I think the parent's point is that Unity is a good tool and if Valve bought at and released the *tool* the result would be more (presumably payware) games that run on Steam.
But how would that make money for Microsoft? They don't care if you are happy with Win 7. They will change for the sake of it, because otherwise they can't charge you again and again and again for stuff you have that actually works already.
Well, by changing the UI a bit Microsoft will get to charge suckers *again* for and operating system to run programs they already have and still work. It is amazing to see so many people drool over whatever polished turd Microsoft lays - even though at best it pretty much does what the previous versions did, just with a different color scheme. Basically by moving UI elements around they get to charge people for what would be considered a Service Pack (fixes and minor features) - although Apple pretty much do the same. Win 8 is not like the 32-bit XP to 64-bit Win7 change that many did. There is no reason to waste your money on the Win8 "upgrade" folks.
Windows 8 *is* Windows, because Microsoft said so. Claiming it is not "Windows" is as ridiculous as those claiming "The Soviet Union wasn't not really communist", or the Inquisition was "not really Christian", or jihadis are "not really Muslim". Now bend forward and get ready for your "upgrade"...
I use a MacBook Pro daily. It sure as hell is Unix, and not just a "handful of terminal commands". The UI is not really X, but that doesn't mean it ain't UNIX (you see, in Unix, unlike Windows, the UI is not the same as the operating system).
Nice analysis. Reports have been coming out that the latest Visual Studio also has some bizarre user-interface design changes to (eg. nearly monochrome). There must be something odd in the air in Seattle (besides desperation).
Sigh. If you don't understand the difference between "old" and "mature" then you need to stop conversing with adults.
How does changing rapidly (also known as the "bleeding edge") make C# mature? answer, it doesn't (since it appears you don't understand what "mature" means, in several senses of the word, eg "then you need to stop conversing with adults"). The Java language changes slowly because it doesn't need to - its nine million users still get things done - and because the emphasis (just like C) is on on having policy in the libraries rather than the language. What you mistake (often made those that are focussed on "teh new shiney") as a lack on innovation is instead a conservative approach to change. Having more language keywords doesn't matter to me, having lots of libraries (and my own code) that will run everywhere does (since I don't get to choose what platforms my customers run on - which has been anything and everything).
You have never worked in an enterprise have you? AD everywhere. Exchange integration mandatory. That's the enterprise world of today.
Actually I suggest you get to more enterprises. They are all migrating to LDAP of one kind or another, but not all of them are there yet. But let us suppose that your statement is true and 100% of enterprises use Microsoft Active Directory. Are you then trying to assert that Java cannot integrate with Active Directory (futhermore, not only not integrate but it is not a part of the standard JEE library?). If so, then you are wrong and your argument is invalid (and it was a pretty lame argument to make).
Win8 will be on the fastest selling tablets for the enterprise by this time next year. It's a guarantee.
This goes without saying. Tablets will be forced to come with Win8. That has always been Microsoft's way of getting people to "upgrade". What will happen is that nearly every tablet received in enterprises next year will be wiped and replaced with their standard image (whatever that is, probably Vista Enterprise, maybe even 7). No matter what happens (if we get back on topic for a moment) the Windows phones will still have no traction - nobody wants them. Everybody seems to lust either for iPhones (which I have, but I hate the restrictiveness of) or the Samsung Galaxy. My wife had a corporate-supplied Windows phone and chose it because she didn't think she could operate an iPhone. Similarly she was initially afraid of my MacBook Pro. Now she has an iPhone and prefers the Mac to Windows (this is not me forcing her [I don't want her commandeering my gear], basically she, like most other users, have discovered that Microsoft interfaces are relatively poor). MY all means wish for Microsoft's success if you want, but it simply is not going to come true (not with what I have seen with all the *ordinary* users I encounter).
I guess that is what adding modern programming constructs looks like to someone who is unable to learn.
Actually I have a PhD in Astrophysics, much of it was doing software development and computational work for some very hard scalability and data processing problems (to support an international gravitational microlensing survey, which has detected a few planets these days). I believe and have learned many programming languages, tools and techniques. I have used Microsoft stuff for two decades but learned some time back that they are the 90% solution - they will solve 90% of your problems very easily but the last 10% of customized stuff you need is a pain or sufficiently difficult no customer wants to pay for the effort (eg. full internationalization solutions with Sql Server [which lacks the correct Unicode support to meet Chinese software requlations], FastInfoSet, the ability to Stream webservice responses that are larger than physical memory while still using full WS-Security). Therefore I choose solutions that may be slightly more difficult for the 90% but allow me to get to the 100% solution. I also choose a single language solution where I can (because my ego is
Given your reference to INRIA above, I guess you are a noob then. Only noobs spell noobs "n00bs".
Here I give a *scientific* paper evaluating the performance of Java and rather than accept the *facts* (rather than your anecdotes) you switch to some lame excuse about how some l33tword is spelt. Double fail.
Simple. C# is a far more mature and developed language than is Java
Incorrect. Java is much older than C# (since C# is a Windows-oriented implementation of Java via the intermediate language Cool, the C# inventors said so [and were amazed they was not pulled up by Sun for this]). Fail. Java is more mature. If by more developed you mean more complicated and with a rapidly increasing number of constructs then C# is indeed ahead. This is the same mistake C++ made. If you value the strategic over the tactical then you value simplicity. In the example you gave of Java's generics, yes they are sub-optimal, but that was necessary so that the huge deployed code-base would still work. When customers choose Java for their *Internet scale* applications (too big to fail) then such things matter. Sun had their hands tied with that one, their business model is not to break their tools every few years so they can sell you new ones (which is Microsoft's business model).
If you are sane, in today's world, your back end is some sort of standards-based interface. REST, SOAP (ouch) or some such.
It depends. Will third parties access your back end? if not then it sounds like you have an unnecessarily complicated and inefficient back end (GWT-RPC uses JSON because the network is the bottleneck in dynamic web-based applications, there is nothing to fear with a JSON interface so it is strange you do). If you do really need third party access to your back-end then make a web-service for sure (and SOAP can be better than REST if you are dealing with third parties who want to auto-generate access code). In that case make a Java webservice client that uses GWT for the front end, but leave the GWT-RPC as it is. So much simpler than the shenanigans you describe (unless there was some other factor left out of the description).
Now to this one. This is actually a misunderstanding. Really. It is. Look at Win 8. WPF is everywhere.
Nope. Win8 is nowhere at the moment and Silverlight is effectively dead. Betting the farm on Microsoft and Microsoft tech is a strategy that people used to do a decade ago. It is bad judgement these days (nb: Mono is not going anywhere either, only a few people like it). This is why Microsoft (and their shareholders) are so worried and why Win8 is such a desperate move (and it looks like a failing move to - most desktop users will probably sick with Win7 and enterprises will stick with whatever they have). Only those buying new boxes and fanbois will get Win8 (and of course, Mac adoption is rocketing among those with a bit more money, intelligence and influence). So no, WPF isn't going to take over in any explosive fit of growth.
So by all means please keep using Microsoft tech and hope that your original statements come true That is exactly what they are doing. Some time in the next years, perhaps even months, there will be tablets and phones out there which plug into docking stations with keyboard, mouse and a big screen. It will be the ultimate in portability. If it doesn't support Office software it has lost in the enterprise space. Some of the tablets will be fully WinTel compatible, and they'll be hard as hell to beat in the enterprise. I don't know if Intel will manage to put x86 on a phone, but it won't matter all that much. The enterprise is using.NET for a huge portion of their vertical software..NET will run fine on WinRT.
I wouldn't advise holding your breath though. Meanwhile I'll be working with software that doesn't need changing no matter what the future holds (this is good news for my customers - since the tech I choose prefers the strategic over the tactical). Plus, I'll still be getting more and more lucrative contracts instead of begging to hold my position against the wave of barely skilled offshore.NET devs.
lol. Actually I'm developing a modern jet combat simulator in Java. It screams in performance terms (that is, is enormously fast - although moving a lot of stuff to GPU shaders always helps). If you *know what you are doing* then Java is very fast, faster than C++, C and (that fastest language of them all) FORTRAN. You don't have to believe me but you ought to believe the French scientific supercomputing outfit INRIA, please refer to http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00312039/en That was five years ago. The JVM has not gotten slower in that time. So basically your statement is out of date - there are so many performance options on modern JVMs, but most Java devs are crap (because most devs are crap).
Using GWT with a.NET back-end? who's monstrous architectural decision was that? Why would anyone torture themselves with such a ridiculous mismatch, apart from some ideological determination to shoehorn.NET where it doesn't belong? Incidentally you made another incorrect assertion (probably inadvertently?), GWT contains both client-side and server-side components. Perhaps you know less about GWT than you think (and possibly have not used the most recent versions of GWT, along with wonderful extensions like vaadin).
Would I do it again? No. GWT is a cool idea, but it is a one-platform pony.
Utter bullshit. So wrong as to be troll-esque and raises my suspicious about either your capabilities or motivations. Anyone who uses GWT knows it is truly multiplatform (I've deployed to customers using Win 32, Win 64, Linux, Solaris - and it works for me on Mac OS X; and to all sorts of browsers, including the fundamentally borked Internet Explorer series). If you mean GWT is single language only then you are correct, being able to do everything with a single language is a feature (clearly not the same thing unless one is trying to be disingenuous) - clearly your project wanted to use the capabilities of GWT while using a.NET back end (obviously.NET didn't have GWT-like capability at the time; this is hardly an advantage of.NET).
Even the fact that you think.NET is a one-platform pony shows how little you know. The GWT app I am talking about above is being deployed on the same Linux box that runs the JBoss server.
If you are using Mono then the software must be worse than I though. You must have discovered by now that Mono is hobbled as it does not (and furthermore, never will) implement all the libraries that Microsoft.NET does (eg. WPF, and the latest failure with the Silverlight clone - since Microsoft is letting this wither and die *as their business model dictates they must in order to sell different tools every few years*). Given a choice between Mono or Java for a long-lived national government or bank-level critical business system on it (the kind of stuff I write) I know which one I'd choose.
I prefer to develop my Android applications in C#, but then again, you didn't know that C# development was possible on Android. Funny enough, it is also far more efficient and performant than Java on Android. Really. It is. But hey, you can develop slower Java apps on Android all you want.
Another wrong assumption. I did know you can write Android apps in a variety of languages, including C#. Why you would want to is beyond me. The performance comes from using the *hardware* properly (eg. OpenGL ES, which I've alluded too I already write shaders and use them from Java). "Far more efficient and performant than Java on Android" - more utter bs again. Generally I regard Java and C# to be in the same performance league (although when I was using C# when it was first released its performance was so bad Microsoft prohibited when compared to even the old JVMs of the time - fortunately both.NET and Java have gotten *much* faster since then). Only n00bs believe marketing spiels and
Do you even know what GWT is? it makes.NET's ASP look neolithic (the Microsoft equivalent of GWT, "Project Volta", has been abandoned as Microsoft struggles to maintain the same level of profitability by shedding research and re-shuffling finances). By.NET MVC do you mean WPF or ASP? both of them are neither best-of-breed nor (far more importantly these days) portable.
It's cool, you stick with your.NET, but it turns out a one-platform pony is the true dinosaur these days. In case you missed it Android is essentially the marketing name of Java on Linux - and it has been whipping both Microsoft and Apple in numbers of units shipped (one million new activations per day, apparently) which is hardly COBOL-esque if you have managed to peek out of the Microsoft reality distortion field for a little bit..NET is not going away soon, but it is not growing significantly either. Java is not going away either but at least it is spreading to every platform it can (eg. Android, Linux, Mac, even crusty ol' Windows).
In that case Java or GWT would have been better choices that.NET. If you are not developing solely for the Windows desktop then there are better, and longer-lived, technologies than.NET out there (the Windows desktop is what.NET is really designed for - which is why in the Enterprise space the ratio of Java to.NET is around 5:1, see the Tiobe Index for the actual figures).
>.NET will run fine on WinRT.
Maybe, but all the PInvokes the.NET devs had to use to get around.NET limitations won't work. There will still be pain for those working with.NET
I agree with you. The problem is not computational power but screen real estate and physical space for input devices. But even if you did have more screen real estate would you really want to do a spreadsheet on your phone? for most people the answer is no. But Microsoft doesn't seem to grok this very well - they insist on trying to make you phone like a desktop (eg. phones with query buttons) when it clearly is not. Given the UI design fiasco with the latest Visual Studio it appears Microsoft has lost focus on what their users actually want - this was part of my point (I hope that came across in the spiel about phones).
Microsoft's competitors also have patents. Some of which probably also apply to the desktop too. Microsoft is as much at risk by a patent war as Apple. It is Mutual Assured Destruction and why the Big Boys don't usually attack each other over patents (they use them to crush smaller players and individual inventors - completely counter to the original intents of patents, but that is how the system is being used now [down with idea/software patents!]).
The premise of the article is that by purchasing a smartphone company then Microsoft would gain assets that will help them gain traction in smartphones. This is simply not going to work and a waste of shareholder assets. Microsoft is not gaining traction with their own phone because the ideas they have that work (or worked) for them on the desktop are not desired by customers looking at mobile phones - but they treat the phone very similarly to the desktop (who wants to have Office capabilities on their phone? no-one). Despite Microsoft generating enormous profits they can't get enough new ideas out that customers want. Buying an ailing smartphone company that also does have enough new ideas is hardly going to help them get new ideas that would affect their smartphone market penetration to the tune of their investment.
IMHO Microsoft should be looking at shoring up its desktop rather than fighting Android (Linux!) and Apple on phones. That battle is pretty much lost for them. By focussing on phones Microsoft seem a bit distracted from their core area of desktop - which has allowed Windows 8 to garner very unfavourable reviews. Concentrate on what you are good at Microsoft! By obsessing over growth they are starting to lose focus, making the new desktop experience worse, and rather than maintaining their high profits they are at risk of negative growth - especially if developers decide Anrdoid desktop or OS X are worthwhile targets for their desktop products (as well as smartphone apps), since the people will also follow. Windows 8 is a muddle of ideas and less suited to the existing users than Windows 7 (hint: tablets and desktops shouldn't have the same experience, one is for content consumption and the other for content creation and their needs are different - don't lose sight of this!).
I think the point went right by you. There are people who say by developing for and deploying on Linux you cannot make money (inferring only Windows should be developed for) - and then point to Microsoft's sales figures. My point is that the operating system doesn't matter for just about anyone other than Microsoft or its distrubution channels, the value lies elsewhere (as you point out).
There are people who don't understand that with GNU/Linux you can make good money. Not with selling an operating system (although that works fine for Microsoft, Red Hat etc) but with the systems you can build on top of the whole GNU/Linux infrastructure. This allows a lot of other companies to make money, not just the operating system vendors. The Linux kernel and GNU components may be free, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a whole lot of financial value in it.
> Mod up! This is absurdly true. Office got a new interface that it didn't need that seems no better (just different) from its last interface
This is due to their business model. Thet must change things every couple of years (make things slightly incompatible or inconsistent) to drive revenue. If they stopped breaking thins then they lose a lot of money. That is why hey drop their techologies for "teh new shiney" every half-decade. Which means everyone investing in their tech will get shafted and loose a lot of the value of their investment. The old adage, "In order for Microsoft to win the customer must lose" is as true as it ever was.
This is one reason I'll always prefer Java to C# (plus, only the former is truly portable, and I live on Windows, Mac and Linux at various stages of my day). Java tech changes very conservatively - people see this is as a flaw but it actually means the 17 years of code your have accumulated (that is, invested time and effort in) still works nicely and is still supported by the tool creator.
NZ has the NZ Police. This organization is nationwide. We have provinces rather than states, so "Feds" is the wrong word to use. So your are correct in questioning the use of the word "Feds". In this case the prosecuting organization is not the NZ Police (their job is solely to apprehend) but instead the "Crown" (the legal name representative of the NZ Government - since it represents authority from the Queen of England).
In that case "Feds" should be "Crown". When talking about the government in a legal sense the term "Crown" is used, not Feds. You may be surprised to find out that there are countries and governments outside the US and they have proper local terms that do not involve US slang (which the parent poster attempted to englighten the A/C to, before another ignoramus A/C tried a slap down on a local talking about their own local government).
I'm a kiwi. We do care. And so do our courts. The judge here will probably make a big deal about the illegal removal of evidence. Plus, there may be more avenues for appeal for DotCom as a result. He is a scuzz, but I think most kiwis see this case as US interests overreaching (although to be fair, we are more concerned about who is selected for our world champion national rugby team:) than legal shenanigans).
Great video. With regard to your indirect snipe that Feynman was smart enough to know that he couldn't (and presumably I'm too dumb to know this) then you may have missed the points of the video you posted, which are:
* Once you start asking "why?" you will rapidly end up with even more questions
* At some point the person explaining a question is likely to pass the bounds of knowledge of the person asking the question. This is why he didn't give an answer. This did not mean he didn't know the answer.
* The answer he did know (since he discovered the theory for it) is that in the case of the electromagnetic field virtual photon pairs are exchanged. In a frame of reference other than that of the charges then this appears to us a 'magnetic field' (which has a different guise to the effects we consider eminating from an 'electric field' - although they are actually the smae thing [it is just our perceived labels for the different effects that is confusing].
* At some point you reach a boundary where there is no more "why?", there is just "it is" - he mentioned the fundamental electromagnetic force as this, while realising that it is charge and virtual photon exchange that is actually more fundamental. There is no known level below this. Once you understand how these things work then you understand magnets to the best level that *anyone* understand them (although few people know the mathematics to perform the calculations - but while *mathematics* is helpful it is actually not required to understand the *physics* of the theoretical model)
So, if you meant to insult me, a big yawn back at ya. Just like Feynman (who was vastly smarter than I), I gave an answer to the level that I estimated a Slashdotter could handle (since I have a PhD in Physics, although not particle physics, this is clearly not the same level as my understanding/computational ability). My statement still stands though, magnitism arises from the observation of moving charge (which we consider fundamental) in a frame that is not the rest frame of the charge. The details about virtual photon exchange, the Uncertaintly Principle etc did not need to be brought out unless another "why?" was forthcoming (indicating the listener might be able to cope with the answer). There are answers to my questions that I don't understand, so the limiting of my response was not out of arrogance, it was the humilty of my own limitations and trying to be considerate of the limitations of others why I gave a limited answer (not because I didn't know to the limit of the fudamentals of current science).
Slashdot Mirror
I think the parent's point is that Unity is a good tool and if Valve bought at and released the *tool* the result would be more (presumably payware) games that run on Steam.
But how would that make money for Microsoft? They don't care if you are happy with Win 7. They will change for the sake of it, because otherwise they can't charge you again and again and again for stuff you have that actually works already.
I'm pretty sure the iPod interface is more minimal than a command line prompt (and associated shell, DOS or otherwise).
Good points. You are completely right.
Well, by changing the UI a bit Microsoft will get to charge suckers *again* for and operating system to run programs they already have and still work. It is amazing to see so many people drool over whatever polished turd Microsoft lays - even though at best it pretty much does what the previous versions did, just with a different color scheme. Basically by moving UI elements around they get to charge people for what would be considered a Service Pack (fixes and minor features) - although Apple pretty much do the same. Win 8 is not like the 32-bit XP to 64-bit Win7 change that many did. There is no reason to waste your money on the Win8 "upgrade" folks.
Windows 8 *is* Windows, because Microsoft said so. Claiming it is not "Windows" is as ridiculous as those claiming "The Soviet Union wasn't not really communist", or the Inquisition was "not really Christian", or jihadis are "not really Muslim". Now bend forward and get ready for your "upgrade" ...
I use a MacBook Pro daily. It sure as hell is Unix, and not just a "handful of terminal commands". The UI is not really X, but that doesn't mean it ain't UNIX (you see, in Unix, unlike Windows, the UI is not the same as the operating system).
Ah, I think you'll find that it is GNU that is Not Unix :)
Nice analysis. Reports have been coming out that the latest Visual Studio also has some bizarre user-interface design changes to (eg. nearly monochrome). There must be something odd in the air in Seattle (besides desperation).
Sigh. If you don't understand the difference between "old" and "mature" then you need to stop conversing with adults.
How does changing rapidly (also known as the "bleeding edge") make C# mature? answer, it doesn't (since it appears you don't understand what "mature" means, in several senses of the word, eg "then you need to stop conversing with adults"). The Java language changes slowly because it doesn't need to - its nine million users still get things done - and because the emphasis (just like C) is on on having policy in the libraries rather than the language. What you mistake (often made those that are focussed on "teh new shiney") as a lack on innovation is instead a conservative approach to change. Having more language keywords doesn't matter to me, having lots of libraries (and my own code) that will run everywhere does (since I don't get to choose what platforms my customers run on - which has been anything and everything).
You have never worked in an enterprise have you? AD everywhere. Exchange integration mandatory. That's the enterprise world of today.
Actually I suggest you get to more enterprises. They are all migrating to LDAP of one kind or another, but not all of them are there yet. But let us suppose that your statement is true and 100% of enterprises use Microsoft Active Directory. Are you then trying to assert that Java cannot integrate with Active Directory (futhermore, not only not integrate but it is not a part of the standard JEE library?). If so, then you are wrong and your argument is invalid (and it was a pretty lame argument to make).
Win8 will be on the fastest selling tablets for the enterprise by this time next year. It's a guarantee.
This goes without saying. Tablets will be forced to come with Win8. That has always been Microsoft's way of getting people to "upgrade". What will happen is that nearly every tablet received in enterprises next year will be wiped and replaced with their standard image (whatever that is, probably Vista Enterprise, maybe even 7). No matter what happens (if we get back on topic for a moment) the Windows phones will still have no traction - nobody wants them. Everybody seems to lust either for iPhones (which I have, but I hate the restrictiveness of) or the Samsung Galaxy. My wife had a corporate-supplied Windows phone and chose it because she didn't think she could operate an iPhone. Similarly she was initially afraid of my MacBook Pro. Now she has an iPhone and prefers the Mac to Windows (this is not me forcing her [I don't want her commandeering my gear], basically she, like most other users, have discovered that Microsoft interfaces are relatively poor). MY all means wish for Microsoft's success if you want, but it simply is not going to come true (not with what I have seen with all the *ordinary* users I encounter).
I guess that is what adding modern programming constructs looks like to someone who is unable to learn.
Actually I have a PhD in Astrophysics, much of it was doing software development and computational work for some very hard scalability and data processing problems (to support an international gravitational microlensing survey, which has detected a few planets these days). I believe and have learned many programming languages, tools and techniques. I have used Microsoft stuff for two decades but learned some time back that they are the 90% solution - they will solve 90% of your problems very easily but the last 10% of customized stuff you need is a pain or sufficiently difficult no customer wants to pay for the effort (eg. full internationalization solutions with Sql Server [which lacks the correct Unicode support to meet Chinese software requlations], FastInfoSet, the ability to Stream webservice responses that are larger than physical memory while still using full WS-Security). Therefore I choose solutions that may be slightly more difficult for the 90% but allow me to get to the 100% solution. I also choose a single language solution where I can (because my ego is
Given your reference to INRIA above, I guess you are a noob then. Only noobs spell noobs "n00bs".
Here I give a *scientific* paper evaluating the performance of Java and rather than accept the *facts* (rather than your anecdotes) you switch to some lame excuse about how some l33tword is spelt. Double fail.
Simple. C# is a far more mature and developed language than is Java
Incorrect. Java is much older than C# (since C# is a Windows-oriented implementation of Java via the intermediate language Cool, the C# inventors said so [and were amazed they was not pulled up by Sun for this]). Fail. Java is more mature. If by more developed you mean more complicated and with a rapidly increasing number of constructs then C# is indeed ahead. This is the same mistake C++ made. If you value the strategic over the tactical then you value simplicity. In the example you gave of Java's generics, yes they are sub-optimal, but that was necessary so that the huge deployed code-base would still work. When customers choose Java for their *Internet scale* applications (too big to fail) then such things matter. Sun had their hands tied with that one, their business model is not to break their tools every few years so they can sell you new ones (which is Microsoft's business model).
If you are sane, in today's world, your back end is some sort of standards-based interface. REST, SOAP (ouch) or some such.
It depends. Will third parties access your back end? if not then it sounds like you have an unnecessarily complicated and inefficient back end (GWT-RPC uses JSON because the network is the bottleneck in dynamic web-based applications, there is nothing to fear with a JSON interface so it is strange you do). If you do really need third party access to your back-end then make a web-service for sure (and SOAP can be better than REST if you are dealing with third parties who want to auto-generate access code). In that case make a Java webservice client that uses GWT for the front end, but leave the GWT-RPC as it is. So much simpler than the shenanigans you describe (unless there was some other factor left out of the description).
Now to this one. This is actually a misunderstanding. Really. It is. Look at Win 8. WPF is everywhere.
Nope. Win8 is nowhere at the moment and Silverlight is effectively dead. Betting the farm on Microsoft and Microsoft tech is a strategy that people used to do a decade ago. It is bad judgement these days (nb: Mono is not going anywhere either, only a few people like it). This is why Microsoft (and their shareholders) are so worried and why Win8 is such a desperate move (and it looks like a failing move to - most desktop users will probably sick with Win7 and enterprises will stick with whatever they have). Only those buying new boxes and fanbois will get Win8 (and of course, Mac adoption is rocketing among those with a bit more money, intelligence and influence). So no, WPF isn't going to take over in any explosive fit of growth.
So by all means please keep using Microsoft tech and hope that your original statements come true .NET for a huge portion of their vertical software. .NET will run fine on WinRT.
I wouldn't advise holding your breath though. Meanwhile I'll be working with software that doesn't need changing no matter what the future holds (this is good news for my customers - since the tech I choose prefers the strategic over the tactical). Plus, I'll still be getting more and more lucrative contracts instead of begging to hold my position against the wave of barely skilled offshore .NET devs.
That is exactly what they are doing. Some time in the next years, perhaps even months, there will be tablets and phones out there which plug into docking stations with keyboard, mouse and a big screen. It will be the ultimate in portability. If it doesn't support Office software it has lost in the enterprise space. Some of the tablets will be fully WinTel compatible, and they'll be hard as hell to beat in the enterprise. I don't know if Intel will manage to put x86 on a phone, but it won't matter all that much. The enterprise is using
lol. Actually I'm developing a modern jet combat simulator in Java. It screams in performance terms (that is, is enormously fast - although moving a lot of stuff to GPU shaders always helps). If you *know what you are doing* then Java is very fast, faster than C++, C and (that fastest language of them all) FORTRAN. You don't have to believe me but you ought to believe the French scientific supercomputing outfit INRIA, please refer to http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00312039/en That was five years ago. The JVM has not gotten slower in that time. So basically your statement is out of date - there are so many performance options on modern JVMs, but most Java devs are crap (because most devs are crap).
Using GWT with a .NET back-end? who's monstrous architectural decision was that? Why would anyone torture themselves with such a ridiculous mismatch, apart from some ideological determination to shoehorn .NET where it doesn't belong? Incidentally you made another incorrect assertion (probably inadvertently?), GWT contains both client-side and server-side components. Perhaps you know less about GWT than you think (and possibly have not used the most recent versions of GWT, along with wonderful extensions like vaadin).
Would I do it again? No. GWT is a cool idea, but it is a one-platform pony. .NET back end (obviously .NET didn't have GWT-like capability at the time; this is hardly an advantage of .NET).
Utter bullshit. So wrong as to be troll-esque and raises my suspicious about either your capabilities or motivations. Anyone who uses GWT knows it is truly multiplatform (I've deployed to customers using Win 32, Win 64, Linux, Solaris - and it works for me on Mac OS X; and to all sorts of browsers, including the fundamentally borked Internet Explorer series). If you mean GWT is single language only then you are correct, being able to do everything with a single language is a feature (clearly not the same thing unless one is trying to be disingenuous) - clearly your project wanted to use the capabilities of GWT while using a
Even the fact that you think .NET is a one-platform pony shows how little you know. The GWT app I am talking about above is being deployed on the same Linux box that runs the JBoss server. .NET does (eg. WPF, and the latest failure with the Silverlight clone - since Microsoft is letting this wither and die *as their business model dictates they must in order to sell different tools every few years*). Given a choice between Mono or Java for a long-lived national government or bank-level critical business system on it (the kind of stuff I write) I know which one I'd choose.
If you are using Mono then the software must be worse than I though. You must have discovered by now that Mono is hobbled as it does not (and furthermore, never will) implement all the libraries that Microsoft
I prefer to develop my Android applications in C#, but then again, you didn't know that C# development was possible on Android. Funny enough, it is also far more efficient and performant than Java on Android. Really. It is. But hey, you can develop slower Java apps on Android all you want. .NET and Java have gotten *much* faster since then). Only n00bs believe marketing spiels and
Another wrong assumption. I did know you can write Android apps in a variety of languages, including C#. Why you would want to is beyond me. The performance comes from using the *hardware* properly (eg. OpenGL ES, which I've alluded too I already write shaders and use them from Java). "Far more efficient and performant than Java on Android" - more utter bs again. Generally I regard Java and C# to be in the same performance league (although when I was using C# when it was first released its performance was so bad Microsoft prohibited when compared to even the old JVMs of the time - fortunately both
COLBOL? dontcha mean COBOL?
Do you even know what GWT is? it makes .NET's ASP look neolithic (the Microsoft equivalent of GWT, "Project Volta", has been abandoned as Microsoft struggles to maintain the same level of profitability by shedding research and re-shuffling finances). By .NET MVC do you mean WPF or ASP? both of them are neither best-of-breed nor (far more importantly these days) portable.
It's cool, you stick with your .NET, but it turns out a one-platform pony is the true dinosaur these days. In case you missed it Android is essentially the marketing name of Java on Linux - and it has been whipping both Microsoft and Apple in numbers of units shipped (one million new activations per day, apparently) which is hardly COBOL-esque if you have managed to peek out of the Microsoft reality distortion field for a little bit. .NET is not going away soon, but it is not growing significantly either. Java is not going away either but at least it is spreading to every platform it can (eg. Android, Linux, Mac, even crusty ol' Windows).
In that case Java or GWT would have been better choices that .NET. If you are not developing solely for the Windows desktop then there are better, and longer-lived, technologies than .NET out there (the Windows desktop is what .NET is really designed for - which is why in the Enterprise space the ratio of Java to .NET is around 5:1, see the Tiobe Index for the actual figures).
> .NET will run fine on WinRT. .NET devs had to use to get around .NET limitations won't work. There will still be pain for those working with .NET
Maybe, but all the PInvokes the
I agree with you. The problem is not computational power but screen real estate and physical space for input devices. But even if you did have more screen real estate would you really want to do a spreadsheet on your phone? for most people the answer is no. But Microsoft doesn't seem to grok this very well - they insist on trying to make you phone like a desktop (eg. phones with query buttons) when it clearly is not. Given the UI design fiasco with the latest Visual Studio it appears Microsoft has lost focus on what their users actually want - this was part of my point (I hope that came across in the spiel about phones).
Microsoft's competitors also have patents. Some of which probably also apply to the desktop too. Microsoft is as much at risk by a patent war as Apple. It is Mutual Assured Destruction and why the Big Boys don't usually attack each other over patents (they use them to crush smaller players and individual inventors - completely counter to the original intents of patents, but that is how the system is being used now [down with idea/software patents!]).
The premise of the article is that by purchasing a smartphone company then Microsoft would gain assets that will help them gain traction in smartphones. This is simply not going to work and a waste of shareholder assets. Microsoft is not gaining traction with their own phone because the ideas they have that work (or worked) for them on the desktop are not desired by customers looking at mobile phones - but they treat the phone very similarly to the desktop (who wants to have Office capabilities on their phone? no-one). Despite Microsoft generating enormous profits they can't get enough new ideas out that customers want. Buying an ailing smartphone company that also does have enough new ideas is hardly going to help them get new ideas that would affect their smartphone market penetration to the tune of their investment.
IMHO Microsoft should be looking at shoring up its desktop rather than fighting Android (Linux!) and Apple on phones. That battle is pretty much lost for them. By focussing on phones Microsoft seem a bit distracted from their core area of desktop - which has allowed Windows 8 to garner very unfavourable reviews. Concentrate on what you are good at Microsoft! By obsessing over growth they are starting to lose focus, making the new desktop experience worse, and rather than maintaining their high profits they are at risk of negative growth - especially if developers decide Anrdoid desktop or OS X are worthwhile targets for their desktop products (as well as smartphone apps), since the people will also follow. Windows 8 is a muddle of ideas and less suited to the existing users than Windows 7 (hint: tablets and desktops shouldn't have the same experience, one is for content consumption and the other for content creation and their needs are different - don't lose sight of this!).
I think the point went right by you. There are people who say by developing for and deploying on Linux you cannot make money (inferring only Windows should be developed for) - and then point to Microsoft's sales figures. My point is that the operating system doesn't matter for just about anyone other than Microsoft or its distrubution channels, the value lies elsewhere (as you point out).
There are people who don't understand that with GNU/Linux you can make good money. Not with selling an operating system (although that works fine for Microsoft, Red Hat etc) but with the systems you can build on top of the whole GNU/Linux infrastructure. This allows a lot of other companies to make money, not just the operating system vendors. The Linux kernel and GNU components may be free, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a whole lot of financial value in it.
> Mod up! This is absurdly true. Office got a new interface that it didn't need that seems no better (just different) from its last interface
This is due to their business model. Thet must change things every couple of years (make things slightly incompatible or inconsistent) to drive revenue. If they stopped breaking thins then they lose a lot of money. That is why hey drop their techologies for "teh new shiney" every half-decade. Which means everyone investing in their tech will get shafted and loose a lot of the value of their investment. The old adage, "In order for Microsoft to win the customer must lose" is as true as it ever was.
This is one reason I'll always prefer Java to C# (plus, only the former is truly portable, and I live on Windows, Mac and Linux at various stages of my day). Java tech changes very conservatively - people see this is as a flaw but it actually means the 17 years of code your have accumulated (that is, invested time and effort in) still works nicely and is still supported by the tool creator.
NZ has the NZ Police. This organization is nationwide. We have provinces rather than states, so "Feds" is the wrong word to use. So your are correct in questioning the use of the word "Feds". In this case the prosecuting organization is not the NZ Police (their job is solely to apprehend) but instead the "Crown" (the legal name representative of the NZ Government - since it represents authority from the Queen of England).
In that case "Feds" should be "Crown". When talking about the government in a legal sense the term "Crown" is used, not Feds. You may be surprised to find out that there are countries and governments outside the US and they have proper local terms that do not involve US slang (which the parent poster attempted to englighten the A/C to, before another ignoramus A/C tried a slap down on a local talking about their own local government).
I'm a kiwi. We do care. And so do our courts. The judge here will probably make a big deal about the illegal removal of evidence. Plus, there may be more avenues for appeal for DotCom as a result. He is a scuzz, but I think most kiwis see this case as US interests overreaching (although to be fair, we are more concerned about who is selected for our world champion national rugby team :) than legal shenanigans).
Great video. With regard to your indirect snipe that Feynman was smart enough to know that he couldn't (and presumably I'm too dumb to know this) then you may have missed the points of the video you posted, which are:
So, if you meant to insult me, a big yawn back at ya. Just like Feynman (who was vastly smarter than I), I gave an answer to the level that I estimated a Slashdotter could handle (since I have a PhD in Physics, although not particle physics, this is clearly not the same level as my understanding/computational ability). My statement still stands though, magnitism arises from the observation of moving charge (which we consider fundamental) in a frame that is not the rest frame of the charge. The details about virtual photon exchange, the Uncertaintly Principle etc did not need to be brought out unless another "why?" was forthcoming (indicating the listener might be able to cope with the answer). There are answers to my questions that I don't understand, so the limiting of my response was not out of arrogance, it was the humilty of my own limitations and trying to be considerate of the limitations of others why I gave a limited answer (not because I didn't know to the limit of the fudamentals of current science).
That's the blueness. Don't forget Mie scattering for the whiteness (clouds, haze etc).