The kids are going to win in the end. They are going to get better computers in the classroom that should ulitimately allow them to get better jobs and improve their quality of living.
I don't think anyone's ever demonstrated a measurable educational benefit of "computers in the classroom." Certainly nobody's documented a relationship between computers in schools and long-term earnings.
Microsoft apologists are so funny. They make up these theories with no factual basis whatsoever. Then they accuse others of having no evidence of Microsoft's wrongdoing--even though the best lawyers money can buy weren't able to get Microsoft off the hook in federal court, where the rules of evidence are everything.
To think that through such a private network we can avoid some sort of internet peral [sic] harbor is absurd. Why? Real simple: was the world trade center a government building?
Remember the good old Cold War days when they told you that every photocopier in the USSR was registered with the government and they collected sample output from every typewriter just in case a dissident used one?
He [Ashcroft] would even quote the fourth amendment back at you, suggesting that while you argue for "security in your papers", it also guarantees the right to be "secure in your persons", not just from some theoretical government torture, but from the deranged psychopathy that makes up the dangerous terrorist element.
I know you're not Ashcroft, but that's an absurd interpretation.
There's nothing in the Constitution that guarantees rights that you have in opposition to other individuals. Those rights may exist, but they are out of scope for the Constitution, which only describes and limits the power of the federal government and (starting with the 14th Amendment) of the states.
If you (or Ashcroft) don't believe me, tell me how to make a 4th Amendment case against the junkie who broke into my house last year.
You don't have regular civil rights in customs anyway...
True. This idea [facial scans at ports of entry] might not be so objectionable.
Anti-terrorism efforts could be successful if our lawmakers would start by limiting themselves to proposals that don't violate our traditional values.
But if Congress and the federal agencies consider the most intrusive possible technological controls, they will have a terrible time getting them to work within any interpretation of the Constitution.
They should start by looking at what the law already allows. And only after implementing those improvements should anyone even think of asking for new legislation.
If these things are not all silly, why not question whether or not a tool like PGP might have helped facilitate the attacks ? *If* it turned out that PGP-encrypted communication was intercepted by the FBI or NSA, but could not be decrypted in time, would that be irrelevant ? Would wondering about cryptography and what we want to allow be so silly then?
It's not a matter of silliness.
It should be obvious to any American that the government should first improve its capabilities within the limits of traditional American values of privacy, free speech, free religion, and free association. If Constitution-bending powers are to be requested, not that I'd endorse such a thing, government should at least prove to the American people that all other possibilities for improving intelligence gathering have been exhausted. Don't you think that's the only reasonable way?
Before the government starts making new laws that put us all under unprecedented surveillance, I suggest they could meet us halfway by recruiting and training intelligence officers who at least understand languages such as Arabic and Urdu!
Several recent news stories indicate that American intelligence is badly lacking in Central Asian and Middle Eastern language skills. They can improve those capaibilities dramatically without contradicting our traditional values.
Sheesh. You'd think that the intelligence organizations would have some agents who could at least read the plaintext when they get it!
The destruction of civil liberties on the net is not happening this week because of the evil Taliban. It is happening because the advocates of Carnivore et al are opportunists using patriotism to get what they wanted all along.
And because the "liberals" *spit* are too weak to do the right thing.
Fair use is not defined by the consumer, but is defined by the creator of the work itself.
That is completely untrue. Fair use is a legal term that is defined in statutes.
If the creator of the work itself publishes their work, for example, using eBook technology, they have defined "fair use" of their book meaning "use on a single Windows machine." If they had decided that their "fair use" should be a bit more generous in its offerings, they would have used an alternative to publishing using eBook technology.
Likewise incorrect. That is the terms of the license they offer. But statutes trump licenses, so a license cannot take away your Fair Use rights under copyright law.
That's why DMCA is so awful. It doesn't literally take away your Fair Use rights, it just makes illegal
the otherwise legal actions you'd use to exercise them.
Sen. Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Levin (D-MI) are the only ones asking for restraint and thought before bulling forward with this amendment to the Commerce, State and Justice appropriations bill (which is sure to pass).
What a disgrace. If you read the debate, you'll see Leahy practically begging for time to read the bill, having seen it for the first time that evening. He also pleaded for the Senate to let the Armed Services Committee get a shot at asking questions in a closed session. Leahy said specifically that there were certain things he wanted to discuss about the bill that could not be done in an open session.
This all leads me to believe that there is something in the bill whose real effect won't be known until a few days from now. Something the Senate leadership doesn't want people to know about until it's too late.
As Leahy said, emphasis mine:
Maybe the Senate wants to just go ahead and adopt new abilities to wiretap our citizens. Maybe they want to adopt new abilities to go into people's computers. Maybe that will make us feel safer. Maybe. And maybe what the terrorists have done made us a little bit less safe. Maybe they have increased Big Brother in this country. If that is what the Senate wants, we can vote for it. But do we really show respect to the American people by slapping something together, something that nobody on the floor can explain, and say we are changing the duties of the Attorney General, the Director of the CIA, the U.S. attorneys, we are going to change your rights as Americans, your rights to privacy? We are going to do it with no hearings, no debate. We are going to do it with numbers on a page that nobody can understand.
What is it about this bill that couldn't wait a few days?
Granted some of the positions the ACLU bases its ratings on can be considered questionable--are school vouchers really anti-freedom or just anti-liberal?--but the overall trend is that Senator Gregg is no friend of the Constitution.
"Like the Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal who refused to surrender years after the bomb ended World War II, Linux zealots remain obsessed with beating Microsoft in desktop computing. Desktop computing? Don't they know? The war is over. Microsoft has won."
Pretty damming commentary from someone who supports Linux, don't you think? Or at least he still does, but on the server platform where it has gained the most ground.
Maybe damning if you believe that guy, but it doesn't have much to do with the dot-bomb crash.
People are going to pick one operating system or another, or they'll mix 'em, but stock and housing prices don't have much effect on either.
Maybe you could tighten up what you're trying to say. There's probably a good point in there but you're leaving a bit to the imagination.
Farmers and construction workers lack neither skills nor drive; can you frame a house? Do you know what working on a farm is like?
Why yes, even though I'm not the guy you're replying to, yes, I have worked on a farm. All summer for a couple of years. (And yes, it is at least as hard as it looks, maybe harder.)
I think the dot-com revolution is much more egotistical than you're willing to admit.
On that we can agree.
Heck, all of the Internet is still just bits going around a network. There is very, very little that is fundamentally new. Practically nothing you couldn't have read in the classic CS literature. It's just that today the hardware and money has caught up to what everybody (every knowledgeable person) already knew could be done with software.
I think I'm saying that even the most highly skilled hackers are mainly putting one intellectual foot in front of the other. So much of what we do as geeks every day is minor variations on well-known themes. It's just that most people lack either the logical thinking skills, the opportunity to apply them here, or the "aha!" that tells them how to find the answer.
It's simple... if you're providing an online service, you need to supply the best protection possible to your clients. And there is no indication that M$ has the slightest clue on how to do this.
It's not that they don't know how to.
It's that Microsoft will practically always prioritize slickness of feature set and (apparent) ease of use over fuddy-duddy things like security and scalability. That's how we got Word macro viruses, Outlook worms, and Bob, to name a few.
When it comes to coolness vs. practicality, Microsoft knows that coolness is what gets short-term market share. (Then you use lock-in to turn it into long-term market share.)
I know I'll probably get moderated down into oblivion for saying this, but I don't see how this is any different than the Dmitri case. I know - people will start talking about "well, it costs me to download it so they're hurting me financially". And I suppose that what Dmitri did isn't going to hurt Adobe financially?
Spammers use your resources without your permission until you tell them to stop, and many times they keep doing it anyway.
And quit whining about being modded down for posting transparently stupid, illogical crap. It has nothing to do with disagreement and everything to do with lameness.
They took VMS and made it into a
winner just when it looked like it'd die at the
hands of an inferior solution (UNIX).
Senator, I served with VMS. I knew VMS. VMS was a friend of mine. Senator, NT is no VMS.
Why do people go on and on about NT being a version of VMS? The guy who led the VMS team also led the NT team years later. That's it. He might have borrowed a few ideas.
However, the psychological effects are dire. Somebody else in this discussion has already catalogued them [phrogz.net] pretty well (though the thing about bad breath was surprising to me). I never see my co-workers. Communication mostly consist of typing, aside from daily phone meeting and the odd call. I spend all my waking time alone in a rented office. Since I started on this project, my personal life has fallen into ruin, I basically have no friends anymore.
I've had exactly the opposite experience. I find that being "at work" is terribly isolating. I have much more of what I consider a normal life working at the home office.
I watch the cops busting bozo drivers on my street. My wife's friend visits us about once a week, bringing lunch. I get the phone calls from school, sign for packages, walk over to the coffeehouse when we're out of Sumatran, that kind of thing. It's no more distracting than having a PHB drop by my cube, but I don't have to deal with the PHB.
I wonder whether the people who write about telecommuting being so isolating are more likely to live in the suburbs, leaving behind the mothership office in a major city. 'Cause I can get a lot more normal, real-life human contact here (about four miles from the center of downtown Cleveland) than at almost any other place I've ever "gone to work."
I know it has been said before, but $12,000 a year for a programmer position makes me feel icky. Where are all the people chanting in front of the world trade center complaining about the "russians taking our jobs?":)
Seriously though, how can the company feel even the least bit of pride in knowing that they are exploiting the naivety of the foreign job market by the order of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars?
What makes you think they're naive?
They're well-qualified geeks who can make a lot less money working for Russian companies. They are probably doing better for themselves than similarly qualified Russians coming to the US on H1-B visas, because they get to live with their families in their native country with no fear of deportation, and because for them changing jobs is as simple as it ever was.
Based on the information in the article, they're doing pretty good work in exchange for a nice lifestyle in their home country. As an American programmer, I don't particularly like having a wider world to compete in, but I can't really complain that these guys are being oppressed.
I believe this is a much different situation from that of "outsourced" factory workers in less-developed countries. These Russian programmers are earning a solid middle-class income, and their participation in the "world economy" isn't enforced at gunpoint. It's a big city in a relatively modern country; these are people who could freely choose to work for local organizations, and who are free to negotiate their salary and working conditions, or to quit.
In other words, I suppose, the difference between the situation in the news article and that of garment workers in (for example) Indonesia is that the former have more options, leverage, power. Unskilled teenagers at a sub-sub-sub-sub-contracted factory located in a less modern country, with no effective labor laws and a national policy favoring centralized employment in the cash economy are at a severe disadvantage.
If it makes you feel better, think of it as a Russian software company that happens to have a sales and marketing office in the US.
Because lets face it in many parts of the world the average person gets by on $2/day or less and if you pay someone $10-12 a day and give them a room with 4 walls and a roof to live in they are doing a lot better than they were.
Well, yes and no. Frequently this is better than the current alternatives for that worker, but you're talking about (perhaps) a 15-year-old girl whose family's subsistence farm was taken away for "progress." She didn't have a lot of money in the old village, but she had food, family, a place to live, and no reason to rely on strangers.
The extremely low wages of workers in less-developed countries do tend to look pretty good in terms of local currency, but people who defend that business model often forget the alternatives that have been taken away from those workers, in some places by force.
Re:dejavu all over again ... how ironic
on
NYSE Goes To Linux
·
· Score: 1
how ironic that it appears that big-business may be aiding of all things, the Open Source movement.
Maybe not so ironic. Big Business in the long run is always gung-ho for what cuts costs and works, and the derivatives guys on Wall Street don't mind spending money on updating their systems if it means more long-term profits.
In the old days of a few years ago, the internet was still a largely lawless frontier. Now that it's gone mainstream, some of that frontier conduct isn't going to work anymore.
I'm sorry, but that, um, doesn't mean anything. All parts of the Internet have always been subject to the laws of their respective countries. And what could you possibly mean by "frontier conduct"? Is downloading a file now a "frontier" behavior?
You've managed to push a lot of jargon with essentially zero meaning.
It's no longer the time to flaunt the existing laws...
If there are "existing laws" how is it a "largely lawless frontier" again?
IAC, the thing that made me really want to reply to your post was your horrible abuse of the word "flaunt." It doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
I don't believe Houston has an income tax. Or any other local government for that matter. I'm not sure any local government even has the right to tax income. Sales tax, yes. Property tax, yes, but not income tax.
Okay, don't believe it.
But local income tax is very common in Ohio at least.
Apparently, police and fire stations will have public Internet access. Does anyone else find the concept of going to the fire station to send e-mail to be a bit bizarre?
Well, yes and no.
In large cities, there's always a fire station within a mile or so. And it's less hassle to have people drop in there than in the police station or a school.
It's no weirder than all those places that have voting at the fire station.
Sure, I'm positive that it will have flaws. But, heck, what doesn't? Don't try to tell me that PHP and Perl don't have flaws, because you're just asking for a beating there.;-)
I won't tell you that, but I will tell you that in my experience their flaws are less shocking. Less guesswork in figuring out what the software "wants."
I'm not sure if you're very aware of the web-development scene right now...But having a platform that has state-management, 1st-run compilation of code, on-the-fly.DLL updating, in-process caching features, and automatic garbage collection for a web app is a huge leap from traditional web dev.
Maybe so, but these are not revolutionary advances, nor are they unique to dot-net. State management has been built into Apache for a couple of years now at least. First-run code compilation is essentially what mod_perl does. Et cetera, et cetera. Garbage collection, likewise, was new in the seventies. Many, many languages and tools have supported it on web applications for years now.
I'm not saying dot-net sucks, but I am a little tired of hearing how great and innovative it is. I've observed that some of the great parts of COM aren't innovative, and many of the innovative parts aren't so great. I suspect dot-net will be like that too.
Ten years of programming Windows applications and adminning networks with lots of Windows PCs tells me that Microsoft's new "technologies" are always, always much cooler in theory than in practice.
I don't doubt your results at all, and if you're happy with the degree of gratuitous non-orthogonality you've encountered so far, super. My experience with COM (and the whole Windows API, actually) is that stuff works in subtly, frustratingly different ways from what is promised in the documentation. And to beat my previous point to death, it's almost always the most "exciting" features you see in demos and books that have the most severe limitations.
I recently picked up "Professional ASP.NET" by Wrox, and, about 650 pages in, I have come to the conclusion that ASP.NET is one of the most fuctional, flexible web platform I have ever seen.
No flame intended. But.
Microsoft's new "technologies" (which I put in quotes because what they call a "technology" is usually just a new implementation of features) always look cool in demos and books. You don't find out about the hidden "features" until you actually develop a reasonably large project.
I'll give one tiny example since it's on my mind right now. Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) provides a function CoCreateInstanceEx, which takes a parameter indicating the DNS name or IP address of the remote host where you want a new COM object to be instantiated. Neato! It's like RPC but with type safety! As long as the remote host is configured to let your host do so, you can instantiate and use a DCOM object anywhere on the Internet or your private network. Not really a new idea, strictly speaking, but nice nonetheless.
But there's an annoying catch. You can't specify your own hostname or IP address. If you want to instantiate a COM object on your own host, you either have to pass a NULL to CoCreateInstanceEx or just call CoCreateInstance (without the "Ex") instead.
It's no big deal, but it breaks perfectly reasonable code for no reason. Gratuitous non-orthogonality.
I love Linux and other free software, and I'm a vocal Microsoft critic, but that doesn't mean I write this stuff out of ignorance. I've been programming in Windows since the 3.0 release, and have recently been spending probably about two-thirds of my work time programming various Win32 projects, from end-user database applications with CA-Visual Objects (anybody even heard of that?) to the C++ middle tier of a couple of 3-tier client/server systems. I don't hate the stuff, I just have plenty of practical knowledge of how it sucks.
COM (and DCOM--"Distributed COM") is littered with barely-documented or undocumented details like these. Like the way strongly-typed parameters can be passed by reference across process boundaries--just not from Visual Basic clients, even though COM is claimed to be language-neutral.
Microsoft development tools, I've found, generally stop doing what you expect the moment "gee-whiz!" settles into "can you make it do this?" When you read Microsoft docs or third-party books on a new "technology" it pays to be skeptical whenever the CS student inside your head says, "That's amazing! How can they do that?"
I guess I'm saying two things:
When the.NET development docs tell you something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is; and
Microsoft APIs are full of nuances and special cases that will annoy and surprise you.
If you write a few pretty decent-sized.NET applications and they work out as well as expected, super. But until then, I'd withhold judgement.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anyone's ever demonstrated a measurable educational benefit of "computers in the classroom." Certainly nobody's documented a relationship between computers in schools and long-term earnings.
Microsoft apologists are so funny. They make up these theories with no factual basis whatsoever. Then they accuse others of having no evidence of Microsoft's wrongdoing--even though the best lawyers money can buy weren't able to get Microsoft off the hook in federal court, where the rules of evidence are everything.
s/private/government/
s/world trade center/Pentagon/
Remember the good old Cold War days when they told you that every photocopier in the USSR was registered with the government and they collected sample output from every typewriter just in case a dissident used one?
Godless Demopublicans.
I know you're not Ashcroft, but that's an absurd interpretation.
There's nothing in the Constitution that guarantees rights that you have in opposition to other individuals. Those rights may exist, but they are out of scope for the Constitution, which only describes and limits the power of the federal government and (starting with the 14th Amendment) of the states.
If you (or Ashcroft) don't believe me, tell me how to make a 4th Amendment case against the junkie who broke into my house last year.
True. This idea [facial scans at ports of entry] might not be so objectionable.
Anti-terrorism efforts could be successful if our lawmakers would start by limiting themselves to proposals that don't violate our traditional values.
But if Congress and the federal agencies consider the most intrusive possible technological controls, they will have a terrible time getting them to work within any interpretation of the Constitution.
They should start by looking at what the law already allows. And only after implementing those improvements should anyone even think of asking for new legislation.
It's not a matter of silliness.
It should be obvious to any American that the government should first improve its capabilities within the limits of traditional American values of privacy, free speech, free religion, and free association. If Constitution-bending powers are to be requested, not that I'd endorse such a thing, government should at least prove to the American people that all other possibilities for improving intelligence gathering have been exhausted. Don't you think that's the only reasonable way?
Before the government starts making new laws that put us all under unprecedented surveillance, I suggest they could meet us halfway by recruiting and training intelligence officers who at least understand languages such as Arabic and Urdu!
Several recent news stories indicate that American intelligence is badly lacking in Central Asian and Middle Eastern language skills. They can improve those capaibilities dramatically without contradicting our traditional values.
Sheesh. You'd think that the intelligence organizations would have some agents who could at least read the plaintext when they get it!
And because the "liberals" *spit* are too weak to do the right thing.
That is completely untrue. Fair use is a legal term that is defined in statutes.
Likewise incorrect. That is the terms of the license they offer. But statutes trump licenses, so a license cannot take away your Fair Use rights under copyright law.
That's why DMCA is so awful. It doesn't literally take away your Fair Use rights, it just makes illegal
the otherwise legal actions you'd use to exercise them.
What a disgrace. If you read the debate, you'll see Leahy practically begging for time to read the bill, having seen it for the first time that evening. He also pleaded for the Senate to let the Armed Services Committee get a shot at asking questions in a closed session. Leahy said specifically that there were certain things he wanted to discuss about the bill that could not be done in an open session.
This all leads me to believe that there is something in the bill whose real effect won't be known until a few days from now. Something the Senate leadership doesn't want people to know about until it's too late.
As Leahy said, emphasis mine:
What is it about this bill that couldn't wait a few days?
You rule.
Similar letters faxed to Rep.Kucinich and the two Ohio senators already. Thanks for giving me the words.
Not so ironic, really, if you know
Gregg's record.
Granted some of the positions the ACLU bases its ratings on can be considered questionable--are school vouchers really anti-freedom or just anti-liberal?--but the overall trend is that Senator Gregg is no friend of the Constitution.
Maybe damning if you believe that guy, but it doesn't have much to do with the dot-bomb crash.
People are going to pick one operating system or another, or they'll mix 'em, but stock and housing prices don't have much effect on either.
Maybe you could tighten up what you're trying to say. There's probably a good point in there but you're leaving a bit to the imagination.
Farmers and construction workers lack neither skills nor drive; can you frame a house? Do you know what working on a farm is like?
Why yes, even though I'm not the guy you're replying to, yes, I have worked on a farm. All summer for a couple of years. (And yes, it is at least as hard as it looks, maybe harder.)
I think the dot-com revolution is much more egotistical than you're willing to admit.
On that we can agree.
Heck, all of the Internet is still just bits going around a network. There is very, very little that is fundamentally new. Practically nothing you couldn't have read in the classic CS literature. It's just that today the hardware and money has caught up to what everybody (every knowledgeable person) already knew could be done with software.
I think I'm saying that even the most highly skilled hackers are mainly putting one intellectual foot in front of the other. So much of what we do as geeks every day is minor variations on well-known themes. It's just that most people lack either the logical thinking skills, the opportunity to apply them here, or the "aha!" that tells them how to find the answer.
It's not that they don't know how to.
It's that Microsoft will practically always prioritize slickness of feature set and (apparent) ease of use over fuddy-duddy things like security and scalability. That's how we got Word macro viruses, Outlook worms, and Bob, to name a few.
When it comes to coolness vs. practicality, Microsoft knows that coolness is what gets short-term market share. (Then you use lock-in to turn it into long-term market share.)
Spammers use your resources without your permission until you tell them to stop, and many times they keep doing it anyway.
And quit whining about being modded down for posting transparently stupid, illogical crap. It has nothing to do with disagreement and everything to do with lameness.
Senator, I served with VMS. I knew VMS. VMS was a friend of mine. Senator, NT is no VMS.
Why do people go on and on about NT being a version of VMS? The guy who led the VMS team also led the NT team years later. That's it. He might have borrowed a few ideas.
Sheesh.
I've had exactly the opposite experience. I find that being "at work" is terribly isolating. I have much more of what I consider a normal life working at the home office.
I watch the cops busting bozo drivers on my street. My wife's friend visits us about once a week, bringing lunch. I get the phone calls from school, sign for packages, walk over to the coffeehouse when we're out of Sumatran, that kind of thing. It's no more distracting than having a PHB drop by my cube, but I don't have to deal with the PHB.
I wonder whether the people who write about telecommuting being so isolating are more likely to live in the suburbs, leaving behind the mothership office in a major city. 'Cause I can get a lot more normal, real-life human contact here (about four miles from the center of downtown Cleveland) than at almost any other place I've ever "gone to work."
What makes you think they're naive?
They're well-qualified geeks who can make a lot less money working for Russian companies. They are probably doing better for themselves than similarly qualified Russians coming to the US on H1-B visas, because they get to live with their families in their native country with no fear of deportation, and because for them changing jobs is as simple as it ever was.
Based on the information in the article, they're doing pretty good work in exchange for a nice lifestyle in their home country. As an American programmer, I don't particularly like having a wider world to compete in, but I can't really complain that these guys are being oppressed.
I believe this is a much different situation from that of "outsourced" factory workers in less-developed countries. These Russian programmers are earning a solid middle-class income, and their participation in the "world economy" isn't enforced at gunpoint. It's a big city in a relatively modern country; these are people who could freely choose to work for local organizations, and who are free to negotiate their salary and working conditions, or to quit.
In other words, I suppose, the difference between the situation in the news article and that of garment workers in (for example) Indonesia is that the former have more options, leverage, power. Unskilled teenagers at a sub-sub-sub-sub-contracted factory located in a less modern country, with no effective labor laws and a national policy favoring centralized employment in the cash economy are at a severe disadvantage.
If it makes you feel better, think of it as a Russian software company that happens to have a sales and marketing office in the US.
Well, yes and no. Frequently this is better than the current alternatives for that worker, but you're talking about (perhaps) a 15-year-old girl whose family's subsistence farm was taken away for "progress." She didn't have a lot of money in the old village, but she had food, family, a place to live, and no reason to rely on strangers.
The extremely low wages of workers in less-developed countries do tend to look pretty good in terms of local currency, but people who defend that business model often forget the alternatives that have been taken away from those workers, in some places by force.
Maybe not so ironic. Big Business in the long run is always gung-ho for what cuts costs and works, and the derivatives guys on Wall Street don't mind spending money on updating their systems if it means more long-term profits.
I'm sorry, but that, um, doesn't mean anything. All parts of the Internet have always been subject to the laws of their respective countries. And what could you possibly mean by "frontier conduct"? Is downloading a file now a "frontier" behavior?
You've managed to push a lot of jargon with essentially zero meaning.
It's no longer the time to flaunt the existing laws...
If there are "existing laws" how is it a "largely lawless frontier" again?
IAC, the thing that made me really want to reply to your post was your horrible abuse of the word "flaunt." It doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Okay, don't believe it.
But local income tax is very common in Ohio at least.
Well, yes and no.
In large cities, there's always a fire station within a mile or so. And it's less hassle to have people drop in there than in the police station or a school.
It's no weirder than all those places that have voting at the fire station.
I won't tell you that, but I will tell you that in my experience their flaws are less shocking. Less guesswork in figuring out what the software "wants."
Maybe so, but these are not revolutionary advances, nor are they unique to dot-net. State management has been built into Apache for a couple of years now at least. First-run code compilation is essentially what mod_perl does. Et cetera, et cetera. Garbage collection, likewise, was new in the seventies. Many, many languages and tools have supported it on web applications for years now.
I'm not saying dot-net sucks, but I am a little tired of hearing how great and innovative it is. I've observed that some of the great parts of COM aren't innovative, and many of the innovative parts aren't so great. I suspect dot-net will be like that too.
Ten years of programming Windows applications and adminning networks with lots of Windows PCs tells me that Microsoft's new "technologies" are always, always much cooler in theory than in practice.
I don't doubt your results at all, and if you're happy with the degree of gratuitous non-orthogonality you've encountered so far, super. My experience with COM (and the whole Windows API, actually) is that stuff works in subtly, frustratingly different ways from what is promised in the documentation. And to beat my previous point to death, it's almost always the most "exciting" features you see in demos and books that have the most severe limitations.
No flame intended. But.
Microsoft's new "technologies" (which I put in quotes because what they call a "technology" is usually just a new implementation of features) always look cool in demos and books. You don't find out about the hidden "features" until you actually develop a reasonably large project.
I'll give one tiny example since it's on my mind right now. Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) provides a function CoCreateInstanceEx, which takes a parameter indicating the DNS name or IP address of the remote host where you want a new COM object to be instantiated. Neato! It's like RPC but with type safety! As long as the remote host is configured to let your host do so, you can instantiate and use a DCOM object anywhere on the Internet or your private network. Not really a new idea, strictly speaking, but nice nonetheless.
But there's an annoying catch. You can't specify your own hostname or IP address. If you want to instantiate a COM object on your own host, you either have to pass a NULL to CoCreateInstanceEx or just call CoCreateInstance (without the "Ex") instead.
It's no big deal, but it breaks perfectly reasonable code for no reason. Gratuitous non-orthogonality.
I love Linux and other free software, and I'm a vocal Microsoft critic, but that doesn't mean I write this stuff out of ignorance. I've been programming in Windows since the 3.0 release, and have recently been spending probably about two-thirds of my work time programming various Win32 projects, from end-user database applications with CA-Visual Objects (anybody even heard of that?) to the C++ middle tier of a couple of 3-tier client/server systems. I don't hate the stuff, I just have plenty of practical knowledge of how it sucks.
COM (and DCOM--"Distributed COM") is littered with barely-documented or undocumented details like these. Like the way strongly-typed parameters can be passed by reference across process boundaries--just not from Visual Basic clients, even though COM is claimed to be language-neutral.
Microsoft development tools, I've found, generally stop doing what you expect the moment "gee-whiz!" settles into "can you make it do this?" When you read Microsoft docs or third-party books on a new "technology" it pays to be skeptical whenever the CS student inside your head says, "That's amazing! How can they do that?"
I guess I'm saying two things:
If you write a few pretty decent-sized .NET applications and they work out as well as expected, super. But until then, I'd withhold judgement.