Again, Solaris and Opensolaris are not currently desktop/laptop OS's. For a server you buy appropriate hardware.
Actually hardware support for desktops is acceptable. It's laptops that are weakest. You really have to choose your laptop carefully. But I can understand that this wouldn't be a priority for developers.
At any rate, the original posting is FUD. It's true that there is concern in some of the Opensolaris forums, because Oracle hasn't said anything about Opensolaris. But there's no particular reason to believe there will be trouble. The article that the posting points to says nothing that would imply problems for Opensolaris. To avoid developing Opensolaris, Oracle would have to come up with some other way to develop and test new Solaris features. The approach that would cause problems for the Opensolaris community would be to close the process. I wouldn't think having less testing of new features would in their interest, but we'll see. Oracle has a number of current opportunities to shoot themselves in the foot with Sun-related issues. This is one of them.
I'm running Windows 7 on the original 2006 Intel Macbook Pro with no problem. The Bootcamp update wasn't supposed to work on machines that old, but did.
I'd start by talking about possibilities with him. Let him decide what he wants to do and get a sense of how much time he's willing to put into it. I mentored someone starting at about that age. He did VB.net for a few months, did a project using it as an OO language, and then moved to Java. But his idea of a simple project is a Swing client talking to a multithreaded server with a database behind it. He made all the decisions on project and language. That may be an unusual situation, but I'd still let the kid make as many of the decisions as possible. Let him see some examples of a few likely candidates, and talk about what he wants to do. Scratch sounds really neat if we wants to play with graphics as quickly as possible. But at 12 I probably would have found it a little bit insulting. If he wants to tinker with IT infrastructure, Java is probably a better starting point,
Java actually does GC perm gen. We see it regularly. By default it forces a stop and copy GC, which can be an issue, but there's a flag to let the concurrent collector handle perm gen. I believe out of perm gen is caused by not allocating a large enough space, by fragmentation, or by something holding a pointer that doesn't allow space to be released. Typically fragmentation can be fixed by allocating a somewhat larger amount of memory. Diagnosing a memory leak can get hairy.
I work on a very large system (Sakai) written in Java by a developers at many institutions, with a variety of programming styles. Too much of my time is spent pawing through implementation code to figure out what's going on when the interface definitions give me methods that return a List, but don't say List *of what*.
Of course this could be solved by proper documentation, but realistically, documentation is never perfect.
Not saying what kind of List you have also forces you into unnecessary casts. These tend to clutter the syntax.
I agree that the full specifications for generics are very hard to understand. But to me the payoff isn't in the weird stuff but in the cases that aren't at all hard to understand.
I use Solaris 10 x64 for production, on Sun hardware. On the desktop I use OS X, and to a lesser extent Windows 7 and OpenSolaris. I've tried various Linux distributions and OpenBSD. I used Solaris 9 and older on SPARC, but my recent experience is with Solaris 10 on x64. That's a rather different and more interesting OS than Solaris 6 - 8, particularly the old x86 port.
I don't see the performance issues with current versions of Solaris. A couple of years ago when we were setting up I looked at published Java benchmarks, and found Solaris a couple of percent better than Linux. Not enough to matter. It is probably true that OpenSolaris on the desktop is not a good fit for small memory. This is particularly true now that the default install uses ZFS. The design of ZFS assumes a fair amount of memory, because by default it uses a large cache. It's fine on my old 1 GB laptop, and I've used smaller virtual machines, but it's not what I'd choose for a 256 MB Pentium. I should note that ZFS is still under active development. A lot of it involves performance.
There's no exception to the Constitution. The wording was imprecise. It's considered reasonable to prevent people from bringing unsafe substances onto planes. So this is a reasonable search.
That was originally true, but not in software. Most of us are hoping the Supreme Court will fix it, but I'm not betting on it. We've now got a whole industry that at least thinks it's dependent upon these things. The court system is going to be very wary of removing such an entitlement.
You're thinking of copyright. Patent doesn't have to do with whether MS cooperated in developing the code. It (unconstitutionally) controls the use of ideas, not expression. Using cleanroom techniques don't help. However if MS help allowed more advanced AD concepts to be used in Samba, it might make it more likely that they could be accused of infringing a patent.
A number of cases like this have gone through the court. Often enforcement is at the State level, but several state courts have indicated that terms like this are not enforceable.
I've actually had this experience. I've mentored someone from about 12 - 15. He's going to be one of the best programmers of his generation if he sticks to it.
First, I agree that at this age finding things he wants to do is more important than the specific technology. But I would argue that the technology does matter to some extent. There's a lot of time between 12 and college. Someone who spends a lot of it programming is going to get at least as much experience before college as in college. I'd like to see it go in the right direction. When I taught computer science 111, I sometimes had to tell kids who were self-taught in Basic to forget everything they knew. I'd hate to see that happen to someone who had invested lots of time.
I think it's the job of the mentor to encourage -- with a light enough touch not to discourage -- use of good programming techniques. That means talking about program structure and design, proper data structures, and any other concepts needed for what they're doing. (In my case the kid likes doing multi-threaded network services, so I had to teach him synchronization much earlier than you'd typically do that.)
I haven't programmed in Scheme, so my judgement on it is probably not reliable. I did do a lot of work in Common Lisp. While in many ways I liked Common Lisp more than more recent languages, I think a language like Java or C++ is more likely to push you to think about structure. C++ seems a bit low level. I'd be willing to accept either a high level language like Perl or Python, or something lower level like Java or Visual Basic (using the newer features of the language so that it's essentially the same as Java -- although C# might be a better choice).
For someone who is just going to be playing around there's a lot to be said for Perl/Python. But if they're going to be doing anything big enough where structure matters, I'd probably start with Java or maybe C#. Of course you can certainly start with Python and them move to Java.
In my case, the student I worked with started with Visual Basic, moved into a more structured form of Visual Basic, and then to Java. By now he's also done PHP and C++. It's also all been his choice. And in fact the real answer may be that when working with teenagers unless you want to spoil the fun there's a limit to how much you can or should actually determine what they do. So you may end up supporting them in whatever language they pick. But if someone is likely to be a professional, I'd probably try to get them into a structured language like Java fairly soon for at least some of their work.
The text as it exists has not just an empty tomb, but an angel that says Jesus has risen, and tells the disciples to return to Galilee, where Jesus will meet them.
This isn't the place to argue whether the account is true. The question here is whether there is an account of the resurrection. It seems really unlikely that the author would put such a statement in unless he also knew (and expected his readers to know) stories about Jesus' appearances in Galilee.
The text is intended as a description of a resurrection. It's your right to believe that it didn't happen that way, but not to say that it just describes a mysterious disappearance of Jesus' body.
Unfortunately the article is confusing. It says that the account of the resurrection is missing from Mark. First, this manuscript isn't news. Recent translations either omit the missing section of Mark or flag it in some way. More seriously, what is missing is Jesus' appearances to some people after the resurrection. The resurrection itself is there.
I don't have any problem with their hiding specific product details. But some of it is just insulting. All mention of ZFS has disappeared. Are they not ready? Have the reconsidered their commitment to it? Why should we be put in the position of Kremlin-watchers in the days of the Soviet Union, having to read meaning into the most minor of wording?
Enterprise customers expect a bit more communication, and as a consumer customer I'd appreciate it as well.
Another big problem is serious product defects. When the newsgroups are full of people who are having problems, would it hurt their image to say "we acknowledge that this is a problem, and we're doing something about it. Stay tuned." The current approach encourages lawsuits by angry customers who think they're being stonewalled.
It depends upon your relationship to him. If you know him really well, you might try to do something. But most likely the most you can do is "I'm worried about you." If the conversation goes somewhere, fine, but if not I don't see what you can do. It sounds to me like this person needs professional help, which you can't give. The best you can do is try to get him to go.
If that doesn't work, you might refer it to either or both of your college's counseling service or dean, depending upon how things are set up, and as someone mentioned, his parents. I had a roommate who simply wouldn't get up. I ended up calling the someone (I don't recall who, but probably counseling). They came over, talked to him, and started working with him. It took a year for him to get completely to normal, but that was the start of the process. (His parents were dead, so I didn't have that option.)
There will be a continuing need for mathematical analysis in finance. They will continue to need to assess risk and model alternatives. There will also continue to be people who try to get rich quick and want analysis to show that their approach doesn't have the risks that it actually does. So the need for good analysts will continue, as will the risks that you'll be pushed to use your analysis to support incorrect arguments. But that's going to be true of anyone in finance, quantitative or not. It's an area that is inherently subject to high pressures to do irresponsible things.
I try Linux every year or so. Until recently I agreed with this. I think the latest Ubuntu is now as nice a UI as Windows, although still not as nice as OS X. However I had to do some tweaking, so of course this won't go for the normal user. (Tweaks: install the Microsoft fonts - otherwise the browser doesn't look very good; install xfce4 and pick a nicer theme, etc.)
The Office problem is still fatal for many people. They want MS Office. No substitute, even if it's better, will do.
It seems like Apple is subsidizing OS X development from hardware. The obvious thing would be to lower hardware price to competitive, increase the cost of OS X to compensate, separate OS X into upgrade and new machine, bundle the new machine version with their hardware, and hack the software to make sure you can't install an upgrade on an unlicensed machine. The results would be a lot less friendly for users.
sorry, the hardware has to be 64 bits. The most likely situation where you'd use this is 64-bit Linux or Solaris under 32-bit Windows. Most recent machines have 64-bit hardware, but a lot of people are wary of running 64-bit Windows. So I think this will be a useful configuration, if the performance penalty isn't too high.
I'm worried that this program may unintentionally handicap your potential computer professionals. My concern is that with your supplying a laptop which the kids take home, it's going to be hard for a kid to justify to his parents to buy a second laptop. But with this one locked down, they won't actually be able to learn to do things like program and administer the computer. That may not be an issue for 6th graders, but by 12th grade you will have students who realy would benefit by a computer that they can do something with.
If you really want to do this, I have specific suggestions
Provide a way for parents to unlock things, so you don't have to make the decisions.
Check the law and see if you actually need to restrict the machines or if it's enough to restrict the connection when they're at school. If, as I suspect, it's the latter, then put on some reasonable parental controls, but give the parents the password.
Provide a simple automated way to rebuild the system. That will reduce your need to be draconian.
There's a big difference between an 11 year old and an 18 year old. By sometime in high school, you want the fewest controls you can legally get away with.
Even so, I'm worried about the impact on budding computer scientists. Are you going to let them install Linux? If not, how many will be able to convince their parents to buy them another machine? I predict that this program is going to significantly reduce your output of kids who do interesting things with computers, unless you adopt an informal policy of ignoring violations by kids that seem to be sophisticated enough to take care of themselves.
How gifted? I have experience, but it's with a kid who may be brighter than all of us put together.
I've been working with someone that age, who humors me by letting me think I'm helping him. I first started work with him at 12. He's now a few months away from being 15. He had played with Visual Basic, but hadn't done any real programming. He did a project for school in Visual Basic (with at least
some object-oriented code), and then moved to Java, reading through Head-First Java. He likes doing client-server applications, with a multithreaded server (yes, I'm gotten him to do synchronization properly) and a Swing-based GUI. He's currently using Eclipse. At this point he no longer needs my help for normal programming tasks (if he ever did).
So basically I don't treat him any differently than a college student in terms of language, tools, or what I expect, but the approach is different. Rather than trying to teach stuff like in a class (yes, I have taught an intro programming course in college), I'm around to provide him with whatever he needs for his current project as he needs it.
I don't know whether that approach would work with other kids or not. I've got pretty much an ideal situation: he's in charge; I'm just a consultant. That may not be possible in the context of something that looks more like a course.
One thing I've observed is that it's really critical for him to come up with projects he cares about. Whatever his ability, attention span is still an issue. He likes multiperson games, so his projects have been either tools to help players with tasks like keeping track of their loot in an existing game, or his own game. It may be more important to come up with the right project than to use the right language. Then pick a good tool for it, just as you would for any programmer.
Probably the only thing left is to lobby congress to change the law in some way to make it practical to go after people, e.g. requiring ISPs and colleges to be responsible for enough monitoring to identify people for real. I'm not happy at the thought of this, but you ask for courses of action, and that's a likely one.
I started to reply, and then realized that I agree with rjh. So I mostly second his remarks.
Some of it depends upon what kind of work you think you'll be doing. For prospective web applications programmers, I'd put PHP high on my list, and enough Java that you can look for jobs in both the.NET and Java worlds.
Note that Java is very, very similar to object-oriented.NET programming. If you're doing.NET the right way there's no reason to be scared of Java..NET is a Java clone, changed just enough that it isn't quite compatible with Java. But in most cases the same facilities are there with the same names. The differences are primarily in the interface to the outside world: GUI programming for desktop and the way it interfaces to the web server for web applications.
In terms of long-term learning, the disadvantage of tackling Java now is that it's not as different from.NET as some of the other things mentioned, so you won't learn as much. This assumes you're doing good object-oriented.NET. But in terms of practicality, it's one of the important application development languages.
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Again, Solaris and Opensolaris are not currently desktop/laptop OS's. For a server you buy appropriate hardware.
Actually hardware support for desktops is acceptable. It's laptops that are weakest. You really have to choose your laptop carefully. But I can understand that this wouldn't be a priority for developers.
At any rate, the original posting is FUD. It's true that there is concern in some of the Opensolaris forums, because Oracle hasn't said anything about Opensolaris. But there's no particular reason to believe there will be trouble. The article that the posting points to says nothing that would imply problems for Opensolaris. To avoid developing Opensolaris, Oracle would have to come up with some other way to develop and test new Solaris features. The approach that would cause problems for the Opensolaris community would be to close the process. I wouldn't think having less testing of new features would in their interest, but we'll see. Oracle has a number of current opportunities to shoot themselves in the foot with Sun-related issues. This is one of them.
I'm running Windows 7 on the original 2006 Intel Macbook Pro with no problem. The Bootcamp update wasn't supposed to work on machines that old, but did.
I'd start by talking about possibilities with him. Let him decide what he wants to do and get a sense of how much time he's willing to put into it. I mentored someone starting at about that age. He did VB.net for a few months, did a project using it as an OO language, and then moved to Java. But his idea of a simple project is a Swing client talking to a multithreaded server with a database behind it. He made all the decisions on project and language. That may be an unusual situation, but I'd still let the kid make as many of the decisions as possible. Let him see some examples of a few likely candidates, and talk about what he wants to do. Scratch sounds really neat if we wants to play with graphics as quickly as possible. But at 12 I probably would have found it a little bit insulting. If he wants to tinker with IT infrastructure, Java is probably a better starting point,
Java actually does GC perm gen. We see it regularly. By default it forces a stop and copy GC, which can be an issue, but there's a flag to let the concurrent collector handle perm gen. I believe out of perm gen is caused by not allocating a large enough space, by fragmentation, or by something holding a pointer that doesn't allow space to be released. Typically fragmentation can be fixed by allocating a somewhat larger amount of memory. Diagnosing a memory leak can get hairy.
I work on a very large system (Sakai) written in Java by a developers at many institutions, with a variety of programming styles. Too much of my time is spent pawing through implementation code to figure out what's going on when the interface definitions give me methods that return a List, but don't say List *of what*.
Of course this could be solved by proper documentation, but realistically, documentation is never perfect.
Not saying what kind of List you have also forces you into unnecessary casts. These tend to clutter the syntax.
I agree that the full specifications for generics are very hard to understand. But to me the payoff isn't in the weird stuff but in the cases that aren't at all hard to understand.
I use Solaris 10 x64 for production, on Sun hardware. On the desktop I use OS X, and to a lesser extent Windows 7 and OpenSolaris. I've tried various Linux distributions and OpenBSD. I used Solaris 9 and older on SPARC, but my recent experience is with Solaris 10 on x64. That's a rather different and more interesting OS than Solaris 6 - 8, particularly the old x86 port.
I don't see the performance issues with current versions of Solaris. A couple of years ago when we were setting up I looked at published Java benchmarks, and found Solaris a couple of percent better than Linux. Not enough to matter. It is probably true that OpenSolaris on the desktop is not a good fit for small memory. This is particularly true now that the default install uses ZFS. The design of ZFS assumes a fair amount of memory, because by default it uses a large cache. It's fine on my old 1 GB laptop, and I've used smaller virtual machines, but it's not what I'd choose for a 256 MB Pentium. I should note that ZFS is still under active development. A lot of it involves performance.
There's no exception to the Constitution. The wording was imprecise. It's considered reasonable to prevent people from bringing unsafe substances onto planes. So this is a reasonable search.
That was originally true, but not in software. Most of us are hoping the Supreme Court will fix it, but I'm not betting on it. We've now got a whole industry that at least thinks it's dependent upon these things. The court system is going to be very wary of removing such an entitlement.
You're thinking of copyright. Patent doesn't have to do with whether MS cooperated in developing the code. It (unconstitutionally) controls the use of ideas, not expression. Using cleanroom techniques don't help. However if MS help allowed more advanced AD concepts to be used in Samba, it might make it more likely that they could be accused of infringing a patent.
Any reason not to use Comodo's equivalent?
A number of cases like this have gone through the court. Often enforcement is at the State level, but several state courts have indicated that terms like this are not enforceable.
I've actually had this experience. I've mentored someone from about 12 - 15. He's going to be one of the best programmers of his generation if he sticks to it.
First, I agree that at this age finding things he wants to do is more important than the specific technology. But I would argue that the technology does matter to some extent. There's a lot of time between 12 and college. Someone who spends a lot of it programming is going to get at least as much experience before college as in college. I'd like to see it go in the right direction. When I taught computer science 111, I sometimes had to tell kids who were self-taught in Basic to forget everything they knew. I'd hate to see that happen to someone who had invested lots of time.
I think it's the job of the mentor to encourage -- with a light enough touch not to discourage -- use of good programming techniques. That means talking about program structure and design, proper data structures, and any other concepts needed for what they're doing. (In my case the kid likes doing multi-threaded network services, so I had to teach him synchronization much earlier than you'd typically do that.)
I haven't programmed in Scheme, so my judgement on it is probably not reliable. I did do a lot of work in Common Lisp. While in many ways I liked Common Lisp more than more recent languages, I think a language like Java or C++ is more likely to push you to think about structure. C++ seems a bit low level. I'd be willing to accept either a high level language like Perl or Python, or something lower level like Java or Visual Basic (using the newer features of the language so that it's essentially the same as Java -- although C# might be a better choice).
For someone who is just going to be playing around there's a lot to be said for Perl/Python. But if they're going to be doing anything big enough where structure matters, I'd probably start with Java or maybe C#. Of course you can certainly start with Python and them move to Java.
In my case, the student I worked with started with Visual Basic, moved into a more structured form of Visual Basic, and then to Java. By now he's also done PHP and C++. It's also all been his choice. And in fact the real answer may be that when working with teenagers unless you want to spoil the fun there's a limit to how much you can or should actually determine what they do. So you may end up supporting them in whatever language they pick. But if someone is likely to be a professional, I'd probably try to get them into a structured language like Java fairly soon for at least some of their work.
The text as it exists has not just an empty tomb, but an angel that says Jesus has risen, and tells the disciples to return to Galilee, where Jesus will meet them.
This isn't the place to argue whether the account is true. The question here is whether there is an account of the resurrection. It seems really unlikely that the author would put such a statement in unless he also knew (and expected his readers to know) stories about Jesus' appearances in Galilee.
The text is intended as a description of a resurrection. It's your right to believe that it didn't happen that way, but not to say that it just describes a mysterious disappearance of Jesus' body.
Unfortunately the article is confusing. It says that the account of the resurrection is missing from Mark. First, this manuscript isn't news. Recent translations either omit the missing section of Mark or flag it in some way. More seriously, what is missing is Jesus' appearances to some people after the resurrection. The resurrection itself is there.
I don't have any problem with their hiding specific product details. But some of it is just insulting. All mention of ZFS has disappeared. Are they not ready? Have the reconsidered their commitment to it? Why should we be put in the position of Kremlin-watchers in the days of the Soviet Union, having to read meaning into the most minor of wording?
Enterprise customers expect a bit more communication, and as a consumer customer I'd appreciate it as well.
Another big problem is serious product defects. When the newsgroups are full of people who are having problems, would it hurt their image to say "we acknowledge that this is a problem, and we're doing something about it. Stay tuned." The current approach encourages lawsuits by angry customers who think they're being stonewalled.
It depends upon your relationship to him. If you know him really well, you might try to do something. But most likely the most you can do is "I'm worried about you." If the conversation goes somewhere, fine, but if not I don't see what you can do. It sounds to me like this person needs professional help, which you can't give. The best you can do is try to get him to go.
If that doesn't work, you might refer it to either or both of your college's counseling service or dean, depending upon how things are set up, and as someone mentioned, his parents. I had a roommate who simply wouldn't get up. I ended up calling the someone (I don't recall who, but probably counseling). They came over, talked to him, and started working with him. It took a year for him to get completely to normal, but that was the start of the process. (His parents were dead, so I didn't have that option.)
There will be a continuing need for mathematical analysis in finance. They will continue to need to assess risk and model alternatives. There will also continue to be people who try to get rich quick and want analysis to show that their approach doesn't have the risks that it actually does. So the need for good analysts will continue, as will the risks that you'll be pushed to use your analysis to support incorrect arguments. But that's going to be true of anyone in finance, quantitative or not. It's an area that is inherently subject to high pressures to do irresponsible things.
I try Linux every year or so. Until recently I agreed with this. I think the latest Ubuntu is now as nice a UI as Windows, although still not as nice as OS X. However I had to do some tweaking, so of course this won't go for the normal user. (Tweaks: install the Microsoft fonts - otherwise the browser doesn't look very good; install xfce4 and pick a nicer theme, etc.)
The Office problem is still fatal for many people. They want MS Office. No substitute, even if it's better, will do.
It seems like Apple is subsidizing OS X development from hardware. The obvious thing would be to lower hardware price to competitive, increase the cost of OS X to compensate, separate OS X into upgrade and new machine, bundle the new machine version with their hardware, and hack the software to make sure you can't install an upgrade on an unlicensed machine. The results would be a lot less friendly for users.
There was a charge in the beginning, but not recently. Recently the universities haven't paid. I was involved in the implementation at a university.
sorry, the hardware has to be 64 bits. The most likely situation where you'd use this is 64-bit Linux or Solaris under 32-bit Windows. Most recent machines have 64-bit hardware, but a lot of people are wary of running 64-bit Windows. So I think this will be a useful configuration, if the performance penalty isn't too high.
I'm worried that this program may unintentionally handicap your potential computer professionals. My concern is that with your supplying a laptop which the kids take home, it's going to be hard for a kid to justify to his parents to buy a second laptop. But with this one locked down, they won't actually be able to learn to do things like program and administer the computer. That may not be an issue for 6th graders, but by 12th grade you will have students who realy would benefit by a computer that they can do something with.
If you really want to do this, I have specific suggestions
Even so, I'm worried about the impact on budding computer scientists. Are you going to let them install Linux? If not, how many will be able to convince their parents to buy them another machine? I predict that this program is going to significantly reduce your output of kids who do interesting things with computers, unless you adopt an informal policy of ignoring violations by kids that seem to be sophisticated enough to take care of themselves.
How gifted? I have experience, but it's with a kid who may be brighter than all of us put together.
I've been working with someone that age, who humors me by letting me think I'm helping him. I first started work with him at 12. He's now a few months away from being 15. He had played with Visual Basic, but hadn't done any real programming. He did a project for school in Visual Basic (with at least some object-oriented code), and then moved to Java, reading through Head-First Java. He likes doing client-server applications, with a multithreaded server (yes, I'm gotten him to do synchronization properly) and a Swing-based GUI. He's currently using Eclipse. At this point he no longer needs my help for normal programming tasks (if he ever did).
So basically I don't treat him any differently than a college student in terms of language, tools, or what I expect, but the approach is different. Rather than trying to teach stuff like in a class (yes, I have taught an intro programming course in college), I'm around to provide him with whatever he needs for his current project as he needs it.
I don't know whether that approach would work with other kids or not. I've got pretty much an ideal situation: he's in charge; I'm just a consultant. That may not be possible in the context of something that looks more like a course.
One thing I've observed is that it's really critical for him to come up with projects he cares about. Whatever his ability, attention span is still an issue. He likes multiperson games, so his projects have been either tools to help players with tasks like keeping track of their loot in an existing game, or his own game. It may be more important to come up with the right project than to use the right language. Then pick a good tool for it, just as you would for any programmer.
Probably the only thing left is to lobby congress to change the law in some way to make it practical to go after people, e.g. requiring ISPs and colleges to be responsible for enough monitoring to identify people for real. I'm not happy at the thought of this, but you ask for courses of action, and that's a likely one.
I started to reply, and then realized that I agree with rjh. So I mostly second his remarks.
Some of it depends upon what kind of work you think you'll be doing. For prospective web applications programmers, I'd put PHP high on my list, and enough Java that you can look for jobs in both the .NET and Java worlds.
Note that Java is very, very similar to object-oriented .NET programming. If you're doing .NET the right way there's no reason to be scared of Java. .NET is a Java clone, changed just enough that it isn't quite compatible with Java. But in most cases the same facilities are there with the same names. The differences are primarily in the interface to the outside world: GUI programming for desktop and the way it interfaces to the web server for web applications.
In terms of long-term learning, the disadvantage of tackling Java now is that it's not as different from .NET as some of the other things mentioned, so you won't learn as much. This assumes you're doing good object-oriented .NET. But in terms of practicality, it's one of the important application development languages.