With JVM you can also use other languages than Java, in that sence there is nothing new. The only difference is that SUN only supports and develops Java, and some others have developed other compilers to compile other languages into JVM bytecode (which has an open spec, so anyone can port any language which fits the JVM model). Just like.NET, the VM model does require some adaptions and constraints, which is why.NET does support C++ but only a subset (without multiple inheritance, for example, making C++/.NET virtually useless IMHO, realistically there is no reason to use anything else but C# on.NET, just as 99% of JVM users use Java).
As for what developers like better: I fear that the biggest impact could come from "strategic" considerations instead of what developers like better: Shops targetting only Windows shall go the safe route, i.e. do what Microsoft says and develop for.NET no matter what. Shops that value cross-platform have no other choice but Java/JVM. I don't think that competition on a technical level shall matter much (especially since technically spoken there are hardly any differences).
Re:Was that so complicated?
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2
No matter managed or unmanaged code,.NET does require some specifics, it does not support general C/C++ or other languages in general, only a specific set.
In that sence, I see no real difference to the JVM. Java is the main language to be compiled into bytecode, but one could also develop other compilers for other languages..NET comes with two or three additional languages, but still C# is viewed as the main language for the future (and it is a clear Java ripoff).
Using other external code (dll's in general, from generic C or C++ origin) is just like JNI. I fail to see a fundamental difference between Java/JVM and C#/.NET
You're paying for your content, one way or the other. One is with your time (watching commercials), the other is with your money.
Even worse, watching commercials also costs you because of higher prices. All costs, including those of commercials, are paid for, in the end by the consumer buying the product.
Thus, commercials are a horrible thing that put a general tax on all product prices, an utter waste of resources. It would be way more efficient to pay directly for content, instead of through commercials.
The only use for commercials is giving product information, but I think it is better to pay for objective non-sponsored product information (e.g. tests from impartial consumer organizations).
On the other hand I attended a MS job faire as a non-traditional CS grad student at the University of Colorado. I heard the recruiter tell the potential employees that Microsoft understands coders just want to code, not find and fix bugs. So they have other people do that stuff for them. I'm not the only one who heard it
That is a horrible idea. Anyone who is not prepared to fix his own bugs (and thus actively tries to prevent them, i.e. simply give his best to write good quality code) should not code. Coding and bugs fixing cannot and may not be separated. If you're not responsible for the shit you create, you will create lots of it.
This will either lead to lots of bugs not being found, or to installing a test and verification procedure with a rigour that makes the development unacceptably expensive and slow.
Huh?!? Please elaborate. You mean you change your baseclass to throw a new kind of exception, you'd have to modify the subclasses to handle this error condition? No, you must mean something else. What?!?
For me the "showstopper" for C# is the lack of checked exceptions. I predict this will kill C# software reliability. I fear many people don't understand in time what a fatal mistake this is. Otherwise, I might have liked it.
You write a lot but don't seem to be well informed on FreeBSD:
If you can fetch the package from an FTP server, you can also cvsup to make sure your ports tree is up-to-date (it just takes a few minutes). The ports tree doesn't need to be very up-to-date b.t.w., since tar-balls that vanished from the sites are kept for a long time on ftp.freebsd.org, which is used as a fall-back. If you don't want to bother with net-access, then just install packages (the binary form of a port) and use the ports that are delivered on CD-ROM with an official FreeBSD set.
make world (I've been doing it regularly for years) has never taking down your box during the process. It uses 2 steps by the way, which you can execute separate if you wish: make buildworld builds everything (in/usr/obj), then make installworld to copy/usr/obj to the system itself, which is a quick process. Even during this step your system remains up and running. A reboot is advisable afterwards but not absolutely necessary (running processes shall still use the old libraries of course).
Upgrading a Linux box (which often comes down to a reinstall) takes much much more time. Upgrading FreeBSD is a routine operation which takes only 1-2 minutes of operator intervention, then takes some hours to complete (compiling) during which your box keeps running. No physical accesss is needed (it remains in multi-user mode and this has always been the case).
You can say much about cons and pros about FreeBSD w.r.t. Linux, but there is absolutely no doubt possible on which one has the superior package management (ports) and system-update system, ease of system administration etc.
At home I run my "production server" on FreeBSD because really, I'm too lazy for Linux.
For those times that I'm not lazy and want to try some neat cool new stuff, I run Linux, Slackware of course. Because if/when I'm not lazy, I want to do everything myself and only deal with the source. I hate being bitten by incompatible packages, vague conflicts between unknown shared libraries etc. The only way to avoid is to recompile from source, and use statically linked software if no source is available (such as commercial software like Opera).
Jordan Hubberd was in the same position
on
Linus Does Not Scale
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As "president" of FreeBSD. Then he had the courage to step down and become a "normal" member of the "core-group", a collective in which every member has the main responsability for a part of the FreeBSD code. Apart from the core group there are other committers but the core group decides who these are and can revoke commit-rights in cases of abuse.
This is a nice distributed system that continues to work very well when the load gets higher; also noone is indispensible, noone has to be afraid what would happen to FreeBSD if a certain person would somehow drop out.
Of course Linus has every right in the world to remain the status quo, even if it damages Linux. After all Linux is his baby and he can do with it what he likes. Whether it is a good idea to rely on an OS with this kind of a leadership structure is another matter however. But noone can force Linus to change, since he doesn't force anyone to use Linux (take it or leave it).
Another network that primarily is intended to share legal information, but that "happens" to be used for illegal (alt.binaries*) file trading as well.
Should they do so (and this applies also to this new network so clearly meant for legal exchange only) than it only becomes too obvious that the RIAA in fact wants to forbid any direct communication between people.
So I would be able to play imported DVD's on a device that does not buffer the video stream in any way, but it would be illegal to play it on a device that uses some buffering in memory.
Isn't it absurd that legality could depend on an internal technical detail of the device? We're not talking about persistent copies here.
Supppose I live in the US and have bought lots of such "licenced" stuff. Then I move to another "territory"; what am I supposed to do with my "licenced" items? Throw them away? Be forced to sell them and 2nd hand prices and buy new ones somewhere else? Just because I change the place where I live?
Such licence-restrictions are so absurd they should be declard illegal or void.
I though Switzerland was bad, but indeed not as horrible as Ireland or Australia. Here it is about EUR 60/month for 512/128 without limits. Dynamic IP however. Static tends to cost EUR 10 extra, if you want it.
If deployment is the problem, than rewriting the complete windowing system seems a bit drastic to me (apart from getting incompatible with the rest of the unix world and the past). Better just fix the deployment problem.
Illegal, as you mention. It is obvious that someone who remains illegally in a country cannot obtain social security.
I don't claim that the criteria for someone to become a legal resident are always fair, but you cannot expect illegal inhabitants to be looked after by social security.
I said *civilized* countries. In no country in western europe people have to live on the street if they are legal residents. Some do out of choice however. Every recognized inhabitant gets enough social security to at least cover food, housing and healthcare. Note that in this respect I fear that the USA does not belong to the group of civilized countries.
There are no people in civilized countries that don't have basic needs such as food, healthcare etc. In fact, I don't believe there are any people in Belgium, or in any other western european country for that matter, who could not buy a (second hand) PC if they are really interested.
However, I do agree that giving free PC's to those that cannot or don't want to afford them is an utter waste of money, and it is an illusion to believe that those people shall be able to make good use of this investment. If someone is not interested by himself, handing out PC's won't automatically change this.
"Roxio, Inc. (Nasdaq:ROXI), the Digital Media Company, and Gracenote today announced the signing of a multi-year license that provides Gracenote CDDB as the exclusive CD recognition service to current and future Roxio customers..."
Even if they got the license free (to save the face of Gracenote) then still this is a defeat because they gave in and no longer shall use freedb.
This establishes the absurd idea that using freedb might be illegal, and this claim hasn't been dismissed now. I can only hope that other companies/software shall continue to challenge Gracenote and offer freedb integration instead.
Why should an interface keep evolving?
on
KDE 3.0 beta 1 is out
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Apple's interface hasn't changed for 10 years (until OS-X). It was just good, people were used to it. The interface doesn't need to change every year (like Windows seems to suggest). On the contrary.
I think the KDE interface is getting near perfect (as far as look&feel is concerned). Making changes just confuses users and adding ever more bloat (like the WinXP themes) is counterproductive.
As for myself, I have been using bare X11/twm for the past 15 years and have no reason to change that. It does the job (for me, admittedly not for everyone), I'm used to it.
It is sad to see how many people even in the Open Software camp seem to be infected by the Microsoft idea of never ending "upgrade" cycles.
Reading the article I find the suggestion that there might be a genetic cause extremely implausible and far fetched. First of all I hardly believe in math-"genes" at all, let alone that mating of two persions with those genes would produce some form of autistic children. Why would it, what evidence is there?
There is a short hint at genetic caus of autism in the article, talking about identical twins often both having autism (or both not). This is so logical, and shows one of the common mistakes that psychology "science" so often makes with statistics and logic. Namely, suppose autism has a social cause (how the child is treated, handled by other people), since identical twins look the same and behave the same (at least initially) chances are they are treated the same by other people. In time they will diverge (a bit) but in the early years they are so similar that the social development due to how people treat them is very much alike. Thus, it is only very logical that either both become autistic, or both don't. To see a proof of a genetic cause for autism in that is just plain stupid.
There could be other causes, such as environmental, mere speculation at the moment. But to worry about genes and IT-people ("math-genes" inbreed) is totally unfounded.
My doughter would be diagnosed with ADHD by many nowadays, but I refuese to accept that. I agree with you that there are other causes, and that it simply needs a good gentle approach and tact to "correct", that is some children just are more susceptible for "rebellion" and need more attention, attention that many parents or teachers cannot or will not give nowadays.
If you then label it and call it some name, the "problem" seems more under control and might give a good feeling to some. I don't buy that, I think it is just a social problem that needs attention and time and it is not helpful to label it and accept it as some kind of disease.
Maybe you don't know better, it depends on what you compare it with. I have to use Office every day at work (for years now) and I keep hating it. Compared to LaTeX and/or Framemaker my productivity is much less.
Creating structured documents with Word (including versioning, diffs between documents etc) is a hell compared to some other solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
With JVM you can also use other languages than Java, in that sence there is nothing new. The only difference is that SUN only supports and develops Java, and some others have developed other compilers to compile other languages into JVM bytecode (which has an open spec, so anyone can port any language which fits the JVM model). Just like .NET, the VM model does require some adaptions and constraints, which is why .NET does support C++ but only a subset (without multiple inheritance, for example, making C++/.NET virtually useless IMHO, realistically there is no reason to use anything else but C# on .NET, just as 99% of JVM users use Java).
.NET no matter what. Shops that value cross-platform have no other choice but Java/JVM. I don't think that competition on a technical level shall matter much (especially since technically spoken there are hardly any differences).
As for what developers like better: I fear that the biggest impact could come from "strategic" considerations instead of what developers like better: Shops targetting only Windows shall go the safe route, i.e. do what Microsoft says and develop for
In that sence, I see no real difference to the JVM. Java is the main language to be compiled into bytecode, but one could also develop other compilers for other languages.
Using other external code (dll's in general, from generic C or C++ origin) is just like JNI. I fail to see a fundamental difference between Java/JVM and C#/.NET
Even worse, watching commercials also costs you because of higher prices. All costs, including those of commercials, are paid for, in the end by the consumer buying the product.
Thus, commercials are a horrible thing that put a general tax on all product prices, an utter waste of resources. It would be way more efficient to pay directly for content, instead of through commercials.
The only use for commercials is giving product information, but I think it is better to pay for objective non-sponsored product information (e.g. tests from impartial consumer organizations).
See: this or this I'm not sure about the current status though.
That is a horrible idea. Anyone who is not prepared to fix his own bugs (and thus actively tries to prevent them, i.e. simply give his best to write good quality code) should not code. Coding and bugs fixing cannot and may not be separated. If you're not responsible for the shit you create, you will create lots of it.
This will either lead to lots of bugs not being found, or to installing a test and verification procedure with a rigour that makes the development unacceptably expensive and slow.
Huh?!? Please elaborate. You mean you change your baseclass to throw a new kind of exception, you'd have to modify the subclasses to handle this error condition? No, you must mean something else. What?!?
And make some new mistakes indeed.
For me the "showstopper" for C# is the lack of checked exceptions. I predict this will kill C# software reliability. I fear many people don't understand in time what a fatal mistake this is. Otherwise, I might have liked it.
You write a lot but don't seem to be well informed on FreeBSD:
/usr/obj), then make installworld to copy /usr/obj to the system itself, which is a quick process. Even during this step your system remains up and running. A reboot is advisable afterwards but not absolutely necessary (running processes shall still use the old libraries of course).
If you can fetch the package from an FTP server, you can also cvsup to make sure your ports tree is up-to-date (it just takes a few minutes). The ports tree doesn't need to be very up-to-date b.t.w., since tar-balls that vanished from the sites are kept for a long time on ftp.freebsd.org, which is used as a fall-back. If you don't want to bother with net-access, then just install packages (the binary form of a port) and use the ports that are delivered on CD-ROM with an official FreeBSD set.
make world (I've been doing it regularly for years) has never taking down your box during the process. It uses 2 steps by the way, which you can execute separate if you wish: make buildworld builds everything (in
Upgrading a Linux box (which often comes down to a reinstall) takes much much more time. Upgrading FreeBSD is a routine operation which takes only 1-2 minutes of operator intervention, then takes some hours to complete (compiling) during which your box keeps running. No physical accesss is needed (it remains in multi-user mode and this has always been the case).
You can say much about cons and pros about FreeBSD w.r.t. Linux, but there is absolutely no doubt possible on which one has the superior package management (ports) and system-update system, ease of system administration etc.
At home I run my "production server" on FreeBSD because really, I'm too lazy for Linux.
For those times that I'm not lazy and want to try some neat cool new stuff, I run Linux, Slackware of course. Because if/when I'm not lazy, I want to do everything myself and only deal with the source. I hate being bitten by incompatible packages, vague conflicts between unknown shared libraries etc. The only way to avoid is to recompile from source, and use statically linked software if no source is available (such as commercial software like Opera).
As "president" of FreeBSD. Then he had the courage to step down and become a "normal" member of the "core-group", a collective in which every member has the main responsability for a part of the FreeBSD code. Apart from the core group there are other committers but the core group decides who these are and can revoke commit-rights in cases of abuse.
This is a nice distributed system that continues to work very well when the load gets higher; also noone is indispensible, noone has to be afraid what would happen to FreeBSD if a certain person would somehow drop out.
Of course Linus has every right in the world to remain the status quo, even if it damages Linux. After all Linux is his baby and he can do with it what he likes. Whether it is a good idea to rely on an OS with this kind of a leadership structure is another matter however. But noone can force Linus to change, since he doesn't force anyone to use Linux (take it or leave it).
Another network that primarily is intended to share legal information, but that "happens" to be used for illegal (alt.binaries*) file trading as well.
Should they do so (and this applies also to this new network so clearly meant for legal exchange only) than it only becomes too obvious that the RIAA in fact wants to forbid any direct communication between people.
Isn't it absurd that legality could depend on an internal technical detail of the device? We're not talking about persistent copies here.
Such licence-restrictions are so absurd they should be declard illegal or void.
I though Switzerland was bad, but indeed not as horrible as Ireland or Australia. Here it is about EUR 60/month for 512/128 without limits. Dynamic IP however. Static tends to cost EUR 10 extra, if you want it.
If deployment is the problem, than rewriting the complete windowing system seems a bit drastic to me (apart from getting incompatible with the rest of the unix world and the past). Better just fix the deployment problem.
Several years ago, not long before they started producing audio CD copiers.
They must have previewed the conflict due to arise between hardware and software (audio) companies.
I don't think they really support the little guys, but mainly their own business (and rightly so).
Illegal, as you mention. It is obvious that someone who remains illegally in a country cannot obtain social security.
I don't claim that the criteria for someone to become a legal resident are always fair, but you cannot expect illegal inhabitants to be looked after by social security.
I said *civilized* countries. In no country in western europe people have to live on the street if they are legal residents. Some do out of choice however. Every recognized inhabitant gets enough social security to at least cover food, housing and healthcare. Note that in this respect I fear that the USA does not belong to the group of civilized countries.
There are no people in civilized countries that don't have basic needs such as food, healthcare etc. In fact, I don't believe there are any people in Belgium, or in any other western european country for that matter, who could not buy a (second hand) PC if they are really interested.
However, I do agree that giving free PC's to those that cannot or don't want to afford them is an utter waste of money, and it is an illusion to believe that those people shall be able to make good use of this investment. If someone is not interested by himself, handing out PC's won't automatically change this.
It is not wrong. It *is* the first release of Daemon News. Before they were sold by others, such as Walnut Creek etc.
On roxio.com is says:
..."
"Roxio, Inc. (Nasdaq:ROXI), the Digital Media Company, and Gracenote today announced the signing of a multi-year license that provides Gracenote CDDB as the exclusive CD recognition service to current and future Roxio customers
Even if they got the license free (to save the face of Gracenote) then still this is a defeat because they gave in and no longer shall use freedb.
This establishes the absurd idea that using freedb might be illegal, and this claim hasn't been dismissed now. I can only hope that other companies/software shall continue to challenge Gracenote and offer freedb integration instead.
Apple's interface hasn't changed for 10 years (until OS-X). It was just good, people were used to it. The interface doesn't need to change every year (like Windows seems to suggest). On the contrary.
I think the KDE interface is getting near perfect (as far as look&feel is concerned). Making changes just confuses users and adding ever more bloat (like the WinXP themes) is counterproductive.
As for myself, I have been using bare X11/twm for the past 15 years and have no reason to change that. It does the job (for me, admittedly not for everyone), I'm used to it.
It is sad to see how many people even in the Open Software camp seem to be infected by the Microsoft idea of never ending "upgrade" cycles.
Reading the article I find the suggestion that there might be a genetic cause extremely implausible and far fetched. First of all I hardly believe in math-"genes" at all, let alone that mating of two persions with those genes would produce some form of autistic children. Why would it, what evidence is there?
There is a short hint at genetic caus of autism in the article, talking about identical twins often both having autism (or both not). This is so logical, and shows one of the common mistakes that psychology "science" so often makes with statistics and logic. Namely, suppose autism has a social cause (how the child is treated, handled by other people), since identical twins look the same and behave the same (at least initially) chances are they are treated the same by other people. In time they will diverge (a bit) but in the early years they are so similar that the social development due to how people treat them is very much alike. Thus, it is only very logical that either both become autistic, or both don't. To see a proof of a genetic cause for autism in that is just plain stupid.
There could be other causes, such as environmental, mere speculation at the moment. But to worry about genes and IT-people ("math-genes" inbreed) is totally unfounded.
My doughter would be diagnosed with ADHD by many nowadays, but I refuese to accept that. I agree with you that there are other causes, and that it simply needs a good gentle approach and tact to "correct", that is some children just are more susceptible for "rebellion" and need more attention, attention that many parents or teachers cannot or will not give nowadays.
If you then label it and call it some name, the "problem" seems more under control and might give a good feeling to some. I don't buy that, I think it is just a social problem that needs attention and time and it is not helpful to label it and accept it as some kind of disease.
Maybe you don't know better, it depends on what you compare it with. I have to use Office every day at work (for years now) and I keep hating it. Compared to LaTeX and/or Framemaker my productivity is much less.
Creating structured documents with Word (including versioning, diffs between documents etc) is a hell compared to some other solutions.
It's not that odd, since everything that can run W95 can run W98 too, IOW there is no reason not to upgrade from W95 to W98.
Hardware and software running with Windows 3.x or MS-DOS however can not generally be assumed to be upgradeble to W98 or newer.