It was a widely held belief back in the time when Europeans were killing and persecuting Natives. It was being done by every country with the resources to do so. It was a slightly more primitive time, if you want to think of it that way.
Guess what? No one really believes in Manifest Destiny anymore. And just because my great(-great){1,} grandparents (or their government) may have believed in it, would not make ME a hypocrite anymore than the fact that Americans bought and sold slaves makes me racist or responsible for slavery.
There are Dell support techs who speak English? Huh... I've only called them twice, once speaking to two different individuals, and I never would have thought that they had English speaking techs.
MS wouldn't even have to go as far as releasing an entire distro. All they would have to do is support.NET on other platforms and write a Window Manager, and people could run Linux without even realizing it, using Office.NET in conjunction with the "Windows" (unimaginatively named) Window Manager.
Eventually Office and IE will probably come out for Linux, but we're a ways off on that. It took a semi-partnership between MS and Apple for Office to come out on Mac, and IE is even farther behind.
To play devil's advocate from a company's perspective:
Cheaper? The cost of the PC is not going to be itemized, so the fact that it is possible to find Windows PCs for $300 (less than half the price) means that it is not necessarily cheaper. In fact, since HP is not the cheapest PC maker around, I'd say you could even get a hardware-comparable Windows PC for the same price by looking around.
Efficient? I suppose it heavily depends on what the company's employees do in their workday. Most employee's jobs involve nothing more complicated than using a single app designed for the company or at least for their industry. What OS it is running on really doesn't matter.
I don't know how you get "easier to install" than WinXP, which on my machine involved putting the CD in rebooting, hitting two keys to format the drive, another to agree to MS's terms, and typing in my Admin password. I suppose you could cut that down by three keystrokes, but what's the point? In addition, installation isn't an issue since the PCs come preinstalled whether you choose Windows or Linux.
Easier to use safely. True if they do not have a resident MS guru (and probably true even if they do), but I'm not so sure companies would see a great value in this if the PCs are being used for what was suggested: Non-critical, daily, non-IT stuff.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "arbitrary 'license violation' warnings," so I'll leave that one alone.
One must remember that even in light of some of these mostly minor, mostly transparent benefits, there are some more easily recognized downfalls as well. At some point, most companies are probably going to run into the OO/MS Office incompatibilities. They may deal with a company that has an IE-centric web page that may cause problems among novice users who simply see something as broken. If a user fails to shutdown the computer properly (it happens ALOT), the inode check upon startup (depending on configuration) can be excessive (much moreso than ScanDisk, which can be easily skipped). These very-visible issues with no real solution for the common company could turn them away from Linux as much as the benefits would attract them.
All in all, I don't think this makes much of a difference in the short term, but in long-term, if HP continues pushing, it will expose more people to Linux, thus paving the way for a greater market share later.
While MS would certainly benefit from controlling the three of the biggest (if not biggest) IM apps, it would not, as you said, leave Yahoo and others out in the cold.
MS, AOL, Yahoo and others are currently working together on standards for the IM market for interoperability. While it probably wouldn't be a panacea in most peoples eyes because MS's would have additional features, for simple messaging, there would be no interop problems.
There is a reason people stopped using Netscape in the first place. And it has nothing to do with market leadership or business practices. It is plainly that Netscape was not up to snuff. I understand that now their browser is significantly better than it was. But I guarentee you IE 7 will be leaps and bounds above that. Once CSS2 is implemented (and maybe a few parts of CSS3), Netscape has nothing to offer IE except useless bells and whistles.
Hmmm... I don't know what it is, but the two machines I just tried it on came back up in 8 seconds and 10 seconds respectfully. Might it be that the machine cut costs somewhere on the hardware, slowing the process down?
FYI: The machine that took 10 seconds had a commit charge of 290MB.
Have Microsoft issued a patent? They may be wanting to protect.NET under copyright, but it seems if they wanted to protect it under patent law, they would have a patent. I personally haven't seen mention of this.
Actually there is a Volvo concept car designed for women that does not allow you to open the hood without a special tool. It has a hole for gas, and a hole for windshield washer fluid. Anything more than that and you have to take it into the mechanic.
It also has a pony-tail hole on the headrest, and an ungodly amount of storage room for a car its size.
Try out Microsoft's WordView. Allows you to read and print any Word 97/2000 files (As a note, Word 2K2 defaults to save in 2000 format, so those should work to, don't know about 2K3)
Actually 74 hits and 9 viruses isn't that bad all things considered.
Adaware is like some SPAM software. It points out anything that _might_ be spyware/adware. I just ran it on my system 3-4 days ago and it came up with something like 33 hits/1 virus. I looked into the issues that it brought up and none of them - not a single one - was actually spyware or adware or anything malicious.
Examples: It pointed out a regsitry key that Windows Media Player's unique identification string. Alright, this could be considered "spyware", except that on my machine, Media Player is set up so that the unique identification is never sent out. I don't think this constitutes a risk of any kind.
A slew of hits came from registry entries for software that was not on my computer. I had installed AIM the day before to find that it now installs spyware. That doesn't really count in my opinion.
1 program was listed as a virus or something along those line (spyware, adware, worm, I don't remember), but looking into it, that program could not have worked on my system, due to my security setup. A non-issue.
I could be wrong, but you seem to be one of those people who has made a prejudgement against Windows security without knowing anything about it. I ran a 20 user (~200 users if you include web customers) Windows network (Win2K almost exclusively, but one each 98, NT, and 2K3 thrown in for good measure) that had no real firewall set up for it (nothing MS specific set up on the firewall) and had no antivirus software installed anywhere.
I designed the system so that everybody got security updates automatically, preapproved by me. Only a single workstation ever got a virus/worm/etc (actually there were multiple) during my management of the system. She installed these virii through her e-mail by opening attachments. But still, the security of the system prevented the virus from spreading to other machines.
Code Red never breached our system, Nimda tried for years, Blaster brought down the network simply due to excessive traffic on some Colo servers but never infected anything on our end. The list goes on.
I don't know why there are so many incompetent Windows administrators out there, but I wish they would all find a job better suited to themselves.
A fix to these problems: Don't give mom the admin password. Install VNC. When she wants new software she can put in a requisition form. You can install it remotely.
Not that I expect anyone to actually heed this, but Mono would be the best bet for a "scripting" language for OpenOffice. It would provide the maximum amount of compatibility with scripts.
That's incorrect. There are data recovery companies that can read upwards of a dozen past writes of data, sometimes even if the platters have been somewhat mangled.
There is apparently latent amounts of data that gets weaker and weaker each write, but with the correct equipment can be picked up.
So I'd say in an important situation, five overwrites would a good idea. I agree it doesn't have to be random.
C - (int)ArrayCounter;//requires incrementing PHP -//dunno, I use C method Java -//never cared C# - Array.GetUpperBound(0); VB.NET - Array.GetUpperBound(0) VB - UBound(Array) BASIC - UBound(Array) 'implementation dependent Pascal - I don't even remember how to declare a variable so that doesn't count bash - #ummm...
Let me clarify one thing real quick, which I suppose you understood, but others may not: When I said C# I meant C# and the.NET framework.
Maybe I am incorrect. It could simply be that I am more familiar with.NET and C# than I am with Java, just as you are more familiar with Java than C# and.NET.
I was simply speaking from my experiences. In actuality I usually use VB, but mix in some C# modules here and there when something is easier to do in C# than it is in VB.
I use VS.NET for all my development so you should be sold now right?;-)
The only part of.NET that I see a problem porting to any other platform is the System.Windows.Forms namespace and a few bits and pieces here and there, which despite what you may have heard on slashdot are NOT integral to write any non-trivial app. They are mostly lower level functionality like interoperating with COM and other things that are simply irrelevent to non Windows development. Oh, there's also the entire Microsoft namespace, but that's designed from the ground up to provide windows specific functionality (like access to the Registry).
And I just read that the Mono project is porting System.Windows.Forms, minus a few lowlevel form functions that are only used in some window customizing code that is generally not used in anything but window "prettying" software.
From what I've read on Mono's Windows.Form implementation, I fully expect within the year to be able to write fully functional GUI enabled apps in Visual Studio.NET and simply copy the compiled executable to my Linux box and run it. I understand I will have to be careful with certain functions (I commonly use the Registry to store things, though I'm moving to the Application.Config method.NET uses so that my apps will be platform-independent), but overall with a tiny bit of forethought I will be a full fledged Linux GUI programmer in short time and I don't need to learn a thing.
I see the.NET strategy more like this: -.NET takes over Java -.NET takes over institutional use (for various reasons I don't wat to get into) - Just about everything (Linux, Solaris, etc) gets an implementation of.NET - Since everybody easily writes.NET apps on any platform now,.NET servers have become more valuable - Microsoft has the single best.NET implementation (they were working on it for years before anyone even heard of it and they now have an OS that was designed with it in mind) - Microsoft makes serious inroads into the server market that they otherwise could not have penetrated - Meanwhile, they haven't lost anyone due to the.NET initiative (no one's going to stop using MS because Linux has.NET now), so their overall customer base is significantly larger. - In addition, as an added bonus, there are now hordes of new devlopers who use "other" languages like Python, Perl, PHP, etc. that now can write full fledged Windows apps with favorite language, thus increasing the development base of Windows.
Oh and as to your question as to what.NET is, there are two answers. 1. (marketing answer) A brand name of new MS products that are XML and web services driven or compatible. 2. (developer answer) A VM platform, similar but superior to Java (at least once more implementations are released) that allows the use of any compatible language, thus avoiding language lock-in.
Actually, given the way the.NET framework works, I would think it would be rather difficult to write low level virus.
I've had extraordinarily good success with.NET scaling to whatever level I've needed it to (excluding a horrible MySQL implementation I got from some third party).
The phrase "isn't even supported by Microsoft in its own products" perplexes me since it is not something that needs to be supported. Maybe you should clarify exactly what you mean by this.
The C# and VB compilers are free (as in beer). So I don't see the developer expense.
Oh well, I guess if you have some preconception of what programming "really is" (and it somehow includes Java for some reason) then that's your prerogitive.
C# as a language is no better (or trivially better) than Java as a language. They're just different. Though either is easy to pick up if you know one.
On the other hand, most benchmarking I've seen (and my own personal experience) indicates that the.NET framework runs pretty spryly on number crunching. I just wrote a quick test in both languages (set a value equal to pi then multiplied it by pi, then divided it by pi 1,000,000 times) and no discernible (I did not benchmark it) difference was apparent. There would only be a reasonable difference if you were doing all sorts of wacky bit moving tricks.
If you were to take those C++ classes and put them in a managed C++ Project (VS.NET) you could compile them to work with.NET. Otherwise, the changes necessary to make usually aren't too difficult.
C# is more feature rich than the latest Java.
I'm not familiar enough with Java to know how easy it would be to do P2P, but it's ridiculously trivial in C#. As long as you're not doing a GUI, it should run fine on Windows 98+, Linux, and BSD (I believe, I've never used it) without recompilation or code changes.
You know, using.NET would actually be a great thing for universities to do to teach concepts since the framework is language-agnostic (or mostly so). With implementations for C++, C#, VB, Java, Eiffel, PHP, Python and others all running through VS.NET, the students could have a wide range of choices about which language to use for any given class.
There are, of course, plenty of logistic problems not to mention the licensing costs involved...
I've written a number of applications (mostly trivial, a few more complex) for my workplace that run on both linux and windows using.NET. I'd say that's platform independent. What's your definition of platform independent?
Nonetheless, there is absolutely no competition in the IDE market. I also wonder if anyone has tried mapping Java classes directly to.NET classes just so they can use the VS.NET IDE...
So they're a bit behind the times, big deal. Any company that doesn't at least take a serious look at comparing.NET and Java has some mismanagement going on.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to make the point that statistics on exports/imports tend to only reflect the export/import of goods and NOT services.
I'm not saying USA is import positive if you DO include services, just that there's more to the picture.
Ever heard of Manifest Destiny?
It was a widely held belief back in the time when Europeans were killing and persecuting Natives. It was being done by every country with the resources to do so. It was a slightly more primitive time, if you want to think of it that way.
Guess what? No one really believes in Manifest Destiny anymore. And just because my great(-great){1,} grandparents (or their government) may have believed in it, would not make ME a hypocrite anymore than the fact that Americans bought and sold slaves makes me racist or responsible for slavery.
There are Dell support techs who speak English? Huh... I've only called them twice, once speaking to two different individuals, and I never would have thought that they had English speaking techs.
MS wouldn't even have to go as far as releasing an entire distro. All they would have to do is support .NET on other platforms and write a Window Manager, and people could run Linux without even realizing it, using Office .NET in conjunction with the "Windows" (unimaginatively named) Window Manager.
Eventually Office and IE will probably come out for Linux, but we're a ways off on that. It took a semi-partnership between MS and Apple for Office to come out on Mac, and IE is even farther behind.
To play devil's advocate from a company's perspective:
Cheaper? The cost of the PC is not going to be itemized, so the fact that it is possible to find Windows PCs for $300 (less than half the price) means that it is not necessarily cheaper. In fact, since HP is not the cheapest PC maker around, I'd say you could even get a hardware-comparable Windows PC for the same price by looking around.
Efficient? I suppose it heavily depends on what the company's employees do in their workday. Most employee's jobs involve nothing more complicated than using a single app designed for the company or at least for their industry. What OS it is running on really doesn't matter.
I don't know how you get "easier to install" than WinXP, which on my machine involved putting the CD in rebooting, hitting two keys to format the drive, another to agree to MS's terms, and typing in my Admin password. I suppose you could cut that down by three keystrokes, but what's the point? In addition, installation isn't an issue since the PCs come preinstalled whether you choose Windows or Linux.
Easier to use safely. True if they do not have a resident MS guru (and probably true even if they do), but I'm not so sure companies would see a great value in this if the PCs are being used for what was suggested: Non-critical, daily, non-IT stuff.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "arbitrary 'license violation' warnings," so I'll leave that one alone.
One must remember that even in light of some of these mostly minor, mostly transparent benefits, there are some more easily recognized downfalls as well. At some point, most companies are probably going to run into the OO/MS Office incompatibilities. They may deal with a company that has an IE-centric web page that may cause problems among novice users who simply see something as broken. If a user fails to shutdown the computer properly (it happens ALOT), the inode check upon startup (depending on configuration) can be excessive (much moreso than ScanDisk, which can be easily skipped). These very-visible issues with no real solution for the common company could turn them away from Linux as much as the benefits would attract them.
All in all, I don't think this makes much of a difference in the short term, but in long-term, if HP continues pushing, it will expose more people to Linux, thus paving the way for a greater market share later.
While MS would certainly benefit from controlling the three of the biggest (if not biggest) IM apps, it would not, as you said, leave Yahoo and others out in the cold.
MS, AOL, Yahoo and others are currently working together on standards for the IM market for interoperability. While it probably wouldn't be a panacea in most peoples eyes because MS's would have additional features, for simple messaging, there would be no interop problems.
There is a reason people stopped using Netscape in the first place. And it has nothing to do with market leadership or business practices. It is plainly that Netscape was not up to snuff. I understand that now their browser is significantly better than it was. But I guarentee you IE 7 will be leaps and bounds above that. Once CSS2 is implemented (and maybe a few parts of CSS3), Netscape has nothing to offer IE except useless bells and whistles.
...assuming, of course, that you are correct, you have just proved Microsoft's side of the antitrust case.
Hmmm... I don't know what it is, but the two machines I just tried it on came back up in 8 seconds and 10 seconds respectfully. Might it be that the machine cut costs somewhere on the hardware, slowing the process down?
FYI: The machine that took 10 seconds had a commit charge of 290MB.
Have Microsoft issued a patent? They may be wanting to protect .NET under copyright, but it seems if they wanted to protect it under patent law, they would have a patent. I personally haven't seen mention of this.
Actually there is a Volvo concept car designed for women that does not allow you to open the hood without a special tool. It has a hole for gas, and a hole for windshield washer fluid. Anything more than that and you have to take it into the mechanic.
It also has a pony-tail hole on the headrest, and an ungodly amount of storage room for a car its size.
Try out Microsoft's WordView. Allows you to read and print any Word 97/2000 files (As a note, Word 2K2 defaults to save in 2000 format, so those should work to, don't know about 2K3)
Actually 74 hits and 9 viruses isn't that bad all things considered.
Adaware is like some SPAM software. It points out anything that _might_ be spyware/adware. I just ran it on my system 3-4 days ago and it came up with something like 33 hits/1 virus. I looked into the issues that it brought up and none of them - not a single one - was actually spyware or adware or anything malicious.
Examples:
It pointed out a regsitry key that Windows Media Player's unique identification string. Alright, this could be considered "spyware", except that on my machine, Media Player is set up so that the unique identification is never sent out. I don't think this constitutes a risk of any kind.
A slew of hits came from registry entries for software that was not on my computer. I had installed AIM the day before to find that it now installs spyware. That doesn't really count in my opinion.
1 program was listed as a virus or something along those line (spyware, adware, worm, I don't remember), but looking into it, that program could not have worked on my system, due to my security setup. A non-issue.
I could be wrong, but you seem to be one of those people who has made a prejudgement against Windows security without knowing anything about it. I ran a 20 user (~200 users if you include web customers) Windows network (Win2K almost exclusively, but one each 98, NT, and 2K3 thrown in for good measure) that had no real firewall set up for it (nothing MS specific set up on the firewall) and had no antivirus software installed anywhere.
I designed the system so that everybody got security updates automatically, preapproved by me. Only a single workstation ever got a virus/worm/etc (actually there were multiple) during my management of the system. She installed these virii through her e-mail by opening attachments. But still, the security of the system prevented the virus from spreading to other machines.
Code Red never breached our system, Nimda tried for years, Blaster brought down the network simply due to excessive traffic on some Colo servers but never infected anything on our end. The list goes on.
I don't know why there are so many incompetent Windows administrators out there, but I wish they would all find a job better suited to themselves.
That ended up being a bit off-topic. Mod at will.
A fix to these problems: Don't give mom the admin password. Install VNC. When she wants new software she can put in a requisition form. You can install it remotely.
Not that I expect anyone to actually heed this, but Mono would be the best bet for a "scripting" language for OpenOffice. It would provide the maximum amount of compatibility with scripts.
That's incorrect. There are data recovery companies that can read upwards of a dozen past writes of data, sometimes even if the platters have been somewhat mangled.
There is apparently latent amounts of data that gets weaker and weaker each write, but with the correct equipment can be picked up.
So I'd say in an important situation, five overwrites would a good idea. I agree it doesn't have to be random.
C - (int)ArrayCounter; //requires incrementing //dunno, I use C method //never cared
PHP -
Java -
C# - Array.GetUpperBound(0);
VB.NET - Array.GetUpperBound(0)
VB - UBound(Array)
BASIC - UBound(Array) 'implementation dependent
Pascal - I don't even remember how to declare a variable so that doesn't count
bash - #ummm...
I don't think I did too bad.
Let me clarify one thing real quick, which I suppose you understood, but others may not: When I said C# I meant C# and the .NET framework.
.NET and C# than I am with Java, just as you are more familiar with Java than C# and .NET.
Maybe I am incorrect. It could simply be that I am more familiar with
I was simply speaking from my experiences. In actuality I usually use VB, but mix in some C# modules here and there when something is easier to do in C# than it is in VB.
I use VS.NET for all my development so you should be sold now right? ;-)
.NET that I see a problem porting to any other platform is the System.Windows.Forms namespace and a few bits and pieces here and there, which despite what you may have heard on slashdot are NOT integral to write any non-trivial app. They are mostly lower level functionality like interoperating with COM and other things that are simply irrelevent to non Windows development. Oh, there's also the entire Microsoft namespace, but that's designed from the ground up to provide windows specific functionality (like access to the Registry).
.NET and simply copy the compiled executable to my Linux box and run it. I understand I will have to be careful with certain functions (I commonly use the Registry to store things, though I'm moving to the Application.Config method .NET uses so that my apps will be platform-independent), but overall with a tiny bit of forethought I will be a full fledged Linux GUI programmer in short time and I don't need to learn a thing.
.NET strategy more like this: .NET takes over Java .NET takes over institutional use (for various reasons I don't wat to get into) .NET .NET apps on any platform now, .NET servers have become more valuable .NET implementation (they were working on it for years before anyone even heard of it and they now have an OS that was designed with it in mind) .NET initiative (no one's going to stop using MS because Linux has .NET now), so their overall customer base is significantly larger.
.NET is, there are two answers.
The only part of
And I just read that the Mono project is porting System.Windows.Forms, minus a few lowlevel form functions that are only used in some window customizing code that is generally not used in anything but window "prettying" software.
From what I've read on Mono's Windows.Form implementation, I fully expect within the year to be able to write fully functional GUI enabled apps in Visual Studio
I see the
-
-
- Just about everything (Linux, Solaris, etc) gets an implementation of
- Since everybody easily writes
- Microsoft has the single best
- Microsoft makes serious inroads into the server market that they otherwise could not have penetrated
- Meanwhile, they haven't lost anyone due to the
- In addition, as an added bonus, there are now hordes of new devlopers who use "other" languages like Python, Perl, PHP, etc. that now can write full fledged Windows apps with favorite language, thus increasing the development base of Windows.
Oh and as to your question as to what
1. (marketing answer) A brand name of new MS products that are XML and web services driven or compatible.
2. (developer answer) A VM platform, similar but superior to Java (at least once more implementations are released) that allows the use of any compatible language, thus avoiding language lock-in.
Actually, given the way the .NET framework works, I would think it would be rather difficult to write low level virus.
.NET scaling to whatever level I've needed it to (excluding a horrible MySQL implementation I got from some third party).
I've had extraordinarily good success with
The phrase "isn't even supported by Microsoft in its own products" perplexes me since it is not something that needs to be supported. Maybe you should clarify exactly what you mean by this.
The C# and VB compilers are free (as in beer). So I don't see the developer expense.
Oh well, I guess if you have some preconception of what programming "really is" (and it somehow includes Java for some reason) then that's your prerogitive.
C# as a language is no better (or trivially better) than Java as a language. They're just different. Though either is easy to pick up if you know one.
.NET framework runs pretty spryly on number crunching. I just wrote a quick test in both languages (set a value equal to pi then multiplied it by pi, then divided it by pi 1,000,000 times) and no discernible (I did not benchmark it) difference was apparent. There would only be a reasonable difference if you were doing all sorts of wacky bit moving tricks.
.NET. Otherwise, the changes necessary to make usually aren't too difficult.
On the other hand, most benchmarking I've seen (and my own personal experience) indicates that the
If you were to take those C++ classes and put them in a managed C++ Project (VS.NET) you could compile them to work with
C# is more feature rich than the latest Java.
I'm not familiar enough with Java to know how easy it would be to do P2P, but it's ridiculously trivial in C#. As long as you're not doing a GUI, it should run fine on Windows 98+, Linux, and BSD (I believe, I've never used it) without recompilation or code changes.
You know, using .NET would actually be a great thing for universities to do to teach concepts since the framework is language-agnostic (or mostly so). With implementations for C++, C#, VB, Java, Eiffel, PHP, Python and others all running through VS.NET, the students could have a wide range of choices about which language to use for any given class.
There are, of course, plenty of logistic problems not to mention the licensing costs involved...
I've written a number of applications (mostly trivial, a few more complex) for my workplace that run on both linux and windows using .NET. I'd say that's platform independent. What's your definition of platform independent?
Nonetheless, there is absolutely no competition in the IDE market. I also wonder if anyone has tried mapping Java classes directly to .NET classes just so they can use the VS.NET IDE...
So they're a bit behind the times, big deal. Any company that doesn't at least take a serious look at comparing .NET and Java has some mismanagement going on.