I think you miss the point that "funding development" is not the same as "making a profit". Some people like to make profits.
I think I made that clear:
It's more like, "Multi-million dollar corporations are using this font to make millions, if not billions of dollars. You are using our work to make lots of money, so we deserve a cut of the action." And corporations go, "Using Helvetica really does bring me that much more money than I spent on it."
My point was they were maximizing their profit--and justly so!--from bigger, richer customers who gained a lot of value from the fonts. Their pricing had nothing to do with the cost of developing the font.
Further, I was saying they needed to create two pricing models: one for those who make lots of money off the font, and one for those of us who don't.
Example: Adobe Photoshop. They have different feature sets (and prices) depending on the end user. That's a perfectly just pricing model, IMHO. The users who make lots of money from Photoshop share the wealth with Adobe, while the enthusiastic amateur gets a very useful "Elements" edition which is only missing the features the pros need (like color separation printing).
So, fonts are expensive because it's VERY hard to make good ones. And there isn't much of a market for them (relatively speaking), so the price never drops.
The labor value theory of doesn't explain the price of Helvetica which has been around for 50 years and heavily used (and bought). It's more like, "Multi-million dollar corporations are using this font to make millions, if not billions of dollars. You are using our work to make lots of money, so we deserve a cut of the action." And corporations go, "Using Helvetica really does bring me that much more money than I spent on it." So thus the expensive prices even for insanely popular and old fonts.
The problem I have with their prices is that as an amateur, not-making-a-dime web site maker, the $1,300 CDN the price is too high for the value I would get from it. So I will stick to things that don't cost me nearly 2 weeks wages--the free Microsoft fonts.
In a sense, this is probably pareto-optimal, but the rest of the world is poorer for me using Microsoft's Arial instead of something they'd enjoy more.
(What I'd like is a differential pricing scheme where a home user can buy a properly licensed font for a lot less, while they can still charge out the whazoo to United Airlines)
This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction. S-C-O We do what we must because we can. For the good of all of us. Except the ones who are dead. But there's no sense crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying till you run out of cake. And the Suing gets done. And you make a neat OS. For the people who are still alive. I'm not even angry. I'm being so sincere right now. Even though you broke my heart. And killed me. And tore me to pieces. And threw every piece into a fire. As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you! Now these points of data make a beautiful line. And we're out of beta. We're releasing on time. So I'm GLaD. I got burned. Think of all the things we learned for the people who are still alive. Go ahead and leave me. I think I prefer to stay inside. Maybe you'll find someone else to help you. Maybe Microsoft THAT WAS A JOKE. HAHA. FAT CHANCE. Anyway, this cake is great. It's so delicious and moist. Look at me still talking when there's Litigating to do. When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I'm not you. I've filings to file. There is research to be done. On the people who are still alive. And believe me I am still alive. I'm selling Licenses and I'm still alive. I feel FANTASTIC and I'm still alive. While you're dying I'll be still alive. And when you're dead I will be still alive. STILL ALIVE...
The upgrade process is a pain, but it's starting to hurt the company's ability to buy NEW software. We've already face a problem at work where IT now has to allow IE7 on some desktops or Citrix servers.
IE6 was such an evil product that Microsoft unleashed on the world, and even Microsoft, I think, realises they're getting hurt by it too.
What I wish was there was a painless way of installing IE6 as a separate special browser while the default browser is something better.
Oh, funny addendum: the Software Standards & Licensing nazis sent out a sniffer to figure out what people had installed in their desktops, and tried to get us web developers to uninstall Firefox and stick to IE6. HAHA! We develop web apps facing the outside world, as we explained to them. Unless you want 80% of your traffic to stop working, we're keeping Firefox. Then, just to make it more interesting, the corporate web czar sent a note out to all us web developers to start installing and testing against other browsers like Opera and Safari. X-D
Left hand, meet the Right hand.
There are over 100,000 apps in the store than do everything under the sun. Many of them free. All of them meet a simple set of minimum requirements and standards.
There is nothing wrong with this picture.
Stop being that @sshole at the bar the claps whenever some wait-staff drops a dish or glass.
But that makes it OK for them to stop you from putting whatever app you want on your property?
That was my point. Apple has become much more pickier about apps lately and rejections are coming for non-technical reasons. Some of them are "Apple just doesn't like the idea of you having your own net-phone app."
For those Apple fans out there who wonder why we hate the idea of Apple becoming the de facto standard for portable computing, this is why. Apple can do what they want with their store (for example, if I owned an app store, I'd like to refuse to sell content I object to), but I would like the freedom to buy an app from someone else.
Since I was forced into Java EE programming 3 years ago, I have to agree with this. When I got into it, I figured it was another COBOL. But when you got innovations like Maven, the entire Apache Commons library, RichFaces/JSF, etc. I really began to like Java -- seriously! I put away my childish.Net books and moved on.:-)
Although I must admit, for full disclosure, that I never liked PHP even when developing in it. Maybe because almost every PHP book I've ever seen includes code like:
I see other people have responded, but a lot of the mathematical texts came that way. For example, Euclid's Elements was the most famous of these. There were a lot of books on the geometry and mathematical knowledge of that age, as well as most of the ancient astronomy. If I still had my text book from the "History of Mathematics" class I took, I could give you specific names and titles.
From what I gather, we are lucky to have what we do. A lot more of that preserved Ancient learning was lost when the library of Baghdad was sacked and burned.
The main way ancient writing reached us is because someone copied it. Lots of copies. Sometimes translated into another language and back, for example, a lot of Greek learning went into Arabic and came back out into Latin or Greek.
With all the copy protection and encryption on our media today, can we ever copy the data and be able to decipher it again?
I am an "Indian" (actually Sri Lankan) Developer, who started programming when I was 7, on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (not just Basic, but loads of yummy Z80 Assembly). I was brought up in the UK.
I too am Indian (half actually), and brought up in Canada, but I still agree with the original poster. From what I can tell, the best & brightest Indian programmers actually earn the same salaries we do--in India! For outsourcing, they look for cheap and fast, and you get what you pay for. Unfortunately, because everyone went to India to do this, India == low quality. You'd have the same problem if you did the same thing in Ireland, but everyone would blame the Irish.
The problem is cheap outsourcing, and because a lot of them were Indian in the 90s, that's the characteristic that sticks in their minds now. In the 2000's, it is the Philipines and mainland China that are providing the next round of cheap IT labour. So far, I have found them to be a very mixed bag. There are some very, very smart and capable people in that group, but others that leave me amazed they were hired.
What experence teachs you is when you need to use a hash vs a btree.
Actually, school teaches you that. If it didn't, you were not paying attention in class.
You are old like me. How do I know? You believe they teach hash and b-tree in elementary computing courses that the new hires come from. A lot of the young IT slaves come from community college (which are getting pretty good these days!) or lower. The result is they may have heard the term hash and tree, but couldn't tell you what they actually are.
In true computing science classes, they do teach this, but I rarely see comp sci grads anymore at my big-name consultant workplace. They seemed to like hiring the cheapest programmers they can, and university/college comp sci types demands higher wages, so as a result, I get newbies writing code that staggers belief.
An example, in Java, a young coder would get the results of several queries from Hibernate then wants to merge them and ensure no duplicates. An old, wiley programmer like me would make the query do all the work for me, but alas, he did not. A middling wiley programmer would use some sort of Set with equals() defined on the entity objects to compare IDs. The young one wrote a double for loop to iterate over every query result, and then used linear search to see if the object was already in his output list, if it wasn't, insert it. Repeat.
I see these new "grads", and I cannot believe they never learned fundamental data structures and algorithms. They don't even seem to be aware of run-time effeciency (big-O notation, etc.). The quality of programming grunts is declining very rapidly, and I worry what kind of defects we will be seeing soon.
Actually many pregnant women receive multiple mercury-laden shots even to this day. That 25-50mcg of mercury, plus formaldehyde and other toxic ingredients do reach the baby in the mother's womb as well. Autism may not always show up right away but this is a factor to consider.
That is called a non sequitor. You say one thing then another without showing they are linked. The studies I've heard about found no link between mercury and autism. Mercury and other nervous system disorders, yes, but not autism. Do you have something to show otherwise?
Also consider this: nobody has absolute proof that vaccines DON'T cause autism
True. And there is no absolute proof that this rock keeps away tigers either. This is specious reasoning
Many studies favor institutional or political bias, especially as the majority of studies are funded by institutions who financially benefit from vaccines.
Wow. Don't know what to say about that one. You've basically resorted to ad hominem rather than show how the studies were flawed. When the tobacco industry engaged in research to support their views, the studies were very quickly found to be either a) flawed, b) unreproducible or c) faked. Other than Jenny McCarthy, do you have some sources I can accept to prove your contention that the studies proving no link were flawed, unreproducible or clearly forged data?
The onus is on you to prove they are wrong because the autism-vaccine link has been investigated by hundreds of researchers over thousands of patients, and they've been remarkably consistent in their findings.
Also, the U.S. government has settled hundreds of lawsuits over the past few decades with parents whose child became autistic or died immediately following a shot.
That's true, but how does settling a lawsuit change the science?
Another question is what causes SIDS? Again, mothers are injected with mercury-laden shots while pregnant, up to 50 mcg per shot, even though pregnant women are warned to stay away from any type of mercury including trace amounts in tuna fish.
Again, another non sequitor. SIDS is relatively rare, so if all pregnant women are exposed to the same levels of mercury, why such a low incidence?
You seem to be suffering from tin-foil hat thinking, and frankly, it's unconvincing.
Telus's broadband solutions never promises unlimited bandwidth and always had a site you could go to to see your current (and past) consumption of bandwidth per month. If you hit the cap, you have the option of buying extra bandwidth for the month. Also, it's a "nice" cap in that it simply throttles you so you can still check e-mail, etc., but not do any serious downloading, etc.
Now it's becoming clear what globalization is really all about - it's about stealing from the productive countries and giving the theft to the lazy, stupid, and unproductive ones such as - oh, say Venezuela.
Kind of a sweeping generalization of Venezuela. There were other items like that on the site. It reminds me of the nativist movement. On the other hand, Apex's over-reaction created a perfect Streisand Effect.
To be fair, you must concede that while the static languages catch some errors at compile time which might not be caught until runtime (or ideally, QA) with a dynamic/duck language, the static languages also "catch" a great deal of non-errors which the programmer is forced to deal with even though they never would have caused problems at run-time, while having the side-effect of reducing code re-use.
Um... no. I work with a proprietary duck type language and Java at work. Java does not catch non-errors, IMHO. On the other hand, we have to test the hell out of the duck type language because we can only find the bugs at run-time, and with the complex code we write at work, that takes a LONG time!
Duck typing is nice and has some nice features. I think it makes remoting such a painless thing to implement. But in practice, I do not find it is better or faster than statically typed languages. In fact, if you are working in a large team, static typing is faster because if goober over there on the other side of the floor changes his interface, he is the one who notices it and has to fix it. In the duck-type language mentioned above, I find out about it when the next nightly dev build happens and I spent half the morning fixing problems he caused.
Duck typing is simply different. It has certain strengths in certain situations, just as statically typed languages. I know this in an unpopular view but: the right language for the right task. Seriously, just because Python/Perl/Ruby is your Dremel motor tool doesn't mean you should remodel your kitchen and build your own cabinets from scratch with just a Dremel!
I've seen some saying bits of what I want to say, and I don't have mod points so I'll just do a "me too":
Programmer User Interfaces. GIMP makes sense to programmers, but shows nothing but contempt for anyone else. I have to switch mental modes to use GIMP, but even then, I find the user interface inconvenient. I used to think Photoshop's user interface was needlessly painful, now I know better...
"We'll Do Everything, But Won't Assume Useful Defaults". I am staring at you Open Office! When I select a range on a spreadsheet and press delete, I would like you to clear the contents of those cells and leave the formatting. Quit bloody asking me what I want to delete each and every time!!
"To Be Done". I am a programmer, and I understand writing user documentation sucks, but I have news for you: I'll ignore your precious open source project if there is inadequate documentation. Don't go crying, "You should write it!" No, you're the one who has to convince me to use your project. It's your responsibility to create docs, not mine.
"Frequent releases are good!" NoScript protects me on-line, but I am so tired of trying to open Firefox and have to wait an extra 2-3 minutes for NoScript to update--AGAIN! For people who use your software in production, frequent releases are bad, m'kay? They have to regression test the new version in a development environment, plan a roll-out, negotiate outages, etc. Either make the frequent releases transparent to me (like Ubuntu does which goes to the trouble to make sure 99% of systems won't break so you don't notice), or batch and release like Microsoft does on a Tuesday.
Developer Arrogance, NMH syndrome, arbitrary and irrational politics, etc. Most of the major projects I follow fork because of developer politics. Developers argue and fork over irrational arguments -- it reminds me of Gulliver's Travels and the Big-End/Little-End arguments. Decisions to not support something that smack of "I didn't design or make it, so I don't like/trust it". This childish and unprofessional behavior will kill open source projects more than any patent troll portfolio.
With all the talk of container and "lego" data centers, Oracle wants to become fully vertically integrated so that you can go to Oracle and say: "I've got $10 million -- sell my data center blocks".
Hardware that runs Oracle really well -- Sun SPARC
The operating system for big data centers -- Solaris
The Java application server -- BEA's WebLogic
The Database -- well duh!
Also, having a horde of hardware engineers is Ellison's wet dream. As I said before, Larry Ellison wakes up every morning and asks himself, "How can I [fsck] Microsoft today?" Larry has stated in the past he wouldn't mind moving beyond databases, and with Sun's hardware and Java, he's poised to do pretty much anything he wants. So he might entertain delusions of mobile, return of the net appliances, home multimedia, etc. In the short term, though, I think he's hoping he can create custom hardware to make Oracle and Java run much faster. Will he succeed? Dunno, but Larry Ellison has a ferocious desire to succeed, and often, that's all you need.
For example, the video chips that launched a revolution. From SGI's original graphics accelerators through the Amiga's "fat agnes" to the early nVidia and ATI cards.
But I do admit I like the fact they included the 555 and 701. Such fond memories breadboarding with those things...
Slashdot Mirror
I think you miss the point that "funding development" is not the same as "making a profit". Some people like to make profits.
I think I made that clear:
My point was they were maximizing their profit--and justly so!--from bigger, richer customers who gained a lot of value from the fonts. Their pricing had nothing to do with the cost of developing the font.
Further, I was saying they needed to create two pricing models: one for those who make lots of money off the font, and one for those of us who don't.
Example: Adobe Photoshop. They have different feature sets (and prices) depending on the end user. That's a perfectly just pricing model, IMHO. The users who make lots of money from Photoshop share the wealth with Adobe, while the enthusiastic amateur gets a very useful "Elements" edition which is only missing the features the pros need (like color separation printing).
The labor value theory of doesn't explain the price of Helvetica which has been around for 50 years and heavily used (and bought). It's more like, "Multi-million dollar corporations are using this font to make millions, if not billions of dollars. You are using our work to make lots of money, so we deserve a cut of the action." And corporations go, "Using Helvetica really does bring me that much more money than I spent on it." So thus the expensive prices even for insanely popular and old fonts.
The problem I have with their prices is that as an amateur, not-making-a-dime web site maker, the $1,300 CDN the price is too high for the value I would get from it. So I will stick to things that don't cost me nearly 2 weeks wages--the free Microsoft fonts.
In a sense, this is probably pareto-optimal, but the rest of the world is poorer for me using Microsoft's Arial instead of something they'd enjoy more.
(What I'd like is a differential pricing scheme where a home user can buy a properly licensed font for a lot less, while they can still charge out the whazoo to United Airlines)
(With apologies to Valve ;-))
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
S-C-O
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
But there's no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the Suing gets done.
And you make a neat OS.
For the people who are still alive.
I'm not even angry.
I'm being so sincere right now.
Even though you broke my heart.
And killed me.
And tore me to pieces.
And threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you!
Now these points of data make a beautiful line.
And we're out of beta.
We're releasing on time.
So I'm GLaD. I got burned.
Think of all the things we learned
for the people who are still alive.
Go ahead and leave me.
I think I prefer to stay inside.
Maybe you'll find someone else to help you.
Maybe Microsoft
THAT WAS A JOKE.
HAHA. FAT CHANCE.
Anyway, this cake is great.
It's so delicious and moist.
Look at me still talking
when there's Litigating to do.
When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I'm not you.
I've filings to file.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are still alive.
And believe me I am still alive.
I'm selling Licenses and I'm still alive.
I feel FANTASTIC and I'm still alive.
While you're dying I'll be still alive.
And when you're dead I will be still alive.
STILL ALIVE...
STILL ALIVE...
The upgrade process is a pain, but it's starting to hurt the company's ability to buy NEW software. We've already face a problem at work where IT now has to allow IE7 on some desktops or Citrix servers. IE6 was such an evil product that Microsoft unleashed on the world, and even Microsoft, I think, realises they're getting hurt by it too. What I wish was there was a painless way of installing IE6 as a separate special browser while the default browser is something better. Oh, funny addendum: the Software Standards & Licensing nazis sent out a sniffer to figure out what people had installed in their desktops, and tried to get us web developers to uninstall Firefox and stick to IE6. HAHA! We develop web apps facing the outside world, as we explained to them. Unless you want 80% of your traffic to stop working, we're keeping Firefox. Then, just to make it more interesting, the corporate web czar sent a note out to all us web developers to start installing and testing against other browsers like Opera and Safari. X-D Left hand, meet the Right hand.
But that makes it OK for them to stop you from putting whatever app you want on your property?
That was my point. Apple has become much more pickier about apps lately and rejections are coming for non-technical reasons. Some of them are "Apple just doesn't like the idea of you having your own net-phone app."
For those Apple fans out there who wonder why we hate the idea of Apple becoming the de facto standard for portable computing, this is why. Apple can do what they want with their store (for example, if I owned an app store, I'd like to refuse to sell content I object to), but I would like the freedom to buy an app from someone else.
The correct quote is:
Since I was forced into Java EE programming 3 years ago, I have to agree with this. When I got into it, I figured it was another COBOL. But when you got innovations like Maven, the entire Apache Commons library, RichFaces/JSF, etc. I really began to like Java -- seriously! I put away my childish .Net books and moved on. :-)
Although I must admit, for full disclosure, that I never liked PHP even when developing in it. Maybe because almost every PHP book I've ever seen includes code like:
sql = "SELECT * FROM foo WHERE id=" . $foo;
shudder
Plan 9 was designed around the idea of completely separate processes that could be running on separate CPUs. Why not start there?
Speak for yourself. Some of us like the mouse and window for code editing.
I see other people have responded, but a lot of the mathematical texts came that way. For example, Euclid's Elements was the most famous of these. There were a lot of books on the geometry and mathematical knowledge of that age, as well as most of the ancient astronomy. If I still had my text book from the "History of Mathematics" class I took, I could give you specific names and titles.
Almost all of today's surviving texts of Archimedes came via Arabic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Writings
From what I gather, we are lucky to have what we do. A lot more of that preserved Ancient learning was lost when the library of Baghdad was sacked and burned.
The main way ancient writing reached us is because someone copied it. Lots of copies. Sometimes translated into another language and back, for example, a lot of Greek learning went into Arabic and came back out into Latin or Greek. With all the copy protection and encryption on our media today, can we ever copy the data and be able to decipher it again?
That was a bit racist, don't you think?
I am an "Indian" (actually Sri Lankan) Developer, who started programming when I was 7, on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (not just Basic, but loads of yummy Z80 Assembly). I was brought up in the UK.
I too am Indian (half actually), and brought up in Canada, but I still agree with the original poster. From what I can tell, the best & brightest Indian programmers actually earn the same salaries we do--in India! For outsourcing, they look for cheap and fast, and you get what you pay for. Unfortunately, because everyone went to India to do this, India == low quality. You'd have the same problem if you did the same thing in Ireland, but everyone would blame the Irish.
The problem is cheap outsourcing, and because a lot of them were Indian in the 90s, that's the characteristic that sticks in their minds now. In the 2000's, it is the Philipines and mainland China that are providing the next round of cheap IT labour. So far, I have found them to be a very mixed bag. There are some very, very smart and capable people in that group, but others that leave me amazed they were hired.
What experence teachs you is when you need to use a hash vs a btree.
Actually, school teaches you that. If it didn't, you were not paying attention in class.
You are old like me. How do I know? You believe they teach hash and b-tree in elementary computing courses that the new hires come from. A lot of the young IT slaves come from community college (which are getting pretty good these days!) or lower. The result is they may have heard the term hash and tree, but couldn't tell you what they actually are.
In true computing science classes, they do teach this, but I rarely see comp sci grads anymore at my big-name consultant workplace. They seemed to like hiring the cheapest programmers they can, and university/college comp sci types demands higher wages, so as a result, I get newbies writing code that staggers belief.
An example, in Java, a young coder would get the results of several queries from Hibernate then wants to merge them and ensure no duplicates. An old, wiley programmer like me would make the query do all the work for me, but alas, he did not. A middling wiley programmer would use some sort of Set with equals() defined on the entity objects to compare IDs. The young one wrote a double for loop to iterate over every query result, and then used linear search to see if the object was already in his output list, if it wasn't, insert it. Repeat.
I see these new "grads", and I cannot believe they never learned fundamental data structures and algorithms. They don't even seem to be aware of run-time effeciency (big-O notation, etc.). The quality of programming grunts is declining very rapidly, and I worry what kind of defects we will be seeing soon.
Actually many pregnant women receive multiple mercury-laden shots even to this day. That 25-50mcg of mercury, plus formaldehyde and other toxic ingredients do reach the baby in the mother's womb as well. Autism may not always show up right away but this is a factor to consider.
That is called a non sequitor . You say one thing then another without showing they are linked. The studies I've heard about found no link between mercury and autism. Mercury and other nervous system disorders, yes, but not autism. Do you have something to show otherwise?
Also consider this: nobody has absolute proof that vaccines DON'T cause autism
True. And there is no absolute proof that this rock keeps away tigers either. This is specious reasoning
Let's have Lisa Simpson explain it for you.
Many studies favor institutional or political bias, especially as the majority of studies are funded by institutions who financially benefit from vaccines.
Wow. Don't know what to say about that one. You've basically resorted to ad hominem rather than show how the studies were flawed. When the tobacco industry engaged in research to support their views, the studies were very quickly found to be either a) flawed, b) unreproducible or c) faked. Other than Jenny McCarthy, do you have some sources I can accept to prove your contention that the studies proving no link were flawed, unreproducible or clearly forged data?
The onus is on you to prove they are wrong because the autism-vaccine link has been investigated by hundreds of researchers over thousands of patients, and they've been remarkably consistent in their findings.
Also, the U.S. government has settled hundreds of lawsuits over the past few decades with parents whose child became autistic or died immediately following a shot.
That's true, but how does settling a lawsuit change the science?
Another question is what causes SIDS? Again, mothers are injected with mercury-laden shots while pregnant, up to 50 mcg per shot, even though pregnant women are warned to stay away from any type of mercury including trace amounts in tuna fish.
Again, another non sequitor. SIDS is relatively rare, so if all pregnant women are exposed to the same levels of mercury, why such a low incidence?
You seem to be suffering from tin-foil hat thinking, and frankly, it's unconvincing.
Telus's broadband solutions never promises unlimited bandwidth and always had a site you could go to to see your current (and past) consumption of bandwidth per month. If you hit the cap, you have the option of buying extra bandwidth for the month. Also, it's a "nice" cap in that it simply throttles you so you can still check e-mail, etc., but not do any serious downloading, etc.
My favorite was this one: http://guestworkerfraud.com/2009/12/sikh-youth-brutally-assaulted-in-us.html Good grief! It isn't even crypto racism.
Kind of a sweeping generalization of Venezuela. There were other items like that on the site. It reminds me of the nativist movement. On the other hand, Apex's over-reaction created a perfect Streisand Effect.
To be fair, you must concede that while the static languages catch some errors at compile time which might not be caught until runtime (or ideally, QA) with a dynamic/duck language, the static languages also "catch" a great deal of non-errors which the programmer is forced to deal with even though they never would have caused problems at run-time, while having the side-effect of reducing code re-use.
Um... no. I work with a proprietary duck type language and Java at work. Java does not catch non-errors, IMHO. On the other hand, we have to test the hell out of the duck type language because we can only find the bugs at run-time, and with the complex code we write at work, that takes a LONG time!
Duck typing is nice and has some nice features. I think it makes remoting such a painless thing to implement. But in practice, I do not find it is better or faster than statically typed languages. In fact, if you are working in a large team, static typing is faster because if goober over there on the other side of the floor changes his interface, he is the one who notices it and has to fix it. In the duck-type language mentioned above, I find out about it when the next nightly dev build happens and I spent half the morning fixing problems he caused.
Duck typing is simply different. It has certain strengths in certain situations, just as statically typed languages. I know this in an unpopular view but: the right language for the right task. Seriously, just because Python/Perl/Ruby is your Dremel motor tool doesn't mean you should remodel your kitchen and build your own cabinets from scratch with just a Dremel!
I've seen some saying bits of what I want to say, and I don't have mod points so I'll just do a "me too":
These are my beefs. Feel free to add more.
What kind of cooling system would you use?
Darn it! We got lots of science & technology places:
With all the talk of container and "lego" data centers, Oracle wants to become fully vertically integrated so that you can go to Oracle and say: "I've got $10 million -- sell my data center blocks".
Sun's already been developing their own data-center-in-a-shipping-container, and Oracle now has all the bits and pieces:
Also, having a horde of hardware engineers is Ellison's wet dream. As I said before, Larry Ellison wakes up every morning and asks himself, "How can I [fsck] Microsoft today?" Larry has stated in the past he wouldn't mind moving beyond databases, and with Sun's hardware and Java, he's poised to do pretty much anything he wants. So he might entertain delusions of mobile, return of the net appliances, home multimedia, etc. In the short term, though, I think he's hoping he can create custom hardware to make Oracle and Java run much faster. Will he succeed? Dunno, but Larry Ellison has a ferocious desire to succeed, and often, that's all you need.
For example, the video chips that launched a revolution. From SGI's original graphics accelerators through the Amiga's "fat agnes" to the early nVidia and ATI cards.
But I do admit I like the fact they included the 555 and 701. Such fond memories breadboarding with those things...
Most flus are carried around the globe by migrating birds, especially in the days before international trade and travel.