iPhone OS is OS X with Apple engineers rm -rf 'ed some parts, a lot of them. Eventually, they will merge to a single OS but it is a bit needless to spare time. Nokia on the other hand, compiled Symbian Foundation OS and have run it on a netbook. Is it interesting technologically? Yes... But still needless:)
As far as I understand, purpose of a Netbook is having Windows or Linux with a huge set of software selection/support (thanks to x86) instead of a Smart device.
Nokia and ARM are doing some similar mistake too. When you have a netbook, you expect _complete_ set of selection/possibilities, same as a PC but you just gotta be sane when selecting your options.
I own a Nokia 9300 (current upgrade is E90) and it runs Symbian which runs perfectly for my needs. Why should I want Linux on it? Why wouldn't I have a x86/Atom netbook and run Opera on it for instance instead of begging some vendor to support it? If I have a netbook, I just hit opera.com , pick windows (or linux) x86 version and install it. Opera is just an example, you can pick any software you like although I suggest Opera for such configurations. Why? Because they are the company who could ship working browser for Nokia 7650 having 2 MB (yes, MB) of disk space:)
Google with their billions of dollars and extremely talented developers can play around but it is _your_ experience at the end.
If you watch closely, the ones who always constantly reboots even while their OS doesn't tell them to do, ones always clears caches, check integrity of files comes from Windows land. It doesn't matter if it is OS X or Linux or even... Symbian!
Quote from me to developer of an app, on IM: "I know I can just logout and login but I used Windows for 8 years." That is after he told me there is absolutely no need to reboot.
It is even like some kind of war syndrome. You can never get rid of that feeling.
Well, you can't beat my rm *.* in/dev back when/dev was a real directory, moving to Windows and doing the exact same thing (del *.* forgetting I am in \WINDOWS\INF) and watch Windows ask me for keyboard driver diskette.
Even more funny, I commented on "norton undelete" as "What kind of moron would need it?" just days ago before the incident. Had to ask inf.zip from very same IRC chatroom I was in.
I knew the chmod 666 is extremely dangerous but I thought "So what? They will hack into my system and make it sound?":)
Well of course, these were the times everyone had kickbanned because they joined a IRC chatroom as root.
I am saying I am very glad that it was real pain in the ass since it thought me how to USE linux very effectively. Next week, I was compiling ALSA by hand. If I had x86, it would be still Slackware or Debian for me.
You actually learn how to edit files safely in/etc on Terminal, how the init scheme works, why it is important and why you should never, ever run as root on a Unix system.
Even if you managed to mount floppy, you would notice the strange silence and figure the sad fact when you first run xmms. Yes, no sound.
Fix was easy (I bet it is unneeded now)
chmod 666/dev/dsp along with the soundblaster config at/etc
While it was total torture after Windows (and coming from Amiga to that land), I am thankful to Patrick Volkerding and Slackware. How? Well, I learned how the unix logic works (even the 666) and compiling things from source. I still use that bits of knowledge today on OS X.
What made me nuts after a year (no dual boot!) is the need of recompiling kernel for a freaking USB mouse. It is not Patrick's fault, I hated one thing. Kernel developers (of that time) was ignoring the PURPOSE of USB. The USB is here not because it is state of art tech, because it is massively dynamic.
Can't they wait for the deal actually happen or demand official statement from Oracle regarding their policies for the future of mysql?
It is not like AOL acquired Sun for God's sake. As far as I know, Oracle does very high end database servers and I don't see why they would spend billions just to "kill" GPL'ed code. Don't you think Oracle as second largest software company on planet doesn't know what GPL is or the mysql developers/community?
I could understand if Sun was left with no buyers and in position of "rejected by IBM", the future of company would be in doubt really. It is not AOL acquired them nor MS (to kill). It seems immature to me.
The TV series shows how deep the story that first movie was based on.
Interestingly, there is no person on earth who can fill the place of Arnold in the first movie. Without Arnold, the Terminator would be a regular 1980s sci-fi movie.
There must be a company at Hollywood to do 3d scans of actors for future. I remember some actor talking about it on TV but forgot which one. It makes good sense, today we may not have the technology or even the languages to write such code but in future, the data can be used.
Better than freezing them with the hope of some technology will wake them up you know:)
Can you at least send them to http://housecall.antivirus.com/ ? It may find it and clean it. If they can't reach there, they could be infected, old time tricks like using hex url etc. may help. Now what we need is, ActiveX like installing antivirus (not joking) which will install with minimum user interaction. Housecall from Trend is a great favour to newbie users, especially after they got rid of "pay us to clean it" scheme but... It is still not a real antivirus to watch the system. It seems Kaspersky guys have a plan (Kaspersky Online Scanner Pro) but it may get pricey.
I remember MCafee having kind of "antivirus subscription" back in the day, did they give up or things became too advanced to watch with a activex installed program? Not sure.
BTW, no newbie around me got infected with Conficker because I actually forced them to install windows updates. My excuse was simple... "It is 2 AM at Redmond Washington and MS releases a security update, this can't be good". Thankfully they listened to the "2 AM" part and took it serious enough to run windows update. I made up the "2 AM" thing but it was really awkward time they released it and their number 1 media puppet made it news in a very off topic way. I knew something was going on. That update was the one closing the conficker hole. MS really knew that security issue will lead to very bad places.
Ever wonder how will people act when they see a real mafia guy/boss in their real life and have to deal with him? I mean the people buying "The Godfather Collection" or "The Sopranos"?
Just imagine what can a guy like Tony Soprano can achieve in legit business as he can manage thousands of psychopaths for his own good, on the street.
And, why doesn't Hollywood make a trilogy like "Mother Theresa"? Because nobody would watch it:) People like the evil, watching the evil I mean.
That is the one thing MS is afraid of. Pushing the IE, inventing Silverlight, trying to kill Java with.NET are all done so the natural progress towards ''Internet as app suite, OS is just a bunch of drivers'' is slowed down.
IMHO that was what made them so afraid about Netscape. We were supposed to have these things 5-6 years earlier if they didn't kill Netscape and started incompatible IE&ActiveX empire. Such ''Office in browser'' etc. things were slowly popping up on Netscape 4 before it got owned and killed by AOL.
Mozilla people had to start from strach and gain the corporate trust so things are just happening now.
Allthought it is not so complete, you can see a glimpse of future at http://g.ho.st/ , you will see all the technologies MS tries to kill in action together. That is what makes them really afraid.
I think people are so locked in 1990s and they don't see the actual gigantic size of Java reach.
J2ME capable phones, devices are heading to 1 billion mark and with the opening of source, ease of licensing, it will be hard to find anything which doesn't support J2ME.
Desktop java is attacked 24/7 but I actually see apps actually written in Java are hitting top spots in general end user download sites.
As there is a huge confusion and a real bad start in Java FX, its future could be in doubt, I agree to it. Just browsing 2-3 professional java developers blogs and reading their opinions made me think that JavaFX will either restart or completely forgotten.
Trust me, the companies like Oracle are interested in everything. One must be absolutely stupid or a pseudo 133t not to be interested in J2ME especially. If it didn't break the master plan of them, even Apple would be putting J2ME into iPhone as the rest of the entire phone industry. Of course, Apple app store and click on jar to install won't mix.
KDE is a very important thing and especially after the massive multi platform compatibility, apps inside KDE suite and whatever they use/advertise are important too.
They could be buying Sun to be a more end user visible company, that was the point of my post. It is not like Sun servers will run Oracle DB better like some claimed. There is no such thing.
Agree or not or hate iPhone enough to reject a free one like me, Apple's reasons to disallow multitasking on iPhone is very, very different and there is nothing there to compare to MS Starter Edition.
iPhone is a phone, running a very stripped down OS X with really minimal set of frameworks and the customer of iPhone doesn't want multi tasking, they want huge battery life and general speed. Apple claims they can't achieve it with actual multi tasking, background apps. It is their choice and whoever buys iPhone accepts it.
However, I guess some little monkey at MS had this neat idea and thought they can use iPhone as reference.
I guess this will be the nirvana for trojan developers. People didn't get what registry is so they didn't jump to their fake registry cleaner trojans.
In starter case, everyone will get effected so it will be easy to trick them to install World's biggest impact having trojan with a simple ''Install this to have more than 3 applications running''.
It is really interesting that people think Oracle products only runs on Unix (Linux, BSD or the real thing) and Sun's server line can only run Unix OS.
I personally know gigantic Oracle&Sun&MS Enterprise Server and J2EE setups, one serves to millions in mission and time critical fashion.
It is the image thing I guess. I mean there is nothing saying that Oracle will conspire anything, especially regarding MS server configurations. The only company having luxury to play such spoiled kid like games is MS and nobody else. For Oracle, SAP kind of companies... Products must run on largest kind of configurations from IBM Mainframe to Windows server.
I also think Oracle wants to be more down to earth company with regular users supporting them because they use their (Sun) technologies.
It is hard to make a regular end user understand that Oracle is World's second largest software company just after Microsoft since they don't use Oracle products on their desktops, mobiles.
Sun's Java on the other hand, especially J2ME is used in most newbie machines, phones even if they don't know what the heck is Java. Open Office has already marked its place as the credible alternative to MS Office, in fact I have seen MS Office owners also installing it as a backup solution in case anything happens to their suite.
MySQL is used in ''soon to be very big deal'' music players coming from KDE Camp, I believe it is already used in all kinds of applications including Firefox.
Hopefully Oracle management will give Sun (engineers) one thing they lacked, trust for future and a clear direction.
Intel could be the first among vendor/OS developers to admit drive fragmentation COULD BE an issue, in certain usage patterns. MS themselves kinda admit too but as you see the negative feedback about NTFS as result of it, I think they may slowly back down from suggesting it to users.
As a guy in video business, you can't believe how much we are blamed, called stupid, old fashion, not reading OS documents when one sees we defrag drives in certain cases. Windows, OS X, Linux won't really matter. When one half of half terabyte of file is beginning drive and the other half is at end of drive, "fps" will drop. (SAS) SCSI, 10K, fiber won't matter. I bet audio guys working with gigantic files and realtime must be getting similar feedback too.
What bothers me is, for some reason, as it is a mostly electronic issue, OS vendors themselves feel like they are being blamed. Even Apple who does a lot to prevent fragmentation, defragmenting on the fly (based on stability comes first rule of course), using once mainframe technology like "hot band" doesn't make it clear.
I once got laughed at for saying it, "defrag" is a luxury system performance enhancement. You can live without it of course but sometimes, it may really matter.
If I had SSD (I plan 32GB for startup drive), I would at least optimise its HFS+ B-Trees and proactively prevent issues with a commercial disk utility like Disk Warrior. I don't think journaling would be good for it anyway and I don't need "hot band" stuff which would happen if journaling enabled.
Your last paragraph explains why COBOL (or lets say J2EE etc), mainframes are target of generic nerds. People who has never seen or worked with such gigantic data to process and billions of dollars depends on a single computer will never understand why COBOL, Mainframe is still around today.
Wikipedia's Mainframe entries seems to be written by real mainframe people so they give great insight about them, their history and why they can't disappear. In fact, there is even a mainframe emulator around which can even run in Windows (besides *nix of course). http://www.hercules-390.org/
I can bet that COBOL developers reading headline "COBOL" on slashdot didn't even bother to check the comments as they must be sick of people talking about something they have no real life clue about. It is still their fault, they should take it serious and explain why it is not some archaic thing and why a language designed purely for business can't be simply abandoned.
In our business, there is almost guarantee that some professional wannabe guy pops up and try to teach wonders of mpeg-2 recording cameras as we, TV industry are such morons still using Digital Betacam (or even plain, in some cases). There is almost no way to explain why raw, 8, 10, 12 bit data is needed and why it should be on a medium that will last more than 50 years. I guess it is similar case for COBOL/Mainframe scene. Hope no "Dell" server mentioned to them.:)
I am not a Java developer but as I am an OS X user on PPC (the horror!) I had to browse a lot of mailing lists, java blogs. As there is a huge fight going on (now stabled a bit) about OS X'es outdated Java, there were some professional developers in discussion who were mentioning they stick with JRE 1.4 compatible unless the application sure needs something more new.
What if your code doesn't/won't need such extensions and you code in Java 6 just because you want to prove you are so up to today's technology and abandoning your stuck users (to Java 5) and kinda outdated corporate desktops? I can tell you the result as one software vendor made that mistake, downloads go down like 30-40%. That is amazingly popular, top software. Not some "geek" tool.
I see same people making funny faces when you mention them Pascal but there is an OS X Utility, decade old, totally "de facto" standard in professional desktops and it is written in? Pascal. Of course, it is not like guy can't code anything else, some of the code is pure ASM or even Objective C in certain conditions. It is kinda funny that most people doesn't know that fact and they become amazed when they hear the word "Pascal". Well, guy sells it to the most picky of picky people on planet, Mac using designers/graphics people so he is successful.
What I tried to mean was, there is a huge elitism in everything in this World and COBOL is not free of it. It gets hit especially since we don't really see mainframes around while they are doing the hard work, with old fashioned language and state of art technologies running that "old" software.
It does not do bad sector checking. There are pricey utilities doing bad sector checking and I assume some generic unix tools can be implemented. The idea is, actually marking and detecting bad sectors.
We don't have this: diskutil verifysurface/Volumes/usb_junk opposed to verifyvolume (fsck -f/dev/* )
The "erase" (format) zeroing all data may be implementing bad sector marking/checking but as you can see, it is erasing data.
There is a mechanism and bad sectors functionality is implemented in HFS (+) so it could be even happening automatically.
The real sad thing is, some companies (lets not name) will charge $100 for utilities which also does sector checking and they are too lazy to implement fat bad block marking which is common knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
iPhone OS is OS X with Apple engineers rm -rf 'ed some parts, a lot of them. Eventually, they will merge to a single OS but it is a bit needless to spare time. Nokia on the other hand, compiled Symbian Foundation OS and have run it on a netbook. Is it interesting technologically? Yes... But still needless :)
As far as I understand, purpose of a Netbook is having Windows or Linux with a huge set of software selection/support (thanks to x86) instead of a Smart device.
Nokia and ARM are doing some similar mistake too. When you have a netbook, you expect _complete_ set of selection/possibilities, same as a PC but you just gotta be sane when selecting your options.
I own a Nokia 9300 (current upgrade is E90) and it runs Symbian which runs perfectly for my needs. Why should I want Linux on it? Why wouldn't I have a x86/Atom netbook and run Opera on it for instance instead of begging some vendor to support it? If I have a netbook, I just hit opera.com , pick windows (or linux) x86 version and install it. Opera is just an example, you can pick any software you like although I suggest Opera for such configurations. Why? Because they are the company who could ship working browser for Nokia 7650 having 2 MB (yes, MB) of disk space :)
Google with their billions of dollars and extremely talented developers can play around but it is _your_ experience at the end.
If you watch closely, the ones who always constantly reboots even while their OS doesn't tell them to do, ones always clears caches, check integrity of files comes from Windows land. It doesn't matter if it is OS X or Linux or even... Symbian!
Quote from me to developer of an app, on IM: "I know I can just logout and login but I used Windows for 8 years." That is after he told me there is absolutely no need to reboot.
It is even like some kind of war syndrome. You can never get rid of that feeling.
Well, you can't beat my rm *.* in /dev back when /dev was a real directory, moving to Windows and doing the exact same thing (del *.* forgetting I am in \WINDOWS\INF) and watch Windows ask me for keyboard driver diskette.
Even more funny, I commented on "norton undelete" as "What kind of moron would need it?" just days ago before the incident. Had to ask inf.zip from very same IRC chatroom I was in.
I knew the chmod 666 is extremely dangerous but I thought "So what? They will hack into my system and make it sound?" :)
Well of course, these were the times everyone had kickbanned because they joined a IRC chatroom as root.
I am saying I am very glad that it was real pain in the ass since it thought me how to USE linux very effectively. Next week, I was compiling ALSA by hand. If I had x86, it would be still Slackware or Debian for me.
You actually learn how to edit files safely in /etc on Terminal, how the init scheme works, why it is important and why you should never, ever run as root on a Unix system.
Even if you managed to mount floppy, you would notice the strange silence and figure the sad fact when you first run xmms. Yes, no sound.
Fix was easy (I bet it is unneeded now)
chmod 666 /dev/dsp along with the soundblaster config at /etc
While it was total torture after Windows (and coming from Amiga to that land), I am thankful to Patrick Volkerding and Slackware. How? Well, I learned how the unix logic works (even the 666) and compiling things from source. I still use that bits of knowledge today on OS X.
What made me nuts after a year (no dual boot!) is the need of recompiling kernel for a freaking USB mouse. It is not Patrick's fault, I hated one thing. Kernel developers (of that time) was ignoring the PURPOSE of USB. The USB is here not because it is state of art tech, because it is massively dynamic.
Remember the horrifying results at threading performance of OS X compared to Linux on same hardware? It was in first G5 ages.
Oracle could be the one helped the issue to get fixed but there is no proof of that, it is just a rumour. Today OS X doesn't have that issue.
The tool everyone used for benchmarking was mysql btw.
Can't they wait for the deal actually happen or demand official statement from Oracle regarding their policies for the future of mysql?
It is not like AOL acquired Sun for God's sake. As far as I know, Oracle does very high end database servers and I don't see why they would spend billions just to "kill" GPL'ed code. Don't you think Oracle as second largest software company on planet doesn't know what GPL is or the mysql developers/community?
I could understand if Sun was left with no buyers and in position of "rejected by IBM", the future of company would be in doubt really. It is not AOL acquired them nor MS (to kill). It seems immature to me.
The TV series shows how deep the story that first movie was based on.
Interestingly, there is no person on earth who can fill the place of Arnold in the first movie. Without Arnold, the Terminator would be a regular 1980s sci-fi movie.
There must be a company at Hollywood to do 3d scans of actors for future. I remember some actor talking about it on TV but forgot which one. It makes good sense, today we may not have the technology or even the languages to write such code but in future, the data can be used.
Better than freezing them with the hope of some technology will wake them up you know :)
And the least CPU processing power requiring will be? Keanu Reeves. In fact, they better set the machines not to sleep after inactivity.
Can you at least send them to http://housecall.antivirus.com/ ? It may find it and clean it. If they can't reach there, they could be infected, old time tricks like using hex url etc. may help.
Now what we need is, ActiveX like installing antivirus (not joking) which will install with minimum user interaction. Housecall from Trend is a great favour to newbie users, especially after they got rid of "pay us to clean it" scheme but... It is still not a real antivirus to watch the system. It seems Kaspersky guys have a plan (Kaspersky Online Scanner Pro) but it may get pricey.
I remember MCafee having kind of "antivirus subscription" back in the day, did they give up or things became too advanced to watch with a activex installed program? Not sure.
BTW, no newbie around me got infected with Conficker because I actually forced them to install windows updates. My excuse was simple... "It is 2 AM at Redmond Washington and MS releases a security update, this can't be good". Thankfully they listened to the "2 AM" part and took it serious enough to run windows update. I made up the "2 AM" thing but it was really awkward time they released it and their number 1 media puppet made it news in a very off topic way. I knew something was going on. That update was the one closing the conficker hole. MS really knew that security issue will lead to very bad places.
Ever wonder how will people act when they see a real mafia guy/boss in their real life and have to deal with him? I mean the people buying "The Godfather Collection" or "The Sopranos"?
Just imagine what can a guy like Tony Soprano can achieve in legit business as he can manage thousands of psychopaths for his own good, on the street.
And, why doesn't Hollywood make a trilogy like "Mother Theresa"? Because nobody would watch it :) People like the evil, watching the evil I mean.
That is the one thing MS is afraid of. Pushing the IE, inventing Silverlight, trying to kill Java with .NET are all done so the natural progress towards ''Internet as app suite, OS is just a bunch of drivers'' is slowed down.
IMHO that was what made them so afraid about Netscape. We were supposed to have these things 5-6 years earlier if they didn't kill Netscape and started incompatible IE&ActiveX empire. Such ''Office in browser'' etc. things were slowly popping up on Netscape 4 before it got owned and killed by AOL.
Mozilla people had to start from strach and gain the corporate trust so things are just happening now.
Allthought it is not so complete, you can see a glimpse of future at http://g.ho.st/ , you will see all the technologies MS tries to kill in action together. That is what makes them really afraid.
I think people are so locked in 1990s and they don't see the actual gigantic size of Java reach.
J2ME capable phones, devices are heading to 1 billion mark and with the opening of source, ease of licensing, it will be hard to find anything which doesn't support J2ME.
Desktop java is attacked 24/7 but I actually see apps actually written in Java are hitting top spots in general end user download sites.
As there is a huge confusion and a real bad start in Java FX, its future could be in doubt, I agree to it. Just browsing 2-3 professional java developers blogs and reading their opinions made me think that JavaFX will either restart or completely forgotten.
Trust me, the companies like Oracle are interested in everything. One must be absolutely stupid or a pseudo 133t not to be interested in J2ME especially. If it didn't break the master plan of them, even Apple would be putting J2ME into iPhone as the rest of the entire phone industry. Of course, Apple app store and click on jar to install won't mix.
KDE is a very important thing and especially after the massive multi platform compatibility, apps inside KDE suite and whatever they use/advertise are important too.
They could be buying Sun to be a more end user visible company, that was the point of my post. It is not like Sun servers will run Oracle DB better like some claimed. There is no such thing.
Agree or not or hate iPhone enough to reject a free one like me, Apple's reasons to disallow multitasking on iPhone is very, very different and there is nothing there to compare to MS Starter Edition.
iPhone is a phone, running a very stripped down OS X with really minimal set of frameworks and the customer of iPhone doesn't want multi tasking, they want huge battery life and general speed. Apple claims they can't achieve it with actual multi tasking, background apps. It is their choice and whoever buys iPhone accepts it.
However, I guess some little monkey at MS had this neat idea and thought they can use iPhone as reference.
I guess this will be the nirvana for trojan developers. People didn't get what registry is so they didn't jump to their fake registry cleaner trojans.
In starter case, everyone will get effected so it will be easy to trick them to install World's biggest impact having trojan with a simple ''Install this to have more than 3 applications running''.
MS actually looks for trouble, as usual.
It is really interesting that people think Oracle products only runs on Unix (Linux, BSD or the real thing) and Sun's server line can only run Unix OS.
I personally know gigantic Oracle&Sun&MS Enterprise Server and J2EE setups, one serves to millions in mission and time critical fashion.
It is the image thing I guess. I mean there is nothing saying that Oracle will conspire anything, especially regarding MS server configurations. The only company having luxury to play such spoiled kid like games is MS and nobody else. For Oracle, SAP kind of companies... Products must run on largest kind of configurations from IBM Mainframe to Windows server.
I also think Oracle wants to be more down to earth company with regular users supporting them because they use their (Sun) technologies.
It is hard to make a regular end user understand that Oracle is World's second largest software company just after Microsoft since they don't use Oracle products on their desktops, mobiles.
Sun's Java on the other hand, especially J2ME is used in most newbie machines, phones even if they don't know what the heck is Java. Open Office has already marked its place as the credible alternative to MS Office, in fact I have seen MS Office owners also installing it as a backup solution in case anything happens to their suite.
MySQL is used in ''soon to be very big deal'' music players coming from KDE Camp, I believe it is already used in all kinds of applications including Firefox.
Hopefully Oracle management will give Sun (engineers) one thing they lacked, trust for future and a clear direction.
A good video editor can make that ad happen just with a consumer hd camera and iMovie or Adobe Premiere (non pro).
It is not just money, it is creativity.
And look to URL before you talk about the quality of graphics :) Youtube.
Intel could be the first among vendor/OS developers to admit drive fragmentation COULD BE an issue, in certain usage patterns. MS themselves kinda admit too but as you see the negative feedback about NTFS as result of it, I think they may slowly back down from suggesting it to users.
As a guy in video business, you can't believe how much we are blamed, called stupid, old fashion, not reading OS documents when one sees we defrag drives in certain cases. Windows, OS X, Linux won't really matter. When one half of half terabyte of file is beginning drive and the other half is at end of drive, "fps" will drop. (SAS) SCSI, 10K, fiber won't matter. I bet audio guys working with gigantic files and realtime must be getting similar feedback too.
What bothers me is, for some reason, as it is a mostly electronic issue, OS vendors themselves feel like they are being blamed. Even Apple who does a lot to prevent fragmentation, defragmenting on the fly (based on stability comes first rule of course), using once mainframe technology like "hot band" doesn't make it clear.
I once got laughed at for saying it, "defrag" is a luxury system performance enhancement. You can live without it of course but sometimes, it may really matter.
If I had SSD (I plan 32GB for startup drive), I would at least optimise its HFS+ B-Trees and proactively prevent issues with a commercial disk utility like Disk Warrior. I don't think journaling would be good for it anyway and I don't need "hot band" stuff which would happen if journaling enabled.
Your last paragraph explains why COBOL (or lets say J2EE etc), mainframes are target of generic nerds. People who has never seen or worked with such gigantic data to process and billions of dollars depends on a single computer will never understand why COBOL, Mainframe is still around today.
Wikipedia's Mainframe entries seems to be written by real mainframe people so they give great insight about them, their history and why they can't disappear. In fact, there is even a mainframe emulator around which can even run in Windows (besides *nix of course). http://www.hercules-390.org/
I can bet that COBOL developers reading headline "COBOL" on slashdot didn't even bother to check the comments as they must be sick of people talking about something they have no real life clue about. It is still their fault, they should take it serious and explain why it is not some archaic thing and why a language designed purely for business can't be simply abandoned.
In our business, there is almost guarantee that some professional wannabe guy pops up and try to teach wonders of mpeg-2 recording cameras as we, TV industry are such morons still using Digital Betacam (or even plain, in some cases). There is almost no way to explain why raw, 8, 10, 12 bit data is needed and why it should be on a medium that will last more than 50 years. I guess it is similar case for COBOL/Mainframe scene. Hope no "Dell" server mentioned to them. :)
I am not a Java developer but as I am an OS X user on PPC (the horror!) I had to browse a lot of mailing lists, java blogs. As there is a huge fight going on (now stabled a bit) about OS X'es outdated Java, there were some professional developers in discussion who were mentioning they stick with JRE 1.4 compatible unless the application sure needs something more new.
What if your code doesn't/won't need such extensions and you code in Java 6 just because you want to prove you are so up to today's technology and abandoning your stuck users (to Java 5) and kinda outdated corporate desktops? I can tell you the result as one software vendor made that mistake, downloads go down like 30-40%. That is amazingly popular, top software. Not some "geek" tool.
I see same people making funny faces when you mention them Pascal but there is an OS X Utility, decade old, totally "de facto" standard in professional desktops and it is written in? Pascal. Of course, it is not like guy can't code anything else, some of the code is pure ASM or even Objective C in certain conditions. It is kinda funny that most people doesn't know that fact and they become amazed when they hear the word "Pascal". Well, guy sells it to the most picky of picky people on planet, Mac using designers/graphics people so he is successful.
What I tried to mean was, there is a huge elitism in everything in this World and COBOL is not free of it. It gets hit especially since we don't really see mainframes around while they are doing the hard work, with old fashioned language and state of art technologies running that "old" software.
It does not do bad sector checking. There are pricey utilities doing bad sector checking and I assume some generic unix tools can be implemented. The idea is, actually marking and detecting bad sectors.
We don't have this: diskutil verifysurface /Volumes/usb_junk opposed to verifyvolume (fsck -f /dev/* )
The "erase" (format) zeroing all data may be implementing bad sector marking/checking but as you can see, it is erasing data.
There is a mechanism and bad sectors functionality is implemented in HFS (+) so it could be even happening automatically.
The real sad thing is, some companies (lets not name) will charge $100 for utilities which also does sector checking and they are too lazy to implement fat bad block marking which is common knowledge.