If this were so, then the D programming language should have won. Any feature you want, it's in there. It even has a nice table to show off.
The thing about a language is that you need to do at least as much, if not more, to keep features *out* of the language. Java/Sun's choice was to keep it simple. This now pays off big time, for instance for real time parsing of Java (in various IDE's including Eclipse). But more importantly, it keeps the language readable and understandable.
C# has many many features (some very interesting features among them), and the way it grows it will become a very fat language indeed. Obese, if they are not carefull. Sun/Java is much more conservative, Java 1.5 was the first big change, and you should not expect *any* new language features in 1.6. They will enhance the API and speed Java up even more (new class verifier), which is much more interesting.
Ugh, I hate to browse through undocumented code, especially if it is mine. It is hard enough finding things on my drive, the network drives and the various backups. Sure, it is all there, but where? Nope, commenting code it is.
I've seen a guy drop a tower case on his foot (fully equiped). First thing my friend says, well, I hope that isn't broken; meaning the tower case of course. Smashed up case vs smashed up foot, I'll know which one I would prefer.
In the netherlands you can get SIM-only plan starting from 3 euro's from T-mobile, a german provider. So what are you talking about? It's still pretty expensive to call from a landline, but normally you would get a slightly higher plan and call back using the mobile phone. These prices will come down (because of the various governments pushing the old monopolies). My plan costs me 20 euro, with 5 months free out of the 24. But then again, I wanted that particular expensive phone (bluetooth support, rather nice screen). At least we all use the same standard (GSM) which is pretty nice.
Some prices are still under presure from the old UMTS deal, which made the Netherlands government a lot of money, which we are paying back now. Since the Dutch telecom provider KPN is now nicely back in the black, that should be history as well. And they finally are delivering UMTS services as well. You would not believe *those* prices though.
VMWare instead of a bootloader? No. I mainly use Windows for media capabilities (movies, music & sometimes games). Note that DirectX or 3D accellerated hardware is not supported by VMWare (yet). For hardware intensive tasks, an OS inside VMWare will never be as responsive as the real thing. So I have Windows and Linux running next to each other*.
I think this is a pretty common setup. Actually, if they are on seperate harddisks, it would be an option to use the BIOS instead, and GRUB or LILO for linux.
* Well, I used too. Linux is now running on it's private VIA EPIA board as server OS, with Cygwin and X installed on my Windows host.
Well, I am not into bootloaders. LILO was something I got used to pretty fast. I absolutely *HATE* grub for it's usability. I haven't got a clue how the menu works (well, a few clues, but too little). And I have programmed computers since the MSX (8 bit Zilog Z80). Grub either has to get a better interface, or it should be thrown aside for LILO again. For most users, bootloaders are a necessary evil. I simply don't find them worth my time, so I don't want to learn about them. They should therefore have a near zero learning curve. Oh, and documentation was seriously lacking the last time I looked.
So I fully agree on your last sentence...good for you though.
Additional question, when can I use "/." as the keyword, like I do in firefox. Shame you can only use alphabetical characters (and probably numbers) but not other characters. It should be a string compare, I will use "http://" if I need a page which name conflicts (never happens anyway).
I like the browsing experience in Opera. I do not like the settings and the rather few (or easy to find?) extensions to it.
"I have relatives who live out in the country who can expect at minimum of at least an hour response time from the police."
Well, there's your problem.
"In the same area there have been at least two cases of home invasion by burglars, with one elderly couple being brutally beaten to the point where the husband died soon afterwards."
And that would not have happened when guns were in the house? What's the response time for an elderly couple to grab a gun? Sheesh, I am just picturing my grandma grabbing and shooting a gun. Bloody unlikely.
"The local police quietly recomended that people in the area should expect to defend themselves."
Local police? Doesn't sound like it. Although I can understand that the needs are different for those 1% living 1 hour from police response times, I doubt that having a gun would do any good.
"The ratio of gun ownership in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA is roughly the same, but only the USA suffers from such a high rate of gun related crime. Why is that?"
Er, in New Zealand, Australia and Canada there are a lot of wild/dangerous animals. What kind of guns? Are they used for self defense (against people), or against anymals? Are they hanging on the wall, or are they taken in a purse?
And in America, there seem to be many more social problems as well as a lot of guns. That's a bad mixture. You should compare instead with a country that has as many social problems but a lot less guns. See if you come on top in killings, cause I bet you do.
That's quite a lot of people I guess, these things don't break that easily. Actually, just check the number of old standalone CD players around. I bet there are quite a number of them out there. And if they are broken, 10 to 1 that it is a dirty lens. My 4 speed CDROM recently gave up on me though:(. Cost me about 120 euro's (without inflation taken into account.
Disk cache? Linux uses that, I've heard. Anyway, my system is at 1.5 GB, and it did not cost that much..NET comes at a price, but I think it will be worth it in the end.
Fortunately, most newer software uses USB for dongles. Much better. Fewer compatibility issues, you can easily use multiple dongles at the same time. Just buy a cheap USB hub if you run out of ports. Note that you can rather easily buy USB to parallel/serial thingies. So most of the time there should not be any problems even if the parallel port is left out. All that said, I've got no personal experience with these kind of things (thank god), so if anyone has I'll be glad to know.
Re:Distribution on Windows
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 1
That depends. Until some time ago (say, 1 month, but I try to forget asap), I was still using a 56 MBit line for internet hookup at my parents home. If I wanted to install a small tool over the internet, the 6..8 MB download would be a pretty big burden. I've already got Java installed for Java applets and applications, and perl for others. But I downloaded those at home and took them with me. It has to be a pretty important app. for me to download GTK+ or take it with me from home...
Anyway, now it's a pretty cheap (20 euro/month) 700Mbit + ADSL line. So 6..8 MB is nothing anymore. But there is a huge number of people that are still behind a 56Kbit - if you're lucky - modem.
You can view evolution take place over millions of years. The only argument against it is if you believe everyting just zapped into existence. The problem with the latter is that then *insert favourite diety* must have deliberately placed dinasaur bones everywhere, put mountains there that have clearly been eroded over a much longer time and to top it off put it in a galaxy that has been there for, er, slightly longer than 6000 years.
In your reasoning you cannot prove anything about the past. I would not like to trade with you. Clearly, signatures (which are all over the place in science) are bunk. No, I never put it there, it just came into being. Yeah, well, right.
The things about it I do like is that, when you are learning IT, you should be made aware of the different language types that are out there. But imperative/OO programming should be the main focus of programming courses. Such languages, together with SQL are by far the most used programming languages. So you need to know the techniques used for those languages.
Languages are indeed a dime a dozen, and they are not too hard to learn most of the time. The problem is that for imperative/OO languages, the API's are huge. You can switch languages pretty easily, but the program is is that you don't know the structure of the API's by that time, let alone find your way in them. So, yes, feel free to explore languages at study time. Somewhere after studying you need to specialize, otherwise you won't be able to solve proglems in a language quickly and correctly because of the unknown API's. Yes, you need to keep an open mind, but you need to specialize in spite of this.
To a smaller degree this even goes for the design phase of software engeneering. If you do not know what modules are available for a language environment, it will be hard to specify what needs to be developed and how much time it will take.
Although I like a lot of new C# constructs, I would recommend Java. I'm a hard time Java user, but I also did a course on C#. Problem with C# is that it already has way more features than Java, and that is not always a plus. Furthermore, it tends to be less OO friendly. E.g.: you can choose methods to be virtual or not in C#. In OO design you would want your methods to be virtual. In C# they aren't, by default!
In C# you have things like operator overloading and properties to worry about. Both can be usefull at times, but they can also obscure what happens underneath pretty easily. Same goes for aliases. Delegations. Precompiler statements. Split source files. Same goes for keywords, the number of keywords in C# is already growing, as is the language specification. For instance you can now embed SQL like statements; nice but can be confusing. Lots of stuff you don't want to know about (yet).
If I were you, I would start off with Java. Take the latest, free Java 1.5 JDK from Sun, the latest, free Eclipse development environment from eclipse.org and set your compiler settings for 1.4.2 compliance. Except for serious, deep, GUI-stuff you can then always load your source files into.NET J#, add some Windows forms (GUI) stuff and you are set. And it is way easier to install as.NET as well, runs under Linux no problem. And no reboots (although Java JDK sometimes asks for it, simply ignore:).
What? The language with a *goto* construct wins? Mod parent down! Besides, current Java has auto boxing / unboxing (automatic switching between objects and basic types). Not completely the same thing, but close enough. And especialy for OO, you won't miss the unsigned data types. Actually, especially with business logic, it makes life easier.
30 MB seems like a lot, but is it really? If it isn't used it'll get swapped out. Furthermore, I've got 1 GB at work and 1.5 GB at home. 30 MB is just 1/50 of the amount of the latter. Beyond that I've got a few services taking a couple of tens of MB's and a browser always on. Leaves enough stuff to do heavy Java development, run a server and a VMware instance. Now *those* things take memory. 30MB is not to be sneezed at, but most people will be able to run it just fine.
That said, I would like a small service (including mailbox in the bar - see Xwindows of 10 years ago) that checks and downloads mail. No further GUI necessary, I'll start Thunderbird after there are enough interesting headers.
"Do you really think that IE7 will continue to be a "damn fine browser" when the masses begin using it and the spammers, hackers, and phishers decide it's now viable enough to heavily exploit?"
Oh, boy, do I hate such non-sense. Of course it is very hard to develop really secure software, but to say that security only relies on the numbers of users is BS. IE4..6 all had the problem that they were at least partly build into the OS, and that most users run with administrative privileges. And then there is the easy way of distributing exploits known as Outlook. And "trusted" ActiveX plugins.
Browsers can be made secure. They're pretty complex, which makes it harder, but you can, and somebody will, make a popular secure browser. The current firefox is pretty near, but I do not think they are there yet.
I'd recommend a USB-2 tuner instead of PCI for the following reasons: - If an AB is included, it's easier to use (since PCI cards will need to have a seperate IR receiver) - Coax connectors do hardly (if at all fit) into normal PCI slots - Easier when installing and upgrading - Notebook computer compatible - Easier to install And you can get quite good quality for a not much higher price than PCI tuner cards.
"PS: I know Javaheads are going to flame me for that one, but compare the comfort of using your average Java app to anything written in QT/KDE,GTK, MFC,.NET, etc. Why the hell is Swing only starting to work at the level that an app like Eclipse does, when QT widgets have worked smoothly and quickly?"
Why would Javaheads like me flame you for that? Swing is not very widely accepted, even by Javaheads as you call them. Java applications -used to be- horendously slow. Now that's mostly over, but they still cannot provide the user with a consistent UI (since it is not consistent (and never will be) with the operating system settings. SWT, as used by Eclipse (and the Azureus bittorrent client), is not as clean as swing, but it understood at witch level it should interface with the host operating system. Considering the number of downloads of Eclipse, expect to hear more from SWT as time goes on.
I've long thought about a highly graphical XML interface description language bundled with Java bytecode for the logic. Together with a cache for storing commonly used parts, and running in a sandbox, it could really make for an excelent user experience. And anger Microsoft to no end of course.
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If this were so, then the D programming language should have won. Any feature you want, it's in there. It even has a nice table to show off.
The thing about a language is that you need to do at least as much, if not more, to keep features *out* of the language. Java/Sun's choice was to keep it simple. This now pays off big time, for instance for real time parsing of Java (in various IDE's including Eclipse). But more importantly, it keeps the language readable and understandable.
C# has many many features (some very interesting features among them), and the way it grows it will become a very fat language indeed. Obese, if they are not carefull. Sun/Java is much more conservative, Java 1.5 was the first big change, and you should not expect *any* new language features in 1.6. They will enhance the API and speed Java up even more (new class verifier), which is much more interesting.
Ugh, I hate to browse through undocumented code, especially if it is mine. It is hard enough finding things on my drive, the network drives and the various backups. Sure, it is all there, but where? Nope, commenting code it is.
I've seen a guy drop a tower case on his foot (fully equiped). First thing my friend says, well, I hope that isn't broken; meaning the tower case of course. Smashed up case vs smashed up foot, I'll know which one I would prefer.
In the netherlands you can get SIM-only plan starting from 3 euro's from T-mobile, a german provider. So what are you talking about? It's still pretty expensive to call from a landline, but normally you would get a slightly higher plan and call back using the mobile phone. These prices will come down (because of the various governments pushing the old monopolies). My plan costs me 20 euro, with 5 months free out of the 24. But then again, I wanted that particular expensive phone (bluetooth support, rather nice screen). At least we all use the same standard (GSM) which is pretty nice.
Some prices are still under presure from the old UMTS deal, which made the Netherlands government a lot of money, which we are paying back now. Since the Dutch telecom provider KPN is now nicely back in the black, that should be history as well. And they finally are delivering UMTS services as well. You would not believe *those* prices though.
"the french army only has 136,000~ soldiers!"
AFAIK *they* are not currently at war. What should they fear? An Albanian invasion?
VMWare instead of a bootloader? No. I mainly use Windows for media capabilities (movies, music & sometimes games). Note that DirectX or 3D accellerated hardware is not supported by VMWare (yet). For hardware intensive tasks, an OS inside VMWare will never be as responsive as the real thing. So I have Windows and Linux running next to each other*.
I think this is a pretty common setup. Actually, if they are on seperate harddisks, it would be an option to use the BIOS instead, and GRUB or LILO for linux.
* Well, I used too. Linux is now running on it's private VIA EPIA board as server OS, with Cygwin and X installed on my Windows host.
Well, I am not into bootloaders. LILO was something I got used to pretty fast. I absolutely *HATE* grub for it's usability. I haven't got a clue how the menu works (well, a few clues, but too little). And I have programmed computers since the MSX (8 bit Zilog Z80). Grub either has to get a better interface, or it should be thrown aside for LILO again. For most users, bootloaders are a necessary evil. I simply don't find them worth my time, so I don't want to learn about them. They should therefore have a near zero learning curve. Oh, and documentation was seriously lacking the last time I looked.
So I fully agree on your last sentence...good for you though.
Additional question, when can I use "/." as the keyword, like I do in firefox. Shame you can only use alphabetical characters (and probably numbers) but not other characters. It should be a string compare, I will use "http://" if I need a page which name conflicts (never happens anyway).
I like the browsing experience in Opera. I do not like the settings and the rather few (or easy to find?) extensions to it.
"I have relatives who live out in the country who can expect at minimum of at least an hour response time from the police."
Well, there's your problem.
"In the same area there have been at least two cases of home invasion by burglars, with one elderly couple being brutally beaten to the point where the husband died soon afterwards."
And that would not have happened when guns were in the house? What's the response time for an elderly couple to grab a gun? Sheesh, I am just picturing my grandma grabbing and shooting a gun. Bloody unlikely.
"The local police quietly recomended that people in the area should expect to defend themselves."
Local police? Doesn't sound like it. Although I can understand that the needs are different for those 1% living 1 hour from police response times, I doubt that having a gun would do any good.
"The ratio of gun ownership in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA is roughly the same, but only the USA suffers from such a high rate of gun related crime. Why is that?"
Er, in New Zealand, Australia and Canada there are a lot of wild/dangerous animals. What kind of guns? Are they used for self defense (against people), or against anymals? Are they hanging on the wall, or are they taken in a purse?
And in America, there seem to be many more social problems as well as a lot of guns. That's a bad mixture. You should compare instead with a country that has as many social problems but a lot less guns. See if you come on top in killings, cause I bet you do.
That's quite a lot of people I guess, these things don't break that easily. Actually, just check the number of old standalone CD players around. I bet there are quite a number of them out there. And if they are broken, 10 to 1 that it is a dirty lens. My 4 speed CDROM recently gave up on me though :(. Cost me about 120 euro's (without inflation taken into account.
Disk cache? Linux uses that, I've heard. Anyway, my system is at 1.5 GB, and it did not cost that much. .NET comes at a price, but I think it will be worth it in the end.
What about a memory stick? Most biosses can boot from that nowadays. And some biosses can be flashed from Windows.
Fortunately, most newer software uses USB for dongles. Much better. Fewer compatibility issues, you can easily use multiple dongles at the same time. Just buy a cheap USB hub if you run out of ports. Note that you can rather easily buy USB to parallel/serial thingies. So most of the time there should not be any problems even if the parallel port is left out. All that said, I've got no personal experience with these kind of things (thank god), so if anyone has I'll be glad to know.
That depends. Until some time ago (say, 1 month, but I try to forget asap), I was still using a 56 MBit line for internet hookup at my parents home. If I wanted to install a small tool over the internet, the 6..8 MB download would be a pretty big burden. I've already got Java installed for Java applets and applications, and perl for others. But I downloaded those at home and took them with me. It has to be a pretty important app. for me to download GTK+ or take it with me from home...
Anyway, now it's a pretty cheap (20 euro/month) 700Mbit + ADSL line. So 6..8 MB is nothing anymore. But there is a huge number of people that are still behind a 56Kbit - if you're lucky - modem.
POLICE: Sir, are you classified as human?
DALLAS: Uh... negative. I am a meat popsicle.
You can view evolution take place over millions of years. The only argument against it is if you believe everyting just zapped into existence. The problem with the latter is that then *insert favourite diety* must have deliberately placed dinasaur bones everywhere, put mountains there that have clearly been eroded over a much longer time and to top it off put it in a galaxy that has been there for, er, slightly longer than 6000 years.
In your reasoning you cannot prove anything about the past. I would not like to trade with you. Clearly, signatures (which are all over the place in science) are bunk. No, I never put it there, it just came into being. Yeah, well, right.
The things about it I do like is that, when you are learning IT, you should be made aware of the different language types that are out there. But imperative/OO programming should be the main focus of programming courses. Such languages, together with SQL are by far the most used programming languages. So you need to know the techniques used for those languages.
Languages are indeed a dime a dozen, and they are not too hard to learn most of the time. The problem is that for imperative/OO languages, the API's are huge. You can switch languages pretty easily, but the program is is that you don't know the structure of the API's by that time, let alone find your way in them. So, yes, feel free to explore languages at study time. Somewhere after studying you need to specialize, otherwise you won't be able to solve proglems in a language quickly and correctly because of the unknown API's. Yes, you need to keep an open mind, but you need to specialize in spite of this.
To a smaller degree this even goes for the design phase of software engeneering. If you do not know what modules are available for a language environment, it will be hard to specify what needs to be developed and how much time it will take.
Although I like a lot of new C# constructs, I would recommend Java. I'm a hard time Java user, but I also did a course on C#. Problem with C# is that it already has way more features than Java, and that is not always a plus. Furthermore, it tends to be less OO friendly. E.g.: you can choose methods to be virtual or not in C#. In OO design you would want your methods to be virtual. In C# they aren't, by default!
.NET J#, add some Windows forms (GUI) stuff and you are set. And it is way easier to install as .NET as well, runs under Linux no problem. And no reboots (although Java JDK sometimes asks for it, simply ignore :).
In C# you have things like operator overloading and properties to worry about. Both can be usefull at times, but they can also obscure what happens underneath pretty easily. Same goes for aliases. Delegations. Precompiler statements. Split source files. Same goes for keywords, the number of keywords in C# is already growing, as is the language specification. For instance you can now embed SQL like statements; nice but can be confusing. Lots of stuff you don't want to know about (yet).
If I were you, I would start off with Java. Take the latest, free Java 1.5 JDK from Sun, the latest, free Eclipse development environment from eclipse.org and set your compiler settings for 1.4.2 compliance. Except for serious, deep, GUI-stuff you can then always load your source files into
What? The language with a *goto* construct wins? Mod parent down! Besides, current Java has auto boxing / unboxing (automatic switching between objects and basic types). Not completely the same thing, but close enough. And especialy for OO, you won't miss the unsigned data types. Actually, especially with business logic, it makes life easier.
30 MB seems like a lot, but is it really? If it isn't used it'll get swapped out. Furthermore, I've got 1 GB at work and 1.5 GB at home. 30 MB is just 1/50 of the amount of the latter. Beyond that I've got a few services taking a couple of tens of MB's and a browser always on. Leaves enough stuff to do heavy Java development, run a server and a VMware instance. Now *those* things take memory. 30MB is not to be sneezed at, but most people will be able to run it just fine.
That said, I would like a small service (including mailbox in the bar - see Xwindows of 10 years ago) that checks and downloads mail. No further GUI necessary, I'll start Thunderbird after there are enough interesting headers.
"Do you really think that IE7 will continue to be a "damn fine browser" when the masses begin using it and the spammers, hackers, and phishers decide it's now viable enough to heavily exploit?"
Oh, boy, do I hate such non-sense. Of course it is very hard to develop really secure software, but to say that security only relies on the numbers of users is BS. IE4..6 all had the problem that they were at least partly build into the OS, and that most users run with administrative privileges. And then there is the easy way of distributing exploits known as Outlook. And "trusted" ActiveX plugins.
Browsers can be made secure. They're pretty complex, which makes it harder, but you can, and somebody will, make a popular secure browser. The current firefox is pretty near, but I do not think they are there yet.
I'd recommend a USB-2 tuner instead of PCI for the following reasons:
- If an AB is included, it's easier to use (since PCI cards will need to have a seperate IR receiver)
- Coax connectors do hardly (if at all fit) into normal PCI slots
- Easier when installing and upgrading
- Notebook computer compatible
- Easier to install
And you can get quite good quality for a not much higher price than PCI tuner cards.
7ba375b06cf2d093d3d761358cf106f8
c1e5b19445361bad8cc1db59e2f4dc7c
No, hopefully, they won't have (better) success. More sucky movies can only be the result of this.
"PS: I know Javaheads are going to flame me for that one, but compare the comfort of using your average Java app to anything written in QT/KDE,GTK, MFC,.NET, etc. Why the hell is Swing only starting to work at the level that an app like Eclipse does, when QT widgets have worked smoothly and quickly?"
Why would Javaheads like me flame you for that? Swing is not very widely accepted, even by Javaheads as you call them. Java applications -used to be- horendously slow. Now that's mostly over, but they still cannot provide the user with a consistent UI (since it is not consistent (and never will be) with the operating system settings. SWT, as used by Eclipse (and the Azureus bittorrent client), is not as clean as swing, but it understood at witch level it should interface with the host operating system. Considering the number of downloads of Eclipse, expect to hear more from SWT as time goes on.
I've long thought about a highly graphical XML interface description language bundled with Java bytecode for the logic. Together with a cache for storing commonly used parts, and running in a sandbox, it could really make for an excelent user experience. And anger Microsoft to no end of course.