I am quite disappointed to hear about your plans to oppose the virginia spam law. I can see why you might see this as a free speech issue, but it most certainly is not. Be aware that there are already laws that charge violators with a $500 per page penalty for sending unauthorized faxes and I think the two situations are analagous. The reason "fax spamming" isn't protected by freedom of speech is because the cost of the speech (paper, ink, busy fax lines) is forced upon the receiver. Spam is precisely like this. Every spam message goes through countless machines on the internet eating up bandwidth and diskspace. This is money, plain and simple. Let me put it another way - would you support telephone soliciting if the calls were collect and the receiver was forced to accept them? The ACLU has done a great many things with regard to freedom of speech (particularly protecting unpopular speech) that I admire but you folks are out of your element here - my guess is that it never occurred to you all that spamming forces a financial burden on people without their permission as I cannot believe you would push forward with this action while in possession of that knowledge.
Yep, NT's just the best thing since sliced bread isn't it? Well perhaps you can answer me this one simple little question: Since NT's administration is largely GUI based why didn't they design it from the ground up to support the kind of behavior x windows has had for - oh lets just say "decades"? Boggles the mind how the geniuses didn't chose to (a) Make sure every gui administration screen had a functional command-line equivalent or (b) Build in x-like ability, this OS was designed in the *90's* you know. Hard to conceive how they selected option (c) - do neither of the above, you have to be physically sitting at the machine to do *many* administration tasks. But pay no attention to the man behind the curtain - just keep repeating "NT is definitely the way to go, once again".
Well - you may be right but there is actually some precedent for this. When the government actually does step in to break up a company (as they did with standard oil) they don't just say "ok, you guys be sure and compete now" they actually put regulators on the premises for a period of years, monitor communication, stock transactions, etc. All of this under a "sudden death" rule whereby if the company is caught attempting to collude with one of their newly split off "competitors" the company is terminated. I certainly share your doubts as to MS's desire to voluntarily comply with something like this, I'm just saying that historically the government has (oddly enough) actually had some sense when it comes to these sorts of matters.
in my opinion is to split them up into 2 or more companies. Suppose we say "applications" and "operating systems" - ok, now you are a member of the applications group, all you care about is selling as many copies of your app as possible (rather than trying to protect the windows monopoly) do you have any objection to porting to linux (if you believe there is money to be made)? Nope no objection. Are you interested in tying your application so completely to one os that porting becomes impossible? Not hardly. Now if you are in the os group, are you interested in providing special secret information to one particular application vendor? Are you interested in moving things into the kernel that really don't belong there to improve the performance of another company's app? Nope. Would you be willing to port your os to say, sparc? maybe. Would you be interested in making sure your os was very well documented and standards compliant so that everyone would want to write apps for it? Definitely. I'm happy to entertain criticisms of this line of reasoning, but I do think it is by far the most compelling option.
When I read something like that original article the first thing that comes to my mind is "Hmm, I wonder how much actual, personal experience this person has with using open-source software?"
It is often the case that a question so obvious as that isn't even posed - people just accept a person's statements and credentials without examination. As an example, I've heard people extolling the superiority of NT's scheduling vs. linux's but these same people nearly inevitably respond with a sheepish "no" when I ask: "Ok, since you're so obviously an expert in computer science - could you sit down right now and code even a bubble sort in any programming language?".
Too many people are just parrots - repeating some spiffy-sounding fact-byte they've been fed with having anywhere near the knowledge to objectively analyze the statement for themselves.
Anyone can sound technically competent in the broad sense - I've interviewed probably 100+ developers in the last 4 years and it is astounding how wide the gap sometimes is between the level of experience/knowledge professed on their resume and their actual competency when it comes down to specific questions.
I suppose (for the author of the original article) that's the downside of spewing out a rant like he did that's likely to be read by the programming community - we don't tend to be easily impressed by hand waving, just boring old facts for us, thanks.
I suppose everyone is entitled to their opinion but I have to tell you after seeing years of typical x apps and lots of gnome/gtk stuff I was pretty well blown away by kde. I have to wonder if some of this ranting is based upon religious rather than pragmatic reasons. I mean have you ever actually run kde? Though probably 8 of the 12 platforms I have actually written commercial code for were unix variants I was always saddened by the relatively amateurish look of most of the x-based apps - netscape being one of the exceptions. I'm using kde now and you know what? Netscape is the least-spiffy looking thing on my desktop.
Well, there are visual debuggers (ddd, xxgdb) which are actually pretty good but your statement "gcc has no... debugger" causes me to want to ask "How much time have you actually spent using gdb?". Gdb is actually very nice and very powerful - it (believe it or not) has some features not found in any other debugger.
I have used the visual c++ debugger and it is very good but I have never in my life found a piece of code I couldn't debug using whatever tools were available and frankly I've found that the biggest proponents of the visual c++ debugger were people who were didn't really want to do the work of thinking through the problem - they just wanted to point their magic gui at it and have the problem go away. The biggest impediment to debugging is deciding that one will actually do the possibly hard work that is required to mentally understand the problem and step through it to solve it.
In summary if you haven't actually spent any time using gdb, reading its manual, learning what it can do you have no basis for criticizing it - though it is not inherently visual it really is quite good, I encourage you to actually try it before making disparaging remarks about its capabilities.
Well, there are visual debuggers (ddd, xxgdb) which are actually pretty good but your statement "gcc has no... debugger" causes me to want to ask "How much time have you actually spent using gdb?". Gdb is actually very nice and very powerful - it (believe it or not) has some features not found in any other debugger. I have used the visual c++ debugger and it is very good but I have never in my life found a piece of code I couldn't debug using whatever tools were available and frankly I've found that the biggest proponents of the visual c++ debugger were people who were didn't really want to do the work of thinking through the problem - they just wanted to point their magic gui at it and have the problem go away. The biggest impediment to debugging is deciding that one will actually do the possibly hard work that is required to mentally understand the problem and step through it to solve it. In summary if you haven't actually spent any time using gdb, reading its manual, learning what it can do you have no basis for criticizing it - though it is not inherently visual it really is quite good, I encourage you to actually try it before making disparaging remarks about its capabilities.
Not hardly, your post was quite reasonable. Though there is no shortage of imbeciles out there giving christianity a bad name, people shouldn't be too hasty in judging the entire faith based upon the behavior of a few cretins. As an analogy observe that linux itself has its fringe elements - you certainly wouldn't want people judging the linux movement based upon the impression these people leave would you? I'm not the church-going type but I have had the chance to know at least two christians who demonstrate wholly admirable and unimpeachable character - their goal is to show what their religion is all about by example. Both have come out with strong statements regarding the actions/philosophies of these militant pro-life types - they like all other reasonable people quite correctly realize those people represent hypocracy at its worst.
I've probably interviewed over 100 people for development positions over the last 2 years. Out of that 100 I'd say less than 10 were top quality. I work in Houston where there is a lot of work that is neither database nor VB nor Y2K related - (hint: its "real" programming). Companies are just looking for really sharp people, experienced or not. The demand here is just staggering and believe me - it is only going to increase from here. Though there may be naysayers, I've easily seen the productivity and quality ratio between "top notch" versus "decent" developers be five to one. Being a superior programmer takes brains and a lot of hard work and I certainly don't see these traits suddenly increasing in the general population.
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I am quite disappointed to hear about your plans to oppose the virginia spam law. I can see why you might see this as a free speech issue, but it most certainly is not. Be aware that there are already laws that charge violators with a $500 per page penalty for sending unauthorized faxes and I think the two situations are analagous. The reason "fax spamming" isn't protected by freedom of speech is because the cost of the speech (paper, ink, busy fax lines) is forced upon the receiver. Spam is precisely like this. Every spam message goes through countless machines on the internet eating up bandwidth and diskspace. This is money, plain and simple. Let me put it another way - would you support telephone soliciting if the calls were collect and the receiver was forced to accept them? The ACLU has done a great many things with regard to freedom of speech (particularly protecting unpopular speech) that I admire but you folks are out of your element here - my guess is that it never occurred to you all that spamming forces a financial burden on people without their permission as I cannot believe you would push forward with this action while in possession of that knowledge.
Yep, NT's just the best thing since sliced bread isn't it? Well perhaps you can answer me this one simple little question: Since NT's administration is largely GUI based why didn't they design it from the ground up to support the kind of behavior x windows has had for - oh lets just say "decades"? Boggles the mind how the geniuses didn't chose to (a) Make sure every gui administration screen had a functional command-line equivalent or (b) Build in x-like ability, this OS was designed in the *90's* you know. Hard to conceive how they selected option (c) - do neither of the above, you have to be physically sitting at the machine to do *many* administration tasks. But pay no attention to the man behind the curtain - just keep repeating "NT is definitely the way to go, once again".
Well - you may be right but there is actually
some precedent for this. When the government
actually does step in to break up a company
(as they did with standard oil) they don't just
say "ok, you guys be sure and compete now" they
actually put regulators on the premises for a
period of years, monitor communication, stock
transactions, etc. All of this under a "sudden
death" rule whereby if the company is caught
attempting to collude with one of their newly
split off "competitors" the company is terminated.
I certainly share your doubts as to MS's desire
to voluntarily comply with something like this,
I'm just saying that historically the government
has (oddly enough) actually had some sense when
it comes to these sorts of matters.
in my opinion is to split them up into 2 or more
companies. Suppose we say "applications" and
"operating systems" - ok, now you are a member
of the applications group, all you care about is
selling as many copies of your app as possible
(rather than trying to protect the windows monopoly) do you have any objection to porting to linux (if you believe there is money to be made)? Nope no objection. Are you interested in tying
your application so completely to one os that porting becomes impossible? Not hardly. Now if you are in the os group, are you interested in providing special secret information to one particular application vendor? Are you interested in moving things into the kernel that really don't belong there to improve the performance of another company's app? Nope. Would you be willing to port your os to say, sparc? maybe. Would you be interested in making sure your os was very well documented and standards compliant so that everyone would want to write apps for it? Definitely. I'm happy to entertain criticisms
of this line of reasoning, but I do think it is
by far the most compelling option.
It is often the case that a question so obvious as that isn't even posed - people just accept a person's statements and credentials without examination. As an example, I've heard people
extolling the superiority of NT's scheduling
vs. linux's but these same people nearly inevitably respond with a sheepish "no" when
I ask: "Ok, since you're so obviously an expert in computer science - could you sit down right now and code even a bubble sort in any programming language?".
Too many people are just parrots - repeating some spiffy-sounding fact-byte they've been fed with having anywhere near the knowledge to objectively analyze the statement for themselves.
Anyone can sound technically competent in the broad sense - I've interviewed probably 100+ developers in the last 4 years and it is
astounding how wide the gap sometimes is between the level of experience/knowledge professed on their resume and their actual competency when it comes down to specific questions.
I suppose (for the author of the original article) that's the downside of spewing out a rant like he did that's likely to be read by
the programming community - we don't tend to be easily impressed
by hand waving, just boring old facts for us, thanks.
One might just as readily ask
Q. Why the hell would I want to want to read
a book in 1999 when I could just watch television?
Fortunately the reponse to both quesions is
the same
A. Because it is often the case that newer
implies only "more recent than" rather than "is an actual improvement"
I suppose everyone is entitled to their opinion
but I have to tell you after seeing years of
typical x apps and lots of gnome/gtk stuff I was
pretty well blown away by kde. I have to wonder
if some of this ranting is based upon religious
rather than pragmatic reasons. I mean have you
ever actually run kde? Though probably 8 of the
12 platforms I have actually written commercial
code for were unix variants I was always saddened
by the relatively amateurish look of most of the
x-based apps - netscape being one of the exceptions. I'm using kde now and you know what?
Netscape is the least-spiffy looking thing on
my desktop.
I have used the visual c++ debugger and it is very good but I have never in my life found a piece of code I couldn't debug using whatever tools were available and frankly I've found that the biggest proponents of the visual c++ debugger were people who were didn't really want to do the work of thinking through the problem - they just wanted to point their magic gui at it and have the problem go away. The biggest impediment to debugging is deciding that one will actually do the possibly hard work that is required to mentally understand the problem and step through it to solve it.
In summary if you haven't actually spent any time using gdb, reading its manual, learning what it can do you have no basis for criticizing it - though it is not inherently visual it really is quite good, I encourage you to actually try it before making disparaging remarks about its capabilities.
Well, there are visual debuggers (ddd, xxgdb) ... debugger" causes me to want to
which are actually pretty good but your statement
"gcc has no
ask "How much time have you actually spent using
gdb?". Gdb is actually very nice and very powerful - it (believe it or not) has some features not found in any other debugger. I have
used the visual c++ debugger and it is very good
but I have never in my life found a piece of code
I couldn't debug using whatever tools were available and frankly I've found that the biggest
proponents of the visual c++ debugger were people
who were didn't really want to do the work of thinking through the problem - they just wanted to
point their magic gui at it and have the problem
go away. The biggest impediment to debugging is
deciding that one will actually do the possibly
hard work that is required to mentally understand
the problem and step through it to solve it. In
summary if you haven't actually spent any time
using gdb, reading its manual, learning what it
can do you have no basis for criticizing it - though it is not inherently visual it really is quite good, I encourage you to actually try it before making disparaging remarks about its capabilities.
Not hardly, your post was quite reasonable. Though there is no shortage of imbeciles out there giving christianity a bad name, people shouldn't be too hasty in judging the entire faith
based upon the behavior of a few cretins. As an
analogy observe that linux itself has its fringe
elements - you certainly wouldn't want people
judging the linux movement based upon the impression these people leave would you? I'm
not the church-going type but I have had the chance to know at least two christians who demonstrate wholly admirable and unimpeachable character - their goal is to show what their religion is all about by example. Both have
come out with strong statements regarding the
actions/philosophies of these militant pro-life types - they like all other reasonable people quite correctly realize those people represent hypocracy at its worst.
I've probably interviewed over 100 people for
development positions over the last 2 years. Out
of that 100 I'd say less than 10 were top quality.
I work in Houston where there is a lot of work
that is neither database nor VB nor Y2K related -
(hint: its "real" programming). Companies are just looking for really sharp people, experienced or not. The demand here is just staggering and believe me - it is only going to increase from here. Though there may be naysayers, I've easily seen the productivity and quality ratio between "top notch" versus "decent" developers be five to one. Being a superior programmer takes brains and a lot of hard work and I certainly don't see these traits suddenly increasing in the general population.