I sure wish "Overrated" mods had to face meta-moderation. It's not "-1, Disagree", and I'm not posting anything that isn't completely obvious to anyone who RTFA.
Cowardice around here isn't always limited to posting anonymously, I guess.
Sucks that you can't read the article and assess the level of the bias he displays for yourself.
I did. He's not shy about his hatred and utter contempt for OOXML and all things Microsoft.
Which, fine, he's entitled to his opinion, but I'm not dumb enough to think that his pseudo-scientific Nth post about why OOXML is trash is less biased than the (N-1)th post.
I'm sure, given the history and great love between IBM and Microsoft, that IBM's Rob Weir is completely impartial in evaluating a competing standard.
He might well be right, but I'd be more inclined to believe it from someone who doesn't have a corporate interest in picking data points to fit the line he would like to draw.
These may be different features than the ones you care about, or even the ones most people care about, but it's easy to see why someone would call it better. (Or worse.)
Change 'may' to 'are' and I'll back that. I do wish you the best as far as living for another 100 years goes, though.
These Certification courses tend to be quite expensive and I know that the companies that do the training promise students (who fork over thousands) the Earth.
Well, that's true. Someone who's working with.NET day to day doesn't really need a course like that, though, in my experience and the experience of developers that I've worked with. A couple $50 books is plenty, and I know people that have done 100% of their studying for cert tests through free online sources.
The.Net framework does seem worse than the Java one, if only because it's documentation seems poorer than suns.
I go back and forth on this.
On one hand, Sun's javadocs for the base Java API are generally superior to MS's for the base.NET API.
On the other hand, a lot of things effectively fall into the.NET framework, that the closest Java equivalent isn't a core Sun creation or generally just isn't documented as well. Something like a Struts or the Struts-successor of your choice, for example. In an awful lot of those cases, the.NET API is a lot better.
So you've got some brilliant and some moderate to terrible on the Java side, whereas on the.NET side you've more got documentation that is consistently good, but not great.
Or do 90% of.NET developers stick with Visual Basic/C# ?
Probably more than that. I've worked on a lot of.NET projects at probably 10-20 different companies, and 100% of the.NET developers I've encountered used VB or C# (most using C#).
The idea of using a garbage collected language in a production environment for a large project is just plain silly, for the simple fact that garbage collection does not scale well and it introduces nondeterminism in your code - two things which are fundamentally opposed to the proper operation of a large software system.
Define does not scale well. I worked on an enterprise.NET project a year or two ago that managed a variety of transactions amounting to millions of dollars worth of business every day for a Fortune 100 company. It required a lot less hardware than you'd guess to run. Garbage collection wasn't a problem at all.
The reality is that for every 100 developers that think they can write non-trivial, say, C++ code that does not leak memory, there's probably around 1-2 that can actually do it. Those people are hard to find and generally not cheap. For most applications, it does not make economic sense to insist on having the "better" software engineers. It's just not cost effective to pay more expensive people to take more time to write the app in the majority of cases where garbage collection vs. manual memory management just doesn't matter.
Further: the union of the set of developers that can reliably write code with good memory management in a language like that, and the set of developers that can make good architecture decisions for an enterprise-level app approaches the empty set. That second set of skills is ultimately much more important to the success or failure of most sizeable applications.
You can hate on GC if you want, but the business world moved on more than a decade ago.
So the takeaway from your post is that files are easy to read in.net, as long as you read the entire thing into memory at once? I guess you only ever deal with text files that are a few KB or something.
It's slightly less straightforward in.NET for massive files, but still generally easier and produces much more readable code (to me) than doing it in C/C++/Java.
I worked on a.NET project a little over a year ago that had to routinely process flat files 3-4 gig in size, so I have some idea of what I'm talking about there. Don't even ask me why that company was storing that volume of data in flat files.
The funny thing is, they (and unfortunately some employers) think it is great to try to learn it all rather than look it up when needed. They call it Microsoft Certification. You can never learn it all in any sufficient depth and even if you could, by the time you did, they would have changed everything anyway.
Honestly, I think 90% of the actual value of a.NET cert is that you're at least exposed to all the major features of the framework. Honestly, you'd never need more than half of them on almost any project.
Sure, you'll forget all the specifics about (for example) the globalization features/classes after you pass the cert test, during the years in which you're writing apps that don't need them -- but when you do have to eventually work on an app that could benefit from those features, at least you'll know that it's out there somewhere for you to look up, and you'll save reinventing the wheel.
The glory of.NET, such as it is, to me, is that I spend much, much less time than with any other language/environment dicking around with plumbing (Struts and half the other things that grew up around Java, I'm looking right at you) or reinventing the wheel, and more time working on the code that's really interesting.
Granted, most of my experience has been working on monolithic business/enterprise apps, so YMMV.
So, you think it's "shortsighted and borderline insane" to believe no-one cares? There's no evidence that there should be a reason to care.
There's a world of difference between (possibly detrimental/incriminating) information about yourself that you choose to make public, and information that is made public without your involvement or consent.
Beyond that, anyone who doesn't think there is a reason to care isn't paying enough attention. I've seen plenty of people miss out on jobs (for example) because of things they put up on myspace, or wrote in their blogs, etc.
My thought is, if the defense handles the case correctly, Sequoia can't win. Force enough dirty laundry up through discovery and make it a loud enough case that even if they win the lawsuit, the bad publicity is irreparable damage.
Of course, that assumes that governments will choose their voting machines in a somewhat reasonable manner in the future, which is not a good assumption.
You know, a 12 foot robot bat might be a bit big for spy missions, but maybe it could be repurposed to scaring the hell out of and possibly murdering people.
It's a 12 foot robot bat, man! That'd scare the hell out of me if it came for me in the dark.
Let me make it easy for you: "24". Certainly, it's not the only place, but it's a good example.
I was thinking about that with respect to this thread, too.
Sure, occasionally Jack Bauer does screw up and torture an innocent person... but overall he saves millions of lives by torturing information out of the "bad guys."
I enjoy the show, but I really wonder sometimes if it's teaching the wrong message there.
It's not a browser you can leave open for a week and keep using. Under windows or linux?
Windows. I'm a consultant, so on the job I'm pretty much using whatever setup the client is using, though I snuck Firefox in on the last few gigs.
Typically I've been using Firefox (2) during the day and closing it every day, and using IE for the few things that I really would prefer to leave open for days at a time.
That makes me skeptical about the value of the benchmark, because Firefox 2 (in my experience, and run on half a dozen different machines) is terrible in that case. It's not a browser you can leave open for a week and keep using.
A lot of people have said 3 is much better about that, which I believe.
Talk to most people about domestic spying or the abuses of the Patriot Act, and they say something like, "Well, if you're not doing something bad, who cares if the government is watching?"
I think that's a completely shortsighted and borderline insane viewpoint, but it's the one I most frequently encounter with most Americans.
Word Perfect made its product available on the MacIntosh, Amiga, Apple ][gs, Atari ST, DOS, Windows, Solaris, and VAX systems.
They also made WordPerfect for Linux, which (itself being closed source) was a massive commercial failure. Most Linux adopters at the time weren't interested in something that wasn't free. No doubt that whole debacle didn't help WordPerfect any either.
It's kind of an interesting footnote, in the sense that I often see people posting to Slashdot that more companies should release their software for Linux as well as Windows/Mac, and there's a great example of why most commercial software isn't.
Ironically, this should be a technical case the judges can understand. Many law offices STILL use WordPerfect, because it was better.
WordPerfect was better... in 1991.
Hell, even for several years thereafter I was using WP5.1. WP6+ was trash, but there was no reason I couldn't keep using 5.1.
Eventually, the world moved on. Word became way-ass better than WordPerfect.
You can try to blame Microsoft, but really, they didn't force WordPerfect to start releasing crap that couldn't successfully compete with their own last version. When WordPerfect lost its market dominance, mostly that was market suicide. You might be able to get Microsoft on charges of molesting the corpse thereafter, but they didn't kill WordPerfect.
WP5.1 for DOS? Probably the best DOS-based word processor ever. Clear market dominance. In those days people mostly laughed at Word.
WP6 for Windows? Steaming pile of crap. They completely did not get the user interface shift that was happening and the new possibilities that a GUI provided until it was much, much too late.
It's up to the courts to ultimately decide if Microsoft played fair or not, but what's not in question is that, at best, they were fighting dirty (kind of pathetic now that I think about it) to beat a competitor who was already doing a great job of beating themselves. Kind of like kicking WordPerfect in the groin once after WordPerfect inexplicably chugged a bottle of hull cleaner and repeatedly fell on its sword.
it's not Republicans trying to take away my money to give it to someone else.
I've never heard of a non-fictional person taking a decades-long nap before.
Anyway, while you were sleeping, the Republicans have become worse about that than the Democrats ever were, sadly. I always admired the fiscal conservatism plank in the Republican platform, and it's 30 years or more gone now.
There is sometimes no way around doing something sequentially.
Yup. And as Amdahl's Law (paraphrased) puts it: the amount of speed increase you can achieve with parallelization is always constrained by the parts of the process that can't be parallelized.
Slashdot Mirror
I sure wish "Overrated" mods had to face meta-moderation. It's not "-1, Disagree", and I'm not posting anything that isn't completely obvious to anyone who RTFA.
Cowardice around here isn't always limited to posting anonymously, I guess.
So what's the basis for this suggestion of bias?
Spend five minutes looking at the article and the page it's on. To his credit, it's not something he tries to hide.
Exhibit A: a link in his sidebar to an article which refers to OOXML as "the document format from Hell."
Sucks that you can't read the article and assess the level of the bias he displays for yourself.
I did. He's not shy about his hatred and utter contempt for OOXML and all things Microsoft.
Which, fine, he's entitled to his opinion, but I'm not dumb enough to think that his pseudo-scientific Nth post about why OOXML is trash is less biased than the (N-1)th post.
I'm sure, given the history and great love between IBM and Microsoft, that IBM's Rob Weir is completely impartial in evaluating a competing standard.
He might well be right, but I'd be more inclined to believe it from someone who doesn't have a corporate interest in picking data points to fit the line he would like to draw.
These may be different features than the ones you care about, or even the ones most people care about, but it's easy to see why someone would call it better. (Or worse.)
Change 'may' to 'are' and I'll back that. I do wish you the best as far as living for another 100 years goes, though.
I've never really had that kind of trouble with the MSDN.
I can always find the page/article I'm looking for; it's just that sometimes it will be spectacularly unhelpful.
You're correct. It's been too long since college.
These Certification courses tend to be quite expensive and I know that the companies that do the training promise students (who fork over thousands) the Earth.
.NET day to day doesn't really need a course like that, though, in my experience and the experience of developers that I've worked with. A couple $50 books is plenty, and I know people that have done 100% of their studying for cert tests through free online sources.
Well, that's true. Someone who's working with
The .Net framework does seem worse than the Java one, if only because it's documentation seems poorer than suns.
.NET API.
.NET framework, that the closest Java equivalent isn't a core Sun creation or generally just isn't documented as well. Something like a Struts or the Struts-successor of your choice, for example. In an awful lot of those cases, the .NET API is a lot better.
.NET side you've more got documentation that is consistently good, but not great.
I go back and forth on this.
On one hand, Sun's javadocs for the base Java API are generally superior to MS's for the base
On the other hand, a lot of things effectively fall into the
So you've got some brilliant and some moderate to terrible on the Java side, whereas on the
Or do 90% of .NET developers stick with Visual Basic/C# ?
.NET projects at probably 10-20 different companies, and 100% of the .NET developers I've encountered used VB or C# (most using C#).
Probably more than that. I've worked on a lot of
The idea of using a garbage collected language in a production environment for a large project is just plain silly, for the simple fact that garbage collection does not scale well and it introduces nondeterminism in your code - two things which are fundamentally opposed to the proper operation of a large software system.
.NET project a year or two ago that managed a variety of transactions amounting to millions of dollars worth of business every day for a Fortune 100 company. It required a lot less hardware than you'd guess to run. Garbage collection wasn't a problem at all.
Define does not scale well. I worked on an enterprise
The reality is that for every 100 developers that think they can write non-trivial, say, C++ code that does not leak memory, there's probably around 1-2 that can actually do it. Those people are hard to find and generally not cheap. For most applications, it does not make economic sense to insist on having the "better" software engineers. It's just not cost effective to pay more expensive people to take more time to write the app in the majority of cases where garbage collection vs. manual memory management just doesn't matter.
Further: the union of the set of developers that can reliably write code with good memory management in a language like that, and the set of developers that can make good architecture decisions for an enterprise-level app approaches the empty set. That second set of skills is ultimately much more important to the success or failure of most sizeable applications.
You can hate on GC if you want, but the business world moved on more than a decade ago.
So the takeaway from your post is that files are easy to read in .net, as long as you read the entire thing into memory at once? I guess you only ever deal with text files that are a few KB or something.
.NET for massive files, but still generally easier and produces much more readable code (to me) than doing it in C/C++/Java.
.NET project a little over a year ago that had to routinely process flat files 3-4 gig in size, so I have some idea of what I'm talking about there. Don't even ask me why that company was storing that volume of data in flat files.
It's slightly less straightforward in
I worked on a
The funny thing is, they (and unfortunately some employers) think it is great to try to learn it all rather than look it up when needed. They call it Microsoft Certification. You can never learn it all in any sufficient depth and even if you could, by the time you did, they would have changed everything anyway.
.NET cert is that you're at least exposed to all the major features of the framework. Honestly, you'd never need more than half of them on almost any project.
.NET, such as it is, to me, is that I spend much, much less time than with any other language/environment dicking around with plumbing (Struts and half the other things that grew up around Java, I'm looking right at you) or reinventing the wheel, and more time working on the code that's really interesting.
Honestly, I think 90% of the actual value of a
Sure, you'll forget all the specifics about (for example) the globalization features/classes after you pass the cert test, during the years in which you're writing apps that don't need them -- but when you do have to eventually work on an app that could benefit from those features, at least you'll know that it's out there somewhere for you to look up, and you'll save reinventing the wheel.
The glory of
Granted, most of my experience has been working on monolithic business/enterprise apps, so YMMV.
So, you think it's "shortsighted and borderline insane" to believe no-one cares? There's no evidence that there should be a reason to care.
There's a world of difference between (possibly detrimental/incriminating) information about yourself that you choose to make public, and information that is made public without your involvement or consent.
Beyond that, anyone who doesn't think there is a reason to care isn't paying enough attention. I've seen plenty of people miss out on jobs (for example) because of things they put up on myspace, or wrote in their blogs, etc.
My thought is, if the defense handles the case correctly, Sequoia can't win. Force enough dirty laundry up through discovery and make it a loud enough case that even if they win the lawsuit, the bad publicity is irreparable damage.
Of course, that assumes that governments will choose their voting machines in a somewhat reasonable manner in the future, which is not a good assumption.
You know, a 12 foot robot bat might be a bit big for spy missions, but maybe it could be repurposed to scaring the hell out of and possibly murdering people.
It's a 12 foot robot bat, man! That'd scare the hell out of me if it came for me in the dark.
Let me make it easy for you: "24". Certainly, it's not the only place, but it's a good example.
I was thinking about that with respect to this thread, too.
Sure, occasionally Jack Bauer does screw up and torture an innocent person... but overall he saves millions of lives by torturing information out of the "bad guys."
I enjoy the show, but I really wonder sometimes if it's teaching the wrong message there.
It's not a browser you can leave open for a week and keep using. Under windows or linux?
Windows. I'm a consultant, so on the job I'm pretty much using whatever setup the client is using, though I snuck Firefox in on the last few gigs.
Typically I've been using Firefox (2) during the day and closing it every day, and using IE for the few things that I really would prefer to leave open for days at a time.
That makes me skeptical about the value of the benchmark, because Firefox 2 (in my experience, and run on half a dozen different machines) is terrible in that case. It's not a browser you can leave open for a week and keep using.
A lot of people have said 3 is much better about that, which I believe.
Talk to most people about domestic spying or the abuses of the Patriot Act, and they say something like, "Well, if you're not doing something bad, who cares if the government is watching?"
I think that's a completely shortsighted and borderline insane viewpoint, but it's the one I most frequently encounter with most Americans.
Word Perfect made its product available on the MacIntosh, Amiga, Apple ][gs, Atari ST, DOS, Windows, Solaris, and VAX systems.
They also made WordPerfect for Linux, which (itself being closed source) was a massive commercial failure. Most Linux adopters at the time weren't interested in something that wasn't free. No doubt that whole debacle didn't help WordPerfect any either.
It's kind of an interesting footnote, in the sense that I often see people posting to Slashdot that more companies should release their software for Linux as well as Windows/Mac, and there's a great example of why most commercial software isn't.
Ironically, this should be a technical case the judges can understand. Many law offices STILL use WordPerfect, because it was better.
WordPerfect was better... in 1991.
Hell, even for several years thereafter I was using WP5.1. WP6+ was trash, but there was no reason I couldn't keep using 5.1.
Eventually, the world moved on. Word became way-ass better than WordPerfect.
You can try to blame Microsoft, but really, they didn't force WordPerfect to start releasing crap that couldn't successfully compete with their own last version. When WordPerfect lost its market dominance, mostly that was market suicide. You might be able to get Microsoft on charges of molesting the corpse thereafter, but they didn't kill WordPerfect.
Yup.
WP5.1 for DOS? Probably the best DOS-based word processor ever. Clear market dominance. In those days people mostly laughed at Word.
WP6 for Windows? Steaming pile of crap. They completely did not get the user interface shift that was happening and the new possibilities that a GUI provided until it was much, much too late.
It's up to the courts to ultimately decide if Microsoft played fair or not, but what's not in question is that, at best, they were fighting dirty (kind of pathetic now that I think about it) to beat a competitor who was already doing a great job of beating themselves. Kind of like kicking WordPerfect in the groin once after WordPerfect inexplicably chugged a bottle of hull cleaner and repeatedly fell on its sword.
it's not Republicans trying to take away my money to give it to someone else.
I've never heard of a non-fictional person taking a decades-long nap before.
Anyway, while you were sleeping, the Republicans have become worse about that than the Democrats ever were, sadly. I always admired the fiscal conservatism plank in the Republican platform, and it's 30 years or more gone now.
There is sometimes no way around doing something sequentially.
Yup. And as Amdahl's Law (paraphrased) puts it: the amount of speed increase you can achieve with parallelization is always constrained by the parts of the process that can't be parallelized.