and you'll have your VB revolution on the Linux desktop.
I think back to all the corporate VB applications I've ever had the pleasure to use.... and can't think of any. Now shitty crappy useless poxy annoying pieces of ignorant-mumpty-who-thought-he-was-a-programmer-because-he-could-click-a-few-toolbars ones, there were loads of.
I agree consistency in development toolkits and so on is a good thing, and making it easier to develop GUIs is a good thing (eg use QTCreator), but the 'ease of use' of VB is not necessarily something to emulate, make it difficult enough that you need a little bit of skill and/or knowledge to make it work.
car analogy: You wouldn't want me fixing your car engine, not even with a Haynes manual and all the 'how-to' youtube vids I could surf. I wouldn't want my manager (or salesman) writing line-of-business applications. Not again, please.
no, the registry was an improvement over windows.ini files, however where there was once less than a dozen such files, the registry became a place to store fecking everything, to the point where it became a multi-megabyte monster.
That's the moral of this story, it doesn't matter what you use, or how lovely the tool you choose is - someone can turn it into the beast from the black arse of sysadmin hell if they're not careful.
I hear samba is going to use a registry like system for their Samba 4 development. I doubt that'll be anything near as bad as how the registry turned out.
then you need to move your offices to the middle of a desert. Space problem solved:)
SMEs often get themselves a small server room, and don't plan for expansion. When the time comes to stick more servers in, they usually have to put them in an office instead, with non-redundant power, little cooling. You're not alone there, but it doesn't necessarily apply to datacentres.
Space at datacentres is often the least of their worries nowadays, (it used to be different), but power is the big problem. Even the DCs in the middle of the metropolis has enough space to fit a few servers, but they can't get the power to them if they did.
forget the admins, its the home routers. For everyone who wants to adopt IPv6, there's a shitty cheap router that simply doesn't support it. Unfortunately, the fact that the internet still works is enough to justify not buying a new one (not that there are many about).
If my router supported it easily, and I could just get myself an IPv6 address, I'd be using it. As it is, it requires some hassle, so I don't. That applies to the millions of ignorant users out there who wouldn't know how to set themselves up with IPv6 too.
So until there's a critical mass of IPv6 capable routers, no ISP is going to bother with it, and so no router manufacturer is going to bother upgrading them. The only way I can see it working is if someone starts marketing IPv6-capable routers as somehow better/faster/newer/future proof, then the marketing war might just drive adoption. Either that or the need for many non-NATed IPs per user in the home (eg phones).
true, but the UID stuff is static and regressive - newcomers don't get the chance to participate, which is kinda poor. Perhaps the 'lowest x active users' would be better as old accounts become closed or unused for over a year.
Then I'd have a reason for hunting down all those... ahem, erm, ah.. a reason for popping back to read/. regularly.
if you're suffering from the lack of ponies, try StackOverflow, and its (possibly today only) Cornify button (select a question first, you might have to click it a couple of times).
to be fair to Microsoft the whole compiler team does a great job, the Visual Studio compiler is one of the best. If only MS had been broken up by the DoJ all those years ago, they'd be creating cross-platform developer tools now, and the whole computing landscape would be vastly different.
for heavy maths, the compiler flags make all the difference. Did your compile use the CPU extensions (SSEx etc), if not, you should try turning them on (VS you need to change the platform from the default 'work on anything' to 'Enable Enhanced Instruction Set' (under code generation).
that might make quite a bit of difference, depending on your code.
that's true, but that's solely the exception that proves the rule. (back in the day) if the rest of Windows wasn't so consistent and usable, maybe no-one would have run it to get Office, or it wouldn't have had such a massive take-up.
Most other applications work correctly, and Windows is all the better for it (insert your own 'imagine how bad...' comment here)
Now, I don't care so much about gnome v kde, but I do wish there was more consistency for all Linux GUIs. If everyone had a common standard to work to (eg the Windows Style Guidelines) then the Linux desktop would become a better place to work. MS did wonders for themselves with this, and until recently kept with it - unfortunately, now they've replaced the menu bar with a round button thing, no-one can find the print option anymore - which only goes to show how important and powerful the guidelines were.
Linux has the opportunity to be great (we all know that, even the MS trolls), but isn't necessarily following up on its potential. Gnome v KDE is probably the biggest factor stopping this from happening.
the old ones are very cleanable - unscrew them (yes, screws! not plastic clips) and put the keys section in the dishwasher on the eco setting. Works wonderfully. Do not put the electronic part in there though.
I believe this has nothing to do with combating pirated, cracked, games. Its there to inconvenience the retail user that paid for the game only.
(incidentally, Impulse is a POS. I bought Sins of a Solar Empire, tried to install impulse (needed to actually get the game downloaded) but it barfed, then barfed everytime as it tried to uninstall the previous version, which wasn't installed, so it meant I'd paid for nothing. My support call to Stardock is still waiting for a response. I fixed it in the end by going through the registry deleteing every reference to 'Stardock', took me a f*** hour, there are so many entries in there)
I think a pirate version would have been easier to install, somehow.
Now, if they really want to combat piracy, the answer is regular updates, mods, etc. If I got a pirate version it may be easy to install, but the bits that get added can be difficult if not too much bother to get. A downloaded/updater for purchased users makes the purchase worthwhile just for the convenience.
The managers you are talking to have a budget for a business portal. They want the project to succeed, so that they look good, and they aren't really interested in having money left over in the budget when they are done
That was last year's business plan. This year, you have to achieve the same level of business support with a drastically reduced budget. You want your manager to look good - send him to the board with a successful project implemented for free.
AFAIK no Browser supports VRML, you need a plugin.
That's possibly the reason no-one supports it, you might as well write your 3d graphics in silverlight to get a better userbase.
Hopefully, this will get an implementation embedded in Firefox and Chrome and then we'll see widespread adoption - especially if Google makes its apps 3d.
I'm not sure it'll give rise to "dancing gif" syndrome, but more a replacement for SVG. Then we get better graphics than downloaded compressed bitmaps, and the possibility of doing a lot more in the browser. That's especially important as the browser moves towards being the desktop.
Unfortunately, I see MS getting in there too, even if they're not interested in the technology - its a standard that isn't directX, oh noes - and just want to strangle it or implement their own 'mostly' compatible version with some extensions. (ok, I might be being too harsh on the new Microsoft here as they do seem to be embracing standards as it suits them currently) But, if that can be resisted and it takes off.... I can only see good things ultimately coming from it.
its not them who are the idiots, you mindfucked moron. Its you that's frigging stupid, you idiot.
(I am assuming you're ok with the insults because you say grown men should be able to handle it. Personally, I'm offended by your patronising comment)
The geek in question didn't write a filesystem that corrupts files, the ordered option is on by default, everything works fine. As you'd realise when you understand how many ext3 filesystems are being used out there for such a long time, but if you had half a brain cell you'd realise this. He did write a different, faster option for the FS which is dangerous to use, as your limited intellect has grasped, but he did document it fully, including the dangers in its use. check the man page, if your mind can cope with putting the necessary letters in the right order in a shell prompt.
What next, you're going to criticise the author of rm for writing something so system-destroying as it (when using the right options, of course).
sure, +ve and -ve stimulation are necessary, but you have to consider the amount of over-stimulation in this case. Several people have commented that the fs writer did nothing wrong, that the non-default option is a fast-but-dangerous option if you like living dangerously. Nothing wrong with that if you know you're making those choices (and it was documented, so good for the FS writer).
Now, if Linus wanted to comment how he thought the option could be dropped, be replaced with something different, or otherwise improved upon then that's fine. If he thought it was a poor choice and wanted to say he thought it wasn't a good thing, that's fine too (the negative stimulation!), but as he shouted out someone for being a moron (when they obviously aren't) this negative stimulation is just an attack.
That does nothing to improve a person, that solely makes them withdraw and defend themselves from future attacks. That's not productive or useful to society (you see it in the damaged children who damage themselves and others in turn) or the linux community. Would you contribute if you thought Linus was going to criticise you so vocally and publicly, instead of with a reasoned argument, calmly delivered?
hm. Similar to a parent of two children ranting at them without taking time to think first. Calling them morons is just going to get them growing up to be dysfunctional at best. No wonder the world has a dim view of the "geek" community.
Gnome's policy of (pseudoquote) "there's one best way to do it and we don't want to confuse the users with too many config options" was extremely frustrating for many KDE users and devs, particularly the power users that/like/ to configure the desktop until it uniquely fits them like a glove, while likewise, the KDE "if it can be configured, different people are going to want different things, so let's expose every single possible configuration option to the user in the GUI" was extremely frustrating to many Gnome users and devs, particularly those who just want it to work, damit, because they have work to do.
so the best thing to do, is give a fully configurable system, and ship with a default set of configurations. Choose one at install: 'desktop', 'server', 'custom' or 'mom' configuration options.
dumbing things down because you think your users don't want options is patronising and stupid. even the ones who 'just want it to work' will occasionally disagree with a choice you made for them.
I think multiple desktop environments is still a good thing, but a unified development environment would be even better. That's my problem with Gnome v KDE - not the desktop per se, but the 2 different ways of developing GUIs. If there was just the one, it'd be easier to do the development, things would fit nicer together, they'd probably be better support and facilities for the development. This is one thing Microsoft got right (along with its GUI style guidelines). Think of this like common standards, you can build any website, but you do it using a common set of html primitives; or you can build any linux distro, but you do it with a common kernel.
The redistributables are not exactly a gig - though I always think like that because they are huge (I have to download the full ones to install on my customer's site as they're not connected to the internet)
But: add them up, its not a gig, but its getting there:
Of course with both WAMP and XAMPP taking about three minutes to install I'm not sure that will work
Ah but it will, Microsoft developers don't tend to look outside the box to see if there's anything else out there - they generally assume that MS provides all they would ever need, and if MS doesn't provide it, its either not available at all, or they never needed it anyway.
This is why this will succeed, the MS blogs and communities will pick up on it and suddenly they'll think its the best thing ever. I doubt they'll actually use much PHP, that's just the teaser to pre-populate the site with apps, they'll all get taken over with ASP.NET MVC stuff before too long -the MS crowd just don't like to install 'foreign' stuff like PHP when they will think nothing of installing over a gig of.net framework to start playing with C#.
I'd say there are such things already, though they do depend on the programmer. I don;t think the compiler can parallelise any but the simplest tasks (though to be fair, neither can most programmers).
OpenMP, Intel's TBB etc all try to make parallelising sections of your program easier, so easy that you might actually succeed in making a correct, concurrent application that doesn't have impossible-to-fix bugs.
Yeah, I reckon you've got the reason things are "single-threaded" by design. So the solution is to start getting creative with sections of programs and not the whole.
For example, if you're using OpenMP to introduce parallelisation, you can easily make loops run in multi-core mode, and you'll get compiler errors if you try to parallelise loops that can't be broken down like that.
Like your building analogy - sure, you have to finish one floor before you can put the next one on, but once the floors are up, you can plumb each room up concurrently. You have to then wait until the plumbing and wiring is done before you can start plastering, and then you have to wait for that to dry before you can decorate - but you can then decorate each room concurrently.
Stuff like that will allow you to easily set some parts running concurrently, and I reckon that's as good as we're going to get unless we start thinking in full-on functional-style programming designs. (see the wikipedia entry for a good exmaple) But I don't hold out hope for that anytime soon, its still hard to get right if the task is not simple.
Besides, who really needs 8 cores anyway - unless there are specialist tasks (and I can think of only a few) the biggest problems we have are memory and IO bandwidth, not CPU performance.
Learn the basics of the language REALLY WELL and be able to crank out functional, readable, SIMPLE code, quickly.
this is good advice- maintainable, easy to understand code is the best (and the best programmers write the simplest code that makes everyone else look at it and say "this coding lark isn't as hard as people make out"). But never underestimate the rare times when you need to know more than the lowest-common programmer.
After all, if you're no better than some outsourced dev from Elbonia, expect you find yourself replaced by an outsourced dev from Elbonia.
Slashdot Mirror
and you'll have your VB revolution on the Linux desktop.
I think back to all the corporate VB applications I've ever had the pleasure to use.... and can't think of any. Now shitty crappy useless poxy annoying pieces of ignorant-mumpty-who-thought-he-was-a-programmer-because-he-could-click-a-few-toolbars ones, there were loads of.
I agree consistency in development toolkits and so on is a good thing, and making it easier to develop GUIs is a good thing (eg use QTCreator), but the 'ease of use' of VB is not necessarily something to emulate, make it difficult enough that you need a little bit of skill and/or knowledge to make it work.
car analogy: You wouldn't want me fixing your car engine, not even with a Haynes manual and all the 'how-to' youtube vids I could surf. I wouldn't want my manager (or salesman) writing line-of-business applications. Not again, please.
no, the registry was an improvement over windows .ini files, however where there was once less than a dozen such files, the registry became a place to store fecking everything, to the point where it became a multi-megabyte monster.
That's the moral of this story, it doesn't matter what you use, or how lovely the tool you choose is - someone can turn it into the beast from the black arse of sysadmin hell if they're not careful.
I hear samba is going to use a registry like system for their Samba 4 development. I doubt that'll be anything near as bad as how the registry turned out.
then you need to move your offices to the middle of a desert. Space problem solved :)
SMEs often get themselves a small server room, and don't plan for expansion. When the time comes to stick more servers in, they usually have to put them in an office instead, with non-redundant power, little cooling. You're not alone there, but it doesn't necessarily apply to datacentres.
Space at datacentres is often the least of their worries nowadays, (it used to be different), but power is the big problem. Even the DCs in the middle of the metropolis has enough space to fit a few servers, but they can't get the power to them if they did.
forget the admins, its the home routers. For everyone who wants to adopt IPv6, there's a shitty cheap router that simply doesn't support it. Unfortunately, the fact that the internet still works is enough to justify not buying a new one (not that there are many about).
If my router supported it easily, and I could just get myself an IPv6 address, I'd be using it. As it is, it requires some hassle, so I don't. That applies to the millions of ignorant users out there who wouldn't know how to set themselves up with IPv6 too.
So until there's a critical mass of IPv6 capable routers, no ISP is going to bother with it, and so no router manufacturer is going to bother upgrading them. The only way I can see it working is if someone starts marketing IPv6-capable routers as somehow better/faster/newer/future proof, then the marketing war might just drive adoption. Either that or the need for many non-NATed IPs per user in the home (eg phones).
true, but the UID stuff is static and regressive - newcomers don't get the chance to participate, which is kinda poor. Perhaps the 'lowest x active users' would be better as old accounts become closed or unused for over a year.
Then I'd have a reason for hunting down all those... ahem, erm, ah.. a reason for popping back to read /. regularly.
if you're suffering from the lack of ponies, try StackOverflow, and its (possibly today only) Cornify button (select a question first, you might have to click it a couple of times).
Looking forward to my Fool Story achievement!
to be fair to Microsoft the whole compiler team does a great job, the Visual Studio compiler is one of the best. If only MS had been broken up by the DoJ all those years ago, they'd be creating cross-platform developer tools now, and the whole computing landscape would be vastly different.
for heavy maths, the compiler flags make all the difference. Did your compile use the CPU extensions (SSEx etc), if not, you should try turning them on (VS you need to change the platform from the default 'work on anything' to 'Enable Enhanced Instruction Set' (under code generation).
that might make quite a bit of difference, depending on your code.
that's true, but that's solely the exception that proves the rule. (back in the day) if the rest of Windows wasn't so consistent and usable, maybe no-one would have run it to get Office, or it wouldn't have had such a massive take-up.
Most other applications work correctly, and Windows is all the better for it (insert your own 'imagine how bad...' comment here)
the troll has 1 relevant thing to say here:
instead of getting your shit together.
Now, I don't care so much about gnome v kde, but I do wish there was more consistency for all Linux GUIs. If everyone had a common standard to work to (eg the Windows Style Guidelines) then the Linux desktop would become a better place to work. MS did wonders for themselves with this, and until recently kept with it - unfortunately, now they've replaced the menu bar with a round button thing, no-one can find the print option anymore - which only goes to show how important and powerful the guidelines were.
Linux has the opportunity to be great (we all know that, even the MS trolls), but isn't necessarily following up on its potential. Gnome v KDE is probably the biggest factor stopping this from happening.
the old ones are very cleanable - unscrew them (yes, screws! not plastic clips) and put the keys section in the dishwasher on the eco setting. Works wonderfully. Do not put the electronic part in there though.
I believe this has nothing to do with combating pirated, cracked, games. Its there to inconvenience the retail user that paid for the game only.
(incidentally, Impulse is a POS. I bought Sins of a Solar Empire, tried to install impulse (needed to actually get the game downloaded) but it barfed, then barfed everytime as it tried to uninstall the previous version, which wasn't installed, so it meant I'd paid for nothing. My support call to Stardock is still waiting for a response. I fixed it in the end by going through the registry deleteing every reference to 'Stardock', took me a f*** hour, there are so many entries in there)
I think a pirate version would have been easier to install, somehow.
Now, if they really want to combat piracy, the answer is regular updates, mods, etc. If I got a pirate version it may be easy to install, but the bits that get added can be difficult if not too much bother to get. A downloaded/updater for purchased users makes the purchase worthwhile just for the convenience.
The managers you are talking to have a budget for a business portal. They want the project to succeed, so that they look good, and they aren't really interested in having money left over in the budget when they are done
That was last year's business plan. This year, you have to achieve the same level of business support with a drastically reduced budget. You want your manager to look good - send him to the board with a successful project implemented for free.
AFAIK no Browser supports VRML, you need a plugin.
That's possibly the reason no-one supports it, you might as well write your 3d graphics in silverlight to get a better userbase.
Hopefully, this will get an implementation embedded in Firefox and Chrome and then we'll see widespread adoption - especially if Google makes its apps 3d.
I'm not sure it'll give rise to "dancing gif" syndrome, but more a replacement for SVG. Then we get better graphics than downloaded compressed bitmaps, and the possibility of doing a lot more in the browser. That's especially important as the browser moves towards being the desktop.
Unfortunately, I see MS getting in there too, even if they're not interested in the technology - its a standard that isn't directX, oh noes - and just want to strangle it or implement their own 'mostly' compatible version with some extensions. (ok, I might be being too harsh on the new Microsoft here as they do seem to be embracing standards as it suits them currently) But, if that can be resisted and it takes off.... I can only see good things ultimately coming from it.
its not them who are the idiots, you mindfucked moron. Its you that's frigging stupid, you idiot.
(I am assuming you're ok with the insults because you say grown men should be able to handle it. Personally, I'm offended by your patronising comment)
The geek in question didn't write a filesystem that corrupts files, the ordered option is on by default, everything works fine. As you'd realise when you understand how many ext3 filesystems are being used out there for such a long time, but if you had half a brain cell you'd realise this. He did write a different, faster option for the FS which is dangerous to use, as your limited intellect has grasped, but he did document it fully, including the dangers in its use. check the man page, if your mind can cope with putting the necessary letters in the right order in a shell prompt.
What next, you're going to criticise the author of rm for writing something so system-destroying as it (when using the right options, of course).
PS. I'm not offended by your post really, enjoy :)
sure, +ve and -ve stimulation are necessary, but you have to consider the amount of over-stimulation in this case. Several people have commented that the fs writer did nothing wrong, that the non-default option is a fast-but-dangerous option if you like living dangerously. Nothing wrong with that if you know you're making those choices (and it was documented, so good for the FS writer).
Now, if Linus wanted to comment how he thought the option could be dropped, be replaced with something different, or otherwise improved upon then that's fine. If he thought it was a poor choice and wanted to say he thought it wasn't a good thing, that's fine too (the negative stimulation!), but as he shouted out someone for being a moron (when they obviously aren't) this negative stimulation is just an attack.
That does nothing to improve a person, that solely makes them withdraw and defend themselves from future attacks. That's not productive or useful to society (you see it in the damaged children who damage themselves and others in turn) or the linux community. Would you contribute if you thought Linus was going to criticise you so vocally and publicly, instead of with a reasoned argument, calmly delivered?
hm. Similar to a parent of two children ranting at them without taking time to think first. Calling them morons is just going to get them growing up to be dysfunctional at best. No wonder the world has a dim view of the "geek" community.
It seems to me that, as usual, the issue is not as clear cut as it first appears
Gnome's policy of (pseudoquote) "there's one best way to do it and we don't want to confuse the users with too many config options" was extremely frustrating for many KDE users and devs, particularly the power users that /like/ to configure the desktop until it uniquely fits them like a glove, while likewise, the KDE "if it can be configured, different people are going to want different things, so let's expose every single possible configuration option to the user in the GUI" was extremely frustrating to many Gnome users and devs, particularly those who just want it to work, damit, because they have work to do.
so the best thing to do, is give a fully configurable system, and ship with a default set of configurations. Choose one at install: 'desktop', 'server', 'custom' or 'mom' configuration options.
dumbing things down because you think your users don't want options is patronising and stupid. even the ones who 'just want it to work' will occasionally disagree with a choice you made for them.
I think multiple desktop environments is still a good thing, but a unified development environment would be even better. That's my problem with Gnome v KDE - not the desktop per se, but the 2 different ways of developing GUIs. If there was just the one, it'd be easier to do the development, things would fit nicer together, they'd probably be better support and facilities for the development. This is one thing Microsoft got right (along with its GUI style guidelines). Think of this like common standards, you can build any website, but you do it using a common set of html primitives; or you can build any linux distro, but you do it with a common kernel.
The redistributables are not exactly a gig - though I always think like that because they are huge (I have to download the full ones to install on my customer's site as they're not connected to the internet)
But: add them up, its not a gig, but its getting there:
plus another 50 odd Mb for the service packs.
Of course with both WAMP and XAMPP taking about three minutes to install I'm not sure that will work
Ah but it will, Microsoft developers don't tend to look outside the box to see if there's anything else out there - they generally assume that MS provides all they would ever need, and if MS doesn't provide it, its either not available at all, or they never needed it anyway.
This is why this will succeed, the MS blogs and communities will pick up on it and suddenly they'll think its the best thing ever. I doubt they'll actually use much PHP, that's just the teaser to pre-populate the site with apps, they'll all get taken over with ASP.NET MVC stuff before too long -the MS crowd just don't like to install 'foreign' stuff like PHP when they will think nothing of installing over a gig of .net framework to start playing with C#.
So - I don't know if it'll work well either.
I'd say there are such things already, though they do depend on the programmer. I don;t think the compiler can parallelise any but the simplest tasks (though to be fair, neither can most programmers).
OpenMP, Intel's TBB etc all try to make parallelising sections of your program easier, so easy that you might actually succeed in making a correct, concurrent application that doesn't have impossible-to-fix bugs.
Yeah, I reckon you've got the reason things are "single-threaded" by design. So the solution is to start getting creative with sections of programs and not the whole.
For example, if you're using OpenMP to introduce parallelisation, you can easily make loops run in multi-core mode, and you'll get compiler errors if you try to parallelise loops that can't be broken down like that.
Like your building analogy - sure, you have to finish one floor before you can put the next one on, but once the floors are up, you can plumb each room up concurrently. You have to then wait until the plumbing and wiring is done before you can start plastering, and then you have to wait for that to dry before you can decorate - but you can then decorate each room concurrently.
Stuff like that will allow you to easily set some parts running concurrently, and I reckon that's as good as we're going to get unless we start thinking in full-on functional-style programming designs. (see the wikipedia entry for a good exmaple) But I don't hold out hope for that anytime soon, its still hard to get right if the task is not simple.
Besides, who really needs 8 cores anyway - unless there are specialist tasks (and I can think of only a few) the biggest problems we have are memory and IO bandwidth, not CPU performance.
Learn the basics of the language REALLY WELL and be able to crank out functional, readable, SIMPLE code, quickly.
this is good advice- maintainable, easy to understand code is the best (and the best programmers write the simplest code that makes everyone else look at it and say "this coding lark isn't as hard as people make out"). But never underestimate the rare times when you need to know more than the lowest-common programmer.
After all, if you're no better than some outsourced dev from Elbonia, expect you find yourself replaced by an outsourced dev from Elbonia.
Even though Microsoft streets used to ship with win95, way before TomTom existed,
someone else who thinks that SatNav is a 21st century invention.
From http://investors.tomtom.com/overview.cfm?Language=1
"TomTom was founded by Harold Goddijn, Peter-Frans Pauwels and Pieter Geelen in 1991"
That'll be 4 years before Win95.