Calling Java a VB for people who hate microsoft is like calling a Porsche a Camero for people who hate Chevys. It's a lot more full featured than VB. I've worked on a genetic algorithm scheduler in Java. Don't try that in VB.
Aside from that, yeah, Java on the client was killed by plain old HTML.
In what possible way is it a good thing for a user to get used to their main interface switching around? The only way to get good at an interface is familiarity. This is like saying that it's a good thing that one week the car uses a steering wheel and the next a joystick. You're never going to win a race in a car like that.
Interface consistency is the big Mac lesson, and one that Windows hasn't learned after so many years. Don't take my word for it though, ask a real UI designer. Any one worth their salt won't be telling you about their hot new "4 dimensional wheel interface" they'll be telling you how their new interface fits with those previously seen by the user and leverages past experience.
Just because the development tool you're using doesn't let you mess with the OS doesn't prove anything about the development tool some virus writer is using.
I was about to post that this was incredibly stupid. But then I realized that having mid level IT bosses rotate about wouldn't actually change much. They'd just go from being clueless in one place to being clueless in another. In fact, it might improve things because they'd have to admit total ignorance (instead of having it but not admitting it.)
But who am I kidding, the pointy haired never admit ignorance. Engineers on the ground probably won't even notice that their new bungee boss isn't from their company.
You have an established, crossplatform standard for guessing file types with a reasonable expectation that it will work, but that's all. And as for working cross platform... windows file types barely work cross platform as it is, and MS doesn't care about cross platform, so why should they work too hard on that?
To start, it would take a few hundred dollars per box to put W2000 on it, since they presumably don't want you to just copy their evaluation version.
So unless they're willing to give you their OS for free, why would you even consider it? Suddenly your supercomputer cluster would cost like a real supercomputer... then you could have just bought a real supercomputer!
Here's a guy who has never written a big pile of Java, he's only heard stories about it. Don't listen to him. You could do it in Java as well as C# - the languages are pretty damn equivalent. The only question is whether to do it in Java/C#, C++/C, or something else.
Someone has been swallowing too many of the microsoft propaganda spews, I think.
This is as surprising as the sun coming up, really. Unless you had some sort of hardware encryption with unique keys embedded in the keyboard (and hardware or maybe software on the other end to decrypt it) it's going to be sniffable.
Encryption hardware costs money. Using unique keys per item costs money to configure them at the factory. If keyboards aren't cheap no one buys them. The math is pretty inescapable.
That's so true, I find that Java is best appreciated coming out of C and C++ (which was my route) and isn't the greatest teaching language because it provides a few too many things. But then, I think teaching languages should be simple - Scheme is great - and not object oriented to start.
I also wouldn't hire anyone who said "I'm a Java developer" for serious work, though I would hire someone who said "I'm a developer, and I really prefer to work in Java". Subtle difference, but important.
There's only so much complexity you can support without a good language architecture. Sure, Java/JSPs are overkill for throwing together a simple site, but the really interesting projects require serious algorithmic chops.
Which is not to say you can't have serious algorithms in other languages, but more to disagree with the idea that web services are always page-based. There is a lot you can't solve well that way...
Dude, there's a whole book you should buy then, that catalogs excellent 90's hacks. Cathedral in Lobby 7, police car on the dome, a bunch of great stuff happened in the last decade.
The book is titled "Is This the Way to Baker House?". You can see the description at MIT Press
Re:This is proof of concept, and not too dangerous
on
Gnutella "Virus" Roams
·
· Score: 2
"This is not a threat... it doesn't effect me anyway..." sounds like the canonical initial cry whenever a security hole the size of the grand canyon is revealed.
It may not effect you, but if it gives the network a bad reputation or screws up enough people who aren't you it's your problem anyway.
A lot of the difference is having had a few courses in algorithms, data structures, and theory. Even good self-taught programmers tend to have to reinvent wheels which an attentive CS major will have been taught about already. Red-Black trees, anyone? O(n) vs. O(n^2)? Someone who has been through a CS major will know what to make of stuff like this.
Mind you, being a CS major doesn't make one a good programmer, but it helps make a good programmer into a deep programmer. And lack of a real CS education has produced a lot of bad code from smart people.
That's an honest opinion I share. Heinlein seems put himself in every book he writes... as that old man with the young girls who want to do his (sexual) bidding. The weirdest thing is that the young women and the old man seem to usually share the same personality. I've read maybe six or seven of his novels looking for the great Heinlein that people talk about but found only the dirty old man. Finally I got wise and stopped looking.
I guess he puts a lot of fantasy into his science fiction... but for that sort of fantasy you might as well go find some porn and get it honestly.;)
So generous, you get an extra 30 hours a week in exchange for two extra weeks of vacation. Anyone can check that math out and draw their own conclusion about how much you care about your workers.
Clearly you get fairly bright[programming] people
but not fairly bright[life] people. I was amazed by your model employee - someone whose home is an empty wasteland and who has no friends.
You must be missing some of the brightest[all] people I knew at MIT, because they would never put up with a company whose stated goal was for work to be all of life. They were bright enough to have some interests other than programming for hire.
Was this really a paean to apathy, a stirring call to wait around and hope that a christ-figure saves us (until which time we lie about like pond-slugs)?
This is pretty low. Even if you don't like your choices, you can write in someone, support a third party that's out there, vote for the lesser of two evils...
But don't try to justify your couch-sitting with lame words about how you're waiting for someone you'll really like.
Alternate programming languages being more productive is by no means a myth. I've worked with (pretty much) the same group of people on two projects in a row: the first in C++, the second in Java.
While the C++ version was certainly the more memory and computation efficient of the two, these benefits paled compared to the improvement in development speed and code quality we acheived by switching to Java. Since then I've moved to another company where we use almost all Java (with little bits of other languages where Java is bad) and we're about to do things that we wouldn't dream of doing in C++, let alone C (yes, I've worked in C for a couple years as well, so I know whereof I speak). Before that first Java project, I thought it was mostly a toy language. Now I'm a believer, and looking for jobs I look for Java.
Java does use more resources to run, but in my experience less to program. Of course, programmer quality probably effects what sort of development speedup you can get - a bad programmer is slow in any language - but...
I'm really familiar with Mage and I love it, but even so this represents a new low for Katz. I expect his next article will compare the nature of the net to pop-tarts.
Just because you can compare too things doesn't mean they're related!
I don't think this has actually been well thought out. Speaking as someone who has to watch his hands and wrists all the time vibration and extra resistance is the last thing I want to do to my hand.
Certainly vibrating controllers (such as the Playstation's) make my hands hurt in under a minute. Their manual acknowledges the danger, telling you not to use the vibration function if it makes your hand hurt.
Mousing also makes my hand hurt if I keep at it for a while - I use a trackpad instead of a mouse because of this - so I'm pretty skeptical that I want to add any extra resistance to a mouse.
Certainly the pin-grid array would be a better way to go - feel, not "feedback".
I think the trend of self-aggrandizement that has started amoung a lot of the slashdot crowd is pretty sickening, and Katz, who often exemplifies it, has outdone himself here. We are not the heroes of our own little sagas. We're regular people. Some of us pretty exceptional regular people. Some of us damn exceptional regular people. But comparing oneself to the heroes of a game - so cool! so daring! so fasionable! - is a level of arrogance from which it's hard to recover. Just try to do the right things and stop pretending to be superheroes.
With EMACS and the standard java commandline tools, and maybe a script to compile everything at once if necessary, you can have a nice development environment that is the same everywhere.
IDE tools are sometimes useful, but you can get the same functionality on the cheap without them. And I spend as much time wondering why the hell JDeveloper hasn't recompiled the files I wanted it to as I used to spend getting my emacs/javac/jdb kit running, and it's much more frustrating because of the lack of feedback from an IDE.
Fancy debugging tools also often encourage you to run in the debugger instead of thinking about what the problem is, you can waste a lot of time that way unless you're disciplined and think first, then run the debugger.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling Java a VB for people who hate microsoft is like calling a Porsche a Camero for people who hate Chevys. It's a lot more full featured than VB. I've worked on a genetic algorithm scheduler in Java. Don't try that in VB.
Aside from that, yeah, Java on the client was killed by plain old HTML.
In what possible way is it a good thing for a user to get used to their main interface switching around? The only way to get good at an interface is familiarity. This is like saying that it's a good thing that one week the car uses a steering wheel and the next a joystick. You're never going to win a race in a car like that.
Interface consistency is the big Mac lesson, and one that Windows hasn't learned after so many years. Don't take my word for it though, ask a real UI designer. Any one worth their salt won't be telling you about their hot new "4 dimensional wheel interface" they'll be telling you how their new interface fits with those previously seen by the user and leverages past experience.
Smoking crack, man.
Just because the development tool you're using doesn't let you mess with the OS doesn't prove anything about the development tool some virus writer is using.
Too right. I'd love to see a quick list of how to get rid of anything on windows.
Everything you install sticks pieces into orifices it shouldn't, and then leaves a snapped off infected stub somewhere you can't pull out.
Perhaps it's too Mac-person, but if you can't drag your install in and drag it out again, it's not a real desktop OS.
Actually, my consultancy has been in the same boat. In our case, however, the partners took the pay cut and the employees kept their full salaries.
Not enough to save the company, but the employees will be payed in full until we close up.
This mostly proves that none of the partners graduated from business school or had the traditional businessman's moral-ectomy.
I was about to post that this was incredibly stupid. But then I realized that having mid level IT bosses rotate about wouldn't actually change much. They'd just go from being clueless in one place to being clueless in another. In fact, it might improve things because they'd have to admit total ignorance (instead of having it but not admitting it.)
But who am I kidding, the pointy haired never admit ignorance. Engineers on the ground probably won't even notice that their new bungee boss isn't from their company.
You have an established, crossplatform standard for guessing file types with a reasonable expectation that it will work, but that's all. And as for working cross platform... windows file types barely work cross platform as it is, and MS doesn't care about cross platform, so why should they work too hard on that?
There's an ad for AT&T broadband that runs on my local TV in which a guy says "I want to download the top 40... while it's still the top 40!"
I've always taken that to be telling me that I should buy a cable modem to pirate music faster.
To start, it would take a few hundred dollars per box to put W2000 on it, since they presumably don't want you to just copy their evaluation version.
So unless they're willing to give you their OS for free, why would you even consider it? Suddenly your supercomputer cluster would cost like a real supercomputer... then you could have just bought a real supercomputer!
Here's a guy who has never written a big pile of Java, he's only heard stories about it. Don't listen to him. You could do it in Java as well as C# - the languages are pretty damn equivalent. The only question is whether to do it in Java/C#, C++/C, or something else.
Someone has been swallowing too many of the microsoft propaganda spews, I think.
This is as surprising as the sun coming up, really. Unless you had some sort of hardware encryption with unique keys embedded in the keyboard (and hardware or maybe software on the other end to decrypt it) it's going to be sniffable.
Encryption hardware costs money. Using unique keys per item costs money to configure them at the factory. If keyboards aren't cheap no one buys them. The math is pretty inescapable.
That's so true, I find that Java is best appreciated coming out of C and C++ (which was my route) and isn't the greatest teaching language because it provides a few too many things. But then, I think teaching languages should be simple - Scheme is great - and not object oriented to start.
I also wouldn't hire anyone who said "I'm a Java developer" for serious work, though I would hire someone who said "I'm a developer, and I really prefer to work in Java". Subtle difference, but important.
There's only so much complexity you can support without a good language architecture. Sure, Java/JSPs are overkill for throwing together a simple site, but the really interesting projects require serious algorithmic chops.
Which is not to say you can't have serious algorithms in other languages, but more to disagree with the idea that web services are always page-based. There is a lot you can't solve well that way...
That was a jen indeed. I wasted many hours playing that. Too bad I only barely remember how the game play worked...
Dude, there's a whole book you should buy then, that catalogs excellent 90's hacks. Cathedral in Lobby 7, police car on the dome, a bunch of great stuff happened in the last decade.
The book is titled "Is This the Way to Baker House?". You can see the description at MIT Press
"This is not a threat... it doesn't effect me anyway..." sounds like the canonical initial cry whenever a security hole the size of the grand canyon is revealed.
It may not effect you, but if it gives the network a bad reputation or screws up enough people who aren't you it's your problem anyway.
A lot of the difference is having had a few courses in algorithms, data structures, and theory. Even good self-taught programmers tend to have to reinvent wheels which an attentive CS major will have been taught about already. Red-Black trees, anyone? O(n) vs. O(n^2)? Someone who has been through a CS major will know what to make of stuff like this.
Mind you, being a CS major doesn't make one a good programmer, but it helps make a good programmer into a deep programmer. And lack of a real CS education has produced a lot of bad code from smart people.
I guess he puts a lot of fantasy into his science fiction... but for that sort of fantasy you might as well go find some porn and get it honestly. ;)
Clearly you get fairly bright[programming] people but not fairly bright[life] people. I was amazed by your model employee - someone whose home is an empty wasteland and who has no friends.
You must be missing some of the brightest[all] people I knew at MIT, because they would never put up with a company whose stated goal was for work to be all of life. They were bright enough to have some interests other than programming for hire.
This is pretty low. Even if you don't like your choices, you can write in someone, support a third party that's out there, vote for the lesser of two evils...
But don't try to justify your couch-sitting with lame words about how you're waiting for someone you'll really like.
Alternate programming languages being more productive is by no means a myth. I've worked with (pretty much) the same group of people on two projects in a row: the first in C++, the second in Java.
While the C++ version was certainly the more memory and computation efficient of the two, these benefits paled compared to the improvement in development speed and code quality we acheived by switching to Java. Since then I've moved to another company where we use almost all Java (with little bits of other languages where Java is bad) and we're about to do things that we wouldn't dream of doing in C++, let alone C (yes, I've worked in C for a couple years as well, so I know whereof I speak). Before that first Java project, I thought it was mostly a toy language. Now I'm a believer, and looking for jobs I look for Java.
Java does use more resources to run, but in my experience less to program. Of course, programmer quality probably effects what sort of development speedup you can get - a bad programmer is slow in any language - but...
I'm really familiar with Mage and I love it, but even so this represents a new low for Katz. I expect his next article will compare the nature of the net to pop-tarts.
Just because you can compare too things doesn't mean they're related!
Certainly vibrating controllers (such as the Playstation's) make my hands hurt in under a minute. Their manual acknowledges the danger, telling you not to use the vibration function if it makes your hand hurt.
Mousing also makes my hand hurt if I keep at it for a while - I use a trackpad instead of a mouse because of this - so I'm pretty skeptical that I want to add any extra resistance to a mouse.
Certainly the pin-grid array would be a better way to go - feel, not "feedback".
I think the trend of self-aggrandizement that has started amoung a lot of the slashdot crowd is pretty sickening, and Katz, who often exemplifies it, has outdone himself here. We are not the heroes of our own little sagas. We're regular people. Some of us pretty exceptional regular people. Some of us damn exceptional regular people. But comparing oneself to the heroes of a game - so cool! so daring! so fasionable! - is a level of arrogance from which it's hard to recover. Just try to do the right things and stop pretending to be superheroes.
It's true.
With EMACS and the standard java commandline tools, and maybe a script to compile everything at once if necessary, you can have a nice development environment that is the same everywhere.
IDE tools are sometimes useful, but you can get the same functionality on the cheap without them. And I spend as much time wondering why the hell JDeveloper hasn't recompiled the files I wanted it to as I used to spend getting my emacs/javac/jdb kit running, and it's much more frustrating because of the lack of feedback from an IDE.
Fancy debugging tools also often encourage you to run in the debugger instead of thinking about what the problem is, you can waste a lot of time that way unless you're disciplined and think first, then run the debugger.