Posts by sola 52 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Nov 2009
They had IntelliJ IDEA installed as well (icon on desktop).
Would have been nice to see it started in the video and demonstrate some editing in a bigger project with lots of Java files to see how well it runs.
Eclipse looked like snappy though for the bloated shit it is.
Those ARM SOCs are becoming pretty powerful.
I started using OSX with El Capitain (company issued 2015 Macbook Air) but I never found it particularly intuitive or even better looking than top-of-the-line Linux distros (Cinnamon or KDE Plasma 5).
Apart from the stellar battery life and fairly good software availability, I found the Macbook generally inferior to my Linux laptop (an Asus N550 with Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon) when it comes to supporting workflows around java/web development.
E.g. I find the whole global menu stuff annoyingly limited with multiple monitors/virtual desktops (Normally, I use a 3-monitor setup with my dev workstations). When I want all monitors to belong to one virtual desktop, I cannot have the global menu on all monitors so I have to look for the global menu (on Monitor1) for a menu item belonging to a window displayed on Monitor2. Plain annoying and unintuitive.
Shortkey configuration is also light-years ahead on Linux (especially on Plasma 5). I set a lot of short-keys for application launchers and even for running application windows (so that, for example, I can switch very fast, directly to a specific application window from another virtual desktop).
Adding manually created launcher entries to the dock / launcher of OSX is a huge hassle compared to the built-in menu editors of Cinnamon and KDE and the ease of creating .desktop files (e.g.: for a manually installed Java application like OTROS which has no .DMG package). I don't understand why there isn't a more simple way to do this in OSX. Also, the OSX dock now looks much uglier than similar dock apps in Linux (e.g: Cairo on Cinnamon or Plank on KDE) And Linux docks have intellihide by default, no need for extra apps to do this very basic thing.
Luckily, I was allowed to have a proper dev Linux workstation so now I only use the Mac when I travel and to run stuff which has no proper, 100% alternative on the penguin. There are not so many things like that now. Just last week, I found that I can create a screencast as fast with KDEnlive as with iMovie (and was a bit it more intuitive too).
All in all, I just don't see why people think that OSX is so easy to use and powerful. Mainstream Linux distros in 2016 beat it handily in features, customizability and, in some cases, even in looks. Nowadays, the hardware is the real value with Macs, not the OS.
Microsoft proves again that they are the biggest pushing force behind the year of the Linux desktop.
Without the incessant blundering around their attempts for even more control, people would not realise that there are now viable, fully open alternatives to Windows (Linux being the most prominent).
They forced Valve to create SteamOS and I am sure that other ISVs are listening to the racket and considering a multi-platform strategy.
> Windows 7 going EOL will be the year of Linux on the desktop, at least for me.
There is no point in waiting that much, Linux is already a very stable platform to develop for.
The most often used APIs you code against on Linux (OpenGL, Vulcan, GTK/Qt, Bluez...etc) are only changed in a backward compatible manner within major versions. External interfaces of the kernel are also kept backward compatible. In the rare cases when you need to code against a kernel-internal interfaces, you may be in trouble but this is equal to the use of undocumented APIs on Windows which is always a gamble.
> And Google just copying the Java APIs like they did must be one of the dumbest things they ever done. Especially as most of those APIs are not very good.
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This is plain silly. Only someone without any clue about the topic can write down something like this.
If Java's APIs weren't very good, then Java never would have become so successful as it is today. It is not a coincidence at all that Google chose it as the main programming language and runtime technology in Android. Even after 20 years after its birthday, Java is the most popular programming language, by a wide margin, see TIOBE (also http://motherboard.vice.com/read/2015s-most-popular-programming-language-was-good-old-java). The ecosystem is just that good around it (third party libraries, compilers, IDEs, debuggers, runtime instrumentation tools...etc) Other, fully open-source/free toolkits come close to it in several aspects but never in all of the aspects.
It is also not a coincidence that Google is in the process of rebasing Android on OpenJDK (the standard, open-source implementation of Java which is also the base of Oracle's own Java version). It has now become obvious that Google will have to pay for using Java, so there is no point in using an inferior, old implementation like Harmony. They might as well update Android to Java 8 and use the latest language features and performance improvements + the miriad advanced tools based on standard Java.
>maybe 2016 will be the year of the linux desktop
We could safely say that currently, Microsoft is the one who puts the biggest effort into the "year of the Linux desktop".
There have been huge advances on the Linux desktop in recent years but they are nothing compared to the effort Microsoft puts into its own destruction with Win10.
The nice thing is that Linux is now basically ready to take over the disgruntled Windows users. If commercial sw like Photoshop and AutoCAD was also available, we would see mass migrations now.
I agree, one of the most annoying development in the Windows saga is the blatant spying attempt.
I just can't imagine how a company that has anything of business value on their computers would allow these "telemetry" services to run. You would have to trust Microsoft completely for that (muuuuhaha).
Anyone with half a brain should now seriously start thinking about moving to Linux. Apple is headed to the same direction so only Linux remains a viable alternative.
By making so many huge mistakes with Windows 10, MS is working really hard on making the year of the Linux desktop a reality. Actually, they may be the biggest contributor at the moment.
Most of the advanced Linux desktops (e.g Mint 17 Cinnamon or KDE Plasma 5 distros) work more similar to Win7 than Win 10/8.x but they are infinitely more customizable. I argue, that these desktop environments actually look better than Win 10 with those Fisher-Price coloured tiles and flat look.
The Linux desktop user experience has been improving leaps and bounds in recent years. No more xorg config, multi-monitor issues, in most cases everything just works. For home use, it may be the best choice, especially if the hw is older. Hw compatibility has also been improving for a growing set of older printers you have better support on Linux than on Windows simply because the producers have not updated their drivers for the older models for Win8+.
With the seemingly continuous major Windows Update problems, it is now arguable that Linux system updates cause less issues than their Windows counterparts, especially on more conservative distros like Linux Mint.
I have no idea how any mentally sane enterprise possessing any intellectual value could tolerate the Windows "telemetry" services (spying on them). Since the "telemetry" is encoded, it is impossible to know what they actually collect and send back home. I would never allow a "telemetry" equipped Win10 (and now 7, 8, 8.1) machine near any of my networks containing product related documentations.
I have worked with Lotus Notes for a couple of years and liked it overall. It is very different from Outlook and Thunderbird but it has its strong points.
Being written in Java is more of an advantage than a negative. You run the exact same software on all different platforms, no annoying differences like Office on Windows and Mac. Moreover, JVMs are pretty fast nowadays and Lotus Notes is typically started once a day so Java's cold-start issue is not very visible. I use several mid/big Java apps daily (like FreeMind, yEd and they work OK.
If Win8 goes into production like this, a huge number of users will migrate to Linux and MacOS on the desktop. What Vista couldn't achieve, Metro will.
This will safely put MacOS to 10-20% of desktop market share and catapult Linux to 5-10% which will actually make it a relevant desktop OS. Apple and Linus will send a big thank you to Balmer.
(Unless a Win8 SP1 comes out in a couple of months and quickly makes it possible to switch Metro off completely.)
It doesn't matter if the UK has worse solar potential than the EU average as long as the price of solar electricity generation is comparable or cheaper than other forms.
Solar generation technologies are continually falling in price. PV the most prominent but other solar tech is advancing too. As others have said, even PV can match grid-parity at a lot of places in the world TODAY, possibly 5 years for the EU average and 10 years for the UK.
There are a lot of news about breakthroughs in the area of cheap, direct hydrogen/methane production from solar energy. Methane production is the most promising because that can be immediately used by NG power plants and distributed through existing networks.
I always say this when Word 97 shits itself and freeze when editing a large, complicated document.
Word97 is still the standard at my company: a huge insurance comp.
This never happens with OpenOffice 3.2 I use in parallel.
An other thing: Most of the people I know find the Ribbon in the new Office is the perfect blocker of real, efficient work.
So yes, OpenOffice is so crappy and MS Office is so good.
Either this, or your post is plain-old bullshit.
Nice idea but I don't see the need for Windows in this home-cloud environment.
Maybe your desktop but everything else is better served with Linux. If you don't need Windows only software, than even your desktop is better served with Linux.
I am not even sure that you can find a serious cloud software which runs on both Win and Linux. Openstack for example seems to have only a windows client.
Not to mention the Windows licence fees if you want to properly own it.
I believe these specs make sense if you look at what Apple has as its marketing strategy.
They always have to have something new and something "cool".
iOS is not very cool anymore, Android has already reached that level. There is no new software/interface invention easy to implement and missing from the competitors (like multi-touch, accelerometer, gyroscope...etc).
So they can only bump up the specs to remain stand out from the crowd.
- The quad-core Cortex-A9 processor with dual graphics cores would stand out from the Tegra2/OMAP4 offerings
- The retina display would also be unique in the 10" segment
- The camera and the SD slots are just simple damage management of the iPad1.
They would simply make the iPad1 cheaper (say $300-400 as a low-end iPad) and sell the iPad2 a bit more expensive ($700-1000) making it the high-end iPad.
This is like the Always Innovating Smart Book but a little bit worse because this cannot be used as a tablet. However, the Atrix is a real phone, while the core of the AI Smart Book is only a MID.
I would definitely buy this if it also had a tablet configuration like the Smart Book
- The screen part should also have a battery, like the AI machine
- The phone should be dockable into the screen to form a tablet
When Apple sells 4 million iPads a quarter and who-knows-how-many iPhones, than I am suspicious when this doesn't compile into growing market share of ARM licensees and shrinking market share of Intel and AMD. And this would only be Apple so we are not talking about the millions of cheap Chineese crap tablets which also use some kind of ARM.
Either this report doesn't include ARM shipments at all (in this case it is worthless), or it is false.
I don't see any need for a clear-cut, browser-based OS. Nobody trusts the cloud to that extent (and they shouldn't).
Android will just do fine,. They just need to develop it to be able to handle tablets.
Netbook machines could be MUCH BETTER SERVED with full Linux OS-es like Ubuntu, not something so limited like ChromeOS.
They should have just created a Google branded Ubuntu distro using Chrome instead of Firefox and call it ChromeOS.
Java's success is heavily based on its huge infrastracture. You can find a Java library for almost anything.
Apache is a BIG Java free-and-open-source library and infrstructure vendor (e.g. Tomcat).
If Apache leaves Java, lot of companies will leave with them (including ours).
Oracle's field of restrictions are worthless crap. Nobody creates a new Java mobile implementations anymore (so they can't rip off anybody with it), and Android will simply kill off J2ME this way. And if Android doesn't manage to kill J2ME, iOS will. JavaFX cannot change anything now. It is too late for that.
If Oracle had the brain of a mosquito, they would drop the field-of-use restrictions, open-source the remaining Java parts and grant the testing kit to everybody who expresses interest. This way they can rekindle the movement around Java and stop its slow sliding to irrelevancy.
They should make an income of supporting Java implementations. If they want to make big money on Java they are not living in this universe. Everyone will leave the platform as soon as possible (starting with open-source projects). This game has been played by Oracle on Oracle Forms and Reports. Companies using those tech have already left or are leaving feverishly.
Apple officially "deprecated" Java on their desktops expressing that they don't want to spend any money on maintaining it.
Now they will become a big-time Java users in their datacenters, likely running the stuff on Linux servers.
I know, that desktops are different business than servers but seeing this, I would be hard pressed to believe any technological superiority claims of Steve Jobs regarding OSX and Apple hw in general.
One could say that Apple hw and sw is DEPRECATED since even them are moving to Java and Linux.
"Linux server revenues rose by 32.6 per cent to $2.1bn; IDC did not return a call at press time to get a figure for Linux server shipment growth in the quarter."
This is bloody ridiculous.
Obviously, those unit numbers would be VERY unfavourable to Microsoft so they (IDC) simply don't include them.
The revenue numbers are somewhat comparable so that could remain in the "research paper".
This is a clear sign that Linux is CONQUERING the server market at a high rate and Microsoft is falling behind so they are paying to market research companies to try to make this less obvious.
Oracle should remove those stupid field of use restrictions and give TCK licenses freely.
If Apache leaves the JCP, they may also stop all Java development and look for an other platform for their projects.
That would effectively kill Java.
Every open-source friendly library and application project would stop development on Java and start looking for an other platform.
As the article well caught it, this growth is from Win7 upgrades. This is expected because XP is very aged and Vista was a piece of .... so everybody who wants to use Windows need to upgrade "nowish" .
If they can show such growth after the Win7 upgrade fever has run out, then I will say they are not on the decline.
"Please start with killing Java post-haste. I wince whenever I see the JVM fire up on any system because I know I'm about to be presented with some fugly, godawful half-assed POS that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Java has never lived up to its promises, and it remains an albatross around the neck of end-user experience. Kill it, so that something good and worthwhile can rise up and take its place!"
For most of the people that actually use Java applications, Java has lived up to the promises.
Here in Hungary, you need desktop Java for filling out the Forms for signed electronic forms for tax correspondance and such (ABEVJava). And businesses cannot send a lot of forms in paper, only in electronic form.
I guess that means bye-bye for Mac with a lot of people here.
Also, if you are an Azureus user (video torrents) you can forget you Mac too in the future.
This is the biggest screwup I have ever seen!!!
No mounting as USB drive??? In 2010??? Access only through Zune?
If I wanted a complete lock-in, I would go to Apple. Their stuff at least looks good.
No memory card slot? WTF ???
And a fugly user interface. The ugliest, early Android versions looked better than this.
I just cant imagine what they thought.
When these people leave Oracle, a lot of faith goes with them.
Success of open-source products is quite often simply based of faith and persistence. If your community looses faith in the product, they will simply migrate to an other open source product. Oracle doesn't understand how this works in this segment. They only understand enterprise behaviour.
I expect that a lot of smaller MySQL users/products will migrate to PostgreSQL and MySQl forks in the next 5 years.
Not only Mysqldump, PostgreSQL dump is also FAR superior to Oracle's exp/imp. I used exp/imp for years and I was quite surprised when I saw pgdump in action for the first time. I just couldn't imagine that a database export/import can actually be fast and efficient.
PostgreSQL is catching up with features (features that matters) to Oracle. The new streaming replication and warm standby features are specifically created for building large, high-availability clusters, typically found in enterprise and/or cloud environments.
I use Ubuntu Karmic for my main OS on my laptop, use XP at work and tested Windows 7 in order to know if it is worth upgrading to it.
Result: Not worth, Ubuntu and XP are just fine.
Yes, Windows 7 is more polished, but it is NOT MUCH more usable than a properly tweaked Ubuntu Gnome desktop or XP. And Linux is still evolving at a breakneck pace. Maybe not the UI specifically, but the distros like Ubuntu are getting better and more integrated with every release. And you get all of it free.
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