Java is multiplatform (.NET will not be unless Microsoft is split up, then it may be ported to Linux)
Actually, I'd argue that Java is monoplatform.. Java *is* the platform, whatever hardware and software underneath is largely invisible and largely inaccessible without creating a specially configured binary package with.dll's or.so's and JNI interfacing.
One advantage I can see to.NET, and one that Microsoft is clearly counting on, is that you could write software that deeply interacts with the hosting platform at the same time that it interacts over the net using SOAP. In this sense, I expect to see a specific piece of.NET code be a lot less portable, but for the.NET framework to integrate more platforms in a native way than Java tends to do.
I don't know where the hell you got this idea from. Both Java and.NET compile down to bytecodes. Sure, you can decompile Java, but there's nothing to say you can't do that with.NET too. And the.NET spec is more open than Java's.
Actually, Java's VM spec is completely open,
in as much as you can go down to your local B&N's and pick up the spec. Further, there have been at least a half dozen independent JVM implementations that I have heard of. You don't need Sun's permission to write or publish a Java-compatible VM, you just need to meet their testing standards (and pay the testing fee, of course) to call it Java.
I love listening to Radio-Canada on the Internet ("Vous ecouteza la premiere chaine de Radio-Canada, en direct, sur Internet"). One
of the better radio stations I've found to listen
to, here in Austin, TX.
And, aside from the occasional late-night student dj tossing around the odd English phraseology, it sounds pretty clean and pure to
my Anglophone ears.
I did software development almost exclusively
using the DataHand for 2-3 years before it started
breaking down on me (whereupon I went out and bought the much cheaper Kinesis Ergo to replace it).
The DataHand took a couple of weeks to get full proficiency on, but once I did, I had no problem using it at rapid speeds. Software development on it using XEmacs posed no problems, and it was less painful than using a flat keyboard for me.
However, after years of using it, I can say that it is not a magic bullet. The lateral forces you have to use with it, especially with your pinkies, can be more than a bit stressful. In addition, the whole design is intended to reduce movement in your hands and fingers. That's fine in theory, but in practice, reducing the major motions of the hands and arms also reduces blood flow, and as a diabetic, this was not doing me any major favors.
The Kinesis is a bit better than a flat, and a whole lot cheaper than the DataHand, and it has the advantage of programmable macro keys, so I would recommend that someone try it before paying $1000 or so for the DataHand.
For me, though, what helped most was taking Yoga classes regularly for a year. All the parts of the body are connected, and Yoga helps provide the strength, flexibility, and increased blood circulation to help the body withstand the rigors of sitting in a chair all day.
Great for posture, as well, which *REALLY* does make a difference. One of the problems I had was thoracic outlet syndrome, where the thoracic nerves in my neck and shoulders were getting compressed from my terrible slouching.
The take-away message here is that RSI is a very holistic (whole-body) kind of thing, and the very best way to take care of it is to take care of your whole body. These keyboards can help, but addressing one ergonomic factor in isolation can lead to other problems.
You just have to use XFree86 4.0.x with the
NVidia binary drivers.. the current version they
have released is 0.95.
Apparently, the GeForce2MX won't work right
if you use the standard 'nv' driver that come
with XFree86 4.0.1, but with the 0.95 X driver
and the matching GLX driver, the GeF2MX works great,
and has very impressive performance in Unreal Tournament to boot.
Oh! I remember you! Well, I remember seeing
your name on various bits of software that I
ran on my (lost, lamented) Amiga 1000.
You did Llamatron, didn't you?
Re:Linux Zealotry, Slashdot, and Growing Moderatio
on
id On Linux: Bad News
·
· Score: 2
All fair points. All I'm saying is, don't confuse an environment that is hostile to traditional software sales to an environment that is hostile to business in general. Like ESR says, it is important to distinguish use value from sale value. The Linux community, businesses using Linux included, benefits from an enormous amount of use value from the available software.
And it's largely a matter of perceived value.. if a Lotus or a Corel can't bring something to the table that is substantially better than can be had for free, why is it a problem if they then fail to make a profit at it? I don't think it makes sense to say that the Linux market is too competitive for software companies to survive in it, but if so, don't we as customers/consumers still benefit from the competition? Folks like Oracle and SAP and Verilog and others who make truly world-class software that does things better than the free alternatives possibly can will be able to make money off of the swelling ranks of commercial Linux users. I myself own commercial, non-open source Linux software, and I'm quite pleased with it. It's just that the standards are higher in Linux-land.
And I agree with you about the UT beauracracy.. UT's office of general counsel approved the GPL for UT-published software under certain conditions, and the work we have done on Ganymede just wouldn't make sense without the ability to publish in that way. I'm much happier having the developer-to-lawyer ratio at infinity, thank you very much.;-)
Re:Linux Zealotry, Slashdot, and Growing Moderatio
on
id On Linux: Bad News
·
· Score: 2
Fair enough, but two points. First, GPL is not anti-business.. there are *tons* of companies producing and selling Linux and Linux accessories.. every PowerEdge server that Dell sells with Linux pre-loaded is real money. The support and service contracts that Red Hat has with Dell, IBM, etc., are real money. The $70 it costs you to pick up a box o' Red Hat at CompUSA is money. Signing up for automatic updates with the Red Hat network is money. TiVo is money.
Second, GPL is a particular license that is granted to J. Random User to download and use one's software, nothing more. If someone came to me and said, 'hey, i wanna use Ganymede on terms other than the GPL', I would say, 'take it up with The University of Texas at Austin's intellectual property licensing department, I'm sure they'd love to make a deal with you.'. Just because something is GPL'ed doesn't mean that commercial variants cannot be sold, provided that there was not significant contributions by others who would not be willing to see their contributions relicensed under a non-GPL license. TrollTech is doing this with their dual GPL/commercial licensing of Qt, and they are hardly alone in doing so.
What are you suggesting as a solution, then? The only things I can think of, assuming you are not willing to rework your build system to use autoconfigure, is to build for specific distros and get very particular about what rpm or deb dependencies are required.
MacOS X has a nice concept of 'software bundles', where an installed application is actually a directory that contains all of the resources and particular libraries that the application requires. I can imagine that something like that might help the situation out somewhat, but it sounds like you are really complaining about the rate of change in the Linux world, which isn't likely to settle down as soon as you would like.
Speaking as both a developer and as a consumer of software on Linux, I have to say that spending the time to make your build environment shippable and understandable by outsiders is a very worthwhile investment.. it may feel a bit funny to spend development time on something other than the actual code that the user will run, but treating such packaging issues with respect is the mark of a good development team and a good product.
Anyway, I'd say that if your product (which sounds quite complex and interesting.. what does it do, precisely?) is so finicky as you suggest and the burden of compiling binaries for various linux distros is so high, I'd imagine that you would have to decide if the revenue or attention you get from making it available is worth the effort, as it would seem unlikely you're going to be able to get much peer development with a closed source product.
Linux Zealotry, Slashdot, and Growing Moderation
on
id On Linux: Bad News
·
· Score: 2
Let's not confuse slashdot with the linux community as a whole, or especially with the linux development community, ok? There are lots of people working with linux who *are* sensitive to the many ways in which linux falls short compared to the competition.
It seems for every centrist pointing out ways in which Linux needs to be improved, or ways in which the peculiar economics of the Linux community might be a disincentive to some commercial developers, there are 2 anonymous cowards trolling about how linux sucks and will never amount to anything and, yes, they may get modded down pretty quickly. I know that I have seen quite a lot of good, 'centrist' critiques modded up on slashdot, though, so it's not all one way.
I would, however, argue the point you make about 'why linux will never take off'. I believe linux has already taken off, and the more it does take off, the less important the fanatics will be. Keep in mind, OS/2, Amiga, and Macintosh all had legions of fanatics, and the reason they did is that each platform had something genuinely worthwhile to bring to the table, but every user those platforms attracted quickly realized that they were in the minority and that network effects would tend to extinguish their investments in time and money in those platforms. One natural result is zealotry to try and get the numbers up and achieve the critical mass required to have a sustainable community and economy around the platform.
Linux is still in the minority, but it is growing at a rate that the Mac, Amiga, and OS/2 never saw. We have plenty of people developing software for Linux, and we have big name vendors like IBM, HP, SGI, Dell, RedHat, and others who are investing in the platform in their corporate interest as a hedge against Microsoft. We have people around the world, speaking dozens of languages, all contributing to and developing fr Linux. As this proceeds, Linux will grow out of its fanatical stage, because the need for it will have dissipated.
Id may be disappointed with sales of Q3A, but I have to give props to Loki software, who are doing amazing work at not only porting games to Linux (real, full-on games like Unreal Tournament, yum), but who is also developing and releasing libraries like SDL and OpenAL to give Linux something akin to DirectX.
I've bought SimCity 3000 from Loki and have been playing a ton of Unreal Tournament with their downloadable patch, and both games feel every bit as professional and polished as their Windows counterparts, right down to the graphical install.
Game after game, Loki continues to do what I would have sworn was impossible to do on Linux, and they really deserve the support of the Linux community.
I have to agree with you. Rand obviously doesn't come from such an amazingly exalted background and thus doesn't have the sense of noblesse that Paul does, but otherwise Paul/Freemen/BG map closely to Rand/Aiel/Aes Sedai.
Hm, I'll go to troll-feeding hell for this, maybe, but I have to disagree with you. I know people who have written significantly large and object-based systems in Perl, the bet-your-business kind, and it has worked out great for them. If you are a CS theory snob, I know a fellow who wrote an extensive graph theoretic analyzer for DNS data, using all the k00l algorithms and data structures. Admittedly, there were a lot of hashes involved...;-)
It is true that a great deal of the appeal of Perl is that you can just rush in and get your hands dirty quickly and make it go, and that can seem like (and be!) messy hackwork, but so what? Like Larry says, just because you can talk baby talk and get along doesn't mean that a Milton or a Shakespeare can't get his work done in the language also.
And as others have noted, CPAN is the epitome of code re-use, and you can't get much more CS cred than that.
From the time I've spent reading through the 3rd edition, I've already come away with a lot of new insights that I somehow never picked up in my 8 years of working with the language. I highly recommend the 3rd edition as the most readable and informative to date. I like the 3rd edition book far more than I do the 2nd edition, and that alone justifies the publication of the new book, Perl 6 or no Perl 6.
As for all the general flaming on Perl here, I have to say I'm a bit surprised.. Perl is still by far my favorite way of doing systems administration scripting, both on UNIX and NT. It seems like whatever I work on, a bit of Perl added to the mix Makes It Better. I can't count the number of times I have wished that/bin/sh was a Perl interpreter.. it would make bootstrapping install scripts on an arbitrary UNIX system a lot easier.
Or are people here *that* enamored of autoconf?
Anyway, best edition yet, and a damn fine job by Mssrs. Wall, Christiansen, and Orfant.
The Java AWT is designed around a model where you add gui components to containers using a layout manager which is responsible for looking at all the components, figuring out their needs, and positioning and sizing them to fit the window they are placed in.
By using these managers, a Java GUI program is meant to be able to adapt to different font and component sizes on different platforms. GUI programmers used to working with the much more homogeneous Windows platform sometimes are tempted to do a 'setLayout(null)' to get rid of the layout manager complexity, and just position the components within their containers directly. This breaks horribly, of course, the moment that Java code is run on a system with much bigger or smaller fonts, or whatever.
So you're saying that you could not have completed the project in 20 years' time? In that time we've gone from MS-DOS to Linux under Enlightenment under GNOME. Java might be great, but it ain't that great.
Yeah, but all that work wasn't done by one programmer and assorted student helpers. The relevant metric is programmer time, not calendar time.
How long do you think it would take you personally to
implement your own threading model, your own GUI, and your own CORBA-like remote method call system with support for distributed garbage collection? And to get it to work on Windows, UNIX, Macintosh, and OS/2?
As it is, Ganymede is almost a quarter million lines of useful, relevant code. Portability and high level class libraries aside, the Java language is so safe to work with that something of that scale is reasonably tractable for a single competent programmer to manage, and that was my point.
I typically spend my night time coding sessions listening to la premiere chaine de radio canada over the net, and the french I hear on the radio doesn't seem all that bad. It is interesting to hear a lot of franglish, but my english is good enough that it doesn't really confuse me.
On the other hand, I know that the media tend to speak a much more formal, standardized form of the language.
And it surprised me to hear that Montreal is so anglicized.. I was trusting in the legendary french stubbornness about the purity of their language more than that..;-)
I'll have to go on vacation sometime up in Montreal and see for myself.. maybe if I walk around carrying my copy of Jacques Parizeau's 'Pour Un Quebec Souverain' I'll be accepted by the hard-core frenchies.;-)
Fly up to Montreal and take a holiday in the area. Travel around and see some of the local culture. Pick up trade mags, etc for hints on jobs. Get a feel for the place to see if you like it. The next few months are going to be cold... I quite like winter, do you?
I like winter just fine. I used to live in Anchorage, Alaska, and every year I drive up to visit my family in Minneapolis. The change in climate was part of my calculations in considering Quebec..;-)
I'm not quite ready to pick up and move, but I am thinking about in within the next year. I assume the best thing to do would be to use some of the job search web sites to get something lined up and then ask their HR department for advice on living and working in Canada for whatever duration.
I doubt that I would want to become a Canadian citizen, but it would be nice to have the PR option if I got a job I really liked and was enjoying the place.
Slashdot Mirror
Q: Don't bacteria have any ethics?
A: Nope.
This one was always obvious, though.. honestly, who didn't think how awesome it would be to have universal access to the web when they first saw it?
'Wow, the web is cool! HEY! I bet if I had a wireless modem it would be better! I'm a genius, watch me run to the patent office!'
SOAP is based on Dave Winer's XML-RPC work, and supersedes it.
Actually, I'd argue that Java is monoplatform.. Java *is* the platform, whatever hardware and software underneath is largely invisible and largely inaccessible without creating a specially configured binary package with .dll's or .so's and JNI interfacing.
One advantage I can see to .NET, and one that Microsoft is clearly counting on, is that you could write software that deeply interacts with the hosting platform at the same time that it interacts over the net using SOAP. In this sense, I expect to see a specific piece of .NET code be a lot less portable, but for the .NET framework to integrate more platforms in a native way than Java tends to do.
Actually, Java's VM spec is completely open, in as much as you can go down to your local B&N's and pick up the spec. Further, there have been at least a half dozen independent JVM implementations that I have heard of. You don't need Sun's permission to write or publish a Java-compatible VM, you just need to meet their testing standards (and pay the testing fee, of course) to call it Java.
Sounds reasonably open to me.
Nah, it's not that big a troll. Not by Slashdot standards, certainly
And the fact that the score is _just_ 1 and the poster is not an Anonymous Coward means that someone already modded it back down to default.
I love listening to Radio-Canada on the Internet ("Vous ecouteza la premiere chaine de Radio-Canada, en direct, sur Internet"). One of the better radio stations I've found to listen to, here in Austin, TX.
And, aside from the occasional late-night student dj tossing around the odd English phraseology, it sounds pretty clean and pure to my Anglophone ears.
hurrah for anonymous cowards keeping it real.
I love the idea of a planetary sampling effort like this, it go great on a CD to ship with the next Voyager-style craft.
See! Lovely Earth Real Estate!
Thrill! To thousands of pictures of little electronic devices with 00's on them!
Marvel! At GPS enthusiasts treading water in the open ocean or trekking across Antarctica!
;-)
I did software development almost exclusively using the DataHand for 2-3 years before it started breaking down on me (whereupon I went out and bought the much cheaper Kinesis Ergo to replace it).
The DataHand took a couple of weeks to get full proficiency on, but once I did, I had no problem using it at rapid speeds. Software development on it using XEmacs posed no problems, and it was less painful than using a flat keyboard for me.
However, after years of using it, I can say that it is not a magic bullet. The lateral forces you have to use with it, especially with your pinkies, can be more than a bit stressful. In addition, the whole design is intended to reduce movement in your hands and fingers. That's fine in theory, but in practice, reducing the major motions of the hands and arms also reduces blood flow, and as a diabetic, this was not doing me any major favors.
The Kinesis is a bit better than a flat, and a whole lot cheaper than the DataHand, and it has the advantage of programmable macro keys, so I would recommend that someone try it before paying $1000 or so for the DataHand.
For me, though, what helped most was taking Yoga classes regularly for a year. All the parts of the body are connected, and Yoga helps provide the strength, flexibility, and increased blood circulation to help the body withstand the rigors of sitting in a chair all day.
Great for posture, as well, which *REALLY* does make a difference. One of the problems I had was thoracic outlet syndrome, where the thoracic nerves in my neck and shoulders were getting compressed from my terrible slouching.
The take-away message here is that RSI is a very holistic (whole-body) kind of thing, and the very best way to take care of it is to take care of your whole body. These keyboards can help, but addressing one ergonomic factor in isolation can lead to other problems.
You just have to use XFree86 4.0.x with the NVidia binary drivers.. the current version they have released is 0.95.
Apparently, the GeForce2MX won't work right if you use the standard 'nv' driver that come with XFree86 4.0.1, but with the 0.95 X driver and the matching GLX driver, the GeF2MX works great, and has very impressive performance in Unreal Tournament to boot.
Oh! I remember you! Well, I remember seeing your name on various bits of software that I ran on my (lost, lamented) Amiga 1000.
You did Llamatron, didn't you?
All fair points. All I'm saying is, don't confuse an environment that is hostile to traditional software sales to an environment that is hostile to business in general. Like ESR says, it is important to distinguish use value from sale value. The Linux community, businesses using Linux included, benefits from an enormous amount of use value from the available software.
And it's largely a matter of perceived value.. if a Lotus or a Corel can't bring something to the table that is substantially better than can be had for free, why is it a problem if they then fail to make a profit at it? I don't think it makes sense to say that the Linux market is too competitive for software companies to survive in it, but if so, don't we as customers/consumers still benefit from the competition? Folks like Oracle and SAP and Verilog and others who make truly world-class software that does things better than the free alternatives possibly can will be able to make money off of the swelling ranks of commercial Linux users. I myself own commercial, non-open source Linux software, and I'm quite pleased with it. It's just that the standards are higher in Linux-land.
And I agree with you about the UT beauracracy.. UT's office of general counsel approved the GPL for UT-published software under certain conditions, and the work we have done on Ganymede just wouldn't make sense without the ability to publish in that way. I'm much happier having the developer-to-lawyer ratio at infinity, thank you very much. ;-)
Fair enough, but two points. First, GPL is not anti-business.. there are *tons* of companies producing and selling Linux and Linux accessories.. every PowerEdge server that Dell sells with Linux pre-loaded is real money. The support and service contracts that Red Hat has with Dell, IBM, etc., are real money. The $70 it costs you to pick up a box o' Red Hat at CompUSA is money. Signing up for automatic updates with the Red Hat network is money. TiVo is money.
Second, GPL is a particular license that is granted to J. Random User to download and use one's software, nothing more. If someone came to me and said, 'hey, i wanna use Ganymede on terms other than the GPL', I would say, 'take it up with The University of Texas at Austin's intellectual property licensing department, I'm sure they'd love to make a deal with you.'. Just because something is GPL'ed doesn't mean that commercial variants cannot be sold, provided that there was not significant contributions by others who would not be willing to see their contributions relicensed under a non-GPL license. TrollTech is doing this with their dual GPL/commercial licensing of Qt, and they are hardly alone in doing so.
What are you suggesting as a solution, then? The only things I can think of, assuming you are not willing to rework your build system to use autoconfigure, is to build for specific distros and get very particular about what rpm or deb dependencies are required.
MacOS X has a nice concept of 'software bundles', where an installed application is actually a directory that contains all of the resources and particular libraries that the application requires. I can imagine that something like that might help the situation out somewhat, but it sounds like you are really complaining about the rate of change in the Linux world, which isn't likely to settle down as soon as you would like.
Speaking as both a developer and as a consumer of software on Linux, I have to say that spending the time to make your build environment shippable and understandable by outsiders is a very worthwhile investment.. it may feel a bit funny to spend development time on something other than the actual code that the user will run, but treating such packaging issues with respect is the mark of a good development team and a good product.
Anyway, I'd say that if your product (which sounds quite complex and interesting.. what does it do, precisely?) is so finicky as you suggest and the burden of compiling binaries for various linux distros is so high, I'd imagine that you would have to decide if the revenue or attention you get from making it available is worth the effort, as it would seem unlikely you're going to be able to get much peer development with a closed source product.
Let's not confuse slashdot with the linux community as a whole, or especially with the linux development community, ok? There are lots of people working with linux who *are* sensitive to the many ways in which linux falls short compared to the competition.
It seems for every centrist pointing out ways in which Linux needs to be improved, or ways in which the peculiar economics of the Linux community might be a disincentive to some commercial developers, there are 2 anonymous cowards trolling about how linux sucks and will never amount to anything and, yes, they may get modded down pretty quickly. I know that I have seen quite a lot of good, 'centrist' critiques modded up on slashdot, though, so it's not all one way.
I would, however, argue the point you make about 'why linux will never take off'. I believe linux has already taken off, and the more it does take off, the less important the fanatics will be. Keep in mind, OS/2, Amiga, and Macintosh all had legions of fanatics, and the reason they did is that each platform had something genuinely worthwhile to bring to the table, but every user those platforms attracted quickly realized that they were in the minority and that network effects would tend to extinguish their investments in time and money in those platforms. One natural result is zealotry to try and get the numbers up and achieve the critical mass required to have a sustainable community and economy around the platform.
Linux is still in the minority, but it is growing at a rate that the Mac, Amiga, and OS/2 never saw. We have plenty of people developing software for Linux, and we have big name vendors like IBM, HP, SGI, Dell, RedHat, and others who are investing in the platform in their corporate interest as a hedge against Microsoft. We have people around the world, speaking dozens of languages, all contributing to and developing fr Linux. As this proceeds, Linux will grow out of its fanatical stage, because the need for it will have dissipated.
Id may be disappointed with sales of Q3A, but I have to give props to Loki software, who are doing amazing work at not only porting games to Linux (real, full-on games like Unreal Tournament, yum), but who is also developing and releasing libraries like SDL and OpenAL to give Linux something akin to DirectX.
I've bought SimCity 3000 from Loki and have been playing a ton of Unreal Tournament with their downloadable patch, and both games feel every bit as professional and polished as their Windows counterparts, right down to the graphical install.
Game after game, Loki continues to do what I would have sworn was impossible to do on Linux, and they really deserve the support of the Linux community.
I have to agree with you. Rand obviously doesn't come from such an amazingly exalted background and thus doesn't have the sense of noblesse that Paul does, but otherwise Paul/Freemen/BG map closely to Rand/Aiel/Aes Sedai.
And Orwant, too.
Hm, I'll go to troll-feeding hell for this, maybe, but I have to disagree with you. I know people who have written significantly large and object-based systems in Perl, the bet-your-business kind, and it has worked out great for them. If you are a CS theory snob, I know a fellow who wrote an extensive graph theoretic analyzer for DNS data, using all the k00l algorithms and data structures. Admittedly, there were a lot of hashes involved... ;-)
It is true that a great deal of the appeal of Perl is that you can just rush in and get your hands dirty quickly and make it go, and that can seem like (and be!) messy hackwork, but so what? Like Larry says, just because you can talk baby talk and get along doesn't mean that a Milton or a Shakespeare can't get his work done in the language also.
And as others have noted, CPAN is the epitome of code re-use, and you can't get much more CS cred than that.
From the time I've spent reading through the 3rd edition, I've already come away with a lot of new insights that I somehow never picked up in my 8 years of working with the language. I highly recommend the 3rd edition as the most readable and informative to date. I like the 3rd edition book far more than I do the 2nd edition, and that alone justifies the publication of the new book, Perl 6 or no Perl 6.
As for all the general flaming on Perl here, I have to say I'm a bit surprised.. Perl is still by far my favorite way of doing systems administration scripting, both on UNIX and NT. It seems like whatever I work on, a bit of Perl added to the mix Makes It Better. I can't count the number of times I have wished that /bin/sh was a Perl interpreter.. it would make bootstrapping install scripts on an arbitrary UNIX system a lot easier.
Or are people here *that* enamored of autoconf?
Anyway, best edition yet, and a damn fine job by Mssrs. Wall, Christiansen, and Orfant.
The Java AWT is designed around a model where you add gui components to containers using a layout manager which is responsible for looking at all the components, figuring out their needs, and positioning and sizing them to fit the window they are placed in.
By using these managers, a Java GUI program is meant to be able to adapt to different font and component sizes on different platforms. GUI programmers used to working with the much more homogeneous Windows platform sometimes are tempted to do a 'setLayout(null)' to get rid of the layout manager complexity, and just position the components within their containers directly. This breaks horribly, of course, the moment that Java code is run on a system with much bigger or smaller fonts, or whatever.
Yeah, but all that work wasn't done by one programmer and assorted student helpers. The relevant metric is programmer time, not calendar time.
How long do you think it would take you personally to implement your own threading model, your own GUI, and your own CORBA-like remote method call system with support for distributed garbage collection? And to get it to work on Windows, UNIX, Macintosh, and OS/2?
As it is, Ganymede is almost a quarter million lines of useful, relevant code. Portability and high level class libraries aside, the Java language is so safe to work with that something of that scale is reasonably tractable for a single competent programmer to manage, and that was my point.
Interessant.
I typically spend my night time coding sessions listening to la premiere chaine de radio canada over the net, and the french I hear on the radio doesn't seem all that bad. It is interesting to hear a lot of franglish, but my english is good enough that it doesn't really confuse me.
On the other hand, I know that the media tend to speak a much more formal, standardized form of the language.
And it surprised me to hear that Montreal is so anglicized.. I was trusting in the legendary french stubbornness about the purity of their language more than that.. ;-)
I'll have to go on vacation sometime up in Montreal and see for myself.. maybe if I walk around carrying my copy of Jacques Parizeau's 'Pour Un Quebec Souverain' I'll be accepted by the hard-core frenchies. ;-)
I like winter just fine. I used to live in Anchorage, Alaska, and every year I drive up to visit my family in Minneapolis. The change in climate was part of my calculations in considering Quebec.. ;-)
I'm not quite ready to pick up and move, but I am thinking about in within the next year. I assume the best thing to do would be to use some of the job search web sites to get something lined up and then ask their HR department for advice on living and working in Canada for whatever duration.
I doubt that I would want to become a Canadian citizen, but it would be nice to have the PR option if I got a job I really liked and was enjoying the place.