One of the better programmers I ever knew was a woman, and also one of the worst. The better one didn't even indent her 'if' statements, much less add comments until I shouted at her and made her review something she had written a few months earlier. The other one, wrote more comments than code... Like she thought she could justify the fact that it didn't work by explaining what it was supposed to do. Pretty much kills that theory in my book. Men and women often think differently, and even different programmers of the same sex think differently. There are a lot of generalizations one can make about women and men in the world, and argue religiously about whether it is environment or instinct... Somehow I don't think programming style is one of them.
As a developer, I use development tools all day long, and I work for a company with very deep pockets. My company would pay for tools if they were truly "better", but often they just are not. You pay all of this money and go through all of the pain to learn the new slick GUI interface, and find out it cannot build your product properly. We use GNU tools. They don't have slick GUI interfaces, but they work. I simply do not believe the person complaining about this has a better tool, they are simply complaining because their slave ship is sinking.
They keep making a crappy product worse because they cannot imagine they can ever be replaced. GM and Ford did this until people eventually bought Toyotas and Hondas... Linux keeps getting better and Windows keeps getting worse. Someday Linux win the desktop if this keeps up. Like Ford and GM, they will find it almost impossible to get those customers back.
This may seem a bit off topic, but I replied because I can use a USB cable to transfer files through Explorer with my Verizon phone just fine. Dun's comments to be true, but competition has forced Verizon to back off from that quite a bit.
I am guilty. I use Verizon because their network works in the US, and my calls are never dropped... I have the wonderful new "Voyager" phone (get the latest software upgrade), which I like a . I have played with the iPhone, and like the "pinch" feature on the touchscreen, but my phone does almost everything else including the "flick". Plus it does quite a few things the iPhone can't, and to copy photos or songs to my phone... I plug in a USB cable...Actually I lied. I don't often do this because it is a bit of a pain to go find the USB cable buried in the bottom of my Laptop bag.. I usually just pop out the MicroSD card, pop it in my Desktop machine, and copy stuff to the drive directly. I use the USB for music more because the software that came with my phone allows me to manage the music on my phone with a nice GUI. I have like 12,000 mp3 songs with maybe a thousand in my phone...and my Voyager supports Bluetooth headphones and Live TV, so it's quite nice in Airports. If I were to ask for anything it would be Blackberry's Trackball, and iPhone's pinch.
Something called "competition" is doing a pretty decent job of prying Verizon "open" as they have to be, and the Voyager is a capable competitor to the iPhone. What good is "Open" if the network you are on stinks? Both AT&T and T-Mobile have pretty crummy networks. I traded "open" for a real keyboard, my bluetooth headphones, and a network that works REALLY WELL.
My company at the time would have been an early registration except for one thing.... They did not know they were supposed to register! We built this big Intranet Infrastructure and started selling WAN services to large companies and wrote software to send email between cc:Mail and MS-Mail and Profs and... a ton more using SNMP across the WAN (this was before all of the mail engines had SNMP gateways, and X.400 was expected to be the next big thing).. It was not until "this Internet thing" started catching on, and customers asked us for "Internet access".. We already had it for us, so we said "sure" and set up a couple of gateways and the customers started using the, not very secret, SNMP back-end to send cc:Mail/MS-Mail messages to people outside their company and started complaining that when they sent e-mail to other companies, the replies did not work... I was in Washington DC and my company headquarters was in California. They asked me to fly out and have a look at the problem. As soon as I got to California, I went to see the person in charge of the DNS, who was reading the "bind" man page and looking at her DNS entries trying to figure out why it wasn't working.
So I asked her... did you forget to pay your dues? Maybe our domain registration expired. She looked up and said "dues"? "registration"? What the hell are you talking about?
Today that wouldn't work for three minutes because the reverse DNS wouldn't work, but back then nobody enforced reverse DNS, so if you had your own DNS that was configured properly, you could work fine until someone in the outside world tried to send a message. Even then, people would just put you in their hosts file and forget about it. We were the DNS for everybody, so nobody noticed. I even found out someone in support had told people the problem was their DNS address was wrong, and in addition to our customers, a bunch of other corporations (not our customers) had changed their corporate wide DNS entries to point to our DNS!... no firewalls back then either. All this came out when this person in support told the "wrong DNS" story to someone on the list above who actually KNEW how the world worked and they said "bullshit! go fix your domain".
It wasn't my job so I never gave it a thought because I was not much of an e-mail guy; usually ignored mine... I even wrote some of the e-mail stuff, but I only wanted to get the Intranet and gateways to work... didn't need to send to the outside world, and I had a company supplied dedicated ISDN line at home, using DNS. Like a week before I went to California, I sent an e-mail to the author of Kermit about a bug I had found, which was the first time I had ever sent an e-mail to anyone in the real world. He called me on the phone to say his reply bounced... I said "too busy now.. got to go to California for some problem they can't figure out... will look at it when I get back and send you another message when it's fixed.."
Today the domain would be owned by some scalper who would have charged us a million or two to sell it to us.:-)
Uh... actually Hurricane Camille did almost exactly the same damage in 1969....It may not be "like clockwork", but Gulfport and Biloxi were devastated in almost exactly the same way, and Pass Christian was completely wiped out... just like this time.
I think it is just like a bathtub. Ever notice that the water splashes out the back of a standard bathtub with the rounded sloping back... Take a good look a the the Gulf of Mexico and ask yourself which part of the Gulf of Mexico YOU want to build your house in when a huge storm comes sweeping in.
Sorry guys... I believe in everything... except Penn and Teller... and maybe these guys.
Almost every "myth", "legend", and "superstition" I have ever heard of is eventually found to be based on some truth... Usually blown totally out of proportion like the game of "Wispers", but real, on some level, none the less. Santa Claus is Saint Nicholas the Bishop of Myra, Dracula is Vlad the Impaler. There are, in my opinion, two kinds of Scientists, those that believe in nothing and spend their lives trying to prove everything is wrong, and those with TRULY an open mind that neither believe nor disbelieve anything until it is proven or disproved. It annoys me to no end that we have scientists spending their lives trying to disprove Nessie and Bigfoot with the argument "someone would have seen it by now"... people seen both, but the scientists are too stupid and arrogant to figure out that Nessie, Bigfoot, and the "Abominable Snowman" (i.e. the Yeti) DO NOT WANT TO BE FOUND. As soon as a bunch of stupid humans go out in the woods and setup a bunch of cameras and test stuff, something like a Bigfoot would leave the area. He,..she, It? can probably smell them from a mile away, and they are pretty sure they are looking for them and no good will come of their being found.
There is just of stuff we take for granted today that was thought to be magic, bullshit, or evil. Someday some scientist or researcher will figure out what ghosts are and then it will just be another fact we take for granted.
Personally I can't wait till someone figures out where the Mermaid legend comes from!...I refuse to accept the notion that sailors saw Manatees and mistook them for beautiful women... No sailor could still sail a ship if he were drunk.
Gee what a cynical view of the world. Sadly, this is true in todays world, and Microsoft is very much of the reason. When I was a child, most companies were honest and good. Soap was soap, and the company that made it was happy to have its fair share of the market. When companies like Microsoft came out, at first, these other companies were horrified, and the old men that ran them were adamant that this would never happen to them... But the governments that looked the other way when laws were ignored and the obscene amounts of money being made caused greedy, less scrupulous men to drive the old men out, and Mattel no longer cared about Barbie, soap came in new scents in smaller boxes for higher prices, Warner Brothers closed their stores because they didn't make enough money forgetting that they had people for their advertising, and now who is Buggs Bunny? I do not see it improving as long as the American Dream marches on. Thanks to people like George Bush, and companies that no longer actually stuff, America is starting to collapse under it's own weight, and I fear I may see the fall of the American Empire maybe in my lifetime. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, we have managed to export our greed and business practices to much of the western world, so we may get to watch most of the western world follow this path. My view is equally cynical I see, but I have no world saving suggestions. I could tell everyone to not patronize the crooks, but there are very few honest companies left anyway. Almost all companies are just greed machines today.
I would disagree. M$ is and always has been basically a criminal organization. They started out selling something that they did not have to IBM, then cheated someone else out of the pieces they needed to cover their lie, put illegal bits of code in their operating system to break their competition (Digital Research's DR-DOS, being the one they actually had to admit to and pay for). They stole the Windows concept from Apple, and ended up having to pay royalties after they were caught again. Their entire history has been one of corruption, bribes, extortion, and criminal behavior. Indeed much of the business world has become morally bankrupt by following M$'s lead and saying.. hey can do it.. How one can say that making decisions that were not "in sync" with the law is not criminal is simply a whitewash of the facts. Today, they are basically engineering criminal extortion out of every person on earth by maintaining an illegal monopoly and forcing people to pay their excessive ransom for an inferior product that could be had cheaper if proper competition was allowed to exist.
If you are between those places, then the one in Indiana is closer than Chicago. This is a Fry's from hell.. It sells just about everything you can think of.
It's not their crippled phones or their single source philosophy.
It's all about the phone calls. Sadly their stupid ancient network protocol makes their phones worthless outside the US, but inside the US Verizon has the most complete network. I use Verizon for one reason and one reason only... To make phone calls... I don't use it as a browser or a mail client... just a cell phone. In this regard Verizon excels.
I have friends on just about every other vendor... We go someplace really remote, and they are always saying... Can I use your phone?
Actually the problem was that Commodore decide. They decided that it was a "Serious" computer and not a "Toy"... They had the largest dealer network in the planet... The 64 and 128 were sold in every toy store in the world that was big enough to matter, but Commodore decided that would make them look like a "toy" so they refused to let their own dealer network sell the Amiga, and then they insisted on their demo units to the PC shops. The shops have a picture of an Amiga and take orders if you insisted, but they would steer you away if they could. The net result was that was then seeling the Amiga.
If Commodore had just let Toys "R" Us sell the damn things, people would have never bought PCs because they would have said... no I don't need one... My "Game Machine" does everything I need. We're just going to buy the next generation "Amiga Game Machine" with the CD32 CD Drive and that new Office software.
Commodore got stuck in sementics and blew their golden opportunity.
This is one of the most clueless posts I have ever read in Slashdot. A complete troll.
The Amiga was light years ahead of everything else:
4096 colors... closest competitor 32... Atari True Multitasking... no competition at all. A proper channel processor (i.e. channel commands were handled by one of the three chips Gary, Agnes, or Denise... not the CPU) A Proper Graphics Processor with built in real time animation in the hardware. A Proper Sound Processor. Quadraphonic Sound. Closest competitor. Mono. Atari and Apple. True Multimedia... fully compatible with NTSC (in US) or PAL (Europe)... no competition at all.
Many PCs today actually have inferior graphics and sound to an original Amiga!
The guys who developed Amiga were geniuses. Commodore (their sugar daddy) was, I'll admit completely incompetent in every way.
I knew Commodore and Amiga was going to go down at an Amiga User's group meeting when the 500 was announced... The Commodore marketing guy comes in and states flatly that the 500 will have no hard drive because "our customers have no interest in hard drives". We all jumped him, but he was simply too stupid to get it. The 500's form factor was really clever with the works in the keyboard... Had they put a 20 meg hard drive in that machine, and allowed Toys "R" Us to sell them... Commodore would be Microsoft today... but no...
While Apple was giving Computers to schools (so kids knew and liked them) Commodore their demo machines at full price to their own dealers... Almost all simply had pictures of them! They shouldn't have bothered to even play... they brought no chips to the table... And Jack Trammel (sp?) had the dubious honor of making Forbes higest paid executive the year before they went backrupt. He was just another Kenneth Lay.
I can't get the picture out of my mind of a rat being tortured with make up. I picture researchers putting some gastly shade of eye makeup on a female rat and watching to see if she can get a date with a male rat.
I suspect alcohol is involved, which would explain the current ghastly shades of eye makeup available for human women. Don't the researchers realize that after a few cold ones, the male rats could care less about the eye makeup?
He has my sympathy since it is apparently part of his job description to run this test suite against his code, but the fact that race conditions exist does not have anything to do with binary compatibility. He is probably frustrated because he knows how to write code, and looking at this sloppy stuff frustrates him... yea... me too, but such is life. In the end, the test suite run on a 300mhz processor with 256 meg is just as binary compatible as the same thing run on a quad processor 3Ghz with 16 Gig of memory... So rather than fight with the race conditions, he should get a clue, and do what SuSe did and run it on some pig that is to slow to fall into the trap. Yes the LSB should fix the test suite, but they probably have more important stuff to do, so they say... "Run it on a slower processor". Cheating is when you link in special libraries that recognize the question and fake the answer. Not so with Race conditions. They prove that the test suite program was poorly written and nothing more. Granted some fool will steal the code from the test suite and try to implement threads using it, and then complain to Red Hat that they are not compatible, but so what? Surprise, Surprise it is not compatible with any of the distributions because the code was not designed to implement enterprise threading, just to prove that a thread worked the way it was supposed to....and it barely does that only if run on a machine too slow to have enough cycles left to run the cleanup code.
Oh yea, Sun... the guys that wrote a language programmers love to hate, and HP, the guys that created a version of UNIX that was so bad, the world dubbed it HP/[S]UX... Those guys? If anything can [finish] kill[ing] off Gnome, it should be Sun and HP working together. Let's just put Carly in charge of it. She should be able to fix it right up just like she did with HP's calculator business. Three years ago, Gnome was ahead. Now with everybody working together, it needs to catch up. I hate to see all that code go to waste though... Why don't we use it for a GUI in a new HP printer with a 62" plasma system status window... they can just bypass the computer all together. Put a keyboard on it, and HP can re-introduce the world to the Electronic Typewriter....oh wait, I forgot... my HP printer already HAS a keypad on it, and plugs straight into the network and can download its own print jobs from the net... it already HAS bypassed the computer. Maybe HP already thought of this! I wonder if IBM could use it in a new Mag Card Selectric Composer...
I stopped using GNOME a couple of years ago because after I got tired of the eye candy, I found that - even though KDE annoyed me by being too Windozeish... It actually WORKED! My KDE desktop goes months without me ever logging off... Gnome's memory leaks caused me to logoff and on every week or so.
GNOME is just a broken GUI written by geeks who want it to look cool at all costs and every release shifts the user paradigm in some strange way that some geek decided was "better"... So I have to install it, spend a couple of daze to make it work again and then spend the next week learning about the stuff they changed. I'm too busy to mess with GNOME. I even wrote applications in GNOME to find out they didn't work in the next release because someone depreciated the API becuase the new one had better support for some eye candy feature.
Now Sun is morphing it into some Java Desktop that will probably never work right... Nothing Sun ever did with GUI stuff ever worked. They still can't get the Terminfo database right after 20 years. If they can't work Curses, what hope do they have for a real GUI?
Now people are suggesting GNOME be forked... Sorry guys... I think GNOME is doomed.
I had a project that would run on Linux, but it was a mission critical application, and I had no idea what the performance would be like under Red Hat Linux. The application was heavily threaded, and Linux is not known for it threading performance. I had access to a large PC server for a couple of months but RedHat would not do a demo and the price was high enough that I just bought a Solaris server. It may have cost more in the end, but I know what I bought and what my performance was going to be. I did not have time and money to go spend on a piece of software that may have been a total waste of money. Today the application is VERY LARGE, runs on 10 LARGE Solaris servers, and it would be a very good deal for Red Hat - and probably Dell, since we tend to use their servers, but RedHat's prices kept me from going there.
For Pure debugging, my favorite was REXX. You could Trace anything and everything. It was also a "nice" little language... if a bit odd.
Today I use PERL for almost everything, however, and not for its debugging, which I don't care for. You can program almost anything in a single line of code however, and have no idea what it does ever again. Plus you can download a module to do almost from CPAN. Want to know if OJ did it? Download the DID_OJ_DO_IT module from CPAN.
I dumped their long distance when they charged me $200 for a long distance call to England because I was not on their "Pay $7 a month for $.10 a minute Plan". They said there WAS no such plan, and never had been when I called them up... I faxed them last months Bill with a $7 charge for "International SuperSaver" or whatever, and this months with a $0 charge for "International SuperSaver", and gave them a choice fix my bill, or talk to my lawyer....Suddenly "Oh yea, we're cancelling that plan effective immediately." Then they kept slamming me into alternate, more expensive plans, and I had to call them up to complain to put it back.
I live in L.A. and dumped their Cell phone after the first year because it had the WORST coverage on the planet. They have all this "coverage" on their map that simply does not exist. When I complained, they admitted this, and told me that I should stick with them because they have the best coverage of ANY provider in Barstow.
Please give AT&T what they REALLY deserve. Bankruptcy.
I Tried it, and It Stinks
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My first IDE was Borland on DOS. It was good then and Micro$oft's was a buggy piece of garbage. Over the years, Micro$oft got better and Borland got hacked and patched and got worse until it couldn't compile anything without fiddling with it first. I FINALLY switched to Visual Studio, about a year or two before Borland died. Then Micro$oft had no competition so VisualStudio got hacked and patched and got worse until it couldn't compile anything without fiddling with it, so I climed off the upgrade tredmill and switched to Linux. I missed having an IDE, so when Borland was "reborn" and announced Kylix. I wasted no time in downloading it and trying it out. It was the same hacked and patched piece of crap that I had abandoned on Windows and it still couldn't compile anything without fiddling with it. Sorry Borland I am not going to shell out $1000 so that you can realize that it's still a piece of Crap a year or two later and leave me holding the bag. If they ever wrote a Good IDE that made me feel it had a reason to live, I might buy it Maybe they should go look for the source for the old DOS one that was so good so many years ago, and start their port from it.
Actually it reminds me of the line from Crocodile Dundee when he sees a TV set and says something like "Oh yea, I saw one of these in a storefront in Sydney once..." He switches it on, and I Love Loosley is on... He switches it off and says "..yup, that's what I saw."
Sorry Borland... maybe you should merge with Greenhills Software, and release a new version of "Multi 2004" Between both programs, maybe you could compile BOTH halves of the program.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the better programmers I ever knew was a woman, and also one of the worst. The better one didn't even indent her 'if' statements, much less add comments until I shouted at her and made her review something she had written a few months earlier. The other one, wrote more comments than code... Like she thought she could justify the fact that it didn't work by explaining what it was supposed to do.
Pretty much kills that theory in my book. Men and women often think differently, and even different programmers of the same sex think differently. There are a lot of generalizations one can make about women and men in the world, and argue religiously about whether it is environment or instinct... Somehow I don't think programming style is one of them.
Sit in it for 12 hours, and then say that. Anyone can make a chair LOOK like a good chair, it's actually getting it right that's hard .. and expensive.
As a developer, I use development tools all day long, and I work for a company with very deep pockets. My company would pay for tools if they were truly "better", but often they just are not. You pay all of this money and go through all of the pain to learn the new slick GUI interface, and find out it cannot build your product properly. We use GNU tools. They don't have slick GUI interfaces, but they work. I simply do not believe the person complaining about this has a better tool, they are simply complaining because their slave ship is sinking.
Because DB2 isn't really a competitor. It's not really a bad database, but I think only three people in the world is running it. ...my wife being one.
They keep making a crappy product worse because they cannot imagine they can ever be replaced. GM and Ford did this until people eventually bought Toyotas and Hondas... Linux keeps getting better and Windows keeps getting worse. Someday Linux win the desktop if this keeps up. Like Ford and GM, they will find it almost impossible to get those customers back.
Couldn't happen to a nicer corporation.
This may seem a bit off topic, but I replied because I can use a USB cable to transfer files through Explorer with my Verizon phone just fine. Dun's comments to be true, but competition has forced Verizon to back off from that quite a bit.
... I plug in a USB cable. ..Actually I lied. I don't often do this because it is a bit of a pain to go find the USB cable buried in the bottom of my Laptop bag.. I usually just pop out the MicroSD card, pop it in my Desktop machine, and copy stuff to the drive directly. I use the USB for music more because the software that came with my phone allows me to manage the music on my phone with a nice GUI. I have like 12,000 mp3 songs with maybe a thousand in my phone ...and my Voyager supports Bluetooth headphones and Live TV, so it's quite nice in Airports. If I were to ask for anything it would be Blackberry's Trackball, and iPhone's pinch.
I am guilty. I use Verizon because their network works in the US, and my calls are never dropped... I have the wonderful new "Voyager" phone (get the latest software upgrade), which I like a . I have played with the iPhone, and like the "pinch" feature on the touchscreen, but my phone does almost everything else including the "flick". Plus it does quite a few things the iPhone can't, and to copy photos or songs to my phone
Something called "competition" is doing a pretty decent job of prying Verizon "open" as they have to be, and the Voyager is a capable competitor to the iPhone. What good is "Open" if the network you are on stinks? Both AT&T and T-Mobile have pretty crummy networks. I traded "open" for a real keyboard, my bluetooth headphones, and a network that works REALLY WELL.
Gee Microsoft finally realizes that Vista is about as useful as an AOL CD.
My company at the time would have been an early registration except for one thing. ... They did not know they were supposed to register! We built this big Intranet Infrastructure and started selling WAN services to large companies and wrote software to send email between cc:Mail and MS-Mail and Profs and ... a ton more using SNMP across the WAN (this was before all of the mail engines had SNMP gateways, and X.400 was expected to be the next big thing).. It was not until "this Internet thing" started catching on, and customers asked us for "Internet access" .. We already had it for us, so we said "sure" and set up a couple of gateways and the customers started using the, not very secret, SNMP back-end to send cc:Mail/MS-Mail messages to people outside their company and started complaining that when they sent e-mail to other companies, the replies did not work ... I was in Washington DC and my company headquarters was in California. They asked me to fly out and have a look at the problem. As soon as I got to California, I went to see the person in charge of the DNS, who was reading the "bind" man page and looking at her DNS entries trying to figure out why it wasn't working.
... no firewalls back then either. All this came out when this person in support told the "wrong DNS" story to someone on the list above who actually KNEW how the world worked and they said "bullshit! go fix your domain".
... I even wrote some of the e-mail stuff, but I only wanted to get the Intranet and gateways to work... didn't need to send to the outside world, and I had a company supplied dedicated ISDN line at home, using DNS. Like a week before I went to California, I sent an e-mail to the author of Kermit about a bug I had found, which was the first time I had ever sent an e-mail to anyone in the real world. He called me on the phone to say his reply bounced... I said "too busy now .. got to go to California for some problem they can't figure out... will look at it when I get back and send you another message when it's fixed.."
:-)
So I asked her... did you forget to pay your dues? Maybe our domain registration expired. She looked up and said "dues"? "registration"? What the hell are you talking about?
Today that wouldn't work for three minutes because the reverse DNS wouldn't work, but back then nobody enforced reverse DNS, so if you had your own DNS that was configured properly, you could work fine until someone in the outside world tried to send a message. Even then, people would just put you in their hosts file and forget about it. We were the DNS for everybody, so nobody noticed. I even found out someone in support had told people the problem was their DNS address was wrong, and in addition to our customers, a bunch of other corporations (not our customers) had changed their corporate wide DNS entries to point to our DNS!
It wasn't my job so I never gave it a thought because I was not much of an e-mail guy; usually ignored mine
Today the domain would be owned by some scalper who would have charged us a million or two to sell it to us.
Uh... actually Hurricane Camille did almost exactly the same damage in 1969. ...It may not be "like clockwork", but Gulfport and Biloxi were devastated in almost exactly the same way, and Pass Christian was completely wiped out ... just like this time.
I think it is just like a bathtub. Ever notice that the water splashes out the back of a standard bathtub with the rounded sloping back... Take a good look a the the Gulf of Mexico and ask yourself which part of the Gulf of Mexico YOU want to build your house in when a huge storm comes sweeping in.
Sorry guys... I believe in everything ... except Penn and Teller. .. and maybe these guys.
... people seen both, but the scientists are too stupid and arrogant to figure out that Nessie, Bigfoot, and the "Abominable Snowman" (i.e. the Yeti) DO NOT WANT TO BE FOUND. As soon as a bunch of stupid humans go out in the woods and setup a bunch of cameras and test stuff, something like a Bigfoot would leave the area. He, ..she, It? can probably smell them from a mile away, and they are pretty sure they are looking for them and no good will come of their being found.
...I refuse to accept the notion that sailors saw Manatees and mistook them for beautiful women... No sailor could still sail a ship if he were drunk.
Almost every "myth", "legend", and "superstition" I have ever heard of is eventually found to be based on some truth... Usually blown totally out of proportion like the game of "Wispers", but real, on some level, none the less. Santa Claus is Saint Nicholas the Bishop of Myra, Dracula is Vlad the Impaler. There are, in my opinion, two kinds of Scientists, those that believe in nothing and spend their lives trying to prove everything is wrong, and those with TRULY an open mind that neither believe nor disbelieve anything until it is proven or disproved. It annoys me to no end that we have scientists spending their lives trying to disprove Nessie and Bigfoot with the argument "someone would have seen it by now"
There is just of stuff we take for granted today that was thought to be magic, bullshit, or evil. Someday some scientist or researcher will figure out what ghosts are and then it will just be another fact we take for granted.
Personally I can't wait till someone figures out where the Mermaid legend comes from!
Gee what a cynical view of the world. Sadly, this is true in todays world, and Microsoft is very much of the reason. When I was a child, most companies were honest and good. Soap was soap, and the company that made it was happy to have its fair share of the market. When companies like Microsoft came out, at first, these other companies were horrified, and the old men that ran them were adamant that this would never happen to them... But the governments that looked the other way when laws were ignored and the obscene amounts of money being made caused greedy, less scrupulous men to drive the old men out, and Mattel no longer cared about Barbie, soap came in new scents in smaller boxes for higher prices, Warner Brothers closed their stores because they didn't make enough money forgetting that they had people for their advertising, and now who is Buggs Bunny? I do not see it improving as long as the American Dream marches on. Thanks to people like George Bush, and companies that no longer actually stuff, America is starting to collapse under it's own weight, and I fear I may see the fall of the American Empire maybe in my lifetime. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, we have managed to export our greed and business practices to much of the western world, so we may get to watch most of the western world follow this path. My view is equally cynical I see, but I have no world saving suggestions. I could tell everyone to not patronize the crooks, but there are very few honest companies left anyway. Almost all companies are just greed machines today.
I would disagree. M$ is and always has been basically a criminal organization. They started out selling something that they did not have to IBM, then cheated someone else out of the pieces they needed to cover their lie, put illegal bits of code in their operating system to break their competition (Digital Research's DR-DOS, being the one they actually had to admit to and pay for). They stole the Windows concept from Apple, and ended up having to pay royalties after they were caught again. Their entire history has been one of corruption, bribes, extortion, and criminal behavior. Indeed much of the business world has become morally bankrupt by following M$'s lead and saying .. hey can do it.. How one can say that making decisions that were not "in sync" with the law is not criminal is simply a whitewash of the facts. Today, they are basically engineering criminal extortion out of every person on earth by maintaining an illegal monopoly and forcing people to pay their excessive ransom for an inferior product that could be had cheaper if proper competition was allowed to exist.
Everyone seems to be missing the REAL horror of this post! The fact that a slashdotter shops at WalMart is disgraceful!
If you are between those places, then the one in Indiana is closer than Chicago. This is a Fry's from hell .. It sells just about everything you can think of.
It's not their crippled phones or their single source philosophy.
... just a cell phone. In this regard Verizon excels.
... Can I use your phone?
It's all about the phone calls. Sadly their stupid ancient network protocol makes their phones worthless outside the US, but inside the US Verizon has the most complete network. I use Verizon for one reason and one reason only... To make phone calls... I don't use it as a browser or a mail client
I have friends on just about every other vendor... We go someplace really remote, and they are always saying
Actually the problem was that Commodore decide. They decided that it was a "Serious" computer and not a "Toy" ... They had the largest dealer network in the planet... The 64 and 128 were sold in every toy store in the world that was big enough to matter, but Commodore decided that would make them look like a "toy" so they refused to let their own dealer network sell the Amiga, and then they insisted on their demo units to the PC shops. The shops have a picture of an Amiga and take orders if you insisted, but they would steer you away if they could. The net result was that was then seeling the Amiga.
... no I don't need one... My "Game Machine" does everything I need. We're just going to buy the next generation "Amiga Game Machine" with the CD32 CD Drive and that new Office software.
If Commodore had just let Toys "R" Us sell the damn things, people would have never bought PCs because they would have said
Commodore got stuck in sementics and blew their golden opportunity.
This is one of the most clueless posts I have ever read in Slashdot. A complete troll.
... closest competitor 32... Atari ... no competition at all. ... not the CPU) ... no competition at all.
.. but no...
.. And Jack Trammel (sp?) had the dubious honor of making Forbes higest paid executive the year before they went backrupt. He was just another Kenneth Lay.
The Amiga was light years ahead of everything else:
4096 colors
True Multitasking
A proper channel processor (i.e. channel commands were handled by one of the three chips Gary, Agnes, or Denise
A Proper Graphics Processor with built in real time animation in the hardware.
A Proper Sound Processor.
Quadraphonic Sound. Closest competitor. Mono. Atari and Apple.
True Multimedia... fully compatible with NTSC (in US) or PAL (Europe)
Many PCs today actually have inferior graphics and sound to an original Amiga!
The guys who developed Amiga were geniuses. Commodore (their sugar daddy) was, I'll admit completely incompetent in every way.
I knew Commodore and Amiga was going to go down at an Amiga User's group meeting when the 500 was announced... The Commodore marketing guy comes in and states flatly that the 500 will have no hard drive because "our customers have no interest in hard drives". We all jumped him, but he was simply too stupid to get it. The 500's form factor was really clever with the works in the keyboard... Had they put a 20 meg hard drive in that machine, and allowed Toys "R" Us to sell them... Commodore would be Microsoft today.
While Apple was giving Computers to schools (so kids knew and liked them) Commodore their demo machines at full price to their own dealers... Almost all simply had pictures of them! They shouldn't have bothered to even play... they brought no chips to the table.
I can't get the picture out of my mind of a rat being tortured with make up. I picture researchers putting some gastly shade of eye makeup on a female rat and watching to see if she can get a date with a male rat.
I suspect alcohol is involved, which would explain the current ghastly shades of eye makeup available for human women. Don't the researchers realize that after a few cold ones, the male rats could care less about the eye makeup?
He has my sympathy since it is apparently part of his job description to run this test suite against his code, but the fact that race conditions exist does not have anything to do with binary compatibility. He is probably frustrated because he knows how to write code, and looking at this sloppy stuff frustrates him... yea ... me too, but such is life. In the end, the test suite run on a 300mhz processor with 256 meg is just as binary compatible as the same thing run on a quad processor 3Ghz with 16 Gig of memory... So rather than fight with the race conditions, he should get a clue, and do what SuSe did and run it on some pig that is to slow to fall into the trap. Yes the LSB should fix the test suite, but they probably have more important stuff to do, so they say... "Run it on a slower processor". Cheating is when you link in special libraries that recognize the question and fake the answer. Not so with Race conditions. They prove that the test suite program was poorly written and nothing more. Granted some fool will steal the code from the test suite and try to implement threads using it, and then complain to Red Hat that they are not compatible, but so what? Surprise, Surprise it is not compatible with any of the distributions because the code was not designed to implement enterprise threading, just to prove that a thread worked the way it was supposed to. ...and it barely does that only if run on a machine too slow to have enough cycles left to run the cleanup code.
Oh yea, Sun ... the guys that wrote a language programmers love to hate, and HP, the guys that created a version of UNIX that was so bad, the world dubbed it HP/[S]UX... Those guys? If anything can [finish] kill[ing] off Gnome, it should be Sun and HP working together. Let's just put Carly in charge of it. She should be able to fix it right up just like she did with HP's calculator business. Three years ago, Gnome was ahead. Now with everybody working together, it needs to catch up. I hate to see all that code go to waste though... Why don't we use it for a GUI in a new HP printer with a 62" plasma system status window... they can just bypass the computer all together. Put a keyboard on it, and HP can re-introduce the world to the Electronic Typewriter. ...oh wait, I forgot... my HP printer already HAS a keypad on it, and plugs straight into the network and can download its own print jobs from the net... it already HAS bypassed the computer. Maybe HP already thought of this! I wonder if IBM could use it in a new Mag Card Selectric Composer...
I stopped using GNOME a couple of years ago because after I got tired of the eye candy, I found that - even though KDE annoyed me by being too Windozeish... It actually WORKED! My KDE desktop goes months without me ever logging off... Gnome's memory leaks caused me to logoff and on every week or so.
GNOME is just a broken GUI written by geeks who want it to look cool at all costs and every release shifts the user paradigm in some strange way that some geek decided was "better"... So I have to install it, spend a couple of daze to make it work again and then spend the next week learning about the stuff they changed. I'm too busy to mess with GNOME. I even wrote applications in GNOME to find out they didn't work in the next release because someone depreciated the API becuase the new one had better support for some eye candy feature.
Now Sun is morphing it into some Java Desktop that will probably never work right... Nothing Sun ever did with GUI stuff ever worked. They still can't get the Terminfo database right after 20 years. If they can't work Curses, what hope do they have for a real GUI?
Now people are suggesting GNOME be forked... Sorry guys... I think GNOME is doomed.
I had a project that would run on Linux, but it was a mission critical application, and I had no idea what the performance would be like under Red Hat Linux. The application was heavily threaded, and Linux is not known for it threading performance. I had access to a large PC server for a couple of months but RedHat would not do a demo and the price was high enough that I just bought a Solaris server. It may have cost more in the end, but I know what I bought and what my performance was going to be. I did not have time and money to go spend on a piece of software that may have been a total waste of money. Today the application is VERY LARGE, runs on 10 LARGE Solaris servers, and it would be a very good deal for Red Hat - and probably Dell, since we tend to use their servers, but RedHat's prices kept me from going there.
For Pure debugging, my favorite was REXX. You could Trace anything and everything. It was also a "nice" little language... if a bit odd.
Today I use PERL for almost everything, however, and not for its debugging, which I don't care for. You can program almost anything in a single line of code however, and have no idea what it does ever again. Plus you can download a module to do almost from CPAN. Want to know if OJ did it? Download the DID_OJ_DO_IT module from CPAN.
I dumped their long distance when they charged me $200 for a long distance call to England because I was not on their "Pay $7 a month for $.10 a minute Plan". They said there WAS no such plan, and never had been when I called them up... I faxed them last months Bill with a $7 charge for "International SuperSaver" or whatever, and this months with a $0 charge for "International SuperSaver", and gave them a choice fix my bill, or talk to my lawyer. ...Suddenly "Oh yea, we're cancelling that plan effective immediately." Then they kept slamming me into alternate, more expensive plans, and I had to call them up to complain to put it back.
I live in L.A. and dumped their Cell phone after the first year because it had the WORST coverage on the planet. They have all this "coverage" on their map that simply does not exist. When I complained, they admitted this, and told me that I should stick with them because they have the best coverage of ANY provider in Barstow.
Please give AT&T what they REALLY deserve. Bankruptcy.
My first IDE was Borland on DOS. It was good then and Micro$oft's was a buggy piece of garbage. Over the years, Micro$oft got better and Borland got hacked and patched and got worse until it couldn't compile anything without fiddling with it first. I FINALLY switched to Visual Studio, about a year or two before Borland died. Then Micro$oft had no competition so VisualStudio got hacked and patched and got worse until it couldn't compile anything without fiddling with it, so I climed off the upgrade tredmill and switched to Linux. I missed having an IDE, so when Borland was "reborn" and announced Kylix. I wasted no time in downloading it and trying it out. It was the same hacked and patched piece of crap that I had abandoned on Windows and it still couldn't compile anything without fiddling with it. Sorry Borland I am not going to shell out $1000 so that you can realize that it's still a piece of Crap a year or two later and leave me holding the bag. If they ever wrote a Good IDE that made me feel it had a reason to live, I might buy it Maybe they should go look for the source for the old DOS one that was so good so many years ago, and start their port from it.
..." He switches it on, and I Love Loosley is on... He switches it off and says "..yup, that's what I saw."
Actually it reminds me of the line from Crocodile Dundee when he sees a TV set and says something like "Oh yea, I saw one of these in a storefront in Sydney once
Sorry Borland... maybe you should merge with Greenhills Software, and release a new version of "Multi 2004" Between both programs, maybe you could compile BOTH halves of the program.