OK, it's not a blink of the eye, but it's almost the same length of time between the London of the Blitz and the London of today...... and not that much longer than the journey time from London to Manchester by train.
One of my mates at Uni, who was thoroughly english and denied any sugestion of Welshness, nonetheless bears the name Gareth Rhys Frowen-Williams. Which is a pretty strong contender.
they use Excel (a spreadsheet) as their 'engine' so to speak.
Well, I suppose they do to the extent that SQL Server 7, SQL Server 2000 and Excel are the same thing, yes.
In most other respects, they do not. For the old-fashioned 'file-serving' aspect of Access theystill use Jet as the engine, and in all other cases they use ADO to connect to SQL Server either in full-on server guise or local MSDE form.
They can use ODBC to connect to an Excel spreadsheet (as a data source, using Jet as the engine) and can then join columns in the spreadsheet to columns in table on the database server(anything ODBC compliant - SQL7, Oracle 8i, MySQL, whatever), which is very useful. But Excel as the engine? Try harder, please.
Oh come on, any moron who used anything for any purpose would would be a moron. Your point being?
So what is the Open Office equivalent for easy secretary-grade querying of multiple data sources? Access the database format (.mdb files accessed using the Jet database engine) is pretty moribund. Access the database client is still tough to beat.
Well, it's not 100%, certainly. Though given that providing a Mandatory Deposit copy if requested is a condition of Copyright Registration, I'd be surprised if a publisher were to refuse a request.
From the 2001 Annual Report, the Copyright Office had a budget of $40,896,000 in fiscal Year 2001, though I'm not clear on whether this includes funding for the storage of earlier MD items. Total LOC funding for 2001 was $572M, plus $119M in gifts.
With the volume of published material increasing exponentially with time, with the best will in the world it's just unfeasible to maintain a comprehensive collection anymore. What Mandatory Deposit gives is the ability, in an environment where the LOC has to make a judgement call, to rely on the availability of any item the LOC really wants (the initial penalty for refusal to supply is a 2500 fine, plus 250 per item refused).
Actually, if I dust off my old Librarian degree for a second, the British Library is in fact not a biulding full of books at all, but rather a collection of orghanised knowledge, which can be acesses from any of thousands of crappy little libraries, and at several huge ones too;-)
Considering the cost of the existing 340km of basement shelving, mostly mobile, in a tightly controlled microenvironment, with fire and flood protection, I certainly wouldn't expect them to skimp on the storage. But I'd expect the competitive tendering process to keep some sort of a lid on the spend.
Wouldn't worry too much about that. VB in the traditional sennse, the VBA language, is dead. Into its twilight and waiting for nothing more than 'unsupported' status in another few years. VB.net is a far more grown-up and disciplined language (which can be a bit of a shock for a VBA programmer if that's all they know).
But MSH sounds to me less like additional clunk as a layer in the replacement for all those old clunks - USER & GDI out, DirectX in. Woolly inconsistent Win32 API out, fully object-oriented, Common Type System compliant winFX API in (the architecture that allowed the old POSIX and OS/2 subsystems finally pays off). Drivers coming out of the kernel at last. A lot of people said the windows CLI was rubbish for years, and the scale of this rebuild seems to give a good opportunity to put in a really good one. Win2k and XP seem like spring-cleans compared to this refurbishment.
Re:I mean, with MSVC, you can do a lot of cool shi
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
Incidentally, one of the most joyous things I heard from the PDC was that the C# and VB.net compilers will ship with the OS (they're currently available free(beer) in the.net framework SDK). Between that, the new winFX API (is it just an API to the Win32 subsystem or a separate subsystem like OS/2 and POSIX used to be?) and the MONAD / MSH announcement, Longhorn sounds like a rather pleasant place to spend a workday.
So he mentions buffer overruns, he really doesnt address them...except by spending billions on the.net managed code environment, no, I guess he doesn't.
That'll happen anyway if they start selling shares - it's an obvious consequence of the moral and legal obligation to maximise shareholder return-on-investment, given that they've got one of the most-visited web pages in existence.
Which in turn suggests that by the time Google's ripe for a takeover, it will already have morphed from it's current fast-loading fairly clean UI to a horrendous flashing billboard.
With the best will in the world, if they're legally obliged to maximise shareholders ROI, they're going to be pretty much forced to sell advertising space heavily on what is after all one of the most-hit pages on the whole Web.
By which point, what with the PageRank problems they're having and so forth, no great loss really.
Is Newham some kind of poster-boy location for Microsoft?
According to the Register story cited in the slashdot article above, Newham's more of a poster-boy location for properly audited financially responsible public sector IT in the UK. Hence the interest in what they find, as they have a reputation for actually doing this sort of exercise properly.
We'll get a reasonably trustworthy temperature reading on hell when Cap Gemini Ernst & Young complete the audit and provide some figures.
Whichever way the result goes at least it'll give us some real objective figures to compare rather than the assumptions from both sides which are about all we have to go on at the moment.
How is Longhorn possibly relevant at this point in time?
Leaving aside the matter of relevance, Longhorn is very topical right now for a news site because this is the week of Moft's Professional Developers' Conference in LA (2 grand, sold out ages ago) and there has therefore been a huge amount of new information released - a lot of the gags came off at the start of the PDC. 'News For [a subset of] Nerds, Stuff That Matters [to some people]'.
Which brings us to relevance. Relevance requires an indirect object - an entity can only have relevance to another entity. So it's not easy to answer your generalised question on the subject. But Longhorn might be relevant to the future of Linux depending on how it turns out, and you should always know your enemy. Getting to know the fundamentals of what may be a very different OS as early as possible may be relevant to those who'll need to look after Longhorn systems in three years, and if nothing else it's relevant to all of us Windows developers as a good early warning to get divorced from non.net (i.e. unmanaged) development as soon as possible because there's no future in it. It may of course be of no relevance to you...
The Moft codenames tend to be placenames, and we've adopted that at work. But we're not quite as glamorous as the big boys, so since we finished 'Grimsby' (a key-from image datacapture thing), we've been working on 'Cleethorpes', which should be done at the end of next week.
The minute we know a project's coming we get the source control and so forth set up, and we need a name straight away. We've got our hearts set on 'Tewkesbury' for the next project, though with a week and a half to go they all seem to turn into 'Slough'.
That which has been physically released to 2000 conference delegates on DVD is not strictly vapourware.
When it is finally realized it will be designed not to be hackable.
Three years from now a significant number of current Slashdot readers will be programming or administrating Longhorn for a living.
M$ has more than enough front organisations to market its products without open source sites like slashdot supporting them.
But at any real 'front' organisation, you'd see very little open criticism or contempt for the product, so perhaps Slashdot is providing a valuable outlet for such views.
Why is Longhorn being reported on slashdot at all?
Because apart from its relevance to the working lives of a lot of slashdot readers whether they like or dislike Microsoft, it drives traffic and thus generates revenue. Just now, this story has 382 comments, 'Microsoft Voice Command Almost Here' has 235 after about 3 hours, 'Microsoft Officially Shows Longhorn, WinFX' has 659, 'More Looks At Far-Off 'Longhorn' has 540 and 'C# 2.0 Spec Released' has 621. While the Panther story and the Fossil fuels story got even more comments, these are pretty healthy page-view evidence.
Remember "running out of free system resources" with plenty of memory in Windows 3.1? The limit that was 64k then is 48mb now.
And Avalon, if it turns out as described currently, should slay that particular little b45t4rd properly, using DirectX exclusively and consigning USER and GDI to the afterlife. Nice to see the back of them.
Does MS assume everyone is running their displays at 1600x1200?
They may be prepared to gamble that by the time they release Longhorn (2006?) 1600*1200 will be pretty common. Win2k works OK-ish on 800*600, not pleasantly, but usably. Bear in mind that with Avalon the whole graphics subsytem will use DirectX so they're already betting on a certain level of hardware graphics support.
Slashdot Mirror
Usually something along the lines of the classic 'ooh look, a goodyear blimp' approach.
Penny for the guy?
OK, it's not a blink of the eye, but it's almost the same length of time between the London of the Blitz and the London of today ... ... and not that much longer than the journey time from London to Manchester by train.
One of my mates at Uni, who was thoroughly english and denied any sugestion of Welshness, nonetheless bears the name Gareth Rhys Frowen-Williams. Which is a pretty strong contender.
Don't panic. It isn't on the company's website, it's on the ACT Electoral commission's website - the tar.gz is here, linked from this page.
they use Excel (a spreadsheet) as their 'engine' so to speak.
Well, I suppose they do to the extent that SQL Server 7, SQL Server 2000 and Excel are the same thing, yes.
In most other respects, they do not. For the old-fashioned 'file-serving' aspect of Access theystill use Jet as the engine, and in all other cases they use ADO to connect to SQL Server either in full-on server guise or local MSDE form.
They can use ODBC to connect to an Excel spreadsheet (as a data source, using Jet as the engine) and can then join columns in the spreadsheet to columns in table on the database server(anything ODBC compliant - SQL7, Oracle 8i, MySQL, whatever), which is very useful. But Excel as the engine? Try harder, please.
Oh come on, any moron who used anything for any purpose would would be a moron. Your point being?
So what is the Open Office equivalent for easy secretary-grade querying of multiple data sources? Access the database format (.mdb files accessed using the Jet database engine) is pretty moribund. Access the database client is still tough to beat.
Nah, it's mop-topped popular beat combos, surely?
Well, it's not 100%, certainly. Though given that providing a Mandatory Deposit copy if requested is a condition of Copyright Registration, I'd be surprised if a publisher were to refuse a request.
From the 2001 Annual Report, the Copyright Office had a budget of $40,896,000 in fiscal Year 2001, though I'm not clear on whether this includes funding for the storage of earlier MD items. Total LOC funding for 2001 was $572M, plus $119M in gifts.
With the volume of published material increasing exponentially with time, with the best will in the world it's just unfeasible to maintain a comprehensive collection anymore. What Mandatory Deposit gives is the ability, in an environment where the LOC has to make a judgement call, to rely on the availability of any item the LOC really wants (the initial penalty for refusal to supply is a 2500 fine, plus 250 per item refused).
Actually, if I dust off my old Librarian degree for a second, the British Library is in fact not a biulding full of books at all, but rather a collection of orghanised knowledge, which can be acesses from any of thousands of crappy little libraries, and at several huge ones too ;-)
There's nothing in the BL that you can't get within a fortnight by Inter Library Loan from the crappy little library of your choice.
Considering the cost of the existing 340km of basement shelving, mostly mobile, in a tightly controlled microenvironment, with fire and flood protection, I certainly wouldn't expect them to skimp on the storage. But I'd expect the competitive tendering process to keep some sort of a lid on the spend.
A very similar requirement benefits the Library of Congress in the USA, under the name "Mandatory Deposit" (here are the rules).
the best way for Moft to keep an eye on their employees' blogs is to encourage them to run them at Moft sites like ASP.net and gotdotnet.com.
Moft has been saying that ActiveX is dead in the water since they released the 1.0 .net framework.
Wouldn't worry too much about that. VB in the traditional sennse, the VBA language, is dead. Into its twilight and waiting for nothing more than 'unsupported' status in another few years. VB.net is a far more grown-up and disciplined language (which can be a bit of a shock for a VBA programmer if that's all they know).
But MSH sounds to me less like additional clunk as a layer in the replacement for all those old clunks - USER & GDI out, DirectX in. Woolly inconsistent Win32 API out, fully object-oriented, Common Type System compliant winFX API in (the architecture that allowed the old POSIX and OS/2 subsystems finally pays off). Drivers coming out of the kernel at last. A lot of people said the windows CLI was rubbish for years, and the scale of this rebuild seems to give a good opportunity to put in a really good one. Win2k and XP seem like spring-cleans compared to this refurbishment.
Incidentally, one of the most joyous things I heard from the PDC was that the C# and VB.net compilers will ship with the OS (they're currently available free(beer) in the .net framework SDK). Between that, the new winFX API (is it just an API to the Win32 subsystem or a separate subsystem like OS/2 and POSIX used to be?) and the MONAD / MSH announcement, Longhorn sounds like a rather pleasant place to spend a workday.
So he mentions buffer overruns, he really doesnt address them...except by spending billions on the .net managed code environment, no, I guess he doesn't.
That'll happen anyway if they start selling shares - it's an obvious consequence of the moral and legal obligation to maximise shareholder return-on-investment, given that they've got one of the most-visited web pages in existence.
Which in turn suggests that by the time Google's ripe for a takeover, it will already have morphed from it's current fast-loading fairly clean UI to a horrendous flashing billboard.
With the best will in the world, if they're legally obliged to maximise shareholders ROI, they're going to be pretty much forced to sell advertising space heavily on what is after all one of the most-hit pages on the whole Web.
By which point, what with the PageRank problems they're having and so forth, no great loss really.
Is Newham some kind of poster-boy location for Microsoft?
According to the Register story cited in the slashdot article above, Newham's more of a poster-boy location for properly audited financially responsible public sector IT in the UK. Hence the interest in what they find, as they have a reputation for actually doing this sort of exercise properly.
We'll get a reasonably trustworthy temperature reading on hell when Cap Gemini Ernst & Young complete the audit and provide some figures.
Whichever way the result goes at least it'll give us some real objective figures to compare rather than the assumptions from both sides which are about all we have to go on at the moment.
tomV
How is Longhorn possibly relevant at this point in time?
.net (i.e. unmanaged) development as soon as possible because there's no future in it. It may of course be of no relevance to you...
Leaving aside the matter of relevance, Longhorn is very topical right now for a news site because this is the week of Moft's Professional Developers' Conference in LA (2 grand, sold out ages ago) and there has therefore been a huge amount of new information released - a lot of the gags came off at the start of the PDC. 'News For [a subset of] Nerds, Stuff That Matters [to some people]'.
Which brings us to relevance. Relevance requires an indirect object - an entity can only have relevance to another entity. So it's not easy to answer your generalised question on the subject. But Longhorn might be relevant to the future of Linux depending on how it turns out, and you should always know your enemy. Getting to know the fundamentals of what may be a very different OS as early as possible may be relevant to those who'll need to look after Longhorn systems in three years, and if nothing else it's relevant to all of us Windows developers as a good early warning to get divorced from non
The Moft codenames tend to be placenames, and we've adopted that at work. But we're not quite as glamorous as the big boys, so since we finished 'Grimsby' (a key-from image datacapture thing), we've been working on 'Cleethorpes', which should be done at the end of next week.
The minute we know a project's coming we get the source control and so forth set up, and we need a name straight away. We've got our hearts set on 'Tewkesbury' for the next project, though with a week and a half to go they all seem to turn into 'Slough'.
Longhorn is still vapourware.
That which has been physically released to 2000 conference delegates on DVD is not strictly vapourware.
When it is finally realized it will be designed not to be hackable.
Three years from now a significant number of current Slashdot readers will be programming or administrating Longhorn for a living.
M$ has more than enough front organisations to market its products without open source sites like slashdot supporting them.
But at any real 'front' organisation, you'd see very little open criticism or contempt for the product, so perhaps Slashdot is providing a valuable outlet for such views.
Why is Longhorn being reported on slashdot at all?
Because apart from its relevance to the working lives of a lot of slashdot readers whether they like or dislike Microsoft, it drives traffic and thus generates revenue. Just now, this story has 382 comments, 'Microsoft Voice Command Almost Here' has 235 after about 3 hours, 'Microsoft Officially Shows Longhorn, WinFX' has 659, 'More Looks At Far-Off 'Longhorn' has 540 and 'C# 2.0 Spec Released' has 621. While the Panther story and the Fossil fuels story got even more comments, these are pretty healthy page-view evidence.
Remember "running out of free system resources" with plenty of memory in Windows 3.1? The limit that was 64k then is 48mb now.
And Avalon, if it turns out as described currently, should slay that particular little b45t4rd properly, using DirectX exclusively and consigning USER and GDI to the afterlife. Nice to see the back of them.
Does MS assume everyone is running their displays at 1600x1200?
They may be prepared to gamble that by the time they release Longhorn (2006?) 1600*1200 will be pretty common. Win2k works OK-ish on 800*600, not pleasantly, but usably. Bear in mind that with Avalon the whole graphics subsytem will use DirectX so they're already betting on a certain level of hardware graphics support.