I did like the matrix but that main reason I'm responding was your comment about Harlan Ellison. He has long been my favorite sci-fi writer and while its hard to pick a "best" he's certainly as good a choice as any. Anyone who hasn't read his stuff is missing out. The most recent thing of his I read (which was quite good) was "slippage" - quite worthwhile.
Never lived in austin but I can certainly tell you some things about houston (where I live):
(a) My house is brand new, has 4 bedrooms + 2 car garage - cost 120K
(b) The job market for programmers in unbelievable here - the headhunters are like buzzards calling all the time trying to steal your good people. If you're any good at all you get 50K - if you're great you can earn twice that
(c) There are a lot of oil/gas companies here which means there are lots of alternative programming jobs to the normal banking/database/vb fare - its no problem to get a position where you use real computer science on a daily basis
(d) It is the 4th largest city in the country so you can see/do/buy pretty much anything
(e) I've had a cable modem for more than two years - works great, very speedy
Houston is a great place to live - I don't know of anywhere else (that's not a small town) where the ratio of what you get paid versus what it costs to live is so favorable.
For what its worth we use a tool called "purify" to combat memory leaks (and overruns and uninitialized memory reads etc.). I have literally seen bugs that might have taken hours or days to ferret out found in minutes using that tool and it is available on platforms other than just windows (we use it mostly on solaris). It is very, very hard to create a non-trivial application that is completely clean - in fact even the best applications typically have bits of naughtiness that are going to be exceedingly difficult to completely eliminate unless you have a programmatic way of identifying them. I've written the folks who make purify before and they're not planning a linux port at the moment - perhaps that'll change in time. If you'd like to lend you voice to convince them to port this great tool to our great OS here's the url: http://www.rational.com/products/purify_unix/index .jtmpl
Ah, I see what you are getting at - rereading my original post I can see how it might be misinterpreted. My point was that this "hole" in RSA was only found because the algorithm is public (a good thing). An encryption algorithm that wasn't public might well contain an equivalent hole but since it wouldn't be subject to scrutiny it would continue to appear secure. As far as "noone would trust...", I'm not so certain - many companies use FlexLM to license their software and I've never seen any mention of the algorithm FlexLM uses. (admittedly I may be wrong here, I've not done exhaustive research to find out what sort of crypto FlexLM uses - it may well be published somewhere). My overall point was that with published algorithms one can have confidence in their quality because people are actively trying to break them whereas with proprietary algorithms you just have to trust the vendor.
Interesting article - it shows again how important it is to only trust those algorithms that are open, published and subject to the scrutiny of the community. I am always amazed by the number of companies who really believe that keeping their encryption algorithms or security holes secret somehow makes them more secure. On a related note, I've often wondered if someday someone will find a fast, general algorithm for factoring. Such an algorithm might exist but be as yet undiscovered or it may be the case that brute force is about as good as can ever be done. Fascinating stuff, cryptoanalysis - I strongly recommend reading Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier to anyone who is interested in this sort of thing.
cost us 30 billion dollars!?!? Oh *no* that's just too damn much money, maybe we'd better just leave MicroSoft alone huh? Good god, is this the sort of response that article is supposed to engender? Puh*leeze* - I haven't read anything so insulting to my intelligence in ages. It sounds a lot like the tripe the cable companies are spewing now that deregulation and an end to their monopolies are looming. Suppose you had an employee who came to you and stated: "I must have a raise, see I have a wife and 3 kids" - what would your response be? Mine would be "Well that is an interesting bit of information, but I think we'll continue to give raises based upon merit, thanks". If it is indeed true that 30 billion will be the cost of remedying MicroSoft's lawlessness than so be it. I personally think it is exceedingly unlikely to be that high, in fact I think the cost will actually be negative since more competition will surely be the result and more competition will result in lower prices and better product quality. Surely you all remember AT&T's ceaseless whining about the horrible results that would come of breaking up of their monopoly - yah it sure has been awful, I just absolutely *hate* paying these reasonable, low long distance rates. I suppose you can't blame a company for wanting to preserve their monopolist status - it is a very lucrative position to be in. Bottom line? quit whining and take your medicine, you did bring this upon yourselves after all.
The company I work for is a cross platform shop - many years ago there was a push to port everything to sco and so we did. We never sold a single product so we dropped sco support years ago. Within the last year we have been actively pushed by real clients willing to buy immediately to port our software to linux. SCO is done - make no mistake about it, for a long time their claim to fame was "We have unix that runs on your pc" - but they are now one of a number of unices that run on a pc and theirs is the only one that is costly. SCO is in a sense like the former soviet union - they are the only country that doesn't seem to be willing to accept that they are no longer a super power but not accepting a thing does not cause that thing to be untrue.
The trouble with "innovative" is that it is a bit difficult to define. Surely we've all heard the famous phrase "nothing new has been done in 2000 years" and in a sense it is true. Any example a person brings up (Einsteinian physics for example) can be dismissed as just a modification of a previously existing idea (Newtonian physics). I'm happy to list open source projects that *I* think are innovative (attempting to list different ones than the other person who replied to your post listed) : Qt, PHP, the ACE library, JPython. All open source, all under active development and all "innovative". Perhaps a more interesting question would be to try and list things that MicroSoft is doing that are "innovative", open source or not. Even trying to be objective the only remotely innovative thing to come out of Redmond that I can recall would probably be ODBC. It is simply ludicrous for them to question anyone else's level of innovation - hell I have a difficult time coming up with a list of software companies with a more dismal innovation record than MS.
Has Java Progressed wrt Generic Programming?
on
Java for EGCS
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· Score: 2
Agreed, I certainly didn't mean to cast aspersions at your point in general - it is a good one. It is always the classic struggle isn't it? Compile time safety vs. flexibility with dynamic typing. Personally I love the flexibility that java/smalltalke/etc. give you but in practice deferring that many potential errors to runtime can certainly cause you a lot of grief. A (possibly) interesting observation about c++'s templates - they actually provide a new type of inheritance in a way, the allow you to plug in any class that has the acceptable methods (the ones you call in the template) without requiring that those classes actually inherit from a common base class. I suppose my final word on the whole deal is that with c++ (with possibly much pain) you can create OO, shippable, speedy software today - java definitely gives you the OO but the speed is sadly just unacceptable for a large percentage of programming projects.
Has Java Progressed wrt Generic Programming?
on
Java for EGCS
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· Score: 2
Yah, what you are saying is valid and true in a sense but I'd estimate I've written approximately 100 to 200 thousand lines of java (at least) in my time and the number of times I've actually encountered the ClassCastException you describe would have to be less than 5. I don't tend to create a Vector (say) and pass it around to every class under the sun and just hope they don't add a Dog object to my Vector of Windows. I'm not saying templates aren't cool/useful (I do a *lot* of c++ programming too and I like it a lot) it is just that this argument smacks of "because of x the result must be y" while ignoring that in practice the real outcomes is "despite x, very rarely y".
Well, if russia had switched to capitalism *before* their economy went down the toilet you might have a point but they didn't. The argument you are presenting is the logical equivalent of: "My wife told me yesterday she was going to divorce me so I immediately switched from christianity to buddhism but sure enough today she divorced me so I now conclude that buddhism does not work".
While I certainly can't condone the ethics of a bartender who would serve someone 22 shots I am still forced to ask: "Who bears the ultimate responsibility for your behavior?". The answer as I see it should be *you*. Noone held that 21-year old down and forced those 22 shots down his throat, he most likely requested and paid for them. On a related note, some professions are dangerous, such as being a policeman or paratrooper, should we step in and prevent people from choosing these horribly risky lines of work? Ultimately this all comes back to the same theme: "People don't know what is good for them, we need the law to step in and save them from themselves". Is this the sort of mentality you'd like to see become even more pervasive here in the US? I certainly prefer accountability and individualism, sad to see I'm resoundingly in the minority.
"Is that really how it works?" - so say the brits I know, I've always thought this was a marvelous idea. Thanks for the compliment on my spam block I figured if you can figure out what that means I'll probably enjoy getting email from you;-)
"No such things happens in Europe" - I might be tempted to add "yet" to that sentence, some say things happen in europe about 18 months after when they happen in the states and there does seem to be some truth to it. I certainly hope not - while I'm quite happy to be living in the US the current state of our legal system isn't one of our finest accomplishments.
Yah, I've thought of that - what about this: if you have a situation where a person couldn't bear the financial burden if they were to lose (but did have a good case) an attorney could offer to shoulder the risk and in response collect a substantial percentage if successful. I realize this would force lawyers to evaluate the case *very* *carefully* (since the attorney himself/herself would be out the money if the case isn't proven) but I submit that could well be a benefit, rather than a liability.
Erm, eh? SMU is in Dallas, not Houston. I would have to say I don't find this behavior surprising - look at recent events: woman suing mcdonalds over hot coffee, people suing bartenders for being "overserved". This is just continuing the trend of people being totally unwilling to accept the consequences of their actions and I fear it'll get better before it gets worse. What we need is to take a page from the british legal system, if I bring a lawsuit against you and can't prove my case - I pay your legal bills.
Haha, yep - that was always the complaint of those who had been ignored on my chat program. I do agree with your sentiment (and admire your optimism that a person once seen as bozotic might ultimately make the transition to sensible). I do have a high degree of confidence that whatever system/. uses will certainly evolve to a state of reasonablness, usability and equilibrium. Certainly with my aforementioned chat program that was what happened - the right balance between letting people have their say and letting people choose not to listen to morons will always be found over time.
A few years ago, I decided I wanted to learn socket programming so I wrote a chat server program. It worked with simple telnet and initially you could just log in as whoever you wanted. Eventually it became clear that many people have a propensity for impersonating others and making disparaging remarks while pretending to be them so a username/password feature was added. As it turned out, about 25% of the program ended up being features to deal with idiots and one of the most useful features was the "ignore" feature where you could specify a list of nicknames and the program would filter out anything said by anyone in that list. There weren't any complaints since it wasn't censorship "from above" (by me, the author of the program) it was censorship by a particular person. As an example, I might list meept and anonymous coward in my "ignore" list (actually I wouldn't, I like to see what everyone has to say) but this might be an interesting feature to consider adding to/. Anyway, word to the wise when writing *any* software that lets large numbers of people communicate, be prepared to write significant code to deal with the fact that a surprising number of people just don't seem to have any sense.
Man, fast server - fastest RealVideo connection I've ever gotten 200 kilo bytes per second (yes bytes, not bits). Damn I love my cable modem:)
Windows desktop is my replacement for a filesystem
on
Enlightenment 0.15
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· Score: 1
I have to admit Axel, I'm with you. Qt is a very nice, well designed toolkit - the documentation is absolutely outstanding. Now for all the folks who are just about wetting their pants to post back and say "Qt sucks" I feel obliged to point out that I will be happy to entertain such rants so long as you fill in the following sentence: "Qt sucks - I know this because I have written [X] lines of code using it". My prediction? [X] will be zero for all Qt flamers to follow.
Gates is a very neurotic person
on
Windows ID
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· Score: 1
Consider the behavior of an anorexic, that person is driven by a thought "I need to be thin" that overrides everything - they may look in the mirror and see a bag of bones but "I need to be thin" continues to be their driving goal, they may step on the scale and see 70 pounds but "I need to be thin" pushes them onward. I think for bill gates that thought is "I need to demonstrate that I am a success". Think about it, the guy became exceedingly rich and powerful *years* ago but is still fixated on the thought that somehow, someway someone might come along and take him down a peg. I suppose he feels like without his accomplishments he'd be left with just himself and that is apparently a terrifying thought. You know, MS might well have been able to beat out Netscape by just making a better product but because of Gates' paranoia they had to stack the deck - coerce all the AOL users into using IE, bundle IE with the OS - Gates couldn't leave any possibility that he might not come out the victor. You know, thinking about it there are some scary parallels with Hitler's behavior. Initially he did a great deal for Germany but in the end it was ultimately his neurotic nature that caused his country's downfall. I suppose it goes without saying that history has an annoying tendency to repeat itself.
Hmm, I dunno - what do you make of this: When my buddy is logged in at the console he gets his drive letter mappings (say under his login drive "S:\" is mapped to a particular directory on another machine). If (while he is logged in) I telnet in and log in as myself, I'm still stuck with his drive letter mappings not mine. I'm not trying to be a wise guy, but this is something I've dealt with within the last week so it came to mind. Comments?
not desirable for all types of programs.
on
QPL 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Indeed, GUI programming is (in my opinion) one of the places where OOP provides the most benefit. By the way, my experience was that until I really understood OOP my c++/java code was just "C code in disguise as c++/java" - the book that really turned the corner for me was "Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". I readily admit that both c++ and java have their drawbacks as languages but OOP itself is wonderful, as much a step forward as was structured programming. If you haven't read that book I urge you to give it a try, it is absolutely in the top 5 programming books I have ever read.
Indeed, and I will help MicroSoft make the move to any of the above countries with a swift boot to the posterior. You MS flunkies just don't get it do you? MicroSoft is irrelevant, in fact I challenge you to come up with a single task to be done on a computer that can only be done via MicroSoft software. Believe me, we don't need MicroSoft and threats about them leaving the country are about as frightening as Michael Bolton threatening to cease releasing music. I have never in my life met a top quality programmer who had any affection for anything MicroSoft - *never*, they are the purveyors of crufty, inelegant apis and bloaware - should they choose to depart my only response would be "good riddance". By the way, should you be prepared to claim "I'm a top quality programmer and I love MicroSoft" be aware that I have interviewed on the order of 100 developers in the last year and I shall subject your claim to serious scrutiny.
Slashdot Mirror
I did like the matrix but that main reason I'm responding was your comment about Harlan Ellison. He has long been my favorite sci-fi writer and while its hard to pick a "best" he's certainly as good a choice as any. Anyone who hasn't read his stuff is missing out. The most recent thing of his I read (which was quite good) was "slippage" - quite worthwhile.
Never lived in austin but I can certainly tell you some things about houston (where I live):
(a) My house is brand new, has 4 bedrooms + 2 car garage - cost 120K
(b) The job market for programmers in unbelievable here - the headhunters are like buzzards calling all the time trying to steal your good people. If you're any good at all you get 50K - if you're great you can earn twice that
(c) There are a lot of oil/gas companies here which means there are lots of alternative programming jobs to the normal banking/database/vb fare - its no problem to get a position where you use real computer science on a daily basis
(d) It is the 4th largest city in the country so you can see/do/buy pretty much anything
(e) I've had a cable modem for more than two years - works great, very speedy
Houston is a great place to live - I don't know of anywhere else (that's not a small town) where the ratio of what you get paid versus what it costs to live is so favorable.
For what its worth we use a tool called "purify" to combat memory leaks (and overruns and uninitialized memory reads etc.). I have literally seen bugs that might have taken hours or days to ferret out found in minutes using that tool and it is available on platforms other than just windows (we use it mostly on solaris). It is very, very hard to create a non-trivial application that is completely clean - in fact even the best applications typically have bits of naughtiness that are going to be exceedingly difficult to completely eliminate unless you have a programmatic way of identifying them. I've written the folks who make purify before and they're not planning a linux port at the moment - perhaps that'll change in time. If you'd like to lend you voice to convince them to port this great tool to our great OS here's the url: http://www.rational.com/products/purify_unix/index .jtmpl
Ah, I see what you are getting at - rereading my original post I can see how it might be misinterpreted. My point was that this "hole" in RSA was only found because the algorithm is public (a good thing). An encryption algorithm that wasn't public might well contain an equivalent hole but since it wouldn't be subject to scrutiny it would continue to appear secure. As far as "noone would trust ...", I'm not so certain - many companies use FlexLM to license their software and I've never seen any mention of the algorithm FlexLM uses. (admittedly I may be wrong here, I've not done exhaustive research to find out what sort of crypto FlexLM uses - it may well be published somewhere). My overall point was that with published algorithms one can have confidence in their quality because people are actively trying to break them whereas with proprietary algorithms you just have to trust the vendor.
Interesting article - it shows again how important it is to only trust those algorithms that are open, published and subject to the scrutiny of the community. I am always amazed by the number of companies who really believe that keeping their encryption algorithms or security holes secret somehow makes them more secure. On a related note, I've often wondered if someday someone will find a fast, general algorithm for factoring. Such an algorithm might exist but be as yet undiscovered or it may be the case that brute force is about as good as can ever be done. Fascinating stuff, cryptoanalysis - I strongly recommend reading Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier to anyone who is interested in this sort of thing.
cost us 30 billion dollars!?!? Oh *no* that's just too damn much money, maybe we'd better just leave MicroSoft alone huh? Good god, is this the sort of response that article is supposed to engender? Puh*leeze* - I haven't read anything so insulting to my intelligence in ages. It sounds a lot like the tripe the cable companies are spewing now that deregulation and an end to their monopolies are looming. Suppose you had an employee who came to you and stated: "I must have a raise, see I have a wife and 3 kids" - what would your response be? Mine would be "Well that is an interesting bit of information, but I think we'll continue to give raises based upon merit, thanks". If it is indeed true that 30 billion will be the cost of remedying MicroSoft's lawlessness than so be it. I personally think it is exceedingly unlikely to be that high, in fact I think the cost will actually be negative since more competition will surely be the result and more competition will result in lower prices and better product quality. Surely you all remember AT&T's ceaseless whining about the horrible results that would come of breaking up of their monopoly - yah it sure has been awful, I just absolutely *hate* paying these reasonable, low long distance rates. I suppose you can't blame a company for wanting to preserve their monopolist status - it is a very lucrative position to be in. Bottom line? quit whining and take your medicine, you did bring this upon yourselves after all.
The company I work for is a cross platform shop - many years ago there was a push to port everything to sco and so we did. We never sold a single product so we dropped sco support years ago. Within the last year we have been actively pushed by real clients willing to buy immediately to port our software to linux. SCO is done - make no mistake about it, for a long time their claim to fame was "We have unix that runs on your pc" - but they are now one of a number of unices that run on a pc and theirs is the only one that is costly. SCO is in a sense like the former soviet union - they are the only country that doesn't seem to be willing to accept that they are no longer a super power but not accepting a thing does not cause that thing to be untrue.
The trouble with "innovative" is that it is a bit difficult to define. Surely we've all heard the famous phrase "nothing new has been done in 2000 years" and in a sense it is true. Any example a person brings up (Einsteinian physics for example) can be dismissed as just a modification of a previously existing idea (Newtonian physics). I'm happy to list open source projects that *I* think are innovative (attempting to list different ones than the other person who replied to your post listed) : Qt, PHP, the ACE library, JPython. All open source, all under active development and all "innovative". Perhaps a more interesting question would be to try and list things that MicroSoft is doing that are "innovative", open source or not. Even trying to be objective the only remotely innovative thing to come out of Redmond that I can recall would probably be ODBC. It is simply ludicrous for them to question anyone else's level of innovation - hell I have a difficult time coming up with a list of software companies with a more dismal innovation record than MS.
Agreed, I certainly didn't mean to cast aspersions at your point in general - it is a good one. It is always the classic struggle isn't it? Compile time safety vs. flexibility with dynamic typing. Personally I love the flexibility that java/smalltalke/etc. give you but in practice deferring that many potential errors to runtime can certainly cause you a lot of grief. A (possibly) interesting observation about c++'s templates - they actually provide a new type of inheritance in a way, the allow you to plug in any class that has the acceptable methods (the ones you call in the template) without requiring that those classes actually inherit from a common base class. I suppose my final word on the whole deal is that with c++ (with possibly much pain) you can create OO, shippable, speedy software today - java definitely gives you the OO but the speed is sadly just unacceptable for a large percentage of programming projects.
Yah, what you are saying is valid and true in a sense but I'd estimate I've written approximately 100 to 200 thousand lines of java (at least) in my time and the number of times I've actually encountered the ClassCastException you describe would have to be less than 5. I don't tend to create a Vector (say) and pass it around to every class under the sun and just hope they don't add a Dog object to my Vector of Windows. I'm not saying templates aren't cool/useful (I do a *lot* of c++ programming too and I like it a lot) it is just that this argument smacks of "because of x the result must be y" while ignoring that in practice the real outcomes is "despite x, very rarely y".
Well, if russia had switched to capitalism *before* their economy went down the toilet you might have a point but they didn't. The argument you are presenting is the logical equivalent of: "My wife told me yesterday she was going to divorce me so I immediately switched from christianity to buddhism but sure enough today she divorced me so I now conclude that buddhism does not work".
While I certainly can't condone the ethics of a bartender who would serve someone 22 shots I am still forced to ask: "Who bears the ultimate responsibility for your behavior?". The answer as I see it should be *you*. Noone held that 21-year old down and forced those 22 shots down his throat, he most likely requested and paid for them. On a related note, some professions are dangerous, such as being a policeman or paratrooper, should we step in and prevent people from choosing these horribly risky lines of work? Ultimately this all comes back to the same theme: "People don't know what is good for them, we need the law to step in and save them from themselves". Is this the sort of mentality you'd like to see become even more pervasive here in the US? I certainly prefer accountability and individualism, sad to see I'm resoundingly in the minority.
"Is that really how it works?" - so say the brits I know, I've always thought this was a marvelous idea. Thanks for the compliment on my spam block I figured if you can figure out what that means I'll probably enjoy getting email from you ;-)
"No such things happens in Europe" - I might be tempted to add "yet" to that sentence, some say things happen in europe about 18 months after when they happen in the states and there does seem to be some truth to it. I certainly hope not - while I'm quite happy to be living in the US the current state of our legal system isn't one of our finest accomplishments.
Yah, I've thought of that - what about this: if you have a situation where a person couldn't bear the financial burden if they were to lose (but did have a good case) an attorney could offer to shoulder the risk and in response collect a substantial percentage if successful. I realize this would force lawyers to evaluate the case *very* *carefully* (since the attorney himself/herself would be out the money if the case isn't proven) but I submit that could well be a benefit, rather than a liability.
erm, "worse before it gets better" - of course
Erm, eh? SMU is in Dallas, not Houston. I would have to say I don't find this behavior surprising - look at recent events: woman suing mcdonalds over hot coffee, people suing bartenders for being "overserved". This is just continuing the trend of people being totally unwilling to accept the consequences of their actions and I fear it'll get better before it gets worse. What we need is to take a page from the british legal system, if I bring a lawsuit against you and can't prove my case - I pay your legal bills.
Haha, yep - that was always the complaint of those who had been ignored on my chat program. I do agree with your sentiment (and admire your optimism that a person once seen as bozotic might ultimately make the transition to sensible). I do have a high degree of confidence that whatever system /. uses will certainly evolve to a state of reasonablness, usability and equilibrium. Certainly with my aforementioned chat program that was what happened - the right balance between letting people have their say and letting people choose not to listen to morons will always be found over time.
A few years ago, I decided I wanted to learn socket programming so I wrote a chat server program. It worked with simple telnet and initially you could just log in as whoever you wanted. Eventually it became clear that many people have a propensity for impersonating others and making disparaging remarks while pretending to be them so a username/password feature was added. As it turned out, about 25% of the program ended up being features to deal with idiots and one of the most useful features was the "ignore" feature where you could specify a list of nicknames and the program would filter out anything said by anyone in that list. There weren't any complaints since it wasn't censorship "from above" (by me, the author of the program) it was censorship by a particular person. As an example, I might list meept and anonymous coward in my "ignore" list (actually I wouldn't, I like to see what everyone has to say) but this might be an interesting feature to consider adding to /. Anyway, word to the wise when writing *any* software that lets large numbers of people communicate, be prepared to write significant code to deal with the fact that a surprising number of people just don't seem to have any sense.
Man, fast server - fastest RealVideo connection :)
I've ever gotten 200 kilo bytes per second (yes
bytes, not bits). Damn I love my cable modem
I have to admit Axel, I'm with you. Qt is a very nice, well designed toolkit - the documentation is absolutely outstanding. Now for all the folks who are just about wetting their pants to post back and say "Qt sucks" I feel obliged to point out that I will be happy to entertain such rants so long as you fill in the following sentence: "Qt sucks - I know this because I have written [X] lines of code using it". My prediction? [X] will be zero for all Qt flamers to follow.
Consider the behavior of an anorexic, that person is driven by a thought "I need to be thin" that overrides everything - they may look in the mirror and see a bag of bones but "I need to be thin" continues to be their driving goal, they may step on the scale and see 70 pounds but "I need to be thin" pushes them onward. I think for bill gates that thought is "I need to demonstrate that I am a success". Think about it, the guy became exceedingly rich and powerful *years* ago but is still fixated on the thought that somehow, someway someone might come along and take him down a peg. I suppose he feels like without his accomplishments he'd be left with just himself and that is apparently a terrifying thought. You know, MS might well have been able to beat out Netscape by just making a better product but because of Gates' paranoia they had to stack the deck - coerce all the AOL users into using IE, bundle IE with the OS - Gates couldn't leave any possibility that he might not come out the victor. You know, thinking about it there are some scary parallels with Hitler's behavior. Initially he did a great deal for Germany but in the end it was ultimately his neurotic nature that caused his country's downfall. I suppose it goes without saying that history has an annoying tendency to repeat itself.
Hmm, I dunno - what do you make of this: When my buddy is logged in at the console he gets his drive letter mappings (say under his login drive "S:\" is mapped to a particular directory on another machine). If (while he is logged in) I telnet in and log in as myself, I'm still stuck with his drive letter mappings not mine. I'm not trying to be a wise guy, but this is something I've dealt with within the last week so it came to mind. Comments?
Indeed, GUI programming is (in my opinion) one of the places where OOP provides the most benefit. By the way, my experience was that until I really understood OOP my c++/java code was just "C code in disguise as c++/java" - the book that really turned the corner for me was "Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". I readily admit that both c++ and java have their drawbacks as languages but OOP itself is wonderful, as much a step forward as was structured programming. If you haven't read that book I urge you to give it a try, it is absolutely in the top 5 programming books I have ever read.
Indeed, and I will help MicroSoft make the move to any of the above countries with a swift boot to the posterior. You MS flunkies just don't get it do you? MicroSoft is irrelevant, in fact I challenge you to come up with a single task to be done on a computer that can only be done via MicroSoft software. Believe me, we don't need MicroSoft and threats about them leaving the country are about as frightening as Michael Bolton threatening to cease releasing music. I have never in my life met a top quality programmer who had any affection for anything MicroSoft - *never*, they are the purveyors of crufty, inelegant apis and bloaware - should they choose to depart my only response would be "good riddance". By the way, should you be prepared to claim "I'm a top quality programmer and I love MicroSoft" be aware that I have interviewed on the order of 100 developers in the last year and I shall subject your claim to serious scrutiny.