If it's anything like django's templates (which is what I know), it's more of a templating language, which allows you to do things like specify a template for a comment field, and then replicate it using a for loop. Or select one of two divs depending on a condition. Stuff like that, which gets done on server side...
It's poor for sales in a consumer-driven environment.
I'm not talking about an internal ERP for a corporate which wants to track everything. I'm not talking about a stock market system that needs to work on sub-second precision. I'm not talking about a SCADA that controls a 200 acre industrial installation.
I know that the technology behind iOS/Android had been available for at least a decade before they actually came out. Blackberry had the field back then. I've seen and operated the HP Windows tablets of the mid 2000s. Why have those efforts failed?
One answer: They all targeted multi-year-patience corporates. Apple and Google targeted consumers. Individuals who don't have either the money, or the patience to wait for two years while you painstakingly figure out every standard, work out every bug, and produce a quality product that costs about 10 times more. In the consumer world, he who's first to market has the mind-share.
Another: A large corporate might be perfectly happy setting up an enterprise Exchange and Sharepoint server, configuring everyone's computers and mobiles to use it, and maintain a large IT workforce to do all this and solve all the problems that would come up. A small business is never so lucky. Any system that's easily deployed and has minimal maintenance is a win. That means cloud, that means web, and that means simplified consumer devices like the iPhone and iPad. It also means that holding up the progress of standards until we "get everything right" is just too slow.
To your specific question: Could you ever browse Wikipedia with your C64? Or play Crysis? Or even Angry Birds (with current graphics, not 8 bit ones). Or even, for that matter, compose a document with pictures in it?
What the "industry" - a nebulous concept in itself - needs, is hardly something we can work out. Different consumers need, or want, different things. One size fits all doesn't work!
Here's the thing: For years now, the rest of the industry's been held back by the "Business environment". Blackberry, IE6, Windows Servers and the like... Stable features, rarely updated (say, every couple of years or so if you're lucky), and a concrete environment for multi-year projects to target.
Now, we have an entirely different ethos trying to compete - the rapid-fire consumer-oriented model of iOS, Android, Chrome and the rest. This is all about eyeballs, because they're not pitching to Joe CTO who needs 2 years to complete his project, which should run for another 20. The audience in this case is the man or woman on the street, who will jump to the next shiny thing in a heartbeat, because the investment is really not that high.
The first method leads to stagnation - we've lived through that... The second leads to instability. That too, we've seen. It remains to be seen, how this will be balanced out as time goes on. Because this isn't going away anymore.
Rote has its uses; how else did you learn the alphabet? Or the multiplication tables? It's like muscle memory. Rote in pattern recognition can come through practice.
Where it gets ridiculous is when it's used to cram useless facts into the kid's head, to be vomited onto a test.
Teachers are only glorified babysitters if parents don't teach the kids to value education.
Interesting "if" there. If the parent doesn't "teach the kids to value education", the teacher may just be a "glorified babysitter". But what if they do, but can't help the child in a particular subject? Is the teacher still only a babysitter?
That's where a good teacher can make a big difference. In boolean logic terms, use an AND gate, rather than an OR gate.
Parents can make their kids work, but if it's not their subject, it wouldn't really be much more than carrot/stick. A teacher is the one who helps most of the kids to understand and develop themselves in the subject.
Forgive me for asking, but wtf are HOTS AND OBE? As far as I know, one is a passing crush, and the other is a British knightly order. I fail to see how either has any relevance to education, apart from someone having hots for their teacher who was knighted by the Queen...
MS skunkworks is truly amazing! Surface (both the original table and the new tablet), Photosynth,... Some of that stuff is revolutionary!
But they seem to have this problem of bringing things to market. I don't know if you remember the number of features announced and then cancelled for Vista; WinFS, for example...
I think this article shows us why - the individual divisions are very innovative. But they compete with each other, distracting them from actually doing anything in the market.
Perfect example of why companies shouldn't be allowed to grow into obesity! It's interesting to note that breaking up MS would probably have been a good thing for the market.
Number of google hits is hardly a measure of popularity.
First, Windows is still dominant on the desktop, and anyone who wants to be treated as a first-class citizen there is mostly going to use.Net. More to the point, all the big corporate IT shops have taken to it.
Second, it's one of those things that's completely polarizing. I, for example, cordially loathe the framework (though C# is ok), and love my C++. But then, the kind of programming I like to do is not really what it's built for. But I use it, because I have to (constraints like interoperating with the guy who wrote a DB backend in.Net, etc). Just because I use it doesn't mean I like it.
Third, you can like.Net, but dislike MS's tactics with it. For example, take Silverlight - touted as the Next Big Thing! Everyone simply had to learn it! But when Win8 came around, it was dropped in favour of HTML5. Lots of people were miffed, and several apps were EOL'd because of that. The cost of redevelopment is insanely high!
Similarly, C++/CLI: It used to be sold as a first-class.Net language. Then, when VS2010 came about, Intellisense (auto-completion, type hints and the like in the IDE) didn't work anymore. When they were asked, the VS team's response was something like "We don't think you C++/CLI programmers matter anymore". Again, lots of angry programmers...
Management loves MS. Programmers are usually either ambivalent, or dislike them...
...with mitigating circumstances taken into account... That would be either (a) they were behaving responsibly and shit happened (always possible) and/or (b) they called it into the appropriate authorities responsibly and it was dealt with.
The point is that there needs to be some kind of consequence for behaving irresponsibly, which doesn't seem to exist right now.
I think it's safe to say that there will be a winner every time a lottery is held... The probability doesn't approach one, it is one! Predicting the winner of a particular lottery, however....
Anyway, this isn't nearly lottery odds; and even then, the resulting damage from such an incident is high enough to take precautions against it. It's like the probability of a reactor core meltdown in a nuclear power plant is fairly low, but it's still something that's secured against by using sensible rules.
As an individual, I may make a different decision; for example, there may be things that Office is better at, which I don't care about. Price wins over features I don't need.
But yeah, $99 is not really overpriced, if there's anything in that which you care about.
Tell me, how do you use Javascript to write a fast, efficient signal processing application?
These guys show real-time 2-D FFT. Admittedly, the combination of SSE/AVX and multi-threading/multi-core would have provided a 30x speedup, but I've been playing around with real-time 2D graphics in JavaScript and have been amazed at its performance. I was even guilty of premature optimization -- I started out coding for double-buffering the graphics with two Canvases and ended up throwing out the double-buffering because with just one Canvas there was no flicker.
Hmm, that doesn't open for me, so I can't see it working. But 2D FFT is one thing, Photoshop is something else.
Fast enough vs so fast you can't notice...
On today's processors, Javascript will be "fast enough" for many applications. E.g., I do scientific software for a living, and I'm partitioning the work into what has to be done natively -- mostly the acquisition and crunching of tens of gigabytes of data at a time -- vs. what can be done cross-platform -- the final post-processing of tens of megabytes of pre-processed data.
Yeah, I have the same kind of experience. Use what's suited to what you're doing. What I'm arguing is that native code is still the best option for many consumer-grade applications, even on the desktop. It's not going anywhere.
Why? I see tablet as the new clipboard in business. Any business that involves an actual atoms-based product or service (as opposed to a bit-based cube farm) involves "walking around" where tablets nee clipboards are needed.
This is where I disagreed with the GP - it's not business apps that really require high-end native code. It's scientific, engineering, and some consumer-grade functions. Most businesses don't need all that much raw speed!
I was initially excited about the UI design philosophy of Win8 Metro. But then I realized that HTML5 can do 95% of what Metro can, and also be truly cross-platform.
I see HTML5 as the cross-platform holy grail that developers have been seeking since the WORA days of Java 15 years ago. First it was supposed to be Java, then Microsoft embraced and extinguished it, and besides it had too big of a footprint download (and a clumsy download process to boot). Then Flash was supposed to be the universal small-footprint. It was just about to take off, then Apple extinguished it by not supporting it at all (completely skipping the "embracing" step). Then Microsoft finally decided to stop holding back.NET from web development -- the purpose for which it seemingly was originally designed but never delivered upon until Silverlight. But by then Windows market share was too small for Microsoft to force a Windows-only solution on the web world.
HTML5 is W3C standard. It's not Sun. It's not Adobe. It's not Microsoft. It's W3C.
HTML5 is the holy grail.
Very confident statement there!
But HTML5 has real flaws - or at least one real, huge flaw, called Javascript! Not that the language itself is bad, but it's inconsistent and needs to be re-spec'd to be a holy grail...
I've heard WebGL a lot. Even tried to use it. And basically stopped due to lack of time.
While it's nice to have, and fairly impressive, it gets nowhere near what a true native app can do. It's all very well to bounce a ball about, or even to do a body browser, but let's be realistic here - it's never going to be Call of Duty. Enough for some ex-flash games, but not anything better.
I don't think the "IE doesn't support WebGL" argument holds much water, really; if they see a need, they'll probably start supporting it. And it still won't be enough.
What I've noticed is that NVidia usually works fairly fine. Until that day you upgrade the kernel, and don't recompile the shim, and it craps out on you and dumps you back into a VGA console (if you're lucky). Or when you upgrade the driver and it clobbers everything suddenly.
The second problem exists on all platforms; I use Win 7 at work, and all of a sudden, the driver tends to crap out for no apparent reason. Usually, after an upgrade, and you either have to downgrade, or upgrade again within a few days. I think they keep releasing minor fixes and patches for particular users - games and the like, which tend to create a LOT of regressions. And don't get me started on the multiple, backwards-incompatible changes made to Cuda and OpenCL. People talk about ABI compatibility in the kernel, but compared to the (lack of) API compatibility in Cuda, that's chickenfeed. At least the kernel has a stable API, and the tools you need to work with it are in the same place over releases!
Of course, ATI drivers are even more flaky! And Intel drivers tend to claim OpenGL features they don't actually implement. But that doesn't excuse NVidia's behaviour either. It just means that all three are horrible companies, and that the GPU market really needs a shake-up.
Tell me, how do you use Javascript to write a fast, efficient signal processing application? How do you write 3D graphics in HTML5?
Native is still consumer; you still need fast, close-to-hardware work for many things like image processing (iPhoto), audio processing (look at all the people raving about garage band on the iPad), games and the like. If anything, the "enterprise" is the one who doesn't need native. Who needs SSE and OpenCL for a billing application, email or even displaying a presentation? Write that in HTML5 + JS or whatever, your users wouldn't notice.
Your basic point is correct, but I think you stressed it too much. Native code isn't going anywhere, and if anything, it's going to get even hotter. It'll be for the superstar apps like Photoshop and Blender. Your flashlight apps and Yet Another Calculator are going to run on the interpreter. What's over is the days of 200 lines of COM gibberish to write Hello World. That was an avoidable fiasco which they're trying to correct in all kinds of ways now.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously not! He said Rails, not PHP.
If it's anything like django's templates (which is what I know), it's more of a templating language, which allows you to do things like specify a template for a comment field, and then replicate it using a for loop. Or select one of two divs depending on a condition. Stuff like that, which gets done on server side...
It's poor for sales in a consumer-driven environment.
I'm not talking about an internal ERP for a corporate which wants to track everything. I'm not talking about a stock market system that needs to work on sub-second precision. I'm not talking about a SCADA that controls a 200 acre industrial installation.
I know that the technology behind iOS/Android had been available for at least a decade before they actually came out. Blackberry had the field back then. I've seen and operated the HP Windows tablets of the mid 2000s. Why have those efforts failed?
One answer: They all targeted multi-year-patience corporates. Apple and Google targeted consumers. Individuals who don't have either the money, or the patience to wait for two years while you painstakingly figure out every standard, work out every bug, and produce a quality product that costs about 10 times more. In the consumer world, he who's first to market has the mind-share.
Another: A large corporate might be perfectly happy setting up an enterprise Exchange and Sharepoint server, configuring everyone's computers and mobiles to use it, and maintain a large IT workforce to do all this and solve all the problems that would come up. A small business is never so lucky. Any system that's easily deployed and has minimal maintenance is a win. That means cloud, that means web, and that means simplified consumer devices like the iPhone and iPad. It also means that holding up the progress of standards until we "get everything right" is just too slow.
To your specific question: Could you ever browse Wikipedia with your C64? Or play Crysis? Or even Angry Birds (with current graphics, not 8 bit ones). Or even, for that matter, compose a document with pictures in it?
What the "industry" - a nebulous concept in itself - needs, is hardly something we can work out. Different consumers need, or want, different things. One size fits all doesn't work!
Congratulations! You have just invented the strike - the most common weapon in the hands of the union!
Assembly still needs a spokesman. Otherwise it's just noise, and ineffective.
Here's the thing: For years now, the rest of the industry's been held back by the "Business environment". Blackberry, IE6, Windows Servers and the like... Stable features, rarely updated (say, every couple of years or so if you're lucky), and a concrete environment for multi-year projects to target.
Now, we have an entirely different ethos trying to compete - the rapid-fire consumer-oriented model of iOS, Android, Chrome and the rest. This is all about eyeballs, because they're not pitching to Joe CTO who needs 2 years to complete his project, which should run for another 20. The audience in this case is the man or woman on the street, who will jump to the next shiny thing in a heartbeat, because the investment is really not that high.
The first method leads to stagnation - we've lived through that... The second leads to instability. That too, we've seen. It remains to be seen, how this will be balanced out as time goes on. Because this isn't going away anymore.
Rote has its uses; how else did you learn the alphabet? Or the multiplication tables? It's like muscle memory. Rote in pattern recognition can come through practice.
Where it gets ridiculous is when it's used to cram useless facts into the kid's head, to be vomited onto a test.
Teachers are only glorified babysitters if parents don't teach the kids to value education.
Interesting "if" there. If the parent doesn't "teach the kids to value education", the teacher may just be a "glorified babysitter". But what if they do, but can't help the child in a particular subject? Is the teacher still only a babysitter?
That's where a good teacher can make a big difference. In boolean logic terms, use an AND gate, rather than an OR gate.
Parents can make their kids work, but if it's not their subject, it wouldn't really be much more than carrot/stick. A teacher is the one who helps most of the kids to understand and develop themselves in the subject.
Forgive me for asking, but wtf are HOTS AND OBE? As far as I know, one is a passing crush, and the other is a British knightly order. I fail to see how either has any relevance to education, apart from someone having hots for their teacher who was knighted by the Queen...
There is a fairly strong evidence stream that says that the first LOCA happened before the tsunami hit, though...
The report touches on that too!
MS skunkworks is truly amazing! Surface (both the original table and the new tablet), Photosynth,... Some of that stuff is revolutionary!
But they seem to have this problem of bringing things to market. I don't know if you remember the number of features announced and then cancelled for Vista; WinFS, for example...
I think this article shows us why - the individual divisions are very innovative. But they compete with each other, distracting them from actually doing anything in the market.
Perfect example of why companies shouldn't be allowed to grow into obesity! It's interesting to note that breaking up MS would probably have been a good thing for the market.
Number of google hits is hardly a measure of popularity.
First, Windows is still dominant on the desktop, and anyone who wants to be treated as a first-class citizen there is mostly going to use .Net. More to the point, all the big corporate IT shops have taken to it.
Second, it's one of those things that's completely polarizing. I, for example, cordially loathe the framework (though C# is ok), and love my C++. But then, the kind of programming I like to do is not really what it's built for. But I use it, because I have to (constraints like interoperating with the guy who wrote a DB backend in .Net, etc). Just because I use it doesn't mean I like it.
Third, you can like .Net, but dislike MS's tactics with it. For example, take Silverlight - touted as the Next Big Thing! Everyone simply had to learn it! But when Win8 came around, it was dropped in favour of HTML5. Lots of people were miffed, and several apps were EOL'd because of that. The cost of redevelopment is insanely high!
Similarly, C++/CLI: It used to be sold as a first-class .Net language. Then, when VS2010 came about, Intellisense (auto-completion, type hints and the like in the IDE) didn't work anymore. When they were asked, the VS team's response was something like "We don't think you C++/CLI programmers matter anymore". Again, lots of angry programmers...
Management loves MS. Programmers are usually either ambivalent, or dislike them...
But will a bunch of redneck yahoos ever be able to cover the amount of property damage typical wildfires cause?
It should be criminal charges, in any sane system. People's lives were put at risk by negligent practices.
...with mitigating circumstances taken into account... That would be either (a) they were behaving responsibly and shit happened (always possible) and/or (b) they called it into the appropriate authorities responsibly and it was dealt with.
The point is that there needs to be some kind of consequence for behaving irresponsibly, which doesn't seem to exist right now.
Not if the laws relating to firearms negligence have been deliberately torn up because the state wants to appear firearms-friendly...
In other words, if the law doesn't work, the law must be changed.
I think it's safe to say that there will be a winner every time a lottery is held... The probability doesn't approach one, it is one! Predicting the winner of a particular lottery, however....
Anyway, this isn't nearly lottery odds; and even then, the resulting damage from such an incident is high enough to take precautions against it. It's like the probability of a reactor core meltdown in a nuclear power plant is fairly low, but it's still something that's secured against by using sensible rules.
As an individual, I may make a different decision; for example, there may be things that Office is better at, which I don't care about. Price wins over features I don't need.
But yeah, $99 is not really overpriced, if there's anything in that which you care about.
Or $20 each for the individual apps on the App Store...
Which seems better, because many people I know would use one or two, but not all three...
...and send a pull request to $DEITY, please?
This closed source science cannot succeed. It's pushing up medical costs and making research more diffi....
Wait, what? Not a patch to the source code? A patch on the skin?
Nevermind...
Which is fine, except for the marketing.
Apple, on the other hand, says "Oh of course the 3GS runs iOS 6. Some features may not work though...". The version number is meaningless...
What this does is to cannibalize WP7 sales in favour of a not-yet-even-remotely-released WP8!
Skyscraper index here we come again!
These guys show real-time 2-D FFT. Admittedly, the combination of SSE/AVX and multi-threading/multi-core would have provided a 30x speedup, but I've been playing around with real-time 2D graphics in JavaScript and have been amazed at its performance. I was even guilty of premature optimization -- I started out coding for double-buffering the graphics with two Canvases and ended up throwing out the double-buffering because with just one Canvas there was no flicker.
Hmm, that doesn't open for me, so I can't see it working. But 2D FFT is one thing, Photoshop is something else.
Fast enough vs so fast you can't notice...
On today's processors, Javascript will be "fast enough" for many applications. E.g., I do scientific software for a living, and I'm partitioning the work into what has to be done natively -- mostly the acquisition and crunching of tens of gigabytes of data at a time -- vs. what can be done cross-platform -- the final post-processing of tens of megabytes of pre-processed data.
Yeah, I have the same kind of experience. Use what's suited to what you're doing. What I'm arguing is that native code is still the best option for many consumer-grade applications, even on the desktop. It's not going anywhere.
WebGL
I answered this above...
Why? I see tablet as the new clipboard in business. Any business that involves an actual atoms-based product or service (as opposed to a bit-based cube farm) involves "walking around" where tablets nee clipboards are needed.
This is where I disagreed with the GP - it's not business apps that really require high-end native code. It's scientific, engineering, and some consumer-grade functions. Most businesses don't need all that much raw speed!
I was initially excited about the UI design philosophy of Win8 Metro. But then I realized that HTML5 can do 95% of what Metro can, and also be truly cross-platform.
I see HTML5 as the cross-platform holy grail that developers have been seeking since the WORA days of Java 15 years ago. First it was supposed to be Java, then Microsoft embraced and extinguished it, and besides it had too big of a footprint download (and a clumsy download process to boot). Then Flash was supposed to be the universal small-footprint. It was just about to take off, then Apple extinguished it by not supporting it at all (completely skipping the "embracing" step). Then Microsoft finally decided to stop holding back .NET from web development -- the purpose for which it seemingly was originally designed but never delivered upon until Silverlight. But by then Windows market share was too small for Microsoft to force a Windows-only solution on the web world.
HTML5 is W3C standard. It's not Sun. It's not Adobe. It's not Microsoft. It's W3C.
HTML5 is the holy grail.
Very confident statement there!
But HTML5 has real flaws - or at least one real, huge flaw, called Javascript! Not that the language itself is bad, but it's inconsistent and needs to be re-spec'd to be a holy grail...
I've heard WebGL a lot. Even tried to use it. And basically stopped due to lack of time.
While it's nice to have, and fairly impressive, it gets nowhere near what a true native app can do. It's all very well to bounce a ball about, or even to do a body browser, but let's be realistic here - it's never going to be Call of Duty. Enough for some ex-flash games, but not anything better.
I don't think the "IE doesn't support WebGL" argument holds much water, really; if they see a need, they'll probably start supporting it. And it still won't be enough.
What I've noticed is that NVidia usually works fairly fine. Until that day you upgrade the kernel, and don't recompile the shim, and it craps out on you and dumps you back into a VGA console (if you're lucky). Or when you upgrade the driver and it clobbers everything suddenly.
The second problem exists on all platforms; I use Win 7 at work, and all of a sudden, the driver tends to crap out for no apparent reason. Usually, after an upgrade, and you either have to downgrade, or upgrade again within a few days. I think they keep releasing minor fixes and patches for particular users - games and the like, which tend to create a LOT of regressions. And don't get me started on the multiple, backwards-incompatible changes made to Cuda and OpenCL. People talk about ABI compatibility in the kernel, but compared to the (lack of) API compatibility in Cuda, that's chickenfeed. At least the kernel has a stable API, and the tools you need to work with it are in the same place over releases!
Of course, ATI drivers are even more flaky! And Intel drivers tend to claim OpenGL features they don't actually implement. But that doesn't excuse NVidia's behaviour either. It just means that all three are horrible companies, and that the GPU market really needs a shake-up.
Tell me, how do you use Javascript to write a fast, efficient signal processing application? How do you write 3D graphics in HTML5?
Native is still consumer; you still need fast, close-to-hardware work for many things like image processing (iPhoto), audio processing (look at all the people raving about garage band on the iPad), games and the like. If anything, the "enterprise" is the one who doesn't need native. Who needs SSE and OpenCL for a billing application, email or even displaying a presentation? Write that in HTML5 + JS or whatever, your users wouldn't notice.
Your basic point is correct, but I think you stressed it too much. Native code isn't going anywhere, and if anything, it's going to get even hotter. It'll be for the superstar apps like Photoshop and Blender. Your flashlight apps and Yet Another Calculator are going to run on the interpreter. What's over is the days of 200 lines of COM gibberish to write Hello World. That was an avoidable fiasco which they're trying to correct in all kinds of ways now.
...is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less...