The cost savings of using this technology could be very attractive to business.
But the cost expenditures of having to install huge AC/DC transformers in the utility rooms and replace each and every desktop computer with a costly new low-wattage model will be very UNattractive to business.
I have yet to hear of any network operations center deploying WiFi instead of traditional cabling. This is not a technology that WOULD have any utility in the typical one-or-two-computer home environment.
The elegant syntaxes in high level languages are there for a reason - to help make code easier to maintain and develop.
Look, I'm not saying that anyone should be writing code in BASIC today -- the language has been obsoleted. But in the past, it had its place as a legitimate introductory language.
And while I'm happy that high level languages make code easier to maintain and develop than ever before, a GREAT programmer needs to grok what's happening at the low levels, too. If all you know is Java and have never had to push a register value to the stack or even make a call to malloc(), your prgramming education is incomplete.
I don't know 'bout you but I'd rather spend a few minutes thinking and write 15 lines than just dive in and write 115 lines like most basic educated guys seem to do.
I don't know why you seem to think 'started with BASIC' is equivalent 'doesn't do any planning'.
Even when I wrote in BASIC, at age 8, I wrote out pseudocode descriptions of program behavior (and often drew FLOWCHARTS!) before typing a single line number.
Choice of language is frankly irrelevant to the argument you are now making.
Apple, now raking in profits from its iPod, should seriously consider lowering their prices on their high-end machines to gain market share.
It's not the high-end machines that Apple could gain market share with, as the Mac Faithful will still buy dual-G5 towers and 30" Cinema Displays whether they're $2000 or $3500.
It's the entry-level hardware that Apple should be cutting prices on to attract new Mac users. Et voila, Mac mini!
I do wonder why there has been so little mainstream marketing for OS X since 10.0 came out years ago, as that is clearly one of the biggest advantages Apple has over Microsoft right now. Longhorn won't ship for years, and a lot of people will be buying new computers in the meantime. Why isn't Apple pursing this market share more aggressively?
There is, however, a shortage of companies willing to invest in their employees by properly training them.
Of course there is. An employee who gets training at one company generally becomes more valuable to the rest of the job market, which means that companies either have to provide salary increases beyond cost-of-living in order to retain employees, or face a perpetual cycle of retraining costs as people pinball from job to higher-paying job.
Of course, since I'm not brown skinned I was accepted immediately. Most of these rants on Slashdot seem to be thinly veiled racism.
Maybe it's because I'm browsing at +2, but yours is the first post I've seen in this entire thread that mentioned skin color.
Let's PLEASE try not to infer racist motive where no proof of such exists. It's a charged allegation which is not easily refutable, even for those who are not racially biased.
Please don't let your students use basic or visual basic, it will destroy any chance of learning to write real code.
Malarkey. I started programming in Tandy BASIC in the early 1980's, and it didn't instill in me any bad habits that I was unable to shake once I moved on to Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java, etc. "GOTO Considered Harmful"? In modern high level languages, yes, we have more elegant syntaxes for branching. But in assembly, what is a JMP instruction anyway but a GOTO?
Visual Basic, I have no experience with and do not wish to gain any.
You make me laugh. Excel is MORE PORTABLE than Perl or Python?
This is an MS Office component we're talking about here. Consider yourself lucky if you can open last year's file format in this year's app properly...
If the operating system can natively convert any MS Works or Office document to the new Metro format via wizard or context menu I will actually purchase a copy of Longhorn.
WHY IN THE DAMN HELL would an operating system ever give a damn about document file formats? That's an application's job.
If it was sold in a box in stores, people who don't know what it is might pick it up and try to install it.
Which was the same justification Microsoft had for offering XP Media Center Edition as only an OEM preinstall. They didn't want to deal with a blitz of support requests from users who couldn't get their PVR functionality working due to a TV tuner card with unsupported drivers, or users that had no tuner at all but didn't know that.
I think it was a wise choice, although if I knew that the no-name tuners HP shipped in their MCPC's were cheapo Conexant chipsets, I might have balked.
Thanks for being part of the problem, you asshole.
And you wonder why users aren't flocking to Linux? When every issue someone brings up about problems they have running it is met with a "RTFM n00b" and an accusation that the user did something wrong?
No it doesn't. Sure, the part of the transfer than FedEx does for you take under 24 hours, but how long does it take to write the data from the source systems onto the tapes? How long does it take to read the data off the tapes and onto the source systems?
Sure, it might take a little longer but the last thing I need is the government mandating which TV I can buy.
You'll still be able to BUY old-fashioned analog-reception TV's forever. But what good will it do you when the FCC has stopped licensing analog TV transmissions?
Broadcast spectrum space is too precious for the FCC to allow broadcasters to move into the digital TV band while indefinitely maintaining their presence in the analog TV band also.
The whole transition has been a mess, with the government, the broadcast industry, and the TV manufacturers working against rather than with each other. No wonder Europe and Asia are moving past us in the technology race.
If I were in charge of everything, I would simply mandate that TV manufacturers need to send out free digital tuner boxes to any customer who requests one. Since they refused to eat the costs before, they can eat the costs now. Too bad in the real world, such a simple solution is fundamentally untenable.
Every respectable mail client from pine through gmail allows you to save mail to folders other than "Inbox". Anyone who does not take advantage of this feature, and allows their inbox to grow to hundreds or more megabytes is a damned moron.
Inbox is for messages you have just received or otherwise still require your attention. If you got it four years back, it doesn't belong in your inbox.
When you get a magazine subscription via snail mail, do you leave your back issues out at streetside, clogging up the mailbox, or do you bring them in and store them in a rack or closet? Why would electronic mail be any different?
A table was mysteriously corrupted about two years ago. The fix? I opened up a HEX editor and repaired the damage.
Oh, is that all it took? A knowledge of precisely which data had been corrupted, and enough familiarity with the internals of the data file format to find and correct it without breaking anything else?
Slashdot Mirror
The cost savings of using this technology could be very attractive to business.
But the cost expenditures of having to install huge AC/DC transformers in the utility rooms and replace each and every desktop computer with a costly new low-wattage model will be very UNattractive to business.
I have yet to hear of any network operations center deploying WiFi instead of traditional cabling. This is not a technology that WOULD have any utility in the typical one-or-two-computer home environment.
is society ready for a generation of kids who literally can't tell reality from fantasy?
Here's the Cluebat[TM] for that generation of kids, and for you: if it's enclosed within the boundaries of a TV screen, it's not reality.
Don't misunderestimate American's knowledge of world geometry! We know that "Andorra" is not next to Dutchland! It is the planet where Ewoks live!
The elegant syntaxes in high level languages are there for a reason - to help make code easier to maintain and develop.
Look, I'm not saying that anyone should be writing code in BASIC today -- the language has been obsoleted. But in the past, it had its place as a legitimate introductory language.
And while I'm happy that high level languages make code easier to maintain and develop than ever before, a GREAT programmer needs to grok what's happening at the low levels, too. If all you know is Java and have never had to push a register value to the stack or even make a call to malloc(), your prgramming education is incomplete.
I don't know 'bout you but I'd rather spend a few minutes thinking and write 15 lines than just dive in and write 115 lines like most basic educated guys seem to do.
I don't know why you seem to think 'started with BASIC' is equivalent 'doesn't do any planning'.
Even when I wrote in BASIC, at age 8, I wrote out pseudocode descriptions of program behavior (and often drew FLOWCHARTS!) before typing a single line number.
Choice of language is frankly irrelevant to the argument you are now making.
Apple, now raking in profits from its iPod, should seriously consider lowering their prices on their high-end machines to gain market share.
It's not the high-end machines that Apple could gain market share with, as the Mac Faithful will still buy dual-G5 towers and 30" Cinema Displays whether they're $2000 or $3500.
It's the entry-level hardware that Apple should be cutting prices on to attract new Mac users. Et voila, Mac mini!
I do wonder why there has been so little mainstream marketing for OS X since 10.0 came out years ago, as that is clearly one of the biggest advantages Apple has over Microsoft right now. Longhorn won't ship for years, and a lot of people will be buying new computers in the meantime. Why isn't Apple pursing this market share more aggressively?
There is, however, a shortage of companies willing to invest in their employees by properly training them.
Of course there is. An employee who gets training at one company generally becomes more valuable to the rest of the job market, which means that companies either have to provide salary increases beyond cost-of-living in order to retain employees, or face a perpetual cycle of retraining costs as people pinball from job to higher-paying job.
Of course, since I'm not brown skinned I was accepted immediately. Most of these rants on Slashdot seem to be thinly veiled racism.
Maybe it's because I'm browsing at +2, but yours is the first post I've seen in this entire thread that mentioned skin color.
Let's PLEASE try not to infer racist motive where no proof of such exists. It's a charged allegation which is not easily refutable, even for those who are not racially biased.
Oh, like I'm the ONLY Slashdotter who got their start in some flavor of BASIC. What's true of me is true of AN ENTIRE GENERATION of programmers.
Tell me, what language did YOU start with? Did you spring fully formed from your father's head, clutching a disk full of flawless C code?
Please don't let your students use basic or visual basic, it will destroy any chance of learning to write real code.
Malarkey. I started programming in Tandy BASIC in the early 1980's, and it didn't instill in me any bad habits that I was unable to shake once I moved on to Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java, etc. "GOTO Considered Harmful"? In modern high level languages, yes, we have more elegant syntaxes for branching. But in assembly, what is a JMP instruction anyway but a GOTO?
Visual Basic, I have no experience with and do not wish to gain any.
You make me laugh. Excel is MORE PORTABLE than Perl or Python?
This is an MS Office component we're talking about here. Consider yourself lucky if you can open last year's file format in this year's app properly...
If the operating system can natively convert any MS Works or Office document to the new Metro format via wizard or context menu I will actually purchase a copy of Longhorn.
WHY IN THE DAMN HELL would an operating system ever give a damn about document file formats? That's an application's job.
So where is the balance?
Why would you expect "balance" from the crowd at Slashdot?
No, seriously, why? Did you mistake this website for a mainstream news outlet?
Is everyone missing that "icon" can mean an important figure in history?
Of course not.
Did the editors of the book miss that capitalizing the C, a la Jobs' favorite product naming convention, gives the title a dual meaning?
What I think you are trying to say is how Google and Microsoft get to that common priority.
Isn't that what the parent poster DID say?
"Microsoft makes quality by prioritizing money" would surely not be a true statement.
*enters 1 + 1 into the built-in calculator*
*gets 2,124,972, 421 as an answer*
*enters 1 + 1 again*
*gets 0.0012 as an answer*
So the Pentium was a quantum computer?
More probably they are using old intel processors.
I don't get it. It's not like the number of missing files is 16,208.99999999999999...
If it was sold in a box in stores, people who don't know what it is might pick it up and try to install it.
Which was the same justification Microsoft had for offering XP Media Center Edition as only an OEM preinstall. They didn't want to deal with a blitz of support requests from users who couldn't get their PVR functionality working due to a TV tuner card with unsupported drivers, or users that had no tuner at all but didn't know that.
I think it was a wise choice, although if I knew that the no-name tuners HP shipped in their MCPC's were cheapo Conexant chipsets, I might have balked.
WTF did you do wrong?!!
Thanks for being part of the problem, you asshole.
And you wonder why users aren't flocking to Linux? When every issue someone brings up about problems they have running it is met with a "RTFM n00b" and an accusation that the user did something wrong?
...a box full of DLT, LTO, or AIT tapes.
No it doesn't. Sure, the part of the transfer than FedEx does for you take under 24 hours, but how long does it take to write the data from the source systems onto the tapes? How long does it take to read the data off the tapes and onto the source systems?
Sure, it might take a little longer but the last thing I need is the government mandating which TV I can buy.
You'll still be able to BUY old-fashioned analog-reception TV's forever. But what good will it do you when the FCC has stopped licensing analog TV transmissions?
Broadcast spectrum space is too precious for the FCC to allow broadcasters to move into the digital TV band while indefinitely maintaining their presence in the analog TV band also.
The whole transition has been a mess, with the government, the broadcast industry, and the TV manufacturers working against rather than with each other. No wonder Europe and Asia are moving past us in the technology race.
If I were in charge of everything, I would simply mandate that TV manufacturers need to send out free digital tuner boxes to any customer who requests one. Since they refused to eat the costs before, they can eat the costs now. Too bad in the real world, such a simple solution is fundamentally untenable.
Every respectable mail client from pine through gmail allows you to save mail to folders other than "Inbox". Anyone who does not take advantage of this feature, and allows their inbox to grow to hundreds or more megabytes is a damned moron.
Inbox is for messages you have just received or otherwise still require your attention. If you got it four years back, it doesn't belong in your inbox.
When you get a magazine subscription via snail mail, do you leave your back issues out at streetside, clogging up the mailbox, or do you bring them in and store them in a rack or closet? Why would electronic mail be any different?
A table was mysteriously corrupted about two years ago. The fix? I opened up a HEX editor and repaired the damage.
Oh, is that all it took? A knowledge of precisely which data had been corrupted, and enough familiarity with the internals of the data file format to find and correct it without breaking anything else?
I'm glad it worked out for you. That time.
To sum up parent's comment:
If you need high availability but not strong data integrity, choose MySQL.
If you need strong data integrity but not high availability, choose MS SQL Server.