Try actually using Moonlight, then tell me it's cross-platform. Microsoft has been "assisting" for more than a year and it's pre-alpha quality.
Heh, I believe that, but then, try using Silverlight 1.0. It would be generous to call it a beta, and really can't fathom why Microsoft didn't do just that. I mean, if GMail can still be a beta 5 years later, surely the first half-assed version of Silverlight can be fairly called an alpha or a beta or something.
Silverlight 2 seems pretty interesting to me, in the sense that it's good for a lot of the same kinds of things Flash would be good for (and is prone to overuse in the same ways, sigh) but is a shit ton easier to develop for. Silverlight 1? Not so much. Decent if you want to stream video, otherwise you probably should be using something else even if you're a MS fan.
The ODF to OOXML translator referenced isn't written by Microsoft, but let's ignore that for the moment.
That may be a.cpp file, but the vast majority of that code is C.
I was wondering if someone would miss the point enough to mention this.
Sure, most C++ code is basically C code. (How fair it is to point to an example that's using classes for everything and say the majority of it is C code could be argued, but there's not much point to it.)
So is most (but less) Java code. So is most C# code. Better than half the lines in most apps that I've seen written in those languages would compile if you tossed them at an ANSI C compiler. Some of the knowledge you'd gain working with C is useless in those languages, but a lot isn't.
Even the things that stayed with C++ are tending to use different libraries and different development methodologies than they would have ten or twenty years ago; the ODF to OOXML translator certainly does.
As a developer, you're always needing to learn new things to stay relevant in the market. Sometimes that's switching to a new language, sometimes it's something else. In no case is your previous experience useless, but also in no case can you safely stand still.
Meanwhile, ODF is portable and, well, C. What can you say? If that's not standing the test of time in programming then what is?
Other than for embedded devices, C is pretty much dead -- and even a lot of that work is in C++ today.
(I'm a more than competent C programmer, but ain't no one paying to write business applications in that, nor have they been for over ten years. Even most of the things I can think of that were done in C 20 years ago are at least over to C++ now.)
There's a difference between a language which is truly obsoleted by other competing languages and a language which is designed to go obsolete for the profit of the creating company.
1) It's designed to go obsolete for profit according to who? I mean, obviously there will keep being new versions of things. Any technology that stops growing is dead.
2) More importantly, from the perspective of a developer, what's the difference?
Any developer who stops learning new languages, tools, techniques, etc. has decided they want to work on legacy apps for the rest of their life.
Sure, new VB6 development is pretty much dead. So is PowerBuilder development (being pretty much the competitor to VB6, back in the day.)
I'd consider having to buy an expensive program for a not at all cheap OS just to open a standardized document a real-world consequence. And with a limited budget that is expected to feed my family, for instance, I'd even call it a safety implication.
I have to wonder if you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds: a document that (and we're speculating even here, but I'll give it to you for the moment) can maybe only be opened correctly with Office is equivalent to (for example) certifying a standard for nuclear plant safety that could kill millions of people.
I'm not trying to be inflammatory, but seriously, listen to yourself for a minute.
"Yes, and most of those people don't actually write a single line of code."
I'm not sure if that was meant to be a slight, or a slight insult.
(I'm not the GP poster)
The way I read it was to suggest that for every developer actually putting in significant time on an open source project that in some way competes with or is a threat to Microsoft, there's a much larger number of people who like to talk that talk and pass themselves off as some kind of iconoclast fighting "the Man."
Or to put it another way, for every Linus Torvalds there's a hundred twitters.
Have you seen the new 3.0 libraries?? MS Application blocks look a lot like J2EE when it first came out + the best of Jakarta that we have all been using for almost a decade. Don't get me wrong C# does a lot of "good" stuff... but a lot of its most "innovative" stuff is just finally bringing it up to snuff with the way we have all been using J2EE since the dot com bust.
I grant you, the first years of C# were (depending on your perspective) either a blatant rip-off of Java, or the kind of language you get when someone who's used Java for a few years and mostly thinks it's good, but is pissed off about a couple things and decides to fix them creates a new language.
That being said, most of that application block stuff is 5 or more years old and isn't what anyone remotely current on.NET would hold up as examples of C# innovation.
As someone who's spent years developing with both Java and C#, at this point, C# is now ahead of Java, and Java is mimicking it to try to catch up. (We're talking core language here -- obviously there are libraries/tools that came out of the Java community that C# is still catching up to.) I hope the practice of stealing the best ideas from the other and competition continues to make both better for it.
I should clarify this a bit -- when I say modern business apps, I don't mean something like Quickbooks necessarily (though for all I know it could be), I mean more along the lines of, company X needs a custom application to automate or better manage aspect Y of its business.
(Microsoft server web technologies have never dominated).
To be fair, there's a lot more to.NET than the web, just as there's a lot more to Java than the web. Nearly all modern business apps are written in one or the other, and then there's all kinds of assorted odds and ends like Java on cell phones.
Also,.NET has really withered on the vine. Though you will always be able to find shops that use.NET, the general consensus that I've heard is that.NET is dying.
That's so so so not my experience in the market.
There's much more demand (as measured by people trying to hire me to use the appropriate technology) currently for my.NET skills than my Java skills.
I want to know what the Green and Libertarian candidates stances are on tech issues. Why these two parties are not mentioned in the corporate-owned media is obvious; the question is why they are being ignored by slashdot?
Probably because they have no realistic chance of winning.
(Yes, I know that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
In all seriousness, I feel like a third party candidate would now need to be part of the "national conversation" on the election a lot earlier than now to win in November -- assuming that's even still really possible.
I mean, all the standard talk about Big Brother and the futility of fighting music piracy and the ethical problems of fighting the means of music piracy etc. aside...
IPods full of American music smuggled past Canadian customs? I'm sure that's exactly how Canadians are getting illicit copies of American music. (And vice versa.)
The only way to do that is to make the better search engine.
Honestly, I don't think that'd even do it anymore, unless it was somehow ridiculously better.
Google's been dominant for so long that its cultural inertia value would carry it a long, long way even if someone else came up with a better search tomorrow -- not that I expect Microsoft to do that.
Out of curiousity, which order did you see the movies in?
I saw The Sixth Sense first and was surprised, saw The Others second and wasn't, because it's very nearly the same twist with an otherwise different plot. That is to say, the twist didn't surprise me specifically because I'd seen The Sixth Sense and was looking for a twist of a similar kind. I have a feeling I'd have enjoyed The Others a lot more if I'd seen them the other way around.
Personally I think the claim is mis-leading anyway. The category is narrowly defined as not only over 1000, but also bought retail. So it's crafted to exclude all the expensive workstations and servers bought by corporations, since they don't usually just drive a truck to WalMart to buy them retail.
Further... and I realize this is purely anecdotal:
100% of the people I know with Macs bought them retail in an Apple store.
0% of the people I know who have bought non-Mac PCs in the last 5+ years bought them retail. They bought them from a place like Dell online, built them from parts, had someone else build them from parts, etc.
Obviously Best Buy is selling uncustomized non-Mac machines to someone retail or they wouldn't still be doing it, but I don't know the people who are buying them.
Possibly, this says something about the appeal of the Apple store as a retail venue vs. as an online order venue. It's hard to say.
And there are plenty of reasons not rooted in racism or irrational xenophobia that would refute that assumption.
I agree. Not the least of these is that it's hard to do such a great job writing a design or requirements that a team half the world away (and, generally, sleeping while you're working and vice versa) can put in a whole productive day without needing to ask any questions. If your offsite team does do this, possibly you did write a great design, but more likely they've made some assumptions that aren't correct about how your business works or what the needs of the users are.
So open source software is not of 'markedly' higher quality. If it is of even 'slightly' higher quality, or 'exactly the same quality' as closed source software, then the fact that it costs less, and gives users freedoms that they don't have with closed source software, means that closed source is doomed.
The problem with your conclusion is that it assumes that code quality as measured in this sort of way is the only or even the most important thing.
It's like buying clothes. Sure, the quality of the clothes you're buying does matter some in making your choice. So does price (which you mention above.) But, what the clothes look/feel like is also often important, and something like whether or not they actually fit you can trump all of those concerns.
In general I would say the open source world (as represented by the best known / flagship projects) produces higher quality code. It's better at finding and fixing bugs. It's often better at fixing inefficient algorithms and the like.
What it's generally [i]not[/i] as good at are higher-level or market-driven concerns, like if a UI is just bad and needs to be replaced whole-cloth, or if key feature that a developer would never use but that most users will want is present, or if documentation is provided or of sufficient quality.
As long as that's true, both open and closed source projects will continue to exist. They're best at different kinds of things, and I would argue they exist in a kind of symbiosis.
In theory I'd agree with that, but Joe Random Intarwebs User isn't savvy enough to make those choices in a semi-smart way.
The zones concept isn't perfect, but for the technically quasi-literate it's generally a better solution to the problem. Golden rule of design: don't build things as though your users are smart, because most of them won't be.
There's a low-end version of Visual Studio that you can get free. This has been true for the last several versions, FYI. It'll fall short in some ways for enterprise/business development depending on what you're doing, but it's still way beyond any of the IDEs or proto-IDEs I had to tinker with code with when I was growing up.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, IIRC they even had an internal slogan -- "it's not done til Lotus won't run", or something like that.
:)
If you've used Lotus, you'd know that's not evil.
Try actually using Moonlight, then tell me it's cross-platform. Microsoft has been "assisting" for more than a year and it's pre-alpha quality.
Heh, I believe that, but then, try using Silverlight 1.0. It would be generous to call it a beta, and really can't fathom why Microsoft didn't do just that. I mean, if GMail can still be a beta 5 years later, surely the first half-assed version of Silverlight can be fairly called an alpha or a beta or something.
Silverlight 2 seems pretty interesting to me, in the sense that it's good for a lot of the same kinds of things Flash would be good for (and is prone to overuse in the same ways, sigh) but is a shit ton easier to develop for. Silverlight 1? Not so much. Decent if you want to stream video, otherwise you probably should be using something else even if you're a MS fan.
The ODF to OOXML translator referenced isn't written by Microsoft, but let's ignore that for the moment.
.cpp file, but the vast majority of that code is C.
That may be a
I was wondering if someone would miss the point enough to mention this.
Sure, most C++ code is basically C code. (How fair it is to point to an example that's using classes for everything and say the majority of it is C code could be argued, but there's not much point to it.)
So is most (but less) Java code. So is most C# code. Better than half the lines in most apps that I've seen written in those languages would compile if you tossed them at an ANSI C compiler. Some of the knowledge you'd gain working with C is useless in those languages, but a lot isn't.
Even the things that stayed with C++ are tending to use different libraries and different development methodologies than they would have ten or twenty years ago; the ODF to OOXML translator certainly does.
As a developer, you're always needing to learn new things to stay relevant in the market. Sometimes that's switching to a new language, sometimes it's something else. In no case is your previous experience useless, but also in no case can you safely stand still.
Meanwhile, ODF is portable and, well, C. What can you say? If that's not standing the test of time in programming then what is?
Other than for embedded devices, C is pretty much dead -- and even a lot of that work is in C++ today.
(I'm a more than competent C programmer, but ain't no one paying to write business applications in that, nor have they been for over ten years. Even most of the things I can think of that were done in C 20 years ago are at least over to C++ now.)
There's a difference between a language which is truly obsoleted by other competing languages and a language which is designed to go obsolete for the profit of the creating company.
1) It's designed to go obsolete for profit according to who? I mean, obviously there will keep being new versions of things. Any technology that stops growing is dead.
2) More importantly, from the perspective of a developer, what's the difference?
Any developer who stops learning new languages, tools, techniques, etc. has decided they want to work on legacy apps for the rest of their life.
Sure, new VB6 development is pretty much dead. So is PowerBuilder development (being pretty much the competitor to VB6, back in the day.)
I'd consider having to buy an expensive program for a not at all cheap OS just to open a standardized document a real-world consequence. And with a limited budget that is expected to feed my family, for instance, I'd even call it a safety implication.
I have to wonder if you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds: a document that (and we're speculating even here, but I'll give it to you for the moment) can maybe only be opened correctly with Office is equivalent to (for example) certifying a standard for nuclear plant safety that could kill millions of people.
I'm not trying to be inflammatory, but seriously, listen to yourself for a minute.
"Yes, and most of those people don't actually write a single line of code."
I'm not sure if that was meant to be a slight, or a slight insult.
(I'm not the GP poster)
The way I read it was to suggest that for every developer actually putting in significant time on an open source project that in some way competes with or is a threat to Microsoft, there's a much larger number of people who like to talk that talk and pass themselves off as some kind of iconoclast fighting "the Man."
Or to put it another way, for every Linus Torvalds there's a hundred twitters.
Have you seen the new 3.0 libraries?? MS Application blocks look a lot like J2EE when it first came out + the best of Jakarta that we have all been using for almost a decade. Don't get me wrong C# does a lot of "good" stuff... but a lot of its most "innovative" stuff is just finally bringing it up to snuff with the way we have all been using J2EE since the dot com bust.
.NET would hold up as examples of C# innovation.
I grant you, the first years of C# were (depending on your perspective) either a blatant rip-off of Java, or the kind of language you get when someone who's used Java for a few years and mostly thinks it's good, but is pissed off about a couple things and decides to fix them creates a new language.
That being said, most of that application block stuff is 5 or more years old and isn't what anyone remotely current on
As someone who's spent years developing with both Java and C#, at this point, C# is now ahead of Java, and Java is mimicking it to try to catch up. (We're talking core language here -- obviously there are libraries/tools that came out of the Java community that C# is still catching up to.) I hope the practice of stealing the best ideas from the other and competition continues to make both better for it.
To be fair, Java is finally evolving again in response to some of that pressure, e.g., adding generics.
On the fat-client side...I just don't find it very compelling, for much the same reason that Java wasn't very compelling.
Out of curiousity, what do you find compelling for fat clients?
Now that, sir, is some damn good trolling.
I should clarify this a bit -- when I say modern business apps, I don't mean something like Quickbooks necessarily (though for all I know it could be), I mean more along the lines of, company X needs a custom application to automate or better manage aspect Y of its business.
(Microsoft server web technologies have never dominated).
.NET than the web, just as there's a lot more to Java than the web. Nearly all modern business apps are written in one or the other, and then there's all kinds of assorted odds and ends like Java on cell phones.
To be fair, there's a lot more to
Also, .NET has really withered on the vine. Though you will always be able to find shops that use .NET, the general consensus that I've heard is that .NET is dying.
.NET skills than my Java skills.
That's so so so not my experience in the market.
There's much more demand (as measured by people trying to hire me to use the appropriate technology) currently for my
When will this ever end? The Canadian Government has apologized for Bryan Adams on several occasions.
But clearly, Celine Dion is still an unrepented act of war, or possibly an atrocity.
I want to know what the Green and Libertarian candidates stances are on tech issues. Why these two parties are not mentioned in the corporate-owned media is obvious; the question is why they are being ignored by slashdot?
Probably because they have no realistic chance of winning.
(Yes, I know that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
In all seriousness, I feel like a third party candidate would now need to be part of the "national conversation" on the election a lot earlier than now to win in November -- assuming that's even still really possible.
I mean, all the standard talk about Big Brother and the futility of fighting music piracy and the ethical problems of fighting the means of music piracy etc. aside...
IPods full of American music smuggled past Canadian customs? I'm sure that's exactly how Canadians are getting illicit copies of American music. (And vice versa.)
The only way to do that is to make the better search engine.
Honestly, I don't think that'd even do it anymore, unless it was somehow ridiculously better.
Google's been dominant for so long that its cultural inertia value would carry it a long, long way even if someone else came up with a better search tomorrow -- not that I expect Microsoft to do that.
Out of curiousity, which order did you see the movies in?
I saw The Sixth Sense first and was surprised, saw The Others second and wasn't, because it's very nearly the same twist with an otherwise different plot. That is to say, the twist didn't surprise me specifically because I'd seen The Sixth Sense and was looking for a twist of a similar kind. I have a feeling I'd have enjoyed The Others a lot more if I'd seen them the other way around.
not quite. first 15-20% at the start, yes. rest, tedious.
Why not quit after that first 15-20%?
I think anger at Blizzard for making the part of the game that you admitted wasn't fun for you more fun for other people is misdirected.
Personally I think the claim is mis-leading anyway. The category is narrowly defined as not only over 1000, but also bought retail. So it's crafted to exclude all the expensive workstations and servers bought by corporations, since they don't usually just drive a truck to WalMart to buy them retail.
Further... and I realize this is purely anecdotal:
100% of the people I know with Macs bought them retail in an Apple store.
0% of the people I know who have bought non-Mac PCs in the last 5+ years bought them retail. They bought them from a place like Dell online, built them from parts, had someone else build them from parts, etc.
Obviously Best Buy is selling uncustomized non-Mac machines to someone retail or they wouldn't still be doing it, but I don't know the people who are buying them.
Possibly, this says something about the appeal of the Apple store as a retail venue vs. as an online order venue. It's hard to say.
And there are plenty of reasons not rooted in racism or irrational xenophobia that would refute that assumption.
I agree. Not the least of these is that it's hard to do such a great job writing a design or requirements that a team half the world away (and, generally, sleeping while you're working and vice versa) can put in a whole productive day without needing to ask any questions. If your offsite team does do this, possibly you did write a great design, but more likely they've made some assumptions that aren't correct about how your business works or what the needs of the users are.
So open source software is not of 'markedly' higher quality. If it is of even 'slightly' higher quality, or 'exactly the same quality' as closed source software, then the fact that it costs less, and gives users freedoms that they don't have with closed source software, means that closed source is doomed.
The problem with your conclusion is that it assumes that code quality as measured in this sort of way is the only or even the most important thing.
It's like buying clothes. Sure, the quality of the clothes you're buying does matter some in making your choice. So does price (which you mention above.) But, what the clothes look/feel like is also often important, and something like whether or not they actually fit you can trump all of those concerns.
In general I would say the open source world (as represented by the best known / flagship projects) produces higher quality code. It's better at finding and fixing bugs. It's often better at fixing inefficient algorithms and the like.
What it's generally [i]not[/i] as good at are higher-level or market-driven concerns, like if a UI is just bad and needs to be replaced whole-cloth, or if key feature that a developer would never use but that most users will want is present, or if documentation is provided or of sufficient quality.
As long as that's true, both open and closed source projects will continue to exist. They're best at different kinds of things, and I would argue they exist in a kind of symbiosis.
In theory I'd agree with that, but Joe Random Intarwebs User isn't savvy enough to make those choices in a semi-smart way.
The zones concept isn't perfect, but for the technically quasi-literate it's generally a better solution to the problem. Golden rule of design: don't build things as though your users are smart, because most of them won't be.
There's a low-end version of Visual Studio that you can get free. This has been true for the last several versions, FYI. It'll fall short in some ways for enterprise/business development depending on what you're doing, but it's still way beyond any of the IDEs or proto-IDEs I had to tinker with code with when I was growing up.