Blame the Linux "activists"...
on
The Linux Uprising
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· Score: 2, Insightful
...who repeatedly paint themselves as heroic rebels fighting against the Evil Empire. That's how they want to be seen, and they try to get as much attention as they can. Slashdot, unfortunately, is infested with them.
I don't want to be too negative about it, though. Some of the attention they've brought to Linux has probably been good for attracting resources, though I worry that some has probably scared away resources, too.
A lot of us Linux users don't see ourselves as activists battling anybody. We just use it because we like it, not because we hate some Evil Empire. We don't get much press, though, because we're surrounded by noisy "M$ sucks!" activists screaming for attention.
Globalization is universal internationalization plus the form of localization that is used when you have a universal foundation.
Some people have claimed internationalization by merely covering major European languages, arguing that since it covers multiple national languages, it is internationalized.
Globalization closes that loophole by aiming for "global" coverage -- a universal foundation capable of handling all languages (for some practical, as opposed to literal, definition of "all").
It also includes the "localization as skins" form of localization. Traditional localization tended to produce different products for different languages. Globalization is an architectural approach that starts by creating a single, universal foundation (the "internationalization" part), then it adds a selection of localized skins (localization, but the new kind, not the old kind) to complete the app for all locales for which skins are available, and making it functional even for languages for which localized skins are not available. (In other words, even if there is no Greek UI, you can still do Greek work thru the English UI, but your menus and manuals will be in English.)
...I think I'd base it on the.Net framework or the Java framework. My preference would be.Net because of the genuine interest MS is taking in making it a good platform for lots of languages and the fact that, if it fit my language adequately, I'd get all those libraries, GC and other services, ASP.Net, ADO.Net, etc., all for free.
However, the genuine interest Sun has taken in making the Java runtime available for lots of *platforms* is pretty attractive, too. If the Mono Project doesn't make it, I'd have to go with Java, but I think Mono will eventually have pretty good coverage of the platforms of interest to me.
Well, I speak Chinese, too, and I build Chinese web apps and commercial boxed apps for all of the principal Chinese markets, and I assure you that his Unicode article was a bunch of nonsense.
I don't have time to write an article about it myself, though, so I'll just give you some "tidbits".
Unicode/ISO 10646 has room for over a million characters. About 100,000 have been assigned so far. The "national" standards bodies of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S. Korea, N. Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are the primary definers of the hanzi repertoire.
The article referred to 170,000 characters, but it wasn't adding them correctly. It's as if you took the 128 characters in ASCII and added them to the 128 characters in EBCDIC and said that there were 256 characters in "English", ignoring the fact that most were duplicates and many characters used in English weren't included in either ASCII or EBCDIC. The counting is all wrong, and that's what he was doing with the world's character sets.
Unicode is not perfect, but it's by far the best approach to dealing with text in our new century. Yes, dealing with text as "just text" is inherently harder than dealing with some limited subset such as "Western text" or "Japanese text" or "Simplified Chinese text". Now that networking has made it possible to address the whole world from a single server, we need a universal text format, and Unicode is by far the best option.
Every time I look at Perl and see all local variables having to be declared as "my $foo" and "my $bar" I think, that must be pretty embarrassing for the language designer.
In serious programming, most variables are local in scope, while few or none are global. Perl variables default to global, so you end up having to fight the default with every variable you create: "my $computer", "my $documents", "my $images", "my $ms_bob", (sorry)....
I hope Perl 6 will turn its back on past booboos and make the things that clearly ought to be default the default, even at the cost of backward compatibility.
And if they really have guts, I hope they'll do what Wayne Gretzky always advocated and "skate to where the puck will be" by making "use UTF-8" the default from now on, and "use bytes" the exception (legacy mode). Windows, Mac, and the major Linux distributions are all converting to Unicode pretty fast now.
Developers' ignorance of another technical field, cognitive pychology, is one of the roots of this problem. Another is their insecurity: "you don't know as much about my specialty as I do so (regardless of the fact that I know nothing about yours) I'm smarter than you are."
So let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose someone remapped your little vi/emacs key bindings and removed the ability to put them back. Of course they'll give you a manual describing where the new keys are. That should be good enough, right, smart guys? RTFM, right?
Any complaints? Is it causing you big trouble? Well, then you're probably just not very smart....;-)
[And, yes, I'm a professional developer, but one who respects the phenomena of cog-psy as they relate to both users *and* to us developers]
Sara, the "users are morons" poster above, represents a lot of developers, but not all of us.
Some of us have learned to recognize that talent comes in many forms, only a few of which care about computer technology.
My background is hardcore technical, but I look at cognitive psych as a technical discipline, and I try to pay attention to its findings.
There are ways of designing functionality that minimize cognitive load without sacrificing power. Unfortunately, most developers are so ignorant of the field of cog-sci, and so arrogant about their cognitive load-lifting prowess, that their designs are seriously suboptimal.
Even more unfortunate, when you point out the absurdities in their designs ("this is a lot harder than it needs to be") their inevitable response is something like, "I don't know what you're talking about. It's not hard for ME." The obvious implication being that anyone who complains about the poor design must just not be very intelligent.
What a bunch of clowns we developers can be sometimes!
Rest assured, though, that there are in fact quite a few developers who are aware of these phenomena. Ironically, one reason that it's so hard to clean up our act is because developers themselves *strongly* resist learning new things!
I completely agree. I lived in Japan for a long time and could read well enough to read manga.
It's just a mindless escape from tedium, like watching endless hours of TV in the US. It's just that the Japanese aren't home to watch TV, for various reasons, so they do the portable equivalent by reading manga.
And it's like TV: the more you watch, the more you're hooked. There's just enough story, suspense, comedy, or whatever to keep you coming back for more. It feels a lot better than staring at the wall (if you turn the TV off in the US) or at the back of the next train commuter's head (if you don't have your manga in Japan.) (Or, dare I say, than doing your work, you regular Slashdot readers...;-) Ouch.)
But there's little real substance there. Not none, but not much. Of course there are a few good TV shows and a few good manga stories, but not enough to fill the bottomless demand for mental anesthesia, so the rest is just forumlaic filler....
Nothing like a little competition. Notice how we go for years with Sun assuring us that the language is "just fine, trust us, we know what's good for you, you don't, all you need are more libraries, you're not a language designer but we are, trust us, you don't need any more features in the language itself, you just don't get it....".
C# comes out with a better language, and suddenly for the first time since inner classes were added in the mid-90's, the language starts evolving useful C#-looking features....
What I want next from Java is for Sun to invent delegates and properties.
Competition is a wonderful thing, and it's good to finally have some in the Java space.
Re:question for all you Java experts
on
Effective Java
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· Score: 1
I'm coming pretty late to this discussion, but you still might see this. It sounds as though you're asking a sincere question, and I think you deserve a better answer.
I don't know how you did your tests, but Java benchmarking is a funny thing. Java should be run in a HotSpot or equivalent runtime optimizer, and when it is you get a slow startup time, slow runs for the first few runs of an app, and then quite fast performance thereafter after the code has been compiled, optimized, and cached by the runtime system.
On a server, that's how a real Java app operates. It is started up, then it is run again and again within an ongoing process. It doesn't have to restart and recompile, so it spends most of its time running quite fast after a slow start. Benchmarks that look at the first run instead of the 1000th are okay for C but completely misrepresent Java. Measurements should reflect the 99.9% case, not the exceptional case (startup).
In my own informal experiments, I've found that Java gets pretty close to C++ after it gets rolling. (I haven't benchmarked against C.) The differences are interesting to me, too, but are usually swamped by other issues such as database connections that dwarf the language delta.
I agree, except that I think you give the mindless MS bashers too much credit. If they knew their stuff, they wouldn't make such ignorant comments about Windows.
The most technically sophisticated people I've met in the Unix/Linux world are usually the least dismissive of Windows or Macintosh, because they have a deeper understanding of the issues and tradeoffs. The annoying Slashdot "M$ sux" types are poseurs.
Too bad it "pisses you off", but that's your problem. It's your own ignorance and "hipocrasy" you should work on. I have a *very* close relative who barely escaped with his life from a situation where the "traditionally privileged" had been promoted as source of everyone's problems often enough that a mob decided that it was time for "justice" (that means violence against the scapegoated minority), yet you think it "causes little harm".
Unlike you, I don't find it any more acceptable for a liberal to spout class warfare vitriol than for a white supremacist to spout racist drivel.
He writes what are almost comic books (speaking of Snow Crash and Diamond Age). Stupid stories with plots that must come from a random algorithm of some sort (plug a random noun and a random verb into a template sentence and use the result to guide the next chapter...), but with intriguing ideas scattered throughout.
If only he would take the intriguing idea generator and apply it to the overall plot first, then fill in the details with smaller intriguing ideas and not say anything cartoonish as filler....
...because if a conservative talked about people that way, he would be "mean spirited" and "full of hate". Instead, in the Bay Area, talking about people this way makes you "socially conscious" and "working for justice", as long as you choose your victims from among the Bay Area's established Perpetrator Classes (you know, members of the "pasty" race, people who earn lots of money, and other such Enemies of The People.)
If instead of targeting someone "pasty" conducting business on a cell phone in an expensive car, you had chosen a Mexican conducting business on a radio from a van, it would have been "hate speech" and a bunch of heroes (a.k.a. "activists") would have put on face paint, beat drums, and waved placards in your face denouncing you as a "hate monger". Fortunately, that term doesn't apply to liberals.
I agree with your response, but I'd like to state it somewhat differently.
It's all a question of repeatability.
The idea of six sigma is a statistical thing, where you have a huge number of instances of the same thing, and they are almost all identical: almost completely repeatable. The fewer the exceptions, the more sigmas.
I feel this is quite inappropriate in something like IT app development, because of the one-off nature of most IT apps. It may be a good idea for other aspects of IT that need to be repeated a huge number of times without any glitches, such as phone connections, server backups, etc., and maybe that's all that 6-sigma is trying to address here. But IT app dev is custom craftsmanship. You have a few things that are approximately repeated, such as putting up yet another web form, but most apps are not clones of anything. If they were, it would be "installation", not app dev. Most apps don't even share much in the way of success metrics, and there are far too few of them to talk about 6-sigma.
I believe in statistical process control for repeatable processes, but for custom crafted items like apps, I think other software methodologies make a lot more sense.
Of course if it has to actually work...
on
SVG On the Rise
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· Score: 0, Troll
...and you need to deliver professional-quality on a real business kind of deadline, then you should use Flash.
Otherwise, if you're trying to do something in-house, where you control your own customers' client setup and they have to take whatever features you give them, and you don't have any pressing deadlines to meet so you can use immature tools or just a raw text editor to build your multimedia presentation, then SMIL/SVG might be a good way to make a statement they'll never forget: that political correctness is more important to you than end-user benefits.
I've spent plenty of time in IT. I've also run a tech support group, and anybody on my staff who talked like you was thrown out (after repeated warnings).
Our users are smart people, not nitwits. Most of them are experts in their fields, including the administrative assistants. Many of them know a lot about their computers, too, which helps. Many of the documents they receive from outside the company are in some Windows format, so having a Windows machine with MS-Office and some major apps installed is a great convenience. Which apps depends on the user, but these are usually professional-grade commercial apps. and are frequently Windows-only or Windows and Mac only.
With a Windows machine, they can get the hardware and software they need to do their jobs and install it themselves without a lot of kludging and emulating and scrounging for freebie knockoffs, simply following the instructions in the box, with occasional help from us. That's what they need to get their work done, and that's what IT should make happen.
Some of us use Linux as well as Win and Mac, but only those who need what Linux does best: allowing for an extraordinary level of customization. But being a platform for running common commercial apps is not what Linux is better at than Windows, and it's not simply an issue of familiarity.
I will say, though, that the proliferation of new platforms (Palm and Linux especially) is creating more demand for non-proprietary file formats for information interchange. This is a great trend that we encourage internally, to the extent we can without disrupting the business. Over time, this will make Linux more practical, which I'd be happy to see. I just can't afford to conclude that it already is merely based on political chest thumping and wishful thinking. Our people have more important issues to attend to.
You're so right about the thousands of dollars of licensing. For a small company that's trying to be flexible, it's a big deal to cough up a $2500 fee for MSDN, and it's even worse to consider that if you use it for anything, you are pretty much condemning yourself to keep paying that fee (plus many others equally pricy) *every year* FOREVER.
It's enough to make any sane and savvy entrepreneurial run off and join what you call "the PHP movement".
It's just my opinion, but I think it would be a mistake to do it. PHP and MySQL are quite amateurish compared to serious enterprise-class tools. Put the PHP and MySQL teams together and between them you won't find anyone who can even SPELL Unicode. They are so far removed from the state of the art in serious enterprise-class platforms that they don't even understand what they lack or why it matters.
Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, etc., invest millions of dollars in R&D to create platforms with architectures that are deeply globalized and rich in other sophisticated features that reflect the enormous expertise and experience of their corporate specialists. Most developers barely understand a fraction of the power in systems like Java,.Net, Oracle, etc., so they don't really realize how much they are losing when they move to a little quickie platform like PHP or MySQL. "Looks good to me, and it's really fast!"
If you have a small company that will be building inventory systems for local shoe stores, you might make great money (if you don't get too many employees) by rolling out quick solutions with simple tools like PHP, so I'm not saying the platform is worthless. Sometimes small, simple tools are the best for the job.
But if you have bigger ambitions, you might be better off mastering platforms like Java and/or C#/.Net plus powerful databases such as Oracle, SQLServer or PostgreSQL. All of these are rich, powerful systems.
Java backed by Postgres can be set up with no software license fees whatsoever on a Linux server. Or you could pay the MS fees for a while, go with C#/.Net and keep an eye on the Mono project. I think that a few years from now, C#/.Net will be as available as Java in no-cost versions, but we won't know for sure until it happens.
I'm not impressed with PHP and MySQL, though. Both projects are years old already and (unlike Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, and some other OSS systems) seem to be guided by a "quick and easy tools for amateurs" approach to architecture that is something that I would personally prefer to avoid, especially given the free or low-cost alternatives.
Unix isn't byte based, it's text based. Of course one layer deeper, it's byte based, but so is every other OS, and below that it's transistor based, etc.
What distinguishes Unix from other OSes is an emphasis on working in text with text utilities, often thru windows (telnet clients) on other machines -- windows whose only supported datatype is text.
In Unix, as in XML, text is sort of considered the ultimate data type. Bytes are just the medium used to represent the text under the surface. If the bytes were what mattered, people would usually work in a hex editor and do hex I/O, but they don't. They work at the text level of abstraction most of the time. It's the text that matters, not the bytes used to digitize it.
For text to reach its full potential, though, you have to say goodbye to grampa's ASCII and move on to a rich, universal form of text: Unicode. It's ludicrous for someone to say that speakers of non-Western languages should never have the ability to use the full range of Unix the way Westerners can. People who make comments like that are usually unaware of the problems that even English speakers have with single-byte encodings. (The second most powerful currency on earth is the Euro. Where is the Euro sign in Latin-1? Where are the curly quotes used by almost all English-language press? What happens when a press release destined for Time Magazine gets piped thru a series of single-byte Unix utilities? Undefined!)
XML, another system that considers text the universal data type, is Unicode based. They understand the concept of "universal". Same for HTML now. More and more Web pages are going to UTF-8, even for English, to avoid weird problems with Macs vs. PCs, Euro signs, curly quotes, embedded non-English text, etc. Are such pages really supposed to be out of reach of standard Unix utilities?
Java and.Net are 100% Unicode. Windows and Macintosh are now all Unicode based.
IETF and W3C have made it clear that no non-Unicode-based text protocols will be considered from now on.
Oracle is recommending Unicode as the format for all database text for new databases. So what happens when you cripple Unix so that it can't handle Oracle data in default form?
AT&T considers Unicode the future of Unix (cf. Plan 9), Sun has made the conversion to full Unicode fundamental to the future of Solaris, and as we speak the Free Standards Organization is preparing to do the same for an upcoming version of the LSB (Linux Standards Base) common core that all major Linux vendors have committed to.
It's unfortunate that so many Unix users still think that ASCII was good enough for grampa, so it should be good enough for every Unix user on earth from now on, but fortunately those who drive the standards have abandoned that kind of thinking forever.
ISO will take a dim view of MS suing people to prevent implementations of an ISO standard. If MS sues anyway, the OSS community will create alternatives that ISO would take very seriously as the basis for the next version of the standard. MS doesn't control the votes of the national representatives on the ISO committee, nor does an ISO standard control MS, but there are powerful commercial incentives for MS to avoid losing control.
It's a great language to work in. If MS makes it impossible to have a full.Net clone, I would still be delighted to have a good ISO C# compiler (even a native compiler), a runtime (which could just be a library that links to native code, like the GC libraries for C++), the subset of libraries included in ISO CLI, GTK# for GUIs, and whatever other libraries the OSS community develops for various useful things (like CPAN, but for Mono).
In fact, if MS starts suing people to prevent them from implementing an ISO standard, the ISO committee would lean strongly toward making this OSS alternative the basis for the next version of the ISO standard.
The soon-to-be ISO C# language is wonderful to work in. The cloning of the full.Net system may be entirely successful, or some substitutions may be required for legal reasons.
Either way will be okay with me. Yes, I'd like to be able to run unmodified Windows apps on Linux, but there will be enough local platform (P/Inovoke) stuff used in most major GUI apps that binary portability won't be likely anyway.
It doesn't have to be like Java: obsessively the same -- at the binary level -- regardless of the costs.
A little bit of porting work in exchange for access to some local platform features and potentially a better end product -- I'll take that tradeoff.
I think Mono will provide it, regardless of what MS does.
Slashdot Mirror
...then follow the advice.
Well said, BTW. Virtual mod point to you.
...who repeatedly paint themselves as heroic rebels fighting against the Evil Empire. That's how they want to be seen, and they try to get as much attention as they can. Slashdot, unfortunately, is infested with them.
I don't want to be too negative about it, though. Some of the attention they've brought to Linux has probably been good for attracting resources, though I worry that some has probably scared away resources, too.
A lot of us Linux users don't see ourselves as activists battling anybody. We just use it because we like it, not because we hate some Evil Empire. We don't get much press, though, because we're surrounded by noisy "M$ sucks!" activists screaming for attention.
Globalization = Internationalization + Localization.
Globalization is universal internationalization plus the form of localization that is used when you have a universal foundation.
Some people have claimed internationalization by merely covering major European languages, arguing that since it covers multiple national languages, it is internationalized.
Globalization closes that loophole by aiming for "global" coverage -- a universal foundation capable of handling all languages (for some practical, as opposed to literal, definition of "all").
It also includes the "localization as skins" form of localization. Traditional localization tended to produce different products for different languages. Globalization is an architectural approach that starts by creating a single, universal foundation (the "internationalization" part), then it adds a selection of localized skins (localization, but the new kind, not the old kind) to complete the app for all locales for which skins are available, and making it functional even for languages for which localized skins are not available. (In other words, even if there is no Greek UI, you can still do Greek work thru the English UI, but your menus and manuals will be in English.)
...I think I'd base it on the .Net framework or the Java framework. My preference would be .Net because of the genuine interest MS is taking in making it a good platform for lots of languages and the fact that, if it fit my language adequately, I'd get all those libraries, GC and other services, ASP.Net, ADO.Net, etc., all for free.
However, the genuine interest Sun has taken in making the Java runtime available for lots of *platforms* is pretty attractive, too. If the Mono Project doesn't make it, I'd have to go with Java, but I think Mono will eventually have pretty good coverage of the platforms of interest to me.
Well, I speak Chinese, too, and I build Chinese web apps and commercial boxed apps for all of the principal Chinese markets, and I assure you that his Unicode article was a bunch of nonsense.
I don't have time to write an article about it myself, though, so I'll just give you some "tidbits".
Unicode/ISO 10646 has room for over a million characters. About 100,000 have been assigned so far. The "national" standards bodies of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S. Korea, N. Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are the primary definers of the hanzi repertoire.
The article referred to 170,000 characters, but it wasn't adding them correctly. It's as if you took the 128 characters in ASCII and added them to the 128 characters in EBCDIC and said that there were 256 characters in "English", ignoring the fact that most were duplicates and many characters used in English weren't included in either ASCII or EBCDIC. The counting is all wrong, and that's what he was doing with the world's character sets.
Unicode is not perfect, but it's by far the best approach to dealing with text in our new century. Yes, dealing with text as "just text" is inherently harder than dealing with some limited subset such as "Western text" or "Japanese text" or "Simplified Chinese text". Now that networking has made it possible to address the whole world from a single server, we need a universal text format, and Unicode is by far the best option.
I just want the back and forward buttons on my Intellimouse Explorer to work in Mozilla on Linux. They are extremely convenient in IE on Windows.
Every time I look at Perl and see all local variables having to be declared as "my $foo" and "my $bar" I think, that must be pretty embarrassing for the language designer.
In serious programming, most variables are local in scope, while few or none are global. Perl variables default to global, so you end up having to fight the default with every variable you create: "my $computer", "my $documents", "my $images", "my $ms_bob", (sorry)....
I hope Perl 6 will turn its back on past booboos and make the things that clearly ought to be default the default, even at the cost of backward compatibility.
And if they really have guts, I hope they'll do what Wayne Gretzky always advocated and "skate to where the puck will be" by making "use UTF-8" the default from now on, and "use bytes" the exception (legacy mode). Windows, Mac, and the major Linux distributions are all converting to Unicode pretty fast now.
Developers' ignorance of another technical field, cognitive pychology, is one of the roots of this problem. Another is their insecurity: "you don't know as much about my specialty as I do so (regardless of the fact that I know nothing about yours) I'm smarter than you are."
;-)
So let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose someone remapped your little vi/emacs key bindings and removed the ability to put them back. Of course they'll give you a manual describing where the new keys are. That should be good enough, right, smart guys? RTFM, right?
Any complaints? Is it causing you big trouble? Well, then you're probably just not very smart....
[And, yes, I'm a professional developer, but one who respects the phenomena of cog-psy as they relate to both users *and* to us developers]
Sara, the "users are morons" poster above, represents a lot of developers, but not all of us.
Some of us have learned to recognize that talent comes in many forms, only a few of which care about computer technology.
My background is hardcore technical, but I look at cognitive psych as a technical discipline, and I try to pay attention to its findings.
There are ways of designing functionality that minimize cognitive load without sacrificing power. Unfortunately, most developers are so ignorant of the field of cog-sci, and so arrogant about their cognitive load-lifting prowess, that their designs are seriously suboptimal.
Even more unfortunate, when you point out the absurdities in their designs ("this is a lot harder than it needs to be") their inevitable response is something like, "I don't know what you're talking about. It's not hard for ME." The obvious implication being that anyone who complains about the poor design must just not be very intelligent.
What a bunch of clowns we developers can be sometimes!
Rest assured, though, that there are in fact quite a few developers who are aware of these phenomena. Ironically, one reason that it's so hard to clean up our act is because developers themselves *strongly* resist learning new things!
I completely agree. I lived in Japan for a long time and could read well enough to read manga.
It's just a mindless escape from tedium, like watching endless hours of TV in the US. It's just that the Japanese aren't home to watch TV, for various reasons, so they do the portable equivalent by reading manga.
And it's like TV: the more you watch, the more you're hooked. There's just enough story, suspense, comedy, or whatever to keep you coming back for more. It feels a lot better than staring at the wall (if you turn the TV off in the US) or at the back of the next train commuter's head (if you don't have your manga in Japan.) (Or, dare I say, than doing your work, you regular Slashdot readers...;-) Ouch.)
But there's little real substance there. Not none, but not much. Of course there are a few good TV shows and a few good manga stories, but not enough to fill the bottomless demand for mental anesthesia, so the rest is just forumlaic filler....
Nothing like a little competition. Notice how we go for years with Sun assuring us that the language is "just fine, trust us, we know what's good for you, you don't, all you need are more libraries, you're not a language designer but we are, trust us, you don't need any more features in the language itself, you just don't get it....".
C# comes out with a better language, and suddenly for the first time since inner classes were added in the mid-90's, the language starts evolving useful C#-looking features....
What I want next from Java is for Sun to invent delegates and properties.
Competition is a wonderful thing, and it's good to finally have some in the Java space.
And a virtual mod point to you.
I'm coming pretty late to this discussion, but you still might see this. It sounds as though you're asking a sincere question, and I think you deserve a better answer.
I don't know how you did your tests, but Java benchmarking is a funny thing. Java should be run in a HotSpot or equivalent runtime optimizer, and when it is you get a slow startup time, slow runs for the first few runs of an app, and then quite fast performance thereafter after the code has been compiled, optimized, and cached by the runtime system.
On a server, that's how a real Java app operates. It is started up, then it is run again and again within an ongoing process. It doesn't have to restart and recompile, so it spends most of its time running quite fast after a slow start. Benchmarks that look at the first run instead of the 1000th are okay for C but completely misrepresent Java. Measurements should reflect the 99.9% case, not the exceptional case (startup).
In my own informal experiments, I've found that Java gets pretty close to C++ after it gets rolling. (I haven't benchmarked against C.) The differences are interesting to me, too, but are usually swamped by other issues such as database connections that dwarf the language delta.
I agree, except that I think you give the mindless MS bashers too much credit. If they knew their stuff, they wouldn't make such ignorant comments about Windows.
The most technically sophisticated people I've met in the Unix/Linux world are usually the least dismissive of Windows or Macintosh, because they have a deeper understanding of the issues and tradeoffs. The annoying Slashdot "M$ sux" types are poseurs.
Too bad it "pisses you off", but that's your problem. It's your own ignorance and "hipocrasy" you should work on. I have a *very* close relative who barely escaped with his life from a situation where the "traditionally privileged" had been promoted as source of everyone's problems often enough that a mob decided that it was time for "justice" (that means violence against the scapegoated minority), yet you think it "causes little harm".
Unlike you, I don't find it any more acceptable for a liberal to spout class warfare vitriol than for a white supremacist to spout racist drivel.
He writes what are almost comic books (speaking of Snow Crash and Diamond Age). Stupid stories with plots that must come from a random algorithm of some sort (plug a random noun and a random verb into a template sentence and use the result to guide the next chapter...), but with intriguing ideas scattered throughout.
If only he would take the intriguing idea generator and apply it to the overall plot first, then fill in the details with smaller intriguing ideas and not say anything cartoonish as filler....
...because if a conservative talked about people that way, he would be "mean spirited" and "full of hate". Instead, in the Bay Area, talking about people this way makes you "socially conscious" and "working for justice", as long as you choose your victims from among the Bay Area's established Perpetrator Classes (you know, members of the "pasty" race, people who earn lots of money, and other such Enemies of The People.)
If instead of targeting someone "pasty" conducting business on a cell phone in an expensive car, you had chosen a Mexican conducting business on a radio from a van, it would have been "hate speech" and a bunch of heroes (a.k.a. "activists") would have put on face paint, beat drums, and waved placards in your face denouncing you as a "hate monger". Fortunately, that term doesn't apply to liberals.
I agree with your response, but I'd like to state it somewhat differently.
It's all a question of repeatability.
The idea of six sigma is a statistical thing, where you have a huge number of instances of the same thing, and they are almost all identical: almost completely repeatable. The fewer the exceptions, the more sigmas.
I feel this is quite inappropriate in something like IT app development, because of the one-off nature of most IT apps. It may be a good idea for other aspects of IT that need to be repeated a huge number of times without any glitches, such as phone connections, server backups, etc., and maybe that's all that 6-sigma is trying to address here. But IT app dev is custom craftsmanship. You have a few things that are approximately repeated, such as putting up yet another web form, but most apps are not clones of anything. If they were, it would be "installation", not app dev. Most apps don't even share much in the way of success metrics, and there are far too few of them to talk about 6-sigma.
I believe in statistical process control for repeatable processes, but for custom crafted items like apps, I think other software methodologies make a lot more sense.
...and you need to deliver professional-quality on a real business kind of deadline, then you should use Flash.
Otherwise, if you're trying to do something in-house, where you control your own customers' client setup and they have to take whatever features you give them, and you don't have any pressing deadlines to meet so you can use immature tools or just a raw text editor to build your multimedia presentation, then SMIL/SVG might be a good way to make a statement they'll never forget: that political correctness is more important to you than end-user benefits.
I've spent plenty of time in IT. I've also run a tech support group, and anybody on my staff who talked like you was thrown out (after repeated warnings).
Our users are smart people, not nitwits. Most of them are experts in their fields, including the administrative assistants. Many of them know a lot about their computers, too, which helps. Many of the documents they receive from outside the company are in some Windows format, so having a Windows machine with MS-Office and some major apps installed is a great convenience. Which apps depends on the user, but these are usually professional-grade commercial apps. and are frequently Windows-only or Windows and Mac only.
With a Windows machine, they can get the hardware and software they need to do their jobs and install it themselves without a lot of kludging and emulating and scrounging for freebie knockoffs, simply following the instructions in the box, with occasional help from us. That's what they need to get their work done, and that's what IT should make happen.
Some of us use Linux as well as Win and Mac, but only those who need what Linux does best: allowing for an extraordinary level of customization. But being a platform for running common commercial apps is not what Linux is better at than Windows, and it's not simply an issue of familiarity.
I will say, though, that the proliferation of new platforms (Palm and Linux especially) is creating more demand for non-proprietary file formats for information interchange. This is a great trend that we encourage internally, to the extent we can without disrupting the business. Over time, this will make Linux more practical, which I'd be happy to see. I just can't afford to conclude that it already is merely based on political chest thumping and wishful thinking. Our people have more important issues to attend to.
You're so right about the thousands of dollars of licensing. For a small company that's trying to be flexible, it's a big deal to cough up a $2500 fee for MSDN, and it's even worse to consider that if you use it for anything, you are pretty much condemning yourself to keep paying that fee (plus many others equally pricy) *every year* FOREVER.
.Net, Oracle, etc., so they don't really realize how much they are losing when they move to a little quickie platform like PHP or MySQL. "Looks good to me, and it's really fast!"
It's enough to make any sane and savvy entrepreneurial run off and join what you call "the PHP movement".
It's just my opinion, but I think it would be a mistake to do it. PHP and MySQL are quite amateurish compared to serious enterprise-class tools. Put the PHP and MySQL teams together and between them you won't find anyone who can even SPELL Unicode. They are so far removed from the state of the art in serious enterprise-class platforms that they don't even understand what they lack or why it matters.
Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, etc., invest millions of dollars in R&D to create platforms with architectures that are deeply globalized and rich in other sophisticated features that reflect the enormous expertise and experience of their corporate specialists. Most developers barely understand a fraction of the power in systems like Java,
If you have a small company that will be building inventory systems for local shoe stores, you might make great money (if you don't get too many employees) by rolling out quick solutions with simple tools like PHP, so I'm not saying the platform is worthless. Sometimes small, simple tools are the best for the job.
But if you have bigger ambitions, you might be better off mastering platforms like Java and/or C#/.Net plus powerful databases such as Oracle, SQLServer or PostgreSQL. All of these are rich, powerful systems.
Java backed by Postgres can be set up with no software license fees whatsoever on a Linux server. Or you could pay the MS fees for a while, go with C#/.Net and keep an eye on the Mono project. I think that a few years from now, C#/.Net will be as available as Java in no-cost versions, but we won't know for sure until it happens.
I'm not impressed with PHP and MySQL, though. Both projects are years old already and (unlike Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, and some other OSS systems) seem to be guided by a "quick and easy tools for amateurs" approach to architecture that is something that I would personally prefer to avoid, especially given the free or low-cost alternatives.
Not flamebait, just nonsense.
.Net are 100% Unicode. Windows and Macintosh are now all Unicode based.
Unix isn't byte based, it's text based. Of course one layer deeper, it's byte based, but so is every other OS, and below that it's transistor based, etc.
What distinguishes Unix from other OSes is an emphasis on working in text with text utilities, often thru windows (telnet clients) on other machines -- windows whose only supported datatype is text.
In Unix, as in XML, text is sort of considered the ultimate data type. Bytes are just the medium used to represent the text under the surface. If the bytes were what mattered, people would usually work in a hex editor and do hex I/O, but they don't. They work at the text level of abstraction most of the time. It's the text that matters, not the bytes used to digitize it.
For text to reach its full potential, though, you have to say goodbye to grampa's ASCII and move on to a rich, universal form of text: Unicode. It's ludicrous for someone to say that speakers of non-Western languages should never have the ability to use the full range of Unix the way Westerners can. People who make comments like that are usually unaware of the problems that even English speakers have with single-byte encodings. (The second most powerful currency on earth is the Euro. Where is the Euro sign in Latin-1? Where are the curly quotes used by almost all English-language press? What happens when a press release destined for Time Magazine gets piped thru a series of single-byte Unix utilities? Undefined!)
XML, another system that considers text the universal data type, is Unicode based. They understand the concept of "universal". Same for HTML now. More and more Web pages are going to UTF-8, even for English, to avoid weird problems with Macs vs. PCs, Euro signs, curly quotes, embedded non-English text, etc. Are such pages really supposed to be out of reach of standard Unix utilities?
Java and
IETF and W3C have made it clear that no non-Unicode-based text protocols will be considered from now on.
Oracle is recommending Unicode as the format for all database text for new databases. So what happens when you cripple Unix so that it can't handle Oracle data in default form?
AT&T considers Unicode the future of Unix (cf. Plan 9), Sun has made the conversion to full Unicode fundamental to the future of Solaris, and as we speak the Free Standards Organization is preparing to do the same for an upcoming version of the LSB (Linux Standards Base) common core that all major Linux vendors have committed to.
It's unfortunate that so many Unix users still think that ASCII was good enough for grampa, so it should be good enough for every Unix user on earth from now on, but fortunately those who drive the standards have abandoned that kind of thinking forever.
ISO will take a dim view of MS suing people to prevent implementations of an ISO standard. If MS sues anyway, the OSS community will create alternatives that ISO would take very seriously as the basis for the next version of the standard. MS doesn't control the votes of the national representatives on the ISO committee, nor does an ISO standard control MS, but there are powerful commercial incentives for MS to avoid losing control.
It's a great language to work in. If MS makes it impossible to have a full .Net clone, I would still be delighted to have a good ISO C# compiler (even a native compiler), a runtime (which could just be a library that links to native code, like the GC libraries for C++), the subset of libraries included in ISO CLI, GTK# for GUIs, and whatever other libraries the OSS community develops for various useful things (like CPAN, but for Mono).
In fact, if MS starts suing people to prevent them from implementing an ISO standard, the ISO committee would lean strongly toward making this OSS alternative the basis for the next version of the ISO standard.
The soon-to-be ISO C# language is wonderful to work in. The cloning of the full .Net system may be entirely successful, or some substitutions may be required for legal reasons.
Either way will be okay with me. Yes, I'd like to be able to run unmodified Windows apps on Linux, but there will be enough local platform (P/Inovoke) stuff used in most major GUI apps that binary portability won't be likely anyway.
It doesn't have to be like Java: obsessively the same -- at the binary level -- regardless of the costs.
A little bit of porting work in exchange for access to some local platform features and potentially a better end product -- I'll take that tradeoff.
I think Mono will provide it, regardless of what MS does.