Motorola now use the "JUIX" operating system which is a combination of Linux and Java so while he was definitely wrong, his mistake was simple enough - assuming that technological superiority would win out over mass-market/buzzword appeal.
Ease of development, maintainability and porting are also forms of technological superiority, and in this case perhaps more important than pure performance?
Java is in no way driving 3D games development - on mobile platforms or otherwise, this is just a bizarre article.
They don't have to "drive" 3D games development, they just have to be fun enough that people with mobile phones want to play them.
There are currently zero mobile Java games available that compare even remotely favourably to a decent GBA title, let alone with any titles available on the DS or PSP.
Oh, I agree DS or PSP games are more fun, it would be strange otherwise since they are dedicated gaming machines. Thing is, there are many millions more mobile phones sold. Not all people are hardcore gamers who are willing to pay for one of those devices. Some just want a few minutes of diversion while on the bus. A Sudoku puzzle or similar. And this article shows that these games are getting better and better.
Typically, the frame rates are awful, the interfaces are not responsive, the sound is often out of sync and of poor quality (as are the often tiny sprites).
That is just FUD. I have played plenty of fun and responsive Java games. Still, it must be said that more developers should focus on making addictive puzzle games or similar rather than action games. As you point out, the processor, the screen and the input possibilities are by necessity rather limited.
I have some friends who are working with developing Java games. So far the big money is not in developing titles for phone companies portals (or even worse trying to sell them to the end user yourself) but to develop ad games for companies who make them available for free downloads, usually as a part of a competition.
From what I understand, the best part of the job is that since graphics on mobile phones and other limited devices are so cruddy development focus tends to be on addictive gameplay rather than eyecandy. It is also still possible to be a small independent game studio, no need for a big art studio to render hours of CGI, etc.
Worst part is that just about all phone developers are very sloppy when it comes to implementing the J2ME standards and all models tend to have their own quirks. Sony Ericsson and Nokia are probably the best, but that is not saying much. So in this case, it really is "write once, debug everywhere" type java.
Mobile gaming is really taking off, I read on GameDev for instance that mobile game developers Gameloft increased their workforce from 432 to 1375 employees.
There are plenty to download for free, then you can send them to your mobile for instance through Bluetooth OBEX push. Works fine even under Linux, I've tried it myself.
People want something new! In the corporate and in their homes. It makes NO sense at all to tell all those word, excel and powerpoint experts that there's yet another Office suite which does JUST THE SAME. Whoaahh, now we're really excited. NOT!!!
There is also the matter of price, and having an open document standard, two important features where Open Office beats MS Office. The first matters a lot for small companies, the latter matters a lot to big companies.
Sun is paying a lot to keep up development on Open Office and providing you with a free office suite. Why are you so negative?
And what makes you think that MS won't follow suit.
Because historically they have always opted for locking customers in?
WebOffice will stand out and be adopted widely. (and quickly). Before the OOo2.0 is out we'll be ready for another revolution. So hurry Google with the WebOffice!
Manually determining how much memory to give to an application was one of the things that us Mac users were more than happy to leave behind with the transition to OS X. Hell, we were more than happy to kill that "feature." Dancing on its coffin and all that. Are you seriously suggesting the world go back?
What we have left behind is having the programmer decide how much memory a program needs. This guy was complaining that he thought the Java programs were using too much memory. I pointed out that as the system administrator, he CAN decide how much memory the VM takes on startup, a pretty nifty feature if you ask me.
The system administrator knows a lot more about the resources of the machine and how they should be distributed. Most people never use that functionality though.
>>Or NOT consider freeing it when you forget about it...
>Programming takes some level of skill.
Yes yes, you are a big man. Go fix those memory leaks that have been with us in Mozilla for years if you think it is so damn easy. No really, I mean it. I would be grateful.
The stack comes for "free" in C. If you need to store something too large, you need the heap. But then, you can allocate it once, and don't even consider freeing it until you finish with it
Or NOT consider freeing it when you forget about it... as the case may be.
Try writing a Java program that eats less than 32k.
(I'd like to see someone make a cutting edge game in Java).
There are lots of games done in Java, mainly for mobile phones through J2ME. A few of them might have cutting edge gameplay (though I've yet to see one), but it is unlikely to see cutting edge graphics. Still, there are some pretty impressive things you can do with JOGL.
How many JVMs can you afford to run on your system for different apps, and how can you make sure they are all the right size, the garbage collectors are in an appropriate mode that can keep up with generated garbage, etc.
You so called counter argument is 6 years old... a lot of it weren't true to begin with, and a lot of things have happened since then.
In the end though, the MOST important thing is that these days, processor cycles are cheap. Programmer cycles are expensive. Therefore it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of program performance to get more productive programmers.
Yep, Honda. That's a good example. A friend also told me a counter-example, a Swedish headache medicine had to change name before launch in Thailand, as the name sounded something like "The stench of a fart" in Thai.
catch the same child molester in the act again, and you send him home, having brought an end to the incident. The following day, you catch the same child molester in the act again... You are convinced that left to his own devices, this child molester will continue to have his way with the children in your neighborhood. Assume that "the state" will not intervene. You choose to kill him, rather than let him continue to terrorize the children in your neighborhood.
That is an awful lot of assumptions you are making - the perpetrator is remorseless and psychopatic, "the state" will not intervene, there are no other options.
In reality there are many other possibilites. I could inform "the state" (police and/or social authorities), who would investigate without a doubt. I could try to reason with this child molester, or threaten to tell everyone else if he did it again. I could inform the neighbours that they should keep their children again. You are doing the same thing as in the book, you are making up a very black and white situation, where you are pure and the opponent is purely and unrepentatly evil. That is a dangerous way of thinking.
How about a more timely and realistic example: You're stranded in the New Orleans Superdome in the aftermath of a Hurricane, and a group of men has dragged a screaming woman into the flithy public restroom to gang-rape her.
But all right, all right, I'll answer your underlying question: Is violence ever acceptible? Yes. I am not a complete pacifist. I just think you (and especially OSC) are creating virtual worlds where everything is set up so that taking the violent path is obviously justified and moral. People in the real world are always justifying their violent acts to themselves, right? They themselves are always the misunderstood good guys in a bad world. So for me the important question to always ask yourself is why you think your own reasoning is any more valid than theirs? Do you really have all the facts, do you really know all about the situation and the motives of the people involved?
Sigh, can't stop myself from correction facts in a joke. I have to get this besserwisser tendency under control.:-(
Hey, I don't mind, its good to have gaps in my knowledge pointed out. Your post did stir some faint memories from high school when talking about Mendel etc. I should obviously go refresh my knowledge in this area.:-)
Yeah, but those backups are like mp3s, in the respect that they are quite lossy. Maybe with 3 backups, there is enough parity to assemble the original.
Seeing as all of them are missing the same 50% of his data (Y cromosome) I find it unlikely.:-)
Did you know that Ender's Game is on the Marine Corps' recommended reading list for Junior elisted personnel?
I actually find that very very scary.
The reality is that the underlying theme of the book, that intent makes makes all the difference in measuring good and evil, that an otherwise "good" person may be obligated to commit horrible deeds in the name of the greater good... That's the message that matters, because that's the position that our people in uniform have routinely found themselves in throughout our history.
Uhu, and that is the VERY THING the article objects to, the message that you are good and innocent while simultanously killing. Come on, like the nazis and all other killers through history wasn't justifying what they were doing the same way. "Sure, all this stuff is distasteful, but we are doing it for the greater good...". And the book constantly paint the opponents as completely evil with no redeeming qualities and no motivations of their own, making it a very easy choice to kill them. Very convenient don't you think?
I prefer this quote from Gandhi: "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"
Point of Sale systems are really not enterprise level software or whatever. Usually the simpler it is it the better.
If you change the previous statement to "a POS terminal" I would agree with you.
A whole POS system though is pretty enterprise to me. Transactions, interfaces to different credit card systems, security, high availability, logging, maybe a rules engine for special taxes and rebate rules...
Seems like the fact that the POS program was written in Java made this possible. But that would mean I made a positive comment about Java on Slashdot. Wait, who is that knocking on the my door...
Is this a "knock-knock" joke?
Jokes aside, I agree. I'm happy they chose Linux, but this does show that the operating system is becoming less and less relevant, so it's suprising how everyone on Slashdot is crowing about how this is a win for Linux.
Good story for me to start they day with. My favourite language on my favourite OS, and developed by, I believe, a Swedish consulting firm. Go team!
This is also a pretty big win for Java. It shows you can switch the underlying OS with little or no trouble.
A neat coincidence is that I just finished the new edition of "Applying UML and Patterns" by Craig Larman which uses a Java based Point of Sale system as a running example throughout the book of how to use UML together with GRASP and Gang of Four patterns.
They were the ones who tried to put actual application controls directly into IE (ActiveX) so that web-borne applications would have full access to the client system.
Sun did that with Applets in 1995, only with a much stricter security system in place.
They are at the helm of all sorts of initatives like SOAP, UPnP, now ASP.Net
ASP.Net are an initiative of what? An awkward merging of two technologies so that ASP developers won't be frightened away?
Sun coined the slogan in 1987. Even when Windows 95 was launched nine years later Microsoft hadn't realized the power of the net and was taken by surprise, Bill Gates has admitted as much himself in interviews.
Slashdot Mirror
Motorola now use the "JUIX" operating system which is a combination of Linux and Java so while he was definitely wrong, his mistake was simple enough - assuming that technological superiority would win out over mass-market/buzzword appeal.
Ease of development, maintainability and porting are also forms of technological superiority, and in this case perhaps more important than pure performance?
Java is in no way driving 3D games development - on mobile platforms or otherwise, this is just a bizarre article.
They don't have to "drive" 3D games development, they just have to be fun enough that people with mobile phones want to play them.
There are currently zero mobile Java games available that compare even remotely favourably to a decent GBA title, let alone with any titles available on the DS or PSP.
Oh, I agree DS or PSP games are more fun, it would be strange otherwise since they are dedicated gaming machines. Thing is, there are many millions more mobile phones sold. Not all people are hardcore gamers who are willing to pay for one of those devices. Some just want a few minutes of diversion while on the bus. A Sudoku puzzle or similar. And this article shows that these games are getting better and better.
Typically, the frame rates are awful, the interfaces are not responsive, the sound is often out of sync and of poor quality (as are the often tiny sprites).
That is just FUD. I have played plenty of fun and responsive Java games. Still, it must be said that more developers should focus on making addictive puzzle games or similar rather than action games. As you point out, the processor, the screen and the input possibilities are by necessity rather limited.
I have some friends who are working with developing Java games. So far the big money is not in developing titles for phone companies portals (or even worse trying to sell them to the end user yourself) but to develop ad games for companies who make them available for free downloads, usually as a part of a competition.
From what I understand, the best part of the job is that since graphics on mobile phones and other limited devices are so cruddy development focus tends to be on addictive gameplay rather than eyecandy. It is also still possible to be a small independent game studio, no need for a big art studio to render hours of CGI, etc.
Worst part is that just about all phone developers are very sloppy when it comes to implementing the J2ME standards and all models tend to have their own quirks. Sony Ericsson and Nokia are probably the best, but that is not saying much. So in this case, it really is "write once, debug everywhere" type java.
Mobile gaming is really taking off, I read on GameDev for instance that mobile game developers Gameloft increased their workforce from 432 to 1375 employees.
There are plenty to download for free, then you can send them to your mobile for instance through Bluetooth OBEX push. Works fine even under Linux, I've tried it myself.
People want something new! In the corporate and in their homes. It makes NO sense at all to tell all those word, excel and powerpoint experts that there's yet another Office suite which does JUST THE SAME. Whoaahh, now we're really excited. NOT!!!
There is also the matter of price, and having an open document standard, two important features where Open Office beats MS Office. The first matters a lot for small companies, the latter matters a lot to big companies.
Sun is paying a lot to keep up development on Open Office and providing you with a free office suite. Why are you so negative?
And what makes you think that MS won't follow suit.
Because historically they have always opted for locking customers in?
WebOffice will stand out and be adopted widely. (and quickly). Before the OOo2.0 is out we'll be ready for another revolution. So hurry Google with the WebOffice!
Sorry to disappoint you...
Manually determining how much memory to give to an application was one of the things that us Mac users were more than happy to leave behind with the transition to OS X. Hell, we were more than happy to kill that "feature." Dancing on its coffin and all that. Are you seriously suggesting the world go back?
What we have left behind is having the programmer decide how much memory a program needs. This guy was complaining that he thought the Java programs were using too much memory. I pointed out that as the system administrator, he CAN decide how much memory the VM takes on startup, a pretty nifty feature if you ask me.
The system administrator knows a lot more about the resources of the machine and how they should be distributed. Most people never use that functionality though.
Anything using swing is incredibly unusably slow.
Try downloading a demo of IDEA IntelliJ. It hogs memory, true, but it is fast AND pretty.
The typical home machine these days is still sub-ghz, and Java performs so poorly as to be unusable on such machines.
A typical mobile phone is sub-ghz too, and there is plenty of J2ME software running on them...
Java rocks on limited devices AND as server software. It is only on the desktop it isn't a big hit. Yet.
>>Or NOT consider freeing it when you forget about it...
>Programming takes some level of skill.
Yes yes, you are a big man. Go fix those memory leaks that have been with us in Mozilla for years if you think it is so damn easy. No really, I mean it. I would be grateful.
The stack comes for "free" in C. If you need to store something too large, you need the heap. But then, you can allocate it once, and don't even consider freeing it until you finish with it
Or NOT consider freeing it when you forget about it... as the case may be.
Try writing a Java program that eats less than 32k.
No problem at all.
(I'd like to see someone make a cutting edge game in Java).
There are lots of games done in Java, mainly for mobile phones through J2ME. A few of them might have cutting edge gameplay (though I've yet to see one), but it is unlikely to see cutting edge graphics. Still, there are some pretty impressive things you can do with JOGL.
How many JVMs can you afford to run on your system for different apps, and how can you make sure they are all the right size, the garbage collectors are in an appropriate mode that can keep up with generated garbage, etc.
Try "java -X". You will see that you can decide what the "right" size is. See this link, a guy forces the JVM to run a web server on 16 mb of memory and still get decent performance.
You so called counter argument is 6 years old... a lot of it weren't true to begin with, and a lot of things have happened since then.
In the end though, the MOST important thing is that these days, processor cycles are cheap. Programmer cycles are expensive. Therefore it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of program performance to get more productive programmers.
Yep, Honda. That's a good example. A friend also told me a counter-example, a Swedish headache medicine had to change name before launch in Thailand, as the name sounded something like "The stench of a fart" in Thai.
catch the same child molester in the act again, and you send him home, having brought an end to the incident. The following day, you catch the same child molester in the act again... You are convinced that left to his own devices, this child molester will continue to have his way with the children in your neighborhood. Assume that "the state" will not intervene. You choose to kill him, rather than let him continue to terrorize the children in your neighborhood.
That is an awful lot of assumptions you are making - the perpetrator is remorseless and psychopatic, "the state" will not intervene, there are no other options.
In reality there are many other possibilites. I could inform "the state" (police and/or social authorities), who would investigate without a doubt. I could try to reason with this child molester, or threaten to tell everyone else if he did it again. I could inform the neighbours that they should keep their children again. You are doing the same thing as in the book, you are making up a very black and white situation, where you are pure and the opponent is purely and unrepentatly evil. That is a dangerous way of thinking.
How about a more timely and realistic example: You're stranded in the New Orleans Superdome in the aftermath of a Hurricane, and a group of men has dragged a screaming woman into the flithy public restroom to gang-rape her.
Is it realistic?
But all right, all right, I'll answer your underlying question: Is violence ever acceptible? Yes. I am not a complete pacifist. I just think you (and especially OSC) are creating virtual worlds where everything is set up so that taking the violent path is obviously justified and moral. People in the real world are always justifying their violent acts to themselves, right? They themselves are always the misunderstood good guys in a bad world. So for me the important question to always ask yourself is why you think your own reasoning is any more valid than theirs? Do you really have all the facts, do you really know all about the situation and the motives of the people involved?
Sigh, can't stop myself from correction facts in a joke. I have to get this besserwisser tendency under control. :-(
:-)
Hey, I don't mind, its good to have gaps in my knowledge pointed out. Your post did stir some faint memories from high school when talking about Mendel etc. I should obviously go refresh my knowledge in this area.
Yeah, but those backups are like mp3s, in the respect that they are quite lossy. Maybe with 3 backups, there is enough parity to assemble the original.
:-)
Seeing as all of them are missing the same 50% of his data (Y cromosome) I find it unlikely.
Did you know that Ender's Game is on the Marine Corps' recommended reading list for Junior elisted personnel?
I actually find that very very scary.
The reality is that the underlying theme of the book, that intent makes makes all the difference in measuring good and evil, that an otherwise "good" person may be obligated to commit horrible deeds in the name of the greater good... That's the message that matters, because that's the position that our people in uniform have routinely found themselves in throughout our history.
Uhu, and that is the VERY THING the article objects to, the message that you are good and innocent while simultanously killing. Come on, like the nazis and all other killers through history wasn't justifying what they were doing the same way. "Sure, all this stuff is distasteful, but we are doing it for the greater good...". And the book constantly paint the opponents as completely evil with no redeeming qualities and no motivations of their own, making it a very easy choice to kill them. Very convenient don't you think?
I prefer this quote from Gandhi:
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"
To Java:
// 7 punctuation marks
public class Square
{
public double operate(double x) {return x * x;}
};
Minor nitpick - the final semicolon, while allowed, is surpurfluous and against the Java Programming Style guidelines.
Point of Sale systems are really not enterprise level software or whatever. Usually the simpler it is it the better.
If you change the previous statement to "a POS terminal" I would agree with you.
A whole POS system though is pretty enterprise to me. Transactions, interfaces to different credit card systems, security, high availability, logging, maybe a rules engine for special taxes and rebate rules...
Seems like the fact that the POS program was written in Java made this possible. But that would mean I made a positive comment about Java on Slashdot. Wait, who is that knocking on the my door...
Is this a "knock-knock" joke?
Jokes aside, I agree. I'm happy they chose Linux, but this does show that the operating system is becoming less and less relevant, so it's suprising how everyone on Slashdot is crowing about how this is a win for Linux.
Good story for me to start they day with. My favourite language on my favourite OS, and developed by, I believe, a Swedish consulting firm. Go team!
This is also a pretty big win for Java. It shows you can switch the underlying OS with little or no trouble.
A neat coincidence is that I just finished the new edition of "Applying UML and Patterns" by Craig Larman which uses a Java based Point of Sale system as a running example throughout the book of how to use UML together with GRASP and Gang of Four patterns.
They were the ones who tried to put actual application controls directly into IE (ActiveX) so that web-borne applications would have full access to the client system.
Sun did that with Applets in 1995, only with a much stricter security system in place.
They are at the helm of all sorts of initatives like SOAP, UPnP, now ASP.Net
ASP.Net are an initiative of what? An awkward merging of two technologies so that ASP developers won't be frightened away?
Sun coined the slogan in 1987. Even when Windows 95 was launched nine years later Microsoft hadn't realized the power of the net and was taken by surprise, Bill Gates has admitted as much himself in interviews.