Perhaps you should take a proper look at how many banks are hiring Java developers.
Perhaps you should also do something about your coding; Swing is not slow. If you end up with a sluggish GUI using Swing, you're not doing it right.
While you might not want to get started on the J2EE platform, it's a must-have skill if you're joining any decent sized institution because it provides a hell of a lot of features that they want and use. And it's much more mature than the.NET platform.
Companies do not commit suicide - and the article acknowledges that. Nor should they; an investment in a company is just that, an investment. The job of the directors (unless instructed otherwise by the shareholders) is to run the company in as profitable way as possible.
There is no way that Sun is worth more as cash than as a going concern. Just not going to happen. The very closest you could get to a corporate suicide of the type that this article advocates is a friendly buyout of some sort.
Personally my money's on Sun making a comeback; they invest in brains and research to an extent that to me inspires confidence in their future.
That sort of pollyanna-ism brings in the readers though, so I suppose it's a good tactic.
> There might be no benefit to Sun in open > sourcing Java. But there is benefit to me.
Firstly, you're a fool. Why should Sun care what you think and what benefits you ? Because they're nice ? That's not they're job. They're under a legal and ethical obligation to look after the interests of their shareholders. They appear to be doing this, so hurrah for them.
Secondly, I as a Java developer do not want Sun to open source Java. What I would like is the "Open Source Community" to write a standards compliant implementation of Java. I can see no reason why Sun should be obliged to hand out the family silver of their implementation when the spec is open. Nobody expected them to hand out their C compiler, Gnu wrote their own.
I'm a Java developer. I rely upon it to make my living. I use it for personal projects. If Sun ever go titsup I'll just carry on with the IBM compiler. If Gnu finished GCJ instead of whining about the difficulty of keeping up with Sun's implementations I might use that too.
This guy pops up on The Register from time to time, and comes across as less balanced than average even by their standards.
Particularly he has a bee in his bonnet about Google. I've never found his shrill arguments very convincing.
I'm sure Google will go bad one day (perhaps when they've gone public, or when the founders leave), but for now they're relying on quality rather than marketing, which gets the thumbs up from me.
I'd trust them at least as much as Hotmail if I wanted such an account.
You might like to learn Java. It has a lot of the power of C, but memory management is essentially handled for you (search on "garbage collection").
It also has "elegance" as a language.
There are things you cannot and should not do in Java, but unless you plan to write operating systems and device drivers (and it doesn't sound like you do) then it may be a good fit for you.
You can reasonably assume that false positives are acceptable.
Rename "is_a_virus(me)" as
contains_replication_routine(me)
and you'll see my point.
That's not a small computer, THIS is a small...
on
PC In An XP Box
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I thought that project was kind of dull when I first saw it. It's not improved with time. On the other hand, I really like the look of the new Nanode PC from Mini-ITX (same site), designed by Hoojum.
Take a look at this picture and the cat. Now look at your desktop PC and imagine a cat standing next to it. The nanode really is that small.
If I were a Christian, I'd have a problem with films that were actively denouncing it.
The Life of Brian, of course, isn't about Christianity, it's about the church.
Christians who're not smart enough to make the distinction, or who represent the church (ie the clergy), tend to have a problem with it, the rest don't.
The overhead of offering the option to Verisign is very nearly nil.
If some of their customers want to renew for 100 years at a stretch, it makes perfect sense to permit them to thrust the money into Verisign's pockets.
And for a company with a valuable domain name it's a lot safer to pay a relatively small amount of money up front and have zero risk of the domain expiring. Remember, Microsoft has accidentally let vital domain names lapse before now !
I loathe VeriSign as a company, but this is just plain common sense.
In pure line count a minimal Java Hello World would only have one additional line.
It is crammed with keywords, and it contains the notion of Objects and Classes.
But I see that as a good thing - you can concentrate on the mainline code and introduce the student to control flow and so forth, but when you come to the concepts of classes you've got a nice immediate example to point to.
It's so much easier to teach a language when a common reaction to new information is "oh, I wondered what that was for" rather than "why would I ever need that ?"
Finally I have to completely disagree with you about type safety. A perfectly written and comprehended program does not need type safety. A real world program will never be either, and type safety will prevent some of the nastiest bugs from occurring and keep your data intact.
I have no problem with C in its place, but its place is not as a learning language or as a business language.
Very true - I'm hoping that some bright spark will take advantage of the Eclipse library and make a decent cross-platform PostgreSQL gui/admin/design tool.
I'm illustrating the reason other people would choose to use MySQL or even SQL Server over Postgres, a point I think you missed. I personally use Postgres on a Linux platform. However:
Oh, you want to run postgres on that substitute for an OS people call win2k?
If my primary platform was Win2K, then I don't think that would be an unreasonable expectation. In those circumstances, which is easier ? Running a MS SQL installer, the MySQL installer, or, uh, installing Cygwin and getting Postgres set up ?
Postgresql is just as fast or faster for just about everything else...
Possibly. As a matter of fact, I don't actually care very much. For my purposes data integrity is way more important than performance anyway. You're not arguing with my point, which is that MySQL is perceived as being fast, regardless of the facts.
huh?/etc/postgresql/*, text editor, voila
Astonishingly enough, editing text files with mediocre documentation isn't much fun, which brings me on to...
You haven't seen Postgresql documentation, have you?
I have the elephant book, and I have the New Riders "PostgreSQL Essential Reference" book on my desk, plus I have a Safari subscription. So yes, I've seen the PostgreSQL documentation. Apparently you haven't.
I'm not particularly talking about the SQL syntax documentation (although that's not especially good), rather the installation documentation and syaadmin documentation.
Let me reiterate, finally, that I'm a fan of PostgreSQL, I like it, and I use it. But I'm not blind to its faults, and I've used many commercial databases, which I suspect you haven't.
Moreover I'm prepared to put my name to my opinions.
I have a suspicion that your management will get accustomed to calling you a pedant. Which may detract from your credibility when recommending products other than "SQL Server".
Incidentally, I'm not suggesting that Postgres is (yet) comparable to the commercial offerings. Just that of the open source solutions I've tried so far, it's the only one that's a real contender to be used in a "live" situation.
I know exactly where you're coming from; I couldn't quite believe it when I discovered that MySQL didn't have views. I was almost as astounded that it didn't have foreign keys with the default table type.
MySQL does have some points that would win it favour:
It's easy to install on a variety of platforms (specifically including Win2K).
It's fast, at least by reputation.
It's easy to configure.
It has good documentation.
If I'm looking for a database for a "real" application, I care about data integrity. Only then will I consider other points. Of the databases I've tried, Postgres wins hands down. But for a "personal" product, or for someone building a system who's fairly new to databases ? I can see why they go for MySQL.
That would be lovely, and would certainly prompt me to pay for an OS upgrade !
The thing that bugs me about OSX since getting my iBook (lovely in every other way) is that it wastes real estate so badly.
The display on my ThinkPad which is 1024x768 seems so much more capacious than the one on the iBook (same resolution) that I find the iBook almost unusable for development.
It's ok for browsing the web, and writing email, but it would be better for both of those with the OS9 gui (though not at the cost of the OS9 stability).
There's nothing on that site to indicate that they're anything other than vapourware.
It doesn't follow that it's impossible - on the contrary, I think this is a technology we'll be seeing very soon - I just doubt that it will be from this company.
So why do I think we'll be seeing it soon ? Simple, grasshopper. Lasers. It's easy enough to build a poor quality monochrome vector display out of a laser diode and a couple of mirrors on motors. That's expensive and clunky.
A laser diode and a couple of piezo-transducer-mounted mirrors would be a slightly more elegant mechanism, and if you can build a vector display with this, you ought just as easily to be able to build a raster display.
So all we're missing is the cheap green laser diode and the cheap blue laser diode to complement the existing cheap red laser diode.
Now, you CAN buy a green laser pointer that's only moderately painfully expensive - and now that there's an imminent demand for blue laser diodes for high density DVD players I'm hoping their cost will plummet.
I don't have the skills to build this, but I'm hoping someone will get onto it soon.
Oh man, wait 'til he tries to sort out the babel fish situation...
Re:Missed one: explain it to someone
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 1
Oops. I just posted almost exactly the same point in a rather more wordy way. We never had the bear, but we did joke about the "cardboard cutout" we'd use instead of an actual person. Presumably someone at the company had heard of the teddy bear in question and adapted it to our circumstances.
Regardless, this is easily the single most important debugging tip and I heartily agree.
Dave.
An extra rule
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Describe the problem to someone else."
This is so effective that it doesn't require the person to whom you're explaining it to pay attention, or even understand. A manager will do;-) Even when the person to whom you're explaining it is smart, alert, and interested, it's almost never them that fixes the bug.
The process of describing the behaviour of the program as it ought to be versus the behaviour it is exhibiting forces you to step back and consider only the facts. This in turn is often enough to give you an insight into the disconnect between what's really happening and what you know should be happening.
If you catch yourself saying "that's impossible" when debugging some particularly freaky bit of behaviour, it's definitely time to try this.
The input of the other party is so irrelevant in this process that we used to joke about keeping a cardboard cut-out programmer to save wear and tear on the real ones...
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should take a proper look at how many banks are hiring Java developers.
.NET platform.
Perhaps you should also do something about your coding; Swing is not slow. If you end up with a sluggish GUI using Swing, you're not doing it right.
While you might not want to get started on the J2EE platform, it's a must-have skill if you're joining any decent sized institution because it provides a hell of a lot of features that they want and use. And it's much more mature than the
Sure, Sun are in the doldrums.
Companies do not commit suicide - and the article acknowledges that. Nor should they; an investment in a company is just that, an investment. The job of the directors (unless instructed otherwise by the shareholders) is to run the company in as profitable way as possible.
There is no way that Sun is worth more as cash than as a going concern. Just not going to happen. The very closest you could get to a corporate suicide of the type that this article advocates is a friendly buyout of some sort.
Personally my money's on Sun making a comeback; they invest in brains and research to an extent that to me inspires confidence in their future.
That sort of pollyanna-ism brings in the readers though, so I suppose it's a good tactic.
D.
> There might be no benefit to Sun in open
> sourcing Java. But there is benefit to me.
Firstly, you're a fool. Why should Sun care what you think and what benefits you ? Because they're nice ? That's not they're job. They're under a legal and ethical obligation to look after the interests of their shareholders. They appear to be doing this, so hurrah for them.
Secondly, I as a Java developer do not want Sun to open source Java. What I would like is the "Open Source Community" to write a standards compliant implementation of Java. I can see no reason why Sun should be obliged to hand out the family silver of their implementation when the spec is open. Nobody expected them to hand out their C compiler, Gnu wrote their own.
I'm a Java developer. I rely upon it to make my living. I use it for personal projects. If Sun ever go titsup I'll just carry on with the IBM compiler. If Gnu finished GCJ instead of whining about the difficulty of keeping up with Sun's implementations I might use that too.
D.
This guy pops up on The Register from time to time, and comes across as less balanced than average even by their standards.
Particularly he has a bee in his bonnet about Google. I've never found his shrill arguments very convincing.
I'm sure Google will go bad one day (perhaps when they've gone public, or when the founders leave), but for now they're relying on quality rather than marketing, which gets the thumbs up from me.
I'd trust them at least as much as Hotmail if I wanted such an account.
D.
You might like to learn Java. It has a lot of the power of C, but memory management is essentially handled for you (search on "garbage collection").
It also has "elegance" as a language.
There are things you cannot and should not do in Java, but unless you plan to write operating systems and device drivers (and it doesn't sound like you do) then it may be a good fit for you.
D.
You can reasonably assume that false positives are acceptable.
Rename "is_a_virus(me)" as
contains_replication_routine(me)
and you'll see my point.
I thought that project was kind of dull when I first saw it. It's not improved with time. On the other hand, I really like the look of the new Nanode PC from Mini-ITX (same site), designed by Hoojum.
Take a look at this picture and the cat. Now look at your desktop PC and imagine a cat standing next to it. The nanode really is that small.
I want one.
The site with the rest of the info is here.
D.
If I were a Christian, I'd have a problem with films that were actively denouncing it.
The Life of Brian, of course, isn't about Christianity, it's about the church.
Christians who're not smart enough to make the distinction, or who represent the church (ie the clergy), tend to have a problem with it, the rest don't.
D.
Just to unpick that specific nit, the kernel as a whole is the specific thing that even the FSF would agree is not GNU/Linux:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux
The overhead of offering the option to Verisign is very nearly nil.
If some of their customers want to renew for 100 years at a stretch, it makes perfect sense to permit them to thrust the money into Verisign's pockets.
And for a company with a valuable domain name it's a lot safer to pay a relatively small amount of money up front and have zero risk of the domain expiring. Remember, Microsoft has accidentally let vital domain names lapse before now !
I loathe VeriSign as a company, but this is just plain common sense.
D.
I think you're over stating your case.
In pure line count a minimal Java Hello World would only have one additional line.
It is crammed with keywords, and it contains the notion of Objects and Classes.
But I see that as a good thing - you can concentrate on the mainline code and introduce the student to control flow and so forth, but when you come to the concepts of classes you've got a nice immediate example to point to.
It's so much easier to teach a language when a common reaction to new information is "oh, I wondered what that was for" rather than "why would I ever need that ?"
Finally I have to completely disagree with you about type safety. A perfectly written and comprehended program does not need type safety. A real world program will never be either, and type safety will prevent some of the nastiest bugs from occurring and keep your data intact.
I have no problem with C in its place, but its place is not as a learning language or as a business language.
D.
And yet, as you approach thirty, you seem not to have mastered the art of the paragraph.
We all think we're smart. Nobody is competent to assess their own intelligence.
Very true - I'm hoping that some bright spark will take advantage of the Eclipse library and make a decent cross-platform PostgreSQL gui/admin/design tool.
I'm illustrating the reason other people would choose to use MySQL or even SQL Server over Postgres, a point I think you missed. I personally use Postgres on a Linux platform. However:
/etc/postgresql/*, text editor, voila
Oh, you want to run postgres on that
substitute for an OS people call win2k?
If my primary platform was Win2K, then I don't think that would be an unreasonable expectation. In those circumstances, which is easier ? Running a MS SQL installer, the MySQL installer, or, uh, installing Cygwin and getting Postgres set up ?
Postgresql is just as fast or
faster for just about everything else...
Possibly. As a matter of fact, I don't actually care very much. For my purposes data integrity is way more important than performance anyway. You're not arguing with my point, which is that MySQL is perceived as being fast, regardless of the facts.
huh?
Astonishingly enough, editing text files with mediocre documentation isn't much fun, which brings me on to...
You haven't seen Postgresql documentation, have you?
I have the elephant book, and I have the New Riders "PostgreSQL Essential Reference" book on my desk, plus I have a Safari subscription. So yes, I've seen the PostgreSQL documentation. Apparently you haven't.
I'm not particularly talking about the SQL syntax documentation (although that's not especially good), rather the installation documentation and syaadmin documentation.
Let me reiterate, finally, that I'm a fan of PostgreSQL, I like it, and I use it. But I'm not blind to its faults, and I've used many commercial databases, which I suspect you haven't.
Moreover I'm prepared to put my name to my opinions.
Well, Postgres which is the one I know most about doesn't have:
Updates to Views
Real Time Replication
Two Phase Commit
I have a suspicion that your management will get accustomed to calling you a pedant. Which may detract from your credibility when recommending products other than "SQL Server".
I'm not as familiar with the others, but I promise you, Postgres is not coming close to toppling oracle, or MS SQL.
It's a good database, but MS SQL has a host of features that Postgres doesn't.
Incidentally, I'm not suggesting that Postgres is (yet) comparable to the commercial offerings. Just that of the open source solutions I've tried so far, it's the only one that's a real contender to be used in a "live" situation.
Seriously ? Or are you just being arsey ?
Everyone I know refers to "the database server" and they only ever mean Mikey's product if they say "SQL Server".
D.
MySQL does have some points that would win it favour:
If I'm looking for a database for a "real" application, I care about data integrity. Only then will I consider other points. Of the databases I've tried, Postgres wins hands down. But for a "personal" product, or for someone building a system who's fairly new to databases ? I can see why they go for MySQL.
D.
That would be lovely, and would certainly prompt me to pay for an OS upgrade !
The thing that bugs me about OSX since getting my iBook (lovely in every other way) is that it wastes real estate so badly.
The display on my ThinkPad which is 1024x768 seems so much more capacious than the one on the iBook (same resolution) that I find the iBook almost unusable for development.
It's ok for browsing the web, and writing email, but it would be better for both of those with the OS9 gui (though not at the cost of the OS9 stability).
D.
There's nothing on that site to indicate that they're anything other than vapourware.
It doesn't follow that it's impossible - on the contrary, I think this is a technology we'll be seeing very soon - I just doubt that it will be from this company.
So why do I think we'll be seeing it soon ? Simple, grasshopper. Lasers. It's easy enough to build a poor quality monochrome vector display out of a laser diode and a couple of mirrors on motors. That's expensive and clunky.
A laser diode and a couple of piezo-transducer-mounted mirrors would be a slightly more elegant mechanism, and if you can build a vector display with this, you ought just as easily to be able to build a raster display.
So all we're missing is the cheap green laser diode and the cheap blue laser diode to complement the existing cheap red laser diode.
Now, you CAN buy a green laser pointer that's only moderately painfully expensive - and now that there's an imminent demand for blue laser diodes for high density DVD players I'm hoping their cost will plummet.
I don't have the skills to build this, but I'm hoping someone will get onto it soon.
D.
BTW, how do you get by the bulldozer?
Oh man, wait 'til he tries to sort out the babel fish situation...
Oops. I just posted almost exactly the same point in a rather more wordy way. We never had the bear, but we did joke about the "cardboard cutout" we'd use instead of an actual person. Presumably someone at the company had heard of the teddy bear in question and adapted it to our circumstances.
Regardless, this is easily the single most important debugging tip and I heartily agree.
Dave.
"Describe the problem to someone else."
;-) Even when the person to whom you're explaining it is smart, alert, and interested, it's almost never them that fixes the bug.
This is so effective that it doesn't require the person to whom you're explaining it to pay attention, or even understand. A manager will do
The process of describing the behaviour of the program as it ought to be versus the behaviour it is exhibiting forces you to step back and consider only the facts. This in turn is often enough to give you an insight into the disconnect between what's really happening and what you know should be happening.
If you catch yourself saying "that's impossible" when debugging some particularly freaky bit of behaviour, it's definitely time to try this.
The input of the other party is so irrelevant in this process that we used to joke about keeping a cardboard cut-out programmer to save wear and tear on the real ones...