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Nat Demos Dashboard
pheared writes "Nat Friedman from Ximian gave a fairly in depth, quite hilarious (got embarrassing screensaver?), and somewhat impromptu, talk about his project "Dashboard" at OLS. From his blog: "The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time." Neat stuff, but I don't think I will be warming up to Mono and C# any time soon."
A hackers dreams come true? Get a log of everything you did today or in the past, all kinds of data passwords etc. all on a golden platter ?! What are the security features in this thing?
In fact, the more knee jerk, unsubstantiated, unjustified snide throwaway comments I read about .net and C#, the more inclined I am to think that I'm seeing Ludditism writ large, and that .net is something that I should be taking a look at sooner rather than later if I want to stay employed in the tech business.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Agreed, especially true because the full Dashboard system is written in a range of languages - the plugins/backends tend to use whatever languages are best for integration with the software. It's certainly not a pure .NET app, not by any stretch.
You don't have a problem with people trying to do the RA better, right?
As always, if you think something doesn't suck then prove it. Everything I've seen of .NET has looked retarded to the point of making Java seem almost decent. If you can provide some good examples of why .NET, Java, or gas powered vacuum cleaners are useful tools then I'd be glad to change my view. I don't like most things Microsoft (excepting Flight Simulator) but my dislike for .NET stems 100% from .NET itself. I wouldn't have liked it coming from anyone. I like Ximian but I don't care fot their Mono obsession.
I sort of agree that it's lame to make snide remarks in story postings not directly related to the topic but I don't think it'd be appropiate to edit postings.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
...and yes, I think you will find it useful.
Seriously, there will be a signal to noise ratio to begin with... but the concept of related information - it's like if someone did "pop up videos" information blurbs for all your computing needs...
So until you can start adding extra memory units to your brain - something like this may prove itself very useful indeed.
BlackNova Traders
Actually, whenever you think you have a point (wether something sucks or not - it works both way you know), you have to make it, not just state it. You merely gave your opinion on the
That said, you're right on the story editing. If the story is worth to be posted, so be it, but it's good question to ask wether this story, as it is stated, should have been accepted.
Oh well, this is Slashdot after all.
I currently have two machines sitting in front of me, one of which runs my "Microsoft" development environment (Visual Studio.NET, C++, C#) and the other my Java development environment (Eclipse). I use all three languages more or less on a daily basis, and I don't think I have any latent bias other than what actually works for me. From this perspective (pun intended) I would make the following observations:
if (!Directory.Exists(str)) Directory.CreateDirectory(str);
So what exactly is wrong with .NET? If you need to work on the Windows platform it's a godsend!
Peer Pressure
It's been my opinion for some time that the editors have actually been encouraged to put jabs like that in, just for the sake of inflating threads (and subsequently, revenue from ad banners).
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
"...shun all things .net - just because it has nothing to do with microsoft?"
Basically this sums it up for quiet a few people. You see the simple truth is you can only be burned by something so many times before you learn. You obviously have not, but I am sure you will get there if this does not do it to you when everything is said and done. Agreements, standards, rationale, etc - none of these things mean anything when dealing with Microsoft. Look at how many companies have teamed up with MS and look what happens to them - by the way, it's not limited to companies; look at their customers too...
The only thing demonstrated by MS is that they will do what ever it takes to hinder/reduce/eliminate competition which in and of itself is not a bad thing, but when it is done illegally they rob you of things you obviously haven't begun to understand yet.
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
The argument to favor .NET because of Mono is like the argument to use GIF because Unisys said they would not enforce patents. In the future, Microsoft is likely to shift positions (possibly many times). Licensing terms could easily make this a non-viable solution because of legal issues.
But even on the technical side of things, I suspect that Mono will not become the write-once run anywhere panacea. There will be advancement, but it will devolve into a situation similar to the World Wide Web. Where HTML is HTML, but there are different versions, different browsers, and resultingly different bugs to work around. This results in de facto standards that supercede the official standard, like working around IE CSS bugs.
You are mistaken about Microsoft and OS/2. Microsoft really believed that OS/2 was the future. I worked at Microsoft in the early 1990's and everything was all OS/2, OS/2, OS/2; developers all had OS/2 computers for development work, the computers in the library ran OS/2, all Microsoft applications had OS/2 versions available, etc.
Customers voted with their dollars, and they voted for Windows rather than OS/2. I believe this was due mainly to the fact that Windows had a much easier migration path: if you had several DOS apps that you needed, you could run them all in Windows, versus running one at a time in the compatibility box under OS/2 and possibly crashing your computer. (Yes, later OS/2 versions were better, but that was after Windows had already won and Microsoft was already gone.) Other issues were that Windows ran much better on the computers that people had back then, and that Windows cost less than OS/2.
So, once Microsoft figured out that the customers wanted Windows and didn't want OS/2, Microsoft made the famous deal with IBM where IBM got OS/2 and Microsoft kept Windows. Microsoft didn't betray any OS/2 users, because IBM was there to support those OS/2 users.
In summary, Microsoft didn't have some cynical bait-and-switch plan, because internally Microsoft was pushing OS/2 right up until the famous "divorce" from IBM. And Microsoft didn't "pull the rug out" because IBM was fully supporting OS/2. It's not Microsoft's fault if IBM wasn't able to take over the world with OS/2.
Microsoft does have some things to answer for, but this really isn't one of them.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely