Many people have a bad impression of updates. They know for sure that updates slow down the computer and they know for sure that updates have previously broken things. So you have a choice: 1. Install something that will degrade your computer (possibly making parts of it unusable) or 2. Don't install it and just hope that you don't open a bad email or something, after all practically speaking viruses aren trojans are quite rare.
I find that modern computer science students don't know how data is stored in memory on real machines, how integers can be big or little endian. We find the big problem with teaching Java programmers C, isn't the language, its knowing what's really in data types. Even programming in Java, throw a bunch of Java data out a socket and the students couldn't document what is on the socket, only how to retrieve it with Java, ie no concept of inter-operability. I think C did a good job of teaching machine architecture along with programming and that part of things seems to have been lost.
On the other hand modern Java students are really good at object oriented design and software engineering which is a real plus.
I seem to get as much regular spam as before. However I now get MySpace and Facebook spam as well. People trolling to be my friend in all sorts of special professional ways.
The other thing to remember is that we have a minority government. It would be fun if this bill failed in the commons and brought down the government forcing an election. Not sure anyone would want to fight an election over this.
Even though everyone had and regularly used calculators the B.C. (Canada) Provincial Scholarship exams required you use a slide rule for Chemistry and Physics. The rational being that people with better (or programmable) calculators wouldn't have an advantage. We had to do special classes and practice with slide rules just for the purpose of writing these exams (in grade 12).
On the up side it did solve the problem of people with calculators that can do all the physics and calculus problems that are around today. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea.
Or as Terry Pratchett postulates: There is an alternate universe out there somewhere where all those checks really are in the mail and the post office is very very busy.
Linspire is already un-ravelling. Saw the announcement just today that the CEO Carmody "resigned". I guess we can all speculate why he was "resigned", but it seems pretty clear.
From my own experience one of the main problems is a misleading feature set. When you choose MySQL you then have to choose one of five or so ISAM packages for it to sit on. This is a problem since they all have difference features. Do you want the one that supports multi-user, the one that is fast or the one with transactioning. Personally I want all of those and can't get them.
Then we had problems with a number of queries where we had the where clause specify fields in the primary index and the optimizer cleverly would always do a table scan. Asking MySQL support led to the answer that we should edit the source fix the optimizer and submit it back to the project. A bit beyond the scope of our little project.
Seem that MySQL is good for web applications where a web server talks to it with one connection and each exchange is atomic, so multi-user and transactioning support isn't needed, so you can use the fast/light isam package.
I'm a bit surprised by this, as I just installed the Longhorn Beta 3 and all this silly UAC stuff seems to be gone (or at least turned off by default). Anyway it doesn't bother me with all those annoying prompts. Is this a pre-cursor to it being removed in SP1 of Vista?
Also the default color scheme goes back to something sensible like in Windows 2000.
Generally a very pleasant retro sort of OS.
IE 7 made if quite hard to turn off activescripting. As a result it just doesn't seem safe surfing nefarious web sites. With Firefox you can still turn off JavaScript and all the other fancy stuff, and just surf HTML. Sounds old fashioned, but if you are just interested in text content and pictures, this is the best. It feels much safer, you don't think the web sites will take over your computer and they can't be tricky at getting around popup blockers and poping up windows everywhere. Plus you can browse around quicker as you don't have to wait for chained active content to download everywhere.
The big benefit I find to running this way, is that most of the adds don't work, so they don't waste your time and bandwidth. They can't jump out at you, they can't play music, etc., etc.
I have IE, Firefox and Opera all installed. But I find myself using Firefox the most because it does what I need the easiest and allows me to turn off all the annoying things I don't like that have been showing up on the web these days.
I guess the real precedent is old coke vs new coke. If consumers vote with their wallets then big mega-corporations listen. MS can't risk a bad quarter over this, a dip in quarterly earning would cause many 10s of billions to be wiped out from their total stock valuation. Will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
I stopped realtime scanning when I realized that over 50% of my CPU was going to scanning virus's. Now that it is turned off, things run much faster. E-mail seems to be the main source of virus's, but most email servers scan for virus's so doing a local realtime scan is just a waste of time. Otherwise just avoid memory keys, and disks which is fairly easy. I find Spyware a bigger problem than virus's but just running Spybot every now and then to clean off things installed by other software like webcams seems good enough. Certainly my PC runs much faster and more reliably with AV turned off. Still do a system scan now and then, but haven't found a virus in like five years.
We've got Vista running on computers around work, but generally there are just too many little gotcha's from programs that need updating to suddenly discovering wierd features like volumne shadowing that just mess you up. So when I just bought a new computer for home, which is plenty powerful enough to run Vista (even has a nVidia 8800 based graphics card), I chose XP for it. Was cheaper and I know how to work it and I know all my software will work on it. Just don't have time for the hassles of Vista, perhaps in a couple of years if the situation improves. Sounds like the Info Week people have the same experience.
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Many people have a bad impression of updates. They know for sure that updates slow down the computer and they know for sure that updates have previously broken things. So you have a choice: 1. Install something that will degrade your computer (possibly making parts of it unusable) or 2. Don't install it and just hope that you don't open a bad email or something, after all practically speaking viruses aren trojans are quite rare.
On the other hand modern Java students are really good at object oriented design and software engineering which is a real plus.
I seem to get as much regular spam as before. However I now get MySpace and Facebook spam as well. People trolling to be my friend in all sorts of special professional ways.
The other thing to remember is that we have a minority government. It would be fun if this bill failed in the commons and brought down the government forcing an election. Not sure anyone would want to fight an election over this.
On the up side it did solve the problem of people with calculators that can do all the physics and calculus problems that are around today. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea.
Or as Terry Pratchett postulates: There is an alternate universe out there somewhere where all those checks really are in the mail and the post office is very very busy.
I think the assumption here is that they are doing the same thing in the US where it is not only un-ethical but illegal.
Linspire is already un-ravelling. Saw the announcement just today that the CEO Carmody "resigned". I guess we can all speculate why he was "resigned", but it seems pretty clear.
From my own experience one of the main problems is a misleading feature set. When you choose MySQL you then have to choose one of five or so ISAM packages for it to sit on. This is a problem since they all have difference features. Do you want the one that supports multi-user, the one that is fast or the one with transactioning. Personally I want all of those and can't get them. Then we had problems with a number of queries where we had the where clause specify fields in the primary index and the optimizer cleverly would always do a table scan. Asking MySQL support led to the answer that we should edit the source fix the optimizer and submit it back to the project. A bit beyond the scope of our little project. Seem that MySQL is good for web applications where a web server talks to it with one connection and each exchange is atomic, so multi-user and transactioning support isn't needed, so you can use the fast/light isam package.
I'm a bit surprised by this, as I just installed the Longhorn Beta 3 and all this silly UAC stuff seems to be gone (or at least turned off by default). Anyway it doesn't bother me with all those annoying prompts. Is this a pre-cursor to it being removed in SP1 of Vista? Also the default color scheme goes back to something sensible like in Windows 2000. Generally a very pleasant retro sort of OS.
IE 7 made if quite hard to turn off activescripting. As a result it just doesn't seem safe surfing nefarious web sites. With Firefox you can still turn off JavaScript and all the other fancy stuff, and just surf HTML. Sounds old fashioned, but if you are just interested in text content and pictures, this is the best. It feels much safer, you don't think the web sites will take over your computer and they can't be tricky at getting around popup blockers and poping up windows everywhere. Plus you can browse around quicker as you don't have to wait for chained active content to download everywhere. The big benefit I find to running this way, is that most of the adds don't work, so they don't waste your time and bandwidth. They can't jump out at you, they can't play music, etc., etc. I have IE, Firefox and Opera all installed. But I find myself using Firefox the most because it does what I need the easiest and allows me to turn off all the annoying things I don't like that have been showing up on the web these days.
I guess the real precedent is old coke vs new coke. If consumers vote with their wallets then big mega-corporations listen. MS can't risk a bad quarter over this, a dip in quarterly earning would cause many 10s of billions to be wiped out from their total stock valuation. Will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
I stopped realtime scanning when I realized that over 50% of my CPU was going to scanning virus's. Now that it is turned off, things run much faster. E-mail seems to be the main source of virus's, but most email servers scan for virus's so doing a local realtime scan is just a waste of time. Otherwise just avoid memory keys, and disks which is fairly easy. I find Spyware a bigger problem than virus's but just running Spybot every now and then to clean off things installed by other software like webcams seems good enough. Certainly my PC runs much faster and more reliably with AV turned off. Still do a system scan now and then, but haven't found a virus in like five years.
We've got Vista running on computers around work, but generally there are just too many little gotcha's from programs that need updating to suddenly discovering wierd features like volumne shadowing that just mess you up. So when I just bought a new computer for home, which is plenty powerful enough to run Vista (even has a nVidia 8800 based graphics card), I chose XP for it. Was cheaper and I know how to work it and I know all my software will work on it. Just don't have time for the hassles of Vista, perhaps in a couple of years if the situation improves. Sounds like the Info Week people have the same experience.