I am a sprint subscriber and had switched my voice mail handling to google voice for a couple of months while using my existing number. I found that it was not as reliable as sprint's visual voice mail, with notifications sometimes coming in hours after the call. Also though gv rates for international dialing are great the quality of the connection is lacking compared to using sprint's long distance service.
Go is mainly meant to be used for systems development not application development. It's audience is developers who currently use C/C++ rather than mobile developers coding in Java.
Why couldn't it replace Java? From reading about it and my limited use of it I get the impression that it's meant to be able to replace C or C++ but it's also meant to be used to write applications as a replacement for a language like Java. The libraries and API stability are lacking, but I don't see any language issues that would make it a bad application language.
I'd say that you should take your time with interop, and practice isolationism for as long as possible. I don't mind waiting for Go to evolve naturally.
Java still has a few killer features that Go doesn't. Primarily, running in a VM and "interpreting" byte code means you can ship a single binary to every platform. Go requires you to compile a separate executable for every platform.
Having to run in a VM is also seen as a drawback by some people, including me. The VM startup time makes using command line tools written in Java painful and Java apps often feel awkward on every platform since they don't use any platform specific features. So even though having a single binary work across all platforms is a killer feature for some people it's yet another disadvantage of java for others.
Despite that being its stated purpose it is an excellent general purpose programming language; GC, 'true' interfaces, i.e. interfaces that are implemented simply by a type having a function set which matches a specified interface, and a lot more - it's simple, clean and obviously has a great future ahead of it.
There's no reason to label go as simply a systems programming language in the same way you can't just label python or ruby scripting languages.
If you talk to people in the Go community you'll see that they interpret "systems programming" to mean both OS-level development and applications-level development.
Users interact with applications, things a user doesn't directly interact with are systems. Where you draw the line is really dependent on what you're doing.
Someone recently described academia as 'Java vocational training'[1].
I'd expect Go to replace Java in the academic context relatively quickly, which should precipitate a shift in business' center of gravity over time. I already suggest Go to people who are serious about learning.
Why would you expect go to replace java in an academic setting? Java is only partly taught due to introductory simplicity and mostly taught due to it ubiquity.
Personally, I'd be surprised if Go replaced Java in academic contexts. Java has inertia, marketability, better cross-platform support, and bundled GUI stuff.
That said, were I teaching a general programming and/or data structures course, I'd probably strongly consider using Go. It is possible and not unreasonable for students to read and understand the whole Go spec. The language is simple and orthogonal enough that I think students could start seeing past the language and to the tasks at hand rather quickly.
Reference counting is available in C++ through the use of smart pointers ( ex. boost::shared_ptr ). In fact unlike Objective C there is no need to explicitly increment/decrement the reference count.
Yes, but the problem is that it's just one approach out of many, so when using other libraries and APIs, you have no consistency. (For example, you'll have to wrap their classes in your refcounting scheme, and unwrap when passing them back in.)
Since you mentioned scooters, I tend to rent those regularly on vacations, for those considering one make sure you get one with large diameter wheels ( ex. http://vtwincyclemotorcyclescooter.com/wp-content/uploads/20... ) rather than something like a vespa. You only sacrifice a little bit of agility for a big boost in safety.
I use password composer (http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/PasswordCompos...) which does an md5 hash of the url and the master password of your choosing to generate a unique password for each website. The extensions for chrome and firefox make it very convenient to use.
Where are you getting that number for Skype from?
In October, 2009, they had 521 million registered users, and 40 million registered users in the preceeding 3 months: http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/skype-hits-521-million-user...
That would indicate to me they likely have more than 50 million active users.
Additionally, when someone buys an iPhone, they are not going to use that phone for the rest of their life. People who already have iPhones will buy new models. Others will migrate from iPhone to other phones. So just based on the number of phones sold, you can't tell when it will "catch up".
Furthermore, as Skype runs on the iPhone (over 3G as well now), iPhone users can also be Skype users.
I got it based on the number of active users, not registered users. Everyone who has registered for Skype ever counts as a registered user. I got my numbers here:
You're right that you can't tell when the iPhone will catch up purely based on those numbers. I'd say it's a smart bet, though, that it won't be long. We know that Apple has already sold a few million iPhone 4s, and I'll bet that it sells somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million before the next iPhone comes out.
You're also right that you can Skype on the iPhone. We don't yet know how good Skype video chat will be on the iPhone, how it will compare to FaceTime, or how many people will use it instead of FaceTime. We also don't know who else (if anyone) will use the FaceTime protocol.
However, we do know that every iPhone 4 comes with FaceTime enabled, that it is trivial to use, and that it is integrated in the phone and contacts at the system level. All of this softens the significance of Skype's apparent head start.
Same here, got two EVO's on a family plan both have about than 1/2 charge left at the end of the day after heavy usage throughout the day. As other people have said it's easy to see what drains your battery on android phone, but I guess the author of the article was more interested in sensationalism than chasing after facts.
Ditto in NYC. You'd be surprised ( or at least I was ) to find out that certain salads are quite the calorie bombs while other dishes ( ex. pasta bolognese ) have far fewer calories than you'd think.
I was thinking the same thing about NYC (though I don't live there) as I remembered reading that a study found it did have an impact on people's eating habits:
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/starbucks.html
