Re:Welcome To The New World, Geek Fewl...
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RIAA Bits
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with most of the parent, but as for this:
I for one am still waiting for the following. Every "record" store gets a computer with a couple of outlet points (cd burners firewire connections and such), some terminals, a big HD array say 1 terrabyte (very cheap if you use IDE, it doesn't have to be fast) and a connection to a central network (doesn't have to be the internet for security).
Then all that is needed is for every music owner to catalog their music and make it available on the central network.
I then browse the catalog in the shop and make my selections. Popular songs are already locally available while others are taking from the network, perhaps stored in a cache, and my selection is then burned or put on an mp3 player etc. I then pay the shopkeeper the fee.
This still sounds like I've got to go somewhere to get my music, which IMO is half the problem that filesharing (or buying from iTunes) solves. It could be good for record stores, giving them lower operating costs, but for the customer its lousy. You've got to do all the work you had to before, and you're getting less for it (don't try to tell me that getting mp3s on your iPod or a burned CD-R is even close to getting the actual CD!), though I guess cost passed onto the consumer would drop. Still not much of a competitor to internet-based solutions.
Hahaha!! This is hilarious! I saw this being developed! It was done by a group of undergrad seniors in Boston University's ECE department as their Senior Design project. I actually worked at the bench across from them. It won the "best project" award in senior design this past spring.
Anyway, I never liked it. Firstly because it doesn't do anything. Unless they've done some major work since graduation, it doesn't allow you to actually manipulate files in any way whatsoever. Its strictly read-only. Second I couldn't see how it would possibly improve efficiency. I mean, the only advantage it would seem to have over 2D is that you can see more of the tree, but nothing's labelled (and its not practical to label all those folders, the screen would be covered with text), so you really can't get any useful information out of it. Additionally, they don't show it in the picture, but when names do come up they're at the bottom of the screen (if I remember right) and pretty dissociated from the folder they're supposed to represent. In short, while its kinda neat looking, and the group worked their asses off on it (its a lot of code), I don't think the program is viable in concept or implementation.
Its cool that they got on the/. front page though!
Not that we'll ever know, but I'd be very curious to know how many songs this girl had on her hard drive. By my reckoning, she'd have to have at least 100 albums worth of music to make this $2000 even remotely reasonable (assuming each album is worth $20, which they aren't). So, continuing to be conservative, say each $20 album has 10 songs on it. Brianna should have 1000 songs stored illegally on her computer. 128kbps mp3's are usually about 1MB/minute, so we're talking 3GB of space probably. Is this possible? Sure. Likely? Not very. Single Mom probably didn't buy the greatest computer with the biggest hard disk on the planet, and really what 12 year old is a great musical connoiseur with especially diverse interests? My suspicion is that even at $2000 they're getting screwed, and not just in principle.
I like this idea, though implementing it for a bazillion dialup users might be a bit complicated. Cable/DSL on the other hand... there it just might work. Seems to me it wouldn't be too hard to just build a firewall into the modem itself, have the default configuration be to block all the usual service ports, and let users access it directly with a web interface similar to what Linksys and the others put into those cable/dsl routers. Piece of cake to implement, negligable administration on the part of the ISP. My guess is its really the cable/dsl users causing most of the worm related headaches on the internet anyway.
1+2 = students who turn in good papers that aren't structured perfectly (and you have to admit, there is some fluidity to language) will get marked down, and those who know what bullet points to put in their papers will get good marks, even though the content is crap.
Yes, exactly! I didn't think of that until I read your post, but its 100% true. Back when I used to write (before I became an engineer), I toyed with the language all the time. As a result, I felt I was able to express a lot of thoughts more clearly, assinine grammatical rules be damned, and the vast majority of my teachers loved it (including in college, so I know it wasn't just a bunch of pansy public high school teachers who love everything). This sort of grading won't allow students that sort of freedom at all, and language is really all about what you do to it. Its not a fixed set of rules that always must be adhered to. The best writers flout the rules a bit (look at Mark Twain for an extreme example), and the last thing we want to teach students is to follow the rule book exactly or fail.
Essays have two aspects, spelling/grammar, and content.
True. I agree.
Right now the computer can grade the technical side of a paper, and the teacher can grade the creative side. Now if the essay is for English class, the focus should be on the technical side of papers, so the computer can judge the whole paper from A to F on spelling and grammar.
True, this can be done. Does it make any sense whatsoever to do so? I think not. Essay writing, at least in high school and above, is and should be about clearly expressing an idea. I seriously doubt this program can comprehend the idea being expressed, nevermind make any assertation as to whether or not it is expressed in a clear, rational fashion (yes, I see that they claim the program can do this too, but let's be serious for a minute). Of course, correct spelling and grammar are a major component of writing a clear, understandable essay, and those could easily be checked by a computer program (but please, not by MS Word!). However, since the teacher should be reading the essay anyway to make sure that the student's thoughts make sense, it seems to me it would be just plain lazy for the teacher to not pay attention to the spelling and grammar as he/she reads. Assuming the teacher actually reads the paper (which they should), this is utterly worthless.
First off, why the hell couldn't this have happened 6 years ago when I was a NH highschooler! Though I guess that laptop would have been pretty worthless now anyway...
More importantly, thinking back I can't imagine my high school taking very well to an insurgence of laptops. In my day no faculty or staff member knew a damn thing about computing (except maybe the IT lady), and half of them were deathly afraid to let us use the machines the school had. Christ, I remember my friend getting kicked out of the library because he was looking at some webpage on geocities and the librarian was convinced that geocities was some sort of computer game. In my experience, most people in education are not especially computer-literate, and few of them are going to have any clue what to do with those laptops. That said, they'll be useful for the keyboarding and programming classes, obviously, and I could see them being used in some of the music classes and maybe science as well. So they definitely have a place, and the program DOES alleviate some of the burden on schools to buy computers and related equipment. No sense in maintaining a computer lab full of machines when everyone already has their own. So I guess overall I think this could be a positive thing unless they feel the need to use the computers to teach geometry or something stupid like that.
Oh and I have to strongly object to this statement:
High School/Public School education is a joke in the U.S. Student's don't even know algebra by the time they graduate with A's in math.
Because I received a public school education in the US, and I don't feel I was short-changed in any way. And I sure as hell knew algebra, and not because I have any great love for the subject either. I'm sure some schools are pretty bad (in fact I know some that are), but that definitely doesn't mean they all are. In fact, I bet the bad ones are still a minority, despite how many people bitch about education.
Oh come on now... okay, maybe Madonna is an alright dancer. I don't know, I'm no expert on the subject. Maybe she's even a good dancer. But there's no way, NO WAY she has anything resembling a respectable voice. I'm not going to say she uses those pitch-correcting machines because I don't have any evidence she does, though I wouldn't bet against it. More to the point, though, is that I do know that her voice is very flinty and weak. Remember several years back when she did that movie version of "Evita"? They had to overdub her voice something like 10 times to get a soundlevel that wouldn't sound absolutely pitiful in comparison to the other vocalists. Thats on the order of the number of times Eric Clapton's "Layla" was overdubbed. And if you ask me, she STILL sounds like a little mouse trying to carry a tune. I'm sorry, but I've personally met scores of people with more vocal talent than Madonna, none of whom were professional singers and most were not likely to become professionals. Madonna MIGHT be more vocally skilled than 99.0% of people, but honestly, there's nothing she does that can't be taught to just about anyone.
Probably true enough, though I think there's a good sized group of people who just don't like the fact that Microsoft's getting their money. And of course, you're just getting that damned "Recovery CD" from Dell anyway, so if you're going to exclusively use Linux on that box it doesn't do you a damned bit of good to get your free copy of Windows.
Thats loser talk! The black plague can be fun for all ages! Come on, Monty Python made it funny with all the "Bring out your dead!" and "I'm not quite dead yet!" and so forth. If thats possible, SURELY it can be made into an entertaining interactive simulation, or maybe a puzzle game, or RTS.
Nooo, wait! I've got it. MMORPG! You could be one of the cart pushers, or someone trying not to get infected, or you could search for a cure. There could be a PvP server where you can play as the rats that spread the plague. How could you NOT pay $9.95/mo for that?
That sounds to me like the ISP could sign its own certificates so that its users could communicate with its AMTP server, but the ISP itself would still have to have a certificate that was universally recognized (i.e. not self signed), or nobody would accept mail from that ISP or any of its users. Likewise, I can run my own SMTP server right now at no particular cost to me, and it will cooperate nicely with virtually all other SMTP servers out there just so long as I don't get blacklisted or something. With AMTP I would have to get a certificate from a CA, or else AOL, for example, would not trust my server and would drop any mail I sent to someuser@aol.com. I could sign my own certificate, sure, but I see no evidence that other AMTP servers would necessarily accept that as valid. In fact if they did, the whole system would be pointless, and we might as well continue using SMTP.
You can write reliable software for a plane, thats true... but a plane is a relatively simple, relatively isolated system. It does a limited number of things in a limited number of ways, and therefore it can be tested exhaustively and completely. Thats simply not the case on a desktop computer, however. You can't exhaustively test a comsumer operating system because you can't possibly know everything that will be done to it. The same is true of a word processing suite, a web browser, various server programs, and pretty much all the software you and I use every day. Unless we want to abolish the whole idea of the personal computer, and move back to a system of appliances that have very limited functionality, I just don't see how you could reasonably expect the same reliability from your PC that you do from a bridge or an airplane. Even then, I defy anyone to design a web browsing appliance that can correctly handle all (or nearly all) the websites out there and be guaranteed not to crash or have any other undesirable behavior. And more importantly, design that appliance so that it cannot be hacked or cracked in any way.
In fact, that has me thinking a little bit... I'd bet a skilled hacker or cracker or what have you would almost certainly be able to break the aforementioned aircraft software. The reason they don't is because they can't get to it. So therefore on a structure like the internet, where everybody is connected to everybody else, secure and reliable computing is just plain impossible. Unless of course you want to radically redesign the internet, but I for one can't even concieve of what you could do to fix that problem while still allowing a somewhat free exchange of information.
>And if his punishment is harsh, so what? If he's found guilty, he's a criminal. He deserves whatever he gets at that point.
NO NO NO NO! He deserves a punishment fitting the crime. If he wrote one variant, he should NOT be incriminated based on the damage done by ALL the variants. Sure he should get into serious trouble. Sure he should probably do some jail time. But my fear is that people will get carried away because of all the virus/worm activity lately and give him a lot worse than he's due. We'd like to think the justice system is above that, but sadly thats not always the case.
You could do that... but this is semiconductors, not wires, so I guess you'd have to redesign your basic logic gates to flow that way. I mean, no way is the normal CMOS inverter going to "just work" with negative voltage... all it can do is output high or low. If I recall a negative input would just give you low, or maybe break the thing. So basically the problem is, as my professors always put it, that you'd need to redesign virtually all of your logic circuits, and your various adders and whatnot. We've spent a lot of time and effort over the years making binary operations efficient. That would all have to be done over for multilevel logic. I guess if we get to the point where we cannot under any circumstances make silicon go faster, then it might be worthwhile to try trinary or something like that, but until then the binary guys will just keep getting faster while you're trying to get your trinary gates up to respectable speed.
Man, you're getting ripped off. At my university Windows and Visual Studio were free, as was most other Microsoft software (Project, SQL Server, etc.).
Of course, they still charged $80 or so for Office, so I guess maybe we weren't that well off.
Thats the classic argument, but lots of things in Computer Science are not entirely about algorithm design and analysis. I find that as Microsoft products become increasingly ubiquitous in academia, people tend to get more and more attached to them, knowingly or not. And its not all the same. I had a "Software Design" class, and it was all MFC and Visual Studio, and it drove me nuts, because most of the class really had nothing to do with anything but Windows. I guess on some level every system has its own version of "events" or "windows messages" or whatever, but when you use one system exclusively you tend to gloss through the general concepts to get to the details. Those details will allow you to do all the fun things, but they're only important if you're using Windows and MFC, and have no applicability outside. I mean, in my working with Linux, why the hell do I care whether OnPrepareDC() or OnPaint() or OnDraw() gets called first when you draw a window?
This software design class wasn't taught very well, and had little to do with design IMO, but I think its a perfect example of what happens when Microsoft gives your department unlimited free software, as it did to mine. Fortunately, it was only the one class. The rest are (for now) relatively untainted.
Maybe you have a different definition of arena show than I do... I'd call the Fleet Center in Boston (where the Celtics/Bruins play) an arena, and therefore I would classify the show Eric Clapton did there as an arena show. When I went to that arena show I fully and rightly expected to see a display of musicianship, and no, I was not disappointed.
I dunno... seems to me if you wanted to make sure the US was the leader in space technology, the first thing you'd do is tell NASA and their funding to promptly go to hell, or maybe make them into a regulatory agency. I mean c'mon... they've been pushing this whole "space shuttle" thing way too far. Smarter people than me will tell you it was an abortion of an idea to start with, and its STILL being used despite its exorbitant cost and inefficiency for most tasks. Some would say that if NASA had more funding they could build something better, but thats what they were supposed to be doing when they designed the shuttle in the first place. Seems to me there's no pressure on NASA to be practical or cost efficient, which is whats really needed.
I'd say theres a difference between something working and something working well. Recent versions of windows (2000/XP) tend to work, unlike previous versions where the tendency was to break with (maybe linearly) increasing frequency until you just get fed up. Now, I should say that I use Linux almost exclusively these days, and when I do go use a Windows machine, I always, ALWAYS feel the difference. Windows chugs right along and does what its supposed to do, but it does those things badly, or slowly, or grossly. Nowadays, if I'm doing anything substantial on a Windows machine (say perhaps I'm installing a couple of programs, listening to music, downloading a couple of files, and browsing good 'ole slashdot) I feel the system grind virtually to a halt under the weight of the tasks I've given it. And the reason I'm trying to do all these things at once is of course because I do so all the time on my Linux box. Windows is performing the tasks I've given it, and its not going to crash, but its taking its sweet time and pissing me off when the UI stops responding the way I want it to, or when I can't get another browser window open, or something like that. Of course, I think half the problem is virusscanner-induced latency, which you naturally don't have in Linux. But anyway... I guess what I'm saying is while a lot of people bash Windows because its fun and everybody will agree with you, there are some real underlying annoyances in the system that you don't really notice until you've used a few other operating systems. Heck, Linux isn't anywheres near perfect either, but I find it less annoying than Windows while still giving me enough hardware compatibility to be useful.
The other factor is hardware. What hardware you have makes all the difference in how your OS will behave. Thats as true for Windows as it is for, say, BeOS. For instance, I'm having this real bitch of a problem on a relative's win2k machine where installing sp4 causes the system to bluescreen on boot. SP3, 2, and 1 all ran fine on the exact same hardware, but Microsoft's updates have evidently broken a driver (a driver they probably didn't write, so I guess its not entirely their fault), but the point is that because I have that piece of hardware, the system is now utterly unusable. Other hardware/driver issues can cause instability and all of that, which is sometimes very hard to debug and so you end up thinking Windows is at fault. I suspect most of your people who have used win2k/xp and have had recurring problems with it have something like that going on.
Huh? It's Linux. The x86 market is half the point.
From the article:
"It will run on existing PC hardware, so CIOs can upgrade at their own pace and budgets," says Ulander. "We will allow interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and allow file and print services on an existing Microsoft server infrastructure. And if you're already using a Microsoft back end, it will handle that too. It's about giving CIOs a choice."
I'm in Brookline... no outages here either, and AFAIK none in the area. Actually that surprises me a bit, since a big chunk of Massachusetts' power comes from Niagra Falls via the big DC lines in Ayer and Tewksbury MA. Guess the Seabrook nuclear plant brought its A-game today.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most of the parent, but as for this:
This still sounds like I've got to go somewhere to get my music, which IMO is half the problem that filesharing (or buying from iTunes) solves. It could be good for record stores, giving them lower operating costs, but for the customer its lousy. You've got to do all the work you had to before, and you're getting less for it (don't try to tell me that getting mp3s on your iPod or a burned CD-R is even close to getting the actual CD!), though I guess cost passed onto the consumer would drop. Still not much of a competitor to internet-based solutions.
Hahaha!! This is hilarious! I saw this being developed! It was done by a group of undergrad seniors in Boston University's ECE department as their Senior Design project. I actually worked at the bench across from them. It won the "best project" award in senior design this past spring.
/. front page though!
Anyway, I never liked it. Firstly because it doesn't do anything. Unless they've done some major work since graduation, it doesn't allow you to actually manipulate files in any way whatsoever. Its strictly read-only. Second I couldn't see how it would possibly improve efficiency. I mean, the only advantage it would seem to have over 2D is that you can see more of the tree, but nothing's labelled (and its not practical to label all those folders, the screen would be covered with text), so you really can't get any useful information out of it. Additionally, they don't show it in the picture, but when names do come up they're at the bottom of the screen (if I remember right) and pretty dissociated from the folder they're supposed to represent. In short, while its kinda neat looking, and the group worked their asses off on it (its a lot of code), I don't think the program is viable in concept or implementation.
Its cool that they got on the
Not that we'll ever know, but I'd be very curious to know how many songs this girl had on her hard drive. By my reckoning, she'd have to have at least 100 albums worth of music to make this $2000 even remotely reasonable (assuming each album is worth $20, which they aren't). So, continuing to be conservative, say each $20 album has 10 songs on it. Brianna should have 1000 songs stored illegally on her computer. 128kbps mp3's are usually about 1MB/minute, so we're talking 3GB of space probably. Is this possible? Sure. Likely? Not very. Single Mom probably didn't buy the greatest computer with the biggest hard disk on the planet, and really what 12 year old is a great musical connoiseur with especially diverse interests? My suspicion is that even at $2000 they're getting screwed, and not just in principle.
I like this idea, though implementing it for a bazillion dialup users might be a bit complicated. Cable/DSL on the other hand... there it just might work. Seems to me it wouldn't be too hard to just build a firewall into the modem itself, have the default configuration be to block all the usual service ports, and let users access it directly with a web interface similar to what Linksys and the others put into those cable/dsl routers. Piece of cake to implement, negligable administration on the part of the ISP. My guess is its really the cable/dsl users causing most of the worm related headaches on the internet anyway.
Yes, exactly! I didn't think of that until I read your post, but its 100% true. Back when I used to write (before I became an engineer), I toyed with the language all the time. As a result, I felt I was able to express a lot of thoughts more clearly, assinine grammatical rules be damned, and the vast majority of my teachers loved it (including in college, so I know it wasn't just a bunch of pansy public high school teachers who love everything). This sort of grading won't allow students that sort of freedom at all, and language is really all about what you do to it. Its not a fixed set of rules that always must be adhered to. The best writers flout the rules a bit (look at Mark Twain for an extreme example), and the last thing we want to teach students is to follow the rule book exactly or fail.
True. I agree.
True, this can be done. Does it make any sense whatsoever to do so? I think not. Essay writing, at least in high school and above, is and should be about clearly expressing an idea. I seriously doubt this program can comprehend the idea being expressed, nevermind make any assertation as to whether or not it is expressed in a clear, rational fashion (yes, I see that they claim the program can do this too, but let's be serious for a minute). Of course, correct spelling and grammar are a major component of writing a clear, understandable essay, and those could easily be checked by a computer program (but please, not by MS Word!). However, since the teacher should be reading the essay anyway to make sure that the student's thoughts make sense, it seems to me it would be just plain lazy for the teacher to not pay attention to the spelling and grammar as he/she reads. Assuming the teacher actually reads the paper (which they should), this is utterly worthless.
Funny how corporate donors are never forthcoming when you want to buy books
Oh come on now... okay, maybe Madonna is an alright dancer. I don't know, I'm no expert on the subject. Maybe she's even a good dancer. But there's no way, NO WAY she has anything resembling a respectable voice. I'm not going to say she uses those pitch-correcting machines because I don't have any evidence she does, though I wouldn't bet against it. More to the point, though, is that I do know that her voice is very flinty and weak. Remember several years back when she did that movie version of "Evita"? They had to overdub her voice something like 10 times to get a soundlevel that wouldn't sound absolutely pitiful in comparison to the other vocalists. Thats on the order of the number of times Eric Clapton's "Layla" was overdubbed. And if you ask me, she STILL sounds like a little mouse trying to carry a tune. I'm sorry, but I've personally met scores of people with more vocal talent than Madonna, none of whom were professional singers and most were not likely to become professionals. Madonna MIGHT be more vocally skilled than 99.0% of people, but honestly, there's nothing she does that can't be taught to just about anyone.
Probably true enough, though I think there's a good sized group of people who just don't like the fact that Microsoft's getting their money. And of course, you're just getting that damned "Recovery CD" from Dell anyway, so if you're going to exclusively use Linux on that box it doesn't do you a damned bit of good to get your free copy of Windows.
Thats loser talk! The black plague can be fun for all ages! Come on, Monty Python made it funny with all the "Bring out your dead!" and "I'm not quite dead yet!" and so forth. If thats possible, SURELY it can be made into an entertaining interactive simulation, or maybe a puzzle game, or RTS.
Nooo, wait! I've got it. MMORPG! You could be one of the cart pushers, or someone trying not to get infected, or you could search for a cure. There could be a PvP server where you can play as the rats that spread the plague. How could you NOT pay $9.95/mo for that?
That sounds to me like the ISP could sign its own certificates so that its users could communicate with its AMTP server, but the ISP itself would still have to have a certificate that was universally recognized (i.e. not self signed), or nobody would accept mail from that ISP or any of its users. Likewise, I can run my own SMTP server right now at no particular cost to me, and it will cooperate nicely with virtually all other SMTP servers out there just so long as I don't get blacklisted or something. With AMTP I would have to get a certificate from a CA, or else AOL, for example, would not trust my server and would drop any mail I sent to someuser@aol.com. I could sign my own certificate, sure, but I see no evidence that other AMTP servers would necessarily accept that as valid. In fact if they did, the whole system would be pointless, and we might as well continue using SMTP.
You can write reliable software for a plane, thats true... but a plane is a relatively simple, relatively isolated system. It does a limited number of things in a limited number of ways, and therefore it can be tested exhaustively and completely. Thats simply not the case on a desktop computer, however. You can't exhaustively test a comsumer operating system because you can't possibly know everything that will be done to it. The same is true of a word processing suite, a web browser, various server programs, and pretty much all the software you and I use every day. Unless we want to abolish the whole idea of the personal computer, and move back to a system of appliances that have very limited functionality, I just don't see how you could reasonably expect the same reliability from your PC that you do from a bridge or an airplane. Even then, I defy anyone to design a web browsing appliance that can correctly handle all (or nearly all) the websites out there and be guaranteed not to crash or have any other undesirable behavior. And more importantly, design that appliance so that it cannot be hacked or cracked in any way.
In fact, that has me thinking a little bit... I'd bet a skilled hacker or cracker or what have you would almost certainly be able to break the aforementioned aircraft software. The reason they don't is because they can't get to it. So therefore on a structure like the internet, where everybody is connected to everybody else, secure and reliable computing is just plain impossible. Unless of course you want to radically redesign the internet, but I for one can't even concieve of what you could do to fix that problem while still allowing a somewhat free exchange of information.
>And if his punishment is harsh, so what? If he's found guilty, he's a criminal. He deserves whatever he gets at that point.
NO NO NO NO! He deserves a punishment fitting the crime. If he wrote one variant, he should NOT be incriminated based on the damage done by ALL the variants. Sure he should get into serious trouble. Sure he should probably do some jail time. But my fear is that people will get carried away because of all the virus/worm activity lately and give him a lot worse than he's due. We'd like to think the justice system is above that, but sadly thats not always the case.
Goddamnit, and here I already posted before I could mod up your post...
stupid anti-abuse moderation system
You could do that... but this is semiconductors, not wires, so I guess you'd have to redesign your basic logic gates to flow that way. I mean, no way is the normal CMOS inverter going to "just work" with negative voltage... all it can do is output high or low. If I recall a negative input would just give you low, or maybe break the thing. So basically the problem is, as my professors always put it, that you'd need to redesign virtually all of your logic circuits, and your various adders and whatnot. We've spent a lot of time and effort over the years making binary operations efficient. That would all have to be done over for multilevel logic. I guess if we get to the point where we cannot under any circumstances make silicon go faster, then it might be worthwhile to try trinary or something like that, but until then the binary guys will just keep getting faster while you're trying to get your trinary gates up to respectable speed.
Nah, all the viruswriters in the world can't take the place of even one security-minded lunatic like Theo DeRaadt.
Man, you're getting ripped off. At my university Windows and Visual Studio were free, as was most other Microsoft software (Project, SQL Server, etc.).
Of course, they still charged $80 or so for Office, so I guess maybe we weren't that well off.
Thats the classic argument, but lots of things in Computer Science are not entirely about algorithm design and analysis. I find that as Microsoft products become increasingly ubiquitous in academia, people tend to get more and more attached to them, knowingly or not. And its not all the same. I had a "Software Design" class, and it was all MFC and Visual Studio, and it drove me nuts, because most of the class really had nothing to do with anything but Windows. I guess on some level every system has its own version of "events" or "windows messages" or whatever, but when you use one system exclusively you tend to gloss through the general concepts to get to the details. Those details will allow you to do all the fun things, but they're only important if you're using Windows and MFC, and have no applicability outside. I mean, in my working with Linux, why the hell do I care whether OnPrepareDC() or OnPaint() or OnDraw() gets called first when you draw a window?
This software design class wasn't taught very well, and had little to do with design IMO, but I think its a perfect example of what happens when Microsoft gives your department unlimited free software, as it did to mine. Fortunately, it was only the one class. The rest are (for now) relatively untainted.
Maybe you have a different definition of arena show than I do... I'd call the Fleet Center in Boston (where the Celtics/Bruins play) an arena, and therefore I would classify the show Eric Clapton did there as an arena show. When I went to that arena show I fully and rightly expected to see a display of musicianship, and no, I was not disappointed.
I dunno... seems to me if you wanted to make sure the US was the leader in space technology, the first thing you'd do is tell NASA and their funding to promptly go to hell, or maybe make them into a regulatory agency. I mean c'mon... they've been pushing this whole "space shuttle" thing way too far. Smarter people than me will tell you it was an abortion of an idea to start with, and its STILL being used despite its exorbitant cost and inefficiency for most tasks. Some would say that if NASA had more funding they could build something better, but thats what they were supposed to be doing when they designed the shuttle in the first place. Seems to me there's no pressure on NASA to be practical or cost efficient, which is whats really needed.
I'd say theres a difference between something working and something working well. Recent versions of windows (2000/XP) tend to work, unlike previous versions where the tendency was to break with (maybe linearly) increasing frequency until you just get fed up. Now, I should say that I use Linux almost exclusively these days, and when I do go use a Windows machine, I always, ALWAYS feel the difference. Windows chugs right along and does what its supposed to do, but it does those things badly, or slowly, or grossly. Nowadays, if I'm doing anything substantial on a Windows machine (say perhaps I'm installing a couple of programs, listening to music, downloading a couple of files, and browsing good 'ole slashdot) I feel the system grind virtually to a halt under the weight of the tasks I've given it. And the reason I'm trying to do all these things at once is of course because I do so all the time on my Linux box. Windows is performing the tasks I've given it, and its not going to crash, but its taking its sweet time and pissing me off when the UI stops responding the way I want it to, or when I can't get another browser window open, or something like that. Of course, I think half the problem is virusscanner-induced latency, which you naturally don't have in Linux. But anyway... I guess what I'm saying is while a lot of people bash Windows because its fun and everybody will agree with you, there are some real underlying annoyances in the system that you don't really notice until you've used a few other operating systems. Heck, Linux isn't anywheres near perfect either, but I find it less annoying than Windows while still giving me enough hardware compatibility to be useful.
The other factor is hardware. What hardware you have makes all the difference in how your OS will behave. Thats as true for Windows as it is for, say, BeOS. For instance, I'm having this real bitch of a problem on a relative's win2k machine where installing sp4 causes the system to bluescreen on boot. SP3, 2, and 1 all ran fine on the exact same hardware, but Microsoft's updates have evidently broken a driver (a driver they probably didn't write, so I guess its not entirely their fault), but the point is that because I have that piece of hardware, the system is now utterly unusable. Other hardware/driver issues can cause instability and all of that, which is sometimes very hard to debug and so you end up thinking Windows is at fault. I suspect most of your people who have used win2k/xp and have had recurring problems with it have something like that going on.
Huh? It's Linux. The x86 market is half the point. From the article: "It will run on existing PC hardware, so CIOs can upgrade at their own pace and budgets," says Ulander. "We will allow interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and allow file and print services on an existing Microsoft server infrastructure. And if you're already using a Microsoft back end, it will handle that too. It's about giving CIOs a choice."
>The only benefit for power users at least is that you would have all your messages whereever you go.
*cough* *cough* IMAP *cough*
I'm in Brookline... no outages here either, and AFAIK none in the area. Actually that surprises me a bit, since a big chunk of Massachusetts' power comes from Niagra Falls via the big DC lines in Ayer and Tewksbury MA. Guess the Seabrook nuclear plant brought its A-game today.