licenses. If your software is licensed including the requirement that you don't modify it and don't duplicate it, then a responsibility should be implied that they take care of said software.
If the responsibility of upkeep becomes too much, a vendor can always abandon the software.
Microsoft can't be expected to fix windows '95 bugs forever, but on the other hand, people have paid for a working product that they should expect to be able to use forever. Seems to make sense to me that when they abandon upkeep, they should lose the responsibility over that product as well as the ownership, it becomes public.
A law making it so could replace much of the copyright law system. We could use the same concept with products, music and books, once they are out of production, out of print or unatainable by commercial means, they lose their exclusive license to the product and anyone can distribute it.
Personally, worst case I'd write a little algorithm to generate it (if I wanted a constant password that is).
More likely I'd write one that created a hashcode from the completed compression, encoded the hashcode in base64, told the user to enter it when he bought his drugs then used a second algorithm online to encode that result into a specific "key" that would only work for that one, umm, "Customer". If possible I'd write the algorithm in a custom bytecode language so that it wasn't just a straightforward decompile.
Of course, if I was going to go through all that effort I'd just write an online casino or something and steal my money the old fashion way.
Because it's not worth the risk. A clean casino can rake in continuous profits, but if there's credible evidence that they're cheating they'll lose their customers.
Casinos don't create code, programmers do.
At least regarding online poker, such tools exist and are commonly used by serious players. If there was funny stuff going on, somebody would have found it.
Quite the intuitive leap from "Tools exist and are used" to "they would have found it". I suggest you bactrack across that logic and look for the hole. While you are searching, consider that programmers have gotten away with putting code into banks and government orginizations with very strict checks without getting caught.
Finally, let's say that some of the people replying to this aren't from the Casino, that you are actually players and trying to argue this in order to continue to believe that your hobby is actually a good idea. In order to do this, you convince yourself that the programming just HAS to be on the up-and-up (because nearly everything in this world IS).
Even without hacks into the code, the games are unbalanced.
I mean, it IS a fairly common practice now to get multiple accounts and log in to the same game at the same time.
Some people go so far as to string connections from multiple networks and to set up fake identies to fool the casinos as well as the old trick of simply relaying connections across the net via virtual terminals (by far the easiest way to do it).
So if you are gambling online in a multi-player poker game, If you don't personally know the people you are playing then you can assume that if you are not cheating yourself, you are going to lose because you are playing a cheater.
You are telling me that as a programmer working on casino code, I physically could not write an undetectable money-stealing routine that would only work for myself?
People have done this on highly-reviewed bank software. Now we have a product that is simple enough for each casino to implement on their own with a small team. I've been on enough small teams to know that their level of insight and code review doesn't pick up anything that a programmer really wants to hide.
And anyway, I'd seriously consider letting the whole programming team in on it. Why not? It's only fixed for a few people--it's not like anyone would ever be able to detect such a slight abnormality as an occasional extra ace going to anyone logged in with a certian string in their name.
To not acknowledge this, at least as a possibility, implies one of three things: 1) a fantastic lack of insight into programming and program management practices 2) an addiction (I've seen addictions completely change the personality of a person--it's like a little guy pulling levers in the effected persons head, causing them to say things that in any other circumstances they would know to be wrong). 3) an adgenda to promote a business
I had assumed #3 because they were ACs, but I suppose it could be either of the other reasons.
Chances are that if nobody understands the problems of VB, then they won't find advantages in other languages.
If your product is all front-end and database, chances are VB is actually a fine choice--that's what it was designed for.
If your product involves significant design, routines that manipulate the data rather than just display it and/or many interacting pieces implemented by multiple programmers but designed by a smaller team of architects (as you will get in a larger project), VB narrows towards completely unusable.
For one thing, when you are architecting a project, it is much easier to "Think" OO in a more pure OO language (C# / Java). It is also more simple to transfer these designs to paper and to other engineers.
Refactoring, which should be constant and ruthless, is much more difficult in VB--last time I checked, in fact, VB basically encouraged C&P through their lack of dynamic form creation and some of their constructs.
There are also programmer/programmer issues in VB, defining an abstract interface between two areas, intelligently isolating code, etc. There are actually many reasons.
The problem is that if you have a team of VB developers, they are going to be completely capable of designing a VB app in any language. Also, if you have really good, experienced OO programmers and a talented architect, you will be able to create a fine app in VB.
My real recommendation would be to get an architect--someone who can design your product out to be maintainable and expandable in any language, and let them pick the most appropriate language for you.
As an alternative, I guess I'd say don't worry about it. Although I'd never recommend VB, if management is stuck on it and all the programmers know it, it's probably your best choice. As I said, you can write crappy VB code in any language, so you might as well do it in VB.
Seriously, 2 Pro-casino posts in reply to mine--both AC, both saying how "It's okay, go ahead and gamble, you can even win something because see there's all this money."?
So it's subsidizing residential providers by charging more to companies providing high-bandwidth services to their users.
Interesting. I'm still on the fence as to the legitimacy of an operation like that--it could be legit, simply charging for all traffic that goes through your router in either direction. It would become a billing nightmare, but I'm not sure there's really anything wrong with it.
Where I would find a HUGE problem is if they were setting priorities based on the target's business model--for instance if they charged more for VOIP phone traffic.
If they really wanted to be fair, however, it would make more sense to charge the ISP of the high-traffic company. For instance, figure out all the byte counts coming in from/out to each ISP, then charge that ISP. The ISP would then charge their customer the appropriate amount. That would not get them the ability to offer a "Gold Level" Service however.
Okay, thanks, I get it. The ability to offer the "Gold Level" service (to have each ISP charge Google ITSELF for a smoother route) is what net neutrality is about. Sorry it took me so long to get there. And yes it seems like a pretty slimy thing to do--Guess it makes sense to make a decision on this practice one way or another.
It may not be outright/obviously "wrong", but what a billing nightmare. I can even see them creating a SPAA type association to collect fees (aka Insurance--you wouldn't want anything to happen to all this nice bandwidth now, would you?)
Okay, now I'm pretty firmly down on the side of this being a Bad Idea. Thanks again.
We have quite a few Indian casinos, and playing poker is legal in general. The online joints are probably taking revenues away from the state, so I'm not terribly surprised.
Besides, with unregulated online casinos running in another country, why on earth would anyone A) implement a casino without the ability to skim (Which could be completely invisible to anyone without some serious probabilities analysis tools and a lot of time to sit playtesting) or B) want to play said unregulated online casino?
At first thought it seemed like "Net Neutrality" was a great idea to stop those greedy phone companies from gouging customers they didn't like.
The more I think about it, the more I realize I still haven't seen every facet of this problem.
First: Everyone accepts that a company with a "Phat Pipe" will pay more if they go over a certain bandwidth limitation. Don't they already do this to the heaviest users? If not, why not? I would assume that when you get a Real Pipe into your business (say, OC-3 or above) that you pay an extreme premium.
So, is there some reason that they are not charging for high-bandwidth sites?
Now, there is one other issue that I would have a huge problem with. Are they asking to charge companies based on what services they wish to provide rather than simply the bandwidth they use? For instance, would they charge a Voip company more just because they were competing with them in the voice offering dept? That would be completely wrong/evil.
Finally, I was listening to a proponent of "Net Neutrality" today talking about how the phone companies are trying to "Double Charge" us by charging the consumer of a service as well as the provider of a service. Could their case be so bad that they have to come up with BS like that??? Everybody pays to connect to the net, everybody is a provider and everybody is a consumer. This is absolutely a non-issue and made me think that they really must not have a case.
I'll re-scan this thread to see if I can get answers to my questions, but anyone with input (or even an opinion) please reply and give me a hand.
In general I agree with your point about companies being greedy, they usually are.
You completely ignored the following facts however and your ignoring them simply makes me feel you have an agenda:
Your original comment was that "Everything" google did was add driven. I gave you some examples of things that weren't and asked why you would ignore the facts and throw up a comment like that. You said nothing in reply. Why?
You mention that all their software is in beta. True, but all is more usable than most other corporate and open source products that are out of beta, again it sounds like you have an agenda.
You mentioned the best photo organizing package I've ever seen and said they didn't create any useful products. You left off Google earth, one of the most amazing and useful computer products EVER and SketchUp. Sounds like you are trying to adjust facts to suit an agenda again.
So, can you be surprised that I feel that there is some goal behind your comments? I was simply trying to figure it out so I could put what you said in perspective--I didn't understand it at all.
So while writing this the only thing I could come up with is maybe you believe strongly in open source--you are out to prove everything that isn't open source is corporate evil--and I do understand that some people treat the concept of open source almost religiously (Kind of the way people treat Google or Apple, perhaps that is the jealousy we noticed?)
The funny thing is (if I'm correct in my guess), this is very similar to my personal philosophy. I agree with your views against corporations and always have--because of the involvement of stockholders they must constantly pay attention to a bottom line that will constantly, slowly, drive each decision toward "Evil" (for lack of a better word)
However, I also feel that when the rare corporation stands out and tries to give a little more than they take (Google, IBM, Sun) even if it's just in one group or area, we should give credit rather than just dismissing it--Show to them that we appreciate their effort with community good will.
If my guess was wrong, please reply just once more and help me understand your motivations (rather than your stance, I get that).
if it's adware--which is what the Google stuff is no matter how "cool" they are--it's "value reduced".
Umm, perhaps I'm just not paying attention but I don't remember seeing adds in well almost any of google's apps.
Can you point out the adds in Picasa, Google Earth, Google Pack Screesaver, Writely or Sketchup? For that matter, i don't remember adds in Google Desktop, but I haven't looked lately.
All those programs are, as far as I remember add-free. Now, either point out the adds in those listed programs, or tell me what the hell it is in your personality that makes you attack a company that has given away for free some of the best, most innovative and most useful software I've seen to date.
Are you just rebelling because they actually ARE "cool" and you can't stand that you weren't somehow involved???
Just trying to figure out how you and more than a couple moderators came to this conclusion. Please help me understand.
Historically microsoft would be the first to go ahead and implement something too slow or too large assuming that hardware will catch up.
Now, to implement a good structure like this ODF, okay so the current implementation of the READER tested a little slow, couldn't the READER be improved by some combination of caching and improved indexing?
Heck, if necessary I doubt there is anything out there saying that a different, more readable format couldn't also be saved--one that could open the first few pages instantly while the rest is parsed in the background.
Since Microsoft has gotten around this problem repeatedly, they MUST know that they are taking a last swing--to accost the format and not the algorithm that reads it is just too ignorant, even for them, to do by accident.
Most (all?) Ethernet hardware reads in an entire packet, looks at it, then sends it on to a destination. This makes building routers and switching hardware fairly easy but extremely slow.
If you go to a high-speed network, what you get is a packet being forwarded as it's being read. By the time the first few bits are through the switch, it should be able to figure out the next hop and have the packet moving in that direction. Phone companies have huge problems with the delays in Ethernet. This is why the ATM protocol was invented, it's hard to use, awkward and not too graceful, but it can fly through a switching network like nobody's business.
Ethernet is also extremely sloppy--Any switch along the way is allowed to throw a packet away and wait for the originator to resend causing a HUGE hiccupp in the communication stream (Most if not all routers do this whenever an address is not in it's forwarding table yet).
IIRC the faster protocols see a "Routing" packet in the stream and set up forwarding hardware before getting the actual packet/stream, then wait until the end of the packet (or entire stream) to tear the route down again.
Ethernet, however, due to it's simplicity is bridging the gaps. It's a pretty crappy protocol in general, but we keep throwing better, smarter hardware at it in an effort to brute-force it into the parameters we require. (I work for a company that makes Ethernet over fiber hardware, and have worked for companies based around ATM, SONET and other interesting solutions).
I guess the point of the article was to remind a world that is coming to believe that ethernet is the end-all be-all of networking that it was always just the simplest hack available and therefore the easiest to deal with.
Good point, very few people recognize that a warning that pops up every single time that you do a "Valid" operation with a slight chance of being "Invalid" is barely more useful (and much more annoying) than no dialog at all.
I have to believe that MS would have (or will add) the ability to enable a class of operation, for instance, give the user the ability to create & delete all files within their profile without warning.
Also, hopefully, they will ship with reasonable defaults.
Not that I have any intentions of going any further down that road than I have to--I'll try to stick with XP for games and migrate towards Linus for everything else.
Are you saying that the keypad appears on a screen, with the numbers in a random order in the array? E.g., so that some person might get a keypad numbered [[6,2,9][5,4,7][8,1,3]] and the next person would get [[3,8,4][5,2,1][6,9,7]]?
That's how ours work here. Most of the time all our security keypads are dark. You use the RFID to light them up and randomize the number positions, then type in a 4-digit code.
In order to get in during off hours you must have MY badge and MY four digit code.
That said, during working hours it just takes a touch of the badge (but then, you can also walk in the front door half the time and not be challenged.)
Incremental compilation and inspecting the contents of a "live" object are fine - I remember them from my Smalltalk days. Unfortunately, the kind of IDE that allows it is huge (right now, Eclipse is taking 146 megabytes of RAM on my development box) and completely beyond what I expect to be available to OLPC computers.
Umm, I can (and have often did) use incremental compilation from the CLI with notepad. As for live inspection, blueJ is better than anything else I've seen out there and should run on a fairly small computer (I used to run it on a 64mb machine running '98 all the time).
Consistency is a strong point for Java. It is less consistent than some other languages - I like the "everything is an object" approach for teaching. I wouldn't want to explain primitive types.
Although I kind of agree--the compiler should be able to treat numbers as objects without any performance degradation, I don't think it's worth the fact that some people would use that bizarre 5.loop type syntax that still gives me shivers. This is just personal preference though and I'm sure some people have the same reaction to not being able to do it--but it totally breaks the consistency of the language to see crap like that. I still get nervous when using "abc".compareTo(str) in java for the same reason... just doesn't fit with the rest of the code.
And moving some library calls inside the language may be a good thing. Just think how regexp support within Perl or list/set/dictionary support in Python make them easy to use languages for many purposes (although I wouldn't want to do a huge thing in Perl).
Please go into more detail here--I think this is my biggest lack of understanding and possibly the widest gap in our communication. I really don't understand why having to learn a new "Pattern" of commands is better than making a library call. This is probably the biggest thing I don't understand. On top of remembering extra bizarre syntax, when it's embedded into a language don't you also lose the ability to easily replace it with another implementation?
With Java I often spend 50% of the time setting up "safety nets" for typing, potential problems and such.
? Wow. What are you saying? How do you transfer your design from paper into a language and still have problems with types? Is it in translation or design? I have never had a single issue with type casting and the like.
In fact, the only time I have had a serious problem was with the binding classes in the JGoodies binding package because he tried to use the Smalltalk theory of making all classes descend from a single root class then use that root class in calls everywhere--this was the most confusing code library I've ever had to use. Every method call took the same object type, so for any given call it was never obvious which sub-type needed to be passed in, or exactly how one object needed to be constructed in order to be connected to the next object.
By all means, grab one of these "newer" languages (Python is older than Java, AFAIK and Smalltalk is the granddaddy of OOP) and play with them. Always keep your mind set on how a child migh relate to what is on screen.
I played with Python before Java came out, and occasionally since. It has too much feature creep and is kind of one of those "Scripty" languages with an unwieldy language definition and, iirc, the ability to create variables on the fly which is an immediate language-killer, one of the worst language sins possible.
You will realise there are many better tools to teach programming just like there are many ways to teach how to cut trees better (and safer) than a chainsaw.
Haven't seen one yet. Small language definition, strong typing, the ability to easily construct classes and useful subclasses, garbage collection so you can focus on decent OO Design.. All the parts are there. If you combine it with an environment like BlueJ I can't imagine a better training environment.
Interesting concept. I've worked at smaller companies and start ups most of my life and always had full control over my computer. Actually, I worked for ADP for a while which is a pretty big company and still had admin rights.
However, if larger companies are locking down the computers, that means that the types of applications run on the typical computer will be cut down severely.
If you are going to do that anyway, why not run Linux? The core apps needed for a typical computer could be run in Linux (Office, email, web). Any apps with Java clients should work fine in Linux, and these days, apps that can't run directly in Linux can be run under a VM or web browser.
The admin cost would be pretty near zero if you are actually locking the computers down. Any problem on a PC simply involves reloading the correct image.
I'm not normally a big pro Linux or Pro Microsoft person, I've been standing back and waiting for the dust to settle. The biggest drawback of Linux to me is installing new software--if that's all done at the admin level, there is very little to differentiate Microsoft any more.
I agree that multiple languages are a great idea. Every good programmer needs a little assembly, and all should play with a few of the more esoteric languages.
Personally I'm not sure what you are talking about with the edit/compile/test cycle, how else do you do it? Maybe you have found some fantastic methodology of which I need to be informed.
With me, I am constantly doing exactly that. Edit 2 lines, run a test, test the app, close it, edit a little more.
I wonder if you are trying to claim that because a scripting language isn't compiled, it's faster. I can't imagine you would be making such an argument since you must recognize that incremental builds used for that type of testing cycle take less than 2 seconds, so what is it?
Also, I don't really understand how Java is more difficult than any other given language. The consistent and accessible documentation makes it much easier than any other I've tried. Also, there are fewer stupid programmer tricks to get yourself tangled up with.
I'm really curious as to what the differences are. Do you feel that moving library calls into language constructs is really that useful? Could you maybe give me an example of what I'm not understanding--I admit that my use of the newest batch of languages has been minimal over the last few years, but I do still keep tabs and have seen very few things that excite me and many that terrify me
(I'm still aghast that languages are being created that allow soft typing, even with an option for strong typing. A few years ago I'd still run into the occasional VB programmer that didn't know what "Option Explicit" was--a good case for immediate termination, or at least complete retraining if I ever heard of one)
The original comment was that java was a language that would scare children.
I learned in basic, then assembly, then C, pretty much on my own. The worst part was probably that I started in Basic, unless I'm severly mistaken, Java would have been a much nicer thing to start with.
For one thing, you never have to deal with the horrors of loose typing. You don't have to deal with random syntax and 20 ways to specify a single concept. If you want a loop in Java, you pretty much have a few simple, consistant tools to choose from.
Throughout the entire proccess of learning and using a language, you should have consistancy and readability, and I have yet to see a language that gives you more than Java.
As for the tricks, like being able to append a looping construct to an integer, I really can't see the advantage. What are you honestly saving?
fears confirmed. Have you ever worked on the same codebase with more than 10 people in your life?
Working in a large-scale development environment requires many many more considerations than weather or not you program within a GUI.
If you think that things like number of keystrokes or speed of initial prototype are more important than documentation or reuse then you just need a little more experience.
In the meantime, as I said, I wouldn't be spraying my lack of experience about so readily if I were you, but that's just me.
You are correct, That optimization could be done by the user. Most of the others can't because C/C++ doesn't have the run time component, and the ones that can require some specialized code.
Except for certain math co-processor functions used for 3-d graphics, Java is rarely less than 50% as fast as C and often significantly faster.
If that seems counter-intuitive, consider that java compiles into machine code (at run time) that is run time-optimized.
For instance, if it notices that it's frequently calling a series of functions with a certain set of values and those functions don't change state, it could calculate the return and skip calling the function altogether.
Although that may not be an exact representation of what's going on, some of the optimizations are much more tricky, and they are across the board. These are things that C and C++ (and even assembly) physically can't compete with.
Here's another trick, one C++ can't compete with. In an OO language, you often allocate thousands of objects a second--that's extremely typical. In C++, it is necessary to spend execution time to physically recover the space of each object that has been allocated. In Java, the management process has gotten to the point where all it does is reserve the few objects it wants to keep then wipe the rest of the objects at once (like returning from a call, you recover the entire stack at once but for permanent heap memory instead of stack memory)
Or are you talking about the physical size of the JRE? It's 13mb, I'm not sure how much it expands to but considering that it's mostly a jar (compressed already), it should be much more efficient that C/C++ libraries. On top of that, since none of it's statically linked, each nontrivial Java app placed on the laptop should be smaller than the equivalent C/C++ app (Especially since byte code was invented to reduce size first--it was used in Excel to reduce code size long before Java was invented)
So, umm, in what way won't it fit?
Oh, and on top of that, to say something like java will scare kids away reveals much more about what kind of a programmer you are than I'd personally be comfortable with myself.
Umm, not really an open source fanatic, in fact I find myself attacking it more than defending it these days (I'm very against java going open source).
I am, however, wondering why on earth a poster would refer to "Commerical" software when that is totally irrelivant except to Microsoft.
The only reason that I can think is that they have some interest in microsoft that goes beyond fair-and-balanced. They may not be paid, may just be a fanboy, I don't know; but it's really the same effect.
I realize that you could do what you said with IE3 if you only visited two sites and they were secure, but wtf are you talking about putting an unpatched windows install on the network naked? Are you on drugs--it's been proven repeatedly that it would be compromized and rootkited within hours.
Your post is honestly as flakey as the original. Do they give you guys a bunch of sheets to type talking points from, then tell you to cover each others asses if someone notices the BS and figures out that you are being paid?
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Doesn't invoking state secrets at all imply that there is something to keep secret?
licenses. If your software is licensed including the requirement that you don't modify it and don't duplicate it, then a responsibility should be implied that they take care of said software.
If the responsibility of upkeep becomes too much, a vendor can always abandon the software.
Microsoft can't be expected to fix windows '95 bugs forever, but on the other hand, people have paid for a working product that they should expect to be able to use forever. Seems to make sense to me that when they abandon upkeep, they should lose the responsibility over that product as well as the ownership, it becomes public.
A law making it so could replace much of the copyright law system. We could use the same concept with products, music and books, once they are out of production, out of print or unatainable by commercial means, they lose their exclusive license to the product and anyone can distribute it.
Personally, worst case I'd write a little algorithm to generate it (if I wanted a constant password that is).
More likely I'd write one that created a hashcode from the completed compression, encoded the hashcode in base64, told the user to enter it when he bought his drugs then used a second algorithm online to encode that result into a specific "key" that would only work for that one, umm, "Customer". If possible I'd write the algorithm in a custom bytecode language so that it wasn't just a straightforward decompile.
Of course, if I was going to go through all that effort I'd just write an online casino or something and steal my money the old fashion way.
Because it's not worth the risk. A clean casino can rake in continuous profits, but if there's credible evidence that they're cheating they'll lose their customers.
Casinos don't create code, programmers do.
At least regarding online poker, such tools exist and are commonly used by serious players. If there was funny stuff going on, somebody would have found it.
Quite the intuitive leap from "Tools exist and are used" to "they would have found it". I suggest you bactrack across that logic and look for the hole. While you are searching, consider that programmers have gotten away with putting code into banks and government orginizations with very strict checks without getting caught.
Finally, let's say that some of the people replying to this aren't from the Casino, that you are actually players and trying to argue this in order to continue to believe that your hobby is actually a good idea. In order to do this, you convince yourself that the programming just HAS to be on the up-and-up (because nearly everything in this world IS).
Even without hacks into the code, the games are unbalanced.
I mean, it IS a fairly common practice now to get multiple accounts and log in to the same game at the same time.
Some people go so far as to string connections from multiple networks and to set up fake identies to fool the casinos as well as the old trick of simply relaying connections across the net via virtual terminals (by far the easiest way to do it).
So if you are gambling online in a multi-player poker game, If you don't personally know the people you are playing then you can assume that if you are not cheating yourself, you are going to lose because you are playing a cheater.
You are telling me that as a programmer working on casino code, I physically could not write an undetectable money-stealing routine that would only work for myself?
People have done this on highly-reviewed bank software. Now we have a product that is simple enough for each casino to implement on their own with a small team. I've been on enough small teams to know that their level of insight and code review doesn't pick up anything that a programmer really wants to hide.
And anyway, I'd seriously consider letting the whole programming team in on it. Why not? It's only fixed for a few people--it's not like anyone would ever be able to detect such a slight abnormality as an occasional extra ace going to anyone logged in with a certian string in their name.
To not acknowledge this, at least as a possibility, implies one of three things:
1) a fantastic lack of insight into programming and program management practices
2) an addiction (I've seen addictions completely change the personality of a person--it's like a little guy pulling levers in the effected persons head, causing them to say things that in any other circumstances they would know to be wrong).
3) an adgenda to promote a business
I had assumed #3 because they were ACs, but I suppose it could be either of the other reasons.
Chances are that if nobody understands the problems of VB, then they won't find advantages in other languages.
a va-web-apps-in-visual-basic-or-javascript/
If your product is all front-end and database, chances are VB is actually a fine choice--that's what it was designed for.
If your product involves significant design, routines that manipulate the data rather than just display it and/or many interacting pieces implemented by multiple programmers but designed by a smaller team of architects (as you will get in a larger project), VB narrows towards completely unusable.
For one thing, when you are architecting a project, it is much easier to "Think" OO in a more pure OO language (C# / Java). It is also more simple to transfer these designs to paper and to other engineers.
Refactoring, which should be constant and ruthless, is much more difficult in VB--last time I checked, in fact, VB basically encouraged C&P through their lack of dynamic form creation and some of their constructs.
There are also programmer/programmer issues in VB, defining an abstract interface between two areas, intelligently isolating code, etc. There are actually many reasons.
The problem is that if you have a team of VB developers, they are going to be completely capable of designing a VB app in any language. Also, if you have really good, experienced OO programmers and a talented architect, you will be able to create a fine app in VB.
My real recommendation would be to get an architect--someone who can design your product out to be maintainable and expandable in any language, and let them pick the most appropriate language for you.
As an alternative, I guess I'd say don't worry about it. Although I'd never recommend VB, if management is stuck on it and all the programmers know it, it's probably your best choice. As I said, you can write crappy VB code in any language, so you might as well do it in VB.
Besides, VB isn't as dead-end as it used to be:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/05/19/write-j
Seriously, 2 Pro-casino posts in reply to mine--both AC, both saying how "It's okay, go ahead and gamble, you can even win something because see there's all this money."?
Smells fishy to me.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised...
So it's subsidizing residential providers by charging more to companies providing high-bandwidth services to their users.
Interesting. I'm still on the fence as to the legitimacy of an operation like that--it could be legit, simply charging for all traffic that goes through your router in either direction. It would become a billing nightmare, but I'm not sure there's really anything wrong with it.
Where I would find a HUGE problem is if they were setting priorities based on the target's business model--for instance if they charged more for VOIP phone traffic.
If they really wanted to be fair, however, it would make more sense to charge the ISP of the high-traffic company. For instance, figure out all the byte counts coming in from/out to each ISP, then charge that ISP. The ISP would then charge their customer the appropriate amount. That would not get them the ability to offer a "Gold Level" Service however.
Okay, thanks, I get it. The ability to offer the "Gold Level" service (to have each ISP charge Google ITSELF for a smoother route) is what net neutrality is about. Sorry it took me so long to get there. And yes it seems like a pretty slimy thing to do--Guess it makes sense to make a decision on this practice one way or another.
It may not be outright/obviously "wrong", but what a billing nightmare. I can even see them creating a SPAA type association to collect fees (aka Insurance--you wouldn't want anything to happen to all this nice bandwidth now, would you?)
Okay, now I'm pretty firmly down on the side of this being a Bad Idea. Thanks again.
We have quite a few Indian casinos, and playing poker is legal in general. The online joints are probably taking revenues away from the state, so I'm not terribly surprised.
Besides, with unregulated online casinos running in another country, why on earth would anyone A) implement a casino without the ability to skim (Which could be completely invisible to anyone without some serious probabilities analysis tools and a lot of time to sit playtesting) or B) want to play said unregulated online casino?
At first thought it seemed like "Net Neutrality" was a great idea to stop those greedy phone companies from gouging customers they didn't like.
The more I think about it, the more I realize I still haven't seen every facet of this problem.
First: Everyone accepts that a company with a "Phat Pipe" will pay more if they go over a certain bandwidth limitation. Don't they already do this to the heaviest users? If not, why not? I would assume that when you get a Real Pipe into your business (say, OC-3 or above) that you pay an extreme premium.
So, is there some reason that they are not charging for high-bandwidth sites?
Now, there is one other issue that I would have a huge problem with. Are they asking to charge companies based on what services they wish to provide rather than simply the bandwidth they use? For instance, would they charge a Voip company more just because they were competing with them in the voice offering dept? That would be completely wrong/evil.
Finally, I was listening to a proponent of "Net Neutrality" today talking about how the phone companies are trying to "Double Charge" us by charging the consumer of a service as well as the provider of a service. Could their case be so bad that they have to come up with BS like that??? Everybody pays to connect to the net, everybody is a provider and everybody is a consumer. This is absolutely a non-issue and made me think that they really must not have a case.
I'll re-scan this thread to see if I can get answers to my questions, but anyone with input (or even an opinion) please reply and give me a hand.
Thanks
In general I agree with your point about companies being greedy, they usually are.
You completely ignored the following facts however and your ignoring them simply makes me feel you have an agenda:
Your original comment was that "Everything" google did was add driven. I gave you some examples of things that weren't and asked why you would ignore the facts and throw up a comment like that. You said nothing in reply. Why?
You mention that all their software is in beta. True, but all is more usable than most other corporate and open source products that are out of beta, again it sounds like you have an agenda.
You mentioned the best photo organizing package I've ever seen and said they didn't create any useful products. You left off Google earth, one of the most amazing and useful computer products EVER and SketchUp. Sounds like you are trying to adjust facts to suit an agenda again.
So, can you be surprised that I feel that there is some goal behind your comments? I was simply trying to figure it out so I could put what you said in perspective--I didn't understand it at all.
So while writing this the only thing I could come up with is maybe you believe strongly in open source--you are out to prove everything that isn't open source is corporate evil--and I do understand that some people treat the concept of open source almost religiously (Kind of the way people treat Google or Apple, perhaps that is the jealousy we noticed?)
The funny thing is (if I'm correct in my guess), this is very similar to my personal philosophy. I agree with your views against corporations and always have--because of the involvement of stockholders they must constantly pay attention to a bottom line that will constantly, slowly, drive each decision toward "Evil" (for lack of a better word)
However, I also feel that when the rare corporation stands out and tries to give a little more than they take (Google, IBM, Sun) even if it's just in one group or area, we should give credit rather than just dismissing it--Show to them that we appreciate their effort with community good will.
If my guess was wrong, please reply just once more and help me understand your motivations (rather than your stance, I get that).
if it's adware--which is what the Google stuff is no matter how "cool" they are--it's "value reduced".
Umm, perhaps I'm just not paying attention but I don't remember seeing adds in well almost any of google's apps.
Can you point out the adds in Picasa, Google Earth, Google Pack Screesaver, Writely or Sketchup? For that matter, i don't remember adds in Google Desktop, but I haven't looked lately.
All those programs are, as far as I remember add-free. Now, either point out the adds in those listed programs, or tell me what the hell it is in your personality that makes you attack a company that has given away for free some of the best, most innovative and most useful software I've seen to date.
Are you just rebelling because they actually ARE "cool" and you can't stand that you weren't somehow involved???
Just trying to figure out how you and more than a couple moderators came to this conclusion. Please help me understand.
This has a really desperate feel to it.
Historically microsoft would be the first to go ahead and implement something too slow or too large assuming that hardware will catch up.
Now, to implement a good structure like this ODF, okay so the current implementation of the READER tested a little slow, couldn't the READER be improved by some combination of caching and improved indexing?
Heck, if necessary I doubt there is anything out there saying that a different, more readable format couldn't also be saved--one that could open the first few pages instantly while the rest is parsed in the background.
Since Microsoft has gotten around this problem repeatedly, they MUST know that they are taking a last swing--to accost the format and not the algorithm that reads it is just too ignorant, even for them, to do by accident.
Most (all?) Ethernet hardware reads in an entire packet, looks at it, then sends it on to a destination. This makes building routers and switching hardware fairly easy but extremely slow.
If you go to a high-speed network, what you get is a packet being forwarded as it's being read. By the time the first few bits are through the switch, it should be able to figure out the next hop and have the packet moving in that direction. Phone companies have huge problems with the delays in Ethernet. This is why the ATM protocol was invented, it's hard to use, awkward and not too graceful, but it can fly through a switching network like nobody's business.
Ethernet is also extremely sloppy--Any switch along the way is allowed to throw a packet away and wait for the originator to resend causing a HUGE hiccupp in the communication stream (Most if not all routers do this whenever an address is not in it's forwarding table yet).
IIRC the faster protocols see a "Routing" packet in the stream and set up forwarding hardware before getting the actual packet/stream, then wait until the end of the packet (or entire stream) to tear the route down again.
Ethernet, however, due to it's simplicity is bridging the gaps. It's a pretty crappy protocol in general, but we keep throwing better, smarter hardware at it in an effort to brute-force it into the parameters we require. (I work for a company that makes Ethernet over fiber hardware, and have worked for companies based around ATM, SONET and other interesting solutions).
I guess the point of the article was to remind a world that is coming to believe that ethernet is the end-all be-all of networking that it was always just the simplest hack available and therefore the easiest to deal with.
Just like SNMP.
Good point, very few people recognize that a warning that pops up every single time that you do a "Valid" operation with a slight chance of being "Invalid" is barely more useful (and much more annoying) than no dialog at all.
I have to believe that MS would have (or will add) the ability to enable a class of operation, for instance, give the user the ability to create & delete all files within their profile without warning.
Also, hopefully, they will ship with reasonable defaults.
Not that I have any intentions of going any further down that road than I have to--I'll try to stick with XP for games and migrate towards Linus for everything else.
Are you saying that the keypad appears on a screen, with the numbers in a random order in the array? E.g., so that some person might get a keypad numbered [[6,2,9][5,4,7][8,1,3]] and the next person would get [[3,8,4][5,2,1][6,9,7]]?
That's how ours work here. Most of the time all our security keypads are dark. You use the RFID to light them up and randomize the number positions, then type in a 4-digit code.
In order to get in during off hours you must have MY badge and MY four digit code.
That said, during working hours it just takes a touch of the badge (but then, you can also walk in the front door half the time and not be challenged.)
Incremental compilation and inspecting the contents of a "live" object are fine - I remember them from my Smalltalk days. Unfortunately, the kind of IDE that allows it is huge (right now, Eclipse is taking 146 megabytes of RAM on my development box) and completely beyond what I expect to be available to OLPC computers.
Umm, I can (and have often did) use incremental compilation from the CLI with notepad. As for live inspection, blueJ is better than anything else I've seen out there and should run on a fairly small computer (I used to run it on a 64mb machine running '98 all the time).
Consistency is a strong point for Java. It is less consistent than some other languages - I like the "everything is an object" approach for teaching. I wouldn't want to explain primitive types.
Although I kind of agree--the compiler should be able to treat numbers as objects without any performance degradation, I don't think it's worth the fact that some people would use that bizarre 5.loop type syntax that still gives me shivers. This is just personal preference though and I'm sure some people have the same reaction to not being able to do it--but it totally breaks the consistency of the language to see crap like that. I still get nervous when using "abc".compareTo(str) in java for the same reason... just doesn't fit with the rest of the code.
And moving some library calls inside the language may be a good thing. Just think how regexp support within Perl or list/set/dictionary support in Python make them easy to use languages for many purposes (although I wouldn't want to do a huge thing in Perl).
Please go into more detail here--I think this is my biggest lack of understanding and possibly the widest gap in our communication. I really don't understand why having to learn a new "Pattern" of commands is better than making a library call. This is probably the biggest thing I don't understand. On top of remembering extra bizarre syntax, when it's embedded into a language don't you also lose the ability to easily replace it with another implementation?
With Java I often spend 50% of the time setting up "safety nets" for typing, potential problems and such.
?
Wow. What are you saying? How do you transfer your design from paper into a language and still have problems with types? Is it in translation or design? I have never had a single issue with type casting and the like.
In fact, the only time I have had a serious problem was with the binding classes in the JGoodies binding package because he tried to use the Smalltalk theory of making all classes descend from a single root class then use that root class in calls everywhere--this was the most confusing code library I've ever had to use. Every method call took the same object type, so for any given call it was never obvious which sub-type needed to be passed in, or exactly how one object needed to be constructed in order to be connected to the next object.
By all means, grab one of these "newer" languages (Python is older than Java, AFAIK and Smalltalk is the granddaddy of OOP) and play with them. Always keep your mind set on how a child migh relate to what is on screen.
I played with Python before Java came out, and occasionally since. It has too much feature creep and is kind of one of those "Scripty" languages with an unwieldy language definition and, iirc, the ability to create variables on the fly which is an immediate language-killer, one of the worst language sins possible.
You will realise there are many better tools to teach programming just like there are many ways to teach how to cut trees better (and safer) than a chainsaw.
Haven't seen one yet. Small language definition, strong typing, the ability to easily construct classes and useful subclasses, garbage collection so you can focus on decent OO Design.. All the parts are there. If you combine it with an environment like BlueJ I can't imagine a better training environment.
Plus, like
Interesting concept. I've worked at smaller companies and start ups most of my life and always had full control over my computer. Actually, I worked for ADP for a while which is a pretty big company and still had admin rights.
However, if larger companies are locking down the computers, that means that the types of applications run on the typical computer will be cut down severely.
If you are going to do that anyway, why not run Linux? The core apps needed for a typical computer could be run in Linux (Office, email, web). Any apps with Java clients should work fine in Linux, and these days, apps that can't run directly in Linux can be run under a VM or web browser.
The admin cost would be pretty near zero if you are actually locking the computers down. Any problem on a PC simply involves reloading the correct image.
I'm not normally a big pro Linux or Pro Microsoft person, I've been standing back and waiting for the dust to settle. The biggest drawback of Linux to me is installing new software--if that's all done at the admin level, there is very little to differentiate Microsoft any more.
I agree that multiple languages are a great idea. Every good programmer needs a little assembly, and all should play with a few of the more esoteric languages.
Personally I'm not sure what you are talking about with the edit/compile/test cycle, how else do you do it? Maybe you have found some fantastic methodology of which I need to be informed.
With me, I am constantly doing exactly that. Edit 2 lines, run a test, test the app, close it, edit a little more.
I wonder if you are trying to claim that because a scripting language isn't compiled, it's faster. I can't imagine you would be making such an argument since you must recognize that incremental builds used for that type of testing cycle take less than 2 seconds, so what is it?
Also, I don't really understand how Java is more difficult than any other given language. The consistent and accessible documentation makes it much easier than any other I've tried. Also, there are fewer stupid programmer tricks to get yourself tangled up with.
I'm really curious as to what the differences are. Do you feel that moving library calls into language constructs is really that useful? Could you maybe give me an example of what I'm not understanding--I admit that my use of the newest batch of languages has been minimal over the last few years, but I do still keep tabs and have seen very few things that excite me and many that terrify me
(I'm still aghast that languages are being created that allow soft typing, even with an option for strong typing. A few years ago I'd still run into the occasional VB programmer that didn't know what "Option Explicit" was--a good case for immediate termination, or at least complete retraining if I ever heard of one)
The original comment was that java was a language that would scare children.
I learned in basic, then assembly, then C, pretty much on my own. The worst part was probably that I started in Basic, unless I'm severly mistaken, Java would have been a much nicer thing to start with.
For one thing, you never have to deal with the horrors of loose typing. You don't have to deal with random syntax and 20 ways to specify a single concept. If you want a loop in Java, you pretty much have a few simple, consistant tools to choose from.
Throughout the entire proccess of learning and using a language, you should have consistancy and readability, and I have yet to see a language that gives you more than Java.
As for the tricks, like being able to append a looping construct to an integer, I really can't see the advantage. What are you honestly saving?
Go teach them Python, Boo or Ruby.
fears confirmed. Have you ever worked on the same codebase with more than 10 people in your life?
Working in a large-scale development environment requires many many more considerations than weather or not you program within a GUI.
If you think that things like number of keystrokes or speed of initial prototype are more important than documentation or reuse then you just need a little more experience.
In the meantime, as I said, I wouldn't be spraying my lack of experience about so readily if I were you, but that's just me.
You are correct, That optimization could be done by the user. Most of the others can't because C/C++ doesn't have the run time component, and the ones that can require some specialized code.
Google Java C speed comparison, or do you need me to do it for you?
Even peoploe who are pro-C come up with decent comparisions for java. Why shouldn't they, Java compiles to machine language anyway.
Except for certain math co-processor functions used for 3-d graphics, Java is rarely less than 50% as fast as C and often significantly faster.
If that seems counter-intuitive, consider that java compiles into machine code (at run time) that is run time-optimized.
For instance, if it notices that it's frequently calling a series of functions with a certain set of values and those functions don't change state, it could calculate the return and skip calling the function altogether.
Although that may not be an exact representation of what's going on, some of the optimizations are much more tricky, and they are across the board. These are things that C and C++ (and even assembly) physically can't compete with.
Here's another trick, one C++ can't compete with. In an OO language, you often allocate thousands of objects a second--that's extremely typical. In C++, it is necessary to spend execution time to physically recover the space of each object that has been allocated. In Java, the management process has gotten to the point where all it does is reserve the few objects it wants to keep then wipe the rest of the objects at once (like returning from a call, you recover the entire stack at once but for permanent heap memory instead of stack memory)
Or are you talking about the physical size of the JRE? It's 13mb, I'm not sure how much it expands to but considering that it's mostly a jar (compressed already), it should be much more efficient that C/C++ libraries. On top of that, since none of it's statically linked, each nontrivial Java app placed on the laptop should be smaller than the equivalent C/C++ app (Especially since byte code was invented to reduce size first--it was used in Excel to reduce code size long before Java was invented)
So, umm, in what way won't it fit?
Oh, and on top of that, to say something like java will scare kids away reveals much more about what kind of a programmer you are than I'd personally be comfortable with myself.
Umm, not really an open source fanatic, in fact I find myself attacking it more than defending it these days (I'm very against java going open source).
I am, however, wondering why on earth a poster would refer to "Commerical" software when that is totally irrelivant except to Microsoft.
The only reason that I can think is that they have some interest in microsoft that goes beyond fair-and-balanced. They may not be paid, may just be a fanboy, I don't know; but it's really the same effect.
I realize that you could do what you said with IE3 if you only visited two sites and they were secure, but wtf are you talking about putting an unpatched windows install on the network naked? Are you on drugs--it's been proven repeatedly that it would be compromized and rootkited within hours.
Your post is honestly as flakey as the original. Do they give you guys a bunch of sheets to type talking points from, then tell you to cover each others asses if someone notices the BS and figures out that you are being paid?