Exactly! This is a ridiculous Ask Slashdot. If you're smart enough to learn ALGOL and FORTRAN, you're smart enough to learn Java or C# (or dumb enough to learn C++...no no, I kid...I kid because I love).
There's nothing magic about GUI programming. Once you code up a few toy GUI projects, you have the basic idea down and can start to work on more difficult things.
To the original question...go read some of the O'Reilly Head First books. They're not perfect but for diving in and learning a fresh new subject, they work great.
If anyone wants a list that they can start researching, I found a decent one here. It's just a list to help you get started.
I think you need to wipe the foam off your chin and relax a little. That silly list includes places like "Afghanistan in the 1980s". Why not list Nazi Germany in the 1930s? And why isn't the USSR in the 1980s listed? If you think the US is evil for trying to get rid of, say, the East German Communist government or the Afghanistan Soviet puppet state, you are transridiculous.
Personally, I root for the home team regardless. It's a Hobbesian war of all vs. all, not some United Federation of Planets, kid.
The nuking of Japan wasn't about avoiding an invasion,
Ah, yes it was, actually.
it was first about preventing the Japanese from a separatist peace treaty with the USSR; and then about showing the USSR (and the rest of the world) who the boss is. And the second bomb was to show the world there's more than one.
I know your history TA told you that, but academics are rewarded for being clever, not for being right. The reason you hear this sort of pap in colleges is that there is no money in simply recording and sharing the truth - one must deconstruct, analyze, and make new angles, right or wrong. In this case - quite wrong.
My experience with both Oracle and MS-SQL has been that they didn't really grok MVCC very well, and their hacks to back-port it aren't nearly as good as a DBMS built with it in mind.
Oracle has done MVCC since 1983 (Oracle 3). The original academic work on MVCC was 1981ish. Saying that the current version of Oracle (11) has back-ported hacks to support MVCC is ridiculous.
I really can't see much of a use for something like Oracle. Either you are writing a small/medium sized application where something like MySQL/PostGres would do just fine out of the box, without any modifications, or you are doing something really large, which you end up writing your own custom storage solution for, which does exactly only what you need it to do, and is very finely tuned.
Perhaps, but most shops find it's cheaper to license Oracle, DB/2, etc. than to write their own storage system from scratch, particularly if they need high multiuser concurrency and MVCC.
Even large and busy sites like CraigsList use MySQL and other free products to handle their data.
Craigslist does not have to manage a very large single image database. The data that appears for San Francisco does not have to be in sync with the ads that appears for Chicago. I imagine all of the ads for San Francisco (probably their biggest city) could fit in memory for a MySQL database. It's just easily compressable text and ads are short. Also, they don't keep more than 7 days. Given those requirements, MySQL is easy.
Facebook does not really use MySQL but rather MySQL they've rewritten to use as a backing store for their gazillion memcache servers.
At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon and telcos use Oracle, primarily because they need one consistent data image everywhere. Banks, airlines, shipping companies, etc. use DB/2 on the mainframe or Oracle for the same reason. If Facebook misses a post or doesn't update your home page, who cares...if a bank allows a payment because it's not looking at an up-to-date view of an account or Amazon 500 copies of a book when it only has 450 in stock, that is a problem.
Oracle also has better features for minimizing or eliminating downtime for maintenance, recovering from user errors, disaster recovery, etc. And frankly, Oracle performs better under high workloads and scales further owing to better design. For now.
Oracle is overused perhaps but it (and DB/2) still do things the free versions don't. The free versions are catching up...Postgres is at about Oracle 7 or 8, depending on which feature you look at. I do think they'll eventually catch up, but it's silly to say there is no use for something like Oracle.
BTW, what drives overuse of Oracle is not laziness or tradition but scaling down of big solutions. Company X develops solution Y for $GIANT_CUSTOMER. They then sell it to smaller customers but have only tested it on Oracle, so smaller customers use Oracle. Vertical integration dictates software (and to some extent hardware) architecture in many cases.
Yes - accountants insist on it for one. You must track costs and how they're allocated otherwise your financials are nonsensical. BTW, doesn't matter if you're public or not - we're talking basic accounting and what you declare for taxes.
Why? Even if some sort of statute of limitations prevents you from learning new things, the rest of the world suffers no such malady.
(That's setting aside the fact that a Perl 6 released in 2001 would not have included amazing features such as roles, grammars, constraints, multidispatch, and autothreading hyperoperators. "Minimal benefits" indeed!)
Minimal to perl's real audience: sysadmins.
I would wager that 80%+ of perl coders are Unix/Linux sysadmins. That's certainly where I've seen the language most widely used. By the time something is big enough to be a real development project - or it comes from a natural "a developer writes this" angle - people are usually working in python or ruby.
Time was when perl was a web development language. Slashdot - created in 1998 - is an example. But few people start a new web project in perl. (Yes, I'm sure you're jumping in now to paste URLs....I said few people, compared to php, python, java, ruby, etc.). Desktop GUI programming in perl? Can be done but rarely is/was. Glue code? Sure...tying together things and using DBI, etc. But mostly perl is used for system things, not application things.
I love perl. But it has never outgrown its roots as a log-processing utility. Yes, sure, you can do all kinds of amazing things with it - talk to DBs, write GUIs, handle web CGI, OOP, etc. But few people do that. HTML::Mason (perl's answer to php)? Sure, you can find some older sites where it's rooted in their ecosystem (e.g., Amazon), but not many people are firing up new HTML::Mason projects. How many books were published for HTML::Mason? One. CakePHP has at least four and Ruby on Rails has God knows how many, which gives you an idea of mindshare, and those are very new frameworks. Heck, even symfony and CodeIgniter have books. Not that I'm endorsing them, but how many new perl books have been published? Where are the great perl-based frameworks? Perl is a systems utility language. Not many new books are published on bash or awk these days, either.
BTW, what languages can you program in for the Google App Engine? Java and Python, not Java and perl. Who did Google hire? Guido, not Larry. Next language to be added to GAE? Probably Go or maybe php. Perl is not on the radar.
Again, I love perl. Used it since 3.x-something. Coincidentally, Damian Conway's Object Oriented Perl is sitting two feet from my monitor as I type this. But who really does large OOP projects in perl? There's a book on php design patterns, for pity's sake, but no one has publishedone on perl. There is a wiki, but to me that speak volumes (no pun intended) about where the developer mindset is.
You can say that's unfair, or short-sighted, or just crowd fashion. Fair enough. But people vote with their eyeballs.
So no, I don't think most people care about perl6. Most people who use perl don't do more than open a file, run some regex, and maybe make a DB connection.
If we presume that the environment is ours to do with as we please, then aren't we as guilty of those who caused the destruction of the environment in the first place?
Does it matter if it's anthropogenic?
I'm against a hot world with rising seas, melting ice caps and global drought. I'm against all of the other terrible nastiness associated with it. I don't give a damn who we blame, but let's find a way to halt/fix it, shall we?
If it's nonanthropogenic, there probably is not a way to stop it.
That's funny, all I want is a decent UNINSTALL package for the Oracle Client and Servers.
I'm looking at you, Oracle 8
Why are you looking at a product that is three versions old and was dropped from support five years ago?
Oracle since version 9 has provided an installer that does provide an uninstall. It's Java-based and requires X on Linux/Unix, but one thing it does do is install and uninstall Oracle clients and servers.
5: Education. Professors used to buy UNIX workstations because they needed them for SPSS, Maple, and other tasks. Because Apple gives a discount for universities, this means that Mac Pros will end up in the statistical computing labs.
How many "statistical computing labs" exist? The stats class I took a few years ago in grad school just handed out a time-bombed SPSS CD that was apparently made for the education market. We loaded it on our own PCs.
For anything else, most compute labs I've seen do not use Apple workstations...they use Linux, which is far cheaper. Lots of engineering packages are released for Linux and Windows but not MacOS. A whitebox PC with Linux loaded on it is still much cheaper than a Mac, regardless of any educational discount.
7: Resale value. Mac Pros are priced competitively with other workstation class machines, so having the machines worth more when they are changed out at the end of an amortization cycle doesn't hurt.
A Mercedes retains more of its value than a Chevy, but they're both still worth 60%+ less in two years.
however now that Macs are basically just expensive PCs
I guess I missed the time when Macs were something other than just expensive personal computers. Was there a time when they were calculators or basketball hoops? Or perhaps you're misusing the term personal computer...
People need bread and want circuses. Given enough of both, not much else is required.
Revolutions happen when "bread" gets too expensive. If there is insufficient bread available, and it's the fault of the ruling class, there is no logical reason not to slaughter them and take their bread. The last time this happened in China was very recently, in 1948.
Smart rulers understand this.
Are you really saying the last economically motivated revolution in the world was China's?
I know, it's so lame. If they expect us to be pliant sheep, the least they could do is give is real bloodsport, not the watered down "sports" we have today. Sports without real-world consequences is like kissing your sister. I want deaths.
Slashdot Mirror
go to a book store, buy a book and read it?
Exactly! This is a ridiculous Ask Slashdot. If you're smart enough to learn ALGOL and FORTRAN, you're smart enough to learn Java or C# (or dumb enough to learn C++...no no, I kid...I kid because I love).
There's nothing magic about GUI programming. Once you code up a few toy GUI projects, you have the basic idea down and can start to work on more difficult things.
To the original question...go read some of the O'Reilly Head First books. They're not perfect but for diving in and learning a fresh new subject, they work great.
What fucking part of the summary do you not understand. He says he owns the god damn thing. Who the fuck are you to call him a liar? No shit.
Do you think you'll still curse in every sentence once you turn 18, or will the novelty have worn off by then?
oh shut up. Freedom is for the wealthy elite, and slavery is for the rest.
If only! As as American and hence part of the wealthy elite, that would so rock.
We're talking about a bunch of hackers here. When I went to my first Defcon, I was socially ackward as all get out.
Ah, so you fit right in.
If anyone wants a list that they can start researching, I found a decent one here. It's just a list to help you get started.
I think you need to wipe the foam off your chin and relax a little. That silly list includes places like "Afghanistan in the 1980s". Why not list Nazi Germany in the 1930s? And why isn't the USSR in the 1980s listed? If you think the US is evil for trying to get rid of, say, the East German Communist government or the Afghanistan Soviet puppet state, you are transridiculous.
Personally, I root for the home team regardless. It's a Hobbesian war of all vs. all, not some United Federation of Planets, kid.
The nuking of Japan wasn't about avoiding an invasion,
Ah, yes it was, actually.
it was first about preventing the Japanese from a separatist peace treaty with the USSR; and then about showing the USSR (and the rest of the world) who the boss is. And the second bomb was to show the world there's more than one.
I know your history TA told you that, but academics are rewarded for being clever, not for being right. The reason you hear this sort of pap in colleges is that there is no money in simply recording and sharing the truth - one must deconstruct, analyze, and make new angles, right or wrong. In this case - quite wrong.
My experience with both Oracle and MS-SQL has been that they didn't really grok MVCC very well, and their hacks to back-port it aren't nearly as good as a DBMS built with it in mind.
Oracle has done MVCC since 1983 (Oracle 3). The original academic work on MVCC was 1981ish. Saying that the current version of Oracle (11) has back-ported hacks to support MVCC is ridiculous.
I really can't see much of a use for something like Oracle. Either you are writing a small/medium sized application where something like MySQL/PostGres would do just fine out of the box, without any modifications, or you are doing something really large, which you end up writing your own custom storage solution for, which does exactly only what you need it to do, and is very finely tuned.
Perhaps, but most shops find it's cheaper to license Oracle, DB/2, etc. than to write their own storage system from scratch, particularly if they need high multiuser concurrency and MVCC.
Even large and busy sites like CraigsList use MySQL and other free products to handle their data.
Craigslist does not have to manage a very large single image database. The data that appears for San Francisco does not have to be in sync with the ads that appears for Chicago. I imagine all of the ads for San Francisco (probably their biggest city) could fit in memory for a MySQL database. It's just easily compressable text and ads are short. Also, they don't keep more than 7 days. Given those requirements, MySQL is easy.
Facebook does not really use MySQL but rather MySQL they've rewritten to use as a backing store for their gazillion memcache servers.
At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon and telcos use Oracle, primarily because they need one consistent data image everywhere. Banks, airlines, shipping companies, etc. use DB/2 on the mainframe or Oracle for the same reason. If Facebook misses a post or doesn't update your home page, who cares...if a bank allows a payment because it's not looking at an up-to-date view of an account or Amazon 500 copies of a book when it only has 450 in stock, that is a problem.
Oracle also has better features for minimizing or eliminating downtime for maintenance, recovering from user errors, disaster recovery, etc. And frankly, Oracle performs better under high workloads and scales further owing to better design. For now.
Oracle is overused perhaps but it (and DB/2) still do things the free versions don't. The free versions are catching up...Postgres is at about Oracle 7 or 8, depending on which feature you look at. I do think they'll eventually catch up, but it's silly to say there is no use for something like Oracle.
BTW, what drives overuse of Oracle is not laziness or tradition but scaling down of big solutions. Company X develops solution Y for $GIANT_CUSTOMER. They then sell it to smaller customers but have only tested it on Oracle, so smaller customers use Oracle. Vertical integration dictates software (and to some extent hardware) architecture in many cases.
There are valid reasons for internal invoicing...
Yes - accountants insist on it for one. You must track costs and how they're allocated otherwise your financials are nonsensical. BTW, doesn't matter if you're public or not - we're talking basic accounting and what you declare for taxes.
Why? Even if some sort of statute of limitations prevents you from learning new things, the rest of the world suffers no such malady.
(That's setting aside the fact that a Perl 6 released in 2001 would not have included amazing features such as roles, grammars, constraints, multidispatch, and autothreading hyperoperators. "Minimal benefits" indeed!)
Minimal to perl's real audience: sysadmins.
I would wager that 80%+ of perl coders are Unix/Linux sysadmins. That's certainly where I've seen the language most widely used. By the time something is big enough to be a real development project - or it comes from a natural "a developer writes this" angle - people are usually working in python or ruby.
Time was when perl was a web development language. Slashdot - created in 1998 - is an example. But few people start a new web project in perl. (Yes, I'm sure you're jumping in now to paste URLs....I said few people, compared to php, python, java, ruby, etc.). Desktop GUI programming in perl? Can be done but rarely is/was. Glue code? Sure...tying together things and using DBI, etc. But mostly perl is used for system things, not application things.
I love perl. But it has never outgrown its roots as a log-processing utility. Yes, sure, you can do all kinds of amazing things with it - talk to DBs, write GUIs, handle web CGI, OOP, etc. But few people do that. HTML::Mason (perl's answer to php)? Sure, you can find some older sites where it's rooted in their ecosystem (e.g., Amazon), but not many people are firing up new HTML::Mason projects. How many books were published for HTML::Mason? One. CakePHP has at least four and Ruby on Rails has God knows how many, which gives you an idea of mindshare, and those are very new frameworks. Heck, even symfony and CodeIgniter have books. Not that I'm endorsing them, but how many new perl books have been published? Where are the great perl-based frameworks? Perl is a systems utility language. Not many new books are published on bash or awk these days, either.
BTW, what languages can you program in for the Google App Engine? Java and Python, not Java and perl. Who did Google hire? Guido, not Larry. Next language to be added to GAE? Probably Go or maybe php. Perl is not on the radar.
Again, I love perl. Used it since 3.x-something. Coincidentally, Damian Conway's Object Oriented Perl is sitting two feet from my monitor as I type this. But who really does large OOP projects in perl? There's a book on php design patterns, for pity's sake, but no one has publishedone on perl. There is a wiki, but to me that speak volumes (no pun intended) about where the developer mindset is.
You can say that's unfair, or short-sighted, or just crowd fashion. Fair enough. But people vote with their eyeballs.
So no, I don't think most people care about perl6. Most people who use perl don't do more than open a file, run some regex, and maybe make a DB connection.
If we presume that the environment is ours to do with as we please, then aren't we as guilty of those who caused the destruction of the environment in the first place?
Double dumbass on us!
No, the camps are:
Does it matter if it's anthropogenic? I'm against a hot world with rising seas, melting ice caps and global drought. I'm against all of the other terrible nastiness associated with it. I don't give a damn who we blame, but let's find a way to halt/fix it, shall we?
If it's nonanthropogenic, there probably is not a way to stop it.
It's not hard to "keep up".
I like the looks of the new interface, but am rather concerned it might put people off by being too different from Windows.
Yeah, that's always held Apple back.
Of course, we can always go back to FVWM95 if you want...
"I don't care enough to actually do the working of typing out a DMCA notice or to sue, so instead I'm going to whine on Slashdot."
until the experiment has been repeated by someone else, I'm not holding any hope.
Ah, I see you remember Cold Fusion...
What if squirrels had wings and shot cruise missiles out of their tail?
Well, that would be awesome, obviously.
That's funny, all I want is a decent UNINSTALL package for the Oracle Client and Servers.
I'm looking at you, Oracle 8
Why are you looking at a product that is three versions old and was dropped from support five years ago?
Oracle since version 9 has provided an installer that does provide an uninstall. It's Java-based and requires X on Linux/Unix, but one thing it does do is install and uninstall Oracle clients and servers.
5: Education. Professors used to buy UNIX workstations because they needed them for SPSS, Maple, and other tasks. Because Apple gives a discount for universities, this means that Mac Pros will end up in the statistical computing labs.
How many "statistical computing labs" exist? The stats class I took a few years ago in grad school just handed out a time-bombed SPSS CD that was apparently made for the education market. We loaded it on our own PCs.
For anything else, most compute labs I've seen do not use Apple workstations...they use Linux, which is far cheaper. Lots of engineering packages are released for Linux and Windows but not MacOS. A whitebox PC with Linux loaded on it is still much cheaper than a Mac, regardless of any educational discount.
7: Resale value. Mac Pros are priced competitively with other workstation class machines, so having the machines worth more when they are changed out at the end of an amortization cycle doesn't hurt.
A Mercedes retains more of its value than a Chevy, but they're both still worth 60%+ less in two years.
however now that Macs are basically just expensive PCs
I guess I missed the time when Macs were something other than just expensive personal computers. Was there a time when they were calculators or basketball hoops? Or perhaps you're misusing the term personal computer...
And I forgot Slashdot doesn't do bbcode. I'm too used to posting at theforvm.
This is Slashdot. Welcome to 1998.
People need bread and want circuses. Given enough of both, not much else is required.
Revolutions happen when "bread" gets too expensive. If there is insufficient bread available, and it's the fault of the ruling class, there is no logical reason not to slaughter them and take their bread. The last time this happened in China was very recently, in 1948.
Smart rulers understand this.
Are you really saying the last economically motivated revolution in the world was China's?
or in this age, fast food and mma on pay pr view.
I know, it's so lame. If they expect us to be pliant sheep, the least they could do is give is real bloodsport, not the watered down "sports" we have today. Sports without real-world consequences is like kissing your sister. I want deaths.
Except for in Japan, where they pixellate all the good bits.
My understanding is that these rules stem from the US postwar occupation.