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User: Procyon101

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  1. Re:This is good, but... on Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL · · Score: 1

    Personally, If I want closures on a JVM, I'd go with KAWA, as I'm already familiar with Scheme, it's got continuations also, and there's already a large amount of existing code recipies for Scheme... not to mention that I can use it to do REAL object oriented programming instead of the cripled OO that Java uses.

    But, Java is designed "just poorly enough" that it hasn't caused me enough pain yet to motivate me to use another language implemented on it's VM; there are simply too many non-VM cross platform languages available for most any non-java centric project for me to need the VM, and Java is "good enough" for large Java projects, and I fear what incompatibilities might arise if I introduce a second language into a large Java Project not to mention that mixing 2 languages in the same project adds more complexity than the benefits would offset.

    I think my favorite "VM" is still gcc. Use any language you want that compiles to C++. gcc is then supported on more platforms than Java.

  2. Re:Firebird is nice on Firebird 2.0 Final Released · · Score: 1

    Beware of basing your DB selection on performance. Indexed text files are WAY faster than any of these DB's, but I wouldn't want to use them for production data storage.

  3. Re:it's not either/or on Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL · · Score: 1
    I'd agree with your prediction if I saw a snowball's chance in hell that Swing could work reasonably well on the desktop--any desktop--but I don't. The desktop requires a dedication to non-cross platform tools, and that is still lacking in the Java community.

    SWT fills this roll. I would agree with yor opinion of swing, but SWT gives you a very good abstraction of the non-cross platform GUI.
  4. Re:bravo on Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL · · Score: 1

    Right. I hav *ALWAYS* capitalized every PL name, to distinguish them from similar words. If the Language is an acronym, I will capitalize the whole thing.

    Therefore, We have languages like BASIC, APL, Java, C++, Snobol, Scheme, Lisp (or jokingly LISP), Visual Basic (outgrown it's acronym status, as Basic now refers to it's predescessor, not it's predescessor's acronym), etc... Seeing an uncapitalize language is like seeing the name e.e.cummings.

  5. Re:This is good, but... on Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL · · Score: 1

    Yes you can. Compilers still suck and you can always hand roll your code, or forego vtables, etc...

    Not that you'd want too, but alot of people have the same view of C++... Sure I can beat the speed of Java/Python/Lisp, etc. by writing it in C++... not that you'd want to.

  6. Re:This is good, but... on Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL · · Score: 1

    A language just isn't a language without the great taste of closures.

  7. Re:Holy Shit! on Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL · · Score: 1

    No, I use eclipse to develop C++ apps also. Emacs is still king for most other langs I use, but Eclipse is catching up.

    Eclipse also is the frameworks for a new class of rapidly developed desktop apps, since eclipse itself can be stripped down to it's barest core and then rassembled with a couple custom add-ons into any kind of application.

  8. Re:Pricing themselves out of the market on Time For Anti-Trust 2.0? · · Score: 1

    Agreed :)

    IMO the "MS is a monopoly" crowd is a bunch of whining and trying to use government strong arming to slap a competitor down. MS has done some shady things, made possible by being the STRONGEST competitor, but calling them a monopoly for them is IMO stretching the definition of monoply.

  9. Re: on The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, the needs aren't typical, they are dev needs. The typical user's needs are email+web browser+picture viewing+cd recording... things that can be done on windows or linux with the same ease (or, save for the cd recording, a palm pilot or alot of cell phones). The only people who care about what OS they are using either have a pet app they can't do without (photoshop or maya, or autocad for instance) and it doesn't matter if that app is BeOS only.. they'd use it. The other group is computer professionals, and the situation there is tilted highly in Linux favor.

    $1000 is not an exaggeration... in fact it's probably low. While I can get Open Source or 3rd party dev tools, I'm still going to need visual studio for compiling/debugging if I am doing any serious MS-centric coding. I need the header files, I need the linked libraries, all that stuff. I could conceivably set it up with msys.. but that's a big hack. The VS lite version, like most "lite" versions of anything, is not going to cut it for productivity. I believe the going price for a decent VS package is close to a grand by itself, but I haven't personally purchased one recently. The next thing is office, although open office is pretty compelling here and integrates just fine. The big issue with open office, is although it can read most anything MS office spits out, the reverse is not true, so other users who shelled out hundred of dollars cannot read my stuff unless I cross save to MS formats, and then I lose formatting and such as the support for that is pretty fuzzy. So add in a couple other apps I might want and $1000 bucks or so is pretty conservative for a computer professional's standard workstation. A system admin's workstation can probably do it for half that, as they don't do the dev-tools thing.

    So then.. having shelled out the dough, we step back and look what we have. SSH is the primary deficiency I see. The reason you don't know what it is is windows has no equivelent, but trust me, for administration purposes, it is *the* killer app and probably the most commonly used application used by a unix professional outside of the command line. What it is: "Secure Shell". It's simply an app that is #1 strongly encrypted and #2 gives you a command prompt on a foreign machine. Most any unix box will have it turned on, and most headless routers, switches, etc also have a port. The MS equivelent is Terminal Services, which gives you a full view of the desktop on the remote system. It's handy for some things, but most of the time I don't WANT the desktop of the other sytem... I just want a command line. I want to reboot the machine or look at a file or set a reg key and loading that full desktop is WAY overkill not to mention slow... prohibitively on low bandwidth lines. It's also ram hungry and takes alot of proc power. Many times I have not been able to reboot a misbehaving windows server through TS because transferring that whole desktop over TCP is just too big of a job for a machine caught in a tight loop or OOM... but a machine has to be *REALLY* hosed for SSH not to get through.

    But that's enough about SSH ;) I agree with a sentiment in another thread... Windows: It can do anything Linux can do, except it's expensive! I would throw in slow, difficult to repair when something goes wrong, hardware hungry (ram and CPU requirements are rediculous).

    Now, don't get me wrong... I'm not anti-ms. I have in the past and will likely again worked FOR microsoft. I have been developing software for the MS platform for going on 15 years. There are niches that Windows fills well. To spout off that Linux has no advantages over Windows though is blatently false. Windows really falls short in the areas of price, speed, development resources, and most server uses. Linux falls short in laptop usage and *WAY* short on ease of configuration and set up.

  10. Re:The "war" is far from over on The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won · · Score: 1

    Perl might not be brain damaged.. but it certainly causes brain damage ;)

    The "how about" is simply answered with "there aren't that many jobs doing web development in Perl." This has nothing to do with the legitamcy of Perl as a development language. The jobs in Web development are in ASP, ASP.NET, PHP and Java. Personally I love scheme for Web development (continuations in a context free protocol are a friggin godsend!) but I'm pretty sure I'll never get a paying job doing that.

  11. Re:The "war" is far from over on The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won · · Score: 1

    You forgot IE.. although alot of the Windows users I know won't even touch IE anymore as firefox gains legitimacy in their minds.

    Of those, the only ones I would give legitimacy are Outlook and photoshop.

    Excel... MAYBE if they are really, really good with spreadsheets but for almost everyone on the planet all spreadsheets are alike for the tiny subset of features that actually get used.

    Outlook is really a good program and has no peers, same with photoshop.

    Everything else is an empty excuse. Their real excuse is: "I have these 3 excel spreadsheets I use. I don't know how to save-as in a way that is guaranteed to work. It is easier to pay the $50 windows tax every few years then it is to find out."

    or me, Windows is just painful to use. It's the only OS I know of where doing things slowly is a feature. I can't sit down to a windows box for 5 minutes without cursing at it. Apparantly most people are much more forgiving than I, as when I explain to them WHY I'm frustrated, they shrug like it's not even a concern.

  12. Re:What Linux can do and Windows cannot on The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won · · Score: 1

    I may be wrong too, but I think "rename /s *.jpef *.jpg" would work.

    If not, you can just do a shell for loop in cmd. I've written some very advanced shell scripts in cmd. It's a pain in the ass language, but it's very capable.

    Hint for cmd programming: implement setq, car and cdr in terms of cmd's FOR.. then program it like a weird lisp dialect... it sounds crazy, but it's a very capable language once you do this.

  13. Re: on The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won · · Score: 1

    Ok then. Apache is poorly integrated into the "windows way of doing things". It's designed for Linux.

    Apache on windows is poorly integrated in comparison to apache on linux. It can do all the same things, but....
    On linux there is a common area for configs. There is no such common area on Windows. Config files for apache are in an arbitray location... I don't remember where.

    Apache runs as a daemon. On windows there are services, but they aren't quite the same thing. So you either run apache in a console window, or wrap it artificially.

    It's simply not an app designed for windows. Sure, you can get it to run with kludges, but *WHY WOULD YOU??* If you need a dedicated web server that runs apache, just install linux in the first place. I wouldn't try to run IIS under wine even if it is possible because it's STUPID to do so.

  14. Re: on The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Another thing windows can do that linux can't:

    Arbitrarily decide that it *might* not be licenced properly and shut itself off asking you to call a 1-800 number to get it back on again. I migrated an entire production server farm over to Linux after my high availability system went down this way. Any OS that will voluntarily sabotage itself when it is not running into technical problems has no business being in a production environment.

  15. Re: on The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The main thing Windows can't do is have nice integration with open source software (the most common kind).

    To get ANY work done on Windows I have to first, spend $1000 or more upgrading the box (Visual Studio, MS Office, Antivirus, etc). Now, since most everything on the planet is written for a autoconf toolchain, I need cygwin... but at that point I'm being about as silly as installing a linux box just to run MS Office under wine... I should have installed Linux in the first place, so let's forgo that step.

    OK, so what do we not have... SSH. Sucks to be me. Sure, I can TS... assuming of course I bought the upgraded licensed version of windows that can actually do that. I can run a webserver... assuming I bought the upgrades. I can run a SQL server... assuming I bought the upgraded OS capable of doing such. I can run apache/mysql, true... but the integration of those apps on the windows platform is abysmal... they were written for Linux and if I'm going to go to the trouble of installing and using them, well, same argument as cygwin.

    Sure. on both platforms I can install out of the box and check email. I can do that on a palm pilot.. that's not an honest comparison. Windows *can* do anything Linux can do... by emulating Linux and doing a piss poor job of it. The reverse is rarely the case except with video games or the occasional specialty application which dwarfs the cost of the OS anyway and you are best off running a dedicated workstation running windows for said app.

  16. Re:Purging Mono on New Mono 1.2 Now Supports WinForms · · Score: 1

    Gnome is using Mono???

    These are the guys who wouldn't touch C++ because vtable dispatching has too much overhead? THEY of all people are tying themselves to a VM based, garbage collected OO language? What is the world coming to?

  17. Re:C# vs Java on New Mono 1.2 Now Supports WinForms · · Score: 1

    I have programmed both. There is no productivity difference.

    Java is more of a purist language, C# is more pragmatic, but they are pretty much 2 dialects of the same language. Nothing revolutionary going on here.

    Now, there are a few kick ass C# libraries that Java would do well to emulate...

  18. Re:another day, another FUD story on Time For Anti-Trust 2.0? · · Score: 1

    No, he is perfectly correct. Users will only pay so much, so either they absorb the cost, or they don't sell machines.

    Windows machines that is. If the price of windows machines go up then consumers will buy Apple and Linux machines. Companies who sell only windows machines have no choice. This is called competition. It's a good thing. The quoted guy is bitching because he wants his monopoly back and doesn't want to compete. Screw him.

  19. Re:Pricing themselves out of the market on Time For Anti-Trust 2.0? · · Score: 1

    For most consumers and businesses, Linux does everything they need it to. As does OS X. OS X is simpler to configure and use all around. Linux runs much more problem-free (bitch to configure though). Those are the 2 major competitors in the marketplace and they are very mature.

    The only lock in companies have right now is self imposed because they save their files in proprietary office formats. That's their own fault and is stupidity. If the cost of windows exceeds the cost of hitting "Save as RTF" in word, then Microsoft will become irrelevant very quickly.

  20. Re:Speaking of spin on Preview of Vista On Old Hardware · · Score: 1

    I have used both. I am intimately familiar with Vista. Vista is indeed more ram hungry than XP. Personally, I would not recommend running Vista with less than 2Gigs, and I assume that ars will change their recommendation (I'm pretty sure they didn't recommend a Gig for XP when it went gold.. many people were running it in 128M.)

    If you can't run basic apps without swapping in 128M then IMO your OS is a *HUGE* ram hog, but that's just my opinion... and of course the current state of all OS's in use not made by Microsoft.

  21. Re:Speaking of spin on Preview of Vista On Old Hardware · · Score: 1

    Are you saying that performance suffering at 512MB under normal usage conditions *isn't* extremely ram hungry??? You must work for Microsoft.

  22. Re:Ruby! on The Ruby Way · · Score: 2, Insightful

    (big-wad
        (of stuff
                (wibble (blargh foo)
                                (lambda (foghat)
                                      (baz bork bork)
                                      bork))))

    You were misleading by eliminating any formatting. That's like me saying java is hard to visually parse:

    class blar:implements boobies{private int foo;private String bar;public boobies(){bar="I'm in ur code. Obfuscating ur lines."}}

  23. Re:GnuCash 2.0 on Managing Money With Linux Apps · · Score: 3, Informative

    The GnuCash help system has a pretty comprehensive yet easy to follow tutorial on it. I learned quite a bit from there.

  24. Re:From TFA... on Voting Machine Glitches Already Being Reported · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you don't like your parties, VOTE THIRD PARTY.

    It's not a wasted vote, as people would have you believe. Sure... they might not get into office, but the percentage they pull down this election is the basis for how seriously they are taken in the next election. It only takes getting around 5% of the votes for the media to start picking them up with "wow! an underdog!" stories and for them to start getting federal campaign money. And once they get those, they get invited to debates and such which instantly boosts them to double digit percentages and has them winning many local elections.

  25. Re:Please explain why Microsoft is threatened? on Virtual Earth 3D Beta Launched · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But they are losing their cash cows to do it!

    They were the ONLY game in town in the desktop and laptop market. Now Apple has a huge chunk, and Linux desktop use is growing and becoming more competitive. They have been left behind by install and update technologies. They are now having to resort to strong-arm tactics to bill their casual-use users at every opportunity which is only pissing off their remaining customer base. This weekend I was asked by a medium sized business owner to "show him these Linux and Apple things" because he just had to spend tens of thousands of dollars because his network pulled down a patch from widows update and decided to shut itself down voluntarally... twice. Granted, he wasn't the most licensing concious guy around, but there is a customer that spends a very large amount of money on MS products that is likely to go elsewhere very soon.

    Microsoft could have EASILY maintained their lead, by focusing on their core business... Hell, they could have CREATED the "next big thing" as a side effect to good product innovation. As they are, they are rapidly becoming the defacto "me-too" second rate clone of every product out there... if they keep it up they will be regarded in the same category as cheap thai knockoffs.

    They have some good tech... why they don't run with it is so beyond me
    WinCE, NT core, SQL Server, Office, WPF, WinFS, IE... these are great technologies, but they are understaffed and horribly mismanaged and if MS doesn't get back on the ball, they will be lose them to competition and will have nothing... not because they missed the next best thing, but because they refused to compete in their own core markets.