Sun has already more or less become irrelevant in hardware - opening Java might have been the best thing for developers but Sun ultimately would become irrelevant to the process. I don't see any open model in which Sun could remain the majority player.
Java won't save Sun and McNealy will ultimately take it to the grave with his company.
Please treat us like human beings. Is that too much to ask?
Are you required to have someone sitting next to you watching everything you do?
Are you prohibited from scratching your ass, picking your nose, or phoning your spouse as pair programmers are?
Pair programming is a dead-end.No seasoned coder is going to put up with someone hanging on their shoulder - at best this technique brings together two weak programmers who may at best catch the odd bug when they aren't shooting the breeze.
Framemaker was marketed towards technical publishers, but last time I checked there wasn't much of a market for paper documentation. Even in 1995 we had major IC firms telling my publishing/translation company to get out of paper, they had no use for ten thousand++ pages of paper on a shelf.
That lead to CDROM publishing...which very very quickly translated to web work. I have to wonder who is still doing print work for technical publishing.
I have to wonder where the growth for any of these products is. For technical documents, the value of html over any of the word processor/print versions is dead-obvious. I say this as an employee of a publishing house that used to publish tens of thousands of pages of circuit manuals. Even in 1995 we understood anything but html was a dead end.
I have to wonder what the targets are for the Framemaker market is at this point. For technical publications, print has been DOA for five years. For consumer work, Quark rules.
If you like Greene's earlier work, go back and reread. This volume is so laborious in its effort to present mindless metaphors to issues that are better presented (even to lay people) with a somewhat more precise language.
Of course this book is simply springboarding off of Greene's (mindless, tiresome) television series - there really isn't much here to even justify a second book.
Please don't just mod this book up because of the (apparently cool) subject matter - this book adds so much in terms of obfuscating metaphors that it subtracts from the topic.
Where are you going to live? Mars? Haha living on Mars requires a supply train from Earth for a long long time. Hint - its a dead rock. Okay, you find some bacteria there. I hope you can eat it.
A Mars program is not going to protect you from environmental concerns or war, which will probably impact you in the next fifty years. There is nowhere remotely inhabitable anywhere near us we could have any hope of colonizing in a sustainable way in the time frame.
Of course an industry zine is going to talk down the costs of space projects, particularly Mars. Its in their interests to get these projects past Congress.
Look at the reality though - ISS, Shuttle etc. Name one of these programs that has not overrun its budget by a substantial margin.
Until one of these sites acutally validates the data people enter about themselves, they will continue to be utterly useless.
The dating networks are filled with fake pics.
The business networks are filled with people with inflated egos and phony credentials.
Sure its fun to surf them but they are useless for any valid application. Just surf LinkedIn sometime to see BS artists on steriods linking to each other in a circle jerk of mutual validation for their collective hagiography.
Gee, it looks like everyone on LinkedIn is a visionary paradigm-smashing thinker who strangely enough isn't remembered by anyone at their last three employers, and can't seem to land a job at all right now even though they are obviously one of the leading thinkers in their field, which of course is based on blending creativity with tech in ways no one else has thought of before.
Folks, a club anyone can join is a club no one will see value in joining. These networks exist so the unemployed can BS themselves to high heaven and link to other people with equally fictional self-appraisals. Once it becomes obvious how high the BS meter is on these sites, they will crash.
Vitriol vs. Economics: Economics wins
on
AT&T Labs' Brain Drain
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Okay, you want to "win"? You must be the cheapest provider of a product or service. That doesn't mean you can't make big money - you can, provided you can stay ahead of stiff competition.
Sure maybe one day we will all be a nation of creative geniuses and biotech gurus, but that will take a generation. Sorry but work-retraining programs are basically a way to teach people how to drive a forklift.
Microsoft pours billions into research each year and from what I can tell they have not produced a product for MS or even a seminal non-commercial work.
Never was a language so misued, so abused, so misunderstood, and more likely to cause a project to derail badly. For systems programming you are far likely to have greater success using plain C. It may be uglier but at least you will get the thing done.
A better middle ground perhaps is like what the Mozilla folks have done - adopt C++ but make it understood that only a subset would be used.
As for the anything-goes C++ approach...I advocate this strongly, for my competitors.
There is no defense against even a moderately well coordinated attack on a city using a very small amount of radioactive material. If possible, these attacks should be prevented by not oppressing or exploiting foreign nations or their peoples for profit or strategic gain.
The danger level has been turned up and in a decade it will be even higher. Nuclear proliferation has not come home to roost as a key issue but it will because the material is out there and someone is going to use it.
What if you find out the bomb was built on a farm in Kentucky? People still don't get the new parameters of conflict- there is no bogeyman nation. These people operate wherever they can find isolation.
Granted, one move like that and treaties with Pakistan or not, the US will be hell bent to exterminate Al Qeada.
For such an "expert" in strategic geopolitics you as many Americans fail to grasp that terrorism is a tactic, not a constituency. The harder you fight it the stronger it becomes. Ask Israel.
Which is far more than any Microsoft division made last year, excluding Office and Operating Systems.
Uh, are you forgetting that Microsoft also has an investment arm for its cash on hand? Apple's performance in investments is not exceptional. Every corporation has enjoyed benefits from a bloated market, low interest rates, and a falling dollar to boost foreign sales.
You have to show Apple doing something outside the performance of the average S&P firm.
Your discussion of Dell with regard to debt is truly meaningless - Dell can finance this debt at insanely low historical rates right now - I am not sure why a firm with a future would want to be debt free when debt is going for such low low costs. This is the time to borrow, not the time to lend.
Every corporation is showing gains on investments. Apple is nothing special. What happens when the music stops and the market begins a long-term decline? My assumption is Apple's investments will go red like everyone else's. There is nothing to indicate their investments are exceptional...every corporation is getting a boost from the rising market and falling dollar.
but if Apple is making money on its investments and losing money on operations, wouldn't it make more sense to cease operations, wind up the business, and just make money on the investments? Is there some major financial concept I am missing here?
No, Citicorp, Vanguard and Merril Lynch already have mutual funds covered.
Added to which there is nothing to indicate that Apple's investments outperform other major investment instruments - we are in a market bubble after all, and practically everyone with money in the market over the last year has seen appreciating balances (not to be confused with making money, which only happens when you sell a security).
Apple should only become a financing operation if they can demosntrate that they are doing something different or better than the trillion-dollar industry already providing investments of every kind. My assumption is they aren't, and when Bubble2 ends, Apple will likely show losses on their investments.
To many investors, a large cash stash is not seen as a positive. It is seen as investor wealth being confiscated and unused. When you invest in Apple you are investing in the ability of the employees to create a vision and use your cash to implement that vision. If you wanted someone to invest in funds on your behalf you could just put your money in SPY or DIA and skip the middleman and get greater clarity on where your funds are going.
Some cash on hand is useful for riding out tough times, but the point of the corporation is not to act as a mutual fund. There are already four thousand funds out there for anyone who wants that.
Yes we've all read Josuttis (why do/. posters think that reading an established text must lead to advocacy???).
The point is C++ introduces a ridiculous maount of complexity which its syntax does not handle very well. This is why C is still far more widely used after a decade of C++ advocacy - it is a better language for systems/library/platform development.
Once again, I wholly support any efforts by my competitors to recode in C++. In a year when they are mired in debugging hell, I will have already cashed my checks.
Never was there a language so misused, so misunderstood. Never has a tool given developers so much rope to hang themselves with...in fact perversely designed to make the dnager outweigh the benefits for most designers.
And to think people think Perl is bad - ever try reading someone else's C++?
But maybe it isn't so bad, after all C++ comes standard with a a great networking library, an awesome database access architecture, and neat security tools. Oh wait...
The best thing you can hope for in any software market is that your competitor make it a priority to code everything in C++.
The built in database access framework, the clean syntax, the pervasive security model, the well-defined XML APIs, the common networking library....picking up the sarcasm yet?
No other language provides so much rope with which developers may hang themselves.
No other language is so falsely claimed to be mastered by programmers who in fact are nowhere near an intermediate level of understanding.
No other language (even Perl) produces such obfuscated code that it is illegible to other team members.
Please let this abomination die, but not before all of my competitors decide to "reimplement everything in C++", which will surely take them out of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Java won't save Sun and McNealy will ultimately take it to the grave with his company.
Are you required to have someone sitting next to you watching everything you do?
Are you prohibited from scratching your ass, picking your nose, or phoning your spouse as pair programmers are?
Pair programming is a dead-end.No seasoned coder is going to put up with someone hanging on their shoulder - at best this technique brings together two weak programmers who may at best catch the odd bug when they aren't shooting the breeze.
That lead to CDROM publishing...which very very quickly translated to web work. I have to wonder who is still doing print work for technical publishing.
I have to wonder what the targets are for the Framemaker market is at this point. For technical publications, print has been DOA for five years. For consumer work, Quark rules.
Of course this book is simply springboarding off of Greene's (mindless, tiresome) television series - there really isn't much here to even justify a second book.
Please don't just mod this book up because of the (apparently cool) subject matter - this book adds so much in terms of obfuscating metaphors that it subtracts from the topic.
Tufte, a "design guru" also advocates what essentially you seem to be saying - "inline" information and avoid needless complication/metaphors etc
A Mars program is not going to protect you from environmental concerns or war, which will probably impact you in the next fifty years. There is nowhere remotely inhabitable anywhere near us we could have any hope of colonizing in a sustainable way in the time frame.
Look at the reality though - ISS, Shuttle etc. Name one of these programs that has not overrun its budget by a substantial margin.
I would expect 80% of bloggers to realize no one is reading their mindless tripe by the end of this year. I mean, how many times can you read -
Really hard to get out of bed today, Lord of the Rings is so cool, This blog is important...
????????
The dating networks are filled with fake pics.
The business networks are filled with people with inflated egos and phony credentials.
Sure its fun to surf them but they are useless for any valid application. Just surf LinkedIn sometime to see BS artists on steriods linking to each other in a circle jerk of mutual validation for their collective hagiography.
Folks, a club anyone can join is a club no one will see value in joining. These networks exist so the unemployed can BS themselves to high heaven and link to other people with equally fictional self-appraisals. Once it becomes obvious how high the BS meter is on these sites, they will crash.
Sure maybe one day we will all be a nation of creative geniuses and biotech gurus, but that will take a generation. Sorry but work-retraining programs are basically a way to teach people how to drive a forklift.
Microsoft pours billions into research each year and from what I can tell they have not produced a product for MS or even a seminal non-commercial work.
A better middle ground perhaps is like what the Mozilla folks have done - adopt C++ but make it understood that only a subset would be used.
As for the anything-goes C++ approach...I advocate this strongly, for my competitors.
The danger level has been turned up and in a decade it will be even higher. Nuclear proliferation has not come home to roost as a key issue but it will because the material is out there and someone is going to use it.
What if you find out the bomb was built on a farm in Kentucky? People still don't get the new parameters of conflict- there is no bogeyman nation. These people operate wherever they can find isolation.
For such an "expert" in strategic geopolitics you as many Americans fail to grasp that terrorism is a tactic, not a constituency. The harder you fight it the stronger it becomes. Ask Israel.
Uh, are you forgetting that Microsoft also has an investment arm for its cash on hand? Apple's performance in investments is not exceptional. Every corporation has enjoyed benefits from a bloated market, low interest rates, and a falling dollar to boost foreign sales.
You have to show Apple doing something outside the performance of the average S&P firm.
Your discussion of Dell with regard to debt is truly meaningless - Dell can finance this debt at insanely low historical rates right now - I am not sure why a firm with a future would want to be debt free when debt is going for such low low costs. This is the time to borrow, not the time to lend.
Every corporation is showing gains on investments. Apple is nothing special. What happens when the music stops and the market begins a long-term decline? My assumption is Apple's investments will go red like everyone else's. There is nothing to indicate their investments are exceptional...every corporation is getting a boost from the rising market and falling dollar.
No, Citicorp, Vanguard and Merril Lynch already have mutual funds covered.
Added to which there is nothing to indicate that Apple's investments outperform other major investment instruments - we are in a market bubble after all, and practically everyone with money in the market over the last year has seen appreciating balances (not to be confused with making money, which only happens when you sell a security).
Apple should only become a financing operation if they can demosntrate that they are doing something different or better than the trillion-dollar industry already providing investments of every kind. My assumption is they aren't, and when Bubble2 ends, Apple will likely show losses on their investments.
Some cash on hand is useful for riding out tough times, but the point of the corporation is not to act as a mutual fund. There are already four thousand funds out there for anyone who wants that.
The point is C++ introduces a ridiculous maount of complexity which its syntax does not handle very well. This is why C is still far more widely used after a decade of C++ advocacy - it is a better language for systems/library/platform development.
Once again, I wholly support any efforts by my competitors to recode in C++. In a year when they are mired in debugging hell, I will have already cashed my checks.
And to think people think Perl is bad - ever try reading someone else's C++?
But maybe it isn't so bad, after all C++ comes standard with a a great networking library, an awesome database access architecture, and neat security tools. Oh wait...
The best thing you can hope for in any software market is that your competitor make it a priority to code everything in C++.
No other language provides so much rope with which developers may hang themselves.
No other language is so falsely claimed to be mastered by programmers who in fact are nowhere near an intermediate level of understanding.
No other language (even Perl) produces such obfuscated code that it is illegible to other team members.
Please let this abomination die, but not before all of my competitors decide to "reimplement everything in C++", which will surely take them out of the market.
P2P does not seem like the best way to collaborate on sensitive data.