it's primarily a software solution which looks for the monitor feature, and fucks up the imagery
The imagery is "f*cked up" to begin with, it's a hardware solution that unfucks up the imagery ONLY if the correct software is found (i.e. Longhorn). The data is stored encrypted, it will look like garbage if you try play it in a 'non-approved' system.
So "Average John" asks his/her technically literate buddy or family member how to solve the problem, and that person installs VLC - just like in the f*cking Windows world: My dad bought a Windows XP laptop the other day and guess what, it couldn't play DVDs 'out-the-box' at all (yes, it's true, check the XP help files, you need 3rd party software installed first). What does he do? He immediately phones me, and I help him out by installing the necessary software.
It is? I downloaded VLC (for free) and play videos full-screen just fine on my Mac. Nothing forces you to QT to play movies on OS X, and there are many decent alternatives. Who TF modded you insightful.
(While you're astroturfing, also keep in mind that Windows XP can't even play DVDs out the box without getting additional software like PowerDVD.)
Hmm, well, you are entitled to your own views, but I am the owner of a software business, and I can inform you "from the horse's mouth" that that "whiny leftist BS" happens to be an extremely accurate view of how the "people at the top" (myself and partners who also own software businesses) view (and manipulate) the people they hire. I'm not sitting here making myself out as some whiny victim of an oppressive corporate culture - on the contrary, I am one of those who employs people and uses them. I'm not a victim at all, I'm a beneficiary of the system, and part of the 'problem' I am talking about. Whether or not Scott Adams personally even thinks about such things is irrelevant - i.e. whether or not Dilbert is part of the cause or just a reflection of the system is irrelevant. I don't like the system, but I would rather be a beneficiary of it than a victim, and anyway, it's ultimately up to each individual to choose whether or not they want to open their eyes and see the world as it really is, or remain a child forever.
You've obviously mistaken me for someone who cared
Yes, clearly:)
I'm quite sure working in a call center sucks ass, but I've worked shitty jobs too, and I always did the best I could anyway, and I expect others to do the same (especially if I'm a customer who has to use the call center).
C# is not standard. Yes I know there is a standard specification, but it's not an "industry standard" in that it's not supported widely. E.g. can I simply compile my C# applications on OS X in Xcode, or on Linux, even if I have used cross-platform libraries like wxWidgets? As an ISV, choosing C# would mean a choice to deliberately limit the available platforms we could run our software on. This doesn't make sense at a time when libs like wxWidgets make it easy to develop decent cross-platform software - there is little advantage to deliberately unnecessarily limiting yourself like that. This makes C# useless for many applications regardless of whether or not it is a good language technically --- it just doesn't have critical mass.
But why doesn't it? Because C# just doesn't offer enough value over and above existing languages to attract significant numbers of new developers - it tries to solve problems that mostly had already been solved already elsewhere, and frankly there was really no point in introducing yet another new language at a time when there were already hundreds of decent languages in widespread use for all sorts of purposes. To make people want to use something new it has to be more than just "good". It has to offer something that really makes people want to switch, especially as there are retraining costs involved in switching to a different language.
Well, if you've ever worked in a call center, weasel words (lies) and management speak (bullshit) are survival tools.
Do you mean when dealing with clients or management? If you mean the former, I've got news for you, the majority of customers don't actually fall for weasel-speak. You may think they do because it often makes them "go away", but most of those customers are actually just interpreting your "strategy" as a refusal to address the problem, going away unhappy, and telling everyone they know that your clients product sucks.
Dilbert cartoons calcify the essence of the repressive workplace....
"Historically," Ralph Nader has pointed out, "you control people by lowering their expectations." This is true in the workplace and other spheres of life. The diminishing of what we could or should expect -- from ourselves, and each other, and institutions -- normalizes what we find unpleasant or worse. For corporate elites, that diminishment is a pleasure to behold. In Nader's words: "If our expectations are low, they have control."
I guess we are just working off different definitions of "innovative" here, because in my mind (and according to the dictionary), "innovative" specifically means to do new stuff that noone has done before. So prior art does negate innovation. By definition! "Innovative" doesn't mean "good", it doesn't "up to date with the latest and greatest", and so on. D3D can be all that and more, but it doesn't mean it's "innovative".
Do you think that someone dreams up an extension first?
Of course not, but do you think Microsoft dreams up things like shaders and multitexturing? No, guys like NVIDIA do, put features into their hardware, and then Microsoft just basically looks at what they've come up with adds wrappers for it in D3D. It's not a case of MS coming up with that stuff, and then NVIDIA saying "hey shaders, great idea MS" and adding it to their hardware. Microsoft sits on boards with NVIDIA and ATI guys to find out what's going on, and they just keep their APIs up to date with that. Making a generic wrapper that will work with everyone's hardware is not innovation in and of itself.
You know I honestly would have expected that "ha ha another person's language sounds soo funny lol!" attitude only from six-year olds, and it's kind of disturbing and sad to see it from adults on slashdot:/ That's f*cking childish, people! As someone who actually speaks some Zulu, it's actually a beautiful language, and the word "ubuntu" is indeed a very fitting name, and is also a very important concept in Nguni culture ("Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" - a person is a person because of / through all people" - doesn't translate very well to English).
Uh, I thought Compaq did that by reverse engineering the IBM PC specification, allowing hardware vendors to create compatible hardware and PC OEMs to build PCs from interchangeable parts? DOS was just built to work on the standardised IBM spec. Nice try though, -1 FUD.
I want to see something new for the desktop, not rehashed ideas that Apple or Microsoft or Unix implemented years earlier.
You're not looking very hard, check out things like Cairo, XGL, E17, etc. There has always been innovative stuff going on for Linux desktops, that have been 'ahead' of both MS and Apple since probably the late 90's, but for some reason these things have always remained basically 'fringe research' that the serious Linux hobbyists play around with and never really made it into the mainstream distros.
Spoken like someone who doesn't actually know the history of OpenGL or anything about it at all, and only got into 3D programming once D3D was established. I suggest you learn some history, if only to balance your views.
Direct3D is innovative. It revs regularly, and it keeps up with technology. It provides a unified API to deal directly with multiple types of underlying hardware and architecture. It incorporates new hardware functionality directly into that API. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
As a Direct3D programmer, I have to say there are two major problems with your argument: firstly, Microsoft didn't create Direct3D, they BOUGHT IT. OK, sure, they've changed it a lot, but mainly to just bring it in line (read "follow" or "catch up") with new hardware innovations by the graphics card vendors like NVIDIA (i.e. shaders, which MS did not invent), and to clean up some of the really braindead aspects of the original design of the API. Secondly, Direct3D never did anything new or original, it only cloned and in fact caught up to either (a) what could already be done in OpenGL or (b) what the hardware vendors invented. MS may sit on advisory boards that steer the development of these technologies now, but they aren't driving the process, that's for sure.
As an example to my point, find a PC game developer who uses Open/GL. Got one? Good. Now, if that developer is iD, go ahead and drop that and find another. Got another? Good. If that's Blizzard (for WoW), go ahead and drop that and find another. Got one? No?
Well, if your definition of "innovative" is "the product that most people use", then we're using very different definitions of "innovative". Most developers use Direct3D due to (extremely obvious) market forces, not because it was more "innovative". In fact (and I know many) most developers that already had experience with OpenGL were dragged kicking and screaming to Direct3D, because it really was an incredibly sh*t API compared to D3D, especially in the beginning.
Oh, please name one thing that can be done in Direct3D that cannot be done in OpenGL. Can't? That's because there isn't anything - with OpenGL's extension mechanism, you can do anything in GL that you can in D3D.
Yes, when Microsoft Word for Windows came out, it kicked the hiney of every DOS based word processor out there
Being "better than the competition at some particular time" and "being innovative" are two different things. "Innovative" means there are features that nobody else has ever done before. What features in the first version of Word for Windows were totally original/new? Also, being "first for the PC" and "being first" are two different things, the PC wasn't the first platform, and comparing to DOS is simply being deliberately misleading, as the first Apple systems had decent visual WYSIWIG word processing in the mid 80's already. If you want to be comparing to DOS (i.e. text-based) word processors, then I can tell you right off the bat that MacWrite easily kicked their asses long before any of those even existed.
Can you name some specific features in Visual Studio.NET that are innovative? Because I use the product, and while it's a fairly decent product, I cannot think of anything in it that is actually new or original. Unless by "innovative" you mean "this is the first time Microsoft has implemented such a feature"?
"Innovative" means "nobody has done anything like this before".
Microsoft didn't create COM, they bought the technology from IIRC a company called Wang (Technologies? can't remember the details).
Although Visual Studio is actually a fairly decent product (at least, it was from about version 5), it has never been "innovative" in any sense - there is nothing new or original in it, they just added features that were equivalent to what you could already do with competitors' products.
I'm not trying to be an anti-linux jerk, i'm just wondering what Ubuntu has to offer that isn't in another distro already.
I haven't tried Ubuntu yet, but I think they must be doing something right, given they're the fastest growing Linux distro.
It does seem unoptimal though to have so much fragmentation, so much reinventing of the wheel. OTOH, each new company that tries their hand at the market, potentially improves Linux in some way permanently. Development would probably be faster if companies/governments could coordinate efforts better (especially of crucial projects like OpenOffice), but getting so many different groups to cooperate is tough, and everyone seems to want a shot at the limelight.
One has to wonder if companies such as Microsoft do things like this intentionally or, as the comment in the article indicated, simply miss some things in the wash?
Of course this was done intentionally. GAIN must be the most widespread and well-known spyware out there, do you think that a team of people working on one of the world's biggest anti-spyware programs accidentally thought it was not a threat and should be set to "ignore"? Or do you think someone "accidentally" modified the status in the database by clicking a few wrong buttons, and that quality control didn't check before a product release that their anti-spyware program happens to ignore the world's biggest spyware? There is just no way this happened by mistake.
There's no conflict at all here - users DO have choice, and all the GP said is, he thinks they should choose Linux and not choose Microsoft, based on certain valid technical and economic considerations. What's the problem exactly? Are you trying to imply that anyone who expresses an opinion on which they honestly think would be the best choice must inherently be making a purely ideological decision? That a truly unbiased person would always only express totally neutral opinions? Are you trying to subtly manipulate us into actually thinking that we should avoid expressing any non-neutral opions on the basis that they inherently indicate an ideological bias? Yes, that's exactly what you're doing, in which case you're just a sophisticated troll, because your 'reasoning' is totally specious.
I think it's more accurate to say the battlecry has gone from "users should have choice" to "users should use the best tool for the job, which I think is (X)". I really don't see the problem with that, technical people are asked to make such decisions every day in companies all over the world, and the whole idea is not to be "neutral" and "unbiased" - the whole idea is to determine what the 'best tool for the job' is, and that's all we're doing here..
Anyway, if you can control your narcissistic knee-jerk ego-driven reactions for a moment, you might realise that I wasn't necessarily talking about every point in GP's post, but rather, that many of the aspects could be identified with - e.g. the egos of programmers who lead projects, the NIH syndrome, the ignoring of some people's inputs but then accepting the same ideas when they come from others - hell, in all the companies I've seen and worked for, as well as all my colleagues in other IT companies, I have never encountered ONE programming team that did not exhibit some of these characteristics and some of the described "politics".
Slashdot Mirror
it's primarily a software solution which looks for the monitor feature, and fucks up the imagery
The imagery is "f*cked up" to begin with, it's a hardware solution that unfucks up the imagery ONLY if the correct software is found (i.e. Longhorn). The data is stored encrypted, it will look like garbage if you try play it in a 'non-approved' system.
So "Average John" asks his/her technically literate buddy or family member how to solve the problem, and that person installs VLC - just like in the f*cking Windows world: My dad bought a Windows XP laptop the other day and guess what, it couldn't play DVDs 'out-the-box' at all (yes, it's true, check the XP help files, you need 3rd party software installed first). What does he do? He immediately phones me, and I help him out by installing the necessary software.
It is? I downloaded VLC (for free) and play videos full-screen just fine on my Mac. Nothing forces you to QT to play movies on OS X, and there are many decent alternatives. Who TF modded you insightful.
(While you're astroturfing, also keep in mind that Windows XP can't even play DVDs out the box without getting additional software like PowerDVD.)
Hmm, well, you are entitled to your own views, but I am the owner of a software business, and I can inform you "from the horse's mouth" that that "whiny leftist BS" happens to be an extremely accurate view of how the "people at the top" (myself and partners who also own software businesses) view (and manipulate) the people they hire. I'm not sitting here making myself out as some whiny victim of an oppressive corporate culture - on the contrary, I am one of those who employs people and uses them. I'm not a victim at all, I'm a beneficiary of the system, and part of the 'problem' I am talking about. Whether or not Scott Adams personally even thinks about such things is irrelevant - i.e. whether or not Dilbert is part of the cause or just a reflection of the system is irrelevant. I don't like the system, but I would rather be a beneficiary of it than a victim, and anyway, it's ultimately up to each individual to choose whether or not they want to open their eyes and see the world as it really is, or remain a child forever.
You've obviously mistaken me for someone who cared
Yes, clearly :)
I'm quite sure working in a call center sucks ass, but I've worked shitty jobs too, and I always did the best I could anyway, and I expect others to do the same (especially if I'm a customer who has to use the call center).
C# is not standard. Yes I know there is a standard specification, but it's not an "industry standard" in that it's not supported widely. E.g. can I simply compile my C# applications on OS X in Xcode, or on Linux, even if I have used cross-platform libraries like wxWidgets? As an ISV, choosing C# would mean a choice to deliberately limit the available platforms we could run our software on. This doesn't make sense at a time when libs like wxWidgets make it easy to develop decent cross-platform software - there is little advantage to deliberately unnecessarily limiting yourself like that. This makes C# useless for many applications regardless of whether or not it is a good language technically --- it just doesn't have critical mass.
But why doesn't it? Because C# just doesn't offer enough value over and above existing languages to attract significant numbers of new developers - it tries to solve problems that mostly had already been solved already elsewhere, and frankly there was really no point in introducing yet another new language at a time when there were already hundreds of decent languages in widespread use for all sorts of purposes. To make people want to use something new it has to be more than just "good". It has to offer something that really makes people want to switch, especially as there are retraining costs involved in switching to a different language.
Well, if you've ever worked in a call center, weasel words (lies) and management speak (bullshit) are survival tools.
Do you mean when dealing with clients or management? If you mean the former, I've got news for you, the majority of customers don't actually fall for weasel-speak. You may think they do because it often makes them "go away", but most of those customers are actually just interpreting your "strategy" as a refusal to address the problem, going away unhappy, and telling everyone they know that your clients product sucks.
You might find this an interesting read: The Trouble with Dilbert. A snippet:
Prior art does not negate innovation
I guess we are just working off different definitions of "innovative" here, because in my mind (and according to the dictionary), "innovative" specifically means to do new stuff that noone has done before. So prior art does negate innovation. By definition! "Innovative" doesn't mean "good", it doesn't "up to date with the latest and greatest", and so on. D3D can be all that and more, but it doesn't mean it's "innovative".
Do you think that someone dreams up an extension first?
Of course not, but do you think Microsoft dreams up things like shaders and multitexturing? No, guys like NVIDIA do, put features into their hardware, and then Microsoft just basically looks at what they've come up with adds wrappers for it in D3D. It's not a case of MS coming up with that stuff, and then NVIDIA saying "hey shaders, great idea MS" and adding it to their hardware. Microsoft sits on boards with NVIDIA and ATI guys to find out what's going on, and they just keep their APIs up to date with that. Making a generic wrapper that will work with everyone's hardware is not innovation in and of itself.
Have you been frozen since the 60's? Is that you Austin Powers? Newsflash, language changes.
You know I honestly would have expected that "ha ha another person's language sounds soo funny lol!" attitude only from six-year olds, and it's kind of disturbing and sad to see it from adults on slashdot :/ That's f*cking childish, people! As someone who actually speaks some Zulu, it's actually a beautiful language, and the word "ubuntu" is indeed a very fitting name, and is also a very important concept in Nguni culture ("Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" - a person is a person because of / through all people" - doesn't translate very well to English).
Uh, I thought Compaq did that by reverse engineering the IBM PC specification, allowing hardware vendors to create compatible hardware and PC OEMs to build PCs from interchangeable parts? DOS was just built to work on the standardised IBM spec. Nice try though, -1 FUD.
Spoken like someone who doesn't actually use OS X and has absolutely no idea of what features it has.
what has apple innovated lately?
Wait six years and see what appears in the next version of Windows after Longhorn, and you'll have the answer to your question.
I want to see something new for the desktop, not rehashed ideas that Apple or Microsoft or Unix implemented years earlier.
You're not looking very hard, check out things like Cairo, XGL, E17, etc. There has always been innovative stuff going on for Linux desktops, that have been 'ahead' of both MS and Apple since probably the late 90's, but for some reason these things have always remained basically 'fringe research' that the serious Linux hobbyists play around with and never really made it into the mainstream distros.
because it really was an incredibly sh*t API compared to D3D, especially in the beginning.
That should read "compared to GL"
Spoken like someone who doesn't actually know the history of OpenGL or anything about it at all, and only got into 3D programming once D3D was established. I suggest you learn some history, if only to balance your views.
Direct3D is innovative. It revs regularly, and it keeps up with technology. It provides a unified API to deal directly with multiple types of underlying hardware and architecture. It incorporates new hardware functionality directly into that API. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
As a Direct3D programmer, I have to say there are two major problems with your argument: firstly, Microsoft didn't create Direct3D, they BOUGHT IT. OK, sure, they've changed it a lot, but mainly to just bring it in line (read "follow" or "catch up") with new hardware innovations by the graphics card vendors like NVIDIA (i.e. shaders, which MS did not invent), and to clean up some of the really braindead aspects of the original design of the API. Secondly, Direct3D never did anything new or original, it only cloned and in fact caught up to either (a) what could already be done in OpenGL or (b) what the hardware vendors invented. MS may sit on advisory boards that steer the development of these technologies now, but they aren't driving the process, that's for sure.
As an example to my point, find a PC game developer who uses Open/GL. Got one? Good. Now, if that developer is iD, go ahead and drop that and find another. Got another? Good. If that's Blizzard (for WoW), go ahead and drop that and find another. Got one? No?
Well, if your definition of "innovative" is "the product that most people use", then we're using very different definitions of "innovative". Most developers use Direct3D due to (extremely obvious) market forces, not because it was more "innovative". In fact (and I know many) most developers that already had experience with OpenGL were dragged kicking and screaming to Direct3D, because it really was an incredibly sh*t API compared to D3D, especially in the beginning.
Oh, please name one thing that can be done in Direct3D that cannot be done in OpenGL. Can't? That's because there isn't anything - with OpenGL's extension mechanism, you can do anything in GL that you can in D3D.
Yes, when Microsoft Word for Windows came out, it kicked the hiney of every DOS based word processor out there
Being "better than the competition at some particular time" and "being innovative" are two different things. "Innovative" means there are features that nobody else has ever done before. What features in the first version of Word for Windows were totally original/new? Also, being "first for the PC" and "being first" are two different things, the PC wasn't the first platform, and comparing to DOS is simply being deliberately misleading, as the first Apple systems had decent visual WYSIWIG word processing in the mid 80's already. If you want to be comparing to DOS (i.e. text-based) word processors, then I can tell you right off the bat that MacWrite easily kicked their asses long before any of those even existed.
Can you name some specific features in Visual Studio .NET that are innovative? Because I use the product, and while it's a fairly decent product, I cannot think of anything in it that is actually new or original. Unless by "innovative" you mean "this is the first time Microsoft has implemented such a feature"?
"Innovative" means "nobody has done anything like this before".
Microsoft didn't create COM, they bought the technology from IIRC a company called Wang (Technologies? can't remember the details).
Although Visual Studio is actually a fairly decent product (at least, it was from about version 5), it has never been "innovative" in any sense - there is nothing new or original in it, they just added features that were equivalent to what you could already do with competitors' products.
I'm not trying to be an anti-linux jerk, i'm just wondering what Ubuntu has to offer that isn't in another distro already.
I haven't tried Ubuntu yet, but I think they must be doing something right, given they're the fastest growing Linux distro.
It does seem unoptimal though to have so much fragmentation, so much reinventing of the wheel. OTOH, each new company that tries their hand at the market, potentially improves Linux in some way permanently. Development would probably be faster if companies/governments could coordinate efforts better (especially of crucial projects like OpenOffice), but getting so many different groups to cooperate is tough, and everyone seems to want a shot at the limelight.
Can the biased moderator explain how the above is a troll? I'm befuddled.
Indeed, OR Mac OS X .. no spyware so far here either.
One has to wonder if companies such as Microsoft do things like this intentionally or, as the comment in the article indicated, simply miss some things in the wash?
Of course this was done intentionally. GAIN must be the most widespread and well-known spyware out there, do you think that a team of people working on one of the world's biggest anti-spyware programs accidentally thought it was not a threat and should be set to "ignore"? Or do you think someone "accidentally" modified the status in the database by clicking a few wrong buttons, and that quality control didn't check before a product release that their anti-spyware program happens to ignore the world's biggest spyware? There is just no way this happened by mistake.
There's no conflict at all here - users DO have choice, and all the GP said is, he thinks they should choose Linux and not choose Microsoft, based on certain valid technical and economic considerations. What's the problem exactly? Are you trying to imply that anyone who expresses an opinion on which they honestly think would be the best choice must inherently be making a purely ideological decision? That a truly unbiased person would always only express totally neutral opinions? Are you trying to subtly manipulate us into actually thinking that we should avoid expressing any non-neutral opions on the basis that they inherently indicate an ideological bias? Yes, that's exactly what you're doing, in which case you're just a sophisticated troll, because your 'reasoning' is totally specious.
I think it's more accurate to say the battlecry has gone from "users should have choice" to "users should use the best tool for the job, which I think is (X)". I really don't see the problem with that, technical people are asked to make such decisions every day in companies all over the world, and the whole idea is not to be "neutral" and "unbiased" - the whole idea is to determine what the 'best tool for the job' is, and that's all we're doing here..
What makes you think I was talking about myself?
Anyway, if you can control your narcissistic knee-jerk ego-driven reactions for a moment, you might realise that I wasn't necessarily talking about every point in GP's post, but rather, that many of the aspects could be identified with - e.g. the egos of programmers who lead projects, the NIH syndrome, the ignoring of some people's inputs but then accepting the same ideas when they come from others - hell, in all the companies I've seen and worked for, as well as all my colleagues in other IT companies, I have never encountered ONE programming team that did not exhibit some of these characteristics and some of the described "politics".
PS AC grow some and post under your nick.