The situation where I work is great. The IT people are extremely competent and know that their job is to facilitate the developers and others in the creation of the company's software (sales of which are being where the company makes its profit). As a programmer, I greatly appreciate the job they do, having worked at other companies where the IT people seemed to think their job was to reduce the amount of work they had to do on a daily basis, regardless of how their lockdowns and poorly thought-out policies impacted anyone else or the company's bottom-line.
Not having access to Google Groups/Deja would be a real productivity loss for me and most other developers I know, so I'm thankful I don't work at the article poster's place of business. Of course, YMMV depending upon where you work and the needs of the users, and blocking sites like Deja may make sense at some companies.
As with the C#, C++, VB.NET, etc IDEs, the "Express" edition of MS SQL Server is available for free. Since I have no idea what your database usage is like, I can't say whether MS SQL Server Express will meet your needs, but it is worth looking at since it would certainly be easier to transition to than MySQL as you're already using SQL Server.
Funfact: In South Korea when you buy a movie ticket, you can buy a particular seat, like at a sports game.
There are assigned seating movie theatres here in the USA as well (I've been to a few of them in New York City), though obviously the general admission style is a lot more common.
I don't care if Google wants to be cute and call all their software beta forever, the issue here that doesn't apply to gmail or google news is that they are charging real money for this service. When you are charging money for a service (rather than giving it away for adviews or whatever) you should really have very basic problems like these sorted out first even if you call the software Beta, Alpha or Ernie.
The issue that is far, far bigger than HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray and yet the industry doesn't seem to understand is that a standard DVD is more than good enough for most people. As with the CD before it, the DVD hits a sweet spot where aficionados might want improvements but the average user just doesn't care enough (if he is even able to discern them). The industry is being lulled into a false sense that the masses want HD DVDs because of the success of HDTVs, but I believe that has more to do with people wanting larger screens that take up less real estate (LCD, Plasma), than it really does with the higher resolution (for the masses, not for everyone). Also, people expect to buy new TVs on a cyclical basis and it is much easier to get them to run through one purchase upgrade than to upgrade their entire old media collection.
Someday HD DVDs (of one format or the other) will be the norm, but I'm quite sure this is going to be a much slower process (far slower than VHS->DVD IMO) than the studios seem to realize and will be driven more via a trickle of sales as people replace old TVs and DVDs with new models (which support old and new formats). In the meantime, they better keep cranking out those Plain Old DVDs.
This isn't quite the average console add-on. Usually it doesn't make sense to make them, as you state, since very few people buy them. You get a catch-22 where developers don't support it because there is no market, and no market ever appears because developers don't support it. Well, there will be HD-DVD movies regardless of what Microsoft does with the 360 (because lots of stand-alone players will support it), so the standard chicken & egg problem doesn't apply here. This looks like a fine add-on, IMO.
Also, a lot of posts here (not the parent one specifically) seem to imply that Microsoft are being dicks for going with their own proprietary format (when HD-DVD isn't even a Microsoft-centric technology, though they obviously have reasons to back competition to Sony's Blu-ray). I must assume these people haven't read much about the next DVD format war since, while HD-DVD is a long way from being open, it is not nearly as horribly DRM-infested as Blu-ray is going to be and really is a better choice for the consumer.
Multiple choice is no good because an automated bot can always guess 'a' (or just randomly) and be right on average 1/4th of the time. Even if a bot can only guess correctly 1% of the time, the system is broken because they can make up for all the bad guesses with volume, volume, volume.
Having said all of that, I hate the idea of CAPTCHAS and really hate the ones that go so overboard that I can barely solve them myself.
I wish my brain were fast enough that my keyboard typing speed was the bottleneck for anything other than mindless dictation... but it isn't... so I'll stick with good ol' QWERTY.
There is an easy solution to this problem, switch to Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer doesn't have this bug and it isn't cluttered by lots of useless feature bloat like tabbed browsing or silly plugins.
Actually all signs point to this being a case where Microsoft is hoping to fix limitations in an existing protocol while sharing the specification of the changes with everyone freely, very much unlike past "embrace and extend" efforts. The sort of knee-jerk "anything Microsoft does must be evil" reaction displayed in many posts on this subject make members of the OSS movement look like a bunch of mindless religious zealot drones and don't help anything.
I love Legos* to death, but they are just too damn expensive. Normal, everyday people just don't like the idea of paying a hundred bucks for a couple of handfuls of plastic blocks, no matter how cool they are.
On the more specific topic of the Mindstorms kit, the author of that article seems to assume everyone who might be interested in Lego would be interested in Mindstorms, which just isn't true. Most people aren't interested in programming their own toys. I know it is difficult for geeks to believe this (and I say this as a professional C++ programmer for the past 10 years), but it is true.
*(yeah, that's right, I called them Legos, suck it down trademark Nazis)
Really; is your company's IT department stupid? Is your company run by dot-com-bubble-wanna-be's who want to repeat the past? When your tasks are so system-resource-undemanding, why did they pay for that machine for you? You could do your work on a 486! Literally!
Have you tried actually using a 486 recently? And I'm not talking about with modern software, but with software we used back then. It isn't pretty. Things were a lot slower and more annoying than you remember, we just didn't notice because we were busy comparing it to a 386 instead of a Pentium 4 or AMD Dual Core. People used to live without electricty too but who wants to now? You can't go back.
There are many other reasons than that why a company wouldn't put this guy on a 486 (or a P1, or...) : Higher total cost of ownership and admin (Say a RAM chip blows, it'll cost you more overall in terms of time and money to aquire 8 megs of old-school SDRAM than it would to get 512Megs of DDR2). Not to mention the very simple fact that most organizations define a baseline system that meets most everyone's needs and just buy that system for everyone when they need a new one. It is easier and cheaper to do this (one install image, etc) than to try to fit everyone to their minimal needs. And good luck getting support on any old 486 software, even in the Open Source realm.
Those are just things off the top of my head and I'm not a system admin.
which enables translation of 4 of the worlds most spoken languages
Note that it says "4 of the worlds most spoken languages", not "the world's 4 most spoken languages". I don't know about the other 3 languages but it looks like your English could use some work!
If the ads were as unobtrusive as Google's ads without having too many privacy issues (I think the privacy issues with Google/gmail are way overblown, for example, though I do think privacy should be a concern), sure I would.
Having a hardline stance of not wanting to see any advertising anywhere is futile and really teaches the industry nothing except that there's a very small niche of anti-all-ad-zealots. Doing everything we can to stop unwanted popups and other over-the-top spamish advertising while actually supporting tasteful advertisements (if the ad money subsidizes something we'd otherwise have to pay for), is a better strategy than trying to be anti-all-ads Don Quixote, IMO.
So really it comes down to how Microsoft implements the system and whether the ads bother me or not, but I won't dismiss the possibility out of hand until I see it in action.
The only reason Apple made a video iPod is the idea comes basically for free once you have the new nicer screens and a big harddrive sitting in the unit.
People who are looking at the video iPod as a validation of the demand for mobile video are mistaken.
99% of the people who wind up owning a video iPod are only ever going to use it to listen to music.
I *AM* an actual designer, and it never fails to amaze me how people will comfortably devote "years" to learning proprietary software that costs $485.00 http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/Adobe_Photoshop_7_0/4 014-3633_16-8918085.html , but cannot be bothered to investigate the menus in Gimp for five minutes for free to discover all the features they claim Gimp is missing. But, uh, oh, yeah, *sure*, you guys are ALL THAT!
If you make a good living doing a job and there is one primary tool that you use for most of your work, the difference between free and $485 is meaningless.
The answer to all of your questions is simple.. It is too late to do that stuff and maintain wide compatibility with existing applications. Is maintaining compatbility worth having an OS that has to be kludge-patched? Microsoft believes it is, and since nobody has made as much money as they have selling an OS, who are we to argue they are wrong, from a business perspective (and who are we to demand they have any greater goals than to be a successful business, since that's what they are...a business)?
Companies with something to gain from the PC being a relic have been pulling out this dead horse of an idea and beating it to death nearly annually. Need I mention ye old Network PC? Or Sun's own JavaStation?
Slashdot Mirror
When Should You Stop Support for Software?
Whenever I feel like it. GOSH!
The situation where I work is great. The IT people are extremely competent and know that their job is to facilitate the developers and others in the creation of the company's software (sales of which are being where the company makes its profit). As a programmer, I greatly appreciate the job they do, having worked at other companies where the IT people seemed to think their job was to reduce the amount of work they had to do on a daily basis, regardless of how their lockdowns and poorly thought-out policies impacted anyone else or the company's bottom-line.
Not having access to Google Groups/Deja would be a real productivity loss for me and most other developers I know, so I'm thankful I don't work at the article poster's place of business. Of course, YMMV depending upon where you work and the needs of the users, and blocking sites like Deja may make sense at some companies.
As with the C#, C++, VB.NET, etc IDEs, the "Express" edition of MS SQL Server is available for free. Since I have no idea what your database usage is like, I can't say whether MS SQL Server Express will meet your needs, but it is worth looking at since it would certainly be easier to transition to than MySQL as you're already using SQL Server.
Funfact: In South Korea when you buy a movie ticket, you can buy a particular seat, like at a sports game.
There are assigned seating movie theatres here in the USA as well (I've been to a few of them in New York City), though obviously the general admission style is a lot more common.
What part of beta do these people not get?
I don't care if Google wants to be cute and call all their software beta forever, the issue here that doesn't apply to gmail or google news is that they are charging real money for this service. When you are charging money for a service (rather than giving it away for adviews or whatever) you should really have very basic problems like these sorted out first even if you call the software Beta, Alpha or Ernie.
The issue that is far, far bigger than HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray and yet the industry doesn't seem to understand is that a standard DVD is more than good enough for most people. As with the CD before it, the DVD hits a sweet spot where aficionados might want improvements but the average user just doesn't care enough (if he is even able to discern them). The industry is being lulled into a false sense that the masses want HD DVDs because of the success of HDTVs, but I believe that has more to do with people wanting larger screens that take up less real estate (LCD, Plasma), than it really does with the higher resolution (for the masses, not for everyone). Also, people expect to buy new TVs on a cyclical basis and it is much easier to get them to run through one purchase upgrade than to upgrade their entire old media collection.
Someday HD DVDs (of one format or the other) will be the norm, but I'm quite sure this is going to be a much slower process (far slower than VHS->DVD IMO) than the studios seem to realize and will be driven more via a trickle of sales as people replace old TVs and DVDs with new models (which support old and new formats). In the meantime, they better keep cranking out those Plain Old DVDs.
Also, a lot of posts here (not the parent one specifically) seem to imply that Microsoft are being dicks for going with their own proprietary format (when HD-DVD isn't even a Microsoft-centric technology, though they obviously have reasons to back competition to Sony's Blu-ray). I must assume these people haven't read much about the next DVD format war since, while HD-DVD is a long way from being open, it is not nearly as horribly DRM-infested as Blu-ray is going to be and really is a better choice for the consumer.
Uranus, moons and gas giants!
Multiple choice is no good because an automated bot can always guess 'a' (or just randomly) and be right on average 1/4th of the time. Even if a bot can only guess correctly 1% of the time, the system is broken because they can make up for all the bad guesses with volume, volume, volume.
Having said all of that, I hate the idea of CAPTCHAS and really hate the ones that go so overboard that I can barely solve them myself.
I wish my brain were fast enough that my keyboard typing speed was the bottleneck for anything other than mindless dictation... but it isn't... so I'll stick with good ol' QWERTY.
There is an easy solution to this problem, switch to Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer doesn't have this bug and it isn't cluttered by lots of useless feature bloat like tabbed browsing or silly plugins.
I pull out the marshmallows to cook them via the upcoming flame war.
Roll the dice to see if I'm getting drunk.
Actually all signs point to this being a case where Microsoft is hoping to fix limitations in an existing protocol while sharing the specification of the changes with everyone freely, very much unlike past "embrace and extend" efforts. The sort of knee-jerk "anything Microsoft does must be evil" reaction displayed in many posts on this subject make members of the OSS movement look like a bunch of mindless religious zealot drones and don't help anything.
I love Legos* to death, but they are just too damn expensive. Normal, everyday people just don't like the idea of paying a hundred bucks for a couple of handfuls of plastic blocks, no matter how cool they are.
On the more specific topic of the Mindstorms kit, the author of that article seems to assume everyone who might be interested in Lego would be interested in Mindstorms, which just isn't true. Most people aren't interested in programming their own toys. I know it is difficult for geeks to believe this (and I say this as a professional C++ programmer for the past 10 years), but it is true.
*(yeah, that's right, I called them Legos, suck it down trademark Nazis)
Really; is your company's IT department stupid? Is your company run by dot-com-bubble-wanna-be's who want to repeat the past? When your tasks are so system-resource-undemanding, why did they pay for that machine for you? You could do your work on a 486! Literally!
Have you tried actually using a 486 recently? And I'm not talking about with modern software, but with software we used back then. It isn't pretty. Things were a lot slower and more annoying than you remember, we just didn't notice because we were busy comparing it to a 386 instead of a Pentium 4 or AMD Dual Core. People used to live without electricty too but who wants to now? You can't go back.
There are many other reasons than that why a company wouldn't put this guy on a 486 (or a P1, or...) : Higher total cost of ownership and admin (Say a RAM chip blows, it'll cost you more overall in terms of time and money to aquire 8 megs of old-school SDRAM than it would to get 512Megs of DDR2). Not to mention the very simple fact that most organizations define a baseline system that meets most everyone's needs and just buy that system for everyone when they need a new one. It is easier and cheaper to do this (one install image, etc) than to try to fit everyone to their minimal needs. And good luck getting support on any old 486 software, even in the Open Source realm.
Those are just things off the top of my head and I'm not a system admin.
Note that it says "4 of the worlds most spoken languages", not "the world's 4 most spoken languages". I don't know about the other 3 languages but it looks like your English could use some work!
If the ads were as unobtrusive as Google's ads without having too many privacy issues (I think the privacy issues with Google/gmail are way overblown, for example, though I do think privacy should be a concern), sure I would.
Having a hardline stance of not wanting to see any advertising anywhere is futile and really teaches the industry nothing except that there's a very small niche of anti-all-ad-zealots. Doing everything we can to stop unwanted popups and other over-the-top spamish advertising while actually supporting tasteful advertisements (if the ad money subsidizes something we'd otherwise have to pay for), is a better strategy than trying to be anti-all-ads Don Quixote, IMO.
So really it comes down to how Microsoft implements the system and whether the ads bother me or not, but I won't dismiss the possibility out of hand until I see it in action.
Uh, no thanks. I believe the fatality rate is lower while reading Slashdot.
Not once you double it due to all the dupes.
I'm going to patent a little algorithm I wrote to determine whether a Slashdot story will be duped in the future:
bool DupePrediction()
{
return true;
}
The only reason Apple made a video iPod is the idea comes basically for free once you have the new nicer screens and a big harddrive sitting in the unit.
People who are looking at the video iPod as a validation of the demand for mobile video are mistaken.
99% of the people who wind up owning a video iPod are only ever going to use it to listen to music.
RISC OS is completely irrelevant to the real world, so of course it should follow in the footsteps of Xara, InterBase, etc.
Open Source: Where old software goes to die!
I *AM* an actual designer, and it never fails to amaze me how people will comfortably devote "years" to learning proprietary software that costs $485.00 http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/Adobe_Photoshop_7_0/
If you make a good living doing a job and there is one primary tool that you use for most of your work, the difference between free and $485 is meaningless.
The answer to all of your questions is simple.. It is too late to do that stuff and maintain wide compatibility with existing applications. Is maintaining compatbility worth having an OS that has to be kludge-patched? Microsoft believes it is, and since nobody has made as much money as they have selling an OS, who are we to argue they are wrong, from a business perspective (and who are we to demand they have any greater goals than to be a successful business, since that's what they are...a business)?
Companies with something to gain from the PC being a relic have been pulling out this dead horse of an idea and beating it to death nearly annually. Need I mention ye old Network PC? Or Sun's own JavaStation?
Imminent death of the PC predicted! News at 11!
Yawn.
Microsoft bad. Oracle hate Microsoft. Oracle good. Praise Oracle. Even if nothing to do with Open Source. Hooray!