1) When was the last time MS took the blame when their software went wrong. 2) Please name the CIO who thinks their company can sue MS so I can publicly humiliate him for his stupidity.
Somebody else on this topic has already linked to several studies that show how much programmer productivity increases with dynamic languages.
As a Java advocate I know you are neither interested in studies nor testimonials from anybody so I won't bother hunting the post down or giving a half a dozen links. Needless to say Google is your friend and show you lots of those.
Our numbers are growing nicely without dell. They will continue to grow without dell. They are growing despite the best efforts of MS to stop us. They are growing despite the FUDster, the lobbyist, the lawyers, and the rest of the human scum that crawl around the corporate halls of the biggest companies in the world.
Maybe we are growing BECAUSE of all of the above who knows.
One day Dell will hop on board, this train is moving whether they are on board or not. I sincerely apologize to you if it's not moving fast enough for you. I know many people are impatient. Perhaps you could pitch and help.
The problem is that the people who want greater market share want it because they want free stuff. It has been my observation that those complain the loudest about market share and the desktop are the ones that are not willing to do jack to get it. They simply want free versions of photoshop or quicken, they want it to look and act exactly like photoshop and quicken, they want the desktop to look exactly like XP and they don't want to pay a cent, code a line, write one line of documentation, or help one person.
They are simply leeches who want some free stuff and whine loudly when they don't get EXACTLY what they want.
Last time the desktop linux topic came up all the leeches were yelling about how gimp was not as good as photoshop and how nobody made a free version of autocad!!!!!.
Alas you are presuming all that goodness you got with java comes at no cost. That's not true. It comes at the cost of developer productivity. You will probably disagree with that statement but the legion of java programmers who have used rails tell us otherwise.
If SQL actually delivered what it promised then maybe there would be no need to ORM but since each database vendor insists on creating their own language we need ORM.
Having said that ORM also allows for faster re-factoring. If you change a field name in your table you don't have to hunt down all your SQL statements, you just change your mapping and you are done.
"What do people do horribly wrong, and what's the wonderfully better approach?"
It's not impossible to do decent access development but it's very hard. Why? To start with VBA does not support inheritance. Since inheritance is the cornerstone of OOP development you are starting off on a bad foot right there. VBA objects don't support static methods, this means that you can't call methods from gui elements without resorting to writing plain old modules.
I have had the distinct misery of both writing and maintaining access applications. It's a write only platform. You can slap together disposable crap fast but if you need to pick it up again in a year or god forbid you need to maintain it from day to day you are better off sticking needles in your eyes.
What you have done leads to unmaintable code. Since the greatest part of the software development lifecycle is the debugging, maintaining, and refactoring part using VB actually is a drain on the productivity of your team when you measure the entire lifecycle of your application.
Sure it only takes a day to slap controls in a form and bind some controls to a SQL statement but good luck trying to find a bug or refactor when you decide to change a field name.
Well since I was right, and you were wrong it was you was speaking out of your ass. You could have done the research in five seconds using google, it's not my job to do that for you. It behooves you to do a google search before you post in a public forum dont you think?
"My 2 biggest successes were in the free markets that were unburdened by regulations."
I think that's everybodies point. Business loves to run free and do whatever it wants. It's great for you, sucks for everybody else.
As I said there are lots of places in the world where there are weak govenments and businesses run the country. I don't want to live in any of them. You want to live in Dubai? Under a king? No democracy? Go ahead. My guess is that you won't live there, you will set up a business and fuck the guest workers like all other dubai businesses do. Get them into the country and then take away their permission to leave so you can work them for cheap.
Dubai is great if you are a) connected b) rich c) royal d) visiting.
"You're right, I witness such a "business." I also witnesses families who were able to leave the situation and better themselves just a few miles over in a tourist-friendly town."
In any country there will be the poor and the rich. The measure of a countries civility and humanity is how the poor live. The fact that there are people "getting ahead" in India is of little consequence when they are getting ahead on the backs of child labor, prison labor, and slavery.
A programmer in India is able to charge two dollars an hour because his house was built by the destiture using bricks made by five year old girls, using furniture made by slave children.
Like I said. No thanks.
"In American, we carry the burden of our parents on our heads so much that by the time we'll retire, we'll have to pass our our expenses to the next generation."
Unlike most of the world your parents will get Social security, medicare or medicaid. Imagine your burden if those weren't there?
"I see opportunities for growth in India, I see almost none hear."
In that case you are blind. If you don't see opportunity in America you are not looking.
"This country, the US, will learn a very harsh lesson, very soon. If it wasn't for the imperialist wars waged against others, I think we'd have collapsed by now."
And we will continue to wage wars to prop ourselves up. One of the reasons we invaded iraq was to prevent them from asking euros for their oil. Make no bones about it. We will kill anybody who gets in our way. This is why America is dominant. We have no morals when it comes to money. This is also why there is more opportunity here then anyplace else.
In india you can buy and sell children. In fact many children are sold to quarries where they carry stones on top of their heads until they are about 15 or 16 because by that time they are crippled by either a leg injury of a spine injury. By the time they are that old they are also deeply in debt to the company they are working for because the company has been charging them for rent and food (which by coincidence is more then they earn). Their only way out is to have children and then sell the children to the company to satisfy their debt. After being freed from their debt both boys and girls usually go into prostitution because their bodies are too broken to do any other kind of work.
That's just one industry. In india there are a huge number of people who are in similar situations.
During the age of the copper barrons people had telegraphs, telephones, newspapers, and mail. They were able to communicate with the outside world just fine. It was not the internet but it was communication nevertheless. Despite the this entire towns were living as indentured slaves. In some places the air was literally toxic and there was a blanket of smog so thick it was like lving in a fog of soot 24/7 and the visilibility was never more then a dozen yards or so.
The barrons themselves lived ourside of town in palacial grounds (which you can still visit today by the way).
"In the long run, I think anyone who has faith in the current system is just being duped. "
I think anybody who thinks that letting corporations run wild will lead to a better society is being duped myself. Not just duped but wilfully ignorant of history. It's fine to have theories but in this case there is no need for theory. We have many examples of what happens to countries when corporations run the place. Not only in history but right now too, all over the world.
Take a loot at any backwater third world country and you will see corporations running everything. Take a look at first world and you will see corporation power checked with govt regulation.
"If you're happy to ignore this collusion and theft, that's fine with me, but I want a way to exit this system."
If you think this bad, take a look at what happens when the corporations run the country.
I too want out BTW. Can i get my portion of the military spending back? I am tired of killing brown people by now.
If everything was dependent on contracts the civil courts would be so bogged down nothing would get done. If a corporation thug came to your house and killed your grandfather because he was costing too much to maintain then you would have to sue them in civil court. They in turn would drag the case out till you were broke and you would be shit out of luck.
Corporations would love nothing better to be completely free to poison the waters, kill people who are claiming insurance benefits etc, buy and sell slaves, put people into indentured servitude etc.
You may think I am being a bit dramatic but all this has happened in the past when corporations were allowed to run free. What makes you think it won't happen again?
You might want to read some history. In history there have been many cases where business has been run without any govt interference. Maybe read up on the copper barrons in montana or read about the post civil war south.
That's just in America. There are lots of examples all over the world of what happens to a country when the corporations are allowed to run wild.
"Better a corporation than a government. Corportations don't have prisons, armies, police and ultimately answer to the higher power of law."
First of all that's an out and out lie. There are numerous mercenary corporations providing soldiers all over the world. There are also numerous corporations providing armed security in the states. So yes corporations do have armies, police and prisons.
Secondly if we let the govt abdicate their responsiblity then there would be no law to which corporations would be subject to.
Finally corporations that don't arm themselves do so because it's easier to buy the services of the govt to provide security for them. RIAA does not need police because they have bought the laws they need and the state is procividing jails and police free of charge for them.
"Wal-mart was trying to save on benefits they wouldn't even offer them to part time employees."
They are doing their best not to. This is another reason why they are so violently anti-union. To walmart their biggest nightmare is a work force capabable of collective bargaining.
They also outsource a ton of work and put a lot of pressure on the vendors to deliver services at below minimum wage rates. This way then can claim ignorance when the vendor uses illegal immigrants to do the work.
"The full-timers do have insurance. But there many are part-timers who do not, just like many other businesses. "
Walmart minimizes the number of full time employees. They make many employees work just below the full time rate (whatever that is in the state) so that they don't have to provide health care. For example they may dictate that all employees in a particular store only work 39 hours per week so they can classify them as part time.
Did you know that a typical walmart store costs the states millions of dollars in food stamps and health benefits? It's true. States are getting pissed about it too.
"How does Wal-Mart compare to any large employer? How much health care does McDonalds provide for part-time employees? How about Starbucks - they have lots of part-timers."
By most criterea and by most researchers much worse. Walmart is amongst the worst of all corporations in treating their employees like domesticated animals.
"I don't know what all this hatred of WMT is, of late. "
Just look around. Look at how they treat their employees, look at the damage they cause to communities and states, look at all the illegal doings they have been caught in, look at all the businesses they destroyed by selling their stuff. Walmart is the only company in the world that actually destroyed businesses by agreeing to sell their gear.
Where was this? Usually walmart avoids severely depressed high crime areas. They like suburbia and small towns best. I would be very interested in knowing which severely depressed high crime area walmart wanted to go into. That seems to go against the walmart business plan.
Damn those teacher unions, what nerve do they have asking for health coverage instead of smaller classrooms. The teachers should sacrifice their health care so your kids get better education damn it.
Why don't programs treat SQL as an internalization problem? In a very real way each database server speaks a different language right? If your web site can dish out web pages in croatian why can't it handle four or five dialetcs of SQL?
You asked someone to correct you, I did. Did you really also want me to give you the google search I used? Anyway the wikipedia page on homeland security lays it all out in plain english.
Slashdot Mirror
"The same arguments were put forward for the use of LISP and Smalltalk 20 years ago."
Yes and they were and are still true. Smalltalk, lisp, ruby, pyton etc are all more productive then java.
Sorry to let you in on the secret.
But hey don't mind me, go ahead and fiddle with your XML config files. No skin off of my teeth.
1) When was the last time MS took the blame when their software went wrong.
2) Please name the CIO who thinks their company can sue MS so I can publicly humiliate him for his stupidity.
Somebody else on this topic has already linked to several studies that show how much programmer productivity increases with dynamic languages.
As a Java advocate I know you are neither interested in studies nor testimonials from anybody so I won't bother hunting the post down or giving a half a dozen links. Needless to say Google is your friend and show you lots of those.
"Our numbers are not enough for Dell to listen. "
Our numbers are growing nicely without dell. They will continue to grow without dell. They are growing despite the best efforts of MS to stop us. They are growing despite the FUDster, the lobbyist, the lawyers, and the rest of the human scum that crawl around the corporate halls of the biggest companies in the world.
Maybe we are growing BECAUSE of all of the above who knows.
One day Dell will hop on board, this train is moving whether they are on board or not. I sincerely apologize to you if it's not moving fast enough for you. I know many people are impatient. Perhaps you could pitch and help.
The problem is that the people who want greater market share want it because they want free stuff. It has been my observation that those complain the loudest about market share and the desktop are the ones that are not willing to do jack to get it. They simply want free versions of photoshop or quicken, they want it to look and act exactly like photoshop and quicken, they want the desktop to look exactly like XP and they don't want to pay a cent, code a line, write one line of documentation, or help one person.
They are simply leeches who want some free stuff and whine loudly when they don't get EXACTLY what they want.
Last time the desktop linux topic came up all the leeches were yelling about how gimp was not as good as photoshop and how nobody made a free version of autocad!!!!!.
Photoshop and Autocad? WTF?
Alas you are presuming all that goodness you got with java comes at no cost. That's not true. It comes at the cost of developer productivity. You will probably disagree with that statement but the legion of java programmers who have used rails tell us otherwise.
If SQL actually delivered what it promised then maybe there would be no need to ORM but since each database vendor insists on creating their own language we need ORM.
Having said that ORM also allows for faster re-factoring. If you change a field name in your table you don't have to hunt down all your SQL statements, you just change your mapping and you are done.
"What do people do horribly wrong, and what's the wonderfully better approach?"
It's not impossible to do decent access development but it's very hard. Why? To start with VBA does not support inheritance. Since inheritance is the cornerstone of OOP development you are starting off on a bad foot right there. VBA objects don't support static methods, this means that you can't call methods from gui elements without resorting to writing plain old modules.
I have had the distinct misery of both writing and maintaining access applications. It's a write only platform. You can slap together disposable crap fast but if you need to pick it up again in a year or god forbid you need to maintain it from day to day you are better off sticking needles in your eyes.
What you have done leads to unmaintable code. Since the greatest part of the software development lifecycle is the debugging, maintaining, and refactoring part using VB actually is a drain on the productivity of your team when you measure the entire lifecycle of your application.
Sure it only takes a day to slap controls in a form and bind some controls to a SQL statement but good luck trying to find a bug or refactor when you decide to change a field name.
Well since I was right, and you were wrong it was you was speaking out of your ass. You could have done the research in five seconds using google, it's not my job to do that for you. It behooves you to do a google search before you post in a public forum dont you think?
"My 2 biggest successes were in the free markets that were unburdened by regulations."
I think that's everybodies point. Business loves to run free and do whatever it wants. It's great for you, sucks for everybody else.
As I said there are lots of places in the world where there are weak govenments and businesses run the country. I don't want to live in any of them. You want to live in Dubai? Under a king? No democracy? Go ahead. My guess is that you won't live there, you will set up a business and fuck the guest workers like all other dubai businesses do. Get them into the country and then take away their permission to leave so you can work them for cheap.
Dubai is great if you are a) connected b) rich c) royal d) visiting.
"You're right, I witness such a "business." I also witnesses families who were able to leave the situation and better themselves just a few miles over in a tourist-friendly town."
In any country there will be the poor and the rich. The measure of a countries civility and humanity is how the poor live. The fact that there are people "getting ahead" in India is of little consequence when they are getting ahead on the backs of child labor, prison labor, and slavery.
A programmer in India is able to charge two dollars an hour because his house was built by the destiture using bricks made by five year old girls, using furniture made by slave children.
Like I said. No thanks.
"In American, we carry the burden of our parents on our heads so much that by the time we'll retire, we'll have to pass our our expenses to the next generation."
Unlike most of the world your parents will get Social security, medicare or medicaid. Imagine your burden if those weren't there?
"I see opportunities for growth in India, I see almost none hear."
In that case you are blind. If you don't see opportunity in America you are not looking.
"This country, the US, will learn a very harsh lesson, very soon. If it wasn't for the imperialist wars waged against others, I think we'd have collapsed by now."
And we will continue to wage wars to prop ourselves up. One of the reasons we invaded iraq was to prevent them from asking euros for their oil. Make no bones about it. We will kill anybody who gets in our way. This is why America is dominant. We have no morals when it comes to money. This is also why there is more opportunity here then anyplace else.
VB.NET is just C# with lipstick anyway. I just don't see the point in it.
Anyway it doesn't matter. All the VB developers will migrate to it, I certainly can't see anybody migrating to it from any other language.
In india you can buy and sell children. In fact many children are sold to quarries where they carry stones on top of their heads until they are about 15 or 16 because by that time they are crippled by either a leg injury of a spine injury. By the time they are that old they are also deeply in debt to the company they are working for because the company has been charging them for rent and food (which by coincidence is more then they earn). Their only way out is to have children and then sell the children to the company to satisfy their debt. After being freed from their debt both boys and girls usually go into prostitution because their bodies are too broken to do any other kind of work.
That's just one industry. In india there are a huge number of people who are in similar situations.
No thanks.
"Primarily the web, honestly. "
During the age of the copper barrons people had telegraphs, telephones, newspapers, and mail. They were able to communicate with the outside world just fine. It was not the internet but it was communication nevertheless. Despite the this entire towns were living as indentured slaves. In some places the air was literally toxic and there was a blanket of smog so thick it was like lving in a fog of soot 24/7 and the visilibility was never more then a dozen yards or so.
The barrons themselves lived ourside of town in palacial grounds (which you can still visit today by the way).
"In the long run, I think anyone who has faith in the current system is just being duped. "
I think anybody who thinks that letting corporations run wild will lead to a better society is being duped myself. Not just duped but wilfully ignorant of history. It's fine to have theories but in this case there is no need for theory. We have many examples of what happens to countries when corporations run the place. Not only in history but right now too, all over the world.
Take a loot at any backwater third world country and you will see corporations running everything. Take a look at first world and you will see corporation power checked with govt regulation.
"If you're happy to ignore this collusion and theft, that's fine with me, but I want a way to exit this system."
If you think this bad, take a look at what happens when the corporations run the country.
I too want out BTW. Can i get my portion of the military spending back? I am tired of killing brown people by now.
If everything was dependent on contracts the civil courts would be so bogged down nothing would get done. If a corporation thug came to your house and killed your grandfather because he was costing too much to maintain then you would have to sue them in civil court. They in turn would drag the case out till you were broke and you would be shit out of luck.
Corporations would love nothing better to be completely free to poison the waters, kill people who are claiming insurance benefits etc, buy and sell slaves, put people into indentured servitude etc.
You may think I am being a bit dramatic but all this has happened in the past when corporations were allowed to run free. What makes you think it won't happen again?
You might want to read some history. In history there have been many cases where business has been run without any govt interference. Maybe read up on the copper barrons in montana or read about the post civil war south.
That's just in America. There are lots of examples all over the world of what happens to a country when the corporations are allowed to run wild.
"Better a corporation than a government. Corportations don't have prisons, armies, police and ultimately answer to the higher power of law."
First of all that's an out and out lie. There are numerous mercenary corporations providing soldiers all over the world. There are also numerous corporations providing armed security in the states. So yes corporations do have armies, police and prisons.
Secondly if we let the govt abdicate their responsiblity then there would be no law to which corporations would be subject to.
Finally corporations that don't arm themselves do so because it's easier to buy the services of the govt to provide security for them. RIAA does not need police because they have bought the laws they need and the state is procividing jails and police free of charge for them.
"Wal-mart was trying to save on benefits they wouldn't even offer them to part time employees."
They are doing their best not to. This is another reason why they are so violently anti-union. To walmart their biggest nightmare is a work force capabable of collective bargaining.
They also outsource a ton of work and put a lot of pressure on the vendors to deliver services at below minimum wage rates. This way then can claim ignorance when the vendor uses illegal immigrants to do the work.
Yes we should just let the corporations go wild. They would never do anything to harm anybody anyway.
"The full-timers do have insurance. But there many are part-timers who do not, just like many other businesses. "
Walmart minimizes the number of full time employees. They make many employees work just below the full time rate (whatever that is in the state) so that they don't have to provide health care. For example they may dictate that all employees in a particular store only work 39 hours per week so they can classify them as part time.
Did you know that a typical walmart store costs the states millions of dollars in food stamps and health benefits? It's true. States are getting pissed about it too.
"How does Wal-Mart compare to any large employer? How much health care does McDonalds provide for part-time employees? How about Starbucks - they have lots of part-timers."
By most criterea and by most researchers much worse. Walmart is amongst the worst of all corporations in treating their employees like domesticated animals.
"I don't know what all this hatred of WMT is, of late. "
Just look around. Look at how they treat their employees, look at the damage they cause to communities and states, look at all the illegal doings they have been caught in, look at all the businesses they destroyed by selling their stuff. Walmart is the only company in the world that actually destroyed businesses by agreeing to sell their gear.
Where was this? Usually walmart avoids severely depressed high crime areas. They like suburbia and small towns best. I would be very interested in knowing which severely depressed high crime area walmart wanted to go into. That seems to go against the walmart business plan.
Damn those teacher unions, what nerve do they have asking for health coverage instead of smaller classrooms. The teachers should sacrifice their health care so your kids get better education damn it.
Why don't programs treat SQL as an internalization problem? In a very real way each database server speaks a different language right? If your web site can dish out web pages in croatian why can't it handle four or five dialetcs of SQL?
You asked someone to correct you, I did. Did you really also want me to give you the google search I used? Anyway the wikipedia page on homeland security lays it all out in plain english.