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MS EULA: JAVA TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT Just noticed that in my EULA for Word 2000 it says:
Matthew Lock
That's got me worried now about the Nuclear Power Plant system I made using Java applets.
Sherrif Lobo
That wording actually comes from Sun, which puts it in all their products.
Joel Spolsky
Funny enough, a friend of mine wrote some code in Java which is part of a particle accelerator control software. It happened to work better than the C code they were using (full of bugs BTW).
Name withheld to protect the guilty
Even sillier, there's a similar clause in the license for POV-Ray.
Charles Miller
The stuff about the nuclear plants and some devices may be is written because of the unpredictability of the garbage collector. Because of it Java applications are not well suited for such real-time devices/systems.
Boris Yankov
I did work experience at nuclear power plant in the UK during the early nineties. They ran the plant on a computer from the 60s which was built out of discrete transistors rather than ICs.
Matthew Lock
The UK is much more advanced than the US when it comes to software control of nuclear power plant processes. The NRC won't allow software process control to be used in reactors... software can be use for "process monitoring", but not control.
Joe AA.
No language is fault-tolerant. You have to program your entire system to be fault tolerant. This has more to do with your application program and hardware set-up.
Paul Vincent Craven
actually, I was talking to an airline employee in a bar about a year ago (forgot which airline...based in chicago) and, some portions of the airplane are controlled by windows. I believe it is something like the refridgeration system for the food. Not mission critical, but i have been on a plane which was stalled on the ground because the refridgeration system wasn't working. The employee said that when that system acted up, the staff would just reboot it. :(
dumbconsultant
Of course there is always this jewel:
Nat Ersoz
Java compilers and virtual machines are given a lot of leeway in how they're allowed to re-order instructions for the sake of optimisation, and that leads to some... interesting results when you start dealing with multiple threads, such as the following example:
Charles Miller
Charles... we will be much more productive if we didn't have to write every bug ourselves. A real shortcut to being state of the art.
Joe AA.
Darn, why did someone have spill the beans and expose that his EULA policy comes from sun?
Albert D. Kallal
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