so perhaps the original should have said "get out of way of teachers" instead of fixing. In either case, education in it's current state is in sad shape.
mod the parent up. Just because clueless reporter joe blow isn't aware of how exploits are being used by hackers, does not constitute "not being exploited." That's like saying, "we couldn't find the murder, therefore there was no death." Some one needs to clean house and kick out all the lazy stupid reporters who can't tell their ass from a flag pole. I wonder if the reporter would say the same thing about seat belts and air bags. "Gee, most cars never deploy the air bag and thousands of people are thrown clear of the car in an accident and lived." Therefore we shouldn't require seat belts on cars and driver side airbags.
big business has never considered the law important. At best, it's an annoyance they have to get around with sneaky tricks.
every body grow up. Don't like what the university is doing, then go to another school. The universities will eventually get the picture and change their tune.
what if someone steals the device? The system could add a password, but if someone steals the watch and the laptop makes no difference. Sounds like it just saves lazy people from typing in their login.
sounds great, anyone hate saving money?
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 1
I recently dumped my domestic chevy for a honda and boy am I glad. My parents love domestic cars and have purchased chevy, buicks and cadillacs. I can't remember any of them going for more than 1 year without needing some minor repair and no more than 2-3 yrs for moderate repair. I consider repairs over 200.00 moderate. Oil changes don't count, but gaskets, seals, carbs and other repairs over 200. I used to spend on average 30.00 a week on gas. Now I spend 12.00 a week on gas. That adds up over a month very quickly. 239mpg sounds like a great idea and would save me quite a bit. Now if only SUV's could get 50mpg that would go a long way.
and where did you get this info about MS investing in symbian?
Here's a clue, it wasn't always called Symbian. It's had my failures in terms of getting something usable that consumer products would use. MS has been trying to get their embedded OS into consumer products for a long time. I'm too lazy to do the research for you, but here is an example. Before consumer devices had megs of memory, several phone manufacturers and other embedded devices tried to use MS embedded OS. Guess what, it didn't work correctly. Why do you think phone manufacturers use custom embedded OS for cheap phones? How can you get a phone under 35.00, but be absolutely reliable? Having a generalized OS with tons of API isn't the right approach. Using a small OS with tightly controlled device specific API is the safest approach. Do some research and you'll see the history of cell phones and embedded OS and RTOS battle goes back to 97 and earlier.
I'll second that sentiment. Firefly is junk. The writing isn't good in my book. Atleast it's not like West Wing or even close. The plots are well rehashed western cast in space. Someone could say the same about John Doe, and compare it to the pretender, but I find John Doe better written. The Hero is flawed and damaged, but he tries for the sake of trying. FOX is a bit confused these days, but I hope they keep John Doe around and let it grow and develop.
I had an embedded engineer tell me this, which I think applies very well.
with a consumer device, it can't crash ever. if you do, it's dead and no retailer will sell the phone.
This about that for a second. Would you buy a toaster or microwave that crashes? Like it or not, phones are consumer devices. People expect a cell phone to operate as reliably as a normal land line phone. That means if it's dropped by child or thrown across room, it has to still work.
How many people here think symbian will be 100% reliable, short of someone throwing it into the fireplace? Just because they licensed it, doesn't it will be used. Just means they have the option of using it.
Well, the accuracy varies. In the best case scenario, it get down to a couple meters as in 10' or so. In worse case, it can be off by a couple kilometers (a mile or so). Using a combination of cell and gps determination, a couple different companies have managed to get location determination down to a couple meters most of the time. What most of the time means is a gray definition coined by some marketing dork. What it means in numbers. I've seen numbers as high as 80% of the time it will return with a couple meters and as low as 30%. When embedded software start to use reflected GPS signals to improve accuracy, you're going to see accuracy down to feet. The software already exists and the method for doing so is well known in the GPS field.
Having worked at a company that made high end cell phones, I disagree. I see this actually the other way around. SymbianOS 6 is way more powerful than PalmOS 4 (and very likely also 5) and this gap will widen even more with SymbianOS 7 [symbian.com]
Phone manufacturers have not been shy about voicing their hatred and disdane for MS. Symbian by the way is a recycled piece of junk. I won't bother rehashing the ugly history of symbian, but the thing has been in development for 6+ years. Do a search in google for symbian to find out how many horrible failures it's had. The only reason it is still alive is MS keeps dumping money into the product.
I've spoken to embedded phone engineers that work at qualcomm and others in the cell industry. Nokia, Ericcson, Sony, LG and motorola hate MS. It's just that simple. Plus symbian takes an order of magnitude more memory to run than other embedded systems. There's a good reason a lot of phones have a simple OS and don't have a full blow RTOS, memory and cost. When you sell phones for 30.00, you can't afford to spend 2.00 on the OS and 10.00 on 16megs of ram. Here is an excerpt from symbian's page
limited memory: mobile phones and handheld computers have a very limited amount of memory, with memory for running programs often in the region of a few megabytes and memory for storing files usually a few tens of megabytes. The challenge for the developer is to make their software usable despite these restrictions, and this requires a combination of skillful programming and careful design. Restricted memory also poses challenges in the design of the operating system itself
Notice they mention megs and not kilobytes. With the competative phone market every kb of memory counts towards the profit margin.
Therefore, you can't fix software development without fixing business process. If the business process is crazy and requirements fluctuate constantly, no language or devleopment technique is going to fix it. From personal experience, software tends to have a higher quality if the communication is open and honest. The projects that fail miserably are ones where business requirements change daily because the business guys haven't got a clue. Rather than trust the engineers to help and assist in solving the problem of "what do we build", it degenerates into "change this, change that."
The best way to ensure the project you work on is successful is to pay attention to the business side and learn how to work with business people effectively. Without that, it doesn't matter if you use XP, OOP or whatever you choose.
Nothing to see here people. Just stupid ego getting in the way of progress. Not unique to open source or even software development. Just look at all the other non-profit orgs that have pissing matching.
After looking all the posts lately about windows problems, including my own. I wonder if Microsoft has done a study on how much money they save by having people tech support problems for their friends and family for free. If microsoft had to support all the problems that are now being solved by geeks for free, I would guess their support costs would be an order of magnitude higher.
I also wonder if the reduction of support calls and increase in profit is simply the result of more people having years of experience with windows. I'm not saying windows hasn't improved, but since windows accounts for a higher percentage of desktop systems than 1988, more people are familair with it. One would expect the percentage of calls to stay roughly the same as time goes on. But on the otherhand, it could simply be attributed to manufacturers improving the installation/manufacturing process. Early on, manufacturers were still figuring out a reliable way to build systems, but as time went on they got better at it. So in many ways, the percieved improvement of windows may not be the results of Microsoft engineers and is most likely the result of programmers getting better at writing software drivers for windows. then again these are all guesses without any proof.
Once again, Borland Delphi provides the most elegant solution, which in this case is a fine blend of the two ideas.
Then why didn't the designer of C# do the same thing? Considering he was involved in designing Delphi? I was seriously hoping Microsoft had change it's ways in terms of programming practices and code samples. But I was stupidly optimistic, and should have known better. It's just another half-ass job. The only way I would consider C# for my primary development language is strong push for better programming practices, thorough documentation and better software design. Yeah right. That will never happen.
A database connection & query takes around 4 lines of code. I was able to master in-code LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, aka Active Directory on Windoze boxes) queries in less than one day, having never touched an LDAP server in my life prior to that.
Do we really want more unmaintainable code? Sure 4 lines of code speeds up proof of concepts, but in production code should be abstracted and well documented. What happened to.NET revolutionizing development and moving to n tier architecture. If you're sticking 4 lines of code into an ASPX page like the way people used to do ASP with vb, then it's not strictly n tier. It doesn't abstract business logic out into it's own tier. I fail to see how anyone can "master" LDAP in one day. There's a lot more LDAP protocol and specification than simply making a connection and getting data.
I've worked with C# a little and lately I'm more disappointed than anything. The language itself is solid and borrows good ideas from other languages, but the examples Microsoft distributes with the SDK have examples like this.
// Return the count this word
public int count { get { return count; } }
The question I keep asking is why is MS encouraging obfuscating coding practices? The only benefit I can see from coding this way is to lower the line count. Given that programmers are lazy and there's always bugs, why won't microsoft encourage good coding practices. The same method written in more lines with better comments would go a long way towards making code easier to maintain.
// Return the count of the word pass in the constructor or method X.
public int getCount() {
return count;
}
I say this because a lot of the work I've done in the past was fixing bad/broken code. More often than not, it was ugly VB, JScript or Perl code that had bad formatting and had no comments. A a provider of technology to small and large business, MS should take the lead in encouraging programmers to write clean, well documented code. There's already enough spaghetti code in the world, we don't need more of it. My biased 2 cents.
Wish I had mod points. I hate to see stuff like the parent post at +5, which is just so much FUD
I don't know the moderator and didn't ask to get modded up. I wish it was fud. Next time I loose 4 hours of sleep during the week day and have to wake up at 5am to go to work, I'll be sure to call you up. Better yet, you can come fix my damn windows box. I have one other friend who has the same problems, but since he switched to linux those problems have disappeared. Just because your system doesn't commit suicide, it doesn't others don't. I know plenty of windows admins who go through this kind of re-install nightmare. So unless you have solid proof all of us who have to re-install are smoking crack, I'd say you're full of it.
1. It's easier than cleaning up all the junk you've accumulated on your machine.
2. It's a knee-jerk reaction to any problem, just like defragging your hard drive (which I also never do; it makes no perceptible difference).
Actually it's because the machine locks up and crashes. As in, it will go BSOD. I'm a bit of a nut and install/uninstall lots of servers, apps and other stuff. The last time I had to reinstall win2K, the system would lock up after running for 5 hours. I've had a variety of prebuilt and self built systems. Prebuilt include small shop custom deal and gateway. I also tend to have at minimum 3HD in my systems. I've managed to kills either the powersource fan or CPU in fan in five systems. My workstation which used to have 2 P3 450 cpu, 3 HD, and DVD has had 3 CPU fan replacement. The Powersource was replaced once with a 450watt dual fan power source.
I must just have bad luck, but I tend to buy high end components like high end tyan and asus motherboards.
I can't be the only person who feels this way about re-installing. Someone else must also go through this BS, please someone else suffer with me:) Otherwise I'll have to shoot myself or stage a protest burning a huge pile of windows XP.
In all fairness to the switch ads
on
Ellen Feiss Interview
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Lately I've been considering switching, but not really because of the ads. More than anything it's the assinine licensing of XP. I recently went through two months of BS dealing with microsoft and their jacked up licensing bs. I'm a heavy computer user and re-install windows at minimum twice a year. This is a format c: drive and completely reinstall clean. Now if I only had 1 computer that would be ok, but I have several as in 5 computers. That means at minimum I re-install windows clean 7 times a year.
Sure win2K and XP are more stable, but after tons of install/uninstalls of apps and programs the thing starts to seriously slow down and munge itself. Since 95 I've had windows corrupt it's own dll's atleast 2x a year on all the systems. This isn't even counting production boxes at work that have mysteriously killed IIS dll's.
The thought of having to tech support my Son's computer is beginning to make me throw up. He already has a skill for crashing win2K and XP by pressing down on a half dozen keys for a minute. Toddlers and young children don't know that microsoft didn't design the keyboard as a ladder or piano. All they know is when I push down on all the keys with my palm, the box makes lots of funny noises. I've seen young children bang on mac keyboards without causing it to lock up hard. Sure the ads are stupid, but many people consider themselves computer challenged. If buying a mac means I don't have to re-install windows on my Son's box 5x times a year, I'm there. I rather not waste 4 hours per install, when I could be doing other things more fun.
that this got posted the same day "create a new life" stirred up tons of flames? From all the flames posted on/. today on both sides of the argument, one might think humans really don't have a clue about anything.
And we are better because we have atomic bombs. Oh give me a break. Research is important and understanding is important, but lets be more cautious. I doubt we are really ready to go down that road. Prove to me the quality of life has measurably improved in all aspects across the entire planet and I'll buy that argument. Saying the invention of internal combution engine saves lives, makes it easier to transport food and so on, but we're simply trading one set of problems for another. In the end, non of these things address the real issue of making life measurably better for everyone. I would think their time would be better spent visiting elementary and high schools inspiring kids to enter research or medicine. Helping to create future scientists that will solve cancer and other problems. My original post wasn't a troll, just because moderators don't agree. There heck of a lot more to life than "people are freaking out". Knowledge != wisdom. Can != should.
In a bizzare accident, two famous scientists attempting to create "new" life died today in their homes. The cause is unknown at this point, but the CDC/FBI/CIA have quaranteed the research lab, their houses, the coworkers, their family and dozens of other people.
Do we really need to go down that road? Does an advanced degree in biology give a person the right to do something so dangerous? Haven't we learned that somethings are better off left alone and that we should appreciate each moment we live? Does this seem incredibly foolish to anyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
so perhaps the original should have said "get out of way of teachers" instead of fixing. In either case, education in it's current state is in sad shape.
every body grow up. Don't like what the university is doing, then go to another school. The universities will eventually get the picture and change their tune.
what if someone steals the device? The system could add a password, but if someone steals the watch and the laptop makes no difference. Sounds like it just saves lazy people from typing in their login.
I recently dumped my domestic chevy for a honda and boy am I glad. My parents love domestic cars and have purchased chevy, buicks and cadillacs. I can't remember any of them going for more than 1 year without needing some minor repair and no more than 2-3 yrs for moderate repair. I consider repairs over 200.00 moderate. Oil changes don't count, but gaskets, seals, carbs and other repairs over 200. I used to spend on average 30.00 a week on gas. Now I spend 12.00 a week on gas. That adds up over a month very quickly. 239mpg sounds like a great idea and would save me quite a bit. Now if only SUV's could get 50mpg that would go a long way.
Here's a clue, it wasn't always called Symbian. It's had my failures in terms of getting something usable that consumer products would use. MS has been trying to get their embedded OS into consumer products for a long time. I'm too lazy to do the research for you, but here is an example. Before consumer devices had megs of memory, several phone manufacturers and other embedded devices tried to use MS embedded OS. Guess what, it didn't work correctly. Why do you think phone manufacturers use custom embedded OS for cheap phones? How can you get a phone under 35.00, but be absolutely reliable? Having a generalized OS with tons of API isn't the right approach. Using a small OS with tightly controlled device specific API is the safest approach. Do some research and you'll see the history of cell phones and embedded OS and RTOS battle goes back to 97 and earlier.
I'll second that sentiment. Firefly is junk. The writing isn't good in my book. Atleast it's not like West Wing or even close. The plots are well rehashed western cast in space. Someone could say the same about John Doe, and compare it to the pretender, but I find John Doe better written. The Hero is flawed and damaged, but he tries for the sake of trying. FOX is a bit confused these days, but I hope they keep John Doe around and let it grow and develop.
with a consumer device, it can't crash ever. if you do, it's dead and no retailer will sell the phone.
This about that for a second. Would you buy a toaster or microwave that crashes? Like it or not, phones are consumer devices. People expect a cell phone to operate as reliably as a normal land line phone. That means if it's dropped by child or thrown across room, it has to still work.
How many people here think symbian will be 100% reliable, short of someone throwing it into the fireplace? Just because they licensed it, doesn't it will be used. Just means they have the option of using it.
Well, the accuracy varies. In the best case scenario, it get down to a couple meters as in 10' or so. In worse case, it can be off by a couple kilometers (a mile or so). Using a combination of cell and gps determination, a couple different companies have managed to get location determination down to a couple meters most of the time. What most of the time means is a gray definition coined by some marketing dork. What it means in numbers. I've seen numbers as high as 80% of the time it will return with a couple meters and as low as 30%. When embedded software start to use reflected GPS signals to improve accuracy, you're going to see accuracy down to feet. The software already exists and the method for doing so is well known in the GPS field.
I see this actually the other way around. SymbianOS 6 is way more powerful than PalmOS 4 (and very likely also 5) and this gap will widen even more with SymbianOS 7 [symbian.com]
Phone manufacturers have not been shy about voicing their hatred and disdane for MS. Symbian by the way is a recycled piece of junk. I won't bother rehashing the ugly history of symbian, but the thing has been in development for 6+ years. Do a search in google for symbian to find out how many horrible failures it's had. The only reason it is still alive is MS keeps dumping money into the product.
I've spoken to embedded phone engineers that work at qualcomm and others in the cell industry. Nokia, Ericcson, Sony, LG and motorola hate MS. It's just that simple. Plus symbian takes an order of magnitude more memory to run than other embedded systems. There's a good reason a lot of phones have a simple OS and don't have a full blow RTOS, memory and cost. When you sell phones for 30.00, you can't afford to spend 2.00 on the OS and 10.00 on 16megs of ram. Here is an excerpt from symbian's page
limited memory: mobile phones and handheld computers have a very limited amount of memory, with memory for running programs often in the region of a few megabytes and memory for storing files usually a few tens of megabytes. The challenge for the developer is to make their software usable despite these restrictions, and this requires a combination of skillful programming and careful design. Restricted memory also poses challenges in the design of the operating system itself
Notice they mention megs and not kilobytes. With the competative phone market every kb of memory counts towards the profit margin.
The best way to ensure the project you work on is successful is to pay attention to the business side and learn how to work with business people effectively. Without that, it doesn't matter if you use XP, OOP or whatever you choose.
Nothing to see here people. Just stupid ego getting in the way of progress. Not unique to open source or even software development. Just look at all the other non-profit orgs that have pissing matching.
I also wonder if the reduction of support calls and increase in profit is simply the result of more people having years of experience with windows. I'm not saying windows hasn't improved, but since windows accounts for a higher percentage of desktop systems than 1988, more people are familair with it. One would expect the percentage of calls to stay roughly the same as time goes on. But on the otherhand, it could simply be attributed to manufacturers improving the installation/manufacturing process. Early on, manufacturers were still figuring out a reliable way to build systems, but as time went on they got better at it. So in many ways, the percieved improvement of windows may not be the results of Microsoft engineers and is most likely the result of programmers getting better at writing software drivers for windows. then again these are all guesses without any proof.
Then why didn't the designer of C# do the same thing? Considering he was involved in designing Delphi? I was seriously hoping Microsoft had change it's ways in terms of programming practices and code samples. But I was stupidly optimistic, and should have known better. It's just another half-ass job. The only way I would consider C# for my primary development language is strong push for better programming practices, thorough documentation and better software design. Yeah right. That will never happen.
but what if the computer won't boot, or won't run IE :)
Do we really want more unmaintainable code? Sure 4 lines of code speeds up proof of concepts, but in production code should be abstracted and well documented. What happened to .NET revolutionizing development and moving to n tier architecture. If you're sticking 4 lines of code into an ASPX page like the way people used to do ASP with vb, then it's not strictly n tier. It doesn't abstract business logic out into it's own tier. I fail to see how anyone can "master" LDAP in one day. There's a lot more LDAP protocol and specification than simply making a connection and getting data.
I've worked with C# a little and lately I'm more disappointed than anything. The language itself is solid and borrows good ideas from other languages, but the examples Microsoft distributes with the SDK have examples like this.
public int count { get { return count; } }
The question I keep asking is why is MS encouraging obfuscating coding practices? The only benefit I can see from coding this way is to lower the line count. Given that programmers are lazy and there's always bugs, why won't microsoft encourage good coding practices. The same method written in more lines with better comments would go a long way towards making code easier to maintain.
public int getCount() {
-
return count;
}I say this because a lot of the work I've done in the past was fixing bad/broken code. More often than not, it was ugly VB, JScript or Perl code that had bad formatting and had no comments. A a provider of technology to small and large business, MS should take the lead in encouraging programmers to write clean, well documented code. There's already enough spaghetti code in the world, we don't need more of it. My biased 2 cents.
I don't know the moderator and didn't ask to get modded up. I wish it was fud. Next time I loose 4 hours of sleep during the week day and have to wake up at 5am to go to work, I'll be sure to call you up. Better yet, you can come fix my damn windows box. I have one other friend who has the same problems, but since he switched to linux those problems have disappeared. Just because your system doesn't commit suicide, it doesn't others don't. I know plenty of windows admins who go through this kind of re-install nightmare. So unless you have solid proof all of us who have to re-install are smoking crack, I'd say you're full of it.
I must just have bad luck, but I tend to buy high end components like high end tyan and asus motherboards.
Yeah, I was thinking when he's old enough to tech support his own system. Until then I think he'll get a mac.
I can't be the only person who feels this way about re-installing. Someone else must also go through this BS, please someone else suffer with me :) Otherwise I'll have to shoot myself or stage a protest burning a huge pile of windows XP.
Sure win2K and XP are more stable, but after tons of install/uninstalls of apps and programs the thing starts to seriously slow down and munge itself. Since 95 I've had windows corrupt it's own dll's atleast 2x a year on all the systems. This isn't even counting production boxes at work that have mysteriously killed IIS dll's.
The thought of having to tech support my Son's computer is beginning to make me throw up. He already has a skill for crashing win2K and XP by pressing down on a half dozen keys for a minute. Toddlers and young children don't know that microsoft didn't design the keyboard as a ladder or piano. All they know is when I push down on all the keys with my palm, the box makes lots of funny noises. I've seen young children bang on mac keyboards without causing it to lock up hard. Sure the ads are stupid, but many people consider themselves computer challenged. If buying a mac means I don't have to re-install windows on my Son's box 5x times a year, I'm there. I rather not waste 4 hours per install, when I could be doing other things more fun.
that this got posted the same day "create a new life" stirred up tons of flames? From all the flames posted on /. today on both sides of the argument, one might think humans really don't have a clue about anything.
if one person says they use pine it will be 4. man that's a lot of people.
And we are better because we have atomic bombs. Oh give me a break. Research is important and understanding is important, but lets be more cautious. I doubt we are really ready to go down that road. Prove to me the quality of life has measurably improved in all aspects across the entire planet and I'll buy that argument. Saying the invention of internal combution engine saves lives, makes it easier to transport food and so on, but we're simply trading one set of problems for another. In the end, non of these things address the real issue of making life measurably better for everyone. I would think their time would be better spent visiting elementary and high schools inspiring kids to enter research or medicine. Helping to create future scientists that will solve cancer and other problems. My original post wasn't a troll, just because moderators don't agree. There heck of a lot more to life than "people are freaking out". Knowledge != wisdom. Can != should.
Do we really need to go down that road? Does an advanced degree in biology give a person the right to do something so dangerous? Haven't we learned that somethings are better off left alone and that we should appreciate each moment we live? Does this seem incredibly foolish to anyone else?