Hell, I read Slashdot and I'm firmly with Amazon on this one.
You can't yell "freedom!" with one breath, then say, "A private company can't take us offline" in the next without being a huge hypocrite. I hate hypocrites. It doesn't matter why Amazon took the site down, or if someone else told them to, it's well-within their right to do so. You're exercising your right to freedom speech, and Amazon's exercising their right to freedom of association.
Please. If these people had a lot of money, and did a lot of shopping, they probably wouldn't be huddled over a computer in their parents basement plotting DOS attacks over IRC.
Hey, I agree with you. I'd much rather everybody moved to Mono. But I'm addressing people like Bruce who shake in their boots and pee their pants because the Microsoft logo might have somehow been linked to the language somehow a little bit. This whole thread has been more than a little bit devil's advocate from me.
That said, it does make me angry how the open source community will whine and moan about something, but they don't offer anything better. If you're offering something better, and people aren't picking it, then ok! Whine and moan! But if you're not offering anything better, than shut up until you are.
You're completely missing the mark. If you think C++/QT is anywhere even remotely close to Java, then you're out in la-la-land and have zero practical experience in this area. (Also, your mind would be blown away by C#, which is *better* than Java.)
Let's set a couple base rules here: 1) If there's no automatic memory management, no. 2) If the GUI builder tools suck ass, no. (Admittedly QT is better than Java's current ones, but nowhere close to C#'s.) 3) If the language is a complex ball of obscure features that takes 5 years to become proficient at, no.
It's just so frustrating... look, if you want people to move from Java/C# to something else, you need something else! This should be extremely "duh" common-sense, but so many people in this thread are missing the point.
Your goal: get people to stop using Java/C#
Solution A: Have an environment as good or better than Java/C#, which is free and has no patent conflicts Solution B: Bitch and moan on Slashdot
Which of those solutions do you think is going to be most effective?
If you're working on something that runs a GUI better, and develops faster, that's great.
The exact point I'm trying to get across is that thing does not exist. C#/Mono is the closest we have to "that thing", and it's unacceptable due to patent threats.
That would be great. If it existed. Until it exists, you can't really tell people to move off Java/C# because there's nothing to move *to*.
Well, this would have been an important point if we were running Java on clients.
People don't run Java on clients (generally) because Java sucks ass at GUIs. C# doesn't, and has about equal distribution on servers and clients. Thus my point that whatever replaces those two has to not suck ass at GUIs.
But frankly, if all you care about is servers, then yes, there's really no issue-- there's already a kajillion environments that run on servers, many of which have close-to-feature-parity with existing Java/C# environments. I'm be more focused on creating an environment that's good at GUIs, and let the server stuff follow at its own pace.
On servers, all of the energy spent on JIT and so on is useless, because we can compile the code and IMO should.
A major fallacy in the Linux world is people responding to "Linux doesn't have a way of doing X" with "you don't need to do X." Regardless of your opinion, and with all due respect, thousands or millions of businesses have decided that Java/C# are ideal for their needs.
You'd be an idiot to: 1) Assume all of those developers/businesses are morons who have no basis for preferring a bytecode environment 2) Dismiss their situation out-of-hand by saying something like "you're doing it wrong"-- that's not going to win any friends
Go might be a good start from a language perspective, but it needs huge amounts work before it even comes close to the level of C# and Java.
If you're going to replace Java, for God's sake, replace it with something that can build a decent GUI. Enough people have suffered over the decades from shitty Java GUIs, let's not subject them to any more.
Plus, Go is compiled, so it kind of misses the entire point. (I suppose the theory is that you ship your program with a just-in-time compiler? Does that currently exist?)
Plus, it's hard to Google anything related to Go because of it's stupid name. But that's relatively minor.
Personally, I'd like a solution based on JavaScript, with a couple of features added-- (optional) strong-typing and namespaces. The benefit here is that JavaScript interpreters get faster every year. The downside is the same as Go, you'd need to develop the libraries and GUI ecosystem.
But this all kind of distracts from my general point, which is: right now, the replacement for C#/Java *does not exist* in the open source community. Sure, if a hundred developers started coding their pants off on Go, maybe in 2-3 years we'd have something, but right now? Nada. This is a huge problem, if you're trying to get people to move off of C#/Java.
Ok, so we have Java-- not open source friendly. We have C#-- not open source friendly. But at the same time, both are hugely popular. There's a gigantic demand for those types of environments here that isn't being met by anything in the open source community right now.
So bitch and moan about "oh we should move off Java, and we should move off C#", but there has to be something there to move *to*. Right now, there's jack.
And, frankly, until there's a as-good-or-better solution out there that's open source friendly, I think telling people "move off Java" is a waste of time... of course they're not going to move! There's nothing to move *to*!
Even Square was releasing Final Fantasy VII in 1997, whereas on the western PC front the world was taken by surprise by Fallout 1. It was like, "whoa, you can actually have a game with a lot of story on the PC?" Though arguably the one that really got the ball rolling and the RPG genre taken seriously in the West was Baldur's Gate in 1998.
Wow... you're missing a whole decade of history. Wizardry? Ultima? Might & Magic? D&D Gold Box games? All of those had great storylines, and were "taken seriously". Hell, Ultima 7 is pretty universally considered the best RPG of all time.
Man, did you honestly believe RPG history started in 1997? It's really hard to take your post at face-value when you're ignoring so many hundreds of great games.
Great, I'm guessing you're getting on the bandwagon right now, then? Or do people in Pakistan not count?
Right, because flooding *never* happened before industrialization.
Which brings up an interesting point: if you rebrand the whole she-bang as "climate change", then you allow yourself to include any absolutely normal, average weather-related activity in the definition. So it's kind of like cheating.
Or is that the point now? You can retro-actively classify any weather disaster after the advent of industrialization as "global warming" and then the death toll rises to millions and millions.
And the really hilarious part is, you just took the "herp derp global warming doesn't exist because it's snowing out!" retard excuse, and turned it around... you're doing the exact same confusing between "weather" and "climate." "Herp derp global warming must exist because there was a flood!" You're really not helping the case.
Somehow, I expect you'll make excuses instead.
If by "excuse" you mean "thinking rationally and questioning what you say," then... yes.
And now you're going to call me a "denier", when in fact I believe that climate change is happening, and is human-caused. I just don't believe it's anything to panic about.
yes. those people are 'lazy'. but, they are MADE lazy, by the system that keeps them in that position so that they wont stir trouble. this may be an intended result, a side effect. doesnt matter.
Yeah! Personal responsibility doesn't exist! All problems, even fatigue, are caused by THE MAN!!!
lets face it - if you dont have the means and the time to do something, freedoms do not matter. no freedom that you cant use, is a real freedom. only a lie.
And protests that don't require any kind of sacrifice at all don't impress me, or anybody else.
Look, if you feel strongly, then take STRONG ACTION. If you're taking wussy "run a script on my computer because I'm sooooo busy" action, then I assume you don't feel strongly about it, and you're certainly not going to sway my opinion on the matter.
If you care, *show* me you care through your actions. And, hey, guess what? Maybe you miss a class. Maybe you miss a mortgage payment. If it's *important* to you, you'll be willing to miss those things.
That's something you might need to ask yourself. What would actually convince you that climate change represents a danger to the lives of millions, possibly billions of people?
Wow. I don't know what it would take, but your shrill fear-mongering isn't going the trick at all.
BILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN DANGER!!! Yeah... right. Tell you what, I'll get right on that bandwagon when the first, oh, thousand or so die, ok?
they dont have the time or resources or the means to mount and run nation-spanning political campaigns, engage in social activity for prolonged periods. they have lives that they are forced to attend to.
If they're not willing to suspend their lives in *any* way, then it can't be a very important issue to them, could it?
"I'm against this, but I can't be arsed to protest it in an effective manner".
"nothing" is always a valid course of action. In fact, I think it should be the default course of action.
Amazon was well within their right to end their business relationship with WikiLeaks. They didn't do anything illegal, they didn't do anything immoral, and they did it specifically to ensure that their thousands of other customers weren't affected.
I understand that people are angry that WikiLeaks is having trouble finding servers, but that was easily predictable and should have been expected by them.
Fresh install of Win7 yesterday. Chrome (browser) gets 100/100 on Acid3, while IE8 gets 20/100. I'm missing the point I'm sure?
Most of the stuff Acid tests has little to do with standards; IE scores so low on it because they decided this particular test was unimportant for real-world scenarios and not a priority. (And frankly, I agree with Microsoft on this one.) Your Acid3 score really says very little about how well you support web standards.
That said, IE9 will have a significantly higher score simply as a side-effect of the other standardization work they've been doing. It won't be out for a bit though.
It's great to have benchmarks so you can compare two products with a single number, but first you have to make sure the number is actually meaningful.
Remember the giant outcry when Chrome stopped displaying "http://" in the URL bar? To read some forums, it sounded like not displaying "http://" was going to cause the end of civilization!
The sad fact is, a lot of people in tech overreact to extremely petty changes in software. I don't know why, but it's happened before, it's happening now, and it'll happen again.
Given how well the content industries are doing financially, all the hubbub against copyright infringers just smacks of greed, and nothing else.
Yes, you're pirating the movies and games, and *they're* the greedy ones.
How do you hold these two ideas in your head without it exploding? Either being greedy is bad, in which case you're just as bad as those media companies you hate, or being greedy is good and you should be cheering on the media companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I read Slashdot and I'm firmly with Amazon on this one.
You can't yell "freedom!" with one breath, then say, "A private company can't take us offline" in the next without being a huge hypocrite. I hate hypocrites. It doesn't matter why Amazon took the site down, or if someone else told them to, it's well-within their right to do so. You're exercising your right to freedom speech, and Amazon's exercising their right to freedom of association.
Please. If these people had a lot of money, and did a lot of shopping, they probably wouldn't be huddled over a computer in their parents basement plotting DOS attacks over IRC.
This is really worth watching. Seriously.
Yeah, we all saw it weeks ago when it was number one on Google Reader and every blog on Earth featured it. Quick work there, Taco.
You'll pry my C# from my cold, dead hands :)
Hey, I agree with you. I'd much rather everybody moved to Mono. But I'm addressing people like Bruce who shake in their boots and pee their pants because the Microsoft logo might have somehow been linked to the language somehow a little bit. This whole thread has been more than a little bit devil's advocate from me.
That said, it does make me angry how the open source community will whine and moan about something, but they don't offer anything better. If you're offering something better, and people aren't picking it, then ok! Whine and moan! But if you're not offering anything better, than shut up until you are.
No. Just no
You're completely missing the mark. If you think C++/QT is anywhere even remotely close to Java, then you're out in la-la-land and have zero practical experience in this area. (Also, your mind would be blown away by C#, which is *better* than Java.)
Let's set a couple base rules here:
1) If there's no automatic memory management, no.
2) If the GUI builder tools suck ass, no. (Admittedly QT is better than Java's current ones, but nowhere close to C#'s.)
3) If the language is a complex ball of obscure features that takes 5 years to become proficient at, no.
It's just so frustrating... look, if you want people to move from Java/C# to something else, you need something else! This should be extremely "duh" common-sense, but so many people in this thread are missing the point.
Your goal: get people to stop using Java/C#
Solution A: Have an environment as good or better than Java/C#, which is free and has no patent conflicts
Solution B: Bitch and moan on Slashdot
Which of those solutions do you think is going to be most effective?
If you're working on something that runs a GUI better, and develops faster, that's great.
The exact point I'm trying to get across is that thing does not exist. C#/Mono is the closest we have to "that thing", and it's unacceptable due to patent threats.
That would be great. If it existed. Until it exists, you can't really tell people to move off Java/C# because there's nothing to move *to*.
Well, this would have been an important point if we were running Java on clients.
People don't run Java on clients (generally) because Java sucks ass at GUIs. C# doesn't, and has about equal distribution on servers and clients. Thus my point that whatever replaces those two has to not suck ass at GUIs.
But frankly, if all you care about is servers, then yes, there's really no issue-- there's already a kajillion environments that run on servers, many of which have close-to-feature-parity with existing Java/C# environments. I'm be more focused on creating an environment that's good at GUIs, and let the server stuff follow at its own pace.
On servers, all of the energy spent on JIT and so on is useless, because we can compile the code and IMO should.
A major fallacy in the Linux world is people responding to "Linux doesn't have a way of doing X" with "you don't need to do X." Regardless of your opinion, and with all due respect, thousands or millions of businesses have decided that Java/C# are ideal for their needs.
You'd be an idiot to:
1) Assume all of those developers/businesses are morons who have no basis for preferring a bytecode environment
2) Dismiss their situation out-of-hand by saying something like "you're doing it wrong"-- that's not going to win any friends
Google's "Go" language is interesting.
Go might be a good start from a language perspective, but it needs huge amounts work before it even comes close to the level of C# and Java.
If you're going to replace Java, for God's sake, replace it with something that can build a decent GUI. Enough people have suffered over the decades from shitty Java GUIs, let's not subject them to any more.
Plus, Go is compiled, so it kind of misses the entire point. (I suppose the theory is that you ship your program with a just-in-time compiler? Does that currently exist?)
Plus, it's hard to Google anything related to Go because of it's stupid name. But that's relatively minor.
Personally, I'd like a solution based on JavaScript, with a couple of features added-- (optional) strong-typing and namespaces. The benefit here is that JavaScript interpreters get faster every year. The downside is the same as Go, you'd need to develop the libraries and GUI ecosystem.
But this all kind of distracts from my general point, which is: right now, the replacement for C#/Java *does not exist* in the open source community. Sure, if a hundred developers started coding their pants off on Go, maybe in 2-3 years we'd have something, but right now? Nada. This is a huge problem, if you're trying to get people to move off of C#/Java.
If you want to know what god thinks about money, look at the people he gives it too.
Ok; I give. Who is God giving money to?
Does he give out cash or checks? Or maybe bank transfers, I suppose being omnipotent he'd have hooks into that system too.
So build something better.
Ok, so we have Java-- not open source friendly. We have C#-- not open source friendly. But at the same time, both are hugely popular. There's a gigantic demand for those types of environments here that isn't being met by anything in the open source community right now.
So bitch and moan about "oh we should move off Java, and we should move off C#", but there has to be something there to move *to*. Right now, there's jack.
And, frankly, until there's a as-good-or-better solution out there that's open source friendly, I think telling people "move off Java" is a waste of time... of course they're not going to move! There's nothing to move *to*!
Randall: Look, do you want to be leader of this gang?
Strutter: No, we agreed: No leader!
Randall: Right. So shut up and do as I say!
Even Square was releasing Final Fantasy VII in 1997, whereas on the western PC front the world was taken by surprise by Fallout 1. It was like, "whoa, you can actually have a game with a lot of story on the PC?" Though arguably the one that really got the ball rolling and the RPG genre taken seriously in the West was Baldur's Gate in 1998.
Wow... you're missing a whole decade of history. Wizardry? Ultima? Might & Magic? D&D Gold Box games? All of those had great storylines, and were "taken seriously". Hell, Ultima 7 is pretty universally considered the best RPG of all time.
Man, did you honestly believe RPG history started in 1997? It's really hard to take your post at face-value when you're ignoring so many hundreds of great games.
Great, I'm guessing you're getting on the bandwagon right now, then? Or do people in Pakistan not count?
Right, because flooding *never* happened before industrialization.
Which brings up an interesting point: if you rebrand the whole she-bang as "climate change", then you allow yourself to include any absolutely normal, average weather-related activity in the definition. So it's kind of like cheating.
Or is that the point now? You can retro-actively classify any weather disaster after the advent of industrialization as "global warming" and then the death toll rises to millions and millions.
And the really hilarious part is, you just took the "herp derp global warming doesn't exist because it's snowing out!" retard excuse, and turned it around... you're doing the exact same confusing between "weather" and "climate." "Herp derp global warming must exist because there was a flood!" You're really not helping the case.
Somehow, I expect you'll make excuses instead.
If by "excuse" you mean "thinking rationally and questioning what you say," then... yes.
And now you're going to call me a "denier", when in fact I believe that climate change is happening, and is human-caused. I just don't believe it's anything to panic about.
yes. those people are 'lazy'. but, they are MADE lazy, by the system that keeps them in that position so that they wont stir trouble. this may be an intended result, a side effect. doesnt matter.
Yeah! Personal responsibility doesn't exist! All problems, even fatigue, are caused by THE MAN!!!
Seriously.
lets face it - if you dont have the means and the time to do something, freedoms do not matter. no freedom that you cant use, is a real freedom. only a lie.
And protests that don't require any kind of sacrifice at all don't impress me, or anybody else.
Look, if you feel strongly, then take STRONG ACTION. If you're taking wussy "run a script on my computer because I'm sooooo busy" action, then I assume you don't feel strongly about it, and you're certainly not going to sway my opinion on the matter.
If you care, *show* me you care through your actions. And, hey, guess what? Maybe you miss a class. Maybe you miss a mortgage payment. If it's *important* to you, you'll be willing to miss those things.
That's something you might need to ask yourself. What would actually convince you that climate change represents a danger to the lives of millions, possibly billions of people?
Wow. I don't know what it would take, but your shrill fear-mongering isn't going the trick at all.
BILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN DANGER!!! Yeah... right. Tell you what, I'll get right on that bandwagon when the first, oh, thousand or so die, ok?
What about Amazon's Freedom of Association?
That seems to have been lost somewhere along the line here...
they dont have the time or resources or the means to mount and run nation-spanning political campaigns, engage in social activity for prolonged periods. they have lives that they are forced to attend to.
If they're not willing to suspend their lives in *any* way, then it can't be a very important issue to them, could it?
"I'm against this, but I can't be arsed to protest it in an effective manner".
"nothing" is always a valid course of action. In fact, I think it should be the default course of action.
Amazon was well within their right to end their business relationship with WikiLeaks. They didn't do anything illegal, they didn't do anything immoral, and they did it specifically to ensure that their thousands of other customers weren't affected.
I understand that people are angry that WikiLeaks is having trouble finding servers, but that was easily predictable and should have been expected by them.
Do you even for a second think that the court or goverment are going to punish Amazon and EveryDNS for banning wikileaks???.
Why should they be punished at all? Did they do something illegal?
You're making an awfully large leap here.
anyone who isn't magically aware whether the "Three Wolf Moon T-shirt" is a real product to buy or a joke,
Huh?
Three Wolf Moon is definitely a real product. You can buy one right now if you want. The *reviews* are the joke.
I don't understand why you seem to think that "real product" and "joke reviews" are somehow mutually-exclusive...
Fresh install of Win7 yesterday. Chrome (browser) gets 100/100 on Acid3, while IE8 gets 20/100. I'm missing the point I'm sure?
Most of the stuff Acid tests has little to do with standards; IE scores so low on it because they decided this particular test was unimportant for real-world scenarios and not a priority. (And frankly, I agree with Microsoft on this one.) Your Acid3 score really says very little about how well you support web standards.
That said, IE9 will have a significantly higher score simply as a side-effect of the other standardization work they've been doing. It won't be out for a bit though.
It's great to have benchmarks so you can compare two products with a single number, but first you have to make sure the number is actually meaningful.
Remember the giant outcry when Chrome stopped displaying "http://" in the URL bar? To read some forums, it sounded like not displaying "http://" was going to cause the end of civilization!
The sad fact is, a lot of people in tech overreact to extremely petty changes in software. I don't know why, but it's happened before, it's happening now, and it'll happen again.
Given how well the content industries are doing financially, all the hubbub against copyright infringers just smacks of greed, and nothing else.
Yes, you're pirating the movies and games, and *they're* the greedy ones.
How do you hold these two ideas in your head without it exploding? Either being greedy is bad, in which case you're just as bad as those media companies you hate, or being greedy is good and you should be cheering on the media companies.
oh my god i think you're finally getting it, their goal is to make good software that they themselves find helpful.
If the software is only usable by a small percentage of the population, it is by definition not "good software".
So while I do "get it", I think you still unfortunately do not.