I agree with parent poster that there seems that a lot of people take lines of code as the only measure of how good a language is. Something like 80% of developer time for an average project is spent on maintenance, and often there are new developers doing it. So in my opinion clarity is at least as important.
The author's comment on "density" is a contrast in brevity and verbosity, and not about clarity. A language such as JavaScript (and Python to name another) communicates the same amount of information with greater clarity in far less space than "high-level" languages such as C++ and Java. The cost of maintaining applications with the same feature goes down as the density of the language increases. Greater density results in fewer lines of code, resulting in less development and maintenance costs.
Can you provide a reference? I've searched high and low for information about enabling this and have not seen anything about changing (the|a) java setting file(s).
T-mobile disables network access to Java applications (e.g. Google Mail, Google Maps) on their Samsung and Motorola models for apps not purchased through T-mobile. You have to buy the more expensive Blackberries to use these programs (and, from what I've read, that's only because RIM told T-mobile to sod off).
The talking ads that pop up at random on Yahoo Finance are the most annoying thing in the world. The site is not suitable for viewing in a cube farm or in an open floor plan. I had to install adblock and flashblock just to deal with it, but it's no longer worth dealing with Yahoo when Google's finance page is now usable.
One thing Yahoo has never gotten right is the usability/annoyance equation in web design.
Yeah... but I can show you a ton of *very* useful software that you just cannot use on Solaris when using only Sun tools (e.g. Boost). That's because Sun cannot bring their compiler up to snuff without breaking backwards compatibility. There's a tradeoff that one makes for the level of backwards compatibility. And those tradeoffs can cause more headaches than they are worth. Sun, IMO, has been on the wrong side of that equation for a very long time.
It's enough of a problem that we are in the process of switching over to GCC.
And to reinforce what two other posters have said, we are upgrading from SunOS 5.8 to 5.10 and are running into binary compatibility issues with Sun's own libraries.
These 3G wireless services are all locked down by the telecom companies. I just bought a phone from T-Mobile that purports to support Java applications, and I have a data plan. However, it turns out that T-Mobile locks out Java applications that T-Mobile did not itself distribute. I cannot use the new Mobile Google Mail application, nor can I use Google Maps on my phone. It's not because the phone does not support it, but because T-Mobile has decided that it can enforce vendor lock-in with DRM'd Java apps.
And judging by my recent reading of the various newsgroups and forums, it's not just T-Mobile that does this -- pretty much they all do.
One can get around this by buying a non-subsidized phone, one that is completely vendor neutral, but these cost considerably more, to the point of making it economically unappealing.
Remember who paid for all those annoying pop-up and pop-under ads when they first came out? X10 are the primary reason all browsers come with popup blockers these days. Their internet marketing tactics stink.
I won't support them. And I urge others to do the same.
My experience with third-party support for RHEL was not that great. The support was through HP, which provides a support contract in partnership with Red Hat. In both cases where support was required, Red Hat developers had to be called in to acknowledge the problem and create a fix, but I was never able to talk to Red Hat directly, which IMO cost me a lot of time. It put me off from requesting support on other issues that I might have otherwise requested help with. We are looking at switching most of our non-production servers over to CentOS because the support we get does not justify the cost.
I cannot imagine this will be any better. In fact, it will probably be quite a bit worse because it seems that Oracle is setting itself up as a competitor to Red Hat, rather than as a partner.
I'm no fan of Novell, but their "first crack at it" was a technology preview of Xen, which by its own admission only supported OSes that have been ported to the Xen hypervisor. It's not like the Xen folks could get the Windows XP source and release a version ported to Xen, now, could they? They were not claiming it would work with other OSes without VT.
Your comment about that seems like an attempt to deflect attention away from the GP's implied point, which was... the knowledge, borne out of years of experience, of just about everyone I know in this industry that must administer a heterogeneous computing environment, that MS does not play nice with others. Every admin, when they consider using MS products in such an environment, has to ask himself, "How will Microsoft fsck me over with this decision?"
I'm doing that now, even as I advocate moving our NIS maps into Active Directory, converting from NIS to LDAP and doing SSO with Kerberos using AD as the KDC.
Re:Sometimes I feel like a Luddite...
on
IronPython 1.0 is Born
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· Score: 2, Informative
This has become common knowledge amongst Python developers, to the point that many people forget where it came from. I was at the 9th International Python Conference where Bruce Eckel (author of Thinking in C++, Thinking in Java, Thinking in Patterns) gave the keynote speech, so it sticks with me that it came from him. See http://www.artima.com/intv/tipping.html for a good interview with him that gives some details into his experience with the langauge.
Would you just be quiet about Colorado! We really don't need any more people who can't drive in a brief snow shower *cough*Californians*cough* moving here. I'm actually quite happy to see many of them leaving lately.
Here are some quick facts about Colorado for anyone considering moving here:
Sun Microsystems continues to lay off people in Broomfield. HP and AMD are laying off people in Fort Collins. First Data had a big layoff in Denver. We have the highest mortgage repo rate in the nation; property values are dropping like crazy. We run out of water half-way through summer. We've had a month of 100+ degree weather. Traffic into and out of Denver during rush out sucks horribly. Most of the techies in Denver live and work in the Denver Tech Center area, which is the most butt-ugly, soul-draining area in the state.
So, yeah -- lots to offer here. Please stay where you are.
The easiest solution is to make it the choice of the users. The current developers can send out a message to the user community saying "We can no longer continue to support the Oracle backend without additional help from the community. We will continue to maintain it if one or more people commit to supporting the Oracle backend and can contribute in a timely manner. Otherwise we will need to drop support by YYYY-MM-DD."
I am willing to bet that most Oracle users are commercial users. This will give some incentive to those users to go to their management team and request resources to support the product that they use.
I'm willing to bet a few of the managers will ask, "Well, can we just move to this free database, PostgreSQL, when support for Oracle stops?"
I hear there's also a bill pending that will make posting fingerpaintings in kindergarten classrooms illegal
The Dept. of Justice has recently adjusted their tactics to deal with the serious issue of kindergarten fingerpainting. Instead of a ban, it will be asking Congress to require that schools retain all fingerpaintings indefinitely to aid the permanent war on terrorism. There is a gold mine of finger print and psychological data in these paintings which will serve the future generations of Americans in their fight against home-grown terrorists. The Attorney General is expected to testify before Congress later this week that he is certain that both Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing could have been prevented had Homeland Security had these valuable assets in the 1990's.
What's totally amazing is other countries are imposing theses rulings, but in America they get away with it.
America -- you mean the Corporate States of America? Sorry, we haven't yet gotten around to amending our constitution to reflect the name change.
Here's a bit from our upcoming amended Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all corporations are created equal, that they are endowed by the State with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Incorporation, Indemnity, and the pursuit of Profit.
Unless you are currently one of the richest people on earth, you are only arguing from hindsight.
It is doubtful that Western Union would have made a successful phone company.
That's not the point. Whether Disney would have made a "non-Disneyfied" LOTR isn't the point either. These were guaranteed winners that were ignored.
It is precisely my point. There are many investments which, in the right hands, are "guaranteed winners" that I pass on every day. Why? Because I have neither the time nor the skill to make them "guaranteed winners".
<CheapShot>Hell, if it is so easy and they are guaranteed winners, YOU should have produced LOTR and Star Wars!</CheapShot>
[how did this] actually end up costing the U.S. economy again?
Hollywood told George Lucas that science-fiction had no mass market appeal. How much would it have cost the economy if Star Wars had never been made?
But it was produced! You forgot to prefix your sentence with "Some people in Hollywood told George..." because, in the end, Star Wars was a Hollywood movie.
I understand the point that you are trying to make but, in the wrong hands, Star Wars would have been horrible! Not only that, Lucas wasn't a known quantity in the mid-70s. His only successful movie up to that point was American Graffiti. How were producers going to judge his likelyhood for success at SciFi? I postulate that the producers that turned George down did the right thing under their circumstances, and that the movie would not have been the success is was with the wrong set of producers.
There is no guarantee that LOTR would have been successful under Disney. In fact there are a couple of attempts at LOTR that were just awful. I firmly believe that a Disney version of LOTR would not have been successful. (Just as that fixer-upper house down the street is a good investment for my neighbor, but not for me.)
There is no guarantee that Western Union executives would have managed to acquire the anti-trust exemption and universal access mandate that AT&T received from the US Government. And there is no guarantee that Lucas would have made the same Star Wars under a different set of producers (they all tend to meddle in different ways).
As I said at the top, you are arguing from hindsight. But worse, you are not taking into consideration all of the aspects of what made each of these things a success. George Lucas + Star Wars != Success. For my proof, see the last three episodes produced; AOTC would have been a failure had the first three episodes not created an instant audience.
Then there's the other half of the problem where business says "it'll never work" when it's a guaranteed winner. Western Union could have owned AT&T for $100,000. Disney passed on the Lord of the Rings trilogy ($6 billion box office, 17 Academy Awards). The amounts of money (and jobs) this is costing our economy is astounding.
Two thoughts:
Hindsight is 20/20.
It is doubtful that Western Union would have made a successful phone company. Nor is it likely that Disney would have produced a "non-Disneyfied" LOTR; one which would have been anywhere near as successful as the version which was made.
And how did either of these cases actually end up costing the U.S. economy again?
I returned the latest Santana CD to Borders Bookstore, where I bought it, after discovering it installed crap without my permission on my company-issued laptop. I was direct with the manager about the problem and they accepted the return with very little hassle.
Exposure took 12-15 HOURS? What does that equate to as far as film speed? You're going to need to get that down quite a few orders of magnitude to be useful for imaging anything.
One of the local radio stations just did a one-minute abridged version of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant". It was just about perfect, except that they cut out the part about the 8x10 color glossies.
Slashdot Mirror
The author's comment on "density" is a contrast in brevity and verbosity, and not about clarity. A language such as JavaScript (and Python to name another) communicates the same amount of information with greater clarity in far less space than "high-level" languages such as C++ and Java. The cost of maintaining applications with the same feature goes down as the density of the language increases. Greater density results in fewer lines of code, resulting in less development and maintenance costs.
Can you provide a reference? I've searched high and low for information about enabling this and have not seen anything about changing (the|a) java setting file(s).
T-mobile disables network access to Java applications (e.g. Google Mail, Google Maps) on their Samsung and Motorola models for apps not purchased through T-mobile. You have to buy the more expensive Blackberries to use these programs (and, from what I've read, that's only because RIM told T-mobile to sod off).
The talking ads that pop up at random on Yahoo Finance are the most annoying thing in the world. The site is not suitable for viewing in a cube farm or in an open floor plan. I had to install adblock and flashblock just to deal with it, but it's no longer worth dealing with Yahoo when Google's finance page is now usable.
One thing Yahoo has never gotten right is the usability/annoyance equation in web design.
Yeah... but I can show you a ton of *very* useful software that you just cannot use on Solaris when using only Sun tools (e.g. Boost). That's because Sun cannot bring their compiler up to snuff without breaking backwards compatibility. There's a tradeoff that one makes for the level of backwards compatibility. And those tradeoffs can cause more headaches than they are worth. Sun, IMO, has been on the wrong side of that equation for a very long time.
It's enough of a problem that we are in the process of switching over to GCC.
And to reinforce what two other posters have said, we are upgrading from SunOS 5.8 to 5.10 and are running into binary compatibility issues with Sun's own libraries.
These 3G wireless services are all locked down by the telecom companies. I just bought a phone from T-Mobile that purports to support Java applications, and I have a data plan. However, it turns out that T-Mobile locks out Java applications that T-Mobile did not itself distribute. I cannot use the new Mobile Google Mail application, nor can I use Google Maps on my phone. It's not because the phone does not support it, but because T-Mobile has decided that it can enforce vendor lock-in with DRM'd Java apps.
And judging by my recent reading of the various newsgroups and forums, it's not just T-Mobile that does this -- pretty much they all do.
One can get around this by buying a non-subsidized phone, one that is completely vendor neutral, but these cost considerably more, to the point of making it economically unappealing.
Remember who paid for all those annoying pop-up and pop-under ads when they first came out? X10 are the primary reason all browsers come with popup blockers these days. Their internet marketing tactics stink.
I won't support them. And I urge others to do the same.
My experience with third-party support for RHEL was not that great. The support was through HP, which provides a support contract in partnership with Red Hat. In both cases where support was required, Red Hat developers had to be called in to acknowledge the problem and create a fix, but I was never able to talk to Red Hat directly, which IMO cost me a lot of time. It put me off from requesting support on other issues that I might have otherwise requested help with. We are looking at switching most of our non-production servers over to CentOS because the support we get does not justify the cost.
I cannot imagine this will be any better. In fact, it will probably be quite a bit worse because it seems that Oracle is setting itself up as a competitor to Red Hat, rather than as a partner.
Not all of them!
Seriously, we are only interested in banning those beach campfires and park barbecues that occur indoors or on airplanes.
I'm no fan of Novell, but their "first crack at it" was a technology preview of Xen, which by its own admission only supported OSes that have been ported to the Xen hypervisor. It's not like the Xen folks could get the Windows XP source and release a version ported to Xen, now, could they? They were not claiming it would work with other OSes without VT.
Your comment about that seems like an attempt to deflect attention away from the GP's implied point, which was... the knowledge, borne out of years of experience, of just about everyone I know in this industry that must administer a heterogeneous computing environment, that MS does not play nice with others. Every admin, when they consider using MS products in such an environment, has to ask himself, "How will Microsoft fsck me over with this decision?"
I'm doing that now, even as I advocate moving our NIS maps into Active Directory, converting from NIS to LDAP and doing SSO with Kerberos using AD as the KDC.
This has become common knowledge amongst Python developers, to the point that many people forget where it came from. I was at the 9th International Python Conference where Bruce Eckel (author of Thinking in C++, Thinking in Java, Thinking in Patterns) gave the keynote speech, so it sticks with me that it came from him. See http://www.artima.com/intv/tipping.html for a good interview with him that gives some details into his experience with the langauge.
Here are some quick facts about Colorado for anyone considering moving here:
So, yeah -- lots to offer here. Please stay where you are.The easiest solution is to make it the choice of the users. The current developers can send out a message to the user community saying "We can no longer continue to support the Oracle backend without additional help from the community. We will continue to maintain it if one or more people commit to supporting the Oracle backend and can contribute in a timely manner. Otherwise we will need to drop support by YYYY-MM-DD."
I am willing to bet that most Oracle users are commercial users. This will give some incentive to those users to go to their management team and request resources to support the product that they use.
I'm willing to bet a few of the managers will ask, "Well, can we just move to this free database, PostgreSQL, when support for Oracle stops?"
The Dept. of Justice has recently adjusted their tactics to deal with the serious issue of kindergarten fingerpainting. Instead of a ban, it will be asking Congress to require that schools retain all fingerpaintings indefinitely to aid the permanent war on terrorism. There is a gold mine of finger print and psychological data in these paintings which will serve the future generations of Americans in their fight against home-grown terrorists. The Attorney General is expected to testify before Congress later this week that he is certain that both Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing could have been prevented had Homeland Security had these valuable assets in the 1990's.
America -- you mean the Corporate States of America? Sorry, we haven't yet gotten around to amending our constitution to reflect the name change.
Here's a bit from our upcoming amended Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all corporations are created equal, that they are endowed by the State with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Incorporation, Indemnity, and the pursuit of Profit.
Someone at the Cato Institute must have received mod points today.
<CheapShot>Hell, if it is so easy and they are guaranteed winners, YOU should have produced LOTR and Star Wars!</CheapShot>
But it was produced! You forgot to prefix your sentence with "Some people in Hollywood told George..." because, in the end, Star Wars was a Hollywood movie.I understand the point that you are trying to make but, in the wrong hands, Star Wars would have been horrible! Not only that, Lucas wasn't a known quantity in the mid-70s. His only successful movie up to that point was American Graffiti. How were producers going to judge his likelyhood for success at SciFi? I postulate that the producers that turned George down did the right thing under their circumstances, and that the movie would not have been the success is was with the wrong set of producers.
There is no guarantee that LOTR would have been successful under Disney. In fact there are a couple of attempts at LOTR that were just awful. I firmly believe that a Disney version of LOTR would not have been successful. (Just as that fixer-upper house down the street is a good investment for my neighbor, but not for me.)
There is no guarantee that Western Union executives would have managed to acquire the anti-trust exemption and universal access mandate that AT&T received from the US Government. And there is no guarantee that Lucas would have made the same Star Wars under a different set of producers (they all tend to meddle in different ways).
As I said at the top, you are arguing from hindsight. But worse, you are not taking into consideration all of the aspects of what made each of these things a success. George Lucas + Star Wars != Success. For my proof, see the last three episodes produced; AOTC would have been a failure had the first three episodes not created an instant audience.
Two thoughts:
Hindsight is 20/20.
It is doubtful that Western Union would have made a successful phone company. Nor is it likely that Disney would have produced a "non-Disneyfied" LOTR; one which would have been anywhere near as successful as the version which was made.
And how did either of these cases actually end up costing the U.S. economy again?
That would be one fine theory if "Crazy Cat Ladies" didn't live with scores of malnourished cats in filthy, feces-laden homes.
We'll let you know when we've finished with the war on drugs.
Just sit tight. This shouldn't take too long.
I returned the latest Santana CD to Borders Bookstore, where I bought it, after discovering it installed crap without my permission on my company-issued laptop. I was direct with the manager about the problem and they accepted the return with very little hassle.
Exposure took 12-15 HOURS? What does that equate to as far as film speed? You're going to need to get that down quite a few orders of magnitude to be useful for imaging anything.
One of the local radio stations just did a one-minute abridged version of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant". It was just about perfect, except that they cut out the part about the 8x10 color glossies.
I got the numbers from here: http://www.retirementliving.com/RLtaxburdens.html