OUR generation acts different on camera. Imagine people born and raised in a world where they are always on TV. Their mentality, their public demeanor, will probably be very different from ours. Where as 30 years ago people would be embarassed to be put in front of a TV camera, we now have children making videos from home and posting them on YouTube, trying desperately to get as many hits as possible. I could imagine a world where individuals would try to program/usurp public survelilance cams to send a feed of their whereabouts over to their web page, and then send constant "what I was thinking" notes via their cell.
The whole point of public education is that every child sould be afforded the same oppurtunities. If you have poor parents that can't afford to buy you these things, what then? Likewise, if your parents are stupid and blow their money on the wrong things, what then?
I hope some top tier university picks him up and gives him a spot teaching the same sort of material in a high-profile kind of way. He certainly deserves a ton of credit for what he wants to do and the way he planned to do it.
See, this is the same sort of ridiculous Linux zealot garbage that I go out of my way to dispute.
OpenOffice runs slower on LINUX that Office runs on WINDOWS.
Microsoft can do nothing to slow down OpenOffice on Linux.
I believe Office apps use some sort of a memory mapped file approach. They don't load the files into memory so much as they use the file on disk as a sort of database. This is why Office apps don't grow so much as you make your documents bigger (especially Excel). The OS handles efficient paging, and the app only holds on to fast hash index of where to find information on the disk (which might come out of the disk cache or be read from the disk on each access).
You can't do this with XML, and this is why XML sucks (for computers) to "work" with. It might be a good way to move data around, but saving document data in XML and trying to use it at runtime is always going to be a bad idea. With XML, you need to load this giant ASCII file and convert it into a binary representation before you can do anything with it. Unless you write your own VERY smart XML parser, most current tools will want all the data in memory and want to store all of the result in memory. POW, you've doubled your apps memory requirements at load time, and you're going to have to hold on to a copy of the converted data at run time (or drop it to disk as a tmp file).
Well, I re-read your post, and I still take issue with the way you phrased that point. That it's "their" platform has nothing to do with why Office runs so well. It's all the same hardware after all. You can only eek so much out of it, and with apps like Excel where its all about memory utilization and clever coding, there isn't much about the OS that really matters.
Someone else mentioned that Office runs great on OSX - we know that OSX is essentially your typical UNIX variant with a fancy GUI system. It's not their OS, but MS still beats OO.o because they code better.
2) Office runs faster, but for that matter, so does IE - is it any suprise that MS can write software for its own OS which takes every possible advantage of its native environment to run with speed?
That's a load of bull. There's nothing that MS can do to "magically" make their apps run faster on the same hardware that other developers can't, and there isn't much that Windows does that is significantly different from the way Linux/X do things.
Tricks that could make Excel perform better might be
Leaving data on the disk until its needed on screen(using memory mapped files)
Not copying data into temporary data structures for display
Writing meta data along with the spread sheet to help it load faster
Avoiding excessive repainting and better buffering of screen updates
Writing their own widgets that work better in a spreadsheet than just using the stock ones that Qt/GTK/Motif gives you
Trading speed for memory by using hashing and other complex data structures to navigate dense data structures rather than using sparse data structures that directly map to the screen.
What makes this notion especially naive is denying that Linux/X developers know their environment just as well as the coders at Microsoft. If anything, the longevity of Unix style OSes and X should make it far easier to write high-performance code, because everyone should be aware by now what the OS related pitfalls are. Regardless of the silly incompatibilities between the various flavors of UNIX, there really isn't much to differentiate them other than slight performance differences caused by how each OS pages memory or handles threads. Any one should be able to get similar performance on any UNIX, or even Windows, if they design their app's data structures well and are using compilers can do similar code optimizations.
The reason OpenOffice runs like a pig can ONLY be attributed to poor coding by its developers, period. Microsoft has had TWENTY years to hone Office into one of the most accomplished software packages ever. Thinking that they do this by using "evil tricks" is just ridiculous. It would be much easier to believe that the OO.o programmers are still new to what they are doing and have very poor quality control.
I work in a similar environment. Gigantic libraries written in C++ that take hours to build and have all sorts of peculurarities on the various implementations of C++ out there. When you have many developers all using the same code base who REFUSE to use the same compilers, you begin to see where C++ can be a pain.
And BTW, there is MONO on UNIX as a free cross platform implementation of.NET. I don't think there is anything about the.NET Common Language Interface that ties you to Windows other than that the only viable implementation is on Win32 only ATM.
But you miss my point - How do you use your C++ libraries in Perl without sitting down and writing tons of wrapper code? How do you use it in Java without writing JNI? C++/CLI is the answer. If you are using Perl.NET, Java.NET, C++.NET, you write the class once and its available to EVERY.NET compatible language, both in terms of interface and compiled code base. Compile it once (for a platform, meaning the OS & CPU) and you're good to go. No wrappers, no interop, no nothing.
And given that things are headed more and more towards Linux/X86 and Win32/X86 as the only game, this will be a huge, huge thing.
This is precisely why I love MSFT's.NET idea. Define a standard way for languages to expose library functionality and a common call convention - then call that functionality indepentent of what language your code is written in, or what code the library is written in.
The.NET runtime-library is comparable to Java's, but also has the advantage of being able to seamlessly talk to all existing COM libraries.
C/C++ on the other hand are an utter joke. On Linux/Unix, at my firm we have 9-12 variations of G++, Intel C++, HP/UX C++ all trying to co-exist together, none of which are binary compatible. ALl code has to be compiled by the compiler you're using for your project, because nothing is binary compatible (C++ never defined an official name mangingling standard)..NET, this all goes away, and it was designed to do this from the start. JAVA was a good starting point, but it was never meant to be a universal inter-language platform. It was meant to be THE language, and thus isn't ultimate answer (sadly, Sun sued Microsoft when they tried to expose COM to Java, rather than trying to make the Interop layer a Sun/Java standard that they could own).
Time Warner Cable in NYC offers these. I can go into their midtown office and trade in my set-top-box for one right now. However, I shall not do so because my STB is the Scientific Atlanta SA8000HD which is a HDTV DVR. There are no alternatives to this box.
Its software not as nice as a Tivo but it has plenty of advantages:
Direct digital HD recordings - there's no decode-recode crap going on like with STB->Tivo
Dual tuners - I can record 2 HD (or standard-def) programs at once, while watching older recordings
The UI is not as bad as people make it out to be
It supports OnDemand video, including HD on demand
It's CHEAP. No purchase fee, only $3 a month more than a regular HD cable box.
I use a SA8000HD DVR digital cable box. It's an HD DVR with a 120gig drive. My cable company (Time Warner Cable NYC) upgraded me to the HD box for free (there's a $6.95 a month DVR rental charge, $4 more than the monthly charge for a regular digital set-top box.)
The SA8000HD isn't great, but it does HDTV. It isn't as smooth as a Tivo, and the software isn't fantastic. But it CAN record 2 channels in HD or SD at once, while I play back previously recorded content. It was FREE and in NYC you absolutely cannot watch cable without a set-top box (thanks to bitch cable pirates).
EQ & EQ2 are group based real-time combat.
There are tons of different strategies and tactics you need to know to succeed at EQ1. Fights have to start a certain way. Spells need to be cast in the right order. Melee players need to setup them selves up properly to avoid dying before hate is locked in on the tank. Healers need to make sure they take care of other support casters during critical lock-down time.
However, once you get the mob locked down, then its just a matter of repeatedly attacking, healing, and nuking, till the mob is dead.
EQ2 adds to this by having special "combo" attacks, where you and the other members of your party must execute sequences of attacks to do extra damage or enfeeble an enemy significantly, improving your game play. These combos are complicated and vary based on the make up of your party. You need to time and plan your actions well, so your whole party will be ready to execute the attack together.
Good and very true point, but the trouble is -- your view doesn't make all that much money for Sony nor Nintendo. MS is a different story, we know they have been losing money on each XBox sold from the start. That $250-$400 earyl adoptors drop on those newly released consoles must add a pretty nice jump to the consoles revenues.
You know, you're right! Bakula's Captain Archer is way too dry and takes himself way too seriously. Everyone was so excited when we heard it'd be Bakula in the staring role, mostly because we had loved him so much on Quantum Leap.
They really need to open him up, put some personality back into the character. We don't watch Bakula for his great acting, we watch him for who he comes across as when he's being himself (or at least, being Sam on Quantum Leep.)
Enterprise certainly did stink to high heaven during season one and most of season two, but lately it's really taken off. If it can keep up its momentum and improve the "sci-fi" aspect of the story lines, it could really become one of the best ST spin-offs yet! (Excluding ST:TNG, you can never hope to beat it)
What makes the new episodes of Enterprise so great are the continuing, evolving story line. Granted, its no Babylon5, each episode begins where the previous one left off, and they have actually been doing some character development! ST extras that tend to die after 5 minutes of screen time have been replaced with guest characters that last two or three episodes before biting it. Antagonists have risen to the ran of Guest Star, much like Gul Dukat and Gherak did on DS9!
Enterprise has really had a huge turn around from its early crap episodes. Give a try, watch a few episodes. You might actually enjoy it.
Re:The reason MS won the word processor war...
on
The War Of The Word
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· Score: 1
Sorry, but I have never seen a copy of Windows that came with even a partial copy of Office. They've always been seperate products.
I don't think WordPad counts at all; it can barely read Word files, and is barely barely more sophisticated than the original WRITE RTF-based word-processor from Windows V1.0.
Not to be a complete buzzkill, but at $20/hr (hopefully w/ benefits), grab that opportunity because it's a good one....... Yes, you could live in NYC on that wage (would probably need a roomate or to live in one of the lower cost areas...)
Try 3-4 room-mates to live in NYC on that salary, and then you'll only be relaxing on $3 watered-down piss bear during happy hour (a typical drink in NYC costs about $7, typical mug of bear $6)
You're comparing a 9800XT to a GF2ti and "You're not that impressed"
What is that supposed to mean? Have you used these cards to do anything other than run 1994 DOOM?
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OUR generation acts different on camera. Imagine people born and raised in a world where they are always on TV. Their mentality, their public demeanor, will probably be very different from ours. Where as 30 years ago people would be embarassed to be put in front of a TV camera, we now have children making videos from home and posting them on YouTube, trying desperately to get as many hits as possible. I could imagine a world where individuals would try to program/usurp public survelilance cams to send a feed of their whereabouts over to their web page, and then send constant "what I was thinking" notes via their cell.
Boy does someone have NO CLUE about what he's talking about.
It also goes to show that OSX has a piece of junk file system.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you down to flame bait.
The whole point of public education is that every child sould be afforded the same oppurtunities. If you have poor parents that can't afford to buy you these things, what then? Likewise, if your parents are stupid and blow their money on the wrong things, what then?
I hope some top tier university picks him up and gives him a spot teaching the same sort of material in a high-profile kind of way. He certainly deserves a ton of credit for what he wants to do and the way he planned to do it.
See, this is the same sort of ridiculous Linux zealot garbage that I go out of my way to dispute. OpenOffice runs slower on LINUX that Office runs on WINDOWS. Microsoft can do nothing to slow down OpenOffice on Linux.
You can't do this with XML, and this is why XML sucks (for computers) to "work" with. It might be a good way to move data around, but saving document data in XML and trying to use it at runtime is always going to be a bad idea. With XML, you need to load this giant ASCII file and convert it into a binary representation before you can do anything with it. Unless you write your own VERY smart XML parser, most current tools will want all the data in memory and want to store all of the result in memory. POW, you've doubled your apps memory requirements at load time, and you're going to have to hold on to a copy of the converted data at run time (or drop it to disk as a tmp file).
Someone else mentioned that Office runs great on OSX - we know that OSX is essentially your typical UNIX variant with a fancy GUI system. It's not their OS, but MS still beats OO.o because they code better.
That's a load of bull. There's nothing that MS can do to "magically" make their apps run faster on the same hardware that other developers can't, and there isn't much that Windows does that is significantly different from the way Linux/X do things.
Tricks that could make Excel perform better might be
What makes this notion especially naive is denying that Linux/X developers know their environment just as well as the coders at Microsoft. If anything, the longevity of Unix style OSes and X should make it far easier to write high-performance code, because everyone should be aware by now what the OS related pitfalls are. Regardless of the silly incompatibilities between the various flavors of UNIX, there really isn't much to differentiate them other than slight performance differences caused by how each OS pages memory or handles threads. Any one should be able to get similar performance on any UNIX, or even Windows, if they design their app's data structures well and are using compilers can do similar code optimizations.
The reason OpenOffice runs like a pig can ONLY be attributed to poor coding by its developers, period. Microsoft has had TWENTY years to hone Office into one of the most accomplished software packages ever. Thinking that they do this by using "evil tricks" is just ridiculous. It would be much easier to believe that the OO.o programmers are still new to what they are doing and have very poor quality control.
http://armentage.blogspot.com/
I work in a similar environment. Gigantic libraries written in C++ that take hours to build and have all sorts of peculurarities on the various implementations of C++ out there. When you have many developers all using the same code base who REFUSE to use the same compilers, you begin to see where C++ can be a pain. And BTW, there is MONO on UNIX as a free cross platform implementation of .NET. I don't think there is anything about the .NET Common Language Interface that ties you to Windows other than that the only viable implementation is on Win32 only ATM.
But you miss my point - How do you use your C++ libraries in Perl without sitting down and writing tons of wrapper code? How do you use it in Java without writing JNI? C++/CLI is the answer. If you are using Perl.NET, Java.NET, C++.NET, you write the class once and its available to EVERY .NET compatible language, both in terms of interface and compiled code base. Compile it once (for a platform, meaning the OS & CPU) and you're good to go. No wrappers, no interop, no nothing.
And given that things are headed more and more towards Linux/X86 and Win32/X86 as the only game, this will be a huge, huge thing.
This is precisely why I love MSFT's .NET idea. Define a standard way for languages to expose library functionality and a common call convention - then call that functionality indepentent of what language your code is written in, or what code the library is written in.
The .NET runtime-library is comparable to Java's, but also has the advantage of being able to seamlessly talk to all existing COM libraries.
C/C++ on the other hand are an utter joke. On Linux/Unix, at my firm we have 9-12 variations of G++, Intel C++, HP/UX C++ all trying to co-exist together, none of which are binary compatible. ALl code has to be compiled by the compiler you're using for your project, because nothing is binary compatible (C++ never defined an official name mangingling standard). .NET, this all goes away, and it was designed to do this from the start. JAVA was a good starting point, but it was never meant to be a universal inter-language platform. It was meant to be THE language, and thus isn't ultimate answer (sadly, Sun sued Microsoft when they tried to expose COM to Java, rather than trying to make the Interop layer a Sun/Java standard that they could own).
2) Self-validation by projecting themselves into the apps (if you think Firefox is good, you think I'm good too.)
Which computer illiterates? The ones that will be dead in 10-15 years?
Its software not as nice as a Tivo but it has plenty of advantages:
The SA8000HD isn't great, but it does HDTV. It isn't as smooth as a Tivo, and the software isn't fantastic. But it CAN record 2 channels in HD or SD at once, while I play back previously recorded content. It was FREE and in NYC you absolutely cannot watch cable without a set-top box (thanks to bitch cable pirates).
EQ & EQ2 are group based real-time combat. There are tons of different strategies and tactics you need to know to succeed at EQ1. Fights have to start a certain way. Spells need to be cast in the right order. Melee players need to setup them selves up properly to avoid dying before hate is locked in on the tank. Healers need to make sure they take care of other support casters during critical lock-down time. However, once you get the mob locked down, then its just a matter of repeatedly attacking, healing, and nuking, till the mob is dead. EQ2 adds to this by having special "combo" attacks, where you and the other members of your party must execute sequences of attacks to do extra damage or enfeeble an enemy significantly, improving your game play. These combos are complicated and vary based on the make up of your party. You need to time and plan your actions well, so your whole party will be ready to execute the attack together.
I said revenue, not profit. Revenue looks good - it means you are doing business. People are interested in your products and are buying them.
Good and very true point, but the trouble is -- your view doesn't make all that much money for Sony nor Nintendo. MS is a different story, we know they have been losing money on each XBox sold from the start. That $250-$400 earyl adoptors drop on those newly released consoles must add a pretty nice jump to the consoles revenues.
They really need to open him up, put some personality back into the character. We don't watch Bakula for his great acting, we watch him for who he comes across as when he's being himself (or at least, being Sam on Quantum Leep.)
Enterprise certainly did stink to high heaven during season one and most of season two, but lately it's really taken off. If it can keep up its momentum and improve the "sci-fi" aspect of the story lines, it could really become one of the best ST spin-offs yet! (Excluding ST:TNG, you can never hope to beat it) What makes the new episodes of Enterprise so great are the continuing, evolving story line. Granted, its no Babylon5, each episode begins where the previous one left off, and they have actually been doing some character development! ST extras that tend to die after 5 minutes of screen time have been replaced with guest characters that last two or three episodes before biting it. Antagonists have risen to the ran of Guest Star, much like Gul Dukat and Gherak did on DS9! Enterprise has really had a huge turn around from its early crap episodes. Give a try, watch a few episodes. You might actually enjoy it.
Sorry, but I have never seen a copy of Windows that came with even a partial copy of Office. They've always been seperate products. I don't think WordPad counts at all; it can barely read Word files, and is barely barely more sophisticated than the original WRITE RTF-based word-processor from Windows V1.0.
Those dirt bags deserve to go out of business and get sued by their ex-employees. "Audience insight Management (AiM)" No more evidence needed.
You're comparing a 9800XT to a GF2ti and "You're not that impressed" What is that supposed to mean? Have you used these cards to do anything other than run 1994 DOOM?