I know that your post was a joke, but they already DO offer free beer and food. Everyone seems to get back to work quite easily. Is the porn a work stoppage requirement?
There is C++, Java, and Python. Almost everything is in those 3 languages.
Sure, there is a lot of javascript for the web apps. And of course http://labs.google.com/papers/sawzall.html is used for processing logs. Oh and a bunch of people like bash scripts for various things. And there are loads of domain specific languages for RPCs, data files, AI systems, etc. etc.
But if you need continuous remote unit-test support? Use Python, Java, or C++. Want 5 minute distributed builds? Use the big 3. Find a compiler bug and need it fixed ASAP? Big 3. Want to integrate with other parts of the Google code base? B3! Need an expert to sort something out? You get the idea.
You can standardize on a base toolset, but you can't exclude the right tool for the job. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis: If the benefits of using a particular tool out way the costs of straying from the beaten path, go for it. Otherwise, it doesn't hurt to standardize.
Microsoft was originally backing HD-DVD because it had their VC1 codec on it. Microsoft made a few pennies for licensing fees on the codec for each HD-DVD sold. Sony's codec was inferior, so image quality tests were showing HD-DVD to beat Blu-ray early. Sony quickly adopted VC1, so Microsoft makes a few pennies sold on every Blu-ray also. Hence, they no longer cared who wins. The Xbox player was just a side effect of their early support for HD-DVD.
I attend a Drexel university, which is a co-op school. We primarily use Linux and open source software in the CS department, so there are a lot of students who prefer Linux. Most students don't even realize they can get tons of MSDNAA stuff for free.
However, a great deal of students go out on co-op and come back with skills in Visual Studio and Microsoft technologies. No one teaches these students how to use vim or emacs. These people were writing code in Eclipse or gedit before Visual Studio. You'd be hard pressed to convince them to switch away from Visual Studio after a 6 month co-op using it. It is far from perfect, but it is a great product and is used happily by many.
The real issues stem from the close minded cultural and social attributes of most professors I know. Nearly every CS class I sit through includes the instructor making at least one Microsoft bashing comment. There isn't really so much as a preference for FOSS tools as there is social pressure and general ignorance of the MSDNAA and Express editions.
Put otherwise: Instead of asking everyone who has written a standards-compliant page to add-in a non-standard tag to make it work in IE... wouldn't it be easier to tell everyone "hey, if you've coded a page that is ~almost~ standards-compliant, but relies in some way on IE7-specific behavior, then add in this tag, and IE8 will render it like IE7." It would be easier to ask, but it would be unrealistic to expect that to work. The middle-tier standards mode is triggered by a docttype which is inserted by many tools such as Dreamweaver which generate non-standard pages! You are asking a world full of completely un-knowledgeable people to be able to add the 'NotQuiteStandard' tag. As far as the average web developer is concerned, if it looks OK in Dreamweaver or Visual Studio, or whatever, it's fine: ship it. People who are struggling with CSS to make everything look just right in every browser, well they are going to be able to insert a "really do it right!" tag because they are the knowledgeable ones.
That said, I think this strategy is weak. If I were in charge, I'd make IE6/7 modes available in IE8 only by use of a URL pattern similar to how the IE-Tab extension works in FireFox. That would cure the problem for intranet applications because the network administrators could easily configure this by group policy.
Additionally, I would make a phishing-detector-style system which reports render-engines preferences to some central server so that the average Joe home user doesn't need to muck with these settings -- they would just get them automatically.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Your complaint is completely unfounded. The Ribbon has excellent keyboard navigation and it is more discoverable than ever before. You just need tap the one magic key, ALT, and then it is a breeze to learn and use.
If you are going to be a grammar nazi... don't. Your post is riddled with grammatical errors.
"People who speak very good English" Should be: "People who speak English very well".
"Almost as bad as "loose" instead of "lose", but non-native English speakers get a pass since they don't know any better." Should be two sentences without the "but". You have several similar errors involving the word "But".
Additionally, please try to eliminate your use of run-on sentences.
Although I work for Microsoft, I really have no personal interest in whether or not OOXML becomes a standard.
I do, however, enjoy playing devil's advocate (and believe me, I do the same in support of non-MS tech at work).
That means the same soon-to-be-ISO-standard OOXML file can be interpreted differently, depending on the 'platform' in which it is being used / read! Typical Microsoft rubbish.... and AGAIN! This link gives me reason to believe that Brian Jones and his team have at least done their homework:
I'd rather a well-defined platform-specific behavior than an ill-defined application-specific behavior.
On an unrelated note, here is some justification on why they "ignored" MathML ("ignored" is in quotes because they support it on the clipboard): http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/10/12/comparison-of-openxml-math-and-mathml.aspx I think this is a bit of a cop-out. They should have pushed for extensions in MathML to support what they need, but I do understand the time constraints of the commercial world vs the standards bodies, so I can understand why they didn't.
If I were writing a system to detect copyrighted movies being uploaded, one approach I would use would be the following:
1) Scan IMDB for a list of actors 2) Spider the web for photos of those actors and learn their faces 3) Match the titles of the uploaded video to movies in IMDB 4) Scan the movie for faces and match them to actors 5) If the actor set mostly matches the credits on IMDB, chances are that it's that movie or show 6) Determine some formula to interpret the previous data to make a call:
A) Not enough matches to warrent any action
B) Obviously fair use, leave up, but send to owner for review w/ low priority
C) Potentially copyright infringement, leave up (or maybe take down) and send to owner for review
D) Obviously copyright infringement, take down and simply send notice to owner
I think Google has DEFINITIVELY PROVEN that you can find a needle in a haystack and software is getting better at it all the time. Every few months or so, I select everything on my desktop, move it into a folder labeled with the current date, and stash that folder into the "Desktop Junk" parent folder of my "Archive" directory. I've got a couple GB of junk over the last few years and I can not count the number of times a 2 second, indexed search located something super useful in that directory.
Proper data organization is certainly valuable for decision making and other business reasons, but there is absolutely no reason you can not create smarter software to organize existing information and to add improved structure to new information. The solution to this problem you see is not better deletion of old data, but superior classification and visualization of all data.
Thanks to people like you, Google added a "Delete" button to Gmail which is just cluttering up the UI. Has anyone got a greesemonkey script to get rid of that for me?:-)
So let's pretend this product was called Google Health ( http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-14-n43.html ). Everywhere the summary/article says "Microsoft" substitute in "Google" and anywhere it says "HealthVault" sub in "Google Health". Push your imagination really hard here.
If Thompson disappears, it will be a sad day for gamers. Why? Because someone new will certainly come along to fight against video games. That new person might actually be reasonably intelligent and charismatic. That would be bad.
If the client has the SilverLight plug-in installed, you simply have to host a file for them. You do not need IIS to do anything special. As far as I understand, you can very easily host a SilverLight application on an Apache server.
"Basically it holds all of the promise of RFID with none of the scary privacy issues."
Not even close. These color bar codes are still bar codes. GUIDs are 128 bits. If a black and white bar code can hold 3KB, as you said, then you could easily fit a few GUIDs in there. RFIDs are typically just GUIDs which reference a database. There is no reason why a black and white bar code can't include a server URL and an item GUID to effectively store infinate data.
The promise of RFID comes from its no-contact nature.
These color bar codes are just a silly unecessary step between black and white bar codes and RFID tags. I can't imagine why Microsoft even spent a penny on their development.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that your post was a joke, but they already DO offer free beer and food. Everyone seems to get back to work quite easily. Is the porn a work stoppage requirement?
Since they are relaxing their restrictions, we can relax our complaints:
This game should get thousands of TWO (2) star reviews on Amazon!
There is C++, Java, and Python. Almost everything is in those 3 languages.
Sure, there is a lot of javascript for the web apps.
And of course http://labs.google.com/papers/sawzall.html is used for processing logs.
Oh and a bunch of people like bash scripts for various things.
And there are loads of domain specific languages for RPCs, data files, AI systems, etc. etc.
But if you need continuous remote unit-test support? Use Python, Java, or C++.
Want 5 minute distributed builds? Use the big 3.
Find a compiler bug and need it fixed ASAP? Big 3.
Want to integrate with other parts of the Google code base? B3!
Need an expert to sort something out? You get the idea.
You can standardize on a base toolset, but you can't exclude the right tool for the job. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis: If the benefits of using a particular tool out way the costs of straying from the beaten path, go for it. Otherwise, it doesn't hurt to standardize.
I've worked at both, they are more similar than not...
I'll be joining Microsoft full-time this summer; if that says anything.
http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/changeset/31322
Microsoft was originally backing HD-DVD because it had their VC1 codec on it. Microsoft made a few pennies for licensing fees on the codec for each HD-DVD sold. Sony's codec was inferior, so image quality tests were showing HD-DVD to beat Blu-ray early. Sony quickly adopted VC1, so Microsoft makes a few pennies sold on every Blu-ray also. Hence, they no longer cared who wins. The Xbox player was just a side effect of their early support for HD-DVD.
I attend a Drexel university, which is a co-op school. We primarily use Linux and open source software in the CS department, so there are a lot of students who prefer Linux. Most students don't even realize they can get tons of MSDNAA stuff for free.
However, a great deal of students go out on co-op and come back with skills in Visual Studio and Microsoft technologies. No one teaches these students how to use vim or emacs. These people were writing code in Eclipse or gedit before Visual Studio. You'd be hard pressed to convince them to switch away from Visual Studio after a 6 month co-op using it. It is far from perfect, but it is a great product and is used happily by many.
The real issues stem from the close minded cultural and social attributes of most professors I know. Nearly every CS class I sit through includes the instructor making at least one Microsoft bashing comment. There isn't really so much as a preference for FOSS tools as there is social pressure and general ignorance of the MSDNAA and Express editions.
So you are a Gurkha who has not yet fallen?
That said, I think this strategy is weak. If I were in charge, I'd make IE6/7 modes available in IE8 only by use of a URL pattern similar to how the IE-Tab extension works in FireFox. That would cure the problem for intranet applications because the network administrators could easily configure this by group policy.
Additionally, I would make a phishing-detector-style system which reports render-engines preferences to some central server so that the average Joe home user doesn't need to muck with these settings -- they would just get them automatically.
Your complaint is completely unfounded. The Ribbon has excellent keyboard navigation and it is more discoverable than ever before. You just need tap the one magic key, ALT, and then it is a breeze to learn and use.
See here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2007/01/04/keyboard-shortcuts-keytips-and-comics.aspx
it WAS ren and stimpy, but they apparently check the referrer to prevent image leaching. oops.
Too late...
http://www.retrojunk.com/img/art-images/rands.jpg
If you are going to be a grammar nazi... don't. Your post is riddled with grammatical errors.
"People who speak very good English"
Should be: "People who speak English very well".
"Almost as bad as "loose" instead of "lose", but non-native English speakers get a pass since they don't know any better."
Should be two sentences without the "but". You have several similar errors involving the word "But".
Additionally, please try to eliminate your use of run-on sentences.
I do, however, enjoy playing devil's advocate (and believe me, I do the same in support of non-MS tech at work). That means the same soon-to-be-ISO-standard OOXML file can be interpreted differently, depending on the 'platform' in which it is being used / read! Typical Microsoft rubbish.... and AGAIN! This link gives me reason to believe that Brian Jones and his team have at least done their homework:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/02/20/beyond-the-basics.aspx
I'd rather a well-defined platform-specific behavior than an ill-defined application-specific behavior.
On an unrelated note, here is some justification on why they "ignored" MathML ("ignored" is in quotes because they support it on the clipboard):
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/10/12/comparison-of-openxml-math-and-mathml.aspx
I think this is a bit of a cop-out. They should have pushed for extensions in MathML to support what they need, but I do understand the time constraints of the commercial world vs the standards bodies, so I can understand why they didn't.
Just in case you (or anyone reading this) didn't know:
That video "What if Microsoft designed the iPod box?" was made AT MICROSOFT. It was first shown during an internal company meeting.
If I were writing a system to detect copyrighted movies being uploaded, one approach I would use would be the following:
1) Scan IMDB for a list of actors
2) Spider the web for photos of those actors and learn their faces
3) Match the titles of the uploaded video to movies in IMDB
4) Scan the movie for faces and match them to actors
5) If the actor set mostly matches the credits on IMDB, chances are that it's that movie or show
6) Determine some formula to interpret the previous data to make a call:
A) Not enough matches to warrent any action
B) Obviously fair use, leave up, but send to owner for review w/ low priority
C) Potentially copyright infringement, leave up (or maybe take down) and send to owner for review
D) Obviously copyright infringement, take down and simply send notice to owner
I think Google has DEFINITIVELY PROVEN that you can find a needle in a haystack and software is getting better at it all the time. Every few months or so, I select everything on my desktop, move it into a folder labeled with the current date, and stash that folder into the "Desktop Junk" parent folder of my "Archive" directory. I've got a couple GB of junk over the last few years and I can not count the number of times a 2 second, indexed search located something super useful in that directory.
:-)
Proper data organization is certainly valuable for decision making and other business reasons, but there is absolutely no reason you can not create smarter software to organize existing information and to add improved structure to new information. The solution to this problem you see is not better deletion of old data, but superior classification and visualization of all data.
Thanks to people like you, Google added a "Delete" button to Gmail which is just cluttering up the UI. Has anyone got a greesemonkey script to get rid of that for me?
So let's pretend this product was called Google Health ( http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-14-n43.html ). Everywhere the summary/article says "Microsoft" substitute in "Google" and anywhere it says "HealthVault" sub in "Google Health". Push your imagination really hard here.
(I just wanted to point out: I'm not taking sides. I've been on the payroll at both companies... http://brandonbloom.name/resume.html )
If Thompson disappears, it will be a sad day for gamers. Why? Because someone new will certainly come along to fight against video games. That new person might actually be reasonably intelligent and charismatic. That would be bad.
Actually, the product was always called SoftGrid. Softricity is the name of the acquired company. And their technology is exceedingly cool :-)
Mission Accomplished!
Who says that a conspiracy needs to be secret or concealed?
http://www.answers.com/conspiracy&r=67/
I know your trolling, but I'd just like to point out these fun facts:
r -hit-4-million-244018.php
M an#Critical_Reception
o n
3 Million PS3s sold -- not copies of Resistance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3
3 to 4 million copies of Gears of War sold
http://kotaku.com/gaming/neogaf/rumor-gears-of-wa
I haven't played it, but apparently Resistance is a good game which was well received:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance:_Fall_of_
Unfortunately for your argument, Gears was much moreso:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_of_War#Recepti
If the client has the SilverLight plug-in installed, you simply have to host a file for them. You do not need IIS to do anything special. As far as I understand, you can very easily host a SilverLight application on an Apache server.
"Basically it holds all of the promise of RFID with none of the scary privacy issues."
Not even close. These color bar codes are still bar codes. GUIDs are 128 bits. If a black and white bar code can hold 3KB, as you said, then you could easily fit a few GUIDs in there. RFIDs are typically just GUIDs which reference a database. There is no reason why a black and white bar code can't include a server URL and an item GUID to effectively store infinate data.
The promise of RFID comes from its no-contact nature.
These color bar codes are just a silly unecessary step between black and white bar codes and RFID tags. I can't imagine why Microsoft even spent a penny on their development.
btw: I work for Microsoft.