MS didn't have to stop using their VM in the original Java court case, which only required two remedies:
1) That the MS VM defaulted to standard Java and used a switch to engage MS extensions instead of being the other way around, as was originally the case. 2) Microsoft would add all standard Java classes including JNI to their distribution instead of shipping a subset that made writing multi-platform code difficult.
It actually took MS about a month to comply with these orders by making an update available that implemented them.
As is the case with Microsoft's GC, Java's won't delete things that are still being referenced by other things, because it quite reasonably assumes that an object which is referenced by another object that hasn't itself been marked for collection isn't garbage.
The main problem with garbage collectors (I like GCs, so this isn't a diatribe against them) is that far too many mediocre programmers assume they have a magical ability to know precisely what they want their code to do. The reality of course is that they use algorithms to decide what should be collected, when it should be collected, and how it should be collected, and those who are unfamiliar with the particular strategies that their GC uses can therefore not only write code with more than a few memory leaks, but also code that results in the GC being used so inefficiently that it does vastly more work than would be necessary if the same functionality was implemented in a slightly different way.
There are plenty of articles about Java memory leaks that can be found by Googling "java memory leaks". Googling "java GC tuning" will produce some useful links to articles containing tips on ensuring that it's not used inefficiently.
My 4 year old Compaq business laptop (still going strong despite a lot of abuse) has the same capability, including a blue light below the button that shows when the touch pad is enabled. I'd assumed that it was a standard feature with laptops given the fact that this one is both venerable and was one of the cheapest business class machines I could find at the time.
"I had a homework assignment that required me to use a Star. I was not impressed by Smalltalk and object oriented programming then, neither am I impressed now."
The Star's software was written in Mesa rather than Smalltalk, and it didn't originally ship with Smalltalk (or any other programming language for that matter). Smalltalk was added later as an option, but then so were several other languages, including Lisp.
"Too complex and bug-ridden compared to simpler things like functional programming"
Smalltalk itself was a small VM with about seventy low-level functions -- everything else, including the byte-code compilers were written in that, and source to them was traditionally supplied (at least in early versions), so anybody competent enough to program in Smalltalk could fix any bugs that weren't in the VMs themselves. It's also unfair to say that Smalltalk's version of OO was more complex than functional programming, because the entire system, including the language itself, only had two types of entity: objects and messages.
"The Star was cool though."
Unfortunately, the initial version was also an entirely closed system which had no development tools at all (the supplied applications were supposed to do everything that an office would need). This situation was rectified at a later date, but the fact that these weren't Star-specific (and didn't even need a Star to run on) meant that they ended up being used to write software for other systems rather than the Star itself.
"I never used Lisa, but I was impressed by it. I first saw the Lisa as an intern at JPL. Nice machine and it could also run Unix."
The Lisa system that ran Unix probably wasn't a standard Lisa. Apple supplied a UNIX-based computer with the same hardware that was used a development system for the Lisa itself, which had no "native" development tools of its own. Those who wanted to write software for it required both a standard Lisa to act as a target / test rig, and a development Lisa, which was a pretty expensive setup for software houses, especially when the potential market for their products was very small, so there was very little interest in developing third party software products for it.
"I was impressed by what is now known as Microsoft Word before it was bought out by Microsoft"
Microsoft didn't buy Word. They employed Charles Symonyl and Richard Brodie (co-writers of the Bravo WYSIWYG word processor at Xerox Parc), who originally crafted it as a multiplatform, true WYSYWYG graphical program which had some similarities to their earlier Bravo. It was released for the IBM PC in 1983, and unusually for the time required a mouse to use properly, so it wasn't particularly successful because mice weren't standard equipment at that time due to the fact that virtually no software worked with them (the Macintosh hadn't been launched yet, and few people had seen, let alone used, Xerox's Star or Apple's Lisa).
"I actually met him once at a University of Maryland talk during the height of the dot-com era -- have you ever met Douglas Engelbart?"
No.
"As far as I'm aware, his NLS didn't feature windows, drop-down menus, icons, and a desktop representation of a file system -- while arguably less important than the networked hypertext that NLS did have, they were the defining features of the Xerox Star and Mac."
NLS had windows, and it had a sort of icon capability in that graphics could be linked to command sets (and lots of other things) which would be invoked when they were clicked with the mouse (NLS could do things with graphics that few if any of today's systems are capable of). NLS didn't have menus, but then neither the Star: a lot of people think that it had them because they were present in Smalltalk (although Smalltalk's menus were pop-up rather than pull-down), but despite rumours to the contrary, the Star's OS and software weren't written in Smalltalk, so while there were some similarities, there were also a number of notable differences.
"Which is the invention, the Xerox Star or the Mac?"
If you're referring to mouse-driven GUIs, then neither of them invented the concept. Doug Englebart's oNLine system had a three button mouse, windows, hypertext, and networked video conferencing by 1968, and he claimed to have been inspired by Vannevar Bush's "Memex" concept that was published in the 1940s. The Xerox PARC team who designed the Star admitted to being influenced by Englebart's work, so it seems strange that this notable pioneer has been largely forgotten by others, who perpetuate the common myth of GUIs originating with research at Xerox PARC.
"So how do they write the English essays? I understand how PC is loosing out in terms of playing music, IM and other trivial stuff, but it seems to me that heavy PC utilization is unavoidable for school and work."
Well blow me down, and there was me thinking that all the school work I did during the 1960s and 1970s without any PCs at all actually existed, instead of obviously being a mere dream caused by advanced age-induced brain rot. It was a strangely detailed dream, too: we had these things called "pens" and "pencils" with a tip which left marks on paper if they were moved around, so they were capable of both writing _and_ drawing, and we used them on books with sheets of blank paper in them that got handed to teachers for marking, and were returned to us the next day. I even dreamt that we had special devices called "rulers"that could be used to ensure that the lines we drew with these strange implements were straight and the right length, while others known as "compasses" that looked like a pair of arms with a hinge at the top allowed us to draw circular figures of varying sizes. This strange fever-dream of mine also had things called "libraries" with large collections of "books", strange devices containing paper pages with text on them that seemed to work despite not having anywhere obvious to put batteries or any electrical leads or sockets. To show how weird this dream was, I lived in a strange that had a monitor-like device which displayed images and produced sound without any obvious boxes such as DVD players, satellite/cable receivers, computers, games consoles, or other such devices to produce them, so it must have worked by some sort of "dream magic" (which, as is typical in dreams, wasn't explained at all).
"I want sanctions against the US, and I want them forcibly disarmed."
Translation: I am a completely useless person from a useless country full of people just as useless as me, so we're all jealous of the US because it goes around demonstrating the fact that it is more powerful and wealthy than us due to being considerably less useless.
"I think the US are evil imperial bastards, and I was in the living room cheering and eating popcorn when they were attacked."
Translation: burning envy leads to such spite that watching others die horribly is a pleasure. It also leads to the sort of stupidity that renders me incapable of seeing how hypocritical it is for someone who claims to have cheered and eaten popcorn while 3,000 human beings were dying to call somebody else evil.
"Americans don't come around my town much since two US Navy guys went drinking in our neighbourhood and were executed in the street"
Translation: Americans don't come to my town since two US Navy guys who went drinking were swamped by beggars and people trying to sell their children for three dollars. However, I'm going to pretend that we did a bit of executing, because all those silly Slashdotters will obviously believe that a country represented by someone without the balls to post non-anonymously would have the courage to attack two whole Americans (and military ones at that!) unless they outnumbered them several thousand to one, and had some less craven foreigners to do the actual attacking, while I and others bravely hide just in case another American turns up and starts shouting or hitting people.
"If Apple is expecting this mythical $831 per phone in revenue, how expensive do you think an unlocked iPhone would be?"
Probably around the same price Apple were selling them for before the $200 drop. My reasoning for this is based on two observations:
1) An iPod touch 16GB (basically an iPhone without the phone) sells for $399, and Apple are obviously making a pretty decent margin on them, otherwise they wouldn't be selling them at that price.
2) You can pick up a basic unlocked GSM phone for about $60 if you look around, and that includes a case, keyboard, display, battery, charger, packaging, and dealer markup. I doubt therefore that the extra bits which separate an iPod touch from an iPhone would cost Apple more than $50, and that's being _extremely_ generous.
It's therefore very likely that they could sell the 16GB iPhone at the old price of $599, and make rather more off each unit than they do from an iPod touch. This would put them around the mid-point of "smart phone" prices ($400 to $1000 for an unlocked modern example (i.e. not older tech., which sells for less), depending on manufacturer, model, and capabilities).
Some driving serves a purpose, but most of it is due to laziness, force of habit, or both.
"People need to get to their jobs. Items need to be transported."
The problem with this justification is that it's entirely the result of circular reasoning. People drive to work because cars allow them to live a long way from their jobs; the jobs are therefore also able to move outside towns that have alternative transport hubs (and expensive land because it's strategically located) because people have cars to reach them, but they also require goods to be transported by road because they're not near any alternative transport systems. Once you have a mobile population and the ability to be supplied with goods almost anywhere, retailers can also move outside the towns to places where land is cheaper because it's agricultural, and they together with industry that also buys up the cheap land push agriculture further from population centres to places where their goods and workers now have make long road journeys. The fact that these out-of-town outfits are producing and selling _exactly_ the same things that were already available tends to be very conveniently overlooked by those who want to pretend that the fumes, noise, and accidents caused by motor vehicles is a necessary evil because everything's so far away from everything else.
"You seem to "believe" a lot of things that seem very convenient for your agenda"
Whereas you are obviously a completely impartial, fact-filled fount of wisdom who obviously has no agenda whatsoever, hence comments such as:
"Basically you want people like me to suffer"
And after writing that piece of sad persecution-complex tripe, you then go on to accuse the parent of being irrational in what has to be either a brilliant piece of comedy, or an awesome display of utter hypocrisy. I really hope for your sake it was the former rather than the latter.
"Windows Vista broke some back-compat with old apps"
It breaks far less stuff than XP did when it came out. The Win9X series ran most old software dating back to the DOS days, including drivers and stuff that wrote directly to the screen, because it had a version of DOS underneath that could bypass Windows completely when necessary. Compatibility with software and drivers written for 16 bit versions of Windows (e.g. Win 2.X, Win3.x) was also _much_ better than XP, which can be notably finicky (or downright impossible even after downloading Microsoft app compatibility toolkit) with software written for 9X and NT 3/4, let alone older Windows versions or DOS. Service Pack 2 also broke applications that ran fine under "vanilla" X or SP1 (including several Microsoft programs), thereby adding to the already impressive list of stuff that either didn't work at all or ran unreliably under XP.
"You show me ONE school text book that doesn't state somewhere"
School textbooks are not written by or for scientists, so this is a straw man.
"Speaking of light, for centuries, scientists accepted the idea that light took no time at all, that it was instantaneous. Olaf Roemer observed that this was not true. However, it took another 50 years for mainstream scientists to believe (accept) his observations.
It took 50 years for others to test and confirm his observations, after which they became accepted. Current science isn't immediately rewritten whenever somebody comes along claiming that it's wrong -- there is a peer review process which includes others repeating experiments under the same conditions, and comparing their results with those of the person or team making the claim. Steady improvements in global communications have progressively accelerated the process, but it can still take several years for others to thoroughly analyse the original experiment and its data for potential flaws, and then attempt to duplicate it (depending of course on the complexity of what is being tested).
"So the consistent laws of gravity, inertia, electricity etc. are all man made?"
The laws are indeed man made, but that doesn't mean that the natural phenomena we measured to derive them are. Of course, anybody who wasn't so obviously determined to build and knock down their own straw men would have realised that the following quote from my prior post made this distinction very clear: "The laws are made by man to model observed natural phenomena".
"So then, why don't we change them? Reverse gravity whenever a car goes uphill and re-instate it when going downhill."
We can freely change the laws, and have done so many times throughout history when new observations and experiments showed that they were wrong. You seem to be (probably deliberately) trying to present such laws as something other than a conceptual model that reflects man's understanding of, and ability to measure physical phenomena, both of which have changed many times. Before Galileo, scientists were convinced that objects of different weights fell at different speeds, and came up with all sorts of laws to predict this, but they were wrong, so all those laws were thrown out, and new ones were formulated. This did not however mean that the nature of reality itself changed to make objects of different weights fall at the same speed the moment Galileo came up with an experiment to prove it -- the laws changed, but nature remained just as it had been since long before there were any humans to build conceptual models of it.
"We observe that nature seems to work in a consistent way. It's not capricious. Water doesn't run uphill one day and the sun doesn't rise in the north one day and in the west the next."
These are localised phenomena, not universal ones. Water in microgravity for example behaves very differently from the way it does on Earth, and other planets can have rotational directions, axes, and axial stability that differ from those of Earth, meaning that not only would their sunrises appear on other horizons, but could also vary significantly in their location over relatively short periods of time (e.g. a human life span).
"It's this very predictability of a universe we did not make, but are mostly spectators in, that makes science and technology possible. We quantify the consistent behavior we observe, but did not create. On the basis of these units and laws we are able to make certain predictions and build useful devices."
I fail to see the point of this sentence, because it's making exactly the same points I did, i.e. that laws are man's attempt to quantify the universe, not fundamental aspects of reality that it "obeys".
"First I did not state laws of "physics" that man fails to obey."
A quote from your original post shows that this is exactly what you stated:
"Nobody has ever shown that any of the laws of nature arise from within our time-space-matter-energy universe.
"Scientists believe this, but they don't KNOW it."
They don't "believe it" either. Belief is something for religios: scientists _accept_ whatever provides the best explanation of the things they observe, and modify or scrap these ideas when new discoveries or better experimental data demonstrate that they're wrong. An excellent example of this in action was the Michelson-Morley experiment that tried to measure the effects of the luminiferous aether that 19th century scientists postulated as the medium through which light-waves travelled, and started a chain of increasingly accurate experiments that ended up entirely removing that idea from mainstream science.
"All of nature obeys the LAWS of physics"
The laws are made by man to model observed natural phenomena, so statements about nature itself obeying them are pure balderdash.
"Nobody has ever shown that any of the laws of nature arise from within our time-space-matter-energy universe"
That's because scientists know precisely where these "laws" came from: the minds of people who measured stuff using human-invented units, and came up with some constants and formulae that expressed various phenomena _as humans observe them_ in said human-invented units. They are man-made representations of man's observation of the universe we occupy, not fundamental rules that the universe itself embodies.
"God gave his laws and the entire universe except for man obeys them"
How does man disobey these "laws of physics" that you claim all of nature must obey? Please cite a reliable recorded incident (i.e. no pseudo-scientific guff like perpetual motion machines) where somebody just decided not obey the inverse square law, the laws of thermodynamics, Boyle's law, or any other "law of physics", and actually succeeded in doing so.
"The last I checked most drivers for winxp work for win2k."
My experiences indicate that it's a fairly hit and miss affair, so the best that can really be said is YMMV.
"They didn't change the driver model drastically"
But they added a considerable number of APIs that some drivers use. A similar situation existed with Windows 98 and 98SE: they have identical driver models, but 98SE added a few networking APIs that made writing network drivers a little easier, so some network cards that had "Windows 98" on their list of supported operating systems didn't work with "vanilla" 98.
"The conquistadors get more credit than they really deserve for their downfall, there. Had it not been for smallpox, Cortez would have been impaled on the end of a spear, and that would have been the end of that."
Historic revisionism at its best. Smallpox was (unwittingly) introduced to the American mainland in 1519 by an African slave called Francisco de Baguia. This is the same year Cortes reached the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, which didn't have any incidence of Smallpox until over a year later (October 1520) because Cortes and his rather small army weren't carriers (most of them would have died long before reaching Tenochtitlan otherwise. Europeans were more resistant to the disease than native American people, but lots of them died from it every year, and epidemics regularly devastated populations, especially in cities. Luis XIV of France for example lost his son, grandson, and great grandson to smallpox within a period of 11 months in 1712). This was _after_ Cortes had already been ejected from Tenochtitlan by Cuitatlahuac, Montezuma's brother, who took over after Montezuma had been killed by his own people. Smallpox definitely played a role in his subsequent re-entry to Tenochtitlan in 1521 (it killed Cuitatlahuac for a start!), but the Aztec Empire had effectively already collapsed when he entered it the first time.
"It's not as though the civilizations there were "inferior" in some social/racial sense that caused them to lose."
There were several factors that allowed to Cortes and his notably small band of followers to defeat the Aztecs:
1) Superstition. Cortes took advantage of the Aztec belief in a white bearded god and their terror of horses, firearms, and war mastiffs, which they hadn't seen before.
2) A difference in tactics. The main aim of Aztec warfare was capturing live prisoners for mass human sacrifice, whereas the Spaniards practised European-style warfare which had very different goals. Aztecs also emphasised the bravery of individual warriors, unlike the Spanish, who operated as cohesive units. They were far more organised in this respect than anyone else in Europe at that period, and this had led to them becoming the most feared soldiers on that continent. There are documented cases of entire armies suing for peace before any fighting took place because one side hired a (frequently small) contingent of Spanish mercenaries, and the opposing side's soldiers refused to face them.
3) Alliances. The Aztecs constantly attacked surrounding peoples to gain a constant flow of sacrifices (this should however be seen in context, because many of those who were victims of the Aztecs also practised human sacrifice), so they were hated by all the non-Aztecs that Cortes encountered on his journey. He took advantage of this to form alliances, which not only greatly increased the size of his initially rather small army, but also gave him a valuable source of intelligence about the terrain and Aztec warfare methods. These people had a pent up desire for revenge that led them to treat captured Aztecs far more brutally than the Spanish, who regarded warfare as the means to an end (getting rich) rather than an end in itself.
4) Technology. Spaniards had metal armour and weapons, crossbows, firearms including cannon, and cavalry. The Aztecs were infantry with obsidian (stone) weapons, slack bows (good for hunting or against unarmoured opponents, useless against anyone with a layer of padding, let alone the advanced Spanish armour of the 16th century), wooden maces, and thrown spears, again with stone heads that were ineffective against the Spanish. It was equivalent to sending a modern army with tanks, automatic weapons, and tactical air support against a Roman legion or one of Alexander's Macedonian phalanxes, neither of which which would stand a chance despite being the most devastating military machines of their time.
"It wasn't enough just to topple their society, but the conquistadors had to finish the job by burning everything they could get their hands o
"Lots of people did stick to Win2K instead of going to XP, and they were right to do so, XP was flaky."
No, but that's only because there aren't any companies who've achieved Microsoft's level of success that need to explain why their entire product range has been so bad for so many years.
"I mean, it's been tough since Enron's "I feel you pain" Shilling went the way of the Dodo, but Thank God we still have Microsoft churning out new way of selling complete and utter BS."
MS have to keep producing BS screens like this to distract shareholders and PHBs in their big corporate customer base, who might otherwise get around to wondering how they managed to spend five years and untold billions of dollars producing the endlessly polished turd called Vista, who the hell thought the Zune was a good idea, and why 30% of XBox-360s have to be repaired or replaced under warranty (i.e. at Microsoft's expense). When the only real success story the biggest software company on the planet has had in the last few years is a remake of a game written by a company they bought just to get previous versions of that game, the BS machine gets put into overdrive to try and prevent too many influential people from having the time to start thinking that whoever's making key decisions for Microsoft these days is an idiot.
"I think we will all feel the loss when the EU finally hangs all of them (at least, that's what they make their conviction sound like:-)."
That's because they know that whining about it all being a pinko commie plot to punish a successful US company for simply being successful will make many of those who usually rant about how terrible "Microsucks" is start demanding that Europe be bombed and invaded for thinking that their silly foreign laws apply to the European bits of US companies who operate there. BS works, hence the fact that MS spend so much on it, and the fact that this particular bit of BS doesn't gel with geeks only indicates that geeks aren't the intended audience for it, unlike their "damned pinko commie Europeans picking on the US" ploy (which isn't only aimed at geeks, but is notably successful at getting the majority of the American ones on their side).
"The difference is XP SP2 was better than XP SP1 in significant ways. Like not crashing as often:)."
Agreed. However, the same could well be true for Vista once it gets a couple of service packs. SP2 came out around 4 years after XP, so it's early days yet (I'm not defending Vista here, but simply pointing out that most of the things said about it were also said about XP, which took several years to become a reasonably useful OS that worked fairly well with most hardware).
"Lots of people did stick to Win2K instead of going to XP, and they were right to do so, XP was flaky."
This is true for professional and medium to large business users (a surprising number of companies are still using Win2K), but not homes and small companies. Few third-party manufacturers bothered to release drivers for Win2K, and it wasn't offered as a pre-install option on most machines aimed at individuals or small businesses, even if they had the resources to run it well (few did in 2000), so that market wasn't even aware of the fact that it existed. They usually ended up with Windows ME during that period, and even "vanilla" XP looked wonderful to anyone who'd been using that for a year!
"this process is about ensuring that our customer's machines aren't compromised."
I cried tears of joy when I read about Microsoft dedicating so many of their resources to securing one customer's machines. It just shows how Steve "Big Hearted" Ballmer is steadily filling what was once a cold, impersonal monopolist with people who are willing to go not just an extra mile, but several extra parsecs to ensure that every one of their customers feels loved and cared for. I'm so very, very glad that there's a still place for wonderful people-oriented guys like this in the cynical cut-throat world of big business. Please excuse me while I throw myself face down on a bed and sob uncontrollably for several days.
"Even windows isn't working with Windows these days... what with Vista breaking so many apps that worked on all previous versions upto XP SP2."
XP SP2 broke lots of stuff that ran on XP SP1 and earlier, and XP itself broke vast quantities of software that ran perfectly well on Win9X variants, including a lot of stuff written for DOS and earlier versions of Windows. Microsoft got away with that, so it's hardly surprising that they think they'll also be able to do it with Vista.
NB: nearly every complaint people have about Vista was also voiced when XP came out. It was a resource hog which ran slowly on most hardware that was around; it had activation that could disable it, and many predicted that this would lead to a consumer revolt which would break Microsoft's monopoly forever; adoption was slow, especially among businesses, once again leading to predictions of Microsoft's impending doom; there were far fewer drivers at launch than was the case with Vista, so a lot of the the hardware people bought for 9X didn't work, and never would work with XP; and it broke huge swathes of existing software, especially games, which are dear to the geek heart, so many predicted that the resulting consumer revolt would have Bill gates rattling a tin cup within a year. People would, it was said, flock to Linux in droves rather than put up with the evils of XP...
Prediction: when the next MS OS comes out, geeks will be lamenting the fact that it breaks software which ran fine on good old Vista (especially games), is a resource hog that doesn't work very well with most of the hardware out there, has no drivers, and a new WeKnowWhereYouLive activation system that consumers won't stand for. This will, they'll say, definitely be the year when Linux takes over the corporate and domestic desktop -- all it needs is some drivers that work with current hardware, and the ability to run the games people can't live fulfilling lives without playing to hand Microsoft their arse on a plate.
"There are very few "commissioned" artists these days"
There are plenty of commissioned artists. Some examples:
Session musicians and singers. Composers who write scores (or in many cases both write and record them) for advertising, TV, radio, movies, video games, etc. Freelance commercial artists, writers, and photographers. Most professional dancers, choreographers, and actors. Just about everyone involved in the movie industry.
Anybody who is paid to do a one-off job, set of jobs, or produce a specific product, and could be described as some sort of artists is a commissioned artist.
"He looked at the stars, and his bible, and decided how things must be."
Aristotle was was thinking about these things well over 300 years before the claimed birth date for the guy who is the central figure for that bible.
"His theories were designed to leave a place for god and heaven"
Aristotle's writings very clearly show that he was a secularist. He theorised about a prime and immovable mover that set all other things in motion, but makes it clear that although this "mover" could well be conscious in some way, it is completely oblivious to us, and therefore neither desires, nor would be aware of attempts to worship it.
"Also, anyone who still believes in creationism in the modern western world obviously refuses to learn. And is, therefor, "inherently dumb."
The same could be said about atheists who spout ignorant tripe about historic figures whose lives, writings, and beliefs are easy to find out about.
Slashdot Mirror
MS didn't have to stop using their VM in the original Java court case, which only required two remedies:
1) That the MS VM defaulted to standard Java and used a switch to engage MS extensions instead of being the other way around, as was originally the case.
2) Microsoft would add all standard Java classes including JNI to their distribution instead of shipping a subset that made writing multi-platform code difficult.
It actually took MS about a month to comply with these orders by making an update available that implemented them.
As is the case with Microsoft's GC, Java's won't delete things that are still being referenced by other things, because it quite reasonably assumes that an object which is referenced by another object that hasn't itself been marked for collection isn't garbage.
The main problem with garbage collectors (I like GCs, so this isn't a diatribe against them) is that far too many mediocre programmers assume they have a magical ability to know precisely what they want their code to do. The reality of course is that they use algorithms to decide what should be collected, when it should be collected, and how it should be collected, and those who are unfamiliar with the particular strategies that their GC uses can therefore not only write code with more than a few memory leaks, but also code that results in the GC being used so inefficiently that it does vastly more work than would be necessary if the same functionality was implemented in a slightly different way.
There are plenty of articles about Java memory leaks that can be found by Googling "java memory leaks". Googling "java GC tuning" will produce some useful links to articles containing tips on ensuring that it's not used inefficiently.
My 4 year old Compaq business laptop (still going strong despite a lot of abuse) has the same capability, including a blue light below the button that shows when the touch pad is enabled. I'd assumed that it was a standard feature with laptops given the fact that this one is both venerable and was one of the cheapest business class machines I could find at the time.
"I had a homework assignment that required me to use a Star. I was not impressed by Smalltalk and object oriented programming then, neither am I impressed now."
The Star's software was written in Mesa rather than Smalltalk, and it didn't originally ship with Smalltalk (or any other programming language for that matter). Smalltalk was added later as an option, but then so were several other languages, including Lisp.
"Too complex and bug-ridden compared to simpler things like functional programming"
Smalltalk itself was a small VM with about seventy low-level functions -- everything else, including the byte-code compilers were written in that, and source to them was traditionally supplied (at least in early versions), so anybody competent enough to program in Smalltalk could fix any bugs that weren't in the VMs themselves. It's also unfair to say that Smalltalk's version of OO was more complex than functional programming, because the entire system, including the language itself, only had two types of entity: objects and messages.
"The Star was cool though."
Unfortunately, the initial version was also an entirely closed system which had no development tools at all (the supplied applications were supposed to do everything that an office would need). This situation was rectified at a later date, but the fact that these weren't Star-specific (and didn't even need a Star to run on) meant that they ended up being used to write software for other systems rather than the Star itself.
"I never used Lisa, but I was impressed by it. I first saw the Lisa as an intern at JPL. Nice machine and it could also run Unix."
The Lisa system that ran Unix probably wasn't a standard Lisa. Apple supplied a UNIX-based computer with the same hardware that was used a development system for the Lisa itself, which had no "native" development tools of its own. Those who wanted to write software for it required both a standard Lisa to act as a target / test rig, and a development Lisa, which was a pretty expensive setup for software houses, especially when the potential market for their products was very small, so there was very little interest in developing third party software products for it.
"I was impressed by what is now known as Microsoft Word before it was bought out by Microsoft"
Microsoft didn't buy Word. They employed Charles Symonyl and Richard Brodie (co-writers of the Bravo WYSIWYG word processor at Xerox Parc), who originally crafted it as a multiplatform, true WYSYWYG graphical program which had some similarities to their earlier Bravo. It was released for the IBM PC in 1983, and unusually for the time required a mouse to use properly, so it wasn't particularly successful because mice weren't standard equipment at that time due to the fact that virtually no software worked with them (the Macintosh hadn't been launched yet, and few people had seen, let alone used, Xerox's Star or Apple's Lisa).
"I actually met him once at a University of Maryland talk during the height of the dot-com era -- have you ever met Douglas Engelbart?"
No.
"As far as I'm aware, his NLS didn't feature windows, drop-down menus, icons, and a desktop representation of a file system -- while arguably less important than the networked hypertext that NLS did have, they were the defining features of the Xerox Star and Mac."
NLS had windows, and it had a sort of icon capability in that graphics could be linked to command sets (and lots of other things) which would be invoked when they were clicked with the mouse (NLS could do things with graphics that few if any of today's systems are capable of). NLS didn't have menus, but then neither the Star: a lot of people think that it had them because they were present in Smalltalk (although Smalltalk's menus were pop-up rather than pull-down), but despite rumours to the contrary, the Star's OS and software weren't written in Smalltalk, so while there were some similarities, there were also a number of notable differences.
There's an excellent article about the Star at: http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/retrospect/
"Which is the invention, the Xerox Star or the Mac?"
If you're referring to mouse-driven GUIs, then neither of them invented the concept. Doug Englebart's oNLine system had a three button mouse, windows, hypertext, and networked video conferencing by 1968, and he claimed to have been inspired by Vannevar Bush's "Memex" concept that was published in the 1940s. The Xerox PARC team who designed the Star admitted to being influenced by Englebart's work, so it seems strange that this notable pioneer has been largely forgotten by others, who perpetuate the common myth of GUIs originating with research at Xerox PARC.
"So how do they write the English essays? I understand how PC is loosing out in terms of playing music, IM and other trivial stuff, but it seems to me that heavy PC utilization is unavoidable for school and work."
/cable receivers, computers, games consoles, or other such devices to produce them, so it must have worked by some sort of "dream magic" (which, as is typical in dreams, wasn't explained at all).
Well blow me down, and there was me thinking that all the school work I did during the 1960s and 1970s without any PCs at all actually existed, instead of obviously being a mere dream caused by advanced age-induced brain rot. It was a strangely detailed dream, too: we had these things called "pens" and "pencils" with a tip which left marks on paper if they were moved around, so they were capable of both writing _and_ drawing, and we used them on books with sheets of blank paper in them that got handed to teachers for marking, and were returned to us the next day. I even dreamt that we had special devices called "rulers"that could be used to ensure that the lines we drew with these strange implements were straight and the right length, while others known as "compasses" that looked like a pair of arms with a hinge at the top allowed us to draw circular figures of varying sizes. This strange fever-dream of mine also had things called "libraries" with large collections of "books", strange devices containing paper pages with text on them that seemed to work despite not having anywhere obvious to put batteries or any electrical leads or sockets. To show how weird this dream was, I lived in a strange that had a monitor-like device which displayed images and produced sound without any obvious boxes such as DVD players, satellite
"I'm not American"
Neither am I.
"I want sanctions against the US, and I want them forcibly disarmed."
Translation: I am a completely useless person from a useless country full of people just as useless as me, so we're all jealous of the US because it goes around demonstrating the fact that it is more powerful and wealthy than us due to being considerably less useless.
"I think the US are evil imperial bastards, and I was in the living room cheering and eating popcorn when they were attacked."
Translation: burning envy leads to such spite that watching others die horribly is a pleasure. It also leads to the sort of stupidity that renders me incapable of seeing how hypocritical it is for someone who claims to have cheered and eaten popcorn while 3,000 human beings were dying to call somebody else evil.
"Americans don't come around my town much since two US Navy guys went drinking in our neighbourhood and were executed in the street"
Translation: Americans don't come to my town since two US Navy guys who went drinking were swamped by beggars and people trying to sell their children for three dollars. However, I'm going to pretend that we did a bit of executing, because all those silly Slashdotters will obviously believe that a country represented by someone without the balls to post non-anonymously would have the courage to attack two whole Americans (and military ones at that!) unless they outnumbered them several thousand to one, and had some less craven foreigners to do the actual attacking, while I and others bravely hide just in case another American turns up and starts shouting or hitting people.
"If Apple is expecting this mythical $831 per phone in revenue, how expensive do you think an unlocked iPhone would be?"
Probably around the same price Apple were selling them for before the $200 drop. My reasoning for this is based on two observations:
1) An iPod touch 16GB (basically an iPhone without the phone) sells for $399, and Apple are obviously making a pretty decent margin on them, otherwise they wouldn't be selling them at that price.
2) You can pick up a basic unlocked GSM phone for about $60 if you look around, and that includes a case, keyboard, display, battery, charger, packaging, and dealer markup. I doubt therefore that the extra bits which separate an iPod touch from an iPhone would cost Apple more than $50, and that's being _extremely_ generous.
It's therefore very likely that they could sell the 16GB iPhone at the old price of $599, and make rather more off each unit than they do from an iPod touch. This would put them around the mid-point of "smart phone" prices ($400 to $1000 for an unlocked modern example (i.e. not older tech., which sells for less), depending on manufacturer, model, and capabilities).
"Driving serves a purpose"
Some driving serves a purpose, but most of it is due to laziness, force of habit, or both.
"People need to get to their jobs. Items need to be transported."
The problem with this justification is that it's entirely the result of circular reasoning. People drive to work because cars allow them to live a long way from their jobs; the jobs are therefore also able to move outside towns that have alternative transport hubs (and expensive land because it's strategically located) because people have cars to reach them, but they also require goods to be transported by road because they're not near any alternative transport systems. Once you have a mobile population and the ability to be supplied with goods almost anywhere, retailers can also move outside the towns to places where land is cheaper because it's agricultural, and they together with industry that also buys up the cheap land push agriculture further from population centres to places where their goods and workers now have make long road journeys. The fact that these out-of-town outfits are producing and selling _exactly_ the same things that were already available tends to be very conveniently overlooked by those who want to pretend that the fumes, noise, and accidents caused by motor vehicles is a necessary evil because everything's so far away from everything else.
"You seem to "believe" a lot of things that seem very convenient for your agenda"
Whereas you are obviously a completely impartial, fact-filled fount of wisdom who obviously has no agenda whatsoever, hence comments such as:
"Basically you want people like me to suffer"
And after writing that piece of sad persecution-complex tripe, you then go on to accuse the parent of being irrational in what has to be either a brilliant piece of comedy, or an awesome display of utter hypocrisy. I really hope for your sake it was the former rather than the latter.
"Windows Vista broke some back-compat with old apps"
It breaks far less stuff than XP did when it came out. The Win9X series ran most old software dating back to the DOS days, including drivers and stuff that wrote directly to the screen, because it had a version of DOS underneath that could bypass Windows completely when necessary. Compatibility with software and drivers written for 16 bit versions of Windows (e.g. Win 2.X, Win3.x) was also _much_ better than XP, which can be notably finicky (or downright impossible even after downloading Microsoft app compatibility toolkit) with software written for 9X and NT 3/4, let alone older Windows versions or DOS. Service Pack 2 also broke applications that ran fine under "vanilla" X or SP1 (including several Microsoft programs), thereby adding to the already impressive list of stuff that either didn't work at all or ran unreliably under XP.
"You show me ONE school text book that doesn't state somewhere"
School textbooks are not written by or for scientists, so this is a straw man.
"Speaking of light, for centuries, scientists accepted the idea that light took no time at all, that it was instantaneous. Olaf Roemer observed that this was not true. However, it took another 50 years for mainstream scientists to believe (accept) his observations.
It took 50 years for others to test and confirm his observations, after which they became accepted. Current science isn't immediately rewritten whenever somebody comes along claiming that it's wrong -- there is a peer review process which includes others repeating experiments under the same conditions, and comparing their results with those of the person or team making the claim. Steady improvements in global communications have progressively accelerated the process, but it can still take several years for others to thoroughly analyse the original experiment and its data for potential flaws, and then attempt to duplicate it (depending of course on the complexity of what is being tested).
"So the consistent laws of gravity, inertia, electricity etc. are all man made?"
The laws are indeed man made, but that doesn't mean that the natural phenomena we measured to derive them are. Of course, anybody who wasn't so obviously determined to build and knock down their own straw men would have realised that the following quote from my prior post made this distinction very clear: "The laws are made by man to model observed natural phenomena".
"So then, why don't we change them? Reverse gravity whenever a car goes uphill and re-instate it when going downhill."
We can freely change the laws, and have done so many times throughout history when new observations and experiments showed that they were wrong. You seem to be (probably deliberately) trying to present such laws as something other than a conceptual model that reflects man's understanding of, and ability to measure physical phenomena, both of which have changed many times. Before Galileo, scientists were convinced that objects of different weights fell at different speeds, and came up with all sorts of laws to predict this, but they were wrong, so all those laws were thrown out, and new ones were formulated. This did not however mean that the nature of reality itself changed to make objects of different weights fall at the same speed the moment Galileo came up with an experiment to prove it -- the laws changed, but nature remained just as it had been since long before there were any humans to build conceptual models of it.
"We observe that nature seems to work in a consistent way. It's not capricious. Water doesn't run uphill one day and the sun doesn't rise in the north one day and in the west the next."
These are localised phenomena, not universal ones. Water in microgravity for example behaves very differently from the way it does on Earth, and other planets can have rotational directions, axes, and axial stability that differ from those of Earth, meaning that not only would their sunrises appear on other horizons, but could also vary significantly in their location over relatively short periods of time (e.g. a human life span).
"It's this very predictability of a universe we did not make, but are mostly spectators in, that makes science and technology possible. We quantify the consistent behavior we observe, but did not create. On the basis of these units and laws we are able to make certain predictions and build useful devices."
I fail to see the point of this sentence, because it's making exactly the same points I did, i.e. that laws are man's attempt to quantify the universe, not fundamental aspects of reality that it "obeys".
"First I did not state laws of "physics" that man fails to obey."
A quote from your original post shows that this is exactly what you stated:
"Nobody has ever shown that any of the laws of nature arise from within our time-space-matter-energy universe.
"Scientists believe this, but they don't KNOW it."
They don't "believe it" either. Belief is something for religios: scientists _accept_ whatever provides the best explanation of the things they observe, and modify or scrap these ideas when new discoveries or better experimental data demonstrate that they're wrong. An excellent example of this in action was the Michelson-Morley experiment that tried to measure the effects of the luminiferous aether that 19th century scientists postulated as the medium through which light-waves travelled, and started a chain of increasingly accurate experiments that ended up entirely removing that idea from mainstream science.
"All of nature obeys the LAWS of physics"
The laws are made by man to model observed natural phenomena, so statements about nature itself obeying them are pure balderdash.
"Nobody has ever shown that any of the laws of nature arise from within our time-space-matter-energy universe"
That's because scientists know precisely where these "laws" came from: the minds of people who measured stuff using human-invented units, and came up with some constants and formulae that expressed various phenomena _as humans observe them_ in said human-invented units. They are man-made representations of man's observation of the universe we occupy, not fundamental rules that the universe itself embodies.
"God gave his laws and the entire universe except for man obeys them"
How does man disobey these "laws of physics" that you claim all of nature must obey? Please cite a reliable recorded incident (i.e. no pseudo-scientific guff like perpetual motion machines) where somebody just decided not obey the inverse square law, the laws of thermodynamics, Boyle's law, or any other "law of physics", and actually succeeded in doing so.
"The last I checked most drivers for winxp work for win2k."
My experiences indicate that it's a fairly hit and miss affair, so the best that can really be said is YMMV.
"They didn't change the driver model drastically"
But they added a considerable number of APIs that some drivers use. A similar situation existed with Windows 98 and 98SE: they have identical driver models, but 98SE added a few networking APIs that made writing network drivers a little easier, so some network cards that had "Windows 98" on their list of supported operating systems didn't work with "vanilla" 98.
"The conquistadors get more credit than they really deserve for their downfall, there. Had it not been for smallpox, Cortez would have been impaled on the end of a spear, and that would have been the end of that."
Historic revisionism at its best. Smallpox was (unwittingly) introduced to the American mainland in 1519 by an African slave called Francisco de Baguia. This is the same year Cortes reached the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, which didn't have any incidence of Smallpox until over a year later (October 1520) because Cortes and his rather small army weren't carriers (most of them would have died long before reaching Tenochtitlan otherwise. Europeans were more resistant to the disease than native American people, but lots of them died from it every year, and epidemics regularly devastated populations, especially in cities. Luis XIV of France for example lost his son, grandson, and great grandson to smallpox within a period of 11 months in 1712). This was _after_ Cortes had already been ejected from Tenochtitlan by Cuitatlahuac, Montezuma's brother, who took over after Montezuma had been killed by his own people. Smallpox definitely played a role in his subsequent re-entry to Tenochtitlan in 1521 (it killed Cuitatlahuac for a start!), but the Aztec Empire had effectively already collapsed when he entered it the first time.
"It's not as though the civilizations there were "inferior" in some social/racial sense that caused them to lose."
There were several factors that allowed to Cortes and his notably small band of followers to defeat the Aztecs:
1) Superstition. Cortes took advantage of the Aztec belief in a white bearded god and their terror of horses, firearms, and war mastiffs, which they hadn't seen before.
2) A difference in tactics. The main aim of Aztec warfare was capturing live prisoners for mass human sacrifice, whereas the Spaniards practised European-style warfare which had very different goals. Aztecs also emphasised the bravery of individual warriors, unlike the Spanish, who operated as cohesive units. They were far more organised in this respect than anyone else in Europe at that period, and this had led to them becoming the most feared soldiers on that continent. There are documented cases of entire armies suing for peace before any fighting took place because one side hired a (frequently small) contingent of Spanish mercenaries, and the opposing side's soldiers refused to face them.
3) Alliances. The Aztecs constantly attacked surrounding peoples to gain a constant flow of sacrifices (this should however be seen in context, because many of those who were victims of the Aztecs also practised human sacrifice), so they were hated by all the non-Aztecs that Cortes encountered on his journey. He took advantage of this to form alliances, which not only greatly increased the size of his initially rather small army, but also gave him a valuable source of intelligence about the terrain and Aztec warfare methods. These people had a pent up desire for revenge that led them to treat captured Aztecs far more brutally than the Spanish, who regarded warfare as the means to an end (getting rich) rather than an end in itself.
4) Technology. Spaniards had metal armour and weapons, crossbows, firearms including cannon, and cavalry. The Aztecs were infantry with obsidian (stone) weapons, slack bows (good for hunting or against unarmoured opponents, useless against anyone with a layer of padding, let alone the advanced Spanish armour of the 16th century), wooden maces, and thrown spears, again with stone heads that were ineffective against the Spanish. It was equivalent to sending a modern army with tanks, automatic weapons, and tactical air support against a Roman legion or one of Alexander's Macedonian phalanxes, neither of which which would stand a chance despite being the most devastating military machines of their time.
"It wasn't enough just to topple their society, but the conquistadors had to finish the job by burning everything they could get their hands o
"Lots of people did stick to Win2K instead of going to XP, and they were right to do so, XP was flaky."
:-)."
No, but that's only because there aren't any companies who've achieved Microsoft's level of success that need to explain why their entire product range has been so bad for so many years.
"I mean, it's been tough since Enron's "I feel you pain" Shilling went the way of the Dodo, but Thank God we still have Microsoft churning out new way of selling complete and utter BS."
MS have to keep producing BS screens like this to distract shareholders and PHBs in their big corporate customer base, who might otherwise get around to wondering how they managed to spend five years and untold billions of dollars producing the endlessly polished turd called Vista, who the hell thought the Zune was a good idea, and why 30% of XBox-360s have to be repaired or replaced under warranty (i.e. at Microsoft's expense). When the only real success story the biggest software company on the planet has had in the last few years is a remake of a game written by a company they bought just to get previous versions of that game, the BS machine gets put into overdrive to try and prevent too many influential people from having the time to start thinking that whoever's making key decisions for Microsoft these days is an idiot.
"I think we will all feel the loss when the EU finally hangs all of them (at least, that's what they make their conviction sound like
That's because they know that whining about it all being a pinko commie plot to punish a successful US company for simply being successful will make many of those who usually rant about how terrible "Microsucks" is start demanding that Europe be bombed and invaded for thinking that their silly foreign laws apply to the European bits of US companies who operate there. BS works, hence the fact that MS spend so much on it, and the fact that this particular bit of BS doesn't gel with geeks only indicates that geeks aren't the intended audience for it, unlike their "damned pinko commie Europeans picking on the US" ploy (which isn't only aimed at geeks, but is notably successful at getting the majority of the American ones on their side).
"The difference is XP SP2 was better than XP SP1 in significant ways. Like not crashing as often :)."
Agreed. However, the same could well be true for Vista once it gets a couple of service packs. SP2 came out around 4 years after XP, so it's early days yet (I'm not defending Vista here, but simply pointing out that most of the things said about it were also said about XP, which took several years to become a reasonably useful OS that worked fairly well with most hardware).
"Lots of people did stick to Win2K instead of going to XP, and they were right to do so, XP was flaky."
This is true for professional and medium to large business users (a surprising number of companies are still using Win2K), but not homes and small companies. Few third-party manufacturers bothered to release drivers for Win2K, and it wasn't offered as a pre-install option on most machines aimed at individuals or small businesses, even if they had the resources to run it well (few did in 2000), so that market wasn't even aware of the fact that it existed. They usually ended up with Windows ME during that period, and even "vanilla" XP looked wonderful to anyone who'd been using that for a year!
"this process is about ensuring that our customer's machines aren't compromised."
I cried tears of joy when I read about Microsoft dedicating so many of their resources to securing one customer's machines. It just shows how Steve "Big Hearted" Ballmer is steadily filling what was once a cold, impersonal monopolist with people who are willing to go not just an extra mile, but several extra parsecs to ensure that every one of their customers feels loved and cared for. I'm so very, very glad that there's a still place for wonderful people-oriented guys like this in the cynical cut-throat world of big business. Please excuse me while I throw myself face down on a bed and sob uncontrollably for several days.
"Even windows isn't working with Windows these days... what with Vista breaking so many apps that worked on all previous versions upto XP SP2."
XP SP2 broke lots of stuff that ran on XP SP1 and earlier, and XP itself broke vast quantities of software that ran perfectly well on Win9X variants, including a lot of stuff written for DOS and earlier versions of Windows. Microsoft got away with that, so it's hardly surprising that they think they'll also be able to do it with Vista.
NB: nearly every complaint people have about Vista was also voiced when XP came out. It was a resource hog which ran slowly on most hardware that was around; it had activation that could disable it, and many predicted that this would lead to a consumer revolt which would break Microsoft's monopoly forever; adoption was slow, especially among businesses, once again leading to predictions of Microsoft's impending doom; there were far fewer drivers at launch than was the case with Vista, so a lot of the the hardware people bought for 9X didn't work, and never would work with XP; and it broke huge swathes of existing software, especially games, which are dear to the geek heart, so many predicted that the resulting consumer revolt would have Bill gates rattling a tin cup within a year. People would, it was said, flock to Linux in droves rather than put up with the evils of XP...
Prediction: when the next MS OS comes out, geeks will be lamenting the fact that it breaks software which ran fine on good old Vista (especially games), is a resource hog that doesn't work very well with most of the hardware out there, has no drivers, and a new WeKnowWhereYouLive activation system that consumers won't stand for. This will, they'll say, definitely be the year when Linux takes over the corporate and domestic desktop -- all it needs is some drivers that work with current hardware, and the ability to run the games people can't live fulfilling lives without playing to hand Microsoft their arse on a plate.
"China doesn't come up with anything new, they just copy"
People in the West said that about Japan until the mid 1970s.
"There are very few "commissioned" artists these days"
There are plenty of commissioned artists. Some examples:
Session musicians and singers.
Composers who write scores (or in many cases both write and record them) for advertising, TV, radio, movies, video games, etc.
Freelance commercial artists, writers, and photographers.
Most professional dancers, choreographers, and actors.
Just about everyone involved in the movie industry.
Anybody who is paid to do a one-off job, set of jobs, or produce a specific product, and could be described as some sort of artists is a commissioned artist.
"He looked at the stars, and his bible, and decided how things must be."
Aristotle was was thinking about these things well over 300 years before the claimed birth date for the guy who is the central figure for that bible.
"His theories were designed to leave a place for god and heaven"
Aristotle's writings very clearly show that he was a secularist. He theorised about a prime and immovable mover that set all other things in motion, but makes it clear that although this "mover" could well be conscious in some way, it is completely oblivious to us, and therefore neither desires, nor would be aware of attempts to worship it.
"Also, anyone who still believes in creationism in the modern western world obviously refuses to learn. And is, therefor, "inherently dumb."
The same could be said about atheists who spout ignorant tripe about historic figures whose lives, writings, and beliefs are easy to find out about.
"by the time Bill Gates wrote The Road Ahead, which (before its redaction) barely mentioned the internet."
Before its redaction, it said that the Internet was a passing fad.
Don't feed the trolls.