"Remember, it's 'raising shareholder value,' Not products or customers."
And a company that ignores its customers, or fails to create new customers, will fail, as has happened time again throughout business history. It's a chicken-and-egg argument in some ways, but fundamentally a businesses wouldn't exist if not for a specific social function and task.
The main reason why "shareholder value" hasn't worked is simply because, since the very inception of the modern corporation in the 19th century, shareholders have abdicated control and influence completely to management. They just don't care about how the company is run - it's a whole lot easier to buy public equity shares than to invest in property or private debt. The de facto reality is that shares are merely an entitlement to profits or to assets upon liquidation (after debt-holders, of course).
Anyway, just a bit of theoretical babble that basically says corporate governance is a lot more complicated than "maximize your profits, boys!"
But the guys who run UNIX at the high-end of the spectrum don't see it as a UNIX, it's a Mac, and it's nice for graphic designers and desktop publishers, and maybe even has some room for people doing surface modeling for design purpose, but it's not a CAD workstation, and it's certainly no server.
Your point is taken, and accurate, but I want to re-iterate it in more simple terms: there is a perception in certain industries that the Mac is not a high-powered workstation and is not a server.
Perceptions are not facts, they're opinions, they're views of the world, so when you say this:
They just plain don't write this stuff for Macs. And they never will.
It strikes me as odd that you'd think this, considering the sheer number of mind-baffling trends we've seen. I'm going to list a bunch of very plausible quotes that I've heard circa 1998 - 1999. They're not true now.
"Embedded systems developers don't write stuff in Java. And they never will"
"Linux will never be considered a serious server OS. The big database vendors will never port their products to it."
- Can you name a big database vendor without a Linux port? - Or that Oracle's main marketing push for the past 18 months has been "Unbreakable Linux"?
So, yeah, I take your point that the major CAD vendors don't write stuff for Mac OS X due to perception issues. But do you honestly believe the platform is not capable of running such applications, especially with the new G5, and with X11 being embedded inside of it in 10.3?
Anyway, my point is mainly that strange things happen out there, and it's the companies that watch for the unexpected successes & failures that make great gains.
Re:Turning into Java?
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 1
But Java is a B&D language that no real hacker would prefer...
probably has something to do with:
I am still mystified at the academic community's love of Java.
Which strikes me as either a misunderstanding or just plain hubris, I'm not quite sure yet. Don't you think some academics like Doug Lea are "tr00 hackers", given the tremendous contributions they've made to both the science & industry (i.e. Doug's concurrency libraries)?
There's a lot to like about Java. It's not the most innovative language in the world, but in many ways, it was innovative enough for the time and purpose: a portable, garbage collected, object oriented language to replace the dominant lanugage at the time, C++, which was/is a mess.
Yes. They both are. Most people do not use Photoshop,
For the target market of these systems, i.e. professionals, I think this is incorrect. If you were referring to the iMac or eMac, you may have a point.
As for the choice of compiler, I understand the argument against GCC, and I'm not sure I agree with it, even though it has merit.
Apple's response while prompt, was not frank. If it were frankly honest, Apple would have to admit that their brand new G5 would be slower than Dell's computer from last quarter under certain conditions.
This is unfortunately the problem with *all* benchmarks. Almost any two competitive systems can be measured to be faster than one another under certain conditions.
The point of Apple's benchmarks were to show that "in the general case", the G5 would be faster than an Intel workstation. The general case assumes either a) using photoshop, or b) using applications compiled with GCC.
Are either of these a large stretch? Well (b) might be, and a comparison with MSVC++ and/or ICC would be nice, but then Apple would probably just counter that with IBM's optimised G5 compiler.
If you want an honest benchmark, have Apple's system tweaked by Apple, Dell's system tweaked by Dell, and who gives a damn which complier is used? I'm a user, not a CPU. I don't care about the theoretical capacity of each computer, especially if the theory is tested using inefficient compliers.
Well then, frankly, you shouldn't be paying attention to SPEC benchmarks, you should be looking at the informal timed application benchmarks. These are more "user-centric" and "whole-system" measurements.
The point many on Slashdot are making is that SPEC benchmarks *are fundamentally* theoretical CPU capacity measurements, not intended for users.
Let Apple and Dell pick their own compliers, or even write their own compliers just for this test.
The amount of man hours that goes into an optimising compiler is arguably more than goes into an operating system kernel. It's a rough business, and usually why people tweak existing compilers to perform better on benchmarks such as SPEC.
Fair enough. I was playing the devil's advocate to try to figure out whether I agree with Apple's approach to this, so necessarily don't take my prior responses as hostile, just concerned.
The observation is generally that GCC is optimised for the G5 and not sufficiently optimised for Intel. And there is no evidence for a more optimised compiler for the G4 and G5 available to Apple, because they use GCC to compile their operating system.
Also note that arguably GCC's code generation on Intel has *no* bearing on code generation on PPC. They're different beasts.
I'm a happy 17" powerbook user, I like Apple's products, but they've never been a perfect company. This incident is an example of that.
Frankly, I'm a bit surprised, Steve Jobs is a very smart guy - he knows that the Internet works this way, that this benchmark would be studied and exposed as unacceptably flawed. Of course, all cross-architecture benchmarks are controversial, but intentional crippling is a bit much. All that needs to happen now is a posting on News.Com and Apple has a PR fiasco.
The first order of business, perhaps, could be to take down the SPEC benchmarks from their marketing web pages and focus on the performance increase beyond the G4, which is what existing Mac users really care about.
Beyond that, they better work on other ways to get Intel people to switch other than processor speed - it seems they're still trailing Intel on this curve, and will be for years.
a) Delegates are the equivalent of two method calls. You're realling going to pull out the "slow" card on that?
b) Delegates DO NOT break OO. They are the same concept interfaces at a method-level. They enable polymorphism at a method-level. It's different, not broken.
c) The benefits of anonymous inner classes are granted,.NET should include some kind of equivalent, though I will note that Java's syntax for them is frustrating.
"Jobs's keynotes have been losing their luster lately."
Perhaps 2 years ago, but MWSF blew everyone away, and then some. You're reaching.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
You never stop learning in this business, and there's always something new coming up.
And that attitude is what I (and I pray others) look for when I interview a developer. The capacity to learn, the hunger to learn doesn't necessarily correspond with chronological age.
"All users of the short file would have to wait until the long file write was complete"
You do realize that change-vectors in a journal can be interleaved?
And that there are well-known technological solutions to allow concurrent r/w operations in a single file/table without readers ever blocking writers? (i.e. Oracle or PostgreSQL's multi-versioning)
The only part of an ACID file system that usually requires some leeway, as in a database system, is the "I", isolation. You could crank that up or down depending on the needed semantics of your situation. Consistency and durability are there in most file systems, atomicity less so.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
"Actually, since the 35 year old has 15 more years of experience, his brain can smoke, char, flame, annihilate and flambe the 20 year old."
Unfortunately, that isn't always true. Some people have 1 year of experience 15 times.
Or perhaps it's hard to compete with a generation that started programming when they were 5 years old.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
it's about eliminating duplicate decisions and explicit behavior-type decisions. A decision is made once, and recorded by what object is constructed. Behavior-Type decisions are when you vary behaviour based on an enumerated type code (just use polymorphism!).
I think it's because society is quick to romanticise the "inventor" when what they really value and remember is the "innovator". Invention is about creating new ideas, innovation is about taking ideas, old and new, and making them useful to people today.
Edison's real accomplishment wasn't inventing electricity, there were many others working on the same stuff around the same time. I'd say his accomplishment was building the beginnings of several industries, notably electricity (and General Electric).
In that way, Gates helped to build the beginnings of the personal computer industry. He will be remembered for that. And, like Edison, i think history will document his many faults too. They just probably won't appear in the sound-bite version of history.
By this logic, assembly language should be be the easiest language of all to read, since it's such a simple, regular syntax.
Actually, no, I was thinking more along the lines of Lisp or Smalltalk. Both are small languages with minimal use of symbolic shorthands, and make use of a large vocabulary.
Lack of enums: Granted, in limited cases, such as parsing textual tokens, enums are useful. Pre 1.5 Java, type-safe enums are usually implemented using Josh Bloch's pattern from his book Effective Java. However, the typical use of enums is "type-coding" operations through a switch statement. This is a holdover from C and would be better written as polymorphic objects.
Lack of default arguments: Granted, though a minor problem.
Operator overloading. While I have seen examples where it's useful, they're primarily in terms of equality comparison, as is your example. I'm not in favour of general operator overloading, but I think the C# approach of allowing overloading of "==" but providing another (non-overloadable I believe) identity comparison operator is a good one. Having said that, the Java solution of marking a hard distinction between the semantics of "==" and ".equals" is a workable solution.
The only thing that makes coding in Java productive at all is a really clever refactoring IDE which automates a lot of those chores
The above chores you've listed have little to do with refactoring IDE's, and you have omitted the observation that most of the maintenance challenges that are simplified by refactoring tools are challenges that exist in C++ as much as they do in Java: renaming methods, re-ordering parameters, moving methods, pulling methods up or down a hierarchy, inlining or extracting methods.
Not to mention the importance of managing dependencies through an IDE that can track them, which is arguably much more important in C++ because they can affect your compile times in horrible ways.
a really enourmous set of standard libraries
So you would prefer to write most standard features yourself? Or use one of several third-party libraries, some of which might be OS-dependent?
Nearly everything I can express in Java I can express more quickly in C++ without any loss in readability, and often with in a way that better expresses my intent to the reader.
I'm really happy that you write clean code, but most C++ programs are not written that way. Furthermore, not everything to do with a language's productivity has to do with its syntax.
In general, Java and C++ are applicable to two mostly orthoganal domains;
In practise, this isn't exactly what happened. Many businesses in the mid-90's tried developing business appliccations with C++, with very mixed results. It requires a level of discipline that isn't characteristic of most developers. This is what led to Java's widespread adoption in the enterprise.
Furthermore, there are non-syntactical benefits to VM-based languages like Java or C#. The "safety net" of Java was a tremendous benefit -- the fact that it generally can't crash (save NullPointerException) with a segmentation fault due to programmer error in memory management.
Let's also not forget that Java's reflective language model, where every component of the language can be inspected, where interoperability and linking occurs at runtime, all of this has conferred tremendous productivity benefits to the deployment and version management of applications. No more worrying about the brittleness of the C++ ABI.
This brittleness led to the creation of standards like COM, which we all know put the COM in COMPLEX. So much so that Microsoft clued into the power of reflective languages and released.NET.
"The result is a langauge that is so syntactically impoverished that it is actually less readable than C++"
Ok, so MORE shorthand syntax makes a language easier to read? Somehow I don't follow -- isn't that the whole reason why many find Perl the equivalent to line-noise?
C++ requires a lot of headspace for humans to parse it. You have to keep in mind the rules for references vs. pointers, heap vs. stack allocation, the two syntaxes for dereferencing, notoriously ambiguous compiler messages, instance vs. static operator overloading, etc. You also can only get bitwise copying, no built-in shallow cloning. You have to manage header files and module dependencies like a hawk -- circular references in a large system shoot your compile times to hell, reducing your productivity. RTTI is a poor-mans approach to reflection. Binary interoperability breaks whenever the vtables in your abstract base classes change, so you have to introduce ugly placeholder hacks to keep them aligned.
C++ allows tremendous freedom in style, it *can* be as readable as Java, maybe in some cases more so. Unfortunately:
a) writing readable C++ code usually requires a level of discipline not found in 90% of programmers.
b) it doesn't have the level of turn-around time and feedback of languages like Java and C# that reduce binary interoperability to the class level, and provide a runtime linking model.
c) it certainly doesn't have the level of feedback of purely interpreted scripting languages.
Scripting languages, or modern OO languages like C# or Java, coupled with a reflective development environment like Eclipse or Visual Studio.NET, and you have a recipe for a tremendously higher level of productivity over C++.
Innovation is about introducing something "new". The problem is that most of what Linux and X represents was new in the 1980s and early 1990s. And the result was that users didn't really value it.
People complain about a lack of innovation in areas that matter to them. Apple of 1984 innovated in terms of user interface, which mattered then. Today, Apple innovates in asthetics and simplicity. Microsoft innovates on feature-completeness for a flat fee. It's what people seem to want.
Of course, the fun thing about human nature is that it changes all the time, so there may come a day where network transparency and full configurability become key differentiators.
Economists calling growth unsustainable is usually slang for "it's too much too quick". Economies don't grow linearly -- they have the weird phenomena of surging & contracting (boom/bust) over years. This is an observable phenomena related to the impefection of all economic systems, being made up of imperfect humans, after all.
This kind of cycle probably would continue to happen no matter what kind of economic policy you subscribe to, so I really must wonder, what's hypocritical?
I know friends that lived in Frisco (I was in san jose a while back), now I'm in Toronto.
Housing is much cheaper in Vancouver (or even Toronto).
Food, clothing, car payments (if it's domestic or Japanese) are at parity -- ignore the exchange rate on these.
Take the exchange into account for the portion of your disposable income you want to spend on U.S. produced equiment or if you want a European car. SO if you wanted to drive a Ford or Toyota in Canada, most of those cars are actually MADE in Canada so it's price competitive with the U.S. European cars tend not to be.
Similarly, most computer electronics are sold through U.S. companies and you get hit with the exchange rate embedded into the price.
But otherwise - I usually haven't seen nightlife & restaurants more expensive in Canada than in SF or NYC. Depends on the "class" of restaurant I suppose: fast food in the U.S. is cheaper, but sit-down or classy restaurants in Canada tend to be cheaper.
International travel would cost more if you fly Air Canada, but Seattle is a quick drive south and may temper that somewhat (for example, being in Toronto, I use JetBlue from Buffalo at times).
Health care varies. It isn't slow across the board. Clinics and checkups aren't slow in particular, it's the ER that sucks at some hospitals (but that's not much different from U.S. ER's:)
Taxes are shrinking in Canada, but they're still high... the marginal rate @ $103,000 in Canada/BC is 40.7%, above that it's 43.7%. Take home income is roughly $76,000 at $135,000, $60,000 at $102,000.
One thing Canada does have better than the U.S. (IMHO) is the RRSP program, (like a 401k), where you can tax-shelter up to $13,500 a year -- but there aren't any real penalities (other than getting taxed) to withdraw that income at a later date. You can also put that $$ into education or a house without being taxed.
Anyway, I believe $85k in SFO with some extra travel and imported equipment probably would be about $100k in Vancouver.. maybe up to $120k. That's also rather high for IT jobs, though not unheard of for senior positions (including bonus).
Slashdot Mirror
"Remember, it's 'raising shareholder value,' Not products or customers."
And a company that ignores its customers, or fails to create new customers, will fail, as has happened time again throughout business history. It's a chicken-and-egg argument in some ways, but fundamentally a businesses wouldn't exist if not for a specific social function and task.
This "increasing shareholder value" line is a fairly recent trend, and primarily a US-centric one, due to the hostile takovers of the 1980s. It largely hasn't been the general practice, as the recent corporate scandals have come to show. A recent on capitalism and democracy shows the problems with shareholder capitalism: the real issue isn't about "value", it's about making managerial power legitimate and accountable.
The main reason why "shareholder value" hasn't worked is simply because, since the very inception of the modern corporation in the 19th century, shareholders have abdicated control and influence completely to management. They just don't care about how the company is run - it's a whole lot easier to buy public equity shares than to invest in property or private debt. The de facto reality is that shares are merely an entitlement to profits or to assets upon liquidation (after debt-holders, of course).
Anyway, just a bit of theoretical babble that basically says corporate governance is a lot more complicated than "maximize your profits, boys!"
Is, imho, a much more important piece to read, as it highlights the ways in which IT does matter, and how Carr's article is dangerous.
sorry for the missing anchor on that link... whoopsie.
But the guys who run UNIX at the high-end of the spectrum don't see it as a UNIX, it's a Mac, and it's nice for graphic designers and desktop publishers, and maybe even has some room for people doing surface modeling for design purpose, but it's not a CAD workstation, and it's certainly no server.
Your point is taken, and accurate, but I want to re-iterate it in more simple terms: there is a perception in certain industries that the Mac is not a high-powered workstation and is not a server.
Perceptions are not facts, they're opinions, they're views of the world, so when you say this:
They just plain don't write this stuff for Macs. And they never will.
It strikes me as odd that you'd think this, considering the sheer number of mind-baffling trends we've seen. I'm going to list a bunch of very plausible quotes that I've heard circa 1998 - 1999. They're not true now.
"Embedded systems developers don't write stuff in Java. And they never will"
- Java is now the biggest platform for mobile phone development
- The NASA JPL is using in their future Mars missions.
"Linux will never be considered a serious server OS. The big database vendors will never port their products to it."
- Can you name a big database vendor without a Linux port?
- Or that Oracle's main marketing push for the past 18 months has been "Unbreakable Linux"?
So, yeah, I take your point that the major CAD vendors don't write stuff for Mac OS X due to perception issues. But do you honestly believe the platform is not capable of running such applications, especially with the new G5, and with X11 being embedded inside of it in 10.3?
Anyway, my point is mainly that strange things happen out there, and it's the companies that watch for the unexpected successes & failures that make great gains.
But Java is a B&D language that no real hacker would prefer ...
probably has something to do with:
I am still mystified at the academic community's love of Java.
Which strikes me as either a misunderstanding or just plain hubris, I'm not quite sure yet. Don't you think some academics like Doug Lea are "tr00 hackers", given the tremendous contributions they've made to both the science & industry (i.e. Doug's concurrency libraries)?
There's a lot to like about Java. It's not the most innovative language in the world, but in many ways, it was innovative enough for the time and purpose: a portable, garbage collected, object oriented language to replace the dominant lanugage at the time, C++, which was/is a mess.
Yes. They both are. Most people do not use Photoshop,
For the target market of these systems, i.e. professionals, I think this is incorrect. If you were referring to the iMac or eMac, you may have a point.
As for the choice of compiler, I understand the argument against GCC, and I'm not sure I agree with it, even though it has merit.
Apple's response while prompt, was not frank. If it were frankly honest, Apple would have to admit that their brand new G5 would be slower than Dell's computer from last quarter under certain conditions.
This is unfortunately the problem with *all* benchmarks. Almost any two competitive systems can be measured to be faster than one another under certain conditions.
The point of Apple's benchmarks were to show that "in the general case", the G5 would be faster than an Intel workstation. The general case assumes either a) using photoshop, or b) using applications compiled with GCC.
Are either of these a large stretch? Well (b) might be, and a comparison with MSVC++ and/or ICC would be nice, but then Apple would probably just counter that with IBM's optimised G5 compiler.
If you want an honest benchmark, have Apple's system tweaked by Apple, Dell's system tweaked by Dell, and who gives a damn which complier is used? I'm a user, not a CPU. I don't care about the theoretical capacity of each computer, especially if the theory is tested using inefficient compliers.
Well then, frankly, you shouldn't be paying attention to SPEC benchmarks, you should be looking at the informal timed application benchmarks. These are more "user-centric" and "whole-system" measurements.
The point many on Slashdot are making is that SPEC benchmarks *are fundamentally* theoretical CPU capacity measurements, not intended for users.
Let Apple and Dell pick their own compliers, or even write their own compliers just for this test.
The amount of man hours that goes into an optimising compiler is arguably more than goes into an operating system kernel. It's a rough business, and usually why people tweak existing compilers to perform better on benchmarks such as SPEC.
Fair enough. I was playing the devil's advocate to try to figure out whether I agree with Apple's approach to this, so necessarily don't take my prior responses as hostile, just concerned.
The observation is generally that GCC is optimised for the G5 and not sufficiently optimised for Intel. And there is no evidence for a more optimised compiler for the G4 and G5 available to Apple, because they use GCC to compile their operating system.
Also note that arguably GCC's code generation on Intel has *no* bearing on code generation on PPC. They're different beasts.
and now have egg on their face for it.
I'm a happy 17" powerbook user, I like Apple's products, but they've never been a perfect company. This incident is an example of that.
Frankly, I'm a bit surprised, Steve Jobs is a very smart guy - he knows that the Internet works this way, that this benchmark would be studied and exposed as unacceptably flawed. Of course, all cross-architecture benchmarks are controversial, but intentional crippling is a bit much. All that needs to happen now is a posting on News.Com and Apple has a PR fiasco.
The first order of business, perhaps, could be to take down the SPEC benchmarks from their marketing web pages and focus on the performance increase beyond the G4, which is what existing Mac users really care about.
Beyond that, they better work on other ways to get Intel people to switch other than processor speed - it seems they're still trailing Intel on this curve, and will be for years.
a) Delegates are the equivalent of two method calls. You're realling going to pull out the "slow" card on that?
.NET should include some kind of equivalent, though I will note that Java's syntax for them is frustrating.
b) Delegates DO NOT break OO. They are the same concept interfaces at a method-level. They enable polymorphism at a method-level. It's different, not broken.
c) The benefits of anonymous inner classes are granted,
"FYI, there are many PPC compilers which easily outperform gcc. "
If this is true, then why does Apple compile OS X with GCC?
"Jobs's keynotes have been losing their luster lately."
Perhaps 2 years ago, but MWSF blew everyone away, and then some. You're reaching.
You never stop learning in this business, and there's always something new coming up.
And that attitude is what I (and I pray others) look for when I interview a developer. The capacity to learn, the hunger to learn doesn't necessarily correspond with chronological age.
FWIW, I'm 25. And I started at 5 on the VIC-20...
"All users of the short file would have to wait until the long file write was complete"
You do realize that change-vectors in a journal can be interleaved?
And that there are well-known technological solutions to allow concurrent r/w operations in a single file/table without readers ever blocking writers? (i.e. Oracle or PostgreSQL's multi-versioning)
The only part of an ACID file system that usually requires some leeway, as in a database system, is the "I", isolation. You could crank that up or down depending on the needed semantics of your situation. Consistency and durability are there in most file systems, atomicity less so.
"Actually, since the 35 year old has 15 more years of experience, his brain can smoke, char, flame, annihilate and flambe the 20 year old."
Unfortunately, that isn't always true. Some people have 1 year of experience 15 times.
Or perhaps it's hard to compete with a generation that started programming when they were 5 years old.
it's about eliminating duplicate decisions and explicit behavior-type decisions. A decision is made once, and recorded by what object is constructed. Behavior-Type decisions are when you vary behaviour based on an enumerated type code (just use polymorphism!).
the Ipod design is patented, which probably explains why there's little in the way of clones....
Anyone can make an MP3 player, but for 14 years no one can make a white one with a big jog wheel.
I think it's because society is quick to romanticise the "inventor" when what they really value and remember is the "innovator". Invention is about creating new ideas, innovation is about taking ideas, old and new, and making them useful to people today.
Edison's real accomplishment wasn't inventing electricity, there were many others working on the same stuff around the same time. I'd say his accomplishment was building the beginnings of several industries, notably electricity (and General Electric).
In that way, Gates helped to build the beginnings of the personal computer industry. He will be remembered for that. And, like Edison, i think history will document his many faults too. They just probably won't appear in the sound-bite version of history.
Actually, no, I was thinking more along the lines of Lisp or Smalltalk. Both are small languages with minimal use of symbolic shorthands, and make use of a large vocabulary.
Lack of enums: Granted, in limited cases, such as parsing textual tokens, enums are useful. Pre 1.5 Java, type-safe enums are usually implemented using Josh Bloch's pattern from his book Effective Java. However, the typical use of enums is "type-coding" operations through a switch statement. This is a holdover from C and would be better written as polymorphic objects.
Lack of default arguments: Granted, though a minor problem.
Operator overloading. While I have seen examples where it's useful, they're primarily in terms of equality comparison, as is your example. I'm not in favour of general operator overloading, but I think the C# approach of allowing overloading of "==" but providing another (non-overloadable I believe) identity comparison operator is a good one. Having said that, the Java solution of marking a hard distinction between the semantics of "==" and ".equals" is a workable solution.
The above chores you've listed have little to do with refactoring IDE's, and you have omitted the observation that most of the maintenance challenges that are simplified by refactoring tools are challenges that exist in C++ as much as they do in Java: renaming methods, re-ordering parameters, moving methods, pulling methods up or down a hierarchy, inlining or extracting methods.
Not to mention the importance of managing dependencies through an IDE that can track them, which is arguably much more important in C++ because they can affect your compile times in horrible ways.
So you would prefer to write most standard features yourself? Or use one of several third-party libraries, some of which might be OS-dependent?
I'm really happy that you write clean code, but most C++ programs are not written that way. Furthermore, not everything to do with a language's productivity has to do with its syntax.
In practise, this isn't exactly what happened. Many businesses in the mid-90's tried developing business appliccations with C++, with very mixed results. It requires a level of discipline that isn't characteristic of most developers. This is what led to Java's widespread adoption in the enterprise.
.NET.
Furthermore, there are non-syntactical benefits to VM-based languages like Java or C#. The "safety net" of Java was a tremendous benefit -- the fact that it generally can't crash (save NullPointerException) with a segmentation fault due to programmer error in memory management.
Let's also not forget that Java's reflective language model, where every component of the language can be inspected, where interoperability and linking occurs at runtime, all of this has conferred tremendous productivity benefits to the deployment and version management of applications. No more worrying about the brittleness of the C++ ABI.
This brittleness led to the creation of standards like COM, which we all know put the COM in COMPLEX. So much so that Microsoft clued into the power of reflective languages and released
"The result is a langauge that is so syntactically impoverished that it is actually less readable than C++"
.NET, and you have a recipe for a tremendously higher level of productivity over C++.
Ok, so MORE shorthand syntax makes a language easier to read? Somehow I don't follow -- isn't that the whole reason why many find Perl the equivalent to line-noise?
C++ requires a lot of headspace for humans to parse it. You have to keep in mind the rules for references vs. pointers, heap vs. stack allocation, the two syntaxes for dereferencing, notoriously ambiguous compiler messages, instance vs. static operator overloading, etc. You also can only get bitwise copying, no built-in shallow cloning. You have to manage header files and module dependencies like a hawk -- circular references in a large system shoot your compile times to hell, reducing your productivity. RTTI is a poor-mans approach to reflection. Binary interoperability breaks whenever the vtables in your abstract base classes change, so you have to introduce ugly placeholder hacks to keep them aligned.
C++ allows tremendous freedom in style, it *can* be as readable as Java, maybe in some cases more so. Unfortunately:
a) writing readable C++ code usually requires a level of discipline not found in 90% of programmers.
b) it doesn't have the level of turn-around time and feedback of languages like Java and C# that reduce binary interoperability to the class level, and provide a runtime linking model.
c) it certainly doesn't have the level of feedback of purely interpreted scripting languages.
Scripting languages, or modern OO languages like C# or Java, coupled with a reflective development environment like Eclipse or Visual Studio
Innovation is about introducing something "new". The problem is that most of what Linux and X represents was new in the 1980s and early 1990s. And the result was that users didn't really value it.
People complain about a lack of innovation in areas that matter to them. Apple of 1984 innovated in terms of user interface, which mattered then. Today, Apple innovates in asthetics and simplicity. Microsoft innovates on feature-completeness for a flat fee. It's what people seem to want.
Of course, the fun thing about human nature is that it changes all the time, so there may come a day where network transparency and full configurability become key differentiators.
Economists calling growth unsustainable is usually slang for "it's too much too quick". Economies don't grow linearly -- they have the weird phenomena of surging & contracting (boom/bust) over years. This is an observable phenomena related to the impefection of all economic systems, being made up of imperfect humans, after all.
This kind of cycle probably would continue to happen no matter what kind of economic policy you subscribe to, so I really must wonder, what's hypocritical?
Uh, I think he's talking about analog degredation. Digital images don't degrade when you copy them.
I know friends that lived in Frisco (I was in san jose a while back), now I'm in Toronto.
:)
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Housing is much cheaper in Vancouver (or even Toronto).
Food, clothing, car payments (if it's domestic or Japanese) are at parity -- ignore the exchange rate on these.
Take the exchange into account for the portion of your disposable income you want to spend on U.S. produced equiment or if you want a European car. SO if you wanted to drive a Ford or Toyota in Canada, most of those cars are actually MADE in Canada so it's price competitive with the U.S. European cars tend not to be.
Similarly, most computer electronics are sold through U.S. companies and you get hit with the exchange rate embedded into the price.
But otherwise - I usually haven't seen nightlife & restaurants more expensive in Canada than in SF or NYC. Depends on the "class" of restaurant I suppose: fast food in the U.S. is cheaper, but sit-down or classy restaurants in Canada tend to be cheaper.
International travel would cost more if you fly Air Canada, but Seattle is a quick drive south and may temper that somewhat (for example, being in Toronto, I use JetBlue from Buffalo at times).
Health care varies. It isn't slow across the board. Clinics and checkups aren't slow in particular, it's the ER that sucks at some hospitals (but that's not much different from U.S. ER's
Taxes are shrinking in Canada, but they're still high... the marginal rate @ $103,000 in Canada/BC is 40.7%, above that it's 43.7%. Take home income is roughly $76,000 at $135,000, $60,000 at $102,000
One thing Canada does have better than the U.S. (IMHO) is the RRSP program, (like a 401k), where you can tax-shelter up to $13,500 a year -- but there aren't any real penalities (other than getting taxed) to withdraw that income at a later date. You can also put that $$ into education or a house without being taxed.
Anyway, I believe $85k in SFO with some extra travel and imported equipment probably would be about $100k in Vancouver.. maybe up to $120k. That's also rather high for IT jobs, though not unheard of for senior positions (including bonus).