How many major sites now use flash, can the screen reader translate that?
The latest versions of Flash have support for accessibility. There is nothing preventing you from creating a Flash based site that is accessible to the blind.
I've rewritten a bunch of my perl scripts in ruby and I've found that the perl versions tend to be faster but the ruby versions are MUCH easier to understand/maintain. For what I'm doing ruby is "fast enough" so maintainability becomes the deciding factor.
I use ruby today everywhere that I used to use perl.
SourceSafe is a decent product if you've got a fast network but it becomes extremely painful on slow networks.
Our network here is fairly sluggish. On a project with about 500 files, SourceSafe would take 30 minutes to do a diff of the source (just see what was different between your local copy and what's in the archive).
The same project in CVS takes about 3 seconds. Needless to say, we've fully switched over to CVS now for performance reasons.
IBM makes lots of noise about supporting Java but what they never mention is that they're supporting an OLDER version of the language. None of IBM's JVM's support Java2 (JDK1.2+). VisualAge does not support Java2. Websphere does not support Java2.
Java2 has been out for quite a while and the fact that IBM still doesn't support it doesn't give me any confidence that they will stay current in the future. How long will it take for them to support 1.3 or the version after that?
Some parts of IBM are doing some really cool things with Java, an example being the Jikes compiler. If you look closely, however, you'll notice that the only parts of IBM doing CURRENT java stuff are research projects. All the products that IBM plans to make money from are using an OLD version of Java. Admittedly, they're still working on the product and are making it faster and more robust but they're supporting the wrong version of the language.
Hearing that IBM will distribute their VM's with all the major linux distros doesn't make me overly happy. Why do I want another Java 1 VM?
If all the distros are going to be providing a version of Java then it should be a CURRENT version. The Blackdown Java2 VM would be a much better choice IMO.
...but I certainly wouldn't want programmers without degrees working on an important project.... but there are a lot of things you can only get exposure to by being in a class.
My personal experience is that if you split programmers into three categories of compentance:
The best
Average
Mediocre to bad
that you will find that #1 is dominated by self taught programmers who have a degree or diploma in something other than computer science, #2 is dominated by programmers with computer science degrees and #3 is a mixture.
It's important to note that all the really good programmers that I know have a degree or diploma in SOMETHING although that something is rarely computer science. Almost all of the really good ones have taught themselves programming.
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The latest versions of Flash have support for accessibility. There is nothing preventing you from creating a Flash based site that is accessible to the blind.
I use ruby today everywhere that I used to use perl.
SourceSafe is a decent product if you've got a fast network but it becomes extremely painful on slow networks.
Our network here is fairly sluggish. On a project with about 500 files, SourceSafe would take 30 minutes to do a diff of the source (just see what was different between your local copy and what's in the archive).
The same project in CVS takes about 3 seconds. Needless to say, we've fully switched over to CVS now for performance reasons.
IBM makes lots of noise about supporting Java but what they never mention is that they're supporting an OLDER version of the language. None of IBM's JVM's support Java2 (JDK1.2+). VisualAge does not support Java2. Websphere does not support Java2.
Java2 has been out for quite a while and the fact that IBM still doesn't support it doesn't give me any confidence that they will stay current in the future. How long will it take for them to support 1.3 or the version after that?
Some parts of IBM are doing some really cool things with Java, an example being the Jikes compiler. If you look closely, however, you'll notice that the only parts of IBM doing CURRENT java stuff are research projects. All the products that IBM plans to make money from are using an OLD version of Java. Admittedly, they're still working on the product and are making it faster and more robust but they're supporting the wrong version of the language.
Hearing that IBM will distribute their VM's with all the major linux distros doesn't make me overly happy. Why do I want another Java 1 VM?
If all the distros are going to be providing a version of Java then it should be a CURRENT version. The Blackdown Java2 VM would be a much better choice IMO.
My personal experience is that if you split programmers into three categories of compentance:
- The best
- Average
- Mediocre to bad
that you will find that #1 is dominated by self taught programmers who have a degree or diploma in something other than computer science, #2 is dominated by programmers with computer science degrees and #3 is a mixture.It's important to note that all the really good programmers that I know have a degree or diploma in SOMETHING although that something is rarely computer science. Almost all of the really good ones have taught themselves programming.