
Yes, indeed it sounds like something you would say.
Or you can try answering any of the 14 or 15 serious problems
Hold on for a minute here. I was under this impression that it was you who were claiming Java is near-perfect and I was the one offerring problems for you. I can see that in the face of such insurmountable obstacles I presented to you, you would want to abandon your silly position...but switching places? You want me to defend Java now and you are going to present problems? I am a generous dude but this is a bit too much to ask of a stranger you know.
Compared to dicking around with JRE's they are truly negligable
I can see what's dear to your heart: The continuous fantasy, undisturbed by any intervention from the real world, that a bad engineering decision, like using the wrong tool for the job, is somehow the fault of anyone other than the engineer who made it.
Oh I agree with you there, it is the engineer's fault. He picked a wrong tool for this and any other job.
A Windows Java app will never run as well as a native Windows app neither will unix Java app run as well as a native unix app....In your weird alternative universe - again, undisturbed by the facts...Java is matching native code in some benchmarks already
You know, this is probably going to get lost on you, but, you cant have it both ways...Java being totally as good as the native code and then... almost being there on some benchmarks
You can't show me anything that says Java is "nowhere near" the size of VB,
Not without getting lucky and having someone publish a report counting deployments of business apps. Your stats speak merely of employment ads which is not a measure of existing applications. Just ponder this: VB in various forms was around longer then Java and its adoption rate was far greater for all these years when Java meant just a type of coffee beans to most IT people.
Manual management of memory and primitive String and array handling are constant invitations to failure, constantly accepted
Err.. yes, particularly all those funky C++ string classes. There is no such tools like bounds checkers (still waiting to be invented says you). And manual memory management (this mighy shock you) is actually preferred by many (I know, I know, dirty backwards cavemen that we all are). In business on the other hand people tend to use stuff like VB with SQL queries in the back end. Stuff really prone to buffer overflows.
Except that Java makes it more difficult to make mistakes like leaking memory
Oh my, these dudes that write this stuff must be real clever to get around that! The banks' Java monkeys must be brilliant!
Pity the poor souls. If they had any idea.
Oh yes they do, I showed this thread to some people and we had a good chuckle at your expense. While drinking Java. Who says I am against all things caffeinated!
someone promised someone else it was impossible to write bad code in Java, and they believed them.
I strongly suspect the misrepresenting party was someone like you
I'm curious. Since you don't seem to use any of the normal, accepted techniques for measuring the benefits of a language, what do you use? Is throwing the bones of your personal black box experience really the limit of your deductive powers?
Normal? Accepted? Methods of measurement of benefits of a language? There is no such thing and likely will never be. All there is to computer languages is flame wars of warring Priesthoods. How in the hell can one measure C versus Pascal? FORTH versus LISP? C# versus Java? These are not bags of puds that you can weight. All the advantages and dis-advantages of the language features are subjective. But what one can easilly judge is the performance of apps written in these languages on one's computer. Or availability of experience and tools used to make those apps. Or time required to make and maintain these apps. That is preciesly what I am doing.
I think that's flippant
You sense correctly, my patience for this audience with the Great Shaman of Expresso is wearing thin.
OK - so you're a customer, then what qualifies you to identify your suppliers as "Java Priests" ? personally they sound behind the curve.
This might shock the other dude (Featureless) I am having a flame war with here but I dont mind people using Java server-side in such a way that I only end up with plain HTML on my end. What the bank uses on the server is really their business. I still think Java is a questionable choice because in that configuration it does not bring to the table anything that Python, PHP or Perl would, but that is not my worry.
What pisses me off to no end though is someone who insists that I must use Java apps because they fit into some insane strategy of easing someone-elses developement costs (which I find highly doubtful). Or worse yet, some SOAP based rental software models. Those are the "Priests" I speak of. People who make applications in some language they feel is good for them but keep in mind the headeaches that attempts to force others to use the same system regardless of merit would cause, are not "Priests" but just "developers".
So, you're complaint is, someone promised you it was impossible to write bad code in Java, and you believed them.
No, my complaint is that I did not believe the checkered-suit salesman, my colleagues didnt believe him, but some poor pointy-haired boss in a bank did and now I am busy shoveling the donkey dung which this unholy sales-rape produced.
Or are you really saying, it's easier to write good code in C..
If by "good" you define "working well" I sure do have a good argument: the 100% of millions of the lines of code in the software running this computer, on which I am typing this missive to you, the Enlightened Grand Moccachino Inquisition.
Sounds like your problem is your architecture. Why the h#ll did you go with a client heavy app instead of a struts server side app ?
Why do *I* go with it? Tell it kindly to the Java priests infecting our suppliers and banks who push this crap on me. Or better yet, tell them not-so-kindly as I do since I am loosing patience fast.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, not.
Or perhaps you'd like to go through the list and explain otherwise
Quoting and dissecting copious amounts of irrelevant drivel is your occupation around here, not mine.
Of course you do not, your hallucinations are all original, it is me who has to quote your delusions back to you.
Excellent, now since you have compiled this list, perheaps you should go read the things it points to and compare your attitude that of their authors.
Dude you need professional help, you are projecting your own sad existance on others.
Well to be honest I never needed you for anything, do not need you now, and will never require your helpful assistance in the future: there are better nutcases then you available to laugh at, far more intelligent programmers to hire and just plain sane people to talk to.
Actually there is very little demand for your brand if insanity in general, perheaps you should consider an employment opportunity hauling sacks of Arabica or Colombian beans, that kind of contact with coffee might be better for you then with what seems to be corroding your brains now.
I am not sure what alternative Slashdot you are reading but you should take a look on this one at the replies from other people to this revealing expose of Java Worshipper's Brunt Beans, some of them users of your favourite The-Holiest-Of-Tongues, who all seem to come equipped with an instrument you appear to lack: a functioning brain. Since you dont have the ability to even read your own posts, or perheaps you just spout them in some feverish religious trance, discussion with you is like talking to a member of a cult of illiterates, whatever you were told at the Holy Temple Of Cappucino is the Only and Ultimate Truth. In one thing I can agree with you absolutely, anyone reading this thread will draw conclusions to your sanity, and they will not be favourable ones.
Yes and he ends up a consumer-sheep-drone who deserves to have anal probes installed by the corporations/securocrats for his own "good". You on the other hand retain integrity and self-respect. And "fun" is all relative, if such things as SC2 are such a big deal to him... small things amuse small minds, I say.
Traditionally the discoveries were published and became part of common pool of knowledge. Parenting and copyrighting of data disovered by students/faculty is a recent (late 20th century) phenomenon.
So the corporation gets to charge for it for twenty years to make its investment back.
That is not right for many reasons. The corporation needs all of the other discoveries made before to make theirs (they do not pay for their use). The corporation while it might indeed invest some sum, is likely to make a windfall far greater then the investment at the expense of everyone, since the greed motivated research is conducted by corporations but they are quite happy to leave the even more expensive research that does not bring immediate commercial payoff to the taxpayers and wait until they can take that and use it for their benefit (and then charge the people who allowed them to get there - talk about laughing all the way to the bank!). This travesty continues in that as soon as the corporation manages to make some movement forward they patent it and then the same taxpayer funded research institutions which enabled that move in the first place are obstructed and barred from advancing for 20 years (or more if the corporation has clever lawyers/lobbysts). The nonsense expands in that other corporations, after making the same or greater amounts of investment are also left in the cold, and this of course makes the entire process incredibly inefficient and unfair to everyone but the winners of this patent casino. Note that the other corporations will have to recoup their costs and thus all the products from all firms (those who did or did not win the patent) must now be priced to recover the multiply over-priced cost of research - consumers/taxpayers get hit here from all directions.
One cannot. Patents do not (currently) cover data in any way, though there's a really scary question about the copyrighting of databases - currently not possible, but the Supreme Court is being boneheaded lately
All of the disoveries are information and thus "data". All the artificial hair-splitting into "patents" and "copyright" has to do with ways of applying greed not with the fundamental properties of what is being dealt with here, which is information.
If the corporation is discovering the knowledge, then putting it into the public domain by patenting it
Think this through in more detail: corporations are producing new pieces of information using a huge mountain of public knowledge. Their activity in essence is like a cutting a path in a jungle off of a network of roads built by others. The jungle (the total information about the universe) is not feasible to be owned by anyone anymore then the Sun is. In order to get to their little path (or more like a tiny step in a path for thats all they can do in one go) one has to traverse the highways and roads and tributaries made by all those generations before them. And what the corporations do after making this tiny step? They turn around and put a road block + tollbooth to charge anyone (including those who stand independently right behind them in that travel) a fee. In essence they are obstructionists who under a pretense of cutting the path are really after traveling it alone and owning as much of it as they can. Others are then forced to cut round-about ways to get around the roadblocks. This whole process in my view is becoming so overrun by thieves, crooks and opportunists that the feverish (and increasing) activity of building barriers and tollbooths has replaced the advance in pursuit of knowledge. The grease of greed is clogging the arteries of science.
Sure the roadblocks can be removed in some time (usually after so many round about ways have been cut around them as to render them meaningless) but this entire process is designed only to further greed under the guise of "motivating" progress. Many a study shows that the so called "incentiv
Its a typo. The sentence was supposed to read:
I still think Java is a questionable choice because in that configuration it does not bring to the table anything that Python, PHP or Perl would not.
I am not really targetting Java itself, rather I aim for its deluded disciples. Java is like any other computer language of the last 6 decades of computing: newer in design, lofty in goals, heady in promise and when push comes to shove it turns out to be merely different. Old problems swapped for new problems. The Princess in the photo turns out to be an aging house-wife skilled in using Photoshop. That does not mean that Java is useless, I am sure it has places where it can be the best tool for the job but they are far fewer then the Roaming Caffeinated Monks would like us to believe
I think the problem is that you've been lumbered with the wrong Java advocates
Well not really. Simply I was around long enough to remember when "downloadable applets" advocates were the only advocates, Sun included. People who are doing this evil to me now are merely victims themselves, they were bamboozled into developing the java-based e-commerce with the downloadable components but it took them 4-9 years of development to get to the point where they are deploying this stuff. Remember, big companies move very slowly and banks in particular move slower and more carefully yet. So I am basically a victim of a bomb made by the Frappucino Friars set to blow up in my face 9 years after being planted.
I did my share of Perl and PHP custom apps, some quite extensive. I never found a need for J2EE but then again, none of my customers run massive e-commerce themselves, so I am willing to let others who did Fortune 100 e-commerce apps with 100 million transactions-per-second speak to such things. For small scale apps I will stand my ground, PHP in particular is quite useful and Perl can be made to work, heck, Slashdot is a Perl application and I dont think it can exactly be qualified as "small-scale" or "trivial".
Rather, we should demand better VM support for GUI applications as well
Not really. At least not in the context I am having to run them. Web-browser launched apps are an abomination from support, mainenance and security perspective. I simply do not want any such abominations, be they made in Java, ActiveX, C# or some other way.
C++ (particularly in embedded applications) is horribly costly and difficult to debug due to its lack of any sort of runtime environment.
I am willing to concede that in some proprietary embedded systems where the whole thing (machine code, memory architecture etc) is designed to support only Java VM this might work quite well. This however does not translate to be universal across all platforms and is plainly not true in traditional OS environments. Also a tear comes to my eye when I recall the way I and some friends of mine were developing software for embedded systems that were equipped with a 9600baud serial interface as the only way to communicate with the user. As I recall we had no issues. A project I was briefly involved in (OpenWRT) is an embedded Linux running in 4MB of Flash memory on a wireless router box with no hardware display and yet we have a complete environment with all sorts of debugging capabilities. I guess as they say, to a bad dancer a tutu can be a hindrance.
And yes you pay some bloat for the runtime environment,...
This is a classic trade-off which all slightly infatuated ( [un?]fortunately it is impossible to inhale Java-the-language or some would) with their pet toy programmers are willing to make for others. The users of apps they write in particular. I have a Newsflash from the user front for you: "Errr.. No. We are not willing to accept more bloat in order to make your life easier".
where processor power is cheaper than developer time
Particularly when it is you who pays for the development and someone else pays for the CPU power.... and the development through purchase of the product. I love Java math! (to be fair this is also the VB and any other make-life-easier-for-programmers-at-the-expense-of -users system math and it actually works as long as you are developing your own apps for internal use, then you merely shuffle costs around)
Well to be honest, Java is not any worse then any of the other ideas people had to "improve" things in computing, it has pros and quite number of cons. My reaction is mostly social, and its the Java advocates' own doing: they hyped and screamed and yelled about Java so loud that some people started to use the thing in precisely the way they were told to by the Java Monks. Unfortunately for me and many others it turned out that the Monks were sufferring from the cranial-rectal syndrome and the use of Java they recommended (GUIs launched from browsers, AWT/Swing UI etc) performed abysmally for many reasons. Smart Java users moved on and applied the system to server-side J2EE etc. (which sadly removed much of the oh-so-much-hyped feature-set from common use, but I am feeling magnamonious and will let it slide). What gets my goat is dudes like Fearureless who go on and basically blame the Banks or me or anyone else but the Java platform and its evangelists for creating this lovely mess for me in the first place. Some others are much wiser and simply advise me to wait a bit to let the Banks realise their mistake and move on.
You seem to be confused between browser plugins and server applications.
No I am not, it is simply quite amusing that some people cannot grasp a simple desire of mine and most other sysadmins in the field: we do not want any plug-ins of any sort. They are nothing but a never-ending maintenance nightmare, versioning nightmare and security nightmare. What I am willing to accept is transmission of plain HTML data generated (I dont really care by what, Java, PHP, COBOL or what not) on the server and rendered by a standards-compliant web browser. Thats the optimal way to conduct e-commerce from my (the end-user's) perspective.
VB apps ...Remember - one app developed by Joe VB Hacker is not the same as one J2EE banking app.
You cannot be serious here or you have not worked with any medium sized corporation. Virtually every one is full of various home-grown VB apps dealing mostly with SQL back ends or locally running Access DBs etc. There is a huge number of these apps all over, the main advantage of VB for business was that they could hire a VB monkey on a 3-month term and get some silly app done. You are thinking major applications only. Java is slowly displacing some of these apps, but not due to its technical advantages but to the simple fact that being a current Great Fad (as VB once was) it is tought to people in every 2-bit school and bookshelves are full of "Teach Yourself Java While Sleeping in 2 Hours" books. Again some people confuse this clever use of the zealotry by the corporations to get cheap labor with some divine abilities of the language. From the commercial perspective, VB and Java have a lot in common, Java being better and improved rendition but essentially meant to fullfill the same task: a 3-month term Java monkey dragging-and-dropping some goofey applet together cheap. Cheap being the operative word here.
Agreed - you stay with the VB kids until you gain some understanding, and leave the enterprise development for the big boys, OK?
Thats rather presumptious on your part. You see you assumed that Java is some Divinely-Ultimate solution to Problems Of Earth Shattering Importance and everyone who is not immediately falling on his knees in worship is somehow childlish (I let you ponder your attitude in this context). I keep my customers very happy by being precisely this type of very-hard-sell that I am because they rode out many a crazy fad their competitors got caught in. My customers have a lot of fun watching their rivals squirm and bleed extraordinary sums of money trying to repair damage caused by one crew of religious fanatics with .... a proven strategy of importing another even more wacky set of Priests of the next "Big Thing"! Never ending comedy, I tell you. All the while my customers laugh all the way to the bank. And so do I ;)
All of this stuff is concocted-on-the-spot mumbo jumbo intended to obfuscate the obvious and common sense things: One: Saddam had no intention/capability/motivation to use these weapons (if they existed in any useful condition after all those successful UN controls, outside the fantasy world of Tom Clancy and people like you, made up hear-say baldedash from Rush Limbaugh not withstading). Two: many other people/countries have superior capabilites and are equally or more hostile to the US; and: Three: the neocons believed there were great spoils of war to be had, both financial and ideological and that is the true reason people are dying there by the bucket from real as opposed to imaginary weapons. Not to mention the massive increase in support for the cause of the Jihadists.
One of my customers has one (LJ4) which started to paper jam after only a few milion pages (not sure how many because the counter rolled over or something). They had two so they took the one with less usage and are using that now for the main invoice printer (10-20 pages an hour). The other one will get fixed and probably will last another decade.
This sort of thing is precisely why the traditional bio/chem weapons are next to useless. Chemicals will linger and change properties to affect your own troops instead of the enemy in quick moving combat, they will disperse and go into ground water or get absorbed by enviroment in other ways, they affect unpredictable areas due to athmospheric action, they have very narrow or upredictably wide effect radius and can move with wind back to your own combat line etc etc etc. In short, a battlefield commander will find suitable conditions for deployment if such thing in 0.0001% of combat situations, while you have to log this crap around adding logistical problems to your own troops. But boy, are they ever useful to rally the other side's brainwashed population to arms with the cry of (in high shrill pitch voice with saliva spraying from horribly twisted in panic mouths) Doubliooo emmmM Deeeees!
No, what made it obsolete is that it is completely uncontrollable and counter-productive weapon. A chemical will have all sorts of undesirable effects like lingering where its not supposed to and affecting your own troops, but most times it will disperse or react with the environment rendering it useless for any combat purposes. Bio weapons screw up both the enemy and your own troops. In neither case these have wide spread effects because the curse of chem/bio weapons is delivery which is extremely difficult to achieve. They simply do not work well.
Saddam was in breach of the agreements (maybe, sorta, possibly) and he was a bad dude. In the future, he might have gotten hold of the genetic weapons. This put together still makes no case for war. You see, the evil tyrant that he was, he was in no shape of form more dangerous or hell-bent on using this shit then any other wacko out there. As a matter of fact, Saddam had way more to lose then some others b y doing so and he was a sworn enemy of the Al-Queida style Jihadists. Anyone with a modicum of undertstanding of the situation and some common sense would tell you (as all the experienced State Department dudes were telling anyone who listened) that combination made for a contained, controllable tin pot dictator whose regime might have with some skill been preassured into making reforms. Whichever way you slice it, what US has done was in the most likelyhood the stupidest of all options.
Shazam! bioweapon of the future would always be unavailable to him, correct?
Brainwash alert! Yes it might have been and it would have changed little because Saddam was not bent of destruction of his ass more the that of USA. Use of such weapon is only available to terrorists, whose, I repeat for the slow in comprehension, he was a sworn, mortal enemy.
It could be filed two years before for all its importance. Not only this report is a lot of "maybe-coulda-woulda", it is also quite silly that otherwise intelligent people are so easilly fooled by all of this Iraq WMD talk. VX is known to be possessed by just about any two-bit country on the planet, including places like Serbia. Anthrax is produced from cow dung. A few nutcases were able to make it in a bathtub in England. Etc. Etc. If Saddam was truly bent on using this (rather awkward and unreliable weapon), he would have done so looong ago. Actually he did in 1980s on the Kurds and probably like every military before him, decided the thing was useless. Did you ever wonder why during WWII noone used chemical weapons on the battlefield? All sides had them. They are just extremely useless things in combat. Additionally, Iraq had no capability to produce nuclear technology in any meaningful way for a foreseeable future due to constant oversight.
Truly frightening bio-weapons are of genetic nature and at this point in time beyond reach of the terrorists. This will unforunately change in not so remote future and because of the nature of the technology they will become the primary, cheap and widely available weapon of unspeakable terror.
A point of caution. While I am not in a position to know the extent of Saddam's doings you should keep this in mind; Histories are written and Villains are made by the Victors. All of the links you quoted are provided by organizations who are sworn enemies of the Bathists and who all are known to make stuff up when it suits them. Some of the mass graves listed here turned out to be graves from the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war. The war itself was actively encouraged and financed by the USA. While it is quite likely that Saddams torture chambers, bullets and chemical weapons killed thens of thousands, that happened over period of twenty years while the Iraq war alone produced around 10000 casaulties (both military and civilian). One has to mention that the first Gulf War prodcued over 150000 dead Iraqi soldiers and civilians, bulk of them killed on the famous slauther on the "Highway of Death" over which they were withdrawing from Kuwait when the war was essentially over.
I am personally not sure who killed more Iraqis in total, Saddam on his own, Saddam aided by the US when he was an "ally" or US by itself.
Oh no no no. That was merely some spiritual twin of yours who showed up with claims like "sacrifice a litte performance for reliablity and security"
And the rest is history.
However, rudimentary common sense does allow us a little leeway in identifying bad arguments. See my earlier posts.
I looked, and I looked, and then I looked some more and only found things like "it performs as well as native apps" followed by "sometimes it performs as well" followed by "on some benchmarks even now it performs as well" followed by "When you finally get them right, native code can(sic!) outperform...". But your common sense? Must have left for holidays on the island of Java never to be seen again (and I cant truly say I blame it)
This is a sadly ironic statement for you. This is because not only does Java sometimes win performance
Oh! Here it is again, I could swear it was steadily outperforming the native code until the native code was sometimes outperformed on some benchmarks by it.
Or availability of experience and tools used to make those apps....Java has no problems there
Clearly! With people of your reasoning abilities behind it, there is no telling what coffee-pot it will be brewing in next! Now thats a scary thought..
Although I cannot be bothered at the moment to answer any of these clearly unnecessary and ridiculous criticisms of my unimpeachable ideas, rest assured I am absolutely correct and you are wrong. Good day
Yes, indeed it sounds like something you would say.
Or you can try answering any of the 14 or 15 serious problems
Hold on for a minute here. I was under this impression that it was you who were claiming Java is near-perfect and I was the one offerring problems for you. I can see that in the face of such insurmountable obstacles I presented to you, you would want to abandon your silly position...but switching places? You want me to defend Java now and you are going to present problems? I am a generous dude but this is a bit too much to ask of a stranger you know.
Compared to dicking around with JRE's they are truly negligable
I can see what's dear to your heart: The continuous fantasy, undisturbed by any intervention from the real world, that a bad engineering decision, like using the wrong tool for the job, is somehow the fault of anyone other than the engineer who made it.
Oh I agree with you there, it is the engineer's fault. He picked a wrong tool for this and any other job.
A Windows Java app will never run as well as a native Windows app neither will unix Java app run as well as a native unix app....In your weird alternative universe - again, undisturbed by the facts...Java is matching native code in some benchmarks already
You know, this is probably going to get lost on you, but, you cant have it both ways...Java being totally as good as the native code and then... almost being there on some benchmarks
You can't show me anything that says Java is "nowhere near" the size of VB,
Not without getting lucky and having someone publish a report counting deployments of business apps. Your stats speak merely of employment ads which is not a measure of existing applications. Just ponder this: VB in various forms was around longer then Java and its adoption rate was far greater for all these years when Java meant just a type of coffee beans to most IT people.
Manual management of memory and primitive String and array handling are constant invitations to failure, constantly accepted
Err.. yes, particularly all those funky C++ string classes. There is no such tools like bounds checkers (still waiting to be invented says you). And manual memory management (this mighy shock you) is actually preferred by many (I know, I know, dirty backwards cavemen that we all are). In business on the other hand people tend to use stuff like VB with SQL queries in the back end. Stuff really prone to buffer overflows.
Except that Java makes it more difficult to make mistakes like leaking memory
Oh my, these dudes that write this stuff must be real clever to get around that! The banks' Java monkeys must be brilliant!
Pity the poor souls. If they had any idea.
Oh yes they do, I showed this thread to some people and we had a good chuckle at your expense. While drinking Java. Who says I am against all things caffeinated!
I strongly suspect the misrepresenting party was someone like you
I'm curious. Since you don't seem to use any of the normal, accepted techniques for measuring the benefits of a language, what do you use? Is throwing the bones of your personal black box experience really the limit of your deductive powers?
Normal? Accepted? Methods of measurement of benefits of a language? There is no such thing and likely will never be. All there is to computer languages is flame wars of warring Priesthoods. How in the hell can one measure C versus Pascal? FORTH versus LISP? C# versus Java? These are not bags of puds that you can weight. All the advantages and dis-advantages of the language features are subjective. But what one can easilly judge is the performance of apps written in these languages on one's computer. Or availability of experience and tools used to make those apps. Or time required to make and maintain these apps. That is preciesly what I am doing.
I think that's flippant
You sense correctly, my patience for this audience with the Great Shaman of Expresso is wearing thin.
This might shock the other dude (Featureless) I am having a flame war with here but I dont mind people using Java server-side in such a way that I only end up with plain HTML on my end. What the bank uses on the server is really their business. I still think Java is a questionable choice because in that configuration it does not bring to the table anything that Python, PHP or Perl would, but that is not my worry.
What pisses me off to no end though is someone who insists that I must use Java apps because they fit into some insane strategy of easing someone-elses developement costs (which I find highly doubtful). Or worse yet, some SOAP based rental software models. Those are the "Priests" I speak of. People who make applications in some language they feel is good for them but keep in mind the headeaches that attempts to force others to use the same system regardless of merit would cause, are not "Priests" but just "developers".
No, my complaint is that I did not believe the checkered-suit salesman, my colleagues didnt believe him, but some poor pointy-haired boss in a bank did and now I am busy shoveling the donkey dung which this unholy sales-rape produced.
Or are you really saying, it's easier to write good code in C..
If by "good" you define "working well" I sure do have a good argument: the 100% of millions of the lines of code in the software running this computer, on which I am typing this missive to you, the Enlightened Grand Moccachino Inquisition.
Why do *I* go with it? Tell it kindly to the Java priests infecting our suppliers and banks who push this crap on me. Or better yet, tell them not-so-kindly as I do since I am loosing patience fast.