Well, I decided that, instead of perpetuating the/. tradition of shooting out of my ass without doing my own research, I'd see for myself which parts of.NET API's were in the ECMA standard, which parts were not, and how much of it Mono is implementing.
So, after downloading the ECMA documentation, I compared it to Microsoft's.NET Framework SDK docs and Mono Class Status page. Here is what I found:
The ECMA standard includes a total of 249 types (classes, interfaces, etc.) as the standard library..NET Framework SDK has approximately 3500 classes defined according to Mono Project, and they claim they have implemented or currently implementing 900 of them. Their status page shows 540 classes as work-in-progress, though that might be out of date.
There are missing classes, interfaces and even methods and properties from the ECMA standard. For example, out of the 120+ types in the System namespace, only 100 of them makes it into the standard. Of the 100 or so methods in the String class, more than 20 of them are not in the standard, including a few constructors. This doesn't seem to be an exception, most (but not all) of the classes have missing members. The SDK documentation doesn't give any special notice about members or types missing from the ECMA standard. I am assuming Mono is implementing the full Framework SDK versions of these libraries.
The ECMA standard libraries define a feature set that is somewhat larger than the C runtime library, the most noticable additions being the network and XML processing libraries. There is a lot of stuff left out, both additional libraries and functionality inside existing libraries (as outlined above).
After this, it is kind of easy to reach to the conclusion that the ECMA standard has major deficiencies, that there is no way (apart from custom tool support) to tell if the code you are writing conforms to that standard and that Microsoft is most likely just paying lip service to the standards process, at least as far as the core.NET API's go. Java and Sun do a much more complete job of defining and sticking to specifications if the ECMA work is any sign.
Personally, I don't plan to touch.NET API's to develop open source software after this. My opinion is that Mono would be much better off if they develop their own cross-platform class libraries instead of using.NET API's. There is nothing preventing them from using CLI VM and multiple language support with their own class libraries. They are already writing everything from scratch, they might as well use their own design rather than playing catch-up to proprietary Microsoft API's.
What about a real window system? What about a real file system?
What do you need a window system in a PDA for? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to fiddle with windows and files in a PDA, that doesn't make sense. Every time a discussion happens on the future of UI on/., we say that the desktop/window and file/folder metaphors need to be left behind. Now you want to carry them into PDA's?
Yes, it is all good and well that this software is as open as it is, but read the interview more closely. De Icaza advocates using.NET API's not included in the ECMA standards and seems to accept, and even embrace, playing catch up to Microsoft's totally proprietary changes to these API's. I see no sense at all in giving Microsoft the leverage of owning and controlling the API's that a considerable amount of Open Source development would be based on.
If you think that CLI and the standardized parts of C# are a good idea, by all means go ahead and develop an open implementation (which they seem to be doing). But leave the rest and design your own API's for GNOME development and other free software instead of monkeying around with WinForms (WinForms for Penguin's sake, what were they thinking?!) and its ilk.
Re:Only Trillian v0.7x affected?
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 1
Same here, and everyone was just too happy to switch. You should pay for its (voluntary) registration, these guys deserve it.
That is so typical. I couldn't disassociate myself from all things American even if I wanted to, and neither can you from me. We have all become dependent on one another, for better or worse. It's not your father's world anymore. The sooner you realize that and stop saying in so many different but same ways "take it or leave it, it's my way or the highway", the sooner people will be able to live together without the fear of planes or bombs or both (a bit dramatic maybe, oh well...).
Read a little more careful next time you accuse someone of supporting the murder of 3000 people. It is obvious you feel strongly about what happened, as I do. I also saw what was left of the World Trade Center just last week and could not believe my eyes watching for 12 straight hours what had happened on September 11th. As I said, it is inconceivable either to support the attacks or say "they deserved it".
You should also remember that Britain and the rest of WWI victors had unwillingly played a large part in the birth of Nazi Germany by imposing very hard terms (both economic and diplomatic) at the end of the war. Being able to say this doesn't make me symphatic to Nazi Germany, but helps me understand some of the reasons why things happened the way they did. You owe it to yourself to take a similar critical look, if for nothing than to prevent future attacks in your own soil.
President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - "If you're not with us, you're against us" - is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.
Just as it is inconcievable to defend the September 11 attacks or blame US and say "they deserved it", it is an ultimately self-defeating attitude to reject any understanding of the motives underlying those attacks. And the more you try to force people into making a choice they don't believe they have to make, the more you guarantee your own failure.
You'd better get down from the high seat. US has the lowest rate of foreign aid to national GDP amongst OECD countries (http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USA id.asp). Plus, most of the people just content to disagree with US foreign policy live in Western nations, far away from where US foreign aid goes. The people you target with your words mostly have a strong dislike for the US government for what it's done to their countries, with a (vocal)minority hating your guts. If you think calling off the already pathetic levels of help US provides for the people who need it is going to help this state of matters, you are mistaken.
Actually, Tomcat 4.0 has its own JNDI provider, so it does support looking up resources (JDBC datasources, etc.) in a standard way. It is also possible to extend its JNDI provider to support your custom resources, they have an example where you can register an arbitrary Java Bean in your web app, and then look it up from a servlet.
Lighten up a little bit. You shouldn't have to develop a fantastically complete theory of everything just to make a bunch of intriguing points. So he speculates. Maybe someone who can actually make a sense of the physics involved will find a thread to follow on, or just dream about it until it makes sense, who knows? It's the "richness through diversity" that we should value.
Apart from the SWT versus Swing issue that everyone already pointed out, Eclipse has a *very* good API for plugin development, the whole Java development environment is itself a set of plugins. You can even download a C/C++ environment for Eclipse from alphaWorks, though that only runs on Linux. I've been writing a plugin for it for the last month or so and it is a joy to develop for compared to Netbeans. From my experience, Netbeans API's accumulated a lot of cruft from version to version and are considerably harder to use.
Eclipse has a quite advanced incremental build system, Java refactoring tools that work well (meaning without breaking the code), builtin CVS support with an excellent way of looking at team development (support for pluggable VCM systems is coming in a later version this month, I heard) and a *very* elegant and functional user interface. Performance is better than Netbeans, too. Apart from CVS support, Netbeans has a ways to go before it catches up with Eclipse on the rest of this stuff. On the other hand, Netbeans has better support for J2EE development in its free versions (Eclipse has none) and has a larger community, though Eclipse is just starting out. I was using Visual Age for server side development and Netbeans for other stuff before Eclipse came along and made a convert out of me.
Actually, I find the 4.0 documentation to be much better than previous versions. It also has very good quality in general when you compare it to 99% of other open source projects out there, not to mention some commercial products. You should check out their how-to's, you'll see what I'm talking about.
You can't expect people desperate for the lives of millions of their fellow citizens to uphold international patent laws for the sake of intellectual property, regardless of whether you believe in the validity of the phrase or not. Do you expect Brazil or another country who doesn't have the technological and/or financial means to come up with a cure to AIDS to be dependent on global pharmaceutical industry's idea of what its profit margins should be? It may be difficult to put a fair price on so called intellectual property, but I would say the lives of millions of people, or even the prospect of easing their agony just a bit, is priceless.
Crashes more often than C++?! Having done Java programming for the last five years along with C and C++, I can honestly say that this statement itself is provably wrong. The VM itself is surprisingly stable, and the class libraries have been debugged to death after five years. In truth, Java is one of the most stable platforms your can find today for development.
Java has no way to pass variables by reference. This is just bullshit. For primitive types, this doesn't even make sense. However, pointers to primitives are another way to pass references to arrays in C/C++, so you are probably just ignorant of how Java handles arrays of primitives. For reference types, it is the reference that is passed by value. As long as you are using reference variables (anything that is an Object) in Java, you are passing by reference. Repeat after me: Java lacks pointer arithmetic, not pointers.
On the other hand, memory management, pointer arithmetic and concepts of stack and heap are crucial if you want CS education. After I learned C along with these concepts when I was 15, I had no trouble at all learning semantics of C++ and Java along with a bunch of other languages. C is probably the "proto-language" in this respect, it gives you the important low-level understanding, the essentials. Any CS student should be able to think on multiple levels, from high level design to heap allocation behavior to assembly (if needed).
Distinguishing the difficulty of teaching object oriented design from teaching procedural programming is also important. Object orientation is useful when (the complexity of the system you are building/the environment you are building for/your extensibility requirements) outmatches your capability to build the system by procedural means. For someone who is starting to learn programming from scratch, procedural concepts are easier to grasp that object oriented ones. This has the additional advantage of letting the person hit the complexity ceiling himself and see what problems object orientation solves, rather than accepting them in blind faith.
The claim that Freenet is completely anonymous is not entirely true. Obviously, if I upload something to a node, I'm giving it my IP.
Well, that's why it is better for you to run your own node. After all, this is P2P. Once you are out of the immediate neighborhood, the Freenet protocol has tricks that makes it at least difficult to track the source back to you. If you want to advertise that you have certain content (I believe the only reason for you to consider uploading to an untrusted node is indexing content) you will have to publish the keys somewhere else, at least until searching functionality is added to Freenet. Ideally, it would be possible to add content to your local node and have it advertised without comprimising your identity.
Windows 2000 uses stream support to store metadata similar to MS Office file attributes (author, subject, version, etc.) for all files. You can access these from a tab on the file's Properties dialog. The extended properties are lost if the file is ever copied outside a network of NTFS disks, like Samba. There should be a couple of articles on MSDN that explains this and some more about NTFS.
Well, I am not particularly fond of shelling out bags of money for CD's (especially since the artists get a puny percentage), but the fact that I am able to listen to a CD seconds after I have bought it online made me buy at least six CD's over the last two months. Assuming I am not the only sucker to do so, it makes you wonder how long the recording companies will be in business with this kind of stupidity...
Too bad it sounds like they expect nothing to be written in Crusoe's native language... There must be some speed improvement that could be gained, if say, Crusoe's achieved 40% market share in the notebook market, that would make it worthwhile for developers to create Crusoe ports.
I don't think ripping out the software part of Crusoe would result in a performance gain. From what I have seen in their patents and today's presentation, the software component seems essential to higher performance than a hardware-only solution. In fact, it might be considerably harder to natively port an operating system to Crusoe, though I don't have any information to confirm this. Any way, the dynamic compilation and special power management features are all controlled by the software, and these are the main reasons that make Crusoe attractive.
Posted by: DRLunsford Date posted: Sat Nov 6 7:28:37 PST 1999
MS got where they are with the help of the dim lights that flicker in corporate boardrooms, the CIOs who were allowed and even encouraged to squander money and time on low capacity, unstable systems. "Diversity is Bad" (quote from a Fortune 500 CIO). Microsoft is the patron saint of these mediocrities. Will these mediocre people just be whisked away with Jackson's ruling? No. The big question is, what will corporate IT departments do now? What will CFOs do? Will the bottom line suddenly become important? Will extensible, stable systems just spring up like mushrooms after a good rain? What about all those mediocre staffers who are deluded by MCSEness into believing they have some skill? And all those countless mercenary consulting companies who have conducted legal robbery of the IT budgets of countless companies?
Tyranny requires the participation of the mediocre to thrive. The real fight is just beginning, which is to restore quality as the goal and to be rid of opportunistic mediocrities everywhere.
Let's hope that we will see the success of the efforts for the coming changes.
Slashdot Mirror
After this, it is kind of easy to reach to the conclusion that the ECMA standard has major deficiencies, that there is no way (apart from custom tool support) to tell if the code you are writing conforms to that standard and that Microsoft is most likely just paying lip service to the standards process, at least as far as the core .NET API's go. Java and Sun do a much more complete job of defining and sticking to specifications if the ECMA work is any sign.
Personally, I don't plan to touch .NET API's to develop open source software after this. My opinion is that Mono would be much better off if they develop their own cross-platform class libraries instead of using .NET API's. There is nothing preventing them from using CLI VM and multiple language support with their own class libraries. They are already writing everything from scratch, they might as well use their own design rather than playing catch-up to proprietary Microsoft API's.
What about a real window system? What about a real file system?
What do you need a window system in a PDA for? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to fiddle with windows and files in a PDA, that doesn't make sense. Every time a discussion happens on the future of UI on /., we say that the desktop/window and file/folder metaphors need to be left behind. Now you want to carry them into PDA's?
Yes, it is all good and well that this software is as open as it is, but read the interview more closely. De Icaza advocates using .NET API's not included in the ECMA standards and seems to accept, and even embrace, playing catch up to Microsoft's totally proprietary changes to these API's. I see no sense at all in giving Microsoft the leverage of owning and controlling the API's that a considerable amount of Open Source development would be based on.
If you think that CLI and the standardized parts of C# are a good idea, by all means go ahead and develop an open implementation (which they seem to be doing). But leave the rest and design your own API's for GNOME development and other free software instead of monkeying around with WinForms (WinForms for Penguin's sake, what were they thinking?!) and its ilk.
Same here, and everyone was just too happy to switch. You should pay for its (voluntary) registration, these guys deserve it.
That is so typical. I couldn't disassociate myself from all things American even if I wanted to, and neither can you from me. We have all become dependent on one another, for better or worse. It's not your father's world anymore. The sooner you realize that and stop saying in so many different but same ways "take it or leave it, it's my way or the highway", the sooner people will be able to live together without the fear of planes or bombs or both (a bit dramatic maybe, oh well...).
Read a little more careful next time you accuse someone of supporting the murder of 3000 people. It is obvious you feel strongly about what happened, as I do. I also saw what was left of the World Trade Center just last week and could not believe my eyes watching for 12 straight hours what had happened on September 11th. As I said, it is inconceivable either to support the attacks or say "they deserved it".
You should also remember that Britain and the rest of WWI victors had unwillingly played a large part in the birth of Nazi Germany by imposing very hard terms (both economic and diplomatic) at the end of the war. Being able to say this doesn't make me symphatic to Nazi Germany, but helps me understand some of the reasons why things happened the way they did. You owe it to yourself to take a similar critical look, if for nothing than to prevent future attacks in your own soil.
amen to that.
Aaah... Here is the link correctly formatted:
i d.asp
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USA
You'd better get down from the high seat. US has the lowest rate of foreign aid to national GDP amongst OECD countries (http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USA id.asp). Plus, most of the people just content to disagree with US foreign policy live in Western nations, far away from where US foreign aid goes. The people you target with your words mostly have a strong dislike for the US government for what it's done to their countries, with a (vocal)minority hating your guts. If you think calling off the already pathetic levels of help US provides for the people who need it is going to help this state of matters, you are mistaken.
Actually, Tomcat 4.0 has its own JNDI provider, so it does support looking up resources (JDBC datasources, etc.) in a standard way. It is also possible to extend its JNDI provider to support your custom resources, they have an example where you can register an arbitrary Java Bean in your web app, and then look it up from a servlet.
Lighten up a little bit. You shouldn't have to develop a fantastically complete theory of everything just to make a bunch of intriguing points. So he speculates. Maybe someone who can actually make a sense of the physics involved will find a thread to follow on, or just dream about it until it makes sense, who knows? It's the "richness through diversity" that we should value.
Apart from the SWT versus Swing issue that everyone already pointed out, Eclipse has a *very* good API for plugin development, the whole Java development environment is itself a set of plugins. You can even download a C/C++ environment for Eclipse from alphaWorks, though that only runs on Linux. I've been writing a plugin for it for the last month or so and it is a joy to develop for compared to Netbeans. From my experience, Netbeans API's accumulated a lot of cruft from version to version and are considerably harder to use.
Eclipse has a quite advanced incremental build system, Java refactoring tools that work well (meaning without breaking the code), builtin CVS support with an excellent way of looking at team development (support for pluggable VCM systems is coming in a later version this month, I heard) and a *very* elegant and functional user interface. Performance is better than Netbeans, too. Apart from CVS support, Netbeans has a ways to go before it catches up with Eclipse on the rest of this stuff. On the other hand, Netbeans has better support for J2EE development in its free versions (Eclipse has none) and has a larger community, though Eclipse is just starting out. I was using Visual Age for server side development and Netbeans for other stuff before Eclipse came along and made a convert out of me.
Economist has a new survey with a "Near Future" topic where they discuss what the corporations are changing into, among other stuff.
Actually, I find the 4.0 documentation to be much better than previous versions. It also has very good quality in general when you compare it to 99% of other open source projects out there, not to mention some commercial products. You should check out their how-to's, you'll see what I'm talking about.
You can't expect people desperate for the lives of millions of their fellow citizens to uphold international patent laws for the sake of intellectual property, regardless of whether you believe in the validity of the phrase or not. Do you expect Brazil or another country who doesn't have the technological and/or financial means to come up with a cure to AIDS to be dependent on global pharmaceutical industry's idea of what its profit margins should be? It may be difficult to put a fair price on so called intellectual property, but I would say the lives of millions of people, or even the prospect of easing their agony just a bit, is priceless.
Java has no way to pass variables by reference. This is just bullshit. For primitive types, this doesn't even make sense. However, pointers to primitives are another way to pass references to arrays in C/C++, so you are probably just ignorant of how Java handles arrays of primitives. For reference types, it is the reference that is passed by value. As long as you are using reference variables (anything that is an Object) in Java, you are passing by reference. Repeat after me: Java lacks pointer arithmetic, not pointers.
On the other hand, memory management, pointer arithmetic and concepts of stack and heap are crucial if you want CS education. After I learned C along with these concepts when I was 15, I had no trouble at all learning semantics of C++ and Java along with a bunch of other languages. C is probably the "proto-language" in this respect, it gives you the important low-level understanding, the essentials. Any CS student should be able to think on multiple levels, from high level design to heap allocation behavior to assembly (if needed).
Distinguishing the difficulty of teaching object oriented design from teaching procedural programming is also important. Object orientation is useful when (the complexity of the system you are building/the environment you are building for/your extensibility requirements) outmatches your capability to build the system by procedural means. For someone who is starting to learn programming from scratch, procedural concepts are easier to grasp that object oriented ones. This has the additional advantage of letting the person hit the complexity ceiling himself and see what problems object orientation solves, rather than accepting them in blind faith.
The claim that Freenet is completely anonymous is not entirely true. Obviously, if I upload something to a node, I'm giving it my IP.
Well, that's why it is better for you to run your own node. After all, this is P2P. Once you are out of the immediate neighborhood, the Freenet protocol has tricks that makes it at least difficult to track the source back to you. If you want to advertise that you have certain content (I believe the only reason for you to consider uploading to an untrusted node is indexing content) you will have to publish the keys somewhere else, at least until searching functionality is added to Freenet. Ideally, it would be possible to add content to your local node and have it advertised without comprimising your identity.
Windows 2000 uses stream support to store metadata similar to MS Office file attributes (author, subject, version, etc.) for all files. You can access these from a tab on the file's Properties dialog. The extended properties are lost if the file is ever copied outside a network of NTFS disks, like Samba. There should be a couple of articles on MSDN that explains this and some more about NTFS.
Well, I am not particularly fond of shelling out bags of money for CD's (especially since the artists get a puny percentage), but the fact that I am able to listen to a CD seconds after I have bought it online made me buy at least six CD's over the last two months. Assuming I am not the only sucker to do so, it makes you wonder how long the recording companies will be in business with this kind of stupidity...
I don't think ripping out the software part of Crusoe would result in a performance gain. From what I have seen in their patents and today's presentation, the software component seems essential to higher performance than a hardware-only solution. In fact, it might be considerably harder to natively port an operating system to Crusoe, though I don't have any information to confirm this. Any way, the dynamic compilation and special power management features are all controlled by the software, and these are the main reasons that make Crusoe attractive.
Just my two cents,
Here is some info on Trnasmeta's fab arrangements, though this is a bit dated:
/09/26/1956233.shtml
http://slashdot.org/articles/98
http://www.redherring.com/mag/issu e60/intel.html