I could ask a more simple question: If X is the way to go and doesn't have the problems I mentioned, then why doesn't everyone building a new OS use it? It's Open Source, it's freely available, it's ported to scads of platforms, including Cygwin. How come QNX, Mac OS X, BeOS and others haven't said "let's go with X windows"? Because it did not fit the task at hand - developing a responsive, crisp, reliable desktop environment. Implementing a windowing system from scratch must surely be more work than porting the tried-and-true X windows, right? What drives these players to go with their own homerolled solution?
X is old. It's a throwback from the Glass House era of computing that has simply been hacked over to squeeze a bit more performance out of it. Sure, there's shared memory, sure there's native drivers, sure there's a whole host of other modifications that are intended to improve performance. The bottom line, however, is that in order to continue supporting remote desktops, X has to carry along a whopping load of cruft. Cruft is bad for a desktop that's running client-only applications.
I don't NEED to display the window from one machine on another, but running X, I don't have the option of turning that feature off. These days, a desktop environment should be dedicated to local applications FIRST, and then provide support for remoting windows SECOND. Guess what, I don't connect to a centralized server to bring up my desktop anymore, and I have no plans to. Allow me to run a desktop that doesn't carry along that kind of extra weight, and I'll show you a real contender.
No matter how fast they make the drivers, no matter how much they optimize it - a client-server based desktop environment is ALWAYS going to be slower than a non-c/s solution. X continues to feel just a bit sluggardly on all my systems, even with the latest, fanciest drivers from whoever.
The second biggest problem I have with Linux is stability. Linux itself is a rock, but I have not used a single X app that hasn't crashed at least once. It's a dismal record. There's no accountability for bugs, so they're only fixed when someone feels like it. I've managed and worked on a few open source projects, and without corporate backing, guess what -- homework, real work, and personal preference come first. Unless you've got some really dedicated guys, shit doesn't get done.
I want Linux to succeed. I really do. I don't see how it's ever going to do it relying on X, and I don't see the desktop environments coming anywhere near more polished corporate-funded alternatives. Mac OS X is pretty, tight, simple, and as powerful as Linux, but I have to have a Mac to run it. Windows 2000 is vanilla, stable, boring, and runs on anything, but I don't LOVE using it. I would love for Linux to be a real alternative, but it simply isn't.
Ditch X and come up with a really solid desktop environment that doesn't require it, and I'll be back in a heartbeat.
The two big features touted for Longhorn (Microsoft's new DESKTOP OS, !=.NET Server) were that it would have a fully DirectX rendered desktop for hardware acceleration of fancy graphical features (OS X already has this in 10.2 using OpenGL, and it's really hot), and a database-like filesystem based on SQL Server allowing arbitrary attributes and indexes on files (OS X will be incorporating a BeFS-like FS in a release in the near future).
Long story short, all the hype Microsoft had left for Longhorn has been done already by Apple. What's the use of developing to a feature set that will be 3-4 years behind the nearest competitor?
Microsoft feels Apple's breath on the back of their necks.
After reading the review of the benchmark, I think there's only two reasonable explanations for the discripencies between the published test and the actual test. Either:
The Middleware Company is deliberately manipulating the results to favor.NET and Microsoft, or
They're really not all that great at J2EE Either way, it has certainly hurt my respect for TMC. They've had some good articles and some great employees over the past few years, but the points listed in the review are blatant and telling. TX_REQUIRED? Come on guys, you should know that would hurt results...or perhaps you do.
Of the 5 jobs I've had in the past 6-7 years, the 4 most recent all required explicit imports except for core libraries, but most explicitly included everything anyway. I also advocate this practice whenever the issue comes up..without explicit includes, there's no way to tell which package a class came from without deeper inspection, and there's no way to tell (at a glance) what classes and packages a piece of code is dependent on.
What's more, modern IDEs for Java (Eclipse) automate the process of expanding imports, according to a set of configurable rules. Ultimately, there's no excuse NOT to explicitly import.
Development projects are moving out of the country more and more, to India, China, anywhere that salaries can be paid much lower than here. Programmers don't have to be geniuses, but companies like to see degrees. Overseas, not going to or dropping out of college is almost unheard of. There's a glut of programmers that have Bachelor's or Master's level degrees that are willing to work for 1/4 to 1/8 of what you are
I've been working full time since 1996, starting as a web programmer, all the way up to my current position as a distributed systems architect. Even still, I've never felt safe without my degree, so I've kept plodding on. I'll finish it this fall after 7.5 years, and it will be worth all the time and effort. Finally, I will have a good answer for that favorite interview question "so have you gotten your degree yet?" Put in the effort and finish the degree, whatever it takes. Thousands (or perhaps millions) of foreign programmers already have done so.
What are you, some kind of wussy? You want to learn without putting in any effort? I've got my fulltime job, wife and kid, two houses, aging parents to support, and I manage to find time for 9 hours of night class per week, plus the associated homework. Turn off the damned TV, put down that cheeseburger, and stop yer whining.
I absolutely have to agree. Not only is this an extremely biased editorial (not an unbiased report), you must not take it at face value. So the school didn't want to talk to him...we don't have any idea how he approached them about the issue or why they turned him down. Did he ask if they'd like to talk about their dumb-ass honor code in front of a bunch of gawking internet slackjaws? I'd probably turn him down too. It's much more difficult to take my statements out of context if I don't say anything.
I'm also not sure what people think the school's motivation for instituting an overly harsh policy towards cheating would be. These policies aren't put in place by a bunch of fat Nazis that want students to fail - they're put in place by professors and department heads together. If this policy is so bogus, how come no professors, who you'd hope would be more liberal than the bureaucrats, have come forward in defense of this student?
I go to the University of Minnesota, and from my estimation, this guy got what he deserved. If you outright copy a bunch of code from a classmate to complete your assignment without proper attribution, then you deserve to get shafted. The excuse that "everybody cheats" is invalid - because it's completely untrue.
What about you open-source advocates? Would you be happy if Microsoft, feeling the GNUoose tightening around their necks, decided to wholesale rip code from GPLed projects and claim it was their own? Would you stand by and say "Oh that's ok, everybody cheats?"
Should we rewind to the poor fellow who "accidentally" found a hole in a local news site's web using FrontPage and "accidentally" downloaded code for their pages and a password list or two, that Slashdotters so gallantly defended? This (the Post article) isn't news, it's an inflammatory editorial by a misinformed sympathizer.
I came to my company only recently, so I'm not sure of all the details, but I know the only major problem they've had with JBoss is the lack of clustering/failover. The simple solution here has just been to run more JBoss instances (they're really friggin tiny) to cover all the bases. Performance has been great (not the best, naturally, but really top-notch), and ease of use is phenomenal.
Personally, I'd say my biggest complaint is the available documentation. Even the for-sale docs aren't all-inclusive, and the free ones can be maddeningly vague. There are, however, many other sources for install and config information. The lack of complicators like a separate deployment tool (e.g. ejbc) or unfriendly supporting descriptors make documentation less of an issue.
And of course, we all know how helpful full source can be...I don't know how many closed-source Java programs (puh-lease, that's like closed-source HTML pages) I've had to decompile to figure out what their hacked-up code is doing wrong...
I work for a company that has chosen to deploy J2EE applications using JBoss, and has seen substantial success from doing so. The applications running in JBoss bring in hundred of thousands of dollars for us, and support multi-million-dollar vendor/customer data exchanges.
As for the certification, more and more it comes with too high a cost. The price tag on the other "compliant" packages is way, way out of scope, and returns only minor additional results for us. You must also view certification from Sun's point - how much have they charged other major players for certification? How would those companies react if Sun now certified *for free* an open-source J2EE container given away *for free*. Where, for example , would BEA's pricing put them? Grossly overpriced, perhaps?
Sun is caught in a rough position. If they reverse their position and certify JBoss, they run the risk of alienating current partners. If they don't certify them, open source communities will continue to take jabs at their so-called support for open projects.
In the end, we don't really care. By our analysis, JBoss returns the best ROI of any of the J2EE containers. Certification is just a respectful (and expensive) nod from Sun. It doesn't define the real-world value of a product.
Microsoft is a Corporation. They're in the business of making money, and doing whatever they possibly can to make more. Anyone looking at the past 10-20 years will see that - Bill knows what he's doing, and he's playing out the same recipe once again.
But I have one simple question that might shed light on the entire issue: What could Microsoft possibly hope to gain by providing, no strings attached, a development platform that anyone, anywhere can use, without putting a single penny in Microsoft's pocket?
If Microsoft is as righteous and friendly to standards bodies and open-source movements as Miguel seems to think they are, they're signing their own death warrant. Microsoft is undoubtedly the most hated software company in the world; if the hype was true, people would move from Microsoft-based solutions to Mono in freaking droves. You'd have people lining up outside Best Buy for the next version of Mono and Gnome. Why in hell would Microsoft make a scenario like that possible?
Anyone who doesn't have Microsoft filling their heads with nonsense can see that Microsoft is leveraging off the powerful movement that Open Source has become to help their platform gain wide acceptance. Truth be told, the world still runs Windows on the vast majority of desktop machines, and still has large investments of time and money in Microsoft solutions. When Microsoft's implementation of.NET encorporates extensions and improvements only available on Microsoft operating systems, 90% of the world's desktops will instantly be running a Mono-incompatible.NET implementation. Miguel is providing validation for the platform, and giving Microsoft a leg up by telling the world, implicitly, that Open Source supports.NET. This is suicide.
It reminds me of a fellow I know that has bilked people out of money, merchandise (myself included) and services many, many, many times. He's good at what he does, which is getting something for nothing, or very little, and there's a sucker born every minute.
Any company as confident as Transmeta that their product is going to revolutionize the market is in for a rude awakening. They didn't invent anything substantially new or different, and constantly touted how impressive their work was. In the end, it was a lot of spin to hide underpowered processors. Power is cheap, in the end, and people want top-end speed and performance.
Although others have already mentioned it, I thought I'd rail on CT for making the mistake of calling gas powered phones "gasoline powered". Talk about confusing, until I read the article I was trying to figure out how you'd fit a gasoline pump nozzle into anything I'd want to attach to my belt. Maybe that whole "liberal education" thing isn't such a bad idea after all?
If this sig is meant to demonstrate that Microsoft can't count, it should be noted that on the dialogs in question, Next and Finish are one button.
Granted the statement is a little confusing, but not incorrect with modified punctuation:
choices: Back, Next/Finish, and Cancel
I got cablemodem when it first came out and was one-way. Waited only two days for installation, and it rocked. Later upgraded to two-way, with about the same 2-day wait to get a new modem. It ran perfectly, all the time. Moved into my new house and wanted DSL. No problem, about 2 weeks wait and everything arrived in the mail. Hooked it up, connected, been online since. I even switched to another service provider recently with absolutely no headache. I just reconfigured the router, rebooted it, and blammo, trimmed $50 off my service charges.
I know lots of people have had problems getting one or both of the great broadband connections, but I couldn't be happier - except perhaps if high-speed DSL was a little cheaper for me.
FYI, my cable provider was MediaOne/RoadRunner (don't know who might have bought M1 now though) and my DSL providers have been Qwest (line, service, formerly USWest) and BitStream Underground (service). I'm located in the Twin Cities. Tell them all I sent ya, I'll split the referral bonus with ya;)
While I am looking forward with excitement to the GBA (although probably not buying one), I still can't understand why anyone would ever buy anything at Circuit City. Everything I've looked for there was either way, way overpriced, or they just didn't carry it. Their selection of computer hardware is worthless, and the sales staff is so pushy you can't even browse without being attacked.
Not to mention that I'd never give my hard-earned dollars to the chief backer of DIVX players...those guys should be shot. Who knows what multi-million-dollar scheme they might try to ram down my throat next. Best Buy all the way.
Has anyone read the full text of the UCITA? I'm certainly not going to trust mailing lists, slashdot, and other media to do interpretation for me. All I have seen is extremely enflamed postings and emails about the UCITA that put it in such an unfavorable light that *anyone* would dislike it. Anyone have a link to the actual text itself? I'm tired of wading through the sea of anti-UCITA propaganda to find the whole truth.
Oh you must be joking about replacing Singletons with global variables...in projects I've worked on recently (such as Litestep) their use of global variables has made a great deal of the code completely unportable. We've had to throw out massive amounts of work because there simply was no way to disconnect the code from the global variables. Globals make code far more cohesive than it every needs to be, and certainly do not belong in a solid OO application.
The concerns about 'delete this' are certainly understandable, but generally unfounded. In well-behaved code, an object will not delete itself unless all clients have released their references to it, just as in a garbage-collected environment. Certainly a pointer to the object may reside on the stack, but there's no harm done in passing or manipulating a pointer value with nothing attached to it. As long as nobody uses the original object anymore, there's not a problem.
The memory management issues under C++ are certainly heinous, I agree. C++ with garbage collection would likely prove to be the most useful OO language around...but Java's getting close to that anyway. Following certain rules for memory allocation and deallocation in C++ can usually iron out the troubles.
What has come out of Amiga in the past years that was worth anything? Nada! Let the sucker die a dignified death and stop tossing it around like a hot potato. There's better things to be doing.
Aliens (Alien 2) was by far the best of the series. Alien didn't move fast enough, although it was excellent moviemaking. Alien 3 didn't have nearly enough guns, and although it had more plot, it wasn't the good old-fashioned People vs Aliens type movie. It was bags of meat running around avoiding a lion. Alien 4 was very cool, with nice flashy special fx, but the plot lacked depth, and was an obvious kludge to bring Ripley back for one more movie.
AP 2 was a pretty decent movie, but like the first one, I'm gonna have to see this many more times to get all the little jokes hidden in everything. This series is one you just have to see more than once to really appreciate.
Windows was able to include it without any rewrite to existing apps. Are we actually admitting that Windows can do something that UN*X can't? And as for the need - try going to 90% of webpages that have hard-coded font sizes in them. The suckers get scaled down so small they look like little bit blocks. With anti-aliasing, at least I could make a guess at what it was supposed to say. And yes, I run at 1600x1200. It doesn't make much difference when people force their pages (or apps) to 6 point fonts.
Hey, I liked Howard the Duck! Beak me baby! Jar Jar wasn't as horrible as people say. It's a kids movie with a complicated plot for the adults. We get the intricacies of intergalactic politics and complex lightsaber battles, and the kids get Jar Jar stepping in poo, and COOL lightsaber battles. You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.
I'm of the opinion that Lucas introduced the symbiotes as a subtle kowtow to the religious right. For a long time, people have been saying that The Force was blasphemous...a mysterious source of energy that surrounds us, binds us... Is Lucas trying to define GOD?! I think he did it to avoid generating anymore heat. Whatever the reasons, it's an interesting twist to be sure. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not. What has me the most curious is how they manage to completely forget about these little mickey-chlorines in the next two episodes.
Slashdot Mirror
I could ask a more simple question: If X is the way to go and doesn't have the problems I mentioned, then why doesn't everyone building a new OS use it? It's Open Source, it's freely available, it's ported to scads of platforms, including Cygwin. How come QNX, Mac OS X, BeOS and others haven't said "let's go with X windows"? Because it did not fit the task at hand - developing a responsive, crisp, reliable desktop environment. Implementing a windowing system from scratch must surely be more work than porting the tried-and-true X windows, right? What drives these players to go with their own homerolled solution?
X is old. It's a throwback from the Glass House era of computing that has simply been hacked over to squeeze a bit more performance out of it. Sure, there's shared memory, sure there's native drivers, sure there's a whole host of other modifications that are intended to improve performance. The bottom line, however, is that in order to continue supporting remote desktops, X has to carry along a whopping load of cruft. Cruft is bad for a desktop that's running client-only applications.
I don't NEED to display the window from one machine on another, but running X, I don't have the option of turning that feature off. These days, a desktop environment should be dedicated to local applications FIRST, and then provide support for remoting windows SECOND. Guess what, I don't connect to a centralized server to bring up my desktop anymore, and I have no plans to. Allow me to run a desktop that doesn't carry along that kind of extra weight, and I'll show you a real contender.
No matter how fast they make the drivers, no matter how much they optimize it - a client-server based desktop environment is ALWAYS going to be slower than a non-c/s solution. X continues to feel just a bit sluggardly on all my systems, even with the latest, fanciest drivers from whoever.
The second biggest problem I have with Linux is stability. Linux itself is a rock, but I have not used a single X app that hasn't crashed at least once. It's a dismal record. There's no accountability for bugs, so they're only fixed when someone feels like it. I've managed and worked on a few open source projects, and without corporate backing, guess what -- homework, real work, and personal preference come first. Unless you've got some really dedicated guys, shit doesn't get done.
I want Linux to succeed. I really do. I don't see how it's ever going to do it relying on X, and I don't see the desktop environments coming anywhere near more polished corporate-funded alternatives. Mac OS X is pretty, tight, simple, and as powerful as Linux, but I have to have a Mac to run it. Windows 2000 is vanilla, stable, boring, and runs on anything, but I don't LOVE using it. I would love for Linux to be a real alternative, but it simply isn't.
Ditch X and come up with a really solid desktop environment that doesn't require it, and I'll be back in a heartbeat.
OS X.
.NET Server) were that it would have a fully DirectX rendered desktop for hardware acceleration of fancy graphical features (OS X already has this in 10.2 using OpenGL, and it's really hot), and a database-like filesystem based on SQL Server allowing arbitrary attributes and indexes on files (OS X will be incorporating a BeFS-like FS in a release in the near future).
The two big features touted for Longhorn (Microsoft's new DESKTOP OS, !=
Long story short, all the hype Microsoft had left for Longhorn has been done already by Apple. What's the use of developing to a feature set that will be 3-4 years behind the nearest competitor?
Microsoft feels Apple's breath on the back of their necks.
The Middleware Company is deliberately manipulating the results to favor .NET and Microsoft, or
They're really not all that great at J2EE
Either way, it has certainly hurt my respect for TMC. They've had some good articles and some great employees over the past few years, but the points listed in the review are blatant and telling. TX_REQUIRED? Come on guys, you should know that would hurt results...or perhaps you do.
Of the 5 jobs I've had in the past 6-7 years, the 4 most recent all required explicit imports except for core libraries, but most explicitly included everything anyway. I also advocate this practice whenever the issue comes up..without explicit includes, there's no way to tell which package a class came from without deeper inspection, and there's no way to tell (at a glance) what classes and packages a piece of code is dependent on.
What's more, modern IDEs for Java (Eclipse) automate the process of expanding imports, according to a set of configurable rules. Ultimately, there's no excuse NOT to explicitly import.
Development projects are moving out of the country more and more, to India, China, anywhere that salaries can be paid much lower than here. Programmers don't have to be geniuses, but companies like to see degrees. Overseas, not going to or dropping out of college is almost unheard of. There's a glut of programmers that have Bachelor's or Master's level degrees that are willing to work for 1/4 to 1/8 of what you are
I've been working full time since 1996, starting as a web programmer, all the way up to my current position as a distributed systems architect. Even still, I've never felt safe without my degree, so I've kept plodding on. I'll finish it this fall after 7.5 years, and it will be worth all the time and effort. Finally, I will have a good answer for that favorite interview question "so have you gotten your degree yet?" Put in the effort and finish the degree, whatever it takes. Thousands (or perhaps millions) of foreign programmers already have done so.
What are you, some kind of wussy? You want to learn without putting in any effort? I've got my fulltime job, wife and kid, two houses, aging parents to support, and I manage to find time for 9 hours of night class per week, plus the associated homework. Turn off the damned TV, put down that cheeseburger, and stop yer whining.
I absolutely have to agree. Not only is this an extremely biased editorial (not an unbiased report), you must not take it at face value. So the school didn't want to talk to him...we don't have any idea how he approached them about the issue or why they turned him down. Did he ask if they'd like to talk about their dumb-ass honor code in front of a bunch of gawking internet slackjaws? I'd probably turn him down too. It's much more difficult to take my statements out of context if I don't say anything.
I'm also not sure what people think the school's motivation for instituting an overly harsh policy towards cheating would be. These policies aren't put in place by a bunch of fat Nazis that want students to fail - they're put in place by professors and department heads together. If this policy is so bogus, how come no professors, who you'd hope would be more liberal than the bureaucrats, have come forward in defense of this student?
I go to the University of Minnesota, and from my estimation, this guy got what he deserved. If you outright copy a bunch of code from a classmate to complete your assignment without proper attribution, then you deserve to get shafted. The excuse that "everybody cheats" is invalid - because it's completely untrue.
What about you open-source advocates? Would you be happy if Microsoft, feeling the GNUoose tightening around their necks, decided to wholesale rip code from GPLed projects and claim it was their own? Would you stand by and say "Oh that's ok, everybody cheats?"
Should we rewind to the poor fellow who "accidentally" found a hole in a local news site's web using FrontPage and "accidentally" downloaded code for their pages and a password list or two, that Slashdotters so gallantly defended? This (the Post article) isn't news, it's an inflammatory editorial by a misinformed sympathizer.
I came to my company only recently, so I'm not sure of all the details, but I know the only major problem they've had with JBoss is the lack of clustering/failover. The simple solution here has just been to run more JBoss instances (they're really friggin tiny) to cover all the bases. Performance has been great (not the best, naturally, but really top-notch), and ease of use is phenomenal.
Personally, I'd say my biggest complaint is the available documentation. Even the for-sale docs aren't all-inclusive, and the free ones can be maddeningly vague. There are, however, many other sources for install and config information. The lack of complicators like a separate deployment tool (e.g. ejbc) or unfriendly supporting descriptors make documentation less of an issue.
And of course, we all know how helpful full source can be...I don't know how many closed-source Java programs (puh-lease, that's like closed-source HTML pages) I've had to decompile to figure out what their hacked-up code is doing wrong...
I work for a company that has chosen to deploy J2EE applications using JBoss, and has seen substantial success from doing so. The applications running in JBoss bring in hundred of thousands of dollars for us, and support multi-million-dollar vendor/customer data exchanges.
As for the certification, more and more it comes with too high a cost. The price tag on the other "compliant" packages is way, way out of scope, and returns only minor additional results for us. You must also view certification from Sun's point - how much have they charged other major players for certification? How would those companies react if Sun now certified *for free* an open-source J2EE container given away *for free*. Where, for example , would BEA's pricing put them? Grossly overpriced, perhaps?
Sun is caught in a rough position. If they reverse their position and certify JBoss, they run the risk of alienating current partners. If they don't certify them, open source communities will continue to take jabs at their so-called support for open projects.
In the end, we don't really care. By our analysis, JBoss returns the best ROI of any of the J2EE containers. Certification is just a respectful (and expensive) nod from Sun. It doesn't define the real-world value of a product.
Microsoft is a Corporation. They're in the business of making money, and doing whatever they possibly can to make more. Anyone looking at the past 10-20 years will see that - Bill knows what he's doing, and he's playing out the same recipe once again.
.NET encorporates extensions and improvements only available on Microsoft operating systems, 90% of the world's desktops will instantly be running a Mono-incompatible .NET implementation. Miguel is providing validation for the platform, and giving Microsoft a leg up by telling the world, implicitly, that Open Source supports .NET. This is suicide.
But I have one simple question that might shed light on the entire issue: What could Microsoft possibly hope to gain by providing, no strings attached, a development platform that anyone, anywhere can use, without putting a single penny in Microsoft's pocket?
If Microsoft is as righteous and friendly to standards bodies and open-source movements as Miguel seems to think they are, they're signing their own death warrant. Microsoft is undoubtedly the most hated software company in the world; if the hype was true, people would move from Microsoft-based solutions to Mono in freaking droves. You'd have people lining up outside Best Buy for the next version of Mono and Gnome. Why in hell would Microsoft make a scenario like that possible?
Anyone who doesn't have Microsoft filling their heads with nonsense can see that Microsoft is leveraging off the powerful movement that Open Source has become to help their platform gain wide acceptance. Truth be told, the world still runs Windows on the vast majority of desktop machines, and still has large investments of time and money in Microsoft solutions. When Microsoft's implementation of
It reminds me of a fellow I know that has bilked people out of money, merchandise (myself included) and services many, many, many times. He's good at what he does, which is getting something for nothing, or very little, and there's a sucker born every minute.
Don't be Microsoft's next sucker, Miguel.
Any company as confident as Transmeta that their product is going to revolutionize the market is in for a rude awakening. They didn't invent anything substantially new or different, and constantly touted how impressive their work was. In the end, it was a lot of spin to hide underpowered processors. Power is cheap, in the end, and people want top-end speed and performance.
Although others have already mentioned it, I thought I'd rail on CT for making the mistake of calling gas powered phones "gasoline powered". Talk about confusing, until I read the article I was trying to figure out how you'd fit a gasoline pump nozzle into anything I'd want to attach to my belt. Maybe that whole "liberal education" thing isn't such a bad idea after all?
If this sig is meant to demonstrate that Microsoft can't count, it should be noted that on the dialogs in question, Next and Finish are one button. Granted the statement is a little confusing, but not incorrect with modified punctuation: choices: Back, Next/Finish, and Cancel
I know lots of people have had problems getting one or both of the great broadband connections, but I couldn't be happier - except perhaps if high-speed DSL was a little cheaper for me.
FYI, my cable provider was MediaOne/RoadRunner (don't know who might have bought M1 now though) and my DSL providers have been Qwest (line, service, formerly USWest) and BitStream Underground (service). I'm located in the Twin Cities. Tell them all I sent ya, I'll split the referral bonus with ya ;)
- Headius
Not to mention that I'd never give my hard-earned dollars to the chief backer of DIVX players...those guys should be shot. Who knows what multi-million-dollar scheme they might try to ram down my throat next. Best Buy all the way.
...if you don't mind wading through fungus, patching walls with duct tape, and praying the power doesn't fail.
Golly...Litestep has been open source for years, and it's entirely Win32 based. How quickly people forget!
Has anyone read the full text of the UCITA? I'm certainly not going to trust mailing lists, slashdot, and other media to do interpretation for me. All I have seen is extremely enflamed postings and emails about the UCITA that put it in such an unfavorable light that *anyone* would dislike it. Anyone have a link to the actual text itself? I'm tired of wading through the sea of anti-UCITA propaganda to find the whole truth.
The concerns about 'delete this' are certainly understandable, but generally unfounded. In well-behaved code, an object will not delete itself unless all clients have released their references to it, just as in a garbage-collected environment. Certainly a pointer to the object may reside on the stack, but there's no harm done in passing or manipulating a pointer value with nothing attached to it. As long as nobody uses the original object anymore, there's not a problem.
The memory management issues under C++ are certainly heinous, I agree. C++ with garbage collection would likely prove to be the most useful OO language around...but Java's getting close to that anyway. Following certain rules for memory allocation and deallocation in C++ can usually iron out the troubles.
What has come out of Amiga in the past years that was worth anything? Nada! Let the sucker die a dignified death and stop tossing it around like a hot potato. There's better things to be doing.
Aliens (Alien 2) was by far the best of the series. Alien didn't move fast enough, although it was excellent moviemaking. Alien 3 didn't have nearly enough guns, and although it had more plot, it wasn't the good old-fashioned People vs Aliens type movie. It was bags of meat running around avoiding a lion. Alien 4 was very cool, with nice flashy special fx, but the plot lacked depth, and was an obvious kludge to bring Ripley back for one more movie.
AP 2 was a pretty decent movie, but like the first one, I'm gonna have to see this many more times to get all the little jokes hidden in everything. This series is one you just have to see more than once to really appreciate.
Windows was able to include it without any rewrite to existing apps. Are we actually admitting that Windows can do something that UN*X can't? And as for the need - try going to 90% of webpages that have hard-coded font sizes in them. The suckers get scaled down so small they look like little bit blocks. With anti-aliasing, at least I could make a guess at what it was supposed to say. And yes, I run at 1600x1200. It doesn't make much difference when people force their pages (or apps) to 6 point fonts.
Hey, I liked Howard the Duck! Beak me baby!
Jar Jar wasn't as horrible as people say. It's a kids movie with a complicated plot for the adults. We get the intricacies of intergalactic politics and complex lightsaber battles, and the kids get Jar Jar stepping in poo, and COOL lightsaber battles. You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.
I'm of the opinion that Lucas introduced the symbiotes as a subtle kowtow to the religious right. For a long time, people have been saying that The Force was blasphemous...a mysterious source of energy that surrounds us, binds us... Is Lucas trying to define GOD?! I think he did it to avoid generating anymore heat. Whatever the reasons, it's an interesting twist to be sure. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not. What has me the most curious is how they manage to completely forget about these little mickey-chlorines in the next two episodes.