as I have mentioned, awt & swing might be the only exception.
I think it has been a mistake to build the java GUI on awt, a platform independant toolkit which only uses the lowest level platform specific stuff. Instead the currect approach of IBM with SWT is much better, basically using a platform independant GUI toolkit and providing java bindings for it (similar to, say, perl or python bindings for GTK or QT).
well that is very strange and I would like to see some code to prove that claim.
for the past 5 years I have been working on 3 very big products written entirely in java. we have always developed on windows and deployed on various platforms (mostly solaris and linux) and I have never ever seen a single compatability problem.
as I mentioned, the only exception might be awt/swing, i have no experience with that. we only do j2ee, using servlets, corba, ejb, db access, xml etc.
But you'll at least have to READ and understand it, since you'll see all kinds of constructs in code from others.
No, I would rather see different programming languages for different programming styles (e.g. functional or OO), not trying to mix every possible feature into one single language.
It may keep the appearance, liked by managers, that there is one "standard" language that "everyone" knows. But in reality, you'll have a mess of features and mixing them, and only few programmers being able to read and understand all code they have to work with. Very dangerous IMHO.
You have apparently been fallen for the FUD from MSFT. This is totally not true. I have been developing very large java appications for years, and we've moved from 1.1 through 1.4 (and for trials I've used 1.5) in large banking applications. Everything has been perfectly backwards compatible, except for a few obscure bugs. Show me any code that doesn't have bugs.
For years we have been developing in a group of 20 developers. We didn't have anything standardized but 1.3. Everyone was developing on a different 1.3 version, and deployment was on yet another. I 2 years time this situation endured we have NEVER seen any version problems at all. We use mainly J2EE (serlvets, EJB, corba, JDBC) but no applets.
The only problematic area has been applets/swing in version 1.1, and especially the incompatability for those when switching from, you guess, MSFTs crippled java implementation to Sun.
It is very sad that to this day, so much time after MSFT's ploy to sabotage Java by bringing incompatible versions, people still believe this story. Please don't give MSFT so much satisfaction by repeating such nonsense, grrrrr.
I doubt it (about the little leagues). You're naming two extremes, but compared to for example Iraq, it might well be that the US has been and is causing bigger number of deaths. The 2nd gulf war has also caused many deaths, also of their own people. And while evidence is not yet 100% certain, global warming of which the US is the main cause with their unwillingness to adapt the way of life and being by far the biggest user of natural resources per capita in the world, it is still unnown how many casualties that is going to cause (in the millions for sure).
Plus depriving future generations of valuable natural resources by using it up now to maintain the current egoistic way of life might also be called terrorist. Blocking fair trade agreements and thus exploiting many poor countries inhabitants, all to protect your own aggressive economy, causing much suffering and deaths as well. If you cannot see why many in the world today consider the US to be the main bully, and yes, terrorist, it is time for you to wake up and open your eyes.
I have one too, of the type you can keep in your pocket. It is very convenient: you walk to the car and can simply open it and press a button to start the engine. The (rfid) card must be somewhere in the vicinity of the car for it to be unlocked automatically when you touch a door handle.
The card also provides some settings, such as airco temperature, chair position, navigation system data and other preferences. I assume each key (I have three) has its own ID, and the cars computer remembers the preferences by each card ID.
OK OK, for the last 6 years then. I'm just static my impression when reading columns, discussions in newsgroups etc. I'm from Holland, which used to be very pro-US. It is no longer the case, public opinion has really reversed. In Switzerland it has always been pretty negative, mainly starting with the blackmail of Swiss banks which had to pay a lot of money to apparent heirs holocaust victims (one wonders why almost only the US heirs got compensated).
The difference: In Holland many remeber the US help and selfless sacrifices to liberate us in WW2. However after many years that "credit" fades away, and more recent, less nice behaviour starts to have bigger mindshare. To my (initial) astonishment about 75% of dutch view the US as number 1 danger and evil in the world. Mind that is from one of the former biggest supporters and allies!
You may like these facts or not (probably not) and say they are injust etc. But these are facts, the US is making almost any nation in the world to their enemy. It is not helpful, neither for the world nor for the US itself.
As for myself, I used to be a supporter of the 2nd Iraq invasion. I was naive at that time. I claimed in discussions that the CIA must have good reasons and must have a plan for after the war, i.e. be well informed that the suppressed people of Iraq will be happy to be liberated and cooperate. It turned out I was proven false, the unbelievable thing is that the CIA had no real information at all, and the whole invasion was just a shot in the dark without reaons nor plan.
It is hard to believe that this is the same country that used to defend western values and civilization during the large part of the 20th century. It has slided into a fascist state without real democracy (though still claims trying to "teach" the rest of the world democracy), where votes are twisted, a large part of people don't even vote, corporations and lobby groups determine the laws and massively influence with costly media campaigns. The current nature of US "democracy" is frightening.
I know, and I was not talking about (all) americans as a people, but as the collective (state) and the implications it has for the world. It is to be hoped it can be corrected next time. There have been other not so nice countries in world history, and it would be foolish to equate all people with the actions of the state.
So you honestly want to deny that the US has the largest personal (i.e. not tighed to economic output) consumption of resources on the planet? Nowhere people drive not only much (which may be explained by larger distances) but also very wasteful cars with high energy usage. Nowhere people eat as much, use up the same amount of natural resources than in the USA. This is not only due to the high standard of living. There are other countries with a similar standard of living but that have much less waste and make more economic use of the limited resources of the planet.
There is only one word for such an attitude: parasite. Using up the resources and thus depriving others and future generations of it. Just to preserve your own standard of living. It is borderless egoism and parasitism. Wonder why there is so much hatred towards the USA in the world these days? Not out of jealousy I say. I live in Switzerland, we're quite fine here too thank you. The US has become extremely impopular here in the last 10 years (say in the period that Bush is in goverment). It is precisely due to this parasitic character, living at the cost of others, bullying the rest of the world to get your way and not make any compromises.
It is to be hoped, also for the US itself, that this changes. You may think you can fight the world but I tell you: if you make everyone to your enemy, including your former allies, you don't have a chance.
If our generation finishes up the oil now, we avoid some lower standard of living for ourselves, well mainly for the developed world since the 3rd world doesn't seem to profit much.
However our children and grandchildren will have to suffer then. Even if new sources of energy are put into use (I hope for nuclear fusion), oil remains a very valuable raw material for chemical industry. Finishing it up now puts a very heavy burden on coming generations.
Your attitude, alas shared by many mainly in the USA believing in some god given right on personal well being at the cost of others, is plainly shortsighted and egoistic, not giving a damn about others and about coming generations.
Not mono but "the original" without regard to open source or not, and I was horrified.
All good style from the Java world (that I have grown accustomed to after 5 years of java, done 10 years C++ before that) is gone, the.net class library is a horrible mess, C# has awful style and features. For quite normal file handling stuff I had to resort to the JNI equivalent to bind WIN32 API calls. I can't stand the getters and setters, the capitalized method names, the absense of checked exceptions, and operator overloading (way too unclear, already in C++ we avoided it like the plague).
I doubt that mono, being a copy of C#, is much better.
On the mainframe a healthy balance between rigorous procedures and practicality has been reached. On the big UNIX machines they are trying to push through the same kind of rigorousness, but without consideration for practicalities, resulting in a disasterous situation.
On the mainframe, the developers can have direct access to data of their "own" application, that is the one they have to provide 3rd level support for. On UNIX, such access is impossible, firewalls are everywhere and you need 10 signatures to make a production change. In short it doesn't work but for the most trivial appliacations.
Most individual member states oppose software patents much more clearly. Several parliaments have ordered their governments to reject them, but were ignored on the EU level. I think the chance is very small that software patents can be introduced via national parliaments.
AFAIK the EPO has been granting those patents in anticipation of coming laws. But none of those patents has actually been used in court to limit others from using the patented technique. The patents are not really in force and are not being enforced.
I oppose advertising in any form and thus feel free to block it. I would rather pay than have to put up with advertisements.
Reasons why I oppose advertisement as a principle:
It is subjective information.
Advertisements are paid for by companies, who calculate the cost of marketing in the market price of their products.
Therefore, everyone, even those that don't watch advertisements, pay a kind of tax on all products due to this rotten system.
It is therefore a complete waste of resources that everyone is forced to accept.
Instead of biased information, I would rather see that the price of products is diminished. The money saved can and should be put partially into an objective organisation that tests products and provides true information on products.
People who visit "free" sites funded by advertisements profit from the money paid by the advertisers. Since this money is paid by all consumers (since it is passed on in the product prices) the public at large is subsidizing people who use these "free" services.
I think the world would be better if we cut out the enormous waste of resources the advertisers make, the waste of everyones time when viewing advertisements, and the damage caused by biased and untrue information.
The only difference between the G3 and iaudio 5 is that the G3 has an AA battery (easily replacable but slightly heavier) and the 5 has a built-in lithium ion battery.
Both have excellent ogg, fm tuner and above all (important for me since I listen a lot to audio books) they are the only players that have really good bookmarks. Also you can speed the playback up which is good for slow paces audio books.
I intended to buy an iriver before but after some research found out about the iaudio, clearly the better choice at this time.
let everyone know loudly that this public relations move is not going to change our mind regarding software patents.
especially some politicians might be fooled by such moves; one of their concerns regarding software patents is the damage they might do to open source software. PR stunts like this could make them think that this is not the case. that must be avoided. it must remain clear that software patents are, in the long term, of utmost danger to OSS.
As much good intentions Nokia may have at this time towards Linux and OSS in general, it is not acceptable to be at the mercy of such good will. Software patents need to be rejected on principle, and not be accepted because they happen to cause no damage AT THE MOMENT because of current good will.
Nokia is one of the main proponents of software patents in the European debate regarding this subject. The only answer is: we don't want your parents, we don't want any (software) patents in existance at all. Anything other would be very hypocritical.
None pirates IP, since intellect is not a property. No matter how long IP proponents try to brainwash the population at large to believe otherwise, I will resist.
Intellect is the core of what makes humans humans, sharing intellect is the root of culture and civilization. Without sharing and copying ideas and gradually improving on them we would still be in the stone age.
Anyone trying to prevent sharing of intellect is an enemy of civilization, an enemy of mankind. Those who spread these lies should, IMHO, be punished; the lie of this evil concept must be fought with all possible means.
I really like Opera, except for adblock of course, and mostly because of its weak client certificate handling. On my work I have to use 3 or 4 different client certificates for the Intranet and 2 more for external sites. Most browsers select a client certificate to present to the server automatically, and only offer a selection box if there is more than 1 possibility.
Opera however insists of me having to select from all 6 certificates, often they are presented such that I cannot distinguish between them. Also after that the cancel button is selected by default.
I am very sure that Opera developers never use client certificates or they would not put up with this horrible handling. Change requests have been ignored under the pretence of security, which is absolutely nonsense (I deal with client certificates professionally, I know at least in this area what I'm talking about:).
Databases such as oracle used to do this, use the underlying disks directly without an extra layer, i.e. use raw devices. In a sense, the database and filesystem were one. However there has ben a move away from this: using a separate filesystem below makes it easier to manage and move around, while costing only about 1% performance.
Note: huge sites don't go down because of 1% performance loss due to an extra filesystem layer.
And I doubt very much that applications that use filebased storage instead of a real database are more reliable. What do you get that idea from? Concurrently updating and searching to complex structured data is hard, and doesn't get easier by doing things the simplistic way.
How right you are. Now just wait until people start with the evergreen argument of medicine. We'll all die a horrible death due to lack of medicine if we don't allow for draconian IP laws.
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as I have mentioned, awt & swing might be the only exception.
I think it has been a mistake to build the java GUI on awt, a platform independant toolkit which only uses the lowest level platform specific stuff. Instead the currect approach of IBM with SWT is much better, basically using a platform independant GUI toolkit and providing java bindings for it (similar to, say, perl or python bindings for GTK or QT).
well that is very strange and I would like to see some code to prove that claim.
for the past 5 years I have been working on 3 very big products written entirely in java. we have always developed on windows and deployed on various platforms (mostly solaris and linux) and I have never ever seen a single compatability problem.
as I mentioned, the only exception might be awt/swing, i have no experience with that. we only do j2ee, using servlets, corba, ejb, db access, xml etc.
But you'll at least have to READ and understand it, since you'll see all kinds of constructs in code from others.
No, I would rather see different programming languages for different programming styles (e.g. functional or OO), not trying to mix every possible feature into one single language.
It may keep the appearance, liked by managers, that there is one "standard" language that "everyone" knows. But in reality, you'll have a mess of features and mixing them, and only few programmers being able to read and understand all code they have to work with. Very dangerous IMHO.
You have apparently been fallen for the FUD from MSFT. This is totally not true. I have been developing very large java appications for years, and we've moved from 1.1 through 1.4 (and for trials I've used 1.5) in large banking applications. Everything has been perfectly backwards compatible, except for a few obscure bugs. Show me any code that doesn't have bugs.
For years we have been developing in a group of 20 developers. We didn't have anything standardized but 1.3. Everyone was developing on a different 1.3 version, and deployment was on yet another. I 2 years time this situation endured we have NEVER seen any version problems at all. We use mainly J2EE (serlvets, EJB, corba, JDBC) but no applets.
The only problematic area has been applets/swing in version 1.1, and especially the incompatability for those when switching from, you guess, MSFTs crippled java implementation to Sun.
It is very sad that to this day, so much time after MSFT's ploy to sabotage Java by bringing incompatible versions, people still believe this story. Please don't give MSFT so much satisfaction by repeating such nonsense, grrrrr.
I doubt it (about the little leagues). You're naming two extremes, but compared to for example Iraq, it might well be that the US has been and is causing bigger number of deaths. The 2nd gulf war has also caused many deaths, also of their own people. And while evidence is not yet 100% certain, global warming of which the US is the main cause with their unwillingness to adapt the way of life and being by far the biggest user of natural resources per capita in the world, it is still unnown how many casualties that is going to cause (in the millions for sure).
Plus depriving future generations of valuable natural resources by using it up now to maintain the current egoistic way of life might also be called terrorist. Blocking fair trade agreements and thus exploiting many poor countries inhabitants, all to protect your own aggressive economy, causing much suffering and deaths as well. If you cannot see why many in the world today consider the US to be the main bully, and yes, terrorist, it is time for you to wake up and open your eyes.
I have one too, of the type you can keep in your pocket. It is very convenient: you walk to the car and can simply open it and press a button to start the engine. The (rfid) card must be somewhere in the vicinity of the car for it to be unlocked automatically when you touch a door handle.
The card also provides some settings, such as airco temperature, chair position, navigation system data and other preferences. I assume each key (I have three) has its own ID, and the cars computer remembers the preferences by each card ID.
OK OK, for the last 6 years then. I'm just static my impression when reading columns, discussions in newsgroups etc. I'm from Holland, which used to be very pro-US. It is no longer the case, public opinion has really reversed. In Switzerland it has always been pretty negative, mainly starting with the blackmail of Swiss banks which had to pay a lot of money to apparent heirs holocaust victims (one wonders why almost only the US heirs got compensated).
The difference: In Holland many remeber the US help and selfless sacrifices to liberate us in WW2. However after many years that "credit" fades away, and more recent, less nice behaviour starts to have bigger mindshare. To my (initial) astonishment about 75% of dutch view the US as number 1 danger and evil in the world. Mind that is from one of the former biggest supporters and allies!
You may like these facts or not (probably not) and say they are injust etc. But these are facts, the US is making almost any nation in the world to their enemy. It is not helpful, neither for the world nor for the US itself.
As for myself, I used to be a supporter of the 2nd Iraq invasion. I was naive at that time. I claimed in discussions that the CIA must have good reasons and must have a plan for after the war, i.e. be well informed that the suppressed people of Iraq will be happy to be liberated and cooperate. It turned out I was proven false, the unbelievable thing is that the CIA had no real information at all, and the whole invasion was just a shot in the dark without reaons nor plan.
It is hard to believe that this is the same country that used to defend western values and civilization during the large part of the 20th century. It has slided into a fascist state without real democracy (though still claims trying to "teach" the rest of the world democracy), where votes are twisted, a large part of people don't even vote, corporations and lobby groups determine the laws and massively influence with costly media campaigns. The current nature of US "democracy" is frightening.
I know, and I was not talking about (all) americans as a people, but as the collective (state) and the implications it has for the world. It is to be hoped it can be corrected next time. There have been other not so nice countries in world history, and it would be foolish to equate all people with the actions of the state.
So you honestly want to deny that the US has the largest personal (i.e. not tighed to economic output) consumption of resources on the planet? Nowhere people drive not only much (which may be explained by larger distances) but also very wasteful cars with high energy usage. Nowhere people eat as much, use up the same amount of natural resources than in the USA. This is not only due to the high standard of living. There are other countries with a similar standard of living but that have much less waste and make more economic use of the limited resources of the planet.
There is only one word for such an attitude: parasite. Using up the resources and thus depriving others and future generations of it. Just to preserve your own standard of living. It is borderless egoism and parasitism. Wonder why there is so much hatred towards the USA in the world these days? Not out of jealousy I say. I live in Switzerland, we're quite fine here too thank you. The US has become extremely impopular here in the last 10 years (say in the period that Bush is in goverment). It is precisely due to this parasitic character, living at the cost of others, bullying the rest of the world to get your way and not make any compromises.
It is to be hoped, also for the US itself, that this changes. You may think you can fight the world but I tell you: if you make everyone to your enemy, including your former allies, you don't have a chance.
If our generation finishes up the oil now, we avoid some lower standard of living for ourselves, well mainly for the developed world since the 3rd world doesn't seem to profit much.
However our children and grandchildren will have to suffer then. Even if new sources of energy are put into use (I hope for nuclear fusion), oil remains a very valuable raw material for chemical industry. Finishing it up now puts a very heavy burden on coming generations.
Your attitude, alas shared by many mainly in the USA believing in some god given right on personal well being at the cost of others, is plainly shortsighted and egoistic, not giving a damn about others and about coming generations.
besides, what's stopping you to use make should you create your own java sysadmin tools?
i don't assume that, as a sysadmin, you should have to deal with (java) software that others write, except maybe to install it.
people should use a decent editor such as emacs. its make mode highlights the tabs so you can readily see what's up.
Not mono but "the original" without regard to open source or not, and I was horrified.
.net class library is a horrible mess, C# has awful style and features. For quite normal file handling stuff I had to resort to the JNI equivalent to bind WIN32 API calls. I can't stand the getters and setters, the capitalized method names, the absense of checked exceptions, and operator overloading (way too unclear, already in C++ we avoided it like the plague).
All good style from the Java world (that I have grown accustomed to after 5 years of java, done 10 years C++ before that) is gone, the
I doubt that mono, being a copy of C#, is much better.
At least in the large bank where I work.
On the mainframe a healthy balance between rigorous procedures and practicality has been reached. On the big UNIX machines they are trying to push through the same kind of rigorousness, but without consideration for practicalities, resulting in a disasterous situation.
On the mainframe, the developers can have direct access to data of their "own" application, that is the one they have to provide 3rd level support for. On UNIX, such access is impossible, firewalls are everywhere and you need 10 signatures to make a production change. In short it doesn't work but for the most trivial appliacations.
Most individual member states oppose software patents much more clearly. Several parliaments have ordered their governments to reject them, but were ignored on the EU level. I think the chance is very small that software patents can be introduced via national parliaments.
AFAIK the EPO has been granting those patents in anticipation of coming laws. But none of those patents has actually been used in court to limit others from using the patented technique. The patents are not really in force and are not being enforced.
Reasons why I oppose advertisement as a principle:
I think the world would be better if we cut out the enormous waste of resources the advertisers make, the waste of everyones time when viewing advertisements, and the damage caused by biased and untrue information.
The only difference between the G3 and iaudio 5 is that the G3 has an AA battery (easily replacable but slightly heavier) and the 5 has a built-in lithium ion battery.
Both have excellent ogg, fm tuner and above all (important for me since I listen a lot to audio books) they are the only players that have really good bookmarks. Also you can speed the playback up which is good for slow paces audio books.
I intended to buy an iriver before but after some research found out about the iaudio, clearly the better choice at this time.
I bought opera for 3 operating systems, yet I hardly use it due to lack of adblock.
Also: its client certificate handling is clumsy to say the least.
And it is less stable.
let everyone know loudly that this public relations move is not going to change our mind regarding software patents.
especially some politicians might be fooled by such moves; one of their concerns regarding software patents is the damage they might do to open source software. PR stunts like this could make them think that this is not the case. that must be avoided. it must remain clear that software patents are, in the long term, of utmost danger to OSS.
As much good intentions Nokia may have at this time towards Linux and OSS in general, it is not acceptable to be at the mercy of such good will. Software patents need to be rejected on principle, and not be accepted because they happen to cause no damage AT THE MOMENT because of current good will.
Nokia is one of the main proponents of software patents in the European debate regarding this subject. The only answer is: we don't want your parents, we don't want any (software) patents in existance at all. Anything other would be very hypocritical.
None pirates IP, since intellect is not a property. No matter how long IP proponents try to brainwash the population at large to believe otherwise, I will resist.
Intellect is the core of what makes humans humans, sharing intellect is the root of culture and civilization. Without sharing and copying ideas and gradually improving on them we would still be in the stone age.
Anyone trying to prevent sharing of intellect is an enemy of civilization, an enemy of mankind. Those who spread these lies should, IMHO, be punished; the lie of this evil concept must be fought with all possible means.
I really like Opera, except for adblock of course, and mostly because of its weak client certificate handling. On my work I have to use 3 or 4 different client certificates for the Intranet and 2 more for external sites. Most browsers select a client certificate to present to the server automatically, and only offer a selection box if there is more than 1 possibility.
:).
Opera however insists of me having to select from all 6 certificates, often they are presented such that I cannot distinguish between them. Also after that the cancel button is selected by default.
I am very sure that Opera developers never use client certificates or they would not put up with this horrible handling. Change requests have been ignored under the pretence of security, which is absolutely nonsense (I deal with client certificates professionally, I know at least in this area what I'm talking about
Databases such as oracle used to do this, use the underlying disks directly without an extra layer, i.e. use raw devices. In a sense, the database and filesystem were one. However there has ben a move away from this: using a separate filesystem below makes it easier to manage and move around, while costing only about 1% performance.
Note: huge sites don't go down because of 1% performance loss due to an extra filesystem layer.
And I doubt very much that applications that use filebased storage instead of a real database are more reliable. What do you get that idea from? Concurrently updating and searching to complex structured data is hard, and doesn't get easier by doing things the simplistic way.
How right you are. Now just wait until people start with the evergreen argument of medicine. We'll all die a horrible death due to lack of medicine if we don't allow for draconian IP laws.