I'm not very experienced with either (know a bit of java, and used to work with ASP/VB on NT4), but for a project like you're describing, ASP and Java would be the last thing I consider.
Both have a reputation for being slow, insecure, and proprietary. As much as sun is trying to shed the image, Java is still their property.
Generally, it's a decent idea to separate the databse from the application/interface, and it looks like you've already done just that, so you should be pretty much able to pick whatever language you want. I'd be inclined to think that ASP.net supports the microsoft databases the best, and leaves a hazy future as to whether or not it will play nicely with your database. I also wouldn't like to rely on a Windows operating system as your server environment.
I'd shop around..... if this is really *just* a frontend, you could go as far as checking out one of the newer languages like python or php. If you want to possibly speed up development, and play around with a few new technologies, you could also check out ruby and see if it suits your needs.
Look at what other people are using. I'd tend to think that PHP and ASP.Net seem to be the two most popular. ASP.Net does have advantages, and from what I hear, it's leaps and bounds better than the original ASP I worked with on NT4. I personally wouldn't like to be locked down to windows OR mono (if it were to ever be shut down by microsoft for some sort of leagal trouble, you'd be in trouble)
But java....just makes me cringe. I've seen very few well-written java applications that were fast, stable, and functional. It can be done.... but very few are able to
No good reason comes to mind for dropping DVD-DL from the burner, but I can give a few good reasons for dropping S-Video and FW800.
S-video is terrible. Really truly terrible for anything apart from TV-Quality video. Given that I think that most MacBook users will own their own DVD players, I tend to doubt that many presentations will be given on a low-resolution TV monitor. It's old outdated technology that 99% of powerbook users never took advantage of. I think I've used it once in the past 3 years (and it looked so terrible that I never did it again).
FW800 never took on, and FW400 never even took on in the PC world (which is unfortunate). USB2 is more than adequate for most consumers, and I'd imagine that an addon FW800 interface will become available shortly for those looking to edit HD Video. I personally wouldn't have pulled the plug on FW800, but from the fact that nobody was using it, I guess it was worth it to shed the extra few ounces for the connector and supporting hardware. I would like to see a new Firewire spec in the future that maintains backward compatibility (with the connector) with Firewire-400, but supports higher speeds and more current supplied by the port. Being able to power a 2.5" hard drive directly from my laptop is a lifesaver. Being able to power two would be even better.
Is it just me, or does it seem like apple's becoming complacent? The last few macworlds have been somewhat disappointing. Front Row is great and all, but it certainly could be improved a lot. Likewise for the iPod Video, Pages, and Aperture.... maybe they're just waiting for the X86 transition nightmare to be over (still a bad decision in my mind...)
True. However, I'm sure the people performing this research are very well aware of this, and if they do indeed discover fakes, there's a whole new chapter of history waiting to be unearthed. This isn't intended to prove the Met's paintings worthless (NOBODY wants that), but is instead could make us say "Hey. This means we've discovered a whole new artist, that the original is out there somewhere, and that we could now have not one, but TWO priceless paintings)
I remember visiting an exhibit on Davinci at one of the NYC Art Musuems a long time ago (I think it was the Met), and the one bit about the exhibit that stuck out in my mind enough to remember it was the (large) selection of DaVinci fakes created throughout the years that at one point or another were used to fool the public. The fact that a 16th century artist could accurately copy a DaVinci, and steal the original without anyone noticing is downright remarkable, and deserves recognition for technical, if not creative merit.
Many artists would have a hard enough time reproducing their own work.
But, why has it remained that way? Inkscape and Blender were both developed along a similar vein and also weren't very good at first, and are now swiftly catching up to their commercial equivalents.
The only thing to improve in the GIMP has been the UI (in which minor, but significant strides were made in Version 2.0). The whole program just feels daunting and old-fashioned to use.
Along the same lines, I think it's time for photoshop to get some serious competition. Portions of the program feel *very* outdated, and many of the newer features are resource-hogs (Bridge, RAW Support, Vanishing Point, Photomerge, etc.). On the other hand, some of the newer photo 'healing' tools are top-rate, and feel like magic. Spot healing is a dream come true for many photographers and designers.
For a good portion of my workflow nowindays, I use a RAW conversion tool du-jour to perform all of my basic image manipulations (much better than any of the old PS tools could have done with just a JPG). I then throw it into Paint.Net to perform any additional processing as necessary that the RAW program I am using will not do. Photoshop is a last resort of sorts. There's no avoiding the fact that it's a huge memory hog.
Which brings me to the point that Paint.Net is an excellent open-source application with a very clear purpose in mind. While retaining an extremely simple interface, it has grown to be a very powerful image manipulation program in a very short amount of time. The GIMP just seems like it's trying too hard to achieve a goal it will never be able to meet. With that also in mind, has anyone else noticed that applications developed specifically for one platform are almost always superior? Quicktime/iTunes for windows sucks. Office for Mac leaves much to be desired in terms of the interface. Mozilla/Firefox does a bad job blending into the surrounding OS, and the Openoffice looks awful on any platform.
Major pharmecutical companies have been fighting attempts by African governments to essentially pirate the design of AIDS drugs. Poor African countries, which are suffering from AIDS epidemics, might be able to buy significant quantities of drugs at cost, but certainly can't pay prices which include the drug companies getting their royalties. Which means that lots of poor Africans are dying so that multinational drug companies can show a profit.
As you've pointed out, if the drug companies were to give away their design, they would go bankrupt. Likewise, the last time I checked, pharmeceuticals weren't much more profitable than other industries. Their costs are high.
Remember that they have to spend R&D to develop that one drug as well as R&D on innumerable drugs that never make it to market.
Basic Economics 101 tells us that it's in the company's best interest to sell their product at the higest price people are willing and able to pay. In Africa, this price is close to zero, and thus it's in the pharmeceutical industry's best interests to sell the drugs marginally above cost so they wouldn't lose money, but would also be slightly compensated for going through the trouble of providing the drugs.
By this logic, the prices being offered to the 3rd world nations are probably close to being "at cost". The problem is that "at cost" when factoring R&D and all other overhead costs is still too high for these poor nations to afford.
Believe me, if the big corporations were empowered to end the AIDS epidemic in Africa (or even part of Africa), they would do it. That's the sort of positive publicity that analysts dream of. (It's interesting. The public's opinion of big pharma has ranged from "Above the Catholic Church" to "Below Big Tabacco" in the past 10 years for no big reason. Curing AIDS and selling it so that Africa could afford it without going bankrupt in the process would definitely provide a pretty big boost)
Given Europe's 2000 year history, I have a pretty good idea that the rest of the world is going to be forced to pay through the nose to use this thing.
Coincidentally, the USSR had its own navigation system that is still partially active today (ie. a few of the satellites haven't crashed back down to earth yet). A bunch of GPS receivers can use it to enhance accuracy when 3 GPS satellites aren't in range.
The developers had better include an easter egg somewhere that lets you play Tic-Tac-Toe or a nice game of chess.
Re:There's Blender meeting in March (also for gimp
on
Blender 2.40 Released
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· Score: 1
What about Paint.Net? Sure, it's win32 only, but in its (very) short existance, so far it's almost caught up to the GIMP from a user's perspective.
Granted, it still lacks a number of more advanced features, but at the same time is elegant in its simplicity and power, and is a pleasure to use --- the UI is clean and responsive, and doesn't attempt to do a half-assed job of copying photoshop.
Oh, and it's also Open Source. The executable is tiny, and the program loads in about 5 seoconds on my rather humble computer, and is very conseravitive with RAM usage. I find that I use it more often than photoshop for my a lot of my simpler work. If they can clone photoshop's healing brush, I think I could probably ditch photoshop completely.
Slashdot story of the year? Okay. I'd actually give it that nomination if the award actually existed.
You see, it's not a dupe, and the editing staff actually went out of their way to do a little real reporting and checked their facts with the official source.
That's not to say the rumor's completely untrue (M$ may be investing or purchasing a minority stake in the company), but as far as we all know, you're not going to do much better for accuracy than this.
for one, no standard windows desktop should take up 300mb of ram.
You could also try running applications that use the operating system's native windowing toolkit. Gaim has a buttload of overhead on windows because it needs to load all of GTK into memory in addition to the normal Win32 windowing toolkit. Ditto for Mozilla.
A better comparison would have been Win32 with IE and AIM versus KDE with Konqueror and whatever KDE's instant messaging program is. Once you start mixing toolkits, RAM usage goes through the roof.
There's a lot more to it than that. The wikipedia article is fascinating, as is much of Tesla's life. Had he actually been able to pull it off, I'd imagine that the 20th century would have been quite different.
I'm pretty sure that "Adequate Supply" is the missing 5%.
Seriously. They screwed up bigtime on this one. Among my friends, there is virtually no hype around the 360. As a matter of fact, a lot of us are seeking out older consoles and their representative games. N64 still has the best selection of 4-player games hands-down. Goldeneye, smash, mariokart, marioparty, etc....
If they brought the system for gaming, why on earth would somebody go through the pain of installing linux? Not only has it proven to be inefficent/unusable as a desktop system, they're not going to be able to use the machine for its intended purpose of playing games.
At the same time, I can play the role of zealot here and suggest buying a mac. Sure, you still won't be able to play any games, but you'll have all the advantages of linux without any of the pitfalls.
Pages, while being an excellent program is not a replacement for Word. It lacks many basic word processing features, and suggests that it was never truly intended for that purpose.
It most closely resembles Microsoft Publisher, or a very stripped-down version of Adobe inDesign or Quark Xpress. Its major feature is page layout (which it does brilliantly). For day-to-day word processing tasks, however, Word is really a completely different application.
The only real thing Apple has to compete with Word is the ailing AppleWorks suite. That said, Microsoft's not going to pull Office Mac off the shelves as long as it's making money (and it is, believe me). Apple can easily build/buy a word processing app in the time between when microsoft stops developing office, and the time consumers become restless. Of course, there's nothing suggesting that they're not doing this already. Keynote is an excellent product, and is miles better than powerpoint, and Pages promises to be an excellent application in the next version or two (still has a few kinks that desperately need to be worked out).
Most of what the article is talking about also can easily be extended to print medium as well. That is, the way a page looks when printed out.
Through a very simple use of CSS, you can rearrange the page to be more friendly for print format by dropping background colors, making the text black, and removing sidebars and navigational elements.
With a little more effort, you can rearrange elements, replace graphics/logos with black & white versions, and rearrange the text so that it's occupying the full width of the page, etc. The driving directions feature on google maps is a great example of this concept.
Even slashdot's CSS redesign sports some of these features by dropping the ads, the top row of topic icons, the sidebar, the "Read More..../Comments?" line below each article, and other assorted navigational elements. Granted, it's still not very pretty compared to most, but it looks a hell of a lot better than the manner in which browsers butcher printed documents without no media attribute set.
Even for a proficent user, there is no compelling reason to use Firefox over Safari. The fact that safari uses the native OS X windowing toolkits means it integrates seamlessly with the OS, uses less memory, and is more stable than firefox would be.
There's really nothing that firefox has that safari lacks. The only thing that comes to mind are extensions, and the vast majority of users aren't going to ever need those. Standards compliance is pretty much on par with firefox (better in some areas, worse in some, but improving with every release....)
Cell phone carriers do exactly what you're describing above in the form of in-network calling.
Heck, I'm switching to Verizon's mobile service because it doesn't make any sense to pay Cingular when virtually all of my contacts are on verizon, and would be free to call if I were a verizon customer.
It's probably racketeering, and definitely immoral, but it's a damn effective business strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not very experienced with either (know a bit of java, and used to work with ASP/VB on NT4), but for a project like you're describing, ASP and Java would be the last thing I consider.
Both have a reputation for being slow, insecure, and proprietary. As much as sun is trying to shed the image, Java is still their property.
Generally, it's a decent idea to separate the databse from the application/interface, and it looks like you've already done just that, so you should be pretty much able to pick whatever language you want. I'd be inclined to think that ASP.net supports the microsoft databases the best, and leaves a hazy future as to whether or not it will play nicely with your database. I also wouldn't like to rely on a Windows operating system as your server environment.
I'd shop around..... if this is really *just* a frontend, you could go as far as checking out one of the newer languages like python or php. If you want to possibly speed up development, and play around with a few new technologies, you could also check out ruby and see if it suits your needs.
Look at what other people are using. I'd tend to think that PHP and ASP.Net seem to be the two most popular. ASP.Net does have advantages, and from what I hear, it's leaps and bounds better than the original ASP I worked with on NT4. I personally wouldn't like to be locked down to windows OR mono (if it were to ever be shut down by microsoft for some sort of leagal trouble, you'd be in trouble)
But java....just makes me cringe. I've seen very few well-written java applications that were fast, stable, and functional. It can be done.... but very few are able to
No good reason comes to mind for dropping DVD-DL from the burner, but I can give a few good reasons for dropping S-Video and FW800.
S-video is terrible. Really truly terrible for anything apart from TV-Quality video. Given that I think that most MacBook users will own their own DVD players, I tend to doubt that many presentations will be given on a low-resolution TV monitor. It's old outdated technology that 99% of powerbook users never took advantage of. I think I've used it once in the past 3 years (and it looked so terrible that I never did it again).
FW800 never took on, and FW400 never even took on in the PC world (which is unfortunate). USB2 is more than adequate for most consumers, and I'd imagine that an addon FW800 interface will become available shortly for those looking to edit HD Video. I personally wouldn't have pulled the plug on FW800, but from the fact that nobody was using it, I guess it was worth it to shed the extra few ounces for the connector and supporting hardware. I would like to see a new Firewire spec in the future that maintains backward compatibility (with the connector) with Firewire-400, but supports higher speeds and more current supplied by the port. Being able to power a 2.5" hard drive directly from my laptop is a lifesaver. Being able to power two would be even better.
MacTV looks likely, or at least some sort of update to Front Row to add PVR functionality or flesch out the feature set a bit.
However, I think they'll pick a new name...
Is it just me, or does it seem like apple's becoming complacent? The last few macworlds have been somewhat disappointing. Front Row is great and all, but it certainly could be improved a lot. Likewise for the iPod Video, Pages, and Aperture.... maybe they're just waiting for the X86 transition nightmare to be over (still a bad decision in my mind...)
True. However, I'm sure the people performing this research are very well aware of this, and if they do indeed discover fakes, there's a whole new chapter of history waiting to be unearthed. This isn't intended to prove the Met's paintings worthless (NOBODY wants that), but is instead could make us say "Hey. This means we've discovered a whole new artist, that the original is out there somewhere, and that we could now have not one, but TWO priceless paintings)
I remember visiting an exhibit on Davinci at one of the NYC Art Musuems a long time ago (I think it was the Met), and the one bit about the exhibit that stuck out in my mind enough to remember it was the (large) selection of DaVinci fakes created throughout the years that at one point or another were used to fool the public. The fact that a 16th century artist could accurately copy a DaVinci, and steal the original without anyone noticing is downright remarkable, and deserves recognition for technical, if not creative merit.
Many artists would have a hard enough time reproducing their own work.
Forgive me for being uninformed, but why would the Secret Service be the agency responsible for investigating this type of incident?
Unless Valerie Plame had a timeshare.....
That's called civil disobediance.
Agreed.
But, why has it remained that way? Inkscape and Blender were both developed along a similar vein and also weren't very good at first, and are now swiftly catching up to their commercial equivalents.
The only thing to improve in the GIMP has been the UI (in which minor, but significant strides were made in Version 2.0). The whole program just feels daunting and old-fashioned to use.
Along the same lines, I think it's time for photoshop to get some serious competition. Portions of the program feel *very* outdated, and many of the newer features are resource-hogs (Bridge, RAW Support, Vanishing Point, Photomerge, etc.). On the other hand, some of the newer photo 'healing' tools are top-rate, and feel like magic. Spot healing is a dream come true for many photographers and designers.
For a good portion of my workflow nowindays, I use a RAW conversion tool du-jour to perform all of my basic image manipulations (much better than any of the old PS tools could have done with just a JPG). I then throw it into Paint.Net to perform any additional processing as necessary that the RAW program I am using will not do. Photoshop is a last resort of sorts. There's no avoiding the fact that it's a huge memory hog.
Which brings me to the point that Paint.Net is an excellent open-source application with a very clear purpose in mind. While retaining an extremely simple interface, it has grown to be a very powerful image manipulation program in a very short amount of time. The GIMP just seems like it's trying too hard to achieve a goal it will never be able to meet. With that also in mind, has anyone else noticed that applications developed specifically for one platform are almost always superior? Quicktime/iTunes for windows sucks. Office for Mac leaves much to be desired in terms of the interface. Mozilla/Firefox does a bad job blending into the surrounding OS, and the Openoffice looks awful on any platform.
Really? My mind immediately jumped to Myst, which I think is a pretty accurate indicator of the GIMP's user interface.
Major pharmecutical companies have been fighting attempts by African governments to essentially pirate the design of AIDS drugs. Poor African countries, which are suffering from AIDS epidemics, might be able to buy significant quantities of drugs at cost, but certainly can't pay prices which include the drug companies getting their royalties. Which means that lots of poor Africans are dying so that multinational drug companies can show a profit.
As you've pointed out, if the drug companies were to give away their design, they would go bankrupt. Likewise, the last time I checked, pharmeceuticals weren't much more profitable than other industries. Their costs are high.
Remember that they have to spend R&D to develop that one drug as well as R&D on innumerable drugs that never make it to market.
Basic Economics 101 tells us that it's in the company's best interest to sell their product at the higest price people are willing and able to pay. In Africa, this price is close to zero, and thus it's in the pharmeceutical industry's best interests to sell the drugs marginally above cost so they wouldn't lose money, but would also be slightly compensated for going through the trouble of providing the drugs.
By this logic, the prices being offered to the 3rd world nations are probably close to being "at cost". The problem is that "at cost" when factoring R&D and all other overhead costs is still too high for these poor nations to afford.
Believe me, if the big corporations were empowered to end the AIDS epidemic in Africa (or even part of Africa), they would do it. That's the sort of positive publicity that analysts dream of. (It's interesting. The public's opinion of big pharma has ranged from "Above the Catholic Church" to "Below Big Tabacco" in the past 10 years for no big reason. Curing AIDS and selling it so that Africa could afford it without going bankrupt in the process would definitely provide a pretty big boost)
Given Europe's 2000 year history, I have a pretty good idea that the rest of the world is going to be forced to pay through the nose to use this thing.
Coincidentally, the USSR had its own navigation system that is still partially active today (ie. a few of the satellites haven't crashed back down to earth yet). A bunch of GPS receivers can use it to enhance accuracy when 3 GPS satellites aren't in range.
This is Rob Lord of Winamp and Muse.net fame. It's a shame Muse.net flopped -- it looks like this is attempting to be a jab in a similar direction.
So the MS in NBC stood for "Microsoft"? I always thought it was "More Stupid NBC"...
Microsoft = More Stupid..... yeah. if you want to kick it up that extra level of abstraction, that still works.
The developers had better include an easter egg somewhere that lets you play Tic-Tac-Toe or a nice game of chess.
What about Paint.Net? Sure, it's win32 only, but in its (very) short existance, so far it's almost caught up to the GIMP from a user's perspective.
Granted, it still lacks a number of more advanced features, but at the same time is elegant in its simplicity and power, and is a pleasure to use --- the UI is clean and responsive, and doesn't attempt to do a half-assed job of copying photoshop.
Oh, and it's also Open Source. The executable is tiny, and the program loads in about 5 seoconds on my rather humble computer, and is very conseravitive with RAM usage. I find that I use it more often than photoshop for my a lot of my simpler work. If they can clone photoshop's healing brush, I think I could probably ditch photoshop completely.
Slashdot story of the year? Okay. I'd actually give it that nomination if the award actually existed.
You see, it's not a dupe, and the editing staff actually went out of their way to do a little real reporting and checked their facts with the official source.
That's not to say the rumor's completely untrue (M$ may be investing or purchasing a minority stake in the company), but as far as we all know, you're not going to do much better for accuracy than this.
that's nothing to brag about
for one, no standard windows desktop should take up 300mb of ram.
You could also try running applications that use the operating system's native windowing toolkit. Gaim has a buttload of overhead on windows because it needs to load all of GTK into memory in addition to the normal Win32 windowing toolkit. Ditto for Mozilla.
A better comparison would have been
Win32 with IE and AIM versus KDE with Konqueror and whatever KDE's instant messaging program is. Once you start mixing toolkits, RAM usage goes through the roof.
We're talking about X-Windows here. I can assure you that it is completely devoid of any sort of intelligent design.
There's a lot more to it than that. The wikipedia article is fascinating, as is much of Tesla's life. Had he actually been able to pull it off, I'd imagine that the 20th century would have been quite different.
I'm pretty sure that "Adequate Supply" is the missing 5%.
Seriously. They screwed up bigtime on this one. Among my friends, there is virtually no hype around the 360. As a matter of fact, a lot of us are seeking out older consoles and their representative games. N64 still has the best selection of 4-player games hands-down. Goldeneye, smash, mariokart, marioparty, etc....
Blegh. Insightful?
If they brought the system for gaming, why on earth would somebody go through the pain of installing linux? Not only has it proven to be inefficent/unusable as a desktop system, they're not going to be able to use the machine for its intended purpose of playing games.
At the same time, I can play the role of zealot here and suggest buying a mac. Sure, you still won't be able to play any games, but you'll have all the advantages of linux without any of the pitfalls.
Pages, while being an excellent program is not a replacement for Word. It lacks many basic word processing features, and suggests that it was never truly intended for that purpose.
It most closely resembles Microsoft Publisher, or a very stripped-down version of Adobe inDesign or Quark Xpress. Its major feature is page layout (which it does brilliantly). For day-to-day word processing tasks, however, Word is really a completely different application.
The only real thing Apple has to compete with Word is the ailing AppleWorks suite. That said, Microsoft's not going to pull Office Mac off the shelves as long as it's making money (and it is, believe me). Apple can easily build/buy a word processing app in the time between when microsoft stops developing office, and the time consumers become restless. Of course, there's nothing suggesting that they're not doing this already. Keynote is an excellent product, and is miles better than powerpoint, and Pages promises to be an excellent application in the next version or two (still has a few kinks that desperately need to be worked out).
Most of what the article is talking about also can easily be extended to print medium as well. That is, the way a page looks when printed out.
Through a very simple use of CSS, you can rearrange the page to be more friendly for print format by dropping background colors, making the text black, and removing sidebars and navigational elements.
With a little more effort, you can rearrange elements, replace graphics/logos with black & white versions, and rearrange the text so that it's occupying the full width of the page, etc. The driving directions feature on google maps is a great example of this concept.
Even slashdot's CSS redesign sports some of these features by dropping the ads, the top row of topic icons, the sidebar, the "Read More..../Comments?" line below each article, and other assorted navigational elements. Granted, it's still not very pretty compared to most, but it looks a hell of a lot better than the manner in which browsers butcher printed documents without no media attribute set.
Agreed.
Even for a proficent user, there is no compelling reason to use Firefox over Safari. The fact that safari uses the native OS X windowing toolkits means it integrates seamlessly with the OS, uses less memory, and is more stable than firefox would be.
There's really nothing that firefox has that safari lacks. The only thing that comes to mind are extensions, and the vast majority of users aren't going to ever need those. Standards compliance is pretty much on par with firefox (better in some areas, worse in some, but improving with every release....)
This was one of the "way before its time" features Microsoft introduced in IE 4 in the form of the Active Desktop (remember it back from Win98??)
It was a really cool concept ruined by poor performance, slow processors, slow connections, and poor security.
I was sad to see how it got put on the backburner after IE5. Active Desktop could have been great...
Cell phone carriers do exactly what you're describing above in the form of in-network calling.
Heck, I'm switching to Verizon's mobile service because it doesn't make any sense to pay Cingular when virtually all of my contacts are on verizon, and would be free to call if I were a verizon customer.
It's probably racketeering, and definitely immoral, but it's a damn effective business strategy.