=Obligatory Car Analogy=
If you had a car with 300Horsepower next to a car with 60Horsepower, what would you call the lesser car in a performance test?
That is a really foolish analogy. The usable speed of a car is about engineering, not horsepower. Just like computer applications, really.
"The torpedo-shaped glider moves through the ocean by changing its buoyancy to dive and surface, unlike motorized, propeller-driven undersea vehicles"
Last I checked submarines had air tanks for buoyancy control, and newer subs are not motorized, but nuclear-powered. Something change in the past few hours while I was sleeping?
And those 'newer subs' use a nuclear reactor to power - guess what? - a motor.
There was a time when the average slashdot user had more than two braincells to rub together, but that time seems sadly past.
It turns out the Facebook issue was not really Microsoft's fault -- www.facebook.com had a broken IPv6 record, and Vista defaults to using IPv6 where XP used IPv4, so that's why the host wasn't working. (In case you run into this with any other Web sites on Vista, I fixed the problem by disabling IPv6 in network settings and rebooting.)
Vista defaulting to IPv6 is a good thing. IPv4 is broken - it doesn't scale to the size we need. So like it or not we all have to switch to v6. Your inability to access facebook is not Vista's fault - it's Facebook's fault. And you let them get away with it...
I run into a lot of people in the same circles who are strong Linux advocates, apparently because the concept of "freedom of speech" is closely aligned with "making every file search as simple and stress-free as a Hamas hostage negotiation". So every year or two I'll try out the latest version of some Linux distro to see how long it would take to get used to it. In 2005, full of optimism, I cheerfully booted up the latest version of Shrike, then tried to find a directory and discovered I could not right-click on the hard drive root dir and specify the name of a directory I wanted to search for...
If you go out in the street in Paris (that's in France; in Europe, you know, you may have heard of it) and ask questions in Xhosa (that's a language, you know, from a place called Africa; you may have heard of it) you won't get a sensible answer. Linux is not (and doesn't pretend to be) a slavish copy of Windows. On the contrary, it's an organic outgrowth of UNIX. That things which work in Windows don't work the same way in Linux isn't surprising, it's inevitable. But to suggest that search and finding things is more difficult on Linux than on Windows is ludicrous. To find anything on Windows is a real, total, piece of shit pain, involving watching ludicrous animations for ten minutes. On Linux it's a two-word command and returns almost instantly.
I, too, am of the opinion that Vista is a mess. But that isn't to say that I agree with you. For me to agree with you you'd need to understand what you're talking about, and you don't. You think the 'operating system' is the skin on the top - the pictures on the screen. It isn't. On Linux and, to a lesser extent, Windows, that skin can be taken off and replaced by something else entirely without any change to the underlying operating system. Vista is, indeed, broken; but your rant did not address a single one of the ways it's broken.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
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The Future of XML
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· Score: 1
XSLT is a nice backwards chaining theorem prover, very similar to Prolog. I have never thought it that way. Maybe my limited knowledge of Prolog is the reason.
I have used XSLT as an "improved-sed", i.e. kinda "extended" pattern-matching (& reg. exp.) engine. This is a huge simplification, obviously.
Of course there is no magic in there. But I do not think it would be easy to do the same in Lisp or other conventional language, i.e. I do not think XSLT is "very easy" to implement.
You can write a simple Prolog interpreter in about thirty lines of LISP. Of course there's more to XSLT than that, because of namespace handling; but not a lot more.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
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The Future of XML
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You forgot XSLT.
It is extremely powerful tool, I once (ages ago) made a pure XSLT implementation to convert XML into C. Whith a CSS the XSLT was even browser/human viewable (the output was somewhat similar to the C program output).
I do not think JSON can do that.
XSLT is a nice backwards chaining theorem prover, very similar to Prolog. I like it and use it a lot - currently for me it venerates SQL, Hibernate mappings, C# code and Velocity macros from a single source XML document. But there's nothing magic about it, and if we didn't have XSLT it would be very easy to do the same sort of thing in LISP or Prolog, or (slightly more awkwardly) in conventional programming languages.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
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The Future of XML
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· Score: 1
There are other programming languages out there.
And there are JSON and/or YAML libraries for quite a lot of them. So what?
Would you like to live in a world of S-expressions? The LISP people would point out there are libraries to read/write S-expressions, so why use JSON? The answer of course is that we want more than simply nesting lists of strings. We want our markup languages to fit our requirements, not the other way around. And saying "JSON for Everything", which the original poster did was... silly.
These sort of arguments are simply, to use your own word, silly. It's all data, and it's trivial to mung it from one expression to another. XML isn't different from SEXPRs, it's simply an alternative, more prolix notation for SEXPRs. What's bad about XML is that it's prolix; what's good about it is that it has made formal grammars easy to write and easy to police, and in the process has made it extremely easy to write editors which can learn new formal grammars. That's a big win. But once you've used your formal grammar to structure your data, what syntax you convert it into for passing it down the wire is up to you.
Specifically, Google has put a lot of weight behind Android. If Google sells an 'own brand' phone - even if it's a Google/Dell own brand phone - then that kills all other Android phones stone dead, because none of the other serious mobile phone vendors will want to be using a competitor's OS. So Google, who aren't stupid, are not going to do this.
This rumour is one of two things:
Dell are bringing out an Android phone.
Someone is maliciously starting a rumour in an attempt to damage Android
Pick something, for example, a set of personal wikis. Start a "test run". Every time someone is asked how to do something by someone else, they don't explain verbally, they put it in their wiki. Between the requester's follow-up questions (also through the wiki) and the answers, there will be the "oral history" captured electronically.
You are missing my point. People is not going to do anything that in the long run they seem to be bad for them (or their employment). You can start all the wikis you want, but it's not going to help if people don't willingly use them, which is not going to happen.
Dead wrong. Certainly, wikis imposed by insensitive management in an organisation with poor morale are not going to be used. Our company wiki, however, is heavily used. Every single employee contributes information to it, and it is kept up to date and useful without any management intervention. People willingly do things which make their job easier, and for most organisation a company procedures manual is exactly that sort of thing.
How many computers do you keep around for 20 years? Same with servers, a 3 year lease leaves you paying for 80% of the value of the product and you get refreshed with new hardware after the term is up. As a result you always have hardware under warranty and you get to take advantage of increased processing ability. Of course not every business grows as fast as the one I'm responsible for. We just started leasing hardware as we're finding it to be far simpler all around. Don't have to worry about Windows or Office licensing, it's all built-in.
Leasing makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that you're not forced to run the new software on the new hardware. You always have the ability to use an older version. That is the reason a Vista license is valid for XP with a simple phone call if you're a single sap at home or through the VL site if you're a business customer.
Of course you do pay for the convenience but it's quite worth while. That NT4 license from the 90s isn't all the useful to me now. Same with Netware 3, of course I do get a number of servers without an OS and use Debian for my workhorse servers. Then I don't have to worry about expiring licensing and all I have to do is remap the LUN when I get the new server to replace it.
Looking in my server rack, there's nothing there less than eight years old and one machine which is twelve years old (and that one is still serving the same system it served twelve years ago, which says something for stability). All of them except the old one run Debian. The thing is, except for big databases, few server-side tasks are actually that demanding - they're all bandwidth limited, not processor limited (even big database systems are more likely to be IO-bound than mill-bound). I agree a twenty year old machine is still a rarity, but there's really no need to upgrade machines on a three year cycle - unless they aren't doing the job you need them to do.
I am suggesting that for some big international corporations working in technology where most desktops are at the hand of engineers, chances are that tools supported only on SuSE and Red Hat are limiting the choice of distributions (I can tell from experience).
And these corporations are early adopters of Linux on the desktop. The other early adopters are governments and some odd corporations which probably do not have these requirements.
I agree that the day Linux will have >10% of the desktop market, what you state will be right. But to get big technical corporations (which are early adopters) to move to Ubuntu, the tools vendors need to support Ubuntu.
And yes, ClearCase is installed on all desktops of engineers, including Windows, Solaris and Linux. And engineers make the vast majority of the employees.
So what you're saying is, the guys at Dell don't know how to run their business? What you're saying is the guys at IBM don't know how to run their business? I don't know, of course, but I'm strongly of the opinion that they do; that the reason they've chosen to support Ubuntu for desktop applications is that that is what the market is demanding. Both IBM and Dell explicitly say just that. Do you really know better than they do?
...what?
Please mr. guru, tell me how this happens exactly.
I not saying it is done that way, but it would be very easy to do it that way. Mobile phones have all the kit which is needed to digitise speech, and to send that digitised speech over a GPRS connection to a web service that does speech-to-text and returns the text would be trivial. Doesn't need a guru.
Sorry, but you are partially incorrect. Some big large enterprises use Linux on the desktops (not all desktops, just a very very small percentage, windows being on 99% of the desktops) and they choose SLED. The reason: ClearCase is supported on SuSE (and Red Hat) but not on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is therefore eliminated at the bat regardless all the advantages it might have.
Many corporations only go with SuSE and/or Red Hat simply because some proprietary software are only supported on these distributions.
Are you seriously suggesting that ClearCase is on every corporate desktop? Because I have to tell you that in twenty-mumble years of developing software for large enterprise environments, I've never encountered it. Not once. This doesn't mean that there aren't any large corporates out there that use it - but it sure as heck isn't universal. Let's face it, 90% of corporate desktops don't have any softwhere development tools on them at all - they run finance, ERP, customer relationship management, production monitoring, and a hundred other things. And for many of those things all the desktop is running is a fairly thin client around onto an enterprise application which is sitting on a server somewhere. Which is precisely why many corporate desktops don't need Windows. They don't really need any serious processing power on the desktop at all.
Ubuntu is fast becoming a powerful player in this area; as the article says, the reason for supporting it was sizable customer demand. That is the logic here. People wanted to run Ubuntu on their enterprise desktops, they wanted IBM to have Notes on that platform, IBM agreed. No mystery. I'd like to know where this is happening. I haven't seen or read anything that would support this statement apart from the relentless ubuntu PR. It's all RH and Novel/Suse in the enterprise; ubuntu is virtually nonexistent in this space.
SuSE is a reasonable choice in the server space; so is RedHat. But neither of those are being deployed on the desktop. Whatever you may think of it, the Linux platform which has got traction on the desktop - in the enterprise as much as in the home - is Ubuntu.
It's been said every year for almost ten years, so can we call it the decade of Linux on the desktop instead?;-) Inaccurate.
Perhaps we could call it the "decade of wishful thinking" or the "decade of fashionably naive, torch carrying, Finnish fanatics?"
All I know is that if we keep repeatedly predicting it on/., we'll only look like a bunch of retarded penguins.;^)
--
Toro
Speak for yourself. I've been using Linux on the desktop now for more than a decade. I keep waiting for Windows to get good enough to be worth switching to, but it doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.
As the economy tightens up, one of the things that happens is people start looking at where they can save some money. Software does not wear out. Software carries on working just as well as it did when it was new, until the hardware platform which supports it wears out.
I won't argue with your overall analysis, but this line caught my eye:
Software does not wear out.
It does wear out, in several ways:
The ecosystem moves on. Businesses exachange Microsoft Office documents. When people outside the company are sending you Office 2003 docs and you can't open them because you're still on Office 97, your software has worn out in crucial way.
While this is true in general, it happens only in an ecosystem where a critical mass of people are upgrading. In a recession, the critical mass aren't upgrading - so the people who feel the pain are the uncommon ones who have the new system, not the majority who still have the old.
The buglist gets longer and longer. Over time, the numbers of bugs and vulnerabilities only goes up. Some of those are fixed in patch releases; some aren't.
New bugs don't appear out of nowhere. No updates means no new bugs. The bugs were there from the start. As software gets older, you know about more of them, but that doesn't mean there are more of them. Just, there are fewer unknown ones waiting to bite you.
The local ecosystem improves. Lots of business software is predicated on interoperability. My employer's IT department goes to heroic lengths to keep our EOLed case tracking software fully functional; an upgrade to a later version was finally required when the underlying database was also EOLed. Continual incremental upgrades are a sound strategy to avoid a massive, system-wide upgrade later.
But see my response to point one above. In a recession, the majority of businesses are putting off upgrading. So the ecosystem remains static, and it's the ones who try to 'move ahead' who feel the pain.
The software is EOLed. No more support, no more bugfixes.
And you got useful support and timely bugfixes from Microsoft when? No, seriously, this one I partly grant you. Microsoft are going to have to try to persuade people to buy new stuff, because without it their revenue is a bust. So they're going to try to EOL older systems. But if the market truly ain't biting - and in a recession it won't - then Microsoft are just going to have to go on selling support for the old stuff because it will be all the revenue they've got.
Expertise moves on. Employees get promoted, leave, switch departments. At a certain point, hiring new talent to maintain old software becomes more difficult because the community of knowledgeable users shrinks. My previous employer was paying $400 an hour for retirees to maintain our twenty year old environmental systems software running on OS/2.
In a recession, you can hire a Microsoft Certified Network Engineer at every Macdonalds drive through in the country.
Most importantly, what software is used for changes. As businesses continuously change, their needs change. Old software can become a limiting factor in doing new things.
That one I really do grant you. A recession will drive companies to leaner business models, which will require new systems to drive those business models. And the businesses which come most successfully out of the recession will be the ones who have been most creative in engineering costs out of their business during the recession. So it isn't all doom for good software engineers... but I still don't see that helping Microsoft much, because 90% of that new software, by value, will be either in-house or bespoke.
You're literally right that software doesn't rot, but you're functionally wrong, I think. Mitigating against switching to free replacements is the fact that a strategy of continual, incremental upgrades is generally the best way to handle the overall environment.
OK, I'm old enough to have been in this industry when IBM were as dominant as Microsoft are now. We didn't see them start to slide, either. We were only aware that IBM were falling when their decline was already well advanced and unstoppable. I think we're in that position with Microsoft now. Why?
We're heading for a recession. The rebuttal to the FA says:
Sure -- Microsoft's dependence on its Office and Windows products makes it vulnerable to a slowdown in business spending. Then again, GE's power turbine and aircraft engine businesses are vulnerable, too. When the economy turns south, virtually every company is affected in one way or another.
That's true, of course. But GE's customers can't download an open source aircraft engine for free. Also, and significantly, aircraft engines wear out. If the airlines want to keep flying at all, they have to continue to buy spare parts, sub-assemblies, refurbished engines and, from time to time, new engines. No matter how tight the economy gets, unless all GE's customers go belly up, they will have to continue to buy parts - and GE can at least hope to get some of that business.
As the economy tightens up, one of the things that happens is people start looking at where they can save some money. Software does not wear out. Software carries on working just as well as it did when it was new, until the hardware platform which supports it wears out. And even then, it can usually be transferred to a new hardware platform. So as the economy tightens up, people simply stop buying new software. Where's the need to upgrade, when the software you have works acceptably well?
There are fewer reasons to buy software in a recession, anyway. The total number of seats is not increasing - most companies will be laying off staff. And hardware upgrades which had been planned will be put off, so there will be no need to buy software for new hardware...
And if people have to get new software for one reason or another, for every significant profitable product in Microsoft's inventory, there's a free alternative. Not 'cheap', free. Usually, of as high quality as the Microsoft product or higher. Increasingly, as easy to use as the Microsoft product. The tighter the economy gets, the harder it becomes to justify choosing 'expensive' over 'free'. Furthermore, unlike GE's competitors, Microsoft's free competitors are not subject to the normal rules of the financial market. they can't go bankrupt. The recession will not hurt them much - it is more likely to help them.
I won't hide the fact that I think it's bad for this industry to have one dominant player, be that IBM, Microsoft or Google. I didn't mourn IBM's fall and I shan't mourn Microsoft's. But I don't think you can any longer pretend it isn't happening.
If I can make IE, Firefox, and Safari render the same by including a meta tag, that's such a vast improvement to the current order, I'm not going to complain.
Just out of curiosity, what would you recommend as a first language? I ask this having dealt with the entry level programming courses already, and so knowing at least intermediate C++ and having struggled through a Java course (placing mid-level Java w/o any Java background = pain). I'm curious as to what your choice would be (are you leaning toward straight C?)
And then you let them use C++. Not the big scary version of C++ everyone in/. is afraid of (IMHO unjustly so), but just the C with classes version. Let them use that for their data structures course. People still have to take a data structures course and write their own implementations of the basic data structures! It's what we do here and it's not too bad an idea -- the kids should get trained on more than one language.
Having just said, in a post up there somewhere, that languages are just tools and you shouldn't get to hung up on them, I continue to be of the opinion that C++ is a grossly over-rated language, with few real merits. From BCPL to C is a step backwards in my opinion (yes, I've programmed professionally in both); and the extensions that C++ provides are essentially a bag hung on the side of a crock. When C++ was first designed it was a long way behind the contemporarystateof theart, and it hasn't got better with time.
It would be amazing if people actually read the article every once in a while.:-/
I make a living as a Java programmer. I enjoy the work I do and feel that no other language/platform can even touch Java's capabilities in team and enterprise development. Even for single-programmer development, there are a lot of situations where Java is the solution to end all solutions.
I have also made my living for the past ten years as a Java programmer. Before that I was a C programmer, and before that I was a LISP programmer. There's no doubt whatever in my mind that of those languages the most powerful, productive and expressive is LISP. However, there's equally no doubt in my mind that any high-level language is primarily a means to communicate with the programmer who has to maintain your code after you, and if it doesn't achieve that goal then it fails.
Many languages have strengths. Java was designed as a special purpose language for programming the low-power, processor and memory-poor devices. For everything else it is compromised by those design goals. But it has the great strength that it is now a lingua franca that many people in the industry can read and understand.
If you're fetishistic about your tools - if you believe that one particular language (normally the one you're familiar with) is somehow better than all others, then you are fundamentally a poor programmer. A good programmer can pick up any Turing complete language and produce good code - and, more importantly, can assess the strengths and the weaknesses of those languages. But in the end, any language is merely a tool, and every Turing-complete language can be used to achieve exactly the same results as any other Turing-complete language.
Me? The most interesting new language I've seen for a while is Scala.
That being said, I agree with the article.
As the author tried to explain, programmers need a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms before they should even begin looking at Java. The specific problem he calls out (which I actually feel only scratches the surface) is that Java offers such a featureful API that the programmer isn't forced to learn the basics. He is able to simply use a Hashtable, a Sort, a LinkedList, or whatever he needs without understanding why it works. Which is a very dangerous thing for someone training to be a Computer Scientist.
I, frankly, don't agree with the article. Firstly, Java has nothing to do with the case - it's a complete side issue. As a pedagogic language, Java has some merits; it's simple, reasonably orthogonal, and has very clear syntax for expressing structure. And it's just as easy to write a course using C++ which uses only very high level graphical toolkits as it is in Java. The issue isn't the language used for teaching (although I'd prefer to see students introduced to a range of languages); the issue is what is taught. A Java-based course, on the other hand, which takes the student through designing their own compiler in Java (not for Java) and then onto considerations of 'Just In Time' compilation will teach as much or more basic computer science as a course which teaches compiler design in C.
If you think you can stick with the programming technology you learned in college for the rest of your life then you're in the wrong industry, my son. The core skill of a programmer is learning new technologies, not rehashing things in familiar ones.
And the government has bailed them out with over £1,000 for each man, woman and child in the whole United Kingdom - an utterly colossal sum of money. Is that good value for your taxes? It certainly doesn't look like good value for money for mine.
That depends on whether there's a good chance of getting it back, doesn't it?
Certainly does, yes. I haven't heard the weather forecast for Hell, yet, but I don't think it's cold enough for snowballs.
Certainly the government takes a lot of my money and does things I don't approve of with it. But in this case, if it really is effectively just a loan and it avoids a financial melt-down, it's probably a loan I'd rather make.
The Rock is bankrupt. It has suffered the consequences of bad lending practices. Admittedly the hype over sub-prime lending didn't help, but sooner or later this sort of thing was going to happen. The government should just have stood back and let it crash.
Perhaps. But then a lot of innocent people who kept their savings with NR would lose money. Confidence in the UK's banking industry would collapse. A large-scale run on every major bank would inevitably follow, and if not rapidly corrected by much more dramatic government action than what we've seen with Rock, that in turn would be followed by the biggest national financial meltdown in history.
That's a fairy story. Northern Rock was never a significant bank anyway - it was a fairly minor regional mortgage lender with a reputation for lax lending practices. If the financial sector had seriously believed that the Northern Rock going down would have taken any other bank down, they could easily have bailed it out with private sector money. They chose not to: therefore the risk to them was not significant.
While I am as wary of any kind of censorship as the next guy, we would also do well to remember that the entire Northern Rock episode was basically caused by media over-hyping a short term liquidity problem, which is a relatively benign, if somewhat unusual, banking situation.
While I agree that Northern Rock had relatively little exposure to sub-prime lending in the US, it was doing the equivalent of sub-prime lending in the UK - lending inflated amounts on uncertain security to people who couldn't afford to make the repayments. They were on the outer limits of legitimate business, an accident waiting to happen. And the government has bailed them out with over £1,000 for each man, woman and child in the whole United Kingdom - an utterly colossal sum of money. Is that good value for your taxes? It certainly doesn't look like good value for money for mine.
The Rock is bankrupt. It has suffered the consequences of bad lending practices. Admittedly the hype over sub-prime lending didn't help, but sooner or later this sort of thing was going to happen. The government should just have stood back and let it crash.
Slashdot Mirror
If you had a car with 300Horsepower next to a car with 60Horsepower, what would you call the lesser car in a performance test?
That is a really foolish analogy. The usable speed of a car is about engineering, not horsepower. Just like computer applications, really.
There's you, there's the girl, that's enough. More than two players is kinky. Just remember to put a rubber on the wiimote.
Last I checked submarines had air tanks for buoyancy control, and newer subs are not motorized, but nuclear-powered. Something change in the past few hours while I was sleeping?
And those 'newer subs' use a nuclear reactor to power - guess what? - a motor.
There was a time when the average slashdot user had more than two braincells to rub together, but that time seems sadly past.
But this one is simply foolish.
Let's look at your complaints in turn:
Vista defaulting to IPv6 is a good thing. IPv4 is broken - it doesn't scale to the size we need. So like it or not we all have to switch to v6. Your inability to access facebook is not Vista's fault - it's Facebook's fault. And you let them get away with it...
If you go out in the street in Paris (that's in France; in Europe, you know, you may have heard of it) and ask questions in Xhosa (that's a language, you know, from a place called Africa; you may have heard of it) you won't get a sensible answer. Linux is not (and doesn't pretend to be) a slavish copy of Windows. On the contrary, it's an organic outgrowth of UNIX. That things which work in Windows don't work the same way in Linux isn't surprising, it's inevitable. But to suggest that search and finding things is more difficult on Linux than on Windows is ludicrous. To find anything on Windows is a real, total, piece of shit pain, involving watching ludicrous animations for ten minutes. On Linux it's a two-word command and returns almost instantly.
I, too, am of the opinion that Vista is a mess. But that isn't to say that I agree with you. For me to agree with you you'd need to understand what you're talking about, and you don't. You think the 'operating system' is the skin on the top - the pictures on the screen. It isn't. On Linux and, to a lesser extent, Windows, that skin can be taken off and replaced by something else entirely without any change to the underlying operating system. Vista is, indeed, broken; but your rant did not address a single one of the ways it's broken.
I have used XSLT as an "improved-sed", i.e. kinda "extended" pattern-matching (& reg. exp.) engine. This is a huge simplification, obviously.
Of course there is no magic in there. But I do not think it would be easy to do the same in Lisp or other conventional language, i.e. I do not think XSLT is "very easy" to implement.
You can write a simple Prolog interpreter in about thirty lines of LISP. Of course there's more to XSLT than that, because of namespace handling; but not a lot more.
It is extremely powerful tool, I once (ages ago) made a pure XSLT implementation to convert XML into C. Whith a CSS the XSLT was even browser/human viewable (the output was somewhat similar to the C program output).
I do not think JSON can do that.
XSLT is a nice backwards chaining theorem prover, very similar to Prolog. I like it and use it a lot - currently for me it venerates SQL, Hibernate mappings, C# code and Velocity macros from a single source XML document. But there's nothing magic about it, and if we didn't have XSLT it would be very easy to do the same sort of thing in LISP or Prolog, or (slightly more awkwardly) in conventional programming languages.
These sort of arguments are simply, to use your own word, silly. It's all data, and it's trivial to mung it from one expression to another. XML isn't different from SEXPRs, it's simply an alternative, more prolix notation for SEXPRs. What's bad about XML is that it's prolix; what's good about it is that it has made formal grammars easy to write and easy to police, and in the process has made it extremely easy to write editors which can learn new formal grammars. That's a big win. But once you've used your formal grammar to structure your data, what syntax you convert it into for passing it down the wire is up to you.
Ain't necessarily so.
Specifically, Google has put a lot of weight behind Android. If Google sells an 'own brand' phone - even if it's a Google/Dell own brand phone - then that kills all other Android phones stone dead, because none of the other serious mobile phone vendors will want to be using a competitor's OS. So Google, who aren't stupid, are not going to do this.
This rumour is one of two things:
Dead wrong. Certainly, wikis imposed by insensitive management in an organisation with poor morale are not going to be used. Our company wiki, however, is heavily used. Every single employee contributes information to it, and it is kept up to date and useful without any management intervention. People willingly do things which make their job easier, and for most organisation a company procedures manual is exactly that sort of thing.
How many computers do you keep around for 20 years? Same with servers, a 3 year lease leaves you paying for 80% of the value of the product and you get refreshed with new hardware after the term is up. As a result you always have hardware under warranty and you get to take advantage of increased processing ability. Of course not every business grows as fast as the one I'm responsible for. We just started leasing hardware as we're finding it to be far simpler all around. Don't have to worry about Windows or Office licensing, it's all built-in.
Leasing makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that you're not forced to run the new software on the new hardware. You always have the ability to use an older version. That is the reason a Vista license is valid for XP with a simple phone call if you're a single sap at home or through the VL site if you're a business customer.
Of course you do pay for the convenience but it's quite worth while. That NT4 license from the 90s isn't all the useful to me now. Same with Netware 3, of course I do get a number of servers without an OS and use Debian for my workhorse servers. Then I don't have to worry about expiring licensing and all I have to do is remap the LUN when I get the new server to replace it.
Looking in my server rack, there's nothing there less than eight years old and one machine which is twelve years old (and that one is still serving the same system it served twelve years ago, which says something for stability). All of them except the old one run Debian. The thing is, except for big databases, few server-side tasks are actually that demanding - they're all bandwidth limited, not processor limited (even big database systems are more likely to be IO-bound than mill-bound). I agree a twenty year old machine is still a rarity, but there's really no need to upgrade machines on a three year cycle - unless they aren't doing the job you need them to do.
And these corporations are early adopters of Linux on the desktop. The other early adopters are governments and some odd corporations which probably do not have these requirements.
I agree that the day Linux will have >10% of the desktop market, what you state will be right. But to get big technical corporations (which are early adopters) to move to Ubuntu, the tools vendors need to support Ubuntu.
And yes, ClearCase is installed on all desktops of engineers, including Windows, Solaris and Linux. And engineers make the vast majority of the employees.
So what you're saying is, the guys at Dell don't know how to run their business? What you're saying is the guys at IBM don't know how to run their business? I don't know, of course, but I'm strongly of the opinion that they do; that the reason they've chosen to support Ubuntu for desktop applications is that that is what the market is demanding. Both IBM and Dell explicitly say just that. Do you really know better than they do?
...what?Please mr. guru, tell me how this happens exactly.
I not saying it is done that way, but it would be very easy to do it that way. Mobile phones have all the kit which is needed to digitise speech, and to send that digitised speech over a GPRS connection to a web service that does speech-to-text and returns the text would be trivial. Doesn't need a guru.
Many corporations only go with SuSE and/or Red Hat simply because some proprietary software are only supported on these distributions.
Are you seriously suggesting that ClearCase is on every corporate desktop? Because I have to tell you that in twenty-mumble years of developing software for large enterprise environments, I've never encountered it. Not once. This doesn't mean that there aren't any large corporates out there that use it - but it sure as heck isn't universal. Let's face it, 90% of corporate desktops don't have any softwhere development tools on them at all - they run finance, ERP, customer relationship management, production monitoring, and a hundred other things. And for many of those things all the desktop is running is a fairly thin client around onto an enterprise application which is sitting on a server somewhere. Which is precisely why many corporate desktops don't need Windows. They don't really need any serious processing power on the desktop at all.
Slackware? Tha had Slackware? Eeee, tha were reet lucki. We had to mek do wi' SLS, wi' thirty-something floppy disks. Aye, an we loved it!
When you buy a Dell PC with Linux on it, which Linux distribution do you get? Why is that?
SuSE is a reasonable choice in the server space; so is RedHat. But neither of those are being deployed on the desktop. Whatever you may think of it, the Linux platform which has got traction on the desktop - in the enterprise as much as in the home - is Ubuntu.
Perhaps we could call it the "decade of wishful thinking" or the "decade of fashionably naive, torch carrying, Finnish fanatics?"
All I know is that if we keep repeatedly predicting it on
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Toro
Speak for yourself. I've been using Linux on the desktop now for more than a decade. I keep waiting for Windows to get good enough to be worth switching to, but it doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.
You haven't used Windows much, have you?
No, I confess that's true!
I won't argue with your overall analysis, but this line caught my eye:
It does wear out, in several ways:
While this is true in general, it happens only in an ecosystem where a critical mass of people are upgrading. In a recession, the critical mass aren't upgrading - so the people who feel the pain are the uncommon ones who have the new system, not the majority who still have the old.
New bugs don't appear out of nowhere. No updates means no new bugs. The bugs were there from the start. As software gets older, you know about more of them, but that doesn't mean there are more of them. Just, there are fewer unknown ones waiting to bite you.
But see my response to point one above. In a recession, the majority of businesses are putting off upgrading. So the ecosystem remains static, and it's the ones who try to 'move ahead' who feel the pain.
And you got useful support and timely bugfixes from Microsoft when? No, seriously, this one I partly grant you. Microsoft are going to have to try to persuade people to buy new stuff, because without it their revenue is a bust. So they're going to try to EOL older systems. But if the market truly ain't biting - and in a recession it won't - then Microsoft are just going to have to go on selling support for the old stuff because it will be all the revenue they've got.
In a recession, you can hire a Microsoft Certified Network Engineer at every Macdonalds drive through in the country.
That one I really do grant you. A recession will drive companies to leaner business models, which will require new systems to drive those business models. And the businesses which come most successfully out of the recession will be the ones who have been most creative in engineering costs out of their business during the recession. So it isn't all doom for good software engineers... but I still don't see that helping Microsoft much, because 90% of that new software, by value, will be either in-house or bespoke.
You're literally right that software doesn't rot, but you're functionally wrong, I think. Mitigating against switching to free replacements is the fact that a strategy of continual, incremental upgrades is generally the best way to handle the overall environment.
OK, I'm old enough to have been in this industry when IBM were as dominant as Microsoft are now. We didn't see them start to slide, either. We were only aware that IBM were falling when their decline was already well advanced and unstoppable. I think we're in that position with Microsoft now. Why?
We're heading for a recession. The rebuttal to the FA says:
That's true, of course. But GE's customers can't download an open source aircraft engine for free. Also, and significantly, aircraft engines wear out. If the airlines want to keep flying at all, they have to continue to buy spare parts, sub-assemblies, refurbished engines and, from time to time, new engines. No matter how tight the economy gets, unless all GE's customers go belly up, they will have to continue to buy parts - and GE can at least hope to get some of that business.
As the economy tightens up, one of the things that happens is people start looking at where they can save some money. Software does not wear out. Software carries on working just as well as it did when it was new, until the hardware platform which supports it wears out. And even then, it can usually be transferred to a new hardware platform. So as the economy tightens up, people simply stop buying new software. Where's the need to upgrade, when the software you have works acceptably well?
There are fewer reasons to buy software in a recession, anyway. The total number of seats is not increasing - most companies will be laying off staff. And hardware upgrades which had been planned will be put off, so there will be no need to buy software for new hardware...
And if people have to get new software for one reason or another, for every significant profitable product in Microsoft's inventory, there's a free alternative. Not 'cheap', free. Usually, of as high quality as the Microsoft product or higher. Increasingly, as easy to use as the Microsoft product. The tighter the economy gets, the harder it becomes to justify choosing 'expensive' over 'free'. Furthermore, unlike GE's competitors, Microsoft's free competitors are not subject to the normal rules of the financial market. they can't go bankrupt. The recession will not hurt them much - it is more likely to help them.
I won't hide the fact that I think it's bad for this industry to have one dominant player, be that IBM, Microsoft or Google. I didn't mourn IBM's fall and I shan't mourn Microsoft's. But I don't think you can any longer pretend it isn't happening.
If I can make IE, Firefox, and Safari render the same by including a meta tag, that's such a vast improvement to the current order, I'm not going to complain.
Ah, to be that young and naive again!
Scheme.
Having just said, in a post up there somewhere, that languages are just tools and you shouldn't get to hung up on them, I continue to be of the opinion that C++ is a grossly over-rated language, with few real merits. From BCPL to C is a step backwards in my opinion (yes, I've programmed professionally in both); and the extensions that C++ provides are essentially a bag hung on the side of a crock. When C++ was first designed it was a long way behind the contemporary state of the art, and it hasn't got better with time.
I make a living as a Java programmer. I enjoy the work I do and feel that no other language/platform can even touch Java's capabilities in team and enterprise development. Even for single-programmer development, there are a lot of situations where Java is the solution to end all solutions.
I have also made my living for the past ten years as a Java programmer. Before that I was a C programmer, and before that I was a LISP programmer. There's no doubt whatever in my mind that of those languages the most powerful, productive and expressive is LISP. However, there's equally no doubt in my mind that any high-level language is primarily a means to communicate with the programmer who has to maintain your code after you, and if it doesn't achieve that goal then it fails.
Many languages have strengths. Java was designed as a special purpose language for programming the low-power, processor and memory-poor devices. For everything else it is compromised by those design goals. But it has the great strength that it is now a lingua franca that many people in the industry can read and understand.
If you're fetishistic about your tools - if you believe that one particular language (normally the one you're familiar with) is somehow better than all others, then you are fundamentally a poor programmer. A good programmer can pick up any Turing complete language and produce good code - and, more importantly, can assess the strengths and the weaknesses of those languages. But in the end, any language is merely a tool, and every Turing-complete language can be used to achieve exactly the same results as any other Turing-complete language.
Me? The most interesting new language I've seen for a while is Scala.
That being said, I agree with the article.As the author tried to explain, programmers need a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms before they should even begin looking at Java. The specific problem he calls out (which I actually feel only scratches the surface) is that Java offers such a featureful API that the programmer isn't forced to learn the basics. He is able to simply use a Hashtable, a Sort, a LinkedList, or whatever he needs without understanding why it works. Which is a very dangerous thing for someone training to be a Computer Scientist.
I, frankly, don't agree with the article. Firstly, Java has nothing to do with the case - it's a complete side issue. As a pedagogic language, Java has some merits; it's simple, reasonably orthogonal, and has very clear syntax for expressing structure. And it's just as easy to write a course using C++ which uses only very high level graphical toolkits as it is in Java. The issue isn't the language used for teaching (although I'd prefer to see students introduced to a range of languages); the issue is what is taught. A Java-based course, on the other hand, which takes the student through designing their own compiler in Java (not for Java) and then onto considerations of 'Just In Time' compilation will teach as much or more basic computer science as a course which teaches compiler design in C.
If you think you can stick with the programming technology you learned in college for the rest of your life then you're in the wrong industry, my son. The core skill of a programmer is learning new technologies, not rehashing things in familiar ones.
And the government has bailed them out with over £1,000 for each man, woman and child in the whole United Kingdom - an utterly colossal sum of money. Is that good value for your taxes? It certainly doesn't look like good value for money for mine.
That depends on whether there's a good chance of getting it back, doesn't it?
Certainly does, yes. I haven't heard the weather forecast for Hell, yet, but I don't think it's cold enough for snowballs.
Certainly the government takes a lot of my money and does things I don't approve of with it. But in this case, if it really is effectively just a loan and it avoids a financial melt-down, it's probably a loan I'd rather make.
The Rock is bankrupt. It has suffered the consequences of bad lending practices. Admittedly the hype over sub-prime lending didn't help, but sooner or later this sort of thing was going to happen. The government should just have stood back and let it crash.
Perhaps. But then a lot of innocent people who kept their savings with NR would lose money. Confidence in the UK's banking industry would collapse. A large-scale run on every major bank would inevitably follow, and if not rapidly corrected by much more dramatic government action than what we've seen with Rock, that in turn would be followed by the biggest national financial meltdown in history.
That's a fairy story. Northern Rock was never a significant bank anyway - it was a fairly minor regional mortgage lender with a reputation for lax lending practices. If the financial sector had seriously believed that the Northern Rock going down would have taken any other bank down, they could easily have bailed it out with private sector money. They chose not to: therefore the risk to them was not significant.
While I agree that Northern Rock had relatively little exposure to sub-prime lending in the US, it was doing the equivalent of sub-prime lending in the UK - lending inflated amounts on uncertain security to people who couldn't afford to make the repayments. They were on the outer limits of legitimate business, an accident waiting to happen. And the government has bailed them out with over £1,000 for each man, woman and child in the whole United Kingdom - an utterly colossal sum of money. Is that good value for your taxes? It certainly doesn't look like good value for money for mine.
The Rock is bankrupt. It has suffered the consequences of bad lending practices. Admittedly the hype over sub-prime lending didn't help, but sooner or later this sort of thing was going to happen. The government should just have stood back and let it crash.