It sounds like it will be accurate, but it turns out that even with that system, and clearly labeled candidates, approximately 2% of the people mark the wrong box!!! Your COUNT can be 100% accurate, but it does not reflect "the will of the voter" with 100% percent accuracy.
Someone marked my previous as a troll, but I'm actually serious. Even with a 100 percent count accuracy, the BEST systems have about a 2% error rate. The studies were done by having volunteers simulate votes - they gave them a slip of paper, with the name/party of the person to vote for. Everyone knew it was a test of the system, not a real election. Being that they knew who the folks were supposed to vote for, and did post interviews with the folks to make sure they did it "right", and everything was filmed - the error rate was about 2%
Sacasim aside - have you ever studied voting systems? I have - It's a side part of one of my jobs. I collect voting data (Not the offical data - we don't do the count). Obviously, when you work with voting all the time, you start to learn about the parts you DON'T deal with
NO ONE has yet to come up with ANY voting method that relects "the wishes of the voter" than +- 2%!!! The system itself can be perfect, but it seems that the voters themselves make a mistake about 2% of the time, no matter what you do! This is why many states (see Florida for an example) have "automatic recount" rules when the race is closer than 3%. It's not a random number
I know that most folks think the elections are WAY off in November - you could not be more wrong
Florida's Primaries are March 9th - IF the primaries are tight, there could be problem
Remember, the first primary of the year is NEXT WEEK (Tuesday - Waskington DC), and the Iowa Caucuses are Monday the 19th
We are already in full election swing
Disclaimer - I write software that looks at election data (but does NOT count vote - so don't shoot me) - we have been in testing, 2-3 days/week since 2 months before the CA recall election. Even without that, we would have been testing since about Labor Day. From Now till June, it's 6 days/week between testing and actual elections
No idea - I was only there about 12 weeks - a long summer job, the summer before college
The reason for such a tight ship was it was a watch company. The previous incarnation of that building was the watchmakers shop (they closed THAT a few months before I started), and they move the clock warehouse in. When they were building watches, the place HAD to be spotless, and it carried over
Then you get the OTHER extreme. One summer I got a temp job closing a plant, and moving the contents to another building. After the move, because I knew something about HVAC (Dad was a mechanic for, oh 35 years at the time, and I used to help him) they kept me on as an HVAC grunt
This place maintianed their HVAC stuff like no other place I've ever seen. My Dad came in to visit, and he was impressed. 5 Machine rooms - year room had at least ONE spare "hot" compressor - piped in, but off, and idle. Open the valves for the water, and turn it on, and you were good to go. Tested at least once/month
Each room had 2 towers - each could handle 75% of the hottest anticipated day. Most days, you could shut one tower with no problems. The company wanted the air clean and good in their building - we ran 50% fresh air - aka, we dumped half our air. ALL the air was filtered, and THEN electrostatic precipitated - even the warehouse!! No dust. due to the 50% fresh air, the building was at a fairly high positive pressue - we basically worked in a clean room! (Not a very clean one - but..). Every morning, after taking the basic readings, and bringing them to my boss, I grabbed a stack of towels, and clean all the machines - no oil drips, no dust - this was done 2x/day!!! The TILE (not concrete) floors in each machine room were swept daily, and stripped and waxed once/week! Spare parts were in bins, parts labeled, inventoried and the like. PM was done constantly. I swear, they used to keep the "Plant" cleaner than the public parts of most food stores or fast food places I've seen. The place was spotless
The "New" FAA AAS traffic control system - was going to replace the current system. MASSIVE amounts of money spent, 2.5 BILLION, where 1.5 BILLION of it had to be written off. About a billion of the development was salvaged by using the Display System Replacement
And the Design of DC was setup to confortable handle quakes in the 10+ range. Yeas, that larger than anything out there, but....
Some of the individual items got tested to levels many times greater than that. I saw some of the gages tested - they were slamming them gack and forth 15-20 FEET in frequency ranges from small fractions of a Hz, up to like 30 hz. That shaker (which had a table about 3ft square) was mounted to a concrete block that was about 15 feet on a side. When they ran high power tests, they had to make sure the printing company "next door" (about 300 feet away) was NOT running their printing press, as the ground would shake enough to make the presses skip even that far away
I've always felt there were multiple choices, depending on what you like
1)A Domke satchel - Jim Domke designed what is probably the most used professional camera bags back when. These are the bags pros use for their "working" bags, (Not storage/shipping cases). You see almost every TV crew with a bunch of them. Well, they make a satchel....
2)Someone else mentioned Eagle Creek - not bad, mine held up
3)You might want to look at what Blackhawk Industries, Eagle Industries (NOT Eagle creek - different folks), Tactical Taylor, LBI etc offer. I know Blackhawk offers a briefcase, I don't think Eagle does. Folks, if it's made by one of this last group, they are built like your life depends on it, frankly because, for most of their customers, it does (They supply "after market" stuff to various military and police units - the ones that say "We'll spend our own cash on better than issue") You can find links via Lightfighter.com
A BIG part of the case hinged on the fact that McDs served the coffee "Hotter than normal" - Well, if the person makes their own coffee, they make coffee hotter than that!!!
As others have pointed out - 700 people, out of "Billions and Billions served" - not a bad ratio
The woam did something dumb - opened her coffee in a moving car.
Now if anything, the lawsuit should have been about driveup windows.......
The coffee in the case at trial was somewhere between 190 and 195 - measured, so, I'd guess the pressure doesn't much matter - the boiling point might me higher, but the temp is still the temp
Actually, I do know what a 3rd degree burn is. I've done First aid on one or 2, and I've had some small (1-2" diameter) ones myself, when I was splashed with molten metal
I also know that anytime you make coffee or tea at home, it's hotter than 190 degs
Think about it. I'll use tea as an example. You put the tea bag in your cup, and you pour BOILING water on it - ditto is you make instant coffee - that water is 22 degress hotter than in the McDs case (which was 190)
To properly make coffee, you pour boiling water through the grounds. Now HOLDING the coffee at 190 might be a bit high, but if the pot is fresh, it'll be hotter than that
Your right, and that's why I find the BEST windows programmers either started out on DOS and remember their command line, or some OTHER command line OS
Batch files - yep, been there, do that (Notice the tense)
Command line utils - yep, to the point that there is a copy of cygwin on my desk
Background processes? Do that
The thing is, I do 2 kinds of programming - the classic stdin>stdout type stuff (what I'm working on today BTW) and the "rich user interface" - stuff where the company has to be able to put an intern that was hired yesterday to work TODAY
There is a place for both styles, and your best programmers will use whichever style of working to accomplish their goal
I know I'm gonna sound like an "Old fart" - but when you learn to program on punch cards, where you have to batch things. Thing is, sometimes a GUI makes life easy
GOOD VB programmers start with the objects, OR the database first (hey, sometime the DB counts for more)
GOOD VB programmers were even doing something similar to this back in VB2 and VB3 - yep, pre objects in VB - NO code (or as little as possible) went in the UI - they wrote "BAS" modules, and called the functions there - effectively - using the idea of encapulation way back when
Just because there is a LARGE percentage of VB programmers who DON'T do it right, doesn't mean we don't ALL do it right
Back when we was interviewing folks during the dotcom boom, a group of us had an expression "Shrink Wrap" - aka, the guys who thought they were programmers because the had taken the shrink wrap off the box
I WILL admit that part of this problem has actually been caused by Microsoft - their example code (particularly in the "old days") was the EXACT _WRONG_ way to write good, maintainable code
The problem is, we still have a LOT of VB coders writing "VB3 code" in a "VB6/DotNet" world.
Ask people who were around "Back when" what happened why Foxpro IV came out. Fox IV was Object Oriented, Fox III was NOT - The product died, because most of the programmers could not make the transition . Microsoft learned form that, and allowed the transition from VB3, to VB4,5,6 to be smooth, and to allow you to still code, "The same old way" - the problem is, people got the "same old problems"
Part of the problem a LOT of VB programmers have in moving to dotnet is that they never learned the "right way" - then there are the "Others". We had NO problems transitioning
Actually, the treand of Farmers Kinds not becoming farmers has been going on in the US for, oh 225+ years now
So, who's going to grow the food? Less people. You always hear about the small farmer going broke - the Ag giants will do it. And guess what, when they want internet access, they'll pay the 10k/month - yeah, our prices for might go up. Right now, farmers earn squat, Grocery Stores earn squat, and the middle is getting rich. If enough people stop farming, the producers prices will go up, and eventually, it'll balance. It really comes down to this - we produce more food than we need
No, what I'm trying to say is that folks who USUALLY say "the Consitution is dynamic" (the phrase used is usually "a living document") claim all sorts of new meanings, or claim that certain parts "Don't count anymore", WITHOUT going through the amendment process. What I'm trying to say is the the USC is supposed to be static except when explictly amended by a vote of a supermajority of the states
If your NOT one of that group, I apologize, however, based on the fact that the clauses having to do with IP have not been changed, I'd call that static.
The Constitution is NOT a dynamic document, no matter what a bunch of insane Lawyers and pols want you to believe, and the fact that it is treated as one is what the judicial reform movement is about
What the constituion DOES have is a way to change it - aka, release a rev. It's called the amendment process. The reason women have the right to vote isn't because the USC is dynamic, but because 31 states said "We want to make this change", and the VERY static writing had a change added to the end of it, stating explictly what was allowed and what was not
OS/2 had some real support, but it had a few "Issues" - a higher hardware requirement, bit the BIGGEST issue was PISS poor marketing by IBM in the begining - the general impression was that OS/2 would ONLY run on IBM PS/2 hardware. If I remember right, there WAS a "extended" version of rev 1 that DID only run on PS/2s that were Microchannel. Microchannel was a flop, as IBM wanted a lot to license it - it was IBMs attempt to grab back the hardware market
Microsoft's big push was that you still had DOS - you did NOT have to go into Windows - Note - this was a SELLING point, NOT a negative - the fact the Win16 was a shell over DOS was considered GOOD. Most users saw no reason for more than DOS (what can I say). Remember, we are back in the days where a LOT of folks were still running 286s - NO PROTECTED mode. Having a 386 was a big deal, and the 386sx (had a 16 bit bus) was a stretch for a lot of folks
A LOT of folks first used windows on that 286, and moved up from there. Sounds silly, huh? Many folks used a lot of TSRs - (Look that term up), and thought that DOS with TSRs were fine - you had to PUSH the new stuff. Very few people even wanted to spend the money for a mouse - in fact, Microsoft got into the Mouse Business so that folks buying Windows could get a mouse - It was a COMMON bundle - buying Windows and your Microsoft mouse in the same box
It was a VERY differnt world in the late 80s, early 90s. People would refuse to run Windows because the fonts and printer drivers they installed for Wordperfect did NOT get used under windows. The printer driver was different! IMHO one of the biggest mistakes Wordperfect ever made was the FIRST Wordperfect for Windows - Instead of following the "CUA" spec (written by IBM - it is the basic User Interface still used by windows apps) the decided it should LOOK and WORK just like Wordperfect for DOS, and even support it's own fonts and drivers - they spent a LONG time hacking things to make it just like WP for DOS. In the mean time, everyone else adopted the "Windows Look and Feel"
Of COURSE it was propoganda! That's what keynote speaches are for Pete's sake - no matter WHO makes them, at ANY conference.
Geez, if you belive 1/10th of what they say at a keynote, you are NOT cynical enough. You come away from a speech like Balmer's with a few things 1)OK, they say they are going to be listening to us more than the office crowd - That's good, if it happens 2)Whatever new features they demo, and you say "That's nice - I wonder how useful they are" -aka, a punch list of things to start looking at 3)SOME idea of where the keynote speaker would LIKE things to go
That's it - you have to take it ALL with a grain of salt. I take all of what Microsft says with a grain of salt. I take what anyone form the Open Source Community with a grain of salt. I take anything that SCO says with a tractor trailer load full of salt.
Keynotes are marketing, nothing more, nothing less
Way back when, during the FIRST Microsoft Developers Conference (it was here in NYC!), I was talking with the guy who was then in charge of VB (VB was version 1.0). Another developer and I said some about "responsability to the developer". He stopped us right there and said - "That is your mistake. My job is NOT to make developers happy. My job is to sell LOTS of these boxes" (while holding up a box from VB1). I've never forgotten that lesson. I take everything they say with a grain of salt, but it's been a good ride for the last 20 years.
For instance - in EVERY version of VB/Visual Studio since the days of VB3, Microsoft has be hyping "data binding". Yeah, I tried it. Every time they come out with a new version, I look at it again. Get's getting close, but still, it's a pure checkmark - NOT useful for full scalable apps. I shrug, and go on my way.
I don't buy the hype - Not from Microsft, or the OSS community, or anyone else. I guess that's why I still have an old TV, use many older computers and the like. They are doing their job, so why change it?
In some ways, I'm an early adopter - I TRY things early - if I like them, I'll convert. If I don't, well, I'll wait for the next version, or try something else. It gives me the chance to know what's out there, but for my bread and butter machines, I work with a lot of older stuff, that just plain works
Hey, it's not a bad way to make a living. There are certainly worse. 22 years in the field (the first 5 were "part time" - I did software as part of my other work) gives you some perspective on trends. I believe that Linix and the like have a real chance to succeed, which is why I started playing with it a few years back. I won't be caught flat footed like some of the DOS or Mainframe programmers I knew
Well, the first time I saw "developers, developers....") was at Tech-Ed in LA about 8 years back - I have no transcript of the conference - If I did, I'd send you a link
Some background. Tech-Ed is a conference (mostly) for developers using Microsoft products. Balmer was doing the keynote. If you've ever been to one of these things, keynotes are always HYPE, and are usually only worth seeing because they tell you what the conference sponsor is pushing that year. At that point, there was some internal friction going on in the Micorsoft developer world. Some of the language products and features were being driven by the "Office" community - aka, VB becoming more like VBScript. There was quite a bit of unhappiness. This was Microsoft's way of saying that Developers would be driving the development platform again, not the "Office" team. He was saying that he kept having to beat one idea into the Microsoft Development team "Developers, Developers, Developers....." (aka, who the customer was)
It was an interesting Tech-Ed - about 1/3rd of the people there got food posioning on either the first or 2nd day - something at lunch did it.
WAY back when, Microsoft treated developers like Gods. They realized the way to drive the acceptance of their PLATFORM (aka Windows, and therefore Office, and....) was to enable developers to write applications easily for that platform - it's the old "Killer App" problem that a lot of platforms faced. No one will develop for platform "X" because no one uses platform "X". No one uses platform "X" because no one develops for it. Microsoft practically GAVE away their development "stuff" - yeah, the list prices might be high, but they made it easy to get discount/free copies. This let people develop for windows (particularly in the F500), so the F500 adopted Windows. The thing is, once the F500 adopted windows, the Office team came up with "VB everywhere", and then VB Script - Nice idea, but they actually crippled VB (and other parts of the platform - parts of the DDE/OLE model if I remember right) to make it "easy for folks writing macros"
This was the announcement that they were moving back to a developer centric model. They never moved all the way back, but they have moved some. Of course, the small developer that doesn't have a multi thousand dollar budget is SOL - I think THIS is what will kill Microsoft in the long run - forgetting about the "One man shop" - all those small consultants who can now do a better, more cost effective job providing a *nix solution. Remember, the average end user doesn't care what platform he is on. He just wants to get his job done. If I can give my end users a solution on *nix cheaper and more effectively, I'll do so, and the client will thank me. Then he'll use the "shink wrap" (or in the *nix world - downloadable) mass solutions for the rest - Star Office, or whatever
I really believe, what drove the adoption of Windows (way back when) was the follow factors
1)DOS compatability - you could move over slowly 2)Multitasking (even if NON preemptive) 3)Terminal Emulators!!! The fact that companies could actually get rid of a terminal on a workers desk, and use a PC that cost about the same price 4)And then the ability for developers to write custom software that could take data from that "terminal", and do business work.
Item 4) was at first done by "screen scraping" - you litterally read the data fields off the mainframe screen, and wrote it back to the mainframe screen behind the scenes! This is why ODBC was such a BIG thing when it came out - we could actually talk to existing data without screen scraping
This is why I held such high hopes for Delphi, - but I forgot one VERY important thing - those terminals. Remember, putting a PC on the end users desk actually saved money. You didn't have to buy a terminal for that user, and terminals cost about as much as a PC! Once the PC was there, companies started SMALL projects writing SMALL projects doing windows development. N
No it was not - It was at Microsoft's TechEd - In LA, about 7 years ago (maybe 8?) - 15k developers there. It was part of the keynote speach
If being a developer who has, and still does, make the majority of his living programming solutions on the Windows Platform makes me a Microsoft shill, so be it. I'll keep making money there, and playing with other OSes and development tools in my free time.
Keep flexible, be able to work on multiple platforms. That mantra has kept me working in this industry for about as long as most/. readers have been alive.
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It sounds like it will be accurate, but it turns out that even with that system, and clearly labeled candidates, approximately 2% of the people mark the wrong box!!! Your COUNT can be 100% accurate, but it does not reflect "the will of the voter" with 100% percent accuracy.
Someone marked my previous as a troll, but I'm actually serious. Even with a 100 percent count accuracy, the BEST systems have about a 2% error rate. The studies were done by having volunteers simulate votes - they gave them a slip of paper, with the name/party of the person to vote for. Everyone knew it was a test of the system, not a real election. Being that they knew who the folks were supposed to vote for, and did post interviews with the folks to make sure they did it "right", and everything was filmed - the error rate was about 2%
Sacasim aside - have you ever studied voting systems? I have - It's a side part of one of my jobs. I collect voting data (Not the offical data - we don't do the count). Obviously, when you work with voting all the time, you start to learn about the parts you DON'T deal with
NO ONE has yet to come up with ANY voting method that relects "the wishes of the voter" than +- 2%!!! The system itself can be perfect, but it seems that the voters themselves make a mistake about 2% of the time, no matter what you do! This is why many states (see Florida for an example) have "automatic recount" rules when the race is closer than 3%. It's not a random number
I know that most folks think the elections are WAY off in November - you could not be more wrong
Florida's Primaries are March 9th - IF the primaries are tight, there could be problem
Remember, the first primary of the year is NEXT WEEK (Tuesday - Waskington DC), and the Iowa Caucuses are Monday the 19th
We are already in full election swing
Disclaimer - I write software that looks at election data (but does NOT count vote - so don't shoot me) - we have been in testing, 2-3 days/week since 2 months before the CA recall election. Even without that, we would have been testing since about Labor Day. From Now till June, it's 6 days/week between testing and actual elections
No idea - I was only there about 12 weeks - a long summer job, the summer before college
The reason for such a tight ship was it was a watch company. The previous incarnation of that building was the watchmakers shop (they closed THAT a few months before I started), and they move the clock warehouse in. When they were building watches, the place HAD to be spotless, and it carried over
Then you get the OTHER extreme. One summer I got a temp job closing a plant, and moving the contents to another building. After the move, because I knew something about HVAC (Dad was a mechanic for, oh 35 years at the time, and I used to help him) they kept me on as an HVAC grunt
This place maintianed their HVAC stuff like no other place I've ever seen. My Dad came in to visit, and he was impressed. 5 Machine rooms - year room had at least ONE spare "hot" compressor - piped in, but off, and idle. Open the valves for the water, and turn it on, and you were good to go. Tested at least once/month
Each room had 2 towers - each could handle 75% of the hottest anticipated day. Most days, you could shut one tower with no problems. The company wanted the air clean and good in their building - we ran 50% fresh air - aka, we dumped half our air. ALL the air was filtered, and THEN electrostatic precipitated - even the warehouse!! No dust. due to the 50% fresh air, the building was at a fairly high positive pressue - we basically worked in a clean room! (Not a very clean one - but..). Every morning, after taking the basic readings, and bringing them to my boss, I grabbed a stack of towels, and clean all the machines - no oil drips, no dust - this was done 2x/day!!! The TILE (not concrete) floors in each machine room were swept daily, and stripped and waxed once/week! Spare parts were in bins, parts labeled, inventoried and the like. PM was done constantly. I swear, they used to keep the "Plant" cleaner than the public parts of most food stores or fast food places I've seen. The place was spotless
I wonder why nothing ever broke down? (duh....)
The "New" FAA AAS traffic control system - was going to replace the current system. MASSIVE amounts of money spent, 2.5 BILLION, where 1.5 BILLION of it had to be written off. About a billion of the development was salvaged by using the Display System Replacement
Folks - that 1.5 BILLION wasted
And the Design of DC was setup to confortable handle quakes in the 10+ range. Yeas, that larger than anything out there, but....
Some of the individual items got tested to levels many times greater than that. I saw some of the gages tested - they were slamming them gack and forth 15-20 FEET in frequency ranges from small fractions of a Hz, up to like 30 hz. That shaker (which had a table about 3ft square) was mounted to a concrete block that was about 15 feet on a side. When they ran high power tests, they had to make sure the printing company "next door" (about 300 feet away) was NOT running their printing press, as the ground would shake enough to make the presses skip even that far away
I've always felt there were multiple choices, depending on what you like
1)A Domke satchel - Jim Domke designed what is probably the most used professional camera bags back when. These are the bags pros use for their "working" bags, (Not storage/shipping cases). You see almost every TV crew with a bunch of them. Well, they make a satchel....
2)Someone else mentioned Eagle Creek - not bad, mine held up
3)You might want to look at what Blackhawk Industries, Eagle Industries (NOT Eagle creek - different folks), Tactical Taylor, LBI etc offer. I know Blackhawk offers a briefcase, I don't think Eagle does. Folks, if it's made by one of this last group, they are built like your life depends on it, frankly because, for most of their customers, it does (They supply "after market" stuff to various military and police units - the ones that say "We'll spend our own cash on better than issue") You can find links via Lightfighter.com
A BIG part of the case hinged on the fact that McDs served the coffee "Hotter than normal" - Well, if the person makes their own coffee, they make coffee hotter than that!!!
As others have pointed out - 700 people, out of "Billions and Billions served" - not a bad ratio
The woam did something dumb - opened her coffee in a moving car.
Now if anything, the lawsuit should have been about driveup windows.......
The coffee in the case at trial was somewhere between 190 and 195 - measured, so, I'd guess the pressure doesn't much matter - the boiling point might me higher, but the temp is still the temp
Actually, I do know what a 3rd degree burn is. I've done First aid on one or 2, and I've had some small (1-2" diameter) ones myself, when I was splashed with molten metal
I also know that anytime you make coffee or tea at home, it's hotter than 190 degs
Think about it. I'll use tea as an example. You put the tea bag in your cup, and you pour BOILING water on it - ditto is you make instant coffee - that water is 22 degress hotter than in the McDs case (which was 190)
To properly make coffee, you pour boiling water through the grounds. Now HOLDING the coffee at 190 might be a bit high, but if the pot is fresh, it'll be hotter than that
I guess that no one should make coffee, tea, or boil anything at your place, as they are all hotter than 190
Remind me not to drink your coffee or tea, as it'll suck
And coffee server AT HOME, coming out of the coffee maker, is HOTTER than it was at McDs, as is tea, properly made (you use BOILING water)
So, if a guest comes to your house, and burns themselves making coffee or tea, should you be liable?
Notice the original article says "One of the biggest in modern times"
NYC Water Tunnel #3 IS the largest public works project ever done without federal funds - It's been going on for something like 35 years now
Your right, and that's why I find the BEST windows programmers either started out on DOS and remember their command line, or some OTHER command line OS
Batch files - yep, been there, do that (Notice the tense)
Command line utils - yep, to the point that there is a copy of cygwin on my desk
Background processes? Do that
The thing is, I do 2 kinds of programming - the classic stdin>stdout type stuff (what I'm working on today BTW) and the "rich user interface" - stuff where the company has to be able to put an intern that was hired yesterday to work TODAY
There is a place for both styles, and your best programmers will use whichever style of working to accomplish their goal
I know I'm gonna sound like an "Old fart" - but when you learn to program on punch cards, where you have to batch things. Thing is, sometimes a GUI makes life easy
No, a BAD VB programmer will do this
GOOD VB programmers start with the objects, OR the database first (hey, sometime the DB counts for more)
GOOD VB programmers were even doing something similar to this back in VB2 and VB3 - yep, pre objects in VB - NO code (or as little as possible) went in the UI - they wrote "BAS" modules, and called the functions there - effectively - using the idea of encapulation way back when
Just because there is a LARGE percentage of VB programmers who DON'T do it right, doesn't mean we don't ALL do it right
Back when we was interviewing folks during the dotcom boom, a group of us had an expression "Shrink Wrap" - aka, the guys who thought they were programmers because the had taken the shrink wrap off the box
I WILL admit that part of this problem has actually been caused by Microsoft - their example code (particularly in the "old days") was the EXACT _WRONG_ way to write good, maintainable code
The problem is, we still have a LOT of VB coders writing "VB3 code" in a "VB6/DotNet" world.
Ask people who were around "Back when" what happened why Foxpro IV came out. Fox IV was Object Oriented, Fox III was NOT - The product died, because most of the programmers could not make the transition . Microsoft learned form that, and allowed the transition from VB3, to VB4,5,6 to be smooth, and to allow you to still code, "The same old way" - the problem is, people got the "same old problems"
Part of the problem a LOT of VB programmers have in moving to dotnet is that they never learned the "right way" - then there are the "Others". We had NO problems transitioning
Actually, the treand of Farmers Kinds not becoming farmers has been going on in the US for, oh 225+ years now
So, who's going to grow the food? Less people. You always hear about the small farmer going broke - the Ag giants will do it. And guess what, when they want internet access, they'll pay the 10k/month - yeah, our prices for might go up. Right now, farmers earn squat, Grocery Stores earn squat, and the middle is getting rich. If enough people stop farming, the producers prices will go up, and eventually, it'll balance. It really comes down to this - we produce more food than we need
No, what I'm trying to say is that folks who USUALLY say "the Consitution is dynamic" (the phrase used is usually "a living document") claim all sorts of new meanings, or claim that certain parts "Don't count anymore", WITHOUT going through the amendment process. What I'm trying to say is the the USC is supposed to be static except when explictly amended by a vote of a supermajority of the states
If your NOT one of that group, I apologize, however, based on the fact that the clauses having to do with IP have not been changed, I'd call that static.
The Constitution is NOT a dynamic document, no matter what a bunch of insane Lawyers and pols want you to believe, and the fact that it is treated as one is what the judicial reform movement is about
What the constituion DOES have is a way to change it - aka, release a rev. It's called the amendment process. The reason women have the right to vote isn't because the USC is dynamic, but because 31 states said "We want to make this change", and the VERY static writing had a change added to the end of it, stating explictly what was allowed and what was not
Or go simple, look up aag electronics, by the Temp module (which is iButton) and go from there
OS/2 had some real support, but it had a few "Issues" - a higher hardware requirement, bit the BIGGEST issue was PISS poor marketing by IBM in the begining - the general impression was that OS/2 would ONLY run on IBM PS/2 hardware. If I remember right, there WAS a "extended" version of rev 1 that DID only run on PS/2s that were Microchannel. Microchannel was a flop, as IBM wanted a lot to license it - it was IBMs attempt to grab back the hardware market
Microsoft's big push was that you still had DOS - you did NOT have to go into Windows - Note - this was a SELLING point, NOT a negative - the fact the Win16 was a shell over DOS was considered GOOD. Most users saw no reason for more than DOS (what can I say). Remember, we are back in the days where a LOT of folks were still running 286s - NO PROTECTED mode. Having a 386 was a big deal, and the 386sx (had a 16 bit bus) was a stretch for a lot of folks
A LOT of folks first used windows on that 286, and moved up from there. Sounds silly, huh? Many folks used a lot of TSRs - (Look that term up), and thought that DOS with TSRs were fine - you had to PUSH the new stuff. Very few people even wanted to spend the money for a mouse - in fact, Microsoft got into the Mouse Business so that folks buying Windows could get a mouse - It was a COMMON bundle - buying Windows and your Microsoft mouse in the same box
It was a VERY differnt world in the late 80s, early 90s. People would refuse to run Windows because the fonts and printer drivers they installed for Wordperfect did NOT get used under windows. The printer driver was different! IMHO one of the biggest mistakes Wordperfect ever made was the FIRST Wordperfect for Windows - Instead of following the "CUA" spec (written by IBM - it is the basic User Interface still used by windows apps) the decided it should LOOK and WORK just like Wordperfect for DOS, and even support it's own fonts and drivers - they spent a LONG time hacking things to make it just like WP for DOS. In the mean time, everyone else adopted the "Windows Look and Feel"
Of COURSE it was propoganda! That's what keynote speaches are for Pete's sake - no matter WHO makes them, at ANY conference.
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Geez, if you belive 1/10th of what they say at a keynote, you are NOT cynical enough. You come away from a speech like Balmer's with a few things
1)OK, they say they are going to be listening to us more than the office crowd - That's good, if it happens
2)Whatever new features they demo, and you say "That's nice - I wonder how useful they are" -aka, a punch list of things to start looking at
3)SOME idea of where the keynote speaker would LIKE things to go
That's it - you have to take it ALL with a grain of salt. I take all of what Microsft says with a grain of salt. I take what anyone form the Open Source Community with a grain of salt. I take anything that SCO says with a tractor trailer load full of salt
Keynotes are marketing, nothing more, nothing less
Way back when, during the FIRST Microsoft Developers Conference (it was here in NYC!), I was talking with the guy who was then in charge of VB (VB was version 1.0). Another developer and I said some about "responsability to the developer". He stopped us right there and said - "That is your mistake. My job is NOT to make developers happy. My job is to sell LOTS of these boxes" (while holding up a box from VB1). I've never forgotten that lesson. I take everything they say with a grain of salt, but it's been a good ride for the last 20 years.
For instance - in EVERY version of VB/Visual Studio since the days of VB3, Microsoft has be hyping "data binding". Yeah, I tried it. Every time they come out with a new version, I look at it again. Get's getting close, but still, it's a pure checkmark - NOT useful for full scalable apps. I shrug, and go on my way.
I don't buy the hype - Not from Microsft, or the OSS community, or anyone else. I guess that's why I still have an old TV, use many older computers and the like. They are doing their job, so why change it?
In some ways, I'm an early adopter - I TRY things early - if I like them, I'll convert. If I don't, well, I'll wait for the next version, or try something else. It gives me the chance to know what's out there, but for my bread and butter machines, I work with a lot of older stuff, that just plain works
Hey, it's not a bad way to make a living. There are certainly worse. 22 years in the field (the first 5 were "part time" - I did software as part of my other work) gives you some perspective on trends. I believe that Linix and the like have a real chance to succeed, which is why I started playing with it a few years back. I won't be caught flat footed like some of the DOS or Mainframe programmers I knew
Well, the first time I saw "developers, developers....") was at Tech-Ed in LA about 8 years back - I have no transcript of the conference - If I did, I'd send you a link
Some background. Tech-Ed is a conference (mostly) for developers using Microsoft products. Balmer was doing the keynote. If you've ever been to one of these things, keynotes are always HYPE, and are usually only worth seeing because they tell you what the conference sponsor is pushing that year. At that point, there was some internal friction going on in the Micorsoft developer world. Some of the language products and features were being driven by the "Office" community - aka, VB becoming more like VBScript. There was quite a bit of unhappiness. This was Microsoft's way of saying that Developers would be driving the development platform again, not the "Office" team. He was saying that he kept having to beat one idea into the Microsoft Development team "Developers, Developers, Developers....." (aka, who the customer was)
It was an interesting Tech-Ed - about 1/3rd of the people there got food posioning on either the first or 2nd day - something at lunch did it.
WAY back when, Microsoft treated developers like Gods. They realized the way to drive the acceptance of their PLATFORM (aka Windows, and therefore Office, and....) was to enable developers to write applications easily for that platform - it's the old "Killer App" problem that a lot of platforms faced. No one will develop for platform "X" because no one uses platform "X". No one uses platform "X" because no one develops for it. Microsoft practically GAVE away their development "stuff" - yeah, the list prices might be high, but they made it easy to get discount/free copies. This let people develop for windows (particularly in the F500), so the F500 adopted Windows. The thing is, once the F500 adopted windows, the Office team came up with "VB everywhere", and then VB Script - Nice idea, but they actually crippled VB (and other parts of the platform - parts of the DDE/OLE model if I remember right) to make it "easy for folks writing macros"
This was the announcement that they were moving back to a developer centric model. They never moved all the way back, but they have moved some. Of course, the small developer that doesn't have a multi thousand dollar budget is SOL - I think THIS is what will kill Microsoft in the long run - forgetting about the "One man shop" - all those small consultants who can now do a better, more cost effective job providing a *nix solution. Remember, the average end user doesn't care what platform he is on. He just wants to get his job done. If I can give my end users a solution on *nix cheaper and more effectively, I'll do so, and the client will thank me. Then he'll use the "shink wrap" (or in the *nix world - downloadable) mass solutions for the rest - Star Office, or whatever
I really believe, what drove the adoption of Windows (way back when) was the follow factors
1)DOS compatability - you could move over slowly
2)Multitasking (even if NON preemptive)
3)Terminal Emulators!!! The fact that companies could actually get rid of a terminal on a workers desk, and use a PC that cost about the same price
4)And then the ability for developers to write custom software that could take data from that "terminal", and do business work.
Item 4) was at first done by "screen scraping" - you litterally read the data fields off the mainframe screen, and wrote it back to the mainframe screen behind the scenes! This is why ODBC was such a BIG thing when it came out - we could actually talk to existing data without screen scraping
This is why I held such high hopes for Delphi, - but I forgot one VERY important thing - those terminals. Remember, putting a PC on the end users desk actually saved money. You didn't have to buy a terminal for that user, and terminals cost about as much as a PC! Once the PC was there, companies started SMALL projects writing SMALL projects doing windows development. N
No it was not - It was at Microsoft's TechEd - In LA, about 7 years ago (maybe 8?) - 15k developers there. It was part of the keynote speach
/. readers have been alive.
If being a developer who has, and still does, make the majority of his living programming solutions on the Windows Platform makes me a Microsoft shill, so be it. I'll keep making money there, and playing with other OSes and development tools in my free time.
Keep flexible, be able to work on multiple platforms. That mantra has kept me working in this industry for about as long as most