You can say exactly the same thing about every programming language ever invented.
Even BASIC??? You make me laugh.
Specifically the C++ is yes, mostly done and dusted. It is a static language: it is rigid and inflexible. That's what for we actually love it, but it is going to be replaced (and it needs to be replaced) because it incorporates the paradigms which were new 20 years ago. For modern programming, C++ is often too restrictive. E.g. implementing analogue of ObjC message dispatch is possible only with intricate low level hacks in asm (or using a 3rd party library which already does that for you). Implementing Perl's eval{} is flat out impossible.
Perl is free form and allows a multitude of approaches to solving problems. One can learn all the syntax and functions and utilities easily by reading through perldoc - just like documentation for any programming language for that matter.
But that would not teach them programming.
The fact is that one constantly advances as a software developer (*). Yet the very same language easily adapts to all the new paradigms, allows trivially to express new ways to code -after all the years- is pretty amazing fit.
Or to put it other way: in Perl number of ways you can do something is equal to the number of Perl programmers. And new programmers always bring something new, something worth learning.
Plus whoever owns OpenID knows every site you visit and the frequency.
I'd take that - over maintaining manually a private DB with passwords.
I'd rather trust one (or few) OpenID provider(s), than hundreds of random people who run the dozens/hundreds sites I visit monthly. Both options have bunch of pros and cons - but at least the former has advantage of being convenient and non-obtrusive.
just because a person uses an "easy" password for something as trivial as a "commenting" user login
And why the hell one needs a password to comment? To me that was always an overkill.
OpenID was poised to solve the problem (allowing single sign-on) and partially does that already. Yet still many sites do not support it - Gawker included.
Over the years not once I was going through bunch of ftpd picking one to install on my Linux box, all of them, ProFTPd included, had a... front door wide open: anonyms had pretty much unlimited read access to everything.
And obviously all of the ftpds were refusing auth users by default. On the few occasions I need the FTP for my LAN server (mostly for Windows clients) it was such a royal pain to setup properly... while welcoming all anonyms from everywhere to copy all the stuff all they want.
For a moment you got me startled. Main site is probably DDoSed all the time (either maliciously or by sheer volume of netizens trying to dig it) but Wikipedia lists two functioning mirrors of the real Wikileaks' wiki. The mirror is slow, but seems to be complete.
I supported wikileaks up until now... the information they shared this time makes me think they really jumped the shark.
Why? The move tells me that the WikiLeaks is truly independent and doesn't withhold information because they judge it to be interesting or not.
I want to judge myself whether the information is interesting or not.
I sincerely hope that WikLeaks heralds the return of the good ol' mass media which is reporting news as they come, not providing interpretations (or exaggerations to make it looks like news).
[..] users don't care, they just want something that they can get familiar with in a short time.
Users do not - but professionals do.
All the little things chip time very fast - the time I'd rather did something useful, instead of bunch of mousewavings, modern desktops tend to impose on me. That's where the hundreds/thousands little options come into play: they allow user to remove the road bumps from the daily workflow.
That's why highly customizable desktops like KDE/Flux/WM/IceWM/etc would remain popular: many who graduate from being an end-user find GNOME, after getting "familiar" with it, quite limiting.
Though sure if you spend 90% of time in Evolution and FireFox, then you pretty much do not care what desktop you run and the whole argument about the desktop environments becomes moot.
Just do it, and worry about what "it" is, and whether the approach was a good idea later, after you've done the first 90% and it is time to do the other 90%.
but I think this has something to do with the fact that I grow older
I concur.
Read your own post again.
10-15 years ago there was much less interactive entertainment - we were tolerant to the long load time and repeating the same level countless times until we done.
Now, there are have the choices: attempt tenth time to get through level of a game; watch YouTube link friend has sent me; watch last night TV show off the TiVo; play a flash game I just got on the RSS feed; get on IRC and grab a fresh anime to watch and talk about it with others.
Games simply found themselves in inconvenient position of competing for the people's time. And the games are doing not all that great at winning our time - and our money. For there are many other, often more accessible, alternatives which guarantee time well spent. Unlike games.
the things that make a datastore scalable can be implemented in SQL RDBMS systems as well.
CACM paper is interesting read, though unsurprisingly it starts with "shared-nothing scalability" and later on goes onto "avoid mulit-node operations".
So what is the point of using an ACID capable RDBMS in horizontally scaled deployment when it is literally advised (if not forbidden due to "shared-nothing") to not to take advantages of the ACID?
I'm tad bit disappointed, since from the parent post description, I have expected to see a mention of major breakthrough in distributed transaction processing performance: an atomic commit across several nodes in the cluster which doesn't suck. But all I see there between the lines is the old "don't do it."
Embedded X server is nonsense: embedded systems do not even implement X server/client per se, they simply wrap graphics right into Xlib-like interface. They are embedded, they do not need the network-transparency. They advertise "We support X!" while in reality it means "stuff which uses Xlib compiles." I worked with bunch of them, and it is considered to be a high-end feature to have the X server at all. In the end, they compile XFree/X.org with special driver which simply strips/skips/bypasses all the network stuff completely, plugging Xlib/Xt directly into the core of X.
Likewise I know for a fact that Sun's Java uses the Xlib. Perl and Python rely on toolkits and are oblivious to the OS or graphics system one runs (== use Xlib).
Heck, I've written my own X client library; it's not rocket science.
Writing Xlib which is a thin wrapper for X protocol isn't rocket science - building applications right on top of it is. Because it is not far from programming in assembler: very efficient but you wont get too much of functionality in any measurable time frame.
That might be a reasonable thing to do if there were significant gains in performance or usability to be expected, but there won't be.
Read up e.g. how FreeType or GDK libraries works to understand why your expertise is probably out-dated. 99.9% of rendering of modern Qt and GTK applications happens inside the client, not on server, only ready-to-display images are transferred to the X server. Logical question arises: why we need to transfer that stuff to server at all?
Xlib is totally irrelevant. Xlib is merely a crappy and obsolete C library that gives you access to the protocol. Many toolkits don't use it.
You do not know what you are talking about. ALL toolkits use it because interface to X is de-facto standardized on level of Xlib (and de jure via LSB on Linux), not the network protocol. The network protocol is also standardized (and that's why X clients running different systems can connect to alien X servers) but it is pretty much never used by applications or toolkits directly.
Run "ldd" on any GUI application - and watch the libX11 being always there.
And why the Flock hasn't cannibalized the FireFox might to be the response to the question why this are not so big news. Power of the web is the power of change: yesterday it was Altavista and news groups and Yahoo boards, today it is Facebook and Twitter and Google, but tomorrow it might be all gone replaced by some new trend in how we share and search for the information.
And the power of change is what would keep the specialized browsers in a niche for quite some time.
All the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss
Profs in my university were pretty open that factually we need very little math in our lives. Yet it helps developing brains and making people generally smarter.
Similarly, one can try to say that we do not need to study literature: who the hell cares about an ancient writing by some brit? Yet, everybody acknowledges the role of the literature because it directly influences our communication skills. I wish it was that simple with the math too.
Android doesn't run Java. (See the RTFA, rest of the discussions)
Apple just recently announced that they from Java from Mac OS X. Oracle hasn't yet announced their own Java version for Macs.
FreeBSD does not have native port of Java (for Sun refused to allow it). Via hacks they use Linux version.
Irix isn't supported/sold anymore.
Likewise, SunOS as a standalone OS doesn't exist anymore: it became the BSD subsystem of the Solaris.
And why you have the WinNT twice on the list? Or you meant the W7? That's plain cheating to include Windows multiple times: version of the Java is the same since the used Win32 subsystem is the same. It's the same as including all and every Linux kernel version on the list.
I can't tell the GP's point precisely, but it might be again the old naming issue: "Java as JVM" vs. "Java as Java SDK".
I presume that GP means by "Java" the Java SDK, implying that as soon as an organization starts using the SDK not the way Oracle envisions, one might become target of a lawsuit. Just like Google. And how many organizations can afford a stand in court against the Oracle?
And to me too that would mean the (slow) death of Java by being converted from "programming language" to "product licensed by Oracle." Because livelihood of a language (or a platform) to me is precisely defined by the new strange things people can do with it.
Re:I thought JAVA was supposed to be crossplatform
on
Apple Deprecates Their JVM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not sure why this was modded funny. IIRC Apache Harmony is written mostly in Java with only bits of C code to bootstrap the JVM written in Java.
Building software is cheap, but when you have in place dozens departments and managerial layers, then yes, it got to be expensive or why we, big guys, are doing it at all??
I once made a budget program for a smallish company, producing all the forms they needed for their partners and tax office. Starting from scratch I needed 2 full days of work. This is not a f***ing rocket science, people. Get real.
You saying that software isn't cheap is precisely the sign of the brokeness of the system. Because as the RH guy says, you just keep pumping useless features to make the software look expensive. By implementing features in a usual corporate manner they always remain half finished, what has the positive effect of creating more space for more features in the future.
No. In administration, monitoring is very important. Because one wants to know the status of the on-going operations. Last thing you want is to wait a day for task to finish only to find that the operation actually hanged.
Linux server slowed down to crawl by heavy I/O in my past experience was exhibiting all the symptoms of the DDOSed system. With 2.6 it got considerably better, but still far from being ideal. Probably because Linux is heavily optimized for Oracle servers where you generally have only single smart process writing to disk, while on desktop one normally has bunch of application simultaneously doing something with files.
I always liked how *BSD did the I/O. At times it is slower than on Linux, but I have never seen *BSD being rendered unresponsive due to I/O.
Slashdot Mirror
You can say exactly the same thing about every programming language ever invented.
Even BASIC??? You make me laugh.
Specifically the C++ is yes, mostly done and dusted. It is a static language: it is rigid and inflexible. That's what for we actually love it, but it is going to be replaced (and it needs to be replaced) because it incorporates the paradigms which were new 20 years ago. For modern programming, C++ is often too restrictive. E.g. implementing analogue of ObjC message dispatch is possible only with intricate low level hacks in asm (or using a 3rd party library which already does that for you). Implementing Perl's eval{} is flat out impossible.
Perl is free form and allows a multitude of approaches to solving problems. One can learn all the syntax and functions and utilities easily by reading through perldoc - just like documentation for any programming language for that matter.
But that would not teach them programming.
The fact is that one constantly advances as a software developer (*). Yet the very same language easily adapts to all the new paradigms, allows trivially to express new ways to code -after all the years- is pretty amazing fit.
Or to put it other way: in Perl number of ways you can do something is equal to the number of Perl programmers. And new programmers always bring something new, something worth learning.
Read on to enlighten yourself.
(*) If you do not - then change the job. Learning new stuff is a part of the job definition.
Plus whoever owns OpenID knows every site you visit and the frequency.
I'd take that - over maintaining manually a private DB with passwords.
I'd rather trust one (or few) OpenID provider(s), than hundreds of random people who run the dozens/hundreds sites I visit monthly. Both options have bunch of pros and cons - but at least the former has advantage of being convenient and non-obtrusive.
just because a person uses an "easy" password for something as trivial as a "commenting" user login
And why the hell one needs a password to comment? To me that was always an overkill.
OpenID was poised to solve the problem (allowing single sign-on) and partially does that already. Yet still many sites do not support it - Gawker included.
I see.
You want it "free" as in "free market:" rip off everybody and run away with all the money?
Because that's only scenario I can think of where (L)GPL can be considered not free.
If you were giving anonyms read access to the root [...]
I wasn't - that was default setup of pretty much all fptds I have seen in RH and Debian.
Is this news?
Over the years not once I was going through bunch of ftpd picking one to install on my Linux box, all of them, ProFTPd included, had a ... front door wide open: anonyms had pretty much unlimited read access to everything.
And obviously all of the ftpds were refusing auth users by default. On the few occasions I need the FTP for my LAN server (mostly for Windows clients) it was such a royal pain to setup properly ... while welcoming all anonyms from everywhere to copy all the stuff all they want.
For a moment you got me startled. Main site is probably DDoSed all the time (either maliciously or by sheer volume of netizens trying to dig it) but Wikipedia lists two functioning mirrors of the real Wikileaks' wiki. The mirror is slow, but seems to be complete.
I supported wikileaks up until now... the information they shared this time makes me think they really jumped the shark.
Why? The move tells me that the WikiLeaks is truly independent and doesn't withhold information because they judge it to be interesting or not.
I want to judge myself whether the information is interesting or not.
I sincerely hope that WikLeaks heralds the return of the good ol' mass media which is reporting news as they come, not providing interpretations (or exaggerations to make it looks like news).
"Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty."
That seems to be out-dated. Both - people and government - are afraid of large business.
People are afraid to lose their jobs and means to sustain their families.
Politicians are afraid to lose their "sponsors" without whom they can't get themselves reelected.
If that outdated principle is what your constitution is based upon, then I can see why you have the problem.
[..] users don't care, they just want something that they can get familiar with in a short time.
Users do not - but professionals do.
All the little things chip time very fast - the time I'd rather did something useful, instead of bunch of mousewavings, modern desktops tend to impose on me. That's where the hundreds/thousands little options come into play: they allow user to remove the road bumps from the daily workflow.
That's why highly customizable desktops like KDE/Flux/WM/IceWM/etc would remain popular: many who graduate from being an end-user find GNOME, after getting "familiar" with it, quite limiting.
Though sure if you spend 90% of time in Evolution and FireFox, then you pretty much do not care what desktop you run and the whole argument about the desktop environments becomes moot.
Just do it, and worry about what "it" is, and whether the approach was a good idea later, after you've done the first 90% and it is time to do the other 90%.
What is in fact just another application of the well known 90/90 rule.
but I think this has something to do with the fact that I grow older
I concur.
Read your own post again.
10-15 years ago there was much less interactive entertainment - we were tolerant to the long load time and repeating the same level countless times until we done.
Now, there are have the choices: attempt tenth time to get through level of a game; watch YouTube link friend has sent me; watch last night TV show off the TiVo; play a flash game I just got on the RSS feed; get on IRC and grab a fresh anime to watch and talk about it with others.
Games simply found themselves in inconvenient position of competing for the people's time. And the games are doing not all that great at winning our time - and our money. For there are many other, often more accessible, alternatives which guarantee time well spent. Unlike games.
the things that make a datastore scalable can be implemented in SQL RDBMS systems as well.
CACM paper is interesting read, though unsurprisingly it starts with "shared-nothing scalability" and later on goes onto "avoid mulit-node operations".
So what is the point of using an ACID capable RDBMS in horizontally scaled deployment when it is literally advised (if not forbidden due to "shared-nothing") to not to take advantages of the ACID?
I'm tad bit disappointed, since from the parent post description, I have expected to see a mention of major breakthrough in distributed transaction processing performance: an atomic commit across several nodes in the cluster which doesn't suck. But all I see there between the lines is the old "don't do it."
100's of millions copies? Are you sure it's not just accounting?
I'm not sure what you are smoking.
Embedded X server is nonsense: embedded systems do not even implement X server/client per se, they simply wrap graphics right into Xlib-like interface. They are embedded, they do not need the network-transparency. They advertise "We support X!" while in reality it means "stuff which uses Xlib compiles." I worked with bunch of them, and it is considered to be a high-end feature to have the X server at all. In the end, they compile XFree/X.org with special driver which simply strips/skips/bypasses all the network stuff completely, plugging Xlib/Xt directly into the core of X.
Likewise I know for a fact that Sun's Java uses the Xlib. Perl and Python rely on toolkits and are oblivious to the OS or graphics system one runs (== use Xlib).
Heck, I've written my own X client library; it's not rocket science.
Writing Xlib which is a thin wrapper for X protocol isn't rocket science - building applications right on top of it is. Because it is not far from programming in assembler: very efficient but you wont get too much of functionality in any measurable time frame.
That might be a reasonable thing to do if there were significant gains in performance or usability to be expected, but there won't be.
Read up e.g. how FreeType or GDK libraries works to understand why your expertise is probably out-dated. 99.9% of rendering of modern Qt and GTK applications happens inside the client, not on server, only ready-to-display images are transferred to the X server. Logical question arises: why we need to transfer that stuff to server at all?
Xlib is totally irrelevant. Xlib is merely a crappy and obsolete C library that gives you access to the protocol. Many toolkits don't use it.
You do not know what you are talking about. ALL toolkits use it because interface to X is de-facto standardized on level of Xlib (and de jure via LSB on Linux), not the network protocol. The network protocol is also standardized (and that's why X clients running different systems can connect to alien X servers) but it is pretty much never used by applications or toolkits directly.
Run "ldd" on any GUI application - and watch the libX11 being always there.
If we keep going down this path, you'll only be able to write any kind of useful desktop apps with Gnome and Qt.
Ask anybody who programmed using Xlib and you would (1) find very of fans of it and (2) be immediately advised to use GTK/Qt/wxWidgets/etc instead.
Do not forget: Xlib doesn't even support widgets, one has to use toolkits for that or draw all the stuff manually.
Flock was my first though too.
And why the Flock hasn't cannibalized the FireFox might to be the response to the question why this are not so big news. Power of the web is the power of change: yesterday it was Altavista and news groups and Yahoo boards, today it is Facebook and Twitter and Google, but tomorrow it might be all gone replaced by some new trend in how we share and search for the information.
And the power of change is what would keep the specialized browsers in a niche for quite some time.
All the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss
Profs in my university were pretty open that factually we need very little math in our lives. Yet it helps developing brains and making people generally smarter.
Similarly, one can try to say that we do not need to study literature: who the hell cares about an ancient writing by some brit? Yet, everybody acknowledges the role of the literature because it directly influences our communication skills. I wish it was that simple with the math too.
Your list is wrong.
Android doesn't run Java. (See the RTFA, rest of the discussions)
Apple just recently announced that they from Java from Mac OS X. Oracle hasn't yet announced their own Java version for Macs.
FreeBSD does not have native port of Java (for Sun refused to allow it). Via hacks they use Linux version.
Irix isn't supported/sold anymore.
Likewise, SunOS as a standalone OS doesn't exist anymore: it became the BSD subsystem of the Solaris.
And why you have the WinNT twice on the list? Or you meant the W7? That's plain cheating to include Windows multiple times: version of the Java is the same since the used Win32 subsystem is the same. It's the same as including all and every Linux kernel version on the list.
I can't tell the GP's point precisely, but it might be again the old naming issue: "Java as JVM" vs. "Java as Java SDK".
I presume that GP means by "Java" the Java SDK, implying that as soon as an organization starts using the SDK not the way Oracle envisions, one might become target of a lawsuit. Just like Google. And how many organizations can afford a stand in court against the Oracle?
And to me too that would mean the (slow) death of Java by being converted from "programming language" to "product licensed by Oracle." Because livelihood of a language (or a platform) to me is precisely defined by the new strange things people can do with it.
I'm not sure why this was modded funny. IIRC Apache Harmony is written mostly in Java with only bits of C code to bootstrap the JVM written in Java.
Building software isn't cheap
I gather you are not engineer?
Building software is cheap, but when you have in place dozens departments and managerial layers, then yes, it got to be expensive or why we, big guys, are doing it at all??
I once made a budget program for a smallish company, producing all the forms they needed for their partners and tax office. Starting from scratch I needed 2 full days of work. This is not a f***ing rocket science, people. Get real.
You saying that software isn't cheap is precisely the sign of the brokeness of the system. Because as the RH guy says, you just keep pumping useless features to make the software look expensive. By implementing features in a usual corporate manner they always remain half finished, what has the positive effect of creating more space for more features in the future.
No. In administration, monitoring is very important. Because one wants to know the status of the on-going operations. Last thing you want is to wait a day for task to finish only to find that the operation actually hanged.
Linux server slowed down to crawl by heavy I/O in my past experience was exhibiting all the symptoms of the DDOSed system. With 2.6 it got considerably better, but still far from being ideal. Probably because Linux is heavily optimized for Oracle servers where you generally have only single smart process writing to disk, while on desktop one normally has bunch of application simultaneously doing something with files.
I always liked how *BSD did the I/O. At times it is slower than on Linux, but I have never seen *BSD being rendered unresponsive due to I/O.