After reading the above, it seems to me that English would be an interesting language to teach in school. Sheesh.
Java most certainly isn't too slow or resource-hungry for most applications. If you look at the typical code generated by your average Java programmer vs. your average C++ programmer, you'll notice that the Java code will be faster and better to maintain.
It also isn't necessarily such a bad education tool. You could go into the inner workings of the JVM, look at the bytecode, the stack-based architecture (very useful model in CS) and garbage collection strategies (Lisp or Smalltalk, anyone?).
Its use as an education tool, rather than an applied programming training course, is questionable though. C++ certainly isn't a very nice model. Smalltalk would be a lot more interesting to study as a 'pure OO' language. C fills the gap between high-level OO-languages and bare metal assembler nicely. The entire range should be taught, using fairly appropriate educational languages. Hey, there are schools out there that teach BASIC and COBOL, and I bet there will be some that teach C-blunt, so don't slag off Java...
2. The economy of scale currently is aimed at laptop users, for whom a 1600x1200 screen is impractically large (unless you happen to be Andre the Giant)
Not so. IBM do a ThinkPad with a 1600x1200 15" display.
Though, I must say, I'm good. Really good. I knew this about myself. I knew I'd make it in the real world, and I did. I make tons more, and have a higher position with more responsibility than any of my friends who studied really hard and got the hardest degree from the best university.
Nobody else believed in me though. Quite frankly, I wouldn't believe any other snot-nosed 18 year old claiming to be too good for school and sure of himself that he'll make it on his own. So I'll think twice before recommending the same course of action to other people...
Hmm, odd. Netscape 4.61 for OS/2, the only version of Netscape which uses native Java rather than a Netscape JVM, certainly has a problem too, but the exploit doesn't seem to work on it. It listens on port 8080, if I request the root document, I get a relocation to the path I specified, but if I hit that URL, Netscape shuts down. Doesn't crash or anything - it just commits suicide. If I had as much spare time as the guy who hacked this together, I'd figure out where it breaks.:-)
Check it out. It can translate existing HTML pages to WML on the fly, either within your servlet framework or as a proxy in front of (and therefore totally independent of) your webserver. It will scale down GIFs or take them out, take out stuff that isn't supported by the target device such as javascript, applets etc.
Wapsody is a Java WAP development environment. Might find that worth looking at too.
The WPS was sweet, but unfortunately the GUI as a whole was unstable. Sure, it was better then what the other guys offered but that's faint praise.
The WPS model of having the entire GUI run as a single process with plug-in shared libraries, indeed turned out to be a fatal mistake. The majority of developers out there are nitwits who didn't understand how to correctly implement it. The WPS is pretty stable (a lot more stable than the early versions of Gnome I've used) if you stay away from third party extensions...
While it would be great to take a look at the code from OS/2 -- and maybe even incorporate a few parts -- it's not realistic. Most of the parts have been superceeded by better, open, programs.
You're incorrect in that OS/2 offers quite a bit of functionality that systems like Linux don't (much faster and better multithreading, SMP, memory management and IPC support, for instance), but speaking as someone who's seen the source code of OS/2, unfortunately I'm afraid not much could indeed be done with it - very large parts are written in x86 assembler...
Even the potentially good stuff such as the WPS GUI and the b-tree support in HPFS is co-owned with Microsoft -- so there's no chance that we'll ever see it.
That is incorrect. PM, the windowing and graphics primitive system, is probably indeed an M$ development. Windows 3.0 is a direct rip-off of the 16-bit version in OS/2 1.2 and 1.3. The WPS, however, is a post-M$ IBM development, first present in OS/2 2.0. HPFS is indeed an M$ development. The new JFS in OS/2, however, is now open source, together with its AIX JFS predecessor and Linux JFS descendant. Getting rid of the M$ HPFS royalties was a big reason for the JFS port to OS/2.
Besides, with KDE/Gnome and the file system changes that coming along, there's very little to pick from the carcas if it were available.
As someone who has programmed both on OS/2 and Unix, I can tell you you're very wrong. OS/2's API is much richer and more consistent than Unix's mess. OS/2 is still by far the fastest and most scalable LAN file server, beating Netware, all Samba implementations and of course Windows SMB implementations hands down. I still haven't seen any GUIs that come close to the WPS model. Java performance on OS/2 kicks the living sh*t out of any Java implementation on Linux...
AC postings generally can't belong to the author since the author is unknown and Slashdot should rightfully take possession of those.
Except that there's no difference between AC posting and posting as a user ID you just registered, with no valid e-mail address...
IMHO,/. is already covered. I'm reading the bottom of the "Post Comment" screen:
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated.
So/. can already remove everything that's illegal. Maybe that statement just needs to be stronger, and state that by submitting a comment, you take full responsibility of it, and release/. of all legal liability. Of course, IANAL.
And if all else fails, host/. in a country that respects freedom of speech, and where copyrights mean very little.:-)
The encoding of the document isn't specified, so it's the default ISO-Latin-1. The quotation mark used throughout the document, however, is encoded as character code 146. According to this page on Latin-1 and Unicode in HTML, the 128-159 range is invalid. M$'s codepage 1252, however, embraces and extends the standard.
Excerpt:
All the CP1252 characters are also available in Unicode. For example the CP1252 character 146 that you mentioned (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) has the Unicode number 8217, therefore you should use this number in order to conform to the HTML standard. Modern HTML browsers like Netscape 4.0 understand Unicode, and will automatically convert the Unicode character ’ back into the character 146 on MS-Windows machines, and into the appropriate character on other systems.
The funny thing is that this page actually renders properly on my Netscape for OS/2, the #1 victim of the embrace&extend strategy...
Hmm, there are certainly some gross historical inaccuracies...
Its effort in personal computer software, OS/2, was quickly crushed by Microsoft's market-dominating Windows.
As usual, all the journalist knows about is the brief attempt to catch the mainstream desktop with Warp 3. Ignore the fact that the OS was pretty damn huge, and still is today, in certain (very big) niches. Ignore that it was first written by Micro$oft, quite a while before Windows 3.x was around - I still have the video clip of Bill Gates saying "we at M$ strongly believe that OS/2 is the OS of the ninetees". If IBM hadn't abandoned the marketing drive behind OS/2, it would have a big chunk of the file and application server market today, if not the desktop.
Even IBM, which plans eventually to use Linux as its unifying Unix platform (shelving AIX),
This is so stupid. Like the quote at the end of the Wired article indicates, if anonymity is outlawed, only outlaws will be anonymous. It is impossible to enforce technologically and in the context of a world-wide environment. After all the noise surrounding Echelon in Europe, I'm sure many countries will be weary of letting the US shove laws to enforce this sort of nonsense down their throats.
Anonymity is crucial for the Net. Many times have I seen people admit things on IRC which they could simply not bring themselves to saying in any other environment. I recall a story of sexual abuse at childhood, which a girl once told me soon after she discovered the chat environment, which she never admitted to anyone before. Because of the feeling of anonymity.
We should not be afraid to speak out. The argument in favour of big brother watching you, and if you don't want that to happen, you must be hiding something, simply misses two crucial points:
The ability to speak one's mind without being afraid of being held accountable at some point in time. That creates an environment of fear similar to police states, like the KGB and the Stasi monitoring all citizens.
Quis custodiat ipsos custodies? Do you trust your government, and all the nameless individuals inside it, prone to bribery by corporate and criminal organisations, enough to only use the information they have on you only for legitimate purposes?
I'll tell you why. Just take a look at all the INCREDIBLY STUPID COMMENTS from meat-eaters to this article, and you realise that marketing your product as "vegetarian" or "vegan" is not the polically correct thing to do in the U.S. Unlike the U.K., where 10-20% of the population is vegetarian (no wonder, one food scandal after another - eating meat kills hordes of Brits every year) and quite a lot of products have a "suitable for vegetarians" logo on them if they are.
I wrote Dilberito an e-mail to ask if it's indeed suitable for veggies, and why they don't market it as such. Still waiting for a reply...
If this stuff is being marketed as junk food, indicating that it's veg[etari]an could actually be counter-productive. Many people actually seem to take pride in poisoning their bodies, destroying the environment and causing horrendous suffering. People have been confronted with how badly they live their lives so often and are just fed up with the guilt trips. The inherent conformism and laziness of the human animal makes it too hard for them to change anyway. All it does is antagonise them. I don't care. I'm not going to start fighting stupidity, when a nobler battle can be won by being sneaky.
Of course, the zoning practise has been seriously undermined by people buying Zone 1 DVD players over the 'net.
Are you sure? Won't those Region 1 players generally only barf up a crappy NTSC signal which is of no use to a TV that can only take PAL/SECAM/...
Not to mention the 120V/60Hz to 230V/50Hz conversion. The voltage transformation is easy, but this is the kind of device that typically will not like a different AC frequency. I'm sure they don't sell those things with autosensing power supplies...
And if so, can anyone recommend me a player that will do multiple DVD regions, play MP3s from a CD, with an autosensing power supply, an RGB (SCART and that Sony tulip-plug thing) connector and switchable NTSC/PAL/SECAM output?
I'm from mainland Europe, I'm based in the UK, and I currently live in the US. I haven't been able to buy any video hardware or media for years because of all these stupid incompatibilities.
(Unless if you're only talking about computer DVD drives).
I have serious problems parsing all that gobbledegook about a 21st century problem, since for the next 11 months, we're still in the 20th century. Popular press (including CNN and Reuters) journalists may have failed first grade, but we at Slashdot have higher journalistic standards!
It also strikes me as unbelievably short-sighted to claim that this may be the biggest problem of the next century. I assure you people in 1900 didn't have the faintest clue about what the 20th century's problems would be. Maybe a big asteroid will fall on our heads, or that 3rd world war will break out anyway because some government was stupid enough to install win2k on a tactical missile control system, or we get invaded by aliens, or the environment gets out of control after screwed up weather-control experiments. Maybe the gene technology revolution will start new fierce political battles, polarising societies world-wide. Maybe we just won't care and happily jack in to the Matrix to enjoy a pseudo-world.
And in 2101, we'll laugh at how self-involved people were in the 20th century were. Even if the blue pill is a suppository, most people will still take it.
This would have a disastrous effect! All those reality cop shows with high speed car chases would disappear! The shockwave of the effect on society would be catastrophic!
You know, wouldn't be that much of a problem to me if they did it. I'd just get a licence plate in another European country and drive around with that. Nobody's screwing around with the mechanics of my baby. And since there wouldn't be many police patrols around anymore to check for speeders, woohoo, turn the M6 into a 400 mile autobahn with no speed limit.
Gosh, the posts in here have been depressing. Although my I met my SO (a geek babe) at work, I would've never become intimate with her had we not started to talk on IRC. In (seriously overrated) real life, you have to think about your image and interact with someone who's doing the same thing. It's horribly bogus. In the realm of an online chat, you can be whoever and wherever you are. You can whip up a beach on a desert island against the backdrop of a sunset in the ocean, or, far more romantic, a server farm full of supercomputer hardware (check out my Big Iron), all in a few lines. Your only limit is your imagination. It helps if you're an able knight of the written word of course... The pen is mightier than the tongue (hmm... lesbians aside).
That's not the main thing of course. What makes online dating so real is that many restrictions fall away. It's much easier to overcome the embarrasment of asking a personal question, and you can formulate it much better because you have the time to think about it. This makes for an environment where you open yourself up much faster. Generally, it's much more honest as well. It's easier to describe intimate personal details when you don't have too look in the other person's eyes.
The effect is that what's connecting online is two people at a deeper level than all social interface crap. We're talking inter-process communication, just short of having shared memory, rather than 2 GUIs trying to interact by reading eachother with cameras and doing real-time vector-processing. (Consider that geeks are generally bad at that real-time stuff).
Additionally, if you're so physically attracted to eachother like my SO and I are, you at least have the opportunity to control your libido;-) Or, of course, let it run wild, no matter how far away you are. (She and I are on different continents ATM).
Sure/. servers up static content. All the bitmaps! There's a lot of static content out there!
By the way, IBM HTTP Server, A.K.A. "IBM HTTP Server Powered by Apache" is Apache, now IBM's preferred webserver. So any performance improvements IBM makes to "their" webserver will go back to the community.
Slashdot Mirror
Java most certainly isn't too slow or resource-hungry for most applications. If you look at the typical code generated by your average Java programmer vs. your average C++ programmer, you'll notice that the Java code will be faster and better to maintain.
It also isn't necessarily such a bad education tool. You could go into the inner workings of the JVM, look at the bytecode, the stack-based architecture (very useful model in CS) and garbage collection strategies (Lisp or Smalltalk, anyone?).
Its use as an education tool, rather than an applied programming training course, is questionable though. C++ certainly isn't a very nice model. Smalltalk would be a lot more interesting to study as a 'pure OO' language. C fills the gap between high-level OO-languages and bare metal assembler nicely. The entire range should be taught, using fairly appropriate educational languages. Hey, there are schools out there that teach BASIC and COBOL, and I bet there will be some that teach C-blunt, so don't slag off Java...
Not so. IBM do a ThinkPad with a 1600x1200 15" display.
Or: why eternal life is not a good idea. Imagine Bill Gates still being alive in 100 years...
A whole universe is destroyed in the Sci-Fi series Lexx. In a particularly disgusting way too, mind you.
Nobody else believed in me though. Quite frankly, I wouldn't believe any other snot-nosed 18 year old claiming to be too good for school and sure of himself that he'll make it on his own. So I'll think twice before recommending the same course of action to other people...
Hmm, odd. Netscape 4.61 for OS/2, the only version of Netscape which uses native Java rather than a Netscape JVM, certainly has a problem too, but the exploit doesn't seem to work on it. It listens on port 8080, if I request the root document, I get a relocation to the path I specified, but if I hit that URL, Netscape shuts down. Doesn't crash or anything - it just commits suicide. If I had as much spare time as the guy who hacked this together, I'd figure out where it breaks. :-)
Wapsody is a Java WAP development environment. Might find that worth looking at too.
The WPS model of having the entire GUI run as a single process with plug-in shared libraries, indeed turned out to be a fatal mistake. The majority of developers out there are nitwits who didn't understand how to correctly implement it. The WPS is pretty stable (a lot more stable than the early versions of Gnome I've used) if you stay away from third party extensions...
While it would be great to take a look at the code from OS/2 -- and maybe even incorporate a few parts -- it's not realistic. Most of the parts have been superceeded by better, open, programs.
You're incorrect in that OS/2 offers quite a bit of functionality that systems like Linux don't (much faster and better multithreading, SMP, memory management and IPC support, for instance), but speaking as someone who's seen the source code of OS/2, unfortunately I'm afraid not much could indeed be done with it - very large parts are written in x86 assembler...
Even the potentially good stuff such as the WPS GUI and the b-tree support in HPFS is co-owned with Microsoft -- so there's no chance that we'll ever see it.
That is incorrect. PM, the windowing and graphics primitive system, is probably indeed an M$ development. Windows 3.0 is a direct rip-off of the 16-bit version in OS/2 1.2 and 1.3. The WPS, however, is a post-M$ IBM development, first present in OS/2 2.0.
HPFS is indeed an M$ development. The new JFS in OS/2, however, is now open source, together with its AIX JFS predecessor and Linux JFS descendant. Getting rid of the M$ HPFS royalties was a big reason for the JFS port to OS/2.
Besides, with KDE/Gnome and the file system changes that coming along, there's very little to pick from the carcas if it were available.
As someone who has programmed both on OS/2 and Unix, I can tell you you're very wrong. OS/2's API is much richer and more consistent than Unix's mess. OS/2 is still by far the fastest and most scalable LAN file server, beating Netware, all Samba implementations and of course Windows SMB implementations hands down. I still haven't seen any GUIs that come close to the WPS model. Java performance on OS/2 kicks the living sh*t out of any Java implementation on Linux...
This post written on an OS/2 system. ;-)
Except that there's no difference between AC posting and posting as a user ID you just registered, with no valid e-mail address...
IMHO, /. is already covered. I'm reading the bottom of the "Post Comment" screen:
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated.
So /. can already remove everything that's illegal. Maybe that statement just needs to be stronger, and state that by submitting a comment, you take full responsibility of it, and release /. of all legal liability. Of course, IANAL.
And if all else fails, host /. in a country that respects freedom of speech, and where copyrights mean very little. :-)
Excerpt:
The funny thing is that this page actually renders properly on my Netscape for OS/2, the #1 victim of the embrace&extend strategy...
Its effort in personal computer software, OS/2, was quickly crushed by Microsoft's market-dominating Windows.
As usual, all the journalist knows about is the brief attempt to catch the mainstream desktop with Warp 3. Ignore the fact that the OS was pretty damn huge, and still is today, in certain (very big) niches. Ignore that it was first written by Micro$oft, quite a while before Windows 3.x was around - I still have the video clip of Bill Gates saying "we at M$ strongly believe that OS/2 is the OS of the ninetees". If IBM hadn't abandoned the marketing drive behind OS/2, it would have a big chunk of the file and application server market today, if not the desktop.
Even IBM, which plans eventually to use Linux as its unifying Unix platform (shelving AIX),
Hello? Somebody got seriously confused here.
Anonymity is crucial for the Net. Many times have I seen people admit things on IRC which they could simply not bring themselves to saying in any other environment. I recall a story of sexual abuse at childhood, which a girl once told me soon after she discovered the chat environment, which she never admitted to anyone before. Because of the feeling of anonymity.
We should not be afraid to speak out. The argument in favour of big brother watching you, and if you don't want that to happen, you must be hiding something, simply misses two crucial points:
Is that free poo as in free beer (Heineken, Budweiser,...) or free speech (KKK, hippies, ...)?
Net-Bew-Ee
I'll tell you why. Just take a look at all the INCREDIBLY STUPID COMMENTS from meat-eaters to this article, and you realise that marketing your product as "vegetarian" or "vegan" is not the polically correct thing to do in the U.S. Unlike the U.K., where 10-20% of the population is vegetarian (no wonder, one food scandal after another - eating meat kills hordes of Brits every year) and quite a lot of products have a "suitable for vegetarians" logo on them if they are.
I wrote Dilberito an e-mail to ask if it's indeed suitable for veggies, and why they don't market it as such. Still waiting for a reply...
If this stuff is being marketed as junk food, indicating that it's veg[etari]an could actually be counter-productive. Many people actually seem to take pride in poisoning their bodies, destroying the environment and causing horrendous suffering. People have been confronted with how badly they live their lives so often and are just fed up with the guilt trips. The inherent conformism and laziness of the human animal makes it too hard for them to change anyway. All it does is antagonise them. I don't care. I'm not going to start fighting stupidity, when a nobler battle can be won by being sneaky.
Are you sure? Won't those Region 1 players generally only barf up a crappy NTSC signal which is of no use to a TV that can only take PAL/SECAM/...
Not to mention the 120V/60Hz to 230V/50Hz conversion. The voltage transformation is easy, but this is the kind of device that typically will not like a different AC frequency. I'm sure they don't sell those things with autosensing power supplies...
And if so, can anyone recommend me a player that will do multiple DVD regions, play MP3s from a CD, with an autosensing power supply, an RGB (SCART and that Sony tulip-plug thing) connector and switchable NTSC/PAL/SECAM output?
I'm from mainland Europe, I'm based in the UK, and I currently live in the US. I haven't been able to buy any video hardware or media for years because of all these stupid incompatibilities.
(Unless if you're only talking about computer DVD drives).
It also strikes me as unbelievably short-sighted to claim that this may be the biggest problem of the next century. I assure you people in 1900 didn't have the faintest clue about what the 20th century's problems would be. Maybe a big asteroid will fall on our heads, or that 3rd world war will break out anyway because some government was stupid enough to install win2k on a tactical missile control system, or we get invaded by aliens, or the environment gets out of control after screwed up weather-control experiments. Maybe the gene technology revolution will start new fierce political battles, polarising societies world-wide. Maybe we just won't care and happily jack in to the Matrix to enjoy a pseudo-world.
And in 2101, we'll laugh at how self-involved people were in the 20th century were. Even if the blue pill is a suppository, most people will still take it.
You know, wouldn't be that much of a problem to me if they did it. I'd just get a licence plate in another European country and drive around with that. Nobody's screwing around with the mechanics of my baby. And since there wouldn't be many police patrols around anymore to check for speeders, woohoo, turn the M6 into a 400 mile autobahn with no speed limit.
That's not the main thing of course. What makes online dating so real is that many restrictions fall away. It's much easier to overcome the embarrasment of asking a personal question, and you can formulate it much better because you have the time to think about it. This makes for an environment where you open yourself up much faster. Generally, it's much more honest as well. It's easier to describe intimate personal details when you don't have too look in the other person's eyes.
The effect is that what's connecting online is two people at a deeper level than all social interface crap. We're talking inter-process communication, just short of having shared memory, rather than 2 GUIs trying to interact by reading eachother with cameras and doing real-time vector-processing. (Consider that geeks are generally bad at that real-time stuff).
Additionally, if you're so physically attracted to eachother like my SO and I are, you at least have the opportunity to control your libido ;-) Or, of course, let it run wild, no matter how far away you are. (She and I are on different continents ATM).
Dhink unexbected zide evvects. *ACHOO* *ACHEE* *snort*. Goddamn little critters are bervectly gapable of knocking me over! *snort*
By the way, IBM HTTP Server, A.K.A. "IBM HTTP Server Powered by Apache" is Apache, now IBM's preferred webserver. So any performance improvements IBM makes to "their" webserver will go back to the community.