It is right annoying. We did have an ArcGIS developer drop by to let us know exactly what was happening on the server versus client front. They seemed awfully schizophrenia -- they'd just sold out to COM with ArcGIS in a big way, but everything about ArcIMS (ActiveX connector dev freezing, cross-platform server installs and new Linux support, Java "MapObjects") pointed everywhere but Microsoft. They pretty obviously have two sides of the house -- and you wonder sometimes if either is really communicating with Jack (the CEO/pres/owner/whatever/rich balding white guy at the top).
A little more O[n]T, I tried to get them to open source their ArcIMS Author application, which was (iirc) written in Java. After they released their MapObjects for Java, every function Author had (display map content to show the state of an XML file you were authoring, no less) was out there. Even though they had no real industry secret -- and though I got an ESRI developer to admit the Author app was only "60% feature complete", no open sourcing.
Just to say I wouldn't read into any one annoucement's effects on the entire company too broadly. Linux on server doesn't mean they aren't selling out 100% to COM on the client. And Linux support and now Python on the client doesn't mean they're getting any friendlier to open source in any meaningful way. As others have pointed out, support isn't job one, nor is returning the favor open source software's given them.
(Fwiw, I support a soon to be unmothballed open source ActiveX ArcIMS template. Not sure if that helps or -- due to disuse -- hurts my claims to expertise here!)
Though the header files, etc, are nice if you're a VC++ whiz, any two-bit Visual Basic 6 hacker like myself has had access to the iTunes COM objects for quite some time.
Not only do you not need the SDK, aside from the sample code (strangely written in jscript of all things), the SDK is nearly worthless for VB6 hackers. All you had to do was open a new project in the VB6 IDE, select Project==References from the menus, and select iTunes 1.0 Type Library (the file is iTunes.exe no less).
Voila. Instant COM compliant objects waiting for you to hack0rz. Hit F2 and search for iTunesLib and the documentation's already there (no SDK required) as well.
If this SDK makes you aware you can hack iTunes, then great. But don't wait to download it to start hacking. Install iTunes, open VB6's IDE, and get a move on!
To stick in a horrible Wizard of Oz (but thankfully not a Zardoz reference, I suppose), you've been wearing the ruby red slippers (or whatever) the whole time. "There's no place like ~. There's no place like ~."
I've been told that all programs can be traced back to a copy & paste of Hello, World. In this limited case, I actually believe what I've been told. The first open/free code was that very same Hello, World example in the first coding manual, wherever it is now, and there are likely a handfull of possible "ultimate parents" of every application that's out there.
Really, though, when's the last time you started a piece of code to be used in production from a completely blank text file? I've even got a VIm macro that shoves in...
I'm not touting Alienware, but please don't compare apples and oranges.
I'm just saying that I can easily get my fill playing my PS2 -- and that about the only thing missing there is online fps gaming at a level I enjoy, which I easily fill by playing Team Fortress and Action Quake online. You might say that makes me not much of a gamer, but I do play a decent amount, all things considered. Why I'd need to shell out for hardware newer than my 1 GHz iMac or 2 GHz P4 Gateway laptop, I'm not real sure. I can afford to skip Doom 3 for the time being if I have to (and I bet I don't, if I put the rendering quality low enough).
So as a relatively hard-core gamer myself, I'm just not sure how Alienware creates such an audience. If I had $3k to burn, it sure as heck wouldn't be on a souped up gaming box, that's all. I'm happy we're "closing in on photorealism", but don't need to spend Alienware dollars to get there. It'll come to me soon enough at a price I can afford. Until then, the Metal Gear Solids and Madden 2005's will keep me entertained.
That said, as a technical advancement (and as a programmer myself), the dual card set-up is a pretty neat trick with the 0s and 1s! Just don't expect my credit card to vote for the advance.
The current implementation splits the screen in half, assigning rendering for each half to one of two cards using a software load balancer to try and ensure proper synchronization. (You may recall that 3dfx's SLI technology split the workload by alternating lines. This is a slightly different approach.) The motherboard is being produced for Alienware by iWill, and Alienware is currently saying that they expect users to see a ~50% performance boost over single card implementations.
50% better from an extra card is nothing to sneeze at. And that sounds reasonable from the point of view of all the extra overhead you'd be going through to coordinate getting the top and bottom halves up at the same time. It's still boggling to me that anyone would shell out so much for a new system in order to game (my PS2 does relatively well, thank you, and even my old StarMax with Voodoo 3 plays Team Fortress quite well in 2004), but as far as geeky-cool, this is awfully neat zeroes and ones.
That said, your original point is right on the money -- sorry can't mod right now. You definitely should be able to see a number of artifacts comparing the top of your screen to the bottom, which could be comical in effect, depending. (Hey, let's see what my Rave looks like up next to this X800 XT...)
That said, however, I'm sure the idea is to have two of the same, but to have the demo create Frankenstein's monster if only to show it can be done. Certainly if two different cards work, two of the same should look proverbially beautious.
Completely integrate; fraid not. Afaik, Thunderbird still uses the MPL (Mozilla Public License) which basically is a convoluted BSD license as far as my IANAL self can figure. That's what allowed Netscape to use Mozilla as its core and still close it up and sell it.
Now can Thunderbird provide a hook so that you could personally set up some module someone else writes to integrate with Exchange? There I have to think it's an easy yes. As long as Thunderbird doesn't incorporate GPL code and just provides standardized hooks, you could add a GPL module that does the trick. Alternately, someone could write an "Exchange to POP3 converter" like Hotmail Popper and other similar projects.
And certainly there's nothing keeping you from forking Thunderbird into a GPL project that I know of, but I don't think your fork, Exchange or not, would be the dominate one.
Koster responds that while "the truly obscene amount of money is in the hands of a few," the situation is not as bad as it sounds. And that, he says, is because there are tens of thousands of what he terms "try me out" Galaxies characters lying dormant that skew the distribution numbers.
"They are dirt-poor," Koster says, "and they really distort the statistics."
This is the part that gets me about all the/.ers running around with Atlas Shrugged images and quotes on their websites. In an pure market economy where value is placed on everything, there are people whose lives the market decides aren't worth supporting. In a 100% open market economy, survivial of the fittest is right back in play, and people die.
Though you might argue it's also very easy for us to ignore the dying caused by our own present system, it's a factor I haven't seen one economist mention in plain speak in their studies, anecdotal and more rigorous. The fantasy equivalent of death (a stream of unrenewed accounts, among other things) is being ignored.
I played Ultima Online for quite some time, and I have to imagine the routine of, "Hack tree, build bow, repeat *100, sell bows, buy adventuring gear, get player-killed [by another player], rinse, repeat," didn't appeal to everyone.* These people left the game -- their account were, for all practical purposes, killed. These players gave up the will to live in this fantasy world. And the money they earned during their brief lives stayed right where the market placed it -- with the powerful.
Anyhow, not to belabor the point, but I wonder if those "dirt poor" characters "lying dormant" don't represent the people a true, ideological market economy would leave in our gutters even moreso than our governed market does today.
(* -- Yes, I realize UO changed the rules to eliminate pkilling quite a bit, but the old days, phew!)
It's amazing to me that with the number of people like you out there, there are still people who wonder why programs are slow and resource hungry when written with modern object oriented languages
Not so fast. No, I absolutely understand what you're talking about, but today's coder is already in that inefficient, Moore's Law or Bust world. If you're not working on a compiler, that stuff doesn't really help you all that much.
My point is this: The trade-off today is to have hackers create easy to write, [hopefully] maintainable code, not [in your example] speedy, efficient code, and a CompSci degree doesn't efficiently prepare you for that world. I've done some machine lang coding, and it's great to start from there and understand the theory behind Form1, how to write a quick sort, and how hashtables work, but when you start earning your dough as a hacker, not a scientist, all that theory goes quickly to waste if you're not writing a compiler or the like. I doubt you're writing much assembly either, and if you are, you're in the extreme minority, and I hope your game rocks.
Another replier said... You can teach a humanities or arts individual to be an excellent programmer...
I daresay you're not really teaching these programmers with unconventional backgrounds at all -- you're reaching out to an aptitude for thinking in a way that higher education isn't really cultivating all that well right now. Many people come out of college looking to earn their bread hacking, not researching, and their CS degree is given too much weight. It's not even in the same field as the work they're being hired to do!
I made a mistake in my original post... a distinction that these threads are making clear is that CompSci is about science. That's an important distinction to make. What so much of what's discussed on/. is about is actually programming, and building atop what the scientists created and the engineers turned into OSes, etc. Now we need worker bees, like myself, with a relatively different set of skills than what a CS grad would have, to make the digital world go round cleanly -- and efficiently from a business standpoint, not an academic one.
Being a mathematician won't make the switch go off that allows you to expertly use object oriented programming. Nor will it help you create a good GUI. Nor will it help you validate date formats. You need a firm grasp on the math you learned in middle school, but the need to be a mathematician has diminished in many computer science workplaces to the point that the "need" is now a simple "added bonus".
When coding was entirely procedural and focused almost entirely on crunching numbers, well, yes, math was a big deal, but the paradigm's changed greatly now. Now aptitude in pure logic [rather than a broad math bkgd, much less pure calc] is much more important in my experience. Relational database design and object oriented programming require great understanding of set theory, not calculus. I AP'ed into sophomore calculus and had two semesters (plus an audit of DiffEQ) in college, and haven't used that stuff once since entering the workplace (on my sixth year).
When I look to interview and hire new programmers to my team, for pure intellectual skills I'm looking at good coding style, properly factored (as in refactoring) coding examples, and the ability to explain, say, why an example database schema is or isn't in good third normal form. The math I've seen in my tasks is very basic, whether the product I've helped develop was a simple web-based MIS, county-wide tax system, or financial tracker for the largest non-profits.
In fact the only time it's been useful for me to understand mathematical concepts [beyond set theory] was when I thought our resident Geographic Information Systems (GIS) experts weren't considering all the ends and outs of different map projections. Even then, what I was commenting on was well outside of my job description of a database admin.
It's good to know math, all other things equal, but in today's programming workplace, the emphasis on math in CS programs is unfounded. I'll even daresay that's why so mnay people who weren't schooled as programmers do so well -- I know about as many programmers that have impressed me with their proverbial skillz that had a degree in the humanities or no degree at all as I do those with a CS background.
Wake up & catch up, CS programs, and teach what's useful in "the real world"!
This does give me the obvious idea of writing an app that culls hotmail addresses (heck, from the spam I get from my account for starters; they're usually nice enough to CC about 15 emails that are right close to mine) and tries each of these passwords at Amazon to see what I get. That'd be the true test of the story.
While I'm posting, where the heck do "dhs3mt" & "dhs3pms" come from? What's so common about dhs3 that would make it hit the list? Or "uwontguessme" & "youwontguessme". Though I could see that being more popular, the fact that those are both there and other right popular ones aren't make me think n is right small in this "study".
In any event, thank heavens. "amazoN" wasn't on the list. Guess my login at Amazon is still safe.
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This project, I think, offers a small amount of comfort to businesses (think enterprise and small biz, too) who have invested exorbitant amounts of programmer-time and dollars on in-house, 'vertical applications'.
Though I'm admittedly intrigued by ReactOS' idea of shooting for NT 4.0, why pour resources into an already unsupported platform? Isn't the.NET platform, targetted already by the open source Mono project a better use of resources?
In the Mono case, we've even got a relatively good breaking point. There's enough C# in the ECMA standard (so even ignoring WinAPIs) for us to build a right good, copyright issue free (IANAL, etc) platform that'll support current and future work that leverages.NET. Instead of asking people to migrate code that runs and works on NT, which I'd argue from the company's point of view that there's no need to jostle, why not have them target new development towards the current [and optionally MS-free] platform Mono/Rotor/.NET CLR represents?
NT 4.0 isn't rusting; it still does what it's always done. The easiest way for a business to keep NT 4.0 apps running is to keep running NT 4.0, not to migrate to anything less than absolutely seamless, licensing fees included.
You can't make a successful business case to enough people using NT 4.0 to switch to an open reproduction to bother. You can, I'll wager, get people to target C#/.NET via a robust Mono with new development. To use what's lately become much too popular a metaphor, target the tip of the spear, not the shaft.
The question isn't, "Why bother creating a drop-in replacement for Windows?" but, rather, "Why bother creating a drop-in replacement for NT 4.0 instead of.NET?" Allow new development to easily target multiple platforms. If you haven't learned anything else from the lack of Linux game ports... "Targetting after the fact" is a bad idea.
From the CNet article: But some rivals said they expect Apple's dominance will be temporary.
"Apple is probably still riding the wave of their initial launch," said Jason Reindorp, a group manager in Microsoft's Windows digital media unit. "They have spent an inordinate amount of money to generate awareness around their closed ecosystem. (But) as people get more sophisticated in this area they are going to be getting more frustrated with a closed ecosystem. I think the market will kind of self-correct as things get more mainstream."
(Let's ignore the fact, for the moment, that CNet decided to end the article with such a poorly written presentation of Apple's "rivals" that think the "dominance [of iTunes] will be temporary" by quoting a Microsoft rep and... hrm... just that one MS rep.)
Is that some sort of joke? A Microsoft employee says that the folk at Apple, "have spent an inordinate amount of money to generate awareness around their closed ecosystem" and that "the market will kind of self-correct as things get more mainstream"?!!
No, Mr. Reindorp, the market doesn't always self-correct. Let me refer you across campus to your OS development building see when it doesn't. You, of all companies, should know the advantages of spending inordinately more than anyone else is prepared to spend to effect dominance in a market. Lucky for you OS consumers haven't reached the level of "sophistication" when it comes to operating systems that you expect from them in the digital music arena.
I'm heartened to see, at least for the time being, a market where Apple is comfortable betting the farm (the market Apple calls a "digital lifestyle" where the Mac is a "digital hub") and MS is not. I'm not sure I 100% believe what Cringely recently said, but this is one case where I hope Apple does ignore MS and keeps releasing a superior product with an inordinately high budget behind it.
And this hope isn't just b/c I like Apple and use OS X daily at home, but also because I'm a stockholder. Apple's plan as you characterize it, as every MS employee should know, is often inordinately successful.
Sheesh. People -- headless Java apps aren't slow. Java compiles the code with a "Just In Time" (JIT) compiler, so you may experience a bit of a delay the *first* time the app does any one function as the bytecode is "really compiled", but after that, there really isn't an issue. In benchmarks that remind me more of the Apple vs. Pentium Photoshop numbers than anything else, you can certainly find people who experience *faster* execution times in Java than in native code [using compiler X]. It all depends on what you're doing. But that you can even venture that Java is faster at some things now tell me it's up to speed.
What's slow about Java and where does the conception come from?
The main culprit is Swing, Sun's preferred GUI toolset, which is gosh awfully derned slow. Unfortunately GUIed applications (like Limewire) are where many people form their Java speed impressions. Here, Swing (perhaps more properly, the implementation of Swing) is relatively slow compared to native GUI code on most every platform. I've heard it said that Swing is good for debugging server-side apps, and sometimes, I regret to admit, I think that statement's more on the money than off. When you compound the problem by creating a relatively complex GUI like Limewire or Netbeans, you really see the problem.
(Luckily it looks like that might be changing. And try Eclipse, the Java IDE from IBM, and compare to Netbeans, Sun's Java IDE. Both are built in Java. Netbeans uses Swing and runs dog slow at times. Eclipse uses SWT (see above link) and flies.)
What else is slow? The *first* time you start your Virtual Machine -- again, depending on how the program's written, and particularly slow when you have to get Swing up & running -- can take a while.
But take Apple's virtual machine. The first Java app that starts can often speed up each that follows -- and restarting the same app a second time without rebooting will cut startup times dramatically as parts of the VM stay on the ready.
Anyhow, I digress. The point of it is that you can use JIT compiling to make your bytecode run quite quickly, expecially for GUIless application. Do you really think so many large companies would use Java for their web presence if Java couldn't at least move bytes around quickly? Sun's smart enough to compile Java into native code in the VM (that's its job, after all), and when you're just dealing with numbers, after the first compile from bytecode, "Java is C", in a sense.
I've been [coincidentally] giving this quite a bit of thought recently -- not so much the survey in the story, natch, but the concept of having legal to reuse code shared between work, home, and your next job.
Your best bet seems to be to start a project at home in a few hours of your spare time with something that's as close to what you do at work as possible *without actually overlapping*, and license that under LGPL (is there a better or just another license? You need something that *forces* user to check changes back in, yet doesn't require you to open source the whole smear). Slap it up on Sourceforge (or something similar).
Now go to work the next week and search Sourceforge for the library that comes the closest to what you need to get done. Hrm, whaddya know? It's [the name of your own LGPL'd library]. Certainly your employeer wouldn't mind you impressing those free hours into service for your company's project.
What's more, now you're all but required to check in your changes to the library (and have to if the work's released with the lib). Perfect! Not only that, you can happily "take" the library with improvements from job to job, or even bundle with your own code later to sell for "money-as-in-real-money". Voila. Legally laundered code.
Obviously you likely won't be able to get your entire application LGPL'd, and some companies might be totally against using open source code (don't ask permission; ask forgiveness folks). But most every coder has a few homespun tools/utilities/libraries they either reuse on the sly or rewrite with each new job. Make it legal, and feel good about releasing the code into the wild, legally, as well.
(It's that or get a very favorable IP agreement. After your first few jobs, however, a favorable IP agreement certainly seems easy to get done, in my experience, as long as you broach the issue right after the job offer and before signing on.)
Just remember that you dug your own grave on this one...;^)
First, no, 1.1.x is not slow. It's actually quite responsive now that Moore's Law has brought computers up to where they needed to be in '98 to run 1.1.x apps smoothly. Don't use 1998 benchmarks for 2004.
Swing, drag & drop, and the mouse wheel issues of yours are all GUI issues. You need to rethread your view of app as interface. Modularize, reuse, refactor! Build an engine in 1.1.x and wrap an AWT -- and then an updated Swing or SWT (for Java 2 users) -- GUI atop that.
There's not a lot, when it comes to pushing bits around (JDBC, file i/o, networking), that you can't write in 1.1 and use through 1.5. You'll miss out on some new fangled stuff (like generics) and, more importantly, the libraries that use it. But other than losing a few libs (and you'll be surprised what's still 1.1 friendly out there), the fact that every example you cited was a GUI issue suggests to me that you're not really using much from Java 2 behind the GUI that's not in 1.1.x either!
What's more -- AWT does mouse wheels! You're using native GUI widgets with AWT. The only issue is that there are so *few* AWT widgets. You're often stuck rolling your own off of a Canvas, and it's tough to get things looking just right. In any event, you should take another look.
You've also gotten the audience of my original post skewed horribly. I started by saying if you want to release a Java client app to John Q. Public (which applets were initially targetting). If you want a business application where you have the IT staff (and user savvy) to get a 1.5. jre installed, super. Absolutely go for 1.5. But if you're pitching to someone who wants to a quick download, a double-click, and have their app a-runnin', having a 1.1.x JVM installed means...
1.) If you *can* present your interface with AWT and are a good enough coder to make your engine with 1.1.x, you're likely done! Create an.exe for Windows and forget about the Java headaches. 2.) As in the last post -- If you find you have to have Java 2 for anything, you can use your same (Java) toolbox to create a 1.1.x app that'll check for a Java 2 JRE and help Granny download it. 3.) If you've created your code in a modular fashion where the engine isn't tied up in GUI code, you can simply rewrite your Swing GUI in AWT (or, better yet, your AWT GUI in Swing) and have two levels of app. Windows and Mac Classic users (the first being horribly more important than the latter) can access all of your app without having installed a JVM themselves. If they have Java 2 installed, your application can be smart enough to provide the enriched GUI.
So 1.1.x is both a great *inroad* and, if you're lucky, *the road* for releasing client-applications to the public, cross-platform and painlessly. It really is a good time to think about writing Java client apps -- renewed MS JVM support and a few vendors pre-installing an up to date jre on their consumer boxes means you'll be up and running in no time flat.
The virtual machine might finally be coming into its own.
Two points, catered to delivering Java-powered client applications to John Q. Public effortlessly (let's face it; that's what applets did):
Up until now, you could release a Java 1.1.x compatible *application* (no security sandbox) without worrying about Granny Smith even having been able to spell jre when she was downloading. That's a good thing. 1.1.x is plenty to check and see if there's a Java 2 JRE laying around, and helping Granny get it if you absolutely need it.
Which brings me to point 2... Do you really *need* Java 2, or do you just want it? Admittedly Swing is a little buggy on 1.1.4 [if you include swingall.jar], which is as far as MS's VM got before the mess started, but Oracle still ships a version of 1.1.8 to power its management tools. There's very little you can't do with 1.1.x, especially once you've got the Collections API in the mix.
I've seen emails go across the Apple Java Development mailing list saying things like, "Our boss says we *have* to have generics, so Macs and their 1.4.x JVM are right out for development." Look, these are things you've been happily *not* using for all of Java's existence, that older code still works in 1.5, yet you're moving the whole of your development over b/c you think a new, just out of beta feature is cool? "As if source code rusted."
This settlement is great news for Java on the desktop. The longer you can keep more of your code 1.1 friendly, the longer you can deploy effortlessly on Windows. That window had almost closed, and now it's back, wide open.
And from the press release, though I'm not so optimistic to believe it'll necessarily be the case, there's nothing ruling out MS's installation of a newer version of Sun's jre by default in the future. Heck, it ain't jre's or clr's that boost an OS, it's, "Developers, developers, developers, developers." Maybe MS sees the more the merrier, and would prefer things like Sun's Mad Hatter not gain any special traction. Reminds me a little of AOL dropping Mozilla (which it based the OS X AOL client on as proof of concept in the Great Game of 0110 Chicken 2003) the second after MS relicensed them the IE engine.
It's something of a pet peeve of mine (one such rant here, mainly the part starting with "What the heck?!") that so many projects *require* the latest OS without actually *needing* it. I'm cautiously suspicious this might be one.
What about Trailblazer requires 10.3? Certainly not the Java-Cocoa bridge for Lucene; that's been around a while. Nor is it AppKit; I've got AppKit (the Safari rendering engine) working with a Java app I've written pretty easily on 10.2 (which, of course, also uses the Jav-Cocoa bridge).
Seeing how all that's left is creating "click-capturing" graphics for display on the neat history page, and I'm curious what shortcut they took that cut out every OS X user that didn't buy their Mac recently or shell out a Ben Franklin to upgrade.
Other than that gripe (aka, "I can't use it, and can't think of a good reason why they've made it so."), it looks great. Wish I'd thought of that!!
Look, sometimes even bad publicity is good publicity. Anything from Ebert is good for a movie; just to hear him lambast something will create ticket sales. The worse the lambasting the better, after a certain point, I have to imagine.
More to the point, Ebert's earned the financial independance to be able to make these statements. You don't get to come into the business cold issuing the same reviews that he does -- or rather you do, but possibly at your own professional peril.
I recently heard (last month or so) something on NPR about a critic who wasn't getting invited to screenings because he wouldn't give fluffy, positive interviews. He likened it to a trade-off (my paraphrase) where you could be counted on to give the required sound-bite/quote needed to slap on the advert in exchange to the early access you needed to write the reviews that you need to, well, heck, feed yourself as a reviewer. I believe the fellow was from NYC.
Grade inflation isn't just in the schools. People need good grades to make the quick buck, which is what corporations are scrambling for, on the whole, today. Movie houses indirectly pay reviewers to say that [positive, fluffy] crap you see blazened across movie promos in your local paper ("American Wedding is as funny as Cats! No, wait..."). People like Ebert are high enough on the totem pole that they have another set of rules.
You should ask your local paper's movie reviewer for a more realistic picture. It'd also be interesting to know what the reviewing business was like when Ebert was starting out, what connections he had, and what his reviews looked like. It could be a new era in grade inflation across the board. Heck, recently an entire section of freshman English at my alma mater got A's. Many other classes, freshman comp and above, had 70-80% A's & B's. That's not a bell curve, that's a lovefest.
Btw, see the new Trump show for a great example of a guy confident enough to have risen above the kissarse stage of business. I realize the show's not reality, but I feel when he's talking over his selection, he's being Trump, not Trump-for-TV. What a shame is that grade inflation works to get you to a certain level (let's call it "Politics and the Peter Principle"), and above that all the things you really wish were important finally take hold.
I believe another reply to this post missed the issue here.
Let's say I'm going to have 100 mini's made a month for 12 months and I have 1200 people willing to pay $150 for them. I could sell 100 a month at $150 for 12 months and rake in $180,000. Not bad.
Let's say, though, that 300 of those people are willing to pay *more* than $150 -- say $250. If I price the mini's at $250 for three months to fit that need, I'll make ($250 * 300) + ($150 * 900) = $210,000! (And that's not including the extra interest from having that higher revenue up front...;^D)
Of course it's more complicated than that. Some of those 900 are going to be pissed that they can't get the mini for $150 the first three months, and say 100 will go buy Rios. But the point is that Apple is awfully savvy on prices (*), and though they're turning a few people away now, overall it's better for the company. The fact that they can't supply enough for the demand is good in that people want this product (and Apple stock went up a buck or so yesterday, I *think*; it's near the highest it's been in quite a while), but bad in that you've lost some revenue by underestimating demand -- but good that you've created free media exposure by perhaps planning not to have enough... Let the market-watchers conjecture away.
(*As anyone who's tried to pick a mid-line Mac can tell you. "I think I'll buy an eMac with Superdrive. No, wait, for $XXX I can get the iMac with a larger HD, flat screen... but if I'm going to do that I can get a G4 Powerbook for $XXX..." Two days later you've got a dual G5 staring at you out of its cardboard box.)
Boy, if this isn't a case of, "I know what I know," I'm not sure what is. But then I just said that.;^)
Folks, it's all zeroes and ones. All we're really talking about here is running & interacting with programs from standard input and reading from standard output. I imagine you could gentoo together a nice, bare version of Linux that had as few (or many, as your half-filled glass may appear to you today) applications available as there are by default in Win2k.
Personally I quite enjoy cmd.exe and use it as much as I do the Terminal (or iTerm or X11 with xterm (with an "&" no less)) in OS X. You can get vim running from cmd.exe very easily with syntax highlighting and full integration with the Windows clipboard.
To sum quickly, I can... change active directories, view directory contents, copy, delete, & move files, edit text, create scripts, call any app I want, interact with anything that has a standard in/out interface, print, schedule repeated/timed tasks, reboot other machines on your network, find & replace strings in files, and install any app I dang well please from either cmd.exe or bash or tcsh or whatever you prefer.
And hey, in any event, it's a far cry better than the command line in Mac OS 9-. (Which, for those who didn't know, you could get in the Mac Programmers' Workshop (MPW), but sure wasn't installed by default.)
Seriously, what's Linux got that MS wants so bad that they can't steal from BSD legally, like Apple did? Rotor's already on FreeBSD, and I'm not sure what MS would want to steal from Linux other than that basic foundation for their CLI, other than brand marketability (which, I suppose, could be enough).
MS doesn't like competition, and that's why they'd help out SCO and have this fellow essentially threaten Red Hat out of business. They don't have to want to have Linux to want to see it gone.
From a practical perspective, cost is an obvious differentiator, as are access to source and the ability to run outside the Intel processor environment. But it's possible to argue that those differences are neither real nor important.... To get beyond superficialities like these...
Oh for heaven's sake. Would nearly so many small to mid-sized companies running "eShops" have considered Linux if it weren't for the phat licensing deal? Ask Grandma Tilly, heck ask 80% of so-called "SQL Server Admins" out there -- Windows is much easier to learn if your skillset == GUI familiarity. Price is HUGE.
Then ask the governments (start with China) how important open source is. Again, cost of ownership is awfully high to move from any OS to any other. There must be something awfully impressive making whole countries' governments swap from one to another, and the security and freedom to explore what you're running is open source's big "in".
Let's follow that up with some anecdotal evidence to prove whatever I'm feeling today...
"like a 1991 copy of Vsifax for SunOS 4.4 -- works perfectly under Solaris 2.9, while Windows 2003/XP server now contains both a Posix-compliant interface set and four generations of the Win32 interface"
Come on. I'm no *NIX expert and usually let Fink do most of my compiling, but I do know that compiling against the wrong version of foolib can fook builds like nobody's business. I also know that...
VB 3 apps still run (heck, until recently the code would compile in VB 6) without much issue, and though I was upset when I tried Mosaic 2.1 on Windows XP recently, this evidence hardly shows that Windows is a kludge and Linux isn't.
I'm not weighing in that he's wrong; I'm saying he hasn't come close to proving his point with his examples. A better way to show the difference would be to, say, throw a highly customized version of Gentoo doing something very specific better than the best you could do along those lines in Windows. But why can we do this in Linux? Because it's *open*, daggummit.
such [major OS] changes[/advancements] historically have been accompanied by the addition of new layers of kludged code intended to maintain some semblance of backward compatibility with previous kludges.
I like where he's trying to take us here -- certainly a hack for SimCity today makes you hack for it again in 98, and then in 2k, etc, and could end up becoming a lot more like the Princess and the Pea than sand in an oyster. And I think a number of Window's security issues come from deadwood left in what's been described as an OS originally designed to provider home users with a workable, but not networkable, computer.
But what he misses is that its the lineage that's causing these issues, not commercialism per se. Linux comes from a server mentality. Security is key. Windows comes from a mentality that perpared itself for Grandma Tilly (and the SQL Server Admins (which I've been doing for 6 years, before you flame)) where user interfaces are nearly king. This is why Windows seems kludged -- because it's trying to be all things to all people. Linux is too, *now*, and you've seen all sorts of, "throw out X11 and use Y" articles around here.
Anyhow, you get the point. The fellow goes so low-level while keeping a very bird's eye view of what's going on that he's basically saying nothing. Hey, it's all 0's and 1's. You can grab any of your favorite anecdotes and point to places where one wins over the other -- it's nearly as bad as the PowerPC vs. x86 MHz wars Mac/Windows trolls fought nearly daily on comp.sys.mac.advocacy for so long. Sure, if you r
The most interesting answer to me that I got from Glenda was with respect to crossplatform technologies. I'd recalled that she'd used OpenAL a number of times. And of course Apple created a decent OpenGL implementation thanks in part to John Carmack's influence. The DirectX to OpenXL porting route is right common nowadays. Wouldn't it be great if it were easier for programmers to *start* with these xplat techs and make ports trivial processes, like Quake 3 was?
But Glenda didn't put much stock in xplat techs becoming easier to use than M$ sellout techs, nor did she see Apple throwing more weight behind their use a solution.
But in true "forest for the trees" fashion, she pointed out the one potential savior for people gaming on "second tier" platforms, let us say, that I'd completely missed.
ruffin: Who else could run with the ball to get mature, cross platform game programming APIs written?
GA: Microsoft, but I don't see why they would want to.
It's sad that the M$ monopoly in the desktop OS market is so, "That's just the way it is," that I would have completely overlooked the answer. That's great insight -- though awfully obvious -- and the perfect "hit-home" reason for us gamers to be pretty angry with the folks in Redmond the way AOL/Netscape, Apple, Sun, and friends are.
I'm hoping to get a editorial based on the interview up soon, but at the same time to keep out the bile and trying to stay relatively objective and fair. That's proving tough.
And at the same time, the porting system is awfully broken. As games get larger and larger, who knows, perhaps taking multiple DVDs instead of multiple CDs (or obscenely long download times via the net), porting all that code isn't going to get any easier.
All the editor is really doing is allowing you to change a few bytes where it's storing its playfield information. If you dissemble it and look around byte marker LF715, you'll see what I'm talking about. Swap out some $FFs for $00s, recompile, and voila.
Hey, you Linux guys didn't really want a GUI, did you?!!
Apple's online store is charging $2399 for refurbed dual G5s, and the student store's price for a new dual G5 is $2699, $100 less than the MacMall refurbs from Tech. You can even take $26 more off for getting rid of the internal mode, which the supercomputer refurbs don't have either.
Even if you add the extra 512 megs of RAM from Apple's site (where prices aren't the best), these Va Tech refurbs are only $100 less than what a student would spend on the same box new. Not to mention these 2 GHz duallies are rated as "Buy only if you need it - Approaching the end of a cycle" on the Macrumors buyers' guide page.
So not a deal at all if you're a student (though I have to think students at Va Tech could get the inside track on the boxes -- anyone know?) and not a great price for a refurb if you're Joe Schmoe. And not a box with great longevity, relatively speaking, either, if Macrumors has the lifecycle pegged.
Wait for a processor speed bump unless you're dying to own a little bit of celebrity.
Slashdot Mirror
It is right annoying. We did have an ArcGIS developer drop by to let us know exactly what was happening on the server versus client front. They seemed awfully schizophrenia -- they'd just sold out to COM with ArcGIS in a big way, but everything about ArcIMS (ActiveX connector dev freezing, cross-platform server installs and new Linux support, Java "MapObjects") pointed everywhere but Microsoft. They pretty obviously have two sides of the house -- and you wonder sometimes if either is really communicating with Jack (the CEO/pres/owner/whatever/rich balding white guy at the top).
A little more O[n]T, I tried to get them to open source their ArcIMS Author application, which was (iirc) written in Java. After they released their MapObjects for Java, every function Author had (display map content to show the state of an XML file you were authoring, no less) was out there. Even though they had no real industry secret -- and though I got an ESRI developer to admit the Author app was only "60% feature complete", no open sourcing.
Just to say I wouldn't read into any one annoucement's effects on the entire company too broadly. Linux on server doesn't mean they aren't selling out 100% to COM on the client. And Linux support and now Python on the client doesn't mean they're getting any friendlier to open source in any meaningful way. As others have pointed out, support isn't job one, nor is returning the favor open source software's given them.
(Fwiw, I support a soon to be unmothballed open source ActiveX ArcIMS template. Not sure if that helps or -- due to disuse -- hurts my claims to expertise here!)
Though the header files, etc, are nice if you're a VC++ whiz, any two-bit Visual Basic 6 hacker like myself has had access to the iTunes COM objects for quite some time.
Not only do you not need the SDK, aside from the sample code (strangely written in jscript of all things), the SDK is nearly worthless for VB6 hackers. All you had to do was open a new project in the VB6 IDE, select Project==References from the menus, and select iTunes 1.0 Type Library (the file is iTunes.exe no less).
Voila. Instant COM compliant objects waiting for you to hack0rz. Hit F2 and search for iTunesLib and the documentation's already there (no SDK required) as well.
If this SDK makes you aware you can hack iTunes, then great. But don't wait to download it to start hacking. Install iTunes, open VB6's IDE, and get a move on!
To stick in a horrible Wizard of Oz (but thankfully not a Zardoz reference, I suppose), you've been wearing the ruby red slippers (or whatever) the whole time. "There's no place like ~. There's no place like ~."
I've been told that all programs can be traced back to a copy & paste of Hello, World. In this limited case, I actually believe what I've been told. The first open/free code was that very same Hello, World example in the first coding manual, wherever it is now, and there are likely a handfull of possible "ultimate parents" of every application that's out there.
.. whenever I try to edit a Java file that doesn't exists. My ADO.NET code was likely originally stolen from the MSDN help files (will likely only work if you've got the .NET SDK installed). My Java networking code likely started somewhere in Mr. Harold's Java IO book from O'Reilly. My Swing code came, in large part I imagine, from The Java Tutorial.
Really, though, when's the last time you started a piece of code to be used in production from a completely blank text file? I've even got a VIm macro that shoves in...
public class fileName
{
}
Are any of these sources the "father" of my crappy shareware app, much less my "professional code"? Of course not. Nor would they want to be!
I'm not touting Alienware, but please don't compare apples and oranges.
I'm just saying that I can easily get my fill playing my PS2 -- and that about the only thing missing there is online fps gaming at a level I enjoy, which I easily fill by playing Team Fortress and Action Quake online. You might say that makes me not much of a gamer, but I do play a decent amount, all things considered. Why I'd need to shell out for hardware newer than my 1 GHz iMac or 2 GHz P4 Gateway laptop, I'm not real sure. I can afford to skip Doom 3 for the time being if I have to (and I bet I don't, if I put the rendering quality low enough).
So as a relatively hard-core gamer myself, I'm just not sure how Alienware creates such an audience. If I had $3k to burn, it sure as heck wouldn't be on a souped up gaming box, that's all. I'm happy we're "closing in on photorealism", but don't need to spend Alienware dollars to get there. It'll come to me soon enough at a price I can afford. Until then, the Metal Gear Solids and Madden 2005's will keep me entertained.
That said, as a technical advancement (and as a programmer myself), the dual card set-up is a pretty neat trick with the 0s and 1s! Just don't expect my credit card to vote for the advance.
From the article:
The current implementation splits the screen in half, assigning rendering for each half to one of two cards using a software load balancer to try and ensure proper synchronization. (You may recall that 3dfx's SLI technology split the workload by alternating lines. This is a slightly different approach.) The motherboard is being produced for Alienware by iWill, and Alienware is currently saying that they expect users to see a ~50% performance boost over single card implementations.
50% better from an extra card is nothing to sneeze at. And that sounds reasonable from the point of view of all the extra overhead you'd be going through to coordinate getting the top and bottom halves up at the same time. It's still boggling to me that anyone would shell out so much for a new system in order to game (my PS2 does relatively well, thank you, and even my old StarMax with Voodoo 3 plays Team Fortress quite well in 2004), but as far as geeky-cool, this is awfully neat zeroes and ones.
That said, your original point is right on the money -- sorry can't mod right now. You definitely should be able to see a number of artifacts comparing the top of your screen to the bottom, which could be comical in effect, depending. (Hey, let's see what my Rave looks like up next to this X800 XT...)
That said, however, I'm sure the idea is to have two of the same, but to have the demo create Frankenstein's monster if only to show it can be done. Certainly if two different cards work, two of the same should look proverbially beautious.
Completely integrate; fraid not. Afaik, Thunderbird still uses the MPL (Mozilla Public License) which basically is a convoluted BSD license as far as my IANAL self can figure. That's what allowed Netscape to use Mozilla as its core and still close it up and sell it.
Now can Thunderbird provide a hook so that you could personally set up some module someone else writes to integrate with Exchange? There I have to think it's an easy yes. As long as Thunderbird doesn't incorporate GPL code and just provides standardized hooks, you could add a GPL module that does the trick. Alternately, someone could write an "Exchange to POP3 converter" like Hotmail Popper and other similar projects.
And certainly there's nothing keeping you from forking Thunderbird into a GPL project that I know of, but I don't think your fork, Exchange or not, would be the dominate one.
Koster responds that while "the truly obscene amount of money is in the hands of a few," the situation is not as bad as it sounds. And that, he says, is because there are tens of thousands of what he terms "try me out" Galaxies characters lying dormant that skew the distribution numbers.
/.ers running around with Atlas Shrugged images and quotes on their websites. In an pure market economy where value is placed on everything, there are people whose lives the market decides aren't worth supporting. In a 100% open market economy, survivial of the fittest is right back in play, and people die.
"They are dirt-poor," Koster says, "and they really distort the statistics."
This is the part that gets me about all the
Though you might argue it's also very easy for us to ignore the dying caused by our own present system, it's a factor I haven't seen one economist mention in plain speak in their studies, anecdotal and more rigorous. The fantasy equivalent of death (a stream of unrenewed accounts, among other things) is being ignored.
I played Ultima Online for quite some time, and I have to imagine the routine of, "Hack tree, build bow, repeat *100, sell bows, buy adventuring gear, get player-killed [by another player], rinse, repeat," didn't appeal to everyone.* These people left the game -- their account were, for all practical purposes, killed. These players gave up the will to live in this fantasy world. And the money they earned during their brief lives stayed right where the market placed it -- with the powerful.
Anyhow, not to belabor the point, but I wonder if those "dirt poor" characters "lying dormant" don't represent the people a true, ideological market economy would leave in our gutters even moreso than our governed market does today.
(* -- Yes, I realize UO changed the rules to eliminate pkilling quite a bit, but the old days, phew!)
It's amazing to me that with the number of people like you out there, there are still people who wonder why programs are slow and resource hungry when written with modern object oriented languages
/. is about is actually programming, and building atop what the scientists created and the engineers turned into OSes, etc. Now we need worker bees, like myself, with a relatively different set of skills than what a CS grad would have, to make the digital world go round cleanly -- and efficiently from a business standpoint, not an academic one.
Not so fast. No, I absolutely understand what you're talking about, but today's coder is already in that inefficient, Moore's Law or Bust world. If you're not working on a compiler, that stuff doesn't really help you all that much.
My point is this: The trade-off today is to have hackers create easy to write, [hopefully] maintainable code, not [in your example] speedy, efficient code, and a CompSci degree doesn't efficiently prepare you for that world. I've done some machine lang coding, and it's great to start from there and understand the theory behind Form1, how to write a quick sort, and how hashtables work, but when you start earning your dough as a hacker, not a scientist, all that theory goes quickly to waste if you're not writing a compiler or the like. I doubt you're writing much assembly either, and if you are, you're in the extreme minority, and I hope your game rocks.
Another replier said...
You can teach a humanities or arts individual to be an excellent programmer...
I daresay you're not really teaching these programmers with unconventional backgrounds at all -- you're reaching out to an aptitude for thinking in a way that higher education isn't really cultivating all that well right now. Many people come out of college looking to earn their bread hacking, not researching, and their CS degree is given too much weight. It's not even in the same field as the work they're being hired to do!
I made a mistake in my original post... a distinction that these threads are making clear is that CompSci is about science. That's an important distinction to make. What so much of what's discussed on
Being a mathematician won't make the switch go off that allows you to expertly use object oriented programming. Nor will it help you create a good GUI. Nor will it help you validate date formats. You need a firm grasp on the math you learned in middle school, but the need to be a mathematician has diminished in many computer science workplaces to the point that the "need" is now a simple "added bonus".
When coding was entirely procedural and focused almost entirely on crunching numbers, well, yes, math was a big deal, but the paradigm's changed greatly now. Now aptitude in pure logic [rather than a broad math bkgd, much less pure calc] is much more important in my experience. Relational database design and object oriented programming require great understanding of set theory, not calculus. I AP'ed into sophomore calculus and had two semesters (plus an audit of DiffEQ) in college, and haven't used that stuff once since entering the workplace (on my sixth year).
When I look to interview and hire new programmers to my team, for pure intellectual skills I'm looking at good coding style, properly factored (as in refactoring) coding examples, and the ability to explain, say, why an example database schema is or isn't in good third normal form. The math I've seen in my tasks is very basic, whether the product I've helped develop was a simple web-based MIS, county-wide tax system, or financial tracker for the largest non-profits.
In fact the only time it's been useful for me to understand mathematical concepts [beyond set theory] was when I thought our resident Geographic Information Systems (GIS) experts weren't considering all the ends and outs of different map projections. Even then, what I was commenting on was well outside of my job description of a database admin.
It's good to know math, all other things equal, but in today's programming workplace, the emphasis on math in CS programs is unfounded. I'll even daresay that's why so mnay people who weren't schooled as programmers do so well -- I know about as many programmers that have impressed me with their proverbial skillz that had a degree in the humanities or no degree at all as I do those with a CS background.
Wake up & catch up, CS programs, and teach what's useful in "the real world"!
This does give me the obvious idea of writing an app that culls hotmail addresses (heck, from the spam I get from my account for starters; they're usually nice enough to CC about 15 emails that are right close to mine) and tries each of these passwords at Amazon to see what I get. That'd be the true test of the story.
While I'm posting, where the heck do "dhs3mt" & "dhs3pms" come from? What's so common about dhs3 that would make it hit the list? Or "uwontguessme" & "youwontguessme". Though I could see that being more popular, the fact that those are both there and other right popular ones aren't make me think n is right small in this "study".
In any event, thank heavens. "amazoN" wasn't on the list. Guess my login at Amazon is still safe.
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(doh!)
This project, I think, offers a small amount of comfort to businesses (think enterprise and small biz, too) who have invested exorbitant amounts of programmer-time and dollars on in-house, 'vertical applications'.
.NET platform, targetted already by the open source Mono project a better use of resources?
.NET. Instead of asking people to migrate code that runs and works on NT, which I'd argue from the company's point of view that there's no need to jostle, why not have them target new development towards the current [and optionally MS-free] platform Mono/Rotor/.NET CLR represents?
.NET?" Allow new development to easily target multiple platforms. If you haven't learned anything else from the lack of Linux game ports... "Targetting after the fact" is a bad idea.
Though I'm admittedly intrigued by ReactOS' idea of shooting for NT 4.0, why pour resources into an already unsupported platform? Isn't the
In the Mono case, we've even got a relatively good breaking point. There's enough C# in the ECMA standard (so even ignoring WinAPIs) for us to build a right good, copyright issue free (IANAL, etc) platform that'll support current and future work that leverages
NT 4.0 isn't rusting; it still does what it's always done. The easiest way for a business to keep NT 4.0 apps running is to keep running NT 4.0, not to migrate to anything less than absolutely seamless, licensing fees included.
You can't make a successful business case to enough people using NT 4.0 to switch to an open reproduction to bother. You can, I'll wager, get people to target C#/.NET via a robust Mono with new development. To use what's lately become much too popular a metaphor, target the tip of the spear, not the shaft.
The question isn't, "Why bother creating a drop-in replacement for Windows?" but, rather, "Why bother creating a drop-in replacement for NT 4.0 instead of
(boy, sorry for the liberal use of bold there)
From the CNet article:
But some rivals said they expect Apple's dominance will be temporary.
"Apple is probably still riding the wave of their initial launch," said Jason Reindorp, a group manager in Microsoft's Windows digital media unit. "They have spent an inordinate amount of money to generate awareness around their closed ecosystem. (But) as people get more sophisticated in this area they are going to be getting more frustrated with a closed ecosystem. I think the market will kind of self-correct as things get more mainstream."
(Let's ignore the fact, for the moment, that CNet decided to end the article with such a poorly written presentation of Apple's "rivals" that think the "dominance [of iTunes] will be temporary" by quoting a Microsoft rep and... hrm... just that one MS rep.)
Is that some sort of joke? A Microsoft employee says that the folk at Apple, "have spent an inordinate amount of money to generate awareness around their closed ecosystem" and that "the market will kind of self-correct as things get more mainstream"?!!
No, Mr. Reindorp, the market doesn't always self-correct. Let me refer you across campus to your OS development building see when it doesn't. You, of all companies, should know the advantages of spending inordinately more than anyone else is prepared to spend to effect dominance in a market. Lucky for you OS consumers haven't reached the level of "sophistication" when it comes to operating systems that you expect from them in the digital music arena.
I'm heartened to see, at least for the time being, a market where Apple is comfortable betting the farm (the market Apple calls a "digital lifestyle" where the Mac is a "digital hub") and MS is not. I'm not sure I 100% believe what Cringely recently said, but this is one case where I hope Apple does ignore MS and keeps releasing a superior product with an inordinately high budget behind it.
And this hope isn't just b/c I like Apple and use OS X daily at home, but also because I'm a stockholder. Apple's plan as you characterize it, as every MS employee should know, is often inordinately successful.
Sheesh. People -- headless Java apps aren't slow. Java compiles the code with a "Just In Time" (JIT) compiler, so you may experience a bit of a delay the *first* time the app does any one function as the bytecode is "really compiled", but after that, there really isn't an issue. In benchmarks that remind me more of the Apple vs. Pentium Photoshop numbers than anything else, you can certainly find people who experience *faster* execution times in Java than in native code [using compiler X]. It all depends on what you're doing. But that you can even venture that Java is faster at some things now tell me it's up to speed.
What's slow about Java and where does the conception come from?
The main culprit is Swing, Sun's preferred GUI toolset, which is gosh awfully derned slow. Unfortunately GUIed applications (like Limewire) are where many people form their Java speed impressions. Here, Swing (perhaps more properly, the implementation of Swing) is relatively slow compared to native GUI code on most every platform. I've heard it said that Swing is good for debugging server-side apps, and sometimes, I regret to admit, I think that statement's more on the money than off. When you compound the problem by creating a relatively complex GUI like Limewire or Netbeans, you really see the problem.
(Luckily it looks like that might be changing. And try Eclipse, the Java IDE from IBM, and compare to Netbeans, Sun's Java IDE. Both are built in Java. Netbeans uses Swing and runs dog slow at times. Eclipse uses SWT (see above link) and flies.)
What else is slow? The *first* time you start your Virtual Machine -- again, depending on how the program's written, and particularly slow when you have to get Swing up & running -- can take a while.
But take Apple's virtual machine. The first Java app that starts can often speed up each that follows -- and restarting the same app a second time without rebooting will cut startup times dramatically as parts of the VM stay on the ready.
Anyhow, I digress. The point of it is that you can use JIT compiling to make your bytecode run quite quickly, expecially for GUIless application. Do you really think so many large companies would use Java for their web presence if Java couldn't at least move bytes around quickly? Sun's smart enough to compile Java into native code in the VM (that's its job, after all), and when you're just dealing with numbers, after the first compile from bytecode, "Java is C", in a sense.
I've been [coincidentally] giving this quite a bit of thought recently -- not so much the survey in the story, natch, but the concept of having legal to reuse code shared between work, home, and your next job.
Your best bet seems to be to start a project at home in a few hours of your spare time with something that's as close to what you do at work as possible *without actually overlapping*, and license that under LGPL (is there a better or just another license? You need something that *forces* user to check changes back in, yet doesn't require you to open source the whole smear). Slap it up on Sourceforge (or something similar).
Now go to work the next week and search Sourceforge for the library that comes the closest to what you need to get done. Hrm, whaddya know? It's [the name of your own LGPL'd library]. Certainly your employeer wouldn't mind you impressing those free hours into service for your company's project.
What's more, now you're all but required to check in your changes to the library (and have to if the work's released with the lib). Perfect! Not only that, you can happily "take" the library with improvements from job to job, or even bundle with your own code later to sell for "money-as-in-real-money". Voila. Legally laundered code.
Obviously you likely won't be able to get your entire application LGPL'd, and some companies might be totally against using open source code (don't ask permission; ask forgiveness folks). But most every coder has a few homespun tools/utilities/libraries they either reuse on the sly or rewrite with each new job. Make it legal, and feel good about releasing the code into the wild, legally, as well.
(It's that or get a very favorable IP agreement. After your first few jobs, however, a favorable IP agreement certainly seems easy to get done, in my experience, as long as you broach the issue right after the job offer and before signing on.)
Just remember that you dug your own grave on this one... ;^)
.exe for Windows and forget about the Java headaches.
First, no, 1.1.x is not slow. It's actually quite responsive now that Moore's Law has brought computers up to where they needed to be in '98 to run 1.1.x apps smoothly. Don't use 1998 benchmarks for 2004.
Swing, drag & drop, and the mouse wheel issues of yours are all GUI issues. You need to rethread your view of app as interface. Modularize, reuse, refactor! Build an engine in 1.1.x and wrap an AWT -- and then an updated Swing or SWT (for Java 2 users) -- GUI atop that.
There's not a lot, when it comes to pushing bits around (JDBC, file i/o, networking), that you can't write in 1.1 and use through 1.5. You'll miss out on some new fangled stuff (like generics) and, more importantly, the libraries that use it. But other than losing a few libs (and you'll be surprised what's still 1.1 friendly out there), the fact that every example you cited was a GUI issue suggests to me that you're not really using much from Java 2 behind the GUI that's not in 1.1.x either!
What's more -- AWT does mouse wheels! You're using native GUI widgets with AWT. The only issue is that there are so *few* AWT widgets. You're often stuck rolling your own off of a Canvas, and it's tough to get things looking just right. In any event, you should take another look.
You've also gotten the audience of my original post skewed horribly. I started by saying if you want to release a Java client app to John Q. Public (which applets were initially targetting). If you want a business application where you have the IT staff (and user savvy) to get a 1.5. jre installed, super. Absolutely go for 1.5. But if you're pitching to someone who wants to a quick download, a double-click, and have their app a-runnin', having a 1.1.x JVM installed means...
1.) If you *can* present your interface with AWT and are a good enough coder to make your engine with 1.1.x, you're likely done! Create an
2.) As in the last post -- If you find you have to have Java 2 for anything, you can use your same (Java) toolbox to create a 1.1.x app that'll check for a Java 2 JRE and help Granny download it.
3.) If you've created your code in a modular fashion where the engine isn't tied up in GUI code, you can simply rewrite your Swing GUI in AWT (or, better yet, your AWT GUI in Swing) and have two levels of app. Windows and Mac Classic users (the first being horribly more important than the latter) can access all of your app without having installed a JVM themselves. If they have Java 2 installed, your application can be smart enough to provide the enriched GUI.
So 1.1.x is both a great *inroad* and, if you're lucky, *the road* for releasing client-applications to the public, cross-platform and painlessly. It really is a good time to think about writing Java client apps -- renewed MS JVM support and a few vendors pre-installing an up to date jre on their consumer boxes means you'll be up and running in no time flat.
The virtual machine might finally be coming into its own.
Two points, catered to delivering Java-powered client applications to John Q. Public effortlessly (let's face it; that's what applets did):
Up until now, you could release a Java 1.1.x compatible *application* (no security sandbox) without worrying about Granny Smith even having been able to spell jre when she was downloading. That's a good thing. 1.1.x is plenty to check and see if there's a Java 2 JRE laying around, and helping Granny get it if you absolutely need it.
Which brings me to point 2... Do you really *need* Java 2, or do you just want it? Admittedly Swing is a little buggy on 1.1.4 [if you include swingall.jar], which is as far as MS's VM got before the mess started, but Oracle still ships a version of 1.1.8 to power its management tools. There's very little you can't do with 1.1.x, especially once you've got the Collections API in the mix.
I've seen emails go across the Apple Java Development mailing list saying things like, "Our boss says we *have* to have generics, so Macs and their 1.4.x JVM are right out for development." Look, these are things you've been happily *not* using for all of Java's existence, that older code still works in 1.5, yet you're moving the whole of your development over b/c you think a new, just out of beta feature is cool? "As if source code rusted."
This settlement is great news for Java on the desktop. The longer you can keep more of your code 1.1 friendly, the longer you can deploy effortlessly on Windows. That window had almost closed, and now it's back, wide open.
And from the press release, though I'm not so optimistic to believe it'll necessarily be the case, there's nothing ruling out MS's installation of a newer version of Sun's jre by default in the future. Heck, it ain't jre's or clr's that boost an OS, it's, "Developers, developers, developers, developers." Maybe MS sees the more the merrier, and would prefer things like Sun's Mad Hatter not gain any special traction. Reminds me a little of AOL dropping Mozilla (which it based the OS X AOL client on as proof of concept in the Great Game of 0110 Chicken 2003) the second after MS relicensed them the IE engine.
It's something of a pet peeve of mine (one such rant here, mainly the part starting with "What the heck?!") that so many projects *require* the latest OS without actually *needing* it. I'm cautiously suspicious this might be one.
What about Trailblazer requires 10.3? Certainly not the Java-Cocoa bridge for Lucene; that's been around a while. Nor is it AppKit; I've got AppKit (the Safari rendering engine) working with a Java app I've written pretty easily on 10.2 (which, of course, also uses the Jav-Cocoa bridge).
Seeing how all that's left is creating "click-capturing" graphics for display on the neat history page, and I'm curious what shortcut they took that cut out every OS X user that didn't buy their Mac recently or shell out a Ben Franklin to upgrade.
Other than that gripe (aka, "I can't use it, and can't think of a good reason why they've made it so."), it looks great. Wish I'd thought of that!!
Look, sometimes even bad publicity is good publicity. Anything from Ebert is good for a movie; just to hear him lambast something will create ticket sales. The worse the lambasting the better, after a certain point, I have to imagine.
More to the point, Ebert's earned the financial independance to be able to make these statements. You don't get to come into the business cold issuing the same reviews that he does -- or rather you do, but possibly at your own professional peril.
I recently heard (last month or so) something on NPR about a critic who wasn't getting invited to screenings because he wouldn't give fluffy, positive interviews. He likened it to a trade-off (my paraphrase) where you could be counted on to give the required sound-bite/quote needed to slap on the advert in exchange to the early access you needed to write the reviews that you need to, well, heck, feed yourself as a reviewer. I believe the fellow was from NYC.
Grade inflation isn't just in the schools. People need good grades to make the quick buck, which is what corporations are scrambling for, on the whole, today. Movie houses indirectly pay reviewers to say that [positive, fluffy] crap you see blazened across movie promos in your local paper ("American Wedding is as funny as Cats! No, wait..."). People like Ebert are high enough on the totem pole that they have another set of rules.
You should ask your local paper's movie reviewer for a more realistic picture. It'd also be interesting to know what the reviewing business was like when Ebert was starting out, what connections he had, and what his reviews looked like. It could be a new era in grade inflation across the board. Heck, recently an entire section of freshman English at my alma mater got A's. Many other classes, freshman comp and above, had 70-80% A's & B's. That's not a bell curve, that's a lovefest.
Btw, see the new Trump show for a great example of a guy confident enough to have risen above the kissarse stage of business. I realize the show's not reality, but I feel when he's talking over his selection, he's being Trump, not Trump-for-TV. What a shame is that grade inflation works to get you to a certain level (let's call it "Politics and the Peter Principle"), and above that all the things you really wish were important finally take hold.
I believe another reply to this post missed the issue here.
;^D)
Let's say I'm going to have 100 mini's made a month for 12 months and I have 1200 people willing to pay $150 for them. I could sell 100 a month at $150 for 12 months and rake in $180,000. Not bad.
Let's say, though, that 300 of those people are willing to pay *more* than $150 -- say $250. If I price the mini's at $250 for three months to fit that need, I'll make ($250 * 300) + ($150 * 900) = $210,000! (And that's not including the extra interest from having that higher revenue up front...
Of course it's more complicated than that. Some of those 900 are going to be pissed that they can't get the mini for $150 the first three months, and say 100 will go buy Rios. But the point is that Apple is awfully savvy on prices (*), and though they're turning a few people away now, overall it's better for the company. The fact that they can't supply enough for the demand is good in that people want this product (and Apple stock went up a buck or so yesterday, I *think*; it's near the highest it's been in quite a while), but bad in that you've lost some revenue by underestimating demand -- but good that you've created free media exposure by perhaps planning not to have enough... Let the market-watchers conjecture away.
(*As anyone who's tried to pick a mid-line Mac can tell you. "I think I'll buy an eMac with Superdrive. No, wait, for $XXX I can get the iMac with a larger HD, flat screen... but if I'm going to do that I can get a G4 Powerbook for $XXX..." Two days later you've got a dual G5 staring at you out of its cardboard box.)
Boy, if this isn't a case of, "I know what I know," I'm not sure what is. But then I just said that. ;^)
Folks, it's all zeroes and ones. All we're really talking about here is running & interacting with programs from standard input and reading from standard output. I imagine you could gentoo together a nice, bare version of Linux that had as few (or many, as your half-filled glass may appear to you today) applications available as there are by default in Win2k.
Personally I quite enjoy cmd.exe and use it as much as I do the Terminal (or iTerm or X11 with xterm (with an "&" no less)) in OS X. You can get vim running from cmd.exe very easily with syntax highlighting and full integration with the Windows clipboard.
To sum quickly, I can... change active directories, view directory contents, copy, delete, & move files, edit text, create scripts, call any app I want, interact with anything that has a standard in/out interface, print, schedule repeated/timed tasks, reboot other machines on your network, find & replace strings in files, and install any app I dang well please from either cmd.exe or bash or tcsh or whatever you prefer.
And hey, in any event, it's a far cry better than the command line in Mac OS 9-. (Which, for those who didn't know, you could get in the Mac Programmers' Workshop (MPW), but sure wasn't installed by default.)
Seriously, what's Linux got that MS wants so bad that they can't steal from BSD legally, like Apple did? Rotor's already on FreeBSD, and I'm not sure what MS would want to steal from Linux other than that basic foundation for their CLI, other than brand marketability (which, I suppose, could be enough).
MS doesn't like competition, and that's why they'd help out SCO and have this fellow essentially threaten Red Hat out of business. They don't have to want to have Linux to want to see it gone.
We start off with a bang:
...
From a practical perspective, cost is an obvious differentiator, as are access to source and the ability to run outside the Intel processor environment. But it's possible to argue that those differences are neither real nor important.
To get beyond superficialities like these...
Oh for heaven's sake. Would nearly so many small to mid-sized companies running "eShops" have considered Linux if it weren't for the phat licensing deal? Ask Grandma Tilly, heck ask 80% of so-called "SQL Server Admins" out there -- Windows is much easier to learn if your skillset == GUI familiarity. Price is HUGE.
Then ask the governments (start with China) how important open source is. Again, cost of ownership is awfully high to move from any OS to any other. There must be something awfully impressive making whole countries' governments swap from one to another, and the security and freedom to explore what you're running is open source's big "in".
Let's follow that up with some anecdotal evidence to prove whatever I'm feeling today...
"like a 1991 copy of Vsifax for SunOS 4.4 -- works perfectly under Solaris 2.9, while Windows 2003/XP server now contains both a Posix-compliant interface set and four generations of the Win32 interface"
Come on. I'm no *NIX expert and usually let Fink do most of my compiling, but I do know that compiling against the wrong version of foolib can fook builds like nobody's business. I also know that...
"On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity."
VB 3 apps still run (heck, until recently the code would compile in VB 6) without much issue, and though I was upset when I tried Mosaic 2.1 on Windows XP recently, this evidence hardly shows that Windows is a kludge and Linux isn't.
I'm not weighing in that he's wrong; I'm saying he hasn't come close to proving his point with his examples. A better way to show the difference would be to, say, throw a highly customized version of Gentoo doing something very specific better than the best you could do along those lines in Windows. But why can we do this in Linux? Because it's *open*, daggummit.
such [major OS] changes[/advancements] historically have been accompanied by the addition of new layers of kludged code intended to maintain some semblance of backward compatibility with previous kludges.
I like where he's trying to take us here -- certainly a hack for SimCity today makes you hack for it again in 98, and then in 2k, etc, and could end up becoming a lot more like the Princess and the Pea than sand in an oyster. And I think a number of Window's security issues come from deadwood left in what's been described as an OS originally designed to provider home users with a workable, but not networkable, computer.
But what he misses is that its the lineage that's causing these issues, not commercialism per se. Linux comes from a server mentality. Security is key. Windows comes from a mentality that perpared itself for Grandma Tilly (and the SQL Server Admins (which I've been doing for 6 years, before you flame)) where user interfaces are nearly king. This is why Windows seems kludged -- because it's trying to be all things to all people. Linux is too, *now*, and you've seen all sorts of, "throw out X11 and use Y" articles around here.
Anyhow, you get the point. The fellow goes so low-level while keeping a very bird's eye view of what's going on that he's basically saying nothing. Hey, it's all 0's and 1's. You can grab any of your favorite anecdotes and point to places where one wins over the other -- it's nearly as bad as the PowerPC vs. x86 MHz wars Mac/Windows trolls fought nearly daily on comp.sys.mac.advocacy for so long. Sure, if you r
The most interesting answer to me that I got from Glenda was with respect to crossplatform technologies. I'd recalled that she'd used OpenAL a number of times. And of course Apple created a decent OpenGL implementation thanks in part to John Carmack's influence. The DirectX to OpenXL porting route is right common nowadays. Wouldn't it be great if it were easier for programmers to *start* with these xplat techs and make ports trivial processes, like Quake 3 was?
But Glenda didn't put much stock in xplat techs becoming easier to use than M$ sellout techs, nor did she see Apple throwing more weight behind their use a solution.
But in true "forest for the trees" fashion, she pointed out the one potential savior for people gaming on "second tier" platforms, let us say, that I'd completely missed.
ruffin: Who else could run with the ball to get mature, cross platform game programming APIs written?
GA: Microsoft, but I don't see why they would want to.
It's sad that the M$ monopoly in the desktop OS market is so, "That's just the way it is," that I would have completely overlooked the answer. That's great insight -- though awfully obvious -- and the perfect "hit-home" reason for us gamers to be pretty angry with the folks in Redmond the way AOL/Netscape, Apple, Sun, and friends are.
I'm hoping to get a editorial based on the interview up soon, but at the same time to keep out the bile and trying to stay relatively objective and fair. That's proving tough.
And at the same time, the porting system is awfully broken. As games get larger and larger, who knows, perhaps taking multiple DVDs instead of multiple CDs (or obscenely long download times via the net), porting all that code isn't going to get any easier.
All the editor is really doing is allowing you to change a few bytes where it's storing its playfield information. If you dissemble it and look around byte marker LF715, you'll see what I'm talking about. Swap out some $FFs for $00s, recompile, and voila.
Hey, you Linux guys didn't really want a GUI, did you?!!
Apple's online store is charging $2399 for refurbed dual G5s, and the student store's price for a new dual G5 is $2699, $100 less than the MacMall refurbs from Tech. You can even take $26 more off for getting rid of the internal mode, which the supercomputer refurbs don't have either.
Even if you add the extra 512 megs of RAM from Apple's site (where prices aren't the best), these Va Tech refurbs are only $100 less than what a student would spend on the same box new. Not to mention these 2 GHz duallies are rated as "Buy only if you need it - Approaching the end of a cycle" on the Macrumors buyers' guide page.
So not a deal at all if you're a student (though I have to think students at Va Tech could get the inside track on the boxes -- anyone know?) and not a great price for a refurb if you're Joe Schmoe. And not a box with great longevity, relatively speaking, either, if Macrumors has the lifecycle pegged.
Wait for a processor speed bump unless you're dying to own a little bit of celebrity.