I've used Java longer than the reviewer -- since it was an alpha. I still use it and am an official participant in the JCP. I plan to continue using Java, probably for years to come.
That being said, I find the C# language to be significantly better designed than the Java language. Things like delegates are a great improvement over interfaces. When Anders Hejlsberg was still at Borland, he tried to persuade Sun to use them in Java instead of the interface approach and they just blew him off. "Syntactic sugar" they called it, and then they went ahead and implemented their own syntactic vinegar. I'll take the sugar, thank you.
Using "properties" in an OO language is a natural.
a.b.c++ calls a set() method instead of directly accessing a member var named c. (The c property may not even be backed by a variable. It may be calculated on demand.) In Java, to use OO methods instead of exposing private variables, you would do something like
a.getB().setC(a.getB().getC()+1);
although usually it would be broken into several simpler steps with temp variables for ease of reading.
C# makes it a breeze to create visual interfaces to object properties without losing the encapsulation of the implementation of those properties.
There are so many other improvements in C# relative to Java that it really annoys me to hear the political refrain "C# is just a knock off of Java". It's such a superior "knockoff" that, for the first time in years, Sun has gotten back in the mode of making language improvements (all of which make it more like the "knockoff") instead of their knee-jerk "you're not language designers so, trust us, you don't need that" reaction of the past.
The Java class libraries are far more complete than those of.Net, though.Net's have the benefit of learning from Java's mistakes. (A nice, consistent way of converting between fundamental data types, well-designed containers, etc.)
I now find myself in the position of using C# when I can (mostly for personal utilities) and Java when I must (for professional production). Since I strongly prefer to use Linux servers and strongly prefer to avoid the MS license ball-and-chain, I anticipate having to continue using Java for years.
While doing so, though, I will continue rooting for Mono and working thru the JCP to try to steer the Java language to embrace and extend what I consider the significant advantages C# (and to some extent the.Net classes) have over Java. All the anti-MS bigots don't make that easy, though.
First Microsoft made it clear that any new gotta-have horizontal application that appeared would rapidly be cloned and included with the Windows OS, which you had to buy even if all you wanted to buy was hardware.
No VC is going to fund a company with an idea for a new client-side horizontal killer app, no matter how good the idea is. They would just be funding MS R&D.
Then along comes Open Source with its "companies that want to be paid for apps deserve to be punished" ethos. Now, categories that are too small to be cloned by MS get cloned by open sourcers.
So MS will still get paid, but the smaller ISVs will be killed off by open source crusaders before they even get a chance to be killed off by MS.
By teaming up this way, MS & the FOSS community have pretty much destroyed this industry. There are other ways to make money in software dev, but there's no future in packaged software.
Java's standard libraries are definitely more developed (=larger, more comprehensive) than those of.Net, but C# is a better language. C# has a whole laundry list of nice features that Java either lacks or has been scrambling to add since the debut of C#. I work in both languages, with much more experience in Java, and I definitely enjoy C# (the language) more than Java.
But the fact that I can use Java on all platforms of interest to me, particularly Linux servers and client devices, is why I keep using Java, so I'm working with the JCP to try to add the C# improvements to Java. If I could use C# everywhere I use Java, though, I would go 100% C# without a second thought.
Also, the.Net bytecode (IL) reputedly has designed-in support for generics, tail calls, and other goodies that Java lacks. I understand [rumor] that for years Guy Steele has been pushing for changes in Java bytecode that would allow for good Lisp/Scheme support. Nothing has changed with Java, but.Net incorporated his suggestions.[/rumor] It wouldn't surprise me if this rumor is true because I've seen how interested MS was in gathering requests from disgruntled Java developers in order to make C#/.Net more attractive.
The Mozilla team could create a test app that could be downloaded. The team would come up with a large problem space of sequences of HTML tags, markup, attribute values (negative numbers, zeroes, missing, mIXed case, etc.). There could be some exhaustive testing of certain combinations, and random testing of others (where the state space is too large).
Volunteers could then download the test app, it would go to the Mozilla site with identifying info about the platform it was on, it would grab the next test set, run it, and report back to Mozilla HQ.
I also can't help thinking that this illustrates (for the billionth time) a fundamental weakness in the C programming language. Surely a language could be designed that would have very clever memory management (perhaps keywords for instructing the compiler which of several memory mgt. options you prefer in a fine-grained way), yielding 99% of C's performance while protecting memory by default (with perhaps manual overrides). Yes, I know C *can* be written this way, just as plain C can be used for home-brewed OOP, but everything about the language makes it unlikely that anyone will.
That's the sort of thing that the Mozilla team could easily request others to do for them. They could have a little discussion regarding good approaches for generating the test cases, maybe even build a downloadable test framework, then they could split up the tests, and have lots of volunteers running the test cases to see what crashed.
If something like this were to happen, it would cause developers to reevaluate their tools, and I think that C/C++ would lose out big time.
C is an excellent model for development in situations with extreme constraints of certain sorts. That doesn't make it the best default general-purpose language.
Looked at in reverse, would any multilingual developer feel *more* inclined to use C for general applications on big (non-device) machines if the personal penalty for bugs in his code rose dramatically?
GnuCash is nice, but the need to run TurboTax keeps me tied to Windows (or Mac). And even with a Windows version, next year's version won't open this year's.tax file (no backward compatibility in TurboTax, ever), and now that I have it "activated" to this machine, even archiving the original installer disk in a shoebox won't help me if I'm using a different machine.
What a bother, and I haven't even mentioned that, oh yeah, I have to pay for it, too. (I'm not implying that I think anyone owes me free software, just that that is an additional drawback of this product.)
Of course, I don't think I'd trust the "open source community" to do it very well, or they'd have the 2003 tax product ready "when it's ready" instead of in time to actually use it.
So, I'd like to see the IRS produce the software that serves as the "reference implementation" of the tax forms, and for them to open source it and archive past year's versions for free downloading at any time.
I like to write code for fun as well as profit. And a lot of people don't see the fun.
People wouldn't give you any flack if you wanted to write music or poetry or draw, or even numb your brain with a game of solitaire, but they'll see writing code as "working" (heavens!) instead of as doing something creative in an interesting medium, and think that makes you pretty weird.
If it does, at least you're not alone.
I will say, though, that I don't find writing C++ to be much fun compared to something like Lisp. The creativity I feel when writing code is degraded, not heightened, when I have to take care of menial chores like memory management. I wouldn't want to write C++ on a small device, either, because it requires so much source code to say anything, and then you have to juggle header files, and root around in a debugger to see what damage your C operations are doing to memory, etc. You need a lot of those things in front of you simultaneously to be productive.
I think that C++ on a pocket device wouldn't be worth doing (until we have full retinal scan displays), so I don't expect you to find much, but as.Net grows, you may eventually have access to things like Scheme or Python that run interactively on the device and do some pretty fun things.
Matz has made it clear that the design of Ruby is based first and foremost on making it easier for him to do his own work, which he has stated is primarily in the Japanese Unix encoding EUC-JP. He says "EUC-JP is good enough for me" and "Ruby's internationalization strategy is whatever doesn't interfere with my Japanese work".
Well, if EUC-JP good enough for him, then he clearly doesn't build globalized apps. It's the Japanese equivalent of a US language designer saying, "I want my language to be optimized for 7-bit ASCII, which is good enough for me." (Which, of course, is the history of many old programming languages from the days of standalone, unconnected computing, but he still takes that approach today in the era of the WORLDWIDE Web.)
His provincial attitude about Unicode tells me that though Ruby's design is full of great ideas and he is a gifted language designer, ultimately Ruby can't be taken seriously as a production platform if you have any international ambition at all.
(On the other hand, something like a Ruby.Net or JRuby that used.Net or Java Strings might be a great tool if the performance could be made acceptible.)
Too bad I'm so late responding, but in case anybody reads this:
All major platforms are expending serious resources to internationalize. Java and.Net are both based on Unicode. The only two text encodings that all conformant XML readers/writers are *required* to understand are both forms of Unicode. The document character set for all HTML documents changed to Unicode in HTML 4 (and thereafter). Perl, as of 5.6, changed over to being entirely Unicode internally. Oracle and Microsoft both recommend buiding all new databases as Unicode. The Linux Standards Base on which most major distributions are based is about to make Unicode (UTF-8) the default system encoding.
And the list goes on and on. Why Unicode? Because it lets you handle not just English, and not just Western languages, but ALL of the world's languages with the same applications. Big players in the world of software are big players all over the world. Limiting themselves to English is not a possibility, and the smaller players are falling in line behind the big ones.
"Learn English, tough" may have some validity when talking about *content* (an online discussion among an international group of specialists may take place in English only with no translations, for example), but it is nonsense when talking about software architecture. In software architecture, "English only" approaches are increasingly obsolete.
Every day they delay they make it more likely I'll die of something that will be cured by nanotech after my death.
Delaying nanotech isn't necessarily safer. It just means that you'll be less likely to be exposed to new dangers, but more likely to die from old ones.
Death when only a few decades old is taken for granted, though, so people stand in the road arguing about the possible toxicity of the road paint while the truck speeds toward them.
Not only did he label it a review of the Tablet PC, but he certainly must have read it closely because he declared it the "most incisive" review so far.
Of course, since it's not even a review of the Tablet PC at all, incisiveness must simply be a synonym for "critical of MS", as in "Slashdot posts are almost uniformly incisive."
I'd raise the walls, install a ceiling, and a door. Facilities people will reject this request because "normal people" don't want to be in a box and building the box blocks the whatever shared sunlight and view you may have.
I suspect that if you put a bunch of developers together, most would be happy to be boxed in (if the alternative was an open cubicle), and if they all want boxes, they aren't blocking each others light/view.
Maybe you could try asking for a bunch of "boxes" back in the area with the least sunlight and no view, available to whoever prefers that style.
I'm not talking about MS's XML, I'm talking about the native file formats (*.doc, *.xsl, *.ppt). MS is free to change the native formats in any new version, too, but MS is constrained by the installed base like everyone else. The document *interchange* format that matters in a business environment is not the latest MS version, but the common denominator in the installed base, which is why Office always offers "Save as..." options for saving in older formats. A reliable interchange format today is probably the 5-yr-old Office97.
If IBM came up with converters for current version MS-Office file formats into and out of a new XML-based interchange format, and opened them to creators of Office competitors, then there could be a lot of Office competitors. Exchanging files with the users of those competing products would be just like exchanging files with users of whatever version of MS-Office the converters were based on. The maintainers of the converters would have years to respond to any file format changes.
What I'd like to see is a seriously committed team develop some high-quality interchange formats -- probably XML -- for certain things such as word proc, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.
They should then also write (and maintain!) translators for MS-Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into and out of these exchange formats.
It should be possible to maintain these converters to a level where they can handle almost all of the documents used in normal business.
With the hard part -- the converters and standard file formats -- handled by a single, powerful team, it would become much easier to create competitive word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation packages that would be usable in a business world full of MS-Office documents.
Eventually the interchange formats could supercede the native MS-Office formats as the standard for document exchange.
My experience is that there is a lot of diversity among my Indian coworkers. Some of them aren't so good, and others are wonderful. It's unfortunate that there aren't enough jobs for all of us, but I'm not sorry they came. They're my friends now. They've become "us".
Half of my family is in China, half in N. America, and I'd have to say that the Chinese pay a lot more attention to the pride of the Chinese race and less attention to race-blind ethical considerations than N. Americans.
In this, though, they are not so different from ethnic Europeans (in N. America or Europe) until the mid-20th century.
I think the combination of the massive cultural inertia of the Chinese, relative isolation until recently, and centuries of grinding poverty where the demands of taking care of your own family left nothing left over for philosophical considerations of human rights around the world, has left the Chinese several decades behind the West in such things.
I think that the ideas the original poster called "ethics" are only rather recent mainstream features of Western society, and that gives me some reason for optimism that they will one day be as prevalent in Chinese culture.
Until then, though, the original poster -- despite the inflammatory wording -- is correctly identifying some real issues. He doesn't show any sign of understanding what lies beneath, but then neither do the political correctness police who automatically bash him for the crime of describing what he sees.
A site that purports to be a language FAQ and yet goes thru the features one at a time eliminating those that can be misused would rule out all good languages -- all useful tools in fact.
There is some value in a list of wise warnings, but that's not how this site presents itself, so I'm forced to conclude that it's just another anti-MS propaganda piece.
Since the REAL story about MS is pretty nasty, yet the technology of C# and.Net is very nice, I don't have much respect for nonsense like this.
I was quite surprised by the sophistication of my child's emotions. (My child is probably typical in this respect.)
When he was about 6 months old, he was trying to do something. His attempts were pretty silly, because of his inexperience with the world, and I laughed at him. Not a big laugh, just a chuckle.
When I did, he suddenly got a look on his face that was absolutely clear. He was obviously very offended. Then it quickly changed to embarrassment and he stopped trying to do what he had been working on and refused to try again.
I was really shocked. I had no idea that a 6-month-old baby could understand that he was being laughed at (not with), nor that he was capable of having his pride hurt.
I assumed babies were simpler, with very simple emotional responses to physical needs and wants. I never imagined that I could hurt a baby's pride.
I guarantee it never happened again. Since then, I've been very careful to treat him with a lot more respect.
I should also say that he resembles me a lot and I can pick up his emotions easily because I recognize my own reactions. I never realized how difficult it is to be a baby or small child. They have LOTS of fears and frustrations. The worst for him appears to be a frustration at the lack of control he has over his own life. If I want something, I can just take it, and he knows that. If he wants something, he has to ask, and more often than not the answer is a "No" for which he has little appeal. (It's often something dangerous that I can't compromise on.) That lack of control is very stressful to him, which is something I hadn't anticipated.
Take their emotions seriously. Imagine yourself in their position and have some empathy for how tough it would be. It seems to be approximately as tough for them as it would be for you in the same situation, which would be pretty tough if you think about it, so try not to automatically say "no" just for your own convenience. Think about how you would like to be treated if you were trapped in their situation, and treat them accordingly.
Our baby was colicky. You can't believe how bad this is. He screams like he's being tortured all night and there's nothing you can do.
All the medical sites say there's no cure except to wait it out. Our pediatrician concurred, though we tried all sorts of things.
Finally, I found a suggestion on the Net that worked.
REMEMBER IT. TELL YOUR FRIENDS:
Baby Zantac (or any equivalent medication). Our baby had acid reflux and it was burning him, causing terrible pain. Few doctors seem to consider this, but at the very least try it among the other steps you take (eliminating dairy products and the other things they'll suggest).
I REALLY wish I'd known at the start. You can't believe how miserable it is for both baby and parents. I don't know if this will solve all colic, or just some, but at least try it and tell other parents to try it.
(And, no, I don't represent any drug company. Use whatever your pediatrician suggests for acid reflux.)
Do the latest ones have any new features useful for Japanese language learning, or are the dictionaries and language-related features in the new ones the same as in the old ones?
On the positive side, there is this kick-ass project called Mono that implements it, and runs on a variety of other systems as well.
Absolutely! And I think that way too many people dismiss the advantages of C#, the language, because of its prominent position in a Microsoft initiative.
I'm a big fan of Java, but after having used it for a lot of projects, I find that I'm VERY pleased by the extras offered by C#, the language, and the basic CLI extras that are covered by the upcoming ISO standard.
I do NOT require a perfect clone of.Net. Go for it, Miguel! Get as close as you can, but if MS blocks you then let's have a Mono Community Process and come up with alternatives that are even better. For a while, being able to run the exact same app on both Windows and Linux might be useful, but my first priority is a great dev platform for Linux, not a way to run Windows apps. Over time, that first priority will get even stronger, and I'll get more interested in other languages such as a MonoScheme and less interested in Windows compatibility.
Twenty is a number. 20 decimal represents that number. 20 hex does not. It represents a different number.
But the 2 and the 0 in 20H are still a two and a zero, so saying "two-zero hex" (where "hex" is optional if understood) is quite correct, while "twenty" is not.
So, original questioner, there is clearly a discrepancy between relativity and quantum mechanics. I claim that the existance of tortilla chips in the world is the cause, and if they were all eliminated, the discrepancy would vanish.
Are you skeptical of my claim? Well then by your logic, *you* are now responsible for proving me wrong, presumably by removing all tortilla chips from the world and demonstrating that the discrepancy still remains.
By your logic, if you don't then you'll just have to accept my tortilla chip theory as correct.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used Java longer than the reviewer -- since it was an alpha. I still use it and am an official participant in the JCP. I plan to continue using Java, probably for years to come.
.Net, though .Net's have the benefit of learning from Java's mistakes. (A nice, consistent way of converting between fundamental data types, well-designed containers, etc.)
.Net classes) have over Java. All the anti-MS bigots don't make that easy, though.
That being said, I find the C# language to be significantly better designed than the Java language. Things like delegates are a great improvement over interfaces. When Anders Hejlsberg was still at Borland, he tried to persuade Sun to use them in Java instead of the interface approach and they just blew him off. "Syntactic sugar" they called it, and then they went ahead and implemented their own syntactic vinegar. I'll take the sugar, thank you.
Using "properties" in an OO language is a natural.
a.b.c++ calls a set() method instead of directly accessing a member var named c. (The c property may not even be backed by a variable. It may be calculated on demand.) In Java, to use OO methods instead of exposing private variables, you would do something like
a.getB().setC(a.getB().getC()+1);
although usually it would be broken into several simpler steps with temp variables for ease of reading.
C# makes it a breeze to create visual interfaces to object properties without losing the encapsulation of the implementation of those properties.
There are so many other improvements in C# relative to Java that it really annoys me to hear the political refrain "C# is just a knock off of Java". It's such a superior "knockoff" that, for the first time in years, Sun has gotten back in the mode of making language improvements (all of which make it more like the "knockoff") instead of their knee-jerk "you're not language designers so, trust us, you don't need that" reaction of the past.
The Java class libraries are far more complete than those of
I now find myself in the position of using C# when I can (mostly for personal utilities) and Java when I must (for professional production). Since I strongly prefer to use Linux servers and strongly prefer to avoid the MS license ball-and-chain, I anticipate having to continue using Java for years.
While doing so, though, I will continue rooting for Mono and working thru the JCP to try to steer the Java language to embrace and extend what I consider the significant advantages C# (and to some extent the
First Microsoft made it clear that any new gotta-have horizontal application that appeared would rapidly be cloned and included with the Windows OS, which you had to buy even if all you wanted to buy was hardware.
No VC is going to fund a company with an idea for a new client-side horizontal killer app, no matter how good the idea is. They would just be funding MS R&D.
Then along comes Open Source with its "companies that want to be paid for apps deserve to be punished" ethos. Now, categories that are too small to be cloned by MS get cloned by open sourcers.
So MS will still get paid, but the smaller ISVs will be killed off by open source crusaders before they even get a chance to be killed off by MS.
By teaming up this way, MS & the FOSS community have pretty much destroyed this industry. There are other ways to make money in software dev, but there's no future in packaged software.
Java's standard libraries are definitely more developed (=larger, more comprehensive) than those of .Net, but C# is a better language. C# has a whole laundry list of nice features that Java either lacks or has been scrambling to add since the debut of C#. I work in both languages, with much more experience in Java, and I definitely enjoy C# (the language) more than Java.
.Net bytecode (IL) reputedly has designed-in support for generics, tail calls, and other goodies that Java lacks. I understand [rumor] that for years Guy Steele has been pushing for changes in Java bytecode that would allow for good Lisp/Scheme support. Nothing has changed with Java, but .Net incorporated his suggestions.[/rumor] It wouldn't surprise me if this rumor is true because I've seen how interested MS was in gathering requests from disgruntled Java developers in order to make C#/.Net more attractive.
But the fact that I can use Java on all platforms of interest to me, particularly Linux servers and client devices, is why I keep using Java, so I'm working with the JCP to try to add the C# improvements to Java. If I could use C# everywhere I use Java, though, I would go 100% C# without a second thought.
Also, the
I sure hope Mono succeeds.
The Mozilla team could create a test app that could be downloaded. The team would come up with a large problem space of sequences of HTML tags, markup, attribute values (negative numbers, zeroes, missing, mIXed case, etc.). There could be some exhaustive testing of certain combinations, and random testing of others (where the state space is too large).
Volunteers could then download the test app, it would go to the Mozilla site with identifying info about the platform it was on, it would grab the next test set, run it, and report back to Mozilla HQ.
I also can't help thinking that this illustrates (for the billionth time) a fundamental weakness in the C programming language. Surely a language could be designed that would have very clever memory management (perhaps keywords for instructing the compiler which of several memory mgt. options you prefer in a fine-grained way), yielding 99% of C's performance while protecting memory by default (with perhaps manual overrides). Yes, I know C *can* be written this way, just as plain C can be used for home-brewed OOP, but everything about the language makes it unlikely that anyone will.
That's the sort of thing that the Mozilla team could easily request others to do for them. They could have a little discussion regarding good approaches for generating the test cases, maybe even build a downloadable test framework, then they could split up the tests, and have lots of volunteers running the test cases to see what crashed.
If something like this were to happen, it would cause developers to reevaluate their tools, and I think that C/C++ would lose out big time.
C is an excellent model for development in situations with extreme constraints of certain sorts. That doesn't make it the best default general-purpose language.
Looked at in reverse, would any multilingual developer feel *more* inclined to use C for general applications on big (non-device) machines if the personal penalty for bugs in his code rose dramatically?
GnuCash is nice, but the need to run TurboTax keeps me tied to Windows (or Mac). And even with a Windows version, next year's version won't open this year's .tax file (no backward compatibility in TurboTax, ever), and now that I have it "activated" to this machine, even archiving the original installer disk in a shoebox won't help me if I'm using a different machine.
What a bother, and I haven't even mentioned that, oh yeah, I have to pay for it, too. (I'm not implying that I think anyone owes me free software, just that that is an additional drawback of this product.)
Of course, I don't think I'd trust the "open source community" to do it very well, or they'd have the 2003 tax product ready "when it's ready" instead of in time to actually use it.
So, I'd like to see the IRS produce the software that serves as the "reference implementation" of the tax forms, and for them to open source it and archive past year's versions for free downloading at any time.
I like to write code for fun as well as profit. And a lot of people don't see the fun.
.Net grows, you may eventually have access to things like Scheme or Python that run interactively on the device and do some pretty fun things.
People wouldn't give you any flack if you wanted to write music or poetry or draw, or even numb your brain with a game of solitaire, but they'll see writing code as "working" (heavens!) instead of as doing something creative in an interesting medium, and think that makes you pretty weird.
If it does, at least you're not alone.
I will say, though, that I don't find writing C++ to be much fun compared to something like Lisp. The creativity I feel when writing code is degraded, not heightened, when I have to take care of menial chores like memory management. I wouldn't want to write C++ on a small device, either, because it requires so much source code to say anything, and then you have to juggle header files, and root around in a debugger to see what damage your C operations are doing to memory, etc. You need a lot of those things in front of you simultaneously to be productive.
I think that C++ on a pocket device wouldn't be worth doing (until we have full retinal scan displays), so I don't expect you to find much, but as
Matz has made it clear that the design of Ruby is based first and foremost on making it easier for him to do his own work, which he has stated is primarily in the Japanese Unix encoding EUC-JP. He says "EUC-JP is good enough for me" and "Ruby's internationalization strategy is whatever doesn't interfere with my Japanese work".
.Net or Java Strings might be a great tool if the performance could be made acceptible.)
Well, if EUC-JP good enough for him, then he clearly doesn't build globalized apps. It's the Japanese equivalent of a US language designer saying, "I want my language to be optimized for 7-bit ASCII, which is good enough for me." (Which, of course, is the history of many old programming languages from the days of standalone, unconnected computing, but he still takes that approach today in the era of the WORLDWIDE Web.)
His provincial attitude about Unicode tells me that though Ruby's design is full of great ideas and he is a gifted language designer, ultimately Ruby can't be taken seriously as a production platform if you have any international ambition at all.
(On the other hand, something like a Ruby.Net or JRuby that used
Too bad I'm so late responding, but in case anybody reads this:
.Net are both based on Unicode. The only two text encodings that all conformant XML readers/writers are *required* to understand are both forms of Unicode. The document character set for all HTML documents changed to Unicode in HTML 4 (and thereafter). Perl, as of 5.6, changed over to being entirely Unicode internally. Oracle and Microsoft both recommend buiding all new databases as Unicode. The Linux Standards Base on which most major distributions are based is about to make Unicode (UTF-8) the default system encoding.
All major platforms are expending serious resources to internationalize. Java and
And the list goes on and on. Why Unicode? Because it lets you handle not just English, and not just Western languages, but ALL of the world's languages with the same applications. Big players in the world of software are big players all over the world. Limiting themselves to English is not a possibility, and the smaller players are falling in line behind the big ones.
"Learn English, tough" may have some validity when talking about *content* (an online discussion among an international group of specialists may take place in English only with no translations, for example), but it is nonsense when talking about software architecture. In software architecture, "English only" approaches are increasingly obsolete.
Every day they delay they make it more likely I'll die of something that will be cured by nanotech after my death.
Delaying nanotech isn't necessarily safer. It just means that you'll be less likely to be exposed to new dangers, but more likely to die from old ones.
Death when only a few decades old is taken for granted, though, so people stand in the road arguing about the possible toxicity of the road paint while the truck speeds toward them.
Not only did he label it a review of the Tablet PC, but he certainly must have read it closely because he declared it the "most incisive" review so far.
Of course, since it's not even a review of the Tablet PC at all, incisiveness must simply be a synonym for "critical of MS", as in "Slashdot posts are almost uniformly incisive."
I'd raise the walls, install a ceiling, and a door. Facilities people will reject this request because "normal people" don't want to be in a box and building the box blocks the whatever shared sunlight and view you may have.
I suspect that if you put a bunch of developers together, most would be happy to be boxed in (if the alternative was an open cubicle), and if they all want boxes, they aren't blocking each others light/view.
Maybe you could try asking for a bunch of "boxes" back in the area with the least sunlight and no view, available to whoever prefers that style.
I'm not talking about MS's XML, I'm talking about the native file formats (*.doc, *.xsl, *.ppt). MS is free to change the native formats in any new version, too, but MS is constrained by the installed base like everyone else. The document *interchange* format that matters in a business environment is not the latest MS version, but the common denominator in the installed base, which is why Office always offers "Save as..." options for saving in older formats. A reliable interchange format today is probably the 5-yr-old Office97.
If IBM came up with converters for current version MS-Office file formats into and out of a new XML-based interchange format, and opened them to creators of Office competitors, then there could be a lot of Office competitors. Exchanging files with the users of those competing products would be just like exchanging files with users of whatever version of MS-Office the converters were based on. The maintainers of the converters would have years to respond to any file format changes.
What I'd like to see is a seriously committed team develop some high-quality interchange formats -- probably XML -- for certain things such as word proc, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.
They should then also write (and maintain!) translators for MS-Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into and out of these exchange formats.
It should be possible to maintain these converters to a level where they can handle almost all of the documents used in normal business.
With the hard part -- the converters and standard file formats -- handled by a single, powerful team, it would become much easier to create competitive word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation packages that would be usable in a business world full of MS-Office documents.
Eventually the interchange formats could supercede the native MS-Office formats as the standard for document exchange.
My experience is that there is a lot of diversity among my Indian coworkers. Some of them aren't so good, and others are wonderful. It's unfortunate that there aren't enough jobs for all of us, but I'm not sorry they came. They're my friends now. They've become "us".
Half of my family is in China, half in N. America, and I'd have to say that the Chinese pay a lot more attention to the pride of the Chinese race and less attention to race-blind ethical considerations than N. Americans.
In this, though, they are not so different from ethnic Europeans (in N. America or Europe) until the mid-20th century.
I think the combination of the massive cultural inertia of the Chinese, relative isolation until recently, and centuries of grinding poverty where the demands of taking care of your own family left nothing left over for philosophical considerations of human rights around the world, has left the Chinese several decades behind the West in such things.
I think that the ideas the original poster called "ethics" are only rather recent mainstream features of Western society, and that gives me some reason for optimism that they will one day be as prevalent in Chinese culture.
Until then, though, the original poster -- despite the inflammatory wording -- is correctly identifying some real issues. He doesn't show any sign of understanding what lies beneath, but then neither do the political correctness police who automatically bash him for the crime of describing what he sees.
A site that purports to be a language FAQ and yet goes thru the features one at a time eliminating those that can be misused would rule out all good languages -- all useful tools in fact.
.Net is very nice, I don't have much respect for nonsense like this.
There is some value in a list of wise warnings, but that's not how this site presents itself, so I'm forced to conclude that it's just another anti-MS propaganda piece.
Since the REAL story about MS is pretty nasty, yet the technology of C# and
I was quite surprised by the sophistication of my child's emotions. (My child is probably typical in this respect.)
When he was about 6 months old, he was trying to do something. His attempts were pretty silly, because of his inexperience with the world, and I laughed at him. Not a big laugh, just a chuckle.
When I did, he suddenly got a look on his face that was absolutely clear. He was obviously very offended. Then it quickly changed to embarrassment and he stopped trying to do what he had been working on and refused to try again.
I was really shocked. I had no idea that a 6-month-old baby could understand that he was being laughed at (not with), nor that he was capable of having his pride hurt.
I assumed babies were simpler, with very simple emotional responses to physical needs and wants. I never imagined that I could hurt a baby's pride.
I guarantee it never happened again. Since then, I've been very careful to treat him with a lot more respect.
I should also say that he resembles me a lot and I can pick up his emotions easily because I recognize my own reactions. I never realized how difficult it is to be a baby or small child. They have LOTS of fears and frustrations. The worst for him appears to be a frustration at the lack of control he has over his own life. If I want something, I can just take it, and he knows that. If he wants something, he has to ask, and more often than not the answer is a "No" for which he has little appeal. (It's often something dangerous that I can't compromise on.) That lack of control is very stressful to him, which is something I hadn't anticipated.
Take their emotions seriously. Imagine yourself in their position and have some empathy for how tough it would be. It seems to be approximately as tough for them as it would be for you in the same situation, which would be pretty tough if you think about it, so try not to automatically say "no" just for your own convenience. Think about how you would like to be treated if you were trapped in their situation, and treat them accordingly.
Our baby was colicky. You can't believe how bad this is. He screams like he's being tortured all night and there's nothing you can do.
All the medical sites say there's no cure except to wait it out. Our pediatrician concurred, though we tried all sorts of things.
Finally, I found a suggestion on the Net that worked.
REMEMBER IT. TELL YOUR FRIENDS:
Baby Zantac (or any equivalent medication). Our baby had acid reflux and it was burning him, causing terrible pain. Few doctors seem to consider this, but at the very least try it among the other steps you take (eliminating dairy products and the other things they'll suggest).
I REALLY wish I'd known at the start. You can't believe how miserable it is for both baby and parents. I don't know if this will solve all colic, or just some, but at least try it and tell other parents to try it.
(And, no, I don't represent any drug company. Use whatever your pediatrician suggests for acid reflux.)
Do the latest ones have any new features useful for Japanese language learning, or are the dictionaries and language-related features in the new ones the same as in the old ones?
What dictionaries are included or available in the Japanese Zaurus?
On the positive side, there is this kick-ass project called Mono that implements it, and runs on a variety of other systems as well.
.Net. Go for it, Miguel! Get as close as you can, but if MS blocks you then let's have a Mono Community Process and come up with alternatives that are even better. For a while, being able to run the exact same app on both Windows and Linux might be useful, but my first priority is a great dev platform for Linux, not a way to run Windows apps. Over time, that first priority will get even stronger, and I'll get more interested in other languages such as a MonoScheme and less interested in Windows compatibility.
Absolutely! And I think that way too many people dismiss the advantages of C#, the language, because of its prominent position in a Microsoft initiative.
I'm a big fan of Java, but after having used it for a lot of projects, I find that I'm VERY pleased by the extras offered by C#, the language, and the basic CLI extras that are covered by the upcoming ISO standard.
I do NOT require a perfect clone of
Go Mono!
Twenty is a number. 20 decimal represents that number. 20 hex does not. It represents a different number.
But the 2 and the 0 in 20H are still a two and a zero, so saying "two-zero hex" (where "hex" is optional if understood) is quite correct, while "twenty" is not.
So, original questioner, there is clearly a discrepancy between relativity and quantum mechanics. I claim that the existance of tortilla chips in the world is the cause, and if they were all eliminated, the discrepancy would vanish.
Are you skeptical of my claim? Well then by your logic, *you* are now responsible for proving me wrong, presumably by removing all tortilla chips from the world and demonstrating that the discrepancy still remains.
By your logic, if you don't then you'll just have to accept my tortilla chip theory as correct.