Apple knows that x86 means you don't have to worry about switching again. x86 (and now x64), mean you're going to get the same support for your system that every other PC vendor in the world will have. If there comes a day when x86 is no longer supported, Apple will switch again, and so will everyone else.
But for now, we know that the main competition for the desktop will definitely take place underneath an x86/x64 instruction set. And that helps Apple in the long run, they've got a lot more things to worry about than chip suppliers who can't meet their (arguably very tiny) demand. PPC does not offer that.
Hey, hey, whoa, wait a minute. I'm not the software engineer. Never said I was. I just write about it.
Are you, or are you not, interested in improving Gimp? Based on the thrashing you've been doing in these threads, I'm guessing you are not. You faked like you wanted to get feedback in that first post, but it's obvious that you feel we must all be forced to like Gimp exactly as it is.
I checked out your blog and noticed you comparing Photoshop and Gimp, so let me ask you a question: how much money have you ever been paid to do work in Gimp? And exactly how long have you been using Gimp? It looks like you've only been writing about it for 2 weeks.
Even though you're in denial about this, the people like myself who post that Gimp needs to work more like Photoshop are basically stating the obvious. Free or not, Gimp is following in the footsteps of the world's most popular photo editing software... how can it not be compared? I've been using Photoshop professionally for 15 years. I own it. Why would I want to change to software offers nothing new except a crappier UI, even if it was a commercial application? No commercial company has been able to convince Photoshop users that their product is better, and a lot have tried since 1990.
So you might want to revisit exactly why you keep posting these very strange and defensive comments... instead focusing on what actually might be worthwhile to improve about Gimp. If you're that big a fan, make it a better program so that Photoshop users might actually like it. It's a truly worthless waste of energy to come on here to bash longtime Photoshop users for sticking with what they've got. Use that time to make it better if you believe so much in FOSS.
Just about the rest of your refutations fall mostly apart.
You guys wanted my input, but instead your flame-bait response pretty much backs up exactly what's wrong with slashdot and the attitude of the FOSS crowd.
Let's go back over the facts: I'm a longtime user Photoshop. I have the money for Photoshop. After all of these years of using Photoshop, I don't like GIMP or the way it handles certain things in the UI. I don't like the fact that the installer requires me to go out and install a piece of FOSS separately instead of just including the darn thing (NO commercial Windows software would require this, sorry to burst your bubble).
The traditional, ignorant/.er response is therefore it must be my issue that I don't understand the software. The correct software engineer response would be, "Hey, those are good software requirements that actually might be improvable." I think the problem with FOSS is that it's a lot of unpaid work, therefore if someone doesn't actually like the result, the response is "Tough shit, it's free software, improve it yourself." Well, my time is worth a lot of money, I'd rather just put $600 of that towards Photoshop and never think about GIMP again. And that's exactly what any professional who's not stuck on Linux would do.
- You can't easily migrate to another database-vendor. Maybe you want to switch. Maybe you have to because of technical reasons. Maybe you have to because your company is being bought by another, which uses a different system and wants to maintain only one platform. Whatever the reason, your stored procedure is going to really, really hurt.
It just depends on where you want to do the work. If your SQL is in your app, you still need to port it. If your SQL code is in your SP, you still need to port it. I don't use SPs, but contrary to the conventional wisdom, stored procedures are not inherently evil, and some employers require them. Granted, you can avoid writing much SQL at all these days using ORM solutions, with a massive performance hit.
You want to take load off the database because it scales not as well as the application servers, of which you can always add another rack full of..... You really, really want to avoid the bottleneck on the database.
Again, different strokes for different folks. Doing a big join on the DB or sending enormous amounts of results over a wire. Pick your poison.
Matt Cutts, a Google employee who works to stop unethical search manipulation,
By "unethical," I hope the OP means "not profitable."
Last I checked, there's nothing unethical about trying to trick an autonomous search system into giving you a higher listing. We're not talking about kicking puppies here, folks. We're talking about Google protecting its ability to charge for a higher listing. Let's not trick ourselves into thinking that manipulating that is somehow against morals or the law.
OK, I'll bite. What is so terrible about Gimp? What can't you do in Gimp? I've been writing about Gimp and making tutorials about Gimp at my blog (see signature) for a while, and inviting people to ask questions about it. Your input could help. Not flamage, mind you. Input.
I'm happy to oblige this, actually. I'll start at the beginning: installation on Windows. It's been a couple years since I tried using GIMP, so I wanted to install it to refresh my memory. I just downloaded the MSI installer and it won't let me install. It says I need to install the "GTK+ Runtime Environment" to use the GIMP. Now why they don't just include another piece of GPLed software in an MSI installer for Windows, where you can assume no one has GTK+ installed, I'll never know. Someone should fix this step and I'll be happy to try again, I've got too much work to do to mess around digging up other software to try this out again.
A few things from memory are: alpha channel handling is poor and confusing, the right click context menu madness, and scripting in Scheme. The new versions of Photoshop have COM scripting on Windows, which means I can script it in whatever language I choose without writing hooks.
99% of business desktops don't have Photoshop, let alone whatever a "datacenter" involves. If Photoshop is at the top of Novell's list, all it shows is that if you have an open web survey and ask Teh Community for responses, you get replies from 15-year-olds.
You're aboslutely right -- except that 99% you're talking about also wouldn't be voting in this poll because they could get Photoshop if they need it. You're ignoring that a huge percentage of non-web-development professionals sit down in front of Linux boxes every day: they're working on movies and video games. You are aware that ILM, Dreamworks, Sony, WETA--just to name a few--have their artists working on Linux, right? That's a several thousand people who daily sit down and struggle without Photoshop. Gimp is a sorry substitute, and most shops have the Photoshop centric positions (art department, matte painters) still on Windows or Mac as a result.
Before you go off saying I don't know what I'm talking about, I am a professional in that industry. Gimp was offered as a solution to me at a former employer on Linux, when Photoshop on SGI was dying off (yes, Photoshop ran on IRIX!). At the time, I said we better figure out a way to get WINE to run Photoshop, because Gimp does not cut it for mortals. Gimp still does not cut it nearly 8 years later. I'll take my current shop where we work on Windows and I have a COM-scriptable Photoshop CS2, thank you very much.
Re:frameworks not language are the key
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
I think it is less about the language and more about the framework. JSP / JSF et. al., are just too bloated with configuration and XML files that leave the new developers scratching their head.
Bingo. This is exactly what's wrong with Java today and right about Ruby on Rails. The same kind of configuration that Hibernate uses XML for is done with simple methods in Ruby. Java is still far more powerful than Ruby... it has far more available for it, it's a very fast language whereas Ruby is not, and has more knowledge out there. But these XML configuration files are a beast to get around when you're just trying to learn how to do Hello World or simple CRUD.
Re:Application Programming
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
Recently I've been learning my way around Mac OS X, with Objective-C and Cocoa. It's not perfect. But. . . For what it's designed for, for developing stand-alone GUI-based applications, I haven't seen anything dramatically better. And you know, I have doubts about whether I'm ever going to.
C#/.NET. Seriously. Objective-C and Cocoa are nice, but I was in love when I first sat down to use C# with the.NET framework in VS. 2005 is a huge step forward, and you can download it for free to check it out. I develop UI apps exclusively in it and it's great (though I have been working with ASP.NET a little recently).
DB2's XML functionality looks awesome, I'm definitely going to try this out.
I am interested in all of these free editions for my web projects because it seems like it offers simpler scalability than MySQL down the road. Most high-end web developers--which I certainly am not--often end up having to find ways to get off of MySql as the site grows. Am I the only one who likes the idea of these scalable databases that I can buy later on?
On the other hand, if you're on Windows, it seems like MSSQL 2005 is your clear choice. It surprises me that any of these companies are bothering to compete against Microsoft there. It's beautifully integrated into the Visual Studio IDE, as well as offers.NET-compiled stored procedures and other Windows-centric friendliness. Oracle and IBM have to come up with great linux tools to compete against what Microsoft has created in MSSQL 2005 (Oracle's Raptor is a start)
Well, this post is a bit late but I hope people find it worthwhile.
I'm not sure what's more scary, the gross negligence that led to the disaster, or the government doing everything possible to cover-up what really happened to the astronauts. The disrespect paid to them by transporting their remains in plastic garbage cans. The secrecy regading the autopsy. You can read about it in this remarkable article from the Miami Herald.
> OTOH, only a small part of.NET has been proposed to the ECMA,
> which is not even a standard organization. Mono provides only a
> small subset of.NET.
ECMA is the organization that standardized Javascript, and is the organization that Firefox looks to for that standard. I'm not sure what else you have to do to be a "standards organization".
Technicalities aside, why does this matter? Python is not a standardized language; nor is Ruby a standardized language. Yet both are mentioned on this site daily and are being used widely in production. With C# and.NET, you have the future direction of the #1 software company in the world. You have the adopted language and framework of a very large number of Fortune 500 companies and Wall Street firms.
Microsoft/.NET is the new version of "you can't get fired by going with IBM," and IT'S ACTUALLY GOOD. That's the part that terrifies Oracle and Sun. In contrast, Java is a terribly disorganized. Developers rely on tons of third party tools to get anything done. The development environments aren't very good compared to VS 2005 (Eclipse, Netbeans -- though much improved with 5.0 -- fall flat in comparison).
Bottom line is, if anyone really worries about.NET not being standardized, they're not in the.NET target market anyway, and they're not part of what Sun and Oracle are at all worried about.
Good luck to Sun and Oracle, they slacked off on Java to the point where they have a long hard road ahead of them. ASP.NET/C#/CLR 2.0 and VS 2005 are awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple knows that x86 means you don't have to worry about switching again. x86 (and now x64), mean you're going to get the same support for your system that every other PC vendor in the world will have. If there comes a day when x86 is no longer supported, Apple will switch again, and so will everyone else.
But for now, we know that the main competition for the desktop will definitely take place underneath an x86/x64 instruction set. And that helps Apple in the long run, they've got a lot more things to worry about than chip suppliers who can't meet their (arguably very tiny) demand. PPC does not offer that.
Hey, hey, whoa, wait a minute. I'm not the software engineer. Never said I was. I just write about it.
Are you, or are you not, interested in improving Gimp? Based on the thrashing you've been doing in these threads, I'm guessing you are not. You faked like you wanted to get feedback in that first post, but it's obvious that you feel we must all be forced to like Gimp exactly as it is.
I checked out your blog and noticed you comparing Photoshop and Gimp, so let me ask you a question: how much money have you ever been paid to do work in Gimp? And exactly how long have you been using Gimp? It looks like you've only been writing about it for 2 weeks.
Even though you're in denial about this, the people like myself who post that Gimp needs to work more like Photoshop are basically stating the obvious. Free or not, Gimp is following in the footsteps of the world's most popular photo editing software... how can it not be compared? I've been using Photoshop professionally for 15 years. I own it. Why would I want to change to software offers nothing new except a crappier UI, even if it was a commercial application? No commercial company has been able to convince Photoshop users that their product is better, and a lot have tried since 1990.
So you might want to revisit exactly why you keep posting these very strange and defensive comments... instead focusing on what actually might be worthwhile to improve about Gimp. If you're that big a fan, make it a better program so that Photoshop users might actually like it. It's a truly worthless waste of energy to come on here to bash longtime Photoshop users for sticking with what they've got. Use that time to make it better if you believe so much in FOSS.
Just about the rest of your refutations fall mostly apart.
/.er response is therefore it must be my issue that I don't understand the software. The correct software engineer response would be, "Hey, those are good software requirements that actually might be improvable." I think the problem with FOSS is that it's a lot of unpaid work, therefore if someone doesn't actually like the result, the response is "Tough shit, it's free software, improve it yourself." Well, my time is worth a lot of money, I'd rather just put $600 of that towards Photoshop and never think about GIMP again. And that's exactly what any professional who's not stuck on Linux would do.
You guys wanted my input, but instead your flame-bait response pretty much backs up exactly what's wrong with slashdot and the attitude of the FOSS crowd.
Let's go back over the facts: I'm a longtime user Photoshop. I have the money for Photoshop. After all of these years of using Photoshop, I don't like GIMP or the way it handles certain things in the UI. I don't like the fact that the installer requires me to go out and install a piece of FOSS separately instead of just including the darn thing (NO commercial Windows software would require this, sorry to burst your bubble).
The traditional, ignorant
- You can't easily migrate to another database-vendor. Maybe you want to switch. Maybe you have to because of technical reasons. Maybe you have to because your company is being bought by another, which uses a different system and wants to maintain only one platform. Whatever the reason, your stored procedure is going to really, really hurt.
.... You really, really want to avoid the bottleneck on the database.
It just depends on where you want to do the work. If your SQL is in your app, you still need to port it. If your SQL code is in your SP, you still need to port it. I don't use SPs, but contrary to the conventional wisdom, stored procedures are not inherently evil, and some employers require them. Granted, you can avoid writing much SQL at all these days using ORM solutions, with a massive performance hit.
You want to take load off the database because it scales not as well as the application servers, of which you can always add another rack full of.
Again, different strokes for different folks. Doing a big join on the DB or sending enormous amounts of results over a wire. Pick your poison.
Matt Cutts, a Google employee who works to stop unethical search manipulation,
By "unethical," I hope the OP means "not profitable."
Last I checked, there's nothing unethical about trying to trick an autonomous search system into giving you a higher listing. We're not talking about kicking puppies here, folks. We're talking about Google protecting its ability to charge for a higher listing. Let's not trick ourselves into thinking that manipulating that is somehow against morals or the law.
OK, I'll bite. What is so terrible about Gimp? What can't you do in Gimp? I've been writing about Gimp and making tutorials about Gimp at my blog (see signature) for a while, and inviting people to ask questions about it. Your input could help. Not flamage, mind you. Input.
I'm happy to oblige this, actually. I'll start at the beginning: installation on Windows. It's been a couple years since I tried using GIMP, so I wanted to install it to refresh my memory. I just downloaded the MSI installer and it won't let me install. It says I need to install the "GTK+ Runtime Environment" to use the GIMP. Now why they don't just include another piece of GPLed software in an MSI installer for Windows, where you can assume no one has GTK+ installed, I'll never know. Someone should fix this step and I'll be happy to try again, I've got too much work to do to mess around digging up other software to try this out again.
A few things from memory are: alpha channel handling is poor and confusing, the right click context menu madness, and scripting in Scheme. The new versions of Photoshop have COM scripting on Windows, which means I can script it in whatever language I choose without writing hooks.
99% of business desktops don't have Photoshop, let alone whatever a "datacenter" involves. If Photoshop is at the top of Novell's list, all it shows is that if you have an open web survey and ask Teh Community for responses, you get replies from 15-year-olds.
You're aboslutely right -- except that 99% you're talking about also wouldn't be voting in this poll because they could get Photoshop if they need it. You're ignoring that a huge percentage of non-web-development professionals sit down in front of Linux boxes every day: they're working on movies and video games. You are aware that ILM, Dreamworks, Sony, WETA--just to name a few--have their artists working on Linux, right? That's a several thousand people who daily sit down and struggle without Photoshop. Gimp is a sorry substitute, and most shops have the Photoshop centric positions (art department, matte painters) still on Windows or Mac as a result.
Before you go off saying I don't know what I'm talking about, I am a professional in that industry. Gimp was offered as a solution to me at a former employer on Linux, when Photoshop on SGI was dying off (yes, Photoshop ran on IRIX!). At the time, I said we better figure out a way to get WINE to run Photoshop, because Gimp does not cut it for mortals. Gimp still does not cut it nearly 8 years later. I'll take my current shop where we work on Windows and I have a COM-scriptable Photoshop CS2, thank you very much.
I think it is less about the language and more about the framework. JSP / JSF et. al., are just too bloated with configuration and XML files that leave the new developers scratching their head.
Bingo. This is exactly what's wrong with Java today and right about Ruby on Rails. The same kind of configuration that Hibernate uses XML for is done with simple methods in Ruby. Java is still far more powerful than Ruby... it has far more available for it, it's a very fast language whereas Ruby is not, and has more knowledge out there. But these XML configuration files are a beast to get around when you're just trying to learn how to do Hello World or simple CRUD.
Recently I've been learning my way around Mac OS X, with Objective-C and Cocoa. It's not perfect. But. . . For what it's designed for, for developing stand-alone GUI-based applications, I haven't seen anything dramatically better. And you know, I have doubts about whether I'm ever going to. .NET framework in VS. 2005 is a huge step forward, and you can download it for free to check it out. I develop UI apps exclusively in it and it's great (though I have been working with ASP.NET a little recently).
C#/.NET. Seriously. Objective-C and Cocoa are nice, but I was in love when I first sat down to use C# with the
DB2's XML functionality looks awesome, I'm definitely going to try this out.
.NET-compiled stored procedures and other Windows-centric friendliness. Oracle and IBM have to come up with great linux tools to compete against what Microsoft has created in MSSQL 2005 (Oracle's Raptor is a start)
I am interested in all of these free editions for my web projects because it seems like it offers simpler scalability than MySQL down the road. Most high-end web developers--which I certainly am not--often end up having to find ways to get off of MySql as the site grows. Am I the only one who likes the idea of these scalable databases that I can buy later on?
On the other hand, if you're on Windows, it seems like MSSQL 2005 is your clear choice. It surprises me that any of these companies are bothering to compete against Microsoft there. It's beautifully integrated into the Visual Studio IDE, as well as offers
Well, this post is a bit late but I hope people find it worthwhile.
I'm not sure what's more scary, the gross negligence that led to the disaster, or the government doing everything possible to cover-up what really happened to the astronauts. The disrespect paid to them by transporting their remains in plastic garbage cans. The secrecy regading the autopsy. You can read about it in this remarkable article from the Miami Herald.
That's "EM64T" -- Extended Memory 64 Technology -- not "EMT64"
> OTOH, only a small part of .NET has been proposed to the ECMA,
> which is not even a standard organization. Mono provides only a
> small subset of .NET.
ECMA is the organization that standardized Javascript, and is the organization that Firefox looks to for that standard. I'm not sure what else you have to do to be a "standards organization".
Technicalities aside, why does this matter? Python is not a standardized language; nor is Ruby a standardized language. Yet both are mentioned on this site daily and are being used widely in production. With C# and .NET, you have the future direction of the #1 software company in the world. You have the adopted language and framework of a very large number of Fortune 500 companies and Wall Street firms.
Microsoft/.NET is the new version of "you can't get fired by going with IBM," and IT'S ACTUALLY GOOD. That's the part that terrifies Oracle and Sun. In contrast, Java is a terribly disorganized. Developers rely on tons of third party tools to get anything done. The development environments aren't very good compared to VS 2005 (Eclipse, Netbeans -- though much improved with 5.0 -- fall flat in comparison).
Bottom line is, if anyone really worries about .NET not being standardized, they're not in the .NET target market anyway, and they're not part of what Sun and Oracle are at all worried about.
Good luck to Sun and Oracle, they slacked off on Java to the point where they have a long hard road ahead of them. ASP.NET/C#/CLR 2.0 and VS 2005 are awesome.