C will always be the language of choice for platforms (RBDMS, OSs, HTTP servers), while the other languages you mention are adequate for extending platforms and scripting.
Smalltalk can probably be written off, and I doubt Dylan will ever get off of the ground. Python, Java and Perl are your best candidates in this field.
McConnell has been publishing the same book now over and over again for the last few years. He's really sold on software engineering. Not me, alt least anymore. A number of bubbles of mine have been burst since I left college to work "in the real world":
Algorithms are the most important thing - does anyone do searching and sorting of large data sets without the aid of a SQL database anymore? Does anyone write their own search routine? I've found that for 97% of cases, searching and sorting is optimized by leaving it to someone else.
Software engineering matters - does anyone write specifications? Does anyone follow a development methodology? I've never worked in any market that executive felt was "slow" enough to allow for sound engineering techniques. Everything has been lost in the rush, and nearly everyone is rushing.
Now what I have found out is this:
Knowing the specific issues of particular systems (databases, operating systems), is far more important than knowing theory of any kind, almost all of the time.
A 1U unit might be more expensive now, but after a year in a colocation, it will cost you more to host the same processing power in a 4U factor. Space is money. Spend a bit more now and economize on the rack space you can afford.
Even other BSDs are choking off BSDI.
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Free Solaris 8
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· Score: 2
NetBSD and BSDI both seem to be fading from public view as FreeBSD takes the lionshare of the BSD audience, with OpenBSD capturing the niche security audience.
Frankly, in a world where almost all of the cheap hardware is x86 commodity components, the allure of NetBSD (emphasizing portability to esoteric platforms) isn't really compelling, and I never could figure out why poeple liked BSDI.
Sun would be remiss to adopt linux
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Free Solaris 8
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· Score: 1
Frankly, they have a better piece of software in Solaris - they would be remiss at this point to drop an effective OS in favor of the "flavour de jour".
Most Sun customers don't appear to be fazed by the fact the Solaris isn't free or even cheap.
On the other hand, Sun, like other unix vendors, are in danger of becoming boutique shops. Most web farms can be run adequately on intel boxes (they need not even be cutting edge), and commodity solutions are even making inroads in the database market (my employer is rolling over NT Oracle installations in favor of linux Oracle).
Any of the other companies you mention could be on each others' shopping lists. It's only a matter of time before these behemoths realize they would be even strong together than apart.
What you're essentially advocating is two or three corporations running the entire entertainment/media/internet business.
I don't think any of these companies are dumb enough to try to create dinaosaurs that big. Their shareholders would punish them severely with a massive sell-off.
AOL shareholders certainly don't want to see Time/Warner-like share price growth (i.e. tepid price growth), which is most likely what they are going to get.
Added to all of this is the everpresent threat of antitrust action, which could definitely be a possibility if AOL made another huge acqiusition.
Lastly, I don't think your supposition, they would be even strong together than apart, is true. At some point, size hinders growth as opposed to aiding it.
Find out what your organization's goal is - and bulk up only insofar as that goal is promoted. AOL is a content distributor. Buying one content provider precludes using others. This is why AOL's strategy is unwise.
I was referring to most of the mid-twentieth century (50's and 60's), when at one point GM sold half of the cars in the world. Obviously now theri presence is diminished.
AOL has now locked itself into one stream of content - the TW stream of content. This essentially locks them out of doing business with other content partners - other partners will not want to feed their media content competition by dealing with AOL.
For example, Miramax would be remiss to provide content to AOL from this point forward, as Disney (the parent of Miramax) competes with Time Warner's media properties. Feeding AOL means feeding Time Warner, which is counter to Disney's goals.
Supplying content to Yahoo on the other hand, doesn't present this problem, as Yahoo only aggregates and distributes. Yahoo is following the correct model for the new economy.
"Programming Perl"...AKA PERLDOCS...already online
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GPL for Books?
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· Score: 1
You already have the text to the definitive Perl book available with every installation....try doing this:
% perldoc perl
and you can basically read the text of Programming Perl online.
This isn't a typo. AOL/TW are pursuing a model perfected by Alfred Sloan at GM, which he used to weild power over the entire automotive industry for most of the 20th century.
The size of the company assured leverage with suppliers and brought incredible economies of scale to the market, but also created a bloated beast unable to cope with nimble competitors that would emerge from Japan during the 70's.
Partnerships and cross-licensing is the way to go for this century - you don't need to own it to use it.
Prediction - within three years, everything but the TW network of cable will be sold off. AOL will realize that Time magazine, Fortune, and other old-world media products (perhaps even CNN) are simply holding back the type of growth they were used to in the pre-merger days.
I love it, a guy writes a great article regarding FreeBSD's VM, and you come in here flaming him over some offhand remark about NT.
Just fess up and admit it - you couldn't understand any of the technical details, but you felt compelled to contribute some comment, so you lay in with this garbage.
If you're not going to contribute to the discussion constructively, don't post. I know this rule may apply to my own post, but I'm just overwhelmed by your idiotic response to a purely technical article.
Katz, one minute you're defending geeks as an oppressed class, now you're generalizing them as offensive online posters. Well Katz, which gross generalization are you going with?
A good quote recently on the XML lists was as follows:
XML only solves the problem of data formatting.
There are some doc-heads out there that are trying to wrap XSL, XQL, XPath, and some of the other proto-standards into one cohesive view of the world, but it really isn't there yet.
SQL databases are still the way to go for storage - more due to uptime and recoverability than anything else. Also, regular programming languages such as Python and Java, when used with DOM bindings are still a more powerful, efficient, and flexible solution than XSLT or XSL-FO.
XSL provides no features for reuse or modularity, so any useful stylesheet ends up being monstrous.
For someone who uses a language like Python or Java, I can't imagine why they would find anything compelling about XSL. It really is a dog language. Most people are just too ga-ga over the fact that it is encoded in XML to see how lame it really is.
Note that XML.com also has some pro-XSL articles listed, but they aren't nearly as persuasive.
The bottom line is that the W3 "ordained" XSL to be part of the grand scheme of things, although the technology hasn't been developed in response to any particular problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Smalltalk can probably be written off, and I doubt Dylan will ever get off of the ground. Python, Java and Perl are your best candidates in this field.
Algorithms are the most important thing - does anyone do searching and sorting of large data sets without the aid of a SQL database anymore? Does anyone write their own search routine? I've found that for 97% of cases, searching and sorting is optimized by leaving it to someone else.
Software engineering matters - does anyone write specifications? Does anyone follow a development methodology? I've never worked in any market that executive felt was "slow" enough to allow for sound engineering techniques. Everything has been lost in the rush, and nearly everyone is rushing.
Now what I have found out is this:
Knowing the specific issues of particular systems (databases, operating systems), is far more important than knowing theory of any kind, almost all of the time.
Thoughts?
A 1U unit might be more expensive now, but after a year in a colocation, it will cost you more to host the same processing power in a 4U factor. Space is money. Spend a bit more now and economize on the rack space you can afford.
Frankly, in a world where almost all of the cheap hardware is x86 commodity components, the allure of NetBSD (emphasizing portability to esoteric platforms) isn't really compelling, and I never could figure out why poeple liked BSDI.
Most Sun customers don't appear to be fazed by the fact the Solaris isn't free or even cheap.
On the other hand, Sun, like other unix vendors, are in danger of becoming boutique shops. Most web farms can be run adequately on intel boxes (they need not even be cutting edge), and commodity solutions are even making inroads in the database market (my employer is rolling over NT Oracle installations in favor of linux Oracle).
What you're essentially advocating is two or three corporations running the entire entertainment/media/internet business.
I don't think any of these companies are dumb enough to try to create dinaosaurs that big. Their shareholders would punish them severely with a massive sell-off.
AOL shareholders certainly don't want to see Time/Warner-like share price growth (i.e. tepid price growth), which is most likely what they are going to get.
Added to all of this is the everpresent threat of antitrust action, which could definitely be a possibility if AOL made another huge acqiusition.
Lastly, I don't think your supposition, they would be even strong together than apart, is true. At some point, size hinders growth as opposed to aiding it.
Find out what your organization's goal is - and bulk up only insofar as that goal is promoted. AOL is a content distributor. Buying one content provider precludes using others. This is why AOL's strategy is unwise.
I was referring to most of the mid-twentieth century (50's and 60's), when at one point GM sold half of the cars in the world. Obviously now theri presence is diminished.
For example, Miramax would be remiss to provide content to AOL from this point forward, as Disney (the parent of Miramax) competes with Time Warner's media properties. Feeding AOL means feeding Time Warner, which is counter to Disney's goals.
Supplying content to Yahoo on the other hand, doesn't present this problem, as Yahoo only aggregates and distributes. Yahoo is following the correct model for the new economy.
% perldoc perl
and you can basically read the text of Programming Perl online.
The size of the company assured leverage with suppliers and brought incredible economies of scale to the market, but also created a bloated beast unable to cope with nimble competitors that would emerge from Japan during the 70's.
Partnerships and cross-licensing is the way to go for this century - you don't need to own it to use it.
Prediction - within three years, everything but the TW network of cable will be sold off. AOL will realize that Time magazine, Fortune, and other old-world media products (perhaps even CNN) are simply holding back the type of growth they were used to in the pre-merger days.
So i guess we should stop all research into photonics now, right?
Thanks for your drivel.
your post officially qualifies as "drivel from idiots". if you don't know anything about photonics, shut up. you don't have to post on every topic.
Just fess up and admit it - you couldn't understand any of the technical details, but you felt compelled to contribute some comment, so you lay in with this garbage.
If you're not going to contribute to the discussion constructively, don't post. I know this rule may apply to my own post, but I'm just overwhelmed by your idiotic response to a purely technical article.
The two concepts are incompatible. Deal with it.
I really don't get it - the guy writes a lucid and solid technical article and people are flaming him for it.
You want to know why? Because none of you here even has a goddam clue as to what he is talking about, but you just want to put in your own 2 cents.
A product which does exactly what you want can be found here, and according to the volacanomark for Java, it is the fastest way to run Java.
Katz, one minute you're defending geeks as an oppressed class, now you're generalizing them as offensive online posters. Well Katz, which gross generalization are you going with?
Corel is at best a dodgy company with questionable finances looking for any lease on life. Red Herring is right to heap abuse on them.
XML only solves the problem of data formatting.
There are some doc-heads out there that are trying to wrap XSL, XQL, XPath, and some of the other proto-standards into one cohesive view of the world, but it really isn't there yet.
SQL databases are still the way to go for storage - more due to uptime and recoverability than anything else. Also, regular programming languages such as Python and Java, when used with DOM bindings are still a more powerful, efficient, and flexible solution than XSLT or XSL-FO.
This format in particular, offer no modularity or reuse features, and there is nothing about XML that strictly forbids such features.
For someone who uses a language like Python or Java, I can't imagine why they would find anything compelling about XSL. It really is a dog language. Most people are just too ga-ga over the fact that it is encoded in XML to see how lame it really is.
Thankfully, few people are rallying behind it.
Does XSL encourage reuse through its syntax? No
Does XSL base its constructs on proven language design ideas picked up in the last twenty years? No
I have no idea why people are so ga-ga over a language that predates Algol-6x in its design.
Just wondering, can't find useful data on the web to tell me.
Looking at any non-trivial XSL stylesheets, you can see what a generally bad idea it is.
My advice would be to use a real programming language with DOM bindings.
XML.com has a good article regarding XSL:XSL considered hamrful.
Note that XML.com also has some pro-XSL articles listed, but they aren't nearly as persuasive.
The bottom line is that the W3 "ordained" XSL to be part of the grand scheme of things, although the technology hasn't been developed in response to any particular problem.