While I agree with your post, it needs to be said that this newspaper and editors have been championing a liberal cause for quite some time. I can only imagine their shock when people started to post thoughts and ideas that were radicaly different than their beliefs. I wonder then, if they then decided to "blame" the people on slashdot.
At the end of the day though, their media and influance is shrinking and I know that this kills them. Seeing that THEY had the final say with their editors, then it is obvious that they wanted to control what content was going to be on the site.
The funny part of this is that if this was some conservative trade rag, and the same thing happened I wonder what the headline of the article would have been....
I understand him, but wait until the marketing dorks get involved. The last thing they want being shoved down their throat is pictures of Macintoshes running MS windows.
You could see the headline now...
"Even Apple realizes that they should run Microsoft Windows".
I hope you are correct though.... I do know a lot of people who have tried Linux just for the fact that it ran on the same hardware they where not using anymore, and if they could play with OSX, then they "may" purchase an apple next time.
I guess I fall in to your category of someone who will wait to see what Apple will release. I run Linux, and Win2k at home on machines with removable HD's. "IF" Apple comes out with a machine that can run Linux, Windows AND OSX then I would seriously consider it IF the price isn't more than ~25 to 30% more than what I could get a white box for.
I am doubt that Apple will make a box that you can easily run Windows on. I fully suspect them to do everything possible to prevent that from happening. I hope and pray they don't but I just don't see them doing that.
Now I also want to say that I was seriously considering a new Macintosh in the next 6 months, but there is NO WAY I would buy one now or in the next year. It will take them at least 2 years to get all the "bugs" and performance issues worked out (look at 68k to ppc migration as an example).
Does Apple really have the cash to survive this osbourne effect? I hope so, but I am not as sure as you are. This will hurt them very bad, and they will forever now be compared to Dell on hardware specs. It will be VERY easy for Joe consumer to look at Dell's specs and then say well the "Apple" is 20% more. Guess I am getting a Dell.
First let me say I agree with you. However, "if" Apple gave people a 1 or 2 year notice then it would kill all the sales of every Mac for the next one to two years. If they make the switch then they need to figure out a way not to kill their current customers/salse AND make it better on everyone in the future AND not kill all their 3rd party developers. This is not so different than when they switched to PPC around 10 years ago. It was painfull for a few years but in the end it was necessary for them.
I personally would love to see X86 inside an Apple. That way pinhead Dell/HP/Whitebox owners out there would loose the argument that their system is sooooooo much faster. Also, one could assume that porting apps from most open source projects would be made easier. The only argument would be cost, and as long as Apple is close to the cost/performance then they will be able to compete nicely. People that don't want to dork with their machines and want better virus/spam/adware protection will pay more for a Macintosh.
Does that mean I think this will happen? Nope. I see Intel possibly producing PPC chips way before I see Apple using X86 chips.
I agree with you, and will add that if you changed Republican to Democrat it would also have been moded differently.
All I can say is it is a huge mistake for the left to keep taking pot shots at Christians. Well heck not just Christians, but any people that have strong religious beliefs. If there were some smart Democrats out there they would be trying to draw more similarities between themselves and Christians. Specifically their view on capital punishment, and their view on taxes.
I agree that 1080P is expensive, but 1080i is not that bad and has been available forever now. I think you miss my point though. My point is that for the first time EVER the console is getting a major upgrade in graphics resolution. This will narrow the gap between the two considerably. Lets say that the PS3 can do 1900X1000, and your super Nvidia card does 2400X1600. That isn't that big of a difference any more to the average consumer. Both will look great.
I would somewhat argue that only the top rated graphic cards can do 1600X1200 Doom 3 now. But I will make a point that Doom 3 looks great at 800X600, and thus this is the exact type of game that will now look and play great on a console. Specifically the PS3. You will probably be able to configure it to run in 720P, 1080i or 1080P. Just like the PC (only different resolutions) and I bet that 720P and 1080I will look great.
Also you do notice that it appears the PS3 "could" use a standard monitor:-) So you may not need a 1080P TV, but a higher end monitor would do...
Lastly, I agree that Sony will NOT make 1080P "THE STANDARD". Yet I predict that because they support HD DVD AND 1080P, they will get at least one more year out of their system than the XBOX 360. Good for Sony, bad for Microsoft.
The core difference that I see between the consoles and computer games is: 1. CPU speed. 2. Screen resolution/Graphics card 3. Controllers 4. Configuration. 5. Living space.
1. Currently the CPU speed is becomming less and less of an issue. This didn't use to be the case, in that consoles got smoked by most PC's. My point on this first issue is that the difference in processing power is far far far less than it use to be.
2. (Graphics) This is currently a HUGE advantage of the PC platform. Most console games still run at a very low resolution. This is going to change big time. Most of the new systems support HDTV, heck the PS3 support 2 1080P TV's. So the difference between the console and a good computer video card + monitor is getting way smaller than it use to be. Heck in some cases these new consoles will actually beat computers for the first time in history. 1900X1000 is definately cool for a video resolution!
3. (Controllers) This may be obvious but a lot of games lend themselves far better to a keyboard + mouse than any controller out there. However the reverse is also true. I predict that keyboards will become more previlant on these new system, and thus taking away another advantage the PC has. Perhaps this is why Sony built bluetooth in to the PS3 by default.
4. (Configuration) Consoles have in general had one major advantage over PC's in regards to configuration. They "just work". You buy that new cool game and you don't have to read the requirements. You know it will work.
5. (Environment) This last point is about where you like to play your games. This is where the PC will always have a place. A lot of homes have a PC and a TV. So, someone can play a game on the PC while everyone else watches something on TV. Granted people can and do have multiple TV's.
So in short, I agree with you that some games were far far better on the PC than on a console, but I see the difference between the console and PC in terms of power and ability shrinking to the point that the console will be "good enough" for most games. Perhaps this is why Microsoft is so concerned about getting in to this market.
For the love of God man, don't give Disney any more ideas. They have already figured out how to squeeze every last red cent out of parents, and now you have them thinking about sucking the "unused" heat from our CPU's!
Come to think of it, perhaps that is why it is so hot in Disneyland.... they have already done it!
I gues the laws of thermaldynamics don't apply to cartoon characters:-)
I spent 2 years of my life as a UI guy and I have nothing but the utmost respect for "good" UI developers and designers. The parents comments about an IDE appear to come from someone who is a UI guy. To use an analogy though; it is kinda like a mechanic saying that they don't like a wrench because it looks ugly.
JDeveloper does not suck for creating front ends. It is good for creating SWING apps and connecting them to Oracle (shocker, considering it is made by Oracle). I did prefer Visual Cafe for SWING, but JDeveloper works fine. Granted I am no fan of Oracle's BC4J, or their other proprietary stuff. However, they, and everyone appears to be moving to JSF.
As for VS.NET, you miss my point. VS.NET will NEVER run on anything BUT Windows, and probably never run well/supported on anything but the latest Microsoft OS. So if you want to "standardize" on a IDE, and some of your developers don't want to use Windows, you are SOL. Yes you can bag standarizing on VS.NET, and just use notepad with a compiler, but that isn't my point. You could use different IDEs, but then you run in to crap like one IDE creates a button different than another. Specifically one wants to create it with a default constructor, and then set all the properties and the other one creates it with a name. Then you can't use your GUI to work with the UI. That sucks.
What IDE loads the fastest.... Ummm ok I will take you word that VS.NET loads faster than other IDE's. Given that I stay in my IDE most of the day, or perhaps load it 2-3 times a day, the extra 20 seconds or so doesn't really bother me. Does it bother anyone else out there? I will say that going from 512MB of RAM to 1GIG helped me a lot, but then I like to keep Microsoft Outlook open, and it seems to take around 200-400MB of RAM.
JBuilder is terrible because you didn't like the UI? I can understand if you didn't "like" it because of the UI, or in your case a few specific things in the UI, but to rate it as terrible is an overstatement.
Now I use JDeveloper (built off of JBuilder by Oracle) and Eclipse. I can say that JDeveloper flat out rocks. I did use Jbuilder 3.x and also found it very good.
The issue is this. Most Java IDE's will run on multiple platforms because they are written in Java. Written in Java comes has it's pro's and cons. It will probably launch a little slower than and require more RAM, BUT.... it will easily run on multiple plaforms. The other issue with all the proprietary Java IDE's is that there is now a "good enough" open source IDE (Eclipse). It will be very very difficult for them to compete. It is my opinion that Eclipse will become the defacto IDE for Java development. Unfortunatly some very good IDEs for Java will go away (Jdeveloper, JBuilder, Visual Cafe etc)
Now as far as Microsoft goes. I personally hate the way it runs on Linux and the Macintosh. It is so buggy that the thing won't even launch:-) You would think that an IDE that cost that much money would work great.:-)
Now my opinion is this for the future. 1. Eclipse will be the IDE of choice for Java development, and as such many vendors will add features to it via the plugins. MyEclipse being the main plugin. The rate of development will be huge over the next 5 years on Eclipse.
2. Microsoft developers will use whatever Microsoft gives them. They will generally only seriously look at Microsoft solutions. At some point Microsoft will have to seriously consider giving away their visual studio product. It is my belief that they will use their "shared source" licence for it within the next 5 years.
Good luck getting.NET apps to run on anything except Windows. Heck good luck getting them to run on anything but the latest version of Windows with all the latest patches. Now if that isn't a concern and you don't mind all the limitations Windows AND not being tied to one vendor, then.NET may be cool. Heck if you don't mind being locked in to one vendor there are a lot of cool tools out there.
Well around 25 years ago there was a show called Space 1999. In that tv show they predicted that in 25 or so years people would be living on the moon. Most predictions made 20-30 years out generally are way too extreeme.
Here is my prediction. We will all be driving cars much like we do today. There will still be conflict in the middle east. Technology will advance, but nobody will be living on the moon, nor will there be flying cars for normal people to own.
Print this post out now an re-read it in 5 years, then 10 then 15, heck for your entire lifetime and it will still be accurate. Things move very slowly.
If you have a 64bit OS then you are no longer tied to 4GB of RAM limitation. Yes you can use some tricks to get around this, but you don't have that limit in a 64bit world. Now if your text program needs to work in an address space above 4GB and it was never designed to be ran that way, will it still work? Probably because the OS will handle the memory management for you. Perhaps not. It probably won't work well if you start to paste in some huge graphics and perhaps a video in to your document. People don't think about that now, but a few years ago people didn't think about putting graphics in documents.
From my limited understanding, 64 bit should be as fast as 32bit "if" the program + libraries are all compiled for 64bit and the compilers are equal. If I add an int 2 + and int 2, it should be the same speed if it is 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128 bit computer (assuming everything else is equal).
Now you asked what am I going to do with a 64bit Window Manager? Perhaps a good 3D destkop? We have some now, but they are limited.
Also understand that it shouldn't be that hard to take TextEdit and re-compile it to 64bit. The issue I see with 64bit for Windows is that the hardware companies will have to come out with two sets of drivers. That is going to confuse the crap out of Microsoft customers.
Lastly, I also drive a Jeep:-) My Wrangler has the ability to go under water (non salt) for a while and come out, dry off and then run again without damage. Kinda cool.... Now I don't want to "test" it, just to find out that my CD player isn't included in that "ability" and for some reason 20% of my electrical isn't covered just because someone thought it wasn't worth the extra few seconds of work.
Well in this case the buck was 0. They already paid for the older boxes. Now I suspect that it really comes down to a budget. This department had a budget for a new system that was approved a long time ago. They chose to spend it on Dell hardware running Linux. Did they "need" that new hardware? Probably not. But they had it budgeted, and if they didn't spend the money they would loose it.
This gets in to a gripe of mine. I see a ton of people at various companies spending money on software solutions (mostly Microsoft) without a thought. Yet if it was "their" money they were spending then they would NEVER make the decisions they do.
We are using Hibernate in a few applications now, (very early projects), and have found it to work well. I personally use Eclipse with the MyEclipse plugin ($30/year) and it will do quite a bit of the repetitive work for you. Now I have found that Hibernate is a memory hog. When it runs low on memory it will kick out "query is not valid" errors.
So my early opinion is that if you have enough memory to handle the load of the system AND you know your user count will not grow a ton, Hibernate is a good solution. I would reccommend the book Hibernate in Action, and perhaps the developers notebook.
We have looked and played with EJB's and have never had a real need of the services and scaleability they provide. That and the complexity of them and none of our projects ever require their use.
Excuse my ignorance, but couldn't you have used session beans and done the O/R mapping yourself? Then within that session bean used some of the CMP entity beans, when needed?
I don't have much time right now, but I would love to talk more about this with you and see what issues you found, and how you solved them.
You are correct about transactions. However my point is fairly general, in that if you want to have a system scale (say 75% database reads, and 25% writes), at some point Hibernate will not be the answer. My experience is that Hibernate is RAM hungry, and EJB's are a pain to debug and develop. No solution is perfect, but Hibernate and EJB's don't really compete against each other.
Excellent points. I definately have a lot to learn about EJB 2.x and Hibernate. I still stand by my point though that EJB is "generally" on a separate server and communicated to, where Hibernate is used in the local JVM. I also stand by the point that the core reason for EJB is scaleability.
From my limited test with Hibernate I have found it to be a HUGE memory hog. Specifically RAM. Now given that the app is not distributed, RAM can become an issue. I also want to point out that when the system finally ran out of ram (~30k rows from a DB to a list of objects) it just gave me a generic hibernate error. "Invalid query" I believe was the error. I spent FOREVER debugging the error, to find out it was just a RAM issue.
I only mention this because, in my opinion no option is perfect. I believe that you and I would be in total agreement about using Hibernate vs. EJB's for 99.99% of the applications.
Hibernate does not really compete with CMP Entity beans, but perhaps sessions beans. I see the breakdown as this.
If the requirements are hundreds of transactions a second, then EJB will probably be the best choice. It has the ability to swap out objects to disk and share resources very well. In my humble opinion it is the only way to scale Java apps up to many thoughsands of concurrant users.
With EJB's, the container handles and provides a ton of features that you the developer can take advantage of. Do you need these features?
EJB's do provide an object to relational mapping but that is only one aspect of the technology. Using this approach though forces you to communicate with another server for that communication. In my opinion the object relational mapping in EJB is lacking, and the 3.0 spec will hopefully address these issues.
Thus Hibernate was born. Hibernate does not require you to communicate to another server (RMI, Corba etc). Hibernate focuses on being the best object relational mapping tool out there. In my opinion it does an excellent job. However asking Hibernate to scale to the levels of EJB may be asking a bit too much.
The question that needs to be asked is what does your application require? Most will find that Hibernate meets the needs and as such it is doing very well.
NOTE: I am generalizing here. Please don't start a flame war. I am a fan of EJB AND Hibernate.
My first issue with this is that he uses spring and hibernate and then compares speed. WTF is this about? You use an OR mapping tool that is fairly robust and you then talk about speed? Why didn't he just code all the SQL by hand and forget Hibernate. On a LOT of applications this would perform much better. Heck he could even rip Spring out and again do what he needs by hand.
How much would that have reduced the size?
Now for my next question. How did both applications scale? Where both speeds acceptable at the required load/user level? Heck if you are building a system that you want to maintain, and potentually switch out databases, then Hibernate ROCKS. Yes there is some overhead, but for 99% of the applications on todays hardware this will not be an issue.
Yep I being the customer and PAYING for software don't really give a rats ass about the underlying details. All I know is that SuSE provides one and RedHat doesn't. RedHat and SuSE charge about the exact same amount to me for their product. Both appear to work great, the only core difference is that SuSE took the extra effort to help their customers out. RedHat uses excuses.
Yeah OR RedHat like SuSE could just include Sun's JVM and have all these issues go away. But for some reason RedHat hates Sun. Way to go RedHat! Forget what your customers really want! It is absolutely brilliant to attack Sun, fight them tooth and nail and ignor the company that runs around 92%+ of the worlds computers. Yep you could crush Sun out and then own say another 1% of the worlds computers.
I have to complement you on another fine move. Changing your pricing and support constantly over the last 4 years. Brilliant! It was nice to see the cost of supported RedHat go from $70 to $1,500 to $2,500 then down to $700 then down to $350 a year.
My point is that you switch the entire call center over to thin clients. First you switch all the applications to web based (and java), then "if" you need to use a PC you can with little effort. However there should be little to no need to switch to a place with a PC. Every call center I have seen has the agents located in one core area or areas. Moving them around is not that big of an issue.
The other bad side of using PC's is that you have to build an "image" of a PC for the call center. So in your example if someone switched to a new area and that area didn't have the call center apps loaded, I.T. would have to use something like WinInstall to push or pull the software down to the client. Ahhh but that software was tested on the callcenter imgage, and thus may not work on a non callcenter PC. It is a freaking nightmare to support. So what most PC call centers do is try and make every call center machine as similar as possible and then lock it down very tight.
In the end you end up making a PC nothing more than a thin client (roaming profiles, extreme security profiles etc) and gaining none of the advantages the PC gives except possibly that you get to purchase one common hardware platform.
So in my scenario, you would have a call center with thin clients (heck citrix boxes in the worst case), in the call center. Any agent could move with little to no effort anywhere in the call center. If for some extreme reason they need to move to an area with PC's they could, and then just use the PC's browser to access their applications.
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While I agree with your post, it needs to be said that this newspaper and editors have been championing a liberal cause for quite some time. I can only imagine their shock when people started to post thoughts and ideas that were radicaly different than their beliefs. I wonder then, if they then decided to "blame" the people on slashdot.
At the end of the day though, their media and influance is shrinking and I know that this kills them. Seeing that THEY had the final say with their editors, then it is obvious that they wanted to control what content was going to be on the site.
The funny part of this is that if this was some conservative trade rag, and the same thing happened I wonder what the headline of the article would have been....
I understand him, but wait until the marketing dorks get involved. The last thing they want being shoved down their throat is pictures of Macintoshes running MS windows.
You could see the headline now...
"Even Apple realizes that they should run Microsoft Windows".
I hope you are correct though.... I do know a lot of people who have tried Linux just for the fact that it ran on the same hardware they where not using anymore, and if they could play with OSX, then they "may" purchase an apple next time.
I guess I fall in to your category of someone who will wait to see what Apple will release. I run Linux, and Win2k at home on machines with removable HD's. "IF" Apple comes out with a machine that can run Linux, Windows AND OSX then I would seriously consider it IF the price isn't more than ~25 to 30% more than what I could get a white box for.
I am doubt that Apple will make a box that you can easily run Windows on. I fully suspect them to do everything possible to prevent that from happening. I hope and pray they don't but I just don't see them doing that.
Now I also want to say that I was seriously considering a new Macintosh in the next 6 months, but there is NO WAY I would buy one now or in the next year. It will take them at least 2 years to get all the "bugs" and performance issues worked out (look at 68k to ppc migration as an example).
Does Apple really have the cash to survive this osbourne effect? I hope so, but I am not as sure as you are. This will hurt them very bad, and they will forever now be compared to Dell on hardware specs. It will be VERY easy for Joe consumer to look at Dell's specs and then say well the "Apple" is 20% more. Guess I am getting a Dell.
First let me say I agree with you. However, "if" Apple gave people a 1 or 2 year notice then it would kill all the sales of every Mac for the next one to two years. If they make the switch then they need to figure out a way not to kill their current customers/salse AND make it better on everyone in the future AND not kill all their 3rd party developers. This is not so different than when they switched to PPC around 10 years ago. It was painfull for a few years but in the end it was necessary for them.
I personally would love to see X86 inside an Apple. That way pinhead Dell/HP/Whitebox owners out there would loose the argument that their system is sooooooo much faster. Also, one could assume that porting apps from most open source projects would be made easier. The only argument would be cost, and as long as Apple is close to the cost/performance then they will be able to compete nicely. People that don't want to dork with their machines and want better virus/spam/adware protection will pay more for a Macintosh.
Does that mean I think this will happen? Nope. I see Intel possibly producing PPC chips way before I see Apple using X86 chips.
I agree with you, and will add that if you changed Republican to Democrat it would also have been moded differently.
All I can say is it is a huge mistake for the left to keep taking pot shots at Christians. Well heck not just Christians, but any people that have strong religious beliefs. If there were some smart Democrats out there they would be trying to draw more similarities between themselves and Christians. Specifically their view on capital punishment, and their view on taxes.
I agree that 1080P is expensive, but 1080i is not that bad and has been available forever now. I think you miss my point though. My point is that for the first time EVER the console is getting a major upgrade in graphics resolution. This will narrow the gap between the two considerably. Lets say that the PS3 can do 1900X1000, and your super Nvidia card does 2400X1600. That isn't that big of a difference any more to the average consumer. Both will look great.
:-) So you may not need a 1080P TV, but a higher end monitor would do...
I would somewhat argue that only the top rated graphic cards can do 1600X1200 Doom 3 now. But I will make a point that Doom 3 looks great at 800X600, and thus this is the exact type of game that will now look and play great on a console. Specifically the PS3. You will probably be able to configure it to run in 720P, 1080i or 1080P. Just like the PC (only different resolutions) and I bet that 720P and 1080I will look great.
Also you do notice that it appears the PS3 "could" use a standard monitor
Lastly, I agree that Sony will NOT make 1080P "THE STANDARD". Yet I predict that because they support HD DVD AND 1080P, they will get at least one more year out of their system than the XBOX 360. Good for Sony, bad for Microsoft.
The core difference that I see between the consoles and computer games is:
1. CPU speed.
2. Screen resolution/Graphics card
3. Controllers
4. Configuration.
5. Living space.
1. Currently the CPU speed is becomming less and less of an issue. This didn't use to be the case, in that consoles got smoked by most PC's. My point on this first issue is that the difference in processing power is far far far less than it use to be.
2. (Graphics) This is currently a HUGE advantage of the PC platform. Most console games still run at a very low resolution. This is going to change big time. Most of the new systems support HDTV, heck the PS3 support 2 1080P TV's. So the difference between the console and a good computer video card + monitor is getting way smaller than it use to be. Heck in some cases these new consoles will actually beat computers for the first time in history. 1900X1000 is definately cool for a video resolution!
3. (Controllers) This may be obvious but a lot of games lend themselves far better to a keyboard + mouse than any controller out there. However the reverse is also true. I predict that keyboards will become more previlant on these new system, and thus taking away another advantage the PC has. Perhaps this is why Sony built bluetooth in to the PS3 by default.
4. (Configuration) Consoles have in general had one major advantage over PC's in regards to configuration. They "just work". You buy that new cool game and you don't have to read the requirements. You know it will work.
5. (Environment) This last point is about where you like to play your games. This is where the PC will always have a place. A lot of homes have a PC and a TV. So, someone can play a game on the PC while everyone else watches something on TV. Granted people can and do have multiple TV's.
So in short, I agree with you that some games were far far better on the PC than on a console, but I see the difference between the console and PC in terms of power and ability shrinking to the point that the console will be "good enough" for most games. Perhaps this is why Microsoft is so concerned about getting in to this market.
For the love of God man, don't give Disney any more ideas. They have already figured out how to squeeze every last red cent out of parents, and now you have them thinking about sucking the "unused" heat from our CPU's!
:-)
Come to think of it, perhaps that is why it is so hot in Disneyland.... they have already done it!
I gues the laws of thermaldynamics don't apply to cartoon characters
I agree with everything you said until your last sentence.
"Can't really blame Bioware on either count. Console games are where most of the sales are anyway."
Would you back this up? Around 90 Million PS2's out there. Tons of PC's and how many Xboxes?
I believe the real answer to the question was that Microsoft gave them a lot of money.
I spent 2 years of my life as a UI guy and I have nothing but the utmost respect for "good" UI developers and designers. The parents comments about an IDE appear to come from someone who is a UI guy. To use an analogy though; it is kinda like a mechanic saying that they don't like a wrench because it looks ugly.
JDeveloper does not suck for creating front ends. It is good for creating SWING apps and connecting them to Oracle (shocker, considering it is made by Oracle). I did prefer Visual Cafe for SWING, but JDeveloper works fine. Granted I am no fan of Oracle's BC4J, or their other proprietary stuff. However, they, and everyone appears to be moving to JSF.
As for VS.NET, you miss my point. VS.NET will NEVER run on anything BUT Windows, and probably never run well/supported on anything but the latest Microsoft OS. So if you want to "standardize" on a IDE, and some of your developers don't want to use Windows, you are SOL. Yes you can bag standarizing on VS.NET, and just use notepad with a compiler, but that isn't my point. You could use different IDEs, but then you run in to crap like one IDE creates a button different than another. Specifically one wants to create it with a default constructor, and then set all the properties and the other one creates it with a name. Then you can't use your GUI to work with the UI. That sucks.
What IDE loads the fastest.... Ummm ok I will take you word that VS.NET loads faster than other IDE's. Given that I stay in my IDE most of the day, or perhaps load it 2-3 times a day, the extra 20 seconds or so doesn't really bother me. Does it bother anyone else out there? I will say that going from 512MB of RAM to 1GIG helped me a lot, but then I like to keep Microsoft Outlook open, and it seems to take around 200-400MB of RAM.
You must be a UI guy...
:-) You would think that an IDE that cost that much money would work great. :-)
JBuilder is terrible because you didn't like the UI? I can understand if you didn't "like" it because of the UI, or in your case a few specific things in the UI, but to rate it as terrible is an overstatement.
Now I use JDeveloper (built off of JBuilder by Oracle) and Eclipse. I can say that JDeveloper flat out rocks. I did use Jbuilder 3.x and also found it very good.
The issue is this.
Most Java IDE's will run on multiple platforms because they are written in Java. Written in Java comes has it's pro's and cons. It will probably launch a little slower than and require more RAM, BUT.... it will easily run on multiple plaforms. The other issue with all the proprietary Java IDE's is that there is now a "good enough" open source IDE (Eclipse). It will be very very difficult for them to compete. It is my opinion that Eclipse will become the defacto IDE for Java development. Unfortunatly some very good IDEs for Java will go away (Jdeveloper, JBuilder, Visual Cafe etc)
Now as far as Microsoft goes. I personally hate the way it runs on Linux and the Macintosh. It is so buggy that the thing won't even launch
Now my opinion is this for the future.
1. Eclipse will be the IDE of choice for Java development, and as such many vendors will add features to it via the plugins. MyEclipse being the main plugin. The rate of development will be huge over the next 5 years on Eclipse.
2. Microsoft developers will use whatever Microsoft gives them. They will generally only seriously look at Microsoft solutions. At some point Microsoft will have to seriously consider giving away their visual studio product. It is my belief that they will use their "shared source" licence for it within the next 5 years.
Look at JSF. I think it rocks.
.NET apps to run on anything except Windows. Heck good luck getting them to run on anything but the latest version of Windows with all the latest patches. Now if that isn't a concern and you don't mind all the limitations Windows AND not being tied to one vendor, then .NET may be cool. Heck if you don't mind being locked in to one vendor there are a lot of cool tools out there.
Good luck getting
Well around 25 years ago there was a show called Space 1999. In that tv show they predicted that in 25 or so years people would be living on the moon. Most predictions made 20-30 years out generally are way too extreeme.
Here is my prediction. We will all be driving cars much like we do today. There will still be conflict in the middle east. Technology will advance, but nobody will be living on the moon, nor will there be flying cars for normal people to own.
Print this post out now an re-read it in 5 years, then 10 then 15, heck for your entire lifetime and it will still be accurate. Things move very slowly.
I believe some of the issues are.
:-) My Wrangler has the ability to go under water (non salt) for a while and come out, dry off and then run again without damage. Kinda cool.... Now I don't want to "test" it, just to find out that my CD player isn't included in that "ability" and for some reason 20% of my electrical isn't covered just because someone thought it wasn't worth the extra few seconds of work.
If you have a 64bit OS then you are no longer tied to 4GB of RAM limitation. Yes you can use some tricks to get around this, but you don't have that limit in a 64bit world. Now if your text program needs to work in an address space above 4GB and it was never designed to be ran that way, will it still work? Probably because the OS will handle the memory management for you. Perhaps not. It probably won't work well if you start to paste in some huge graphics and perhaps a video in to your document. People don't think about that now, but a few years ago people didn't think about putting graphics in documents.
From my limited understanding, 64 bit should be as fast as 32bit "if" the program + libraries are all compiled for 64bit and the compilers are equal. If I add an int 2 + and int 2, it should be the same speed if it is 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128 bit computer (assuming everything else is equal).
Now you asked what am I going to do with a 64bit Window Manager? Perhaps a good 3D destkop? We have some now, but they are limited.
Also understand that it shouldn't be that hard to take TextEdit and re-compile it to 64bit. The issue I see with 64bit for Windows is that the hardware companies will have to come out with two sets of drivers. That is going to confuse the crap out of Microsoft customers.
Lastly, I also drive a Jeep
Well in this case the buck was 0. They already paid for the older boxes. Now I suspect that it really comes down to a budget. This department had a budget for a new system that was approved a long time ago. They chose to spend it on Dell hardware running Linux. Did they "need" that new hardware? Probably not. But they had it budgeted, and if they didn't spend the money they would loose it.
This gets in to a gripe of mine. I see a ton of people at various companies spending money on software solutions (mostly Microsoft) without a thought. Yet if it was "their" money they were spending then they would NEVER make the decisions they do.
I see your point. A hybrid approach would suck.
We are using Hibernate in a few applications now, (very early projects), and have found it to work well. I personally use Eclipse with the MyEclipse plugin ($30/year) and it will do quite a bit of the repetitive work for you. Now I have found that Hibernate is a memory hog. When it runs low on memory it will kick out "query is not valid" errors.
So my early opinion is that if you have enough memory to handle the load of the system AND you know your user count will not grow a ton, Hibernate is a good solution. I would reccommend the book Hibernate in Action, and perhaps the developers notebook.
We have looked and played with EJB's and have never had a real need of the services and scaleability they provide. That and the complexity of them and none of our projects ever require their use.
Excuse my ignorance, but couldn't you have used session beans and done the O/R mapping yourself? Then within that session bean used some of the CMP entity beans, when needed?
I don't have much time right now, but I would love to talk more about this with you and see what issues you found, and how you solved them.
Thanks
EJB 3.0 is NOT out yet!
:-) :-) :-)
I am willing to bet that 99% of all EJB 2.0 apps do not use the local interface.
Now having said that... It does look like the EJB 3.0 spec for O/R mapping will look a lot like Hibernate
This is great news.
First, I am sorry about the spelling.
You are correct about transactions. However my point is fairly general, in that if you want to have a system scale (say 75% database reads, and 25% writes), at some point Hibernate will not be the answer. My experience is that Hibernate is RAM hungry, and EJB's are a pain to debug and develop. No solution is perfect, but Hibernate and EJB's don't really compete against each other.
Excellent points. I definately have a lot to learn about EJB 2.x and Hibernate. I still stand by my point though that EJB is "generally" on a separate server and communicated to, where Hibernate is used in the local JVM. I also stand by the point that the core reason for EJB is scaleability.
From my limited test with Hibernate I have found it to be a HUGE memory hog. Specifically RAM. Now given that the app is not distributed, RAM can become an issue. I also want to point out that when the system finally ran out of ram (~30k rows from a DB to a list of objects) it just gave me a generic hibernate error. "Invalid query" I believe was the error. I spent FOREVER debugging the error, to find out it was just a RAM issue.
I only mention this because, in my opinion no option is perfect. I believe that you and I would be in total agreement about using Hibernate vs. EJB's for 99.99% of the applications.
Here is my understanding of it.
Hibernate does not really compete with CMP Entity beans, but perhaps sessions beans. I see the breakdown as this.
If the requirements are hundreds of transactions a second, then EJB will probably be the best choice. It has the ability to swap out objects to disk and share resources very well. In my humble opinion it is the only way to scale Java apps up to many thoughsands of concurrant users.
With EJB's, the container handles and provides a ton of features that you the developer can take advantage of. Do you need these features?
EJB's do provide an object to relational mapping but that is only one aspect of the technology. Using this approach though forces you to communicate with another server for that communication. In my opinion the object relational mapping in EJB is lacking, and the 3.0 spec will hopefully address these issues.
Thus Hibernate was born. Hibernate does not require you to communicate to another server (RMI, Corba etc). Hibernate focuses on being the best object relational mapping tool out there. In my opinion it does an excellent job. However asking Hibernate to scale to the levels of EJB may be asking a bit too much.
The question that needs to be asked is what does your application require? Most will find that Hibernate meets the needs and as such it is doing very well.
NOTE: I am generalizing here. Please don't start a flame war. I am a fan of EJB AND Hibernate.
I would read the article but the site is down.
My first issue with this is that he uses spring and hibernate and then compares speed. WTF is this about? You use an OR mapping tool that is fairly robust and you then talk about speed? Why didn't he just code all the SQL by hand and forget Hibernate. On a LOT of applications this would perform much better. Heck he could even rip Spring out and again do what he needs by hand.
How much would that have reduced the size?
Now for my next question. How did both applications scale? Where both speeds acceptable at the required load/user level? Heck if you are building a system that you want to maintain, and potentually switch out databases, then Hibernate ROCKS. Yes there is some overhead, but for 99% of the applications on todays hardware this will not be an issue.
Yep I being the customer and PAYING for software don't really give a rats ass about the underlying details. All I know is that SuSE provides one and RedHat doesn't. RedHat and SuSE charge about the exact same amount to me for their product. Both appear to work great, the only core difference is that SuSE took the extra effort to help their customers out. RedHat uses excuses.
Yeah OR RedHat like SuSE could just include Sun's JVM and have all these issues go away. But for some reason RedHat hates Sun. Way to go RedHat! Forget what your customers really want! It is absolutely brilliant to attack Sun, fight them tooth and nail and ignor the company that runs around 92%+ of the worlds computers. Yep you could crush Sun out and then own say another 1% of the worlds computers.
I have to complement you on another fine move. Changing your pricing and support constantly over the last 4 years. Brilliant! It was nice to see the cost of supported RedHat go from $70 to $1,500 to $2,500 then down to $700 then down to $350 a year.
Signed
Microsoft
My point is that you switch the entire call center over to thin clients. First you switch all the applications to web based (and java), then "if" you need to use a PC you can with little effort. However there should be little to no need to switch to a place with a PC. Every call center I have seen has the agents located in one core area or areas. Moving them around is not that big of an issue.
The other bad side of using PC's is that you have to build an "image" of a PC for the call center. So in your example if someone switched to a new area and that area didn't have the call center apps loaded, I.T. would have to use something like WinInstall to push or pull the software down to the client. Ahhh but that software was tested on the callcenter imgage, and thus may not work on a non callcenter PC. It is a freaking nightmare to support. So what most PC call centers do is try and make every call center machine as similar as possible and then lock it down very tight.
In the end you end up making a PC nothing more than a thin client (roaming profiles, extreme security profiles etc) and gaining none of the advantages the PC gives except possibly that you get to purchase one common hardware platform.
So in my scenario, you would have a call center with thin clients (heck citrix boxes in the worst case), in the call center. Any agent could move with little to no effort anywhere in the call center. If for some extreme reason they need to move to an area with PC's they could, and then just use the PC's browser to access their applications.