Well the typography geek in me is a little concerned. Bitstream isn't really regarded as a high standard font foundry. Has anyone found a list of exactly which fonts they're giving us? Sure beggers can't be choosers, but a bunch of useless fonts are not going to advance the OS interfaces of KDE and Gnome anymore than the open-source fonts currently available. Additionally, "Modification and re-release (under a different name) is explicitly allowed, too." is not a Good Thing (TM) either.
While I agree that both: the Linux implementation is behind, and IBM's intentions are questionable, conceptually SWT is a better direction than Swing.
First, of all I have never been impressed with the performance of any Swing GUI I have used. Secondly, the widgets are too clunky and drastically inconsistent compared to the naitive OS (Ok, I'll agree that OS X Swing is pretty a solid, reliable implementation). For a user, performance, consitency, and clean layout are paramount to a good GUI.
The stance that SWT takes is to first use the native UI, and if not available (such as a Tree widget on Windows vs. no equivlent on Motif), then provide a custom implementation. This picks up where AWT failed, proving a useful widget toolkit, while still being essentially native.
The Swing API is beautiful, and kudos should go to the team responsible for it. But underneath the hood, Sun should have allowed in their spec hooking to native OS UI like AWT did and SWT does.
Ant a positive example of where the true goals of open source have succeeded. By offering a simple framework to extend build tasks, many other open-source development tools have been able to easily plugin to the Ant framework. It is in a word a community success.
On another note, I always find it interesting that a book is published on Ant while it is probably the best documented project underneath the Jakarta umbrella.
it's true that postgresql's back-end architecture limits a driver's compliance with the jdbc specification.
it's also true that the jdbc driver that ships with postgresql is poorly executed.
this driver offers more potential to be the jdbc driver of choice for postgresql. i'm already using it in a number of applications despite its "alpha" status (the lead developer is keeping it alpha until fully compliant with the jdbc spec, but this of course could not happen until the backend changes).
Sure this is an issue between the FBI and two US corporations, but these companies reach internationally. Could they release patches that apply only in non-US countries? Although, I know the answer is really no, look at the PGP export regulations (ie. "Are you from Canada or the US" "Yes" "Go download"!), it is something to consider.
The new anti-terrorism laws implemented are only in valid the US. The argument pro "Magic Latern" can therefore only be enforced in the US. Anywhere else and truly its espionage. I certainly believe that spyware for the purposes of espionage should be prevented by an anti-virus program. What if Canada and the CSIS (all you Canadians can laugh now), came up with a similar program? Would you not as an American be concerned about CSIS spying on you?
The internet has no national boundries and this is of course not resolvable in the foreseeable future. The US government and the FBI should just be careful that this doesn't further complicate an already controversial foreign policy.
I agree that every language has its pros and cons. And I also agree that leveraging the best from various languages is a logical, rational and utopic idea.
But the truth is, for a business developing software in house (or outsourced), every new language equals a new skill. That skill either needs to be hired, trained or outsourced. Even if the difference is only Java vs. M$ Java (C#). If things break down and no one is around that can fix it (or knows how to, or takes too much time to), money is lost, and the performance gains are irrelevant.
I usually recommend to clients to set standards and stick to them. If, however, multiple languages are what's truly necessary or fit the company "vision" to do the job, be consistent in their applications and usage. For example (and this purposely stupid, to illustrate my point):
- Java for all database & data access modules
- Visual Basic & COM for all middleware & business rule modules (objects)
- PHP for all web application presentation
- PowerBuilder for all client side GUIs
Then at least a company can match skillset to experience based on the standard. The cost of ownership is at least reasonable. (Unless of course the company was stupid enough to use PowerBuilder for GUIs, then I'd quit:)
My other recommendation is to stick with a high level languages only. Although performance is lost, the cost saved on maintenance is far more imporant for a business. A high-level language, like Java for example, that is is powerful enough yet accesible, goes a long way vs. C++ in a business environment. (I know this last line will definately cause a few flames;)
I agree that regulation is a concern, but as a Canadian I would say the chances of a real Big Brother situation isn't likely. There is more money in it for agencies like DoubleClick than the Canadian government. Also my professional dealings with government agencies indicate there is a genuine concern about maintaining citizen privacy.
Additionally the Canadian government has provided funding and regulation in other areas from culture to banking. All, yes, under careful watch, but the results are what make Canada a good country to live in. (yes I toot my Canadian patriotism now!)
Enabling an entire country with high speed Internet will have benefits to all aspects of living from econmic to social. I think these benefits will greatly out-weight those fears of privacy and control.
The neighbourhood network issue has already screwed Rogers@Home (Southern Ontario outfit) once. A few years ago they were focred to perform a multi-billion dollar network upgrade two-years a head of schedule. Once done the speed improved, but yet again their service has been diminishing lately. The recent is an outage of almost a week affecting a large part of Southern Ontario.
I've been a ADSL user for over three years personnally and professionally. I run a small web company (10 employees). Our office Internet is a standard home ADSL package, we use a business connection for hosting small sites, and all our employees are connected at home with ADSL. All this for well under $1000 CDN a month! Try doing that with cable and keeping security tight!
And I've noticed consistent speed and ping times improvements over the past three years. Where cable seems to degrade over popularity.
Rogers will only charge me for a TV cable with channels I'll never watch. Increase rates without notice. Leave my computers on an open network. And give me horrible service.
High speed IS very easy to get in Canada. Bell the large (and quite often monolithic) telco up here really pushed ADSL. There are a couple immediate factors on why the price is good:
1- The competition between ADSL and Cable (provided by Rogers and @Home) is very intense. Both companys have invested into multi-million dollar ad campaigns including TV.
2- Nortel, who provided the original ADSL modems for Bell, were once the same company as Bell. The hardware was probably really cheap for Bell to provide.
At around $40 CDN a month (about $25 USD!!!) it's a pretty good deal. And once you have it you can't go back!
As for the literacy I think its really hit or miss. The Globe has done many research articles on Canadians and the internet. We fall far behind e-commerce sales to the US, and our overall user volume is less. The population differences would have to be the main factor.
But then again our Internet Banking which has been around since 1996 is pretty advanced (I believe in comparision to most US banks). Most people I know swear by it. Again this is due to the monolithic bank structure we have here.
Finally if this is any indication of a typical Canadian user: my middle-aged mother, who can barely get around Windows, certainly can update her website, check her email and prevent herself from getting worm viruses (by not using Outlook!).
It's all perspective, and a dramatically different economic structure (a handful of companies representing 90% of the Canadian market).
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Well the typography geek in me is a little concerned. Bitstream isn't really regarded as a high standard font foundry. Has anyone found a list of exactly which fonts they're giving us? Sure beggers can't be choosers, but a bunch of useless fonts are not going to advance the OS interfaces of KDE and Gnome anymore than the open-source fonts currently available. Additionally, "Modification and re-release (under a different name) is explicitly allowed, too." is not a Good Thing (TM) either.
While I agree that both: the Linux implementation is behind, and IBM's intentions are questionable, conceptually SWT is a better direction than Swing.
First, of all I have never been impressed with the performance of any Swing GUI I have used. Secondly, the widgets are too clunky and drastically inconsistent compared to the naitive OS (Ok, I'll agree that OS X Swing is pretty a solid, reliable implementation). For a user, performance, consitency, and clean layout are paramount to a good GUI.
The stance that SWT takes is to first use the native UI, and if not available (such as a Tree widget on Windows vs. no equivlent on Motif), then provide a custom implementation. This picks up where AWT failed, proving a useful widget toolkit, while still being essentially native.
The Swing API is beautiful, and kudos should go to the team responsible for it. But underneath the hood, Sun should have allowed in their spec hooking to native OS UI like AWT did and SWT does.
Ant a positive example of where the true goals of open source have succeeded. By offering a simple framework to extend build tasks, many other open-source development tools have been able to easily plugin to the Ant framework. It is in a word a community success.
On another note, I always find it interesting that a book is published on Ant while it is probably the best documented project underneath the Jakarta umbrella.
it's true that postgresql's back-end architecture limits a driver's compliance with the jdbc specification.
it's also true that the jdbc driver that ships with postgresql is poorly executed.
this driver offers more potential to be the jdbc driver of choice for postgresql. i'm already using it in a number of applications despite its "alpha" status (the lead developer is keeping it alpha until fully compliant with the jdbc spec, but this of course could not happen until the backend changes).
Sure this is an issue between the FBI and two US corporations, but these companies reach internationally. Could they release patches that apply only in non-US countries? Although, I know the answer is really no, look at the PGP export regulations (ie. "Are you from Canada or the US" "Yes" "Go download"!), it is something to consider.
The new anti-terrorism laws implemented are only in valid the US. The argument pro "Magic Latern" can therefore only be enforced in the US. Anywhere else and truly its espionage. I certainly believe that spyware for the purposes of espionage should be prevented by an anti-virus program. What if Canada and the CSIS (all you Canadians can laugh now), came up with a similar program? Would you not as an American be concerned about CSIS spying on you?
The internet has no national boundries and this is of course not resolvable in the foreseeable future. The US government and the FBI should just be careful that this doesn't further complicate an already controversial foreign policy.
My $0.02 (and maybe a bit off topic)...
Cheers
I agree that every language has its pros and cons. And I also agree that leveraging the best from various languages is a logical, rational and utopic idea.
But the truth is, for a business developing software in house (or outsourced), every new language equals a new skill. That skill either needs to be hired, trained or outsourced. Even if the difference is only Java vs. M$ Java (C#). If things break down and no one is around that can fix it (or knows how to, or takes too much time to), money is lost, and the performance gains are irrelevant.
I usually recommend to clients to set standards and stick to them. If, however, multiple languages are what's truly necessary or fit the company "vision" to do the job, be consistent in their applications and usage. For example (and this purposely stupid, to illustrate my point):
- Java for all database & data access modules
- Visual Basic & COM for all middleware & business rule modules (objects)
- PHP for all web application presentation
- PowerBuilder for all client side GUIs
Then at least a company can match skillset to experience based on the standard. The cost of ownership is at least reasonable. (Unless of course the company was stupid enough to use PowerBuilder for GUIs, then I'd quit:)
My other recommendation is to stick with a high level languages only. Although performance is lost, the cost saved on maintenance is far more imporant for a business. A high-level language, like Java for example, that is is powerful enough yet accesible, goes a long way vs. C++ in a business environment. (I know this last line will definately cause a few flames;)
Cheers
I agree that regulation is a concern, but as a Canadian I would say the chances of a real Big Brother situation isn't likely. There is more money in it for agencies like DoubleClick than the Canadian government. Also my professional dealings with government agencies indicate there is a genuine concern about maintaining citizen privacy.
Additionally the Canadian government has provided funding and regulation in other areas from culture to banking. All, yes, under careful watch, but the results are what make Canada a good country to live in. (yes I toot my Canadian patriotism now!)
Enabling an entire country with high speed Internet will have benefits to all aspects of living from econmic to social. I think these benefits will greatly out-weight those fears of privacy and control.
The neighbourhood network issue has already screwed Rogers@Home (Southern Ontario outfit) once. A few years ago they were focred to perform a multi-billion dollar network upgrade two-years a head of schedule. Once done the speed improved, but yet again their service has been diminishing lately. The recent is an outage of almost a week affecting a large part of Southern Ontario.
I've been a ADSL user for over three years personnally and professionally. I run a small web company (10 employees). Our office Internet is a standard home ADSL package, we use a business connection for hosting small sites, and all our employees are connected at home with ADSL. All this for well under $1000 CDN a month! Try doing that with cable and keeping security tight!
And I've noticed consistent speed and ping times improvements over the past three years. Where cable seems to degrade over popularity.
Rogers will only charge me for a TV cable with channels I'll never watch. Increase rates without notice. Leave my computers on an open network. And give me horrible service.
The choice seems easy to me....
High speed IS very easy to get in Canada. Bell the large (and quite often monolithic) telco up here really pushed ADSL. There are a couple immediate factors on why the price is good:
1- The competition between ADSL and Cable (provided by Rogers and @Home) is very intense. Both companys have invested into multi-million dollar ad campaigns including TV.
2- Nortel, who provided the original ADSL modems for Bell, were once the same company as Bell. The hardware was probably really cheap for Bell to provide.
At around $40 CDN a month (about $25 USD!!!) it's a pretty good deal. And once you have it you can't go back!
As for the literacy I think its really hit or miss. The Globe has done many research articles on Canadians and the internet. We fall far behind e-commerce sales to the US, and our overall user volume is less. The population differences would have to be the main factor.
But then again our Internet Banking which has been around since 1996 is pretty advanced (I believe in comparision to most US banks). Most people I know swear by it. Again this is due to the monolithic bank structure we have here.
Finally if this is any indication of a typical Canadian user: my middle-aged mother, who can barely get around Windows, certainly can update her website, check her email and prevent herself from getting worm viruses (by not using Outlook!).
It's all perspective, and a dramatically different economic structure (a handful of companies representing 90% of the Canadian market).