Yes, but booting up the OS on Gentoo is maybe a monthly task, whereas you are going to be taking a reboot required update on XP more frequently than that... so in total time spend booting during the life of a machine...:)
I agree. I started to write something to that effect in my original response, but thought it diverged from the point I wanted to make. He got what he asked for. If he wanted a different outcome, he should have signed up for something that had the possibility of supplying that outcome.
Employment is anagolous to time as a Certificate of Deposit is to money. You are going in with a set expectation of what you WILL earn for the duration of the agreement. You may not be able to get the same deal when the minimum agreement is over, and almost *ANY* investment will probably pay off better even while you are under the terms, but your risk is mitigated, except for the opportunity cost of not taking the risks, which can be mammoth. The original post's question is one of "How can I find a CD with the same returns as Google has shown in the last few years." You can't. The poster had a rude introduction to opportunity cost. Somehow, most people don't see opportunity cost as a real cost, no matter how big of a cost it turns out to be.
He did his job,and got paid for it. That's what he asked for, and that's what he got. There's nothing here to be "protected" against. He's just complaining because other people did well on a risky investment, whereas he went in with no risk and got exactly what he asked for.
Actually, IIRC, the definitions of Alpha and Beta (from varions MS Press books) are:
Alpha: Nearly feature complete. Technology preview. Bugs prevelant. Deviations from spec are to be expected. Beta: Feature complete. All deviations from spec are bugs. RC: No known bugs. Complete product, may release this build with no changes.
If MS releases a beta, it is to be assumed that this version is *FEATURE COMPLETE*. If it is missing a feature, then that feature will not be in the final product. There may be bugs present, but they are unintended.
This has been the definition of Beta since the day the term was used. Let's not go reinventing termonology just because marketing departments like to call Alpha releases "Beta" just becaue it gets more adoption. If MS released a Beta (or anyone else for that matter), you should hold their feet to the fire and review the inended feature set against the actual feature set and hammer them when they fall short. Otherwise we will have to start releasing "Gamma" versions because people didn't like the term "Alpha"
Now, with network broadcast buffer overflows, I have had Win boxen infected within seconds of being connected to the internet. Running Windows outside of a firewall *or* with no AV *or* unpatched and unrebooted is simply not an option anymore.
I know a few people who still run with software firewall only, but they are typically the ones I have to go fix their boxes regularly also.
The core duo is an *EXCELLENT* value when you put power efficiency into the matrix. it's currently, by far, the best mobile proc on the market with the T2500 beating the pants off AMD's competing MT-40 and still being able to stay in the same price ballpark. There is currently no better value laptop chip out there.
I run a 64 bit OS and full 64 bit applications. I do not use Windows XP 64, as it is a steaming pile of shit, as you say. I will not be upgrading to Vista 64, because it doesn't offer me anything over what I am using now, so it's a non event to me.
SUSE support maybe? If a company "supports Linux" then I am definately going to be bugging the hell out of them and giving them poor reviews if I can't make a supported product work on my Gentoo box.
Because most buttons change graphics on press, and the user is given feedback at that point as to which button was actually pressed. As there is often some lag in mouse pointer placement, this gives the user a moment to reposition the pointer over the proper button before releasing. You can make an arguement for the action on mouse-down, but in practice, users almost unanimously prefer the action on mouse-up behavior.
The whole point of an armed populace is that the fighting doesn't involve conscripts only. Because it is a domestic war, the military ends up fragmenting. These were the points made in the Federalist Papers supporting the 2nd ammendment.
It works like this: 1) The government gets out of hand. THe people bitch. 2) The government tires of the people bitching and represses them. 3) Somebody fires shots. Doesn't matter who, but the tension breaks and the government makes a military move. 4) In an unarmed populace, this is where it ends. The government can easily suppress revolt with little if any blood. In an armed populace, if the government is being naughty, some group of people shoots back. 5) There has now been non trivial loss of life both military and civilian. On our own soil. Everyone looks at the situation and makes a morality check. Soldiers *REALLY* don't like going to war against their home towns. 6) The military fragments. The executive likely disbands congress because the political infighting gets in the way. Some top level generals seceed from the executive controlled military and proclaim loyalty to individual state governments. All seceeders form a pact for mutual protection because the majority of arms is probably still in the hands of the federal. 7) Nos the armed populace comes into play a second time, this time not just as a tripwire. The now people's army can be resupplied with small arms at every stop. Conscriptionists sign up at every turn to fight the big bad federal government. The federal government must rely on drafts of unwilling soldiers and therefore suffers major morale issues. Civilian militias annoy the federal armies through guerrilla tactics which makes the rebellion armies job easier. 8) Eventually the people overtake the executive, reinstate congress, yadda yadda. There's a big Libertarian movement to reset the Republic back to their enumerated rights and things return to normal.
The Civil War would have gone this way except for the fact that the underlying moral issue that was under the executive branch's banner was compelling enough that the federal government continued to recieve conscription support, or at least neutrality from a wide region. Had the loss of property experienced by the south that spurred on the civil war been anything other than human being ownership, the south would have won that war easily. They would not have created a new country however, they would have marched into Washington, thrown Lincoln and his cronies in prison or executed them, and elected a new president.
The right to bear arms was not put in so there could be a civilian uprising. Almost no examples of successfull civilian uprisings have ever happened in human history. The right to bear arms is important because it reminds the federal government that in order to oppress the people, somebody has to fire shots, and once those shots get fired a chain reaction is initiated that will invariably lead to the destruction of their own power base. Lincoln took a HUGE risk, betting that the moral high ground he held would keep him safe, and he barely won (he would have been hanged if it weren't for Lee and Sherman having one bad day... arguably he would have been hanged if Lee had one extra shipment of artillery rounds arrive 12 hours early).
I don't want ANYTHING new in 2.6 I like 2.6 the way it is. So do a whole lot of other people. THe feature set was complete a LONG time ago now.
Go play in 2.7, and when you've got something new to offer and the community wants it in a stable branch, then make 2.8 for them and go play in 2.9... what was wrong with that? It served us very well in the good old days of 2.4/2.5
Installed XP Pro about 1 month ago. I immediately went to Windows update, as the SMS server on my companies network will turn off your ethernet port if you don't have all the latest security patches on your machine, which told me to install a new video driver. I did so, did the manditory reboot and got a blue screen on startup. I came back up and booted into safe mode. I was dumped into 640x480 mode, so I went to change the resolution by right-clicking on the desktop. I was able to bring up the dialog to change resolution and saw that a higher resolution was availabe so that I could actually see something on the screen in order to get new drivers. I set the resoultion to something a little better, but I could not click the "ok" button because Microsoft made the dialog to set the resolution non-resizeable and too big to fit on the default fail-safe resolution screen (that is so screwed up it must have been a planned out sick joke by the windows PMs). After hitting tab to click ok, and closing the window instead about 5 times by mistake, I finally changed resolutions. I got to the video card manufacturer's website in IE (a process that after running adaware I saw had mysteriously gotten things installed on my machine without my knowledge) and installed their unsigned drivers. Windows warned me about installing drivers that won't blue screen my machine, but I did it anyway. Manditory reboot again. After the system came back up, Windows gives me a nag screen saying that it has a better video driver available on windows update that might be better for crashing my machine and that I shouldn't be trusting the hardware manufacturer. I told the nag dialog to go to hell.
Windows might be ok for servers, but it is definately not ready for the desktop.
Agreed. I was so excited about getting a new Turion 64 Lappy... until I did some last minute research and pulled up all the benchmarks on the core duo. Damn them. I really wanted to go 64 bit, but that chip is so damn fast I couldn't turn it down, especially at the price point.
Buying my cell phone "forces" me to use some crappy preloaded OS that I cannot change. If I don't like it, I buy a different cell phone. Buying my car "forces" me to use the installed alternator. If I don't like it, I buy a different car. My solution for IE? I don't buy Windows. It works out pretty good for me. It's not like there aren't a plethora of good operating systems out there. There always have been.
As for drivers, I haven't had any problems with driver support for a couple years. I don NOT blame the hardware companies for writing drivers only for the most popular OS, as software development is expensive, so, profit in mind, they put the money where it is used best. The fault of these companies is when they refuse to release the specifications for their hardware so that others can write drivers for them, but that is hardly Microsoft's fault.
Laptops: www.avadirect.com www.xmeld.com... I just bought a new top of the line dual core laptop. Having windows installed is a premium add on I did not go with, as I will be installing Gentoo instead. They will install Linux for you by default for significantly cheaper than Windows. Dell might not offer it, but then again, that's like looking for custom auto parts at wal-mart... the fact that they don't carry the good stuff has nothing to do with monopoly powers but everything to do with the fact their customers have no idea what they are looking for anyway, so why confuse them.
Zero games... that's a failing of linux. MS doesn't pay people to write games for them. Game authors write games for the people who will buy games. Those people own windows boxen.
A *LOT* of web pages render INCREDIBLY poorly under IE. Way moreso than under firefox and others. I will only go to a trusted website in IE for fear of the spyware and crap that will choke my machine. The web is damn near unuseable from an IE browser. Open source beats MS' pants off in this arena.
Gentoo is the only distro I recommend solely for the community. I'm actually in awe of how well the forums, wiki, bug tracker and handbook work and it puts just about every other organization, commercial or not, to shame.
The libraries don't seem as polished in alot of ways as Java's do. Take collections, for instance. They do not use standard terminology to identify the collections for one, but rather show some of their VB heritage. When they added generics, these were not a simple drop-in, like Java was, but rather a non trivial shift to using a different set of collections.
Often times in.NET the lower level library API's are not documented as well as Java's are, and sometimes not at all. All in all, it just seems a bit "clunkier" of a library. Not that it isn't a very good library, but Sun has just added that extra spit and polish. As with most MS dev environments.NET, while being by far the best library suite ever to come out of MS, has more of a maverick "git-r-done" coding style than the sleek and stylish. That's not always a bad thing, as someties doing things the pretty way is not the easiest or best.
If I had to choose between the 2 languages for a project, I would most likely choose Java, but mainly because of 3rd party library support (eclipse and hibernate having no equal). From a language standpoint, they are both on pretty equal footing, with both languages having slight advantages in certain areas, but functionally they are so similiar in both feature set and style that they are more of a separate dialect than a seperate language.
True, but they have a goldmine of money flowing into their coffers. Of course they are going to go with the sure thing river of money instead of risking it on the field of competition.
Fighting a free market is not shortsightedness on a company's part. A Free market DOES work in everyone's favor, and that's the problem from an individual standpoint when you are in a position of superiority in the current marketplace.
Why does.NET kick ass? I program in C# daily. It is Java, redone decently, with a couple extra features but without some of the polish that Java has. It's nice for a scripted language, but it's by no means revolutionary. Hell, Java isn't revolutionary..NET is another iteration of a concept that has been around since the 70's, and it has the same advantages and disadvantages that all VMs have. Nothing much to see here. Give me a reason why it's the dog's bollocks, because I really am curious.
I'm here at MS right now. I've come and gone, as have many of my peers. MS doesn't give alot of information in their references for liability reasons, but they don't slander by any means, and old employess are welcome back.
The benefits are definately great. In my experience though, I have always been able to find other employers willing to offer me more salary than Microsoft has (I'm a SDE3-4 at Microsoft) except back in 2001, where you were lucky if you were working at all. Amazon has had offers on the table that make MS look like pocket change. Most of the smaller companies around seem to know what MS pays and are willing to offer a little more than that in order to get you. MS is pretty tough to negotiate their offers... they have a big labor pool to choose from.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but booting up the OS on Gentoo is maybe a monthly task, whereas you are going to be taking a reboot required update on XP more frequently than that... so in total time spend booting during the life of a machine... :)
cacert.org
They have a great concept that should be supported.
I agree. I started to write something to that effect in my original response, but thought it diverged from the point I wanted to make. He got what he asked for. If he wanted a different outcome, he should have signed up for something that had the possibility of supplying that outcome.
Employment is anagolous to time as a Certificate of Deposit is to money. You are going in with a set expectation of what you WILL earn for the duration of the agreement. You may not be able to get the same deal when the minimum agreement is over, and almost *ANY* investment will probably pay off better even while you are under the terms, but your risk is mitigated, except for the opportunity cost of not taking the risks, which can be mammoth. The original post's question is one of "How can I find a CD with the same returns as Google has shown in the last few years." You can't. The poster had a rude introduction to opportunity cost. Somehow, most people don't see opportunity cost as a real cost, no matter how big of a cost it turns out to be.
I'm curious how he got "screwed".
He did his job,and got paid for it. That's what he asked for, and that's what he got. There's nothing here to be "protected" against. He's just complaining because other people did well on a risky investment, whereas he went in with no risk and got exactly what he asked for.
cacert.org
Actually, IIRC, the definitions of Alpha and Beta (from varions MS Press books) are:
Alpha: Nearly feature complete. Technology preview. Bugs prevelant. Deviations from spec are to be expected.
Beta: Feature complete. All deviations from spec are bugs.
RC: No known bugs. Complete product, may release this build with no changes.
If MS releases a beta, it is to be assumed that this version is *FEATURE COMPLETE*. If it is missing a feature, then that feature will not be in the final product. There may be bugs present, but they are unintended.
This has been the definition of Beta since the day the term was used. Let's not go reinventing termonology just because marketing departments like to call Alpha releases "Beta" just becaue it gets more adoption. If MS released a Beta (or anyone else for that matter), you should hold their feet to the fire and review the inended feature set against the actual feature set and hammer them when they fall short. Otherwise we will have to start releasing "Gamma" versions because people didn't like the term "Alpha"
That used to be the case.
Now, with network broadcast buffer overflows, I have had Win boxen infected within seconds of being connected to the internet. Running Windows outside of a firewall *or* with no AV *or* unpatched and unrebooted is simply not an option anymore.
I know a few people who still run with software firewall only, but they are typically the ones I have to go fix their boxes regularly also.
The core duo is an *EXCELLENT* value when you put power efficiency into the matrix. it's currently, by far, the best mobile proc on the market with the T2500 beating the pants off AMD's competing MT-40 and still being able to stay in the same price ballpark. There is currently no better value laptop chip out there.
I run a 64 bit OS and full 64 bit applications. I do not use Windows XP 64, as it is a steaming pile of shit, as you say. I will not be upgrading to Vista 64, because it doesn't offer me anything over what I am using now, so it's a non event to me.
I guess I'm not "people".
SUSE support maybe? If a company "supports Linux" then I am definately going to be bugging the hell out of them and giving them poor reviews if I can't make a supported product work on my Gentoo box.
Because most buttons change graphics on press, and the user is given feedback at that point as to which button was actually pressed. As there is often some lag in mouse pointer placement, this gives the user a moment to reposition the pointer over the proper button before releasing. You can make an arguement for the action on mouse-down, but in practice, users almost unanimously prefer the action on mouse-up behavior.
The whole point of an armed populace is that the fighting doesn't involve conscripts only. Because it is a domestic war, the military ends up fragmenting. These were the points made in the Federalist Papers supporting the 2nd ammendment.
It works like this:
1) The government gets out of hand. THe people bitch.
2) The government tires of the people bitching and represses them.
3) Somebody fires shots. Doesn't matter who, but the tension breaks and the government makes a military move.
4) In an unarmed populace, this is where it ends. The government can easily suppress revolt with little if any blood. In an armed populace, if the government is being naughty, some group of people shoots back.
5) There has now been non trivial loss of life both military and civilian. On our own soil. Everyone looks at the situation and makes a morality check. Soldiers *REALLY* don't like going to war against their home towns.
6) The military fragments. The executive likely disbands congress because the political infighting gets in the way. Some top level generals seceed from the executive controlled military and proclaim loyalty to individual state governments. All seceeders form a pact for mutual protection because the majority of arms is probably still in the hands of the federal.
7) Nos the armed populace comes into play a second time, this time not just as a tripwire. The now people's army can be resupplied with small arms at every stop. Conscriptionists sign up at every turn to fight the big bad federal government. The federal government must rely on drafts of unwilling soldiers and therefore suffers major morale issues. Civilian militias annoy the federal armies through guerrilla tactics which makes the rebellion armies job easier.
8) Eventually the people overtake the executive, reinstate congress, yadda yadda. There's a big Libertarian movement to reset the Republic back to their enumerated rights and things return to normal.
The Civil War would have gone this way except for the fact that the underlying moral issue that was under the executive branch's banner was compelling enough that the federal government continued to recieve conscription support, or at least neutrality from a wide region. Had the loss of property experienced by the south that spurred on the civil war been anything other than human being ownership, the south would have won that war easily. They would not have created a new country however, they would have marched into Washington, thrown Lincoln and his cronies in prison or executed them, and elected a new president.
The right to bear arms was not put in so there could be a civilian uprising. Almost no examples of successfull civilian uprisings have ever happened in human history. The right to bear arms is important because it reminds the federal government that in order to oppress the people, somebody has to fire shots, and once those shots get fired a chain reaction is initiated that will invariably lead to the destruction of their own power base. Lincoln took a HUGE risk, betting that the moral high ground he held would keep him safe, and he barely won (he would have been hanged if it weren't for Lee and Sherman having one bad day... arguably he would have been hanged if Lee had one extra shipment of artillery rounds arrive 12 hours early).
I want 2.7
I don't want ANYTHING new in 2.6 I like 2.6 the way it is. So do a whole lot of other people. THe feature set was complete a LONG time ago now.
Go play in 2.7, and when you've got something new to offer and the community wants it in a stable branch, then make 2.8 for them and go play in 2.9... what was wrong with that? It served us very well in the good old days of 2.4/2.5
Installed XP Pro about 1 month ago. I immediately went to Windows update, as the SMS server on my companies network will turn off your ethernet port if you don't have all the latest security patches on your machine, which told me to install a new video driver. I did so, did the manditory reboot and got a blue screen on startup. I came back up and booted into safe mode. I was dumped into 640x480 mode, so I went to change the resolution by right-clicking on the desktop. I was able to bring up the dialog to change resolution and saw that a higher resolution was availabe so that I could actually see something on the screen in order to get new drivers. I set the resoultion to something a little better, but I could not click the "ok" button because Microsoft made the dialog to set the resolution non-resizeable and too big to fit on the default fail-safe resolution screen (that is so screwed up it must have been a planned out sick joke by the windows PMs). After hitting tab to click ok, and closing the window instead about 5 times by mistake, I finally changed resolutions. I got to the video card manufacturer's website in IE (a process that after running adaware I saw had mysteriously gotten things installed on my machine without my knowledge) and installed their unsigned drivers. Windows warned me about installing drivers that won't blue screen my machine, but I did it anyway. Manditory reboot again. After the system came back up, Windows gives me a nag screen saying that it has a better video driver available on windows update that might be better for crashing my machine and that I shouldn't be trusting the hardware manufacturer. I told the nag dialog to go to hell.
Windows might be ok for servers, but it is definately not ready for the desktop.
Agreed. I was so excited about getting a new Turion 64 Lappy... until I did some last minute research and pulled up all the benchmarks on the core duo. Damn them. I really wanted to go 64 bit, but that chip is so damn fast I couldn't turn it down, especially at the price point.
Buying my cell phone "forces" me to use some crappy preloaded OS that I cannot change. If I don't like it, I buy a different cell phone.
Buying my car "forces" me to use the installed alternator. If I don't like it, I buy a different car.
My solution for IE? I don't buy Windows. It works out pretty good for me. It's not like there aren't a plethora of good operating systems out there. There always have been.
As for drivers, I haven't had any problems with driver support for a couple years. I don NOT blame the hardware companies for writing drivers only for the most popular OS, as software development is expensive, so, profit in mind, they put the money where it is used best. The fault of these companies is when they refuse to release the specifications for their hardware so that others can write drivers for them, but that is hardly Microsoft's fault.
Laptops: www.avadirect.com www.xmeld.com... I just bought a new top of the line dual core laptop. Having windows installed is a premium add on I did not go with, as I will be installing Gentoo instead. They will install Linux for you by default for significantly cheaper than Windows. Dell might not offer it, but then again, that's like looking for custom auto parts at wal-mart... the fact that they don't carry the good stuff has nothing to do with monopoly powers but everything to do with the fact their customers have no idea what they are looking for anyway, so why confuse them.
Zero games... that's a failing of linux. MS doesn't pay people to write games for them. Game authors write games for the people who will buy games. Those people own windows boxen.
A *LOT* of web pages render INCREDIBLY poorly under IE. Way moreso than under firefox and others. I will only go to a trusted website in IE for fear of the spyware and crap that will choke my machine. The web is damn near unuseable from an IE browser. Open source beats MS' pants off in this arena.
Gentoo is the only distro I recommend solely for the community. I'm actually in awe of how well the forums, wiki, bug tracker and handbook work and it puts just about every other organization, commercial or not, to shame.
The libraries don't seem as polished in alot of ways as Java's do. Take collections, for instance. They do not use standard terminology to identify the collections for one, but rather show some of their VB heritage. When they added generics, these were not a simple drop-in, like Java was, but rather a non trivial shift to using a different set of collections.
.NET the lower level library API's are not documented as well as Java's are, and sometimes not at all. All in all, it just seems a bit "clunkier" of a library. Not that it isn't a very good library, but Sun has just added that extra spit and polish. As with most MS dev environments .NET, while being by far the best library suite ever to come out of MS, has more of a maverick "git-r-done" coding style than the sleek and stylish. That's not always a bad thing, as someties doing things the pretty way is not the easiest or best.
Often times in
If I had to choose between the 2 languages for a project, I would most likely choose Java, but mainly because of 3rd party library support (eclipse and hibernate having no equal). From a language standpoint, they are both on pretty equal footing, with both languages having slight advantages in certain areas, but functionally they are so similiar in both feature set and style that they are more of a separate dialect than a seperate language.
Actually, if you know C++ or java, then C# is a peice of cake. I would hate to move to C# from a background in only C.
True, but they have a goldmine of money flowing into their coffers. Of course they are going to go with the sure thing river of money instead of risking it on the field of competition.
Fighting a free market is not shortsightedness on a company's part. A Free market DOES work in everyone's favor, and that's the problem from an individual standpoint when you are in a position of superiority in the current marketplace.
Why does .NET kick ass? I program in C# daily. It is Java, redone decently, with a couple extra features but without some of the polish that Java has. It's nice for a scripted language, but it's by no means revolutionary. Hell, Java isn't revolutionary. .NET is another iteration of a concept that has been around since the 70's, and it has the same advantages and disadvantages that all VMs have. Nothing much to see here. Give me a reason why it's the dog's bollocks, because I really am curious.
Bullshit.
I'm here at MS right now. I've come and gone, as have many of my peers. MS doesn't give alot of information in their references for liability reasons, but they don't slander by any means, and old employess are welcome back.
The benefits are definately great. In my experience though, I have always been able to find other employers willing to offer me more salary than Microsoft has (I'm a SDE3-4 at Microsoft) except back in 2001, where you were lucky if you were working at all. Amazon has had offers on the table that make MS look like pocket change. Most of the smaller companies around seem to know what MS pays and are willing to offer a little more than that in order to get you. MS is pretty tough to negotiate their offers... they have a big labor pool to choose from.