The thing that gets me is that there's usually a lot of emphasis on "China" when in reality, there were likely just as many, if not more, migrations to the Americas from the area which is now (and was then) India. India was a nation long before China was even populated.
Web 2.0 is nonsense. Anyone who's done web design knows how it goes...
Client: I'd like a Web 2.0 site. Me: Could you describe it for me? Client: You know, something that plays by Web 2.0 standards. None of the old stuff. Me: Do you mean you'd like a database-driven, dynamic web site? Client: *fires up web browser and goes to, say, digg.com* No, like this. Me: So you want a blue and grey color scheme? Client: No, buttons that look like this with the jelly bean look!
Your word of the day is "hyperbole". Please, dictionary.com it or something. It will be on the exam.
But seriously, "Web 2.0" is a bit more than 4 or 6 "layers" of functionality above bare heardware, if you count them all:
Hardware is abstracted by an OS, is abstracted by libraries, are utilized by a web server, which has extra functionality added to it for dynamic content, which is stored in a database. Said database is abstracted by a user interface written in a high-level programming language, which runs on the web server (with +functionality modules). This "Web 2.0" content is then provided (over whichever network model you want to use), and is then interpreted again on the other side of the connection by the client - web browser, plugins, libraries (on down the 'stack").
I'm counting at least 10 functional, independent layers of technology from "Web 2.0" to "hardware" - which was what the grandparent poster was referring to, not OSI or any other such model - which is, in fact, a tool for understanding data representation, and not the end-all, be-all.
What I want to know is what the Internet, Government - whomever is responsible for this Web thing - decided to go a full version release without a single damn point release. What gives? They didn't even bother to fix any of the bugs, and now they're not even phasing off the 1.0 nonsense.
[quote]If they can make it easy to use and market it successfully, they'll have no trouble commanding a $60 premium -[/quote]
Easy to use and market successfully? We're talking about a market which is full of sleek, well-designed products marketed by the likes of Nintendo, Sony, Sega, and Microsoft. These devices have like 6 buttons and interfaces to match - the Wii being targeted towards little children. You can't get much "easier to use" than most of these devices and retain any sort of usability or feature advantage.
[quote]that's dinner for two at a decent restaurant in Los Angeles. And if they can keep the games to $20, parents will be able to quickly determine that the total cost of ownership for the console would be a lot lower than a Playstation, with its $60 games.[/quote]
You seem to be making two arguments at once.
1) Most people buying game systems are not living in (or eating out in the city of) Los Angeles. Seriously. 2) Even Nintendo isn't keeping Wii games at $20, and they're marketing the Wii to young kids and (young) families, and other such people on a tight entertainment budget. And, again, see, "Apple Premiums on Everything" and tell me, honestly, if you think Apple would sell anything physical for $20. (Heck, they charge a dollar for nothing - digital content - on iTunes where the conventional method of acquiring it has been 'free'.)
Could Apple do it? Sure, maybe. Do they show any signs of wanting to do it? Absolutely not - look at the Apple TV, for crying out loud: it's hardly been a success.
Eh, the convergence of Apple and UNIX isn't foreign. Anyone familiar with the history of both companies knows that if you wanted to (say) connect to a UNIX system from home in the early 1980s, you used a Mac...
The primary problem I have with Mac OS X is how it handles threads. In short, it doesn't do so well, at all. The end result is that in an all-apple shop, you've got to spend a boatload in order to get half-decent 'server' performance (and sometimes you just don't have the reasonable option to use anything but a mac). So you want a freight train, but the closest thing Apple will sell you is a Ferrari - not because they don't like freight trains, but because they're unable to make them yet.
Oh, and I really liked the NeXT boxes. I 'stole' one - along with the (at the time) awesomely huge 21" CRT - from the computer department's storage room when I was working there. Likewise, I think MacOS X makes a pretty good desktop OS; I'm not facing any inherent limitations or irritating bottlenecks with using it as a workstation, for instance. Though personally, I would really appreciate a 'fully accepted' way to actually configure everything. If you're going to offer a "full GUI" to do things on a UNIX system, I should be able to change [i]everything[/i] from within that GUI, damn it.
Their other big play between now an 2013 could be videogames. There's no reason why Apple can't release its own Xbox - I'm sure Intel would be happy to lend them a lot of engineering help in order to establish a presence in that market. Make the device function with iPhones and serve as a media hub, sell it for $300 or less and watch as it erodes the market for more expensive gaming devices from its rivals. The iPhone is already poised to become a successful portable gaming device in its own right.
Apple could also use their position to smash the high-priced game model that's dominated the market for the past two decades. Keep the price of games to $19.95 and win share away from more expensive rivals, who have been using their cut of game revenue to fund console development.... you're kind of out in left field, there. Come back in a bit, we can see the players a bit better from here.
Since when has Apple - or anything to accessorize their products, such as the myriad of shareware 'solutions' which provide only the basest features - been 'cheap'? I saw software for OS X the other day which cost over $30, and all the software did was take screen/snapshots of the screen in a vaguely novel fashion. And that isn't the norm, from what I can tell.
No, if Apple were to produce a game system, it would cost 20%+ more than the competition, have only a limited number of games (with very generic names, like Street Fight and Ride Bike) which would have not only an up-front cost higher than the competition, but would also have a per-game for-pay subscription model.
Who cares about everybody? Apple only cares about people with money. Preferably, those who are easily parted from it.
Remember those ads from the 1950s promising the easy life if you only buy their special new product, firmly targeting the (at the time) new middle class? That's Apple, today.
In computer games, the 'rock stars' are not the programmers, animators, or anyone else. They're much more like animated films, in this respect (where a big-name human attachment does not necessarily mean success).
Video games are more like auteur films. Their success is determined by the aggregate work of the group, as manifest in the game studio or game title name (GTA being one good example - think: Zelda, Final Fantasy, the Nintendo/Sega characters, Quake, WarCraft, Starcraft, etc.). A Zelda game, or a Blizzard game comes out and it's almost automatically concluded to be a success - and often is, largely on the basis of the franchise/formulistic approach which has proven successful.
Just like "action films with Bruce Willis" or "crazy person movies with Jack Nickolson".
Especially since these 'game actors' aren't usually all that great at what they do. Game developers are, typically, "the best of the best".
Case in point, Max Payne's voice actor/facial actor was one of the developers. Max Payne 2 replaced him with an 'actor' - and the presentation was pretty bad in all respects. MP wouldn't have been half as popular as it was if it'd had had an 'actor' in the leading role...
I don't know abotu any of that, but what I can tell you is this: the boss WILL remember being the topic of a slashdot article! And there's certainly enough contextual information in the "ask slashdot" to figure out who's being referred to, if that 'who' happens to be you.
+10 for sqlite. It's pretty damn good for a flat-file database: fast, with a fairly full feature set, while still remaining efficient and small.
There are interface libraries available for it for most languages, including.NET stuff. There are even projects out there to make it the backend for a db server...
I think the biggest legitimate criticism about OS X not being UNIX is that it doesn't actually use/etc. It uses yet-another hive registry, as Windows does. This makes granular configuration and diagnosis of problems, well, problematic at best.
I (and I'm sure many others) have other contentions with OS X not being "UNIXy" enough (lack of actual root account by default, , but this has to be the biggest for me. If LiveCDs and other 'newbie' distros can get criticism for being too candy-assed and not nearly "solid" enough for the above reasons (Lindows/Linspire comes to mind), the same certainly holds true for MacOS X.
Yeah, and the Mac Book cases are made by the thrusting hips of the pixie elves responsible for all things happy and good in this world!
Get a grip. The only - and only - thing which makes Apple products worthwhile is the way they look/are presented. Internally, there is little difference between an Apple and another product - the layout of the hardware or placement/type of fan, and not much more. That might be worth a little bit more, as is the nice displays Apple uses, but...
This makes anything other than Apple's laptops a near-zero value benefit for the vast majority of the public. A desktop, is a desktop, and gets shoved under a desk. And there's little to distinguish an iMac from anything else, at the end of the day.
Yes, there's the OS and applications. Those are nice, from a user perspective. It's great for inexperienced, technically inept or disinclined users - and for people who want it to "just work". However, for anyone who wants to actually customize their 'experience', good luck!
From a technical standpoint, OS X is really pretty damn dogged, too (for any real work). I was surprised and oh-so frustrated when I upgraded from a G4 1.2Ghz eMac with 512M (10.3) to a C2D 2.4GHz w/ 2G RAM (10.5) this past week. I'm surprised the hardware is even in the same class as (say) an axp+ x2 6000+, which I have running XP 64 bit: the performance is night and day. It only runs marginally faster in common tasks, if that, than the old mac. I am truly skeptical that performance of (say) FileMaker Pro, which I've yet to install and use, will be any better on this machine than the old mac.
Personally, I think the "give us money!" bombardment a person gets just after sinking over $1,000 into a computer from Apple is just a little bit much. No, I don't want to pay more for some service. That's not a deal breaker by itself, but for me, it's the final straw.
When you're paying a 40%+ premium on hardware (and much, much more when you buy anything 'extra' like RAM or disk), realize that money is going towards image and look more than anything else. You're buying a community, a culture. That's fine, I guess - beauty is valuable in and of itself - but don't pretend it's something more than it is.
You fail to see several angles of how, exactly, they're selling out.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the OLPC is government- and industry- funded. It is, in essence, a tax write-off for large corporations to do charitable work. The fact that charity might actually be done has nothing to do with it; the primary objective is a tax incentive - something which is actualized simply by the company existing.
At this point, they're already profitable without even doing anything. Returning some of that money to their contributors through the purchase of hardware (and software) is just icing on the cake.
Did you read the article? Or even maybe glance at one of the other posts in this thread?.NET is largely the nonsense he's complaining about..NET is a massive kludge, and even s
As someone familiar with VC++, C++, perl, php, VB, and a number of other languages, it took me over half an hour to try and figure out how to do several different list/array type functions in.NET. This was not because it wasn't possible - it was because there were so many additional/useless/crappy abstracted functions and classes, many of which did much of the same thing, poorly, with poor documentation for all of it.
And then there's the gross inconsistency of object/container reference methods which make Java's inception look almost divinely inspired. Why does one particular function call work on one data type, but not on one which is almost identical and a child of the prior one? And so on and so forth....NET is really appealing when you first get into it, but it quickly becomes a nightmare if you're trying to develop something original or unique. As far as I can tell, the language was designed with the "cookie cutter 'solution' providing" software development segment - where all the meat is written in C or C++, and referenced by entry-level programmers in a repetitive manner, day in and day out.
While Linux makes headway, there are certainly many things which MS can do in order to hold onto their market - or, I should say, gain a foothold on a new market, because he preponderance of business machines (whether they're desktops or laptops) and servers are not going to go away.
In fact, they might even be able to leverage better, more sales to business-oriented people through the combination of their various software connectivity technologies.
In my mind, it seems like it would be pretty simple to use Windows Powered/Windows CE on these devices, and might be preferable from an end-user perspective. These devices will not only run faster with a truly portable, embedded system-friendly OS (which is what Windows CE 5.0 is, arguably moreso than Linux), but short of full-fledged productivity software, it has more than enough software available to it for not only the common home user, but also most things a business user will do.
If I recall, the licensing per-unit for Windows CE was only like $5, and all other costs are pretty reasonable. That's hardly substantial.
And in a couple years, the speed difference won't even matter. I'd argue the speed difference isn't significant enough to worry about now, for what can be done on such a small screen and keyboard.
(This coming from someone who has not voluntarily used Windows in over 3 years.)
You might do that now, but I'm fairly certain that the "Shutdown" option was put where it is now for pragmatic reasons, not a lack of UI insight. That is, Windows needed to restart 3, 4, 5 or more times per day, if it did not restart itself that many times without your permission.
One thing I'm coming to terms with is that our modern way of life, where we go off to work every morning, is fundamentally flawed and non-conductive of raising a healthy, happy family.
You'll never hear someone who was raised on a small family farm complain about his parents working too much. Why? Because the kids were working too, right along side their parents. And in more cases than not, those families stick together like glue.
Are they rich? No, probably not. But the ones I've known aren't wanting for much. They've got plenty of food, and they're usually in good health. They've got their spouses and their children, and they're able to do work which, while they may not actually love (say, a rancher who wants to do more wood working, or a farmer who wants to raise animals - whatever), they're at least doing innately satisfying work.
And possibly the best thing about it is that you've got no "boss". Sure, you've got economic and environmental forces at work, but ultimately you are responsible for your choices.
In case you thought it was your fault, don't worry about it. Dynamics is utter shit. I had a Dynamics GP installer - and her supervisor - monkey around with an install for the better part of the morning before getting it to work. It involved using an older version, upgrading, then installing a yet-unreleased patch and... URG. And there was a problem with the installer itself not working properly in 2k3, but it worked OK on XP, so... don't want to think about it!
I'm kind of struggling through the same thing. (My first problem is that I'm only recently graduated and haven't had a chance to work a full career in IT - but that's neither here nor there.:P Maybe if I'd have a little more luck finding jobs...)
First I thought like you did: hey, I'll do what I love! Unfortunately for me, there isn't much future in "backpacking" careers, metal workers actually don't make all that much money, and my interest in "shooting things" really only qualifies me to be a hitman or join the military - both career choices which, unfortunately, aren't great for a family man.
And, in all seriousness, changing careers these days - if you want to be paid much of anything - involves spending a fair amount of time going back to school, and then starting all over. They make the whole process quite unappealing.
(So if you're young and inexperienced right now, and trying to decide what you want to do with your life/what to major in, I suggest actually working somewhere, for shit wages, and trying to live on it for a while. And then go to school; it'll give you new perspective.)
Now, I'm resigned to dying young - either that, or just 'trudging away' to put the bread on the table, and enjoy my time off. There are a lot worse fates that working a relatively easy job which allows you to use your head instead of your back to earn a living, and having time off and money on the weekends.
Someone else said, "Do what you love. In the end it is all that matters." I'd argue that, in the end, nothing at all matters, because you're dead.:) What matters is that you live a good life now, and if you're clawing your way through life,
Of course, another option is to just work less, or work smarter. If there's a demand for your time, charge more for it, and spend more of it yourself. Time, my friend, is truly the only thing you've got, and if you've not got enough to spend the money you've made, what good is the money?
Without a body, it is at least plausible that Sturgeon and the wife were in cahoots to get the husband put away. Lacking any concrete evidence, it's certainly possible for what's being described on
Presented with a frame job as such, Reiser would've had only three options: plead guilty, plead it to be a frame job, or plead his case.
The fact that Sturgeon had motivation to see Reiser put away adds to that possibility, in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that gets me is that there's usually a lot of emphasis on "China" when in reality, there were likely just as many, if not more, migrations to the Americas from the area which is now (and was then) India. India was a nation long before China was even populated.
Web 2.0 is nonsense. Anyone who's done web design knows how it goes...
Client: I'd like a Web 2.0 site.
Me: Could you describe it for me?
Client: You know, something that plays by Web 2.0 standards. None of the old stuff.
Me: Do you mean you'd like a database-driven, dynamic web site?
Client: *fires up web browser and goes to, say, digg.com* No, like this.
Me: So you want a blue and grey color scheme?
Client: No, buttons that look like this with the jelly bean look!
Your word of the day is "hyperbole". Please, dictionary.com it or something. It will be on the exam.
But seriously, "Web 2.0" is a bit more than 4 or 6 "layers" of functionality above bare heardware, if you count them all:
Hardware is abstracted by an OS, is abstracted by libraries, are utilized by a web server, which has extra functionality added to it for dynamic content, which is stored in a database. Said database is abstracted by a user interface written in a high-level programming language, which runs on the web server (with +functionality modules). This "Web 2.0" content is then provided (over whichever network model you want to use), and is then interpreted again on the other side of the connection by the client - web browser, plugins, libraries (on down the 'stack").
I'm counting at least 10 functional, independent layers of technology from "Web 2.0" to "hardware" - which was what the grandparent poster was referring to, not OSI or any other such model - which is, in fact, a tool for understanding data representation, and not the end-all, be-all.
What I want to know is what the Internet, Government - whomever is responsible for this Web thing - decided to go a full version release without a single damn point release. What gives? They didn't even bother to fix any of the bugs, and now they're not even phasing off the 1.0 nonsense.
[quote]If they can make it easy to use and market it successfully, they'll have no trouble commanding a $60 premium -[/quote]
Easy to use and market successfully? We're talking about a market which is full of sleek, well-designed products marketed by the likes of Nintendo, Sony, Sega, and Microsoft. These devices have like 6 buttons and interfaces to match - the Wii being targeted towards little children. You can't get much "easier to use" than most of these devices and retain any sort of usability or feature advantage.
[quote]that's dinner for two at a decent restaurant in Los Angeles. And if they can keep the games to $20, parents will be able to quickly determine that the total cost of ownership for the console would be a lot lower than a Playstation, with its $60 games.[/quote]
You seem to be making two arguments at once.
1) Most people buying game systems are not living in (or eating out in the city of) Los Angeles. Seriously.
2) Even Nintendo isn't keeping Wii games at $20, and they're marketing the Wii to young kids and (young) families, and other such people on a tight entertainment budget. And, again, see, "Apple Premiums on Everything" and tell me, honestly, if you think Apple would sell anything physical for $20. (Heck, they charge a dollar for nothing - digital content - on iTunes where the conventional method of acquiring it has been 'free'.)
Could Apple do it? Sure, maybe. Do they show any signs of wanting to do it? Absolutely not - look at the Apple TV, for crying out loud: it's hardly been a success.
Eh, the convergence of Apple and UNIX isn't foreign. Anyone familiar with the history of both companies knows that if you wanted to (say) connect to a UNIX system from home in the early 1980s, you used a Mac...
The primary problem I have with Mac OS X is how it handles threads. In short, it doesn't do so well, at all. The end result is that in an all-apple shop, you've got to spend a boatload in order to get half-decent 'server' performance (and sometimes you just don't have the reasonable option to use anything but a mac). So you want a freight train, but the closest thing Apple will sell you is a Ferrari - not because they don't like freight trains, but because they're unable to make them yet.
Oh, and I really liked the NeXT boxes. I 'stole' one - along with the (at the time) awesomely huge 21" CRT - from the computer department's storage room when I was working there. Likewise, I think MacOS X makes a pretty good desktop OS; I'm not facing any inherent limitations or irritating bottlenecks with using it as a workstation, for instance. Though personally, I would really appreciate a 'fully accepted' way to actually configure everything. If you're going to offer a "full GUI" to do things on a UNIX system, I should be able to change [i]everything[/i] from within that GUI, damn it.
Their other big play between now an 2013 could be videogames. There's no reason why Apple can't release its own Xbox - I'm sure Intel would be happy to lend them a lot of engineering help in order to establish a presence in that market. Make the device function with iPhones and serve as a media hub, sell it for $300 or less and watch as it erodes the market for more expensive gaming devices from its rivals. The iPhone is already poised to become a successful portable gaming device in its own right.
Apple could also use their position to smash the high-priced game model that's dominated the market for the past two decades. Keep the price of games to $19.95 and win share away from more expensive rivals, who have been using their cut of game revenue to fund console development.
Since when has Apple - or anything to accessorize their products, such as the myriad of shareware 'solutions' which provide only the basest features - been 'cheap'? I saw software for OS X the other day which cost over $30, and all the software did was take screen/snapshots of the screen in a vaguely novel fashion. And that isn't the norm, from what I can tell.
No, if Apple were to produce a game system, it would cost 20%+ more than the competition, have only a limited number of games (with very generic names, like Street Fight and Ride Bike) which would have not only an up-front cost higher than the competition, but would also have a per-game for-pay subscription model.
Who cares about everybody? Apple only cares about people with money. Preferably, those who are easily parted from it.
Remember those ads from the 1950s promising the easy life if you only buy their special new product, firmly targeting the (at the time) new middle class? That's Apple, today.
What's the acronym for the opposite of FUD?
More than likely, this is just more nonsense from the standard Apple product cycle.
Exactly.
In computer games, the 'rock stars' are not the programmers, animators, or anyone else. They're much more like animated films, in this respect (where a big-name human attachment does not necessarily mean success).
Video games are more like auteur films. Their success is determined by the aggregate work of the group, as manifest in the game studio or game title name (GTA being one good example - think: Zelda, Final Fantasy, the Nintendo/Sega characters, Quake, WarCraft, Starcraft, etc.). A Zelda game, or a Blizzard game comes out and it's almost automatically concluded to be a success - and often is, largely on the basis of the franchise/formulistic approach which has proven successful.
Just like "action films with Bruce Willis" or "crazy person movies with Jack Nickolson".
Especially since these 'game actors' aren't usually all that great at what they do. Game developers are, typically, "the best of the best".
Case in point, Max Payne's voice actor/facial actor was one of the developers. Max Payne 2 replaced him with an 'actor' - and the presentation was pretty bad in all respects. MP wouldn't have been half as popular as it was if it'd had had an 'actor' in the leading role...
I don't know abotu any of that, but what I can tell you is this: the boss WILL remember being the topic of a slashdot article! And there's certainly enough contextual information in the "ask slashdot" to figure out who's being referred to, if that 'who' happens to be you.
They might just have the same lawyers as that kid who mocked Scientology.
+10 for sqlite. It's pretty damn good for a flat-file database: fast, with a fairly full feature set, while still remaining efficient and small.
.NET stuff. There are even projects out there to make it the backend for a db server...
There are interface libraries available for it for most languages, including
Hmmm my 8 core 16 GB- low end computer - is quite insulted
FACT Apples have always been about the same OR BETTER priced compared to equal PC's
A quick stop at the Apple store tells me that the cheapest Mac purchasable with those specs is going to run a person over $6,000 after taxes.
Stop over at NewEgg and you can build a comparable system - with a nice bling-bling case - for around 1/3rd that.
I think the biggest legitimate criticism about OS X not being UNIX is that it doesn't actually use /etc. It uses yet-another hive registry, as Windows does. This makes granular configuration and diagnosis of problems, well, problematic at best.
I (and I'm sure many others) have other contentions with OS X not being "UNIXy" enough (lack of actual root account by default, , but this has to be the biggest for me. If LiveCDs and other 'newbie' distros can get criticism for being too candy-assed and not nearly "solid" enough for the above reasons (Lindows/Linspire comes to mind), the same certainly holds true for MacOS X.
Yeah, and the Mac Book cases are made by the thrusting hips of the pixie elves responsible for all things happy and good in this world!
Get a grip. The only - and only - thing which makes Apple products worthwhile is the way they look/are presented. Internally, there is little difference between an Apple and another product - the layout of the hardware or placement/type of fan, and not much more. That might be worth a little bit more, as is the nice displays Apple uses, but...
This makes anything other than Apple's laptops a near-zero value benefit for the vast majority of the public. A desktop, is a desktop, and gets shoved under a desk. And there's little to distinguish an iMac from anything else, at the end of the day.
Yes, there's the OS and applications. Those are nice, from a user perspective. It's great for inexperienced, technically inept or disinclined users - and for people who want it to "just work". However, for anyone who wants to actually customize their 'experience', good luck!
From a technical standpoint, OS X is really pretty damn dogged, too (for any real work). I was surprised and oh-so frustrated when I upgraded from a G4 1.2Ghz eMac with 512M (10.3) to a C2D 2.4GHz w/ 2G RAM (10.5) this past week. I'm surprised the hardware is even in the same class as (say) an axp+ x2 6000+, which I have running XP 64 bit: the performance is night and day. It only runs marginally faster in common tasks, if that, than the old mac. I am truly skeptical that performance of (say) FileMaker Pro, which I've yet to install and use, will be any better on this machine than the old mac.
Personally, I think the "give us money!" bombardment a person gets just after sinking over $1,000 into a computer from Apple is just a little bit much. No, I don't want to pay more for some service. That's not a deal breaker by itself, but for me, it's the final straw.
When you're paying a 40%+ premium on hardware (and much, much more when you buy anything 'extra' like RAM or disk), realize that money is going towards image and look more than anything else. You're buying a community, a culture. That's fine, I guess - beauty is valuable in and of itself - but don't pretend it's something more than it is.
You fail to see several angles of how, exactly, they're selling out.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the OLPC is government- and industry- funded. It is, in essence, a tax write-off for large corporations to do charitable work. The fact that charity might actually be done has nothing to do with it; the primary objective is a tax incentive - something which is actualized simply by the company existing.
At this point, they're already profitable without even doing anything. Returning some of that money to their contributors through the purchase of hardware (and software) is just icing on the cake.
Did you read the article? Or even maybe glance at one of the other posts in this thread? .NET is largely the nonsense he's complaining about. .NET is a massive kludge, and even s
.NET. This was not because it wasn't possible - it was because there were so many additional/useless/crappy abstracted functions and classes, many of which did much of the same thing, poorly, with poor documentation for all of it.
.NET is really appealing when you first get into it, but it quickly becomes a nightmare if you're trying to develop something original or unique. As far as I can tell, the language was designed with the "cookie cutter 'solution' providing" software development segment - where all the meat is written in C or C++, and referenced by entry-level programmers in a repetitive manner, day in and day out.
As someone familiar with VC++, C++, perl, php, VB, and a number of other languages, it took me over half an hour to try and figure out how to do several different list/array type functions in
And then there's the gross inconsistency of object/container reference methods which make Java's inception look almost divinely inspired. Why does one particular function call work on one data type, but not on one which is almost identical and a child of the prior one? And so on and so forth...
I disagree.
While Linux makes headway, there are certainly many things which MS can do in order to hold onto their market - or, I should say, gain a foothold on a new market, because he preponderance of business machines (whether they're desktops or laptops) and servers are not going to go away.
In fact, they might even be able to leverage better, more sales to business-oriented people through the combination of their various software connectivity technologies.
In my mind, it seems like it would be pretty simple to use Windows Powered/Windows CE on these devices, and might be preferable from an end-user perspective. These devices will not only run faster with a truly portable, embedded system-friendly OS (which is what Windows CE 5.0 is, arguably moreso than Linux), but short of full-fledged productivity software, it has more than enough software available to it for not only the common home user, but also most things a business user will do.
If I recall, the licensing per-unit for Windows CE was only like $5, and all other costs are pretty reasonable. That's hardly substantial.
And in a couple years, the speed difference won't even matter. I'd argue the speed difference isn't significant enough to worry about now, for what can be done on such a small screen and keyboard.
(This coming from someone who has not voluntarily used Windows in over 3 years.)
You might do that now, but I'm fairly certain that the "Shutdown" option was put where it is now for pragmatic reasons, not a lack of UI insight. That is, Windows needed to restart 3, 4, 5 or more times per day, if it did not restart itself that many times without your permission.
One thing I'm coming to terms with is that our modern way of life, where we go off to work every morning, is fundamentally flawed and non-conductive of raising a healthy, happy family.
You'll never hear someone who was raised on a small family farm complain about his parents working too much. Why? Because the kids were working too, right along side their parents. And in more cases than not, those families stick together like glue.
Are they rich? No, probably not. But the ones I've known aren't wanting for much. They've got plenty of food, and they're usually in good health. They've got their spouses and their children, and they're able to do work which, while they may not actually love (say, a rancher who wants to do more wood working, or a farmer who wants to raise animals - whatever), they're at least doing innately satisfying work.
And possibly the best thing about it is that you've got no "boss". Sure, you've got economic and environmental forces at work, but ultimately you are responsible for your choices.
In case you thought it was your fault, don't worry about it. Dynamics is utter shit. I had a Dynamics GP installer - and her supervisor - monkey around with an install for the better part of the morning before getting it to work. It involved using an older version, upgrading, then installing a yet-unreleased patch and... URG. And there was a problem with the installer itself not working properly in 2k3, but it worked OK on XP, so... don't want to think about it!
I'm kind of struggling through the same thing. (My first problem is that I'm only recently graduated and haven't had a chance to work a full career in IT - but that's neither here nor there. :P Maybe if I'd have a little more luck finding jobs...)
:) What matters is that you live a good life now, and if you're clawing your way through life,
First I thought like you did: hey, I'll do what I love! Unfortunately for me, there isn't much future in "backpacking" careers, metal workers actually don't make all that much money, and my interest in "shooting things" really only qualifies me to be a hitman or join the military - both career choices which, unfortunately, aren't great for a family man.
And, in all seriousness, changing careers these days - if you want to be paid much of anything - involves spending a fair amount of time going back to school, and then starting all over. They make the whole process quite unappealing.
(So if you're young and inexperienced right now, and trying to decide what you want to do with your life/what to major in, I suggest actually working somewhere, for shit wages, and trying to live on it for a while. And then go to school; it'll give you new perspective.)
Now, I'm resigned to dying young - either that, or just 'trudging away' to put the bread on the table, and enjoy my time off. There are a lot worse fates that working a relatively easy job which allows you to use your head instead of your back to earn a living, and having time off and money on the weekends.
Someone else said, "Do what you love. In the end it is all that matters." I'd argue that, in the end, nothing at all matters, because you're dead.
Of course, another option is to just work less, or work smarter. If there's a demand for your time, charge more for it, and spend more of it yourself. Time, my friend, is truly the only thing you've got, and if you've not got enough to spend the money you've made, what good is the money?
Without a body, it is at least plausible that Sturgeon and the wife were in cahoots to get the husband put away. Lacking any concrete evidence, it's certainly possible for what's being described on
Presented with a frame job as such, Reiser would've had only three options: plead guilty, plead it to be a frame job, or plead his case.
The fact that Sturgeon had motivation to see Reiser put away adds to that possibility, in my opinion.