At least, that's where I assume you were speaking from after posting a comment like the above claiming XP development methodology is some "new idiot buzzword". Take a look at www.extremeprogramming.org for a bit of history and perspective. There has been a lot of discussion and interest in lightweight software development methodologies over the past few years in part due Kent Beck's book "Extreme Programming explained", but keep in mind, it was first published in late 1999. This is hardly "new" and for sure didn't come out just this week as you imply.
Also, for the sake of the rest of us "hard working...computing professionals" (college educated or otherwise), please take some time to keep up in your field or shut up and listen when you don't know something. If you're actually a software developer and don't know or don't care about the work of some of the individuals listed on the XP site or the XP book series authors and those listed in the credits (Martin Fowler, Erich Gamma, Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham to name a few), then please do us "serious" Software Engineers a favor and make that career move you've been grumbling about. At this point you're either a.) young and ignorant and bound to make us look bad or b.) old and arogant and bound to make us look worse.
Why was it considered a less than welcome offer? Was this just one school district opionion or was it founded on something more public education specific?
"RMS isn't even that fat compared to most of these other tubby OSS hippies. He is, however, clearly nuts."
This moderating system is a bit wierd. I wanted like hell to rate the above statement "redundant" simply because it contained the words "RMS", "hippies" and "nuts". Then I realized that would take points away from the poster.
All of the people praising about how "thier child is growing up learning all about computers" and will be better off for it fail to realize that for the most part, thier child is merely growing up learning how to be a digital consumer. Saying that your kid knows application XYZ and "surfs the net" (gawd I HATE that term) means he's learned computers is like saying that taking a defensive driving course means you're a mechanic.
The irony is that it seems this is (as stated above) due the the "user friendly" advancements. Almost two decades ago, you had to know something a bit more than surface to do just about anything. Kids got into computer magazines for 8-bit micros came with printed source code for games and graphics. Magazines like Byte! had hardware discussions that got into the actual hardware, not just "This graphics card has these specs and is SOOO pretty!".
What NEEDS to be done is to quit dumping fortunes into "computer education" in schools that only amount to more digital consumer training and seriously teach kids about computers in school. Get them working with led's and logic gates. Give 'em simple CPU's and teach 'em assembly. Hell, give 'em BASIC Stamps and have them create robots. Anything that helps demystify the things they use everyday.
There's a part of me that is intrigued and scared to see what is going to happen to the technology world as generations grow up with more and more abstracted away.
Those linux boxen can run just fine w/o video cards, keyboards, or mice connected to them. Can the same be said of any 'Doze variant?
Of course the licensing cost is the devils bargan to be wary of here. Even if they got some nice PR deal, if it's a RESEARCH operation at a university and someone might want to SHARE the fruits of the RESEARCH, it would require anyone else who wanted to verify or extend the work with the clustering software to also run 'Doze. Is M$ going to step up and offer the same deal (or better) to every other members of the research community if they want to contribute, analize, or validate and expand the work? I didn't think so.
If there's one place where Linux excells and Microsoft needs to be kept out of with armed guards, constentino wire, and rabbid dogs it's the computing research centers in higher education. Scraping by to live and make post graduate tuition can suck, but having to fight for grant money that only lines the pockets of the richest man on the planet just so you can do your thesis is adding way too much insult to injury. For the sake of future scholars, show this salesweasle the door with the help of your foot.
Be is one of the few companies that genuinely do have a case, me thinks. With browsers the situation is bit convoluted (no one ever made money selling browsers).
From the early license agreements, Netscape was free for educational use. Businesses and personal non-educational use required you to pay for the license. I remember seeing boxed copies for sale all over the place back in 1995. It was available for nearly every flavor of *NIX, Mac, and Winblowz. They sold the "killer app" that made the web a household name. There's no reason they couldn't still be licensing Navigator to this day; except for one: Microshaft's fear.
Microshaft pissed in the punchbowl. They dumped an inferior web browser (everything before IE 3.0 was a joke) on consumers and killed of what could have been a serious cash cow. They did this because they couldn't compete on any real merit (typical Microsoft there) so they undercut the competion on price relying on the OS monopoly to fund the dumping untill they drove the competitor out. They did this with word processors, and spreadsheets if you ever stop to wonder what happened to WordPerfect and Lotus 123. The OS monopoly funds screw-up after screw-up of crappy versions and learning while eating into the competitors customer base with cheap prices. By the time version 3 is out, they've cought up. This "business strategy" works great if you've got the cash to burn and nobody to answer to for doing it since smaller companies don't get to spend years screwing up at least three times .
My point is this: Netscape's complaint is more than legit. Microsoft's monopoly/preditory practices go way further than Netscape or BeOS as well. With the finding of facts to go on, over $20,000,000,000.00USD (yes folks, that's over TWENTY BILLION in the bank), a huge list of enemies, a corporate culture of arrogance, and the current economic slump, they're a prime target to get swamped with lawsuits for the next 5 to 10 years.
It's been a long time coming, they more than deserve it, and I for one am looking forward to watching the show.
Nah. They'll just go down the hall and ask the NT guys what they wish they would have done different when they swiped project Mica source from DEC to build NT. I swear, hasn't that company sold anything that wasn't stolen directly or blatantly plagerized? Oh yeah they have, now I remember... MS Bob.
"My boss gave me a set of criteria which needs to be filled: intuitive and easy to use IDE; simplified GUI design and event handling; advanced error handling; advanced object oriented design including multiple inheritance, abstract classes, and garbage collection; full support for operator and function overloading;
and portable (at compile-time) across various platforms."
Your boss is most likely a tech ignorant (or worse tech wannabe) that has no business diticating a list of requirements like this and, from the sound of it, has no experience shipping software. If all of these are hard and fast requirements, then C++ fails to make it on the Garbage Collection and advanced error handling, Java fails on the multiple inheritance and operator overloading, and VB.not and C-Hash fail on the cross platform (unless the M$ shills in the audience can point me to the respective Mac || *NIX compilers for them AND assoc. libraries). Don't even get started on the IDE issue - nothing like a three way flame war between DevStudio sheep, Emacs evangelists, and VI virtuosos. If you're even thinking about dictating an IDE for developers to use, you're going to be in for a real fun time.
Languages/platforms don't even get chosen in for-profit software endevors because they meet a laundry list of requirements like this. For better or (usually) worse, there's the practicality of developer experience, cost of maintainance (inc. compiler/ide licences), and above all market perception (just try to go off and sell that great tool written in Sather with TCL/TK UI bindings that runs on any *BSD desktop).
Despite this, it's not the things ON the list that disturb me, it's the thinks left OFF the list. No specification of multi-threading support? No question about parsers for XML? Don't need a networking library? How about ODBC drivers? What about support contracts or consulting rates if you run into a big problem and need a hired gun? And dear GOD why the HELL is there no mention of automated build and testing harnesses for any of it?!?!?
See what you can do to get a boss who's been through an actual product lifecycle. Otherwise, get ready learn what "deathmarch" means firsthand.
I think you're right on there about functional languages. The only book I've stumbled over that may head in that direction is "The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia" by Paul Hudak http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521644089 and FWIW, it's copyright June of 2000. I don't own it but was thinking of picking it up soon to play with since my exposure to FP in college was as you well stated; "way off in theory-land".:) I've not been too inspired to dig into functional programming for that reason, but this book at least sound like something fun to play and learn with it.
You're forgetting the apartment crowd and the cable dependancy there. I for one would have loved to buy a DirectTV w/ DirecTiVo when I bought my stand alone unit 4 months ago, but my landlord doesn't want me mounting a dish to his roof (go figure:). This is quite often the case for appartments and in some larger cities (Seattle for example) where up to 50% of the housing market is rental, that's a HUGE loss on customers just because they're stuck with cable.
To make things worse for us apartment delling cable subscribers (victims, since they know we can't switch to a dish) is that the digitial cable boxen often require the use of the IR blaster. I had to build a "fort" for this thing and it has been known to drop digits when changing channels from time to time. If your digital cable box and TiVo combo doesn't require an IR blaster, you're damn lucky.
Setting up TiVo w/ a digital cable box is by far the hardest route to have to go. I hope that TiVo gets together with the cable providers and starts edging into the digital cable boxes the same way they edged into the dish systems. I don't know anyone else, but because of my beloved TiVo setup, I've haven't touched a Pay-Per-View order since I got it. Not for having so many more choices, but because I don't want to mess with the IR Blaster "fort".
Why not the next Bill Gates? Is his success too much for you to handle?
Gates' "success" was all in the realm of business backstabbing and legal weaslework. He hasn't made any significant technical contribution in nearly a quarter century. There's more than enough institutions in this country to inspire greed and deciet. Too many. People drop out of college all the time because they want to make a fast buck.
Once again, more Slashdot bias.
Not exactly. Linus and Gates may be in the same iconic figurehead category, but Linus earned his Masters in CS from the University of Helsinki while working on Linux and Gates dropped out of Harvard to go make a quick buck. Too bad for him he didn't stay. He might have learned something about Anti-trust law the easy way:) Most of us Slashdot folks recognize with Linus because he has a genuine passion for computing and learning so he's a better example to be inspired by.
Of course, this will be moderated down by some small-minded twit of a user, or one of the fine hypocrite editors.
Probably not. Morons that flame as Anonymous Cowards are more often ignored by most of the readers. I doubt anyone would waste moderator points on your silly post, but I'll have a fun time ripping it:)
Piss all over you, Slashdot.
With the exception of article posting decisions,
this is almost compleatly a web community. If
you don't like it, piss on you. Go start your own web site that praises unethical business con men. Of course, you're going to have to compete with the likes of The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Business Week, etc. It'll be a tough task, but I do wish you the best of luck.
It's about time! Microsoft used thier monopoly position to fund predatory pricing in the web browser software market. Even the Microsoft apologist trolls should have been mad about it. If M$ was so wonderfull, why did they fearfully kill what could have been thier next cash cow?
The web browser was the killer app for the 'Net and they could have made more off it than the whole Office bundle put together if they had the balls to go after the money. Stock holders should have been furious over them killing what would have been a golden goose.
Funny thing is, had IBM come along and started building an "Office Killer" and giving it away for free, those pukes in Redmond would be the first to cry about it. Between the Ant-trust suit, class action suits, and now this I hope the legal process bleeds Microsoft of every cent of thier stolen money. Just look at thier track record: leaching university computing cycles to build BASIC, screwing Seattle Computer Products out of QDOS and lying to IBM, stealing and poorly implementing the Mac interface from Apple, literally stealing source code from DEC to build NT off of VMS, stealing code from the DiscStacker folks... come to think of it, have they actually origionally invented from the ground up anything of use? Anything at all they can say is origional?
I guess it's a good thing Gates dropped out of Harvard. He probably would have been cought cheating and been expelled otherwise. Must have saved his family some spare change and some grief.
You're forgetting the one important fact: marketoids, salesweasels and other scum-wearing suits that run businesses don't understand SHIT about technology and THEY DON'T WANT TO. This, is thier ultimate downfall; for they can not effectivly communicate the nature of the business problems compleat with all of the details needed to implement solutions in the technical domain. It takes an understanding of business, people, and computing to build software that will meet demands and make a profit (not just "make money"). Speaking english isn't enough though if you don't "communicate" as being westernized in the "busyness" world, and being 8 time zones away relying on video conferenceing/phone/e-mail doesn't give the impatient popmpus "I'm-so-important" slimeball the immediate gratification they demand.
Long story short, while there's a fear for American Programmers seeing jobs leave the country, untill the conditioning of the business culture changes, there's nothing to worry about. Given the tendancy that short-sighted, egotistical arogance is rewarded in corporate America, It's going to take external forces that nobody counted on to change the game, because the slimeballs benefit WAY too much from the current rule set.
In the mean time, Tech workers need to do two things: 1.) keep thier skills up to date and sharp and 2.) learn a bit about the slimeballs world. Don't get sucked into it!! Therein lies the road to hell, but UNDERSTAND the nature of it and what drives them.
This focus on skills, rather than knowledge is, I think, causing many of the problems in the United States' educational system. Kids don't learn to think, they memorize specific processes. "You just stick the right formula in; a solution for every fool."
This is the way it's always been. Someone somewhere comes up with a cannon of material and it's downloaded into skulls so that K-12 is all nice and homogonized. It's only getting worse. In Washington state, it's become the yardsick and my wife (a highschool English teacher) has been forced along with others into dealing with the a nasty state mandated exam. There's no room for critical thinking when you have facts to memorize.
I've heard it said that some IT managers prefer to hire people with Mathmatics, rather than CS degrees, "because they want people who can think."
Hahah:) Ahhh... not quite. IT managers hire people with Math degrees because they tend to have the same discrete math, logic, and problem solving skill set as the CS degrees. Of course, they'd rahter have the CS degrees, but they command too much money and would rather CREATE technology (software, firmware, whatever) than be chained to a pager 24/7 fixing crap for a bunch of tech-illiterate suits:)
Educators increasingly focus on getting students to come up with good answers. It is infinitely more important that they teach students to ask good questions.
Unfortunatly, the "educators" that make the decisions on course curriculum are the equivalent of government middle-management *SHUDDER* and have no interest in doing anything but paying lip service to anyone who interacts with them. There are all of these fools out there with thier "Masters in Education" who couldn't stand up and teach a classroom of students for a one or two week unit let alone for a quarter who end up running things. Asking questions means challenging authority, and in the modern educational process this is not allowed.
Short of your confusion over Math majors in IT, I agree with your overall statement. However, computers in the classroom or no, the only thing that is going to give the American Educational system a fighting chance is privitization. There is no incentive for the system to fix itself, so solving the problem will require an outside force.
The show is a success because of great plot writing and actual character development. If the "Great looking chicks" argument held water for Sci-Fi, then we'd all be talking about how excelent Dark Angel is (GAG!).
Either the M$ Xbob or the PS/2 is capable in terms of hardware and/or expandable hardware of doing 90% of what most home users want. The Xbob is just a specialized PC running a specialized Windoze XP. Only blessed hardware touches it, so all MS needs to do is decide to clean-up/port/tweak IE/Office/etc and slap on one line of USB printer, ethernet adapter, keybaord, mouse, and VGA monitor adapter (or charge you a fortune for an "Xbox Monitor). 'Fraid yet Gateway? Sony would have to do more work (most likely with Linux) to get the same sort of stuff ported, and I think they have less RAM to deal with for apps.
The only thing preventing it are the companies in question.
Computer skills should be handled in the word processing/keyboarding/computer-whatever classes. If schools are so concerned about those skills, then they need to rank it up there with P.E. crap like dodgeball "skills" and make it required in order to graduate. Between the lack of training for faculty, dammaged systems, software that doesn't fit lesson plans, and IT people that get paid school district wages, computers in school have always been a joke and a stupid waste of tax funds. My wife, a high school English teacher, would rather have enough books for the students to take home than see another dime spent on tech deployed in the High School environment where the culture prevents it from being put to good use.
"What's the appeal of these childish stories to grown, sophisticated adults?".
I think there's a lot to be said for allowing yourself the pleasure of enjoying "childish" things. Let's face it. There's a hell of a lot about the "sophisticated adult" world right now that just flat sucks. Sept. 11th attacks, military response to them, Antrhax, economic downturn, and high-tech layoffs are all a painfull contrast to the past few years of blinding prosperity. What the hell is so damn great about being a grown-up again?
The worse things look, the more I just want to go ride my bike through the leaves in the street this afternoon. Instead, I'll be sitting around trying to decode and deal with stupid office political struggles. The world would be a much better place if we all went back to taking naps in the afternoon after cookies and milk. Perhaps not realistic, but more productive than office politics.
Let's hope they're spending all the money on developer salaries and hardware. There are still too many companies out there to this day that should have been 5 smart guys in a garage making something kick-ass enough to sell itself if the idea is so damn good. And this idea is damn good.
It may sound like a silly question, but if Sony puts FireWire on it's systems and Apple wants to
expand the impact and capability of FireWire, they should do a PCI add in card that runs under X86. I like Apple, and if this is just bait to get people to use Macs for MP3's that's fine. However, selling a large number of units and using it as a BRIDGE from the PC to the Mac world would be a hell of a lot smarter.
Generally, operator overloading is just syntatical sugar and is not strictly an OO language feature. Heck, Perl even supports it.
I think Java did well to leave it alone with the exception of String class, but that was one of those peer presure things. One could even deal without it in the Strings class.
After graduating with a B.S. in C.S. in 1997, I knew I could never work for Microsoft. I find their products inferior, and their business practices disgusting. Add in the pile of companies they have "aquired" technology from or run into the ground through the use of thier monopoly (Netscape, Lotus, WordPerfect, etc) and I'm left with the sinking feeling that if you fight them, you loose. Not because they're better or smarter, but because they have the resources of a giant monopoly to back them up.
Think about it people, if MSN in the early days had to do something novel like, uh, show a _PROFIT_, there's no way they could have contended with AOL. But, with tons of monopoly money they just stuck around and got to screw up as much as they wanted and loose as much money as they wanted untill they got in a position to get it right. Any other company? Not enough backing, no way in hell it could be pulled off.
How about WinCE (or, "wince" the derigotory term and being what a user does when interacting with it)? Come on people, Apple gave up on Newton and they had better R&D concepts, developer support experience, the whole nine yards. Palm still has a good majority (barely), but if WinCE wasn't backed with piles and piles of monopoly money; enough to screw up time after time in the market (clam-shell keyboards?? Multiple CPU's?? Color WAY too soon??) they would be long dead.
And how about a favorite: IE. Yeah this one really pisses me off. Web browsers are not trivial applications. MS threw a metric assload of people at building IE (still do, I'm sure) that they couldn't have afforded to pay AND give away if not for all of the monopoly money. What's worse is that Netscape used to sell Navigator and could have made a profit. The web browser was the "next killer app" in & around 1995. I'd think MS stockholders would be furious for having Bill & Co. put a bullet in what could have been the next application space to make money in if they would have competed for the dollars instead of dumping inferior crap on the market and pulling license nasties untill the programmers could figure out how to write a browser.
I would love to see just one of these entities have to survive on it's own. They'd have dot-bombed faster than anything on the books. And that's the sad part; the nice fallback monopolies lets MS slowly crush anything they want to.
At the rate things are going, it looks like anyone programming will eventually be doing it for the MS monopoly machine, one way or another. Either having to use thier "tools" and target thier OS in order to make a buck, then praying that MS doesn't decide they want to get into your space.
Other companies don't have this level of screw up luxury; multiple failure isn't an option.
Too bad all of the hard-working honest programmers and tech visionaries don't have the luxury of a few do-overs. Imagine how much brighter the computing landscape would be.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, that's where I assume you were speaking from after posting a comment like the above claiming XP development methodology is some "new idiot buzzword". Take a look at www.extremeprogramming.org for a bit of history and perspective. There has been a lot of discussion and interest in lightweight software development methodologies over the past few years in part due Kent Beck's book "Extreme Programming explained", but keep in mind, it was first published in late 1999. This is hardly "new" and for sure didn't come out just this week as you imply.
...computing professionals" (college educated or otherwise), please take some time to keep up in your field or shut up and listen when you don't know something. If you're actually a software developer and don't know or don't care about the work of some of the individuals listed on the XP site or the XP book series authors and those listed in the credits (Martin Fowler, Erich Gamma, Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham to name a few), then please do us "serious" Software Engineers a favor and make that career move you've been grumbling about. At this point you're either a.) young and ignorant and bound to make us look bad or b.) old and arogant and bound to make us look worse.
Also, for the sake of the rest of us "hard working
Why was it considered a less than welcome offer? Was this just one school district opionion or was it founded on something more public education specific?
This moderating system is a bit wierd. I wanted like hell to rate the above statement "redundant" simply because it contained the words "RMS", "hippies" and "nuts". Then I realized that would take points away from the poster.
I'll just go home now....
The irony is that it seems this is (as stated above) due the the "user friendly" advancements. Almost two decades ago, you had to know something a bit more than surface to do just about anything. Kids got into computer magazines for 8-bit micros came with printed source code for games and graphics. Magazines like Byte! had hardware discussions that got into the actual hardware, not just "This graphics card has these specs and is SOOO pretty!".
What NEEDS to be done is to quit dumping fortunes into "computer education" in schools that only amount to more digital consumer training and seriously teach kids about computers in school. Get them working with led's and logic gates. Give 'em simple CPU's and teach 'em assembly. Hell, give 'em BASIC Stamps and have them create robots. Anything that helps demystify the things they use everyday. There's a part of me that is intrigued and scared to see what is going to happen to the technology world as generations grow up with more and more abstracted away.
SnowCrash anyone?
If there's one place where Linux excells and Microsoft needs to be kept out of with armed guards, constentino wire, and rabbid dogs it's the computing research centers in higher education. Scraping by to live and make post graduate tuition can suck, but having to fight for grant money that only lines the pockets of the richest man on the planet just so you can do your thesis is adding way too much insult to injury. For the sake of future scholars, show this salesweasle the door with the help of your foot.
From the early license agreements, Netscape was free for educational use. Businesses and personal non-educational use required you to pay for the license. I remember seeing boxed copies for sale all over the place back in 1995. It was available for nearly every flavor of *NIX, Mac, and Winblowz. They sold the "killer app" that made the web a household name. There's no reason they couldn't still be licensing Navigator to this day; except for one: Microshaft's fear.
Microshaft pissed in the punchbowl. They dumped an inferior web browser (everything before IE 3.0 was a joke) on consumers and killed of what could have been a serious cash cow. They did this because they couldn't compete on any real merit (typical Microsoft there) so they undercut the competion on price relying on the OS monopoly to fund the dumping untill they drove the competitor out. They did this with word processors, and spreadsheets if you ever stop to wonder what happened to WordPerfect and Lotus 123. The OS monopoly funds screw-up after screw-up of crappy versions and learning while eating into the competitors customer base with cheap prices. By the time version 3 is out, they've cought up. This "business strategy" works great if you've got the cash to burn and nobody to answer to for doing it since smaller companies don't get to spend years screwing up at least three times .
My point is this: Netscape's complaint is more than legit. Microsoft's monopoly/preditory practices go way further than Netscape or BeOS as well. With the finding of facts to go on, over $20,000,000,000.00USD (yes folks, that's over TWENTY BILLION in the bank), a huge list of enemies, a corporate culture of arrogance, and the current economic slump, they're a prime target to get swamped with lawsuits for the next 5 to 10 years.
It's been a long time coming, they more than deserve it, and I for one am looking forward to watching the show.
Nah. They'll just go down the hall and ask the NT guys what they wish they would have done different when they swiped project Mica source from DEC to build NT. I swear, hasn't that company sold anything that wasn't stolen directly or blatantly plagerized? Oh yeah they have, now I remember... MS Bob.
Your boss is most likely a tech ignorant (or worse tech wannabe) that has no business diticating a list of requirements like this and, from the sound of it, has no experience shipping software. If all of these are hard and fast requirements, then C++ fails to make it on the Garbage Collection and advanced error handling, Java fails on the multiple inheritance and operator overloading, and VB.not and C-Hash fail on the cross platform (unless the M$ shills in the audience can point me to the respective Mac || *NIX compilers for them AND assoc. libraries). Don't even get started on the IDE issue - nothing like a three way flame war between DevStudio sheep, Emacs evangelists, and VI virtuosos. If you're even thinking about dictating an IDE for developers to use, you're going to be in for a real fun time.
Languages/platforms don't even get chosen in for-profit software endevors because they meet a laundry list of requirements like this. For better or (usually) worse, there's the practicality of developer experience, cost of maintainance (inc. compiler/ide licences), and above all market perception (just try to go off and sell that great tool written in Sather with TCL/TK UI bindings that runs on any *BSD desktop).
Despite this, it's not the things ON the list that disturb me, it's the thinks left OFF the list. No specification of multi-threading support? No question about parsers for XML? Don't need a networking library? How about ODBC drivers? What about support contracts or consulting rates if you run into a big problem and need a hired gun? And dear GOD why the HELL is there no mention of automated build and testing harnesses for any of it?!?!?
See what you can do to get a boss who's been through an actual product lifecycle. Otherwise, get ready learn what "deathmarch" means firsthand.
I think you're right on there about functional languages. The only book I've stumbled over that may head in that direction is "The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia" by Paul Hudak http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521644089 and FWIW, it's copyright June of 2000. I don't own it but was thinking of picking it up soon to play with since my exposure to FP in college was as you well stated; "way off in theory-land".:) I've not been too inspired to dig into functional programming for that reason, but this book at least sound like something fun to play and learn with it.
To make things worse for us apartment delling cable subscribers (victims, since they know we can't switch to a dish) is that the digitial cable boxen often require the use of the IR blaster. I had to build a "fort" for this thing and it has been known to drop digits when changing channels from time to time. If your digital cable box and TiVo combo doesn't require an IR blaster, you're damn lucky.
Setting up TiVo w/ a digital cable box is by far the hardest route to have to go. I hope that TiVo gets together with the cable providers and starts edging into the digital cable boxes the same way they edged into the dish systems. I don't know anyone else, but because of my beloved TiVo setup, I've haven't touched a Pay-Per-View order since I got it. Not for having so many more choices, but because I don't want to mess with the IR Blaster "fort".
Gates' "success" was all in the realm of business backstabbing and legal weaslework. He hasn't made any significant technical contribution in nearly a quarter century. There's more than enough institutions in this country to inspire greed and deciet. Too many. People drop out of college all the time because they want to make a fast buck.
Once again, more Slashdot bias.
Not exactly. Linus and Gates may be in the same iconic figurehead category, but Linus earned his Masters in CS from the University of Helsinki while working on Linux and Gates dropped out of Harvard to go make a quick buck. Too bad for him he didn't stay. He might have learned something about Anti-trust law the easy way:) Most of us Slashdot folks recognize with Linus because he has a genuine passion for computing and learning so he's a better example to be inspired by.
Of course, this will be moderated down by some small-minded twit of a user, or one of the fine hypocrite editors.
Probably not. Morons that flame as Anonymous Cowards are more often ignored by most of the readers. I doubt anyone would waste moderator points on your silly post, but I'll have a fun time ripping it:)
Piss all over you, Slashdot. With the exception of article posting decisions, this is almost compleatly a web community. If you don't like it, piss on you. Go start your own web site that praises unethical business con men. Of course, you're going to have to compete with the likes of The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Business Week, etc. It'll be a tough task, but I do wish you the best of luck.
So piss on you, Mr. AC.
-bADlOGIN
Funny thing is, had IBM come along and started building an "Office Killer" and giving it away for free, those pukes in Redmond would be the first to cry about it. Between the Ant-trust suit, class action suits, and now this I hope the legal process bleeds Microsoft of every cent of thier stolen money. Just look at thier track record: leaching university computing cycles to build BASIC, screwing Seattle Computer Products out of QDOS and lying to IBM, stealing and poorly implementing the Mac interface from Apple, literally stealing source code from DEC to build NT off of VMS, stealing code from the DiscStacker folks... come to think of it, have they actually origionally invented from the ground up anything of use? Anything at all they can say is origional?
I guess it's a good thing Gates dropped out of Harvard. He probably would have been cought cheating and been expelled otherwise. Must have saved his family some spare change and some grief.
Long story short, while there's a fear for American Programmers seeing jobs leave the country, untill the conditioning of the business culture changes, there's nothing to worry about. Given the tendancy that short-sighted, egotistical arogance is rewarded in corporate America, It's going to take external forces that nobody counted on to change the game, because the slimeballs benefit WAY too much from the current rule set.
In the mean time, Tech workers need to do two things: 1.) keep thier skills up to date and sharp and 2.) learn a bit about the slimeballs world. Don't get sucked into it!! Therein lies the road to hell, but UNDERSTAND the nature of it and what drives them.
This is the way it's always been. Someone somewhere comes up with a cannon of material and it's downloaded into skulls so that K-12 is all nice and homogonized. It's only getting worse. In Washington state, it's become the yardsick and my wife (a highschool English teacher) has been forced along with others into dealing with the a nasty state mandated exam. There's no room for critical thinking when you have facts to memorize.
I've heard it said that some IT managers prefer to hire people with Mathmatics, rather than CS degrees, "because they want people who can think."
Hahah:) Ahhh... not quite. IT managers hire people with Math degrees because they tend to have the same discrete math, logic, and problem solving skill set as the CS degrees. Of course, they'd rahter have the CS degrees, but they command too much money and would rather CREATE technology (software, firmware, whatever) than be chained to a pager 24/7 fixing crap for a bunch of tech-illiterate suits:)
Educators increasingly focus on getting students to come up with good answers. It is infinitely more important that they teach students to ask good questions.
Unfortunatly, the "educators" that make the decisions on course curriculum are the equivalent of government middle-management *SHUDDER* and have no interest in doing anything but paying lip service to anyone who interacts with them. There are all of these fools out there with thier "Masters in Education" who couldn't stand up and teach a classroom of students for a one or two week unit let alone for a quarter who end up running things. Asking questions means challenging authority, and in the modern educational process this is not allowed.
Short of your confusion over Math majors in IT, I agree with your overall statement. However, computers in the classroom or no, the only thing that is going to give the American Educational system a fighting chance is privitization. There is no incentive for the system to fix itself, so solving the problem will require an outside force.
Please see the Jargon File Apendix A which discusses "The meaning of 'Hack'" at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Meaning -of-Hack.html.
The show is a success because of great plot writing and actual character development. If the "Great looking chicks" argument held water for Sci-Fi, then we'd all be talking about how excelent Dark Angel is (GAG!).
Either the M$ Xbob or the PS/2 is capable in terms of hardware and/or expandable hardware of doing 90% of what most home users want. The Xbob is just a specialized PC running a specialized Windoze XP. Only blessed hardware touches it, so all MS needs to do is decide to clean-up/port/tweak IE/Office/etc and slap on one line of USB printer, ethernet adapter, keybaord, mouse, and VGA monitor adapter (or charge you a fortune for an "Xbox Monitor). 'Fraid yet Gateway? Sony would have to do more work (most likely with Linux) to get the same sort of stuff ported, and I think they have less RAM to deal with for apps.
The only thing preventing it are the companies in question.
Computer skills should be handled in the word processing/keyboarding/computer-whatever classes. If schools are so concerned about those skills, then they need to rank it up there with P.E. crap like dodgeball "skills" and make it required in order to graduate. Between the lack of training for faculty, dammaged systems, software that doesn't fit lesson plans, and IT people that get paid school district wages, computers in school have always been a joke and a stupid waste of tax funds. My wife, a high school English teacher, would rather have enough books for the students to take home than see another dime spent on tech deployed in the High School environment where the culture prevents it from being put to good use.
"What's the appeal of these childish stories to grown, sophisticated adults?".
I think there's a lot to be said for allowing yourself the pleasure of enjoying "childish" things. Let's face it. There's a hell of a lot about the "sophisticated adult" world right now that just flat sucks. Sept. 11th attacks, military response to them, Antrhax, economic downturn, and high-tech layoffs are all a painfull contrast to the past few years of blinding prosperity. What the hell is so damn great about being a grown-up again?
The worse things look, the more I just want to go ride my bike through the leaves in the street this afternoon. Instead, I'll be sitting around trying to decode and deal with stupid office political struggles. The world would be a much better place if we all went back to taking naps in the afternoon after cookies and milk. Perhaps not realistic, but more productive than office politics.
Let's hope they're spending all the money on developer salaries and hardware. There are still too many companies out there to this day that should have been 5 smart guys in a garage making something kick-ass enough to sell itself if the idea is so damn good. And this idea is damn good.
It may sound like a silly question, but if Sony puts FireWire on it's systems and Apple wants to expand the impact and capability of FireWire, they should do a PCI add in card that runs under X86. I like Apple, and if this is just bait to get people to use Macs for MP3's that's fine. However, selling a large number of units and using it as a BRIDGE from the PC to the Mac world would be a hell of a lot smarter.
Generally, operator overloading is just syntatical sugar and is not strictly an OO language feature. Heck, Perl even supports it.
I think Java did well to leave it alone with the exception of String class, but that was one of those peer presure things. One could even deal without it in the Strings class.
Apparently, you don't have any "toleranse" for a dictionary either:)
If you're going to be pompous, at least be thorough about it.
After graduating with a B.S. in C.S. in 1997, I knew I could never work for Microsoft. I find their products inferior, and their business practices disgusting. Add in the pile of companies they have "aquired" technology from or run into the ground through the use of thier monopoly (Netscape, Lotus, WordPerfect, etc) and I'm left with the sinking feeling that if you fight them, you loose. Not because they're better or smarter, but because they have the resources of a giant monopoly to back them up.
Think about it people, if MSN in the early days had to do something novel like, uh, show a _PROFIT_, there's no way they could have contended with AOL. But, with tons of monopoly money they just stuck around and got to screw up as much as they wanted and loose as much money as they wanted untill they got in a position to get it right. Any other company? Not enough backing, no way in hell it could be pulled off.
How about WinCE (or, "wince" the derigotory term and being what a user does when interacting with it)? Come on people, Apple gave up on Newton and they had better R&D concepts, developer support experience, the whole nine yards. Palm still has a good majority (barely), but if WinCE wasn't backed with piles and piles of monopoly money; enough to screw up time after time in the market (clam-shell keyboards?? Multiple CPU's?? Color WAY too soon??) they would be long dead.
And how about a favorite: IE. Yeah this one really pisses me off. Web browsers are not trivial applications. MS threw a metric assload of people at building IE (still do, I'm sure) that they couldn't have afforded to pay AND give away if not for all of the monopoly money. What's worse is that Netscape used to sell Navigator and could have made a profit. The web browser was the "next killer app" in & around 1995. I'd think MS stockholders would be furious for having Bill & Co. put a bullet in what could have been the next application space to make money in if they would have competed for the dollars instead of dumping inferior crap on the market and pulling license nasties untill the programmers could figure out how to write a browser.
I would love to see just one of these entities have to survive on it's own. They'd have dot-bombed faster than anything on the books. And that's the sad part; the nice fallback monopolies lets MS slowly crush anything they want to.
At the rate things are going, it looks like anyone programming will eventually be doing it for the MS monopoly machine, one way or another. Either having to use thier "tools" and target thier OS in order to make a buck, then praying that MS doesn't decide they want to get into your space.
Other companies don't have this level of screw up luxury; multiple failure isn't an option.
Too bad all of the hard-working honest programmers and tech visionaries don't have the luxury of a few do-overs. Imagine how much brighter the computing landscape would be.
I think I'll go puke now too.
This has got to mean no more market "crashes", right?
:)
Oh yeah. That was bad.