Damn shame you got modded down. Your comment is the only one close to the truth. Seems like they've all been revising their dates lately, doesn't it? Why should we believe that have any idea about them now? They insisted they were right before.
I agree completely. I don't think they've ever been about innovation, though they do like to throw the word around. I do beleive they try to offer value for the money, and frankly, Excel is one of the finest applications of *any* kind I've ever used, and I still love NT 4.0 (though I admit that's a personal problem).
Ah, I think you're right! I'd forgotten about that.. I remembered seeing the credits to NCSA, but I think you're right about Spyglass... which also snagged Mosaic code.
You're right, I left a bunch of others out too. I was just going off the top of my head. There were similar products on the market prior to IIS (several companies), SQL Server (Oracle and Sybase), MS Mail/Exchange (cc:Mail, WordPerfect Office - the mail package, not the word processor), and several others.
Some of us remember the marketing where they were trying to convince us to give Word a chance in our WP setups, and they were pitching NT to replace aging mainframes! They then settled on a smaller target -- Netware, though Novell had total market share at the time:) The smartest thing MS did on that was to give us the Netware migration tool (codename Visine -- get it?).
Their mantra has always been:
1) Get to market first, at all costs
You're kidding, right? Did you just get into computers a year or two ago or something? Microsoft is hardly a first-to-market company:
NT? (OS/2 and Netware)
Word? (WordPerfect and Wordstar)
Excel? (Lotus 1,2,3)
FrontPage? (bought it from Vermeer, or bought Vermeer, I forget)
IE? (used pd code in first few revs)
PowerPoint? (Harvard Graphics)
Access? (wrote some, bought some)
For just about every MS product you can think of, they were second or third to market, not first.
They have no need to be first to market.
2) Continue to add features, based on customer feedback
MS roadmaps out massive feature lists in advance, and implements and releases in cycles. It's not like
they wait to see what customers are going to ask for. I attended a MS hoo-rah prior to the release of
Office 95. Many of the features they listed like voice control and mapping, weren't included until
much later releases. I'm not saying they don't implement based on customer feedback, but it's
not like they don't think something through before an initial release.
3) When the product gets good enough (after 4 or 5 major revisions) tout its reliability and stability
No argument here. You're absolutely wrong on your first point, though.
Not likely, it's possible they're modifying each downloaded copy slightly (like in one of the ID3v2 tags) so they can find out who lets their copy out into the wild. Maybe then they'll try to hunt down pirates based on information given upon purchase.
It's definitely possible; I know a company that modifies each of their software's installers upon download so info provided during signup can be retrieved for any particular installer file.
I know the story is being run on April Fool's day, and that makes me
a fool for treating it as real, but the story on astronomy.com was posted March 28,
so I'll bite.
Does anyone else think these "archaeoastronomers" are full of it? Does anyone else see a sketch of an eclipse here? Their explanation completely ignores the rest of the wall. I would think that someone looking for astronomical explanations of these diagrams on this cave wall would have noticed the following:
Of the two overlapping ringed circles: The "big circle" has a center with nine rings around it. Sort of like the orbits of the planets, maybe? The slightly smaller circle (the center of which crosses what would be Jupiter's orbit) has more rings around it... rings similar to
moon orbits around Jupiter. Don't look at it as two circles colliding in 2D, look at it as a blow-up of Jupiter and it's moons.
The other shapes on the wall also resemble orbits... Can anyone count the
number of object orbiting the other objects? Do they line up to numbers
of moons around planets in our solar system? The picture accompanying the
article is so small, and even the "larger view" is pretty low-res. Specifically,
the third circle on the right (with a center and three rings), the one to the immediate left of the vertical rings/diamonds on the far right... those little white dots look like
several satellites orbiting something.
I'm not saying I'm any more correct than the "archaeoastronomers" are, but if you've
got astronomy on the brain looking at that cave drawing, I don't see how you get
"eclipse". It's also obvious they're just making wild guesses, so I can too.
Archaeologists and historians in general piss me off with their clueless arrogance. Here's a quote from the story:
Some feel the neolithic people lacked the sophistication to memorialize the eclipse in this way.
Do they think that only in recent history have humans become intelligent? Our brain today is the same as theirs. They were just as "sophisticated" as we are. Every time the archaeologists find something new, there are plenty of quotes about how surprised they are at the intricacy of something, or the design of something else. If you believe the archaeologists, nothing mattered to our ancestors but their kitchen utensils and their paintings.
The people in the story were only around 5000 years ago. We haven't changed that much... We see the amazing art and design in Europe from a few centuries ago, lots of long-lasting writing in the Middle East a couple thousand years ago, pyramids and beautiful work from who knows when in Egypt, and we're supposed to think that somehow 5000 years ago in Ireland they were illiterate cave monkeys?
I want to second this. PowerBASIC is fantastic. It's about $150 or so for the Win32 GUI-mode compiler if you shop around (check Provantage), and it makes the tiniest, fastest executables I've seen, short of raw assembly. The user forums on the PowerBASIC site are also excellent, and you can get help on just about anything, with commented source code even.
It's got BASIC-like abstraction of dialogs, TCP/IP, file I/O, regex, and more. The source output is readable by pretty much any programmer. If you choose, you can also write your apps SDK-style rather than using the dialog-abstraction keywords.
Don't mistake it for a VB-alike. It supports all native Windows datatypes as well as pointers. I've written fairly GUI-intensive apps that do quite a bit of work (regexing, FTPing, SMTPing, and more) where the output file was less than 80K. Also, the output executable is a normal PE Windows exe, and has zero external runtimes.
It's the next best thing to raw assembly, with the ease of coding in BASIC. I'm also a faithful customer of PowerBASIC, and don't work for them.
What functionality in MS SQL are you missing? I've found that most people that complain about the feature set in MS SQL just don't know of the feature's existence or how to use it.
My mom always said the best ending would have been finding out Scully was Mulder's sister. They sort of made that impossible with some of their stories, but it could have been done if planned from the beginning.
Actually, I have an opinion about the behavior. I think it's juvenile behavior at its finest. I think the whole punishment scenario is just greed (in the case of the experiments) and spitefulness. Even when the punishment cost the punisher, they would still do it even though no overall good was gained. Of course part of the article discusses whether or not there was a perceived good.
It really reinforced for me that the mob-rule do-as-we-say mentality that seems so apparent in daily life is real and experimentally indicated. The people in the experiments used punishment to bring about desired behavior, again even when that desired behavior wasn't good for any reason other than the perception that it benefitted the entire group, even if the group was not harmed in any way by the opposite behavior.
It wasn't prevention of behavior that hurt the group -- it was prevention of unpopular behavior that had no effect on the group.
In the most recent Scientific American (I just got it in the mail a couple weeks ago; I don't know if it's on the stands yet), there is a long detailed article about this exactly. The article covers a lot of examples and guesses a lot on the reasons for the behavior.
...when the jury is still out on whether OOP can even solve computer science problems?
Other than a small handful of examples, I haven't seen where OO helps any way other than the creation of arbitrary data types and convenient grouping of data and functionality which can be done, although less cleanly, in a procedural language as well. The complexities of inheritance and God forbid, polymorphism, usually lead to more problems than they solve, in my opinion.
I agree that OO programming can be more programmer-friendly in some cases, but in general find it more trouble than it's worth. Sometimes it looks to me like most of the things that can be re-used have already been turned into libraries, and the rest is all custom programming.
I confess to learning programming using procedural techniques and using them for a dozen years before picking up OOP, and still finding those techniques easier to apply. But I'm not the only one that questions whether OO is a big red herring to productivity.
I've been wanting to a legit copy of Office 97 rather than living on the MSDN copy from work (should I ever have to get another job). I found a guy on eBay selling a sealed unregistered OEM copy for $75. I used "buy it now" to end the auction and used eBay's own BillPoint to pay. This happened three days ago.
About six hours later I got notice that the auction had ended at Microsoft's request because the good were pirated (VERO rule or somethign like that). See the problem? I already paid for the goods, and the charge has cleared my bank. The listing is gone, and I haven't heard from the seller. What happens to my money?
I've written eBay about it, but of course haven't heard back probably because of the Christmas holiday. Has this happened to anyone else, and if so, what happened?
Agreed, but I enjoyed them both about the same. That was pretty much the basis for my list -- how much I enjoyed them. Some, like Fight Club and To Kill A Mockingbird were 99% identical.
I'd have LOVED to be able to include The Postman, but I didn't like the movie quite as much as the book. I love Brin's book, and unlike most, I liked the movie a lot. I think the movie got rid of a lot of the confusing or silly stuff from the book, but the book was still a little better. Maybe if Sam Raimi had directed it, it'd have been as good <g>.
Yes, or I could not have made a comparison. In my opinion, the movies were all at least as good in these cases. Some were better than the books, but all were at least as good. I didn't break down the list as to which I'd read before seeing the movie, but it's about half and half, and I don't see a correlation as to same/better.
Slashdot Mirror
The book is called Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star Trek: The Next Generation: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671 520989.
Shakespeare did not write in Middle English. He wrote in modern English. Many of the words he used are now archaic, but it was modern English.
I had one, and enjoyed it until 1993 or so. I'm pretty sure the keys were rubber, but now that you've given me the seed of doubt, I can't be positive.
Yup, we had it, but it was called the Timex/Sinclair TS2068. A pic I found via Google search.
Interesting, but maybe not, because they present you with the TOS before you sign.
Damn shame you got modded down. Your comment is the only one close to the truth. Seems like they've all been revising their dates lately, doesn't it? Why should we believe that have any idea about them now? They insisted they were right before.
I agree completely. I don't think they've ever been about innovation, though they do like to throw the word around. I do beleive they try to offer value for the money, and frankly, Excel is one of the finest applications of *any* kind I've ever used, and I still love NT 4.0 (though I admit that's a personal problem).
Visine -- gets the red out.
Novell was known as "Big Red."
*That* is Microsoft's true power -- to force other companies to respond to their actions, rather than to attempt innovation.
Ah, I think you're right! I'd forgotten about that.. I remembered seeing the credits to NCSA, but I think you're right about Spyglass... which also snagged Mosaic code.
You're right, I left a bunch of others out too. I was just going off the top of my head. There were similar products on the market prior to IIS (several companies), SQL Server (Oracle and Sybase), MS Mail/Exchange (cc:Mail, WordPerfect Office - the mail package, not the word processor), and several others.
:) The smartest thing MS did on that was to give us the Netware migration tool (codename Visine -- get it?).
Some of us remember the marketing where they were trying to convince us to give Word a chance in our WP setups, and they were pitching NT to replace aging mainframes! They then settled on a smaller target -- Netware, though Novell had total market share at the time
NT? (OS/2 and Netware)
Word? (WordPerfect and Wordstar)
Excel? (Lotus 1,2,3)
FrontPage? (bought it from Vermeer, or bought Vermeer, I forget)
IE? (used pd code in first few revs)
PowerPoint? (Harvard Graphics)
Access? (wrote some, bought some)
For just about every MS product you can think of, they were second or third to market, not first. They have no need to be first to market. MS roadmaps out massive feature lists in advance, and implements and releases in cycles. It's not like they wait to see what customers are going to ask for. I attended a MS hoo-rah prior to the release of Office 95. Many of the features they listed like voice control and mapping, weren't included until much later releases. I'm not saying they don't implement based on customer feedback, but it's not like they don't think something through before an initial release. No argument here. You're absolutely wrong on your first point, though.
Not likely, it's possible they're modifying each downloaded copy slightly (like in one of the ID3v2 tags) so they can find out who lets their copy out into the wild. Maybe then they'll try to hunt down pirates based on information given upon purchase.
It's definitely possible; I know a company that modifies each of their software's installers upon download so info provided during signup can be retrieved for any particular installer file.
I know the story is being run on April Fool's day, and that makes me a fool for treating it as real, but the story on astronomy.com was posted March 28, so I'll bite.
Does anyone else think these "archaeoastronomers" are full of it? Does anyone else see a sketch of an eclipse here? Their explanation completely ignores the rest of the wall. I would think that someone looking for astronomical explanations of these diagrams on this cave wall would have noticed the following:
Of the two overlapping ringed circles: The "big circle" has a center with nine rings around it. Sort of like the orbits of the planets, maybe? The slightly smaller circle (the center of which crosses what would be Jupiter's orbit) has more rings around it... rings similar to moon orbits around Jupiter. Don't look at it as two circles colliding in 2D, look at it as a blow-up of Jupiter and it's moons.
The other shapes on the wall also resemble orbits... Can anyone count the number of object orbiting the other objects? Do they line up to numbers of moons around planets in our solar system? The picture accompanying the article is so small, and even the "larger view" is pretty low-res. Specifically, the third circle on the right (with a center and three rings), the one to the immediate left of the vertical rings/diamonds on the far right... those little white dots look like several satellites orbiting something.
I'm not saying I'm any more correct than the "archaeoastronomers" are, but if you've got astronomy on the brain looking at that cave drawing, I don't see how you get "eclipse". It's also obvious they're just making wild guesses, so I can too.
Archaeologists and historians in general piss me off with their clueless arrogance. Here's a quote from the story:
Do they think that only in recent history have humans become intelligent? Our brain today is the same as theirs. They were just as "sophisticated" as we are. Every time the archaeologists find something new, there are plenty of quotes about how surprised they are at the intricacy of something, or the design of something else. If you believe the archaeologists, nothing mattered to our ancestors but their kitchen utensils and their paintings.
The people in the story were only around 5000 years ago. We haven't changed that much... We see the amazing art and design in Europe from a few centuries ago, lots of long-lasting writing in the Middle East a couple thousand years ago, pyramids and beautiful work from who knows when in Egypt, and we're supposed to think that somehow 5000 years ago in Ireland they were illiterate cave monkeys?
How have archaeologists gotten so arrogant?
I want to second this. PowerBASIC is fantastic. It's about $150 or so for the Win32 GUI-mode compiler if you shop around (check Provantage), and it makes the tiniest, fastest executables I've seen, short of raw assembly. The user forums on the PowerBASIC site are also excellent, and you can get help on just about anything, with commented source code even.
It's got BASIC-like abstraction of dialogs, TCP/IP, file I/O, regex, and more. The source output is readable by pretty much any programmer. If you choose, you can also write your apps SDK-style rather than using the dialog-abstraction keywords.
Don't mistake it for a VB-alike. It supports all native Windows datatypes as well as pointers. I've written fairly GUI-intensive apps that do quite a bit of work (regexing, FTPing, SMTPing, and more) where the output file was less than 80K. Also, the output executable is a normal PE Windows exe, and has zero external runtimes.
It's the next best thing to raw assembly, with the ease of coding in BASIC. I'm also a faithful customer of PowerBASIC, and don't work for them.
What functionality in MS SQL are you missing? I've found that most people that complain about the feature set in MS SQL just don't know of the feature's existence or how to use it.
My mom always said the best ending would have been finding out Scully was Mulder's sister. They sort of made that impossible with some of their stories, but it could have been done if planned from the beginning.
Actually, I have an opinion about the behavior. I think it's juvenile behavior at its finest. I think the whole punishment scenario is just greed (in the case of the experiments) and spitefulness. Even when the punishment cost the punisher, they would still do it even though no overall good was gained. Of course part of the article discusses whether or not there was a perceived good.
It really reinforced for me that the mob-rule do-as-we-say mentality that seems so apparent in daily life is real and experimentally indicated. The people in the experiments used punishment to bring about desired behavior, again even when that desired behavior wasn't good for any reason other than the perception that it benefitted the entire group, even if the group was not harmed in any way by the opposite behavior.
It wasn't prevention of behavior that hurt the group -- it was prevention of unpopular behavior that had no effect on the group.
In the most recent Scientific American (I just got it in the mail a couple weeks ago; I don't know if it's on the stands yet), there is a long detailed article about this exactly. The article covers a lot of examples and guesses a lot on the reasons for the behavior.
...when the jury is still out on whether OOP can even solve computer science problems?
Other than a small handful of examples, I haven't seen where OO helps any way other than the creation of arbitrary data types and convenient grouping of data and functionality which can be done, although less cleanly, in a procedural language as well. The complexities of inheritance and God forbid, polymorphism, usually lead to more problems than they solve, in my opinion.
I agree that OO programming can be more programmer-friendly in some cases, but in general find it more trouble than it's worth. Sometimes it looks to me like most of the things that can be re-used have already been turned into libraries, and the rest is all custom programming.
I confess to learning programming using procedural techniques and using them for a dozen years before picking up OOP, and still finding those techniques easier to apply. But I'm not the only one that questions whether OO is a big red herring to productivity.
I've been wanting to a legit copy of Office 97 rather than living on the MSDN copy from work (should I ever have to get another job). I found a guy on eBay selling a sealed unregistered OEM copy for $75. I used "buy it now" to end the auction and used eBay's own BillPoint to pay. This happened three days ago.
About six hours later I got notice that the auction had ended at Microsoft's request because the good were pirated (VERO rule or somethign like that). See the problem? I already paid for the goods, and the charge has cleared my bank. The listing is gone, and I haven't heard from the seller. What happens to my money?
I've written eBay about it, but of course haven't heard back probably because of the Christmas holiday. Has this happened to anyone else, and if so, what happened?
Agreed, but I enjoyed them both about the same. That was pretty much the basis for my list -- how much I enjoyed them. Some, like Fight Club and To Kill A Mockingbird were 99% identical.
I'd have LOVED to be able to include The Postman, but I didn't like the movie quite as much as the book. I love Brin's book, and unlike most, I liked the movie a lot. I think the movie got rid of a lot of the confusing or silly stuff from the book, but the book was still a little better. Maybe if Sam Raimi had directed it, it'd have been as good <g>.
Now if they'd just make a movie of Brin's Earth.
Yes, or I could not have made a comparison. In my opinion, the movies were all at least as good in these cases. Some were better than the books, but all were at least as good. I didn't break down the list as to which I'd read before seeing the movie, but it's about half and half, and I don't see a correlation as to same/better.
Has there ever been a movie that's been "as good" as the book?
Absolutely. Off the top of my head, and I know I'm missing a bunch: