Comment Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score 1) 244
That is the business version not the school one which is free.
Comment Re:Java the new COBOL? (Score 1) 277
2) The thing is, Java can be debugged/developed on a Windows box and deployed on a Linux box, without any further testing.
I mean, you'd be nuts to actually do it without testing, but if your coders are smart and multi-OS aware there won't be any problems.
I myself wrote a calendar app for personal use, on Windows 2000. One day I tried it on Ubuntu, and everything worked fine - although it looked like shit because Gnome skinning didn't work. Not the same category as a business app, but it didn't even need a recompile. When you can write something java in 2002, and it runs flawlessly on a 2009 OS that didn't exist when it was created, without a recompile... you have to factor that in as a feature.
3) Python?
Java's VM is impressive. When flipping from C-based to JVM-based, Python gets about a 2-5x speedup. At this point, Java is "the wheel", for a lot of non-business apps. Re-inventing the wheel in other languages is pointless - just build on top of it.
4) I agree with you here. Although Java encourages readable syntax, it's certainly not the best language available for it.
5) Java running in Server mode is effectively compiled. That's why it starts so slow. Java running in Desktop mode is quasi-compiled. Quasi-compiled works okay, because the Java interpreter is very fast, and it lets Java apps start quicker than C# apps.
6) Python and C/C++ are more popular for front-end apps - probably because there are more front-end apps than back-end apps. Java is extremely popular for DB stuff that connects with webservers. There seems to be a lot of government, banking, and business sites running on Apache Tomcat - but because of the nature of the JVM, each site is running its own unique applications.
Submission + - EFF: Apple's jailbroken iPhone/tower claim FUD (computerworld.com)
CWmike writes: "The EFF took exception today to Apple's claims that jailbroken iPhones could cripple a mobile carrier network, calling the argument nothing but "a hill of beans." "This is all just a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt," said Fred von Lohmann, an EFF senior staff attorney and the organization's expert in intellectual property law. He said Apple's claims that jailbroken iPhones could bring down a carrier's tower software was just a hypothetical game. "None of this has ever happened [with jailbroken iPhones]," von Lohmann said. "You don't see the independent iPhone stores filled with malicious software tools. Instead, they're filled with the software that Apple has refused to offer in its App Store. If we had to live under this kind of regime for computers, consumers would rebel," said von Lohmann. "This isn't about stopping attacks, it's about Apple and AT&T trying to lock out other programs. I can't imagine anything that's any more blatantly anti-competitive.""
Submission + - NC Bill to create Star Fleet Academy (ncleg.net)
Bill Wood writes: "From the Bill itself.
There is appropriated from the General Fund to the Board of Governors of The University of North Carolina the sum of one million seven hundred thousand dollars ($1,700,000) for the 20092010 fiscal year to be allocated to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to be used to secure land, to conduct a feasibility/market study, and to develop a master plan for the construction of a stateoftheart technology research and development building complex known as The Star Fleet Academy Complex.
Disclaimer — I work at NCAT."
Submission + - IBM executive to head up U.S. patent office (networkworld.com)
jbrodkin writes: "Nobody has dominated the annual list of new U.S. patents like IBM. Now Big Blue may put one of its own officials at the top of the government office that oversees patents in America. David Kappos, vice president and assistant general counsel for intellectual property at IBM, was nominated by President Obama for the post last month and went through a confirmation hearing Wednesday. If confirmed, he will become the new Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Kappos would be charged with reforming an office that suffers from a backlog of 770,000 patent applications. IBM is also one of the key contributors to the patent backlog, having been awarded the most patents of any company for 16 consecutive years. IBM set a record in 2008 with 4,000 new patents, and could benefit substantially from a patent office equipped to more speedily approve applications."
Submission + - World's oldest computer is even older than thought (newscientist.com)
Calopteryx writes: "A word in ancient Greek deciphered on a dial of the Antikythera mechanism — the world's first computer — suggests the device, the iPhone of the ancient world, may date to the early second century BC."
Submission + - HP Victim of Enterprising Greenpeace Stunt
An anonymous reader writes: Employees at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto received a shock this morning as they checked their voicemail and found that each and every one of them had received a message from Captain James T. Kirk, AKA William "The Shat" Shatner upbraiding the company for abandoning their plans to remove toxins from its hardware. The organisation behind this stunt were Greenpeace, who, to underline their point, scaled the building and painted Hazardous Products on the roof with toxin free paint.
Submission + - Why Hackers Will Save the World (blogspot.com)
Glyn Moody writes: "Those coding free software are not just changing the world of computing: the ideas and techniques behind their work have inspired a host of other movements, including open content, open access, open data, open science and many more. This keynote talk [Ogg video] from the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit looks at the larger lesson about sharing these projects can teach a planet faced by dwindling natural resources and rising global demand."
Submission + - Stopping Spam Before it Hits the Mail Server (technologyreview.com)
Al writes: "A team of researchers at Georgia Institute for Technology say they have developed a way to catch spam before it even arrives on the mail server. Instead of bothering to analyse the contents of a spam message, their software, called SNARE (Spatio-temporal Network-level Automatic Reputation Engine), examines key aspects of individual packets of data to determine whether it might be spam. The team, led by assistant prof Nick Feamster, analyzed 2.5 million emails collected by McAfee in order to determine the key packet characteristics of spam. These include the geodesic proximity of end mail servers and the number of ports open on the sending machine. The approach catches spam 70 percent of the time, with a 0.3 false positive rate. Of course, revealing these characteristics could also allow spammers to fake their packets to avoid filtering."
Submission + - SPAM: iPhone SMS attack to be unleashed at Black Hat
alphadogg writes: Apple has just over a day left to patch a bug in it's iPhone software that could let hackers take over the iPhone, just by sending out and SMS message. The bug was discovered by noted iPhone hacker Charlie Miller, who first talked about the issue at the SyScan conference in Singapore. At the time, he said he'd discovered a way to crash the iPhone via SMS, and that he thought that the crash could ultimately lead to working attack code. Since, then he's been working hard, and he now says he's able to take over the iPhone with a series of malicious SMS messages.Miller said he will show how this can be done during a presentation at the Black Hat [spam URL stripped] security conference in Las Vegas this Thursday with security researcher Collin Mulliner.
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Comment email? (Score 1) 136
Do people still use that? Either way, why not try to improve your hiring processes instead of treating all your employees like criminals. If you do treat me like a criminal and give me the punishment, I do feel obliged to get to do the crime as well...
Comment EU elections (Score 1) 315
I voted for "piratpartiet" (The Pirate Party). Who did you vote for?
Comment I call BS (Score 4, Insightful) 194
This whole things reeks of making-stuff-up!
Comment Shows how vulnerable computer systems are (Score 2, Insightful) 212
Time to actually use the US "hackers" to teach important US computer users something about security, and demand more of it from the manufacturers.
Or start using OpenVMS for all important stuff. That OS is nice:)
Comment Re:Actually, there is an iTunes for movies (Score 2, Insightful) 474
There is one problem with it, and it is not the fault of Apple. Since the distribution rights are owned by a silly amount of silly people in a silly amount of different countries, those countries won't get movies distributed in iTunes.
Apparently they see some magic gain in *not* making their product available in *preferred* distribution channels. Basically they are assholes twice over. First to their customers (us), and then to their shareholders (why aren't we making money? Oh, because the distributers are assholes who don't want to *sell* our products).
Set the distribution rights free, drop DRM, and make the products available in the preferred way (internet, and no, that do *NOT* mean through some crap IE webbrowser crap solution with sub par quality), yadda, yadda, yadda. Most of you guys on slashdot gets this.
