a common api (directx) is not good enough. Every developer must know exactly what kind of hardware controller everyone will have in order to make the game controls work well.
the reason keyboard + mouse works so well for quake is because the developers coded the game with that interface in mind. if Carmack knew every PC owner had a PS2 controller, then he might have tweaked the game interface very differently to play well on a PS2 controller. button layouts, control sensitivity and accelleration all make a huge difference in game playability.
the ergonomic issues are subtle but can make the difference between a successful intuitive playable game, and a clunky annoying piece of crap (just try playing Quake with a PS2 style controller: it was not designed for that and it totally sucks).
eh?? it's a decent review of the book in question (save for the fact that he never actually says wtf.NET Remoting is, or why anyone would be interested in knowing more about it.).
he doesn't mention the book he's selling in his user id link AT ALL. don't click on the user id links if you don't want to know what he has to say about himself (I sure as hell didn't.) by that standard your "fallenbit.com" link is a "sleazy infomercial advert"... only with no interest to anyone anywhere.
or perhaps lead to some driver API that would allow easy creation of cross platform drivers for certain device classes. If a good enough api layer would allow simple recompiles to target linux or windows, THEN we would see many more native drivers (plus some resistance to kernel revision changes). Laziness is the most powerful force in human nature.
the current "kernel driver modules that break or have to be recompiled for every kernel update or option change" totally sucks. the GPL ideology hasn't worked for drivers, let vendors have an easy way to provide binary only drivers and we will Live In A Better World (tm).
(and some companies DO get a competitive advantage through their drivers: witness Carmack's comments on ATI hardware vs Nvidia drivers)
not a bad idea if it proves to be too costly for google to make potential advertisers certify no trademark infringement.
however keep in mind that trademark law is a *consumer protection* system. it's not made to protect giant corporations (though that's often how it's perceived): the point is to protect YOU, the little guy from companies who lie.
that way if you go into a "Ford Auto Dealership" and walk out with a "Ford F150 Truck," you know exactly who you are dealing with. Otherwise everyone could be selling "Ford F150 Trucks" and who knows what the hell you are actually getting. It's all about preventing consumer confusion (and this is a critical test in most litigation of this time, "is this activity confusing the little guy?")
this is why trademarks (not copyrights!) have to be defended, there must be some effort on the part of the trademark owner to give it value and differentiation. i.e. Once "xeroxing" becomes a generic term and nobody is confused about it actually means (generic term for photocopying, nobody associates it with a company or product), it ceases to be a problem for normal people and you lose trademark protection.
do you want features, or RAM minimalism braggadoccio? unless your machine is seriously underpowered (and it sounds like it is) that RAM usage is insignificant. I waste more than that on a heavily tabbed set of browser windows. And I wont give up tabs for the sake of admiring idle RAM chips.
If you can't stand sparing some resources for a dramatically better feature set (and trust me, iTunes *blows away* every other mp3 player I've tried, and I've tried them all) then go on and play your mp3s with vi. Don't touch daddy's power tools;)
the Alpha died for the same reason all "Other Miscellaneous Systems" die: no apps.
nobody buys a computer for "performance," or to run an operating system. They buy computers based on the software they need to run. I've done some work with companies that had Alpha servers running NT and the problem was always the same: I need a driver for X hardware/printer, but it's not out for the alpha. I need to run Y antivirus, or B backup software, or and it's not available for the alpha.
It was faster. It was more efficient. It got replaced.
This is a lesson Steve Jobs has learned. This is why he started the whole iApps initiative, is buying up key software titles and cajoled Intuit into reviving Quicken for OSX.
To all the BeOS, Amiga, Alpha and Commodore 64 fanboys: "It's the apps, stupid."
this guy may have some points but he is whacked out:
Misleading Prices
Both Apple and Dell are guilty of using misleading prices. For example, Apple gives the price of the low-end G5 as "$1999", and the high-end G5 as "$2999". In other words, they have subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer to make it seem cheaper, which is absolutely ridiculous. This demonstrates that both Apple and Dell are willing to mislead people when stating their prices.
if you have the means, do what I did: get a mac laptop. My personal server runs redhat, my dual proc desktop runs win2k (mostly for gaming these days), and the laptop is a tibook.
Mac desktops are well built and all, but they are just not price-performance competitive. They're not worth the money, but their laptops are another story entirely. Mac laptops actually are price-competitive with similarly featured pc laptops. They are far higher quality than your average Dell sucktop however (keyboard & screen particularly).
an ibook can be had for about $1k. get the best of three worlds, and use each where it shines best.
it's useless to argue with trolls like alienw. they want music, they want it for free, and they dont care what it cost to produce. they dont even care that "stealing" it will ultimately lead to less music being made.
they'll spend any amount of intellectual effort to justify to themselves why they should take for free what others have paid to produce. these are also the same people who view ads on their favorite website as a personal atrocity to be fought with all possible means.
Make good on your word or be punished; now he is being punished.
And the punishment is apparently death, for saddam, his sons, and any unfortunate civilians who are nearby. Destruction of whole cities, perhaps. Think about this punishment, especially in light of sworn testimony before Congress by the CIA: "saddam is not likely to attack anyone, and has no substantial links to al-qaeda or 9/11."
It looks like another attempt to grab more cash in this nasty economy to me.
I hate it when companies try to make money. Employees, electricity and phone service should all be GPL. they could maybe get office furniture off of kazaa.
the "quartz extreme" rendering engine for the mac os x desktop uses opengl to draw the desktop (I think windows become "textures" that are handled by the card directly). to make it fly you need AGP/16mb VRAM minimum, and more ram/faster cards are highly recommended.
It's pretty slick, it gives you lots of eye candy for "free": transparent windows, shadows, goofy "genie" minimization effects, etc. iirc, apps like Keynote (powerpoint-killer), imovie, final cut pro etc can use the quartz-extreme layer to do fancy compositity/blending in realtime, which can be very nice.
So for the first time, having a nice graphics card makes a big difference for daily non-game operation.
Terrorism is attacking civilian targets for the fear factor. The Pentagon is the fucking head of the military
uh, not sure what rock you've been under, but they flew a plane FILLED WITH CIVILIANS into the Pentagon. Both the plane and the buildings were targets. So what was your point about military targets again?
"cowardly" is the wrong word to use to describe a group that willingly died
*unarmed civilians* on those planes. think it through next time.
Must have USB and Firewire, built-in ethernet, and 802.11b support... Small is important, lightweight is important, long battery life is important. I don't care about screen size... Performance isn't a major concern... don't play games... will not pay for windows
uh, get an ibook? oh wait...
seriously, ibook + osx + fink + apple X11 == everything you want in a linux laptop, except for the ugly fonts. If you're dying for more speed get the new 12" G4 Powerbook (~$1700), which is just like the ibook only smaller in every dimension, and faster.
why exactly does your current ibook fail your requirements, anyway?
If I understand correctly, this system strikes me as somewhat similar to how google ranks pages. the google system obviously works... I have a feeling this will work too.
the feedback only breaks things down if users limit their selections to received recommendations. since many people continually update their collection, we have enough input to avoid "the one giant recommended playlist." most people search out new music.
And this is why the SPEWS blocklist is so effective and so good. If he were on it, then that would mean that he and/or his network fell into one of the following categories:
Is a spammer
Is an ISP harboring a spammer (or an upstream ISP thereof)
Is a customer of an ISP harboring a spammer
uh, this is exactly why things like blacklists *are* broken. There are plenty of spammers not on any blacklist, so don't think of (!blacklisted) as equal to (whitelisted). Also, (blacklisted) != (spammer) as well, since alot of these list ops don't care about false positives or collateral damage.
Secondly, consider your "is a customer of an isp harboring a spammer" rule. The point of antispam efforts is not to block out all spam. (redirect all email to/dev/null would accomplish THAT goal). The point is to allow genuine communication. That means a perfect antispam would allow 100% of "useful" communication (whatever you define "useful" to be) and deny 100% of everything else. Blocking "customers of ISPs" goes directly against that: purposefully denying non-spam traffic is a broken concept. Blacklisters tend to justify such behavior as "zero tolerance," and "putting pressure on ISPs," but I think attacking innocent bystanders is extremely offensive, ineffective and just plain wrong.
So what if your favorite blacklist decides to stuff the entire 64.*.*.* IP address range? you will cut a lot of spam but suffer enormous collateral damage. Find a spammer, block the spammer. but don't bomb his whole neighborhood "to prove a point."
Re:xml turns 5...
on
XML Turns 5
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"bit rot" of supporting software is itself only a piece of the problem. even if we had XML decades ago, what good would it do you if you had perfectly formed XML data... sitting on your 8" floppy disk? IIRC google had to jump through hoops to get some older Usenet archives off magnetic tape, a feat that may not be possible at all in 5 years.
The solution is not legislation, it is the creative use of technology. Build software that "learns" what is spam and what isn't, then evolves to keep up with the changing tactics of the spammers.
sure. then the spammers evolve to beat your antispam. then you evolve more, and defeat their anti-anti-spam. after a few cycles, you need a Beowulf cluster to run all the rules and an AI to filter the remains and untag false positives. Then, since spammers are *making money*, they buy TWO beowulf clusters and THREE AIs to beat you...
then, while you are speccing out a new beowulf cluster of beowulf clusters, you realize that you will always lose, because the spammers are making money. In fact, you have already lost, because they are making you spend money too.
what can we do to end this anarchic "whoever has the biggest guns makes the rules" condition? If only we could organize our society, and make rules to improve our lives so we are not at the mercy of the unscrupulous....
sometimes government DOES need to step in and set limits on massively unwanted behavior.
security BY obscurity is a bad idea (obscurity being a main feature of your security, that is). but security PLUS obscurity is pretty good, if you are using well tested security.
And the NSA is real good at testing security.
so if your box uses a method tested by 1,000 crypto Ph.Ds (i.e. NSA) then you gain a slight measure of security by keeping the method secret too. No need to give your attacker ANY information, like block sizes/key lengths/number of wires needed etc. Make them figure that out too.
I'm sure the government has plenty of crypto methods available and losing a box probably isn't catastrophic. but what if the box reveals hardware that uses 2 megabyte keys? no need to even let the enemy know how advanced you are.
the bugs listed don't seem to be the main focus of the memo (whether the memo is 'real' or not is a separate question.) While the bugs are there, they seem to support a different argument: deployment issues.
if you develop an "enterprise" java app, you typically have to nail down the JVM in use. i.e. if you tested on 1.3.1, that's what you can support, because you know all the bugs. If a separate Java app needs a different version, then you have some hard choices:
1. everybody bundles their own JVM for support purposes (and your memory usage skyrockets, this is where they start talking about 9mb hello worlds an 1 GB "real" apps).
2. be prepared for support problems with app #2.
3. run everything on it's own box, which is not feasible for business desktops and is a bit counter to Sun's Semi Big Iron offerings.
this isn't such a big deal for single-use systems (like "point" servers), but if you are deploying desktop apps (NOT servlets) then you run into a maintenance and deployment nightmare. This problem could keep java from becoming "the new visual basic" for ubiquitous super specific business apps. (well, vb introduces it's own 'DLL hell' problem that we'll set aside for now).
the memo authors seem to be advocating a more backwards-compatible release system following some established Sun guidelines.
while this is largely true, it's also true that "tech people" whose job it is to deal with the technology itself often forget that the point is the work to be done, NOT the tech process. So your accounting user may be a "tech moron," but that's ok, because their job is not technology, but accounting. By most accountant standards, *I* am a "financials moron," but they don't hold it against me, that's why we BOTH have jobs. Really, it's better this way.
a LOT of the complaining is from someone who can't figure out that the "align center" button has moved three places over
the problem is this: If a user, in the course of doing their REAL job, finally knows where the print button is, what happens when an "upgrade" moves it? well, that means looking at and clicking on every button that exists on the screen to find the new one. That's time not spent doing their actual job (accounting or press releases or whatever) and is time "wasted." Why, exactly, does the print button need to be moved?
Look at your average program interface: how many clickable items are on the screen? count em, and now search em ALL from the perspective of someone who's not used to reverse engineering UIs (consider that "smart users" are the ones who have a good reverse-engineering-a-new-UI skillset). Then ask yourself why the result of "right click on Network Neighborhood" changed from windows NT to windows 2000. Any good reason? Anyone?
I am no mechanic, and it would royally piss me off if the gas/brake pedals moved every time I brought the car into the shop. It also TOTALLY pisses me off if somebody moves my car seat from it's "perfect driving position." The car software analogy doesn't really fly far, but the emotional attachment people get to a certain way of working is very similar. It's just that car manufacturers respect that, and software UI engineers don't.
So don't flame on USER MORONS too much. The "smart programmers" should use their powers for Good, and maybe avoid the temptation to put 1700 clickable items onscreen at once, then shuffle them every release in order to be "New."
yeah. it would suck for the star trek universe if everytime you got teleported, YOU were killed, but an exact duplicate of you (without the memory of being killed) got instantiated somewhere else. nobody would ever know that teleportation == death for your particular thread of consciousness.
Lotus Notes is OK, but as a "client side" administrator I find it to be a bit of a pain. the notes.id file is a nice security concept, but it makes automatic rollouts of software harder. everyone needs their own id file, in some accessible place. Usually that needs to be on the network (especially if your business has a terminal server cluster) but then you have to hack each and every client to use the network location.
and creating terminal server installs is a royal pain: you have to copy a gazillion files and icons(!!) to a personal area for EACH user, AND make sure their notes.id file is there, before the user can do anything. Granted, this just takes a well written login script to do it once per user, but it wastes disk space and time. And if your notes.id file has to be read over a (usually unencrypted) network, I question how much extra security it buys you.
anyway, notes is ok, and is pretty cool if you have a notes programmer making it sing and dance for you. but the client admin interface needs a little help.
Slashdot Mirror
a common api (directx) is not good enough. Every developer must know exactly what kind of hardware controller everyone will have in order to make the game controls work well.
the reason keyboard + mouse works so well for quake is because the developers coded the game with that interface in mind. if Carmack knew every PC owner had a PS2 controller, then he might have tweaked the game interface very differently to play well on a PS2 controller. button layouts, control sensitivity and accelleration all make a huge difference in game playability.
the ergonomic issues are subtle but can make the difference between a successful intuitive playable game, and a clunky annoying piece of crap (just try playing Quake with a PS2 style controller: it was not designed for that and it totally sucks).
eh?? it's a decent review of the book in question (save for the fact that he never actually says wtf .NET Remoting is, or why anyone would be interested in knowing more about it.).
he doesn't mention the book he's selling in his user id link AT ALL. don't click on the user id links if you don't want to know what he has to say about himself (I sure as hell didn't.) by that standard your "fallenbit.com" link is a "sleazy infomercial advert"... only with no interest to anyone anywhere.
unbunch thy panties, please.
yeah, 800mhz G4, student-proof construction and 6 hr battery life for $1000 is such a turn-off.
... and finally Unix-based ...
however, if they raise the price to $2000and cut the battery life in half, perhaps you will be more impressed.
p.s.
what rock have you been living under? ibooks have run osx since day one... YEARS ago.
or perhaps lead to some driver API that would allow easy creation of cross platform drivers for certain device classes. If a good enough api layer would allow simple recompiles to target linux or windows, THEN we would see many more native drivers (plus some resistance to kernel revision changes). Laziness is the most powerful force in human nature.
the current "kernel driver modules that break or have to be recompiled for every kernel update or option change" totally sucks. the GPL ideology hasn't worked for drivers, let vendors have an easy way to provide binary only drivers and we will Live In A Better World (tm).
(and some companies DO get a competitive advantage through their drivers: witness Carmack's comments on ATI hardware vs Nvidia drivers)
not a bad idea if it proves to be too costly for google to make potential advertisers certify no trademark infringement.
however keep in mind that trademark law is a *consumer protection* system. it's not made to protect giant corporations (though that's often how it's perceived): the point is to protect YOU, the little guy from companies who lie.
that way if you go into a "Ford Auto Dealership" and walk out with a "Ford F150 Truck," you know exactly who you are dealing with. Otherwise everyone could be selling "Ford F150 Trucks" and who knows what the hell you are actually getting. It's all about preventing consumer confusion (and this is a critical test in most litigation of this time, "is this activity confusing the little guy?")
this is why trademarks (not copyrights!) have to be defended, there must be some effort on the part of the trademark owner to give it value and differentiation. i.e. Once "xeroxing" becomes a generic term and nobody is confused about it actually means (generic term for photocopying, nobody associates it with a company or product), it ceases to be a problem for normal people and you lose trademark protection.
so think it through.
do you want features, or RAM minimalism braggadoccio? unless your machine is seriously underpowered (and it sounds like it is) that RAM usage is insignificant. I waste more than that on a heavily tabbed set of browser windows. And I wont give up tabs for the sake of admiring idle RAM chips.
;)
If you can't stand sparing some resources for a dramatically better feature set (and trust me, iTunes *blows away* every other mp3 player I've tried, and I've tried them all) then go on and play your mp3s with vi. Don't touch daddy's power tools
the Alpha died for the same reason all "Other Miscellaneous Systems" die: no apps.
nobody buys a computer for "performance," or to run an operating system. They buy computers based on the software they need to run. I've done some work with companies that had Alpha servers running NT and the problem was always the same: I need a driver for X hardware/printer, but it's not out for the alpha. I need to run Y antivirus, or B backup software, or and it's not available for the alpha.
It was faster. It was more efficient. It got replaced.
This is a lesson Steve Jobs has learned. This is why he started the whole iApps initiative, is buying up key software titles and cajoled Intuit into reviving Quicken for OSX.
To all the BeOS, Amiga, Alpha and Commodore 64 fanboys: "It's the apps, stupid."
Misleading Prices
Both Apple and Dell are guilty of using misleading prices. For example, Apple gives the price of the low-end G5 as "$1999", and the high-end G5 as "$2999". In other words, they have subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer to make it seem cheaper, which is absolutely ridiculous. This demonstrates that both Apple and Dell are willing to mislead people when stating their prices.
Next crackpot, please.
if you have the means, do what I did: get a mac laptop. My personal server runs redhat, my dual proc desktop runs win2k (mostly for gaming these days), and the laptop is a tibook.
Mac desktops are well built and all, but they are just not price-performance competitive. They're not worth the money, but their laptops are another story entirely. Mac laptops actually are price-competitive with similarly featured pc laptops. They are far higher quality than your average Dell sucktop however (keyboard & screen particularly).
an ibook can be had for about $1k. get the best of three worlds, and use each where it shines best.
it's useless to argue with trolls like alienw. they want music, they want it for free, and they dont care what it cost to produce. they dont even care that "stealing" it will ultimately lead to less music being made.
they'll spend any amount of intellectual effort to justify to themselves why they should take for free what others have paid to produce. these are also the same people who view ads on their favorite website as a personal atrocity to be fought with all possible means.
save your breath.
Make good on your word or be punished; now he is being punished.
And the punishment is apparently death, for saddam, his sons, and any unfortunate civilians who are nearby. Destruction of whole cities, perhaps. Think about this punishment, especially in light of sworn testimony before Congress by the CIA: "saddam is not likely to attack anyone, and has no substantial links to al-qaeda or 9/11."
It looks like another attempt to grab more cash in this nasty economy to me.
I hate it when companies try to make money. Employees, electricity and phone service should all be GPL. they could maybe get office furniture off of kazaa.
damn economy.
the "quartz extreme" rendering engine for the mac os x desktop uses opengl to draw the desktop (I think windows become "textures" that are handled by the card directly). to make it fly you need AGP/16mb VRAM minimum, and more ram/faster cards are highly recommended.
It's pretty slick, it gives you lots of eye candy for "free": transparent windows, shadows, goofy "genie" minimization effects, etc. iirc, apps like Keynote (powerpoint-killer), imovie, final cut pro etc can use the quartz-extreme layer to do fancy compositity/blending in realtime, which can be very nice.
So for the first time, having a nice graphics card makes a big difference for daily non-game operation.
Terrorism is attacking civilian targets for the fear factor. The Pentagon is the fucking head of the military
uh, not sure what rock you've been under, but they flew a plane FILLED WITH CIVILIANS into the Pentagon. Both the plane and the buildings were targets. So what was your point about military targets again?
"cowardly" is the wrong word to use to describe a group that willingly died
*unarmed civilians* on those planes. think it through next time.
Must have USB and Firewire, built-in ethernet, and 802.11b support ... Small is important, lightweight is important, long battery life is important. I don't care about screen size ... Performance isn't a major concern... don't play games ... will not pay for windows
uh, get an ibook? oh wait...
seriously, ibook + osx + fink + apple X11 == everything you want in a linux laptop, except for the ugly fonts. If you're dying for more speed get the new 12" G4 Powerbook (~$1700), which is just like the ibook only smaller in every dimension, and faster.
why exactly does your current ibook fail your requirements, anyway?
If I understand correctly, this system strikes me as somewhat similar to how google ranks pages. the google system obviously works... I have a feeling this will work too.
the feedback only breaks things down if users limit their selections to received recommendations. since many people continually update their collection, we have enough input to avoid "the one giant recommended playlist." most people search out new music.
Is a spammer
Is an ISP harboring a spammer (or an upstream ISP thereof)
Is a customer of an ISP harboring a spammer
/dev/null would accomplish THAT goal). The point is to allow genuine communication. That means a perfect antispam would allow 100% of "useful" communication (whatever you define "useful" to be) and deny 100% of everything else. Blocking "customers of ISPs" goes directly against that: purposefully denying non-spam traffic is a broken concept. Blacklisters tend to justify such behavior as "zero tolerance," and "putting pressure on ISPs," but I think attacking innocent bystanders is extremely offensive, ineffective and just plain wrong.
uh, this is exactly why things like blacklists *are* broken. There are plenty of spammers not on any blacklist, so don't think of (!blacklisted) as equal to (whitelisted). Also, (blacklisted) != (spammer) as well, since alot of these list ops don't care about false positives or collateral damage.
Secondly, consider your "is a customer of an isp harboring a spammer" rule. The point of antispam efforts is not to block out all spam. (redirect all email to
So what if your favorite blacklist decides to stuff the entire 64.*.*.* IP address range? you will cut a lot of spam but suffer enormous collateral damage. Find a spammer, block the spammer. but don't bomb his whole neighborhood "to prove a point."
"bit rot" of supporting software is itself only a piece of the problem. even if we had XML decades ago, what good would it do you if you had perfectly formed XML data... sitting on your 8" floppy disk? IIRC google had to jump through hoops to get some older Usenet archives off magnetic tape, a feat that may not be possible at all in 5 years.
The solution is not legislation, it is the creative use of technology. Build software that "learns" what is spam and what isn't, then evolves to keep up with the changing tactics of the spammers.
sure. then the spammers evolve to beat your antispam. then you evolve more, and defeat their anti-anti-spam. after a few cycles, you need a Beowulf cluster to run all the rules and an AI to filter the remains and untag false positives. Then, since spammers are *making money*, they buy TWO beowulf clusters and THREE AIs to beat you...
then, while you are speccing out a new beowulf cluster of beowulf clusters, you realize that you will always lose, because the spammers are making money. In fact, you have already lost, because they are making you spend money too.
what can we do to end this anarchic "whoever has the biggest guns makes the rules" condition? If only we could organize our society, and make rules to improve our lives so we are not at the mercy of the unscrupulous....
sometimes government DOES need to step in and set limits on massively unwanted behavior.
security BY obscurity is a bad idea (obscurity being a main feature of your security, that is). but security PLUS obscurity is pretty good, if you are using well tested security.
And the NSA is real good at testing security.
so if your box uses a method tested by 1,000 crypto Ph.Ds (i.e. NSA) then you gain a slight measure of security by keeping the method secret too. No need to give your attacker ANY information, like block sizes/key lengths/number of wires needed etc. Make them figure that out too.
I'm sure the government has plenty of crypto methods available and losing a box probably isn't catastrophic. but what if the box reveals hardware that uses 2 megabyte keys? no need to even let the enemy know how advanced you are.
the bugs listed don't seem to be the main focus of the memo (whether the memo is 'real' or not is a separate question.) While the bugs are there, they seem to support a different argument: deployment issues.
if you develop an "enterprise" java app, you typically have to nail down the JVM in use. i.e. if you tested on 1.3.1, that's what you can support, because you know all the bugs. If a separate Java app needs a different version, then you have some hard choices:
1. everybody bundles their own JVM for support purposes (and your memory usage skyrockets, this is where they start talking about 9mb hello worlds an 1 GB "real" apps).
2. be prepared for support problems with app #2.
3. run everything on it's own box, which is not feasible for business desktops and is a bit counter to Sun's Semi Big Iron offerings.
this isn't such a big deal for single-use systems (like "point" servers), but if you are deploying desktop apps (NOT servlets) then you run into a maintenance and deployment nightmare. This problem could keep java from becoming "the new visual basic" for ubiquitous super specific business apps. (well, vb introduces it's own 'DLL hell' problem that we'll set aside for now).
the memo authors seem to be advocating a more backwards-compatible release system following some established Sun guidelines.
YHBT
:)
YHL
HAND
(sorry, it was too obvious, couldnt resist
USERS ARE MORONS
while this is largely true, it's also true that "tech people" whose job it is to deal with the technology itself often forget that the point is the work to be done, NOT the tech process. So your accounting user may be a "tech moron," but that's ok, because their job is not technology, but accounting. By most accountant standards, *I* am a "financials moron," but they don't hold it against me, that's why we BOTH have jobs. Really, it's better this way.
a LOT of the complaining is from someone who can't figure out that the "align center" button has moved three places over
the problem is this: If a user, in the course of doing their REAL job, finally knows where the print button is, what happens when an "upgrade" moves it? well, that means looking at and clicking on every button that exists on the screen to find the new one. That's time not spent doing their actual job (accounting or press releases or whatever) and is time "wasted." Why, exactly, does the print button need to be moved?
Look at your average program interface: how many clickable items are on the screen? count em, and now search em ALL from the perspective of someone who's not used to reverse engineering UIs (consider that "smart users" are the ones who have a good reverse-engineering-a-new-UI skillset). Then ask yourself why the result of "right click on Network Neighborhood" changed from windows NT to windows 2000. Any good reason? Anyone?
I am no mechanic, and it would royally piss me off if the gas/brake pedals moved every time I brought the car into the shop. It also TOTALLY pisses me off if somebody moves my car seat from it's "perfect driving position." The car software analogy doesn't really fly far, but the emotional attachment people get to a certain way of working is very similar. It's just that car manufacturers respect that, and software UI engineers don't.
So don't flame on USER MORONS too much. The "smart programmers" should use their powers for Good, and maybe avoid the temptation to put 1700 clickable items onscreen at once, then shuffle them every release in order to be "New."
yeah. it would suck for the star trek universe if everytime you got teleported, YOU were killed, but an exact duplicate of you (without the memory of being killed) got instantiated somewhere else. nobody would ever know that teleportation == death for your particular thread of consciousness.
Lotus Notes is OK, but as a "client side" administrator I find it to be a bit of a pain. the notes.id file is a nice security concept, but it makes automatic rollouts of software harder. everyone needs their own id file, in some accessible place. Usually that needs to be on the network (especially if your business has a terminal server cluster) but then you have to hack each and every client to use the network location.
and creating terminal server installs is a royal pain: you have to copy a gazillion files and icons(!!) to a personal area for EACH user, AND make sure their notes.id file is there, before the user can do anything. Granted, this just takes a well written login script to do it once per user, but it wastes disk space and time. And if your notes.id file has to be read over a (usually unencrypted) network, I question how much extra security it buys you.
anyway, notes is ok, and is pretty cool if you have a notes programmer making it sing and dance for you. but the client admin interface needs a little help.