Dionysios Synodinos's Blog

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After Apple more manufacturers refuse to ship latest Java

After the widespread disapproval of Apple’s choice not to ship Java 6 with its latest Leopard OS it has come to my attention that there are more manufacturers that are adopting this anti-Java approach.

Today, as I had planned for months now, I went and bought a new laptop to replace my aging Vaio. When it comes to hardware I always go big, so I went a little over my budget and got a brand new “ultimate laptop”.

Some might find it a bit bold for laptop with a mass of 1 kg and a volume of 1 l to operate at the fundamental limits of speed and memory capacity fixed by physics, but when it comes to using the Eclipse IDE you need all the performance you can get. As the benchmarks show it performs about 5.4258x10^50 logical operations per second on ~1031 bits. There were of course some cooling issues because although its computational machinery is in fact in a highly specified physical state with zero entropy, while it performs a computation that uses all its resources of energy and memory space it appears to an outside observer to be in a thermal state at ~109 degrees Kelvin. This might prove tricky during the warm greek summer, but my workplace is heavily air-conditioned so I think I can manage.

The weight is also a bit of a problem: since the rate at which the components of a
computer can communicate is limited by the speed of light, the computation in the “ultimate laptop” has been speeded up and made more serial by compressing it. In fact it has been compressed to the black-hole limit of 1.485x10^–27 m where computation is fully serial.

With all these said it came as sock to find out that the “ultimate laptop” not only doesn’t come with Java 6, but also the pre-installed Java 5 that comes with it is broken. Searching around the blogosphere I found several references about how the “ultimate laptop” engineers had no resources to update to Sun’s rendering pipeline for their  new model. Further disagreement about font rendering, Quartz, Chinese cooking and the support for the ultimate “filthy rich clients” had lead this marvelous piece of engineering to come out java-crippled.

Please Sun do something about Java 6 in the “ultimate laptop”...

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