I would say that his entire story quite paints a picture of an unusable service.
The technology is not relevant, the result is. His results are unacceptable. Maybe they are not very usefull for doing statistics, but they are rather usefull for determining usability, and that is really the only thing that counts for a customer.
Many places in Europe had cellular phone networks before the introducton of GSM. They were analog systems pretty similar to what was there in the USA.
The main advantages of GSM had to do with standarisation and management advantages of a digital network. The only feature beyond voice conversation that was there from the start was text messaging.
Usage of cellular phones was a lot higher in the USA at the time, but it wasnt like it was non existant in Europe.
> Assuming this is true (maybe not) then the US carriers would pick the latter so they can get the most out of each tower. After all, theyhave more to put up b/c they need to cover a MUCH larger area.
I don't know that, I do know that the rest of the world together is a lot bigger then the USA, while I simply cannot remember encountering a place without coverage in the last decade while being outside, and only a few while being inside. That includes places like the jungle in northern Thailand, the mountain areas of Austria, Spain, France, Germany, middle of the desert in Egypt and many more non urban areas. Places without coverage do exist, but as long as some form of human settlement or travel is taking place, you have an extremely good chance of getting coverage also.
> I'm in VT, and coverage is spotty due to the mountains. How to eurpoean cells compare in mountainous regions?
I have no experience with Japan, but I do with South Korea and CHina. I can just grab my GSM phone and use it in either country without much care for where I am exactly in those countries. The same is simply not true in the USA.
So, while you may be right that both have a bit of a mixed market, they both seem to have excelent coverage for the GSM system.
And well, as someone else mentioned before, you can basicly use a GSM phone almost everywhere in the world with an extremely good chance of good coverage, that is, as long as you are not in the USA.
When reading through the entire discussion, it really reads like a blast from the past, people complaining about coverage outside cities? no coverage inside buildings? having to rush to the Window to have a chance at all to have a phone conversation when inside?
That was the way things were over here like 15 years ago when they were introducing GSM on a large scale, but has been something of the past for quite some time now.
> Making points that have nothing to do with the conversation is much more silly, don't you think? I didn't make the claim that everyone on Slashdot thinks the same thing. I'm making the point that if one is going to say that copying content you don't have the rights to and breaking license agreements is not theft when it comes to music and movies, then it becomes difficult to argue such when it comes to GPL'ed software.
You were claiming that people on slashdot make the argument consistently, and I was pointing out that they as consistently make the opposing argument. That relates directly to your initial claim.
Just in case you dont understand, the people calling this theft now could for all you know be the same people who call downloading music theft.
> The argument is made consistently on Slashdot that theft is the physical removal of someone elses property. It means they no longer have their original property.
That argument is always part of a discussion where people consistently claim otherwise. Attributing a consistent opinion to a few million people is silly.
> If we would be honest, we would admit that the backup argument was brought forward during the previous decade as an excuse for copying stuff. That the backup somehow ended in our cousin's hands, and in our cousin friends' hands, was entirely a 'coincidence'...
Maybe true for you, definitely not true for me. When I buy a CD (yeah, I am one of those exceptional people who does that every now and then), I make a copy that I use and I store the original in a safe place. I suggest you speak for yourself here and not for others.
Also keep in mind that even in the USA, you pay a levy on recordable CDs to compensate for making a copy. Either that levy goes, or the RIAA explicitly allows backups and stops standing in the way of it, they actually get money because of it!
> Now, if someone had developed a JVM in all but name (unable to call it "Java" for branding reasons), GPL'd it and said that it aimed towards Java compliance...
Yep.. it is one of the 2 possible outcomes that I see, but the outcome would still be a large dent in Sun's relevance. What I am trying to say in my article is that Sun could prevent this from happening. The longer they wait the more difficult it will become.
> It really is annoying not being able to redistribute those binaries that you've made. Keep shouting, but shout at the right people. They are listening, but big ships take time to turn.
I know they are listening, things got a bit better over time already, but that coastline it is going to hit is not going to move away to give more room to a big ship. Sun's Java implementation is still relevant today, but as alternatives become more mature, it will lose that. Alternatives are not limited to Java reimplementations or.NET or clones, and esp. when it comes to practical web application development, the alternatives are a lot less cumbersome to use also. They wont provide everything that Java should, but that rarely turns out to be a limitation.
What counts for me is in the end how much code is out there that I can use and combine to build custom solutions. Java does pretty well in that, but for the large majority of web based projects its somewhat dwarfed by what is out there written in php or perl for example, and then there is ruby and python and pike and..
To me it seems that Sun just really doesn't know what it wants. They want control and yet also want to get the benefits of open source. I think it is really simple, Linus seems to have pretty good control over Linux still because he provides good leadership. If Sun is capable of that they can let go of their worries there. They should keep in mind however that open source software doesn't need them, but many who are involved with open source software would welcome the day that Sun just clearly moves into a direction. They have to if they want to keep some kind of leadership in their own open source experiments really.
> OK, I'll admit I'm a beginner when it comes to Java, and I have been working for Sun for 4 years (which ends in a fortnight due to economics) so I maybe have been drinking the Kool Aid a bit, but why don't you ask IBM to make you a Free/OpenBSD JVM port? From what I can see, IBM loves to make PR out of Sun's perceived failings. Just look at the amount of IBM posted here as news.
I am a former IBM employee (worked there for 11 years), let me just keep it at IBM being a company thats there for the money, no more and no less. They have found a way to proffit from Linux so they use it and promote it. There is no reason to believe that IBM's support has any other motivations.
For as far as them producing a 'real' open source Java version, I doubt they can do that without either Sun's blessing or rewriting a huge pile of code.
Sun promotes Java almost as if it is a religion at times. Now, I do think they came up with something pretty neat there, but I think they are also the ones who effectively control the standard and decide what can call itself Java. That simply makes them the ones to look at first imho.
But, as far as my article goes, open source is not what I am asking for, I have the source and in a form that can be used to create a native version for my platforms of choice.
What I can't do easily is provide the result of that to others. Since I make a living from combining seperate bits and pieces into working systems, that makes Suns implementation unusable for me. In specific situations, the gnu solution was usefull for me.
I don't need Sun's blessing or warantee on a version that I build myself from their sources. I don't need advertising rights or whatever. I do need the ability to take the native version I built and put it on a customers machine to perform some job there, instead of having that customer go to Sun, jump through some hoops to get the source, then go somewhere else to get the patchkit, and then back to Sun to get a Linux jdk so they can actually build a native version.
What Sun does is their thing, but right now I rather use an alternative that doesn't impose such a limitation on me, You can read my article as an attack on Java, I'd rather suggest reading it as an explanation of why I use something else while Java would do as good or maybe even a better job from a purely technical point of view. If there would be a for me usable JRE and JVM I would use them where apropriate.
> Sun is very bad at PR and struggles to communicate well with the Linux/FOSS/Slashdot community. That's no secret. You can judge for yourself.
Which I find somewhat interesting because for a long time, Sun was one of the few major players who actually had a way to deal with hobbyist users and small time developers by means of affordable software and tools (I have a whole bunch of Solaris CDs here directly from Sun which was cheaper then the single version of AIX that I have, not to mention things like Irix or HPUX) To me it seems like they somehow lost this.
> What also amazes me, is that Miguel jumped on the.NET bandwagon and started a.NET/C#/CLR project frmo scratch when he could have taken an Open Source or Free JVM/JRE project and built upon that.
Would have been more usefull to me personally. It seems to me that he has personal and possibly political motivations for his choice. Wether this has to do more with MS or Sun is unclear to me.
On another note, let me elaborate a bit on the idea of running Java (or anything else) with help of Linux compatibility on a system like FreeBSD.
I mentioned that the performance is not as good as when using a native version. It may of course perform good enough for what you need still.
For a server admin, installing Linux compatibility means introducing more kernel code and a whole lot of libraries. That is extra code that needs to be kept uptodate, and that does nothing more then duplicate what is already there. Diskspace is not a r
> Wrong. You confuse Java the language with Java the platform.
Not really, tho I may be unclear about it in that article. JAVA as a language I like. the platform as it currently comes from SUN I don't like.
> gcc compiles Java source down to native machine code on most architectures and provides its own runtime for the parts of the system which require it.
And have you ever tried using it with real world JAVA software that an end user might want to run, let alone OOo?
Come back when you did.
In case you don't want to or can't be bothered, it works very well for specific situations, but is not a complete replacement.
> If you want to run Java bytecode (either compiled with gcc or some other Java compiler) you have a joice of Java Virtual Machines and Java Runtime Environments from sever manufacturers, including IBM.
And which ones that are actually capable of running the large majority of JAVA applications out there also run on the platform that I happen to need for other things? (You'll prolly argue that I should switch platforms in that case, well, I don't need JAVA, so the choice is really easy for me when it comes to it)
> FreeBSD and OpenBSD run Linux binaries very well. Native ports to these platforms are not required. Incidentally, Solaris 10 will also run Linux binaries unmodified on x86.
First of all performance of the Linux jvm on FreeBSD completely and utterly sucks when compared to a native port.
Second, that does nothign whatsoever for people who need to run this on say Alpha or MIPS or PPC hardware for example.
> Well, I use Slackware and that comes with an up-to-date Sun Java Runtime Environment. Installing a JRE (or SDK) is not very difficult, and is rearely more complicated than extracting a tarball as root and setting some environmnet variables. As for recompiling Java to run against "new libraries" you completely miss the point of Java. The new JREs are backwards compatible.
And you obviously have no clue about the world outside JAVA. There are libraries outside the JVM that are used by the JVM. There may be reasons for having to change such a library, and there may even be reasons to change to a version that is not binary compatible (and hence requires programs that use it to be relinked).
> Unless you have been living under a rock, you will realise that there are several independent Java implementations available, including ones from Sun and IBM, a free one called kaffe, and of course gcc's java compiler. Java will not become irrelevant. There are billions of computing devices around the world running Java. What might happen is that Miguel's anti Java/pro.NET FUD might become a mindset amongst the/. zealots. (Might? I think it already has).
I personally don't care about mono, and I do actually care about JAVA as a language. I see SUN having done a good job at turnign JAVA into a burden instead of a solution for the large majority of my customers that use it. I don't deal with that side of things, but its very hard to not notice what happens (unless maybe when you are blinded by SUN?)
I am aware of there being independent reimplementations, and I am also aware of their usability outside very specific situations, it seems you have no clue.
> Anyway, your article sucks.
Everyone their own opinion. I hope you live happy under the SUN.
> I work on several open source projects. I use java -- in fact, I prefer Java. There is no problem with the current situation.
This article that I wrote quite some time ago is still as valid as when I wrote it.
You may not have a problem, but who are you to decide for others that they don't have a problem? So stop claiming there is no problem just because you don't happen to have one.
> and they keep trying to sell software. Stop it. Cut it out. It's a loser, big time.
While I agree with your analysis of SUN, any financial analist looking at things will spot Microsoft and conclude that selling software is not a loser, its a big time winner.
> Portability is not a strict requirement to an Open Source project.
No, it just used to be an unforfilled major selling argument for JAVA. Besides, portability is not a requirement, but a big advantage to have still for open source software.
> You make it sound like all those companies are now in a bind and rushing out to replace vb6. Guess what, you are wrong. Microsoft is not releasing new versions based on vb6, that is it, no global catastrophe as you predict.
> VB6 code will continue to run - and that is a good thing since it is undeniably the most used language, followed closely by COBOL. Guess what? COBOL is also not going to have any new versions anytime soon either.
You are wrong there.
You can still get uptodate COBOL compilers that run on modern platforms and from multiple sources.
You can no longer get VB6 from its only source, and after a while you will have the situation where you can either run on an outdated operating system or not run VB6.
That my friend is where the difference lies and why your example is invalid.
As a bit of advice, it doesn't do much for the credibility of your future anti-American badmouthing if you don't at least get your facts straight.
It does not do much for your patriotism to regard every critical comment about the USA as being an attack and being anti American. It also doesn't do well for the credibility of your arguments. Maybe learn that the most valuable thing a FRIEND can do is provide you with valid critisism. Just nice words and 'all is fine' is not going to bring you anything at all.
> I think the main objection to the ICC is that it will be highly politicized.
THere is definitely a risk of that, yes.
> We aren't talking about going after thieves and murderers, but heads of states that commit atrocities. I doubt the US would just give shelter to such a person unless they were acting in the interests of the US (such as a US general found liable for accidental deaths of civilians in an armed conflict).
THe USA has regularely pressured other states into extraditing former heads of state, has gone into another country to capture its back then current head of state. For good reasons? in the cases I am aware of, in all cases, there was an obvious problem that was not dealt with locally so I think there were good reasons.
The problem is that when you apply that to others, but don't want to submit to the same standard, you are being hypocrit. If the USA has a decent legal system, which for most purposes it has, there is virtually zero chance of there beign a succesfull claim against a US citizen in the ICC, that is, unless there is a problem that the USA refuses to deal with.
Of course, that doesn't change the risk of the ICC becomming heavily politicized, and without proper checks that is a real problem.
Not participating will not change that, participating means you may be able to prevent it. So while I do see that problem, I don't see how the non participation of the USA will help preventing it, nor do I see how the USA applying different standards depending on who they deal with is going to help this, if anything, it makes it worse.
> The question would be whether the trial was fair and the rights of the citizen in question were respected.
Cases being handled by international tribunals often seem to do pretty well with regards to that, and are at times critisized for being too protective with regards to the defendant. I share the concern, but there is little practical evidence to suggest this will be a major problem.
That the US justice system is politicezed at least in certain things has all to do with the system and in no way means each system will be that way or has a tendency to become that way.
> Sorry to deflate your anti-American rant midstream, but your premise is based on an incorrect assumption--namely, that U.S. courts do not enforce foreign judgments.
No, it is based on the notion that US courts believe they can apply US law to non US citizens doing things outside the USA.
It is also based on the USA not recognizing things like the international criminal court, and while there is one valid argument being brought up (who are going to verify that those judges are doing a proper job and are not being political?) against it, there is also a lot of disinformation being brought up to justify this.
> The USA exists for the benefit of US citizens. It benefits US citizens for foreigners who hurt US citizens to be brought to trial in the US; it does not benefit US citizens for US citizens to be brought to trial abroad.
No argument there, just don't be all upset when others do the same.
> Make him pay a fine? His money's not in the UK. They'd have to get these things from the US, and the US would refuse.
Isn't it interesting how they indeed refuse such things, yet demand from other countries that they extradite their citizens to the USA so the USA can apply its own law abroad? In a specific case they went to the point of taking military action even (tho the guy in question no doubt deserved it)
If people wonder why outsiders consider the USA bad and hypocrit, think about those things again maybe.
Heh, recently I was talkign to a rather big tech company wanting to hire me to do JAVA work for them..
The thing is, I have not written any serious JAVA code since the days of JDK 1.1, but I did write quite a few things in other languages since. I use a similar method of writing down what I want to do in comments, slowly ending up basicly describing the actual program's functinality there, and then fill in the code.
Language does matter, one language is more suited to a task then another, but it should not matter at all for the process that gets you from a design (or even just an idea) to working code.
(Oh, and I didn't accept the job, there is a reason why I didn't do JAVA since the 1.1 days, tho with the JDK5 this may change, at least you can avoid )
An american computer geek has discovered that if you don't set an administrative password, your computer is vulnerable to root attacks.
*gasp*
I am sorry but I don't see how the fact that your windows computer, if you don't have a firewall between it and the world, is vulnerable to attack, is news. It's more like common sense...
In fact, even if you install a firewall on your windows computer, it's still vulnerable to any number of dozens of attacks.
Hmm.. you are almost there.. if you ake your second comment, and just start thinking about how to fix it...
You see, a firewall is really important..
but making sure your system is not vulnerable regardless of the firewall really works a lot better.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say that his entire story quite paints a picture of an unusable service.
The technology is not relevant, the result is. His results are unacceptable. Maybe they are not very usefull for doing statistics, but they are rather usefull for determining usability, and that is really the only thing that counts for a customer.
No idea about that, I do know that many train and subway stations in Europe have repeaters, and so do many trains and subways.
Many places in Europe had cellular phone networks before the introducton of GSM. They were analog systems pretty similar to what was there in the USA.
The main advantages of GSM had to do with standarisation and management advantages of a digital network. The only feature beyond voice conversation that was there from the start was text messaging.
Usage of cellular phones was a lot higher in the USA at the time, but it wasnt like it was non existant in Europe.
> Assuming this is true (maybe not) then the US carriers would pick the latter so they can get the most out of each tower. After all, theyhave more to put up b/c they need to cover a MUCH larger area.
I don't know that, I do know that the rest of the world together is a lot bigger then the USA, while I simply cannot remember encountering a place without coverage in the last decade while being outside, and only a few while being inside. That includes places like the jungle in northern Thailand, the mountain areas of Austria, Spain, France, Germany, middle of the desert in Egypt and many more non urban areas. Places without coverage do exist, but as long as some form of human settlement or travel is taking place, you have an extremely good chance of getting coverage also.
> I'm in VT, and coverage is spotty due to the mountains. How to eurpoean cells compare in mountainous regions?
See above. No problem usually.
I have no experience with Japan, but I do with South Korea and CHina. I can just grab my GSM phone and use it in either country without much care for where I am exactly in those countries. The same is simply not true in the USA.
So, while you may be right that both have a bit of a mixed market, they both seem to have excelent coverage for the GSM system.
And well, as someone else mentioned before, you can basicly use a GSM phone almost everywhere in the world with an extremely good chance of good coverage, that is, as long as you are not in the USA.
When reading through the entire discussion, it really reads like a blast from the past, people complaining about coverage outside cities? no coverage inside buildings? having to rush to the Window to have a chance at all to have a phone conversation when inside?
That was the way things were over here like 15 years ago when they were introducing GSM on a large scale, but has been something of the past for quite some time now.
> Making points that have nothing to do with the conversation is much more silly, don't you think? I didn't make the claim that everyone on Slashdot thinks the same thing. I'm making the point that if one is going to say that copying content you don't have the rights to and breaking license agreements is not theft when it comes to music and movies, then it becomes difficult to argue such when it comes to GPL'ed software.
You were claiming that people on slashdot make the argument consistently, and I was pointing out that they as consistently make the opposing argument. That relates directly to your initial claim.
Just in case you dont understand, the people calling this theft now could for all you know be the same people who call downloading music theft.
> You only use Apple machines but you can only afford five bucks to donate to PearPC?
Typical case of cause and effect?
> The argument is made consistently on Slashdot that theft is the physical removal of someone elses property. It means they no longer have their original property.
That argument is always part of a discussion where people consistently claim otherwise. Attributing a consistent opinion to a few million people is silly.
> If we would be honest, we would admit that the backup argument was brought forward during the previous decade as an excuse for copying stuff. That the backup somehow ended in our cousin's hands, and in our cousin friends' hands, was entirely a 'coincidence'...
Maybe true for you, definitely not true for me.
When I buy a CD (yeah, I am one of those exceptional people who does that every now and then), I make a copy that I use and I store the original in a safe place. I suggest you speak for yourself here and not for others.
Also keep in mind that even in the USA, you pay a levy on recordable CDs to compensate for making a copy. Either that levy goes, or the RIAA explicitly allows backups and stops standing in the way of it, they actually get money because of it!
> Now, if someone had developed a JVM in all but name (unable to call it "Java" for branding reasons), GPL'd it and said that it aimed towards Java compliance...
.NET or clones, and esp. when it comes to practical web application development, the alternatives are a lot less cumbersome to use also. They wont provide everything that Java should, but that rarely turns out to be a limitation.
Yep.. it is one of the 2 possible outcomes that I see, but the outcome would still be a large dent in Sun's relevance. What I am trying to say in my article is that Sun could prevent this from happening. The longer they wait the more difficult it will become.
> It really is annoying not being able to redistribute those binaries that you've made. Keep shouting, but shout at the right people. They are listening, but big ships take time to turn.
I know they are listening, things got a bit better over time already, but that coastline it is going to hit is not going to move away to give more room to a big ship. Sun's Java implementation is still relevant today, but as alternatives become more mature, it will lose that. Alternatives are not limited to Java reimplementations or
What counts for me is in the end how much code is out there that I can use and combine to build custom solutions. Java does pretty well in that, but for the large majority of web based projects its somewhat dwarfed by what is out there written in php or perl for example, and then there is ruby and python and pike and..
To me it seems that Sun just really doesn't know what it wants. They want control and yet also want to get the benefits of open source. I think it is really simple, Linus seems to have pretty good control over Linux still because he provides good leadership. If Sun is capable of that they can let go of their worries there. They should keep in mind however that open source software doesn't need them, but many who are involved with open source software would welcome the day that Sun just clearly moves into a direction. They have to if they want to keep some kind of leadership in their own open source experiments really.
lda #$00 .loop .loop
sta $d020
sta $d021
xor #$01
jmp
> OK, I'll admit I'm a beginner when it comes to Java, and I have been working for Sun for 4 years (which ends in a fortnight due to economics) so I maybe have been drinking the Kool Aid a bit, but why don't you ask IBM to make you a Free/OpenBSD JVM port? From what I can see, IBM loves to make PR out of Sun's perceived failings. Just look at the amount of IBM posted here as news.
.NET bandwagon and started a .NET/C#/CLR project frmo scratch when he could have taken an Open Source or Free JVM/JRE project and built upon that.
I am a former IBM employee (worked there for 11 years), let me just keep it at IBM being a company thats there for the money, no more and no less. They have found a way to proffit from Linux so they use it and promote it. There is no reason to believe that IBM's support has any other motivations.
For as far as them producing a 'real' open source Java version, I doubt they can do that without either Sun's blessing or rewriting a huge pile of code.
Sun promotes Java almost as if it is a religion at times. Now, I do think they came up with something pretty neat there, but I think they are also the ones who effectively control the standard and decide what can call itself Java. That simply makes them the ones to look at first imho.
But, as far as my article goes, open source is not what I am asking for, I have the source and in a form that can be used to create a native version for my platforms of choice.
What I can't do easily is provide the result of that to others. Since I make a living from combining seperate bits and pieces into working systems, that makes Suns implementation unusable for me. In specific situations, the gnu solution was usefull for me.
I don't need Sun's blessing or warantee on a version that I build myself from their sources. I don't need advertising rights or whatever. I do need the ability to take the native version I built and put it on a customers machine to perform some job there, instead of having that customer go to Sun, jump through some hoops to get the source, then go somewhere else to get the patchkit, and then back to Sun to get a Linux jdk so they can actually build a native version.
What Sun does is their thing, but right now I rather use an alternative that doesn't impose such a limitation on me, You can read my article as an attack on Java, I'd rather suggest reading it as an explanation of why I use something else while Java would do as good or maybe even a better job from a purely technical point of view. If there would be a for me usable JRE and JVM I would use them where apropriate.
> Sun is very bad at PR and struggles to communicate well with the Linux/FOSS/Slashdot community. That's no secret. You can judge for yourself.
Which I find somewhat interesting because for a long time, Sun was one of the few major players who actually had a way to deal with hobbyist users and small time developers by means of affordable software and tools (I have a whole bunch of Solaris CDs here directly from Sun which was cheaper then the single version of AIX that I have, not to mention things like Irix or HPUX) To me it seems like they somehow lost this.
> What also amazes me, is that Miguel jumped on the
Would have been more usefull to me personally. It seems to me that he has personal and possibly political motivations for his choice. Wether this has to do more with MS or Sun is unclear to me.
On another note, let me elaborate a bit on the idea of running Java (or anything else) with help of Linux compatibility on a system like FreeBSD.
I mentioned that the performance is not as good as when using a native version. It may of course perform good enough for what you need still.
For a server admin, installing Linux compatibility means introducing more kernel code and a whole lot of libraries. That is extra code that needs to be kept uptodate, and that does nothing more then duplicate what is already there. Diskspace is not a r
> Wrong. You confuse Java the language with Java the platform.
.NET FUD might become a mindset amongst the /. zealots. (Might? I think it already has).
Not really, tho I may be unclear about it in that article. JAVA as a language I like. the platform as it currently comes from SUN I don't like.
> gcc compiles Java source down to native machine code on most architectures and provides its own runtime for the parts of the system which require it.
And have you ever tried using it with real world JAVA software that an end user might want to run, let alone OOo?
Come back when you did.
In case you don't want to or can't be bothered, it works very well for specific situations, but is not a complete replacement.
> If you want to run Java bytecode (either compiled with gcc or some other Java compiler) you have a joice of Java Virtual Machines and Java Runtime Environments from sever manufacturers, including IBM.
And which ones that are actually capable of running the large majority of JAVA applications out there also run on the platform that I happen to need for other things? (You'll prolly argue that I should switch platforms in that case, well, I don't need JAVA, so the choice is really easy for me when it comes to it)
> FreeBSD and OpenBSD run Linux binaries very well. Native ports to these platforms are not required. Incidentally, Solaris 10 will also run Linux binaries unmodified on x86.
First of all performance of the Linux jvm on FreeBSD completely and utterly sucks when compared to a native port.
Second, that does nothign whatsoever for people who need to run this on say Alpha or MIPS or PPC hardware for example.
> Well, I use Slackware and that comes with an up-to-date Sun Java Runtime Environment. Installing a JRE (or SDK) is not very difficult, and is rearely more complicated than extracting a tarball as root and setting some environmnet variables. As for recompiling Java to run against "new libraries" you completely miss the point of Java. The new JREs are backwards compatible.
And you obviously have no clue about the world outside JAVA. There are libraries outside the JVM that are used by the JVM. There may be reasons for having to change such a library, and there may even be reasons to change to a version that is not binary compatible (and hence requires programs that use it to be relinked).
> Unless you have been living under a rock, you will realise that there are several independent Java implementations available, including ones from Sun and IBM, a free one called kaffe, and of course gcc's java compiler. Java will not become irrelevant. There are billions of computing devices around the world running Java. What might happen is that Miguel's anti Java/pro
I personally don't care about mono, and I do actually care about JAVA as a language. I see SUN having done a good job at turnign JAVA into a burden instead of a solution for the large majority of my customers that use it. I don't deal with that side of things, but its very hard to not notice what happens (unless maybe when you are blinded by SUN?)
I am aware of there being independent reimplementations, and I am also aware of their usability outside very specific situations, it seems you have no clue.
> Anyway, your article sucks.
Everyone their own opinion. I hope you live happy under the SUN.
> I work on several open source projects. I use java -- in fact, I prefer Java. There is no problem with the current situation.
This article that I wrote quite some time ago is still as valid as when I wrote it.
You may not have a problem, but who are you to decide for others that they don't have a problem? So stop claiming there is no problem just because you don't happen to have one.
> and they keep trying to sell software. Stop it. Cut it out. It's a loser, big time.
While I agree with your analysis of SUN, any financial analist looking at things will spot Microsoft and conclude that selling software is not a loser, its a big time winner.
> Portability is not a strict requirement to an Open Source project.
No, it just used to be an unforfilled major selling argument for JAVA. Besides, portability is not a requirement, but a big advantage to have still for open source software.
> You make it sound like all those companies are now in a bind and rushing out to replace vb6. Guess what, you are wrong. Microsoft is not releasing new versions based on vb6, that is it, no global catastrophe as you predict.
> VB6 code will continue to run - and that is a good thing since it is undeniably the most used language, followed closely by COBOL. Guess what? COBOL is also not going to have any new versions anytime soon either.
You are wrong there.
You can still get uptodate COBOL compilers that run on modern platforms and from multiple sources.
You can no longer get VB6 from its only source, and after a while you will have the situation where you can either run on an outdated operating system or not run VB6.
That my friend is where the difference lies and why your example is invalid.
As a bit of advice, it doesn't do much for the credibility of your future anti-American badmouthing if you don't at least get your facts straight.
It does not do much for your patriotism to regard every critical comment about the USA as being an attack and being anti American. It also doesn't do well for the credibility of your arguments. Maybe learn that the most valuable thing a FRIEND can do is provide you with valid critisism. Just nice words and 'all is fine' is not going to bring you anything at all.
> I think the main objection to the ICC is that it will be highly politicized.
THere is definitely a risk of that, yes.
> We aren't talking about going after thieves and murderers, but heads of states that commit atrocities. I doubt the US would just give shelter to such a person unless they were acting in the interests of the US (such as a US general found liable for accidental deaths of civilians in an armed conflict).
THe USA has regularely pressured other states into extraditing former heads of state, has gone into another country to capture its back then current head of state. For good reasons? in the cases I am aware of, in all cases, there was an obvious problem that was not dealt with locally so I think there were good reasons.
The problem is that when you apply that to others, but don't want to submit to the same standard, you are being hypocrit. If the USA has a decent legal system, which for most purposes it has, there is virtually zero chance of there beign a succesfull claim against a US citizen in the ICC, that is, unless there is a problem that the USA refuses to deal with.
Of course, that doesn't change the risk of the ICC becomming heavily politicized, and without proper checks that is a real problem.
Not participating will not change that, participating means you may be able to prevent it. So while I do see that problem, I don't see how the non participation of the USA will help preventing it, nor do I see how the USA applying different standards depending on who they deal with is going to help this, if anything, it makes it worse.
> The question would be whether the trial was fair and the rights of the citizen in question were respected.
Cases being handled by international tribunals often seem to do pretty well with regards to that, and are at times critisized for being too protective with regards to the defendant. I share the concern, but there is little practical evidence to suggest this will be a major problem.
That the US justice system is politicezed at least in certain things has all to do with the system and in no way means each system will be that way or has a tendency to become that way.
> Sorry to deflate your anti-American rant midstream, but your premise is based on an incorrect assumption--namely, that U.S. courts do not enforce foreign judgments.
No, it is based on the notion that US courts believe they can apply US law to non US citizens doing things outside the USA.
It is also based on the USA not recognizing things like the international criminal court, and while there is one valid argument being brought up (who are going to verify that those judges are doing a proper job and are not being political?) against it, there is also a lot of disinformation being brought up to justify this.
> The USA exists for the benefit of US citizens. It benefits US citizens for foreigners who hurt US citizens to be brought to trial in the US; it does not benefit US citizens for US citizens to be brought to trial abroad.
No argument there, just don't be all upset when others do the same.
> Make him pay a fine? His money's not in the UK. They'd have to get these things from the US, and the US would refuse.
Isn't it interesting how they indeed refuse such things, yet demand from other countries that they extradite their citizens to the USA so the USA can apply its own law abroad? In a specific case they went to the point of taking military action even (tho the guy in question no doubt deserved it)
If people wonder why outsiders consider the USA bad and hypocrit, think about those things again maybe.
Heh, recently I was talkign to a rather big tech company wanting to hire me to do JAVA work for them..
The thing is, I have not written any serious JAVA code since the days of JDK 1.1, but I did write quite a few things in other languages since. I use a similar method of writing down what I want to do in comments, slowly ending up basicly describing the actual program's functinality there, and then fill in the code.
Language does matter, one language is more suited to a task then another, but it should not matter at all for the process that gets you from a design (or even just an idea) to working code.
(Oh, and I didn't accept the job, there is a reason why I didn't do JAVA since the 1.1 days, tho with the JDK5 this may change, at least you can avoid )
> I don't know of any other Motif software that is even in minor use anymore.
:)
JDK1.4 and most likely all others use Motif, does that count? (eventho it is not strictly spoken an application of course
Hmm.. you are almost there.. if you ake your second comment, and just start thinking about how to fix it...
You see, a firewall is really important..
but making sure your system is not vulnerable regardless of the firewall really works a lot better.