yeah, they do that whenever you perform an "action" on something else in your library. I've noticed it too, on the Mac. A bit annoying.
If enough people email apple to complain about it, they'll fix it. Though considering we're at version 4 now, I gather that most people in the Mac world haven't complained about this particular quirk much, for some reason.
The diverse knowledge and political knowhow required to make any large organization undertake any major changes is at least as complex as building a distributed system with several hundred thousand lines of code. Management is still largely a liberal art (despite what the quantitative-obsessed MBA hordes may think).
There are lots of incompetent programmers; there are lots of incompetent executives and management consultants. But in both categories there are those that can do truly amazing things.
Certainly it's unfortunate that we don't always value expert technical achievement (this has been changing in pockets here and there), but it doesn't take away from the ability of these executives.
That last statement was uncalled for, and I apologize.
It was a result of my general frustration in listening to your problems which in my opinion are a result of a lack of understanding of the Java virtual machine. Reading your other posts about defeating GC has confirmed this. You have a lot of learning to do, I think. (But I shouldn't have been so condescending.)
"Java is not high level even in design. It is basically C++ stripped down. That makes it less high-level than C++."
That's a stunning feat of illogic. Every move to a high level strips out some features of the lower level.
The number one bug error in Java? Null reference exception.
That would imply quite a few segmentation faults in C.
For web programming, C HTTP requests are short lived so we don't bother with freeing any memory. Leaked C memory is around for less than a second, who cares?
Words fail me. Memory leaks are very important for most systems. How can you suggest an extremely narrow case (forked C processes) is applicable to a general case?
My experience has been that the Java claim of less bugs because of no NULL pointers and no memory leaks is hogwash. Yeah, there are no array bounds errors in Java but if one uses Strings in C++ one can get the same benefit.
Memory leaks in Java are a result of improperly letting go of objects.
In a web-based stateless system written in Java , there is very little chance of memory leaks, just like in your C application, unless you're stuffing a whole ton of useless objects into your ServletContext or HttpSession.
NULL pointer exceptions in Java are a result of improperly NULLifying your instance variables or by using fields that haven't been initialized yet.
So, in summary, you're writing code that uses uninitialized variables and simultaneously stuffs every object in sight into a static variable or HttpSession.
Again, words fail me. You do realize that while Java is a lot easier to manage memory than C, it still requires someone to apply a mild amount of *thought* behind what they're doing?
Garbage collection in the JVM is a big disaster costwise. It is really a challenge to tune and benchmark garbabe collection behavior. Performance is not linear, but shows elbows in the curve because the memory allocation failure and swapping starts happening much above 50% sustained CPU utilization.
Optimizing GC is not a very difficult challenge on modern virtual machines (v1.3-v1.4) because manual GC is no longer required. Analyzing GC occurences can be done easily wtih -verbose:gc, and there are many options for tuning thresholds.
You have much bigger problems than GC optimization if you're swapping memory: you don't even understand how to set a maximum heap size.
Again, words fail me. In my career, I don't think I've seen so much incompetence packed into a single message. Please consider a different career.
I had a VoiceStream / Nokia GSM phone in the NYC area in 2000-2002 and I had much better reception than my friends on other CDMA/TDMA networks. Generally every city I had to go to (San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Charleston SC, Detroit) worked fine with GSM, though I found I would have no reception in smaller cities in states like Virginia. I was quite content with GSM.
I moved to Toronto in 2002 and have a Rogers AT&T Wireless GSM phone (a BlackBerry 5810). Toronto reception for GSM is OK, but GPRS reception tends to suck (making the BlackBerry difficult to use - it sometimes takes upwards of 10 minutes to negotiate a GPRS signal vs. the "always-on" Mobitex signal of prior models).
Now besides the reception being awful for GPRS everywhere, I find the AT&T GSM network is somewhat dodgy at times when I travel: I found myself having to roam onto the VoiceStream network in NYC quite a bit. In Seattle, the AT&T network was barely reachable, and in San Francisco, same thing (Cingular's was reachable though).
There were entire days in San Francisco this past June where I couldn't get *any* GSM signal from any network, AT&T OR Cingular, even when I did a network scan. I've heard similar complaints from other GSM users.
So I'm not sure what the problem is... I know the BlackBerry 5810 isn't the best GSM phone, but I've heard of problems with 6710's and the new "blueberrys". I'm not sure about the Sony/Ericssons. Are all the recent models of GSM phones just crap? Or has the recent upsurge in GSM network investment created a bunch of technical problems?
The absolute worst thing about the Fox film was the "revelation" that the Doctor was part human. This is an unforgivable twist that should be removed from memory.
Really? I thought I quite liked that bit. I wonder if the new series will treat it as canon.
I used to think Dell did meaningful work: they had high quality boxes for cheap prices. This was around 1996-97. Then Dell skyrocketed... and and I switched to a Mac.
Your comments on success are well taken. Economists and businesspeople often view profit maximization and financial results as the end of a business, but the reality is that this is the "mode" of the business - it says nothing of what the business actually does, just the constraints that it is under (it needs to be profitable).
At the same time, there is concern of a business' sustainability if it is not profitable enough. Apple, for example, has not been particularily profitable lately, which means while they're not decaying fast, they're still decaying in a sense: they're not covering their future costs adequately. This may change, but it is a valid concern, especially to long term buyers of Apple products and services.
Unfortunately, the over-emphasis on quantitative measures has caused a distortion of what "success" means everywhere. Financial analysts even sometimes go so far as to scorn anyone that actually cares about what a business does instead of a dispassionate look at numbers. This ignores another reality: businesses are simultaenously social and economic institutions. One can't get rid of that social aspect (though they may try).
While I think Phil exagerrates the cost of a Java solution over a scripting based solution, he does hit the nail on the head with Java's dearth of support for named bind-variables and flexible SQL support.
This is more cultural than technological. SQLJ has been available for years and handles bind variables in the same way that C does. But nobody uses it.
There's a tremendous distaste for SQL databases in the Java community. A major component of the Java community seems to have evolved out of the OO purist / Smalltalk view of things that view relational databases as an abomination to be avoided, or at least wrapped and hidden with an object-relational mapping layer. This is due to many varied reasons: dealing with objects alone is very empowering, and becoming an expert at SQL and relations is a discipline unto itself that many Java developers choose not to undertake.
If one DID actually try to learn the technology behind SQL and databases like Oracle, they'd discover a tremendously powerful engine for storing and retrieving data, that doesn't necessarily require elaborate model-view-controller architectures for good maintainability.
Simple web applications can be written with packages of stored procedures and a minimal data binding framework to JSP pages in a snap. In fact, this seems to be the approach ASP.NET and ADO.NET has been taking. Apple's WebObjects took this approach too, though with an object/relational mapper underneath (and "Fetch Specifications" instead of , or in support of, stored procedures).
Struts was the first real stab at a good data binding framework for JSP and is wonderful, but generally wasn't dynamic enough until the introduction of the DynaBean.
In summary, I think Java can definitely achieve the productivity levels of PHP and Perl, but the default recommendations from Sun are not the approaches that lead to these levels of productivity. I would suggest that the learning curve in Java might be higher to achieve this productivity, but it certainly is possible.
But I also think that the Java-based techniques do tend to favour a certain level of modularity that PHP and Perl and traditional VB/ASP based approaches do not favour out of the box, thus leading to a very unmaintainable approach. I think the Java community over compensated with "too much" modularity, but there are signs this is calming down.
I didn't say philosophy was wrong or bad, I just said that philosophical posturing is politically ineffective.
Philosophical inquiry is a noble and good persuit. But when it becomes mere posturing it elminates the possibility of debate which is the essense of politics.
I would like to honestly point out something that seems to be often missed by free software advocates and is a major reason why the free software argument has had a difficult time politically.
You have an opinion about what software becomes when it leaves your head - that the information is "freed". The world at large has a very different perspsective on that, they view it as intellectual property.
Who is "right" or "wrong" objectively is for philosophers or saints to decide. In politics, the question is never, "who is right", the question is one of "what works" to progress society? (the reason for this is that politics, even democratic politics, is not a realiable means to figure out right from wrong)
I am saying this because rhetoric like the above message is clearly philosophical, it is not political. Using a philosophical stance will not help the cause of promoting free software and reasonable copyright laws in this world, because philosophical posturing is often not concerned with reality as it is, but how it should be (or how the FSF says it should be).
The idea of copyright as a means to promote the progress of society is an old one, and still may be a good one. But it continues to be stretched to the point of abuse by those who wish to turn this principle into solely implying the progress of for-profit corporations. We must fight this trend politically. That means, we need solutions, and we need actions, and concrete visions.
We do not need philosophizing about whether charging a fee for free software is good or bad, or rationalizing it as "giving a small free to other friends". I point out this not as an insult, but because you seemed to have hit RMS' philosophy square on the head. It is a crystal clear example of why RMS is ineffective in politics but ESR is somewhat effective. (I sometimes wonder if the FSF goal is free software or universal friendship?)
I think most people realize that economic transactions in the world exist precicely because most of the world is not friendly with one another. We may regret this, think it awful, but it is... reality today. Software development exists within an economic system. And changing that is a a much bigger battle than fair copyright laws. Choose your battles wisely, and some may actually be solved in this lifetime.
Linux or POSIX don't even enter into his thinking as platforms. He already thinks of the Linux and POSIX APIs as being irrelevant, supplanted by Java APIs, APIs that, by his own statement, Sun effectively owns.
I think you're misreading this.
Scott was referring to development communities within the corporate world, and was correct, there really are only two "communities" left in that world, led by rabid fans.
There are pockets of C++ , COBOL, Perl, Python, etc. but they're more "tools" than "communities".
Sure, they have their rabid fans, but you really don't see too many Python vs..NET articles here.. No, it's all Java vs..NET because the "communities" really are "tribes", complete with their own belief systems and mythologies, fed by their large creators.
I know top, top, talented people who are still unemployed (and we're talking about people whose names at least 25% of Slashdot would instantly recognize).
Are they willing to move? That usually is a major reason for "dearth of talent": it's aribtrary based on the pool in the area. Web-based job sites have helped change this, of course, but people with families don't like to move.
Another argument is that Silicon Valley has an abnormally high percentage of IT unemployment vs. the rest of the country.
Another argument is that it's pretty hard to judge "stardom" from a resume.
And finally, one person's definition of stardom is not another's. There are lots of guru C, Lisp and COBOL programmers out there that are unemployed because they don't understand J2EE. I've interviewed people like this... and as much as I recognize their talent, it's a hard sell, especially when they won't be productive for a few months (when your project is only a few months long!). It sucks, but welcome to the culture of IT today.
I'm generally in agreement with Schumpeter's view, but there are a couple of other ideas you should look into:
- Henry Mintzberg, a well known organizational theorist, has noted that most organizations have the "seeds of their own destruction" planted into them in their tendency to drift towards a bureaucratic configuration, which inevitably leads to a politicized configuration, thus resulting in either renewal or the death of the organization. This is congruent with Schumpeter's view of creative destruction, though from an organizational theory perspective.
There is a problem however: corporations more and more are being sustained through political means. Corporate welfare is all the rage in the USA - from the airline industry to MCI Worldcom, handouts are the norm. Ever since the government bailed out Chrysler so many years ago, it has become almost impossible for the government to let a big company die.
The hackles and howls from the business community and press over the death of Arther Andersen are still being felt: they don't feel it's a good idea to let a company die. And they may have a point, considering the social wreckage caused by unemployment. BUT we still don't have a good solution to balancing the need for killing ineffective, weak, or corrupt companies with the need for social continuity and a strong employment policy.
- Karl Polanyi wrote some great stuff about the problem with economic growth and "creative destruction" - it's the "destruction" part that wreaks havoc on society. Social legislation serves as a counter balance to economic growth. Society is getting better at coping with change, but its mode of behaviour since the beginning of time has been to prevent change. Growth uber alles can cause tremendous strife and can even lead to depressions if the society cannot keep up, or if there is too much transitional unemployment. Is this because a key purpose of modern society is to provide status and function for the individual in the context of its representative organizations (whether businesses, non-profits, or government). If it fails to do this, society will begin to disintegrate - and the economy will follow. Today, social concerns are treated another one of those "exogenous" factors in the market system because they're hard to measure.
The new growth theorists are finally taking Schumpeter seriously in factoring technological change and innovation into the core economic models (the endogenous growth theories). I wonder how long it will be before they factor social needs into it. Social needs are even harder to quanitify than innovation, but it doesn't make it any less important.
Unfortunately, way too many pseudo-intellectuals that will take economic theory's dearth of support for social needs as indication that social needs are actually irrelevant and that growth is paramount, and all social ills can be solved by freer markets. This is a sadly incomplete vision.
sure, granted, but CPU resources vs. hardware resources from an economic perspective, are just that: resources. Continuing my analogy, back in the day, CPU cycles WERE a fairly scarce resource and allocating them on compile jobs was fairly expensive if the programmers weren't very thorough in their efforts to make a bug free program.
Today this isn't a concern (and, to the horror of many a mainframer, CPU idleness is considered a good thing to some).
What we have in the aerospace bureaucracy is a fear - of economics mostly, but safety as well (which is the purpose of bureaucracy in the first place I suppose). The question now becomes who's going to fight the good fight to change the aritficially imposed economics of this situation over the coming years / decades. Typically this requires a monomaniac on a mission.
I see a lot of skeptics replying, "Carmack is wrong headed, if you screw up a rocket, it crashes, it's not just a compile bug". Many of these comments seem to be suggesting that we should go back to the "old school" style of programmer that thought & planned his code before submitting, instead of relying on the feedback of a compiler.
This is based on the completely false assertion that code will be better / more bug free if you "think harder". It ignores that in the past 30 years of programming we have learned the value of feedback in the software development thought process.
The idea that somehow if I spend more time in a chair planning the solution that the solution will be better if I evolve my way to it is some sort of romantic vision of how solutions to tough problems are actually solved. This could be seen as a version the "prove the code works" vs. "test the code" debate. Or that proofs follow from the axioms. I counter that usually it's a process of some rather messy creativity, trial, and error.
In programming in the large, we have generally learned that "phased" approaches to software development (known as waterfall) tend not to work very well because they de-emphasize the feedback that occurs downstream in the development process. To contrast, an incremental approach enables smaller steps to be delivered , and minimizes the impact of erroneous assumptions discovered downstream in the development.
In programming in the small, development is a form of communication between the computer and the developer. The computer is designed to tell us where we are wrong, we just need to tell it exactly what to expect: for this we have compilers and test cases. Compilers can't catch everything.
Now, this is not suggesting that today's style of "let's see if it compiles!" development is appropriate for aerospace. That is the unfortunate effect of feedback & incremental approaches - it makes programming easier, even for people that shouldn't be doing it. These people "program by accident", and just meander through their code until it does the job, sort of. This is not a reflection of the incremental approach in the hands of an experienced developer that "programs on purpose", that understands what he or she is doing at every step of the way.
Aerospace development isn't "amateur hour", and the incremental approach will just make professionals all the more productive.
There's also a plausible argument that most of the scrappy upstarts that innovate are actually making boatloads of mistakes that large players can easily take advantage of due to their size.
There certainly are examples of companies where the scrappy upstart actually managed to stay afloat when the competitors rushed in. Most of today's gorillas are those companies. They aren't the norm, but perhaps nor should they be.
Competition and innovation are difficult, especially because the only determinant of success is whether you can create enough customers to remain profitable. You can point to one company being more "clever" or "inventive" than the other, but that's not what sells - it's what the market deems as innovation that sells, for better or worse. A lot of small players get too wrapped up in their own genius to recognize that. Disruptive technologies are a difficult sell at first, because you're not pandering to a need, you're creating a new one.
Secondly, the idea of the "small innovator" out-innovating the big company is a bit of a romantic myth. Certainly the disruptive innovations tend to come from outside, but the incremental ones certainly come en masse from large companies.
As for "huge, bloated" companies like Microsoft/Sony are so successful, please add a bit of context here. Microsoft has so much cash in the bank that I'm not sure their bloat will have much of any impact for at least another decade. The Sony group, on the other hand, were hurting badly 10 years ago, and were saved by their own major innovation - the Playstation. The story of the Playstation was hardly about a bunch of smoky Japanese guys in room looking to crush the competition...
spread it around all the investors and it's pretty small (but quite acceptable in this economic environment). percentage figures aren't a conspiracy, it's all about relative to how much you put in. which company is in better shape, the company that earns $10m profit on $4 billion in revenue or $10m in profit on $30m in revenue? One is certainly bigger, but that's today. profit is tomorrow's costs.
The problem with revolution is that those who revolt either a) think they have "THE" answer, or b) have no answer and are basically just trying to destroy they old. Both of these positions are inherently irresponsible and typically lead to greater atrocities than were committed under the prior regime in the short-run.
This is not to say that revolts CAN have positive effects. They can, but we tend to romanticize these few exceptions.
Eclipse could plug into Bitkeeper and act as a front-end... there are many such plugins for things like Perforce, ClearCase, PVCS, etc. But that's about it.
We have the case of a government chartered monopoly becoming a regular business. When they own the common infrastructure, how else can you foster competition but through regulation?
Markets are not created by God or magically. They're an effective social and political construct used to allocate goods. And they don't always work.
All of this stuff just seems to be be a means to ensure competition for consumers. I fail to see how this has anything to do with economic planning, full employment, or proletarian revolution.
Because if you do mean its improved in the very recent past, I feel you should put less faith in off-hand anecdotal evidence
I mean within the past 3 years, yes., And I would say the same for you, since your pointing to your company as anecdotal evidence. The truth is that anecdotes are all we have barring an independent reliability analysis of MySQL.
I'm quite glad you've had success with MySQL. I'm merely pointing out that some people haven't. The number of these incidents are getting lower, but it's going to take time for people to get comfortable with it. Oracle used to lose data back in the 1980's too. It arguably took them until v6 to get truly reliable. And it's going to take time for MySQL to handle all of the different needs out there (OLTP on one hand, massively parallel warehousing on the other hand). Data management is necessarily a very risk-averse area.
Also note that I haven't gone into feature comparisons which is another area where MySQL is a few years behind. They'll probably catch up to a reasonable extent eventually. But I'm not too frightened for IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft quite yet.
support in CVS isn't as sophisticated as it is in alternative SCM solutions (Perforce is my fav). This makes it hard to use in multi-streamed development projects. There are whitepapers on the Perforce website about their branching & integration approach.
There are a few other reasons too: (forgive me if my memory here is rusty, I haven't used CVS in a bit) the distinction between tags for branches and tags as labels gets confusing at times. The version number system (1.1.1.1.1..... ad nauseum) is also difficult for human parsing (it's useful in a revision history to note explicit branch & integration points without having to parse out the version string)
Generally my feeling about CVS is that it does most jobs well, the real issue is the amount of human attention and discpline required to use it properly for large development projects.
Re:Are you asking about .NET, or something else?
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Can .NET Really Scale?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No one knows the real reasons behind the Orbitz debacle, other than it being attributed in the press to oracle real application clusters. RAC runs quite a few large systems without such press debacles including a crucial one for the FAA... We don't know if it was a bug, or incompetent sysadmins, or both.
As for MySQL being "reliable", you need only look at the history of Slashdot to see that MySQL's "reliability" is, at best, a fairly recent innovation, and still open for debate.
"The problem is not whether or not the executives are focusing on the quarter. The problem is that the executives no longer feel they have to answer to anybody."
This is called the Agency problem, and has been known since the 1930's, but has been exacerbated by the past 20 years combination of hostile takeovers and neo-conservative politics. Politics in the western world has generally been attempting to return social power back to the plutocrats. This effectively was the basis for power in the 19th century which gave corporate management it's legitimacy: property rights in the corporation forced them to do be responsible.
The problem isn't that management has usurped this power from shareholders, it's that shareholders abdicated this power. They just want a claim on profits. They don't want responsibility.
Thus leaving management as illegitimate power until we find a suitable social principle to make it legitimate -- there are a few contenders, though none in vogue today.
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yeah, they do that whenever you perform an "action" on something else in your library. I've noticed it too, on the Mac. A bit annoying.
If enough people email apple to complain about it, they'll fix it. Though considering we're at version 4 now, I gather that most people in the Mac world haven't complained about this particular quirk much, for some reason.
what's even worse is that he switches words... first it's amoral, then it's immoral.
He's probably right, amoral means "without morals". It's a business decision (and probably a poor, short-sighted one).
As for being "immoral", that's an RMS-like complaint about freedom that is subject to debate.
The diverse knowledge and political knowhow required to make any large organization undertake any major changes is at least as complex as building a distributed system with several hundred thousand lines of code. Management is still largely a liberal art (despite what the quantitative-obsessed MBA hordes may think).
There are lots of incompetent programmers; there are lots of incompetent executives and management consultants. But in both categories there are those that can do truly amazing things.
Certainly it's unfortunate that we don't always value expert technical achievement (this has been changing in pockets here and there), but it doesn't take away from the ability of these executives.
That last statement was uncalled for, and I apologize.
It was a result of my general frustration in listening to your problems which in my opinion are a result of a lack of understanding of the Java virtual machine. Reading your other posts about defeating GC has confirmed this. You have a lot of learning to do, I think. (But I shouldn't have been so condescending.)
"Java is not high level even in design. It is basically C++ stripped down. That makes it less high-level than C++."
That's a stunning feat of illogic. Every move to a high level strips out some features of the lower level.
The number one bug error in Java? Null reference exception.
That would imply quite a few segmentation faults in C.
For web programming, C HTTP requests are short lived so we don't bother with freeing any memory. Leaked C memory is around for less than a second, who cares?
Words fail me. Memory leaks are very important for most systems. How can you suggest an extremely narrow case (forked C processes) is applicable to a general case?
My experience has been that the Java claim of less bugs because of no NULL pointers and no memory leaks is hogwash. Yeah, there are no array bounds errors in Java but if one uses Strings in C++ one can get the same benefit.
Memory leaks in Java are a result of improperly letting go of objects.
In a web-based stateless system written in Java , there is very little chance of memory leaks, just like in your C application, unless you're stuffing a whole ton of useless objects into your ServletContext or HttpSession.
NULL pointer exceptions in Java are a result of improperly NULLifying your instance variables or by using fields that haven't been initialized yet.
So, in summary, you're writing code that uses uninitialized variables and simultaneously stuffs every object in sight into a static variable or HttpSession.
Again, words fail me. You do realize that while Java is a lot easier to manage memory than C, it still requires someone to apply a mild amount of *thought* behind what they're doing?
Garbage collection in the JVM is a big disaster costwise. It is really a challenge to tune and benchmark garbabe collection behavior. Performance is not linear, but shows elbows in the curve because the memory allocation failure and swapping starts happening much above 50% sustained CPU utilization.
Optimizing GC is not a very difficult challenge on modern virtual machines (v1.3-v1.4) because manual GC is no longer required. Analyzing GC occurences can be done easily wtih -verbose:gc, and there are many options for tuning thresholds.
You have much bigger problems than GC optimization if you're swapping memory: you don't even understand how to set a maximum heap size.
Again, words fail me. In my career, I don't think I've seen so much incompetence packed into a single message. Please consider a different career.
I had a VoiceStream / Nokia GSM phone in the NYC area in 2000-2002 and I had much better reception than my friends on other CDMA/TDMA networks. Generally every city I had to go to (San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Charleston SC, Detroit) worked fine with GSM, though I found I would have no reception in smaller cities in states like Virginia. I was quite content with GSM.
I moved to Toronto in 2002 and have a Rogers AT&T Wireless GSM phone (a BlackBerry 5810). Toronto reception for GSM is OK, but GPRS reception tends to suck (making the BlackBerry difficult to use - it sometimes takes upwards of 10 minutes to negotiate a GPRS signal vs. the "always-on" Mobitex signal of prior models).
Now besides the reception being awful for GPRS everywhere, I find the AT&T GSM network is somewhat dodgy at times when I travel: I found myself having to roam onto the VoiceStream network in NYC quite a bit. In Seattle, the AT&T network was barely reachable, and in San Francisco, same thing (Cingular's was reachable though).
There were entire days in San Francisco this past June where I couldn't get *any* GSM signal from any network, AT&T OR Cingular, even when I did a network scan. I've heard similar complaints from other GSM users.
So I'm not sure what the problem is... I know the BlackBerry 5810 isn't the best GSM phone, but I've heard of problems with 6710's and the new "blueberrys". I'm not sure about the Sony/Ericssons. Are all the recent models of GSM phones just crap? Or has the recent upsurge in GSM network investment created a bunch of technical problems?
The absolute worst thing about the Fox film was the "revelation" that the Doctor was part human. This is an unforgivable twist that should be removed from memory.
Really? I thought I quite liked that bit. I wonder if the new series will treat it as canon.
I used to think Dell did meaningful work: they had high quality boxes for cheap prices. This was around 1996-97. Then Dell skyrocketed... and and I switched to a Mac.
Your comments on success are well taken. Economists and businesspeople often view profit maximization and financial results as the end of a business, but the reality is that this is the "mode" of the business - it says nothing of what the business actually does, just the constraints that it is under (it needs to be profitable).
At the same time, there is concern of a business' sustainability if it is not profitable enough. Apple, for example, has not been particularily profitable lately, which means while they're not decaying fast, they're still decaying in a sense: they're not covering their future costs adequately. This may change, but it is a valid concern, especially to long term buyers of Apple products and services.
Unfortunately, the over-emphasis on quantitative measures has caused a distortion of what "success" means everywhere. Financial analysts even sometimes go so far as to scorn anyone that actually cares about what a business does instead of a dispassionate look at numbers. This ignores another reality: businesses are simultaenously social and economic institutions. One can't get rid of that social aspect (though they may try).
While I think Phil exagerrates the cost of a Java solution over a scripting based solution, he does hit the nail on the head with Java's dearth of support for named bind-variables and flexible SQL support.
This is more cultural than technological. SQLJ has been available for years and handles bind variables in the same way that C does. But nobody uses it.
There's a tremendous distaste for SQL databases in the Java community. A major component of the Java community seems to have evolved out of the OO purist / Smalltalk view of things that view relational databases as an abomination to be avoided, or at least wrapped and hidden with an object-relational mapping layer. This is due to many varied reasons: dealing with objects alone is very empowering, and becoming an expert at SQL and relations is a discipline unto itself that many Java developers choose not to undertake.
If one DID actually try to learn the technology behind SQL and databases like Oracle, they'd discover a tremendously powerful engine for storing and retrieving data, that doesn't necessarily require elaborate model-view-controller architectures for good maintainability.
Simple web applications can be written with packages of stored procedures and a minimal data binding framework to JSP pages in a snap. In fact, this seems to be the approach ASP.NET and ADO.NET has been taking. Apple's WebObjects took this approach too, though with an object/relational mapper underneath (and "Fetch Specifications" instead of , or in support of, stored procedures).
Struts was the first real stab at a good data binding framework for JSP and is wonderful, but generally wasn't dynamic enough until the introduction of the DynaBean.
In summary, I think Java can definitely achieve the productivity levels of PHP and Perl, but the default recommendations from Sun are not the approaches that lead to these levels of productivity. I would suggest that the learning curve in Java might be higher to achieve this productivity, but it certainly is possible.
But I also think that the Java-based techniques do tend to favour a certain level of modularity that PHP and Perl and traditional VB/ASP based approaches do not favour out of the box, thus leading to a very unmaintainable approach. I think the Java community over compensated with "too much" modularity, but there are signs this is calming down.
I didn't say philosophy was wrong or bad, I just said that philosophical posturing is politically ineffective.
Philosophical inquiry is a noble and good persuit. But when it becomes mere posturing it elminates the possibility of debate which is the essense of politics.
I would like to honestly point out something that seems to be often missed by free software advocates and is a major reason why the free software argument has had a difficult time politically.
You have an opinion about what software becomes when it leaves your head - that the information is "freed". The world at large has a very different perspsective on that, they view it as intellectual property.
Who is "right" or "wrong" objectively is for philosophers or saints to decide. In politics, the question is never, "who is right", the question is one of "what works" to progress society? (the reason for this is that politics, even democratic politics, is not a realiable means to figure out right from wrong)
I am saying this because rhetoric like the above message is clearly philosophical, it is not political. Using a philosophical stance will not help the cause of promoting free software and reasonable copyright laws in this world, because philosophical posturing is often not concerned with reality as it is, but how it should be (or how the FSF says it should be).
The idea of copyright as a means to promote the progress of society is an old one, and still may be a good one. But it continues to be stretched to the point of abuse by those who wish to turn this principle into solely implying the progress of for-profit corporations. We must fight this trend politically. That means, we need solutions, and we need actions, and concrete visions.
We do not need philosophizing about whether charging a fee for free software is good or bad, or rationalizing it as "giving a small free to other friends". I point out this not as an insult, but because you seemed to have hit RMS' philosophy square on the head. It is a crystal clear example of why RMS is ineffective in politics but ESR is somewhat effective. (I sometimes wonder if the FSF goal is free software or universal friendship?)
I think most people realize that economic transactions in the world exist precicely because most of the world is not friendly with one another. We may regret this, think it awful, but it is
Linux or POSIX don't even enter into his thinking as platforms. He already thinks of the Linux and POSIX APIs as being irrelevant, supplanted by Java APIs, APIs that, by his own statement, Sun effectively owns.
.NET articles here.. No, it's all Java vs. .NET because the "communities" really are "tribes", complete with their own belief systems and mythologies, fed by their large creators.
I think you're misreading this.
Scott was referring to development communities within the corporate world, and was correct, there really are only two "communities" left in that world, led by rabid fans.
There are pockets of C++ , COBOL, Perl, Python, etc. but they're more "tools" than "communities".
Sure, they have their rabid fans, but you really don't see too many Python vs.
I know top, top, talented people who are still unemployed (and we're talking about people whose names at least 25% of Slashdot would instantly recognize).
Are they willing to move? That usually is a major reason for "dearth of talent": it's aribtrary based on the pool in the area. Web-based job sites have helped change this, of course, but people with families don't like to move.
Another argument is that Silicon Valley has an abnormally high percentage of IT unemployment vs. the rest of the country.
Another argument is that it's pretty hard to judge "stardom" from a resume.
And finally, one person's definition of stardom is not another's. There are lots of guru C, Lisp and COBOL programmers out there that are unemployed because they don't understand J2EE. I've interviewed people like this... and as much as I recognize their talent, it's a hard sell, especially when they won't be productive for a few months (when your project is only a few months long!). It sucks, but welcome to the culture of IT today.
I'm generally in agreement with Schumpeter's view, but there are a couple of other ideas you should look into:
- Henry Mintzberg, a well known organizational theorist, has noted that most organizations have the "seeds of their own destruction" planted into them in their tendency to drift towards a bureaucratic configuration, which inevitably leads to a politicized configuration, thus resulting in either renewal or the death of the organization. This is congruent with Schumpeter's view of creative destruction, though from an organizational theory perspective.
There is a problem however: corporations more and more are being sustained through political means. Corporate welfare is all the rage in the USA - from the airline industry to MCI Worldcom, handouts are the norm. Ever since the government bailed out Chrysler so many years ago, it has become almost impossible for the government to let a big company die.
The hackles and howls from the business community and press over the death of Arther Andersen are still being felt: they don't feel it's a good idea to let a company die. And they may have a point, considering the social wreckage caused by unemployment. BUT we still don't have a good solution to balancing the need for killing ineffective, weak, or corrupt companies with the need for social continuity and a strong employment policy.
- Karl Polanyi wrote some great stuff about the problem with economic growth and "creative destruction" - it's the "destruction" part that wreaks havoc on society. Social legislation serves as a counter balance to economic growth. Society is getting better at coping with change, but its mode of behaviour since the beginning of time has been to prevent change. Growth uber alles can cause tremendous strife and can even lead to depressions if the society cannot keep up, or if there is too much transitional unemployment. Is this because a key purpose of modern society is to provide status and function for the individual in the context of its representative organizations (whether businesses, non-profits, or government). If it fails to do this, society will begin to disintegrate - and the economy will follow. Today, social concerns are treated another one of those "exogenous" factors in the market system because they're hard to measure.
The new growth theorists are finally taking Schumpeter seriously in factoring technological change and innovation into the core economic models (the endogenous growth theories). I wonder how long it will be before they factor social needs into it. Social needs are even harder to quanitify than innovation, but it doesn't make it any less important.
Unfortunately, way too many pseudo-intellectuals that will take economic theory's dearth of support for social needs as indication that social needs are actually irrelevant and that growth is paramount, and all social ills can be solved by freer markets. This is a sadly incomplete vision.
sure, granted, but CPU resources vs. hardware resources from an economic perspective, are just that: resources. Continuing my analogy, back in the day, CPU cycles WERE a fairly scarce resource and allocating them on compile jobs was fairly expensive if the programmers weren't very thorough in their efforts to make a bug free program.
Today this isn't a concern (and, to the horror of many a mainframer, CPU idleness is considered a good thing to some).
What we have in the aerospace bureaucracy is a fear - of economics mostly, but safety as well (which is the purpose of bureaucracy in the first place I suppose). The question now becomes who's going to fight the good fight to change the aritficially imposed economics of this situation over the coming years / decades. Typically this requires a monomaniac on a mission.
I see a lot of skeptics replying, "Carmack is wrong headed, if you screw up a rocket, it crashes, it's not just a compile bug". Many of these comments seem to be suggesting that we should go back to the "old school" style of programmer that thought & planned his code before submitting, instead of relying on the feedback of a compiler.
This is based on the completely false assertion that code will be better / more bug free if you "think harder". It ignores that in the past 30 years of programming we have learned the value of feedback in the software development thought process.
The idea that somehow if I spend more time in a chair planning the solution that the solution will be better if I evolve my way to it is some sort of romantic vision of how solutions to tough problems are actually solved. This could be seen as a version the "prove the code works" vs. "test the code" debate. Or that proofs follow from the axioms. I counter that usually it's a process of some rather messy creativity, trial, and error.
In programming in the large, we have generally learned that "phased" approaches to software development (known as waterfall) tend not to work very well because they de-emphasize the feedback that occurs downstream in the development process. To contrast, an incremental approach enables smaller steps to be delivered , and minimizes the impact of erroneous assumptions discovered downstream in the development.
In programming in the small, development is a form of communication between the computer and the developer. The computer is designed to tell us where we are wrong, we just need to tell it exactly what to expect: for this we have compilers and test cases. Compilers can't catch everything.
Now, this is not suggesting that today's style of "let's see if it compiles!" development is appropriate for aerospace. That is the unfortunate effect of feedback & incremental approaches - it makes programming easier, even for people that shouldn't be doing it. These people "program by accident", and just meander through their code until it does the job, sort of. This is not a reflection of the incremental approach in the hands of an experienced developer that "programs on purpose", that understands what he or she is doing at every step of the way.
Aerospace development isn't "amateur hour", and the incremental approach will just make professionals all the more productive.
There's also a plausible argument that most of the scrappy upstarts that innovate are actually making boatloads of mistakes that large players can easily take advantage of due to their size.
There certainly are examples of companies where the scrappy upstart actually managed to stay afloat when the competitors rushed in. Most of today's gorillas are those companies. They aren't the norm, but perhaps nor should they be.
Competition and innovation are difficult, especially because the only determinant of success is whether you can create enough customers to remain profitable. You can point to one company being more "clever" or "inventive" than the other, but that's not what sells - it's what the market deems as innovation that sells, for better or worse. A lot of small players get too wrapped up in their own genius to recognize that. Disruptive technologies are a difficult sell at first, because you're not pandering to a need, you're creating a new one.
Secondly, the idea of the "small innovator" out-innovating the big company is a bit of a romantic myth. Certainly the disruptive innovations tend to come from outside, but the incremental ones certainly come en masse from large companies.
As for "huge, bloated" companies like Microsoft/Sony are so successful, please add a bit of context here. Microsoft has so much cash in the bank that I'm not sure their bloat will have much of any impact for at least another decade.
The Sony group, on the other hand, were hurting badly 10 years ago, and were saved by their own major innovation - the Playstation. The story of the Playstation was hardly about a bunch of smoky Japanese guys in room looking to crush the competition...
spread it around all the investors and it's pretty small (but quite acceptable in this economic environment). percentage figures aren't a conspiracy, it's all about relative to how much you put in. which company is in better shape, the company that earns $10m profit on $4 billion in revenue or $10m in profit on $30m in revenue? One is certainly bigger, but that's today. profit is tomorrow's costs.
The problem with revolution is that those who revolt either a) think they have "THE" answer, or b) have no answer and are basically just trying to destroy they old. Both of these positions are inherently irresponsible and typically lead to greater atrocities than were committed under the prior regime in the short-run.
This is not to say that revolts CAN have positive effects. They can, but we tend to romanticize these few exceptions.
Eclipse could plug into Bitkeeper and act as a front-end... there are many such plugins for things like Perforce, ClearCase, PVCS, etc. But that's about it.
We have the case of a government chartered monopoly becoming a regular business. When they own the common infrastructure, how else can you foster competition but through regulation?
Markets are not created by God or magically. They're an effective social and political construct used to allocate goods. And they don't always work.
All of this stuff just seems to be be a means to ensure competition for consumers. I fail to see how this has anything to do with economic planning, full employment, or proletarian revolution.
Because if you do mean its improved in the very recent past, I feel you should put less faith in off-hand anecdotal evidence
I mean within the past 3 years, yes., And I would say the same for you, since your pointing to your company as anecdotal evidence. The truth is that anecdotes are all we have barring an independent reliability analysis of MySQL.
I'm quite glad you've had success with MySQL. I'm merely pointing out that some people haven't. The number of these incidents are getting lower, but it's going to take time for people to get comfortable with it. Oracle used to lose data back in the 1980's too. It arguably took them until v6 to get truly reliable. And it's going to take time for MySQL to handle all of the different needs out there (OLTP on one hand, massively parallel warehousing on the other hand). Data management is necessarily a very risk-averse area.
Also note that I haven't gone into feature comparisons which is another area where MySQL is a few years behind. They'll probably catch up to a reasonable extent eventually. But I'm not too frightened for IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft quite yet.
support in CVS isn't as sophisticated as it is in alternative SCM solutions (Perforce is my fav). This makes it hard to use in multi-streamed development projects. There are whitepapers on the Perforce website about their branching & integration approach.
There are a few other reasons too: (forgive me if my memory here is rusty, I haven't used CVS in a bit) the distinction between tags for branches and tags as labels gets confusing at times. The version number system (1.1.1.1.1..... ad nauseum) is also difficult for human parsing (it's useful in a revision history to note explicit branch & integration points without having to parse out the version string)
Generally my feeling about CVS is that it does most jobs well, the real issue is the amount of human attention and discpline required to use it properly for large development projects.
No one knows the real reasons behind the Orbitz debacle, other than it being attributed in the press to oracle real application clusters. RAC runs quite a few large systems without such press debacles including a crucial one for the FAA... We don't know if it was a bug, or incompetent sysadmins, or both.
As for MySQL being "reliable", you need only look at the history of Slashdot to see that MySQL's "reliability" is, at best, a fairly recent innovation, and still open for debate.
"The problem is not whether or not the executives are focusing on the quarter. The problem is that the executives no longer feel they have to answer to anybody."
This is called the Agency problem, and has been known since the 1930's, but has been exacerbated by the past 20 years combination of hostile takeovers and neo-conservative politics. Politics in the western world has generally been attempting to return social power back to the plutocrats. This effectively was the basis for power in the 19th century which gave corporate management it's legitimacy: property rights in the corporation forced them to do be responsible.
The problem isn't that management has usurped this power from shareholders, it's that shareholders abdicated this power. They just want a claim on profits. They don't want responsibility.
Thus leaving management as illegitimate power until we find a suitable social principle to make it legitimate -- there are a few contenders, though none in vogue today.