They used it in real school too, I never had a java course, and I get along just fine today in 'the real world.' Admittedly I don't use Ada either, but it worked well enough for Data Structures and Algorithms classes.
In school. It wasn't actually any different from very many other languages that have huge class libraries, it's just that they were all 'included' in the langauge instead of linked in separately. It's more verbose and stuff, but I didn't see any completely foreign concepts in Ada that aren't around in most other langauges. Just more typing, from what I remember.
No, I personally don't want to waste any of it on Vista. But, my company hired me because they have a job they need me to do, and someone has it in their mind despite my objections that they'll roll out vista. And also XP is going out of support in just over 12 months.
First of all, it's not my call. Second, we didn't. We are planning the rollout anyway though because we will have to stay in support past April of next year, which is the End of Mainstream support for XP.
Workarounds like not running screensavers aren't the point. I'm not trying to figure out how I can deploy vista, I'm telling you why I cannot. If there were a driver that worked, then I would be able to do it. If I were the one responsible for the vista drivers then I would be more proactive about it, but as such I cannot be for a number of reasons. In this particular case I'm at the mercy of the companies who are not doing anything about it. Both Dell and Nvidia shoulder some of the responsibility here, I don't blame Microsoft even one bit. These companies signed up to do business with microsoft and they knew very well that vista was going to break their run of the mill stuff. Dell knows that to support their own custom mobile chipset they'll have to keep up with nvidia, and nvidia, knowing that a large portion of their sales are derived from sales to dell users, need to keep up with their customers. Sure microsoft could have made it so that their new OS didn't break things, but the other two companies are distributing their products with full knowledge of the fact that it does break.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Dell, they use a dell branded customized chipset for mobile devices, so the only place to get drivers for Dell's mobile video hardware is from Dell. They take the vendors drivers and tweak them so that they run on their systems. So, first NVidia must put out an update, then Dell must put out an update. Then we can use it.
Now, I must also point out that my company would have been a lot smarter not to use Dell, but it's saved them money in the past, so there wasn't really the right published information at the time for us to have known that we should do anything like looking for a new hardware vendor to support vista. We thought we were covered. Nothing I can do about it now, but some of the blame goes to us too, for buying Dells.
That's not addressing the issue. The problem is that there is something wrong with the driver, the screensavers are just one example of the problem 'in action.' There are a ton of other issues with the NVidia drivers sucking that I could talk about as well, but then again, it's not really incumbent upon me to give you another example;)
We're a dell hardware shop. We buy on a 4 year cycle, every machine gets replaced every 4 years with the latest latitude line shipping model of laptop. In this past few cycles they've been NVidia based. They all have 2 gigs of ram, sata hard drives, dual core higher end processors and of course, NVidia Mobile chipsets. So, all 800 people at my company with nvidia chipsets cannot deploy vista until a) the drivers are fixed. b) the hardware cycle comes up in 4 years. All the people getting new machines right now are perfectly happy because the hardware is supported, but just those purchased 6 months ago and before (D820's) are not capable of running vista with dual monitors without gambling on whether or not they will be alive after a weekend on screensaver.
You have pretty much the same philosophy I do on the subject (especially the bits about SQL and.net) Microsoft shouldn't be considered evil for being the market leader, but they deserve the lumps they get for not focusing as much on innovating and simply re-packaging other people's software. I've always sort of had a problem with people thinking 'big' means 'bad' but microsoft will lose the advantages of being 'big' if they continue to be 'bad' in the innovation department.
On the Vista front, they had a few good ideas, but they should be a little more sensitive to who their customers are. Big businesses, who replace hardware on a cycle cannot follow microsoft through a 'we don't support that brand new hardware' cycle if said hardware (like NVidia mobile devices) is part of the latest batch of shipping high-middle-end laptops and desktops off the shelf at the OEMs. I can definitely condone breaking BACKWARD compatibility, but drivers for stuff that just came off the assembly line, considered industry standard at the time the software ships, should be most certainly supported. I think this is where microsoft went wrong on vista
While I hope you're right about the secular aspect of things. I'd love to see the day. But, as far as politics go in Europe, you can tell me about the great European 'social maturity' in about 30 years. When you'll have a tiny little labor force left and several metric tonnes of obligations doling out money in social welfare programs enacted by politicians catering to whiny people for votes. Apparently none of the politicians like to do 'scientific' math anymore. It's all based on what they 'feel is right.' Wonderful. We've all got the right to consume more than we produce, right? (I'm not implying America is infinitely better, but this 'few decades of lag' we have might be enough for us to be able to learn from the mistakes of the Europeans, in that regard, and fix it before it gets too bad here.)
In raising running water to the 50th story of a building... the nature of an inch of copper pipe is of grave consequence, whereas your own feelings about it count for nothing. (It's a paraphrase, so I left out the quotation marks.)
Howard Roark is not my dogmatic model;) But I get the point. If you're going to use novels as a guideline lets not forget who looks more like a looter than whom. However, I don't actually think using OSS makes anyone a looter, after all the even exchange (their satisfaction of contribution and recognition) they get out of it was of their own free will. This isn't to say that a number of it's consumers don't have that mentality. The guy who damns debian because they don't have a driver for his particular soundcard, now that's a fucking looter! hehe. Anyway, I still think that it's necessary to have proprietary stuff anymore, just because. If you take away the industry, lots of buzz about it (open source included) tends to suffer then. If there are no customers buying the corn, the highest technology plows start to look more like paperweights. I don't hate OSS, I contribute myself at times, but I still relish the fact we've got both.
You're not trusting microsoft's anything. The people who write this code are experts in their respective fields, who so happen to be on a microsoft payroll. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer didn't get together over a lunch and write a list of what they decree to be republican or democrat. The shareholders don't vote on what should be included in which column. This is not representative of microsoft, just paid for and owned by microsoft. True making them red or blue might be a silly squeeze, but the fact is that the readers will identify with that sort of sentiment. Look at the Red State/Blue State maps that everyone makes and looks at on TV. Anyway, it's just an experimental thingy, like any other. Deserves the same respect any other experiment does, even if you don't go try to formulate a business model based on its findings.
That's a rather ridiculous analogy. If people couldn't make any money on software, there would be a lot less of it, and especially a lot less commercial software and design for open source to emulate and 'replace'. Open source can grow faster than proprietary partly because they have taken ideas that were developed after much ado and investment by companies that actually had to pay to come up with it. I'm not saying open source is bad, but trying to kill proprietary software with it entirely is very bad.
Call me names if you like. It's not convenient for the market to correct itself, see what's happening with the financial industry now, but it does indeed correct itself. It doesn't leave everyone happy and smiling with loaves of bread in their hands as you might imagine you find in the Smurf's Village, but it does work. Regulation tries to close doors incessantly by saying 'thou shalt not' but there is no limit to what people can dream up in opposition to it. Ways around it, ways through it, and it even encourages the kind of corruption that's observable in many industries that would not otherwise have had opportunities to establish dominant footholds that you so despise. By enacting regulation, you create the opportunity for people to buy their way out of it, putting those honest folks that follow it at a disadvantage. That's some return on your investment in goodwill (as if that's what it actually were to begin with -- which it isn't.) The fact that the government will bail out large corporations when they should otherwise fail is a serious problem too. It's necessary to both end corporate welfare, AND deregulate industries, to let the long term (though not necessarily short term) benefits of the market forces be realized. It's true this isn't the way things are going now, but delivering the internet into the hands of those who would lay claim to it on their basis of their 'expertise' is more a folly.
That's an absurd piece of language. You might as well have saved your fingers the effort of typing it, and your poor, misunderstood, wrist from moving to the mouse and going to all the trouble of bringing your fingers close enough to click the mouse button on 'submit.'
Experts inject their opinions. That's why they call themselves experts. Their opinions can, and should, reflect their own beliefs, and if they're worth a damn, they don't take into consideration the teeming millions of non-experts necessarily.
So, I think that businesses, who will vote best practices into being based on whether or not the market will bear them, are doing just fine. After all, it's businesses that bear the brunt of the R&D, and businesses that make investments. We shouldn't be punishing them for making good choices to the extent that they become indispensable in the market. When something 'isn't working' eventually they lose their customers. The problem is when governments try to step in and tell us what's in everyone's best interest, and cap and regulate this, that or the other without realizing that any regulatory action will spur countless collateral reactions, many or all of which will be to the detriment of, or obviate, whatever effect they were trying to curtail or control in the first place.
For an example, If Comcast fucks over enough customers, for example, Verizon will win their market space. Vice versa also applies. I'm sure there are those of you who will point to the fact that there aren't always competing interests in all areas, so that this is 'unfair' but I think it's to the contrary... bad performance by one company in one market opens up the field for the competition to walk in and save the day. Businesses that do not have the interests of their customers as the number one goal will eventually, though certainly not instantly, fail or lose share to other businesses. And anyway, they run the wires, and install the servers and routers. So tough shit to all you who think that somehow you're entitled to some of that investment without having made some yourself in it.
You don't go smashing the glass on a jewelry store and taking diamond rings and handing them out just because you think 'they've got a lot of them, and the people I'm giving them to don't.' So why is it different with anything else, like internet service? Oh yeah, I forgot, it's because you want it. So that makes it ok.
Haha, ok. well I'm not used to people joking about that I guess. Recently I've become disillusioned with the majority of public opinion. It's funny because I think that most people would say that. Oh well.
I hope for the sake of reason and logic that those days are long gone. A schmuck in his basement deserves as much credit for solving a problem as the guy who writes the forwards to your textbooks. Think before you post, and no, I'm not sorry if I've offended you.
I'd agree with you. But you can't mean what I think you do or that would mean I was seeing someone who knows something about economics, for real, from facts, not from feelings or beliefs, on Slashdot. That just can't be. So should I laugh instead?
Like marijuana or cocaine? Wasn't one of the primary complaints against legalizing marijuana from a law enforcement perspective the lack of ability to monitor the level of intoxication of a user? Well there you go. Hippies rejoice. It's a step toward your green [smoke] goal. Tree hugging anyone?
I'm not sure you need an advanced degree to figure out that a patent granted based on 'what' you are scanning as opposed to say 'inventing the scanner' is a bit on the obvious side. We should also see patents on scanning each other thing that it's possible to scan. These guys didn't invent a scanner, nor the idea that you should store digital data once you've scanned it, they've only articulated that it's something they'll be doing using a scanner that what they'll be scanning and storing are 'checks'. That's fucking ridiculous. I'll take on out on Newsprint media then. How about Comic Books? perhaps I can 'invent' a system that will 'enable' you to scan your ass on a copier and archive it for later ensuing hilarity. This doesn't show anything but the fact that the guys who granted this patent didn't actually think about it, and that the guys debating it right now are being paid not to admit that they've thought about it by some lobbyist. I'm all for freemarkets and IP, but god damnit, someone vet these things.
I have personal horror stories with vista. I installed a new set of drivers from Dell, and it deactivated my copy of windows. Also, it randomly decides that it won't come back on after the screen blanks at idle. I did disable hibernation, and I have turned off all power management, but it still 'goes black' and still requires intermittent hard shutdown, power back ons. It's like a game, when I come in after the weekend, will I have to power it down, or won't I? I've yet to see if SP1 will fix it, I haven't installed it yet. But... I assure you the horror stories are real. We have mobile dell latitude 820's with the Nvidia video cards. As a result you have to get the drivers from dell, and can't go to nvidia for video stuff because dell has a custom mobile chipset. I have a theory that it's driver issues most of the time I've been seeing, but I can't go get new ones. Anyway, I'm not sure what the huge holdup is, but I suppose you could say that it's my hardware... except for the fact that it's brand new 4 months ago, and has all the screaming new crap it in that was available at the time, and somehow it doesn't work. Being required to forklift an entire company's inventory just to run things (and yes I have Aero turned OFF) is a ridiculous proposition, ESPECIALLY when you have the industry leading vendor putting their flagship product out in this situation. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
haha in refernce to your java being easy to read by default, you're forgetting about people like this.
They used it in real school too, I never had a java course, and I get along just fine today in 'the real world.' Admittedly I don't use Ada either, but it worked well enough for Data Structures and Algorithms classes.
In school. It wasn't actually any different from very many other languages that have huge class libraries, it's just that they were all 'included' in the langauge instead of linked in separately. It's more verbose and stuff, but I didn't see any completely foreign concepts in Ada that aren't around in most other langauges. Just more typing, from what I remember.
Then why doesnt it happen when I have XP on the same box? Anyway, that's not the only issue, just the one I decided to note.
No, I personally don't want to waste any of it on Vista. But, my company hired me because they have a job they need me to do, and someone has it in their mind despite my objections that they'll roll out vista. And also XP is going out of support in just over 12 months.
First of all, it's not my call. Second, we didn't. We are planning the rollout anyway though because we will have to stay in support past April of next year, which is the End of Mainstream support for XP.
I believe that you are right. NVidia is probably the lions share of why Vista gets the bad rap that it does.
Workarounds like not running screensavers aren't the point. I'm not trying to figure out how I can deploy vista, I'm telling you why I cannot. If there were a driver that worked, then I would be able to do it. If I were the one responsible for the vista drivers then I would be more proactive about it, but as such I cannot be for a number of reasons. In this particular case I'm at the mercy of the companies who are not doing anything about it. Both Dell and Nvidia shoulder some of the responsibility here, I don't blame Microsoft even one bit. These companies signed up to do business with microsoft and they knew very well that vista was going to break their run of the mill stuff. Dell knows that to support their own custom mobile chipset they'll have to keep up with nvidia, and nvidia, knowing that a large portion of their sales are derived from sales to dell users, need to keep up with their customers. Sure microsoft could have made it so that their new OS didn't break things, but the other two companies are distributing their products with full knowledge of the fact that it does break.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Dell, they use a dell branded customized chipset for mobile devices, so the only place to get drivers for Dell's mobile video hardware is from Dell. They take the vendors drivers and tweak them so that they run on their systems. So, first NVidia must put out an update, then Dell must put out an update. Then we can use it.
Now, I must also point out that my company would have been a lot smarter not to use Dell, but it's saved them money in the past, so there wasn't really the right published information at the time for us to have known that we should do anything like looking for a new hardware vendor to support vista. We thought we were covered. Nothing I can do about it now, but some of the blame goes to us too, for buying Dells.
That's not addressing the issue. The problem is that there is something wrong with the driver, the screensavers are just one example of the problem 'in action.' There are a ton of other issues with the NVidia drivers sucking that I could talk about as well, but then again, it's not really incumbent upon me to give you another example ;)
We're a dell hardware shop. We buy on a 4 year cycle, every machine gets replaced every 4 years with the latest latitude line shipping model of laptop. In this past few cycles they've been NVidia based. They all have 2 gigs of ram, sata hard drives, dual core higher end processors and of course, NVidia Mobile chipsets. So, all 800 people at my company with nvidia chipsets cannot deploy vista until a) the drivers are fixed. b) the hardware cycle comes up in 4 years. All the people getting new machines right now are perfectly happy because the hardware is supported, but just those purchased 6 months ago and before (D820's) are not capable of running vista with dual monitors without gambling on whether or not they will be alive after a weekend on screensaver.
You have pretty much the same philosophy I do on the subject (especially the bits about SQL and .net) Microsoft shouldn't be considered evil for being the market leader, but they deserve the lumps they get for not focusing as much on innovating and simply re-packaging other people's software. I've always sort of had a problem with people thinking 'big' means 'bad' but microsoft will lose the advantages of being 'big' if they continue to be 'bad' in the innovation department.
On the Vista front, they had a few good ideas, but they should be a little more sensitive to who their customers are. Big businesses, who replace hardware on a cycle cannot follow microsoft through a 'we don't support that brand new hardware' cycle if said hardware (like NVidia mobile devices) is part of the latest batch of shipping high-middle-end laptops and desktops off the shelf at the OEMs. I can definitely condone breaking BACKWARD compatibility, but drivers for stuff that just came off the assembly line, considered industry standard at the time the software ships, should be most certainly supported. I think this is where microsoft went wrong on vista
While I hope you're right about the secular aspect of things. I'd love to see the day. But, as far as politics go in Europe, you can tell me about the great European 'social maturity' in about 30 years. When you'll have a tiny little labor force left and several metric tonnes of obligations doling out money in social welfare programs enacted by politicians catering to whiny people for votes. Apparently none of the politicians like to do 'scientific' math anymore. It's all based on what they 'feel is right.' Wonderful. We've all got the right to consume more than we produce, right? (I'm not implying America is infinitely better, but this 'few decades of lag' we have might be enough for us to be able to learn from the mistakes of the Europeans, in that regard, and fix it before it gets too bad here.)
In raising running water to the 50th story of a building... the nature of an inch of copper pipe is of grave consequence, whereas your own feelings about it count for nothing. (It's a paraphrase, so I left out the quotation marks.)
Howard Roark is not my dogmatic model ;) But I get the point. If you're going to use novels as a guideline lets not forget who looks more like a looter than whom. However, I don't actually think using OSS makes anyone a looter, after all the even exchange (their satisfaction of contribution and recognition) they get out of it was of their own free will. This isn't to say that a number of it's consumers don't have that mentality. The guy who damns debian because they don't have a driver for his particular soundcard, now that's a fucking looter! hehe. Anyway, I still think that it's necessary to have proprietary stuff anymore, just because. If you take away the industry, lots of buzz about it (open source included) tends to suffer then. If there are no customers buying the corn, the highest technology plows start to look more like paperweights. I don't hate OSS, I contribute myself at times, but I still relish the fact we've got both.
You're not trusting microsoft's anything. The people who write this code are experts in their respective fields, who so happen to be on a microsoft payroll. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer didn't get together over a lunch and write a list of what they decree to be republican or democrat. The shareholders don't vote on what should be included in which column. This is not representative of microsoft, just paid for and owned by microsoft. True making them red or blue might be a silly squeeze, but the fact is that the readers will identify with that sort of sentiment. Look at the Red State/Blue State maps that everyone makes and looks at on TV. Anyway, it's just an experimental thingy, like any other. Deserves the same respect any other experiment does, even if you don't go try to formulate a business model based on its findings.
sorry, yeah, I misunderstood your intention. I took your summary to be your personal opinion not a summary of the parent.
That's a rather ridiculous analogy. If people couldn't make any money on software, there would be a lot less of it, and especially a lot less commercial software and design for open source to emulate and 'replace'. Open source can grow faster than proprietary partly because they have taken ideas that were developed after much ado and investment by companies that actually had to pay to come up with it. I'm not saying open source is bad, but trying to kill proprietary software with it entirely is very bad.
Call me names if you like. It's not convenient for the market to correct itself, see what's happening with the financial industry now, but it does indeed correct itself. It doesn't leave everyone happy and smiling with loaves of bread in their hands as you might imagine you find in the Smurf's Village, but it does work. Regulation tries to close doors incessantly by saying 'thou shalt not' but there is no limit to what people can dream up in opposition to it. Ways around it, ways through it, and it even encourages the kind of corruption that's observable in many industries that would not otherwise have had opportunities to establish dominant footholds that you so despise. By enacting regulation, you create the opportunity for people to buy their way out of it, putting those honest folks that follow it at a disadvantage. That's some return on your investment in goodwill (as if that's what it actually were to begin with -- which it isn't.) The fact that the government will bail out large corporations when they should otherwise fail is a serious problem too. It's necessary to both end corporate welfare, AND deregulate industries, to let the long term (though not necessarily short term) benefits of the market forces be realized. It's true this isn't the way things are going now, but delivering the internet into the hands of those who would lay claim to it on their basis of their 'expertise' is more a folly.
That's an absurd piece of language. You might as well have saved your fingers the effort of typing it, and your poor, misunderstood, wrist from moving to the mouse and going to all the trouble of bringing your fingers close enough to click the mouse button on 'submit.'
Experts inject their opinions. That's why they call themselves experts. Their opinions can, and should, reflect their own beliefs, and if they're worth a damn, they don't take into consideration the teeming millions of non-experts necessarily.
So, I think that businesses, who will vote best practices into being based on whether or not the market will bear them, are doing just fine. After all, it's businesses that bear the brunt of the R&D, and businesses that make investments. We shouldn't be punishing them for making good choices to the extent that they become indispensable in the market. When something 'isn't working' eventually they lose their customers. The problem is when governments try to step in and tell us what's in everyone's best interest, and cap and regulate this, that or the other without realizing that any regulatory action will spur countless collateral reactions, many or all of which will be to the detriment of, or obviate, whatever effect they were trying to curtail or control in the first place.
For an example, If Comcast fucks over enough customers, for example, Verizon will win their market space. Vice versa also applies. I'm sure there are those of you who will point to the fact that there aren't always competing interests in all areas, so that this is 'unfair' but I think it's to the contrary... bad performance by one company in one market opens up the field for the competition to walk in and save the day. Businesses that do not have the interests of their customers as the number one goal will eventually, though certainly not instantly, fail or lose share to other businesses. And anyway, they run the wires, and install the servers and routers. So tough shit to all you who think that somehow you're entitled to some of that investment without having made some yourself in it.
You don't go smashing the glass on a jewelry store and taking diamond rings and handing them out just because you think 'they've got a lot of them, and the people I'm giving them to don't.' So why is it different with anything else, like internet service? Oh yeah, I forgot, it's because you want it. So that makes it ok.
Haha, ok. well I'm not used to people joking about that I guess. Recently I've become disillusioned with the majority of public opinion. It's funny because I think that most people would say that. Oh well.
I hope for the sake of reason and logic that those days are long gone. A schmuck in his basement deserves as much credit for solving a problem as the guy who writes the forwards to your textbooks. Think before you post, and no, I'm not sorry if I've offended you.
keep that left brain working then, because honestly, the country will need as many folks like yourself as it can muster ;)
I'd agree with you. But you can't mean what I think you do or that would mean I was seeing someone who knows something about economics, for real, from facts, not from feelings or beliefs, on Slashdot. That just can't be. So should I laugh instead?
Like marijuana or cocaine? Wasn't one of the primary complaints against legalizing marijuana from a law enforcement perspective the lack of ability to monitor the level of intoxication of a user? Well there you go. Hippies rejoice. It's a step toward your green [smoke] goal. Tree hugging anyone?
I'm not sure you need an advanced degree to figure out that a patent granted based on 'what' you are scanning as opposed to say 'inventing the scanner' is a bit on the obvious side. We should also see patents on scanning each other thing that it's possible to scan. These guys didn't invent a scanner, nor the idea that you should store digital data once you've scanned it, they've only articulated that it's something they'll be doing using a scanner that what they'll be scanning and storing are 'checks'. That's fucking ridiculous. I'll take on out on Newsprint media then. How about Comic Books? perhaps I can 'invent' a system that will 'enable' you to scan your ass on a copier and archive it for later ensuing hilarity. This doesn't show anything but the fact that the guys who granted this patent didn't actually think about it, and that the guys debating it right now are being paid not to admit that they've thought about it by some lobbyist. I'm all for freemarkets and IP, but god damnit, someone vet these things.
I have personal horror stories with vista. I installed a new set of drivers from Dell, and it deactivated my copy of windows. Also, it randomly decides that it won't come back on after the screen blanks at idle. I did disable hibernation, and I have turned off all power management, but it still 'goes black' and still requires intermittent hard shutdown, power back ons. It's like a game, when I come in after the weekend, will I have to power it down, or won't I? I've yet to see if SP1 will fix it, I haven't installed it yet. But... I assure you the horror stories are real. We have mobile dell latitude 820's with the Nvidia video cards. As a result you have to get the drivers from dell, and can't go to nvidia for video stuff because dell has a custom mobile chipset. I have a theory that it's driver issues most of the time I've been seeing, but I can't go get new ones. Anyway, I'm not sure what the huge holdup is, but I suppose you could say that it's my hardware... except for the fact that it's brand new 4 months ago, and has all the screaming new crap it in that was available at the time, and somehow it doesn't work. Being required to forklift an entire company's inventory just to run things (and yes I have Aero turned OFF) is a ridiculous proposition, ESPECIALLY when you have the industry leading vendor putting their flagship product out in this situation. Go figure.