This guy is saying that programmers only have 3 choices; Java, C# or VB. He backs this up by stating Java is what you learn in school these days.
Do not buy into his "reasoning". When I was in school, they were teaching Scheme and Lisp--make no mistake, what they teach is school is not what will build the future! The programmers who only learned what the professor told them became tech support and helpdesk. In those days, to be a 'real programmer' you had to know assembler and 'C'. They made the big bucks, and all major operating systems and applications were written in them.
Today, things haven't really changed that much. Professors are teaching goofy stuff, programmers get a degree but never learned pointers, and the major software is still written in C. The major difference is the success of C++. Yes, there are lots of Java programmers out there, but really fairly few *major* Java programs. The major OS's and applications are still written in C and C++,rather than assembly.
Of course, in the end, if you learn 'right', what language you use is simply a choice, like a carpenter might use a metal hammer for nails, and a rubber hammer for wooden pegs. The right tool for the job. Today, the jury is out on C# being the right tool for anything, and even Java is still a new fangled gadget that hasn't fully proven itself in the toolbox.
Katz did it 'cause he's mentioned in their book!
on
Disinformation.com
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· Score: 2
Its now clear why this article was posted. Mr Katz is referenced in their book as a wise point of view on the Columbine incident. The good news is, slashdot is also mentioned a couple of times.
Quick review of the book: mostly tired old conspiracy theories. There are indeed some interesting articles. You just need a lot of tolerance to conspiracy gobblygook to get to them. Like digging through manure to find truffles or something. Noam Chomsky's opener is pretty good. The wild ramblings about suicidal and megalomanical Howard Bloom entertained me. Most of the conspiracy bits like the one about JFK make you feel real ripped off.
The reason everyone is confused about this story is that it lacks enough information to make judgements about the issue.
Clearly RR has the right to block email to their servers. If you are their customer and don't like it, you can cancel.
Whats unclear is if RR has a *reason* to block this email. Is it possible that the administrator is just ignorant and uninformed? Possible, but not likely. Something had to prompt the guy to get off his butt and take action; even if he believes forwarded mail is harmful in some way, he would still have to find out about it.
The author is going to have to call up RR and get them to explain their actions. My best guess is that spammers were abusing his service, someone complained, so the administrator took action.
NASA has dug itself into a huge corner by playing up on layman's desire to find life "out there". The fact is nobody really expects to find life on Mars. Or anywhere else in the solar system. Telling people that they have new evidence for life lets them keep their funding, but does not approach the topic honestly.
Is finding life "out there" the ultimate goal of space exploration. No! Finding life would be a big deal but it cannot be the driving goal. This is for the same reason that going to the moon cannot be solely for collecting moon rocks. Answering the question would stop the program right in its tracks..now what?
Finding water on Mars is a big deal because it vastly eases human outposts. Air and rocket fuel can be synthesized more easily, not to mention the need for water itself.
Perhaps you should work on you interpersonal skills. Here you are calling me, a complete stranger, names. Has name calling ever worked for you?
In fact I do know how unemployement works, as I am an employer. The fact is I as the employer foot the bill. When a former employee of mine claims unemployement, my rate goes up.
I am a very experienced programmer; after retiring I decided to try my hand at a massively multiplayer game system. I got a long way too; my graphics engine smokes any of the the games out there today. My network engine is distributed and robust. Oh, its a glory to see.
All except that its not quite finished yet, and probably never will be.
I knew the magnitude of the problem, or thought I did. And I was right...about the programming end of it. Its a big task, but I'm a big programmer.
But taking an engine and making a game is just plain overwhelming. The content for a decent game is a lot of work, mostly artistic. Polishing all the edges takes time, what I thought would take two years, I now estimate at about ten (1.5 years into it).
My suggestion: don't go there unless you have a big team behind you. Ever notice how big the credits pages are for games? Take heed!
If you say "volunteer effort always adds value" then I will say "for hire effort adds more value than volunteer effort"
This my friend is the cornerstone of capitalism.
The fact that nobody is willing to pay you for your volunteer effort is evidence that that effort is not as valuable as those things that people would be willing to pay for.
In specific for this case, it is much more valuable to society as a whole that a person earn a living rather than collect unemployement and do volunteer work.
All programs require an application to run on, usually the one called the Operating System. The OS is simply an application on the BIOS, which is an appication on the chips firmware.
Try using your applications without an OS and see how far you get.
Haha I'm afraid this one is partly my fault. The goal of running scandisk at startup was to reduce the number of product support calls with questions about how lost clusters got on the users harddrive. The main reason of course is people just turn the computer off without shutting down, which doesnt let the file system complete whatever task its performing. Now originally the idea was scandisk would run, clean up any 'problems' and continue boot.
But then cold reality stepped in and two things happened: one, people didn't like seeing scandisk run, and didnt understand why it was running, and two, user Ed jumped in and decided to fix this problem with a message.
So the message is for that segment of users who arbitrarily turn their computer off, rather than shutting down. But of course there is a bugaboo that if the system crashed, you still get the message, because there is no way to tell the difference between a crash and pulling the plug.
In the big scheme of things, that message relieves more confusion than it causes.
If you are on a tight budget, or unemployed, you should not be worrying about places to volunteer. Maybe get off the free-software wagon and go join the capitalists. After you are producing surplus, then you can start thinking about helping others.
The moral of this story, only half told, is "fulfillment comes from within". But morals, when condensed into pithy sayings never quite have the impact of a story unfolding.
Perhaps the author may find someday that even the community of people who share his passion is not really a necessary ingredient to happiness, more like frosting on the cake.
Make sure all your dialog boxes work with "Large Fonts". This helps two classes of people: one is people with poor vision, and the other is people with very high resolution monitors.
Nothing is more annoying than having a non-resizable dialog box with two letters of a sentence in it because the font is too big.
The problem is that the EULA makes you agree to let MS record this information. Thus, you have no grounds to complain when it turns out you don't have a button to turn it off, perhaps in some patch that is automatically applies by windows update...
The real problem isn't so much what Microsoft will do with the information. I mean really who cares.
But what other 3rd parties could do with it is really disconcerting. Even assuming MS doesn't sell the information, the information is still being collected and deposited somewhere. Somewhere that maybe a detective or the FBI could trace you down. Or your system administrator, wife or mother-in-lawyer. Just for innocently checking out that warez movie link...or borrowing a DVD that happened to be ripped..
I worked at Microsoft for over a decade, and have to say it was a very pleasant experience, not described by the authors complaint at all.
I think its pretty damn funny that people piss and moan about Microsoft, about their job, and about the government. Maybe you should stop moaning and get busy?
Now I am happily retired, joining in the fray here. But to be clear, I think a symptom of happy employees is success, and Microsoft has it in spades. So go on, bash the hell out of them. I'll sit back drinking my daquiris compliments of Mr G.
Do a search for flowers. Bam, top hit is 1800 flowers. Candies, top several hits are candie dot coms. Books--amazon.com. Its obvious that Google does bias their searches in favor of their sponsors. A guy I know from Inktomi says they all do it, including Google, and the proof is right in front of your face.
Buzz Alrin's idea of a hotel travelling to mars and back is not nuts. No more nuts than Christopher Columbus trying to sail to India.
What is nuts, is spending over 2 TRILLION dollars on bombs and warplanes. That much money could easily fund a space colony, and move humanity's constructive technology to the level of its destructive technology.
One thing that bugs me about how people understand space is they think of it as enormous distances of emptiness speckled by dots of dust. This view is ignorant and limited. Though by earth standards the distances between the planets is astonomical, the idea is rendered meaningless by the astronomical speeds reached. Spaceships could travel between the planets in shorter times than ships cross the ocean with engines designed for it. Thinking of the planets and asteroids as lifeless dustballs is also off the mark; do you think of a field as a lifeless patch of dirt? Probably so. But, with vision, those lifeless dustballs could be turned into power and food generating plants that could power the earth and solve world hunger. All it takes is imagination and ingenuity.
I was wondering that, so I looked it up. It turns out that after reaching a certain height, the weather balloon explodes from (internal pressure) and drops its payload. Usually this is a "radiosonde", a device which radios the weather conditions back to the weather station. The radiosonde weights about.3kg and is usually packaged in styrofoam to cushion the landing. Sometimes it has a parachute too.
Inside the radiosonde package there is also a self-addressed prepaid envelope so anyone who finds it can mail it back to the weather service. No kidding!
The complaint seems to be that the "network" is being used inefficiently. But who cares? I pay for my bandwith, and I'm glad to use it all up. Costs the same for me.
Sure, as the number of users gets larger, the quality of my searches stops getting better. But I don't care because the quality of my searches are already good enough.
This whole thing sounds like sour grapes from people who want to control from a central server.
MSDOS 5.0 was build from MS-DOS 4.2, which was in fact PC-DOS 4.0 with some bug fixes made by Microsoft to the PC-DOS codebase. I know this as I worked on the project.
The fifth possibility is: All of the above. Which is probably closer to the truth. With that many people with their fingers in the pie...
Your main point stands however: building windows without IE will take a long time and MS will have many ripostes, including finding bugs in the states build, which will be inevitable on a code base so large.
I would like to re-note that 98lite's functionality would not satisfy the states demands, because the core functionality of IE is still present, and can be 'resurrected' with a few lines of VB code. More effort is required.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy is saying that programmers only have 3 choices; Java, C# or VB. He backs this up by stating Java is what you learn in school these days.
Do not buy into his "reasoning". When I was in school, they were teaching Scheme and Lisp--make no mistake, what they teach is school is not what will build the future! The programmers who only learned what the professor told them became tech support and helpdesk. In those days, to be a 'real programmer' you had to know assembler and 'C'. They made the big bucks, and all major operating systems and applications were written in them.
Today, things haven't really changed that much. Professors are teaching goofy stuff, programmers get a degree but never learned pointers, and the major software is still written in C. The major difference is the success of C++. Yes, there are lots of Java programmers out there, but really fairly few *major* Java programs. The major OS's and applications are still written in C and C++,rather than assembly.
Of course, in the end, if you learn 'right', what language you use is simply a choice, like a carpenter might use a metal hammer for nails, and a rubber hammer for wooden pegs. The right tool for the job. Today, the jury is out on C# being the right tool for anything, and even Java is still a new fangled gadget that hasn't fully proven itself in the toolbox.
Its now clear why this article was posted. Mr Katz is referenced in their book as a wise point of view on the Columbine incident.
The good news is, slashdot is also mentioned a couple of times.
Quick review of the book: mostly tired old conspiracy theories. There are indeed some interesting articles. You just need a lot of tolerance to conspiracy gobblygook to get to them.
Like digging through manure to find truffles or something. Noam Chomsky's opener is pretty good. The wild ramblings about suicidal and megalomanical Howard Bloom entertained me. Most of the conspiracy bits like the one about JFK make you feel real ripped off.
The reason everyone is confused about this story is that it lacks enough information to make judgements about the issue.
Clearly RR has the right to block email to their servers. If you are their customer and don't like it, you can cancel.
Whats unclear is if RR has a *reason* to block this email. Is it possible that the administrator is just ignorant and uninformed? Possible, but not likely. Something had to prompt the guy to get off his butt and take action; even if he believes forwarded mail is harmful in some way, he would still have to find out about it.
The author is going to have to call up RR and get them to explain their actions. My best guess is that spammers were abusing his service, someone complained, so the administrator took action.
NASA has dug itself into a huge corner by playing up on layman's desire to find life "out there". The fact is nobody really expects to find life on Mars. Or anywhere else in the solar system. Telling people that they have new evidence for life lets them keep their funding, but does not approach the topic honestly.
Is finding life "out there" the ultimate goal of space exploration. No! Finding life would be a big deal but it cannot be the driving goal. This is for the same reason that going to the moon cannot be solely for collecting moon rocks. Answering the question would stop the program right in its tracks..now what?
Finding water on Mars is a big deal because it vastly eases human outposts. Air and rocket fuel can be synthesized more easily, not to mention the need for water itself.
Perhaps you should work on you interpersonal skills. Here you are calling me, a complete stranger, names. Has name calling ever worked for you?
In fact I do know how unemployement works, as I am an employer. The fact is I as the employer foot the bill. When a former employee of mine claims unemployement, my rate goes up.
I am a very experienced programmer; after retiring I decided to try my hand at a massively multiplayer game system. I got a long way too; my graphics engine smokes any of the the games out there today. My network engine is distributed and robust. Oh, its a glory to see.
All except that its not quite finished yet, and probably never will be.
I knew the magnitude of the problem, or thought I did. And I was right...about the programming end of it. Its a big task, but I'm a big programmer.
But taking an engine and making a game is just plain overwhelming. The content for a decent game is a lot of work, mostly artistic. Polishing all the edges takes time, what I thought would take two years, I now estimate at about ten (1.5 years into it).
My suggestion: don't go there unless you have a big team behind you. Ever notice how big the credits pages are for games? Take heed!
If you say "volunteer effort always adds value" then I will say "for hire effort adds more value than volunteer effort"
This my friend is the cornerstone of capitalism.
The fact that nobody is willing to pay you for your volunteer effort is evidence that that effort is not as valuable as those things that people would be willing to pay for.
In specific for this case, it is much more valuable to society as a whole that a person earn a living rather than collect unemployement and do volunteer work.
All programs require an application to run on, usually the one called the Operating System. The OS is simply an application on the BIOS, which is an appication on the chips firmware.
Try using your applications without an OS and see how far you get.
Haha I'm afraid this one is partly my fault. The goal of running scandisk at startup was to reduce the number of product support calls with questions about how lost clusters got on the users harddrive. The main reason of course is people just turn the computer off without shutting down, which doesnt let the file system complete whatever task its performing. Now originally the idea was scandisk would run, clean up any 'problems' and continue boot.
But then cold reality stepped in and two things happened: one, people didn't like seeing scandisk run, and didnt understand why it was running, and two, user Ed jumped in and decided to fix this problem with a message.
So the message is for that segment of users who arbitrarily turn their computer off, rather than shutting down. But of course there is a bugaboo that if the system crashed, you still get the message, because there is no way to tell the difference between a crash and pulling the plug.
In the big scheme of things, that message relieves more confusion than it causes.
You can implement a turing machine in a spreadsheet, and thus any algorithm. Thus, a spreadsheet is a program.
I bought a laptop. The guys made excuses for months, then disappeared. I think Paypal should be required to track him down and shut him down.
I have used Paypal exactly once. And exactly once I got ripped off. Not a good record.
Now I was ripped off by the seller, not PayPal, so I think PayPal should have the right to do whatever it takes to stop fraud.
If you are on a tight budget, or unemployed, you should not be worrying about places to volunteer. Maybe get off the free-software wagon and go join the capitalists. After you are producing surplus, then you can start thinking about helping others.
Indeed. One of us has the cart before the horse...
The moral of this story, only half told, is "fulfillment comes from within".
But morals, when condensed into pithy sayings never quite have the impact of a story unfolding.
Perhaps the author may find someday that even the community of people who share his passion is not really a necessary ingredient to happiness, more like frosting on the cake.
Make sure all your dialog boxes work with "Large Fonts". This helps two classes of people: one is people with poor vision, and the other is people with very high resolution monitors.
Nothing is more annoying than having a non-resizable dialog box with two letters of a sentence in it because the font is too big.
The problem is that the EULA makes you agree to let MS record this information. Thus, you have no grounds to complain when it turns out you don't have a button to turn it off, perhaps in some patch that is automatically applies by windows update...
The real problem isn't so much what Microsoft will do with the information. I mean really who cares.
But what other 3rd parties could do with it is really disconcerting. Even assuming MS doesn't sell the information, the information is still being collected and deposited somewhere. Somewhere that maybe a detective or the FBI could trace you down. Or your system administrator, wife or mother-in-lawyer.
Just for innocently checking out that warez movie link...or borrowing a DVD that happened to be ripped..
I worked at Microsoft for over a decade, and have to say it was a very pleasant experience, not described by the authors complaint at all.
I think its pretty damn funny that people piss and moan about Microsoft, about their job, and about the government. Maybe you should stop moaning and get busy?
Now I am happily retired, joining in the fray here. But to be clear, I think a symptom of happy employees is success, and Microsoft has it in spades. So go on, bash the hell out of them. I'll sit back drinking my daquiris compliments of Mr G.
Do a search for flowers. Bam, top hit is 1800 flowers. Candies, top several hits are candie dot coms. Books--amazon.com. Its obvious that Google does bias their searches in favor of their sponsors.
A guy I know from Inktomi says they all do it, including Google, and the proof is right in front of your face.
Buzz Alrin's idea of a hotel travelling to mars and back is not nuts. No more nuts than Christopher Columbus trying to sail to India.
What is nuts, is spending over 2 TRILLION dollars on bombs and warplanes. That much money could easily fund a space colony, and move humanity's constructive technology to the level of its destructive technology.
One thing that bugs me about how people understand space is they think of it as enormous distances of emptiness speckled by dots of dust. This view is ignorant and limited. Though by earth standards the distances between the planets is astonomical, the idea is rendered meaningless by the astronomical speeds reached. Spaceships could travel between the planets in shorter times than ships cross the ocean with engines designed for it. Thinking of the planets and asteroids as lifeless dustballs is also off the mark; do you think of a field as a lifeless patch of dirt? Probably so. But, with vision, those lifeless dustballs could be turned into power and food generating plants that could power the earth and solve world hunger. All it takes is imagination and ingenuity.
I was wondering that, so I looked it up. It turns out that after reaching a certain height, the weather balloon explodes from (internal pressure) and drops its payload. Usually this is a "radiosonde", a device which radios the weather conditions back to the weather station. The radiosonde weights about .3kg and is usually packaged in styrofoam to cushion the landing. Sometimes it has a parachute too.
Inside the radiosonde package there is also a self-addressed prepaid envelope so anyone who finds it can mail it back to the weather service. No kidding!
The complaint seems to be that the "network" is being used inefficiently. But who cares? I pay for my bandwith, and I'm glad to use it all up. Costs the same for me.
Sure, as the number of users gets larger, the quality of my searches stops getting better. But I don't care because the quality of my searches are already good enough.
This whole thing sounds like sour grapes from people who want to control from a central server.
MSDOS 5.0 was build from MS-DOS 4.2, which was in fact PC-DOS 4.0 with some bug fixes made by Microsoft to the PC-DOS codebase. I know this as I worked on the project.
The fifth possibility is: All of the above. Which is probably closer to the truth. With that many people with their fingers in the pie...
Your main point stands however: building windows without IE will take a long time and MS will have many ripostes, including finding bugs in the states build, which will be inevitable on a code base so large.
I would like to re-note that 98lite's functionality would not satisfy the states demands, because the core functionality of IE is still present, and can be 'resurrected' with a few lines of VB code. More effort is required.