Realised I forgot the second part of your query. In terms of ecosystem I'm referring to tools (profilers, decompilers, etc), libraries (for example hibernate, spring, jaxp, ANTLR, jbpm etc etc). There are equivalents for many of these in the.NET world now, but in many cases they're non-free and non-open, and also often less mature than their Java counterparts.
Something I miss as a server-side dev is JMX - if anyone's aware of anything like that for.NET I'd love to hear about it!
It largely depends on the field of application. You have to remember that.NET was originally marketed primarily for line-of-business desktop and web apps; in that role, you don't need e.g. a fancy collection framework, but solid database access and a fast UI framework is a must - and so those were prioritized. Consequently, there are areas where.NET is relatively underdeveloped compared to Java, and then there are other areas where it's on par or ahead.
100% agreed there. What struck me as interesting (after years of explaining Swing to WinForms devs) is how much WPF reminds me of Swing, mixed with a little HTML and CSS. The DB stuff though is very impressive, the shame is that in my place of work (and, I suspect, many others) it's not really very useful. We don't do 2-tier apps, we don't run SQL Server and we don't run Windows app servers. A lot of it feels like it was created to make the demo look really cool rather than to be actually useful in major development projects - but that could be my bias talking.
Still, as a Java guy who has become responsible for a bunch of.NET stuff, it's a lot less painful now than it would have been a couple of years ago!
It's not so much concerns (as in things which are wrong) and more that some of the libraries in Java are so powerful. I have a personal soft spot for util.concurrent (which started life as Doug Lea's concurrency package). The executor model effectively gets rid of the need to directly manipulate threads/pools (and are great for DI based apps, e.g. using Spring/Unity), and the concurrent collections (like ConcurrentLinkedQueue) are nice for performance in heavily multithreaded apps. Even the little things - for example I don't think there's an equivalent to the "fairness" parameter on.NET's semaphore (which lets you control the order that threads can enter it) just make some aspects of coding in.NET feel like a bit of a step backward.
Collections have become _much_ better in.NET 4, the lack of something even as simple as a Set was kind of embarrassing for a while there:) I actually just noticed they now have a ConcurrentDictionary in.NET 4 so that's cool.
LINQ is interesting, but I'm not sure what you mean about parallelism being better in C# - can you elaborate?
The main area that C# (actually all of.NET) lags behind Java is in the core libraries. The collections support is lacking (and only recently became useful in any real way), there's no equivalent that I'm aware of to something like java.util.concurrent (see previous comment about parallelism), etc. The toolset is also lacking - I don't care how many people say VS is awesome, it still needs Resharper (which is, of course, basically a port of IntelliJ to.NET) to be great rather than merely adequate. It's also good to see projects like nant, Moq, Castle, nUnit and so on come along but it's going to take a while to build up an equivalent to the Java ecosystem.
That said, as a pure language, C# is great. The event/delegate model, lambdas, even simple sugars like Properties are all real improvements over Java (though structs can burn in hell). As a platform though,.NET has a way to go before it's really mature IMHO.
I think FF4 is great, I've been using it all through the betas. There's a couple of UI things I think need a little polish but compared to 3.6 it's night & day. Faster too.
I'm a Brit who has lived in the US for the past few years. Navigation certainly is different, but much of it is just what you're used to.
There are really two systems of signage working in parallel. The first is what I'd call "long distance" signage - that's what you see at intersections where it indicates the towns that you'll reach by going one way or another. The assumption here is that knowing you're headed towards your destination is more useful than knowing the name of some minor street on the way to it - which is true if you're trying to get somewhere some distance away. One thing that you will notice is that major roads have both a name and a number (e.g. A40) - and those numbers are displayed on signs. This is useful because the "local" name of the street (e.g. Main St) might change a number of times along it's length. This is similar to the Route/County Route system used here (at least in my part of the US). People can give directions like "take the A40 for 30 miles" rather than list out all the different names.
Then you have the local signage, which is basically the street name signs. You're right that they're much less consistent that in the US - but a lot of them are also hundreds of years old:) I also find the US style of hanging the names on traffic lights or on poles visually less appealing - not an issue in some places but it would ruin towns with a lot of nice old buildings to put those giant green signs everywhere.
As for the question - of course I'd take a GPS over a map - regardless of where I'm driving! Assuming equal map accuracy between the two it's really a no brainer, especially if you're driving alone (can't read a map and drive at the same time).
The USD hasn't really changed much in value vs the Egyptian Pound over the last year (it's down about 5% or so) - historically it's pretty much business as usual. In fact, the great weakening of the dollar due to the bailout is pretty mythical - vs GBP and EUR it's pretty average right now (actually pretty strong against GBP), the exception being JPY which is strong at the moment. Look at the 10y charts and it's really doing fine (unlike 2008!).
I agree about the screwed up farming subsidies re: ethanol, and the price of wheat has certainly risen sharply since the middle of last year, but I don't see evidence for the fx markets having much to do with it.
The wiper controls are simple, located on a stalk to the right of the wheel
I'm genuinely curious - where else would they be? I've driven a bunch of cars, even a few Chevvy's and the like (not a fun experience!) but I've never seen wipers anywhere other than on a stalk. Headlights I've seen on the dash (which is weird enough) but not wipers.
You mean the unlimited data and free tethering they haven't even announced yet? AFAIK all the reports around plan pricing are pure conjecture, I haven't seen anything official.
When the iphone first launched on at&t it had the same restriction. The problem I had was that when using data (which I do a lot) incoming phone calls would go straight to voicemail. No idea if Verizon works the same way, but it was incredibly annoying at the time.
and the ever insulting "alloy wheels" (like anyone has ever cared)
Well I care. I actually do give a crap how my car looks, and to my eyes there's basically nothing uglier than steel wheels with plastic hubcaps. Spokes please! As for keyless entry - do you just mean a lock/unlock remote? I thought that was basically standard these days - certainly has been on the last few cars I've bought.
I'm sure I'm showing my ignorance, but how to you put in after market systems these days? Can't remember the last time I saw a dash with a DIN shaped hole in it.
ABS is useful for more than avoiding rear-ending the guy in front. It's useful when you need to stop at a red light and the ground is slippery, it's useful when a kid runs out in front of you, it's useful when you hit a patch of black ice coming into to a turn. I don't understand the attitude that says "this isn't a 100% foolproof solution to the problem, therefore it is of zero value", but this is slashdot and it's pretty common around here.
[quote]is far more open than Xbox ever was. [/quote] Citation needed. Seriously, I have both and no strong allegiance either way, but I can't think of any way that a PS3 is "more open" than a 360 from a software POV. If you look at the hardware there's the ability to use a generic HD in the PS3 vs a MS only one, but that's about it I think. Sony also still don't have a program for "sanctioned homebrew", which MS has had for some time now.
Where they're flying from is just over the river from the heliport the president uses when he's visiting NYC. If they'd made that flight on one of those days they'd have a whole lot more than one squad car paying them a visit:)
Cool video though, and I'm glad that for once the authorities didn't over step.
So what? Guy cheats on wife, it's hardly interesting or in any way relevant. It might be slightly ironic if Assange was being accused of infidelity, but he isn't.
The body IS the sensor cartridge. Other than that it's basically a screen, CPU, shutter, battery and lens mount. You probably want to upgrade the screen and CPU every once in a while anyway, and the shutter will wear out over time.
The real money in a camera system (and the most important from a quality POV) is in the lens. You keep the lenses, you switch out the body (sensor).
I assume you're trying to make some kind of clever point which is way above my head, but in case you're actually being serious, I point you to basically every major game of the last 5 years. The biggest blockbuster of them all is Call of Duty : Black Ops which sold at least (depending on which source you use) 5.6m copies on it's first day, and cost $60 in the US on all platforms.
If I visited a website a few days ago, but forgot to bookmark it, I could just drop down the URL list and select it from there
Only if you had visited it by typing the URL. If you'd got there by following a link, it wouldn't be there. Given the likelihood of one of those vs the other, I personally found the drop down "typed URL history" completely useless. The history, on the other hand, contains all the visited sites - whether typed or not - so you can still look there to find it.
Better yet, if you remember something about the site or page (for example a word from the page title) then typing that in the URL bar will usually find it pretty quickly. I don't know about you but I'm much more likely to remember that the page was about "geeky shirts" than that I'd visited it on Friday afternoon via a typed URL.
Slashdot Mirror
Realised I forgot the second part of your query. In terms of ecosystem I'm referring to tools (profilers, decompilers, etc), libraries (for example hibernate, spring, jaxp, ANTLR, jbpm etc etc). There are equivalents for many of these in the .NET world now, but in many cases they're non-free and non-open, and also often less mature than their Java counterparts.
Something I miss as a server-side dev is JMX - if anyone's aware of anything like that for .NET I'd love to hear about it!
100% agreed there. What struck me as interesting (after years of explaining Swing to WinForms devs) is how much WPF reminds me of Swing, mixed with a little HTML and CSS. The DB stuff though is very impressive, the shame is that in my place of work (and, I suspect, many others) it's not really very useful. We don't do 2-tier apps, we don't run SQL Server and we don't run Windows app servers. A lot of it feels like it was created to make the demo look really cool rather than to be actually useful in major development projects - but that could be my bias talking.
Still, as a Java guy who has become responsible for a bunch of .NET stuff, it's a lot less painful now than it would have been a couple of years ago!
It's not so much concerns (as in things which are wrong) and more that some of the libraries in Java are so powerful. I have a personal soft spot for util.concurrent (which started life as Doug Lea's concurrency package). The executor model effectively gets rid of the need to directly manipulate threads/pools (and are great for DI based apps, e.g. using Spring/Unity), and the concurrent collections (like ConcurrentLinkedQueue) are nice for performance in heavily multithreaded apps. Even the little things - for example I don't think there's an equivalent to the "fairness" parameter on .NET's semaphore (which lets you control the order that threads can enter it) just make some aspects of coding in .NET feel like a bit of a step backward.
Collections have become _much_ better in .NET 4, the lack of something even as simple as a Set was kind of embarrassing for a while there :) I actually just noticed they now have a ConcurrentDictionary in .NET 4 so that's cool.
LINQ is interesting, but I'm not sure what you mean about parallelism being better in C# - can you elaborate?
The main area that C# (actually all of .NET) lags behind Java is in the core libraries. The collections support is lacking (and only recently became useful in any real way), there's no equivalent that I'm aware of to something like java.util.concurrent (see previous comment about parallelism), etc. The toolset is also lacking - I don't care how many people say VS is awesome, it still needs Resharper (which is, of course, basically a port of IntelliJ to .NET) to be great rather than merely adequate. It's also good to see projects like nant, Moq, Castle, nUnit and so on come along but it's going to take a while to build up an equivalent to the Java ecosystem.
That said, as a pure language, C# is great. The event/delegate model, lambdas, even simple sugars like Properties are all real improvements over Java (though structs can burn in hell). As a platform though, .NET has a way to go before it's really mature IMHO.
I think FF4 is great, I've been using it all through the betas. There's a couple of UI things I think need a little polish but compared to 3.6 it's night & day. Faster too.
I just pressed Alt. Guess what happened? Oh yes - I got a keyboard accessible menu bar. But don't let facts get in the way of a good rant.
I'm a Brit who has lived in the US for the past few years. Navigation certainly is different, but much of it is just what you're used to.
There are really two systems of signage working in parallel. The first is what I'd call "long distance" signage - that's what you see at intersections where it indicates the towns that you'll reach by going one way or another. The assumption here is that knowing you're headed towards your destination is more useful than knowing the name of some minor street on the way to it - which is true if you're trying to get somewhere some distance away. One thing that you will notice is that major roads have both a name and a number (e.g. A40) - and those numbers are displayed on signs. This is useful because the "local" name of the street (e.g. Main St) might change a number of times along it's length. This is similar to the Route/County Route system used here (at least in my part of the US). People can give directions like "take the A40 for 30 miles" rather than list out all the different names.
Then you have the local signage, which is basically the street name signs. You're right that they're much less consistent that in the US - but a lot of them are also hundreds of years old :) I also find the US style of hanging the names on traffic lights or on poles visually less appealing - not an issue in some places but it would ruin towns with a lot of nice old buildings to put those giant green signs everywhere.
As for the question - of course I'd take a GPS over a map - regardless of where I'm driving! Assuming equal map accuracy between the two it's really a no brainer, especially if you're driving alone (can't read a map and drive at the same time).
The USD hasn't really changed much in value vs the Egyptian Pound over the last year (it's down about 5% or so) - historically it's pretty much business as usual. In fact, the great weakening of the dollar due to the bailout is pretty mythical - vs GBP and EUR it's pretty average right now (actually pretty strong against GBP), the exception being JPY which is strong at the moment. Look at the 10y charts and it's really doing fine (unlike 2008!).
I agree about the screwed up farming subsidies re: ethanol, and the price of wheat has certainly risen sharply since the middle of last year, but I don't see evidence for the fx markets having much to do with it.
Sounds like Piranha 3D - it was awesome :)
I'm genuinely curious - where else would they be? I've driven a bunch of cars, even a few Chevvy's and the like (not a fun experience!) but I've never seen wipers anywhere other than on a stalk. Headlights I've seen on the dash (which is weird enough) but not wipers.
I've never heard of anyone going to jail for infringing a patent.
You mean the unlimited data and free tethering they haven't even announced yet? AFAIK all the reports around plan pricing are pure conjecture, I haven't seen anything official.
When the iphone first launched on at&t it had the same restriction. The problem I had was that when using data (which I do a lot) incoming phone calls would go straight to voicemail. No idea if Verizon works the same way, but it was incredibly annoying at the time.
Like driving?
Well I care. I actually do give a crap how my car looks, and to my eyes there's basically nothing uglier than steel wheels with plastic hubcaps. Spokes please! As for keyless entry - do you just mean a lock/unlock remote? I thought that was basically standard these days - certainly has been on the last few cars I've bought.
I'm sure I'm showing my ignorance, but how to you put in after market systems these days? Can't remember the last time I saw a dash with a DIN shaped hole in it.
ABS is useful for more than avoiding rear-ending the guy in front. It's useful when you need to stop at a red light and the ground is slippery, it's useful when a kid runs out in front of you, it's useful when you hit a patch of black ice coming into to a turn. I don't understand the attitude that says "this isn't a 100% foolproof solution to the problem, therefore it is of zero value", but this is slashdot and it's pretty common around here.
[quote]is far more open than Xbox ever was. [/quote]
Citation needed. Seriously, I have both and no strong allegiance either way, but I can't think of any way that a PS3 is "more open" than a 360 from a software POV. If you look at the hardware there's the ability to use a generic HD in the PS3 vs a MS only one, but that's about it I think. Sony also still don't have a program for "sanctioned homebrew", which MS has had for some time now.
Whether or not the drugs are optional, driving is. Need to take the drugs to stay healthy? Give someone else the car keys.
Where they're flying from is just over the river from the heliport the president uses when he's visiting NYC. If they'd made that flight on one of those days they'd have a whole lot more than one squad car paying them a visit :)
Cool video though, and I'm glad that for once the authorities didn't over step.
So what? Guy cheats on wife, it's hardly interesting or in any way relevant. It might be slightly ironic if Assange was being accused of infidelity, but he isn't.
The body IS the sensor cartridge. Other than that it's basically a screen, CPU, shutter, battery and lens mount. You probably want to upgrade the screen and CPU every once in a while anyway, and the shutter will wear out over time.
The real money in a camera system (and the most important from a quality POV) is in the lens. You keep the lenses, you switch out the body (sensor).
I assume you're trying to make some kind of clever point which is way above my head, but in case you're actually being serious, I point you to basically every major game of the last 5 years. The biggest blockbuster of them all is Call of Duty : Black Ops which sold at least (depending on which source you use) 5.6m copies on it's first day, and cost $60 in the US on all platforms.
I'm imagining a giant electro magnet.... :)
Only if you had visited it by typing the URL. If you'd got there by following a link, it wouldn't be there. Given the likelihood of one of those vs the other, I personally found the drop down "typed URL history" completely useless. The history, on the other hand, contains all the visited sites - whether typed or not - so you can still look there to find it.
Better yet, if you remember something about the site or page (for example a word from the page title) then typing that in the URL bar will usually find it pretty quickly. I don't know about you but I'm much more likely to remember that the page was about "geeky shirts" than that I'd visited it on Friday afternoon via a typed URL.