You was lucky! We used to dream of using Turbo Pascal Version 2. When I was a kid we didn't get our supper until we had bootstrapped Wirth's original compiler with a Tiny Pascal interpreter we had from an old Byte magazine.
What we need to do is be developing newer, fresher ideas which keep microsoft on their toes
New and fresh ideas are a dime a dozen. I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a new fresh idea that actually works.
I don't need a fully working fresh new idea before I'll evaluate it. But I do want to see a prototype of sorts. I'm not going to go join a cause just because someone had an idea. Show me a prototype so I can actually determine for myself if the idea is workable and usable, and I might just decide to donate my programming skills towards it. But just saying "we need to do something different" isn't going to cut it.
The biggest drawback to offshoring (my company's term) your development and IT is the enormous drain it places on your productivity. Getting two groups from completely different work cultures working together smoothly is a piece of cake compared to keeping your productivity up.
My company laid off software developers with fifteen years experience in a highly specialized medical field, and replaced them with contractors in India. When I was hired I went through an eight hour grueling interview. When I transfered to development, I had to have another eight hour interview. But we sent three managers to India to hire forty workers at a one day job fair. Huh? Everyone talks a lot about the brilliant software engineers in India. They're correct. But what they don't mention is that like Silicon Valley five years ago, they're all already employed so you won't get them.
Our executives think they're oh so smart for offshoring our core development work, and giving themselves raises for their innovation. But our lower level managers are shitting bricks and wondering if the Indian group is even up to the level of writing unit tests. They're guessing it will take at least two years to get the India group as a whole up to the level they need to be.
In the meantime we don't have enough developers here domestically to complete the necessary projects already in the pipeline. If the executives don't wise up, we will be out of business by the time India gets up to speed.
You completely missed the point. Programmers cause security defects, not programming languages. Marketing a language as something "you can't make an error in" is a very dangerous attitude. Yet everytime C, C++ or security is brought up, hordes of slashdorks crawl out of the woodwork hyping their favorite language you can't write errors with.
1) Not all OEM's have an agreement with Microsoft to charge you for Windows whether or not you get it. My prior system came from a company where I had to buy Windows separately if I wanted it. I couldn't buy a Dell this way, but that's only because Dell decided to enter into an agreement with Microsoft.
2) Some of these kinds of agreements forbid selling dual boot systems. But again, they are not universal. Maybe Dell won't sell you such a system, but there are companies that will.
Just a few systems that will sell you Microsoft-free systems: Iron Systems, FreeBSD Systems, and Penguin Computing. One of these even sells laptops and offers dual booting. Those are just three off the top of my head.
I have owned seven systems in my life. Only two came with Microsoft products. The first came with MSDOS 3.3. The other was purchased used. Of the rest, none had any Microsoft "tax" applied to them. I was joking in my earlier post about the "Apple tax". I have never owned an Apple computer. They've all been x86 systems. None have been mail order.
You're absolutely correct! Buffer overflows are the only kind of security hole there is. No one has ever found a security defect in Java, C#, Python or Haskell!
Yeah, halfway through the book I knew that was coming. I could understand him getting through to Nicci, but to start a whole revolution with a statue? Hah!
Frankly I think he's just cranking out the books too fast. The character's were one dimensional, the moral dilemas all black and white, and the societies too contrived. I almost thought for a moment Ayn Rand was still alive and writing fantasy under a pseudonym!
The Sword of Truth series is a good example. I liked "Wizard's First Rule". But damn, we're on like the seventh book of the series now. I tired of reading about how much Richard loves Kahlan! Have Jagang choke on a chicken bone and kill himself, then write something new in a completely different world.
Microsoft would not exist in the way that it does without a particular type of government granted monopoly called - copyright.
Not quite. Although copyrights are government granted monopolies, and the antithesis of free markets, they are not the basis of Microsoft's monopoly.
Go reread the MS EULA. Surprise! It's a EULA! It's not based on copyright law at all. Why? Because it's a EULA! It's a freaking contract! And contracts are fully acceptable in free markets. In a world without copyrights, there would still be contracts. While I think that click-through agreements are inherently bogus, that does not mean that there are other ways to ensure agreement before software use.
So this little thing called "the user agreeing not to copy the software of their own free will" gives Microsoft a monopoly over the operating system known as Windows. But surely it didn't create it's monopoly on the desktop at large? Of course not. There's also the OEM contracts. That did a lot.
There's also the factor known as "the defacto market standard". This is a tough one for geeks to swallow, but essentially it means that the marketplace wants a standard OS, and Windows was in the right place at the right time and at the right price to be it. It might have been Solaris or the Mac, but the price was not right. It might have been OS/2, but it didn't arrive in time and was still pricier than Windows.
Like it or not, Windows achieved its monopoly through the free market.
Well, I for one consider ISo communist. But NOT because it's European. It's because it can only be the result of a plot designed to attack western capitalism at its foundation.
Only an insidious communist conspiracy could cause successful corporations to abandon all productivity in favor of the mindless paper shuffling that is ISO compliance.
Ever wonder why it took two decades to get an ISO standard for C++? It's because the actual programmers on the committe kept dying of violent boredom.
Sigh. There's a reason why people buy SUV's, and it's not because they want to suck up gas. It's because most of them have families and need a lot of passenger room and cargo capacity.
It used to be huge station wagons sucking up the gas. Then it was vans. Now it's SUV's. It will change again. I personally think it's silly to buy an 4WD SUV when you never ever plan to leave the city, but it's still a heck of a lot better then a Honda Civic when you have four soccer playing children and labrador retriever.
p.s. I was stuck behind an aging Toyota Corolla the other day at the stop light. It has bumper stickers talking about honking for whales, hugging trees, voting for Gore and Davis, and one that said "f*ck SUVs". The Toyota was dripping oil and emitting noxious blue smoke. But it was okay because he cared about the environment...
If you'd read the patent, you'd see it actually covers "placing an order over a with one press of a button".
Just reading the abstract one can easily see that it's more than just that. It's a patent on a specific business method involving tracking the customer information though the purchase process in a specific way. There are a lot of details covered in the body of the patent. In many ways, it's a "weak" patent because it can be so easily bypassed that no one with a clue need ever pay royalties.
Don't get me wrong, I think this patent sucks and sucks big time. But it's not a patent on "one click shopping". Although the USPTO might be more than happy to rubber stamp such a vague invention, any company knows that filing one is tantamount to declaring war. It guarantees the surfacing of a whole fleets of "submarine" patents owned by their competitors.
Then blame your boss for making you buy a Dell out of your own pocket. At my work I'm forced to use a Dell also, but it was the company that paid for it, not me. If a company wants to pay the Microsoft "tax", then that's their concern, not mine.
The "one click shopping" patent is so misunderstood that it's entering the realm of myth. The patent was NOT "one click shopping". I brought up that phrase during a meeting with an experienced patent attorney in the field of software, and I walked out of that room with half my butt chewed off, and a greater understanding of the patent process.
Patent attorneys dislike the USPTO every bit as much as geeks do. Although he made it clear to me that he feels that USPTO is manned by drunken monkeys with rubber stamps, he also made it clear that "one click shopping" was a solid patent that had been grossly mischaracterized by the media. Never let a cheapass marketing phrase get anywhere near a patent.
That's part of the *title* of the patent, not the patent itself. The patent will be more specific than that, and will typically cover one or more specific implementations.
By specifying "x86 architecture", your artificially limiting the marketplace. You might as well artificially limit that marketplace to Dell, then whine about the "Intel tax" since Dell doesn't offer AMD chips.
The actual marketplace is not "x86 architecture", but "laptops with office productivity and networking functionality". In such a market, Apple and Sun notebooks are viable options.
But to stop your whining, I'll tell you about one Windows-free x86 architecture laptop. There are many many more. eRacks
But be sure you can prove that you were FORCED to buy that product.
I have owned five computers in my life. The latest one is only one month old. I have never paid a Microsoft "tax". Methinks the poster just doesn't know how to buy a computer.
I'm wavering a bit on this issue. When you make your personal website publicly accessible, shouldn't you expect some of your personal information to be publicly accessible as well?
After all, when you get a telephone, your name and (new) phone number gets listed in the phone book for all to see. Merely listing a phone number in a phone book without the corresponding name is absurd.
You can of course, choose to keep your phone number unlisted, and give it only to your friends and relatives. Well, you can do the same thing with your website! Don't list it in WHOIS. Give your friends and family your static IP address and you never have to worry about a thing.
Okay, I'm going to be the old fart and piss all over this idea.
Other than the eye-candy factor, what does this give anyone? With a *true* 3D screen, CAD and medical imaging applications would really benefit. But everything else would be visual masturbation.
At least until we get 3D media. That's one of the two major problems. All of our media today is 2D. Our text documents are 2D. Our photos are 2D. Our quicktime movies are 2D. Maybe when we get 3D cameras and hollywood starts giving us 3D movies that do more than explore the boundaries of cheese, it might be different. But even then, 3D images are still static in that you can't rotate them beyond a few degrees.
What about the actual work you and I do on our systems? I've heard a lot of people ruminate on 3D user interfaces. I think they're smoking crack. Yes, there's a lot of really cool eye-candy stuff you can get. But what about real usability? Programming the innards of a 3D spreadsheet would be a piece of cake. In essence, they already are. Programming the UI of a 3D spreadsheet would be a nightmare though. Can you imagine a usable 3D spreadsheet? Wouldn't today's 2D sheets stacked in z-order be incredibly more usable?
The other major problem is the monitor itself. No matter how much you don't want it to be so, the monitor is still a 2D veiwport. Back when the primary output device of a computer was a 1D stream of text on a teletype or printer, line editors were king. But the 2D screen editor happened very shortly after the 2D monitor arrived. But there's no 3D monitor out there, so trying to put 3D data on a 2D monitor is as silly as running a 2D screen editor on a daisywheel printer terminal.
Some other posts have mentioned the Star Wars chessboard. That's what we need before we go to true 3D interfaces: a true 3D display. Not a 2D viewport into a 3D world, but an actual 3D world we can walk around. That Star Wars chessboard might as well be 2D if your head is rigidly locked into a single position. All it gains you is depth perception.
I fully expect 3D to become the norm as soon as we dump the monitor viewport for a real 3D desktop (that is literally a desktop), and start using more 3D data. In the mean time the current z-order paradigm of 2D images on a stack will rule. We might add some eye-candy to it, but it's still going to be 2D.
Reading the XFree86 documentation, it was rather pessimistic about 3D performance. Not that that's my overriding concern, but I really wanted something more than outdated crippleware.
I like Matrox, but dammit you just can't find them in the market anymore. Have they gone mail-order only?
Slashdot Mirror
You was lucky! We used to dream of using Turbo Pascal Version 2. When I was a kid we didn't get our supper until we had bootstrapped Wirth's original compiler with a Tiny Pascal interpreter we had from an old Byte magazine.
What we need to do is be developing newer, fresher ideas which keep microsoft on their toes
New and fresh ideas are a dime a dozen. I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a new fresh idea that actually works.
I don't need a fully working fresh new idea before I'll evaluate it. But I do want to see a prototype of sorts. I'm not going to go join a cause just because someone had an idea. Show me a prototype so I can actually determine for myself if the idea is workable and usable, and I might just decide to donate my programming skills towards it. But just saying "we need to do something different" isn't going to cut it.
The biggest drawback to offshoring (my company's term) your development and IT is the enormous drain it places on your productivity. Getting two groups from completely different work cultures working together smoothly is a piece of cake compared to keeping your productivity up.
My company laid off software developers with fifteen years experience in a highly specialized medical field, and replaced them with contractors in India. When I was hired I went through an eight hour grueling interview. When I transfered to development, I had to have another eight hour interview. But we sent three managers to India to hire forty workers at a one day job fair. Huh? Everyone talks a lot about the brilliant software engineers in India. They're correct. But what they don't mention is that like Silicon Valley five years ago, they're all already employed so you won't get them.
Our executives think they're oh so smart for offshoring our core development work, and giving themselves raises for their innovation. But our lower level managers are shitting bricks and wondering if the Indian group is even up to the level of writing unit tests. They're guessing it will take at least two years to get the India group as a whole up to the level they need to be.
In the meantime we don't have enough developers here domestically to complete the necessary projects already in the pipeline. If the executives don't wise up, we will be out of business by the time India gets up to speed.
You completely missed the point. Programmers cause security defects, not programming languages. Marketing a language as something "you can't make an error in" is a very dangerous attitude. Yet everytime C, C++ or security is brought up, hordes of slashdorks crawl out of the woodwork hyping their favorite language you can't write errors with.
1) Not all OEM's have an agreement with Microsoft to charge you for Windows whether or not you get it. My prior system came from a company where I had to buy Windows separately if I wanted it. I couldn't buy a Dell this way, but that's only because Dell decided to enter into an agreement with Microsoft.
2) Some of these kinds of agreements forbid selling dual boot systems. But again, they are not universal. Maybe Dell won't sell you such a system, but there are companies that will.
Just a few systems that will sell you Microsoft-free systems: Iron Systems, FreeBSD Systems, and Penguin Computing. One of these even sells laptops and offers dual booting. Those are just three off the top of my head.
I have owned seven systems in my life. Only two came with Microsoft products. The first came with MSDOS 3.3. The other was purchased used. Of the rest, none had any Microsoft "tax" applied to them. I was joking in my earlier post about the "Apple tax". I have never owned an Apple computer. They've all been x86 systems. None have been mail order.
You're absolutely correct! Buffer overflows are the only kind of security hole there is. No one has ever found a security defect in Java, C#, Python or Haskell!
Don't forget Ruby. It's a lot closer to the market C# is targetting.
The fact so many people consider the expression "the Microsoft tax" natural and valid says something.
What it says is that so many people are stupid.
Yeah, go mod me down. I'm so depressed after paying the "Apple tax" on my new Mac that I just don't care anymore.
Yeah, halfway through the book I knew that was coming. I could understand him getting through to Nicci, but to start a whole revolution with a statue? Hah!
Frankly I think he's just cranking out the books too fast. The character's were one dimensional, the moral dilemas all black and white, and the societies too contrived. I almost thought for a moment Ayn Rand was still alive and writing fantasy under a pseudonym!
Probably not, but they had universities when the anglo-saxons were still living in grass huts.
Funny thing about Chinese civilization. The quickly reached their peak, then stayed there ossified for the next 1500 years.
The Sword of Truth series is a good example. I liked "Wizard's First Rule". But damn, we're on like the seventh book of the series now. I tired of reading about how much Richard loves Kahlan! Have Jagang choke on a chicken bone and kill himself, then write something new in a completely different world.
Microsoft would not exist in the way that it does without a particular type of government granted monopoly called - copyright.
Not quite. Although copyrights are government granted monopolies, and the antithesis of free markets, they are not the basis of Microsoft's monopoly.
Go reread the MS EULA. Surprise! It's a EULA! It's not based on copyright law at all. Why? Because it's a EULA! It's a freaking contract! And contracts are fully acceptable in free markets. In a world without copyrights, there would still be contracts. While I think that click-through agreements are inherently bogus, that does not mean that there are other ways to ensure agreement before software use.
So this little thing called "the user agreeing not to copy the software of their own free will" gives Microsoft a monopoly over the operating system known as Windows. But surely it didn't create it's monopoly on the desktop at large? Of course not. There's also the OEM contracts. That did a lot.
There's also the factor known as "the defacto market standard". This is a tough one for geeks to swallow, but essentially it means that the marketplace wants a standard OS, and Windows was in the right place at the right time and at the right price to be it. It might have been Solaris or the Mac, but the price was not right. It might have been OS/2, but it didn't arrive in time and was still pricier than Windows.
Like it or not, Windows achieved its monopoly through the free market.
even PHBs would find it easy to understand
Hee, hee!
Moi: This patent will make Mozilla illegal.
Boss: I don't understand. I'll have to schedule a meeting with the IP guys sometime next year.
Moi: This patent makes Internet Explorer illegal.
Boss: Horrors! I'll get the lawyers digging for prior art right now!
Well, I for one consider ISo communist. But NOT because it's European. It's because it can only be the result of a plot designed to attack western capitalism at its foundation.
Only an insidious communist conspiracy could cause successful corporations to abandon all productivity in favor of the mindless paper shuffling that is ISO compliance.
Ever wonder why it took two decades to get an ISO standard for C++? It's because the actual programmers on the committe kept dying of violent boredom.
Sigh. There's a reason why people buy SUV's, and it's not because they want to suck up gas. It's because most of them have families and need a lot of passenger room and cargo capacity.
It used to be huge station wagons sucking up the gas. Then it was vans. Now it's SUV's. It will change again. I personally think it's silly to buy an 4WD SUV when you never ever plan to leave the city, but it's still a heck of a lot better then a Honda Civic when you have four soccer playing children and labrador retriever.
p.s. I was stuck behind an aging Toyota Corolla the other day at the stop light. It has bumper stickers talking about honking for whales, hugging trees, voting for Gore and Davis, and one that said "f*ck SUVs". The Toyota was dripping oil and emitting noxious blue smoke. But it was okay because he cared about the environment...
If you'd read the patent, you'd see it actually covers "placing an order over a with one press of a button".
Just reading the abstract one can easily see that it's more than just that. It's a patent on a specific business method involving tracking the customer information though the purchase process in a specific way. There are a lot of details covered in the body of the patent. In many ways, it's a "weak" patent because it can be so easily bypassed that no one with a clue need ever pay royalties.
Don't get me wrong, I think this patent sucks and sucks big time. But it's not a patent on "one click shopping". Although the USPTO might be more than happy to rubber stamp such a vague invention, any company knows that filing one is tantamount to declaring war. It guarantees the surfacing of a whole fleets of "submarine" patents owned by their competitors.
Then blame your boss for making you buy a Dell out of your own pocket. At my work I'm forced to use a Dell also, but it was the company that paid for it, not me. If a company wants to pay the Microsoft "tax", then that's their concern, not mine.
The "one click shopping" patent is so misunderstood that it's entering the realm of myth. The patent was NOT "one click shopping". I brought up that phrase during a meeting with an experienced patent attorney in the field of software, and I walked out of that room with half my butt chewed off, and a greater understanding of the patent process.
Patent attorneys dislike the USPTO every bit as much as geeks do. Although he made it clear to me that he feels that USPTO is manned by drunken monkeys with rubber stamps, he also made it clear that "one click shopping" was a solid patent that had been grossly mischaracterized by the media. Never let a cheapass marketing phrase get anywhere near a patent.
That's part of the *title* of the patent, not the patent itself. The patent will be more specific than that, and will typically cover one or more specific implementations.
Debian is 100% Free software. And they don't have an annual begging campaign to get there.
That's good. You ought to petition that as the new Debian motto.
By specifying "x86 architecture", your artificially limiting the marketplace. You might as well artificially limit that marketplace to Dell, then whine about the "Intel tax" since Dell doesn't offer AMD chips.
The actual marketplace is not "x86 architecture", but "laptops with office productivity and networking functionality". In such a market, Apple and Sun notebooks are viable options.
But to stop your whining, I'll tell you about one Windows-free x86 architecture laptop. There are many many more. eRacks
But be sure you can prove that you were FORCED to buy that product.
I have owned five computers in my life. The latest one is only one month old. I have never paid a Microsoft "tax". Methinks the poster just doesn't know how to buy a computer.
I'm wavering a bit on this issue. When you make your personal website publicly accessible, shouldn't you expect some of your personal information to be publicly accessible as well?
After all, when you get a telephone, your name and (new) phone number gets listed in the phone book for all to see. Merely listing a phone number in a phone book without the corresponding name is absurd.
You can of course, choose to keep your phone number unlisted, and give it only to your friends and relatives. Well, you can do the same thing with your website! Don't list it in WHOIS. Give your friends and family your static IP address and you never have to worry about a thing.
Okay, I'm going to be the old fart and piss all over this idea.
Other than the eye-candy factor, what does this give anyone? With a *true* 3D screen, CAD and medical imaging applications would really benefit. But everything else would be visual masturbation.
At least until we get 3D media. That's one of the two major problems. All of our media today is 2D. Our text documents are 2D. Our photos are 2D. Our quicktime movies are 2D. Maybe when we get 3D cameras and hollywood starts giving us 3D movies that do more than explore the boundaries of cheese, it might be different. But even then, 3D images are still static in that you can't rotate them beyond a few degrees.
What about the actual work you and I do on our systems? I've heard a lot of people ruminate on 3D user interfaces. I think they're smoking crack. Yes, there's a lot of really cool eye-candy stuff you can get. But what about real usability? Programming the innards of a 3D spreadsheet would be a piece of cake. In essence, they already are. Programming the UI of a 3D spreadsheet would be a nightmare though. Can you imagine a usable 3D spreadsheet? Wouldn't today's 2D sheets stacked in z-order be incredibly more usable?
The other major problem is the monitor itself. No matter how much you don't want it to be so, the monitor is still a 2D veiwport. Back when the primary output device of a computer was a 1D stream of text on a teletype or printer, line editors were king. But the 2D screen editor happened very shortly after the 2D monitor arrived. But there's no 3D monitor out there, so trying to put 3D data on a 2D monitor is as silly as running a 2D screen editor on a daisywheel printer terminal.
Some other posts have mentioned the Star Wars chessboard. That's what we need before we go to true 3D interfaces: a true 3D display. Not a 2D viewport into a 3D world, but an actual 3D world we can walk around. That Star Wars chessboard might as well be 2D if your head is rigidly locked into a single position. All it gains you is depth perception.
I fully expect 3D to become the norm as soon as we dump the monitor viewport for a real 3D desktop (that is literally a desktop), and start using more 3D data. In the mean time the current z-order paradigm of 2D images on a stack will rule. We might add some eye-candy to it, but it's still going to be 2D.
Reading the XFree86 documentation, it was rather pessimistic about 3D performance. Not that that's my overriding concern, but I really wanted something more than outdated crippleware.
I like Matrox, but dammit you just can't find them in the market anymore. Have they gone mail-order only?