Advantages: Filesystem benchmarks improve. Real performance... I guess that improves, too. Does anybody know?

Disadvantages: You risk data loss with 95% of the apps you use on a daily basis. This will persist until the apps are rewritten to force data commits at appropriate times, but hopefully not frequently enough to eat up all the performance improvements and more.

Ext4 might be great for servers (where crucial data is stored in databases, which are presumably written by storage experts who read the Posix spec), but what is the rationale for using it on the desktop? Ext4 has been coming for years, and everyone assumed it was the natural successor to ext3 for *all* contexts where ext3 is used, including desktops. I hope distros don't start using or recommending ext4 by default until they figure out how to configure it for safe usage on the desktop. (That will happen long before the apps are rewritten.) Filesystem benchmarks be damned.

I noticed the same thing in Philadelphia with the service personnel. All the passengers were white and Asian, and the personnel cleaning, driving the carts, and working at the stores and restaurants were black. For me it was really disturbing, like a trip into an alternative-history universe, with white people on their way to and from vacation, college, and jet-set jobs, and a bunch of black people feeding them and cleaning up after them. Seeing just a few black faces walking around with carry-ons or a few white people working at the Pizza Hut would have broken the spell, but to look around you'd think the racial roles were enforced by law. It was uncanny, and I was relieved to leave.

I guess the logic behind it is that airport jobs are good working-class jobs. Some places don't seem to have any white working-class people; all the white people are either college graduates or desperately pretending to be.

Ah, so instead of a bag that was gay in the sleek, urban, waxed-bikini-line way, you wanted a bag that was gay in the hairy, gun-polishing, unwittingly homoerotic, paramilitary-camaraderie, "let's practice jiujitsu so we can protect our families" kind of way.

Personally, neither way works for me, so I'm only gay in the "rarely has sex with women" kind of way.

(P.S. My current carry-on sucks, and I might end up buying a Tom Bihn Aeronaut as a result of this review, but why is this on Slashdot?)

iPod, iPhone, and next, the iTablet?

A revolutionary new product type is conceived. "Everyone will want one! Everyone will have one!" Then a few products come out, and it turns out that only a few people want one. The conventional wisdom changes: "Never mind. Kinda lame. Just for gadget enthusiasts." Years later, Apple creates the first implementation that isn't a fiddly high-overhead pain in the ass to use. The revolution finally arrives. "Everybody wants one! Everybody has one!" Then other companies spend years trying to figure out how Apple's product is different from theirs. Thousands of people like me who kind of hate Apple hold out a few years and then give up and buy the Apple product.

I haven't decided whether I will wait out the iTable cycle, if that's what is coming. I can't stand OSX (I have a Mac Mini at home gathering dust because someone persuaded me I had to give OSX a chance,) but if the alternative is waiting until 2013 for a decent competitor, I'll buy, and I'll give Apple credit for another "first" regardless of the predecessors. Why? Because I'm familiar with some of the currently available tablets and have no desire to carry one around, and knowing fucking Apple, they will come out with a product I want to use, and I will have to swallow my resentment and buy one.

Software has to be designed to scale up and down through an acceptable range of hardware. If fast dev boxes spawn software that doesn't scale down, then slow dev boxes in the hands of the same developers just create the opposite problem: software that doesn't scale up to take advantage of multiple cores and gigs of RAM.

Wouldn't you rather piss off stingy customers than rich ones who are spending money on technology?

It's far from an abandoned space. Jambi/Qt faces the opposite problem: trying to take market share away from two large, popular GUI application frameworks: Netbeans and Eclipse RCP. Eclipse RCP is already well-established as the platform of choice for Java programmers who want to build GUI applications using native widgets. GUI applications framework have a significant learning curve, so the uptake of Jambi/Qt among Java programmers will be gradual at best.

As the developer of a commercial Eclipse RCP application, I'll be disappointed if Jambi doesn't catch on. It seems like a simpler, light alternative to Eclipse and a good choice when you don't intend to build a heavy, complex application (which is what Eclipse RCP is good for, and not much else.)

No kidding. These obfuscated C winners impress the hell out of me, but in real life, I have yet to meet anybody who can code that way who doesn't think everybody should code that way all the time.

Most software distributors provide an easy, careless route through the installer -- just keep clicking OK. I think that's a fine thing to do, since most people just don't care. What do I need installed for Java to run well on my system? Don't tell me; just do it.

People who are more picky can find out what's going to be installed and opt out. They're a (supposedly) more sophisticated minority, so they can assume the relatively light burden of finding the checkboxes, understanding what they mean, and checking them or unchecking them as they desire.

Anyone who takes the careless route through an installer -- not taking the time to find out what the installer actually installs, and just clicking "OK" as fast as possible -- can't really complain if they end up installing something they didn't want, unless the installer is labeled in bad faith. That certainly wasn't the case here. Sun just wants their product to perform better in Firefox so people are more likely to have a positive perception of it.

Lack of documentation is so bad that many people won't read the documentation I write. They just aren't used to working that way.

It's a cultural thing, though. Some cultures are better than others. Java is WONDERFUL -- Java developers pretty much accept that missing or incomplete Javadoc in a public API is a serious bug. C and C++ are pretty pathetic. There are many extremely well-done and well-polished C and C++ libraries that have copious but holey documentation. You can tell the developers spent a lot of time working on the documentation but didn't really know how to do it -- probably because they've never bothered using documentation themselves. Typical documentation deficiences include:

• The "success" behavior of every function is documented, but nothing is said about error cases. What if the arguments are invalid? Either the user adds a bunch of possibly redundant error checks to his code, or he passes bad arguments and hopes the library doesn't segfault his program.
• The documentation says a function returns non-zero error codes in certain cases but does not document which error codes will be returned.
• The documentation says that a function throws exceptions in certain cases but does not say which exceptions will be thrown. C++ developers in particular are notorious for misunderstanding the purpose of exceptions -- either they think no exceptions should be caught except at top-level, or they think all exceptions should be caught immediately. In either case, there's absolutely no point in documenting them. Of course that is entirely unrealistic. You don't want to pop up a dialog box saying, "This application has encountered a FileNotFoundException and may be unstable. It is recommended that you save all your data and restart." Neither do you want to catch a HolyShitInternalMeltdownError, log it, and continue with a pending database commit.
• A function is documented to return a global error code whose documentation makes no sense in the context of that function, and no further information is provided.
• Memory management is undocumented, or is documented in one obscure place that it takes two hours to find. So, if you look at the documentation for a function that returns a pointer, you have a hell of a time figuring out whose responsibility that object is.
• The documentation tells you that a pointer returned from a function is to memory owned by the library, but it doesn't tell you how long the pointer is valid. You have to read the code or (more likely) make a common-sense guess and fix the code later if it segfaults.
• When you pass a pointer to a library, the documentation fails to mention when you are allowed to deallocate that memory or whether the library will alter the data.
• No documentation is provided at all, because then there are no bugs.

Do we really want to mire ourselves in a soon-to-be-outdated technology standard? While South Korea has stood still on cell phone cable technology, the United States has forged ahead with a dizzying array of connector options. As a matter of principle, regulation (by government or voluntarily through industry consortia) shouldn't mandate where companies are allowed to innovate and where they are not.

In any case, the fact that American consumers (who have the freedom to do so) have been buying these specialized connectors and cables for years proves that consumers want them. That's common sense as well as basic economic theory -- which some Slashdotters seem to understand better than others.

The threat of legislation was enough.

I'm sure the handset makers are deeply saddened by this. Clearly, this unwelcome meddling by government will hurt consumers by ending competition in this vital technical matter. Why, instead of buying the latest high-tech replacement cable custom optimized for advanced synergy with their handset, people might replace a lost cable with an abandoned, misbranded, maybe even second-handed cable from an older handset. This could cost consumers literally incalculable amounts of synergy and innovation. Why won't the government just let capitalism work?

That's the long-term outlook, but in the short term, most developers are working in an older mindset, using a definition of "portable" that includes C. Of course, very few people are savvy enough to write completely portable C code, and even they make mistakes, so porting a C program to a new binary platform requires at least a code review and a bunch of testing.

In this C-centric world, binary compatibility remains extremely important even when you have access to source code.

VLIW has been more successful in other markets, such as embedded processors for telecom equipment. I got the impression from my computer architecture class (hopefully someone with more specific information can chime in here) that a VLIW processor beats the socks off x86 given a well-crafted stream of instructions, but compiler support was just too hard and never really materialized, so VLIW is used mostly used for special-purpose devices where the software hot spots can be hand-written (using C intrinsics or assembly) to make efficient use of the processor. Basically, given the lack of sufficiently intelligent compilers, VLIW platforms suck for general-purpose computing.

I'm not sure if I'm getting trolled or not, but....

This is a recipe for abuse. Crying censorship is a regular tactic in art (where being comfortably tolerated by the establishment is the ultimate embarrassment,) commerce (get the new super cure that the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want you to know about!) and politics. Think of how often conservatives lament the liberal media that keeps them down, and how the liberals went on and on about Fox News hosts who shout over everything their guests say. Being censored is chic and always will be in a society that values freedom.

In this case the alleged victims are music bloggers, one of the most self-dramatizing and attention-whorish categories of people on earth -- yet these particular bloggers might have a legitimate complaint and might deserve support. You have to take each case on its merits, and you have to withhold help and publicity from attention whores so you can afford to give it to people who have been legitimately wronged.

Your fatalism here is out of step with your eagerness for action elsewhere. Plus, why would you expect governments to go after censors? Governments in many cases are the censors, and when the censors are private entities, they are usually acting within their legal rights, so the government rarely helps. It does take keystrokes, or to put it another way, words. The chattering classes don't change things directly by their chatter, but through their chatter (or keystrokes -- maybe we should call them the "clattering classes") they decide how to wield their real power -- voting and consumption.

Point taken. I could go either way, but it seems at this point they need the attention of people who can help them investigate, so later the Slashdot headline wouldn't have to be phrased in the form of a question. It would help focus the conversation a bit ;-)

I'm confused. Fighting back, supporting those who fight back, and bypassing censorship require knowing when censorship happens and who is responsible for it. By that reasoning, it's hard to see how it's irrelevant whether Google is censoring or not.

"Please stop." Please stop sharing information and doing collective investigation about censorship? Just fight back randomly against... everybody? Even those who don't censor? Work hard to find alternative means of distribution for... all speech? Even the stuff that hasn't been censored?

It seems more constructive to focus efforts on actual censors and instances of actual censorship. Hence, discussions like this are important and relevant. The facts have to be established before anyone knows what action to take. Whether this particular discussion should have made the front page of Slashdot before the facts were better established is another question (and IMHO the answer is "no.")