Why is this modded down to 0? I had similar concerns about Mono. M$ went w/ gnome dudes possibly for covering fire against DoJ. An Open Source implementation of.Net gives so much validity to M$.Net. But we all new that M$ could yank the chain and throttle Mono. It could and it will.
And a scolding is in order for Icaza and gang. Has history of M$ taught nothing to you? Do we (Linux/Apache/GNU) are server people, we need to learn from a desktop company how to put an XML wrapper around http requests!
I came to USA on an H1B visa. All Indians and I am sure other immigrant communities are obsessed with the question - "What makes America Great". Most say - "oh they had vast resources to begin with". I contended myself with that for a month until I familiarised myself with the geography and realised that south of Texas everything was in similar shape as India. So that didn't make any sense.
While in engineering college in India, I read about Steve Jobs, Woznaik, Atkinson, Hewlett, Allen, and yes Gates. (Bill Gates is soon going to get a temple and a denomination amongst Hindu gods). I was amazed by their contempt of authority and yet having the guts to go out on a limb and create great things. These stories of Edison all the way to Carmack were sometimes the only threads from which a true techie could hang his belief.
I did see the westerns, atleast the popular ones - the spaghetti trio, few John Waynes, Tombstone and even in the age of cable TV, I could not help but be mesmerised by Wyatt Earp and Doc Halliday.
The Wild West. It all made sense. That is the cornerstone of this Great Country. In the Wild West even a thug could be deputized as long as he had the skills. The undercurrent being a safe place for business, growth, raising family driven by the Protestant Ethic.
If you read Peter Drucker's book on innovation, the British treated innovators as tradesmen, inline with blacksmiths, cobblers etc. The innovators could never become gentlemen component of the society. And America never cared for that kind of classism. With the Industrial Age fueled by war demands the innovators and scientists (including, Oppenheimer, Rutherford, Einstein) found home in USA. Why? They were the fastest guns in their business and they were deputized to take care of the situation.
America wants, America gets, not because it snatches from others, but because it guarantees respect and freedom. I'd actually call it - willing to cut a fair deal. Are H1Bs the fastest guns? Are Mexican immigrants the best gardners, mechanics, Taco Bell cashiers? I don't know. But to kill a deer you don't need an assault rifle.
I think it is wrong of H1Bs to expect getting a green card or any other residency, employment guarantees. Certainly the H1B program is rife with abuse. People get their relatives in by forging their credentials, people are harassed to work in bad conditions (low pay, no benefits, ethnic abuse - caste etc bullshit). This program needs a hard look and reform. There is a need to get the brilliant people to USA and address labor shortage. If the problem goes away, so should any non-contributing components. No point keeping the 'gcc-build' directory around after a successful 'make install'. Fair deal.
Ambient Devices' Orb. Ambient Devices is an MIT Media Lab company and it has this Orb that changes color according to the stock portfolio. Check out the link, scroll down a bit.
I cannot agree more on this patent and IP thing. This is beyond common sense. We are developing a system and seems like we just stepped into a patent/copyright minefield. We don't need engineers - we need lawyers! Don't the sci-fi writers own all possible patents already?
It is true the that the 300million strong middle class exist. It is also true that the rest are struggle to survive and suffer abject poverty. One fact doesn't obfustace other.
India is poor for centuries. We just don't know any better. However US in its glorious 60s, admist moon landings and transistor invention was lynching innocent men, women, and children - despite the superior education, facilities, economy, and resources. So what was that you were saying about 'tough love'?
Answer: The Internet and a booming Consumer middle class.
As an Indian, I grew up amongst the ideas of conseravationist approach to life - use less electricity, lead as less materialistic life as possible - remenant of Gandhi's self-reliance theory. Since we don't have resources so we must consume less.
This changed with the 90s reform, globalization, and the Internet. People learnt to consume - letting go off securities of saving money and spending judicially to credit cards and financing cars. Cable TV and MTV (Asia) encouraged the youth to let go of the seemingly secure shackles and embrace a consumer lifestyle - Ray Bans, Nike, Levis, Budweiser etc. All these "new" ideas found roots and manifestation is spending money on things besides necessities. The circle of consumption is now established and people are open to the idea of faster, better, cheaper.
The Internet acted as catalyst. The two "sects" using the Internet were rich people and academia. And then the students in academia went on to be corporate managers etc so it spread. The Internet brought Linux few were in for ideology while most are in for the coolness factor. In India a brainy chap is cool although with the 'aping the west' the term "geek" has made it into the pop-culture. These "geeks" are wannabe geeks.
So socio-economic transformation and H1B people's exposure to business and s/w has development has tilted the scales in favor service economy. Service economy depends on tiers of services which is another win for business spending. All these factors contribute to a demand for communication among other things.
India has a healthy middle class of 300million - more than US' entire population and more for China who has witnessed fruits of globalization earlier and with Taiwan next doors as an evidence of success, Chinese and Indian are eager to catch up.
IMHO, US has the greatest and strongest economy however current trend of "cutting cost" to serve an unknown master is not doing anyone any good.
under linux, everyone still has to write their own shit until there's some decent open source toolkit for that and that of course means a longer time to market
Exactly my point my friend. Now, you've got to ask yourself who is best positioned in PVR market to do that? Here's one for PDAs and other embedded categories Lineo
TiVO uses Linux on a custom PowerPC chip fabricated by IBM that includes MPEG-2 encode/decode on the chip and the source is available from TiVO website. When the cable/satellite companies start building PVRs into their boxes, what OS do you think they will use - Windows Embedded? Perhaps QNX but most certainly Linux. More Linux jobs, hooray for Open Source!
Too bad that TiVO may not be able to recover their investment or may have to morph into a PVR system software developer/consultant. But their name will live forever has the few OpenSource ventures that 'changed the world'. And that ain't so bad.
I do not understand the obsessiveness with Apple. Have you forgotten the latest DMCA drama over iDVD? Have you forgotten how Apple eats up app developers by bundling similar features into the OS? Does that remind you of anybody else? Sure their products are slick and we must acknowledge that. But how come recently every sneeze in Cupertino becomes a fever at Slashdot?
Mummified dinosaur - the words evoked Egyptians working on dinosaur preservation and a moment later it's that "naah!" feeling but you are curious completely knowing in advance that it is a fossil.
News is entertainment. Science is entertainment. Until anything isn't on the border of sensationalism, it doesn't matter anymore? Whatever happened to sincere inquisitiveness, wonder, and inquiry.
By means of the Mummy, mankind, it is said,
Attests to the gods its respect for the dead.
We plunder his tomb, be he sinner or saint,
Distil him for physic and grind him for paint,
Exhibit for money his poor, shrunken frame,
And with levity flock to the scene of the shame.
O, tell me, ye gods, for the use of my rhyme:
For respecting the dead what's the limit of time?
The Economist article is poorly researched and written, hell I can't believe it made it up there. Anyways, I am a developer however I resent sys admins being called "PlayStation nerds" - what is that? Some sort of "eye-roll". The entire article doesn't state one objective argument in favor of N1 or how is it going to pull off the feat. It takes a derogatory view of sys admins as people who have nothing to do but make your network/MIS related work miserable, some sort of "pizza fueled weirdos" and the good news is that you can get rid of them! What insight!
OpenView was supposed to do that. CMIP/TMN, JMX, Zero Administration etc. there is no mention of competing products, there are no comparisons, no technical overview, no "special ingredient" that makes N1 special, all we have is "PlayStation nerds" and the plan to eliminate them. I do wonder how admins earn this reputation may be Economist should really question the OS maker up north whose songs they sing and whose crap is left for admins to clean up.
Java Companion is a free (PDF) download of a good treatment on the subject. As a practicising java developer there's no substitute for the GoF Design Patterns especially the discussion on each pattern. But sometimes it's hard to gather the full meaning because a C++ demonstration is used replete with multiple inheritance or even just inheritance that may be realised in Java as composition. With Java, one requires little bit help, some lateral thinking to come up with an equivalent. The download has helped me immensely.
While I am pretty pleased that after all the grief DMCA has given to OpenSource, hackers and enthusiasts the people are beginning to fall in the ditch they dug for others, I can't help wondering what is so special about these fonts. I'm sure Adobe can create alternative similar looking fonts.
I did some drafting in College and now sometimes my handwriting looks like the standard drafting lettering - am I violating DMCA - sheesh.
It did occur to me that my post might be taken in the way you describe. However in my defense here are the points:
I am a Java Developer and I like many features of the language. Java community also agrees on a common subset.
I know C# is out there and is Java like
This book is supposed to bridge how C# is Java like i.e. what of it's features a Java programmer can use and what needs to be rethought. Do we get standard design patterns - observers, factories? How is RMI replaced? etc
While I don't want the verbatim quotes from the book, some confirmation by the reviewer will definitely encourage me to check it out.
Even cnet editors can parrot the features of C# and draw resemblances to Java. If a review is addressed to a Java Programmer or for that matter any review that is addressed to any community, must address the concerns, questions, dilemmas directly. Attention to the publisher doesn't help me see how C# can be approached by a Java developer.
While I am a Java developer and I am interested in C# from a knowledge-about-languages perspective, this review is far from getting me there. At exactly one point the reviewer mentions threads and Swing. But then what about it? At more than four places Microsoft press is mentioned and it is advised to give them a fair chance. Well, after reading this review I still don't have a clue what the book is about. The ToC is interesting but not helpful. I bet that a 'Python for Perl Programmers' book would get an objective review with less focus on publishers and book contents/excerpts that would do the topic some justice. What I am trying to say is that there is no 'java angle'
I propose slashdot community lay down some guidelines about reviewing a technical book. I applaud the reviewer's efforts and for keeping an open mind towards the source;-)
RUP, IMHO comes short when it comes to developing software that is really valuable to end customer. Check out the demo here. RUP wants to divide the whole s/w development process into stages and proceed in a systematic fashion where progression into one stage completely disqualifies the previous stages. The problem is that most of the times the customer never really understands what is possible and what really is required to address a business and/or process need. Which really translates to improper requirements. This is also the cause of user dissatisfaction because by the time s/w arrives the business needs/environment may have changed or shows symptoms of the same. This is very disconcerting to the end customer for his time and expenditure.
This is why Extreme Programming is a bit more applicable to what we know about s/w development, how much can we communicate to the end user, how can we make it easier for developers to let users participate in all stages of development.
That said, I actually like UML a lot. The use cases work in larger contexts while class diagrams work in narrow contexts i.e. 2-4 people can really understand what you are trying to communicate. The sequence diagrams are priceless, because even managers can follow some of it. I like to combine class diagrams with a design pattern [GoF] applications.
Rational now has an extreme programming plug-in. That very statement makes me run in the opposite direction. XP is often compared to Open Source, where users really know what they want and the whole process is more conversational rather than a contract that's been handed off to a developer.
... how the embedded Linux market was surprisingly successful financially for them,
I think it should be "how the embedded Linux market was a surprisingly financial success for them" maybe the author intended: "how the embedded Linux market was surprisingly financially successful for them". The latter just doesn't seem fluent.
"... desktop-oriented company actually made real money from Linux this year!" I think it should be "real money with Linux this year".
I have a zaurus SL5500. I haven't gone jogging with it and it doesn't have any ergonomic controls like a thumb wheel to control volume. That aside, it still is unix friendly. I transfer data by two methods, put the CF card in the CompactFlash adapter and then mount that as drive on my Linux laptop - rip, copy, eject!
At home I have a 802.11b network, plug in the CF 802.11b card and the Qtopia desktop application will work with the IP address - upload, manage, roam!
Besides that, it has a healthy developer community, Sharp supports open source efforts and it's a PDA! I'm sure that a 256MB storage card is enough for your 8-mile run! Short of a solid state device I'll only invest in an iPod.
Slashdot Mirror
expect curry flavored tickets in the mail.
Why is this modded down to 0? I had similar concerns about Mono. M$ went w/ gnome dudes possibly for covering fire against DoJ. An Open Source implementation of .Net gives so much validity to M$ .Net. But we all new that M$ could yank the chain and throttle Mono. It could and it will.
And a scolding is in order for Icaza and gang. Has history of M$ taught nothing to you? Do we (Linux/Apache/GNU) are server people, we need to learn from a desktop company how to put an XML wrapper around http requests!
Check out this PDA reference platform by Ajile. The processor is aj-100, 100% native java CPU. So even the device drivers are in Java.
1. Boot computer
2. Hit 'shift' at lilo prompt
3. type 'init=/bin/bash'
I came to USA on an H1B visa. All Indians and I am sure other immigrant communities are obsessed with the question - "What makes America Great". Most say - "oh they had vast resources to begin with". I contended myself with that for a month until I familiarised myself with the geography and realised that south of Texas everything was in similar shape as India. So that didn't make any sense.
While in engineering college in India, I read about Steve Jobs, Woznaik, Atkinson, Hewlett, Allen, and yes Gates. (Bill Gates is soon going to get a temple and a denomination amongst Hindu gods). I was amazed by their contempt of authority and yet having the guts to go out on a limb and create great things. These stories of Edison all the way to Carmack were sometimes the only threads from which a true techie could hang his belief.
I did see the westerns, atleast the popular ones - the spaghetti trio, few John Waynes, Tombstone and even in the age of cable TV, I could not help but be mesmerised by Wyatt Earp and Doc Halliday.
The Wild West. It all made sense. That is the cornerstone of this Great Country. In the Wild West even a thug could be deputized as long as he had the skills. The undercurrent being a safe place for business, growth, raising family driven by the Protestant Ethic.
If you read Peter Drucker's book on innovation, the British treated innovators as tradesmen, inline with blacksmiths, cobblers etc. The innovators could never become gentlemen component of the society. And America never cared for that kind of classism. With the Industrial Age fueled by war demands the innovators and scientists (including, Oppenheimer, Rutherford, Einstein) found home in USA. Why? They were the fastest guns in their business and they were deputized to take care of the situation.
America wants, America gets, not because it snatches from others, but because it guarantees respect and freedom. I'd actually call it - willing to cut a fair deal. Are H1Bs the fastest guns? Are Mexican immigrants the best gardners, mechanics, Taco Bell cashiers? I don't know. But to kill a deer you don't need an assault rifle.
I think it is wrong of H1Bs to expect getting a green card or any other residency, employment guarantees. Certainly the H1B program is rife with abuse. People get their relatives in by forging their credentials, people are harassed to work in bad conditions (low pay, no benefits, ethnic abuse - caste etc bullshit). This program needs a hard look and reform. There is a need to get the brilliant people to USA and address labor shortage. If the problem goes away, so should any non-contributing components. No point keeping the 'gcc-build' directory around after a successful 'make install'. Fair deal.
Ambient Devices' Orb. Ambient Devices is an MIT Media Lab company and it has this Orb that changes color according to the stock portfolio. Check out the link, scroll down a bit.
I cannot agree more on this patent and IP thing. This is beyond common sense. We are developing a system and seems like we just stepped into a patent/copyright minefield. We don't need engineers - we need lawyers! Don't the sci-fi writers own all possible patents already?
It is true the that the 300million strong middle class exist. It is also true that the rest are struggle to survive and suffer abject poverty. One fact doesn't obfustace other.
India is poor for centuries. We just don't know any better. However US in its glorious 60s, admist moon landings and transistor invention was lynching innocent men, women, and children - despite the superior education, facilities, economy, and resources. So what was that you were saying about 'tough love'?
Answer: The Internet and a booming Consumer middle class.
As an Indian, I grew up amongst the ideas of conseravationist approach to life - use less electricity, lead as less materialistic life as possible - remenant of Gandhi's self-reliance theory. Since we don't have resources so we must consume less.
This changed with the 90s reform, globalization, and the Internet. People learnt to consume - letting go off securities of saving money and spending judicially to credit cards and financing cars. Cable TV and MTV (Asia) encouraged the youth to let go of the seemingly secure shackles and embrace a consumer lifestyle - Ray Bans, Nike, Levis, Budweiser etc. All these "new" ideas found roots and manifestation is spending money on things besides necessities. The circle of consumption is now established and people are open to the idea of faster, better, cheaper.
The Internet acted as catalyst. The two "sects" using the Internet were rich people and academia. And then the students in academia went on to be corporate managers etc so it spread. The Internet brought Linux few were in for ideology while most are in for the coolness factor. In India a brainy chap is cool although with the 'aping the west' the term "geek" has made it into the pop-culture. These "geeks" are wannabe geeks.
So socio-economic transformation and H1B people's exposure to business and s/w has development has tilted the scales in favor service economy. Service economy depends on tiers of services which is another win for business spending. All these factors contribute to a demand for communication among other things.
India has a healthy middle class of 300million - more than US' entire population and more for China who has witnessed fruits of globalization earlier and with Taiwan next doors as an evidence of success, Chinese and Indian are eager to catch up.
IMHO, US has the greatest and strongest economy however current trend of "cutting cost" to serve an unknown master is not doing anyone any good.
under linux, everyone still has to write their own shit until there's some decent open source toolkit for that and that of course means a longer time to market
Exactly my point my friend. Now, you've got to ask yourself who is best positioned in PVR market to do that? Here's one for PDAs and other embedded categories Lineo
TiVO uses Linux on a custom PowerPC chip fabricated by IBM that includes MPEG-2 encode/decode on the chip and the source is available from TiVO website. When the cable/satellite companies start building PVRs into their boxes, what OS do you think they will use - Windows Embedded? Perhaps QNX but most certainly Linux. More Linux jobs, hooray for Open Source!
Too bad that TiVO may not be able to recover their investment or may have to morph into a PVR system software developer/consultant. But their name will live forever has the few OpenSource ventures that 'changed the world'. And that ain't so bad.
I do not understand the obsessiveness with Apple. Have you forgotten the latest DMCA drama over iDVD? Have you forgotten how Apple eats up app developers by bundling similar features into the OS? Does that remind you of anybody else? Sure their products are slick and we must acknowledge that. But how come recently every sneeze in Cupertino becomes a fever at Slashdot?
Pardon my ignorance, why do we hate AOL?
you mean *four* laws.
Mummified dinosaur - the words evoked Egyptians working on dinosaur preservation and a moment later it's that "naah!" feeling but you are curious completely knowing in advance that it is a fossil.
News is entertainment. Science is entertainment. Until anything isn't on the border of sensationalism, it doesn't matter anymore? Whatever happened to sincere inquisitiveness, wonder, and inquiry.
By means of the Mummy, mankind, it is said,
Attests to the gods its respect for the dead.
We plunder his tomb, be he sinner or saint,
Distil him for physic and grind him for paint,
Exhibit for money his poor, shrunken frame,
And with levity flock to the scene of the shame.
O, tell me, ye gods, for the use of my rhyme:
For respecting the dead what's the limit of time?
Scopas Brune
The Economist article is poorly researched and written, hell I can't believe it made it up there. Anyways, I am a developer however I resent sys admins being called "PlayStation nerds" - what is that? Some sort of "eye-roll". The entire article doesn't state one objective argument in favor of N1 or how is it going to pull off the feat. It takes a derogatory view of sys admins as people who have nothing to do but make your network/MIS related work miserable, some sort of "pizza fueled weirdos" and the good news is that you can get rid of them! What insight!
OpenView was supposed to do that. CMIP/TMN, JMX, Zero Administration etc. there is no mention of competing products, there are no comparisons, no technical overview, no "special ingredient" that makes N1 special, all we have is "PlayStation nerds" and the plan to eliminate them. I do wonder how admins earn this reputation may be Economist should really question the OS maker up north whose songs they sing and whose crap is left for admins to clean up.
Java Companion is a free (PDF) download of a good treatment on the subject. As a practicising java developer there's no substitute for the GoF Design Patterns especially the discussion on each pattern. But sometimes it's hard to gather the full meaning because a C++ demonstration is used replete with multiple inheritance or even just inheritance that may be realised in Java as composition. With Java, one requires little bit help, some lateral thinking to come up with an equivalent. The download has helped me immensely.
I agree. I have been using Qtopia Desktop on linux since I bought my Zaurus and that was in June '02. It says it's 1.6 beta.
While I am pretty pleased that after all the grief DMCA has given to OpenSource, hackers and enthusiasts the people are beginning to fall in the ditch they dug for others, I can't help wondering what is so special about these fonts. I'm sure Adobe can create alternative similar looking fonts.
I did some drafting in College and now sometimes my handwriting looks like the standard drafting lettering - am I violating DMCA - sheesh.
Even cnet editors can parrot the features of C# and draw resemblances to Java. If a review is addressed to a Java Programmer or for that matter any review that is addressed to any community, must address the concerns, questions, dilemmas directly. Attention to the publisher doesn't help me see how C# can be approached by a Java developer.
While I am a Java developer and I am interested in C# from a knowledge-about-languages perspective, this review is far from getting me there. At exactly one point the reviewer mentions threads and Swing. But then what about it? At more than four places Microsoft press is mentioned and it is advised to give them a fair chance. Well, after reading this review I still don't have a clue what the book is about. The ToC is interesting but not helpful. I bet that a 'Python for Perl Programmers' book would get an objective review with less focus on publishers and book contents/excerpts that would do the topic some justice. What I am trying to say is that there is no 'java angle'
;-)
I propose slashdot community lay down some guidelines about reviewing a technical book. I applaud the reviewer's efforts and for keeping an open mind towards the source
I think they are the bandwagon ;-)
RUP, IMHO comes short when it comes to developing software that is really valuable to end customer. Check out the demo here. RUP wants to divide the whole s/w development process into stages and proceed in a systematic fashion where progression into one stage completely disqualifies the previous stages. The problem is that most of the times the customer never really understands what is possible and what really is required to address a business and/or process need. Which really translates to improper requirements. This is also the cause of user dissatisfaction because by the time s/w arrives the business needs/environment may have changed or shows symptoms of the same. This is very disconcerting to the end customer for his time and expenditure.
This is why Extreme Programming is a bit more applicable to what we know about s/w development, how much can we communicate to the end user, how can we make it easier for developers to let users participate in all stages of development.
That said, I actually like UML a lot. The use cases work in larger contexts while class diagrams work in narrow contexts i.e. 2-4 people can really understand what you are trying to communicate. The sequence diagrams are priceless, because even managers can follow some of it. I like to combine class diagrams with a design pattern [GoF] applications.
Rational now has an extreme programming plug-in. That very statement makes me run in the opposite direction. XP is often compared to Open Source, where users really know what they want and the whole process is more conversational rather than a contract that's been handed off to a developer.
... how the embedded Linux market was surprisingly successful financially for them,
I think it should be "how the embedded Linux market was a surprisingly financial success for them" maybe the author intended: "how the embedded Linux market was surprisingly financially successful for them". The latter just doesn't seem fluent.
"... desktop-oriented company actually made real money from Linux this year!" I think it should be "real money with Linux this year".
I have a zaurus SL5500. I haven't gone jogging with it and it doesn't have any ergonomic controls like a thumb wheel to control volume. That aside, it still is unix friendly. I transfer data by two methods, put the CF card in the CompactFlash adapter and then mount that as drive on my Linux laptop - rip, copy, eject!
At home I have a 802.11b network, plug in the
CF 802.11b card and the Qtopia desktop application will work with the IP address - upload, manage, roam!
Besides that, it has a healthy developer community, Sharp supports open source efforts and it's a PDA! I'm sure that a 256MB storage card is enough for your 8-mile run! Short of a solid state device I'll only invest in an iPod.