Communism basically suggests an even share of the community for everyone, socialism contraststs this by offering shares in proportion to the effort put into the comunity.
Using that definition, RMS's views are more communist than socialist, because he wants everyone to have equal access to all software, regardless of how much they contribute. The big problem with free software and open source (IMHO) is that it makes it very easy for freeloaders to get by, but very difficult for people who actually contribute something to get rewarded for their work.
I don't see the problem. Money is the necessary evil in this case (just as in almost all cases). If Namesys can get the money, then good for them.
My point is that this is a business model that requires that there be "suckers", because no-one with a clue would be willing to pay for the service, since they could just wait for some other sucker to come along, and then freeload.
Well, one of my housemates is from the Bay Area; her theory is that the large numbers of CS-heavy schools (Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford, several of the other UC-* schools) and the nice climate are what does it. Incidentally, both of her parents own startups.:)
Well, I'm in the bay area. The vast majority of the people here aren't from the local area, myself included. More than 50% are from either India, China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Most of the rest are from other parts of the US, Canada, Europe, or Australia. Where I work, I know only one person who's actually from California. I can only think of a few people here who went to a local school.
I think it just has to do with popularity. VCs think the bay area is "cool", so they're willing to invest millions in eUselessStuff.com from Palo Alto, but they won't spend a dime on Actually Useful Technology Inc. from somewhere on the east coast.
But this business model is fucked because the pressure is on to not incorporate features his team can charge for further down the road.
Not only that, but there's also the issue of one customer paying for a feature that could potentially benefit many. Is it really right for that one person to have to bear the entire cost? Wouldn't it be more fair if all of the people who were to benefit from the feature paid for its development, proportionately to how much they benefited from it? That doesn't sound very much like open source though...
I'm really quite suprised that more US companies are not establishing development shops in economically disadvantaged places.
Even ignoring economically disadvantaged places, why do so many high-tech companies feel the urge to set up shop in places like sillicon valley, where rent is hideously expensive, and so employees need to be paid more, just to cover living expenses? Part of the answer to both questions is probably that startups, at least, can't get funding if they try to set-up somewhere that isn't considered "cool" by VCs.
As for big companies, a lot of them do have development offices overseas. They just don't really advertise the fact.
2:Microsoft has open API's. Ever read msdn.microsoft.com? Didn't think so.
It's a well known fact that Microsoft's applications call undocumented functions in Windows. And were you asleep during the whole Kerberos fiasco?
BTW, since msdn.microsoft.com is so useful, tell me where I can find the spec for the CAB file format. And I don't mean source code that can only ever compile on Windows because it calls special CAB-generating Win32 functions, unless you can tell me where the exact operation of said functions is documented precisely enough that one could reimplement them on a non-Windows platform.
Re:Depends on what kind of anime you like...
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 1
That's funny. Our tastes seem to be almost identical. I was going to mention Key the Metal Idol and Wings of Honneamise as well, and almost everything else you listed I agree with too, except...
Heroic Legend of Arslan (Cross the Lord of the Rings characters with Akira Kurasawa and get a good medieval yarn.)
I found this to be insufferably boring. Of course, I felt the same way about The Hobbit, so your comparison to Tolkien is probably accurate.
Record of Lodoss War (The OVAs are what D&D was meant to be, and the TV series is good apart from the annoying ending segments.)
I actually thought the end-segments were funny. Oh well.
Record of Lodoss War (very D&D-ish, but an interesting group of adventurers)
It also has that cool "second part" to each episode. The second part has the same characters as the real story, but they're drawn SD-style, and the story line is often a parody of the real story.
I'm still wondering how the puns managed to translate into English...
IMO , that kind of "feature" is useless to get some work done. It should be implemanted on the application level - ie only a few apps need ta have alpha channel things like the Gimp or some games. The only people really interested are Hardware vendors, one more occasion to upgrade the CPU and/or the Graphic card.....
Actually, many GUI applications could potentially make use of this. Think anti-aliased text, or PNG's that actually work correctly in web-browsers. You say that applications that need it should be the ones to implement it. Well what about other features of the windowing system, like line drawing? By having this in the windowing system, there's one piece of code to debug, optimize, and make hardware specific versions of. If each application has to support alpha-transparency on its own, then we'll never get to make use of hardware-based alpha-composition. Do you really want to see the day when GIMP runs better on Win32 than on Linux?
And your performance claims make no sense. Just adding alpha transparency to the windowing system doesn't mean every widget would have to use it. Widgets that don't need it wouldn't use it, or would have it as an option. There wouldn't be any significant performance degradation for widgets that don't use it. Widgets that do need it can make use of it, and less developers will need to reinvent the wheel by writing their own alpha-composition code.
So basically, all these years that I have been building web applications I have been hosing this man's patent without ever even being aware of it? How can he claim control of procedures developed independently of him with no fore-knowledge of his supposed technical advances?
I've said it before, and I'll sy it again. The problem with patents is not that the USPTO grants "obvious" patents, or patents where there is clearly prior art. The problem is that patents can make something illegal even if you don't know of the patent's existance. That's the way all patents work, and that's why I think they're evil. They essentially say "even if you come up with this idea on your own, you're not allowed to use it". (Copyright, on the other hand, only applies to actually copying the original work, not independently developing something similar, hence I think copyright is okay.)
But hey- they just 'neutralized' the comments- that means they balanced them out right? I mean there must have been tons of positive user comments as well right?
There are a few positive comments (4) scattered among the 149 neutrals, so it looks like only negative comments were neutralized.
The funny thing is, if you look at the supposedly positive comments (look for "Praise"), three of them are actually negative comments as well. (I'm guessing the posters either accidentally chose positive, or chose positive fearing that their comment would be deleted otherwise) The only genuinely positive comment is:
User: socketware (18) (not a registered user) Date: Dec-21-99 00:54:41 PST
Praise: Got back to me after ending auction and set things right. Thanks for the help!
And even that seems pretty borderline... One can only imagine how they "set things right".
It doesn't, of course. But the problem there is not the concept of the IDE.
I've already said I have nothing against IDE's per se. It's just that none of the existing ones meet my requirements. Multi-platform and multi-lnguage support are some of my requirements.
What you are missing is the ease with which a good IDE will do much of that stuff. Visual C++ will tell you the parameter info of a function in a tooltip if you just position the mouse over it. It will put the same tooltip info up as you type parameters. Without any user interaction. It will give you a list of member functions to selection from if you type in a class instance and the '.' or '->'. Again, without any user interaction.
Yes, you can get the same information with VIM. But you can't get it as easily, or as transparently.
This isn't a feature that requires an IDE. It could be implemented just as well in a stand-alone text editor. And while VIM doesn't support this particular feature, it does support loads of other features that Visual C++'s editor doesn't support. And what if I work with Java, or Python, or some other programming language? What if I need to look up a UNIX-specific function's signature? Will any of these features work? I don't do much Win32-specific C++ programming, so I fear most of VC++'s features will be of little use to me.
And the non-editting features of Visual C++ (project management, build management) simply won't work with my project, a minor feature like tooltips aren't particularly compelling, especially since I can use ctags to practically the same result, albeit in a slightly less "transparent" way... ^]yy^Tp
At least these problems can be remedied in this case. I can't imagine adding you're favourite vi keybindings is going to need a CS degree. It's already xp and the language, I'm sure, can be altered or added to.
Many IDE's aren't even configurable enough to even allow the setting of complicated keybindings. Trying to force a non-modal editor to behave modal like vi would be a huge pain. There's also a lot more I like about my editor than keybindings. Trying to emulate my favorite editor in some other editor will always be a game of catch-up (much like GUI skins that try to emulate the native look and feel).
This sounds like an interesting point, could you explain a little further. Do you mean Delphi-like coordinates on forms vs. Java Swing layout components?
Yes, essentially. Java isn't unique in supporting layout management though. There are numerous problems with not using layout managers. The fact that most GUI builders don't let you use a layout manager makes them useless for real applications.
Again, this isn't a problem that has to exist. It's possible to make a GUI builder that supports layout management. Most of the existing GUI builders don't though. And the fact that most IDE's are closed (ie: don't let you pick and choose your components) means that you've got to find an IDE that not only has a proper GUI builder, but also has an editor you like, works on all of the platforms you support, supports all of the languages you use, and can deal with a huge number of source files. Combine that with the fact that each developer has their own favorite editor, and you've got a serious problem.
Visual C++ will automatically find where a variable is defined.
I can do that in VIM with ctags and cscope.
it will allow me to add files to a project with a mouse click instead of a makefile edit.
We've got scripts that will automatically generate makefiles based on where you put files in the filesystem. Once set up, you just create the new source file, and it's totally automatic. With an IDE, you lose flexibility. Suppose some of my C files are generated with some new tool? Then what do I do? And how does Visual C++ help me when I need to build the project on Linux or Solaris? If I have to write makefiles for one platform, I may as well just write reasonably portable makefiles, and use them on all platforms.
It will tell me what modules call the symbol I've highlited.
That can be done with cscope, or find|nm|grep. Incidently, how well does this work in Visual C++ when you have over 6000 source files?
It will show me the header comment attached to the function call I've highlited.
That can be done with ctags or cscope.
Some of the features you've mentioned are useful, but they don't need to be in an IDE. With a good editor I can add additional features that suit me.
With typical IDEs I have to change my work habits to suit the whims of the IDE developers, because the typical IDE is closed and has limited configurability. I prefer to choose the right tool for each individual task.
Also, some of the features you mention simply don't work unless you use the IDE for your project management. IDEs tend to be flakey for dealing with large multi-developer projects, and also bound to a particular platform and/or language, so that isn't a viable option for multi-platform multi-language projects. (by multi-language I mean implemented in multiple programming languages)
For me, I'd have to say being able to click on an identifier, press a keyboard shortcut, and get help on the identifier (what header file to include, etc.) is the biggest reason I use an IDE. I dunno, can you do that with emacs/vi?
I actually use VIM, not plain old vi. In VIM you can hit 'K' to do a "keyword lookup". By default this runs man on the keyword, but you can override that behaviour. The default works fairly well for standard C functions on a properly configured UNIX system. I don't use Emacs, but I suspect it supports something similar. I know Emacs also has an integrated "info" viewer for people who like that sort of thing... (I hate info myself)
You can also do a "ctags" lookup by hitting '^]' (ctrl-]) on a word. That's incredibly useful for internal functions (where often the only documentation is the inline comments). Plain vi supports ctags as well, and Emacs also has tags support. Both VIM and Emacs also have cscope support. (cscope is somewhat like ctags, but with multiple search types)
The best part about powerful programmer's editors like VIM and Emacs is that they're incredibly customizable. If your company/project has coding guidelines, you can often adjust settings or make mappings/bindings that encourage you to follow the guidelines. If there's some task you have to do over and over again, you can automate it. VIM lets you choose from it's own internal language (think "sed on steroids"), Python, Perl, and TCL. Emacs has elisp. Both can also easily call out to external programs.
I like IDEs cause they help you do a lot of the little things that make coding go quicker - auto indenting, parens matching, debugging, etc.
Most decent editors (like VIM or Emacs) have auto-indenting and parens matching. In fact, for virtually any editor feature you can think of, I'll bet that the stand-alone editors do at least as good a job, and in most cases a significantly better job, than most of the IDE's (debugging is not an editor feature). That's one of the main reasons I don't use an IDE. IDE's tend to have crappy editors. (that, and I have yet to see a compelling feature that would make me actually want to use an IDE. A "compile" button isn't a compelling feature...)
You must be a college student or probably just learned how to program. An IDE is a tool, that may simplify certain tasks in certain environments.
That's a pretty inflamatory remark. I'm not a college student, and I've been progrmming for over 15 years, yet I tend to agree with the original poster. At every company I've worked at, almost no-one used IDE's because most state of the art IDE's suck. Virtully all existing IDE's are a crappy note-pad like editor with a "compile" button, a cheesy GUI builder, and a lame excuse for project management.
If the question is "Do you consider an IDE useful?", the answer is definitely yes. All it takes is trying to manage a project with 20 - 50 files each with a 1000 or more lines of code to quickly turn one against bare bones editors and towards IDEs.
Explain how increasing the number of files makes an IDE more useful? The project management features of most IDEs are a joke. The project I'm working on has over 6000 source files. We don't use an IDE. We use a revision control system for managing our files, and tools like ctags and cscope for finding things. How would an IDE help us? Oh, and did I mention that our source files are in at least 6 different languages?
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against IDE's per se. It's just that every IDE I've ever seen has had a bunch of annoying problems. They tend to be difficult or impossible to extend, they don't let you use your favorite editor, they're not cross-platform, and they're usually tied to a particular language. The vast vajority of GUI editors also suck big time, because almost all of them use coordinate placement of components (instead of proper geometry/layout management).
An IDE is a tool. But trying to build real software with today's IDE's is like trying to build a house with tools like these. If a better IDE comes along, I might start using it. But today I'll stick with bash and VIM as my development environment.
...Larry will be touting that week's flavor of Network Computer...
Ever notice that Microsoft's "DNA" looks a heck of a lot like Oracle's "Network Computer Architecture" (NCA)? Except, everything is Windows-ized, of course...
Also, I know that most flash devices have a limited number of writes they can perform before failure (a large number, I'll admit). Is this a worry with this technology or not?
Did you read the article? Right next to the pretty graph it says:
"Further, Flash memory 'wears out' (fails) after 100,000 write cycles, while the OUM memory state can be written more than 10 trillion times..."
Slashdot Mirror
Communism basically suggests an even share of the community for everyone, socialism contraststs this by offering shares in proportion to the effort put into the comunity.
Using that definition, RMS's views are more communist than socialist, because he wants everyone to have equal access to all software, regardless of how much they contribute. The big problem with free software and open source (IMHO) is that it makes it very easy for freeloaders to get by, but very difficult for people who actually contribute something to get rewarded for their work.
I don't see the problem. Money is the necessary evil in this case (just as in almost all cases). If Namesys can get the money, then good for them.
My point is that this is a business model that requires that there be "suckers", because no-one with a clue would be willing to pay for the service, since they could just wait for some other sucker to come along, and then freeload.
Well, one of my housemates is from the Bay Area; her theory is that the large numbers of CS-heavy schools (Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford, several of the other UC-* schools) and the nice climate are what does it. Incidentally, both of her parents own startups. :)
Well, I'm in the bay area. The vast majority of the people here aren't from the local area, myself included. More than 50% are from either India, China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Most of the rest are from other parts of the US, Canada, Europe, or Australia. Where I work, I know only one person who's actually from California. I can only think of a few people here who went to a local school.
I think it just has to do with popularity. VCs think the bay area is "cool", so they're willing to invest millions in eUselessStuff.com from Palo Alto, but they won't spend a dime on Actually Useful Technology Inc. from somewhere on the east coast.
But this business model is fucked because the pressure is on to not incorporate features his team can charge for further down the road.
Not only that, but there's also the issue of one customer paying for a feature that could potentially benefit many. Is it really right for that one person to have to bear the entire cost? Wouldn't it be more fair if all of the people who were to benefit from the feature paid for its development, proportionately to how much they benefited from it? That doesn't sound very much like open source though...
I'm really quite suprised that more US companies are not establishing development shops in economically disadvantaged places.
Even ignoring economically disadvantaged places, why do so many high-tech companies feel the urge to set up shop in places like sillicon valley, where rent is hideously expensive, and so employees need to be paid more, just to cover living expenses? Part of the answer to both questions is probably that startups, at least, can't get funding if they try to set-up somewhere that isn't considered "cool" by VCs.
As for big companies, a lot of them do have development offices overseas. They just don't really advertise the fact.
The "Kerberos Fiasco" has nothing to do with open APIs. You must be a complete moron.
There's a vanishingly thin line between APIs, protocols and file formats. Any non-moron would know this.
2:Microsoft has open API's. Ever read msdn.microsoft.com? Didn't think so.
It's a well known fact that Microsoft's applications call undocumented functions in Windows. And were you asleep during the whole Kerberos fiasco?
BTW, since msdn.microsoft.com is so useful, tell me where I can find the spec for the CAB file format. And I don't mean source code that can only ever compile on Windows because it calls special CAB-generating Win32 functions, unless you can tell me where the exact operation of said functions is documented precisely enough that one could reimplement them on a non-Windows platform.
That's funny. Our tastes seem to be almost identical. I was going to mention Key the Metal Idol and Wings of Honneamise as well, and almost everything else you listed I agree with too, except...
Heroic Legend of Arslan (Cross the Lord of the Rings characters with Akira Kurasawa and get a good medieval yarn.)
I found this to be insufferably boring. Of course, I felt the same way about The Hobbit, so your comparison to Tolkien is probably accurate.
Record of Lodoss War (The OVAs are what D&D was meant to be, and the TV series is good apart from the annoying ending segments.)
I actually thought the end-segments were funny. Oh well.
P-P-Parn!
The great thing is, you can pick sub, or dub (in 4 different languages) on the same disc, and even flip on the fly.
When I first heard about DVD's support for multiple audio channels and optional subtitles, I immediately thought "the perfect anime format"...
In the interest of filling in the fourth quad, is it possible to have it subbed and dubbed simultaneously?
Record of Lodoss War (very D&D-ish, but an interesting group of adventurers)
It also has that cool "second part" to each episode. The second part has the same characters as the real story, but they're drawn SD-style, and the story line is often a parody of the real story.
I'm still wondering how the puns managed to translate into English...
I remembered a really cool anthology which hasn't been mentioned here, Robot Carnival.
And it had a pretty cool title sequence too, from what I remember...
IMO , that kind of "feature" is useless to get some work done. It should be implemanted on the application level - ie only a few apps need ta have alpha channel things like the Gimp or some games. The only people really interested are Hardware vendors, one more occasion to upgrade the CPU and/or the Graphic card .....
Actually, many GUI applications could potentially make use of this. Think anti-aliased text, or PNG's that actually work correctly in web-browsers. You say that applications that need it should be the ones to implement it. Well what about other features of the windowing system, like line drawing? By having this in the windowing system, there's one piece of code to debug, optimize, and make hardware specific versions of. If each application has to support alpha-transparency on its own, then we'll never get to make use of hardware-based alpha-composition. Do you really want to see the day when GIMP runs better on Win32 than on Linux?
And your performance claims make no sense. Just adding alpha transparency to the windowing system doesn't mean every widget would have to use it. Widgets that don't need it wouldn't use it, or would have it as an option. There wouldn't be any significant performance degradation for widgets that don't use it. Widgets that do need it can make use of it, and less developers will need to reinvent the wheel by writing their own alpha-composition code.
FYI: slashdot and every portol and just about every major ISP uses GET or POST.
Every time you type an HTTP URL into your browser it does an HTTP GET...
So basically, all these years that I have been building web applications I have been hosing this man's patent without ever even being aware of it? How can he claim control of procedures developed independently of him with no fore-knowledge of his supposed technical advances?
I've said it before, and I'll sy it again. The problem with patents is not that the USPTO grants "obvious" patents, or patents where there is clearly prior art. The problem is that patents can make something illegal even if you don't know of the patent's existance. That's the way all patents work, and that's why I think they're evil. They essentially say "even if you come up with this idea on your own, you're not allowed to use it". (Copyright, on the other hand, only applies to actually copying the original work, not independently developing something similar, hence I think copyright is okay.)
There are a few positive comments (4) scattered among the 149 neutrals, so it looks like only negative comments were neutralized.
The funny thing is, if you look at the supposedly positive comments (look for "Praise"), three of them are actually negative comments as well. (I'm guessing the posters either accidentally chose positive, or chose positive fearing that their comment would be deleted otherwise) The only genuinely positive comment is:
And even that seems pretty borderline... One can only imagine how they "set things right".
It doesn't, of course. But the problem there is not the concept of the IDE.
I've already said I have nothing against IDE's per se. It's just that none of the existing ones meet my requirements. Multi-platform and multi-lnguage support are some of my requirements.
What you are missing is the ease with which a good IDE will do much of that stuff. Visual C++ will tell you the parameter info of a function in a tooltip if you just position the mouse over it. It will put the same tooltip info up as you type parameters. Without any user interaction. It will give you a list of member functions to selection from if you type in a class instance and the '.' or '->'. Again, without any user interaction.
Yes, you can get the same information with VIM. But you can't get it as easily, or as transparently.
This isn't a feature that requires an IDE. It could be implemented just as well in a stand-alone text editor. And while VIM doesn't support this particular feature, it does support loads of other features that Visual C++'s editor doesn't support. And what if I work with Java, or Python, or some other programming language? What if I need to look up a UNIX-specific function's signature? Will any of these features work? I don't do much Win32-specific C++ programming, so I fear most of VC++'s features will be of little use to me.
And the non-editting features of Visual C++ (project management, build management) simply won't work with my project, a minor feature like tooltips aren't particularly compelling, especially since I can use ctags to practically the same result, albeit in a slightly less "transparent" way... ^]yy^Tp
At least these problems can be remedied in this case. I can't imagine adding you're favourite vi keybindings is going to need a CS degree. It's already xp and the language, I'm sure, can be altered or added to.
Many IDE's aren't even configurable enough to even allow the setting of complicated keybindings. Trying to force a non-modal editor to behave modal like vi would be a huge pain. There's also a lot more I like about my editor than keybindings. Trying to emulate my favorite editor in some other editor will always be a game of catch-up (much like GUI skins that try to emulate the native look and feel).
This sounds like an interesting point, could you explain a little further. Do you mean Delphi-like coordinates on forms vs. Java Swing layout components?
Yes, essentially. Java isn't unique in supporting layout management though. There are numerous problems with not using layout managers. The fact that most GUI builders don't let you use a layout manager makes them useless for real applications.
Again, this isn't a problem that has to exist. It's possible to make a GUI builder that supports layout management. Most of the existing GUI builders don't though. And the fact that most IDE's are closed (ie: don't let you pick and choose your components) means that you've got to find an IDE that not only has a proper GUI builder, but also has an editor you like, works on all of the platforms you support, supports all of the languages you use, and can deal with a huge number of source files. Combine that with the fact that each developer has their own favorite editor, and you've got a serious problem.
Visual C++ will automatically find where a variable is defined.
I can do that in VIM with ctags and cscope.
it will allow me to add files to a project with a mouse click instead of a makefile edit.
We've got scripts that will automatically generate makefiles based on where you put files in the filesystem. Once set up, you just create the new source file, and it's totally automatic. With an IDE, you lose flexibility. Suppose some of my C files are generated with some new tool? Then what do I do? And how does Visual C++ help me when I need to build the project on Linux or Solaris? If I have to write makefiles for one platform, I may as well just write reasonably portable makefiles, and use them on all platforms.
It will tell me what modules call the symbol I've highlited.
That can be done with cscope, or find|nm|grep. Incidently, how well does this work in Visual C++ when you have over 6000 source files?
It will show me the header comment attached to the function call I've highlited.
That can be done with ctags or cscope.
Some of the features you've mentioned are useful, but they don't need to be in an IDE. With a good editor I can add additional features that suit me.
With typical IDEs I have to change my work habits to suit the whims of the IDE developers, because the typical IDE is closed and has limited configurability. I prefer to choose the right tool for each individual task.
Also, some of the features you mention simply don't work unless you use the IDE for your project management. IDEs tend to be flakey for dealing with large multi-developer projects, and also bound to a particular platform and/or language, so that isn't a viable option for multi-platform multi-language projects. (by multi-language I mean implemented in multiple programming languages)
For me, I'd have to say being able to click on an identifier, press a keyboard shortcut, and get help on the identifier (what header file to include, etc.) is the biggest reason I use an IDE. I dunno, can you do that with emacs/vi?
I actually use VIM, not plain old vi. In VIM you can hit 'K' to do a "keyword lookup". By default this runs man on the keyword, but you can override that behaviour. The default works fairly well for standard C functions on a properly configured UNIX system. I don't use Emacs, but I suspect it supports something similar. I know Emacs also has an integrated "info" viewer for people who like that sort of thing... (I hate info myself)
You can also do a "ctags" lookup by hitting '^]' (ctrl-]) on a word. That's incredibly useful for internal functions (where often the only documentation is the inline comments). Plain vi supports ctags as well, and Emacs also has tags support. Both VIM and Emacs also have cscope support. (cscope is somewhat like ctags, but with multiple search types)
The best part about powerful programmer's editors like VIM and Emacs is that they're incredibly customizable. If your company/project has coding guidelines, you can often adjust settings or make mappings/bindings that encourage you to follow the guidelines. If there's some task you have to do over and over again, you can automate it. VIM lets you choose from it's own internal language (think "sed on steroids"), Python, Perl, and TCL. Emacs has elisp. Both can also easily call out to external programs.
I like IDEs cause they help you do a lot of the little things that make coding go quicker - auto indenting, parens matching, debugging, etc.
Most decent editors (like VIM or Emacs) have auto-indenting and parens matching. In fact, for virtually any editor feature you can think of, I'll bet that the stand-alone editors do at least as good a job, and in most cases a significantly better job, than most of the IDE's (debugging is not an editor feature). That's one of the main reasons I don't use an IDE. IDE's tend to have crappy editors. (that, and I have yet to see a compelling feature that would make me actually want to use an IDE. A "compile" button isn't a compelling feature...)
You must be a college student or probably just learned how to program. An IDE is a tool, that may simplify certain tasks in certain environments.
That's a pretty inflamatory remark. I'm not a college student, and I've been progrmming for over 15 years, yet I tend to agree with the original poster. At every company I've worked at, almost no-one used IDE's because most state of the art IDE's suck. Virtully all existing IDE's are a crappy note-pad like editor with a "compile" button, a cheesy GUI builder, and a lame excuse for project management.
If the question is "Do you consider an IDE useful?", the answer is definitely yes. All it takes is trying to manage a project with 20 - 50 files each with a 1000 or more lines of code to quickly turn one against bare bones editors and towards IDEs.
Explain how increasing the number of files makes an IDE more useful? The project management features of most IDEs are a joke. The project I'm working on has over 6000 source files. We don't use an IDE. We use a revision control system for managing our files, and tools like ctags and cscope for finding things. How would an IDE help us? Oh, and did I mention that our source files are in at least 6 different languages?
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against IDE's per se. It's just that every IDE I've ever seen has had a bunch of annoying problems. They tend to be difficult or impossible to extend, they don't let you use your favorite editor, they're not cross-platform, and they're usually tied to a particular language. The vast vajority of GUI editors also suck big time, because almost all of them use coordinate placement of components (instead of proper geometry/layout management).
An IDE is a tool. But trying to build real software with today's IDE's is like trying to build a house with tools like these. If a better IDE comes along, I might start using it. But today I'll stick with bash and VIM as my development environment.
...Larry will be touting that week's flavor of Network Computer...
Ever notice that Microsoft's "DNA" looks a heck of a lot like Oracle's "Network Computer Architecture" (NCA)? Except, everything is Windows-ized, of course...
Sun: As much as Larry Ellison wishes it was, Sun is not a monopoly.
Huh? I think You're confusing Ellison with McNealy. Ellison is the CEO of Oracle, not Sun.
Also, I know that most flash devices have a limited number of writes they can perform before failure (a large number, I'll admit). Is this a worry with this technology or not?
Did you read the article? Right next to the pretty graph it says:
"Further, Flash memory 'wears out' (fails) after 100,000 write cycles, while the OUM memory state can be written more than 10 trillion times..."
"Altos -- The curiously strong freshmaker"