spud beasts

[Michael Lake]

Wookey wrote:
> On Mon 09 Oct, Julian Todd wrote:
> > PS What's wrong with Java apart from it's easy to write
> > and you don't need to be a professional GTK programmer
> > to do it?
> 
> The main problem is that normal users can't install it, and even if they can,
> running the applications requires a fair amount of runicness. I've had great
> difficulty installing it myself and I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. None
> of this is Julian's fault, but it is a real problem for people who want to
> use tunnel. I also suspect that when I finally get it going, I'm going to
> find it's hopelessly slow on my machine.

I must weigh in here and agree with Wookey. As a user (I
don't program in Java) I find generally find it slow and
buggy. Its implementation across various platforms from Mac,
Wintex, Linux on Intel and Alpha and Solaris is highly
variable and seems immature at present - that is an
application will work fine on Solaris slow on Linux and GPF
on Windows yet another app will be fine on Windows and
refuse to run at all on a UNIX platform.

> java. Maybe once OSes all come with a JVM built-in then things will be
> dramatically improved, but right now it's not really practical.

Yep. When there are Java cards that can do the stuff in
hardware or we all have much faster PCs and Java is more
stable and mature it might be practical. 

I like that Survex being fast and NEVER crashing.

Mike
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Michael Lake
University of Technology, Sydney
Email: mailto:Mike.Lake@uts.edu.au Ph: 02 9514 1724 Fx: 02
9514 1628 
URL: http://www.science.uts.edu.au/~michael-lake/
Linux enthusiast, active caver and interested in anything
technical.
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