On Wednesday 21 November 2007, Chris G wrote: > Then you should complain to the people who wrote the web page, not the > implementors of Java. So he's going to complain to his IT organization... this is the right way to get Linux in the enterprise, yes?! (no.) Chris, many users of Fedora are doing so in organizations where they have zero control of the infrastructure; Fedora needs to adapt to the infrastructure that is present, because the infrastructure that is present is not going to be changed just for little old Fedora's sake. If you think the infrastructure needs to be changed just to accommodate an unsupported OS, well, you don't know what you're talking about. Some IT organizations will work with you, unless you make yourself a pest: do that, and they may decide to intentionally make it difficult for you. > Personally I hate pages that use Java, it very, very rarely adds > anything useful to publically available web pages and (as you have > discovered) it isn't always easy to get the Java plugin (if that's > what you need) working well. We use a Java system for a remote controlled radio telescope here. It works very well, and allows real-time control of the radio telescope, with in-browser spectrometer/radiometer control and graphing, along with telescope positioning and a webcam showing the telescope. We make this telescope available over the internet to educators who complete our training program for the telescope; they can then use the telescope in-class to give hands-on education to their students in radio telescopy. The students, using the radiometer and a servlet-driven mapping/deconvolution routine, can map the sky at 1.42GHz (the neutral hydrogen emission line). The students, using the spectrometer function, can determine the doppler shifts of various portions of the galactic plane and can draw a curve of the galactic rotation (while we could calculate that for them in-applet, we prefer to teach them how to take the raw doppler frequency shifts and derive the galactic velocities by hand). At the time we put this online, Java was the only option for this sort of control through a browser; it's been online for 5 years with a couple of systems upgrades in between. As development of this size of system is expensive, we will continue to use Java applet control until something better comes along (and, while I can't tell you what it is due to NDA, I can say that there is something far superior that is coming along nicely; it did require a sizable grant to fund the development, though. And, no, it isn't yet another AJAX hack.). We do have Linux and Mac users; and, quite frankly, icedtea does not work with this applet at all. I had it working fine in F7 with Sun's JRE, but haven't yet gotten it to work in F8. -- Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu
