Two unrelated: The first game system I got was an Atari 2600. This was in 1991 or thereabouts - I had an NES and eventually an SNES, but I never did catch up with the rest of the world until I got an N64 in 1998 or thereabouts.
Anyway, I think the Atari was just something my dad had in his closet and gave to me. My favorite games were probably Pitfall and Frogger.
The Atari ST is a bit of a different story. My dad bought it for doing computer-aided synthesizer work in the late 80's sometime. It eventually passed on to me, with that 30 MB hard drive. It had a text adventure game that we could never really do very well at, some game where you shot things at a bubble, and Daleks. (And BASIC.)
And, of course, the inevitable 486 with the Turbo button, and the shareware games. Oh, the shareware games! Commander Keen comes to mind, but there were tons of others. And wondering why our 230 MB HD was getting so full, and finding out that my family was recording 2 MB.wav files of my little brother singing and other such wasteful nonsense.
I remember having some Capsella! That stuff was pretty cool. I especially liked making things that floated.
I also recall FisherTechnik, which was really fun. I got one of the basic "Lots of pieces" sets when I was 9 or 10. I never did get into the upper levels of it, but it looked really exciting. Damned expensive, though. (It looks like now they don't even sell the plain set I had with lots of plain old bricks and gears and chains and stuff. They just sell the candy coated, 'applied' stuff.)
We have a backlog of Microsoft Works documents that could be traced back as much as 10 years. Unfortunately, these documents cannot be read by any version of Microsoft Office, or any later version of Microsoft Works, that I have tried. so to this day we borrow someone's copy of Microsoft Works 3.0 (ours is lost) every time we set up a new PC.
And, sadly, it wasn't until just recently, maybe the past year or two, that my dad was persuaded to stop making all of his new documents and databases in MS Works 3.0. (As an added bonus, I have gotten him to stop putting his documents in random locations around the hard drive, and start putting them in a folder on the desktop. He still refuses to use "My Documents" for any such purpose.)
Which is strange, because in 1999 I was making web applications that utilised hidden frames to post information to the server and return JavaScript arrays which I would then use to modify the limited parts of the DOM I had access to at that time. It worked in Netscape 3, Netscape 4, and IE 3 and IE 4.
Yup. Our company has a VERY old web application that makes minor use of this sort of thing, to fill dropdowns in a business application. Except, whoever wrote it used a pop-up window instead. Not quite as eleganet.
The ONLY thing that has been around for approx' a year is the utterly stupid name for it, "AJAX".
A simple solution would be to believe AJAX stands for "AJAX, Javascript And XmlHttpRequest." (This definition replaces 'asynchronous' with a specific mechanism, XmlHttpRequest, and drops XML.)
Even so, it could be interpreted in the same manner as LAMP. The operating system could be one of Linux, any BSD, Solaris, Darwin, or something else entirely. The web server could be Apache or a great many others. Database? MySQL, Postgres, Firebird, SQLite... Language/Platform? Oh, hell. So, the real representation would be/[LBSDW].[MPFS][PRMLS]/. Use your imagination on these. AJAX is the sameway; it is a mishmash of ideas and technologies, but a few lead the pack and represent what is going on.
But, maybe your RIA idea is better.:)
I have been working on a nice AJAX app for awhile now and the most tiring part of it (apart from cross-browser woes) is trying to explain what AJAX is.
Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts, let alone in capriciously using them to illustrate areas of concern.
That's perfect. It is a bad sign about Google's corporate culture that, as a search engine company with ad revenue, they don't think people should be able to find the information the search engine provides.
Do your developers/testers/whatevers have a choice of their own desktop/workstation OS, either as individuals or as teams? If so, do any of them choose Linux or another *nix as their primary system, or dual-boot?
(This brings to mind the chapter of "Dealers Of Lightning" about the Xerox Parc team trying to buy a DEC, when Xerox owned SDS.)
Advanced Unix Programming came out with a 2nd edition in 2004, and I was lucky enough to spot it in a Half Price Books here in Indy. This is very similar, in terms of upgraded content.
In particular, the test systems are the same between books. (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Darwin.) Both books have grown considerably to take on the growth of Unix and the various flavors.
Of course, AUP came out in 1985, so it had a little more turf to cover.
For those not familiar with AUP, it is a slightly different beast from APUE. It only covers Unix system calls in C categorically, whereas APUE covers a wider range of tasks and subjects within Unix.
Here is the problem: Existing programs are written knowing that deleted programs dissappear immediately. Therefore, since programs may be writing temporary files to/tmp or elsewhere, or even have their own backup systems, a garbage system with limited space could end up playing housekeeper for thousands of unused or redundant files, and few of the legitimate ones.
Yes, my solution only works for future use; but the system call solution breaks the expectancies of already written programs, and muddles the underlying straightforward filesystem and the expectations it creates.
And I agree, either a file-system snapshot or a well-integrated SCCS would work better.
I'd like a system library that would modify the rename(2), truncate(2), unlink(2), and write(2) calls to move the deleted stuff to some private directory (/.Trash,/.Recycler, whatever). Obviously the underlying routine would have to do its own garhage collection, deleting trash files by some FIFO or largest-older-first algorithm.
Why modify the system calls? Keep the system calls simple and orthogonal, so the kernel codebase stays small(er). Write this functionality in userland, starting wherever you are most likely to use it; if that is in programming tasks, write wrappers to the C calls to do this. If it is at the prompt, write a shell script. (Or an alias...) If multiple places, write it in the way that keeps it the most centralized. IMHO, this should have been standard 30 years ago, but there's no reason not to do it now.:)
As for the block-level mirroring matter, clearly if you need this sort of mirroring it should be done wherever block-level disk access is done. Still, I would object much less if the driver could live in userland. And I agree that my data-loss problems are minimally related to hard drive failure, and far less likely to fail than my home DSL connection.
Interestingly, the advertisement I saw just now was. "For the next two weeks you can steal Airopeek and EtherPeek."
The library here (Carmel, Indiana) has a similar problem, and so did the libraries at Purdue. Of course, in a library situation, you are supposed to be giving the books to whoever wants to read them. The problem is that you want the people to then bring them back. The books I want to look at or check out seem to always be mysteriously missing...
The community college's goal is to get you a job as soon as humanly possible, so they offer:[...]
A university is about a foundation of theoretical knowledge. You don't go to university to be trained for a job, you go to learn the knowledge to understand a field. Universities offer: [...]
I've seen this sort of comment all over this page. It is true for the most part, and it should be, but it is not necessarily the complete truth. In fact, in the almost-two years of university at a well respected CS department, we were expected to learn Java, C and C++ and a little bit of the 'theoretical' stuff including basic understanding of big O notation and some simple data structures. Basically, we were being educated so that we could go straight to Microsoft and get a job maintaining Word. There were rumors of a difficult class around the third year (compilers), but I dropped out and went home for other reasons.
Interesting. I scanned through a list of web pages and buzz-word dictionaries to get a set of words, then glued the words into an order than would appear to make sense.
Nonono, you proactively leveraged interactive datums and utilized them to cross-develop your synergistic information resources. You'lll never get anywhere if you talk all boring like that.
Is that really the best you can come up with? You need to have a poke through "The Dilbert Principle" and maybe try again, because I understood most of that and I know which parts are nonsense (And which parts are just bad management).
There is a pretty simple reason for that... The idea behind this naming scheme is credit given where credit is due. Linus and co. created Linux, GNU created the GNU stuff (gcc/bash/utils). Thus, GNU/Linux.
But the HURD is by GNU people, so you don't need to have any other credit given when you're mainly packaging it with the GNU tools.
Not that I call it GNU/Linux anyway. It cleaerly ought to be "GNUlix".
Good point... I think maybe what I was thinking, or trying to say, is don't go with a firm who believe in the One Great Platform and insist that everything else is crap. I work at a one-platform company myself, and we have done most of our work in ASP or ASP.NET, but we could handle J2EE or a LAMP application if one needed to be maintained or extended. But of course, ASP.NET is what we mainly offer our clients, because we have experience and structure there.
And, when I said $TECHNOLOGY, I was also referring to client-side stuff; such as if they insisted it should be done in Flash or Java applets or should be targeted at IE or anything like that. So, I was more trying to say, "Avoid OS/platform/language/editor fanboys", or something.:)
First, I don't see why it is important that a web application or web site be developed on a cross platform backend. The whole idea behind HTTP is that the web browser doesn't care whether the server at the other end is Windows or OpenBSD or Contiki. And I will say that, yes, if you program in PHP or Perl or use Zope, you can probably move back and forth between BSD and Linux and Solaris with impunity. Are you really going to be changing your server OS every few months? Even every few years? Universal portability of those things is a solution to a problem that hardly anyone has.
Second, If ASP.NET is supposed to be easy and has no depth, they forgot to tell me. And apparently, you've never used it, and don't know anything about it for a few different reasons:
1: It isn't actually locked to the Windows/IIS platform. System.Web is fully functional in Mono, and there is both a small reference web server (XSP) and an Apache module (mod_mono) that can be used to serve pages that are identical to those served under IIS. So ASP.NET pages are portable even though it isn't gravely important. (Of course, Mono itself doesn't run properly under BSD yet AFAIK; it runs under Linux, Windows and OS X.)
2: ASP.NET is not a 'lego bricks' platform with no depth. Despite the gripes I do have about it, it is remarkably cool in certain ways. Once you grok the event driven programming and OO model behind it, master databinding and figure out how to get it to do what you want, it is a great tool to have.
And your entire last paragraph is hogwash. You seem to be saying that the best programmers do it the hardest way on purpose. The opposite is true; only an idiot would intentionally do it the hardest, longest way. Are you seriously saying that companies should pay more for development firms to do it the longest and hardest way, on purpose because that means the programmers are smarter? Absolute bullshit.
Allow me to illustrate. This is like saying that you should have your portrait painted by a man who cut his own fingers off and paints with his feet, because it means he is more dedicated to painting. No, he is more dedicated to painting with his feet. If he really wanted to paint portraits, he would have kept his fingers, because that is what the damn fingers are for.
Lastly, I couldn't tell you about Tomcat specifically, but I just saw Jakarta Struts For Dummies at Borders the other day, so apparently the J2EE learning curve is not as steep as you would have us believe.
print is not the web. There's still this strange idea floating out there that print designers are interchangable with, or even superior to, web designers. The web is a whole different medium, and requires different skill sets. If they try to sell you on their print designers, it's a bad sign.
This is so true it makes me want to cry. In my case, it is even worse; we are doing the IMPLEMENTATION of a 'web design' being done by a print designer in a marketing firm that doesn't have any grip on good web design. Worse, this is a data-driven site that is expected to have an admin tool at some point, and involves some different technical details of things, and involves one HELL of a lot of magically turning Excel spreadsheets into normalize data.
(because I'd rather put a hot poker in my eye than work with ASP).
I hate to rake this over the coals, but are you referring to the old ASP, with VBScript and so forth? If so, I absolutely and completely agree that it is awful and not to be touched.
On the other hand, ASP.NET is a pretty cool system, as long as you know that the interactive parts just won't work it Links or NN 1.0 or the like. There are a lot of details in ASP.NET that I don't like, mostly having to do with the ASPX/ASCX format and use, and the god-awful web forms designer (ARGH) and other things having to do with CSS. BUT, the power of ASP.NET, the event-driven programming and ViewState and control hierarchy, make it a joy to use once you know what you are doing. C# is not bad either; I would rather be using Python or something, but at least I know where I stand. (Vs. VBScript)
And by the way, ASP.NET runs under Mono. I've run the ASP.NET demos on Mono under both Linux and Windows using XSP, and I'm sure mod_mono isn't much harder. Since the web forms designer is such a shame and I do everything in source anyway, this makes it all the more reasonable. I don't know about performance though.
Again, if you were just referring to the old ASP, I concur totally. I've worked with that stuff. Uuuugh.
As for which language, php, java, or asp.net, it doesn't matter as much as the quality of the programmer. A lot of things seem to take much less effort in php though.
I agree with the basic point - that language doesn't matter as much as the programmer - but to some degree, I think that it is important to know that the techonology being used is appropriate. PHP may be fine for some types of web sites, but the kind of thing I do (data-driven business/management applications) requires a lot of interactivity, and it would be hell to try to do all of that in PHP. (We currently use ASP.NET.)
Being easier to learn or simpler in some situations doesn't mean that the tool is better. An example would be using well-factored CSS versus using whatever mix of HTML and in-line styling gets the job done. One of these options makes the site design flexible and reworkable, and one of them will force you to do massive work to even change the color scheme.
My opinion with ASP.NET versus other techonologies is that power of the tool (ViewState and event driven programming, as well as DataBinding, just to name a few) more than justifies the learning curve and the development complexity. (I have a lot of gripes about ASP.NET, also, having to do with how MVC is handled and WHY THE HELL THERE ISN'T A WEB CONTROL THAT GENERATES UL/LI TAGS. Oh well.)
Also of interest are things like O/R Mappers. Sure, you have more control if you don't use them, and your grid is just a little loop with some copy-pasting action in there; but is it easily maintainable, and extensible, etc? How much time do you spend writing and maintaining SQL Code? It adds a layer of complexity, but ulimately saves you a lot of work. (I use LLBLGen Pro; things like Hibernate are similar.)
Anyway, like I said, I agree with the basic point that people are more important than technology used, but I have a different viewpoint on how technologies should be chosen and used. YMMMV.
I think the best thing you can do for your company would be to get a tour of their facility, talk to some programmers, and try to gauge what kind of operation they are running.
If you need some pointers on this, a good start would be The Joel Test. Grab a copy of Joel On Software and take it over there and say, "How does your company score on this test?" They may look at you funny; just tell them you're trying to be sure they're a high quality organization. You can check off some of the boxes yourself, like the "quite working conditions", but on others, you will just have to trust them. If they refuse to talk to you about that sort of thing, take them off your list and go on to the next place, because they are not worth your attention. (Keep in mind they may try to do the "Manage the iceberg" thing to you; this is probably actually a good sign. Just tell them to cut it out.:)
The most important aspect of the development practice, though, is PEOPLE, not tools or platform or methodology or any of that. Unfortunately, it will be very hard for you to get far enough inside an organization to figure out if they people are SMART and GET THINGS DONE. But if you get a chance to talk to someone like a lead developer or project manager within the company, look for intelligence and resourcefulness.
Things to avoid are places where you walk in and they tell you "We'll do your site in $TECHNOLOGY, and nothing else." Also, aviod any place that doesn't try to figure out WHAT EXACTLY YOUR ARE ASKING THEM TO DO before they commit to it!
Unfortunately, you probably will not select the company at which I work. Ces la vis.
It sounds like what you need is just a testing environment for ASP.NET code, and some basic instructions. I messed around with this a few weeks ago, so I know where you're at.
If so, you don't really need Apache/mod_mono; just use XSP, which is just an ASP.NET server written in C# by the Mono project. It may not be as fast, but you can test away with it.
Your toolbox on your local computer should probably be Mono, mcs (C# compiler), MonoDevelop (Based on SharpDevelop), XSP, and the ASP.NET examples for Mono. These are all provided by the Windows, OS X and Linux packages on go-mono.com. If you're using debian, though, you can get them as seperate packages.
Once you've got all that, copy the ASP.NET demos into your home directory, then go to that directory and run XSP (in debian, the command is just 'xsp') and take a look at the examples.
You can change or create.aspx files directly and XSP will compile them for you when you visit them; but compiling libraries and code behind files requires a command along the lines of "mcs -t:library -o CodeBehind.dll CodeBehind.cs" or something.
For the kind of money that would constitute a significant donation to an open-source project in western civilization, you could train a team of smart teenagers in a third world country into programmers and food, clothe and house them as they create their own damn open source projects. Hell, as Squeak proves, children can be programmers too! High potential children in third world countries are a great area of untapped programmer potential that can only be tapped by open source projects for serious legal reasons.
I second the "Fuitadnet used to be cool, but now it sucks" POV. The first account I opened up with Fuitad I created maybe two years ago. It was really great, especially for the price! 5 dollars a month for solid web hosting.
The second one was really disturbing. It took them a solid 3 weeks to get my web site up, due to some kind of DNS problem, and the servers seem to no longer be top-notch. Same exact numbers (3 gigs, 25 gigs, FTP/SSH/LAMP), totally different service.
Windows hasn't done that since, like, ME. What planet have YOU been living on?
AtariAmarok
Wrong on Windows jokes
Wrong on Zeppelin puns
Wrong for America
...but this begs the question, was it running on "Dangerous Mode" before? I mean, that would explain the loss of function here. Er... I mean, "Dangeresque Mode." See how I threw in that pop culture reference there? Bang!
Slashdot Mirror
Two unrelated: The first game system I got was an Atari 2600. This was in 1991 or thereabouts - I had an NES and eventually an SNES, but I never did catch up with the rest of the world until I got an N64 in 1998 or thereabouts.
Anyway, I think the Atari was just something my dad had in his closet and gave to me. My favorite games were probably Pitfall and Frogger.
The Atari ST is a bit of a different story. My dad bought it for doing computer-aided synthesizer work in the late 80's sometime. It eventually passed on to me, with that 30 MB hard drive. It had a text adventure game that we could never really do very well at, some game where you shot things at a bubble, and Daleks. (And BASIC.)
And, of course, the inevitable 486 with the Turbo button, and the shareware games. Oh, the shareware games! Commander Keen comes to mind, but there were tons of others. And wondering why our 230 MB HD was getting so full, and finding out that my family was recording 2 MB .wav files of my little brother singing and other such wasteful nonsense.
I remember having some Capsella! That stuff was pretty cool. I especially liked making things that floated.
I also recall FisherTechnik, which was really fun. I got one of the basic "Lots of pieces" sets when I was 9 or 10. I never did get into the upper levels of it, but it looked really exciting. Damned expensive, though. (It looks like now they don't even sell the plain set I had with lots of plain old bricks and gears and chains and stuff. They just sell the candy coated, 'applied' stuff.)
We have a backlog of Microsoft Works documents that could be traced back as much as 10 years. Unfortunately, these documents cannot be read by any version of Microsoft Office, or any later version of Microsoft Works, that I have tried. so to this day we borrow someone's copy of Microsoft Works 3.0 (ours is lost) every time we set up a new PC.
And, sadly, it wasn't until just recently, maybe the past year or two, that my dad was persuaded to stop making all of his new documents and databases in MS Works 3.0. (As an added bonus, I have gotten him to stop putting his documents in random locations around the hard drive, and start putting them in a folder on the desktop. He still refuses to use "My Documents" for any such purpose.)
Yup. Our company has a VERY old web application that makes minor use of this sort of thing, to fill dropdowns in a business application. Except, whoever wrote it used a pop-up window instead. Not quite as eleganet.
A simple solution would be to believe AJAX stands for "AJAX, Javascript And XmlHttpRequest." (This definition replaces 'asynchronous' with a specific mechanism, XmlHttpRequest, and drops XML.)
Even so, it could be interpreted in the same manner as LAMP. The operating system could be one of Linux, any BSD, Solaris, Darwin, or something else entirely. The web server could be Apache or a great many others. Database? MySQL, Postgres, Firebird, SQLite... Language/Platform? Oh, hell. So, the real representation would be /[LBSDW].[MPFS][PRMLS]/. Use your imagination on these. AJAX is the sameway; it is a mishmash of ideas and technologies, but a few lead the pack and represent what is going on.
But, maybe your RIA idea is better. :)
I have been working on a nice AJAX app for awhile now and the most tiring part of it (apart from cross-browser woes) is trying to explain what AJAX is.
That's perfect. It is a bad sign about Google's corporate culture that, as a search engine company with ad revenue, they don't think people should be able to find the information the search engine provides.
Do your developers/testers/whatevers have a choice of their own desktop/workstation OS, either as individuals or as teams? If so, do any of them choose Linux or another *nix as their primary system, or dual-boot? (This brings to mind the chapter of "Dealers Of Lightning" about the Xerox Parc team trying to buy a DEC, when Xerox owned SDS.)
Advanced Unix Programming came out with a 2nd edition in 2004, and I was lucky enough to spot it in a Half Price Books here in Indy. This is very similar, in terms of upgraded content.
In particular, the test systems are the same between books. (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Darwin.) Both books have grown considerably to take on the growth of Unix and the various flavors.
Of course, AUP came out in 1985, so it had a little more turf to cover.
For those not familiar with AUP, it is a slightly different beast from APUE. It only covers Unix system calls in C categorically, whereas APUE covers a wider range of tasks and subjects within Unix.
Here is the problem: Existing programs are written knowing that deleted programs dissappear immediately. Therefore, since programs may be writing temporary files to /tmp or elsewhere, or even have their own backup systems, a garbage system with limited space could end up playing housekeeper for thousands of unused or redundant files, and few of the legitimate ones.
Yes, my solution only works for future use; but the system call solution breaks the expectancies of already written programs, and muddles the underlying straightforward filesystem and the expectations it creates.
And I agree, either a file-system snapshot or a well-integrated SCCS would work better.
Why modify the system calls? Keep the system calls simple and orthogonal, so the kernel codebase stays small(er). Write this functionality in userland, starting wherever you are most likely to use it; if that is in programming tasks, write wrappers to the C calls to do this. If it is at the prompt, write a shell script. (Or an alias...) If multiple places, write it in the way that keeps it the most centralized. IMHO, this should have been standard 30 years ago, but there's no reason not to do it now. :)
As for the block-level mirroring matter, clearly if you need this sort of mirroring it should be done wherever block-level disk access is done. Still, I would object much less if the driver could live in userland. And I agree that my data-loss problems are minimally related to hard drive failure, and far less likely to fail than my home DSL connection.
Interestingly, the advertisement I saw just now was. "For the next two weeks you can steal Airopeek and EtherPeek."
The library here (Carmel, Indiana) has a similar problem, and so did the libraries at Purdue. Of course, in a library situation, you are supposed to be giving the books to whoever wants to read them. The problem is that you want the people to then bring them back. The books I want to look at or check out seem to always be mysteriously missing...
Speaking of which, I guess they haven't made an ending for BSD, either...
I've seen this sort of comment all over this page. It is true for the most part, and it should be, but it is not necessarily the complete truth. In fact, in the almost-two years of university at a well respected CS department, we were expected to learn Java, C and C++ and a little bit of the 'theoretical' stuff including basic understanding of big O notation and some simple data structures. Basically, we were being educated so that we could go straight to Microsoft and get a job maintaining Word. There were rumors of a difficult class around the third year (compilers), but I dropped out and went home for other reasons.
Is that really the best you can come up with? You need to have a poke through "The Dilbert Principle" and maybe try again, because I understood most of that and I know which parts are nonsense (And which parts are just bad management).
There is a pretty simple reason for that... The idea behind this naming scheme is credit given where credit is due. Linus and co. created Linux, GNU created the GNU stuff (gcc/bash/utils). Thus, GNU/Linux.
But the HURD is by GNU people, so you don't need to have any other credit given when you're mainly packaging it with the GNU tools.
Not that I call it GNU/Linux anyway. It cleaerly ought to be "GNUlix".
Good point... I think maybe what I was thinking, or trying to say, is don't go with a firm who believe in the One Great Platform and insist that everything else is crap. I work at a one-platform company myself, and we have done most of our work in ASP or ASP.NET, but we could handle J2EE or a LAMP application if one needed to be maintained or extended. But of course, ASP.NET is what we mainly offer our clients, because we have experience and structure there.
And, when I said $TECHNOLOGY, I was also referring to client-side stuff; such as if they insisted it should be done in Flash or Java applets or should be targeted at IE or anything like that. So, I was more trying to say, "Avoid OS/platform/language/editor fanboys", or something. :)
First, I don't see why it is important that a web application or web site be developed on a cross platform backend. The whole idea behind HTTP is that the web browser doesn't care whether the server at the other end is Windows or OpenBSD or Contiki. And I will say that, yes, if you program in PHP or Perl or use Zope, you can probably move back and forth between BSD and Linux and Solaris with impunity. Are you really going to be changing your server OS every few months? Even every few years? Universal portability of those things is a solution to a problem that hardly anyone has.
Second, If ASP.NET is supposed to be easy and has no depth, they forgot to tell me. And apparently, you've never used it, and don't know anything about it for a few different reasons:
1: It isn't actually locked to the Windows/IIS platform. System.Web is fully functional in Mono, and there is both a small reference web server (XSP) and an Apache module (mod_mono) that can be used to serve pages that are identical to those served under IIS. So ASP.NET pages are portable even though it isn't gravely important. (Of course, Mono itself doesn't run properly under BSD yet AFAIK; it runs under Linux, Windows and OS X.)
2: ASP.NET is not a 'lego bricks' platform with no depth. Despite the gripes I do have about it, it is remarkably cool in certain ways. Once you grok the event driven programming and OO model behind it, master databinding and figure out how to get it to do what you want, it is a great tool to have.
And your entire last paragraph is hogwash. You seem to be saying that the best programmers do it the hardest way on purpose. The opposite is true; only an idiot would intentionally do it the hardest, longest way. Are you seriously saying that companies should pay more for development firms to do it the longest and hardest way, on purpose because that means the programmers are smarter? Absolute bullshit.
Allow me to illustrate. This is like saying that you should have your portrait painted by a man who cut his own fingers off and paints with his feet, because it means he is more dedicated to painting. No, he is more dedicated to painting with his feet. If he really wanted to paint portraits, he would have kept his fingers, because that is what the damn fingers are for.
Lastly, I couldn't tell you about Tomcat specifically, but I just saw Jakarta Struts For Dummies at Borders the other day, so apparently the J2EE learning curve is not as steep as you would have us believe.
I hate to rake this over the coals, but are you referring to the old ASP, with VBScript and so forth? If so, I absolutely and completely agree that it is awful and not to be touched.
On the other hand, ASP.NET is a pretty cool system, as long as you know that the interactive parts just won't work it Links or NN 1.0 or the like. There are a lot of details in ASP.NET that I don't like, mostly having to do with the ASPX/ASCX format and use, and the god-awful web forms designer (ARGH) and other things having to do with CSS. BUT, the power of ASP.NET, the event-driven programming and ViewState and control hierarchy, make it a joy to use once you know what you are doing. C# is not bad either; I would rather be using Python or something, but at least I know where I stand. (Vs. VBScript)
And by the way, ASP.NET runs under Mono. I've run the ASP.NET demos on Mono under both Linux and Windows using XSP, and I'm sure mod_mono isn't much harder. Since the web forms designer is such a shame and I do everything in source anyway, this makes it all the more reasonable. I don't know about performance though.
Again, if you were just referring to the old ASP, I concur totally. I've worked with that stuff. Uuuugh.
I agree with the basic point - that language doesn't matter as much as the programmer - but to some degree, I think that it is important to know that the techonology being used is appropriate. PHP may be fine for some types of web sites, but the kind of thing I do (data-driven business/management applications) requires a lot of interactivity, and it would be hell to try to do all of that in PHP. (We currently use ASP.NET.)
Being easier to learn or simpler in some situations doesn't mean that the tool is better. An example would be using well-factored CSS versus using whatever mix of HTML and in-line styling gets the job done. One of these options makes the site design flexible and reworkable, and one of them will force you to do massive work to even change the color scheme.
My opinion with ASP.NET versus other techonologies is that power of the tool (ViewState and event driven programming, as well as DataBinding, just to name a few) more than justifies the learning curve and the development complexity. (I have a lot of gripes about ASP.NET, also, having to do with how MVC is handled and WHY THE HELL THERE ISN'T A WEB CONTROL THAT GENERATES UL/LI TAGS. Oh well.)
Also of interest are things like O/R Mappers. Sure, you have more control if you don't use them, and your grid is just a little loop with some copy-pasting action in there; but is it easily maintainable, and extensible, etc? How much time do you spend writing and maintaining SQL Code? It adds a layer of complexity, but ulimately saves you a lot of work. (I use LLBLGen Pro; things like Hibernate are similar.)
Anyway, like I said, I agree with the basic point that people are more important than technology used, but I have a different viewpoint on how technologies should be chosen and used. YMMMV.
I think the best thing you can do for your company would be to get a tour of their facility, talk to some programmers, and try to gauge what kind of operation they are running.
If you need some pointers on this, a good start would be The Joel Test. Grab a copy of Joel On Software and take it over there and say, "How does your company score on this test?" They may look at you funny; just tell them you're trying to be sure they're a high quality organization. You can check off some of the boxes yourself, like the "quite working conditions", but on others, you will just have to trust them. If they refuse to talk to you about that sort of thing, take them off your list and go on to the next place, because they are not worth your attention. (Keep in mind they may try to do the "Manage the iceberg" thing to you; this is probably actually a good sign. Just tell them to cut it out. :)
The most important aspect of the development practice, though, is PEOPLE, not tools or platform or methodology or any of that. Unfortunately, it will be very hard for you to get far enough inside an organization to figure out if they people are SMART and GET THINGS DONE. But if you get a chance to talk to someone like a lead developer or project manager within the company, look for intelligence and resourcefulness.
Things to avoid are places where you walk in and they tell you "We'll do your site in $TECHNOLOGY, and nothing else." Also, aviod any place that doesn't try to figure out WHAT EXACTLY YOUR ARE ASKING THEM TO DO before they commit to it!
Unfortunately, you probably will not select the company at which I work. Ces la vis.
It sounds like what you need is just a testing environment for ASP.NET code, and some basic instructions. I messed around with this a few weeks ago, so I know where you're at.
If so, you don't really need Apache/mod_mono; just use XSP, which is just an ASP.NET server written in C# by the Mono project. It may not be as fast, but you can test away with it.
Your toolbox on your local computer should probably be Mono, mcs (C# compiler), MonoDevelop (Based on SharpDevelop), XSP, and the ASP.NET examples for Mono. These are all provided by the Windows, OS X and Linux packages on go-mono.com. If you're using debian, though, you can get them as seperate packages.
Once you've got all that, copy the ASP.NET demos into your home directory, then go to that directory and run XSP (in debian, the command is just 'xsp') and take a look at the examples.
You can change or create .aspx files directly and XSP will compile them for you when you visit them; but compiling libraries and code behind files requires a command along the lines of "mcs -t:library -o CodeBehind.dll CodeBehind.cs" or something.
I hope that gets you started.
For the kind of money that would constitute a significant donation to an open-source project in western civilization, you could train a team of smart teenagers in a third world country into programmers and food, clothe and house them as they create their own damn open source projects. Hell, as Squeak proves, children can be programmers too! High potential children in third world countries are a great area of untapped programmer potential that can only be tapped by open source projects for serious legal reasons.
I second the "Fuitadnet used to be cool, but now it sucks" POV. The first account I opened up with Fuitad I created maybe two years ago. It was really great, especially for the price! 5 dollars a month for solid web hosting.
The second one was really disturbing. It took them a solid 3 weeks to get my web site up, due to some kind of DNS problem, and the servers seem to no longer be top-notch. Same exact numbers (3 gigs, 25 gigs, FTP/SSH/LAMP), totally different service.
Windows hasn't done that since, like, ME. What planet have YOU been living on?
AtariAmarok...but this begs the question, was it running on "Dangerous Mode" before? I mean, that would explain the loss of function here. Er... I mean, "Dangeresque Mode." See how I threw in that pop culture reference there? Bang!
...Especially the repeated use of "Faggin". Say it with me.
Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin. Faggin.
Anyway... A couple of things:
- No coverage of Transmeta. Fair enough.
- No mention of quantum computing. Fair enough.
- No mention of TRON VLSI. Fine by me.
- No diagrams or illustrations. Bad Thing. Too Much Text.
This concludes Quam's nitpick for the day.