Coding under Windows is actually easier. If he's used to it, he will not easily make the switch. The reason it's easier is that the Integrated Development Environments are more comprehensive. There's more automatic code generation, there's plenty of code samples around, and plenty of people and books with deep expertise. Now, a lot of experience and smarts exists in the unix world too, deeper even, but your friend doesn't sound like he's in that world so it will be harder for him to tap into.
So, why do it? The reason to do it is that the code you end up with under windows is a big steaming pile of non-portability. In many instances, i.e. if it does anything whizzy, it won't even port to other versions of Windows. And there's tons of totally bogus crap you have to deal with in Windows, interfaces not working the way they are specced, weird... ok, one example: quick, allocate a string, and make it work cross platform. Do you want TCHAR, wstring, or any one of six others. Search MSDN, that will help you decide. ha ha ha.
Unix is for people who like to code everything they do. People who want to write a script to check in and out of source control. This morning, my cable modem was down at home. I whipped up a one line script so it would retry my the net every five minutes so I could make a service call from work and then later today I'll be able to log in from work and get to my home network. (The script: while [ 1 ] ; do/etc/rc.d/init.d/network start ; sleep 10 ; if ping -qc10 207.46.130.45 ; then exit ; else/etc/rc.d/init.d/network stop ; sleep 300 ; fi ; done )
you just can't do things like that under Windows. Oh, I know, there are tools you can find to do each thing, but it's not in Windows' blood. OK, then there's stuff like how regular the APIs are, how simple the inter-process control, and how network capable your apps will be (X Windows was designed for network use. When my home cable modem comes back up, I'll be able to log in from across the internet and use my several machines at home no different than if I were at home.
Finally (yes, there's more to say, but I gotta get to work:) you asked about Linux, and it's unix with all the source available. You can look up how things work, no secrets, no frustration with apps that don't quite do what you want. Apps that don't quite do what you want? That's almost the definition of Windows.
Unix isn't perfect, and Linux isn't perfect Unix, but if you love coding, you'll love coding them.
One cannot make sense of your original question and your current line of reasoning. Look at it this way:
you ask what is French about French toast.
I explain the origin of the phrase.
You say, "but nobody knows that, yet they continue to use the phrase. I want to know what most people mean when they say French toast.
Then the only answer can be, they don't mean anything. They think steep means hard by analogy to walking uphill.
Are you satisfied now?
No, you are not satisfied, because you are one of those people who will argue something into the ground rather than concede a point.
Certainly, the meaning of words is determined by usage, there's no denying that. But when people say "steep learning curve," they are using the phrase wrong.
I'll bet that you think "carrot and stick approach" refers to convincing by reward and punishment.
Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't make it obscure. Probably 90% of the world's population never heard of Moore's Law nor Phillip's curves. That doesn't make them obscure either.
The one I'm describing is the reverse of nothing. It's called learning curve theory and it's really the only one there is. When I said there could be other things called learning curves, I meant in the abstract. If you search academic literature, you will find only the one I described.
Clearly, there could be more than one thing called a learning curve, but the one everybody talks about comes from economics, and it measures experience on the x-axis (log scale) and cost on the y-axis, and they are often linear with a negative slope. They are used to describe the decreasing costs associated with number of units manufactured. The log scale is used because generally you keep needing to manufacture N times as many to achieve the same cost reduction. It's no more a "law" of manufacturing than Moore's Law, but it seems to work about as well.
The way I see it, software licenses are like blood groups - different blood groups are incompatible and must be kept separate (or else all sorts of Bad Things happen), and the same is true for licences.
your way of thinking about it will avoid conflicts between licenses, but it doesn't cover the whole space of possibilities. For example, BSD licensed code may be incorporated into a GPL'ed project and that formerly BSD'ed code may be released under a GPL license. This is not a problem to the proponents of the BSD license because they don't believe in restricting what licensees can do. The BSD way of thinking is, "it's allowed, that makes it OK."
so, at the beach women take their tops off around strangers. but just try to get an acquaintance to flash her boobs for you: she'll just be so open minded about it that it won't happen.
while I see the humor in your joke, it's not illegal to download something you have rights to. He may not have the rights, but I suspect the owner will not wish to initiate an action against him.
this idea that the rest of the world is less obsessed with nudity than we in the US are is highly overrated. B-grade foreign films and TV are not at all distinguishable from American content and they have all the same nudge-nudge wink-wink attitudes toward titillation. What is weird is the extent to which you accept a stereotype under the guise of being open-minded.
Quick, name all of the computer companies that devoted themselves to some technology, failed to make it big, then found success by shifting to a new technology... Right. SCO's not going anywhere with this either, though they will be helping their existing customers to ease their way into Linux. It's an important little business school lesson: you can't just make a list of reasons why something is going to work (support, suits, installed base, history). You have to look at future probabilities based on track record.
BTW, anybody remember, was Novell a company that started with one thing then switched? In any case, their technology has to have set some world records in the kluge categories.
Well, "they're being made an example of" is slightly different to me: one could punish one company extra hard to convince everybody else to make changes. Or, one could have a much more modest goal, something like "we don't have the resources or power to change everybody, but if we focus on somebody high profile, they have the most to lose and we'll get some meaningful concessions on a small scale.
but, it's just shades of gray.
And the moderation? please, moderation has become a joke. Slashdot moderation is overrun by thinly educated hotheads. Here's a proposed change to the moderation system: moderation can only go up, not down, and let the scores climb as high as they want to. "Flamebait" and "Troll" should be eliminated because they've become meaningless. I don't moderate any more 'cuz I suspect the system is rigged anyway.
We must realize that we are living in a society defined completely by material things.
the problem with this statement is that there are society's not "defined" (whatever that means) by material things. There aren't. There are societies that have lots of stuff and there are societies that seek it, and individuals in those societies fall on a spectrum, but those who would have you believe that they don't seek the material usually are (a) secure in the knowledge of where their next meal comes from and (b) artful at hiding their own strong preferences.
for those who wish to directly improve wages and working conditions for some third world workers ASAP, focusing on a rich high profile company is the right thing to do.
Nike has improved pay and working conditions where its plants are. The argument could be made that it will hurt third world workers in the long run because it makes opening overseas plants less attractive, but I don't think that is born out in reality. They are still cheaper places to manufacture, and this way Nike now has an incentive to get conditions improved generally so all companies have to pay the "tax" that Nike now pays.
that's nothing! we had hull breaches on decks 7, 11, and 13, plasma venting in shuttle bay 2, warp core breaches, and shields down to 40%. Helm was restored in a few minutes, but until we reversed the polarity of the neutrino flow, shield harmonics were destabilized and were allowing tachyon bursts to pass which of course took us back to before the ion storm and the whole cycle repeated itself except one member of the crew, Mr. Chipotle, had an increasing sense that we'd been here before. We put him in the brig but he escaped up one of the Jeffrey's tubes and saved us.
take this seriously, folks, it could happen to you:)
In 1980 IBM was the "monopoly". Fast forward to 1995 it is MS.
without the anti-trust action against IBM, the monopoly would still be IBM. If they were free to act as aggressively as they wanted, they could have squeezed Microsoft. Microsoft has shown themselves to be too greedy and not willing to rein themselves in at all, hence their antitrust problem. But, the scrutiny of the Justice Department and Microsoft's intransigence is what is going to lead to Microsoft's downfall, not any particular detail of the ruling.
but it's entirely possible. Ever heard of Back Orifice?
yes, I've heard of Back Orifice. But, in that case it would only have been correct for him to say, "I discovered the machine had already been hacked and I was able to connect to Back Orifice." Connecting to Back Orifice is not called hacking.
He hacked his way across the internet and into that computer and captured a screenshot? Please! If he knew how to do that, he'd be far too busy to do what he's doing with it.
BTW, I host my own domains and email and I monitor spam closely. The problem is getting worse: There's even a spammer operating over the last few days who is mailing to "postmaster@" and that is a huge no-no. They are shameless.
the real problem with systems research is that it takes a long time for non-researchers to get up to speed on the simplest stuff known far and wide in the academy. The vast army of the unwashed who are cranking out code today are doing good work, but at nowhere near their potential because of the things they don't know. It is not possible to fix this problem: after the barbarians overran "ossified" Rome, it took centuries to get back to that level of civilization. And the exact same thing is happening today with the internet and open source. It is progress, though, a necessary step.
Cases in point:
Java is a new, reasonably earnest attempt at an advanced language. Yet, it is not even close to where Scheme was 20 years ago. Exception handling (e.g. signalling, throw/catch) should be used extensively in the libraries, not just for error conditions: "not found" should never be "returns -1". Never! And perl? Please, it's patheticly broken, "relevant" only because an army of visigoths is clubbing us to death with it.
Linux: oh, reading Linus's recent unsophisticated analysis of text vs. binary in the/proc filesystem (or whatever pseudo-filesystem that was). Yikes! Abstraction? the Vikings seem never to have heard of it, but they're still raping our women.
From SQL to XML to VB: these syntaxes are as ugly as early FORTRAN, and their semantics are as random and incomplete as one would hope a hashtable turns out. Lisp solved the same problems 40 years ago, all in one and much more. But the huns have stolen our printing presses and are cranking out their pr0n-ographic (see K&R) code.
But don't worry. All that academia has found out lies preserved in the temples and it will be rediscovered. It will just take time.
depends a lot on how good you are, and what else you've got to write. Think about South Park: released on the net, didn't make any money, but set them up for success because fans were hungry for more. But not everyone can expect to achieve that sort of success.
The game in ordinary publishing is that you get an advance for your next book and you live on the money. Your book never earns enough to pay back the advance, but if it sells well enough, they'll give you another advance on your next book. The internet will not necessarily help to get you on that escalator, unless you manage to release it in a way that catches people's attention: Blair Witch Project, for example.
yeah, I know, I'm using movie examples. It'd be tougher for a book, but I wanted to illustrate how PR and word of mouth work to establish your identity or brandname with "buzz".
Slashdot Mirror
So, why do it? The reason to do it is that the code you end up with under windows is a big steaming pile of non-portability. In many instances, i.e. if it does anything whizzy, it won't even port to other versions of Windows. And there's tons of totally bogus crap you have to deal with in Windows, interfaces not working the way they are specced, weird... ok, one example: quick, allocate a string, and make it work cross platform. Do you want TCHAR, wstring, or any one of six others. Search MSDN, that will help you decide. ha ha ha.
Unix is for people who like to code everything they do. People who want to write a script to check in and out of source control. This morning, my cable modem was down at home. I whipped up a one line script so it would retry my the net every five minutes so I could make a service call from work and then later today I'll be able to log in from work and get to my home network. (The script: while [ 1 ] ; do /etc/rc.d/init.d/network start ; sleep 10 ; if ping -qc10 207.46.130.45 ; then exit ; else /etc/rc.d/init.d/network stop ; sleep 300 ; fi ; done )
you just can't do things like that under Windows. Oh, I know, there are tools you can find to do each thing, but it's not in Windows' blood. OK, then there's stuff like how regular the APIs are, how simple the inter-process control, and how network capable your apps will be (X Windows was designed for network use. When my home cable modem comes back up, I'll be able to log in from across the internet and use my several machines at home no different than if I were at home.
Finally (yes, there's more to say, but I gotta get to work :) you asked about Linux, and it's unix with all the source available. You can look up how things work, no secrets, no frustration with apps that don't quite do what you want. Apps that don't quite do what you want? That's almost the definition of Windows.
Unix isn't perfect, and Linux isn't perfect Unix, but if you love coding, you'll love coding them.
Certainly, the meaning of words is determined by usage, there's no denying that. But when people say "steep learning curve," they are using the phrase wrong.
I'll bet that you think "carrot and stick approach" refers to convincing by reward and punishment.
The one I'm describing is the reverse of nothing. It's called learning curve theory and it's really the only one there is. When I said there could be other things called learning curves, I meant in the abstract. If you search academic literature, you will find only the one I described.
Steep learning curves show fast learning.
your way of thinking about it will avoid conflicts between licenses, but it doesn't cover the whole space of possibilities. For example, BSD licensed code may be incorporated into a GPL'ed project and that formerly BSD'ed code may be released under a GPL license. This is not a problem to the proponents of the BSD license because they don't believe in restricting what licensees can do. The BSD way of thinking is, "it's allowed, that makes it OK."
so, at the beach women take their tops off around strangers. but just try to get an acquaintance to flash her boobs for you: she'll just be so open minded about it that it won't happen.
you're on the right track, but what I'm doing is slashdot-name-squatting till the reak karmageddon comes along and has to buy it from me.
while I see the humor in your joke, it's not illegal to download something you have rights to. He may not have the rights, but I suspect the owner will not wish to initiate an action against him.
I believe that KDE dropped CORBA because it wasn't called KORBA!
this idea that the rest of the world is less obsessed with nudity than we in the US are is highly overrated. B-grade foreign films and TV are not at all distinguishable from American content and they have all the same nudge-nudge wink-wink attitudes toward titillation. What is weird is the extent to which you accept a stereotype under the guise of being open-minded.
Not, of course, to say that writing haiku generators isn't fun and worthwhile. But's let's not call them intelligent,
If someone were to write a truly intelligent haiku generator, then we should call it intelligent.
BTW, anybody remember, was Novell a company that started with one thing then switched? In any case, their technology has to have set some world records in the kluge categories.
but, it's just shades of gray.
And the moderation? please, moderation has become a joke. Slashdot moderation is overrun by thinly educated hotheads. Here's a proposed change to the moderation system: moderation can only go up, not down, and let the scores climb as high as they want to. "Flamebait" and "Troll" should be eliminated because they've become meaningless. I don't moderate any more 'cuz I suspect the system is rigged anyway.
the problem with this statement is that there are society's not "defined" (whatever that means) by material things. There aren't. There are societies that have lots of stuff and there are societies that seek it, and individuals in those societies fall on a spectrum, but those who would have you believe that they don't seek the material usually are (a) secure in the knowledge of where their next meal comes from and (b) artful at hiding their own strong preferences.
- for those who wish to directly improve wages and working conditions for some third world workers ASAP, focusing on a rich high profile company is the right thing to do.
Nike has improved pay and working conditions where its plants are. The argument could be made that it will hurt third world workers in the long run because it makes opening overseas plants less attractive, but I don't think that is born out in reality. They are still cheaper places to manufacture, and this way Nike now has an incentive to get conditions improved generally so all companies have to pay the "tax" that Nike now pays.that's nothing! we had hull breaches on decks 7, 11, and 13, plasma venting in shuttle bay 2, warp core breaches, and shields down to 40%. Helm was restored in a few minutes, but until we reversed the polarity of the neutrino flow, shield harmonics were destabilized and were allowing tachyon bursts to pass which of course took us back to before the ion storm and the whole cycle repeated itself except one member of the crew, Mr. Chipotle, had an increasing sense that we'd been here before. We put him in the brig but he escaped up one of the Jeffrey's tubes and saved us.
take this seriously, folks, it could happen to you :)
without the anti-trust action against IBM, the monopoly would still be IBM. If they were free to act as aggressively as they wanted, they could have squeezed Microsoft. Microsoft has shown themselves to be too greedy and not willing to rein themselves in at all, hence their antitrust problem. But, the scrutiny of the Justice Department and Microsoft's intransigence is what is going to lead to Microsoft's downfall, not any particular detail of the ruling.
No, that's not nitpicking, it's a HUGE difference. moderate him up, or change the title of the story to something coherent.
he should retire, go out on top. Before he proves that without a monopoly... he's a nobody.
Dude! if the machine is running PC Anywhere, you wouldn't need to launch Back Orifice. This story is made up!
yes, I've heard of Back Orifice. But, in that case it would only have been correct for him to say, "I discovered the machine had already been hacked and I was able to connect to Back Orifice." Connecting to Back Orifice is not called hacking.
BTW, I host my own domains and email and I monitor spam closely. The problem is getting worse: There's even a spammer operating over the last few days who is mailing to "postmaster@" and that is a huge no-no. They are shameless.
Cases in point:
But don't worry. All that academia has found out lies preserved in the temples and it will be rediscovered. It will just take time.
The game in ordinary publishing is that you get an advance for your next book and you live on the money. Your book never earns enough to pay back the advance, but if it sells well enough, they'll give you another advance on your next book. The internet will not necessarily help to get you on that escalator, unless you manage to release it in a way that catches people's attention: Blair Witch Project, for example.
yeah, I know, I'm using movie examples. It'd be tougher for a book, but I wanted to illustrate how PR and word of mouth work to establish your identity or brandname with "buzz".
uh... Canada itself faces breakup. What they heck to they know? :)