What are you putting in the capsule that you think should really be interesting in 1000 years? PS2 games with a TV and such? Spare them, please.
Think about the degradation of plastics, oxidation of the materials, and outside interference from shock, moisture on the container, and other items. Why try to make junk from today work forever?
It may be more interesting to put something personalized and written from you describing your life, rather than trying to bottle it. Your apparatus of the container is a good judgement of the technology available at the time. Also, you get to solve the "how should i communicate and store it" question (been done on/. many times)
Then, the geek portion of you can still solve the issues of
- how to safely hold the contents
- when to wake up (never?)
- how to wake up
- how to detect premature tampering
- how to perform a self-diagnostic to let finders know if they're seeing your intended payload
- how to signal once awake
All these have great metaphors in CompSci/Networking references. I'd start there.
The battery is a chemistry problem, driven by how much power you'll need. If you act like a RF beacon and signal 1kW once every 24 hours, you can decide how much power you'll need. A pulsed beacon will definitely singal longer than most. RF will be more detectable than other sources (especially if underground), and best if you sweep a wide freq. on each pulse.
Also, work out the location: Are you buying land in a relatively quiet place on the earth? Not on a geologic fault, floodplain, mild temperature ranges, development area, etc. You could probably only extrapolate about 300years into the future with any chance of a lucky guess, IMHO.
And really, you could just toss it into a FreshKills, NY (a trash dump). Your signal will lead our descendants to a treasure trove of items.
It's funny that people eek out the "best in audio quality" without examining that most of the music they listen to, or recorded at all, is of mediocre quality to begin with. Want to listen to some awesome jazz from days gone by? then don't worry about speaker cables, room resonance, or other things esoteric. just put it in the mid-level stereo and go make dinner. there *is* value to just having music reside in the background, rather than trying to recreate a headphone-like experience with your house.
i find my reaction to audiophiles a little negative. just another obessive-compulsive outlet for those so inclined.
most people spend all this money just to hear loud explosions in crap-ass movies in their home theatre anyway.
Config files aren't going to be forward compat, so place their contents into an XML file. But also place enough documentation in the XML file that each admin can grow a small hand-editable help file right with it, geared towards the audience they admin with. DON'T keep all these xml's in the etc file, but in another directory.
"xtransetc" build a navigatiable page set from the files, allow you to hop around quickly and remotely. "genetc" fills the dir from the xml files, as you've tweaked it (with comments, don't/dos) "readetc" fills the xml file "meat" from the etc directory itself, thus it's two-way.
This first step re-bottles the data in a more extensible format. Next up, you keep portions of the "meat" in the user's specific folders. Then, genetc collects and collates these separate portions into a single etc folder, overwriting with the xml base. this runs at full logon. next, during this process, check user's groups to ensure they have overwriting permissions for each config payload.
New configuration files can be absorbed blindly, just leaving many of the metadata tags empty. a list of "feed" dirs is kept in the xml store, as well as the "discovered_in_dir" tag in the xml file.
Dependencies can be built through metainfo tags as well, but also holding very specific information, like dates, checksums, or package/file authentication. In addition, a "cross-compatability" section can list several safe substitutes for given dependencies.
the full thesaurus of dependency identifiers (since multiple names may point to the same program) has be to the cross-distro key. this shouldn't be hard, just a web site one distro starts and as others creep up, are posted.
in this way, you can gen a full web version of all distro/packages/apps/config files into a single tree, with dependencies and synonymous identifiers. also, versions will add "depth" dimension to the tree to see where branches formed and detached (if ever).
If you can learn VB6, you can learn VB.NET. This is where MS wants the VB programmers to go, and it ain't hard. In MS's.NET (or most newer languages like Python, Perl and Java), you can write much more feature-rich applications than VB could dare to touch, much more quickly.
Your list above is silly, btw. I'd keep that stuff to yourself.
Like any digital compensation piggyback (taxes, filters, hosting responsibilities), this is ignorance in print.
When the simplified view of "two computers talking" is the picture of someone's internet, it seems easy and this shite arises. But proxies, caches, distributed content are the mainstay. AOL, Earthlink both cache content. Most commercial pages are a built in some part of linked content. Vendors that sell have HQ , hosting, order processing and customer services all in different locations, and often in different countries. Who's going to regulate that? If you squeeze it, it goes to puppet offices in tax haven zones, like online casinos.
Adding to this that digitial information is impossible to fully categorize. For public-at-large transactions, we have standards, but as the FBI found out, to sniff out packets that are encrypted in several layers (or watermarked) is a big endeavor, and has no guarantees.
Digital information can be tracked, sure. So if the medium is public and needs sort sort of "market share" for effectiveness, you can trace participants. Hence the [MP|RI]AA nonsense. But for simply swapping music online through clubs or private protocols, the door is wide open. Host your music in unshown,encrypted TIFF layers, for a starting concept. The game is still afoot, to me.
Remember folks, the information wants to be free. So like water, the longer it exists in that format, the more it's going to leak/spill out to places it wasn't originally intended. So the credit information streaming out to eastern europe each week later is more a matter of time than security, IMO. Of course, we know that's what security is measured in anyway.
But you are the choir. How do we get WI politicos to read this thread?
No rights, and only 1 guarantee: you're going to die.
Everything else is a social construction, just so we can all get along.
Re:the most free/popular building design software
on
3D Home Planning Software?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a game level editor and visualizaer. I'm sure the modelling is strong, at least for primitives, but the focus on real time effects may make things like lighting effects suffer.
I went for cheap and just downloaded Moray. I plugged in accurate measurements, added a few simple textures, and could imagine the space easily. Traced out in POVRay, the pictures are pretty and cost zippo.
You'll have to find good models for your smaller items, if you want to use models. I didn't use them. There are plenty of models for Pov-Ray, but not a lot for dedicated to Moray. I haven't looked into that side of it much. However, building your basic nighttable/bed/lamp is easy in CSG, just for verifying that your space will fill as you imagine.
Space planning and room "look" was very nice with this, and very quick, since Moray has some crude group tools. Sadly, it doesn't seem to do low-level renderings (non-reflective,etc) and the CSG Evals are still only wireframe (and messy on big pics). Your quickest bet for POV speed is smaller pictures, which are useless.
Export the scene text, plug the camera math into a "clock" POVRay variable and you can spit out a directory of frames, with pretty good quality, overnight on most machines/scenes. There's a cl MPG builder to link them up, allowing for frame pauses and other simple tricks. This gives nice walkthroughs.
It is more labor intensive than the pro tools available, but it costs nothing. You learn a simple modeller, and with POV-Ray you can raytrace shiny things to your heart's content.
It might be easier to simply put a radiation detection system on, as a helmet. Have a group use a whole bunch of different phones for several functions, and several times, in different situations (cell crossing, no service). This would build the "average exposure" level.
Then, recording the input, just bombard rat brains with this level of radiation over several timed periods, and see how much DNA mutation occurs over each period. Of course, you'll also have to have a rat control group to subtract typical mutations over time for a similar diet,environment, etc.
Once that is all done, you've created one of the world's most expensive and researched stickers. That's it. A sticker that'll be mandatory on your phone when you buy it. People will peel it off and nobody knows the difference.
Then, years later, the "choice of damaging yourself" through cell phone use will be litigated endlessly, and whole states will fight to pay for the costs of all the strange brain reactions from the mutated DNA. However in America, subtracting out poor diet, lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyle and other politically-decided enviro-hazard levels, the plaintiff class might be hard to distinguish. Case dismissed.
For a cheap, fast batch lookups I once wrote a hashed matrix using STL. Loaded all the cells, dynamically typed, added indexes on the data for that run, and then passed around this collection of in-memory tables to our routines. Ran fast and was simple to debug, since all the traversing was O(ln(n)) based (or a variant thereof). Adding serialization, we could distribute to machines overnight dynamically and cut the run to a few minutes - from almost 8 hours.
Until it came time to dipose the memory. The STL slowly crawled tons of our objects, and the C++ dispose pattern was just too inefficient for all the stack hits. So we pointed the library at a custom heap and never disposed the dictionary - we just disposed the heap in bulk.
All written without hesitation for "longhand" syntax. (and btw, its "if ( NULL == var ) " to those that care). The code optimized fine, with just a few choice inlines we got to stick. No reg vars, no assembly piles littering the code.
But this was an in-house business app, and the lifecycles / requirements are different than other products. However, because of the nice algorithms, optimization wasn't difficult, and didn't rely on code tricks. If you're squabbling over code tricks for optimization, you're choosing the wrong algorithm, to me.
Oh - you must mean when you call anything in the OS, or reference any one of their former-perfect-solution COM objects?
Actually, use of a language isn't the trouble, just writing *well* in that language. Even checking the source isn't problem....they do employ an army of programmers, and send them to dozens of "better C" classes, written by gurus they themselves employ.
In the end, it might be the sad support for legacy interfaces that they're stuck with, or the fact that they can't seem to upgrade all of their code fast enough. Whatever it is, MS can't seem to improve their programs without forcing a sandbox to do it, eh? Sad.
Everyone knows that in a C/C++ world, you end up adopting or building a safer framework to avoid letting newb's use the standard C lib like the wild cowboy it was born as. In fact, it's what makes "better" programmers once they learn all these crazy nuiances, down to hand-asm optimizatios. But if you're stuck with tons of code that needs to be refactored (or just completely reengineered) because of past mistakes, there is a breaking point. Applications that *rely* on cowboy tactics are there to hold you up.
SO they release a "whole new OS" every few years or so, and force everyone to jump. They make the kernel bullet proof, and thunk old code. But somehow, something like IE lives on to trick users over those damned ActiveX objects, or marketing gets their fingers into Outlook and makes it auto-run everything. Sad, but MS is a product of many teams pushing different directions - which is to say it's no different than many companies.
Perhas they will learn a lesson from Open Source after all -> many eyes makes for better checking.
As an experiment, I think MS should just re-release IE as a complete.NET app from the ground up. It may enlighten MS about the limitations of.NET, the pervasiveness of a good security model, and how to useful componentize an application (and NOT build it as "an integral part of the OS").
avoid Ad hominem dude, try to stay on topic. Save the name calling for your schoolyard.
You need to resort to "letter of the law" arguments to obscure the facts coming out of Gitmo, Iraq/n and Afganistan right now? Isn't there anything in your so-emotional post for the "concept of freedom" that perhaps the US needs more help domestically than a tiny country (out of so many) needs to change regimes?
You were lied to man: no WMD, no link to Al Quaeda, no imminent threat. Soldiers are dying for a cause that doesn't exist. Are we safer now? No, actually we're worse off, by simply repeating the mistakes of the past. We are a bigger target, with more attackers, than when we started.
The current US administration is wildly out of bounds regarding the spirit of almost any law: human rights, foreign affairs, UN participation, separation of church and state, manipulation of the media, manipulation of national science opinions, and management of the environment. It's been a long long time since the 1940's guy. Party's over.
He is dead wrong there, in a big way. MS may not be solely to blame when their boxen die, but how many different [read: crappy] programs are out there. Anyone hate their office groupware suite? IBM, Novell, MS all release behemouths that have tons of holes and patches, plus all the other ditties on the platform.
Simply put, MS's encouragement of software as proprietary holding encourages vendors to not share code, thus losing the peer-review-fix concept. FOSS, OTOH, benefits from this, and reaches excellence much sooner. Actually, the big vendors will sometimes use just those sources for their products, when they want to start with the best in class. (Like historial discoveries of MS's hosting, hotmail, TCP/IP stack components coming from the FOSS world)
CORE Their big problem with FOSS is that it turns algorithms into commodities. There is, for the given market-snapshot demands, an optimal solution. If Linux hits it early (say, MP3 music storage, or the PVR utilities), then you see others try to jump on the bandwagon touting "value added" versions. One of these additions is Support. "We can offer Support.", they say.
Well, unless you are part of a huge MS partnership, have certified several of your server/network/development personnel in their technology, and keep up close ties (read: pay big money), you are simply not getting the personal attention that a HUGE, and I mean, huge world of *nix experience can give you online.
Anyway, many Linux vendors offers the same thing, if you don't trust your own tech teams to keep the server alive - they can deploy gurus for money too. BFD. MS still doesn't have any true advantage over Linux, even in Support. It's done a different way, and they still "just don't get it".
Dude, you're seriously out of touch with modern US politics. Since when did your 1940's US engaged in a Preemptive War Of Self Defense? I can only hope someday our administration is tried for war crimes.
Haven't you read the theories? We need to get sentient machines going quickly, which then will enable us to convert our knowledge to shared digital information. Only then can we pass on everything we've learned to the next evolutionary step: Machines that build machines. They will figure out a way to gather sufficient energy - don't believe this "people energy-pod" rumor you've been hearing.
Thereby, in the distant future, they'll send out hundreds of thousands of autonomous "seeds" to distant planets, carrying everything we have learned, with the mission of eventually tying together each's knowledge into a central intelligent repository spanning the galaxy.
We're already doomed, it's time to build the time capsule. Even if we're not, it'd be a good idea.
You're not going to believe this, but right now were using TUTOS for issue tracking, and we'll be moving into Remedy soon, we've been told. Hoboy, now I'm really excited!
Thank you! not many people will remind me when my spelling/grammar can be improved. Only when i see these comments do i take time to commit it to memory....for a short time at least it seems! HA
Although powerful in it's own way, my company's use of the "PVCS/Dimensions" suite leaves such an ugly taste that our group refuses to use it. The repository tree was designed seemingly by blind monkeys, and there is little power to change this layout per average "user" (although these same developers write code to control most of the servers - ironic).
The product is certainly powerful enough to store an enterprise-amount of data, but our implementation and workflow rules around it are abysmal. This isn't a knock on them, I simply don't know enough about it.
So, we opted to use another product, but for a while there simply was no Source Code Control at all. Each developer had a sandbox directory on the shared drive, and their own little fiefdom of backups, directories, etc. Quite scary. Now, we have a sweet layout that everyone enjoys.
When all this reached corporate, the discussion was "use PVCS"
"we dont get it, it's confusing and locked from changes" "get training"
"pay for it, money and time, and show us how this repository is organized" "soooo, how's that other product working out?"
The rest is you, yourself, and your interpretation. Are you counting solar activity [what level?] without dreams, or vice versa, in your "coinkydink" correlations?
Don't forget the influence of the moon, biorhythims, and presidential politics!
Why would you want a PC when a Mac can be had for that low price. What does the PC have that the Mac doesn't?
His interest.
Dude, there is a point of anti-MS nonsense that makes a flippant comment a troll. Just answer his question. Unless you are the type that likes to be preached to while shopping.
>>You're not doing it the way everyone expects you to do it.
Let's extend this: Developer churn. Software lifecycle. Is this lead developer going to write a full documentment explaining (1) the easy stuff: the compilation steps AND (2) the minutae of hacks, fixes and workaround when you hit compiler limits, newb misunderstandings, etc.
Think about your way slower compile when only a single module changes implementation. abandon static libs and your make time should be swift.
Overall I think you could solve the problem by choosing a different language than a C-based h/c combo change. If you go that route, do as the Romans.
Unlike many popular forms of advertising, I don't trust testimonials. When a piece of equipment is reviewed, I judge the review by it's source, since perhaps as a tech I'm a bit happier with a "clumsy UI" than with sheer abilities of, say, hardware.
So I look to Toms, [H], Ars for reviews by people who seem to have similar knowledge as myself. Then, when tests are formed, I don't trust just one benchmark, nor just one test or review.
If a company is going to game the testing, I'm disappointed. This lowers the confidence I have in these tests. Since blatent ads and testimonials turn me off, where else do it look? I'll have to just rely on the repeatability of any review's scores. This usually uncovers companies that try to dupe the reviewer.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you putting in the capsule that you think should really be interesting in 1000 years? PS2 games with a TV and such? Spare them, please.
/. many times)
Think about the degradation of plastics, oxidation of the materials, and outside interference from shock, moisture on the container, and other items. Why try to make junk from today work forever?
It may be more interesting to put something personalized and written from you describing your life, rather than trying to bottle it. Your apparatus of the container is a good judgement of the technology available at the time. Also, you get to solve the "how should i communicate and store it" question (been done on
Then, the geek portion of you can still solve the issues of
- how to safely hold the contents
- when to wake up (never?)
- how to wake up
- how to detect premature tampering
- how to perform a self-diagnostic to let finders know if they're seeing your intended payload
- how to signal once awake
All these have great metaphors in CompSci/Networking references. I'd start there.
The battery is a chemistry problem, driven by how much power you'll need. If you act like a RF beacon and signal 1kW once every 24 hours, you can decide how much power you'll need. A pulsed beacon will definitely singal longer than most. RF will be more detectable than other sources (especially if underground), and best if you sweep a wide freq. on each pulse.
Also, work out the location: Are you buying land in a relatively quiet place on the earth? Not on a geologic fault, floodplain, mild temperature ranges, development area, etc. You could probably only extrapolate about 300years into the future with any chance of a lucky guess, IMHO.
And really, you could just toss it into a FreshKills, NY (a trash dump). Your signal will lead our descendants to a treasure trove of items.
It's funny that people eek out the "best in audio quality" without examining that most of the music they listen to, or recorded at all, is of mediocre quality to begin with. Want to listen to some awesome jazz from days gone by? then don't worry about speaker cables, room resonance, or other things esoteric. just put it in the mid-level stereo and go make dinner. there *is* value to just having music reside in the background, rather than trying to recreate a headphone-like experience with your house.
i find my reaction to audiophiles a little negative. just another obessive-compulsive outlet for those so inclined.
most people spend all this money just to hear loud explosions in crap-ass movies in their home theatre anyway.
Config files aren't going to be forward compat, so place their contents into an XML file. But also place enough documentation in the XML file that each admin can grow a small hand-editable help file right with it, geared towards the audience they admin with. DON'T keep all these xml's in the etc file, but in another directory.
"xtransetc" build a navigatiable page set from the files, allow you to hop around quickly and remotely.
"genetc" fills the dir from the xml files, as you've tweaked it (with comments, don't/dos)
"readetc" fills the xml file "meat" from the etc directory itself, thus it's two-way.
This first step re-bottles the data in a more extensible format. Next up, you keep portions of the "meat" in the user's specific folders. Then, genetc collects and collates these separate portions into a single etc folder, overwriting with the xml base. this runs at full logon. next, during this process, check user's groups to ensure they have overwriting permissions for each config payload.
New configuration files can be absorbed blindly, just leaving many of the metadata tags empty. a list of "feed" dirs is kept in the xml store, as well as the "discovered_in_dir" tag in the xml file.
Dependencies can be built through metainfo tags as well, but also holding very specific information, like dates, checksums, or package/file authentication. In addition, a "cross-compatability" section can list several safe substitutes for given dependencies.
the full thesaurus of dependency identifiers (since multiple names may point to the same program) has be to the cross-distro key. this shouldn't be hard, just a web site one distro starts and as others creep up, are posted.
in this way, you can gen a full web version of all distro/packages/apps/config files into a single tree, with dependencies and synonymous identifiers. also, versions will add "depth" dimension to the tree to see where branches formed and detached (if ever).
um, yeah. i'll get right on that.
Dude
.NET (or most newer languages like Python, Perl and Java), you can write much more feature-rich applications than VB could dare to touch, much more quickly.
If you can learn VB6, you can learn VB.NET. This is where MS wants the VB programmers to go, and it ain't hard. In MS's
Your list above is silly, btw. I'd keep that stuff to yourself.
Like any digital compensation piggyback (taxes, filters, hosting responsibilities), this is ignorance in print.
When the simplified view of "two computers talking" is the picture of someone's internet, it seems easy and this shite arises. But proxies, caches, distributed content are the mainstay. AOL, Earthlink both cache content. Most commercial pages are a built in some part of linked content. Vendors that sell have HQ , hosting, order processing and customer services all in different locations, and often in different countries. Who's going to regulate that? If you squeeze it, it goes to puppet offices in tax haven zones, like online casinos.
Adding to this that digitial information is impossible to fully categorize. For public-at-large transactions, we have standards, but as the FBI found out, to sniff out packets that are encrypted in several layers (or watermarked) is a big endeavor, and has no guarantees.
Digital information can be tracked, sure. So if the medium is public and needs sort sort of "market share" for effectiveness, you can trace participants. Hence the [MP|RI]AA nonsense. But for simply swapping music online through clubs or private protocols, the door is wide open. Host your music in unshown,encrypted TIFF layers, for a starting concept. The game is still afoot, to me.
Remember folks, the information wants to be free. So like water, the longer it exists in that format, the more it's going to leak/spill out to places it wasn't originally intended. So the credit information streaming out to eastern europe each week later is more a matter of time than security, IMO. Of course, we know that's what security is measured in anyway.
But you are the choir. How do we get WI politicos to read this thread?
No rights, and only 1 guarantee: you're going to die.
Everything else is a social construction, just so we can all get along.
This is a game level editor and visualizaer. I'm sure the modelling is strong, at least for primitives, but the focus on real time effects may make things like lighting effects suffer.
I went for cheap and just downloaded Moray. I plugged in accurate measurements, added a few simple textures, and could imagine the space easily. Traced out in POVRay, the pictures are pretty and cost zippo.
You'll have to find good models for your smaller items, if you want to use models. I didn't use them. There are plenty of models for Pov-Ray, but not a lot for dedicated to Moray. I haven't looked into that side of it much. However, building your basic nighttable/bed/lamp is easy in CSG, just for verifying that your space will fill as you imagine.
Space planning and room "look" was very nice with this, and very quick, since Moray has some crude group tools. Sadly, it doesn't seem to do low-level renderings (non-reflective,etc) and the CSG Evals are still only wireframe (and messy on big pics). Your quickest bet for POV speed is smaller pictures, which are useless.
Export the scene text, plug the camera math into a "clock" POVRay variable and you can spit out a directory of frames, with pretty good quality, overnight on most machines/scenes. There's a cl MPG builder to link them up, allowing for frame pauses and other simple tricks. This gives nice walkthroughs.
It is more labor intensive than the pro tools available, but it costs nothing. You learn a simple modeller, and with POV-Ray you can raytrace shiny things to your heart's content.
It might be easier to simply put a radiation detection system on, as a helmet. Have a group use a whole bunch of different phones for several functions, and several times, in different situations (cell crossing, no service). This would build the "average exposure" level.
Then, recording the input, just bombard rat brains with this level of radiation over several timed periods, and see how much DNA mutation occurs over each period. Of course, you'll also have to have a rat control group to subtract typical mutations over time for a similar diet,environment, etc.
Once that is all done, you've created one of the world's most expensive and researched stickers. That's it. A sticker that'll be mandatory on your phone when you buy it. People will peel it off and nobody knows the difference.
Then, years later, the "choice of damaging yourself" through cell phone use will be litigated endlessly, and whole states will fight to pay for the costs of all the strange brain reactions from the mutated DNA. However in America, subtracting out poor diet, lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyle and other politically-decided enviro-hazard levels, the plaintiff class might be hard to distinguish. Case dismissed.
"...and when we compared the content of the cell phone conversations, we found no difference"
For a cheap, fast batch lookups I once wrote a hashed matrix using STL. Loaded all the cells, dynamically typed, added indexes on the data for that run, and then passed around this collection of in-memory tables to our routines. Ran fast and was simple to debug, since all the traversing was O(ln(n)) based (or a variant thereof). Adding serialization, we could distribute to machines overnight dynamically and cut the run to a few minutes - from almost 8 hours.
Until it came time to dipose the memory. The STL slowly crawled tons of our objects, and the C++ dispose pattern was just too inefficient for all the stack hits. So we pointed the library at a custom heap and never disposed the dictionary - we just disposed the heap in bulk.
All written without hesitation for "longhand" syntax. (and btw, its "if ( NULL == var ) " to those that care). The code optimized fine, with just a few choice inlines we got to stick. No reg vars, no assembly piles littering the code.
But this was an in-house business app, and the lifecycles / requirements are different than other products. However, because of the nice algorithms, optimization wasn't difficult, and didn't rely on code tricks. If you're squabbling over code tricks for optimization, you're choosing the wrong algorithm, to me.
Oh - you must mean when you call anything in the OS, or reference any one of their former-perfect-solution COM objects?
.NET app from the ground up. It may enlighten MS about the limitations of .NET, the pervasiveness of a good security model, and how to useful componentize an application (and NOT build it as "an integral part of the OS").
Actually, use of a language isn't the trouble, just writing *well* in that language. Even checking the source isn't problem....they do employ an army of programmers, and send them to dozens of "better C" classes, written by gurus they themselves employ.
In the end, it might be the sad support for legacy interfaces that they're stuck with, or the fact that they can't seem to upgrade all of their code fast enough. Whatever it is, MS can't seem to improve their programs without forcing a sandbox to do it, eh? Sad.
Everyone knows that in a C/C++ world, you end up adopting or building a safer framework to avoid letting newb's use the standard C lib like the wild cowboy it was born as. In fact, it's what makes "better" programmers once they learn all these crazy nuiances, down to hand-asm optimizatios. But if you're stuck with tons of code that needs to be refactored (or just completely reengineered) because of past mistakes, there is a breaking point. Applications that *rely* on cowboy tactics are there to hold you up.
SO they release a "whole new OS" every few years or so, and force everyone to jump. They make the kernel bullet proof, and thunk old code. But somehow, something like IE lives on to trick users over those damned ActiveX objects, or marketing gets their fingers into Outlook and makes it auto-run everything. Sad, but MS is a product of many teams pushing different directions - which is to say it's no different than many companies.
Perhas they will learn a lesson from Open Source after all -> many eyes makes for better checking.
As an experiment, I think MS should just re-release IE as a complete
You should have just gone to sleep. You are way too childly antagonistic to really debate.
avoid Ad hominem dude, try to stay on topic. Save the name calling for your schoolyard.
You need to resort to "letter of the law" arguments to obscure the facts coming out of Gitmo, Iraq/n and Afganistan right now? Isn't there anything in your so-emotional post for the "concept of freedom" that perhaps the US needs more help domestically than a tiny country (out of so many) needs to change regimes?
You were lied to man: no WMD, no link to Al Quaeda, no imminent threat. Soldiers are dying for a cause that doesn't exist. Are we safer now? No, actually we're worse off, by simply repeating the mistakes of the past. We are a bigger target, with more attackers, than when we started.
The current US administration is wildly out of bounds regarding the spirit of almost any law: human rights, foreign affairs, UN participation, separation of church and state, manipulation of the media, manipulation of national science opinions, and management of the environment. It's been a long long time since the 1940's guy. Party's over.
He is dead wrong there, in a big way. MS may not be solely to blame when their boxen die, but how many different [read: crappy] programs are out there. Anyone hate their office groupware suite? IBM, Novell, MS all release behemouths that have tons of holes and patches, plus all the other ditties on the platform.
Simply put, MS's encouragement of software as proprietary holding encourages vendors to not share code, thus losing the peer-review-fix concept. FOSS, OTOH, benefits from this, and reaches excellence much sooner. Actually, the big vendors will sometimes use just those sources for their products, when they want to start with the best in class. (Like historial discoveries of MS's hosting, hotmail, TCP/IP stack components coming from the FOSS world)
CORE
Their big problem with FOSS is that it turns algorithms into commodities. There is, for the given market-snapshot demands, an optimal solution. If Linux hits it early (say, MP3 music storage, or the PVR utilities), then you see others try to jump on the bandwagon touting "value added" versions. One of these additions is Support. "We can offer Support.", they say.
Well, unless you are part of a huge MS partnership, have certified several of your server/network/development personnel in their technology, and keep up close ties (read: pay big money), you are simply not getting the personal attention that a HUGE, and I mean, huge world of *nix experience can give you online.
Anyway, many Linux vendors offers the same thing, if you don't trust your own tech teams to keep the server alive - they can deploy gurus for money too. BFD. MS still doesn't have any true advantage over Linux, even in Support. It's done a different way, and they still "just don't get it".
mug
Dude, you're seriously out of touch with modern US politics. Since when did your 1940's US engaged in a Preemptive War Of Self Defense? I can only hope someday our administration is tried for war crimes.
Haven't you read the theories? We need to get sentient machines going quickly, which then will enable us to convert our knowledge to shared digital information. Only then can we pass on everything we've learned to the next evolutionary step: Machines that build machines. They will figure out a way to gather sufficient energy - don't believe this "people energy-pod" rumor you've been hearing.
Thereby, in the distant future, they'll send out hundreds of thousands of autonomous "seeds" to distant planets, carrying everything we have learned, with the mission of eventually tying together each's knowledge into a central intelligent repository spanning the galaxy.
We're already doomed, it's time to build the time capsule. Even if we're not, it'd be a good idea.
You're not going to believe this, but right now were using TUTOS for issue tracking, and we'll be moving into Remedy soon, we've been told. Hoboy, now I'm really excited!
Thank you! not many people will remind me when my spelling/grammar can be improved. Only when i see these comments do i take time to commit it to memory....for a short time at least it seems! HA
Although powerful in it's own way, my company's use of the "PVCS/Dimensions" suite leaves such an ugly taste that our group refuses to use it. The repository tree was designed seemingly by blind monkeys, and there is little power to change this layout per average "user" (although these same developers write code to control most of the servers - ironic).
The product is certainly powerful enough to store an enterprise-amount of data, but our implementation and workflow rules around it are abysmal. This isn't a knock on them, I simply don't know enough about it.
So, we opted to use another product, but for a while there simply was no Source Code Control at all. Each developer had a sandbox directory on the shared drive, and their own little fiefdom of backups, directories, etc. Quite scary. Now, we have a sweet layout that everyone enjoys.
When all this reached corporate, the discussion was
"use PVCS"
"we dont get it, it's confusing and locked from changes"
"get training"
"pay for it, money and time, and show us how this repository is organized"
"soooo, how's that other product working out?"
It could just be coincidence...
End Of Story.
The rest is you, yourself, and your interpretation. Are you counting solar activity [what level?] without dreams, or vice versa, in your "coinkydink" correlations?
Don't forget the influence of the moon, biorhythims, and presidential politics!
Why would you want a PC when a Mac can be had for that low price. What does the PC have that the Mac doesn't?
His interest.
Dude, there is a point of anti-MS nonsense that makes a flippant comment a troll. Just answer his question. Unless you are the type that likes to be preached to while shopping.
>>You're not doing it the way everyone expects you to do it.
Let's extend this: Developer churn. Software lifecycle. Is this lead developer going to write a full documentment explaining (1) the easy stuff: the compilation steps AND (2) the minutae of hacks, fixes and workaround when you hit compiler limits, newb misunderstandings, etc.
Think about your way slower compile when only a single module changes implementation. abandon static libs and your make time should be swift.
Overall I think you could solve the problem by choosing a different language than a C-based h/c combo change. If you go that route, do as the Romans.
In the US, it'll be every 27 minutes to allow satelite synch, unless there's a time out.
Unlike many popular forms of advertising, I don't trust testimonials. When a piece of equipment is reviewed, I judge the review by it's source, since perhaps as a tech I'm a bit happier with a "clumsy UI" than with sheer abilities of, say, hardware.
So I look to Toms, [H], Ars for reviews by people who seem to have similar knowledge as myself. Then, when tests are formed, I don't trust just one benchmark, nor just one test or review.
If a company is going to game the testing, I'm disappointed. This lowers the confidence I have in these tests. Since blatent ads and testimonials turn me off, where else do it look? I'll have to just rely on the repeatability of any review's scores. This usually uncovers companies that try to dupe the reviewer.