You don't need to buy new software versions every year either. And people stopped using Vista because it sucked badly. Windows 7 was a marked improvement. Windows 8 was a very minor improvement in comparison, and Windows 10 is a step backwards.
Linux is a choice, and it's making more inroads into the back office. For the developer's cubicles the Mac is much more popular than I remember. I think last year the biggest Windows users were hardware developers, because of lock in with tools and software that isn't portable (meaning people keep around Windows XP or XP under vmware for that purpose).
It may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, but Microsoft is not the unstoppable juggernaut it used to be.
We know Nunes loves the FISA and the surveillance state. He just wants it all controlled by the republicans (but not that wishy washy moderates who criticize his best friend Trump).
The other thing conspiracy theories forget, is that the democrats has been the most disorganized and inept political organization for decades. There's no way they could manage a conspiracy. They lost an election that was pretty much handed to them on a silver platter. Not that the republicans are much better, letting Trump and Carson outlast much better candidates, but the republicans at least know how to get organized.
However by general consent of congress and the executive, the president keeps control of the DOJ at an extreme distance when it comes to independent counsels. Why do you think Clinton didn't just fire Kenneth Star?
Checks and balances is the modern notion. Checks and balances only arose over time. The supreme court is mentioned extremely rarely in the constitution and was given almost no details as to their power. Learn some history.
It's Nunes. Who's very much an extremist. And the democrats wanted to put out their own version of a memo, instead of just the heavily edited and biased Nunes version. So Democrats voted in unison and that's bad, but it's perfectly ok when the Republicans line up and sing as a chorus?
I'd rather see the truth, not some party's version of it that helps with elections.
And yet, customers are not upgrading to Windows 10 despite the heavy handed approach, especially with the money making enterprise customers. Linux is making lots more inroads in the server market. Overall MS marketshare is going down especially as PCs are less popular and smartphones and tablets are taking off.
I have dealt with multiple versions of products stretching back a few decades. That's why they paid us. As a developer it is frustrating, but as a customer they're kept happy.
Microsoft is losing market share, it's not really a smart move to further annoy the customers.
Right, so pull out the windows 3.1 support. That makes sense. But Windows 7 is still highly popular, especially in the enterprise where Microsoft makes most of their money.
If a customer is paying, it makes sense to do what the customer wants. And many customers do buy support from Microsoft. But even if this is a one-shot purchase, the customer may still buy other products in the future. That means, don't annoy your customers if you want to retain their business.
Also notice that Windows 7 is still supported by Microsoft, it has not reached end of life, and some customers are still paying for Windows 7 support. What is different here is that they're saying a new product will not work on a supported version of Windows. That sounds a lot like annoying the customers to me.
What does this have with killing off old software? Capitalism says that you should keep making the software if customers are still paying for it. There are companies that will support twenty year old software still, as long as the checks clear. That's why Cobol programmers can demand a good salary.
Making sense or not, a busness should always do what the customer wants. A business that forces a customer to do something against their will ends up losing customers. A business always exists to provide products to customers, the whims of the developers are unimportant to that. If extra developer time is needed to support backwards compatibility, then any reasonable company will allocate extra developer time.
There are many software companies that manage to keep support for old products for longer than a decade. Of course, even after a company deprecates a product and drops support, that product will still live on at the customers' sites. You cannot force a company to stop using a product they paid for and are still using.
LibreOffice is not produced by a for-profit business. If they piss of customers then that's their problem. Microsoft can piss off customers too, and seems to be experts at doing so, but it canot force pissed off customers to keep paying the Microsoft tax. No one actually needs Office 365 or Office 19, anymore than they need new versions of Windows.
The fact that someone gave money to Clinton instead of Trump says very little about politics. Clinton was the lesser of two evils, whereas Trump was dedicated to the destruction of most federal departments (witness the slash and burn leaders he appointed to the departments).
Most people vote based on their wallets, and teachers voting for Trump meant voting for losing their jobs.
Teaching creationism should not be considered left or right, it should be considered stupid. The only reason it's considered right wing is because many of those hard core fundamentalists allied themselves with fiscal conservatives and segregationists. We used to have a much more equal distribution of religious believers across the parties until the Moral Majority insisted that you couldn't be a good Christian unless you voted the way they told you to.
Remember when we used to be a first world country in the US, and poured resources into science and engineering and education so that we wouldn't fall behind the Commies? Today it seems like our competition is Syria, and as long as we're doing better than Syria that we don't need to work harder to be better.
This is like Biff from Back To The Future is president, and he gives noogies to any nerdy scientist he runs across.
I certainly learned history in high school. American history, California history, world history, ancient history. They don't teach these things anymore?
Every time I mistype my password even one time, I get an email instantly saying I must have had trouble logging in and they can help be get back on. I think it's pushing really really hard for me to go to a "click on your picture to log in" model. I've clicked no to this every single time I login and it still shows up.
I don't think there are high school level texts on computer science. They may have something about programing (not the same as CS), they may have an introductory electronics text, but I don't think there's a good introductory level text that skims the surface of what computer science encompasses.
Thought that's not really needed. I think high school should be the prerequisite before you really dive into computer science as a major in college. Just like high school science just skims the simple surface, you can't really get deep into science until you get college math under your belt. Remember all the greats who built up the industry from scratch, build all our programing languages, designed all the computer architectures, figured out how to make self driving cars, none of them took a high school computer science class.
I'd rather the high school level just have a similar broad overview. Basics of programming, basics of computer architecture, basics of algorithms, basics of numerical analysis, basics of digital logic.
There are so many crappy coders now that they are influencing everyone around them into thinking that crappy coders are a good thing, and that we need more tools to help out crappy coders, and that we should fight off outsourcing to countries that specialize in crappy coding.
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You don't need to buy new software versions every year either. And people stopped using Vista because it sucked badly. Windows 7 was a marked improvement. Windows 8 was a very minor improvement in comparison, and Windows 10 is a step backwards.
Linux is a choice, and it's making more inroads into the back office. For the developer's cubicles the Mac is much more popular than I remember. I think last year the biggest Windows users were hardware developers, because of lock in with tools and software that isn't portable (meaning people keep around Windows XP or XP under vmware for that purpose).
It may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, but Microsoft is not the unstoppable juggernaut it used to be.
We know Nunes loves the FISA and the surveillance state. He just wants it all controlled by the republicans (but not that wishy washy moderates who criticize his best friend Trump).
The other thing conspiracy theories forget, is that the democrats has been the most disorganized and inept political organization for decades. There's no way they could manage a conspiracy. They lost an election that was pretty much handed to them on a silver platter. Not that the republicans are much better, letting Trump and Carson outlast much better candidates, but the republicans at least know how to get organized.
However by general consent of congress and the executive, the president keeps control of the DOJ at an extreme distance when it comes to independent counsels. Why do you think Clinton didn't just fire Kenneth Star?
Checks and balances is the modern notion. Checks and balances only arose over time. The supreme court is mentioned extremely rarely in the constitution and was given almost no details as to their power. Learn some history.
They can't because all of this is classified information and needs the President's approval to make any of it public.
It's Nunes. Who's very much an extremist. And the democrats wanted to put out their own version of a memo, instead of just the heavily edited and biased Nunes version. So Democrats voted in unison and that's bad, but it's perfectly ok when the Republicans line up and sing as a chorus?
I'd rather see the truth, not some party's version of it that helps with elections.
And yet, customers are not upgrading to Windows 10 despite the heavy handed approach, especially with the money making enterprise customers. Linux is making lots more inroads in the server market. Overall MS marketshare is going down especially as PCs are less popular and smartphones and tablets are taking off.
I have dealt with multiple versions of products stretching back a few decades. That's why they paid us. As a developer it is frustrating, but as a customer they're kept happy.
Microsoft is losing market share, it's not really a smart move to further annoy the customers.
Right, so pull out the windows 3.1 support. That makes sense. But Windows 7 is still highly popular, especially in the enterprise where Microsoft makes most of their money.
Supported until 2023. It'll still be good for several years after that.
It's not like Office 2019 is going to have any useful new features. It'll probably be slower than Office 2016 also.
I like it. Doesn't mean I want Windows 10. But it is better than Windows 7 in many ways. Sure it's got some ugly stuff, but so does Windows 7.
If a customer is paying, it makes sense to do what the customer wants. And many customers do buy support from Microsoft. But even if this is a one-shot purchase, the customer may still buy other products in the future. That means, don't annoy your customers if you want to retain their business.
Also notice that Windows 7 is still supported by Microsoft, it has not reached end of life, and some customers are still paying for Windows 7 support. What is different here is that they're saying a new product will not work on a supported version of Windows. That sounds a lot like annoying the customers to me.
What does this have with killing off old software? Capitalism says that you should keep making the software if customers are still paying for it. There are companies that will support twenty year old software still, as long as the checks clear. That's why Cobol programmers can demand a good salary.
Making sense or not, a busness should always do what the customer wants. A business that forces a customer to do something against their will ends up losing customers. A business always exists to provide products to customers, the whims of the developers are unimportant to that. If extra developer time is needed to support backwards compatibility, then any reasonable company will allocate extra developer time.
There are many software companies that manage to keep support for old products for longer than a decade. Of course, even after a company deprecates a product and drops support, that product will still live on at the customers' sites. You cannot force a company to stop using a product they paid for and are still using.
LibreOffice is not produced by a for-profit business. If they piss of customers then that's their problem. Microsoft can piss off customers too, and seems to be experts at doing so, but it canot force pissed off customers to keep paying the Microsoft tax. No one actually needs Office 365 or Office 19, anymore than they need new versions of Windows.
The fact that someone gave money to Clinton instead of Trump says very little about politics. Clinton was the lesser of two evils, whereas Trump was dedicated to the destruction of most federal departments (witness the slash and burn leaders he appointed to the departments).
Most people vote based on their wallets, and teachers voting for Trump meant voting for losing their jobs.
Teaching creationism should not be considered left or right, it should be considered stupid. The only reason it's considered right wing is because many of those hard core fundamentalists allied themselves with fiscal conservatives and segregationists. We used to have a much more equal distribution of religious believers across the parties until the Moral Majority insisted that you couldn't be a good Christian unless you voted the way they told you to.
But the DOE secretary has a built in bias against the DOE!
Remember when we used to be a first world country in the US, and poured resources into science and engineering and education so that we wouldn't fall behind the Commies? Today it seems like our competition is Syria, and as long as we're doing better than Syria that we don't need to work harder to be better.
This is like Biff from Back To The Future is president, and he gives noogies to any nerdy scientist he runs across.
I certainly learned history in high school. American history, California history, world history, ancient history. They don't teach these things anymore?
Not being on Facebook is in itself evidence that you may be a space alien or a conspiracy theorist.
Every time I mistype my password even one time, I get an email instantly saying I must have had trouble logging in and they can help be get back on. I think it's pushing really really hard for me to go to a "click on your picture to log in" model. I've clicked no to this every single time I login and it still shows up.
I don't think there are high school level texts on computer science. They may have something about programing (not the same as CS), they may have an introductory electronics text, but I don't think there's a good introductory level text that skims the surface of what computer science encompasses.
Thought that's not really needed. I think high school should be the prerequisite before you really dive into computer science as a major in college. Just like high school science just skims the simple surface, you can't really get deep into science until you get college math under your belt. Remember all the greats who built up the industry from scratch, build all our programing languages, designed all the computer architectures, figured out how to make self driving cars, none of them took a high school computer science class.
I'd rather the high school level just have a similar broad overview. Basics of programming, basics of computer architecture, basics of algorithms, basics of numerical analysis, basics of digital logic.
There are so many crappy coders now that they are influencing everyone around them into thinking that crappy coders are a good thing, and that we need more tools to help out crappy coders, and that we should fight off outsourcing to countries that specialize in crappy coding.