Yeah, you could do most of the same in Python or SmallTalk, but certainly not in most popular languages.
Like Perl? I have yet to get a Ruby guy to answer me why Rails shouldn't be ported to a faster, more standard and more prolific language like Perl. From everything I have seen the languages both have the exact same capabilities. Class-DBI instead of AR, etc. Rails seems to have a purpose, but Ruby just seems to be the product of some devs ego and hatred of '->' instead of '.'.
I haven't used Azureus or Gnutella, so I can't comment on them. Eclipse, however, I love. Try comparing the memory requirements of Eclipse to any other modern IDE, and you will find that it is (in general) lower than its contemporaries.
I use Visual Studio 2005 (C#) and Eclipse (Java/Perl) at work. Eclipse will generally eat up about 80 Mb of memory when I have the main projects open. Visual Studio, on the other hand, will eat up 100+ Mb easily - and it page faults like a mofo, trying to do disk writes every time you switch your focus. 2003 wasn't quite as bad in terms of page faults, but it still ate up over 100 Mb of memory easy, and thats without any dynamic compilation (C#).
Except that in the Mirror universe, the Borg wouldn't force all the intelligent species in the galaxy into their collective. Instead, they would offer gift baskets and greeting cards, asking people to join their hippie commune.
As a bit of anecdotal evidence, I offer up my university - UW Milwaukee. All required programming courses are C++. Electives exist for most of the languages you mention, but no student is required to learn any of them. From what I hear of people I have hired from UW Madison, that school is a Java shop - again, with electives for the more obscure language.
But then, of course, this is Wisconsin we are talking about. We tend to be practical up here, and have students learn stuff they will actually use in the industry. Learning the other stuff helps with the theory, since most of them have better models - but no significant real world usage.
The article doesn't mention whether it was a paid service or not. I get the feeling that free skype users (the ones that don't bridge to telephone) will be out of luck just as much as the ones who pay to talk to landlines.
You seriously think Nintendo will support a full range of real blue tooth headsets? Come on, these are console makers we are talking about - the kinds of people that make us buy their component cables, because putting standard component out on something is just too difficult...
Of course, I don't truly believe they will even bother to support online chat anyway. Nintendo already has a mic on the DS, and it has never been used as a voice chat device, despite its obvious suitability for the role. Nintendo, while I love their games, sucks at implimenting any type of online system. Look at how bad the DS is screwed up because of friend codes, and per-game online software.
This is exactly what DTDs and XSDs are there to take care of. Relying on the document to follow your own in house rules is the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do, in fact. The format document defines exactly what your parser should be doing/expecting, and if your data vendor doesn't respect that contract, its very easy to show who is in the wrong. With flat files, all I have to do is add an extra column and your parser will die. For one time imports this doesn't matter, but most business processes are not one time.
Some companies have to interoperate with each other. And by some, I actually mean nearly all of them. Most of the data exchanged comes out of a database at some point, and as such, is naturally able to be put into a hierarchy with reasonable ease. XML, and similar formats, make this much less painful than if you had to flatten it out.
Where I currently work, I get data from several dozen other large companies. Most of it is not in XML. We generally have 2 people full time just on maintaining the parsers. If they were all in XML, the amount of maintainence required would be next to nothing.
Actually, if you check the website, id sells Quake 1 for $10,000 per title - flat rate. Thats actually a pretty good deal when you consider all the crap you wont have to do, even if you have to improve the rendering engine. Its also GPL'd if you want to use it for your own private purposes.
You overhear things from friends and such. At least for the big titles, I can see this happening if your circle of friends contains a large percentage of gamers.
This is using the "pointer" functionality of the wiimote. We are discussing using them as an alternative to a dance mat, which would be pretty darn hard to do if you need to keep them facing the sensor bar at all points in time.
The wiimote may be able to determine distance from the IR pointer (sounds reasonable anyway), but even if that is the case - that functionality is very limited in scope due to its directional nature.
I don't think many people would be wanting to re-zero their wiimotes after every step. If you mean the thing will automatically do that, well then it would need to be sure that the person always returned their foot to the center, otherwise you would end up doing some pretty impressive splits when you tried to do two successive right steps.
In true DDR, especially while going fast, you tend to leave your foot on one of the sensors. Always returning to center just isn't possible with most of the stuff they want you to do.
It knows its accelerating towards the screen, or away from the screen, but not its absolute distance. You can prove this by varying your distance from the screen while performing the copy.
So it knows its rough relative distance from rest, but this is an approximation based on the acceleromiter data. Due to limited resolution and accuracy, this obviously cannot be relied upon to let the programmer know when something is back at its "center" or whatever.
Unfortunately not, as the Wiimote doesn't actually know its position in 3d space very well. It knows acceleration, orientation and - if you are pointing at the sensor bar, it can tell where you are pointing. That, however, is it. I was dismayed to learn that they hadn't just gone with true 3d positioning (doing away with the need for accelerometers and such), but such is life...
Lets not forget SWT either. That, quite literally, blends into whatever desktop you are running. Heck, Eclipse's SWT implementation looks better than most native apps.
At the cost of (arguably) reduced readability in many cases.
So, let me see if I got this straight...
obj.setProperty(sampleValue);
is harder to read than
obj.Property = sampleValue;
Yeah... I am afraid we don't quite see eye to eye on this one. The issue of delegates I agree with to some degree, as it is nice syntactic sugar, but one that is, again, easily done equivalently well through the use of listener interfaces. Admittedly, it uses more lines of code, but it also guarantees that people actually impliment the interface, as opposed to simply subscribing to events haphazardly and hoping they got the right ones.
And, while I am at it - C#'s lack of a "throws" clause on functions is just as annoying. In Java, I have a programmatic way of knowing what exceptions to expect from a function (other than runtime ones, of course). In C#, I have to guess... or just catch Exception and hope it isn't a nasty one that I am keeping from rightfully propogating up the stack. Now, if you are purely in your own code this isn't absolutely terrible, as you can just start digging and figure it out. However, if you are using any microsoft stuff, or any third party dlls, you are pretty much screwed.
Might you cite some source of these nebulous performance issues? Unless you are using like java 1, you won't be having any of these....
I tried to learn Java with 1.1
Oh, well, see that explains it. You might want to compare Java 1.1 with something equivalent from Microsoft at the time, like VB6, which is ungodly slow. The current incarnation of Java, like VB.Net, has undergone massive improvements.
Plus Java apps are really buggy in IE and Firefox.
These are "applets", not "apps". They aren't really used much anymore. Still fun to play with, though.
stuff like modem drivers that require kernel headers
Precisely how many kernel modules have you compiled on windows? Yes, generally kernel modules / drivers are tricky to get to work, but... thats just the way they are. Some pretty fun low level stuff is going on in there, that affects how your computer does basic operations, so I would anticipate it being a bit hard to get those to work. Everyone gives you precompiled stuff for windows, so you never have to see any of the effort that goes into making those work.
Plus when I went to ask for help on forums, I got called a n00b and was called a lot of bad names and flamed to death.
Java will have those incorporated in short order, i'm sure. Even if not, its not a bit loss at all. Getter/Setter methods are easy to generate and offer the exact same functionality.
Have you by chance considered that fixing it may cause more problems than it actually solves? Not all software behavior that seems strange is a bug. If its an understood part of the design, and you can work around it easily, then so be it. I would much rather fly on that, than knowing that the engineers had just added in shiny cool year-end date rolloff functionality that may or may not work, as opposed to the current software that has worked near flawlessly for decades. Especially with dates. They may seem simple on the outside, but after having worked in the financial industry for 5 years, I cant tell you how fscked up our calendar system is.
You can do the same with the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. As an added benefit, you can even see the source code to that browser window. Open Source FTW.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't used Azureus or Gnutella, so I can't comment on them. Eclipse, however, I love. Try comparing the memory requirements of Eclipse to any other modern IDE, and you will find that it is (in general) lower than its contemporaries.
I use Visual Studio 2005 (C#) and Eclipse (Java/Perl) at work. Eclipse will generally eat up about 80 Mb of memory when I have the main projects open. Visual Studio, on the other hand, will eat up 100+ Mb easily - and it page faults like a mofo, trying to do disk writes every time you switch your focus. 2003 wasn't quite as bad in terms of page faults, but it still ate up over 100 Mb of memory easy, and thats without any dynamic compilation (C#).
Except that in the Mirror universe, the Borg wouldn't force all the intelligent species in the galaxy into their collective. Instead, they would offer gift baskets and greeting cards, asking people to join their hippie commune.
As a bit of anecdotal evidence, I offer up my university - UW Milwaukee. All required programming courses are C++. Electives exist for most of the languages you mention, but no student is required to learn any of them. From what I hear of people I have hired from UW Madison, that school is a Java shop - again, with electives for the more obscure language.
But then, of course, this is Wisconsin we are talking about. We tend to be practical up here, and have students learn stuff they will actually use in the industry. Learning the other stuff helps with the theory, since most of them have better models - but no significant real world usage.
The article doesn't mention whether it was a paid service or not. I get the feeling that free skype users (the ones that don't bridge to telephone) will be out of luck just as much as the ones who pay to talk to landlines.
Why not tax instant messaging then ... I mean, thats communicating information across the internet too.
ZOMG! People exchanging ideas! This is bad, they may get smart and overthrow our corrupt government!
You seriously think Nintendo will support a full range of real blue tooth headsets? Come on, these are console makers we are talking about - the kinds of people that make us buy their component cables, because putting standard component out on something is just too difficult ...
Of course, I don't truly believe they will even bother to support online chat anyway. Nintendo already has a mic on the DS, and it has never been used as a voice chat device, despite its obvious suitability for the role. Nintendo, while I love their games, sucks at implimenting any type of online system. Look at how bad the DS is screwed up because of friend codes, and per-game online software.
That only works if you are the larger company. Most of these guys are huge international brokerages - they aren't changing for us.
This is exactly what DTDs and XSDs are there to take care of. Relying on the document to follow your own in house rules is the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do, in fact. The format document defines exactly what your parser should be doing/expecting, and if your data vendor doesn't respect that contract, its very easy to show who is in the wrong. With flat files, all I have to do is add an extra column and your parser will die. For one time imports this doesn't matter, but most business processes are not one time.
Some companies have to interoperate with each other. And by some, I actually mean nearly all of them. Most of the data exchanged comes out of a database at some point, and as such, is naturally able to be put into a hierarchy with reasonable ease. XML, and similar formats, make this much less painful than if you had to flatten it out.
Where I currently work, I get data from several dozen other large companies. Most of it is not in XML. We generally have 2 people full time just on maintaining the parsers. If they were all in XML, the amount of maintainence required would be next to nothing.
Actually, if you check the website, id sells Quake 1 for $10,000 per title - flat rate. Thats actually a pretty good deal when you consider all the crap you wont have to do, even if you have to improve the rendering engine. Its also GPL'd if you want to use it for your own private purposes.
You overhear things from friends and such. At least for the big titles, I can see this happening if your circle of friends contains a large percentage of gamers.
This is using the "pointer" functionality of the wiimote. We are discussing using them as an alternative to a dance mat, which would be pretty darn hard to do if you need to keep them facing the sensor bar at all points in time.
The wiimote may be able to determine distance from the IR pointer (sounds reasonable anyway), but even if that is the case - that functionality is very limited in scope due to its directional nature.
I don't think many people would be wanting to re-zero their wiimotes after every step. If you mean the thing will automatically do that, well then it would need to be sure that the person always returned their foot to the center, otherwise you would end up doing some pretty impressive splits when you tried to do two successive right steps.
In true DDR, especially while going fast, you tend to leave your foot on one of the sensors. Always returning to center just isn't possible with most of the stuff they want you to do.
It knows its accelerating towards the screen, or away from the screen, but not its absolute distance. You can prove this by varying your distance from the screen while performing the copy.
So it knows its rough relative distance from rest, but this is an approximation based on the acceleromiter data. Due to limited resolution and accuracy, this obviously cannot be relied upon to let the programmer know when something is back at its "center" or whatever.
Unfortunately not, as the Wiimote doesn't actually know its position in 3d space very well. It knows acceleration, orientation and - if you are pointing at the sensor bar, it can tell where you are pointing. That, however, is it. I was dismayed to learn that they hadn't just gone with true 3d positioning (doing away with the need for accelerometers and such), but such is life ...
obj.setProperty(sampleValue);
is harder to read than
obj.Property = sampleValue;
Yeah
And, while I am at it - C#'s lack of a "throws" clause on functions is just as annoying. In Java, I have a programmatic way of knowing what exceptions to expect from a function (other than runtime ones, of course). In C#, I have to guess
Unfortunately, too late for me. I read his comment history after I hit submit ... ah well.
Oh, well, see that explains it. You might want to compare Java 1.1 with something equivalent from Microsoft at the time, like VB6, which is ungodly slow. The current incarnation of Java, like VB
These are "applets", not "apps". They aren't really used much anymore. Still fun to play with, though.
Precisely how many kernel modules have you compiled on windows? Yes, generally kernel modules / drivers are tricky to get to work, but
I wonder why
Java will have those incorporated in short order, i'm sure. Even if not, its not a bit loss at all. Getter/Setter methods are easy to generate and offer the exact same functionality.
Have you by chance considered that fixing it may cause more problems than it actually solves? Not all software behavior that seems strange is a bug. If its an understood part of the design, and you can work around it easily, then so be it. I would much rather fly on that, than knowing that the engineers had just added in shiny cool year-end date rolloff functionality that may or may not work, as opposed to the current software that has worked near flawlessly for decades. Especially with dates. They may seem simple on the outside, but after having worked in the financial industry for 5 years, I cant tell you how fscked up our calendar system is.
You can do the same with the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. As an added benefit, you can even see the source code to that browser window. Open Source FTW.
Because IE7 is closed source and we can't fix it.
You steal someone else's identity, of course.