Yes, give people credit, but not necessarily with money or gifts, give them public recognition. Movies do it with line credits and special thanks sections. I know that as a developer I really feel good when a solid app goes out the door and my name is on it, even if it's just buried under the "About" box.
It's pretty easy to see that the wider the diameter of a wire, the less resistance it has. I'm not sure what you're basing your info on.
You're right that they step up the voltage and use low current and then use the transformer box on your house to convert it back into low voltage, higher current power to run your appliances, but regardless of the voltage, the thicker the wire, the less the resistance and thus the less heat given off by the wire.
It's because they need to use thick wires that they use aluminum to run power lines instead of copper, because copper is too expensive to produce that much wire.
I really don't think you can transfer electricity very far without losing a lot of it. That much wire just builds up in resistance too quickly even with those big fat wires they hang.
This probably belonged in my initial post, but don't forget all the talk of "moving coastlines" that the global warming people keep harping about. If the ocean level moves, what happens to the power? Flooded or dried up. Either way, not very stable.
I think the whole harness the ocean thing is cool, but not very practical for powering the planet. Maybe little pieces of it.
This would be great for people near a shoreline with good enough wave action to get it going, but transporting the electricity from the coast, to say, Nebraska wouldn't be very cost effective. Even if you were on the coast, I wonder how many of the coasts near major population centers have enough wave action to make this worthwhile. It would be cool if it really is "low cost" and available though.
Right on. From a personal level, I would probably take the "install once and forever version", but as someone who actually works closely with our IT department, THIS IS THEIR DREAM. Because you pay a cheap price for Office 10 and then next year you pay for Office 11. You save money because you have much less cost put into old software and can more easily keep up with the latest versions.
This is a great choice. And I agree with you, Microsoft isn't going to go to a subscription only model. That's just doomsaying from people who hate Microsoft so much they can't take it when they try anything new.
Don't we have monopoly laws because monopolies stagnate the market? It's a pretty mixed message when that MS adversaries are sending and/. readers too when they attack exactly the practices they say Microsoft doesn't have.
Fair enough. I just think it's Sun's place to advertise their stuff as cross-platform and to pick up extra business because of it. If their stuff is really so much better then they shouldn't have to bad-mouth other software vendors to make themselves look better. A way I would support their claim is if they released benchmarks for their software compared to Microsoft's across multiple platforms and their just was no line for MS on the other platforms. That would get their point across in a totally fair way that I think would be good business.
I agree, it's not a direct comparison, but that's why I think the comments I was responding to merited the response. They're different things and the original comment quoted from Sun was really unnecessary and in bad taste. As much as people ridicule Microsoft, I don't see them making official posts that bad-talk a specific company (oh boy, I just set myself up for some replies if anyone is still reading this thread). Perhaps I'm overreacting a bit, but after attending a trade show once where a Sun exec was speaking, I've had a bad taste in my mouth about their intentions ever since. This guy was fanatical, almost to the level of Larry Ellison, but not quite. And I've seen other things like this that all slant the same direction.
I really resent Sun's "handcuffs" statement and the post by jbischof that started this whole thing. I understand people's dislike of some of the things Microsoft has done, but that doesn't make their product bad. In the case of.NET and in VB, what they're trying to do is create something that widens the market and lends itself to rapid development. Not all companies can pay a top consultant to come in and work through the intricacies of other platforms. It's a good business model.
As to some of their other practices that were unfair like their packaging deals with computer resellers, I think they deserve any punishment they get. That's flat out wrong. Maybe there were some happenings like that for the whole JavaScript thing and I just missed it, but it seemed more to me like they were just reacting to a new language that was really hot and talked about. And if that pushes Sun to keep improving their product to have a better one than Microsoft, then that's cool with me.
Sorry that my getting some actual benefit out of Slashdot and thanking someone for their useful info with something other than Karma pained you so much.
I'm sorry if I was unclear. I'm not saying any language is 'better' than C++ in general, just better for certain cases. For what you were working on, I think your decision was probably the best one you could have made. But for somebody wanting to write an app to interface with a database to track sales or do time entry, or practically anything business related, C++ simply takes too long because it makes things that are simple in VB very complex and you don't get any measurable performance benefit. Once again, for the scenario you described, more power to you. Anything that needs to be highly efficient is better off on a unix"like" system. Real-time = NOT Windows in my opinion.
I'm sorry VB didn't work out for you. I'm not sure what you mean by "Mountain of Hacks". What do you do now and WHY is it better? I've had a lot of success with VB and don't see any explanations of your flames against it. Convince me.
Actually, my comment has been marked as 'Insightful' twice, not flamebait and if you read the replies and my replies to those, you'll see that the rest of us were having an intelligent conversation.
All I get from your post is "you like MS platform, I don't". Good for you. Don't use it. Nothing is being crammed anywhere.
I write for other platforms too and I happen to find writing for MS a lot easier than the others. If the others were as easy then perhaps they would be as successful.
Welcome to my qualified opinion. Please take it as such in the future.
I have only dabbled with Perl and I did like a lot of things that it offered. I can't really say much other than that because I'm just not an expert in it. The thing that strikes me as the advantage of VB is that I can use it for the web, I can use it for desktop applications, I can use it as server scriptlets to automate other programs such as the Office Suite or many other non-MS affiliated products, etc.. One language for all of these things! Maybe you can do some of that stuff in Perl too and I just don't realize it so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
What tools do you use for your Perl development?
I understand where you're coming from, but I have to disagree from my experience in the industry. I think that people miss the primary reason for creating high-level languages. It's to make it easier and faster to write useful code. You just can't beat VB for this.
I'm not saying that interpreted Java isn't the right solution for SOME problems. Like I said, I use it rather frequently for things that really need to actually run on several platforms. Where I'm taking issue with your statement is really with your last comment in your reply. If you write something that works on the Microsoft/x86 platform, you've already reached the great majority of the places it's going to be used. And it's easier. You've gotten the most bang for the buck available in all the programming world. For each platform you want to support, it takes longer and consequently costs more money. Sometimes that's okay, sometimes trying to please everyone makes the project overly ambitious. Lots of times you really only DO need to support Windows users to be the most successful.
I think Microsoft's approach has been far from perfect, but is in many ways the best game in town. They wanted to hit the largest portion of the population they could and make it easy for programmers to adopt their language. I think the concept behind making Java was a good one, but Sun the corporation swung from their goal of creating something that would help people to something that would hurt Microsoft. And that's not what it's supposed to really be all about.
To swing back to the.NET discussion, I think this is really a simple proof of what I just said. Sun isn't concerned with whether or not their stuff will actually be useful. They're more concerned with bashing Microsoft. I much prefer the route Linux has taken. For the most part it has taken care of it's own business and grown to fill a niche that has since expanded and expanded because it has become a solid product. I think Sun should learn a lesson from this and concentrate on what they're doing instead of trying to counter Microsoft all the time. Ultimately, that's a losing strategy. They're letting MS run the game and putting themselves in the catch-up role.
Sounds like you've never programmed for rapid development or on a budget before. VB is plenty powerful for what most people need and takes a third the time to code in my experience. As someone who started out gung-ho C++ and who writes at least ten lines of Java a day, I feel pretty safe saying that VB is one of the best things that could have come along for businesses that want an application up quickly that performs acceptably. C++ may have a performance edge, but when combined with the latency of your network or the Internet, it doesn't make a bit of difference. Plus, the increased control you have with C++ or Java doesn't really gain you anything you can't accomplish more easily with VB, just more effort with greatly diminishing returns.
As for platform independence, I think it's highly overrated by slashdot readers. All it really does is force you to leave out advanced features and code for the weakest link in the system. Don't get me wrong, I have to swallow the pill and dumb down a lot of the work I do so it will run correctly on a Mac or Netscape to reach all of the target audience sometimes, but much 'sweeter' applications can be developed in LESS time if you consentrate on a target platform.
Lastly on platform independence, just realize that Java isn't any more platform independent than anything else, it's just got an interpreter that has been written for each platform! If a new platform comes out, it won't run Java at all until someone writes an interpreter for it and when new releases of Java come out Macs and other platforms lag behind on the new releases so you STILL get code that doesn't work everywhere.
Microsoft utilized VB to allow one easy to use, fast language to work across the most popular platform. I think they did more for application development with that move than all the effect Java has had being just another language to learn that still can only be used in certain places.
Oh, I don't think we'll see a lot of progress right away with nano-tech, but I think it will be revolutionary in the next few decades and it's a good idea to start thinking about what it could mean. When Fermi was inventing the first electric generator, he didn't have any idea what it would do to the world, he just thought it was cool that he could make a current with a magnet and some wire. The difference between his times and ours is that anytime something like this comes along now, there are thousands working on it all over the world thanks to global communication so the revolution can be much quicker. Also, those less scrupulous have a lot more access to cutting edge technology information than ever before.
Look for this to become a serious industry as techniques for creating this stuff improve and new uses are found for things. If high-tech development has shown us anything throughout history it is that as soon as humans discover they can do something, they find a reason to.
Richard Smalley, one of the guys who got the Nobel back in '96 for discovering the C-60 bucky-ball has founded a company for making nanotubes cheaply. (http://cnanotech.com) I'm both anxious and a little frightened to see what science starts coming up with once it starts getting cheap to work with this stuff!
So I've noticed. Quake III had a deal where if you were getting around 128 fps you could jump a couple of pixels higher and make some jumps that weren't otherwise possible. An interesting side feature of good frames!
I don't think so, as a user of both Oracle and Microsoft products on a daily basis I think Oracle makes a lot of irresponsible claims about their competitor. I guess nobody thinks it's a travesty of justice when the big boy on the block gets picked on. When Microsot tries to point this out, THEY'RE the ones who get flamed. My real point is that Ellison is fanatic who is only really interested in taking down Microsoft so HE can be the big boy instead of just worrying about his own product. Take what he says with a grain of salt.
I used to proclaim to my friends with sweet setups that over 60+ fps was all the same until I got a GeForce. The human eye may not be able to distinguish the difference, but the playability still goes up. With the higher frames you are more likely to get that millisecond jump start on someone that doesn't have it and the world is displayed more smoothly the higher up you go.
Putting a man anywhere takes ten times as much money as robotic missions. We put a man on the moon simply so we could say we did it before the Russians (who never did it). Until there's actually something useful a person can do out there other than hit a golf ball or almost get killed, it doesn't make any sense to send a man to do a robot's work.
I think this headline really misses the point of what Microsoft is trying to do. They're just defending their product against unfair claims and trying to find a legal way to do it. I don't think it's the best way, but I do think it is pretty unfair for Oracle to insinuate that SQL Server is optimized for benchmarks and then to show off examples that are optimized for Oracle. Oracle is just slandering Microsoft because Ellison has an inferiority complex and Bill is too nerdy to know how to fight back.
Slashdot Mirror
by IBM. Even Microsoft is using ideas like this in new versions of IIS.
Yes, give people credit, but not necessarily with money or gifts, give them public recognition. Movies do it with line credits and special thanks sections. I know that as a developer I really feel good when a solid app goes out the door and my name is on it, even if it's just buried under the "About" box.
It's pretty easy to see that the wider the diameter of a wire, the less resistance it has. I'm not sure what you're basing your info on.
You're right that they step up the voltage and use low current and then use the transformer box on your house to convert it back into low voltage, higher current power to run your appliances, but regardless of the voltage, the thicker the wire, the less the resistance and thus the less heat given off by the wire.
It's because they need to use thick wires that they use aluminum to run power lines instead of copper, because copper is too expensive to produce that much wire.
I really don't think you can transfer electricity very far without losing a lot of it. That much wire just builds up in resistance too quickly even with those big fat wires they hang.
This probably belonged in my initial post, but don't forget all the talk of "moving coastlines" that the global warming people keep harping about. If the ocean level moves, what happens to the power? Flooded or dried up. Either way, not very stable.
I think the whole harness the ocean thing is cool, but not very practical for powering the planet. Maybe little pieces of it.
This would be great for people near a shoreline with good enough wave action to get it going, but transporting the electricity from the coast, to say, Nebraska wouldn't be very cost effective. Even if you were on the coast, I wonder how many of the coasts near major population centers have enough wave action to make this worthwhile. It would be cool if it really is "low cost" and available though.
Right on. From a personal level, I would probably take the "install once and forever version", but as someone who actually works closely with our IT department, THIS IS THEIR DREAM. Because you pay a cheap price for Office 10 and then next year you pay for Office 11. You save money because you have much less cost put into old software and can more easily keep up with the latest versions.
/. readers too when they attack exactly the practices they say Microsoft doesn't have.
This is a great choice. And I agree with you, Microsoft isn't going to go to a subscription only model. That's just doomsaying from people who hate Microsoft so much they can't take it when they try anything new.
Don't we have monopoly laws because monopolies stagnate the market? It's a pretty mixed message when that MS adversaries are sending and
Fair enough. I just think it's Sun's place to advertise their stuff as cross-platform and to pick up extra business because of it. If their stuff is really so much better then they shouldn't have to bad-mouth other software vendors to make themselves look better. A way I would support their claim is if they released benchmarks for their software compared to Microsoft's across multiple platforms and their just was no line for MS on the other platforms. That would get their point across in a totally fair way that I think would be good business.
I agree, it's not a direct comparison, but that's why I think the comments I was responding to merited the response. They're different things and the original comment quoted from Sun was really unnecessary and in bad taste. As much as people ridicule Microsoft, I don't see them making official posts that bad-talk a specific company (oh boy, I just set myself up for some replies if anyone is still reading this thread). Perhaps I'm overreacting a bit, but after attending a trade show once where a Sun exec was speaking, I've had a bad taste in my mouth about their intentions ever since. This guy was fanatical, almost to the level of Larry Ellison, but not quite. And I've seen other things like this that all slant the same direction.
.NET and in VB, what they're trying to do is create something that widens the market and lends itself to rapid development. Not all companies can pay a top consultant to come in and work through the intricacies of other platforms. It's a good business model.
I really resent Sun's "handcuffs" statement and the post by jbischof that started this whole thing. I understand people's dislike of some of the things Microsoft has done, but that doesn't make their product bad. In the case of
As to some of their other practices that were unfair like their packaging deals with computer resellers, I think they deserve any punishment they get. That's flat out wrong. Maybe there were some happenings like that for the whole JavaScript thing and I just missed it, but it seemed more to me like they were just reacting to a new language that was really hot and talked about. And if that pushes Sun to keep improving their product to have a better one than Microsoft, then that's cool with me.
Sorry that my getting some actual benefit out of Slashdot and thanking someone for their useful info with something other than Karma pained you so much.
I'm sorry if I was unclear. I'm not saying any language is 'better' than C++ in general, just better for certain cases. For what you were working on, I think your decision was probably the best one you could have made. But for somebody wanting to write an app to interface with a database to track sales or do time entry, or practically anything business related, C++ simply takes too long because it makes things that are simple in VB very complex and you don't get any measurable performance benefit. Once again, for the scenario you described, more power to you. Anything that needs to be highly efficient is better off on a unix"like" system. Real-time = NOT Windows in my opinion.
I'm sorry VB didn't work out for you. I'm not sure what you mean by "Mountain of Hacks". What do you do now and WHY is it better? I've had a lot of success with VB and don't see any explanations of your flames against it. Convince me.
Actually, my comment has been marked as 'Insightful' twice, not flamebait and if you read the replies and my replies to those, you'll see that the rest of us were having an intelligent conversation.
All I get from your post is "you like MS platform, I don't". Good for you. Don't use it. Nothing is being crammed anywhere.
I write for other platforms too and I happen to find writing for MS a lot easier than the others. If the others were as easy then perhaps they would be as successful.
Welcome to my qualified opinion. Please take it as such in the future.
I have only dabbled with Perl and I did like a lot of things that it offered. I can't really say much other than that because I'm just not an expert in it. The thing that strikes me as the advantage of VB is that I can use it for the web, I can use it for desktop applications, I can use it as server scriptlets to automate other programs such as the Office Suite or many other non-MS affiliated products, etc.. One language for all of these things! Maybe you can do some of that stuff in Perl too and I just don't realize it so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. What tools do you use for your Perl development?
I understand where you're coming from, but I have to disagree from my experience in the industry. I think that people miss the primary reason for creating high-level languages. It's to make it easier and faster to write useful code. You just can't beat VB for this.
.NET discussion, I think this is really a simple proof of what I just said. Sun isn't concerned with whether or not their stuff will actually be useful. They're more concerned with bashing Microsoft. I much prefer the route Linux has taken. For the most part it has taken care of it's own business and grown to fill a niche that has since expanded and expanded because it has become a solid product. I think Sun should learn a lesson from this and concentrate on what they're doing instead of trying to counter Microsoft all the time. Ultimately, that's a losing strategy. They're letting MS run the game and putting themselves in the catch-up role.
I'm not saying that interpreted Java isn't the right solution for SOME problems. Like I said, I use it rather frequently for things that really need to actually run on several platforms. Where I'm taking issue with your statement is really with your last comment in your reply. If you write something that works on the Microsoft/x86 platform, you've already reached the great majority of the places it's going to be used. And it's easier. You've gotten the most bang for the buck available in all the programming world. For each platform you want to support, it takes longer and consequently costs more money. Sometimes that's okay, sometimes trying to please everyone makes the project overly ambitious. Lots of times you really only DO need to support Windows users to be the most successful.
I think Microsoft's approach has been far from perfect, but is in many ways the best game in town. They wanted to hit the largest portion of the population they could and make it easy for programmers to adopt their language. I think the concept behind making Java was a good one, but Sun the corporation swung from their goal of creating something that would help people to something that would hurt Microsoft. And that's not what it's supposed to really be all about.
To swing back to the
Sounds like you've never programmed for rapid development or on a budget before. VB is plenty powerful for what most people need and takes a third the time to code in my experience. As someone who started out gung-ho C++ and who writes at least ten lines of Java a day, I feel pretty safe saying that VB is one of the best things that could have come along for businesses that want an application up quickly that performs acceptably. C++ may have a performance edge, but when combined with the latency of your network or the Internet, it doesn't make a bit of difference. Plus, the increased control you have with C++ or Java doesn't really gain you anything you can't accomplish more easily with VB, just more effort with greatly diminishing returns.
As for platform independence, I think it's highly overrated by slashdot readers. All it really does is force you to leave out advanced features and code for the weakest link in the system. Don't get me wrong, I have to swallow the pill and dumb down a lot of the work I do so it will run correctly on a Mac or Netscape to reach all of the target audience sometimes, but much 'sweeter' applications can be developed in LESS time if you consentrate on a target platform.
Lastly on platform independence, just realize that Java isn't any more platform independent than anything else, it's just got an interpreter that has been written for each platform! If a new platform comes out, it won't run Java at all until someone writes an interpreter for it and when new releases of Java come out Macs and other platforms lag behind on the new releases so you STILL get code that doesn't work everywhere.
Microsoft utilized VB to allow one easy to use, fast language to work across the most popular platform. I think they did more for application development with that move than all the effect Java has had being just another language to learn that still can only be used in certain places.
Oh, and thanks about the earlier article. I hadn't seen it.
Oh, I don't think we'll see a lot of progress right away with nano-tech, but I think it will be revolutionary in the next few decades and it's a good idea to start thinking about what it could mean. When Fermi was inventing the first electric generator, he didn't have any idea what it would do to the world, he just thought it was cool that he could make a current with a magnet and some wire. The difference between his times and ours is that anytime something like this comes along now, there are thousands working on it all over the world thanks to global communication so the revolution can be much quicker. Also, those less scrupulous have a lot more access to cutting edge technology information than ever before.
Look for this to become a serious industry as techniques for creating this stuff improve and new uses are found for things. If high-tech development has shown us anything throughout history it is that as soon as humans discover they can do something, they find a reason to. Richard Smalley, one of the guys who got the Nobel back in '96 for discovering the C-60 bucky-ball has founded a company for making nanotubes cheaply. (http://cnanotech.com) I'm both anxious and a little frightened to see what science starts coming up with once it starts getting cheap to work with this stuff!
So I've noticed. Quake III had a deal where if you were getting around 128 fps you could jump a couple of pixels higher and make some jumps that weren't otherwise possible. An interesting side feature of good frames!
I don't think so, as a user of both Oracle and Microsoft products on a daily basis I think Oracle makes a lot of irresponsible claims about their competitor. I guess nobody thinks it's a travesty of justice when the big boy on the block gets picked on. When Microsot tries to point this out, THEY'RE the ones who get flamed. My real point is that Ellison is fanatic who is only really interested in taking down Microsoft so HE can be the big boy instead of just worrying about his own product. Take what he says with a grain of salt.
I used to proclaim to my friends with sweet setups that over 60+ fps was all the same until I got a GeForce. The human eye may not be able to distinguish the difference, but the playability still goes up. With the higher frames you are more likely to get that millisecond jump start on someone that doesn't have it and the world is displayed more smoothly the higher up you go.
Putting a man anywhere takes ten times as much money as robotic missions. We put a man on the moon simply so we could say we did it before the Russians (who never did it). Until there's actually something useful a person can do out there other than hit a golf ball or almost get killed, it doesn't make any sense to send a man to do a robot's work.
I think this headline really misses the point of what Microsoft is trying to do. They're just defending their product against unfair claims and trying to find a legal way to do it. I don't think it's the best way, but I do think it is pretty unfair for Oracle to insinuate that SQL Server is optimized for benchmarks and then to show off examples that are optimized for Oracle. Oracle is just slandering Microsoft because Ellison has an inferiority complex and Bill is too nerdy to know how to fight back.