Why in the world are they trying to compare a full blown PVR/Media Center (Windows Media Center) to a computer with a remote (Mac Mini)?
This is one of the worst head-to-head comparison articles I have ever seen. In fact, it isn't a comparison article at all, it's more of a blurb about using the Mini as a PVR.
Nowhere in the article do they cite what Media Center hardware they're comparing against. Similarly, they describe absolutely no objective tests with side-by-side results (a la Tom's Hardware). Yet they complain about *specific* MCE PC problems like spending "hours" to display "anything" on a TV and "jet plane" fan noise, both of which are very hardware-specific and have nothing to do with Windows MCE itself. This whole article reeks of fanboi-ism.
I have a college friend who they practically threw a job on. He wouldn't tell us how much he would get paid, only that it was "above 50 grand". Mind you he isn't some genuis programmer, he's good but still has a lot to learn.
I know of very few major companies hiring grads and starting them for less than 50 grand. And in the Seattle or San Jose areas? Forget about it. You need to look around some more.
Trust me, the last people you should be sobbing about in terms of earnings are MS employees.
The interest in this article isn't that people feel sorry for MS employees. Rather, the interest lies in the fact that Microsoft makes billions in profits every year, steadily increasing annually, and yet employee compensation is not growing and the employees of one of the richest corporations in the world are not happy.
This is surprising considering that Microsoft lobbies to raise the H1-B visa cap every year, complaining of a "lack of qualified U.S. applicants". A shortage of applicants should cause wages to increase for hiring as well as retaining current employees, but this article tends to dispute that assumption.
Wow, that's more than I get with 17 years of experience. You'll pardon me if I don't weep for the poor Microsoft employees.
If you honestly
are a software developer (not a sysadmin)
have 17 years of experience
live in a major metropolitan area (>2 million people)
AND make less than 75k per year
then you're getting screwed, unless those 17 years weren't very productive... IMO, you should be looking around at other opportunities if you meet those criteria.
I'm not talking about constant antibiotic use. Obviously antibiotics are only necessary when OTC decongestants and home remedies fail to clear congested sinuses which have developed an infection. Infections are fairly infrequent even for chronic sinusitis patients, usually not exceeding 4 separate infections per year.
No single home remedy works for all these patients. Most armchair physicians believe a cure which seems to work for large numbers of people will work for everyone. In reality, every patient is different and will respond differently to various treatments.
Every patient's sinus cavities have different draining characteristics. Even surgical drilling/flushing operations do not clear badly congested sinuses reliably, which is why they the treatment is combined with antibiotics. All it takes is a microscopic bacterial residue to rebound into a new infectious outbreak. The sinus cavities are a nearly perfect breeding ground for bacterial infections, which is why they are so common.
Doctors will not prescribe an antibiotic without first verifying that there is some type of bacterial infection. While your coworker may have tried to get antibiotics from his/her doctor, they would have failed unless they actually demonstrated symptoms consistent with a bacterial infection.
You do realize that the common cold is a VIRAL infection, and anti-biotics kill BACTERIA, and will therefore be totally useless except to contribute to the anti-biotic tolerance of bacteria?"
What you seem to be neglecting is that many, many people have a condition called sinusitis that is frequently associated with colds. Many cases of acute sinusitis are accompanied by bacterial infections of the sinus cavities, which can be quite severe. If left untreated, sinus infections can lead to bronchitis and pneumonia. It is perfectly reasonable to treat such infections with antibiotics before they reach the lungs and require more significant treatment.
OPEC wants cheap oil to prevent investments in production capacity of oil sands and shale oil (and other alternatives to Middle East crude). As long as the price of oil per barrel sits under $40, it will continue to be economically infeasible to produce oil from these sources, and the world will continue to give oodles of money to the Middle East for a share of what comes out of their ground.
The big secret is that the US and Candada have enough KNOWN oil sands and shale oil to supply our petroleum demands for more than 100 years. In fact, the exact quantities are still largely unknown. The supply could be much greater.
But no one will invest in production unless the price of oil stays above $40-$50 per barrel permanently. There is a great deal of interest right now in the oil sands up in Candada, but to my knowledge, the shale oil in the US is still largely untapped.
Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft does hire lots of *nix people. But you aren't going to be doing cutting edge work.
I suppose working with Anders Hejlsberg on the C# compiler is boring, eh? And writing a Bluetooth stack for Windows Mobile devices... that's probably as boring as implementing Quicksort now, isn't it? Or working on the new Visual Studio Team System source control software... that's cake, since we all know how to implement a simple, scalable revision control system, right?
Here's a thought. Maybe -- just maybe -- your brief interview experience did not expose you to some of the cutting edge work that Microsoft is doing...
They don't even use C++. No, I don't mean they use C#. They use C and lots of reference-counted pointers. No STL at all. Windows is really pretty ugly inside. If you are programmer with very high standards, you aren't going to like it.
Thousands of software engineers working on C code are collectively rolling their eyes right now.
If you think that "high standards" require use of C++ and the STL, then you might want to rethink why you didn't get that offer. Here's a hint: software engineering is not about the language, but how you use it.
Unless they've rewritten it lately, the Linux kernel is written in C. BSD is C as well. In fact, most modern operating systems were written (and are now extended and maintained) in C. I suppose your conclusion about Windows applies to those systems as well?
Oh wait, I almost forgot... while interviewing, you had a chance to skim all 50+ million lines of code in Windows and determine that they were ugly. I guess we'll just take your word for it, then.
I use netflix, I would consiter myself a regular->heavy renter getting 3-5 disks/week.
I have the top-of-the-line rental plan (3 at a time), and if I send the movies back in the mail on the same day I receive them (yes, I've tested this out), I max out at 14 movies per month, or roughly 3.2 movies per week.
There is no way you're getting 5 movies per week from Netflix. And that sucks. I can watch 5 movies in one slow weekend. Unlimited my ass. Selling me something under misleading terms pisses me off considerably.
Seriously, if they wanted to do an actually funny RPG nerd bit, they should've done more research. Take a video camera to OrcCon, or GenCon, or even find a local RPG store that has the traditional "tables in the back" and go watch those guys.
Al Gore just called. He wants his sense of humor back.
Seriously. Of course they're just acting like nerds! That's precisely what makes it so funny! This video is a mockumentary, like "Spinal Tap" and "Best in Show." Most people find mockumentaries much more amusing than documentaries. "Trekkies" is a good example of a documentary with real nerds. Some found it amusing, but most people just thought it was plain eerie or weird.
Why bring Apple into a conversation about a defective XP driver?
I am willing to bet that Microsoft's driver was written by Intel vendors using Intel reference code. The ACPI spec is horribly complicated/confusing, making the Intel reference code that much more important.
I would be very surprised if MS developed an ACPI driver from scratch in-house. Similarly, I would also be surprised if Apple developed their own driver.
What does this mean? Apple and MS may both use the same Intel ACPI reference code, possibly exposing the same issue. We won't know for sure until testing.
As usual, the evidence of the ignorant falls somewhat short of being accurate.
Aphorisms aside, the data I presented are directly from the CDC. I obviously paraphrased the transmission vectors for effect. Citing every possible way one can contract AIDS was never my intent; capturing the largest percentages was.
You can contract AIDS not just from sharing needles, but from using another junkies' spoon.
I could be a junkie. I choose not to be. Choices are important in life, especially if you want to keep living.
The relatively high percentage of AIDS in the black community is correlated to the relatively high percentage of black men who are incarcerated.
I could also correlate that high number with the percentage of black men who suffer from sickle cell anemia, but that doesn't make the correlated data a causative factor for contracting AIDS. Setting the PMITA prison myth aside, why should these individuals be accounted for any differently than those who have unprotected homosexual contact in the first place?
As for having unprotected sex being idiotic, if that were true we're all idiots. Well, probably not you. I'll let you in on a little secret, though -- condomless feels better. In the moment, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you can beat the odds.
Ad hominem attacks are always the last refuge of those who feel threatened by ideas.
Category 1:
60.8%: men from unprotected homosexual contact or shared-IV drug usage
7.2%: females engaging in shared-IV drug usage
= 68% idiots
Category 2:
11.9%: men from unprotected heterosexual contact
18.9%: females from unprotected heterosexual contact
= 30.7% people who should be using protection from the idiots in Category 1
And as for Africa (home to 2/3 of the world's AIDS population), there is even more evidence of blatant ignorance, even amongst government officials. The Internet also keeps its share of idiot-run websites denying the link between HIV and AIDS.
I'd say idiots are both the primary cause of AIDS transmission, and are also the disease's primary victims. That's pretty uncontroversial when you look at the evidence.
But I have much more sympathy for the idiots in Africa (who have no chance to get a decent education) than I do for idiots in the U.S. and the industrialized world who know better.
Sundquist wasn't voted out, he had reached the two-term limit, and couldn't run again.
Hmm, I guess I had forgotten about that. I remember him leaving office in disgrace, his popularity numbers in the gutter. He certainly would not have won re-election if he had been able to do so.
TennCare has been cut to the bone. It was a great concept - provide health care for everyone in Tennessee who couln't afford it otherwise - and it requires money to do that. These days, people are dying because their TennCare has been stopped, and the fallback resources are inadequate.
Claims like these are ridiculous because they are completely unsupportable. People die every day, and that's a shame. But that happens whether people have insurance or not. Just because people die without insurance doesn't mean they did not receive medical treatment. In fact, hospitals are required to treat Emergency Room cases for all patients, regardless of their ability to pay. It's a federal law, known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.
If you're so keen on getting health insurance to people who can't afford it, why don't you contribute to a charity designed to do just that? Or, send donations to the TennCare program. Put your money where your mouth is.
Well, your post (and others) actually makes it very clear that americans are still scary people...
Whoa, wait just a minute. Any student of modern European history would find this statement incredibly ironic. Pot, kettle, black. Get over your self-superior European selves.
News Flash: Americans do NOT want to flatten Europe with nuclear weapons. The funny thing here is, the OP brought it up as an example of an absurd idea. You did an excellent job of demonstrating how to overreact and take things out of context. Bravo.
I lived near Memphis for 20+ years, until 2002. Ever since a state-run health care program named "TennCare" started in the mid-90s, state expenditures have skyrocketed and the government has been in a huge budget crunch. Some legislators have been trying to pass a state income tax for years, and each year it gets voted down. Governor Don Sundquist, a few years back, publicly pledged his support for the state income tax... and was promptly voted out.
This is just another ploy to increase tax revenue without instigating a state income tax, which the people of Tennessee continue to reject.
If I were them, I would demand lower expenditures, but that seems to be impossible to achieve, no matter who you vote into office.
The competitors are naturally disadvantaged because they don't have the inside knowledge into the protocols supported by Windows on the desktop.
First of all, vendors are free to ship their own network filesystem protocols for Windows. Nothing is stopping them. In fact, these vendors can even write their own file system redirectors to make this protocol work exactly like CIFS/SMB, integrating into the standard filesystem. Why won't they do this? Because it's hard work, and it would be easier for them to reverse-engineer the way Microsoft has already implemented it. Then they don't have to write the client side stuff themselves, because it's hard to do.
Second of all, Windows has used one variant or another of the SMB protocol ever since the Microsoft Lan Manager shipped in 1987. The LAN Manager client software was included as part of the Windows 3.1 back in 1992. At the time, Novell and Banyan had their own proprietary systems which were just as popular, and eventually as Windows gained popularity, Novell shipped its own proprietary client for Windows for years. Insinuating that these protocols are some kind of "monopoly tool" added by Microsoft to increase its Server share is ridiculous because they didn't have a desktop monopoly when they were added!
They have to waste time and/or money on reverse engineering.
Bingo! I think you nailed it on the head. These companies want a free lunch. They want to use Microsoft's networking client for their own servers without writing their own. It all boils down to that. They *could* write their own client-side networking stack using their own server protocols of choice, but that's difficult to do. So, rather than doing this work, they litigate instead! The EU court system, full of people who don't like big business (particularly American big businesses), is happy to oblige them. Now they'll be able to use Microsoft's client as if it were their own.
The market does want that, but when there's an 800lbs gorilla in the market, the market no longer works as intended.
This is complete, utter B.S. This EU antitrust ruling is for documentation of *server* protocols. Microsoft is NOT the "800-pound" gorilla in the server market. Their share is around 50%, which does NOT constitute a monopoly. Once upon a time, Sun had an even greater market share and was the 800-pound gorilla, but they failed to ride the commoditization of the PC industry to cut costs until recently.
If the server market wanted to buy "open" alternatives (as vague as that term is), they would do so. There are plenty of well-established server providers out there, Linux companies included. (Server has always been the traditional realm of Unix.) But whenever companies pick Microsoft anyway, people here on Slashdot (and apparently in the EU too) cry "monopoly". After all, it's easier to litigate than compete.
Linux adoption is NOT slow because "The Man" (Microsoft) is illegally trying to keep it down. Linux does a fine job of slowing its own adoption by shooting itself in the foot all the time.
I tried to run my users with no privs on the last job, and always got bitten by programs such as WordPerfect, which insisted they had to run with PowerUser privs. Meanwhile, complex, computationaly demanding, graphics-heavy programs such as Spartan (visual environment for quantum chemistry), quietly installed in their own folder, didn't write to the registry, and could be moved without breaking because they didn't install anything to the system directories.
The problem is two-fold: lazy app writers, and lazy administrators.
Fixing these problems is usually not difficult. Most of these programs just need write access to a particular folder, or registry key, and they work fine. You can use FileMon and RegMon to figure out which resources these broken apps require, and then assign specific privileges to users accordingly. NT has AMAZING object-level security granularity built-in (more sophisticated than traditional Unix), but most administrators only understand 2 modes: privileged and unprivileged. They just add people to the Administrators group. It's easier, and administrators are lazy.
And even to this day, app vendors don't test their software properly under LUA. This is laziness as well.
Everyone jumps on Microsoft for these problems. But yet, everyone jumps on Microsoft if it doesn't maintain backwards compatibility. It's a Catch-22 for them.
My advice to you is, boycott ALL software that can't work under LUA. Demand that it be fixed immediately. If you MUST install it, then don't be lazy by giving out Administrator privileges. Figure out why the app is failing, and assign privileges as needed!
This is obviously indicative of a overcomplex poorly-designed system with far, far too many interdependencies. Well-designed systems do not have this problem.
I won't deny that Windows is complicated. "Overcomplex" is debatable, since much of this complexity is due to maintaining backwards compatibility over the years. Arguably, this has been Microsoft's key to dominance in the PC software industry. But TEST complexity is only somewhat affected by system complexity. The majority of test complexity usually derives from "scenario-platform explosion." There are simply more things to test in Windows because there are so many "supported" uses for it, and so many customers who depend on it to work a certain way, and so many current versions of Windows that must be supported.
I'm talking about releasing a security advisory and temporary workarounds shortly after finding or learning of the bug. This is responsible, and what responsible companies, both in the computing industry and other industries.
As you are very well aware, the minute these advisories go public, exploit code turns up. This happens time and time again. Until a solution is ready to be deployed to ALL customers, making such an announcement will only create more problems than it will solve.
This is typical Microsoft arrogance: other companies and development teams fix their bugs and maintain their code, and don't "go on to other things". I'm sure others here can attest to that as well.
Don't put words in my mouth. Microsoft releases bug fixes continuously, for products that are much older than what most software vendors support. Your claim that it is abnormal for 3rd parties to find the majority of publicly acknowledged bugs AFTER a product has been shipped is extremely odd. Testers (and this assumes the company even has designated testers) start testing new features soon after a product ships. Bugs in released software are fixed as they are reported by 3rd parties and end-users. This is standard stuff, covered in Software Engineering 101: The Release Cycle...
If it were any other industry, Microsoft would have its head on a block. Cars with even minor problems have recalls issued at the expense of the manufacturer.
I wish intelligent people (of which I'm sure you are one) would stop using dumb analogies. Cars and Windows have very little in common. Cars require a knowledgeable, government-licensed operator. Windows does not. Furthermore, cars are systems with well-defined applications (driving at certain speeds, under a set range of conditions, etc). It is MUCH easier from an engineering standpoint to design and control quality of a system with limited application scenarios. Windows is a generic system designed to handle whatever applications its users wish to install. From a system perspective, its design (and even feature) requirements are often vague. It is merely a platform for unknown application scenarios.
Because the scenarios are limited, and because cars are manufactured as entire systems end-to-end, car manufacturers can control quality very tightly for its limited scenarios. Daimler-Chrysler doesn't need to worry about a car being driven through the Pacific Ocean, or even through a salt water rainstorm: that's not a scenario they need to worry about. They know precisely the crash-test scenarios that they need to test to meet NTSB requirements. They don't need to protect drivers from machine-gun bullets, because this is not "normal operation." By contrast, Microsoft not only needs to worry about all these possible scenarios its software might encounter, but it also doesn't even have control over the HARDWARE on which its software will run.
I can think of ONE area where the two industries are similar to some degree: safety. Mistakes and neglect in the care and operation of cars that lead to accidents are NOT the res
They have reports of bugs for months, often, and do nothing until it's publically reported and/or there's an exploit in the wild. Does it take Microsoft 6 months to come up with a patch for a single buffer overrun? Or are they just too arrogant and think they're above doing anything about problems until they're exposed?
Bug fixes can be usually be checked into source control immediately (obviously depending on the amount of code that needs to be altered). But *testing* that this fix works on 3 different architectures (x86, x64, ia64), 6 different Windows versions (2000, 2000 Server, XP Pro, XP Home, 2003 Server, XP 64-bit), and doesn't regress any other Windows component or 3rd party application takes LOTS of time. It would involve coordinating with multiple test teams across multiple Windows divisions, all of whom are undoubtedly working on something different. And even after a patch has gone through this huge test matrix, there is still a risk that it will break something, making MS reluctant to patch all but the most serious problems.
How often do we see bug reports from Microsoft about a critical vulnerabilities, compared to third-party reports?
I'm not sure what industry you work in, but this sequence is normal in most industries. While a product is under development, the majority of bug reports are generated by the development/test teams. But once it has been released to the public, the product teams move on to a new project and no longer concentrate on finding bugs in the released product. Instead, post-release bug reports come from end-users and resellers. These bugs are filed, verified, triaged, and possibly fixed as deemed appropriate by product support personnel.
Perhaps you're holding Microsoft to a different standard here?
I hear this claim often: "non-profit organizations are somehow more objective because they don't have the common goal of profit." But it simply isn't true. Non-profit organizations have OTHER goals which, on many levels, provide even greater motivation to "do whatever needs to be done" to achieve them.
By their very nature, non-profit organizations are a group of people with a specific agenda. They exist to promote, implement, and raise awareness of that agenda, whether it is protecting the environment, raising money for a specific disease or underprivileged group, or promoting some specific action like stopping smoking. The group's supporters and/or staff overwhelmingly share this common goal because they are typically volunteers. In other words, participating in these organizations isn't "just a day job" for them: they fundamentally believe in the agenda.
Next, you need to understand how these non-profits achieve these goals. Predominantly, they require public support. This means advertising (e.g., "thetruth.org"), communicating (e.g., sending "experts" to raise awareness of an issue in the media), and lobbying (e.g., capitol hill lobbyists and "voter cards" mailed to group's members) just to name a few of the operational tactics used to garner public support. These tactics bring public funding and interest to their agendas, both vital to achieving their goals.
Have you EVER heard of a non-profit organization just close up shop because an issue just isn't relevant anymore? No. They might close due to lack of interest, or lack of funding: but there will always be an agenda to promote. So that means that public attention is as critical to these organizations as profit is to corporations. Corporations go bankrupt when they fail to profit: non-profit organizations "fade away" when they lose the attention of the public. This is why they constantly seek attention.
It's important to see all of these things when you're interacting with a non-profit organization. They absolutely have agendas, and they WILL play to people to get more attention and money devoted to them. THIS is where non-profit bias comes from.
I don't think the nVidia/ATI switch is nearly as bothersome as the Intel/PowerPC switch.
This is hilarious. Have you ever written a GPU emulator before? Then you have no idea what's involved.
CPU emulators are EASY. Think about how many CPU emulators there are on the market: Virtual PC, VMWare, Fusion (Mac 68k), etc. Hell, I had to write a MIPS emulator as a solo project in a college-level computer engineering class. The main reason they're so easy is that the CPU instruction sets are well-studied and well-documented.
As a result, you get tons of unstable Windows applications because to get any reasonable concurrency you have to throw out the years of hard work that OS designers put into having protected memory.
Throw out years of hard work? Give me a break! It almost seems that you are blaming the poor quality of modern threaded applications on Windows! That's rich!
Concurrency is difficult to use correctly no matter what technology you use. Inter-process shared/mapped memory is just as susceptible to race conditions as cross-thread shared memory, and inter-process synchronization logic can deadlock just as easily as thread synchronization logic. And the results are the same: once a process is deadlocked, or corrupts its data due to a race condition, what difference does it make if it's running in its own address space? The software has failed catastrophically either way!
We are ALL well aware that poorly written multi-threaded software is unreliable and that threads can easily trash other threads' data if not written correctly. And yet, for performance-critical applications, programmers still prefer to use threads. Why? It's simple: Because, for MANY applications, the benefits in performance outweigh the risks.
Finally, I'd like to point out one more thing. You claim that to get "reasonable concurrency" on Windows you are FORCED to use threads. I completely disagree. While process startup latency is relatively high on Windows, Windows offers a rich set of interprocess communication mechanisms, and context switching is quite fast. And if your program is so performance-critical that process startup latency is your biggest bottleneck, then switching to thread synchronization seems perfectly reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the worst head-to-head comparison articles I have ever seen. In fact, it isn't a comparison article at all, it's more of a blurb about using the Mini as a PVR.
Nowhere in the article do they cite what Media Center hardware they're comparing against. Similarly, they describe absolutely no objective tests with side-by-side results (a la Tom's Hardware). Yet they complain about *specific* MCE PC problems like spending "hours" to display "anything" on a TV and "jet plane" fan noise, both of which are very hardware-specific and have nothing to do with Windows MCE itself. This whole article reeks of fanboi-ism.
- are a software developer (not a sysadmin)
- have 17 years of experience
- live in a major metropolitan area (>2 million people)
- AND make less than 75k per year
then you're getting screwed, unless those 17 years weren't very productive... IMO, you should be looking around at other opportunities if you meet those criteria.I'm not talking about constant antibiotic use. Obviously antibiotics are only necessary when OTC decongestants and home remedies fail to clear congested sinuses which have developed an infection. Infections are fairly infrequent even for chronic sinusitis patients, usually not exceeding 4 separate infections per year.
No single home remedy works for all these patients. Most armchair physicians believe a cure which seems to work for large numbers of people will work for everyone. In reality, every patient is different and will respond differently to various treatments.
Every patient's sinus cavities have different draining characteristics. Even surgical drilling/flushing operations do not clear badly congested sinuses reliably, which is why they the treatment is combined with antibiotics. All it takes is a microscopic bacterial residue to rebound into a new infectious outbreak. The sinus cavities are a nearly perfect breeding ground for bacterial infections, which is why they are so common.
Doctors will not prescribe an antibiotic without first verifying that there is some type of bacterial infection. While your coworker may have tried to get antibiotics from his/her doctor, they would have failed unless they actually demonstrated symptoms consistent with a bacterial infection.
What you seem to be neglecting is that many, many people have a condition called sinusitis that is frequently associated with colds. Many cases of acute sinusitis are accompanied by bacterial infections of the sinus cavities, which can be quite severe. If left untreated, sinus infections can lead to bronchitis and pneumonia. It is perfectly reasonable to treat such infections with antibiotics before they reach the lungs and require more significant treatment.
You can read more about sinusitis from the National Institute of Health.
OPEC wants cheap oil to prevent investments in production capacity of oil sands and shale oil (and other alternatives to Middle East crude). As long as the price of oil per barrel sits under $40, it will continue to be economically infeasible to produce oil from these sources, and the world will continue to give oodles of money to the Middle East for a share of what comes out of their ground.
The big secret is that the US and Candada have enough KNOWN oil sands and shale oil to supply our petroleum demands for more than 100 years. In fact, the exact quantities are still largely unknown. The supply could be much greater.
But no one will invest in production unless the price of oil stays above $40-$50 per barrel permanently. There is a great deal of interest right now in the oil sands up in Candada, but to my knowledge, the shale oil in the US is still largely untapped.
I suppose working with Anders Hejlsberg on the C# compiler is boring, eh? And writing a Bluetooth stack for Windows Mobile devices... that's probably as boring as implementing Quicksort now, isn't it? Or working on the new Visual Studio Team System source control software... that's cake, since we all know how to implement a simple, scalable revision control system, right?
Here's a thought. Maybe -- just maybe -- your brief interview experience did not expose you to some of the cutting edge work that Microsoft is doing...
Thousands of software engineers working on C code are collectively rolling their eyes right now.
If you think that "high standards" require use of C++ and the STL, then you might want to rethink why you didn't get that offer. Here's a hint: software engineering is not about the language, but how you use it.
Unless they've rewritten it lately, the Linux kernel is written in C. BSD is C as well. In fact, most modern operating systems were written (and are now extended and maintained) in C. I suppose your conclusion about Windows applies to those systems as well?
Oh wait, I almost forgot... while interviewing, you had a chance to skim all 50+ million lines of code in Windows and determine that they were ugly. I guess we'll just take your word for it, then.
Heh, I meant to say *middle-of-the-road* rental plan. Regardless, it's still not "unlimited."
I have the top-of-the-line rental plan (3 at a time), and if I send the movies back in the mail on the same day I receive them (yes, I've tested this out), I max out at 14 movies per month, or roughly 3.2 movies per week.
There is no way you're getting 5 movies per week from Netflix. And that sucks. I can watch 5 movies in one slow weekend. Unlimited my ass. Selling me something under misleading terms pisses me off considerably.
Al Gore just called. He wants his sense of humor back.
Seriously. Of course they're just acting like nerds! That's precisely what makes it so funny! This video is a mockumentary, like "Spinal Tap" and "Best in Show." Most people find mockumentaries much more amusing than documentaries. "Trekkies" is a good example of a documentary with real nerds. Some found it amusing, but most people just thought it was plain eerie or weird.
I am willing to bet that Microsoft's driver was written by Intel vendors using Intel reference code. The ACPI spec is horribly complicated/confusing, making the Intel reference code that much more important.
I would be very surprised if MS developed an ACPI driver from scratch in-house. Similarly, I would also be surprised if Apple developed their own driver.
What does this mean? Apple and MS may both use the same Intel ACPI reference code, possibly exposing the same issue. We won't know for sure until testing.
Category 1:
60.8%: men from unprotected homosexual contact or shared-IV drug usage
7.2%: females engaging in shared-IV drug usage
= 68% idiots
Category 2:
11.9%: men from unprotected heterosexual contact
18.9%: females from unprotected heterosexual contact
= 30.7% people who should be using protection from the idiots in Category 1
And as for Africa (home to 2/3 of the world's AIDS population), there is even more evidence of blatant ignorance, even amongst government officials. The Internet also keeps its share of idiot-run websites denying the link between HIV and AIDS.
I'd say idiots are both the primary cause of AIDS transmission, and are also the disease's primary victims. That's pretty uncontroversial when you look at the evidence.
But I have much more sympathy for the idiots in Africa (who have no chance to get a decent education) than I do for idiots in the U.S. and the industrialized world who know better.
Hmm, I guess I had forgotten about that. I remember him leaving office in disgrace, his popularity numbers in the gutter. He certainly would not have won re-election if he had been able to do so.
Claims like these are ridiculous because they are completely unsupportable. People die every day, and that's a shame. But that happens whether people have insurance or not. Just because people die without insurance doesn't mean they did not receive medical treatment. In fact, hospitals are required to treat Emergency Room cases for all patients, regardless of their ability to pay. It's a federal law, known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.
And it appears that now-governor Bredesen is attempting to revive TennCare again, despite Alexander's attempts to get costs under control: http://www.state.tn.us/governor/viewArticleContent .do?id=694
If you're so keen on getting health insurance to people who can't afford it, why don't you contribute to a charity designed to do just that? Or, send donations to the TennCare program. Put your money where your mouth is.
Whoa, wait just a minute. Any student of modern European history would find this statement incredibly ironic. Pot, kettle, black. Get over your self-superior European selves.
News Flash: Americans do NOT want to flatten Europe with nuclear weapons. The funny thing here is, the OP brought it up as an example of an absurd idea. You did an excellent job of demonstrating how to overreact and take things out of context. Bravo.
I lived near Memphis for 20+ years, until 2002. Ever since a state-run health care program named "TennCare" started in the mid-90s, state expenditures have skyrocketed and the government has been in a huge budget crunch. Some legislators have been trying to pass a state income tax for years, and each year it gets voted down. Governor Don Sundquist, a few years back, publicly pledged his support for the state income tax... and was promptly voted out.
This is just another ploy to increase tax revenue without instigating a state income tax, which the people of Tennessee continue to reject.
If I were them, I would demand lower expenditures, but that seems to be impossible to achieve, no matter who you vote into office.
First of all, vendors are free to ship their own network filesystem protocols for Windows. Nothing is stopping them. In fact, these vendors can even write their own file system redirectors to make this protocol work exactly like CIFS/SMB, integrating into the standard filesystem. Why won't they do this? Because it's hard work, and it would be easier for them to reverse-engineer the way Microsoft has already implemented it. Then they don't have to write the client side stuff themselves, because it's hard to do.
Second of all, Windows has used one variant or another of the SMB protocol ever since the Microsoft Lan Manager shipped in 1987. The LAN Manager client software was included as part of the Windows 3.1 back in 1992. At the time, Novell and Banyan had their own proprietary systems which were just as popular, and eventually as Windows gained popularity, Novell shipped its own proprietary client for Windows for years. Insinuating that these protocols are some kind of "monopoly tool" added by Microsoft to increase its Server share is ridiculous because they didn't have a desktop monopoly when they were added!
Bingo! I think you nailed it on the head. These companies want a free lunch. They want to use Microsoft's networking client for their own servers without writing their own. It all boils down to that. They *could* write their own client-side networking stack using their own server protocols of choice, but that's difficult to do. So, rather than doing this work, they litigate instead! The EU court system, full of people who don't like big business (particularly American big businesses), is happy to oblige them. Now they'll be able to use Microsoft's client as if it were their own.
Mod parent offtopic. This policitcal troll has no relevance to the current discussion.
This is complete, utter B.S. This EU antitrust ruling is for documentation of *server* protocols. Microsoft is NOT the "800-pound" gorilla in the server market. Their share is around 50%, which does NOT constitute a monopoly. Once upon a time, Sun had an even greater market share and was the 800-pound gorilla, but they failed to ride the commoditization of the PC industry to cut costs until recently.
If the server market wanted to buy "open" alternatives (as vague as that term is), they would do so. There are plenty of well-established server providers out there, Linux companies included. (Server has always been the traditional realm of Unix.) But whenever companies pick Microsoft anyway, people here on Slashdot (and apparently in the EU too) cry "monopoly". After all, it's easier to litigate than compete.
Linux adoption is NOT slow because "The Man" (Microsoft) is illegally trying to keep it down. Linux does a fine job of slowing its own adoption by shooting itself in the foot all the time.
The problem is two-fold: lazy app writers, and lazy administrators.
Fixing these problems is usually not difficult. Most of these programs just need write access to a particular folder, or registry key, and they work fine. You can use FileMon and RegMon to figure out which resources these broken apps require, and then assign specific privileges to users accordingly. NT has AMAZING object-level security granularity built-in (more sophisticated than traditional Unix), but most administrators only understand 2 modes: privileged and unprivileged. They just add people to the Administrators group. It's easier, and administrators are lazy.
And even to this day, app vendors don't test their software properly under LUA. This is laziness as well.
Everyone jumps on Microsoft for these problems. But yet, everyone jumps on Microsoft if it doesn't maintain backwards compatibility. It's a Catch-22 for them.
My advice to you is, boycott ALL software that can't work under LUA. Demand that it be fixed immediately. If you MUST install it, then don't be lazy by giving out Administrator privileges. Figure out why the app is failing, and assign privileges as needed!
I won't deny that Windows is complicated. "Overcomplex" is debatable, since much of this complexity is due to maintaining backwards compatibility over the years. Arguably, this has been Microsoft's key to dominance in the PC software industry. But TEST complexity is only somewhat affected by system complexity. The majority of test complexity usually derives from "scenario-platform explosion." There are simply more things to test in Windows because there are so many "supported" uses for it, and so many customers who depend on it to work a certain way, and so many current versions of Windows that must be supported.
As you are very well aware, the minute these advisories go public, exploit code turns up. This happens time and time again. Until a solution is ready to be deployed to ALL customers, making such an announcement will only create more problems than it will solve.
Don't put words in my mouth. Microsoft releases bug fixes continuously, for products that are much older than what most software vendors support. Your claim that it is abnormal for 3rd parties to find the majority of publicly acknowledged bugs AFTER a product has been shipped is extremely odd. Testers (and this assumes the company even has designated testers) start testing new features soon after a product ships. Bugs in released software are fixed as they are reported by 3rd parties and end-users. This is standard stuff, covered in Software Engineering 101: The Release Cycle...
I wish intelligent people (of which I'm sure you are one) would stop using dumb analogies. Cars and Windows have very little in common. Cars require a knowledgeable, government-licensed operator. Windows does not. Furthermore, cars are systems with well-defined applications (driving at certain speeds, under a set range of conditions, etc). It is MUCH easier from an engineering standpoint to design and control quality of a system with limited application scenarios. Windows is a generic system designed to handle whatever applications its users wish to install. From a system perspective, its design (and even feature) requirements are often vague. It is merely a platform for unknown application scenarios.
Because the scenarios are limited, and because cars are manufactured as entire systems end-to-end, car manufacturers can control quality very tightly for its limited scenarios. Daimler-Chrysler doesn't need to worry about a car being driven through the Pacific Ocean, or even through a salt water rainstorm: that's not a scenario they need to worry about. They know precisely the crash-test scenarios that they need to test to meet NTSB requirements. They don't need to protect drivers from machine-gun bullets, because this is not "normal operation." By contrast, Microsoft not only needs to worry about all these possible scenarios its software might encounter, but it also doesn't even have control over the HARDWARE on which its software will run.
I can think of ONE area where the two industries are similar to some degree: safety. Mistakes and neglect in the care and operation of cars that lead to accidents are NOT the res
Bug fixes can be usually be checked into source control immediately (obviously depending on the amount of code that needs to be altered). But *testing* that this fix works on 3 different architectures (x86, x64, ia64), 6 different Windows versions (2000, 2000 Server, XP Pro, XP Home, 2003 Server, XP 64-bit), and doesn't regress any other Windows component or 3rd party application takes LOTS of time. It would involve coordinating with multiple test teams across multiple Windows divisions, all of whom are undoubtedly working on something different. And even after a patch has gone through this huge test matrix, there is still a risk that it will break something, making MS reluctant to patch all but the most serious problems.
I'm not sure what industry you work in, but this sequence is normal in most industries. While a product is under development, the majority of bug reports are generated by the development/test teams. But once it has been released to the public, the product teams move on to a new project and no longer concentrate on finding bugs in the released product. Instead, post-release bug reports come from end-users and resellers. These bugs are filed, verified, triaged, and possibly fixed as deemed appropriate by product support personnel.
Perhaps you're holding Microsoft to a different standard here?
I hear this claim often: "non-profit organizations are somehow more objective because they don't have the common goal of profit." But it simply isn't true. Non-profit organizations have OTHER goals which, on many levels, provide even greater motivation to "do whatever needs to be done" to achieve them.
By their very nature, non-profit organizations are a group of people with a specific agenda. They exist to promote, implement, and raise awareness of that agenda, whether it is protecting the environment, raising money for a specific disease or underprivileged group, or promoting some specific action like stopping smoking. The group's supporters and/or staff overwhelmingly share this common goal because they are typically volunteers. In other words, participating in these organizations isn't "just a day job" for them: they fundamentally believe in the agenda.
Next, you need to understand how these non-profits achieve these goals. Predominantly, they require public support. This means advertising (e.g., "thetruth.org"), communicating (e.g., sending "experts" to raise awareness of an issue in the media), and lobbying (e.g., capitol hill lobbyists and "voter cards" mailed to group's members) just to name a few of the operational tactics used to garner public support. These tactics bring public funding and interest to their agendas, both vital to achieving their goals.
Have you EVER heard of a non-profit organization just close up shop because an issue just isn't relevant anymore? No. They might close due to lack of interest, or lack of funding: but there will always be an agenda to promote. So that means that public attention is as critical to these organizations as profit is to corporations. Corporations go bankrupt when they fail to profit: non-profit organizations "fade away" when they lose the attention of the public. This is why they constantly seek attention.
It's important to see all of these things when you're interacting with a non-profit organization. They absolutely have agendas, and they WILL play to people to get more attention and money devoted to them. THIS is where non-profit bias comes from.
This is hilarious. Have you ever written a GPU emulator before? Then you have no idea what's involved.
CPU emulators are EASY. Think about how many CPU emulators there are on the market: Virtual PC, VMWare, Fusion (Mac 68k), etc. Hell, I had to write a MIPS emulator as a solo project in a college-level computer engineering class. The main reason they're so easy is that the CPU instruction sets are well-studied and well-documented.
Throw out years of hard work? Give me a break! It almost seems that you are blaming the poor quality of modern threaded applications on Windows! That's rich!
Concurrency is difficult to use correctly no matter what technology you use. Inter-process shared/mapped memory is just as susceptible to race conditions as cross-thread shared memory, and inter-process synchronization logic can deadlock just as easily as thread synchronization logic. And the results are the same: once a process is deadlocked, or corrupts its data due to a race condition, what difference does it make if it's running in its own address space? The software has failed catastrophically either way!
We are ALL well aware that poorly written multi-threaded software is unreliable and that threads can easily trash other threads' data if not written correctly. And yet, for performance-critical applications, programmers still prefer to use threads. Why? It's simple: Because, for MANY applications, the benefits in performance outweigh the risks.
Finally, I'd like to point out one more thing. You claim that to get "reasonable concurrency" on Windows you are FORCED to use threads. I completely disagree. While process startup latency is relatively high on Windows, Windows offers a rich set of interprocess communication mechanisms, and context switching is quite fast. And if your program is so performance-critical that process startup latency is your biggest bottleneck, then switching to thread synchronization seems perfectly reasonable.