Java - when properly written - has been proven to be as fast in file operations, memory access and sequential processing as true "compiled" applications.
The same goes for other JIT languages such as.NET.
Though I could think of a ton of jokes - and have already seen a few - my first question is, "why."
I can see the possible benefits of no longer relying on aging cobol programmers. I am often dealing with just this issue as I migrate '70's and '80's era systems off off ADABAS and COBOL. However, why would one want to make a one for one class creation of existing mainframe applications. I honestly remember a few programmers I knew doing this right before they retired back in '05. They took a COBOL/IMS application running on an AS390 and turned it into a HTML/ASP.NET application written in C# with IMS and SQL Server on a z890 in virtual MVS and SLES environments. The screens - web based now - were one for one matching with the previous mainframe screens.
My question then too, was why bother?
I just finished a second project in taking a '80's era mainframe application - this one to track the purchase of vital (birth death marriage) records - from mainframe into an n-tier model. Instead of simply copying the mainframe screens we spent time deciding what worked on the mainframe and what didn't. Some of the mainframe concepts - particularly in the public lookup - were fine. They stayed and became web-based applications. Other items were thrown out the window and completely re-worked into a user-friendly and efficient system. (In this case, we used MS.NET 2005 and C#, but we could have just as easily used Java. I'm not trying to say anything about the choice of language or underlying platform.)
Having done a similar project for real property records in '07, we learned many lessons and were able to reuse assemblies in the new application. In fact, the entire UI, security, printing, data encapsulation, image import (there are over 160M TIFF files in our system), reporting and cashiering/finance/cash handling subsystems are identical and shared among both applications.
I can see possibly wanting to utilize some classes for back end work but wouldn't it be better to review these individually and decide what is best?
Oh, and we're saving roughly $3M/year in mainframe costs.:)
(Okay, post finished now to wait for someone to mod me as a troll...)
At least here in LA County it is extremely complicated.
Given that the law requires us to have a maximum of 1,000 residents per precinct and that ballots must not show the same candidates in the same order on any subsequent precincts, there are a ton of complications. Keep in mind, we have well over 8M potential voters in LA County and 5,000 precincts. (Let's not even get into the fact that we print ballots in eight languages by Federal law.)
In the November election, we counted well over 4,000,000 ballots between about 8:30 PM and 2:00 AM. We have 24 tally machines which each read ballot cards. The tally machines used to be setup to read punch cards, but after the screw up in Florida 2000, they were converted to optical scan. They must be continually calibrated. Since we do not use a vendor for the tally software, I can tell you the programming is quite complex.
The programs are all written in assembler. The tally machines know nothing of the votes, just which bubble (these are IBM cards similar to the ones used in mainframes back in teh '60s and '70s.) is filled in. Each machine must be loaded with the hundreds of possible ballot group layouts so that - when the bubbles are read - it can feed the information to the collector computer. (Which is connected via Token Ring by the way, so it is not on our ethernet network.) The collector computer then simply feeds this information - ballot group, numbers filled in, presents reporting - to the mainframe. This computer then assembles all that and comes out with a running total in any given vote.
So how?
Here's how. One piece of software allows the contests to be generated. (Presidential, city council, county supervisors, Board of education, senatorial, state assembly, state Senate, congressional, propositions, water board....) Then the contests are consolidated as necessary. The precincts (given a TRA - Tax Rate Area) are setup and another software starts doing ballot layout for each of the ballot groups. (We had around 300 ballot groups in November combined with the 5,000 precincts.) The printer prints all this and the ballots are sent via truck to the polling locations on the day before the election. On election day, people come in and vote. (Let's not forget the 700,000 absentee voters in LA County who sent in their votes prior to the election and still ahd to be sorted and counted on election evening - by precinct and ballot group.)
After 8:00 PM, the ballots boxes are brought in (via Sheriff), unsealed, opened, scanned in (to a ballot tracking software) and then sorted by ballot group within a precinct. They are fed into the tally machines and counted.
Just to make sure the tally machines are calibrated, the team runs a "logic and accuracy" test prior to and after the actual counting. The machines' counts are set to zero, a group of ballots are run through and the expected counts should be totaled up.
If any of this process goes wrong, you'll have an error.
Too bad the election terrorists made sure electronic voting was disallowed.
Heh - that's nothing compared to the GPS-enabled cell phones I setup at my previous job. They had each employee tracked as to when they logged in, where they went, and when they went home.
http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/gps/
The cool thing was that a given employee could always turn the phone off and also didn't necessarily need to report to the office to "clock in" as it could be done remotely. This works really well for the maintenance and engineering folks who spent most of their time in the field.
I tend to agree. Cheap insurance. You can even get a pre-paid plan so that said daughter isn't spending way too many hours talking to girlfriends. I have a buddy who utilizes the cell phone for his (17YO) daughter. He's had occasion to need to locate her after she's driven off with friends.
"You are at the store with Denise? Then how come your cell phone puts you across town near Roger's house?"
I'm not sure how my comment is flamebait, but I suppose I should have checked out my source material better. I guess I'm just wiped from working on a bibliography (in MLA format) for my eight-year-old last night.
I figured this to be occurring from a Wall Street company. But am surprised to see a British law firm. Of course, it sounds liek the old Shakespeare quote, "he doth protest too much." (I hope that isn't still copyrighted...)
Like I always say (having borrowed the phrase from my former boss), "Why Improvise when you can plagiarize?"
I am surprised this is even newsworthy. If the Canadians want to borrow phrases from other countries' current laws, then that should be simply a compliment to the originating country.
I've been working IT professionally for the past fifteen years. I started as a junior level programmer and moved into customer support (outside) doing systems integration as well as programming and configuration. I went for my master's but - due to the fact that I was flying at least twice a week - never finished.
That was 1998. Now - 11 years later - I don't regret not finishing. I am now a departmental-level manager in charge of some 30 staff members and an $8M budget. When I go to hire people I don't really look at their degree. I want to know what they can do and how well they apply themselves.
What I understand is this - a masters works great in academia. My wife is a professor and a teacher (elementary) so she hears about the degrees all the time. My area finds a degree a great starting place but something that loses value after about five years.
In fact, my boss' boss has no college degree. He got the job not because of his degree (or lack thereof) but because of his skills and what had had done previously.
I actually don't even have a CS degree. I have a degree in German with a minor in PolySci. Does it matter? No. Keep in mind that I graduated college in '92, when PC's were still mostly running DOS and most business computers were running either mainframe, unix or VMS.
What are the illegal alien gardeners gonna do for work?
Seriously, my city uses goats asw ell. We loved watchign them crawl over the hillsides to clear the brush. In California, the rain falls from November-ish to April-ish. The open fields and hilsides gets 4-6 feet of grass and weeds. If they're not cleared, they becom fire hazards for the six months of no rain. The goats do a great job clearing and fertalizing. Also, my kids love watching them.
Actually, fifteen years ago, when I was running around installing servers and whatnot, NT was the way to go. Novell ws the evil empire in my circles. They wanted certification on this, didn't want interopriblity on that, and had a my-way-or-the-highway. Even DOS/Win95 seemed okay compared to OS/2 or the Unix offerings.
Now, on to the question at hand. If one looks at the chart it ain't all bad. I really think most people care about OOo 3.x and Office 2007 SP2. In that case, the chart isnt' valid, since 2.4 is the OOo version listed. However, I did like the comment, "Spreadsheet interoperability is not hard. This is not rocket science. Everyone knows what TODAY() means. Everyone knows what =A1+A2 means. To get this wrong requires more effort than getting it right. It is especially frustrating when we know that the underlying applications support the same fundamental formula language, or something very close to it, and are tripped up by lack of namespace coordination. Whether it is accidental or intentional I don't know or care. But I cannot fail to notice that the same application -- Microsoft Excel 2007 -- will process ODF spreadsheet documents without problems when loaded via the Sun or CleverAge plugins, but will miserably fail when using the "improved" integrated code in Office 2007 SP2. This ain't right."
Wierd. I wonder how hard it would be to simply write a document following the standards.
I'll check it out - as soon as my local mirror lets me actually grab an ISO - but it appears from the screenshots to be the same uninspired and unfriendly GNOME interface. Is this actually changed? Do they have a usable file open/save dialog box now that can preview icons?
I've been using openSUSE (with KDE 3.x) for five years now as my primary OS. I recently switched to Vista as I was frustrated with some things in openSUSE/KDE. Maybe I'll try this and also the KUbuntu.
Did that change also? The only mention in the article about KUbuntu is the forthcoming KDE 4.3 release in October with 9.10.
Well, that's not entirely true. Though it is ugly, uninspired and the complete antithesis to user-friendly, GNOME is not limiting. You can run KDE apps in GNOME, you can run X apps and you can even run GNOME apps under KDE. (Just don't try to use the file open/save dialog boxes with any success.)
Honestly, I've been a Linux advocate since - oh - '96 or so, and a linux user fulltime since 2004. However, I've recently just about given up on Desktop Linux at least. I migrated my primary laptop from Linux (openSUSE) to Vista a few weeks back simply because there were too many things not working the way I felt they needed to be.
I could get around most of the constant need for IE by using Crossover Office or IES4Linux. However, more and more sites are requiring IE7 or plugins which don't work in Wine. Running VirtualBox or VMWare works but drags the computer down way too much. (And I could never convince RIM to make a Blackberry desktop program for Linux, in spite of four years of asking them at least monthly. Oh, and neither VirtualBox nor VMWare seems to let me synch my blackberry when running under Linux.)
I might be wrong, but I see the ease of use of Wintendo much more than of Linux, especially for desktops. Yes, it is true that *nix is already in use on embedded devices such as my DSL router, my ethernet router, my son's Didj handheld game system, my wife's TiVO and on our Satellite NAV system in the car. However, there just "seems" to be something missing from the desktop arena.
Since switching the laptop to Vista (after almost two years on openSUSE), I've noticed a few things. First, it never fails to connect to my wireless (WPA encrypted/no SSID broadcast) network at home. Under openSUSE, I would routinely connect instead to my neighbor's network and have serious trouble connecting to mine, unless I went to the CLI and typed in su rcnetwork restart.
Second, I can now finally fill in PDF forms and save teh data. You wouldnt' think this was a big deal, but it is for me. (I'm a PHB.) There is an OSS java program but it would routinely fail for me.
Third, I can actually get on my corporate WAN via the new Juniper web-based VPN. (Yes, I've written to Juniper to ask them not to use ActiveX for this.)
Fourth, flash based and java based web applications work faster and better. Though I use Firefox, I do have IE tab running.
Now, in fairness, I've had my share of issues. After installing Office2007 (only because OOo 3.x doesn't support comments and versions in documents) I started crashing. I even got a few bluescreens. Also, on about every other day, my laptop will simply shut off. I have no idea why.
Will I continue to use Linux? You bet! I have it running on another older laptop, which i use to SSH into my home network from work or whereever. (I have a static IP at home.) I can use this for a proxy or simply to diagnose an issue my wife or kids might be having.
However, I don't see it taking over the desktop anytime soon. Had this question been asked of me two years ago, I woudl have said and emphatic, "yes." However I think that the window of opportunity has slipped by and that the big money - Microshaft and The-Cult-of-Apple - have made it nearly impossible to let better technology succeed.
Mark me down as a troll if you wish, this is simply my $0.02.
(Oh, and I had to read this page in compatibility mode, because IE8 throws too many errors...)
Not trying to be a troll, but I kind of laugh when I see the "OOo benchmarks on various OS" reports. I use openSUSE for the most part and the Go OO version of OpenOffice on both Vista and openSUSE. What I've found interesting is how much faster and more responsive Office 2003 is running either natively or under Crossover Office (which I posted before in the openSUSE mailing lists).
I really like OOo - and especially Go-OO - for it's user interface and nice clean setup, when working in Calc or Text. However, I would like to see some serious speed improvements in starting time, especially for the bundled versions coming with the distros.
..you're right. If you think you can't, you're right.
I manage about fifteen programmers and programmer/analysts. Most have CS degrees, some have CIS degrees. Typically when I hire, I look for someone who has a CS degree and has been doing work on the side. Three of my best guys were ones fresh out of college, who co-wrote a game on the side just for the fun of it.
However, I can say that a CS degree is nothing more than an entry point. (I personally have a PolySci/German degree, but have been programming since I was nine - oh, I'm 40 this year.)
I'd suggest this. Get your CS degree. Go out and find jobs doing stuff in the area or write your own apps either for friends, for a market you think might exist or just because you want to.
When you graduate, you'll have a degree in CS along with a few years of professional-level work to back up your degree. You can then market this either to employers and get paid a salary, market to potential customers and get paid per job, or market in general your skills as a contractor.
I've done all three. Since I have two rugrats, I currently limit myself to working my 50-hour workweek (often at night after they go to bed) and a little work on the side for family.
Sigh.......you mean, the one that leads you eventually to a page stating the following about IE7 support not working...?
IE 7 engine (beta support)
* GIF images are not displayed correct
* Https sites do not work
* Crashes a lot
* Options dialog does not open (see this hack to avoid this problem)
* Flash does not work
* ActiveX does not work
* Cookies does not work
* Few rendering bugs like this
* javascript:alert() does not open
* Find dialog does not open (Ctrl+F)
Slashdot Mirror
"sluggish java"??
.NET.
I've heard this misfound rumor time and again.
Java - when properly written - has been proven to be as fast in file operations, memory access and sequential processing as true "compiled" applications.
The same goes for other JIT languages such as
Though I could think of a ton of jokes - and have already seen a few - my first question is, "why."
.NET 2005 and C#, but we could have just as easily used Java. I'm not trying to say anything about the choice of language or underlying platform.)
:)
I can see the possible benefits of no longer relying on aging cobol programmers. I am often dealing with just this issue as I migrate '70's and '80's era systems off off ADABAS and COBOL. However, why would one want to make a one for one class creation of existing mainframe applications. I honestly remember a few programmers I knew doing this right before they retired back in '05. They took a COBOL/IMS application running on an AS390 and turned it into a HTML/ASP.NET application written in C# with IMS and SQL Server on a z890 in virtual MVS and SLES environments. The screens - web based now - were one for one matching with the previous mainframe screens.
My question then too, was why bother?
I just finished a second project in taking a '80's era mainframe application - this one to track the purchase of vital (birth death marriage) records - from mainframe into an n-tier model. Instead of simply copying the mainframe screens we spent time deciding what worked on the mainframe and what didn't. Some of the mainframe concepts - particularly in the public lookup - were fine. They stayed and became web-based applications. Other items were thrown out the window and completely re-worked into a user-friendly and efficient system. (In this case, we used MS
Having done a similar project for real property records in '07, we learned many lessons and were able to reuse assemblies in the new application. In fact, the entire UI, security, printing, data encapsulation, image import (there are over 160M TIFF files in our system), reporting and cashiering/finance/cash handling subsystems are identical and shared among both applications.
I can see possibly wanting to utilize some classes for back end work but wouldn't it be better to review these individually and decide what is best?
Oh, and we're saving roughly $3M/year in mainframe costs.
(Okay, post finished now to wait for someone to mod me as a troll...)
So, does this mean that the term "band geek" was discovered 35,000 years ago?
I wonder if they wore underwear so that Ogg could give the owner of this flute a wedgie.
At least here in LA County it is extremely complicated.
Given that the law requires us to have a maximum of 1,000 residents per precinct and that ballots must not show the same candidates in the same order on any subsequent precincts, there are a ton of complications. Keep in mind, we have well over 8M potential voters in LA County and 5,000 precincts. (Let's not even get into the fact that we print ballots in eight languages by Federal law.)
In the November election, we counted well over 4,000,000 ballots between about 8:30 PM and 2:00 AM. We have 24 tally machines which each read ballot cards. The tally machines used to be setup to read punch cards, but after the screw up in Florida 2000, they were converted to optical scan. They must be continually calibrated. Since we do not use a vendor for the tally software, I can tell you the programming is quite complex.
The programs are all written in assembler. The tally machines know nothing of the votes, just which bubble (these are IBM cards similar to the ones used in mainframes back in teh '60s and '70s.) is filled in. Each machine must be loaded with the hundreds of possible ballot group layouts so that - when the bubbles are read - it can feed the information to the collector computer. (Which is connected via Token Ring by the way, so it is not on our ethernet network.) The collector computer then simply feeds this information - ballot group, numbers filled in, presents reporting - to the mainframe. This computer then assembles all that and comes out with a running total in any given vote.
So how?
Here's how. One piece of software allows the contests to be generated. (Presidential, city council, county supervisors, Board of education, senatorial, state assembly, state Senate, congressional, propositions, water board....) Then the contests are consolidated as necessary. The precincts (given a TRA - Tax Rate Area) are setup and another software starts doing ballot layout for each of the ballot groups. (We had around 300 ballot groups in November combined with the 5,000 precincts.) The printer prints all this and the ballots are sent via truck to the polling locations on the day before the election. On election day, people come in and vote. (Let's not forget the 700,000 absentee voters in LA County who sent in their votes prior to the election and still ahd to be sorted and counted on election evening - by precinct and ballot group.)
After 8:00 PM, the ballots boxes are brought in (via Sheriff), unsealed, opened, scanned in (to a ballot tracking software) and then sorted by ballot group within a precinct. They are fed into the tally machines and counted.
Just to make sure the tally machines are calibrated, the team runs a "logic and accuracy" test prior to and after the actual counting. The machines' counts are set to zero, a group of ballots are run through and the expected counts should be totaled up.
If any of this process goes wrong, you'll have an error.
Too bad the election terrorists made sure electronic voting was disallowed.
Heh - that's nothing compared to the GPS-enabled cell phones I setup at my previous job. They had each employee tracked as to when they logged in, where they went, and when they went home.
http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/gps/
The cool thing was that a given employee could always turn the phone off and also didn't necessarily need to report to the office to "clock in" as it could be done remotely. This works really well for the maintenance and engineering folks who spent most of their time in the field.
I tend to agree. Cheap insurance. You can even get a pre-paid plan so that said daughter isn't spending way too many hours talking to girlfriends. I have a buddy who utilizes the cell phone for his (17YO) daughter. He's had occasion to need to locate her after she's driven off with friends.
"You are at the store with Denise? Then how come your cell phone puts you across town near Roger's house?"
LOL!
I'm not sure how my comment is flamebait, but I suppose I should have checked out my source material better. I guess I'm just wiped from working on a bibliography (in MLA format) for my eight-year-old last night.
I figured this to be occurring from a Wall Street company. But am surprised to see a British law firm. Of course, it sounds liek the old Shakespeare quote, "he doth protest too much." (I hope that isn't still copyrighted...)
Like I always say (having borrowed the phrase from my former boss), "Why Improvise when you can plagiarize?"
I am surprised this is even newsworthy. If the Canadians want to borrow phrases from other countries' current laws, then that should be simply a compliment to the originating country.
I've been working IT professionally for the past fifteen years. I started as a junior level programmer and moved into customer support (outside) doing systems integration as well as programming and configuration. I went for my master's but - due to the fact that I was flying at least twice a week - never finished.
That was 1998. Now - 11 years later - I don't regret not finishing. I am now a departmental-level manager in charge of some 30 staff members and an $8M budget. When I go to hire people I don't really look at their degree. I want to know what they can do and how well they apply themselves.
What I understand is this - a masters works great in academia. My wife is a professor and a teacher (elementary) so she hears about the degrees all the time. My area finds a degree a great starting place but something that loses value after about five years.
In fact, my boss' boss has no college degree. He got the job not because of his degree (or lack thereof) but because of his skills and what had had done previously.
I actually don't even have a CS degree. I have a degree in German with a minor in PolySci. Does it matter? No. Keep in mind that I graduated college in '92, when PC's were still mostly running DOS and most business computers were running either mainframe, unix or VMS.
I did a quantifiable survey. On my desk, I have two machines running Linux, one machine running Vista and one running XP.
2/4 machines are running Linux.
Therefore, Linux adoption is 50%.
(The margin of error for this survey is +/- 50%)
...hmm, I wonder if it runs on Linux. /ducks!
Seriously, I wonder if there's an image. I have both Apple II and TRS-80 emulators.
First Google shows how to rank pages using pigeon technology. Now they're using goats?
What are the illegal alien gardeners gonna do for work?
Seriously, my city uses goats asw ell. We loved watchign them crawl over the hillsides to clear the brush. In California, the rain falls from November-ish to April-ish. The open fields and hilsides gets 4-6 feet of grass and weeds. If they're not cleared, they becom fire hazards for the six months of no rain. The goats do a great job clearing and fertalizing. Also, my kids love watching them.
Woudn't that be 10100 years ago?
Actually, fifteen years ago, when I was running around installing servers and whatnot, NT was the way to go. Novell ws the evil empire in my circles. They wanted certification on this, didn't want interopriblity on that, and had a my-way-or-the-highway. Even DOS/Win95 seemed okay compared to OS/2 or the Unix offerings.
Now, on to the question at hand. If one looks at the chart it ain't all bad. I really think most people care about OOo 3.x and Office 2007 SP2. In that case, the chart isnt' valid, since 2.4 is the OOo version listed. However, I did like the comment, "Spreadsheet interoperability is not hard. This is not rocket science. Everyone knows what TODAY() means. Everyone knows what =A1+A2 means. To get this wrong requires more effort than getting it right. It is especially frustrating when we know that the underlying applications support the same fundamental formula language, or something very close to it, and are tripped up by lack of namespace coordination. Whether it is accidental or intentional I don't know or care. But I cannot fail to notice that the same application -- Microsoft Excel 2007 -- will process ODF spreadsheet documents without problems when loaded via the Sun or CleverAge plugins, but will miserably fail when using the "improved" integrated code in Office 2007 SP2. This ain't right."
Wierd. I wonder how hard it would be to simply write a document following the standards.
go figure.
I doubt it is hardware. I ran a burn-in test a few weeks prior. It has been running without a hitch for the past week.
I do wish I had even gotten a BSOD, as it would have been easier to diagnose. In my case, the system would just turn off.
Ah well...
I'll check it out - as soon as my local mirror lets me actually grab an ISO - but it appears from the screenshots to be the same uninspired and unfriendly GNOME interface. Is this actually changed? Do they have a usable file open/save dialog box now that can preview icons?
I've been using openSUSE (with KDE 3.x) for five years now as my primary OS. I recently switched to Vista as I was frustrated with some things in openSUSE/KDE. Maybe I'll try this and also the KUbuntu.
Did that change also? The only mention in the article about KUbuntu is the forthcoming KDE 4.3 release in October with 9.10.
Well, that's not entirely true. Though it is ugly, uninspired and the complete antithesis to user-friendly, GNOME is not limiting. You can run KDE apps in GNOME, you can run X apps and you can even run GNOME apps under KDE. (Just don't try to use the file open/save dialog boxes with any success.)
Honestly, I've been a Linux advocate since - oh - '96 or so, and a linux user fulltime since 2004. However, I've recently just about given up on Desktop Linux at least. I migrated my primary laptop from Linux (openSUSE) to Vista a few weeks back simply because there were too many things not working the way I felt they needed to be.
I could get around most of the constant need for IE by using Crossover Office or IES4Linux. However, more and more sites are requiring IE7 or plugins which don't work in Wine. Running VirtualBox or VMWare works but drags the computer down way too much. (And I could never convince RIM to make a Blackberry desktop program for Linux, in spite of four years of asking them at least monthly. Oh, and neither VirtualBox nor VMWare seems to let me synch my blackberry when running under Linux.)
I might be wrong, but I see the ease of use of Wintendo much more than of Linux, especially for desktops. Yes, it is true that *nix is already in use on embedded devices such as my DSL router, my ethernet router, my son's Didj handheld game system, my wife's TiVO and on our Satellite NAV system in the car. However, there just "seems" to be something missing from the desktop arena.
Since switching the laptop to Vista (after almost two years on openSUSE), I've noticed a few things. First, it never fails to connect to my wireless (WPA encrypted/no SSID broadcast) network at home. Under openSUSE, I would routinely connect instead to my neighbor's network and have serious trouble connecting to mine, unless I went to the CLI and typed in su rcnetwork restart.
Second, I can now finally fill in PDF forms and save teh data. You wouldnt' think this was a big deal, but it is for me. (I'm a PHB.) There is an OSS java program but it would routinely fail for me.
Third, I can actually get on my corporate WAN via the new Juniper web-based VPN. (Yes, I've written to Juniper to ask them not to use ActiveX for this.)
Fourth, flash based and java based web applications work faster and better. Though I use Firefox, I do have IE tab running.
Now, in fairness, I've had my share of issues. After installing Office2007 (only because OOo 3.x doesn't support comments and versions in documents) I started crashing. I even got a few bluescreens. Also, on about every other day, my laptop will simply shut off. I have no idea why.
Will I continue to use Linux? You bet! I have it running on another older laptop, which i use to SSH into my home network from work or whereever. (I have a static IP at home.) I can use this for a proxy or simply to diagnose an issue my wife or kids might be having.
However, I don't see it taking over the desktop anytime soon. Had this question been asked of me two years ago, I woudl have said and emphatic, "yes." However I think that the window of opportunity has slipped by and that the big money - Microshaft and The-Cult-of-Apple - have made it nearly impossible to let better technology succeed.
Mark me down as a troll if you wish, this is simply my $0.02.
(Oh, and I had to read this page in compatibility mode, because IE8 throws too many errors...)
Not trying to be a troll, but I kind of laugh when I see the "OOo benchmarks on various OS" reports. I use openSUSE for the most part and the Go OO version of OpenOffice on both Vista and openSUSE. What I've found interesting is how much faster and more responsive Office 2003 is running either natively or under Crossover Office (which I posted before in the openSUSE mailing lists).
I really like OOo - and especially Go-OO - for it's user interface and nice clean setup, when working in Calc or Text. However, I would like to see some serious speed improvements in starting time, especially for the bundled versions coming with the distros.
..you're right. If you think you can't, you're right.
I manage about fifteen programmers and programmer/analysts. Most have CS degrees, some have CIS degrees. Typically when I hire, I look for someone who has a CS degree and has been doing work on the side. Three of my best guys were ones fresh out of college, who co-wrote a game on the side just for the fun of it.
However, I can say that a CS degree is nothing more than an entry point. (I personally have a PolySci/German degree, but have been programming since I was nine - oh, I'm 40 this year.)
I'd suggest this. Get your CS degree. Go out and find jobs doing stuff in the area or write your own apps either for friends, for a market you think might exist or just because you want to.
When you graduate, you'll have a degree in CS along with a few years of professional-level work to back up your degree. You can then market this either to employers and get paid a salary, market to potential customers and get paid per job, or market in general your skills as a contractor.
I've done all three. Since I have two rugrats, I currently limit myself to working my 50-hour workweek (often at night after they go to bed) and a little work on the side for family.
Here's a link to real news, in case anyone though Bradley is a news source...
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gs2WHoM41pW8pDFh-0KIrDnOsqfwD971E2JG0
LOL!!
Sigh... ....you mean, the one that leads you eventually to a page stating the following about IE7 support not working...?
IE 7 engine (beta support)
* GIF images are not displayed correct
* Https sites do not work
* Crashes a lot
* Options dialog does not open (see this hack to avoid this problem)
* Flash does not work
* ActiveX does not work
* Cookies does not work
* Few rendering bugs like this
* javascript:alert() does not open
* Find dialog does not open (Ctrl+F)
AFAIK, ies4linux only covers 6.0 - unless something's changed.
I use it on occasion, particularly when I need to load those evul ActiveX controls, like at work:
http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/2008/20081205_ie6_yoda_ii_ponte.jpg
Oh, no! I got given a flamebait score. Bummer. I was kinda hoping for troll material.
Better luck next time!