Actually, if you look at the photos. There is a plane in flight with N355SX and it has windows, then another picture of another plane also labeled N355SX does not have windows.
Looks like more than one plane carries the tail number.
Interesting, about 15 years ago I wrote a short story in which commercial airline pilots were "figureheads". Most had lost what pilot training they had from years of atrophy. The pilot was only there to reassure the passengers that someone could fly the thing if the computers failed, but because the systems were designed for computer control and reflexes, it was pretty much impossible for a human to pilot them anyways.
The aircraft companies were able to take lots of shortcuts in the design of the planes because they could count on computer control to compensate before stress became too great for the airframe to handle, using minute adjustments billions of times a second to keep the planes infrastructure as free of stress as possible.
Ahh.. mid-90's.. when Popular Mechanics was a great source of fiction inspiration.
No. It's like saying that people should play poker with their cards exposed. After all, if Poker was a secure game, knowing the cards shouldn't matter.
Poker becomes a useless exercise if someone KNOWS what the cards are. The same is true in search engine algorithms. If everyone knows the algorithm, then results can be gamed.
It should be noted that Netscape already gave the product away for free. If you read my link to Eric Sink's page, he says that this tactic on Netscapes part is part of what put them out of business.
Yes, it's illegal to use your war chest to drive a competitor out of buisness by giving away a free or below market cost product, *AND THEN RAISE THE PRICE AFTER THE COMPETITOR IS DEAD*. Microsoft only produced a product that they gave away at no additional cost, something Netscape was already doing before Microsoft even entered the market.
The browser tying argument is dead, and has been dead for ages. The court of appeal stripped overturned Jacksons findings on that.
Actually, if google opened up its search engine, then result spamming would reach epic proportions. Spammers would know exactly how google ranks sites, and could then game the system to make erection pills show up for every result no matter what you entered.
Please. You really have no idea how the industry works, and why some companies thrive and some die. I'll give you a hint, there's one reason, and one reason only that tech companies die. And it has little to do with Microsoft (though certainly, they have their hand in it).
That reason, is that they fail to provide a product that consumers want. Microsoft is really good at making consumers want it's products, thus it gives people what they want, and people buy it. Let's look at your examples.
Wordperfect? They sat on their laurels after Windows was released, were late with a Windows product, and that product sucked and their existing userbase did not like it. They failed, time and again, to produce a product that their customers wanted in the GUI world. They ruled DOS, but they miscalculated how quickly DOS would die, and how people would quickly jump ship to a better product. In other words, Wordperfect created suicide. Later owners of the technology didn't do a lot to differentiate it from the by then dominant Word. Then, the companies that owned the technology did not put enough money behind it, and they would sell it off again and again before it could gain traction.
The guy that invented the spreadsheet is Dan Bricklin, and Visicalc was killed by Lotus. Microsoft didn't even have a decent spreadsheet until years after Visicalc was dead.
visual programming? I don't think that term means what you think it means. I'd be interested to know what company you're talking about.
The first commercial web browser? That was Spry. They sold a product called "Internet in a box", derived from NCSA Mosaic. This product existed and died before Microsoft even entered the market. So i have to wonder exactly how it was that Microsoft killed them. Spyglass was the next, and though they licensed the name Mosaic and technology from NCSA, they never used any of the code and wrote everything from scratch. It's true that Microsoft was the cause of their destruction, but it was because Microsoft out-developed them. They had 1000 Developers on the IE team, and spyglass had 20. None of this had anything to do with anti-competitive behavior, other than that Microsoft could use it's massive war chest to out-develop everyone else, and frankly there is no law against that.
GEOS? Are you freaking kidding me? That was an 8086 based task switching system, no memory management, etc.. it did a lot, sure.. but they didn't have the resources to make that into any kind of major product.
Finally, we get to BeOS. BeOS was killed by Apple, not Microsoft. Ok, Microsoft may have leveled the killing blow, but apple crippled them to the point that a toddler could have killed them. Why? Because BeOS was positioning itself to be the next MacOS. They thought it was a done deal, until apple went behind their back and bought NeXT instead (just noticed, both of those have 3 capital letters and one lowercase, an e in both cases). Be had put all it's eggs in the Apple basket, and apple crushed them. In a last ditch effort, they decided to port to x86, but they were already a dead man walking and only had a handful of developers doing all the work. They couldn't support a commercial OS with that.
Yes, it's been tried before. It fails for largely social reasons. If there's enough impetus to change, then it can succeed. Previously, there hasn't been enough impetus.
If ICANN starts becomeing more dictatorial and taking peoples domains away on whims, then you will start to see impetus brewing. In general, people don't change unless there is an overwhelming reason to do so. Revolution (or Civil War.. the only difference is who wins) only happens when you have nothing left to lose.
Actually, it wouldn't be that hard to implement a new set of root domain servers. These servers could forward unrecognized requests to the current domain system.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but getting IE market share down to 50% wasn't easy either, and has been slowly growing. You just need to get a small group of administrators to implement alternative dns servers, the provide a painless and easy way for end users to change their DNS to these new servers.
Of course, this is rife with opportunity for malware, and unscrupulous people, so you would have to establish some kind of parent organization to oversee the whole thing, similar to ICANN. Maybe you'd be replacing one evil with another, but maybe not.. Having competing domain name authorities might force them to play nice.
Yes, it would be an uphill battle.. but so was going after Intels market share by AMD, or going after IE with Firefox or going after WIndows with Linux or Mac. Yes, not all of those succeeded, or are succeeding.. but it can be done if it's well organized.
First thing you should understand is that not everyone works well under a situation like that. I recall one time when I was crossing the border from Canada back to the US (I'm a us citizen, driving a car registered in my name from the US, with a US Drivers license back before they required passports for border crossing). The border agent asked me to tell him the name of my High School. My mind went blank and I couldn't remember. 5 minutes after i crossed, my brain suddenly started working again.
Basically, all you're doing is measuring how well someone performs on command.
Also, regarding the "1000 lines of code you're proud of", I would have trouble as well, since i'm not proud of any of my previous work, nor should you be of yours. Why? Because as we get better at our jobs, we look back at our previous work and consider it naive, and poor. We'd write it differently if we were doing it today because we're now better programmers than we were then.
Further, I find that most open source code suffers from the same problem as my own code. I take shortcuts when I write code for myself, because I want to scratch my own "itch" and don't care about the quality as much as getting something that works. When I write code for someone else, I have different priorities and focus more on maintainability and writing good code than just getting it done.
What you want to see is perfect code, and most people can't write perfect code. The industry average is 1 bug for every 20 lines of code. So a bug at line 22 would indicate a better than average bug rate;) Yes, i'm teasing.
I just think you have an unrealistic view of what a good coder is.
It should be pointed out that technically, WPARAM stands for "WORD" param, and while most people think of a WORD as 2 bytes, it's technically considered the native size of architecture.
If you're a graphic designer, then chances are.. most of your work is public, or not considered "trade secret" or proprietary. You can take work you've done for clients and show it to other potential clients, without breaking any kind of employment contract. Unless your work was involving things that needed secret security clearances, that's pretty much straight forward.
Programming is not the same thing. I can't show any of the code i've written for previous employers or clients due to confidentiality, trade secret, and other issues. The only work I can show is work i've done on my own, for myself. And for people that don't have much free time to do such tasks, that's pretty hard to do.
What you're saying is that if you don't have lots of free time to do unencumbered work, then you're not worth hiring. That's a stupid statement for so many reasons. My time is valuable, I get paid for it. I can't feed my kids, pay my rent, pay off my student loans, etc.. if I am doing work that is not paying.
Really? I guess if your parents are paying your way through school, you have plenty of time to play games and do mods.
Many people have to work full time jobs, sometimes 2 part-time jobs that equal more than a full-time job. While taking a full class load. If you call going to shool 8 hours a day, working 10+ hours a day, and trying to find time to do class work "lazy", then you're just plain insane.
It's good that you see things so black and white, and can't imagine how anyone else has different circumstances than you. You'll be a great manager.
Actually, there are many options, but it depends on what you're trying to do. There are lots of third party administration tools. If all you want to do is use the default toolset, then PowerShell is your only logical choice.
SCO, was originally Caldera linux, which was funded by Ray Noorda's finance group. Of course Ray Noorda founded Novell. Now, Novell follows in the footsteps of Ray Noorda, has sold off all it's technology to AttachMate and is pursuing profit via litigation. It's SCO all over again, except this time it's Microsoft they're suing so this will be heralded as a good thing.
What part of "If Oracle owns all the rights to the source code" didn't you understand? I don't know if that's the case, but if they do.. then they can relicense it on their whim. The fact that MySQL was already dual licensed suggests that MySql AB required all submissions to assign copyright to them.
The orb is gone in Office 2010. Microsoft listened to that feedback and changed it.
Access is not just a database, but a forms engine. You can't replace Access with Postgre, it's only part of the solution. What people like about access is that it's a single file that you distribute, double click on it and your app runs, including the database. Postgre simply can't do that, even if you use some other forms engine.
Lots of people were constricted by Excel 2007's 64k row limitaiton. Excel is a useful tool for a lot of people who aren't database experts. You can call them clueless, but they are getting their jobs done just fine with Excel.
If you look at your first article, and read all the way to the bottom, you'll find that Office 2007 was slow to execute macros at first, but later hotfixes solved that problem.
Yes, if you recieve any software under a GPL license, you can give it to whomever you want free of charge, or you can charge them as much as you want. There is no requirement to charge only a nominal fee for the binary distribution. It's only the SOURCE code that cannot have a large fee associated with it. No, you cannot charge someone to use the software, but you can charge them as much as you want to receive the binary from you.
Most people really don't understand the GPL. It's truly amazing how many people license their code under the GPL without even knowing what the GPL's requirements really are.
Incorrect. You can't charge (other than a modest processing fee) for the source code of GPL'd binary. You can certainly charge someone to receive the binary in the first place, and you're only required to give the source (free of charge) to those that received a copy of the binary from you. You are under no requirement to give source to someone that does not have the binary (though most gpl developers do).
However, even so.. if Oracle owns all the rights to the source code, then they can remove the GPL at any time. That won't stop previous versions from continuing to be GPL and forkable, but Oracle is under no requirement to continue releasing any software they own the full rights to under the GPL.
And what happens when someone sends you an Excel spreadsheet with embedded macros that you're required to fill out for things like Expense Reports, or requesting Sick or Vacation time?
Just because you don't use most features in your daily routine doesn't mean you will never need them, because you can't control what other people send you.
Actually, it's closer to 50%. Which means that Office 2010 contains around twice as many features, and those features are almost certainly more complex than the first 50%. Consider a feature like Live Preview. This single feature touches most of the other features, and likely requires significantly more overhead than version of Office that did not have live preview.
As computers get more capable, the software that uses them is written to do more.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you look at the photos. There is a plane in flight with N355SX and it has windows, then another picture of another plane also labeled N355SX does not have windows.
Looks like more than one plane carries the tail number.
Interesting, about 15 years ago I wrote a short story in which commercial airline pilots were "figureheads". Most had lost what pilot training they had from years of atrophy. The pilot was only there to reassure the passengers that someone could fly the thing if the computers failed, but because the systems were designed for computer control and reflexes, it was pretty much impossible for a human to pilot them anyways.
The aircraft companies were able to take lots of shortcuts in the design of the planes because they could count on computer control to compensate before stress became too great for the airframe to handle, using minute adjustments billions of times a second to keep the planes infrastructure as free of stress as possible.
Ahh.. mid-90's.. when Popular Mechanics was a great source of fiction inspiration.
No. It's like saying that people should play poker with their cards exposed. After all, if Poker was a secure game, knowing the cards shouldn't matter.
Poker becomes a useless exercise if someone KNOWS what the cards are. The same is true in search engine algorithms. If everyone knows the algorithm, then results can be gamed.
It should be noted that Netscape already gave the product away for free. If you read my link to Eric Sink's page, he says that this tactic on Netscapes part is part of what put them out of business.
Yes, it's illegal to use your war chest to drive a competitor out of buisness by giving away a free or below market cost product, *AND THEN RAISE THE PRICE AFTER THE COMPETITOR IS DEAD*. Microsoft only produced a product that they gave away at no additional cost, something Netscape was already doing before Microsoft even entered the market.
The browser tying argument is dead, and has been dead for ages. The court of appeal stripped overturned Jacksons findings on that.
Actually, if google opened up its search engine, then result spamming would reach epic proportions. Spammers would know exactly how google ranks sites, and could then game the system to make erection pills show up for every result no matter what you entered.
Please. You really have no idea how the industry works, and why some companies thrive and some die. I'll give you a hint, there's one reason, and one reason only that tech companies die. And it has little to do with Microsoft (though certainly, they have their hand in it).
That reason, is that they fail to provide a product that consumers want. Microsoft is really good at making consumers want it's products, thus it gives people what they want, and people buy it. Let's look at your examples.
Wordperfect? They sat on their laurels after Windows was released, were late with a Windows product, and that product sucked and their existing userbase did not like it. They failed, time and again, to produce a product that their customers wanted in the GUI world. They ruled DOS, but they miscalculated how quickly DOS would die, and how people would quickly jump ship to a better product. In other words, Wordperfect created suicide. Later owners of the technology didn't do a lot to differentiate it from the by then dominant Word. Then, the companies that owned the technology did not put enough money behind it, and they would sell it off again and again before it could gain traction.
The guy that invented the spreadsheet is Dan Bricklin, and Visicalc was killed by Lotus. Microsoft didn't even have a decent spreadsheet until years after Visicalc was dead.
visual programming? I don't think that term means what you think it means. I'd be interested to know what company you're talking about.
The first commercial web browser? That was Spry. They sold a product called "Internet in a box", derived from NCSA Mosaic. This product existed and died before Microsoft even entered the market. So i have to wonder exactly how it was that Microsoft killed them. Spyglass was the next, and though they licensed the name Mosaic and technology from NCSA, they never used any of the code and wrote everything from scratch. It's true that Microsoft was the cause of their destruction, but it was because Microsoft out-developed them. They had 1000 Developers on the IE team, and spyglass had 20. None of this had anything to do with anti-competitive behavior, other than that Microsoft could use it's massive war chest to out-develop everyone else, and frankly there is no law against that.
You should really read http://www.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html as that covers it pretty well.
GEOS? Are you freaking kidding me? That was an 8086 based task switching system, no memory management, etc.. it did a lot, sure.. but they didn't have the resources to make that into any kind of major product.
Finally, we get to BeOS. BeOS was killed by Apple, not Microsoft. Ok, Microsoft may have leveled the killing blow, but apple crippled them to the point that a toddler could have killed them. Why? Because BeOS was positioning itself to be the next MacOS. They thought it was a done deal, until apple went behind their back and bought NeXT instead (just noticed, both of those have 3 capital letters and one lowercase, an e in both cases). Be had put all it's eggs in the Apple basket, and apple crushed them. In a last ditch effort, they decided to port to x86, but they were already a dead man walking and only had a handful of developers doing all the work. They couldn't support a commercial OS with that.
Yes, it's been tried before. It fails for largely social reasons. If there's enough impetus to change, then it can succeed. Previously, there hasn't been enough impetus.
If ICANN starts becomeing more dictatorial and taking peoples domains away on whims, then you will start to see impetus brewing. In general, people don't change unless there is an overwhelming reason to do so. Revolution (or Civil War.. the only difference is who wins) only happens when you have nothing left to lose.
Actually, it wouldn't be that hard to implement a new set of root domain servers. These servers could forward unrecognized requests to the current domain system.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but getting IE market share down to 50% wasn't easy either, and has been slowly growing. You just need to get a small group of administrators to implement alternative dns servers, the provide a painless and easy way for end users to change their DNS to these new servers.
Of course, this is rife with opportunity for malware, and unscrupulous people, so you would have to establish some kind of parent organization to oversee the whole thing, similar to ICANN. Maybe you'd be replacing one evil with another, but maybe not.. Having competing domain name authorities might force them to play nice.
Yes, it would be an uphill battle.. but so was going after Intels market share by AMD, or going after IE with Firefox or going after WIndows with Linux or Mac. Yes, not all of those succeeded, or are succeeding.. but it can be done if it's well organized.
First thing you should understand is that not everyone works well under a situation like that. I recall one time when I was crossing the border from Canada back to the US (I'm a us citizen, driving a car registered in my name from the US, with a US Drivers license back before they required passports for border crossing). The border agent asked me to tell him the name of my High School. My mind went blank and I couldn't remember. 5 minutes after i crossed, my brain suddenly started working again.
Basically, all you're doing is measuring how well someone performs on command.
Also, regarding the "1000 lines of code you're proud of", I would have trouble as well, since i'm not proud of any of my previous work, nor should you be of yours. Why? Because as we get better at our jobs, we look back at our previous work and consider it naive, and poor. We'd write it differently if we were doing it today because we're now better programmers than we were then.
Further, I find that most open source code suffers from the same problem as my own code. I take shortcuts when I write code for myself, because I want to scratch my own "itch" and don't care about the quality as much as getting something that works. When I write code for someone else, I have different priorities and focus more on maintainability and writing good code than just getting it done.
What you want to see is perfect code, and most people can't write perfect code. The industry average is 1 bug for every 20 lines of code. So a bug at line 22 would indicate a better than average bug rate ;) Yes, i'm teasing.
I just think you have an unrealistic view of what a good coder is.
It should be pointed out that technically, WPARAM stands for "WORD" param, and while most people think of a WORD as 2 bytes, it's technically considered the native size of architecture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computing)
So in reality, the size of a word is supposed to change from 16 bit to 32 bit, and it's name isn't supposed to change.
If you're a graphic designer, then chances are.. most of your work is public, or not considered "trade secret" or proprietary. You can take work you've done for clients and show it to other potential clients, without breaking any kind of employment contract. Unless your work was involving things that needed secret security clearances, that's pretty much straight forward.
Programming is not the same thing. I can't show any of the code i've written for previous employers or clients due to confidentiality, trade secret, and other issues. The only work I can show is work i've done on my own, for myself. And for people that don't have much free time to do such tasks, that's pretty hard to do.
What you're saying is that if you don't have lots of free time to do unencumbered work, then you're not worth hiring. That's a stupid statement for so many reasons. My time is valuable, I get paid for it. I can't feed my kids, pay my rent, pay off my student loans, etc.. if I am doing work that is not paying.
Really? I guess if your parents are paying your way through school, you have plenty of time to play games and do mods.
Many people have to work full time jobs, sometimes 2 part-time jobs that equal more than a full-time job. While taking a full class load. If you call going to shool 8 hours a day, working 10+ hours a day, and trying to find time to do class work "lazy", then you're just plain insane.
It's good that you see things so black and white, and can't imagine how anyone else has different circumstances than you. You'll be a great manager.
PowerShell *IS* Microsoft's solution. What are you referring to?
Wow, how hard was it for you to completely ignore the COM interop built into powershell?
2005 called and wants it's arguments back. PowerShell has been around for quite a while now, no VBScript required.
Actually, there are many options, but it depends on what you're trying to do. There are lots of third party administration tools. If all you want to do is use the default toolset, then PowerShell is your only logical choice.
What are you talking about? PowerShell scripts use the extension .ps1. Double click, and it runs.
SCO, was originally Caldera linux, which was funded by Ray Noorda's finance group. Of course Ray Noorda founded Novell. Now, Novell follows in the footsteps of Ray Noorda, has sold off all it's technology to AttachMate and is pursuing profit via litigation. It's SCO all over again, except this time it's Microsoft they're suing so this will be heralded as a good thing.
What part of "If Oracle owns all the rights to the source code" didn't you understand? I don't know if that's the case, but if they do.. then they can relicense it on their whim. The fact that MySQL was already dual licensed suggests that MySql AB required all submissions to assign copyright to them.
The orb is gone in Office 2010. Microsoft listened to that feedback and changed it.
Access is not just a database, but a forms engine. You can't replace Access with Postgre, it's only part of the solution. What people like about access is that it's a single file that you distribute, double click on it and your app runs, including the database. Postgre simply can't do that, even if you use some other forms engine.
Lots of people were constricted by Excel 2007's 64k row limitaiton. Excel is a useful tool for a lot of people who aren't database experts. You can call them clueless, but they are getting their jobs done just fine with Excel.
If you look at your first article, and read all the way to the bottom, you'll find that Office 2007 was slow to execute macros at first, but later hotfixes solved that problem.
Office 2010 is also significantly faster.
Yes, if you recieve any software under a GPL license, you can give it to whomever you want free of charge, or you can charge them as much as you want. There is no requirement to charge only a nominal fee for the binary distribution. It's only the SOURCE code that cannot have a large fee associated with it. No, you cannot charge someone to use the software, but you can charge them as much as you want to receive the binary from you.
Most people really don't understand the GPL. It's truly amazing how many people license their code under the GPL without even knowing what the GPL's requirements really are.
Incorrect. You can't charge (other than a modest processing fee) for the source code of GPL'd binary. You can certainly charge someone to receive the binary in the first place, and you're only required to give the source (free of charge) to those that received a copy of the binary from you. You are under no requirement to give source to someone that does not have the binary (though most gpl developers do).
However, even so.. if Oracle owns all the rights to the source code, then they can remove the GPL at any time. That won't stop previous versions from continuing to be GPL and forkable, but Oracle is under no requirement to continue releasing any software they own the full rights to under the GPL.
And what happens when someone sends you an Excel spreadsheet with embedded macros that you're required to fill out for things like Expense Reports, or requesting Sick or Vacation time?
Just because you don't use most features in your daily routine doesn't mean you will never need them, because you can't control what other people send you.
Actually, it's closer to 50%. Which means that Office 2010 contains around twice as many features, and those features are almost certainly more complex than the first 50%. Consider a feature like Live Preview. This single feature touches most of the other features, and likely requires significantly more overhead than version of Office that did not have live preview.
As computers get more capable, the software that uses them is written to do more.