Putting aside the issue of whether or not you really need to upgrade, which others have addressed, the RAD tool that does what you want is RealBasic. It's not OSS or free-beer free, but you only asked for compatibility with free stuff. Caveat: I only goofed around with the demo, but I've never heard anything but good stuff about RealBasic.
First, about security...I have had pretty bad luck as a victim of crime in the last twenty years or so: a stereo, several car stereos, a car, bikes, and more stuff than I can remember. Both my wife and my ex-wife had credit cards stolen. It's true that locking your door/car, keeping stuff out of sight, and not leaving stuff lying around in public places helps a lot, but it's important to remember that shit happens, even if you're careful. Don't take stuff to college that you can't afford to lose, make sure that your insurance covers your situation, and don't be afraid to call your folks (or whoever) when you need help.
Now, if I may, a little academic advice: comp sci and math classes are important, and will definitely make you a better programmer. However, I think it's important to spend as much time as you can in humanities classes. There are six billion other people in the world, some of whom you will need to deal with personally, and it helps to know a little more about where they're coming from. Anything from History to English will teach you that. Also, the humanities classes are where the hotties are. Look 'em in the eye and actually listen when you talk to them, and you will get all the trim you want. Just ask nicely.
Finally, if you can, study in another country for a year. I have never, ever met anyone who studied abroad who regretted it.
In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.
I didn't make it to the language stuff...I could only get this far. I invite Mr Graham to go find a "tribe of nomads" and engage them in a friendly stick-collecting contest. I suggest that the older, more experienced nomad will out-collect him by a factor of at least 25, and younger or infirm nomads will only best him by a factor of 5 or so. With any luck, the nomads will use those collected sticks to give him the beating he so richly deserves. (He can re-think the intra-nomad productivity variation during the punishment phase of the exercise.)
It's really too bad...I liked the stuff Graham has written about lisp, but now I'm a little suspicious of it.
Squeak, and this article, just makes me nostalgic for Hypertalk on the old, old MacOS. It was really the string theory of computer science...a 21st century idea that fell into the 1980s. The runtime (Hypercard) was kind of drawing program, and kind of a RAD, and almost a database, and ran pretty comfortably (if slowly) in 1M of memory from floppies. It was really scalable to your level of ambition: you could draw pictures, or build GUIs that just moved from page to page, or write custom handlers for buttons in a smalltalkish language, or write external pascal libraries. I knew lots of non-programmers who wound up writing Hypertalk, 'cos it didn't even feel like programming.
Did I mention it was slow? It crawled. But it was great. It anticipated (or inspired) the web, and Visual Basic, and Tk, and a lot of other stuff. Apple totally drove it into the ground during the Scully era. It would be sweet on a modern box.
Get all the sleep, see all the movies, go to all the restaurants, and have all the sex you can now before it's too late! This is probably also your last chance to spend money on yourself, so go buy a few CDs or whatever it is you like to waste money on.
I don't mean to scare you with any of that...your kid will be far more fun than anything you give up. But savor the other stuff while you can.
P.S. I'm one more person who has never worked at a software shop, and I've never had a problem.
Those of us in IT departments really need to get over the idea of being entitled to job security. Why is the "jobless recovery" jobless? Because of increased productivity, i.e., companies can do more with fewer people. Where does increased productivity come from? Many places, but one of the main places is from the automation that IT departments provide. We have been putting other folks out of jobs at a furious rate. We don't have typing pools or mailrooms or nearly as many administrative assistants and customer reps because of email, web sites, and other stuff that comes out of IT.
We rationalize it by saying those jobs sucked anyway...and it's probably true...but many people were depending on those sucky jobs to pay their bills and feed their families. If it's wrong for your boss to save money by exporting your job to India, then it's wrong for your boss to save money by replacing someone else's job with code that you wrote or an application that you administer. If you believe that the people that you helped to displace eventually found other, better jobs, then you have to believe that that is what you will have to do when the time comes.
I don't like this, I don't like saying it, and I don't like management, but it's totally hypocritical to expect mercy after we have acted as executioners for so many years.
I think Stephenson is bad at endings because he cops so much from Thomas Pynchon, who seemed to eschew endings on artistic grounds. Of course, maybe Pynchon isn't good at endings either.
[spoilers] V: just kinda peters out. Crying of Lot 49: the book ends with blank pages where the last chapter is supposed to be. Gravity's Rainbow: 100 pages from the end the main character simply disappears, and there's a lot of druggy rambling about lightbulbs, refrigerators and Richard Nixon. Vineland: has a pretty conventional ending. Presumably, Pynchon was buying a boat or something Mason & Dixon: I did not finish this. In fact, I have never heard any reports of anyone finishing it.
Does anyone else smell a Wired shill on slashdot? This must be the fourth or fifth "I saw a really neat story in Wired" article in the last two weeks...
here are so many skills 'lost' in the modern 'american' lifestyle... but I find my fellows tend to have books on these subjects lying around, too
Y'know, brewing a single batch of beer doesn't make you a skilled brewer. Playing with something or reading about it isn't the same as doing it, even if it's boring, until you're good at it. I'm not dissing your interest in beermaking or tinsmithing or whatever, only reacting to the quotes around 'lost' and despairing for a nation of dilettantes and poetasters who don't even understand the scope of their own ignorance about what "craft" really means.
[OP]When I say Java won't turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.
Er... I don't think that Cobol is an evolutionary dead-end; in the best world, it would be extinct, but it isn't. What makes a language widely used is something that we can't predict right now - we have to watch it evolve over time, and as it grows and matures look at different aspects.
"Extinct" & "evolutionary dead-end" aren't quite the same; the dinosaurs are extinct, but there are species today evolved from dinosaurs, like birds.
Maybe nobody uses algol now, but algol has living descendants. Cobol doesn't, and I think it's pretty safe to say that there won't come a time when someone says "hey, let's use the cobol paradigm!"
You know, spam has never been a problem for me, and I haven't really done anything special to avoid it. Honestly, I have never once personally received a viagra or Nigerian pigeon drop spam. I post on usenet very rarely, but I do it with my real e-mail account, and I use my real address to register with sites that I really want to see. I do it rarely, but I do it. Maybe I'm just lucky.
OK, so maybe the books were set up so that the movie didn't make any profits despite its vast revenues. Maybe this happens all the time with movies. Who were the lawyers and agents who approved Lee's contract? If all the geeks on/. know about studio accounting tricks, why didn't Lee's people, who presumably work in the publishing and entertainment industries?
The Pistols were a marketed, packaged commodity -- the punk equivalent of the Spice Girls. Many other bands maintained a semblance of integrity, and deserve more credit: the Damned, the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, hell, even the Clash.
What exactly is there to celebrate about a band that was all hype and zero substance?
Kids, the comment above is the exact opposite of punk rock.
The great thing about punk was that you got to decide for yourself what was good. Setting up alternative yardsticks--integrity, or noisiness, or whatever--is missing the point. Yes, I am missing the point right now. Fuck you.
And anyway, how were the Ramones, God bless 'em, any different? Didn't you see Rock and Roll High School? How much more packaging and marketing could a band want?
Where is that in IE 5.2? I'm using 5.2 on 10.2 to reply to your message and christ if I can figure out what you're talking about. The only find i can see requires i hit cmd-f, then type shit into a window.
It isn't anywhere--that's kinda the point. Just start typing the text of the link that you want the focus to move to. When I type "r" the focus moves to "rob's page" (the first match on the page) and when I follow immediately with an "e" the focus moves to the reply link. Links that have focus have a little box around them. (If the focus is in a text box, you have to tab out, or whatever you type will go into the text box, rather than move the focus around.) When you press return when a link has the focus, IE follows the link.
>Typeahead rocks my socks, but the Mozilla team >didn't invent it. Internet Explorer for the Mac >has had this for quite some time.
IE has had "fill in the box" type-ahead completion for years, but it sounds like what he's describing is different.
As an example, say you wanted to reply to this article. Instead of clicking on "Reply to This", you'd type enough of "reply" to jump the highlight to the link in the active window.
Not exactly the same thing. Not even remotely the same thing, even.
No, they're not the same, but IE does have move-the-focus typeahead. And autocompletion typeahead. It has both.
I am not advocating that you do your application in Java, but have you looked at the Java Swing classes? The guys who came up with Swing appear to be total design pattern freaks. There are probably some ideas (like the Observer pattern a few other posters have mentioned, and Listeners) worth stealing and implementing in your language of choice. All the source is available, too.
I tend to use 'slimmer' solutions than a full-blown framework like EJB (yes, I like 2- and 2.5-tier applications).;-) But I would like to caution those who strike out at Java/EJB/J2EE as though it's just marketing speak. It ain't all a crock, and like anything that achieves some popularity it will attract idiots who will give others a bad impression.
Just for the record, the author of Building Java Enterprise Applications isn't one of those idiots. I haven't read the book yet, but Brett McLaughlin is a smart guy, and I think it's unlikely he presents EJB's as a magic bullet. A few years ago he wrote in an article for O'Reilly's online Java thing:
I'd estimate 50% to 70% of the companies that have purchased or are purchasing J2EE solutions could easily get by with a simple servlet and a JDBC-based solution. Presentation logic housed in the servlet coupled with database access through JDBC would suffice for most types of applications, including many e-commerce solutions.
I can't remember where, but I've definitely seen those pictures--the little girl with face paint and the hats on the wall--long ago. My first instinct is that they're part of the Photoshop 3.0 tutorial materials.
I am noticing a lack of Ents in the preview. Does anyone know if the big boys are going to be in the movie?
Yes, they will. There was a "secret" preview for TT after the credits of FOTR on one day in March, and it was different from this trailer. There was about a second or two of what I think was probably Treebeard and certainly an Ent or a Huorn.
If you have lost six years of data already, people are motivated and understand the issue. That's good--a huge obstable has been removed.
No solution that you come up with will work without training. If it's at all possible, try to sit down with everybody and show them how it works. Help them create files or folders or whatever in any shares that they have set up. Create shortcuts. Answer questions. Repeat as necessary. It really only takes 5 - 15 minutes at every desk.
I try to take people to the closet and show them the file server and the tape backup so that they have a picture of the share as something other than an icon on their screen.
Here's training (in my experience) that doesn't work well with non-technical users: sending e-mail explaining how your system works. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard. Using a projector to show people basic actions. Successful training requires the user to get the mouse in their hands, trying while you watch. Try not to grit your teeth if you can help it.
If you don't have time or resources to do this all yourself, figure out who knows what they're doing (it isn't hard) and ask them to help spread the love.
I like Matthias Felleisen & Daniel P Friedman's books:Little Schemer, Seasoned Schemer and A Little Java, a Few Patterns. They look like they're books for kids--and they are--but anyone can learn from them, and they cover programming, rather than syntax.
Slashdot Mirror
Putting aside the issue of whether or not you really need to upgrade, which others have addressed, the RAD tool that does what you want is RealBasic. It's not OSS or free-beer free, but you only asked for compatibility with free stuff. Caveat: I only goofed around with the demo, but I've never heard anything but good stuff about RealBasic.
First, about security...I have had pretty bad luck as a victim of crime in the last twenty years or so: a stereo, several car stereos, a car, bikes, and more stuff than I can remember. Both my wife and my ex-wife had credit cards stolen. It's true that locking your door/car, keeping stuff out of sight, and not leaving stuff lying around in public places helps a lot, but it's important to remember that shit happens, even if you're careful. Don't take stuff to college that you can't afford to lose, make sure that your insurance covers your situation, and don't be afraid to call your folks (or whoever) when you need help.
Now, if I may, a little academic advice: comp sci and math classes are important, and will definitely make you a better programmer. However, I think it's important to spend as much time as you can in humanities classes. There are six billion other people in the world, some of whom you will need to deal with personally, and it helps to know a little more about where they're coming from. Anything from History to English will teach you that. Also, the humanities classes are where the hotties are. Look 'em in the eye and actually listen when you talk to them, and you will get all the trim you want. Just ask nicely.
Finally, if you can, study in another country for a year. I have never, ever met anyone who studied abroad who regretted it.
In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.
I didn't make it to the language stuff...I could only get this far. I invite Mr Graham to go find a "tribe of nomads" and engage them in a friendly stick-collecting contest. I suggest that the older, more experienced nomad will out-collect him by a factor of at least 25, and younger or infirm nomads will only best him by a factor of 5 or so. With any luck, the nomads will use those collected sticks to give him the beating he so richly deserves. (He can re-think the intra-nomad productivity variation during the punishment phase of the exercise.)
It's really too bad...I liked the stuff Graham has written about lisp, but now I'm a little suspicious of it.
P.S. It's the JVM, stupid.
Squeak, and this article, just makes me nostalgic for Hypertalk on the old, old MacOS. It was really the string theory of computer science...a 21st century idea that fell into the 1980s. The runtime (Hypercard) was kind of drawing program, and kind of a RAD, and almost a database, and ran pretty comfortably (if slowly) in 1M of memory from floppies. It was really scalable to your level of ambition: you could draw pictures, or build GUIs that just moved from page to page, or write custom handlers for buttons in a smalltalkish language, or write external pascal libraries. I knew lots of non-programmers who wound up writing Hypertalk, 'cos it didn't even feel like programming.
Did I mention it was slow? It crawled. But it was great. It anticipated (or inspired) the web, and Visual Basic, and Tk, and a lot of other stuff. Apple totally drove it into the ground during the Scully era. It would be sweet on a modern box.
Get all the sleep, see all the movies, go to all the restaurants, and have all the sex you can now before it's too late! This is probably also your last chance to spend money on yourself, so go buy a few CDs or whatever it is you like to waste money on.
I don't mean to scare you with any of that...your kid will be far more fun than anything you give up. But savor the other stuff while you can.
P.S. I'm one more person who has never worked at a software shop, and I've never had a problem.
Those of us in IT departments really need to get over the idea of being entitled to job security. Why is the "jobless recovery" jobless? Because of increased productivity, i.e., companies can do more with fewer people. Where does increased productivity come from? Many places, but one of the main places is from the automation that IT departments provide. We have been putting other folks out of jobs at a furious rate. We don't have typing pools or mailrooms or nearly as many administrative assistants and customer reps because of email, web sites, and other stuff that comes out of IT.
We rationalize it by saying those jobs sucked anyway...and it's probably true...but many people were depending on those sucky jobs to pay their bills and feed their families. If it's wrong for your boss to save money by exporting your job to India, then it's wrong for your boss to save money by replacing someone else's job with code that you wrote or an application that you administer. If you believe that the people that you helped to displace eventually found other, better jobs, then you have to believe that that is what you will have to do when the time comes.
I don't like this, I don't like saying it, and I don't like management, but it's totally hypocritical to expect mercy after we have acted as executioners for so many years.
I think Stephenson is bad at endings because he cops so much from Thomas Pynchon, who seemed to eschew endings on artistic grounds. Of course, maybe Pynchon isn't good at endings either.
[spoilers]
V: just kinda peters out.
Crying of Lot 49: the book ends with blank pages where the last chapter is supposed to be.
Gravity's Rainbow: 100 pages from the end the main character simply disappears, and there's a lot of druggy rambling about lightbulbs, refrigerators and Richard Nixon.
Vineland: has a pretty conventional ending. Presumably, Pynchon was buying a boat or something
Mason & Dixon: I did not finish this. In fact, I have never heard any reports of anyone finishing it.
What is that quote? Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains
It's the first line in the communist manifesto...comrade.
Does anyone else smell a Wired shill on slashdot? This must be the fourth or fifth "I saw a really neat story in Wired" article in the last two weeks...
http://slate.msn.com/id/2070182/
here are so many skills 'lost' in the modern 'american' lifestyle... but I find my fellows tend to have books on these subjects lying around, too
Y'know, brewing a single batch of beer doesn't make you a skilled brewer. Playing with something or reading about it isn't the same as doing it, even if it's boring, until you're good at it. I'm not dissing your interest in beermaking or tinsmithing or whatever, only reacting to the quotes around 'lost' and despairing for a nation of dilettantes and poetasters who don't even understand the scope of their own ignorance about what "craft" really means.
Sorry...middle age coming on...
[OP]When I say Java won't turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.
Er... I don't think that Cobol is an evolutionary dead-end; in the best world, it would be extinct, but it isn't. What makes a language widely used is something that we can't predict right now - we have to watch it evolve over time, and as it grows and matures look at different aspects.
"Extinct" & "evolutionary dead-end" aren't quite the same; the dinosaurs are extinct, but there are species today evolved from dinosaurs, like birds.
Maybe nobody uses algol now, but algol has living descendants. Cobol doesn't, and I think it's pretty safe to say that there won't come a time when someone says "hey, let's use the cobol paradigm!"
I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students.
These aren't orthogonal. Where do you think financial aid comes from...the tooth fairy?
Am I the only person who doesn't receive spam?
You know, spam has never been a problem for me, and I haven't really done anything special to avoid it. Honestly, I have never once personally received a viagra or Nigerian pigeon drop spam. I post on usenet very rarely, but I do it with my real e-mail account, and I use my real address to register with sites that I really want to see. I do it rarely, but I do it. Maybe I'm just lucky.
OK, so maybe the books were set up so that the movie didn't make any profits despite its vast revenues. Maybe this happens all the time with movies. Who were the lawyers and agents who approved Lee's contract? If all the geeks on /. know about studio accounting tricks, why didn't Lee's people, who presumably work in the publishing and entertainment industries?
The Pistols were a marketed, packaged commodity -- the punk equivalent of the Spice Girls. Many other bands maintained a semblance of integrity, and deserve more credit: the Damned, the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, hell, even the Clash.
What exactly is there to celebrate about a band that was all hype and zero substance?
Kids, the comment above is the exact opposite of punk rock.
The great thing about punk was that you got to decide for yourself what was good. Setting up alternative yardsticks--integrity, or noisiness, or whatever--is missing the point. Yes, I am missing the point right now. Fuck you.
And anyway, how were the Ramones, God bless 'em, any different? Didn't you see Rock and Roll High School? How much more packaging and marketing could a band want?
Where is that in IE 5.2? I'm using 5.2 on 10.2 to reply to your message and christ if I can figure out what you're talking about. The only find i can see requires i hit cmd-f, then type shit into a window.
It isn't anywhere--that's kinda the point. Just start typing the text of the link that you want the focus to move to. When I type "r" the focus moves to "rob's page" (the first match on the page) and when I follow immediately with an "e" the focus moves to the reply link. Links that have focus have a little box around them. (If the focus is in a text box, you have to tab out, or whatever you type will go into the text box, rather than move the focus around.) When you press return when a link has the focus, IE follows the link.
>IE does have move-the-focus typeahead
Where? I'm on IE 6, and I don't get anything like the behavior he's describing.
IE 5.2 under Mac OS X.2. I used it to reply to this message.
>Typeahead rocks my socks, but the Mozilla team
>didn't invent it. Internet Explorer for the Mac
>has had this for quite some time.
IE has had "fill in the box" type-ahead completion for years, but it sounds like what he's describing is different.
As an example, say you wanted to reply to this article. Instead of clicking on "Reply to This", you'd type enough of "reply" to jump the highlight to the link in the active window.
Not exactly the same thing. Not even remotely the same thing, even.
No, they're not the same, but IE does have move-the-focus typeahead. And autocompletion typeahead. It has both.
I am not advocating that you do your application in Java, but have you looked at the Java Swing classes? The guys who came up with Swing appear to be total design pattern freaks. There are probably some ideas (like the Observer pattern a few other posters have mentioned, and Listeners) worth stealing and implementing in your language of choice. All the source is available, too.
I tend to use 'slimmer' solutions than a full-blown framework like EJB (yes, I like 2- and 2.5-tier applications). ;-) But I would like to caution those who strike out at Java/EJB/J2EE as though it's just marketing speak. It ain't all a crock, and like anything that achieves some popularity it will attract idiots who will give others a bad impression.
Just for the record, the author of Building Java Enterprise Applications isn't one of those idiots. I haven't read the book yet, but Brett McLaughlin is a smart guy, and I think it's unlikely he presents EJB's as a magic bullet. A few years ago he wrote in an article for O'Reilly's online Java thing:
I'd estimate 50% to 70% of the companies that have purchased or are purchasing J2EE solutions could easily get by with a simple servlet and a JDBC-based solution. Presentation logic housed in the servlet coupled with database access through JDBC would suffice for most types of applications, including many e-commerce solutions.
i.e., what you just said.
I can't remember where, but I've definitely seen those pictures--the little girl with face paint and the hats on the wall--long ago. My first instinct is that they're part of the Photoshop 3.0 tutorial materials.
I am noticing a lack of Ents in the preview. Does anyone know if the big boys are going to be in the movie?
Yes, they will. There was a "secret" preview for TT after the credits of FOTR on one day in March, and it was different from this trailer. There was about a second or two of what I think was probably Treebeard and certainly an Ent or a Huorn.
If you have lost six years of data already, people are motivated and understand the issue. That's good--a huge obstable has been removed.
No solution that you come up with will work without training. If it's at all possible, try to sit down with everybody and show them how it works. Help them create files or folders or whatever in any shares that they have set up. Create shortcuts. Answer questions. Repeat as necessary. It really only takes 5 - 15 minutes at every desk.
I try to take people to the closet and show them the file server and the tape backup so that they have a picture of the share as something other than an icon on their screen.
Here's training (in my experience) that doesn't work well with non-technical users: sending e-mail explaining how your system works. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard. Using a projector to show people basic actions. Successful training requires the user to get the mouse in their hands, trying while you watch. Try not to grit your teeth if you can help it.
If you don't have time or resources to do this all yourself, figure out who knows what they're doing (it isn't hard) and ask them to help spread the love.
I like Matthias Felleisen & Daniel P Friedman's books: Little Schemer, Seasoned Schemer and A Little Java, a Few Patterns. They look like they're books for kids--and they are--but anyone can learn from them, and they cover programming, rather than syntax.