Its like bringing up cases of racism in a 'mostly' non-racist society. You try not to think about hating group X, but there's just something about them that annoys you, and by not associating with group X I feel like I'm not discriminating against them. In the end a question like this just makes you feel dirtier.
The OP did a very bad job in framing their question, but the question holds merit."Is a graduate from a 4-year university any more likely to succeed in your company than a 2-year collage/trade/poly-tech/overthephone/overtheinternet graduate?" Just as important as the original question, we have to realize that we all have built-in discrimination in one form or another against anyone who took a different path than yourself.
From my personal bias, I get agitated that incompetent nitwits with university degrees get hired above my pay grade because I only worked my ass off learning 8 courses / semester for 2 years at a poly-tech instead of most universities which suggest 4-5? courses per semester for 4 years at a typical university. I respect smart, performance oriented people who benefit everyone they work with that have a can-do and hopefully pragmatic approach to their daily work. That person could come from collage, university, or be completely uneducated and I'd appreciate them all the same.
Other annoyances (possibly off-topic): 1. Pretty much all IT/Programming job applications specify "Bachelors or higher" in their job postings. Most of the time when they realize you've been working in the industry for 10 years they could care less about where you went to school. As a senior development job, they should more be asking, "So what have you done with yourself since graduating?". Even if the term is thrown in everywhere, it still hurts to be deselected before even applying.
2. Our company seems to promote the least capable programmers to become technical managers. Because we've basically stopped hiring junior developers (note to everyone, this is a big fat warning sign that your company is heading into stagnation) the number of actual promotions that occur in the company are very very few. The few people that have made the step up have been by and large the worst coders we've ever had (as full times, contractors on the other hand...). This tells me that they've either got the best soft-skills in the world, or someone's giving them the step up because they're too embarrassed or frightened to lay them off. Now mind you, all of the promotions I'm talking about are very technical oriented jobs that require expertise to make sane judgments, not line manager who's technical merit is a nice-to-have.
3. Every PHD I've ever met has been pretentious, pompous, and non-pragmatic. Their production always under-exceeded their peers. Its really depressing, because I know there must be are a lot of really great PHD's out there, but my personal experiences have been clouded in a small sample of pure mediocrity.
NT4 did ship with 4 OS revisions: X86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC.
Apply did intentionally cripple their OS because Atoms are standard X86 instruction sets. Its not like building some new fangled incompatible technology like mips, alpha, PPC, or ARM. Its like building an Intel X86 architecture instruction set supported OS then checking to see that the CPU version ID is 5 instead of 7. If 7 then fail to boot. That is effectively what Apple is doing.
Just in pure economic terms (for cars, but computers would be the same), you have two options:
Calculate upfront cost of getting a new car: Up front cost = - Change in maintainance cost = ( - ) * Change in fuel cost = ( - ) * (For your calculation, I'd just use 2.70usd as a benchmark prices won't go up much factor, then try adding a dollar to see how that skews) * Note: If you're changing your fuel grade, you'll also need to factor in cheaper / more expensive gas into the calculation Total value proposition = - - If your is more than 0, it doesn't make purely economic sense to buy that new car
Environmental terms: Buying a new car has a large up front cost just like the economic one. It takes a lot of processing and driving to get the metal in the ground to the car lot where you pick it up. If you buy a new car every year which has progressively lower MPG, it is NOT good for the environment as a whole. I don't know any firm numbers on this, so you'll have to use your best judgment. If you drive your car many years, the environmental impact of the initial purchase becomes less and less significant.
Try selling a cola named 'koke fun' or 'pepze fun' and see how long it takes for the law suits to start rolling in. The name is not exact, but it is close enough to elicit a miss-understanding, at least in spoken English.
Changing my MAC address on Ethernet ports doesn't break the Ethernet specifications, but it does go against the standard address allocation layed out by the IEEE (or whomever splits the address blocks between vendors). Maybe USB has these two schemes within the same umbrella organization, but for me there seems like no reason to be so.
I don't know the ins and outs of why Palm had to take this step to be interoperable (if the 3rd party license cripples their field of use for instance) but they did, and I don't see how this could be considered 'illegal' in any definition. They will at the worst be in violation of the USB consortium's rules. If they loose their status to sell USB, it'll mean that any applicable USB treaty patents could be used against Palm in court to stop them from selling the equivalent of 'USB'.
Funny that I use firefox on a very regular basis, and the only issues I've ever had on my many Windows / Linux PC's have been related directly to NS plug-ins which cannot be blamed on Firefox for the issues with buggy plug-ins (unless Firefox isn't honouring the contract / API).
OSS projects don't generally plan to have feature X, Y, and Z added and working within N weeks/months. OSS usually works by having John, Laura, and Paul submitting some random fix that they decided to spend time on, and if the fixes are sufficient enough for production use, those patches make it into the next release. Having fixed schedules doesn't make OSS == Agile.
I'm not really much of an agile proponent, but without a predetermined goal for what the next release is going to have, then getting the contributors to work feverishly on specific parts of the code that really need improvement is hard. Really large projects like fedora have something like https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList which they chip away at through releases, but I don't believe that many small projects I've seen have such targeted collaboration goals.
I went to BCIT, which is a 2 year trade/technology school, and we had large numbers of group projects throughout the courses. There are pluses and minuses to the technique, which really comes down to work distribution and reward.
- Some team members naturally did less (sometimes nothing) for projects while getting lifted by the rest of the group - Some team members offset their poor abilities in X and applied them to Y instead, making up for their inadequacies - Some team members would just stop communicating. They may have gotten the work done, but outside classes they were like ghosts
The good things were that it taught us small group teamwork very well. We knew that there are people you can depend on, and those that can't. Since grading was simply based on the net outcome of the group's work, some people who had no business programming got free rides (for group projects at least), but it taught us a good lesson about dealing with dead weight. Some of the lazy sort managed to get by to graduate, but many more flunked out along the way. That was one of the most important non-technical skills I learned when getting a real job.
Final Fantasy series remakes on the PS/DS were basically the same games, but some rough edges got a fix up. Good job to Square for doing it right(not changing the name), much unlike the sad remakes like Dune 2 / Dune 2000. The valve games also brought (IMHO) a nice graphics update to a lot of great HL mods that make them very graphics parity with modern games.
In the end, it really comes down to this: Would I pay for the same game with better graphics/sound(+small UI tweaks)?
1. Being an independent developer doesn't mean you don't have a day job where you interact with real people in meaningful and healthy ways 2. Many kernel hackers telecommute or are simply paid by said developer for supporting their junk. This doesn't mean that these developers live 'healthy corporate lives'
hmmm.. kernel byte-code instrumentation... sounds neat. The exposed JVM interfaces are similar to kernel API's anyways. I don't think the jump wouldn't be as crazy as you'd expect. Although, the magic of bootstrapping classpaths, sysproperties, etc.. would need a wild paradigm shift.
[/home/myhome ] # ls -l */home/myhome/system.jar [ / ] # cd system.jar/com/command [/home/myhome/system.jar/com/myprogram ] # ls -l */home/myhome/system.jar/com/myprogram/Cat/home/myhome/system.jar/com/myprogram/Grep [/home/myhome/com/myprogram ] #./Cat file:///tmp/ThisIs.txt |./Grep "ScarryHuh?"
or just [/home/myhome ] # export "PATH=/home/myhome/system.jar/com/myprogram:${PATH}" [/home/myhome ] # Cat file:///tmp/ThisIs.txt | Grep "ScarryHuh?"
> Anonymous inner classes are clearly a hack necessitated by a lack of first-class function types I don't much care for functional languages and I'm glad I don't have to deal with them for general purpose Object-oriented programming language. If you're hot for functional languages, there's always groovy and Scala to write on top of.
> Can you give any example of something being sped up significantly by reimplementing it in Java?
Development time
All joking aside, Java is simpler and its faster to develop pretty much anything that Java's suitable for. It may not be as fast as the native counterparts, but you'll finish development a lot faster. Your statement on speed just proves my point, you can spend years making a millions of line ASM program to make a GUI application that an equivalent in Java will never be able to beat, but that doesn't mean that I'm literally going to spend the time to do it. If it makes sense to program 'insert application here' in Java( or any other high level languages), then do it and save time/money. If said environment can't meet your requirements, then maybe you have a case to tear down a few abstractions and do it in a lower level language.
There's a reason so many enthusiasts write in C/C++, but most professionals code in Java, VB, C#, etc... (Excluding scripting / web languages, as those are generally for a different crowd). When I get excited about coding, I like to reinvent every little bell or whistle to see how it all works. I want to challenge myself, because frankly that's why I'm programming in my spare time to begin with; versus at work, I code whatever my boss's bosses thinks will be the fastest / cheapest development time possible so that they can ship 2 more widgets to potential customers. Its far less glamorous, and far more productive.
I think you're missing the picture here. You can throw any amount of certification at something and it wouldn't matter: CentOS is a piece of software that benefits my company. If CentOS or whatever product I use stops working (or deteriorates some way), I've got to maintain it myself, or migrate away from it.
I can't rely on CentOS, or Windows, or my IBM mainframe working perpetually. Thats why we pay for support, pay for the assurance that the software / hardware / whatever keeps on working as long as I need it. If I want more assurance, I'll spend more money. If I want absolute assurance, I'd hire an army of developers to maintain a CentOS clone myself.
It doesn't matter that CentOS or any other project fades away into dust. What should really matter is how this affects your business. If this type of collapse causes a severe impact, maybe you should start to consider why you're not taking appropriate protection / alternatives to heart. In this case it'd be pretty moot since the pain in migrating to other Redhat clones or just Redhat wouldn't be such a big deal. Regardless, if you just expect things to work forever (especially in the OSS world) then you're better off putting some capital down to cover your butt.
The fact that you're concerned over this merits the thought that you should really be investing into a commercial offering of the product, say Redhat Enterprise. I doubt they'll be walking away any time soon. This is just business, really. If you want -confidence- in who you're buying from, then don't pay for fly-by-night operations. CentOS is open source, and nobody (or not many) people get payed to stay around and keep the machine running. I love open source, and I love using OSS developed technologies, but you must realize that there could be a day in the unknown future that said OSS vendor XYZ won't be around anymore. What is your contingency if the CentOS community just decided to stop making releases / updates?
Just as a side note on subclipse, I must say that the latest branch has some pretty great improvements in the merge department. It makes my life a little easier. The only problem for me is that sometimes (very little testing on it so far), the merge seems to disappear into lala land never to continue progress. It is so locked up that I'm forced to murder eclipse mercilessly.
Swing used the abstraction from the OS -because- of the inter-OS incompatibility between widgets. AWT uses native OS widgets throughout if that's your bread and butter. They subsequently added OS theme engines back into Swing due to the inconsistencies between everything. I don't have a problem with swing as it is at this point. Since 1.5's metal, the platform agnostic look and feels have really come upon their own. SWT has a few bases filled in by containing a larger set of widgets, and arguably better set of API's for some of them. I'd consider myself a java guru, and I still run into roadblocks extending existing swing components to add some new crazy behaviour. I can't even say if that's possible in other toolkits, but its not trivial in Swing.
For what it was, VB6 was pretty good. I'd say it was excellent for the roll it was meant for, creating powerful GUI's that anyone could easily put together. It sucked when you wanted to do anything complex, but that was usually abstracted away to ActiveX land. I would say that the.NET reinvention of VB killed the platform. And as most have seen, you may as well learn C# instead, since that's the language VB.net was modelled off, not VB6.
If a new programmer decided to learn VB.net, I'd say they're wasting their time. The only -good- options for Visual Basic (the language/platform) are VB6. If you want to learn a relevant programming language, this isn't it.
The alternative is to maintain a pool of cobol developers to maintain the code instead of hiring (probably much cheaper) Java developers to improve any bad code.
WYSIWYG's are a bad analogy, because it abstracts the process of writing HTML to a tool with the intent of writing HTML. In both cases (by hand or by machine) the results are HTML. With a -converter- like this one, the results may still generate bad code.
1. This may be the case, but to be honest, I've seen large numbers of mass-market Blu-Rays selling for $10 recently. It took years before seeing and DVD movies selling for that cheap. I won't bother debating reasons for this, but none the less, Blu-Ray disc costs are not as bad as they were when first released.
2. Bandwidth is getting a little cheaper, but you won't be downloading Blu-Ray quality movies from my internet provider any time soon (60GB / mo. cap, or 120GB/mo for highest tier). If you're not downloading 30GB movies or the sort, then start comparing apples to apples and just say DVD's will die soon instead.
3. DRM isn't going anywhere. The influx of piracy makes DRM look immaterial as it unfortunately is for the most part. I hate DRM and I wish it did go away, but sadly this is the only protection a content producer has to restrict their customers from violating their copyrights.
"Many directors will choose a high-grain film or print though, for "ambience" or "effect" and I've even seen that grain on "digital" movies"
Its called ISO, and quite often what may perceive as an added effect may very well have been a limitation on filming conditions. Almost all -very dark- scenes will require higher ISO film (ISO CCD's / estimations for digital) settings in order to properly record the picture. There are times that one would want to artificially accentuate their scenes (eg. Kill Bill, Animated Features, Green Screen's) but by and large, directors & DOP's attempt to minimize these built-in limitations of their camera work as much as possible. If they really wanted a certain effect, its a lot better to add it in later during post production.
I recently 'made the jump' into Blu-Ray with the purchase of a 52" Sony 120hz TV. The high definition really pops out on some scenes of some movies, but it isn't required for most movies that you'll watch unless you exclusively watch movies with large panoramic scenes. Its a tool in my A/V toolbox. I still buy more DVD's than Blu-Rays, but given the option of picking up a new release, Blu-Ray's prices have definitely come down to the point where I'd have to seriously decide if its worth the extra money. True Blood Season 1 $15 extra: worth it, $15 for Blu-Rays of some choice movies: yes, $30+ for new release Blu-Rays: No, unless they're very must-have like The dark knight, or animated movies which are absolutely gorgeous on BD.
Just a side note, I had a really bad audidgy driver on Linux, and it was Sooo bad that IT caused the video tearing. Switching to my onboard audio card made all sync issues vanish... try playing it without sound to see if it makes a difference.
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Its like bringing up cases of racism in a 'mostly' non-racist society. You try not to think about hating group X, but there's just something about them that annoys you, and by not associating with group X I feel like I'm not discriminating against them. In the end a question like this just makes you feel dirtier.
The OP did a very bad job in framing their question, but the question holds merit."Is a graduate from a 4-year university any more likely to succeed in your company than a 2-year collage/trade/poly-tech/overthephone/overtheinternet graduate?" Just as important as the original question, we have to realize that we all have built-in discrimination in one form or another against anyone who took a different path than yourself.
From my personal bias, I get agitated that incompetent nitwits with university degrees get hired above my pay grade because I only worked my ass off learning 8 courses / semester for 2 years at a poly-tech instead of most universities which suggest 4-5? courses per semester for 4 years at a typical university. I respect smart, performance oriented people who benefit everyone they work with that have a can-do and hopefully pragmatic approach to their daily work. That person could come from collage, university, or be completely uneducated and I'd appreciate them all the same.
Other annoyances (possibly off-topic):
1. Pretty much all IT/Programming job applications specify "Bachelors or higher" in their job postings. Most of the time when they realize you've been working in the industry for 10 years they could care less about where you went to school. As a senior development job, they should more be asking, "So what have you done with yourself since graduating?". Even if the term is thrown in everywhere, it still hurts to be deselected before even applying.
2. Our company seems to promote the least capable programmers to become technical managers. Because we've basically stopped hiring junior developers (note to everyone, this is a big fat warning sign that your company is heading into stagnation) the number of actual promotions that occur in the company are very very few. The few people that have made the step up have been by and large the worst coders we've ever had (as full times, contractors on the other hand...). This tells me that they've either got the best soft-skills in the world, or someone's giving them the step up because they're too embarrassed or frightened to lay them off. Now mind you, all of the promotions I'm talking about are very technical oriented jobs that require expertise to make sane judgments, not line manager who's technical merit is a nice-to-have.
3. Every PHD I've ever met has been pretentious, pompous, and non-pragmatic. Their production always under-exceeded their peers. Its really depressing, because I know there must be are a lot of really great PHD's out there, but my personal experiences have been clouded in a small sample of pure mediocrity.
NT4 did ship with 4 OS revisions: X86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC.
Apply did intentionally cripple their OS because Atoms are standard X86 instruction sets. Its not like building some new fangled incompatible technology like mips, alpha, PPC, or ARM. Its like building an Intel X86 architecture instruction set supported OS then checking to see that the CPU version ID is 5 instead of 7. If 7 then fail to boot. That is effectively what Apple is doing.
Just in pure economic terms (for cars, but computers would be the same), you have two options:
Calculate upfront cost of getting a new car:
Up front cost = -
Change in maintainance cost = ( - ) *
Change in fuel cost = ( - ) * (For your calculation, I'd just use 2.70usd as a benchmark prices won't go up much factor, then try adding a dollar to see how that skews)
* Note: If you're changing your fuel grade, you'll also need to factor in cheaper / more expensive gas into the calculation
Total value proposition = - -
If your is more than 0, it doesn't make purely economic sense to buy that new car
Environmental terms:
Buying a new car has a large up front cost just like the economic one. It takes a lot of processing and driving to get the metal in the ground to the car lot where you pick it up. If you buy a new car every year which has progressively lower MPG, it is NOT good for the environment as a whole. I don't know any firm numbers on this, so you'll have to use your best judgment. If you drive your car many years, the environmental impact of the initial purchase becomes less and less significant.
Try selling a cola named 'koke fun' or 'pepze fun' and see how long it takes for the law suits to start rolling in. The name is not exact, but it is close enough to elicit a miss-understanding, at least in spoken English.
Changing my MAC address on Ethernet ports doesn't break the Ethernet specifications, but it does go against the standard address allocation layed out by the IEEE (or whomever splits the address blocks between vendors). Maybe USB has these two schemes within the same umbrella organization, but for me there seems like no reason to be so.
I don't know the ins and outs of why Palm had to take this step to be interoperable (if the 3rd party license cripples their field of use for instance) but they did, and I don't see how this could be considered 'illegal' in any definition. They will at the worst be in violation of the USB consortium's rules. If they loose their status to sell USB, it'll mean that any applicable USB treaty patents could be used against Palm in court to stop them from selling the equivalent of 'USB'.
Great point, where's the Boo rah over flash games? I don't see the ever flowing exodus toward flash games, do you?
Funny that I use firefox on a very regular basis, and the only issues I've ever had on my many Windows / Linux PC's have been related directly to NS plug-ins which cannot be blamed on Firefox for the issues with buggy plug-ins (unless Firefox isn't honouring the contract / API).
you got it =)
OSS projects don't generally plan to have feature X, Y, and Z added and working within N weeks/months. OSS usually works by having John, Laura, and Paul submitting some random fix that they decided to spend time on, and if the fixes are sufficient enough for production use, those patches make it into the next release. Having fixed schedules doesn't make OSS == Agile.
I'm not really much of an agile proponent, but without a predetermined goal for what the next release is going to have, then getting the contributors to work feverishly on specific parts of the code that really need improvement is hard. Really large projects like fedora have something like https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList which they chip away at through releases, but I don't believe that many small projects I've seen have such targeted collaboration goals.
I went to BCIT, which is a 2 year trade/technology school, and we had large numbers of group projects throughout the courses. There are pluses and minuses to the technique, which really comes down to work distribution and reward.
- Some team members naturally did less (sometimes nothing) for projects while getting lifted by the rest of the group
- Some team members offset their poor abilities in X and applied them to Y instead, making up for their inadequacies
- Some team members would just stop communicating. They may have gotten the work done, but outside classes they were like ghosts
The good things were that it taught us small group teamwork very well. We knew that there are people you can depend on, and those that can't. Since grading was simply based on the net outcome of the group's work, some people who had no business programming got free rides (for group projects at least), but it taught us a good lesson about dealing with dead weight. Some of the lazy sort managed to get by to graduate, but many more flunked out along the way. That was one of the most important non-technical skills I learned when getting a real job.
Final Fantasy series remakes on the PS/DS were basically the same games, but some rough edges got a fix up. Good job to Square for doing it right(not changing the name), much unlike the sad remakes like Dune 2 / Dune 2000. The valve games also brought (IMHO) a nice graphics update to a lot of great HL mods that make them very graphics parity with modern games.
In the end, it really comes down to this: Would I pay for the same game with better graphics/sound(+small UI tweaks)?
The topic on the whole is useless.
1. Being an independent developer doesn't mean you don't have a day job where you interact with real people in meaningful and healthy ways
2. Many kernel hackers telecommute or are simply paid by said developer for supporting their junk. This doesn't mean that these developers live 'healthy corporate lives'
hmmm.. kernel byte-code instrumentation... sounds neat. The exposed JVM interfaces are similar to kernel API's anyways. I don't think the jump wouldn't be as crazy as you'd expect. Although, the magic of bootstrapping classpaths, sysproperties, etc.. would need a wild paradigm shift.
[ /home/myhome ] # ls -l * /home/myhome/system.jar /home/myhome/system.jar/com/myprogram ] # ls -l * /home/myhome/system.jar/com/myprogram/Cat /home/myhome/system.jar/com/myprogram/Grep /home/myhome/com/myprogram ] # ./Cat file:///tmp/ThisIs.txt | ./Grep "ScarryHuh?"
[ / ] # cd system.jar/com/command
[
[
or just /home/myhome ] # export "PATH=/home/myhome/system.jar/com/myprogram:${PATH}" /home/myhome ] # Cat file:///tmp/ThisIs.txt | Grep "ScarryHuh?"
[
[
> Anonymous inner classes are clearly a hack necessitated by a lack of first-class function types
I don't much care for functional languages and I'm glad I don't have to deal with them for general purpose Object-oriented programming language. If you're hot for functional languages, there's always groovy and Scala to write on top of.
> Can you give any example of something being sped up significantly by reimplementing it in Java?
Development time
All joking aside, Java is simpler and its faster to develop pretty much anything that Java's suitable for. It may not be as fast as the native counterparts, but you'll finish development a lot faster. Your statement on speed just proves my point, you can spend years making a millions of line ASM program to make a GUI application that an equivalent in Java will never be able to beat, but that doesn't mean that I'm literally going to spend the time to do it. If it makes sense to program 'insert application here' in Java( or any other high level languages), then do it and save time/money. If said environment can't meet your requirements, then maybe you have a case to tear down a few abstractions and do it in a lower level language.
There's a reason so many enthusiasts write in C/C++, but most professionals code in Java, VB, C#, etc... (Excluding scripting / web languages, as those are generally for a different crowd). When I get excited about coding, I like to reinvent every little bell or whistle to see how it all works. I want to challenge myself, because frankly that's why I'm programming in my spare time to begin with; versus at work, I code whatever my boss's bosses thinks will be the fastest / cheapest development time possible so that they can ship 2 more widgets to potential customers. Its far less glamorous, and far more productive.
I think you're missing the picture here. You can throw any amount of certification at something and it wouldn't matter: CentOS is a piece of software that benefits my company. If CentOS or whatever product I use stops working (or deteriorates some way), I've got to maintain it myself, or migrate away from it.
I can't rely on CentOS, or Windows, or my IBM mainframe working perpetually. Thats why we pay for support, pay for the assurance that the software / hardware / whatever keeps on working as long as I need it. If I want more assurance, I'll spend more money. If I want absolute assurance, I'd hire an army of developers to maintain a CentOS clone myself.
It doesn't matter that CentOS or any other project fades away into dust. What should really matter is how this affects your business. If this type of collapse causes a severe impact, maybe you should start to consider why you're not taking appropriate protection / alternatives to heart. In this case it'd be pretty moot since the pain in migrating to other Redhat clones or just Redhat wouldn't be such a big deal. Regardless, if you just expect things to work forever (especially in the OSS world) then you're better off putting some capital down to cover your butt.
The fact that you're concerned over this merits the thought that you should really be investing into a commercial offering of the product, say Redhat Enterprise. I doubt they'll be walking away any time soon. This is just business, really. If you want -confidence- in who you're buying from, then don't pay for fly-by-night operations. CentOS is open source, and nobody (or not many) people get payed to stay around and keep the machine running. I love open source, and I love using OSS developed technologies, but you must realize that there could be a day in the unknown future that said OSS vendor XYZ won't be around anymore. What is your contingency if the CentOS community just decided to stop making releases / updates?
Just as a side note on subclipse, I must say that the latest branch has some pretty great improvements in the merge department. It makes my life a little easier. The only problem for me is that sometimes (very little testing on it so far), the merge seems to disappear into lala land never to continue progress. It is so locked up that I'm forced to murder eclipse mercilessly.
Swing used the abstraction from the OS -because- of the inter-OS incompatibility between widgets. AWT uses native OS widgets throughout if that's your bread and butter. They subsequently added OS theme engines back into Swing due to the inconsistencies between everything. I don't have a problem with swing as it is at this point. Since 1.5's metal, the platform agnostic look and feels have really come upon their own. SWT has a few bases filled in by containing a larger set of widgets, and arguably better set of API's for some of them. I'd consider myself a java guru, and I still run into roadblocks extending existing swing components to add some new crazy behaviour. I can't even say if that's possible in other toolkits, but its not trivial in Swing.
For what it was, VB6 was pretty good. I'd say it was excellent for the roll it was meant for, creating powerful GUI's that anyone could easily put together. It sucked when you wanted to do anything complex, but that was usually abstracted away to ActiveX land. I would say that the .NET reinvention of VB killed the platform. And as most have seen, you may as well learn C# instead, since that's the language VB.net was modelled off, not VB6.
If a new programmer decided to learn VB.net, I'd say they're wasting their time. The only -good- options for Visual Basic (the language/platform) are VB6. If you want to learn a relevant programming language, this isn't it.
The alternative is to maintain a pool of cobol developers to maintain the code instead of hiring (probably much cheaper) Java developers to improve any bad code.
WYSIWYG's are a bad analogy, because it abstracts the process of writing HTML to a tool with the intent of writing HTML. In both cases (by hand or by machine) the results are HTML. With a -converter- like this one, the results may still generate bad code.
It was probably one of the Craig James Bond movies or Kill Bill. Both had very pronounced grainy moments.
1. This may be the case, but to be honest, I've seen large numbers of mass-market Blu-Rays selling for $10 recently. It took years before seeing and DVD movies selling for that cheap. I won't bother debating reasons for this, but none the less, Blu-Ray disc costs are not as bad as they were when first released.
2. Bandwidth is getting a little cheaper, but you won't be downloading Blu-Ray quality movies from my internet provider any time soon (60GB / mo. cap, or 120GB/mo for highest tier). If you're not downloading 30GB movies or the sort, then start comparing apples to apples and just say DVD's will die soon instead.
3. DRM isn't going anywhere. The influx of piracy makes DRM look immaterial as it unfortunately is for the most part. I hate DRM and I wish it did go away, but sadly this is the only protection a content producer has to restrict their customers from violating their copyrights.
"Many directors will choose a high-grain film or print though, for "ambience" or "effect" and I've even seen that grain on "digital" movies"
Its called ISO, and quite often what may perceive as an added effect may very well have been a limitation on filming conditions. Almost all -very dark- scenes will require higher ISO film (ISO CCD's / estimations for digital) settings in order to properly record the picture. There are times that one would want to artificially accentuate their scenes (eg. Kill Bill, Animated Features, Green Screen's) but by and large, directors & DOP's attempt to minimize these built-in limitations of their camera work as much as possible. If they really wanted a certain effect, its a lot better to add it in later during post production.
I recently 'made the jump' into Blu-Ray with the purchase of a 52" Sony 120hz TV. The high definition really pops out on some scenes of some movies, but it isn't required for most movies that you'll watch unless you exclusively watch movies with large panoramic scenes. Its a tool in my A/V toolbox. I still buy more DVD's than Blu-Rays, but given the option of picking up a new release, Blu-Ray's prices have definitely come down to the point where I'd have to seriously decide if its worth the extra money. True Blood Season 1 $15 extra: worth it, $15 for Blu-Rays of some choice movies: yes, $30+ for new release Blu-Rays: No, unless they're very must-have like The dark knight, or animated movies which are absolutely gorgeous on BD.
A single bad moderation doesn't make a bad community. Hell, they're modded 4 at the moment. Let the system do its job.
Just a side note, I had a really bad audidgy driver on Linux, and it was Sooo bad that IT caused the video tearing. Switching to my onboard audio card made all sync issues vanish... try playing it without sound to see if it makes a difference.