I hear what you are saying, and I don't think anyone would pass up the oportunity to have a cheaper digital receiver. But the problem is not *what* the government is mandating, it's that they *are* mandating it. The FCC has no business forcing consumers to use a technology that is not absolutely vital to the health of the economy. People vote with their dollars, and that's what drives the economy. Would you want Uncle Sam telling you what brand of car you can/can't drive?
You are right. My earlier statement was wrong in that, yes, Slashdot has *always* been biased... against Microsoft, against MPAA, against this and that. But let me try to expand on what I meant...
Ever since I started reading slashdot, almost every single article posted related to me in some way or another... hence "news for nerds, stuff that matters". Maybe I agreed with the article, maybe I disagreed with it, but it was still there for me to chew on. This is the beauty of/.'s comment section. We get to debate it in there.
But... as of lateley things have changed. Yes, the articles, for the most part, still concern me in one way or another. But now, instead of just posting them up there, and adding any additional information to the post, the editors feel so inclined to put their (usually) one-sided opinion right up on the main page, as opposed to being like everyone else and using the comments section. The problem is... when you do that, half of the comments are people "taking the flaimbait" and posting a retalliation for their distaste of your personal opinion.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with your opinion... I'm just saying I disagree with you putting it right up on the main page and making it part of the article submission, rather than putting your own personal comments in the comment section like everyone else. This would cut down on the amount of bs I have to sift through (yes, even retalliations to your comments get modded up some how) and read the stuff that really matters. Just my $0.09.
Yep, I agree. Every day I grow more and more tired of seeing/. editors use their mass audience as a chanel to spout their political views. Slant aside, they almost ALWAYS have something biased to say on every single article posted. I am reading less/. every day because of this. Sad.
I guess another way to look at it is: Are you in it for the money, or for the glory?
Those who only took up programming because they saw dollar-signs, and have no further interest in the art would, in my opinion, be the most likely to get bored/burntout/tired and jump ship to management.
I don't necessarily see this as a problem. I have had lots of problems in the past dealing with those types of programmers. Great people, but just have too much of a lack of interest in what they are doing, and therefore to a worse job than those who enjoy it. I say good riddance to them, and wish them well in management.
This frees up jobs for those of us who find this line of work interesting and actually, God forbid, enjoy our jobs. This increases our average salaries and decreases the amount of incompetence we have to deal with everyday (although some could argue that more management = more incompetence:)
Anyway... my point is: This realization, coupled with the dot-com bust is ultimately making things better for the average programmer (and by programmer I mean one who is in it for the programming, not necessarily the $$$).
I just love how this is always the last question from a zealot when he's been proven wrong. Allow me to answer, yet again
How, exactly, was said zealot proven wrong???
It doesn't exist. You need a real, business OS to run these tools.
It's called rdesktop, and it works beautifully for those of us that are forced to administer W2K machines, but don't want to be forced to run it on our desktop. Go back to redmond and sit in your cubicle for another year. Check back with us then, and we'll see if you have any more brilliant comments to post.
If a "Web Service" is a fad, then why would M$ be pushing.NET, which you say is not a fad?.NET is, supposedly, based upon the notion of web services.
Also, you say there are a lot of benefits by studying the CLR. Well, that would go for a lot of things out in the tech world, including the JVM itself. However, I wholeheartedly disagree with your statement about it being the "perfect" platform for teaching language design, abstract machine design, etc.
C# is no better at teaching "language design" than any other. Hell, it is almost identical to Java, so why not stick with Java? Point being, why should schools and universities spend thousands of dollars switchinting to the ".NET platform" when they already have one that works just fine.
By "abstract machine design", I hope you aren't referring to "platform independence", because you and I both know that isn't true with anything M$ to date.
Sen. Hollings says the reason broadband isn't as popular today as it should have been is because media giants are afraid to provide large quantities of digital content to the masses over it. Therefore, the public has no 'interest' in broadband. This is blatently wrong. Then he goes on to say the entertainment industry needs a "nudge" in the right direction... which is presumably to come up with a standard for thwarting piracy. Then, the best part, he says that, in order to increase public interest in broadband, the government needs to step in to regulate the digital media industry a little.
So my point, and question, is: Since when is it the government's job to promote public interest in a certain area, especially with regards to entertainment????
True, true. But perhaps that adspace was bought before they decided to change their "stance". I don't know. I sent a letter to google, and got the same response as the gunshop dude. Who knows.
I dunno, this may be off topic, but according to this link, Google does not accept any ads for companies that have websites or products in any way affilliated with firearms or knives.
This comes as a dissappointment for someone who regularly visits Geeks With Guns.
Say it ain't so...
"Last Friday, the company announced new funding and a restructuring that eliminated its services and consulting work and significantly pared down its product line."
Yeah, I'd say that announcement just said it all. "Eliminated its services and consulting work..." and "pared down its product line". What else does a company need to do to dissolve itself?
I wholeheartedly agree. Those parents are just trying to shift the focus of blame off of them, and onto something else, like media. It's a typical move. They portray the illusion that, somehow, society has failed them by not helping them raise their children. It's wrong, so very wrong.
There is nothing quite like the feeling of having 16-on-16 in a good CounterStrike game.
Interestingly enough, the technique they are using to "expand" their coverage area is remarkably similar to the distributed nature of peer-to-peer sharing networks, such as Gnutella.
I wonder how well it will scale. Will users' bandwidth drop as more and more customers in their area sign on, due to the heavy relaying of traffic?
Okay, I must admit I have lost all respect for GNOME/Ximian, now.
Miguel has this "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude, which usually goes along with being a follower, not a leader. Some friends I have, who are also MS people, always jokingly say, "Don't fight it... don't fight it! Let Uncle Bill take care of you!". I really hate that way of thinking.
Open source is about pure innovation, and problem solving, not porting others' work over to the free world (necessarily).
The other beef I have is with his comments regarding productivity. He says he has reached a point where he has "implemented too many linked lists", etc etc. My problem is, a good programmer knows how to reuse his/her code, and not reimplement ALL of it from scratch every damn time. You know why Microsoft's code is so bulky and unreliable? It's because they made their API's so attractive to lazy programmers who "don't want to deal with all that hard stuff" by doing it all for them. You write a "hello world" program in windows, and you'll be lucky if it isn't under 200Kb, because the routines and libraries that actually got compiled in are the same ones MS Office uses.
If we ignore the small and tedious details to programming, and base GNOME on the.NOT Framework, then it will be just as bulky and unreliable as windows programs.
Good software is not made by people who want to "get it done quickly and efficiently", it's made by people who want to spend the time to do it right, and "get it to run quickly and make it efficient". It's only one way or the other... we can drag 'n drop our way to building an application, but it sure as hell won't be as fast/reliable/efficient/good as a program written in a text editor, compiled by hand, checked and rechecked.
Something to think about... you know that cool cacheing feature that google has? That basically means they have the entire internet saved on their disk array.
Seriously though, I've been doing a lot of work and research in the area of neural nets, fuzzy logic, evolutionary algorithms, etc. etc. I wouldn't mind feeding 900,000 webpages into a neural net, and seeing how well it learns, or *what* it learns.
With processing power up at the level it is today, how much of a difference in these two chips' performances is really notable?
Even if the Athlon "XP" outperformed the intel (as I am told is often), it probably wouldn't be much, at least not enough worth talking about, and it sure wouldn't negate the fact that there have been several AMD "bugs" which notably inflict Linux users.
They are, however, much cheaper. So I guess for me, the comparison isn't "price/performance", it's "price/functionality".
Just my.02
Woz didn't invent the computer. He didn't build the first computer. What he did was more important... he sparked a revolution by bringing the computer industry into the public spotlight.
Perhaps he will do something equally important to the wireless world. We all know wireless has been around for a while, but it seems it really hasn't taken off. We have several different standards, and several different trying to invent what wireless *should* be like. Maybe Woz's new company will spark another revolution...
I definitely agree with that. If there's one thing I would give Microsoft credit for, it would be their UI. I never did understand why companies such as RedHat are trying to push so hard for Linux on the desktop. I believe the easier something is to use, the less customizable it is in the longrun. I say leave Windows on the desktop. Who cares. But companies should be pushing Linux onto servers. That is where it excels. Kudos to IBM. Yet still, I will never use Microsoft on my desktop unless it's to play a game that only runs under Windows.
Here's the way I look at it. I don't see the point in the whole battle of MS vs. Unix. If you are a veteran Unix user, then you know hands-down that it is well better suited than anything Microsoft has as far as a server platform. Microsoft's "touchy-feely-pointy-clicky" idea for a CRITICAL SERVER PLATFORM is absolutely a bad idea, and any sysadmin who tells you MS is better than Unix in this area is totally and completely incompetent. These sorts of people love MS, becuase they can fake like they know how to admin a real network, when all they know how to do is run through a few mouse-clicks, much like a monkey can learn. Are these the types of people you want to hire? People who have no real problem-solution skills (unless it's solving MS bug problems)? If you don't understand the DNS protocol and client-server architecture inside and out, then why the hell would I want to hire you to "easily, simply" point and click your way through the setup? When a real problem with it arises, it's a 4-hour-long phonecall to MS techsupport, as opposed to using one's brain to figure out a simple problem in 5 minutes. I dispise MS Windows networks for these reasons. They are absolutely worthless, and save you no administration time. They, in fact, make things more of a burden.
Just my opinion, and I think I am entitled to it since I have both Unix and MS admin experience.. and have been doing Unix for 10 years. Windows is absolutely great for the desktop, especially for game play. Do I think linux will seriously compete with MS on the desktop? Not in the forseable future. "The right tool for the right job"... Windows for desktops (as it was originally intended), and Unix for critical servers (as it was originally intended).
Slashdot Mirror
I hear what you are saying, and I don't think anyone would pass up the oportunity to have a cheaper digital receiver. But the problem is not *what* the government is mandating, it's that they *are* mandating it. The FCC has no business forcing consumers to use a technology that is not absolutely vital to the health of the economy. People vote with their dollars, and that's what drives the economy. Would you want Uncle Sam telling you what brand of car you can/can't drive?
You are right. My earlier statement was wrong in that, yes, Slashdot has *always* been biased... against Microsoft, against MPAA, against this and that. But let me try to expand on what I meant...
/.'s comment section. We get to debate it in there.
Ever since I started reading slashdot, almost every single article posted related to me in some way or another... hence "news for nerds, stuff that matters". Maybe I agreed with the article, maybe I disagreed with it, but it was still there for me to chew on. This is the beauty of
But... as of lateley things have changed. Yes, the articles, for the most part, still concern me in one way or another. But now, instead of just posting them up there, and adding any additional information to the post, the editors feel so inclined to put their (usually) one-sided opinion right up on the main page, as opposed to being like everyone else and using the comments section. The problem is... when you do that, half of the comments are people "taking the flaimbait" and posting a retalliation for their distaste of your personal opinion.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with your opinion... I'm just saying I disagree with you putting it right up on the main page and making it part of the article submission, rather than putting your own personal comments in the comment section like everyone else. This would cut down on the amount of bs I have to sift through (yes, even retalliations to your comments get modded up some how) and read the stuff that really matters. Just my $0.09.
Yep, I agree. Every day I grow more and more tired of seeing /. editors use their mass audience as a chanel to spout their political views. Slant aside, they almost ALWAYS have something biased to say on every single article posted. I am reading less /. every day because of this. Sad.
I guess another way to look at it is: Are you in it for the money, or for the glory?
:)
Those who only took up programming because they saw dollar-signs, and have no further interest in the art would, in my opinion, be the most likely to get bored/burntout/tired and jump ship to management.
I don't necessarily see this as a problem. I have had lots of problems in the past dealing with those types of programmers. Great people, but just have too much of a lack of interest in what they are doing, and therefore to a worse job than those who enjoy it. I say good riddance to them, and wish them well in management.
This frees up jobs for those of us who find this line of work interesting and actually, God forbid, enjoy our jobs. This increases our average salaries and decreases the amount of incompetence we have to deal with everyday (although some could argue that more management = more incompetence
Anyway... my point is: This realization, coupled with the dot-com bust is ultimately making things better for the average programmer (and by programmer I mean one who is in it for the programming, not necessarily the $$$).
I just love how this is always the last question from a zealot when he's been proven wrong. Allow me to answer, yet again
How, exactly, was said zealot proven wrong???
It doesn't exist. You need a real, business OS to run these tools.
It's called rdesktop, and it works beautifully for those of us that are forced to administer W2K machines, but don't want to be forced to run it on our desktop. Go back to redmond and sit in your cubicle for another year. Check back with us then, and we'll see if you have any more brilliant comments to post.
If a "Web Service" is a fad, then why would M$ be pushing .NET, which you say is not a fad? .NET is, supposedly, based upon the notion of web services.
Also, you say there are a lot of benefits by studying the CLR. Well, that would go for a lot of things out in the tech world, including the JVM itself. However, I wholeheartedly disagree with your statement about it being the "perfect" platform for teaching language design, abstract machine design, etc.
C# is no better at teaching "language design" than any other. Hell, it is almost identical to Java, so why not stick with Java? Point being, why should schools and universities spend thousands of dollars switchinting to the ".NET platform" when they already have one that works just fine.
By "abstract machine design", I hope you aren't referring to "platform independence", because you and I both know that isn't true with anything M$ to date.
Sen. Hollings says the reason broadband isn't as popular today as it should have been is because media giants are afraid to provide large quantities of digital content to the masses over it. Therefore, the public has no 'interest' in broadband. This is blatently wrong. Then he goes on to say the entertainment industry needs a "nudge" in the right direction... which is presumably to come up with a standard for thwarting piracy. Then, the best part, he says that, in order to increase public interest in broadband, the government needs to step in to regulate the digital media industry a little. So my point, and question, is: Since when is it the government's job to promote public interest in a certain area, especially with regards to entertainment????
True, true. But perhaps that adspace was bought before they decided to change their "stance". I don't know. I sent a letter to google, and got the same response as the gunshop dude. Who knows.
I dunno, this may be off topic, but according to this link, Google does not accept any ads for companies that have websites or products in any way affilliated with firearms or knives.
This comes as a dissappointment for someone who regularly visits Geeks With Guns.
Say it ain't so...
"Last Friday, the company announced new funding and a restructuring that eliminated its services and consulting work and significantly pared down its product line."
Yeah, I'd say that announcement just said it all. "Eliminated its services and consulting work..." and "pared down its product line". What else does a company need to do to dissolve itself?
I wholeheartedly agree. Those parents are just trying to shift the focus of blame off of them, and onto something else, like media. It's a typical move. They portray the illusion that, somehow, society has failed them by not helping them raise their children. It's wrong, so very wrong.
There is nothing quite like the feeling of having 16-on-16 in a good CounterStrike game.
First post? Maybe... go ahead...
Interestingly enough, the technique they are using to "expand" their coverage area is remarkably similar to the distributed nature of peer-to-peer sharing networks, such as Gnutella.
I wonder how well it will scale. Will users' bandwidth drop as more and more customers in their area sign on, due to the heavy relaying of traffic?
Okay, I must admit I have lost all respect for GNOME/Ximian, now.
.NOT Framework, then it will be just as bulky and unreliable as windows programs.
Miguel has this "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude, which usually goes along with being a follower, not a leader. Some friends I have, who are also MS people, always jokingly say, "Don't fight it... don't fight it! Let Uncle Bill take care of you!". I really hate that way of thinking.
Open source is about pure innovation, and problem solving, not porting others' work over to the free world (necessarily).
The other beef I have is with his comments regarding productivity. He says he has reached a point where he has "implemented too many linked lists", etc etc. My problem is, a good programmer knows how to reuse his/her code, and not reimplement ALL of it from scratch every damn time. You know why Microsoft's code is so bulky and unreliable? It's because they made their API's so attractive to lazy programmers who "don't want to deal with all that hard stuff" by doing it all for them. You write a "hello world" program in windows, and you'll be lucky if it isn't under 200Kb, because the routines and libraries that actually got compiled in are the same ones MS Office uses.
If we ignore the small and tedious details to programming, and base GNOME on the
Good software is not made by people who want to "get it done quickly and efficiently", it's made by people who want to spend the time to do it right, and "get it to run quickly and make it efficient". It's only one way or the other... we can drag 'n drop our way to building an application, but it sure as hell won't be as fast/reliable/efficient/good as a program written in a text editor, compiled by hand, checked and rechecked.
Something to think about... you know that cool cacheing feature that google has? That basically means they have the entire internet saved on their disk array. Seriously though, I've been doing a lot of work and research in the area of neural nets, fuzzy logic, evolutionary algorithms, etc. etc. I wouldn't mind feeding 900,000 webpages into a neural net, and seeing how well it learns, or *what* it learns.
With processing power up at the level it is today, how much of a difference in these two chips' performances is really notable? Even if the Athlon "XP" outperformed the intel (as I am told is often), it probably wouldn't be much, at least not enough worth talking about, and it sure wouldn't negate the fact that there have been several AMD "bugs" which notably inflict Linux users. They are, however, much cheaper. So I guess for me, the comparison isn't "price/performance", it's "price/functionality". Just my .02
Woz didn't invent the computer. He didn't build the first computer. What he did was more important... he sparked a revolution by bringing the computer industry into the public spotlight. Perhaps he will do something equally important to the wireless world. We all know wireless has been around for a while, but it seems it really hasn't taken off. We have several different standards, and several different trying to invent what wireless *should* be like. Maybe Woz's new company will spark another revolution...
I definitely agree with that. If there's one thing I would give Microsoft credit for, it would be their UI. I never did understand why companies such as RedHat are trying to push so hard for Linux on the desktop. I believe the easier something is to use, the less customizable it is in the longrun. I say leave Windows on the desktop. Who cares. But companies should be pushing Linux onto servers. That is where it excels. Kudos to IBM. Yet still, I will never use Microsoft on my desktop unless it's to play a game that only runs under Windows.
I still prefer real breasts to fake ones. So hopefully there will be no CGI pron...
Why would I go back to napster, or anything like napster, when gnutella has been serving me fine since the day napster shut down it's service?
Here's the way I look at it. I don't see the point in the whole battle of MS vs. Unix. If you are a veteran Unix user, then you know hands-down that it is well better suited than anything Microsoft has as far as a server platform. Microsoft's "touchy-feely-pointy-clicky" idea for a CRITICAL SERVER PLATFORM is absolutely a bad idea, and any sysadmin who tells you MS is better than Unix in this area is totally and completely incompetent. These sorts of people love MS, becuase they can fake like they know how to admin a real network, when all they know how to do is run through a few mouse-clicks, much like a monkey can learn. Are these the types of people you want to hire? People who have no real problem-solution skills (unless it's solving MS bug problems)? If you don't understand the DNS protocol and client-server architecture inside and out, then why the hell would I want to hire you to "easily, simply" point and click your way through the setup? When a real problem with it arises, it's a 4-hour-long phonecall to MS techsupport, as opposed to using one's brain to figure out a simple problem in 5 minutes. I dispise MS Windows networks for these reasons. They are absolutely worthless, and save you no administration time. They, in fact, make things more of a burden. Just my opinion, and I think I am entitled to it since I have both Unix and MS admin experience.. and have been doing Unix for 10 years. Windows is absolutely great for the desktop, especially for game play. Do I think linux will seriously compete with MS on the desktop? Not in the forseable future. "The right tool for the right job"... Windows for desktops (as it was originally intended), and Unix for critical servers (as it was originally intended).
Wonder what Thurrott will say about this one... can't wait to read his uneducated and overexaggerated opinions.