Yes, Windows was so poorly architectured. I mean, what bafoon decided that a process should ever be able to listen to the keyboard. And who was the moron that thought running more then one process at a time was a good idea. I tell you what, if I couldn't type on my keyboard, then no one would have made a key listener. And if I could only run a single process at a time, then I'd be able to immediately know if something I didn't like was running.
I'm not even sure where to start:
a process that listens to the keyboard... well, that's certainly been around for a long time, and to my point of poor architecture, it isn't what I was referencing. Not even sure what you mean by that.
bafoon? (emphasis mine)... So are you talking about a baboon, or a buffoon. I guess the difference my be nuanced so if you can't figure it out, that's okay.
multiple processes running at the same time... again, certainly not what I was talking about. Multiple process machines have been around for a long time, and Microsoft finally jumped into the 80's with their true pre-emptive multi-process system (would be nice if they could provide multi-user).
making things easier to use... well, there's a difference for making things easier to use, and making reasonable security and "partitioning" architecture choices. You could make a car so easy to use you just hop in and push the gas pedal and it goes! Most car manufacturers provide a key to make that a little more difficult for any people other than the owner. Go figure.
First, Microsoft is announcing this anti-spyware will be
free. I'm wondering how could they charge for it? Spyware
basically is malware takes advantage of a poorly architected
Windows environment, n'est-ce pas? I would think it unseemly to
manufacture a product that has deficiencies, then sell a product
to protect against those deficiencies. (Oh, you want air
in those tires? We have an addon, called valve-stems which, for
now, we're offering for free.)
And I know some claim this isn't Microsoft's fault that
spyware happens, but it really mostly is. They designed Windows
to be as easy and automatic to use as possible, which really is
the gateway for much of the malware wreaking computer havoc.
Second, is this a step in the direction of violating their
consent decree (if that is what the DOJ imposed, I don't remember
technically what it was)? They say you can swap out their
anti-spyware for any other vendor's, but seemingly putting theirs
in place by default, and making it free sounds a lot like a
previous browser war to me.
Third, assuming this all goes according to Microsoft's plan,
and if they do this, and if anti-spyware companies go out of
business because their air supplies have been cut off, is
Microsoft going to ratchet their price just a wee bit more to
cover this cost (I've gotten posts in the past asking for an
example where Microsoft's done this -- they don't actually add to
their price in an itemized way, but their price for their
software/OS certainly hasn't attenuated to the same curve
hardware has in the PC industry... and it's not because they
couldn't sell it for less and make a profit... it's because they
don't have to sell it for less.)
If I were a anti-spyware vendor, I'd be pissed. (Unless I was
the one Microsoft bought out.)
Maybe Microsoft should just rename it the Cabbage
Patch 360, rake in their overinflated profits and be
done with it. This stinks of marketing shennanigans; either
Microsoft has really blown it on their ability to deliver in
anticipation of trumping others' rollouts (disingenuous), or
they're pulling the Cabbage Patch stunt to go for even more hype
and mania around this product (also disingenuous).
Hmmm, since you managed to get this as a slashdot article I'm not going to
lose any sleep that you won't get you your refund. You will.
This is a perfect example of where I think there is some power and benefit
to blogging, as discussed in this
slashdot article, and
my post, among
others. Dollars to donuts, you'll get your refund, and The Chip Merchant
will issue some clarification of their policy. Good luck!
(And the poster does seem to have a valid point, I'm looking at different listings
for memory for "The Chip Merchant", and under warranty for the memory
I looked at, they are all listed as lifetime.)
Hmmm, maybe
when memory fails, they're unable to remember their policy.
I heard this same announcement on the radio this morning. My initial reaction
was $2.50 a pop?, what the? My next reaction is, I'll never buy
music at $2.50 a song, never! (Okay, unless you count Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, or
Violin Concerto in D as a song.)
I'm getting the sense that these providers may actually really not care about the
phone part of your cell "phone" service. Heck, if the buying public really will
pay that kind of money for a song, why bother trying to make money on cell phone
technology?
Are any slashdotters willing to pay this price per song? (Not
to mention the selection is less than half the other major players.)
Where did I put my Dual 1226? (Not to worry, I know exactly where it is.)
One of the fundamental underpinnings of the internet is its openness. That's
not exact terminology but describes the internet's zen. Creating.mobi
for specific use makes sense, the mobile world is almost ready for that.
Establishing strict guidelines helps define a consistent (and predictable)
mobile web experience, but strict policy flies in the internet zen's face.
Give designers free reign, let them create, let them innovate. Extend the
freedom and define the extension as mobile friendly, but don't define
what mobile friendly is to the web site creators.
As in the other TLD worlds, creativity has served to enhance and extend the
web experience beyond many's expectations..mobi should be no different, and
constraining.mobi with policy weakens its potential. Let the free
market and competing ideas dictate the policy.
The mobile user community will vote with their smart-text pads as to what is
the most effective web site.
Also, there are unknown (now) reasons to create any kind of web site presence
in.mobi.
I'm only speculating, but I hope for their sake they have all of their
data backed up and off-site. How ironic would it be for a company steeped in
high speed communications technology ostensibly with the capability to set up their
own redundant high-speed SAN to lose data and research in the fire? I'm hoping
they didn't, but wonder if they did, considering their projection of a couple
years to recover, and also having to start from scratch. Does that mean for the
research?, or the building only?
The article didn't shed much light on paranormal experience nor did it
even lead me to be much more curious. In my opinion it's mostly goofiness.
However, the article did contain a gem, and delivered as a parting word of
wisdom:
One paranormal investigator in North Carolina, no
fan of Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) operating system,
says he has had to explain to people "that if you're running Windows,
you have a much bigger problem than ghosts.
Hmmm, have to register to read the article, I hate that.
But, from the slashdot summary,..., Microsoft has been
hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research
boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite
bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of
other victims--even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob
scapegoat...,
As with all sea changes in communications comes (especially early
on) a high noise to signal ratio. Hopefully reasonable readers apply reasonable
filters to what they read.
There may be incendiary posts, unnecessary posts, and inappropriate post (including
but not limited to trolling, flaming, and slander), but in the collective body
of blogs are useful nuggets worth mining. Vendors, companies, and individuals
benefit if they choose by tuning in to this.
The evolution of airing a complaint has evolved from snail mail (good luck), to
phone calls (good luck), and with the internet, to "Contact Us" (hmmm, good luck).
None of these in my experience have been as effective as I prefer because
the receiving complainant can easily ignore the missives as so much whining, and
invisible that they don't have to be responsive.
Not all ignore complaints, pleas for help, etc. Notably (and
I'm only picking a couple) I've always received timely and helpful
replies from Amazon.com and Thumbnails Plus. These are
only two examples, I could cite more.
But with the volume raised, the signal amplified with the more public blogosphere
I've seen signs there can be positive outcomes. Again, while some posts are
inflammatory only, valid complaints about activities, governments, and companies
in such a public forum spur action faster and more effectively than in the past.
And, as with all emerging conduits, mechanisms are being built and refined
eventually improving the signal to noise ratio to a much more acceptable number
(case in point... you troll or flame too much here, even anonymously, you
get shut down until you clean up your act).
I am looking forward to the future that is the blogosphere.
From the slashdot article "quoting" Microsoft: According to Microsoft, 'when you have a company of 60,000 employees, people are coming and going all the time.
But in this Slate article is the snippet that we continue to have the lowest turnover in the industry?, (as part of a question Bill Gates raised about continuing to make Microsoft an attractive place to work).
Seems these two statements conflict, both tailored to serve the spin necessary. So, what is it? Is Microsoft suffering from an exodus or do they truly have one of the lowest turnovers in the industry?
The article is expectedly mostly spin, but I'm surprised at how much
rehash it is. Specifically:
Mr Gates said that the PC of today is still not the PC he dreamed about 30
years ago however, and that was a challenge he would continue to pursue.
I think that says a lot. Computers today are astronomically more powerful than
ever before which is a natural consequence of the development and maturation of
electronics and transistors, etc. But, Mr. Gates and Microsoft has promised year
after year the power (delivered, but not because of Microsoft) but not the
ease of use.
I do think (and of course this is just opinion) the software could have
evolved much further than we see today if Microsoft hadn't been so dominant. There
are/were hints of advances but often these were stunted early either by Microsoft
essentially buying out companies and putting their own stamp on the technology
(and sometimes actually advancing it), or by cooking up something similar and
squashing the competition with price undercuts.
"They can do lots of things, but still you can't talk to them, and that is one of
the things we will get this decade," he predicted.
(Actually, technically, Mr. Gates is wrong here: you can talk
to them. They won't do much, but you can still talk to them.)
I saw Mr. Gates say this same thing at a Expo Keynote speech in the '90s. I said it
then, I'll say it now, we'll get real speech recognition in computers sort of, but
it's not clear people really want to talk to them anyway. It's mostly amazing
and a little disgusting Mr. Gates gets to get away with these promises year
after year. I suppose it's partially the consuming public's fault for having
a collective short memory and never calling Microsoft on this.
As for Mr. Gates' prediction MS is going to be bigger than Google, uh, hello,
it already is. I think this is mostly code language for what they intend (hope)
to do to Google. I'm not sure MS is positioned quite as nicely this time
to accomplish this.
And, finally, from the article:
"We are stronger than ever because we have a research lab in Cambridge,
we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems
in computer science are going to be solved."
I'm not sure what Mr. Gates is implying here. But if I were on one of the
U.S. campuses, I'd be pissed, and a little nervous.
shoe on other foot this time? weird.
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's interesting today to see the bloat and memory hog complaints leveled
against the non-Microsoft product while showing MS' version as lean and mean.
I can't defend the numbers, they do look huge, but we're seeing about one
or two articles a week in the trade rags about the latest memory, cpu, cache, etc.
advances. Technological advances render all but the most dramatic processing demands
almost moot.
In the numbers and benchmarks from this article, unfortunately, this is one of the
more dramatic instances. I'm always willing to wait a little more for opening an
application, or a file if other factors offset. In this case, free vs. whatever
Office goes for now, typically is enough of an offset, but maybe not so for a large
company where that extra "time" and computer resources add up big, and the pricing
is likely to be more disounted for volume licensing.
Interesting numbers on the two different speeds on processing XML. Does anyone
know or conjecture the difference in the true internal XML data for the comparison?
I thought OpenOffice was the more pure in the sense that it is true human readable
data in the XML while Microsoft's format is more of an envelope architecture for
binary proprietary Office payloads. And, I wonder what the specifics in this test were
around that.
Bottom line for me: I'm still going with OpenOffice, I've been a fan for years.
I have a good friend whose son is brilliant. He looks at anything, and
instantly is taking it apart and putting it back together. In our technical day
and age, he has tinkered with computers a LOT and has shown great acumen in
troubleshooting and configuring not only Windows, but putting together a network.
I tried to turn him on to coding, but he went out and got Visual Studio, and
went off on his own. He came back and proudly demonstrated his various creations.
While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of
programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and
cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code.
He is now taking some programming classes, and while he is doing well, they have
begun java, and it has totally thrown him. He's getting back on his feet, but
his initial foray into VS gave him some bad (and some wrong) insights into
programming and languages.
His reaction so far to having to actually write and understand code is that it
is stupid. I think that's a dangerous culture to cultivate in an IT universe. He
is doing well in his class but he constantly wants to go back and do the drag and
drop thing.
I don't know about today, but I can relate my experience.
I once was part of an e-mail group and was assigned the task of writing a pseudo-mime interface into our smtp allowing transfer of binary information. (This was pre-mime.)
I would amass large test streams of e-mails and data for testing. And while I did strive for discretion, invariably I got a peek here and there of the e-mail messages. I had to assert complete conversion in and out of binary form with no changes to the originals. I did do this mostly with diff scripting, but for sanity checks would read text to ensure that the starting point of my work looked reasonable and uncorrupted.
I wasn't surprised to see very personal messages exchanged, but what surprised me most was the blatant conducting of what were clearly illicit affairs via e-mail! And, how many times I saw those kinds of messages!
I never associated message text with address info, so it was anonymous voyeurism, but I must say I was shocked.
Word to the wise, never conduct any transactions or conversations via e-mail you wouldn't mind showing up in some blog, or bulletin, etc. I suspect the level of monitoring of e-mail is even more prevalent today than the day I was doing that work.
I'm seeing standard and predictable fare (not necessarily a bad thing) in posts for this article. There are basically two camps; those who just want a cell phone that sends and receives calls reliably (that's where I am); and those who love the extra features and want the coolest gadgetry they can blend with their cell phones.
My thoughts:
reliable calls. Please fix cell phone technology before you add cameras and video to my phone! I've heard the argument it's the manufacturers of the phones doing this, not the providers. I don't care! Clearly the phone manufacturers and providers talk (unless, maybe they're using cell phones), and collaborate on what goes into new cell phone designs.
There has been a recent emergency in my family and I was totally frustrated by the number of dropped calls, unintelligible conversations, etc. I endured with people on the other end using cell phones.
it isn't the cell phones that are the problem, it's the implementation of the networks. I don't care! If I'm buying cell phone service, I assume it's an end-to-end solution. If you want to know more about how cell phones work, look here. It's an interesting read, you'll learn a lot about how cell phone technology works, but you won't find out why or how they would fix quality problems with the technology.
combining is just a bad idea. I remember one time combo TV-VCRs on the market. I asked a friend why he'd bought it. He shrugged, said it just seemed cool, and more convenient. But what happens if the VCR breaks? (It did, btw). Same for combo-cell phones. More stuff in one device means more opportunity for some piece to break, leaving you with awkward devices that don't do everything you bought it for.
related to point previous, there's the compromise in quality of added functionality. If I'm dishing out $900 for a do-all gadget and it takes pictures, it'd better be at least 4Mpixel with a Leica lens and variable focus (I don't want infinite depth of field in all of my pictures).
for the total cost of this new gadget (I'm loathe to call it a phone) I could buy: a very good 4M pixel camera; an iPod; and a cell phone. I know people argue for the convenience of them all in one. I don't buy that. The all-in-one invariably compromises in form factor. It's not an ideal form factor for a phone, it's not an ideal form factor for a camera, and it's not for an mp3 player.
Yeah, it's not as convenient to carry multiple gadgets around, but it's not nearly as inconvenient as people want to make it out to be to strengthen their all-in-one argument.
pay-for services. I didn't even know about this one until recently, but lots of these combo gadgets are designed to suck more money out of you. For example, the ads show people sharing pictures and videos with their camera phones, but it turns out that's not part of the basic service, you pay as you go to send pictures. What a ripoff (why isn't that just part of the service minutes?)!
I keep hearing the argument that we can just buy a phone if that's all we want. But, I'm not finding that to be true. I've been to kiosks where they don't offer any non-enhanced phones. They may be out there, but they're not easy to find -- and the sales force out there isn't inclined to be helpful around this, they're making their big bucks by selling the bling.
Bottom line: (at least for me) I just want a phone that does a very good job of being a phone.
I haven't been deep in numbers for processor performance over the last couple of years. I've found the processing speed to be so fast lately that the software I use or care about runs FAST on most modern processors.
That said, when someone asks me for advice, unless they have some specific high-end gaming requirement, the only advice I offer is don't buy a Celeron!
Other than the poor performing Celeron I suspect most processing bottlenecks today are more from insufficient memory, bad or slow bus architectures, network latencies, and disk I/O bandwidth.
Frustrating to me is the non-sequitur naming of technology, I don't know if it's done intentionally to confuse the buying public. A friend of mine saw the ads for some manufacturer's laptop with Centrino technology (which really isn't about processor anyway), and went to her favorite electronics store and got talked into a laptop with the Celeron (mistakenly remembering the "C" word incorrectly).
I made her take it back and exchange for Centrino.
This isn't an economic study, it's a hit piece. And you know it! It doesn't even come close to presenting objective statistics.
Maybe I didn't take enough time to deep research on this subject. And maybe I took with too much faith reports from media I so deeply distrust in other matters. For that, I apologize.
And maybe I'm a little jaded after a 21 year career with a major firm cut short three years before full pension, a corporation raided by a crooked (alleged) CEO who walked away with $500M (the law is still trying to indict him). A firm where that same CEO tended to business while our stock went from $51+ (when he took over) to less than $2 a share (when he was forced out).
But regardless, the reports illustrate something amiss. They probably have soft research on both ends of the comparison, but I'm willing to bet the gap (relatively) is widening as described. And to my point, I am frustrated that CEOs continue to reap generous stock options, obscene golden parachutes, and salaries with raises and bonuses not commensurate with their company's performance.
I know had I shown performance with such negative results I would not have been able to keep my job.
As it is though, I was still unable to keep my job even with highest job ratings, salary out of band because of my accomplishments, and the highest technical achievement award given at my former company. For my contribution, not only were the raises paltry the last couple of years, I am now sans job and still looking.
Forgive my trespass -- my perspective obviously has bias.
That said, it'd be nice to see business conducted by meritocracy rather than politics.
It looks like IT is now part of the mainstream workforce again, and is now treated as such. Which basically means it stinks. Not because I think everyone should be treated better, but because of the widening gap between CEOs and their "employees".
The average salary of CEOs is now 431 times the salary of his or her respective company's employees. I'm no business expert, but something seems out of whack. If CEOs were held to the same kind of raises based on the performance of their companies (pick your favorite yardstick) I suspect it highly unlikely they would be compensated this way.
Meanwhile, IT folks are perceived to be expendable, and, on paper, it seems to make sense to the people determining salaries they can now play the competitive market against IT workers. I guess that's just the nature of business.
No -- a programmer with real skill can debug without a debugger.
Yes a programmer with real skill can debug without a debugger. I do it all the time. As for perturbed code altering a bug's behavior and giving information about the bug, I agree. But that can be nuanced behavior and I consider it more sophisticated detective work.
Print statements and trace logs may seem antiquated, but they can get the job done. It sounds like you don't know how to use them and instead rely on a debugger as a crutch. A debugger is a useful tool but what if you didn't have one?
Wow! You sure can infer a lot from minimal information! I do know how to use them and have used them many times. Maybe I'll back pedal slightly from my claim of "totally useless". You're right, when I don't have a debugger, print statements is an approach. I've done it, I know how, and I'm quite good at it. I typically find debuggers to be a more direct and concise approach.
A lot of people immediately jump into a debugger whenever a problem occurs.
Ahem. I don't.
Many times the correct course of action is to sit down and really think about the evidence presented, the structure of the code, and how the observed bug might have been caused.
Ahem, again. That's exactly my approach. Something isn't working or behaves unexpectedly my first reaction is careful thought about my code and if there were any careless or invalid assumptions I made that could have produced the unexpected behavior. Many times that is sufficient.
To admit that you rely on a debugger is basically to admit a lack of skill.
I'm not sure I agree that I have "admitted" anything. I don't rely on a debugger and fortunately my code is good enough I rarely resort to one. But, on whole, debuggers have saved my butt more than print statements and with less heartache.
(Maybe I'm a bit partial to debuggers because my very first assignment ever in my career was to write an assembler debugger for an OS we created for EEProms. There really were no easy ways to create "print" statements so we (I) got the task to write (all in assembler) a debugger letting the team step through code (all assembly code), look at registers and memory, etc. It was our only alternative.)
That WAS my point... I didn't like perl when I first encountered it, but you can do things with it quickly, and I like its flexibility. And I think it's a good test for aptitude -- if you find yourself doing productive things with perl, it's a good bet you'll take to other languages. Is it the best or only first choice? No. But it can tell you a lot about your aptitude.
Using use strict; is a good suggestion also for starting (I think the Learning PERL book starts beginners with that (though I haven't looked it up).)
Slashdot Mirror
From your reply:
I'm not even sure where to start:
Okay, a couple of thoughts:
And I know some claim this isn't Microsoft's fault that spyware happens, but it really mostly is. They designed Windows to be as easy and automatic to use as possible, which really is the gateway for much of the malware wreaking computer havoc.
If I were a anti-spyware vendor, I'd be pissed. (Unless I was the one Microsoft bought out.)
Maybe Microsoft should just rename it the Cabbage Patch 360, rake in their overinflated profits and be done with it. This stinks of marketing shennanigans; either Microsoft has really blown it on their ability to deliver in anticipation of trumping others' rollouts (disingenuous), or they're pulling the Cabbage Patch stunt to go for even more hype and mania around this product (also disingenuous).
Hmmm, since you managed to get this as a slashdot article I'm not going to lose any sleep that you won't get you your refund. You will.
This is a perfect example of where I think there is some power and benefit to blogging, as discussed in this slashdot article, and my post, among others. Dollars to donuts, you'll get your refund, and The Chip Merchant will issue some clarification of their policy. Good luck!
(And the poster does seem to have a valid point, I'm looking at different listings for memory for "The Chip Merchant", and under warranty for the memory I looked at, they are all listed as lifetime .)
Hmmm, maybe when memory fails, they're unable to remember their policy.
I heard this same announcement on the radio this morning. My initial reaction was $2.50 a pop?, what the? My next reaction is, I'll never buy music at $2.50 a song, never! (Okay, unless you count Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, or Violin Concerto in D as a song.)
I'm getting the sense that these providers may actually really not care about the phone part of your cell "phone" service. Heck, if the buying public really will pay that kind of money for a song, why bother trying to make money on cell phone technology?
Are any slashdotters willing to pay this price per song? (Not to mention the selection is less than half the other major players.)
Where did I put my Dual 1226? (Not to worry, I know exactly where it is.)
Q: How do I determine if my PC is a zombie...
A: Boot your machine. If it says anything about or similar to "Welcome to Windows", there's a good possiblity it is a zombie.
One of the fundamental underpinnings of the internet is its openness. That's not exact terminology but describes the internet's zen. Creating .mobi
for specific use makes sense, the mobile world is almost ready for that.
Establishing strict guidelines helps define a consistent (and predictable)
mobile web experience, but strict policy flies in the internet zen's face.
Give designers free reign, let them create, let them innovate. Extend the freedom and define the extension as mobile friendly, but don't define what mobile friendly is to the web site creators.
As in the other TLD worlds, creativity has served to enhance and extend the web experience beyond many's expectations. .mobi should be no different, and
constraining .mobi with policy weakens its potential. Let the free
market and competing ideas dictate the policy.
The mobile user community will vote with their smart-text pads as to what is the most effective web site.
Also, there are unknown (now) reasons to create any kind of web site presence in .mobi.
Let the market decide!
I'm only speculating, but I hope for their sake they have all of their data backed up and off-site. How ironic would it be for a company steeped in high speed communications technology ostensibly with the capability to set up their own redundant high-speed SAN to lose data and research in the fire? I'm hoping they didn't, but wonder if they did, considering their projection of a couple years to recover, and also having to start from scratch. Does that mean for the research?, or the building only?
The article didn't shed much light on paranormal experience nor did it even lead me to be much more curious. In my opinion it's mostly goofiness.
However, the article did contain a gem, and delivered as a parting word of wisdom:
Nicely put, and 'nuff said.
Andy Oram offers interesting insights, and paradoxically offers as a solution, modding our government. Cool!
Fie!, I Read Slashdot's Text
Pox On Said Text
(It's not about /. modding afterall, so it's legal to mod me offtopic)
Hmmm, have to register to read the article, I hate that.
But, from the slashdot summary, ..., Microsoft has been
hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research
boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite
bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of
other victims--even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob
scapegoat...,
As with all sea changes in communications comes (especially early on) a high noise to signal ratio. Hopefully reasonable readers apply reasonable filters to what they read.
There may be incendiary posts, unnecessary posts, and inappropriate post (including but not limited to trolling, flaming, and slander), but in the collective body of blogs are useful nuggets worth mining. Vendors, companies, and individuals benefit if they choose by tuning in to this.
The evolution of airing a complaint has evolved from snail mail (good luck), to phone calls (good luck), and with the internet, to "Contact Us" (hmmm, good luck). None of these in my experience have been as effective as I prefer because the receiving complainant can easily ignore the missives as so much whining, and invisible that they don't have to be responsive.
Not all ignore complaints, pleas for help, etc. Notably (and I'm only picking a couple) I've always received timely and helpful replies from Amazon.com and Thumbnails Plus . These are only two examples, I could cite more.
But with the volume raised, the signal amplified with the more public blogosphere I've seen signs there can be positive outcomes. Again, while some posts are inflammatory only, valid complaints about activities, governments, and companies in such a public forum spur action faster and more effectively than in the past.
And, as with all emerging conduits, mechanisms are being built and refined eventually improving the signal to noise ratio to a much more acceptable number (case in point... you troll or flame too much here, even anonymously, you get shut down until you clean up your act).
I am looking forward to the future that is the blogosphere.
From the slashdot article "quoting" Microsoft: According to Microsoft, 'when you have a company of 60,000 employees, people are coming and going all the time.
But in this Slate article is the snippet that we continue to have the lowest turnover in the industry? , (as part of a question Bill Gates raised about continuing to make Microsoft an attractive place to work).
Seems these two statements conflict, both tailored to serve the spin necessary. So, what is it? Is Microsoft suffering from an exodus or do they truly have one of the lowest turnovers in the industry?
The article is expectedly mostly spin, but I'm surprised at how much rehash it is. Specifically:
I think that says a lot. Computers today are astronomically more powerful than ever before which is a natural consequence of the development and maturation of electronics and transistors, etc. But, Mr. Gates and Microsoft has promised year after year the power (delivered, but not because of Microsoft) but not the ease of use.
I do think (and of course this is just opinion) the software could have evolved much further than we see today if Microsoft hadn't been so dominant. There are/were hints of advances but often these were stunted early either by Microsoft essentially buying out companies and putting their own stamp on the technology (and sometimes actually advancing it), or by cooking up something similar and squashing the competition with price undercuts.
(Actually, technically, Mr. Gates is wrong here: you can talk to them. They won't do much, but you can still talk to them.)
I saw Mr. Gates say this same thing at a Expo Keynote speech in the '90s. I said it then, I'll say it now, we'll get real speech recognition in computers sort of, but it's not clear people really want to talk to them anyway. It's mostly amazing and a little disgusting Mr. Gates gets to get away with these promises year after year. I suppose it's partially the consuming public's fault for having a collective short memory and never calling Microsoft on this.
As for Mr. Gates' prediction MS is going to be bigger than Google, uh, hello, it already is. I think this is mostly code language for what they intend (hope) to do to Google. I'm not sure MS is positioned quite as nicely this time to accomplish this.
And, finally, from the article:
I'm not sure what Mr. Gates is implying here. But if I were on one of the U.S. campuses, I'd be pissed, and a little nervous.
It's interesting today to see the bloat and memory hog complaints leveled against the non-Microsoft product while showing MS' version as lean and mean.
I can't defend the numbers, they do look huge, but we're seeing about one or two articles a week in the trade rags about the latest memory, cpu, cache, etc. advances. Technological advances render all but the most dramatic processing demands almost moot.
In the numbers and benchmarks from this article, unfortunately, this is one of the more dramatic instances. I'm always willing to wait a little more for opening an application, or a file if other factors offset. In this case, free vs. whatever Office goes for now, typically is enough of an offset, but maybe not so for a large company where that extra "time" and computer resources add up big, and the pricing is likely to be more disounted for volume licensing.
Interesting numbers on the two different speeds on processing XML. Does anyone know or conjecture the difference in the true internal XML data for the comparison? I thought OpenOffice was the more pure in the sense that it is true human readable data in the XML while Microsoft's format is more of an envelope architecture for binary proprietary Office payloads. And, I wonder what the specifics in this test were around that.
Bottom line for me: I'm still going with OpenOffice, I've been a fan for years.
I have a good friend whose son is brilliant. He looks at anything, and instantly is taking it apart and putting it back together. In our technical day and age, he has tinkered with computers a LOT and has shown great acumen in troubleshooting and configuring not only Windows, but putting together a network.
I tried to turn him on to coding, but he went out and got Visual Studio, and went off on his own. He came back and proudly demonstrated his various creations.
While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code.
He is now taking some programming classes, and while he is doing well, they have begun java, and it has totally thrown him. He's getting back on his feet, but his initial foray into VS gave him some bad (and some wrong) insights into programming and languages.
His reaction so far to having to actually write and understand code is that it is stupid. I think that's a dangerous culture to cultivate in an IT universe. He is doing well in his class but he constantly wants to go back and do the drag and drop thing.
vim
I don't know about today, but I can relate my experience.
I once was part of an e-mail group and was assigned the task of writing a pseudo-mime interface into our smtp allowing transfer of binary information. (This was pre-mime.)
I would amass large test streams of e-mails and data for testing. And while I did strive for discretion, invariably I got a peek here and there of the e-mail messages. I had to assert complete conversion in and out of binary form with no changes to the originals. I did do this mostly with diff scripting, but for sanity checks would read text to ensure that the starting point of my work looked reasonable and uncorrupted.
I wasn't surprised to see very personal messages exchanged, but what surprised me most was the blatant conducting of what were clearly illicit affairs via e-mail! And, how many times I saw those kinds of messages!
I never associated message text with address info, so it was anonymous voyeurism, but I must say I was shocked.
Word to the wise, never conduct any transactions or conversations via e-mail you wouldn't mind showing up in some blog, or bulletin, etc. I suspect the level of monitoring of e-mail is even more prevalent today than the day I was doing that work.
I'm seeing standard and predictable fare (not necessarily a bad thing) in posts for this article. There are basically two camps; those who just want a cell phone that sends and receives calls reliably (that's where I am); and those who love the extra features and want the coolest gadgetry they can blend with their cell phones.
My thoughts:
There has been a recent emergency in my family and I was totally frustrated by the number of dropped calls, unintelligible conversations, etc. I endured with people on the other end using cell phones.
Yeah, it's not as convenient to carry multiple gadgets around, but it's not nearly as inconvenient as people want to make it out to be to strengthen their all-in-one argument.
Bottom line: (at least for me) I just want a phone that does a very good job of being a phone.
I haven't been deep in numbers for processor performance over the last couple of years. I've found the processing speed to be so fast lately that the software I use or care about runs FAST on most modern processors.
That said, when someone asks me for advice, unless they have some specific high-end gaming requirement, the only advice I offer is don't buy a Celeron!
Other than the poor performing Celeron I suspect most processing bottlenecks today are more from insufficient memory, bad or slow bus architectures, network latencies, and disk I/O bandwidth.
Frustrating to me is the non-sequitur naming of technology, I don't know if it's done intentionally to confuse the buying public. A friend of mine saw the ads for some manufacturer's laptop with Centrino technology (which really isn't about processor anyway), and went to her favorite electronics store and got talked into a laptop with the Celeron (mistakenly remembering the "C" word incorrectly).
I made her take it back and exchange for Centrino.
Hello Arandir,
Maybe I didn't take enough time to deep research on this subject. And maybe I took with too much faith reports from media I so deeply distrust in other matters. For that, I apologize.
And maybe I'm a little jaded after a 21 year career with a major firm cut short three years before full pension, a corporation raided by a crooked (alleged) CEO who walked away with $500M (the law is still trying to indict him). A firm where that same CEO tended to business while our stock went from $51+ (when he took over) to less than $2 a share (when he was forced out).
But regardless, the reports illustrate something amiss. They probably have soft research on both ends of the comparison, but I'm willing to bet the gap (relatively) is widening as described. And to my point, I am frustrated that CEOs continue to reap generous stock options, obscene golden parachutes, and salaries with raises and bonuses not commensurate with their company's performance.
I know had I shown performance with such negative results I would not have been able to keep my job.
As it is though, I was still unable to keep my job even with highest job ratings, salary out of band because of my accomplishments, and the highest technical achievement award given at my former company. For my contribution, not only were the raises paltry the last couple of years, I am now sans job and still looking.
Forgive my trespass -- my perspective obviously has bias.
That said, it'd be nice to see business conducted by meritocracy rather than politics.
Best Regards.
Okay, you've given your anecdotal evidence which includes by your own words "guessing".
Googling "ceo" "salary" "ratio", you might want to look at two out of the first three hits: this article and this one.
It looks like IT is now part of the mainstream workforce again, and is now treated as such. Which basically means it stinks. Not because I think everyone should be treated better, but because of the widening gap between CEOs and their "employees".
The average salary of CEOs is now 431 times the salary of his or her respective company's employees. I'm no business expert, but something seems out of whack. If CEOs were held to the same kind of raises based on the performance of their companies (pick your favorite yardstick) I suspect it highly unlikely they would be compensated this way.
Meanwhile, IT folks are perceived to be expendable, and, on paper, it seems to make sense to the people determining salaries they can now play the competitive market against IT workers. I guess that's just the nature of business.
Yes a programmer with real skill can debug without a debugger. I do it all the time. As for perturbed code altering a bug's behavior and giving information about the bug, I agree. But that can be nuanced behavior and I consider it more sophisticated detective work.
Wow! You sure can infer a lot from minimal information! I do know how to use them and have used them many times. Maybe I'll back pedal slightly from my claim of "totally useless". You're right, when I don't have a debugger, print statements is an approach. I've done it, I know how, and I'm quite good at it. I typically find debuggers to be a more direct and concise approach.
Ahem. I don't.
Ahem, again. That's exactly my approach. Something isn't working or behaves unexpectedly my first reaction is careful thought about my code and if there were any careless or invalid assumptions I made that could have produced the unexpected behavior. Many times that is sufficient.
I'm not sure I agree that I have "admitted" anything. I don't rely on a debugger and fortunately my code is good enough I rarely resort to one. But, on whole, debuggers have saved my butt more than print statements and with less heartache.
(Maybe I'm a bit partial to debuggers because my very first assignment ever in my career was to write an assembler debugger for an OS we created for EEProms. There really were no easy ways to create "print" statements so we (I) got the task to write (all in assembler) a debugger letting the team step through code (all assembly code), look at registers and memory, etc. It was our only alternative.)
That WAS my point... I didn't like perl when I first encountered it, but you can do things with it quickly, and I like its flexibility. And I think it's a good test for aptitude -- if you find yourself doing productive things with perl, it's a good bet you'll take to other languages. Is it the best or only first choice? No. But it can tell you a lot about your aptitude.
Using use strict; is a good suggestion also for starting (I think the Learning PERL book starts beginners with that (though I haven't looked it up).)