If AOL chose Microsoft, I'm sure Microsoft would mess it up. Some way or another AOL customer's computers/credit card info would get in the hand of the bad guys. Or at the very least, they would display really obnoxious ads which would turn even more AOL subscribers away. In a perfect world Microsoft would mess up so bad to kill AOL and then everyone would get a real ISP.
Unfortunately, google won the contract. Now Google has to partner with this dinosaur ISP and get dragged down by it, just like Time Warner. What made AOL great in the beginning was the access to such a wide variety of content. The WWW made that content obsolete and now AOL is only riding on all of its older subscribers and its name brand recognition.
The Internet is coming of age. Its time for AOL to either change or die. I hope, for Google's sake, that it's not part of the latter.
Why didn't John Seigenthaler edit his own page with correct information? Instead of sueing wikipedia he could have just added the "correct" information himself. Isn't that the point of wikipedia? What don't I understand here?
Hi. We're really smart scientists from Russia.
Cool!
We've got some cool ideas on how to transfer humans back and forth from space.
Great!
We've done all of the design work.
Wow!
Now give us money so we can build it.
No.
Fudge.
Who needs websites when all of the worlds information is nicely organized with meta information in a single database? How long do you think it'll be before google imports all of wikipedia? They're allready trying to import all books and tv shows. And once they get GooglePay hooked in, and everyone can buy and sell anyything through a google base type of interface... what will happen to amazon? Google is taking over the internet slowly but surely. If I were Gates, I'd be pissing in my pants.
Its the MIT vs Bell labs debate.
MIT's programming style was to always make the best most abstract software available. They never have bugs and its always revolutionary. The problem is that it never gets done.
Bell labs software didn't do what it was supposed to, had a ton of bugs, but was always the first in the hands of the user.
Many believe in bell labs style because user's expectations are much lower. When an update comes around they are extremly greatful.
Force the ports two 10Mbps. Most switches have the capability to change speed on a port by port basis. The students don't really need the faster LAN access. And if anyone complains then just switch that individual user back to 100mbps. It doesn't permanently solve your problems but it'll work.
Without ray-tracing hardware I find it very unlikely that games will have photorealism any time soon (next 5 years at least). Movies can't even do photorealistic rendering perfectly and they use ray-tracing.
How about digital signal processing and information theory? These areas are by far the most interesting (to me), CS only occasionally touches on them, and they have very little to do with hardware electronics.
They are so mathamatically perfect that I wonder why anyone studies anything else.
Problem solving skills are what is needed in any environment; CS, ECE, or even business it doesn't matter. I feel that to build those skills your best option is to dive into mathamatical theory. From what I've seen (after four years in Cornell engineering) is that ECE (or EE) gives you the best theoretical background for any engineering.
You should really have a good understanding of fourier/laplace analysis (i.e. know the difference between a DTFT and a DFT). If you learn those well, you'll understand that they are really linear transformations from one basis to another. Once you really see that, you can start advancing on to more advanced topics such as estimation (ML/Kalman filtering/Periodigram etc.). All of these things are taught in a CS degree but they go much more deeply into the theory in ECE.
In CS they teach you how, in ECE they teach you why! Even though experience helps you in the short term, it is the theory that makes you smarter. Stay as abstract as you possibly can, don't settle to learn anything useful until you need to!
I would also like to mention that everyone gives Microsoft s#!@ for mentioning a phrase like that ("nothing they do ever works, haha"...lame), but when linux developers mention it, then everyone rejoices.
Speculation, speculation, speculation. No one really knows what the licensing scheme of Metro will be (probably not microsoft either). This article and comment tree is just another giant slashdot troll.
What about the other guy who write code with a tab equaling three spaces instead of four,... or five, or whatever. You are the bane of our existance
But seriously, I don't understand why tabs have become such an issue. Any modern editor should be able to look at code and figure out the tabbing scheme and adapt it to the user settings. It could do a simple parse and look at what is at the begining of each new line. After looking at a few lines, it wouldn't be too difficult to figure out what the tab-convention is.
I don't understand why people don't use more descriptive variable names. For something stupidly simple like a counter in a 'for' loop, the iterating variable could easily be 'ctr' instead of 'c'. There is zero performance hit and everyone understands the code more clearly. TWO LETTERS, come on man!
Going further... in c++ member functions and variables should be more descriptive. For instance, in a variable length array class, (mMaxArrayLength, mCurrentArrayLength) are much much better than (max, len) which is the common lexicon.
I feel (at least in c++) that documentation should only be used to explain high level functionality, the inner workings of a fucntion/method should be evident by the variable/method/class names. It doesn't add code size or decrease performance in any way. And, with the advent of copy and paste, it doesn't really slow development time either.
BUT.... Even more important than that is consistancy. Whatever coding/documenting style is chosen for a particular project, for god sakes, stick with it. Nine out of ten coding/documenting styles will be exactly the same, with little changes here and there. The most important thing is be consistant with the whole project.
In nearly every review I read about Longhorn all they mention are the new graphics engine (avalon), and their new file system (winfs). (Honestly, who really cares about the new graphics engine? I'm perfectly comfortable in a shell. ooh animated windows)
The file system is pretty cool, but the glaring ommision in any review is their new messaging subsystem. Indigo will provide an even easier way for computers to communicate. In fact, it will be just as easy to create a native application as a network application.
Even though the average user probably wont see the difference, new software will be more seemlesly internet based than ever before!
the whole buying and selling on everquest isn't much different from buying and selling cards. Magic cards can get extremly expensive and people gladly toss over huge amounts of money to get a good deck.
I agree with you that testing is extremly expensive. At Microsoft only about half of their full-time programmers are contributing new code to products. The rest (literally thousands of programmers) are writing automated test code to make sure everything is working properly.
"sounds like a great way to get cheap qualified labor"
Honestly, what do you know. Google give very competitive offers. Not to mention their perks...
If you really want a good inside Google article, someone should write about their food. When I visited their headquarters I was baraged by excellent gormet food available all day. In addition, their snack bars are at nearly every turn and feature every type of candy, beverage, nut, and fruit imaginable.
From the replies I've seen to my post, it seems that people have been taking my Porche analogy a little bit too seriously.
In my post I was not arguing whether a Porche is better than a Taurus, or Linux is better than Microsoft. I was saying that Microsoft is capable of competing against Linux even if Microsoft's software costs money. I just don't see Microsoft going anywhere in the long term. I also don't think that its fair to say that the only way they will last is by being anti-competitive and evil. (As a caveat to that statement, I'm sure they will be evil sometimes.)
I was ambiguous when I said that Linux is "free". The "freedom" part of Linux can be considered an additional feature of the platform. However freedom with software doesn't get you anywhere if the software is complete crap, you might as well write it over yourself. The freedom has to be coupled with great software to properly compete.
People make a really big deal out of free. But if one product is better than the other -and I won't argue whether win. or linux is better- than why not pay for it. People pay more for a Porche than a Taurus because a Porche is better. If there was ever a car which was entirely free, people would still pay for the Porche.
The argument shouldn't be: Linux is better because it is free. It should be: Microsoft's higher price is not enough to justify the additional features one gets from it. If someone paid you a hundred dollars to use an operating system and it was really bad, most people probably wouldn't use it. The price, whether it be $-100, $0, $100, or $1000 is meaningless. However weighing that price to the given feature set is what is important.
Microsoft is completly capable of competing against Linux in the long term and writing them off as some ageing dinosaur is not accurate.
No I dont work for MS, Yes I'm running Linux on my laptop, m6811 fedora core 3... hot
Slashdot Mirror
Errr... Last time I checked I was still getting about 50 spam messages a day.
If AOL chose Microsoft, I'm sure Microsoft would mess it up. Some way or another AOL customer's computers/credit card info would get in the hand of the bad guys. Or at the very least, they would display really obnoxious ads which would turn even more AOL subscribers away. In a perfect world Microsoft would mess up so bad to kill AOL and then everyone would get a real ISP.
Unfortunately, google won the contract. Now Google has to partner with this dinosaur ISP and get dragged down by it, just like Time Warner. What made AOL great in the beginning was the access to such a wide variety of content. The WWW made that content obsolete and now AOL is only riding on all of its older subscribers and its name brand recognition.
The Internet is coming of age. Its time for AOL to either change or die. I hope, for Google's sake, that it's not part of the latter.
Why didn't John Seigenthaler edit his own page with correct information? Instead of sueing wikipedia he could have just added the "correct" information himself. Isn't that the point of wikipedia? What don't I understand here?
Hi. We're really smart scientists from Russia. Cool! We've got some cool ideas on how to transfer humans back and forth from space. Great! We've done all of the design work. Wow! Now give us money so we can build it. No. Fudge.
Who needs websites when all of the worlds information is nicely organized with meta information in a single database? How long do you think it'll be before google imports all of wikipedia? They're allready trying to import all books and tv shows. And once they get GooglePay hooked in, and everyone can buy and sell anyything through a google base type of interface... what will happen to amazon? Google is taking over the internet slowly but surely. If I were Gates, I'd be pissing in my pants.
Its the MIT vs Bell labs debate. MIT's programming style was to always make the best most abstract software available. They never have bugs and its always revolutionary. The problem is that it never gets done. Bell labs software didn't do what it was supposed to, had a ton of bugs, but was always the first in the hands of the user. Many believe in bell labs style because user's expectations are much lower. When an update comes around they are extremly greatful.
Force the ports two 10Mbps. Most switches have the capability to change speed on a port by port basis. The students don't really need the faster LAN access. And if anyone complains then just switch that individual user back to 100mbps. It doesn't permanently solve your problems but it'll work.
That makes sense. But why is it better than Flash?
But once we get to photorealism,
Without ray-tracing hardware I find it very unlikely that games will have photorealism any time soon (next 5 years at least). Movies can't even do photorealistic rendering perfectly and they use ray-tracing.
How about digital signal processing and information theory? These areas are by far the most interesting (to me), CS only occasionally touches on them, and they have very little to do with hardware electronics.
They are so mathamatically perfect that I wonder why anyone studies anything else.
"Do what you love, and you will kick ass and take names and regardless of how thin the market gets"
Oh another inspired slashdoter. Don't you wish we could all be this happily ignorant?
Problem solving skills are what is needed in any environment; CS, ECE, or even business it doesn't matter. I feel that to build those skills your best option is to dive into mathamatical theory. From what I've seen (after four years in Cornell engineering) is that ECE (or EE) gives you the best theoretical background for any engineering.
You should really have a good understanding of fourier/laplace analysis (i.e. know the difference between a DTFT and a DFT). If you learn those well, you'll understand that they are really linear transformations from one basis to another. Once you really see that, you can start advancing on to more advanced topics such as estimation (ML/Kalman filtering/Periodigram etc.). All of these things are taught in a CS degree but they go much more deeply into the theory in ECE.
In CS they teach you how, in ECE they teach you why! Even though experience helps you in the short term, it is the theory that makes you smarter.
Stay as abstract as you possibly can, don't settle to learn anything useful until you need to!
I would also like to mention that everyone gives Microsoft s#!@ for mentioning a phrase like that ("nothing they do ever works, haha"...lame), but when linux developers mention it, then everyone rejoices.
Speculation, speculation, speculation. No one really knows what the licensing scheme of Metro will be (probably not microsoft either). This article and comment tree is just another giant slashdot troll.
sorry for trolling myself.
What about the other guy who write code with a tab equaling three spaces instead of four,... or five, or whatever. You are the bane of our existance
But seriously, I don't understand why tabs have become such an issue. Any modern editor should be able to look at code and figure out the tabbing scheme and adapt it to the user settings. It could do a simple parse and look at what is at the begining of each new line. After looking at a few lines, it wouldn't be too difficult to figure out what the tab-convention is.
I don't understand why people don't use more descriptive variable names. For something stupidly simple like a counter in a 'for' loop, the iterating variable could easily be 'ctr' instead of 'c'. There is zero performance hit and everyone understands the code more clearly. TWO LETTERS, come on man!
Going further... in c++ member functions and variables should be more descriptive. For instance, in a variable length array class, (mMaxArrayLength, mCurrentArrayLength) are much much better than (max, len) which is the common lexicon.
I feel (at least in c++) that documentation should only be used to explain high level functionality, the inner workings of a fucntion/method should be evident by the variable/method/class names. It doesn't add code size or decrease performance in any way. And, with the advent of copy and paste, it doesn't really slow development time either.
BUT.... Even more important than that is consistancy. Whatever coding/documenting style is chosen for a particular project, for god sakes, stick with it. Nine out of ten coding/documenting styles will be exactly the same, with little changes here and there. The most important thing is be consistant with the whole project.
end of rant
In nearly every review I read about Longhorn all they mention are the new graphics engine (avalon), and their new file system (winfs).
(Honestly, who really cares about the new graphics engine? I'm perfectly comfortable in a shell. ooh animated windows)
The file system is pretty cool, but the glaring ommision in any review is their new messaging subsystem. Indigo will provide an even easier way for computers to communicate. In fact, it will be just as easy to create a native application as a network application.
Even though the average user probably wont see the difference, new software will be more seemlesly internet based than ever before!
the whole buying and selling on everquest isn't much different from buying and selling cards. Magic cards can get extremly expensive and people gladly toss over huge amounts of money to get a good deck.
manual.txt: one big text file. convert all your graphics into ascii art. someway lock the file so its only viewable in notepad.
I agree with you that testing is extremly expensive. At Microsoft only about half of their full-time programmers are contributing new code to products. The rest (literally thousands of programmers) are writing automated test code to make sure everything is working properly.
Shouldn't the two nerd schools team up and pull pranks on a jock school? All of this seems so counter-productive.
How is this any different than a half hour tv-ad? Microsoft just wants to make money, so for them I understand this move entirely.
But is it naive for me to hope that most Americans will see through this and realize that their watching a very expensive marketing pitch?
This type of advertisements hidden in a semi-reputable publication (I know MTV may not be reputable but it has a good following) makes me sick.
"sounds like a great way to get cheap qualified labor"
Honestly, what do you know. Google give very competitive offers. Not to mention their perks...
If you really want a good inside Google article, someone should write about their food. When I visited their headquarters I was baraged by excellent gormet food available all day. In addition, their snack bars are at nearly every turn and feature every type of candy, beverage, nut, and fruit imaginable.
From the replies I've seen to my post, it seems that people have been taking my Porche analogy a little bit too seriously.
In my post I was not arguing whether a Porche is better than a Taurus, or Linux is better than Microsoft. I was saying that Microsoft is capable of competing against Linux even if Microsoft's software costs money. I just don't see Microsoft going anywhere in the long term. I also don't think that its fair to say that the only way they will last is by being anti-competitive and evil. (As a caveat to that statement, I'm sure they will be evil sometimes.)
I was ambiguous when I said that Linux is "free". The "freedom" part of Linux can be considered an additional feature of the platform. However freedom with software doesn't get you anywhere if the software is complete crap, you might as well write it over yourself. The freedom has to be coupled with great software to properly compete.
People make a really big deal out of free. But if one product is better than the other -and I won't argue whether win. or linux is better- than why not pay for it. People pay more for a Porche than a Taurus because a Porche is better. If there was ever a car which was entirely free, people would still pay for the Porche.
The argument shouldn't be: Linux is better because it is free. It should be: Microsoft's higher price is not enough to justify the additional features one gets from it. If someone paid you a hundred dollars to use an operating system and it was really bad, most people probably wouldn't use it. The price, whether it be $-100, $0, $100, or $1000 is meaningless. However weighing that price to the given feature set is what is important.
Microsoft is completly capable of competing against Linux in the long term and writing them off as some ageing dinosaur is not accurate.
No I dont work for MS, Yes I'm running Linux on my laptop, m6811 fedora core 3... hot