Can people not see whats happening? Google releases all these really cool products that eventually become apart of your daily life.
Before the only google app I couldnt live without was Google search then Gmail (with Google Chat + Google Talk) then Google News then Google Local/Maps now because of the integration of GMail Im even started to use Google Calendar because it is so convenient to use, I received a confirmation email about tickets I bought online, right beside my email there was a link to add the event to my calendar, within 2 weeks I had it booked - awesome!
I use all their services daily for free, what google gets in return is to host all your personal info so they can target you with ads. After using googles services for so many years my online profile must read like a diary, as it has everything I ever searched for (what im interested in), almost every place I have ever been (searches from Google Maps/Local) as well as most of my friends/contacts (emails and contacts) and their profiles, etc. I reckon Google knows more about me than I do (people forget things:))
Now the most important and valuable thing in IT is data and because of these added 'Google Services' they have a lot of it on a lot of people. Now since everything is tied to my gmail account (aka Google Account) it is likely that I will be using Google's services for the rest of my life. Where as if they just had a search then as soon as someone developed a better search I would've just easily switched.
The benefit of merging with Nintendo is only so that the mac mini which apple is hoping to make its way into everyones lounge room is capable of playing nintendo games.
Now Apple shouldn't need to fork out 20+ billion for this feature they should just come to some agreement that lets the Nintendo Wii games be playable on a Mac. All they need is an apple-like Wii controller and some software that lets the Mac run nintendo games.
Then bang! the mac mini is capable of becoming the centre of your digital living room that is capable of playing TV, DVD's, Internet and now even games!
This will benefit nintendo because hardware game consoles have always been a loss leader - so Im sure they will be more than happy if someone else decides to make compatible consoles as long as they still get their licensing for each game.
Weakly typed dynamic languages do not have a future in large scale development projects. Given the average skillset of developers (i.e. not all developers having PHD's) there is a likely chance that less than perfect code will be written. The better language will be the language that is capable of producing less bugs. A common attribute of large scale development projects is that they are written by a team of developers and not everyone will know exactly how the whole system 'works'. In these cases without a doubt less bugs will be produced with statically typed languages that adhere to strongly typed interfaces.
Dynamic languages are also poor candidates for writing re-usable well tested components, and because of theyre dynamic (anything goes) nature it is harder to produce good intelligent IDE's for them.
The problem with statically typed languages is that they are inherently unproductive as it takes a considerable more code to produce the same outcome that can be written with dynamic code. But with more intelligent IDE's and common features being included into some statically typed languages this productivity gap is closing. If you take into account the maintenance of code (fixing bugs and adding new features) you will almost always be better off using statically typed languages for large scale projects.
With that being said I believe languages like Boo will be the future (C# 3.0+ also looks to be on a very productive path with inclusion of features like type inference, lambda functions etc.). I like Boo cause it is a python-esque language that is statically typed (compiles to.NET). It has advanced features like first class support for regular expressions, hash tables, closures, etc. Works well with both Mono and MS.NET so it runs perfectly on both platforms and it includes a great IDE with Sharpdevelop 2.0+.
Provide two stylesheets and make the new one the default if you want (for the noobs)
But for the love of god offer us the old stylesheet back.
This is way too hard to read!
There is a *very interesting* article on Joel on software (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/18.ht ml) on how it is essential for the Record labels to be able to control the popularity of its songs:
"...Here's the dream world for the EMI Group, Sony/BMG, etc.: there are two prices for songs on iTunes, say, $2.49 and $0.99. All the new releases come out at $2.49. Some classic rock (Sweet Home Alabama) is at $2.49. Unwanted, old, crap, like, say, Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) -- the crap we only know because it was pushed on us in the 70s by paid-off disk jockeys -- would be deliberately priced at $0.99 to send a clear message that $0.99 = crap.
And now when a musician gets uppity, all the recording industry has to do is threaten to release their next single straight into the $0.99 category, which will kill it dead no matter how good it is. And suddenly the music industry has a lot more leverage over their artists in negotiations: the kind of leverage they are used to having. Their favorite kind of leverage. The "we won't promote your music if you don't let us put rootkits on your CDs" kind of leverage.
And Apple? Apple wants the signaling to come from what they promote on the front page of the iTunes Music Store. In the battle between Apple and the recording industry over who gets to manipulate what songs you buy, Apple (like movie theaters) is going to be in favor of fixed prices, while the recording industry is going to want variable prices."
Its all speculative but it sounds like this may have come from the same people who brought us the public character assasination of the former CIO of Massachusetts Peter Quinn (who proposed the adoption of an open document format).
Coincidentally personal attacks of character seem to happen a lot when dealing with Microsoft. Peculiarly though they all share the 'same theme' where they seem to only occur when Microsofts profits are at stake.
Fire the current CEO and marketdroids. Apart from saving the salaries of a higly paid and underperforming execs, companies might actually want to do business with a company who's chief isn't soley concentrated on funneling as much money out of you as they possibly can. Thats if there are still some talented engineers who haven't deflected yet.
Luckily they didn't continue their marketing stategy by adding the year to their software (e.g. Windows 2003 server) otherwise we'd be getting 'Windows 2005' in 2007.
If you want to you can run your Oracle app on Enterprise DB (http://www.enterprisedb.com/) a commercially supported Postgresql based RDBMS with a fraction of the price of an Oracle license. Apparently "EnterpriseDB runs most applications written for Oracle unchanged".
Although I still think Opensource databases are the future it is nice to know there is a smooth migration path away from Oracle.
Active Directory is the #1 server software that will benefit as a result of having a Windows Desktop monopoly. Thanks to closed proprietory protocols and Microsoft anti-competitive embrace and extend tactics of LDAP and kerberos Windows desktops work best with Active Directory.
Features like Single sign-on for Windows Desktops will only work seamlessly with Active Directory.
Opera has a lot going for it. It is a lightweight standards compliant browser who's rendering engine still fits on a floppy disk today (if you take away the chrome). It is the second browser to pass the ACID2 compliance test (Safari was the first).
It is also the best browser technology to work on embedded devices. Previously the best way to provide rich-content for embedded devices(e.g. mobile phones) you would have to use WML (basic markup for mobiles,etc). Instead Opera went a different route and chose to instead 'scale down' the web page so it would fit in the embedded devices, this allows the devices to be able to view much of the websites on the Internet. This is why its the choice browser in many embedded devices e.g. the Nokia 770.
They are also the leading innovator in many browser technologies that we use today including Tabbed Browsing, mouse gestures, etc.
I personally use it because it has the best IRC client available on OSX - and the browser is now available at no cost!
Personally I would like to see a Enterprise Linux Suse alternative become popular. I do not like the Redhat model of not being able to run an unsupported version of the *Exact same operating system* that is used as a server for work. And RHEL isn't cheap it is more expensive to configure a Dell server with RHEL than a basic Windows 2003 server (though you will get better support). I am all for Redhat making money, I just do not like not being able to run and maintain multiple versions of unsupported RHEL at home (to me that seems anti-FSF, but Redhat is an excellent contributor to OSS and if this is the only way they can make money - then it is somewhat justified). Plus the competition will be good for both Distro's. The world is definately a better place with Ubuntu, but it will not spur on rapid adoption of Linux in the Enterprise space.
As the parent poster pointed out the corporate culture of large departments and companies with mission critical services is vastly different to SMB's. Basically, there is not a snowflake chance in hell that any of the larger departments I have worked for in the past or present will consider a Linux that is not supported by at least one of the big Unix players: Sun, HP, IBM, Novell.
The only reason we were able to sneak in a RHEL development server was purely on price where a fully loaded 4GB Ram Dual CPU Redundant Dell server came in less than the cost of installing an extra 1GB of RAM to our production (unnamed legacy Unix OS) server. And even then the only reason the dept considered the switch to Linux was because it was for a non-mission critical development server. Im happy to report that the RHEL development server has been running solidly for a couple of years and its looks as though the next iteration of our production servers will be running RHEL/x86 Servers.
Commercial support from Canonical will definately be a big plus for Ubuntu, but unless it is commerically supported by at least one major vendor with a local presence it will not be considered in many enterprises.
How can we take this seriously. No one know how the exploit was achieved, what services was left open and what was installed on the target machine.
The target machine as far as we know does not represent any typical OSX installation. So this exploit has not made a OSX user's typical desktop installation any less secure or a typical Internet any less secure webserver, as it would not have had the same settings.
The fact that the result of the exploit has been published without any information relating to how the exploit was done and what tools were used renders this article a bad PR Stunt.
You can create a tables, views, forms and reports (basically setup a complete basic database package) all with GUI tools and can be developed in minutes. You can also connect them to multiple backend databases seamlessy. This is suitable for most small to medium sized databases, that do not have many concurrent users and only needs to be accessed within the Intranet.
For this domain, no other platform has the ease of use and RAD of Access. Despite what anyone says, a web interface to a database is *not* the same thing. Not even if it was built by Ruby and Ajax powered with all the latest web 2.0 buzzwords.
Their are limitations in that if your database size or userbase grows significantly, you may need to re-write the database, however this is generally not an issue for the thousands of basic time recoring, contacts and issue logging databases out there.
This is FUD pure and simple, the fact that Skype is applying it to a very untilized feature mean that it won't affect many people in the real world. It still does have a purpose to spread FUD, the messages from this are quite clear:
- If you want to be sure that all software will work you need Intel processors. - If you want to run processor intensive tasks like a 10-way conference you will need the new Intel processors. - The quality of the AMD chips are equivalent to the older Intel processors, and can only handle 1/2 the load of the new Intel processors.
Unfortunately not all people have the technical knowledge to know this is complete BS, so to be sure that their software will work some people will just opt for Intel processors, which is what the Intel marketing dept is hoping for.
Intel is quite clearly using their size and budget to keep a monopoly by imposing artificial limits. This is clearly anti-competitive and this practice should be stopped before it begins.
That is a sad story. That is definately not what Open Source is about. Unfortunately it is a result of you deciding to select Redhat as your first Linux Distrobution. Redhat is really an enterprise version of Linux that I would only recommend to medium-large businesses that want the reassurance of having a supported version of Linux.
If you want an easy to use, polished Linux Distrobution that *Just Works out of the box* with a thriving community I recommend that you try Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/). You will like the Ubuntu difference (http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu):
"Ubuntu is Free Software, and available to you free of charge. It's also Free in the sense of giving you rights of Software Freedom, but you probably knew that already! Unlike many of the other commercial distributions in the free and open source world (Libranet, Lindows, Xandros, Red Hat) the Ubuntu team really does believe that Free software should be free of software licencing charges."
In fact they will even send you a copy free of charge (they will even pay for postage): https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
You can safely use/deploy Ubuntu knowing that you will never be caught in an expensive update cycle. Ubuntu is tailored for the Desktop and as a result offers a superior Desktop experience than 'Redhat Enterprise Linux' which is more tailored for servers anyway.
Also you will always be able to get Firefox from the firefox website (http://www.getfirefox.com/ absolutely free of charge (although they do welcome donations). Firefox strives to be a free, standards compliant web browser that aims to work on many different platforms (i.e. ensuring that you don't have to buy Windows in order to surf the Internet).
So it does look like Sony would be a *cheaper buy* then Disney. This would open up a range of possibilities, suddenly Apple gets the leading gaming platform and will have a major influence in both Sony and Disney Media companies. From there owning the living room would be a non-issue.
Unfortunately Apple and Sony's *DNA* are so different so this will never be a reality, a nice thought though.
He is saying that Java is not a good language for you to *learn* programming with, not to use. This is not a bias towards Java as it applies to VB and C# as well. He makes an example of Java because some Universaties are using Java as the language to teach programming.
This is for good reason, with Java you never have to deal with pointer arithmetic and memory allocation and deallocation, etc. People who learned to program with Java won't necessarily know that an array is a sequence in memory, a char can also be an int, a String is an array of chars, Strings are immutable, etc.
This raises a couple of problems as it allows mediocre programmers to get degrees and write code (who otherwise wouldn't have managed if they were forced to use C/C+++), and people who write unoptimized code as they don't understand how their program works fundamentally. A good example being 'fucked strings'.
An important insight that is highlighted in the parent article is that Libraries are better than frameworks. The distinction being that Libraries contains code that you don't have to write where frameworks dictate the way you write code.
As a Java programmer for many years I can relate to the above article, there is simply too many frameworks, config files and overhead required in proportion to the size of most projects.
In the end your choice should be about *overall productivity* which is different to everyone. Note you should compare it to the task at hand, some frameworks are simply better for certain tasks. This should include time required to learn a new framework/language/platform, development, maintenance, deployment, installation, setup, updates, etc.
I personally prefer framework/platforms that allow me to write the minimum amount of code, as any code I write is code I have to maintain. My weapons of choice for Web 2.0 projects are: - Mono (Open Source / Crossplatform / Feature Complete ) - Boo (statically typed, Python-like language, with built-in templating so you don't need another framework to compensate for it) - IHttpHandler (Lighter weight alternative to ASP.NET pages, akin to Java Servlets) - JQuery (A must for Javascript apps - borrows the best features from Prototype, Behaviour, Moo.fx and more)
I was seriously considering RoR, but ended up going with Boo as it is statically typed, faster and has access to the.NET Framework libraries.
Slashdot Mirror
Bootcamp!
Dude its called upselling!
Can people not see whats happening? Google releases all these really cool products that eventually become apart of your daily life.
:))
Before the only google app I couldnt live without was Google search
then Gmail (with Google Chat + Google Talk)
then Google News
then Google Local/Maps
now because of the integration of GMail Im even started to use Google Calendar because it is so convenient to use, I received a confirmation email about tickets I bought online, right beside my email there was a link to add the event to my calendar, within 2 weeks I had it booked - awesome!
I use all their services daily for free, what google gets in return is to host all your personal info so they can target you with ads. After using googles services for so many years my online profile must read like a diary, as it has everything I ever searched for (what im interested in), almost every place I have ever been (searches from Google Maps/Local) as well as most of my friends/contacts (emails and contacts) and their profiles, etc. I reckon Google knows more about me than I do (people forget things
Now the most important and valuable thing in IT is data and because of these added 'Google Services' they have a lot of it on a lot of people. Now since everything is tied to my gmail account (aka Google Account) it is likely that I will be using Google's services for the rest of my life. Where as if they just had a search then as soon as someone developed a better search I would've just easily switched.
The benefit of merging with Nintendo is only so that the mac mini which apple is hoping to make its way into everyones lounge room is capable of playing nintendo games.
Now Apple shouldn't need to fork out 20+ billion for this feature they should just come to some agreement that lets the Nintendo Wii games be playable on a Mac. All they need is an apple-like Wii controller and some software that lets the Mac run nintendo games.
Then bang! the mac mini is capable of becoming the centre of your digital living room that is capable of playing TV, DVD's, Internet and now even games!
This will benefit nintendo because hardware game consoles have always been a loss leader - so Im sure they will be more than happy if someone else decides to make compatible consoles as long as they still get their licensing for each game.
Weakly typed dynamic languages do not have a future in large scale development projects. Given the average skillset of developers (i.e. not all developers having PHD's) there is a likely chance that less than perfect code will be written. The better language will be the language that is capable of producing less bugs. A common attribute of large scale development projects is that they are written by a team of developers and not everyone will know exactly how the whole system 'works'. In these cases without a doubt less bugs will be produced with statically typed languages that adhere to strongly typed interfaces.
.NET). It has advanced features like first class support for regular expressions, hash tables, closures, etc. Works well with both Mono and MS.NET so it runs perfectly on both platforms and it includes a great IDE with Sharpdevelop 2.0+.
Dynamic languages are also poor candidates for writing re-usable well tested components, and because of theyre dynamic (anything goes) nature it is harder to produce good intelligent IDE's for them.
The problem with statically typed languages is that they are inherently unproductive as it takes a considerable more code to produce the same outcome that can be written with dynamic code. But with more intelligent IDE's and common features being included into some statically typed languages this productivity gap is closing. If you take into account the maintenance of code (fixing bugs and adding new features) you will almost always be better off using statically typed languages for large scale projects.
With that being said I believe languages like Boo will be the future (C# 3.0+ also looks to be on a very productive path with inclusion of features like type inference, lambda functions etc.). I like Boo cause it is a python-esque language that is statically typed (compiles to
Provide two stylesheets and make the new one the default if you want (for the noobs) But for the love of god offer us the old stylesheet back. This is way too hard to read!
Is it me or is M$ only cares about being a corporate whore?
There is a *very interesting* article on Joel on software (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/18.ht ml) on how it is essential for the Record labels to be able to control the popularity of its songs:
"...Here's the dream world for the EMI Group, Sony/BMG, etc.: there are two prices for songs on iTunes, say, $2.49 and $0.99. All the new releases come out at $2.49. Some classic rock (Sweet Home Alabama) is at $2.49. Unwanted, old, crap, like, say, Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) -- the crap we only know because it was pushed on us in the 70s by paid-off disk jockeys -- would be deliberately priced at $0.99 to send a clear message that $0.99 = crap.
And now when a musician gets uppity, all the recording industry has to do is threaten to release their next single straight into the $0.99 category, which will kill it dead no matter how good it is. And suddenly the music industry has a lot more leverage over their artists in negotiations: the kind of leverage they are used to having. Their favorite kind of leverage. The "we won't promote your music if you don't let us put rootkits on your CDs" kind of leverage.
And Apple? Apple wants the signaling to come from what they promote on the front page of the iTunes Music Store. In the battle between Apple and the recording industry over who gets to manipulate what songs you buy, Apple (like movie theaters) is going to be in favor of fixed prices, while the recording industry is going to want variable prices."
Its all speculative but it sounds like this may have come from the same people who brought us the public character assasination of the former CIO of Massachusetts Peter Quinn (who proposed the adoption of an open document format).
, 00.html), who was judging the US anti-trust case against Microsoft.1 957219) in its on going anti-trust court case.
Coincidentally personal attacks of character seem to happen a lot when dealing with Microsoft. Peculiarly though they all share the 'same theme' where they seem to only occur when Microsofts profits are at stake.
- There was a direct attack on the character of U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson (http://www.wired.com/news/antitrust/0,1551,45914
- Microsoft also charged the EU Commission of conspiracy and collusion (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/02/
- Another personal legal attack on "the Brazilian government official credited with developing the country's open source strategy" (http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/50944/)
Just sounds like another case of an attack on a persons well-being for the sake of profits.
KOffice is looking pretty impressive aswell lately.
Fire the current CEO and marketdroids. Apart from saving the salaries of a higly paid and underperforming execs, companies might actually want to do business with a company who's chief isn't soley concentrated on funneling as much money out of you as they possibly can. Thats if there are still some talented engineers who haven't deflected yet.
Scott McNealy they need you over at SCO.
to stop Vista being able to run on Mac's.
Luckily they didn't continue their marketing stategy by adding the year to their software (e.g. Windows 2003 server) otherwise we'd be getting 'Windows 2005' in 2007.
If you want to you can run your Oracle app on Enterprise DB (http://www.enterprisedb.com/) a commercially supported Postgresql based RDBMS with a fraction of the price of an Oracle license. Apparently "EnterpriseDB runs most applications written for Oracle unchanged".
Although I still think Opensource databases are the future it is nice to know there is a smooth migration path away from Oracle.
Active Directory is the #1 server software that will benefit as a result of having a Windows Desktop monopoly. Thanks to closed proprietory protocols and Microsoft anti-competitive embrace and extend tactics of LDAP and kerberos Windows desktops work best with Active Directory.
Features like Single sign-on for Windows Desktops will only work seamlessly with Active Directory.
Opera has a lot going for it. It is a lightweight standards compliant browser who's rendering engine still fits on a floppy disk today (if you take away the chrome). It is the second browser to pass the ACID2 compliance test (Safari was the first).
It is also the best browser technology to work on embedded devices. Previously the best way to provide rich-content for embedded devices(e.g. mobile phones) you would have to use WML (basic markup for mobiles,etc). Instead Opera went a different route and chose to instead 'scale down' the web page so it would fit in the embedded devices, this allows the devices to be able to view much of the websites on the Internet. This is why its the choice browser in many embedded devices e.g. the Nokia 770.
They are also the leading innovator in many browser technologies that we use today including Tabbed Browsing, mouse gestures, etc.
I personally use it because it has the best IRC client available on OSX - and the browser is now available at no cost!
If I could buy a letter I would go with: BadAnalorgyGuy
Personally I would like to see a Enterprise Linux Suse alternative become popular. I do not like the Redhat model of not being able to run an unsupported version of the *Exact same operating system* that is used as a server for work. And RHEL isn't cheap it is more expensive to configure a Dell server with RHEL than a basic Windows 2003 server (though you will get better support). I am all for Redhat making money, I just do not like not being able to run and maintain multiple versions of unsupported RHEL at home (to me that seems anti-FSF, but Redhat is an excellent contributor to OSS and if this is the only way they can make money - then it is somewhat justified). Plus the competition will be good for both Distro's. The world is definately a better place with Ubuntu, but it will not spur on rapid adoption of Linux in the Enterprise space.
As the parent poster pointed out the corporate culture of large departments and companies with mission critical services is vastly different to SMB's. Basically, there is not a snowflake chance in hell that any of the larger departments I have worked for in the past or present will consider a Linux that is not supported by at least one of the big Unix players: Sun, HP, IBM, Novell.
The only reason we were able to sneak in a RHEL development server was purely on price where a fully loaded 4GB Ram Dual CPU Redundant Dell server came in less than the cost of installing an extra 1GB of RAM to our production (unnamed legacy Unix OS) server. And even then the only reason the dept considered the switch to Linux was because it was for a non-mission critical development server. Im happy to report that the RHEL development server has been running solidly for a couple of years and its looks as though the next iteration of our production servers will be running RHEL/x86 Servers.
Commercial support from Canonical will definately be a big plus for Ubuntu, but unless it is commerically supported by at least one major vendor with a local presence it will not be considered in many enterprises.
How can we take this seriously. No one know how the exploit was achieved, what services was left open and what was installed on the target machine.
The target machine as far as we know does not represent any typical OSX installation. So this exploit has not made a OSX user's typical desktop installation any less secure or a typical Internet any less secure webserver, as it would not have had the same settings.
The fact that the result of the exploit has been published without any information relating to how the exploit was done and what tools were used renders this article a bad PR Stunt.
Access has no equivalent!
You can create a tables, views, forms and reports (basically setup a complete basic database package) all with GUI tools and can be developed in minutes. You can also connect them to multiple backend databases seamlessy. This is suitable for most small to medium sized databases, that do not have many concurrent users and only needs to be accessed within the Intranet.
For this domain, no other platform has the ease of use and RAD of Access. Despite what anyone says, a web interface to a database is *not* the same thing. Not even if it was built by Ruby and Ajax powered with all the latest web 2.0 buzzwords.
Their are limitations in that if your database size or userbase grows significantly, you may need to re-write the database, however this is generally not an issue for the thousands of basic time recoring, contacts and issue logging databases out there.
This is FUD pure and simple, the fact that Skype is applying it to a very untilized feature mean that it won't affect many people in the real world. It still does have a purpose to spread FUD, the messages from this are quite clear:
- If you want to be sure that all software will work you need Intel processors.
- If you want to run processor intensive tasks like a 10-way conference you will need the new Intel processors.
- The quality of the AMD chips are equivalent to the older Intel processors, and can only handle 1/2 the load of the new Intel processors.
Unfortunately not all people have the technical knowledge to know this is complete BS, so to be sure that their software will work some people will just opt for Intel processors, which is what the Intel marketing dept is hoping for.
Intel is quite clearly using their size and budget to keep a monopoly by imposing artificial limits. This is clearly anti-competitive and this practice should be stopped before it begins.
That is a sad story. That is definately not what Open Source is about. Unfortunately it is a result of you deciding to select Redhat as your first Linux Distrobution. Redhat is really an enterprise version of Linux that I would only recommend to medium-large businesses that want the reassurance of having a supported version of Linux.
If you want an easy to use, polished Linux Distrobution that *Just Works out of the box* with a thriving community I recommend that you try Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/). You will like the Ubuntu difference (http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu):
"Ubuntu is Free Software, and available to you free of charge. It's also Free in the sense of giving you rights of Software Freedom, but you probably knew that already! Unlike many of the other commercial distributions in the free and open source world (Libranet, Lindows, Xandros, Red Hat) the Ubuntu team really does believe that Free software should be free of software licencing charges."
In fact they will even send you a copy free of charge (they will even pay for postage):
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
You can safely use/deploy Ubuntu knowing that you will never be caught in an expensive update cycle. Ubuntu is tailored for the Desktop and as a result offers a superior Desktop experience than 'Redhat Enterprise Linux' which is more tailored for servers anyway.
Also you will always be able to get Firefox from the firefox website (http://www.getfirefox.com/ absolutely free of charge (although they do welcome donations). Firefox strives to be a free, standards compliant web browser that aims to work on many different platforms (i.e. ensuring that you don't have to buy Windows in order to surf the Internet).
Actually that makes a lot of sense. I've been checking their market cap and it does seem feasible (well more feasible than Apple buying Disney):
AAPL (Apple): 59.07B
SNE (Sony): 45.88B
DIS (Disney): 53.98B
So it does look like Sony would be a *cheaper buy* then Disney. This would open up a range of possibilities, suddenly Apple gets the leading gaming platform and will have a major influence in both Sony and Disney Media companies. From there owning the living room would be a non-issue.
Unfortunately Apple and Sony's *DNA* are so different so this will never be a reality, a nice thought though.
He is saying that Java is not a good language for you to *learn* programming with, not to use. This is not a bias towards Java as it applies to VB and C# as well. He makes an example of Java because some Universaties are using Java as the language to teach programming.
This is for good reason, with Java you never have to deal with pointer arithmetic and memory allocation and deallocation, etc. People who learned to program with Java won't necessarily know that an array is a sequence in memory, a char can also be an int, a String is an array of chars, Strings are immutable, etc.
This raises a couple of problems as it allows mediocre programmers to get degrees and write code (who otherwise wouldn't have managed if they were forced to use C/C+++), and people who write unoptimized code as they don't understand how their program works fundamentally. A good example being 'fucked strings'.
An important insight that is highlighted in the parent article is that Libraries are better than frameworks. The distinction being that Libraries contains code that you don't have to write where frameworks dictate the way you write code.
.NET Framework libraries.
As a Java programmer for many years I can relate to the above article, there is simply too many frameworks, config files and overhead required in proportion to the size of most projects.
In the end your choice should be about *overall productivity* which is different to everyone. Note you should compare it to the task at hand, some frameworks are simply better for certain tasks. This should include time required to learn a new framework/language/platform, development, maintenance, deployment, installation, setup, updates, etc.
I personally prefer framework/platforms that allow me to write the minimum amount of code, as any code I write is code I have to maintain. My weapons of choice for Web 2.0 projects are:
- Mono (Open Source / Crossplatform / Feature Complete )
- Boo (statically typed, Python-like language, with built-in templating so you don't need another framework to compensate for it)
- IHttpHandler (Lighter weight alternative to ASP.NET pages, akin to Java Servlets)
- JQuery (A must for Javascript apps - borrows the best features from Prototype, Behaviour, Moo.fx and more)
I was seriously considering RoR, but ended up going with Boo as it is statically typed, faster and has access to the