Mine controls scientific devices with network throttling, DSP analysis, generates a GUI and performs datalogging all in real-time.
According to your web site, you are a physics major "with electronics specialization", a journalist, and you are now spending your time making films. There's no evidence on your site that you have done anything interesting in software other than a lot of Visual C++ hacking: no new software ideas, no computer science publications, no new algorithms, nothing.
Sorry, but to me, you look just like the non-expert software developer that Visual C++ is aimed at. To me, you look like you are so far away from the kind of skill level represented by, say, the Bell Labs UNIX hackers or Microsoft systems researchers that you don't even understand what you are lacking.
And don't complain that I looked at your background--you brought it up and tried to claim authority based on it.
Remind me to put that in the next Linux advertising campaign.
I was writing about UNIX, not Linux. Linux as a whole is trying to dumb itself down to be usable by mainstream folks, although fortunately, it still has a usable UNIX-like core.
I'd actually say that the average Windows developer cares a lot more about their userbase, because they know that their users could be anyone.
Yes, and what you don't get is that an application designed for "anyone" is often far from a good application for someone skilled.
I think Linux is going down the Windows path: ever more junk gets added to the system in an attempt to make everybody happy. That just can't be good in the long run.
Think about how many IPC mechanisms there are now: TCP/IP, UNIX domain sockets, SystemV IPC, BSD memory mapping, various kernel-internal mechanisms, file-system based mechanisms, etc. And now we get added to that netlink and D-BUS?
Similarly with file system hacks: we get several incompatible user-level VFS implementations, numerous kernel file systems (many of which have their own non-UNIX semantics and extensions), we get WebDAV hacks on top of CODA hooks, we get NFS loopbacks for cryptography, etc.
Yes, something like netlink does make sense. I'd also put something like VFS into the kernel. But in return, a lot of stuff should be officially deprecated and eventually removed from the Linux kernel. That will break software, but it is vitally important for keeping the entire system manageable and comprehensible. (I suspect that part of the attraction of BSD is probably that it doesn't have as many features as Linux--it's simpler.)
Furthermore, creating all that wonderful functionality for Linux isn't going to do any good if systems like Gnome don't start relying on it. That is, if the Linux kernel were to offer a unified namespace, Gnome should drop VFS even though that means it won't be able to run as well on Solaris and BSD anymore.
Of course, all these things will eventually fix themselves by selection in the market place. However, I would hate to see that selection happening by Linux and Gnome going away entirely because they have become too unwieldy.
Copy&paste is still inconsistent in X and just annoying.
Copy-and-paste is completely consistent in X. As is the selection mechanism. What is inconsistent is the support by toolkits and applications for them. Unfortunately, Gnome and KDE both are to blame here. Instead of supporting X11 conventions, Gnome and KDE are each doing their own thing, mostly like Windows but not quite, and definitely inconsistent with X11.
When I first used Linux and I ran X, my thought was "damn, this is slow." This feeling is echoed by a lot of other people. It's nice to see that a replacement is on the way.
X is not slow--it's as efficient or more efficient as Windows GDI, and it runs rings around Macintosh's Quartz. All of them are, of course, client-server system so there is no particular reason why X should be any slower than the other systems.
What makes X-based desktops slow is the desktop environments themselves. In part, that's because some desktop environments try to emulate graphics primitives in client code that X11 does not support (e.g., transparency, anti-aliasing), and in part it's because they don't take into account the client/server nature of X11. And in part, it's because they are just slow completely independent of any display-related functions (e.g., inter-application communication, huge memory footprints, etc.).
Identifying the bottlenecks correctly matters a great deal: if you are trying to fix Gnome or KDE performance by hacking around in X, you are mostly wasting your time.
The only thing on the X server side that will help a lot is the RENDER extension, because the RENDER extension for X is eliminating the need for Gnome and KDE to emulate graphics primitives client-side.
Re:The unintended benefits of pollution
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Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
Sure, the climate changes a lot by itself, often unfavorably for humans. But that is not a reason to blindly contribute to such changes.
What current climate models tell us that burning large amounts of fossil fuels will plausibly lead to changes in the global climate that are bad for us. That means that the prudent thing to do is to reduce those kind of emissions.
In different words, you are using the typical excuses of smokers: you say, "yeah, I know it may be bad for me, but even beef and apples may cause cancer or liver damage, so why worry about it?".
Of course, there isn't. Environmentalists aren't claiming there is. They are saying: "if we continue doing this, these are the bad things that can happen to us".
That is, environmental models showing global warming over the short term are plausible. That alone should be sufficient to take them seriously; absolute proof that this model or that model is correct just isn't needed.
The burden of proof in such cases simply isn't symmetric. People wanting to emit large amounts of some substance into the environment need to provide clear and convincing proof that it is safe. People who want to stop such emissions should only be required to raise plausible objections. That's because the risks from emitting something harmful are so much greater than the losses associated with simply not emitting it.
Its Global Warming this pas 15 years, before then it was Global Cooling.
And they may well have been right, since the nature of pollution has changed greatly since the 1950's and 1960's.
Screw the fact they don't have all the facts, it doesn't prevent either camp from making claims.
That's like having unprotected sex with a prostitute and arguing that it's harmless because, after all, nobody can prove that you are going to get sick. Or it's like drinking a bottle of cleaning fluid and arguing that it's harmless because, after all, nobody can prove to you that it is going to kill you by causing internal bleeding (maybe it will just destroy your liver).
Environmentalism is much more about ideaology than realism.
Your supposed "realism" is about ignoring the possible consequences of your actions. You use the demand for "all the facts" to excuse irresponsible actions and irresponsible risk taking. And for what? Slightly increased short-term consumption.
Targetted at all skill levels does not mean "makes programming accessible to large numbers of people with limited experience" [lots more stuff deleted]
No, but pointing at a product site doesn't mean that a single sentence supports the entire argument.
In any case, I can assure you from personal experience that VC++ allows people with no understanding of the Windows libraries to put together complex GUI apps: I put together GUI apps in VC++ long before I understood the Windows libraries and toolkits, and so have many other people that I know.
Also, the ability to do great work with primitive tools when easier tools to use are available does not make you a 'better' programmer. It makes you the textbook definition of a masochist.
I disagree that VC++ is an "easier tool" in general. What VC++ is good at is handholding and user assistance, and the people who like VC++ and find it useful are people who like handholding and user assistance.
And my reputation as a highly skilled software engineer precedes me in many circles.
I'm sure that there are "many circles" in which the developers of Microsoft Word are held in high esteem.
But let's return to the original point. Spolsky, in effect, claimed that Windows and UNIX are really just variations on a theme. And I'm saying that he is wrong: the differences between the systems are far more fundamental. Windows is a mass-market product, both as far as its users and its programmer community are concerned. UNIX is a specialty product, suitable really only for skilled users and developers. And, frankly, I hope that will not change.
The.net framework is much much more intuitive than VC++ ever was. It's a lot more like Java plus a few improvements.
That's true but completely irrelevant to the point. Programming in VC++ may seem obscure and difficult to you, but it still provides a lot of handholding relative to UNIX-based C/C++ development, handholding that makes it possible for people with pretty limited C++ skills to attempt to tackle pretty complex tasks.
In two years of windows development working in VC++, VB, VBScript, C#, ASP, ASP.net, COM+,.net, I have never had to use make directly.
If that represents your entire time programming C++, you are making my point: you are a complete beginner as far as C++ programming is concerned.
it seems we may not have the "exponential" growth in population we once thought we had.
What do you mean "thought"? We once had exponential growth. But exponential growth in biological systems sooner or later must necessarily level off. This is all standard population biology.
The only question is why economists still cling to the absurd notion that economic growth can go on forever.
No, that's VB's stated goal. Unless you'd like to provide a reference?
Visual C++ is targeted at "all skill levels". Or are you asserting that Microsoft really is targeting Visual C++ only at advanced developers?
Being forced to manually edit make files does NOT a good software engineer make
No, but the ability to do great work with such primitive tools as make and gdb demonstrates that you are a skilled and experienced programmer.
And if you have never acquired that skill, it strongly suggests that you really don't have that much experience because even in Windows programming, it comes up with regularity.
Sure: WORM (write-once-read-many) file systems have been around much longer. See here for a paper from 1991. And write-once optical drives were available commercially already at least in the late 1980's.
I used to work for one such chap who had a doctorate from MIT and founded his own company.
Well, then he probably understand the difference between "all Windows programmers suck", which is what you seem to believe I said, and "Windows programming is overwhelmingly done by people with little experience and skill for people with little experience and skill", which is what I actually said. He would also know that you can't argue against my point by citing a few instances. Too bad that you don't understand the difference.
VB/VC++'s stated goal is to make programming accessible to large numbers of people with limited skills and experience. And, in fact, all I'm saying is that it succeeded spectacularly in that goal. Now, what's your point?
The very people who cannot accept that anything good happens on other platforms are the UNIX biggots!
UNIX bigots are happy to admit that there are plenty of other, interesting non-UNIX platforms. Windows just isn't one of them.
Some of the most useful, productive and sublime applications I have ever used happen to run on Windows
I have yet to see any application on Windows that was "useful, productive, and sublime" that wasn't a copy of something developed on some other platform. There probably are a few good original applications on Windows (there is a lot of software for it, after all, it's bound to happen occasionally), but they clearly are quite rare and obscure among the junk Windows developers grind out day-to-day.
"The OS and PLATFORM do not dictate the USEFULNESS of the APPLICATION"
That attitude sums up one of the key problems with Windows: its developers treat it like a glorified program loader. For UNIX users, the OS is the application.
Jeezus! You're one arrogant SOB.
Windows has 90% of the market, and every grandma and child runs it. But you aren't satisfied with commercial, mainstream success, you also want it to be viewed as an elegant and well-designed operating system. Windows is successful because it is mainstream and unimaginative, and that's just as it should be. If you are a Windows developer or Microsoft employee, be satisfied with the commercial success that Windows has and stop trying to claim the entire world as yours. Stop being such a goddamned Borg.
Does your usenet reader serve news articles to other users?
Yes: the way people traditionally read USENET news is by becoming a USENET node, downloading articles to the directory hierarchy of the local machine, and then redistributing them to neighboring sites. Reading news by connecting to centralized news servers via a network client happened many years later.
No, you need a costly usenet servers architecture.
There is nothing intrinsically "costly" about it: it's something a PDP-11 used to handle and that regularly ran over dial-up.
Not only machines, but also huuuge bandwith. Today's usenet servers that want to serve large portion of world hierarchies can only get it via dedicated satellite usenet-only feeds.
Just like a BT solution, you only redistribute those articles that you yourself are interested in.
The reason why we got a USENET infrastructure with a small number of backbone sites (compared to the readership) that carried everything is simply because a bunch of sites took on that role and carry everything. There is nothing in the protocol or design of USENET that requires it.
RSS+BT on the other hand is poor server and rich clients that exchange articles between themselves via p2p network only supervised by a BT tracker.
And you believe that BT and the BT tracker scales up to many billions of files on millions of nodes by sheer magic? BT would probably need a lot of work to scale up. And at least USENET doesn't need any supervision by anything--it's completely asynchronous and unsupervised.
Note that I did not claim that USENET would work any better than RSS+BT--I have no idea whether it would--simply that people are basically reinventing USENET when they combine RSS and BT.
I actually suspect that there are intrinsic properties of large peer-to-peer news networks that people don't like because that's why USENET became more and more centralized over the years.
What morron modded parent as insightful?
That's what I would ask about your posting. In fact, I would ask what moron wrote it.
you're missing the point here i think. the relative complexity of programming on each platform is irrelevant to everyone in the entire world, except programmers. people *want* simplicity, and for good reason
UNIX is complex in the sense a musical instrument is complex: there is a lot you can do with it.
Windows is complex in the sense that a Rube Goldberg machine is complex: it has lots of strings, wheels, water buckets, and cats.
the whole reason why ready-to-serve meals sell well is because of convenience, and that's the same reason windows sells. not because it's better or faster or nicer or whatever, it's simply more convenient, and that's what people want. give the customer what they want - ever heard of that?
Of course. And did I ever say Windows should go away? Just like fast food, I think it's unavoidable that something like Windows exists, and it's good because it makes the masses happy.
What I disagree with is Spolky's assertion that UNIX and Windows are somehow pretty similar and that they just have some superficial cultural differences.
and your analogy is misleading: people don't learn to play the violin because playing the violin is complex, they play it because it sounds nice.
My point exactly: people accept that the violin is hard to learn because, for a skilled musician, the violin is a good instrument, while a CD player isn't.
if that pisses off the chefs and the shop-keepers, well tough
The only people who seemed "pissed off" are some Windows developers who apparently can't accept that the really good stuff happens on other platforms and is done by other people. Come on, guys, be happy that you have a job and are making money. Your software equivalent of fast food joints are raking in big bucks. But don't try to pass off Chicken McNuggets as a gourmet meal.
The UNIX crowd (=chefs), on the other hand, really doesn't care what Windows people think of UNIX because the UNIX crowd already knows what's better and who is more skilled. They don't care, that is, as long as the Windows crowd doesn't insult them by saying that, deep down, Windows and UNIX are really just the same.
It's a cultural difference in roughly the same sense that the difference between turning on a CD player and playing a musical instrument is a "cultural difference".
Windows programming is overwhelmingly done by people with little experience and skill for people with little experience and skill. Windows programming environments are the programming equivalent of prerecorded music, painting by numbers, or ready-to-serve meals.
And Windows programmers will never advance beyond that stage if they keep doing just Windows programmings: you no more learn programming by using Visual C++ than you learn to play the piano by playing all of Horowitz's collected works on your CD player over and over again.
UNIX is obscure, unforgiving, and takes a long time to master. Just like a musical instrument. You won't hear musicians complain either that a violin or a piano has a user interface that is "too complex"--compared to what their craft is really about, the initial difficulties of the instrument are minor.
But even the appreciation of art takes experience, so it is perhaps not surprising that Spolsky even fails to understand the difference.
You're much better off plugging serial port, USB, PCI, and/or FireWire protocol analyzers into real-world hardware. For serial ports and USB, the necessary hardware isn't even all that expensive (probably cheaper than VMware).
Or maybe you can explain how digging a tunnel has the effect of stopping terrorism.
It's going to increase trade, migration, and tourism, accelerating Morocco's transition from being a third world nation to being a prosperous first world nation. It's not guaranteed to work, but it's the only approach Europe has.
US-style isolationism and militarism is impractical for Europe given its location (and it is actually ineffective and cost-prohibitive for the US as well as 9/11 and the subsequent wars show).
Seems to me like the opposite would be true -- the tunnel would be a very attractive target for terrorist attacks.
It is that, too, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were blown up at some point. But there are already plenty of attractive terrorist targets, so adding one more won't make any difference. And it can be rebuilt again.
A lot has changed since WWII. Back then, the US was fairly isolated geographically and it could manage to produce most of what it needed domestically. Today, the US is easily reachable by weapons and terrorists and the US economy and military could not function without massive influxes of foreign raw materials, manufactured goods, services, and know-how.
The lesson of the last 100 years is that the US will keep itself armed because it works -- and because any war can be made a war of attrition.
We have seen how well that approach works in Vietnam. And if any war were actually to affect US commerce with other industrialized nations, the US economy and military would fall apart almost instantly.
Why can't the US have a healthy 10-15% unemployment rate?
First of all, the US statistics are an illusion because many people who would be counted as unemployed in Europe aren't counted as unemployed in the US.
But even taking the US unemployment rate at face value, it is simply kept so low through massive foreign borrowing. If the dollar were devalued and the US economy deflated to the point of bringing it anywhere near balance, US unemployment would soar past European unemployment even with the US's already illusory standards.
It is going to be fun watching France dig itself out of the economic hole it threw itself into.
France is running its economy pretty conservatively. Europeans seem less wealthy than Americans (whether they actually are is another question) because European governments are making the necessary economically hard choices. The US, on the other hand, is living an economic lie, financed by unsustainable foreign borrowing.
Ths US trade deficit is $500bn, about 5% of GDP (e.g., here). US net foreign debt is $2.3 trillion, about 25% of GDP.
Bringing just the trade deficit into balance would require a massive increase in unemployment and a sharp drop in US GDP (here).
Maybe that 35 hours work week was a bad idea? Ha ha.
You make it sound as if the 35 hour work week was some kind of attempt to create a socialist paradise. It wasn't. It was an attempt to spread less available work among a fixed labor pool. What's the US alternative? Massive borrowing to maintain the illusion of wealth and to put the remaining unemployed out on the street.
And whether the US will be able to live with its tough position on welfare reform is an open question: welfare benefits are just starting to run out; even Americans don't seem to have the stomach to live with that. I predict welfare benefits will just keep getting extended.
It is silly to compare how a super power is spending on a war over seas to how a nation with only a fraction the GDP is building a very expensive tunnel to Morocco.
It is precisely because Spain's financial means are more limited that the comparison is informative. Spain doesn't have the option of fighting big wars to deal with threats. Instead, they have to find means of promoting peace, development, and cooperation. One way they believe they can do that is through cooperative infrastructure projects.
Of course, it's dangerous to think that just because the US is a superpower, it is exempt from forces like budget deficits or capital flow. The current strength of the US military is bought at a staggering social and economic cost and it is anybody's guess how long it can be sustained.
The fact that the US spends lots of money does not add or subtract to the viability of such a massive government projects for Spain and Morocco. It is a cute commentary on US foreign policy, but plays no effect on whether these two nations should try and dig a tunnel under the sea.
Unless you have information that the rest of us don't, for now, we can assume that the Spanish have done their homework: as economic data shows, they are in far better control of their budget than the US is.
Note, incidentally, that digging has gotten a whole lot cheaper over the last decade and that there are many alternative tunnel technologies available as well, so there is no reason to believe that this project will be more than a blip in the Spanish budget.
Back to the topic at hand, the point was, regardless of what the US is doing, building such a tunnel is expensive. It is only justified if there is going to be some net gain for the two countries involved.
Yes, and the net gain is improved cooperation between Europe and Northern Africa, as well as a better shot at democratization and economic development in Morocco. Those are long-term goals that require long-term investments. Proponents of projects like these recognize that.
Yes, despite of this all, I think building a tunnel to a third world nation would be a bad idea for Spain.
Well, and Europeans don't want their neighboring third world nations to remain third world nations forever. That's why they try to integrate them and cooperate with them and why they invest in such projects.
The US approach to foreign policy, military intervention and a degree of isolationism, just is not workable for Europeans. While Europe is capable of creating a military to rival that of the US, Europeans are not willing to pay the financial or political cost of that. Furthermore, Europe's geographic location makes US-style isolationism impractical.
And that's the point of my original comparison between the Iraq war and this kind of project. Once you understand the relationship, you will understand why this kind of project makes financial sense to Europeans and why they can afford it.
Shihar wondered whether this is wasteful government spending.
My response is simple: no, it isn't. It is an effective and cheap means of promoting economic development and the development of democratic societies in Muslim nations in Northern Africa. Those kinds of cooperative infrastructure projects are, in fact, the only choice Europe seems to have for peaceful co-existence with its African and Middle Eastern neighbors.
To give Americans some idea of its order of magnitude, I made a comparison to a recent Middle East-related project by the US: the tunnel's cost is going to be a tiny fraction of what the US spent on the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq also was justified as promoting the development of democracies in Muslim societies. In fact, its cost is probably going to be small compared even to something like a single stealth bomber (which costs several billion dollars).
So, do you get it now? I responded to Shihar's question by a cost/benefit comparison with a related project recently carried out by the US, as well as with standard military hardware. Sorry if I didn't spell it out clearly enough the first time for you to understand.
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Mine controls scientific devices with network throttling, DSP analysis, generates a GUI and performs datalogging all in real-time.
According to your web site, you are a physics major "with electronics specialization", a journalist, and you are now spending your time making films. There's no evidence on your site that you have done anything interesting in software other than a lot of Visual C++ hacking: no new software ideas, no computer science publications, no new algorithms, nothing.
Sorry, but to me, you look just like the non-expert software developer that Visual C++ is aimed at. To me, you look like you are so far away from the kind of skill level represented by, say, the Bell Labs UNIX hackers or Microsoft systems researchers that you don't even understand what you are lacking.
And don't complain that I looked at your background--you brought it up and tried to claim authority based on it.
Remind me to put that in the next Linux advertising campaign.
I was writing about UNIX, not Linux. Linux as a whole is trying to dumb itself down to be usable by mainstream folks, although fortunately, it still has a usable UNIX-like core.
I'd actually say that the average Windows developer cares a lot more about their userbase, because they know that their users could be anyone.
Yes, and what you don't get is that an application designed for "anyone" is often far from a good application for someone skilled.
I think Linux is going down the Windows path: ever more junk gets added to the system in an attempt to make everybody happy. That just can't be good in the long run.
Think about how many IPC mechanisms there are now: TCP/IP, UNIX domain sockets, SystemV IPC, BSD memory mapping, various kernel-internal mechanisms, file-system based mechanisms, etc. And now we get added to that netlink and D-BUS?
Similarly with file system hacks: we get several incompatible user-level VFS implementations, numerous kernel file systems (many of which have their own non-UNIX semantics and extensions), we get WebDAV hacks on top of CODA hooks, we get NFS loopbacks for cryptography, etc.
Yes, something like netlink does make sense. I'd also put something like VFS into the kernel. But in return, a lot of stuff should be officially deprecated and eventually removed from the Linux kernel. That will break software, but it is vitally important for keeping the entire system manageable and comprehensible. (I suspect that part of the attraction of BSD is probably that it doesn't have as many features as Linux--it's simpler.)
Furthermore, creating all that wonderful functionality for Linux isn't going to do any good if systems like Gnome don't start relying on it. That is, if the Linux kernel were to offer a unified namespace, Gnome should drop VFS even though that means it won't be able to run as well on Solaris and BSD anymore.
Of course, all these things will eventually fix themselves by selection in the market place. However, I would hate to see that selection happening by Linux and Gnome going away entirely because they have become too unwieldy.
Copy&paste is still inconsistent in X and just annoying.
Copy-and-paste is completely consistent in X. As is the selection mechanism. What is inconsistent is the support by toolkits and applications for them. Unfortunately, Gnome and KDE both are to blame here. Instead of supporting X11 conventions, Gnome and KDE are each doing their own thing, mostly like Windows but not quite, and definitely inconsistent with X11.
When I first used Linux and I ran X, my thought was "damn, this is slow." This feeling is echoed by a lot of other people. It's nice to see that a replacement is on the way.
X is not slow--it's as efficient or more efficient as Windows GDI, and it runs rings around Macintosh's Quartz. All of them are, of course, client-server system so there is no particular reason why X should be any slower than the other systems.
What makes X-based desktops slow is the desktop environments themselves. In part, that's because some desktop environments try to emulate graphics primitives in client code that X11 does not support (e.g., transparency, anti-aliasing), and in part it's because they don't take into account the client/server nature of X11. And in part, it's because they are just slow completely independent of any display-related functions (e.g., inter-application communication, huge memory footprints, etc.).
Identifying the bottlenecks correctly matters a great deal: if you are trying to fix Gnome or KDE performance by hacking around in X, you are mostly wasting your time.
The only thing on the X server side that will help a lot is the RENDER extension, because the RENDER extension for X is eliminating the need for Gnome and KDE to emulate graphics primitives client-side.
Sure, the climate changes a lot by itself, often unfavorably for humans. But that is not a reason to blindly contribute to such changes.
What current climate models tell us that burning large amounts of fossil fuels will plausibly lead to changes in the global climate that are bad for us. That means that the prudent thing to do is to reduce those kind of emissions.
In different words, you are using the typical excuses of smokers: you say, "yeah, I know it may be bad for me, but even beef and apples may cause cancer or liver damage, so why worry about it?".
There is no accurate model of the environment.
Of course, there isn't. Environmentalists aren't claiming there is. They are saying: "if we continue doing this, these are the bad things that can happen to us".
That is, environmental models showing global warming over the short term are plausible. That alone should be sufficient to take them seriously; absolute proof that this model or that model is correct just isn't needed.
The burden of proof in such cases simply isn't symmetric. People wanting to emit large amounts of some substance into the environment need to provide clear and convincing proof that it is safe. People who want to stop such emissions should only be required to raise plausible objections. That's because the risks from emitting something harmful are so much greater than the losses associated with simply not emitting it.
Its Global Warming this pas 15 years, before then it was Global Cooling.
And they may well have been right, since the nature of pollution has changed greatly since the 1950's and 1960's.
Screw the fact they don't have all the facts, it doesn't prevent either camp from making claims.
That's like having unprotected sex with a prostitute and arguing that it's harmless because, after all, nobody can prove that you are going to get sick. Or it's like drinking a bottle of cleaning fluid and arguing that it's harmless because, after all, nobody can prove to you that it is going to kill you by causing internal bleeding (maybe it will just destroy your liver).
Environmentalism is much more about ideaology than realism.
Your supposed "realism" is about ignoring the possible consequences of your actions. You use the demand for "all the facts" to excuse irresponsible actions and irresponsible risk taking. And for what? Slightly increased short-term consumption.
Targetted at all skill levels does not mean "makes programming accessible to large numbers of people with limited experience" [lots more stuff deleted]
No, but pointing at a product site doesn't mean that a single sentence supports the entire argument.
In any case, I can assure you from personal experience that VC++ allows people with no understanding of the Windows libraries to put together complex GUI apps: I put together GUI apps in VC++ long before I understood the Windows libraries and toolkits, and so have many other people that I know.
Also, the ability to do great work with primitive tools when easier tools to use are available does not make you a 'better' programmer. It makes you the textbook definition of a masochist.
I disagree that VC++ is an "easier tool" in general. What VC++ is good at is handholding and user assistance, and the people who like VC++ and find it useful are people who like handholding and user assistance.
And my reputation as a highly skilled software engineer precedes me in many circles.
I'm sure that there are "many circles" in which the developers of Microsoft Word are held in high esteem.
But let's return to the original point. Spolsky, in effect, claimed that Windows and UNIX are really just variations on a theme. And I'm saying that he is wrong: the differences between the systems are far more fundamental. Windows is a mass-market product, both as far as its users and its programmer community are concerned. UNIX is a specialty product, suitable really only for skilled users and developers. And, frankly, I hope that will not change.
The .net framework is much much more intuitive than VC++ ever was. It's a lot more like Java plus a few improvements.
.net, I have never had to use make directly.
That's true but completely irrelevant to the point. Programming in VC++ may seem obscure and difficult to you, but it still provides a lot of handholding relative to UNIX-based C/C++ development, handholding that makes it possible for people with pretty limited C++ skills to attempt to tackle pretty complex tasks.
In two years of windows development working in VC++, VB, VBScript, C#, ASP, ASP.net, COM+,
If that represents your entire time programming C++, you are making my point: you are a complete beginner as far as C++ programming is concerned.
it seems we may not have the "exponential" growth in population we once thought we had.
What do you mean "thought"? We once had exponential growth. But exponential growth in biological systems sooner or later must necessarily level off. This is all standard population biology.
The only question is why economists still cling to the absurd notion that economic growth can go on forever.
No, that's VB's stated goal. Unless you'd like to provide a reference?
Visual C++ is targeted at "all skill levels". Or are you asserting that Microsoft really is targeting Visual C++ only at advanced developers?
Being forced to manually edit make files does NOT a good software engineer make
No, but the ability to do great work with such primitive tools as make and gdb demonstrates that you are a skilled and experienced programmer.
And if you have never acquired that skill, it strongly suggests that you really don't have that much experience because even in Windows programming, it comes up with regularity.
Sure: WORM (write-once-read-many) file systems have been around much longer. See here for a paper from 1991. And write-once optical drives were available commercially already at least in the late 1980's.
I used to work for one such chap who had a doctorate from MIT and founded his own company.
Well, then he probably understand the difference between "all Windows programmers suck", which is what you seem to believe I said, and "Windows programming is overwhelmingly done by people with little experience and skill for people with little experience and skill", which is what I actually said. He would also know that you can't argue against my point by citing a few instances. Too bad that you don't understand the difference.
VB/VC++'s stated goal is to make programming accessible to large numbers of people with limited skills and experience. And, in fact, all I'm saying is that it succeeded spectacularly in that goal. Now, what's your point?
WORM file systems using such techniques have been around since at least the 1980's.
The very people who cannot accept that anything good happens on other platforms are the UNIX biggots!
UNIX bigots are happy to admit that there are plenty of other, interesting non-UNIX platforms. Windows just isn't one of them.
Some of the most useful, productive and sublime applications I have ever used happen to run on Windows
I have yet to see any application on Windows that was "useful, productive, and sublime" that wasn't a copy of something developed on some other platform. There probably are a few good original applications on Windows (there is a lot of software for it, after all, it's bound to happen occasionally), but they clearly are quite rare and obscure among the junk Windows developers grind out day-to-day.
"The OS and PLATFORM do not dictate the USEFULNESS of the APPLICATION"
That attitude sums up one of the key problems with Windows: its developers treat it like a glorified program loader. For UNIX users, the OS is the application.
Jeezus! You're one arrogant SOB.
Windows has 90% of the market, and every grandma and child runs it. But you aren't satisfied with commercial, mainstream success, you also want it to be viewed as an elegant and well-designed operating system. Windows is successful because it is mainstream and unimaginative, and that's just as it should be. If you are a Windows developer or Microsoft employee, be satisfied with the commercial success that Windows has and stop trying to claim the entire world as yours. Stop being such a goddamned Borg.
Does your usenet reader serve news articles to other users?
Yes: the way people traditionally read USENET news is by becoming a USENET node, downloading articles to the directory hierarchy of the local machine, and then redistributing them to neighboring sites. Reading news by connecting to centralized news servers via a network client happened many years later.
No, you need a costly usenet servers architecture.
There is nothing intrinsically "costly" about it: it's something a PDP-11 used to handle and that regularly ran over dial-up.
Not only machines, but also huuuge bandwith. Today's usenet servers that want to serve large portion of world hierarchies can only get it via dedicated satellite usenet-only feeds.
Just like a BT solution, you only redistribute those articles that you yourself are interested in.
The reason why we got a USENET infrastructure with a small number of backbone sites (compared to the readership) that carried everything is simply because a bunch of sites took on that role and carry everything. There is nothing in the protocol or design of USENET that requires it.
RSS+BT on the other hand is poor server and rich clients that exchange articles between themselves via p2p network only supervised by a BT tracker.
And you believe that BT and the BT tracker scales up to many billions of files on millions of nodes by sheer magic? BT would probably need a lot of work to scale up. And at least USENET doesn't need any supervision by anything--it's completely asynchronous and unsupervised.
Note that I did not claim that USENET would work any better than RSS+BT--I have no idea whether it would--simply that people are basically reinventing USENET when they combine RSS and BT.
I actually suspect that there are intrinsic properties of large peer-to-peer news networks that people don't like because that's why USENET became more and more centralized over the years.
What morron modded parent as insightful?
That's what I would ask about your posting. In fact, I would ask what moron wrote it.
Sorry, guys, but you are basically reinventing USENET over TCP/IP.
you're missing the point here i think. the relative complexity of programming on each platform is irrelevant to everyone in the entire world, except programmers. people *want* simplicity, and for good reason
UNIX is complex in the sense a musical instrument is complex: there is a lot you can do with it.
Windows is complex in the sense that a Rube Goldberg machine is complex: it has lots of strings, wheels, water buckets, and cats.
the whole reason why ready-to-serve meals sell well is because of convenience, and that's the same reason windows sells. not because it's better or faster or nicer or whatever, it's simply more convenient, and that's what people want. give the customer what they want - ever heard of that?
Of course. And did I ever say Windows should go away? Just like fast food, I think it's unavoidable that something like Windows exists, and it's good because it makes the masses happy.
What I disagree with is Spolky's assertion that UNIX and Windows are somehow pretty similar and that they just have some superficial cultural differences.
and your analogy is misleading: people don't learn to play the violin because playing the violin is complex, they play it because it sounds nice.
My point exactly: people accept that the violin is hard to learn because, for a skilled musician, the violin is a good instrument, while a CD player isn't.
if that pisses off the chefs and the shop-keepers, well tough
The only people who seemed "pissed off" are some Windows developers who apparently can't accept that the really good stuff happens on other platforms and is done by other people. Come on, guys, be happy that you have a job and are making money. Your software equivalent of fast food joints are raking in big bucks. But don't try to pass off Chicken McNuggets as a gourmet meal.
The UNIX crowd (=chefs), on the other hand, really doesn't care what Windows people think of UNIX because the UNIX crowd already knows what's better and who is more skilled. They don't care, that is, as long as the Windows crowd doesn't insult them by saying that, deep down, Windows and UNIX are really just the same.
It's a cultural difference in roughly the same sense that the difference between turning on a CD player and playing a musical instrument is a "cultural difference".
Windows programming is overwhelmingly done by people with little experience and skill for people with little experience and skill. Windows programming environments are the programming equivalent of prerecorded music, painting by numbers, or ready-to-serve meals.
And Windows programmers will never advance beyond that stage if they keep doing just Windows programmings: you no more learn programming by using Visual C++ than you learn to play the piano by playing all of Horowitz's collected works on your CD player over and over again.
UNIX is obscure, unforgiving, and takes a long time to master. Just like a musical instrument. You won't hear musicians complain either that a violin or a piano has a user interface that is "too complex"--compared to what their craft is really about, the initial difficulties of the instrument are minor.
But even the appreciation of art takes experience, so it is perhaps not surprising that Spolsky even fails to understand the difference.
A serial data analyzer costs you nothing because you can use an existing Linux PC for it.
You can get hardware USB protocol analyzers for less than $800 and they will work much better than any software hack.
Of course, if you want software hacks, you can also simply run various sniffing programs under Windows.
You're much better off plugging serial port, USB, PCI, and/or FireWire protocol analyzers into real-world hardware. For serial ports and USB, the necessary hardware isn't even all that expensive (probably cheaper than VMware).
Or maybe you can explain how digging a tunnel has the effect of stopping terrorism.
It's going to increase trade, migration, and tourism, accelerating Morocco's transition from being a third world nation to being a prosperous first world nation. It's not guaranteed to work, but it's the only approach Europe has.
US-style isolationism and militarism is impractical for Europe given its location (and it is actually ineffective and cost-prohibitive for the US as well as 9/11 and the subsequent wars show).
Seems to me like the opposite would be true -- the tunnel would be a very attractive target for terrorist attacks.
It is that, too, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were blown up at some point. But there are already plenty of attractive terrorist targets, so adding one more won't make any difference. And it can be rebuilt again.
A lot has changed since WWII. Back then, the US was fairly isolated geographically and it could manage to produce most of what it needed domestically. Today, the US is easily reachable by weapons and terrorists and the US economy and military could not function without massive influxes of foreign raw materials, manufactured goods, services, and know-how.
The lesson of the last 100 years is that the US will keep itself armed because it works -- and because any war can be made a war of attrition.
We have seen how well that approach works in Vietnam. And if any war were actually to affect US commerce with other industrialized nations, the US economy and military would fall apart almost instantly.
Why can't the US have a healthy 10-15% unemployment rate?
First of all, the US statistics are an illusion because many people who would be counted as unemployed in Europe aren't counted as unemployed in the US.
But even taking the US unemployment rate at face value, it is simply kept so low through massive foreign borrowing. If the dollar were devalued and the US economy deflated to the point of bringing it anywhere near balance, US unemployment would soar past European unemployment even with the US's already illusory standards.
It is going to be fun watching France dig itself out of the economic hole it threw itself into.
France is running its economy pretty conservatively. Europeans seem less wealthy than Americans (whether they actually are is another question) because European governments are making the necessary economically hard choices. The US, on the other hand, is living an economic lie, financed by unsustainable foreign borrowing.
Ths US trade deficit is $500bn, about 5% of GDP (e.g., here). US net foreign debt is $2.3 trillion, about 25% of GDP.
Bringing just the trade deficit into balance would require a massive increase in unemployment and a sharp drop in US GDP (here).
Maybe that 35 hours work week was a bad idea? Ha ha.
You make it sound as if the 35 hour work week was some kind of attempt to create a socialist paradise. It wasn't. It was an attempt to spread less available work among a fixed labor pool. What's the US alternative? Massive borrowing to maintain the illusion of wealth and to put the remaining unemployed out on the street.
And whether the US will be able to live with its tough position on welfare reform is an open question: welfare benefits are just starting to run out; even Americans don't seem to have the stomach to live with that. I predict welfare benefits will just keep getting extended.
Put mission control on a boat and have it travel about one time zone per day.
It is silly to compare how a super power is spending on a war over seas to how a nation with only a fraction the GDP is building a very expensive tunnel to Morocco.
It is precisely because Spain's financial means are more limited that the comparison is informative. Spain doesn't have the option of fighting big wars to deal with threats. Instead, they have to find means of promoting peace, development, and cooperation. One way they believe they can do that is through cooperative infrastructure projects.
Of course, it's dangerous to think that just because the US is a superpower, it is exempt from forces like budget deficits or capital flow. The current strength of the US military is bought at a staggering social and economic cost and it is anybody's guess how long it can be sustained.
The fact that the US spends lots of money does not add or subtract to the viability of such a massive government projects for Spain and Morocco. It is a cute commentary on US foreign policy, but plays no effect on whether these two nations should try and dig a tunnel under the sea.
Unless you have information that the rest of us don't, for now, we can assume that the Spanish have done their homework: as economic data shows, they are in far better control of their budget than the US is.
Note, incidentally, that digging has gotten a whole lot cheaper over the last decade and that there are many alternative tunnel technologies available as well, so there is no reason to believe that this project will be more than a blip in the Spanish budget.
Back to the topic at hand, the point was, regardless of what the US is doing, building such a tunnel is expensive. It is only justified if there is going to be some net gain for the two countries involved.
Yes, and the net gain is improved cooperation between Europe and Northern Africa, as well as a better shot at democratization and economic development in Morocco. Those are long-term goals that require long-term investments. Proponents of projects like these recognize that.
Yes, despite of this all, I think building a tunnel to a third world nation would be a bad idea for Spain.
Well, and Europeans don't want their neighboring third world nations to remain third world nations forever. That's why they try to integrate them and cooperate with them and why they invest in such projects.
The US approach to foreign policy, military intervention and a degree of isolationism, just is not workable for Europeans. While Europe is capable of creating a military to rival that of the US, Europeans are not willing to pay the financial or political cost of that. Furthermore, Europe's geographic location makes US-style isolationism impractical.
And that's the point of my original comparison between the Iraq war and this kind of project. Once you understand the relationship, you will understand why this kind of project makes financial sense to Europeans and why they can afford it.
Shihar wondered whether this is wasteful government spending.
My response is simple: no, it isn't. It is an effective and cheap means of promoting economic development and the development of democratic societies in Muslim nations in Northern Africa. Those kinds of cooperative infrastructure projects are, in fact, the only choice Europe seems to have for peaceful co-existence with its African and Middle Eastern neighbors.
To give Americans some idea of its order of magnitude, I made a comparison to a recent Middle East-related project by the US: the tunnel's cost is going to be a tiny fraction of what the US spent on the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq also was justified as promoting the development of democracies in Muslim societies. In fact, its cost is probably going to be small compared even to something like a single stealth bomber (which costs several billion dollars).
So, do you get it now? I responded to Shihar's question by a cost/benefit comparison with a related project recently carried out by the US, as well as with standard military hardware. Sorry if I didn't spell it out clearly enough the first time for you to understand.