"you have to use our compiler to get matching results."
That's not just a possibility, but a near certainty. No two C++ compilers will generate the exact same object code, because, among many other reasons, of name mangling.
d = Split("This is a silly sentence chock full of words.") For i = UBound(d) To LBound(d) Step -1: oStr = oStr & d(i) & " ": Next MsgBox oStr
It did take dozens of lines to do even simple text processing in the days before VB got decent string handling functions, regexes, and the Dictionary class, circa VB6. (All were of course inspired by Perl.)
In my experience, initial development of Microsoft-centric solutions is often less expensive than Java or even OSS-based solutions. This is especially true for the one-off or "quick and dirty" stuff so prevalent in Microsoft-centric shops.
However, the initial cost savings are eaten dozens if not hundreds of times over by higher total lifecycle costs.
Basically, for every dollar we spend writing, say, a VB/IIS/MSSQL app, we spend dozens or hundreds of dollars maintaining it and rewriting it.
The comparable development using superior technologies does cost a bit more, mainly because you have to hire better developers - people who, for instance, know how to sort an array, without resorting to writing the rows to an invisible ListBox and then setting its.Sorted property to True (don't laugh - I've seen this seriously suggested multiple times, both on comp.lang.basic.visual.misc, and among people I've worked with).
But well-written Java and/or OSS apps stay written. They don't break over time due to DLL incompatibilities or the obsolescence or poor scalability of the toolset or a decision to move to another platform or the virus/worm/trojan of the week.
If it were up to me we would allow the use of M$ development tools only for the "quick and dirty" stuff - prototypes basically - and those would be absolutely unsupported by IT. Any production system requiring IT support would need to be based exclusively on open/Free protocols, standards, and products.
OK, so who has more money then? On one side you have SCO, Mafia$oft, and possibly Sun. On the other you have IBM (bigger than those three combined), plus every vendor and user of Free Software in the world.
The problem is that the "steps to ameliorate potential impacts" usually proposed by pseudo-leftists all involve the initiation of force and/or fraud, usually in ways that will impoverish the masses, including those they pretend to speak for, while enriching their own very narrow interests. As such, decent and informed people should continue to oppose those steps, in favor of market-based solutions that by definition do *not* require force or fraud.
The "pump and dump" looks to me like a diversion of some sort. It is so clearly and blatantly illegal that there is a large risk of prosecution and incarceration in Federal "pound me in the ass" prison. The SCO folks, while assholes, are reasonably clever ones, so the only reasonable conclusion I can see is that something is going on that makes this risk completely worthwhile to them. My guess is M$, but I could be wrong.
terrorists that we've seen, Timothy McVeigh, the DC area snipers, the Abortion Clinic bombers
The abortion mills are today's equivalent of the Auschwitz death camps. I would have a very hard time equating their destruction with "terrorism," provided that innocent people are not harmed in the process.
And you cheapen the term "terrorist" when you use it inappropriately. McVeigh was part of a terrorist group (two actually, the U.S. Army, and a small group of conspirators most of whom were never charged). The DC snipers were terrorists by any reasonable definition. But people who try to save unborn babies from being cruelly murdered are not. You may not agree with them. But they are not terrorists.
For most of "human" history there were multiple species of "humans" living concurrently, and there were formerly many more species of ape alive at the same time too.
If you observe a session of Congress, you can see that this is still true today.
think that the interesting thing is that the nation state standing army concept is a relatively recent phenomenon (ok so the nation state is pretty recent but even so...).
The nation-state is a very temporary concept too. The formerly sovereign states of the U.S. degenerated into a single central government upon the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, and something vaguely similar is happening in Europe right now.
It seems likely to me that the sovereign nations of SE Asia and S. America will band together for what will at first seem like very sensible reasons such as common markets, mutual defense, etc., ultimately giving up too much of their sovereignty, and becoming subserviant administrative divisions of yet another mega-state.
What we will have then are a handful of mega-nations (the US, EU, China, Russia, and a few others) rather than nation-states that even pretend to be accountable to the People.
I am truly grateful that I won't live long enough to see the inevitable results.
Gentoo is only a hobby distribution, simply because companies cannot afford recompiling Gentoo for 2 days.
I must respectfully but strongly disagree.
First, Gentoo is not so much a distribution, as a set of very powerful programs and scripts that you use to build your own "distribution," customized however you like.
This only needs to be done once (per organization, not per machine), and you end up with a distribution that is completely your own, customized to your company's needs, optimized for whatever CPU architecture(s) you have the most of, and free from the stupid linking and dependency hell problems that continue to plague binary distributions, especially if you have to build software that isn't already part of them.
You get to use whatever versions of software you choose, not what a distribution maintainer has chosen for you.
The process takes hours, not days, except for very large programs like KDE, Mozilla and OpenOffice, and there are binary packages for these. But you will want to spend time testing any distribution, and it will be much more than 2 days, and the time needed to compile even the largest programs is pretty insignificant by comparison.
Face it, this takes quite a lot of time, and time is money. That's business.
And that is exactly why I chose Gentoo, even though my time is very valuable (and was even more valuable at the time). I wanted a Linux distro that worked the way I thought it should, and no commercial distro does this (and not Debian either, though it and Slack probably come closest). I knew that the small amount of time I'd invest up front would be more than repaid down the road, as I'd have a clean, up-to-date system that would practically maintain itself, but according to my own preferences.
I think that DCOM, and therefore ADO, and therefore most data-backed applications, depend on the RPC service. So this wouldn't be an option for most corporate desktops.
Discrimination by private individuals and entities should be and usually is legal, because people have the right to freely associate, or not to. (There are exceptions under current "law" but they are of dubious Constitutional validity.)
On the other hand, government must protect all persons equally, and thus it must not discriminate for reasons such as race, color, gender, age, etc. (again there are exceptions but those also are of dubious validity).
Now, that's the law. Here's my opinion: in a functioning economy with competition, discrimination due to color is usually a really, really stupid thing to do, regardless of morality. Minority people's money is just as good as anyone else's. If you don't want it, I guarantee there is a competing business that does. It's only when there is a real lack of competition, and a history of institutionalized lack of equal justice under the law, that private discrimination ends up causing significant harm.
GnuWin is a distribution of Free/Open Source software for Windows. It includes among many other things Mozilla, OpenOffice, PHP, Apache, several games, programming languages and tools, and more.
There are several other similar projects out there that might be worth considering as well.
Please check them out. It will cost you little or nothing, and will provide your users a wealth of interesting, Free and Open Source software.
True, but a quick Web search suggests that those are confined to those countries that don't respect people's right to defend themselves anyway, so they seem to be the least of the problems in those places.
If you cleanly separate presentation, business logic, and data, then it should generally be possible to architect an app that is friendly to both rich/GUI and Web-based clients. Many of mine certainly have both.
I believe passionately in Free Software, but use the term "Open Source" to refer to it in contexts where the term "Free" might be misunderstood (a surprisingly large percentage of the time unfortunately where PHBs are involved.)
My understanding is that Bruce's position is very similar - he believes in Freedom, not just openness, but openness is the foot that gets Free software into the door of large, PHB-infested corporations.
Bruce . . in the unlikely event that this is modded up sufficiently . . . would you care to comment?
Don't apologize, because you didn't say anything wrong.
Law enforcement officers have special powers only while performing their lawful duties. If they were to show up without an invitation or a valid warrant, then they would not have the right to enter, and if they tried anyway, they would be criminals, and have no more powers or rights than any other criminals.
Linux is not illegal. SCO's own actions in releasing it under the GPL prove this. So no cop will ever have a valid warrant to confiscate Linux. If he claims to, well, we will be discussing it in court.
(And please try to remember that not all cops are "assholes in uniform." Lots are, and most of the rest tolerate and even protect those who are. But not all!!!!)
Linux has some compelling advantages that MacOS does not. It runs on the systems most people have, and is Free (as in freedom and possibly as in beer).
The scumbags that rule the UN and most countries have of course learned from history what most of their semi-literate publicly "educated" subjects could not: monopoly control of information and weapons is necessary to continue their reign of oppression. If most people in the world had access to truthful history together with the means of self-defense, the world - especially the industrialized world - would look very different.
Slashdot Mirror
"you have to use our compiler to get matching results."
That's not just a possibility, but a near certainty. No two C++ compilers will generate the exact same object code, because, among many other reasons, of name mangling.
If you live in a city, planning to be 30 minutes early does not guarantee that you will never be late.
My commute is 7 miles. It takes 16 minutes some days and more than an hour on others.
Some people in the office commute from more than 60 miles away.
If it were not permissible for them to at least occasionally come in late and leave late, they would not be able to work here.
In my experience, initial development of Microsoft-centric solutions is often less expensive than Java or even OSS-based solutions. This is especially true for the one-off or "quick and dirty" stuff so prevalent in Microsoft-centric shops.
However, the initial cost savings are eaten dozens if not hundreds of times over by higher total lifecycle costs.
Basically, for every dollar we spend writing, say, a VB/IIS/MSSQL app, we spend dozens or hundreds of dollars maintaining it and rewriting it.
The comparable development using superior technologies does cost a bit more, mainly because you have to hire better developers - people who, for instance, know how to sort an array, without resorting to writing the rows to an invisible ListBox and then setting its .Sorted property to True (don't laugh - I've seen this seriously suggested multiple times, both on comp.lang.basic.visual.misc, and among people I've worked with).
But well-written Java and/or OSS apps stay written. They don't break over time due to DLL incompatibilities or the obsolescence or poor scalability of the toolset or a decision to move to another platform or the virus/worm/trojan of the week.
If it were up to me we would allow the use of M$ development tools only for the "quick and dirty" stuff - prototypes basically - and those would be absolutely unsupported by IT. Any production system requiring IT support would need to be based exclusively on open/Free protocols, standards, and products.
OK, so who has more money then? On one side you have SCO, Mafia$oft, and possibly Sun. On the other you have IBM (bigger than those three combined), plus every vendor and user of Free Software in the world.
The problem is that the "steps to ameliorate potential impacts" usually proposed by pseudo-leftists all involve the initiation of force and/or fraud, usually in ways that will impoverish the masses, including those they pretend to speak for, while enriching their own very narrow interests. As such, decent and informed people should continue to oppose those steps, in favor of market-based solutions that by definition do *not* require force or fraud.
The "pump and dump" looks to me like a diversion of some sort. It is so clearly and blatantly illegal that there is a large risk of prosecution and incarceration in Federal "pound me in the ass" prison. The SCO folks, while assholes, are reasonably clever ones, so the only reasonable conclusion I can see is that something is going on that makes this risk completely worthwhile to them. My guess is M$, but I could be wrong.
terrorists that we've seen, Timothy McVeigh, the DC area snipers, the Abortion Clinic bombers
The abortion mills are today's equivalent of the Auschwitz death camps. I would have a very hard time equating their destruction with "terrorism," provided that innocent people are not harmed in the process.
And you cheapen the term "terrorist" when you use it inappropriately. McVeigh was part of a terrorist group (two actually, the U.S. Army, and a small group of conspirators most of whom were never charged). The DC snipers were terrorists by any reasonable definition. But people who try to save unborn babies from being cruelly murdered are not. You may not agree with them. But they are not terrorists.
For most of "human" history there were multiple species of "humans" living concurrently, and there were formerly many more species of ape alive at the same time too.
If you observe a session of Congress, you can see that this is still true today.
think that the interesting thing is that the nation state standing army concept is a relatively recent phenomenon (ok so the nation state is pretty recent but even so...).
The nation-state is a very temporary concept too. The formerly sovereign states of the U.S. degenerated into a single central government upon the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, and something vaguely similar is happening in Europe right now.
It seems likely to me that the sovereign nations of SE Asia and S. America will band together for what will at first seem like very sensible reasons such as common markets, mutual defense, etc., ultimately giving up too much of their sovereignty, and becoming subserviant administrative divisions of yet another mega-state.
What we will have then are a handful of mega-nations (the US, EU, China, Russia, and a few others) rather than nation-states that even pretend to be accountable to the People.
I am truly grateful that I won't live long enough to see the inevitable results.
Switzerland?
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
You, sir, obviously have never tried a Moebius Pancake. :)
For me it comes down to to the freedom of speech issue
If SPAM is "free speech," then being forcibly gang-raped is "making love."
Back in my prime, I'd have been perfectly qualified to pay Mr. McBride a visit myself (see my user info). :)
Gentoo is only a hobby distribution, simply because companies cannot afford recompiling Gentoo for 2 days.
I must respectfully but strongly disagree.
First, Gentoo is not so much a distribution, as a set of very powerful programs and scripts that you use to build your own "distribution," customized however you like.
This only needs to be done once (per organization, not per machine), and you end up with a distribution that is completely your own, customized to your company's needs, optimized for whatever CPU architecture(s) you have the most of, and free from the stupid linking and dependency hell problems that continue to plague binary distributions, especially if you have to build software that isn't already part of them.
You get to use whatever versions of software you choose, not what a distribution maintainer has chosen for you.
The process takes hours, not days, except for very large programs like KDE, Mozilla and OpenOffice, and there are binary packages for these. But you will want to spend time testing any distribution, and it will be much more than 2 days, and the time needed to compile even the largest programs is pretty insignificant by comparison.
Face it, this takes quite a lot of time, and time is money. That's business.
And that is exactly why I chose Gentoo, even though my time is very valuable (and was even more valuable at the time). I wanted a Linux distro that worked the way I thought it should, and no commercial distro does this (and not Debian either, though it and Slack probably come closest). I knew that the small amount of time I'd invest up front would be more than repaid down the road, as I'd have a clean, up-to-date system that would practically maintain itself, but according to my own preferences.
http://www.gnuwin.org/index.html
I think that DCOM, and therefore ADO, and therefore most data-backed applications, depend on the RPC service. So this wouldn't be an option for most corporate desktops.
Discrimination by private individuals and entities should be and usually is legal, because people have the right to freely associate, or not to. (There are exceptions under current "law" but they are of dubious Constitutional validity.)
On the other hand, government must protect all persons equally, and thus it must not discriminate for reasons such as race, color, gender, age, etc. (again there are exceptions but those also are of dubious validity).
Now, that's the law. Here's my opinion: in a functioning economy with competition, discrimination due to color is usually a really, really stupid thing to do, regardless of morality. Minority people's money is just as good as anyone else's. If you don't want it, I guarantee there is a competing business that does. It's only when there is a real lack of competition, and a history of institutionalized lack of equal justice under the law, that private discrimination ends up causing significant harm.
GnuWin is a distribution of Free/Open Source software for Windows. It includes among many other things Mozilla, OpenOffice, PHP, Apache, several games, programming languages and tools, and more.
There are several other similar projects out there that might be worth considering as well.
Please check them out. It will cost you little or nothing, and will provide your users a wealth of interesting, Free and Open Source software.
True, but a quick Web search suggests that those are confined to those countries that don't respect people's right to defend themselves anyway, so they seem to be the least of the problems in those places.
If you cleanly separate presentation, business logic, and data, then it should generally be possible to architect an app that is friendly to both rich/GUI and Web-based clients. Many of mine certainly have both.
I believe passionately in Free Software, but use the term "Open Source" to refer to it in contexts where the term "Free" might be misunderstood (a surprisingly large percentage of the time unfortunately where PHBs are involved.)
My understanding is that Bruce's position is very similar - he believes in Freedom, not just openness, but openness is the foot that gets Free software into the door of large, PHB-infested corporations.
Bruce . . in the unlikely event that this is modded up sufficiently . . . would you care to comment?
Don't apologize, because you didn't say anything wrong.
Law enforcement officers have special powers only while performing their lawful duties. If they were to show up without an invitation or a valid warrant, then they would not have the right to enter, and if they tried anyway, they would be criminals, and have no more powers or rights than any other criminals.
Linux is not illegal. SCO's own actions in releasing it under the GPL prove this. So no cop will ever have a valid warrant to confiscate Linux. If he claims to, well, we will be discussing it in court.
(And please try to remember that not all cops are "assholes in uniform." Lots are, and most of the rest tolerate and even protect those who are. But not all!!!!)
Linux has some compelling advantages that MacOS does not. It runs on the systems most people have, and is Free (as in freedom and possibly as in beer).
The scumbags that rule the UN and most countries have of course learned from history what most of their semi-literate publicly "educated" subjects could not: monopoly control of information and weapons is necessary to continue their reign of oppression. If most people in the world had access to truthful history together with the means of self-defense, the world - especially the industrialized world - would look very different.