What a silly article.
on
Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 1, Insightful
No, the "Slashdot collective" has no realistic chance of replacing SMTP. But then, neither does Cisco or Microsoft or Sun. Not with umpteen trillion SMTP servers out there, all of which would need to be replaced en masse.
Except for, you know, some minor things like browser support for the DOM (which is huge), CSS (which is huger), XML, XSLT, and XHTML.
Or maybe he's just talking about the UI side, where we've seen absolutely no improvement whatsoever. Except for tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, integrated search bars, and popup blocking (though back then, popups weren't so much a problem).
Which is to say, really, that he's wrong. Sure, browser development is arguably slower now than it was back in the Navigator 1.2 Perpetual Beta days, but that's always the case -- the mad rush of innovation has to slow down after the low-hanging fruit is plucked. It certainly hasn't stopped, though.
VS.Net is great for interface work, I'll grant you; but for serious code-wrangling, VS.Net is just frustrating. Where's the refactoring support that's built into Eclipse or IDEA, for instance?
... never make open-source development an important part of your business, because if you do, your developers can walk out and sell the code you paid them to develop.
(Unless you sign them to non-competes, which I can't believe the JBoss Group didn't do.)
The biggest difference for me is that Firebird's interface is a lot cleaner than Opera's, that Firebird's core engine is more standards-compliant (DOM Events Level 2 don't work at all in Opera, for instance), and that Firebird is free. There may be little reason to switch to Firebird from Opera (better the devil you know, and all), but if you're an IE user, Firebird is the alternative browser of choice.
I've had to code drop down menus differently for different browsers to get things to look the same, however when I'm done, you get the exact same page, with everything the same size and in the same place in IE, Netscape, Mozilla, and Konqueror. I've never used Opera so I don't test that one, but I guess I probably should.
It's probably broken. And when IE7 comes out, with a slightly different set of JavaScript/CSS bugs, it'll be broken on that. And when Safari comes out with a user-agent string that claims to be "Gecko-Like", it might be broken there. Client-sniffing is just dumb. If a feature doesn't work uniformly enough for your needs, don't use that feature.
You know, if you're going to rant about how evil something is, you could at least do yourself the favor of learning about it.
No,.NET isn't just a rebadging of COM -- it's a fundamentally new development platform for Windows that's actually really really good. It's as good as Java and -- in some important ways -- a lot better.
Microsoft's politics might be a valid reason to reject.NET, but the technology itself is excellent.
It'll go mostly dead (you can use it as a dumb VCR, basically), which is why I'm not buying one.
Besides, it's stupid to have to use a second source for program information when my digital cable already has that functionality in it. Anyone know if Time-Warner Cable plans to integrate TiVo-esque functionality into their digital cable boxes soon?
This is a great example of what open source can accomplish? A (not-quite-primetime) clone of a decades-old game that's already been re-implemented several times commercially with better graphics and gameplay?
No, I don't think so. This may be nice to have around in the game-poor Linux world, but it's not an example of what open source can do. For that you'll want to look to Apache, to Postgres, to BIND, and to any of the other programs that do what they do _better_ than the comparable commercial alternatives.
1. High-level. Contrary to Mr. DiBona's assertion, most of computer science is looking at higher levels, not lower ones. Sure, there's the obligatory computer fundamentals, but what's more important is what's done on top of the fundamentals -- databases, algorithms, AI, what have you. Java allows the student to quickly learn the basics of programming without having to simultaneously learn machine fundamentals, which they'll pick up later. (Not the case with C.)
2. It's free, in the monetary sense, which is important for high schools and small colleges. (Not the case with VB.)
3. It's real; students can compile and write real, significant programs in Java and know that businesses use Java extensively for significant applications. (Not the case with Pascal or Python.)
4. It's GUI, but not exclusively so: Students can start out learning console programming, but also be able to use a standard GUI framework (Swing) to make GUI apps. In C, you need to learn Motif, MFC, or the equivalent to write GUI apps, which is significantly more involved (and system-specific).
5. It's cross-platform. You can have Unix machines in the labs, but still allow people to do homework on their Macs or Windows machines. (Not the case with VB, and only partially true of C.)
6. It's clean. A lot of Java tends to look like pseudocode -- it's a very straightforward language, with few distracting frills. (Not the case with C++, certainly, nor with Perl.)
7. It's familial. It looks like other C-based languages look. It uses familiar types, familiar notation, and familiar keywords. (Not the case with VB or Perl.)
On the whole, it's a solid language for instructional purposes, combining the simplicity of Pascal with the real-world applicability of C++.
This may be true now, because most people who have a CS degree (and thus are more likely to understand things at a level greater than the superficial) learned C++ for their degree -- so the people who only know Java, and not C++, are the casual accountants-cum-programmers.
With the move to Java as a primary teaching language, this is going to be far less true in the future. Those people with CS degrees, who've taken classes in assembly language, computer architecture, and symbolic circuit design, will all have learned Java, and not many of them will know C++.
Far from being "a morbid joke", I've found Java to be one of the best languages for server-side development on Unix. I worked for two years writing server-side Perl apps (with CGI and mod_perl). When I first switched to Java, I was somewhat irritated by it -- but after getting used to its way of dealing with the world, I find it to be more powerful, faster, and far more maintainable than Perl.
Of course, if you haven't done anything with Java since the bad old days of JServ, you can be forgiven for your dismissal. But go download Tomcat and see how well modern Java works.
There are several free (both senses) regular expression packages out there that work quite well. You can find two of them at the Jakarta Project's web site: http://jakarta.apache.org
Forget the phone. Imagine instead a router, like the DSL routers that a lot of people have already -- except instead of plugging into a DSL line, it has a cell receiver that can receive and transmit data wicked fast no matter how far you are from the CO.
This is still in the tech-demo phase, but if they roll it out, and it works, it'll be very tempting tech.
Extreme programming's certainly interesting, but it's not the only alternative to the waterfall approach. People who are interested in XP might also want to look at Booch/Jacobsen/Rumbaugh Unified Software Development Process, which is described in a book of the same name (look at the big Addison-Wesley software engineering section at your local B&N for it and dozens of sorta-companion books).
Of course, XP has the advantage of sounding more glamorous and radical, which probably explains why it gets the press.
But think carefully, can you really name something developed in the last nine years that came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it? I consider innovations to be things such as the wheel, fire, airplanes, mechanized warfare, the radio, television, PC, and the Internet.
So, you can give eight examples of "innovation" that have occurred since the dawn of time -- and you're concerned that we haven't had one in the last decade? Boy, that's shocking!
From the sounds of things, C# is a sort-of-interesting language that's fatally crippled by its close relationship to Microsoft. Unless it gets full, free, equal implementations on Unix platforms, it's dead.
That doesn't mean it's entirely worthless, though; in fact, the real benefit of C# might be that it guilts Sun into finally submitting Java to a real standards body. Sun likes to portray itself as an open company, and that image has largely flown up until now -- but when the contrast of Microsoft standardizing C# and Sun zealously guarding Java becomes too glaring, Sun's going to look decidedly less friendly. With any luck, Microsoft's pressure will push Sun into doing the right thing.
I like the concept of this device -- the ability to digitally record shows, and to be able to "pause" regular TV.
What I don't like is the subscription model. I'd gladly pay the cash for one of these things, but I really hate the idea that it needs to download information from a service in order to work. Because when that service goes out of business, the TiVo is basically reduced to paperweight status. It happened to DiVX, after all.
Re:before we put the cart before the horse . . .
on
The Future of GNOME
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· Score: 1
Clicking on it's button on the task bar doesn't give it focus. if it's behind another window, you have to move or minimize one or the other in order to change focus.
This is not a design flaw; it's a bug. Get the latest RPMs from Red Hat, and you will find that this problem has been corrected.
GNOME is still terribly buggy, I'm afraid, but it's nevertheless managed to displace AfterStep as my windowing environment of choice.
If "they" don't teach generalized skills at your school, you need to get a better school. In these parts, they teach classes on:
Databases (including all sorts of theory, including some subsets of logic)
Operating systems (which is to say, general principles underlying operating systems, not "How to configure NT")
Computer languages (overview of different types of languages, including Prolog, Lisp, and others.)
Assembly language
Data structures
Algorithms
Circuit design
And a whole lot more
And, oh, they teach all of this using Unix systems and require that CS students take twice as many non-CS classes as CS ones. And I don't think the U. of Wisconsin is particularly unusual in all these regards.
If there are CS majors out there who are getting one-dimensional educations, they're doing it in spite of the system, not because of it.
The article quotes one student as saying that he doesn't want a technical degree because he wants to broaden his horizons, discover himself, become an educated person, and so forth.
Well, that's fine, and those are admirable goals; but the simple reality is that a CS degree doesn't prevent you from achieving them. Most colleges are, in fact, quite adamant about making sure that technical/science people are well-rounded in the humanities; if anything, it's easier to be a one-dimensional humanities major who knows no science than it is to be a one-dimensional tech major who knows no humanities. But even if your particular school doesn't require tech majors to take a boatload of humanities classes, you still can if you want to -- and I speak here as someone who's double-majoring in both CS and history.
College isn't tech school, and a different major won't make it one. I suspect the real reason that the kid in the article elected to major in a squishy subject is that he was afraid CS classes would be too hard.
One of us is confused. I don't think that the "moderation points" that would be lost refer to the rewards for the poster; they refer to the moderators' ability to adjust posts. And if moderators lose the ability to adjust posts semi-randomly, it won't hurt anything -- assuming, as seems to be the case, that there are enough moderators around to make the loss of one statistically insignificant.
In the process, say goodbye to Apple with their proprietary OS. People will either buy a Wintel if they want to blow a lot of money, or take a free AOLbox if they are cheapos.
Which is all quite interesting, except that Apple doesn't sell cheap computers. Yeah, they have their iMac, but people buying $999 iMacs aren't buying them because they're cheap -- there are too many $499 Wintel machines for that to be a consideration. No, people buying Macs are buying them because they want to have a Mac, for whatever reason, and they're willing to pay more for it. Getting rid of the low-end of the market, if it happens, hurts Microsoft a lot more than Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the "Slashdot collective" has no realistic chance of replacing SMTP. But then, neither does Cisco or Microsoft or Sun. Not with umpteen trillion SMTP servers out there, all of which would need to be replaced en masse.
Except for, you know, some minor things like browser support for the DOM (which is huge), CSS (which is huger), XML, XSLT, and XHTML.
Or maybe he's just talking about the UI side, where we've seen absolutely no improvement whatsoever. Except for tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, integrated search bars, and popup blocking (though back then, popups weren't so much a problem).
Which is to say, really, that he's wrong. Sure, browser development is arguably slower now than it was back in the Navigator 1.2 Perpetual Beta days, but that's always the case -- the mad rush of innovation has to slow down after the low-hanging fruit is plucked. It certainly hasn't stopped, though.
VS.Net is great for interface work, I'll grant you; but for serious code-wrangling, VS.Net is just frustrating. Where's the refactoring support that's built into Eclipse or IDEA, for instance?
... never make open-source development an important part of your business, because if you do, your developers can walk out and sell the code you paid them to develop.
(Unless you sign them to non-competes, which I can't believe the JBoss Group didn't do.)
The biggest difference for me is that Firebird's interface is a lot cleaner than Opera's, that Firebird's core engine is more standards-compliant (DOM Events Level 2 don't work at all in Opera, for instance), and that Firebird is free. There may be little reason to switch to Firebird from Opera (better the devil you know, and all), but if you're an IE user, Firebird is the alternative browser of choice.
You know, if you're going to rant about how evil something is, you could at least do yourself the favor of learning about it.
.NET isn't just a rebadging of COM -- it's a fundamentally new development platform for Windows that's actually really really good. It's as good as Java and -- in some important ways -- a lot better.
.NET, but the technology itself is excellent.
No,
Microsoft's politics might be a valid reason to reject
It'll go mostly dead (you can use it as a dumb VCR, basically), which is why I'm not buying one.
Besides, it's stupid to have to use a second source for program information when my digital cable already has that functionality in it. Anyone know if Time-Warner Cable plans to integrate TiVo-esque functionality into their digital cable boxes soon?
Three letters: RMS.
This is a great example of what open source can accomplish? A (not-quite-primetime) clone of a decades-old game that's already been re-implemented several times commercially with better graphics and gameplay?
No, I don't think so. This may be nice to have around in the game-poor Linux world, but it's not an example of what open source can do. For that you'll want to look to Apache, to Postgres, to BIND, and to any of the other programs that do what they do _better_ than the comparable commercial alternatives.
1. High-level. Contrary to Mr. DiBona's assertion, most of computer science is looking at higher levels, not lower ones. Sure, there's the obligatory computer fundamentals, but what's more important is what's done on top of the fundamentals -- databases, algorithms, AI, what have you. Java allows the student to quickly learn the basics of programming without having to simultaneously learn machine fundamentals, which they'll pick up later. (Not the case with C.)
2. It's free, in the monetary sense, which is important for high schools and small colleges. (Not the case with VB.)
3. It's real; students can compile and write real, significant programs in Java and know that businesses use Java extensively for significant applications. (Not the case with Pascal or Python.)
4. It's GUI, but not exclusively so: Students can start out learning console programming, but also be able to use a standard GUI framework (Swing) to make GUI apps. In C, you need to learn Motif, MFC, or the equivalent to write GUI apps, which is significantly more involved (and system-specific).
5. It's cross-platform. You can have Unix machines in the labs, but still allow people to do homework on their Macs or Windows machines. (Not the case with VB, and only partially true of C.)
6. It's clean. A lot of Java tends to look like pseudocode -- it's a very straightforward language, with few distracting frills. (Not the case with C++, certainly, nor with Perl.)
7. It's familial. It looks like other C-based languages look. It uses familiar types, familiar notation, and familiar keywords. (Not the case with VB or Perl.)
On the whole, it's a solid language for instructional purposes, combining the simplicity of Pascal with the real-world applicability of C++.
This may be true now, because most people who have a CS degree (and thus are more likely to understand things at a level greater than the superficial) learned C++ for their degree -- so the people who only know Java, and not C++, are the casual accountants-cum-programmers.
With the move to Java as a primary teaching language, this is going to be far less true in the future. Those people with CS degrees, who've taken classes in assembly language, computer architecture, and symbolic circuit design, will all have learned Java, and not many of them will know C++.
Far from being "a morbid joke", I've found Java to be one of the best languages for server-side development on Unix. I worked for two years writing server-side Perl apps (with CGI and mod_perl). When I first switched to Java, I was somewhat irritated by it -- but after getting used to its way of dealing with the world, I find it to be more powerful, faster, and far more maintainable than Perl.
Of course, if you haven't done anything with Java since the bad old days of JServ, you can be forgiven for your dismissal. But go download Tomcat and see how well modern Java works.
There are several free (both senses) regular expression packages out there that work quite well. You can find two of them at the Jakarta Project's web site: http://jakarta.apache.org
Forget the phone. Imagine instead a router, like the DSL routers that a lot of people have already -- except instead of plugging into a DSL line, it has a cell receiver that can receive and transmit data wicked fast no matter how far you are from the CO.
This is still in the tech-demo phase, but if they roll it out, and it works, it'll be very tempting tech.
Extreme programming's certainly interesting, but it's not the only alternative to the waterfall approach. People who are interested in XP might also want to look at Booch/Jacobsen/Rumbaugh Unified Software Development Process, which is described in a book of the same name (look at the big Addison-Wesley software engineering section at your local B&N for it and dozens of sorta-companion books).
Of course, XP has the advantage of sounding more glamorous and radical, which probably explains why it gets the press.
So, you can give eight examples of "innovation" that have occurred since the dawn of time -- and you're concerned that we haven't had one in the last decade? Boy, that's shocking!
Oracle's New Internet Computer (http://www.thinknic.com), a Linux-based thin client, has an Ethernet connection.
From the sounds of things, C# is a sort-of-interesting language that's fatally crippled by its close relationship to Microsoft. Unless it gets full, free, equal implementations on Unix platforms, it's dead.
That doesn't mean it's entirely worthless, though; in fact, the real benefit of C# might be that it guilts Sun into finally submitting Java to a real standards body. Sun likes to portray itself as an open company, and that image has largely flown up until now -- but when the contrast of Microsoft standardizing C# and Sun zealously guarding Java becomes too glaring, Sun's going to look decidedly less friendly. With any luck, Microsoft's pressure will push Sun into doing the right thing.
I like the concept of this device -- the ability to digitally record shows, and to be able to "pause" regular TV.
What I don't like is the subscription model. I'd gladly pay the cash for one of these things, but I really hate the idea that it needs to download information from a service in order to work. Because when that service goes out of business, the TiVo is basically reduced to paperweight status. It happened to DiVX, after all.
This is not a design flaw; it's a bug. Get the latest RPMs from Red Hat, and you will find that this problem has been corrected.
GNOME is still terribly buggy, I'm afraid, but it's nevertheless managed to displace AfterStep as my windowing environment of choice.
- Databases (including all sorts of theory, including some subsets of logic)
- Operating systems (which is to say, general principles underlying operating systems, not "How to configure NT")
- Computer languages (overview of different types of languages, including Prolog, Lisp, and others.)
- Assembly language
- Data structures
- Algorithms
- Circuit design
- And a whole lot more
And, oh, they teach all of this using Unix systems and require that CS students take twice as many non-CS classes as CS ones. And I don't think the U. of Wisconsin is particularly unusual in all these regards.If there are CS majors out there who are getting one-dimensional educations, they're doing it in spite of the system, not because of it.
The article quotes one student as saying that he doesn't want a technical degree because he wants to broaden his horizons, discover himself, become an educated person, and so forth.
Well, that's fine, and those are admirable goals; but the simple reality is that a CS degree doesn't prevent you from achieving them. Most colleges are, in fact, quite adamant about making sure that technical/science people are well-rounded in the humanities; if anything, it's easier to be a one-dimensional humanities major who knows no science than it is to be a one-dimensional tech major who knows no humanities. But even if your particular school doesn't require tech majors to take a boatload of humanities classes, you still can if you want to -- and I speak here as someone who's double-majoring in both CS and history.
College isn't tech school, and a different major won't make it one. I suspect the real reason that the kid in the article elected to major in a squishy subject is that he was afraid CS classes would be too hard.
One of us is confused. I don't think that the "moderation points" that would be lost refer to the rewards for the poster; they refer to the moderators' ability to adjust posts. And if moderators lose the ability to adjust posts semi-randomly, it won't hurt anything -- assuming, as seems to be the case, that there are enough moderators around to make the loss of one statistically insignificant.
"D-Fly" says:
Which is all quite interesting, except that Apple doesn't sell cheap computers. Yeah, they have their iMac, but people buying $999 iMacs aren't buying them because they're cheap -- there are too many $499 Wintel machines for that to be a consideration. No, people buying Macs are buying them because they want to have a Mac, for whatever reason, and they're willing to pay more for it. Getting rid of the low-end of the market, if it happens, hurts Microsoft a lot more than Apple.