In short, merely being perfectly usable by grandma does not make Linux the viable alternative to Windows from the perspective of an *average consumer*. This is a huge complaint of mine. Being usable by "grandma" is totally meaningless if its not usable by the "grandson". And frankly, while Linux distros try to support the super-basic users and the super-advanced users, they completely neglect everything in-between.
Which is why saying "Tech School" is very misleading. When most people hear that term, they think DeVry or ITT, not "Engineering-oriented University" (which isn't called a University *only* because it doesn't have the same diversity of academic departments)
Then he better get in line. Hardly any of them exist to begin with, and those that do are in high demand. This is especially true at tech schools, where even the ugliest mutt can pull off a group of 4 or 5 suitors.
And I attended Rensselaer (we call it RPI, damnit), and am grateful for it.
You'd be amazed at how much you learn and grow when you are surrounded by people who are much smarter than you. Its not about the classes, but really about the people you'll meet along the way.
And because RPI is an engineering school, what few "liberal arts" classes they have are tailored to the subject areas of interest to technical people.
Seems like a load of crap invented by laptop manufacturers who thought it would be better to confuse buyers with acronyms than meaningful numbers. Of course I'm probably half-wrong, and there is some sort of reason for all of this.
Regardless, just print this out, and post it on your wall.
Which some Linux distributions (*cough*RedHat*cough*) insist on giving you instead of Sun Java, while making you think you still have a usable JRE. (and thus making it more difficult to correctly install the Sun JRE in a way that doesn't conflict or sit off to the side)
Except on phone platforms that have a lot of commonality. An example of this would be BlackBerry. Yes, to look-and-feel like the built-in apps, you do need to use a lot of BlackBerry-specific APIs. However, if you do, your apps *won't* look like ass (most generic J2ME apps do), and will work just fine on all the different BlackBerries out there. (and it is one of the more popular phone platforms)
I tried reading the Head First book on Design Patterns due to a friend's suggestion a while back. I'll have to admit that the first couple chapters tend to unfold pretty well. They present the information in a way that doesn't make any assumptions and is quite accessible to someone new to the material.
However, once you "get it", the style becomes increasingly tiresome. After a while you just want the damn information, not some cartoony scenario that dances around the issue before *finally* getting to the point. You then say "I'm not an idiot, I'll just go get the real book on this subject." In other words, their style works well for the first few chapters, but not for a whole book.
> Sounds really like a tank with no one to get injured in it. You really have no clue what a tank is? Or the difference between a tank and a truck? This is *not* a tank. It is a utility vehicle! The variant currently being shown is design to haul crap around so soldiers don't need to. Of course it does have armed variants that are designed to shoot weapons, keeping soldiers from harm. But, still, it is not heavy armor.
And w.r.t. air strikes, do you realize what the alternative is to our current approach of guided weapons? Yes, carpet bombing. Creates a lot more civilian casualties. Instead of killing civilians who the bad guys are hiding next to, they'll also kill the civilians in the buildings down the street.
And if you're using C, its at a level that you can directly see the translation to assembly code. C just makes it a lot easier to have human-readable structure to the program. Of course even then, you need to break into in-line asm every time you need to access a specific feature of the hardware. (which are quite common on microcontrollers, or anything where you are programming without an operating system, for that matter)
Gah! And in my Freshman year of CS education, I was learning complex data structures in C++. Thank goodness that I went to college just before everyone started switching to Java. Because Java lets you completely gloss over some of the most important concepts to understand, IMHO, it really should not be used as an introductory language. Actually, aside from perhaps one real class, I never even used Java in college. (and I really didn't get into IDEs of any sort until after college, regardless of language)
Of course today I mainly program in Java and C#, but its comforting to know that I could easily go back to C or C++ if the need arose. (and feel like I need to start up a side-project in one of them, just to prove to myself that I can still program in a *real* language, hehe)
Didn't realize it was *that* long ago. Then again, Star Trek fan sites were among the first content to appear on the Internet in quantity, back in the days when Yahoo! was actually a *browseable* website index. Of course I first started wandering the web in the 1994-1995 timeframe, and I was young enough that a year of calendar time seemed like 5 years by my current POV.
Actually, I think I remember when this site was first promoted. If I remember correctly, they used it as an excuse to forcibly shut down just about every fan site they could find on the Internet! (Memory Alpha probably came much later)
Correction... Only POP is a complete featureless piece of crap. But even still, prioritizing message downloads by size is just about the *only* special thing you can do with POP if the client was written to support it. With IMAP, you can do a lot more. Heck, you can even selectively download individual attachments in IMAP! (IMAP is actually a very fancy and featureful protocol. Check out the RFCs sometime if you're curious. It isn't the protocol's fault if many clients simply assume its "POP with Folders".)
It is a shame that he doesn't bother to even mention anything about the BlackBerry platform. First and foremost, it *is* J2ME. (well, for the most part) You can run standard J2ME stuff on the BlackBerry, but you can also run stuff written against the BlackBerry-specific API. RIM provides free development tools, and while their own IDE is pretty poor, integrating their tools with the NetBeans IDE is pretty easy.
The biggest advantage of BlackBerry Java development, IMHO, is that the OS itself is practically a JVM, and the built-in apps are also Java. On most phones, running a J2ME app requires waiting forever for the thing to start and never integrate well. On the BlackBerry, your own Java apps start instantly and can look just like all the other built-in apps. Finally, BlackBerry is a common platform across a wide range of popular devices, so you'll always have plenty of potential users even if you build BlackBerry-specific apps.
And now for the shameless plug... Back when I got my BlackBerry, I found that there were no decent available E-Mail clients for them. (only the service-based E-Mail, which stinks if you're not hooked to a corporate BIS server.) So, I kicked off an open-source project to write my own: LogicMail - http://www.logicprobe.org/proj/logicmail
A few months? That is total BS! Java 6 was released in December of last year. That's about 10 months ago. The latest version of Java 6 you can get from Apple is a castrated developer preview (w/o optimizations) based on build 88 of JDK 6. (looks like I was downloading build 103 by mid-Oct of last year on my Linux desktop)
Apple has done a nice job at UI integration for what Java versions they have released, but they definitely are also sending a message that they really don't care about staying up to date with the Java world.
I'd also go so far to say that Java performance sucks under OSX, but I haven't done much objective research to back that up with numbers. However, I did once work on an app that made extensive use of the tree structure of the Java preferences API to store its configuration. Saving the config was near-instant on Linux, but very slow on OSX. I profiled the code, and found the issue in the OSX-specific implementation. (eventually fixing it by changing how my application stored preference data)
The TSA didn't exist pre-9/11. When 9/11 happened, everyone screamed "the airport security people are dolts, so federalize them!". Overnight, all the Mexicans were gone, and replaced by twice as many random clueless people who were plucked off the street and put into uniforms an hour beforehand. Hence, the TSA was born.
The way the US metal detectors are calibrated these days, I'm worried that I'll set them off if my blood iron content is too high. I almost feel like frequent travelers (which I've been in the past) could use a boot-camp course on rapid "remove the laptop, take off the shoes, remove the belt, wallet, keys... walk through the detector, reverse the process and continue onward".
A few days ago I was flying out of Tel Aviv on El Al. Yeah, that's right, the airline that cares more about *real* security and is a far more tempting target than any of these US airlines. And I didn't have to present my plastic bag, or remove my shoes or belt! (of course they do scan the baggage, and question each passenger a bit more thoroughly than they ever do in the US, but it was still a far more pleasant experience than checking back in with Continental in Newark on my way back.)
The TSA is all about making it look like they're doing something, instead of actually doing something. I once heard it said that you simply cannot apply logic to security policy, since then it will never make sense to you. I'm curious what the next hairbrained terrorist scheme will be, and what sort of totally senseless travel restrictions will be added as a result. Any ideas?
Firefox works just fine on OSX. I hardly ever bother with Safari.
Also, Firefox actually has plugins that are *FREE*. (and AdBlock Plus is mandatory) I swear Apple leaves gaping deficiencies all over their software stack just to keep giving live to a thriving community of shareware software vendors that nickel-and-dime you to death to plug the holes. (to get adblocking in Safari, you have to pay for "Pithhelmet")
Actually, properly written Java apps can look like native apps on MacOSX. In fact, aside from the menu bar issue, the widgets look native by default. (or at least they did when I was writing a Swing app on a PowerBook) There are even whole guides on how to write your Java apps so they do look/feel/work like native apps on OSX (and its all really minor top-level stuff), while still obviously working normally everywhere else.
They more accurately portray Linux as a uber-dork wearing a backpack, and *BSD as someone who looks almost the same (but is pissy about being confused with Linux)....as I type this on my SuSE 10.2 desktop, connected to a network of Solaris and FreeBSD machines...
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why saying "Tech School" is very misleading. When most people hear that term, they think DeVry or ITT, not "Engineering-oriented University" (which isn't called a University *only* because it doesn't have the same diversity of academic departments)
Then he better get in line. Hardly any of them exist to begin with, and those that do are in high demand. This is especially true at tech schools, where even the ugliest mutt can pull off a group of 4 or 5 suitors.
And I attended Rensselaer (we call it RPI, damnit), and am grateful for it.
You'd be amazed at how much you learn and grow when you are surrounded by people who are much smarter than you. Its not about the classes, but really about the people you'll meet along the way.
And because RPI is an engineering school, what few "liberal arts" classes they have are tailored to the subject areas of interest to technical people.
Seems like a load of crap invented by laptop manufacturers who thought it would be better to confuse buyers with acronyms than meaningful numbers. Of course I'm probably half-wrong, and there is some sort of reason for all of this.
Regardless, just print this out, and post it on your wall.
Which some Linux distributions (*cough*RedHat*cough*) insist on giving you instead of Sun Java, while making you think you still have a usable JRE. (and thus making it more difficult to correctly install the Sun JRE in a way that doesn't conflict or sit off to the side)
Except on phone platforms that have a lot of commonality. An example of this would be BlackBerry. Yes, to look-and-feel like the built-in apps, you do need to use a lot of BlackBerry-specific APIs. However, if you do, your apps *won't* look like ass (most generic J2ME apps do), and will work just fine on all the different BlackBerries out there. (and it is one of the more popular phone platforms)
I tried reading the Head First book on Design Patterns due to a friend's suggestion a while back. I'll have to admit that the first couple chapters tend to unfold pretty well. They present the information in a way that doesn't make any assumptions and is quite accessible to someone new to the material.
However, once you "get it", the style becomes increasingly tiresome. After a while you just want the damn information, not some cartoony scenario that dances around the issue before *finally* getting to the point. You then say "I'm not an idiot, I'll just go get the real book on this subject." In other words, their style works well for the first few chapters, but not for a whole book.
> Sounds really like a tank with no one to get injured in it.
You really have no clue what a tank is? Or the difference between a tank and a truck? This is *not* a tank. It is a utility vehicle! The variant currently being shown is design to haul crap around so soldiers don't need to. Of course it does have armed variants that are designed to shoot weapons, keeping soldiers from harm. But, still, it is not heavy armor.
And w.r.t. air strikes, do you realize what the alternative is to our current approach of guided weapons? Yes, carpet bombing. Creates a lot more civilian casualties. Instead of killing civilians who the bad guys are hiding next to, they'll also kill the civilians in the buildings down the street.
And if you're using C, its at a level that you can directly see the translation to assembly code. C just makes it a lot easier to have human-readable structure to the program. Of course even then, you need to break into in-line asm every time you need to access a specific feature of the hardware. (which are quite common on microcontrollers, or anything where you are programming without an operating system, for that matter)
Gah! And in my Freshman year of CS education, I was learning complex data structures in C++. Thank goodness that I went to college just before everyone started switching to Java. Because Java lets you completely gloss over some of the most important concepts to understand, IMHO, it really should not be used as an introductory language. Actually, aside from perhaps one real class, I never even used Java in college. (and I really didn't get into IDEs of any sort until after college, regardless of language)
Of course today I mainly program in Java and C#, but its comforting to know that I could easily go back to C or C++ if the need arose. (and feel like I need to start up a side-project in one of them, just to prove to myself that I can still program in a *real* language, hehe)
Didn't realize it was *that* long ago. Then again, Star Trek fan sites were among the first content to appear on the Internet in quantity, back in the days when Yahoo! was actually a *browseable* website index. Of course I first started wandering the web in the 1994-1995 timeframe, and I was young enough that a year of calendar time seemed like 5 years by my current POV.
Actually, I think I remember when this site was first promoted. If I remember correctly, they used it as an excuse to forcibly shut down just about every fan site they could find on the Internet! (Memory Alpha probably came much later)
Anyone else remember this period?
Correction... Only POP is a complete featureless piece of crap. But even still, prioritizing message downloads by size is just about the *only* special thing you can do with POP if the client was written to support it. With IMAP, you can do a lot more. Heck, you can even selectively download individual attachments in IMAP! (IMAP is actually a very fancy and featureful protocol. Check out the RFCs sometime if you're curious. It isn't the protocol's fault if many clients simply assume its "POP with Folders".)
It is a shame that he doesn't bother to even mention anything about the BlackBerry platform. First and foremost, it *is* J2ME. (well, for the most part) You can run standard J2ME stuff on the BlackBerry, but you can also run stuff written against the BlackBerry-specific API. RIM provides free development tools, and while their own IDE is pretty poor, integrating their tools with the NetBeans IDE is pretty easy.
The biggest advantage of BlackBerry Java development, IMHO, is that the OS itself is practically a JVM, and the built-in apps are also Java. On most phones, running a J2ME app requires waiting forever for the thing to start and never integrate well. On the BlackBerry, your own Java apps start instantly and can look just like all the other built-in apps. Finally, BlackBerry is a common platform across a wide range of popular devices, so you'll always have plenty of potential users even if you build BlackBerry-specific apps.
And now for the shameless plug...
Back when I got my BlackBerry, I found that there were no decent available E-Mail clients for them. (only the service-based E-Mail, which stinks if you're not hooked to a corporate BIS server.) So, I kicked off an open-source project to write my own:
LogicMail - http://www.logicprobe.org/proj/logicmail
A few months? That is total BS! Java 6 was released in December of last year. That's about 10 months ago. The latest version of Java 6 you can get from Apple is a castrated developer preview (w/o optimizations) based on build 88 of JDK 6. (looks like I was downloading build 103 by mid-Oct of last year on my Linux desktop)
Apple has done a nice job at UI integration for what Java versions they have released, but they definitely are also sending a message that they really don't care about staying up to date with the Java world.
I'd also go so far to say that Java performance sucks under OSX, but I haven't done much objective research to back that up with numbers. However, I did once work on an app that made extensive use of the tree structure of the Java preferences API to store its configuration. Saving the config was near-instant on Linux, but very slow on OSX. I profiled the code, and found the issue in the OSX-specific implementation. (eventually fixing it by changing how my application stored preference data)
I still remember the 90's when that generation would boast how they didn't even know those things, and seemed proud of it.
The TSA didn't exist pre-9/11. When 9/11 happened, everyone screamed "the airport security people are dolts, so federalize them!". Overnight, all the Mexicans were gone, and replaced by twice as many random clueless people who were plucked off the street and put into uniforms an hour beforehand. Hence, the TSA was born.
The way the US metal detectors are calibrated these days, I'm worried that I'll set them off if my blood iron content is too high. I almost feel like frequent travelers (which I've been in the past) could use a boot-camp course on rapid "remove the laptop, take off the shoes, remove the belt, wallet, keys... walk through the detector, reverse the process and continue onward".
A few days ago I was flying out of Tel Aviv on El Al. Yeah, that's right, the airline that cares more about *real* security and is a far more tempting target than any of these US airlines. And I didn't have to present my plastic bag, or remove my shoes or belt! (of course they do scan the baggage, and question each passenger a bit more thoroughly than they ever do in the US, but it was still a far more pleasant experience than checking back in with Continental in Newark on my way back.)
The TSA is all about making it look like they're doing something, instead of actually doing something. I once heard it said that you simply cannot apply logic to security policy, since then it will never make sense to you. I'm curious what the next hairbrained terrorist scheme will be, and what sort of totally senseless travel restrictions will be added as a result. Any ideas?
PIDs are generated randomly, on OpenBSD.
(not sure about anywhere else)
And what environmental factors could possible cause that on the moon, which has no atmosphere or tectonic activity?
Firefox works just fine on OSX. I hardly ever bother with Safari.
Also, Firefox actually has plugins that are *FREE*. (and AdBlock Plus is mandatory)
I swear Apple leaves gaping deficiencies all over their software stack just to keep giving live to a thriving community of shareware software vendors that nickel-and-dime you to death to plug the holes.
(to get adblocking in Safari, you have to pay for "Pithhelmet")
Actually, properly written Java apps can look like native apps on MacOSX. In fact, aside from the menu bar issue, the widgets look native by default. (or at least they did when I was writing a Swing app on a PowerBook) There are even whole guides on how to write your Java apps so they do look/feel/work like native apps on OSX (and its all really minor top-level stuff), while still obviously working normally everywhere else.
Somehow, I don't think the people of Deutchland will be too happy after you called their country Douche-land ;-)
I really like the spoofs on this site: http://tv.truenuff.com/mac/
...as I type this on my SuSE 10.2 desktop, connected to a network of Solaris and FreeBSD machines...
They more accurately portray Linux as a uber-dork wearing a backpack, and *BSD as someone who looks almost the same (but is pissy about being confused with Linux).