IE exists for developers. The whole Windows platform is why people use Windows... not necessary bits and pieces. I can whip up an app with VB 6.0 with an integrated browser and/or browser functionality in under 30 seconds, and that alone will keep me buying copies of Windows. IE is used in tons of Windows apps, both commercial and custom. Without the drop-in IE COM objects, Windows as a development platform would be woefully incomplete and less compelling.
The way I read it is that the Linux people they found would not rush something out the door. You typical Linux admin will want to go thorugh a rigourous testing phase and write up some scripts to automate all the regular process, while a Windows admin will slap something together and shout "It boots so it works". Managers are often pennywise and pound foolish so wil go after the Windows option.
Exactly. They want someone who will get the job done, which more often than not (6 years of experience here), is to rush something out the door. If that's the job, then that's what you do, regardless of whatever your ivory tower ideals are about "proper" software development.
Instead of pretending, you should just do it. It's that simple. No, you can't be a dwarf with an axe, but life doesn't have to consist of a job in a cubicle and a shitty, generic apartment in the suburbs, with dinner at a Subway. The only problem is that it takes balls to live life the way you want it, and the VAST majority of people have no balls to speak of.
You're right. Why should computers help out humans in doing work. They don't exist to help us, they exist so that we can help them, right?
Dude, you need to get out more. There's *ZERO* point in learning about computers just for the sake of learning about computers. *ZERO*. Let me restate that: ZERO. If a computer doesn't help me get my job done, then I don't want it. If I have to spend more time learning about hom computers work than they save me, then it's a net loss.
Need to work on that reading comprehension thing a bit... You suggest that the company should hire some expertise, but the last line of the quote you used said explicitly that finding competent Linux expertise was difficult. That's a very valid point that you conveniently ignored.
No, not quite. The best and most effective solution is: HAVE NO CHILDREN. I love it when environmentalists try to preach to me, while towing 6 kids behind them. Humans, by far and away, have the largest impact on the environment. Fuck "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle". How about "Get a vasectomy"?
Don't use eBay. eBay has been a festering pile of shit for many years. I have little sympathy for people who are just realizing this. Believe it or not, I live a full and rewarding life, and I don't buy or sell anything on eBay at all!
It's simple. The US economy is much worse now than it was in the 80's. Sure GDP and spending are up, but that's largely due to consumer spending on credit. Now people are stretched thin, and are only interested in buying as much cheap crap as possible, no matter where it came from. , so that they can keep up with the Joneses. I run an independent retail store, and I see this all of the time. People have, thanks to things like Wal-Mart and Froogle, etc. become real price whores, as I call them. They no longer care about quality, or whether little kids made what they're buying. People just want their crap and they want it cheap.
Why's that? Are you or somebody you know going to come over and physically break our applications? They work fine now. There's no reason to believe that they won't continue to work just as well.
I tend to disagree. Sure, these crappy files are out there, but I think that a lot of people (like myself) still delete them and stop sharing them. I think that, especially with the quality voting thing, that Kazaa will improve pretty damn soon. I know that I'm gonna hop back on Kazaa(Lite) tonight and see what I can find (and what I can contribute). I think that even a few thousand geeks who see this story and decide to fire up Kazaa Lite again (like me) will make a big improvement.
Still, saying that OSS is "almost good enough" well... that's just not good enough. At least not for me. I only switch software of ANY kind when there is something else out there that is better in terms of getting my job done. The development model can be fantastic, but that only works on an academic level. So far, there aren't a whole lot of examples of OSS coming out with software that people actually want to use (with a few notable exceptions like Apache and PostGRE).
That's how I sumamrize this article. There's not a single nugget of real information in this article. It's a lot of marketing, blogging bullshit, which quite honestly, doesn't mean anything. "synergy" and "critical mass" and "collective intelligence" are just buzzwords with as much meaning as "Web 2.0".
Actually, we use Active X for quite a few of our internal apps. There's no better replacement for it, and I've seen a lot of workarounds. For example: a DBGrid. I can slap a DBGrid into a web page in seconds with an Active X control, or I can try some buggy Javascipt kludge that works in just a few browsers, and doesn't have 50% of the functionality that a real COM object does. So, we're already using 2 browsers right now. We tried Firefox assuming that it was going to be better for more generic browsing, but with all of the secuity exploits, bugs, and the automatic updates STILL not working, it may be time to go back to IE for the sake of productivity and simplicity.
My new Dual Xeon Server with W2K Server installed was just fine firewall-less while I was getting all of the Windows updates. I don't know what you people are doing to get all of this crap installed on your machines...
Another tip for you: if you remove the gas pedal from your car, you won't have any crashes! Really!
DOWNLOADING MORE SOFTWARE to intentionally disable part of a program that is supposed to work is 150% unacceptable.
Jesus, how bad does software have to get before people finally start to not use it? Luckily, I didn't pay anything for my Firefox installations, so I can't really bitch. But I CAN look at other, less buggy alternatives (like IE) that also offer useful features that Firefox doesn't, like Active X.
If news organizations are losing out to bloggers, what does that say about the newspeople?
It doesn't say anything about newspeople. What it does say is that consumers of blogs tend to believe anything that's written, while ignoring the source. Bloggers will never replace journalists for those of us who are interested in real news... not just rehashed "news", conspiracy theories, and opinion, more often than not, written by people with no idea how to write, how to write without bias, how to present facts, and certainly no clue as to how to actually research news.
I run a store in which our customers tend to be obsessive about the subject matter that we sell. These people believe *ANYTHING* that they read on "the Internet". It's amazing the shit (both quantity and quality) that we hear that people say they found online.
Personally, I don't feel in any way threatened by any word, phrase, or sentence with the prefix "cyber" in it. Cyber*, to me, means a way for non-geeks to explain something that they don't in any way understand.
Yes, but doesn't all of this kind of make sense for Sun? I mean if they die as a company, all of their IP becomes abandonware, and thus not helpful to anyone anymore. But, as a technique to keep themselves from dying, they opensource all of their previous products that they can, which immediately drives up product awareness and puts more eyes on the product, which immediately attracts investors.. and soon enough Sun is out of the spiralling blackhole that they once were in.
You forgot one important thing... a technique for them to actually make money. I think it makes *no* sense to open source their hardware, because who is going to contribute to it? I wouldn't imagine that there are legions on Sun hardware hackers ready to help them re-design their chips. The only people that would benefit from this would be their competitors. I see this as a great way to kill Sun very quickly.
You're right. Why do we need "professional writers"? We've got bloggers! They're just as good, right? And while we're at it, we don't need "professional programmers" because anybody can make a web page. And, I don't need a "professional car mechanic" because I can change my own oil. Just because YOU don't understand that writers actually have real talent and/or real education doesn't mean that they add no value to society as a whole.
The only issue is how the mechanism of the compensation will work, and, as with so many other things (including software), traditional publishing is merely one possible model.
Oh yeah, the whole Free Software thing is doing wonders for raising the value of programmers, isn't it? Let's see, I can count exactly (1) OSS company that is even turning a profit. That's not exactly what I'd call success.
In a perfect world with unlimited resources (ie: time and money), we'd all be our own car mechanics, we'd all make our own clothes, we'd all grow and raise our own food, we'd all be our own plumbers, etc. Unfortunately, there's this thing called "Reality" that unfortunately makes it impossible for any of us to do all of these things (if any). So, if VB6 lets people make quick, dirty programs that work without having to learn about bits and bytes, so be it.
Debugged? No. It's simple, and it works. Maintain? There's nothing to maintain. It's a self-contained.exe. Testing? Yeah, I fired it up, typed in some numbers, and it returned the correct result. Tested. Deployed? Yeah, I emailed her a copy of it. No, it's not a script, unless you've seen a script with a GUI, which I never have. It's a very simple app, and if not for VB, it would not have been worth making. That's my point. VB was the right tool for this job (and many others), and often is. There's no reason that every app written needs to be held to some kind of 6 Sigma standard. To do so in cases like this would be a tremendous waste of time and money.
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IE exists for developers. The whole Windows platform is why people use Windows... not necessary bits and pieces. I can whip up an app with VB 6.0 with an integrated browser and/or browser functionality in under 30 seconds, and that alone will keep me buying copies of Windows. IE is used in tons of Windows apps, both commercial and custom. Without the drop-in IE COM objects, Windows as a development platform would be woefully incomplete and less compelling.
The way I read it is that the Linux people they found would not rush something out the door. You typical Linux admin will want to go thorugh a rigourous testing phase and write up some scripts to automate all the regular process, while a Windows admin will slap something together and shout "It boots so it works". Managers are often pennywise and pound foolish so wil go after the Windows option.
Exactly. They want someone who will get the job done, which more often than not (6 years of experience here), is to rush something out the door. If that's the job, then that's what you do, regardless of whatever your ivory tower ideals are about "proper" software development.
Instead of pretending, you should just do it. It's that simple. No, you can't be a dwarf with an axe, but life doesn't have to consist of a job in a cubicle and a shitty, generic apartment in the suburbs, with dinner at a Subway. The only problem is that it takes balls to live life the way you want it, and the VAST majority of people have no balls to speak of.
RTFA. It's been 2 years.
You're right. Why should computers help out humans in doing work. They don't exist to help us, they exist so that we can help them, right?
Dude, you need to get out more. There's *ZERO* point in learning about computers just for the sake of learning about computers. *ZERO*. Let me restate that: ZERO. If a computer doesn't help me get my job done, then I don't want it. If I have to spend more time learning about hom computers work than they save me, then it's a net loss.
Need to work on that reading comprehension thing a bit... You suggest that the company should hire some expertise, but the last line of the quote you used said explicitly that finding competent Linux expertise was difficult. That's a very valid point that you conveniently ignored.
+5 Troll. The whole thing. Yor entire post, is 100% Troll. That's pretty damn awesome.
No, not quite. The best and most effective solution is: HAVE NO CHILDREN. I love it when environmentalists try to preach to me, while towing 6 kids behind them. Humans, by far and away, have the largest impact on the environment. Fuck "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle". How about "Get a vasectomy"?
Don't use eBay. eBay has been a festering pile of shit for many years. I have little sympathy for people who are just realizing this. Believe it or not, I live a full and rewarding life, and I don't buy or sell anything on eBay at all!
Don't forget that Slashdot has a loooong history of banning IP's of users that post messages that oppose Slashdot groupthink...
Just keep in mind that there's no agreement between you and the content provider saying that they have to provide you anything for free. Leech.
It's simple. The US economy is much worse now than it was in the 80's. Sure GDP and spending are up, but that's largely due to consumer spending on credit. Now people are stretched thin, and are only interested in buying as much cheap crap as possible, no matter where it came from. , so that they can keep up with the Joneses. I run an independent retail store, and I see this all of the time. People have, thanks to things like Wal-Mart and Froogle, etc. become real price whores, as I call them. They no longer care about quality, or whether little kids made what they're buying. People just want their crap and they want it cheap.
You'll have to change this sooner or later.
Why's that? Are you or somebody you know going to come over and physically break our applications? They work fine now. There's no reason to believe that they won't continue to work just as well.
I tend to disagree. Sure, these crappy files are out there, but I think that a lot of people (like myself) still delete them and stop sharing them. I think that, especially with the quality voting thing, that Kazaa will improve pretty damn soon. I know that I'm gonna hop back on Kazaa(Lite) tonight and see what I can find (and what I can contribute). I think that even a few thousand geeks who see this story and decide to fire up Kazaa Lite again (like me) will make a big improvement.
Still, saying that OSS is "almost good enough" well... that's just not good enough. At least not for me. I only switch software of ANY kind when there is something else out there that is better in terms of getting my job done. The development model can be fantastic, but that only works on an academic level. So far, there aren't a whole lot of examples of OSS coming out with software that people actually want to use (with a few notable exceptions like Apache and PostGRE).
That's how I sumamrize this article. There's not a single nugget of real information in this article. It's a lot of marketing, blogging bullshit, which quite honestly, doesn't mean anything. "synergy" and "critical mass" and "collective intelligence" are just buzzwords with as much meaning as "Web 2.0".
Actually, we use Active X for quite a few of our internal apps. There's no better replacement for it, and I've seen a lot of workarounds. For example: a DBGrid. I can slap a DBGrid into a web page in seconds with an Active X control, or I can try some buggy Javascipt kludge that works in just a few browsers, and doesn't have 50% of the functionality that a real COM object does. So, we're already using 2 browsers right now. We tried Firefox assuming that it was going to be better for more generic browsing, but with all of the secuity exploits, bugs, and the automatic updates STILL not working, it may be time to go back to IE for the sake of productivity and simplicity.
My new Dual Xeon Server with W2K Server installed was just fine firewall-less while I was getting all of the Windows updates. I don't know what you people are doing to get all of this crap installed on your machines...
Another tip for you: if you remove the gas pedal from your car, you won't have any crashes! Really!
DOWNLOADING MORE SOFTWARE to intentionally disable part of a program that is supposed to work is 150% unacceptable.
Jesus, how bad does software have to get before people finally start to not use it? Luckily, I didn't pay anything for my Firefox installations, so I can't really bitch. But I CAN look at other, less buggy alternatives (like IE) that also offer useful features that Firefox doesn't, like Active X.
If news organizations are losing out to bloggers, what does that say about the newspeople?
It doesn't say anything about newspeople. What it does say is that consumers of blogs tend to believe anything that's written, while ignoring the source. Bloggers will never replace journalists for those of us who are interested in real news... not just rehashed "news", conspiracy theories, and opinion, more often than not, written by people with no idea how to write, how to write without bias, how to present facts, and certainly no clue as to how to actually research news.
I run a store in which our customers tend to be obsessive about the subject matter that we sell. These people believe *ANYTHING* that they read on "the Internet". It's amazing the shit (both quantity and quality) that we hear that people say they found online.
Personally, I don't feel in any way threatened by any word, phrase, or sentence with the prefix "cyber" in it. Cyber*, to me, means a way for non-geeks to explain something that they don't in any way understand.
Yes, but doesn't all of this kind of make sense for Sun? I mean if they die as a company, all of their IP becomes abandonware, and thus not helpful to anyone anymore. But, as a technique to keep themselves from dying, they opensource all of their previous products that they can, which immediately drives up product awareness and puts more eyes on the product, which immediately attracts investors.. and soon enough Sun is out of the spiralling blackhole that they once were in.
You forgot one important thing... a technique for them to actually make money. I think it makes *no* sense to open source their hardware, because who is going to contribute to it? I wouldn't imagine that there are legions on Sun hardware hackers ready to help them re-design their chips. The only people that would benefit from this would be their competitors. I see this as a great way to kill Sun very quickly.
You're right. Why do we need "professional writers"? We've got bloggers! They're just as good, right? And while we're at it, we don't need "professional programmers" because anybody can make a web page. And, I don't need a "professional car mechanic" because I can change my own oil. Just because YOU don't understand that writers actually have real talent and/or real education doesn't mean that they add no value to society as a whole.
The only issue is how the mechanism of the compensation will work, and, as with so many other things (including software), traditional publishing is merely one possible model.
Oh yeah, the whole Free Software thing is doing wonders for raising the value of programmers, isn't it? Let's see, I can count exactly (1) OSS company that is even turning a profit. That's not exactly what I'd call success.
In a perfect world with unlimited resources (ie: time and money), we'd all be our own car mechanics, we'd all make our own clothes, we'd all grow and raise our own food, we'd all be our own plumbers, etc. Unfortunately, there's this thing called "Reality" that unfortunately makes it impossible for any of us to do all of these things (if any). So, if VB6 lets people make quick, dirty programs that work without having to learn about bits and bytes, so be it.
Debugged? No. It's simple, and it works. Maintain? There's nothing to maintain. It's a self-contained .exe. Testing? Yeah, I fired it up, typed in some numbers, and it returned the correct result. Tested. Deployed? Yeah, I emailed her a copy of it. No, it's not a script, unless you've seen a script with a GUI, which I never have. It's a very simple app, and if not for VB, it would not have been worth making. That's my point. VB was the right tool for this job (and many others), and often is. There's no reason that every app written needs to be held to some kind of 6 Sigma standard. To do so in cases like this would be a tremendous waste of time and money.