I was one of the people who would have preferred Java stay in the hands of Sun, I didn't think they had any reason to go open source. I thought (and honestly still think) that most of the people who were upset that Java wasn't open source were simply trying to find anything they could to bitch about and wouldn't switch to Java even once it was open source. Honestly I don't think many did switch after it was opened up.

Now, though, I'm really glad it was done. I haven't really been impressed with anything Oracle has done since buying Sun. At least Java can do the same thing Open Office did if it has to. It might be harder because the Java name is more critical (being "Java" has actual meaning) and I think Oracle still controls that, but at least there IS a way out if need be.

In the navy that box was labeled "PFM" and almost always contained the CPU and anything else more complicated than a resistor.

Can you suggest any workable alternative? I'm sure they would be open to anything that might work, but in the history of the world I don't think we've had any program this successful at exposing the stuff that the most powerful governments of the time are trying to cover up.

My first thought is "This is no different than what America has been doing for decades now--but as I read it I can't believe that so many people are striking out at India over this as though they were the first to try it. If you are going to get mad at someone, why are you ignoring the people that are currently using and abusing this exact data--not only as it goes in and out of our own country but as many others as we can get our hands on as well.

You think ANY data gets in or out of Iraq that we don't record and analyze inside and out? Afghanistan? Hell, I'd be surprised if our government doesn't already have (and use) all the data going in and out of India!

I'm a light drinker. I have a beer or two a month, maybe 3 drinks at a party a couple times a year. I feel no need to drink daily--once you start drinking daily I'd say you've gone to moderate.

The fact that drinking less than one drink a day didn't even occur to you could be a point of data.

The equipment to make it work is hard to find and most of the channels are encrypted now. They have a cable-card based decoding system. Even at that, it's a pain in the butt.

Mine broke into 8 triangular sections. Although it would never have worked for skiing (it is a mesh material that would have just acted like a sieve until it filled with snow), I always though it would be interesting to take the sections apart and make a bunch of sculptures--ladybugs perhaps (they are approximately wing-shaped sections).

Barring something artistic, I'd arrange to sell it for scrap metal.

Get Slacker & Pandora... Between those and podcasts the only thing you can't get is APHC, and I'll easily live without that rather than trying to remember when it comes on and finding it.

It'd be better if we don't support artists, shows and other media content that doesn't support our new timeshifting/locationshifting lifestyles anyway.

People tend to forget that with capitalism end user sale price has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with manufacturing cost--it is exclusively related to what people will pay for a product, nothing else (Except, in a few cases, government control).

If someone figured out how to make a home for $45.76 using nanotech or something they will still be able to sell it for $400,000 or $4M as long as someone will pay for it.

This is what makes monopolies so dangerous and government oversight so important.

I decided a few years back that it's going to continue to get worse until it SERIOUSLY inconveniences nearly everyone. This will probably come about a year before people start dying off in waves, leading to a 60-90% population reduction.

I've decided to go with the "Foundation" approach (should be familiar to SF readers)--the faster the apocalypse comes, the better chance humanity has of surviving it and beginning to rebuild.

The other way to think of it, the more we delay it, the more long-term style damage we build up.

At least this approach has made it easier for me not to care about this whole gulf fiasco.

And anyone in America who thinks they are making a difference? Did you have kids? You just contributed more damage to the ecology than you will ever, in your entire life, make up for by conserving. Even if you didn't. If you leave no footprint and are the perfect global citizen, in the time you read this the number and lifestyle increase in China and India have just made more damage than all the work you've done to offset it over the course of your life.

There IS NO WINNING with this number of people on the planet. Period. Ever. Face it and make conclusions using that as a starting point.

I hope you were serious because I'm going to spend a bit of time giving you a serious answer.

Telcom Network management is a very vertical platform. We have cross-platform development issues, need to interact with many databases and needed a very strong client/server system. We bought a system from Dorado Software that did a lot of the base network management stuff (mapping, discovery, ability to add configuration, etc). We also leveraged a lot of the messaging, client/server and failover capabilities of J2EE.

This is a pretty damn hard problem space. On top of this large platform that contacted/interacted with/managed many MANY devices, you needed customers to be able to interface to their own specific devices using their devices' own little invented language which is often some off-flavor of SNMP or CMIP--for many devices you just had to programatically telnet/http to the device and interact with it as though you were a user.) We're talking many million dollar devices that take up a room and don't get updated all that often or devices where you have many million deployed... You don't change them, you learn to speak their language instead)

So as an end customer (say a large telephone company) you might have this Mangement platform from some vendor managing millions of dollars worth of room-sized T1/T2/T3/OC3 switches and terminators. It may also manage end-customer equipment like high-end routers, switches, DSUs, etc. You could even want to go down to the level of managing PCs or cable set-top boxes (imagine how many of those are hooked up to one head-end).

Now, each of those have software written by their vendor to integrate their hardware into Dorado's platform--either that or the customer has to write that software or contract it out.

Java was a real boon to this industry--When Java became popular the C stuff (which it all was up until then) pretty much VANISHED. The speed of development, vastly more controllable codebase, easier integration and ability to remove windows from the equation--Windows wasn't considered a professional platform by the Bells for a LONG time and they are slow to integrate changes. They still prefer Unix (not even Linux) for many deployments.

Java Is pretty much a perfect solution for this space. It let me scan a sparse class B network space in 15 minutes! I challenge you to do significantly better in another language. There is nothing wrong at all with the choice of language, Even with the old IO libraries I was able to singlehandedly replace the ping library with my fast one in a weekend including client/server integration relaying results, scheduling and database updates. I couldn't have done it in a month using C even with a small team, and few dynamic languages would have been quick enough.

In fact, I was in Network Management for 20+ years and from the time they moved from c to Java, things just took off. Tools started to be reusable, you could buy stuff "off the shelf" that EVERYONE previously had to spend years creating themselves, developers were available and pretty easy to find, the J2EE platform contained a bunch of powerful functionality for free, the list goes on.

Yes, but we live in a world where we have certain price/hardware/testing/platform constraints. Java was by far better than any other solution I've seen--There is an established base of developers, there are existing network management platforms. I can't even imagine starting over from scratch on propitiatory hardware and a language we had to learn from scratch, it would have made every project I've ever been on completely fail.

Not that it's not true in theory, if your theory ignores 100x longer delivery dates (no exaggeration) and 50x "other" cost overruns (Possible exaggeration, maybe not)

Okay, so the iPhone vetting process sucks and the Android is to easy to install malware.

I've noticed that with chrome, each extension I install asks for permission to use a specific list of services. I'm assuming that if they try to use a service that they haven't asked to use, they will be denied.

I'd really like this to be THE universal security measure. When I install a game, I expect it to tell me that it wants to use the registry (under it's name only), read/write the hard disk (under it's directory and user/saves) and the Network.

If I install word and it tells me it want's to use the network, I expect I'd be able to uncheck that selection and word would function but it would be completely blocked from using the internet at the OS level.

These apps really need to be sandboxed. This generally involves a virtual memory space, but I think Google should be able to pull it off.

In the long run I think Google is headed in the right direction, I'm not sure Apple will be able to keep up in the security arena. Apple is stuck compiling to C which is a little harder to sandbox--Google can manipulate it's code a little better and already has the right idea (if not in the right department yet).

I had a problem where the customer wanted to discover a class-b network in a reasonable amount of time.

Aside from Java's lack of ping causing huge heartaches the limitation was that when using old Java IO it allocated a thread per connection while waiting for a response.

This limited me to 2-4000 outstanding connection attempts at any time. Since most didn't connect, I needed at least 3 retries on each with progressive back-off times--the threads were absolutely the bottleneck.

I reduced the time for this discovery process from days (or the machine just locked up) to 15 minutes. With nio I probably could have reduced it significantly more (although at some point packet collisions would have become problematic).

NIO may not be defective, it just may be solving a problem you haven't conceived of.

I can't tell what's a troll and what's not these days.

Are you talking about how Apple should have been more creative and not stolen the trademark from Apple records (by first swearing not to enter the music industry and then entering the industry)? or about iPood, something fairly creative and COMPLETELY outside the iPod's industry?

The problem that you seem to be missing is that morals are subjective. Your morals may not apply to me. For instance, if I feel it is morally wrong for you to discuss football because I feel that football and it's "Us vs them" mentality has destroyed American politics, do I have the right to find you and stop you (or punish you) for violating my morals?

The fact that everyone doesn't automatically recognize this fact instantly is what scares the GP (and me).

In fact, I'm reluctant to hit submit because it's hard to believe it's not a troll, but it was written with a sincere sounding naivety so I'll give it a go :)