Basic and Pascal are easy to learn in because that's what they were designed for. Yes, they are quite limited, but they're what I learned and now I'm smrkt enough to... post... on... Slashdot............... Erm. Hrm.
Hey, there's this language out there DESIGNED to be easy for people to learn. Erm.... Think it was Squeak. Try finding out something about that....
And I'd say Java was easier to learn than Basic or Pascal. Just download Eclipse, unzip it, and start..... erm. Welllll..... No. Try Squeak - I didn't learn it, and I'm not sure it's what you want, but I remember there being a fat Ask Slashdot around here somewhere or possibly here somewhere or even possibly going to learn the IBM way, in java while gaming
Whatever. Go check out the toplist on TopCoder. A shot at $40k / year in contests is an amazing salary in India, Eastern Bloc countries, or China. Here it won't buy you a house in the more populous states. You're wrong.
Well, it's possible you're right, but you'd need to get ratios as to who was competing from where in this contest, and how often they had worked in this type of contest before. For reference on this kind of info, go check out the toplists on TopCoder.
1. either starting their own small businesses and don't have time for this kind of thing,
2. making enough money that they don't want to take a huge time risk for a possible 10k,
3. self-effacing enough that they don't care,
4. or already working for Google
Four groups there. Still too few, you're right. But the argument is really that there's more incentive to do other things than program computers here, not to mention the social pressure away from spending a lot of time inside working on something arcane other people simply don't understand, because it's not QUITE as relatively profitable in a social sense.
You're confusing 'driven' and 'smart.' 'Driven' means that coding can make you 10x what your neighbors do and you can live like a king, so you work your tail off to get up in the world through knowing as much as possible about coding.
'Driven' people in the States are going to business school and meeting all the bigwigs' kids instead because you won't be able to pay off your student loans in the American computer industry for fifteen years instead of the five it takes you working in accounting / consulting...
The unbelievably, incredibly, killer-code 'Smart' people in the States are either starting their own small businesses and don't have time for this kind of thing, making enough money that they don't want to take a huge time risk for a possible 10k, self-effacing enough that they don't care, or already working for Google, and therefore ineligible for participation.
Erm. There were no studies cited by this article, making it even more laughable. Some guy in Wales says Office people have a hard time understanding ITSpeak. I say I have a hard time understanding a welsh accent in the FIRST place, so it's completely possible that if someone was discussing Network setup in Welsh I wouldn't even have anything to compare it to, seeing as NetworkSpeak is so foreign to even certain types of IT professionals.
But regardless, it has no 'base' layer of knowledge, no gradation, and no real study... Now a study, I'd be quite interested in that kind of study.
Yes. I can use IE 5.0, which I consider an old version because it comes installed by default in Win 2000. That's a little old in this industry, seeing as I build myself a computer with win2k on it five years ago and it had a PII 400 and that was still decently fast.
Of course that will never happen and I will continue to use paper ballots like every other sane American should.
Ah, bringing around the wonder of paper ballots counted on Diebold machines. Isn't Democracy wonderful? I, personally, look forward to the 'one man, one vote' days when instead of the very confusing two candidates we currently have to actually think about we'll have just one- making everything just that little bit easier to digest intellectually for the common couch potato.
Noone ever says M$ is stupid around here. The general view is that they are extremely crafty and cunning. They just write frustrating code to work with sometimes, and Slashdot can grow into one giant brain fart of rage.
I count upon them to botch it, unfortunately. If you look at the articles currently coming up about the company itself, it reminds me more of a place where good insurance or accounting practices are followed than a place where everyone does an incredible job and loves doing it. It seems management will be the absolute best place to work, if not the only decent one, and that's not very good for code quality; especially when you have such a high-test set of people working for you. It is monstrously hard to produce good code in a large corporation, and it seems to get harder over time no matter what you do.
Sure it is something. But it is not used well in desktop applications (applications can all write to your home directory with your session startup scripts and so, wreck your data or whatever else they please). One could run them as dummy users that can't write to your home directory, but that'd make for an extremely confusing and inconvenient application. One could with some care and a whole lot of dummy users and setuid scripts copying things about in intelligent ways create the same kind of security model that Microsoft are doing for IE7. Problem is that it isn't a very good design and more importantly; no one appears to be doing it.
Even if possible it does not help if no one does it, and even if it gets done it will not be as nice as Microsofts framework that utilizes the much better security model provided by NT. Now, as I said, if it works out for Microsoft there will no doubt be some movement to get something going on Linux as well, but credit where credit is due. Microsoft is doing something interesting here.
Implementation is something I'm worried about, but on the whole you're probably both right and working in an area beyond my level of expertise with the newer MSFT software. That's not to say I believe / like your opinion wholly - I don't WANT the revolution in security to come from someone involved in encrypting my computer's data.... But I can definitely see your point.
I'm not downloading IE7 unless people start writing stuff that only works on IE7. I hope THAT doesn't happen quite desperately, but I am also probably doomed to grumbling about it. M$'s grand new plans of interaction capabilities developed right out of the box are going to be really really useful for certain kinds of applications and I wish it were as easy to do with Apache, MySQL, PHP and Javascript.... *sigh*
Right, I don't really buy this study either. I were just stating that if one says that Firefox is worse now one can't argue that people should switch. Also, sure, if people switch over in masses the development effort will go faster, but this was not really about what was best for Firefox, but what is best for the user now.
Best for the user right now is probably Opera - noone is willing to pay for a browser so there aren't really that many people willing to mess around with writing viruses and crap for it. As to whether Firefox or IE is better, well... Hard to say. I'd have to sift through exactly what the holes found in Firefox were, but last time I read up in any detail on the security holes found in an Open Source project, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were all holes in tertiary stuff... Linux server software (and this is not necessarily true of Firefox, I'm really going way out on a limb here, and it will take backup from someone who keeps completely on top of this to really help me out... hint hint...) has bugs and problems and security patches, yes, but they're for a minor exploit that crashes or allows someone in through highly obscure software. Microsoft, since it's all one big piece, ends up handing you the keys to the castle. Therefore, one Microsoft bug can be seen as an unequivocal disaster and twenty Linux bugs can be seen as a biteme.
This is one that shows up over and over, that IE's basic design is flawed. Which is, as far as I can tell, unfounded. All the external interfaces and architecture seems clean and nice enough, and since I (and I would guess; you) have no way to look at the source I can't say that we have any reason to believe that the IE source is in a bad state.
This is where I do have proof. All those security patches for IE? Yeah, design flaw. It's not an arms race to fight off the hackers at the gate because you wrote effective, stable software. It's an arms race to fight off the hackers at the gate because you wanted to lock Netscape and friends out of the browser industry by making ActiveX mildly attractive and highly proprietary / dangerous to work in due to its features which were promised but under-tested. Or badly designed. Take your pick.
This is not a process-level permission thing (which would wreck the way the application works, you need to be able to save files, change settings and so on for it to be a sane desktop application). Rather Microsoft is finally getting around leveraging and extending the rather advanced and fine-grained NT security model for something. The basic idea is that most of the application runs with very restricted permissions and can launch subcomponents like a download or settings panel that have a higher level of permission. This is set on a very fine-grained level. There is no need to have separate components, nor is it all-or-nothing, a component can have access to specific system calls according with specific parameters, they may change only some given parts of the registry and so on.
You mean like Unix? What an innovation!
This I call bullshit,
Microsoft has been behind in security design for over a decade. I was working in Unix, which is capable of doing the things you're calling revolutionary, when I was in junior high a full uhm.... Longer than I want to think about... ago. Everything is a file and files have - while not a perfect permissions system - at least something which is designed for multi-user and therefore easily modifiable to multi-permission. Call BS all you want, but M$ has a lot of spaghetti code in your computer....
I'm trying not to be biased here, but I obviously am very much so.
If this is so it just leads to the question: Why should people use Firefox now then? Lets wait until 2010 when it will actually be better and stick to IE which is better now.
Except then Firefox will not get developed to as high a level as IE has and will never reach that point. Note that this observer has the same problem as most observers who say, "It's better!" And that problem is that the numbers aren't exactly fairly proportioned. An IE hack that gives someone access to all your 'net data then wipes your entire hard drive is counted as one bug, as is a firefox flaw that gives someone access to your last ten sites viewed. That's a biased and unfounded example, but the reality stands regardless - THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO DO A SECURITY STUDY.
I don't really believe in this, but arguing like that is arguing against Firefox.
It is arguing against the further development of Firefox, too. No users, no development.
My personal opinion on these things is: People care way too much about browser religion. Let people use IE, not that much wrong with it.
There's piles of things wrong with IE, they're just not user-visible all the time and that is a main portion of the problem's gestalt.
Both IE and Firefox are huge complex applications processing huge amounts of diverse untrusted data. Sure it'd be great if they were secure, but it is just not happening that way yet.
You can lock Firefox down if you want. Won't be able to see EVERYTHING, but it will definitely be secure. Not quite anywhere near as true with IE.
There might be some hope on the horizon with low-rights IE7. It might be that it really does manage to remove the impact of the bugs, which is really the best case scenario as things stand.
You can do this in linux. Natively. Just make yourself a different user with no rights to do certain things. Try that in Windows and see if it works for you. As to the, "Microsoft will solve everything in the end" mentality, well, I can't really argue with that.
If so we will no doubt see similar approaches integrated in Linux desktops and see Firefox refactored to use the same approach.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Microsoft is behind and has been so for a very long time. The stuff you want is part of the problem with their occasional 'buy instead of implement' business model.
Nintendo's never cared about Third Party developers anyways. Heard of Square? Yeah, snubbed on the 64 and they left. 64 wasn't that successful, (and I think this is a pretty close to cause-and-effect relationship) and neither was the cube after it; I think they messed up in losing Square, but then they're definitely still in business... Point is, even when their biggest 3rd party developer said, "Go CD or we will leave" they stuck to their guns and did what they wanted.
When the second controller combinines with the first there will be enough buttons to make a fighting style game like tekken so hard and so responsive at the same time there will be absolutely no chance they will be outclassed. This is the future and M$ / Sony have missed out and this console will be the one to own. I have not even seriously considered buying a single console since the N64 because my computer can do everything the other consoles can. This console is now different, and I am amazed at how cool it is.
Location: A beach in Northern California, slightly south of San Fran.
Power Generation: This Honda Generator for reliability and gas efficiency, 20hrs of code at a time. (note: after viewing the power consumption of this solution, you may require a second generation unit or higher model number)
Computers: 2 Mac Mini's - one for compile runing Gentoo, the other dual boot Red Hat / Os X... Cluttering up your beach space is simply unacceptable.
Second Computer set: some low power-drain and Form Factored PIV for testing that 'old and busted' windows crud people occasionally run
Display: 2x The DLA-QX1g - Why do monitors (old and busted) when you can have the new hotness of a projection screen with 1365x1024 resolution. It's a no brainer. Remember to get a widescreen lens for the projector, and an active screen to go with as well - these things are going to need to produce a LOT of lumens to compete with the sun.
A 4 port KVM switch
Input: Microsoft Natural keyboard w/ mouse, wireless versions. Gonna have to be both, although you might want a trackball that works in midair.... MS is still pretty much the best at putting together an awesome and non-stress creating keyboard / mouse combo. Alternatively, you could combine keyboard and chair I guess. That would mean, with the screen and the KVS switching hotkeys, etc, you wouldn't NEED a desk, although you might want a second screen and projector for a computer to be used as a notepad hooked up to one of the keyboard inputs on the KVM but not the video. Note: Sand might get into your chair, I'd be down with a yoga mat or chaise lounge, and the wireless keyboard.
Simply aping the rest of the industry has always worked for them before. Why change now?
Because the other option is:
a) Free
b) Easily modifiable if you figure out something else you want it to do
c) More Stable
d) Running on an OS that's Free'er than yours
e) Kicking your tail
f) Preferred by Developers
g) All of the above
It might be mildly intelligent to actually add features that people really want badly to overcome the rest of the problems there....
Of course there isn't. People have been trying for years and all the better they've gotten is to use 'multiline interfaces' and 'pre-loaded text'... They're nothing special, and don't have anywhere NEAR the number of highly useful and functional control commands vi does.
If the next three people under you don't write code but they do deals, what do you get?
Anyone know the pecking order at Microsoft? It seems to me that the next three down from Billy or Balmer might be involved in Advertising and FUD....
The first company meeting where I talked about software as a service was in 1998. The relationship with our customers has changed from software in a box to something else.
Totally tempted to say something along the lines of, "Frustration in a box?" I wouldn't ever though. What it really seems like is that the move to services is driven by a need to sell more stuff rather than actual customer demand... Maybe not true on the Business end, but home users definitely seem to want something that just works right out of the box... Services might accomplish this, but one might question their necessity.... And if you sell 10 million boxes of software that come with unnecessary services people end up paying for in some way or another, well, doesn't that imply you're able to manipulate the market somehow?
And the reason it's "Total World Domination" (evil) on one hand and the exact opposite on the other is based on this, and this alone:
Ownership
Noone can really own Linux. If Linux totally dominates the world, it is because it is better than the previous version of whatever. Not because you were there almost first and had better connections.
Yeah, uhm. Q3 is so old that anyone 'hacking' is just sad. 50% of the time you can beat them anyways. I suggest you get online before you call yourself 'pretty damned good' - I can kill lots and lots of bots, but when it comes down to it I'm not really that great. Despite more hours of playtime than anyone I know online or off, I'm pretty much average or slightly below until I get a good run at Rocket Arena 3, my game of choice. It's kinda sad really.
Slashdot Mirror
Basic and Pascal are easy to learn in because that's what they were designed for. Yes, they are quite limited, but they're what I learned and now I'm smrkt enough to... post... on... Slashdot............... Erm. Hrm.
Hey, there's this language out there DESIGNED to be easy for people to learn. Erm.... Think it was Squeak. Try finding out something about that....
And I'd say Java was easier to learn than Basic or Pascal. Just download Eclipse, unzip it, and start..... erm. Welllll..... No. Try Squeak - I didn't learn it, and I'm not sure it's what you want, but I remember there being a fat Ask Slashdot around here somewhere or possibly here somewhere or even possibly going to learn the IBM way, in java while gaming
Whatever. Go check out the toplist on TopCoder. A shot at $40k / year in contests is an amazing salary in India, Eastern Bloc countries, or China. Here it won't buy you a house in the more populous states. You're wrong.
Well, it's possible you're right, but you'd need to get ratios as to who was competing from where in this contest, and how often they had worked in this type of contest before. For reference on this kind of info, go check out the toplists on TopCoder.
1. either starting their own small businesses and don't have time for this kind of thing,
2. making enough money that they don't want to take a huge time risk for a possible 10k,
3. self-effacing enough that they don't care,
4. or already working for Google
Four groups there. Still too few, you're right. But the argument is really that there's more incentive to do other things than program computers here, not to mention the social pressure away from spending a lot of time inside working on something arcane other people simply don't understand, because it's not QUITE as relatively profitable in a social sense.
You're confusing 'driven' and 'smart.' 'Driven' means that coding can make you 10x what your neighbors do and you can live like a king, so you work your tail off to get up in the world through knowing as much as possible about coding.
'Driven' people in the States are going to business school and meeting all the bigwigs' kids instead because you won't be able to pay off your student loans in the American computer industry for fifteen years instead of the five it takes you working in accounting / consulting...
The unbelievably, incredibly, killer-code 'Smart' people in the States are either starting their own small businesses and don't have time for this kind of thing, making enough money that they don't want to take a huge time risk for a possible 10k, self-effacing enough that they don't care, or already working for Google, and therefore ineligible for participation.
Erm. There were no studies cited by this article, making it even more laughable. Some guy in Wales says Office people have a hard time understanding ITSpeak. I say I have a hard time understanding a welsh accent in the FIRST place, so it's completely possible that if someone was discussing Network setup in Welsh I wouldn't even have anything to compare it to, seeing as NetworkSpeak is so foreign to even certain types of IT professionals.
But regardless, it has no 'base' layer of knowledge, no gradation, and no real study... Now a study, I'd be quite interested in that kind of study.
Yes. I can use IE 5.0, which I consider an old version because it comes installed by default in Win 2000. That's a little old in this industry, seeing as I build myself a computer with win2k on it five years ago and it had a PII 400 and that was still decently fast.
Of course that will never happen and I will continue to use paper ballots like every other sane American should.
Ah, bringing around the wonder of paper ballots counted on Diebold machines. Isn't Democracy wonderful? I, personally, look forward to the 'one man, one vote' days when instead of the very confusing two candidates we currently have to actually think about we'll have just one- making everything just that little bit easier to digest intellectually for the common couch potato.
Noone ever says M$ is stupid around here. The general view is that they are extremely crafty and cunning. They just write frustrating code to work with sometimes, and Slashdot can grow into one giant brain fart of rage.
I count upon them to botch it, unfortunately. If you look at the articles currently coming up about the company itself, it reminds me more of a place where good insurance or accounting practices are followed than a place where everyone does an incredible job and loves doing it. It seems management will be the absolute best place to work, if not the only decent one, and that's not very good for code quality; especially when you have such a high-test set of people working for you. It is monstrously hard to produce good code in a large corporation, and it seems to get harder over time no matter what you do.
Sure it is something. But it is not used well in desktop applications (applications can all write to your home directory with your session startup scripts and so, wreck your data or whatever else they please). One could run them as dummy users that can't write to your home directory, but that'd make for an extremely confusing and inconvenient application. One could with some care and a whole lot of dummy users and setuid scripts copying things about in intelligent ways create the same kind of security model that Microsoft are doing for IE7. Problem is that it isn't a very good design and more importantly; no one appears to be doing it.
Even if possible it does not help if no one does it, and even if it gets done it will not be as nice as Microsofts framework that utilizes the much better security model provided by NT. Now, as I said, if it works out for Microsoft there will no doubt be some movement to get something going on Linux as well, but credit where credit is due. Microsoft is doing something interesting here.
Implementation is something I'm worried about, but on the whole you're probably both right and working in an area beyond my level of expertise with the newer MSFT software. That's not to say I believe / like your opinion wholly - I don't WANT the revolution in security to come from someone involved in encrypting my computer's data.... But I can definitely see your point.
I'm not downloading IE7 unless people start writing stuff that only works on IE7. I hope THAT doesn't happen quite desperately, but I am also probably doomed to grumbling about it. M$'s grand new plans of interaction capabilities developed right out of the box are going to be really really useful for certain kinds of applications and I wish it were as easy to do with Apache, MySQL, PHP and Javascript.... *sigh*
Right, I don't really buy this study either. I were just stating that if one says that Firefox is worse now one can't argue that people should switch. Also, sure, if people switch over in masses the development effort will go faster, but this was not really about what was best for Firefox, but what is best for the user now.
Best for the user right now is probably Opera - noone is willing to pay for a browser so there aren't really that many people willing to mess around with writing viruses and crap for it. As to whether Firefox or IE is better, well... Hard to say. I'd have to sift through exactly what the holes found in Firefox were, but last time I read up in any detail on the security holes found in an Open Source project, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were all holes in tertiary stuff... Linux server software (and this is not necessarily true of Firefox, I'm really going way out on a limb here, and it will take backup from someone who keeps completely on top of this to really help me out... hint hint...) has bugs and problems and security patches, yes, but they're for a minor exploit that crashes or allows someone in through highly obscure software. Microsoft, since it's all one big piece, ends up handing you the keys to the castle. Therefore, one Microsoft bug can be seen as an unequivocal disaster and twenty Linux bugs can be seen as a biteme.
This is one that shows up over and over, that IE's basic design is flawed. Which is, as far as I can tell, unfounded. All the external interfaces and architecture seems clean and nice enough, and since I (and I would guess; you) have no way to look at the source I can't say that we have any reason to believe that the IE source is in a bad state.
This is where I do have proof. All those security patches for IE? Yeah, design flaw. It's not an arms race to fight off the hackers at the gate because you wrote effective, stable software. It's an arms race to fight off the hackers at the gate because you wanted to lock Netscape and friends out of the browser industry by making ActiveX mildly attractive and highly proprietary / dangerous to work in due to its features which were promised but under-tested. Or badly designed. Take your pick.
This is not a process-level permission thing (which would wreck the way the application works, you need to be able to save files, change settings and so on for it to be a sane desktop application). Rather Microsoft is finally getting around leveraging and extending the rather advanced and fine-grained NT security model for something. The basic idea is that most of the application runs with very restricted permissions and can launch subcomponents like a download or settings panel that have a higher level of permission. This is set on a very fine-grained level. There is no need to have separate components, nor is it all-or-nothing, a component can have access to specific system calls according with specific parameters, they may change only some given parts of the registry and so on.
You mean like Unix? What an innovation!
This I call bullshit,
Microsoft has been behind in security design for over a decade. I was working in Unix, which is capable of doing the things you're calling revolutionary, when I was in junior high a full uhm.... Longer than I want to think about... ago. Everything is a file and files have - while not a perfect permissions system - at least something which is designed for multi-user and therefore easily modifiable to multi-permission. Call BS all you want, but M$ has a lot of spaghetti code in your computer....
I'm trying not to be biased here, but I obviously am very much so.
Let's go through your objections point by point
If this is so it just leads to the question: Why should people use Firefox now then? Lets wait until 2010 when it will actually be better and stick to IE which is better now.
Except then Firefox will not get developed to as high a level as IE has and will never reach that point. Note that this observer has the same problem as most observers who say, "It's better!" And that problem is that the numbers aren't exactly fairly proportioned. An IE hack that gives someone access to all your 'net data then wipes your entire hard drive is counted as one bug, as is a firefox flaw that gives someone access to your last ten sites viewed. That's a biased and unfounded example, but the reality stands regardless - THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO DO A SECURITY STUDY.
I don't really believe in this, but arguing like that is arguing against Firefox.
It is arguing against the further development of Firefox, too. No users, no development.
My personal opinion on these things is: People care way too much about browser religion. Let people use IE, not that much wrong with it.
There's piles of things wrong with IE, they're just not user-visible all the time and that is a main portion of the problem's gestalt.
Both IE and Firefox are huge complex applications processing huge amounts of diverse untrusted data. Sure it'd be great if they were secure, but it is just not happening that way yet.
You can lock Firefox down if you want. Won't be able to see EVERYTHING, but it will definitely be secure. Not quite anywhere near as true with IE.
There might be some hope on the horizon with low-rights IE7. It might be that it really does manage to remove the impact of the bugs, which is really the best case scenario as things stand.
You can do this in linux. Natively. Just make yourself a different user with no rights to do certain things. Try that in Windows and see if it works for you. As to the, "Microsoft will solve everything in the end" mentality, well, I can't really argue with that.
If so we will no doubt see similar approaches integrated in Linux desktops and see Firefox refactored to use the same approach.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Microsoft is behind and has been so for a very long time. The stuff you want is part of the problem with their occasional 'buy instead of implement' business model.
Nintendo's never cared about Third Party developers anyways. Heard of Square? Yeah, snubbed on the 64 and they left. 64 wasn't that successful, (and I think this is a pretty close to cause-and-effect relationship) and neither was the cube after it; I think they messed up in losing Square, but then they're definitely still in business... Point is, even when their biggest 3rd party developer said, "Go CD or we will leave" they stuck to their guns and did what they wanted.
When the second controller combinines with the first there will be enough buttons to make a fighting style game like tekken so hard and so responsive at the same time there will be absolutely no chance they will be outclassed. This is the future and M$ / Sony have missed out and this console will be the one to own. I have not even seriously considered buying a single console since the N64 because my computer can do everything the other consoles can. This console is now different, and I am amazed at how cool it is.
Your post was (choose one)
[x] Least good serious post
[x] Worst joke ever
Lowest common denominator, I think.
It relies a whole lot on context to be funny in the first place, if it's funny at all. :P
Austrian girls are occasionally incredibly smoking hot, FYI. Two or three of the most beautiful women I've ever met were Austrian.
PythonFanboy "Ni! Ni! Ni!"
MaleBolgeFanBoy "Hey, would someone help me write a parser to get this hello world thing going?"
JavaScriptFanBoy "Lookit the preeetty coooloors"
FlashFanBoy "My colors are prittier!"
XMLFanBoy "Hey, management approved my project. Start working on better buzzwords, plebians."
Location: A beach in Northern California, slightly south of San Fran.
Power Generation: This Honda Generator for reliability and gas efficiency, 20hrs of code at a time. (note: after viewing the power consumption of this solution, you may require a second generation unit or higher model number)
Computers: 2 Mac Mini's - one for compile runing Gentoo, the other dual boot Red Hat / Os X... Cluttering up your beach space is simply unacceptable.
Second Computer set: some low power-drain and Form Factored PIV for testing that 'old and busted' windows crud people occasionally run
Display: 2x The DLA-QX1g - Why do monitors (old and busted) when you can have the new hotness of a projection screen with 1365x1024 resolution. It's a no brainer. Remember to get a widescreen lens for the projector, and an active screen to go with as well - these things are going to need to produce a LOT of lumens to compete with the sun.
A 4 port KVM switch
Input: Microsoft Natural keyboard w/ mouse, wireless versions. Gonna have to be both, although you might want a trackball that works in midair.... MS is still pretty much the best at putting together an awesome and non-stress creating keyboard / mouse combo. Alternatively, you could combine keyboard and chair I guess. That would mean, with the screen and the KVS switching hotkeys, etc, you wouldn't NEED a desk, although you might want a second screen and projector for a computer to be used as a notepad hooked up to one of the keyboard inputs on the KVM but not the video. Note: Sand might get into your chair, I'd be down with a yoga mat or chaise lounge, and the wireless keyboard.
Simply aping the rest of the industry has always worked for them before. Why change now? Because the other option is:
a) Free
b) Easily modifiable if you figure out something else you want it to do
c) More Stable
d) Running on an OS that's Free'er than yours
e) Kicking your tail
f) Preferred by Developers
g) All of the above
It might be mildly intelligent to actually add features that people really want badly to overcome the rest of the problems there....
Of course there isn't. People have been trying for years and all the better they've gotten is to use 'multiline interfaces' and 'pre-loaded text'... They're nothing special, and don't have anywhere NEAR the number of highly useful and functional control commands vi does.
If the next three people under you don't write code but they do deals, what do you get?
Anyone know the pecking order at Microsoft? It seems to me that the next three down from Billy or Balmer might be involved in Advertising and FUD....
The first company meeting where I talked about software as a service was in 1998. The relationship with our customers has changed from software in a box to something else.
Totally tempted to say something along the lines of, "Frustration in a box?" I wouldn't ever though. What it really seems like is that the move to services is driven by a need to sell more stuff rather than actual customer demand... Maybe not true on the Business end, but home users definitely seem to want something that just works right out of the box... Services might accomplish this, but one might question their necessity.... And if you sell 10 million boxes of software that come with unnecessary services people end up paying for in some way or another, well, doesn't that imply you're able to manipulate the market somehow?
Shennanigans, btw.
And the reason it's "Total World Domination" (evil) on one hand and the exact opposite on the other is based on this, and this alone:
Ownership
Noone can really own Linux. If Linux totally dominates the world, it is because it is better than the previous version of whatever. Not because you were there almost first and had better connections.
Yeah, uhm. Q3 is so old that anyone 'hacking' is just sad. 50% of the time you can beat them anyways. I suggest you get online before you call yourself 'pretty damned good' - I can kill lots and lots of bots, but when it comes down to it I'm not really that great. Despite more hours of playtime than anyone I know online or off, I'm pretty much average or slightly below until I get a good run at Rocket Arena 3, my game of choice. It's kinda sad really.