(Going by IDC numbers-- Netcraft only counts servers active on the web, most Windows servers are Active Directory, File Servers, Exchange Servers or Printer Servers and not on the web.)
I thought IBM's business model was selling clients completely broken software (Lotus Notes, for example), then selling expensive contractors to fix it to but almost-but-not-quite-as-bad as Outlook. This business model requires talking directly to C*O level employees, and skipping everybody in the organization who actually has to *use* the software (and especially people who have to support it), of course.
I mean, say what you want about Microsoft, but at least their software works out-of-the-box.
Let me ask you a simple question: why is the government still paying "Science Applications International Corp." if they have failed in their task?
When you can answer that question, you will understand the zen of government waste.
And if you think the private sector is any better, you're living in a fantasy land.
First of all, even if the private sector was ten thousand times *worse*, that's completely irrelevant to the conversation. This is just replying "but but... Windows has the same problem!" any time someone points out a weakness in Linux. Who cares?
But secondly, if you do care about that (even though it's not relevant to the conversation), at least the private sector isn't wasting money it took from private citizens at gunpoint. Which is basically what taxes are, when you boil it down a bit. They're wasting their own money, which they're perfectly entitled to do.
How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.
It's actually pretty hard if you're an entity like New York City, dealing with dozens of unions, all of which have their own contracts negotiated with completely different rates, clauses, classifications of hours, etc. Just codifying all of the union contracts into the system is a significant investment of time, and you need to have ongoing support for when the contracts are re-negotiated each year.
This isn't government corruption. It's private enterprise. The idea is that government is fundamentally incompetent.
But in this case, they are.
The government hired these contractors who can't get shit done. The government has "renegotiated" the delivery date every single time the project has been late. I mean, seriously, what aren't you getting about this?
Are the contractors to blame? Yes, of course. They shouldn't have taken work they couldn't complete on-time and on-budget. But the government is the one *still paying them*. A competently-run organization would have kicked these developers to the curb ages ago.
This way of thinking has brought us multi-billion-dollar FAA upgrades that didn't work, new IRS d-bases that failed utterly, and created a whole industry of government contractors whose sole function in life is to transfer tax money from your pocket to theirs.
That industry of government contractors exists for two reasons:
1) Because the government *sucks* at managing projects. If they tried to pull that shit in the private sector, they'd be out of business in no time flat. (Dilbert-esque corporations can manage this one too, BTW. But most avoid it.)
2) Governments frequently pass laws to interfere in the process. For example, in Washington State, it's *far* more important for your contracting company to be owned by a minority than to be competent. Someone decided that minority-owned businesses don't do well enough, and so passed a law that gives them a huge head start when bidding for government contracts.
Both of those reasons? Both are the government's fault. The first because the government doesn't oversee projects, and the second because the government doesn't prioritize competence when accepting bids.
Your argument here makes no sense. Does the commercial consulting company deserve blame? Yes. But the government is allowing themselves to get stomped all over by them, and that's much worse.
Maybe you could stop running giant ad campaigns (bus, billboard, web...) telling me to get my swine flu shot. How much did that ad campaign cost? And while we're at it, why don't you stop making new lotto games and spending tons of money advertising them as well? And how much do we spend putting giant "click it or ticket" billboards along every highway? I think it's safe to assume people know that there's a seatbelt law at this point.
Wow, if you actually *like* the templates in C++, I guess we just need to agree we'll never agree on the issue.
But thanks for confirming you actually benchmarked it. So many people do not, and dismiss far superior languages with no actual data backing them up. I can see you're not in that category.
So it can't be written in.net for religious reasons, i.e. not free. That makes sense, but it's hardly an AHAHAHAHA situation.
There's also the minor detail that the wikitext parser's behaviour is literally defined as "whatever the parser PHP code happens to do" and is provably not describable in EBNF.
That just means the current Wikipedia can't be *ported* to.net. That doesn't say anything about whether it could be written in.net, so is irrelevant to this discussion.
But the main reason is that you're an aggressive socially-crippled nerd who shouts rather than bothering to do his own homework and who thinks other people have to prove an assertion isn't true.
I just want people to give reasons for their opinions to prevent this site from filling up with even more bullshit than is normally piled here, is that too much to ask? I guess so.
To ask a stupid question, have you ever tried benchmarking your code in another language, or did you just automatically assume "fast = C++" without any research at all? If the latter (which I assume is the case), then I'm going to put you in the "habit" category.
To make a stupid observation, you left out C as a viable choice. It's a lot like C++, but with fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot. (Also, you used to be able to natively compile Java, I'm not sure if that's still the case.)
Well, I guess *writing* the application may or may not suck-- I've never done it. But I've yet to see a single half-decent GUI app in Java, which tells me that making one is so difficult that nobody's yet achieved it. (Or possibly that Java coders universally do not give a shit if their product sucks.)
Care to give some examples?
I'd actually love to see a *counter*-example. What Java GUI app has a UI that doesn't blow goats on every platform it runs on? The nicest I've seen is Eclipse, and it's still wrong in many ways on Windows (and awful on Mac.)
If you want to write apps specific to Windows, and have a ton of money to throw away on proprietary, super expensive microsoft tools, C# works.
Tools to develop in C# are free. Stop spreading FUD.
Well, no, no I don't - his statement is self-evidently blitheringly stupid.
It's not fucking self-evident. Answer the fucking question.
Wikipedia is just a simple front-end to a database. Why, exactly, couldn't it be written in.net? Why couldn't it be written in Java, or Python, or Ruby, or almost any language?
Programming is programming; it's a discipline independent of anything else. It involves logic, but not math. (Unless you include logic in math, in which case the answer to this question is "duh" and there's no point in having this discussion.)
If you're writing a program in a domain where math is important, for example calculating spaceship orbits or rendering 3D graphics, then math is important. This is also kind of a duh.
But here's the fun part: if you're writing a program in a domain where accounting is important, then the principles of accounting are far more important than anything else. If you're writing a program to run a coffeemaker, knowledge of making espresso is more important than knowledge of math. If you're writing a front-end to a database, then you need to know the principles of good GUI design much more-so than math.
Math isn't something fundamental to computer programming, it's simply a problem domain like any other. You can write a program to do accounting, you can write a program to schedule meetings, you can write a program to make coffee-- each of those problem domains are perfectly valid, and yet don't include anything like linear algebra in them.
Last time we had a discussion like this, I mentioned that colleges would better serve their students by teaching them GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) rather than advanced math, because the number of graduates working with money is an order of magnitude higher than the number working with, say, calculating orbits. I stand by that.
I don't want a super-math-nerd programming GUIs, for example. I can't even come close to imagining a scenario where they'd make anything even resembling usable.
I no longer expect any privacy from my government.
Pretty sure the US Government (I'm not sure which Government you're under; you didn't specify) never promised you privacy in the first place. You could change that with a Constitutional Amendment, but it wouldn't be easy.
What the hell has happend to us as a country? Has it always been this fucked and we just have the means to know about it now? Or were things truly better back int he day?
It's always been fucked, and in fact it's better now than at any time in history. Hell, even the summary mentions innocent people being put into concentration camps here in the United States-- is that the "back in the day" you want to experience? Concentration camps?
What you're experiencing is called "nostalgia." It *should* be treated as a psychological disorder, like any number of other delusions, but instead it's, unfortunately, seen as normal.
Maybe you want to write a GUI app. Java does, and always has, sucked at it, while C# (even in Mono) is pretty good at it.
Frankly, in this day and age, I don't see any reason at all to use C++ other than: 1) established, large, codebase; 2) habit. It's long been shown that languages with automatic memory management are easier and quicker to write, and end up with fewer bugs that are more easily fixed. Plus C/C++ have tons of unsafe hard-to-use functions still in the standard library... let's finally put an end to buffer overflow bugs, please!
Java, C#, Ruby, Python-- whatever you use is fine, but not C++. Please not C++.
You have to actually produce reasons here, not just type AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. After you've come up with a couple of compelling reasons, then you can move on to the all-caps laughing.
(Although the WMF Lucene search implementation was done in C# on Mono for a while, when Java wasn't yet sufficiently free software. It ran at half the speed of the Java version.)
Ok... is this relevant to anything at all? "Mono sucks." Yes, we all already knew that. But Mono isn't the only.net runtime... which does nothing to address De Icaza's point above.
6.) Weapon decals that made sense-- the rocket launcher didn't protrude through your chest or somehow come up between your legs, it was on your shoulder like it should be
7.) Marathon 2: very early (first?) use of 3D environmental sound, replacing music
1) OpenGL and C++ are both multi-platform, so I don't get why you need something specifically aimed at Linux. You can't just translate Windows C++ samples?
2) Since video games aren't CPU-bound anymore, and since Python is a *much* cleaner and easier language than C++, and since Python has OpenGL libraries available-- why?
The only benefit you're going to get from this is the knowledge that C++ kind of sucks compared to Python. I can tell you that right now and save a lot of time.
Meritocracy is also misleading, though. It could simply be the person who has the most *free time* to do the work, not the person who does the best work.
Yes, but there is a noise level of "people gripe about every change, no matter how minor." You have to be able to separate the people with genuine complaints from the people griping because it's different-- that's not an easy task!
Making it even worse, on the Internet, a single complainer can look like a dozen or more different people with very little effort.
I don't see why IE remaining on the machine matters, if another browser is installed and set as default.
Maybe you haven't used Windows in awhile, but in Vista and Windows 7, if you set another browser as default, *every icon in the OS* changes to that browser. You really have to make an effort to get to IE once you've set Firefox to default, and the average user is probably not going to find it. (Well, it's still in All Programs, but the icon on the desktop and in the quick launch are gone.)
Plus, this way the computer still works for those (poorly-written, but pretty common) browsers that have IE hard-coded into them. Otherwise, you're just punishing the user.
Microsoft's hosting the website, so presumably only they have the analytics data to tell what people are choosing on the ballet. They probably won't release that data unless someone forces them to, but it would be interesting to see.
Well, if it's a woosh it's a woosh. I still think it's more likely to be a typo for "web server". Which will now be played-off as if it was a joke all-along, so I lose either way! Damn.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's "only" preferred 3:1 there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_market_share#Servers
(Going by IDC numbers-- Netcraft only counts servers active on the web, most Windows servers are Active Directory, File Servers, Exchange Servers or Printer Servers and not on the web.)
I thought IBM's business model was selling clients completely broken software (Lotus Notes, for example), then selling expensive contractors to fix it to but almost-but-not-quite-as-bad as Outlook. This business model requires talking directly to C*O level employees, and skipping everybody in the organization who actually has to *use* the software (and especially people who have to support it), of course.
I mean, say what you want about Microsoft, but at least their software works out-of-the-box.
Let me ask you a simple question: why is the government still paying "Science Applications International Corp." if they have failed in their task?
When you can answer that question, you will understand the zen of government waste.
And if you think the private sector is any better, you're living in a fantasy land.
First of all, even if the private sector was ten thousand times *worse*, that's completely irrelevant to the conversation. This is just replying "but but... Windows has the same problem!" any time someone points out a weakness in Linux. Who cares?
But secondly, if you do care about that (even though it's not relevant to the conversation), at least the private sector isn't wasting money it took from private citizens at gunpoint. Which is basically what taxes are, when you boil it down a bit. They're wasting their own money, which they're perfectly entitled to do.
How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.
It's actually pretty hard if you're an entity like New York City, dealing with dozens of unions, all of which have their own contracts negotiated with completely different rates, clauses, classifications of hours, etc. Just codifying all of the union contracts into the system is a significant investment of time, and you need to have ongoing support for when the contracts are re-negotiated each year.
That said, there's still no excuse for this.
This isn't government corruption. It's private enterprise. The idea is that government is fundamentally incompetent.
But in this case, they are.
The government hired these contractors who can't get shit done. The government has "renegotiated" the delivery date every single time the project has been late. I mean, seriously, what aren't you getting about this?
Are the contractors to blame? Yes, of course. They shouldn't have taken work they couldn't complete on-time and on-budget. But the government is the one *still paying them*. A competently-run organization would have kicked these developers to the curb ages ago.
This way of thinking has brought us multi-billion-dollar FAA upgrades that didn't work, new IRS d-bases that failed utterly, and created a whole industry of government contractors whose sole function in life is to transfer tax money from your pocket to theirs.
That industry of government contractors exists for two reasons:
1) Because the government *sucks* at managing projects. If they tried to pull that shit in the private sector, they'd be out of business in no time flat. (Dilbert-esque corporations can manage this one too, BTW. But most avoid it.)
2) Governments frequently pass laws to interfere in the process. For example, in Washington State, it's *far* more important for your contracting company to be owned by a minority than to be competent. Someone decided that minority-owned businesses don't do well enough, and so passed a law that gives them a huge head start when bidding for government contracts.
Both of those reasons? Both are the government's fault. The first because the government doesn't oversee projects, and the second because the government doesn't prioritize competence when accepting bids.
Your argument here makes no sense. Does the commercial consulting company deserve blame? Yes. But the government is allowing themselves to get stomped all over by them, and that's much worse.
Modest? It's already high enough. Changing the property tax to a "modest" one would lower it.
Hey I know, Washington!
Maybe you could stop running giant ad campaigns (bus, billboard, web...) telling me to get my swine flu shot. How much did that ad campaign cost? And while we're at it, why don't you stop making new lotto games and spending tons of money advertising them as well? And how much do we spend putting giant "click it or ticket" billboards along every highway? I think it's safe to assume people know that there's a seatbelt law at this point.
Christ.
I'd thought that after all this time he was finally wising up and accepting what everyone else on the planet was saying.
I wasn't saying that. Don't put words in my mouth.
Wow, if you actually *like* the templates in C++, I guess we just need to agree we'll never agree on the issue.
But thanks for confirming you actually benchmarked it. So many people do not, and dismiss far superior languages with no actual data backing them up. I can see you're not in that category.
So it can't be written in .net for religious reasons, i.e. not free. That makes sense, but it's hardly an AHAHAHAHA situation.
There's also the minor detail that the wikitext parser's behaviour is literally defined as "whatever the parser PHP code happens to do" and is provably not describable in EBNF.
That just means the current Wikipedia can't be *ported* to .net. That doesn't say anything about whether it could be written in .net, so is irrelevant to this discussion.
But the main reason is that you're an aggressive socially-crippled nerd who shouts rather than bothering to do his own homework and who thinks other people have to prove an assertion isn't true.
I just want people to give reasons for their opinions to prevent this site from filling up with even more bullshit than is normally piled here, is that too much to ask? I guess so.
To ask a stupid question, have you ever tried benchmarking your code in another language, or did you just automatically assume "fast = C++" without any research at all? If the latter (which I assume is the case), then I'm going to put you in the "habit" category.
To make a stupid observation, you left out C as a viable choice. It's a lot like C++, but with fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot. (Also, you used to be able to natively compile Java, I'm not sure if that's still the case.)
How does writing a GUI app suck in Java?
Well, I guess *writing* the application may or may not suck-- I've never done it. But I've yet to see a single half-decent GUI app in Java, which tells me that making one is so difficult that nobody's yet achieved it. (Or possibly that Java coders universally do not give a shit if their product sucks.)
Care to give some examples?
I'd actually love to see a *counter*-example. What Java GUI app has a UI that doesn't blow goats on every platform it runs on? The nicest I've seen is Eclipse, and it's still wrong in many ways on Windows (and awful on Mac.)
If you want to write apps specific to Windows, and have a ton of money to throw away on proprietary, super expensive microsoft tools, C# works.
Tools to develop in C# are free. Stop spreading FUD.
Well, no, no I don't - his statement is self-evidently blitheringly stupid.
It's not fucking self-evident. Answer the fucking question.
Wikipedia is just a simple front-end to a database. Why, exactly, couldn't it be written in .net? Why couldn't it be written in Java, or Python, or Ruby, or almost any language?
I think people are looking at the problem wrong.
Programming is programming; it's a discipline independent of anything else. It involves logic, but not math. (Unless you include logic in math, in which case the answer to this question is "duh" and there's no point in having this discussion.)
If you're writing a program in a domain where math is important, for example calculating spaceship orbits or rendering 3D graphics, then math is important. This is also kind of a duh.
But here's the fun part: if you're writing a program in a domain where accounting is important, then the principles of accounting are far more important than anything else. If you're writing a program to run a coffeemaker, knowledge of making espresso is more important than knowledge of math. If you're writing a front-end to a database, then you need to know the principles of good GUI design much more-so than math.
Math isn't something fundamental to computer programming, it's simply a problem domain like any other. You can write a program to do accounting, you can write a program to schedule meetings, you can write a program to make coffee-- each of those problem domains are perfectly valid, and yet don't include anything like linear algebra in them.
Last time we had a discussion like this, I mentioned that colleges would better serve their students by teaching them GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) rather than advanced math, because the number of graduates working with money is an order of magnitude higher than the number working with, say, calculating orbits. I stand by that.
Depends on the type of program.
I don't want a super-math-nerd programming GUIs, for example. I can't even come close to imagining a scenario where they'd make anything even resembling usable.
I no longer expect any privacy from my government.
Pretty sure the US Government (I'm not sure which Government you're under; you didn't specify) never promised you privacy in the first place. You could change that with a Constitutional Amendment, but it wouldn't be easy.
What the hell has happend to us as a country? Has it always been this fucked and we just have the means to know about it now? Or were things truly better back int he day?
It's always been fucked, and in fact it's better now than at any time in history. Hell, even the summary mentions innocent people being put into concentration camps here in the United States-- is that the "back in the day" you want to experience? Concentration camps?
What you're experiencing is called "nostalgia." It *should* be treated as a psychological disorder, like any number of other delusions, but instead it's, unfortunately, seen as normal.
Maybe you want to write a GUI app. Java does, and always has, sucked at it, while C# (even in Mono) is pretty good at it.
Frankly, in this day and age, I don't see any reason at all to use C++ other than: 1) established, large, codebase; 2) habit. It's long been shown that languages with automatic memory management are easier and quicker to write, and end up with fewer bugs that are more easily fixed. Plus C/C++ have tons of unsafe hard-to-use functions still in the standard library... let's finally put an end to buffer overflow bugs, please!
Java, C#, Ruby, Python-- whatever you use is fine, but not C++. Please not C++.
Wikipedia? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no. Really, no.
Why not?
You have to actually produce reasons here, not just type AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. After you've come up with a couple of compelling reasons, then you can move on to the all-caps laughing.
(Although the WMF Lucene search implementation was done in C# on Mono for a while, when Java wasn't yet sufficiently free software. It ran at half the speed of the Java version.)
Ok... is this relevant to anything at all? "Mono sucks." Yes, we all already knew that. But Mono isn't the only .net runtime... which does nothing to address De Icaza's point above.
4.) Multiple multiplayer modes
5.) Voice-chat in multiplayer (yes, really!)
6.) Weapon decals that made sense-- the rocket launcher didn't protrude through your chest or somehow come up between your legs, it was on your shoulder like it should be
7.) Marathon 2: very early (first?) use of 3D environmental sound, replacing music
1) OpenGL and C++ are both multi-platform, so I don't get why you need something specifically aimed at Linux. You can't just translate Windows C++ samples?
2) Since video games aren't CPU-bound anymore, and since Python is a *much* cleaner and easier language than C++, and since Python has OpenGL libraries available-- why?
The only benefit you're going to get from this is the knowledge that C++ kind of sucks compared to Python. I can tell you that right now and save a lot of time.
Meritocracy is also misleading, though. It could simply be the person who has the most *free time* to do the work, not the person who does the best work.
Yes, but there is a noise level of "people gripe about every change, no matter how minor." You have to be able to separate the people with genuine complaints from the people griping because it's different-- that's not an easy task!
Making it even worse, on the Internet, a single complainer can look like a dozen or more different people with very little effort.
I don't see why IE remaining on the machine matters, if another browser is installed and set as default.
Maybe you haven't used Windows in awhile, but in Vista and Windows 7, if you set another browser as default, *every icon in the OS* changes to that browser. You really have to make an effort to get to IE once you've set Firefox to default, and the average user is probably not going to find it. (Well, it's still in All Programs, but the icon on the desktop and in the quick launch are gone.)
Plus, this way the computer still works for those (poorly-written, but pretty common) browsers that have IE hard-coded into them. Otherwise, you're just punishing the user.
Microsoft's hosting the website, so presumably only they have the analytics data to tell what people are choosing on the ballet. They probably won't release that data unless someone forces them to, but it would be interesting to see.
Well, if it's a woosh it's a woosh. I still think it's more likely to be a typo for "web server". Which will now be played-off as if it was a joke all-along, so I lose either way! Damn.