The first company had hired me to fix the problems they had with software when the other programmers they hired couldn't do it and quit. The IT department had a 90% turnaround. Somehow management changed from hiring people who do quality work to people who write code that is "good enough" in that it compiles without errors being the only criteria. Then they grew the IT department by promoting low level workers from other departments to IT management and anyone who was competent they decided earned too much money and they overstressed them until they quit so they'd save on unemployment. As one manager told me "programmers are a dime a dozen, we get 500 resumes a week for your position and can hire someone at a fraction of your salary that doesn't get sick on the job" and that I should look for other work or they'll make up a reason to fire me and they got several people who'll accept a promotion or pay raise to file false claims about me in order to get rid of me.
The other job the seating was for the lunch room, there was no assigned seating, but no matter where I sat I was told to move or they'd fight me outside in the parking lot. I eventually are lunch in my office or went out for lunch. I was told to move my car or someone would damage it. I ended up parking way in the back of the building near a telephone pole that wasn't technically the company's parking lot, but there didn't seem to be any place in the company's parking lot that I could park in without someone threatening to damage my car. The $3.5 million profit was started to be made as soon as they applied my changes to their program and database which made it faster more efficient and less prone to crashing. I gave them even more ideas on how to improve the program, which management liked, but fired me soon after anyway with no reason given to me why I was being fired. I had gotten sick at work and was on prescription medicine (anti-depressants) due to the stress I was under, coworkers found out about that and bullied me for being sick and having to take medicine for it.
Dilbert calls such managers as PHBs or Pointy Haired Bosses. They know next to nothing about technology but hold meetings for no good reason but to invent acronyms and businessspeak that only serve to confuse people more and then call anyone who doesn't understand it as an idiot that needs to be micromanaged more by the PHB. I've had quite a few of them. I can recall some administrative assistant that got promoted to manager over a few projects we had worked on. She wanted me to change the name of how items are stored into a database and expected me to do it within 15 minutes. She had no idea that we had thousands of queries and stored procedures that were written by hand and needed to be changed by hand in order to make work . I tried to explain to her that the column names on the tables don't show up in the graphic forms and reports and we can just change the labels in the forums and reports to the new names, and leave the column names in the tables alone. She had no idea what a column was (yet she claimed Excel knowledge which uses columns and rows to address things) and my managed had told me to use "pieces of information" for her when talking about databases. So I did and then she accused me of dumbing things down for her. I ended up changing all of those tables and queries and stored procedures by hand and the database management tool didn't have a search and replace option. Anyway her and other managers made the decision to go with the Dotnet technology when it was still in beta testing stage so they could be bleeding edge and get a jump on the competition. I did research and found over a hundred different flaws in the beta that wouldn't be fixed until service pack 1 came out for the language (Visual Studio 2002.Net) in about a year or so after the beta test was over. They went with it anyway using beta test software for production machines, but only after firing me as I got too sick from the stress and abuse from coworkers and managers and ended up in a hospital with stroke level blood pressure and a colon about to explode.
Yeah water cooler ninjas, I was constantly debugging their programs and putting out technological fires that they started. Eventually I got put in charge of legacy software while they got promotions and pay raises even if they messed up their programs so bad I had to work extra hours to fix them so they didn't crash workstations and servers. They'd spend a lot of time gossiping and reading newspapers and watering office plants and making coffee instead of working, but had become valuable employees and managers would praise them for their good work each day even if I was fixing all of their mistakes.
After they got rid of me I checked the Microsoft newsgroups for the company domain name and found the managers and water cooler ninjas begging Microsoft to fix the problems they had in their software so they could get production machines working properly. Asking for help so their programs wouldn't crash workstations and servers a dozen times a day or more. I wasn't there for all of the fireworks after they fired the only competent programmer and worker in the IT department. I only caught the begging and pleading to Microsoft in newsgroups.
The same thing happened when I worked for a small business later. Nobody there knew how to convert the database or rewrite the code so it works better. After I taught two other employees and got them working at a good level, they fired me after the water cooler ninjas attacked me and the manager thanked me for making their product better and then two weeks later said he had to fire me. They made $3.5 million the year they fired me, and before that they had a loss before they hired me and customers had complained that the program was too buggy and slow to work. I'll bet the water cooler ninjas had filed false reports on me to the HR director, ever since I first started working there other employees were very territorial and got mad at me for parking in the wrong place or not sitting in a certain seat or rewriting their code that crashed the sy
Ada is very much like Pascal, but with a black box strategy.
Sure class libraries are not included with Ada as they are in Pascal, C++, Java, et all. But the advantage of Ada is that each team developing a part of the program can write their own piece of it and only release the APIs needed to interface with that piece of the program without seeing the source code. For example you can write functions and procedures into a class library and keep it secret so only members on your team can see the source code, but another contracting agency on another team cannot steal your IP because they only have access to your library but not your source code. They know the variables they have to send to your functions and procedures in order to use them and what they pass back, but it is a black box process in that they cannot see how the black box works only what goes in and out of it.
Ada meets the DOD standards for a secure language because of the black box concept. That way a program written for the military by several different contracting teams is more secure because if an enemy agent gets a copy of one of the source code copy to one of the libraries they won't have access to the other five or six libraries that it interfaces into in order to work.
Of course this means Ada isn't the best language to use for an open source project, or for when several teams need access to the source code of the other teams as well. Ada should only be used when the IP or security needs to be secret and on a need to know basis that can control who can see the source code and who cannot.
Don't look to management for help. Most likely they'll either deny it or blame you and side with the bully.
I haven't had anything work for an IT Bully.
I tried being nice, I tried telling them that what they were doing is wrong, I tried reporting them to management, I tried giving them things like food, I helped them out with their projects, I was a team player, but I still got bullied.
Ultimately I was the one that got fired because I got really sick from the stress of all the bullying. When my health insurance bills got too high, management got rid of me.
Not much I can do about it. I am better off being self employed. Nobody to bully me then.
Ezekiel Stane tries to take over the world with a Linux Beowulf cluster of supermen. At first he tried Windows but kept getting the BSOD. He found that open source software worked better for his evil schemes.
"while in Avengers Tower, the Skrull that had replaced Edwin Jarvis inserts a computer virus into Stark Tower's systems that causes any computer controlled by Iron Man, including S.H.I.E.L.D. and Iron Man's armor itself, to crash. It also releases every prisoner in the Raft (among them being Armadillo, Doctor Doom, Mandrill, Molecule Man, and Shockwave) and the Cube."
Tony Stark should have used Linux instead of Windows.:)
Bill Gates now controls our federal government. Welcome to the United States of Microsoft aka MS-USA. Now George W. Bush and Congress answer only to Bill Gates the new Emperor of the United States.
I guess you didn't notice by my profile that I joke around a lot, right? The profile that says space pirate ninja from 4096. Did you think I ever was serious? Most of my comments get modded as "funny" here.
"But since spamming is mostly illegal anyway, or in a backwards country that doesn't care, or both... Are you proposing a whole new tier of legitimised spam, on top of the swades of botnet-russian-mafia-illegal-cocksize spam I already get? I gotta get in on that whilst the irons hot."
Littering is illegal as well, but most people when caught littering have to pay a fine or fee. In cases when a nation has a law that allows spam, you just issue a tax for it, like $1 an email or something, and then collect from the spammers when spam controls detect that the email they sent is a spam. It would mean re-writing how email servers and clients work so that they can detect spam and mark it and then report back to some agency how many spam emails were sent for a certain product and web site that identifies the spammer company and then either fines them a fee or charges them a tax for each spam incident. You could create a government email address to forward the spam messages to in your country and they can sort out which ones are real spam and identify the spam company that sent it and fine them a fee or put a tax on them for sending out spam.
You could do the same for pop-up blockers, identify the web site that sent a pop-up ad.
Anti-malware programs can be rewritten to identify the malware and each nation can put a fee on the malware author for each infection that gets detected.
My point is that when you either charge a fee for violating the law if it is illegal, or charge a tax when it is legal, the money should go to improving the Internet. That doing so should cut down on the spam, pop-ups, and malware infections because people and companies that make them will be faced with the consequences of their actions and pay for them.
'Is there anyone dumb enough to still believe the romantic portrayal of the young valiant American heros defending liberty and freedom from the vicious hordes that everyone else refers to as "the rest of the world" ?'
Yes but only if Hollywood makes a movie about it and shows it world wide.
I debate with people from all around the world on Internet forums, most of them cite examples from Hollywood movies. Then they think that the USA must really be like what they keep seeing in movies about the USA. Like Forrest Gump was a real person, all of those Tom Clancy movies really happened, the Borne Identity and spinoffs are true stories, etc. Then they have the nerve to call US citizens as idiots? I keep telling them that what they saw in a movie is fictional and never really happened. They are the same people who watch US Cable TV news channels and yell at the TV screen about how wrong they got it, because of what they saw in movies.
I'm just glad that not everyone outside of the USA believes everything they see in Hollywood movies.
I guess they're the same people that think that The Davinci Code was a documentary and really happened. I can't seem to convince them that it was written as fiction and followed a script.
We know that some nations like North Korea have Hacker Colleges to train in cyber warfare and other nations like China, Russia, etc do as well as they have groups that use a lot of phishing websites and phishing emails to fool people into thinking they are logining into ebay or their bank, and steal their account information. That is a way they can steal money from other economies, using that form of cyber warfare on nation's citizens. The next step up from that is attacking government systems as well as military systems.
Yeah the USA doesn't do cyber warfare because we see it as unethical and illegal and immoral. But other nations have a different viewpoint. Not the entire "rest of the world" but some nations like North Korea, China, Russia, and even now in the middle-east Iran, Syria, etc are developing their own cyber warfare divisions. A lot of pro-Radical Islamic terrorist material was put on P2P file sharing networks for example as a way to recruit more people into their networks. I'm betting that a lot of "warez" that they upload are loaded with malware to turn systems into bots so they can launch attacks from zombie infected systems.
Of course Hollywood cannot make Radical Islamic Terrorists as the bad guys anymore because they don't want more Theo van Gogh incidents from Radical Islamic terrorists murdering artists, writers, film makers, etc who show Islam in a negative light. So they instead choose the CIA or the US government to be the new bad guys. Which only fuels more Anti-American viewpoints from people who watch those films, and like I said, cannot separate reality from fantasy.
Actually I proved them all wrong but I was too busy to do all of them right away. I hope you didn't mind the delay, I had some work to get done and only answered one of your horribly wrong and misinformed points.
"No. I play HL:2 on a system with 1GB of RAM and a 256MB video card. Runs fine. Vista runs fine of my laptop with integrated graphics from 2005. No Aero glass, but I have it dropped even further down to W2000 style. Vista runs WELL on slow machines with a simple theme."
My Compaq 2580US Laptop had 1G of RAM and ran Vista like a dog. My new laptop has 386M of video RAM, 2G (1.6G free for the system RAM) and runs Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword slow, but not fast enough for my tastes. It slows down when I try to go to negotiations with other Civilizations and I wait for it to load the animated AI character I have to deal with. When I added an extra 1G memory stick, it ran a lot faster. HL2 is an older game, maybe that is why it works with less RAM?
"This may be true, but I will suggest that 2GB is not really needed for Vista. I have a gaming computer with 1GB and it is FAST. I think the main reason people computers are slow is the anti-virus or anti-spyware software they have running all the time, 2, or 3, or even 4 programs at a time. All those programs scanning every file that is accessed--is it any wonder they are slow?"
Vista and OSX are fully multitasking systems. Yes I really need programs running in the background and doing things. So do most other people. I got my email client loaded, my web browser, my programming tool, a game I am playing, and anti-virus and anti-spyware programs as well as a firewall running. Some people also run P2P files sharing programs, IM clients, and MP3 music players at the same time as well. 1G can't cut it for all of that. I may get an idea for my program, pause the video game, open the programming tool, write code, write a word document, write an email, and then go back to playing the game at home. I cannot just run one program at a time, I need several open at once. Maybe you don't multitask, but I do and so do a lot of people.
"I'm not sure what you are babbling about VPC for...please name the software that won't run in Vista. There are VERY few incompatible mainstream programs. Also, there is no XP virtual machine in Vista. Lots of the APIs are backwards compatible so that all the calls programs need are still there."
Put a tax on spam emails, and popup advertising? Then use that tax to pay for the new Internet.
Also charge the spyware and adware companies fees for infecting a majority of the Internet and affecting bandwidth, and use those fees to pay for the new Internet.
My plan is to get the money from companies and people that abuse the Internet via taxes or fees and use that to build the new faster Internet.
Maybe it will cut down on spam, adware, spyware, and popup ads? Just a thought.
Of course Xp Home doesn't offer that as XP Pro does but instead of domain policies and domain logins you could have used child safe controls like Norton Internet Security offers for XP Home.
If your son is a hacker, then he knows that he can login via the local account instead of a domain to bypass the domain policies and domain logins. One other way is to log into safe mode with networking support by pressing F8 on bootup which still gives Internet access but without domain policies or domain logins. But there are other ways to bypass domain policies as well if one knows what to do.
But I admit you found a way to use XP Pro and domains to try and control what your family does. You are an exception because you know how to get a server working and how to administer security on it and workstations, but most families just use XP Home and peer to peer workgroup networking without domains. Mostly because they don't know enough to set up a domain and domain policies.
I figured that with the delays that ReactOS has had in the past, the beta test might get moved up two years to 2010. Once before ReactOS was supposed to be beta ready in 2006, but they changed it to 2008 because they had to do a code review to remove any code that looked like Microsoft Windows code from ReactOS as someone claimed people had stolen Windows code or reverse engineered it and then just copy and pasted the Windows code into ReactOS.
Maybe you forgot the Xenix days at Microsoft when Xenix was based on Unix System code?
Microsoft used Xenix as a standard until IBM talked to Microsoft about OS/2, which Microsoft eventually dropped in favor of Windows.
Of course Microsoft sold the rights to Xenix to SCO and it became SCO Unix later.
Ironic that Xenix came from almost the same roots as Mac OSX in Unix with BSD parts added. Had Microsoft decided not to take up IBM on their OS/2 offer, they might have developed the Windows GUI on Xenix and eventually replaced MS-DOS with Xenix with a GUI instead of Windows 95 replacing MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. I think what got Microsoft basing Windows on MS-DOS was the MS-DOS legacy code that most businesses needed to run. Which is why OS/2 had a DOS and Windows mode, because Microsoft couldn't find a way to get DOS and Windows apps running in Xenix, so they sold Xenix and went to OS/2 and then back to MS-DOS and Windows.
I think that Steve Jobs saw that Microsoft made a mistake in not using Unix, and that was the flaw of the Macintosh as well. Which is why Next based their OS on Unix and the MACH kernel. Then when Apple and next merged, they merged Mac OS with NextOS to get a new Unix based OS that worked like a Macintosh.
Well considering that a lot of business apps and programming tools don't work on Vista, but work on XP, ReactOS an XP compatible OS, might get some of the market in people and businesses that still want to run legacy Windows applications.
Besides most of these customized legacy Windows apps have no Linux or Mac OSX port either. So if Windows 7.0 will shut them out, these people and businesses have no where else to go as Windows 7.0 won't run their legacy apps and neither will Linux or Mac OSX.
You are also forgetting that Microsoft has the VirtualPC software to run legacy versions of Windows within the Windows 7.0 environment to run legacy apps. VirtualPC could run ReactOS just as well as Windows XP, but guess which one is free to download off the Internet and doesn't require activation to get to work?
"Yes - you have the option of choosing a more secure OS, or purchasing components to better secure your current OS."
So basically if I need software that only an insecure OS can run, I'm just shit out of luck. Even if I run a secure OS like Linux or Mac OSX I still need a virtual machine to run the insecure OS within so I can run the software that Linux and Mac OSX cannot run. If WINE cannot run it because it needs BITS or some other service that WINE doesn't support I have to go the virtual machine route.
That means if I need a Windows only PLC programmer tool, or a custom application for my business that only exists for Windows, and no Linux or Mac OSX alternative exists I am still forced to use an insecure OS to run the software I need to run my business or program. But because I am forced to either run an insecure OS or go out of business, if I choose to stay in business and run the insecure OS if I get hacked I'm at fault? Even if I bought a hardware router, a software firewall and other security programs and hardware options, to protect myself I'm still at fault.
Of course if I had a few million in VC I could hire some programmers to write custom versions for Mac OSX or Linux to do what I want, to fit my needs, but being poor and trying to run my own business doesn't give me those resources.
Of course my real only hope is that ReactOS is finished and has better security than Windows, so it can run legacy Windows programs and also be secure at the same time.
Most people don't run Windows because they want to, they run Windows because nothing else can run the software they need for their business or work. Mostly because there isn't a Linux or Mac OSX alternative to the Windows based software they use. In that case a car analogy doesn't work because it is not the hardware that is the problem but the software. The difference between a PC running Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux doesn't really differ that much by hardware, the real difference is the software used. Even Macs use the same processor, RAM, video, hard drive, and expansion bus as most PCs running Windows do. Technically most modern PCs should be able to be reformatted and put Linux on them or a hacked version of Mac OSX for Non-Apple systems. But the later is not quite ethical or legal to do in the case of the hacked Mac OSX install.
So until Linux and Mac OSX get better support for business applications, PLC programs, and customized programs that only exist for Windows get ported to Linux or Mac OSX, a lot of people are stuck with an insecure OS by either being the main OS or an OS in a virtual machine. Not only that but Linux and Mac OSX need to get better driver support for third party hardware to support more machines, or in the case of Apple support non-Apple hardware via OEM versions of Mac OSX.
Not the fault of the company that wrote the insecure OS? Not the fault of the hacker/cracker who broke into your system and stole your identity? Not the fault of the bank for having an insecure way to verify an identity? Not the fault of the UK Police for not catching the person or people who stole your identity?
In the USA we call such a thing as double jeopardy when someone becomes a victim of something twice. Like being charged with the same crime after being found not guilty or innocent of it the first time. We wrote our laws to cover that as England did it to people a lot before we rebelled. Now I see the UK is still doing it to people.
might be the answer. ReactOS should be ready for at least beta testing by 2010. No need for Microsoft to GPL XP as ReactOS is a Windows clone built by GPL code to run Windows XP etc programs in it and use Windows drivers.
Visual BASIC 2002, 2003 for starters won't run on Vista. Visual BASIC 2005 needs SP1 to work.
Directsoft PLC software won't run on Vista either.
VMWare just upgraded its software to run on Vista, before that it locked Vista up.
Some software reports comctl32.dll is out of date on Windows Vista like MAME 0.56 and disables features as a result. I found that with many open source projects that use that control to be the case. But the Vista version of comctl32.dll has a newer version number than the one in XP.
Peer Guardian 2 doesn't support Vista yet. I wish it did.
There are more examples, but I don't want to waste my time on them. I'll instead just link to them and let you read them.
so it is smart of Microsoft to extend XP Home for low end laptops. Most of those low end laptops got Vista certification for upgrades but were only able to run Vista Home Basic due to lack of graphics power, CPU power, low memory, etc.
College students, for example, cannot afford $700+ laptops that run Vista Home Premium, and would go for a $200 or $300 laptop running XP Home instead.
I installed an OEM copy of XP Home SP1a that I bought from Pricewatch.com (My bet is that Pricewatch.com will have web vendors still selling OEM copies of XP for the next ten years as I can find old OEM copies of 95, 98, ME, 2000 on them already really cheap) on a 330Mhz Pentium II Laptop that I upgraded with a 40Gig hard drive and 192M of RAM that met the minimum requirements for XP Home for my brother-in-law after getting the laptop for $30 from a friend who got it from a storage locker she bid on that someone didn't pay their rent on. Total cost was like $230, including the XP Home OEM install CD (which cost like $89 plus shipping and the rest were the price of hardware to upgrade the laptop so it could run XP). Sure it constantly swaps virtual RAM on the hard drive, but it runs modern XP software like the video player he uses to buy and watch videos on the Internet. Windows 98 couldn't run the video player as it needed Media Player 10 or higher plus integration with IE 6 or 7 and Media Player to allow the DRM to work.
Well you can trick XP Home to run the Windows 2000 version of IIS that is older, but it is very difficult to do that. Most people just install Apaache as a web server and don't bother with IIS unless they want Active Server Pages or something.
XP Home doesn't have the corporate networking to attach to domains or advanced networks. But then people working at home or using it for personal use won't need anything but Internet access and peer to peer networking via workgroups.
There are other things like remote access that XP Pro has that XP Home doesn't, but you can use RealVNC for the same purpose on XP Home and most people disable remote access on XP Pro because hackers like to exploit it to gain access to the PC.
You forgot XP Media Center Edition, in which XPMC can control devices like XBoxes etc to stream media for them. XP Pro has an upgrade to XPMC but I don't think XP Home has a Media Center option unless you can upgrade the OS.
Also XP Pro has registry tweaks that XP Home doesn't, but those are minor. If someone knows what they are doing they can tweak XP Home to function like and become XP Pro by modifying the registry.
Plus XP Pro has that VLK license feature that XP Home doesn't, which is why pirates like XP Pro better.
Only thing I can think of is that XP Pro can support multiple processors and XP Home is limited to one and doesn't even have Dual Core support.
Actually WinFLC is an embedded version of XP tweaked for systems running 233Mhz processors and 128M of RAM or higher to run the terminal services client to connect to a terminal server that runs a newer version of Windows.
This is different as it is the Windows XP Home edition and has more features than WinFLC has. It is not an embedded version of XP that uses terminal services client to run the OS from a virtual machine to work as a client for a server. It is a stand alone OS.
I think Microsoft extended the life of XP for laptops to fight the OLPC and other sub $200 laptop projects to help bring Windows to the third world and poor people around the world as Vista requires some serious modern hardware to work, and XP is more suited for low end laptops that are underpowered and cannot run Vista.
Actually a lot of Vista PCs and laptops use 384M or more system RAM for video RAM leaving only 1.6G or less of free available RAM. Of course you can allocate the system RAM to as much or little video RAM in BIOS as you want but you really need like 386M or 512M of video RAM to get the full effects of Vista and get Vista games and graphic programs to work the best.
Mac OSX has almost the same requirements as Vista, it runs better in 4G than 2G and needs a lot of memory for the graphic effects.
Sadly some PCs and laptops can only go up to 3G but Vista does allow you to use USB devices for simulating RAM by using the free space on those USB devices as system RAM.
Also you will want more RAM to allocate to virtual machines to run VirtualPC 2007 and XP in a virtual machine with at least 512M to 1G allocated to system RAM for the virtual machine. That is to run software that Vista won't run in the XP virtual machine. Mac OSX also needs that for XP virtual machines like Parallels.
as long as Stephen Hawking is still alive, I am sure he can handle it. After all Stephen Hawking beat all the other great scientists in poker with Commander Data in the far future, so he should be smarter than Picard or Kirk. If anyone knows how to reverse a black hole it would be Hawking.
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Clarification:
The first company had hired me to fix the problems they had with software when the other programmers they hired couldn't do it and quit. The IT department had a 90% turnaround. Somehow management changed from hiring people who do quality work to people who write code that is "good enough" in that it compiles without errors being the only criteria. Then they grew the IT department by promoting low level workers from other departments to IT management and anyone who was competent they decided earned too much money and they overstressed them until they quit so they'd save on unemployment. As one manager told me "programmers are a dime a dozen, we get 500 resumes a week for your position and can hire someone at a fraction of your salary that doesn't get sick on the job" and that I should look for other work or they'll make up a reason to fire me and they got several people who'll accept a promotion or pay raise to file false claims about me in order to get rid of me.
The other job the seating was for the lunch room, there was no assigned seating, but no matter where I sat I was told to move or they'd fight me outside in the parking lot. I eventually are lunch in my office or went out for lunch. I was told to move my car or someone would damage it. I ended up parking way in the back of the building near a telephone pole that wasn't technically the company's parking lot, but there didn't seem to be any place in the company's parking lot that I could park in without someone threatening to damage my car. The $3.5 million profit was started to be made as soon as they applied my changes to their program and database which made it faster more efficient and less prone to crashing. I gave them even more ideas on how to improve the program, which management liked, but fired me soon after anyway with no reason given to me why I was being fired. I had gotten sick at work and was on prescription medicine (anti-depressants) due to the stress I was under, coworkers found out about that and bullied me for being sick and having to take medicine for it.
Dilbert calls such managers as PHBs or Pointy Haired Bosses. They know next to nothing about technology but hold meetings for no good reason but to invent acronyms and businessspeak that only serve to confuse people more and then call anyone who doesn't understand it as an idiot that needs to be micromanaged more by the PHB. I've had quite a few of them. I can recall some administrative assistant that got promoted to manager over a few projects we had worked on. She wanted me to change the name of how items are stored into a database and expected me to do it within 15 minutes. She had no idea that we had thousands of queries and stored procedures that were written by hand and needed to be changed by hand in order to make work . I tried to explain to her that the column names on the tables don't show up in the graphic forms and reports and we can just change the labels in the forums and reports to the new names, and leave the column names in the tables alone. She had no idea what a column was (yet she claimed Excel knowledge which uses columns and rows to address things) and my managed had told me to use "pieces of information" for her when talking about databases. So I did and then she accused me of dumbing things down for her. I ended up changing all of those tables and queries and stored procedures by hand and the database management tool didn't have a search and replace option. Anyway her and other managers made the decision to go with the Dotnet technology when it was still in beta testing stage so they could be bleeding edge and get a jump on the competition. I did research and found over a hundred different flaws in the beta that wouldn't be fixed until service pack 1 came out for the language (Visual Studio 2002.Net) in about a year or so after the beta test was over. They went with it anyway using beta test software for production machines, but only after firing me as I got too sick from the stress and abuse from coworkers and managers and ended up in a hospital with stroke level blood pressure and a colon about to explode.
Yeah water cooler ninjas, I was constantly debugging their programs and putting out technological fires that they started. Eventually I got put in charge of legacy software while they got promotions and pay raises even if they messed up their programs so bad I had to work extra hours to fix them so they didn't crash workstations and servers. They'd spend a lot of time gossiping and reading newspapers and watering office plants and making coffee instead of working, but had become valuable employees and managers would praise them for their good work each day even if I was fixing all of their mistakes.
After they got rid of me I checked the Microsoft newsgroups for the company domain name and found the managers and water cooler ninjas begging Microsoft to fix the problems they had in their software so they could get production machines working properly. Asking for help so their programs wouldn't crash workstations and servers a dozen times a day or more. I wasn't there for all of the fireworks after they fired the only competent programmer and worker in the IT department. I only caught the begging and pleading to Microsoft in newsgroups.
The same thing happened when I worked for a small business later. Nobody there knew how to convert the database or rewrite the code so it works better. After I taught two other employees and got them working at a good level, they fired me after the water cooler ninjas attacked me and the manager thanked me for making their product better and then two weeks later said he had to fire me. They made $3.5 million the year they fired me, and before that they had a loss before they hired me and customers had complained that the program was too buggy and slow to work. I'll bet the water cooler ninjas had filed false reports on me to the HR director, ever since I first started working there other employees were very territorial and got mad at me for parking in the wrong place or not sitting in a certain seat or rewriting their code that crashed the sy
Ada is very much like Pascal, but with a black box strategy.
Sure class libraries are not included with Ada as they are in Pascal, C++, Java, et all. But the advantage of Ada is that each team developing a part of the program can write their own piece of it and only release the APIs needed to interface with that piece of the program without seeing the source code. For example you can write functions and procedures into a class library and keep it secret so only members on your team can see the source code, but another contracting agency on another team cannot steal your IP because they only have access to your library but not your source code. They know the variables they have to send to your functions and procedures in order to use them and what they pass back, but it is a black box process in that they cannot see how the black box works only what goes in and out of it.
Ada meets the DOD standards for a secure language because of the black box concept. That way a program written for the military by several different contracting teams is more secure because if an enemy agent gets a copy of one of the source code copy to one of the libraries they won't have access to the other five or six libraries that it interfaces into in order to work.
Of course this means Ada isn't the best language to use for an open source project, or for when several teams need access to the source code of the other teams as well. Ada should only be used when the IP or security needs to be secret and on a need to know basis that can control who can see the source code and who cannot.
Don't look to management for help. Most likely they'll either deny it or blame you and side with the bully.
I haven't had anything work for an IT Bully.
I tried being nice, I tried telling them that what they were doing is wrong, I tried reporting them to management, I tried giving them things like food, I helped them out with their projects, I was a team player, but I still got bullied.
Ultimately I was the one that got fired because I got really sick from the stress of all the bullying. When my health insurance bills got too high, management got rid of me.
Not much I can do about it. I am better off being self employed. Nobody to bully me then.
Ezekiel Stane tries to take over the world with a Linux Beowulf cluster of supermen. At first he tried Windows but kept getting the BSOD. He found that open source software worked better for his evil schemes.
:)
Too bad Tony Stark had Stark Technology and his Iron Man armor pwned by a Skrull Alien Virus.
"while in Avengers Tower, the Skrull that had replaced Edwin Jarvis inserts a computer virus into Stark Tower's systems that causes any computer controlled by Iron Man, including S.H.I.E.L.D. and Iron Man's armor itself, to crash. It also releases every prisoner in the Raft (among them being Armadillo, Doctor Doom, Mandrill, Molecule Man, and Shockwave) and the Cube."
Tony Stark should have used Linux instead of Windows.
Bill Gates now controls our federal government. Welcome to the United States of Microsoft aka MS-USA. Now George W. Bush and Congress answer only to Bill Gates the new Emperor of the United States.
I guess you didn't notice by my profile that I joke around a lot, right? The profile that says space pirate ninja from 4096. Did you think I ever was serious? Most of my comments get modded as "funny" here.
"But since spamming is mostly illegal anyway, or in a backwards country that doesn't care, or both... Are you proposing a whole new tier of legitimised spam, on top of the swades of botnet-russian-mafia-illegal-cocksize spam I already get? I gotta get in on that whilst the irons hot."
Littering is illegal as well, but most people when caught littering have to pay a fine or fee. In cases when a nation has a law that allows spam, you just issue a tax for it, like $1 an email or something, and then collect from the spammers when spam controls detect that the email they sent is a spam. It would mean re-writing how email servers and clients work so that they can detect spam and mark it and then report back to some agency how many spam emails were sent for a certain product and web site that identifies the spammer company and then either fines them a fee or charges them a tax for each spam incident. You could create a government email address to forward the spam messages to in your country and they can sort out which ones are real spam and identify the spam company that sent it and fine them a fee or put a tax on them for sending out spam.
You could do the same for pop-up blockers, identify the web site that sent a pop-up ad.
Anti-malware programs can be rewritten to identify the malware and each nation can put a fee on the malware author for each infection that gets detected.
My point is that when you either charge a fee for violating the law if it is illegal, or charge a tax when it is legal, the money should go to improving the Internet. That doing so should cut down on the spam, pop-ups, and malware infections because people and companies that make them will be faced with the consequences of their actions and pay for them.
'Is there anyone dumb enough to still believe the romantic portrayal of the young valiant American heros defending liberty and freedom from the vicious hordes that everyone else refers to as "the rest of the world" ?'
Yes but only if Hollywood makes a movie about it and shows it world wide.
I debate with people from all around the world on Internet forums, most of them cite examples from Hollywood movies. Then they think that the USA must really be like what they keep seeing in movies about the USA. Like Forrest Gump was a real person, all of those Tom Clancy movies really happened, the Borne Identity and spinoffs are true stories, etc. Then they have the nerve to call US citizens as idiots? I keep telling them that what they saw in a movie is fictional and never really happened. They are the same people who watch US Cable TV news channels and yell at the TV screen about how wrong they got it, because of what they saw in movies.
I'm just glad that not everyone outside of the USA believes everything they see in Hollywood movies.
I guess they're the same people that think that The Davinci Code was a documentary and really happened. I can't seem to convince them that it was written as fiction and followed a script.
We know that some nations like North Korea have Hacker Colleges to train in cyber warfare and other nations like China, Russia, etc do as well as they have groups that use a lot of phishing websites and phishing emails to fool people into thinking they are logining into ebay or their bank, and steal their account information. That is a way they can steal money from other economies, using that form of cyber warfare on nation's citizens. The next step up from that is attacking government systems as well as military systems.
Yeah the USA doesn't do cyber warfare because we see it as unethical and illegal and immoral. But other nations have a different viewpoint. Not the entire "rest of the world" but some nations like North Korea, China, Russia, and even now in the middle-east Iran, Syria, etc are developing their own cyber warfare divisions. A lot of pro-Radical Islamic terrorist material was put on P2P file sharing networks for example as a way to recruit more people into their networks. I'm betting that a lot of "warez" that they upload are loaded with malware to turn systems into bots so they can launch attacks from zombie infected systems.
Of course Hollywood cannot make Radical Islamic Terrorists as the bad guys anymore because they don't want more Theo van Gogh incidents from Radical Islamic terrorists murdering artists, writers, film makers, etc who show Islam in a negative light. So they instead choose the CIA or the US government to be the new bad guys. Which only fuels more Anti-American viewpoints from people who watch those films, and like I said, cannot separate reality from fantasy.
Actually I proved them all wrong but I was too busy to do all of them right away. I hope you didn't mind the delay, I had some work to get done and only answered one of your horribly wrong and misinformed points.
"No. I play HL:2 on a system with 1GB of RAM and a 256MB video card. Runs fine. Vista runs fine of my laptop with integrated graphics from 2005. No Aero glass, but I have it dropped even further down to W2000 style. Vista runs WELL on slow machines with a simple theme."
My Compaq 2580US Laptop had 1G of RAM and ran Vista like a dog. My new laptop has 386M of video RAM, 2G (1.6G free for the system RAM) and runs Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword slow, but not fast enough for my tastes. It slows down when I try to go to negotiations with other Civilizations and I wait for it to load the animated AI character I have to deal with. When I added an extra 1G memory stick, it ran a lot faster. HL2 is an older game, maybe that is why it works with less RAM?
"This may be true, but I will suggest that 2GB is not really needed for Vista. I have a gaming computer with 1GB and it is FAST. I think the main reason people computers are slow is the anti-virus or anti-spyware software they have running all the time, 2, or 3, or even 4 programs at a time. All those programs scanning every file that is accessed--is it any wonder they are slow?"
Vista and OSX are fully multitasking systems. Yes I really need programs running in the background and doing things. So do most other people. I got my email client loaded, my web browser, my programming tool, a game I am playing, and anti-virus and anti-spyware programs as well as a firewall running. Some people also run P2P files sharing programs, IM clients, and MP3 music players at the same time as well. 1G can't cut it for all of that. I may get an idea for my program, pause the video game, open the programming tool, write code, write a word document, write an email, and then go back to playing the game at home. I cannot just run one program at a time, I need several open at once. Maybe you don't multitask, but I do and so do a lot of people.
"I'm not sure what you are babbling about VPC for...please name the software that won't run in Vista. There are VERY few incompatible mainstream programs. Also, there is no XP virtual machine in Vista. Lots of the APIs are backwards compatible so that all the calls programs need are still there."
Not according to Microsoft not everything is backwards compatible with Vista Microsoft says to check your legacy software before trying to run it on Vista. Microsoft claims to have rewritten code in Vista that changes how APIs work, some things that were integers are now longs, and other data types used in API calls have changed as well. Many people are complaining about Vista not being backward compatible. But you seem to act as if Microsoft and these other people are somehow lying about that and Vista is 100% backwards compatible?
Put a tax on spam emails, and popup advertising? Then use that tax to pay for the new Internet.
Also charge the spyware and adware companies fees for infecting a majority of the Internet and affecting bandwidth, and use those fees to pay for the new Internet.
My plan is to get the money from companies and people that abuse the Internet via taxes or fees and use that to build the new faster Internet.
Maybe it will cut down on spam, adware, spyware, and popup ads? Just a thought.
Of course Xp Home doesn't offer that as XP Pro does but instead of domain policies and domain logins you could have used child safe controls like Norton Internet Security offers for XP Home.
If your son is a hacker, then he knows that he can login via the local account instead of a domain to bypass the domain policies and domain logins. One other way is to log into safe mode with networking support by pressing F8 on bootup which still gives Internet access but without domain policies or domain logins. But there are other ways to bypass domain policies as well if one knows what to do.
But I admit you found a way to use XP Pro and domains to try and control what your family does. You are an exception because you know how to get a server working and how to administer security on it and workstations, but most families just use XP Home and peer to peer workgroup networking without domains. Mostly because they don't know enough to set up a domain and domain policies.
I figured that with the delays that ReactOS has had in the past, the beta test might get moved up two years to 2010. Once before ReactOS was supposed to be beta ready in 2006, but they changed it to 2008 because they had to do a code review to remove any code that looked like Microsoft Windows code from ReactOS as someone claimed people had stolen Windows code or reverse engineered it and then just copy and pasted the Windows code into ReactOS.
Maybe you forgot the Xenix days at Microsoft when Xenix was based on Unix System code?
Microsoft used Xenix as a standard until IBM talked to Microsoft about OS/2, which Microsoft eventually dropped in favor of Windows.
Of course Microsoft sold the rights to Xenix to SCO and it became SCO Unix later.
Ironic that Xenix came from almost the same roots as Mac OSX in Unix with BSD parts added. Had Microsoft decided not to take up IBM on their OS/2 offer, they might have developed the Windows GUI on Xenix and eventually replaced MS-DOS with Xenix with a GUI instead of Windows 95 replacing MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. I think what got Microsoft basing Windows on MS-DOS was the MS-DOS legacy code that most businesses needed to run. Which is why OS/2 had a DOS and Windows mode, because Microsoft couldn't find a way to get DOS and Windows apps running in Xenix, so they sold Xenix and went to OS/2 and then back to MS-DOS and Windows.
I think that Steve Jobs saw that Microsoft made a mistake in not using Unix, and that was the flaw of the Macintosh as well. Which is why Next based their OS on Unix and the MACH kernel. Then when Apple and next merged, they merged Mac OS with NextOS to get a new Unix based OS that worked like a Macintosh.
Well considering that a lot of business apps and programming tools don't work on Vista, but work on XP, ReactOS an XP compatible OS, might get some of the market in people and businesses that still want to run legacy Windows applications.
Besides most of these customized legacy Windows apps have no Linux or Mac OSX port either. So if Windows 7.0 will shut them out, these people and businesses have no where else to go as Windows 7.0 won't run their legacy apps and neither will Linux or Mac OSX.
You are also forgetting that Microsoft has the VirtualPC software to run legacy versions of Windows within the Windows 7.0 environment to run legacy apps. VirtualPC could run ReactOS just as well as Windows XP, but guess which one is free to download off the Internet and doesn't require activation to get to work?
"Yes - you have the option of choosing a more secure OS, or purchasing components to better secure your current OS."
So basically if I need software that only an insecure OS can run, I'm just shit out of luck. Even if I run a secure OS like Linux or Mac OSX I still need a virtual machine to run the insecure OS within so I can run the software that Linux and Mac OSX cannot run. If WINE cannot run it because it needs BITS or some other service that WINE doesn't support I have to go the virtual machine route.
That means if I need a Windows only PLC programmer tool, or a custom application for my business that only exists for Windows, and no Linux or Mac OSX alternative exists I am still forced to use an insecure OS to run the software I need to run my business or program. But because I am forced to either run an insecure OS or go out of business, if I choose to stay in business and run the insecure OS if I get hacked I'm at fault? Even if I bought a hardware router, a software firewall and other security programs and hardware options, to protect myself I'm still at fault.
Of course if I had a few million in VC I could hire some programmers to write custom versions for Mac OSX or Linux to do what I want, to fit my needs, but being poor and trying to run my own business doesn't give me those resources.
Of course my real only hope is that ReactOS is finished and has better security than Windows, so it can run legacy Windows programs and also be secure at the same time.
Most people don't run Windows because they want to, they run Windows because nothing else can run the software they need for their business or work. Mostly because there isn't a Linux or Mac OSX alternative to the Windows based software they use. In that case a car analogy doesn't work because it is not the hardware that is the problem but the software. The difference between a PC running Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux doesn't really differ that much by hardware, the real difference is the software used. Even Macs use the same processor, RAM, video, hard drive, and expansion bus as most PCs running Windows do. Technically most modern PCs should be able to be reformatted and put Linux on them or a hacked version of Mac OSX for Non-Apple systems. But the later is not quite ethical or legal to do in the case of the hacked Mac OSX install.
So until Linux and Mac OSX get better support for business applications, PLC programs, and customized programs that only exist for Windows get ported to Linux or Mac OSX, a lot of people are stuck with an insecure OS by either being the main OS or an OS in a virtual machine. Not only that but Linux and Mac OSX need to get better driver support for third party hardware to support more machines, or in the case of Apple support non-Apple hardware via OEM versions of Mac OSX.
Not the fault of the company that wrote the insecure OS? Not the fault of the hacker/cracker who broke into your system and stole your identity? Not the fault of the bank for having an insecure way to verify an identity? Not the fault of the UK Police for not catching the person or people who stole your identity?
In the USA we call such a thing as double jeopardy when someone becomes a victim of something twice. Like being charged with the same crime after being found not guilty or innocent of it the first time. We wrote our laws to cover that as England did it to people a lot before we rebelled. Now I see the UK is still doing it to people.
might be the answer. ReactOS should be ready for at least beta testing by 2010. No need for Microsoft to GPL XP as ReactOS is a Windows clone built by GPL code to run Windows XP etc programs in it and use Windows drivers.
Visual BASIC 2002, 2003 for starters won't run on Vista. Visual BASIC 2005 needs SP1 to work.
Directsoft PLC software won't run on Vista either.
VMWare just upgraded its software to run on Vista, before that it locked Vista up.
Some software reports comctl32.dll is out of date on Windows Vista like MAME 0.56 and disables features as a result. I found that with many open source projects that use that control to be the case. But the Vista version of comctl32.dll has a newer version number than the one in XP.
Peer Guardian 2 doesn't support Vista yet. I wish it did.
There are more examples, but I don't want to waste my time on them. I'll instead just link to them and let you read them.
so it is smart of Microsoft to extend XP Home for low end laptops. Most of those low end laptops got Vista certification for upgrades but were only able to run Vista Home Basic due to lack of graphics power, CPU power, low memory, etc.
College students, for example, cannot afford $700+ laptops that run Vista Home Premium, and would go for a $200 or $300 laptop running XP Home instead.
I installed an OEM copy of XP Home SP1a that I bought from Pricewatch.com (My bet is that Pricewatch.com will have web vendors still selling OEM copies of XP for the next ten years as I can find old OEM copies of 95, 98, ME, 2000 on them already really cheap) on a 330Mhz Pentium II Laptop that I upgraded with a 40Gig hard drive and 192M of RAM that met the minimum requirements for XP Home for my brother-in-law after getting the laptop for $30 from a friend who got it from a storage locker she bid on that someone didn't pay their rent on. Total cost was like $230, including the XP Home OEM install CD (which cost like $89 plus shipping and the rest were the price of hardware to upgrade the laptop so it could run XP). Sure it constantly swaps virtual RAM on the hard drive, but it runs modern XP software like the video player he uses to buy and watch videos on the Internet. Windows 98 couldn't run the video player as it needed Media Player 10 or higher plus integration with IE 6 or 7 and Media Player to allow the DRM to work.
Well you can trick XP Home to run the Windows 2000 version of IIS that is older, but it is very difficult to do that. Most people just install Apaache as a web server and don't bother with IIS unless they want Active Server Pages or something.
XP Home doesn't have the corporate networking to attach to domains or advanced networks. But then people working at home or using it for personal use won't need anything but Internet access and peer to peer networking via workgroups.
There are other things like remote access that XP Pro has that XP Home doesn't, but you can use RealVNC for the same purpose on XP Home and most people disable remote access on XP Pro because hackers like to exploit it to gain access to the PC.
You forgot XP Media Center Edition, in which XPMC can control devices like XBoxes etc to stream media for them. XP Pro has an upgrade to XPMC but I don't think XP Home has a Media Center option unless you can upgrade the OS.
Also XP Pro has registry tweaks that XP Home doesn't, but those are minor. If someone knows what they are doing they can tweak XP Home to function like and become XP Pro by modifying the registry.
Plus XP Pro has that VLK license feature that XP Home doesn't, which is why pirates like XP Pro better.
Only thing I can think of is that XP Pro can support multiple processors and XP Home is limited to one and doesn't even have Dual Core support.
Actually WinFLC is an embedded version of XP tweaked for systems running 233Mhz processors and 128M of RAM or higher to run the terminal services client to connect to a terminal server that runs a newer version of Windows.
This is different as it is the Windows XP Home edition and has more features than WinFLC has. It is not an embedded version of XP that uses terminal services client to run the OS from a virtual machine to work as a client for a server. It is a stand alone OS.
I think Microsoft extended the life of XP for laptops to fight the OLPC and other sub $200 laptop projects to help bring Windows to the third world and poor people around the world as Vista requires some serious modern hardware to work, and XP is more suited for low end laptops that are underpowered and cannot run Vista.
Actually a lot of Vista PCs and laptops use 384M or more system RAM for video RAM leaving only 1.6G or less of free available RAM. Of course you can allocate the system RAM to as much or little video RAM in BIOS as you want but you really need like 386M or 512M of video RAM to get the full effects of Vista and get Vista games and graphic programs to work the best.
Mac OSX has almost the same requirements as Vista, it runs better in 4G than 2G and needs a lot of memory for the graphic effects.
Sadly some PCs and laptops can only go up to 3G but Vista does allow you to use USB devices for simulating RAM by using the free space on those USB devices as system RAM.
Also you will want more RAM to allocate to virtual machines to run VirtualPC 2007 and XP in a virtual machine with at least 512M to 1G allocated to system RAM for the virtual machine. That is to run software that Vista won't run in the XP virtual machine. Mac OSX also needs that for XP virtual machines like Parallels.
as long as Stephen Hawking is still alive, I am sure he can handle it. After all Stephen Hawking beat all the other great scientists in poker with Commander Data in the far future, so he should be smarter than Picard or Kirk. If anyone knows how to reverse a black hole it would be Hawking.
Besides never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon Five problem.