So you've never tried these products and you are just talking out of your ass right? I guess that is appropriate, your ass is the orifice closest to the organ forming your "thoughts".
before they married Microsoft, right? How's that working out?
Depends on what you mean by "working out". The first result is that finally, at long last, Nokia has a smartphone operating system that matches their excellent hardware. They have not had that before. Nokia "smart" phones up until now have been a nightmare to use. A horrible user experience where simple tasks like sending an SMS requires many, many selections through endless menus and at least twice reading in the manual.
Whether they are going to be able to sell these excellent phones with an excellent operating system is anybody's guess at this point in time.
they auto focuse faster, etc?.. Are the EF lenses a step below the "L" lenses
An L lens is an EF (usually) lens. EF is the mount, and they come in two variations, EF and EF-S. The latter for crop cameras (basically anything that is not the 1D and the 5D). The EF-S lenses should not be used on the 5D.
There are many things that determines whether your picture will be good or less good. The primary thing is the photographer. A good photographer can take better pictures with a cell phone than a bad photographer with a Canon 5D or even a Hasselblad. Ignoring that obvious thing, a hugely important thing in image quality is not the number of pixels (or mega pixels as some say) but the glass. Good glass on few pixels is better than mediocre glass on many pixels. In fact, bad glass combined with a high pixel count will probably make your pictures look worse, since the high number of pixels will reveal the low quality of the glass.
Making good lenses (glass) is expensive. So, more expensive lenses (for example L lenses) "paint" better pictures on your cameras sensor. They may not focus any faster, they may even be slower. Some really good lenses may even be manual focus only, particularly video lenses. For example the Distagon CP.2 lenses. Great glass. They cost more than the 5D body. In short, better lenses, all else equal, give better pictures. This is particularly important for full-frame or better cameras.
So, what should you purchase as the first lens for a 5D? Depends on what you want to do. Video? Pictures? Landscape? Portrait? Daytime mostly? Night mostly? For general photography I might say that the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM. It doesn't have image stabilization, which some might find to be a problem, but it is a very good lens. The 24-105mm f/4L IS USM has stabilization and is about $200 less, but I would trade IS for the f/2.8, since I am on a tripod mostly.
On the other hand, if my budget only allowed for one lens, I would trade the expensive body for a less expensive body and more and better glass any time of the day. The 7D or even the 60D and a good selection of good glass will serve most photographers better than a 5D and a single zoom.
Yeah, some of the new system cameras, I am not sure what to call them, use m4/3 mounts and stuff, but APS-C chips. That means they are not m4/3 cameras though, since the format specifies the m4/3 sized chip.
The 5D is clearly a very capable video solution when you are aware of its limitations, just as long as one realizes that it is not something the average consumer should invest in. Things have been moving fast in the DSLR video camp though, and the 5D might not be worth the investment at the moment, again, depending on a lot of things. If video is the main thing, many would argue that the 7D and the 60D have some advantages over the 5D (but obviously not the sensor).
The thing about photography however is that there is something that has an even stronger influence on your pictures than your camera body. The lenses. You should spend (significantly) more on glass than you do on the body. Twice as much or more. This means that you should take your total budget, divide it by about three, and spend that on the body, the rest on glass. Approximately. When starting out.
With a Canon 5DII costing about $2,300 these days, that means your total budget would be in the neighborhood of $7,000. Depending on a lot of factors, I would spend that on something like:
EF 24-70 f/2.8L - at about $1,200
EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS USM at about $2,400 (you could go with the non-IS or f/4 versions here, but would probably regret it)
Two fast primes, for example the 50mm f/1.2 and the 85mm f/1.2L - they'll be around $3,000
Glass is, by far, the most important investment you make, more so than the body. On a budget, you'll get a lot more if you invest in glass than if you invest in body. A 60D and great glass will get you better results than a 5D and mediocre glass. Of course you need light too:-)
I thought I heard of a mark III version coming out...maybe it will have auto focus for video?
For technical reasons, a DSLR will probably never have good or great autofocus in video mode. This is because the mirror needs to be out of the way in video mode and the mirror is needed to get good (DSLR quality) auto focus. The alternative is to go for a solution similar to Sony, using a semi-transparent mirror that is always down. In that way, for video, the Sony Alphas are great. In professional video, autofocus is basically unheard of.
I'll try to explain. You take a picture, let's just say a head and shoulders portrait, with an APS-C and a full frame, using the same lens, you will have to be further away from the subject to get the same image on the APS-C than the full frame due to the 1.6x crop factor. Assuming the same distance from the subject to the background (you want blurred), as you move away from the subject, the background (all other things held the same) will get sharper, in other words, DOF changes, and perhaps not in the way you want.
I can promise you, there never will be anything of the kind. Gimp will never catch (or play in the same league) as PS, whenever the FOSS community has created something approaching Lightroom it will be unusable, with a terrible interface and at least two camps of developers warring with each other over whether the menus should have round corners or not. I love FOSS software, and FOSS can deliver on some things. High quality software like Lightroom? Nah. Never. FOSS has yet to deliver a usable GUI for an OS in a timely fashion.
Eh, that's a contradiction in terms. A micro 4/3 camera uses a micro 4/3 sensor, which is smaller (about 40% smaller) than an APS-C sensor which again is smaller than a full size sensor. A MFT camera will, in general, not produce the same quality results a DSLR will, all else being equal. On the other hand, a good photog with a MFT camera will significantly outperform a mediocre photographer with a Hasselblad medium format.
Unless you are into professional video, DO NOT get the Canon D5 for video. When I mean professional video I mean: You have a dedicated focus puller or a very good add-on focusing system - most DSLRs do have auto focus in video mode, but for technical reasons they are somewhere between junk and utterly useless. The people who use DSLRs for those really cool videos you see, can not produce what you see without a team of somewhere between three and ten people (actors not included).
DSLRs are probably close to the worst thing you can get for video unless you are willing to do as the pros do. Manual focus, all manual shooting, an investment of at least three to five times the price of your camera in support systems, and at least the price of the camera for a single lens.
That's very cool if all you do is surf for porn. The sad reality is that for productive work for most users, there are two alternatives, Windows and OSX, and these days, I much prefer Microsoft over Apple. The latter has gone completely evil.
What do I mean by productive work? This is what I use mostly on my Windows PC:
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas Pro and various video tools.
Aptana Studio for Ruby development
Visual Studio for C#.NET development
Play! Framework in Eclipse
All of the above are only available on Windows or they work significantly better on Windows than on alternative platforms. Eclipse is great, unless you have to use it on Linux that is.
You are absolutely correct, the MVC framework (I use v3, not v2 that you pointed to) is a great framework for developing web apps, as is Play if you want to deploy on something that is not Windows. These frameworks do not solve the "heavy" client problem however.
Some client applications are computationally intensive or they are data intensive. Imagine for example a "wizard" style interface with 5-7 different paths to go, with typically 4-5 steps in each path. That amounts to a significant number of forms. This creates two problems that may be significant.
There is a significant number of GETs and POSTs going from the browser to the server, even if you use JSON (which I do). This is mostly unneeded traffic used mainly to transfer stateful data between the different forms.
The server has to maintain state for every single user currently using this application.
For smaller applications and a moderate set of users, this is not an issue. If you have upwards of 10 000 simultaneous users, it becomes a scalability nightmare however. The server not only has to maintain state, either in a volatile session object (RAM usage goes way up) or in a DB (with associated scalability issues), it also has to process and run the decision making process (which form is next depends on the input from the previous form). In other words, you are adding rather significant overhead to the server. There is also the issue then of session management, how do you set up time-out etc?
If you use a Flex, SL or Java "applet" on the other hand, the server is involved twice, once (or only a few times) serving up the base data. It doesn't have to decide which form to show next based on what was in a POST, the client application does all of that work. The server is only involved at the end when the user presses the "go" button (or similar) with all of the relevant data in one single POST. While the user is using the application, the server is not involved at all.
There are two distinct advantages to this. One, the server doesn't have to maintain state at all, not even logged-in state (since the Flex/SL/Java application can log back in if it was bumped. There is also another, but more subtle, advantage. We developed a standard web application like this some time back, and after a short while we were told that it was totally non-functional. Why? Because in the old client app (developed in Delphi) the user could go through half the workflow, go for lunch (or go home at the end of the day) and come back later and finish up. With the web-based approach, their session timed out, they had to log back in and they lost all the input. Sure, we managed to code around that, it wasn't even hard, but it added yet another layer of complexity and yet another layer of anti-scalability to our server. With a Flex/SL/Java app, we wouldn't have to worry about it at all.
Servers should be stateless, but for some LoB applications, particularly ones dealing with matters that are regulated by law or some other government regulations, state is crucial. For such, particularly complex ones, Flex/SL/Java is an infinitely better solution than HTML, 5, 6 or 7.
You can of course do all of this in JavaScript, but that means, as was my point, that you have to give up DI, MOQ etc. Javascript is great for simple things, but simply not useful for large complex things.
For LoB applications, HTML and JavaScript is about as bad as, and on some levels worse than, Visual Basic in the early 1990s.
The most important use for Silverlight is not (as most uneducated/.ers seem to think) to stream video. Who gives a flying f.ck about streaming video? SL is used for in-house and LoB applications. The kinds that run comprise thousands and thousands of different screens (or forms as many call them) and that are updated by small development teams continuously based on industry and regulatory changes. At the moment these apps can be developed as desktop apps (most are) or browser-delivered apps. For the last kind there are only three real alternatives, Flex, SL and Java applets. Of the three, SL is by far the best.
For those who think HTML and JavaScript is great for this, please show me how to create a MVC or MVVM, fully testable JavaScript application for this. I need to be able to moq my data, to easily change the model to test controllers etc. DI is a requirement. I can get all of this on the server side of things, but if I have 10 000 insurance agents hitting my app 8 hours a day. What does that mean? Each of them are running through "wizard" style apps with perhaps 10-15 "forms". If I maintain state on the server and post back every time something changes on the client, I have a huge performance issue and must scale my server up beyond reason. With an intelligent client app, I can do the same thing with two requests, one GET and a final POST, leaving the client to do all the intermediate state handling. How do I do this in Javascript and HTML5? It is imminently possible, but it is an insane way of doing things. I can not create a fully testable app in Javascript. Anyone ever heard of Dependency Injection? Controller testing? Moq'ing? Please. Javascript is BASIC from 1980s.
A number of high level government military and intelligence officials have gone on record as saying the US Govt has known for decades that some of the ufo's seen in the skies over the USA are in fact craft from other star systems.
That's not what they said, they said it was Santa.
The number of things I can not prove wrong (or right for that matter) is infinite. Assuming that there is a conspiracy because some nut says he thinks there is, is about as rational as belief in God, Santa Claus or the Spaghetti Monster. Sadly conspiracy nuts don't see it this way. They conveniently forgets two very important things. Firstly, in general government agencies are inept and incompetent, and secondly, three people can keep an important secret if, and only if, two of them are dead.
Area 51 is with a likelihood bordering on 100% exactly what the govt says it is. Nothing interesting.
Sigh. You seem to think Lisp did some of this before. Which part? Please be specific. Nobody ever said.NET was anything but a Java copy, which now is a significant improvement on Java, but that is another discussion. But again, you seem to think compiling and instantiating source code from a running program is what is new here. It isn't. You have basically been able to do that in.NET since its inception. Each "layer" of the compilation process as a service on the other hand has not been available. Neither is it in any other language I know of.
If you know otherwise, can you point me to a Lisp environment that will allow me to input source, and it gives me back the syntax tree for said source? Just the syntax tree, I'm building a Lisp syntax high-lighter and I don't want to parse the source to build the tree.
Oh, and I want to modify the code generated by the Lisp system before it is executed. Just slightly. From within my program. Can I hook into the generator and modify its behavior?
.NET has always been able to compile and execute code from within a running program as well. That is not what Roslynd is about. You can not do this in Java at the moment. If you can, I would like to know the API that will give me a full syntax tree from a piece of Java code. What format is the syntax tree returned in?
OK; so what you are saying is that Orange was a bunch of gullible idiots who didn't even know the phone number of a good lawyer. Why should anyone have sympathy for a company committing harakiri?
But, from what I understand, you aren't forced to use union labor in Finland
That's irrelevant. There is no extra cost in hiring union labor. Unions in Scandinavia have long since made sure that union wages apply to everyone, unionized or not. Also, there is no minimum wage in Finland, the unions negotiate a minimum wage. This means that there is no realistic way of hiring people at below union wages. Not legally. All over time, that is beyond I guess 37.5 hours is paid plus 50% for the first two hours and 100% for every hour past that.
There is also the vacation to take into consideration, a Finnish worker is entitled to 30 days of paid vacation (that is 30 working days, in other words six weeks) in addition to 14 paid holidays (that's just a day short of three weeks). So, in addition to being expensive hour-for-hour, the employer has to pay for nine weeks off for the Finnish worker. We have not yet talked about sick days, lots of those too, and the 281 days of (paid) parental leave available until your youngest child is three years old. Oh, and your job is guaranteed in that three year period.
In other words, Finnish workers are expensive. Very expensive. The company did not move production to Finland because it was cheap. The US is one of the cheapest countries in the western world in which to produce stuff. The exception being GM and Ford until recently, who had a lot of old crap they had to deal with and that they had not set aside money for. That isn't applicable in this situation though, since the cars were not going to be produced by GM or Ford.
Slashdot Mirror
So you've never tried these products and you are just talking out of your ass right? I guess that is appropriate, your ass is the orifice closest to the organ forming your "thoughts".
before they married Microsoft, right? How's that working out?
Depends on what you mean by "working out". The first result is that finally, at long last, Nokia has a smartphone operating system that matches their excellent hardware. They have not had that before. Nokia "smart" phones up until now have been a nightmare to use. A horrible user experience where simple tasks like sending an SMS requires many, many selections through endless menus and at least twice reading in the manual.
Whether they are going to be able to sell these excellent phones with an excellent operating system is anybody's guess at this point in time.
for example some code of mine (using PDO rather than mysqli) that generates a parameterised query.
http://isis.philpem.me.uk/hg/isis/file/9364d6277308/app/models/searchmodel.class.php
Honestly, that was one huge anti-pattern.
PHP does not inherently promote SQL injections. Stupid design patterns do.
Isn't PHP an anti-pattern all by it self?
they auto focuse faster, etc? .. Are the EF lenses a step below the "L" lenses
An L lens is an EF (usually) lens. EF is the mount, and they come in two variations, EF and EF-S. The latter for crop cameras (basically anything that is not the 1D and the 5D). The EF-S lenses should not be used on the 5D.
There are many things that determines whether your picture will be good or less good. The primary thing is the photographer. A good photographer can take better pictures with a cell phone than a bad photographer with a Canon 5D or even a Hasselblad. Ignoring that obvious thing, a hugely important thing in image quality is not the number of pixels (or mega pixels as some say) but the glass. Good glass on few pixels is better than mediocre glass on many pixels. In fact, bad glass combined with a high pixel count will probably make your pictures look worse, since the high number of pixels will reveal the low quality of the glass.
Making good lenses (glass) is expensive. So, more expensive lenses (for example L lenses) "paint" better pictures on your cameras sensor. They may not focus any faster, they may even be slower. Some really good lenses may even be manual focus only, particularly video lenses. For example the Distagon CP.2 lenses. Great glass. They cost more than the 5D body. In short, better lenses, all else equal, give better pictures. This is particularly important for full-frame or better cameras.
So, what should you purchase as the first lens for a 5D? Depends on what you want to do. Video? Pictures? Landscape? Portrait? Daytime mostly? Night mostly? For general photography I might say that the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM. It doesn't have image stabilization, which some might find to be a problem, but it is a very good lens. The 24-105mm f/4L IS USM has stabilization and is about $200 less, but I would trade IS for the f/2.8, since I am on a tripod mostly.
On the other hand, if my budget only allowed for one lens, I would trade the expensive body for a less expensive body and more and better glass any time of the day. The 7D or even the 60D and a good selection of good glass will serve most photographers better than a 5D and a single zoom.
Yeah, some of the new system cameras, I am not sure what to call them, use m4/3 mounts and stuff, but APS-C chips. That means they are not m4/3 cameras though, since the format specifies the m4/3 sized chip.
The 5D is clearly a very capable video solution when you are aware of its limitations, just as long as one realizes that it is not something the average consumer should invest in. Things have been moving fast in the DSLR video camp though, and the 5D might not be worth the investment at the moment, again, depending on a lot of things. If video is the main thing, many would argue that the 7D and the 60D have some advantages over the 5D (but obviously not the sensor).
The thing about photography however is that there is something that has an even stronger influence on your pictures than your camera body. The lenses. You should spend (significantly) more on glass than you do on the body. Twice as much or more. This means that you should take your total budget, divide it by about three, and spend that on the body, the rest on glass. Approximately. When starting out.
With a Canon 5DII costing about $2,300 these days, that means your total budget would be in the neighborhood of $7,000. Depending on a lot of factors, I would spend that on something like:
Glass is, by far, the most important investment you make, more so than the body. On a budget, you'll get a lot more if you invest in glass than if you invest in body. A 60D and great glass will get you better results than a 5D and mediocre glass. Of course you need light too :-)
I thought I heard of a mark III version coming out...maybe it will have auto focus for video?
For technical reasons, a DSLR will probably never have good or great autofocus in video mode. This is because the mirror needs to be out of the way in video mode and the mirror is needed to get good (DSLR quality) auto focus. The alternative is to go for a solution similar to Sony, using a semi-transparent mirror that is always down. In that way, for video, the Sony Alphas are great. In professional video, autofocus is basically unheard of.
I'll try to explain. You take a picture, let's just say a head and shoulders portrait, with an APS-C and a full frame, using the same lens, you will have to be further away from the subject to get the same image on the APS-C than the full frame due to the 1.6x crop factor. Assuming the same distance from the subject to the background (you want blurred), as you move away from the subject, the background (all other things held the same) will get sharper, in other words, DOF changes, and perhaps not in the way you want.
I can promise you, there never will be anything of the kind. Gimp will never catch (or play in the same league) as PS, whenever the FOSS community has created something approaching Lightroom it will be unusable, with a terrible interface and at least two camps of developers warring with each other over whether the menus should have round corners or not. I love FOSS software, and FOSS can deliver on some things. High quality software like Lightroom? Nah. Never. FOSS has yet to deliver a usable GUI for an OS in a timely fashion.
Eh, that's a contradiction in terms. A micro 4/3 camera uses a micro 4/3 sensor, which is smaller (about 40% smaller) than an APS-C sensor which again is smaller than a full size sensor. A MFT camera will, in general, not produce the same quality results a DSLR will, all else being equal. On the other hand, a good photog with a MFT camera will significantly outperform a mediocre photographer with a Hasselblad medium format.
Unless you are into professional video, DO NOT get the Canon D5 for video. When I mean professional video I mean: You have a dedicated focus puller or a very good add-on focusing system - most DSLRs do have auto focus in video mode, but for technical reasons they are somewhere between junk and utterly useless. The people who use DSLRs for those really cool videos you see, can not produce what you see without a team of somewhere between three and ten people (actors not included).
DSLRs are probably close to the worst thing you can get for video unless you are willing to do as the pros do. Manual focus, all manual shooting, an investment of at least three to five times the price of your camera in support systems, and at least the price of the camera for a single lens.
Morality
That's very cool if all you do is surf for porn. The sad reality is that for productive work for most users, there are two alternatives, Windows and OSX, and these days, I much prefer Microsoft over Apple. The latter has gone completely evil.
What do I mean by productive work? This is what I use mostly on my Windows PC:
All of the above are only available on Windows or they work significantly better on Windows than on alternative platforms. Eclipse is great, unless you have to use it on Linux that is.
You are absolutely correct, the MVC framework (I use v3, not v2 that you pointed to) is a great framework for developing web apps, as is Play if you want to deploy on something that is not Windows. These frameworks do not solve the "heavy" client problem however.
Some client applications are computationally intensive or they are data intensive. Imagine for example a "wizard" style interface with 5-7 different paths to go, with typically 4-5 steps in each path. That amounts to a significant number of forms. This creates two problems that may be significant.
For smaller applications and a moderate set of users, this is not an issue. If you have upwards of 10 000 simultaneous users, it becomes a scalability nightmare however. The server not only has to maintain state, either in a volatile session object (RAM usage goes way up) or in a DB (with associated scalability issues), it also has to process and run the decision making process (which form is next depends on the input from the previous form). In other words, you are adding rather significant overhead to the server. There is also the issue then of session management, how do you set up time-out etc?
If you use a Flex, SL or Java "applet" on the other hand, the server is involved twice, once (or only a few times) serving up the base data. It doesn't have to decide which form to show next based on what was in a POST, the client application does all of that work. The server is only involved at the end when the user presses the "go" button (or similar) with all of the relevant data in one single POST. While the user is using the application, the server is not involved at all.
There are two distinct advantages to this. One, the server doesn't have to maintain state at all, not even logged-in state (since the Flex/SL/Java application can log back in if it was bumped. There is also another, but more subtle, advantage. We developed a standard web application like this some time back, and after a short while we were told that it was totally non-functional. Why? Because in the old client app (developed in Delphi) the user could go through half the workflow, go for lunch (or go home at the end of the day) and come back later and finish up. With the web-based approach, their session timed out, they had to log back in and they lost all the input. Sure, we managed to code around that, it wasn't even hard, but it added yet another layer of complexity and yet another layer of anti-scalability to our server. With a Flex/SL/Java app, we wouldn't have to worry about it at all.
Servers should be stateless, but for some LoB applications, particularly ones dealing with matters that are regulated by law or some other government regulations, state is crucial. For such, particularly complex ones, Flex/SL/Java is an infinitely better solution than HTML, 5, 6 or 7.
You can of course do all of this in JavaScript, but that means, as was my point, that you have to give up DI, MOQ etc. Javascript is great for simple things, but simply not useful for large complex things.
1990s? Compared to what? HTML5?
For LoB applications, HTML and JavaScript is about as bad as, and on some levels worse than, Visual Basic in the early 1990s.
The most important use for Silverlight is not (as most uneducated /.ers seem to think) to stream video. Who gives a flying f.ck about streaming video? SL is used for in-house and LoB applications. The kinds that run comprise thousands and thousands of different screens (or forms as many call them) and that are updated by small development teams continuously based on industry and regulatory changes. At the moment these apps can be developed as desktop apps (most are) or browser-delivered apps. For the last kind there are only three real alternatives, Flex, SL and Java applets. Of the three, SL is by far the best.
For those who think HTML and JavaScript is great for this, please show me how to create a MVC or MVVM, fully testable JavaScript application for this. I need to be able to moq my data, to easily change the model to test controllers etc. DI is a requirement. I can get all of this on the server side of things, but if I have 10 000 insurance agents hitting my app 8 hours a day. What does that mean? Each of them are running through "wizard" style apps with perhaps 10-15 "forms". If I maintain state on the server and post back every time something changes on the client, I have a huge performance issue and must scale my server up beyond reason. With an intelligent client app, I can do the same thing with two requests, one GET and a final POST, leaving the client to do all the intermediate state handling. How do I do this in Javascript and HTML5? It is imminently possible, but it is an insane way of doing things. I can not create a fully testable app in Javascript. Anyone ever heard of Dependency Injection? Controller testing? Moq'ing? Please. Javascript is BASIC from 1980s.
Does this mean that it has a huge negative "thinness"? Sigh.
A number of high level government military and intelligence officials have gone on record as saying the US Govt has known for decades that some of the ufo's seen in the skies over the USA are in fact craft from other star systems.
That's not what they said, they said it was Santa.
His wife is reportedly not happy about this development. She'd prefer less speed.
OK, prove them wrong. You can't,
The number of things I can not prove wrong (or right for that matter) is infinite. Assuming that there is a conspiracy because some nut says he thinks there is, is about as rational as belief in God, Santa Claus or the Spaghetti Monster. Sadly conspiracy nuts don't see it this way. They conveniently forgets two very important things. Firstly, in general government agencies are inept and incompetent, and secondly, three people can keep an important secret if, and only if, two of them are dead.
Area 51 is with a likelihood bordering on 100% exactly what the govt says it is. Nothing interesting.
Three people can keep a secret if, and only if, two of them are dead. This basic insight escapes most conspiracy nuts. Don't know why.
The government is incompetent, it simply doesn't have the skills that conspiracy nuts attribute to it.
OK. Working on it :-)
Just curious, which apps are you missing?
Sigh. You seem to think Lisp did some of this before. Which part? Please be specific. Nobody ever said .NET was anything but a Java copy, which now is a significant improvement on Java, but that is another discussion. But again, you seem to think compiling and instantiating source code from a running program is what is new here. It isn't. You have basically been able to do that in .NET since its inception. Each "layer" of the compilation process as a service on the other hand has not been available. Neither is it in any other language I know of.
If you know otherwise, can you point me to a Lisp environment that will allow me to input source, and it gives me back the syntax tree for said source? Just the syntax tree, I'm building a Lisp syntax high-lighter and I don't want to parse the source to build the tree.
Oh, and I want to modify the code generated by the Lisp system before it is executed. Just slightly. From within my program. Can I hook into the generator and modify its behavior?
.NET has always been able to compile and execute code from within a running program as well. That is not what Roslynd is about. You can not do this in Java at the moment. If you can, I would like to know the API that will give me a full syntax tree from a piece of Java code. What format is the syntax tree returned in?
OK; so what you are saying is that Orange was a bunch of gullible idiots who didn't even know the phone number of a good lawyer. Why should anyone have sympathy for a company committing harakiri?
But, from what I understand, you aren't forced to use union labor in Finland
That's irrelevant. There is no extra cost in hiring union labor. Unions in Scandinavia have long since made sure that union wages apply to everyone, unionized or not. Also, there is no minimum wage in Finland, the unions negotiate a minimum wage. This means that there is no realistic way of hiring people at below union wages. Not legally. All over time, that is beyond I guess 37.5 hours is paid plus 50% for the first two hours and 100% for every hour past that.
There is also the vacation to take into consideration, a Finnish worker is entitled to 30 days of paid vacation (that is 30 working days, in other words six weeks) in addition to 14 paid holidays (that's just a day short of three weeks). So, in addition to being expensive hour-for-hour, the employer has to pay for nine weeks off for the Finnish worker. We have not yet talked about sick days, lots of those too, and the 281 days of (paid) parental leave available until your youngest child is three years old. Oh, and your job is guaranteed in that three year period.
In other words, Finnish workers are expensive. Very expensive. The company did not move production to Finland because it was cheap. The US is one of the cheapest countries in the western world in which to produce stuff. The exception being GM and Ford until recently, who had a lot of old crap they had to deal with and that they had not set aside money for. That isn't applicable in this situation though, since the cars were not going to be produced by GM or Ford.