I don't think we can tell from this article whose fault this is. If Microsoft really did lock down their changes several months ago and documented them properly, it is Blackboard's fault not to have adapted. On the other hand, if Microsoft has kept changing things, has failed to document the API properly, or has failed to see to it that their code actually conforms to the documentation, it is Microsoft's fault.
As far as I can tell, the exclusion of support for Linux is not disclosed prior to sale. If it isn't, it looks to me like a breach of contract by HP. Furthermore, if the exclusion is disclosed prior to sale, it is probably enforceable to the extent that the OS you run is reasonably related to their ability to repair it, e.g. cases where they need to run diagnostics that run only under MS Windows, but a blanket exclusion that applies even to things that have nothing to do with the OS, e.g. bits that have broken off, visibly cracked boards, defective keyboards, blown power supplies, etc. is unreasonable and, I conjecture, unenforceable. I'd love to see what a lawyer thinks of this.
On another point, several people have suggested restoring MS Windows temporarily to get HP to repair the machine. The last two machines I bought from HP, one a laptop, one a desktop, did not have restore CDs. They had a "hidden partition" on the hard drive. If the hard drive fails or you lose access to it, there is no way to restore MS windows short of buying it separately at considerable expense. My understanding is that all HP machines are provided without restore CDs. Is this incorrect?
(By the way, you do realize that these aren't really downsides of using OO, right? OO is designed as an interactive office suite, not a document conversion filter. Criticising it for not filtering well is sort of like complaining that your pigs can't fly very far.)
This is true only if you consider it good design to focus on the GUI and build the
functionality around it, in which case it can be very difficult to separate the functionality from the GUI. There are some applications for which it makes no sense not to use the GUI, but those are pretty rare. A word processor, for example, overlaps to a considerable extent with a document transformer, so it makes a lot of sense to be able to get at the functionality without the GUI.
The classical Unix view, which I would advocate, is that you separate the functionality from the GUI so that the GUI just serves as one possible interface. Then you can run from the command line or a shell script or as a child process of another program if you want to.
To note but one example, GNU emacs, which is almost always used with a GUI (even if one
types into it a lot - it isn't running as a command-line program) can be run in batch
mode without the GUI. I have actually done this - I have run emacs as a daughter of a Tcl program as a filter to which the parent program passes data and an elisp program to execute.
From this point of view, complaining about the inability to run without X11 is more like
complaining that your ducks can fly and swim but not walk than complaining that pigs can't fly.
Statistics and spreadsheet usage are sufficiently different that even if you are familiar with Excel or Calc as spreadsheets, that in itself doesn't yield familiarity with the statistical functions. R is not that different from other programs for doing statistics and scientific graphics, so if people have any sort of background in those areas, they shouldn't need to learn a lot to use R. Are intro stat courses using Excel? I find that hard to believe given the
criticism I've heard of Excel from statisticians.
I'm curious why so many people are concerned with the ability of calc to do statistics. Is this just a carryover from the MS Windows world where Excel seems to be used for all sorts of things it isn't well suited for? Why not do your stats in R, which is much more powerful than Calc or Excel?
I desperately want to know how to disable Java and speed up OO, and I bet I'm not alone.
Could you please explain or post a pointer to instructions? Thanks.
It's true that in many contexts strcat is not very efficient, but the GNU extension stpcpy addresses this problem. Indeed, the example in the manual entry is of using stpcpy to implement a more efficient strcat().
Moreover, there is absolutely no need to use assembly language either to understand this or to write it. Indeed, I wrote my own version of stpcpy (actually, the wide character version wcpcpy) in just a minute recently for portability to non-GNU environments, in C.
I agree that some knowledge of assembly language is useful for understanding what is going on at the lowest levels, but this is not an example of the utility of knowledge of assembly language.
I think you've swapped Dershowitz and Said. Said's academic claim to fame was his stupid book on Orientalism, which revealed his ignorance of the history and scholarship of the Arab world.
His political claim to fame was his defense of terrorism and bigotry. Dershowitz on the other hand is a distinguished civil libertarian as well as one who has told the truth about Arab bigotry and terrorism and has defended the only free, democratic country in the Middle East.
Nader is a curious case. He did indeed do some great work in exposing corporate misbehaviour,
but I lost respect for him when his hopeless runs for President took votes away from the Democratic candidates that might have saved us from Bush.
BNF is a useful notation, but it is just a notation for context-free grammars,
which had already been developed and whose properties were already understood.
Chomsky described the Chomsky hierarchy of formal languages, including
context-free languages (type 2), in 1956, three years before Backus introduced a primitive version of BNF in describing what became Algol 58. The basic ideas came from mathematical logic and linguistics. Backus' role was to introduce these ideas to the specification of computer languages, ironically in part in reaction to the problem of specifying Fortran, which is not context-free.
I also use FLAC. One point to note is that the compression ratio varies considerably with the type of material compressed. I've posted comparisons of algorithms using linguistic field recordings rather than music here.
For my material, the greatest compression was achieved by Lossless Audio, but the increment is not that great, and the time for both compression and decompression is much greater.
In addition to the fact that many Indians are not as urbane, tolerant, and well-educated as those one encounters in the US, one has to take into account the fact that India is much more diverse ethnically and religiously than the United States, and that many potentially hostile groups live in close proximity. While I don't agree with such censorship, I can understand the desire of the Indian government to keep everybody happy and avoid bloodshed.
I'm curious why you think that. I had just the opposite reaction. It seems too obvious to be patentable. It is analagous to location systems in use on land and in the air, the only difference being that you use a signal that passes through water with little distortion, namely sonar, instead of one that doesn't, such as RF.
Why is this a unique, non-obvious, innovation?
Whenever I hear about managers anxiety about their code
becoming contaminated with open source, I wonder whether they
really shouldn't be more concerned about a different source
of contamination, namely the toolkits that so many (most?)
programmers carry with them from job to job. It seems like
just about everyone has a stash of code useful code from past work
that he or she draws on instead of reimplementing from scratch.
Some of this code may have been copied out of a textbook,
journal article, or web page; some of it may be hobby code; some of it may
have been written for a project for a previous employer. I suspect
that a lot of proprietary code is contaminated with functions that
technically belong to the company for which they were first written or
to the author or publisher of the source from which they were copied.
I wonder if this kind of contamination shouldn't be as much of an issue
as concern about open source. As far as I know, no one has gotten bitten
by this.
Extended wouldn't be abbreviated that way
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 1
I've used Unix since 1982 and I've always understood it to be "et cetera", pronounced
et-cee. "extended tool chest" is out of the question. If that were the meaning, it would
have been abbreviated "xtc", not "etc".
Uh, actually, this program doesn't do the right thing. Surely the right thing to do is not to delete the files but to remove Randall's name from them. Some people deserve to be on those lists.
You've missed the point. The GP is correctly pointing out that the OP's usage was correct for his New Zealand dialect and that the GGP was wrong to whine about it. Sure, the usage "different to" is unfamiliar to Americans and therefore strikes them as odd, but that hardly justifies the assumption that a New Zealander is wrong to use it. What is wrong here is the GGP's
assumption that there is a single "correct English grammar" from which all deviations are wrong.
You appear to be correct that SQL server is profitable.
I note, however, that the figures you cite are consistent with what I said is reported (the big moneymakers are the ones I cited and two of the five divisions are losing money), and they don't in any way refute my statement as to what is widely reported. Here, for example, is a report of the type that I mentioned, which is the first hit returned by Google on "Microsoft profit breakdown Office Windows". You will of course note that I indicated that I didn't know whether the reports were true. Don't be so quick to criticize.
I didn't mean to suggest that she is my ideal of feminine beauty, merely that, for those of us who are straight men, Condi is the most attractive of the plausible candidates. There are only two women as far as I know.
In case anyone didn't get it, my post was meant to be humorous. If the candidates were computer geeks, their choice of website host might be a factor in my decision whom to support, but even then it would be one of many issues. To use this as a criterion for deciding among non-geeks is just silly. They probably have no idea what OS their website host is running or what the issues are.
It is widely reported that Microsoft makes its money on Windows and Office. The other products earn little or even lose money. If this is true, it may make sense for Microsoft to attract people to Windows or keep them using Windows, by supporting PostgresSQL, even if it reduces their sales of their own database.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think we can tell from this article whose fault this is. If Microsoft really did lock down their changes several months ago and documented them properly, it is Blackboard's fault not to have adapted. On the other hand, if Microsoft has kept changing things, has failed to document the API properly, or has failed to see to it that their code actually conforms to the documentation, it is Microsoft's fault.
As far as I can tell, the exclusion of support for Linux is not disclosed prior to sale. If it isn't, it looks to me like a breach of contract by HP. Furthermore, if the exclusion is disclosed prior to sale, it is probably enforceable to the extent that the OS you run is reasonably related to their ability to repair it, e.g. cases where they need to run diagnostics that run only under MS Windows, but a blanket exclusion that applies even to things that have nothing to do with the OS, e.g. bits that have broken off, visibly cracked boards, defective keyboards, blown power supplies, etc. is unreasonable and, I conjecture, unenforceable. I'd love to see what a lawyer thinks of this.
On another point, several people have suggested restoring MS Windows temporarily to get HP to repair the machine. The last two machines I bought from HP, one a laptop, one a desktop, did not have restore CDs. They had a "hidden partition" on the hard drive. If the hard drive fails or you lose access to it, there is no way to restore MS windows short of buying it separately at considerable expense. My understanding is that all HP machines are provided without restore CDs. Is this incorrect?
This is true only if you consider it good design to focus on the GUI and build the functionality around it, in which case it can be very difficult to separate the functionality from the GUI. There are some applications for which it makes no sense not to use the GUI, but those are pretty rare. A word processor, for example, overlaps to a considerable extent with a document transformer, so it makes a lot of sense to be able to get at the functionality without the GUI.
The classical Unix view, which I would advocate, is that you separate the functionality from the GUI so that the GUI just serves as one possible interface. Then you can run from the command line or a shell script or as a child process of another program if you want to. To note but one example, GNU emacs, which is almost always used with a GUI (even if one types into it a lot - it isn't running as a command-line program) can be run in batch mode without the GUI. I have actually done this - I have run emacs as a daughter of a Tcl program as a filter to which the parent program passes data and an elisp program to execute. From this point of view, complaining about the inability to run without X11 is more like complaining that your ducks can fly and swim but not walk than complaining that pigs can't fly.
Statistics and spreadsheet usage are sufficiently different that even if you are familiar with Excel or Calc as spreadsheets, that in itself doesn't yield familiarity with the statistical functions. R is not that different from other programs for doing statistics and scientific graphics, so if people have any sort of background in those areas, they shouldn't need to learn a lot to use R. Are intro stat courses using Excel? I find that hard to believe given the criticism I've heard of Excel from statisticians.
I'm curious why so many people are concerned with the ability of calc to do statistics. Is this just a carryover from the MS Windows world where Excel seems to be used for all sorts of things it isn't well suited for? Why not do your stats in R, which is much more powerful than Calc or Excel?
I desperately want to know how to disable Java and speed up OO, and I bet I'm not alone. Could you please explain or post a pointer to instructions? Thanks.
Actually, wcpcpy is a GNU extension but stpcpy is not. stpcpy is not in the ANSI or POSIX standards, but originated somewhere other than GNU.
It's true that in many contexts strcat is not very efficient, but the GNU extension stpcpy addresses this problem. Indeed, the example in the manual entry is of using stpcpy to implement a more efficient strcat(). Moreover, there is absolutely no need to use assembly language either to understand this or to write it. Indeed, I wrote my own version of stpcpy (actually, the wide character version wcpcpy) in just a minute recently for portability to non-GNU environments, in C.
I agree that some knowledge of assembly language is useful for understanding what is going on at the lowest levels, but this is not an example of the utility of knowledge of assembly language.
I think you've swapped Dershowitz and Said. Said's academic claim to fame was his stupid book on Orientalism, which revealed his ignorance of the history and scholarship of the Arab world. His political claim to fame was his defense of terrorism and bigotry. Dershowitz on the other hand is a distinguished civil libertarian as well as one who has told the truth about Arab bigotry and terrorism and has defended the only free, democratic country in the Middle East.
Nader is a curious case. He did indeed do some great work in exposing corporate misbehaviour, but I lost respect for him when his hopeless runs for President took votes away from the Democratic candidates that might have saved us from Bush.
BNF is a useful notation, but it is just a notation for context-free grammars, which had already been developed and whose properties were already understood. Chomsky described the Chomsky hierarchy of formal languages, including context-free languages (type 2), in 1956, three years before Backus introduced a primitive version of BNF in describing what became Algol 58. The basic ideas came from mathematical logic and linguistics. Backus' role was to introduce these ideas to the specification of computer languages, ironically in part in reaction to the problem of specifying Fortran, which is not context-free.
I also use FLAC. One point to note is that the compression ratio varies considerably with the type of material compressed. I've posted comparisons of algorithms using linguistic field recordings rather than music here. For my material, the greatest compression was achieved by Lossless Audio, but the increment is not that great, and the time for both compression and decompression is much greater.
In addition to the fact that many Indians are not as urbane, tolerant, and well-educated as those one encounters in the US, one has to take into account the fact that India is much more diverse ethnically and religiously than the United States, and that many potentially hostile groups live in close proximity. While I don't agree with such censorship, I can understand the desire of the Indian government to keep everybody happy and avoid bloodshed.
17th century, actually: 1680.
I'm stunned at the absence of rogue.
I'm curious why you think that. I had just the opposite reaction. It seems too obvious to be patentable. It is analagous to location systems in use on land and in the air, the only difference being that you use a signal that passes through water with little distortion, namely sonar, instead of one that doesn't, such as RF. Why is this a unique, non-obvious, innovation?
And what exactly are they protecting their evidence from? It's not like it is going to go up in a puff of smoke once someone sees it.
Whenever I hear about managers anxiety about their code becoming contaminated with open source, I wonder whether they really shouldn't be more concerned about a different source of contamination, namely the toolkits that so many (most?) programmers carry with them from job to job. It seems like just about everyone has a stash of code useful code from past work that he or she draws on instead of reimplementing from scratch. Some of this code may have been copied out of a textbook, journal article, or web page; some of it may be hobby code; some of it may have been written for a project for a previous employer. I suspect that a lot of proprietary code is contaminated with functions that technically belong to the company for which they were first written or to the author or publisher of the source from which they were copied. I wonder if this kind of contamination shouldn't be as much of an issue as concern about open source. As far as I know, no one has gotten bitten by this.
I've used Unix since 1982 and I've always understood it to be "et cetera", pronounced et-cee. "extended tool chest" is out of the question. If that were the meaning, it would have been abbreviated "xtc", not "etc".
Uh, actually, this program doesn't do the right thing. Surely the right thing to do is not to delete the files but to remove Randall's name from them. Some people deserve to be on those lists.
You've missed the point. The GP is correctly pointing out that the OP's usage was correct for his New Zealand dialect and that the GGP was wrong to whine about it. Sure, the usage "different to" is unfamiliar to Americans and therefore strikes them as odd, but that hardly justifies the assumption that a New Zealander is wrong to use it. What is wrong here is the GGP's assumption that there is a single "correct English grammar" from which all deviations are wrong.
You appear to be correct that SQL server is profitable. I note, however, that the figures you cite are consistent with what I said is reported (the big moneymakers are the ones I cited and two of the five divisions are losing money), and they don't in any way refute my statement as to what is widely reported. Here, for example, is a report of the type that I mentioned, which is the first hit returned by Google on "Microsoft profit breakdown Office Windows". You will of course note that I indicated that I didn't know whether the reports were true. Don't be so quick to criticize.
Interesting. Do you know of a publication of the algorithm? Google yields many hits for the company but apparently none for the algorithm.
I didn't mean to suggest that she is my ideal of feminine beauty, merely that, for those of us who are straight men, Condi is the most attractive of the plausible candidates. There are only two women as far as I know.
In case anyone didn't get it, my post was meant to be humorous. If the candidates were computer geeks, their choice of website host might be a factor in my decision whom to support, but even then it would be one of many issues. To use this as a criterion for deciding among non-geeks is just silly. They probably have no idea what OS their website host is running or what the issues are.
It is widely reported that Microsoft makes its money on Windows and Office. The other products earn little or even lose money. If this is true, it may make sense for Microsoft to attract people to Windows or keep them using Windows, by supporting PostgresSQL, even if it reduces their sales of their own database.
If cuteness is the standard, barring the entry of an unknown, it looks like Condi will be the next President.