Re:indeed, it was "facing problems"
on
James Gosling on Java
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Unsafe mode was added to C# to allow the grandfathering of massive volumes of ill-behaved code into.NET systems. Microsoft does not like giving up old code bases.
And Sun, instead, creates millions of lines of untested, immature C code and adds it to their Sun Java implementation (just look at the Java2D code). Frankly, I trust even Microsoft's libraries more than that.
Microsoft's claim that sprinkling "unmanaged code" everywhere in your system is superior to linking to external libraries is very strange.
Unsafe statements are explicitly marked in C#, and they are limited to unsafe modules. C# is exactly the same as JNI in that regard, but C# provides you with a much better language to write JNI-like modules in, a language that is far safer than C/C++ even in unsafe mode, and a language that actually works across systems.
What does the phrase "tightly limit unsafe code to just the statements where it is needed, often just a single statement" mean? How can you limit something that can be everywhere?
It means that as a programmer developing a piece of code that needs to do something unsafe, it's better for me if I can compile almost all of my code in safe mode and only have a single line of unsafe code, than being forced to write an entire JNI module in C/C++.
Now they're claiming it's okay to put buffer overflow vulnerabilities in your code because it's convenient for the programmer. They just don't seem to understand security.
You keep confusing safety and security; safety is neither necessary nor sufficient for security. Most Java applications are, in fact, not secure at all.
C# supports runtime safety in a well-designed and time-tested framework, which is helpful for building secure systems. But forcing people to use only safe constructs does not improve security any further, it actually makes it worse.
Perhaps you'd care to explain how that's 'pure Java' any more?
The code is pure Java. That pure Java code happens to open a file, write a.so file, and load it in. So, you can write pure Java code that does something impure; Gosling's assertion that the Java language prevents you from doing this is therefore bogus.
let me know how that port of your spreadsheet with GNOME integration goes... and do post your results of getting X11 up and running. and you might as well give us your timeframe for when Qt and KDE will be ported as well.
There is nothing to "port", the stuff just compiles and works. And, it turns out, X11 is a great window system for handhelds. This isn't theory--Linux-based handhelds have been out for a while, and they are a joy to develop for and with.
and my point is... *anything* can be made portable if designed portable. you simply do not depend on *anything* for your program to function. PalmOS, WinCE, Linux?
If you design things to be portable between PalmOS and Windows, or between WinCE and Win32, you pay a steep price in development costs and functionality. The nice thing is that if you run the same OS on your desktop and on your handheld, you don't pay that price (you may still need to customize your application for the smaller screen size, but that's much less work).
(ported that mp3 player to your Linux based phone? did you remember to port ALSA? what about libsoundfile? etc. etc.)
That's the difference between Linux and WinCE: if you use Linux on the handheld, there is nothing to port. Yes, the sound system works just like it does on a desktop. So does the GUI. So do all the libraries.
The technology has faced numerous challenges over the last decade
Yes, like the fact that the original Java language spec was full of bugs. Problems like lack of reflection and errors in the type system (e.g., array), plus numerous security bugs, were just unforgivable.
Another obstacle was that Sun lied about what they were going to do with Java. They promised an ISO/ANSI/ECMA standardization, but instead, they kept it proprietary.
Gosling: The only serious divide is they have this unsafe mode which they use a lot. One of the principles I believe in is there shouldn't be an unsafe mode.
General purpose programming languages need an "unsafe" mode, and Java itself has one: it's called JNI. It's widely used, by Sun, by Eclipse, and by many other projects. How does Java's unsafe mode compare to C#'s "unsafe" mode? Java's unsafe mode sucks: because JNI relies on C or C++, it is not just unsafe, it is highly dangerous, and it requires recompilation between machines. With C#, you can tightly limit unsafe code to just the statements where it is needed, often just a single statement, with everything else in the unsafe module being as safe as pure Java. That is much preferable to having to code the same module entirely in C or C++.
Even in so called "pure" Java, you can screw yourself: write a ".so" file, then load it. You could implement C#'s unsafe that way if you wanted to, with runtime code generation. So, even so-called "pure" Java is as "unsafe" as C# because you can do the same things in it if you are willing to invest the effort.
What Gosling fails to understand is that the purpose of runtime safety is not to keep the programmer from doing something bad at all cost, it is to make it hard to do something bad accidentally. C#, just like Java, keeps the programmer from doing something bad accidentally, and C#, just like Java, gives applications themselves control over the safety of the modules they are willing to load.
I think Gosling should be kept far away from language or systems design. Gosling's major software systems (Gosling's Emacs, NeWS, and Java) all initially had grave design flaws and awful performance. With many of his systems, he demonstrated hostility towards notions of free and/or open source software (NeWS was meant to kill X11, and with Java, Sun misled people). The only reason Java eventually succeeded was because lots of people invested a lot of time and effort to fix up the mess that Gosling had created.
Does 1 person who wants to see that content have the right to tell 1,000,000 other people to put up with his crap?
In a true democracy, the answer is clearly yes, he has that right: democracy does not mean "tyranny of the majority", it means a certain set of basic rights and principles that limit what the majority can impose on the minority. And one of those rights is the right to express your opinion even if it is unpopular.
Giving people the choice to access content deemed undesirable by the majority certainly does not "tell 1,000,000 other people to put up with crap"--they simply don't have to seek out the content.
The problem is that, as you point out, we ourselves don't live by those rules for a democratic society--we are not fully democratic. And if we can restrict content based on "community standards", then, indeed, it's a hard argument to make that an even more conservative society like Iran can't set stricter limits based that may well reflect common public opinion.
Christians were (and remain) Christians long before anyone anyone had heard of Martin Luther, or before anyone thought of translating anything into English and binding it in soft-cover to thump and reinterpret.
The church that Luther rebelled against was even nuttier, more intolerant, and more violent than Luther himself.
There are moderate and moral branches of Christianity, but Catholicism, traditional Lutheranism, Calvinism, and modern "evangelical Christians" are not among them.
The Chinese and Iranian governments probably do engage in something that can be legitimately characterized as objectionable censorship. But where should the line between censorship and legitimate restrictions be drawn?
The US tracks and prosecutes the copying of music and videos, distribution of pornography showing individuals that appear to be younger than 18 years, and information related to bomb making and terrorism. The latter can land you in indefinite detention without the benefit of a trial, other offenses may result in long jail sentences, prison labor, and may effectively constitute a death sentence given the realities of the US prison system. Germany and France crack down on the distribution of Nazi-related content, even if it not intended to promote Nazi ideology, but they are more liberal on sex and copying. And France seeks out certain kinds of linguistically undesirable content. I suspect most people in each of those nations support most of those policies. Likewise, we don't actually know what the Chinese and Iranian people want; it is wrong to assume that, even if they could decide democratically, they would want to draw the line where we want to draw it.
Before we criticize nations like Iran and China, it's good to reflect on what we actually want them to do and what the people in those nations want. We apparently don't want them to have a free and unrestricted Internet, since we don't have that ourselves. Nor can we expect other societies to tolerate some of the content that we have learned to live with (goatse etc.). So, what do you actually want Iran and China to do? Only filtering and enforcement for the benefit of Disney? Or what?
Exabyte has its own set of problems, like changing standards and technologies, wear, etc. I wouldn't consider it any more reliable than DVD or external disk.
The best backup and archival storage is distribution to live RAID servers. A RAID server tells you when storage is going bad and you can replace it without loss of data.
X11 sucks. I'm waiting for a native port. X11 is too primitive.
It is unlikely people will bother porting a lot of Gnome software directly to Macintosh. However, there are several efforts in the works on OS X backends for Gtk+ so you may still be getting a "native" version of Evolution at some point.
As for whether X11 "sucks", well, that's a matter of opinion. X11 already has several times more users than the Macintosh GUI, and the latest X11 servers have graphics capabilities and hardware acceleration that put OS X to shame.
my point is that those of us who work for organistions like this are not a small specialised subset, there are millions of us locked in to M$ by institutional policies
And there are also many millions who are not locked into Microsoft by institutional policies. For many of those, OpenOffice is a practical, real-world solution.
And the number of people in your situation is shrinking: workflow and forms are moving to the web, MS Office is switching to XML, and OOo 2.0 has even better import/export.
Because the way it is, UNIX and Linux applications run poorly on Macintosh.
There are an insignificant number of people who want to use the one advantage X would have, running applications over a network
The advantage of X is the huge number of scientific, educational, and engineering applications. Network transparency is a bonus.
Just because no one uses X now, when it's no good, doesn't mean people will start when it's any better.
X11 is far more widely used than Macintosh: every UNIX workstation and every Linux desktop machine uses it. A large fraction of Windows and Macintosh machines at universities also use X11 to access applications.
X11 is the second most widely used window system today, with Macintosh being at best a distant third.
They're not going to get more customers by supporting Open Office.
They might get more customers by supporting Linux and UNIX applications better in general, however, rather than telling everybody to port them.
That's why Linux is a shitty desktop, all sorts of protocols and libraries all doing the same thing
A Gnome desktop is more streamlined and consistent than a Macintosh: it uses a consistent theme, a single set of APIs, and a single set of preference settings.
That's why even when Linux is free and Mac OS is expensive, Linux still can't beat its market share.
Linux already has a bigger market share than Macintosh, and that's without Apple's PR budget.
it does suck that this is being rejected, and yes - the US's FDA is notoriously stricter than other countries
I think that's more myth than fact. There are many drugs and devices available in the US that are banned or restricted in Europe. Each country just seems to have its own set of hangups about what it permits and what it doesn't permit.
If the US actually were stricter, it's also unclear that that would be a good thing. In many cases, the decision should be up to the doctor and patient.
but not all that bad when faced with certainty of death.
We are all faced with "certainty of death". There are some tradeoffs we can make between comfort and quantity, but just because you are willing to accept an extreme amount of discomfort (think "medieval torture") for a small increase in quantity doesn't mean that that's the decision society has to bless or pay for.
Furthermore, these devices are hugely expensive. The $500k that are spent to extend the life of 10% of the recipients by 6 months need to come from somewhere. Unless insurance premiums go up, if money is spent on that, it means that other procedures don't get done.
There is still hope, [...] assuming that they would support it due to their right to life/culture of life stance.
And why would that be "hope"? Why would you place your uninformed judgement, or that of DeLay or Bush, above that of people who have studied the data, know medicine, and have thought about this long and hard?
Implanting an artificial heart in a sick patient is a painful, dangerous, and costly procedure with (apparently, according to the panel) little benefit to either the patient or research. Those are just the facts of life: as it is, the technology isn't ready. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to subject patients to it, and we can save more lives by spending the money on other procedures.
When companies come up with devices that do work, then they will get approved. And they can still implant new designs as experimental devices.
Why is this event called "Gnomedex"? I find it rather disturbing that Microsoft has started sponsoring and (in effect) marketing under the Gnome name. How did this happen? Isn't Gnome protected by a trademark?
Microsoft is also getting excited about XML-based GUIs, database file systems, "managed code", desktop search, garbage collection, etc., all ideas that have been around for a long time. The company behaves like a smart computer science freshman, who thinks that because he is thinking one week ahead of his intro CS class, he is inventing things nobody else ever thought of. And, like a freshman, they lack the taste to separate the good from the bad ideas.
Unlike Java, X11 doesn't have a standard high-level graphical framework, so there's no way Apple can provide generic "X11" integration
At the X11 layer, Apple should provide good window management, clipboard integration, keycode management, printing, and a small extension that would let X11 apps access Apple-native features through the X11 protocol. The rest (menu bars, etc.) the Gnome and KDE developers would do if Apple's legal department only would let them.
If I wanted X11 to load when I log in, I'd put it in my login items.
See, that's one of the problems with Apple's X11 server: it is so big, heavy, and inefficient. The X11 protocol is simple; a good implementation of it as part of the OS X GUI would probably be more lightweight than the menu bar clock.
Because they have 2-3% market share on the desktop and need more customers.
They already have a great, consistent, good-looking GUI
Ah, yes, the myth of Macintosh consistency. Never mind that it's a hodgepodge of APIs (Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz, OpenGL, Swing, Java2D, etc.) and themes (silver, classic, gumdrop, Office, etc.).
And who wants to run a server just to get an office program working?
You, apparently, or how do you think the current OS X GUI works? Adding another protocol (X11) to the protocols it already understands is not a big deal.
I can't think of anything more inefficient and pointless than running a GUI on top of another GUI.
Yes, that's the problem: X11 runs on top of the OS X GUI. A good implementation would put it on equal footing with Carbon, OpenGL, and Cocoa as another choice.
Programs should use the native GUI, there's no reason not to other than laziness and arrogance.
No, "arrogance" is if you don't listen to potential customers and just try to shove your APIs down their throats. And at 2-3% market share, it's not just arrogance, it's stupidity.
Nobody is ever going to bother developing X-based interfaces for Mac software.
As long as the X11 server for Macintosh keeps sucking as badly as it does, indeed, nobody will bother.
It isn't even simple to make existing X applications fit in, since at the very least they use different widget sets.
It would be easy to make Gnome and KDE apps look and feel exactly like Macintosh apps. The only obstacle is Apple's legal department.
OS X already ships with at least three different widget sets (Carbon, Cocoa, Swing), four different graphics APIs (Carbon, Quartz, Java2D, OpenGL), and three different themes (classic, silver, Cocoa). Third party apps already use dozens of different widget sets. Another graphics API and two more toolkits won't make a difference: they'll be able to emulate the common Apple L&F as well as all the others.
Take your own advice, if you ever work for an organisation that insists on using complex word templates
Yes, some people in the real world cannot move away from MS Office. But there exist people in the real world that can. Therefore, your claim is wrong, and my claim is right: it is feasible in the real world to move away from MS Office, it is simply not feasible for everybody.
A lot of these Office clones seem to be fairly limited in function as compared to MS Office. For example, Apple Keynote still tends to loose a lot of formatting when importing PowerPoint documents.
By that argument, MS Office is even more limited because MS Office can't even import native Keynote or OpenOffice documents at all.
In reality, the non-Microsoft office suites (it is incorrect referring to them as "clones", since Microsoft didn't even come up with the concept) are full-fledged office suites that exceed MS Office functionality in many areas.
Moving away from MS Office, however, is not really feasible in the real world (well, not yet at least!)
That's pure FUD. I exchange documents with lots of people. Even though I actually have a copy of MS Office installed (site license), I haven't had to bother firing it up in more than a year: OpenOffice has handled everything just fine and I use it as the default handler for MS Office documents. On the Windows partition on my laptop I erased MS Office altogether--it was just taking up space.
And with Microsoft's free viewer programs, Microsoft's move to XML formats, and web-based conversion services, you don't even need MS Office around as a safety blanket anymore.
Don't confuse your special situation and preferences with the reality at large.
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Unsafe mode was added to C# to allow the grandfathering of massive volumes of ill-behaved code into .NET systems. Microsoft does not like giving up old code bases.
And Sun, instead, creates millions of lines of untested, immature C code and adds it to their Sun Java implementation (just look at the Java2D code). Frankly, I trust even Microsoft's libraries more than that.
Microsoft's claim that sprinkling "unmanaged code" everywhere in your system is superior to linking to external libraries is very strange.
Unsafe statements are explicitly marked in C#, and they are limited to unsafe modules. C# is exactly the same as JNI in that regard, but C# provides you with a much better language to write JNI-like modules in, a language that is far safer than C/C++ even in unsafe mode, and a language that actually works across systems.
What does the phrase "tightly limit unsafe code to just the statements where it is needed, often just a single statement" mean? How can you limit something that can be everywhere?
It means that as a programmer developing a piece of code that needs to do something unsafe, it's better for me if I can compile almost all of my code in safe mode and only have a single line of unsafe code, than being forced to write an entire JNI module in C/C++.
Now they're claiming it's okay to put buffer overflow vulnerabilities in your code because it's convenient for the programmer. They just don't seem to understand security.
You keep confusing safety and security; safety is neither necessary nor sufficient for security. Most Java applications are, in fact, not secure at all.
C# supports runtime safety in a well-designed and time-tested framework, which is helpful for building secure systems. But forcing people to use only safe constructs does not improve security any further, it actually makes it worse.
Perhaps you'd care to explain how that's 'pure Java' any more?
.so file, and load it in. So, you can write pure Java code that does something impure; Gosling's assertion that the Java language prevents you from doing this is therefore bogus.
The code is pure Java. That pure Java code happens to open a file, write a
let me know how that port of your spreadsheet with GNOME integration goes... and do post your results of getting X11 up and running. and you might as well give us your timeframe for when Qt and KDE will be ported as well.
There is nothing to "port", the stuff just compiles and works. And, it turns out, X11 is a great window system for handhelds. This isn't theory--Linux-based handhelds have been out for a while, and they are a joy to develop for and with.
and my point is... *anything* can be made portable if designed portable. you simply do not depend on *anything* for your program to function. PalmOS, WinCE, Linux?
If you design things to be portable between PalmOS and Windows, or between WinCE and Win32, you pay a steep price in development costs and functionality. The nice thing is that if you run the same OS on your desktop and on your handheld, you don't pay that price (you may still need to customize your application for the smaller screen size, but that's much less work).
(ported that mp3 player to your Linux based phone? did you remember to port ALSA? what about libsoundfile? etc. etc.)
That's the difference between Linux and WinCE: if you use Linux on the handheld, there is nothing to port. Yes, the sound system works just like it does on a desktop. So does the GUI. So do all the libraries.
The technology has faced numerous challenges over the last decade
Yes, like the fact that the original Java language spec was full of bugs. Problems like lack of reflection and errors in the type system (e.g., array), plus numerous security bugs, were just unforgivable.
Another obstacle was that Sun lied about what they were going to do with Java. They promised an ISO/ANSI/ECMA standardization, but instead, they kept it proprietary.
Gosling: The only serious divide is they have this unsafe mode which they use a lot. One of the principles I believe in is there shouldn't be an unsafe mode.
General purpose programming languages need an "unsafe" mode, and Java itself has one: it's called JNI. It's widely used, by Sun, by Eclipse, and by many other projects. How does Java's unsafe mode compare to C#'s "unsafe" mode? Java's unsafe mode sucks: because JNI relies on C or C++, it is not just unsafe, it is highly dangerous, and it requires recompilation between machines. With C#, you can tightly limit unsafe code to just the statements where it is needed, often just a single statement, with everything else in the unsafe module being as safe as pure Java. That is much preferable to having to code the same module entirely in C or C++.
Even in so called "pure" Java, you can screw yourself: write a ".so" file, then load it. You could implement C#'s unsafe that way if you wanted to, with runtime code generation. So, even so-called "pure" Java is as "unsafe" as C# because you can do the same things in it if you are willing to invest the effort.
What Gosling fails to understand is that the purpose of runtime safety is not to keep the programmer from doing something bad at all cost, it is to make it hard to do something bad accidentally. C#, just like Java, keeps the programmer from doing something bad accidentally, and C#, just like Java, gives applications themselves control over the safety of the modules they are willing to load.
I think Gosling should be kept far away from language or systems design. Gosling's major software systems (Gosling's Emacs, NeWS, and Java) all initially had grave design flaws and awful performance. With many of his systems, he demonstrated hostility towards notions of free and/or open source software (NeWS was meant to kill X11, and with Java, Sun misled people). The only reason Java eventually succeeded was because lots of people invested a lot of time and effort to fix up the mess that Gosling had created.
This is big because it's a full desktop OS. Think windows xp on a laptop. All other phone OSes were deliberately designed for small devices.
Why does that matter? Because it makes development and porting to it a lot easier than to PalmOS, PPC, WinCE, or Symbian.
Does 1 person who wants to see that content have the right to tell 1,000,000 other people to put up with his crap?
In a true democracy, the answer is clearly yes, he has that right: democracy does not mean "tyranny of the majority", it means a certain set of basic rights and principles that limit what the majority can impose on the minority. And one of those rights is the right to express your opinion even if it is unpopular.
Giving people the choice to access content deemed undesirable by the majority certainly does not "tell 1,000,000 other people to put up with crap"--they simply don't have to seek out the content.
The problem is that, as you point out, we ourselves don't live by those rules for a democratic society--we are not fully democratic. And if we can restrict content based on "community standards", then, indeed, it's a hard argument to make that an even more conservative society like Iran can't set stricter limits based that may well reflect common public opinion.
Christians were (and remain) Christians long before anyone anyone had heard of Martin Luther, or before anyone thought of translating anything into English and binding it in soft-cover to thump and reinterpret.
The church that Luther rebelled against was even nuttier, more intolerant, and more violent than Luther himself.
There are moderate and moral branches of Christianity, but Catholicism, traditional Lutheranism, Calvinism, and modern "evangelical Christians" are not among them.
The Chinese and Iranian governments probably do engage in something that can be legitimately characterized as objectionable censorship. But where should the line between censorship and legitimate restrictions be drawn?
The US tracks and prosecutes the copying of music and videos, distribution of pornography showing individuals that appear to be younger than 18 years, and information related to bomb making and terrorism. The latter can land you in indefinite detention without the benefit of a trial, other offenses may result in long jail sentences, prison labor, and may effectively constitute a death sentence given the realities of the US prison system. Germany and France crack down on the distribution of Nazi-related content, even if it not intended to promote Nazi ideology, but they are more liberal on sex and copying. And France seeks out certain kinds of linguistically undesirable content. I suspect most people in each of those nations support most of those policies. Likewise, we don't actually know what the Chinese and Iranian people want; it is wrong to assume that, even if they could decide democratically, they would want to draw the line where we want to draw it.
Before we criticize nations like Iran and China, it's good to reflect on what we actually want them to do and what the people in those nations want. We apparently don't want them to have a free and unrestricted Internet, since we don't have that ourselves. Nor can we expect other societies to tolerate some of the content that we have learned to live with (goatse etc.). So, what do you actually want Iran and China to do? Only filtering and enforcement for the benefit of Disney? Or what?
Exabyte has its own set of problems, like changing standards and technologies, wear, etc. I wouldn't consider it any more reliable than DVD or external disk.
The best backup and archival storage is distribution to live RAID servers. A RAID server tells you when storage is going bad and you can replace it without loss of data.
X11 sucks. I'm waiting for a native port. X11 is too primitive.
It is unlikely people will bother porting a lot of Gnome software directly to Macintosh. However, there are several efforts in the works on OS X backends for Gtk+ so you may still be getting a "native" version of Evolution at some point.
As for whether X11 "sucks", well, that's a matter of opinion. X11 already has several times more users than the Macintosh GUI, and the latest X11 servers have graphics capabilities and hardware acceleration that put OS X to shame.
my point is that those of us who work for organistions like this are not a small specialised subset, there are millions of us locked in to M$ by institutional policies
And there are also many millions who are not locked into Microsoft by institutional policies. For many of those, OpenOffice is a practical, real-world solution.
And the number of people in your situation is shrinking: workflow and forms are moving to the web, MS Office is switching to XML, and OOo 2.0 has even better import/export.
But why would anyone bother doing this?
Because the way it is, UNIX and Linux applications run poorly on Macintosh.
There are an insignificant number of people who want to use the one advantage X would have, running applications over a network
The advantage of X is the huge number of scientific, educational, and engineering applications. Network transparency is a bonus.
Just because no one uses X now, when it's no good, doesn't mean people will start when it's any better.
X11 is far more widely used than Macintosh: every UNIX workstation and every Linux desktop machine uses it. A large fraction of Windows and Macintosh machines at universities also use X11 to access applications.
X11 is the second most widely used window system today, with Macintosh being at best a distant third.
They're not going to get more customers by supporting Open Office.
They might get more customers by supporting Linux and UNIX applications better in general, however, rather than telling everybody to port them.
That's why Linux is a shitty desktop, all sorts of protocols and libraries all doing the same thing
A Gnome desktop is more streamlined and consistent than a Macintosh: it uses a consistent theme, a single set of APIs, and a single set of preference settings.
That's why even when Linux is free and Mac OS is expensive, Linux still can't beat its market share.
Linux already has a bigger market share than Macintosh, and that's without Apple's PR budget.
it does suck that this is being rejected, and yes - the US's FDA is notoriously stricter than other countries
I think that's more myth than fact. There are many drugs and devices available in the US that are banned or restricted in Europe. Each country just seems to have its own set of hangups about what it permits and what it doesn't permit.
If the US actually were stricter, it's also unclear that that would be a good thing. In many cases, the decision should be up to the doctor and patient.
but not all that bad when faced with certainty of death.
We are all faced with "certainty of death". There are some tradeoffs we can make between comfort and quantity, but just because you are willing to accept an extreme amount of discomfort (think "medieval torture") for a small increase in quantity doesn't mean that that's the decision society has to bless or pay for.
Furthermore, these devices are hugely expensive. The $500k that are spent to extend the life of 10% of the recipients by 6 months need to come from somewhere. Unless insurance premiums go up, if money is spent on that, it means that other procedures don't get done.
There is still hope, [...] assuming that they would support it due to their right to life/culture of life stance.
And why would that be "hope"? Why would you place your uninformed judgement, or that of DeLay or Bush, above that of people who have studied the data, know medicine, and have thought about this long and hard?
Implanting an artificial heart in a sick patient is a painful, dangerous, and costly procedure with (apparently, according to the panel) little benefit to either the patient or research. Those are just the facts of life: as it is, the technology isn't ready. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to subject patients to it, and we can save more lives by spending the money on other procedures.
When companies come up with devices that do work, then they will get approved. And they can still implant new designs as experimental devices.
Are you thanking NetCaptor on a daily basis for your tabbed browser?
NetCaptor didn't invent the technology either. Tab-like browsing mechanisms first came out of the academic community.
Or Microsoft for providing the libraries that NetCaptor used to build the browser in the first place?
Microsoft did not invent tab-like mechanisms or GUI toolkits.
Why is this event called "Gnomedex"? I find it rather disturbing that Microsoft has started sponsoring and (in effect) marketing under the Gnome name. How did this happen? Isn't Gnome protected by a trademark?
Microsoft is also getting excited about XML-based GUIs, database file systems, "managed code", desktop search, garbage collection, etc., all ideas that have been around for a long time. The company behaves like a smart computer science freshman, who thinks that because he is thinking one week ahead of his intro CS class, he is inventing things nobody else ever thought of. And, like a freshman, they lack the taste to separate the good from the bad ideas.
Unlike Java, X11 doesn't have a standard high-level graphical framework, so there's no way Apple can provide generic "X11" integration
At the X11 layer, Apple should provide good window management, clipboard integration, keycode management, printing, and a small extension that would let X11 apps access Apple-native features through the X11 protocol. The rest (menu bars, etc.) the Gnome and KDE developers would do if Apple's legal department only would let them.
If I wanted X11 to load when I log in, I'd put it in my login items.
See, that's one of the problems with Apple's X11 server: it is so big, heavy, and inefficient. The X11 protocol is simple; a good implementation of it as part of the OS X GUI would probably be more lightweight than the menu bar clock.
Why would they?
Because they have 2-3% market share on the desktop and need more customers.
They already have a great, consistent, good-looking GUI
Ah, yes, the myth of Macintosh consistency. Never mind that it's a hodgepodge of APIs (Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz, OpenGL, Swing, Java2D, etc.) and themes (silver, classic, gumdrop, Office, etc.).
And who wants to run a server just to get an office program working?
You, apparently, or how do you think the current OS X GUI works? Adding another protocol (X11) to the protocols it already understands is not a big deal.
I can't think of anything more inefficient and pointless than running a GUI on top of another GUI.
Yes, that's the problem: X11 runs on top of the OS X GUI. A good implementation would put it on equal footing with Carbon, OpenGL, and Cocoa as another choice.
Programs should use the native GUI, there's no reason not to other than laziness and arrogance.
No, "arrogance" is if you don't listen to potential customers and just try to shove your APIs down their throats. And at 2-3% market share, it's not just arrogance, it's stupidity.
Nobody is ever going to bother developing X-based interfaces for Mac software.
As long as the X11 server for Macintosh keeps sucking as badly as it does, indeed, nobody will bother.
It isn't even simple to make existing X applications fit in, since at the very least they use different widget sets.
It would be easy to make Gnome and KDE apps look and feel exactly like Macintosh apps. The only obstacle is Apple's legal department.
OS X already ships with at least three different widget sets (Carbon, Cocoa, Swing), four different graphics APIs (Carbon, Quartz, Java2D, OpenGL), and three different themes (classic, silver, Cocoa). Third party apps already use dozens of different widget sets. Another graphics API and two more toolkits won't make a difference: they'll be able to emulate the common Apple L&F as well as all the others.
Take your own advice, if you ever work for an organisation that insists on using complex word templates
Yes, some people in the real world cannot move away from MS Office. But there exist people in the real world that can. Therefore, your claim is wrong, and my claim is right: it is feasible in the real world to move away from MS Office, it is simply not feasible for everybody.
A lot of these Office clones seem to be fairly limited in function as compared to MS Office. For example, Apple Keynote still tends to loose a lot of formatting when importing PowerPoint documents.
By that argument, MS Office is even more limited because MS Office can't even import native Keynote or OpenOffice documents at all.
In reality, the non-Microsoft office suites (it is incorrect referring to them as "clones", since Microsoft didn't even come up with the concept) are full-fledged office suites that exceed MS Office functionality in many areas.
Moving away from MS Office, however, is not really feasible in the real world (well, not yet at least!)
That's pure FUD. I exchange documents with lots of people. Even though I actually have a copy of MS Office installed (site license), I haven't had to bother firing it up in more than a year: OpenOffice has handled everything just fine and I use it as the default handler for MS Office documents. On the Windows partition on my laptop I erased MS Office altogether--it was just taking up space.
And with Microsoft's free viewer programs, Microsoft's move to XML formats, and web-based conversion services, you don't even need MS Office around as a safety blanket anymore.
Don't confuse your special situation and preferences with the reality at large.
Evolution offers Exchange integration. Of course, it's an X11 application, and Apple's X11 server sucks, so it's a pain to use under OS X.
Once Apple comes around to actually supporting X11 well, then all this software will become available for Macintosh.