James Gosling Appointed to the Order of Canada 191
Andrija Ifkovic writes "James Gosling, the creator of Java language and a VP of Sun has been appointed to the Order of Canada. 'The Order of Canada recognizes outstanding lifetime achievement and contributions to society and the country by Canadians from all walks of life.' This is the highest honor Canada can bestow upon its citizens."
Re:An award (Score:1, Informative)
My favorite Java incident was when the lead manager of the Java admin part of a rather complex embedded system I was the lead engineer on (but told to use Java for our admin interface) said "testing filed a memory leak against my code, it can't be, Java is garbage collected."
Yes, but in some GUI history object holding a reference to some 4MB "temporary" working data structure x 100 past history entries is a memory leak (especially in 1997). The constant excuse that garbage collection excuses programmers from proper lifetime/resource management really chapps my ass.
Now, where did I put that chapstick for my ass....
Re:Canada? yeah right (Score:1, Informative)
Not really. The right for civil court appeals to the UK Privy Council ended in 1949.
Canada wasn't independent until the 1980s when Trudeau repatriated the constitution from the UK. Prior to that, the UK parliament could amend Canada's constitution whenever they felt like it. If Canada wanted changes to their constitution, they had to ask the UK parliament to do it for them, because they lacked the legal power to do so.
Currently, there is no legal relationship between the UK & Canadian governments, aside from having the same head of state (the Queen).
Re:Sir James Gosling? (Score:2, Informative)
Legally, yes, but the Queen (in right of Canada) doesn't do that anymore unless the CANADIAN government allows it. It's been against government policy since the 40s.
Re:For Java? (Score:5, Informative)
Swing doesn't take any "setting up", it's a core API.
Tomcat runs pretty-much out of the box, although porting web-apps to it from other servlet containers can be problematic (especially if you foolishly use container-specific extensions).
Eclipse can be troublesome in that the website doesn't make it entirely clear what it is you should be downloading. As long as you get it right, however (and it's not really that hard, certainly much easier than it used to be) then you just extract it and double-click the executable to run it.
Now I'll grant that perhaps you might have trouble integrating Eclipse and Tomcat (as I've never tried it I can't comment), and you'd certainly have trouble trying to use Swing in a web-app, but without more detail I really can't see where on Earth you could be going wrong.
Re:Canada? yeah right (Score:4, Informative)
In day to day practise yes, but in truth the Governor General and in turn the Queen do have some very important political power. The powers that the GG (and the Queen) hold are part of the checks and balances of government in Canada preventing an "unscrupulous Prime Minister" from doing too much harm.
The GG (as the representative of the head of state) and the head of state (currently the Queen, but will be a King) are the only ones allowed to dissolve parliament and call an election. The Prime Minister is not allowed. The GG also gives Royal Ascent to new laws. By tradition the GG will dissolve parliament and pass Royal Ascent when the Prime Minister asks so that a new federal election can be called and new laws can come into effect. Theoretically the Queen (by way of the GG in Canada and other commonwealth nations) can dissolve parliament at any time and can withhold Royal Ascent. But like in England, if this happened there would be a political firestorm kicked up. This happened once in Canada in 1926 when the GG did not dissolve a minority government as requested by the Prime Minister. In Australia where the GG has the same role, their GG dissolved the government in 1975 due to a crisis in government. In both cases this kicked up a lot of debate on the role of the GG.
Only the Queen (or King) can appoint a GG, but by tradition appoints someone suggested by the PM.
Re:For Java? (Score:3, Informative)
As for the JDK, sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk should cover it.
Bob & Doug *not* members of Order of Canada (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an independent confirmation [canadianshakespeares.ca]: Although it has been written in various places that Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas received the Order of Canada for their contribution to Canadian culture, a phone call to Rideau Hall revealed that they were not members of the Order of Canada.
Re:For Java? (Score:4, Informative)
Bull. Swing implements its own 100% Java widget toolkit with various custom "look and feel" hooks. It cares not-a-bit what GTK+ theme you are using. It doesn't even know what GTK+ is.
> As for Eclipse, you can tell it's intended to be a Windows app, because it tries to write to its install directory.
Poppycock. I have Eclipse 3.2 installed into
Eclipse writes everything to a workspace, which the user chooses on startup and can exist anywhere on the file system. The default is ~/workspace, but this can be changed by the user to whatever is more desired.
You can even install new plug-ins and features in your home area and tie them into your workspace, so each user can have their own custom features without sudo'ing up and adding them into the base install.
Yep, him and my Dad (Score:3, Informative)
Most people who have had hip replacements have benefited from my Dad's work. Including Dad himself.
We're so proud!