Numbers of people who do evil things... duh!:-) This is based purely on my gut instinct, since I don't really need statistics for opinions I only expect me to subscribe to. If I were trying to be persuasive, I'd wave some numbers in your face that attempted to justify my irrational hatred of white male Republicans. But I'm not trying to be persuasive, this is just a rant. If it helps you to hate me more, I'm one of those self-hating white males (aren't we the worst kind?).
Libertarians are OK, but they just don't grab me. I'll vote for particular candidates, but I'm not enough of a "joiner" to buy into all of their ideas. I'm not a big Ayn Rand fan anyway:-).
Well, no, but just by sheer numbers (at least in America), I think the white male Republicans are in the lead. So, I'm OK with God starting there before he takes all the other scuzz-buckets too. They can all die incredibly painful deaths for all I care. By my belief system it's a boon for them -- this gives them a chance to start over as, say, an earthworm all that sooner and maybe only have a few thousand more lifetimes of life in this world:-).
(and yes, I do tend to vote Democrat more often than Republican, but I really would love a decent third party and I tend to vote out incumbents when it comes down a choice between equally evil candidates, which is happening more and more often)
I'm sorry, I can't be anything but damn happy about this. My only disappointment is that he didn't actually serve some time behind bars before dying. He and his cronies were pure scum, worse than any blue-collar criminal by far. A street thug ends up ruining a few people's lives -- these manipulative assholes ruined thousands of people's lives as they sat in their comfy boardrooms and made their schemes.
Sorry, I'm just not impressed by some dude who basically used his pull and contacts to get a nice toy. I mean, he didn't do any of this himself! He used the old-boys network to get his keen "mod". I'm not even saying he didn't get those contacts for a good reason -- if anyone frequented my business for 20 years, I'd hook them up too. But this is so irrelevant as/. material.
If we substitute "how I got some nice free golf clubs" for "Redberry", that would be about the same result, and just as boring.
Oh, and the other article? Talk about over-the-top hype. I thought I was reading Wired from 1992.
Well, even if you don't trust Rational, I worked a few years ago with a company that (over six years ago) had a tool that would do this round-tripping between UML and Java code. Worked like a charm, proved handy for very large systems we were designing where the object hierarchy and relations were helpful to see all laid out in one big sheet.
Tools are getting smarter. We need to leverage them to help us write the code, check the code, and maintain the code. They are, however, just tools -- not panaceas.
It's funny, as I'm reading this I'm packing my two Kurobox-en (http://www.kurobox.com/) into my suitcase to take with me on the road for some development. Two systems, each about the size of a Mac Mini, one has my web server and Subversion, one has the MySQL database.
Works fine for me. Granted, I'm not doing J2EE development on the boxes (these are my Rails development boxes), but honestly, they both seem to pack a ton of horsepower for the teeny CPU and power requirements (17 Watts each). Total cost for both units plus a 300 GB disk for each -- about $550.
I use these boxes because I happen to have them (when they're not development boxes, they are my home disk servers -- bringing them along has the side benefit of me having access to my MP3 collection on the road too). If I were buying something just for this purpose, I'd get a Mac Mini (~$1000 tricked out) or a second laptop (a Dell laptop with decent horsepower but low on the bells and whistels would be under $1000, I just speced one out today).
Most of the time, I do development *entirely* on my laptop. With 1GB RAM and a mid-range Pentium M, it keeps up just fine with an IDE up, a web server, and a J2EE servlet container (it's when I add a database on top of all that that it starts to slow down too much). Two laptops would handle my needs just fine. Most demos I see when vendors come in these days are run off the Sales Engineers laptop, so I'd say it's becoming a ubiquitous solution.
I guess since I'm one of many asking the "why" questions, maybe we need a better statement of the reasons you think you need so much horsepower. Certainly, for $2000 or so (still less than a 1U server, I'm sure) you could have *two* small boxes which would fit in any decent sized laptop bag (my laptop bag fits both my Kuros side by side, and they are comparable in size to a Mac Mini).
I suspect most people are going to front-end Java servlet containers with Apache via something like mod_caucho or mod_jk (or, um, whatever the newest version of the Apache Server-to-Tomcat communications format is, those darn open source folks seem to change their minds a lot). Apache a lot more customizable options for controlling access, rewriting urls, and other things you usually end up needing in any realy production environment.
I'd have to disagree, only because I've seen this happen many many times. It's just a fact, these guys operate on very thin margins. They are constantly a few bad months away from bankruptcy. Steve Jackson, ICE, Hero Games, etc -- every publisher other than TSR/Wizards/Hasbro (and TSR was in danger of dying -- that's why WOTC bought them!). They've all done this sort of appeal to fans, as have many small comics publishers I'm acquainted with (again, basically everyone except DC and Marvel has had these times -- and Marvel also flirted with bankruptcy). I'm used to hitting up sales from various publishers to get them a cash infusion to stay afloat, and I don't mind it -- it is usually a win/win scenario. They clear inventory/drum up business, I get cool stuff cheap.
I think even a very smart businessman has a very hard time in this sort of business where there is a small audience being asked to divide a finite amount of money among a huge number of options.
Didn't Graham study art? If not academically, he certainly has studied it personally. I hear that being rich from being bought out by Yahoo gives you plenty of free time and wealth to pursue your more philosophical interests. Just because he's a smart engineer (and indeed, he is obviously an incredibly smart fellow -- read up on any of his software work and you'll be impressed, even if you don't worship s-expressions like Paul does) does not rule out him having informed and defensible opinions on other topics.
Or, you know, he could be completely wrong. I'm sure he is pretty sure he is not, because he has the great hacker quality of confidence and a bit of hubris to go with it, but I also don't think he presents his essays are authoritative universal truths. They are... essays. Opinions.
Personally, I find him a great read even when I don't agree with him. I mean, certainly on this topic you at least have to grant that he has a very informed opinion, having been quite successful in helming a startup to acquisition and in continuing to work in that arena.
He's Steve Ballmer. Richer than kings of old ever dreamed of. Much like the Hilton sisters, his kids are going to be able to be complete morons and they will get by just fine in life...
Judges have been ordering access to email accounts and other private data for years. GMail just happens to be an email provider which has a greater ability to deliver such data. Your ISP of choice could have gotten an order like this anytime in the last 10 years - it's no different than any other subpoena ordering access to records which the judge (right or wrong) thinks are relevant to the case.
So, nothing stunning here. *twirls finger in the air* Big whoop.
Use encryption if you don't want people to read your email. That's been true for... well, forever in the email world.
Yes, I know what "the flow" is. I get into it quite often. I also realize just as often that, guess what? I'm part of a team of people. We regularly shout over the cubicle walls, or prarie-dog to look over into each others cubes to discuss something quickly. When we need to all have a quick discussion, we pop up, walk over to the nearest intersection of cubicle quadrants, and have a "standing meeting".
I find putting on headphones and listening to music (even low-volume music) is just enough to shut out the world. Others in the team also (duh) respect when I want to be left alone to hack. In a pinch, we do have enclaves I can retreat to and shut the door of, and in that environment I will not be disturbed.
So... gosh, like most of life, it takes a mix of solutions to get the job done. Imagine that...
Ruby is great, but the standard libraries are under-documented and just don't measure up to the JDK (which, granted, is f'ing huge and includes so much stuff I have never in 10 years of programming Java had a need touse). It's also lacking some of the other support I take for granted with Java (for example, nice IDEs - they exist, but are still not as good as the average Java IDE in terms of boosting my productivity).
It looks like my next language of choice, however. I like the OO concepts, and although the block/yield methodology is a bit awkward (the packaging of blocks into Procs is the way the entire language should have gone, I 'got' that concept much easier), it's solid and on it's way to much wider use.
But... booth-babe gigs are the only form of employment for some of these nubile young ladies. What will they do now, E3? How will they afford their next adjustment to their fake cleavage without these vital jobs?
Please, won't someone consider the poor booth babes?
Re:Java programmers are more expensive
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Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You haven't checked jakarta.apache.org lately, have you? One of the most active open-source communities out there! Perhaps actual applications using Java aren't as prolific, but the building blocks for them are very much out there, widely used, and actively worked on.
It is to laugh
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Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh, please.
Java is still in incredibly heavy use in larger-scale systems and internal applications. It doesn't need to be "hip", "trendy", or "LAMP". It just needs to do a job, do it well, and be maintainable. It does that (and more), has still proven fairly easy to scale from small projects to very large, and is still a decent (though not terrific) language.
It also plays well with many other solutions, by virtue of numerous scripting languages which target Java bytecodes, as well as native code integration if you simply cannot get by without some piece of C code (although, there goes easy portability - one of the major benefits).
These articles are just a joke. That they would even use the term "hip" shows that this is far from a serious study.
Unfortunately, the escort to the door thing is becoming more prevelant. I saw an entire development group marched out the door once in one fell swoop, they were told they could come back the next day and get all their stuff under the eyes of security, but they had to leave in the middle of a work day with basically 0 minutes notice... they went from the conference room to the door, with perhaps 1 minute to grab something from their cubes.
I wouldn't take it personally. It's usually not a reflection on the person themselves, just the company's paranoia.
Thank you. "Wannabe" is just the right term. It really burns my ass when someone who is ignorant (and I mean that in the truest sense of the word -- they might not be stupid, but they obviously do not actually know what they are talking about) just spits out the standard "Java is teh suX0r!!!! It is sl0w!!!!" stuff.
*rolls eyes*
LISP weenies and C++ gurus can knock Java. They've earned the right to do so. Anyone who has written code for one of the "scripting languages" people position as competitors to Java (they aren't, just different tools for different jobs) can knock Java, because they've shown they understand the compromises and internals of designing a language....but if you've sorta kinda read a book on Perl, or you think PHP "r0xors" because your favorite Counterstrike fansite uses it for the forum system, or you think Java is slow because an applet of Jake waving ran slow in Netscape 3.0 in 1996, you might not quite be qualified to offer an opinion on this subject.
Really? SQL Server works for us, but when it gets bunged up or isn't performing "right", it seems to be a real bitch to figure out what to do. Maybe our DBA just isn't yet fully up to speed (he's more of an Oracle guy by training, only been doing SQL Server for a few years), but it hasn't been ideal.
I think in my experience, Oracle has been the most solid database across all the projects I've worked on (well, OK, aside from the big-iron DB2 when I was at Ford Motor). It seems way expensive to get it that way and keep it that way, but if you're willing to sign the checks it delivers solidly. SQL Server is OK, and MySQL has been OK (been easier from the developer end to debug and tune my SQL via MySQL, even with the nice Query Analyzer output from MS Enterprise Manager I never quite understood how to "make things quicker" with SQL Server).
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Numbers of people who do evil things... duh! :-) This is based purely on my gut instinct, since I don't really need statistics for opinions I only expect me to subscribe to. If I were trying to be persuasive, I'd wave some numbers in your face that attempted to justify my irrational hatred of white male Republicans. But I'm not trying to be persuasive, this is just a rant. If it helps you to hate me more, I'm one of those self-hating white males (aren't we the worst kind?).
:-).
Libertarians are OK, but they just don't grab me. I'll vote for particular candidates, but I'm not enough of a "joiner" to buy into all of their ideas. I'm not a big Ayn Rand fan anyway
Well, no, but just by sheer numbers (at least in America), I think the white male Republicans are in the lead. So, I'm OK with God starting there before he takes all the other scuzz-buckets too. They can all die incredibly painful deaths for all I care. By my belief system it's a boon for them -- this gives them a chance to start over as, say, an earthworm all that sooner and maybe only have a few thousand more lifetimes of life in this world :-).
(and yes, I do tend to vote Democrat more often than Republican, but I really would love a decent third party and I tend to vote out incumbents when it comes down a choice between equally evil candidates, which is happening more and more often)
I'm sorry, I can't be anything but damn happy about this. My only disappointment is that he didn't actually serve some time behind bars before dying. He and his cronies were pure scum, worse than any blue-collar criminal by far. A street thug ends up ruining a few people's lives -- these manipulative assholes ruined thousands of people's lives as they sat in their comfy boardrooms and made their schemes.
Sorry, I'm just not impressed by some dude who basically used his pull and contacts to get a nice toy. I mean, he didn't do any of this himself! He used the old-boys network to get his keen "mod". I'm not even saying he didn't get those contacts for a good reason -- if anyone frequented my business for 20 years, I'd hook them up too. But this is so irrelevant as /. material.
If we substitute "how I got some nice free golf clubs" for "Redberry", that would be about the same result, and just as boring.
Oh, and the other article? Talk about over-the-top hype. I thought I was reading Wired from 1992.
Well, even if you don't trust Rational, I worked a few years ago with a company that (over six years ago) had a tool that would do this round-tripping between UML and Java code. Worked like a charm, proved handy for very large systems we were designing where the object hierarchy and relations were helpful to see all laid out in one big sheet.
Tools are getting smarter. We need to leverage them to help us write the code, check the code, and maintain the code. They are, however, just tools -- not panaceas.
It's funny, as I'm reading this I'm packing my two Kurobox-en (http://www.kurobox.com/) into my suitcase to take with me on the road for some development. Two systems, each about the size of a Mac Mini, one has my web server and Subversion, one has the MySQL database.
Works fine for me. Granted, I'm not doing J2EE development on the boxes (these are my Rails development boxes), but honestly, they both seem to pack a ton of horsepower for the teeny CPU and power requirements (17 Watts each). Total cost for both units plus a 300 GB disk for each -- about $550.
I use these boxes because I happen to have them (when they're not development boxes, they are my home disk servers -- bringing them along has the side benefit of me having access to my MP3 collection on the road too). If I were buying something just for this purpose, I'd get a Mac Mini (~$1000 tricked out) or a second laptop (a Dell laptop with decent horsepower but low on the bells and whistels would be under $1000, I just speced one out today).
Most of the time, I do development *entirely* on my laptop. With 1GB RAM and a mid-range Pentium M, it keeps up just fine with an IDE up, a web server, and a J2EE servlet container (it's when I add a database on top of all that that it starts to slow down too much). Two laptops would handle my needs just fine. Most demos I see when vendors come in these days are run off the Sales Engineers laptop, so I'd say it's becoming a ubiquitous solution.
I guess since I'm one of many asking the "why" questions, maybe we need a better statement of the reasons you think you need so much horsepower. Certainly, for $2000 or so (still less than a 1U server, I'm sure) you could have *two* small boxes which would fit in any decent sized laptop bag (my laptop bag fits both my Kuros side by side, and they are comparable in size to a Mac Mini).
What American Way of Life would you expect a programmer in the UK to have, exactly?
Where's the moderation option, +1 - "Oh, Snap"
I suspect most people are going to front-end Java servlet containers with Apache via something like mod_caucho or mod_jk (or, um, whatever the newest version of the Apache Server-to-Tomcat communications format is, those darn open source folks seem to change their minds a lot). Apache a lot more customizable options for controlling access, rewriting urls, and other things you usually end up needing in any realy production environment.
I'd have to disagree, only because I've seen this happen many many times. It's just a fact, these guys operate on very thin margins. They are constantly a few bad months away from bankruptcy. Steve Jackson, ICE, Hero Games, etc -- every publisher other than TSR/Wizards/Hasbro (and TSR was in danger of dying -- that's why WOTC bought them!). They've all done this sort of appeal to fans, as have many small comics publishers I'm acquainted with (again, basically everyone except DC and Marvel has had these times -- and Marvel also flirted with bankruptcy). I'm used to hitting up sales from various publishers to get them a cash infusion to stay afloat, and I don't mind it -- it is usually a win/win scenario. They clear inventory/drum up business, I get cool stuff cheap.
I think even a very smart businessman has a very hard time in this sort of business where there is a small audience being asked to divide a finite amount of money among a huge number of options.
I'd rather have ideas, with "consequences", than no ideas at all.
I believe he gets to say this because he can actually spell the word "moron".
Didn't Graham study art? If not academically, he certainly has studied it personally. I hear that being rich from being bought out by Yahoo gives you plenty of free time and wealth to pursue your more philosophical interests. Just because he's a smart engineer (and indeed, he is obviously an incredibly smart fellow -- read up on any of his software work and you'll be impressed, even if you don't worship s-expressions like Paul does) does not rule out him having informed and defensible opinions on other topics.
Or, you know, he could be completely wrong. I'm sure he is pretty sure he is not, because he has the great hacker quality of confidence and a bit of hubris to go with it, but I also don't think he presents his essays are authoritative universal truths. They are... essays. Opinions.
Personally, I find him a great read even when I don't agree with him. I mean, certainly on this topic you at least have to grant that he has a very informed opinion, having been quite successful in helming a startup to acquisition and in continuing to work in that arena.
He's Steve Ballmer. Richer than kings of old ever dreamed of. Much like the Hilton sisters, his kids are going to be able to be complete morons and they will get by just fine in life...
Judges have been ordering access to email accounts and other private data for years. GMail just happens to be an email provider which has a greater ability to deliver such data. Your ISP of choice could have gotten an order like this anytime in the last 10 years - it's no different than any other subpoena ordering access to records which the judge (right or wrong) thinks are relevant to the case.
So, nothing stunning here. *twirls finger in the air* Big whoop.
Use encryption if you don't want people to read your email. That's been true for... well, forever in the email world.
Amen.
Yes, I know what "the flow" is. I get into it quite often. I also realize just as often that, guess what? I'm part of a team of people. We regularly shout over the cubicle walls, or prarie-dog to look over into each others cubes to discuss something quickly. When we need to all have a quick discussion, we pop up, walk over to the nearest intersection of cubicle quadrants, and have a "standing meeting".
I find putting on headphones and listening to music (even low-volume music) is just enough to shut out the world. Others in the team also (duh) respect when I want to be left alone to hack. In a pinch, we do have enclaves I can retreat to and shut the door of, and in that environment I will not be disturbed.
So... gosh, like most of life, it takes a mix of solutions to get the job done. Imagine that...
Ruby is great, but the standard libraries are under-documented and just don't measure up to the JDK (which, granted, is f'ing huge and includes so much stuff I have never in 10 years of programming Java had a need touse). It's also lacking some of the other support I take for granted with Java (for example, nice IDEs - they exist, but are still not as good as the average Java IDE in terms of boosting my productivity).
It looks like my next language of choice, however. I like the OO concepts, and although the block/yield methodology is a bit awkward (the packaging of blocks into Procs is the way the entire language should have gone, I 'got' that concept much easier), it's solid and on it's way to much wider use.
But... booth-babe gigs are the only form of employment for some of these nubile young ladies. What will they do now, E3? How will they afford their next adjustment to their fake cleavage without these vital jobs?
Please, won't someone consider the poor booth babes?
You haven't checked jakarta.apache.org lately, have you? One of the most active open-source communities out there! Perhaps actual applications using Java aren't as prolific, but the building blocks for them are very much out there, widely used, and actively worked on.
Oh, please.
Java is still in incredibly heavy use in larger-scale systems and internal applications. It doesn't need to be "hip", "trendy", or "LAMP". It just needs to do a job, do it well, and be maintainable. It does that (and more), has still proven fairly easy to scale from small projects to very large, and is still a decent (though not terrific) language.
It also plays well with many other solutions, by virtue of numerous scripting languages which target Java bytecodes, as well as native code integration if you simply cannot get by without some piece of C code (although, there goes easy portability - one of the major benefits).
These articles are just a joke. That they would even use the term "hip" shows that this is far from a serious study.
So... they're frustrated that they can't make more money?
Well, damn, we have a lot in common.
Unfortunately, the escort to the door thing is becoming more prevelant. I saw an entire development group marched out the door once in one fell swoop, they were told they could come back the next day and get all their stuff under the eyes of security, but they had to leave in the middle of a work day with basically 0 minutes notice... they went from the conference room to the door, with perhaps 1 minute to grab something from their cubes.
I wouldn't take it personally. It's usually not a reflection on the person themselves, just the company's paranoia.
Thank you. "Wannabe" is just the right term. It really burns my ass when someone who is ignorant (and I mean that in the truest sense of the word -- they might not be stupid, but they obviously do not actually know what they are talking about) just spits out the standard "Java is teh suX0r!!!! It is sl0w!!!!" stuff.
...but if you've sorta kinda read a book on Perl, or you think PHP "r0xors" because your favorite Counterstrike fansite uses it for the forum system, or you think Java is slow because an applet of Jake waving ran slow in Netscape 3.0 in 1996, you might not quite be qualified to offer an opinion on this subject.
*rolls eyes*
LISP weenies and C++ gurus can knock Java. They've earned the right to do so. Anyone who has written code for one of the "scripting languages" people position as competitors to Java (they aren't, just different tools for different jobs) can knock Java, because they've shown they understand the compromises and internals of designing a language.
Really? SQL Server works for us, but when it gets bunged up or isn't performing "right", it seems to be a real bitch to figure out what to do. Maybe our DBA just isn't yet fully up to speed (he's more of an Oracle guy by training, only been doing SQL Server for a few years), but it hasn't been ideal.
I think in my experience, Oracle has been the most solid database across all the projects I've worked on (well, OK, aside from the big-iron DB2 when I was at Ford Motor). It seems way expensive to get it that way and keep it that way, but if you're willing to sign the checks it delivers solidly. SQL Server is OK, and MySQL has been OK (been easier from the developer end to debug and tune my SQL via MySQL, even with the nice Query Analyzer output from MS Enterprise Manager I never quite understood how to "make things quicker" with SQL Server).
That would be what prepared statements are for. No need to use stored procs just for that.