If you are writing programs *FOR WINDOWS*, then the whole.Net thing is definitely better. You get a program that matches the L&F of Windows far more precisely with a library designed to work well with Windows.
I've used both languages long enough to know that both are far better than the bad ol' days of writing C++. Both are well thought out, and have strong class libraries. Both have a wealth of 3rd party code out there. Loving one shouldn't require you to hate the other.
If I was writing some server side app to be run under Tomcat and Apache, then sure I'd pick Java. Horses for Courses.
The whole idea that the Universe will eventually just go quiet and cold... that we are just in an early energetic time, but all there is in the future is Infinite Heat Death where even subatomic particles have lost the ability to hold together.... is a rather depressing thought.
"What is the point of this article?.......Interesting to ponder....."
I think that's basically it. Something "Interesting to Ponder". It's a nice little mental exercise pondering the future of the universe, and contrasting that with our place in it now. That's all.
but why couldn't the same be done on an unmanned mission?
I have this feeling that manned missions a thing of the past.
As robotics and telemetry get better, that 1960's need to have a physical human doing the exploring has already gone away. Robots are cheaper, expendable, have better senses, can be sent on one way trips...
There may come a time when people will make the physical journey, but not yet. Not with the tech we have now or in the near future.
I read the article, and got the gist of what they have found, but what does it mean? Why is is important? Is there any practical upshot of the discovery?
The basic problem with any "Freeze a Person for a Hundred years" idea, no matter how it's done, is a common Software Dev problem.
How do you test and debug such a system?
Family Robinson turns up at a distant star a hundred years later and it turns out, well bugger, despite being well preserved they've degenerated enough that they can't be thawed.
Really, what are you paying extra for? So that the store wont stick you on a Spam list? Wont use your Credit Card drain your bank account? What is the actual cost involved in limiting your supplied information to the transaction at hand?
If the store even hints that my info is going to be used beyond what it is supplied for, I wouldn't touch the place with a 10 foot pole.
Does "Conflict of Interest" have any meaning in US politics?
I thought it would be an utterly obvious case of No, he can't help formulate technology policy for the government because, obviously, he's a bit biased towards one particular company.
Well, that's sort of the answer. The winner wont be the format with the cheapest players, or the best quality, or the best movies. That stuff is important, but not the critical issue.
The winner will be the format that gets pushed the most in the Retail stores.
In Australia we've had a few retailers saying that they only plan to stock Bluray. Makes sense for them... no confusion for the customer and salesman, no doubling up on shelf space for yet another format. And probably get nice deals from the Sony for being Exclusive.
You can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one sells it, you're buggered.
The idea of copyrighting their Secrets seems just bizarre. It's like some physicist copyrighting String Theory. If it's the way the Universe is constructed, then how can you claim ownership of the fact?
Xenu exists, then he exists. He's not some some designed commercial property. (Which, of course, he is)
... which is good. That's Democracy for ya. Officials have the Fear of getting voted out of office and ridiculed in the media, so they try and do popular things. Without that, they'd just do whatever will bring in the best bribes.
Yeah, there are plenty of products on the list that are "Version 1.0" of a concept. They didn't work out in that initial incarnation, but others took the ideas, refined them and used newer tech, and eventually made the things work comfortably.
You can look at Wireless networking. For years it was a difficult, impractical technology. But in the past couple of years the kinks have been smoothed out and it's now commonplace.
And I look at VR tech the same way. It'll slowly leech it's way into common usage, as the hardware becomes less klugdy. It's just not there yet.
It was a nice little stocktake of our software at the time. We had a good deal of old stuff written in the 1970's, so it was useful to go through all that, and decide whether it would still work or should be scrapped. An excuse to say to the 2 remaining users "Sorry, we can't support this program anymore. Upgrade, fer heavens sake."
It made me think a bit more carefully about dates within code. I fixed up a number of "2037" bugs as well.
All over the world, DAT tapes are being inserted into servers for the nightly backup.... Yeah, but it didn't succeed as a consumer audio product. Good idea, but never caught on.
Newtons... great devices, a bit ahead of their time. But towards the end of their life, they were starting to get the needed power to be useful. Another generation, and Apple would have gotten there.
Lisa? Great concept machine. Totally amazed me when I first saw one. But cost too much to sell many. Evolved into a Macintosh.
OS/2 2.0? A brilliant OS for it's time. It gained a good deal of support. Just not quite enough to survive against the MS beast.
Dreamcast?
None of these products were "bad". They were all quite innovative and gained fans, but they just didn't quite crack the economic threshold.
Separation of Powers. The UK, and Australia also run on that principle. The Politicians make the law. The Police enforce the law. The Judges decide who has broken the law.
And those 3 groups should never get involved in the others duties.
In Australia last week we had a Politician promising to spend billions of dollars to get a high speed internet connection into every home. Why does every home need faster internet? I can understand it for business in many cases (by by no means even most businesses), but for home?
The best explanation that came up was to download Movies faster. Hrrm. It is NOT a high priority of the nation to be able to download movies fast. That is a triviality.
Similarly, while there is occasional use for Internet in a home.... some businesses rudely insist that they be contacted and bills paid through it.... it really isn't critically useful. My wife pops on once a week to read emails, but she could easily, happily do with out that. My kids would go play physical, non-computer games without it, which would be a good thing.
I never ever push people into getting internet. It doesn't make their lives "better".
The explosion of Video Arcades. The birth of "Tactics" being developed for video games. Songs written about it. T Shirts. Video Game Addiction. Really cool sound effects...
And on top of it all, go try it on mame some time... it's still a fun game.
"Let's face it, most people really don't care what OS they're running. They don't buy a computer to run an OS, they buy a computer to run applications... be they games, office automation, home accounting, music, movies, anything..."
But they do care when things aren't where they expect them. Your typical secretary knows all about the Start Menu, how MS Office works, how to get onto the network volumes, how to check the printer queue. All that stuff.
Throw a Mac at them that does all that differently, and well, it's annoying.
Standardization is good. The stearing wheel is the round thing, and this pedal makes the car go fast, and that pedal is the brake.
"So, Commodore/Amiga, BBC, Atari, Sinclair/spectrum, Amstrad, etc were all monopolistic bastards too?"
Yes, and all their systems eventually died away.
The MS/Intel PC combo is the standard. It's what people know, and what they will continue to use.
I reckon Apple will eventually realise that building a massive OS and hardware for a fringe audience isn't where the real cash is. iPods and iPhones and selling services for those gadgets is easier money.
*Big Smile* I always wonder why Republicans so bravely defend the rights of Government and Business to treat the common man however they damn well want.
Seems a weird sort of Bravery. "Yes, I am proud to let you trample all over me!"
Slashdot Mirror
You know what? Sometimes getting a bit closer to the Metal is fun. Into low level APIs, using simple raw C.
Stripping away the abstractions and garbage collectors...
It's like going back to Nature.
If you are writing programs *FOR WINDOWS*, then the whole .Net thing is definitely better. You get a program that matches the L&F of Windows far more precisely with a library designed to work well with Windows.
I've used both languages long enough to know that both are far better than the bad ol' days of writing C++. Both are well thought out, and have strong class libraries. Both have a wealth of 3rd party code out there.
Loving one shouldn't require you to hate the other.
If I was writing some server side app to be run under Tomcat and Apache, then sure I'd pick Java. Horses for Courses.
If O2 does have the contract, you know they will keep quiet about it until they are given permission to talk.
The whole idea that the Universe will eventually just go quiet and cold... that we are just in an early energetic time, but all there is in the future is Infinite Heat Death where even subatomic particles have lost the ability to hold together.... is a rather depressing thought.
"What is the point of this article? ... ....Interesting to ponder....."
I think that's basically it. Something "Interesting to Ponder".
It's a nice little mental exercise pondering the future of the universe, and contrasting that with our place in it now. That's all.
As robotics and telemetry get better, that 1960's need to have a physical human doing the exploring has already gone away. Robots are cheaper, expendable, have better senses, can be sent on one way trips...
There may come a time when people will make the physical journey, but not yet. Not with the tech we have now or in the near future.
I read the article, and got the gist of what they have found, but what does it mean? Why is is important? Is there any practical upshot of the discovery?
The basic problem with any "Freeze a Person for a Hundred years" idea, no matter how it's done, is a common Software Dev problem.
How do you test and debug such a system?
Family Robinson turns up at a distant star a hundred years later and it turns out, well bugger, despite being well preserved they've degenerated enough that they can't be thawed.
Oh Netscape....
*sigh* such a frittered away opportunity.
Ya could have been a contender!
Really, what are you paying extra for?
So that the store wont stick you on a Spam list?
Wont use your Credit Card drain your bank account?
What is the actual cost involved in limiting your supplied information to the transaction at hand?
If the store even hints that my info is going to be used beyond what it is supplied for, I wouldn't touch the place with a 10 foot pole.
Does "Conflict of Interest" have any meaning in US politics?
I thought it would be an utterly obvious case of No, he can't help formulate technology policy for the government because, obviously, he's a bit biased towards one particular company.
That's "not mushroom".
We'll have not mushroom by 2020.
Well, that's sort of the answer. The winner wont be the format with the cheapest players, or the best quality, or the best movies. That stuff is important, but not the critical issue.
The winner will be the format that gets pushed the most in the Retail stores.
In Australia we've had a few retailers saying that they only plan to stock Bluray. Makes sense for them... no confusion for the customer and salesman, no doubling up on shelf space for yet another format. And probably get nice deals from the Sony for being Exclusive.
You can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one sells it, you're buggered.
The idea of copyrighting their Secrets seems just bizarre.
It's like some physicist copyrighting String Theory. If it's the way the Universe is constructed, then how can you claim ownership of the fact?
Xenu exists, then he exists. He's not some some designed commercial property. (Which, of course, he is)
... which is good. That's Democracy for ya.
Officials have the Fear of getting voted out of office and ridiculed in the media, so they try and do popular things. Without that, they'd just do whatever will bring in the best bribes.
Yeah, there are plenty of products on the list that are "Version 1.0" of a concept. They didn't work out in that initial incarnation, but others took the ideas, refined them and used newer tech, and eventually made the things work comfortably.
You can look at Wireless networking. For years it was a difficult, impractical technology. But in the past couple of years the kinks have been smoothed out and it's now commonplace.
And I look at VR tech the same way. It'll slowly leech it's way into common usage, as the hardware becomes less klugdy. It's just not there yet.
It was a nice little stocktake of our software at the time.
We had a good deal of old stuff written in the 1970's, so it was useful to go through all that, and decide whether it would still work or should be scrapped. An excuse to say to the 2 remaining users "Sorry, we can't support this program anymore. Upgrade, fer heavens sake."
It made me think a bit more carefully about dates within code.
I fixed up a number of "2037" bugs as well.
All over the world, DAT tapes are being inserted into servers for the nightly backup....
Yeah, but it didn't succeed as a consumer audio product. Good idea, but never caught on.
Newtons... great devices, a bit ahead of their time. But towards the end of their life, they were starting to get the needed power to be useful. Another generation, and Apple would have gotten there.
Lisa? Great concept machine. Totally amazed me when I first saw one. But cost too much to sell many. Evolved into a Macintosh.
OS/2 2.0? A brilliant OS for it's time. It gained a good deal of support. Just not quite enough to survive against the MS beast.
Dreamcast?
None of these products were "bad". They were all quite innovative and gained fans, but they just didn't quite crack the economic threshold.
Separation of Powers.
The UK, and Australia also run on that principle.
The Politicians make the law.
The Police enforce the law.
The Judges decide who has broken the law.
And those 3 groups should never get involved in the others duties.
In Australia last week we had a Politician promising to spend billions of dollars to get a high speed internet connection into every home. Why does every home need faster internet?
I can understand it for business in many cases (by by no means even most businesses), but for home?
The best explanation that came up was to download Movies faster. Hrrm.
It is NOT a high priority of the nation to be able to download movies fast.
That is a triviality.
Similarly, while there is occasional use for Internet in a home.... some businesses rudely insist that they be contacted and bills paid through it.... it really isn't critically useful. My wife pops on once a week to read emails, but she could easily, happily do with out that. My kids would go play physical, non-computer games without it, which would be a good thing.
I never ever push people into getting internet. It doesn't make their lives "better".
Space Invaders was a pioneer in so many ways.
The explosion of Video Arcades.
The birth of "Tactics" being developed for video games.
Songs written about it.
T Shirts.
Video Game Addiction.
Really cool sound effects...
And on top of it all, go try it on mame some time... it's still a fun game.
It really is the Mother of all Games.
"Let's face it, most people really don't care what OS they're running. They don't buy a computer to run an OS, they buy a computer to run applications... be they games, office automation, home accounting, music, movies, anything..."
But they do care when things aren't where they expect them.
Your typical secretary knows all about the Start Menu, how MS Office works, how to get onto the network volumes, how to check the printer queue. All that stuff.
Throw a Mac at them that does all that differently, and well, it's annoying.
Standardization is good. The stearing wheel is the round thing, and this pedal makes the car go fast, and that pedal is the brake.
"So, Commodore/Amiga, BBC, Atari, Sinclair/spectrum, Amstrad, etc were all monopolistic bastards too?"
Yes, and all their systems eventually died away.
The MS/Intel PC combo is the standard. It's what people know, and what they will continue to use.
I reckon Apple will eventually realise that building a massive OS and hardware for a fringe audience isn't where the real cash is. iPods and iPhones and selling services for those gadgets is easier money.
Of course sales of DVDs still make both formats seem insignificant.
Maybe they should both surrender.
*Big Smile*
I always wonder why Republicans so bravely defend the rights of Government and Business to treat the common man however they damn well want.
Seems a weird sort of Bravery. "Yes, I am proud to let you trample all over me!"