See, the thing is: these days, real-world programming skill is not about the language anymore, it's about the libraries. You may be able to switch from Java to C# in a few days, but knowing the libraries inside out is going to take a lot longer.
I second the recommendation for Tcl/Tk/Starkits; it's a great little system for putting together small GUIs quickly. Nothing else even comes close.
If you need more of a real programming language, consider wxLua. It's also small and easy to distribute, but it's a bit better as a language than Tcl.
Finally, consider Sharpdevelop (sharpdevelop.com). It's a free, high-quality IDE for C#, and you can use it with Microsoft's free.NET tools. The main problem with it is that.NET is the usual moving target that all Microsoft APIs are, and that Microsoft may stop making available the free.NET tools at a moment's notice.
we have a girl claiming to be lesbian, but no one makes a big deal out of it - mostly because she doesn't.
We have a lot of guys and gals claiming to be straight. Unfortunately, unlike your lesbian friend, they are making a big deal out of it, and it annoys the hell out of everybody who isn't straight.
but you don't have to wave your flag out in front of everyone.
Why shouldn't we? Straight people do it day-in and day-out.
he company I work for has a sexual harassment policy. It is very clear and unambiguous. However, the company I work for does not advertise itself as a GLBT friendly company. It is just understood as one.
Well, that's its loss. There are plenty of companies that do advertise themselves as "GLBT friendly", and the only people it bothers are bigots.
My point is, some things are better left handled in private. It's not a matter of bigotry, its a matter of tact.
See, and to keep these things "in private" is exactly why these people are trying to create a "GLBT-friendly clan". Of course, they shouldn't have to.
But let's look at your comment. In a society with pervasive and often completely tactless displays of heterosexuality, you consider it tactless when gay people merely mention the fact that they exist. Look in the mirror and you'll see the face of a bigot.
I've actually gotten younger people I know to stop saying "That's so gay" when they mean "that's stupid" by pointing out that, hey, I'm gay, and it hurts every time they do that.
A simpler response is something like "Stop trying to come on to me."; they'll stop using such language pretty quickly.
It's not like a gay couldn't play WoW, as I'm sure thousands of gay people do play, but rather that recruiting people to a gay guild is adding unnecessary tension.
No, what is "adding unnecessary tension" is narrow-minded pricks who don't want to face the fact that minorities exist.
It's like naming a guild "republican lovers" and trying to recruit people in to that kind of guild. I'm sure many people would dislike that too
I may disagree with, and even dislike, Republicans, but I recognize that they exist, that they have a right to exist, and that they have a right to assemble. If they want to have a "Republican lover's club", that's their business.
To the degree that attempting to establish a monopoly is.
However, there isn't any point in getting upset about this since it is wrong for Microsoft to be allowed to deploy this technology no matter who they are willing to license it to.
That would allow inventors to have immediate protection against knockoffs of a technology even as they try to get broader protection by meeting the more stringent requirements for a conventional patent.
That is absolutely unacceptable because it would give people the benefits of both patent types. It would make the current situation far worse because, not only would people get the long term protection in some cases, they would get the short term protection even for the most bogus of inventions.
If people decide to use the limited patent, then they should be barred from filing the same invention under a conventional patent.
If it turns out that hobbyists are a bad thing, then the market will demonstrate that. There's no need to act as if your rights are being suppressed.
The market, left to its own devices, will often produce gargantuan companies that exclude any potential competitor from entering--we have seen plenty of examples of that throughout the 20th century. Microsoft is no different from the monopolists and robber barons that came before them. As for not wanting to deal with so-called "hobbyists", that is standard monopolistic practice.
Nevertheless, complaining about Microsoft not licensing DRM to small players is missing the point--Microsoft shouldn't be in control of DRM technologies at all. If there is to be DRM at all, then it should be open, freely implementable, and public. But, in fact, it can be argued that any use of DRM technologies should automatically void copyright since people using DRM are not holding up their part of the copyright bargain.
Yes, like most uses of large databases. In fact, relational databases were designed and intended for that case.
but chances are VERY, VERY high that you would be doing *far* better with just about any other RDBMs; be it PostgreSQL, Firebird, or even the likes of PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MSSQL Server.
Sorry, but from first hand experience, I can tell you that that's wishful thinking. If you can get away with using a simpler database (MySQL, in many cases even SQLite), you are better off using it, both in terms of performance and in terms of maintainability. Even if that requires writing extra code in your app because the database doesn't support some complex query type, you're usually still better off using it.
In principle, there could be a high performance relational store that is designed for both fast updates and fast data analysis, but mainstream relational databases aren't it.
If you need a summary view of a table that's a few GB, MySQL can't help you much there. Disk I/O is only so fast. What you need is a materialized view, and PostgreSQL allows you to do that (with triggers, &c.).
You still pay the same amount on disk I/O (actually more), you just spread it out.
So by omitting features, MySQL often makes things much less "straightforward".
Be that as it may, the needs of a lot of busy web sites are well-served by the limited feature set MySQL has, and for that limited feature set, it performs very well.
The logic error is yours:.deb binaries don't have problems with versioning; the only people for whom binary distribution is a challenge is people who want to distribute binaries outside of a distribution, and that's almost always people who are trying to distribute proprietary software. If something is good, useful, and available in source form, it will make it into distributions.
There's something wrong with drivers on Linux, but there's something wrong with drivers on Windows and OS X as well. On Windows, many drivers that get shipped with hardware are already outdated by the time they reach the customer. And OS X supports a lot less hardware than Linux. On the whole, the Linux driver situation is pretty good relative to other systems, it's just that drivers suck everywhere.
The other points you observe are that binary-only distributions of anything (drivers or apps) are not well supported. That's deliberate. People who work on open source software believe that it is the economically more efficient model for the software business. That belief is no more and no less religious than your or Microsoft's that software should be binary only and proprietary. May the better business model win.
Re:Why listen to Mitnick?
on
Mitnick on OSS
·
· Score: 1
There is indeed more to security than technical issues. But before you get to those, you should know the technical issues. Furthermore, Mitnick chose to comment on a technical issue.
Simply stated, MySQL is typically faster than PostgreSQL with low scalability requirements yet PostgreSQL tends to scale much, much better than does MySQL for both complex queries and highly concurrent, mixed operation loads.
Well, those are directions most people do not want to scale into; generally, when people design high performance web sites, they tend to go for simple queries and straightforward loads.
Postgres is a great database because of its features, but for most applications, MySQL is both sufficient and efficient.
If I pay as much as I do for a DVD, I expect to get a tangible object.
Call me again when I get unlimited on-demand viewing of Warner movies for maybe $10/month (I'm willing to pay around $40/month for unlimited on-demand viewing of all studios).
COBOL was designed for business applications, but that doesn't make it a nice language for that purpose. Fortran was designed for scientific applications, but people increasingly prefer C++. Java was designed for set top boxes and bouncing heads on web pages, but it's being touted as an enterprise platform (although, I suppose, that is supporting your point more than mine).
In any case, PHP5 is a pretty good dynamic programming language. I think it's better suited to enterprise software development than Java or any of the other widely available alternatives.
Just like Sun was going to open source Java, and like Sun was going to make an ISO and ANSI Java standard.
Sun management is a bunch of liars. At this point, you can't believe anything they say until they do it.
Why listen to Mitnick?
on
Mitnick on OSS
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Why would you listen to anything Mitnick has to say? His attacks were based on social engineering, and he got caught. He's missed nearly a decade of technological development, and he wasn't a technical genius to start with either. And if it hadn't been for Shimomura's and Markoff's success in manipulating and blowing the story out of proportion for their own fame and fortune, Mitnick wouldn't have been more than a footnote.
Yes, and Apple's speech recognition technology is many years behind the state of the art. IBM and others had better speech recognition and speech synthesis a decade ago than Apple has today.
And where exactly is new speech technology supposed to come from inside Apple anyway? They fired all the people who knew anything about speech in the 90's and shut down the labs.
The number sound a little exaggerated, but that type of schedule is possible for most people: you accumulate lots of sleep debt during the week and make it up on the weekend.
Note that you don't quite need to make up your sleep debt exactly hour-for-hour, but, in return, you'll also not function as well while you have a sleep debt.
Nobody gets enough sleep. 8 or 9 hours a night is ideal.
Ideal is about 10h/night, like humans used to get (usually together with a moderate amount of physical activity during the day). 8h/night is the minimum for most people.
Slashdot Mirror
See, the thing is: these days, real-world programming skill is not about the language anymore, it's about the libraries. You may be able to switch from Java to C# in a few days, but knowing the libraries inside out is going to take a lot longer.
We're talking HelloWorld.Net. If you know about the other stuff, you probably make more money.
I second the recommendation for Tcl/Tk/Starkits; it's a great little system for putting together small GUIs quickly. Nothing else even comes close.
.NET tools. The main problem with it is that .NET is the usual moving target that all Microsoft APIs are, and that Microsoft may stop making available the free .NET tools at a moment's notice.
If you need more of a real programming language, consider wxLua. It's also small and easy to distribute, but it's a bit better as a language than Tcl.
Finally, consider Sharpdevelop (sharpdevelop.com). It's a free, high-quality IDE for C#, and you can use it with Microsoft's free
we have a girl claiming to be lesbian, but no one makes a big deal out of it - mostly because she doesn't.
We have a lot of guys and gals claiming to be straight. Unfortunately, unlike your lesbian friend, they are making a big deal out of it, and it annoys the hell out of everybody who isn't straight.
but you don't have to wave your flag out in front of everyone.
Why shouldn't we? Straight people do it day-in and day-out.
he company I work for has a sexual harassment policy. It is very clear and unambiguous. However, the company I work for does not advertise itself as a GLBT friendly company. It is just understood as one.
Well, that's its loss. There are plenty of companies that do advertise themselves as "GLBT friendly", and the only people it bothers are bigots.
My point is, some things are better left handled in private. It's not a matter of bigotry, its a matter of tact.
See, and to keep these things "in private" is exactly why these people are trying to create a "GLBT-friendly clan". Of course, they shouldn't have to.
But let's look at your comment. In a society with pervasive and often completely tactless displays of heterosexuality, you consider it tactless when gay people merely mention the fact that they exist. Look in the mirror and you'll see the face of a bigot.
I've actually gotten younger people I know to stop saying "That's so gay" when they mean "that's stupid" by pointing out that, hey, I'm gay, and it hurts every time they do that.
A simpler response is something like "Stop trying to come on to me."; they'll stop using such language pretty quickly.
It's not like a gay couldn't play WoW, as I'm sure thousands of gay people do play, but rather that recruiting people to a gay guild is adding unnecessary tension.
No, what is "adding unnecessary tension" is narrow-minded pricks who don't want to face the fact that minorities exist.
It's like naming a guild "republican lovers" and trying to recruit people in to that kind of guild. I'm sure many people would dislike that too
I may disagree with, and even dislike, Republicans, but I recognize that they exist, that they have a right to exist, and that they have a right to assemble. If they want to have a "Republican lover's club", that's their business.
It's perfectly normal business practice.
To the degree that attempting to establish a monopoly is.
However, there isn't any point in getting upset about this since it is wrong for Microsoft to be allowed to deploy this technology no matter who they are willing to license it to.
Generally I find that the Kama Sutra makes for a good Friday, although I haven't tried "The Worm" yet.
That would allow inventors to have immediate protection against knockoffs of a technology even as they try to get broader protection by meeting the more stringent requirements for a conventional patent.
That is absolutely unacceptable because it would give people the benefits of both patent types. It would make the current situation far worse because, not only would people get the long term protection in some cases, they would get the short term protection even for the most bogus of inventions.
If people decide to use the limited patent, then they should be barred from filing the same invention under a conventional patent.
If it turns out that hobbyists are a bad thing, then the market will demonstrate that. There's no need to act as if your rights are being suppressed.
The market, left to its own devices, will often produce gargantuan companies that exclude any potential competitor from entering--we have seen plenty of examples of that throughout the 20th century. Microsoft is no different from the monopolists and robber barons that came before them. As for not wanting to deal with so-called "hobbyists", that is standard monopolistic practice.
Nevertheless, complaining about Microsoft not licensing DRM to small players is missing the point--Microsoft shouldn't be in control of DRM technologies at all. If there is to be DRM at all, then it should be open, freely implementable, and public. But, in fact, it can be argued that any use of DRM technologies should automatically void copyright since people using DRM are not holding up their part of the copyright bargain.
Yahoo and Google are mostly read only databases
Yes, like most uses of large databases. In fact, relational databases were designed and intended for that case.
but chances are VERY, VERY high that you would be doing *far* better with just about any other RDBMs; be it PostgreSQL, Firebird, or even the likes of PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MSSQL Server.
Sorry, but from first hand experience, I can tell you that that's wishful thinking. If you can get away with using a simpler database (MySQL, in many cases even SQLite), you are better off using it, both in terms of performance and in terms of maintainability. Even if that requires writing extra code in your app because the database doesn't support some complex query type, you're usually still better off using it.
In principle, there could be a high performance relational store that is designed for both fast updates and fast data analysis, but mainstream relational databases aren't it.
If you need a summary view of a table that's a few GB, MySQL can't help you much there. Disk I/O is only so fast. What you need is a materialized view, and PostgreSQL allows you to do that (with triggers, &c.).
You still pay the same amount on disk I/O (actually more), you just spread it out.
So by omitting features, MySQL often makes things much less "straightforward".
Be that as it may, the needs of a lot of busy web sites are well-served by the limited feature set MySQL has, and for that limited feature set, it performs very well.
The logic error is yours: .deb binaries don't have problems with versioning; the only people for whom binary distribution is a challenge is people who want to distribute binaries outside of a distribution, and that's almost always people who are trying to distribute proprietary software. If something is good, useful, and available in source form, it will make it into distributions.
There's something wrong with drivers on Linux, but there's something wrong with drivers on Windows and OS X as well. On Windows, many drivers that get shipped with hardware are already outdated by the time they reach the customer. And OS X supports a lot less hardware than Linux. On the whole, the Linux driver situation is pretty good relative to other systems, it's just that drivers suck everywhere.
The other points you observe are that binary-only distributions of anything (drivers or apps) are not well supported. That's deliberate. People who work on open source software believe that it is the economically more efficient model for the software business. That belief is no more and no less religious than your or Microsoft's that software should be binary only and proprietary. May the better business model win.
There is indeed more to security than technical issues. But before you get to those, you should know the technical issues. Furthermore, Mitnick chose to comment on a technical issue.
Simply stated, MySQL is typically faster than PostgreSQL with low scalability requirements yet PostgreSQL tends to scale much, much better than does MySQL for both complex queries and highly concurrent, mixed operation loads.
Well, those are directions most people do not want to scale into; generally, when people design high performance web sites, they tend to go for simple queries and straightforward loads.
Postgres is a great database because of its features, but for most applications, MySQL is both sufficient and efficient.
Native XML capabilities don't belong in a relational database. If you want an XML database, use one.
If I pay as much as I do for a DVD, I expect to get a tangible object.
Call me again when I get unlimited on-demand viewing of Warner movies for maybe $10/month (I'm willing to pay around $40/month for unlimited on-demand viewing of all studios).
COBOL was designed for business applications, but that doesn't make it a nice language for that purpose. Fortran was designed for scientific applications, but people increasingly prefer C++. Java was designed for set top boxes and bouncing heads on web pages, but it's being touted as an enterprise platform (although, I suppose, that is supporting your point more than mine).
In any case, PHP5 is a pretty good dynamic programming language. I think it's better suited to enterprise software development than Java or any of the other widely available alternatives.
Just like Sun was going to open source Java, and like Sun was going to make an ISO and ANSI Java standard.
Sun management is a bunch of liars. At this point, you can't believe anything they say until they do it.
Why would you listen to anything Mitnick has to say? His attacks were based on social engineering, and he got caught. He's missed nearly a decade of technological development, and he wasn't a technical genius to start with either. And if it hadn't been for Shimomura's and Markoff's success in manipulating and blowing the story out of proportion for their own fame and fortune, Mitnick wouldn't have been more than a footnote.
Yes, and Apple's speech recognition technology is many years behind the state of the art. IBM and others had better speech recognition and speech synthesis a decade ago than Apple has today.
And where exactly is new speech technology supposed to come from inside Apple anyway? They fired all the people who knew anything about speech in the 90's and shut down the labs.
The number sound a little exaggerated, but that type of schedule is possible for most people: you accumulate lots of sleep debt during the week and make it up on the weekend.
Note that you don't quite need to make up your sleep debt exactly hour-for-hour, but, in return, you'll also not function as well while you have a sleep debt.
Nobody gets enough sleep. 8 or 9 hours a night is ideal.
Ideal is about 10h/night, like humans used to get (usually together with a moderate amount of physical activity during the day). 8h/night is the minimum for most people.