I'll take a one-way mission, too. Hell, imagine never having to wear bug spray anymore. No more poison ivy. No more dimwits trying to push their religion on you by force if necessary. And you'd be spending your life building a new world. That would be a wonderful place to die.
How much fresh water, oil, and labor do you think it takes to just keep you fed? To supply you with clothing? To make a single computer chip? There are no supermarkets on Mars, no Chinese sweat shops, no Best Buy. In fact, those "dimwits" you want to get away from will control everything you do, say, and think; if you don't comply, they'll just stop sending supplies.
If you want to "build a new world", try getting yourself a plot of land in the north of Canada and living off the grid: the government will leave you alone, and it will be paradise compared to Mars.
Many people here seem, as expected, look more on the copyright side of the issue. The fact is, getting such an edition together is *not* easy by any stretch
No, it isn't. And it's a good thing if it is made available even in this limited form. The issue is with the content of the announcement and who paid whom for what.
Consider the amount of money that has to be paid to musicologists to do research for the 35 years.
I suspect many of those musicologists are gainfully employed in academia and paid for by the public already. And if the music community had a community spirit, these discussions, academic as well as interpretational, could be carried out in a public forum (like Wikipedia).
The music is not "free" the way the Internet Archive understands it, so they can't redistribute it. The music is only made available, under license, for "personal" or "educational" use, and you are specifically prohibited from downloading all of it or redistributing it. It's largely marketing for the publisher.
For a truly free edition of Mozart's public domain works, we'll have to wait until older editions are scanned at the libraries. But it's going to happen.
The stuff is "free-as-in-beer". You can't download the complete archive, and you can't use it for anything other than "personal" or "educational" use. You probably can't even perform it. So, distribution through BT is not going to happen.
I could, under "fair use", xerox a printed edition that I'd purchassed, and use it in the same way that I can now use a download from this site.
Or you could just go to the library and copy it there.
In practice, it was prohibitively expensive to get your hands on this stuff before today, and impossible in a lot of cases. Now, it's a mouse click away.
Again, that's what libraries are for.
But before today, it was free in neither sense.
Actually, there's a significant amount of truly free sheet music around the internet, not just Mutopia.
but if a terrorist is planning on dying in the explosion there is no need for any safety precautions at all.
Well, yes, there is, because if he disables himself before making enough to blow up the plane, he won't accomplish his task. And disabling himself is the most likely outcome if he starts these kinds of reactions without safety equipment.
What they have put up is hardly "free"; it requires you to agree to a license agreement that limits you to "personal use" under "fair use" principles. Well, geez, you already could copy the music under those principles before.
Companies like Barereiter have been playing tricks with copyright for a long time, for example, by slightly modifying sheet music every few years with meaningless (and often, erroneous) "interpretations".
This is not how music should be treated 200 years after a composer's death, in particular in the day and age of the Internet. There is no reason why Mozart's entire body of work shouldn't be digitized and freely available with no restrictions on use at all, in a form like Project Gutenberg.
OK, I'm now feeding the troll, but I'll not let that smear stand.
Yeah, that's the problem: you're a zealot who views companies like people with reputations that can be smeared. Sun is a company, not a person.
Sun has been scrupulously clear over exactly what is and is not under open source licenses. [...] There are indeed parts of Solaris that are still encumbered, but that doesn't stop Nexenta and three other distributions building complete distributions,
Well, so it's called "OpenSolaris", but it's really not all of Solaris. How is that "scrupulously clear"?
The full source to the Java class libraries will be released in the spring under GNU/Classpath apart from the bits that hostile parties refuse to relicense to Sun.
Well, so it's not the full source, it's only part of the source. And we don't know whether those "hostile parties" prevent so much stuff from being released that the release ends up being useless. We won't know that until the release actually happens.
And that's all I'm saying: until the release actually happens, we won't know what will be released and what it will do. But you want people to throw caution into the wind and pretend that a mere announcement of something that may happen partially some time next year is the same as a legally binding commitment. Say, if Microsoft did something like that, would you trust them? I wouldn't. So, why should I trust Sun any more?
I remember seeing a British TV show on G4 or something where they dropped a metal pellet into a ceramic bathtub. In a few seconds, the tub was demolished.
That was one of the alkali metals. They skitter around on the surface of the water creating a light show, but that's all. If the tub was demolished, it was not by that. In fact, ceramic bath tubs are incredibly tough.
When this mixture set (after 30 minutes) a match-head size drop of this stuff blew a watermelon to pieces
Looks fake to me. Unless my calculations are way off, I think it's physically impossible for such a small amount of stuff to "vaporize" a melon through any chemical reaction; even under ideal conditions, I think it could at best raise the temperature of the melon by about 20C.
It's fine when normal people kick around the water cooler and talk about the relative usability of different interfaces. It's entirely different when someone who claims to be a UI professional does it. A professional should know better than to give such a superficial analysis.
Norman is right in one thing: complex stuff sells well. But that has nothing to do with complex stuff being better, it has to do with psychology and economics. But, then, Norman wouldn't understand those.
Basically, the approach is pretty close to the VMware approach but presently requires the newer, more advanced processors to operate.
That's not a good way of putting it, because it incorrectly suggests that VMware somehow pioneered virtualization and KVM follows it. But what VMware actually pioneered was a workaround for a lack of virtualization instructions on older x86. Modern x86 virtualization follows models that have been around since long before VMware existed.
If you are actually interested and not trolling, I'd suggest you join the other 18,000 or so people over on OpenSolaris.org where the source code used to build Solaris is available under a Free license
In fact, according to opensolaris.org, only parts of Solaris have been released in that form.
Thank you for illustrating my point again that we can't go by press releases or zealots like you in making platform decisions, neither with Solaris nor with Java.
There are dozens of heap allocation algorithms, whether or not the heap allocator is integrated into the garbage collector, or a call out to some routine is sort of irrelevant. The fact is that somewhere in the garbage collector there is some form of heap allocation/deallocation. Whether you choose to call it that or not will probably affect the maintainability of your code, more than the performance characteristics of the GC. At some point characteristics like how you select a region to be broken up, how you reuse allocation, or how you merge adjacent regions back in is a heap management problem not a GC problem.
Garbage collectors usually don't do any of those things: they don't break up regions, they don't reuse allocated memory, and they don't merge blocks.
I'm sorry, but this discussion is pointless: you evidently have no idea of how garbage collectors work and lack any basis from which to argue. Since you keep comparing C++ and Java, I also must conclude that those are the only two languages you have any real experience with (both seriously flawed), which means that you, again, simply aren't competent to argue about C++ relative to the languages that preceded it.
"Really? All of it? Or just some of it? Who can even tell." All you need to do is look.
The question was rhetorical. In fact, Solaris has not been released as open source, only parts of it have been. Sun is playing word games again.
Therefore, by definition, Sun have already made a substantial contribution.
So what? I never said anything different. What I said was that the RMS statement that was quoted didn't apply to the announcement or Sun's previous efforts, it applied to actually open sourcing Java, something that has not happened yet.
The point was that the announcement was not "meaningless".
You keep saying that, you simply fail to support your argument. What exactly has changed after the announcement? Linux distributions still have the same problems with the Sun Java license they had a few weeks ago. People still can only download Sun Java by agreeing to Sun's licensing agreements.
Until Sun actually ships Java under an open source license, nothing has changed at all.
Not true, of course. It means that many developers who want to stick with open source can work with Java knowing that in a matter of months, it will be open. They can change policies now.
Just like they "knew" that when Sun announce they were going for ISO or ECMA standardization, Java would be an ISO or ECMA standard? I don't think so. A press release is not a legally binding contract. Java will be open source once it has been released under that license, not a second sooner.
Well, firstly, Solaris is certainly open source,
Really? All of it? Or just some of it? Who can even tell.
I quote: "Sun will have contributed more than any other company to free software."
Yes, RMS is saying that after they have done the open source release, then that will be true. And it doesn't mean that anybody has to like Sun anymore than before. Sun made a strategic decision; you can bet that if they can screw other open source projects, they still will.
If Sun say they are going to do it, they are going to do it, problems or not. Their statement that they are doing this is hardly "meaningless".
They are "meaningless" in that nothing changes for users until they actually deliver.
And that interpretation is already assuming that they are actually being honest and that no problems crop up. Given what happened with Java standardization and the tricks they have been playing with Solaris, Sun has little credibility when it comes to open source.
I thought we were discussing C++ vs's newer languages like java and C# as they relate to having runtime features C++ doesn't have.
No. My point (which started this thread) is that none of those languages have much of anything that's new; C++ was a huge step backwards from the state of the art at the time, and neither Java nor C# have fully caught up with where we were 25 years ago.
I'm afraid you don't understand that most garbage collectors also have heap allocators, and that C/C++ and many other languages skip the middle man and simply use the heap allocator.
Your model of how garbage collectors work is completely wrong. High performance garbage collectors aren't a layer on top of a C/C++-like heap allocator--that would be horribly inefficient--they use completely different allocation strategies.
C++ is an incredibly flexable language, that is its strong point.
I used to think so myself, but after using C++ professionally for 20 years, I can say without a doubt that C++'s flexibility is its weak point: it has enormous project management costs and no significant benefits.
GC's are added for programmer safety not performace.
Quite right. The nice thing is that you get the added safety without paying a cost in performance, which should make it a no-brainer.
When your done please explain to me how that can be faster than a simple stack allocation (usually precomputed by the compiler and done when the initial stack is setup on procedure entry) done in C/C++ or a fast O(1) heap based allocator
You're incorrectly assuming that other languages can't use stack allocation (they can, and do, and do so more than C++), and that the C/C++ memory allocator is "fast" (it isn't, relative to a good garbage collector).
Now, i've seen dozens of programs written in both C++ and java which are written to prove that java has faster memory allocation
Which part of "As for Java, Java's implementation of garbage collection, reflection, and other features are lousy, so you can't use Java as a yardstick" did you not understand?
The point here is that while you may be able to make C++ programs slower than java, there is usually some way to tweak the C++ program to reverse the situation.
I fully agree. Were you trying to make a point?
In general, when you compare C++ to a good implementation of a good language X (and that excludes Java), you'll find that C++ sometimes wins and sometimes loses in terms of performance; but C++ almost always loses in terms of programmer productivity and software quality.
No, it's not "extreme". If you want to use Java "for free", you can do so already right now. The purpose of the open source release is to allow integration into FOSS distributions, and to encourage contributions. Until that actually happens, any Java open source license makes no difference.
Also, just because Sun says that they are going to do it doesn't mean it's going to go through without problems.
They say they will be releasing parts over the next few months. The first true open source release will come with Java 7. Sun promised GPL with a linking exception; I'd wait and see whether they actually deliver or whether there are some unforeseen issues with it.
You'll know it when it happens, because that's when Linux distributions will start including it in their "free" portions. Until then, the announcement is meaningless.
25 years ago Stroustrup wasn't wrong, I would like to see you run a modern java enviroment on a 64k machine (no, the embedded java systems that remove most of the language don't count).
C++ was never aimed at "64k machines". The kinds of machines people started using C++ on had several megabytes of memory at least--machines perfectly capable of running other high level languages of the day. C++ use on PCs didn't become common until they reached that size and performance; prior to that, it was used mostly for research applications on UNIX workstations.
Also, C++ 20 years ago (which is when it was released) was not the same language as it is today. 20 years ago, C++ was a small, backwards compatible extension of C, implemented as a preprocessor. As such, it made sense as a temporary improvement for C until people could move to something else. Today, C++ is a different language--a bloated monster.
Performace did matter back then, for example the much toted java garbage collection system would take up 100% of a 8mhz 286's cycles just figuring out what could be released.
That's not how GC costs work; GC isn't some big, fixed overhead that you can only afford once you have a fast machine. Rather, GC costs a certain number of cycles per byte allocated. That means that the impact on a normal program running 10 sec on an 8 MHz machine is the same as on a normal program running 10 sec on an 8 GHz machine.
Furthermore, then, as now, a good garbage collector reduces the total amount of CPU spend on memory management compared to C++'s manual storage management scheme; C++ memory management is highly inefficient.
As for Java, Java's implementation of garbage collection, reflection, and other features are lousy, so you can't use Java as a yardstick. Nevertheless, C++ programs like OpenOffice and Firefox are slow and very resource intensive; evidently, using C++ as the underlying language doesn't work magic.
Stroustrup was wrong 25 years ago, and he should have known better. I was there, I know.
This is not a criticism of Stourstrup; C++ simply implements what everyone thought was necessary in a high performance OO language twenty five years ago.
Sorry, no, that's false. People knew pretty much as much about OOP and high performance language implementations back then as they do today: dynamic compilation, dynamic optimization, generational garbage collection, incremental compilation, runtime class updating, method dispatch optimization, etc.
Since the paradigm was not in widespread use, it's no surprising that the design is different from what we'd come up with today.
We haven't "come up" with anything "today". What happened is that people like Stroustrup incorrectly postulated 25 years ago that efficiency was more important than good design and designed languages without what they naively considered "inefficient" constructs. We have been spending the last 25 years putting these features back in again. Today, Java and C# are almost where OOLs were before C++, except that Java and C# are far more bloated and less consistent.
Stroustrup was simply wrong, and he could have known better if he had done his homework.
Why is it Microsoft's job to simplify a process so it can be better implemented by their competitors?
I don't presume to tell Microsoft what to do, and I'm not speaking to Microsoft. I frankly don't care what Microsoft does. I'm just telling potential Microsoft customers: wake up, Microsoft is screwing you again.
And in this case, Microsoft customers are screwed not only because their choice of OS is limited because of Microsoft's poor standardization efforts, but because not even Microsoft's new OS runs reliably on the platform they themselves have defined.
So the problem can't lie entirely with Microsoft (though they are partly to blame for the extremely lax and often Windows-centric ACPI practices).
That is precisely why it is Microsoft's fault: instead of having manufacturers code against a spec and a detailed test suite, they code and test against Windows. And Microsoft usually likes that. If they didn't like it, they'd create a public test suite and simplify the specs to the point where they can actually be implemented easily.
It seems to me if I create something, it belongs to *me*.
Well, that may "seem" to you, but you haven't made an argument for it, that's not the way the law works, and that's not how things have worked historically.
Whereas if anything which *can* be copied for free is legally permitted to be copied for free, production of such things will almost cease.
That's merely your unfounded assertion.
In fact, most of the great works of art in history have been produced without copyright protection, and the US, on its way to becoming a world power, was ignoring foreign copyrights and patents completely. Evidence mostly suggests that copyrights (and patents) harm growth, innovation, art, and culture.
And, maybe you can tell us: what have you produced that's worth shit?
So it seems to me I'm using the power of the State to prevent theft.
There is no theft because there is no property in the first place. The law doesn't recognize copyrights and patents as "property"; they are temporary monopolies granted by the government, with a specific aim in mind. The US Constitution protects your property, but lawmakers could reduce copyrights and patents, or even abolish them, if they concluded that society doesn't benefit from them anymore, without conflict with the US Constitution.
If you need to attack me, you are insecure in your arguments.
I'm quite secure in my arguments; I'm merely annoyed that people like you keep blabbing on about copyright law without understanding even the legal basics or history.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take a one-way mission, too. Hell, imagine never having to wear bug spray anymore. No more poison ivy. No more dimwits trying to push their religion on you by force if necessary. And you'd be spending your life building a new world. That would be a wonderful place to die.
How much fresh water, oil, and labor do you think it takes to just keep you fed? To supply you with clothing? To make a single computer chip? There are no supermarkets on Mars, no Chinese sweat shops, no Best Buy. In fact, those "dimwits" you want to get away from will control everything you do, say, and think; if you don't comply, they'll just stop sending supplies.
If you want to "build a new world", try getting yourself a plot of land in the north of Canada and living off the grid: the government will leave you alone, and it will be paradise compared to Mars.
Many people here seem, as expected, look more on the copyright side of the issue. The fact is, getting such an edition together is *not* easy by any stretch
No, it isn't. And it's a good thing if it is made available even in this limited form. The issue is with the content of the announcement and who paid whom for what.
Consider the amount of money that has to be paid to musicologists to do research for the 35 years.
I suspect many of those musicologists are gainfully employed in academia and paid for by the public already. And if the music community had a community spirit, these discussions, academic as well as interpretational, could be carried out in a public forum (like Wikipedia).
The music is not "free" the way the Internet Archive understands it, so they can't redistribute it. The music is only made available, under license, for "personal" or "educational" use, and you are specifically prohibited from downloading all of it or redistributing it. It's largely marketing for the publisher.
For a truly free edition of Mozart's public domain works, we'll have to wait until older editions are scanned at the libraries. But it's going to happen.
The stuff is "free-as-in-beer". You can't download the complete archive, and you can't use it for anything other than "personal" or "educational" use. You probably can't even perform it. So, distribution through BT is not going to happen.
I could, under "fair use", xerox a printed edition that I'd purchassed, and use it in the same way that I can now use a download from this site.
Or you could just go to the library and copy it there.
In practice, it was prohibitively expensive to get your hands on this stuff before today, and impossible in a lot of cases. Now, it's a mouse click away.
Again, that's what libraries are for.
But before today, it was free in neither sense.
Actually, there's a significant amount of truly free sheet music around the internet, not just Mutopia.
but if a terrorist is planning on dying in the explosion there is no need for any safety precautions at all.
Well, yes, there is, because if he disables himself before making enough to blow up the plane, he won't accomplish his task. And disabling himself is the most likely outcome if he starts these kinds of reactions without safety equipment.
What they have put up is hardly "free"; it requires you to agree to a license agreement that limits you to "personal use" under "fair use" principles. Well, geez, you already could copy the music under those principles before.
Companies like Barereiter have been playing tricks with copyright for a long time, for example, by slightly modifying sheet music every few years with meaningless (and often, erroneous) "interpretations".
This is not how music should be treated 200 years after a composer's death, in particular in the day and age of the Internet. There is no reason why Mozart's entire body of work shouldn't be digitized and freely available with no restrictions on use at all, in a form like Project Gutenberg.
OK, I'm now feeding the troll, but I'll not let that smear stand.
Yeah, that's the problem: you're a zealot who views companies like people with reputations that can be smeared. Sun is a company, not a person.
Sun has been scrupulously clear over exactly what is and is not under open source licenses. [...] There are indeed parts of Solaris that are still encumbered, but that doesn't stop Nexenta and three other distributions building complete distributions,
Well, so it's called "OpenSolaris", but it's really not all of Solaris. How is that "scrupulously clear"?
The full source to the Java class libraries will be released in the spring under GNU/Classpath apart from the bits that hostile parties refuse to relicense to Sun.
Well, so it's not the full source, it's only part of the source. And we don't know whether those "hostile parties" prevent so much stuff from being released that the release ends up being useless. We won't know that until the release actually happens.
And that's all I'm saying: until the release actually happens, we won't know what will be released and what it will do. But you want people to throw caution into the wind and pretend that a mere announcement of something that may happen partially some time next year is the same as a legally binding commitment. Say, if Microsoft did something like that, would you trust them? I wouldn't. So, why should I trust Sun any more?
I remember seeing a British TV show on G4 or something where they dropped a metal pellet into a ceramic bathtub. In a few seconds, the tub was demolished.
That was one of the alkali metals. They skitter around on the surface of the water creating a light show, but that's all. If the tub was demolished, it was not by that. In fact, ceramic bath tubs are incredibly tough.
When this mixture set (after 30 minutes) a match-head size drop of this stuff blew a watermelon to pieces
Looks fake to me. Unless my calculations are way off, I think it's physically impossible for such a small amount of stuff to "vaporize" a melon through any chemical reaction; even under ideal conditions, I think it could at best raise the temperature of the melon by about 20C.
It's fine when normal people kick around the water cooler and talk about the relative usability of different interfaces. It's entirely different when someone who claims to be a UI professional does it. A professional should know better than to give such a superficial analysis.
Norman is right in one thing: complex stuff sells well. But that has nothing to do with complex stuff being better, it has to do with psychology and economics. But, then, Norman wouldn't understand those.
Basically, the approach is pretty close to the VMware approach but presently requires the newer, more advanced processors to operate.
That's not a good way of putting it, because it incorrectly suggests that VMware somehow pioneered virtualization and KVM follows it. But what VMware actually pioneered was a workaround for a lack of virtualization instructions on older x86. Modern x86 virtualization follows models that have been around since long before VMware existed.
If you are actually interested and not trolling, I'd suggest you join the other 18,000 or so people over on OpenSolaris.org where the source code used to build Solaris is available under a Free license
In fact, according to opensolaris.org, only parts of Solaris have been released in that form.
Thank you for illustrating my point again that we can't go by press releases or zealots like you in making platform decisions, neither with Solaris nor with Java.
There are dozens of heap allocation algorithms, whether or not the heap allocator is integrated into the garbage collector, or a call out to some routine is sort of irrelevant. The fact is that somewhere in the garbage collector there is some form of heap allocation/deallocation. Whether you choose to call it that or not will probably affect the maintainability of your code, more than the performance characteristics of the GC. At some point characteristics like how you select a region to be broken up, how you reuse allocation, or how you merge adjacent regions back in is a heap management problem not a GC problem.
Garbage collectors usually don't do any of those things: they don't break up regions, they don't reuse allocated memory, and they don't merge blocks.
I'm sorry, but this discussion is pointless: you evidently have no idea of how garbage collectors work and lack any basis from which to argue. Since you keep comparing C++ and Java, I also must conclude that those are the only two languages you have any real experience with (both seriously flawed), which means that you, again, simply aren't competent to argue about C++ relative to the languages that preceded it.
"Really? All of it? Or just some of it? Who can even tell." All you need to do is look.
The question was rhetorical. In fact, Solaris has not been released as open source, only parts of it have been. Sun is playing word games again.
Therefore, by definition, Sun have already made a substantial contribution.
So what? I never said anything different. What I said was that the RMS statement that was quoted didn't apply to the announcement or Sun's previous efforts, it applied to actually open sourcing Java, something that has not happened yet.
The point was that the announcement was not "meaningless".
You keep saying that, you simply fail to support your argument. What exactly has changed after the announcement? Linux distributions still have the same problems with the Sun Java license they had a few weeks ago. People still can only download Sun Java by agreeing to Sun's licensing agreements.
Until Sun actually ships Java under an open source license, nothing has changed at all.
Not true, of course. It means that many developers who want to stick with open source can work with Java knowing that in a matter of months, it will be open. They can change policies now.
Just like they "knew" that when Sun announce they were going for ISO or ECMA standardization, Java would be an ISO or ECMA standard? I don't think so. A press release is not a legally binding contract. Java will be open source once it has been released under that license, not a second sooner.
Well, firstly, Solaris is certainly open source,
Really? All of it? Or just some of it? Who can even tell.
I quote: "Sun will have contributed more than any other company to free software."
Yes, RMS is saying that after they have done the open source release, then that will be true. And it doesn't mean that anybody has to like Sun anymore than before. Sun made a strategic decision; you can bet that if they can screw other open source projects, they still will.
If Sun say they are going to do it, they are going to do it, problems or not. Their statement that they are doing this is hardly "meaningless".
They are "meaningless" in that nothing changes for users until they actually deliver.
And that interpretation is already assuming that they are actually being honest and that no problems crop up. Given what happened with Java standardization and the tricks they have been playing with Solaris, Sun has little credibility when it comes to open source.
I thought we were discussing C++ vs's newer languages like java and C# as they relate to having runtime features C++ doesn't have.
No. My point (which started this thread) is that none of those languages have much of anything that's new; C++ was a huge step backwards from the state of the art at the time, and neither Java nor C# have fully caught up with where we were 25 years ago.
I'm afraid you don't understand that most garbage collectors also have heap allocators, and that C/C++ and many other languages skip the middle man and simply use the heap allocator.
Your model of how garbage collectors work is completely wrong. High performance garbage collectors aren't a layer on top of a C/C++-like heap allocator--that would be horribly inefficient--they use completely different allocation strategies.
C++ is an incredibly flexable language, that is its strong point.
I used to think so myself, but after using C++ professionally for 20 years, I can say without a doubt that C++'s flexibility is its weak point: it has enormous project management costs and no significant benefits.
GC's are added for programmer safety not performace.
Quite right. The nice thing is that you get the added safety without paying a cost in performance, which should make it a no-brainer.
When your done please explain to me how that can be faster than a simple stack allocation (usually precomputed by the compiler and done when the initial stack is setup on procedure entry) done in C/C++ or a fast O(1) heap based allocator
You're incorrectly assuming that other languages can't use stack allocation (they can, and do, and do so more than C++), and that the C/C++ memory allocator is "fast" (it isn't, relative to a good garbage collector).
Now, i've seen dozens of programs written in both C++ and java which are written to prove that java has faster memory allocation
Which part of "As for Java, Java's implementation of garbage collection, reflection, and other features are lousy, so you can't use Java as a yardstick" did you not understand?
The point here is that while you may be able to make C++ programs slower than java, there is usually some way to tweak the C++ program to reverse the situation.
I fully agree. Were you trying to make a point?
In general, when you compare C++ to a good implementation of a good language X (and that excludes Java), you'll find that C++ sometimes wins and sometimes loses in terms of performance; but C++ almost always loses in terms of programmer productivity and software quality.
No, it's not "extreme". If you want to use Java "for free", you can do so already right now. The purpose of the open source release is to allow integration into FOSS distributions, and to encourage contributions. Until that actually happens, any Java open source license makes no difference.
Also, just because Sun says that they are going to do it doesn't mean it's going to go through without problems.
They say they will be releasing parts over the next few months. The first true open source release will come with Java 7. Sun promised GPL with a linking exception; I'd wait and see whether they actually deliver or whether there are some unforeseen issues with it.
You'll know it when it happens, because that's when Linux distributions will start including it in their "free" portions. Until then, the announcement is meaningless.
25 years ago Stroustrup wasn't wrong, I would like to see you run a modern java enviroment on a 64k machine (no, the embedded java systems that remove most of the language don't count).
C++ was never aimed at "64k machines". The kinds of machines people started using C++ on had several megabytes of memory at least--machines perfectly capable of running other high level languages of the day. C++ use on PCs didn't become common until they reached that size and performance; prior to that, it was used mostly for research applications on UNIX workstations.
Also, C++ 20 years ago (which is when it was released) was not the same language as it is today. 20 years ago, C++ was a small, backwards compatible extension of C, implemented as a preprocessor. As such, it made sense as a temporary improvement for C until people could move to something else. Today, C++ is a different language--a bloated monster.
Performace did matter back then, for example the much toted java garbage collection system would take up 100% of a 8mhz 286's cycles just figuring out what could be released.
That's not how GC costs work; GC isn't some big, fixed overhead that you can only afford once you have a fast machine. Rather, GC costs a certain number of cycles per byte allocated. That means that the impact on a normal program running 10 sec on an 8 MHz machine is the same as on a normal program running 10 sec on an 8 GHz machine.
Furthermore, then, as now, a good garbage collector reduces the total amount of CPU spend on memory management compared to C++'s manual storage management scheme; C++ memory management is highly inefficient.
As for Java, Java's implementation of garbage collection, reflection, and other features are lousy, so you can't use Java as a yardstick. Nevertheless, C++ programs like OpenOffice and Firefox are slow and very resource intensive; evidently, using C++ as the underlying language doesn't work magic.
Stroustrup was wrong 25 years ago, and he should have known better. I was there, I know.
This is not a criticism of Stourstrup; C++ simply implements what everyone thought was necessary in a high performance OO language twenty five years ago.
Sorry, no, that's false. People knew pretty much as much about OOP and high performance language implementations back then as they do today: dynamic compilation, dynamic optimization, generational garbage collection, incremental compilation, runtime class updating, method dispatch optimization, etc.
Since the paradigm was not in widespread use, it's no surprising that the design is different from what we'd come up with today.
We haven't "come up" with anything "today". What happened is that people like Stroustrup incorrectly postulated 25 years ago that efficiency was more important than good design and designed languages without what they naively considered "inefficient" constructs. We have been spending the last 25 years putting these features back in again. Today, Java and C# are almost where OOLs were before C++, except that Java and C# are far more bloated and less consistent.
Stroustrup was simply wrong, and he could have known better if he had done his homework.
Why is it Microsoft's job to simplify a process so it can be better implemented by their competitors?
I don't presume to tell Microsoft what to do, and I'm not speaking to Microsoft. I frankly don't care what Microsoft does. I'm just telling potential Microsoft customers: wake up, Microsoft is screwing you again.
And in this case, Microsoft customers are screwed not only because their choice of OS is limited because of Microsoft's poor standardization efforts, but because not even Microsoft's new OS runs reliably on the platform they themselves have defined.
So the problem can't lie entirely with Microsoft (though they are partly to blame for the extremely lax and often Windows-centric ACPI practices).
That is precisely why it is Microsoft's fault: instead of having manufacturers code against a spec and a detailed test suite, they code and test against Windows. And Microsoft usually likes that. If they didn't like it, they'd create a public test suite and simplify the specs to the point where they can actually be implemented easily.
It seems to me if I create something, it belongs to *me*.
Well, that may "seem" to you, but you haven't made an argument for it, that's not the way the law works, and that's not how things have worked historically.
Whereas if anything which *can* be copied for free is legally permitted to be copied for free, production of such things will almost cease.
That's merely your unfounded assertion.
In fact, most of the great works of art in history have been produced without copyright protection, and the US, on its way to becoming a world power, was ignoring foreign copyrights and patents completely. Evidence mostly suggests that copyrights (and patents) harm growth, innovation, art, and culture.
And, maybe you can tell us: what have you produced that's worth shit?
So it seems to me I'm using the power of the State to prevent theft.
There is no theft because there is no property in the first place. The law doesn't recognize copyrights and patents as "property"; they are temporary monopolies granted by the government, with a specific aim in mind. The US Constitution protects your property, but lawmakers could reduce copyrights and patents, or even abolish them, if they concluded that society doesn't benefit from them anymore, without conflict with the US Constitution.
If you need to attack me, you are insecure in your arguments.
I'm quite secure in my arguments; I'm merely annoyed that people like you keep blabbing on about copyright law without understanding even the legal basics or history.