That is a general problem, I did most of the stuff in the last years trying to cover with good OO design and patterns, but I constantly find myself in a mess of too many classes to cover a domain, functionality which is split over several classes, which are layered. Many classlibs I have seen have similar problems, due to the fact that excessive pattern usage enforces heaps and heaps of classes covering domains, which probably could be easier covered by a few hacks within a procedural domain.
I am not against OO and patterns, in fact I lovem them, but from a maintainability standpoint they easily can become a nightmare. But that is not a problem of c++ it is a software enigneering problem per se.
Sort of a sidecomment, if a java server needs 11 CPUs you definitely have a problem on your hand which is caused by poor program design.
I have two java server installations here one serves around 2500 users with around 100.000 hits per month, almost no CPU cycles used, and basically running constantly without any crashes or bigger load on the database (although it uses an OODB/RDB mapper, but omits stuff like EJB, but uses a portlet engine). On the same app server around 10 other webapps with similar loads run within the same VM
The othe one a CMS which has a handful of users, and hammers ram and the DB like no other second program I have seen. Both fulfill similar domains, but the one with the almost nil CPU load simply has a simple clean design the other one tries to access the DB via a VFS (speaking of extreme overdesign)
Sure Java has its problems, RAM is for instance one, if you are a webhoster, I can clearly see why you hate java with a tomcat which needs a good 128MB+ for a medium sized app, but on the other hand if a webapp is well designed it is fast, and blows speedwise everything out of the water, and basically runs without crashes from day1 to infinity. I am not even talking here about clustering and other niftyness you can get out of the box.
See objective C with GnuStep as base for the next gen C based frameworks and low level languages, than having that monster without decent classlib C++ rising again.
Sorry, been there, done that, but the widespread usage of C++ was one of the biggest history jokes ever. A language, as bloated as a language could be, with lots of cool features on the language level, but ommitting the two most important aspects, a good standardized classlib which covers all important application scope aspects, and a language which is actually usable without having to fight with it for years before being able to master it to a certain degree.
There was a reason why people flooded to java in 97-98, it was less the hype, it was more the fact, that people tried to implement big long running systems in C++ and saw it was not really feasable in a decent timeframe, due to constantly crashing problems thanks to the missing boundary checks, memory leaks thanks to the missing garbage collector, and general programming errors and unreadable code, thanks to the byzantine bloatware the language in fact really is. Add to that the compiler bugs caused by the 1200 pages of language specs and you could see why people were fleeing from C++.
And up to date, whenever I have to talk about C++ I only can give the advice, limit yourself in the usage of features and only use a readable subset of it (which would be similar to java and C#), try to omit the C heritage entirely if possible, do not use preprocessors, do not use extensive operator overloading or templating. And check out the KDE/Qt API, they so far have been the only ones to master the language on a design level which in fact results in readable and maintainable code.
Not really the Mac came out before Windows 1.0 and Microsoft had full access to the first MacOS code, due to its contracts with Apple, even before the Mac came out.
You can see the similarities between Windows and MacOS in most data structures and functions.
So Apple was not too far away to conclude Microsoft might have copied a lot from MacOS, but they failed to convince the court, that Microsoft had to open their codebase for public inspection.
I probably wouldnt if they wouldnt constantly try to take over existings markets, that way (by leveraging their Windows monopoly at it) and then taking over that markets with inferior solutions and basically killing off a handful of rather successful companies that way.
Microsoft is sort of like the bunny invasion in australia, once they enter a market, by any means nessecary (Netscape was the perfect example for that), there is afterwards not too much food for the rest of the wildlife to make a living.
Microsoft is sort of the Walmart of software companies.
Well, part of it really is the teaching, I have met many women in the past. My last girlfriend definitely was strong at math, and math definitely was one of the technical subjects with a higher women percentage than other technical fields (although I would consider math more to be a philosophical field than technical).
But there are others who shy away. If the percentage of woman who cannot cope with math is really higher I dont know. But one thing I know for sure, women in their teens are much more influencable by media stereotypes than the average teen guy is. So if the media tells them math is hip they will enroll into math, and if they tell them eating shit is hip a high percentage of teen women will do it as well. That is the principle the whole fashion and music industry is built upon. Dont get me wrong, teenage men fall for stuff like that too, but not as easily as teenage girls.
So if we constantly have shows how unhip science is and you only become cool by being a total idiot, you dont have to wonder that the current situation is miserable.
But that does not have anything to do with CS student numbers going down generally. That is pretty normal if you constantly hammer into the people, that your job, you have to invest years for, and you have to open a students loan for, is moved to the third world if you are unwilling to work for third world wages (which you cannot due to your university credit, and the higher living costs). CS people were treated like shit by many CEOs in the past and as replacable dog food, so now they have the backslash of not getting enough CS people anymore in the near future and the 90s cyle will repeat again. (over here in german speaking countries we call that the Swine cycle, every tech field has to go through constantly)
Microsoft has never done that
Altair Basic, basically reimplemented code from some mainframe basic interpreters
Dos... basically a bad copycat from CPM bought from a small Seattle company
Windows... one of the problems why Apple failed in the courtcase, was that Apple never managed it, to have Microsoft open their Windows 1.0 and 2.0 code, they had been suspecting for a long time, lots of MacOSX code went into the early Windows versions
Word, basically a wordperfect clone, ditto for the predecessor for excel, wasnt it the guy who invented spreadsheets who went to Microsoft with a new idea and later he was told to go somehwere else, while Microsoft started to work on the first version of Excels predessor on the Mac
Harddrive compression... they lost a courtcase against stac
The WindowsNT base, basically they bought the core team from DEC which did VMs.
Windows networking basically a forked SMB from IBM
NTFS basically a forked OS/2 filesystem
Win95 gui, a blank copy of the OS7 desktop
Internet Explorer, based on Spyglass Mosaic, Spyglass had to fight in court to get any payments besides the small initial one
The list is much longer, Microsoft never was a company which did any real inventions, the usually just copy or buy them and then tell anybody they need freedom to innovate.
Actually, try to compare the simplessness of the nautilus spatial and browsing interfaces, to konquerer, where you can tab and split windows the way you like it, where you can access virtual filesystems with simple urls (hint type man:whaever you like in konqueror, type alt-l once or alt-t and alt-r)
and you can see that the whole spatial approach of nautilus is totally idiotic and how limiting the nautilus browsing mode is.
Actually Sun is not throwing in the towel, Swing has done an interesting approach no other Widget set has done so far.
They basically went the way, of rendering the widgets still in software, but the underlying graphics layer is hardware accelerated if possible and the rendering data for the skins is directly parsed from the underlying OS skinning engine if present.
And Swing has gotten much faster that way. Swing has been already more than usable in 1.4 and I recently checked the latest 1.6/6.0 builds, and all I can say is wohaaa...
The guy in 1.6 at least on Windows is very snappy. I have had running Firefox and SwingSet2 running side by side and SwingSet2 blew firefox away rendering speedwise.
The main problem with spatial nautilus are twofold.
The problem of file browsing was not a problem of file broswing per se, but nautilus was god awful in the file browsing mode.
From day 1 nautilus was a desaster, first it was slow but the functionality was there.
Then they took out splitting, then they took out tabbing, then they took out boomarking. What was left was a desaster of a file browser.
And then they went the spatial route, which is fine per se, but did hide many important commands in half documented hotkeys and basically made it impossible for the average user, to change the behavior, but hiding it in a registry like config file on how to change the stuff back into almost equally awful nautilus browsing mode.
Gnome has bigger problems than nautilus, which still works for most users. Gnome needs a compound document model, it needs one which works with the existing models (kparts and the openoffice model).
Currently the stance is, KDE has something working, the gnome project tries to reinvent the wheel, mostly fails then either dumps the idea alltogether (bonobo for instance) or takes the kde implementation under free desktop and then reimplements it and forces sort of the kde people to use the gnome implementation (happened with the automatization stuff and various other things).
Also gnome needs a decent cd burning frontend, the current frontend is a desaster, same goes for the networking browser...
Ahem OSX is not new... it is just an evolution from NeXTStep which is older than the WinNT line WinXP is based upon and older than Linux.
If you take the Mach kernel and the BSD personality into account its roots go way back into the eighties.
means, that you dont have any standard user on the machine where you just have to guess the password.
On the other hand sharing the same password for sudo and the normal user, like OSX and Ubuntu do it, is as much as a security risk as having a dedicated root because all you have to find out is how to get into the machine as a normal sudo user.
Luther was very moderate in many ways and even Catholics nowadays have a high opinion of him (he probably would not have any needs for going a separate route nowadays) but he had several mistakes
a) his stance towards Witches, yes, Calvinism was awful, but Luther also had a very problematic opinion towards witches, he simply was a child of his times, and also was infected by witch paranoia
b) his later writings against jews basically were one of the corner stones which the nazis could built upon in the long run (one of them not the main one)
c) His role regarding the farmers revolts is also somewhat problematic, but that is a non issue in this discussion here
Inquisition itself does not have anything to do with witch hunting per se. Although they were involved in that too.
In fact the bigger part of the witch hunting history goes towards the protestants. Believe me, you would not want to live in the protestantic areas of germany after the 30 years war, if you thing, McCarthy was bad, if you think, the current, either you belong to us or you are our enemy attitude is bad. That is nothing compared to what was going on then. Salem is a walk in the park compared to what happened in western europe between 1600 and the mid 17s. Often with famlies totally eradicated just because one neighbour wanted their money and there was a legal way to get rid of them.
The catholic church can be blamed for many things, but definitely not for being the biggest witch hunters.
(Actually the stance of many catholics during the worst witch huntings were at the opposite side of affairs)
Actually no real witch hunting occurred in the so called dark middle ages, which mostly were more civilized than the so codern era.
Most of the witch hunting over here in Europe occured after 1600 and endured sort of until around 1750.
The funny thing is, that mostly the catholics are blamed for the witch hunting, but in fact, the catholic church is to blame for many things, but not for being the most evil witch hunters.
In fact witch hunting was sort of moderate in catholic countries, while in many protestantic parts it became sort of a plaque, which was even more fueled after the 30 years war, which left a thinned and devastated and basically frightened population.
If the americans speak of Salem, believe me, that is nothing compared to what happened over here, and in the end triggered the age of enlightment.
It in my opinion was the main mistake (besides his later day stance towards jews) of Marthin Luther, that he was bound by his times and could not see in how bogus the whole witch idea is, thus he enforced witch hunting in the long run, in the protestantic areas.
(The whole witch idea came originally from greece btw. but never was really that important until the 15 hundreds)
Actually some texts were lost, but the so called dark ages were not that dark. Most of the texts (the most important ones) were copied thousands of times by the byzantine book vendors. They made their way to the arabs and there triggered arab science, which was the most advanced in the world until around 1000AD.
Some texts were preserved in western Europe by european monks, but the so called dark ages only were dark in the former western roman parts and germany. Roman civilization still lived on in the Byzantine empire and then in the Ottman empire which basically blended the byzantine culture with its own.
The so called Rennesance (actually it in fact was the second western one, the first one was in the 11th century which was stopped by a plaque) was triggered by scientists and philosophers going to italy while the last years of byzantine decline. (Basically the original trigger was several lectures of Pleton in italy, where he discussed the works of Plato in comparison to Aristoteles, which made the knowledge hungry italians learn greek )
In the end, the complain, so much was lost in the so called dark ages, is totally untrue, civilization lived on continually, it is just a natural kind of thing that some knowledge gets lost on the way.
The problem with gnosticism is, that it was there way before christianity and influenced lots of other religions as well.
One of the reasons the early church dismissed many of those "gospels" was that they had a dubious heritage and they basically just should pave an inroad for gnosticism.
In reading for instance Thomas, you can clearly see the gnostic roots and also some greek influences which are totally in opposite of what you can gather about the personality of jesus in the other gospels.
I would not trust the Gospel of Thomas too much, it is to my knowledge and reading a heavily gnostic influenced piece of work. Gnosticism has been a strong side influence in many religons of the era 200 BC-500AD.
Several parts of it do not even suite to the character Jesus has shown to be in the other gospels, but basically could be rerooted into heavy greek influence of that era. There are probably lots of other gospels during that era, due to my knowledge it sort of was a fashion to write gospels and books back then (some of them with very dubious content regarding the real events). Some people with more knowledge into that stuff might correct me into this, but that is my current state of affairs regarding the knowledge of those things.
I did not use expose until recently, I now put it onto my middle mouse button (wheel pressed), in combination with that one, it is simply awesome, much better than any taskbar I have ever seen.
Actually Windows becomes slower over time, the reason for this, is that Windows has a much tighter integration of the libraries.
Once programs start to dump stuff into the system more and more libs are loaded into ram dependend on each other, never to be released, another reason is that versioning is done within the COM objects themselves instead of going the naming mechanism unix does, which means, with every update you basically load another bunch of new minor versions with every com object into never to be properly releasead also.
Add to that the usual slow down problems like virus scanners, software firewalls, application preloaders etc... and you can see the speed going down the drain.
Actually, the Firewall of SP2 is not new, even a plain XP already had the firewall integrated, it just was sort of hidden and turned off by default.
All Microsoft basically did in SP2 was to fix thousands of holes and add new user interfaces to the already existing features.
(which formerly were reachable under the tcpip tab in the network section)
Actually it really was possible to complete (there are various walkthroughs floating the web, and the game is hosted also somewhere)
it just had several problems:
There were some mistakes you could make easily which never showed until the last third of the game.
The game basically was unforgiving in that area by simply not giving any warning but letting you play further.
The Microsoft side of things is no tad better.
The windows upgrades are more frequent and often more expensive, you run into troubles which broken configurations about 10% of the time. And speaking of breaking APIs, that happens even from service pack to service pack, and often Microsoft dumps an entire product line into oblivion once the next competitior arises with another cross platform solution.
Ask the people who programmed Visual Basic, who now basically can reprogram their stuff for.net.
Ask the people who were talked into DCOM, ask the people who constantly run into specs which could be from the Arabic 1001 nights tales.
The next deprecation frontier probably will be the dreadful MFC (the sooner the better)
And.Net will be dumped once the next hype thing comes along and threatens Microsofts monopoly.
To the worst, Apple at least releases working features, Microsoft often releases only marketing ploy interfaces and fixes them years later.
DCom was such an issue, it did not work for a long time, Microsoft just was selling it, because they needed something to be positioned against cross platform corba (which they saw as a problem back then which could threaten their Windows lock in)
Another one was the sharepoint portal server which in its first incarnation was not usable at all.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a general problem, I did most of the stuff in the last years trying to cover with good OO design and patterns, but I constantly find myself in a mess of too many classes to cover a domain, functionality which is split over several classes, which are layered. Many classlibs I have seen have similar problems, due to the fact that excessive pattern usage enforces heaps and heaps of classes covering domains, which probably could be easier covered by a few hacks within a procedural domain.
I am not against OO and patterns, in fact I lovem them, but from a maintainability standpoint they easily can become a nightmare. But that is not a problem of c++ it is a software enigneering problem per se.
Sort of a sidecomment, if a java server needs 11 CPUs you definitely have a problem on your hand which is caused by poor program design.
I have two java server installations here one serves around 2500 users with around 100.000 hits per month, almost no CPU cycles used, and basically running constantly without any crashes or bigger load on the database (although it uses an OODB/RDB mapper, but omits stuff like EJB, but uses a portlet engine). On the same app server around 10 other webapps with similar loads run within the same VM
The othe one a CMS which has a handful of users, and hammers ram and the DB like no other second program I have seen. Both fulfill similar domains, but the one with the almost nil CPU load simply has a simple clean design the other one tries to access the DB via a VFS (speaking of extreme overdesign)
Sure Java has its problems, RAM is for instance one, if you are a webhoster, I can clearly see why you hate java with a tomcat which needs a good 128MB+ for a medium sized app, but on the other hand if a webapp is well designed it is fast, and blows speedwise everything out of the water, and basically runs without crashes from day1 to infinity. I am not even talking here about clustering and other niftyness you can get out of the box.
See objective C with GnuStep as base for the next gen C based frameworks and low level languages, than having that monster without decent classlib C++ rising again.
Sorry, been there, done that, but the widespread usage of C++ was one of the biggest history jokes ever. A language, as bloated as a language could be, with lots of cool features on the language level, but ommitting the two most important aspects, a good standardized classlib which covers all important application scope aspects, and a language which is actually usable without having to fight with it for years before being able to master it to a certain degree. There was a reason why people flooded to java in 97-98, it was less the hype, it was more the fact, that people tried to implement big long running systems in C++ and saw it was not really feasable in a decent timeframe, due to constantly crashing problems thanks to the missing boundary checks, memory leaks thanks to the missing garbage collector, and general programming errors and unreadable code, thanks to the byzantine bloatware the language in fact really is. Add to that the compiler bugs caused by the 1200 pages of language specs and you could see why people were fleeing from C++.
And up to date, whenever I have to talk about C++ I only can give the advice, limit yourself in the usage of features and only use a readable subset of it (which would be similar to java and C#), try to omit the C heritage entirely if possible, do not use preprocessors, do not use extensive operator overloading or templating. And check out the KDE/Qt API, they so far have been the only ones to master the language on a design level which in fact results in readable and maintainable code.
Not really the Mac came out before Windows 1.0 and Microsoft had full access to the first MacOS code, due to its contracts with Apple, even before the Mac came out.
You can see the similarities between Windows and MacOS in most data structures and functions.
So Apple was not too far away to conclude Microsoft might have copied a lot from MacOS, but they failed to convince the court, that Microsoft had to open their codebase for public inspection.
I probably wouldnt if they wouldnt constantly try to take over existings markets, that way (by leveraging their Windows monopoly at it) and then taking over that markets with inferior solutions and basically killing off a handful of rather successful companies that way.
Microsoft is sort of like the bunny invasion in australia, once they enter a market, by any means nessecary (Netscape was the perfect example for that), there is afterwards not too much food for the rest of the wildlife to make a living.
Microsoft is sort of the Walmart of software companies.
Well, part of it really is the teaching, I have met many women in the past.
My last girlfriend definitely was strong at math, and math definitely was one of the technical subjects with a higher women percentage than other technical fields (although I would consider math more to be a philosophical field than technical).
But there are others who shy away. If the percentage of woman who cannot cope with math is really higher I dont know. But one thing I know for sure, women in their teens are much more influencable by media stereotypes than the average teen guy is. So if the media tells them math is hip they will enroll into math, and if they tell them eating shit is hip a high percentage of teen women will do it as well. That is the principle the whole fashion and music industry is built upon. Dont get me wrong, teenage men fall for stuff like that too, but not as easily as teenage girls.
So if we constantly have shows how unhip science is and you only become cool by being a total idiot, you dont have to wonder that the current situation is miserable.
But that does not have anything to do with CS student numbers going down generally. That is pretty normal if you constantly hammer into the people, that your job, you have to invest years for, and you have to open a students loan for, is moved to the third world if you are unwilling to work for third world wages (which you cannot due to your university credit, and the higher living costs). CS people were treated like shit by many CEOs in the past and as replacable dog food, so now they have the backslash of not getting enough CS people anymore in the near future and the 90s cyle will repeat again. (over here in german speaking countries we call that the Swine cycle, every tech field has to go through constantly)
Microsoft has never done that
Altair Basic, basically reimplemented code from some mainframe basic interpreters
Dos... basically a bad copycat from CPM bought from a small Seattle company
Windows... one of the problems why Apple failed in the courtcase, was that Apple never managed it, to have Microsoft open their Windows 1.0 and 2.0 code, they had been suspecting for a long time, lots of MacOSX code went into the early Windows versions
Word, basically a wordperfect clone, ditto for the predecessor for excel, wasnt it the guy who invented spreadsheets who went to Microsoft with a new idea and later he was told to go somehwere else, while Microsoft started to work on the first version of Excels predessor on the Mac
Harddrive compression... they lost a courtcase against stac
The WindowsNT base, basically they bought the core team from DEC which did VMs.
Windows networking basically a forked SMB from IBM
NTFS basically a forked OS/2 filesystem
Win95 gui, a blank copy of the OS7 desktop
Internet Explorer, based on Spyglass Mosaic, Spyglass had to fight in court to get any payments besides the small initial one
The list is much longer, Microsoft never was a company which did any real inventions, the usually just copy or buy them and then tell anybody they need freedom to innovate.
Actually, try to compare the simplessness of the nautilus spatial and browsing interfaces, to konquerer, where you can tab and split windows the way you like it, where you can access virtual filesystems with simple urls (hint type man:whaever you like in konqueror, type alt-l once or alt-t and alt-r) and you can see that the whole spatial approach of nautilus is totally idiotic and how limiting the nautilus browsing mode is.
Actually Sun is not throwing in the towel, Swing has done an interesting approach no other Widget set has done so far. They basically went the way, of rendering the widgets still in software, but the underlying graphics layer is hardware accelerated if possible and the rendering data for the skins is directly parsed from the underlying OS skinning engine if present.
And Swing has gotten much faster that way. Swing has been already more than usable in 1.4 and I recently checked the latest 1.6/6.0 builds, and all I can say is wohaaa... The guy in 1.6 at least on Windows is very snappy. I have had running Firefox and SwingSet2 running side by side and SwingSet2 blew firefox away rendering speedwise.
If it was reverse engineering it would be an isse, but all Tridgell did was to open a telnet terminal and type help...
The main problem with spatial nautilus are twofold. The problem of file browsing was not a problem of file broswing per se, but nautilus was god awful in the file browsing mode.
From day 1 nautilus was a desaster, first it was slow but the functionality was there. Then they took out splitting, then they took out tabbing, then they took out boomarking. What was left was a desaster of a file browser. And then they went the spatial route, which is fine per se, but did hide many important commands in half documented hotkeys and basically made it impossible for the average user, to change the behavior, but hiding it in a registry like config file on how to change the stuff back into almost equally awful nautilus browsing mode.
Gnome has bigger problems than nautilus, which still works for most users. Gnome needs a compound document model, it needs one which works with the existing models (kparts and the openoffice model). Currently the stance is, KDE has something working, the gnome project tries to reinvent the wheel, mostly fails then either dumps the idea alltogether (bonobo for instance) or takes the kde implementation under free desktop and then reimplements it and forces sort of the kde people to use the gnome implementation (happened with the automatization stuff and various other things).
Also gnome needs a decent cd burning frontend, the current frontend is a desaster, same goes for the networking browser...
Yes... but to do that you have to get rid of software patents, and the DMCA.
Ahem OSX is not new... it is just an evolution from NeXTStep which is older than the WinNT line WinXP is based upon and older than Linux. If you take the Mach kernel and the BSD personality into account its roots go way back into the eighties.
means, that you dont have any standard user on the machine where you just have to guess the password. On the other hand sharing the same password for sudo and the normal user, like OSX and Ubuntu do it, is as much as a security risk as having a dedicated root because all you have to find out is how to get into the machine as a normal sudo user.
Luther was very moderate in many ways and even Catholics nowadays have a high opinion of him (he probably would not have any needs for going a separate route nowadays) but he had several mistakes a) his stance towards Witches, yes, Calvinism was awful, but Luther also had a very problematic opinion towards witches, he simply was a child of his times, and also was infected by witch paranoia b) his later writings against jews basically were one of the corner stones which the nazis could built upon in the long run (one of them not the main one) c) His role regarding the farmers revolts is also somewhat problematic, but that is a non issue in this discussion here
Inquisition itself does not have anything to do with witch hunting per se. Although they were involved in that too.
In fact the bigger part of the witch hunting history goes towards the protestants. Believe me, you would not want to live in the protestantic areas of germany after the 30 years war, if you thing, McCarthy was bad, if you think, the current, either you belong to us or you are our enemy attitude is bad. That is nothing compared to what was going on then. Salem is a walk in the park compared to what happened in western europe between 1600 and the mid 17s. Often with famlies totally eradicated just because one neighbour wanted their money and there was a legal way to get rid of them.
The catholic church can be blamed for many things, but definitely not for being the biggest witch hunters. (Actually the stance of many catholics during the worst witch huntings were at the opposite side of affairs)
Actually no real witch hunting occurred in the so called dark middle ages, which mostly were more civilized than the so codern era.
Most of the witch hunting over here in Europe occured after 1600 and endured sort of until around 1750.
The funny thing is, that mostly the catholics are blamed for the witch hunting, but in fact, the catholic church is to blame for many things, but not for being the most evil witch hunters. In fact witch hunting was sort of moderate in catholic countries, while in many protestantic parts it became sort of a plaque, which was even more fueled after the 30 years war, which left a thinned and devastated and basically frightened population.
If the americans speak of Salem, believe me, that is nothing compared to what happened over here, and in the end triggered the age of enlightment.
It in my opinion was the main mistake (besides his later day stance towards jews) of Marthin Luther, that he was bound by his times and could not see in how bogus the whole witch idea is, thus he enforced witch hunting in the long run, in the protestantic areas. (The whole witch idea came originally from greece btw. but never was really that important until the 15 hundreds)
Actually some texts were lost, but the so called dark ages were not that dark. Most of the texts (the most important ones) were copied thousands of times by the byzantine book vendors. They made their way to the arabs and there triggered arab science, which was the most advanced in the world until around 1000AD. Some texts were preserved in western Europe by european monks, but the so called dark ages only were dark in the former western roman parts and germany. Roman civilization still lived on in the Byzantine empire and then in the Ottman empire which basically blended the byzantine culture with its own.
The so called Rennesance (actually it in fact was the second western one, the first one was in the 11th century which was stopped by a plaque) was triggered by scientists and philosophers going to italy while the last years of byzantine decline. (Basically the original trigger was several lectures of Pleton in italy, where he discussed the works of Plato in comparison to Aristoteles, which made the knowledge hungry italians learn greek )
In the end, the complain, so much was lost in the so called dark ages, is totally untrue, civilization lived on continually, it is just a natural kind of thing that some knowledge gets lost on the way.
The problem with gnosticism is, that it was there way before christianity and influenced lots of other religions as well.
One of the reasons the early church dismissed many of those "gospels" was that they had a dubious heritage and they basically just should pave an inroad for gnosticism.
In reading for instance Thomas, you can clearly see the gnostic roots and also some greek influences which are totally in opposite of what you can gather about the personality of jesus in the other gospels.
I would not trust the Gospel of Thomas too much, it is to my knowledge and reading a heavily gnostic influenced piece of work. Gnosticism has been a strong side influence in many religons of the era 200 BC-500AD.
Several parts of it do not even suite to the character Jesus has shown to be in the other gospels, but basically could be rerooted into heavy greek influence of that era. There are probably lots of other gospels during that era, due to my knowledge it sort of was a fashion to write gospels and books back then (some of them with very dubious content regarding the real events). Some people with more knowledge into that stuff might correct me into this, but that is my current state of affairs regarding the knowledge of those things.
I did not use expose until recently, I now put it onto my middle mouse button (wheel pressed), in combination with that one, it is simply awesome, much better than any taskbar I have ever seen.
Actually Windows becomes slower over time, the reason for this, is that Windows has a much tighter integration of the libraries. Once programs start to dump stuff into the system more and more libs are loaded into ram dependend on each other, never to be released, another reason is that versioning is done within the COM objects themselves instead of going the naming mechanism unix does, which means, with every update you basically load another bunch of new minor versions with every com object into never to be properly releasead also.
Add to that the usual slow down problems like virus scanners, software firewalls, application preloaders etc... and you can see the speed going down the drain.
Actually, the Firewall of SP2 is not new, even a plain XP already had the firewall integrated, it just was sort of hidden and turned off by default. All Microsoft basically did in SP2 was to fix thousands of holes and add new user interfaces to the already existing features. (which formerly were reachable under the tcpip tab in the network section)
Actually it really was possible to complete (there are various walkthroughs floating the web, and the game is hosted also somewhere) it just had several problems: There were some mistakes you could make easily which never showed until the last third of the game. The game basically was unforgiving in that area by simply not giving any warning but letting you play further.
The Microsoft side of things is no tad better. The windows upgrades are more frequent and often more expensive, you run into troubles which broken configurations about 10% of the time. And speaking of breaking APIs, that happens even from service pack to service pack, and often Microsoft dumps an entire product line into oblivion once the next competitior arises with another cross platform solution.
.net.
Ask the people who were talked into DCOM, ask the people who constantly run into specs which could be from the Arabic 1001 nights tales.
The next deprecation frontier probably will be the dreadful MFC (the sooner the better)
And .Net will be dumped once the next hype thing comes along and threatens Microsofts monopoly.
To the worst, Apple at least releases working features, Microsoft often releases only marketing ploy interfaces and fixes them years later.
Ask the people who programmed Visual Basic, who now basically can reprogram their stuff for
DCom was such an issue, it did not work for a long time, Microsoft just was selling it, because they needed something to be positioned against cross platform corba (which they saw as a problem back then which could threaten their Windows lock in)
Another one was the sharepoint portal server which in its first incarnation was not usable at all.