Sure. You think they'd steal the bad stuff from Apple and IBM? What? You don't like paperclips? C'mon, I had to give MS a point of two in their favor for something.
BTW, remember MS BOB? Melinda (as in Bill's wife) was project lead for BOB before they were married. And when it got canned, the little dog had some friends made for him and Office got usability. Amazing what a little pillow talk to can do to a project's design goals...
They have built a common Windowing library into the.NET Framework callable from any.NET enabled language
Sounds like a great way to propogate MS's bugs all over the place. "Hey, look: I can get Gnumeric to crash by importing this Access data via.NET..." No thanks. I want little if anything to do with Microsoft. The reasons I don't care for either them as a company or their products are too numerous/long to get into here (like anyone cares anyway). But it should suffice to say that nobody every asked if I wanted MS crap everywhere. Nobody ever came round and asked me a damn thing. MS, as always, presumes to know what I want and what is best for me. Again, no thanks.
Whether you guys will admit to it or not, there are some smart folks at Microsoft. They have a plan, they have a map to get from A to B, and they execute that plan. Microsoft has real history of coming from behind.
They do indeed make and follow plans. The real trouble is that they usually get shown the way because of other people's ideas and work. Although there's nothing at all wrong with building upon the work of others (science, after all, has gotten plenty of mileage out of this concept). It's just that the troublesome bit is that for MS to "come from behind" successfully they have to ruthlesslessly squash the guy who's idea they're bent on embracing and/or extending. Think about Steve Jobs or Marc Andreesen or Lotus or IBM for a minute. Ponder where the NT kernel came from, or think about something like icons or titlebars, or look for mention of Mosaic in MSIE's About Box or something. Go find out where DOS came from. Ask yourself if Java is any good or not.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, approaches the stability and conformance to standards of IE on Windows in the Linux mix.
I spit up all over myself when I read this. And I had seriously contemplated telling you that you are completely and totally full of shit. But I decided that you are simply uninformed. Opera 5 will run for months for me. I've had a copy running on one of my Linux workstations since July, and that's with daily use. I've even given Opera 6TP3 (their latest Linux beta) a try. It's good, but has some wrinkles yet. Sometimes it goes poof, but it's not a big deal. When it comes back up it has my browser windows open where I had them. But overall, Opera is the most stable browser I've ever used (except for possibly Lynx). It should go without saying that Linux is stable, perhaps even more so since my web browser isn't closely tied to my GUI or OS.
As for standards... hmmm... I don't think so, but in this respect I'm uninformed (or full of shit; I don't use MS products anymore so I wouldn't know in either case). I do seem to recall seeing MSIE render some pretty bad pages, but I can't remember anything specific off the top of my head. I certainly got a kick out of reading how MSIE handles MIME types, and I know that frames and tables are not quite right sometimes in MSIE.
Then they have usability AND more reliability than you will ever give them credit for.
Hey, I'm all for them fixing bugs. A more stable platform would be great. MS has had a good handle on usability, so I'm not sure how that applies to this month's work. But if they're willing to spend a month to fix the products they've been receiving billions of dollars from selling, more power to them. Might keep them out of court or something, who knows? And there'll be far fewer secretaries and such complaining about OS and Office problems.
A completely different topic is whether or not, given MS's security track record, it's a sane thing to have.NET closely tied to either personal or corporate money. I certainly don't care for someone else to be holding a singular combo to every safe I own, especially when that someone is (by definition) more concerned about the bottom line than my financial well-being. And if I wouldn't trust my personal information to MS, then I certainly wouldn't bet my company's future on it. Security and convenience are mutually exclusive. MS has historically wanted things to be more convenient for end-users, and little suggests they'll change appreciably in this regard. Convenience is.NET's raison d' etra. So that doesn't bode well. But like I said, that's off topic...
Bottom line: Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean that you should do a thing.
...with NVidia cards. Well, at least not with my Geforce2. The game simply would not work for a great majority of linux gamers. Word of that got out (too late for me, but others must have heard about about the video issues). Combine that with the fact that it was something like 3 years old when the port was completed and you have a darn good reason why the game didn't sell. I don't think some abnormality endemic to Linux gamers was the cause.
Even if you were simultaneously porting an upcoming Win32 title, you'd still face the "why can't I get a binary free?" issue. Loki had that in spades with Tribes2, but it sold pretty well. (Most people wanted to binary for servers anyway -- id ruined people on that count, IMO.)
I wouldn't use SiN's sales figures as anything but an anecdotal tale.
Well, nearly everything. I still have to get MindRover. TuxGames sells it (and they should be able to get some copies, since that letter Draeker sent out was an invite to buy up the balance of Loki's stock.
Actually, my new copy of Linux Journal came in the mail today. Doc Searls interviews Google's Director of Marketing in one of his columns. In it, he asks if Google makes money, and she says that they are in fact profitable. She goes on to say that their revenue is split 50/50 from ad sales and technology licensing (like with Yahoo and such). She said that have 130-odd customers for their search technology, and European and Asian sales offices opening soon.
Customers pay for the bandwidth and servers. Actual customers who buy an actual product. A novel business model, wouldn't you say?
Anyway, since she was interviewed before the magazine went to press, I'd be comfortable in saying that Google has been profitable for at least 45 days.
I think we're in the same boat as far as misintepreting. It's been a bad week so far. I've been grumpy lately...:-)
You're probably right, though. Likely lots of people would have been pissed. I can imagine people playing the single player and then trying MP stuff maybe. But I can also see folks wanting to get online and start playing. If they hadn't already given their money to Tuxgames, they probably didn't wait and went and bought a Win32 copy.
It's the same thing that happened to Q3A. People weren't willing to wait. They knew they could get the Linux binaries off id's ftp site. So that counted as a Win32 sale. Although I admit most of that was probably server people wanting a Q3A server and also a playable copy for their Win32 game machines.
Quit all this whining already, just be glad that TTimo busted his ass for a few months and the port is available. He didn't HAVE to port it, and Id didn't HAVE to feel the need to pay him to do it.
I pay for something that I thought was going to be released very shortly after I paid for it. It wasn't. How am I whining?
If TTimo hadn't ported it, I wouldn't have bought it in the first place. But he did, Tuxgames offered it for sale, took my money and sat on it for nearly three months when they could have released an MP version. How am I whining?
Quit beind altruistic. My beef, whining, whatever, isn't with id. I'm glad it was ported. You can safely say that id's making more money than they otherwise would have if it wasn't ported. I just wish Tuxgames realizes how hard it is to support them.
They should have shipped RtCW already. The multiplayer binaries have been out for a while (late November if I recall). So they've been waiting on the single player binaries. Meanwhile, people that aren't absolute Linux fanatics have become pissed off, bought the win32 version and downloaded the Linux MP binaries.
While I can appreciate Tuxgames' wanting to package a complete game, I (like many other people) primarily want to play the MP version. And I assumed that when I ordered it early last Decemeber that it would ship as soon as they had packaged it. But that wasn't the case. I wrote tuxgames and asked them what they were waiting on, and they told me to join the mailing list so I could find out when it was going to ship. Not especially helpful.
If you make it hard to show support then only diehards will. If you make it easy, then id gets to see plenty of Linux gamers. For example, everyone at work has been bugging me to set up a server on our game machine. I've been telling them to wait until I get my copy. Now many of them are beyond the game, having played it for the last two months straight. So I'll get my copy, put it on our game machine and it won't get played very much because everyone's moved on. At least I'll have shown my Linux support. If they would have shipped with MP only and then emailed me a download link to the SP binaries when they becamse available, I'd have been very happy I bought from Tuxgames. I would have been playing on Linux with my Win32 friends damn near after the game went GM. As it is, I'm just grumpy that I paid for a game over two months ago and am just now going to get it.
I almost bought a Win32 copy a couple weeks ago, and maybe I should have. It just seems to me that waiting two and a half months is asking a lot simply to show "support" for a single-player portion of a primarily multiplayer game (how many of you still play Quake2 or Q3A in single player mode?). Besides, id ought to be able to gauge Linux support from their ftp logs, right?
I guess sometimes I feel left out enough as a Linux gamer without having to tell people why I'm waiting to set up a RtCW server...
Whatever you do, don't forget to indoctrinate the kids as part of your campaign for social justice for software licensing. And remind the kids what they can do when they find a pirate. You may think of a pirate as mom or dad, but they are really thieves who should be reported immediately. As Chad Codemaster knows, there can be no innovation if software is copied. God forbid what would happen if the actual source to a program got released to the thieving masses. How would a developer eat?
On the subject of gaming, how is it you're going about playing windows games?
I mostly play native ports. I buy just about every game Loki releases. I'm a sucker. I even bought SiN even thoiugh it won't work with NVidia cards. I also use Transgaming's WineX. It supports quite a few Win32-only games (like Age of Empires). It won't work with DirectX8 games, however, but support is coming.
I used my PC for games about 60% of the time I was in front of it when it had Windows and Linux on it. Now that Windows is gone, I find myself reading Perlmonks or looking at freshmeat stuff more often than I used to. I'm happy I switched.
While I've been waiting for the site to come up I've put up a new site, AquaPAD.org. This site is meant to support the AquaPAD which I am starting to sell now. I'll have the review up here as soon as the server issues are fixed.
He has a whole new web site created specifically for a device he intends to sell. He's linking to it from a page which reviews that same device. What are the odds the review will be objective? "In conclusion, Aquapads thoroughly suck. Click here to buy one from me at a special review-only price..."
AMD Zone sounds like a great site. I'd trust his reviews. Way more so than Tom's or Anandtech or Dan's data. None of those guys has a deeply personal involvement with the hardware in question.
Look, all I'm saying is that if I run a company and I say "submit a resume in Word format", then you either submit a Word resume or move on. For the record, I personally agree with you and the three posts below this one. But the fact is that you can't expect to bend a prospective employer to your will.
A resume is supposed to get your foot in the door. Someone hopes to do that by sending them a resume in a format they either can't or won't read. It does make a point, but while that point is being made, some fellow who bodged a resume together on his girlfriend's Word-laden PC is in talking to HR, not you.
Unless you're a complete superstar, you don't get to say what their HR dept will read. "You want to hire me? Then here's my CV. Oh, really... can't open it? Well, you can download and install a PDF reader for free. PDF is a standard and much better than Word, you know..." It won't fly unless you're a big shot. And if so, then more power to you. Maybe the next guy will get a shot because you already primed the PDF pump...
So you paid for Windows and now you feel like they're all yours and nobody else's, eh?:-)
on my zoomin' fast 700mhz box crapped and I'm sitting here with a copy of windows 2k, xp, rh 7.1, caldera 2.3.. Interesting dilemma.
Well, I can tell you what I would do. But you already know what I would do. This is Slashdot, after all. Answer: Install Debian.
Seriously, I think you'd get a lot more out of RH 7.1 than 2K or XP. Why? I've used Linux as a desktop OS for years now, and I made the complete switch last May. I haven't been to Fry's once. So I've saved lots of money. My machine has been up continuously since then, BTW. And I play Tribes2 and RtCW quite a bit. (But I also use Star Office a lot). Now, I've had to ssh into it from another machine in my office to kill -9 a game or whatever, but I never reboot.
As far as the Caldera - RH argument, it's a matter of choice really. RH might be more "dynamic" maybe. It's certainly being updated more. Quite a few RPMs out there too. Go with what you know. Of course, real men use a Linux with apt-get, yada yada yada... (They make you say good things about Debian on/. regardless of the fact that it's all Linux and all good.:-)
(writing this on my 486 laptop running win95 WOOT!)
Ugh. Maybe Linux there as well? RH 5.0 runs fine on my P100 laptop. XMMS streams to the stereo. I tried WinAMP and Win95 on it and it wouldn't even run.
So... What should I go to? I got a better box for games, and I really don't like playing around with linux on a 200mhz 64mb ram machine with a 2 mb vid card.
Oddly enough, you have a machine which is almost perfect for Linux. It's not powerful enough to run the latest MS (or other) apps, yet you could run a minimal Linux install and get added life out of that box as a word processor. Since the box is old, there should be very little wrestling with drivers. As far as GUIs bringing you down, try Blackbox. It's very minimal (yet very full-featured) and should serve you well.
From those who have - how is koffice compared to the standard MS suite?
Well, I use Star Office 6 even at work now. Guy says he wants "powerpoint", I give him slides. Need to look at Excel sheets, I open scalc. As far as KOffice, I don't know. I've had more than once experience where KWord just quit on me. Vanished. No core file, no syslog error, nothing. Just gone. I save a lot when using either it or KWrite (which is worse; KWrite goes down more than a White House intern). I'm using older versions, sure, but I was not too impressed with the stability. Now Kate... wow. There's an editor. Sure, it's plain text, but it's a real good example of a stable app. At least in my experience these last few months. Does syntax highlighting fo0r Perl, C and SQL, too, so that's a big plus. Of course, I've turned in memos/meeting notes, whatever printed two-to-a-sheet with enscript or with line numbers before, so...
What about file compatibility problems (can I take stuff to school?)
You should be able to move files between home and school. Make sure to save in native format (Star Office will ask what format you want to save it in). I've exchanged Word 2000 docs with Star Office 6 and back again. Every once in a while I get a document that saves to like 8MB (when it should be like 400K). A resave helps sometimes.
I haven't been able to get simple Word or Excel macros running. I haven't tried, though. I don't want to run macros if I can help it.
Speed - how is star offices speed - I'm assuming x is a lot faster on this box than on the 200, but are there any issues?
Star Office 5 is about as fast as a wounded prawn. It will literally suck the life force out through your face. One should be paid to use it. The Star Office Beta 6, however, rocks. Worlds better. It has warts, sure, but it's beta. (Do you really think any software -- which had a ship date -- that came out of either Redmond or Mountain View had anything like the QA it should have had?) I've been using beta 6 since it came out and haven't noticed anything overly weird (except a deep-seated and possibly misguided reliance on Java). Me and a few other gus use it for work, so it's good enough I guess.
Any "major psycotic hatreds"?
Visio. I hate Visio. And sometimes I hate project managers, too.
Any comments / advice from people who have done the switch?
I've been using nothing but Linux for months now -- like I said -- and I wouldn't go back. Hell, I couldn't. Deal with XP and it's sugary GUI and nasty licensing/copy "protection"? Not a chance. Pay for Apple hardware? I'll save for my kids college funds instead and run Linux on older hardware. And why not? Linux runs great for me. I love being able to right-click on the desktop and get an xterm where I can write a shell script that goes into cron. Networking works, I have every compiler I'd ever want, a choice of GUIs, lots of customizing, I use ssh tunnels, scp is fine, samba keeps me and the wife in sync, games are fine and I just don't spend any more time or money on the upgrade mill. And BTW, check out Opera for Linux. I've paid for the Win32 and Linux versions of Opera. Everyone who's taken time to look at Opera has loved it, at least in my experience (which is predominantly IE users).
-B
I know at least one reason....
on
KOffice 1.1.1 Ships
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Word is quite possibly the worst program for the job, but only a handful of companies will accept my resume in.PDF format. This is despite the fact that I have yet to find one single reason why.DOC would be a better choice than.PDF.
I can think of one reason: Because they are the people who are hiring and they get to say what they want to accept from applicants?
Start your own company (or get really important in an already established organization) and then refuse to accept any resumes but those in PDF format. Much better than trying to buck the system before you're even being considered for a position...
They may be harder to find, and there may be less of them, but OS X jobs (outside of Apple) do exist.
I never said that Mac OS X jobs are non-existent, I merely said that they are scarce. So we agree. I also, in a roundabout way, said that perhaps programming jobs in other, more widely distributed operating systems are more available. I used Monster to illustrate my point because: A. it was fastest and I was leaving work at the time of my post and B. Monster, as the largest online job board, probably represents a very large sample of available high-tech jobs. I admit my post wasn't scientifically valid, and it was certainly biased (statistically, I mean), but the point stands: By any measure there are much fewer Mac OS X programming jobs than not.
You've done quite a good job of refuting me, and I hope that any aspiring Mac OS X/BSD programmer sees your post. But I fear that Mac OS X will languish in near obscurity like Be or Amiga or any older Mac OS did. (That's not flamebait, it's fact. MacOS, like BeOS and others before it, has had a very small market share and today represent only a very small percentage of the OS market. Note that Linux -- my personal OS of choice -- is included in this group of "marginal" operating systems.) If you want to be a Mac OS X programmer (for like GUI stuff or some such maybe) then you will have a much harder time finding a job than if you wrote Motif or KDE or MFC apps (again, using GUI programming merely as an example). Again, it's fact. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's true. And I'm guessing it'll be that way for a long time to come, best intentions and (semi) corporate evangelism aside. Mac OS X is still -- like it or not -- a "fringe" OS, same as Linux or BE.
But then we both still have our choice, right? And we have almost as much choice as anyone has ever had? So it's all still good. But then again I don't use BeOS...
(And as a complete aside, I had a thought: What was it that "killed" Be? What was it that made MSFT king of the hill? Why are there fewer Mac OS apps than Win32 (or perhaps even Unix apps)? The answer: Developers. People,
hired by other people, that exist only to make applications tailored to a specific operating system. BeOS got bought, and then delevoper mindshare moved to something else. It moved to perhaps Mac OS X. It doesn't matter. The point is that when Be lost its developer support, it lost its viability as an OS. It lost even all hope of being anything but fringe. If Mac OS X doesn't get developer support -- say it only has one app that plays MP3s and also syncs with an iPod -- then what might its fate be? Not good, I think. In fact, I think looking at developer mindshare -- or like compiler sales -- is probably a much better metric for OS penetration than outright OS purchases, at least in terms of lange-range growth. If Mac OS X doesn't have or continue to grow this mind share then what will happen is a very scary thought.)
Not counting the hundreds of people at Apple working on OSX itself, the following vendors all have OS X programmers:
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit
Intuit
Adobe
Macromedia
Qualcomm
Ok, sure: all those companies actually employ people to write Mac OS X software. How many are hiring? I can't seem to find any on the job boards. And in fact, a search on monster.com for "mac os x" for every job category and every location yields just 17 jobs. Nationwide. A similar search for "windows" in just the "computer software" category yields 1,075 results. A search for "Linux" in the same category returns 246 listings. Solaris has 301 jobs, AIX has 115, and BSD has 8 (although a BSD search for all categories returns 37 listings).
Anyway, I get your point. But the trouble is that there just aren't that many jobs for Mac OS X programmers now. And I can guarantee you that your chances of getting a programming job at Qualcomm are like from slim to none. I recently found out that two very competent and capable engineers were cut in yet another popularity contest. And in any case, most people are going to be buying commodity hardware and running Win32 software. So the jobs are going to follow that...
I suggest you stay out of the U.K., as all of the inhabitants speak like that. I suggest you slink back to your trailer and slug back another Bud Light.
I have to say that yours was one of the funniest replies I've ever had. Thanks!
(BTW, it's not a "trailer"... it's a Double Wide.)
Guardent are taking the unusal step of trying to sell a product
I'm sorry, but Guardent are only one single company. However, the employees of Guardent is all individuals.
The use of plural verbs with collective nouns when talking about the actions of the whole group ranks right up there with using the word virii as the most pretentious grammatical annoyance one can find. It's not a matter of national importance or anything, just a pet peeve.
Ok, let's say you want to have a list of strings. You could do so like that:
@list = ("element1", "element2", "element3")
Well, just try to do the same in C.
Actually, you wanna see something would really twist C's noodle? Try this one:
push(@list, "element${_}") for (1.. 20);
And of course, there are all sorts of cool things built into Perl. Like the "spaceship" operator, regexes, the || and && operators returning the last value evaluated (as opposed to 1 or 0), about five hundred ways to iterate/loop, $_, etc. There's also my personal favorites: lack of strong (any, really) typing and being able to create any type of variable/structure on the fly. They're also Perl's largest complaints, which is probably why I'm so partial to them. There's nothing like being able to just make a "$foo = 123;" statement and then append a string to it...:-)
But the orginal poster was correct: Perl can be very complex. It can also be very simple. It's like they say, Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible. I love having enough rope to hang myself; others need more structure. To each his own. Choice is a very good thing.
Rather than looking abroad may I suggest joing a domestic (USA) organization.
Judging from the way MKalus spelled "organisations", Americorps may in fact be abroad. Although I got the feeling that the desired destination was like S. America, Africa, Balkans, etc.
I don't think he was daying that young people don't value thir time; I think he was saying that, since he no longer has the energy of youth, he has less time to do all the things he might want to do, so he needs to be careful about how he spends his time in order to get to do all the stuff he wants.
You said it perfectly. I used to spend all night -- for weeks on end -- on a VIC-20 doing mostly useless stuff in BASIC. I didn't have a job, family (of my own), eating, anything really to get in the way of my interest. Back then I could attack things with a passion that had no regard for time or other personal responsibilities.
When I was in college, I could spend all night fooling with GIS stuff or pascal or whatever, just because I had to get that one project done. And more often than not, I'd "waste" plenty of time doing things not strictly necessary. I had more responsibility then than I did when I was in high school, but it was subconsciously counted as school, so I could metally get away with it.
Now I'm at the point where I come home and I just want to spend time with my family, in the garage working with wood or something, making a good dinner, etc. If I'm on the computer at night, it's with a very carefully chosen project. I don't have as much time to burn now as I did then. I have to choose my "battles". There's still plenty of room for fun, and that's what I do on my off hours.
The trick is to make the fun stuff also count as work stuff.
Like another poster said, you have to have a well-rounded toolkit to get along. And I do. I've got a very well rounded set of skills, and I am always looking for more to learn. But consider the time budget imposed by age and responsibility with the ROI I'd get from learning another language roughly equivalent to a couple I already know. I can get by with perl and python and PHP in order to do what I do -- even for the fun stuff. It's when I see more and more job ads in the "computer" section ask for Ruby that I'll start to make that ROI worth it. In the meantime, there's plenty more stuff I have to know better than I do.
I wasn't saying that youth can or do waste their time. They just have more of it. Which they should enjoy to the fullest doing whatever it is that piques their curiosity, even if it doesn't "offically" count as something important. Us old guys don't get that luxury anymore...:-)
I've had a habit of reading want ads (mostly job postings lately, but the "Farm Equipment" and "Misc Real Estate 4 Sale" sections are always good) since I was a kid. I know, that's weird. But back then it was always fascinating to me that you could find out just want people want if you read enoguh ads. I thought that if I could read all the want ads then I'd know exactly what my city needed. I imagined that you could make graphs and see what was in demand and such -- kinda like SimCity's zoning bar graphs (which was my immediate thought when SimCity came out).
I'm not officially OT. See, I still read wants ads. And I look at what's in demand for clues to what I should be learning, trends, etc. Databases are a good example from a couple years ago. I noticed that lots of the 1996 job ads had web->DB stuff in them, and so starting brushing up on databases in my off hours. It turned out to be useful later on. I know that one could take this line of reasoning to mean that everyone should start learning VB and IIS stuff, but it isn't an absolute. You kinda have to read all the ads and then stand back and squint to see the trendfs in your area. If you're a Unix geek, you'll see what ost people want, which might lead to learning something new.
My (long winded) point is: Ruby won't be on my radar until people can reasonably be expected to pay me for using it. I know I just got modded down in the minds of a lot of poeple by saying that, but it's how I think. When I see Ruby listed in want ads, then I start noticing it (especially if its mention grows over time). I figure that I need to kill two birds with one stone: know enough to get my job done by knowing a diverse enough range of stuff so that I can still get paid. If I spent all my time learning every other thing that came out, I'd never get any work done. And I'd only know a little bit about everything. I need to know a certain subset of things really well, and just the right amount about a lot of other stuff in order to stay competitive. It's setting that threshold of other stuff where the want ads come in handy. If everyone wants wireless all of the sudden, something's up. So I devote a little time to learning it.
I guess as I get older, I'm starting to value my unplugged time. I can't burn 36 straight hours engrossed in new (and mostly arcane) stuff like I did 15, 20, or even 10 years ago. I have to choose my projects and apply my time wisely. So whern I start seeing Ruby in the wants ads, I'll take a look. I'll be behind the curve, but that's fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Come again?
Sure. You think they'd steal the bad stuff from Apple and IBM? What? You don't like paperclips? C'mon, I had to give MS a point of two in their favor for something.
BTW, remember MS BOB? Melinda (as in Bill's wife) was project lead for BOB before they were married. And when it got canned, the little dog had some friends made for him and Office got usability. Amazing what a little pillow talk to can do to a project's design goals...
-B
Sounds like a great way to propogate MS's bugs all over the place. "Hey, look: I can get Gnumeric to crash by importing this Access data via .NET..." No thanks. I want little if anything to do with Microsoft. The reasons I don't care for either them as a company or their products are too numerous/long to get into here (like anyone cares anyway). But it should suffice to say that nobody every asked if I wanted MS crap everywhere. Nobody ever came round and asked me a damn thing. MS, as always, presumes to know what I want and what is best for me. Again, no thanks.
Whether you guys will admit to it or not, there are some smart folks at Microsoft. They have a plan, they have a map to get from A to B, and they execute that plan. Microsoft has real history of coming from behind.
They do indeed make and follow plans. The real trouble is that they usually get shown the way because of other people's ideas and work. Although there's nothing at all wrong with building upon the work of others (science, after all, has gotten plenty of mileage out of this concept). It's just that the troublesome bit is that for MS to "come from behind" successfully they have to ruthlesslessly squash the guy who's idea they're bent on embracing and/or extending. Think about Steve Jobs or Marc Andreesen or Lotus or IBM for a minute. Ponder where the NT kernel came from, or think about something like icons or titlebars, or look for mention of Mosaic in MSIE's About Box or something. Go find out where DOS came from. Ask yourself if Java is any good or not.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, approaches the stability and conformance to standards of IE on Windows in the Linux mix.
I spit up all over myself when I read this. And I had seriously contemplated telling you that you are completely and totally full of shit. But I decided that you are simply uninformed. Opera 5 will run for months for me. I've had a copy running on one of my Linux workstations since July, and that's with daily use. I've even given Opera 6TP3 (their latest Linux beta) a try. It's good, but has some wrinkles yet. Sometimes it goes poof, but it's not a big deal. When it comes back up it has my browser windows open where I had them. But overall, Opera is the most stable browser I've ever used (except for possibly Lynx). It should go without saying that Linux is stable, perhaps even more so since my web browser isn't closely tied to my GUI or OS.
As for standards... hmmm... I don't think so, but in this respect I'm uninformed (or full of shit; I don't use MS products anymore so I wouldn't know in either case). I do seem to recall seeing MSIE render some pretty bad pages, but I can't remember anything specific off the top of my head. I certainly got a kick out of reading how MSIE handles MIME types, and I know that frames and tables are not quite right sometimes in MSIE.
Then they have usability AND more reliability than you will ever give them credit for.
Hey, I'm all for them fixing bugs. A more stable platform would be great. MS has had a good handle on usability, so I'm not sure how that applies to this month's work. But if they're willing to spend a month to fix the products they've been receiving billions of dollars from selling, more power to them. Might keep them out of court or something, who knows? And there'll be far fewer secretaries and such complaining about OS and Office problems.
A completely different topic is whether or not, given MS's security track record, it's a sane thing to have .NET closely tied to either personal or corporate money. I certainly don't care for someone else to be holding a singular combo to every safe I own, especially when that someone is (by definition) more concerned about the bottom line than my financial well-being. And if I wouldn't trust my personal information to MS, then I certainly wouldn't bet my company's future on it. Security and convenience are mutually exclusive. MS has historically wanted things to be more convenient for end-users, and little suggests they'll change appreciably in this regard. Convenience is .NET's raison d' etra. So that doesn't bode well. But like I said, that's off topic...
Bottom line: Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean that you should do a thing.
-B
Even if you were simultaneously porting an upcoming Win32 title, you'd still face the "why can't I get a binary free?" issue. Loki had that in spades with Tribes2, but it sold pretty well. (Most people wanted to binary for servers anyway -- id ruined people on that count, IMO.)
I wouldn't use SiN's sales figures as anything but an anecdotal tale.
-B
Loki will be sorely missed.
-B
Actually, my new copy of Linux Journal came in the mail today. Doc Searls interviews Google's Director of Marketing in one of his columns. In it, he asks if Google makes money, and she says that they are in fact profitable. She goes on to say that their revenue is split 50/50 from ad sales and technology licensing (like with Yahoo and such). She said that have 130-odd customers for their search technology, and European and Asian sales offices opening soon. Customers pay for the bandwidth and servers. Actual customers who buy an actual product. A novel business model, wouldn't you say?
Anyway, since she was interviewed before the magazine went to press, I'd be comfortable in saying that Google has been profitable for at least 45 days.
-B
I think we're in the same boat as far as misintepreting. It's been a bad week so far. I've been grumpy lately... :-)
You're probably right, though. Likely lots of people would have been pissed. I can imagine people playing the single player and then trying MP stuff maybe. But I can also see folks wanting to get online and start playing. If they hadn't already given their money to Tuxgames, they probably didn't wait and went and bought a Win32 copy.
It's the same thing that happened to Q3A. People weren't willing to wait. They knew they could get the Linux binaries off id's ftp site. So that counted as a Win32 sale. Although I admit most of that was probably server people wanting a Q3A server and also a playable copy for their Win32 game machines.
-B
I pay for something that I thought was going to be released very shortly after I paid for it. It wasn't. How am I whining?
If TTimo hadn't ported it, I wouldn't have bought it in the first place. But he did, Tuxgames offered it for sale, took my money and sat on it for nearly three months when they could have released an MP version. How am I whining?
Quit beind altruistic. My beef, whining, whatever, isn't with id. I'm glad it was ported. You can safely say that id's making more money than they otherwise would have if it wasn't ported. I just wish Tuxgames realizes how hard it is to support them.
-B
While I can appreciate Tuxgames' wanting to package a complete game, I (like many other people) primarily want to play the MP version. And I assumed that when I ordered it early last Decemeber that it would ship as soon as they had packaged it. But that wasn't the case. I wrote tuxgames and asked them what they were waiting on, and they told me to join the mailing list so I could find out when it was going to ship. Not especially helpful.
If you make it hard to show support then only diehards will. If you make it easy, then id gets to see plenty of Linux gamers. For example, everyone at work has been bugging me to set up a server on our game machine. I've been telling them to wait until I get my copy. Now many of them are beyond the game, having played it for the last two months straight. So I'll get my copy, put it on our game machine and it won't get played very much because everyone's moved on. At least I'll have shown my Linux support. If they would have shipped with MP only and then emailed me a download link to the SP binaries when they becamse available, I'd have been very happy I bought from Tuxgames. I would have been playing on Linux with my Win32 friends damn near after the game went GM. As it is, I'm just grumpy that I paid for a game over two months ago and am just now going to get it.
I almost bought a Win32 copy a couple weeks ago, and maybe I should have. It just seems to me that waiting two and a half months is asking a lot simply to show "support" for a single-player portion of a primarily multiplayer game (how many of you still play Quake2 or Q3A in single player mode?). Besides, id ought to be able to gauge Linux support from their ftp logs, right?
I guess sometimes I feel left out enough as a Linux gamer without having to tell people why I'm waiting to set up a RtCW server...
-B
-B
-B
Here's how the MS build team could find out:
#!/bin/sh ./*.h ./*.cpp | grep total
cd win32/src
echo "Bugs found: " wc -l
Just pipe that out to some place where a web server could get to it and you have numbers.
They have shell on Win32, right? Or maybe they build on *nix... :-)
-B
I mostly play native ports. I buy just about every game Loki releases. I'm a sucker. I even bought SiN even thoiugh it won't work with NVidia cards. I also use Transgaming's WineX. It supports quite a few Win32-only games (like Age of Empires). It won't work with DirectX8 games, however, but support is coming.
I used my PC for games about 60% of the time I was in front of it when it had Windows and Linux on it. Now that Windows is gone, I find myself reading Perlmonks or looking at freshmeat stuff more often than I used to. I'm happy I switched.
-B
He has a whole new web site created specifically for a device he intends to sell. He's linking to it from a page which reviews that same device. What are the odds the review will be objective? "In conclusion, Aquapads thoroughly suck. Click here to buy one from me at a special review-only price..."
AMD Zone sounds like a great site. I'd trust his reviews. Way more so than Tom's or Anandtech or Dan's data. None of those guys has a deeply personal involvement with the hardware in question.
-B
A resume is supposed to get your foot in the door. Someone hopes to do that by sending them a resume in a format they either can't or won't read. It does make a point, but while that point is being made, some fellow who bodged a resume together on his girlfriend's Word-laden PC is in talking to HR, not you.
Unless you're a complete superstar, you don't get to say what their HR dept will read. "You want to hire me? Then here's my CV. Oh, really... can't open it? Well, you can download and install a PDF reader for free. PDF is a standard and much better than Word, you know..." It won't fly unless you're a big shot. And if so, then more power to you. Maybe the next guy will get a shot because you already primed the PDF pump...
-B
So you paid for Windows and now you feel like they're all yours and nobody else's, eh? :-)
on my zoomin' fast 700mhz box crapped and I'm sitting here with a copy of windows 2k, xp, rh 7.1, caldera 2.3.. Interesting dilemma.
Well, I can tell you what I would do. But you already know what I would do. This is Slashdot, after all. Answer: Install Debian.
Seriously, I think you'd get a lot more out of RH 7.1 than 2K or XP. Why? I've used Linux as a desktop OS for years now, and I made the complete switch last May. I haven't been to Fry's once. So I've saved lots of money. My machine has been up continuously since then, BTW. And I play Tribes2 and RtCW quite a bit. (But I also use Star Office a lot). Now, I've had to ssh into it from another machine in my office to kill -9 a game or whatever, but I never reboot.
As far as the Caldera - RH argument, it's a matter of choice really. RH might be more "dynamic" maybe. It's certainly being updated more. Quite a few RPMs out there too. Go with what you know. Of course, real men use a Linux with apt-get, yada yada yada... (They make you say good things about Debian on /. regardless of the fact that it's all Linux and all good. :-)
(writing this on my 486 laptop running win95 WOOT!)
Ugh. Maybe Linux there as well? RH 5.0 runs fine on my P100 laptop. XMMS streams to the stereo. I tried WinAMP and Win95 on it and it wouldn't even run.
So... What should I go to? I got a better box for games, and I really don't like playing around with linux on a 200mhz 64mb ram machine with a 2 mb vid card.
Oddly enough, you have a machine which is almost perfect for Linux. It's not powerful enough to run the latest MS (or other) apps, yet you could run a minimal Linux install and get added life out of that box as a word processor. Since the box is old, there should be very little wrestling with drivers. As far as GUIs bringing you down, try Blackbox. It's very minimal (yet very full-featured) and should serve you well.
From those who have - how is koffice compared to the standard MS suite?
Well, I use Star Office 6 even at work now. Guy says he wants "powerpoint", I give him slides. Need to look at Excel sheets, I open scalc. As far as KOffice, I don't know. I've had more than once experience where KWord just quit on me. Vanished. No core file, no syslog error, nothing. Just gone. I save a lot when using either it or KWrite (which is worse; KWrite goes down more than a White House intern). I'm using older versions, sure, but I was not too impressed with the stability. Now Kate... wow. There's an editor. Sure, it's plain text, but it's a real good example of a stable app. At least in my experience these last few months. Does syntax highlighting fo0r Perl, C and SQL, too, so that's a big plus. Of course, I've turned in memos/meeting notes, whatever printed two-to-a-sheet with enscript or with line numbers before, so...
What about file compatibility problems (can I take stuff to school?)
You should be able to move files between home and school. Make sure to save in native format (Star Office will ask what format you want to save it in). I've exchanged Word 2000 docs with Star Office 6 and back again. Every once in a while I get a document that saves to like 8MB (when it should be like 400K). A resave helps sometimes.
I haven't been able to get simple Word or Excel macros running. I haven't tried, though. I don't want to run macros if I can help it.
Speed - how is star offices speed - I'm assuming x is a lot faster on this box than on the 200, but are there any issues?
Star Office 5 is about as fast as a wounded prawn. It will literally suck the life force out through your face. One should be paid to use it. The Star Office Beta 6, however, rocks. Worlds better. It has warts, sure, but it's beta. (Do you really think any software -- which had a ship date -- that came out of either Redmond or Mountain View had anything like the QA it should have had?) I've been using beta 6 since it came out and haven't noticed anything overly weird (except a deep-seated and possibly misguided reliance on Java). Me and a few other gus use it for work, so it's good enough I guess.
Any "major psycotic hatreds"?
Visio. I hate Visio. And sometimes I hate project managers, too.
Any comments / advice from people who have done the switch?
I've been using nothing but Linux for months now -- like I said -- and I wouldn't go back. Hell, I couldn't. Deal with XP and it's sugary GUI and nasty licensing/copy "protection"? Not a chance. Pay for Apple hardware? I'll save for my kids college funds instead and run Linux on older hardware. And why not? Linux runs great for me. I love being able to right-click on the desktop and get an xterm where I can write a shell script that goes into cron. Networking works, I have every compiler I'd ever want, a choice of GUIs, lots of customizing, I use ssh tunnels, scp is fine, samba keeps me and the wife in sync, games are fine and I just don't spend any more time or money on the upgrade mill. And BTW, check out Opera for Linux. I've paid for the Win32 and Linux versions of Opera. Everyone who's taken time to look at Opera has loved it, at least in my experience (which is predominantly IE users).
-B
I can think of one reason: Because they are the people who are hiring and they get to say what they want to accept from applicants?
Start your own company (or get really important in an already established organization) and then refuse to accept any resumes but those in PDF format. Much better than trying to buck the system before you're even being considered for a position...
-B
I never said that Mac OS X jobs are non-existent, I merely said that they are scarce. So we agree. I also, in a roundabout way, said that perhaps programming jobs in other, more widely distributed operating systems are more available. I used Monster to illustrate my point because: A. it was fastest and I was leaving work at the time of my post and B. Monster, as the largest online job board, probably represents a very large sample of available high-tech jobs. I admit my post wasn't scientifically valid, and it was certainly biased (statistically, I mean), but the point stands: By any measure there are much fewer Mac OS X programming jobs than not.
You've done quite a good job of refuting me, and I hope that any aspiring Mac OS X/BSD programmer sees your post. But I fear that Mac OS X will languish in near obscurity like Be or Amiga or any older Mac OS did. (That's not flamebait, it's fact. MacOS, like BeOS and others before it, has had a very small market share and today represent only a very small percentage of the OS market. Note that Linux -- my personal OS of choice -- is included in this group of "marginal" operating systems.) If you want to be a Mac OS X programmer (for like GUI stuff or some such maybe) then you will have a much harder time finding a job than if you wrote Motif or KDE or MFC apps (again, using GUI programming merely as an example). Again, it's fact. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's true. And I'm guessing it'll be that way for a long time to come, best intentions and (semi) corporate evangelism aside. Mac OS X is still -- like it or not -- a "fringe" OS, same as Linux or BE.
But then we both still have our choice, right? And we have almost as much choice as anyone has ever had? So it's all still good. But then again I don't use BeOS...
(And as a complete aside, I had a thought: What was it that "killed" Be? What was it that made MSFT king of the hill? Why are there fewer Mac OS apps than Win32 (or perhaps even Unix apps)? The answer: Developers. People, hired by other people, that exist only to make applications tailored to a specific operating system. BeOS got bought, and then delevoper mindshare moved to something else. It moved to perhaps Mac OS X. It doesn't matter. The point is that when Be lost its developer support, it lost its viability as an OS. It lost even all hope of being anything but fringe. If Mac OS X doesn't get developer support -- say it only has one app that plays MP3s and also syncs with an iPod -- then what might its fate be? Not good, I think. In fact, I think looking at developer mindshare -- or like compiler sales -- is probably a much better metric for OS penetration than outright OS purchases, at least in terms of lange-range growth. If Mac OS X doesn't have or continue to grow this mind share then what will happen is a very scary thought.)
-B
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit
Intuit
Adobe
Macromedia
Qualcomm
Ok, sure: all those companies actually employ people to write Mac OS X software. How many are hiring? I can't seem to find any on the job boards. And in fact, a search on monster.com for "mac os x" for every job category and every location yields just 17 jobs. Nationwide. A similar search for "windows" in just the "computer software" category yields 1,075 results. A search for "Linux" in the same category returns 246 listings. Solaris has 301 jobs, AIX has 115, and BSD has 8 (although a BSD search for all categories returns 37 listings).
Anyway, I get your point. But the trouble is that there just aren't that many jobs for Mac OS X programmers now. And I can guarantee you that your chances of getting a programming job at Qualcomm are like from slim to none. I recently found out that two very competent and capable engineers were cut in yet another popularity contest. And in any case, most people are going to be buying commodity hardware and running Win32 software. So the jobs are going to follow that...
-B
I have to say that yours was one of the funniest replies I've ever had. Thanks!
(BTW, it's not a "trailer"... it's a Double Wide.)
-B
I'm sorry, but Guardent are only one single company. However, the employees of Guardent is all individuals.
The use of plural verbs with collective nouns when talking about the actions of the whole group ranks right up there with using the word virii as the most pretentious grammatical annoyance one can find. It's not a matter of national importance or anything, just a pet peeve.
-B
It's the "greater than equal less than" comparison operator, like from the Schwartzian Transform or some such:
sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] } map { [$_, -s] } @array;
The Jargon File has a good definition. I've also seen people use the term for something like this:
while (<>) { print };
That looks more like the goatse operator to me, though.
-B
Actually, you wanna see something would really twist C's noodle? Try this one:
push(@list, "element${_}") for (1 .. 20);
And of course, there are all sorts of cool things built into Perl. Like the "spaceship" operator, regexes, the || and && operators returning the last value evaluated (as opposed to 1 or 0), about five hundred ways to iterate/loop, $_, etc. There's also my personal favorites: lack of strong (any, really) typing and being able to create any type of variable/structure on the fly. They're also Perl's largest complaints, which is probably why I'm so partial to them. There's nothing like being able to just make a "$foo = 123;" statement and then append a string to it... :-)
But the orginal poster was correct: Perl can be very complex. It can also be very simple. It's like they say, Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible. I love having enough rope to hang myself; others need more structure. To each his own. Choice is a very good thing.
-B
Judging from the way MKalus spelled "organisations", Americorps may in fact be abroad. Although I got the feeling that the desired destination was like S. America, Africa, Balkans, etc.
-B
You said it perfectly. I used to spend all night -- for weeks on end -- on a VIC-20 doing mostly useless stuff in BASIC. I didn't have a job, family (of my own), eating, anything really to get in the way of my interest. Back then I could attack things with a passion that had no regard for time or other personal responsibilities.
When I was in college, I could spend all night fooling with GIS stuff or pascal or whatever, just because I had to get that one project done. And more often than not, I'd "waste" plenty of time doing things not strictly necessary. I had more responsibility then than I did when I was in high school, but it was subconsciously counted as school, so I could metally get away with it.
Now I'm at the point where I come home and I just want to spend time with my family, in the garage working with wood or something, making a good dinner, etc. If I'm on the computer at night, it's with a very carefully chosen project. I don't have as much time to burn now as I did then. I have to choose my "battles". There's still plenty of room for fun, and that's what I do on my off hours. The trick is to make the fun stuff also count as work stuff.
Like another poster said, you have to have a well-rounded toolkit to get along. And I do. I've got a very well rounded set of skills, and I am always looking for more to learn. But consider the time budget imposed by age and responsibility with the ROI I'd get from learning another language roughly equivalent to a couple I already know. I can get by with perl and python and PHP in order to do what I do -- even for the fun stuff. It's when I see more and more job ads in the "computer" section ask for Ruby that I'll start to make that ROI worth it. In the meantime, there's plenty more stuff I have to know better than I do.
I wasn't saying that youth can or do waste their time. They just have more of it. Which they should enjoy to the fullest doing whatever it is that piques their curiosity, even if it doesn't "offically" count as something important. Us old guys don't get that luxury anymore... :-)
-B
I'm not officially OT. See, I still read wants ads. And I look at what's in demand for clues to what I should be learning, trends, etc. Databases are a good example from a couple years ago. I noticed that lots of the 1996 job ads had web->DB stuff in them, and so starting brushing up on databases in my off hours. It turned out to be useful later on. I know that one could take this line of reasoning to mean that everyone should start learning VB and IIS stuff, but it isn't an absolute. You kinda have to read all the ads and then stand back and squint to see the trendfs in your area. If you're a Unix geek, you'll see what ost people want, which might lead to learning something new.
My (long winded) point is: Ruby won't be on my radar until people can reasonably be expected to pay me for using it. I know I just got modded down in the minds of a lot of poeple by saying that, but it's how I think. When I see Ruby listed in want ads, then I start noticing it (especially if its mention grows over time). I figure that I need to kill two birds with one stone: know enough to get my job done by knowing a diverse enough range of stuff so that I can still get paid. If I spent all my time learning every other thing that came out, I'd never get any work done. And I'd only know a little bit about everything. I need to know a certain subset of things really well, and just the right amount about a lot of other stuff in order to stay competitive. It's setting that threshold of other stuff where the want ads come in handy. If everyone wants wireless all of the sudden, something's up. So I devote a little time to learning it.
I guess as I get older, I'm starting to value my unplugged time. I can't burn 36 straight hours engrossed in new (and mostly arcane) stuff like I did 15, 20, or even 10 years ago. I have to choose my projects and apply my time wisely. So whern I start seeing Ruby in the wants ads, I'll take a look. I'll be behind the curve, but that's fine.
-B