"Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?"
I worked on some projects involving email at the white house. The system tracks other things includuding gifts and snail mail.
There are very specific rules and laws that must be followed and the million dollar consultants the white house pays to manage this stuff is very aware of those rules and laws.
Any destruction of email by the white house is purely intentional, period.
"Opera's Haarvard suggests that it's about Silverlight [opera.com], and Microsoft trying to close the web. Mozilla, Opera and others are pushing to extend open web technologies, but Microsoft is saying, wait, the web doesn't need to be extended at all! Well, except with Silverlight and WPF..."
Insightful? Come on, that's rubbish. It is a simple minded microsoft bash with no basis in fact or reasoning, and yet it gets moderated insightful.
Silverlight is not about competing with Javascript at all. It's about bringing robustness to web apps. It's about being slightly compatible with desktop apps in code. Those are things that current web technologies, even with AJAX, can not do. Silverlight is about competing with adobe flash, which by the way is way ahead of microsoft at the moment for the robust web app space, so why did you choose to bash Microsoft and not adobe? Never mind, we know the answer.
Mozilla, opera and other pushing to extend open web technologies? Please.... how does a fight between what version 2 of something is named have anything to do with extending open technologies? You are throwing around buzzwords to make yourself sound smarter (and some moderators fall right for it). Microsoft is saying we have a standard, we have products that are written to that standard, and it will be expensive to supercede that standard with a replacement. They have no objections to something new, just dont break the old.
yeah, but there is a big difference between fat pipes between cities, cell towers and businesses and the copper that runs to the homes. As far as I know, the fat pipes are not all owned by the phone company. I think sprint / verizon / whoever can run them just like AT&T. When they install the fiber I believe they install several pipes and who gets those pipes is not up to AT&T. Plus, towers within site of each other can use microwave and not suffer the latency of sat com, and fall back on fiber if needed. AT&T may still get a piece of the $$ where another provider wasnt in place but they would no longer have their monopoly in a huge portion of the market.
How long will it be before the phone company, and their physical infrastructure becomes irrelevant? Can the wireless networks now provided primarily for cell phones replace the copper wire that we are so dependent on any time soon? I sure hope so. I think the best thing that can happen in the long run, is for the phone company to shoot itself in the foot and generate enough interest to get themselves replaced. The sooner the better. Hopefully the power line companies see this de-regulation, and start using their infrastructure to bring internet access to homes. Then the phone company would have real competition. I hope. Then again, they could be like the clueless cable TV operators who seemed to be doing a real shitty job of it.
I watched a TV program the other night. It was an early 1960's version of what the future would bring. They showed handheld telephones (we have them), space flight to the moon (been there), instant food cooking (ala Microwave ovens), tiny refrigerator sized computers (we have more than they imagined) and of course, a telephone system with video. Every prediction came true, except the one the phone company has prevented. The technology has been there for decades, but there is no motivation for the monopolies to innovate. The entire world suffers stagnation as a result. Now, I'm not one to bash self made monopolies. I personally believe in some cases even though they are a monopoly they can be driven by market pressures to improve, but in the case of the phone company it has been an apathetic selfish government sponsored pig. I hope they die soon.
I'll bet the success of this rivals the success of the java browser replacing the operating system.
Nothing would please me more than to use a least common denominator User Interface for complex minipulation of pictures and movies. I bet it will work great on dial up too!
"Now, i know our court systems are horribly abused but it seems that a legitimate use for them "They billed my checking account for 12 months of service when it never worked according to their advertised bla bla bla" can never actually come to fruition."
just re-itterating what I've already said a few times; Been there, done that. Got billed for 6 months for a t1 that was turned off. Took them to small claims court - TN allows $24k in small claims court - I won the case according to the judge - 1 month later he signs an order written by AT&T that says I agreed to settle and never sue again.
I guess in the long run I should be happy I wasn't ordered to pay for it.
So many of you are naive that these things will come out 'right' in a court of law. Let me tell you firsthand, they do not. AT&T has complete control over the courts.
It's just like the story from the other day where it costs the guy $7,500 to fight the police for arrest for not showing his license. He obviously had the law on his side and yet it cost him $7,500 to get the charges dropped. Yes you can say he was an idiot for getting to that point in the first place, but the fact is the law did nothing to protect him.
I recently took AT&T to court for not delivering on a T1 contract level of service. They turned off my service in Jan, I lost my job. I have continued to receive $600 a month bills from them and had my cell phone, voice phone and dial internet disconnected because I did not pay after Jan. Easy day in court right? Yes as a matter of fact it was. The judge drilled the AT&T lawyer a new asshole. So the final outcome? Phone still disconnected, still receiving bills. Judge signs final order written by AT&T lawyer which is nothing like what he ordered in court.
AT&T is out of control and no one is going to stop them anytime soon. It will take another Judge Green to step in (like the breakup in the 80s) and I wouldn't expect that to happen for another 20 years.
You can also check out porn sites that are much more interesting to look at.
I have had 3 good quality hobby level telescopes - a 6" Newton, and 2 8" cassys, one manual, one computer (goto). In looking back at my experiences, the first one was the only one that really gave me any pleasure, as I bought it for and observed Haley's comet. Everything else was disappointing. Astrophotography is out of the reach of hobbyist. Sure you can take some pictures, but the only thing you get out of them is the fact that you took them. They are nothing to look at compared to what is abundantly available elsewhere. The costs for equipment to get a decent picture is easily over $8k.
There is a certain enjoyment from doing it yourself and learning about the technology, but you can get that from many other hobbies as well. If you decide to proceed and spend your hard saved $1000, just be sure your expectations are set appropriately.
I'm not advocating random assault on a group of people. I'm advocating giving crooked Nazi acting cops what they deserve.
My dad was a cop - I respected him, but I will admit I learned a lot about the true nature of the common cop from him. I worked with a lot of cop type people (CIA, FBI etc) - some are quite honest hard working intelligent people. Most real cops on the other hand are criminals with badges, and I do mean most. Uneducated assholes who are on a power trip with their badge. I welcome the opportunity to piss on them.
I was a passenger in a car that got rear ended. When the cops showed up, the first one took my drivers license. A minute later another cop walked up and demanded I give him my license. I told him I had already given it to the first officer and I got the "if you dont give me your license right now you are going to jail" routine. I pretty much laughed in his face which pissed him off to no end.
In the end they took my friend to the hospital and towed his car away even though I was fine and able to drive it away and he told them that I would drive it. I was left in a town that is so small there was no such thing as taxi cabs, 60 miles from home and stranded.
As much as i wish the justice system would work in cases like these, it doesnt. Your only hope is to find that cop on a dark road one night and beat the shit out of him. I've heard a baseball bat works great in suprise situations.
I live in the sticks - I knew when i moved here that commodity internet access was not going to be available, but my line of work allowed me to pay the high prices and install a T1. I did so, but what I found was that even though I was willing to pay for it the 'locals' simply were not smart enough to support it. So anyhow, I have a $14,000 bill for service that is not even turned on. I take them to court. To my suprise, the court is unwilling to force them to meet their contractual obligations. Bottom line is I win, but Bell South (AT&T) walks away from their contract, I have no service and now I have to move (again).
The problems goes beyond 'not available at reasonable costs', the problem is not available if the phone company doesn't feel like providing it. So what does the universal access charge that every single phone customer pays every month go to? Certainly not universal access.
A quote from the last article;
A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."
So brave man go ahead, post any classified secrets you know of as AC on slashdot and see if anybody is listening - that is IF you know of anything classified, somehow I doubt that you do.
well that is a perfectly naive response. If I had first hand knowledge it would be classified, and posting on slashdot is certainly not worth risking felony conspiracy charges now is it? Otherwise I'm just making it up.
Or probably I am just stating something fairly obvious to anyone who has read a newspaper in the last couple of years, but maybe did not think about at the moment, thus invoking what we call 'intellectual thought'
Oh and by the way, I never intended to imply China has existing secret ones, no I am probably thinking of (or know of) other countries.
Too many comments to read and see how many times it has already been said, but there is only one reason everyone really hates Microsoft; They are the clear leader. The crowd you have heard likes to root for the underdog, period. They hate the obvious front runner.
All the other arguments are BS.
People complain Microsoft products suck. Total BS. If they sucked they would not be the most used. The fact is you can take any product and argue either for or against it, regardless of its platform. MS products were the first to have UI similarity and became the easiest and most productive for people before anyone else did that. That made them an obvious choice for people just beginning to use computers for non-computer work.
People complain about security problems. This is only partially true. Security issues existed in computerville long before Microsoft entered the scene. One only has to watch War Games again to remember what the Unix world was with its backdoors and lack of security concerns. As Microsoft became the front runner, they became the target. ANY OS that got to the point Microsoft did would have suffered the same consequences. While that does not dismiss the security nativity, you can not put the total blame on Microsoft, its the assholes out there who insist on attacking computers in the first place, many of which hate Microsoft I might point out.
Lastly, people complain about Microsoft business practices. Again BS. MS listens to their customers. They analyze what new functionality will help them increase sales. And the successfully execute, admirably predicting the defect threshold consumers will tolerate. That's not being greedy or abusive, it is good business sense. Something apparently a lot of people can not recognize. In this case, I think it jealousy instead of hate.
Me personally; I have been very happy with Microsoft. I have never had issues with crashing or viruses. Maybe I am smarter about it than most who have all these problems. On the other that can't be it because I have had the opposite experience with Linux. Out of 20-30 distributions I have tried over the last 20 years, the last one that installed and ran without digging into and having to fix something was the one I downloaded to floppies. Every distribution has had problems. God damn simple things like not being able to get the fonts right between a console and an x-term. There were many other problems but that is an example of the kind of carelessness that usually goes into creating a linux release. When people do not get paid for their work they work on things they feel like and ignore issues that others feel are important. There is no accountability. There is no boss saying "you will maintain the documentation." The last 2 release of Fedora, the flagship of the communities, could not partition my hard disk correctly. I sit through a painful 1.5 hour install with everything just fine, reboot and get a geometry error. You don't have that type of problem with Windows, at least I never have.
Why do people hate Microsoft? Because they're morons. Most people do not hate Microsoft, instead they are at worst case jealous and a small minority. Microsoft runs on what, over 80% of all computers? The vast majority embrace Microsoft and thank them for making the computer experience a lot better than it was.
Yes to your first comment, no to your second. I dont see how in the world printf could even touch COBOL.
There are aspects of COBOL that are still not available in present day lnguages.
A super simple example is COBOLs ability to perform a pre-process, sort HUGE amounts of data, and then perform a post-process. Now, granted that was how things worked back then and is not done that way today. Today we just split it up into 2 programs and do some kind of sort in the middle, but the point is that COBOL had some real business programming assistance built into it, that current language don't.
Examine x replacing y with z - is there a current equiv without 2 or more steps?
There are more - I used to know (use) them all:P COBOL was great in its time. It was my second learnt language in what has been a long computer programming career (Fortran first, 370 Assembler third).
You are saying the right thing, but not qualifying it correctly.
There is absolutely more horsepower and flexibility in the *nix environment, BUT; There is a steeper learning curve. Given 2 admin that are experts in each, *nix will give you more. Given 2 newbs, the Windows environment will get you up and running a medium complex web site faster, cheaper. The majority of enterprises work that way, newbs and short on staff.
Well give credit to the American consumer as well.
We have no hesitation looking to find cheaper versions of products we want, ignoring quality. And at the same time we enjoy constantly griping about not being paid enough.
The quality of products produced by US workers has also declined. The quality factor alone is no longer significantly different. So given a choice of poor quality work from both inside or outside, which are you going to pick? The lower cost of course. That is not greed on the part of businesses. It is common sense.
well assembly language is powerful. I was talking about modern languages that are somewhat useful. Python and php are script language hacks. The day you see the FBI running its operation on either is the same day hell will freeze over. c++ was fine for a first attempt at making C object oriented. Java and C# both are based on what was good about c++ and attempt to overcome what was bad about it. Again, no 21st century enterprise is going to use c++. I'm not downing the language, I doubt if many shrink wrap commercial products will use anything other than c++ for a while. It has it's place, it is not in the enterprise.
I have been programming 25 years now and I see a different problem at the root of these massive failures.
The current state of development tools is hideous. We have some very nice powerful languages, Java, C#/.Net, some very powerful databases, but we still have to spend hideous amounts of time making them work together.
These large applications (the FBI and this Health Care system) take soooo long to spec out and build that by the time they are done the requirements have changed, the technology has changed and the developers are always having to restart the process. I will admit, I do not like web applications. They are very limited in robustness. Developers resort to hacks like AJAX to make them somewhat useable. And it makes me mad that in the 21st century I have to resort to using a text based editor to design Graphical UIs. How dumb. Yes there are some WYSIWYG editors but they NEVER get you to where you want to go. Any good web application (of which I guess there 3 or 4) had the HTML written by hand. I had hoped XAML was going to change that. It will not, at least initially. It provides much better user experience potential, but in order to develop a real application you are still going to have to code text by hand.
What went wrong? The dBase III of the 80s was a far better development environment than what we have today. We have taken several steps backwards. Yes the end products that we develop today by hand scale enormously, but they take too long to develop. We spend at least 80% of our time coding plumbing that we shouldn't even had to think about.
If you can cut the development cycle, then maybe you can get a large application developed and delivered before it is out of date. Vendors need to wake up. If someone ever comes out with a real dBase/Notes/Delphi/early VB type product that can deliver large scale applications (hopefully not on web) they would put the others out of business.
I'm not exactly sure how they came to that conclusion. I worked in one of the first retail home computer software stores and we had tons of customers come in and say "I need/want Visicalc. What computer should I buy?" An apple II was seldome the recomendation. We sold Atari 400/800s, apples, commodore pets and I think most of the time we recommended a TRS-80 if their needs was strictly business with Visicalc.
And we sold a ton of Visicalcs. If Dan couldn't get rich it is because he spent the profits poorley. Not because they were not there.
Slashdot Mirror
"Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?"
I worked on some projects involving email at the white house. The system tracks other things includuding gifts and snail mail.
There are very specific rules and laws that must be followed and the million dollar consultants the white house pays to manage this stuff is very aware of those rules and laws.
Any destruction of email by the white house is purely intentional, period.
Reminds me of the time I got a nice letter from California telling me that the use of the Hollywood sign in a video required royalties.
I suppose all those pictures of lights in NY Times Square and Las Vegas fall into the same category.
While I generally support IP and copyright, pushing it to these kinds of limits cause me to wonder where to draw a reasonable line.
"Opera's Haarvard suggests that it's about Silverlight [opera.com], and Microsoft trying to close the web. Mozilla, Opera and others are pushing to extend open web technologies, but Microsoft is saying, wait, the web doesn't need to be extended at all! Well, except with Silverlight and WPF..."
.... how does a fight between what version 2 of something is named have anything to do with extending open technologies? You are throwing around buzzwords to make yourself sound smarter (and some moderators fall right for it). Microsoft is saying we have a standard, we have products that are written to that standard, and it will be expensive to supercede that standard with a replacement. They have no objections to something new, just dont break the old.
Insightful? Come on, that's rubbish. It is a simple minded microsoft bash with no basis in fact or reasoning, and yet it gets moderated insightful.
Silverlight is not about competing with Javascript at all. It's about bringing robustness to web apps. It's about being slightly compatible with desktop apps in code. Those are things that current web technologies, even with AJAX, can not do. Silverlight is about competing with adobe flash, which by the way is way ahead of microsoft at the moment for the robust web app space, so why did you choose to bash Microsoft and not adobe? Never mind, we know the answer.
Mozilla, opera and other pushing to extend open web technologies? Please
yeah, but there is a big difference between fat pipes between cities, cell towers and businesses and the copper that runs to the homes. As far as I know, the fat pipes are not all owned by the phone company. I think sprint / verizon / whoever can run them just like AT&T. When they install the fiber I believe they install several pipes and who gets those pipes is not up to AT&T. Plus, towers within site of each other can use microwave and not suffer the latency of sat com, and fall back on fiber if needed. AT&T may still get a piece of the $$ where another provider wasnt in place but they would no longer have their monopoly in a huge portion of the market.
How long will it be before the phone company, and their physical infrastructure becomes irrelevant? Can the wireless networks now provided primarily for cell phones replace the copper wire that we are so dependent on any time soon? I sure hope so. I think the best thing that can happen in the long run, is for the phone company to shoot itself in the foot and generate enough interest to get themselves replaced. The sooner the better. Hopefully the power line companies see this de-regulation, and start using their infrastructure to bring internet access to homes. Then the phone company would have real competition. I hope. Then again, they could be like the clueless cable TV operators who seemed to be doing a real shitty job of it.
I watched a TV program the other night. It was an early 1960's version of what the future would bring. They showed handheld telephones (we have them), space flight to the moon (been there), instant food cooking (ala Microwave ovens), tiny refrigerator sized computers (we have more than they imagined) and of course, a telephone system with video. Every prediction came true, except the one the phone company has prevented. The technology has been there for decades, but there is no motivation for the monopolies to innovate. The entire world suffers stagnation as a result. Now, I'm not one to bash self made monopolies. I personally believe in some cases even though they are a monopoly they can be driven by market pressures to improve, but in the case of the phone company it has been an apathetic selfish government sponsored pig. I hope they die soon.
I'll bet the success of this rivals the success of the java browser replacing the operating system.
Nothing would please me more than to use a least common denominator User Interface for complex minipulation of pictures and movies. I bet it will work great on dial up too!
"Now, i know our court systems are horribly abused but it seems that a legitimate use for them "They billed my checking account for 12 months of service when it never worked according to their advertised bla bla bla" can never actually come to fruition."
just re-itterating what I've already said a few times; Been there, done that. Got billed for 6 months for a t1 that was turned off. Took them to small claims court - TN allows $24k in small claims court - I won the case according to the judge - 1 month later he signs an order written by AT&T that says I agreed to settle and never sue again.
I guess in the long run I should be happy I wasn't ordered to pay for it.
So many of you are naive that these things will come out 'right' in a court of law. Let me tell you firsthand, they do not. AT&T has complete control over the courts.
It's just like the story from the other day where it costs the guy $7,500 to fight the police for arrest for not showing his license. He obviously had the law on his side and yet it cost him $7,500 to get the charges dropped. Yes you can say he was an idiot for getting to that point in the first place, but the fact is the law did nothing to protect him.
I recently took AT&T to court for not delivering on a T1 contract level of service. They turned off my service in Jan, I lost my job. I have continued to receive $600 a month bills from them and had my cell phone, voice phone and dial internet disconnected because I did not pay after Jan. Easy day in court right? Yes as a matter of fact it was. The judge drilled the AT&T lawyer a new asshole. So the final outcome? Phone still disconnected, still receiving bills. Judge signs final order written by AT&T lawyer which is nothing like what he ordered in court.
AT&T is out of control and no one is going to stop them anytime soon. It will take another Judge Green to step in (like the breakup in the 80s) and I wouldn't expect that to happen for another 20 years.
For $1000 you are much better off buying a good laptop and visiting http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ everyday.
You can also check out porn sites that are much more interesting to look at.
I have had 3 good quality hobby level telescopes - a 6" Newton, and 2 8" cassys, one manual, one computer (goto). In looking back at my experiences, the first one was the only one that really gave me any pleasure, as I bought it for and observed Haley's comet. Everything else was disappointing. Astrophotography is out of the reach of hobbyist. Sure you can take some pictures, but the only thing you get out of them is the fact that you took them. They are nothing to look at compared to what is abundantly available elsewhere. The costs for equipment to get a decent picture is easily over $8k.
There is a certain enjoyment from doing it yourself and learning about the technology, but you can get that from many other hobbies as well. If you decide to proceed and spend your hard saved $1000, just be sure your expectations are set appropriately.
I'm not advocating random assault on a group of people. I'm advocating giving crooked Nazi acting cops what they deserve.
My dad was a cop - I respected him, but I will admit I learned a lot about the true nature of the common cop from him. I worked with a lot of cop type people (CIA, FBI etc) - some are quite honest hard working intelligent people. Most real cops on the other hand are criminals with badges, and I do mean most. Uneducated assholes who are on a power trip with their badge. I welcome the opportunity to piss on them.
I was a passenger in a car that got rear ended. When the cops showed up, the first one took my drivers license. A minute later another cop walked up and demanded I give him my license. I told him I had already given it to the first officer and I got the "if you dont give me your license right now you are going to jail" routine. I pretty much laughed in his face which pissed him off to no end.
In the end they took my friend to the hospital and towed his car away even though I was fine and able to drive it away and he told them that I would drive it. I was left in a town that is so small there was no such thing as taxi cabs, 60 miles from home and stranded.
As much as i wish the justice system would work in cases like these, it doesnt. Your only hope is to find that cop on a dark road one night and beat the shit out of him. I've heard a baseball bat works great in suprise situations.
I live in the sticks - I knew when i moved here that commodity internet access was not going to be available, but my line of work allowed me to pay the high prices and install a T1. I did so, but what I found was that even though I was willing to pay for it the 'locals' simply were not smart enough to support it. So anyhow, I have a $14,000 bill for service that is not even turned on. I take them to court. To my suprise, the court is unwilling to force them to meet their contractual obligations. Bottom line is I win, but Bell South (AT&T) walks away from their contract, I have no service and now I have to move (again).
The problems goes beyond 'not available at reasonable costs', the problem is not available if the phone company doesn't feel like providing it. So what does the universal access charge that every single phone customer pays every month go to? Certainly not universal access.
OK, so you believe that by posting as anonymous, that there is no way it could be tracked back to me? And you believe this in context to a story on a people tracking system?0 2/msg01352.html
Dude, spend less time jerking off, your brain needs more exercise.
Every ISP tracks and maintain logs of IPs, and dial in times for dial up customers. Many countries are introducing or have passed laws making it a legal requirement. Many (most?) ISPs are already doing it out of courtesy to law enforcement (wouldn't want to piss off the cia or interpol now would you?).
Some quick unfiltered results from a google search for those who are challenged in using a tool like google;
http://www.sage.org/lists/sage-members-archive/20
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6156948.html
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3871
http://safari.oreilly.com/0130454966
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5748649.html
A quote from the last article;
A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."
So brave man go ahead, post any classified secrets you know of as AC on slashdot and see if anybody is listening - that is IF you know of anything classified, somehow I doubt that you do.
well that is a perfectly naive response. If I had first hand knowledge it would be classified, and posting on slashdot is certainly not worth risking felony conspiracy charges now is it? Otherwise I'm just making it up. Or probably I am just stating something fairly obvious to anyone who has read a newspaper in the last couple of years, but maybe did not think about at the moment, thus invoking what we call 'intellectual thought' Oh and by the way, I never intended to imply China has existing secret ones, no I am probably thinking of (or know of) other countries.
China is deploying the worlds largest 'known' people tracking system. There are plenty of secret ones just as big already deployed.
traffic jams, 700 miles an hour? Don't think it will work.
Too many comments to read and see how many times it has already been said, but there is only one reason everyone really hates Microsoft; They are the clear leader. The crowd you have heard likes to root for the underdog, period. They hate the obvious front runner.
All the other arguments are BS.
People complain Microsoft products suck. Total BS. If they sucked they would not be the most used. The fact is you can take any product and argue either for or against it, regardless of its platform. MS products were the first to have UI similarity and became the easiest and most productive for people before anyone else did that. That made them an obvious choice for people just beginning to use computers for non-computer work.
People complain about security problems. This is only partially true. Security issues existed in computerville long before Microsoft entered the scene. One only has to watch War Games again to remember what the Unix world was with its backdoors and lack of security concerns. As Microsoft became the front runner, they became the target. ANY OS that got to the point Microsoft did would have suffered the same consequences. While that does not dismiss the security nativity, you can not put the total blame on Microsoft, its the assholes out there who insist on attacking computers in the first place, many of which hate Microsoft I might point out.
Lastly, people complain about Microsoft business practices. Again BS. MS listens to their customers. They analyze what new functionality will help them increase sales. And the successfully execute, admirably predicting the defect threshold consumers will tolerate. That's not being greedy or abusive, it is good business sense. Something apparently a lot of people can not recognize. In this case, I think it jealousy instead of hate.
Me personally; I have been very happy with Microsoft. I have never had issues with crashing or viruses. Maybe I am smarter about it than most who have all these problems. On the other that can't be it because I have had the opposite experience with Linux. Out of 20-30 distributions I have tried over the last 20 years, the last one that installed and ran without digging into and having to fix something was the one I downloaded to floppies. Every distribution has had problems. God damn simple things like not being able to get the fonts right between a console and an x-term. There were many other problems but that is an example of the kind of carelessness that usually goes into creating a linux release. When people do not get paid for their work they work on things they feel like and ignore issues that others feel are important. There is no accountability. There is no boss saying "you will maintain the documentation." The last 2 release of Fedora, the flagship of the communities, could not partition my hard disk correctly. I sit through a painful 1.5 hour install with everything just fine, reboot and get a geometry error. You don't have that type of problem with Windows, at least I never have.
Why do people hate Microsoft? Because they're morons. Most people do not hate Microsoft, instead they are at worst case jealous and a small minority. Microsoft runs on what, over 80% of all computers? The vast majority embrace Microsoft and thank them for making the computer experience a lot better than it was.
Yes to your first comment, no to your second. I dont see how in the world printf could even touch COBOL.
:P COBOL was great in its time. It was my second learnt language in what has been a long computer programming career (Fortran first, 370 Assembler third).
There are aspects of COBOL that are still not available in present day lnguages.
A super simple example is COBOLs ability to perform a pre-process, sort HUGE amounts of data, and then perform a post-process. Now, granted that was how things worked back then and is not done that way today. Today we just split it up into 2 programs and do some kind of sort in the middle, but the point is that COBOL had some real business programming assistance built into it, that current language don't.
Examine x replacing y with z - is there a current equiv without 2 or more steps?
There are more - I used to know (use) them all
Not a broken Linux, but a broken Apple;
m /2100-7349_3-6141031.html
http://news.com.com/MySpace+to+Apple+Fix+that+wor
Reported to slashdot 3 days ago, story accepted, never published.
You are soo correct, if it is Microsoft it is critical news. If it is anyone else, it's covered up.
You are saying the right thing, but not qualifying it correctly.
There is absolutely more horsepower and flexibility in the *nix environment, BUT; There is a steeper learning curve. Given 2 admin that are experts in each, *nix will give you more. Given 2 newbs, the Windows environment will get you up and running a medium complex web site faster, cheaper. The majority of enterprises work that way, newbs and short on staff.
Well give credit to the American consumer as well.
We have no hesitation looking to find cheaper versions of products we want, ignoring quality. And at the same time we enjoy constantly griping about not being paid enough.
The quality of products produced by US workers has also declined. The quality factor alone is no longer significantly different. So given a choice of poor quality work from both inside or outside, which are you going to pick? The lower cost of course. That is not greed on the part of businesses. It is common sense.
Maybe they know something you don't?
well assembly language is powerful. I was talking about modern languages that are somewhat useful. Python and php are script language hacks. The day you see the FBI running its operation on either is the same day hell will freeze over. c++ was fine for a first attempt at making C object oriented. Java and C# both are based on what was good about c++ and attempt to overcome what was bad about it. Again, no 21st century enterprise is going to use c++. I'm not downing the language, I doubt if many shrink wrap commercial products will use anything other than c++ for a while. It has it's place, it is not in the enterprise.
I have been programming 25 years now and I see a different problem at the root of these massive failures.
The current state of development tools is hideous. We have some very nice powerful languages, Java, C#/.Net, some very powerful databases, but we still have to spend hideous amounts of time making them work together.
These large applications (the FBI and this Health Care system) take soooo long to spec out and build that by the time they are done the requirements have changed, the technology has changed and the developers are always having to restart the process. I will admit, I do not like web applications. They are very limited in robustness. Developers resort to hacks like AJAX to make them somewhat useable. And it makes me mad that in the 21st century I have to resort to using a text based editor to design Graphical UIs. How dumb. Yes there are some WYSIWYG editors but they NEVER get you to where you want to go. Any good web application (of which I guess there 3 or 4) had the HTML written by hand. I had hoped XAML was going to change that. It will not, at least initially. It provides much better user experience potential, but in order to develop a real application you are still going to have to code text by hand.
What went wrong? The dBase III of the 80s was a far better development environment than what we have today. We have taken several steps backwards. Yes the end products that we develop today by hand scale enormously, but they take too long to develop. We spend at least 80% of our time coding plumbing that we shouldn't even had to think about.
If you can cut the development cycle, then maybe you can get a large application developed and delivered before it is out of date. Vendors need to wake up. If someone ever comes out with a real dBase/Notes/Delphi/early VB type product that can deliver large scale applications (hopefully not on web) they would put the others out of business.
Flash: Here is your chance!
I'm not exactly sure how they came to that conclusion. I worked in one of the first retail home computer software stores and we had tons of customers come in and say "I need/want Visicalc. What computer should I buy?" An apple II was seldome the recomendation. We sold Atari 400/800s, apples, commodore pets and I think most of the time we recommended a TRS-80 if their needs was strictly business with Visicalc.
And we sold a ton of Visicalcs. If Dan couldn't get rich it is because he spent the profits poorley. Not because they were not there.