A friend of mine who was a sales manager at Intuit told me that they were rewriting the next generation of their apps to run on a common cross platform base. (Currently the mac version seems to be a hacked up version of the windows version.) He did not know if cross-platform meant windows/mac or if it included linux, but if they're going to all that trouble, they'd be fools not to include the ability to run on linux. Especially since M$ has tried to kill them on multiple occasions. They recently appointed a new CIO, Lars Rabbe, who used to be CIO of Yahoo!, so he should be quite familiar with open source.
I read about the beginnings of the Land Warrior project several years ago. The article said that the earliest (semi working) prototype was put together by a group of techs who went down to Fry's and picked out what they thought might work. My guess is that OS decision was undertaken a little hastily the first time around.
Actually, our military budget is NOT greater than the rest of the world combined, although it is 45% of world military spending. see World Military Spending
This means that we are only half of the market. The other half would still be there if we stopped spending tomorrow.
Another thing to consider is that the edge of technology would probably not be pressed as hard without the military spending. The Internet was NOT on the drawing board until the military put it there. Would a civilian version ever have evolved?
1) You didn't read my whole comment, slick. I dealt with Vietnam. You'll notice that the type of things that happened in Vietnam did not happen in the Gulf War. It's amazing what you can do with quality people and a little feedback, no?
2) I said "assuming". There are criminals in the military just like there are criminals in all walks of life. Or are all hackers really crackers?
3) You are welcome to believe what you wish. "I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it." However, assuming people guilty until proven innocent reflects poorly on your character.
War crimes are just that: crimes. If you torture someone, kill a non combatant, or anything of that nature, your are committing a crime and under the Universal Code of Military Justice you can (and probably will) be prosecuted. If anyone gives you an order to do such you are REQUIRED BY YOUR OATH to DISSOBEY! They start telling you this in your first week and you will hear it periodically for the rest of your military career
I am tired of people assuming that American Soldiers are criminals! We are professionals, and that sort of criminal brutality is beneath us! That's like saying doctors at the world best hospital go home and perform back alley operations, just because some doctors do. Doing something like that would impugn our honor.
And yes, some terrible things happened during Vietnam, however, the Army of that day was completely different. It was a draft army of non-professionals. Today the Army is all VOLUNTEER. If you don't think that makes a difference, think what would happen if people off the street were dragged into IT and forced to become network admins. Sounds ridiculous? It is, and it is even worse when you apply that format to armed forces.
Troops also have the means to refuse orders. They are usually heavily armed. How do you force someone to do something when they are carrying a machine gun? It's very difficult. A lot of officers and Non-coms died in Vietnam because they hadn't thought that one through before giving stupid orders.
I am a professional. I fight in the forces that make men free.
1) The Army is a pretty safe place to be, these days, jobs that have higher casualty rates include firefighting & farming. Even during a war casualty rates are low.
2) The Army will teach you to do all the things that geeks are traditionally bad at. I found it worth it for this reason alone. Now that I'm running my own company, I find my Army experience contributes heavily to my success.
If you do go, remember: It's not the bullet with your name on it that you should worry about; you'll never dodge that one. Worry about all the ones that say, "To whom it may concern."
Yea, but they call it "Hundred mile an hour" tape now. Supposedly something about airplanes, but I wouldn't fly in anything held together with the stuff. Used a fair amount of it on my tank, though.
No, but you would tolerate your secretary keeping track of those things, just the same as you tolerate your housekeeper straightening up your nightstand. (Or at least I do; I actually pay for the privilege.) How many executives have their secretaries keep track of birthdays, gifts, discussions, and other work/personal things?
What we expect computers to do for us today is NOT the same thing as what we will expect computers to do for us in a couple of years. Personally, the fact that computers have such problems doing so many things is intensely frustrating to me.
Much as I like the idea of Linux, I have never been able to get the reality to match my needs. Office costs a few hundred dollars and open source is free? So what, I can make that back in a couple hours and not spend all the time trying to figure out an os that thinks it is too wonderful to take care of the details for me. I have a Linux box sitting under my desk, and it is only on rarely. Mostly it's a hobby; Win2k, Office, and a few other applications do just about everything I need right now with a minimum of fuss. Stability problems? Not here, ace. My box stays on for months at a time.
If Linux wants to win, it will have to do something new, and it will have to do it better and easier than the competition. Until then it will be something I play around with rather than something I depend on.
I am not talking about server side stuff here; that's great for IT people and Uber-geeks. I am an accountant and do not have time to learn the intricacies of shell scripting when I want to get my work done.
That said, I think that learning scripting is an extremely useful idea. My personal favorite is Python, but I use it to extend what is at the edges, not to do things my os should know how to take care of...
Re:emacs is great, but it is showing it's age
on
Extensible IDEs?
·
· Score: 1
These are exactly the sort of things I was thinking of.
other features I forgot to mention: * support for tooltips, function info, member lists, etc. * generator to create forms * strong support for unit testing (test, debug, release) instead of (debug, release) in Visual Studio
emacs is great, but it is showing it's age
on
Extensible IDEs?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I use emacs, but I am far from satisfied. It only runs cross-platform under protest, many of the tools are poor approximations of what else is out there, and in general it is showing its age. Xemacs is not much better.
Has anyone given any thought to creating a text editor based on the principles of emacs? i.e. a toolkit for building editors? It seems to me that with the advances that have been made, time is ripe for a new level of text editor. Something taking the best from the IDE world, as well as the best tools from the older text editors.
My wish list (off the top of my head): 1. Easily and fully extensible, (MVC architecture) 2. Good support for projects of all types 3. Fast to start-up, edit, etc. (I've run into several IDE's that I like, but feel to sluggish to use) 4. Fully cross platform. (wxWindows?) 5. Full drawing capability for RAD GUI's, Bitmaps, etc. 6. Better GUI than emacs or Xemacs! (The speedbar is a poor man's explorer view!) 7. Good shell integration. 8. Easily scriptable in multiple languages. 9. Something akin to Komodo's Rx Toolkit 10. Coherent enough that if you only use a feature every month or two, you don't have to read the manual each time. 11. Easily manageable modules, tools, etc.
Has anybody heard of anything like this? Is anyone interesting in taking it one? I'd be willing to contribute, but I don't have the experience to work up the high level design...
1) They are not getting away with it, read some of the other posts or take a basic finance course.
2) If capitalism sucks so bad, why is the US:
a. The richest country in the world
b. The country with the highest standard of living
c. One of the countries with the highest standard of living for the poor.
3) Your logic is based on a false premise, by giving stock away at less than market value, they are diluting it, and costing themselves future financing.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine who was a sales manager at Intuit told me that they were rewriting the next generation of their apps to run on a common cross platform base. (Currently the mac version seems to be a hacked up version of the windows version.) He did not know if cross-platform meant windows/mac or if it included linux, but if they're going to all that trouble, they'd be fools not to include the ability to run on linux. Especially since M$ has tried to kill them on multiple occasions. They recently appointed a new CIO, Lars Rabbe, who used to be CIO of Yahoo!, so he should be quite familiar with open source.
I read about the beginnings of the Land Warrior project several years ago. The article said that the earliest (semi working) prototype was put together by a group of techs who went down to Fry's and picked out what they thought might work. My guess is that OS decision was undertaken a little hastily the first time around.
This means that we are only half of the market. The other half would still be there if we stopped spending tomorrow.
Another thing to consider is that the edge of technology would probably not be pressed as hard without the military spending. The Internet was NOT on the drawing board until the military put it there. Would a civilian version ever have evolved?
I have folders labeled: ...
99
98
97
96
Once in a while I create a new lower one and put new stuff in that. I don't know what I'll do when I reach '0' though.
$25,000 per year X 300 million people (rounded estimate) = $7.5 Trillion
US GDP 2001: $10 Trillion
US GDP 1990: $6 Trillion
Finding 3/4ths of the national GDP to give away seems, oh, a little optimistic.
1) You didn't read my whole comment, slick. I dealt with Vietnam. You'll notice that the type of things that happened in Vietnam did not happen in the Gulf War. It's amazing what you can do with quality people and a little feedback, no?
2) I said "assuming". There are criminals in the military just like there are criminals in all walks of life. Or are all hackers really crackers?
3) You are welcome to believe what you wish. "I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it." However, assuming people guilty until proven innocent reflects poorly on your character.
War crimes are just that: crimes. If you torture someone, kill a non combatant, or anything of that nature, your are committing a crime and under the Universal Code of Military Justice you can (and probably will) be prosecuted. If anyone gives you an order to do such you are REQUIRED BY YOUR OATH to DISSOBEY! They start telling you this in your first week and you will hear it periodically for the rest of your military career
I am tired of people assuming that American Soldiers are criminals! We are professionals, and that sort of criminal brutality is beneath us! That's like saying doctors at the world best hospital go home and perform back alley operations, just because some doctors do. Doing something like that would impugn our honor.
And yes, some terrible things happened during Vietnam, however, the Army of that day was completely different. It was a draft army of non-professionals. Today the Army is all VOLUNTEER. If you don't think that makes a difference, think what would happen if people off the street were dragged into IT and forced to become network admins. Sounds ridiculous? It is, and it is even worse when you apply that format to armed forces.
Troops also have the means to refuse orders. They are usually heavily armed. How do you force someone to do something when they are carrying a machine gun? It's very difficult. A lot of officers and Non-coms died in Vietnam because they hadn't thought that one through before giving stupid orders.
I am a professional. I fight in the forces that make men free.
2 points:
1) The Army is a pretty safe place to be, these days, jobs that have higher casualty rates include firefighting & farming. Even during a war casualty rates are low.
2) The Army will teach you to do all the things that geeks are traditionally bad at. I found it worth it for this reason alone. Now that I'm running my own company, I find my Army experience contributes heavily to my success.
If you do go, remember: It's not the bullet with your name on it that you should worry about; you'll never dodge that one. Worry about all the ones that say, "To whom it may concern."
Yea, but they call it "Hundred mile an hour" tape now. Supposedly something about airplanes, but I wouldn't fly in anything held together with the stuff. Used a fair amount of it on my tank, though.
The screen! It's so blue...
No, but you would tolerate your secretary keeping track of those things, just the same as you tolerate your housekeeper straightening up your nightstand. (Or at least I do; I actually pay for the privilege.) How many executives have their secretaries keep track of birthdays, gifts, discussions, and other work/personal things?
What we expect computers to do for us today is NOT the same thing as what we will expect computers to do for us in a couple of years. Personally, the fact that computers have such problems doing so many things is intensely frustrating to me.
Much as I like the idea of Linux, I have never been able to get the reality to match my needs. Office costs a few hundred dollars and open source is free? So what, I can make that back in a couple hours and not spend all the time trying to figure out an os that thinks it is too wonderful to take care of the details for me. I have a Linux box sitting under my desk, and it is only on rarely. Mostly it's a hobby; Win2k, Office, and a few other applications do just about everything I need right now with a minimum of fuss. Stability problems? Not here, ace. My box stays on for months at a time.
If Linux wants to win, it will have to do something new, and it will have to do it better and easier than the competition. Until then it will be something I play around with rather than something I depend on.
I am not talking about server side stuff here; that's great for IT people and Uber-geeks. I am an accountant and do not have time to learn the intricacies of shell scripting when I want to get my work done.
That said, I think that learning scripting is an extremely useful idea. My personal favorite is Python, but I use it to extend what is at the edges, not to do things my os should know how to take care of...
These are exactly the sort of things I was thinking of.
other features I forgot to mention:
* support for tooltips, function info, member lists, etc.
* generator to create forms
* strong support for unit testing (test, debug, release) instead of (debug, release) in Visual Studio
I use emacs, but I am far from satisfied. It only runs cross-platform under protest, many of the tools are poor approximations of what else is out there, and in general it is showing its age. Xemacs is not much better.
Has anyone given any thought to creating a text editor based on the principles of emacs? i.e. a toolkit for building editors? It seems to me that with the advances that have been made, time is ripe for a new level of text editor. Something taking the best from the IDE world, as well as the best tools from the older text editors.
My wish list (off the top of my head):
1. Easily and fully extensible, (MVC architecture)
2. Good support for projects of all types
3. Fast to start-up, edit, etc. (I've run into several IDE's that I like, but feel to sluggish to use)
4. Fully cross platform. (wxWindows?)
5. Full drawing capability for RAD GUI's, Bitmaps, etc.
6. Better GUI than emacs or Xemacs! (The speedbar is a poor man's explorer view!)
7. Good shell integration.
8. Easily scriptable in multiple languages.
9. Something akin to Komodo's Rx Toolkit
10. Coherent enough that if you only use a feature every month or two, you don't have to read the manual each time.
11. Easily manageable modules, tools, etc.
Has anybody heard of anything like this? Is anyone interesting in taking it one? I'd be willing to contribute, but I don't have the experience to work up the high level design...
1) They are not getting away with it, read some of the other posts or take a basic finance course.
2) If capitalism sucks so bad, why is the US:
a. The richest country in the world
b. The country with the highest standard of living
c. One of the countries with the highest standard of living for the poor.
3) Your logic is based on a false premise, by giving stock away at less than market value, they are diluting it, and costing themselves future financing.