I have to wonder if Timothy would have posted this story had it been the other way round? Same as the Greenpeace story earlier. Ooo, political organizations that Timothy personally likes use technology too!
So is their only option to completely remove themselves from society in order to prove their point? Everyone would just ignore them. It is necessary for organizations such as theirs to accept some amount of hypocrisy in order to exist at all.
There's absolutely no reason Greenpeace couldn't use wooden, sail-powered ships (Hello? They were good enough for CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS!) with solar panels or small wind turbines on board for their electrical needs (such as radio comms). Chinese admiral Cheng Ho even grew food on the decks of his ships, so they would have a ready supply of lentils (or whatever they eat). Or they could harvest seaweed - the Welsh make bread from seaweed, for example. Or even catching fish, for those who're so inclined.
That Greenpeace prefers to use a more-or-less modern ship, and that they are unconcerned about the ecological impact of that ship, shows them up for what they are, publicity-seeking egomaniacs.
compilers! you can't program sh*t on a windows install without buying separate software
Really? When Microsoft's C++ compiler is free? When VBA is built into every Office program? When you can download a JDK for free?
your choice of how your desktop environment looks
Plenty of choice in XP, tho' I prefer the Win2K look
games, not just freecell and solitaire
Is that a joke? How many games are released for Linux compared to Windows?
real networking tools, such as nmap, a variety of firewalls, heck the list is too long to begin here
Just download 'em. If you know that you need 'em, you surely know where to get 'em.
a powerful command prompt for expert users
Ditto.
Now, I'm fairly platform-agnostic. I'll use the tools to get the job done, that's all an OS is, a tool. But you're doing yourself and Linux no favours by spouting this sort of unfounded nonsense.
Actually, I'm not even sure UNIX/MULTICS were even designed to have a keyboard or a screen, let alone a mouse.
Indeed. At a fairly fundamental level, Unix believes you're communicating with it using a teletype machine - like an electric typewriter with a serial cable. The "terminal" allowing text to be positioned anywhere is a hack on top of that, using control codes that would have physically moved the print head and the paper reel before. Even when you call up an xterm, there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in the software "above" Unix to make it think you're still using a teletype.
This is only news 'cos they're using graphics cards. If they were using Wyse terminals or DEC VT100s connecting to serial ports, it would be nothing you couldn't do with a desktop Unix workstation in the 80s. With LAT you could hang dozens of terminals off of a VAXstation. Or a bigger box in the 70s.
So, we're now excluding minorities on the so-called World-Wide-Web.
LOL, there are a billion Chinese, dude, maybe more. More people than in the US and EU combined (you know, the people who invented and paid for the internet and the web). If this block is a problem for the Chinese, maybe they ought to do something about the problem in their own territory. That they don't amounts to their government giving implicit approval of committing fraud so long as just foreigners are the victims. That sound right to you?
With Java development, the OS is completely marginalized. The question is which OS is the operation group in the organizations in question willing to support.
Hmm, it's less simple than that. Java is designed to run well on processors with lots of registers, like the SPARC, which has some very efficient hardware for sharing registers (you "see" 16, but 8 overlap with the stack object "above" you and 8 "below", so you can shift data around very very quickly, no need to unload and load). On the other hand, Java on Win32/x86 is way faster, because people have invested a lot more effort in making it so.
So the OS may be marginalized (Oracle has exactly the same effect) but the hardware decision becomes more important (ditto with Oracle).
It's called bullshit. We had a case here recently in England, a farmer was being terrorized by local gangs, his property stolen or destroyed, receiving threats. He asked the police for help and they did absolutely nothing. So, one evening, in desperation, he fought back with his shotgun. Yeah, the police rushed straight to the scene and arrested HIM.
The police are basically lazy. Dealing with gangs who don't give a fuck anyway is a lot of hassle for them, and they might get hurt themselves. Dealing with a law-abiding old man, that's something they can handle, even tho' the situation would never have arisen if they'd put the donuts down and actually done their jobs in the first place.
Prioritizing, my arse. The police, like any civil servants, couldn't care less about doing their jobs, they're just sitting around waiting to collect their fat pensions.
The Coalition Provincial Authority cannot account for a few billion dollars worth of oil revenues
Well, the EU can't account for a few billion here and there either. That's the nature of government. There's zero evidence that any of that money went to the military (which was the original point I disputed). More likely it went on bribes to UN people.
But would you really want to create value for society which only consumes and gives you nothing in return?
The entire philosophy of Socialism is that it is possible to persuade people, by whatever means, to do this. The reason Socialism always fails is that productive people soon figure this out, and the non-productive are helpless without them.
wtf ? do they not teach the concept of KISS in school anymore ?
It IS simple, just not in the way you're thinking. Sure the device is more complex - but its simpler to use 'cos Windows is used in lots of other places and people are already familiar with it. The complexity has been shifted out of the mind of the programmer (who would otherwise have to learn PFOS, Picture Frame OS in addition to every other platform) and into the device.
Seriously. I stayed at the Ice Hotel in Sweden earlier this year, it's too warm even 200km inside the Arctic Circle for 6 months of the year for it to be structurally safe, but that won't be a problem in Antarctica. An amazing experience, and it's perfectly environmentally friendly too, and if you need more room, no problem, you've got all the materials you need right there!
The biggest downside with Cisco is, undeniably, price.
Well, you aren't paying for the kit, you're paying for the support infrastructure they have in place. Sure it's expensive upfront, but if something goes wrong, you'll be glad you did.
That's actually a very common trick in the mainframe world to radically improve performance.
I didn't know that. I suspect it's because mainframes have amazing I/O and relatively not much processor. Smaller systems are more balanced, their processors are much faster relative to their I/O subsystems than mainframes. It would make little sense to use this trick on a Sun.
But, none of the people I've seen do this are old mainframe hands - they're kids who got taught Java in their CS classes and think EJBs are the only way to write serious apps...
somebody on the team should be a "database developer".
Luckily, my present project does this (I'm one of these people). I've done client-server and n-tier development, and I've been a DBA and a sysadmin, now I'm inbetween the two camps, able to speak to both of them in their language, and (usually) with the authority to say "this should be done in OCI" and "this should be a trigger". But you're right, people who have this broad experience are quite rare, there's far too little cross-pollination between programmers and DBAs. Mostly in fact the two sides see each other as enemies, which is a shame, at the end of the day our job is to deliver an application, not to bicker.
I would say that mapping the object model to the data model directly in such a way that you can't change it later is actually a counterexample of encapsulation.
Oh, I quite agree. Doesn't stop people doing it, tho'. Data needs to be stored, but often objects themselves don't - often objects are just handy containers for algorithms, you feed them data (or instantiate them with data), they do some processing, then you store the massaged data or pass it on to the next algorithm. In this case persistence is a red herring and the objects themselves should be stateless. Instead, the objects are made stateful, and the only way to store the data is to persist the object, which is massively overcomplex and performs terribly.
the database can be altered dramatically, swapped out with another database, the dialect of SQL in each database can be accounted for, etc., without any modification to the code dependent on those EJBs
In around 8 years of developing Oracle and Sybase applications for large companies, I've NEVER come across a case in which switching database mid-stream was even considered. I have however seen thousands upon thousands of man-hours wasted on "database independance". It's a wild goose chase, one of those things that sounds like it might be a good idea, but has no practical worth. You think Ford's engine designers lay awake at night wondering how they can be compatible with Honda exhausts?
Are they? I mean, do you have any sort of reference for money from the trust fund going into the Pentagon's budget? Or is this just what Michael Moore told you to think?
It's all about job security with these guys. They've always got FUD prepared like
Then explain what reinventing the wheel for every application like the EJB camp want to is? You've paid for the database, why not use as many features of it as you can?
I laugh when the same developers pay lip-service to ideas like "code reuse". By that they mean, "let us write our own libraries and we'll use them on the next project too". Ever look on Sourceforge, wonder why there are so many GUI toolkits and X window managers and little scripting languages and text editors? 'Cos give any developer the chance and they'll choose making tools over using tools to get something useful done.
For the same reason Iraqi oil is controlled by american companies.
Who modded this insightful?
The practice is the same all over the middle east. A foreign company leases an oilfield from the government for a set number of years, and pays them a fee per barrel extracted. At no time does control over the oil transfer from the government to a company until the oil is sold on the open market. If a company misbehaves, its lease can be cancelled and it'll be stuck with a pile of equipment on someone elses land that it had better shift sharpish so someone else can use the field.
Also, the proceeds from Iraqi oil are presently going into a trust fund, which will be spent on rebuilding. That fund isn't growing as quickly as it ought as local terrorists are intent on cutting the volumes.
The only advice I can give is to run tests comparing the performance of different SQL statements that do the same thing to determine which is the fastest. The results may surprise you.
No no no, rather than doing the join in SQL at all they will select everything from table A, everything from table B into the application, then the application will iterate through them, performing the join a row at a time, in memory, between objects by comparing properties. Forget the database cache, forget the query optimizer, forget indexes. The usual justification for this is "platform independance".
So then why does this cause the project to go wrong?
Because they are reluctant to develop classes that don't have an underlying table (for "persistance") and they are reluctant to develop classes that instantiate from or manipulate more than one table (for "encapsulation"). This results in horribly inflexible applications that cannot be developed beyond the original spec without horrible kludges.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the editors of a world-class newspaper see it differently, so at least there's room for doubt.
Last I checked, this wasn't the NYT discussion forum, but a whole 'nother site.
I have to wonder if Timothy would have posted this story had it been the other way round? Same as the Greenpeace story earlier. Ooo, political organizations that Timothy personally likes use technology too!
This is not news, Timothy.
We'll see how long it takes the French to blow this one up,
In 2004, protest was beginning!
What happen?
Someone set us up the wireless network! Erm I mean bomb!!
Bonjour, m'sieur! All your ships are belong to moi!
So is their only option to completely remove themselves from society in order to prove their point? Everyone would just ignore them. It is necessary for organizations such as theirs to accept some amount of hypocrisy in order to exist at all.
There's absolutely no reason Greenpeace couldn't use wooden, sail-powered ships (Hello? They were good enough for CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS!) with solar panels or small wind turbines on board for their electrical needs (such as radio comms). Chinese admiral Cheng Ho even grew food on the decks of his ships, so they would have a ready supply of lentils (or whatever they eat). Or they could harvest seaweed - the Welsh make bread from seaweed, for example. Or even catching fish, for those who're so inclined.
That Greenpeace prefers to use a more-or-less modern ship, and that they are unconcerned about the ecological impact of that ship, shows them up for what they are, publicity-seeking egomaniacs.
compilers! you can't program sh*t on a windows install without buying separate software
Really? When Microsoft's C++ compiler is free? When VBA is built into every Office program? When you can download a JDK for free?
your choice of how your desktop environment looks
Plenty of choice in XP, tho' I prefer the Win2K look
games, not just freecell and solitaire
Is that a joke? How many games are released for Linux compared to Windows?
real networking tools, such as nmap, a variety of firewalls, heck the list is too long to begin here
Just download 'em. If you know that you need 'em, you surely know where to get 'em.
a powerful command prompt for expert users
Ditto.
Now, I'm fairly platform-agnostic. I'll use the tools to get the job done, that's all an OS is, a tool. But you're doing yourself and Linux no favours by spouting this sort of unfounded nonsense.
Actually, I'm not even sure UNIX/MULTICS were even designed to have a keyboard or a screen, let alone a mouse.
Indeed. At a fairly fundamental level, Unix believes you're communicating with it using a teletype machine - like an electric typewriter with a serial cable. The "terminal" allowing text to be positioned anywhere is a hack on top of that, using control codes that would have physically moved the print head and the paper reel before. Even when you call up an xterm, there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in the software "above" Unix to make it think you're still using a teletype.
This is only news 'cos they're using graphics cards. If they were using Wyse terminals or DEC VT100s connecting to serial ports, it would be nothing you couldn't do with a desktop Unix workstation in the 80s. With LAT you could hang dozens of terminals off of a VAXstation. Or a bigger box in the 70s.
So, we're now excluding minorities on the so-called World-Wide-Web.
LOL, there are a billion Chinese, dude, maybe more. More people than in the US and EU combined (you know, the people who invented and paid for the internet and the web). If this block is a problem for the Chinese, maybe they ought to do something about the problem in their own territory. That they don't amounts to their government giving implicit approval of committing fraud so long as just foreigners are the victims. That sound right to you?
With Java development, the OS is completely marginalized. The question is which OS is the operation group in the organizations in question willing to support.
Hmm, it's less simple than that. Java is designed to run well on processors with lots of registers, like the SPARC, which has some very efficient hardware for sharing registers (you "see" 16, but 8 overlap with the stack object "above" you and 8 "below", so you can shift data around very very quickly, no need to unload and load). On the other hand, Java on Win32/x86 is way faster, because people have invested a lot more effort in making it so.
So the OS may be marginalized (Oracle has exactly the same effect) but the hardware decision becomes more important (ditto with Oracle).
It's called prioritizing.
It's called bullshit. We had a case here recently in England, a farmer was being terrorized by local gangs, his property stolen or destroyed, receiving threats. He asked the police for help and they did absolutely nothing. So, one evening, in desperation, he fought back with his shotgun. Yeah, the police rushed straight to the scene and arrested HIM.
The police are basically lazy. Dealing with gangs who don't give a fuck anyway is a lot of hassle for them, and they might get hurt themselves. Dealing with a law-abiding old man, that's something they can handle, even tho' the situation would never have arisen if they'd put the donuts down and actually done their jobs in the first place.
Prioritizing, my arse. The police, like any civil servants, couldn't care less about doing their jobs, they're just sitting around waiting to collect their fat pensions.
while you take off, smiling quietly to yourself
In your faster-than-a-bullet car?
The Coalition Provincial Authority cannot account for a few billion dollars worth of oil revenues
Well, the EU can't account for a few billion here and there either. That's the nature of government. There's zero evidence that any of that money went to the military (which was the original point I disputed). More likely it went on bribes to UN people.
But would you really want to create value for society which only consumes and gives you nothing in return?
The entire philosophy of Socialism is that it is possible to persuade people, by whatever means, to do this. The reason Socialism always fails is that productive people soon figure this out, and the non-productive are helpless without them.
wtf ? do they not teach the concept of KISS in school anymore ?
It IS simple, just not in the way you're thinking. Sure the device is more complex - but its simpler to use 'cos Windows is used in lots of other places and people are already familiar with it. The complexity has been shifted out of the mind of the programmer (who would otherwise have to learn PFOS, Picture Frame OS in addition to every other platform) and into the device.
This is Orkut saying that HE offered a neutral party to look and Affinity (the one's sueing Google) have refused the offer
Maybe they had some cause to doubt the neutrality of said party?
I mean, if you're suing someone, would your trust THEM to provide the evidence?
one should invest into some steel.
Why not make it out of ice?
Seriously. I stayed at the Ice Hotel in Sweden earlier this year, it's too warm even 200km inside the Arctic Circle for 6 months of the year for it to be structurally safe, but that won't be a problem in Antarctica. An amazing experience, and it's perfectly environmentally friendly too, and if you need more room, no problem, you've got all the materials you need right there!
The biggest downside with Cisco is, undeniably, price.
Well, you aren't paying for the kit, you're paying for the support infrastructure they have in place. Sure it's expensive upfront, but if something goes wrong, you'll be glad you did.
That's actually a very common trick in the mainframe world to radically improve performance.
I didn't know that. I suspect it's because mainframes have amazing I/O and relatively not much processor. Smaller systems are more balanced, their processors are much faster relative to their I/O subsystems than mainframes. It would make little sense to use this trick on a Sun.
But, none of the people I've seen do this are old mainframe hands - they're kids who got taught Java in their CS classes and think EJBs are the only way to write serious apps...
somebody on the team should be a "database developer".
Luckily, my present project does this (I'm one of these people). I've done client-server and n-tier development, and I've been a DBA and a sysadmin, now I'm inbetween the two camps, able to speak to both of them in their language, and (usually) with the authority to say "this should be done in OCI" and "this should be a trigger". But you're right, people who have this broad experience are quite rare, there's far too little cross-pollination between programmers and DBAs. Mostly in fact the two sides see each other as enemies, which is a shame, at the end of the day our job is to deliver an application, not to bicker.
I would say that mapping the object model to the data model directly in such a way that you can't change it later is actually a counterexample of encapsulation.
Oh, I quite agree. Doesn't stop people doing it, tho'. Data needs to be stored, but often objects themselves don't - often objects are just handy containers for algorithms, you feed them data (or instantiate them with data), they do some processing, then you store the massaged data or pass it on to the next algorithm. In this case persistence is a red herring and the objects themselves should be stateless. Instead, the objects are made stateful, and the only way to store the data is to persist the object, which is massively overcomplex and performs terribly.
the database can be altered dramatically, swapped out with another database, the dialect of SQL in each database can be accounted for, etc., without any modification to the code dependent on those EJBs
In around 8 years of developing Oracle and Sybase applications for large companies, I've NEVER come across a case in which switching database mid-stream was even considered. I have however seen thousands upon thousands of man-hours wasted on "database independance". It's a wild goose chase, one of those things that sounds like it might be a good idea, but has no practical worth. You think Ford's engine designers lay awake at night wondering how they can be compatible with Honda exhausts?
and paying for the US military expenses.
Are they? I mean, do you have any sort of reference for money from the trust fund going into the Pentagon's budget? Or is this just what Michael Moore told you to think?
It's all about job security with these guys. They've always got FUD prepared like
Then explain what reinventing the wheel for every application like the EJB camp want to is? You've paid for the database, why not use as many features of it as you can?
I laugh when the same developers pay lip-service to ideas like "code reuse". By that they mean, "let us write our own libraries and we'll use them on the next project too". Ever look on Sourceforge, wonder why there are so many GUI toolkits and X window managers and little scripting languages and text editors? 'Cos give any developer the chance and they'll choose making tools over using tools to get something useful done.
For the same reason Iraqi oil is controlled by american companies.
Who modded this insightful?
The practice is the same all over the middle east. A foreign company leases an oilfield from the government for a set number of years, and pays them a fee per barrel extracted. At no time does control over the oil transfer from the government to a company until the oil is sold on the open market. If a company misbehaves, its lease can be cancelled and it'll be stuck with a pile of equipment on someone elses land that it had better shift sharpish so someone else can use the field.
Also, the proceeds from Iraqi oil are presently going into a trust fund, which will be spent on rebuilding. That fund isn't growing as quickly as it ought as local terrorists are intent on cutting the volumes.
The only advice I can give is to run tests comparing the performance of different SQL statements that do the same thing to determine which is the fastest. The results may surprise you.
No no no, rather than doing the join in SQL at all they will select everything from table A, everything from table B into the application, then the application will iterate through them, performing the join a row at a time, in memory, between objects by comparing properties. Forget the database cache, forget the query optimizer, forget indexes. The usual justification for this is "platform independance".
So then why does this cause the project to go wrong?
Because they are reluctant to develop classes that don't have an underlying table (for "persistance") and they are reluctant to develop classes that instantiate from or manipulate more than one table (for "encapsulation"). This results in horribly inflexible applications that cannot be developed beyond the original spec without horrible kludges.