In 1870, people would say we could not get to the moon because horses would not survive in the vacuum of space. It's just not true, as Jules Verne wrote his famous novel in 1865. By then, many of the most important mechanics rules to go to the moon were known and actively studied: initial acceleration and speed, travel length, isolation in order to keep pressure, means to get safely back, the author even imagined a zero-G spot somewhere between earth and the moon, and a giant canon to provide the initial acceleration... You would be surprised, read it. If you know maths, it'll be funnier.
The difference between the travel to the moon and the colonization of space, is that 142 years ago, we knew the goal and some of the most important rules, we just lacked the means (we even knew the basics to get them) and a major motivation. Now, to colonize the outer-space, we know practically nothing, and that that we know tells us it's impossible and useless. The technological revolutions that people in this forum are talking about are exactly the 'magic wand' the blog purposely tries to avoid, and they are by no means better than Jules Verne's giant canon.
Even the space elevator, which actually is the only one to realistically approach to the 'columbiad' isn't useful to that travel.
I installed Safari on my PC as soon as I read on/. they were releasing it - So far, it's a very negative experience: as some people have already pointed out, the interface looks just plain ugly on Windows XP, I've seen lots of crashes and bugs, and pages are rendered really ugly (/. main page doesn't shows headlines, etc). It still is very slow, much more that Firefox and Opera (I can't say for IE6). Now, beta versions are usually like this, so no surprise there, but if they can't yet deliver a truly faster browser, they shouldn't sell it that way. Let's wait for the final version.
My god, you really are a fanatic OSS troll, I can't believe they moded you "Insightful" (are you Richard Stallman ? That would explain everything). I can't believe that you believe half the stuff that you just wrote, and I can't believe that you claim it as if all non-believers are just plain stupid. I mean, you sound like a teenager that just spent the last few months in a taliban camp, seriously - maybe you forgot to write "die Micro$oft, die slowly and in pain"... pretty rude post.
Feed them the line about "the pen is mightier than the sword" and hope they buy it. Honestly, are you even believing what you're saying ? People aren't that stupid that they'll just buy into whatever propaganda you feed them, it's a different culture with different values, and America failed this war because they just didn't understand it. Only neo-conservators could invent such a stupid ideology - Sarkozy isn't one of them.
I just think it's really dangerous to yourself to answer in such a tone: to any political subject, you can similarly give a dozen radical counter-arguments and flaws. It's dangerous because on the long term you become a puppet to any good enough puppet-master, who will tell you all counterarguments that you previously missed, and you will happily respond with hate against said subject. Concerning freedoms, it's quite obvious the USA have lost a lot of these in the past 10 years, but it still is one the countries that has enough liberties as to be mentioned as a "free country", even if not all people in America are equally free. Political anarchism was a 19th century defeated ideology, and no one, even people we today label as "terrorist", even remember what it was all about.
I always said that we lived in a computer simulated Matrix, and this just proves that the Matrix is optimized to speed up things when we're not looking. Think about it: we only see a minimal part of our surrounding world, does the Matrix need to execute quantum probabilities, or even atomic-level algorithms for the myriads of galaxies and stars and cosmic clouds or black holes, when we only see gravitational and electro-magnetic effects ? Well, no, obviously not. Does the Matrix need to perform cat in the box games when must humans beings are not using super-mega accelerators ? No.
In fact, I'm beginning to think that I've been elected to tell the truth to you, poor, insignificant and ignorant virtual reality-zombies. But I can't prove it, so I'm still hesitating.
You just tell the compiler/eclipse to act as if the code is 1.4/1.3 and it will handle it. Listen, I'm not trying at all to downplay you, nor to disallow your expertise. I have more than 3 years of professional experience in Java development, and I can tell you that sentence is just plain wrong. I know of all javac/Eclipse compiler options, and they aren't (and can't) be enough to cleanly compile code into previous VMs versions, period. In fact Eclipse has a nice feature that let's you target the right VM when you are compiling (among those installed in your system). Hell, I have even had troubles targeting JVM 1.4.0 from JVM 1.4.2 (the reason: at the time, new XML-related API and implementations override behavior from third-party libraries).
Trust me, you want to avoid hours and hours of debugging, however, if you still aren't convinced, I seriously advice you to try it and get back to this forum in a couple of years. Back to the main thread, C# did great in not having those "semi-backwards" compatibility issues: all of C# 2.0 new features are incompatible with previous CLR versions. Therefore, if you want to benefit from them, you have to adopt all of the new (by then).Net 2.0 environment: Visual Studio 2005, CLR 2.0, compiler version 2.0, ASP.Net 2005, etc. All or nothing, which is why, by pure coincidence, Microsoft released all of those new things roughly a the same time.
Instead, Sun chose to release some backwards incompatible features, and the ones who are compatible, must be turned on with compiling options (and you must remember to turn off those that aren't) ; Sun released it's next three different IDEs (Netbeans, JSC, JSE) at months separated dates, and they featured different degrees of Java 5 support ; and last but not the least, if you find.Net version numbering difficult, just check the Java one.
No, YOU are wrong: target indicates that the bytecode will be compatible with the specified VM. In fact, there are many steps that have to be taken if you want to compile code that will run for a previous VM with a modern version of a Java compiler:
disable language unsupported features (generics, assertions can be compiled within a certain degree - enumerations can't) ;
compile against the libraries version of the target VM, otherwise even if the class files remain compatible, there may be calls to non-existent methods) ;
ensure yourself that all of your libraries will be compatible with that VM version (not as straightforward as it sounds)
Perform tests against the VM you're targeting, and if it's a desktop distributable application, against all VMs that came after that version;
??? I forgot.
In fact, in most projects that target an obsolete VM, it's much, much easier to get yourself the compiler for that VM, and code only on it. As an example, I'm currently running Eclipse on Java 6 VM, but since most work is still done on Java 1.4, or even 1.3, I keep most of those JDKs on my hard-drive.....
In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons many people still code on Java 1.4 (as opposed to a MS pure environment, where most C# 1.2 projects translated into C# 2.0 when it appeared 2 years ago), even if it's really hard to imagine otherwise.... Sun could really have done a lot more to encourage Java development.
People hate excuses, and some of the arguments that appear on the post, and arguably many of the answers from/.tters, sound exactly like excuses to refuse to do your job or to refuse to comply to your enterprise standards (you do now that, even if they have major disadvantages for you, there may some advantages four your management to create those standards). You should try to make a list of programs or features that are indispensable for your job, but are available only on Unix/Solaris. Saying something like "X (or whatever) is a better desktop, or I use tar files, or I'm faster on the command line than on Explorer" is just the opposite of what I mean, and that'll make you sound like a cry-baby. Instead: I need the fast command line ops in order to review my logs, or I need the stability of Unix to simulate a server environment, I'm working on that obscure library that's not on Windows, or our product has some precious customers that would like this feature ported on Solaris, that sounds much more mature. If you can't say that, you should question yourself and your motives to go against the mainstream: is it really a professional requirement, or just an immature need to make people comply to your independence needs ?
Well, that and the fact that they were trying to write it as an Applet. I mean, you don't just take a full up office suite and cram it into a tiny portion of a Web Browser window! That's not exactly a recipe for a good interface. The Corel concept was good on paper, but the implementation was outright horrid. Unfortunately, it was probably caused by the misconception that Java == Applets. Something that we programmers still struggle with today.
I like this so much:
it was probably caused by the misconception that Java == Applets
Maybe at Corel they just believed Sun's marketing, something that we developers still dumbly do today !
Quite frankly, playing the blame game on high tech is just not fair on tens of millions of dollars projects.
I think you're completely ignoring Bruce's main point: the reasons why Java Applets failed on the RIA ten years ago, and the reasons why they keep on failing on that market and where instead replaced by AJAX, which IS NOT a superior technology per se (it's not even a technology, but rather a series of techniques and products that are built on it - GWT sounds like a technology, let's wait and see it grows up mature). Bruce is not even talking about Java main successes, he doesn't even question that Java rules server side, that's out of scope for that article. Instead, he wonders if that superiority will be kept: quite frankly, after seeing what Flex and.Net are capable of, you can't pretend that Java is superior in all server enterprise business cases.
The article doesn't deny that there's a lot (a huge, huge lot) of solutions that can fill JRE's and JEE's holes, and particularly, a huge amount of FOSS or OSS solutions, but instead that the lack of integration of those solutions into all client's JREs is preventing applets and desktop applications to win market share. Do you agree that's the main purpose of a JRE, do you ? Now, are those JREs keeping the promises they continously made over the years ? The man is even saying that, paradoxically, if you Open Source Java, that would save, because there would be a better integration ! (I'm saying paradoxically because integration and FOSS together sounds like an oxymoron to me).
Somehow, all of your arguments show you deny even the most basic evidences. The proof of it ? Well, your points are so much on the defensive that you just ignore that sounds as an excuse. Most of your replies to Bruce's points are so completely right on the technological side (it shows you have a major knowledge and understanding of the IT business, and you certainly are a master developer), but you still miss the target.
To me, Java is ironically a little as MS Windows ten years ago: Sun and IBM are heavily promoting it as a much better product than competition's, and have somewhat a monopoly on that market niche
, a monopoly based on words, nothing but words. And with a lot of people that will defend that technology, no matter what. I think you should and you can take, based on your experience, take two steps back, and see the whole picture.
I have to agree with you: just as many other cosmological theories, this one doesnt meet the minima scientific criteria to be called a "theory". It's kind of sad when scientific facts and mathematical abstractions are mixed-up to create ambiguous and semi-religious stories. Not convinced ? Well, here are some questions:
what observable experiencies are explained by this theory that were not explained by the big bang ?
Is the theory simpler than its counterparts ? If you read the article, no.
what kind of observations would eventually allow a disapprouval of the theory ? As, by definition, everything would be reseted at each bang, I have absolutetly no way to know if an observable fact is a singularity for this particular between-bangs, or if it repeats itself at each one
As you pointed out, this "theory" has been considered since Plato, and has made its appearences in religion and "the Matrix". In fact, it's kind of reassuring: we can always put back the quest for the origins, rather than search'em by scientific means.
Oh God no, I am certainly not trying to bash the Linux zealots, even if sometimes I can have some kind of an extremist language. However, I also don't believe that you should take all of the blame for not liking the iPod interface... even more, you should not accept it at all, and eventually, you should ask your money back.
System administrators will not follow your reasoning: they want something from a product, and if it isn't there, they won't buy into it. Even if that is beaucause of ignorance, incompetence, etc. In economics, ideals do not always count. For example, you accepted the challenge to learn a new system, or rather a new interface, because you had certain expectations that eventually are fulfilled, and that's because they are studied and understood by Apple engineers. The fullfillment of those expectations is what keeps you satisfied, and eventualy, prevent you to throw it in a trash.
However, the path to retain Linux at an enterprise level is a lot, lot more difficult than that, and for some users and administrators, it isn't worth it. And I believe that, even the recent upgrades and usability improvements in Linux distributions, Linux still has a long way to walk through, and still is a very difficult system for most (if not all) non IT-savvy users. And that as long as Linux distributors don't understand the reasons, or keep defensive on their own users, they will fail at their goals (to free the world from the evil M$).
Here we go, I didn't really have to wait that long... Whenever there is a post about the Windows/Linux war, Linux zealots feel they have to destroy by any means whatever negative input they hear about their preferred system (or whatever positive input they hear about their archi-rival). This is called "a defensive attitude", and is easily recognized by everybody, as one of their arguments is the typical "blame the user" argument. You all know, that comes back from those far, far away Unix times... The user is stupid and he has been lied to all along, therefore bugs don't count, and their pain can only be self-inflicted. System administrators are just as stupid, even worse, they are incompetent...
I think that attitude is directly responsable for Linux not gaining much more market than it could: it despises users. The articles are pretty clear for the reasons two custommers switched to Windows: they perceived Linux as too hard to manage, and they couldn't just fill all of their needs. About Coofey Intern., it says "Costs are down, too: just 11 IT staff now support 1,600 Windows employees " and "there's very little training required for them to understand how to use it" (who can say that about Linux ?), and "they weren't delivering what they needed to deliver". Why not believe them ?
I am just asking: where does it says that a company should play with IT, and forget to be productive ? If I estimate that I can't have non-scalable costs because of the additional competences needed, is it worth it ?
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between the travel to the moon and the colonization of space, is that 142 years ago, we knew the goal and some of the most important rules, we just lacked the means (we even knew the basics to get them) and a major motivation. Now, to colonize the outer-space, we know practically nothing, and that that we know tells us it's impossible and useless. The technological revolutions that people in this forum are talking about are exactly the 'magic wand' the blog purposely tries to avoid, and they are by no means better than Jules Verne's giant canon.
Even the space elevator, which actually is the only one to realistically approach to the 'columbiad' isn't useful to that travel.
I installed Safari on my PC as soon as I read on /. they were releasing it - So far, it's a very negative experience: as some people have already pointed out, the interface looks just plain ugly on Windows XP, I've seen lots of crashes and bugs, and pages are rendered really ugly ( /. main page doesn't shows headlines, etc). It still is very slow, much more that Firefox and Opera (I can't say for IE6). Now, beta versions are usually like this, so no surprise there, but if they can't yet deliver a truly faster browser, they shouldn't sell it that way. Let's wait for the final version.
My god, you really are a fanatic OSS troll, I can't believe they moded you "Insightful" (are you Richard Stallman ? That would explain everything). I can't believe that you believe half the stuff that you just wrote, and I can't believe that you claim it as if all non-believers are just plain stupid. I mean, you sound like a teenager that just spent the last few months in a taliban camp, seriously - maybe you forgot to write "die Micro$oft, die slowly and in pain"... pretty rude post.
I just think it's really dangerous to yourself to answer in such a tone: to any political subject, you can similarly give a dozen radical counter-arguments and flaws. It's dangerous because on the long term you become a puppet to any good enough puppet-master, who will tell you all counterarguments that you previously missed, and you will happily respond with hate against said subject. Concerning freedoms, it's quite obvious the USA have lost a lot of these in the past 10 years, but it still is one the countries that has enough liberties as to be mentioned as a "free country", even if not all people in America are equally free. Political anarchism was a 19th century defeated ideology, and no one, even people we today label as "terrorist", even remember what it was all about.
I always said that we lived in a computer simulated Matrix, and this just proves that the Matrix is optimized to speed up things when we're not looking. Think about it: we only see a minimal part of our surrounding world, does the Matrix need to execute quantum probabilities, or even atomic-level algorithms for the myriads of galaxies and stars and cosmic clouds or black holes, when we only see gravitational and electro-magnetic effects ? Well, no, obviously not.
Does the Matrix need to perform cat in the box games when must humans beings are not using super-mega accelerators ? No.
In fact, I'm beginning to think that I've been elected to tell the truth to you, poor, insignificant and ignorant virtual reality-zombies. But I can't prove it, so I'm still hesitating.
Trust me, you want to avoid hours and hours of debugging, however, if you still aren't convinced, I seriously advice you to try it and get back to this forum in a couple of years. Back to the main thread, C# did great in not having those "semi-backwards" compatibility issues: all of C# 2.0 new features are incompatible with previous CLR versions. Therefore, if you want to benefit from them, you have to adopt all of the new (by then)
Instead, Sun chose to release some backwards incompatible features, and the ones who are compatible, must be turned on with compiling options (and you must remember to turn off those that aren't) ; Sun released it's next three different IDEs (Netbeans, JSC, JSE) at months separated dates, and they featured different degrees of Java 5 support ; and last but not the least, if you find
-
disable language unsupported features (generics, assertions can be compiled within a certain degree - enumerations can't) ;
-
compile against the libraries version of the target VM, otherwise even if the class files remain compatible, there may be calls to non-existent methods) ;
- ensure yourself that all of your libraries will be compatible with that VM version (not as straightforward as it sounds)
- Perform tests against the VM you're targeting, and if it's a desktop distributable application, against all VMs that came after that version
;
- ??? I forgot.
In fact, in most projects that target an obsolete VM, it's much, much easier to get yourself the compiler for that VM, and code only on it. As an example, I'm currently running Eclipse on Java 6 VM, but since most work is still done on Java 1.4, or even 1.3, I keep most of those JDKs on my hard-drive..... In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons many people still code on Java 1.4 (as opposed to a MS pure environment, where most C# 1.2 projects translated into C# 2.0 when it appeared 2 years ago), even if it's really hard to imagine otherwise.... Sun could really have done a lot more to encourage Java development.People hate excuses, and some of the arguments that appear on the post, and arguably many of the answers from /.tters, sound exactly like excuses to refuse to do your job or to refuse to comply to your enterprise standards (you do now that, even if they have major disadvantages for you, there may some advantages four your management to create those standards). You should try to make a list of programs or features that are indispensable for your job, but are available only on Unix/Solaris. Saying something like "X (or whatever) is a better desktop, or I use tar files, or I'm faster on the command line than on Explorer" is just the opposite of what I mean, and that'll make you sound like a cry-baby. Instead: I need the fast command line ops in order to review my logs, or I need the stability of Unix to simulate a server environment, I'm working on that obscure library that's not on Windows, or our product has some precious customers that would like this feature ported on Solaris, that sounds much more mature. If you can't say that, you should question yourself and your motives to go against the mainstream: is it really a professional requirement, or just an immature need to make people comply to your independence needs ?
Lol.
I like this so much: it was probably caused by the misconception that Java == AppletsMaybe at Corel they just believed Sun's marketing, something that we developers still dumbly do today !
Quite frankly, playing the blame game on high tech is just not fair on tens of millions of dollars projects.
I think you're completely ignoring Bruce's main point: the reasons why Java Applets failed on the RIA ten years ago, and the reasons why they keep on failing on that market and where instead replaced by AJAX, which IS NOT a superior technology per se (it's not even a technology, but rather a series of techniques and products that are built on it - GWT sounds like a technology, let's wait and see it grows up mature). Bruce is not even talking about Java main successes, he doesn't even question that Java rules server side, that's out of scope for that article. Instead, he wonders if that superiority will be kept: quite frankly, after seeing what Flex and .Net are capable of, you can't pretend that Java is superior in all server enterprise business cases.
The article doesn't deny that there's a lot (a huge, huge lot) of solutions that can fill JRE's and JEE's holes, and particularly, a huge amount of FOSS or OSS solutions, but instead that the lack of integration of those solutions into all client's JREs is preventing applets and desktop applications to win market share. Do you agree that's the main purpose of a JRE, do you ? Now, are those JREs keeping the promises they continously made over the years ? The man is even saying that, paradoxically, if you Open Source Java, that would save, because there would be a better integration ! (I'm saying paradoxically because integration and FOSS together sounds like an oxymoron to me).
Somehow, all of your arguments show you deny even the most basic evidences. The proof of it ? Well, your points are so much on the defensive that you just ignore that sounds as an excuse. Most of your replies to Bruce's points are so completely right on the technological side (it shows you have a major knowledge and understanding of the IT business, and you certainly are a master developer), but you still miss the target.
To me, Java is ironically a little as MS Windows ten years ago: Sun and IBM are heavily promoting it as a much better product than competition's, and have somewhat a monopoly on that market niche
, a monopoly based on words, nothing but words. And with a lot of people that will defend that technology, no matter what. I think you should and you can take, based on your experience, take two steps back, and see the whole picture.The same old question: is Linux too much difficult for most people, or am I just plain stupid ? On your opinion ?
As you pointed out, this "theory" has been considered since Plato, and has made its appearences in religion and "the Matrix". In fact, it's kind of reassuring: we can always put back the quest for the origins, rather than search'em by scientific means.
Oh God no, I am certainly not trying to bash the Linux zealots, even if sometimes I can have some kind of an extremist language. However, I also don't believe that you should take all of the blame for not liking the iPod interface... even more, you should not accept it at all, and eventually, you should ask your money back.
System administrators will not follow your reasoning: they want something from a product, and if it isn't there, they won't buy into it. Even if that is beaucause of ignorance, incompetence, etc. In economics, ideals do not always count. For example, you accepted the challenge to learn a new system, or rather a new interface, because you had certain expectations that eventually are fulfilled, and that's because they are studied and understood by Apple engineers. The fullfillment of those expectations is what keeps you satisfied, and eventualy, prevent you to throw it in a trash.
However, the path to retain Linux at an enterprise level is a lot, lot more difficult than that, and for some users and administrators, it isn't worth it. And I believe that, even the recent upgrades and usability improvements in Linux distributions, Linux still has a long way to walk through, and still is a very difficult system for most (if not all) non IT-savvy users. And that as long as Linux distributors don't understand the reasons, or keep defensive on their own users, they will fail at their goals (to free the world from the evil M$).
Here we go, I didn't really have to wait that long... Whenever there is a post about the Windows/Linux war, Linux zealots feel they have to destroy by any means whatever negative input they hear about their preferred system (or whatever positive input they hear about their archi-rival). This is called "a defensive attitude", and is easily recognized by everybody, as one of their arguments is the typical "blame the user" argument. You all know, that comes back from those far, far away Unix times... The user is stupid and he has been lied to all along, therefore bugs don't count, and their pain can only be self-inflicted. System administrators are just as stupid, even worse, they are incompetent...
I think that attitude is directly responsable for Linux not gaining much more market than it could: it despises users. The articles are pretty clear for the reasons two custommers switched to Windows: they perceived Linux as too hard to manage, and they couldn't just fill all of their needs. About Coofey Intern., it says "Costs are down, too: just 11 IT staff now support 1,600 Windows employees " and "there's very little training required for them to understand how to use it" (who can say that about Linux ?), and "they weren't delivering what they needed to deliver". Why not believe them ?
I am just asking: where does it says that a company should play with IT, and forget to be productive ? If I estimate that I can't have non-scalable costs because of the additional competences needed, is it worth it ?