"You do realise that Java grew out of Oak, which was a language and runtime environment for programming set-top boxes?"
Absolutely. I consider the business failure of Oak-based set-top boxes to be evidence that Gosling et al didn't know much about embedded systems. What embedded systems had they developed that would give them insight into how to create a language for one?
"There's also J2ME, which I have used to implement applications on handheld devices such as scanners."
It's true that now that vasts amounts of memory are available at low prices, it's practical for developers to use J2ME or Windows CE as the basis for embedded systems that don't have hard real-time requirements.
When comparing languages either for features or speed the only reasonable approach is to include any standard libraries in the analysis. Otherwise you end up with conclusions like "C is a bad language because you can't do I/O with it". So, yes, it's understandable that there are cross-platform compromises in Java that any language would have, but that doesn't make your GUI applications run any faster.
I guess I was looking for benchmarks or specific applications that could be compared side-by-side. Simply stating that your performance is better isn't proof.
I think Java from start to finish was designed primary by MOR IT developers who are used to a lot of resources and have little or no experience in real-time or embedded environments.
I have plenty of examples for you where our Java code is not only faster than competitors written in C or C++, but the margin of speed differences are double or greater."
For a guy demanding proof you might actually tell us about these examples you "have plenty of".
Your theory is that the GPLv2 version will be obsoleted by changes made by MS, but somehow this will not be a problem for the GPLv3 version. If MS is always making changes, Samba will always be playing catch-up and thus any application depending on Samba will be at the mercy of MS and Samba team's ability to reverse engineer and update Samaba in a timely fashion.
What's interesting to me is the theory I read many years ago that the whole concern about proving that a work of art was original wasn't so much because the original was superior to the copies, but rather to try to preserve the concept of exclusivity (and thus value) that modern technology rendered obsolete. (Note that I'm not claiming that artists' rights are obsolete)
Well, its a "joke" that became a brand. There's no good reason why the "G" for GNU needs to be included in the application's name. The fact that it is, suggests that the GNU "cuteness" is still alive and well. I thought that sort of thing was cute too when I read about it in Metamagical Themas in the mid-80's, but it seems very stale now.
"The "right" to privacy is based on, in this age, willful ignorance; hardly comparable to a directed, intentional assault against another human being's life."
Your statement is right: there's no comparison between believing in a right to privacy and committing a murder.
"Comparing signals intelligence to murder is about on par with comparing illicit copying to stealing."
Having not compared anything to "signals intelligence", I feel no need to justify it.
As service to those who weren't reading carefully, I was comparing the pickup of acoustic speech (yes, such a phrase is redundant but some readers need extra help) at a distance to firing a rifle from a distance. This was not an appeal to emotion, but a demonstration of the logical consequences of a theory that claims that technological advances make rights obsolete.
I think the whole GNU "joke" is getting a bit old and shouldn't be perpended to so many applications. It's a bit like calling it AMWITABIMP (A Man Walks Into A Bar Image Manipulation Program). GCC could be renamed AMWITABCC (A Man Walks Into A Bar Compiler Collection). You get the idea.
"Well, these stupid suckers are gullible enough to program this application for ten years and release all of their work for free! That makes them my-y-y BITCH!"
If a right of privacy is obsolete because technology allows listening from a distance, than a right to life was made obsolete years ago because high-powered rifles can kill you from a distance.
It would be very foolish to abandon a right every time a technology makes it more difficult to protect.
Based on your silence when I asked if independent analysis is performed at your company to correlate interview performance with actual job performance, I think you're just spinning the facts.
I guess you're either not very good at software development, or you're proof that a scientific mindset isn't needed to be a successful software developer.
If the current non-GPLv3 version of Samba actually works, I don't see why one has to have the GPLv3 version to achieve interoperability. If it doesn't, than it's unlikely that the license used is going to improve the technology.
"No, I don't need a "more general sample". The sample I have seen has been biased towards the better applicants, therefore, the rest of the industry gets worse applicants"
You just pile the unsupported assumptions on top of each other. How do you know that your sample is biased towards the better applicants?
"Hiring is so important to companies that they are investing a huge amount of time and money in trying to improve the process."
You can't reliably improve a process if you have no objective way to measure the outcome.
"If you can come up with a demonstrably better process, let the world know about it."
The issue isn't whether I (or anyone else) can come up with a better process, it's whether the process you use is good enough to allow you to draw conclusions about the qualifications of people you have never met and know nothing about. Nothing you've said has convinced me of that.
The fact that a particular guy was reported to be the fastest typist of his time doesn't prove that other people weren't typing fast enough to create the kind of problems that QWERTY may have been designed to solve. No doubt most typists were simply doing their jobs and probably had no knowledge or interest in typing competitions.
"You do realize that QWERTY predates touch-typing?"
Even if you're correct, the fact that there may have not been a formal "touch-typing" method, doesn't mean that people didn't do a form of touch-typing. It's not as if people hadn't been playing musical instruments by touch for centuries before the typewriter was invented.
"Now, is the sample I interviewed representative? Well, it's representative for the kinds of companies I worked at, which tend to attract above average applicants. So, yes, it tells me a lot about the applicant pool that's out there."
Hey, great circular argument. If you want to limit your conclusions to those individuals who actually applied to your companies, I have no problem with that. If you want to draw a more general conclusion, you need a more general sample to be valid.
"Of course, they do: I interview the guy, I have to live with him for at least the next 3 years. It doesn't require great amounts of bookkeeping to correlate my own impressions when I hired the guy with his performance. All those documents are also part of the personnel file, so one can look at them in a single place."
So you write down and preserve all the results of applying your hiring criteria to a particular candidate and those results are always stored in the candidate's personnel file if they are hired? Does some independent party within the company study the hiring criteria and compare it to his performance on the job? Even if all the data were available (and it I suspect it isn't), the potential to study it is different from actually doing the studying. It sounds like you believe your subjective process is a good one and aren't really interested in finding out if it's flawed or could be improved.
"All the companies I have worked at have had quite well-defined and consistently applied criteria: HR makes sure that the candidate's resume meets the formal job requirements, and after that, they hire if and only if several team members give the OK based on interviews."
That's a hiring policy or process, not a well-defined set of criteria.
"Of course, the decision by each team member is a subjective one." That pretty much confirms there is no objective criteria.
That's because nobody has come up with better criteria. Many candidates that would have worked out are rejected that way. That's because accepting a bad candidate is at least as costly than rejecting a good one, and so people tend to set the cut-off for hiring at about where an applicant has a 50/50 chance of working out.
You admit that the criteria is subjective and then jump to the conclusion that somehow this subjective approach tends to weed-out the weaker candidates. Perhaps the opposite is true.
The idea that QWERTY wasn't designed to slow typists down doesn't seem to have much more evidence (i.e somebody said so) than the claim that it was. The difference is that the claim that it was designed to slow typists down has a much longer history (for whatever that it is worth). I first read about that claim around 1972 in Writers Digest magazine.
Prose, poetry, and programs all have their unique needs.
There's no practical limitation that prevents us from studying the effectiveness of a program's line size, so there's no reason to rely on studies that have suspect relevance to programming.
"Do you understand the concept of a "representative sample"?"
I understand that a particular individual's experience in hiring people is extremely unlikely to meet the statistical criteria of a representative sample. Of course any scientific study must also include an objective means for measurement and is valid only to the extent that those measurements are meaningful and valid.
In practice, companies rarely have a well defined and consistently applied criteria to evaluate candidates and make no attempt to correlate that criteria with the actual performance of those they hire. Thus the hiring process remains rather subjective.
Slashdot Mirror
"You do realise that Java grew out of Oak, which was a language and runtime environment for programming set-top boxes?"
Absolutely. I consider the business failure of Oak-based set-top boxes to be evidence that Gosling et al didn't know much about embedded systems. What embedded systems had they developed that would give them insight into how to create a language for one?
"There's also J2ME, which I have used to implement applications on handheld devices such as scanners."
It's true that now that vasts amounts of memory are available at low prices, it's practical for developers to use J2ME or Windows CE as the basis for embedded systems that don't have hard real-time requirements.
When comparing languages either for features or speed the only reasonable approach is to include any standard libraries in the analysis. Otherwise you end up with conclusions like "C is a bad language because you can't do I/O with it". So, yes, it's understandable that there are cross-platform compromises in Java that any language would have, but that doesn't make your GUI applications run any faster.
I guess I was looking for benchmarks or specific applications that could be compared side-by-side. Simply stating that your performance is better isn't proof.
I think Java from start to finish was designed primary by MOR IT developers who are used to a lot of resources and have little or no experience in real-time or embedded environments.
"Please provide proof of your assertions.
I have plenty of examples for you where our Java code is not only faster than competitors written in C or C++, but the margin of speed differences are double or greater."
For a guy demanding proof you might actually tell us about these examples you "have plenty of".
Your theory is that the GPLv2 version will be obsoleted by changes made by MS, but somehow this will not be a problem for the GPLv3 version. If MS is always making changes, Samba will always be playing catch-up and thus any application depending on Samba will be at the mercy of MS and Samba team's ability to reverse engineer and update Samaba in a timely fashion.
What's interesting to me is the theory I read many years ago that the whole concern about proving that a work of art was original wasn't so much because the original was superior to the copies, but rather to try to preserve the concept of exclusivity (and thus value) that modern technology rendered obsolete. (Note that I'm not claiming that artists' rights are obsolete)
Well, its a "joke" that became a brand. There's no good reason why the "G" for GNU needs to be included in the application's name. The fact that it is, suggests that the GNU "cuteness" is still alive and well. I thought that sort of thing was cute too when I read about it in Metamagical Themas in the mid-80's, but it seems very stale now.
"The "right" to privacy is based on, in this age, willful ignorance; hardly comparable to a directed, intentional assault against another human being's life."
Your statement is right: there's no comparison between believing in a right to privacy and committing a murder.
"Comparing signals intelligence to murder is about on par with comparing illicit copying to stealing."
Having not compared anything to "signals intelligence", I feel no need to justify it.
As service to those who weren't reading carefully, I was comparing the pickup of acoustic speech (yes, such a phrase is redundant but some readers need extra help) at a distance to firing a rifle from a distance. This was not an appeal to emotion, but a demonstration of the logical consequences of a theory that claims that technological advances make rights obsolete.
I think the whole GNU "joke" is getting a bit old and shouldn't be perpended to so many applications. It's a bit like calling it AMWITABIMP (A Man Walks Into A Bar Image Manipulation Program). GCC could be renamed AMWITABCC (A Man Walks Into A Bar Compiler Collection). You get the idea.
"Well, these stupid suckers are gullible enough to program this application for ten years and release all of their work for free! That makes them my-y-y BITCH!"
The bitch doth bitch too much, me thinks.
If a right of privacy is obsolete because technology allows listening from a distance, than a right to life was made obsolete years ago because high-powered rifles can kill you from a distance.
It would be very foolish to abandon a right every time a technology makes it more difficult to protect.
Based on your silence when I asked if independent analysis is performed at your company to correlate interview performance with actual job performance, I think you're just spinning the facts.
I guess you're either not very good at software development, or you're proof that a scientific mindset isn't needed to be a successful software developer.
If that's true then it sounds like Samba isn't (won't) be a very reliable way to interoperate.
If the current non-GPLv3 version of Samba actually works, I don't see why one has to have the GPLv3 version to achieve interoperability. If it doesn't, than it's unlikely that the license used is going to improve the technology.
"No, I don't need a "more general sample". The sample I have seen has been biased towards the better applicants, therefore, the rest of the industry gets worse applicants"
You just pile the unsupported assumptions on top of each other. How do you know that your sample is biased towards the better applicants?
"Hiring is so important to companies that they are investing a huge amount of time and money in trying to improve the process."
You can't reliably improve a process if you have no objective way to measure the outcome.
"If you can come up with a demonstrably better process, let the world know about it."
The issue isn't whether I (or anyone else) can come up with a better process, it's whether the process you use is good enough to allow you to draw conclusions about the qualifications of people you have never met and know nothing about. Nothing you've said has convinced me of that.
The fact that a particular guy was reported to be the fastest typist of his time doesn't prove that other people weren't typing fast enough to create the kind of problems that QWERTY may have been designed to solve. No doubt most typists were simply doing their jobs and probably had no knowledge or interest in typing competitions.
"You do realize that QWERTY predates touch-typing?"
Even if you're correct, the fact that there may have not been a formal "touch-typing" method, doesn't mean that people didn't do a form of touch-typing. It's not as if people hadn't been playing musical instruments by touch for centuries before the typewriter was invented.
"Now, is the sample I interviewed representative? Well, it's representative for the kinds of companies I worked at, which tend to attract above average applicants. So, yes, it tells me a lot about the applicant pool that's out there."
Hey, great circular argument. If you want to limit your conclusions to those individuals who actually applied to your companies, I have no problem with that. If you want to draw a more general conclusion, you need a more general sample to be valid.
"Of course, they do: I interview the guy, I have to live with him for at least the next 3 years. It doesn't require great amounts of bookkeeping to correlate my own impressions when I hired the guy with his performance. All those documents are also part of the personnel file, so one can look at them in a single place."
So you write down and preserve all the results of applying your hiring criteria to a particular candidate and those results are always stored in the candidate's personnel file if they are hired? Does some independent party within the company study the hiring criteria and compare it to his performance on the job? Even if all the data were available (and it I suspect it isn't), the potential to study it is different from actually doing the studying. It sounds like you believe your subjective process is a good one and aren't really interested in finding out if it's flawed or could be improved.
"All the companies I have worked at have had quite well-defined and consistently applied criteria: HR makes sure that the candidate's resume meets the formal job requirements, and after that, they hire if and only if several team members give the OK based on interviews."
That's a hiring policy or process, not a well-defined set of criteria.
"Of course, the decision by each team member is a subjective one."
That pretty much confirms there is no objective criteria.
That's because nobody has come up with better criteria. Many candidates that would have worked out are rejected that way. That's because accepting a bad candidate is at least as costly than rejecting a good one, and so people tend to set the cut-off for hiring at about where an applicant has a 50/50 chance of working out.
You admit that the criteria is subjective and then jump to the conclusion that somehow this subjective approach tends to weed-out the weaker candidates. Perhaps the opposite is true.
The idea that QWERTY wasn't designed to slow typists down doesn't seem to have much more evidence (i.e somebody said so) than the claim that it was. The difference is that the claim that it was designed to slow typists down has a much longer history (for whatever that it is worth). I first read about that claim around 1972 in Writers Digest magazine.
Prose, poetry, and programs all have their unique needs.
There's no practical limitation that prevents us from studying the effectiveness of a program's line size, so there's no reason to rely on studies that have suspect relevance to programming.
http://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/dvorak2.html
It's a misconception that the programming field is all about writing lines of code.
"Do you understand the concept of a "representative sample"?"
I understand that a particular individual's experience in hiring people is extremely unlikely to meet the statistical criteria of a representative sample. Of course any scientific study must also include an objective means for measurement and is valid only to the extent that those measurements are meaningful and valid.
In practice, companies rarely have a well defined and consistently applied criteria to evaluate candidates and make no attempt to correlate that criteria with the actual performance of those they hire. Thus the hiring process remains rather subjective.