Agreed. Specifically if you're going to be doing Java-based web development, it will pay for itself in less than a month. Auto-complete JSP tag libraries, more EJB intelligence than most developers, and fantastic refactoring capabilities.
Eclipse has all that too though, right? Well, I'm an independent consultant right now, and at my current gig most of the other developers use Eclipse. Maybe they haven't spent enough time installing & configuring plugins, but they struggle to do some of the more helpful things (validating JSP pages, enabling auto-complete in XML's with DTD's, live code templates) that happen almost out of the box in IDEA.
Seriously: this isn't just the next iteration of emacs -vs- VI. If your next project gives you the flexibility try it out for a month.
This reminds me of
a paper
I read several years ago that gave a mathematical proof showing that objective estimation of software complexity is impossible. The same author has since provided some
supplementary notes as well that are a good read, and even a PDF of some slides from a talk he gave.
Being a math weenie myself, I gave a short presentation of the results to my development. Afterwards, my manager pulled me aside & told me to stop wasting valuable development time since we were already behind our schedule.
I congratulate you on providing one of the best examples of trolling I've seen in a while from a non-anonymous post. Let's see if you've covered the basics:
Don't even mention the article or review? CHECK.
Claim through a variety of tech buzzwords that something else is better than the subject matter? CHECK.
Offer no substantive proof other than "a zillion times"? CHECK.
Congratualations... you're a winner!
All sarcasm aside, if you don't like Java and don't develop software in Java, then a book whose title starts out Java Application Development is probably not for you. Moving right along....
Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java...
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in? For some reason, the Evermore Software folks are attempting to use this as a marketing bullet point (it's the first point on their web page, even), when Joe User really just wants to know why it's better than MS Office.
I write Java to pay the bills, and as such I'm a big supporter of the platform. But users just don't care. In fact because of the Microsoft FUD machine, saying it's Java might even be a turn-off to quasi-technical people. I once had a government purchasing manager say "Java? We're moving away from that because Microsoft no longer supports it." Idiotic yes, but to paraphrase Forrest Gump: Customer is as Customer does.
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have. You can sell it to anybody. But from the customer standpoint it simply doesn't matter.
What's up with everyone wanting to put their linux stuff in walmart?
If I had to guess, it's because Wal-Mart is the only retail outlet that a certain monopolist can't bully. The reason Linux OS's are showing up there is that Wal-Mart doesn't care if they piss off the folks in Redmond.
If anyone hasn't read the article, Apple hasn't yet been sued at all. The group in question, Sacem, has threatened to sue Apple, but has not yet done so. To quote:
In a statement, Sacem said that unless Apple settles its growing account, the agency that collects the payments "will have no other option than to go immediately to court to make sure that the rights of artists, composers and producers are respected."
People & businesses get threatened by suits much more often than someone actually taking legal action. I think I was threatened by a suit in traffic this morning. If this does make it to court then it might be a real story, but until then it's just a negotiation in a public forum (the media):)
Seems like most people are missing one of the major points of having a Solaris workstation: development and platform scalability.
You can design, write, compile, and test an application on your little one or two-processor workstation. Once you're satisfied that it'll correctly calculate the national debt to 100 significant figures, you can copy it over *completely unchanged* to a 108-CPU Sun E15K and it will run exactly the same. Exactly. Just a little faster.
Platform scalability of that sort is not available from any other vendor that I know of. It's also darn nice when you've got a 4-CPU server that is swamped and want to upgrade to a 32-CPU box. You don't have to change anything. I know a sys-admin who once upgraded their machine by literally swapping out the boot drive. Not exactly elegant (and he didn't tell his boss how he did it so quickly), but it worked for him.
So, you're right: if you're looking for a desktop machine that'll run web browsers and still give you all the CLI goodness of a UNIX or a work-alike, you can get it cheaper elsewhere, although the difference is less than most people think. Have you priced one out recently? Really? Oh yeah, and the support is simply awesome.
I don't even bother with office for OSX anymore, as openoffice seems to suite my needs. Just find a Cocoa based launcher and your set.
Have you checked out NeoOffice/J for your OpenOffice needs? It makes the X11 server unnecessary for running OpenOffice. It also has cut-and-paste support & native printing built-in, which is great. It isn't a full Cocoa port (not even close, really), but it's good at what it promises to do: let you run OpenOffice on OS X painlessly.
I'm a full-time developer, whose Java work typically pays the bills. I have a 1GHz Powerbook that I use; it's the only real UI-friendly computer I even turn on these days (the servers at clients' sites & in my closet don't count). I do all my day-to-day development on my Powerbook, with a CVS server running elsewhere that does the "official" builds, backups, etc etc.
Overall, I've never noticed a performance problem when compiling large applications. As a barometer, I just did an "ant clobber dist" on a current project (around 200 classes, plus 50 JSP pages, etc etc), and it built a distributable in 18 seconds. Not too shabby. Overall, Java compiler performance shouldn't be a concern in purchasing a laptop; if your build takes too long, it's more likely the fault of a poor build process than a slow compiler!
Anyway, Java integration into Mac OS X is the best in the industry. It's amazing -- Apple's OS is more Java-aware than Sun's:) Full graphical Java applications run fast, Java Web Start is built in, and the OS ships with a built-in Java Application Server, JBoss. The only downer is that JVM releases typically lag Sun by 4 - 6 months, but that's acceptable in my mind; it takes that long to shake the "D'oh!" bugs out of a VM anyway.
Finally, if you're going to do lots of development at a desk, I'd also strongly recommend plunking down the $2K for an Apple Flatscreen. Yeah yeah, it's expensive... but you'll be more productive with a great external monitor. And if you're going to be buying that much hardware, you might as well look into joining the Apple Developer Connection, as you might be able to get 12 - 20 % off of hardware purchases (especially if you can claim Student status somehow).
When people ask me what I do know. I am a janitor.... The moment a prase like "I work computers" comes out of your mouth. Or "I work on Cisco stuff" you get a nice carpet bombing of questions and requests for help.
Here's a thought: consider the possibility of spending $30 on business cards. When this feared carpet bombing of questions comes, hand out business cards & tell them to call you during office hours. If/when the phone rings, start the "billable hours" clock and get a lease on a Porsche.
At least, that's the way it worked when *I* was getting started.... What? It's not the mid-90's?? Oh, never mind... maybe you really should be a janitor; you'll have better job security.
Well first, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that anyone is going to "beat" Microsoft within the next 10 - 20 years. They have such a huge advantage over anyone & everyone in terms of market share, market capitalization, cash, and sheer intimidation that we're more likely to see the demise of Wal-Mart in our lifetimes than see Microsoft become the #2 software company in the world.
Their revenue levels are approaching $10 billion per quarter; their liquid assets (i.e. cash on hand) late last year were pegged at $52 billion dollars. It's difficult to grasp those sorts of financial numbers, but for comparison Red Hat's revenue & cash numbers are $0.033 billion & $0.090 billion.
You should care because Microsoft is an unrepentent monopoly, and any competition -- any at all -- with them only helps to spur innovation, either on Microsoft's part or on everybody else's. You should care because without competition at a serious level (and with the US gov't apparently unwilling to deal with them), Microsoft will continue to inhibit R&D efforts everywhere around them.
Now I'm gonna get a little off-topic & probably invite all sorts of people to flame me for not rallying around the OSS flag, but there you go....
Open Source software isn't going to bring down the Microsoft empire. That's right, I said it. Yes, OSS works very well in certain markets, mainly for developing tools & components that everyone can use to go out & build products. But it has yet to prove itself as a viable business model outside of that use. And don't get all "Look at Red Hat!!" on me... the breadth of their business is a speck on the wall compared to Microsoft (see financial numbers above).
What about IBM, you say? It's interesting -- many people make the case that IBM's embracing of Linux and other open-source movements is the beginning of a new era in the economics of software development. One thing most people don't notice is that IBM's model of using OSS inherently prohibits them from improving it in ways that would make it commercially successful to *anyone else* but IBM. They make money off of Open Source Software precisely because it is difficult to provide real-world, large scale solutions with it. Why would they want to change that fact?
Sorry for the rant.... Anyway, getting back on-topic here, you should care about Sun -vs- Microsoft because at least Sun is attempting to compete head-on with them, even if they are woefully over-matched. Historically, those sorts of minor competitors have been the impetus that finally brought around real change in monopolistic markets.
Back in the mid 70's, AT&T was the world's largest corporation and the #2 employer in the US (behind the government). They provided 80% of phone service in the US, ran the only profitable telephone equipment company, and had a government mandate to stay a monopoly. There was no competition for local phone service and scant little for long distance, but two companies that were fighting the good fight were MCI and Southern Pacific Communications (aka Sprint).
It was those small competitors' slight chances at competition that gave AT&T pause. Thinking they had a blank check from the government, Ma Bell essentially forced MCI & others purchase equipement directly from them, then undercut their prices to boot. The government finally had to act, splitting up AT&T in 1982 and setting in motion some much needed competition, innovation, and progress in the communications market. Now I can call cross-country for $0.04/minute, or for free on my cell phone. Ask someone older than 40 how much they'd pay for that call in 1975.
Long story short, we need the little guys to survive to act as the impetus for long-ranging change. Sun is one of those little guys that is willing to fight the good fight, forcing Microsoft to react. Maybe someday they'll miscalculate and come tumbling down to earth where they'll have to compete on the quality of their products instead of their girth.
--Mid
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool .
on
Sun and Eclipse Squabble
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Who in the sane mind would ask such a thing...
A sane company who's trying to beat everyone's favorite convicted monopolist at gathering developers around their campfire for the next big platform of application development (i.e. this Internet thing). Can you name more than 3 IDE's for Windows development? No fair using Google....
What I'm saying is that I think that Sun wants to have "... all the wood behind one arrowhead " when Java &.NET start really competing for developer mindshare. And yes, I'm sure that will happen soon. Is that so difficult to see?
Anyway, my prediction is that IBM will have a good laugh about this whole thing. They'll ignore it, continue to make gobs of $$$ off of their services division, and not worry about fighting Microsoft directly. It's worked well for them for 20 years... why stop now?
While this comment is pretty well written, it's so naive it almost smacks of trolling. No examples, no proof... very little substance beyond your own opinion.
Have you done any research into command line administration on OS X? If you had, you probably would've run into the Apple Server documentation, which covers in extensive detail how OS X Server can be administrated from the command line. Much of the info is relevant to OS X Client as well but, since Client is targeted towards Mom & Pop computer users, it doesn't have **everything** available from the command line. If that's what you wanted, then you just bought the wrong version of the OS.
Even so, have you installed Fink to automatically download, "configure; make; make test; make install" almost any OSS software you can think of for OS X? It works wonderfully, and thankfully has removed me from the process tweaking header files & hand-applying patches to get stuff to build & install.
Honestly, I use OS X, Linux & Solaris boxes daily, and I can't say that one OS's CLI support is any better than the other. Terminal emulation isn't rocket science any more. And, while the default Terminal.app is decent, I've been using iTerm as my emulator for a while & am very happy with it.
You might have had the wrong expectations on Mac OS X Client if you truly do want to do everything via the command line & a terminal window. You also might have not spent enough time with the OS to get used to the BSD-ism's of the CLI. But you may want to provide some more substance.
I think what they're looking for is TracNet, by a company called KVH. This is the same company that is selling mobile DirecTV systems in high-end SUV's for a few thousand dollars. Their Internet access product is currently suited for a big rig installation; from their documents, it's about $6K & works through the DirecPC satellite feed.
They're supposed to be working on a similar version for SUV-sized vehicles. I doubt it'd be cheap, but for the application you're describing (accident assessors, etc), it'll probably be a no-brainer.
I'm not sure if that's exactly correct. According to Apple, AAC was developed by the MPEG group, of which Dolby is a member, but appears to be a large organization with hundreds of members.
I don't profess to follow all the inner workings of the MPEG group, or how the AAC licensing works, but this page has some details. Those licensing fees are collected by Via Licensing (an independent subsidiary of Dolby), but that doesn't mean the IP is owned by Dolby....
But I'm just researching by random Google searches... someone else might have better (as in knowledgable) info than me.
Sun has purchased a whole string of licenses from the various owners of Unix, with SCO being the latest. As you can see from this press release, they're protecting their arses as best they can. I can't say I blame them....
I conducted my own tests pitting Java 1.4 against gcc 3.3 and icc 8.0 using his benchmark code, and found Java to perform significantly worse than C on Linux/Athlon.
Reading the author's analysis of his results, we eventually get to this statement:
Comparing my results to those of the original author, there are three possible explanations for the descrepancies between his findings for gcc vs. Java performance....
So, he's wondering why his benchmark (on Linux, AMD/Athlon) provides different results from the OSNews article (on Windows, Intel/x86). Let's see... different hardware platforms, different JVM implementations... where-oh-where could the differences lie?? He continues a bit later:
The second (possibility) is that the JRE implementation on Windows is much better than on Linux. I would also guess that this is not the case, and would expect them to function with more or less equivalent performance.
Why would he guess that? What rationale supports that view? Somehow I don't think the JVM team at Sun spends gobs of time optimizing their implementation** for AMD/Linux. I'd "guess" that Windows x/86 is a bit higher on their priority list. But maybe I'm missing something.
In short, nothing to see here, move along to a more "insensitive-clod" or "... beowolf cluster"-friendly article.
--Mid
** Lest people forget, the Sun JVM is a reference implementation. You want performance? Try using an alternate clean-room implementation that was built for performance.
I'd probably modify that to read "If you can get SpeakEasy DSL, do so." Other providers (read: the Baby Bells) can be just as bad as cable companies are. They're so used to operating as monopolies or oligopolies that they forget that customers actually have a smidgeon of choice in the broadband arena.
I, for one, let them know it every time they cold-call me asking if I'd like to "augment" my cable subscription that I am blissfully happy with my SpeakEasy service. SpeakEasy has excellent transfer speeds, excellent customer service, and genuinely does what they promise. Last Fall, my DSL upstream speed doubled as a result of SpeakEasy upgrading their network, and my price stayed the same. And they scheduled the outage at a low usage time. And they actually got the link back up 2 hours before their window was up. Kick. Ass.
Those of you who aren't familiar with Omni's other apps, check them out. These guys are some of the best software developers in the business.
Abso-freakin-loutly. If you've never seen OmniGraffle (their diagramming application), check it out. I put together graphical representations of a theoretical computer cluster in about 5 minutes that is thoroughly impressive. Ditto for a quick sketch of UML. And a street map to get to my house. And so on. Basically, if I have to think about anything for more than 2 minutes, I'll usually sketch it out in OmniGraffle (in about 3 minutes) to make sure I've got it right.
Another of their applications, OmniOutliner (an organizational/outline app), is also something I use every day. Yeah, you might not think it sounds that useful, but an outlining tool that can handle multiple columns (with various column types) and export to any useful format you can think of makes my job a whole lot easier. I use it to take meeting minutes, keep notes on technical documentation, and keep a log of what I did to get things working (for instance, getting OpenLDAP to work with SSL connections).
Yeah, I am gushing a lot, but I swear I don't work for these guys (I don't want to live in Seattle). But they just make my life as a developer easier & more productive. Check the apps out.
... is a Tumi. Yes, they are much more expensive than the competition. Yes, they may not look like the flashiest bag with all the cool compartments in all sorts of places.
But, the fact of the matter is, you get what you pay for. Tumi spends an incredible amount of time & money researching typical usage patterns, wear & tear damage, and the types of storage compartments that people actually use.
I'm currently on Tumi bag #2 in my lifetime (I switched from a backpack to a saddlebag two years ago). All the pockets seem to be in the perfect place, there's no significant wear to speak of... the bag looks great & protects my laptop very well. I'll continue to buy Tumi for all my luggage as long as I can afford it.
If you mock the President... then the terrorists win.
Completely offtopic, but...
Well, that's a rather small & narrow-minded view, don't you think? As a voting American, I feel that I have the freedom to mock the President whenever I want to. If we limit mockery, why not limit criticism & all political debate? By your logic, Dennis Miller is guity of aiding the enemy several times over. Howard Dean must be one of the ring-leaders himself! Off with their heads!!!!
Seriously though, you do more to aid terrorism when you buy your fiancee a diamond ring, buy some drugs for the weekend, or attempt to limit my freedom of speech with your tunnel-vision view of GW Bush. Getting elected to the presidency does not give him immunity to questions, criticisms, or even mockery from his constituents.
Congratulations. Your knee-jerk reactions are top-notch! Maybe there should be some form of an Olympic competition for this sort of comment. We could time the read-summary-to-post-uninformed-remark cycle.
} else {
This pricing model is just one option. If you still want to pay the old fashioned way, you're more than welcome to do it. From the article: Sun would continue to sell individual pieces of the server package, but [they feel] that most companies would reap big savings from... the "happy meal" approach.
Regardless, that manager & secretary will still use the features of the server plenty. For instance, when they access their work calendar & email from home via the secure web server, or change their overall benefits package via the HR department's internal webpage, or watch the CEO's most recent town hall meeting at another corporate location via an internal webcast.
Plus, Sun's new pricing model allows the corporation to have a very predictable price for the licensing fees. If you try doing that with WebSphere, the IBM salespeople will have to show you numerous graphs, charts, and "example use cases" before they even guesstimate the cost. With Sun, you get a dollar figure.
Troll? Or just naive? I'll bite.... Some questions:
Did you notice that, by mis-typing some URL, you implicitly agreed with their Terms of Service agreement?
How long would you trust a fine, upstanding monopoly company like Verisign to continue to provide this useful service pro bono? Did you read that TOS after all? Notice where they explicitly state "The information... may be supplied by VeriSign's commericial licensors, advertisers or others" Hmm... what *could* they possibly be planning here?
Would you mind if every domain-spoofing spam email that you bounced from your email went directly to Verisign, who would be free to do with it what they wish? Legally, you would have just sent them an email, and they'd be more than happy to harvest as much info from it as possible. And, by the way, Verisign has plenty of experience selling people's personal data for profit.
Look -- the root name servers are at the absolute core of the usefulness of the Internet. Using a hey just hijacked every non-existent URL on the planet & pointed it directly at their own money-making, pay-per-click-thru search engine. For crissake man, are you paying attention here?
Are you talking about gaming titles? That is probably still the case, yes. But for any other type of software, this is just a FUD argument. In terms of being an everyday computer for the masses, it works excellently. In terms of being an everyday computer for a Java developer (my case), it beats the pants off of any other platform I've worked with.
No, I can't play the newest PC game title, but I get plenty of gaming in on the PS2. And as a bonus, I get the warm-n-fuzzy moral feeling of not giving WinTel any of my hard-earned $$$:)
Hmm... interesting how one of the UI screenshots needed call-out text boxes to tell us what we were looking at. Does anyone else think that's a bad sign? Note that Mac OS S screenshots displaying new UI functionality in Panther don't need such explicit "point to the widget" explanation.
Another interesting point from the MacOS user experience: the original incarnation of OS X's Aqua interface was candy-colored almost to the point of distraction. From those Longhorn screenshots, obviously the Windows UI folks saw that & said "I'll bet we can out-shiny that!" However, in the two years since the original Aqua, the OS X UI has been toned down considerably based on real user's feedback & common sense.
How long before Longhorn's Aero interface does the same? Two years after it's (finally) released? Screw that; even my X11 windows served back to my laptop from the Solaris box are easier to work with....
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Specifically if you're going to be doing Java-based web development, it will pay for itself in less than a month. Auto-complete JSP tag libraries, more EJB intelligence than most developers, and fantastic refactoring capabilities.
Eclipse has all that too though, right? Well, I'm an independent consultant right now, and at my current gig most of the other developers use Eclipse. Maybe they haven't spent enough time installing & configuring plugins, but they struggle to do some of the more helpful things (validating JSP pages, enabling auto-complete in XML's with DTD's, live code templates) that happen almost out of the box in IDEA.
Seriously: this isn't just the next iteration of emacs -vs- VI. If your next project gives you the flexibility try it out for a month.
--Mid
This reminds me of a paper I read several years ago that gave a mathematical proof showing that objective estimation of software complexity is impossible. The same author has since provided some supplementary notes as well that are a good read, and even a PDF of some slides from a talk he gave.
Being a math weenie myself, I gave a short presentation of the results to my development. Afterwards, my manager pulled me aside & told me to stop wasting valuable development time since we were already behind our schedule.
Sigh.
I congratulate you on providing one of the best examples of trolling I've seen in a while from a non-anonymous post. Let's see if you've covered the basics:
Congratualations... you're a winner!
All sarcasm aside, if you don't like Java and don't develop software in Java, then a book whose title starts out Java Application Development is probably not for you. Moving right along....
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in? For some reason, the Evermore Software folks are attempting to use this as a marketing bullet point (it's the first point on their web page, even), when Joe User really just wants to know why it's better than MS Office.
I write Java to pay the bills, and as such I'm a big supporter of the platform. But users just don't care. In fact because of the Microsoft FUD machine, saying it's Java might even be a turn-off to quasi-technical people. I once had a government purchasing manager say "Java? We're moving away from that because Microsoft no longer supports it." Idiotic yes, but to paraphrase Forrest Gump: Customer is as Customer does.
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have. You can sell it to anybody. But from the customer standpoint it simply doesn't matter.
What's up with everyone wanting to put their linux stuff in walmart?
If I had to guess, it's because Wal-Mart is the only retail outlet that a certain monopolist can't bully. The reason Linux OS's are showing up there is that Wal-Mart doesn't care if they piss off the folks in Redmond.
--Mid
If anyone hasn't read the article, Apple hasn't yet been sued at all. The group in question, Sacem, has threatened to sue Apple, but has not yet done so. To quote:
:)
In a statement, Sacem said that unless Apple settles its growing account, the agency that collects the payments "will have no other option than to go immediately to court to make sure that the rights of artists, composers and producers are respected."
People & businesses get threatened by suits much more often than someone actually taking legal action. I think I was threatened by a suit in traffic this morning. If this does make it to court then it might be a real story, but until then it's just a negotiation in a public forum (the media)
--Mid
Seems like most people are missing one of the major points of having a Solaris workstation: development and platform scalability.
You can design, write, compile, and test an application on your little one or two-processor workstation. Once you're satisfied that it'll correctly calculate the national debt to 100 significant figures, you can copy it over *completely unchanged* to a 108-CPU Sun E15K and it will run exactly the same. Exactly. Just a little faster.
Platform scalability of that sort is not available from any other vendor that I know of. It's also darn nice when you've got a 4-CPU server that is swamped and want to upgrade to a 32-CPU box. You don't have to change anything. I know a sys-admin who once upgraded their machine by literally swapping out the boot drive. Not exactly elegant (and he didn't tell his boss how he did it so quickly), but it worked for him.
So, you're right: if you're looking for a desktop machine that'll run web browsers and still give you all the CLI goodness of a UNIX or a work-alike, you can get it cheaper elsewhere, although the difference is less than most people think. Have you priced one out recently? Really? Oh yeah, and the support is simply awesome.
--Mid
I don't even bother with office for OSX anymore, as openoffice seems to suite my needs. Just find a Cocoa based launcher and your set.
Have you checked out NeoOffice/J for your OpenOffice needs? It makes the X11 server unnecessary for running OpenOffice. It also has cut-and-paste support & native printing built-in, which is great. It isn't a full Cocoa port (not even close, really), but it's good at what it promises to do: let you run OpenOffice on OS X painlessly.
--Mid
I'm a full-time developer, whose Java work typically pays the bills. I have a 1GHz Powerbook that I use; it's the only real UI-friendly computer I even turn on these days (the servers at clients' sites & in my closet don't count). I do all my day-to-day development on my Powerbook, with a CVS server running elsewhere that does the "official" builds, backups, etc etc.
:) Full graphical Java applications run fast, Java Web Start is built in, and the OS ships with a built-in Java Application Server, JBoss. The only downer is that JVM releases typically lag Sun by 4 - 6 months, but that's acceptable in my mind; it takes that long to shake the "D'oh!" bugs out of a VM anyway.
Overall, I've never noticed a performance problem when compiling large applications. As a barometer, I just did an "ant clobber dist" on a current project (around 200 classes, plus 50 JSP pages, etc etc), and it built a distributable in 18 seconds. Not too shabby. Overall, Java compiler performance shouldn't be a concern in purchasing a laptop; if your build takes too long, it's more likely the fault of a poor build process than a slow compiler!
Anyway, Java integration into Mac OS X is the best in the industry. It's amazing -- Apple's OS is more Java-aware than Sun's
Finally, if you're going to do lots of development at a desk, I'd also strongly recommend plunking down the $2K for an Apple Flatscreen. Yeah yeah, it's expensive... but you'll be more productive with a great external monitor. And if you're going to be buying that much hardware, you might as well look into joining the Apple Developer Connection, as you might be able to get 12 - 20 % off of hardware purchases (especially if you can claim Student status somehow).
HTH,
--Mid
When people ask me what I do know. I am a janitor.... The moment a prase like "I work computers" comes out of your mouth. Or "I work on Cisco stuff" you get a nice carpet bombing of questions and requests for help.
Here's a thought: consider the possibility of spending $30 on business cards. When this feared carpet bombing of questions comes, hand out business cards & tell them to call you during office hours. If/when the phone rings, start the "billable hours" clock and get a lease on a Porsche.
At least, that's the way it worked when *I* was getting started.... What? It's not the mid-90's?? Oh, never mind... maybe you really should be a janitor; you'll have better job security.
--Mid
Why would I care whether Sun beats Microsoft?
Well first, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that anyone is going to "beat" Microsoft within the next 10 - 20 years. They have such a huge advantage over anyone & everyone in terms of market share, market capitalization, cash, and sheer intimidation that we're more likely to see the demise of Wal-Mart in our lifetimes than see Microsoft become the #2 software company in the world.
Their revenue levels are approaching $10 billion per quarter; their liquid assets (i.e. cash on hand) late last year were pegged at $52 billion dollars. It's difficult to grasp those sorts of financial numbers, but for comparison Red Hat's revenue & cash numbers are $0.033 billion & $0.090 billion.
You should care because Microsoft is an unrepentent monopoly, and any competition -- any at all -- with them only helps to spur innovation, either on Microsoft's part or on everybody else's. You should care because without competition at a serious level (and with the US gov't apparently unwilling to deal with them), Microsoft will continue to inhibit R&D efforts everywhere around them.
Now I'm gonna get a little off-topic & probably invite all sorts of people to flame me for not rallying around the OSS flag, but there you go....
Open Source software isn't going to bring down the Microsoft empire. That's right, I said it. Yes, OSS works very well in certain markets, mainly for developing tools & components that everyone can use to go out & build products. But it has yet to prove itself as a viable business model outside of that use. And don't get all "Look at Red Hat!!" on me... the breadth of their business is a speck on the wall compared to Microsoft (see financial numbers above).
What about IBM, you say? It's interesting -- many people make the case that IBM's embracing of Linux and other open-source movements is the beginning of a new era in the economics of software development. One thing most people don't notice is that IBM's model of using OSS inherently prohibits them from improving it in ways that would make it commercially successful to *anyone else* but IBM. They make money off of Open Source Software precisely because it is difficult to provide real-world, large scale solutions with it. Why would they want to change that fact?
Sorry for the rant.... Anyway, getting back on-topic here, you should care about Sun -vs- Microsoft because at least Sun is attempting to compete head-on with them, even if they are woefully over-matched. Historically, those sorts of minor competitors have been the impetus that finally brought around real change in monopolistic markets.
Back in the mid 70's, AT&T was the world's largest corporation and the #2 employer in the US (behind the government). They provided 80% of phone service in the US, ran the only profitable telephone equipment company, and had a government mandate to stay a monopoly. There was no competition for local phone service and scant little for long distance, but two companies that were fighting the good fight were MCI and Southern Pacific Communications (aka Sprint).
It was those small competitors' slight chances at competition that gave AT&T pause. Thinking they had a blank check from the government, Ma Bell essentially forced MCI & others purchase equipement directly from them, then undercut their prices to boot. The government finally had to act, splitting up AT&T in 1982 and setting in motion some much needed competition, innovation, and progress in the communications market. Now I can call cross-country for $0.04/minute, or for free on my cell phone. Ask someone older than 40 how much they'd pay for that call in 1975.
Long story short, we need the little guys to survive to act as the impetus for long-ranging change. Sun is one of those little guys that is willing to fight the good fight, forcing Microsoft to react. Maybe someday they'll miscalculate and come tumbling down to earth where they'll have to compete on the quality of their products instead of their girth.
--Mid
Who in the sane mind would ask such a thing...
.NET start really competing for developer mindshare. And yes, I'm sure that will happen soon. Is that so difficult to see?
A sane company who's trying to beat everyone's favorite convicted monopolist at gathering developers around their campfire for the next big platform of application development (i.e. this Internet thing). Can you name more than 3 IDE's for Windows development? No fair using Google....
What I'm saying is that I think that Sun wants to have "... all the wood behind one arrowhead " when Java &
Anyway, my prediction is that IBM will have a good laugh about this whole thing. They'll ignore it, continue to make gobs of $$$ off of their services division, and not worry about fighting Microsoft directly. It's worked well for them for 20 years... why stop now?
--Mid
While this comment is pretty well written, it's so naive it almost smacks of trolling. No examples, no proof... very little substance beyond your own opinion.
Have you done any research into command line administration on OS X? If you had, you probably would've run into the Apple Server documentation, which covers in extensive detail how OS X Server can be administrated from the command line. Much of the info is relevant to OS X Client as well but, since Client is targeted towards Mom & Pop computer users, it doesn't have **everything** available from the command line. If that's what you wanted, then you just bought the wrong version of the OS.
Even so, have you installed Fink to automatically download, "configure; make; make test; make install" almost any OSS software you can think of for OS X? It works wonderfully, and thankfully has removed me from the process tweaking header files & hand-applying patches to get stuff to build & install.
Honestly, I use OS X, Linux & Solaris boxes daily, and I can't say that one OS's CLI support is any better than the other. Terminal emulation isn't rocket science any more. And, while the default Terminal.app is decent, I've been using iTerm as my emulator for a while & am very happy with it.
You might have had the wrong expectations on Mac OS X Client if you truly do want to do everything via the command line & a terminal window. You also might have not spent enough time with the OS to get used to the BSD-ism's of the CLI. But you may want to provide some more substance.
I think what they're looking for is TracNet, by a company called KVH. This is the same company that is selling mobile DirecTV systems in high-end SUV's for a few thousand dollars. Their Internet access product is currently suited for a big rig installation; from their documents, it's about $6K & works through the DirecPC satellite feed.
They're supposed to be working on a similar version for SUV-sized vehicles. I doubt it'd be cheap, but for the application you're describing (accident assessors, etc), it'll probably be a no-brainer.
--Mid
AAC is owned by Dolby...
I'm not sure if that's exactly correct. According to Apple, AAC was developed by the MPEG group, of which Dolby is a member, but appears to be a large organization with hundreds of members.
I don't profess to follow all the inner workings of the MPEG group, or how the AAC licensing works, but this page has some details. Those licensing fees are collected by Via Licensing (an independent subsidiary of Dolby), but that doesn't mean the IP is owned by Dolby....
But I'm just researching by random Google searches... someone else might have better (as in knowledgable) info than me.
--Mid
Solaris...well....
Sun has purchased a whole string of licenses from the various owners of Unix, with SCO being the latest. As you can see from this press release, they're protecting their arses as best they can. I can't say I blame them....
--Mid
Quoting the post:
I conducted my own tests pitting Java 1.4 against gcc 3.3 and icc 8.0 using his benchmark code, and found Java to perform significantly worse than C on Linux/Athlon.
Reading the author's analysis of his results, we eventually get to this statement:
Comparing my results to those of the original author, there are three possible explanations for the descrepancies between his findings for gcc vs. Java performance....
So, he's wondering why his benchmark (on Linux, AMD/Athlon) provides different results from the OSNews article (on Windows, Intel/x86). Let's see... different hardware platforms, different JVM implementations... where-oh-where could the differences lie?? He continues a bit later:
The second (possibility) is that the JRE implementation on Windows is much better than on Linux. I would also guess that this is not the case, and would expect them to function with more or less equivalent performance.
Why would he guess that? What rationale supports that view? Somehow I don't think the JVM team at Sun spends gobs of time optimizing their implementation** for AMD/Linux. I'd "guess" that Windows x/86 is a bit higher on their priority list. But maybe I'm missing something.
In short, nothing to see here, move along to a more "insensitive-clod" or "... beowolf cluster"-friendly article.
--Mid
** Lest people forget, the Sun JVM is a reference implementation. You want performance? Try using an alternate clean-room implementation that was built for performance.
If you can get DSL, do so.
I'd probably modify that to read "If you can get SpeakEasy DSL, do so." Other providers (read: the Baby Bells) can be just as bad as cable companies are. They're so used to operating as monopolies or oligopolies that they forget that customers actually have a smidgeon of choice in the broadband arena.
I, for one, let them know it every time they cold-call me asking if I'd like to "augment" my cable subscription that I am blissfully happy with my SpeakEasy service. SpeakEasy has excellent transfer speeds, excellent customer service, and genuinely does what they promise. Last Fall, my DSL upstream speed doubled as a result of SpeakEasy upgrading their network, and my price stayed the same. And they scheduled the outage at a low usage time. And they actually got the link back up 2 hours before their window was up. Kick. Ass.
--Mid
Those of you who aren't familiar with Omni's other apps, check them out. These guys are some of the best software developers in the business.
Abso-freakin-loutly. If you've never seen OmniGraffle (their diagramming application), check it out. I put together graphical representations of a theoretical computer cluster in about 5 minutes that is thoroughly impressive. Ditto for a quick sketch of UML. And a street map to get to my house. And so on. Basically, if I have to think about anything for more than 2 minutes, I'll usually sketch it out in OmniGraffle (in about 3 minutes) to make sure I've got it right.
Another of their applications, OmniOutliner (an organizational/outline app), is also something I use every day. Yeah, you might not think it sounds that useful, but an outlining tool that can handle multiple columns (with various column types) and export to any useful format you can think of makes my job a whole lot easier. I use it to take meeting minutes, keep notes on technical documentation, and keep a log of what I did to get things working (for instance, getting OpenLDAP to work with SSL connections).
Yeah, I am gushing a lot, but I swear I don't work for these guys (I don't want to live in Seattle). But they just make my life as a developer easier & more productive. Check the apps out.
--Mid
... is a Tumi. Yes, they are much more expensive than the competition. Yes, they may not look like the flashiest bag with all the cool compartments in all sorts of places.
But, the fact of the matter is, you get what you pay for. Tumi spends an incredible amount of time & money researching typical usage patterns, wear & tear damage, and the types of storage compartments that people actually use.
I'm currently on Tumi bag #2 in my lifetime (I switched from a backpack to a saddlebag two years ago). All the pockets seem to be in the perfect place, there's no significant wear to speak of... the bag looks great & protects my laptop very well. I'll continue to buy Tumi for all my luggage as long as I can afford it.
Do yourself a favor & spend the extra dough.
--Mid
If you mock the President ... then the terrorists win.
Completely offtopic, but...
Well, that's a rather small & narrow-minded view, don't you think? As a voting American, I feel that I have the freedom to mock the President whenever I want to. If we limit mockery, why not limit criticism & all political debate? By your logic, Dennis Miller is guity of aiding the enemy several times over. Howard Dean must be one of the ring-leaders himself! Off with their heads!!!!
Seriously though, you do more to aid terrorism when you buy your fiancee a diamond ring, buy some drugs for the weekend, or attempt to limit my freedom of speech with your tunnel-vision view of GW Bush. Getting elected to the presidency does not give him immunity to questions, criticisms, or even mockery from his constituents.
--Mid
competition for this sort of comment. We could time the read-summary-to-post-uninformed-remark cycle.This pricing model is just one option. If you still want to pay the old fashioned way, you're more than welcome to do it. From the article: Sun would continue to sell individual pieces of the server package, but [they feel] that most companies would reap big savings from
Regardless, that manager & secretary will still use the features of the server plenty. For instance, when they access their work calendar & email from home via the secure web server, or change their overall benefits package via the HR department's internal webpage, or watch the CEO's most recent town hall meeting at another corporate location via an internal webcast.
Plus, Sun's new pricing model allows the corporation to have a very predictable price for the licensing fees. If you try doing that with WebSphere, the IBM salespeople will have to show you numerous graphs, charts, and "example use cases" before they even guesstimate the cost. With Sun, you get a dollar figure.--Mid
Look -- the root name servers are at the absolute core of the usefulness of the Internet. Using a hey just hijacked every non-existent URL on the planet & pointed it directly at their own money-making, pay-per-click-thru search engine. For crissake man, are you paying attention here?
--Mid
Are you talking about gaming titles? That is probably still the case, yes. But for any other type of software, this is just a FUD argument. In terms of being an everyday computer for the masses, it works excellently. In terms of being an everyday computer for a Java developer (my case), it beats the pants off of any other platform I've worked with.
:)
No, I can't play the newest PC game title, but I get plenty of gaming in on the PS2. And as a bonus, I get the warm-n-fuzzy moral feeling of not giving WinTel any of my hard-earned $$$
--Mid
Hmm... interesting how one of the UI screenshots needed call-out text boxes to tell us what we were looking at. Does anyone else think that's a bad sign? Note that Mac OS S screenshots displaying new UI functionality in Panther don't need such explicit "point to the widget" explanation.
Another interesting point from the MacOS user experience: the original incarnation of OS X's Aqua interface was candy-colored almost to the point of distraction. From those Longhorn screenshots, obviously the Windows UI folks saw that & said "I'll bet we can out-shiny that!" However, in the two years since the original Aqua, the OS X UI has been toned down considerably based on real user's feedback & common sense.
How long before Longhorn's Aero interface does the same? Two years after it's (finally) released? Screw that; even my X11 windows served back to my laptop from the Solaris box are easier to work with....
--Mid