I'm a fan of using objects in the right place.. but to suggest they increase the functionality of a language is simply wrong. They allow for better (well, different) organisation of code, easier reuse, and improved encapsulation over procedural or functional coding styles, but they don't actually allow you to do anything that can't be done using any other approach. The functionality of the language remains the same.
If you're going to wear a binary watch, make sure that you're able to read binary as if it were Base10. If a foxy chick asks you the time in a bar not being able to read your watch loses whatever geek points a binary watch might have afforded you.
They really haven't actually. They've stopped being mostly geeks and academics and now the internet is open to all. Users are much, much less advanced today than they were ten years ago. What has changed in more recent times is that the users now they're think more advanced. They're presented with interesting social networks (FlickR, Blogger, deli.co.us, etc), and they're capable of using these straightforward interfaces with lots of handholding (rebranding categories as tags for example) and they get the impression that they're learning something. Does that mean they know, or care, what an XMLHTTPRequest is? Nope.
The same goes for customers. Yes, they want advanced reporting and robust apps.. do they care how those are achieved? Generally, nope.
As for managers being fired for an application being unavailable 1% of the time.. the article talks about AJAX.. AJAX relies on JavaScript. Between 7% and 10% of web users have JavaScript turned off either implicitly or due to their IE security level. Surely if you're creating an AJAX application then you must realise the application is already unavailable to 7% of users even when your server is up and running? If high availability is key then you'd better not be using anything beyond HTML.
If you are not really much of a one for interesting Java coding suggestions, with examples, then perhaps this is not the book that you thought you were looking for.
That's something that a relatively high level language such as Java lends itself all too well to. It seems, from this review at least, that this is a cookbook, but rather than the very useful code in something like the Perl Cookbook, this is full of trivial examples that rarely apply to the real world. Not much good to learn from, not much good to copy from.
I doubt it'll be appearing in my collection any time soon.
Currently I'd discount Ruby from any sizable web development as it's still very much a minority language and it'd be practically impossible, or outragously expensive, to hire a Ruby developer. If your development team or company vanish (run over by a bus, move to Australia, whatever) you need to be able to get someone else who can come in and maintain the code quickly. That just wouldn't happen for a site written in Ruby. Of course, it'd be fine for any small development like a homepage or a blog.. but PHP would be equally fine for such an unimportant venture despite it's shortcomings. To a lesser extent the same can be said for Python. There's a lot fewer Python developers about than PHP, but there are some.
Caveat: IAAPD (I Am A PHP Developer), so perhaps I'm horribly biased.
3.6Mbps is actually a little low for the protocol that they're using.. it's supposed to be able to do 8 - 10 Mbps. No mention of why it's not up to scratch in the article though..
Given that few would support commercial piracy, and given the poor publicity over the use of DRM, how much of their problem is directly caused by commercial piracy? Garfield: "We are studying that issue, but do not have a real answer. Identifying the scope of the commercial versus the open source problem is no easier than discerning real data on p2p usage.
Eh? Where in that question did he infer the interviewer was talking about open source anything? This sort of ridiculous statement about the open source by a clueless muppet with no idea what open source is, let along how it works, just makes him look like a jerk. The interviewer clearly meant commercial piracy as in a person selling what they make with a DVD duplication system in their garage as opposed to someone sharing something they've downloaded either through a P2P network or giving copies to their mates.
What is a "hypertext link"? My definition of "hypertext" is a series of documents linked together by related words that can be navigated by clicking on highlighted words. As soon as a tag starts doing things like controlling a television the document stops being "hypertext". In purely academic terms, what Microsoft has patented as I understand it is actually impossible.
As a result of running software based on open standards, the agency is now saving around 20m per year a considerable portion of the agency's 200m yearly IT budget.
I advocate and use open standards whereever possible.. but you have to be aware that it's rarely a case of "switch and save". There are other related costs that need to be considered with a large changeover to a different document standard. Not least there's the cost of re/training staff to use new software. Then there's the cost of developing a solution (doubtless IBM has one to sell) to allow access to archived materials at the same time as accessing the new format. Then there's the cost in staff turnover. Iif you're not using MS Office you may find a lot of your secretarial staff are keen to leave.. they need to keep their skills current just as much as the resident IT geeks.. and in the secretarial world 'current' = latest version of Office.
While it's nice to say "these guys saved 20 million Euros" I wouldn't take that figure as red. They might have saved 20m euros on Microsoft licences (yay!), but what did the change cost elsewhere? Was that 20m euros really an overall saving?
I will be buying an X360 to replace my Xboxes which currently run as extenders. I have less than 10 games (most bought used). If MS is losing money on every X360, then they'll lose 3x that with my units.
I imagine Microsoft can afford the loss. What they gain from your purchase is perceived market share. Of all the consoles sold there'll be 3 360s and no PS3s as a result of your purchase. As Microsoft are desperate to show their stockholders that the cash they're burning through to grab as large a chunk of the games industry as they can they won't be too bothered that they've lost a bit of money. Money is easy to get. World domination is all in the statistics.
I'm sure that creating this engine was an interesting challenge.. but.. why? 2D only graphics cards don't really exist anymore. It doesn't exist for non-PC platforms so it doesn't really aid portability (though they say in the FAQs it could if someone wrote a "SwiftASM" thing for the target CPU) either.
The spam problem will never be halted by arresting the spammers. There's so much money to be made that there'll always be someone to step up to the plate as soon as a spammer is taken down. The only way to stop spam is to stop it being profitable. Stop people buying from spam adverts and noone will bother to send the adverts. The only ways to do that though is to stop people seeing the adverts (spam filtering), or to educate them that 99.9% of products advertised are a complete rip-off.. and the 0.1% that aren't should be avoided because the company selling them resorts to spamming to sell stuff.
Much as it's great to see a suspected criminal arrested for sending this crap out, there's no chance that it'll actually made any significant dent in the torrent of spam flowing through mail servers every day.
Legg Mason analyst Scott Devitt said the deal promises to give PayPal a leg-up in becoming the accepted payment mechanism system on VeriSign's 100,000 or so small business sites.
My experience tells me otherwise. I've been developing small business ecommerce sites for the past 10 years, and on every single development I've been part of we've tried to avoid Paypal integration simply because it puts users off. As I'm based in the UK I've had very little experience of Verisign's payment gateway, but if users have a worse perception of it than they do of Paypal's then I'd be really suprised.
JVMs are surprisingly good at figuring out things that we used to assume only the developer could know.
Yes they are. Now. 10 years ago when Java applets were being embedded in webpages (to show rippling water below a logo:) ) they weren't. The performance of the language has greatly improved while the perception of language has remained the roughly same (at least amoung the general coding community).
Just goes to show that even if you have a great technical product you'll still need the marketdriods. Unfortunately.
Technically speaking all graphics packages are based on "8 bit" technology. An image on a computer is made up of (usually) 4 channels.. red, green, blue and alpha. Each channel contains a greyscale image.. with 256 levels of greyness. 256 levels = 8 bit.
That's not the same as saying they're using 8 bit CPU instructions though. They're not. The code has kept up with modern CPUs and languages.
Things where one user needs to access an application from many locations (email for example), or where a group of distributed users need have instant access to shared information (calendar, notes).. great idea to have a remotely hosted application or data store.
But for word processing? Spreadsheets? That seems like a waste of bandwidth, and an unnecessary security risk. I've been working remotely for the last 2 years (300 miles from the company office). I've never encountered a situation where a remote service text editor would be preferable to a local app. Given my flaky internet connection that would really be a very bad thing. Whatsmore.. I'm not sure of course, but I rather doubt the capability of a javascript based spreadsheet. It might be ok for holding a small set of data and a handful of equations, but I wouldn't much like to view the last 10 years of accounts of a medium sized company with one. It'd be considerably slower than a properly compiled and optimized application.
Last year, at the PhillyClassic videogame event, I noticed a teenager wearing an ironic t-shirt. His shirt showed an original Nintendo controller and said 'Know your roots.'
I hate to be picky*, but there's nothing wrong with that T-Shirt at all. It is not, as the reviewer implies, suggesting video games started with Nintendo, merely that the wearer's experience of video games started with the NES. Of course, without knowing the person wearing it there's no way to know if it's accurate or not, but you can't assume it isn't simply because it's a NES pad on the front.
* Actually I love being picky. Can't smoke, can't drink, drugs are out, what's left if I can't pick holes in topics on the net?
Calling Concorde a fiscal failure is a little deceptive. Sure, the British and French government's never got their investment back from British Airways and Air France, but they never wanted it back. European government often backs extremely expensive development of aviation projects without requiring the money is paid back. It annoys Boeing and Lockheed no end. But they do it to keep jobs and confidence going in the industry.
And besides, it's cool.
Sometimes you have to look beyond simply making a profit.
As one blogger pointed out this morning...the release of Google Desktop 2.0 is beginning to take shape as a browser in itself as the need for a Firefox or IE is almost eliminated
Well, if a [i]blogger[/i] said it then it must be true.;)
the move was not about getting a slice of anyone's action but purely to protect the quality of products that utilize the Linux name
You have to wonder, if in some whacky parallel universe Microsoft decided to release some form of Linux toolset or even a distro of their own, whether or not they'd end up getting permission to use the name or not..
While I'm sure John Hall is right that they're interested in protecting Linux from shoddy rubbish, if they were presented with an opportunity to block Microsoft by using this copyright I'm reasonably sure they'd put their ethics aside to score points (or dollars) against Bill.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a fan of using objects in the right place .. but to suggest they increase the functionality of a language is simply wrong. They allow for better (well, different) organisation of code, easier reuse, and improved encapsulation over procedural or functional coding styles, but they don't actually allow you to do anything that can't be done using any other approach. The functionality of the language remains the same.
If you're going to wear a binary watch, make sure that you're able to read binary as if it were Base10. If a foxy chick asks you the time in a bar not being able to read your watch loses whatever geek points a binary watch might have afforded you.
users have become more advanced
.. do they care how those are achieved? Generally, nope.
.. the article talks about AJAX .. AJAX relies on JavaScript. Between 7% and 10% of web users have JavaScript turned off either implicitly or due to their IE security level. Surely if you're creating an AJAX application then you must realise the application is already unavailable to 7% of users even when your server is up and running? If high availability is key then you'd better not be using anything beyond HTML.
They really haven't actually. They've stopped being mostly geeks and academics and now the internet is open to all. Users are much, much less advanced today than they were ten years ago. What has changed in more recent times is that the users now they're think more advanced. They're presented with interesting social networks (FlickR, Blogger, deli.co.us, etc), and they're capable of using these straightforward interfaces with lots of handholding (rebranding categories as tags for example) and they get the impression that they're learning something. Does that mean they know, or care, what an XMLHTTPRequest is? Nope.
The same goes for customers. Yes, they want advanced reporting and robust apps
As for managers being fired for an application being unavailable 1% of the time
If you are not really much of a one for interesting Java coding suggestions, with examples, then perhaps this is not the book that you thought you were looking for. That's something that a relatively high level language such as Java lends itself all too well to. It seems, from this review at least, that this is a cookbook, but rather than the very useful code in something like the Perl Cookbook, this is full of trivial examples that rarely apply to the real world. Not much good to learn from, not much good to copy from. I doubt it'll be appearing in my collection any time soon.
Currently I'd discount Ruby from any sizable web development as it's still very much a minority language and it'd be practically impossible, or outragously expensive, to hire a Ruby developer. If your development team or company vanish (run over by a bus, move to Australia, whatever) you need to be able to get someone else who can come in and maintain the code quickly. That just wouldn't happen for a site written in Ruby. Of course, it'd be fine for any small development like a homepage or a blog .. but PHP would be equally fine for such an unimportant venture despite it's shortcomings. To a lesser extent the same can be said for Python. There's a lot fewer Python developers about than PHP, but there are some.
Caveat: IAAPD (I Am A PHP Developer), so perhaps I'm horribly biased.
I'm 75% the way there already!
3.6Mbps is actually a little low for the protocol that they're using .. it's supposed to be able to do 8 - 10 Mbps. No mention of why it's not up to scratch in the article though..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA
"In 2006 we'll be wanting qualified people with relevant experience."
It take a certain kind of recruitment consultant to figure out these gems..
Given that few would support commercial piracy, and given the poor publicity over the use of DRM, how much of their problem is directly caused by commercial piracy?
Garfield: "We are studying that issue, but do not have a real answer. Identifying the scope of the commercial versus the open source problem is no easier than discerning real data on p2p usage.
Eh? Where in that question did he infer the interviewer was talking about open source anything? This sort of ridiculous statement about the open source by a clueless muppet with no idea what open source is, let along how it works, just makes him look like a jerk. The interviewer clearly meant commercial piracy as in a person selling what they make with a DVD duplication system in their garage as opposed to someone sharing something they've downloaded either through a P2P network or giving copies to their mates.
Gah. Idiot.
What is a "hypertext link"? My definition of "hypertext" is a series of documents linked together by related words that can be navigated by clicking on highlighted words. As soon as a tag starts doing things like controlling a television the document stops being "hypertext". In purely academic terms, what Microsoft has patented as I understand it is actually impossible.
If they'd bundled Starcraft instead of Messenger/Media Player there wouldn't be any problem.
As a result of running software based on open standards, the agency is now saving around 20m per year a considerable portion of the agency's 200m yearly IT budget.
.. but you have to be aware that it's rarely a case of "switch and save". There are other related costs that need to be considered with a large changeover to a different document standard. Not least there's the cost of re/training staff to use new software. Then there's the cost of developing a solution (doubtless IBM has one to sell) to allow access to archived materials at the same time as accessing the new format. Then there's the cost in staff turnover. Iif you're not using MS Office you may find a lot of your secretarial staff are keen to leave .. they need to keep their skills current just as much as the resident IT geeks .. and in the secretarial world 'current' = latest version of Office.
I advocate and use open standards whereever possible
While it's nice to say "these guys saved 20 million Euros" I wouldn't take that figure as red. They might have saved 20m euros on Microsoft licences (yay!), but what did the change cost elsewhere? Was that 20m euros really an overall saving?
I will be buying an X360 to replace my Xboxes which currently run as extenders. I have less than 10 games (most bought used). If MS is losing money on every X360, then they'll lose 3x that with my units.
I imagine Microsoft can afford the loss. What they gain from your purchase is perceived market share. Of all the consoles sold there'll be 3 360s and no PS3s as a result of your purchase. As Microsoft are desperate to show their stockholders that the cash they're burning through to grab as large a chunk of the games industry as they can they won't be too bothered that they've lost a bit of money. Money is easy to get. World domination is all in the statistics.
I'm sure that creating this engine was an interesting challenge .. but .. why? 2D only graphics cards don't really exist anymore. It doesn't exist for non-PC platforms so it doesn't really aid portability (though they say in the FAQs it could if someone wrote a "SwiftASM" thing for the target CPU) either.
Is it just a fun toy? Or have I missed something?
The spam problem will never be halted by arresting the spammers. There's so much money to be made that there'll always be someone to step up to the plate as soon as a spammer is taken down. The only way to stop spam is to stop it being profitable. Stop people buying from spam adverts and noone will bother to send the adverts. The only ways to do that though is to stop people seeing the adverts (spam filtering), or to educate them that 99.9% of products advertised are a complete rip-off .. and the 0.1% that aren't should be avoided because the company selling them resorts to spamming to sell stuff.
Much as it's great to see a suspected criminal arrested for sending this crap out, there's no chance that it'll actually made any significant dent in the torrent of spam flowing through mail servers every day.
Legg Mason analyst Scott Devitt said the deal promises to give PayPal a leg-up in becoming the accepted payment mechanism system on VeriSign's 100,000 or so small business sites.
My experience tells me otherwise. I've been developing small business ecommerce sites for the past 10 years, and on every single development I've been part of we've tried to avoid Paypal integration simply because it puts users off. As I'm based in the UK I've had very little experience of Verisign's payment gateway, but if users have a worse perception of it than they do of Paypal's then I'd be really suprised.
JVMs are surprisingly good at figuring out things that we used to assume only the developer could know.
:) ) they weren't. The performance of the language has greatly improved while the perception of language has remained the roughly same (at least amoung the general coding community).
Yes they are. Now. 10 years ago when Java applets were being embedded in webpages (to show rippling water below a logo
Just goes to show that even if you have a great technical product you'll still need the marketdriods. Unfortunately.
Technically speaking all graphics packages are based on "8 bit" technology. An image on a computer is made up of (usually) 4 channels .. red, green, blue and alpha. Each channel contains a greyscale image .. with 256 levels of greyness. 256 levels = 8 bit.
That's not the same as saying they're using 8 bit CPU instructions though. They're not. The code has kept up with modern CPUs and languages.
Things where one user needs to access an application from many locations (email for example), or where a group of distributed users need have instant access to shared information (calendar, notes) .. great idea to have a remotely hosted application or data store.
.. I'm not sure of course, but I rather doubt the capability of a javascript based spreadsheet. It might be ok for holding a small set of data and a handful of equations, but I wouldn't much like to view the last 10 years of accounts of a medium sized company with one. It'd be considerably slower than a properly compiled and optimized application.
But for word processing? Spreadsheets? That seems like a waste of bandwidth, and an unnecessary security risk. I've been working remotely for the last 2 years (300 miles from the company office). I've never encountered a situation where a remote service text editor would be preferable to a local app. Given my flaky internet connection that would really be a very bad thing. Whatsmore
Last year, at the PhillyClassic videogame event, I noticed a teenager wearing an ironic t-shirt. His shirt showed an original Nintendo controller and said 'Know your roots.'
I hate to be picky*, but there's nothing wrong with that T-Shirt at all. It is not, as the reviewer implies, suggesting video games started with Nintendo, merely that the wearer's experience of video games started with the NES. Of course, without knowing the person wearing it there's no way to know if it's accurate or not, but you can't assume it isn't simply because it's a NES pad on the front.
* Actually I love being picky. Can't smoke, can't drink, drugs are out, what's left if I can't pick holes in topics on the net?
Calling Concorde a fiscal failure is a little deceptive. Sure, the British and French government's never got their investment back from British Airways and Air France, but they never wanted it back. European government often backs extremely expensive development of aviation projects without requiring the money is paid back. It annoys Boeing and Lockheed no end. But they do it to keep jobs and confidence going in the industry.
And besides, it's cool.
Sometimes you have to look beyond simply making a profit.
This new plane is supposed to be able to carry 300 people at Mach 2. Concorde's top speed was Mach 2 as well. It was designed over 40 years ago.
I'd have thought we'd be capable of at least twice that by now.
As one blogger pointed out this morning...the release of Google Desktop 2.0 is beginning to take shape as a browser in itself as the need for a Firefox or IE is almost eliminated
;)
Well, if a [i]blogger[/i] said it then it must be true.
It's simpler.
It requires fewer wires and stuff.
It's cheaper to make.
It (optionally) supports DRM.
Sounds awesome for the manufacturers and content providers. But what do I, as a consumer, get that I don't get from DVI or HDMI?
Other than a bill for a new monitor next time I upgrade my graphics card..
the move was not about getting a slice of anyone's action but purely to protect the quality of products that utilize the Linux name
You have to wonder, if in some whacky parallel universe Microsoft decided to release some form of Linux toolset or even a distro of their own, whether or not they'd end up getting permission to use the name or not..
While I'm sure John Hall is right that they're interested in protecting Linux from shoddy rubbish, if they were presented with an opportunity to block Microsoft by using this copyright I'm reasonably sure they'd put their ethics aside to score points (or dollars) against Bill.