Even architects have to know the basics. Or their fancy designs would fall over. There's a reason you make engineering students build bridges out of spaghetti. The same computer students should know how to build a DB out of a flat file.
the dumbing down of software (and everything else apparently, the UK A levels -.. erm exams for 16 year olds after mainstream schooling is over) was recently described as 'too much like sat-nav' where the students are guided through the answers. Universities want students capable of 'map reading' instead, where they have to figure out where the are and where they're going.
The issue isn't restricted to USA, but all the western world, possibly you have a system of 'inclusion at all costs' where you can't fail anyone in case it upsets the poor thickos, or anyone too lazy to study should still pass because it helps the schools post ever-increasing pass rates.
The same applies to software today, especially now we have.NET with its 'Visual Basic' style coding, that's designed to be so easy anyone can do it, we get people who havn't the faintest clue about what they're doing, just that the examples and generated boilerplate does it for them.
unfortunately, it seems that if/. *had* outsourced their coding this silly javascript nonsense we're seeing would be fixed.... eventually, and for lots of money, after a process consultant had submitted the change request forms and the technical lead had decided that a complete rewrite using.net was the only way to solve the problem.
The "spy satellite" capability only was needed when NASA's vehicle became so big that they couldn't fund it solely with NASA funds.
I understood part of the shuttle design had 'input' from the military who demanded it be big enough to launch spy satellites. NASA wanted a smaller one for crew.
nope. One is correct English grammar, the other is made up nonsense. If the author was referring to a single person who was explicitly female, then that's ok. As they were referring to a single generic gender, then the correct form is to use the masculine term.
It isn't about preference, its about doing it right. If I misspelled every word here, you'd be right to be annoyed with me (even if I claimed I was standing up for people who can't spell). If "everything Yoda-style wrote I", then you'd also be right to be annoyed with me. If I decide to use the incorrect terms for generic references to people, you should also be annoyed with me.
I've noticed this 'politically correct' way of writing documents nowadays. I assumed it was deluded female tech authors trying to make some kind of point. Its not grammatically correct (according to my old English teacher - she said "In English, He embraces She") as the masculine form always includes the feminine. Like "mankind" means women too. "Womenkind" on the other hand is very exclusive.
Pity us poor men, we don't have a gender bias, we have to share it with women, while women get their own.
So, yeah, it annoys me too - authors should know better than to write in this way, of all the incorrect forms of grammer, this is the one that really stands out for some reason.
in rural Africa.... I'm sure its not going to be the equivalent of a short drive to the shops!
I recall something about this in south africa for mobiles. Te problem with fixed base stations was that they were raided for copper and orther materials, so they thought about putting the station on a tethered balloon. Why wouldn't that be a better solution that 'disposable' weather balloons (unless the coverage was so good for a near-orbit balloon).
I'd be worried about silverlight if v3 delivers what it promised - GUI apps that work on both desktop and web platforms. If this is true, then WPF is a dead technology too. At the moment MS doesn't really care about obsoleting recent technologies (look at Linq2SQL) so they might just go ahead and dive this forward - if all the desktop devs suddenly start writing silverlight code, MS definitely has a chance of supplanting flash as the de-facto animation gui on the web.
the point is that most people get more than that, unless they live far away from the exchange. People who live in the wilds, for example.
I get 7mbps, but to be fair, I'd happily pay 50p a month extra if it meant they laid fibre everywhere (my house in the metropolis first please) and I got 20mbps:) I'd even pay £1 more for something even faster...
Most people buy the software with the computer, Dell or HP preinstalls it to your specification and you're pretty much done. The hardware is chucked away well before the software, and then... well, you just buy another PC with the OS preinstalled. IIRC its cheaper to do this than it is to put a free OS on the computer. (sucks that does, but if you have a monopolistic marketplace, what did you expect? A class-action lawsuit?)
Its generally only the large enterprises that go for SA because the quantity of licences they buy makes it cost-effective. I'm not sure what the cut-off point is for quantity of desktops and servers is before SA makes sense.
Really? Ah, I see what you've done - you're thinking of highly-skilled me there, rather than the far more common user that staffs all the call centres and administrative jobs 99% of Windows clients are used for. They get more like $9/hr. So $90 for a new Windows OS (plus TCO issues like the cost of someone like me to install it, configure it, get the rest of the IT backend stuff setup to work with it, and test that all the corporate shitty enterprise software still works) might be more than the company wants to pay. At my rates that'd be more like a month of said administrative worker's time, more once you factor in the project managers, consultants and accountants with all the meetings you'll need to have to justify, cost, budget and implement it.
Reminds me of the old adage: "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it".
Failure to do so results in nothing. Until Microsoft announces it's coming to audit you (that you have to pay for), and then you find out how much its going to cost you.
because nobody really cares about you. You don't buy a copy of Windows on Select agreement, or Software Assurance - ie you don't pay Stevie every year to run the same software, or in the case where you get tp upgrade to the latest version, *have* to upgrade whether you want to or not.
See, you don't want to run anything but the latest stuff, but you don't spend like those companies do, and they;re the ones who buy the "enterprise" software that still needs XP, or NT4, or DOS. Selling to you is just a sideline to Microsoft's real business.
And last I looked, you weren't the marketplace for Biztalk, Exchange and all the other Really Expensive server software MS gets to sell to the companies that pay for Windows on their yearly licences.
It won't be much of an issue - most users are behind a NAT device so are not easily (for joe sixpack) going to be able to enable the webserver part. A lot of other apps have embedded webservers in them (think torrent apps and firewalls!) to remotely control them anyway, so its not like this is going to make a significant increase in the number of computers that are already "botnet-enabled".
But... lets assume it works really well, and is secure (eg only serves static html pages or carefully written add-on modules written by people who know what they're doing). Maybe this could be IPv6's killer app.
however, the covenant as set forth above will continue as to specific copies of Covered Products distributed by Novell for Revenue before such update
so.. the stuff Novell gives away for free is not necessarily covered by the 'lets be good' bit of the covenant? that's more scary to the F/OSS community than any other part of it.
So MS could turn around tomorrow and say to any company that used Mono "we're suing" and they'd be within their rights. I doubt MS would sue anyone over Mono - they're too busy enticing Linux developers with "just have one go, just to see what all the fuss is about. Its sooo easy, you'll feel great developing using it" that they prefer the benefits of getting Linux devs to consider some cross-platform development using Mono.
However, I feel that if they see themselves losing the netbook or mobile OS space, they will do everything they can to reclaim it, using any and every weapon they have. Nobody thought MS would sue over VFAT - that everyone uses for their flash drives, but they did.
Fair enough, but there is 1 issue that I have with.NET and its the same issue I had with Java: lock-in.
Remember the "100% pure Java" logos and disclaimers? The problem there is that they're telling you its ok to use Java, as long as you use Java too. You can do anything you want, as long as its written in Java..NET is the same, though to be fair, the interop is better but I feel that is a legacy issue that MS will want to slowly use much less of, I see this already - if you write a GUI in.NET, WPF ==.NET only, you'll find it difficult to do it using C++ only for example, and there is no code-behind in C++, only a.NET language. In other words, starting to write in.NET means to continue to write in.NET.
With the native development tools, they all had a C interface to be compatibly with everything else - any library was designed to be used by anything you wanted, Python, Java, Perl all have bindings for C. But with.NET/Java, once you've written your library, its effectively only usable by other.NET/Java apps.
I like interoperability. I like being able to reuse other people's hard work. I like free software.
This also applies to server applications - if I want to run a web server, its fine - get mod_x going and I'm pretty much ready to go. If its a Java app, then suddenly I need to install tomcat or similar and get that whole application server framework running before I can run my little java app. I don't like this - all that overhead that doesn't need to be there, it offends my sensibilities as a professional programmer, as someone who takes the time to do things properly and efficiently. I'm sure I could slap together some managed app in no time, but it would never be satisfying to become a "VB Programmer"..NET is also an issue because MS doesn't have a good track record of playing nicely. If you take the devil's money, even with the best intentions, you'll still end up burnt.
add-ons, by definition, are not part of the application. Therefore GNote may well be a line-by-line port of Tomboy. Nobody said anything about also porting any addons that may be available.
Which is fair enough (unless you happen to have had a quick look at the summary, an even quicker look at the diagrams and thought "d'uh WTF?" to yourself). I think if he'd created a colourful fractal image, or moving dots swirling around then everyone would be saying how great it was. As it is, it looks like dull statistics.
I found the interesting bits to be how closely tux3 kept coming up next to fat or ntfs, whilst btrfs was close to xfs, and ext4 with ext3 and ext2. Maybe there's something in the analysis after all!
Then I would ask for help from other members of the department and make it a customizable growing project to protect the academic integrity of my school and students.
I'd set it as next year's assignment!
The following year would be "using the university's cheat-detector algorithm, submit the supplied program such that it successfully passes the detector without raising any investigative points".
The year after that, "improve the detector to successfully protect against accepting supplied programs A and B such that they are correctly detected as similar".
Repeat until retirement. (Why did I ever go for a job in the private sector, my talents are obviously wasted here!)
ah, but all of those server-side apps are effectively doing a single task, multiple times - ie, each request occurs in a different thread, they do not split 1 request onto several CPUs. That's what all this talk of 'desktop parallelism' is all about.
So now everyone sees multiple cores on the desktop and think to themselves, that data grid is populating really slowly.. I know, we need to parallelise it, that'll make it go faster! (yeah, sure it will)
I'm sure there are tasks that will benefit from parallel processing (I think of map routing, not that Google's directions are particularly slow) but the vast majority simply won't be worth the effort to code.
And Dublin, what an excellent idea... just because they used to have good tax breaks for large relocating corporations doesn't mean that will continue. Not when the IMF steps in and tells them how to run their economy after their debts destroy it; even Dell has pulled out of Ireland and is moving from Limerick to Poland.
Perhaps if MS was under the jurisdiction of the EU, they'll do what the DoJ should have done and will break it up into several MiniSofts.
its not hard at all - slap a openmp pragma on your for loop and you're done. Of course, your loop has to fulfill some obvious requirements of simplicity like not being able to update a variable in one thread and also use it in a different thread (but you can have variables in each thread you combine at the end of the task, for example).
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps someone like Gartner needs to write a TCO report on outsourced code... only then would the MBAs take notice.
How much do I have to pay them to write such a report, I heard they do it for cash :)
Even architects have to know the basics. Or their fancy designs would fall over. There's a reason you make engineering students build bridges out of spaghetti. The same computer students should know how to build a DB out of a flat file.
the dumbing down of software (and everything else apparently, the UK A levels - .. erm exams for 16 year olds after mainstream schooling is over) was recently described as 'too much like sat-nav' where the students are guided through the answers. Universities want students capable of 'map reading' instead, where they have to figure out where the are and where they're going.
The issue isn't restricted to USA, but all the western world, possibly you have a system of 'inclusion at all costs' where you can't fail anyone in case it upsets the poor thickos, or anyone too lazy to study should still pass because it helps the schools post ever-increasing pass rates.
The same applies to software today, especially now we have .NET with its 'Visual Basic' style coding, that's designed to be so easy anyone can do it, we get people who havn't the faintest clue about what they're doing, just that the examples and generated boilerplate does it for them.
unfortunately, it seems that if /. *had* outsourced their coding this silly javascript nonsense we're seeing would be fixed.... eventually, and for lots of money, after a process consultant had submitted the change request forms and the technical lead had decided that a complete rewrite using .net was the only way to solve the problem.
The "spy satellite" capability only was needed when NASA's vehicle became so big that they couldn't fund it solely with NASA funds.
I understood part of the shuttle design had 'input' from the military who demanded it be big enough to launch spy satellites. NASA wanted a smaller one for crew.
nope. One is correct English grammar, the other is made up nonsense. If the author was referring to a single person who was explicitly female, then that's ok. As they were referring to a single generic gender, then the correct form is to use the masculine term.
It isn't about preference, its about doing it right. If I misspelled every word here, you'd be right to be annoyed with me (even if I claimed I was standing up for people who can't spell). If "everything Yoda-style wrote I", then you'd also be right to be annoyed with me. If I decide to use the incorrect terms for generic references to people, you should also be annoyed with me.
I've noticed this 'politically correct' way of writing documents nowadays. I assumed it was deluded female tech authors trying to make some kind of point. Its not grammatically correct (according to my old English teacher - she said "In English, He embraces She") as the masculine form always includes the feminine. Like "mankind" means women too. "Womenkind" on the other hand is very exclusive.
Pity us poor men, we don't have a gender bias, we have to share it with women, while women get their own.
So, yeah, it annoys me too - authors should know better than to write in this way, of all the incorrect forms of grammer, this is the one that really stands out for some reason.
in rural Africa.... I'm sure its not going to be the equivalent of a short drive to the shops!
I recall something about this in south africa for mobiles. Te problem with fixed base stations was that they were raided for copper and orther materials, so they thought about putting the station on a tethered balloon. Why wouldn't that be a better solution that 'disposable' weather balloons (unless the coverage was so good for a near-orbit balloon).
I'd be worried about silverlight if v3 delivers what it promised - GUI apps that work on both desktop and web platforms. If this is true, then WPF is a dead technology too. At the moment MS doesn't really care about obsoleting recent technologies (look at Linq2SQL) so they might just go ahead and dive this forward - if all the desktop devs suddenly start writing silverlight code, MS definitely has a chance of supplanting flash as the de-facto animation gui on the web.
the point is that most people get more than that, unless they live far away from the exchange. People who live in the wilds, for example.
I get 7mbps, but to be fair, I'd happily pay 50p a month extra if it meant they laid fibre everywhere (my house in the metropolis first please) and I got 20mbps :) I'd even pay £1 more for something even faster...
lol.
DirectX 11 will be giving us all a standard language for GPU computing. No more bullshit between ATi and Nvidia.
Yup. I suppose you could say that Windows is a standard OS, none of this bullshit between Intel and AMD!
OpenCL is the standard. DirectX is a proprietary, locked-in solution.
Why?
Most people buy the software with the computer, Dell or HP preinstalls it to your specification and you're pretty much done. The hardware is chucked away well before the software, and then... well, you just buy another PC with the OS preinstalled. IIRC its cheaper to do this than it is to put a free OS on the computer. (sucks that does, but if you have a monopolistic marketplace, what did you expect? A class-action lawsuit?)
Its generally only the large enterprises that go for SA because the quantity of licences they buy makes it cost-effective. I'm not sure what the cut-off point is for quantity of desktops and servers is before SA makes sense.
Person operating the PC cost $90/h
Really? Ah, I see what you've done - you're thinking of highly-skilled me there, rather than the far more common user that staffs all the call centres and administrative jobs 99% of Windows clients are used for. They get more like $9/hr. So $90 for a new Windows OS (plus TCO issues like the cost of someone like me to install it, configure it, get the rest of the IT backend stuff setup to work with it, and test that all the corporate shitty enterprise software still works) might be more than the company wants to pay. At my rates that'd be more like a month of said administrative worker's time, more once you factor in the project managers, consultants and accountants with all the meetings you'll need to have to justify, cost, budget and implement it.
Reminds me of the old adage: "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it".
Failure to do so results in nothing. Until Microsoft announces it's coming to audit you (that you have to pay for), and then you find out how much its going to cost you.
because nobody really cares about you. You don't buy a copy of Windows on Select agreement, or Software Assurance - ie you don't pay Stevie every year to run the same software, or in the case where you get tp upgrade to the latest version, *have* to upgrade whether you want to or not.
See, you don't want to run anything but the latest stuff, but you don't spend like those companies do, and they;re the ones who buy the "enterprise" software that still needs XP, or NT4, or DOS. Selling to you is just a sideline to Microsoft's real business.
And last I looked, you weren't the marketplace for Biztalk, Exchange and all the other Really Expensive server software MS gets to sell to the companies that pay for Windows on their yearly licences.
It won't be much of an issue - most users are behind a NAT device so are not easily (for joe sixpack) going to be able to enable the webserver part. A lot of other apps have embedded webservers in them (think torrent apps and firewalls!) to remotely control them anyway, so its not like this is going to make a significant increase in the number of computers that are already "botnet-enabled".
But... lets assume it works really well, and is secure (eg only serves static html pages or carefully written add-on modules written by people who know what they're doing). Maybe this could be IPv6's killer app.
however, the covenant as set forth above will continue as to specific copies of Covered Products distributed by Novell for Revenue before such update
so.. the stuff Novell gives away for free is not necessarily covered by the 'lets be good' bit of the covenant? that's more scary to the F/OSS community than any other part of it.
So MS could turn around tomorrow and say to any company that used Mono "we're suing" and they'd be within their rights. I doubt MS would sue anyone over Mono - they're too busy enticing Linux developers with "just have one go, just to see what all the fuss is about. Its sooo easy, you'll feel great developing using it" that they prefer the benefits of getting Linux devs to consider some cross-platform development using Mono.
However, I feel that if they see themselves losing the netbook or mobile OS space, they will do everything they can to reclaim it, using any and every weapon they have. Nobody thought MS would sue over VFAT - that everyone uses for their flash drives, but they did.
your answer is misleading, who care about how things *were*. What is the state of play today, and possibly consider the state of thing to come.
Fair enough, but there is 1 issue that I have with .NET and its the same issue I had with Java: lock-in.
Remember the "100% pure Java" logos and disclaimers? The problem there is that they're telling you its ok to use Java, as long as you use Java too. You can do anything you want, as long as its written in Java. .NET is the same, though to be fair, the interop is better but I feel that is a legacy issue that MS will want to slowly use much less of, I see this already - if you write a GUI in .NET, WPF == .NET only, you'll find it difficult to do it using C++ only for example, and there is no code-behind in C++, only a .NET language. In other words, starting to write in .NET means to continue to write in .NET.
With the native development tools, they all had a C interface to be compatibly with everything else - any library was designed to be used by anything you wanted, Python, Java, Perl all have bindings for C. But with .NET/Java, once you've written your library, its effectively only usable by other .NET/Java apps.
I like interoperability. I like being able to reuse other people's hard work. I like free software.
This also applies to server applications - if I want to run a web server, its fine - get mod_x going and I'm pretty much ready to go. If its a Java app, then suddenly I need to install tomcat or similar and get that whole application server framework running before I can run my little java app. I don't like this - all that overhead that doesn't need to be there, it offends my sensibilities as a professional programmer, as someone who takes the time to do things properly and efficiently. I'm sure I could slap together some managed app in no time, but it would never be satisfying to become a "VB Programmer". .NET is also an issue because MS doesn't have a good track record of playing nicely. If you take the devil's money, even with the best intentions, you'll still end up burnt.
add-ons, by definition, are not part of the application. Therefore GNote may well be a line-by-line port of Tomboy. Nobody said anything about also porting any addons that may be available.
Which is fair enough (unless you happen to have had a quick look at the summary, an even quicker look at the diagrams and thought "d'uh WTF?" to yourself). I think if he'd created a colourful fractal image, or moving dots swirling around then everyone would be saying how great it was. As it is, it looks like dull statistics.
I found the interesting bits to be how closely tux3 kept coming up next to fat or ntfs, whilst btrfs was close to xfs, and ext4 with ext3 and ext2. Maybe there's something in the analysis after all!
Then I would ask for help from other members of the department and make it a customizable growing project to protect the academic integrity of my school and students.
I'd set it as next year's assignment!
The following year would be "using the university's cheat-detector algorithm, submit the supplied program such that it successfully passes the detector without raising any investigative points".
The year after that, "improve the detector to successfully protect against accepting supplied programs A and B such that they are correctly detected as similar".
Repeat until retirement. (Why did I ever go for a job in the private sector, my talents are obviously wasted here!)
ah, but all of those server-side apps are effectively doing a single task, multiple times - ie, each request occurs in a different thread, they do not split 1 request onto several CPUs. That's what all this talk of 'desktop parallelism' is all about.
So now everyone sees multiple cores on the desktop and think to themselves, that data grid is populating really slowly.. I know, we need to parallelise it, that'll make it go faster! (yeah, sure it will)
I'm sure there are tasks that will benefit from parallel processing (I think of map routing, not that Google's directions are particularly slow) but the vast majority simply won't be worth the effort to code.
Cheap? I think M$ would want quality.
why? They havn't gone for that to date.
da dum!
And Dublin, what an excellent idea... just because they used to have good tax breaks for large relocating corporations doesn't mean that will continue. Not when the IMF steps in and tells them how to run their economy after their debts destroy it; even Dell has pulled out of Ireland and is moving from Limerick to Poland.
Perhaps if MS was under the jurisdiction of the EU, they'll do what the DoJ should have done and will break it up into several MiniSofts.
its not hard at all - slap a openmp pragma on your for loop and you're done. Of course, your loop has to fulfill some obvious requirements of simplicity like not being able to update a variable in one thread and also use it in a different thread (but you can have variables in each thread you combine at the end of the task, for example).