No need to be sorry, I'm glad to hear it. I'm a Java fan too. I'm stuck on Java 1.4 at the moment though, since we use it at work, so I haven't had time to test startup/Swing performance of the new versions. As soon as I'm finished with my math studies I'll install the recent versions at home and start developing.:-)
Shows like American Chopper and American HotRod, which I have watched over here in the UK, are more like soap operas than educational, enlightening shows. The two or three minutes of engineering in each episode is overshadowed by 57 minutes of workplace drama and commercials.
Amen. The worst example to my mind is the Americanizing of Scrapheap Challenge. First, change it to Junkyard WARS, because WARS are MUCH COOLER. Less tinkering and technology (that is boring), more arguing and soap style "talking in private with the camera" where team members bitch about each other and the other team. Annoying Yee-haw style hosts, teams that take it WAY too seriously and even start crying and arguing when they lose (according to interviews with the hosts).
Oh well, hopefully the british seasons can get a good DVD realease. I bought an early Scrapheap DVD a couple of years ago, huge mistake. It was a transfer from VHS directly, a whole season on one hour. Each episode was cut to 5 minutes "here are our teams - here they are welding something - here they are arguing - and now they are going to race!". More like trailers than episodes, and again they removed the fun parts (the design decisions, the tinkering) and focused on the least relevant (who won the race).
Time Team in your garden is a good DVD though, it has whole episodes. The River Cottage series too. If you live in the US, did Discovery ever air those series there? Either way, you should pick them up on DVD from Amazon.uk.
Question. Is Java an okay choice for a desktop application?
It is ok, but not great. Azureus is written in Java, as are numerous IDEs like Eclipse, Netbeans, IDEA so it is clearly doable to do good looking, complex, fast applications in Java no matter what toolkit you use. Still, I have seen many small, ugly, yet crappy performing apps in Java too, so it is not as trivial as some people would like you to believe. (I think ALL GUI programming is a lot harder than the average Slashdot reader believes though, regardless of language.)
If so, what's the quickest, snappiest GUI toolkit to use?
Quickest to learn - Swing. Lots of good books and tutorials, and performance is getting pretty good these days (from 1.5 and up). Layout managers are a bit annoying, but there are some better ones coming.
Best performing - SWT probably, but it is less portable.
Both still have the problem of JVM startup time though (another problem Sun is looking at, they are currently testing a new faster classloader that uses less memory for instance). Some people accept the startup time, others find it too annoying to use Java on the desktop. YMMV.
Old news, and it should be noted that this magazine is of the type that loves to hype Microsoft products and have articles like "Become a computer pro - master the hidden features of Word!"
A more Linux/open source friendly publication, which also doesn't dumb it down quite as much (though they have fallen in quality the last couple of years) is Datormagazin.
Re:The funny thing is...
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
... that they all spell that "whipituptitude" differently. Look for yourself:
* In TFA1: whipituptitude
* In TFA2 referenced from TFA1: whipuptitude
With Perl, there is always more than one way to spell it.
Hell, you could buy a 300 GB HD for half the money.... *ahem*
Um, yes, but remember Family Guy was resurrected (and possibly Futurama too) due to good DVD sales. Also copying the B5 films and series to the HD would pretty much fill that HD up and take up a whole slot in the computer. It is difficult to take that HD to watch with friends as well.
For me, the Tachicomas were nauseatingly cute, and the worst part of the series. Think the personality of a perky 12 year old japanese school girl (including voice) in the body of of spider-ish police tank.
Slightly off-topic, I just found you can buy the Babylon 5 Complete Universe box. All the series, all the films in a single, reasonably priced package. 41 DVDs in all. *drool*
Maybe on Slashdot... Java has an excellent track record for security. Compare with the PHP worm that swept the net, or PHP based framworks like NukePHP that are hacked so regularly that sites are unusable..Net I haven't kept up with, so I don't know how they do security in real life.
Server side java is REALLY fast. On artifical benchmarks, java can be as fast as C++, and these people wrote a high performance Linux cluster monitoring tool in Java.
If you need more proof, Java is now the preferred language for Boeing when doing mission critical and real time software. NASA used it during the Mars mission...
and proprietary.
You can join the Java Community Process for free as an individual and vote for how future versions of Java will look like, Sun has handed over control over just about everything but the Java trademark to this JCP. There are also plenty of open source implementations of compilers and JVMs. Sun keeps donating stuff to the open source community. DTrace, Solaris, 1600 patents, cryptography tech....
More choices
on
JSF vs ASP.net
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you go with Java, there are plenty of other choices than JSF. Struts, while a bit verbose and showing its age, is a very mature framework that scales well and has been used successfully in lots of projects. A lot of people recommend Tapestry or Cocoon. It all depends on the size of your project and what people are experienced with.
A good thing with Java, no matter which framework you choose, is that you have a huge number of open source tools and libs to help you (Eclipse, Netbeans, JUnit, Ant, Maven, CruiseControl, JMeter, PMD, Checkstyle, xdoclet, Hibernate, Spring, Tomcat, commons logging, jsch...) , and there are also plenty of books, online tutorials, and programmers around who know Java.
Here is an idea, instead of aping after everything Microsoft does (monkey see, monkey do...), thereby giving them water on their millwheel, why don't you write good apps that run natively on Linux instead.
Or if you really want platform independence, write it in Java. Then you will be able to run it on Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, BSD, mainframes...
Since when does headline grabbing equal interesting? Why do we need a list giving attention grabbing whores MORE attention?
How about some people who have moved the media forward? Will Wright, Old Grandma Hardcore and Brenda Braithwaite from that list look like they qualify. Who else? If you answer Carmack I may harm you.
And please, don't mention that Mars is also going through a warming period. That is merely an accidential coincedance; or caused by those SUV's that NASA beligerantly dropped onto the unsuspecting planet, breaking holes in its celestrial sphere and causing horrible consequenceses.
If I may distract you from savagely beating up that strawman, there are some real arguments against Mars warming here.:-)
You are describing weather, and weather changes, correct. But when you measure weather over time, you get a climate average, and that average is shifting:
CBS: "The year 2005, the World Wildlife Fund said, is shaping up as the worst for extreme weather, with the hottest temperatures, most Arctic melting, worst Atlantic hurricane season and warmest Caribbean waters.
It's also been the driest year in decades in the Amazon, where a drought may surpass anything in the past century, said the report by international environmental group. "
If anyone should get the credits for inventing King Kong, shouldn't it be Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace? Not to mention previous works by Jules Verne and others...
True, I have high hopes for some of those, and especially Sam & Max (If it gets cancelled again I'm going to kill someone). Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy) was ok... the first half. For the second half, I agree with Something Awful.
This is not sarcasm or any other kind of flamebait, but why is gaming on PC's so important ? Can't you get a $500 PC for random computer work and then a $100 playstation (or random game system) for games ?
The kind of games I like are mostly not available for consoles. Non-linear RPGs, strategy games (real time and "classic"), adventure games (though these are almost gone unfortunately)...
Despite the claim that Java is So 90's, IBM, RedHat and Novell continues to pledge their commitment to J2EE and the Java community. Also, Java has recently overtaken C++ as the most popular language on Sourceforge. Also, every Blu-ray unit will come with a JVM, and menues and other content will be created with J2ME, and it seems like Blu-ray is winning the next gen DVD war.
What I'd like to see is an editor that combines the best of Emacs and Eclipse. You'd never have to take your hands from the keyboard. You'd get the attractive UI of Eclipse without the Visual envy. You'd get an editor that makes you more productive and happy than any other.
Try downloading the evaluation version of IDEA IntelliJ. It has lots of fans. One of their stated goals is that you should never have to reach for the mouse, sensible keyboard shortcuts for everything. Looks nice too, shows what you can do with Swing.
I was impressed with it. The only drawback is that it is not open source... and the hefty pricetag.
The media is run by English majors who brag to each other who understands math/science less than the others! Don't expect an English major to understand tech stuff.
I have met a LOT of bright English majors. Many of them, being intellectuals in general, are above the average citizen when it comes to knowledge of science and technology. Not once have I met any person boasting about being ignorant. Your comment is such a fucking troll, and this "us vs them" liberal arts bashing on Slashdot gets more and more tiring every day.
Ok, having your own photo printer is conventient, and as geeks we love our tech toys of course, but remember that these days you can have your digital images printed professionally at photo labs VERY cheap.
The prints will last longer, and cost per page is probably going to be the same or even lower, as the printer manufacturers keep jacking up the price for new ink cartriges and use ever more draconian tech and/or EULA measures to prevent cheap no-name replacements/refills.
Slashdot Mirror
>time java HelloWorld
...though I guess I fail the "sense of humour" test.
Hello world!
real 0m0.284s
user 0m0.236s
sys 0m0.020s
And that is in Java 1.4, newer JVM versions have faster startup.
Myth busted!
No need to be sorry, I'm glad to hear it. I'm a Java fan too. I'm stuck on Java 1.4 at the moment though, since we use it at work, so I haven't had time to test startup/Swing performance of the new versions. As soon as I'm finished with my math studies I'll install the recent versions at home and start developing. :-)
Shows like American Chopper and American HotRod, which I have watched over here in the UK, are more like soap operas than educational, enlightening shows. The two or three minutes of engineering in each episode is overshadowed by 57 minutes of workplace drama and commercials.
Amen. The worst example to my mind is the Americanizing of Scrapheap Challenge. First, change it to Junkyard WARS, because WARS are MUCH COOLER. Less tinkering and technology (that is boring), more arguing and soap style "talking in private with the camera" where team members bitch about each other and the other team. Annoying Yee-haw style hosts, teams that take it WAY too seriously and even start crying and arguing when they lose (according to interviews with the hosts).
Oh well, hopefully the british seasons can get a good DVD realease. I bought an early Scrapheap DVD a couple of years ago, huge mistake. It was a transfer from VHS directly, a whole season on one hour. Each episode was cut to 5 minutes "here are our teams - here they are welding something - here they are arguing - and now they are going to race!". More like trailers than episodes, and again they removed the fun parts (the design decisions, the tinkering) and focused on the least relevant (who won the race).
Time Team in your garden is a good DVD though, it has whole episodes. The River Cottage series too. If you live in the US, did Discovery ever air those series there? Either way, you should pick them up on DVD from Amazon.uk.
Question.
Is Java an okay choice for a desktop application?
It is ok, but not great. Azureus is written in Java, as are numerous IDEs like Eclipse, Netbeans, IDEA so it is clearly doable to do good looking, complex, fast applications in Java no matter what toolkit you use. Still, I have seen many small, ugly, yet crappy performing apps in Java too, so it is not as trivial as some people would like you to believe. (I think ALL GUI programming is a lot harder than the average Slashdot reader believes though, regardless of language.)
If so, what's the quickest, snappiest GUI toolkit to use?
Quickest to learn - Swing. Lots of good books and tutorials, and performance is getting pretty good these days (from 1.5 and up). Layout managers are a bit annoying, but there are some better ones coming.
Best performing - SWT probably, but it is less portable.
Both still have the problem of JVM startup time though (another problem Sun is looking at, they are currently testing a new faster classloader that uses less memory for instance). Some people accept the startup time, others find it too annoying to use Java on the desktop. YMMV.
Old news, and it should be noted that this magazine is of the type that loves to hype Microsoft products and have articles like "Become a computer pro - master the hidden features of Word!"
A more Linux/open source friendly publication, which also doesn't dumb it down quite as much (though they have fallen in quality the last couple of years) is Datormagazin.
* In TFA1: whipituptitude
* In TFA2 referenced from TFA1: whipuptitude
With Perl, there is always more than one way to spell it.
Hell, you could buy a 300 GB HD for half the money.... *ahem*
Um, yes, but remember Family Guy was resurrected (and possibly Futurama too) due to good DVD sales. Also copying the B5 films and series to the HD would pretty much fill that HD up and take up a whole slot in the computer. It is difficult to take that HD to watch with friends as well.
Support quality programs by buying them.
For me, the Tachicomas were nauseatingly cute, and the worst part of the series. Think the personality of a perky 12 year old japanese school girl (including voice) in the body of of spider-ish police tank.
Slightly off-topic, I just found you can buy the Babylon 5 Complete Universe box. All the series, all the films in a single, reasonably priced package. 41 DVDs in all. *drool*
Both have a reputation for being slow, insecure,
.Net I haven't kept up with, so I don't know how they do security in real life.
Maybe on Slashdot... Java has an excellent track record for security. Compare with the PHP worm that swept the net, or PHP based framworks like NukePHP that are hacked so regularly that sites are unusable.
Server side java is REALLY fast. On artifical benchmarks, java can be as fast as C++, and these people wrote a high performance Linux cluster monitoring tool in Java.
If you need more proof, Java is now the preferred language for Boeing when doing mission critical and real time software. NASA used it during the Mars mission...
and proprietary.
You can join the Java Community Process for free as an individual and vote for how future versions of Java will look like, Sun has handed over control over just about everything but the Java trademark to this JCP. There are also plenty of open source implementations of compilers and JVMs. Sun keeps donating stuff to the open source community. DTrace, Solaris, 1600 patents, cryptography tech....
If you go with Java, there are plenty of other choices than JSF. Struts, while a bit verbose and showing its age, is a very mature framework that scales well and has been used successfully in lots of projects. A lot of people recommend Tapestry or Cocoon. It all depends on the size of your project and what people are experienced with.
A good thing with Java, no matter which framework you choose, is that you have a huge number of open source tools and libs to help you (Eclipse, Netbeans, JUnit, Ant, Maven, CruiseControl, JMeter, PMD, Checkstyle, xdoclet, Hibernate, Spring, Tomcat, commons logging, jsch...) , and there are also plenty of books, online tutorials, and programmers around who know Java.
Here is an idea, instead of aping after everything Microsoft does (monkey see, monkey do...), thereby giving them water on their millwheel, why don't you write good apps that run natively on Linux instead.
Or if you really want platform independence, write it in Java. Then you will be able to run it on Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, BSD, mainframes...
Since when does headline grabbing equal interesting? Why do we need a list giving attention grabbing whores MORE attention?
How about some people who have moved the media forward? Will Wright, Old Grandma Hardcore and Brenda Braithwaite from that list look like they qualify. Who else? If you answer Carmack I may harm you.
And please, don't mention that Mars is also going through a warming period. That is merely an accidential coincedance; or caused by those SUV's that NASA beligerantly dropped onto the unsuspecting planet, breaking holes in its celestrial sphere and causing horrible consequenceses.
:-)
If I may distract you from savagely beating up that strawman, there are some real arguments against Mars warming here.
You are describing weather, and weather changes, correct. But when you measure weather over time, you get a climate average, and that average is shifting:
CBS: "The year 2005, the World Wildlife Fund said, is shaping up as the worst for extreme weather, with the hottest temperatures, most Arctic melting, worst Atlantic hurricane season and warmest Caribbean waters.
It's also been the driest year in decades in the Amazon, where a drought may surpass anything in the past century, said the report by international environmental group. "
BBC: "The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year, according to new data released by US scientists.
They say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century.
The Arctic climate varies naturally, but the researchers conclude that human-induced global warming is at least partially responsible. "
If anyone should get the credits for inventing King Kong, shouldn't it be Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace? Not to mention previous works by Jules Verne and others...
But beneath that superficial ugliness lies a sparkling beautiful language.
;-)
So you are telling me that once I kiss the frog it will turn into a beautiful prince? Forget it! I think you are just trying to trick me...
Ouch, such cutting edge satire. Thank you for reminding us that brevity is the soul of wit.
True, I have high hopes for some of those, and especially Sam & Max (If it gets cancelled again I'm going to kill someone). Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy) was ok... the first half. For the second half, I agree with Something Awful.
This is not sarcasm or any other kind of flamebait, but why is gaming on PC's so important ?
Can't you get a $500 PC for random computer work and then a $100 playstation (or random game system) for games ?
The kind of games I like are mostly not available for consoles. Non-linear RPGs, strategy games (real time and "classic"), adventure games (though these are almost gone unfortunately)...
Despite the claim that Java is So 90's, IBM, RedHat and Novell continues to pledge their commitment to J2EE and the Java community. Also, Java has recently overtaken C++ as the most popular language on Sourceforge. Also, every Blu-ray unit will come with a JVM, and menues and other content will be created with J2ME, and it seems like Blu-ray is winning the next gen DVD war.
What I'd like to see is an editor that combines the best of Emacs and Eclipse. You'd never have to take your hands from the keyboard. You'd get the attractive UI of Eclipse without the Visual envy. You'd get an editor that makes you more productive and happy than any other.
Try downloading the evaluation version of IDEA IntelliJ. It has lots of fans. One of their stated goals is that you should never have to reach for the mouse, sensible keyboard shortcuts for everything. Looks nice too, shows what you can do with Swing.
I was impressed with it. The only drawback is that it is not open source... and the hefty pricetag.
He used html, java, dhtml, xml...
He used JavaSCRIPT. Big difference.
Also, the Sun JRE does not provide the source, whereas the GCC does.
Sun provides the source for the JDK (the compiler), same as GCC does, though not under the same licence obviously.
Since the specs are open, there are open source implemenations of the JRE available.
The media is run by English majors who brag to each other who understands math/science less than the others! Don't expect an English major to understand tech stuff.
I have met a LOT of bright English majors. Many of them, being intellectuals in general, are above the average citizen when it comes to knowledge of science and technology. Not once have I met any person boasting about being ignorant. Your comment is such a fucking troll, and this "us vs them" liberal arts bashing on Slashdot gets more and more tiring every day.
Ok, having your own photo printer is conventient, and as geeks we love our tech toys of course, but remember that these days you can have your digital images printed professionally at photo labs VERY cheap.
The prints will last longer, and cost per page is probably going to be the same or even lower, as the printer manufacturers keep jacking up the price for new ink cartriges and use ever more draconian tech and/or EULA measures to prevent cheap no-name replacements/refills.