Just look at it as distributed computing. The clients do the visual transformation so the server doesn't have to. The effects of this are two-fold:
First, reduced bandwidth. Not for you, though. Nobody (aside from you) cares how much bandwidth you have to use to view a single web page. People care how much bandwidth it takes to serve their own page thousands of times. Minimizing this figure saves money.
Second, server load. Again, thousands (or in some cases hundreds of thousands) of hits tends to put a strain on systems like this. If we offload visual transformations to the client, we save time on our server and our web pages are sent out faster.
Both of these result in reduced costs for website owners. It's what's going to make sure the internet stays as free as it can be.
Kumbaya.
Re:Is it just me, or couldn't posts about Dev thin
on
Eclipse 3.1 Released
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· Score: 1
An IDE is a certain type of program, such as Eclipse.
I actually sat in a demo at a SoundTrack where they had some sort of force feedback in a sofa. I'm sure somebody knows the name of this technology -- I obviously don't.
We were watching The Fast and the Furious, and you could literally feel the engines. It was awesome.
Perhaps projects such as this one will encourage the video game industry to begin to see alternatives to simple scripted AI.
Not unless companies like Sony start making their hardware with ideas like this in mind. 2 TFLOPS is impressive for insane real-time graphics operations, but floating point operations aren't exactly optimal for things like AI.
(I know TFA was referring to PC games, but so many games are multi-platform these days that often developers just work with the least common denominator.)
Working for an upcoming VoIP company, I can see where things are headed. Vonage is already connecting customers with WiFi phones. This means you have phone service, and you can use this phone anywhere there is a WiFi connection -- your office, Starbucks, or whatever.
Since this upcoming VoIP company is an offshoot of a Wireless ISP, we also get to hear all the talk about WiMAX. Intel and Nokia are teaming up to implement it on a massive scale. Assuming that the frequency licensing does not become an issue, consumers will be able to purchase true nomadic high-speed connections (with speeds probably in the vicinity of today's mid-range DSL) for roughly the same price we pay today for our broadband.
The obvious combination of these ideas is a phone that connects to a VoIP network over a nomadic WiMAX connection. $200 hardware, $50 for your internet connection, and another $25 a month for the phone service that you can take anywhere. As I posted above, at least one VoIP provider is offering unlimited international calling. Even if the rates for VoIP increase considerably, this is still well below the threshold for cost benefit.
This list is a prime example of the types of non-sequiturs and half-truths that people will conjure up to try to bash corporations for the sake of bashing corporations. The fact that it's been modded 'Informative' is disappointing. Few of the items on that list are legitimate issues. Many of them are simply differences in the relative maturities of the languages. Some are misunderstandings about the way the languages were intended to work. Others are outright lies. The last one is self-referencing and redundant. I urge readers to comb through it before accepting it as justification for their corporate hatred.
The fact of the matter here is that.NET brings many of the benefits of Java to the fingertips of developers without the slow runtime environment. But for the sake of being thorough, let's list the real problems with.NET.
Poor documentation. This is a huge issue even in the.NET community. The best documents there are for.NET are the comments on the prototypes in the SDK. That is unacceptable.
Portability. This is obviously motivated by profits, which is understandable, but still a drawback for the software community at large. In that light, Microsoft should have released the platform for linux and OSX. The related open-source projects are changing this, but they should never have been necessary.
Exception handling. It's there, it's decent, but it's not quite as good as Java.
I'm sure there are projects that are better suited to be written in Java. But the software community, if they want to save Java, will eventually be forced to "respond" to.NET. Because there are more people who care about how fast their program does what they expect it to do than there are who care whether their platform is owned by Microsoft. I anticipate there will be a shift towards native compilation. Whether it will work depends on how soon they do it.
We're going to see the reasonable end of Java soon, its only surviving remnant being JavaScript. Here's why.
I remember five years ago when we were developing Java apps. We complained because Java was so slow compared to machine-specific compiled languages, but we were ecstatic about the convenience that it earned us because the JRE was implemented on every platform that we would ever want to use. We predicted that hardware speed would continue to grow indefinitely, to the point that Java would be just as fast as these other compiled languages.
Sadly, Java's hourglass has run out of sand. We're still sick of it running more slowly than C for desktop applications and sick of it running more slowly than (insert web language of choice) for web applications. Tomcat is nice, and using POJO's for data storage is nice, but nobody in their right mind is willing to take the performance hit anymore.
To make matters worse, we have projects like dotGNU and mono that allow us to port our.NET applications written in C# to linux. I'm sure many of you know that C# is syntactically VERY similar to Java. So why stick with java when you can write almost identical code and have it run many times faster in the same environment?
Not to wander too far off topic, but the REASON the ads are there is because they generate a revenue stream. In other words, people spend money on the items that are advertised to them.
If 'not resisting' advertisements was really some sort of affliction, then advertisements would not be an effective method for generating business.
And with regard to opera: being a web developer, I use it about as often as our customers use it -- often enough to make sure the site will work properly. I develop on IE and FF because that's who has the market share. If Opera takes over, rest assured I'll jump right in.
So I should download a browser that very few people use which will tempt me with targeted advertisements to spend money I don't have and likely not display things properly, and I should do this because it will allow me to see the URL in javaScript popup windows?
Am I missing something here?
Google stores your payment information. You go to a vendor (presumably through Froogle) who accepts Google payments. On checkout, you are sent BACK to google.com to pay. Google takes a small proportion of the transaction fee.
As an additional result the things we purchase through Google may cost LESS than they do now because the companies using Google's payment system don't have to have their own secure system and payment app. They just have to talk to google's payment interface, telling google what you bought, from whom, and how much it cost. It's brilliant.
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at it as distributed computing. The clients do the visual transformation so the server doesn't have to. The effects of this are two-fold:
First, reduced bandwidth. Not for you, though. Nobody (aside from you) cares how much bandwidth you have to use to view a single web page. People care how much bandwidth it takes to serve their own page thousands of times. Minimizing this figure saves money.
Second, server load. Again, thousands (or in some cases hundreds of thousands) of hits tends to put a strain on systems like this. If we offload visual transformations to the client, we save time on our server and our web pages are sent out faster.
Both of these result in reduced costs for website owners. It's what's going to make sure the internet stays as free as it can be.
Kumbaya.
An IDE is a certain type of program, such as Eclipse.
Hope that helps.
-nt-
I actually sat in a demo at a SoundTrack where they had some sort of force feedback in a sofa. I'm sure somebody knows the name of this technology -- I obviously don't.
We were watching The Fast and the Furious, and you could literally feel the engines. It was awesome.
Perhaps projects such as this one will encourage the video game industry to begin to see alternatives to simple scripted AI.
Not unless companies like Sony start making their hardware with ideas like this in mind. 2 TFLOPS is impressive for insane real-time graphics operations, but floating point operations aren't exactly optimal for things like AI.
(I know TFA was referring to PC games, but so many games are multi-platform these days that often developers just work with the least common denominator.)
Working for an upcoming VoIP company, I can see where things are headed. Vonage is already connecting customers with WiFi phones. This means you have phone service, and you can use this phone anywhere there is a WiFi connection -- your office, Starbucks, or whatever.
Since this upcoming VoIP company is an offshoot of a Wireless ISP, we also get to hear all the talk about WiMAX. Intel and Nokia are teaming up to implement it on a massive scale. Assuming that the frequency licensing does not become an issue, consumers will be able to purchase true nomadic high-speed connections (with speeds probably in the vicinity of today's mid-range DSL) for roughly the same price we pay today for our broadband.
The obvious combination of these ideas is a phone that connects to a VoIP network over a nomadic WiMAX connection. $200 hardware, $50 for your internet connection, and another $25 a month for the phone service that you can take anywhere. As I posted above, at least one VoIP provider is offering unlimited international calling. Even if the rates for VoIP increase considerably, this is still well below the threshold for cost benefit.
Have you looked at BroadVoice? They have an unlimited international plan for $24.95 monthly.
The fact of the matter here is that
- Poor documentation. This is a huge issue even in the
.NET community. The best documents there are for .NET are the comments on the prototypes in the SDK. That is unacceptable.
- Portability. This is obviously motivated by profits, which is understandable, but still a drawback for the software community at large. In that light, Microsoft should have released the platform for linux and OSX. The related open-source projects are changing this, but they should never have been necessary.
- Exception handling. It's there, it's decent, but it's not quite as good as Java.
I'm sure there are projects that are better suited to be written in Java. But the software community, if they want to save Java, will eventually be forced to "respond" toWe're going to see the reasonable end of Java soon, its only surviving remnant being JavaScript. Here's why.
.NET applications written in C# to linux. I'm sure many of you know that C# is syntactically VERY similar to Java. So why stick with java when you can write almost identical code and have it run many times faster in the same environment?
I remember five years ago when we were developing Java apps. We complained because Java was so slow compared to machine-specific compiled languages, but we were ecstatic about the convenience that it earned us because the JRE was implemented on every platform that we would ever want to use. We predicted that hardware speed would continue to grow indefinitely, to the point that Java would be just as fast as these other compiled languages.
Sadly, Java's hourglass has run out of sand. We're still sick of it running more slowly than C for desktop applications and sick of it running more slowly than (insert web language of choice) for web applications. Tomcat is nice, and using POJO's for data storage is nice, but nobody in their right mind is willing to take the performance hit anymore.
To make matters worse, we have projects like dotGNU and mono that allow us to port our
Not to wander too far off topic, but the REASON the ads are there is because they generate a revenue stream. In other words, people spend money on the items that are advertised to them.
If 'not resisting' advertisements was really some sort of affliction, then advertisements would not be an effective method for generating business.
And with regard to opera: being a web developer, I use it about as often as our customers use it -- often enough to make sure the site will work properly. I develop on IE and FF because that's who has the market share. If Opera takes over, rest assured I'll jump right in.
You're right... any average Joe can make a million in 26 weeks.
Who are they kidding, anyway?
So I should download a browser that very few people use which will tempt me with targeted advertisements to spend money I don't have and likely not display things properly, and I should do this because it will allow me to see the URL in javaScript popup windows? Am I missing something here?
...but I'm still not going to buy your browser.
This is precisely what I imagine will happen.
Google stores your payment information. You go to a vendor (presumably through Froogle) who accepts Google payments. On checkout, you are sent BACK to google.com to pay. Google takes a small proportion of the transaction fee.
As an additional result the things we purchase through Google may cost LESS than they do now because the companies using Google's payment system don't have to have their own secure system and payment app. They just have to talk to google's payment interface, telling google what you bought, from whom, and how much it cost. It's brilliant.