In a company environment you even install from a deployment server instead so not even a CD is needed. And often that installation is done without even touching the preinstalled OS.
But lately there have been hardware that required extra drivers to be added to the XP installation so a plain vanilla CD wouldn't work, it has to be tweaked. And if M$ gots their way the hardware manufacturers will soon drop XP supported drivers on their new hardware just to force people to go to Vista or Win 7.
Microsoft has passed the age of being Hot a long time ago, so this seems to be a feeble attempt to make money out of everyone else that's classed as hot.
Some code reviewing is validated but much of the tiresome review work can be resolved by automatic tools these days. Tools like Lint and FindBugs.
But a review to make sure that the code is easy to understand and maintain is a different issue that can't be addressed by automatic tools. At least not until you get a tool that can semantically understand comments.
Someone mod parent Funny. Insightful - maybe it is that too.
We are all waiting for the major disaster of Windows that makes everyone abolish it. One cause may be that Mount St. Helens is one vent of a Supervolcano.
Mount St. Helens seems to be sharing the magma pocket with Mount Rainier.
It don't have to come down to a volcano erupting to take out Redmond, it's enough with a considerable quake.
But on the other hand - it's more likely that Microsoft does something utterly stupid which makes them drop dead. Just look at GM, they failed to adapt.
If you drink after coding it's to celebrate a decent system. VB coders has to drink to be able to cope with finding all bugs that the language allowed them to implement.
But of course - no language is safe from stupid designs.
Fortran has it's place, even though it's a bit of a fringe language today.
It has evolved since Fortran 77, and is better. It's also one of the languages where it doesn't require the programmer to have a detailed knowledge about how to parallelize a problem since later versions has those features built in. The programmer just have to be aware that it can be parallelized, but not waste time on the details about how to do it. Unfortunately GNU Fortran doesn't support this yet (unless it has been enabled lately).
Python is certainly not an alternative - unless you want to have a replacement for Basic.
Education shall primarily be done in type-safe languages that forces the developers to learn the importance of type safety. Way too many bugs have been created through history that are related to operations that aren't type-safe. Ada is one language that is really strict. Java is acceptable. C# is not acceptable since it has some unsafe parts when it comes to data typing.
And Visual Basic should be taken out, shot, drowned, burnt and sterilized for all it's abilities to make things unsafe and bug-ridden.
The alternative would be to give them a stupid low bid and then send them a check that has to be cashed for a fee or being inconvenient to cash directly.
The first thing - this is one of the reasons why DRM-protected media is doing bad in online sales.
People are aware of the limitations and problems.
And this is yet another reason why getting the media in formats that are secured for long-time use. Even DVD:s are better for the consumer since they don't depend on the availability of a server somewhere on the net, and can be used standalone. But the thing that really sucks with DVD:s are the copyright notice that you are forced to watch, which means that some people rips the DVD:s to get rid of that crap.
If the media industry had caught on the track earlier and offered music at a reasonable price without any crippling DRM they would have been better off in sales. There are people willing to pay for it, if they can get it. Going torrent works for some, but some of us wants a reliable and legal source for our media.
Microsoft are everywhere, but you are right, Redmond, Washington, at least last time I checked.
And the important thing here is to try to ignore the people that comes with such threats because they are short-lived and it costs a lot of money to move an operation.
Another issue is that to find a place with a low tax pressure he will have to look into some really strange places - where people not really want to live anyway. Almost every country have taxes, they are just applied in different ways.
If the auditor certifies a system according to current regulations and the system later fails. Is that the fault of the auditor or the regulations?
System changes can render the certification invalid and then the system has to be revalidated.
New threats and hacking methods appears all the time, so even current regulations may be outdated.
You shall never certify your own system, always bring an outside certification agency. Then it's up to you to take action and responsibility.
Always expect at least one security measure to fail. This means that you shall never rely on a single protection as a pin code or a password for critical systems.
It's your system, so you should have the ultimate responsibility.
But then - who certifies the auditors? Do they have an up to date certification? Don't let this stop you - even auditors without certifications can be really good.
Every component in a system may check out really well, but when they interact you may have a hole as big as Grand Canyon.
Third-party problems like hijacked certificates can cause a major headache.
So I would rather say that if an auditor is in the auditing report showing incompetence and negligence - then the auditor is a valid target, but if the documentation is covering the system well then the customer shouldn't be able to complain. And it's also hard for an auditor to be able to verify every aspect of a system without an extended study and analysis of the code, possible backdoors and system design.
In a large company there may be employees that uses their own time to contribute to OSS without labeling the code as originating from "BigCompany" since that would make it obvious that they are working with things that they shouldn't.
But on the other hand - such employees gains experience, which is good for the company.
Features are added all the time which bogs down the software, and then there is an effort to speed it up and then there are features added again.
One catch in performance is that it sure is faster to use RAM for data, but there is also a lot of useless data floating around in RAM, which is a waste of resources.
And this is often the curse of object-oriented programming. Objects carries more data than necessary for many of the uses of the object. Only a few cases exists where all the object data is used. A lot of object-oriented programming is somewhat like using 18-wheelers for grocery shopping.
This often explains why old languages like C, Cobol etc. are able to do the same thing as a program written in C++, Java or C# at the fraction of the resource cost and at much greater speed. The disadvantage is that the old languages require more skills from the programmer to avoid the classical problems of deadlocks and race conditions as well as having to implement functionality for linked lists etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Still - that program won't necessarily be able to detect which licensing condition a machine was sold under.
In a company environment you even install from a deployment server instead so not even a CD is needed. And often that installation is done without even touching the preinstalled OS.
But lately there have been hardware that required extra drivers to be added to the XP installation so a plain vanilla CD wouldn't work, it has to be tweaked. And if M$ gots their way the hardware manufacturers will soon drop XP supported drivers on their new hardware just to force people to go to Vista or Win 7.
OpenDNS is the solution.
At least until the DNS queries are hijacked.
The ID situation in the US is sometimes a joke compared to other countries - like in the EU.
Microsoft has passed the age of being Hot a long time ago, so this seems to be a feeble attempt to make money out of everyone else that's classed as hot.
Some code reviewing is validated but much of the tiresome review work can be resolved by automatic tools these days. Tools like Lint and FindBugs.
But a review to make sure that the code is easy to understand and maintain is a different issue that can't be addressed by automatic tools. At least not until you get a tool that can semantically understand comments.
Seriously - If it goes supernova we should be a bit worried because it's close enough to drown us with radiation.
If that happens all our petty bickering on this planet will seem insignificant.
Of course - it's not certain that the radiation will be strong enough to kill off all life, but things will probably change a lot.
Someone mod parent Funny. Insightful - maybe it is that too.
We are all waiting for the major disaster of Windows that makes everyone abolish it. One cause may be that Mount St. Helens is one vent of a Supervolcano.
Mount St. Helens seems to be sharing the magma pocket with Mount Rainier.
It don't have to come down to a volcano erupting to take out Redmond, it's enough with a considerable quake.
But on the other hand - it's more likely that Microsoft does something utterly stupid which makes them drop dead. Just look at GM, they failed to adapt.
No need for drinking, Don't drink and code.
If you drink after coding it's to celebrate a decent system. VB coders has to drink to be able to cope with finding all bugs that the language allowed them to implement.
But of course - no language is safe from stupid designs.
Fortran has it's place, even though it's a bit of a fringe language today.
It has evolved since Fortran 77, and is better. It's also one of the languages where it doesn't require the programmer to have a detailed knowledge about how to parallelize a problem since later versions has those features built in. The programmer just have to be aware that it can be parallelized, but not waste time on the details about how to do it. Unfortunately GNU Fortran doesn't support this yet (unless it has been enabled lately).
Python is certainly not an alternative - unless you want to have a replacement for Basic.
Education shall primarily be done in type-safe languages that forces the developers to learn the importance of type safety. Way too many bugs have been created through history that are related to operations that aren't type-safe. Ada is one language that is really strict. Java is acceptable. C# is not acceptable since it has some unsafe parts when it comes to data typing.
And Visual Basic should be taken out, shot, drowned, burnt and sterilized for all it's abilities to make things unsafe and bug-ridden.
The alternative would be to give them a stupid low bid and then send them a check that has to be cashed for a fee or being inconvenient to cash directly.
You forgot to read the second half "...without any crippling DRM" which is where they REALLY fails.
Reasonable price may exist online, but then you have to suffer DRM and unusable formats.
The first thing - this is one of the reasons why DRM-protected media is doing bad in online sales.
People are aware of the limitations and problems.
And this is yet another reason why getting the media in formats that are secured for long-time use. Even DVD:s are better for the consumer since they don't depend on the availability of a server somewhere on the net, and can be used standalone. But the thing that really sucks with DVD:s are the copyright notice that you are forced to watch, which means that some people rips the DVD:s to get rid of that crap.
If the media industry had caught on the track earlier and offered music at a reasonable price without any crippling DRM they would have been better off in sales. There are people willing to pay for it, if they can get it. Going torrent works for some, but some of us wants a reliable and legal source for our media.
Microsoft are everywhere, but you are right, Redmond, Washington, at least last time I checked.
And the important thing here is to try to ignore the people that comes with such threats because they are short-lived and it costs a lot of money to move an operation.
Another issue is that to find a place with a low tax pressure he will have to look into some really strange places - where people not really want to live anyway. Almost every country have taxes, they are just applied in different ways.
So I would just check in on Ballmer and say STFU.
It makes sense if there is an economic criminality of considerable scale.
Pornography and money-laundering is not that far apart.
This is an interesting case to have.
So I would rather say that if an auditor is in the auditing report showing incompetence and negligence - then the auditor is a valid target, but if the documentation is covering the system well then the customer shouldn't be able to complain. And it's also hard for an auditor to be able to verify every aspect of a system without an extended study and analysis of the code, possible backdoors and system design.
Go on - rub it in to someone paying 25%.
But how will they calculate the tax? Is it going to be on the sale of the file or is it going to be per megabyte?
If it's going to be per megabyte then it may effectively kill open source.
Censorship is more indecent than any use of profanity ever can be.
Someone has to make a reality check.
Makes sense - the amount of intrusion attempts and spam coming from Chinese servers may make it worth it.
Don't forget that a good lawyer also costs money which means that with enough money you can buy the ruling of the court too.
Just look at the Pirate Bay trial.
In a large company there may be employees that uses their own time to contribute to OSS without labeling the code as originating from "BigCompany" since that would make it obvious that they are working with things that they shouldn't.
But on the other hand - such employees gains experience, which is good for the company.
Are the slashdot editors starting to get senile?
The law isn't linear, it's more sawtooth-style.
Features are added all the time which bogs down the software, and then there is an effort to speed it up and then there are features added again.
One catch in performance is that it sure is faster to use RAM for data, but there is also a lot of useless data floating around in RAM, which is a waste of resources.
And this is often the curse of object-oriented programming. Objects carries more data than necessary for many of the uses of the object. Only a few cases exists where all the object data is used. A lot of object-oriented programming is somewhat like using 18-wheelers for grocery shopping.
This often explains why old languages like C, Cobol etc. are able to do the same thing as a program written in C++, Java or C# at the fraction of the resource cost and at much greater speed. The disadvantage is that the old languages require more skills from the programmer to avoid the classical problems of deadlocks and race conditions as well as having to implement functionality for linked lists etc.
The 1366 socket has been around for almost a year now, so I also wonder why it appeared now.
Did someone mistype the year to 2009 this time last year?
There is a big difference between the actions taken by Wikipedia and the holocaust.
There is nothing stopping the Scientologists from using their own channels. They are free to use whatever channel they like.
It's more like a newspaper - the editor can chose to not publish an article on whatever grounds he like.