You're absolutely right, but given the context (this is the Nth story of this kind to show up on/.) we all "know what they mean".
This topic has been so beat to death that I would imagine everyone who is interested has had his or her say or at least given the topic some consideration.
You also have to consider that/. is far from trying to live up to "journalistic standards" (if such a thing even exists any more), it's just a bunch of guys sitting around venting their opinions.
Perhaps you should focus your criticism on the New York Times.:-)
Yeah, but Stephen King didn't have to start out this way.
Just the fact that he did it was news, and would attract a lot of people. If I tried it, I'd probably get paid once... perhaps from my Mom... no matter how good it was.
So what you're saying is: Word does a whole bunch of things half-assed rather than doing one thing really good.
Well, we all know that Microsoft has a rule than every application must be expanded until it can be used as a virus vector. If edlin had been written in the last 10 years, it would give you access to kernel functions through scripting.
This is what you get when you are developing your apps to have the longest list of features, rather than features that are good and feature that people actually want or need.
...because I always found it to be painfully frustrating to do anything more complex than what you can do with Wordpad. Plus everything I've heard from publishing experts says Word is more trouble than it's worth. It's not even 100% compatible with itself.
I did spend a couple of months with Outlook 2003. Here's what I found.
1. I attempted to import all my e-mail archives. It turns out O2003 loses data once the PST gets past about a gigabyte or a gig and a half. I was told this by two people who have much more experience with MS than I, plus that's exactly what happened to me. This is absurd. How could a product ship like this?! What if I hadn't noticed some missing data or hadn't been told this. MS doesn't seem to care, as long as those tick mark lists on the marketing materials are long.
2. I reimported my data into multiple databases, you know, the kind of stupid thing I thought we were a decade past having to do. Anyhow, O2003 was at least an order of magnitude slower than OE when opening big folders. How could MS's top-of-the-line program be worse than the "lite" version which has been around, essentially unchanged, for 5 years or more. Except for the spam feature, OE was better in almost every way.
Yes, the UI was really nice, and yes, the spam filter worked great without having to train it for 2 months like Thunderbird (which I use now, and I love it!), but on a day-to-day basis it was killing me with 30-second or more waits just to use than damn thing. I'm convinced that MS can't write good apps any more (if they ever could) and Office reached it's peak of usefulness around 7 years ago, with each successive version just adding more bloat, garbage and chrome. They seem to spend more time trying to send business towards Intel (in the form of faster processors) or the memory manufacturers than actually giving us something useful to do work with. For years, MS functionality has been increasing in a linear fashion (with 90% of the features being useful to maybe 5% of users) while system requirements have increased geometrically.
Is this the wonderful future we have thanks to big bloated monstrosities like OLE (whatever they call it now) and.NET? Will Outlook 2007 take two minutes to start up on a 10GHz machine with 6GB of RAM and crap out with 100MB of message store? I wouldn't be surprised.
Here's the question you have to ask vis-a-vis Microsoft's extensions of the language and libraries:
What does Microsoft use to write its OS and applications? From everything I've heard it's all C and Win32. Now if they don't use, why should we?
My experience with all these new technologies is that you are trading one set of headaches for another. You can either write the piece of functionality yourself, or you can beat yourself senseless trying to figure out how to use Microsoft's tools that supposedly provide that functionality.
A good example is a simple Internet connection. In the pre-.NET days, doing a simple FTP transfer took about 200 lines of cookbook MFC code. This is ludicrous. I adapted some socket code many years ago, so it takes about 5 lines of code to do an ftp transfer. In fact all the socket code and ftp code in my class library probably didn't add up to the code needed to _use_ MFC ftp support. I thought the whole point of providing libraries and extensions was to make things simpler. If that's the case then why do so many of MS's sample programs, which are generally only simple examples, exceed hundreds of lines of code.
Granted I haven't played with.NET, since the only thing it seems to be useful for is integrating with a bunch of other stuff. Since memory management is pretty easy if you understand it, I don't see the need for garbage collection, and I don't need to integrate with C# or J# or Bb or whatever the hell they're pet langauge is these days, it seems I'm taking on a huge amount of bloat and headache for little in return. Hence I continue developing productively without it.
I didn't vote for the DMCA, which stomps all over Fair Use. There's no one to prevent Congress from passing contradictory laws. After all, they been ignoring many parts of the Constitution for 140 years, and most of it for the last 30.
It seems, from what everyone is saying, the answer is no.
Leave it up to Microsoft who never saw a technology they couldn't "improve" by bloating it beyond all reason.
Everything MS comes out with is only easier when you use it exactly the way they do. Anytime you want to branch off into something new, you're suddenly faced with practically reverse engineering it to figure out what the heck is going on.
I've never understodd the need to keep cramming new more and more levels of stuff between the code and what you're trying to do. But I think template metaprogramming is just a "stupid code trick" and worth little more than proving how clever you are, so you shouldn't ask me. I'm too busy getting work done.
Extrapolating from the first trilogy to the second and through to the third I think we'll be having some real competition for "Manos: The Hands of Fate"
Someone made a funny joke against Republicans and he gets modded funny. I turn the joke around and make it a joke about Democrats and I get modded as a Troll.
It just goes to show that/. is overrun with a bunch of immature knee-jerk partisans.
Before 9/11, the biggest terrorist threat in the U.S. was supposedly fanatical environmentalists... you know, the types who spike logs and such.
But the fact of the matter is, suicidal terrorists are more likely to be radical Muslims. Note that all the others you mentioned did not commit suicidal terrorism.
Of course Middle Easterners aren't the only people who could blow up planes or buildings or such, but face facts, terrorists are still much more likely to be Muslim nutcases than anyone else. Also, note that the people you mentioned were operating alone or almost alone. There will always be some fruitcake at the far end of the bell curve, but there are whole nations of people "over there" being taught fanatical hatred of the West and being indoctrinated that murder-suicide is some kind of holy act. So racial profiling _does_ make sense, but random checks are sill necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't have an answer to that, so I ignored it. Besides, I don't agree with the flying definition anyway.
I suppose you could say that rockets are simply ejecting what they flap.
Propellors or turbines spin. You could consider that one way flapping.
But with Linux you don't have to be root to do something useful.
You're absolutely right, but given the context (this is the Nth story of this kind to show up on /.) we all "know what they mean".
/. is far from trying to live up to "journalistic standards" (if such a thing even exists any more), it's just a bunch of guys sitting around venting their opinions.
:-)
This topic has been so beat to death that I would imagine everyone who is interested has had his or her say or at least given the topic some consideration.
You also have to consider that
Perhaps you should focus your criticism on the New York Times.
Yeah, but Stephen King didn't have to start out this way.
Just the fact that he did it was news, and would attract a lot of people. If I tried it, I'd probably get paid once... perhaps from my Mom... no matter how good it was.
Word of Mouth isn't quite that powerful... yet!
So what you're saying is: Word does a whole bunch of things half-assed rather than doing one thing really good.
Well, we all know that Microsoft has a rule than every application must be expanded until it can be used as a virus vector. If edlin had been written in the last 10 years, it would give you access to kernel functions through scripting.
This is what you get when you are developing your apps to have the longest list of features, rather than features that are good and feature that people actually want or need.
...because I always found it to be painfully frustrating to do anything more complex than what you can do with Wordpad. Plus everything I've heard from publishing experts says Word is more trouble than it's worth. It's not even 100% compatible with itself.
.NET? Will Outlook 2007 take two minutes to start up on a 10GHz machine with 6GB of RAM and crap out with 100MB of message store? I wouldn't be surprised.
I did spend a couple of months with Outlook 2003. Here's what I found.
1. I attempted to import all my e-mail archives. It turns out O2003 loses data once the PST gets past about a gigabyte or a gig and a half. I was told this by two people who have much more experience with MS than I, plus that's exactly what happened to me. This is absurd. How could a product ship like this?! What if I hadn't noticed some missing data or hadn't been told this. MS doesn't seem to care, as long as those tick mark lists on the marketing materials are long.
2. I reimported my data into multiple databases, you know, the kind of stupid thing I thought we were a decade past having to do. Anyhow, O2003 was at least an order of magnitude slower than OE when opening big folders. How could MS's top-of-the-line program be worse than the "lite" version which has been around, essentially unchanged, for 5 years or more. Except for the spam feature, OE was better in almost every way.
Yes, the UI was really nice, and yes, the spam filter worked great without having to train it for 2 months like Thunderbird (which I use now, and I love it!), but on a day-to-day basis it was killing me with 30-second or more waits just to use than damn thing. I'm convinced that MS can't write good apps any more (if they ever could) and Office reached it's peak of usefulness around 7 years ago, with each successive version just adding more bloat, garbage and chrome. They seem to spend more time trying to send business towards Intel (in the form of faster processors) or the memory manufacturers than actually giving us something useful to do work with. For years, MS functionality has been increasing in a linear fashion (with 90% of the features being useful to maybe 5% of users) while system requirements have increased geometrically.
Is this the wonderful future we have thanks to big bloated monstrosities like OLE (whatever they call it now) and
Yeah, and you'll be crying after World War III when the EMP from the nukes erases all your 8" floppies and I'll be sitting pretty with my paper tapes.
You haven't lived till you've played Baldur's Gate off of paper tape.
Here's the question you have to ask vis-a-vis Microsoft's extensions of the language and libraries:
.NET, since the only thing it seems to be useful for is integrating with a bunch of other stuff. Since memory management is pretty easy if you understand it, I don't see the need for garbage collection, and I don't need to integrate with C# or J# or Bb or whatever the hell they're pet langauge is these days, it seems I'm taking on a huge amount of bloat and headache for little in return. Hence I continue developing productively without it.
What does Microsoft use to write its OS and applications? From everything I've heard it's all C and Win32. Now if they don't use, why should we?
My experience with all these new technologies is that you are trading one set of headaches for another. You can either write the piece of functionality yourself, or you can beat yourself senseless trying to figure out how to use Microsoft's tools that supposedly provide that functionality.
A good example is a simple Internet connection. In the pre-.NET days, doing a simple FTP transfer took about 200 lines of cookbook MFC code. This is ludicrous. I adapted some socket code many years ago, so it takes about 5 lines of code to do an ftp transfer. In fact all the socket code and ftp code in my class library probably didn't add up to the code needed to _use_ MFC ftp support. I thought the whole point of providing libraries and extensions was to make things simpler. If that's the case then why do so many of MS's sample programs, which are generally only simple examples, exceed hundreds of lines of code.
Granted I haven't played with
I didn't vote for the DMCA, which stomps all over Fair Use. There's no one to prevent Congress from passing contradictory laws. After all, they been ignoring many parts of the Constitution for 140 years, and most of it for the last 30.
It seems, from what everyone is saying, the answer is no.
Leave it up to Microsoft who never saw a technology they couldn't "improve" by bloating it beyond all reason.
Everything MS comes out with is only easier when you use it exactly the way they do. Anytime you want to branch off into something new, you're suddenly faced with practically reverse engineering it to figure out what the heck is going on.
I've never understodd the need to keep cramming new more and more levels of stuff between the code and what you're trying to do. But I think template metaprogramming is just a "stupid code trick" and worth little more than proving how clever you are, so you shouldn't ask me. I'm too busy getting work done.
But it should be news that security features prevent people from doing things they are legally entitled to do.
That's OK, I was just taking the joke and running with it.
My cousin, eh? Hmmmm....
Extrapolating from the first trilogy to the second and through to the third I think we'll be having some real competition for "Manos: The Hands of Fate"
It's all about Microsoft lock-in. Don't kid yourself otherwise.
Have you seen my cousin? She's hot! Used to be a cheerleader for some minor league (whatever you call it) football team in Florida.
Now this shows /. at its best.
/. is overrun with a bunch of immature knee-jerk partisans.
Someone made a funny joke against Republicans and he gets modded funny. I turn the joke around and make it a joke about Democrats and I get modded as a Troll.
It just goes to show that
Mod away, I've got karma coming out of by ears.
Good distinction.
Being someone who tries to be a "thoughtful conservative" I have found that I often agree with "thoughtful liberals" on many issues.
I wouldn't necessarily say that but I would say there is a tendency for liberals to be ruled by emotion whereas conservatives are ruled by intellect.
Again, no insults intended, just an observation. Of course, when it comes to extremes, emotions tend to cancel intellect on both sides.
And maybe liberals are caused by inhaling too much pollution. :-)
Sounds to me that voting Democrat should be classified as a form of hysteria.
;-)
Perhaps some kind of medication could get that overactive amygdala to slow down again.
It's a hyperintelligent shade of the color blue, you insensitive clod.
Before 9/11, the biggest terrorist threat in the U.S. was supposedly fanatical environmentalists... you know, the types who spike logs and such.
But the fact of the matter is, suicidal terrorists are more likely to be radical Muslims. Note that all the others you mentioned did not commit suicidal terrorism.
Of course Middle Easterners aren't the only people who could blow up planes or buildings or such, but face facts, terrorists are still much more likely to be Muslim nutcases than anyone else. Also, note that the people you mentioned were operating alone or almost alone. There will always be some fruitcake at the far end of the bell curve, but there are whole nations of people "over there" being taught fanatical hatred of the West and being indoctrinated that murder-suicide is some kind of holy act. So racial profiling _does_ make sense, but random checks are sill necessary.
MTV has definitely censored good music for years.
I keep hearing about this "rest of the world", but I've never seen it. Either it doesn't exist or doesn't matter.
I'm going back to sleep.