The original Baby Einstein stuff, made by whats-her-name and her daughters, wasn't bad, and was oddly hypnotic to people of all ages. All the ones I've seen that were produced after Disney took over are total crap, basically just squeezing the last few dollars out of a good name. "Baby Einstein", "Baby Mozart", and "Baby Bach" are worth checking out if your child is very young.
simple stuff like streaming audio/video embedded in websites
The problem here is legal, not technical. The technical solutions already exist, and work quite well in my experience. The only real problem with any of them is that they aren't installed by default in any distro that I'm aware of.
Ok, which means that the manager was probably not even involved before you got the BBB involved. You probably could have gotten similar results by calling up the manager himself. Also note that the issue wasn't about money -- it was about paperwork. It probably costed the manager nothing to make your wife happy in that case, so he did.
Wrong on all counts. It was about money (they decided we didn't qualify for the loan they gave us 2 days after all the paperwork was signed), the manager was involved from the begining (he helped negotiate the sale), and "making it right" did cost them money, though not as much as it could have (he offered to buy us diner at one of the best sushi places in town, but we wanted nothing more to do with them at that point).
When my wife and I bought our first car together the dealership kept jerking us around, after all the papers were signed. After about a week of "we need you to come over and re-sign stuff again" my wife filed a complaint with the BBB and the next day the manager of the place was ready to clean her shoes with his tongue.
So, I suspect you're just being a naysayer. But, either way, it costs nothing to file a complaint, and it may have positive results.
All I know of Inventor comes from a friend, who used it and a couple other packages in an engineering sales position. He didn't have a very high opinion of it, though their IT guy was apparantly completely worthless, so I suppose it could have been no fault of Inventor's that they had so many problems with it.
Nothing, but it'll have tons of extra, unneeded crap attached to it.
When I was first learning to code, I started all my projects in Notepad, then opened them in VS when it came time to try and compile it. That was the only way I could keep the clutter down to a managable level, and end up with something I could actually say I understood.
I haven't used either myself, so this is all second-hand. But, isn't Inventor just a 3d package dumped on top of AutoCAD? If he's doing 3d work, Pro-E should be at least comparable, and I suspect it would be a great improvement. Pro-E is the premere 3d CAD package out there, and it's priced accordingly, so it might be eliminated from your list just for that.
If he sticks with AutoCAD because he's old-school, then BRL-CAD is probably worth looking at. It was developed by the Army's Balistic Research Labratory, and was recently open-sourced. It has a lot of features, but, as I've mentioned, an arcane interface.
Personal bias here, but I came to the conclusion years ago that the reason AutoCAD was the standard was because if you could figure it out, you'd have no problem with one of the many CAD packages that are actually usable.;-)
Cedega (Transgaming) has support for a lot of the big titles before they're actually released, and I hear on an often enough basis from people who claim better performance with Linux/Cedega than under Windows. Most likely they're using a stripped-down Gentoo, and/or a custom stripped-down runlevel.
I have no basis for comparison, as I'm pure Linux at this point. No complaints on the gaming front since I git Cedega, but then I'm not the dedicated gamer I once was.
IIRC, Pro-Engineer runs on Linux, and of course there's BRL-CAD (though honestly I haven't managed to figure out how to actually use it yet). Not sure about the current state of AutoCAD, but they did have a Unix version back in the day.
As for games, I hear from people all the time that they have games running better and faster under Cedega than on Windows, though I suspect those people are probably using a stripped down Gentoo, or I guess maybe just a custom stripped down runlevel.
You claimed there was nothing MS could do to make non-MS apps perform worse than MS apps, and I refuted it. IIRC, that was one of the complaints Netscape made in US v. MS, though I couldn't tell you if it was upheld or not. I strongly suspect, though, that this was precisely the basis for the requirement that they open up their APIs.
At this point, servers are moved to Linux for the software offerings and stability.
Actually, I'm strictly a desktop user, and that's why I switched. All the apps my wife and I used on Windows have been available on Linux for at least 3-4 years now, so I guess I could more accurately say that software offerings were a non-issue. Stability was an issue, though. I found that I was spending roughly a week out of every year reinstalling Windows, and that's not including all the regular maintenance stuff.
While Windows may have a better chance of "just working" from the get-go, once you get Linux working, it "just keeps working." That little extra investment in the beginning has saved me a lot of time in the long run.
Right, then you're just at the whim of bulletin boards, lack of documentation, lack of drivers, lack of vendor support...
An old and VERY tired argument, which, according to my experience, was busted years ago.
I had this side project at a past employer, where I built a fileserver, based on Suse7.3, and upgraded all the desktops from Win98 to 2k. The Suse install went without a hitch; despite that everything but the hard drives was existing hardware, not hand picked for compatability; and took about 45 minutes of my time, including the time it took me to hand pick the packages I wanted and setup samba ("my time" meaning time I actually had to be there, swapping CDs, clicking "Next", etc)(samba was setup following a howto I found at tldp, as I was a complete n00b at the time).
The Win2k upgrade took about 2 hours of my time per machine, mostly shuffling CDs to reinstall apps and drivers, and I ran into several problems with unsupported hardware. Most aggravating was our plotter, though I did eventually find a "solution", which required that I replace the win2k parallel port driver with the one from NT4, which is a protected system file, and so can only be replaced with the use of kernel debugger, running on a seperate machine hooked up to the machine you're modifying via a serial cable. Yeah, that was gonna happen! This was to be able to print to it over the network, BTW.
Yeah, I know it's just an anecdote, but there's always somebody digging up some anecdote about how Windows works perfectly and Linux requires impossible effort and deep knowledge to get working. Well, there's my counterexample. Argument invalidated.
I think that "freedom to modify and fix problems" is more related to those of us who actually understand to a certain degree the underpinnings of an OS and are able to get into the guts of the Linux OS. As for the actual "fixing" - that's limited to an even smaller group of coders.
You start with a good point, but extrapolate it beyond it's bounds, completely forgetting why software Freedom is important. I do not have the expertise to modify the underpinnings of Linux, but there is nothing stopping me from obtaining that expertise, either by learning it myself, or hiring someone else who has it. If I have a problem with the kernel, I can get it fixed. I don't have to submit a bug report or feature request and hope the kernel devs think it's interesting enough for them to spend some time on it, I can take action to get it fixed. Once that's done, it's almost irrelevant whether the kernel devs want to accept my patch or not. If they do, great, but if not, well, the number of non-vanilla kernels out there suggests it's not that big a deal to maintain your own fork. Not only is my problem solved, but I have the power to ensure it stays solved.
At this point, Linux is for the computer-compitent-curious, and that's all, I think.
I think you're stuck in 1998, or maybe you're a Gentoo user. Anyway, I can say for certain that you aren't a Suse user. There are distros out there, such as Suse, that kick MS's ass all the way around the block when it comes to ease of install and maintainance, and at least break even for ease of everyday use.
There's nothing that MS can do to "magically" make their apps run faster on the same hardware that other developers can't
Really? You've perused the Windows source code and verified that there are no undocumented APIs that give MS apps priority? No functions to the effect of if (author != "Microsoft") { run slow }?
Apps are dependent on the OS, and if the OS is Windows then there ARE, in fact, several things MS can do to "magically" make their apps run faster, and there's not a damned thing that other developers can do about it.
While I think your post is very funny, and I love a MP reference as much as anyone, you seem to have missed something very important: the problem has nothing to do with Open Source! Let's take another look at that snippet you quoted, and see if we can make things a bit more clear, shall we?
"It is a known problem that OOo takes a while to start. Staroffice (at the point when Sun bought it) was made by a German company. Most of the internal functions are named in german, and use abbreviations that are not obvious."
So, hopefully now it is plain that this code was not made by some German guy working for free in his spare time, but was in fact written by a german guy getting paid by a company to write code, all of which was then bought by Sun, and then at some later point opened up to the world. The problem would still exist, and be at least as bad, if Sun had never opened up the code (probably worse, as it being open source at least allows for more eyes to look at the problem).
In fact, had it been a FOSS project from the get-go, this problem wouldn't exist. There's strong incentive when creating open source code to make it readable to others. Developers really don't like to work with code they can't make sense of, and in the FOSS world that means either your submissions get rejected, or no developers are attracted to your project. Thus, had it started out as FOSS, it either wouldn't have this problem, or the project would have died out years ago.
Clearly, no such incentive existed within the proprietary software company where Staroffice was originally produced. So, while you apparently were hoping to poke holes in the open source methodology, you have in fact pointed out one of the reasonss proprietary software development is seriously flawed: it often encourages bad code to be released to the public (in order to meet shipment, slopiness because "no one will ever see it", or even as intentional obfuscation).
While we're on the subject, your math is certainly questionable: how exactly does "nearly double" = "scant more"?
There are plenty of tech jobs that pay $9 an hour, and those are exactly the kinds of jobs a CS student with no documentable experience can expect to get. Besides, it was 9 weeks, not 12, which makes it more like $12 an hour. To make it $9 an hour they'd have to have been putting in 55 hours per week, and to bring it down to minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, they'd have to be putting in 97 hours a week. "Scant more", you say?
Hypothetically: What if MS pulls it off and puts out the best OS that the Linux guys have ever seen.
I think this is a logical impossibility, simply because everyone has different needs. But, I'll try to address the individual questions first:
Will the Linux guys at that point stop bashing MS?
No. Producing a superior technology is necessary, but not sufficient. They have too much power and influence for us to ignore the way they choose to conduct themselves.
Will you consider using the MS OS?
If it fulfilled a need that couldn't be filled with Linux, maybe. It's been a long time since I've been able to think of one, though, and I am a gamer.
Now I understand you don't trust them, but how will you respond if you can't say their product sucks?
That I still don't trust them, and strongly prefer not to support an organization whose impact on the world is largely negative.
Will the comments be, "Ya they make the best OS, but they are evil?"
That is the simplistic version of what I just said.
Or will you continue to say that "Windows is just crap because they don't share the kernel source?"
Yeah, I'll say that too, which brings me back to my origional point. The thing is that MS's goal is not to make the best OS for me, but rather to make the best OS for them. The simple fact is, if it happens to also be the best OS for me, that's little more than coincidence, and not something I can rely on in the future.
Now, you can argue that it's just basic capitalism, and that's exactly how a company ought to conduct itself. Fine, why should it be any different for me? Why does the corporation get a free pass for acting only in it's own interest (or, rather, the interest of its shareholders, which is often very much NOT the same thing), and yet when I do the same I'm labeled a zealot?
Anyway, for several years now I have been able to get a Linux distro that is better for me than anything MS has yet offered. In the unlikely event that this ceases to be the case, all the tools and documentation I'd need in order to continue on my own are freely available. I very much doubt that this will ever be the case with MS, making their hypothetically superior technology the inferior choice in the long run. I will agree that I have not yet had a need to do so, but that isn't really the point. I haven't yet had to open the hood of my car, either, but that doesn't mean that day isn't coming, and wouldn't it be foolish of me to ignore that reality?
You whine, moan and complain because Microsoft's command prompt sucks, and when they fix it, you go out of your way to find new things to bitch about.
The bold portion there is the real point of contention: You say they fixed it, while the GP says they just created a more powerful suckage. As for "going out of [our] way", well, someone has to counter the massive MS hype machine, so that the people trying to make decisions can hopefully find the truth somewhere in the middle.
What is very interesting, is that if they HAD copied Bash, or one of the other unix command lines, you would have immediatly jumped on them for that too.
Of course we would have, just like I'm sure you'd jump on OOo for copying a feature from MSO, and for the same reason: lack of innovation.
However, I think it would have been mixed with a liberal portion of acknowledgment as well. There are very good reasons for why Bourne shell derivatives have ruled the *nix world for 30+ years. Only a great fool would not take the time to understand those reasons before creating a shell of their own.
It's not something that is meant to compete with bash.
Now that's just dumb. Competing with bash is EXACTLY what MSH is meant to do, since their lack of a bash equivalent is one of the primary reasons MS is losing the Unix server replacement battle.
In fact, if it weren't for bash, MSH wouldn't exist at all.
MS has to pipe objects because of a fundamental flaw in their original design philosophy: that binary objects and text are treated differently. *nix treats it all the same, and therefore doesn't have the problem that piping objects compensates for.
Adding complexity in order to solve a problem you don't have doesn't sound like good design to me.
The funny thing is, every program I've had to write at a job has had to have an endless loop in it.
I should perhaps note that I have never actually worked as a programmer, but have merely had to write a few programs in order to do my actual job more efficiently (or at all, in some cases).
It has nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with population.
India produces roughly 5 times as many engineers as we do, and has roughly 5 times the population. China produces roughly 10 times as many engineers as we do, and has roughly 10 times the population.
Rather than play chicken little with regards to our education system, we could perhaps simply recognize that only a certain percentage of people have the apptitude, ability, and desire to be engineers. If you're going to base the competition only on the numbers produced, the country with the highest population will win. Period.
For the time being, I suppose we can at least take some pride in the fact that a lot of them pay a lot of money to get their educations here.
Slashdot Mirror
The original Baby Einstein stuff, made by whats-her-name and her daughters, wasn't bad, and was oddly hypnotic to people of all ages. All the ones I've seen that were produced after Disney took over are total crap, basically just squeezing the last few dollars out of a good name. "Baby Einstein", "Baby Mozart", and "Baby Bach" are worth checking out if your child is very young.
I don't own a Mac. I've never liked the Mac UI, and OSX kept all the parts I don't like, and added a few more.
I don't care what the problem is, I just take issue with people who don't bother to understand the question before piping in with useless "solutions".
simple stuff like streaming audio/video embedded in websites
The problem here is legal, not technical. The technical solutions already exist, and work quite well in my experience. The only real problem with any of them is that they aren't installed by default in any distro that I'm aware of.
Perhaps you should read the whole question before answering it. Here, let me repost the relevant portion so it's a bit clearer for you:
Well, the answers for Mac OS 10.3|4 is different than Mac OS 10.2.8, which I'm currently running.
Ok, which means that the manager was probably not even involved before you got the BBB involved. You probably could have gotten similar results by calling up the manager himself. Also note that the issue wasn't about money -- it was about paperwork. It probably costed the manager nothing to make your wife happy in that case, so he did.
Wrong on all counts. It was about money (they decided we didn't qualify for the loan they gave us 2 days after all the paperwork was signed), the manager was involved from the begining (he helped negotiate the sale), and "making it right" did cost them money, though not as much as it could have (he offered to buy us diner at one of the best sushi places in town, but we wanted nothing more to do with them at that point).
When my wife and I bought our first car together the dealership kept jerking us around, after all the papers were signed. After about a week of "we need you to come over and re-sign stuff again" my wife filed a complaint with the BBB and the next day the manager of the place was ready to clean her shoes with his tongue.
So, I suspect you're just being a naysayer. But, either way, it costs nothing to file a complaint, and it may have positive results.
Well, that opens the door for damages above $5000, also. Repeat after me: "plus legal fees and punitive damages."
All I know of Inventor comes from a friend, who used it and a couple other packages in an engineering sales position. He didn't have a very high opinion of it, though their IT guy was apparantly completely worthless, so I suppose it could have been no fault of Inventor's that they had so many problems with it.
Nothing, but it'll have tons of extra, unneeded crap attached to it.
When I was first learning to code, I started all my projects in Notepad, then opened them in VS when it came time to try and compile it. That was the only way I could keep the clutter down to a managable level, and end up with something I could actually say I understood.
I haven't used either myself, so this is all second-hand. But, isn't Inventor just a 3d package dumped on top of AutoCAD? If he's doing 3d work, Pro-E should be at least comparable, and I suspect it would be a great improvement. Pro-E is the premere 3d CAD package out there, and it's priced accordingly, so it might be eliminated from your list just for that.
;-)
If he sticks with AutoCAD because he's old-school, then BRL-CAD is probably worth looking at. It was developed by the Army's Balistic Research Labratory, and was recently open-sourced. It has a lot of features, but, as I've mentioned, an arcane interface.
Personal bias here, but I came to the conclusion years ago that the reason AutoCAD was the standard was because if you could figure it out, you'd have no problem with one of the many CAD packages that are actually usable.
Cedega (Transgaming) has support for a lot of the big titles before they're actually released, and I hear on an often enough basis from people who claim better performance with Linux/Cedega than under Windows. Most likely they're using a stripped-down Gentoo, and/or a custom stripped-down runlevel.
I have no basis for comparison, as I'm pure Linux at this point. No complaints on the gaming front since I git Cedega, but then I'm not the dedicated gamer I once was.
IIRC, Pro-Engineer runs on Linux, and of course there's BRL-CAD (though honestly I haven't managed to figure out how to actually use it yet). Not sure about the current state of AutoCAD, but they did have a Unix version back in the day.
As for games, I hear from people all the time that they have games running better and faster under Cedega than on Windows, though I suspect those people are probably using a stripped down Gentoo, or I guess maybe just a custom stripped down runlevel.
Anyway, just food for thought.
I never said it didn't.
You claimed there was nothing MS could do to make non-MS apps perform worse than MS apps, and I refuted it. IIRC, that was one of the complaints Netscape made in US v. MS, though I couldn't tell you if it was upheld or not. I strongly suspect, though, that this was precisely the basis for the requirement that they open up their APIs.
At this point, servers are moved to Linux for the software offerings and stability.
Actually, I'm strictly a desktop user, and that's why I switched. All the apps my wife and I used on Windows have been available on Linux for at least 3-4 years now, so I guess I could more accurately say that software offerings were a non-issue. Stability was an issue, though. I found that I was spending roughly a week out of every year reinstalling Windows, and that's not including all the regular maintenance stuff.
While Windows may have a better chance of "just working" from the get-go, once you get Linux working, it "just keeps working." That little extra investment in the beginning has saved me a lot of time in the long run.
Right, then you're just at the whim of bulletin boards, lack of documentation, lack of drivers, lack of vendor support...
An old and VERY tired argument, which, according to my experience, was busted years ago.
I had this side project at a past employer, where I built a fileserver, based on Suse7.3, and upgraded all the desktops from Win98 to 2k. The Suse install went without a hitch; despite that everything but the hard drives was existing hardware, not hand picked for compatability; and took about 45 minutes of my time, including the time it took me to hand pick the packages I wanted and setup samba ("my time" meaning time I actually had to be there, swapping CDs, clicking "Next", etc)(samba was setup following a howto I found at tldp, as I was a complete n00b at the time).
The Win2k upgrade took about 2 hours of my time per machine, mostly shuffling CDs to reinstall apps and drivers, and I ran into several problems with unsupported hardware. Most aggravating was our plotter, though I did eventually find a "solution", which required that I replace the win2k parallel port driver with the one from NT4, which is a protected system file, and so can only be replaced with the use of kernel debugger, running on a seperate machine hooked up to the machine you're modifying via a serial cable. Yeah, that was gonna happen! This was to be able to print to it over the network, BTW.
Yeah, I know it's just an anecdote, but there's always somebody digging up some anecdote about how Windows works perfectly and Linux requires impossible effort and deep knowledge to get working. Well, there's my counterexample. Argument invalidated.
I think that "freedom to modify and fix problems" is more related to those of us who actually understand to a certain degree the underpinnings of an OS and are able to get into the guts of the Linux OS. As for the actual "fixing" - that's limited to an even smaller group of coders.
You start with a good point, but extrapolate it beyond it's bounds, completely forgetting why software Freedom is important. I do not have the expertise to modify the underpinnings of Linux, but there is nothing stopping me from obtaining that expertise, either by learning it myself, or hiring someone else who has it. If I have a problem with the kernel, I can get it fixed. I don't have to submit a bug report or feature request and hope the kernel devs think it's interesting enough for them to spend some time on it, I can take action to get it fixed. Once that's done, it's almost irrelevant whether the kernel devs want to accept my patch or not. If they do, great, but if not, well, the number of non-vanilla kernels out there suggests it's not that big a deal to maintain your own fork. Not only is my problem solved, but I have the power to ensure it stays solved.
At this point, Linux is for the computer-compitent-curious, and that's all, I think.
I think you're stuck in 1998, or maybe you're a Gentoo user. Anyway, I can say for certain that you aren't a Suse user. There are distros out there, such as Suse, that kick MS's ass all the way around the block when it comes to ease of install and maintainance, and at least break even for ease of everyday use.
I c
There's nothing that MS can do to "magically" make their apps run faster on the same hardware that other developers can't
Really? You've perused the Windows source code and verified that there are no undocumented APIs that give MS apps priority? No functions to the effect of if (author != "Microsoft") { run slow }?
Apps are dependent on the OS, and if the OS is Windows then there ARE, in fact, several things MS can do to "magically" make their apps run faster, and there's not a damned thing that other developers can do about it.
While I think your post is very funny, and I love a MP reference as much as anyone, you seem to have missed something very important: the problem has nothing to do with Open Source! Let's take another look at that snippet you quoted, and see if we can make things a bit more clear, shall we?
"It is a known problem that OOo takes a while to start. Staroffice (at the point when Sun bought it) was made by a German company. Most of the internal functions are named in german, and use abbreviations that are not obvious."
So, hopefully now it is plain that this code was not made by some German guy working for free in his spare time, but was in fact written by a german guy getting paid by a company to write code, all of which was then bought by Sun, and then at some later point opened up to the world. The problem would still exist, and be at least as bad, if Sun had never opened up the code (probably worse, as it being open source at least allows for more eyes to look at the problem).
In fact, had it been a FOSS project from the get-go, this problem wouldn't exist. There's strong incentive when creating open source code to make it readable to others. Developers really don't like to work with code they can't make sense of, and in the FOSS world that means either your submissions get rejected, or no developers are attracted to your project. Thus, had it started out as FOSS, it either wouldn't have this problem, or the project would have died out years ago.
Clearly, no such incentive existed within the proprietary software company where Staroffice was originally produced. So, while you apparently were hoping to poke holes in the open source methodology, you have in fact pointed out one of the reasonss proprietary software development is seriously flawed: it often encourages bad code to be released to the public (in order to meet shipment, slopiness because "no one will ever see it", or even as intentional obfuscation).
Mathematics DOES lie. It's called "Statistics".
While we're on the subject, your math is certainly questionable: how exactly does "nearly double" = "scant more"?
There are plenty of tech jobs that pay $9 an hour, and those are exactly the kinds of jobs a CS student with no documentable experience can expect to get. Besides, it was 9 weeks, not 12, which makes it more like $12 an hour. To make it $9 an hour they'd have to have been putting in 55 hours per week, and to bring it down to minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, they'd have to be putting in 97 hours a week. "Scant more", you say?
Well, you know, it's those names that are exclusive to the region commonly refered to as "America."
First you have the traditional ones like Geronimo, Ishi, and Sacajawea. Then there are the more modern ones, like Shawnequa, Loquanda, and Aquaneta.
Hypothetically: What if MS pulls it off and puts out the best OS that the Linux guys have ever seen.
I think this is a logical impossibility, simply because everyone has different needs. But, I'll try to address the individual questions first:
Will the Linux guys at that point stop bashing MS?
No. Producing a superior technology is necessary, but not sufficient. They have too much power and influence for us to ignore the way they choose to conduct themselves.
Will you consider using the MS OS?
If it fulfilled a need that couldn't be filled with Linux, maybe. It's been a long time since I've been able to think of one, though, and I am a gamer.
Now I understand you don't trust them, but how will you respond if you can't say their product sucks?
That I still don't trust them, and strongly prefer not to support an organization whose impact on the world is largely negative.
Will the comments be, "Ya they make the best OS, but they are evil?"
That is the simplistic version of what I just said.
Or will you continue to say that "Windows is just crap because they don't share the kernel source?"
Yeah, I'll say that too, which brings me back to my origional point. The thing is that MS's goal is not to make the best OS for me, but rather to make the best OS for them. The simple fact is, if it happens to also be the best OS for me, that's little more than coincidence, and not something I can rely on in the future.
Now, you can argue that it's just basic capitalism, and that's exactly how a company ought to conduct itself. Fine, why should it be any different for me? Why does the corporation get a free pass for acting only in it's own interest (or, rather, the interest of its shareholders, which is often very much NOT the same thing), and yet when I do the same I'm labeled a zealot?
Anyway, for several years now I have been able to get a Linux distro that is better for me than anything MS has yet offered. In the unlikely event that this ceases to be the case, all the tools and documentation I'd need in order to continue on my own are freely available. I very much doubt that this will ever be the case with MS, making their hypothetically superior technology the inferior choice in the long run. I will agree that I have not yet had a need to do so, but that isn't really the point. I haven't yet had to open the hood of my car, either, but that doesn't mean that day isn't coming, and wouldn't it be foolish of me to ignore that reality?
You whine, moan and complain because Microsoft's command prompt sucks, and when they fix it, you go out of your way to find new things to bitch about.
The bold portion there is the real point of contention: You say they fixed it, while the GP says they just created a more powerful suckage. As for "going out of [our] way", well, someone has to counter the massive MS hype machine, so that the people trying to make decisions can hopefully find the truth somewhere in the middle.
What is very interesting, is that if they HAD copied Bash, or one of the other unix command lines, you would have immediatly jumped on them for that too.
Of course we would have, just like I'm sure you'd jump on OOo for copying a feature from MSO, and for the same reason: lack of innovation.
However, I think it would have been mixed with a liberal portion of acknowledgment as well. There are very good reasons for why Bourne shell derivatives have ruled the *nix world for 30+ years. Only a great fool would not take the time to understand those reasons before creating a shell of their own.
It's not something that is meant to compete with bash.
Now that's just dumb. Competing with bash is EXACTLY what MSH is meant to do, since their lack of a bash equivalent is one of the primary reasons MS is losing the Unix server replacement battle.
In fact, if it weren't for bash, MSH wouldn't exist at all.
you would accomplish that ("command | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | cut -d ':' -f 1") using something like this:
`command | $_.split(" ")[2].split(":")[0] | another_filter_for_further_processing`
Gee, that's a LOT better!
MS has to pipe objects because of a fundamental flaw in their original design philosophy: that binary objects and text are treated differently. *nix treats it all the same, and therefore doesn't have the problem that piping objects compensates for.
Adding complexity in order to solve a problem you don't have doesn't sound like good design to me.
The funny thing is, every program I've had to write at a job has had to have an endless loop in it.
I should perhaps note that I have never actually worked as a programmer, but have merely had to write a few programs in order to do my actual job more efficiently (or at all, in some cases).
It has nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with population.
India produces roughly 5 times as many engineers as we do, and has roughly 5 times the population. China produces roughly 10 times as many engineers as we do, and has roughly 10 times the population.
Rather than play chicken little with regards to our education system, we could perhaps simply recognize that only a certain percentage of people have the apptitude, ability, and desire to be engineers. If you're going to base the competition only on the numbers produced, the country with the highest population will win. Period.
For the time being, I suppose we can at least take some pride in the fact that a lot of them pay a lot of money to get their educations here.