The winner is Linux... ok, so it's silly, but... Linux is really taking giant strides towards being a very usable operating system, even for grandma.
Last week I bought an mp3 (and ogg!) player for my fiancee`. We took it home, plugged it into the USB port, and up popped a window. She clicked and dragged a few ogg files into it and they were available on the player. The 'grip' program was equally easy to set up, even if it did have a lot of sub-sub-options to configure. I've been using Linux for nearly 10 years, and... I have to say I was impressed! It's one thing for me to be able to make it do what I want, but another when it "just works" for someone who isn't a computer person.
Europeans are, at this point, probably as or more expensive, especially considering the weak dollar.
It's not outsourcing, it's expanding. Linux doesn't just exist in the US, you know. There are big opportunities in other parts of the world, and apparently they want to be there.
I liked the bit in the opening space shoot em up where R2 kills the bad droid that is latched onto someone's fighter craft, and the dead droid hulk is slowly "blown" backwards and off the spaceship, presumably by "space wind"?
Oh, get real. It's difficult to know what really happened, and whether the soldiers made a mistake or whether it was simply a terrible tragedy, but if the soldiers had wanted that woman dead, there would be nothing left of her, the car, or any of the other occupants besides a smoking crater.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence".
Apparently, according to the article (you read it, right?) the ads are selected to maximize revenue, not just on the ads that pay most per click. This means that if an ad is not clicked much, because it is, say, annoying, then it won't actually come up as much...
It depends on the project of course, but my experience is that scripting languages are always going to "scale down" better than c++, and so will be able to more quickly bring something functional on line.
You are of course correct that learning the scripting language and the low level language isn't free, but learning the scripting language is within reach of more people, and for someone who knows the low level language, the scripting language might take longer than a week, but won't be that hard.
Ruby is slow even for scripting languages. It's fine for many things, but if you need performance Ruby doesn't cut it. And if you really need performance no scripting can cut it and you gotta use something better.
The ideal way of doing things is to write as much as you can in the scripting language. This is almost always faster and more efficient in terms of programmer time. Then, you go back and redo the speed critical bits and pieces in C or C++.
When this dawned on me, I really began to appreciate Tcl a lot more than I had in the past. It's C API lets you do a ton of fun things. Multiple interpreters, stacked channels, all kinds of access to variables and commands. And the original source code is extremely legible should you ever get the urge to hack on it directly.
...like any language that has had its time in the limelight. There are millions upon millions of lines of code written in it, and a lot of that isn't just going to be rewritten from one day to the next, no matter how much buzz and hype Sun and MS spew forth about their new languages.
I wrote an article about the economics of programming languages that talks about this and other issues that concern the adoption and lifecycle of languages, although be forewarned that the login system is a bit fiddly:
I thought it was just a simple configuration error, but I've sent email to their webmaster and it hasn't been fixed. Perhaps if other people were to politely let them know that, while Sun Microsystems may or may not be a fine company, their logo appearing on the web site of the US Senate is probably not appropriate.
I don't get why these articles always seem to push some one-off distribution that someone has scrounged together for their particular architecture. With Debian/Ubuntu, Gentoo or whatever, you get the same basic OS you use everywhere else, modulo a few tools that are specific to that architecture. That makes your life easier, so you can spend more time on interesting things, be it watching movies, kernel hacking or whatever...
Even if this article is a bit dated, it's very relevant. I find it interesting because he talks some about the economics behind managing risks like those cited.
Dr. Varian's writings are in general quite interesting. He is quite able in his discussions of economics for people without a background in the field, like myself.
talks about some of the cool stuff that Tcl does. My favorite thing about the language is that it hits a real sweet spot with its level of abstraction. Python has an event loop now, in Twisted, but Tcl's had the same thing for ages, and it's very easy to use.
Sometimes, with complex regexp's, it's handy to be able to build them incrementally. I know it's just one of many, but I wrote a little tool that's handy for this. It's called regexpviewer, and it's available here:
I've been using gcj to develop Hecl ( http://www.hecl.org/ ) with, and so far I've been pretty happy. I found one compiler bug, which I reported and which was then promptly fixed. At FOSDEM, I also had occasion to go visit the Free Java developer room, and the impression I get is that these guys are making enough headway that it doesn't matter what Sun does at this point. Redhat had something like 3 or 4 very sharp developers (Tom Tromey, for instance) working more or less full time on gcj and ClassPath. Sure, Sun has way more people, but for now, all the free guys have to do is play catch up with the spec, not surpass Sun. That comes next;-)
By the way, I don't think blackdown is actually open source in that it's based on the Sun code.
I'm curious - does the new Fedora actually ship with gcj and gij as 'Java'? That will be an interesting development to watch.
I wrote a brief article on systems that scale down, with programming languages in mind. You are correct that all the Java baggage comes into its own when you start writing larger programs, but for beginners, or people just wanting to whip something together, it is baggage.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a Samsung YP-MT6V:
2 c_product_detail.jsp?eUser=&prod_id=YP-MT6V%2FXAA
http://product.samsung.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b
I got it because it does ogg in addition to mp3.
The winner is Linux
... ok, so it's silly, but... Linux is really taking giant strides towards being a very usable operating system, even for grandma.
Rule #2
The winner is Linux
Last week I bought an mp3 (and ogg!) player for my fiancee`. We took it home, plugged it into the USB port, and up popped a window. She clicked and dragged a few ogg files into it and they were available on the player. The 'grip' program was equally easy to set up, even if it did have a lot of sub-sub-options to configure. I've been using Linux for nearly 10 years, and... I have to say I was impressed! It's one thing for me to be able to make it do what I want, but another when it "just works" for someone who isn't a computer person.
Oh, and no, I didn't read the article:-)
Europeans are, at this point, probably as or more expensive, especially considering the weak dollar.
It's not outsourcing, it's expanding. Linux doesn't just exist in the US, you know. There are big opportunities in other parts of the world, and apparently they want to be there.
I liked the bit in the opening space shoot em up where R2 kills the bad droid that is latched onto someone's fighter craft, and the dead droid hulk is slowly "blown" backwards and off the spaceship, presumably by "space wind"?
According to informed sources (http://wiki.tcl.tk/11951) a lot of Puppy Linux is done with Tcl and Tk. Reminds me to some degree of ETLinux:t ml
http://www.prosa.it/etlinux/papers/linuxandc.en.h
although of course that was aimed at much smaller targets.
Oh, get real. It's difficult to know what really happened, and whether the soldiers made a mistake or whether it was simply a terrible tragedy, but if the soldiers had wanted that woman dead, there would be nothing left of her, the car, or any of the other occupants besides a smoking crater.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence".
Apparently, according to the article (you read it, right?) the ads are selected to maximize revenue, not just on the ads that pay most per click. This means that if an ad is not clicked much, because it is, say, annoying, then it won't actually come up as much...
It depends on the project of course, but my experience is that scripting languages are always going to "scale down" better than c++, and so will be able to more quickly bring something functional on line.
You are of course correct that learning the scripting language and the low level language isn't free, but learning the scripting language is within reach of more people, and for someone who knows the low level language, the scripting language might take longer than a week, but won't be that hard.
The ideal way of doing things is to write as much as you can in the scripting language. This is almost always faster and more efficient in terms of programmer time. Then, you go back and redo the speed critical bits and pieces in C or C++.
When this dawned on me, I really began to appreciate Tcl a lot more than I had in the past. It's C API lets you do a ton of fun things. Multiple interpreters, stacked channels, all kinds of access to variables and commands. And the original source code is extremely legible should you ever get the urge to hack on it directly.
...like any language that has had its time in the limelight. There are millions upon millions of lines of code written in it, and a lot of that isn't just going to be rewritten from one day to the next, no matter how much buzz and hype Sun and MS spew forth about their new languages.
6 791/0418_welton.html
I wrote an article about the economics of programming languages that talks about this and other issues that concern the adoption and lifecycle of languages, although be forewarned that the login system is a bit fiddly:
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=9553/byt111384524
I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
The first step in corporate ownership of the US Senate is this:
http://www.senate.gov/favicon.ico
I thought it was just a simple configuration error, but I've sent email to their webmaster and it hasn't been fixed. Perhaps if other people were to politely let them know that, while Sun Microsystems may or may not be a fine company, their logo appearing on the web site of the US Senate is probably not appropriate.
... be sure to let the rest of the world know about the modems that don't work at the Linux Incompatibility List:
http://www.leenooks.com/
I don't get why these articles always seem to push some one-off distribution that someone has scrounged together for their particular architecture. With Debian/Ubuntu, Gentoo or whatever, you get the same basic OS you use everywhere else, modulo a few tools that are specific to that architecture. That makes your life easier, so you can spend more time on interesting things, be it watching movies, kernel hacking or whatever...
not 'Felding'.
Even if this article is a bit dated, it's very relevant. I find it interesting because he talks some about the economics behind managing risks like those cited.
m es/2000-06-01.html
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTi
Dr. Varian's writings are in general quite interesting. He is quite able in his discussions of economics for people without a background in the field, like myself.
This article:
0 0.asp
http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1759,1778148,
talks about some of the cool stuff that Tcl does. My favorite thing about the language is that it hits a real sweet spot with its level of abstraction. Python has an event loop now, in Twisted, but Tcl's had the same thing for ages, and it's very easy to use.
Sometimes, with complex regexp's, it's handy to be able to build them incrementally. I know it's just one of many, but I wrote a little tool that's handy for this. It's called regexpviewer, and it's available here:
h tml
http://www.dedasys.com/freesoftware/applications.
Perhaps other people can recommend other tools they've found useful for learning/building regular expressions.
I'm a Debian developer, and I'll agree that it's not simple in all the ways it could be, but I don't get this:
"apt-get & dpkg and all these related tools are not as brain-dead simple to use as pacman is"
How is "apt-get install whatever" any more difficult than "pacman -S firefox"?
I want to short stuff that I don't think is going anywhere. They're losing part of the information they could capture without that feature.
I've been using gcj to develop Hecl ( http://www.hecl.org/ ) with, and so far I've been pretty happy. I found one compiler bug, which I reported and which was then promptly fixed. At FOSDEM, I also had occasion to go visit the Free Java developer room, and the impression I get is that these guys are making enough headway that it doesn't matter what Sun does at this point. Redhat had something like 3 or 4 very sharp developers (Tom Tromey, for instance) working more or less full time on gcj and ClassPath. Sure, Sun has way more people, but for now, all the free guys have to do is play catch up with the spec, not surpass Sun. That comes next;-)
By the way, I don't think blackdown is actually open source in that it's based on the Sun code.
I'm curious - does the new Fedora actually ship with gcj and gij as 'Java'? That will be an interesting development to watch.
I wrote a brief article on systems that scale down, with programming languages in mind. You are correct that all the Java baggage comes into its own when you start writing larger programs, but for beginners, or people just wanting to whip something together, it is baggage.
http://dedasys.com/articles/scalable_systems.html
Why?
'Cause I've got better things to do in life, like go drink some beer. That's why.
Uhrm... make that 2001. Not trolling though, just a bit confused as to the decade after not much sleep:-)
I've been happily running Debian on my Tibook since 1991. About time for a new one...