but I can say that I have been in the procedural world long enough to realize that there seems to be a divine power in OOP. It makes you *think* entirely different about problems, and by breaking a very large, very complex problem into approachable components. Allowing not only a single developer to build more complex systems, but systems that are well suited for re-use in future or existing systems.
I'm sorry, but I must completely disagree with your comment. When "structured" languages like C and PASCAL "burst" onto the scene back in the early 80's, they touted the EXACT same benefits that OOP is touting today, more modular code, code reuse, breaking problems down into simpler components, etc, etc, etc. Fact is that the tools keep changing but the tool users don't, thereby negating many of the benefits of having "better" tools. Crappy code is crappy code regardless of the methodology behind it, the fact that is crappy in an object oriented way doesn't make it better than crappy structured code or even crappy spaghetti code for that matter.
I can see how people would think like this though. Many (most?) were not even around when the transition from languages like COBOL/Fortran/BASIC/Assembler to C/PASCAL occured to see how history is simply repeating itself (as it always seems to in this industry).
the object oriented paridigm, component models, virtual machines. (VM's, by the way, go back at least 20 years in the literature
Pretty much every programming concept/innovation today has roots that go back. OO is at least 20yo. VM were implemented, it was just that mainframes were the only things beefy enough to implement them effectively, not that they were overtly complex. The Java vm is not too technically different that the old pcode interpreters, again, nothing new here.
I doubt many modern 'c0derz' could properly knock out a simple quick-sort, let alone a fully ACID SQL DBMS.
Right but the problem is that for some strange reason, 20 years later, a coder still does have to know how to knock out a quick sort (or some such). We won't see true progress until we get to the point where your "average" coder absolutely will never need to know this, unlike the hodgepodge of high level/low level stuff we have now.
what "improvements" over the last quarter century have actually brought progress to the key issue: more quickly and more inexpensively developing software that's more reliable?"
I've only been programming for 19 years (not 25) but I can say that I've seen absolutely no progress in software development givin your contraints of defining "progress" as being able to achieve the three goals (speed, cost, robustness). HOWEVER, I don't really blame the tools, rather the nature of the end result. The software we have to write has become significantly more complex, and at a rate that has surpassed our abilities to effectively create tools to deal with their complexity. "Back in the day" when a "good" business level word processor was 100KLines of code and written by a small group of dedicated and bright people, you could get very good results. Now, something like Word is significantly larger than 1MLines of code being worked on by programmers with 15+ years of experience to those who just got out of school to those who you wouldn't trust to add up your grocery bill let alone write a line of code.
It's like we still have hammers and nails, but the "market" wants us to build steel skyscrappers. So we come up with even better hammers and whiz bang processes to "better" utilize those hammers and nail together steel girders, but the fact is that those tools are woefully inadequate to truely make a dent in improving that which we build.
I think some people are missing the point of this. Some have said ".13u, big whoop, how does that help me? on such a slow *ss chip". Well the point is that SiS is not trying to compete with the big boys on the high not, that's not their schtick. They want to push motherboards, esp to oems, and this product allows them to offer "higher" end graphics to their customers. It won't be long before they shrink the puppy enough to integrate directly into their chipsets, thereby offering oems an attractive compromise between speed and price.
So in the end, the fact that they can "push the envelope" as far as their production process goes does bode well for the consumer. You just have to look at this product in the context for which it was intended.
businesses don't train their employees to use Word. Rather, they expect to see it on their resumés.
Well that is true too. However, since they expect to see it, many people learn it. And in the case where people actually have to do WP, then chances are Word is the WP they know.
Most of the "training" I refer to is that the employer expects the user to use (and therefore learn) Word.
The percentage of incidents where you would lose both your backups and the originals (given that they are stored in separate places)
Actually I think that this is exactly the info he was looking for. His statement was that it wasn't good enough to just make a backup and then throw it into your desk drawer, you should take further steps.
I don't know about the "least" of your problems, I would think of it more as compounding or piling on to your problems. In the digital age I have photos (don't do the film thing anymore), personal records, emails, contact info for people I've long forgotten but am sure will need to contact again one day, etc on my computer, and if I lost all of that (including backups), then that would REALLY suck, BAD. But then again, that's the beauty of digital, I can backup all of our pics onto a cd (or several) and scatter them about significantly easier than I could do the same for my film.
The one thing those backups contain that might cause a problem for my wife is the MS Money backup
But this will only be a problem if:
- you died in the fire along with the original copy (i.e. if you just had a heart attack she could still easily get to the original).
- the safe deposit backup was the only one you kept. For things like financial info, you could easily keep a copy at work of give a copy to another family member, or give a copy to your wife to stash somewhere (probably her purse;)
That's true (that was what was said, yes, I'm that old). However the key part of my statement was "anytime soon". And the reason I say that is that back then, Word, WordPerfect, WordStar (yes, WordStar) and a gaggle of other lesser known WP apps all duked it out for supremecy. Now the market is more saturated (I wonder how many _new_ Word licenses there are vs those who upgrade) and there really isn't a viable competitor, yet. If OS continues to gain momentum and OO continues to mature, then it could indeed prove to be a worthy competitor, but it still is going to take a while.
Your scenerio may be true in some cases, but in all the environments that i've been in (and they all use/used Word), this has not been the case. Not that isn't validity to your statement, just that I think mine is still just as valid (as it is based on my personal experience). Not that they've never used forms, but there was still plenty of free form (no pun intended) use (or really starting off with a template). I've seen the same in Excel (actually, I personally have seen it a lot more in Excel than Word).
No version of word is similar to it's immediate predecessor
Oh really, can you tell which basic editing commands have changed radically in the last three verions of Word? And by basic I am including things like creating style sheets, fields (which also includes things like TOC and indices), not just typing and deleting. Just using style sheets as an example, they have not fundamentally changed since the days of the DOS version of Word.
I doubt anyone has any kind of special attachment to word
Actually they do, it's called experience. Word sure may not be the best WP out there, but people are familiar with it, and in the terms of business productivity, that means more than being "the best". Businesses have a HUGE investment in training their staff on how to use software, and once that expense is incurred, you better have a damn good reason to incur it again. And seeing as how businesses make up the overwhelming _paying_ majority of Word users, I don't think it's going to disappear tomorrow.
Well the biggest problem is the sheer number of IE users and therefor the potential impact of a security hole. While a problem in say, Samba, has fairly limited exposure.
And probably the thing that any OS proponent will gleefully point out, is that the "solutions" offered by M$ are typically not very satisfying and there really isn't much you can do about it (vs switching OS's of course;)
I agree that there is a a large amount of M$ bashing, but then what would one expect, when in Rome....
OK, you listed the "benefits" of MSO and you say that OOo is "easier to use" and that MSO isn't "flexible", could you be a bit more specific? I would like to take a look at OOo and would be interested in the perspective of someone who has used both.
And that points out the number one problem with this procedure, lack of cred. I mean, man, the horror stories, plus that massively (literally and figuratively) cool scar to show off at the pool parties and by the beach.
But the surgeons are right there in the room. The answer is simple. The patient will sue:
- the surgeons involved
- the hospital
- the manufacturer of the device
- possibly the other staff depending no the nature of the, uh, "problem"
Once in court, the insurance companies for these individuals will duke it out and the "blame" for the "accident" will be divvied out between all the members. So the docters will be held x%, hospital y%, manufacturer z% where x+y+z==100.
This is standard lawsuit fare, no different really. It's all in the percentages and who pays what amount. In the end it's always trivial to find all parties involved at least partially responsible.
First and most blatant, the author does not list exactly what these commerical software line items are, he only compares them with what the OS application he is planning on using. Just as a simple example, he lists WU_FTPD and then assigns a cost of $50x3 for the commerical "equivilent". What is this commerical package? Can't he just use WU_FTPD (assuming the "cost" is the same for the Win32 version as the Linux). The ftp server that ships with Win2K doesn't require any licensing fees (though it's feature set is a bit week compared to other packages). Win2k also comes with a dns server and dhcp servers, so what are the costs that he is associating with these? I'm not saying that these are made up, just that his article is basically useless without it.
One other thing, why is Samba listed as an expense? Presumably if you were going with a Windoze solution you wouldn't need it? Do they have other non Windoze boxes that currently don't connect to existing Windoze boxes that going with Windoze with force them to purchase Samba?
All these things call cast into doubt the accuracy of his article. If he'd at least list the "commerical" packages, then one could make a truely educated attempt at determining the "real" cost savings.
Just out of curiosity, we hear a lot about people migrating from various solutions over to Linux, but I don't hear much about people doing the reverse. Is this because this just isn't happening (doubt it) or that it's just not publicised? If it does occur, I think it would benefit the community greatly to feature them even more so than those who switch TO Linux. I think the reason is obvious, if someone is switching away, then there is something to be learned. It may be features, it may be economics, or it may even be politics, but I think that we would learn from these turncoa^h^h^h uh, people.
Even if Office is the best productivity suite available, is it so much better that it is worth the extra cost of the software and the O/S needed to run it?
Damn skippy it would be. Remember, companies don't use OS's, they use applications. This is why SGI used to be so successful even though their stuff was ungodly expensive compared to other solutions, they provided tools to let people get done what they needed to get done in the best way possible. Hell, if you could get your hands on a piece of software that made you 25% more efficient at doing your job (of course this is in absolutely no way implying that office does this, this is just a generalzation), wouldn't you sink an extra $500 to acquire it? In a heartbeat you would.
The main point being that in the end, the OS don't mean squat, its the apps that run on it. "Minor" cost variances in the OS doesn't save you much in the long term if you can't get the apps that will help you do your job better. This is why M$ dominates on the desktop, but is losing more ground in the server room, Windoze is a desktop oriented OS, Linux is (was) not. Linux makes inroads in the server space because the applications available more readily lend themselves to that.
Well sorta. Notice that there are only two major computer manufacturers that support two major hardware architectures, IBM and HP. Everyone else sticks to a single primary arch. because it just gets too expensive to support any more than that. It makes it a lot easier when there is no overlap between the products as well. Now SGI has Irix/MIPS and Linux/Intel product lines and in many ways they compete with each other (one of the reasons they dropped the workstations, well that and no one was buying them). Now on the high end they've once again introduced product overlap.
Ditto for the OS. Though I guess one saving grace is that the nature of the software for these hpc systems is vastly different and simpler than those for a "general purpose" desktop machine, so it's not like they have to try to support a wide variety of apps across two os's.
You have to remember that SGI is a hardware manufacturer, not an integrator. They don't just pick and choose commodity parts and through a machine together (well ok, their Intel boxes were kinda like that). This is what I mean by schizo.
Well it seems like a good choice for SGI. It allows them to come out with a supercomputer using "more" commodity parts (e.g. Intel processors) running an OS that is the hot topic and, one would assume, cheaper for them to sell. After all, what would their options be if they had not chose Linux? Irix only runs on MIPS afaik. Maybe BeOS;)
This is more SGI schizo behaviour. They can't really decide what they want to do or be, what hardware platform they want to push or what OS they want to use. Another sad day in a long line of sad days for a once cool company.
People are getting upset because the game (which is supposed to simulate "real" life, sorta) is becoming more real by having corporate presences? Just imagine how up in arms people would be if some group wanted to protest the game because it depicted sex acts ("there is just no need for such things to be in a game, it cheapens it and you never know where it's going to lead. Next thing you know they'll be having
Sim kids and worse Sim Abortions, STOP THE KILLING OF UNBORN SIMS") followed of course by ("My Bits, My Choice!")
Slashdot Mirror
but I can say that I have been in the procedural world long enough to realize that there seems to be a divine power in OOP. It makes you *think* entirely different about problems, and by breaking a very large, very complex problem into approachable components. Allowing not only a single developer to build more complex systems, but systems that are well suited for re-use in future or existing systems.
I'm sorry, but I must completely disagree with your comment. When "structured" languages like C and PASCAL "burst" onto the scene back in the early 80's, they touted the EXACT same benefits that OOP is touting today, more modular code, code reuse, breaking problems down into simpler components, etc, etc, etc. Fact is that the tools keep changing but the tool users don't, thereby negating many of the benefits of having "better" tools. Crappy code is crappy code regardless of the methodology behind it, the fact that is crappy in an object oriented way doesn't make it better than crappy structured code or even crappy spaghetti code for that matter.
I can see how people would think like this though. Many (most?) were not even around when the transition from languages like COBOL/Fortran/BASIC/Assembler to C/PASCAL occured to see how history is simply repeating itself (as it always seems to in this industry).
the object oriented paridigm, component models, virtual machines. (VM's, by the way, go back at least 20 years in the literature
Pretty much every programming concept/innovation today has roots that go back. OO is at least 20yo. VM were implemented, it was just that mainframes were the only things beefy enough to implement them effectively, not that they were overtly complex. The Java vm is not too technically different that the old pcode interpreters, again, nothing new here.
I doubt many modern 'c0derz' could properly knock out a simple quick-sort, let alone a fully ACID SQL DBMS.
Right but the problem is that for some strange reason, 20 years later, a coder still does have to know how to knock out a quick sort (or some such). We won't see true progress until we get to the point where your "average" coder absolutely will never need to know this, unlike the hodgepodge of high level/low level stuff we have now.
what "improvements" over the last quarter century have actually brought progress to the key issue: more quickly and more inexpensively developing software that's more reliable?"
I've only been programming for 19 years (not 25) but I can say that I've seen absolutely no progress in software development givin your contraints of defining "progress" as being able to achieve the three goals (speed, cost, robustness). HOWEVER, I don't really blame the tools, rather the nature of the end result. The software we have to write has become significantly more complex, and at a rate that has surpassed our abilities to effectively create tools to deal with their complexity. "Back in the day" when a "good" business level word processor was 100KLines of code and written by a small group of dedicated and bright people, you could get very good results. Now, something like Word is significantly larger than 1MLines of code being worked on by programmers with 15+ years of experience to those who just got out of school to those who you wouldn't trust to add up your grocery bill let alone write a line of code.
It's like we still have hammers and nails, but the "market" wants us to build steel skyscrappers. So we come up with even better hammers and whiz bang processes to "better" utilize those hammers and nail together steel girders, but the fact is that those tools are woefully inadequate to truely make a dent in improving that which we build.
I think some people are missing the point of this. Some have said ".13u, big whoop, how does that help me? on such a slow *ss chip". Well the point is that SiS is not trying to compete with the big boys on the high not, that's not their schtick. They want to push motherboards, esp to oems, and this product allows them to offer "higher" end graphics to their customers. It won't be long before they shrink the puppy enough to integrate directly into their chipsets, thereby offering oems an attractive compromise between speed and price.
So in the end, the fact that they can "push the envelope" as far as their production process goes does bode well for the consumer. You just have to look at this product in the context for which it was intended.
businesses don't train their employees to use Word. Rather, they expect to see it on their resumés.
Well that is true too. However, since they expect to see it, many people learn it. And in the case where people actually have to do WP, then chances are Word is the WP they know.
Most of the "training" I refer to is that the employer expects the user to use (and therefore learn) Word.
The percentage of incidents where you would lose both your backups and the originals (given that they are stored in separate places)
Actually I think that this is exactly the info he was looking for. His statement was that it wasn't good enough to just make a backup and then throw it into your desk drawer, you should take further steps.
I don't know about the "least" of your problems, I would think of it more as compounding or piling on to your problems. In the digital age I have photos (don't do the film thing anymore), personal records, emails, contact info for people I've long forgotten but am sure will need to contact again one day, etc on my computer, and if I lost all of that (including backups), then that would REALLY suck, BAD. But then again, that's the beauty of digital, I can backup all of our pics onto a cd (or several) and scatter them about significantly easier than I could do the same for my film.
The one thing those backups contain that might cause a problem for my wife is the MS Money backup
:
;)
But this will only be a problem if
- you died in the fire along with the original copy (i.e. if you just had a heart attack she could still easily get to the original).
- the safe deposit backup was the only one you kept. For things like financial info, you could easily keep a copy at work of give a copy to another family member, or give a copy to your wife to stash somewhere (probably her purse
That's true (that was what was said, yes, I'm that old). However the key part of my statement was "anytime soon". And the reason I say that is that back then, Word, WordPerfect, WordStar (yes, WordStar) and a gaggle of other lesser known WP apps all duked it out for supremecy. Now the market is more saturated (I wonder how many _new_ Word licenses there are vs those who upgrade) and there really isn't a viable competitor, yet. If OS continues to gain momentum and OO continues to mature, then it could indeed prove to be a worthy competitor, but it still is going to take a while.
Your scenerio may be true in some cases, but in all the environments that i've been in (and they all use/used Word), this has not been the case. Not that isn't validity to your statement, just that I think mine is still just as valid (as it is based on my personal experience). Not that they've never used forms, but there was still plenty of free form (no pun intended) use (or really starting off with a template). I've seen the same in Excel (actually, I personally have seen it a lot more in Excel than Word).
No version of word is similar to it's immediate predecessor
Oh really, can you tell which basic editing commands have changed radically in the last three verions of Word? And by basic I am including things like creating style sheets, fields (which also includes things like TOC and indices), not just typing and deleting. Just using style sheets as an example, they have not fundamentally changed since the days of the DOS version of Word.
I doubt anyone has any kind of special attachment to word
Actually they do, it's called experience. Word sure may not be the best WP out there, but people are familiar with it, and in the terms of business productivity, that means more than being "the best". Businesses have a HUGE investment in training their staff on how to use software, and once that expense is incurred, you better have a damn good reason to incur it again. And seeing as how businesses make up the overwhelming _paying_ majority of Word users, I don't think it's going to disappear tomorrow.
Well the biggest problem is the sheer number of IE users and therefor the potential impact of a security hole. While a problem in say, Samba, has fairly limited exposure.
;)
....
And probably the thing that any OS proponent will gleefully point out, is that the "solutions" offered by M$ are typically not very satisfying and there really isn't much you can do about it (vs switching OS's of course
I agree that there is a a large amount of M$ bashing, but then what would one expect, when in Rome
big trough urinal that seats 2 or 3
Now there is a mental image that I didn't need early in the morning!
OK, you listed the "benefits" of MSO and you say that OOo is "easier to use" and that MSO isn't "flexible", could you be a bit more specific? I would like to take a look at OOo and would be interested in the perspective of someone who has used both.
Now it will be
"the robot left a servo in the patients chest, DOH!"
And that points out the number one problem with this procedure, lack of cred. I mean, man, the horror stories, plus that massively (literally and figuratively) cool scar to show off at the pool parties and by the beach.
But the surgeons are right there in the room. The answer is simple. The patient will sue:
- the surgeons involved
- the hospital
- the manufacturer of the device
- possibly the other staff depending no the nature of the, uh, "problem"
Once in court, the insurance companies for these individuals will duke it out and the "blame" for the "accident" will be divvied out between all the members. So the docters will be held x%, hospital y%, manufacturer z% where x+y+z==100.
This is standard lawsuit fare, no different really. It's all in the percentages and who pays what amount. In the end it's always trivial to find all parties involved at least partially responsible.
First and most blatant, the author does not list exactly what these commerical software line items are, he only compares them with what the OS application he is planning on using. Just as a simple example, he lists WU_FTPD and then assigns a cost of $50x3 for the commerical "equivilent". What is this commerical package? Can't he just use WU_FTPD (assuming the "cost" is the same for the Win32 version as the Linux). The ftp server that ships with Win2K doesn't require any licensing fees (though it's feature set is a bit week compared to other packages). Win2k also comes with a dns server and dhcp servers, so what are the costs that he is associating with these? I'm not saying that these are made up, just that his article is basically useless without it.
One other thing, why is Samba listed as an expense? Presumably if you were going with a Windoze solution you wouldn't need it? Do they have other non Windoze boxes that currently don't connect to existing Windoze boxes that going with Windoze with force them to purchase Samba?
All these things call cast into doubt the accuracy of his article. If he'd at least list the "commerical" packages, then one could make a truely educated attempt at determining the "real" cost savings.
Just out of curiosity, we hear a lot about people migrating from various solutions over to Linux, but I don't hear much about people doing the reverse. Is this because this just isn't happening (doubt it) or that it's just not publicised? If it does occur, I think it would benefit the community greatly to feature them even more so than those who switch TO Linux. I think the reason is obvious, if someone is switching away, then there is something to be learned. It may be features, it may be economics, or it may even be politics, but I think that we would learn from these turncoa^h^h^h uh, people.
Even if Office is the best productivity suite available, is it so much better that it is worth the extra cost of the software and the O/S needed to run it?
Damn skippy it would be. Remember, companies don't use OS's, they use applications. This is why SGI used to be so successful even though their stuff was ungodly expensive compared to other solutions, they provided tools to let people get done what they needed to get done in the best way possible. Hell, if you could get your hands on a piece of software that made you 25% more efficient at doing your job (of course this is in absolutely no way implying that office does this, this is just a generalzation), wouldn't you sink an extra $500 to acquire it? In a heartbeat you would.
The main point being that in the end, the OS don't mean squat, its the apps that run on it. "Minor" cost variances in the OS doesn't save you much in the long term if you can't get the apps that will help you do your job better. This is why M$ dominates on the desktop, but is losing more ground in the server room, Windoze is a desktop oriented OS, Linux is (was) not. Linux makes inroads in the server space because the applications available more readily lend themselves to that.
Well sorta. Notice that there are only two major computer manufacturers that support two major hardware architectures, IBM and HP. Everyone else sticks to a single primary arch. because it just gets too expensive to support any more than that. It makes it a lot easier when there is no overlap between the products as well. Now SGI has Irix/MIPS and Linux/Intel product lines and in many ways they compete with each other (one of the reasons they dropped the workstations, well that and no one was buying them). Now on the high end they've once again introduced product overlap.
Ditto for the OS. Though I guess one saving grace is that the nature of the software for these hpc systems is vastly different and simpler than those for a "general purpose" desktop machine, so it's not like they have to try to support a wide variety of apps across two os's.
You have to remember that SGI is a hardware manufacturer, not an integrator. They don't just pick and choose commodity parts and through a machine together (well ok, their Intel boxes were kinda like that). This is what I mean by schizo.
Well it seems like a good choice for SGI. It allows them to come out with a supercomputer using "more" commodity parts (e.g. Intel processors) running an OS that is the hot topic and, one would assume, cheaper for them to sell. After all, what would their options be if they had not chose Linux? Irix only runs on MIPS afaik. Maybe BeOS ;)
This is more SGI schizo behaviour. They can't really decide what they want to do or be, what hardware platform they want to push or what OS they want to use. Another sad day in a long line of sad days for a once cool company.
it offers unparalleled scalability in the line of Linux supercomputing
;)
Wow, sorry but that sentence smacked of marketing/speak. "Unparalleled scalability"? Hopefully this was just a play on words
businesses seeking to expand without sinking a lot of money into unnecessary costs
What would those "unnecessary costs" be? (just asking).
People are getting upset because the game (which is supposed to simulate "real" life, sorta) is becoming more real by having corporate presences? Just imagine how up in arms people would be if some group wanted to protest the game because it depicted sex acts ("there is just no need for such things to be in a game, it cheapens it and you never know where it's going to lead. Next thing you know they'll be having Sim kids and worse Sim Abortions, STOP THE KILLING OF UNBORN SIMS") followed of course by ("My Bits, My Choice!")