One of the reasons more seasoned programmers are not particularly interested is that in most cases someone else has already doen the hard work.
Want to serve multiple user on multiple cpus with your web pages? Then write a single threaded program and let Apache handle the parallelism. Same goes for JavaEE, database triggers, etc. etc. going all the way back to good old CICS and COBOL.
It is very rare that you actually need to do parallel programing yourself. Either you are doing some TP monitor like program which schedules tasks other people have written in which case you should use use C and POSIX threads (anything else will land you in deep sewage) or you are doing serious science stuff in which case there are several "standard" fortran libraries to do multithreaded matrix math -- but if the workload is "serious" you should be looking at clustering anyway.
Only internal incompetance and lack of interest currently stops your government knowing everything about you!
If we are to have a "transarent" society then the citizen should be able to "see" everything that thier government does. Currently in the US not even congree can see what the executive is doing.
The 60s civil rights movement has triumphed, we have equality -- everybody is downtrodden.
OS/2 failed because the Hardware/software combo required for OS/2 was twice the price of the a decent Windows 3.1 machine.
Windows 3.1 was good enough and though OS/2 was better it was not twice as good.
Also early versions of OS/2 had a seriously wierd user interface (I think they were trying to avoid a possible "look and feel" lawsuit from Apple) which put a lot of people off. I certainly hated it!
Another nail in the coffin was third party apps support. Most of these would run in Windows emulation mode -- which made users think "Why am I paying extra for an operating system which just emulates a cheaper system?"
"AT&T argues that it must get involved in stopping the flow of pirated content because much of this content is shared using peer-to-peer protocols, which eats up valuable network bandwidth, slowing network connections for many of its customers."
They just want to block file sharers!
The corporate weasels just dressed this up in a load of crud about copyrioght protection, protecting kittens from microwaves and otherwise keeping the planet safe for CEOs who havent yet earned thier first billion.
Thye dont need any fancy technoligy to do this -- just a list of port numbers.
To be fair to the eurocrats up the road it looks like they are attempting to acheive two very reasonable objectives.
One -- get rid of the current absurd situation where distribution companies have a license to distribute in a single european country but not the rest of the EU. IE the Polish licensee is only licensed to sell CDs in Poland and would be breaking thier license agreement by mailing a CD to someone in Germany.
Two -- if distributors insist on DRM then there should be a conistent legal framework throughout the EU. Currently some types of copying are legal in some countries but not in others.
Now the immigration guys have more time to ask you dumb questions.
Why is it that they always suspect people with two cameras, a video, a return ticket, bookings at a resort hotel and a pile of guide books have come here to get a job illegally?
I mulled on this overnight and realised that that several languages have actually implemented "COME FROM" albeit in disguise.
The first attempt was propably DB2 SQLs "ON ERROR" statement which is actualy a "COME TO" statement but just as devistating to program logic as "COME FROM", this was faithfully implemented in by most "pre-compiler" sql implmentations such as Pro*C.
Then in purist java we have perhaps the purest implementation the "catch " statement is definately a typesafe implementation of "COME FROM".
The somewhat less than pure C++ implementation of "catch" combines the functionality if the "COME FROM" with the elegence of "COME TO" and half the features of a good "ON INTERUPT" and the reliability of "DIVIDE BY ZERO".
For the superlative "HOW DID I GET HERE?" experience nothing can beat the combination of J2EE, Spring, and ASPECTJ. This is truly distributed coding; the "FROM "code is hidden in a the spring xml, the "COME" code is elegently hidden in some xml file referenced by an AspectJ xml file, and the actual transfer is done by a java class you didnt know was in your project. No wonder they abandoned the obfusticated C contest!
If you are going to implement "COME FROM" can we have "ALTER GO TO" back please.
For the younger among you this was a fiendish COBOL construct which altered the target of a plain "go to" somewhere else in the program. A wonderful tool for sadists whith a particular dislike of maintenance programers.
As far as I can work out from the article what survived for 47 years was the server name and the applications.
" in its final incarnation as an Amdahl Millienium 1050.."
There is a lot of mention of IMS which wasnt available till the 1970s so all in all this is a pretty standard history for any mainframe site. (apart from actually replacing the mainframe which hardly ever happens).
Programming languages (since COBOL) were designed for humans to read.
The first language FORTRAN was designed for mathemeticians rahter than humans but the prinicple still holds.
Computers were very happy with lists of machine instructions.
The only real question is easy is it to express to solution to a complex problem in the language of choice. For me the overall winner has to be Python -- most code is about the problem, logic is clearly expressed, complex concepts can be hidden as apparently simple objects -- wonderful stuff.
The clear loser is Java ( apoligies to Java fan boys but I am currently rewriting a fast clear high performance php application as a complex , hard to read badly performing J2EE app because this is somehow "standard") -- its more of an educational tool for illustrating abstract coding concepts than a practical language. An enormous amount of code, I would rekon 50%, is purly about java rather than the problem at hand and which idiot thought "System.out.println()" was somehow better than "print"? Even worse because no one will admit any indadequaces in the basic language we are stuck with thoughands of competing frameworks which do stuff the language ought to do out of the box.
I have been working with computers since 1974 and honestly havent come accross anything really new since 1985.
Sure the harware gets smaller and cheaper and memory constaints no longer exist. But a CICS DB2 system from 1985 had was faced with all the same problems of concurreny, shared resources and throughput taht a modern J2EE system faces. The only difference is that CICS solved most of these problems in a more elegent manner.
Progamming is programming no matter what the language, and, algorithms are timeless; Shell sort was developed in 1959 and is still the most widely implemented sort algorithm. If you computer science course of 1982 has no relevance today then it must have been a piss poor course.
How badly informed is this magazine? The Fortune 500 companies (probably the fortune 5,000,000 companies) wont touch Vista with a bargepole. They have spent millions of man hours writing testing and deploying thousands of apps Windows XP.
Does Information week think they are going to risk this investment by deploying evferything on an untested operating System after upgrading/replacing millions of working XP PCs with "Vista unready" hardware.
Windows NT was a common site on business desktops until about 2005 a full five years after Win2K became available and three years after XP was released. This comparitively rapid deployement of XP only happened because it was largely a rebranding of NT plus some eye candy. Vista is drasticly different from XP and no sensible IT department will touch it until at least SP2 is available and the current set of desktop hardware needs replacing anyway.
After RTFAing I got the strong impression that the Flash Gordan device in question was specificaly for ground based targets. A task that can be easily accomplished by a poor, undereducated, third world terrorist/freedom fighter with little or no training and minimal equipment.
Whats the point of spending n million bucks on a gizmo when you can achieve the same result with exisiting technoligy for a few thousands. Oh thankyou Mr. Boeing for your generous campiagn contriibution a mega expensive, untested laser gizmo is just what we need to protect democracy.
The US military is fantasticly good at destroyng ground based targets they are just not very good at identifieing the right targets. ( The Chinese embassay in Belgrade for example.) I dont see the point of this gizmo other than as a subsiday to Boeing.
If they relly want to destroy thing on hte ground why dont they enclose some high explosives in a steel container with a fuse set to go off when it hits an object. They could then drop this from the plane.
I think this is actually a ploy to gain support for some new nukes. The number of turbines proposed averages out at one turbine for every two miles of coastline (according to the BBC news).
Once middle England realises thier favorate beach/bird sanctuary/sea view is going to host a dozen turbines the "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome will kick in fast, then the UK government will say "Oh then we will have to build some nukes, heres a plan I made earlier".
Most UK politicians are PR persons, lawyers or phone cleaners. You need to take into account how spineless conniving and selfserving these slimeballs are before you can interpret what they say.
" I find it very difficult to think a world with Pol Pot and Stalin is better than one without them. "
This is absolutly true, but I dont have people knoking on my door with Stalinist pamphlets ( not since 1974 at any rate), and I dont see many people on TV persuding me to be a Stalinist. Besides Stalin never pretended to be interested in anyone except Stalin. ( Same is probably true for most TV evangilists except they do pretend. )
As for Pol Pot, according to most accounts of the year 0 in Cambodia, Pol Pot's version of Marxism was a religion, complete with holy texts, catechisms, wierd prohibitions and senseless rituals.
The "Just adding up the body count " arguments still holds. Stalin was an evil b****d who was proud of his the ability of his armies to inflict and sustain casualties. Attila the Hun trained up a nation as an invading force. Religion claims to be a force for good yet constantly inflicts death and suffering on humanity.
Depending on how the question is asked somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of the UK population profess to have no religion.
Over the last twenty years of so we haven't been involved in much mass slaughter, genocide or torture. Most of the population deplores our involvement in the Iraqi occupation.
Internally the one peice of real conflict (in Nothern Ireland) has its roots in the religious wars of the 1600s.
Furthermore the Brits are high on any list of donators to charity ( actual cash per person, percentage of GDP etc.). Technically the USA gives more money per person but most US charities would not qualify for charitable status in the UK (Jerry Falwells mansion, funding of anti-abortion terrorism etc.); so on the whole we probably do more genuine giving than "religious" countries.
I see that the old "you focus only on extremists" arguments, but there are so many of them! What may seem "normal" religious views to a USAian look "extreme" to the average European.
I also see the "many people contribute to humanitarian causes because of their religious beliefs " argumant being trotted out. Really are we humans so bad that we need to fear a bearded old man in the sky before we beheave properly?
The basis of modern moral philosophy which actually defines what most people think of as "good" was largly the work of few agnostics like Jeremy Bentham and Benjamin Franklin and many many aethiests from Thomas Paine through Bertrand Russell. So contrary to popular opinion thier would appear to be a "greater goodness" in non beleivers than beleivers.
I find it very difficult to think a world with Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson is better than one without them.
I come from a country (the whole continent actually) which was torn apart for nearly two hundred years by religous conflict.
The USAs deep seated religious obsession is rooted in the founding myth of the Pilgrim Fathers escaping religious persecution, when, in fact they left England because they were not allowed to force thier opinion on more moderate protestants, and, had a deep seated fear that James I would make it legal to practice Catholisim and judaism in England.
Just adding up the body count should convince anyone that religion is a bad idea for humanity.
Windows is not easier to install -- its just that Dell/Acer/HP did it for you. Installing an new XP from a shrink box is a long complex process, you usually lose a few devices on the way and spend another half a day trying to locate the right drivers for your sound card etc.
Troubleshooting is not easier in Windows, especialy if an uninstall program f**s up and leaves your startup and registry in a mess.
The only real problem from the end user point of view is the numerous intall package formats, if you are running RED hat you can guarentee that the software you really want is packed for Debian, if you are running Suse its incredibly frustrating when the latest greatest version of whatever is only available at Ubuntu. How hard would it be to get a unified package management system?
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One of the reasons more seasoned programmers are not particularly interested is that in most cases someone else has already doen the hard work.
Want to serve multiple user on multiple cpus with your web pages? Then write a single threaded program and let Apache handle the parallelism. Same goes for JavaEE, database triggers, etc. etc. going all the way back to good old CICS and COBOL.
It is very rare that you actually need to do parallel programing yourself. Either you are doing some TP monitor like program which schedules tasks other people have written in which case you should use use C and POSIX threads (anything else will land you in deep sewage) or you are doing serious science stuff in which case there are several "standard" fortran libraries to do multithreaded matrix math -- but if the workload is "serious" you should be looking at clustering anyway.
Only internal incompetance and lack of interest currently stops your government knowing everything about you!
If we are to have a "transarent" society then the citizen should be able to "see" everything that thier government does. Currently in the US not even congree can see what the executive is doing.
The 60s civil rights movement has triumphed, we have equality -- everybody is downtrodden.
.. or does this sound like java applets circa 1998?
s/SUN/ADOBE/g
Well at least with gmail you pretty much no the route your e-mail took.
Do you know which ISPs router/switches your external e-mail took to get to the recipient?
If you are that paranoid then use encryption.
OS/2 failed because the Hardware/software combo required for OS/2 was twice the price of the
a decent Windows 3.1 machine.
Windows 3.1 was good enough and though OS/2 was better it was not twice as good.
Also early versions of OS/2 had a seriously wierd user interface (I think they were trying to avoid a possible "look and feel" lawsuit from Apple) which put a lot of people off. I certainly hated it!
Another nail in the coffin was third party apps support. Most of these would run in Windows emulation mode -- which made users think "Why am I paying extra for an operating system which just emulates a cheaper system?"
"AT&T argues that it must get involved in stopping the flow of pirated content because much of this content is shared using peer-to-peer protocols, which eats up valuable network bandwidth, slowing network connections for many of its customers."
They just want to block file sharers!
The corporate weasels just dressed this up in a load of crud about copyrioght protection, protecting kittens from microwaves and otherwise keeping the planet safe for CEOs who havent yet earned thier first billion.
Thye dont need any fancy technoligy to do this -- just a list of port numbers.
To be fair to the eurocrats up the road it looks like they are attempting to acheive two very reasonable objectives.
One -- get rid of the current absurd situation where distribution companies have a license to distribute in a single european country but not the rest of the EU. IE the Polish licensee is only licensed to sell CDs in Poland and would be breaking thier license agreement by mailing a CD to someone in Germany.
Two -- if distributors insist on DRM then there should be a conistent legal framework throughout the EU. Currently some types of copying are legal in some countries but not in others.
Now the immigration guys have more time to ask you dumb questions.
Why is it that they always suspect people with two cameras, a video, a
return ticket, bookings at a resort hotel and a pile of guide books have
come here to get a job illegally?
I mulled on this overnight and realised that that several languages have actually implemented "COME FROM" albeit in disguise.
The first attempt was propably DB2 SQLs "ON ERROR" statement which is actualy a "COME TO" statement
but just as devistating to program logic as "COME FROM", this was faithfully implemented in by most
"pre-compiler" sql implmentations such as Pro*C.
Then in purist java we have perhaps the purest implementation the "catch " statement is definately
a typesafe implementation of "COME FROM".
The somewhat less than pure C++ implementation of "catch" combines the functionality if the "COME FROM"
with the elegence of "COME TO" and half the features of a good "ON INTERUPT" and the reliability of
"DIVIDE BY ZERO".
For the superlative "HOW DID I GET HERE?" experience nothing can beat the combination of J2EE, Spring, and
ASPECTJ. This is truly distributed coding; the "FROM "code is hidden in a the spring xml, the "COME" code is
elegently hidden in some xml file referenced by an AspectJ xml file, and the actual transfer is done by a java class you didnt know was in your project. No wonder they abandoned the obfusticated C contest!
If you are going to implement "COME FROM" can we have "ALTER GO TO" back please.
For the younger among you this was a fiendish COBOL construct which altered the
target of a plain "go to" somewhere else in the program. A wonderful tool
for sadists whith a particular dislike of maintenance programers.
Get real -- this is perl we are talking about.
A programming language used for poetry.
A programming language where "bless" is a basic operation.
A programming language which borrows the "understood" syntax from English.
A programming language where all published examples contain variables "Foo" and "Bar".
Of course they are going publish a new release on the twentieth anniversary. I dont think it occurred to anyone in the perl community not to.
As far as I can work out from the article what survived for 47 years was the server name and the applications.
" in its final incarnation as an Amdahl Millienium 1050.."
There is a lot of mention of IMS which wasnt available till the 1970s so all in all
this is a pretty standard history for any mainframe site. (apart from actually replacing the
mainframe which hardly ever happens).
Programming languages (since COBOL) were designed for humans to read.
The first language FORTRAN was designed for mathemeticians rahter than humans but the prinicple still
holds.
Computers were very happy with lists of machine instructions.
The only real question is easy is it to express to solution to a complex problem in the language
of choice. For me the overall winner has to be Python -- most code is about the problem, logic
is clearly expressed, complex concepts can be hidden as apparently simple objects -- wonderful stuff.
The clear loser is Java ( apoligies to Java fan boys but I am currently rewriting a fast clear high performance php
application as a complex , hard to read badly performing J2EE app because this is somehow "standard") -- its more
of an educational tool for illustrating abstract coding concepts than a practical language. An enormous amount of code,
I would rekon 50%, is purly about java rather than the problem at hand and which idiot thought "System.out.println()" was somehow better than "print"? Even worse because no one will admit any indadequaces in the basic language we are stuck with thoughands of competing frameworks which do stuff the language ought to do out of the box.
Troll -- another first for me!
I have been working with computers since 1974 and honestly havent come accross anything really new since 1985.
Sure the harware gets smaller and cheaper and memory constaints no longer exist. But a CICS DB2 system from 1985 had was faced with all the same problems of concurreny, shared resources and throughput taht a modern J2EE system faces.
The only difference is that CICS solved most of these problems in a more elegent manner.
Progamming is programming no matter what the language, and, algorithms are timeless; Shell sort was developed in 1959 and is still the most widely implemented sort algorithm. If you computer science course of 1982 has no relevance today then it must have been a piss poor course.
" Informationweek advices business users ".
How badly informed is this magazine? The Fortune 500 companies (probably the fortune 5,000,000 companies) wont touch Vista with a bargepole. They have spent millions of man hours writing testing and deploying thousands of apps Windows XP.
Does Information week think they are going to risk this investment by deploying evferything on an untested operating System after upgrading/replacing millions of working XP PCs with "Vista unready" hardware.
Windows NT was a common site on business desktops until about 2005 a full five years after Win2K became available and three years after XP was released. This comparitively rapid deployement of XP only happened because it was largely a rebranding of NT plus some eye candy. Vista is drasticly different from XP and no sensible IT department will touch it until at least SP2 is available and the current set of desktop hardware needs replacing anyway.
After RTFAing I got the strong impression that the Flash Gordan device in question was specificaly for ground based targets. A task that can be easily accomplished by a poor, undereducated, third world terrorist/freedom fighter with little or no training and minimal equipment.
Whats the point of spending n million bucks on a gizmo when you can achieve the same result with exisiting technoligy for a few thousands. Oh thankyou Mr. Boeing for your generous campiagn contriibution a mega expensive, untested laser gizmo is just what we need to protect democracy.
The US military is fantasticly good at destroyng ground based targets they are just not very good at identifieing the right targets. ( The Chinese embassay in Belgrade for example.) I dont see the point of this gizmo other than as a subsiday to Boeing.
If they relly want to destroy thing on hte ground why dont they enclose some high explosives in a steel container with a fuse set to go off when it hits an object. They could then drop this from the plane.
just an idea.
Actually in the UK you drive on hte correct side of the road.
,Barbados ,Bermuda ,Bhutan, Bophuthatswana, Botswana, British Virgin Islands ,Brunei ,Cayman Islands ,Channel Islands ,Ciskei ,Cyprus ,Dominica ,Falkland Islands ,Fiji ,Grenada ,Guyana ,Hong Kong ,India ,Indonesia ,Ireland ,Jamaica ,Japan ,Kenya ,Lesotho ,Macau ,Malawi ,Malaysia ,Malta ,Mauritius ,Montserrat ,Mozambique ,Namibia ,Nepal ,New Zealand ,Pakistan ,Papua New Guinea ,St. Vincent & Grenadines ,Seychelles ,Sikkim ,Singapore ,Solomon Islands ,Somalia ,South Africa ,Sri Lanka ,St Kitts & Nevis ,St. Helena ,St. Lucia ,Surinam ,Swaziland ,Tanzania ,Thailand ,Tonga ,Trinidad & Tobago ,Uganda ,United Kingdom ,US Virgin Islands ,Venda ,Zambia ,Zimbabwe.
As do the virtuous citizens of Anguilla , Antigua & Barbuda, Australia, Bahamas, Bangladesh
Where I currently live (in Belgium) we quite often drive on hte left side of the road although there is apparently some law against it.
I think this is actually a ploy to gain support for some new nukes.
The number of turbines proposed averages out at one turbine for every two miles of coastline (according to the BBC news).
Once middle England realises thier favorate beach/bird sanctuary/sea view is going to host a dozen turbines the "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome will kick in fast, then the UK government will say "Oh then we will have to build some nukes, heres a plan I made earlier".
Most UK politicians are PR persons, lawyers or phone cleaners. You need to take into account how spineless conniving and selfserving these slimeballs are before you can interpret what they say.
" I find it very difficult to think a world with Pol Pot and Stalin is better than one without them. "
This is absolutly true, but I dont have people knoking on my door with Stalinist pamphlets ( not since 1974 at any rate), and I dont see many people on TV persuding me to be a Stalinist. Besides Stalin never pretended to be interested in anyone except Stalin. ( Same is probably true for most TV evangilists except they do pretend. )
As for Pol Pot, according to most accounts of the year 0 in Cambodia, Pol Pot's version of Marxism was a religion, complete with holy texts, catechisms, wierd prohibitions and senseless rituals.
The "Just adding up the body count " arguments still holds. Stalin was an evil b****d who was proud of his the ability of his armies to inflict and sustain casualties. Attila the Hun trained up a nation as an invading force. Religion claims to be a force for good yet constantly inflicts death and suffering on humanity.
Depending on how the question is asked somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of the UK population profess to have no religion.
Over the last twenty years of so we haven't been involved in much mass slaughter, genocide or torture.
Most of the population deplores our involvement in the Iraqi occupation.
Internally the one peice of real conflict (in Nothern Ireland) has its roots in the religious wars of the 1600s.
Furthermore the Brits are high on any list of donators to charity ( actual cash per person, percentage of GDP etc.). Technically the USA gives more money per person but most US charities would not qualify for charitable status in the UK (Jerry Falwells mansion, funding of anti-abortion terrorism etc.); so on the whole we probably do more genuine giving than "religious" countries.
I see that the old "you focus only on extremists" arguments, but there are so many of them! What may seem "normal" religious views to a USAian look "extreme" to the average European.
I also see the "many people contribute to humanitarian causes because of their religious beliefs " argumant being trotted out. Really are we humans so bad that we need to fear a bearded old man in the sky before we beheave properly?
The basis of modern moral philosophy which actually defines what most people think of as "good" was largly the work of few agnostics like Jeremy Bentham and Benjamin Franklin and many many aethiests from Thomas Paine through Bertrand Russell. So contrary to popular opinion thier would appear to be a "greater goodness" in non beleivers than beleivers.
I find it very difficult to think a world with Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson is better than one without them.
I come from a country (the whole continent actually) which was torn apart for nearly two hundred years by religous conflict.
The USAs deep seated religious obsession is rooted in the founding myth of the Pilgrim Fathers escaping religious persecution, when, in fact they left England because they were not allowed to force thier opinion on more moderate protestants, and, had a deep seated fear that James I would make it legal to practice Catholisim and judaism in England.
Just adding up the body count should convince anyone that religion is a bad idea for humanity.
.... these being the brains that get abducted by aliens, and see images of the virgin mary in slices of toast?
Good luck guys.
Windows is not easier to install -- its just that Dell/Acer/HP did it for you. Installing an new XP from a shrink box is a long complex process, you usually lose a few devices on the way and spend another half a day trying to locate the right drivers for your sound card etc.
Troubleshooting is not easier in Windows, especialy if an uninstall program f**s up and leaves your startup and registry in a mess.
The only real problem from the end user point of view is the numerous intall package formats, if you are running RED hat you can guarentee that the software you really want is packed for Debian, if you are running Suse its incredibly frustrating when the latest greatest version of whatever is only available at Ubuntu. How hard would it be to get a unified package management system?