Is it what it is. If women choose to opt out, for whatever reason, so what. Another example of trying to ascribe a problem to something where none exists.
-M
PS: My advice, unless you are active in an open source project, i.e. passionate, don't bother with any CS programs, guy or girl. One word - India.
But I think that's as much as a function of the fact that a developer today is standing on the shoulders of giants more than ever.
To quote Isaac Newton, "If I have been able to see farther, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
Frankly, we've hit a point where there's a lot less "science" in Computer Science, or rather, the need for such training in many programming jobs.
There's nothing wrong with a well rounded education but for some people they don't have the time or inclination to take on full engineering curriculums (as I did).
While I don't mind have gotten a rounded education in light of where tech careers have gone, it's too bad I didn't follow my father... construction. Given his real estate holdings, I doubt I will reach his station in life (economically) if I stay on a pure tech track... highly unlikely.
So if CS degrees are nowadays more about vocational training, so what. A tech degree of any kind, no matter how full of yourself you are, is not going to take you where it once might. That's reality. For all the noise we hear about a focus on math & science, it seems to me to be rendered somewhat moot since some Big Wig Biz guy is going to offshore such work anyway. So I ask, what's the point?
Don't get me wrong, a good foundation in math is good, we just don't all need to become math majors...
If you manage to learn and apply algebra, you can at least solve some practical math problems. But considering some of the stories of people who can't deal with fractions, well, obviously we're failing somewhere in the math department.
Moore's Law has eroded the need for such knowledge. It would be like concerning myself on how to design circuits to convert a DC current to AC current because I happen to use devices that use electricity, e.g., my toaster (as in bread).
I learned assembly long ago, still retaining a fair amount of it (80x86). There have been a few occasions where I've called upon its use, yeah twice in the last eight years... and that's about it.
Yes some people who write games are still concerne with assembly as are people in embedded markets. But those jobs, situations and skills are niche, much like the Win32 programming I used to do in the early 90's.
90% of IT jobs are with non-tech companies. Those situations are about the last place you will find anyone caring about something called "assembly language."
A perfect example of this is Intuit. They've managed to keep Microsoft at bay despite fierce competition. Those flames were fanned when an acquisition of Intuit fell through therefore strengthening Microsoft's resolve.
Nevertheless Intuit is still with unlike lots of MS road kill that comes to mind.
This question to some degree seems pointless. It assumes that somehow Microsoft's desktop monopoly will mean that people will stop using a web application (search) with a brand that has become incredibly powerful.
This seems like a variation on all the claims that Apple was on its death bed eight years ago. In fact I remember seeing NBC News running a story that seemed to echo this industry consensus.
And despite Microsoft's desktop domination, it seems most Microsoft employees (much to the chagrin of MS management) are opting to patronize Apple with its latest creation, the iPod. The story in Wired was featured in Slashdot just recently.
Google is incredibly entrenched in people's minds. It has become a powerful brand. Evidence of this is the fact that people readily use its name as a verb.
Microsoft setting its search engine as the default for whatever future browser they release will *not* cause people to stop using Google.
I TOTALLY AGREE. Bill Gates is probably the biggest philanthropist that has ever lived. I lived in Seattle for six years where this type of news tended to be more readily reported, even more modest charity. I don't recall Paul Allen doing much. In fact there was a huge controversy several years ago when the a-hole bought a piece of land on an island and then booted a summer camp that had operated for years under the previous owner. A summer camp for inner city youth. It caused quite a stink and frankly says a lot about Paul Allen vs. Bill Gates. The former is an a**hole, plain and simple.
Tell me, you were an avid user of software leveraging VMs on the IBM PC? I highly doubt. Yeah sure we all know UCSD P-Code Pascal compilers were creaming Turbo Pascal... if you believe that, recheck your history.
Yeah sure the concepts were there, so what. People in the days of the IBM PC wanted SPEED above all else.
Yes the MS-DOS API was an interrupt drive interface, do you think if I said "INT 21h" it would mean much to many people here?
Not sure what point you're trying to make here. Mine was simple, VMs were not widely used on the IBM PC. Having had one, I certainly never cared to leverage such a system.
Sorry anonymous, it wasn't that. It was Lotus betting on OS/2. People's short memory forget that OS/2 was codeveloped by Microsoft alongside IBM. When OS/2 sales failed to materialize Microsoft persisted with its Windows development efforts. When Windows 3.s sales rocketed, so did Microsoft business apps because at that point in time, Lotus et al were way behind the curve. They had simply figured Windows 3.x was just another OS/2 from Microsoft and it wouldn't go anywhere. They were wrong. By the time Lotus and other companies like WordPefect released Windows (which had become wildly popular) products, they were seriously behind Microsoft. The rest as they say is history.
Well Mitch Kapor founded Lotus. The individual (I forget his name) who did the coding (someone else entirely, Kapor was the business man) did it all in a very short period of time pretty much by himself. He was writing 1-2-3 in assembly language. Yes a concept that is hard to believe for many Slashdotters with all their talk of PHP, PERL, Python et al, but back then, writing desktop applications in assembly language was quite common and in fact a *NECESSITY*. Why? Because other programs were written in this manner manipulating the IBM PC's hardware directly. "Device drivers? MS-DOS APIs? What's that and why bother?" was often the viewpoint held during those times. Programs were significantly more zippy when the IBM PC's hardware was manipulated with hand written assembly. So much so that it was a business necessity... if you wanted to compete in the IBM PC software space. Otherwise your competitors had a major advantage over you - SPEED of the application.
This is all hard to appreciate today given how powerful computers have become. Virtual machines? Not on your life, e.g., the UCSD P-Code system never caught on (the notion of virtual machines was pioneered at the U of California, San Diego):
http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/
Why didn't it catch on? Simple, speed. The IBM PC had a 4.77 MHz 8088 processor and hand written/tuned assembly code creamed practically any program written in a high level language. In fact for years "PC Magazine" (which is still very much alive) would publish the assembly language listings to many of the MS-DOS utilities featured in its covers. Needless to say the idea of that magazine publishing assembly language listings today is quite laughable.
I was around in the 80's. It was my teens and it was in 1984 that I found computing as a hobby. Not too long after that, still in the 80's, I woundup doing work for a trader in one of Chicago's commodity markets and pretty much everyone and their mother used Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft had "Multiplan" - their answer to Lotus 1-2-3 (the reigning spreadsheet of the day) but no one really cared.
In fact, Microsoft's software lineup was incredibly diverse since it was a young company trying to put its hand into every market to shore the perception that they had a hand in anything and everything. Sort of like today except back then companies constituted real competition vs. today where you're practically assured of being roadkill if Microsoft sets its sites on you. There was "Microsoft LISP" (no, I'm not kidding; it was actually another company's product repackaged) and Microsoft even had software that worked on the Commodore 64 home computer. I mentioned Multiplan earlier, Microsoft's spreadsheet, well not only could you buy it for the IBM PC, check out this screenshot of their Commodore 64 version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:C64_Multiplan .p ng
Am I rueful? A little bit. Do I miss those days? Not a chance. What you can do today with a home computer vs. back then is night and day. In retrospect it is slightly surprising that things held my attention as they did. The Net, tons of free software (open source and otherwise), powerful desktop computers all were quite some time off. If you thought dialup today is bad, try operating on the common standard of the day, 1200 baud modems, as in 120 characters per second, as in, yes it took several seconds to fill an 80x25 text screen which most people had in the form of MS-DOS (forget GUI desktops, they weren't common place for quite some time to come).
What I so miss however is the the sense that there were lots of great things happening. They're happening today, but the attitude back then was different. For example, you could realistically expect a company to try something "way out there." For example, I was aware of one Chicago trading company (again, commodities markets) had purchased LISP machines to see if it could come up with AI strategies to improve their trading systems:
http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbol ic s-info/symbolics.html
While open source is prevalent today in some circles, companies have moved to a situation where vendor support is an end all, be all when it comes to decision making. They can be risk averse to the point of self-detriment resulting in very staid environments at times. One example of this is the IT department for the state of Texas. A friend who works there told me once that unless some set of software came on the HP-UX CD, forget about using it. For him, this meant forgetting about PERL since it was not shipped on the HP-UX CDs (this was a few years ago). Even my situation today reflects this to a degree. I work at a very large financial institution and Apache is non-existent in our production systems. While internal Apache sites can readily be deployed to share infromation with coworkers Apache on customer facing servers is a no go.
There just seemed to be more variety in what companies might try because the IT market hadn't settled down. While open source is great (something that I personally have great faith in), back then we did not have today's situation where IT like the automotive industry had just a handful of companies owning respective markets, a.k.a., consolidation. As a frame of reference around the turn of the 20th century there were 30+ automotive companies in the USA. By the 30's things had settled down to the "Big Three" that we've known internalized for quite some time. Today Lotus' 1-2-3 is just a memory as are Symbolics machine, the Commodore 64 and many, MANY other things.
-M
PS: Having said that, I have a pretty sweet desktop these days - a 64 bith Athlon system. The things I do today are pretty amazing in and of themselves... thanks to Moore's Law.
YES!!!! I'm laughing at all these "I used X to solve problems like this" where X is some RDBMS. Listen up folks, you can't trivially implement a tick database with such a system. 'Nuff said.
No offense but you clearly don't understand the problem space of "tick databases". In a nutshell you have data that is constantly flowing in and needs to be indexed real time. With the ultimate goal of being able to satisfy queries on this data in "real time."
A relational database cannot give this to you. If you take the naive approach and try to build such a system with a RDBMS product you wind up with a situation where eventually your system keels over since all it's trying to do is update its indices. Remember, a RDBMS has to keep its indices up to date to satisfy queries in a "reasonable" period of time. Eventually what happens is that the RDBMS winds up thrashing and spends all of its time trying to update indices. Never mind that the tick data is flowing in and completely saturating your ability to assimilate it into your database. The end result is that the system fails.
Some of the exchanges (Chicago Mercantil Exchange) have symbols where sixty transactions per second occur. And this is just for one symbol/instruction, e.g., some contract in the commodities market. When you take the Chicago Mercantile Exchange along with all the other exchanges and various derivatives, e.g., options, single stock futures, this amounts to TENS OF THOUSANDS of symbols/instruments. Most people are used to hearing NASDAQ and NYSE symbols, e.g., MSFT. But the commodity markets are incredibly busy and it's a space your average person hears very little of. When a hurricane comes in and wipes out the orange crop in Florida, people holding futures contracts on oranges get rich (one example). Places like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade are two such places where these kinds of contracts are traded.
Anyway, it doesn't matter WHAT version of MySQL you were using - a MySQL database is not going to allow you to build a tick database.
The poser of the question (that started this thread) signals his ignorance of microprocessor design and underscores what AMD has said all along, and everyone else who hasfollowed the industry since when there was much more competition in the microprocessor, namely you can't juxtpose microprocessors on clock frequency alone. Anyone remember the Intel i860? Or when MIPS was a stand alone company competing against Intel (seemingly). If you say no to these things, that probably explains why you're even pondering this stuff. Nothing to ponder, some of us have known this all along.
Your opinion is wrong. The X Window System on Mac OS X is nothing new, it's been there for quite some time. It's just a how-to article. Nothing more, nothing less.
So, if I go to the very bad parts of the South Side where I grew up I should conclude that that entire city is a haven for illegal activity? This analogy comes to mind in light of where I grew up. Likewise, if some E.T. come to planet earth and saw the massive amounts of p0rn in terms of web content, he might conclude that the Net is a vehicle for a sex crazed race, therefore news sites, e-commerce,/. et al must be anomalies.
I see no substance to this claim having participated in IRC channels myself and pointing out to my analogies.
MS' Office suite has a stranglehold in corporate offices but while many people are used to Outlook, using a different email client is not out of the question. It's often Excel and PowerPoint and Word documents floating around that causes business people to have little choice (because like 95+% of their peers use it - inside/outside the company).
Email on the other hand is a different story. I was very impressed with Evolution on LINUX. Having a Windows port would at least pry one finger on Microsoft's stranglehold in corporate offices... maybe.
I know the/. crowd is very anti-MS but the reality is, most business people really don't care about this stuff. As long as it gets the job done they're cool. Business people who might raise an eyebrow are CIOs who want to cut costs but MS could easily give away Outlook and see the situation as a "we got take it in the gut to keep Word, Excel and PowerPoint entrenched." Do not be surprised if MS were to take such a stance.
If they did, the motivation for CIOs to use Evolution disappears.
There's also the security argument but many larger companies have wised up and your Joe Average User runs in a limited account to stop their desktop from becoming a festering pool of viruses.
The/. crowd may also laugh at "retraining costs" argument (since invariably companies do consider this) since we're talking "email" here. However, given the amazing inflexibility I've witnessed with the average person during my lifetime (even among the tech ranks), there's some teeth to this argument.
Home users often fall in a few buckets:
1) Web based mail 2) AOL mail 3) Still blissfully ignorant and using Outlook Express 4) Have a geek friend who has proselytized open source and are now running an open source email client, e.g., Mozilla's client.
That leaves primarily the third group (and some segment of the fourth group) as candidates for Evolution. Assuming NOVELL doesn't expect to charge people for this. This will have some impact but nothing dramatic.
I personally, gasp, went back to Outlook. I liked the changes they made in Office 2003 and they eliminated some of the annoyances I had with previous versions of Outlook. I operated with the Mozilla email client for quite some time having eschewed Office 2000 and Office XP.
I would be happy to go to Evolution if for no other reason than I discovered that MS is as usual thwarting my attempt to run securely. Being a super savvy user (as well as a developer/security person) I happen to run Outlook in a stunted account, i.e. I run it in a different account (Windows "runas" command) and played with ACLs so that sensitive areas such as C:\WINDOWS and "C:\Program Files" can't be written to). You might ask why I didn't create a limitd account and run Outlook with that. Turns out if you do, Office will not leverage Windows XP's themes. Stupid. I don't like the "classic" Windows motif and prefer the default that comes with Windows XP. Anyway, I discovered much to my chagrin that despite running Outlook in this fashion if I were to run Word (under my normal desktop account), save a document, then try to reopen that document later, Word simply cannot find the document. It will repeatedly stick up an error dialog on each attempt UNTIL I close Outlook, which happens to be running under a different user!!!
I've done Win32 development. It would seem the moronic MS Office development is generating a cookie, alias, moniker, etc., based on the window station I am logged into. They are probably using the Win32 handle and are keying into some shared memory. God for all you know they could be generating strings and putting them into the Global Atom Table.
Why would they do such a thing? Because *no one* would EVER think of running desktop apps in a secure fashion... right? What they have done is simply architecturally unsound.
No offense, I don't think you understand what's going on here.
First, I'm not much of a fan of DCOM, even though I did spend 2-1/2 years at Microsoft. While DCOM and DCE RPCs are conceptually the same, the problem here is DCOM laden Windows (many entry points).
I have a different opinion of just plain COM (no crossing network wires). MS has done a good job defining many interfaces and like it or not, OLE Containers allow for the building of larger UIs from components. MS had this right YEARS ago. Never mind JavaBeans et al.
As far as this somehow polluting *NIX, what you have observed is an implementation issue. That and MS doesn't have enough code reviews.
There is nothing wrong with the concept of Remote Procedure Calls. The whole idea of calling into remote code was pioneered by Sun with their Network File System (NFS) except that because they were the vanguard, DCE RPCs which came later were incompatible not to mention there were the old *NIX turf wars and RPCs were another schism (outside of System V vs. BSD).
Like any network service (NFS being no exception) if you can connect to a network socket and send the "right" set of bytes, you can potentially elicit undesirable effects (from the perspective of the owner of the computer system of course).
Anwyay, MS simply went "DCOM happy" and exposed many more services than a typical *NIX box might expose... serving as entry points... and without a firewall, they were asking for trouble.
The other problem with DCOM and DCE RPCs is that:
1) Most C++ developers who think they're good can't code for sh*t in that language.
2) The old adage of "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" applies. The propensity to decompose everything to C++ interfaces with the DCOM/RPC crowd went overboard.
3) C++ is just too low level for many things that need to be done nowadays. The argument of "C++ is fast" has been consistently assaulted by Moore's Law giving that notion about as much relevance as the idea of coding contemporary applications in assembly language. With the computing power afforded nowadays, it is simply not worth dealing with memory management and the memory leaks that are bound to happen and cause system hiccups (or outright failures). Yes there are some applications that demand it, but those are the exception, not the rule. And just like the guy who write graphics drivers for me, I will leave those tasks to someone else.
4) Lastly, the Net and the high interconnectivity called for in mixed environments (which may not be DCE-RPC enabled) it is not worth architecting large systems with around DCE-RPCs.
In my experiences I found #1 to be a biggest issue.
I remember I would ask people to rank themselves on a scale from 1 to 10 with C++. I would qualify the upper tiers noting that "If you say you're an 8 you should be able to tell me in what situations you want to write a copy constructor... off the top of your head." Many people would respond with "8" - guess what was my first question? And most were clueless to answer it.
Having worked at Andersen Consulting little more than a decade ago and seeing the dismal IT failures of EDS has had in England, when I here of vast amounts of money wasted on failed IT projects these companies immediately come to mind.
Windows' TCP/IP stack is known to suck compared to various *NIXs.
I recall years ago having a 450 MHz AMD K6-2 LINUX box with 128 MB of RAM consistently beating out a 900 MHz Athlon with 768 MB of RAM (running Windows) when it came to downloads over my broadband connection.
Given Mac OS X's pedigree, this does not surprise me.
"Macintosh vs. Windows" is totally irrelevant here... but given that Macintoshes now use an OS based on UNIX, it certainly makes them stand out.
I might also point out that Hotmail for a time (and may very well still be) was using FreeBSD for its DNS servers... that's because when MS tried using their own "dogfood" (Windows 2000), it keeled over.
I have to agree. Casual end users are largely ignorant and rather blissful about the Net. This is also complicated by over eager kids in some househods to click on "Yes" to anything that pops up and/or are installing thus facilitating the compromise of computers.
Security and convenience are inversely proportional to each other.
Until the consequences of ignorance start exceeding those of convenience the status quo will continue to exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it what it is. If women choose to opt out, for whatever reason, so what. Another example of trying to ascribe a problem to something where none exists.
-M
PS: My advice, unless you are active in an open source project, i.e. passionate, don't bother with any CS programs, guy or girl. One word - India.
But I think that's as much as a function of the fact that a developer today is standing on the shoulders of giants more than ever.
To quote Isaac Newton, "If I have been able to see farther, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
Frankly, we've hit a point where there's a lot less "science" in Computer Science, or rather, the need for such training in many programming jobs.
There's nothing wrong with a well rounded education but for some people they don't have the time or inclination to take on full engineering curriculums (as I did).
While I don't mind have gotten a rounded education in light of where tech careers have gone, it's too bad I didn't follow my father... construction. Given his real estate holdings, I doubt I will reach his station in life (economically) if I stay on a pure tech track... highly unlikely.
So if CS degrees are nowadays more about vocational training, so what. A tech degree of any kind, no matter how full of yourself you are, is not going to take you where it once might. That's reality. For all the noise we hear about a focus on math & science, it seems to me to be rendered somewhat moot since some Big Wig Biz guy is going to offshore such work anyway. So I ask, what's the point?
Don't get me wrong, a good foundation in math is good, we just don't all need to become math majors...
If you manage to learn and apply algebra, you can at least solve some practical math problems. But considering some of the stories of people who can't deal with fractions, well, obviously we're failing somewhere in the math department.
Anyway, just rambling now...
-M
Sure, and you and everyone you know is working on Doom3 or a competitor?
Just because you use it, doesn't mean you engineer it.
You use a TV... when was the last time you even thought of any of the eletronics inside of it?
-M
Moore's Law has eroded the need for such knowledge. It would be like concerning myself on how to design circuits to convert a DC current to AC current because I happen to use devices that use electricity, e.g., my toaster (as in bread).
I learned assembly long ago, still retaining a fair amount of it (80x86). There have been a few occasions where I've called upon its use, yeah twice in the last eight years... and that's about it.
Yes some people who write games are still concerne with assembly as are people in embedded markets. But those jobs, situations and skills are niche, much like the Win32 programming I used to do in the early 90's.
90% of IT jobs are with non-tech companies. Those situations are about the last place you will find anyone caring about something called "assembly language."
-M
It is possible to beat Microsoft.
A perfect example of this is Intuit. They've managed to keep Microsoft at bay despite fierce competition. Those flames were fanned when an acquisition of Intuit fell through therefore strengthening Microsoft's resolve.
Nevertheless Intuit is still with unlike lots of MS road kill that comes to mind.
This question to some degree seems pointless. It assumes that somehow Microsoft's desktop monopoly will mean that people will stop using a web application (search) with a brand that has become incredibly powerful.
This seems like a variation on all the claims that Apple was on its death bed eight years ago. In fact I remember seeing NBC News running a story that seemed to echo this industry consensus.
And despite Microsoft's desktop domination, it seems most Microsoft employees (much to the chagrin of MS management) are opting to patronize Apple with its latest creation, the iPod. The story in Wired was featured in Slashdot just recently.
Google is incredibly entrenched in people's minds. It has become a powerful brand. Evidence of this is the fact that people readily use its name as a verb.
Microsoft setting its search engine as the default for whatever future browser they release will *not* cause people to stop using Google.
-M
I TOTALLY AGREE. Bill Gates is probably the biggest philanthropist that has ever lived. I lived in Seattle for six years where this type of news tended to be more readily reported, even more modest charity. I don't recall Paul Allen doing much. In fact there was a huge controversy several years ago when the a-hole bought a piece of land on an island and then booted a summer camp that had operated for years under the previous owner. A summer camp for inner city youth. It caused quite a stink and frankly says a lot about Paul Allen vs. Bill Gates. The former is an a**hole, plain and simple.
-M
Including using a borg Gates in light of his philanthropy. It's just plain puerile.
-M
PS: Avid LINUX user.
Tell me, you were an avid user of software leveraging VMs on the IBM PC? I highly doubt. Yeah sure we all know UCSD P-Code Pascal compilers were creaming Turbo Pascal... if you believe that, recheck your history.
Yeah sure the concepts were there, so what. People in the days of the IBM PC wanted SPEED above all else.
Yes the MS-DOS API was an interrupt drive interface, do you think if I said "INT 21h" it would mean much to many people here?
Not sure what point you're trying to make here. Mine was simple, VMs were not widely used on the IBM PC. Having had one, I certainly never cared to leverage such a system.
Nuff said,
-M
What's your point? Go troll somewhere else.
Sorry anonymous, it wasn't that. It was Lotus betting on OS/2. People's short memory forget that OS/2 was codeveloped by Microsoft alongside IBM. When OS/2 sales failed to materialize Microsoft persisted with its Windows development efforts. When Windows 3.s sales rocketed, so did Microsoft business apps because at that point in time, Lotus et al were way behind the curve. They had simply figured Windows 3.x was just another OS/2 from Microsoft and it wouldn't go anywhere. They were wrong. By the time Lotus and other companies like WordPefect released Windows (which had become wildly popular) products, they were seriously behind Microsoft. The rest as they say is history.
-M
Well Mitch Kapor founded Lotus. The individual (I forget his name) who did the coding (someone else entirely, Kapor was the business man) did it all in a very short period of time pretty much by himself. He was writing 1-2-3 in assembly language. Yes a concept that is hard to believe for many Slashdotters with all their talk of PHP, PERL, Python et al, but back then, writing desktop applications in assembly language was quite common and in fact a *NECESSITY*. Why? Because other programs were written in this manner manipulating the IBM PC's hardware directly. "Device drivers? MS-DOS APIs? What's that and why bother?" was often the viewpoint held during those times. Programs were significantly more zippy when the IBM PC's hardware was manipulated with hand written assembly. So much so that it was a business necessity... if you wanted to compete in the IBM PC software space. Otherwise your competitors had a major advantage over you - SPEED of the application.
This is all hard to appreciate today given how powerful computers have become. Virtual machines? Not on your life, e.g., the UCSD P-Code system never caught on (the notion of virtual machines was pioneered at the U of California, San Diego):
http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/
Why didn't it catch on? Simple, speed. The IBM PC had a 4.77 MHz 8088 processor and hand written/tuned assembly code creamed practically any program written in a high level language. In fact for years "PC Magazine" (which is still very much alive) would publish the assembly language listings to many of the MS-DOS utilities featured in its covers. Needless to say the idea of that magazine publishing assembly language listings today is quite laughable.
-M
I was around in the 80's. It was my teens and it was in 1984 that I found computing as a hobby. Not too long after that, still in the 80's, I woundup doing work for a trader in one of Chicago's commodity markets and pretty much everyone and their mother used Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft had "Multiplan" - their answer to Lotus 1-2-3 (the reigning spreadsheet of the day) but no one really cared.
n .p ng
l ic s-info/symbolics.html
In fact, Microsoft's software lineup was incredibly diverse since it was a young company trying to put its hand into every market to shore the perception that they had a hand in anything and everything. Sort of like today except back then companies constituted real competition vs. today where you're practically assured of being roadkill if Microsoft sets its sites on you. There was "Microsoft LISP" (no, I'm not kidding; it was actually another company's product repackaged) and Microsoft even had software that worked on the Commodore 64 home computer. I mentioned Multiplan earlier, Microsoft's spreadsheet, well not only could you buy it for the IBM PC, check out this screenshot of their Commodore 64 version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:C64_Multipla
Am I rueful? A little bit. Do I miss those days? Not a chance. What you can do today with a home computer vs. back then is night and day. In retrospect it is slightly surprising that things held my attention as they did. The Net, tons of free software (open source and otherwise), powerful desktop computers all were quite some time off. If you thought dialup today is bad, try operating on the common standard of the day, 1200 baud modems, as in 120 characters per second, as in, yes it took several seconds to fill an 80x25 text screen which most people had in the form of MS-DOS (forget GUI desktops, they weren't common place for quite some time to come).
What I so miss however is the the sense that there were lots of great things happening. They're happening today, but the attitude back then was different. For example, you could realistically expect a company to try something "way out there." For example, I was aware of one Chicago trading company (again, commodities markets) had purchased LISP machines to see if it could come up with AI strategies to improve their trading systems:
http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbo
While open source is prevalent today in some circles, companies have moved to a situation where vendor support is an end all, be all when it comes to decision making. They can be risk averse to the point of self-detriment resulting in very staid environments at times. One example of this is the IT department for the state of Texas. A friend who works there told me once that unless some set of software came on the HP-UX CD, forget about using it. For him, this meant forgetting about PERL since it was not shipped on the HP-UX CDs (this was a few years ago). Even my situation today reflects this to a degree. I work at a very large financial institution and Apache is non-existent in our production systems. While internal Apache sites can readily be deployed to share infromation with coworkers Apache on customer facing servers is a no go.
There just seemed to be more variety in what companies might try because the IT market hadn't settled down. While open source is great (something that I personally have great faith in), back then we did not have today's situation where IT like the automotive industry had just a handful of companies owning respective markets, a.k.a., consolidation. As a frame of reference around the turn of the 20th century there were 30+ automotive companies in the USA. By the 30's things had settled down to the "Big Three" that we've known internalized for quite some time. Today Lotus' 1-2-3 is just a memory as are Symbolics machine, the Commodore 64 and many, MANY other things.
-M
PS: Having said that, I have a pretty sweet desktop these days - a 64 bith Athlon system. The things I do today are pretty amazing in and of themselves... thanks to Moore's Law.
YES!!!! I'm laughing at all these "I used X to solve problems like this" where X is some RDBMS. Listen up folks, you can't trivially implement a tick database with such a system. 'Nuff said.
-M
No offense but you clearly don't understand the problem space of "tick databases". In a nutshell you have data that is constantly flowing in and needs to be indexed real time. With the ultimate goal of being able to satisfy queries on this data in "real time."
A relational database cannot give this to you. If you take the naive approach and try to build such a system with a RDBMS product you wind up with a situation where eventually your system keels over since all it's trying to do is update its indices. Remember, a RDBMS has to keep its indices up to date to satisfy queries in a "reasonable" period of time. Eventually what happens is that the RDBMS winds up thrashing and spends all of its time trying to update indices. Never mind that the tick data is flowing in and completely saturating your ability to assimilate it into your database. The end result is that the system fails.
Some of the exchanges (Chicago Mercantil Exchange) have symbols where sixty transactions per second occur. And this is just for one symbol/instruction, e.g., some contract in the commodities market. When you take the Chicago Mercantile Exchange along with all the other exchanges and various derivatives, e.g., options, single stock futures, this amounts to TENS OF THOUSANDS of symbols/instruments. Most people are used to hearing NASDAQ and NYSE symbols, e.g., MSFT. But the commodity markets are incredibly busy and it's a space your average person hears very little of. When a hurricane comes in and wipes out the orange crop in Florida, people holding futures contracts on oranges get rich (one example). Places like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade are two such places where these kinds of contracts are traded.
Anyway, it doesn't matter WHAT version of MySQL you were using - a MySQL database is not going to allow you to build a tick database.
-M
The poser of the question (that started this thread) signals his ignorance of microprocessor design and underscores what AMD has said all along, and everyone else who hasfollowed the industry since when there was much more competition in the microprocessor, namely you can't juxtpose microprocessors on clock frequency alone. Anyone remember the Intel i860? Or when MIPS was a stand alone company competing against Intel (seemingly). If you say no to these things, that probably explains why you're even pondering this stuff. Nothing to ponder, some of us have known this all along.
Your opinion is wrong. The X Window System on Mac OS X is nothing new, it's been there for quite some time. It's just a how-to article. Nothing more, nothing less.
So, if I go to the very bad parts of the South Side where I grew up I should conclude that that entire city is a haven for illegal activity? This analogy comes to mind in light of where I grew up. Likewise, if some E.T. come to planet earth and saw the massive amounts of p0rn in terms of web content, he might conclude that the Net is a vehicle for a sex crazed race, therefore news sites, e-commerce, /. et al must be anomalies.
I see no substance to this claim having participated in IRC channels myself and pointing out to my analogies.
Worthless noise.
I haven't played BurnOut 3, but it's on my radar.
-M
MS' Office suite has a stranglehold in corporate offices but while many people are used to Outlook, using a different email client is not out of the question. It's often Excel and PowerPoint and Word documents floating around that causes business people to have little choice (because like 95+% of their peers use it - inside/outside the company).
/. crowd is very anti-MS but the reality is, most business people really don't care about this stuff. As long as it gets the job done they're cool. Business people who might raise an eyebrow are CIOs who want to cut costs but MS could easily give away Outlook and see the situation as a "we got take it in the gut to keep Word, Excel and PowerPoint entrenched." Do not be surprised if MS were to take such a stance.
/. crowd may also laugh at "retraining costs" argument (since invariably companies do consider this) since we're talking "email" here. However, given the amazing inflexibility I've witnessed with the average person during my lifetime (even among the tech ranks), there's some teeth to this argument.
Email on the other hand is a different story. I was very impressed with Evolution on LINUX. Having a Windows port would at least pry one finger on Microsoft's stranglehold in corporate offices... maybe.
I know the
If they did, the motivation for CIOs to use Evolution disappears.
There's also the security argument but many larger companies have wised up and your Joe Average User runs in a limited account to stop their desktop from becoming a festering pool of viruses.
The
Home users often fall in a few buckets:
1) Web based mail
2) AOL mail
3) Still blissfully ignorant and using Outlook Express
4) Have a geek friend who has proselytized open source and are now running an open source email client, e.g., Mozilla's client.
That leaves primarily the third group (and some segment of the fourth group) as candidates for Evolution. Assuming NOVELL doesn't expect to charge people for this. This will have some impact but nothing dramatic.
I personally, gasp, went back to Outlook. I liked the changes they made in Office 2003 and they eliminated some of the annoyances I had with previous versions of Outlook. I operated with the Mozilla email client for quite some time having eschewed Office 2000 and Office XP.
I would be happy to go to Evolution if for no other reason than I discovered that MS is as usual thwarting my attempt to run securely. Being a super savvy user (as well as a developer/security person) I happen to run Outlook in a stunted account, i.e. I run it in a different account (Windows "runas" command) and played with ACLs so that sensitive areas such as C:\WINDOWS and "C:\Program Files" can't be written to). You might ask why I didn't create a limitd account and run Outlook with that. Turns out if you do, Office will not leverage Windows XP's themes. Stupid. I don't like the "classic" Windows motif and prefer the default that comes with Windows XP. Anyway,
I discovered much to my chagrin that despite running Outlook in this fashion if I were to run Word (under my normal desktop account), save a document, then try to reopen that document later, Word simply cannot find the document. It will repeatedly stick up an error dialog on each attempt UNTIL I close Outlook, which happens to be running under a different user!!!
I've done Win32 development. It would seem the moronic MS Office development is generating a cookie, alias, moniker, etc., based on the window station I am logged into. They are probably using the Win32 handle and are keying into some shared memory. God for all you know they could be generating strings and putting them into the Global Atom Table.
Why would they do such a thing? Because *no one* would EVER think of running desktop apps in a secure fashion... right? What they have done is simply architecturally unsound.
If you are curious about Window stations:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?u
No offense, I don't think you understand what's going on here.
First, I'm not much of a fan of DCOM, even though I did spend 2-1/2 years at Microsoft. While DCOM and DCE RPCs are conceptually the same, the problem here is DCOM laden Windows (many entry points).
I have a different opinion of just plain COM (no crossing network wires). MS has done a good job defining many interfaces and like it or not, OLE Containers allow for the building of larger UIs from components. MS had this right YEARS ago. Never mind JavaBeans et al.
As far as this somehow polluting *NIX, what you have observed is an implementation issue. That and MS doesn't have enough code reviews.
There is nothing wrong with the concept of Remote Procedure Calls. The whole idea of calling into remote code was pioneered by Sun with their Network File System (NFS) except that because they were the vanguard, DCE RPCs which came later were incompatible not to mention there were the old *NIX turf wars and RPCs were another schism (outside of System V vs. BSD).
Like any network service (NFS being no exception) if you can connect to a network socket and send the "right" set of bytes, you can potentially elicit undesirable effects (from the perspective of the owner of the computer system of course).
Anwyay, MS simply went "DCOM happy" and exposed many more services than a typical *NIX box might expose... serving as entry points... and without a firewall, they were asking for trouble.
The other problem with DCOM and DCE RPCs is that:
1) Most C++ developers who think they're good can't code for sh*t in that language.
2) The old adage of "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" applies. The propensity to decompose everything to C++ interfaces with the DCOM/RPC crowd went overboard.
3) C++ is just too low level for many things that need to be done nowadays. The argument of "C++ is fast" has been consistently assaulted by Moore's Law giving that notion about as much relevance as the idea of coding contemporary applications in assembly language. With the computing power afforded nowadays, it is simply not worth dealing with memory management and the memory leaks that are bound to happen and cause system hiccups (or outright failures). Yes there are some applications that demand it, but those are the exception, not the rule. And just like the guy who write graphics drivers for me, I will leave those tasks to someone else.
4) Lastly, the Net and the high interconnectivity called for in mixed environments (which may not be DCE-RPC enabled) it is not worth architecting large systems with around DCE-RPCs.
In my experiences I found #1 to be a biggest issue.
I remember I would ask people to rank themselves on a scale from 1 to 10 with C++. I would qualify the upper tiers noting that "If you say you're an 8 you should be able to tell me in what situations you want to write a copy constructor... off the top of your head." Many people would respond with "8" - guess what was my first question? And most were clueless to answer it.
This from the person who said to the US Attorney General, "I say to heck with Janet Reno."
Then again, perhaps he realized the stupidity of his ways...
-M
PS: Welcome to the world of GLOBAL politics Mr. Ballmer.
Having worked at Andersen Consulting little more than a decade ago and seeing the dismal IT failures of EDS has had in England, when I here of vast amounts of money wasted on failed IT projects these companies immediately come to mind.
I'm guessing you don't have much (real world) experience on this topic... no offense.
Windows' TCP/IP stack is known to suck compared to various *NIXs.
I recall years ago having a 450 MHz AMD K6-2 LINUX box with 128 MB of RAM consistently beating out a 900 MHz Athlon with 768 MB of RAM (running Windows) when it came to downloads over my broadband connection.
Given Mac OS X's pedigree, this does not surprise me.
"Macintosh vs. Windows" is totally irrelevant here... but given that Macintoshes now use an OS based on UNIX, it certainly makes them stand out.
I might also point out that Hotmail for a time (and may very well still be) was using FreeBSD for its DNS servers... that's because when MS tried using their own "dogfood" (Windows 2000), it keeled over.
-M
I have to agree. Casual end users are largely ignorant and rather blissful about the Net. This is also complicated by over eager kids in some househods to click on "Yes" to anything that pops up and/or are installing thus facilitating the compromise of computers.
Security and convenience are inversely proportional to each other.
Until the consequences of ignorance start exceeding those of convenience the status quo will continue to exist.
-M