Why.NET? Because if you want to develop on Windows you'll eventually need it. They will be dropping the Win32 API. First it was supposed to disappear in Longhorn, but who knows. Eventually your only interface to the OS will be a.NET API. That's the grand plan. Longhorn was originally supposed to be called Windows.NET. Sort of silly now.
But if you get off Windows you'll actually have a choice of "platforms".
Then you must not live in a large city. Here in NYC there were hundreds of arrests and some violence when Bush came to town for a trade meeting. There was a huge violent protest in Canada a year or two ago. In NYC the media didn't report the violence and I hear that happens elsewhere. I assume it's because the media feels reporting them will help them grow in support next time they come to town.
And there's always Google. Many Americans travel to other countries just to protest these sort of things.
With secret WTO and World Bank meetings there's hardly anything a US citizen can do until after the deals have been made. And then they can only vote the Prez out of office. Of course we could write our congressmen, but considering we're talking about the entire economy there's no way to counter all of the corporate lobbyists. Even voilent protests aren't working.
Today we already have very unbalanced trade between the US and other countries, especially those in Asia. Policies seem to favor short term profit by large companies. If we want to predict the future we should look to similar industry shifts in the past: the auto and electronics industries in Asia. If they turn out higher quality software at lower prices we'll see the industry grow there and shrink in the US.
My guess is that it'll balance out due to quality and services. With software in businesses being so wrapped up in services they will always need at least some local support. Plus I don't think there will be a problem with quality adjustments like we saw with the US auto industry.
However their large growth will affect the value of the dollar and choices by US investors. There are so many factors it's really hard to predict.
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. -- James Madison
The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it. -- Woodrow Wilson
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts. -- Edmund Burke
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. --- Benjamin Franklin
Yes, these quotes are repeated constantly... but they need to be.
You've expressed what the whole argument boils down to: those who are willing to accept that they don't know something and those that require an answer to every question. God has always been used to fill in the blanks. Those with closure issues can't handle the thought that they will never know how they came to be. And they'll never know what happens when you die until you die. And we still don't really understand how the brain works. So god is used to answer the questions. It's very convenient since everything can be explained with "him".
I see nothing wrong with having faith in a god. But don't use him/her to fill in the blanks when other natural theories fit them very well.
Shouldn't we send the person who did that download some flowers or balloons or something? Imagine being that guy, walking around town, "Yeah, that 50 millionth was me!" and everyone responding "Yeah, sure...". We should make it like the reward you get for being the 1,000th person to buy something in a new supermarket.
I'm just about to open my new site: "The Dark Helmet Side: Memoirs of a Schwartz"
First few posts: "Channukah on Druidia" "I Am Surrounded By A$$holes" "A Night With a Druish Princess" "Yogurt! I Hate Yogurt!" "Only One Man Would Dare Use Strawberry"
Agreed. I've written relatively complex "apps" with Excel and Access. However, I found them always to be flakey at best. Database connectivity sounds nice, but often the size of the data overloads Excel (65,536 rows the last time I used it). Even with much less data it can come to a crawl. And because it can't be multithreaded users get annoyed that it's "locked" and have to wait. What annoyed me the most was the inadequate error reporting. Most messages were useless when dealing with an "app" and I couldn't trap absolutely everything for the user.
In the near future the VBA runtime will be dropped in favor of.NET. They want ALL development, from scripting in the CLI to enterprise apps, to be running on.NET. They were going to release an Office.NET (in 2004?) until they realized it would take them much longer to rewrite Office in.NET or integrate current Office code with.NET - probably cause interrop sucks. At the moment only 3rd party tools can link.NET with Excel in any useful way. So the latest version may be best... for now. But be prepared for the possibility of your spreadsheet code not executing in a future version of Office. I've asked and they were saying they would drop the VBA runtime completely and offer no backwards compatibility (just like VB.NET).
When I try to convince people not to use.NET one question I ask is: if it's so great then why, after 5 years, have they not rewritten their Office apps for it (as they vowed they'd do)? They offer no idea of when/if this will happen. One obvious reason is that they're already deprecating WinForms. They're talk of "we're doing what our customers ask for" is crap. Most customers in the financial industry want tight Office integration with.NET.
No application should crash due to bad data. At worst it should close gracefully. However I've found that Microsoft apps, more than any other, are very sensitive to their data. Why should parsing and displaying HTML ever bring down a web browser? It shouldn't but there's been HTML to crash IE for many years (and other browsers, also). Word, Excel, and the other Office apps run user scripts saved within documents. Those scripts can also very easily crash those apps.
So while I don't believe that they should be sent any document data I do understand why they need it. They could, however, work on making sure their apps never crash due only to data (if that's even entirely possible).
The idea was to hold the right employees accountable when regulations or laws are broken within a company. It's a response to Enron and WorldCom.
The problem with doing this with the internet is its built-in distribution of responsibilities across many companies. If I get a virus do we audit my ISP, the company that built the routers, the telecom company that owns the wiring, the source's ISP, the developer of the virus (who's rarely found), the developer of the OS, server admins?
Within one company it's relatively easy to trace responsibility. Over the internet there would be many debates, very costly audits, and rarely prosecutions.
I spent 10 years in IT of the financial industry. The day SOX got passed everything went downhill. The problem is that it's more about accountability that actually doing things right. Now I can't blame the law for that. The law makes lots of sense. But the way companies handle it adds 100 times the overhead and even more technical problems. Entire systems are built so there's a "signiture" of approval and record of every little thing. People are so busy making others accountable (basically flowing both uphill and downhill) and no one takes accountability for their own actions and quality of work goes way down. What happens in the company is whatever intrisic trust there was between coworkers disappears. All the company wants and needs is the paper trail. Cost of the service goes up while quality goes down.
So while we want some accountability, and IT version of SOX is not the way to go. There are other good reasons, but this is one I'm personally experienced with. It's among the reasons I left the financial industry 2 months ago.
Generally I'd agree with you. And I'm entirely against software patents. But consider Microsoft's actions while software patents are legal:
"Alacritech claims that it discussed its technology with Microsoft in 1998 and that Microsoft subsequently cut off communication with the company. In May 2003, Microsoft demonstrated a technology it called "Chimney" that Alacritech said was similar to its own intellectual property. Alacritech offered Microsoft a license, but Microsoft rejected Alacritech's terms, and in August 2004, Alacritech filed suit claiming patent infringement."
Microsoft's used this tactic before and lost in court. They meet, often make an agreement, then close their doors and duplicate the technology from another company. If it weren't over a software patent wouldn't you still want that practice to be stopped (assuming they signed an NDA or other contract)?
The Linux kernel? You think it's only "aping" features from MS and Apple? The last major release was mostly for the benefit of servers.
You're missing the big picture and picking out the few things that you see wrong. There's a lot more going on out there in open source than we see in our little worlds. All those students studying the Linux kernel is OS class... what will they be most educated in when they graduate? All those companies using open source for their servers and some contributing back... think server's haven't gone anywhere that MS hasn't? Anyone who's written servers for both MS and Linux know that Linux is not aping a single feature from MS.
Which population is biggest: those who've read source from the Solaris kernel, those who've read source from the Windows kernel, or those who've read source from the Linux kernel?
I'd make a large bet it's Linux. It has the addition of professors and students browsing it. It also had more hardware vendors (e.g. mobile devices) and software veldors looking at it and modifying it.
The last time I used Mandrake (9?) it had a one-click installer. Find the app I want and it downloaded and installed all dependencies without a problem (at least for me). It also had a one-click process for only installing all security updates.
The only thing I didn't like was that I often didn't know what apps I was looking for since I was new to Linux. If I knew I wanted a media player but never heard of xmms I wouldn't know to install it. So that required web searches. All they needed to do was add a text search through the RPM descriptions to solve that problem.
And there's no reason a one-click installer can't be added to Gentoo. With rare exception the depenency tree is handled far better than any RPM-based system I've seen. It's one step to install apps from the command line (2 if you pretend first). Anyone could write a little GUI to handle that.
Dealing with employment rights is part of making (and losing) money for their shareholders. This isn't about marriage or religion. This legislation is extremely important to their HR and legal departments as well as employees. If they backed down on legislation supporting equal employement rights for non-whites would you say the same thing?
I couldn't disagree more (you knew somebody had to, right?;) Plenty of high quality un-fun code is written in the open source community. Think every line of the Linux kernel or GCC was fun to write? It's not as much the fun as how badly someone wants it. People have been toying around with this sort of thing for a long time. But there doesn't seem to be enough real community demand to get a big enough team to hammer it out.
I know nothing of graphics programming. But if I was very interested in having accelerated window animations I'd learn OpenGL and help out. There will always be someone who wants that itch scratched.
Microsoft has all the lawyers. Microsoft has many lobbyists and has funded politicians to office. Who can stop Microsoft? If Microsoft does not make it, who can stop Microsoft from stealing it, sending a stream of lawyers to fight it, or calling in political favors?
Who can stop AT&T? Who can stop the American Tabacco Company? Who can stop Standard Oil?
The only thing that's definite is change.
It's happened before. It will happen again. Someday they will be the #2 player.
"Let me now... warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it."
You're missing the point and not using your own brain to process all the info. I was oversimplifying because my point was the difference between communism and socialism. A diatribe on communism isn't necessary because most people have a general idea of what it is. In this case equating social programs to communism was wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Why .NET? Because if you want to develop on Windows you'll eventually need it. They will be dropping the Win32 API. First it was supposed to disappear in Longhorn, but who knows. Eventually your only interface to the OS will be a .NET API. That's the grand plan. Longhorn was originally supposed to be called Windows.NET. Sort of silly now.
But if you get off Windows you'll actually have a choice of "platforms".
The Inquirer? The same Inquirer that blasts Brittany when she's caught not wearing make-up is complaining about Mozilla's bashing?
Oh, wait, wrong tabloid...
Then you must not live in a large city. Here in NYC there were hundreds of arrests and some violence when Bush came to town for a trade meeting. There was a huge violent protest in Canada a year or two ago. In NYC the media didn't report the violence and I hear that happens elsewhere. I assume it's because the media feels reporting them will help them grow in support next time they come to town.
And there's always Google. Many Americans travel to other countries just to protest these sort of things.
With secret WTO and World Bank meetings there's hardly anything a US citizen can do until after the deals have been made. And then they can only vote the Prez out of office. Of course we could write our congressmen, but considering we're talking about the entire economy there's no way to counter all of the corporate lobbyists. Even voilent protests aren't working.
Today we already have very unbalanced trade between the US and other countries, especially those in Asia. Policies seem to favor short term profit by large companies. If we want to predict the future we should look to similar industry shifts in the past: the auto and electronics industries in Asia. If they turn out higher quality software at lower prices we'll see the industry grow there and shrink in the US.
My guess is that it'll balance out due to quality and services. With software in businesses being so wrapped up in services they will always need at least some local support. Plus I don't think there will be a problem with quality adjustments like we saw with the US auto industry.
However their large growth will affect the value of the dollar and choices by US investors. There are so many factors it's really hard to predict.
Hang on, let me use Spotlight to search my new Mac to see if I have any more info on this...
Nope, don't care.
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. -- James Madison
The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it. -- Woodrow Wilson
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts. -- Edmund Burke
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. --- Benjamin Franklin
Yes, these quotes are repeated constantly... but they need to be.
You've expressed what the whole argument boils down to: those who are willing to accept that they don't know something and those that require an answer to every question. God has always been used to fill in the blanks. Those with closure issues can't handle the thought that they will never know how they came to be. And they'll never know what happens when you die until you die. And we still don't really understand how the brain works. So god is used to answer the questions. It's very convenient since everything can be explained with "him".
I see nothing wrong with having faith in a god. But don't use him/her to fill in the blanks when other natural theories fit them very well.
Shouldn't we send the person who did that download some flowers or balloons or something? Imagine being that guy, walking around town, "Yeah, that 50 millionth was me!" and everyone responding "Yeah, sure...". We should make it like the reward you get for being the 1,000th person to buy something in a new supermarket.
I'm just about to open my new site: "The Dark Helmet Side: Memoirs of a Schwartz"
First few posts:
"Channukah on Druidia"
"I Am Surrounded By A$$holes"
"A Night With a Druish Princess"
"Yogurt! I Hate Yogurt!"
"Only One Man Would Dare Use Strawberry"
Agreed. I've written relatively complex "apps" with Excel and Access. However, I found them always to be flakey at best. Database connectivity sounds nice, but often the size of the data overloads Excel (65,536 rows the last time I used it). Even with much less data it can come to a crawl. And because it can't be multithreaded users get annoyed that it's "locked" and have to wait. What annoyed me the most was the inadequate error reporting. Most messages were useless when dealing with an "app" and I couldn't trap absolutely everything for the user.
In the near future the VBA runtime will be dropped in favor of .NET. They want ALL development, from scripting in the CLI to enterprise apps, to be running on .NET. They were going to release an Office.NET (in 2004?) until they realized it would take them much longer to rewrite Office in .NET or integrate current Office code with .NET - probably cause interrop sucks. At the moment only 3rd party tools can link .NET with Excel in any useful way. So the latest version may be best... for now. But be prepared for the possibility of your spreadsheet code not executing in a future version of Office. I've asked and they were saying they would drop the VBA runtime completely and offer no backwards compatibility (just like VB.NET).
.NET one question I ask is: if it's so great then why, after 5 years, have they not rewritten their Office apps for it (as they vowed they'd do)? They offer no idea of when/if this will happen. One obvious reason is that they're already deprecating WinForms. They're talk of "we're doing what our customers ask for" is crap. Most customers in the financial industry want tight Office integration with .NET.
When I try to convince people not to use
No application should crash due to bad data. At worst it should close gracefully. However I've found that Microsoft apps, more than any other, are very sensitive to their data. Why should parsing and displaying HTML ever bring down a web browser? It shouldn't but there's been HTML to crash IE for many years (and other browsers, also). Word, Excel, and the other Office apps run user scripts saved within documents. Those scripts can also very easily crash those apps.
So while I don't believe that they should be sent any document data I do understand why they need it. They could, however, work on making sure their apps never crash due only to data (if that's even entirely possible).
The idea was to hold the right employees accountable when regulations or laws are broken within a company. It's a response to Enron and WorldCom.
The problem with doing this with the internet is its built-in distribution of responsibilities across many companies. If I get a virus do we audit my ISP, the company that built the routers, the telecom company that owns the wiring, the source's ISP, the developer of the virus (who's rarely found), the developer of the OS, server admins?
Within one company it's relatively easy to trace responsibility. Over the internet there would be many debates, very costly audits, and rarely prosecutions.
NO!
I spent 10 years in IT of the financial industry. The day SOX got passed everything went downhill. The problem is that it's more about accountability that actually doing things right. Now I can't blame the law for that. The law makes lots of sense. But the way companies handle it adds 100 times the overhead and even more technical problems. Entire systems are built so there's a "signiture" of approval and record of every little thing. People are so busy making others accountable (basically flowing both uphill and downhill) and no one takes accountability for their own actions and quality of work goes way down. What happens in the company is whatever intrisic trust there was between coworkers disappears. All the company wants and needs is the paper trail. Cost of the service goes up while quality goes down.
So while we want some accountability, and IT version of SOX is not the way to go. There are other good reasons, but this is one I'm personally experienced with. It's among the reasons I left the financial industry 2 months ago.
Generally I'd agree with you. And I'm entirely against software patents. But consider Microsoft's actions while software patents are legal:
"Alacritech claims that it discussed its technology with Microsoft in 1998 and that Microsoft subsequently cut off communication with the company. In May 2003, Microsoft demonstrated a technology it called "Chimney" that Alacritech said was similar to its own intellectual property. Alacritech offered Microsoft a license, but Microsoft rejected Alacritech's terms, and in August 2004, Alacritech filed suit claiming patent infringement."
Microsoft's used this tactic before and lost in court. They meet, often make an agreement, then close their doors and duplicate the technology from another company. If it weren't over a software patent wouldn't you still want that practice to be stopped (assuming they signed an NDA or other contract)?
The Linux kernel? You think it's only "aping" features from MS and Apple? The last major release was mostly for the benefit of servers.
You're missing the big picture and picking out the few things that you see wrong. There's a lot more going on out there in open source than we see in our little worlds. All those students studying the Linux kernel is OS class... what will they be most educated in when they graduate? All those companies using open source for their servers and some contributing back... think server's haven't gone anywhere that MS hasn't? Anyone who's written servers for both MS and Linux know that Linux is not aping a single feature from MS.
A few bad apples don't spoil the tree.
Which population is biggest: those who've read source from the Solaris kernel, those who've read source from the Windows kernel, or those who've read source from the Linux kernel?
I'd make a large bet it's Linux. It has the addition of professors and students browsing it. It also had more hardware vendors (e.g. mobile devices) and software veldors looking at it and modifying it.
The last time I used Mandrake (9?) it had a one-click installer. Find the app I want and it downloaded and installed all dependencies without a problem (at least for me). It also had a one-click process for only installing all security updates.
The only thing I didn't like was that I often didn't know what apps I was looking for since I was new to Linux. If I knew I wanted a media player but never heard of xmms I wouldn't know to install it. So that required web searches. All they needed to do was add a text search through the RPM descriptions to solve that problem.
And there's no reason a one-click installer can't be added to Gentoo. With rare exception the depenency tree is handled far better than any RPM-based system I've seen. It's one step to install apps from the command line (2 if you pretend first). Anyone could write a little GUI to handle that.
Dealing with employment rights is part of making (and losing) money for their shareholders. This isn't about marriage or religion. This legislation is extremely important to their HR and legal departments as well as employees. If they backed down on legislation supporting equal employement rights for non-whites would you say the same thing?
Yup, free country by a$$. We used to look to Canada and say, "They ban books! How draconian!" Now they're looking like a bastion of freedom. Scary.
I couldn't disagree more (you knew somebody had to, right? ;) Plenty of high quality un-fun code is written in the open source community. Think every line of the Linux kernel or GCC was fun to write? It's not as much the fun as how badly someone wants it. People have been toying around with this sort of thing for a long time. But there doesn't seem to be enough real community demand to get a big enough team to hammer it out.
I know nothing of graphics programming. But if I was very interested in having accelerated window animations I'd learn OpenGL and help out. There will always be someone who wants that itch scratched.
Microsoft has all the lawyers. Microsoft has many lobbyists and has funded politicians to office. Who can stop Microsoft? If Microsoft does not make it, who can stop Microsoft from stealing it, sending a stream of lawyers to fight it, or calling in political favors?
Who can stop AT&T? Who can stop the American Tabacco Company? Who can stop Standard Oil?
The only thing that's definite is change.
It's happened before. It will happen again. Someday they will be the #2 player.
"Let me now... warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it."
-- George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
You're missing the point and not using your own brain to process all the info. I was oversimplifying because my point was the difference between communism and socialism. A diatribe on communism isn't necessary because most people have a general idea of what it is. In this case equating social programs to communism was wrong.