You're obviously not running Windows (or haven't kept up with your updates). Sorry, but that puts you outside the target audience.:) If you ever feel the need to run.NET apps however, there's a project called Mono you might be interested in...
API work mostly, regular C#.DLL:s. Some for Compact Framework, some ASP.NET. Sure Visual Studio crashes or hangs sometimes, but it's very rare and certainly not to the point of requiring a complete system rebuilds. My cow-orkers haven't experienced anything like what you describe (there are about six of us), either. Did you talk to Microsoft about this?
You're completely right (well, except I don't smoke) except that even if I had provided reasons why I think.NET/C# is better than Java, it'd still just be my subjective opinion.
Have you actually used visual studio? it degrades to a useless piece of rubbish after a few months.
This is news to me, since I've been working off the same Visual Studio 2005 installation for almost 10 months now. Only time it got dreadfully slow was when I tried using a refactoring tool called Resharper. Since I uninstalled that, VS has been zippy. Before switching to VS2005, I believe I had a VS2003 installation that was several years old.
Which IDE one prefers is a matter of taste alone. Back when I was writing Java, I used IntelliJ and liked it. Yet I find Visual Studio far superior, and C# a language far superior to Java. Now, IntelliJ doesn't do C# and Visual Studio doesn't do Java, so for me the choice is simple.
Now, regarding performance, I'd have to say you're wrong. There are certainly benchmarks that go both ways, but by my purely subjective perception of performance, Java desktop apps (such as Azureus, Eclipse or Zend Development Environment) often feel extremely sluggish, whereas C# apps perform as well as or better than applications written in C++. Furthermore, C# apps often use Windows.Forms for the GUI, which creates a much more seamless integration with other Windows apps.
People who claim Java is faster will usually just look at J2EE web services and ignore everything else.
Well, duh. That's the definition of closed-source software and is hardly a Microsoft-specific thing. If you don't like it, use something else. Clearly, most customers are perfectly fine with this.
Spoken like a true troll who has used neither.NET, nor Visual Studio or MSDN. All three statements are absolutely true and tens of thousands of architects, developers and testers would back me up on that.
From what experience I have, neither HP nor Fujitsu-Siemens are worth shit as far as their laptops or support for the same go. They do not ship individual parts, take ages to do simple maintenance, and the boxes don't hold up very well. I recently worked in technical support for a major university who sold/loaned students laptops. By far, the Fujitsu-Siemens models caused the most problems, HP in a close second, then Lenovo, then Dell. And Lenovo/IBM and Dell were by far the easiest to get support for.
windows XP also doesn't come with ati or nvidia drivers... it uses a vesa driver by default, too
Um, I call BS. I installed a Windows XP system from scratch as late as yesterday (from an original retail disc with SP2 slipstream'd) and it gave me proper nVidia drivers. Old ones, mind you, but the chipset had gone out of production and I couldn't find any newer drivers from nVidia's site. The ones included in Windows supported everything essential, though.
If your IT staff is not technically minded, you have bigger problems than SPAM. Maybe it's just me, but I was under the distinct impression that the foremost qualification necessary to join the IT staff of any self-respecting company is to be technically minded. What are those people doing there if they can't do their jobs?
What kind of a "company" is this? I guess it's too much to ask for a name.
Try and put a good Cisco WiFi card in the mini-pci slot of a HP, Compaq, or IBM laptop. "Unauthorized wireless network card detected. System halted..."
What? I have a perfectly good Cisco WiFi card in the mini-PCI slot of my IBM laptop. It has always worked perfectly. Please elaborate.
Supercomputers aren't about single ultra-powerful CPU:s. A supercomputer consists of lots of CPU:s, possibly thousands, working together. One Opteron 2.2GHz isn't a supercomputer, but a thousand such CPU:s certainly are, if made to work in parallel. Obviously this requires pretty advanced hardware to manage the interconnects and such, in addition to software specifically written for such systems, but that's why everyone doesn't has a supercomputer in his home, even though one can be built using mostly "off-the-shelf" PC hardware.
There are loads of free games for Windows, too. Granted, most people prefer the so-called "blockbusters", but that doesn't mean those are all there is. And there's a whole lot of old Windows/DOS games that still run well (some even on Linux, I believe), like the Monkey Island series.
her only games are freecell/hearts/solitaire/minesweeper
...because that's really an edge Linux has over Windows. Games. Yeah. How long will it take until she wants to play a game that's Windows-only? Because there aren't really that many out there for Linux.
you have to hunt real hard to find out what the hoopla is all about.
No, you have to type "Mohammed" into Google, and it's on the first page. Better yet, type "Mohammed caricatures" and you get several pages of links. That's not "hunting real hard", that's something even a school kid could do.
Parent is a troll who obviously didn't even RTFA. This patch is legit, it comes with complete source code, and it's been verified good by at least one third party, Steve Gibson of GRC.com. It immunizes against the vulnerability and has no known ill effects. It's as good a counter-measure as there can be before an official fix is released.
The problem isn't that the user base is completely uneducated - it's that for the majority of the educated users on Windows, they're not switching because THERE'S NOTHING BETTER TO SWITCH TO. I'm not trolling; I'd be off Windows in a heartbeat if I had the option. I've replaced pretty much everything else on my box with FSS/OSS alternatives. Windows remains because for the stuff I do with my computer and the expectations I place upon it, there's nothing else to use.
"Most people have been trained to buy their information. Along the way free information is derided as just that, "free" and all it suggests."
That's an interesting suggestion, one I've never heard before. Quite the opposite is taking place, as a matter of fact. Google and Wikipedia have largely replaced books and encyclopediae as sources of information on pretty much any topic. Both are completely free services, and while neither is perfect, both are good enough for most practical uses.
"It will "just work.""
Like Sony's rootkit DRM "just worked"? Like SunnComm's? Like CSS? The analog hole is as open as ever, making effective DRM impossible. It's hardly any better on the software side of things. Every new game out there gets cracked and distributed.
"Most have gladly done that already with iTunes. So the audio battle is over and DRM has won. Your video is next."
Blatantly untrue. Most people don't use iTunes. Those who do don't necessarily use it as their single source of music, and iPods play regular MP3's. Even Sony's MP3 players play real MP3's nowadays (as opposed to being limited to ATRAC) and there is still a limitless supply of MP3's available for download, all over the web, including very recently released singles and albums. The audio battle was won by the pirates in 1995 or something, the music industry has been trying (and failing) to catch up ever since.
"Even when someone breaks it, it just won't put a big dent in the corporation's bottom line."
This may be true, but does it matter? The point it will prove is that effective DRM is practically impossible to achieve without alienating your customers and spending a shitload of cash that turns out to be for naught. Every dollar the industry spends on DRM is a dollar wasted, and that affects the bottom line, albeit in a less-obvious way (note that the music industry always blames piracy for lost revenue).
"The Entertainment corps get to drag the poor guy through court as an "example to all." Thereby reinforcing the mindset that information should be owned, lock, stock and barrel."
I think I established in my reply to your first point that the opposite of the mindset you describe is by far more popular. Also, do note that the RIAA & co have been dragging people through court for quite some time now, and that has still not done anything except give them bad PR. There is no real decline in music, movie or software piracy due to these lawsuits.
Forgot to add: They also claim that their layout requires "no special hardware". This too is highly questionable, as most people would value having a keyboard that actually produces keypresses in accordance with what's printed on the keys. This is especially valuable when trying to learn a new keyboard layout, as (almost) anyone adopting Colemak would have to do.
However, since there are (at this time) no known vendors of Colemak-layout keyboards, anyone wanting to use such a keyboard with the proper key mappings would have to rearrange the keys by himself. Even then the result would not be perfect as the symbols combined on a number of keys (like the number keys, hah) have changed. In other words, not only does the Colemak layout require special hardware, there are possibly no keyboards that can even be (easily) modified to be fully Colemak-compliant.
Of course, you could always buy a Das Keyboard and write on the keys yourself. But I'd hardly consider that an easy mod.
Their website cites "multilingual" as a major feature of this layout. Reading a bit more about this however, they've just made up lots of key combos for various "multilingual" characters. So? Anyone can pull a bunch of key combos out of their $ORIFICE and list them on a web page, or even write a custom keyboard map. And speaking as someone who does a lot of typing in my native language, I'd rather have my Ås, Äs and Ös as first-class letters, thankyouverymuch. Putting either under a (non-initiutive) key combo like [AltGr][f] is, principally, the same to me as putting "Q" under [AltGr][O]...
Btw, according to TFA, it's "Colemak" not "COLMAK". The website is even Colemak.com ffs...
This is not normal Windows behaviour. If you're using NTFS and are not, say, editing important system files that have been saved to disk in an inconsistent state (being in the middle of a service pack install, for instance), Windows would just happily boot up and keep going in event of a power failure.
I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally shut the power down to one of my PC's, or had a power failure. Never had a single problem such as Windows not booting. With NTFS, there's not even an annoying disk check to wait for like there was with FAT(32).
OTOH, MySQL 4.1 is not included in any currently shipping version of Windows, either. And it seems rather strange that Linux would break down over such a simple thing as installing a software package it wasn't originally shipped with. On Windows, installing MySQL is a five-minute, mostly click-and-watch job, as I'm sure you know.
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You're obviously not running Windows (or haven't kept up with your updates). Sorry, but that puts you outside the target audience. :) If you ever feel the need to run .NET apps however, there's a project called Mono you might be interested in...
API work mostly, regular C# .DLL:s. Some for Compact Framework, some ASP.NET. Sure Visual Studio crashes or hangs sometimes, but it's very rare and certainly not to the point of requiring a complete system rebuilds. My cow-orkers haven't experienced anything like what you describe (there are about six of us), either. Did you talk to Microsoft about this?
You're completely right (well, except I don't smoke) except that even if I had provided reasons why I think .NET/C# is better than Java, it'd still just be my subjective opinion.
Have you actually used visual studio? it degrades to a useless piece of rubbish after a few months.
This is news to me, since I've been working off the same Visual Studio 2005 installation for almost 10 months now. Only time it got dreadfully slow was when I tried using a refactoring tool called Resharper. Since I uninstalled that, VS has been zippy. Before switching to VS2005, I believe I had a VS2003 installation that was several years old.
Which IDE one prefers is a matter of taste alone. Back when I was writing Java, I used IntelliJ and liked it. Yet I find Visual Studio far superior, and C# a language far superior to Java. Now, IntelliJ doesn't do C# and Visual Studio doesn't do Java, so for me the choice is simple.
Now, regarding performance, I'd have to say you're wrong. There are certainly benchmarks that go both ways, but by my purely subjective perception of performance, Java desktop apps (such as Azureus, Eclipse or Zend Development Environment) often feel extremely sluggish, whereas C# apps perform as well as or better than applications written in C++. Furthermore, C# apps often use Windows.Forms for the GUI, which creates a much more seamless integration with other Windows apps.
People who claim Java is faster will usually just look at J2EE web services and ignore everything else.
Well, duh. That's the definition of closed-source software and is hardly a Microsoft-specific thing. If you don't like it, use something else. Clearly, most customers are perfectly fine with this.
Spoken like a true troll who has used neither .NET, nor Visual Studio or MSDN. All three statements are absolutely true and tens of thousands of architects, developers and testers would back me up on that.
From what experience I have, neither HP nor Fujitsu-Siemens are worth shit as far as their laptops or support for the same go. They do not ship individual parts, take ages to do simple maintenance, and the boxes don't hold up very well. I recently worked in technical support for a major university who sold/loaned students laptops. By far, the Fujitsu-Siemens models caused the most problems, HP in a close second, then Lenovo, then Dell. And Lenovo/IBM and Dell were by far the easiest to get support for.
Correction: Not all programmers are engineers, but there are still plenty of engineers who are programmers.
windows XP also doesn't come with ati or nvidia drivers... it uses a vesa driver by default, too
Um, I call BS. I installed a Windows XP system from scratch as late as yesterday (from an original retail disc with SP2 slipstream'd) and it gave me proper nVidia drivers. Old ones, mind you, but the chipset had gone out of production and I couldn't find any newer drivers from nVidia's site. The ones included in Windows supported everything essential, though.
It's actually a BMW M5, which has got a V10 engine. The article summary is wrong.
If your IT staff is not technically minded, you have bigger problems than SPAM. Maybe it's just me, but I was under the distinct impression that the foremost qualification necessary to join the IT staff of any self-respecting company is to be technically minded. What are those people doing there if they can't do their jobs?
What kind of a "company" is this? I guess it's too much to ask for a name.
Try and put a good Cisco WiFi card in the mini-pci slot of a HP, Compaq, or IBM laptop. "Unauthorized wireless network card detected. System halted..."
What? I have a perfectly good Cisco WiFi card in the mini-PCI slot of my IBM laptop. It has always worked perfectly. Please elaborate.
Supercomputers aren't about single ultra-powerful CPU:s. A supercomputer consists of lots of CPU:s, possibly thousands, working together. One Opteron 2.2GHz isn't a supercomputer, but a thousand such CPU:s certainly are, if made to work in parallel. Obviously this requires pretty advanced hardware to manage the interconnects and such, in addition to software specifically written for such systems, but that's why everyone doesn't has a supercomputer in his home, even though one can be built using mostly "off-the-shelf" PC hardware.
Linux, you can have all the free games you want.
There are loads of free games for Windows, too. Granted, most people prefer the so-called "blockbusters", but that doesn't mean those are all there is. And there's a whole lot of old Windows/DOS games that still run well (some even on Linux, I believe), like the Monkey Island series.
her only games are freecell/hearts/solitaire/minesweeper
...because that's really an edge Linux has over Windows. Games. Yeah. How long will it take until she wants to play a game that's Windows-only? Because there aren't really that many out there for Linux.
Saab (the ones who make shitty cars) also have a .biz domain. http://www.saab.biz/
you have to hunt real hard to find out what the hoopla is all about.
No, you have to type "Mohammed" into Google, and it's on the first page. Better yet, type "Mohammed caricatures" and you get several pages of links. That's not "hunting real hard", that's something even a school kid could do.
Parent is a troll who obviously didn't even RTFA. This patch is legit, it comes with complete source code, and it's been verified good by at least one third party, Steve Gibson of GRC.com. It immunizes against the vulnerability and has no known ill effects. It's as good a counter-measure as there can be before an official fix is released.
The problem isn't that the user base is completely uneducated - it's that for the majority of the educated users on Windows, they're not switching because THERE'S NOTHING BETTER TO SWITCH TO. I'm not trolling; I'd be off Windows in a heartbeat if I had the option. I've replaced pretty much everything else on my box with FSS/OSS alternatives. Windows remains because for the stuff I do with my computer and the expectations I place upon it, there's nothing else to use.
"Most people have been trained to buy their information. Along the way free information is derided as just that, "free" and all it suggests."
That's an interesting suggestion, one I've never heard before. Quite the opposite is taking place, as a matter of fact. Google and Wikipedia have largely replaced books and encyclopediae as sources of information on pretty much any topic. Both are completely free services, and while neither is perfect, both are good enough for most practical uses.
"It will "just work.""
Like Sony's rootkit DRM "just worked"? Like SunnComm's? Like CSS? The analog hole is as open as ever, making effective DRM impossible. It's hardly any better on the software side of things. Every new game out there gets cracked and distributed.
"Most have gladly done that already with iTunes. So the audio battle is over and DRM has won. Your video is next."
Blatantly untrue. Most people don't use iTunes. Those who do don't necessarily use it as their single source of music, and iPods play regular MP3's. Even Sony's MP3 players play real MP3's nowadays (as opposed to being limited to ATRAC) and there is still a limitless supply of MP3's available for download, all over the web, including very recently released singles and albums. The audio battle was won by the pirates in 1995 or something, the music industry has been trying (and failing) to catch up ever since.
"Even when someone breaks it, it just won't put a big dent in the corporation's bottom line."
This may be true, but does it matter? The point it will prove is that effective DRM is practically impossible to achieve without alienating your customers and spending a shitload of cash that turns out to be for naught. Every dollar the industry spends on DRM is a dollar wasted, and that affects the bottom line, albeit in a less-obvious way (note that the music industry always blames piracy for lost revenue).
"The Entertainment corps get to drag the poor guy through court as an "example to all." Thereby reinforcing the mindset that information should be owned, lock, stock and barrel."
I think I established in my reply to your first point that the opposite of the mindset you describe is by far more popular. Also, do note that the RIAA & co have been dragging people through court for quite some time now, and that has still not done anything except give them bad PR. There is no real decline in music, movie or software piracy due to these lawsuits.
Forgot to add: They also claim that their layout requires "no special hardware". This too is highly questionable, as most people would value having a keyboard that actually produces keypresses in accordance with what's printed on the keys. This is especially valuable when trying to learn a new keyboard layout, as (almost) anyone adopting Colemak would have to do.
However, since there are (at this time) no known vendors of Colemak-layout keyboards, anyone wanting to use such a keyboard with the proper key mappings would have to rearrange the keys by himself. Even then the result would not be perfect as the symbols combined on a number of keys (like the number keys, hah) have changed. In other words, not only does the Colemak layout require special hardware, there are possibly no keyboards that can even be (easily) modified to be fully Colemak-compliant.
Of course, you could always buy a Das Keyboard and write on the keys yourself. But I'd hardly consider that an easy mod.
Their website cites "multilingual" as a major feature of this layout. Reading a bit more about this however, they've just made up lots of key combos for various "multilingual" characters. So? Anyone can pull a bunch of key combos out of their $ORIFICE and list them on a web page, or even write a custom keyboard map. And speaking as someone who does a lot of typing in my native language, I'd rather have my Ås, Äs and Ös as first-class letters, thankyouverymuch. Putting either under a (non-initiutive) key combo like [AltGr][f] is, principally, the same to me as putting "Q" under [AltGr][O]...
Btw, according to TFA, it's "Colemak" not "COLMAK". The website is even Colemak.com ffs...
I'll stick to QWERTY for the time being.
This is not normal Windows behaviour. If you're using NTFS and are not, say, editing important system files that have been saved to disk in an inconsistent state (being in the middle of a service pack install, for instance), Windows would just happily boot up and keep going in event of a power failure.
I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally shut the power down to one of my PC's, or had a power failure. Never had a single problem such as Windows not booting. With NTFS, there's not even an annoying disk check to wait for like there was with FAT(32).
OTOH, MySQL 4.1 is not included in any currently shipping version of Windows, either. And it seems rather strange that Linux would break down over such a simple thing as installing a software package it wasn't originally shipped with. On Windows, installing MySQL is a five-minute, mostly click-and-watch job, as I'm sure you know.