You can't buy a volume license for Win95 because it's end of life. I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't care. I don't like Windows 95 anyway. It's primitive. I prefer the NT/2K Kernel.
Yes, you can get a CD. It may be keyed to a particular manufacturer. You payed for the preinstalled image, not the retail version. Retail version is 3-4x more expensive.
You can order barebone systems from some OEMs.
Or you can build them yourself.
You can have Linux, Novell, etc on some systems. Especially enterprise products and workstations. You can't order much Linux on consumer desktops because let's face it, the market is not there yet. If the market was there, the big OEMs would battle MS for it. But they don't see it.
There is no such thing as a copy protected HD. Not yet. May never be. It's paranoia.
Not going to comment on UCITA, I'm not a lawyer, but Freedom of Speech always has priority over consumer laws. Look at Texas Cattle Industry vs. Oprah.:)
As Arkanasas people say, the frog shall be gigged. But not yet.
I agree. I use Odigo 3 as well. I like it, if only to get rid of all ICQ and AIM.. It doesn't do MSN, i think (at least not yet) but it does a decent job of doing Yahoo, AIM and ICQ. File transfer only seems to work with people running Odigo, but I have yet to have problems with normal messaging with ICQ/AIM/Yahoo users.
Wish list: first and foremost, I want to be able to tune the settings of the ICQ/AIM/Yahoo plugins to handle my firewall better. Running ICQ client works fine, but running Odigo + plugin seems to make my firewall warn, even though it eventually works.
Open source in this case would just help AOL change their protocol enough to break Odigo.:) They've done it before.
And no, I don't have that many fonts installed. This is my laptop. You could also right click on the fonts directory and watch the number of fonts magically pop up in properties!
Makes me wonder if these people who bash windows really know where the dos box is.
But, I believe they have the widest product offering on the linux market. Correct me if I'm wrong. Full linux distro, full office suite, etc. Who else has as many linux products as Corel?
What they do need (in my opinion) is some aliances. TurboLinux and RedHat are in bed with the big boys.. IBM, Compaq, Dell, etc. Anyone offering Corel Linux preinstalled? Not that i'm aware of.
Also, aquisitions? with what money? they seem to be running dry. If they acquire anything, it can't be big. They should probably try to invest they remaining play money into R&D rather than acquiring someone.
Linux has a lot of room to grow. For example, how many people know how to configure linux to be an optimal file server? How about a database server? If I were Corel, I would take a free database offering (Interbase?) and configure it to return TPCs on par with Microsoft or Oracle databases. Then sell it as an out of box solution. The market is there... Microsoft is charging upwards of $20,000 per server for SQL solutions, not counting NT licensing.
Why do we need suffixes? what is the real difference between.com and.net? Is anyone policing their assignment? Of course,.gov,.mil and.edu seem to be policed, but they are US-centric.
I say, instead of trying to come up with a bunch of new suffixes, just drop them and let people use whatever names they want. Why http://slashdot.org when you can simply http://slashdot
Of course, this could cause problems with intranet vs. internet sites, but we could work around that to..
But being in Texas, maybe we can get ship Bush away.
This sucks. I'm either stuck with Bush as a president or Bush as a Governor.
Never thought I'd say this, but i'm up to my neck in Bush!
I want Clinton back. I don't mind if Monica comes back too.
Don't think windows. Think transaction servers, commerce servers, sql engine, etc. Sure, they are coveted. I'm sure Oracle would like to get the MSSQL source code so they can write a set of benchmarks to exploit weakneses in SQL engine.
Pretty silly. You have locking problems deleting from your locks table.:) It is also very expensive. We use up about 70,000-100,000 row locks in a current schema. If the application implemented locks in a table, it would slow to a crawl.
I don't think you understand what the purpose of locking is. Sometimes it may be desirable to lock at page level. Other times at table level. Other times at row level.
transactions can let the dbms decide, but the dbms doesn't always pick the right locking mechanism for your application. How long do you hold the lock? On an insert, do you want a whole page locked, or just a single row?
Row level locking can speed up concurency. Some DBMSs will escalate the locks for you, and some do a better job than others. But to say you never have a reason to lock, it's simply silly. Try writing a 200+ client application and not worying about locking.
Of course, it is customary to bash M$ here. However SQL2000 is enterprise quality. Right now, if you are not running Oracle, MSSQL or DB2 you are not in the big leagues. Unless of course, you are running a proprietary solution.
I think this is a valid question and should be moderated up, not down.
Being excited that linux shows up in a tv show shows the user community's insecurity and proves that it still doesn't have a too significant amount of the market.
Besides, it could've been FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc. Why does it have to be Linux?
If you think the job is beneath you, why are you applying? This was a contract position by the way.
And I have nothing against contract position, I've asked my company repeatedly to re-hire me as a contractor, but they won't go for it. As a contractor I get excused from all the stupid rah-rah type of meetings and I don't have to sign my life away when it comes to intellectual property.
Actually to answer my own question, it's your contract agency that's mass submitting resumes hoping one will stick.
By the way, please ignore the "QA Engineer" misnomer. It is indeed more like a technician. However internally we refer to all the test monkeys and code monkeys as engineers.
That doesn't help us apartment dwellers. My appt building finally let us install dishes this year, at $300 deposit. And that's only if your appartment's balcony is on the south side.
With DSL, I have to sign a contract and pay installation. With cable, I can move to another apartment, plug in the cable modem into the cable outlet and go.
Cable is far from perfect. But for us people who are mobile and don't like to throw away money on contracts and installation, it's a much better option. I will move to DSL when I have my own home. But by that time, I'm sure something better will be along.
I think your networking and personal skills also pay a great importance in your marketability. I work for a big computer maker in.. Over the years, I've gotten to know people at cisco, at dell, etc. if I need to look for a new job, I have a backdoor entrance at other places.
And I'm not a great business networker. But, I keep friendships. I'm 30, I have about 8-10 years in the industry, and I'm not degreed. As a development team lead, I have the task of finding people, and THERE IS A SHORTAGE! There is no shortage of warm bodies, but it's true some are asking more money than they should (I had a QA engineer ask for $100k/yr to sit in a chair and follow a 30 page test plan). Give me a break.
I think this article is the nerd army crying foul that they can't extort as much money as they want from the IT industry.
If the development jobs get exported, fine. i don't want to be a code monkey forever, I have gone into system architecture. And it's not as easy to export architecture.
You want a job when you are in your 40s, stop being a code monkey. after 10-20 years in the industry, you should have gathered enough experience to be a system designer/architect. A broad knowledge of systems is very valuable and cannot be imported.
Why ignore? Some of us just get certifications because well... it's just another challenge. It doesn't mean that I will push MSSQL if I have a MSDBA.
To ignore someone's resume because of four letters pn the resume is very short sighted. No wonder there is a labor shortage. Bad management.
Considering monumental failures such as Esperanto and others, personally I can consider english the closest we have to an international language. I know that at least in europe and many asian countries, you can get around at least a little with english. No other language can claim that.
The internet has silently standardized on english. I always thought standards were a good thing. The english alphabet is relatively easy to learn, and noone forces you to actually spell english words.
(As a disclaimer: I'm not a native english speaker, but I don't have a problem with english being the language of the 'net)
I think this would be a huge step backwards. people will start memorizing IP addresses again instead of names.
probably the first thing I'd do is write an application that for every funky-characterd domain name I see I'd automatically alias it to an english name in/etc/hosts so it won't break any of the existing tools.
BlahSo the problems are that DNS servers won't support it for a while (if ever) and the people with such domain names will get a rude awakening when they won't be able to use most of the existing tools with their funky new domain names.
Why not? Are you the guy in the pinto in front of me on the freeway because you refuse to buy cars that have japanese parts?
Truth is, Netscape had only a handful of products. It's inexcusable for them to have screwed up this badly! There have been companies that have survived against MS, at least this far.
PalmOS vs WinCE? Aol vs MSN? Oracle vs SQL Server? Heck, even Borland C++ Builder vs Visual C++, though some may debate that.. But I think Borland has the upper edge with a better object library and a much faster development environment. Unless you are developing drivers, I can't conceive why you'd use Visual C++.
Netscape dropped the ball. They had the market and the lead. They focused on their server products, and forgot to research the market for clients. They ended up with bloated, ugly clients and releases with a ton of bugs. They refused to follow the market and support new technologies (ActiveX, VBScript). They were self righteous and got what they deserved. You may say "Why support ActiveX, it's a M$ invention!". But, in order to capture enterprise market share these days, sorry, you need to support ActiveX as well. And if you don't have enterprise market share, your product will not compete with IE.
Netscape is ugly, it's a CPU and memory hog, and hardly functional in today's market. Instead of supporting a project like Mozilla, the resources should be put into starting a new browser project from scratch.
Yes, I use IE. It's the best client for Windows (I know this is not a popular thing to say here). Opera is also a good browser, but it's not free. If it was, I'd use Opera. I used Netscape for a long time. I didn't move because I loved IE, I moved because I was frustrated with Netscape!
Easy formula to write a successful browser: start with a thin, slim browser. Add smart security overrides. Add central management features. Add support for all scripting that MS supports, if you are running on windows (heck, leverage the MS Active Scripting control, how hard can that be??). Lose the skins, stick with a standard UI. Don't bother with a mail client, a news reader, etc. Support Java and ActiveX. Support SSL. Don't load in memory the features until they are being used (e.g. don't load the Java subsystem until an applet is actually executed). That's it. I'd use it.
I think one of the problems that usenet is having is that it is becoming fragmented.. Many companies have decided to host their own newsgroups on their own servers and not share them with the rest of the world. (for example, borland.* newsgroups come to mind)
If a new search engine would allow me to search these "private usenets" as well, I would definitely use it over deja! Especially since I can't access NNTP from work because of our firewall and well, I fully agree that deja's new focus on reviews is stupid. They should've spawned a new site for reviews.
Well, I don't fully understand how this works either. Why do they need a "SUPERFAST COMPUTER" to wiretap email? They could just make copies of the email in transit, then use a slow computer to do the filtering and delete the uninteresting copies. Noone is going to notice a 5-second delay in email.
The only explanation is that they indend to use this beast to filter large amounts of random TCP data. Maybe hook it up in a backbone, listen for interesting messages, then trace them back to the source.
Such power is useless for mail filtering, especially if they have the luxury of taking it to the ISP's location. Heck, all you really have to do is get a warrant and force the ISP to Bcc: all incoming and outgoing mail from a person to a FBI mail account.
People still shut down their computers?
on
Linux BIOS
·
· Score: 1
I haven't shut down my Windows 2000 workstation in 3-4 months. My linux one goes down for development purposes, but other than that, it would always be up as well. Oh, and my laptop doesn't shut down, it goes into hibernate mode.
I also have four 8-way proliant servers that take about 4-6 minutes to initialize their drive arrays and bootstrap the OS. However, they haven't been down since I set'em up six months ago. And our intranet web server hasn't been rebooted since last november. (yep, it runs Windoze NT4.0)
so, as far as I'm concerned, four minutes every six months is okay. if you can't afford it, it's probably because you are running servers, and then there is always clustering.
I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing this whole thing, but the ideal situation would be to have true plug and play OSs and hot-plug hardware. I don't see absolutely any reason why an OS could run for years without the need to reboot. And I suspect we'll see that very soon.
Microsoft has already hinted at it. If it will trully happen first from MS or from Linux, I don't know.
If you've been a code monkey for 20-30 years, that's wrong. You should've gone into architecture by now. If not, it indicates a lack of drive, or worse, not wanting to take on too much responsability.
We have great architects in the mid 50s where I work. They are well organized, and have the patience to document a system throughly. They have experience with complex systems and also, maybe more importantly, dealing with people and egos.
Let's face it, you walk into a job interview, you are 50 years old, and you've been a staff programmer for 20 years, what does that say about you? Now, walk into a job interview as a 50-year old architect, and you'll be snatched up.
Re:The more OSes... (too many OSs!)
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 1
I'd love to know if even 20% of the people bragging about how many OSs they have actually have legal copies (SCO Unix, NT4, Win2K especially) Personally.. another OS? Ho hum. I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I don't have a problem with the NT4/W2K kernel and I think it is much better written than the Linux one. What I'd like to see is an Explorer replacement. I want to be able to use all Windows 2K drivers, all 32 bit app, I just want my desktop to look like one of the Linux WMs. I know there are desktop enhancements out there, but all that I've tried failed miserably.. BeOS should've been a windows explorer replacement, and not a new OS. They can probably market their appliance version, but why bother with a new desktop OS? Same for AtheOS. Just my opinion.
Most of these are groundless whines.
:)
You can't buy a volume license for Win95 because it's end of life. I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't care. I don't like Windows 95 anyway. It's primitive. I prefer the NT/2K Kernel.
Yes, you can get a CD. It may be keyed to a particular manufacturer. You payed for the preinstalled image, not the retail version. Retail version is 3-4x more expensive.
You can order barebone systems from some OEMs.
Or you can build them yourself.
You can have Linux, Novell, etc on some systems. Especially enterprise products and workstations. You can't order much Linux on consumer desktops because let's face it, the market is not there yet. If the market was there, the big OEMs would battle MS for it. But they don't see it.
There is no such thing as a copy protected HD. Not yet. May never be. It's paranoia.
Not going to comment on UCITA, I'm not a lawyer, but Freedom of Speech always has priority over consumer laws. Look at Texas Cattle Industry vs. Oprah.
As Arkanasas people say, the frog shall be gigged. But not yet.
Compaq Unix (Tru64) has DCOM support... see http://www.digital.com/info/SP7070/SP7070HM.HTM
I agree. I use Odigo 3 as well. I like it, if only to get rid of all ICQ and AIM.. It doesn't do MSN, i think (at least not yet) but it does a decent job of doing Yahoo, AIM and ICQ. File transfer only seems to work with people running Odigo, but I have yet to have problems with normal messaging with ICQ/AIM/Yahoo users.
:) They've done it before.
Wish list: first and foremost, I want to be able to tune the settings of the ICQ/AIM/Yahoo plugins to handle my firewall better. Running ICQ client works fine, but running Odigo + plugin seems to make my firewall warn, even though it eventually works.
Open source in this case would just help AOL change their protocol enough to break Odigo.
Why is it so hard to count fonts on windows?
c:> dir c:\winnt\fonts\*.ttf
134 File(s) 25,563,012 bytes
0 Dir(s) 5,505,404,928 bytes free
Could it be that I have 134 fonts???
God...
And no, I don't have that many fonts installed. This is my laptop. You could also right click on the fonts directory and watch the number of fonts magically pop up in properties!
Makes me wonder if these people who bash windows really know where the dos box is.
But, I believe they have the widest product offering on the linux market. Correct me if I'm wrong. Full linux distro, full office suite, etc. Who else has as many linux products as Corel?
What they do need (in my opinion) is some aliances. TurboLinux and RedHat are in bed with the big boys.. IBM, Compaq, Dell, etc. Anyone offering Corel Linux preinstalled? Not that i'm aware of.
Also, aquisitions? with what money? they seem to be running dry. If they acquire anything, it can't be big. They should probably try to invest they remaining play money into R&D rather than acquiring someone.
Linux has a lot of room to grow. For example, how many people know how to configure linux to be an optimal file server? How about a database server? If I were Corel, I would take a free database offering (Interbase?) and configure it to return TPCs on par with Microsoft or Oracle databases. Then sell it as an out of box solution. The market is there... Microsoft is charging upwards of $20,000 per server for SQL solutions, not counting NT licensing.
Maybe it's time for my own Distro... Hehe.
Why do we need suffixes? what is the real difference between .com and .net? Is anyone policing their assignment? Of course, .gov, .mil and .edu seem to be policed, but they are US-centric.
I say, instead of trying to come up with a bunch of new suffixes, just drop them and let people use whatever names they want. Why http://slashdot.org when you can simply http://slashdot
Of course, this could cause problems with intranet vs. internet sites, but we could work around that to..
But being in Texas, maybe we can get ship Bush away. This sucks. I'm either stuck with Bush as a president or Bush as a Governor. Never thought I'd say this, but i'm up to my neck in Bush! I want Clinton back. I don't mind if Monica comes back too.
Don't think windows. Think transaction servers, commerce servers, sql engine, etc. Sure, they are coveted. I'm sure Oracle would like to get the MSSQL source code so they can write a set of benchmarks to exploit weakneses in SQL engine.
Pretty silly. You have locking problems deleting from your locks table. :) It is also very expensive. We use up about 70,000-100,000 row locks in a current schema. If the application implemented locks in a table, it would slow to a crawl.
I don't think you understand what the purpose of locking is. Sometimes it may be desirable to lock at page level. Other times at table level. Other times at row level.
transactions can let the dbms decide, but the dbms doesn't always pick the right locking mechanism for your application. How long do you hold the lock? On an insert, do you want a whole page locked, or just a single row?
Row level locking can speed up concurency. Some DBMSs will escalate the locks for you, and some do a better job than others. But to say you never have a reason to lock, it's simply silly. Try writing a 200+ client application and not worying about locking.
It can store and retrieve data pretty reliably.
Hey, MSSQL6.5 doesn't support row-level locking (well, it does insert-row-level locking, but i don't think it supports it on updates, for example)
Of course, it is customary to bash M$ here. However SQL2000 is enterprise quality. Right now, if you are not running Oracle, MSSQL or DB2 you are not in the big leagues. Unless of course, you are running a proprietary solution.
Please!
Assumption is the mother of all fuckups. Have you ever seen the Microsoft source code?
And... have you never seen open source code that is beyond crap?
Just because you can't read it, it doesn't mean it's badly written. Try seeing an implementation of a COM subsystem that is easy to read.
I think this is a valid question and should be moderated up, not down.
Being excited that linux shows up in a tv show shows the user community's insecurity and proves that it still doesn't have a too significant amount of the market.
Besides, it could've been FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc. Why does it have to be Linux?
If you think the job is beneath you, why are you applying? This was a contract position by the way.
And I have nothing against contract position, I've asked my company repeatedly to re-hire me as a contractor, but they won't go for it. As a contractor I get excused from all the stupid rah-rah type of meetings and I don't have to sign my life away when it comes to intellectual property.
Actually to answer my own question, it's your contract agency that's mass submitting resumes hoping one will stick.
By the way, please ignore the "QA Engineer" misnomer. It is indeed more like a technician. However internally we refer to all the test monkeys and code monkeys as engineers.
That doesn't help us apartment dwellers. My appt building finally let us install dishes this year, at $300 deposit. And that's only if your appartment's balcony is on the south side.
With DSL, I have to sign a contract and pay installation. With cable, I can move to another apartment, plug in the cable modem into the cable outlet and go.
Cable is far from perfect. But for us people who are mobile and don't like to throw away money on contracts and installation, it's a much better option. I will move to DSL when I have my own home. But by that time, I'm sure something better will be along.
I think your networking and personal skills also pay a great importance in your marketability. I work for a big computer maker in.. Over the years, I've gotten to know people at cisco, at dell, etc. if I need to look for a new job, I have a backdoor entrance at other places.
And I'm not a great business networker. But, I keep friendships. I'm 30, I have about 8-10 years in the industry, and I'm not degreed. As a development team lead, I have the task of finding people, and THERE IS A SHORTAGE! There is no shortage of warm bodies, but it's true some are asking more money than they should (I had a QA engineer ask for $100k/yr to sit in a chair and follow a 30 page test plan). Give me a break.
I think this article is the nerd army crying foul that they can't extort as much money as they want from the IT industry.
If the development jobs get exported, fine. i don't want to be a code monkey forever, I have gone into system architecture. And it's not as easy to export architecture.
You want a job when you are in your 40s, stop being a code monkey. after 10-20 years in the industry, you should have gathered enough experience to be a system designer/architect. A broad knowledge of systems is very valuable and cannot be imported.
Why ignore? Some of us just get certifications because well... it's just another challenge. It doesn't mean that I will push MSSQL if I have a MSDBA. To ignore someone's resume because of four letters pn the resume is very short sighted. No wonder there is a labor shortage. Bad management.
Considering monumental failures such as Esperanto and others, personally I can consider english the closest we have to an international language. I know that at least in europe and many asian countries, you can get around at least a little with english. No other language can claim that.
/etc/hosts so it won't break any of the existing tools.
The internet has silently standardized on english. I always thought standards were a good thing. The english alphabet is relatively easy to learn, and noone forces you to actually spell english words.
(As a disclaimer: I'm not a native english speaker, but I don't have a problem with english being the language of the 'net)
I think this would be a huge step backwards. people will start memorizing IP addresses again instead of names.
probably the first thing I'd do is write an application that for every funky-characterd domain name I see I'd automatically alias it to an english name in
BlahSo the problems are that DNS servers won't support it for a while (if ever) and the people with such domain names will get a rude awakening when they won't be able to use most of the existing tools with their funky new domain names.
Why not? Are you the guy in the pinto in front of me on the freeway because you refuse to buy cars that have japanese parts?
Truth is, Netscape had only a handful of products. It's inexcusable for them to have screwed up this badly! There have been companies that have survived against MS, at least this far.
PalmOS vs WinCE? Aol vs MSN? Oracle vs SQL Server?
Heck, even Borland C++ Builder vs Visual C++, though some may debate that.. But I think Borland has the upper edge with a better object library and a much faster development environment. Unless you are developing drivers, I can't conceive why you'd use Visual C++.
Netscape dropped the ball. They had the market and the lead. They focused on their server products, and forgot to research the market for clients. They ended up with bloated, ugly clients and releases with a ton of bugs. They refused to follow the market and support new technologies (ActiveX, VBScript). They were self righteous and got what they deserved. You may say "Why support ActiveX, it's a M$ invention!". But, in order to capture enterprise market share these days, sorry, you need to support ActiveX as well. And if you don't have enterprise market share, your product will not compete with IE.
Netscape is ugly, it's a CPU and memory hog, and hardly functional in today's market. Instead of supporting a project like Mozilla, the resources should be put into starting a new browser project from scratch.
Yes, I use IE. It's the best client for Windows (I know this is not a popular thing to say here). Opera is also a good browser, but it's not free. If it was, I'd use Opera. I used Netscape for a long time. I didn't move because I loved IE, I moved because I was frustrated with Netscape!
Easy formula to write a successful browser: start with a thin, slim browser. Add smart security overrides. Add central management features. Add support for all scripting that MS supports, if you are running on windows (heck, leverage the MS Active Scripting control, how hard can that be??). Lose the skins, stick with a standard UI. Don't bother with a mail client, a news reader, etc. Support Java and ActiveX. Support SSL. Don't load in memory the features until they are being used (e.g. don't load the Java subsystem until an applet is actually executed). That's it. I'd use it.
I think one of the problems that usenet is having is that it is becoming fragmented.. Many companies have decided to host their own newsgroups on their own servers and not share them with the rest of the world. (for example, borland.* newsgroups come to mind)
If a new search engine would allow me to search these "private usenets" as well, I would definitely use it over deja! Especially since I can't access NNTP from work because of our firewall and well, I fully agree that deja's new focus on reviews is stupid. They should've spawned a new site for reviews.
Well, I don't fully understand how this works either. Why do they need a "SUPERFAST COMPUTER" to wiretap email? They could just make copies of the email in transit, then use a slow computer to do the filtering and delete the uninteresting copies. Noone is going to notice a 5-second delay in email.
The only explanation is that they indend to use this beast to filter large amounts of random TCP data. Maybe hook it up in a backbone, listen for interesting messages, then trace them back to the source.
Such power is useless for mail filtering, especially if they have the luxury of taking it to the ISP's location. Heck, all you really have to do is get a warrant and force the ISP to Bcc: all incoming and outgoing mail from a person to a FBI mail account.
I also have four 8-way proliant servers that take about 4-6 minutes to initialize their drive arrays and bootstrap the OS. However, they haven't been down since I set'em up six months ago. And our intranet web server hasn't been rebooted since last november. (yep, it runs Windoze NT4.0)
so, as far as I'm concerned, four minutes every six months is okay. if you can't afford it, it's probably because you are running servers, and then there is always clustering.
I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing this whole thing, but the ideal situation would be to have true plug and play OSs and hot-plug hardware. I don't see absolutely any reason why an OS could run for years without the need to reboot. And I suspect we'll see that very soon.
Microsoft has already hinted at it. If it will trully happen first from MS or from Linux, I don't know.
Maybe I'm biased here, but this is how I think:
If you've been a code monkey for 20-30 years, that's wrong. You should've gone into architecture by now. If not, it indicates a lack of drive, or worse, not wanting to take on too much responsability.
We have great architects in the mid 50s where I work. They are well organized, and have the patience to document a system throughly. They have experience with complex systems and also, maybe more importantly, dealing with people and egos.
Let's face it, you walk into a job interview, you are 50 years old, and you've been a staff programmer for 20 years, what does that say about you? Now, walk into a job interview as a 50-year old architect, and you'll be snatched up.
I'd love to know if even 20% of the people bragging about how many OSs they have actually have legal copies (SCO Unix, NT4, Win2K especially) Personally.. another OS? Ho hum. I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I don't have a problem with the NT4/W2K kernel and I think it is much better written than the Linux one. What I'd like to see is an Explorer replacement. I want to be able to use all Windows 2K drivers, all 32 bit app, I just want my desktop to look like one of the Linux WMs. I know there are desktop enhancements out there, but all that I've tried failed miserably.. BeOS should've been a windows explorer replacement, and not a new OS. They can probably market their appliance version, but why bother with a new desktop OS? Same for AtheOS. Just my opinion.