Cytosorbents (CTSO: http://www.cytosorb.com/) and Aethlon Medical (AEMD: http://www.aethlonmedical.com/products/hemopurifier.htm), both publicly traded corporations, have built something similar,: an extracorporeal filter that fits into the standard dialysis machine you can find in any hospital. By filtering out "cytokines", which are produced during inflammatory processes, they hope to increase survivability by halting "cytokine storm," which is kind of a runaway feedback-loop which leads to organ failure, septic shock, and death. If it is proved to increase patient survivability, this technology is huge: sepsis is a leading cause of expense and mortality in the United States. If it works as is hoped, there are many lives that could be saved and trainloads of money to be made. This PDF from the company makes the investment case: http://www.cytosorbents.com/pdf/CTSO_Investor_Presentation_-_Feb_2015.pdf
Both companies are attempting to commercialize their technologies and gain approvals in various countries. Cytosorbents has been steadily gaining approvals in the EU and other places worldwide. CTSO hopes to initially crack the US market through a trial using their filter as a part of cardiac surgery. AEMD is pursuing an FDA trial with their filter.
The two-hundred-billion-dollar question is whether their devices will broadly improve patient outcomes: they obviously filter out bad stuff from blood, but the real question is whether that is broadly effective in critical care situations.
I'm not a shill for either company, but I have significant investment gains in both. I'm constantly trying to assess how defensible each company's patent portfolio is, and whether the tech will improve general patent outcomes as much is suggested by a number of preliminary studies. I'd be interested in hearing other informed perspectives, especially from people doing research in this area.
There is an FLV movie showing the gameplay as well as the University of Washington's news release on the topic at the UW's news site. Link to the news release and contact for media here:
As others have commented, this is Old News. The Fantastic Four have been running around MSFT's Tech Ed conference since at least 2006. Here, they're trying unsuccessfully to recruit Wonder Boy in Boston's Fenway Park:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/71/170084610_50babdf659.jpg
I found them charming, literate, and witty, if a little on the quiet side. The four had a professional minder that accompanied them in their quest to save the world during the TE2007 party at Universal Studios Island of Adventure: their nicknames are "Red", "Green", "Yellow", and "Blue".
These little figures have been given away at the last few Tech Eds, and they have a place of honor in our kitchen next to my ultra-rare foam "Nine Guy." My wife gets a kick out of them, struggling and failing to understand how a smiling toy relates to an enterprise-ready relationalo database system. "It's complicated," I explain.:)
My point wasn't to suggest that Vista was without fault. It was just to suggest my own experiences with a number of systems, including DX10 hardware. (weird that some folks took that to be bragging, when DX10 is the focus of the article here.)
For better or worse, most people won't be running the x64 version of Vista in the short term. I would imagine MSFT et. al. will iron out its issues in time.
BTW, I disabled UAC in Vista and am happier for it. The OS is undoubtedly less secure in this configuration. I'll accept the risk. God made backups for a reason. If you're running x64 and all that suggests, you might be well-served to do the same.
Returning your respect: if you want to be hacked off about MSFT and AAPL business practices, monocultures, market dominance and so forth, that's your right. But that's a different argument and a different subject than whether a particular release of an OS is good or terrible. Pretending that an OS release is a disaster when it isn't for most of the buying public undermines credibility.
A number of people have commented -- some not very politely -- that none of my software choices are free/open source, and that all of my platforms appear to be Windows machines. The point of throwing out my collection of Windows platforms and tools is to suggest that I have a rational basis for comparing XP vs. Vista on a variety of platforms.
In my work, I have also set up and maintain a half-dozen server machines, as well as supplying nominal tech support for an mixed office (Win98, XP, MacOS, and yes, Unix.)
No competant developer would ignore the best free software out there. Likewise, IMHO, it's counterproductive to pretend that everything that comes out of Redmond is terrible. Some tools, such as Visual Studio 2005/2008, C#, and SQL Server 2005, rank among the best-designed tools I have ever worked with. There is power, clarity, and depth in their implementation. They enable me and enable others to do things that are not possible or not easy to acccomplish with competing frameworks and toolsets. I won't deny myself or or my career their benefits.
As seems usual many Slashdotters seem to be overreaching, equating their fantasy lives with what's happening in the marketplace, and what most users are experiencing.
Among machines I use regularly in Seattle and in Southern California I'm now running:
Two machines that use XP
A TabletPC with XP
A Dell XPSII laptop that was running Vista RC1, then Vista RC2, and as of a week ago is running the release version of Vista
A smaller Dell laptop that followed a similar upgrade path to the machine above
A new Dell 9200 Desktop with a quad-core Q6600 CPU and a DX10-capable GTS8600 video card
I have used all of these machines to run a wide variety of software:
Office
the original Unreal Tournament from 1999
Homeworld 2
Visual Studio 2005
Visual Studio 2008
Photoshop CS2 suite
Sorenson's toolsets
Morrowind: Oblivion
...and tons of other stuff
The problems I have had to date?
In Vista RC1 headphone support on my laptops didn't work
Some of the more advanced developer tools I've used and plugins for VS.NET have required elevation to install correctly
That's it, folks. Other than that Vista seems like a pretty decent tool that chugs along and mostly stays out of my way whether I'm using it for new or old software. It has not been the ordeal that some of you wish it was, and if my problems are limited to issues involving beta OS releases and installation issues associated with expert-level tools, I can't imagine Joe Sixpack is tearing his hair out over ubiquitious tools like say, Office.
Part of being a good advocate for a cause like free software is having the maturity to be intellectually honest. Your hyperventilating every time the name of Microsoft is spoken doesn't make FSF any better or any more appealing. Indeed, people whose living depends on computing may shy away from free software solutions, afraid that they might attract more of your kind to the workplace. Who would want to work with such a negative personality type?
Freehand was not better than Illustrator. Maybe sometime last century, but not when it died. I worked with both until Freehand's death, and it its late stages it could not compete in finish or features. If your last experience with Illustrator was v7 or before, you've missed a lot of real improvement.
Background: I've attended last eight FlashForward conferences, I'm going to Flash on the Beach, I've programmed some non-trivial Actionscript. I like Flash and believe in its potential to create effective interactive experiences. That all said, based on what I've seen of it, Microsoft is set to give the Flash platfom a well-deserved pounding, and I think there's a good chance that when the smoke clears Redmond will be the king of this particular hill.
Why? The analogy is why I started my career with Dreamweaver, watched its development stall, and am slowly but surely replacing all of my workflow with Visual Studio 2005/VS.NET 2008 beta. If you're trying to code anything, VS.NET just flat-out kills Dreamweaver. It kills it because it is better in most every tangible and intangible way. I hate to sound like the fanboi but VS.NET 2008 may be the best-designed and best-implemented tool I have ever seen. When you get past the point of trivial scripting and pre-baked behaviors, it is really, really nice to have an IDE that anticpates and understands the intent of what you are trying to do with your programming.
At this point the.NET framework is mature and the alpha version (post v1) version of Silverlight will incorporate a subset of.NET. For those out you not invested in it, the ".NET framework" is a collection of about nine bazillion classes and associated methods(functions) that Microsoft has already done the work of making. Once you learn how to plug into that API, you can effectively "outsource" much of the boring parts of your job to some poor schmo in Redmond. And if you want to build custom classes atop that that extend the functionality to the specific business problem/web problem you're trying to solve, you can do that, too. Your custom classes and custom controls become a "first-class" part of the VS.NET IDE, showing up in intellisense, prompting you with documentation, and so on. This is so powerful.
.NET's maturity and the maturity of the VS.NET tool are the twin reasons that Adobe should fear Silverlight. Programming Actionscript sucks by comparison with programming C#, and I say that having learned Actionscript first and C# a distant second. Actionscript-specific coding tools are comparatively weak and toy-ish, even fairly good tools like PrimalScript's IDE. Working with Silverlight is going to be a natural progression for those of us already making ASP.NET applications, and what we already know about the.NET Framework will save us thousands of lines of boring code. Let Microsoft implement the IO and the DB layer and async network communication and non-sucky collection types. For something like Silverlight, I want to play at a high-level and work quickly. I'm guessing that.NET/VS.NET will do this a lot better than AS2/AS3, and for that reason, Adobe should be quite concerned.
I've found studying GoF-esque design patterns to be enormously useful for my learning, with two cavaets. First, the GoF book was NOT the best book for my learning, and I doubt it should be the first that people glom on to: more on this in a bit. Second, I rarely apply patterns directly.
For me the study of design patterns could be named, "abstracting your programming: better and smarter" or "useful ways to think about programming" or "OO is not overrated: the right way to use the object oriented paradigm." The benefits of patterns are indirect but real: thinking about the patterns helps you think about your own work in different ways.
The best patterns book I've found is the Design Patterns Explained by Shalloway and Trott. The second best book about patterns allegedly isn't about patterns but I think maybe it is: McConnell's magnificent Code Complete. Yet another great patterns-book-that-isn't-about-patterns-but sorta is is Beginning C# Objects: From Concepts to Code. I'd pick up any of these books before I picked up GoF again, but that may reflect where I'm at: maybe GoF requires l337 h4Axors ski11z to fully appreciate. I dunno: the discussion of the Bridge pattern in c4 or c5 of Design Patterns Explained seems as deep as anything to come out of the Gang of Four.
My humble opinion is that design patterns that come out of OO and programming are fundamentally different than what designers (I am one) are trying to call "design patterns" these days. Web site design does express "patterns" but those patterns are fundamentally different than what is meant by "design patterns" in the land of programming. Methinks there is some confusion about what is meant in each case by "design" and "pattern," as well as a desire to pick up the buzzword de jour. Not convincing.
-KF
MS regularly end of lifes things. Just recently the EOL'd foxpro. Sure its a crap language and a crap environment, but I know 5 people personally who are frantically trying to teach themselves.NET and get experience with that environment, as now that MS has declared foxpro dead, they aren't ever expecting to get another foxpro job.
So here's a personal anecdote: Microsoft, Inc. held a free training session/love-in for devs and wannabee devs at a vacated movie theater in Bellevue, WA. It was ~2003 and I was one of the wannbee-devs-in training in the audience. Bellevue is maybe five miles from the "promised land" of Microsoft's RedWest campus and One Microsoft Way and MSFT managers were supervising the proceedings. I recall some discussion of extending Office 2003, some interesting demos of Visual Studio, and a lovely parting gift of an Intel webcam, which I still have. (thanks, guys!)
An older grizzled bearded guy stands up during one of the Q&A's, his voice tinged with injury: "...but what plans do you have for FoxPro?! Some of us spent a lot of time building these skills." Answer from a Microsoft PM presenting in front of his colleagues and managers: ~"I don't think there are specific plans, and it's very unclear whether that product will be developed further." Followup: "[insert whining here]". Answer to the followup: ~"I've tried to give you a pretty honest answer about where VFP is going, and my suggestion would be to look at growing your skills with.NET if you're interested in developing for MSFT platforms."
I'm not sure how much clearer it gets than that. The writing has been on the wall for VFP for years and years now, and you would have to be borderline negligent as a dev not to realize that. A benefit of playing with proprietary frameworks is that the corporations that own them tend to be pretty up-front about their future. Around 2002 I was learning faux-OO VBScript/ASP (lol), but I quickly recognized that path was a dead end. Developers cannot afford to fall asleep at the switch. Anyone who was surprised by the death of ASP or FoxPro wasn't at all serious to begin with.
Not sure this is really news in the way that some might think it. A few reasons:
PDC is not Microsoft's preeminent developer conference. Tech Ed 200X is. My understanding is that TE is Microsoft's biggest developer conference, and it's running next week, June 4-8 (or 3-8 if you registered for the pre-conference sessions.) Picture 10,0000+ geeks trying hard to make dinner conversation, cavernous convention halls, and (literally) dawn-to-dusk classes and sessions for six days. Quite an experience.
Conferences get cancelled all the time for all kinds of reasons: I was scheduled to go to Lynda.com's DX3 in Boston, and it got nixed a few weeks out, probably because of competition from FlashForward, MIX, and TechEd. Conferences can get nuked for any of a number of reasons: attendence, competing events, a sense of quiet. I'd rather they schedule developer conferences for when they're warranted, rather than trying to hype up whatever's finished according to a timetable.
In this case, we're in something of a quiet period: SQL Server 2005 and VS.NET 2005 have been released, ASP.NET 2.0 has been out for awhile, and everyone's waiting for the next big shoes to fall: the growth (or failure) of Silverlight, an ORM-ish technology called LINQ, and the next version of VS.NET, which will fold a lot of web dev/expression stuff into VS.NET. My guess is that "Orcas" will be an extremely significant release for MSFT, in that it will finally turn a wo rld class programming/DB interaction environment into a tool that advanced designers and Dreamweaver users will want to use.
All of that's a bit off, and so for now, a quiet conference schedule may represent some honesty from Redmond. Personally, among Microsft technologies, I'm currently most excited about some of the third-party stuff coming out. Check out the controls offered by Telerik, or even more gee-whiz cool, the just-released EntitySpaces 2007 ORM framework. Awesome tools. I think Mike & Co. just released this to production yesterday.
BTW, I will be at Tech Ed if anyone wants to meet over junk food and ice cream. As I have a bit of a background programming Actionscript, I'm interested particularly in seeing what Expression/Silverlight can do.
If this is correct, sounds like Jason B.-style invention, impossible, a lie.
Where does this chestnutty anecdote appear in Katz's works? I want details. It's demonstrable horseshit. When did K buy the "PC"? From who? Dell? When?
In terms of speed: one thing I'm really liking is how Vista's built-in security features alert you reliably to any funkiness that a webpage or an install program or anything else might try to do to your system. If something wants to write to \\Program Files, you'll know about it. If it tries to modify any settings, you know. If an installer is trying to dump something in your startup folders, you're given a chance to authorize or deny the behavior before the change is made.
In Beta 1, the implementation of this was a complete pain in the ass. In RC2, it's like, "ah, thanks, I really appreciate knowing about that." Knowing what's being done to your system should eliminate the problem of "startup bloat" that afflicts XP: Real and Apple and everyone else would run the equivalent of TSRs on your machine, and eventually things got clogged up.
I didn't even partition my drive: my installs of XP are gone. I've been on Vista full-time for weeks now, and so far no badness.
Your experience is valid for you and I respect it. That said...
I installed Beta 1, didn't like it, installed RC2, and think it's pretty awesome. Faster than XP, rock-solid stable, doesn't break any of the hardware on either of the primary systems I've installed it on (A Dell Inspiron E1505 and a Dell XPSII). Aero looks and feels great even on the crappy integrated graphics that are a part of my E1405.
I thought Vista RC2 was so great I installed it on my primary production workstation, and have been happily using it for a few weeks now with no issues.
Vista's "Sync Manager" is a killer implementation if you have a need to periodically take your work elsewhere. It just works.
The lesson here: "your mileage may vary" when dealing with beta installations. Vista takes ~2 hours to install, and that's a valid complaint, but no babysitting is required. Aside from that, I have nothing but positive experiences to report with the OS. Microsoft has done a pretty good job with this.
Well, that's just weak: modding my parent post down in the first five minutes it's up as "overrated." Guess you didn't like whatever truths I offered in my own experience of Vista.
I'm told that the original symbolic object for the wedding ceremony was in fact a coin.
Instead of a ring, my boss gave his wife $2000 in shares of the inaugural issue of the Fidelity Magellen Fund. 20+ years later, I do think she's a bit happier with this gift.
Instead of a diamond, I gave my wife a $300 filigreed ring, silver. More beautiful than most any diamond. For me, I got a $120 silver ring. I love it, and I love the idea that if I lose it I can swap it out for something else identically symbolic.
In just a few years, my wife will be done with her surgical training and I expect she will bring home the bank. We will not buy anything so trivial as diamonds. Maybe a nice car, a new laptop, or a donation for children's literacy.
Think different. Buying diamonds is taking your place as a tool of clever marketing. Aren't there better things to do with your money?
-KF
The typical Slashdot commentary is particularly worthless on this article. Maybe I can rescue it with a little bit of signal. I've installed Vista three times, going on five, and here's the report.
I installed Vista Beta 1 on a Dell XPS II laptop, shortly after I saw it demoed at Tech Ed 2006 in Boston. Beta 1 was intesting, buat on my laptop was slow. The showstopper for Beta 1 and the utility of my tricked out laptop was that headphones didn't work, which sucked. Laptop went in closet.
Around Oct. 10 MSFT released Vista RC2, and I pulled laptop out of closet for the install.
Folks, as far as I'm concerned, Vista is +done+. It runs faster and better than XP. It is miles ahead of the first beta, which I guess shouldn't be too surprising. The search is great, the compatibility is great, my headphones work, my Canon EOS Rebel XTi is recognized, Visual Studio and Flash 8 and DW and Photoshop CS2 and all my other apps work without fail. The multi-monitor Remote Desktop feature (mstsc/span) is extremely nice. No lockups or slowdowns. Unreal Tournament (the original, anod best, from 1999) and Morrowind: Oblivion run smoothly. Vista's graphic design is "pretty."
After installing Vista RC2 on my XPSII for a few days, I was sold and upgraded my primary work laptop. I've been running with no troubles for a few weeks now. Shortly I'll upgrade my primary static workstations in two places I commonly do office-ey things.
The article questions what Vista will cost. Personally, I'll pay Microsoft their money. It's a great upgrade that solves a lot of problems.
BTW, if threre's anyone in the Costa Mesa/Newport Beach/Huntington beach area with a external USB DVD, I'd appreciate it if I could drop by and borrow it for two hours. I have a Fujitsu 5020 TabletPC that I'd like to upgrade to RC2 prior to an adventure in Ireland starting Dec 2. I have the Vista disk -- I'im on MSDN -- but I'm travelling without an external DVD device. Anyone?
Netscape does not deserve your reverence, people. Don't believe me? Download any old build of NN and try using and/or coding for the thing. In the first couple of versions, they had a modestly interesting product. Beyond the era of, I dunno, IE3, Netscape was an also-ran.
I don't even know where to begin with the suckage:
1) nested tables didn't work
2) css didn't work
3) netscape, inc. tried repeatedly to make proprietary flavors of markup
4) you had all of these bizarre spacing artifacts
5) Netscape was bloated, and you could watch the app leak memory
6) It was slow
7) It set Ajax-like functionality back literally years. Microsoft had demo code of Ajax-ey stuff for production releases of IE in, what, 1999?
8) Netscape got slower and suckier with each successive release, rather than better
9) In the late days Netscape, Inc. couldn't ship on time to within a ~years time.
Since Netscape stopped being a player -- thank God -- you've seen the emergence of much more agile development efforts (Safari, Flock, extensions) and the resurgence of technologies that were invented, oh, last century or so.
Netscape was a poor competitor with a poor product that drove itself into the ground. Microsoft put out a modestly competant browser with IE5,6,7, made few substantive improvements over the course of years, and was still able to eat Netscape's lunch because of the galactic suckiness of what Netscape was coding and releases.
Revere Flock, revere Flickr, revere Microsoft's better developer stuff, revere Apple. But please don't revere Netscape, because for most of its corporate life, their core product sucked. I'm glad they're gone.
For those who have the $ for it, my experience is that an MSDN subscription will pay for itself in all sorts of ways.
Part of the MSDN support contract is unlimited newsgroup support in addition to formal support incidents. Meaning, that you can post to USENET, and Microsoft guarantees that someone will answer your question in (I think) 24 hours. Microsoft hires engineers and other folks to patrol for questions from MSDN subscribers, and the answers that they tend to give you are exceptional. I've received code samples, compiled projects, analyses of logs, and many other kinds of help from the support folks. This assistance helps me to plan project timeframes a lot more accurately: you don't get "stuck."
Even purely as an educational and training thing, MSDN is worth the money, and I'll buy it as long as I'm in my current line of work.
Another atypical form of support that's extremely valuable is MSFT's relentless stream of conferences and training events, especially Tech Ed. Tech ed is insane: 5+ days of dawn-to-dusk training, and they end up putting the entirity of the conference on streamable audio/video DVDs. One of the Microsofties from the 2006 event in Boston told me that they flew close to a thousand employees out to Tech Ed to staff the booths, train, present, etc. Even at $1600/head for registration, they cannot be making money off of this sort of monster event. But that's not the point. Microsoft is able to train a lot of people quickly, and show attendees a bunch of stuff that might be useful to their problem spaces. Developers of modest talents get free reign to pick the brains of developers of exceptional talents, and a little of that rubs off. And that's how Microsoft wins.
Microsoft targets the needs of brilliant developers and it targets the needs of really mediocre developers and puts enough training out there in enough different forms that everyone is served. It has been a successful strategy, and IMHO deserves respect. Everyone wins.
OS/2 did some neat things. I know, because I stuck with it for years with the rest of the crowd on USNET's OS/2 groups. I even played amateur OS/2 evangelist before I knew better.
It serves some people's purposes to suggest that MS killed OS/2, but I think it's safer to say that OS/2's shortcomings helped OS/2 kill itself. OS/2 preemptively multitasked stuff more than a decade before Apple managed to do the same with OSX, and it did some other nifty tricks. But in terms of providing an computing environment that was significantly more useful or usable than mid-90s Windows for most people's needs, OS/2 was a failure.
OS/2 was big and bloated. It didn't ship with many useful apps, or take advantage of the superior architecture of the OS. It crashed. In the end, I switched back to windows, not because I needed X app or Y compatibility, but because there was simply no compelling reason to use an operating system that was more complicated, less compatible, and no more stable than Win9X.
As a personal thing it was a useful experience. It taught me to keep emotions out of the evaluation of a system's merits. In the immortal words of Alice and Bill, the operative consideration should always be "gimmee gimmee gimmeee."
If the tool will "gimmee" enough, I could care less whether it was created by Apple or Microsoft or Walmart. Merit trumps all.
In 1998 Microsoft hired me right out of college and green as all hell to edit and write Encarta reference products. I stuck with it for a year and a half, crafting masterpieces such as "Iceberg", "Independent Counsel Act", and a few million other articles that began with the letter "i".
I remember whining with all of the rest of the dash trash about my so-cruel and unequal fate.
With the benefit of hindsight I realize that that Microsoft treated us more than fairly. The company arranged parties and outings for us that were pretty fun. Our supervisors treated us with great respect. We ate with the blue badges. The coffee and drinks were free. We got overtime where warranted. We were allowed to work autonomously, maybe too autonomously.
I think many orange badges people are upset because they're unwilling to face a more uncomfortable truth. Dash trash are not unequally treated so much as being employees of unequal pay and status. These inequalities are a function of temp employees' inferior experience and skill. Looking back at my own experience, I wasn't ready for Microsoft in 1998, and there's no way in hell I would have been hired full time given MSFT's other potential hires.
But as a temp I was offered an opportunity to get a glimpse inside the cathedral and to gain a lot of worthwhile experience. Being able to say I "worked at Microsoft", even as a contractor, has proven to be enormously valuable in my career. I've used that aura to create a developer/design/architecture position for myself that is more satisfying and far more lucrative than I would have managed continuing with pure editorial stuff for the 'soft.
Brothers and Sisters of the High Order of Dash Trash, I feel your pain. But take responsibility for your learning, your self-improvement, and your career. If Microsoft isn't pulling you on full-time, it isn't because the most successful corporation in the history of the world is lacking for payroll. There's something that's missing in you, and maybe you need a bit of work yourself before you're ready for the big leagues. There's lots of opportunity out there, and maybe just maybe you should forgo the sucky commute across 520 for something else.
Slashdot Mirror
for something that might point to an answer to your questions, see my comment below regarding CTSO and AEMD, and have a read through Cytosorbents' recent investor presentation: http://www.cytosorbents.com/pdf/CTSO_Investor_Presentation_-_Feb_2015.pdf
Cytosorbents and Aethlon appear to be playing in the same space.
Cytosorbents (CTSO: http://www.cytosorb.com/) and Aethlon Medical (AEMD: http://www.aethlonmedical.com/products/hemopurifier.htm), both publicly traded corporations, have built something similar,: an extracorporeal filter that fits into the standard dialysis machine you can find in any hospital. By filtering out "cytokines", which are produced during inflammatory processes, they hope to increase survivability by halting "cytokine storm," which is kind of a runaway feedback-loop which leads to organ failure, septic shock, and death. If it is proved to increase patient survivability, this technology is huge: sepsis is a leading cause of expense and mortality in the United States. If it works as is hoped, there are many lives that could be saved and trainloads of money to be made. This PDF from the company makes the investment case: http://www.cytosorbents.com/pdf/CTSO_Investor_Presentation_-_Feb_2015.pdf
Both companies are attempting to commercialize their technologies and gain approvals in various countries. Cytosorbents has been steadily gaining approvals in the EU and other places worldwide. CTSO hopes to initially crack the US market through a trial using their filter as a part of cardiac surgery. AEMD is pursuing an FDA trial with their filter.
The two-hundred-billion-dollar question is whether their devices will broadly improve patient outcomes: they obviously filter out bad stuff from blood, but the real question is whether that is broadly effective in critical care situations.
I'm not a shill for either company, but I have significant investment gains in both. I'm constantly trying to assess how defensible each company's patent portfolio is, and whether the tech will improve general patent outcomes as much is suggested by a number of preliminary studies. I'd be interested in hearing other informed perspectives, especially from people doing research in this area.
http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=41558
As others have commented, this is Old News. The Fantastic Four have been running around MSFT's Tech Ed conference since at least 2006. Here, they're trying unsuccessfully to recruit Wonder Boy in Boston's Fenway Park: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/71/170084610_50babdf659.jpg
I found them charming, literate, and witty, if a little on the quiet side. The four had a professional minder that accompanied them in their quest to save the world during the TE2007 party at Universal Studios Island of Adventure: their nicknames are "Red", "Green", "Yellow", and "Blue".
These little figures have been given away at the last few Tech Eds, and they have a place of honor in our kitchen next to my ultra-rare foam "Nine Guy." My wife gets a kick out of them, struggling and failing to understand how a smiling toy relates to an enterprise-ready relationalo database system. "It's complicated," I explain. :)
-KF
My point wasn't to suggest that Vista was without fault. It was just to suggest my own experiences with a number of systems, including DX10 hardware. (weird that some folks took that to be bragging, when DX10 is the focus of the article here.)
For better or worse, most people won't be running the x64 version of Vista in the short term. I would imagine MSFT et. al. will iron out its issues in time.
BTW, I disabled UAC in Vista and am happier for it. The OS is undoubtedly less secure in this configuration. I'll accept the risk. God made backups for a reason. If you're running x64 and all that suggests, you might be well-served to do the same.
-KF
A number of people have commented -- some not very politely -- that none of my software choices are free/open source, and that all of my platforms appear to be Windows machines. The point of throwing out my collection of Windows platforms and tools is to suggest that I have a rational basis for comparing XP vs. Vista on a variety of platforms.
In my work, I have also set up and maintain a half-dozen server machines, as well as supplying nominal tech support for an mixed office (Win98, XP, MacOS, and yes, Unix.)
No competant developer would ignore the best free software out there. Likewise, IMHO, it's counterproductive to pretend that everything that comes out of Redmond is terrible. Some tools, such as Visual Studio 2005/2008, C#, and SQL Server 2005, rank among the best-designed tools I have ever worked with. There is power, clarity, and depth in their implementation. They enable me and enable others to do things that are not possible or not easy to acccomplish with competing frameworks and toolsets. I won't deny myself or or my career their benefits.
-KF
As seems usual many Slashdotters seem to be overreaching, equating their fantasy lives with what's happening in the marketplace, and what most users are experiencing.
Among machines I use regularly in Seattle and in Southern California I'm now running:
- Two machines that use XP
- A TabletPC with XP
- A Dell XPSII laptop that was running Vista RC1, then Vista RC2, and as of a week ago is running the release version of Vista
- A smaller Dell laptop that followed a similar upgrade path to the machine above
- A new Dell 9200 Desktop with a quad-core Q6600 CPU and a DX10-capable GTS8600 video card
I have used all of these machines to run a wide variety of software:- Office
- the original Unreal Tournament from 1999
- Homeworld 2
- Visual Studio 2005
- Visual Studio 2008
- Photoshop CS2 suite
- Sorenson's toolsets
- Morrowind: Oblivion
- ...and tons of other stuff
The problems I have had to date?- In Vista RC1 headphone support on my laptops didn't work
- Some of the more advanced developer tools I've used and plugins for VS.NET have required elevation to install correctly
That's it, folks. Other than that Vista seems like a pretty decent tool that chugs along and mostly stays out of my way whether I'm using it for new or old software. It has not been the ordeal that some of you wish it was, and if my problems are limited to issues involving beta OS releases and installation issues associated with expert-level tools, I can't imagine Joe Sixpack is tearing his hair out over ubiquitious tools like say, Office.Part of being a good advocate for a cause like free software is having the maturity to be intellectually honest. Your hyperventilating every time the name of Microsoft is spoken doesn't make FSF any better or any more appealing. Indeed, people whose living depends on computing may shy away from free software solutions, afraid that they might attract more of your kind to the workplace. Who would want to work with such a negative personality type?
-KF
-KF
Background: I've attended last eight FlashForward conferences, I'm going to Flash on the Beach, I've programmed some non-trivial Actionscript. I like Flash and believe in its potential to create effective interactive experiences. That all said, based on what I've seen of it, Microsoft is set to give the Flash platfom a well-deserved pounding, and I think there's a good chance that when the smoke clears Redmond will be the king of this particular hill.
Why? The analogy is why I started my career with Dreamweaver, watched its development stall, and am slowly but surely replacing all of my workflow with Visual Studio 2005/VS.NET 2008 beta. If you're trying to code anything, VS.NET just flat-out kills Dreamweaver. It kills it because it is better in most every tangible and intangible way. I hate to sound like the fanboi but VS.NET 2008 may be the best-designed and best-implemented tool I have ever seen. When you get past the point of trivial scripting and pre-baked behaviors, it is really, really nice to have an IDE that anticpates and understands the intent of what you are trying to do with your programming.
At this point the .NET framework is mature and the alpha version (post v1) version of Silverlight will incorporate a subset of .NET. For those out you not invested in it, the ".NET framework" is a collection of about nine bazillion classes and associated methods(functions) that Microsoft has already done the work of making. Once you learn how to plug into that API, you can effectively "outsource" much of the boring parts of your job to some poor schmo in Redmond. And if you want to build custom classes atop that that extend the functionality to the specific business problem/web problem you're trying to solve, you can do that, too. Your custom classes and custom controls become a "first-class" part of the VS.NET IDE, showing up in intellisense, prompting you with documentation, and so on. This is so powerful.
-KF
For me the study of design patterns could be named, "abstracting your programming: better and smarter" or "useful ways to think about programming" or "OO is not overrated: the right way to use the object oriented paradigm." The benefits of patterns are indirect but real: thinking about the patterns helps you think about your own work in different ways.
The best patterns book I've found is the Design Patterns Explained by Shalloway and Trott. The second best book about patterns allegedly isn't about patterns but I think maybe it is: McConnell's magnificent Code Complete. Yet another great patterns-book-that-isn't-about-patterns-but sorta is is Beginning C# Objects: From Concepts to Code. I'd pick up any of these books before I picked up GoF again, but that may reflect where I'm at: maybe GoF requires l337 h4Axors ski11z to fully appreciate. I dunno: the discussion of the Bridge pattern in c4 or c5 of Design Patterns Explained seems as deep as anything to come out of the Gang of Four.
My humble opinion is that design patterns that come out of OO and programming are fundamentally different than what designers (I am one) are trying to call "design patterns" these days. Web site design does express "patterns" but those patterns are fundamentally different than what is meant by "design patterns" in the land of programming. Methinks there is some confusion about what is meant in each case by "design" and "pattern," as well as a desire to pick up the buzzword de jour. Not convincing. -KF
So here's a personal anecdote: Microsoft, Inc. held a free training session/love-in for devs and wannabee devs at a vacated movie theater in Bellevue, WA. It was ~2003 and I was one of the wannbee-devs-in training in the audience. Bellevue is maybe five miles from the "promised land" of Microsoft's RedWest campus and One Microsoft Way and MSFT managers were supervising the proceedings. I recall some discussion of extending Office 2003, some interesting demos of Visual Studio, and a lovely parting gift of an Intel webcam, which I still have. (thanks, guys!)
An older grizzled bearded guy stands up during one of the Q&A's, his voice tinged with injury: "...but what plans do you have for FoxPro?! Some of us spent a lot of time building these skills." Answer from a Microsoft PM presenting in front of his colleagues and managers: ~"I don't think there are specific plans, and it's very unclear whether that product will be developed further." Followup: "[insert whining here]". Answer to the followup: ~"I've tried to give you a pretty honest answer about where VFP is going, and my suggestion would be to look at growing your skills with .NET if you're interested in developing for MSFT platforms."
I'm not sure how much clearer it gets than that. The writing has been on the wall for VFP for years and years now, and you would have to be borderline negligent as a dev not to realize that. A benefit of playing with proprietary frameworks is that the corporations that own them tend to be pretty up-front about their future. Around 2002 I was learning faux-OO VBScript/ASP (lol), but I quickly recognized that path was a dead end. Developers cannot afford to fall asleep at the switch. Anyone who was surprised by the death of ASP or FoxPro wasn't at all serious to begin with.
PDC is not Microsoft's preeminent developer conference. Tech Ed 200X is. My understanding is that TE is Microsoft's biggest developer conference, and it's running next week, June 4-8 (or 3-8 if you registered for the pre-conference sessions.) Picture 10,0000+ geeks trying hard to make dinner conversation, cavernous convention halls, and (literally) dawn-to-dusk classes and sessions for six days. Quite an experience.
Conferences get cancelled all the time for all kinds of reasons: I was scheduled to go to Lynda.com's DX3 in Boston, and it got nixed a few weeks out, probably because of competition from FlashForward, MIX, and TechEd. Conferences can get nuked for any of a number of reasons: attendence, competing events, a sense of quiet. I'd rather they schedule developer conferences for when they're warranted, rather than trying to hype up whatever's finished according to a timetable.
In this case, we're in something of a quiet period: SQL Server 2005 and VS.NET 2005 have been released, ASP.NET 2.0 has been out for awhile, and everyone's waiting for the next big shoes to fall: the growth (or failure) of Silverlight, an ORM-ish technology called LINQ, and the next version of VS.NET, which will fold a lot of web dev/expression stuff into VS.NET. My guess is that "Orcas" will be an extremely significant release for MSFT, in that it will finally turn a wo rld class programming/DB interaction environment into a tool that advanced designers and Dreamweaver users will want to use.
All of that's a bit off, and so for now, a quiet conference schedule may represent some honesty from Redmond. Personally, among Microsft technologies, I'm currently most excited about some of the third-party stuff coming out. Check out the controls offered by Telerik, or even more gee-whiz cool, the just-released EntitySpaces 2007 ORM framework. Awesome tools. I think Mike & Co. just released this to production yesterday.
BTW, I will be at Tech Ed if anyone wants to meet over junk food and ice cream. As I have a bit of a background programming Actionscript, I'm interested particularly in seeing what Expression/Silverlight can do.
The University of Washington's news and information office put together a release that includes an embedded video and a PDF of the research paper: http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articl eID=28494
The inline video, made by the researchers, is well-crafted and rather entertaining.
Disclosure: I work on behalf of the UW and the technical side of its news operations.
Where does this chestnutty anecdote appear in Katz's works? I want details. It's demonstrable horseshit. When did K buy the "PC"? From who? Dell? When?
In terms of speed: one thing I'm really liking is how Vista's built-in security features alert you reliably to any funkiness that a webpage or an install program or anything else might try to do to your system. If something wants to write to \\Program Files, you'll know about it. If it tries to modify any settings, you know. If an installer is trying to dump something in your startup folders, you're given a chance to authorize or deny the behavior before the change is made.
In Beta 1, the implementation of this was a complete pain in the ass. In RC2, it's like, "ah, thanks, I really appreciate knowing about that." Knowing what's being done to your system should eliminate the problem of "startup bloat" that afflicts XP: Real and Apple and everyone else would run the equivalent of TSRs on your machine, and eventually things got clogged up.
I didn't even partition my drive: my installs of XP are gone. I've been on Vista full-time for weeks now, and so far no badness.
-KF
I installed Beta 1, didn't like it, installed RC2, and think it's pretty awesome. Faster than XP, rock-solid stable, doesn't break any of the hardware on either of the primary systems I've installed it on (A Dell Inspiron E1505 and a Dell XPSII). Aero looks and feels great even on the crappy integrated graphics that are a part of my E1405.
I thought Vista RC2 was so great I installed it on my primary production workstation, and have been happily using it for a few weeks now with no issues.
Vista's "Sync Manager" is a killer implementation if you have a need to periodically take your work elsewhere. It just works.
The lesson here: "your mileage may vary" when dealing with beta installations. Vista takes ~2 hours to install, and that's a valid complaint, but no babysitting is required. Aside from that, I have nothing but positive experiences to report with the OS. Microsoft has done a pretty good job with this.
-KF
Come on, that's the best you can do?
I'm thinking "male nurse." ;)
Well, that's just weak: modding my parent post down in the first five minutes it's up as "overrated." Guess you didn't like whatever truths I offered in my own experience of Vista.
-KF
I'm told that the original symbolic object for the wedding ceremony was in fact a coin.
Instead of a ring, my boss gave his wife $2000 in shares of the inaugural issue of the Fidelity Magellen Fund. 20+ years later, I do think she's a bit happier with this gift.
Instead of a diamond, I gave my wife a $300 filigreed ring, silver. More beautiful than most any diamond. For me, I got a $120 silver ring. I love it, and I love the idea that if I lose it I can swap it out for something else identically symbolic.
In just a few years, my wife will be done with her surgical training and I expect she will bring home the bank. We will not buy anything so trivial as diamonds. Maybe a nice car, a new laptop, or a donation for children's literacy.
Think different. Buying diamonds is taking your place as a tool of clever marketing. Aren't there better things to do with your money? -KF
I installed Vista Beta 1 on a Dell XPS II laptop, shortly after I saw it demoed at Tech Ed 2006 in Boston. Beta 1 was intesting, buat on my laptop was slow. The showstopper for Beta 1 and the utility of my tricked out laptop was that headphones didn't work, which sucked. Laptop went in closet.
Around Oct. 10 MSFT released Vista RC2, and I pulled laptop out of closet for the install.
Folks, as far as I'm concerned, Vista is +done+. It runs faster and better than XP. It is miles ahead of the first beta, which I guess shouldn't be too surprising. The search is great, the compatibility is great, my headphones work, my Canon EOS Rebel XTi is recognized, Visual Studio and Flash 8 and DW and Photoshop CS2 and all my other apps work without fail. The multi-monitor Remote Desktop feature (mstsc /span) is extremely nice. No lockups or slowdowns. Unreal Tournament (the original, anod best, from 1999) and Morrowind: Oblivion run smoothly. Vista's graphic design is "pretty."
After installing Vista RC2 on my XPSII for a few days, I was sold and upgraded my primary work laptop. I've been running with no troubles for a few weeks now. Shortly I'll upgrade my primary static workstations in two places I commonly do office-ey things.
The article questions what Vista will cost. Personally, I'll pay Microsoft their money. It's a great upgrade that solves a lot of problems.
BTW, if threre's anyone in the Costa Mesa/Newport Beach/Huntington beach area with a external USB DVD, I'd appreciate it if I could drop by and borrow it for two hours. I have a Fujitsu 5020 TabletPC that I'd like to upgrade to RC2 prior to an adventure in Ireland starting Dec 2. I have the Vista disk -- I'im on MSDN -- but I'm travelling without an external DVD device. Anyone?
I don't even know where to begin with the suckage:
1) nested tables didn't work
2) css didn't work
3) netscape, inc. tried repeatedly to make proprietary flavors of markup
4) you had all of these bizarre spacing artifacts
5) Netscape was bloated, and you could watch the app leak memory
6) It was slow
7) It set Ajax-like functionality back literally years. Microsoft had demo code of Ajax-ey stuff for production releases of IE in, what, 1999?
8) Netscape got slower and suckier with each successive release, rather than better
9) In the late days Netscape, Inc. couldn't ship on time to within a ~years time.
Since Netscape stopped being a player -- thank God -- you've seen the emergence of much more agile development efforts (Safari, Flock, extensions) and the resurgence of technologies that were invented, oh, last century or so.
Netscape was a poor competitor with a poor product that drove itself into the ground. Microsoft put out a modestly competant browser with IE5,6,7, made few substantive improvements over the course of years, and was still able to eat Netscape's lunch because of the galactic suckiness of what Netscape was coding and releases.
Revere Flock, revere Flickr, revere Microsoft's better developer stuff, revere Apple. But please don't revere Netscape, because for most of its corporate life, their core product sucked. I'm glad they're gone.
-KF
Part of the MSDN support contract is unlimited newsgroup support in addition to formal support incidents. Meaning, that you can post to USENET, and Microsoft guarantees that someone will answer your question in (I think) 24 hours. Microsoft hires engineers and other folks to patrol for questions from MSDN subscribers, and the answers that they tend to give you are exceptional. I've received code samples, compiled projects, analyses of logs, and many other kinds of help from the support folks. This assistance helps me to plan project timeframes a lot more accurately: you don't get "stuck."
Even purely as an educational and training thing, MSDN is worth the money, and I'll buy it as long as I'm in my current line of work.
Another atypical form of support that's extremely valuable is MSFT's relentless stream of conferences and training events, especially Tech Ed. Tech ed is insane: 5+ days of dawn-to-dusk training, and they end up putting the entirity of the conference on streamable audio/video DVDs. One of the Microsofties from the 2006 event in Boston told me that they flew close to a thousand employees out to Tech Ed to staff the booths, train, present, etc. Even at $1600/head for registration, they cannot be making money off of this sort of monster event. But that's not the point. Microsoft is able to train a lot of people quickly, and show attendees a bunch of stuff that might be useful to their problem spaces. Developers of modest talents get free reign to pick the brains of developers of exceptional talents, and a little of that rubs off. And that's how Microsoft wins.
Microsoft targets the needs of brilliant developers and it targets the needs of really mediocre developers and puts enough training out there in enough different forms that everyone is served. It has been a successful strategy, and IMHO deserves respect. Everyone wins.
It serves some people's purposes to suggest that MS killed OS/2, but I think it's safer to say that OS/2's shortcomings helped OS/2 kill itself. OS/2 preemptively multitasked stuff more than a decade before Apple managed to do the same with OSX, and it did some other nifty tricks. But in terms of providing an computing environment that was significantly more useful or usable than mid-90s Windows for most people's needs, OS/2 was a failure.
OS/2 was big and bloated. It didn't ship with many useful apps, or take advantage of the superior architecture of the OS. It crashed. In the end, I switched back to windows, not because I needed X app or Y compatibility, but because there was simply no compelling reason to use an operating system that was more complicated, less compatible, and no more stable than Win9X.
As a personal thing it was a useful experience. It taught me to keep emotions out of the evaluation of a system's merits. In the immortal words of Alice and Bill, the operative consideration should always be "gimmee gimmee gimmeee."
If the tool will "gimmee" enough, I could care less whether it was created by Apple or Microsoft or Walmart. Merit trumps all.
We never were asked to show our badge; it stayed in my wallet. Nobody ever seemed to mind.
In 1998 Microsoft hired me right out of college and green as all hell to edit and write Encarta reference products. I stuck with it for a year and a half, crafting masterpieces such as "Iceberg", "Independent Counsel Act", and a few million other articles that began with the letter "i".
I remember whining with all of the rest of the dash trash about my so-cruel and unequal fate.
With the benefit of hindsight I realize that that Microsoft treated us more than fairly. The company arranged parties and outings for us that were pretty fun. Our supervisors treated us with great respect. We ate with the blue badges. The coffee and drinks were free. We got overtime where warranted. We were allowed to work autonomously, maybe too autonomously.
I think many orange badges people are upset because they're unwilling to face a more uncomfortable truth. Dash trash are not unequally treated so much as being employees of unequal pay and status. These inequalities are a function of temp employees' inferior experience and skill. Looking back at my own experience, I wasn't ready for Microsoft in 1998, and there's no way in hell I would have been hired full time given MSFT's other potential hires.
But as a temp I was offered an opportunity to get a glimpse inside the cathedral and to gain a lot of worthwhile experience. Being able to say I "worked at Microsoft", even as a contractor, has proven to be enormously valuable in my career. I've used that aura to create a developer/design/architecture position for myself that is more satisfying and far more lucrative than I would have managed continuing with pure editorial stuff for the 'soft.
Brothers and Sisters of the High Order of Dash Trash, I feel your pain. But take responsibility for your learning, your self-improvement, and your career. If Microsoft isn't pulling you on full-time, it isn't because the most successful corporation in the history of the world is lacking for payroll. There's something that's missing in you, and maybe you need a bit of work yourself before you're ready for the big leagues. There's lots of opportunity out there, and maybe just maybe you should forgo the sucky commute across 520 for something else.