Ideally the stock price reflects real value, in practice it often doesn't. During the.com phase, low value companies had high stock values. I've worked for a company that produced 30-40% profit for five years running (it's entire lifetime) yet had very low valued stock due to being a telecommunications software company when being so was considered "bad").
The market is very sensitive to hype and trends. Real value is not always recognised.
No it doesn't - the trading price of the share has no baring on the "value" of the company (which is most directly and obviously realised through dividends). Shares are worth what you can sell them for irrespective of the worth of the company they are shares for. E.g.: Amazon shares could trade for $50 each while the company produces no profit (and therefore return to investors) at all.
You're assuming that stock prices reflect the "value" of a company - they don't. Investors aren't often all that smart and a bit of media buzz is often enough to make them invest. Media buzz != sound financial investment.
The fact that SCO is listing higher is an indictment on the mentality of investors not a reflection of the soundness of their legal case.
Re:Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain . .
on
What You Can't Say
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You bastard! There I was reading/. late at night with the wife sleeping soundly in bed and you make me go spray coffee out my nose!
You're a nut - in no way would the NZ govt. care if you built a missle. Your conspiracy theory is all very amusing but just not as plausable as the taxman wanting his tax.
The Government wants to shut down your garage business because you're hurting our chances of getting a trade deal? Yeah right.
"very efficient networking "
Are we talking about the same language that requires a SEPERATE THREAD for every network connection?? Thats not what I'd call efficient,
convenient or logical.
No, I'm talking about the language which has multiplexed selectors since version 1.4. (Java, just in case you were having problems with your facts, which, evidently you were)
That's a fair point, and is true to some degree. The thing is, Delphi is marketed as a RAD tool and the whole RAD buzz is that you can wack together and application with a couple of clicks and you;re done.
To his credit, the architect mentioned has realised the trap he'd fallen into (basically beleiving the RAD hype) and has taken steps to remedy the problem.
It remains the case that Delphi is marketed and focused toward developing RAD applications and presents the GUI as the primary organisational metaphor for your code. While it is true that you don't have to use the tool in this way, it remains true that this is the tool's primary purpose, and that primary purpose is muddleheaded.
If the tool is designed to facilitate a bad programming model, it is a bad tool. It's like linux - with some work you can do unsafe and insecure things on linux, but it's *designed* to be a secure system and it does everything it can to help you keep your box safe. That's why its a good system. By comparison, an OS which has a design that leads to slack security practices (like defaulting to only having one root login with auto-login) is a bad design - even if it is possible with some work to to make the system secure.
Yes I think that's quite true - good programmers can make good code with bad tools. Its just that Delphi and RAD in general is aimed at noobs and marketed as a three-clicks-and-you're-done kind of tool. The reality is that this kind of approach is limited and is no substitue for a knowledgable programmer.
RAD tools are pretty dodgy - at least, Delphi certainly is. Yes, it's quick to wack together simple GUI programs, but the code produced is often brittle and difficult to maintain. The company I work for has some Delphi products, and the original architect of those admits that Delphi makes them hard to maintain or change.
I come from a background of using emacs and the command line for building my code, and for me, Delphi sucks big time for being very restrictive and rather stupidly focused on the graphical layout of your project as it's primary organising principle. To me, code has it's own structure and very rarely does it revolve around the look of the application - yet this is the single organisational principle offered to the developer my Delphi. I very strongly think that this is a mistake.
I'm not anti IDE - I've used Visual C++ for C/C++ and Eclipse for Java and I really like both of those environments, because they are based around your code (a class browser being the standard main view). But in the case of Delphi I really think it gives the wrong idea about software development, and the code I've seen produced with it is pretty when it runs, but ugly and brittle on the inside.
IMO the reason that Kylix hasn't sold well is that it is a tool for people who don't understand that code needs to be elegant on the inside, not just flash on the outside.
For a community which supposedly dislikes FUD,/. sure dishes it out by the bucketload whenever Java is mentioned.
I used to work in telecommunications and I've used C, C++, Erlang and Java to write server / client code in and they're all pretty good fits (well, C and C++ are nicer for networking in Unix than Windows IMO but YMMV).
Java's main selling point for this kind of work is that it manages complexity extremely well, and has very efficient networking and threading.
You claim that the project's decision makers must have brought in Java 'marketing hype'. I claim that you are yet another/. anti-Java FUD merchant. Noone complains when a new project comes out written in Perl or Python, but mention Java and it's start-up-the-holy-war time again.
I find all the anti x86 comments odd. I, for one, would be glad to use OSX if it came to x86.
I like the new OS, but I don't want to pay the hardware premium, and I don't want to buy hardware with vendor lock in attached.
We can all see that vertically integrated software is bad in the case of M$, why can't you see that vertically integrated hardware/OS is bad in the case of Apple?
I see/. is having it's weekly "Real hackers don't like Java" rant.
Give it a fucking rest. Seriously. A lot of people use Java because it is the best tool for their tasks. Likewise, there are many other languages I have used (C, C++, LISP) which are fantastic for different kinds of tasks.
In general I prefer Java because it is quick and painless for solving the kind of problems I'm coding for. Your milage may vary, but stow the continual JAVA IS EVIL crap - it is dull, boring, wrong and monotonous.
There would not be so many Java programmers if the language sucked.
I come from a C,C++ background. I used to do a lot of graphics hacking where C was my weapon of choice for speed concerns. I know about making things go fast. These days, Java and OpenGL meets all my speed concerns, so that's what I use.
If you don't like JSP, don't use it. Note that JSP IS NOT Java, it is a set of libraries you can use - like servlets or J2EE, it is only one of many ways to crack the Web-App nut. But if you find that one way of doing things does not suit you, don't trash the whole damn language.
Garbage collection in Java is not guranteed. It's what I call Union. It'll clean up when it god damn well feels like it. In the meantime, the system slows to a crawl..
Incremental GC has had the GC pause problem solved for years now.
Graphics in Java are abysmally slow. Even basic UIs lack the speed and responsiveness of GUIs written in C, C++ or similar languages.
Swing is somewhat slow, true. However Java can drive opengl - which is pretty damn quick. A java developer can also use SWT - IBM's GUI kit which is very fast, utilising the platform GUI.
Java was supposed to be: Write once, run anywhere, but what it is in reality is: Write once, debug everywhere... over and over and over. Or perhaps more appropriately it is" Write once, run screaming.
Absolute rubbish! In all my years of Java programming the only time I've ever had problems was way back in an old 1.1.6 release with some crappy Borland components which didn't work properly on Linux. Other than that one problem, I have never had issues with writing Java code for mutliple platforms.
I've worked in a variety of Java development projects in the past and not once has it ever risen to the task to show itself as a worthy choice and/or a mature language. Instead it has invariably wasted companies time and money. Primarily because they failed to realize that Java is a small task tool, not suitable for major applications or those requiring performance.
This is out and out FUD. There have been several reports showing that Java development is typically half the time of C/C++ development. It is also much cheaper to maintain, which is a code cost often ignored by Java's detractors.
Java sucks! Stick with C and C++ for most development, there's a reason they are the standard: they work.
Riiiiiight, so C/C++ coming from a position of having a huge user base and losing a large chunk of that to Java says nothing for Java's ability to get the job done? Face it, C/C++ - which are both languages that I have programmed in for years, and like a great deal - have lost a lot of ground to Java. I'm not saying that Java is going to wipe those languages out or anything, but there is no way that Java could have made so much inroads unless it provides something better than C/C++ at least for some territory.
Your 'java is crap at everything' attitude is mindless FUD. Different tools have different uses.
The US military and Political establishment sucks.
In a time of relative peace, they seem to be doing their best to fuck up the world for everyone.
For god's sake America - vote the moron out... and what happened to activism? In the 60's people protested Vietnam, in the 00's your president lies to you and the public barely says 'tut tut' before going back to tv.
If there really was one gram of creativity anywhere in the movie world, Jackson would write an original script instead of adapting an existing work. Creativity is such boring work, it's easier to copy.
You obviously have no clue about Peter Jackson's past films then. Moron.
The Anthrax that Iraq had was liquid Anthrax - which only keeps for 3 years. In no way could it still exist.
The US invaded on the pretense that the WMD did exist, not that the Iraqi paperwork was shoddy. They claimed that they were there, they had proof and that we would all see that they were right when the invasion was over. The US did not do this - it has not proven its point. You don't kill thousands of people over Shoddy Paperwork... or maybe you think that is just?
Oh? So tell me where the Weapons of Mass Destruction are then....and, tell me how the US is now a safer place....and, tell me how this solved anything to do with Sept 11.
The US was wrong. They claimed the existence of WMD. They are not there.
The Iraqi people are free? Are they governing themselves? Are they controlling their own natural resources? I must have missed that bit of news...
I'm suprised at the number of people who think this is a redundant story. Sure, it's obvious that Mac users like Macs. What is not obvious, and is quite interesting, is that the reasons for liking Macs is clearly not because price / performance / compatibilty reasons - which are probably the most important things from the viewpoint of pure computing.
Mac users border on facisim in their insistence that Macs are the One Way to Go - anything else is just *wrong*. Sure, there are people like that in all OS camps (Linux sure has its share), but Mac users seem particularly susceptible. I find it ironic, that for all the hype about creativity, what you get from Apple is: Any look and feel - as long as it's our one, Any hardware you like - as long as it's our HW.
If Apple was about "freedom", they wouldn't have a monopoloy on the hardware that can run their OS.
The open source community spends considerable amounts of time and intellectual capital in internecine warfare about licensing dogma (rather akin, in its irrelevancy, to medieval priests debating angels dancing on the heads of pins) and appears to contain a strong element that believes that users should change to accommodate computers, not the other way around.
Ermm... bullshit!
'Licencing dogma' is 'irrellevant'? Utter bullshit! Licensing is about control. Control is power. Power is *never* irrellevant. Power is the whole of fucking history. Grow up!
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The market is very sensitive to hype and trends. Real value is not always recognised.
No it doesn't - the trading price of the share has no baring on the "value" of the company (which is most directly and obviously realised through dividends). Shares are worth what you can sell them for irrespective of the worth of the company they are shares for. E.g.: Amazon shares could trade for $50 each while the company produces no profit (and therefore return to investors) at all.
You're assuming that stock prices reflect the "value" of a company - they don't. Investors aren't often all that smart and a bit of media buzz is often enough to make them invest. Media buzz != sound financial investment.
The fact that SCO is listing higher is an indictment on the mentality of investors not a reflection of the soundness of their legal case.
You bastard! There I was reading /. late at night with the wife sleeping soundly in bed and you make me go spray coffee out my nose!
You insensitive clod!
You're a nut - in no way would the NZ govt. care if you built a missle. Your conspiracy theory is all very amusing but just not as plausable as the taxman wanting his tax.
The Government wants to shut down your garage business because you're hurting our chances of getting a trade deal? Yeah right.
That's a fair point, and is true to some degree. The thing is, Delphi is marketed as a RAD tool and the whole RAD buzz is that you can wack together and application with a couple of clicks and you;re done.
To his credit, the architect mentioned has realised the trap he'd fallen into (basically beleiving the RAD hype) and has taken steps to remedy the problem.
It remains the case that Delphi is marketed and focused toward developing RAD applications and presents the GUI as the primary organisational metaphor for your code. While it is true that you don't have to use the tool in this way, it remains true that this is the tool's primary purpose, and that primary purpose is muddleheaded.
If the tool is designed to facilitate a bad programming model, it is a bad tool. It's like linux - with some work you can do unsafe and insecure things on linux, but it's *designed* to be a secure system and it does everything it can to help you keep your box safe. That's why its a good system. By comparison, an OS which has a design that leads to slack security practices (like defaulting to only having one root login with auto-login) is a bad design - even if it is possible with some work to to make the system secure.
I realised I should substantiate that claim:
Delphi is much more similar to C++ than Java or C#.
Java is late binding, Delhpi is linked at compile time (like C++)
Java allows polymorphism unless specifically prevented Delphi disallows it unless specifically enabled (like C++)
Java is entirely Object Oriented, Delphi uses a conglomeration of procedural and OO code (like C++)
Java has a hierachical scope system, Delphi does not.
Delphi has stack object creation (like C++), Java does not.
I could go on. In short, Java is very unlike Delphi indeed. If anything, Delphi is much like a less powerful version of C++.
Delphi is *not* very similar to Java at all. Java is OO through and through - Delphi is not.
Yes I think that's quite true - good programmers can make good code with bad tools. Its just that Delphi and RAD in general is aimed at noobs and marketed as a three-clicks-and-you're-done kind of tool. The reality is that this kind of approach is limited and is no substitue for a knowledgable programmer.
Yeah, Borland used to produce one of the best C/C++ IDEs there were, but I just hate the RAD offerings they sell these days.
RAD tools are pretty dodgy - at least, Delphi certainly is. Yes, it's quick to wack together simple GUI programs, but the code produced is often brittle and difficult to maintain. The company I work for has some Delphi products, and the original architect of those admits that Delphi makes them hard to maintain or change.
I come from a background of using emacs and the command line for building my code, and for me, Delphi sucks big time for being very restrictive and rather stupidly focused on the graphical layout of your project as it's primary organising principle. To me, code has it's own structure and very rarely does it revolve around the look of the application - yet this is the single organisational principle offered to the developer my Delphi. I very strongly think that this is a mistake.
I'm not anti IDE - I've used Visual C++ for C/C++ and Eclipse for Java and I really like both of those environments, because they are based around your code (a class browser being the standard main view). But in the case of Delphi I really think it gives the wrong idea about software development, and the code I've seen produced with it is pretty when it runs, but ugly and brittle on the inside.
IMO the reason that Kylix hasn't sold well is that it is a tool for people who don't understand that code needs to be elegant on the inside, not just flash on the outside.
For a community which supposedly dislikes FUD, /. sure dishes it out by the bucketload whenever Java is mentioned.
/. anti-Java FUD merchant. Noone complains when a new project comes out written in Perl or Python, but mention Java and it's start-up-the-holy-war time again.
I used to work in telecommunications and I've used C, C++, Erlang and Java to write server / client code in and they're all pretty good fits (well, C and C++ are nicer for networking in Unix than Windows IMO but YMMV).
Java's main selling point for this kind of work is that it manages complexity extremely well, and has very efficient networking and threading.
You claim that the project's decision makers must have brought in Java 'marketing hype'. I claim that you are yet another
I find all the anti x86 comments odd. I, for one, would be glad to use OSX if it came to x86.
I like the new OS, but I don't want to pay the hardware premium, and I don't want to buy hardware with vendor lock in attached.
We can all see that vertically integrated software is bad in the case of M$, why can't you see that vertically integrated hardware/OS is bad in the case of Apple?
Long live freedom of choice.
Peter.
I see /. is having it's weekly "Real hackers don't like Java" rant.
/. language bigots make me sick.
Give it a fucking rest. Seriously. A lot of people use Java because it is the best tool for their tasks. Likewise, there are many other languages I have used (C, C++, LISP) which are fantastic for different kinds of tasks.
In general I prefer Java because it is quick and painless for solving the kind of problems I'm coding for. Your milage may vary, but stow the continual JAVA IS EVIL crap - it is dull, boring, wrong and monotonous.
There would not be so many Java programmers if the language sucked.
I come from a C,C++ background. I used to do a lot of graphics hacking where C was my weapon of choice for speed concerns. I know about making things go fast. These days, Java and OpenGL meets all my speed concerns, so that's what I use.
If you don't like JSP, don't use it. Note that JSP IS NOT Java, it is a set of libraries you can use - like servlets or J2EE, it is only one of many ways to crack the Web-App nut. But if you find that one way of doing things does not suit you, don't trash the whole damn language.
You
Your 'java is crap at everything' attitude is mindless FUD. Different tools have different uses.
The US military and Political establishment sucks.
In a time of relative peace, they seem to be doing their best to fuck up the world for everyone.
For god's sake America - vote the moron out... and what happened to activism? In the 60's people protested Vietnam, in the 00's your president lies to you and the public barely says 'tut tut' before going back to tv.
What a bunch of sheep.
If there really was one gram of creativity anywhere in the movie world, Jackson would write an original script instead of adapting an existing work. Creativity is such boring work, it's easier to copy.
You obviously have no clue about Peter Jackson's past films then. Moron.
That's all very well for the Telecom investors, but it has the unfortunate side effect of turning New Zealand into a technological backwater.
The US invaded on the pretense that the WMD did exist, not that the Iraqi paperwork was shoddy. They claimed that they were there, they had proof and that we would all see that they were right when the invasion was over. The US did not do this - it has not proven its point. You don't kill thousands of people over Shoddy Paperwork... or maybe you think that is just?
US & UK were right and Europe was wrong???
...and, tell me how the US is now a safer place. ...and, tell me how this solved anything to do with Sept 11.
Oh? So tell me where the Weapons of Mass Destruction are then.
The US was wrong. They claimed the existence of WMD. They are not there.
The Iraqi people are free? Are they governing themselves? Are they controlling their own natural resources? I must have missed that bit of news...
Do US companies regulary use mycompany.co.us in the same way as New Zealand and Australia or the UK do mycompany.co.mycountry ????
stop whining
I'm suprised at the number of people who think this is a redundant story. Sure, it's obvious that Mac users like Macs. What is not obvious, and is quite interesting, is that the reasons for liking Macs is clearly not because price / performance / compatibilty reasons - which are probably the most important things from the viewpoint of pure computing.
Mac users border on facisim in their insistence that Macs are the One Way to Go - anything else is just *wrong*. Sure, there are people like that in all OS camps (Linux sure has its share), but Mac users seem particularly susceptible. I find it ironic, that for all the hype about creativity, what you get from Apple is:
Any look and feel - as long as it's our one,
Any hardware you like - as long as it's our HW.
If Apple was about "freedom", they wouldn't have a monopoloy on the hardware that can run their OS.
Ermm... bullshit!
'Licencing dogma' is 'irrellevant'? Utter bullshit! Licensing is about control. Control is power. Power is *never* irrellevant. Power is the whole of fucking history. Grow up!