It could be successful if it could run Windows programs. I've been wanting a full unix that could reliably run Windows stuff -- all Windows stuff, particularly Direct/X games -- for quite some time. I develop software. I'd want my cake and eat it too.
If you wait 3 months for something, whats an extra 12 hours?
Well, it's more an issue of a 30% being meaningles if the task takes a second, and being quite meaningful if it takes 3 months, because if it takes 3 months and the difference is 30%, that's another month, but what's another 1/3rd of a second?
And this is exactly why you see the HPC folks caring about fortran-versus-C and all that, but to anyone else -- who cares?
If you think Linux does bad under load, try loading down Windows. My machine crawls to an unusable halt under the most basic of loads.
Two thumb up on JDK1.4. The new io (nio) alone is worth the switch. I've been playing with it since beta one, and except for a strange bug (now fixed) in UDP where all incoming packets on all channels each falsely reported their origination address as having come from the same address as was reprorted on the first packet... except for that!:)... this stuff rocks. Packet transmission speeds are up something like 40-50% or more if I recall correctly. It's quick.
The Channel abstraction for talking to sockets also happens to be a nice one. The whole nio library has the taste of having been well-thought out by someone who really new what he was doing.
C//
Re:This is not news. Doesn't ANYONE study history
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 2
The pattern you are describing is as old as history. Inventions come and go over time in different societies, many of which go to the dustbin because they are before their time in the sense that the situational context -- the people, the infrastructure, the mechanics and so forth -- just isn't ready for that innovation. Later, when the innovation is revisited, the context is different, and what was at one time a perfectly fine idea with bad timing suddenly takes off and is extolled as a new and wonderful thing.
This idea is discussed a bit in the classic _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ (which won a Pulitzer Prize), where the author makes a strong case that an invention isn't nearly as important to a society as it is that the society is interested in the invention.
What you describe is seizure, and it's completely inappropriate in a civil matter.
I am confused. Clarify for me: Was Microsoft found guilty or liable in the Antitrust Case. I thought they were found guilty, and that it was indeed actually a criminal violation.
Well if you'd really like to lick our boots, please go ahead. Just try not to be so sychophantic about it, okay? It's embarrassing.:):)
[end quote]
So if you can't understand that that is quoting out of context you... ----
What you fail to realize is that you're experiencing a language failure. While I understand that English isn't your first language and sarcasm is therefor difficult to detect, there was sarcasm present in my message to you along with a liberal two -- two! count them! two! -- smiley faces to alert you its presence. So, it would appear, not only are you guilty of lacking a sense of humor, you need to acquire some understanding about important written linguistic markers of the digital age.
What is especially funny is that so many Americans actually do believe this
We're trailing on vapor.:) In the 50's it was in many ways true. The U.S. GNP post-war-time economy had a major portion of world wide production power.
The other day I was perusing the y. 2000 CIA factbook. I found it interesting to note that China has about half the GNP of the U.S., and that they are now the second largest economy in the world. Of course, their per capita GNP isn't all that spectactular yet, but that's just a matter of time. It appears that the sleeping dragon is finally awakening.
...that some how the world is there to support and adore the US...
Well if you'd really like to lick our boots, please go ahead. Just try not to be so sychophantic about it, okay? It's embarrassing.:):)
...but we did have stability and we knew what was important...
No, not really. Stability isn't much of a feature of modern economic society. Apparently you missed the big tech bust in '90, which really hit San Diego hard in particular (where I live), but even more we should consider the power of shifting economic dynamics over history. To wit:
Consider the world of 1900. At this moment in time, over 90% of the U.S. population was dedicated to agrarian pursuits. Today, less than 2% of the population is dedicated to agricultural work. That's a massive shift in labor allocation: entire careers and lines of work evaporated wholesale, creating an entirely different and better and more abundant economy. During the same time period, agricultural productivity rose over 400 times.
The USA, functionally speaking, owns the world
Not really. Get a copy of the CIA factbook. China has the world's second largest economy at about half the size of the U.S. Japan's is a close third. And really, these changes are nothing new. In the 50's, the U.S. GNP was literally larger than all the GNP's of all nations on earth combined. It's a diferent world today, and it's a better world. As it turns out, economies are not a zero sum game. In the topsy-turvy world of economics all players get to have more and it doesn't have to be at the expense of the other players.
This of course doesn't negate localized effects. The world is a chaotic place and sudden changes in economic realities temporarily displace people as they adapt to new markets.
Take care of us and the economy will take care of itself.
Obviously various societies around the globe are experimenting with different levels of this belief. What does seem true however is that any attempt to universally protect all individuals generally produces a society with misery and paucity of goods.
What appears to be the dominant successful model is to not protect workers from the demand-changes of business, but rather to help them adapt and to likewise perhaps encourage business to promote this adaptation.
I can't believe I'm thinking this way, anti-technology, but tech and...
You're blaming the wrong target. The tech economy bubble is to be blamed on very bad business decisions. If I only had $10 for every venture investment made without insisting on the otherwise mandatory business plan with a clear market analysis and plan for profitibility. What happened is that the various venture capitalists all got stupid. The market expanded to accomodate the sensical and the lucky, but ejected the idiots and also-rans. My quip for the day: "too many players began to think of the tech economy as Vegas and not Wall Street."
While indeed programmers have little trouble with the functional aspects of these languages (C, Tcl, PHP) that nevertheless isn't by any stretch the dominant realization of these languages.
Since you avoided this sentence, I'll assume it was too much of a hot potato for you. It's true, though, you know? What you're failing to realize is that functional programming languages aren't popular for a reason: they aren't popular, because largely people don't like them.
The loss of American business to foreign countries will hurt you more than any system of immigration ever will. The failure of American business culture to compete internationally and domestically will hurt you more than any immigrant ever can. Preventing immigration is not the answer.
Economics is not a synergistic game.
In fact it is. Your statement is completely at the odds with the fundamental basis of modern economics. This, however, occurs at the systemic level over larger periods of time and protects individuals at any particular time point not at all.
No system reaches >100% efficiency.
Non sequitur.
Please rephrase.
You understood what I meant clearly enough.
As someone facing unemployment soon...
While I understand how that stings -- and I sympathize! -- being stung does not in any special way demonstrate that a perceived solution that would have prevented a particular sting would be the best for the overall nation of individuals.
Well if we're bringing people over here, and there leaving from over there, and these people have higher IQs on average, there is at least one long term argument which suggests that their brain drain is our brain gain. Ultimately we can't prevent companies from outsourcing entirely to foreign countries, so it follows that having smart foreigners come here to become citizens has its benefits in comparison to the alternatives.
Most protectionism is based on gut feelings. Much of those feelings aren't based on the counterintuitive truth of economics, which is by no stretch a zero sum game. In the topsy turvy world of economics, when more players enter the playing field, there actually ends up being more for everyone. This can be a sour pill to swallow, of course, when you're one of the ones who's currently not in the more for everyone category. Economic changes can be disruptive on a microscale, of course.
If there is a loophole for contractors, it should be eliminated. All indentured servitude aspects of the system should likewise be eliminated. Under those circumstances, employers would likely not even so much as use the H1B system as much, as you and I both know that their nom-dejure explanation for H1B requests is really deception: what they actually want is cheaper workers.
If they want these badly enough to set up operations in a foreign country, that's fine, but it shouldn't be at the expensive of immigrants who are future citizens.
And with that, I'll leave you with a quote from Ayn Rand: "I believe that immigrants are better than those born here. The immigrants actually had to want to be here. Everyone else was simply born."
How many large Lisp efforts have you worked on? Modern Lisp as realized by industry is dominated by classical imperative programming style as realized from within what is otherwise claimed to be a functional language. It's just not so in practice. Modification by consequence and imperative forms exist everywhere. That's just how it is.
In your list of languages which have functional aspects, you neglected to mention C. While indeed programmers have little trouble with the functional aspects of these languages (C, Tcl, PHP) that nevertheless isn't by any stretch the dominant realization of these languages. Imperative style rules the day. I believe that this reflects the way that human beings actually think:
Well, sort of. Prolog belongs to a family of programming languages sometimes referred to as "evaluative". It doesn't pay to worry about these things too much, however. Some people look at things differently, and by some ways of conceiving the world, Prolog is validly considered a functional language with a very limited kind of function: a predicate.
You can hire H1Bs straight off the boat to...
...India supplies the code monkeys at 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of an American, while...
Well, not quite true. Probably more like 30% less. It's illegal to pay an H1B less than the "prevailing wage," and so the companies have to tread very carefully to appear to not be doing so and give themselves some plausible deniability. Anyway, the answer is not so much to scrap the H1B system, but to A) enforce the current rules, and B) give people here on work visas more flexibility in finding new jobs. If an H1B could comfortably get a job at a higher wage within 6 months of entering the country, believe me, they would. That would be better for all involved, including the H1B worker.
From having developed very large amounts of code with plenty of undocumented back-end, my guess is that the oodles of complaints about "hidden APIs" exploited by Microsoft is really more of an issue of exactly what programmers seemingly everywhere do: we write lots of code to get the job done, and then, at the last minute, document our public API. That still leaves plenty of very useful code (auspiciously, our "own") which we understand, but nobody else does. While I can acknowledge the possibility that there is malfeasance, Occam's Razor impels me to believe that the most obvious and likely explanation is the one which is most important to look at first.
Since to the best of my ability to discern, most programmers drag their feet writing documentation, and likewise since Microsoft employs something not all that different from "most programmers", it therefor logically follows that Microsoft programmers drag their feet writing docs and do only what they perceive they really have to do.
Of course they have an advantage when they use their own code. If you're a programmer, then so do you. And so do I.
Functional programming languages not only remove the need for most of that hardware, they are also nicer to program in.
A categorical claim that a functional programming language is "nicer to program in" is the kind of question that begs for evidence. Presumably since speed of learning and so forth are measurable, you'd only make a claim like this if you thought some psychologists somewhere had studied the phenomenon. Of course, it's far more likely that you mean "I personally find functional programming languages easier to program in" and that you're just an unusual MIT mutant. Given the hordes of sorry meatheads programming in VB by preference, I'm afraid I view it likely that your statement is not exactly right. I think it's most likely that people actually think imperatively (and I'm admitting that's just an educated guess, but I think it's a good one, what do you think?). Hence that's why programmers prefer languages that give them imperative forms. It also explains the relative paucity of Lisp and especially Prolog programmers, wouldn't you say?
You really should be talking to an attorney, not the Slashdot audience. Your beta tester is full of shit on legal grounds, he's just plain out of luck, doesn't even have a legal peanut to stand on. But that's neither here nor there. You need to hear this from an attorney.
I don't believe "Java is slow" (except for Swing, which is very slow), I just believe that C# is faster, that's all. And that's because it is. Sorry if that gets your gourd. You can get the Release Candidate and try it yourself if you like.
Slashdot Mirror
Who would buy such a beast?
It could be successful if it could run Windows programs. I've been wanting a full unix that could reliably run Windows stuff -- all Windows stuff, particularly Direct/X games -- for quite some time. I develop software. I'd want my cake and eat it too.
C//
The bigger question is how I got moderated to "insightful" for admitting to be confused. Slashdot. Go figure.
C//
If you wait 3 months for something, whats an extra 12 hours?
Well, it's more an issue of a 30% being meaningles if the task takes a second, and being quite meaningful if it takes 3 months, because if it takes 3 months and the difference is 30%, that's another month, but what's another 1/3rd of a second?
And this is exactly why you see the HPC folks caring about fortran-versus-C and all that, but to anyone else -- who cares?
If you think Linux does bad under load, try loading down Windows. My machine crawls to an unusable halt under the most basic of loads.
C//
Two thumb up on JDK1.4. The new io (nio) alone is worth the switch. I've been playing with it since beta one, and except for a strange bug (now fixed) in UDP where all incoming packets on all channels each falsely reported their origination address as having come from the same address as was reprorted on the first packet... except for that!:)... this stuff rocks. Packet transmission speeds are up something like 40-50% or more if I recall correctly. It's quick.
The Channel abstraction for talking to sockets also happens to be a nice one. The whole nio library has the taste of having been well-thought out by someone who really new what he was doing.
C//
The pattern you are describing is as old as history. Inventions come and go over time in different societies, many of which go to the dustbin because they are before their time in the sense that the situational context -- the people, the infrastructure, the mechanics and so forth -- just isn't ready for that innovation. Later, when the innovation is revisited, the context is different, and what was at one time a perfectly fine idea with bad timing suddenly takes off and is extolled as a new and wonderful thing.
This idea is discussed a bit in the classic _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ (which won a Pulitzer Prize), where the author makes a strong case that an invention isn't nearly as important to a society as it is that the society is interested in the invention.
C//
C//
Q:...why wouldnt they be able to do the same with windows?
A: JAIL.
C//
What you describe is seizure, and it's completely inappropriate in a civil matter.
I am confused. Clarify for me: Was Microsoft found guilty or liable in the Antitrust Case. I thought they were found guilty, and that it was indeed actually a criminal violation.
C//
Well if you'd really like to lick our boots, please go ahead. Just try not to be so sychophantic about it, okay? It's embarrassing. :) :)
[end quote]
So if you can't understand that that is quoting out of context you...
----
What you fail to realize is that you're experiencing a language failure. While I understand that English isn't your first language and sarcasm is therefor difficult to detect, there was sarcasm present in my message to you along with a liberal two -- two! count them! two! -- smiley faces to alert you its presence. So, it would appear, not only are you guilty of lacking a sense of humor, you need to acquire some understanding about important written linguistic markers of the digital age.
C//
That's the other annoying american habbit, they tend to quote out of context to try to look clever.
I didn't quote you out of context. However, if you're trying to look clever, you should probably correctly spell the word "habit". One "b".
Grow a sense of humor.
C//
What is especially funny is that so many Americans actually do believe this
:) In the 50's it was in many ways true. The U.S. GNP post-war-time economy had a major portion of world wide production power.
...that some how the world is there to support and adore the US...
:) :)
We're trailing on vapor.
The other day I was perusing the y. 2000 CIA factbook. I found it interesting to note that China has about half the GNP of the U.S., and that they are now the second largest economy in the world. Of course, their per capita GNP isn't all that spectactular yet, but that's just a matter of time. It appears that the sleeping dragon is finally awakening.
Well if you'd really like to lick our boots, please go ahead. Just try not to be so sychophantic about it, okay? It's embarrassing.
C//
...but we did have stability and we knew what was important...
No, not really. Stability isn't much of a feature of modern economic society. Apparently you missed the big tech bust in '90, which really hit San Diego hard in particular (where I live), but even more we should consider the power of shifting economic dynamics over history. To wit:
Consider the world of 1900. At this moment in time, over 90% of the U.S. population was dedicated to agrarian pursuits. Today, less than 2% of the population is dedicated to agricultural work. That's a massive shift in labor allocation: entire careers and lines of work evaporated wholesale, creating an entirely different and better and more abundant economy. During the same time period, agricultural productivity rose over 400 times.
The USA, functionally speaking, owns the world
Not really. Get a copy of the CIA factbook. China has the world's second largest economy at about half the size of the U.S. Japan's is a close third. And really, these changes are nothing new. In the 50's, the U.S. GNP was literally larger than all the GNP's of all nations on earth combined. It's a diferent world today, and it's a better world. As it turns out, economies are not a zero sum game. In the topsy-turvy world of economics all players get to have more and it doesn't have to be at the expense of the other players.
This of course doesn't negate localized effects. The world is a chaotic place and sudden changes in economic realities temporarily displace people as they adapt to new markets.
Take care of us and the economy will take care of itself.
Obviously various societies around the globe are experimenting with different levels of this belief. What does seem true however is that any attempt to universally protect all individuals generally produces a society with misery and paucity of goods.
What appears to be the dominant successful model is to not protect workers from the demand-changes of business, but rather to help them adapt and to likewise perhaps encourage business to promote this adaptation.
I can't believe I'm thinking this way, anti-technology, but tech and...
You're blaming the wrong target. The tech economy bubble is to be blamed on very bad business decisions. If I only had $10 for every venture investment made without insisting on the otherwise mandatory business plan with a clear market analysis and plan for profitibility. What happened is that the various venture capitalists all got stupid. The market expanded to accomodate the sensical and the lucky, but ejected the idiots and also-rans. My quip for the day: "too many players began to think of the tech economy as Vegas and not Wall Street."
Hope things turn out well for you, Mr. Whitt.
C//
While indeed programmers have little trouble with the functional aspects of these languages (C, Tcl, PHP) that nevertheless isn't by any stretch the dominant realization of these languages.
Since you avoided this sentence, I'll assume it was too much of a hot potato for you. It's true, though, you know? What you're failing to realize is that functional programming languages aren't popular for a reason: they aren't popular, because largely people don't like them.
C//
They take food from the mouths of Americans.
Nothing like they will if we don't compete.
Who benefits?
The loss of American business to foreign countries will hurt you more than any system of immigration ever will. The failure of American business culture to compete internationally and domestically will hurt you more than any immigrant ever can. Preventing immigration is not the answer.
Economics is not a synergistic game.
In fact it is. Your statement is completely at the odds with the fundamental basis of modern economics. This, however, occurs at the systemic level over larger periods of time and protects individuals at any particular time point not at all.
No system reaches >100% efficiency.
Non sequitur.
Please rephrase.
You understood what I meant clearly enough.
As someone facing unemployment soon...
While I understand how that stings -- and I sympathize! -- being stung does not in any special way demonstrate that a perceived solution that would have prevented a particular sting would be the best for the overall nation of individuals.
I'm sorry you're going through a tough time.
C//
I think the work visas should be limited, period.
Well if we're bringing people over here, and there leaving from over there, and these people have higher IQs on average, there is at least one long term argument which suggests that their brain drain is our brain gain. Ultimately we can't prevent companies from outsourcing entirely to foreign countries, so it follows that having smart foreigners come here to become citizens has its benefits in comparison to the alternatives.
Most protectionism is based on gut feelings. Much of those feelings aren't based on the counterintuitive truth of economics, which is by no stretch a zero sum game. In the topsy turvy world of economics, when more players enter the playing field, there actually ends up being more for everyone. This can be a sour pill to swallow, of course, when you're one of the ones who's currently not in the more for everyone category. Economic changes can be disruptive on a microscale, of course.
If there is a loophole for contractors, it should be eliminated. All indentured servitude aspects of the system should likewise be eliminated. Under those circumstances, employers would likely not even so much as use the H1B system as much, as you and I both know that their nom-dejure explanation for H1B requests is really deception: what they actually want is cheaper workers.
If they want these badly enough to set up operations in a foreign country, that's fine, but it shouldn't be at the expensive of immigrants who are future citizens.
And with that, I'll leave you with a quote from Ayn Rand: "I believe that immigrants are better than those born here. The immigrants actually had to want to be here. Everyone else was simply born."
(paraphrased)
C//
The problems that people have with ... Lisp...
How many large Lisp efforts have you worked on? Modern Lisp as realized by industry is dominated by classical imperative programming style as realized from within what is otherwise claimed to be a functional language. It's just not so in practice. Modification by consequence and imperative forms exist everywhere. That's just how it is.
In your list of languages which have functional aspects, you neglected to mention C. While indeed programmers have little trouble with the functional aspects of these languages (C, Tcl, PHP) that nevertheless isn't by any stretch the dominant realization of these languages. Imperative style rules the day. I believe that this reflects the way that human beings actually think:
Do this to that.
It's a common thought pattern.
C//
Prolog is logical programming language...
Well, sort of. Prolog belongs to a family of programming languages sometimes referred to as "evaluative". It doesn't pay to worry about these things too much, however. Some people look at things differently, and by some ways of conceiving the world, Prolog is validly considered a functional language with a very limited kind of function: a predicate.
C//
You can hire H1Bs straight off the boat to ...
...India supplies the code monkeys at 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of an American, while...
Well, not quite true. Probably more like 30% less. It's illegal to pay an H1B less than the "prevailing wage," and so the companies have to tread very carefully to appear to not be doing so and give themselves some plausible deniability. Anyway, the answer is not so much to scrap the H1B system, but to A) enforce the current rules, and B) give people here on work visas more flexibility in finding new jobs. If an H1B could comfortably get a job at a higher wage within 6 months of entering the country, believe me, they would. That would be better for all involved, including the H1B worker.
C//
From having developed very large amounts of code with plenty of undocumented back-end, my guess is that the oodles of complaints about "hidden APIs" exploited by Microsoft is really more of an issue of exactly what programmers seemingly everywhere do: we write lots of code to get the job done, and then, at the last minute, document our public API. That still leaves plenty of very useful code (auspiciously, our "own") which we understand, but nobody else does. While I can acknowledge the possibility that there is malfeasance, Occam's Razor impels me to believe that the most obvious and likely explanation is the one which is most important to look at first.
Since to the best of my ability to discern, most programmers drag their feet writing documentation, and likewise since Microsoft employs something not all that different from "most programmers", it therefor logically follows that Microsoft programmers drag their feet writing docs and do only what they perceive they really have to do.
Of course they have an advantage when they use their own code. If you're a programmer, then so do you. And so do I.
C//
Functional programming languages not only remove the need for most of that hardware, they are also nicer to program in.
A categorical claim that a functional programming language is "nicer to program in" is the kind of question that begs for evidence. Presumably since speed of learning and so forth are measurable, you'd only make a claim like this if you thought some psychologists somewhere had studied the phenomenon. Of course, it's far more likely that you mean "I personally find functional programming languages easier to program in" and that you're just an unusual MIT mutant. Given the hordes of sorry meatheads programming in VB by preference, I'm afraid I view it likely that your statement is not exactly right. I think it's most likely that people actually think imperatively (and I'm admitting that's just an educated guess, but I think it's a good one, what do you think?). Hence that's why programmers prefer languages that give them imperative forms. It also explains the relative paucity of Lisp and especially Prolog programmers, wouldn't you say?
C//
You really should be talking to an attorney, not the Slashdot audience. Your beta tester is full of shit on legal grounds, he's just plain out of luck, doesn't even have a legal peanut to stand on. But that's neither here nor there. You need to hear this from an attorney.
C//
...with no justification whatsoever.
Two words: unsafe code.
Thank you for playing.
C//
You haven't done any C# development, so stop making stuff up.
C//
I don't believe "Java is slow" (except for Swing, which is very slow), I just believe that C# is faster, that's all. And that's because it is. Sorry if that gets your gourd. You can get the Release Candidate and try it yourself if you like.
C//
Follow the money, baby...
MSFT: Market capitalization: $337B
SUNW: Market capitalization: $33B
That's a factor of 10.
C//
If you want to maximize your users, why not use java instead of c#.
Even as a release candidate C# is faster than the best Java has to offer after a half decade of development or more.
C//