Copyright law was created to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", not to grand a monopoly right for the creator. The limited monopoly right is just the means to promote art, not the desired outcome. The current law of 150+ years (or is it now 300 years?) is absolutely not proportional. With better technology the copyright terms should be shortened and not extended. With our current digital technology, the term should be 5 years or even shorter. Almost everything today should be fair use, so that the authors finally create new characters and new stories, instead to reboot and retell the same stories over and over again.

No, the problem is with extensions, and we should get rid of extensions once and for all. Those are an artifact of 1980s DOS times, and should not be used at all by modern systems. Maybe they are convenient for the user to see what kind of type the user should expect, but nothing more and the "hide extension" "feature" just shows the _problem_ of file extensions.

Modern systems should recognize file types based on the content of the file, not on some stupid extension. For example, a .jar, .ooxml and .odf file is just a zip file with special content. The system should recognize the content and open it as a Jar executable, or in your office app. That way, the system can ensure that the file type matches the file name, and activate anti-virus scans on any executable, be it .com, .exe or .jar or the silly nakedpic.jpg.exe.

I'm using Linux with Firefox 35.0 and if I just drag one shape over the diagram the CPU goes to over 20%. For typing text into a shape the CPU goes up to 10%. Even f I just hover my mouse cursor over the shapes the CPU goes up to over 10%. Comparing that to VisualParadigm (Java) where the CPU stays at about 10% for dragging shapes and stays at between 0% and 1% in idle. Sorry but JavaScript is at least still 15 years to be on par with Java or other languages, if ever JavaScript reaches the same performance of Java, which is very doubtful.

In my opinion, the WC3 must release a DOM bytecode specification and drop JavaScript as part of the standard. That way, anyone is free to use any language for the Web and we can have binary bytecode embedded in the HTML pages, which additional type and runtime information. How about the WC3 just adopt the JVM bytecode? We already have a JavaScript script engine in Java.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

Yes, I have it from various micro-benchmarks sites. I myself didn't wrote or did any of those benchmarks, because it's useless anyway. Java is fast for my needs, and there are various high performance libraries in Java, like http://code.google.com/p/effic...

You can't tell me that when I need 30% of CPU to run HTML5 video, or the same CPU utilization to run some stupid JavaScript counter that JavaScript is on par with Java. Optimal Java runs only 3 times slower as C code, but JavaScript still hogs down my CPU. Web apps are still just a nice gimmick, I would really hate my life if I had to use a web app replacement for my work or in my free time. And yes, that includes "advanced" sites like Facebook. HTML is simply not designed to be a web app, and neither was the web or JavaScript.

I think my description is accurate, servers do run the Internet. Servers provide the services of the Internet, like web, email, chat, etc. From where would you get those services if there would be no servers?

Web servers run the Internet, so I would say that they "run everything". Whatever, the question was about whether or not Linux is mainstream. It doesn't really matter if it's highly customized or not. That is actually a selling point of Linux, that you can customize it. How is Stallman keeping Linux from mainstream desktop? He doesn't run anything (Canonical or RedHat or Suse), he is not a developer, he is an activist. And without him there would be no Linux, because there would be no gcc or all the other GNU tools, and no GPL, the license that made Linux successful.

I used now a lot of laptops with Linux and usually it runs everything out of the box. 10 years ego I had problems with a DSL modem, but there was also a driver available. Linux have usually problems with printers and scanners if those vendors chose not to support Linux.

First of all, Linux is already mainstream on servers, super computers, embedded systems, smartphones, etc. Second, what have Stallman to do with anything? If there would be no Stallman and GNU, there wouldn't be Linux. But today Stallman don't play a major role in Linux development anymore. Third, a Linux system is pretty easy to use. Just install it and it works. And lastly, no user care one bit about the discussion over systemd. Users are just using what is the default and if it works, it's fine. Sysvinit and systemd are just fine for users, it's only the hardcore old school users that are whining about systemd.

Is that another "things are not like I wanted them to be" posts? Linux is a community of vastly different groups with lots of different interests, with over 100,000 software packages, each scratching an itch. If you want a complete "experience" then MacOSX or even Windows is maybe better for you, i.e. a computer system where each component is designed from only one vendor. As a newbie Linux user myself, I'm pretty amazed that all those thousands of different software packages, all from different developers, can even work together and that even better than, for example, on Windows. On Windows I remember that every software app brings a whole SDK so it can run, and there is zero reusing of software packages (except for the Windows SDK).

Your student should have used a real database with Gnuplot to plot the data. Calc/Excel is only good if people enter the data and if you have a million data rows than the data is coming from some database or automatic data source anyway. What is the point in using Calc/Excel for a million data rows?

My ass don't run.

I use Java apps all the time and there is no different between native apps and Java apps. Incomplete list of Java apps that I use: VisualParadigm, Eclipse, FreeMind, ArgoUML. JEdit is quite popular, just like Netbeans.

"Java is just a pig, with its jitting, memory hogging, heavyweight thread locks, etc, etc."

Sure, whatever.

Java is one of the most popular languages, topped only by C, and sometimes ASP.NET and PHP.
http://langpop.com/
http://w3techs.com/technologie...

It depends on the kind of app. For GUI and web, it just fine. For high end computation of course native code will outperform. See http://beautynbits.blogspot.co...

The size is a good point. 130 MB for the JRE in VisualParadigm. VisualParadigm itself is 285 MB. But I don't think that so many clients care about the size, depending which clients you have. Maybe Java 9 can be more modular.

I never understood the distinction between "release" and "debug" code. It's sure wonderful if on your own development machine with the few test cases you get meaningful error codes, but on the client's computer your program just crash. I'm sure the client will appreciate how fast your program crash with "release" code, only to not have the possibility to give you a meaningful error code to fix it.