Sure, lately many journalists are all gushy over Apple, but it seemed for year after year in the past you couldn't find a positive (or even fair) mention of Apple in the mainstream press. Every time Microsoft hacked up another hairball, another half-assed version of Windows or Office, updated OLE/COM/COM+ with whatever name was hip that week, etc., the tech media would hype every new feature as if Gates were a genius. There was nary a mention that most of these feature had been around in other products (MacOS, Netscape, CORBA,...) for years. All the while, every other week, it'd be "Apple is Going Out of Business Tomorrow".
The truth is that the media (like most people) are fickle and faddish. Right now the iPod is hot so the media love Apple. Google is in the same boat. A few years ago is was Linux. Wanna bet that in 2007 (or 08 or 09) Microsoft will be back on top of the hype cycle with Vista?
Someone earlier in the thread used the word "elegance". That, in my opinion, is the key word. Java and C# are decent languages with powerful (though somewhat bloated) platforms in J2EE and.Net. But they're not fun. The code at the end result for any major undertaking just feels ugly. Better than C++ perhaps, but rarely (if ever) something I could call elegant or beautiful. And that's a web app. The code for a GUI app written in Java or C# is just downright ugly, even in the best of cases.
Objective C code, on the other hand, just seems to be more elegant. Some of this is due to the structure and syntax of the language itself and a large part is due to Cocoa.
When I'm coding in C# or Java, I feel like I'm a hack writing up the police blotter and obit for the local paper. When I'm coding in Objective C (or Ruby), I feel like I'm writing poetry.
Actually, I think Ruby might just be picking up some steam, thanks to Rails. David Heinemeier Hansson won the "Hacker of the Year" award at OSCON for Rails. Just about every week it seems like I see a new article in this magazine or that one about it. Ruby has surpassed Python in Japan. Who knows?
They all offer free WiFi via Personal Telco and seem to be doing very well. It might be because they also have great coffee, a nice atmosphere, and friendly staff. It might be because almost every coffee shop in town other than Star*ucks offer free WiFi. I especially enjoy:
all the World Cup shops (best coffee in town)
Anna Banana's, NW 21st (kinda hippie, but nice)
Coffee Time, NW 21st
Sultan Cafe, NW 18th (hookahs!)
Java Vivace, NW 23d (mmm, crepes)
Stumptown, Downtown 3d & Oak (good coffee or beer!)
Palio, Ladd's Addition (cool little neighborhood hangout)
Fireside, SE Powell & 12th
Sueña, Hollywood (though their tables & chairs suck)
Actually the Adobe-Macromedia marriage isn't final yet. They still have to get past the antitrust regulators. As a matter of fact, Adobe recently
withdrew and refiled their proposal so the DOJ would have more time to review it.
I've had great experiences with the two Ericsson phones I've used with my my Mac: a T68i and z600. I really can't go on enough about my z600. It's small, but tough and sturdy (have you seen the 'buttons' on the Razr!?). It works flawlessly with iSync, Salling Clicker, the web, and OS X's Bluetooth File Exchange. It's gonna take a lot for me to give up this one.
As someone mentioned earlier, no matter which phone you end up getting, make sure it's on the Clicker compatability list. Clicker kicks ass.
Wow, Dvorak finally got lucky and hit the dartboard. Thank goodness he isn't letting this little taste of accuracy go to his head. It's good to see that John is going to keep entertaining us with wild-ass predictions, based on nothing more than ignorance and a few too many cups of coffee.
He certainly doesn't let facts get in his way. Take this gem:
"While Apple ran on the PowerPC chip the amount of developer effort in the Open Source camps was nil."
That's gotta make anyone who's been to OSCON in the last few years laugh.
I don't know how well it measures up against Visual Studio, but I for one love X-Code. It's a nice IDE, useful but not over done. X-Code and a number of other development tools come with OS X (and are avaible at no charge from the Apple Developer Network website). X-Code uses gcc and gdb for compiling and debugging. You can use it to code C, C++, Objective C and others.
As far as coding goes, it sounds like you'll really want to learn Cocoa. Cocoa is the core set of OS X frameworks (think MFC, only much, much better). There are Cocoa bindings Java and a few other langs, but ideally you'll want to use Objective C. Obj C is a great language, much easier to learn than C++, and in my opinion a joy to program.
Good luck.
Oh yeah, and if anybody had bothered to Read The Friggin' Article, they'd have seen that this doesn't really have much to do with any of the Websphere products, but hey this is/. , so I guess that'd be asking too much.>
The term "Websphere" could mean alot of different things. It is IBM's branding for all of their middleware and web related products:
Websphere Application Server(WAS)
This is their J2EE application server. It plays in the sam space as BEA's WebLogic App Server, JBoss, etc. It's the cornerstone of their Websphere line and comes in many sizes and flavors, running on anything from a single server, to clusters of servers, to minis, to the Mainframe.
Websphere Studio Application Developer(WSAD)
This is their primary J2EE development tool. It's built around the Eclipse framework IBM developed and released to open source, so their are also tons and tons of other tools that plugin to WSAD.
Websphere Portal Server(WPS)
A portal and colaboration server built on top of WAS. WPS also includes a lot of the technologies that grew out of their Domino platform.
... and on and on for about a hundred products. One of the few products not branded "Websphere" is their web server, an Apache distro, called simply "IBM HTTPD" or "IBM HTTP Server".
That's somewhat true, but the issue wasn't support for the war, but supporting and honoring the troops that are fighting and dying in it.
President Bush has used the military for photo ops, while at the same time cutting their combat pay and benefits. He has yet to attend even a single memorial service for the Americans who gave their lives to fight in his precious little war.
Governor Kulongoski, who knows what it's like to actually serve has consistently fought to protect and promote the interests of the troops. The Governor has also acknowledged and honored each Oregonian who gave his life in this war.
"... I doubt there will be huge numbers of existing Peoplesoft customers changing their underlying databases..."
Sadly, they won't have a choice. Larry has made it perfectly clear that he wanted to buy Peoplesoft in order to kill off their products and migrate their user base to Oracle solutions (which IMHO are quite inferior).
For those of us with large Peoplesoft installations supported by DB2 on the mainframe, this is going to be an expensive and difficult transition.
Look, I liked 'Cryptonomicon', liked it a lot, but to compare it to 'Gravity's Rainbow' is inane. It's not even in the same ball park. There are a few books, a few authors, out there playing in Pynchon's league - DeLillo, Roth, (some) Barth, Wallace, - but Stephenson isn't one of them. He's good. For a sci-fi writer, he's top shelf. Pynchon he ain't.
Roughly what percent of your music collection is unauthorized files from P2P like Kazaa, FTP, etc.? 0%
Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from sources like iTunes Music Store, eMusic, etc? 1% (about 10 albums from iTMS)
Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from shareable sources like Creative Commons-licensed music? 0%
Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of your own CDs? 99% (about 1000 CDs)
Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of friends' CDs? 0% (though my girlfriend and I do share our libraries through iTunes & Rendezvous)
...it's a good thing that Apple went with NeXT. With NeXT, they got Jobs, who was the real reason for Apple's turn-around and continued relevance today.
As a longtime Apple geek, I was excited to see Jobs return as well. The company has rebounded fantastically under his reign. But the best thing about Apple choosing NeXT over Be is UNIX. Even with BeOS's technical coolness, I think that no small part of the success of OS X lies in its UNIX roots.
I totally agree. Too often people get so wrapped up in what's cool about their language of choice that they refuse to see that no single language or programming model is always the right choice.
For building large, web based apps with multiple back-end legacy and database systems, thousands of simultaneous users, and dozens shared components, J2EE has been a godsend. It has gotten rid of a hundred headaches with development, maintenance and administration. But that doesn't mean that there's not a place for Perl or PHP for simple CGIs or quick web apps that aren't huge enterprise wide systems. I've also become quite smitten recently with Objective C (and the Cocoa or GnuStep libs) for my personal pet projects -- usually small stand-alone GUI apps. The point, just as OmniVector said, is pick the right tool for the job.
m.m.
btw: I know this is bucking/. tradition, but how 'bout getting back to the original question. It appears that someone has already decided that C++ is the best tool for this job. (Yeah yeah, I know, but cut the guy some slack okay? It wasn't his decision.) Can anybody recommend a good book for an experienced Java programmer who wants to leverage that knowledge in an attempt to learn C++?
This is your child, not your new toy or pet. Why should she have to go through life branded with a weird name because of your obsessions. How would you like to have been called 'Caboose Williamson' because of your dad's fondness for model trains? What if your mom was really into amateur radio and decided to christen you 'Frequency Modulation Jones'?
This name is a gift you are giving to your child. Try to give her something she might want.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, lately many journalists are all gushy over Apple, but it seemed for year after year in the past you couldn't find a positive (or even fair) mention of Apple in the mainstream press. Every time Microsoft hacked up another hairball, another half-assed version of Windows or Office, updated OLE/COM/COM+ with whatever name was hip that week, etc., the tech media would hype every new feature as if Gates were a genius. There was nary a mention that most of these feature had been around in other products (MacOS, Netscape, CORBA,...) for years. All the while, every other week, it'd be "Apple is Going Out of Business Tomorrow".
The truth is that the media (like most people) are fickle and faddish. Right now the iPod is hot so the media love Apple. Google is in the same boat. A few years ago is was Linux. Wanna bet that in 2007 (or 08 or 09) Microsoft will be back on top of the hype cycle with Vista?
r.m.
Someone earlier in the thread used the word "elegance". That, in my opinion, is the key word. Java and C# are decent languages with powerful (though somewhat bloated) platforms in J2EE and .Net. But they're not fun. The code at the end result for any major undertaking just feels ugly. Better than C++ perhaps, but rarely (if ever) something I could call elegant or beautiful. And that's a web app. The code for a GUI app written in Java or C# is just downright ugly, even in the best of cases.
Objective C code, on the other hand, just seems to be more elegant. Some of this is due to the structure and syntax of the language itself and a large part is due to Cocoa.
When I'm coding in C# or Java, I feel like I'm a hack writing up the police blotter and obit for the local paper. When I'm coding in Objective C (or Ruby), I feel like I'm writing poetry.
m.m.
The best Obj-C & Cocoa intro:
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
m.m.
Actually, I think Ruby might just be picking up some steam, thanks to Rails. David Heinemeier Hansson won the "Hacker of the Year" award at OSCON for Rails. Just about every week it seems like I see a new article in this magazine or that one about it. Ruby has surpassed Python in Japan. Who knows?
m.m.
World Cup has at least three locations:
They all offer free WiFi via Personal Telco and seem to be doing very well. It might be because they also have great coffee, a nice atmosphere, and friendly staff. It might be because almost every coffee shop in town other than Star*ucks offer free WiFi. I especially enjoy:
Actually the Adobe-Macromedia marriage isn't final yet. They still have to get past the antitrust regulators. As a matter of fact, Adobe recently withdrew and refiled their proposal so the DOJ would have more time to review it.
m.m.
I've had great experiences with the two Ericsson phones I've used with my my Mac: a T68i and z600. I really can't go on enough about my z600. It's small, but tough and sturdy (have you seen the 'buttons' on the Razr!?). It works flawlessly with iSync, Salling Clicker, the web, and OS X's Bluetooth File Exchange. It's gonna take a lot for me to give up this one.
As someone mentioned earlier, no matter which phone you end up getting, make sure it's on the Clicker compatability list. Clicker kicks ass.
m.m.
Wow, Dvorak finally got lucky and hit the dartboard. Thank goodness he isn't letting this little taste of accuracy go to his head. It's good to see that John is going to keep entertaining us with wild-ass predictions, based on nothing more than ignorance and a few too many cups of coffee.
He certainly doesn't let facts get in his way. Take this gem:
That's gotta make anyone who's been to OSCON in the last few years laugh.
m.m.
Fair point.
Try typing "online music".
On Google the top two references are iTunes and iTMS. On MSN you'll have to go through a few pages before you'll see anything about iTunes.
Yeah, I trust Microsoft to provide unbiased search results. Sure I do.
m.m.
I don't know how well it measures up against Visual Studio, but I for one love X-Code. It's a nice IDE, useful but not over done. X-Code and a number of other development tools come with OS X (and are avaible at no charge from the Apple Developer Network website). X-Code uses gcc and gdb for compiling and debugging. You can use it to code C, C++, Objective C and others. As far as coding goes, it sounds like you'll really want to learn Cocoa. Cocoa is the core set of OS X frameworks (think MFC, only much, much better). There are Cocoa bindings Java and a few other langs, but ideally you'll want to use Objective C. Obj C is a great language, much easier to learn than C++, and in my opinion a joy to program. Good luck.
Oh yeah, and if anybody had bothered to Read The Friggin' Article, they'd have seen that this doesn't really have much to do with any of the Websphere products, but hey this is /. , so I guess that'd be asking too much.>
r.m.
The term "Websphere" could mean alot of different things. It is IBM's branding for all of their middleware and web related products:
This is their J2EE application server. It plays in the sam space as BEA's WebLogic App Server, JBoss, etc. It's the cornerstone of their Websphere line and comes in many sizes and flavors, running on anything from a single server, to clusters of servers, to minis, to the Mainframe.
This is their primary J2EE development tool. It's built around the Eclipse framework IBM developed and released to open source, so their are also tons and tons of other tools that plugin to WSAD.
A portal and colaboration server built on top of WAS. WPS also includes a lot of the technologies that grew out of their Domino platform.
IBM's Message Oriented Middleware foundation. (Formerly MQSeries)
EAI
B2C
mobile connectivity
... and on and on for about a hundred products. One of the few products not branded "Websphere" is their web server, an Apache distro, called simply "IBM HTTPD" or "IBM HTTP Server".
That's somewhat true, but the issue wasn't support for the war, but supporting and honoring the troops that are fighting and dying in it.
President Bush has used the military for photo ops, while at the same time cutting their combat pay and benefits. He has yet to attend even a single memorial service for the Americans who gave their lives to fight in his precious little war.
Governor Kulongoski, who knows what it's like to actually serve has consistently fought to protect and promote the interests of the troops. The Governor has also acknowledged and honored each Oregonian who gave his life in this war.
r.m.
Yes, Gov. Kulongoski has attended the funeral of every fallen Oregonian soldier, sailor, and airman during his term.
Unlike our Commander in Chief, he believes very strongly that they deserve at least this respect.
Then again, unlike our Commander in Chief, he's a real veteran (Marine, 11th & 12th Regs), who actually served, instead just playing dress-up.
m.m.
Sadly, they won't have a choice. Larry has made it perfectly clear that he wanted to buy Peoplesoft in order to kill off their products and migrate their user base to Oracle solutions (which IMHO are quite inferior).
For those of us with large Peoplesoft installations supported by DB2 on the mainframe, this is going to be an expensive and difficult transition.
m.m.
Look, I liked 'Cryptonomicon', liked it a lot, but to compare it to 'Gravity's Rainbow' is inane. It's not even in the same ball park. There are a few books, a few authors, out there playing in Pynchon's league - DeLillo, Roth, (some) Barth, Wallace, - but Stephenson isn't one of them. He's good. For a sci-fi writer, he's top shelf. Pynchon he ain't.
m.m.
0%
1% (about 10 albums from iTMS)
0%
99% (about 1000 CDs)
0% (though my girlfriend and I do share our libraries through iTunes & Rendezvous)
"I haven't seen so many Microsoft fan-boys since..."
c|net.
m.m.
As a longtime Apple geek, I was excited to see Jobs return as well. The company has rebounded fantastically under his reign. But the best thing about Apple choosing NeXT over Be is UNIX. Even with BeOS's technical coolness, I think that no small part of the success of OS X lies in its UNIX roots.
m.m.
I totally agree. Too often people get so wrapped up in what's cool about their language of choice that they refuse to see that no single language or programming model is always the right choice.
For building large, web based apps with multiple back-end legacy and database systems, thousands of simultaneous users, and dozens shared components, J2EE has been a godsend. It has gotten rid of a hundred headaches with development, maintenance and administration. But that doesn't mean that there's not a place for Perl or PHP for simple CGIs or quick web apps that aren't huge enterprise wide systems. I've also become quite smitten recently with Objective C (and the Cocoa or GnuStep libs) for my personal pet projects -- usually small stand-alone GUI apps. The point, just as OmniVector said, is pick the right tool for the job.
m.m.
btw: I know this is bucking /. tradition, but how 'bout getting back to the original question. It appears that someone has already decided that C++ is the best tool for this job. (Yeah yeah, I know, but cut the guy some slack okay? It wasn't his decision.) Can anybody recommend a good book for an experienced Java programmer who wants to leverage that knowledge in an attempt to learn C++?
This is your child, not your new toy or pet. Why should she have to go through life branded with a weird name because of your obsessions. How would you like to have been called 'Caboose Williamson' because of your dad's fondness for model trains? What if your mom was really into amateur radio and decided to christen you 'Frequency Modulation Jones'?
This name is a gift you are giving to your child. Try to give her something she might want.
m.m.
>Oh great. Now one can proudly say "I write with P".
Big deal. I've been writing with P for years on the 'snow' framework.
m.m.
Exactly:
m.m.
It's just getting ridiculous. We really need to do something about patent and copyright law in this country.
m.m.