Obligatory rant here...how do they know it's the best product if they never run anything non-microsoft.
As a policy, I don't run anything that competes with Microsoft. My goal is to make sure Microsoft products are the best products in the world. It's an easy choice for me, in that sense--to run Microsoft technology. We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run Oracle. We're 100 percent Windows, SQL Server.
What does the following mean? Other than an incoherent repetition of the above.
We do, in areas on the client, have an open-source client running--just for competitive analysis. As an IT organization, I have no skills and no ability and no purchasing of those products. We don't even run J2EE. Everything is.Net.
This guy really earned his title as Chief Information Officer. When I read this interview I got flashbacks of video clips of Iraq's Minister of Information making all those bizarre claims about the invasion.
I related to your post immediately. I grew up here in the US, learning English and Gujarati (language of Gujarat in northern India) almost simultaneously. By the end of high school, almost serendipitously, I became sort of a language junkie. I took 6 years of German, and am not having much practice with it in my life. But at my last company, I worked with Punjabi guys, and was able to very quickly develop a sense of words/phrases that they would use and the general meaning. This in spite of the fact that Punjabi and Gujarati are quite different.
I ended up majoring in English Lit in college. I'm fascinated with how intimidated people can be when in the presence of one or two people who speak a different language. It seems to me, so much of language is contained in the non-tangible aspects of our speech, body language, verbal nuance, etc.
On top of that I live in San Diego, CA, so I'm dying to learn Spanish one of these days. One time this construction worker at the grocery store looked up at me and said thinking I was Latino, "mmmggh, Amigo...", and I was just nodded my head...kind of a nice moment.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea.
They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by
small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is
clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
-- Military school Commandant's graduation address, "The Secret War of
Lisa Simpson"
When I set up a Debian box about 6 months ago, the installation didn't seem any more difficult than installing RedHat (which was the only distribution I had used up till that point). You don't HAVE to use dselect or tasksel. The Debian installer (for woody at least) provided some images of standard packages that a user might want when setting up an initial install. I hosed that up, but that was my own fault. I ended up just using apt-get to install specific packages I needed. It's just a web server, so I didn't need much.
I've only used Redhat and Debian; Debian is WAY better with the package management then RedHat. I'm looking forward to converting my other RedHat box over to Debian as soon as I find the time.
Agreed. Microsoft does cater to convenience. Easy interoperability of so much of their software and development tools is what makes it such a target for security.
Developers of Apache and Samba are not receiving some directive from upper management saying that their stuff has to play nice with all the other server software on Unix/Linux. Microsoft on the other hand wants EVERYTHING to play nice in order to suck everyone into their binary pit.
usingDotnet = true; if ( usingDotnet ) { useIIS = true; if ( useIIS ) { useWin2003server = true; // more nested conditionals // m$ says, "Trust us, it will be easier the more you say true." } }
The reason we have SOOO much to talk about on SlashDot is exactly because Microsoft thinks exclusively of the end-user ( end-user = users of MS Office, as well as many IDE code monkeys) and NEVER thinks of the developer, except at the lowest common denominator.
This might be offtopic but... A friend of mine said that the "baristas" at Starbucks create the "unique" taste of coffee, by roasting the beans longer than average. I recently bought a regular non-flavored coffee there, and was able to confirm that they do, in fact, burn their coffee. Maybe this is something true connoisseurs appreciate, but as far as I'm concerned it's "burning". Call it "dark roasting" call it a "feature enhancement".
Then again, what do I know...I put cream and sugar in my coffee.
Yeah, and here in the NAVY, there's no chance we'll be dropping IE anytime soon. I just showed this IE/HomelandSecurity/MozillaDownloadSpike article to one of my co-workers, and she just did the verbal equivalent of patting me on the head. Some people just have no imagination.
Yeah, 3.4 MB and it was only 75% downloaded after 15 minutes? Anyway, I don't want to Know! I'm happy where I work, and I'm ignorantly satisfied with my salary. Last year I spent 12 months working at a crap software company. They had a market niche and the competition wasn't enough to make them get off their asses and write good software. Instead they had been stove-piping and patching together various client-database applications for 10 or 15 years. When I left for another company, everyone kept asking, "Oh, you're leaving because it's better money?", and I'm like, no, I'm leaving because the company I'm going to work for actually tries to design and implement good software. The fact that the salary was higher was just an added bonus. I would have taken a pay cut to go to this company. But everyone's always fixated on the money.
I went to school for liberal arts, so I'm one of THOSE web monkeys. But I learned my shit, and I'm happy to be making what I consider to be decent money, although most developers who have a degree and the same experience as me would probably feel undervalued making my salary. But like I said...I'm not going to RTF3.4MBReport. Sometimes Ignorance is Bliss.
I doubt the average email user actually needs 1GB of space. Certainly, users will find a way to not be able to live without 1GB of space, but this morning when I saw a notice from Yahoo saying that they had increased my account capacity to 100MB, I kind of lost the desire for a gmail account. I suppose I just needed a little bit more extra space and not a LOT more extra space.
And yes, I delete all the superflous, massive video attachments after a short period time, because Yahoo has a huge red indicator saying "YOu are using 100+ % of your email space!!!"
100MB is fine by me. Although, I wouldn't mind trying out a gmail account, just to see what all the fuss is all about.
I second your reason for not using Linux on the desktop. The minor issues with getting peripherals to work (like sound, graphics, etc) in Linux can be discouraging. Most people are using Windows for their desktop and workstation, and simply running Linux for servers.
I mainly use Samba, Apache, and CVS, and it's all running off of my Linux machines, while I use Win2K with the latest service packs for all my personal work. I got Debian up and running really fast to use as my web server, but I never could get the X Window configuration to gel; I had no qualms about leaving it the way it was. I just ssh into that box. What's the pOint? I'm not using Linux for it's GUI/Desktop, I'm using it becasue Linux is just way more flexible, stable, and extensible for it's networking and server capabilities.
While I think it would great to have a linux desktop that competes neck-in-neck with Mac or Windows, if it never happened, it would be no sweat off my back. Using the argument that the GUI/Desktop should be pursued more by the OSS community is IMHO kind of worthless, because the whole point is to eliminate the manual-button-point-click blockade of Windows. Using a powerful tool requires at least some ambition and sweat. That's not a snob comment. It's a fact. I don't look down on people who do NOT use the command line. They are simply making a choice on how to spend their time and that's fine. I understand that using the command-line gives me more power in the long run. I also understand that it reduces the tedium and redundance of pushing buttons and right clicking to install and uninstall DLL's from a COM Admin window 20 times a day during development...
True, there is logging in the Event Viewer. But wouldn't it be nice if instead of having to point and click to open up a dialogue window when reading the log/error comments, you could just open up a text file? Or better yet, you could write a script that specifically tracked certain kinds of log statements? I've heard you can do that on ANOTHER operating system.
.NET provides "remoting" and Java provides RMI. These are essentially Remote Objects. CORBA provides this cross-platform. If I understand exactly what you're asking for, it already exists. Clients can instantiate objects remotely, and maintain virtually local control of these remote objects, using the aforementioned technologies.
However, if you're using PHP, the whole concept of remote object has to be patched together (just like in ASP) simply because there is no true "state" in web applications.
I bank at Washington Mutual, and use their online system a lot (www.wamu.com). The thing that's really frustrating is they check for IE and Netscape in their JavaScript, and if it's neither of those, they throw you an error page saying your browser is not secure. This is just crap.
If they don't want to support Opera, then they should say, we only want our customers to use Netscape and IE, but to throw an error at you saying your browser doesn't support SSL and 128-bit encryption, is highly disingenuine.
Umm, I just did view source on ESPN, and found several instances of
<table>
elements.
I have to agree with some of the other posters. CSS is nice for regulating element attributes like font, color, etc, but when it comes to layout, (I could be wrong, I'm still learning) a lot of the proselytizing for CSS leaves something to be desired. If div and span can be used to remove most tables, I have yet to find this magical method.
That's a pretty brazen statement. Certifications are totally and uniquely in the eye of the beholder. I talked to my cousin who is a pro-MS guy and a year or two ago he said to me, "Those Unix admin guys are a dime a dozen". Unix people say the same thing about MS guys.
It gets ridiculous to say the least. I'll gladly pursue my.NET certification, when the time is right. I may not advertise it on a billboard, but I'll certainly include it on my resume.
That's really depressing, but I have a feeling you are absolutely correct. My current company encourages developers to pursue MS certifications and I may bite on that pretty soon when I get more familiar with.NET. They even pay bonuses for certain combinations of certs passed.
I'd love to move back to developing in an environment that uses UNIX, but until then I'll take advantage of whatever my company offers to pay for with Microsoft-related stuff. I consider it a bonus that they actually want us to learn something.
I only started reading that tutorial, but it demonstrates very clearly that writing software is tied to a unique sense of literacy. Much like creative writing, programmers have to develop program flow (much like a plot) and they do a butt-load of "naming". As far as I'm concerned, when reading other people's code, "naming" is my biggest pet peeve. What you call a function or variable determines the overall readability of code. The best creative writers have often "bent" the language to create a new literary sensibility. I have to wonder if programmers had more creative sensibility when naming variables, classes and methods (hell, even package/component names), wouldn't it make code more interesting to read?
...how about an object library that I use for self-education and future reference?
At my very first programming job, I had the opportunity to work with a few very skilled developers, and I held on to the code they used to to prototype a data management system. Is it illegal for me to have it? I'm guessing, strictly, yes. But I'll never implement that code elsewhere, because it was a very specialized client/server application for a very specialized client. I couldn't use it elsewhere, even if I wanted to...and quite honestly, most people code for applications and clients that are so specialized, that in most cases, it would be illogical to try and carry that over to another company (or even project). On the otherhand, it's useful for me to hold on to examples of "good" code and object architecture. And as far as the code I write for a particular company, it's useful for me to hang on to so that I can see what I'm now doing intelligently and what I'm still doing stupidly.
...DFW gave it the old college try...
on
Everything and More
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think it's his best book ever. And I certainly haven't read or studied enough math to say that his book is either really good or really bad.
I do think that some of the introductory stuff that he wrote about basic math (like Principle of Induction, how counting is taught in elementary school in Platonic fashion, etc) was really informative as well as fun to read. I haven't gotten past 60% of the way through the book, because a lot of the stuff is confusing and going over my head. I'll probably finish it at some point, but it's not easy stuff to digest for someone even with a couple calculus classes under their belt. I was taking a calculus review last fall, and when I saw the book come out, I was pretty excited to check it out. Honestly, at this point I'm sort of burned out on math. Not just math, but Math.
No matter what you think of Infinite Jest being too long, or whether you believe that DFW is fashionably being worshipped as the post-modern god of contemporary literature, I think that what he's doing is incredibly important. That is, amongst all the tech and science illiterate people involved in the liberal arts, he introduced science and math into the aesthetic realm, in a way that most people probably never imagined. In Infinite Jest, he included some intriguing passages that require at least a little bit of understanding of calculus in a way that was entertaining and enlightening. Math underlies so much of the modern world, and most people don't have any real conscious realization of it.
Is it well written? I think it's written well enough. I wouldn't have the slightest clue how to begin writing such a book. It wasn't as accessible as Hawking's Brief History of Time, but it has certainly been enlightening to me, in the same way that James Gleick's book on chaos theory was enlightening to me. For people who are not otherwise familiar with DFW, definitely check out A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do again and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Wallace's incredibly precise awareness and (almost scientific) attention to linguistic detail is seriously unparalleled. At least in my reading experience.
You could also say that Samba server also helped to significantly make (almost as much as Apache) the reputation for *nix platforms in everyday corporate offices and even small businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
I related to your post immediately. I grew up here in the US, learning English and Gujarati (language of Gujarat in northern India) almost simultaneously. By the end of high school, almost serendipitously, I became sort of a language junkie. I took 6 years of German, and am not having much practice with it in my life. But at my last company, I worked with Punjabi guys, and was able to very quickly develop a sense of words/phrases that they would use and the general meaning. This in spite of the fact that Punjabi and Gujarati are quite different.
I ended up majoring in English Lit in college. I'm fascinated with how intimidated people can be when in the presence of one or two people who speak a different language. It seems to me, so much of language is contained in the non-tangible aspects of our speech, body language, verbal nuance, etc.
On top of that I live in San Diego, CA, so I'm dying to learn Spanish one of these days. One time this construction worker at the grocery store looked up at me and said thinking I was Latino, "mmmggh, Amigo...", and I was just nodded my head...kind of a nice moment.
The correct syntax is as follows: CSS/XHTML:traditionalHTML::hand-codedHTML:FrontPag e98 ;)
When I set up a Debian box about 6 months ago, the installation didn't seem any more difficult than installing RedHat (which was the only distribution I had used up till that point). You don't HAVE to use dselect or tasksel. The Debian installer (for woody at least) provided some images of standard packages that a user might want when setting up an initial install. I hosed that up, but that was my own fault. I ended up just using apt-get to install specific packages I needed. It's just a web server, so I didn't need much.
I've only used Redhat and Debian; Debian is WAY better with the package management then RedHat. I'm looking forward to converting my other RedHat box over to Debian as soon as I find the time.
I agree that the hubbub about IE is not speculation or half-truth, but for the average non-technical end-user it's still effectively FUD.
All I was saying was, it's too bad people couldn't choose Mozilla or Opera without it being a knee-jerk reaction.
It's a shame that that had to happen only because of the recent FUD about IE.
The reason we have SOOO much to talk about on SlashDot is exactly because Microsoft thinks exclusively of the end-user ( end-user = users of MS Office, as well as many IDE code monkeys) and NEVER thinks of the developer, except at the lowest common denominator.
This might be offtopic but ... A friend of mine said that the "baristas" at Starbucks create the "unique" taste of coffee, by roasting the beans longer than average. I recently bought a regular non-flavored coffee there, and was able to confirm that they do, in fact, burn their coffee. Maybe this is something true connoisseurs appreciate, but as far as I'm concerned it's "burning". Call it "dark roasting" call it a "feature enhancement".
Then again, what do I know...I put cream and sugar in my coffee.
Yeah, and here in the NAVY, there's no chance we'll be dropping IE anytime soon. I just showed this IE/HomelandSecurity/MozillaDownloadSpike article to one of my co-workers, and she just did the verbal equivalent of patting me on the head. Some people just have no imagination.
Yeah, 3.4 MB and it was only 75% downloaded after 15 minutes? Anyway, I don't want to Know! I'm happy where I work, and I'm ignorantly satisfied with my salary. Last year I spent 12 months working at a crap software company. They had a market niche and the competition wasn't enough to make them get off their asses and write good software. Instead they had been stove-piping and patching together various client-database applications for 10 or 15 years. When I left for another company, everyone kept asking, "Oh, you're leaving because it's better money?", and I'm like, no, I'm leaving because the company I'm going to work for actually tries to design and implement good software. The fact that the salary was higher was just an added bonus. I would have taken a pay cut to go to this company. But everyone's always fixated on the money.
I went to school for liberal arts, so I'm one of THOSE web monkeys. But I learned my shit, and I'm happy to be making what I consider to be decent money, although most developers who have a degree and the same experience as me would probably feel undervalued making my salary. But like I said...I'm not going to RTF3.4MBReport. Sometimes Ignorance is Bliss.
"Burninanting the Packets in the Countryside!"
And yes, I delete all the superflous, massive video attachments after a short period time, because Yahoo has a huge red indicator saying "YOu are using 100+ % of your email space!!!"
100MB is fine by me. Although, I wouldn't mind trying out a gmail account, just to see what all the fuss is all about.
I mainly use Samba, Apache, and CVS, and it's all running off of my Linux machines, while I use Win2K with the latest service packs for all my personal work. I got Debian up and running really fast to use as my web server, but I never could get the X Window configuration to gel; I had no qualms about leaving it the way it was. I just ssh into that box. What's the pOint? I'm not using Linux for it's GUI/Desktop, I'm using it becasue Linux is just way more flexible, stable, and extensible for it's networking and server capabilities.
While I think it would great to have a linux desktop that competes neck-in-neck with Mac or Windows, if it never happened, it would be no sweat off my back. Using the argument that the GUI/Desktop should be pursued more by the OSS community is IMHO kind of worthless, because the whole point is to eliminate the manual-button-point-click blockade of Windows. Using a powerful tool requires at least some ambition and sweat. That's not a snob comment. It's a fact. I don't look down on people who do NOT use the command line. They are simply making a choice on how to spend their time and that's fine. I understand that using the command-line gives me more power in the long run. I also understand that it reduces the tedium and redundance of pushing buttons and right clicking to install and uninstall DLL's from a COM Admin window 20 times a day during development...
True, there is logging in the Event Viewer. But wouldn't it be nice if instead of having to point and click to open up a dialogue window when reading the log/error comments, you could just open up a text file? Or better yet, you could write a script that specifically tracked certain kinds of log statements? I've heard you can do that on ANOTHER operating system.
.NET provides "remoting" and Java provides RMI. These are essentially Remote Objects. CORBA provides this cross-platform. If I understand exactly what you're asking for, it already exists. Clients can instantiate objects remotely, and maintain virtually local control of these remote objects, using the aforementioned technologies.
However, if you're using PHP, the whole concept of remote object has to be patched together (just like in ASP) simply because there is no true "state" in web applications.
I bank at Washington Mutual, and use their online system a lot (www.wamu.com). The thing that's really frustrating is they check for IE and Netscape in their JavaScript, and if it's neither of those, they throw you an error page saying your browser is not secure. This is just crap.
If they don't want to support Opera, then they should say, we only want our customers to use Netscape and IE, but to throw an error at you saying your browser doesn't support SSL and 128-bit encryption, is highly disingenuine.
I have to agree with some of the other posters. CSS is nice for regulating element attributes like font, color, etc, but when it comes to layout, (I could be wrong, I'm still learning) a lot of the proselytizing for CSS leaves something to be desired. If div and span can be used to remove most tables, I have yet to find this magical method.
That's a pretty brazen statement. Certifications are totally and uniquely in the eye of the beholder. I talked to my cousin who is a pro-MS guy and a year or two ago he said to me, "Those Unix admin guys are a dime a dozen". Unix people say the same thing about MS guys.
.NET certification, when the time is right. I may not advertise it on a billboard, but I'll certainly include it on my resume.
It gets ridiculous to say the least. I'll gladly pursue my
That's really depressing, but I have a feeling you are absolutely correct. My current company encourages developers to pursue MS certifications and I may bite on that pretty soon when I get more familiar with .NET. They even pay bonuses for certain combinations of certs passed.
I'd love to move back to developing in an environment that uses UNIX, but until then I'll take advantage of whatever my company offers to pay for with Microsoft-related stuff. I consider it a bonus that they actually want us to learn something.
I only started reading that tutorial, but it demonstrates very clearly that writing software is tied to a unique sense of literacy. Much like creative writing, programmers have to develop program flow (much like a plot) and they do a butt-load of "naming". As far as I'm concerned, when reading other people's code, "naming" is my biggest pet peeve. What you call a function or variable determines the overall readability of code. The best creative writers have often "bent" the language to create a new literary sensibility. I have to wonder if programmers had more creative sensibility when naming variables, classes and methods (hell, even package/component names), wouldn't it make code more interesting to read?
At my very first programming job, I had the opportunity to work with a few very skilled developers, and I held on to the code they used to to prototype a data management system. Is it illegal for me to have it? I'm guessing, strictly, yes. But I'll never implement that code elsewhere, because it was a very specialized client/server application for a very specialized client. I couldn't use it elsewhere, even if I wanted to...and quite honestly, most people code for applications and clients that are so specialized, that in most cases, it would be illogical to try and carry that over to another company (or even project). On the otherhand, it's useful for me to hold on to examples of "good" code and object architecture. And as far as the code I write for a particular company, it's useful for me to hang on to so that I can see what I'm now doing intelligently and what I'm still doing stupidly.
I don't think it's his best book ever. And I certainly haven't read or studied enough math to say that his book is either really good or really bad.
I do think that some of the introductory stuff that he wrote about basic math (like Principle of Induction, how counting is taught in elementary school in Platonic fashion, etc) was really informative as well as fun to read. I haven't gotten past 60% of the way through the book, because a lot of the stuff is confusing and going over my head. I'll probably finish it at some point, but it's not easy stuff to digest for someone even with a couple calculus classes under their belt. I was taking a calculus review last fall, and when I saw the book come out, I was pretty excited to check it out. Honestly, at this point I'm sort of burned out on math. Not just math, but Math.
No matter what you think of Infinite Jest being too long, or whether you believe that DFW is fashionably being worshipped as the post-modern god of contemporary literature, I think that what he's doing is incredibly important. That is, amongst all the tech and science illiterate people involved in the liberal arts, he introduced science and math into the aesthetic realm, in a way that most people probably never imagined. In Infinite Jest, he included some intriguing passages that require at least a little bit of understanding of calculus in a way that was entertaining and enlightening. Math underlies so much of the modern world, and most people don't have any real conscious realization of it.
Is it well written? I think it's written well enough. I wouldn't have the slightest clue how to begin writing such a book. It wasn't as accessible as Hawking's Brief History of Time, but it has certainly been enlightening to me, in the same way that James Gleick's book on chaos theory was enlightening to me. For people who are not otherwise familiar with DFW, definitely check out A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do again and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Wallace's incredibly precise awareness and (almost scientific) attention to linguistic detail is seriously unparalleled. At least in my reading experience.
You could also say that Samba server also helped to significantly make (almost as much as Apache) the reputation for *nix platforms in everyday corporate offices and even small businesses.
I would like to get a similar all-in-one type deal for all the Calvin and Hobbes comics.