I'll believe there's a "sign-on war" the day Ebay locks people out for not having a passport/liberty alliance account. (Currently they support Passport+their own system.)
Honestly, site-specific sign-on systems are easy to develop and most e-tailers have a powerful motive to offer their customers as many choices as possible. This is stark contrast to the one-or-the-other image a "war" connotes.
You won't get very far speaking Mandarin in Oxford Circus either, and it's a far more popular language than French:-)... the point I was trying to make is that English is increasingly accepted as a "link language" in Europe (and even in Asia) - why are the French being the holdouts?
(at least they were as recently as 1995... not sure what it's like there now)
I speak passable French, although I would probably not clear an A-level exam. I agree with the parent: speaking French in France does open a lot of doors.
> Speak English to a Frenchman in France, though, and you have just earned yourself an enemy for life.
This is also true, and IMO is a bug. Folk who speak English in Holland or Scandinavia just don't have to face the same hostility-at-worst/truculence-at-best as Paris or (worse) any of the smaller towns. Even the Germans don't react quite as badly to English, dash it.
And after all this they wonder why their tourism revenues are dropping.
Comctl.dll first shipped with Windows 3.x. Comctl32 was an evolution and first shipped with the initial release of Windows 95 (when the Internet wasn't even a twinkle in MS' eye), not IE (source). Calling it IE-specific is a travesty. New versions of Commctl.dll were shipped with all Internet Explorer releases and Windows Service Packs, because Microsoft was on a jihad then to spread IE far and wide and wanted uniform UI across different OS flavors and service packs (all of which had different versions of Comctl32 -- ah, the joys of having both the browser and OS developers in the same organization).
Btw, if Mozilla was slow for the sole reason that it did not use native widgets (==Comctl32) then perhaps they should have taken tips from the SWT guys and used freakin' native widgets. Thankfully, this is not the case. As several Win32 developers have repeatedly pointed out, Mozilla is slow mainly because it's compiled badly. Rebasing helps, and the new Moz builds are faster because of that. There are many other optimizations possible, but I believe most of them will be moot because by that time Firefox will rule the roost.
As for MSHTML: Log into a freshly booted Windows 2000 box, with Web View for folders disabled (i.e., 'Classic view' enabled), Active Desktop disabled, and no Web-related shell accessories like Google's Deskbar. In this configuration, MSHTML is not loaded. And yet even here IE starts faster than Firefox - code optimized for one platform will trump xp code every time. Firefox has the overhead of init'ing a lot more stuff: for example it has to load XPCOM whereas IE can simply call OLE directly, which is loaded because the shell uses it.
Of course, Firefox is still very usable because it is secure, has kickass extensions like Adblock and Scribe, and is fast enough in terms of both load time and normal use.
Kind of funny... the primary reason I don't enjoy many comics is that I could never bring myself to follow their long story arcs (the longest "comic" I enjoyed was Gaiman's Sandman series). Somehow it's much easier for me to curl up with a fresh novel than with soap operas on paper.
Good verse, except that Moz does BLINK, and IE doesn't (it mercifully didn't implement BLINK. It did introduce MARQUEE though, and may eternal hellfire await the inventor of that).
Re:No mention of Quagga/Zebra?
on
XORP 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I know you were being funny, but whatever the marketing tag, Windows versioning has been pretty consistent.
Windows 95 4.00.950 Windows 98 4.10.1998
MS then shifted into a real build numbering system for Win9x (something NT has always had):
Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 Windows ME 4.11.3000
Windows NT 3.1 3.10.497 Windows NT 4.0 4.00.1381 Windows 2000 5.00.2195 Windows XP 5.1.2600 Windows 2003 5.2.3763
Note these version strings are for initially released OSes, service packs and localized releases may have different minor numbers.
Companies don't mature until they go through a couple generations of management and product lines. This is one of the criteria used in Built to Last, one of the few biz books I can say were a *good* use of my time (the other IIRC was the ability to deal with failure and bounce back).
Basically, MS has been under the same management (Gates, and even Ballmer has been around since the beginning, pretty much) since its inception. Product lines -- well, in a way it has been through three: command line (DOS-era), early GUI (Win 3.x and Win9x) and modern OSes and platforms (NT, networking products), but it has shown considerable difficulty getting out of the "sell boxes of software" model.
Given all of these, I'd call MS a very immature company even now. Midlife crises will come the day Linux is just as good on the desktop as OSX is, and MS is forced to look in the mirror and ask, "what now?"
Heh. I hereby propose (drumroll) bheer's law: "In any slashpost critical of another's grammar and/or spelling, the probability of a grammar/spelling error rises to twice the/. average."
Look, there is no way that the right to vote should be given to anyone who's still dependent on his/her parents. There is too much room for abuse.
Folk who cross voting age don't magically become financially independent. Adults are often dependent on their spouses for money. The point is, secret ballot gives everyone a fair chance to vote in secrecy.
The original point I was trying to make is, there is no magic definition of adulthood. Once upon a time, you could be 25 and be thought of as "too young". It gradually went down to 21 and today we have 18 as the "magic age" -- an age that's actually low by historical standards.
There are hundreds of 14-17 year-olds, they are recognized as some of the biggest spenders around. At the same time, they've got no rights and no one to speak up for what *they* want (as against childrens-rights groups who think they know what people of that age want). Sounds unfair to me. If you read Glenn Reynold's article I linked to above, you'll note he talks about the enormous waste of talent we incur as we imprison kids in high school.
Here's an interesting related article you may like to read. I disagree about giving babies the ballot, and 14-year olds may not yet be ready to vote, but giving 16-year olds the right to vote is IMO a no-brainer.
Great idea lowering the voting age to 14 or 15. Spears and Aguillera in 2008!
By the time Spears hits 35 (which is the minimum age you need to be to be president) they'd have lost their cred with the teen crowd:-)
There was a time when a 21yr old was a "callow youth" not worth listening to, but these days they can vote. So why not push the voting age down lower? Kids are a lot smarter than you think they are.
Actually, between large numbers parents who vote (and organize themselves into pressure groups), and the large numbers of twentysomethings who don't vote, and teenagers who *can't* vote, who do you think makes a more effective pressure group? Who do you think the guv'mint will try to pander to?
Off topic: I've been reading this and been wondering about how much of this "won't someone think of the children" crap would still exist if legal age for voting was 14 or 15.
To add to SmallFurryCreature's great response, I'd say that as a person with family in India I'd love to see an economically successful Pakistan, not an economically/socially dependent Pakistan. Why? Because a) the average poor Pakistani would be much less likely to be swayed by Jihad-mongering terrorists and their promises of virgins in paradise if he had good jobs and access to a decent lifestyle and b) Pakistani generals would be much more wary of nuclear posturing and aiding the Taliban when their business community would tell them to back off. (This already happened in India when the country's IT biz told the govt to tone down war rhetoric because their customers were getting upset -- Friedman had a great piece on it in the NYT (paid-for link) called India, Pakistan and GE (free copy))
The same is true for the Arab world vis-a-vis the West btw.
I coded all of my programs in Linux, using only one.cpp file for each assignment. The other students(and the teacher) spent the whole semester pulling their hair out trying to create relatively simple programs, and cut and paste from one to another( a lot of the code is jsut repetive "glue"), trying to figure out why things didn't work when there were a half dozen files created created by Visual Studio each time they wanted to code.
cl (which the C++ compiler underneath Visual Studio - now downloadable for free) has a complete roster of command line options.. try "cl -help" sometime. A typical college exercise should be compileable with a "cl -o foo.exe foo.cpp bar.lib baz.lib". Of course, nmake and link exist in case your code is larger than a 1-unit job. I'm not sure what you mean about "glue". If you're writing code for Win32's GUI, you do have cruft --.rc files that define your GUI -- but those are a necessary evil. Pre-compiled headers are optional and you don't need the IDE for those anyway. Now, since you said other students "got lost" in Visual Studio, please, please tell me these weren't CS students, otherwise I'll know why all the jobs are headed to India:->
On top of that, Windows does not normally come with ANY development tools, my other primary reason it is a bad platform to code ON. You can't just walk up to any available Windows box and code. Precious few have VS on them. Very few Linux or UNIX boxes come without at least a few tools like Emacs and VI.
The compiler suite (includes nmake and the like) is downloadable for free. The API docs are downloadable for free. I do realize that as a student, you do not have administrative access into university computers, but this looks like a goof-up on the part of your university IS staff, not MS. Although I strongly believe MS is stupid not to bundle dev tools with all its academic editions.
But if you are trying to tell me its an ideal development platform, or even as good of one as a typical UNIX or Linux systemm, you are either not a coder, highly ignorant, or flat-out lying.
I don't believe any of Unix/Linux or Windows is an _ideal_ dev environment. Having developed for Solaris, Linux _and_ Windows, I'd say each has pros and cons. That said, I write code for a living, and I believe Windows is just as productive -- I'd say more productive but that's just my opinion -- an environment as Unix if you know what to do (mainly, stop expecting it to do everything the Unix way) and you know the platform limitations (e.g. cross-platform OpenGL support on Windows sucks).
Individual purchases: Tell that bit about TCO to the student who has to balance rent, partying and beer with buying a desktop or laptop. Sure, if he's got the cash and knows his way around, he'll buy a mac (which is expensive even after the Apple.edu discount, especially when you consider Dell and HP offer specials regularly). If he's not got the money he'll buy a Gateway or Dell or no-namer.
Interestingly, if he's got the money but not got friends with the `nerd' set, guess what he'll buy? Most of the time, I'll bet it'll be Windows.
As for school purchases: I'd take TCO studies with a pinch of salt because even when _not_ biased they are very sensitive to the environment studied. Despite all the TCO hype, accountants depreciate Macs at the same rate as PCs, and that's all that really matters.
Anyhow, most universities buy PCs because between the PC makers and Apple, PC makers give a better deal - competition at work. And yeah, I guess the fact that they get a lot of OS support on x86 helps too. Apple has historically done well in the K12 market because of its simplicity, not because the schools' ancient Macs run the latest and greatest Mac apps well (so much for useful lifetime - just goes to show `useful lifetimes' are whatever you define them to be).
> Why does a history major need to use a digitakl camera or play MP3s?
In the next paragraph I clarified that I was talking about the general case: And even if you were talking about college procurements, why *should* colleges buy the lowest common denominator...
Besides, as these devices become more common, it's likely they'll get adopted in class. iPods are useful note-takers, for example. K-12 schools already use cameras and audio to great effect.
Finally, if you argument is that Linux is better because "it can do less and no one needs that extra sh*t anyway"... well, with evangelists like you, don't expect largescale adoption anytime soon:-).
I'm not trying to troll when I called Linux an inferior desktop (well, considering this/. it was probably unintended flamebait:-)) -- please realize: most history majors do _not_ have the time or patience to go back time and again and download the latest and greatest distros to solve basic hardware interop issues that are no-brainers in Windows XP or OS X*. Hell, I've helped folk on LUGs with sendmail.cf back in the day and I chafed at the idiocy I had to put up with while connecting a scanner. (cue to jwz's famous Linux-is-free-if-your-time-has-no-value rant here).
Regarding cameras: USB mass-storage devices (which'd imply most cameras) might work with KDE and Gnome now (I last used Gnome 2.2), but what about USB devices that don't implement a mass-storage interface, e.g. the Creative Zen, which stupidly doesn't implement one for its music library? How easily can Aunt Tillie hook up her iPod on KDE?
*Yeah, this is all because of proprietary hardware. Who said life was fair?
Even if you hadn't written you were a CS student, it would've been kind of obvious by the ivory-tower snarkiness of that post:-)
Windows is a pretty good OS to write software for, depending on the kind of software you make. Remember the time when Sun's Windows JVM actually ran better than its Solaris JVM? Compared to the Linux crowd, Microsoft _knows_ how to put a desktop OS together, even if it's a Renault minivan compared to OS X's BMW.
OTOH, you have to realize that 95% of students are using computers to surf the web, send e-mail, and write papers...and thats it
Are you saying that because the Linux desktop can now do email+web in a semi-decent manner (thanks to Moz) we should accept a _drop_ in usability and go to an inferior desktop? What happens when I want to make my digital video camera work? What happens when I want my MP3 player to work? And please don't point me to half-assed SF.net projects, give me something a typical history major could use.
And even if you were talking about college procurements, why *should* colleges buy the lowest common denominator especially when it will be reviled by everyone except the CS department? Yeah, in the ideal world, they'd buy only Macs and make the both the history majors and the CS crowd happy, but go take Economics 101 and figure out why that's not likely anytime soon.
The bottom line is that generally speaking, schools should just buy whatever is the best deal. Whether it is the most widely used platform or not is completely insignificant at this point.
Right now, Windows *is* the best deal. Like all best deals, it is a compromise. It makes History majors reasonably happy, it makes the beancounters reasonably happy, and the CS folk tolerate it because they can use Cygwin or SFU.
Wow, I've been using Word since version 6 and I never knew that. (I never really grokked tab stops -- seemed too typewriter-like to me) I got by creating an invisible table with two columns and aligning each differently.
Backward binary compatibility has a price. So does not providing backward binary compatibility. Real software vendors (IBM, Sun, etc) have known this for decades. Unlike, say, wannabes like Redhat, which took the high road and said binaries for Redhat N.x won't run on N+1.x.
Of course, with open source, you may have the option to recompile, but not if you're running something that's closed-source, like DB/2 for Linux.
Anyhow, the lesson from the last 20 years is that the software market (including those who pay for open-source, such as Citibank) values backward binary compatibility. With their 3.x RHEL line, Redhat has shown that they too have gotten this message. Microsoft's approach to backward compatibility might seem kludgy, but this is probably one of the best things they've done.
There's probably a zillion special little mods to the OS to make select, Microsoft-approved legacy apps run properly.
The only index MS would use is: is it popular? if so, it would be supported. Take a look at AppCompat sometime - lots of stuff from Lotus and Corel are on that list.
Btw, the parent has got to be one of most clueless posts I've ever read on Slashdot. That it got to +3 Insightful is just sad.
If one case of bad press can kill of a company, it was never very strong to begin with. For example, Lotus' Notes, despite numerous compatibility problems across various versions of Windows, managed to stay afloat and thrive. Maybe Caldera should look into their own business model than blame competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll believe there's a "sign-on war" the day Ebay locks people out for not having a passport/liberty alliance account. (Currently they support Passport+their own system.)
Honestly, site-specific sign-on systems are easy to develop and most e-tailers have a powerful motive to offer their customers as many choices as possible. This is stark contrast to the one-or-the-other image a "war" connotes.
You won't get very far speaking Mandarin in Oxford Circus either, and it's a far more popular language than French :-) ... the point I was trying to make is that English is increasingly accepted as a "link language" in Europe (and even in Asia) - why are the French being the holdouts?
(at least they were as recently as 1995... not sure what it's like there now)
I speak passable French, although I would probably not clear an A-level exam. I agree with the parent: speaking French in France does open a lot of doors.
> Speak English to a Frenchman in France, though, and you have just earned yourself an enemy for life.
This is also true, and IMO is a bug. Folk who speak English in Holland or Scandinavia just don't have to face the same hostility-at-worst/truculence-at-best as Paris or (worse) any of the smaller towns. Even the Germans don't react quite as badly to English, dash it.
And after all this they wonder why their tourism revenues are dropping.
Comctl.dll first shipped with Windows 3.x. Comctl32 was an evolution and first shipped with the initial release of Windows 95 (when the Internet wasn't even a twinkle in MS' eye), not IE (source). Calling it IE-specific is a travesty. New versions of Commctl.dll were shipped with all Internet Explorer releases and Windows Service Packs, because Microsoft was on a jihad then to spread IE far and wide and wanted uniform UI across different OS flavors and service packs (all of which had different versions of Comctl32 -- ah, the joys of having both the browser and OS developers in the same organization).
Btw, if Mozilla was slow for the sole reason that it did not use native widgets (==Comctl32) then perhaps they should have taken tips from the SWT guys and used freakin' native widgets. Thankfully, this is not the case. As several Win32 developers have repeatedly pointed out, Mozilla is slow mainly because it's compiled badly. Rebasing helps, and the new Moz builds are faster because of that. There are many other optimizations possible, but I believe most of them will be moot because by that time Firefox will rule the roost.
As for MSHTML: Log into a freshly booted Windows 2000 box, with Web View for folders disabled (i.e., 'Classic view' enabled), Active Desktop disabled, and no Web-related shell accessories like Google's Deskbar. In this configuration, MSHTML is not loaded. And yet even here IE starts faster than Firefox - code optimized for one platform will trump xp code every time. Firefox has the overhead of init'ing a lot more stuff: for example it has to load XPCOM whereas IE can simply call OLE directly, which is loaded because the shell uses it.
Of course, Firefox is still very usable because it is secure, has kickass extensions like Adblock and Scribe, and is fast enough in terms of both load time and normal use.
>attention deficit
Kind of funny... the primary reason I don't enjoy many comics is that I could never bring myself to follow their long story arcs (the longest "comic" I enjoyed was Gaiman's Sandman series). Somehow it's much easier for me to curl up with a fresh novel than with soap operas on paper.
Not all that is gold does BLINK
Good verse, except that Moz does BLINK, and IE doesn't (it mercifully didn't implement BLINK. It did introduce MARQUEE though, and may eternal hellfire await the inventor of that).
Companies don't mature until they go through a couple generations of management and product lines. This is one of the criteria used in Built to Last, one of the few biz books I can say were a *good* use of my time (the other IIRC was the ability to deal with failure and bounce back).
Basically, MS has been under the same management (Gates, and even Ballmer has been around since the beginning, pretty much) since its inception. Product lines -- well, in a way it has been through three: command line (DOS-era), early GUI (Win 3.x and Win9x) and modern OSes and platforms (NT, networking products), but it has shown considerable difficulty getting out of the "sell boxes of software" model.
Given all of these, I'd call MS a very immature company even now. Midlife crises will come the day Linux is just as good on the desktop as OSX is, and MS is forced to look in the mirror and ask, "what now?"
indefinate
/. average."
Heh. I hereby propose (drumroll) bheer's law: "In any slashpost critical of another's grammar and/or spelling, the probability of a grammar/spelling error rises to twice the
Look, there is no way that the right to vote should be given to anyone who's still dependent on his/her parents. There is too much room for abuse.
Folk who cross voting age don't magically become financially independent. Adults are often dependent on their spouses for money. The point is, secret ballot gives everyone a fair chance to vote in secrecy.
The original point I was trying to make is, there is no magic definition of adulthood. Once upon a time, you could be 25 and be thought of as "too young". It gradually went down to 21 and today we have 18 as the "magic age" -- an age that's actually low by historical standards.
There are hundreds of 14-17 year-olds, they are recognized as some of the biggest spenders around. At the same time, they've got no rights and no one to speak up for what *they* want (as against childrens-rights groups who think they know what people of that age want). Sounds unfair to me. If you read Glenn Reynold's article I linked to above, you'll note he talks about the enormous waste of talent we incur as we imprison kids in high school.
Here's an interesting related article you may like to read. I disagree about giving babies the ballot, and 14-year olds may not yet be ready to vote, but giving 16-year olds the right to vote is IMO a no-brainer.
There's this little thing called Secret Ballot - Dad *can't* see how he voted.
Great idea lowering the voting age to 14 or 15. Spears and Aguillera in 2008!
:-)
By the time Spears hits 35 (which is the minimum age you need to be to be president) they'd have lost their cred with the teen crowd
There was a time when a 21yr old was a "callow youth" not worth listening to, but these days they can vote. So why not push the voting age down lower? Kids are a lot smarter than you think they are.
Doesn't the government have better things to do?
Uh, no.
Actually, between large numbers parents who vote (and organize themselves into pressure groups), and the large numbers of twentysomethings who don't vote, and teenagers who *can't* vote, who do you think makes a more effective pressure group? Who do you think the guv'mint will try to pander to?
Off topic: I've been reading this and been wondering about how much of this "won't someone think of the children" crap would still exist if legal age for voting was 14 or 15.
...I recall from a friend doing a PhD torturing kittens...
Gee, I bet neighborhood bullies and `disturbed kids' everywhere would give an arm and a leg to get to the university offering that course.
To add to SmallFurryCreature's great response, I'd say that as a person with family in India I'd love to see an economically successful Pakistan, not an economically/socially dependent Pakistan. Why? Because a) the average poor Pakistani would be much less likely to be swayed by Jihad-mongering terrorists and their promises of virgins in paradise if he had good jobs and access to a decent lifestyle and b) Pakistani generals would be much more wary of nuclear posturing and aiding the Taliban when their business community would tell them to back off. (This already happened in India when the country's IT biz told the govt to tone down war rhetoric because their customers were getting upset -- Friedman had a great piece on it in the NYT (paid-for link) called India, Pakistan and GE (free copy))
The same is true for the Arab world vis-a-vis the West btw.
I coded all of my programs in Linux, using only one .cpp file for each assignment. The other students(and the teacher) spent the whole semester pulling their hair out trying to create relatively simple programs, and cut and paste from one to another( a lot of the code is jsut repetive "glue"), trying to figure out why things didn't work when there were a half dozen files created created by Visual Studio each time they wanted to code.
.rc files that define your GUI -- but those are a necessary evil. Pre-compiled headers are optional and you don't need the IDE for those anyway. Now, since you said other students "got lost" in Visual Studio, please, please tell me these weren't CS students, otherwise I'll know why all the jobs are headed to India :->
cl (which the C++ compiler underneath Visual Studio - now downloadable for free) has a complete roster of command line options.. try "cl -help" sometime. A typical college exercise should be compileable with a "cl -o foo.exe foo.cpp bar.lib baz.lib". Of course, nmake and link exist in case your code is larger than a 1-unit job. I'm not sure what you mean about "glue". If you're writing code for Win32's GUI, you do have cruft --
On top of that, Windows does not normally come with ANY development tools, my other primary reason it is a bad platform to code ON. You can't just walk up to any available Windows box and code. Precious few have VS on them. Very few Linux or UNIX boxes come without at least a few tools like Emacs and VI.
The compiler suite (includes nmake and the like) is downloadable for free. The API docs are downloadable for free. I do realize that as a student, you do not have administrative access into university computers, but this looks like a goof-up on the part of your university IS staff, not MS. Although I strongly believe MS is stupid not to bundle dev tools with all its academic editions.
But if you are trying to tell me its an ideal development platform, or even as good of one as a typical UNIX or Linux systemm, you are either not a coder, highly ignorant, or flat-out lying.
I don't believe any of Unix/Linux or Windows is an _ideal_ dev environment. Having developed for Solaris, Linux _and_ Windows, I'd say each has pros and cons. That said, I write code for a living, and I believe Windows is just as productive -- I'd say more productive but that's just my opinion -- an environment as Unix if you know what to do (mainly, stop expecting it to do everything the Unix way) and you know the platform limitations (e.g. cross-platform OpenGL support on Windows sucks).
Here's your Win32 zip - IIRC you can run this even on a guest account as long as you have access to some unzip software.
Individual purchases: Tell that bit about TCO to the student who has to balance rent, partying and beer with buying a desktop or laptop. Sure, if he's got the cash and knows his way around, he'll buy a mac (which is expensive even after the Apple .edu discount, especially when you consider Dell and HP offer specials regularly). If he's not got the money he'll buy a Gateway or Dell or no-namer.
Interestingly, if he's got the money but not got friends with the `nerd' set, guess what he'll buy? Most of the time, I'll bet it'll be Windows.
As for school purchases: I'd take TCO studies with a pinch of salt because even when _not_ biased they are very sensitive to the environment studied. Despite all the TCO hype, accountants depreciate Macs at the same rate as PCs, and that's all that really matters.
Anyhow, most universities buy PCs because between the PC makers and Apple, PC makers give a better deal - competition at work. And yeah, I guess the fact that they get a lot of OS support on x86 helps too. Apple has historically done well in the K12 market because of its simplicity, not because the schools' ancient Macs run the latest and greatest Mac apps well (so much for useful lifetime - just goes to show `useful lifetimes' are whatever you define them to be).
> Why does a history major need to use a digitakl camera or play MP3s?
... well, with evangelists like you, don't expect largescale adoption anytime soon :-).
In the next paragraph I clarified that I was talking about the general case: And even if you were talking about college procurements, why *should* colleges buy the lowest common denominator...
Besides, as these devices become more common, it's likely they'll get adopted in class. iPods are useful note-takers, for example. K-12 schools already use cameras and audio to great effect.
Finally, if you argument is that Linux is better because "it can do less and no one needs that extra sh*t anyway"
I'm not trying to troll when I called Linux an inferior desktop (well, considering this /. it was probably unintended flamebait :-)) -- please realize: most history majors do _not_ have the time or patience to go back time and again and download the latest and greatest distros to solve basic hardware interop issues that are no-brainers in Windows XP or OS X*. Hell, I've helped folk on LUGs with sendmail.cf back in the day and I chafed at the idiocy I had to put up with while connecting a scanner. (cue to jwz's famous Linux-is-free-if-your-time-has-no-value rant here).
Regarding cameras: USB mass-storage devices (which'd imply most cameras) might work with KDE and Gnome now (I last used Gnome 2.2), but what about USB devices that don't implement a mass-storage interface, e.g. the Creative Zen, which stupidly doesn't implement one for its music library? How easily can Aunt Tillie hook up her iPod on KDE?
*Yeah, this is all because of proprietary hardware. Who said life was fair?
> Its a horrible OS to write software in, IMHO
:-)
Even if you hadn't written you were a CS student, it would've been kind of obvious by the ivory-tower snarkiness of that post
Windows is a pretty good OS to write software for, depending on the kind of software you make. Remember the time when Sun's Windows JVM actually ran better than its Solaris JVM? Compared to the Linux crowd, Microsoft _knows_ how to put a desktop OS together, even if it's a Renault minivan compared to OS X's BMW.
OTOH, you have to realize that 95% of students are using computers to surf the web, send e-mail, and write papers...and thats it
Are you saying that because the Linux desktop can now do email+web in a semi-decent manner (thanks to Moz) we should accept a _drop_ in usability and go to an inferior desktop? What happens when I want to make my digital video camera work? What happens when I want my MP3 player to work? And please don't point me to half-assed SF.net projects, give me something a typical history major could use.
And even if you were talking about college procurements, why *should* colleges buy the lowest common denominator especially when it will be reviled by everyone except the CS department? Yeah, in the ideal world, they'd buy only Macs and make the both the history majors and the CS crowd happy, but go take Economics 101 and figure out why that's not likely anytime soon.
The bottom line is that generally speaking, schools should just buy whatever is the best deal. Whether it is the most widely used platform or not is completely insignificant at this point.
Right now, Windows *is* the best deal. Like all best deals, it is a compromise. It makes History majors reasonably happy, it makes the beancounters reasonably happy, and the CS folk tolerate it because they can use Cygwin or SFU.
June 25 is in 3 hours in Britain.
Exactly. This is about as useful as dropping in a house demolition notice on the day of the bloody demolition. Oh, wait...
Wow, I've been using Word since version 6 and I never knew that. (I never really grokked tab stops -- seemed too typewriter-like to me) I got by creating an invisible table with two columns and aligning each differently.
Backward binary compatibility has a price. So does not providing backward binary compatibility. Real software vendors (IBM, Sun, etc) have known this for decades. Unlike, say, wannabes like Redhat, which took the high road and said binaries for Redhat N.x won't run on N+1.x.
Of course, with open source, you may have the option to recompile, but not if you're running something that's closed-source, like DB/2 for Linux.
Anyhow, the lesson from the last 20 years is that the software market (including those who pay for open-source, such as Citibank) values backward binary compatibility. With their 3.x RHEL line, Redhat has shown that they too have gotten this message. Microsoft's approach to backward compatibility might seem kludgy, but this is probably one of the best things they've done.
There's probably a zillion special little mods to the OS to make select, Microsoft-approved legacy apps run properly.
The only index MS would use is: is it popular? if so, it would be supported. Take a look at AppCompat sometime - lots of stuff from Lotus and Corel are on that list.
Btw, the parent has got to be one of most clueless posts I've ever read on Slashdot. That it got to +3 Insightful is just sad.
If one case of bad press can kill of a company, it was never very strong to begin with. For example, Lotus' Notes, despite numerous compatibility problems across various versions of Windows, managed to stay afloat and thrive. Maybe Caldera should look into their own business model than blame competitors.