Interestingly enough, I've seen more GOTOs in 'hardcore' C code (just look at the Linux kernel) than I ever saw on VB. So what's your excuse for hating VB?
Microsoft ActiveX was never a necessity for the web.
Correct.
Neither were cookies or javascript.
Wrong.
Same about Macromedia flash etc
I don't know about "etc", but you're right about Flash.
It is all about the ignorance
Thank you, yes.
And you seem to be one of those poor minds.
Right. So it's unfortunate that you're getting hit by mods at the moment (I'd rather they wait until you really dig yourself into the hole), but as I said, I'd really like to be enlightened. Tell us how you would develop an online office system without cookies or JavaScript. Just plain HTML.
What would you suggest be used to enable the functionality? ActiveX controls so that it only works with IE? I'm actually curious as to how you think a developer can give you a certain set of functionality with plain HTML.
And what kind of idiot mods my posting about a software compatibility issue as flamebait?
Well, I'll wait for your response but I'm leaning towards "-1, Ignorant".
I'd suggest also checking out Alfred Bester some time
I think I've heard of him before ("Tiger, Tiger" sort of rings a bell) but I've never read any of his work. But since you mentioned him in the same sentence as Zelazny now I shall have to =)
Good lord, that article is so full of bullshit, hyperbolic FUD and half truths it's not even funny. "LOLOLOL!! VISTA will use a USB stick to RUN LOLOLOLO!!"
If this was anyone making the same FUD uninformed posts about Linux or OS X "LOLOLO! OS X cracked in 29 Minutes!! LOLOLOL!" it would be dismissed as always "oh we know this guy, he's an astroturfer and a known shill, yawn" in less time it takes to say "kernel", but I'm sure a lot of people will take this dumbass' word at face value and parrot the same bullshit on IRC, Slashdot and other fine forums. I fully expect to see the "oh, well you know Vista will swap ram to a USB device, so it will be 1,000,000,000 times slower than Linux" argument in the next Windows.vs.Linux flamewar.
It seems it's getting more and more difficult for FOSS to wring their hands and yell "OMFG we're under FUD attack from teh evil empire" given these types of things, not to mention Novell, IBM et.al getting into the game to fight it out with Microsoft.
What a waste of bandwidth. It used to be that the community could craft measured, valid responses to bullshit, but I see that art is being lost.
I don't know what exactly this is doing on/. other than perhaps the Internet angle (politiks on teh interwebs! yay!) but reading through the review I was reminded of something I read the other day... I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat!
But what the heck, it looks interesting. Might want to add it to the summer reading list. I'm busy revisiting Zelazny's Amber right now.
Mmmkay, since I've noticed that you're some sort of shining star around here and your insight tends to get modded up regularly, I'll try to be as polite as possible, even though my first instinct is to say you're full of it.
Your first problem is that you're mashing VB6 and VB.NET. They, for all the similarities in syntax, are really completely different languages with a completely different runtime going underneath. Now, since this is a question about a "beginners language", it's unlikely that someone would mistakenly rant off about VB6, since it has been largely deprecated. Anyone starting with "VB" now would use VB.NET, with or without the pretty IDE. I think that's clear enough from most of the posts I've seen so far in this article.
Some of your points are valid vis-a-vis VB6. It was completely tied to the IDE (the preprocessor infact was the IDE) and it supported a semi-OO model, which is like saying "a little bit pregnant", but regardless, most of these limitations were related to the fact that VB6 was essentially a COM server and consumer platform. The lack of implementation inheritance is a good example of that - since COM is a binary spec, it does not support it. Polymorphism and aggregation OTOH, which permeate COM, were. So pre-VB.NET, "Visual Basic" was both hobbled and all the better off for being tied to intrinsically to the COM spec. VB6 didn't behave like it did because someone at Microsoft didn't have anything better to do, it did because it had to play by the rules - the rules of COM. You could either understand these limitations (if they were to you) and live with them, or just use C++. By the time Microsoft released ATL, COM-centric coding in C++ became extremely easy - I always chuckle at the quitessential "yeah I know C++ and VB sucks, but I don't know a replacement for the GetObject() function and my life suxx0rz" claim from people who think it's really cool to bash VB because it has a large following of hobby developers that know nothing about software design, as if it was impossible to do anything meaningful with it. But I digress.
Along comes VB.NET, which is essentially the VB6 syntax ported to the.NET CLR. Like the other "mainstream" languages that target the CLR/CLI, VB.NET is essentially a full OO implementation, unless you're willing to call Python or Java "toys" because they don't support multiple inheritance or the concept of friend classed as implemented by C++.
So you have a fully OO language (for all practical purposes) with generics, operator overloading, partial classes, etc. that can be easily decoupled from the IDE - all you need is a text editor and the compiler, though most people prefer the IDE route. It just happens to look like BASIC. Other than that, I think it's a good beginner's language. Wouldn't you agree?
That's as far as VB currently goes... the rest of your rant is just the usual bashing a platform that is no longer supported or in active development, nor understood (obviously) by people like you.
HAR-HAR! But no, don't assume everyone wastes time the same way you do. When I wrote that post I had four tabs open: GMail, an article on Der Spiegel, a test site on my box and the Slashdot page I was typing into. Of course it had been open for at least a day. A whole day. Maybe that was too much? Should I close it at least every 12 hours? Eight hours? Four? Maybe I should just close it every time I want to navigate to another page? That should plug any memory leaks for sure!
And firefox 1.5 does release the memory associated with a tab
I'll tell it you said that. Maybe it will remember it's supposed to do that now. Thanks!
Someone needs to remind the IE team that this is not - I repeat not - one of the Firefox features they have to copy.
And this better be easily disabled. As in a checkbox in a dialog, not having to hack about:config. I don't pay $$$ per month for broadband just to have the browser playfully load teh interwebs into my RAM so I can "perceive" more speed.
It's ridiculous that Firefox uses 700MB of memory with 4 tabs open (right now, btw). They need to fix this, not engage in creative PR.
I'm not going to rehash all the reasons Microsoft has for doing that and I do think it's lame... but that has nothing to do with the relative merit of the technology or its implementations, which was my point to begin with.
The average slashbot (of course already deeply biased against anything that Microsoft does or does not do) sees that as "proof" that Microsoft is out to get Mono, which is completely ridiculous. If that was the case Mono would not exist by now. If Mono's biggest problem is failing to get Microsoft to subsidize their marketing efforts then I say they're doing just fine. They'll have to find other ways to promote Mono to Windows developers - why the hell should Microsof help them do that? Let Novell do it. It's not like Mono is some one-man basement project funded by someone's leftover movies-and-popcorn allowance.
Do pretend to know what this guy's passion happens to be? Do you know him?
Let me ask you this - Miguel de Icaza created a.NET clone, and now the founder of Gentoo is going to be a.NET developer. There's a GNU clone of the CLR as well. Do you figure you and a million other slashbots are missing something, somehow? Is it possible?
M$FT
Ho-ho-ho! You used a dollar sign instead of an "S"!! Innovative! Hilarious!
I can't believe how much BS these people come up with.
I can't believe posts like these keep being modded up around here for everyone to ponder. If you're going to claim this is "BS" then I suggest you also provide some sort of proof. What exactly is your point? That you think it's impossible anyone would ever actually enjoy using the.NET platform to write applications?
I very much doubt it's a "blessing" - I can't imagine why the submitter would phrase it that way. It would be a "blessing" if Apple was actually trying to get people to crack and leak their software (as some of the better conspiracy theories around seem to indicate), but I personally doubt that's the case. Every time someone "cracks" software, trust in the company suffers a downturn (large or small, depending on the context). There's no way this is some Apple plan to raise awareness of the project, because every headline reads "Apple [whatever] cracked again". That cannot be good, regardless of the real severity or relevance of the crack.
I'm going to make a wild guess that Intel is not thinking about ye olde PCs, but devices. VoIP is the next thing, and they want to make sure all those appliances are running Intel chipsets.
Cisco has a good start on them though - but not the software, that's Skype.
This is going to be an interesting field to watch for the next five years.
Good lord, how many times do you need to type "M$" to make your point? And WTF? "Astroturfers"? I just looked at your posting history and you apparently do nothing but claim Slashdot is full of "M$ astroturfers". What the fuck is wrong with you? Just what exactly makes you think I'm "astroturfing" for Microsoft? Because I'm not spitting bullshit about them 24/7 using retard lamecronyms like "M$" and "Windoze"? Am I not anti-Microsoft enough for you, oh Slashdot Overseer of Anti-M$ Propaganda?
Heysoos effin' crust, just when I thought I'd seen the bottom of the barrel another slashbot comes out of his hole and surprises me.
Just typical, I spend my last mod point, and then I find a troll like this. Please reassure me that you are not really this stupid.
You completely missed my point. Next time you write another one of your "let me tell you how it is" retard essays, make sure you know what exactly it is that you're replying to. Now do me a favor and go fuck yourself
I would gather at least some of those passing visitors purchased a vehicle.
Impulse buying, while applicable to $10 Pokemon Clocks on eBay, is generally not something one does with $60,000 luxury cars. Even assuming averages to try and theorize how many people checking out "what's happening on the web" actually dropped sixty grand to congratulate themselves on finding bmw.de in the Google index, I'd guess this was a rather ineffectual marketing ploy.
Anyone else feel Google has way too much power already? I mean, who needs domain names anymore? I just type what I'm looking for into Google and up comes the right answer. Right? Wellsometimes.
Google owns their search engine of course, but I think it's just a little evil to essentially make an entire company disappear from teh interwebs. If they weren't so pervasive then this would be a non-issue, but when I see these stories I get a little worried. Hopefully they won't expand their definition of "cheating" to include things we might think are OK.
You can mount volumes ala *nix in Windows just fine. I have mountpoints for all my external USB/Firewire drives so that they never get drive letters. On this system I have a hard drive which normally would be the D: drive but is mounted under c:\volumes; so are all my USB thumbdrives and a Firelite drive I use. Because you are posting this with the usual tone and hubris of someone who can't take 5 minutes to google a problem I'll just give you a hint: Disk manager. Other than that, good luck.
You'll never get away from drive letters because they would break too much legacy stuff. I don't mount my CD/DVD|RW drives either because I'm scared of how something like the Roxio shit I run will react, so I don't even want to go there. And still, I can have nine physical volumes on a 2000/XP/2003 box and just three drive letters.
When will we have actual symbolic links?
XP/2003 have file hard links and 2000 also supports directory simbolic links - I use one to 'alias' my 'home' folder at the root of the C: drive, and it works fine. Check out SysInternal's JUNCTION or XP's FSUTIL. Been doing that for years.
When will you ship with everything possible disabled until needed or manually enabled?
XPSP2 and 2003 ship locked down. It took them long enough, but they do now.
When will defragging a disk or some obscure network function not lock up every task?
Huh? Defragging takes no toll as far as I'm concerned, and the networking lockup issues are MUCH better in XP/2003 than they were in 2000 and NT4. In any case it's not like my Fedora box doesn't go stupid sometimes with unreachable SMB shares.
When will you not install by default two thousand modem
There are 1,400 files in the \INF directory on XP; most of them are 'compiled' PNF archives anyway. Why is this an issue? What, haven't you looked under your/dev directory lately?
When will you disable autoplay features by default
2003 and XP warn about 'active content' and are much smarter about autoplaying volumes than any other OS I've used, and that includes OS X. There might be a valid complaint here but I can't see it.
something reasonable with the trash "heap"
Ah, the registry. Let's not even go there because like most of the people who complain about it have no idea how it works or why it is designed that way. Yes, it's binary and it has its problems, especially when trying to fix a b0rked box, but... ah, let's not go there.
They don't fix bugs they know about so they don't break compatability with programs that rely on the bugs.
Unless the bugs are vulnerability vectors this is called 'doing business'. Unlike FLOSSies, software companies write code for profit and part of that means finding workarounds for stupid design mistakes (like using undocumented internals) made by other companies that write software for your platform. Breaking some shareware author's tray icon is not the same as killing Photoshop or Lotus Notes. Read Raymond Chen's blog, you'll be surprised at what lengths they go to to cater to the likes of Symantec, Corel, etc.
They don't submit their code for review by the public.
That's a nice philosophical point, but philosophical nonetheless. If I follow your logic then Firefox would have had zero vulnerabilities the day it was released, and that's not the case now, is it? The "many eyes no bugs" mantra goes south in a hurry when you have a 10-million line codebase and a few hundred actually qualified people looking at it.
They don't follow security best practices, like turning off services by default.
They didn't, but they do now. Server 2003 ships seriously locked down.
They make their OS less secure by obfuscating design to make it difficult for competitors.
Yes... no one writes applications for Windows because its design is "obfuscated". Yes.
They use propriety data formats.
There you go again with the philosophy.
They alter the OS to make it work with their programs instead of designing a solid OS so that anyone can make programs run with it.
First you complain on (1) that they don't fix bugs to avoid breaking applications and now you postulate that they break compatibility whenever they feel like it so that it works only with theirs. Which is it?
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, I've seen more GOTOs in 'hardcore' C code (just look at the Linux kernel) than I ever saw on VB. So what's your excuse for hating VB?
Even the Google fanboy in me would be hard pressed to attempt an argument like that... It's the other way around.
Correct.
Neither were cookies or javascript.
Wrong.
Same about Macromedia flash etc
I don't know about "etc", but you're right about Flash.
It is all about the ignorance
Thank you, yes.
And you seem to be one of those poor minds.
Right. So it's unfortunate that you're getting hit by mods at the moment (I'd rather they wait until you really dig yourself into the hole), but as I said, I'd really like to be enlightened. Tell us how you would develop an online office system without cookies or JavaScript. Just plain HTML.
And what kind of idiot mods my posting about a software compatibility issue as flamebait?
Well, I'll wait for your response but I'm leaning towards "-1, Ignorant".
I think I've heard of him before ("Tiger, Tiger" sort of rings a bell) but I've never read any of his work. But since you mentioned him in the same sentence as Zelazny now I shall have to =)
Thanks.
If this was anyone making the same FUD uninformed posts about Linux or OS X "LOLOLO! OS X cracked in 29 Minutes!! LOLOLOL!" it would be dismissed as always "oh we know this guy, he's an astroturfer and a known shill, yawn" in less time it takes to say "kernel", but I'm sure a lot of people will take this dumbass' word at face value and parrot the same bullshit on IRC, Slashdot and other fine forums. I fully expect to see the "oh, well you know Vista will swap ram to a USB device, so it will be 1,000,000,000 times slower than Linux" argument in the next Windows.vs.Linux flamewar.
It seems it's getting more and more difficult for FOSS to wring their hands and yell "OMFG we're under FUD attack from teh evil empire" given these types of things, not to mention Novell, IBM et.al getting into the game to fight it out with Microsoft.
What a waste of bandwidth. It used to be that the community could craft measured, valid responses to bullshit, but I see that art is being lost.
You're absolutely right, I stand corrected. I didn't know Python had that particular feature - I must say I'm impressed. Very nice.
But what the heck, it looks interesting. Might want to add it to the summer reading list. I'm busy revisiting Zelazny's Amber right now.
Your first problem is that you're mashing VB6 and VB.NET. They, for all the similarities in syntax, are really completely different languages with a completely different runtime going underneath. Now, since this is a question about a "beginners language", it's unlikely that someone would mistakenly rant off about VB6, since it has been largely deprecated. Anyone starting with "VB" now would use VB.NET, with or without the pretty IDE. I think that's clear enough from most of the posts I've seen so far in this article.
Some of your points are valid vis-a-vis VB6. It was completely tied to the IDE (the preprocessor infact was the IDE) and it supported a semi-OO model, which is like saying "a little bit pregnant", but regardless, most of these limitations were related to the fact that VB6 was essentially a COM server and consumer platform. The lack of implementation inheritance is a good example of that - since COM is a binary spec, it does not support it. Polymorphism and aggregation OTOH, which permeate COM, were. So pre-VB.NET, "Visual Basic" was both hobbled and all the better off for being tied to intrinsically to the COM spec. VB6 didn't behave like it did because someone at Microsoft didn't have anything better to do, it did because it had to play by the rules - the rules of COM. You could either understand these limitations (if they were to you) and live with them, or just use C++. By the time Microsoft released ATL, COM-centric coding in C++ became extremely easy - I always chuckle at the quitessential "yeah I know C++ and VB sucks, but I don't know a replacement for the GetObject() function and my life suxx0rz" claim from people who think it's really cool to bash VB because it has a large following of hobby developers that know nothing about software design, as if it was impossible to do anything meaningful with it. But I digress.
Along comes VB.NET, which is essentially the VB6 syntax ported to the .NET CLR. Like the other "mainstream" languages that target the CLR/CLI, VB.NET is essentially a full OO implementation, unless you're willing to call Python or Java "toys" because they don't support multiple inheritance or the concept of friend classed as implemented by C++.
So you have a fully OO language (for all practical purposes) with generics, operator overloading, partial classes, etc. that can be easily decoupled from the IDE - all you need is a text editor and the compiler, though most people prefer the IDE route. It just happens to look like BASIC. Other than that, I think it's a good beginner's language. Wouldn't you agree?
That's as far as VB currently goes... the rest of your rant is just the usual bashing a platform that is no longer supported or in active development, nor understood (obviously) by people like you.
HAR-HAR! But no, don't assume everyone wastes time the same way you do. When I wrote that post I had four tabs open: GMail, an article on Der Spiegel, a test site on my box and the Slashdot page I was typing into. Of course it had been open for at least a day. A whole day. Maybe that was too much? Should I close it at least every 12 hours? Eight hours? Four? Maybe I should just close it every time I want to navigate to another page? That should plug any memory leaks for sure!
And firefox 1.5 does release the memory associated with a tab
I'll tell it you said that. Maybe it will remember it's supposed to do that now. Thanks!
Your options are:
Pick any one, as long as it's #2.
And this better be easily disabled. As in a checkbox in a dialog, not having to hack about:config. I don't pay $$$ per month for broadband just to have the browser playfully load teh interwebs into my RAM so I can "perceive" more speed.
It's ridiculous that Firefox uses 700MB of memory with 4 tabs open (right now, btw). They need to fix this, not engage in creative PR.
I'm not going to rehash all the reasons Microsoft has for doing that and I do think it's lame... but that has nothing to do with the relative merit of the technology or its implementations, which was my point to begin with.
The average slashbot (of course already deeply biased against anything that Microsoft does or does not do) sees that as "proof" that Microsoft is out to get Mono, which is completely ridiculous. If that was the case Mono would not exist by now. If Mono's biggest problem is failing to get Microsoft to subsidize their marketing efforts then I say they're doing just fine. They'll have to find other ways to promote Mono to Windows developers - why the hell should Microsof help them do that? Let Novell do it. It's not like Mono is some one-man basement project funded by someone's leftover movies-and-popcorn allowance.
Do pretend to know what this guy's passion happens to be? Do you know him?
Let me ask you this - Miguel de Icaza created a .NET clone, and now the founder of Gentoo is going to be a .NET developer. There's a GNU clone of the CLR as well. Do you figure you and a million other slashbots are missing something, somehow? Is it possible?
M$FT
Ho-ho-ho! You used a dollar sign instead of an "S"!! Innovative! Hilarious!
I can't believe how much BS these people come up with.
I can't believe posts like these keep being modded up around here for everyone to ponder. If you're going to claim this is "BS" then I suggest you also provide some sort of proof. What exactly is your point? That you think it's impossible anyone would ever actually enjoy using the .NET platform to write applications?
I very much doubt it's a "blessing" - I can't imagine why the submitter would phrase it that way. It would be a "blessing" if Apple was actually trying to get people to crack and leak their software (as some of the better conspiracy theories around seem to indicate), but I personally doubt that's the case. Every time someone "cracks" software, trust in the company suffers a downturn (large or small, depending on the context). There's no way this is some Apple plan to raise awareness of the project, because every headline reads "Apple [whatever] cracked again". That cannot be good, regardless of the real severity or relevance of the crack.
Cisco has a good start on them though - but not the software, that's Skype.
This is going to be an interesting field to watch for the next five years.
Heysoos effin' crust, just when I thought I'd seen the bottom of the barrel another slashbot comes out of his hole and surprises me.
You completely missed my point. Next time you write another one of your "let me tell you how it is" retard essays, make sure you know what exactly it is that you're replying to. Now do me a favor and go fuck yourself
Impulse buying, while applicable to $10 Pokemon Clocks on eBay, is generally not something one does with $60,000 luxury cars. Even assuming averages to try and theorize how many people checking out "what's happening on the web" actually dropped sixty grand to congratulate themselves on finding bmw.de in the Google index, I'd guess this was a rather ineffectual marketing ploy.
Google owns their search engine of course, but I think it's just a little evil to essentially make an entire company disappear from teh interwebs. If they weren't so pervasive then this would be a non-issue, but when I see these stories I get a little worried. Hopefully they won't expand their definition of "cheating" to include things we might think are OK.
I for one thought of Jessica Alba and a Swiss Army pocket knife. Not necessarily in that order.
Although I will admit that checking my Yahoo! calendar for TPS report deadlines would be mildly amusing.
The first guest should be Lois!
You can mount volumes ala *nix in Windows just fine. I have mountpoints for all my external USB/Firewire drives so that they never get drive letters. On this system I have a hard drive which normally would be the D: drive but is mounted under c:\volumes; so are all my USB thumbdrives and a Firelite drive I use. Because you are posting this with the usual tone and hubris of someone who can't take 5 minutes to google a problem I'll just give you a hint: Disk manager. Other than that, good luck.
You'll never get away from drive letters because they would break too much legacy stuff. I don't mount my CD/DVD|RW drives either because I'm scared of how something like the Roxio shit I run will react, so I don't even want to go there. And still, I can have nine physical volumes on a 2000/XP/2003 box and just three drive letters.
When will we have actual symbolic links?
XP/2003 have file hard links and 2000 also supports directory simbolic links - I use one to 'alias' my 'home' folder at the root of the C: drive, and it works fine. Check out SysInternal's JUNCTION or XP's FSUTIL. Been doing that for years.
When will you ship with everything possible disabled until needed or manually enabled?
XPSP2 and 2003 ship locked down. It took them long enough, but they do now.
When will defragging a disk or some obscure network function not lock up every task?
Huh? Defragging takes no toll as far as I'm concerned, and the networking lockup issues are MUCH better in XP/2003 than they were in 2000 and NT4. In any case it's not like my Fedora box doesn't go stupid sometimes with unreachable SMB shares.
When will you not install by default two thousand modem
There are 1,400 files in the \INF directory on XP; most of them are 'compiled' PNF archives anyway. Why is this an issue? What, haven't you looked under your /dev directory lately?
When will you disable autoplay features by default
2003 and XP warn about 'active content' and are much smarter about autoplaying volumes than any other OS I've used, and that includes OS X. There might be a valid complaint here but I can't see it.
something reasonable with the trash "heap"
Ah, the registry. Let's not even go there because like most of the people who complain about it have no idea how it works or why it is designed that way. Yes, it's binary and it has its problems, especially when trying to fix a b0rked box, but... ah, let's not go there.
The two other issues you raise are valid.
Unless the bugs are vulnerability vectors this is called 'doing business'. Unlike FLOSSies, software companies write code for profit and part of that means finding workarounds for stupid design mistakes (like using undocumented internals) made by other companies that write software for your platform. Breaking some shareware author's tray icon is not the same as killing Photoshop or Lotus Notes. Read Raymond Chen's blog, you'll be surprised at what lengths they go to to cater to the likes of Symantec, Corel, etc.
They don't submit their code for review by the public.
That's a nice philosophical point, but philosophical nonetheless. If I follow your logic then Firefox would have had zero vulnerabilities the day it was released, and that's not the case now, is it? The "many eyes no bugs" mantra goes south in a hurry when you have a 10-million line codebase and a few hundred actually qualified people looking at it.
They don't follow security best practices, like turning off services by default.
They didn't, but they do now. Server 2003 ships seriously locked down.
They make their OS less secure by obfuscating design to make it difficult for competitors.
Yes... no one writes applications for Windows because its design is "obfuscated". Yes.
They use propriety data formats.
There you go again with the philosophy.
They alter the OS to make it work with their programs instead of designing a solid OS so that anyone can make programs run with it.
First you complain on (1) that they don't fix bugs to avoid breaking applications and now you postulate that they break compatibility whenever they feel like it so that it works only with theirs. Which is it?
Good heavens, are you saying you blame us for the actions of your stupid politicians?