Eclipse is written in Java, as is the PHP IDE (Zend? Been a while since I had to use PHP.) There are others as well outside of the software development field (Kandid is fun, but not necessarily very useful), but it's been a while since I used any. Generally, they tend to be slow, memory hungry, ugly, and stick out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of your applications. (Except for the PHP IDE. I was reasonably impressed with it - it was just slow and memory hungry.)
Mostly I notice Java when I suddenly see the Java console/updater balloon pop up in my system tray while I'm browsing the web, and it annoys me to no end. Because of Sun's bone-headedness, even when a web developer does a good job of seamlessly integrating Java into a site, I still get reminded of it by their stupid and pointless system popups.
Personally, I think there is value in any field to have somebody come in who is willing to throw out the conventional wisdom about what can and can't be done and shake things up a bit. It's like Mark Twain's statement:
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
I believe that you are confusing Boise, a city known for, uh, being in Idaho, with David Boies, a lawyer known for losing such cases as DOJ v. Microsoft(*), Gore v. Bush, Napster v. RIAA, etc.
(*) OK, technically, he was on the winning side, but for all the good it did, and all the money spent, it may as well have been a loss.
Nardelli certainly may not have done the greatest job, but HD is still around, and doing well enough at that, so I don't think it's fair to say that he drove the company into the ground. Still, there have certainly been enough other cases of CEO's that have failed miserably and still been paid quite well before moving on to some other equally lucrative position (Fiorina springs to mind as well). Still, I can't think of many CEO's that have failed their company as publicly and as spectacularly as McBride, and while doing so much to alienate almost every other company or group in their industry.
Honestly, I don't see what's so outrageous about that, other than that AT&T ended up waiving the charge. This isn't a case of being misquoted, or any other error or wrongdoing on AT&T's part. The guy new the rates up front, and presumably knew that he couldn't put a European SIM card in the phone. The fact that he doesn't know anything about data rates or sizes is his own fault, and not any fault of the phone provider (especially if he really is a web developer as he claims). Sorry, but I think AT&T should have told him to suck it up and offered to put him on a payment plan.
You consider that to be plain English? I can barely imagine my wife (who is fairly computer literate, and uses linux on our laptop) trying to figure out what that means. Just about everyone else that I know that doesn't write software for a living would be totally lost at that prompt.
I used to run 1600x1200 on a 15" MAG, so it's definitely possible, although I must have been far more tolerant of low refresh rates back then. I've also had a Dell Inspiron with a 1600x1200 15-point-something screen. It was actually very surprising to me that I couldn't find a full 1600x1200 LCD smaller than 20" when I started looking to replace my aging CRT at home.
I won't argue that KDE is definitely a very impressive project from a technical standpoint. If they could make it at all attractive, I might even use it. I will admit that the steady removal of interface options from Gnome has been a bit irritating, but overall, I don't think that it's any worse than KDE, which suffers the opposite problem of having a million plus one configuration options, 3/4ths of which don't actually affect anything obvious.
As for Gnome starting life as a Windows wanna be, I take it you've never used any of the previous versions of KDE?
I don't think that good Science Fiction matters whether you can predict technology trends correctly or not. I've been reading some older Asimov and Clarke stories recently. I'm finding that it's pretty easy to tell in what era different stories were written. In some you have humans capable of interstellar space flight and world spanning subways, while their most advanced computers systems are rooms or buildings full of punch card readers. Others will completely discard the laws of physics as soon as the word "nuclear" is mentioned, while computers are non-existent.
But when it comes down to it, none of that makes a well written story any less interesting, because it's not the technology that makes them good. And poorly written Sci-Fi is poorly written whether it manages to guess the future correctly or not.
I'm not sure. It's been a while since I read either, but I think the original edition of "Programming Perl" (pink cover, if you can find it) probably tops it. There was an entire chapter devoted to Perl Poetry, and an example chapter where Job (of Biblical fame) used Perl and CTBCPP (Clay Tablet by Carrier Pigeon Protocol) to inventory his goods.
On the other hand, 1st edition Programming Perl is so old (pre- Perl 5) that any information it contains is probably useless for anything other than entertainment value.
Actually, I'd say if an organization already has a significant investment in Windows infrastructure (I'll refrain for the moment on passing judgment on that qualifier) I would say that Apache is a significant disadvantage. The only reason that I can see to choose Apache over IIS on a Windows server would be if you had already decided that you wanted to use PHP as your server side language (why anyone would do such a thing is beyond me, but I have seen it done) because PHP on IIS is either horribly slow or horribly unstable depending on whether you set it up as a cgi or an ISAPI filter.
ASP.NET is a decent programming environment, as web languages go anyway. I'm still impressed at how thoroughly Microsoft screwed it up, because you can tell that they started out with a lot of good ideas. But even if you immediately through out all of the crap they've stuffed in there, you're still left with a solid language, a decent template system, and a fairly comprehensive class library to build your own framework, which is still on par with or ahead of most other web languages.
If you don't have a significant investment into Windows in your server room already, I'd probably choose Apache over IIS just to avoid building a dependence on Windows servers, but I have no idea what server side language I'd use these days.
Sorry, that half of the comment was geared more towards the "super V-chip that could screen content on everything from cell phones to the Internet" that this article is talking about, rather than the existing implementation.
The problem with the V-Chip is that it should be a feature that I can pay extra for if I actually want it, rather than a government mandated component that I am paying for whether I ever use it or not. While we're at it, why don't we include a mandatory NetNanny subscription with every new PC sold as well. After all, you can turn it off if you don't want to use it, right?
Anyway, if the V-Chip were an option that a customer had to make a conscious decision to purchase, I 'm sure we'd find out pretty quickly just how many people actually care.
Probably the best way is to have one of the companies that provides URL filtering start providing a rating system for web sites that people can subscribe to if they want it. This one definitely needs to be an opt-in, though. I would imagine that maintaining a rating system for the internet wouldn't have a trivial cost associated with it, even with a large subscriber base.
These already exist- NetNanny, Cyber Patrol, and dozens of others. Why not let people use the products that are already out there, rather than mandating that we all spend money on some magical new hardware that will be equally (in)effective?
Except that the nutritional information on the side of my cereal box doesn't cost me more money whether I read it or not. Oh, and it's not mandating something that will never and can never actually work.
Meaning that it will still be supported and used far more often than any of the much more advanced competing formats, despite numerous significant shortcomings and a restrictive license enforced by a litigious corporation?
I think we could all do with a few less file formats going the way of the GIF format...
The difference between Google and the vast majority of companies that ended up folding in '99 - '01, is that Google, whether or not the have a coherent business plan, is making money. All of the companies that disappeared in the bubble (and many of the companies that weathered it, for that matter- see Amazon) were losing money like crazy. There are a few other key factors to consider. You named one publicly traded company right now that is ridiculously overvalued. How many others are there? It's a far cry from 1998 where any company that had anything to do with tech (and many that didn't) were all ridiculously overvalued, and you had a huge number of daytraders convinced that they could beat the system. And if you think this "bubble" is ripe with people investing in stupid ideas, where were you 8 years ago? This is pretty tame in comparison. Sure, there are a handful of big name companies throwing money around like it's going out of style. But I could probably count the number of acquisitions in the last two years of companies "which don't have a business model, are hemorrhaging money and don't necessarily have a competitive edge beyond popularity" on my fingers and toes, and the number of companies doing the acquiring on one hand. That's nothing. Aut if you're right, and Google does go the way of the Dodo because they blew too much money on silly acquisitions, it's not going to bring down the whole industry. And you don't have the hordes of idiot VC's out for a quick IPO anymore, like there were back then exacerbating the problem.
I believe the certification also applies to the hardware the OS is running on. Somebody had posted a list of the certified Unices (?) above, and every one of them was of the form of "*IX version xyz on Some Manufacturer's Specific Hardware". So even somebody with a lot of money to burn would have to choose a standard hardware platform, and even then they would have to spend the money all over again every time that they released a new version, which may be workable for, say, Red Hat's almost 2 year release cycles, but not for a project like Ubuntu.
I'm not sure this is really a comparable situation to Firefox. Firefox was helped along significantly by the dearth of anything approaching useful web development tools in Internet Explorer. Even when the number of Firefox users on our web sites was around 2%, my company supported Firefox because that was what all of the web developers used. Because IE behaved so bizarrely and was so hard to debug, most developers found it easier to develop on Firefox first, and then hack it until it worked right on IE. IE got a little bit better in this respect with IE7, but it was far too little, to late. Even if for some unexplained reason, end users started dropping Firefox like a hot potato, all of our websites would still support Firefox, because Firefox support is essentially "free" from a developer-time point of view.
ODF has no comparable advantage against OOXML, which means it will have to get a much higher penetration than FF before people can't ignore it.
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Eclipse is written in Java, as is the PHP IDE (Zend? Been a while since I had to use PHP.)
There are others as well outside of the software development field (Kandid is fun, but not necessarily very useful), but it's been a while since I used any. Generally, they tend to be slow, memory hungry, ugly, and stick out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of your applications. (Except for the PHP IDE. I was reasonably impressed with it - it was just slow and memory hungry.)
Mostly I notice Java when I suddenly see the Java console/updater balloon pop up in my system tray while I'm browsing the web, and it annoys me to no end. Because of Sun's bone-headedness, even when a web developer does a good job of seamlessly integrating Java into a site, I still get reminded of it by their stupid and pointless system popups.
Personally, I think there is value in any field to have somebody come in who is willing to throw out the conventional wisdom about what can and can't be done and shake things up a bit. It's like Mark Twain's statement:
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
Mostly by not watching sensationalist, made up garbage, like Sicko.
I believe that you are confusing Boise, a city known for, uh, being in Idaho, with David Boies, a lawyer known for losing such cases as DOJ v. Microsoft(*), Gore v. Bush, Napster v. RIAA, etc.
(*) OK, technically, he was on the winning side, but for all the good it did, and all the money spent, it may as well have been a loss.
Nardelli certainly may not have done the greatest job, but HD is still around, and doing well enough at that, so I don't think it's fair to say that he drove the company into the ground. Still, there have certainly been enough other cases of CEO's that have failed miserably and still been paid quite well before moving on to some other equally lucrative position (Fiorina springs to mind as well). Still, I can't think of many CEO's that have failed their company as publicly and as spectacularly as McBride, and while doing so much to alienate almost every other company or group in their industry.
Honestly, I don't see what's so outrageous about that, other than that AT&T ended up waiving the charge. This isn't a case of being misquoted, or any other error or wrongdoing on AT&T's part. The guy new the rates up front, and presumably knew that he couldn't put a European SIM card in the phone. The fact that he doesn't know anything about data rates or sizes is his own fault, and not any fault of the phone provider (especially if he really is a web developer as he claims). Sorry, but I think AT&T should have told him to suck it up and offered to put him on a payment plan.
You consider that to be plain English? I can barely imagine my wife (who is fairly computer literate, and uses linux on our laptop) trying to figure out what that means. Just about everyone else that I know that doesn't write software for a living would be totally lost at that prompt.
Well, to the person falling off the ladder, it doesn't really make much difference, does it?
I used to run 1600x1200 on a 15" MAG, so it's definitely possible, although I must have been far more tolerant of low refresh rates back then. I've also had a Dell Inspiron with a 1600x1200 15-point-something screen. It was actually very surprising to me that I couldn't find a full 1600x1200 LCD smaller than 20" when I started looking to replace my aging CRT at home.
Granted, but I'd still take that over having the whole thing hit us, if it came down to it...
GNU/Good GNU/Grief!
Surely, you mean "kontrast"?
I won't argue that KDE is definitely a very impressive project from a technical standpoint. If they could make it at all attractive, I might even use it. I will admit that the steady removal of interface options from Gnome has been a bit irritating, but overall, I don't think that it's any worse than KDE, which suffers the opposite problem of having a million plus one configuration options, 3/4ths of which don't actually affect anything obvious.
As for Gnome starting life as a Windows wanna be, I take it you've never used any of the previous versions of KDE?
I don't think that good Science Fiction matters whether you can predict technology trends correctly or not. I've been reading some older Asimov and Clarke stories recently. I'm finding that it's pretty easy to tell in what era different stories were written. In some you have humans capable of interstellar space flight and world spanning subways, while their most advanced computers systems are rooms or buildings full of punch card readers. Others will completely discard the laws of physics as soon as the word "nuclear" is mentioned, while computers are non-existent.
But when it comes down to it, none of that makes a well written story any less interesting, because it's not the technology that makes them good. And poorly written Sci-Fi is poorly written whether it manages to guess the future correctly or not.
I'm not sure. It's been a while since I read either, but I think the original edition of "Programming Perl" (pink cover, if you can find it) probably tops it. There was an entire chapter devoted to Perl Poetry, and an example chapter where Job (of Biblical fame) used Perl and CTBCPP (Clay Tablet by Carrier Pigeon Protocol) to inventory his goods.
On the other hand, 1st edition Programming Perl is so old (pre- Perl 5) that any information it contains is probably useless for anything other than entertainment value.
Actually, I'd say if an organization already has a significant investment in Windows infrastructure (I'll refrain for the moment on passing judgment on that qualifier) I would say that Apache is a significant disadvantage. The only reason that I can see to choose Apache over IIS on a Windows server would be if you had already decided that you wanted to use PHP as your server side language (why anyone would do such a thing is beyond me, but I have seen it done) because PHP on IIS is either horribly slow or horribly unstable depending on whether you set it up as a cgi or an ISAPI filter.
ASP.NET is a decent programming environment, as web languages go anyway. I'm still impressed at how thoroughly Microsoft screwed it up, because you can tell that they started out with a lot of good ideas. But even if you immediately through out all of the crap they've stuffed in there, you're still left with a solid language, a decent template system, and a fairly comprehensive class library to build your own framework, which is still on par with or ahead of most other web languages.
If you don't have a significant investment into Windows in your server room already, I'd probably choose Apache over IIS just to avoid building a dependence on Windows servers, but I have no idea what server side language I'd use these days.
Sorry, that half of the comment was geared more towards the "super V-chip that could screen content on everything from cell phones to the Internet" that this article is talking about, rather than the existing implementation.
The problem with the V-Chip is that it should be a feature that I can pay extra for if I actually want it, rather than a government mandated component that I am paying for whether I ever use it or not. While we're at it, why don't we include a mandatory NetNanny subscription with every new PC sold as well. After all, you can turn it off if you don't want to use it, right?
Anyway, if the V-Chip were an option that a customer had to make a conscious decision to purchase, I 'm sure we'd find out pretty quickly just how many people actually care.
These already exist- NetNanny, Cyber Patrol, and dozens of others. Why not let people use the products that are already out there, rather than mandating that we all spend money on some magical new hardware that will be equally (in)effective?
Except that the nutritional information on the side of my cereal box doesn't cost me more money whether I read it or not. Oh, and it's not mandating something that will never and can never actually work.
Meaning that it will still be supported and used far more often than any of the much more advanced competing formats, despite numerous significant shortcomings and a restrictive license enforced by a litigious corporation?
I think we could all do with a few less file formats going the way of the GIF format...
I think there needs to be a new corollary to Godwin's law regarding people who use the word "disruptive".
The difference between Google and the vast majority of companies that ended up folding in '99 - '01, is that Google, whether or not the have a coherent business plan, is making money. All of the companies that disappeared in the bubble (and many of the companies that weathered it, for that matter- see Amazon) were losing money like crazy. There are a few other key factors to consider. You named one publicly traded company right now that is ridiculously overvalued. How many others are there? It's a far cry from 1998 where any company that had anything to do with tech (and many that didn't) were all ridiculously overvalued, and you had a huge number of daytraders convinced that they could beat the system. And if you think this "bubble" is ripe with people investing in stupid ideas, where were you 8 years ago? This is pretty tame in comparison. Sure, there are a handful of big name companies throwing money around like it's going out of style. But I could probably count the number of acquisitions in the last two years of companies "which don't have a business model, are hemorrhaging money and don't necessarily have a competitive edge beyond popularity" on my fingers and toes, and the number of companies doing the acquiring on one hand. That's nothing. Aut if you're right, and Google does go the way of the Dodo because they blew too much money on silly acquisitions, it's not going to bring down the whole industry. And you don't have the hordes of idiot VC's out for a quick IPO anymore, like there were back then exacerbating the problem.
I believe the certification also applies to the hardware the OS is running on. Somebody had posted a list of the certified Unices (?) above, and every one of them was of the form of "*IX version xyz on Some Manufacturer's Specific Hardware". So even somebody with a lot of money to burn would have to choose a standard hardware platform, and even then they would have to spend the money all over again every time that they released a new version, which may be workable for, say, Red Hat's almost 2 year release cycles, but not for a project like Ubuntu.
I'm not sure this is really a comparable situation to Firefox. Firefox was helped along significantly by the dearth of anything approaching useful web development tools in Internet Explorer. Even when the number of Firefox users on our web sites was around 2%, my company supported Firefox because that was what all of the web developers used. Because IE behaved so bizarrely and was so hard to debug, most developers found it easier to develop on Firefox first, and then hack it until it worked right on IE. IE got a little bit better in this respect with IE7, but it was far too little, to late. Even if for some unexplained reason, end users started dropping Firefox like a hot potato, all of our websites would still support Firefox, because Firefox support is essentially "free" from a developer-time point of view.
ODF has no comparable advantage against OOXML, which means it will have to get a much higher penetration than FF before people can't ignore it.