How about reviews of other non-Ubuntu Linux distros. and see how they compare with Vista? At the moment, I'm running Mandriva ( my rolling "blog/review" is at http://www.paullee.com/computers/computerblog.html ) - but I can't do a side-by-side comparison with MS software because I won't let that bundle o'bugs near my PC! Argghh!
A friend of mine works in the computer games industry and several of his games have been published by MS. I don't know the figures, but most of MS's profits come from Office and OSes. Everything else brings in chicken feed.
I used to work for Autonomy. They were a bunch of shits. Heres an article they didn't like very much:
Life in the Autonomy sweatshop Or: Stress Is More Fun
Following a successful interview at Autonomy Headquarters in Cambridge
on March 24th, I was offered employment and agreed to start work on
May 22nd. Despite this being a huge upheaval involving a large outlay
of money (since no relocation fee was offered), I decided to make the
move from Woking to the Cambridge area.
At first, everything went well, and I was impressed by the company:
free lunches on Friday, TV during the 2006 England World Cup matches,
and even occasion social events (the Cambridge beer festival and
go-karting). But soon, the facade began to shatter and Autonomy
revealed itself as a company focussed on money and power. Visitors to
the company are insulated from this cut-throat attitude by the fun of
seeing red-bellied piranhas in the reception, and having board rooms
named after James Bond villains. The induction process consisted of
"Sign this contract, give us your bank details, heres your desk, here
are your co-workers, here is your staff handbook (about 12 pages), and
the sandwich van is up the road." About ten minutes in total: no
mention of quality, IT policy etc.
My first job was to devour the documentation concerning the company's
Virage product (a video archive and logging system) to write DLL
plug-ins to facilitate a company's video and audio analysis. This
involved reading through massive Software Development Kit documents,
and trying some of the sample plug-ins (bluescreen detection, for
instance). Everything was fine apart from the so-called IT Support: it
took days to get my email sorted out, and weeks to get my Windows XP
workstation activated.
Sat next to me was Pieter, a Dutch (?) developer, whose voice was so
quiet I couldn't discern it over the noise of the fans and general din
in the office. Whenever I asked him for help, I passed him the
keyboard and asked him to type in the relevant stuff. He seemed to be
doing work on voice recognition, on the SoftCell system.
My manager was Abigail Betley, of whom more later.
My first job was write a plug-in that could detect and indentify
logos, or on-screen idents shown during a TV programme's broadcast. I
quickly identified many technical papers, and a simple method that
would isolate a non-animated logo from the rest of the screen. I tried
out this method and it worked fine. At this point, Abigail (Abby) went
on holiday for about 5 days or so, leaving me to doing some more work
(including coming up with Software Requirements, which to this day I
never received any feedback about). The only sore point was Abby's
colleague, Unai Ayo, a Spanish national, who phoned me up the day
before Abby was due back asking if "I had anything" and "whether logos
were correctly identified". Now, this was about a week and a half
AFTER I joined. Those of you who have done any research into Logo
Detection know that it is technically very complicated; indeed, one
scientific paper related how a Neural Net had been used (with about
89% accuracy) - and here I was 10 days after joining the company and
this major technical problem was expected to be sorted out.
Alarm bells started ringing here.
Anyway, Abby came back and I was temporarily told to park the Logo
Detector (so that it could be handed over to the Neurodynamics team
downstairs, who had experience in image identification - car number
plates etc.). I was starting to get concerned as it looked like "my"
Gmail has at least one good thing in its favor: its spam filter. Since I started using Gmail two months ago, nearly 100% of spam was filtered, with only one or two (minor) flase negatives. Compare that to Yahoo's SpamGuard. Yuk!
Plus Gmail has a host of other great features, thre best one of which is free pop3 access.
I've introduced a longtime user of Yahoo to Gmail and she hasn't looked back either.
Perhaps those who have viewed their website access logs can dispute MS's story. From my own stats, in the last month, the people using Vista is only a few % - far less than even Linux!
If it was to include UK Companies, this lot would be top of the list!
I've heard that the company has been taken to court on a few occasions for treating employees badly, and the company settled to prevent
details of their working practises from emerging. Having worked for them, I see why they'd do this!
Somewhat topical given the proximity of today's date to 11/22. This is from a mailing list, btw Col. Prouty is a leading ex-intelligence officer and JFK author:
I would go further that wikipedia is being used as a tool to spread dis-information.
I had a fight with them after I tried to keep correcting lies about Fletcher Prouty.
Every time I would correct something, someone (mcadams & friends) would change it.
I was threatened with being banned if I fixed any falsehood, as ?vandalization? I was also told ?maybe wikipedia isn?t for you?
All the people who judge if you want third party intervention are kids...
No one uses real names. Its almost who ever posts first will be regarded as the truth.
Then they leave a little flag ?contents of this site are under dispute?
but leave lies up.
These lies can be small such as incorrect dates, etc. but just try to change
them?Then they say well bring this up in the discussion area which is like a
forum.
I was hassled in my old job, which just about cracked me up. When I put up an article on my website detailing how I was bullied, I was threatened with legal action, libel - you name it. It seems
that the company involved, whom I regard as having an obsession with power and money, wanted to stifle any criticisms, even going so far as to have articles (yes, even on Slashdot) and newsgroup submissions deleted. And yet, they don't care about the harm done to me.
http://www.btinternet.com/~dr_paul_lee/auto.shtml
In addition to using spam filters, I also set up my mail filters. Most spam related email I get is addressed to anyone but me, so I just filter on the to: field looking for anything other than my name. Gets shunted straight into trash!
I've just started collecting spam statistics based on a few modifications I made to my presence on the internet. Basically, I was getting about 100 spams per night. Now, after altering my email address when I post to newsgroups to include "nospam", and changing the mailto tags on my webpages to images of my email, my spam has gone down to about 30 per night - and still falling. I also access my email server side, before downloading (no broadband you see), and select unwanted messages to train SpamGuard - and this has helped a lot!
Perhaps this might explain why so many people claim to have encountered ghosts - infrasound and magnetic fields have strange effects on the body- more info here
My God. Such UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have been around for years - BAE Systems (the company for whom I work) have been involved with them for ages.
Would Slashdot be interested in another recent newsworthy story - Sputnik launched? Or perhaps the first corracle crossing of a pond perhaps?
Oh dear, if this refers to the old chestnut "bees are aerodynamically unable to fly", an old Fortean Times did some investigation into this and found that the original back-of-the-envelope calculations by some scientist was wrong, but people ignored his retraction. Theres probably something on snopes about this.
Heres a suggestion: would it be possible to learn both? If so, you could then post the pros and cons of both languages.
I've held off learning C#, mainly because I felt it was a M$ rip-off of Java. However, it is very easy to learn. Java feels like c++ does to C; that it has had lots of stuff bolted on over the years. I use c#/java to write guis mainly, and, with.net studio, c# is a heck of a lot easier to learn and use, especially if you've used visual c++.
Slashdot Mirror
How about reviews of other non-Ubuntu Linux distros. and see how they compare with Vista?l ) - but I can't do a side-by-side comparison with MS software because I won't let that bundle o'bugs near my PC! Argghh!
At the moment, I'm running Mandriva ( my rolling "blog/review" is at http://www.paullee.com/computers/computerblog.htm
A friend of mine works in the computer games industry and several of his games have been published by MS. I don't know the figures, but most of MS's profits come from Office and OSes. Everything else brings in chicken feed.
Jet Set Willy! Yay! We were obsessed with it. The holy mantra "Poke 35899,0" was branded into our consciousness.
I used to work for Autonomy. They were a bunch of shits. Heres an article
they didn't like very much:
Life in the Autonomy sweatshop
Or:
Stress Is More Fun
Following a successful interview at Autonomy Headquarters in Cambridge
on March 24th, I was offered employment and agreed to start work on
May 22nd. Despite this being a huge upheaval involving a large outlay
of money (since no relocation fee was offered), I decided to make the
move from Woking to the Cambridge area.
At first, everything went well, and I was impressed by the company:
free lunches on Friday, TV during the 2006 England World Cup matches,
and even occasion social events (the Cambridge beer festival and
go-karting). But soon, the facade began to shatter and Autonomy
revealed itself as a company focussed on money and power. Visitors to
the company are insulated from this cut-throat attitude by the fun of
seeing red-bellied piranhas in the reception, and having board rooms
named after James Bond villains. The induction process consisted of
"Sign this contract, give us your bank details, heres your desk, here
are your co-workers, here is your staff handbook (about 12 pages), and
the sandwich van is up the road." About ten minutes in total: no
mention of quality, IT policy etc.
My first job was to devour the documentation concerning the company's
Virage product (a video archive and logging system) to write DLL
plug-ins to facilitate a company's video and audio analysis. This
involved reading through massive Software Development Kit documents,
and trying some of the sample plug-ins (bluescreen detection, for
instance). Everything was fine apart from the so-called IT Support: it
took days to get my email sorted out, and weeks to get my Windows XP
workstation activated.
Sat next to me was Pieter, a Dutch (?) developer, whose voice was so
quiet I couldn't discern it over the noise of the fans and general din
in the office. Whenever I asked him for help, I passed him the
keyboard and asked him to type in the relevant stuff. He seemed to be
doing work on voice recognition, on the SoftCell system.
My manager was Abigail Betley, of whom more later.
My first job was write a plug-in that could detect and indentify
logos, or on-screen idents shown during a TV programme's broadcast. I
quickly identified many technical papers, and a simple method that
would isolate a non-animated logo from the rest of the screen. I tried
out this method and it worked fine. At this point, Abigail (Abby) went
on holiday for about 5 days or so, leaving me to doing some more work
(including coming up with Software Requirements, which to this day I
never received any feedback about). The only sore point was Abby's
colleague, Unai Ayo, a Spanish national, who phoned me up the day
before Abby was due back asking if "I had anything" and "whether logos
were correctly identified". Now, this was about a week and a half
AFTER I joined. Those of you who have done any research into Logo
Detection know that it is technically very complicated; indeed, one
scientific paper related how a Neural Net had been used (with about
89% accuracy) - and here I was 10 days after joining the company and
this major technical problem was expected to be sorted out.
Alarm bells started ringing here.
Anyway, Abby came back and I was temporarily told to park the Logo
Detector (so that it could be handed over to the Neurodynamics team
downstairs, who had experience in image identification - car number
plates etc.). I was starting to get concerned as it looked like "my"
Gmail has at least one good thing in its favor: its spam filter. Since I started using Gmail two months ago, nearly 100% of spam was filtered, with only one or two (minor) flase negatives. Compare that to Yahoo's SpamGuard. Yuk! Plus Gmail has a host of other great features, thre best one of which is free pop3 access. I've introduced a longtime user of Yahoo to Gmail and she hasn't looked back either.
Perhaps those who have viewed their website access logs can dispute MS's story. From my own stats, in the last month, the people using Vista is only a few % - far less than even Linux!
Maybe its the CSI Exclusion Principle ...
CSI? De-centralized CPU? Where will they be located; Miami, New York or Las Vegas?
If you're interested in debunking all pseudo-science, particularly the rampant blatherings of self proclaimed mediums and psychics, click here
Don't trust the makers of blinkx
They also deleted my post about my old employers, possibly after a bit of legal hassle- http://www.btinternet.com/~dr_paul_lee/zzq.shtml
If it was to include UK Companies, this lot would be top of the list! I've heard that the company has been taken to court on a few occasions for treating employees badly, and the company settled to prevent details of their working practises from emerging. Having worked for them, I see why they'd do this!
This was on b3ta.com recently. Personally, I doubt whether the old company I used to work for had much Christmas spirit. Read it and weep.
Somewhat topical given the proximity of today's date to 11/22. This is from a mailing list, btw Col. Prouty is a leading ex-intelligence officer and JFK author: I would go further that wikipedia is being used as a tool to spread dis-information. I had a fight with them after I tried to keep correcting lies about Fletcher Prouty. Every time I would correct something, someone (mcadams & friends) would change it. I was threatened with being banned if I fixed any falsehood, as ?vandalization? I was also told ?maybe wikipedia isn?t for you? All the people who judge if you want third party intervention are kids... No one uses real names. Its almost who ever posts first will be regarded as the truth. Then they leave a little flag ?contents of this site are under dispute? but leave lies up. These lies can be small such as incorrect dates, etc. but just try to change them?Then they say well bring this up in the discussion area which is like a forum.
I was hassled in my old job, which just about cracked me up. When I put up an article on my website detailing how I was bullied, I was threatened with legal action, libel - you name it. It seems that the company involved, whom I regard as having an obsession with power and money, wanted to stifle any criticisms, even going so far as to have articles (yes, even on Slashdot) and newsgroup submissions deleted. And yet, they don't care about the harm done to me. http://www.btinternet.com/~dr_paul_lee/auto.shtml
In addition to using spam filters, I also set up my mail filters. Most spam related email I get is addressed to anyone but me, so I just filter on the to: field looking for anything other than my name. Gets shunted straight into trash!
I've just started collecting spam statistics based on a few modifications I made to my presence on the internet. Basically, I was getting about 100 spams per night. Now, after altering my email address when I post to newsgroups to include "nospam", and changing the mailto tags on my webpages to images of my email, my spam has gone down to about 30 per night - and still falling. I also access my email server side, before downloading (no broadband you see), and select unwanted messages to train SpamGuard - and this has helped a lot!
Pass my CV on to them willl you? http://www.btinternet.com?~dr_paul_lee/cv.doc
Shame its made by these shits, its rather good.
I recently lost my job, though not as mercilessly as the RadioShack method. Well, actually, I tell a lie: I was forced out my job - http://www.btinternet.com/~dr_paul_lee/autonomy.ht m
Would Slashdot be interested in another recent newsworthy story - Sputnik launched? Or perhaps the first corracle crossing of a pond perhaps?
I've held off learning C#, mainly because I felt it was a M$ rip-off of Java. However, it is very easy to learn. Java feels like c++ does to C; that it has had lots of stuff bolted on over the years. I use c#/java to write guis mainly, and, with .net studio, c# is a heck of a lot easier to learn and use, especially if you've used visual c++.
So, I suppose it depends on your background.!