Depends how you measure efficiency, but yes. (Also depends how you define "framework".)
I'm sure someone could write a book -- I haven't got the experience, but someone -- which covered all the possibilities here. Fact is, this is actually something you want to do your best to translate into numbers, and then have a manager look it over and make the call.
The kinds of questions you want to ask are:
How much work is it, really, to find people with the skills?
How much does it cost to train people who don't have the skills?
How efficient are they at developing for this framework? If possible, measure in dollars to functionality.
How long is it going to take to migrate to a new framework? How much money? Double those amounts, because you're underestimating. (Yes, you are. Really.)
How long are you intending to keep the product you're developing on that framework?
How much does it cost you now to maintain?
Based on all of this, how long before your migration pays off?
You could fill a book with questions like this, analysis, etc -- it's really a bunch of boring business stuff. And it's going to be very different based on what the framework is, what your project is, the lifespan of your project, etc.
For example: I just finished porting a simple corporate website (and a blog) from an old, contractor-hacked version of a blogging engine to a shiny new one. In the process, I tried to avoid touching the actual engine itself, rather adding our skin as a theme, and adapting the site to the features the engine had, rather than the other way around.
Say what you will, but it took the contractors months to make those modifications, and it took me about a week to port what I saved of their stuff over to the new engine. The old site was buggy as hell, probably because of the contractor modifications. The new one actually works.
Now, a few jobs ago, I was working at a company which had a fairly large.NET app, which had SQL injection vulnerabilities all over the place, and was not fun to maintain. But we did anyway, because it was a big app, and we'd lose money anytime it went down, and so on. Maintenance may have been a pain, but a ground-up rewrite was just not feasible, as much as it was needed.
And then there was the odd job I did -- a single server (an old, retired computer) which sits in a corner, whose sole purpose is to run a single app once every three months. I hacked it together as an AJAX app before I really knew JavaScript, with an ugly, hackish backend, horrible limitations, etc. But it allows one person to do in 20 minutes to an hour what used to take two people more like five hours or more, and allows reports to be sent via email, rather than printed out. And it's only run once every three months, so as much as I would like to patch it up now that I know better, it's not worth it -- it's good enough, and no new features are really needed.
The best answer anyone ever gave me was that whitespace can be nuked by pasting in places like Slashdot, which tend to trim whitespace. But that's like not wanting to use XML because some forums don't like angle brackets. Seems like a perverse reason to me.
Of course, there's another possible answer: Write a preprocessor.
Myself, I'm happy with Ruby, and Rails, and Merb/Camping/etc if I need them. The one thing I wish I didn't have to do is write all those "end" statements -- it's not DRY, I'm already indenting anyway.
you have to wonder how the buzz for a platform can reach such a tremendous pitch when there are still basic problems with it that need to be solved...
I wonder, too, and it does often piss me off, but the fact is, it filled a need, and it forced people to think differently about how to develop web frameworks (and applications). In other words, it was going to happen, whether or not the technology was ready -- and Ruby is a lot better now because of it.
And why do you think they call ORMs "Object Relational Mappers"? They seem to be designed to make sure you can't use any Relational features.
It's the 80/20 rule. But that's disingenuous; I can do whatever SQL I want, for the very few cases where you need custom SQL. The Rails catchphrase, "convention over configuration", isn't really accurate -- what it really means is "there are sane defaults, so you can do the common things quickly and easily, but the configuration is there if you need it." Compare to Java, where you can end up with more XML configuration than code for an ORM...
There are still things I hate very much about Rails, and I did stay away for a long time because of the buzz. Let it get to a certain amount of hype, and nothing can live up to that -- but it is useful, hyped or not.
Example: The App Zapper. Yes, Apple forgot to include an uninstaller with their OS, or a standard way for app developers to include one. No, dragging the app to the Trash doesn't quite "uninstall". And yes, that is a shareware model.
Yes, a shareware model. In 2008. For essential system software.
Now, the app store here does allow free downloads, so it's not exactly relevant to this article, but I can see why there would be confusion.
Those older creators want, no.. need these protections as they see in the non-internet world. The only real way to "guarantee" this is by digital restrictions.
I'm not sure if you're saying this sarcastically/ironically, but no, they don't need those protections. They don't need them any more than they needed "protection" against VCRs.
In fact, I could point to numerous examples of things which are being released over the Internet, without copy protection, some without even demanding payment, and are doing quite well. None are blockbusters, of course -- blockbusters require a huge investment up front, and are why we need "the studios" -- but some are quite good, and especially in music, I think they show that this is possible.
What alternatives do we have?
If you mean, alternatives to piracy, I have a fairly simple formula:
New things which I don't know anything about, I'll often pirate first, to see if they're worth my while. Occasionally I come across something like Firefly, for which I'm willing to stretch the rules a bit, and buy some DRM'd DVDs, secure in the knowledge that I'll be able to rip it and archive it, either on hard drives or on a lot of DVD-Rs. And occasionally, I come across something like Umphrey's McGee or Sanctuary, which I can buy as a DRM-free download, and which I will buy for no other reason than to support the concept of DRM-free content.
The more legit way this would work is, I could rent movies, and buy the ones I really like. But for each one, I'd have to be cracking the DRM constantly (which is illegal), and the rentals are more of a hassle than BitTorrent, whether or not I intend to keep a copy. I would pay rental prices ($2/movie or so) to get slightly better quality than the average torrent, and to have them seeded by something like Amazon's S3 -- if anyone were offering such a thing. And for some things, I would (and do) pay as much for a DRM-free, high-quality digital copy as I would for a physical version.
To be fair, without those sports celebrities, those developing the hardware, software, and networks would get precisely $0/year.
And hitting that ball with that stick isn't easy. Maybe you should be out there, too?
There is one thing I find backwards, though: Why should the actor be paid 42 bazillion dollars, but the writers get no special treatment? Why is it the actors, and occasionally directors, become household names, but no one has a clue who the writers were? Raise your hand if you thought much about Hollywood writers before the writer's strike.
As much as I like watching Summer Glau, Jewel State, Nathon Filion, etc, I'd consider myself to be a Joss Whedon fan rather than a Ron Glass fan.
In the theater in our small town, they're still like $6.50 for an adult ticket. I'd be very curious to know how much the theater gets to keep.
At the same time, the job of a theater is basically to have a big room and a projector. It's kind of like your friend who has the big-screen TV. I'm sure there's upkeep, and of course the employees have to be paid, but it's not a case where I feel like they deserve huge margins.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert with FreeBSD or MySQL. The Linux kernel used is not a "stable release" whereas FreeBSD is (although I'm not aware of any significant performance improvements over the 2.6.24 kernel -- 2.6.25-rc4 is simply what I have installed on the machine). Compilers were different versions of gcc-4.2, MySQL code base and compile options were slightly different due to being compiled from ports on FreeBSD. In other words, I can't say definitively that Linux is faster than FreeBSD. My primary interest is to see that Linux's performance problems on this workload are under control. Questions or suggestions are welcome.
And I do tend to agree with that. Ultimately, there are enough reasons keeping me on Linux (vs FreeBSD) that as long as there isn't that huge gap (seen in the graph linked to), I don't really care that much about whatever's left.
Nor am I particularly loyal to Linux. I understand and respect the GPL, but if there was another sufficiently open OS that beat Linux in ways I care about, I'd probably be using it, at least at home.
I think part fo the reason that PG was traditionally slower than MySQL was that it did lots of complicated locking to provide better scalability across processors, whereas we see MySQL performance dropping off after we go to more than eight cores.
Actually, what I remember is a bit different: Postgres supports transactions. MySQL's default MyISAM does not, and is thus faster.
Personally, I prefer correctness to speed -- and I also seem to remember that Postgres was always faster than MySQL's InnoDB.
...the New South Wales cabinet has proposed new powers for police to search computers anywhere under a search warrant, and adds: "The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse are invoked to explain why police need the new laws, which have yet to be introduced into Parliament...."
Read The Fucking Summary. Thank you.
Or, if you still don't get it: The laws have been proposed, not passed. There's still the chance that parliament will figure out the implications and reject the law, in favor of sanity.
In my opinion, SCO is no longer a software company, but a litigation company.
They have been for years. Did you just now notice this? Or are you stating this for the benefit of the few people who don't know? (Obviously, that would include some fairly wealthy people... or people with ulterior motives.)
Seems to me, based on an uneducated guess, that it would sometimes perform better, and sometimes just as well as, it would have without the runtime optimizations -- and only very occasionally would it perform much worse. After all, how many times will that "other class" be loaded and unloaded? If the answer is "a lot", wouldn't the pattern of loading/unloading be noticed by the runtime, and optimized for?
And occasionally performing much worse, while unacceptable for some applications, is also one approach to garbage collection that works quite well in practice. And garbage collection is another place where it seems to be worth it not to worry about yourself.
The quality of movie downloads is poor and almost certainly isn't cutting into DVD sales, where the quality of downloadable music was high.
Actually, it was piss-poor, for awhile, just not enough people noticed or cared. Even then, dynamic range compression had killed enough of it.
Pay-per-listen and limited time music downloads were never the choice of the industry (though they did try subscription models).
Perhaps, but consider also that it's not generally possible to buy just one or two episodes of a TV show you want to try out, unless you're already subscribed.
It may happen one day, but it isn't even on the industry's radar right now, much less the consumer's radar.
Neither was YouTube, or Napster, before they happened.
One more parallel: We're getting more and more mobile devices on which we can watch movies. This means that anyone who wants to watch a movie -- or a TV show, or any other video clip -- on their iPhone, or PSP, etc, already has a copy in their computer. Same with the early mp3 players.
Oh, and of course, piracy is beating the studios to it.
The same is arguably true of firmware. A bug in firmware can have potentially disastrous effects, you never know what it might do to running code. Depending on the device, it could affect the memory space just as easily.
Of course, it depends how far you're willing to take this, as hardware itself can have bugs, or simply be faulty. And I agree that binary blobs are bad. I'm just not sure how to define the difference clearly.
Linux isn't only on i686, so why should we accept binary blobs of code for that processor?
While I agree, it's really not entirely the case with NDISwrapper. They do support OS X binary blobs, and I did get wireless networking going on my Powerbook (32-bit PPC) by the same method.
The real question is, why should we accept binary blobs at all?
And the answer is, we shouldn't, but we will anyway, because they get the job done. Just like kernel development ran on BitKeeper until it was revoked, forcing them to write Git, we'll continue to use the closed nVidia drivers until we can't anymore, because that's human nature.
If your kernel isn't tainted, and you can provide all source, you are more likely to get help than if it's proprietary.
The other point to consider is: If you are running, say, nVidia drivers, then most of your kernel problems should really be reported to nVidia, as we have no idea what the fsck they're doing inside your kernel. Compare this to the open Intel drivers -- not only do we know what they do, but the kernel developers will actually maintain them, and make sure they continue to work with new versions of the kernel.
I've never gotten a message from their own AIM bots, and in Kopete, as in every single other IM client I've used, it's possible to simply collapse groups (and forget about them).
So what, exactly, is the problem? (Or is there something I'm missing?)
The people I feel sorry for are the *good* artists who will get swept up in the free music movement that end up broke and pissed off when their fan base isn't using it for a showcase example of some alternative goodwill based economy.
Well, two things:
First, many artists make enough on tour, and find that recordings, legitimate or not, are good advertising for their actual live concerts. I know I'd never have gone to see Umphrey's McGee, had I not first heard a few pirated songs on my brother's iPod.
And second, I, too, want to see the RIAA go down, but not because I want free or optional-payment music to take over. Rather, because I want DRM-free music with a higher percentage going straight to the artist. Taking the above example, the first of their concerts that I went to, I bought an album of that concert on the way out -- they actually had people burning CDs madly just after the concert. The second one, I was with a bunch of people, and we were in a hurry, so I waited, and bought it online -- for a bit less money, but I got full flac downloads, as fast as my fiber (at work) could go.
Based on these experiences, I can definitely say that the RIAA couldn't really do much for this band. I can also say that I would go to see them live again -- being a jam band, every concert is different, and it doesn't take an audiophile to tell you that while these recordings are pretty good (about as good as their studio recordings, I think), they're nothing compared to the real thing.
Now, that is just one band, but it's a relatively small band. And their label has a number of other small bands, as does the company which makes and sells the live recordings. In fact, if I thought I could do a better job, I could make my own recording.
Understand: Concert tickets are not free, and while they're certainly easy to pirate (being DRM-free), the official recordings are not free, either. None of it is "free as in beer". But this is how it should be done. No gigantic recording industry needed.
If another descendent of that abstract class is loaded then java has to stop doing that.
True enough. Now, what if it's not deterministic that this other class will be loaded, and in some cases, it's never loaded?
I am not necessarily arguing that the JVM, as written, is the best possible example of runtime optimization, but I do think it's possible to do it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends how you measure efficiency, but yes. (Also depends how you define "framework".)
I'm sure someone could write a book -- I haven't got the experience, but someone -- which covered all the possibilities here. Fact is, this is actually something you want to do your best to translate into numbers, and then have a manager look it over and make the call.
The kinds of questions you want to ask are:
You could fill a book with questions like this, analysis, etc -- it's really a bunch of boring business stuff. And it's going to be very different based on what the framework is, what your project is, the lifespan of your project, etc.
For example: I just finished porting a simple corporate website (and a blog) from an old, contractor-hacked version of a blogging engine to a shiny new one. In the process, I tried to avoid touching the actual engine itself, rather adding our skin as a theme, and adapting the site to the features the engine had, rather than the other way around.
Say what you will, but it took the contractors months to make those modifications, and it took me about a week to port what I saved of their stuff over to the new engine. The old site was buggy as hell, probably because of the contractor modifications. The new one actually works.
Now, a few jobs ago, I was working at a company which had a fairly large .NET app, which had SQL injection vulnerabilities all over the place, and was not fun to maintain. But we did anyway, because it was a big app, and we'd lose money anytime it went down, and so on. Maintenance may have been a pain, but a ground-up rewrite was just not feasible, as much as it was needed.
And then there was the odd job I did -- a single server (an old, retired computer) which sits in a corner, whose sole purpose is to run a single app once every three months. I hacked it together as an AJAX app before I really knew JavaScript, with an ugly, hackish backend, horrible limitations, etc. But it allows one person to do in 20 minutes to an hour what used to take two people more like five hours or more, and allows reports to be sent via email, rather than printed out. And it's only run once every three months, so as much as I would like to patch it up now that I know better, it's not worth it -- it's good enough, and no new features are really needed.
I'm curious -- why?
The best answer anyone ever gave me was that whitespace can be nuked by pasting in places like Slashdot, which tend to trim whitespace. But that's like not wanting to use XML because some forums don't like angle brackets. Seems like a perverse reason to me.
Of course, there's another possible answer: Write a preprocessor.
Myself, I'm happy with Ruby, and Rails, and Merb/Camping/etc if I need them. The one thing I wish I didn't have to do is write all those "end" statements -- it's not DRY, I'm already indenting anyway.
I wonder, too, and it does often piss me off, but the fact is, it filled a need, and it forced people to think differently about how to develop web frameworks (and applications). In other words, it was going to happen, whether or not the technology was ready -- and Ruby is a lot better now because of it.
It's the 80/20 rule. But that's disingenuous; I can do whatever SQL I want, for the very few cases where you need custom SQL. The Rails catchphrase, "convention over configuration", isn't really accurate -- what it really means is "there are sane defaults, so you can do the common things quickly and easily, but the configuration is there if you need it." Compare to Java, where you can end up with more XML configuration than code for an ORM...
There are still things I hate very much about Rails, and I did stay away for a long time because of the buzz. Let it get to a certain amount of hype, and nothing can live up to that -- but it is useful, hyped or not.
May be a troll, but it is often true.
Example: The App Zapper. Yes, Apple forgot to include an uninstaller with their OS, or a standard way for app developers to include one. No, dragging the app to the Trash doesn't quite "uninstall". And yes, that is a shareware model.
Yes, a shareware model. In 2008. For essential system software.
Now, the app store here does allow free downloads, so it's not exactly relevant to this article, but I can see why there would be confusion.
I'm not. It's still an Apple-controlled portal.
Wake me up when I can just give users a download, from my website, either directly to their iPhone or through iTunes.
I'm not sure if you're saying this sarcastically/ironically, but no, they don't need those protections. They don't need them any more than they needed "protection" against VCRs.
In fact, I could point to numerous examples of things which are being released over the Internet, without copy protection, some without even demanding payment, and are doing quite well. None are blockbusters, of course -- blockbusters require a huge investment up front, and are why we need "the studios" -- but some are quite good, and especially in music, I think they show that this is possible.
If you mean, alternatives to piracy, I have a fairly simple formula:
New things which I don't know anything about, I'll often pirate first, to see if they're worth my while. Occasionally I come across something like Firefly, for which I'm willing to stretch the rules a bit, and buy some DRM'd DVDs, secure in the knowledge that I'll be able to rip it and archive it, either on hard drives or on a lot of DVD-Rs. And occasionally, I come across something like Umphrey's McGee or Sanctuary, which I can buy as a DRM-free download, and which I will buy for no other reason than to support the concept of DRM-free content.
The more legit way this would work is, I could rent movies, and buy the ones I really like. But for each one, I'd have to be cracking the DRM constantly (which is illegal), and the rentals are more of a hassle than BitTorrent, whether or not I intend to keep a copy. I would pay rental prices ($2/movie or so) to get slightly better quality than the average torrent, and to have them seeded by something like Amazon's S3 -- if anyone were offering such a thing. And for some things, I would (and do) pay as much for a DRM-free, high-quality digital copy as I would for a physical version.
To be fair, without those sports celebrities, those developing the hardware, software, and networks would get precisely $0/year.
And hitting that ball with that stick isn't easy. Maybe you should be out there, too?
There is one thing I find backwards, though: Why should the actor be paid 42 bazillion dollars, but the writers get no special treatment? Why is it the actors, and occasionally directors, become household names, but no one has a clue who the writers were? Raise your hand if you thought much about Hollywood writers before the writer's strike.
As much as I like watching Summer Glau, Jewel State, Nathon Filion, etc, I'd consider myself to be a Joss Whedon fan rather than a Ron Glass fan.
In the theater in our small town, they're still like $6.50 for an adult ticket. I'd be very curious to know how much the theater gets to keep.
At the same time, the job of a theater is basically to have a big room and a projector. It's kind of like your friend who has the big-screen TV. I'm sure there's upkeep, and of course the employees have to be paid, but it's not a case where I feel like they deserve huge margins.
From that page:
And I do tend to agree with that. Ultimately, there are enough reasons keeping me on Linux (vs FreeBSD) that as long as there isn't that huge gap (seen in the graph linked to), I don't really care that much about whatever's left.
Nor am I particularly loyal to Linux. I understand and respect the GPL, but if there was another sufficiently open OS that beat Linux in ways I care about, I'd probably be using it, at least at home.
Actually, what I remember is a bit different: Postgres supports transactions. MySQL's default MyISAM does not, and is thus faster.
Personally, I prefer correctness to speed -- and I also seem to remember that Postgres was always faster than MySQL's InnoDB.
Yep. Thanks, Linus, for dropping the pluggable schedulers in favor of The One Scheduler...
Read The Fucking Summary. Thank you.
Or, if you still don't get it: The laws have been proposed, not passed. There's still the chance that parliament will figure out the implications and reject the law, in favor of sanity.
They have been for years. Did you just now notice this? Or are you stating this for the benefit of the few people who don't know? (Obviously, that would include some fairly wealthy people... or people with ulterior motives.)
Seems to me, based on an uneducated guess, that it would sometimes perform better, and sometimes just as well as, it would have without the runtime optimizations -- and only very occasionally would it perform much worse. After all, how many times will that "other class" be loaded and unloaded? If the answer is "a lot", wouldn't the pattern of loading/unloading be noticed by the runtime, and optimized for?
And occasionally performing much worse, while unacceptable for some applications, is also one approach to garbage collection that works quite well in practice. And garbage collection is another place where it seems to be worth it not to worry about yourself.
Actually, it was piss-poor, for awhile, just not enough people noticed or cared. Even then, dynamic range compression had killed enough of it.
Perhaps, but consider also that it's not generally possible to buy just one or two episodes of a TV show you want to try out, unless you're already subscribed.
Neither was YouTube, or Napster, before they happened.
One more parallel: We're getting more and more mobile devices on which we can watch movies. This means that anyone who wants to watch a movie -- or a TV show, or any other video clip -- on their iPhone, or PSP, etc, already has a copy in their computer. Same with the early mp3 players.
Oh, and of course, piracy is beating the studios to it.
The same is arguably true of firmware. A bug in firmware can have potentially disastrous effects, you never know what it might do to running code. Depending on the device, it could affect the memory space just as easily.
Of course, it depends how far you're willing to take this, as hardware itself can have bugs, or simply be faulty. And I agree that binary blobs are bad. I'm just not sure how to define the difference clearly.
While I agree, it's really not entirely the case with NDISwrapper. They do support OS X binary blobs, and I did get wireless networking going on my Powerbook (32-bit PPC) by the same method.
The real question is, why should we accept binary blobs at all?
And the answer is, we shouldn't, but we will anyway, because they get the job done. Just like kernel development ran on BitKeeper until it was revoked, forcing them to write Git, we'll continue to use the closed nVidia drivers until we can't anymore, because that's human nature.
If your kernel isn't tainted, and you can provide all source, you are more likely to get help than if it's proprietary.
The other point to consider is: If you are running, say, nVidia drivers, then most of your kernel problems should really be reported to nVidia, as we have no idea what the fsck they're doing inside your kernel. Compare this to the open Intel drivers -- not only do we know what they do, but the kernel developers will actually maintain them, and make sure they continue to work with new versions of the kernel.
My Konqueror passes Acid2, and crashes instantly on Acid3.
I'm told Webkit fares better -- can't wait for a Webkit-powered Konqueror.
I've never gotten a message from their own AIM bots, and in Kopete, as in every single other IM client I've used, it's possible to simply collapse groups (and forget about them).
So what, exactly, is the problem? (Or is there something I'm missing?)
Well, two things:
First, many artists make enough on tour, and find that recordings, legitimate or not, are good advertising for their actual live concerts. I know I'd never have gone to see Umphrey's McGee, had I not first heard a few pirated songs on my brother's iPod.
And second, I, too, want to see the RIAA go down, but not because I want free or optional-payment music to take over. Rather, because I want DRM-free music with a higher percentage going straight to the artist. Taking the above example, the first of their concerts that I went to, I bought an album of that concert on the way out -- they actually had people burning CDs madly just after the concert. The second one, I was with a bunch of people, and we were in a hurry, so I waited, and bought it online -- for a bit less money, but I got full flac downloads, as fast as my fiber (at work) could go.
Based on these experiences, I can definitely say that the RIAA couldn't really do much for this band. I can also say that I would go to see them live again -- being a jam band, every concert is different, and it doesn't take an audiophile to tell you that while these recordings are pretty good (about as good as their studio recordings, I think), they're nothing compared to the real thing.
Now, that is just one band, but it's a relatively small band. And their label has a number of other small bands, as does the company which makes and sells the live recordings. In fact, if I thought I could do a better job, I could make my own recording.
Understand: Concert tickets are not free, and while they're certainly easy to pirate (being DRM-free), the official recordings are not free, either. None of it is "free as in beer". But this is how it should be done. No gigantic recording industry needed.
Does Java not encourage .jsp extensions?
I do agree that it's a deeply flawed methodology, but I couldn't find a better one -- and I figured it was better than "anonymous coward says so".
As for the rest of the post, looks like it's been modded flamebait, which is probably appropriate.
True enough. Now, what if it's not deterministic that this other class will be loaded, and in some cases, it's never loaded?
I am not necessarily arguing that the JVM, as written, is the best possible example of runtime optimization, but I do think it's possible to do it right.
If Hillary gets the nomination, I will write in Obama.
Of all the candidates I've bothered to research, I figure I may as well vote for one I can believe in, rather than against one I hate.
Actually, he might be dealing with more urgent issues -- not that it would make much difference.