Sigh. I have never even been close to the bees knees. As a desktop OS is is unparallelled in one important area though, applications. If you are so amazingly in love with an OS that you do not care what applications it can run, you are a moron. Linux has nothing that compares to Photoshop. Not even close. Linux has nothing that can take the place of Lightroom. Nothing in the same league, nothing. If you do photography, you can not do without either one or both of these. You simply can't. Hell, Linux can't even import the photos from my camera. In that regard it is utterly useless. Advocating Linux to someone who needs to do image management would be moronic in the extreme.
bloat
Really. You want to use Linux as an example of something that is not bloat. That means you are a moron. Even Linus thinks Linux is bloated by now. Anyone who has been paying attention over the past decade can not fail to notice Linux bloat. It is monstrous. If you want to see non-bloat, look at QNX.
susceptibility to malware
Seriously? Are you claiming that the latest installment of Linux is safer when it comes to malware than Windows. If you claim that you are an ignorant idiot. Windows 7 as an operating system is significantly better protected than Linux. Really, it is true. Check out someone who actually knows. You can google it if you wish. Again, I would not hold Windows nor Linux up here since neither has a good track record. At the moment, with the latest versions, Windows is out ahead though. With a bit of a margin actually.
experience goes back into the 70s
I am pretty sure that is a lie. It does explain your affection for an operating system that was designed in the 1970s though. Which Linux was.
Again, I am a huge Linux fan and I use it where appropriate. For a home user or for the vast majority of enterprise use, Linux is a really bad fit for the desktop. There is nothing like Office for Linux, Open/Libre Office simply isn't good enough. There is nothing like Lightroom or Photoshop for Linux. There is no real video editing software for Linux. As an operating system it has its strengths, as a platform to run applications that do productive work outside of SW development, it is crap simply because there are no applications. Not in the same league as on OSX and Windows. Not by a mile.
BTW, tell your colleague from me that if he runs into one show-stopping issue with Windows a month he should stop surfing porn sites and answer "Yes" every time they tell him he needs to download a virus checking piece of software from said porn site. Windows hasn't been that unstable since Windows 98.
I've found it superior to windows for quite a few years
Good for you. Now, can you please find me a good alternative to Photoshop? If you say GIMP you prove that you know nothing at all. How about Sony Vegas, can you do that for me? Hey, lets make it easy, can you find an IDE that comes close to Eclipse on Windows?
Your statement about proficiency is silly to say the least. Which six quite different Operating Systems are we talking about?
OK, I can play that game too. In 1985 I got my first PC, an XT clone, it had DOS and two diskette stations. I later installed Minix on said PC and developed a multi-user BBS for same. I only had one modem, so the "multi" in users was me and whoever was logged in. It had a total of 15 active users. I upgraded the PC then with an MFM controller and a 20M HD. It was a great day when I replaced the MFM controller with an RLL controller and my 20M HD magically grew to a 32M HD.
That was my first foray into a Unix like OS at home, but at school I used SunOS (which was better than the later Solaris IMnsHO) and Pyramid Unix. Later I moved my BBS to an Atari ST also running Minix. The Motorola architecture, 16/32 bit was heaven to program against compared to the 8086.
Time went by and I upgraded to a 386. I installed Linux 0.93 on that. It was heaven compared to Minix on 8086. That was at home. In more professional environments I worked with DEC Vaxen, and the odd PDP, but the PDPs were ancient then, just some old terrible legacy stuff that needed to be maintained every now and then. Tru64 was a great Unix when it rolled around.
Moving on I got into the OS/2 Warp thing, which is still un-beat as it comes to UI/UX on any platform. It went nowhere so I installed Windows NT 3.5(1) on my PC, the most stable Windows ever, not strange, it was basically VMS for PCs. On the way I have dabbled with Apple, Acorn and various esoteric systems. Doing all this when you were just a glimmer of hope in your fathers sweaty palms.
So you must have a reading-comprehension problem I take it. My personal workstation is a Windows XP thing, but if you had been able to read you would have seen that I also have to do cross-platform stuff. In such cases I am on Linux primarily. Some times I wander into Solaris territory.
There are a number of reasons that Windows (I would like it to be 7, but that isn't going to happen for another month or so) is my primary workstation. The main is that it is also my customers main workstation. Another is that I use Photoshop and Sony Vegas, neither of which have equivalents on Linux.
Linux is a great server OS, but as a client OS it sucks. Still. Big hairy balls. Eclipse on Windows, as an example, is a joy to use compared to on Linux. On Linux it is, quite frankly, crap. The fault of Eclipse? Not so much. The fault of Linux.
Being religious about what platform you use is a sure sign that as an IT professional you are ready for replacement.
Two things you should do to fix that. Number one, you should try to migrate off that Pentium 4 with 256M of RAM. Secondly you should stop buying software from Phantom Software and Bagles on the corner. There is no such thing as Visual Studio 2011, and I doubt there ever will be.
Now, if you want to try a really, really slow IDE that is not a figment of your imagination, try Eclipse
Currently my favorite tools for developing enterprise LOB apps (assuming web-based) would probably be something like:
Ruby/Rails (never could get the hang of Python, probably me)
.NET MVC (I refuse to call it ASP.NET, it has nothing to do with that abomination)
Java with Play!
Spring MVC
These are in order. Ruby is frequently out due to, well, it being Ruby and lots of people with decision-making power will go "Ruby???"..NET is out when I want do be cross-platform (not comfortable with Mono yet). Play! When I need to use Java and if I can avoid managers getting involved. Spring if the above fails.
.NET MVC beats both Play! and Spring hands down. It is significantly better both in tooling and in features, not to forget time-to-release. As an old Java hand it some times pains me to say this, but I can only think of a single advantage Java has over C#/.NET these days, and that is some measure of cross-platform capabilities. If cross-platform is irrelevant, you'll be significantly more productive with.NET than Java. Always. It didn't use to be like that, but Java has stagnated in a bad way and it is too bloated. Unless you use Play! that is.
Lazy is a mandatory requirement for a developer. Good developers are lazy. That's how things get better. This is not a trait for developers only. The guy who invented the wheel was too bloody lazy to carry stuff, just ask his wife and his neighbors. That horrible contraption that lazy bastard wrought upon the world should never have gone anywhere. Sadly people are too lazy, and now a large number of wood carriers are out of a job because of that bastard.
Not because OpenGL for Windows sucks, like someone else is saying, simply because, compared to DirectX, OpenGL sucks. Big hairy balls. It is eons away from being a competitor to DirectX, and it probably will never get there since it doesn't have half the muscle behind it needed to get there.
Not if Apple were working on theirs first, which they obviously were.
They were? And what divine entity told you this?
Also, you're wrong. It's not he who started working on it first, it is he who published it first. It's derivative work and Apple shamelessly ripped him off.
I would say "amen" to all of the above and recommend making sure you get a printer so that your wife can hang some of the images on the wall. That makes a huge difference. Make sure she gets them framed properly. Also, if you get a printer capable of larger prints, that is better.
As to the list - if the $1500 for the 35mm 1.4 prime is a little on the high side, you can get very, very good results with a 50mm 1.4 too, at about 1/3 of the price. You just have to move a little further away. Heck, if you are a Canon person, even the $100 50mm 1.8 is going to blow you away if you are used to the kit lens. Shooting with primes also makes you a better photographer, since you learn that you have to move your body to shoot. Moving your body seems to engage the brain a little more:-)
BZZTZ. Wrong. If you invest a modest amount of money in an ink-jet today it will print at a better quality than your local place. For me, as an enthusiast, at significantly better quality. The local shop has a printer that is calibrated for badly lit, highly compressed JPEGs, and good photos come out looking like sh*t. That is, of course, unless you go to a shop where the guy running it knows what he is doing. Not going to happen at WalMart.
My color printer at home will, since it is properly calibrated and all my photos are RAW images, print images at significantly higher quality than the photo shop doing "real photo printing" - that is unless I engage one of the high-end shops that properly calibrate their printers. I am not quite certain when you last used an inkjet printer, but it's almost a decade since they printed "cheap smudgy mess".
Don't forget, the photo printer at your local store is calibrated to the lowest common denominator. Badly lit shots stored as highly compressed JPEG junk. I don't know of any serious photographer today that doesn't print his own stuff unless he needs to do mass-printings. The majority of them use ink-jet today. Sure, they do not use the $249 Epson from Amazon, but even that one is probably better than the average photo store on typical prints (if operated by someone who knows what they are doing)
Many I know use the Pixma Pro series. Slightly more than the run-off-the-mill Epson/Canon but not excessively so. And, as I said, with higher quality than Wall Mart.
Here's the problem. Every time a highly advanced species or group of individuals has met a less advanced group, eventually the lesser developed group perishes more or less with perhaps a few lucky individuals integrating into the more advanced group. Happy (for the less advanced) integration normally happens only within the same species. In cross-species situations if the lesser developed group is lucky they become servants for the more advanced group. Perhaps well treated servants (like horses and pets are to us), but servants all the same.
A civilization capable of traveling across interstellar space is significantly more advanced than ours. There is no reason to think we'll be anything but fun little pets to them. If we are lucky. If we are less lucky we will temporarily become an exploitable resource populated by mindless ants-like creatures.
In terms of ecosystem I'm referring to tools (profilers, decompilers, etc), libraries (for example hibernate, spring, jaxp, ANTLR, jbpm etc etc).
Hibernate and Spring are fine for.NET, ANTLR does C#, I don't see a good reason to use jaxp on.NET but I might be uninformed. Seems to me that LINQ2XML is far superior.
I don't know of any free, good BPM tools for.NET, but honestly, I don't know of any for Java either. I have worked with jbpm on JBoss and it was a nightmare, though we were never really sure who was the ultimate culprit, jbpm, Smooks or the Java NTLM integration. What we do know is that if all three were enabled in one JBoss instance, nothing would really work. Smooks never worked. In one project that used to rely heavily on Smooks we still have situations where nothing changes and smooks just stops parsing stuff. Yuck!
There are several commercial BPM solutions that are better than what is in JBoss. If you need the power of something like jbpm you'll probably go for the commercial solution anyway. If you don't need to full power of something like jbpm for.Net, Windows Workflow works great for small things.
As a long-time Java developer, it was a huge surprise for me that.Net (I can only talk about 3.5 and later) was as mature and polished as it actually is. I can also say with confidence that I am significantly more productive in.Net than I was in Java, and that's all that counts. Considering I have developed commercial Java apps since 1997 and only done.Net since 2009, that's something of a surprise.
It's sad that a pathetic looser calls someone who has contributed so much to Open Source nasty names. Once you have grown past the stage where spelling your name is a chore and you have contributed something more than what your bowels empties into your adult diapers, come back to us and tell us about it. Until then you are a jealous little shit.
C# of today is in significant areas way ahead of Java. LINQ and parallelism is only two areas. Java might catch up in some areas and will undoubtedly jump ahead in others in Java 7, but Java 7 has proven that the entire Java process is irreversibly broken. The delays and the Oracle ownership are significant problems.
I build vertical in-house enterprise apps for a living. No environment on the planet currently matches.Net for this. Not even close. Being able to run on Linux servers is something I would miss greatly. I hope Miguel will find a new sponsor.
they had to change their name due to legal issues like fraud accounting
Not entirely accurate. What is now Accenture was not part of the fraudulent practices that sank Arthur Anderson, but it shared the name. Distancing them selves from the people in blue suits that made a living out of stealing was a good thing. Why is it, btw, that that one business sector, the blue suits always steal, get caught and get away with it?
In Norway "imperial units of measure" are typically called "English units of measure", so a mile is typically called "an English mile". The question "how long is an English mile" is thus usually answered "as far as an English car will run".
What the hell Dev environment are you suing for the Android?
Eclipse, and it can't hold a candle to VS2010 in my opinion. That might be because I use Eclipse on Linux though.
SO you evaluate the phones usefulness based on your opinion of the dev language?
Did I say that? Of course not. I just said I didn't like Objective-C. It makes me feel like it is 1989 again, and it isn't.
[C# ahead of Java] In what way?
LINQ is a good starting point. Concurrency is another. Dynamic - you have to try it. Oh, and nothing like the botched Java compile-time auto-boxing. If there ever was a bad idea implemented in Java, the current auto-boxing mechanism is a great example.
Some examples (please ignore any and all errors) - get some data from a list, ordered (LINQ):
List<Person> myFriends = allPeople.Where( p => p.Status == Friend ).OrderBy( p => p.LastName ).ToList();
Parse some XML, assume you have an XML stream where each Person is defined as something like
You want to parse this into a List type thing. How to do this?
XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse( theXML );
List<Person> people = (from p in doc.Descendants("person")
select new Person {
firstname = p.Element("firstname"),
lastname = p.Element("lastname")
}).ToList();
Too easy. Compare this to, for example, Smooks, which fails in weird and impossible to understand ways. It is heaven.
I thin k you need to take a look at your eclipse environment
I have been doing Java dev for quite a while. I know my Eclipse quite well. Compared to VS2010 it falls short. Not badly so, but still.
Java is slower then C, always has been and always will be... The question is development speed and cost
For one, Java is not necessarily slower than C, but in most cases it will be. With a JIT you can at least theoretically achieve optimizations that are not possible in a compiled language, such as code-removal, pre-calculations of values that are determined will not change etc. But yes, Java will generally be slower than C. I don't know why that is a point to make though, since I have never raised any issues with the speed of Java in this discussion. In fact, I have claimed that I prefer C#, which is very similar to Java in most ways, for example it is run in a VM with a JIT Compiler. Some minor differences in the way execution happens, but that is as relevant as bringing up the speed of Java in this discussion.
As to the speed and cost of development, that is precisely why I use C# over Java. I am significantly more productive in C# than I can be in Java, and that is quite amazing given that I have developed in Java since 1997 and in C# since 2009.
I need to be able to easily access Gmail, Google calendars, etc... The iPhone is a pain to set up, and as near as I can tell, that's the same with WP7 phones
You are just guessing now, are you not? You have in fact never seen an iPhone and never heard of WP7. Setting the iPhone up to use Gmail is a snap. If someone was having problems with that they need to go back to their day-job as a bus driver and stop pretending they know how to use computers. I have actually not set up Google Calendar on my iPhone so I can not say anything about that. For Windows Phone 7 you have to provide your Gmail credentials, and if that is painful for you then I can of course understand why you do not like WP7, but I am also surprised that you are at the same time actually able to post on/. since posting on/. requires significantly more skills and work than setting up Gmail and Google Calendars on WP7.
No one is going to willingly downgrade to a windows phone.
Just for the record, I upgraded from iPhone to WP7 this year. A little by accident. Developing for mobile I have to keep tabs on what goes on, so I have an iPhone 3GS, a Galaxy Tab and I got a WP7 phone just before Christmas. I was not expecting it to be my main phone, which at the time was the iPhone, so I just got the cheapest they had, the LG.
I was immediately impressed with the development environment which is at least a generation ahead of Android and even more ahead of Apple (gawd I hate Objective-C). I doodled some apps. Worked on it for a while. I found my self grabbing the WP7 phone more and more and suddenly I found I preferred it over the other two.
Does the phone have shortcomings? Fewer now that the first update is out, but sure, it does. It is still a significantly improved user experience over iOS though. Given what we saw at Mix, the Microsoft lead over Apple in phone usability will take another significant leap forward. Honestly, nobody innovates on the phone like Microsoft at the moment. It took a while to get started, but as some of the other Microsoft teams, the WP7 team is world class with a great product.
Sadly I think a number of developers, particularly of the ilk that reads/. are making judgements mostly on their own superstition. Microsoft of 2011 is not Microsoft of 1999. There is a significant improvement, and many Microsoft products, like C# - which has jumped far, far ahead of Java now,.NET MVC and others, are really quite good. In my current job I integrate JBoss and Microsoft solutions. Working in Eclipse on Linux is a huge step backwards compared to VS2010 on Windows.
Before concluding I am a MS fanboi, I have been working almost exclusively in Java since early 1997 and was part of one of the very early companies to make serious money on a commercial Java product. In the beginning we had to carefully wrap our Java stuff in C front-ends to make sure our customers didn't notice it was Java. If they had, at the time they would have rejected it, since everybody "knew" at the time that Java was too slow to use for anything real.
Nullable data-types are a good idea. Significantly better than Java auto-boxing for example. Auto-boxing is a compile-time thing, where it should have been a VM thing. Why? Because errors in reflection when using auto-boxing can be very hard to catch. Assigning null to an Integer value in Java is not an issue. What happens if some tool, let's for example call it something silly like "Smooks", does some nifty stuff with some XML and creates objects for you. Or tries, and then assigns nulls to your int values? What happens? Impossible to track down errors is what.
So, who comes up with a system where I can assign successfully intermix int and Integer, most of the time? The worst possible thing to deal with is stuff that works most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. I have never even been close to the bees knees. As a desktop OS is is unparallelled in one important area though, applications. If you are so amazingly in love with an OS that you do not care what applications it can run, you are a moron. Linux has nothing that compares to Photoshop. Not even close. Linux has nothing that can take the place of Lightroom. Nothing in the same league, nothing. If you do photography, you can not do without either one or both of these. You simply can't. Hell, Linux can't even import the photos from my camera. In that regard it is utterly useless. Advocating Linux to someone who needs to do image management would be moronic in the extreme.
bloat
Really. You want to use Linux as an example of something that is not bloat. That means you are a moron. Even Linus thinks Linux is bloated by now. Anyone who has been paying attention over the past decade can not fail to notice Linux bloat. It is monstrous. If you want to see non-bloat, look at QNX.
susceptibility to malware
Seriously? Are you claiming that the latest installment of Linux is safer when it comes to malware than Windows. If you claim that you are an ignorant idiot. Windows 7 as an operating system is significantly better protected than Linux. Really, it is true. Check out someone who actually knows. You can google it if you wish. Again, I would not hold Windows nor Linux up here since neither has a good track record. At the moment, with the latest versions, Windows is out ahead though. With a bit of a margin actually.
experience goes back into the 70s
I am pretty sure that is a lie. It does explain your affection for an operating system that was designed in the 1970s though. Which Linux was.
Again, I am a huge Linux fan and I use it where appropriate. For a home user or for the vast majority of enterprise use, Linux is a really bad fit for the desktop. There is nothing like Office for Linux, Open/Libre Office simply isn't good enough. There is nothing like Lightroom or Photoshop for Linux. There is no real video editing software for Linux. As an operating system it has its strengths, as a platform to run applications that do productive work outside of SW development, it is crap simply because there are no applications. Not in the same league as on OSX and Windows. Not by a mile.
BTW, tell your colleague from me that if he runs into one show-stopping issue with Windows a month he should stop surfing porn sites and answer "Yes" every time they tell him he needs to download a virus checking piece of software from said porn site. Windows hasn't been that unstable since Windows 98.
Sigh. You really didn't get it did you?
I've found it superior to windows for quite a few years
Good for you. Now, can you please find me a good alternative to Photoshop? If you say GIMP you prove that you know nothing at all. How about Sony Vegas, can you do that for me? Hey, lets make it easy, can you find an IDE that comes close to Eclipse on Windows?
Your statement about proficiency is silly to say the least. Which six quite different Operating Systems are we talking about?
OK, I can play that game too. In 1985 I got my first PC, an XT clone, it had DOS and two diskette stations. I later installed Minix on said PC and developed a multi-user BBS for same. I only had one modem, so the "multi" in users was me and whoever was logged in. It had a total of 15 active users. I upgraded the PC then with an MFM controller and a 20M HD. It was a great day when I replaced the MFM controller with an RLL controller and my 20M HD magically grew to a 32M HD.
That was my first foray into a Unix like OS at home, but at school I used SunOS (which was better than the later Solaris IMnsHO) and Pyramid Unix. Later I moved my BBS to an Atari ST also running Minix. The Motorola architecture, 16/32 bit was heaven to program against compared to the 8086.
Time went by and I upgraded to a 386. I installed Linux 0.93 on that. It was heaven compared to Minix on 8086. That was at home. In more professional environments I worked with DEC Vaxen, and the odd PDP, but the PDPs were ancient then, just some old terrible legacy stuff that needed to be maintained every now and then. Tru64 was a great Unix when it rolled around.
Moving on I got into the OS/2 Warp thing, which is still un-beat as it comes to UI/UX on any platform. It went nowhere so I installed Windows NT 3.5(1) on my PC, the most stable Windows ever, not strange, it was basically VMS for PCs. On the way I have dabbled with Apple, Acorn and various esoteric systems. Doing all this when you were just a glimmer of hope in your fathers sweaty palms.
So you must have a reading-comprehension problem I take it. My personal workstation is a Windows XP thing, but if you had been able to read you would have seen that I also have to do cross-platform stuff. In such cases I am on Linux primarily. Some times I wander into Solaris territory.
There are a number of reasons that Windows (I would like it to be 7, but that isn't going to happen for another month or so) is my primary workstation. The main is that it is also my customers main workstation. Another is that I use Photoshop and Sony Vegas, neither of which have equivalents on Linux.
Linux is a great server OS, but as a client OS it sucks. Still. Big hairy balls. Eclipse on Windows, as an example, is a joy to use compared to on Linux. On Linux it is, quite frankly, crap. The fault of Eclipse? Not so much. The fault of Linux.
Being religious about what platform you use is a sure sign that as an IT professional you are ready for replacement.
Two things you should do to fix that. Number one, you should try to migrate off that Pentium 4 with 256M of RAM. Secondly you should stop buying software from Phantom Software and Bagles on the corner. There is no such thing as Visual Studio 2011, and I doubt there ever will be.
Now, if you want to try a really, really slow IDE that is not a figment of your imagination, try Eclipse
Ah, QNX :-)
Just curious, retarded compared to what?
Currently my favorite tools for developing enterprise LOB apps (assuming web-based) would probably be something like:
These are in order. Ruby is frequently out due to, well, it being Ruby and lots of people with decision-making power will go "Ruby???". .NET is out when I want do be cross-platform (not comfortable with Mono yet). Play! When I need to use Java and if I can avoid managers getting involved. Spring if the above fails.
.NET MVC beats both Play! and Spring hands down. It is significantly better both in tooling and in features, not to forget time-to-release. As an old Java hand it some times pains me to say this, but I can only think of a single advantage Java has over C#/.NET these days, and that is some measure of cross-platform capabilities. If cross-platform is irrelevant, you'll be significantly more productive with .NET than Java. Always. It didn't use to be like that, but Java has stagnated in a bad way and it is too bloated. Unless you use Play! that is.
Your post SCREAMS lazy/crappy developer.
Lazy is a mandatory requirement for a developer. Good developers are lazy. That's how things get better. This is not a trait for developers only. The guy who invented the wheel was too bloody lazy to carry stuff, just ask his wife and his neighbors. That horrible contraption that lazy bastard wrought upon the world should never have gone anywhere. Sadly people are too lazy, and now a large number of wood carriers are out of a job because of that bastard.
Not because OpenGL for Windows sucks, like someone else is saying, simply because, compared to DirectX, OpenGL sucks. Big hairy balls. It is eons away from being a competitor to DirectX, and it probably will never get there since it doesn't have half the muscle behind it needed to get there.
Not if Apple were working on theirs first, which they obviously were.
They were? And what divine entity told you this?
Also, you're wrong. It's not he who started working on it first, it is he who published it first. It's derivative work and Apple shamelessly ripped him off.
Pope: Little boys like to have old men up their waste disposal system.
People: He is infallible, so it must be so.
It's probably not amazing, but I would trust Microsoft today far more than I would trust Apple.
I would say "amen" to all of the above and recommend making sure you get a printer so that your wife can hang some of the images on the wall. That makes a huge difference. Make sure she gets them framed properly. Also, if you get a printer capable of larger prints, that is better.
As to the list - if the $1500 for the 35mm 1.4 prime is a little on the high side, you can get very, very good results with a 50mm 1.4 too, at about 1/3 of the price. You just have to move a little further away. Heck, if you are a Canon person, even the $100 50mm 1.8 is going to blow you away if you are used to the kit lens. Shooting with primes also makes you a better photographer, since you learn that you have to move your body to shoot. Moving your body seems to engage the brain a little more :-)
BZZTZ. Wrong. If you invest a modest amount of money in an ink-jet today it will print at a better quality than your local place. For me, as an enthusiast, at significantly better quality. The local shop has a printer that is calibrated for badly lit, highly compressed JPEGs, and good photos come out looking like sh*t. That is, of course, unless you go to a shop where the guy running it knows what he is doing. Not going to happen at WalMart.
My color printer at home will, since it is properly calibrated and all my photos are RAW images, print images at significantly higher quality than the photo shop doing "real photo printing" - that is unless I engage one of the high-end shops that properly calibrate their printers. I am not quite certain when you last used an inkjet printer, but it's almost a decade since they printed "cheap smudgy mess".
Don't forget, the photo printer at your local store is calibrated to the lowest common denominator. Badly lit shots stored as highly compressed JPEG junk. I don't know of any serious photographer today that doesn't print his own stuff unless he needs to do mass-printings. The majority of them use ink-jet today. Sure, they do not use the $249 Epson from Amazon, but even that one is probably better than the average photo store on typical prints (if operated by someone who knows what they are doing)
Many I know use the Pixma Pro series. Slightly more than the run-off-the-mill Epson/Canon but not excessively so. And, as I said, with higher quality than Wall Mart.
Here's the problem. Every time a highly advanced species or group of individuals has met a less advanced group, eventually the lesser developed group perishes more or less with perhaps a few lucky individuals integrating into the more advanced group. Happy (for the less advanced) integration normally happens only within the same species. In cross-species situations if the lesser developed group is lucky they become servants for the more advanced group. Perhaps well treated servants (like horses and pets are to us), but servants all the same.
A civilization capable of traveling across interstellar space is significantly more advanced than ours. There is no reason to think we'll be anything but fun little pets to them. If we are lucky. If we are less lucky we will temporarily become an exploitable resource populated by mindless ants-like creatures.
Irony - definition, something that you can stick a fridge magnet to.
In terms of ecosystem I'm referring to tools (profilers, decompilers, etc), libraries (for example hibernate, spring, jaxp, ANTLR, jbpm etc etc).
Hibernate and Spring are fine for .NET, ANTLR does C#, I don't see a good reason to use jaxp on .NET but I might be uninformed. Seems to me that LINQ2XML is far superior.
I don't know of any free, good BPM tools for .NET, but honestly, I don't know of any for Java either. I have worked with jbpm on JBoss and it was a nightmare, though we were never really sure who was the ultimate culprit, jbpm, Smooks or the Java NTLM integration. What we do know is that if all three were enabled in one JBoss instance, nothing would really work. Smooks never worked. In one project that used to rely heavily on Smooks we still have situations where nothing changes and smooks just stops parsing stuff. Yuck!
There are several commercial BPM solutions that are better than what is in JBoss. If you need the power of something like jbpm you'll probably go for the commercial solution anyway. If you don't need to full power of something like jbpm for .Net, Windows Workflow works great for small things.
As a long-time Java developer, it was a huge surprise for me that .Net (I can only talk about 3.5 and later) was as mature and polished as it actually is. I can also say with confidence that I am significantly more productive in .Net than I was in Java, and that's all that counts. Considering I have developed commercial Java apps since 1997 and only done .Net since 2009, that's something of a surprise.
It's sad that a pathetic looser calls someone who has contributed so much to Open Source nasty names. Once you have grown past the stage where spelling your name is a chore and you have contributed something more than what your bowels empties into your adult diapers, come back to us and tell us about it. Until then you are a jealous little shit.
C# of today is in significant areas way ahead of Java. LINQ and parallelism is only two areas. Java might catch up in some areas and will undoubtedly jump ahead in others in Java 7, but Java 7 has proven that the entire Java process is irreversibly broken. The delays and the Oracle ownership are significant problems.
I build vertical in-house enterprise apps for a living. No environment on the planet currently matches .Net for this. Not even close. Being able to run on Linux servers is something I would miss greatly. I hope Miguel will find a new sponsor.
they had to change their name due to legal issues like fraud accounting
Not entirely accurate. What is now Accenture was not part of the fraudulent practices that sank Arthur Anderson, but it shared the name. Distancing them selves from the people in blue suits that made a living out of stealing was a good thing. Why is it, btw, that that one business sector, the blue suits always steal, get caught and get away with it?
In Norway "imperial units of measure" are typically called "English units of measure", so a mile is typically called "an English mile". The question "how long is an English mile" is thus usually answered "as far as an English car will run".
What the hell Dev environment are you suing for the Android?
Eclipse, and it can't hold a candle to VS2010 in my opinion. That might be because I use Eclipse on Linux though.
SO you evaluate the phones usefulness based on your opinion of the dev language?
Did I say that? Of course not. I just said I didn't like Objective-C. It makes me feel like it is 1989 again, and it isn't.
[C# ahead of Java] In what way?
LINQ is a good starting point. Concurrency is another. Dynamic - you have to try it. Oh, and nothing like the botched Java compile-time auto-boxing. If there ever was a bad idea implemented in Java, the current auto-boxing mechanism is a great example.
Some examples (please ignore any and all errors) - get some data from a list, ordered (LINQ):
List<Person> myFriends = allPeople.Where( p => p.Status == Friend ).OrderBy( p => p.LastName ).ToList();
Parse some XML, assume you have an XML stream where each Person is defined as something like
<person>
<firstname>Tom</firstname>
<lastname>Jones</lastname>
</person>
You want to parse this into a List type thing. How to do this?
XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse( theXML );
List<Person> people = (from p in doc.Descendants("person")
select new Person {
firstname = p.Element("firstname"),
lastname = p.Element("lastname")
}).ToList();
Too easy. Compare this to, for example, Smooks, which fails in weird and impossible to understand ways. It is heaven.
I thin k you need to take a look at your eclipse environment
I have been doing Java dev for quite a while. I know my Eclipse quite well. Compared to VS2010 it falls short. Not badly so, but still.
Java is slower then C, always has been and always will be ... The question is development speed and cost
For one, Java is not necessarily slower than C, but in most cases it will be. With a JIT you can at least theoretically achieve optimizations that are not possible in a compiled language, such as code-removal, pre-calculations of values that are determined will not change etc. But yes, Java will generally be slower than C. I don't know why that is a point to make though, since I have never raised any issues with the speed of Java in this discussion. In fact, I have claimed that I prefer C#, which is very similar to Java in most ways, for example it is run in a VM with a JIT Compiler. Some minor differences in the way execution happens, but that is as relevant as bringing up the speed of Java in this discussion.
As to the speed and cost of development, that is precisely why I use C# over Java. I am significantly more productive in C# than I can be in Java, and that is quite amazing given that I have developed in Java since 1997 and in C# since 2009.
I need to be able to easily access Gmail, Google calendars, etc... The iPhone is a pain to set up, and as near as I can tell, that's the same with WP7 phones
You are just guessing now, are you not? You have in fact never seen an iPhone and never heard of WP7. Setting the iPhone up to use Gmail is a snap. If someone was having problems with that they need to go back to their day-job as a bus driver and stop pretending they know how to use computers. I have actually not set up Google Calendar on my iPhone so I can not say anything about that. For Windows Phone 7 you have to provide your Gmail credentials, and if that is painful for you then I can of course understand why you do not like WP7, but I am also surprised that you are at the same time actually able to post on /. since posting on /. requires significantly more skills and work than setting up Gmail and Google Calendars on WP7.
No one is going to willingly downgrade to a windows phone.
Just for the record, I upgraded from iPhone to WP7 this year. A little by accident. Developing for mobile I have to keep tabs on what goes on, so I have an iPhone 3GS, a Galaxy Tab and I got a WP7 phone just before Christmas. I was not expecting it to be my main phone, which at the time was the iPhone, so I just got the cheapest they had, the LG.
I was immediately impressed with the development environment which is at least a generation ahead of Android and even more ahead of Apple (gawd I hate Objective-C). I doodled some apps. Worked on it for a while. I found my self grabbing the WP7 phone more and more and suddenly I found I preferred it over the other two.
Does the phone have shortcomings? Fewer now that the first update is out, but sure, it does. It is still a significantly improved user experience over iOS though. Given what we saw at Mix, the Microsoft lead over Apple in phone usability will take another significant leap forward. Honestly, nobody innovates on the phone like Microsoft at the moment. It took a while to get started, but as some of the other Microsoft teams, the WP7 team is world class with a great product.
Sadly I think a number of developers, particularly of the ilk that reads /. are making judgements mostly on their own superstition. Microsoft of 2011 is not Microsoft of 1999. There is a significant improvement, and many Microsoft products, like C# - which has jumped far, far ahead of Java now, .NET MVC and others, are really quite good. In my current job I integrate JBoss and Microsoft solutions. Working in Eclipse on Linux is a huge step backwards compared to VS2010 on Windows.
Before concluding I am a MS fanboi, I have been working almost exclusively in Java since early 1997 and was part of one of the very early companies to make serious money on a commercial Java product. In the beginning we had to carefully wrap our Java stuff in C front-ends to make sure our customers didn't notice it was Java. If they had, at the time they would have rejected it, since everybody "knew" at the time that Java was too slow to use for anything real.
Nullable data-types are a good idea. Significantly better than Java auto-boxing for example. Auto-boxing is a compile-time thing, where it should have been a VM thing. Why? Because errors in reflection when using auto-boxing can be very hard to catch. Assigning null to an Integer value in Java is not an issue. What happens if some tool, let's for example call it something silly like "Smooks", does some nifty stuff with some XML and creates objects for you. Or tries, and then assigns nulls to your int values? What happens? Impossible to track down errors is what.
So, who comes up with a system where I can assign successfully intermix int and Integer, most of the time? The worst possible thing to deal with is stuff that works most of the time.