"Are the guys who work at Microsoft a bunch of idiots that anyone can out-program?"
Seems so, if not out-program, at least out project. MS semms to have several concerns about anticompetitive actions and bureocracy for doing good software decision nowadays (but sometimes they get it right).
C++ also have an ANSI standard. So, if you code following ANSI C++ and POSIX, your program should run on every unix (and NT). But C++ compilers are known to not following standars, so it is not that good.
I don't know if this is true. Yes, MS has a lot of money to spend, but I doubt it can leave on a competitive market. Just look on how it has been adminitrated, how many projects are sucessful and make a fast comparaison on quality and usability of MS main products (Windows and Office) and the competition. Word is the only main MS product that beats the competitors, but is becomming worse, and the others are becomming better. MS also seems to not remember how to inovate, on products and on strategy.
Unfortunately, MS may not survive on a concurrent market. But I still have hope that it sell its code to other companies before it close the doors.
Many sucessfull memes want to reproduce (and are sucessfull because of this). That is the reason the parents want to brainwash their children is that they believe that their children must know the "truth". And their fanatism make tem belive that because if it was otherwise, they wouldn't be converted. That said, they didn't fear knowledge, they fear anything that destroys their memes.
The funny part is to imagine what those people would think about been evidence of memes evolution
At least here at Brazil, there was a big FUD attack on gmail. I know of several people, all over the coutry that won't use it because they were hit by some rumors of hiw google would use their data (stuff that aren't on the EULA).
And spreading rumors is a natural reaction, so I expect people of several countries to have done that.
The u.s. is in the transition to a wholely IP based economy, the DMCA is their lifeblood to a prosperous future.
I really hope not. Since I am not american, I will not lose so much, but the US making such a transition to a "produce nothing" economy will be a big hit on the world's economy.
Dialog boxes with pictures help only to confuse the user. There is no better stuf than text to put into them.
The probem you are pointing happens because some systems abuse of dialog box, they appear all the time, so the user don't care about them. The solution is simple, just use dialog boxes to ask the user for directions, never confirmations (unless there is something very dangerous). Dangerous actions should be hard to execute. So, the system should require concentration to execute the attachment, not to cancel the (easy) execution.
If there are privacy concerns, nobody should even know that they have material evidence. Also, is the justice asking for the logs? I don't think so (it's just the **AA), since a court decided that they don't need to give it.
But I fully admit to not understanding the "hate Microsoft at any price." I think there is just a drive among some people to hate the leader.
That is not this. We hate Microsoft because it
1: destroys interoperability
2: abuses of its economical (and political) power
3: it goes very deep to make products that (miss)act alone, making error when we know how to make it right.
I understand that people don't care about 3, but there is no excuse about 1 and 2.
TCPA is not DRM, like several TCPA opponents say. Also, TCPA is not completelly independent of DRM either (like some TCPA defendors - read IBM - say), one of its goals is to improve DRM.
That beeing said, I disagree of your reasoning. TCPA have the downside of making it possible to enforce DRM, but have several upsides too (if it didn't have upsides, nobody would fear it). The best way of fighting its downsides is offering clear implementations of the upsides, so, nobody will need to use the evil implementations.
He probably pasted that from the prompt, since MathLab's prompt doesn't accept line breaks. It also doesn't accept comments, since comments spans to the end of the line and you don't have line breaks.
MathLab language is not very clear even if you write it right. Also, it doesn't help people writting better programs, since the prompt is so bad. But, yes, your supervisor's code is bad.
If you have benn working with people that don't use a computer often, it is natural that they don't want to remove eye candy. But don't assume that only geeks want to remove them, that is not true. Casual users love eye candy, the other ones also like it but prefer usability.
Well, integer factorization is now known to be NP, since prime is P. The proff is very easy, verify if each factor is prime (P) and verify if their product is the number you are trying to factorize (P). The fact that remains to be known is if factorization is P or not. That may be very hard, since not problem has ever been proved not beeing P.
Is the problem of simulating nature on a submicroscopic level NP-complete?
First, I have to ask: What problem? As far as I know, simulating the interation of a certain number of particles may be NP complete if you take into consideration the number of particles. But if this number is fixed, it is not. I am not sure, but I think it is P.
So, all you got is a computer that becomes much more fast than conventional ones when its size increase, but you still don't have an efficient way of solving NP complete problems.
Increasing shelf-life, and therefore the range at which food can be reasonably delivered (this directly impacts the price of food in the third world, as getting food in place before it rots is a huge cost).
I don't know what "third world" are you talking about, but the one I use to know exports food. This may reduce the cost of food on the "first world", or just on the larger cities.
1. I can't get XP working on my computer with 1024x768 without going into the net, downloading a driver, installing it and changing the resolution. I also have to do that to have 24 or 32 bit colors. Where is the difference? The average Joe doesn't know how to install Windows either.
2. We can't requier that the user educate himself, but we can make a less sensible piece of software.
3. Yes, I also belive that Windows will not die, but if it doesn't become better, it will. Win may survive, but it will be very different from what we have today. Also, there is no bad on a possible Windows death, we will still have competiton, FOSS make it impossible to not have.
They want their current (illegally issued, and thus currently illegal) patents to be legalized so they can use them for defensive purposes.
If there are no patents, there is no need for defensive patents.
They know that with about 50,000 illegally issued patents in Europe there will be a big patent war where everybody sues everybody in Europe if these illegal patents are legalized. This will give them (and the rest of the US software business) a big competitive advantage.
Rephrasing it: The current situation give a big competitive advantage for the Europe. MS is on a position of disadvantage, they only want to lower the playing field by making Europe as fuzzy as EUA.
Where the third point is also valid, I think the goal of MS supporting software patents on Europe is only fighting FOSS.
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That's cool. I really missed this screensaver when changed to KDE.
Me neither, KDE doesn't display them.
"Are the guys who work at Microsoft a bunch of idiots that anyone can out-program?"
Seems so, if not out-program, at least out project. MS semms to have several concerns about anticompetitive actions and bureocracy for doing good software decision nowadays (but sometimes they get it right).
"C++ -- I'm not qualified to comment on that."
C++ also have an ANSI standard. So, if you code following ANSI C++ and POSIX, your program should run on every unix (and NT). But C++ compilers are known to not following standars, so it is not that good.
"Not that M$ will ever go away."
I don't know if this is true. Yes, MS has a lot of money to spend, but I doubt it can leave on a competitive market. Just look on how it has been adminitrated, how many projects are sucessful and make a fast comparaison on quality and usability of MS main products (Windows and Office) and the competition. Word is the only main MS product that beats the competitors, but is becomming worse, and the others are becomming better. MS also seems to not remember how to inovate, on products and on strategy.
Unfortunately, MS may not survive on a concurrent market. But I still have hope that it sell its code to other companies before it close the doors.
Many sucessfull memes want to reproduce (and are sucessfull because of this). That is the reason the parents want to brainwash their children is that they believe that their children must know the "truth". And their fanatism make tem belive that because if it was otherwise, they wouldn't be converted. That said, they didn't fear knowledge, they fear anything that destroys their memes.
The funny part is to imagine what those people would think about been evidence of memes evolution
100+ CDs is something very impressive for the juri...
At least here at Brazil, there was a big FUD attack on gmail. I know of several people, all over the coutry that won't use it because they were hit by some rumors of hiw google would use their data (stuff that aren't on the EULA).
And spreading rumors is a natural reaction, so I expect people of several countries to have done that.
The u.s. is in the transition to a wholely IP based economy, the DMCA is their lifeblood to a prosperous future.
I really hope not. Since I am not american, I will not lose so much, but the US making such a transition to a "produce nothing" economy will be a big hit on the world's economy.
But you still can be your own great great grandparent.
Websites should be written to standards so they can be viewed by users in the browser of their choice.
That would be fine if the browser the viewer is using actually supported the standards...
Dialog boxes with pictures help only to confuse the user. There is no better stuf than text to put into them.
The probem you are pointing happens because some systems abuse of dialog box, they appear all the time, so the user don't care about them. The solution is simple, just use dialog boxes to ask the user for directions, never confirmations (unless there is something very dangerous). Dangerous actions should be hard to execute. So, the system should require concentration to execute the attachment, not to cancel the (easy) execution.
If there are privacy concerns, nobody should even know that they have material evidence. Also, is the justice asking for the logs? I don't think so (it's just the **AA), since a court decided that they don't need to give it.
But I fully admit to not understanding the "hate Microsoft at any price." I think there is just a drive among some people to hate the leader.
That is not this. We hate Microsoft because it
1: destroys interoperability
2: abuses of its economical (and political) power
3: it goes very deep to make products that (miss)act alone, making error when we know how to make it right.
I understand that people don't care about 3, but there is no excuse about 1 and 2.
TCPA is not DRM, like several TCPA opponents say. Also, TCPA is not completelly independent of DRM either (like some TCPA defendors - read IBM - say), one of its goals is to improve DRM.
That beeing said, I disagree of your reasoning. TCPA have the downside of making it possible to enforce DRM, but have several upsides too (if it didn't have upsides, nobody would fear it). The best way of fighting its downsides is offering clear implementations of the upsides, so, nobody will need to use the evil implementations.
You don't use to read shell scripts, do you? Shell scripts surely need comments.
He probably pasted that from the prompt, since MathLab's prompt doesn't accept line breaks. It also doesn't accept comments, since comments spans to the end of the line and you don't have line breaks.
MathLab language is not very clear even if you write it right. Also, it doesn't help people writting better programs, since the prompt is so bad. But, yes, your supervisor's code is bad.
If you have benn working with people that don't use a computer often, it is natural that they don't want to remove eye candy. But don't assume that only geeks want to remove them, that is not true. Casual users love eye candy, the other ones also like it but prefer usability.
It is the same space waste, with different eye candy. I think it looks better than XP, but it is subjective.
Well, integer factorization is now known to be NP, since prime is P. The proff is very easy, verify if each factor is prime (P) and verify if their product is the number you are trying to factorize (P). The fact that remains to be known is if factorization is P or not. That may be very hard, since not problem has ever been proved not beeing P.
Is the problem of simulating nature on a submicroscopic level NP-complete?
First, I have to ask: What problem? As far as I know, simulating the interation of a certain number of particles may be NP complete if you take into consideration the number of particles. But if this number is fixed, it is not. I am not sure, but I think it is P.
So, all you got is a computer that becomes much more fast than conventional ones when its size increase, but you still don't have an efficient way of solving NP complete problems.
I guesss a lot of people 1T years for now will disagree :)
Increasing shelf-life, and therefore the range at which food can be reasonably delivered (this directly impacts the price of food in the third world, as getting food in place before it rots is a huge cost).
I don't know what "third world" are you talking about, but the one I use to know exports food. This may reduce the cost of food on the "first world", or just on the larger cities.
1. I can't get XP working on my computer with 1024x768 without going into the net, downloading a driver, installing it and changing the resolution. I also have to do that to have 24 or 32 bit colors. Where is the difference? The average Joe doesn't know how to install Windows either.
2. We can't requier that the user educate himself, but we can make a less sensible piece of software.
3. Yes, I also belive that Windows will not die, but if it doesn't become better, it will. Win may survive, but it will be very different from what we have today. Also, there is no bad on a possible Windows death, we will still have competiton, FOSS make it impossible to not have.
They want their current (illegally issued, and thus currently illegal) patents to be legalized so they can use them for defensive purposes.
If there are no patents, there is no need for defensive patents.
They know that with about 50,000 illegally issued patents in Europe there will be a big patent war where everybody sues everybody in Europe if these illegal patents are legalized. This will give them (and the rest of the US software business) a big competitive advantage.
Rephrasing it: The current situation give a big competitive advantage for the Europe. MS is on a position of disadvantage, they only want to lower the playing field by making Europe as fuzzy as EUA.
Where the third point is also valid, I think the goal of MS supporting software patents on Europe is only fighting FOSS.