I always thought exactly the same thing. Take Dell for example, where I work, it's virtually impossible to buy anything without a 3 year support contract through our "premium" account yet this is what we are supposed to do. At the same time, since we have our own IT resources and sufficient economies of scale, this support is practically worthless.
I see a lot of people suggesting computer, math, philosophy, and other similarly esoteric texts. The other camp seems to be taking what are generally perceived to be great literary texts at least 40 years old.
This is kind of interesting to me since my favorite books have always been stories about actual fantastic adventures. As a kid I grew up on stuff like the Lion/Witch/Wardrobe, Watership Down, and a Wrinkle in Time. Later it was dragon lance books, Raymond Feist, and Tad Williams. My favorite book to this day is "To the Vanishing Point" by Alan Dean Foster. The common theme is that all of these books are more or less about mostly normalish people and creatures that become heros and go out an accomplish things.
Sure, the everyday hero theme is pretty common in print and movies, very cliche. But it's not very common in everyday people. Most of the folks I know plod through life, one day of work at a time. They hate their jobs but show up every day dutifully spinning around like a cog in a machine. Relatively few think, hey I can go do something great.
So don't get someone the Art of War or the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or some bookshelf filler on lisp. Instead get them a nice fun read that reminds them that they can in fact make a difference.
All very true. One of the big problems in marketing is that there have been so many promotions and sales, that customers have been very much trained to wait for these. Whether it is at the grocery store or at an electronics store, it is very rare for me to make a purchase of something not on sale. Some companies have tried shifting to everyday low pricing styles like Walmart, but this has not generally been successful. There is some marketing dogma that states that promotions help profits short term but continued promotions hurt long term.
Read what I said again. I didn't say all of OSS was consistent with each other. I said Gnome and KDE are consistent with each other
I see your point and concede it. Part of the problem for me is that it's difficult for me to make a fair comparison because the kinds of programs I use regularly on linux are so very different from the things I use regularly on windows.
Is typing one more letter (g or k) at the beginning of a command really that much harder to do? I really don't see the issue with this. I've rarely had a problem figuring out a command name.
Kputting kthe kletter kk kat kthe kbeginning kof kevery kword kmakes kthings kmuch kharder kto kread. Gdon't gyou gagree? Remember that study a while back that said if you mxied up the mdidle letetrs but kpet the frist and lsat letetrs the smae, thnigs wree sitll redaable? Well, that just goes to show you how important that first letter is. Perhaps if I used gnome or kde on a daily basis I would get used to it, but as it is, it is damned hard for me to visually sort through a list of program names when everything begins with the same letter.
You're obviously not a developer.
First, developer tools are specialized programs and I specifically said without crossing into the realm of very special purpose software. Second, I am a developer first and an admin second. Are you thinking of any particular outstanding tools?
Actually it is just as easy to configure a firewall within Redhat as it is with XP.
I'm sure you're right. Years of hellish experience configuring things through text files on various linux distributions (not just Red Hat) has trained me to google before trying alternatives like looking at the redhat-config scripts or rummaging through settings menus. It's a mostly bad habbit I need to break because while it is useful to figure out how to do something using the basic tools, it's not always desirable to spend the time required to do so.
Fragile? Obscure? Guess you don't need the registry.
I've needed to edit the registry once in the past two years that I can recall. It was a network problem on a friend's pc that was a result of some kind of bug.
Apache hasn't been that hard to configure, once I figured how to make the directories accessible.
What I'm hearing here is that it was hard to figure out how to make the directories accessible.
Can you make Windows file sharing work with Linux boxes?
Yes, but not as well as I would like to. Of course, now we are talking about interoperability features, not configuration. If we are talking about configuration, it would seem to me that it would need to be linux based configuration.
Is configuring XP's software firewall that much easier than using Yast?
I've run several versions of debian and redhat. Are you suggesting I now switch to Suse so it's easier to configure my firewall? The underlying problem here is that it is often hard to figure out how to configure something in linux, and when I do, I want that information to be portable. However, many of the semi-easy hit and miss configuration programs out there are vendor specific and I can not afford to be.
It may be harder to configure X, but at least I can restart it without rebooting.
That's not going to make my top ten most useful features list any time soon.
I used the word fragile because, in my experience, it is fairly easy to edit configuration files (for apache for instance) in a manner that renders the configured program or service unrunnable. Of course, there's plenty of things you can do to protect yourself against this. And of course the same thing *can* happen in a gui based config, it's just that it's usually a lot easier to do in text based config. On the other hand, with text based config you kind of need the program to complain and not start just like you need a compiler to catch syntax errors. But I'd rather not need this syntax check over the entire configuration process.
'obscure' may be going a bit far.
Consider a couple of things. When configuring a text file, you often have to look up the options you wish to configure in documentation. In contrast, most GUI based configs are organized in a manner that makes it fairly easy to find your option. If a particular field can have 3 values, those values are enumerated right there in the configuration program and are guaranteed to be up to date. In contrast, even if the options you want happen to be enumerated in a comment within a text conf or manual, you don't always know that this information is current.
Ditto. Cygwin and perl are usually among the first few things I load on a windows workstation. Some other folks have put together a nice collection of unix/gnu software for windows. In particular, the grandparent may be interested in these nicely packaged Unix Utils.
Do you really prefer hunting through pages and pages of drop-down menus for the one checkbox that does what you want? Isn't it easier to just type 'man program' and be pointed to the right configuration file and right entry?
Let me think about this. I find IIS much easier to configure than Apache. While Exchange is a piece of shit, Exchange configuration is infinitely less terrifying than something like sendmail. Samba configuration is about as much fun as a bag of rabid chihuahuas when compared to windows file sharing. Editing various linux network configuration files is far more tedius than using something like a windows network config gui. IPChains firewall configuration is very intimidating when compared to a little gui like the XP software firewall. You'd have to be insane to say you'd rather change resolutions by editting some X configuration file than by right clicking on the desktop and selecting a different valid resolution.... I guess I just don't see many situations where I am more comfortable adjusting fragile and obscure text configuration files.
Get real. Even Microsoft programs don't share the same interface as each other. KDE or Gnome are much better in this respect. Other Linux programs may not fit in so well, but neither do third party programs on windows. Your claim is bogus
Consistency of the UI is not one you can put in the win column for linux. Consider configuring samba. Do you use swat, webmin, redhat-config-samba, vim and a text file, etc. Consider your basic editors like emacs and vim, these interfaces have nil in common. I use vim almost daily and still don't remember the exact syntax for a search and replace. Why? Because it's not a consistent interface. For comparison, in just about all windows programs that have this feature, it is ctrl-h and you can find it under the edit menu.
Is this (obscure program names) a serious gripe or just whining?
Linux program names are truly awful. I have always been apalled by the use of prefixes in KDE and Gnome programs which makes visually scanning through lists of programs and command line completion all that much harder.
Sure, if I was bloody rich. I would have to spend at least $5,000 dollars to get the equivalent programs on Windows. The "hassle" is not worth that much money. I'd rather take the ten minutes to learn how to use the program. I'm not that lazy.
Huh? How exactly does this chain of reasoning go? I mean, without crossing into the realm of very special purpose software, most of the tools I use on Linux are also available in virtually identical forms on Windows (Mozilla, Gimp, Open Office, vim, Apache, Perl, Php, etc).
Securing a Linux system is much less work than securing a windows system. You don't have to spend a half hour just configuring the damn web browser to be slighty more secure then the swiss cheese default settings.
It all depends on what you want to do. I mean, for basic needs configuring something like IPChains is hell compared to say the built in XP firewall.
In addition, it sounds like one of Opera's primary advantages over Mozilla in this market is compactness and efficiency. If the technology industry has taught us anything, it's that hardware is constantly improving. Sure Mozilla doesn't sound like they could compete now, but with hardware improvements and some encouragement in the direction of embedded devices, I can't imagine why they couldn't be a feasible browser in that market within a short period. And completely free competes very well with not so free.
In my experience, when people are exposed to Mozilla for a stretch of time, it rapidly becomes apparent that it is better than IE. It's just something that sells itself. Looking at some stats from January 2003 to June 2004, Mozilla usage has almost trippled going from 4% to 11.2%. Mozilla usage is up 37% this year alone. That is some serious growth anyway you look at it and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.
[DISCLAIMER]I don't play a lot of games.[/DISCLAIMER]
But could the downfall of PC games have anything to do with the upgrade cycle? People still think of computers as expensive, complex, and evil devices. This drastically reduces their desire to upgrade. Relatively few people buy computers primarily for gaming. Rather they want to use internet applications (web, email, chat, p2p) and office applications (word processing, spreadsheets, accounting). All of the latest versions of this stuff run fine on a 3-4 year old PC and with longhorn and the next Office still at least 2 years away, there's no indication that this will change anytime soon. Traditionally, for sale computer games have a lot of high powered graphics that require cutting edge systems. Well, people don't have the same impotus to upgrade that they once did, hence the market has probably shrunk.
Also, it seems to me that improvements in graphics aren't as important as they once were, even in graphically intense games such as first person shooters. Things like reflections or fire effects don't affect gameplay as much as early improvements did. It's all garnish. Since high end graphics were a driving motivation in the PC games market, the diminishing gains of graphics technology has probably affected PCs. Now, today's console's look almost as good, if not better than, most of today's pcs.
I used to work for a company that bought all of their windows licenses retail. It was kind of a weird situtation though. They had access to lots of used computer equipment and the parent company owned a computer retailer. Also, I've bought one or two upgrades retail for personal use.
Whoa there. I read slashdot daily and very well could be a reader of Linux Today, yet I spend most of my time (80-90%)working with Microsoft technologies. I mean, I generally laugh off all ads, but I can imagine people like me who wouldn't.
Not neccesarily. But I can see the validity in the point of "how can we trust them to post unbiased reviews when they are funded by Microsoft"
If they show ads from Microsoft, we can't be sure they can be trusted as an unbiased source. If they refuse to show ads from Microsoft, we can be sure they can't be trusted as an unbiased source.
Me too. I took one of those it training courses where you go off and attend a class for a week and pretend to learn things instead of actually working. Anyways, all the students needed high level access on the PC and some access on the domain. The training center administrators just had everything set up so they could reimage everything for each new class. It worked nicely.
Let your customers do whatever they want, then just reimage the pc for the next guys.
I see suggestions for virtually every programming language under the sun, and I don't get it. If you want to teach someone how to do something computer programmy, find a task they are interested in accomplishing that requires programming skills. Then help them learn how to accomplish this task. Don't put the technology in front of the purpose for the technology.
The question then is, what would your mom want to accomplish? A lot of tech people I know like to make their own web pages that they read kind of like a morning paper. Mine had news blurbs, comics, movie times, and links to a few other sites. This is the kind of thing that might be achievable with a little html and perl. Then again that's two technologies already and you'd also need regex/lwp/scheduling. It might be a little tough for a first venture into programming.
Another possibility you may want to consider is that your mother isn't really interested in learning a programming language, she's just interested in getting a better understanding of something her son is interested in.
In my experience the number of times someone uses the "learn how to think" argument is inversely proportional to the value of the material they are peddling. For example, at Ohio State, it's not uncommon for a Computer Science undergrad to take 30 credit hours worth of math in a 200 credit hour program.
After having worked for a few years as a developer, I can safely say that virtually all of the material in those math classes was of no direct utility in my occupation. I can't even remember the last time I took a derivative or integral of anything. However, I still hear people proclaiming that these courses are good because they help teach people how to think.
But, my college education seemed to have very little impact on my ability to think or my general thought processes in attacking a problem. In addition, the suggestion that the math classes I took were designed to teach me how to think seems almost laughable. Most of those math classes had between 50 and 100 students and met at most 3 times a week for less than an hour with any given teacher. Not all of the teachers were understandable (bad english). It was more about processing students through an academic machine than it was about teaching them to think. To contrast that, I had a few very influential teachers in high school that had a rather large impact on how I think.
Yet people will still say these anonymous math courses are valuable because they teach people how to think. Personally I think it must be a cognitive dissonance thing with an element of deferral to authority figures. Dr. Milgram says this course is valuable and he has a Phd therefore it must be valuable. I've never used an ounce of calculus since that final three years ago even though I spent $5,000 and 6 months of my life studying high level math. If I didn't invest all that energy into acquiring the content, it must have been for something else. Perhaps I was learning how to think? Yeah, that's the ticket.
Not that I trust anything to make any release (for any product), and not that it does any good for you now, but I think stored procedures and views are due in some form in version 5.
A long time ago, an algorithms class I took did a series of tests to try sorting by different methods. For small list sizes (~100), bubble sort was always faster. Since illustrating this point was the purpose of the assignment, it was my general understanding that this was an accepted fact. I could be mistaken, but it doesn't really matter. Bubble Wikipedia Entry
My personal take on this kind of optimization is to mostly ignore it until you reach a point where it becomes important. Of course, I mostly write software that talks to databases, might be running distributed components, etc. Most of the large data set work gets done by the database engine. The vast majority of nontrivial optimizations are in reducing the number of network trips.
Of course, even in what I do, I have met code that somehow managed to be so dreadfully awful that network trips weren't necessarily the major culprit. However, in those cases, it's often some pretty scary code written by an even scarier programmer (think 10,000 line procedures with 25 parameters).
You know, for some reason, this is what I thought everyone would be saying. Yet, this is the first post I've read that even considered the possibility the law could be inappropriate or overly broad. Why is it everyone is so quick to outlaw activities of which they do not approve?
I hate spyware as much as the next guy, but there are definitely tiers of evilness involved and there are definitely programs that come bundled with spyware/adware that many people like and probably think are worth the "price."
Do they actually provide any measurable service to the users who use their product?
A lot of spyware I've seen comes bundled with products which the user choses to install. It is the price they pay to sponsor the usually free program they want to use.
So what right do they have to advertise to you, or sell information from your PC, beyond the end user being stupid enough to agree to some liscence?
None (unless the information is theirs), are you saying you want to get rid of the user's right to chose to install a free program bundled with spyware?
I went back to graduate school after a few years out in the real world. Presently I work as primary IT staff in a small engineering career services office that serves a large Big Ten university. Anyways, the biggest difference for me is that compared to my outside jobs, this is a very relaxing position.
For the most part, people here tend to work 40 hour work weeks. Some work more, but it appears to be more of a choice than a requirement. Also, there's little or no pressure to get the big X done in time for customer C. This isn't to say there aren't deadlines, just that you can usually see them coming from a long way away. To contrast, at an old job, our boss once came in friday afternoon and told us we needed to develop an inhouse/integrated inventory tracking system by monday. You don't get that in Academia. Another key point is that the basic job of a university/university offices is to help people, not to enrich some corrupt CEO. Overall, it's a lot less stress and a lot more rewarding.
Anyways, that's just my experience. Your mileage may vary.
That's defintely true to a point and I think a lot of stress comes from malfunctioning or difficult to understand software. But forgetting that for a moment, technology is an enabler. It allows a person to do more things than they used to be able to do. This means a person can be more productive. This also means they have more responsibilities. This in itself leads to additional stress.
I wouldn't recommend assembly for serious programming, but for getting an understanding of the fundamentals, it's hard to beat.
One problem that I've found with many CS programs is that they put the knowledge ahead of the motivation for the knowledge. Teaching assembly first would be a prime example. The teachers may believe that this will provide a simpler and more understandable foundation in which their students can learn to program. However, none of the students can actually do anything remotely useful in assembler. Therefore they will exhibit remarkable indifference to the subject matter.
If they were being taught in a language like Java, C#, or even Perl, then they would be working in languages which they could use to produce useful programs. The utility of the knowledge gained would motivate them more than the fear of getting a bad mark. At least that's just the way my own brain works....
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I always thought exactly the same thing. Take Dell for example, where I work, it's virtually impossible to buy anything without a 3 year support contract through our "premium" account yet this is what we are supposed to do. At the same time, since we have our own IT resources and sufficient economies of scale, this support is practically worthless.
I see a lot of people suggesting computer, math, philosophy, and other similarly esoteric texts. The other camp seems to be taking what are generally perceived to be great literary texts at least 40 years old.
This is kind of interesting to me since my favorite books have always been stories about actual fantastic adventures. As a kid I grew up on stuff like the Lion/Witch/Wardrobe, Watership Down, and a Wrinkle in Time. Later it was dragon lance books, Raymond Feist, and Tad Williams. My favorite book to this day is "To the Vanishing Point" by Alan Dean Foster. The common theme is that all of these books are more or less about mostly normalish people and creatures that become heros and go out an accomplish things.
Sure, the everyday hero theme is pretty common in print and movies, very cliche. But it's not very common in everyday people. Most of the folks I know plod through life, one day of work at a time. They hate their jobs but show up every day dutifully spinning around like a cog in a machine. Relatively few think, hey I can go do something great.
So don't get someone the Art of War or the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or some bookshelf filler on lisp. Instead get them a nice fun read that reminds them that they can in fact make a difference.
All very true. One of the big problems in marketing is that there have been so many promotions and sales, that customers have been very much trained to wait for these. Whether it is at the grocery store or at an electronics store, it is very rare for me to make a purchase of something not on sale. Some companies have tried shifting to everyday low pricing styles like Walmart, but this has not generally been successful. There is some marketing dogma that states that promotions help profits short term but continued promotions hurt long term.
Read what I said again. I didn't say all of OSS was consistent with each other. I said Gnome and KDE are consistent with each other
I see your point and concede it. Part of the problem for me is that it's difficult for me to make a fair comparison because the kinds of programs I use regularly on linux are so very different from the things I use regularly on windows. Is typing one more letter (g or k) at the beginning of a command really that much harder to do? I really don't see the issue with this. I've rarely had a problem figuring out a command name.
Kputting kthe kletter kk kat kthe kbeginning kof kevery kword kmakes kthings kmuch kharder kto kread. Gdon't gyou gagree? Remember that study a while back that said if you mxied up the mdidle letetrs but kpet the frist and lsat letetrs the smae, thnigs wree sitll redaable? Well, that just goes to show you how important that first letter is. Perhaps if I used gnome or kde on a daily basis I would get used to it, but as it is, it is damned hard for me to visually sort through a list of program names when everything begins with the same letter.
You're obviously not a developer.
First, developer tools are specialized programs and I specifically said without crossing into the realm of very special purpose software. Second, I am a developer first and an admin second. Are you thinking of any particular outstanding tools?
Actually it is just as easy to configure a firewall within Redhat as it is with XP.
I'm sure you're right. Years of hellish experience configuring things through text files on various linux distributions (not just Red Hat) has trained me to google before trying alternatives like looking at the redhat-config scripts or rummaging through settings menus. It's a mostly bad habbit I need to break because while it is useful to figure out how to do something using the basic tools, it's not always desirable to spend the time required to do so.
Fragile? Obscure? Guess you don't need the registry.
I've needed to edit the registry once in the past two years that I can recall. It was a network problem on a friend's pc that was a result of some kind of bug.
Apache hasn't been that hard to configure, once I figured how to make the directories accessible.
What I'm hearing here is that it was hard to figure out how to make the directories accessible.
Can you make Windows file sharing work with Linux boxes?
Yes, but not as well as I would like to. Of course, now we are talking about interoperability features, not configuration. If we are talking about configuration, it would seem to me that it would need to be linux based configuration.
Is configuring XP's software firewall that much easier than using Yast?
I've run several versions of debian and redhat. Are you suggesting I now switch to Suse so it's easier to configure my firewall? The underlying problem here is that it is often hard to figure out how to configure something in linux, and when I do, I want that information to be portable. However, many of the semi-easy hit and miss configuration programs out there are vendor specific and I can not afford to be.
It may be harder to configure X, but at least I can restart it without rebooting.
That's not going to make my top ten most useful features list any time soon.
I used the word fragile because, in my experience, it is fairly easy to edit configuration files (for apache for instance) in a manner that renders the configured program or service unrunnable. Of course, there's plenty of things you can do to protect yourself against this. And of course the same thing *can* happen in a gui based config, it's just that it's usually a lot easier to do in text based config. On the other hand, with text based config you kind of need the program to complain and not start just like you need a compiler to catch syntax errors. But I'd rather not need this syntax check over the entire configuration process.
'obscure' may be going a bit far.
Consider a couple of things. When configuring a text file, you often have to look up the options you wish to configure in documentation. In contrast, most GUI based configs are organized in a manner that makes it fairly easy to find your option. If a particular field can have 3 values, those values are enumerated right there in the configuration program and are guaranteed to be up to date. In contrast, even if the options you want happen to be enumerated in a comment within a text conf or manual, you don't always know that this information is current.
Ditto. Cygwin and perl are usually among the first few things I load on a windows workstation. Some other folks have put together a nice collection of unix/gnu software for windows. In particular, the grandparent may be interested in these nicely packaged Unix Utils.
Do you really prefer hunting through pages and pages of drop-down menus for the one checkbox that does what you want? Isn't it easier to just type 'man program' and be pointed to the right configuration file and right entry?
Let me think about this. I find IIS much easier to configure than Apache. While Exchange is a piece of shit, Exchange configuration is infinitely less terrifying than something like sendmail. Samba configuration is about as much fun as a bag of rabid chihuahuas when compared to windows file sharing. Editing various linux network configuration files is far more tedius than using something like a windows network config gui. IPChains firewall configuration is very intimidating when compared to a little gui like the XP software firewall. You'd have to be insane to say you'd rather change resolutions by editting some X configuration file than by right clicking on the desktop and selecting a different valid resolution.... I guess I just don't see many situations where I am more comfortable adjusting fragile and obscure text configuration files.
Get real. Even Microsoft programs don't share the same interface as each other. KDE or Gnome are much better in this respect. Other Linux programs may not fit in so well, but neither do third party programs on windows. Your claim is bogus
Consistency of the UI is not one you can put in the win column for linux. Consider configuring samba. Do you use swat, webmin, redhat-config-samba, vim and a text file, etc. Consider your basic editors like emacs and vim, these interfaces have nil in common. I use vim almost daily and still don't remember the exact syntax for a search and replace. Why? Because it's not a consistent interface. For comparison, in just about all windows programs that have this feature, it is ctrl-h and you can find it under the edit menu.
Is this (obscure program names) a serious gripe or just whining? Linux program names are truly awful. I have always been apalled by the use of prefixes in KDE and Gnome programs which makes visually scanning through lists of programs and command line completion all that much harder.
Sure, if I was bloody rich. I would have to spend at least $5,000 dollars to get the equivalent programs on Windows. The "hassle" is not worth that much money. I'd rather take the ten minutes to learn how to use the program. I'm not that lazy.
Huh? How exactly does this chain of reasoning go? I mean, without crossing into the realm of very special purpose software, most of the tools I use on Linux are also available in virtually identical forms on Windows (Mozilla, Gimp, Open Office, vim, Apache, Perl, Php, etc).
Securing a Linux system is much less work than securing a windows system. You don't have to spend a half hour just configuring the damn web browser to be slighty more secure then the swiss cheese default settings.
It all depends on what you want to do. I mean, for basic needs configuring something like IPChains is hell compared to say the built in XP firewall.
In addition, it sounds like one of Opera's primary advantages over Mozilla in this market is compactness and efficiency. If the technology industry has taught us anything, it's that hardware is constantly improving. Sure Mozilla doesn't sound like they could compete now, but with hardware improvements and some encouragement in the direction of embedded devices, I can't imagine why they couldn't be a feasible browser in that market within a short period. And completely free competes very well with not so free.
In my experience, when people are exposed to Mozilla for a stretch of time, it rapidly becomes apparent that it is better than IE. It's just something that sells itself. Looking at some stats from January 2003 to June 2004, Mozilla usage has almost trippled going from 4% to 11.2%. Mozilla usage is up 37% this year alone. That is some serious growth anyway you look at it and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.
[DISCLAIMER]I don't play a lot of games.[/DISCLAIMER]
But could the downfall of PC games have anything to do with the upgrade cycle? People still think of computers as expensive, complex, and evil devices. This drastically reduces their desire to upgrade. Relatively few people buy computers primarily for gaming. Rather they want to use internet applications (web, email, chat, p2p) and office applications (word processing, spreadsheets, accounting). All of the latest versions of this stuff run fine on a 3-4 year old PC and with longhorn and the next Office still at least 2 years away, there's no indication that this will change anytime soon. Traditionally, for sale computer games have a lot of high powered graphics that require cutting edge systems. Well, people don't have the same impotus to upgrade that they once did, hence the market has probably shrunk.
Also, it seems to me that improvements in graphics aren't as important as they once were, even in graphically intense games such as first person shooters. Things like reflections or fire effects don't affect gameplay as much as early improvements did. It's all garnish. Since high end graphics were a driving motivation in the PC games market, the diminishing gains of graphics technology has probably affected PCs. Now, today's console's look almost as good, if not better than, most of today's pcs.
I used to work for a company that bought all of their windows licenses retail. It was kind of a weird situtation though. They had access to lots of used computer equipment and the parent company owned a computer retailer. Also, I've bought one or two upgrades retail for personal use.
Whoa there. I read slashdot daily and very well could be a reader of Linux Today, yet I spend most of my time (80-90%)working with Microsoft technologies. I mean, I generally laugh off all ads, but I can imagine people like me who wouldn't.
Not neccesarily. But I can see the validity in the point of "how can we trust them to post unbiased reviews when they are funded by Microsoft"
If they show ads from Microsoft, we can't be sure they can be trusted as an unbiased source. If they refuse to show ads from Microsoft, we can be sure they can't be trusted as an unbiased source.
Me too. I took one of those it training courses where you go off and attend a class for a week and pretend to learn things instead of actually working. Anyways, all the students needed high level access on the PC and some access on the domain. The training center administrators just had everything set up so they could reimage everything for each new class. It worked nicely.
Let your customers do whatever they want, then just reimage the pc for the next guys.
I see suggestions for virtually every programming language under the sun, and I don't get it. If you want to teach someone how to do something computer programmy, find a task they are interested in accomplishing that requires programming skills. Then help them learn how to accomplish this task. Don't put the technology in front of the purpose for the technology.
The question then is, what would your mom want to accomplish? A lot of tech people I know like to make their own web pages that they read kind of like a morning paper. Mine had news blurbs, comics, movie times, and links to a few other sites. This is the kind of thing that might be achievable with a little html and perl. Then again that's two technologies already and you'd also need regex/lwp/scheduling. It might be a little tough for a first venture into programming.
Another possibility you may want to consider is that your mother isn't really interested in learning a programming language, she's just interested in getting a better understanding of something her son is interested in.
Some way to get the "learn how to think"
In my experience the number of times someone uses the "learn how to think" argument is inversely proportional to the value of the material they are peddling. For example, at Ohio State, it's not uncommon for a Computer Science undergrad to take 30 credit hours worth of math in a 200 credit hour program.
After having worked for a few years as a developer, I can safely say that virtually all of the material in those math classes was of no direct utility in my occupation. I can't even remember the last time I took a derivative or integral of anything. However, I still hear people proclaiming that these courses are good because they help teach people how to think.
But, my college education seemed to have very little impact on my ability to think or my general thought processes in attacking a problem. In addition, the suggestion that the math classes I took were designed to teach me how to think seems almost laughable. Most of those math classes had between 50 and 100 students and met at most 3 times a week for less than an hour with any given teacher. Not all of the teachers were understandable (bad english). It was more about processing students through an academic machine than it was about teaching them to think. To contrast that, I had a few very influential teachers in high school that had a rather large impact on how I think.
Yet people will still say these anonymous math courses are valuable because they teach people how to think. Personally I think it must be a cognitive dissonance thing with an element of deferral to authority figures. Dr. Milgram says this course is valuable and he has a Phd therefore it must be valuable. I've never used an ounce of calculus since that final three years ago even though I spent $5,000 and 6 months of my life studying high level math. If I didn't invest all that energy into acquiring the content, it must have been for something else. Perhaps I was learning how to think? Yeah, that's the ticket.
Not that I trust anything to make any release (for any product), and not that it does any good for you now, but I think stored procedures and views are due in some form in version 5.
A long time ago, an algorithms class I took did a series of tests to try sorting by different methods. For small list sizes (~100), bubble sort was always faster. Since illustrating this point was the purpose of the assignment, it was my general understanding that this was an accepted fact. I could be mistaken, but it doesn't really matter. Bubble Wikipedia Entry
My personal take on this kind of optimization is to mostly ignore it until you reach a point where it becomes important. Of course, I mostly write software that talks to databases, might be running distributed components, etc. Most of the large data set work gets done by the database engine. The vast majority of nontrivial optimizations are in reducing the number of network trips.
Of course, even in what I do, I have met code that somehow managed to be so dreadfully awful that network trips weren't necessarily the major culprit. However, in those cases, it's often some pretty scary code written by an even scarier programmer (think 10,000 line procedures with 25 parameters).
You know, for some reason, this is what I thought everyone would be saying. Yet, this is the first post I've read that even considered the possibility the law could be inappropriate or overly broad. Why is it everyone is so quick to outlaw activities of which they do not approve? I hate spyware as much as the next guy, but there are definitely tiers of evilness involved and there are definitely programs that come bundled with spyware/adware that many people like and probably think are worth the "price."
Do they actually provide any measurable service to the users who use their product?
A lot of spyware I've seen comes bundled with products which the user choses to install. It is the price they pay to sponsor the usually free program they want to use.
So what right do they have to advertise to you, or sell information from your PC, beyond the end user being stupid enough to agree to some liscence?
None (unless the information is theirs), are you saying you want to get rid of the user's right to chose to install a free program bundled with spyware?
I went back to graduate school after a few years out in the real world. Presently I work as primary IT staff in a small engineering career services office that serves a large Big Ten university. Anyways, the biggest difference for me is that compared to my outside jobs, this is a very relaxing position.
For the most part, people here tend to work 40 hour work weeks. Some work more, but it appears to be more of a choice than a requirement. Also, there's little or no pressure to get the big X done in time for customer C. This isn't to say there aren't deadlines, just that you can usually see them coming from a long way away. To contrast, at an old job, our boss once came in friday afternoon and told us we needed to develop an inhouse/integrated inventory tracking system by monday. You don't get that in Academia. Another key point is that the basic job of a university/university offices is to help people, not to enrich some corrupt CEO. Overall, it's a lot less stress and a lot more rewarding.
Anyways, that's just my experience. Your mileage may vary.
That's defintely true to a point and I think a lot of stress comes from malfunctioning or difficult to understand software. But forgetting that for a moment, technology is an enabler. It allows a person to do more things than they used to be able to do. This means a person can be more productive. This also means they have more responsibilities. This in itself leads to additional stress.
I wouldn't recommend assembly for serious programming, but for getting an understanding of the fundamentals, it's hard to beat.
One problem that I've found with many CS programs is that they put the knowledge ahead of the motivation for the knowledge. Teaching assembly first would be a prime example. The teachers may believe that this will provide a simpler and more understandable foundation in which their students can learn to program. However, none of the students can actually do anything remotely useful in assembler. Therefore they will exhibit remarkable indifference to the subject matter.
If they were being taught in a language like Java, C#, or even Perl, then they would be working in languages which they could use to produce useful programs. The utility of the knowledge gained would motivate them more than the fear of getting a bad mark. At least that's just the way my own brain works....