the first stealth ship has been designed and is sold by the french since years ; it has been sold to saudi arabia and taiwan and it's in service since 1990's. the first swedish class appeared in 2000 (june 2000) and it's built started at the same time the first french models were already serving at sea (while not yet certified for operational use at that time).
the visby is a small ship with 43 crewmen and a length of 72 meters while the french "la fayette" is 125 meters with 164 crewmen.
more information on world stealth ships:
http://www.lowobservable.com/shipwor.htm
you should also check the last improvements on submarines if you are interested in technology on naval warfare. the most interesting thing is the closed-circuit diesel engines which are the most dangerous threat to any nuclear submarine.
you see, submarines even when stopped have to keep pumps working to cool their nuclear reactor while a diesel engine can really stop and be totally silent, waiting for its nuclear prey to pass by. and since the germans have designed a fully-closed circuit diesel engine that can work for up to a WEEK below water.. it looks like the nuclear submarine is not the idea combat submarine of the future while revised and advanced diesel engines are top-notch:)
1. the best solution is to scan everyone. every bag, every person and no exceptions. no one.
2. use a tool to "tag" some people and scan them.
solution 2 is what tsa would prefer because solution 1, which is the only valuable one regarding security, requires TIME and thus MONEY.
i would suggest to use solution 1. it will pay in the long term and save lives. and because everyone has to be searched, it will not raise as much problems as flagging a few.
this stupid program is just a try to avoid solution 1 to spend less cash and putting more risk on people that will die if something wrong happens.
and solution 2 will allow terrorists to do "dull runs" for years and once they're always taggued green and have a clean aspect like a family life, good job and education, they will be able to attack again.
most 9/11 terrorists were pretty clean. some had families, been living in the US for years, reconnaisance around the twin towers started four years before attack (as video founds show) and they had real papers under false names, issued by someone from the administration in Virginia that issued true driver licenses but under false names.
jump on solution 1. scan everyone, everything. solution 2 is just keeping the risk over people's life and they are priceless.
niels moved to netbsd where he works now but i believe most of his code will be ported to openbsd when required. theo seems to have been a bit harsh over niels and niels left. well, this is a business between niels and theo and we should not dwelve into it;)
very interesting move. while what did happen to the world trade center was pretty bad, for now it's mainly the volunteer us forces that went into "war" against terrorism. but thinking about a draft even just for specialized people means a lot for the civilian life out there. i wonder how i would react if my own country (france) would go back to draft (we're only out of it since a few years no more). having a draft in a country fighting for its way of life is, i feel, a really different situation than the current one in the US. the main reason for which it has been stopped in france is most people think a professional army like the US one would give better results than trying to spend time on people to see them leave after 1 or 2 monthes once they're ready to serve (it takes near a year just to get a base grunt). and a lot of young people in france could avoid it using various methods so only the not very rich and influent ones would have to serve for 10 monthes so it wasn't very democratic:/
it is not because my own country or government does things that everyone is ok with them. there are people for strict secularism, and others that don't care. i am a pragmatic. so when the issue was raised, i looked around in various countries and in England they just don't care and let people do what they want. i think france should have done like England does. we all come from various cultures and the more we share and exchange, the richer we are in the end. problem in france and source of secularism is the state had his butt raped so hard by the catholic church and the king that when they killed the king, they wanted to crush the catholic church that helped him screw the people. secularism is the government afraid of church.
secularism is the norm in france. i might not agree with it, but public schools are the property of state, and the state defines laws. if people don't agree with those, they are free to leave the public schools or leave the country itself. i do regret personnally that people just can't be accepted as they are, but my voice is just one and polls show that the french majority wanted this law. democracy works like this so i do accept it. doing laws for what people want can be bad or even disastrous sometimes but that's how democracy works. please do not judge all bloody frogs because of what our government does. we are not all stupid even if may look as the norm from your nice country;)
english is not my native tongue. i usually only post humourous stuff but i forget to add a smiley when it would help or sometimes people think i'm angered or aggressive so it doesn't go very well sometimes:) the whole text was not written by me so i hope the grammar mistakes are only mine in the first sentences on the top of it:D
i do understand that some content might not be appreciated online by people or governments. in france for example, we do not have a free speech amendement like the US constitution has. we have a free speech unless we do things like nazi propaganda or promoting killing people because of their religion, skin color, or stuff alike. while i do understand this is rather desirable as people should be accepted as they are, i have a problem with censorship. first, i believe that ideas should be fought with ideas and not law. if you have a law, it means that somewhere, someone or a group of persons chooses what is legal and what is not. this means that if today we censor pedophilia or promotion of crime, we could end up someday in a democratic country with laws that will make any critic of the government or something more sensitive (like it would not be allowed to criticize history as publied by the government, and you all know that he who can rewrite history has a great deal of power over coming societies). i thus would prefer to have freedom of speech written in constitution and this would not be modifiable without the majority of people in the country to vote for a modification. this way, politics would not be able to introduce laws that could censor valued content like criticism of political power or things alike. of course, this will allow some people to publish and discuss their political views which are "extreme" to other people, but we if we have censorship, we let people choose for everyone else and if this goes wrong someday, it is gonna be very bad. i feel that it's a binary question. you do not have free speech if it is not absolute and for everyone. this, including people you would really dislike or even hate. i like to recall a quote from Voltaire, that said to someone he didn't share his ideas : "sir, i might not like your ideas and will fight them, but i am ready to fight for your right to express those as i expose mines". i tend to prefer the US constitution about it rather than our current laws in France. i do not trust that politicians can always remain "serious". if someday extreme-right or left politicans get in power, they will be able to legally and by using law to outlaw anything that will go against them, and we will have to leave to be able to keep our free speech. uk should fight those ideas with ideas and if a web site promoted crime to have it closed. but those ideas of "cleaning" internet is just a digital ethnic-alike cleansing i dont like. not because of what it is but of what it could become if it goes wrong. i would prefer the government to trust us, we the people, to fight ideas that are dangerous to democracy. we should let everyone express their ideas, and respect their freedom to talk. how can we ask for freedom of speech if it is not available to everyone, blindly as justice should be ? that is why justice has a blindfold over her eyes. there is a tendency in governments to distrust their people and good will to fight dangerous ideas or crime-promoting things. i believe the majority of people is rather sane and good for each other and we are probably able to take care of those matters without people choosing what we can talk about, and what we are not able to talk about because "we" would have a tendency to bad things. there is no good censorship. because it has been used in history to have political opponents shut up. it is like weapons. it is not because they can be used for crimes they would be wrong. but this is another very difficult subject to talk about:)
read this nice memo, go fix java problems and come back to open your mouth later, kid or i'll call your mommy and tell her you didn't your homework.
The Java Problem
Author: Julian S. Taylor
Reviewed by: Steve Talley, Mark Carlson, Henry Knapp, Willy (Waikwan) Hui, Eugene Krivopaltsev, Peter Madany, Michael Boucher
Executive Summary
While the Java language provides many advantages over C and C++, its implementation on Solaris presents barriers to the delivery of reliable applications. These barriers prevent general acceptance of Java for production software within Sun. A review of the problem indicates that these issues are not inherent to Java but instead represent implementation oversights and inconsistencies common to projects which do not communicate effectively with partners and users.
Within Sun, the institutional mechanism for promoting this sort of communication between partners is the System Architecture Council codified in the Software Development Framework (SDF). We propose that the process of releasing our Java implementation will benefit from conformance with the SDF.
Introduction
This document details the difficulties that keep our Solaris Java implementation from being practical for the development of common software applications. It represents a consensus of several senior engineers within Sun Microsystems. We believe that our Java implementation is inappropriate for a large number of categories of software application. We do not believe these flaws are inherent in the Java platform but that they relate to difficulties in our Solaris implementation.
We all agree that the Java language offers many advantages over the alternatives. We would generally prefer to deploy our applications in Java but the implementation provided for Solaris is inadequate to the task of producing supportable and reliable products.
Our experience in filing bugs against Java has been to see them rapidly closed as "will not fix". 22% of accepted non-duplicate bugs against base Java are closed in this way as opposed to 7% for C++. Key examples include:
4246106 Large virtual memory consumption of JVM
4374713 Anonymous inner classes have incompatible serialization
4380663 Multiple bottlenecks in the JVM
4407856 RMI secure transport provider doesn't timeout SSL sessions
4460368 For jdk1.4, JTable.setCellSelectionEnabled() does not work
4460382 For Jdk1.4, the table editors for JTable do not work.
4433962 JDK1.3 HotSpot JVM crashes Sun Management Center Console
4463644 Calculation of JTable's height is different for jdk1.2 and jdk1.4
4475676 [under jdk1.3.1, new JFrame launch causes jumping]
In personal conversations with Java engineers and managers, it appears that Solaris is not a priority and the resource issues are not viewed as serious. Attempts to discuss this have not been productive and the message we hear routinely from Java engineering is that new features are key and improvements to the foundation are secondary. This is mentioned only to make it clear that other avenues for change have been explored but without success. Here we seek to briefly present the problem and recommend a solution.
Defining the Java Problem
These are the problems we have observed which we believe indicate the need for an improved implementation and a modified approach.
1. The support model seems flawed
Since Java is not a self-contained binary, every Java program depends fundamentally upon the installed Java Runtime Environment (JRE). If that JRE is broken, correction and relief is required. This sort of relief needs to happen in a timely manner and needs to fix only the problem without the likelihood of introducing additional bugs. Java Software does not provide such relief.
Java packages are released (re-released) every four or five months, introducing bug fixes and new features and new bugs with each release. These releases are upgrading packages which remove all trace of the prior installed pac
the most fascinating to me is that sco is saying that if linux is entreprise capable it's because technologies have been comited by ibm to linux, which are stolen from them. so.. why sco has no product that offers any of those technologies ? numa ? rcu ? and so on. so they are saying that linux is bad because it has many things it should not have, while sco offers no product capable of same stuff. lame. darl mc bride is the live proof that we should distribute contraceptives freely and for free to women:D
>Java cannot compare with C and C++, because it i
>simply so much easier to write applications in
>Java, it is simpler than C++, more concise than C,
>it is better documented, and it is all in one
>place.
could be. i have not used java enough to really know but i would not use java to talk to a hardware component which is my favorite coding activity:) now that gcc produces binary from java i might give a try to it though. he he.
i did not intend my post as a troll and i honestly believe it is easier to learn from the K&R book from a simple 80x25 or 80x50 BSD/Linux console than using Java.
if i have to choose i would prefer using java than c# but i will try both before i do my mind, who knows. and it is good for oneself's ego to find and understand when and how we are wrong to learn from our mistakes. i liked java when i used it some time ago but i also think that because sun keeps a tight hand over it is not letting the language spread as it could. when i first tried java my first though has been "wow. good stuff. i _only_ it could produce a binary i would write java and run compiled binaries like C ones";)
uses and people will show how it behaves. if sun makes java as free as C it might get quite far especially since gcc now allows to produce binaries instead of bytecode from those sources (i have not extensively been using this so i dont know if it is real binary code and something like a mix of jre+binary)
i am mainly a C user but i tried java years ago when i was using a Mac and i have kept an eye on Java since. my problems with it and how Sun behaves are:
1. the claimed "portability" of Java
i think this is a fine joke. a java program has portability trouble across different JRE on the same processor and OS. dont even try to think of this about different processors or even various operating systems. the high deniability of people when you tell them about this tells a lot of the inner problems of Java : axioms you are not allowed to discuss even if everything shows there's something wrong.
let's get an exemple. you can install NetBSD 1.6.1 and in its kernel you have compatibility options that allow you to use binaries compiled on previous versions of NetBSD like a binary coming from ten years ago, compiled on NetBSD 0.9
how can i be able to run BINARY code that is ten years old on a machine, and not be able to run Java bytecode on the same machine with two
different JRE properly ?
i can even grab a binary for a proprietary unix system years and years ago and have it run... so we are able to run today programs from machines whom are no longer available and that existed before Java even came to birth.
2. Writing non-portable code using Java
Java is said to be impossible to be used to write non-portable programs. fine. so why does the applet that works fine under Internet Explorer and Windows doesn't work on a Macintosh under MacOS or MacOS X ?
3. Standards
C is a standard. We had the ANSI C that was followed by ISO C and more recently the C99 which GCC supports. So if you write code relatively cleanly it will get compiled (sometimes with a few fixes) on weirdo platforms. C should suck compared to Java about portability. So a few monthes ago why did I run into so much trouble to try to run Freenet ? It has been written using Java so it would be as portable as possible. But when you try to run it with JRE A it doesn't work so you move to JRE B but you get even worse problems so you try another JRE... Excuse-me ?!
While in the same time we got programs written in C that can be compiled on Linux, BSD, Windows, HP-UX, AIX across a dozen different kind of processors. We could be able to find rpm, debian packages, Free/Net/Open's entries in their respective Ports/pkgsrc...
NetBSD 1.6.1 released in august 2003 runs on 52 different architectures, with 17 disctinct hardware architectures and 11 different processors and it's mainly based on C code. The beauty of it ?
If I find a PCMCIA card and write a device for it, it will also mean that if you got a Zaurus (which runs a different archictecture and processor as the i386 I could have used to write a PCMCIA driver) you can plug the PCMCIA card and have it work. It means that if you install NetBSD on a Mac and it has a PCI port, you can plug a x86 supported card and have it work while you have no driver for that very same card available under both MacOS and MacOS X.
I'm not saying that C is the answer but that proper design and continuous work can achieve great results. Linux is also available on an incredible number of platforms, probably even more than NetBSD currently has from small cards with tiny processors to big 8-way monster machines.
Last, let me reproduce the words of someone from Advogato about this, dej who says :
The only real problem with Java is that it is proprietary.
I cannot legally use Java in any way, without giving Sun the ability to impair my business. This does not hold true for C++.
The license that accompanies the JRE you can download from Sun gives you the right to use it to test your own applications. It does not give you the right to run other people's applications arbitrarily. I suppose you can buy a JRE from Sun for this purpose. But then Sun controls
I hope we will be able, someday in Europe, to give money to NetBSD and other open source projects like GNU while having the money we give substracted from our taxes. In the end, each euro or dollar we put into open source is dedicated to everyone, the whole community but also all users !:)
I hope someone is checking about this for Europe.
The BSD license required people that used its code to put an advertising clause, which is no longer required since the licence was modified:
The advertising clause in the license appearing on BSD Unix files was officially rescinded by the Director of the Office of Technology Licensing of the University of California on July 22 1999. He states that clause 3 is "hereby deleted in its entirety."
As long the licence remains in the source code you can distribute or incorporate the code and you no longer have to advertise about it.
Does it matter if Microsoft uses BSD code ? No. The BSD licence allows this. Microsoft can use the BSD TCP/IP code and it is not a problem for them or for any BSD project. The code is written and anyone can use it, and having the code used by a company doesn't make the BSD one no longer available.
Remember. DARPA wanted the TCP/IP and several projects developped those protocols and a stack. Then, the DARPA evaluated each implementation for performance and quality and the BSD one was chosen. The BSD TCP/IP is the reference code and it would be stupid for a company not to use it : it has been designed by DARPA as the best one, and its licence allowed proprietary inclusion. Why bother write your own when several have been written and all failed to offer better results and code quality compared to Berkeley work ? Why did BSD became so much spread ? Because DARPA designed their code as the reference they would use. All universities asked for BSD release from then on and it spread like fire.
Perhaps Microsoft uses BSD code. They can do it freely and there is no comment to be made. Licence allows it and the clause about advertising is no longer present so they dont have to tell about it. There is no use is telling again and again "Microsoft uses BSD TCP/IP" to have people come and without any clue say "they use a TCP/IP from someone else". You dont even know on what this external TCP/IP was based and even if you knew you would not be allowed to tell it. It's like talking about God. Perhaps it does exist, perhaps it does not but we have no proof about any of those affirmations and who really cares in the end ?
The IPv6 is developped by KAME right now. It is mainly based on NetBSD and uses the BSD licence with no advertising clause. Other BSD are also involved in this work as well as Linux people. When you are a proprietary company do you write your own code without using the freely available reference code ? No. Because even if you do, you will have to track changes and port them to your own. This costs a lot in time and money and any project people know this. This is also why we see patches come back from proprietary companies go back to BSD projects : it costs so much to port them version after version they prefer to produce a patch so it gets in the source, so they have it maintained automatically when they move to a newer version. This is how BSD has proprietary companies give their changes back to us : in the long term it costs so much it because a pain to apply and port patches to a new version. And it works in the fact. GPL has you publish changes if you distribute the stuff, BSD makes you publish those to the projects to avoid money and time loss which compagnies are very sensible too.
So can we stop this nonsense once and for all ? It does not matter if Microsoft uses BSD code or not. They can do it and they will do it when they want. They dont have to advertise about it. And if they keep the licence in the source code we do not see it.
I am sorry to be against this topic but I do seriously urge any person competent not to participate in such a bullshit test. Asking people to "crack" something while offering cash doesn't mean it's secure (which is what is implied, which is insanely stupid for people that work in security and professionnals involved in cryptography). It just proves that no one that cared to break it came over it to break it. Serious cryptographers ask people to present their work in a formalized scientific form. We have a HUGE history of crypto having get breaked and like in science, we want people to present their work and show us they did study all previous breakings and that none apply to their work. This is annoying, yes, but it's like that in science. If it's done seriously and how people expect it to be,it will be considered seriously. No cryptographer will ever consider loosing time in such a contest unless there is a serious implication for people or the public (like voting machines for example).
We should bash this stupid annoucement that implies that "if no one breaks it it means it's secure" because that's an insult to cryptography and those that work hard in shadow to have it work properly.
This is really the kind of stuff that pisses me of:(
Slashdot Mirror
the first stealth ship has been designed and is sold by the french since years ; it has been sold to saudi arabia and taiwan and it's in service since 1990's. the first swedish class appeared in 2000 (june 2000) and it's built started at the same time the first french models were already serving at sea (while not yet certified for operational use at that time).
:
:)
the visby is a small ship with 43 crewmen and a length of 72 meters while the french "la fayette" is 125 meters with 164 crewmen.
more information on world stealth ships
http://www.lowobservable.com/shipwor.htm
you should also check the last improvements on submarines if you are interested in technology on naval warfare. the most interesting thing is the closed-circuit diesel engines which are the most dangerous threat to any nuclear submarine.
you see, submarines even when stopped have to keep pumps working to cool their nuclear reactor while a diesel engine can really stop and be totally silent, waiting for its nuclear prey to pass by. and since the germans have designed a fully-closed circuit diesel engine that can work for up to a WEEK below water.. it looks like the nuclear submarine is not the idea combat submarine of the future while revised and advanced diesel engines are top-notch
fascinating move isn't it ?
why has the tsa developped such a tool ?
1. the best solution is to scan everyone. every bag, every person and no exceptions. no one.
2. use a tool to "tag" some people and scan them.
solution 2 is what tsa would prefer because solution 1, which is the only valuable one regarding security, requires TIME and thus MONEY.
i would suggest to use solution 1. it will pay in the long term and save lives. and because everyone has to be searched, it will not raise as much problems as flagging a few.
this stupid program is just a try to avoid solution 1 to spend less cash and putting more risk on people that will die if something wrong happens.
and solution 2 will allow terrorists to do "dull runs" for years and once they're always taggued green and have a clean aspect like a family life, good job and education, they will be able to attack again.
most 9/11 terrorists were pretty clean. some had families, been living in the US for years, reconnaisance around the twin towers started four years before attack (as video founds show) and they had real papers under false names, issued by someone from the administration in Virginia that issued true driver licenses but under false names.
jump on solution 1. scan everyone, everything. solution 2 is just keeping the risk over people's life and they are priceless.
niels moved to netbsd where he works now but i believe most of his code will be ported to openbsd when required. theo seems to have been a bit harsh over niels and niels left. well, this is a business between niels and theo and we should not dwelve into it ;)
very interesting move. while what did happen to the world trade center was pretty bad, for now it's mainly the volunteer us forces that went into "war" against terrorism. but thinking about a draft even just for specialized people means a lot for the civilian life out there. i wonder how i would react if my own country (france) would go back to draft (we're only out of it since a few years no more). having a draft in a country fighting for its way of life is, i feel, a really different situation than the current one in the US. the main reason for which it has been stopped in france is most people think a professional army like the US one would give better results than trying to spend time on people to see them leave after 1 or 2 monthes once they're ready to serve (it takes near a year just to get a base grunt). and a lot of young people in france could avoid it using various methods so only the not very rich and influent ones would have to serve for 10 monthes so it wasn't very democratic :/
it is not because my own country or government does things that everyone is ok with them. there are people for strict secularism, and others that don't care. i am a pragmatic. so when the issue was raised, i looked around in various countries and in England they just don't care and let people do what they want. i think france should have done like England does. we all come from various cultures and the more we share and exchange, the richer we are in the end. problem in france and source of secularism is the state had his butt raped so hard by the catholic church and the king that when they killed the king, they wanted to crush the catholic church that helped him screw the people. secularism is the government afraid of church.
secularism is the norm in france. i might not agree with it, but public schools are the property of state, and the state defines laws. if people don't agree with those, they are free to leave the public schools or leave the country itself. i do regret personnally that people just can't be accepted as they are, but my voice is just one and polls show that the french majority wanted this law. democracy works like this so i do accept it. doing laws for what people want can be bad or even disastrous sometimes but that's how democracy works. please do not judge all bloody frogs because of what our government does. we are not all stupid even if may look as the norm from your nice country ;)
english is not my native tongue. i usually only post humourous stuff but i forget to add a smiley when it would help or sometimes people think i'm angered or aggressive so it doesn't go very well sometimes :) the whole text was not written by me so i hope the grammar mistakes are only mine in the first sentences on the top of it :D
i do understand that some content might not be appreciated online by people or governments. in france for example, we do not have a free speech amendement like the US constitution has. we have a free speech unless we do things like nazi propaganda or promoting killing people because of their religion, skin color, or stuff alike. while i do understand this is rather desirable as people should be accepted as they are, i have a problem with censorship. first, i believe that ideas should be fought with ideas and not law. if you have a law, it means that somewhere, someone or a group of persons chooses what is legal and what is not. this means that if today we censor pedophilia or promotion of crime, we could end up someday in a democratic country with laws that will make any critic of the government or something more sensitive (like it would not be allowed to criticize history as publied by the government, and you all know that he who can rewrite history has a great deal of power over coming societies). :)
i thus would prefer to have freedom of speech written in constitution and this would not be modifiable without the majority of people in the country to vote for a modification. this way, politics would not be able to introduce laws that could censor valued content like criticism of political power or things alike. of course, this will allow some people to publish and discuss their political views which are "extreme" to other people, but we if we have censorship, we let people choose for everyone else and if this goes wrong someday, it is gonna be very bad. i feel that it's a binary question. you do not have free speech if it is not absolute and for everyone. this, including people you would really dislike or even hate.
i like to recall a quote from Voltaire, that said to someone he didn't share his ideas : "sir, i might not like your ideas and will fight them, but i am ready to fight for your right to express those as i expose mines". i tend to prefer the US constitution about it rather than our current laws in France. i do not trust that politicians can always remain "serious". if someday extreme-right or left politicans get in power, they will be able to legally and by using law to outlaw anything that will go against them, and we will have to leave to be able to keep our free speech. uk should fight those ideas with ideas and if a web site promoted crime to have it closed. but those ideas of "cleaning" internet is just a digital ethnic-alike cleansing i dont like. not because of what it is but of what it could become if it goes wrong. i would prefer the government to trust us, we the people, to fight ideas that are dangerous to democracy. we should let everyone express their ideas, and respect their freedom to talk.
how can we ask for freedom of speech if it is not available to everyone, blindly as justice should be ? that is why justice has a blindfold over her eyes. there is a tendency in governments to distrust their people and good will to fight dangerous ideas or crime-promoting things. i believe the majority of people is rather sane and good for each other and we are probably able to take care of those matters without people choosing what we can talk about, and what we are not able to talk about because "we" would have a tendency to bad things. there is no good censorship. because it has been used in history to have political opponents shut up. it is like weapons. it is not because they can be used for crimes they would be wrong. but this is another very difficult subject to talk about
read this nice memo, go fix java problems and come back to open your mouth later, kid or i'll call your mommy and tell her you didn't your homework.
The Java Problem
Author: Julian S. Taylor Reviewed by: Steve Talley, Mark Carlson, Henry Knapp, Willy (Waikwan) Hui, Eugene Krivopaltsev, Peter Madany, Michael Boucher
Executive Summary
While the Java language provides many advantages over C and C++, its implementation on Solaris presents barriers to the delivery of reliable applications. These barriers prevent general acceptance of Java for production software within Sun. A review of the problem indicates that these issues are not inherent to Java but instead represent implementation oversights and inconsistencies common to projects which do not communicate effectively with partners and users.
Within Sun, the institutional mechanism for promoting this sort of communication between partners is the System Architecture Council codified in the Software Development Framework (SDF). We propose that the process of releasing our Java implementation will benefit from conformance with the SDF.
Introduction
This document details the difficulties that keep our Solaris Java implementation from being practical for the development of common software applications. It represents a consensus of several senior engineers within Sun Microsystems. We believe that our Java implementation is inappropriate for a large number of categories of software application. We do not believe these flaws are inherent in the Java platform but that they relate to difficulties in our Solaris implementation. We all agree that the Java language offers many advantages over the alternatives. We would generally prefer to deploy our applications in Java but the implementation provided for Solaris is inadequate to the task of producing supportable and reliable products. Our experience in filing bugs against Java has been to see them rapidly closed as "will not fix". 22% of accepted non-duplicate bugs against base Java are closed in this way as opposed to 7% for C++. Key examples include:
4246106 Large virtual memory consumption of JVM
4374713 Anonymous inner classes have incompatible serialization
4380663 Multiple bottlenecks in the JVM
4407856 RMI secure transport provider doesn't timeout SSL sessions
4460368 For jdk1.4, JTable.setCellSelectionEnabled() does not work
4460382 For Jdk1.4, the table editors for JTable do not work.
4433962 JDK1.3 HotSpot JVM crashes Sun Management Center Console
4463644 Calculation of JTable's height is different for jdk1.2 and jdk1.4
4475676 [under jdk1.3.1, new JFrame launch causes jumping]
In personal conversations with Java engineers and managers, it appears that Solaris is not a priority and the resource issues are not viewed as serious. Attempts to discuss this have not been productive and the message we hear routinely from Java engineering is that new features are key and improvements to the foundation are secondary. This is mentioned only to make it clear that other avenues for change have been explored but without success. Here we seek to briefly present the problem and recommend a solution.
Defining the Java Problem
These are the problems we have observed which we believe indicate the need for an improved implementation and a modified approach.
1. The support model seems flawed
Since Java is not a self-contained binary, every Java program depends fundamentally upon the installed Java Runtime Environment (JRE). If that JRE is broken, correction and relief is required. This sort of relief needs to happen in a timely manner and needs to fix only the problem without the likelihood of introducing additional bugs. Java Software does not provide such relief. Java packages are released (re-released) every four or five months, introducing bug fixes and new features and new bugs with each release. These releases are upgrading packages which remove all trace of the prior installed pac
the most fascinating to me is that sco is saying that if linux is entreprise capable it's because technologies have been comited by ibm to linux, which are stolen from them. so.. why sco has no product that offers any of those technologies ? numa ? rcu ? and so on. so they are saying that linux is bad because it has many things it should not have, while sco offers no product capable of same stuff. lame. darl mc bride is the live proof that we should distribute contraceptives freely and for free to women :D
damn myself ! stop or i'll.. i'll kill myself ! ;)
dont know what did happen but my message got posted as anonymous coward. it's me that wrote it :)
interesting point indeed. thanks for this nice "indirect" talk :)
>simply so much easier to write applications in
>Java, it is simpler than C++, more concise than C,
>it is better documented, and it is all in one
>place.
could be. i have not used java enough to really know but i would not use java to talk to a hardware component which is my favorite coding activity :)
now that gcc produces binary from java i might give a try to it though. he he.
i did not intend my post as a troll and i honestly believe it is easier to learn from the K&R book from a simple 80x25 or 80x50 BSD/Linux console than using Java.
uses and people will show how it behaves. if sun makes java as free as C it might get quite far especially since gcc now allows to produce binaries instead of bytecode from those sources (i have not extensively been using this so i dont know if it is real binary code and something like a mix of jre+binary)
i am mainly a C user but i tried java years ago when i was using a Mac and i have kept an eye on Java since. my problems with it and how Sun behaves are :
1. the claimed "portability" of Java
i think this is a fine joke. a java program has portability trouble across different JRE on the same processor and OS. dont even try to think of this about different processors or even various operating systems. the high deniability of people when you tell them about this tells a lot of the inner problems of Java : axioms you are not allowed to discuss even if everything shows there's something wrong.
let's get an exemple. you can install NetBSD 1.6.1 and in its kernel you have compatibility options that allow you to use binaries compiled on previous versions of NetBSD like a binary coming from ten years ago, compiled on NetBSD 0.9
how can i be able to run BINARY code that is ten years old on a machine, and not be able to run Java bytecode on the same machine with two different JRE properly ?
i can even grab a binary for a proprietary unix system years and years ago and have it run... so we are able to run today programs from machines whom are no longer available and that existed before Java even came to birth.
2. Writing non-portable code using Java
Java is said to be impossible to be used to write non-portable programs. fine. so why does the applet that works fine under Internet Explorer and Windows doesn't work on a Macintosh under MacOS or MacOS X ?
3. Standards
C is a standard. We had the ANSI C that was followed by ISO C and more recently the C99 which GCC supports. So if you write code relatively cleanly it will get compiled (sometimes with a few fixes) on weirdo platforms. C should suck compared to Java about portability. So a few monthes ago why did I run into so much trouble to try to run Freenet ? It has been written using Java so it would be as portable as possible. But when you try to run it with JRE A it doesn't work so you move to JRE B but you get even worse problems so you try another JRE... Excuse-me ?!
While in the same time we got programs written in C that can be compiled on Linux, BSD, Windows, HP-UX, AIX across a dozen different kind of processors. We could be able to find rpm, debian packages, Free/Net/Open's entries in their respective Ports/pkgsrc...
NetBSD 1.6.1 released in august 2003 runs on 52 different architectures, with 17 disctinct hardware architectures and 11 different processors and it's mainly based on C code. The beauty of it ?
If I find a PCMCIA card and write a device for it, it will also mean that if you got a Zaurus (which runs a different archictecture and processor as the i386 I could have used to write a PCMCIA driver) you can plug the PCMCIA card and have it work. It means that if you install NetBSD on a Mac and it has a PCI port, you can plug a x86 supported card and have it work while you have no driver for that very same card available under both MacOS and MacOS X.
I'm not saying that C is the answer but that proper design and continuous work can achieve great results. Linux is also available on an incredible number of platforms, probably even more than NetBSD currently has from small cards with tiny processors to big 8-way monster machines.
Last, let me reproduce the words of someone from Advogato about this, dej who says :
The only real problem with Java is that it is proprietary.
I cannot legally use Java in any way, without giving Sun the ability to impair my business. This does not hold true for C++.
The license that accompanies the JRE you can download from Sun gives you the right to use it to test your own applications. It does not give you the right to run other people's applications arbitrarily. I suppose you can buy a JRE from Sun for this purpose. But then Sun controls
I hope we will be able, someday in Europe, to give money to NetBSD and other open source projects like GNU while having the money we give substracted from our taxes. In the end, each euro or dollar we put into open source is dedicated to everyone, the whole community but also all users ! :)
I hope someone is checking about this for Europe.
The BSD license required people that used its code to put an advertising clause, which is no longer required since the licence was modified :
The advertising clause in the license appearing on BSD Unix files was officially rescinded by the Director of the Office of Technology Licensing of the University of California on July 22 1999. He states that clause 3 is "hereby deleted in its entirety."
As long the licence remains in the source code you can distribute or incorporate the code and you no longer have to advertise about it.
Does it matter if Microsoft uses BSD code ? No.
The BSD licence allows this. Microsoft can use the BSD TCP/IP code and it is not a problem for them or for any BSD project. The code is written and anyone can use it, and having the code used by a company doesn't make the BSD one no longer available.
Remember. DARPA wanted the TCP/IP and several projects developped those protocols and a stack. Then, the DARPA evaluated each implementation for performance and quality and the BSD one was chosen. The BSD TCP/IP is the reference code and it would be stupid for a company not to use it : it has been designed by DARPA as the best one, and its licence allowed proprietary inclusion. Why bother write your own when several have been written and all failed to offer better results and code quality compared to Berkeley work ? Why did BSD became so much spread ? Because DARPA designed their code as the reference they would use. All universities asked for BSD release from then on and it spread like fire.
Perhaps Microsoft uses BSD code. They can do it freely and there is no comment to be made. Licence allows it and the clause about advertising is no longer present so they dont have to tell about it. There is no use is telling again and again "Microsoft uses BSD TCP/IP" to have people come and without any clue say "they use a TCP/IP from someone else". You dont even know on what this external TCP/IP was based and even if you knew you would not be allowed to tell it. It's like talking about God. Perhaps it does exist, perhaps it does not but we have no proof about any of those affirmations and who really cares in the end ?
The IPv6 is developped by KAME right now. It is mainly based on NetBSD and uses the BSD licence with no advertising clause. Other BSD are also involved in this work as well as Linux people. When you are a proprietary company do you write your own code without using the freely available reference code ? No. Because even if you do, you will have to track changes and port them to your own. This costs a lot in time and money and any project people know this. This is also why we see patches come back from proprietary companies go back to BSD projects : it costs so much to port them version after version they prefer to produce a patch so it gets in the source, so they have it maintained automatically when they move to a newer version. This is how BSD has proprietary companies give their changes back to us : in the long term it costs so much it because a pain to apply and port patches to a new version. And it works in the fact. GPL has you publish changes if you distribute the stuff, BSD makes you publish those to the projects to avoid money and time loss which compagnies are very sensible too.
So can we stop this nonsense once and for all ? It does not matter if Microsoft uses BSD code or not. They can do it and they will do it when they want. They dont have to advertise about it. And if they keep the licence in the source code we do not see it.
I am sorry to be against this topic but I do seriously urge any person competent not to participate in such a bullshit test. Asking people to "crack" something while offering cash doesn't mean it's secure (which is what is implied, which is insanely stupid for people that work in security and professionnals involved in cryptography). It just proves that no one that cared to break it came over it to break it. Serious cryptographers ask people to present their work in a formalized scientific form. We have a HUGE history of crypto having get breaked and like in science, we want people to present their work and show us they did study all previous breakings and that none apply to their work. This is annoying, yes, but it's like that in science. If it's done seriously and how people expect it to be ,it will be considered seriously. No cryptographer will ever consider loosing time in such a contest unless there is a serious implication for people or the public (like voting machines for example).
We should bash this stupid annoucement that implies that "if no one breaks it it means it's secure" because that's an insult to cryptography and those that work hard in shadow to have it work properly.
This is really the kind of stuff that pisses me of :(