fair enough, perhaps 7 or 8 different skill sets is too much, but its always been the case where you use an appropriate tool for each job - you used write the data access in SQL, back end in C++, and the front ends in VB. Then apps moved to the web and you needed HTML/ASP skills instead. That's already 4 different skill sets (naturally, replace said languages with alternatives, there's still 4 in there).
Its not too bad an approach, mainly because although you need 4 different skill sets, you get specialists in each tier. Ask a DBA how to write a fancy query that's fast and they'll tell you immediately. Ask them about C++ code and they generally havn't a clue, the same applies the other way round, the C++ guy will know how to write queries, but won't be nearly as good at them as the DB guys.
As long as you get them working together, you end up with a very good application, easy to maintain and well written. If you go for the "one language only", then you end up with people who aren't masters of much at all. You see this in Microsoft shops where everyone is a C# developer, they only know how to write basic queries, or get an ORM to do it for them, the front ends tend to be better than the back-end, if not entirely mixed up together, and the apps end up poor, slow and unmaintainable.
You're confusing number of jobs using those languages, with amount of churn as programmers quit and move on.
What you can see from those figures is that, if you're a Java programmer you'll likely quit and move to a different Java job. If you're a COBOL programmer, you'll happily stay there until retirement.
I think you'll only notice if you join a company that uses COBOL a lot, a financial company generally, and only then if you're employed to help with it. Even then, you'll probably only be interfacing to a "black box" where you don;t know or care what language runs it.
Does that mean my Java skill set is likely to keep me employed for the next 30 to 40 years?
havn't you reskilled in C# yet? Java is not the same as COBOL, whereas those old COBOL apps will still be running 50 years (IBM'll see to it they do, so no-one needs to re-engineer their system), you are now on the downward slope to obsolescence in favour of this century's 'must-have' language fashion accessory.
I think its pants too, but that's what the software vendors have foisted upon us.
Apache, Lighttpd and my current favorite nginx are awesome, but they dont have the close integration with their development tools and operating system that IIS does. Speaking of development tools... there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
True, the web servers just serve webs, they don't have integrated debugging engines that IIS has... oh, wait a minute... lets take the most common web language for apache - PHP. Can you debuglivePHP sites? I suppose you can. All you need to do it either know how to already, or use Google like everyone else. Failing that, you could always go to the Zend site and see what resources they have to help you (a little like going to the Microsoft site when you need information. I'd stick with Google though)
If you want an open source equivalent of Visual Studio, there's the biggie - Eclipse. That has plugins for every kind of development environment you'll ever want (just like VS where you plugin C#, VB.net, C++ modules). If you wanted something more lightweight so you can run several of them, try google again.
As for MSDN, its true MSDN is wonderful, well it was, before they deleted most pages in favour of the "this is how.net does it" versions. But on Linux you have man pages - but they're more the equivalent of technet, for programming APIs, you do have to go to the API you want, try google and bookmark the page where you got the API from. eg for Perl, there's wonderfully comprehensive documentation that actually puts MSDN to shame, for PHP - go to Zend site and see for yourself.
You have to do this anyway, even with MSDN. If you want to code Perl, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, etc - MSDN is useless to you. Even supported languages are not the best - try javascript reference in MSDN. The web's better.
But I guess, if you only want to know the VB.NET language reference, and the.NET framework then VS and MSDN are all you need. All in one handy container that you'll never think to look outside of.
Now its true that most applications run on Windows so you don't need Linux (shame really), and that MS has woken up to the areas were Linux shone (eg web serving) and is taking market share from it. I, however, think that this doesn't matter - as long as the applications are free, if everyone ran them on Windows it would cripple Microsoft. Why bother buying Office if OOo is acceptable? If MS loses all that revenue (and it has a big mouth to feed) then it will wither away quite quickly. Linux doesn't *have* to take market share from Windows. I think 5 years from now things will be different in the software world.
Groove 2007 * Work together and share information with team members -- anywhere, anytime and with anybody (erm, with team members or with anyone? Besides what stupid non-descriptive name there ever was)
InfoPath 2007 * Collect and manage data with ease. Extend the reach of your business with rich electronic forms. fair enough, this actually tells you what it does, silly name for a forms engine though)
Visio 2007 * Visualise, explore and communicate complex information, systems and processes (still a stupid name for a layout application)
OneNote 2007 * Gather your information in one place; quickly find what you need; share your notes and information (hang on, doesn't Groove do sharing and InfoPath do data collection?)
Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 * Help organisations improve performance by integrating monitoring, analysis and planning into a single application.(planning?)
just one thing please, stop calling users "lusers". Users are the reasons we have computers, just because some are ignorant speaks more about the elitism, poor state of HCI and usability, poor state of education and the too-rapidly changing software environment than anything else.
It also weakens your good responses and makes you sound stupid.
just tell her "its like having a mac". Then she might twig why she can;t go to best buy and buy some Windows software.
People are familiar with Macs, that they're different, that they're superior (so the mac people keep saying;) ), that they're more specialised for certain kinds of task. In many, many ways Linux is a lot like that.
call in is like so last century dude. Status changes tend to be computerised - you type in the 2 digit short-message code and press send, similar to texting in the '10' codes to the control centre.
1. ability to eavesdrop on digital communication traffic, including relay-mode from one handset through another to the base station. 2. ability to decrypt IDEA or AES128 encrypted traffic 3. ability to keep it quiet from the cops, and military (who also use TETRA communications).
even if you get a handset, you'll still need to be part of the right keygroup
the thing I don't get is... why is this news? We already do do this.
999 calls are already pinpointed, either by EISEC address lookup, or mobile ellipse (unfortunately most mobiles don't give out the exact location, but it has to be inferred from mast/cell positions)
Officer handsets already return vehicle-location co-ordinates (depending on the handset, of course), but all Airwave (the UK's emergency service 'radio' network) handsets provide this.
As for 'officer emergency' issues, they have a red button on the handsets, press it, and it starts spamming out location packets and forces opens a channel to the control centre so an operator can hear everything that goes on.
Disclaimer: I write control centre software, including that used at neighbouring Suffolk Constabulary.
I doubt it, why would they bother with MySQL (unless its part of an 'upgrade' path to SQL Server).
MS already has SQL Server express, and developer edition versions so I'm not sure why they'd want to take MySQL on. I'm sure they're just waiting for Access to die naturally, or only keeping it around for legacy reasons.
And as for Java, they made J++ so this is 5 years too late for them, they don;t want Java now - they're more interested in converting Java devs to C# (and Windows lock-in, obviously)
yeah, I think I should have taken time with that post instead of clicking send so readily. Perhaps I should have refreshed my limited knowledge a bit on wikipedia first:-)
traditionally companies return money to shareholders in the form of dividends, it makes them attractive to long-term holders like pension funds, and is good for tax in some cases. However, recently it has become fashionable for the buy-back instead. Companies think it'll increase their share price and that's all that matters (to their executive's bonuses, naturally).
to be fair, the British government didn't deliberately starve the Irish, instead they were proponents of 'free market forces'. They didn't have supermarkets or microwave readymeals in those days, so a staple foodstuff like the potato was pretty much all you ate anyway. Of course, if you were rich you could afford meat - like the cattle raised in Ireland for English tables. The landlords got richer and the poor stayed poor.
The trouble was that the blight reduced the number of potatoes in circulation, and as other people were richer, they could afford to pay more - and so the farmers shipped their potatoes to the richer people, leaving the peasants to starve. As has always been the way.
Incidentally the British didn't deliberately starve the people - after they'd woken up to the trouble, they did ship in large amounts of aid and close the ports to food exports. Too late for most of course, but don't get incompetence confused with conspiracy.
There's been too much FUD about the potato famine, I suppose spread for modern political reasons. The truth is just dull, the government took a 'light touch' approach to the markets. Unfortunately this approach to 'hands off' free-trade doesn't give what society requires, with such lax input from governments, the free market doesn't always work correctly and you have monopolies appearing and abusing the freedom that should be providing a better set of choices. For computers, its no good saying "you could run Linux" if everyone needs to run Windows because of the ubiquity of software running on it.
Protectionism is the last thing you want, when you get that, you invite stagnation. There's no innovation of growth, the established parties simply try to maintain their market with what they've got. Developing new products is a significant cost - and without free trade getting in the way and allowing new entrants to the market, there's no incentive to spend. Of course you might get new upstarts appearing, but that happens so rarely, and most of them are small and get killed off by the established big players either by being bought out (name any MS product really) or having their market destroyed (eg IE v Netscape).
Ultimately the government needs to step in and support open standards, making sure everyone works with them. Then you can have much better spread of heterogeneous systems as they would work together, giving people the ability to choose an alternative to the dominant product.
Its easy to say they are losing money. Q4 2008 net cashflow: $-2bn. Part of that loss was down to financing and investing activities. If they portfolio's like the rest of ours, next quarter will be a lot more lost than that!
So if you lose 2bn one quarter, maybe 3bn next quarter... pretty soon you're going to be down to your last billion in the bank. That's how companies go bankrupt, unless they can pull round their expenditures to cover this (and persuade everyone to upgrade to Win7: analysts expect MS to gather £1.5bn in revenue from Win7 sales), they could be on a downward trend over the next few years. Remember, no-one gives a hoot what you did in the past, financials are entirely focussed on your future prospects.
sure they are that bad. A CFL draws roughly half the power it emits as light (if you see what I mean) giving a power factor of about 0.5, which is dreadfully inefficient.
However, power factor refers to the current load, so a CFL of 0.5 will draw twice the current, but it will still be drawing the wattage it claims. So yes, they need to shove more current down the wires, but its costing you the rated watts.
Also, the CFL will be rated at 13W, the comparable IL at 60W. even if the CFL is drawing twice the current, its still using a quarter of the energy used by the incandescent.
Put it another way, a 60W incandescent draws 0.5 amps (60W/ 120V = 0.5). A 0.5 PF CFL at 13W draws 0.2 amps (13W/120/0.5)
I doubt its a serious blow against CFLs, just a serious attempt at FUD to talk up ILs, or an attempt to justify power companies charging you more (as that 13W lamp still costs you for 13W even if the power company has to deliver more).
I'm not entirely sure it should, but if you've been sold a piece of music, after 50 years you get to keep it, share it, rip it, use bits of it etc. Why should software really be different? And if you're allowed to use pieces of music, why not pieces of software. Just because the source code is not publicly visible during its active life, there's no reason why it can't be made public afterwards.
The concept of the copyright expiry is that by that time the work is effectively valueless, so giving the source shouldn't be a problem for anyone by then.
Just imagine if you went to the large corporations. My main customer runs a callcentre on NT4. We're only just getting rid of it to upgrade to something more modern.... XP.
No, I kid you not, but it should be fine for another 10 years before they have to shell out another few hundred k to upgrade the PCs.
there's always copyright laws - if software was regulated by copyright (instead of patents) then after the lifetime of the copyright ran out (50 years IIRC, and the music industry hasn't had it extended) then the source could be made publicly available.
It would not help in this case (not unless software copyright length was measured in "internet years")(or XP is still being used far into the future), but its a suggestion to make things fair and unbiased.
good point, just the other day someone from MS was saying how they've taken over 95% of the netbook market, and last I looked, those little netbooks weren't running Vista.
They should keep support for x years after sales ended, not the other way round.
It's interesting that the failures of technological companies are often social failures, not fundamentally technological failures.
True, but often its the technical failures that presage these (after all, if everything worked fine, why would there be a social problem to solve?!)
From TFA:
The other major issue was that baseball considered Silverlight too unstable. There were some high-profile glitches, including last year's opening day, which saw many MLB.com subscribers struggling to log in and others who were unable to watch games. The malfunctions lasted several days.
They then go on to review NetFlix's problems that were suspected of being a Silverlight issue.
I suspect the only social failure in this case was MS's inability to hype silverlight up so much that any technical issues were blamed elsewhere and not on silverlight itself.
Well no, in reality they should take out the Vista-specific wording and leave it as a generic, all-purpose "No buying thousands of licenses of anything without approval" rule.
sure, lets take out that Vista wording then...... provision forbidding government agencies from upgrading to Windows [snip] without written consent of the legislature
so "the speed of Java", from GP, is a perfect description of this
and I thought he was being ironic.
I suppose it *should* be really fast, but combine with all the exceptions in the framework object-oriented layers, the lax approach to memory management (which leads to hundreds of GCs per second), the 'lets be safe' approach to multithreading locks, etc... just be grateful that computers are so unbelieveably fast and memory so cheap nowadays, you'd never have run Java or.net on a computer just a few years ago unless it was an 'enterprise' app running on a cluster.
Now just think what you could do with something more efficient, even if it meant developers had to have more skill than they currently do.
Slashdot Mirror
fair enough, perhaps 7 or 8 different skill sets is too much, but its always been the case where you use an appropriate tool for each job - you used write the data access in SQL, back end in C++, and the front ends in VB. Then apps moved to the web and you needed HTML/ASP skills instead. That's already 4 different skill sets (naturally, replace said languages with alternatives, there's still 4 in there).
Its not too bad an approach, mainly because although you need 4 different skill sets, you get specialists in each tier. Ask a DBA how to write a fancy query that's fast and they'll tell you immediately. Ask them about C++ code and they generally havn't a clue, the same applies the other way round, the C++ guy will know how to write queries, but won't be nearly as good at them as the DB guys.
As long as you get them working together, you end up with a very good application, easy to maintain and well written. If you go for the "one language only", then you end up with people who aren't masters of much at all. You see this in Microsoft shops where everyone is a C# developer, they only know how to write basic queries, or get an ORM to do it for them, the front ends tend to be better than the back-end, if not entirely mixed up together, and the apps end up poor, slow and unmaintainable.
You're confusing number of jobs using those languages, with amount of churn as programmers quit and move on.
What you can see from those figures is that, if you're a Java programmer you'll likely quit and move to a different Java job. If you're a COBOL programmer, you'll happily stay there until retirement.
I think you'll only notice if you join a company that uses COBOL a lot, a financial company generally, and only then if you're employed to help with it. Even then, you'll probably only be interfacing to a "black box" where you don;t know or care what language runs it.
then why didn't they store dates as number of seconds since 1970 in a 4-byte field? :)
(yeah, I know, limitations of thin-client forms applications)
Does that mean my Java skill set is likely to keep me employed for the next 30 to 40 years?
havn't you reskilled in C# yet? Java is not the same as COBOL, whereas those old COBOL apps will still be running 50 years (IBM'll see to it they do, so no-one needs to re-engineer their system), you are now on the downward slope to obsolescence in favour of this century's 'must-have' language fashion accessory.
I think its pants too, but that's what the software vendors have foisted upon us.
Apache, Lighttpd and my current favorite nginx are awesome, but they dont have the close integration with their development tools and operating system that IIS does. Speaking of development tools... there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
True, the web servers just serve webs, they don't have integrated debugging engines that IIS has... oh, wait a minute... lets take the most common web language for apache - PHP. Can you debug live PHP sites? I suppose you can. All you need to do it either know how to already, or use Google like everyone else. Failing that, you could always go to the Zend site and see what resources they have to help you (a little like going to the Microsoft site when you need information. I'd stick with Google though)
If you want an open source equivalent of Visual Studio, there's the biggie - Eclipse. That has plugins for every kind of development environment you'll ever want (just like VS where you plugin C#, VB.net, C++ modules). If you wanted something more lightweight so you can run several of them, try google again.
As for MSDN, its true MSDN is wonderful, well it was, before they deleted most pages in favour of the "this is how .net does it" versions. But on Linux you have man pages - but they're more the equivalent of technet, for programming APIs, you do have to go to the API you want, try google and bookmark the page where you got the API from. eg for Perl, there's wonderfully comprehensive documentation that actually puts MSDN to shame, for PHP - go to Zend site and see for yourself.
You have to do this anyway, even with MSDN. If you want to code Perl, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, etc - MSDN is useless to you. Even supported languages are not the best - try javascript reference in MSDN. The web's better.
But I guess, if you only want to know the VB.NET language reference, and the .NET framework then VS and MSDN are all you need. All in one handy container that you'll never think to look outside of.
Now its true that most applications run on Windows so you don't need Linux (shame really), and that MS has woken up to the areas were Linux shone (eg web serving) and is taking market share from it. I, however, think that this doesn't matter - as long as the applications are free, if everyone ran them on Windows it would cripple Microsoft. Why bother buying Office if OOo is acceptable? If MS loses all that revenue (and it has a big mouth to feed) then it will wither away quite quickly. Linux doesn't *have* to take market share from Windows. I think 5 years from now things will be different in the software world.
you forgot the best ones in Office 2007:
Groove 2007
* Work together and share information with team members -- anywhere, anytime and with anybody (erm, with team members or with anyone? Besides what stupid non-descriptive name there ever was)
InfoPath 2007
* Collect and manage data with ease. Extend the reach of your business with rich electronic forms. fair enough, this actually tells you what it does, silly name for a forms engine though)
Visio 2007
* Visualise, explore and communicate complex information, systems and processes (still a stupid name for a layout application)
OneNote 2007
* Gather your information in one place; quickly find what you need; share your notes and information (hang on, doesn't Groove do sharing and InfoPath do data collection?)
Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
* Help organisations improve performance by integrating monitoring, analysis and planning into a single application.(planning?)
just one thing please, stop calling users "lusers". Users are the reasons we have computers, just because some are ignorant speaks more about the elitism, poor state of HCI and usability, poor state of education and the too-rapidly changing software environment than anything else.
It also weakens your good responses and makes you sound stupid.
just tell her "its like having a mac". Then she might twig why she can;t go to best buy and buy some Windows software.
People are familiar with Macs, that they're different, that they're superior (so the mac people keep saying ;) ), that they're more specialised for certain kinds of task. In many, many ways Linux is a lot like that.
call in is like so last century dude. Status changes tend to be computerised - you type in the 2 digit short-message code and press send, similar to texting in the '10' codes to the control centre.
what you need:
1. ability to eavesdrop on digital communication traffic, including relay-mode from one handset through another to the base station.
2. ability to decrypt IDEA or AES128 encrypted traffic
3. ability to keep it quiet from the cops, and military (who also use TETRA communications).
even if you get a handset, you'll still need to be part of the right keygroup
the thing I don't get is... why is this news? We already do do this.
999 calls are already pinpointed, either by EISEC address lookup, or mobile ellipse (unfortunately most mobiles don't give out the exact location, but it has to be inferred from mast/cell positions)
Officer handsets already return vehicle-location co-ordinates (depending on the handset, of course), but all Airwave (the UK's emergency service 'radio' network) handsets provide this.
As for 'officer emergency' issues, they have a red button on the handsets, press it, and it starts spamming out location packets and forces opens a channel to the control centre so an operator can hear everything that goes on.
Disclaimer: I write control centre software, including that used at neighbouring Suffolk Constabulary.
I doubt it, why would they bother with MySQL (unless its part of an 'upgrade' path to SQL Server).
MS already has SQL Server express, and developer edition versions so I'm not sure why they'd want to take MySQL on. I'm sure they're just waiting for Access to die naturally, or only keeping it around for legacy reasons.
And as for Java, they made J++ so this is 5 years too late for them, they don;t want Java now - they're more interested in converting Java devs to C# (and Windows lock-in, obviously)
However, you may have added to it.
yeah, I think I should have taken time with that post instead of clicking send so readily. Perhaps I should have refreshed my limited knowledge a bit on wikipedia first :-)
traditionally companies return money to shareholders in the form of dividends, it makes them attractive to long-term holders like pension funds, and is good for tax in some cases. However, recently it has become fashionable for the buy-back instead. Companies think it'll increase their share price and that's all that matters (to their executive's bonuses, naturally).
to be fair, the British government didn't deliberately starve the Irish, instead they were proponents of 'free market forces'. They didn't have supermarkets or microwave readymeals in those days, so a staple foodstuff like the potato was pretty much all you ate anyway. Of course, if you were rich you could afford meat - like the cattle raised in Ireland for English tables. The landlords got richer and the poor stayed poor.
The trouble was that the blight reduced the number of potatoes in circulation, and as other people were richer, they could afford to pay more - and so the farmers shipped their potatoes to the richer people, leaving the peasants to starve. As has always been the way.
Incidentally the British didn't deliberately starve the people - after they'd woken up to the trouble, they did ship in large amounts of aid and close the ports to food exports. Too late for most of course, but don't get incompetence confused with conspiracy.
There's been too much FUD about the potato famine, I suppose spread for modern political reasons. The truth is just dull, the government took a 'light touch' approach to the markets. Unfortunately this approach to 'hands off' free-trade doesn't give what society requires, with such lax input from governments, the free market doesn't always work correctly and you have monopolies appearing and abusing the freedom that should be providing a better set of choices. For computers, its no good saying "you could run Linux" if everyone needs to run Windows because of the ubiquity of software running on it.
Protectionism is the last thing you want, when you get that, you invite stagnation. There's no innovation of growth, the established parties simply try to maintain their market with what they've got. Developing new products is a significant cost - and without free trade getting in the way and allowing new entrants to the market, there's no incentive to spend. Of course you might get new upstarts appearing, but that happens so rarely, and most of them are small and get killed off by the established big players either by being bought out (name any MS product really) or having their market destroyed (eg IE v Netscape).
Ultimately the government needs to step in and support open standards, making sure everyone works with them. Then you can have much better spread of heterogeneous systems as they would work together, giving people the ability to choose an alternative to the dominant product.
Its easy to say they are losing money. Q4 2008 net cashflow: $-2bn. Part of that loss was down to financing and investing activities. If they portfolio's like the rest of ours, next quarter will be a lot more lost than that!
So if you lose 2bn one quarter, maybe 3bn next quarter... pretty soon you're going to be down to your last billion in the bank. That's how companies go bankrupt, unless they can pull round their expenditures to cover this (and persuade everyone to upgrade to Win7: analysts expect MS to gather £1.5bn in revenue from Win7 sales), they could be on a downward trend over the next few years. Remember, no-one gives a hoot what you did in the past, financials are entirely focussed on your future prospects.
sure they are that bad. A CFL draws roughly half the power it emits as light (if you see what I mean) giving a power factor of about 0.5, which is dreadfully inefficient.
However, power factor refers to the current load, so a CFL of 0.5 will draw twice the current, but it will still be drawing the wattage it claims. So yes, they need to shove more current down the wires, but its costing you the rated watts.
Also, the CFL will be rated at 13W, the comparable IL at 60W. even if the CFL is drawing twice the current, its still using a quarter of the energy used by the incandescent.
Put it another way, a 60W incandescent draws 0.5 amps (60W/ 120V = 0.5). A 0.5 PF CFL at 13W draws 0.2 amps (13W/120/0.5)
I doubt its a serious blow against CFLs, just a serious attempt at FUD to talk up ILs, or an attempt to justify power companies charging you more (as that 13W lamp still costs you for 13W even if the power company has to deliver more).
Here's an less sensational article about the problem.
I'm not entirely sure it should, but if you've been sold a piece of music, after 50 years you get to keep it, share it, rip it, use bits of it etc. Why should software really be different? And if you're allowed to use pieces of music, why not pieces of software. Just because the source code is not publicly visible during its active life, there's no reason why it can't be made public afterwards.
The concept of the copyright expiry is that by that time the work is effectively valueless, so giving the source shouldn't be a problem for anyone by then.
Just imagine if you went to the large corporations. My main customer runs a callcentre on NT4. We're only just getting rid of it to upgrade to something more modern.... XP.
No, I kid you not, but it should be fine for another 10 years before they have to shell out another few hundred k to upgrade the PCs.
there's always copyright laws - if software was regulated by copyright (instead of patents) then after the lifetime of the copyright ran out (50 years IIRC, and the music industry hasn't had it extended) then the source could be made publicly available.
It would not help in this case (not unless software copyright length was measured in "internet years")(or XP is still being used far into the future), but its a suggestion to make things fair and unbiased.
good point, just the other day someone from MS was saying how they've taken over 95% of the netbook market, and last I looked, those little netbooks weren't running Vista.
They should keep support for x years after sales ended, not the other way round.
It's interesting that the failures of technological companies are often social failures, not fundamentally technological failures.
True, but often its the technical failures that presage these (after all, if everything worked fine, why would there be a social problem to solve?!)
From TFA:
The other major issue was that baseball considered Silverlight too unstable. There were some high-profile glitches, including last year's opening day, which saw many MLB.com subscribers struggling to log in and others who were unable to watch games. The malfunctions lasted several days.
They then go on to review NetFlix's problems that were suspected of being a Silverlight issue.
I suspect the only social failure in this case was MS's inability to hype silverlight up so much that any technical issues were blamed elsewhere and not on silverlight itself.
on the other hand, "stall-ma-nux" is probably quite a cool name. Now say it in your best Cartman voice, see what I mean. :)
Well no, in reality they should take out the Vista-specific wording and leave it as a generic, all-purpose "No buying thousands of licenses of anything without approval" rule.
sure, lets take out that Vista wording then... ... provision forbidding government agencies from upgrading to Windows [snip] without written consent of the legislature
works for me :-)
so "the speed of Java", from GP, is a perfect description of this
and I thought he was being ironic.
I suppose it *should* be really fast, but combine with all the exceptions in the framework object-oriented layers, the lax approach to memory management (which leads to hundreds of GCs per second), the 'lets be safe' approach to multithreading locks, etc... just be grateful that computers are so unbelieveably fast and memory so cheap nowadays, you'd never have run Java or .net on a computer just a few years ago unless it was an 'enterprise' app running on a cluster.
Now just think what you could do with something more efficient, even if it meant developers had to have more skill than they currently do.