No, it's not. If it costs them $2 to get every $1 from you, they don't want your $1.
What's foolish is some slashdotters' simplistic ideas about business.
Of course that's not to say that this move is going to help them. The side effect of making Red Hat less visible may well cost them more than they save, but if they can't find a profitable business model, they'll disappear anyway.
In fact, the rules are so clear and easy to identify that it is the language of choice for many computer scientists working on AI.
I can't imagine what you could be referring to. Hangul is not a language, it's a writing system. It's the "language of choice" for people whose language happens to be Korean, of course, but you seem to be claiming that it has some widely accepted advantage as a tool for solving AI problems. Sure, maybe when Korean or Hangul themselves are the *problem*, but otherwise I can't imagine that there is anything significant behind this claim.
It sounds like yet another in a nearly endless stream of preposterously overblown claims by Koreans about the glories of Hangul. I'm a big fan of Hangul, but it's not the "most scientific" writing system ever invented (linguists don't use Hangul for any language other than Korean, and even for serious Korean work the linguists at Seoul National switch to IPA to represent dialectic distinctions that Hangul can't handle), and I think claims like this don't do it any great service.
(Unless, of course, there really *is* something substantial to this claim, and I just haven't heard about it. That's always possible, but I'll go on doubting until I hear something that changes my mind.)
I lived in Korea for years and am quite fluent in Korean (for a time I was a professional interpreter), and I can attest to the essential correctness of what the poster you're responding to is saying, whether it bruises your Korean-American feelings or not.
But your own points are mostly correct, too.
Koreans (in Korea) don't generally consider themselves to have made much of a contribution toward bringing about the modern scientific and technological world. Partly for that reason, they are intensely proud of a *very* short list of things they *can* take credit for.
Hangul is probably the best of the world's major writing systems from the perspective of representing its (single) target spoken language in written form with maximum consistency and minimal cruft. Claims of it having been personally invented by King Sejong, of it having been patterned after mouth shapes, of it being good for any language other than Korean, etc., are mostly specious (cultural myths not taken seriously by genuine Korean linguists), but for its core purpose -- writing Korean -- it's marvelous. Ironically, it wasn't held in much esteem by Koreans themselves until as recently as the Japanese occupation in the 20th century, but now it's practically worshipped in Korea.
Korea's historical population is not so different from that of England, France, or Germany. Ask a Korean about Korea's accomplishments and you'll get roughly the same list you quoted: Hangul, turtle boats, non-movable wood block printing, a water clock. There are several *single individuals* in the West who have accomplished that much.
Now consider the accomplishments of England, France, or Germany over the last three centuries or so. Art, music, literature, science, technology, law.... I'm afraid there's no comparison, and few Koreans try to pretend that there is.
The reasons for the discrepancy will be argued about for generations, but I think the accomplishments of Korean-Americans, for example, make it pretty clear that it's not genetic. Whatever the reason(s), the discrepancy is real, and largely uncontradicted in Korea.
For most of us, work is a means to an end. What you're suggesting isn't what I would consider a bonus.
I don't know whether your claim of "most of us" above is accurate or not, but it sure doesn't apply to me.
The hours of my life matter a lot to me. I spend too many hours at work to NOT treat it as part of my "real life". I look for work that I want to do as an integral part of living my life, not as a "means to an end".
If I can't find such work, that's a hardship that I work to try to overcome if I can. Sometimes I can't for a while, but I don't shrug it off as "work is just a means to an end".
Most of the time, I care how it goes, and I value being given authority and resources that give me more leverage over this important portion of my life.
An employer who provided a bonus of this sort to me would be giving me some resources for improving things in an area of my life that I care about, and this would matter to me.
It takes a lot of resources to support media streaming, with video requiring a lot more than audio.
On top of that, you have a well-developed international system of broadcast rights management that has evolved over decades that governs who gets to deliver what media coverage to whom and who pays. This isn't something simplistic like copyright laws. It's an evolved ecology of contractual and implicit agreements among all of the major players internationally regarding who does what, how it's managed, and how it's accounted for (meaning financial obligations). The teams have contracts, the players have contracts, venues have contracts, broadcasters have contracts, advertisers, media distributors, the unions...and most of these are multiyear contracts regarding what you are allowed to sell to whom and under what circumstances, based on how things have been in the past.
Suddenly, we have a technical way to deliver streaming video to anyone over the Net. It costs money to manage, but suppose some organization decided to pay. They're still going to run right into the brick wall of all the interlocking agreements among all parties. Cutting this gordian knot will take a lot of time and a lot of financial incentives, because it will be resisted by many parties who can retaliate financially.
I'd love to be able to tune in to every radio and TV broadcast in the world as well as a huge variety of small, niche operations that can't afford any medium other than the Net, and to do so as simply as I view a Web page.
We're going to have to evolve into it, though, starting with media with minimal commercial entanglements, such as NPR or BBC, for example, and new media that is wholly owned by some guy streaming it from his garage. Then we'll grow out from there.
I hope it won't take too long, but with Net users demanding their "right" to have expensive things for free, and with the.com delusion that giving things away is the key to profits having faded, I'm afraid it's going to take a long time to evolve this new media world.
I'm not religious, but it seems to me that the study is a reasonable one to do. If it turned out that prayer had a measurable, salutary, repeatable effect, that would have meant that there was something going on that would be worth investigating further.
On the other hand, if there's no difference, it doesn't disprove God or prayer. Even though I'm not a believer, I know that the *theory* is that there is a God listening to the prayers who isn't an automaton but an omniscient and omnipotent being. Such a being could presumably cause the test to come out any way he chose. If his purpose is to test people's faith, that purpose would not be well served if anybody could discover the reality of God with no need for any faith at all by simple scientific experiments.
So it's just a test to see what would happen. If something did, it would be worth looking into further. If nothing happened (results uncorrelated to prayer), then it doesn't appear to prove anything more than that there is no automatic benefit or harm from prayer performed in this manner. All the Big Questions are still there.
I don't see how these numbers could mean anything other than that the subset who died from risky behaviors died, on average, at an older age than those who died of non-risky causes.
Simpson's requires some correlation with some other factor, but I don't see a candidate here. That link shows that people with a HS physics background get lower physics scores than those without any preparation -- because they are taking two different classes.
For these life expectancy numbers, I'm not sure what the analog of two different classes could be (as long as we're not combining human lifespan with, say, dog lifespan), so I don't think Simpson's is the explanation here.
I'm working on it right now. Drop by ILC on Oct 14 and you can see for yourself.
I've been counting the days, but unfortunately I can't afford to be there in person. I'll be entirely dependent on whatever reports leak out of the conference.... ...unless of course you decide to start updating your Arc site again. I realize that keeping a site updated takes work that could be spent on the project itself, but that's why so many projects have discussion lists. You can post a few sentences at a time, people can respond with questions, suggestions, etc.
In any case, I'd sure like to have a way to find out what's going on with Arc that wouldn't cost me several thousands of dollars.;-)
As for preventing people from creating new dialects of Lisp, as far as I know I've done nothing to slow down the guys working on Perl, Python, and Ruby;-) ;-) Of course there's more than a grain of truth in this. Nothing is slowing Perl, Python, and Ruby. They may spend a lot of time rediscovering old Lisp ideas as they look for new ways to improve, but at least they're looking. The Common Lisp community clearly isn't going much farther since they've already convinced themselves that they achieved perfection decades ago.
For a real Lisp to inspire the kind of passion we've seen from Perl and Python would require a critical mass of community participation in an ongoing design, where all the decisions haven't already been made.
Sorry, I didn't notice that anyone responded until now, but maybe you'll see this, lingqi.
No, I couldn't take them to lunch. When I said that they were told to leave "immediately", I really meant it. By the time I came out of a meeting, all but one were gone, and I only ran into that one by accident when I was picking up some paperwork in HR.
I'll have to say that I wish Graham would get back to work on his new Lisp dialect, Arc.
A lot of people are working on spam -- and as others have mentioned, the idea of spamming spammers isn't anything new -- but Arc is the best hope I see of bringing Lisp into the 21st century.
I know he said that it's best to have a good problem to work on when developing a new language, but the only thing he's talked about for the last two years has been general approaches to the spam problem that don't have anything to do with Arc, while the Arc website itself gathers cobwebs.
In the meantime, a lot of people who like the Arc ideas enough that they'd be willing to help with the implementation, or just implement them themselves, aren't doing so because maybe Graham *is* still working on it, but just not talking about it.
Graham has had some good ideas regarding spam, for which I'm grateful. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but I'm probably not the only one who would rather see his next article be about Arc at Three Years rather than more about spam.
Yes, US states are suffering budget constraints, but the purchase price of software is small potatoes in the US compared to the cost of personnel. People costs such as training and support far outweight what you save in the initial software purchase, and I don't think open source benefits from simple-minded economic arguments ("it's free!") that lead to "policy mandates" from above that fail on the front lines and make everybody cranky.
Over time, though, open source software will get easier to use and people will encounter it more and more often. More "killer apps" will appear for Linux, prompting the installation of Linux for those apps, leading to experimentation with other apps ("as long as we have this Linux box and the app is free for the download, why not check it out...?"), leading to more familiarity and more experiments, etc., from the bottom up.
When the users instigate the experiments, they'll be a lot more patient with the inevitable obstacles than if the decision is imposed on them from above.
The Chinese want to make sure that Westerners pay for Chinese products while the Chinese don't have to pay for Western products.
So, now they'll go from stealing Western software to stealing their own. (The rule is that they have to use Chinese-made software, not that they have to use open source software.) Oh, well.
But there's another side of it that is likely to require forking: security, as in State Security. I don't think the Chinese have any objection to back doors in software. They just want them to be their OWN back doors. "Chinese-made" software, whether nominally "open source" or not, is likely to be what The Party wants it to be. And even if it is in some sense open source, if you think open source software can't be booby trapped, you're pretty naive.
I think Greenspun wrote something similar regarding his Ars Digita University web app class. I don't have the link, but at that time he let people choose either C#/ASP.Net or Java, and his comment was that all the people who chose.Net finished the assignment on time, while few of those who chose Java did.
I've heard similar comments from the software demo guys at a major software company (NOT MS).
Having done client-side apps with C# (not web apps, no ASP.Net, just.Net), I'll have to say that it seems to be both more powerful (in returning some of the C++ features that Java took out) and easier to use than Java, mainly because it feels like it has been reconsidered based on what has worked well and what hasn't in Java.
Unfortunately, I really don't want to use Windows for servers (clients are okay), so I'm not likely to be able to take advantage of this unless Mono (go-mono.org) succeeds, but I think that C#/ASP.Net is probably a better TECHNOLOGY (though not necessarily better CHOICE yet) for serious web apps than either Java or PHP.
Bill Joy is an alpha geek who created technologies that other geeks respect and still use, who ALSO made it to the highest levels of the business world -- while remaining a hardcore techie. Joy talks about controversial technical visions.
Vinod Khosla is a business guy who has made a career of getting companies started for the cash he could milk out of the deal. He talks about maximizing his financial return.
So when American techies and the publications they read talk more about Bill Joy than Vinod Khosla, you conclude that it could only be prejudice against Indians.
Yeah, what else could it be? Those *@#$% ethnocentric Americans.... When will they grow up and start paying more attention to me?
I've programmed for Mac, Unix, Win32, and Java, and I've never experienced an easier platform for writing GUI apps than the combo of C#,.Net, and Visual Studio. (Now for writing algorithmically challenging apps, nothing beats Lisp, but....)
I think the C# language is a big improvement over Java (the language). So many lessons from years of Java experience have been incorporated into C#, that it's absurd to dismiss it as a Java "knockoff". It's Java done over again with the benefit of hindsight and a lack of legacy baggage combined with the ease of GUI building that made VB so popular (but without any trace of Basic).
Of course, the fact that it's realistically only for Windows (so far) is a huge drawback (for me). With Java, you can hop from platform to platform and from tool vendor to tool vendor (incl. open source) as they come and go, and there's a lot of security in that. (I seem to change Java IDEs every 18 months or so, and I like that I can do that.)
If both C# and Java were equally cross-platform and there were good C# tools from vendors other than MS, I'd choose C# over Java in a heartbeat for the language improvements alone. If I'm assured that the client wants Windows only, I'll use C# for sure. When I don't have that assurance, I'll stick with Java for safety. (Of course, if it's not a GUI app, and I don't need the type of safety you get by using a mainstream language, I think some form of Lisp or ML would be my first choice.)
It's like Java: you need the runtime environment. For now, that means that most of the installed base of Windows machines won't already have what you need to run an app, so you'll have to include a 21MB runtime with your 21kB app, or point them as MS's website for a free download of the.Net framework (the runtime). Not very pleasant for mass distribution yet.
On the other hand, the.Net framework is now included in all currently shipping Windows versions, so it will be as standard as the Win32 API itself a few years from now. In fact, it's likely to gradually replace the Win32 API (in my opinion).
There is no such thing as "international English". In some companies the term has been used for marketing purposes, but its use is spurious. US English and UK "British" English are genuine standards, but there is no international standard. Many users of British English are unaware that US orthography is the preferred form in many nations, not just in the US.
And as for Latin roots, I'm only aware of one Latin-based language that spells it "colour": French. To be more like French is to be less like the world of Latin-based languages, not more like it.
If we can't even supply jobs to those alive now, how can we supply jobs to a world where there are BILLIONS more people?
What, are jobs dug up out of the ground and burned up? How many years of jobs do we have left before we've used them all up? (Let's ask Jeremy Rifkin. He's probably writing a book warning us about it as we speak.)
If you have billions more people, you'll have billions of additional customers, people with needs to fill and problems to solve. Of course, there are business cycles of expansion and contraction, and there are secular shifts of jobs from old industries to new industries and from one region to another.
However, this notion of "we [inevitably meaning The Government] have to supply jobs" needs a secular shift of its own toward a reduction in the friction one encounters when trying to create jobs, especially for oneself and maybe a few friends.
I'm not suggesting a totally unregulated black market free-for-all. It's hard to create a good job for yourself in such an environment, too. Just an environment in which the government (and a lot of people) think less about creating or retaining jobs and more about how to make it easy and uncomplicated for average joes to (repeatedly) create their own jobs and jobs for their friends and colleagues.
The French government is banning yet another English word, not pronouncing it in a more French-sounding way.
You say Americans are just the same and wouldn't stand for the adoption of a new concept word from another language, yet the term "jihad" has rather recently been adopted into common usage and hasn't been banned from government publications in the US.
Americans, like all English speakers, adopt new concept words from other languages frequently. Perhaps you could show us a list of commonly used "foreign" words that have been banned by the US government and the English terms designed by the government to replace them.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not. If it costs them $2 to get every $1 from you, they don't want your $1.
What's foolish is some slashdotters' simplistic ideas about business.
Of course that's not to say that this move is going to help them. The side effect of making Red Hat less visible may well cost them more than they save, but if they can't find a profitable business model, they'll disappear anyway.
In fact, the rules are so clear and easy to identify that it is the language of choice for many computer scientists working on AI.
I can't imagine what you could be referring to. Hangul is not a language, it's a writing system. It's the "language of choice" for people whose language happens to be Korean, of course, but you seem to be claiming that it has some widely accepted advantage as a tool for solving AI problems. Sure, maybe when Korean or Hangul themselves are the *problem*, but otherwise I can't imagine that there is anything significant behind this claim.
It sounds like yet another in a nearly endless stream of preposterously overblown claims by Koreans about the glories of Hangul. I'm a big fan of Hangul, but it's not the "most scientific" writing system ever invented (linguists don't use Hangul for any language other than Korean, and even for serious Korean work the linguists at Seoul National switch to IPA to represent dialectic distinctions that Hangul can't handle), and I think claims like this don't do it any great service.
(Unless, of course, there really *is* something substantial to this claim, and I just haven't heard about it. That's always possible, but I'll go on doubting until I hear something that changes my mind.)
I lived in Korea for years and am quite fluent in Korean (for a time I was a professional interpreter), and I can attest to the essential correctness of what the poster you're responding to is saying, whether it bruises your Korean-American feelings or not.
But your own points are mostly correct, too.
Koreans (in Korea) don't generally consider themselves to have made much of a contribution toward bringing about the modern scientific and technological world. Partly for that reason, they are intensely proud of a *very* short list of things they *can* take credit for.
Hangul is probably the best of the world's major writing systems from the perspective of representing its (single) target spoken language in written form with maximum consistency and minimal cruft. Claims of it having been personally invented by King Sejong, of it having been patterned after mouth shapes, of it being good for any language other than Korean, etc., are mostly specious (cultural myths not taken seriously by genuine Korean linguists), but for its core purpose -- writing Korean -- it's marvelous. Ironically, it wasn't held in much esteem by Koreans themselves until as recently as the Japanese occupation in the 20th century, but now it's practically worshipped in Korea.
Korea's historical population is not so different from that of England, France, or Germany. Ask a Korean about Korea's accomplishments and you'll get roughly the same list you quoted: Hangul, turtle boats, non-movable wood block printing, a water clock. There are several *single individuals* in the West who have accomplished that much.
Now consider the accomplishments of England, France, or Germany over the last three centuries or so. Art, music, literature, science, technology, law.... I'm afraid there's no comparison, and few Koreans try to pretend that there is.
The reasons for the discrepancy will be argued about for generations, but I think the accomplishments of Korean-Americans, for example, make it pretty clear that it's not genetic. Whatever the reason(s), the discrepancy is real, and largely uncontradicted in Korea.
For most of us, work is a means to an end. What you're suggesting isn't what I would consider a bonus.
I don't know whether your claim of "most of us" above is accurate or not, but it sure doesn't apply to me.
The hours of my life matter a lot to me. I spend too many hours at work to NOT treat it as part of my "real life". I look for work that I want to do as an integral part of living my life, not as a "means to an end".
If I can't find such work, that's a hardship that I work to try to overcome if I can. Sometimes I can't for a while, but I don't shrug it off as "work is just a means to an end".
Most of the time, I care how it goes, and I value being given authority and resources that give me more leverage over this important portion of my life.
An employer who provided a bonus of this sort to me would be giving me some resources for improving things in an area of my life that I care about, and this would matter to me.
It takes a lot of resources to support media streaming, with video requiring a lot more than audio.
.com delusion that giving things away is the key to profits having faded, I'm afraid it's going to take a long time to evolve this new media world.
On top of that, you have a well-developed international system of broadcast rights management that has evolved over decades that governs who gets to deliver what media coverage to whom and who pays. This isn't something simplistic like copyright laws. It's an evolved ecology of contractual and implicit agreements among all of the major players internationally regarding who does what, how it's managed, and how it's accounted for (meaning financial obligations). The teams have contracts, the players have contracts, venues have contracts, broadcasters have contracts, advertisers, media distributors, the unions...and most of these are multiyear contracts regarding what you are allowed to sell to whom and under what circumstances, based on how things have been in the past.
Suddenly, we have a technical way to deliver streaming video to anyone over the Net. It costs money to manage, but suppose some organization decided to pay. They're still going to run right into the brick wall of all the interlocking agreements among all parties. Cutting this gordian knot will take a lot of time and a lot of financial incentives, because it will be resisted by many parties who can retaliate financially.
I'd love to be able to tune in to every radio and TV broadcast in the world as well as a huge variety of small, niche operations that can't afford any medium other than the Net, and to do so as simply as I view a Web page.
We're going to have to evolve into it, though, starting with media with minimal commercial entanglements, such as NPR or BBC, for example, and new media that is wholly owned by some guy streaming it from his garage. Then we'll grow out from there.
I hope it won't take too long, but with Net users demanding their "right" to have expensive things for free, and with the
Mod points are no substitute for reasoned debate.
I'm not religious, but it seems to me that the study is a reasonable one to do. If it turned out that prayer had a measurable, salutary, repeatable effect, that would have meant that there was something going on that would be worth investigating further.
On the other hand, if there's no difference, it doesn't disprove God or prayer. Even though I'm not a believer, I know that the *theory* is that there is a God listening to the prayers who isn't an automaton but an omniscient and omnipotent being. Such a being could presumably cause the test to come out any way he chose. If his purpose is to test people's faith, that purpose would not be well served if anybody could discover the reality of God with no need for any faith at all by simple scientific experiments.
So it's just a test to see what would happen. If something did, it would be worth looking into further. If nothing happened (results uncorrelated to prayer), then it doesn't appear to prove anything more than that there is no automatic benefit or harm from prayer performed in this manner. All the Big Questions are still there.
I don't see how these numbers could mean anything other than that the subset who died from risky behaviors died, on average, at an older age than those who died of non-risky causes.
Simpson's requires some correlation with some other factor, but I don't see a candidate here. That link shows that people with a HS physics background get lower physics scores than those without any preparation -- because they are taking two different classes.
For these life expectancy numbers, I'm not sure what the analog of two different classes could be (as long as we're not combining human lifespan with, say, dog lifespan), so I don't think Simpson's is the explanation here.
I'm working on it right now. Drop by ILC on Oct 14 and you can see for yourself.
...unless of course you decide to start updating your Arc site again. I realize that keeping a site updated takes work that could be spent on the project itself, but that's why so many projects have discussion lists. You can post a few sentences at a time, people can respond with questions, suggestions, etc.
;-)
;-)
;-) Of course there's more than a grain of truth in this. Nothing is slowing Perl, Python, and Ruby. They may spend a lot of time rediscovering old Lisp ideas as they look for new ways to improve, but at least they're looking. The Common Lisp community clearly isn't going much farther since they've already convinced themselves that they achieved perfection decades ago.
I've been counting the days, but unfortunately I can't afford to be there in person. I'll be entirely dependent on whatever reports leak out of the conference....
In any case, I'd sure like to have a way to find out what's going on with Arc that wouldn't cost me several thousands of dollars.
As for preventing people from creating new dialects of Lisp, as far as I know I've done nothing to slow down the guys working on Perl, Python, and Ruby
For a real Lisp to inspire the kind of passion we've seen from Perl and Python would require a critical mass of community participation in an ongoing design, where all the decisions haven't already been made.
Sorry, I didn't notice that anyone responded until now, but maybe you'll see this, lingqi.
No, I couldn't take them to lunch. When I said that they were told to leave "immediately", I really meant it. By the time I came out of a meeting, all but one were gone, and I only ran into that one by accident when I was picking up some paperwork in HR.
consider us birds of a feather
I'll have to say that I wish Graham would get back to work on his new Lisp dialect, Arc.
A lot of people are working on spam -- and as others have mentioned, the idea of spamming spammers isn't anything new -- but Arc is the best hope I see of bringing Lisp into the 21st century.
I know he said that it's best to have a good problem to work on when developing a new language, but the only thing he's talked about for the last two years has been general approaches to the spam problem that don't have anything to do with Arc, while the Arc website itself gathers cobwebs.
In the meantime, a lot of people who like the Arc ideas enough that they'd be willing to help with the implementation, or just implement them themselves, aren't doing so because maybe Graham *is* still working on it, but just not talking about it.
Graham has had some good ideas regarding spam, for which I'm grateful. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but I'm probably not the only one who would rather see his next article be about Arc at Three Years rather than more about spam.
Yes, US states are suffering budget constraints, but the purchase price of software is small potatoes in the US compared to the cost of personnel. People costs such as training and support far outweight what you save in the initial software purchase, and I don't think open source benefits from simple-minded economic arguments ("it's free!") that lead to "policy mandates" from above that fail on the front lines and make everybody cranky.
Over time, though, open source software will get easier to use and people will encounter it more and more often. More "killer apps" will appear for Linux, prompting the installation of Linux for those apps, leading to experimentation with other apps ("as long as we have this Linux box and the app is free for the download, why not check it out...?"), leading to more familiarity and more experiments, etc., from the bottom up.
When the users instigate the experiments, they'll be a lot more patient with the inevitable obstacles than if the decision is imposed on them from above.
I was laid off, but since my boss really liked me (and opposed the layoff), I got a month's warning.
So my coworkers took me out to lunch to cheer me up, wish me well, and offer advice, tell me it would all work out for the best, etc.
When we came back from lunch, all of them were called in to HR, laid off, and told to clear out IMMEDIATELY.
So beginning that afternoon, and for the next month, it was just me and their empty desks.
"WYSIWYG". That's classic.
The Chinese want to make sure that Westerners pay for Chinese products while the Chinese don't have to pay for Western products.
So, now they'll go from stealing Western software to stealing their own. (The rule is that they have to use Chinese-made software, not that they have to use open source software.) Oh, well.
But there's another side of it that is likely to require forking: security, as in State Security. I don't think the Chinese have any objection to back doors in software. They just want them to be their OWN back doors. "Chinese-made" software, whether nominally "open source" or not, is likely to be what The Party wants it to be. And even if it is in some sense open source, if you think open source software can't be booby trapped, you're pretty naive.
I think Greenspun wrote something similar regarding his Ars Digita University web app class. I don't have the link, but at that time he let people choose either C#/ASP.Net or Java, and his comment was that all the people who chose .Net finished the assignment on time, while few of those who chose Java did.
.Net), I'll have to say that it seems to be both more powerful (in returning some of the C++ features that Java took out) and easier to use than Java, mainly because it feels like it has been reconsidered based on what has worked well and what hasn't in Java.
I've heard similar comments from the software demo guys at a major software company (NOT MS).
Having done client-side apps with C# (not web apps, no ASP.Net, just
Unfortunately, I really don't want to use Windows for servers (clients are okay), so I'm not likely to be able to take advantage of this unless Mono (go-mono.org) succeeds, but I think that C#/ASP.Net is probably a better TECHNOLOGY (though not necessarily better CHOICE yet) for serious web apps than either Java or PHP.
You're the first post I've seen here to actually describe a PHP weakness explicitly. I'd be interested in seeing more examples if you have them.
Bill Joy is an alpha geek who created technologies that other geeks respect and still use, who ALSO made it to the highest levels of the business world -- while remaining a hardcore techie. Joy talks about controversial technical visions.
Vinod Khosla is a business guy who has made a career of getting companies started for the cash he could milk out of the deal. He talks about maximizing his financial return.
So when American techies and the publications they read talk more about Bill Joy than Vinod Khosla, you conclude that it could only be prejudice against Indians.
Yeah, what else could it be? Those *@#$% ethnocentric Americans.... When will they grow up and start paying more attention to me?
I've programmed for Mac, Unix, Win32, and Java, and I've never experienced an easier platform for writing GUI apps than the combo of C#, .Net, and Visual Studio. (Now for writing algorithmically challenging apps, nothing beats Lisp, but....)
I think the C# language is a big improvement over Java (the language). So many lessons from years of Java experience have been incorporated into C#, that it's absurd to dismiss it as a Java "knockoff". It's Java done over again with the benefit of hindsight and a lack of legacy baggage combined with the ease of GUI building that made VB so popular (but without any trace of Basic).
Of course, the fact that it's realistically only for Windows (so far) is a huge drawback (for me). With Java, you can hop from platform to platform and from tool vendor to tool vendor (incl. open source) as they come and go, and there's a lot of security in that. (I seem to change Java IDEs every 18 months or so, and I like that I can do that.)
If both C# and Java were equally cross-platform and there were good C# tools from vendors other than MS, I'd choose C# over Java in a heartbeat for the language improvements alone. If I'm assured that the client wants Windows only, I'll use C# for sure. When I don't have that assurance, I'll stick with Java for safety. (Of course, if it's not a GUI app, and I don't need the type of safety you get by using a mainstream language, I think some form of Lisp or ML would be my first choice.)
It's like Java: you need the runtime environment. For now, that means that most of the installed base of Windows machines won't already have what you need to run an app, so you'll have to include a 21MB runtime with your 21kB app, or point them as MS's website for a free download of the .Net framework (the runtime). Not very pleasant for mass distribution yet.
.Net framework is now included in all currently shipping Windows versions, so it will be as standard as the Win32 API itself a few years from now. In fact, it's likely to gradually replace the Win32 API (in my opinion).
On the other hand, the
There is no such thing as "international English". In some companies the term has been used for marketing purposes, but its use is spurious. US English and UK "British" English are genuine standards, but there is no international standard. Many users of British English are unaware that US orthography is the preferred form in many nations, not just in the US.
And as for Latin roots, I'm only aware of one Latin-based language that spells it "colour": French. To be more like French is to be less like the world of Latin-based languages, not more like it.
If we can't even supply jobs to those alive now, how can we supply jobs to a world where there are BILLIONS more people?
What, are jobs dug up out of the ground and burned up? How many years of jobs do we have left before we've used them all up? (Let's ask Jeremy Rifkin. He's probably writing a book warning us about it as we speak.)
If you have billions more people, you'll have billions of additional customers, people with needs to fill and problems to solve. Of course, there are business cycles of expansion and contraction, and there are secular shifts of jobs from old industries to new industries and from one region to another.
However, this notion of "we [inevitably meaning The Government] have to supply jobs" needs a secular shift of its own toward a reduction in the friction one encounters when trying to create jobs, especially for oneself and maybe a few friends.
I'm not suggesting a totally unregulated black market free-for-all. It's hard to create a good job for yourself in such an environment, too. Just an environment in which the government (and a lot of people) think less about creating or retaining jobs and more about how to make it easy and uncomplicated for average joes to (repeatedly) create their own jobs and jobs for their friends and colleagues.
I won't be able to give up Windows (or possibly Mac) until there is some equivalent of TurboTax
And at $15/hour, all you'll need to have a good life is to move to India and take that job with you. ;-)
The French government is banning yet another English word, not pronouncing it in a more French-sounding way.
You say Americans are just the same and wouldn't stand for the adoption of a new concept word from another language, yet the term "jihad" has rather recently been adopted into common usage and hasn't been banned from government publications in the US.
Americans, like all English speakers, adopt new concept words from other languages frequently. Perhaps you could show us a list of commonly used "foreign" words that have been banned by the US government and the English terms designed by the government to replace them.