At one time there was software that could translate FoxPro (for DOS) code to C or C++. That would be a good way to transition from old FoxPro programs to something else.
Does anyone have a link or information?
(Note that, contrary to what the Slashdot story said, Microsoft is not really releasing any source code of value.)
Is Roland Piquepaille paid for Slashdot stories?
on
A Single-Photon Server
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Roland_Piquepaille, the submitter of this story, is apparently a publicist. Apparently he is paid to have stories placed in media like Slashdot.
Mr. Piquepaille's affiliations and motivations should be disclosed. Does he pay someone at Slashdot to run his stories?
Also, for me, computing is an important area of continuing interest. Most of Mr. Piquepaille's stories, like this one, have very little real connection to computing, so they waste my time. I'm not the only one annoyed by this, apparently: Here is a script to Hide stories submitted by Roland Piquepaille from Slashdot.org.
Digg.com or Reddit.com are more appropriate media for Mr. Piquepaille. However, I suspect that his stories would seldom be considered interesting enough to be placed on the Digg or Reddit front pages.
-- Most people in the U.S. have no idea how corrupt is the Bush
administration. Here's my
summary of U.S. gov. corruption. Where's yours?
I think you hide from yourself the true nature of your business. Your
company makes a lot of money because of many, many adversarial practices like
tricky, closed file formats, mixing program files and operating system files,
and actually encouraging piracy of your products so that competitors cannot
make money.
Your company has never, as far as I am aware, released an excellent
product. Windows XP was terribly buggy and troublesome until Service Pack 2. You
waste the time of millions of well-educated people. You deliberately manage
your business in such a way that programmers are not allowed to finish their
jobs. Programmers know how to make very secure software, but your software has had literally
hundreds of thousands of expoits. A large part of the money you make comes
from people buying new computers because their old computers have become
infected. When you are told of an exploit, you often take many months to fix
it, showing your true self and your true belief in how to live in the world by
taking advantage. (Internet Explorer was 78%
unpatched when I wrote this.)
I think you should not think of yourself as primarily a business man.
You should think of yourself as primarily an abuser.
The fact is, most government officials were adults and very busy before
personal computers were common. Since they have been so busy with their
careers they have had little time to educate themselves about technology. It
isn't exactly correct to call them ignorant, because that's too respectful.
More precisely, they are iggerunt.
Remember, Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, called the Time-Warner
merger with AOL, "better than sex". Immediately after, the combined
company lost 88 billion dollars because of the deal. Quote from the linked
article: "AOL reported a loss of nearly $100bn for 2002, after a loss of
$44.9bn for the final three months of the year."
Ted Turner is a smart guy, but he was iggerunt about technology.
The proper response to "Under Secretary of Commerce for
Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO" Jon W. Dudas is, "Dude,
you're fired."
If you truly love a woman, you will stick with her when she has troubles. If you truly love a country, you will still be intensely involved even when bad things are happening.
I agree with the parent comment. It's too big an intellectual challenge for most people to think about the details of software design. Users just want their software to work.
The correct approach is a very loving one. You try to discover what would make their work easiest, and make the software do everything software can do. Most jobs require that a person turn himself or herself partly into a robot. That's wrong. If a machine can do it, a machine should do it.
Programmers typically say to this, "I just want to be a programmer, not a sociologist." The real world requires every one of us to be a sociologist, or be out of touch with what's happening.
-- Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
In my original post, I said this, "Seriously, if you know something about the history and you have a little technical knowledge, would you ever buy anything from Diebold?"
I said nothing about not using Diebold ATMs. The liability is the banks', not the users'. The only point is that anyone knowing the history and having technical knowledge would try to find some other supplier.
Slashdot is not the proper forum for speculation.
on
Speed of Light Exceeded?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
kdawson: You said, and I quote: "What exactly the researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this point by subscribers to Nature."
The linked article says, and I quote: "Last Updated: Friday, November 10, 2000 | 11:57 PM ET" (My emphasis.)
Please consider that Slashdot is not the proper forum for speculation about Physics, especially when it is not clear what happened, and the article is over 6 YEARS old.
Please consider that perhaps you should not be a Slashdot editor. It amazes me that Slashdot editors are still, after all these years, not very good at what they do. What social processes prevented even the most simple learning?
-- Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does
violence just cause more violence?
"The company is concerned that this relatively small and marginally profitable unit is hurting the company's overall image."
That's absurd. Diebold's voting machines have destroyed the company's image completely, in my opinion. Seriously, if you know something about the history and you have a little technical knowledge, would you ever buy anything from Diebold?
The Bush administration is the most corrupt administration the U.S.
has ever had. Here is my summary of the corruption: George
W. Bush comedy and tragedy.
I find it scary how little U.S. citizens know about the activities of their government. Part of the reason is that the Bush administration uses the same method of abuse Microsoft uses. Both exploit the fact that it is difficult for people to defend against many, many abuses, each small in themselves. Both, in my opinion, use sophisticated public relations methods to sell their lies.
I hope you will write your own summary of U.S. government corruption and send it to your elected
representatives.
-- Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does
violence just cause more violence?
Wow! I don't have the time to understand the bug thoroughly, but it certainly
has the characteristics of the CPU hogging bug. I like this: Comment 31: "... if the loop is length more like 25,000 instead of
250, does the
number of inner windows actually increase to 25,000? I see 250 inner windows
with the testcase for sure..."
That certainly seems like the CPU hogging bug. Fixing the bug took
more than 4 years, and resulted in a lot of foolish and sometimes abusive
behavior from Mozilla developers, like the 20 excuses linked above. I learned
how little Mozilla developers know about the theory of science.
Still, nothing about this changes the fact that Mozilla Foundation
needs technically oriented top management. I would volunteer for the job, but
only long enough to find and hire and train the right person. Could I really
do that? Yes, but I don't expect to be asked.
If I were the temporary head of the Mozilla Foundation, my priority
would be to fix the remaining bugs. My second priority would be to integrate
SQL Lite into Firefox everywhere it is needed.
The issue with the CPU hogging bug is this: Browsers are our windows
on the world; they are VERY important. I don't accept any cynicism about the
importance of browsers; it is literally true that they are important to the
human efficiency. People like me who often have 10 windows with 30 tabs
each really suffer when every window and tab crashes. I'm not the only one.
Opera is stable and also free, but suffers from some bad design
decisions. For having a look at Digg and Reddit and other common destinations,
I use a separate computer and 10 installations of Opera. I like that Opera can
be installed in separate folders that don't interfere with each other.
I was surprised by this in your comment above: "You're probably
just trolling,..." You really owe it people and yourself to visit the
extensive documentation to which I linked, for example, before you think that
someone is trying to do harm.
-- Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does
violence just cause more violence?
As others have said in this discussion, the Mozilla Foundation is hugely disfunctional. It often happens that people post very serious bugs and they are ignored for YEARS. Read the links I posted, and the links to the links.
Great sense of community? She is one of the most painfully socially limited people I have ever seen.
Can someone with no technical knowledge run a technical organization? No. Such a person cannot know the truth about the health of the organization.
You are giving her credit for the achievements of the technically knowledgeable people. No article by a writer with no technical knowledge in a business magazine changes that.
Now the Mozilla Foundation makes $50 million per year for making Google the default browser in Firefox. When she was first made to be in charge, it was, as she herself says, entirely an accident. No one else wanted the job of being the non-technical administrator of a company with almost no income.
-- Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does
violence just cause more violence?
"Publishing detailed explanations of the exploits on your blog gets them fixed within a few weeks."
Saying over and over that "Firefox is the most unstable program in common use" gets the bugs fixed in 2 years. Firefox is more stable now that they fixed the CPU hogging bugs, but wow, what a hassle.
The last time I got information about it, the Mozilla Foundation was headed by a woman with NO technical experience and very, very little social ability.
-- Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does
violence just cause more violence?
He's right. Consider universities defensively. They are ALL involved in at least some kinds of fraud, apparently. They all take advantage of the lack of life experience of the students.
I asked a well-known consultant in Physics how he knew enough to be helping people who had been Physics researchers for years. He told me he learned more than nine-tenths of what he knew by himself, after he got a PhD.
Take care of yourself. Have a life.
Consider how much a university will be personally interested in you. That's the only way to get knowledge that isn't already in books.
-- Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does
violence just cause more violence?
Who knows Steve Ballmer's intent, other than he is often adversarial? Whatever his intent is, it certainly is not logical. It certainly isn't logical to live the way he lives, in my opinion.
Is it possible that no one at Microsoft realized that the name Zune sounds like Zen?
I can easily show you how odd is the story to which you linked, by adding a
paragraph that would have to be true for the rest of the story to be as
innocent as they describe. Here's my paragraph:
"David Placek, Lexicon's CEO, said, 'Although we have been a
professional branding company for years, in this one particular case we did no
research about the competition whatsoever. Therefore we didn't know that the
name Zune differs from the name used by a famous, large, and
very reputable competitor only in the vowels.' "
If my paragraph sounds credible, and if you think Steve Ballmer knew
nothing whatsoever about the competition, and no one in Microsoft management
knew anything about MP3 players, then fine, there was no morally adversarial
intent.
Don't you think it is a bit odd that the naming of a Microsoft product
was given a long, convoluted story in sfgate? It looks like a public relations
effort to me.
The Zune does not compete with the iPod, it competes with the Zen. Can
you imagine anyone saying they would rather have a Zune than an iPod?
I've only reviewed one model of the Zen carefully, but the one I saw
is a surprisingly excellent product. Recently a 1 GB model was only $49 after
rebate at Fry's. It's great for someone who can survive with a library of only
300 songs.
I agree, Ballmer is a bully. Ballmer has taken his ignorant behavior to an extreme, in my opinion: He is a
prime example of someone who lacks social skills and technical insight, who
can only survive in a technical world by being adversarial toward those who
would rather not have a fight.
Don't forget: Microsoft's Zune music player is named after Creative's
excellent Zen Player. Aside from being morally criminal to infringe on someone
else's intellectual property, it's just mean.
If the world were technically knowledgeable enough not to be locked
into Microsoft's file formats and virtual OS monopoly, and other adversarial
behavior, Microsoft could not make a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any experience with FlagShip? Apparently it can translate legacy xBase code to C++.
Since Microsoft is killing FoxPro, everyone using it will need to transition to something else. What is the best way to make the transition?
At one time there was software that could translate FoxPro (for DOS) code to C or C++. That would be a good way to transition from old FoxPro programs to something else.
Does anyone have a link or information?
(Note that, contrary to what the Slashdot story said, Microsoft is not really releasing any source code of value.)
You know that Slashdot readers don't really believe the article when all the first comments are attempts at jokes.
-
Most people in the U.S. have no idea how corrupt the U.S. gov. is. Here is my summary of U.S. government corruption. Where's yours?
Roland_Piquepaille, the submitter of this story, is apparently a publicist. Apparently he is paid to have stories placed in media like Slashdot.
Mr. Piquepaille's affiliations and motivations should be disclosed. Does he pay someone at Slashdot to run his stories?
Also, for me, computing is an important area of continuing interest. Most of Mr. Piquepaille's stories, like this one, have very little real connection to computing, so they waste my time. I'm not the only one annoyed by this, apparently: Here is a script to Hide stories submitted by Roland Piquepaille from Slashdot.org.
Digg.com or Reddit.com are more appropriate media for Mr. Piquepaille. However, I suspect that his stories would seldom be considered interesting enough to be placed on the Digg or Reddit front pages.
--
Most people in the U.S. have no idea how corrupt is the Bush administration. Here's my summary of U.S. gov. corruption. Where's yours?
Mr. Ballmer,
I think you hide from yourself the true nature of your business. Your company makes a lot of money because of many, many adversarial practices like tricky, closed file formats, mixing program files and operating system files, and actually encouraging piracy of your products so that competitors cannot make money.
Your company has never, as far as I am aware, released an excellent product. Windows XP was terribly buggy and troublesome until Service Pack 2. You waste the time of millions of well-educated people. You deliberately manage your business in such a way that programmers are not allowed to finish their jobs. Programmers know how to make very secure software, but your software has had literally hundreds of thousands of expoits. A large part of the money you make comes from people buying new computers because their old computers have become infected. When you are told of an exploit, you often take many months to fix it, showing your true self and your true belief in how to live in the world by taking advantage. (Internet Explorer was 78% unpatched when I wrote this.)
I think you should not think of yourself as primarily a business man. You should think of yourself as primarily an abuser.
Michael Jennings
You will no doubt agree that an 88 billion dollar loss is very rough.
The fact is, most government officials were adults and very busy before personal computers were common. Since they have been so busy with their careers they have had little time to educate themselves about technology. It isn't exactly correct to call them ignorant, because that's too respectful. More precisely, they are iggerunt.
Remember, Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, called the Time-Warner merger with AOL, "better than sex". Immediately after, the combined company lost 88 billion dollars because of the deal. Quote from the linked article: "AOL reported a loss of nearly $100bn for 2002, after a loss of $44.9bn for the final three months of the year."
Ted Turner is a smart guy, but he was iggerunt about technology.
The proper response to "Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO" Jon W. Dudas is, "Dude, you're fired."
"I suppose with Dick and Bush, the double standard will apply."
Most people in the U.S. have no idea how corrupt the Bush administration is. Here is my summary of U.S. government corruption. Where's yours?
If you truly love a woman, you will stick with her when she has troubles. If you truly love a country, you will still be intensely involved even when bad things are happening.
MOD PARENT UP! This is a new development among Slashdot editors: Stories that are impossible to understand.
Comments about poor editing are always on-topic.
I agree with the parent comment. It's too big an intellectual challenge for most people to think about the details of software design. Users just want their software to work.
The correct approach is a very loving one. You try to discover what would make their work easiest, and make the software do everything software can do. Most jobs require that a person turn himself or herself partly into a robot. That's wrong. If a machine can do it, a machine should do it.
Programmers typically say to this, "I just want to be a programmer, not a sociologist." The real world requires every one of us to be a sociologist, or be out of touch with what's happening.
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
In my original post, I said this, "Seriously, if you know something about the history and you have a little technical knowledge, would you ever buy anything from Diebold?"
I said nothing about not using Diebold ATMs. The liability is the banks', not the users'. The only point is that anyone knowing the history and having technical knowledge would try to find some other supplier.
kdawson: You said, and I quote: "What exactly the researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this point by subscribers to Nature."
The linked article says, and I quote: "Last Updated: Friday, November 10, 2000 | 11:57 PM ET" (My emphasis.)
Please consider that Slashdot is not the proper forum for speculation about Physics, especially when it is not clear what happened, and the article is over 6 YEARS old.
Please consider that perhaps you should not be a Slashdot editor. It amazes me that Slashdot editors are still, after all these years, not very good at what they do. What social processes prevented even the most simple learning?
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
"The company is concerned that this relatively small and marginally profitable unit is hurting the company's overall image."
That's absurd. Diebold's voting machines have destroyed the company's image completely, in my opinion. Seriously, if you know something about the history and you have a little technical knowledge, would you ever buy anything from Diebold?
DEADbold.
--
My summary of U.S. gov corruption. Where's your's?
"... I think the US Supreme Court should draw a line..."
The U.S. Supreme Court already drew its line. It elected George W. Bush.
--
Will the U.S. government violence end 3,000 years of violence in the Middle East? Or, increase it?
The Bush administration is the most corrupt administration the U.S. has ever had. Here is my summary of the corruption: George W. Bush comedy and tragedy.
I find it scary how little U.S. citizens know about the activities of their government. Part of the reason is that the Bush administration uses the same method of abuse Microsoft uses. Both exploit the fact that it is difficult for people to defend against many, many abuses, each small in themselves. Both, in my opinion, use sophisticated public relations methods to sell their lies.
I hope you will write your own summary of U.S. government corruption and send it to your elected representatives.
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
Wow! I don't have the time to understand the bug thoroughly, but it certainly has the characteristics of the CPU hogging bug. I like this: Comment 31: "... if the loop is length more like 25,000 instead of 250, does the number of inner windows actually increase to 25,000? I see 250 inner windows with the testcase for sure..."
..." You really owe it people and yourself to visit the
extensive documentation to which I linked, for example, before you think that
someone is trying to do harm.
That certainly seems like the CPU hogging bug. Fixing the bug took more than 4 years, and resulted in a lot of foolish and sometimes abusive behavior from Mozilla developers, like the 20 excuses linked above. I learned how little Mozilla developers know about the theory of science.
Still, nothing about this changes the fact that Mozilla Foundation needs technically oriented top management. I would volunteer for the job, but only long enough to find and hire and train the right person. Could I really do that? Yes, but I don't expect to be asked.
If I were the temporary head of the Mozilla Foundation, my priority would be to fix the remaining bugs. My second priority would be to integrate SQL Lite into Firefox everywhere it is needed.
The issue with the CPU hogging bug is this: Browsers are our windows on the world; they are VERY important. I don't accept any cynicism about the importance of browsers; it is literally true that they are important to the human efficiency. People like me who often have 10 windows with 30 tabs each really suffer when every window and tab crashes. I'm not the only one.
Opera is stable and also free, but suffers from some bad design decisions. For having a look at Digg and Reddit and other common destinations, I use a separate computer and 10 installations of Opera. I like that Opera can be installed in separate folders that don't interfere with each other.
I was surprised by this in your comment above: "You're probably just trolling,
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
As others have said in this discussion, the Mozilla Foundation is hugely disfunctional. It often happens that people post very serious bugs and they are ignored for YEARS. Read the links I posted, and the links to the links.
Great sense of community? She is one of the most painfully socially limited people I have ever seen.
Can someone with no technical knowledge run a technical organization? No. Such a person cannot know the truth about the health of the organization.
You are giving her credit for the achievements of the technically knowledgeable people. No article by a writer with no technical knowledge in a business magazine changes that.
Now the Mozilla Foundation makes $50 million per year for making Google the default browser in Firefox. When she was first made to be in charge, it was, as she herself says, entirely an accident. No one else wanted the job of being the non-technical administrator of a company with almost no income.
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
"Publishing detailed explanations of the exploits on your blog gets them fixed within a few weeks."
Saying over and over that "Firefox is the most unstable program in common use" gets the bugs fixed in 2 years. Firefox is more stable now that they fixed the CPU hogging bugs, but wow, what a hassle.
See this Slashdot comment: Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs .
The last time I got information about it, the Mozilla Foundation was headed by a woman with NO technical experience and very, very little social ability.
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
"If vulnerabilities are found, they would be fixed promptly. This is something Mozilla has always done..."
See this Slashdot comment: Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs.
The last time I got information, the Mozilla Foundation was headed by a woman with NO technical experience and very, very little social ability.
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
He's right. Consider universities defensively. They are ALL involved in at least some kinds of fraud, apparently. They all take advantage of the lack of life experience of the students.
I asked a well-known consultant in Physics how he knew enough to be helping people who had been Physics researchers for years. He told me he learned more than nine-tenths of what he knew by himself, after he got a PhD.
Take care of yourself. Have a life.
Consider how much a university will be personally interested in you. That's the only way to get knowledge that isn't already in books.
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
Who knows Steve Ballmer's intent, other than he is often adversarial? Whatever his intent is, it certainly is not logical. It certainly isn't logical to live the way he lives, in my opinion.
Is it possible that no one at Microsoft realized that the name Zune sounds like Zen?
I can easily show you how odd is the story to which you linked, by adding a paragraph that would have to be true for the rest of the story to be as innocent as they describe. Here's my paragraph:
"David Placek, Lexicon's CEO, said, 'Although we have been a professional branding company for years, in this one particular case we did no research about the competition whatsoever. Therefore we didn't know that the name Zune differs from the name used by a famous, large, and very reputable competitor only in the vowels.' "
If my paragraph sounds credible, and if you think Steve Ballmer knew nothing whatsoever about the competition, and no one in Microsoft management knew anything about MP3 players, then fine, there was no morally adversarial intent.
Don't you think it is a bit odd that the naming of a Microsoft product was given a long, convoluted story in sfgate? It looks like a public relations effort to me.
The Zune does not compete with the iPod, it competes with the Zen. Can you imagine anyone saying they would rather have a Zune than an iPod?
I've only reviewed one model of the Zen carefully, but the one I saw is a surprisingly excellent product. Recently a 1 GB model was only $49 after rebate at Fry's. It's great for someone who can survive with a library of only 300 songs.
I agree, Ballmer is a bully. Ballmer has taken his ignorant behavior to an extreme, in my opinion: He is a prime example of someone who lacks social skills and technical insight, who can only survive in a technical world by being adversarial toward those who would rather not have a fight.
Don't forget: Microsoft's Zune music player is named after Creative's excellent Zen Player. Aside from being morally criminal to infringe on someone else's intellectual property, it's just mean.
If the world were technically knowledgeable enough not to be locked into Microsoft's file formats and virtual OS monopoly, and other adversarial behavior, Microsoft could not make a profit.
Can enom, and therefore enom resellers, be trusted? Did enom do anything incompetent or abusive? You seem to imply they did.
See this recent Slashdot story with recommended domain name registrars.
How many other domain name registrars are equally incompetent?
What other registrar would you recommend?