I've been programming for over 20 years, the real test is what the end users think. mozilla effectively abandoned its end users. Sure bits could have been re-written , but starting from scratch gave the ball to MS IE to play with
If you want sweeping statements then Unix was designed with multi-user and therefore security isolation in mind.
Windows 2000 is the closest MS have got back to something unix like, but for all the good things they learnt from unix they have kept some of their old winxx ideas in the mix
"Well sorry suckers but in my local book stores, the amount of shelf space on Java books is heading down and thats a sign that the language has gone the way of Ada, Pascal and others. I figure Java books will be very hard to find in 5 years if not impossable."
And how many books are there on C in your local bookstore? 1? Looks like no-ones writes in C either then. The great thing about Java is all the free documentation and tutorials. It is probably the most written about language ever.
"One of the major supporters of Java at sun is Bill Joy. Keep in mind that this is the person that created the vi editor."
"Customer service doesn't give you any direct income at all, it is just there to perhaps hold on to customers that may go away if they don't have their problems solved."
If applied to some cheap, low profit consumer item then perhaps, but many companies cost in customer service or else have a service contract. Service contracts can be quite lucractive if you can minimize the costs you incur. Ever been offered an extended warranty:*)
"You may say that if you have purchased an expensive product and have problems, you should be entitled to good customer service. Yes, you may be right in thinking that, but then again, what if you can get the help you need without contacting customer service? If you have a really bad problem and need to talk to someone, but can't seem to get in touch with a real person, remember that this is in part due to people who can't be bothered to help themselves."
You seem to have a hang up on what seem like "time wasters" to you. Don't forget they paid your wages!
If you ever buy a new BMW you will wonder why they can have great customer service but an equivalent costing Ford/GM SUV doesn't. I will always personally use companies that have good customer service and recommend the same for my company. We will gladly pay for a more expensive bid for better quality and service.
"Some people also appear to be completely oblivious of the fact that there is a real life person in the other end (once you find one, mind you). It is so much easier to be helpful to people who are calm and rational, and realize that the person they are communicating with is not responsible for your problems. They didn't create the product - they are just there to help you. Yelling at them won't help, except perhaps making you feel better. Actually, if you are obnoxious, the support person might not feel like giving you good customer service. Have you any idea how much easier it is to help someone who is nice to you and how much better you feel afterwards if the conversation was a pleasant one?
trained support techs know how to deal with upset customers. I always got the customer to be calm and communicative and sometimes it was the irate ones who were the best customers. One even sent me and the group a case of wine because they felt bad about giving us a hard time! (when it was really our product at fault)
It is not *easy* but I've seen it done, don't forget Microsoft pay peanuts to testers on the payroll, you can only make a good salary by going contracting.
And when you only pay peanuts you get monkeys, or was it elephants?...
And guess what that Microsoft 'tech' you spoke
to is a third party supplier who is about as connected to MS as you are.
You can see this in their solution database, not so often now but many used to add things like "Microsoft told us" or "Microsoft doesn't know". I think they updated their filter scripts after that.
No history?! No court case is a better description.
Of course they will enforce this and they win every time. IBM make a huge amount from licensing their patent portfolio.
Some people still think IBM is a benevolet grandpa. Seems like a lot of IBM employees post to slashdot so this is for them too. This is how the IBM patent game is played. (btw You didn't think that patent bonus was to reward you being smart, did you?)
Company A comes into IBMs sights, possible doing something very cool that IBM may have a partial patent on.
IBM asks Company A if it would like to license said IBM technology, as IBM has 400 patents in this area and company A has 2.
Company A feels their patent is the best but hired attorneys shudder at facing IBM. IBM who have even patented the F1 help key. Company A pays IBM
a royaly minus cross-licensing payment for their patent
How about their full featured 'professional' flight simulator. Would this be useful for
hijackers to learn the controls on a commercial plane? Assuming they have a little flying knowledge...
Another data point, Dell has been promoting Itanium powered Dimension 730 series for ages now and you can't buy one from the web site, you can only look at the description.
Also dell has links to the Microsoft software piracy page, hmm I wonder who asked for that link then?
a) Mono will be crippled and a half baked attempt in the same vein that gnome is a nice desktop but
isn't as useable as MS windows.
b) Microsoft will threaten Mono/FSF regardless
c) Mono/FSF accuse Microsoft of making Mono unusable because of (b) and also changing specs and anything else that Microsoft normally does
FSF can't afford a DOJ type court case to fight (b) that runs for *many* years. Even companies that have had judgements against Microsoft have had hollow victories, viz Sun/Java
Result, Microsoft get to keep.net open source/FSF ends up with nothing.
Except there is more to a threads library than
renaming its functions!
Solaris has a posix wrapper anyway and already
had a tool to help move from Solaris thread
naming to posix thread naming. ie users could
have moved to other posix threads libraries years
ago.
The real issue is that Linux threads become
highly unpredictable above even 50% of the
old maximum of 1024
Everyone knows that. My prediction? We will see
a media attack by SGI/Intel/IBM on Linus to
accept their new threads library before the
year is out.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, that is the size of it and also why bzero
works at Redhat and not a Fortune 1000 company.
On the one hand the changes are explained as
essentially that developers are compatible with the spec.
But on the other disregards *backward* compatibility for dynamic libraries etc
You can't have it both ways, my customers would
accept a binary that works over my source compatibility every time. Why? They buy solutions not code.
Look around your team, if you think you are working hard, chances are someone else isn't.
I've been programming for over 20 years, the real test is what the end users think. mozilla effectively abandoned its end users. Sure bits could have been re-written , but starting from scratch gave the ball to MS IE to play with
You obviously don't use any threads, check out the bug fixes from the 2.4.7 kernels upwards and then we will talk about smp
er where is the Java unsafe class Einstein
I know Fox focused on some of the more outrageous scams but soundcity 2000 was the one that is worth stopping for the benefit of all internet commerce
They sold music CDs on the web, except they never
sent them.
If you want sweeping statements then Unix was designed with multi-user and therefore security isolation in mind.
Windows 2000 is the closest MS have got back to something unix like, but for all the good things they learnt from unix they have kept some of their old winxx ideas in the mix
James Gosling designed Java and is still involved in its design. You can't get any more major than that.
Bill Joy was/is a major supporter of jini/jxta.
Java draws more from xemacs than vi, I prove my point
"Well sorry suckers but in my local book stores, the amount of shelf space on Java books is heading down and thats a sign that the language has gone the way of Ada, Pascal and others. I figure Java books will be very hard to find in 5 years if not impossable."
And how many books are there on C in your local bookstore? 1? Looks like no-ones writes in C either then. The great thing about Java is all the free documentation and tutorials. It is probably the most written about language ever.
"One of the major supporters of Java at sun is Bill Joy. Keep in mind that this is the person that created the vi editor."
Wrong editor, wrong guy. James Gosling and Xemacs
Except when that patent was filed, BT was a government monopoly paid for by the British tax payer.
Yes there were some smart guys there, but taxpayers subsidized this innovation. BT the company shouldn't reap the rewards
Still works for me, (West coast usa)
When are you going to have the time to watch those 2000 hours again? 4hrs/night = 1460/year.
It would take you a year to watch a years worth of material, by which time you would have recorded more stuff. You would never catch up
For example you can get directtv with tivo hardware installed for virtually free and just pay tivo the subscription
expert satellite
If applied to some cheap, low profit consumer item then perhaps, but many companies cost in customer service or else have a service contract. Service contracts can be quite lucractive if you can minimize the costs you incur. Ever been offered an extended warranty :*)
"You may say that if you have purchased an expensive product and have problems, you should be entitled to good customer service. Yes, you may be right in thinking that, but then again, what if you can get the help you need without contacting customer service? If you have a really bad problem and need to talk to someone, but can't seem to get in touch with a real person, remember that this is in part due to people who can't be bothered to help themselves."
You seem to have a hang up on what seem like "time wasters" to you. Don't forget they paid your wages! If you ever buy a new BMW you will wonder why they can have great customer service but an equivalent costing Ford/GM SUV doesn't. I will always personally use companies that have good customer service and recommend the same for my company. We will gladly pay for a more expensive bid for better quality and service.
"Some people also appear to be completely oblivious of the fact that there is a real life person in the other end (once you find one, mind you). It is so much easier to be helpful to people who are calm and rational, and realize that the person they are communicating with is not responsible for your problems. They didn't create the product - they are just there to help you. Yelling at them won't help, except perhaps making you feel better. Actually, if you are obnoxious, the support person might not feel like giving you good customer service. Have you any idea how much easier it is to help someone who is nice to you and how much better you feel afterwards if the conversation was a pleasant one?
trained support techs know how to deal with upset customers. I always got the customer to be calm and communicative and sometimes it was the irate ones who were the best customers. One even sent me and the group a case of wine because they felt bad about giving us a hard time! (when it was really our product at fault)
Sir. I sense pain in your life. We will never know why you suffer intolerance and difficulty building relationships.
Get a copy of Return to Castle wolfenstein, it will offer some relief. Majestic is too frustrating
It is not *easy* but I've seen it done, don't forget Microsoft pay peanuts to testers on the payroll, you can only make a good salary by going contracting.
And when you only pay peanuts you get monkeys, or was it elephants?...
And guess what that Microsoft 'tech' you spoke
to is a third party supplier who is about as connected to MS as you are.
You can see this in their solution database, not so often now but many used to add things like "Microsoft told us" or "Microsoft doesn't know". I think they updated their filter scripts after that.
"And since the machine(s) was behind the firewall, nobody could access it anyway."
A large percentage of theft is committed by disgruntled employees than anyone else.
Just because the bank manager left the safe combination on the desk don't assume nobody can access the contents of the safe.
gcc 3.0.1 is broken for me too, logged a serious bug on it a couple of weeks ago.
I wish the code maintainers were more honest, all you see are cvs comments like this.
"fixed typo in xxx_"
which means totally rewrote function implementation, tested with a 10 line c program.
No history?! No court case is a better description.
Of course they will enforce this and they win every time. IBM make a huge amount from licensing their patent portfolio.
Some people still think IBM is a benevolet grandpa. Seems like a lot of IBM employees post to slashdot so this is for them too. This is how the IBM patent game is played. (btw You didn't think that patent bonus was to reward you being smart, did you?)
Company A comes into IBMs sights, possible doing something very cool that IBM may have a partial patent on.
IBM asks Company A if it would like to license said IBM technology, as IBM has 400 patents in this area and company A has 2.
Company A feels their patent is the best but hired attorneys shudder at facing IBM. IBM who have even patented the F1 help key. Company A pays IBM
a royaly minus cross-licensing payment for their patent
I heard that one of the cluetrain authors companies actually went out of business, don't which one it was.
sounds like a good recommendation for the book!
How about their full featured 'professional' flight simulator. Would this be useful for
hijackers to learn the controls on a commercial plane? Assuming they have a little flying knowledge...
Another data point, Dell has been promoting Itanium powered Dimension 730 series for ages now and you can't buy one from the web site, you can only look at the description.
Also dell has links to the Microsoft software piracy page, hmm I wonder who asked for that link then?
My theory is
.net open source/FSF ends up with nothing.
a) Mono will be crippled and a half baked attempt in the same vein that gnome is a nice desktop but
isn't as useable as MS windows.
b) Microsoft will threaten Mono/FSF regardless
c) Mono/FSF accuse Microsoft of making Mono unusable because of (b) and also changing specs and anything else that Microsoft normally does
FSF can't afford a DOJ type court case to fight (b) that runs for *many* years. Even companies that have had judgements against Microsoft have had hollow victories, viz Sun/Java
Result, Microsoft get to keep
Except there is more to a threads library than
renaming its functions!
Solaris has a posix wrapper anyway and already
had a tool to help move from Solaris thread
naming to posix thread naming. ie users could
have moved to other posix threads libraries years
ago.
The real issue is that Linux threads become
highly unpredictable above even 50% of the
old maximum of 1024
Everyone knows that. My prediction? We will see
a media attack by SGI/Intel/IBM on Linus to
accept their new threads library before the
year is out.