Uhm. Last I checked, Apple *adopted* USB. They didn't invent it. If you'll kindly read http://www.usb.org/about, you'll note that Apple isn't even on the board of directors of the USB standards organization.
a) Your coworker has no business looking at your screen. He or she should be doing their own work, and should not be snooping on you. It isn't a case of somebody being loud, for instance. The viewer has the option of 1) not looking in the first place, 2) turning away, 3) ignoring the pornography, or even 4) enjoying it.
You have apparently never worked in cubeville.
Pr0n is considered indecent in most of the civilized world. Get over it. Whack off at home, man, don't do it where I might accidentally see you.
He might be a bit flamboyant about it, but the principle works. When you start telling management that "we're losing this many $ per day because they shut my computer off," they generally do something about it if the organization is even remotely sane.
(a) Freedom cuts both ways. People have freedom of expression, and people have the freedom of employees to prevent themselves from being exposed to porn in the workplace. If you're looking at porn at work, you're taking the latter right away from all your coworkers. Which do you take away: the right that one person enjoys, or the right that many people enjoy? Perhaps a poor explanation, but the principle is valid.
(b) The workplace is not a free environment. You are working for someone, on THEIR property. What you do on your own time is your own business. What you do on company property is very much the company's business.
Freedom does not mean "I can do whatever the hell I want, whenever the hell I want, wherever the hell I want," at least if it is to be applied to more than one person.
Your application may need to support Windows, Unix, handhelds and other devices. You can't do that with.NET.
Uh, I do that on a daily basis with.NET. Where have you been? There's Mono for Unix, and there's this thing called the.NET Compact Framework for mobile devices...
Oh, and all the Java tools and software from Sun are FREE and soon a lot of it will be open source. MS would never do that.
Which is why they released the spec and let the Mono guys build their *own* open source version.
I'm tired of arguing with those who are just re-hasing MS FUD. This thread is dead, I have better ones to waste my time on.
I would politely suggest that, instead of wasting time being a zealot, you go get an actual job as a programmer. The real world tends to cure zealotry in all but the most hardcore cases.
IIRC Swing has been around way longer than.NET, and that's probably why you see so many more postings. Or maybe it's because you don't need a "WinForms developer" to write for Winforms. YMMV. But that's not what I wanted to post about.
I wanted to speak to Enterprise data centers, since I work in such an environment. Said environment is, in fact, one of the top 10 most visited web sites in the US according to some analysts (lies, damn lies, and statistics as always, so I won't bother being more specific).
We use.NET for over 50% of our services, and it's growing rapidly because.NET has proven that it scales better than most other solutions (Java included)..NET is just now creeping onto the radar in the enterprise. My prediction: 2006 or perhaps 2007 will be the year that.NET overtakes Java in terms of new development. It won't take much longer than that, though. What you're seeing is the after-effects of Microsoft's early marketing attempts, which didn't really tell anyone what.NET was (why would I want it? Microsoft didn't answer that question well). Now it's starting to get traction as more and more people understand just what.NET is, and it will probably be exponential.
if ( obj.x == 5 )
return (obj2.Whatever);
else if (obj.bling == "sillystring" )
return (obj2.DerivedValue)
else
throw ( new SillyException( "oogaooga" ) );
} finally {
B.Cleanup();
} }
More or less, anyway. The only wart is that (AFAIK) you can't access variables scoped to the try block from within the finally block. That would be a kickass option.
Maybe they should just add a finally clause to methods.
The battle never ended. You just got used to the sound of the cannons.
Microsoft was not trying to make Java proprietary; Microsoft was trying to make it integrate properly into Windows. If Sun had worked with them instead of against them, Java would probably be a very popular platform for desktop applications. Instead, it's gotten itself pidgeonholed on the server side.
Meanwhile, as a direct result of Sun's lack of cooperation, Microsoft decided to build their own wheel..NET is a *direct* response to Java. And Microsoft took the time to do it right, which has a sinigifcant possibility of killing off new Java development in the long run..NET is light years ahead of Java in terms of ease of development -- which is what matters to people who are responsible for making money.
Technologies that work well on the desktop do tend to find their way onto the server. Just look at Windows for proof of that.
I have with far more complex stuff than Hello World..NET 2.0 stuff is choppy (the Mono team isn't supporting it officially yet, and it isn't nearly ready), but.NET 1.1 seems to work pretty well.
And even with.NET 2.0, I had no problem writing a fairly nice monitoring suite for one of our server farms. It uses the network libs, the XML DOM libs, and other similar stuff. I compile under Visual Studio (sorry, MonoDevelop just ain't there yet), push the code, and it just runs.
As an administrator who has run many Java apps, and a programmer who has written many Java apps, I will say this:
Java is a PITA in a production environment.
Can it be stable? Yes, it can. Or it can break in completely opaque ways that take weeks to troubleshoot. The problem is that which one you get is luck of the draw. 99% of this problem, IMO, is the garbage collection mechanism. Java's GC is horrible..NET's GC is excellent. The difference is amazing.
Add to that the lack of simple invocation of java apps from a command line (eg. without OS-level hacks you can't just add them to your PATH), the fact that most professional Java applications seem to require reams of XML/Greek for configuration (ever used a Java app server? I've used several, and they all suck!), and other such issues, and you get an environment that most sysadmins absolutely DESPISE..NET, on the other hand, behaves remarkably like a normal native executable, even under Linux (though you still need the OS hack, it's easier than Java's). It's perceptibly faster than Java for many applications. And there is no equivalent of JNI when you need to do things that the VM can't do -- you pretty much just do them.
The list goes on.
While I agree that many instances of poor performance / VM crashes / out of memory errors tend to be caused by the programmers writing bad Java, it says something that I've yet to see those same issues with C# -- and the quality of the programmers isn't that much higher.
I can't speak to any similarities/interoperability between modern ADO and ODBC, but I can speak to the rest. For ADO.NET, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's a completely new environment that happens to be capable of interoperating with ODBC drivers -- but I haven't done the research to support that statement.
COM is the basis of most older Microsoft technologies (OLE, DirectX, DirectShow, DirectSound, ActiveX,...), and.NET can interoperate with COM -- but pure.NET doesn't use COM or DCOM at all. The core of.NET is the CLR, which is Microsoft's answer to the Java VM. By design, it supports mutliple languages (C#, VB.NET, J#,...).
The CLR leaves any modern JVM in the dust in terms of both performance and usability. A pure.NET app uses.NET-specific remoting protocols, not COM. A.NET app can invoke native system calls and other "unmanaged" code running outside the VM, without any ugly hacked-up proxies (and without using COM-related technologies). And C# is a far more versatile language than Java ever will be.
In short,.NET blows Java out of the water for real-world applications. It's not as portable as Java, but it can be when using pure managed code (hence Mono, which I use daily in a production environment). ASP.NET provides Microsoft's answer to JSP and friends, and it works reasonably well. But most of all, a.NET executable has the same appearance as any other executable on the system, unlike Java (which is a pain in the arse outside of an app server environment).
Being a Unix company, you'd think Sun would've at least supported #! syntax, but noooo...
I am not ordinarily a Microsoft fan. I run Linux on the desktop and on many of my servers, and on the server I vastly prefer it to Microsoft products. But I will defend Microsoft in that.NET, while not revolutionary in concept, is definitely revolutionary in execution. I have built complex production systems in C, C++, perl, Java,.NET, and more..NET is my favorite environment yet, because it has nearly all the benefits of Java while managing to have nearly none of the drawbacks. And C# is simply a kick-ass language.
Allow movies to be legally downloaded for $1 and the block buster might net $200M in a weekend without the middleman and retail costs. And it does not require Sony/BMG, Arista or any other RIAA memebr company.
I would hope not, since RIAA is a music-related organization, not a movie-related organization...
Explaining that difference is like explaining why the word "fuck" is considered "dirty" by our society where "have sex" isn't.
The problem that this crowd has with ppl and ur is that they were born of laziness in combination with the lack of typing ability on the part of the multitudes of folk from the Summer That Never Ended.
Prior to that event, it wasn't such a big deal.
But now when u see a bunch of ppl that come from aol doin the txt msg thing, it gets fuggin annoying.
See the difference? If you don't want to look (a) computer-illiterate and (b) like a high school teenager, then dont' use them. If you are either of those things, then whatever, I probably don't deal with you much online anyway:-)
Imagine the stain that will appear in the record company exec's shorts when you propose that idea. "Why give 'em 100 songs, when we can get 'em to pay $20 for every ten?"
I don't agree or disagree with this -- I have no direct experience with Sx86 9or 10 to back up either position. That said, I consider it "too little, too late" in Sun's case. It's unfortunate -- they had the opportunity to lock up the market, and it passed them by.
The company I was working for a few years ago had a large-scale cluster of Solaris x86 boxes, a couple of E4500s, some WinNT stuff, and a few smaller 1U sun boxes (forget the model offhand).
The Solaris x86 boxes had nasty issues with the default threading libraries (that was a HARD problem to track down, and if I didn't have a friend at Sun it would've taken a lot longer). As a side note, that little threading issue had a tendency to take boxes completely offline every hour or so.
The 1U Sun boxes weren't under much load, but seemed okay for what they were doing (which, oddly, involved running a Java app server).
The E4500's (at serious $$$ per machine) were running Oracle. They failed every other week (if you've heard of the Ecache bug, that was usually -- but not always -- the cause). Sun eventually provided a fix for the Ecache bug, but that fix cost us a serious percentage of available CPU power -- power that we PAID FOR!
The kicker: we eventually replaced our Solaris x86 on the web cluster with RedHat. It blew the LIVING SHIT out of Solaris x86 in terms of performance. This was in 2001.
While I applaud sun for moving toward Opteron (*Sparc sucks), I would never recommend their hardware (or software) to another company. Commodity x86 hardware running Linux provides far higher bang for the buck. Oh, and Linux admins are easier to hire.
If you're looking for a massive system, I hear IBM has some interesting machines...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. It's off topic to talk about who invented USB in a discussion about an article regarding... USB peripherals.
I love Slashdot.
--S
Uhm. Last I checked, Apple *adopted* USB. They didn't invent it. If you'll kindly read http://www.usb.org/about, you'll note that Apple isn't even on the board of directors of the USB standards organization.
--S
Wow. That is the most impressive argument that I have ever seen for lag in wireless devices.
Do you do geek stand-up?
--S
You have apparently never worked in cubeville.
Pr0n is considered indecent in most of the civilized world. Get over it. Whack off at home, man, don't do it where I might accidentally see you.
--S
He might be a bit flamboyant about it, but the principle works. When you start telling management that "we're losing this many $ per day because they shut my computer off," they generally do something about it if the organization is even remotely sane.
Or who knows, maybe I just have good luck.
--S
You seem to forget two things:
(a) Freedom cuts both ways. People have freedom of expression, and people have the freedom of employees to prevent themselves from being exposed to porn in the workplace. If you're looking at porn at work, you're taking the latter right away from all your coworkers. Which do you take away: the right that one person enjoys, or the right that many people enjoy? Perhaps a poor explanation, but the principle is valid.
(b) The workplace is not a free environment. You are working for someone, on THEIR property. What you do on your own time is your own business. What you do on company property is very much the company's business.
Freedom does not mean "I can do whatever the hell I want, whenever the hell I want, wherever the hell I want," at least if it is to be applied to more than one person.
--S
Uh, I do that on a daily basis with
Which is why they released the spec and let the Mono guys build their *own* open source version.
I would politely suggest that, instead of wasting time being a zealot, you go get an actual job as a programmer. The real world tends to cure zealotry in all but the most hardcore cases.
--S
And I mentioned what Java was built around exactly... where?
Dude, when you have to resort to inventing "my" beliefs, then I *have* won the argument.
--S
If you wish to continue believing that .NET was designed around COM, do feel free. Reality shouldn't stand in your way. :-)
--S
Visual J++ != Visual J#.
.NET infrastructure.
Yes, COM was used in pre-.NET languages. That has no bearing on the present
--S
IIRC Swing has been around way longer than .NET, and that's probably why you see so many more postings. Or maybe it's because you don't need a "WinForms developer" to write for Winforms. YMMV. But that's not what I wanted to post about.
.NET for over 50% of our services, and it's growing rapidly because .NET has proven that it scales better than most other solutions (Java included). .NET is just now creeping onto the radar in the enterprise. My prediction: 2006 or perhaps 2007 will be the year that .NET overtakes Java in terms of new development. It won't take much longer than that, though. What you're seeing is the after-effects of Microsoft's early marketing attempts, which didn't really tell anyone what .NET was (why would I want it? Microsoft didn't answer that question well). Now it's starting to get traction as more and more people understand just what .NET is, and it will probably be exponential.
I wanted to speak to Enterprise data centers, since I work in such an environment. Said environment is, in fact, one of the top 10 most visited web sites in the US according to some analysts (lies, damn lies, and statistics as always, so I won't bother being more specific).
We use
--S
try/finally is exactly what you want. The finally block will be executed regardless of whether or not an exception is thrown. To use your example:
// Do stuff...
String func( someObject obj, anotherObject obj2 ) {
int a;
myComplexObject B;
try {
B.OpenSomeExpensiveResource();
if ( obj.x == 5 )
return (obj2.Whatever);
else if (obj.bling == "sillystring" )
return (obj2.DerivedValue)
else
throw ( new SillyException( "oogaooga" ) );
} finally {
B.Cleanup();
}
}
More or less, anyway. The only wart is that (AFAIK) you can't access variables scoped to the try block from within the finally block. That would be a kickass option.
Maybe they should just add a finally clause to methods.
void someFunction() {
byte[] memory = AllocLotsOfUnmanagedMemory();
} finally {
FreeUnmanagedMemory(memory);
}
The scoping issues ARE kinda unnatural though.
--S (too lazy to format any better than that!)
The battle never ended. You just got used to the sound of the cannons.
.NET is a *direct* response to Java. And Microsoft took the time to do it right, which has a sinigifcant possibility of killing off new Java development in the long run. .NET is light years ahead of Java in terms of ease of development -- which is what matters to people who are responsible for making money.
Microsoft was not trying to make Java proprietary; Microsoft was trying to make it integrate properly into Windows. If Sun had worked with them instead of against them, Java would probably be a very popular platform for desktop applications. Instead, it's gotten itself pidgeonholed on the server side.
Meanwhile, as a direct result of Sun's lack of cooperation, Microsoft decided to build their own wheel.
Technologies that work well on the desktop do tend to find their way onto the server. Just look at Windows for proof of that.
--S
Nail on the head, baby.
--S
I have with far more complex stuff than Hello World. .NET 2.0 stuff is choppy (the Mono team isn't supporting it officially yet, and it isn't nearly ready), but .NET 1.1 seems to work pretty well.
.NET 2.0, I had no problem writing a fairly nice monitoring suite for one of our server farms. It uses the network libs, the XML DOM libs, and other similar stuff. I compile under Visual Studio (sorry, MonoDevelop just ain't there yet), push the code, and it just runs.
And even with
--S
As an administrator who has run many Java apps, and a programmer who has written many Java apps, I will say this:
.NET's GC is excellent. The difference is amazing.
.NET, on the other hand, behaves remarkably like a normal native executable, even under Linux (though you still need the OS hack, it's easier than Java's). It's perceptibly faster than Java for many applications. And there is no equivalent of JNI when you need to do things that the VM can't do -- you pretty much just do them.
Java is a PITA in a production environment.
Can it be stable? Yes, it can. Or it can break in completely opaque ways that take weeks to troubleshoot. The problem is that which one you get is luck of the draw. 99% of this problem, IMO, is the garbage collection mechanism. Java's GC is horrible.
Add to that the lack of simple invocation of java apps from a command line (eg. without OS-level hacks you can't just add them to your PATH), the fact that most professional Java applications seem to require reams of XML/Greek for configuration (ever used a Java app server? I've used several, and they all suck!), and other such issues, and you get an environment that most sysadmins absolutely DESPISE.
The list goes on.
While I agree that many instances of poor performance / VM crashes / out of memory errors tend to be caused by the programmers writing bad Java, it says something that I've yet to see those same issues with C# -- and the quality of the programmers isn't that much higher.
--S
I can't speak to any similarities/interoperability between modern ADO and ODBC, but I can speak to the rest. For ADO.NET, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's a completely new environment that happens to be capable of interoperating with ODBC drivers -- but I haven't done the research to support that statement.
...), and .NET can interoperate with COM -- but pure .NET doesn't use COM or DCOM at all. The core of .NET is the CLR, which is Microsoft's answer to the Java VM. By design, it supports mutliple languages (C#, VB.NET, J#, ...).
.NET app uses .NET-specific remoting protocols, not COM. A .NET app can invoke native system calls and other "unmanaged" code running outside the VM, without any ugly hacked-up proxies (and without using COM-related technologies). And C# is a far more versatile language than Java ever will be.
.NET blows Java out of the water for real-world applications. It's not as portable as Java, but it can be when using pure managed code (hence Mono, which I use daily in a production environment). ASP.NET provides Microsoft's answer to JSP and friends, and it works reasonably well. But most of all, a .NET executable has the same appearance as any other executable on the system, unlike Java (which is a pain in the arse outside of an app server environment).
.NET, while not revolutionary in concept, is definitely revolutionary in execution. I have built complex production systems in C, C++, perl, Java, .NET, and more. .NET is my favorite environment yet, because it has nearly all the benefits of Java while managing to have nearly none of the drawbacks. And C# is simply a kick-ass language.
COM is the basis of most older Microsoft technologies (OLE, DirectX, DirectShow, DirectSound, ActiveX,
The CLR leaves any modern JVM in the dust in terms of both performance and usability. A pure
In short,
Being a Unix company, you'd think Sun would've at least supported #! syntax, but noooo...
I am not ordinarily a Microsoft fan. I run Linux on the desktop and on many of my servers, and on the server I vastly prefer it to Microsoft products. But I will defend Microsoft in that
And yes, I *was* around when COM hit the market.
--S
Yah, okay, you can figure out how to get the fleet ignored. But do you remember how to get the Babel fish out of the vending machine?
(FINALLY! A USE FOR SPAM! Adams was way ahead of his time!)
--S
But the Mason will know the codes to get through the blast-proof doors.
I would hope not, since RIAA is a music-related organization, not a movie-related organization...
--S
Explaining that difference is like explaining why the word "fuck" is considered "dirty" by our society where "have sex" isn't.
:-)
The problem that this crowd has with ppl and ur is that they were born of laziness in combination with the lack of typing ability on the part of the multitudes of folk from the Summer That Never Ended.
Prior to that event, it wasn't such a big deal.
But now when u see a bunch of ppl that come from aol doin the txt msg thing, it gets fuggin annoying.
See the difference? If you don't want to look (a) computer-illiterate and (b) like a high school teenager, then dont' use them. If you are either of those things, then whatever, I probably don't deal with you much online anyway
--S (some of us hear what we read...)
Imagine the stain that will appear in the record company exec's shorts when you propose that idea. "Why give 'em 100 songs, when we can get 'em to pay $20 for every ten?"
--S
I don't agree or disagree with this -- I have no direct experience with Sx86 9or 10 to back up either position. That said, I consider it "too little, too late" in Sun's case. It's unfortunate -- they had the opportunity to lock up the market, and it passed them by.
--S
Try QSOL. They've been good about getting Opterons out for us so far. We usually order 2xx's, though...
--S
Success does not equal quality.
:-)
The company I was working for a few years ago had a large-scale cluster of Solaris x86 boxes, a couple of E4500s, some WinNT stuff, and a few smaller 1U sun boxes (forget the model offhand).
The Solaris x86 boxes had nasty issues with the default threading libraries (that was a HARD problem to track down, and if I didn't have a friend at Sun it would've taken a lot longer). As a side note, that little threading issue had a tendency to take boxes completely offline every hour or so.
The 1U Sun boxes weren't under much load, but seemed okay for what they were doing (which, oddly, involved running a Java app server).
The E4500's (at serious $$$ per machine) were running Oracle. They failed every other week (if you've heard of the Ecache bug, that was usually -- but not always -- the cause). Sun eventually provided a fix for the Ecache bug, but that fix cost us a serious percentage of available CPU power -- power that we PAID FOR!
The kicker: we eventually replaced our Solaris x86 on the web cluster with RedHat. It blew the LIVING SHIT out of Solaris x86 in terms of performance. This was in 2001.
While I applaud sun for moving toward Opteron (*Sparc sucks), I would never recommend their hardware (or software) to another company. Commodity x86 hardware running Linux provides far higher bang for the buck. Oh, and Linux admins are easier to hire.
If you're looking for a massive system, I hear IBM has some interesting machines...
--S