Buy the book called "The Best Little Guide to Stock Market Investing" from Amazon, open a trading account at an online discount brokerage, and you're off.
The origins of humanity are well known. The origin of the universe itself isn't well understood, so maybe this is what your professor meant. Neither one involves anything supernatural or an old man who lives in the sky.
You should look up the difference between scientific theory and what's accepted as fact. Hint: there really isn't any. In science, "just a theory" is tantamount to saying "just a fact".
There's no solid evidence that Jesus ever existed. No third-party eyewitness accounts exist. It's very likely he never lived at all, and was made up later.
"This is why you see more commerical Gtk apps than commercial Qt/KDE apps"
That's incorrect. There are far, far, FAR more commercial Qt apps than GTK apps. Hardly anyone uses GTK for commercial development, whereas Qt is used by everyone from Adobe to Google to Disney to NASA.
Well, let's face facts: in the late '90s-2001, an awful lot of people got into software startups for the money. And here in Vancouver, there are a lot of Chinese people (warning: politically incorrect commentary ahead) who are pressured by their families to go into medicine or engineering. Many of them end up in programming, and they don't particularly enjoy it - it's just a job. And it shows in the quality of their work, and their lack of interest in at-home "geek" activities such as trying out new languages, frameworks, etc.
In short, money does play a big role, particularly when intersected with cultures that place an inordinate emphasis on status and material success.
I also don't get where the AI part happens - so they are recruiting humans to perform tasks that solve problems currently impossible or very difficult for computers to solve on their own? How is that AI?
This is particularly true for evolution, where all kinds of "common sense" types come out of the woodwork. They read somewhere that evolution = animals magically splitting into new species, plus they are often religious anyway, so off they go to argue about something they know nothing about. I guess it's because the overall gist of evolutionary theory can be communicated in layman's terms. so they somehow feel they are qualified to debate its fundamentals.
Oh, I'm with you on the openness bit, believe me. I'm just stating the facts as they stand. What my personal opinion is doesn't really matter much.
IAX2 is nice, but it's not geared for personal endpoints - it's a trunking protocol first and foremost, and lacks a lot of features provided by both Skype and SIP. You can make a simple softphone with IAX2, but it won't be terribly great. That's why there aren't many around.
Well, using Qt obviously makes a huge difference. Not only is it an excellent toolkit, but they do a tremendous amount of work to make things portable, so writing cross-platform code becomes a piece of cake. That's also why KDE 4 (which will hopefully end up as the first, "real" Linux gui) will run on Windows.
Skype deals with firewalls and NAT better. If you know the ins and outs of SIP, you'll know that it's a nightmare on the WAN. SIP's designers pretended it's an ipv6 world when creating it (my old boss sat on several of these IETF task forces). One reason it sucks so much was the decision to embed the ip address as a TEXT STRING inside the SIP message, so it never gets NAT'd.
Skype just works. Very, very few people care that it's closed, as evidenced by its adoption rate.
Sure. 16 bit apps run in a VM. 32 bit apps have native binary support. MS have an entire team that tests backwards compatibility.
"What was your point exactly ? The latest version of Postgresql will work just fine with your old database of 1998."
We are talking about backwards compatibility of binaries. The original poster said Linux backwards compat. is excellent; it is not. It stinks. If I took an old binary, and tried to run it today on my modern Gentoo system, it would not launch. Period. As others have pointed out, Solaris would in fact run a 10 year old binary, because Sun, like MS, have made a special effort to guarantee it.
"Backward compatibility on Linux is in fact excellent."
It is terrible. We are not talking about recompiling here. Take a BINARY from 10 years ago, and launch it on a modern system. It won't run. Recompiling is not an option for commercial software purchased by end-users. (Read that last sentence again). Companies with significant investments in legacy systems therefore can't upgrade their Linux systems without breaking stuff. It's normally not a problem with MS and (I've just learned) Solaris, because MS and Sun take special pains to guarantee a high degree of backwards compatibility.
It is a recognised problem in the enterprise - Linux legacy support sucks. That fact that you won't recognise this tells me you don't work with real systems professionally, but are instead some kind of home hobbyist whose opinions are worth shit.
Yes, same here. I learned assembler on a C64. Those snowy days spent coding read/data statements to poke values into the 4k memory space starting at 49152 were well worth it...how many others remember typing 'sys 49152' and getting a screenful of random blinking squares and crazy sounds because of bugs? Then I got an assembler (I believe it was made by a company called French Silk? Something weird like that) and that helped a lot.
Remember the C64 Programmer's Reference Guide? It included a memory map of the entire system - you could look up any memory address and see what it was for, laid out over a few pages.
That's how I learned to program, and make a living today. I couldn't have done it without Commodore, since as a pre-teen kid I couldn't afford anything else with my crappy summer jobs.
"Without ridiculous laws against reverse-engineering, and ridiculous patent laws, anyone would be able to dissassemble any file format and then write software to use that format. Your State prevents you from doing this and entering the market, hence prices go up and service goes down, dig?"
Reverse engineering of file formats is legal. It is a very difficult process, particularly for highly complex binary file formats like Word and so forth. The reason why.doc compatibility sucks has nothing to do with "the State". Please stop trying to wedge everything into your paranoid political mold.
You're the third or fourth person to point out Solaris - I am convinced! I have no experience with it, however, which is why I made no mention of it in my post.
Anyway, my point mainly applied to Linux, and I agree with you 100%.
The difference is everyone in the UK is automatically covered. In the US, 15% of the population has no health care. Imagine if your nephew had been one of them.
Yes, I responded to an earlier comment made about Solaris. Very commendable policy. I also fully agree about the importance of this sort of thing in enterprise apps - decision-makers want predictibility looking both forwards and backwards. Surprises and broken apps that may or may not work after a recompile are liabilities, pure and simple.
"For MS, backwards compatibility is delusional lip service - but that is what IT managers like, after all."
Er, have you ever worked in software or IT? Microsoft place the highest emphasis on backwards compatibility, running 16 bit software in virtual machines and 32 bit software natively. I'll ignore your inane comment about IT management, since you sound like you're just making stuff up anyway.
Can you explain the precise mechanism of this Unix binary backwards compatibility you're talking about? I work with Linux every day and have since 1998. I'm pretty sure if I grabbed a version of, say, Postgresql from those days and tried to launch it now, it wouldn't work, nor would it even compile. Same with any gui desktop app or driver. I haven't worked a lot with AIX or HP-UX since the '90s, but I'd be pretty surprised if a CDE app from 10 years ago just fired up without any problems.
"Stop being stupid - most 16 bit windows software does NOT run on windows XP."
Actually yeah it does, unless it's doing something really wonky. I had occasion to run a few 16 bit freeware programs at a job awhile back, and I was amazed at how well they ran.
It is the best in the business, period. Ancient software (i.e. Windows 3.1, 16 bit stuff) will normally run on modern versions of Windows with few if any problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Saying things like, "That's nonsense!" or "Well, why would this guy have done that if so and so" doesn't constitute evidence. Sorry.
There are no eyewitness accounts of his existence. Not even from the Romans. If you know of one, post a link citing sources.
Here, read this (warning: you won't like it): http://www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm/
Buy the book called "The Best Little Guide to Stock Market Investing" from Amazon, open a trading account at an online discount brokerage, and you're off.
The origins of humanity are well known. The origin of the universe itself isn't well understood, so maybe this is what your professor meant. Neither one involves anything supernatural or an old man who lives in the sky.
You should look up the difference between scientific theory and what's accepted as fact. Hint: there really isn't any. In science, "just a theory" is tantamount to saying "just a fact".
There's no solid evidence that Jesus ever existed. No third-party eyewitness accounts exist. It's very likely he never lived at all, and was made up later.
http://www.trolltech.com/customers/
"This is why you see more commerical Gtk apps than commercial Qt/KDE apps"
That's incorrect. There are far, far, FAR more commercial Qt apps than GTK apps. Hardly anyone uses GTK for commercial development, whereas Qt is used by everyone from Adobe to Google to Disney to NASA.
Well, let's face facts: in the late '90s-2001, an awful lot of people got into software startups for the money. And here in Vancouver, there are a lot of Chinese people (warning: politically incorrect commentary ahead) who are pressured by their families to go into medicine or engineering. Many of them end up in programming, and they don't particularly enjoy it - it's just a job. And it shows in the quality of their work, and their lack of interest in at-home "geek" activities such as trying out new languages, frameworks, etc.
In short, money does play a big role, particularly when intersected with cultures that place an inordinate emphasis on status and material success.
I also don't get where the AI part happens - so they are recruiting humans to perform tasks that solve problems currently impossible or very difficult for computers to solve on their own? How is that AI?
This is particularly true for evolution, where all kinds of "common sense" types come out of the woodwork. They read somewhere that evolution = animals magically splitting into new species, plus they are often religious anyway, so off they go to argue about something they know nothing about. I guess it's because the overall gist of evolutionary theory can be communicated in layman's terms. so they somehow feel they are qualified to debate its fundamentals.
Oh, I'm with you on the openness bit, believe me. I'm just stating the facts as they stand. What my personal opinion is doesn't really matter much.
IAX2 is nice, but it's not geared for personal endpoints - it's a trunking protocol first and foremost, and lacks a lot of features provided by both Skype and SIP. You can make a simple softphone with IAX2, but it won't be terribly great. That's why there aren't many around.
Well, using Qt obviously makes a huge difference. Not only is it an excellent toolkit, but they do a tremendous amount of work to make things portable, so writing cross-platform code becomes a piece of cake. That's also why KDE 4 (which will hopefully end up as the first, "real" Linux gui) will run on Windows.
Skype deals with firewalls and NAT better. If you know the ins and outs of SIP, you'll know that it's a nightmare on the WAN. SIP's designers pretended it's an ipv6 world when creating it (my old boss sat on several of these IETF task forces). One reason it sucks so much was the decision to embed the ip address as a TEXT STRING inside the SIP message, so it never gets NAT'd.
Skype just works. Very, very few people care that it's closed, as evidenced by its adoption rate.
Jim Butterfield! I used to love his articles in The Transactor - incredibly technical and in-depth. No mention of design patterns anywhere ;)
"Can you explain the one in Windows ?"
Sure. 16 bit apps run in a VM. 32 bit apps have native binary support. MS have an entire team that tests backwards compatibility.
"What was your point exactly ? The latest version of Postgresql will work just fine with your old database of 1998."
We are talking about backwards compatibility of binaries. The original poster said Linux backwards compat. is excellent; it is not. It stinks. If I took an old binary, and tried to run it today on my modern Gentoo system, it would not launch. Period. As others have pointed out, Solaris would in fact run a 10 year old binary, because Sun, like MS, have made a special effort to guarantee it.
"Backward compatibility on Linux is in fact excellent."
It is terrible. We are not talking about recompiling here. Take a BINARY from 10 years ago, and launch it on a modern system. It won't run. Recompiling is not an option for commercial software purchased by end-users. (Read that last sentence again). Companies with significant investments in legacy systems therefore can't upgrade their Linux systems without breaking stuff. It's normally not a problem with MS and (I've just learned) Solaris, because MS and Sun take special pains to guarantee a high degree of backwards compatibility.
It is a recognised problem in the enterprise - Linux legacy support sucks. That fact that you won't recognise this tells me you don't work with real systems professionally, but are instead some kind of home hobbyist whose opinions are worth shit.
Yes, same here. I learned assembler on a C64. Those snowy days spent coding read/data statements to poke values into the 4k memory space starting at 49152 were well worth it...how many others remember typing 'sys 49152' and getting a screenful of random blinking squares and crazy sounds because of bugs? Then I got an assembler (I believe it was made by a company called French Silk? Something weird like that) and that helped a lot.
Remember the C64 Programmer's Reference Guide? It included a memory map of the entire system - you could look up any memory address and see what it was for, laid out over a few pages.
That's how I learned to program, and make a living today. I couldn't have done it without Commodore, since as a pre-teen kid I couldn't afford anything else with my crappy summer jobs.
"Without ridiculous laws against reverse-engineering, and ridiculous patent laws, anyone would be able to dissassemble any file format and then write software to use that format. Your State prevents you from doing this and entering the market, hence prices go up and service goes down, dig?"
.doc compatibility sucks has nothing to do with "the State". Please stop trying to wedge everything into your paranoid political mold.
Reverse engineering of file formats is legal. It is a very difficult process, particularly for highly complex binary file formats like Word and so forth. The reason why
Yes, yes, I've been endlessly corrected on the Solaris front - my apologies.
You're the third or fourth person to point out Solaris - I am convinced! I have no experience with it, however, which is why I made no mention of it in my post.
Anyway, my point mainly applied to Linux, and I agree with you 100%.
The difference is everyone in the UK is automatically covered. In the US, 15% of the population has no health care. Imagine if your nephew had been one of them.
Yes, I responded to an earlier comment made about Solaris. Very commendable policy. I also fully agree about the importance of this sort of thing in enterprise apps - decision-makers want predictibility looking both forwards and backwards. Surprises and broken apps that may or may not work after a recompile are liabilities, pure and simple.
That's pretty cool! I never really used Solaris, unfortunately, except to fool around with OpenSolaris recently.
Does this only apply to statically-linked stuff, or does Sun ship all the ancient libs (gui, etc.) like Microsoft does? Either way, it's nice to see.
"For MS, backwards compatibility is delusional lip service - but that is what IT managers like, after all."
Er, have you ever worked in software or IT? Microsoft place the highest emphasis on backwards compatibility, running 16 bit software in virtual machines and 32 bit software natively. I'll ignore your inane comment about IT management, since you sound like you're just making stuff up anyway.
Can you explain the precise mechanism of this Unix binary backwards compatibility you're talking about? I work with Linux every day and have since 1998. I'm pretty sure if I grabbed a version of, say, Postgresql from those days and tried to launch it now, it wouldn't work, nor would it even compile. Same with any gui desktop app or driver. I haven't worked a lot with AIX or HP-UX since the '90s, but I'd be pretty surprised if a CDE app from 10 years ago just fired up without any problems.
"Stop being stupid - most 16 bit windows software does NOT run on windows XP."
Actually yeah it does, unless it's doing something really wonky. I had occasion to run a few 16 bit freeware programs at a job awhile back, and I was amazed at how well they ran.
It is the best in the business, period. Ancient software (i.e. Windows 3.1, 16 bit stuff) will normally run on modern versions of Windows with few if any problems.
Exactly. I have a dual boot Gentoo/Windows 2000 laptop, and it works just great. I've barely ever even used XP.