Spring is already open source. It's a very widely used Java web application framework - possibly the king of that particular hill. That's why it's used in hundreds of companies, as the article states.
I'm also sure it's pretty fast in terms of performance.
The proprietary piece here is Hyperic, not Spring.
But you and the other post-writers are right, it's still a long way from being noteworthy to IBM or Microsoft. Too many big companies insist on proprietary software from big name vendors, regardless of the technical or financial merits of cheaper competition (open source or otherwise).
Peer review is better than a lot of other options, but it's still not perfect. If a majority of teachers in a particular school have a particular political, religious, or social agenda they can use the pretense of peer review to force the remaining staff to go along or be fired.
It has less potential for abuse than when the principal can hire and fire teachers at will, but the potential for abuse still exists.
Poverty is often self-perpetuating. If you're born to poor parents, you have one or more of three likely possibilities:
1. Your parents are too busy working extra hours at crap jobs trying to make ends meet, and whatever moral values and values in education they wanted to give you didn't happen because they couldn't be there.
2. Your parents are too uneducated or criminal to understand the value of education, and they taught you the same lack of values on purpose or by setting a bad example.
3. Your parents understand the value of a good education, but since they never got one they can't help you in school at all or even check your homework.
We should never let kids from these terrible backgrounds get away with being a disruptive influence or an awful student. But just because you do not tolerate bad behavior, does not mean you blame the kid for the poor circumstances they were born into. I'm an atheist, but a religious saying is appropriate here: hate the sin, not the sinner.
That's the kicker, though. I have a brother who was born with a chronic medical condition. He wants to work, he's smart and has a good work ethic, but he can't even take a job unless it offers excellent medical benefits or else all of his income will be eaten by his medical costs. No sense making $9 an hour when your monthly take home after medical expenses is less than $0.
From his life, and others, and problems I've had with my kids, I get to see first hand how socialized health care can't possibly fuck the American public worse than we get it now.
You can't steal a Mercedes because you think $50,000 is too much for a new car that will be worth $20,000 in five years. You can't steal a comic book from a store because you think $3 is too much for something you can read in twenty minutes.
Games are no different. If it's not worth $50 for 8 hours of game play, don't play it.
The.NET and Flash platforms represent an enormous market.
But Oracle and the JavaFX community have their work cut out for them if they expect JavaFX to gain a real foothold in this market. Flash is ridiculously dominant.
I suspect the best we can hope is that competition from Silverlight and JavaFX forces Adobe to make Flash fully open source. I wouldn't be upset if JavaFX makes significant inroads, but I honestly don't see it happening.
I'm sure there's a genetic factor. But the article explicitly describes how people using modern shoes use heel-down first walking and running. People who are barefoot or who use thinner shoes tend to put the ball of the foot down first, then the heel.
I'm speculating, but I would not be surprised if that difference in foot travel has an impact on both the state of the foot arch. I would also imagine that it has a big difference in the health of ankles, knees, and hips.
Actually, I do know guys that are bothered if their girlfriend earns more than they do.
It's not a question of male dominance, though. It's insecurity. At least among the guys I know, they struggle with insecurity and feeling like you are the major provider gives them a sense of worth in the relationship. If a woman likes them despite the fact that they are not a provider, they have to get by on looks and personality, and they lack faith in their own attributes.
He's not saying that he is all knowing. (Or she is not saying she is all knowing, whatever.)
Evolution does not require faith. Evolution fits the best experimental evidence we have to date. It doesn't take faith to believe in that, any more than it takes faith to believe that your television will work or that gravity is 32 feet per second squared on the earth's surface.
Intelligent Design requires faith because there is no evidence. Your can't use data to support or disprove the idea, you have to start with religious belief. And as I said above, if there is Intelligent Design then why are their birth defects, nipples on men, malaria, Ebola, an appendix organ we don't use, hair on places that don't need it, and parasites? Does it seem logical for a Designer to do all of those weird things?
Evolution, on the other hand, has no problems with those things. Evolution is often called 'survival of the fittest' but is really 'survival of the fit enough'. As long as an evolutionary change in a species does not specifically reduce their ability to survive, it can occur. We have hair in useless places and nipples on men and the unused Appendix organ because those things do not interfere with our ability to survive. Birth defects are a side effect of the way our genetics are mingled with our partners in sexual reproduction. Dangerous parasites and diseases evolved just like we did.
Belief in evolution is a faith the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby. You can't compare it with a religion at all. They are different. You can believe - but not prove - that God created evolution. But that's as close as the two mix.
What was there before the Big Bang? Researchers don't know, and right now no one has figured out how to make experiments to test any theories on the idea.
But there are hypothesis about the Big Bang itself and experimental evidence to suggest they are true. The universe is expanding, all of the galaxies are moving away from one central starting point. That has data to back it up. There are certainly gaps in the knowledge, and a lot more to learn. But it fits all of the information we have at present.
Intelligent Design cannot be verified by experiments. There's no way you can prove or disprove it. And why did the Intelligence give men nipples? Why did the Intelligence give men and women Appendixes? Why did the Intelligent Designer design mosquitoes, malaria, smallpox, scarlet fever, autism, spina biffida, mumps, and leprosy? You can explain all of those things with current evolution theory. You can't explain them with Intelligent Design, unless maybe God likes LSD.
And of course, many reasonable Christians, Muslims, Jews, and so forth take the logical view that God created evolution and the Big Bang, or whatever the real beginning of the universe was.
The idea seems to be that your ankles were injured and your feet are flat because you've been using the running shoes.
I can't speak to your specific case. I have flat feet, and I gave up on running entirely because I would get ankle and knee pain. I was using running shoes. Maybe I would have had better luck with something that had a thinner pad. I can only comfortably assert that the running shoes I used were not good enough to help me.
If nothing else, I'm grateful that the article has inspired me to try running again. I had abandoned the idea entirely.
I am the exact target market for Scala. I'm a Java developer who has been reading about functional programming for years. I've been trying to pick up Haskell in my spare time, and some very neat concepts 'click' instantly but others drive me bonkers.
So Scala is definitely on my list of must-learns. Just as soon as I can write non-trivial Haskell apps.
I think health trumps everything else. So I don't mind if a physician earns $100,000 or even $200,000 or $250,000 per year. Most of the extra costs we pay at the doctor's office are covering liability insurance and overpriced medical equipment.
Our pediatricians schedule about 4 patient visits per hour. With insurance the cost per visit is $15. Without insurance, it's $200. I doubt my insurance company is paying $185 extra per visit, and even if it is the lack of Ferraris in the parking lot tells me the physician is not getting even 20% of the $800 per hour in gross income he brings to the facility.
I don't understand the love of Spring. One of Java's core strengths is supposed to be strong static typing, which lets you catch a large class of errors at compile time instead of run time.
When you move larger and larger amounts of your application into XML files and replace explicit class references with dependency injection, haven't you just tossed that out the window? At some point don't you decide that Spring has taken you so far away from Java itself that your real solution is a different programming language? Wouldn't it make more sense to use Perl, Python, or Ruby right out of the gate?
But a modern doctor didn't go through 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, and another three or five years of grueling internships to get paid in chickens. If anyone in our society earns a six figure income, it would be them.
I agree with every criticism you wrote except Office 2007. After a few weeks, I found it far more intuitive to use and productive than any previous version of Office.
I think it's a fair criticism of Microsoft that they often rearrange GUIs and document command line alternatives poorly solely for the purpose of selling training and tech support. But the Office 2007 UI redesign, for at least some tasks, seems to be a case (exception?) where they did it for the right reason - to make it better.
Some degree of refactoring is nice, of course. On the other hand, Scala has operator overloading and higher order functions. That removes some of the common refactoring requirements you have with Java.
The battle between Scala and F# could be interesting. Scala has the strength of Java's widespread use and now the added strength of open source. But (despite Slashdot prevalent opinion) Microsoft still carries a lot of weight, and F# may be the most powerful option on the.NET framework.
I don't like generic type erasure either.
Re:Should have used PHP.
on
Twitter On Scala
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· Score: 3, Informative
Scala has the significant advantage that it's built on Java and interoperable with Java. Scala source code compiles directly into.class files. You get the speed of the JVM (which is acceptably quick these days), the ability to easily call Java APIs from within Scala, and the ability to run your Scala code on any machine with the JVM.
It's popular to dislike Java, and even as a well paid Java developer I'm not a huge fan of the language. But Java still is extremely common, and you can even write Java code for your Scala code to use while you're learning Scala.
Scala also keeps Java's strong static typing and adds functional language features. I don't think it needs any development at all to be adapted for mainstream use.
On the other hand, as a C++ developer I found learning Java to be child's play. The learning curve from Java to Scala, for me at least, is noticeably steeper. If anything kneecaps Scala I suspect it will be the barrier to entry, not the language itself.
I take my resting heart rate every morning. If it goes up, your body is heading towards a overtrained state, time to take a rest.
Interesting. When I do strength training, my resting pulse will be elevated for a week or more. It takes at least two weeks without strength workouts for my resting pulse to drop back to 60 or so. I train hard, but not hard enough to get tunnel vision or vomit during the workout.
I know running can be a positive addiction, to to speak, but I don't think genetics are the cause of your joint aches. Force is mass times acceleration, and over five hundred high speed strides every time you run a mile is a tremendous amount of force for your joints to withstand. There's a stereotype that most people are too lazy to keep up a running routine for years on end, but my anecdotal experience is that most people are stopped by joint pain, not laziness.
Your problem is not the developers, it's the friends who said you should "absolutely be using Linux instead".
I'm a huge fan of Linux, and I use it on my home PC. But I only recommend it to friends, family, and coworkers when I legitimately believe it meets the needs of whatever they're trying to accomplish.
To do otherwise is as counter productive as recommending a Toyota Corolla to someone that needs a dump truck. It doesn't matter how well the Corolla is engineered, it's not a solution.
Thanks for the example. I'll check if there are places I made that exact error, or any similar to it. We implemented indexes by the simple expedient of adding an index, running vacuum analyze to update the query planner, and then running benchmark queries against the database. Rinse, lather, and repeat for a few different columns in a few different tables, and keep the indexes that gave a significant query performance boost.
But I have a few queries I just can't figure out how to speed up, or determine a database refactor that makes sense. I still have a lot to learn.
I think every solution should always be given a fair consideration. But when you factor all features, Microsoft and many other proprietary vendors enter the arena at a major disadvantage: licensing costs, software use restrictions, a dis-incentive for the vendor to make migrating to other vendors easy, a dis-incentive to make their software compatible with other vendors, and of course no ability to review or fork the source code yourself.
I never have to worry about paying an additional software licensing fee to a vendor when my PostgreSQL database passes the 10 GB boundary, or when I add another server on the domain, or when I install an extra CPU in a server. I never have to worry about being unable to buy an additional new copy of my Linux distribution. I don't violate any terms of use when I post performance comparisons or feature complaints or any other comment about the products.
Now on the bright side, I think open source software has become so good partly as a reaction to the good moves by proprietary vendors. OpenOffice plays catch-up to Microsoft Office. The various open source VMs play catch-up to VMware and such. PostgreSQL keeps racing to try and match Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server. But the gaps are getting very narrow, in some cases open source has a clear lead, and the open source licensing advantages are a very strong argument all by themselves.
What's in your Postgres bag of tricks? We certainly have acceptable speed with it, but we have one table with 5 million rows, 1 with 2 million rows, and the rest are all tiny. I understand and use indexes - what are the other tricks? Master the query analyzer? Liberal use of partitions?
Your example query shouldn't be that bad, especially if you have indexes and use table partitions for large volumes of data. But even my worst queries (and I had some awful ones as I climbed the SQL learning curve) never joined more than a dozen tables. I can't imagine 20.
The program should not be geared towards creating a new energy infrastructure. As you say, that would be prohibitively expensive.
The program should be geared towards finding ways to make non-fossil fuel energy sources more cost effective than fossil fuels. If we can do that, converting becomes a matter of boosting profits, and companies will pay for it out of their own pockets.
Slashdot Mirror
Spring is already open source. It's a very widely used Java web application framework - possibly the king of that particular hill. That's why it's used in hundreds of companies, as the article states.
I'm also sure it's pretty fast in terms of performance.
The proprietary piece here is Hyperic, not Spring.
But you and the other post-writers are right, it's still a long way from being noteworthy to IBM or Microsoft. Too many big companies insist on proprietary software from big name vendors, regardless of the technical or financial merits of cheaper competition (open source or otherwise).
Peer review is better than a lot of other options, but it's still not perfect. If a majority of teachers in a particular school have a particular political, religious, or social agenda they can use the pretense of peer review to force the remaining staff to go along or be fired.
It has less potential for abuse than when the principal can hire and fire teachers at will, but the potential for abuse still exists.
Poverty is often self-perpetuating. If you're born to poor parents, you have one or more of three likely possibilities:
1. Your parents are too busy working extra hours at crap jobs trying to make ends meet, and whatever moral values and values in education they wanted to give you didn't happen because they couldn't be there.
2. Your parents are too uneducated or criminal to understand the value of education, and they taught you the same lack of values on purpose or by setting a bad example.
3. Your parents understand the value of a good education, but since they never got one they can't help you in school at all or even check your homework.
We should never let kids from these terrible backgrounds get away with being a disruptive influence or an awful student. But just because you do not tolerate bad behavior, does not mean you blame the kid for the poor circumstances they were born into. I'm an atheist, but a religious saying is appropriate here: hate the sin, not the sinner.
a good market for your skills
That's the kicker, though. I have a brother who was born with a chronic medical condition. He wants to work, he's smart and has a good work ethic, but he can't even take a job unless it offers excellent medical benefits or else all of his income will be eaten by his medical costs. No sense making $9 an hour when your monthly take home after medical expenses is less than $0.
From his life, and others, and problems I've had with my kids, I get to see first hand how socialized health care can't possibly fuck the American public worse than we get it now.
You can't steal a Mercedes because you think $50,000 is too much for a new car that will be worth $20,000 in five years. You can't steal a comic book from a store because you think $3 is too much for something you can read in twenty minutes.
Games are no different. If it's not worth $50 for 8 hours of game play, don't play it.
The .NET and Flash platforms represent an enormous market.
But Oracle and the JavaFX community have their work cut out for them if they expect JavaFX to gain a real foothold in this market. Flash is ridiculously dominant.
I suspect the best we can hope is that competition from Silverlight and JavaFX forces Adobe to make Flash fully open source. I wouldn't be upset if JavaFX makes significant inroads, but I honestly don't see it happening.
I'm sure there's a genetic factor. But the article explicitly describes how people using modern shoes use heel-down first walking and running. People who are barefoot or who use thinner shoes tend to put the ball of the foot down first, then the heel.
I'm speculating, but I would not be surprised if that difference in foot travel has an impact on both the state of the foot arch. I would also imagine that it has a big difference in the health of ankles, knees, and hips.
Actually, I do know guys that are bothered if their girlfriend earns more than they do.
It's not a question of male dominance, though. It's insecurity. At least among the guys I know, they struggle with insecurity and feeling like you are the major provider gives them a sense of worth in the relationship. If a woman likes them despite the fact that they are not a provider, they have to get by on looks and personality, and they lack faith in their own attributes.
He's not saying that he is all knowing. (Or she is not saying she is all knowing, whatever.)
Evolution does not require faith. Evolution fits the best experimental evidence we have to date. It doesn't take faith to believe in that, any more than it takes faith to believe that your television will work or that gravity is 32 feet per second squared on the earth's surface.
Intelligent Design requires faith because there is no evidence. Your can't use data to support or disprove the idea, you have to start with religious belief. And as I said above, if there is Intelligent Design then why are their birth defects, nipples on men, malaria, Ebola, an appendix organ we don't use, hair on places that don't need it, and parasites? Does it seem logical for a Designer to do all of those weird things?
Evolution, on the other hand, has no problems with those things. Evolution is often called 'survival of the fittest' but is really 'survival of the fit enough'. As long as an evolutionary change in a species does not specifically reduce their ability to survive, it can occur. We have hair in useless places and nipples on men and the unused Appendix organ because those things do not interfere with our ability to survive. Birth defects are a side effect of the way our genetics are mingled with our partners in sexual reproduction. Dangerous parasites and diseases evolved just like we did.
Belief in evolution is a faith the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby. You can't compare it with a religion at all. They are different. You can believe - but not prove - that God created evolution. But that's as close as the two mix.
What was there before the Big Bang? Researchers don't know, and right now no one has figured out how to make experiments to test any theories on the idea.
But there are hypothesis about the Big Bang itself and experimental evidence to suggest they are true. The universe is expanding, all of the galaxies are moving away from one central starting point. That has data to back it up. There are certainly gaps in the knowledge, and a lot more to learn. But it fits all of the information we have at present.
Intelligent Design cannot be verified by experiments. There's no way you can prove or disprove it. And why did the Intelligence give men nipples? Why did the Intelligence give men and women Appendixes? Why did the Intelligent Designer design mosquitoes, malaria, smallpox, scarlet fever, autism, spina biffida, mumps, and leprosy? You can explain all of those things with current evolution theory. You can't explain them with Intelligent Design, unless maybe God likes LSD.
And of course, many reasonable Christians, Muslims, Jews, and so forth take the logical view that God created evolution and the Big Bang, or whatever the real beginning of the universe was.
The idea seems to be that your ankles were injured and your feet are flat because you've been using the running shoes.
I can't speak to your specific case. I have flat feet, and I gave up on running entirely because I would get ankle and knee pain. I was using running shoes. Maybe I would have had better luck with something that had a thinner pad. I can only comfortably assert that the running shoes I used were not good enough to help me.
If nothing else, I'm grateful that the article has inspired me to try running again. I had abandoned the idea entirely.
I am the exact target market for Scala. I'm a Java developer who has been reading about functional programming for years. I've been trying to pick up Haskell in my spare time, and some very neat concepts 'click' instantly but others drive me bonkers.
So Scala is definitely on my list of must-learns. Just as soon as I can write non-trivial Haskell apps.
I think health trumps everything else. So I don't mind if a physician earns $100,000 or even $200,000 or $250,000 per year. Most of the extra costs we pay at the doctor's office are covering liability insurance and overpriced medical equipment.
Our pediatricians schedule about 4 patient visits per hour. With insurance the cost per visit is $15. Without insurance, it's $200. I doubt my insurance company is paying $185 extra per visit, and even if it is the lack of Ferraris in the parking lot tells me the physician is not getting even 20% of the $800 per hour in gross income he brings to the facility.
I don't understand the love of Spring. One of Java's core strengths is supposed to be strong static typing, which lets you catch a large class of errors at compile time instead of run time.
When you move larger and larger amounts of your application into XML files and replace explicit class references with dependency injection, haven't you just tossed that out the window? At some point don't you decide that Spring has taken you so far away from Java itself that your real solution is a different programming language? Wouldn't it make more sense to use Perl, Python, or Ruby right out of the gate?
Insurance is definitely part of the problem.
But a modern doctor didn't go through 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, and another three or five years of grueling internships to get paid in chickens. If anyone in our society earns a six figure income, it would be them.
I agree with every criticism you wrote except Office 2007. After a few weeks, I found it far more intuitive to use and productive than any previous version of Office.
I think it's a fair criticism of Microsoft that they often rearrange GUIs and document command line alternatives poorly solely for the purpose of selling training and tech support. But the Office 2007 UI redesign, for at least some tasks, seems to be a case (exception?) where they did it for the right reason - to make it better.
Some degree of refactoring is nice, of course. On the other hand, Scala has operator overloading and higher order functions. That removes some of the common refactoring requirements you have with Java.
.NET framework.
The battle between Scala and F# could be interesting. Scala has the strength of Java's widespread use and now the added strength of open source. But (despite Slashdot prevalent opinion) Microsoft still carries a lot of weight, and F# may be the most powerful option on the
I don't like generic type erasure either.
Scala has the significant advantage that it's built on Java and interoperable with Java. Scala source code compiles directly into .class files. You get the speed of the JVM (which is acceptably quick these days), the ability to easily call Java APIs from within Scala, and the ability to run your Scala code on any machine with the JVM.
It's popular to dislike Java, and even as a well paid Java developer I'm not a huge fan of the language. But Java still is extremely common, and you can even write Java code for your Scala code to use while you're learning Scala.
Scala also keeps Java's strong static typing and adds functional language features. I don't think it needs any development at all to be adapted for mainstream use.
On the other hand, as a C++ developer I found learning Java to be child's play. The learning curve from Java to Scala, for me at least, is noticeably steeper. If anything kneecaps Scala I suspect it will be the barrier to entry, not the language itself.
I take my resting heart rate every morning. If it goes up, your body is heading towards a overtrained state, time to take a rest.
Interesting. When I do strength training, my resting pulse will be elevated for a week or more. It takes at least two weeks without strength workouts for my resting pulse to drop back to 60 or so. I train hard, but not hard enough to get tunnel vision or vomit during the workout.
I know running can be a positive addiction, to to speak, but I don't think genetics are the cause of your joint aches. Force is mass times acceleration, and over five hundred high speed strides every time you run a mile is a tremendous amount of force for your joints to withstand. There's a stereotype that most people are too lazy to keep up a running routine for years on end, but my anecdotal experience is that most people are stopped by joint pain, not laziness.
Your problem is not the developers, it's the friends who said you should "absolutely be using Linux instead".
I'm a huge fan of Linux, and I use it on my home PC. But I only recommend it to friends, family, and coworkers when I legitimately believe it meets the needs of whatever they're trying to accomplish.
To do otherwise is as counter productive as recommending a Toyota Corolla to someone that needs a dump truck. It doesn't matter how well the Corolla is engineered, it's not a solution.
Thanks for the example. I'll check if there are places I made that exact error, or any similar to it. We implemented indexes by the simple expedient of adding an index, running vacuum analyze to update the query planner, and then running benchmark queries against the database. Rinse, lather, and repeat for a few different columns in a few different tables, and keep the indexes that gave a significant query performance boost.
But I have a few queries I just can't figure out how to speed up, or determine a database refactor that makes sense. I still have a lot to learn.
I think every solution should always be given a fair consideration. But when you factor all features, Microsoft and many other proprietary vendors enter the arena at a major disadvantage: licensing costs, software use restrictions, a dis-incentive for the vendor to make migrating to other vendors easy, a dis-incentive to make their software compatible with other vendors, and of course no ability to review or fork the source code yourself.
I never have to worry about paying an additional software licensing fee to a vendor when my PostgreSQL database passes the 10 GB boundary, or when I add another server on the domain, or when I install an extra CPU in a server. I never have to worry about being unable to buy an additional new copy of my Linux distribution. I don't violate any terms of use when I post performance comparisons or feature complaints or any other comment about the products.
Now on the bright side, I think open source software has become so good partly as a reaction to the good moves by proprietary vendors. OpenOffice plays catch-up to Microsoft Office. The various open source VMs play catch-up to VMware and such. PostgreSQL keeps racing to try and match Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server. But the gaps are getting very narrow, in some cases open source has a clear lead, and the open source licensing advantages are a very strong argument all by themselves.
What's in your Postgres bag of tricks? We certainly have acceptable speed with it, but we have one table with 5 million rows, 1 with 2 million rows, and the rest are all tiny. I understand and use indexes - what are the other tricks? Master the query analyzer? Liberal use of partitions?
Your example query shouldn't be that bad, especially if you have indexes and use table partitions for large volumes of data. But even my worst queries (and I had some awful ones as I climbed the SQL learning curve) never joined more than a dozen tables. I can't imagine 20.
The program should not be geared towards creating a new energy infrastructure. As you say, that would be prohibitively expensive.
The program should be geared towards finding ways to make non-fossil fuel energy sources more cost effective than fossil fuels. If we can do that, converting becomes a matter of boosting profits, and companies will pay for it out of their own pockets.