Well put. I've held for awhile, that software production has more to do with movie production than it does with engineering. Sure, there are tricks and techniques ("algorithms" and "patterns") that are very mathematic in nature and cross well with engineering domains, but there's that whole communication/creative/style side that is so often undersold and misunderstood.
Yes, I too like it better when Slashdot sticks to the wild speculative stuff that just might come to pass in 6 days from now if we all stick our heels together and tap 3 times...
I can't even imagine the complaints environmental would have towards this kind of thing. This is like building fences on open grazing land, except an order of magnitude more severe. The engineer in me thinks it's cool tho.:)
Nope. This is patently not Microsoft. What this is Apple circa 1984 all over again.
The original Macintosh computers were revolutionary, better, yada, yada, all that. They really were. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 were a huge joke compared in many ways. But Apple killed themselves with a thousand cuts, that all make me feel like the clock's been wound back 20 years. Thread running through it all, was an arrogance (real or imaginary isn't important), that the media ran with, and the masses slowly but steadily flock to. It started with the developer community, and it trickled outwards. None of the actual "technical" or "business" aspect matter. The fact is, the amount of bad press engendered by all of this, would take miracles in price reduction and technology to overcome now.
I own 6 Macs. 2 laptops, 2 iMacs, and 2 iPhones. I love all 6 of them. I've been an Apple faithful for a long time, though I spend a lot of time loving Linux too. I've only been able to recently reconcile how I feel about Apple these days. I decided there are really two Apples. There is Mac OS X apple, which I still love and think highly of. And there is iPhoneOS Apple. And when my next contract cycle comes up, I'll look at something else. Tired of the games from Apple. Being faithful, waiting for them to return 16 years later, a kinder, better, more open, underdog phone vendor isn't what I'm in the mood for a second time round.
I agree. Super-parent may have been right, as he says "a bunch of years back" ago. The technology was new and budding at the time. You have to recoup your costs somehow. But the printer companies have got this pretty well established and figured now. For quite some time. Costs should have eventually come down as the initial wave of adoption paid for the development. Instead, they saw a cash cow, and went into legal/obfuscation mode to protect the cow.
OK, I hate to see any human out of work and generally unhappy, that's the good moral way to feel. So as a fellow being, I grant Gosling that.
But I'm having a hard time seeing his "passing" from some sort of throne as the inventor of Java, as anything but a very belated sense of "finally!" (pun somewhat intended). Java was one of the worst things to happen in the evolution of Programming Language history. By selling itself as having features of dynamic languages, it marginalized just about every progressing dynamic language model and replaced them with something that Gosling described at OOPSLA 96 with the comment "will Java work? of course Java will succeed, there's not a damn new thing in it." Or at least so the myth goes. It's taken 15 years of stupidity and massive wastes of canceled project and total rewrites all in the name of "doing the mainstream thing" to finally realize that we're left with something that is only just short of the complexity found in C++, and as arcane and stiff to write in.
You can all mourn the passing of "Father of Java" or the passing of Sun the once-cool hardware maker. I think they both got what they deserved for ever foisting Java upon us. I hope James is forced to take a job maintaining some J2EE install with millions of spaghetti code lines.
Wait! So... gah. No wait. I can't handle it. What you're saying, is that as human beings we're not just mathematical functions? It's not just a matter of f(gene), or f(environment)?? What could this mean? Do I have to accept that maybe, just maybe, that some degree of individual choice is involved in who we become?
That was always the biggest unknown mystery for me. My son just finished reading Two Towers thus qualifying him to sit down and watch the movie with me. And again, I recalled that what I really always wanted was not more elven/men lore of Numenor and all, but I wanted a tangential tale that talked about someone going somewhere and finding out what happened to those elusive ent wives.
Is it just me, or is it annoying that reading this article, it uses a a non standard control to advance from page to page? That it omits the standard "next" link at the bottom of the text where my focus and mouse will be as I finish each page?
On the one hand, there's this Google in China thing. Totally caved to the Chinese government's demands. In the name of getting a buck. But then they try to take the moralistic high ground with the US government. Which is it? I don't want the US government poking in any of my gmail or searches or anything. But then my idealistic side kicks in thinks "hey, why should I be on Google's side in one case and not the other."
This is in honest question. I run a Debian box, I track 'testing' and upgrade about weekly. What would (K)Ubuntu offer me at this time? I think if I were building a new machine, I'd definitely try this "Ubuntu thing" out. Would there be any reason to switch though?
One reason I might be tempted to stay away from C++, is once you use it, you might want to use STL or boost. C++ compilers for off-the-mainstream architectures aren't usually as good about code reduction as a maybe GCC for x86 might be. I've seen embedded communications apps go from 40Kb C executables to 1 MB for C++, all so we would be able to use STL streams and such. The problem... there's only 2MB of flash only these devices, we can't upgrade to the new uClinux because we used up so much room.
If you really want to do "objects" in an embedded environment... why not use embedded Java or these guys.
If you really feel that way, you should try Dolphin Smalltalk. It's a solid easy to use quick to get the job done tool for Windows. Its everything you like about C#, and even more so. I don't work for them at all. When I *have* to do windows stuff (which I avoid like the plague), there stuff's great.
If he thinks studying to be an engineer in American Academia is a bust... he oughta try actually being an engineer in corporate America. I had some good teachers, some bad teachers, learnt some good things, feel like the system dropped the ball on some others. For all that, I kinda miss it. The fact is... that while there are still some Cool Places To Work (tm) in corporate America, most will concede that it ain't what it used to be. And that job satisfaction working as an engineer on the average, continues a downward trend. That Scot Adams has been so dead on for years now, and that it just gets "better", is perhaps most telling. I wonder sometimes if this sense of career frustration bleeds back into the academic circles. And in some ways, it's probably good that it does. If I'm beating my head against the wall more than ever with PHBs I work for/with, it's probably best that the kids coming out of school learn to cope with and still produce in a similiar environment while in University Land.
Dolphin? Link? Are you referring to Object-Arts Dolphin Smalltalk? If so, I'm curious what changes/improvements you are referring to. I'm a regular Squeaker/VisualWorkser myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Well put. I've held for awhile, that software production has more to do with movie production than it does with engineering. Sure, there are tricks and techniques ("algorithms" and "patterns") that are very mathematic in nature and cross well with engineering domains, but there's that whole communication/creative/style side that is so often undersold and misunderstood.
Yes, I too like it better when Slashdot sticks to the wild speculative stuff that just might come to pass in 6 days from now if we all stick our heels together and tap 3 times...
Nicely put. Agree for me 100%
I can't even imagine the complaints environmental would have towards this kind of thing. This is like building fences on open grazing land, except an order of magnitude more severe. The engineer in me thinks it's cool tho. :)
Wish I had mod points. Mod parent up.
Nope. This is patently not Microsoft. What this is Apple circa 1984 all over again.
The original Macintosh computers were revolutionary, better, yada, yada, all that. They really were. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 were a huge joke compared in many ways. But Apple killed themselves with a thousand cuts, that all make me feel like the clock's been wound back 20 years. Thread running through it all, was an arrogance (real or imaginary isn't important), that the media ran with, and the masses slowly but steadily flock to. It started with the developer community, and it trickled outwards. None of the actual "technical" or "business" aspect matter. The fact is, the amount of bad press engendered by all of this, would take miracles in price reduction and technology to overcome now.
I own 6 Macs. 2 laptops, 2 iMacs, and 2 iPhones. I love all 6 of them. I've been an Apple faithful for a long time, though I spend a lot of time loving Linux too. I've only been able to recently reconcile how I feel about Apple these days. I decided there are really two Apples. There is Mac OS X apple, which I still love and think highly of. And there is iPhoneOS Apple. And when my next contract cycle comes up, I'll look at something else. Tired of the games from Apple. Being faithful, waiting for them to return 16 years later, a kinder, better, more open, underdog phone vendor isn't what I'm in the mood for a second time round.
I agree. Super-parent may have been right, as he says "a bunch of years back" ago. The technology was new and budding at the time. You have to recoup your costs somehow. But the printer companies have got this pretty well established and figured now. For quite some time. Costs should have eventually come down as the initial wave of adoption paid for the development. Instead, they saw a cash cow, and went into legal/obfuscation mode to protect the cow.
OK, I hate to see any human out of work and generally unhappy, that's the good moral way to feel. So as a fellow being, I grant Gosling that.
But I'm having a hard time seeing his "passing" from some sort of throne as the inventor of Java, as anything but a very belated sense of "finally!" (pun somewhat intended). Java was one of the worst things to happen in the evolution of Programming Language history. By selling itself as having features of dynamic languages, it marginalized just about every progressing dynamic language model and replaced them with something that Gosling described at OOPSLA 96 with the comment "will Java work? of course Java will succeed, there's not a damn new thing in it." Or at least so the myth goes. It's taken 15 years of stupidity and massive wastes of canceled project and total rewrites all in the name of "doing the mainstream thing" to finally realize that we're left with something that is only just short of the complexity found in C++, and as arcane and stiff to write in.
You can all mourn the passing of "Father of Java" or the passing of Sun the once-cool hardware maker. I think they both got what they deserved for ever foisting Java upon us. I hope James is forced to take a job maintaining some J2EE install with millions of spaghetti code lines.
I thought this too (that the English don't use English units).
But now I've become a Top Gear addict. And Jeremy definitely talks in miles per hour. And Hammond does vehicle weights in pounds.
I seen it on youtube. It must be so.
Did February just go by 3 times in a row? Did I miss something?
Wait! So... gah. No wait. I can't handle it. What you're saying, is that as human beings we're not just mathematical functions? It's not just a matter of f(gene), or f(environment)?? What could this mean? Do I have to accept that maybe, just maybe, that some degree of individual choice is involved in who we become?
Sigh. Time to go roll a new worldview.
This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products...
That was always the biggest unknown mystery for me. My son just finished reading Two Towers thus qualifying him to sit down and watch the movie with me. And again, I recalled that what I really always wanted was not more elven/men lore of Numenor and all, but I wanted a tangential tale that talked about someone going somewhere and finding out what happened to those elusive ent wives.
There's way too many programmers. Not enough good ones. Nuff said.
Move on citizens.
Is it just me, or is it annoying that reading this article, it uses a a non standard control to advance from page to page? That it omits the standard "next" link at the bottom of the text where my focus and mouse will be as I finish each page?
I'm having a hard time getting excited about a new internet designed by the same people that brought us the JISX encoding nightmare.
On the one hand, there's this Google in China thing. Totally caved to the Chinese government's demands. In the name of getting a buck. But then they try to take the moralistic high ground with the US government. Which is it? I don't want the US government poking in any of my gmail or searches or anything. But then my idealistic side kicks in thinks "hey, why should I be on Google's side in one case and not the other."
Looking beyond the microchip one has to wonder if it's going to be a macrochip? or a picochip? or what? :)
This is in honest question. I run a Debian box, I track 'testing' and upgrade about weekly. What would (K)Ubuntu offer me at this time? I think if I were building a new machine, I'd definitely try this "Ubuntu thing" out. Would there be any reason to switch though?
Statistics, Politics, and Code Comments
One reason I might be tempted to stay away from C++, is once you use it, you might want to use STL or boost. C++ compilers for off-the-mainstream architectures aren't usually as good about code reduction as a maybe GCC for x86 might be. I've seen embedded communications apps go from 40Kb C executables to 1 MB for C++, all so we would be able to use STL streams and such. The problem... there's only 2MB of flash only these devices, we can't upgrade to the new uClinux because we used up so much room.
If you really want to do "objects" in an embedded environment... why not use embedded Java or these guys.
If you really feel that way, you should try Dolphin Smalltalk. It's a solid easy to use quick to get the job done tool for Windows. Its everything you like about C#, and even more so. I don't work for them at all. When I *have* to do windows stuff (which I avoid like the plague), there stuff's great.
If he thinks studying to be an engineer in American Academia is a bust... he oughta try actually being an engineer in corporate America. I had some good teachers, some bad teachers, learnt some good things, feel like the system dropped the ball on some others. For all that, I kinda miss it. The fact is... that while there are still some Cool Places To Work (tm) in corporate America, most will concede that it ain't what it used to be. And that job satisfaction working as an engineer on the average, continues a downward trend. That Scot Adams has been so dead on for years now, and that it just gets "better", is perhaps most telling. I wonder sometimes if this sense of career frustration bleeds back into the academic circles. And in some ways, it's probably good that it does. If I'm beating my head against the wall more than ever with PHBs I work for/with, it's probably best that the kids coming out of school learn to cope with and still produce in a similiar environment while in University Land.
Dolphin? Link? Are you referring to Object-Arts Dolphin Smalltalk? If so, I'm curious what changes/improvements you are referring to. I'm a regular Squeaker/VisualWorkser myself.