I have to point out that Microsoft has already tried many of these tactics to take over the Web entirely, and got frighteningly close.
By what metric?
Browser market share, at one time, sure -- for all the good that did them. A billion people started with MSN as their home page and promptly went to Google to search anyway.
By any other measure I can't even imagine how you could say they were even in the ballpark, much less "frighteningly close."
I mean, yes, this is slashdot, but Microsoft isn't Mecha-Godzilla. Adobe/Macromedia, Yahoo, Google, and a host of other assorted companies have beat their ass around the web in an assortment of areas.
Here's an idea! Let's just assume that it'll always be zero-cost. Let's further assume that it'll always be available on any platform that anyone might like, rather than pushing people towards platforms that the vendor likes.
Now that that's out of the way, I can feel confident putting my content into this format, knowing that I, the content creator, am in control.
Let's not buy cars either. The government could decide at any time that we aren't allowed to drive them on roads anymore! I realize that's not the best analogy, but to me it's on a similar level of paranoia.
Be honest here: 99% of what gets put on the web is not anything that anyone will care about in 5-10 years. It is not the end of the world if someone can't see the video of you chugging Diet Coke and Mentos in ten years. There are a million things more important in the world to worry about than whether or not Adobe will take Flash away from in some kind of scheme too insane for a Bond villain.
Further: while that kind of web technology doesn't have open source guaranteeing its freedom, competition in the free market is a good enough guarantee, again, for most if not all purposes.
In short : he was (probably) a murderer, but got convicted for being a nerd.
That's not really the way I read the trial coverage; more that, his own testimony convicted him -- the jury was completely sure that the story he was feeding them was a lie, and if you're lying about what happened while on trial for your life, you're guilty of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
Although I guess you could say he was convicted because he was a nerd, in the sense that he thought he was smarter than the jury and they would fall for the story he came up with.
Just as a point of fact though, there is nothing in the Bible that prohibits killing.
The phrase "Thou shalt not kill" isn't found in the Bible. That is a inaccurate translation. The actual verse is "Do not murder." Talmudic scholars include in that to mean gross and/or intentional negligence as well.
I'd think though (for Christians) that everything Jesus had to say about turning the other cheek and letting him without sin cast the first stone would pretty much eliminate any of the circumstances in which you could claim a killing justified and therefore not murder.
Re:easy way to fill a book
on
Head First C#
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Wouldn't the n00bs already be familiar with object oriented techniques since every language they have ever used had OO as a major feature.
Well, not necessarily. As a consultant who's done a fair bit of maintenance coding on projects that I didn't do any of the original development or design for, I can tell you that a surprising number of people use a perfectly good object oriented language to write programs that have only one object or method. (Or similarly technically use an OO language to write code that would hurt even people who wouldn't consider themselves to be OO purists.)
Well, to be fair, Yahoo in general may not be awesome, but there are some products of theirs that are pretty good. I prefer Yahoo's news setup to Google's or Microsoft's. Flickr is pretty good. Yahoo video is probably technically superior to YouTube at this point, if still much lacking in market share. Yahoo Answers is without equal.
I don't get the idea of wanting to buy Yahoo's search, though. Live Search's problem isn't that it's technically inferior to Google at this point (though it may be) -- its problem is that Google has the mindshare (it's become the verb for doing an internet search), and buying Yahoo Search won't fix that.
Microsoft buying Yahoo would only have made sense if they never had MSN in the first place. It is buying a competitor to compete with its own products and if they intend to only shut it down or merge it with MSN, its only going to bleed massive amounts of money from MSFT in the process.
Just like Google buying YouTube made sense because there was no Google Video, and Yahoo buying Jumpcut only made sense because there was no Yahoo Video.
Or, this could be exactly business as usual in the industry.
Maybe these prices will help drive the American consumer away from their opulent sport utility text messages to something a little more environmentally sustainable.
You'd think one of the wireless carriers would be able to differentiate themselves in the market and make a killing off selling 10 cent text messages. (That is, people would change to their service when possible because they're half the price of anyone else, and 10 cents for a text message is still a huge profit.) Do I just not understand the market dynamics, or could this be a case of price fixing?
OpenOffice.org is a descendant of Star Office, originally released in 1984 (according to Wikipedia anyway). They have plenty of their own legacy spaghetti code:)
I was given to understand that OO being Open Source meant that hundreds of developers with unlimited free time would magically fix all of that for us and/or spin some straw into gold.:)
Yeah, it seems like extremely wishful thinking to me.
I think Microsoft will probably be more open sourcey in areas where it makes sense, and continue business as usual where that makes sense. By makes sense, I really mean, makes sense for them financially. Open sourcing Windows doesn't make sense for them financially. Relying on the community to troubleshoot and improve something like device drivers that isn't exactly their core business I can easily see.
P.S. There is a reason why Firefox stomps IE and That's because WE made it good - Windows can be good too if you let us (the end users) make it that way
By 'stomps' you mean 'still has less market share than'? I'm just saying.
FF is great in the sense that it's ridiculously customizable. I've got add-ons installed to make my Firefox exactly what I want it to be for the things I use it for, and that's great. . . but I question whether that's what the mainstream audience will ever really want.
"Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond."
Whatever is the choice of most businesses is always going to lag behind in adoption.
Case in point, my current client is a Fortune 100 company that mandates IE6 as the browser of choice and is planning to move to IE7 sometime next year. There's thousands and thousands of people right there still using IE6 essentially through no choice of their own.
Big, non-software business is always about the last to adopt any technology.
Anyone who is happy with the Heller decision simply must recognize that without Bush in the White House appointing two justices, gun rights would have taken a serious hit today.
Do we know who another president would have appointed and how they would have voted? No, we don't.
You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts or law.
If what the law says wasn't open to argument and interpretation, there wouldn't be any need for lawyers or law professors.
Violent, armed criminals almost never own guns in compliance with the law, and so further restrictions won't help stop them from shooting you.
Well, that's not strictly true. Most illegally owned guns were legally owned by someone else at some point. You as a legal gun owner might not shoot me, but the guy who breaks into your house when you're not home might, or the guy he sells the gun to might.
I'm not saying the ruling is a bad thing; it's just a less simple issue statistically than you're presenting.
Why would you aim for 1/3 of the market when you can aim for 2/3?
Because, on average, I enjoy my job a lot more when I'm doing.NET work. I tend to spend a lot less time dicking around with XML files and the environment, a lot less time fighting my IDE (disclaimer, my recent experience is mostly with Eclipse and I expect the alternatives would be better, for me) and a lot more time writing code that solves the problem at hand. I understand that not everyone will have the same preferences or experience, but for me, that's much more satisfying.
I only need one job at a time, it might as well be one I like.
(I've got about double the Java experience, so it's not like I can't go that way if I need/want to as well.)
It's literally C# with crappier (unnecessarily verbose) syntax. There's a difference between nice syntax, and having to spell everything out. Do they still have 'If... [...] End If'?
As of.NET 3.5, this is no longer true. VB.NET actually has some features that C# doesn't -- XML literals and a few other things that are mostly useful if you're using LINQ.
(I assume C# will get them in the next version if they turn out to be useful out in the trenches.)
Probably true. But what does that tell us about general language fitness really since it's equally as easy to hog resources in a language with GC? Database connections for example.
When you absolutely need deterministic release of resources you end up having to approach the problem in a similar fashion to c++ memory management anyway.
Many people believe seem to believe GC allows you to forget about resource management when it doesn't at all. It's a great tool for a certain class of problems but not a panacea.
That's a good point, and absolutely true. My 'other resources' management code in GC languages does look a lot like my memory management code in C++ -- but slightly less so, because there are generally less gotchas around exception handling in those languages.
In response, I'd only offer that almost all of the code I write uses what would amount to dynamic memory allocation in C++, but a much smaller subset of it uses database connection or other "unmanaged resources." I think it's easier to be good about something like that when it's less ubiquitous.
Well, right. Wouldn't you say that's an added "gotcha" / source of complexity as far as doing memory management correctly, one that doesn't exist in most other languages?
How well has your shop been able to port managed code to handheld devices?
There's the.NET compact framework specifically for that.
I personally haven't done anything with it, but the handhold folks I know are pretty happy with it, and a couple of those guys are rabidly anti-Microsoft in the general case, so I assume it must be decent.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to point out that Microsoft has already tried many of these tactics to take over the Web entirely, and got frighteningly close.
By what metric?
Browser market share, at one time, sure -- for all the good that did them. A billion people started with MSN as their home page and promptly went to Google to search anyway.
By any other measure I can't even imagine how you could say they were even in the ballpark, much less "frighteningly close."
I mean, yes, this is slashdot, but Microsoft isn't Mecha-Godzilla. Adobe/Macromedia, Yahoo, Google, and a host of other assorted companies have beat their ass around the web in an assortment of areas.
Here's an idea! Let's just assume that it'll always be zero-cost. Let's further assume that it'll always be available on any platform that anyone might like, rather than pushing people towards platforms that the vendor likes.
Now that that's out of the way, I can feel confident putting my content into this format, knowing that I, the content creator, am in control.
Let's not buy cars either. The government could decide at any time that we aren't allowed to drive them on roads anymore! I realize that's not the best analogy, but to me it's on a similar level of paranoia.
Be honest here: 99% of what gets put on the web is not anything that anyone will care about in 5-10 years. It is not the end of the world if someone can't see the video of you chugging Diet Coke and Mentos in ten years. There are a million things more important in the world to worry about than whether or not Adobe will take Flash away from in some kind of scheme too insane for a Bond villain.
Further: while that kind of web technology doesn't have open source guaranteeing its freedom, competition in the free market is a good enough guarantee, again, for most if not all purposes.
In short :
he was (probably) a murderer, but got convicted for being a nerd.
That's not really the way I read the trial coverage; more that, his own testimony convicted him -- the jury was completely sure that the story he was feeding them was a lie, and if you're lying about what happened while on trial for your life, you're guilty of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
Although I guess you could say he was convicted because he was a nerd, in the sense that he thought he was smarter than the jury and they would fall for the story he came up with.
As a Christian I agree. Immoral != illegal.
Just as a point of fact though, there is nothing in the Bible that prohibits killing.
The phrase "Thou shalt not kill" isn't found in the Bible. That is a inaccurate translation. The actual verse is "Do not murder." Talmudic scholars include in that to mean gross and/or intentional negligence as well.
I'd think though (for Christians) that everything Jesus had to say about turning the other cheek and letting him without sin cast the first stone would pretty much eliminate any of the circumstances in which you could claim a killing justified and therefore not murder.
Wouldn't the n00bs already be familiar with object oriented techniques since every language they have ever used had OO as a major feature.
Well, not necessarily. As a consultant who's done a fair bit of maintenance coding on projects that I didn't do any of the original development or design for, I can tell you that a surprising number of people use a perfectly good object oriented language to write programs that have only one object or method. (Or similarly technically use an OO language to write code that would hurt even people who wouldn't consider themselves to be OO purists.)
Well, to be fair, Yahoo in general may not be awesome, but there are some products of theirs that are pretty good. I prefer Yahoo's news setup to Google's or Microsoft's. Flickr is pretty good. Yahoo video is probably technically superior to YouTube at this point, if still much lacking in market share. Yahoo Answers is without equal.
I don't get the idea of wanting to buy Yahoo's search, though. Live Search's problem isn't that it's technically inferior to Google at this point (though it may be) -- its problem is that Google has the mindshare (it's become the verb for doing an internet search), and buying Yahoo Search won't fix that.
Microsoft buying Yahoo would only have made sense if they never had MSN in the first place. It is buying a competitor to compete with its own products and if they intend to only shut it down or merge it with MSN, its only going to bleed massive amounts of money from MSFT in the process.
Just like Google buying YouTube made sense because there was no Google Video, and Yahoo buying Jumpcut only made sense because there was no Yahoo Video.
Or, this could be exactly business as usual in the industry.
I thought Microsoft offered a translation kit for older versions of Office. Dunno if this is offered on mac.
You can download a plugin for Office '03 on Windows that lets it handle '07's .docx just fine. I haven't tried with older versions of Office than that.
And now that Microsoft is belatedly leveraging its monopoly power to force the world into rentware, I'll be giving OpenOffice a spin.
I'll assume you didn't read TFA, since this is Slashdot.
You don't have to rent Office; you can still buy it. Renting it is a new option.
Maybe these prices will help drive the American consumer away from their opulent sport utility text messages to something a little more environmentally sustainable.
You'd think one of the wireless carriers would be able to differentiate themselves in the market and make a killing off selling 10 cent text messages. (That is, people would change to their service when possible because they're half the price of anyone else, and 10 cents for a text message is still a huge profit.) Do I just not understand the market dynamics, or could this be a case of price fixing?
The big textbook manufacturers aren't interested in open textbooks, but some of them are starting to participate in things like this:
http://www.freeloadpress.com/index.aspx
Textbooks that are free as in beer, if not free as in speech. (With ads.)
Probably, you (being a lot of folks here) should just accept that Microsoft's moves will never be "Open enough" for you and call it a day.
Their goals aren't your goals, and never will be.
OpenOffice.org is a descendant of Star Office, originally released in 1984 (according to Wikipedia anyway). They have plenty of their own legacy spaghetti code :)
I was given to understand that OO being Open Source meant that hundreds of developers with unlimited free time would magically fix all of that for us and/or spin some straw into gold. :)
I'm thinking you might mean Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month.
I don't have a link to an online copy of the essay, but here's a wikipedia article discussing it a bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Yeah, it seems like extremely wishful thinking to me.
I think Microsoft will probably be more open sourcey in areas where it makes sense, and continue business as usual where that makes sense. By makes sense, I really mean, makes sense for them financially. Open sourcing Windows doesn't make sense for them financially. Relying on the community to troubleshoot and improve something like device drivers that isn't exactly their core business I can easily see.
P.S. There is a reason why Firefox stomps IE and That's because WE made it good - Windows can be good too if you let us (the end users) make it that way
By 'stomps' you mean 'still has less market share than'? I'm just saying.
FF is great in the sense that it's ridiculously customizable. I've got add-ons installed to make my Firefox exactly what I want it to be for the things I use it for, and that's great. . . but I question whether that's what the mainstream audience will ever really want.
"Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond."
Whatever is the choice of most businesses is always going to lag behind in adoption.
Case in point, my current client is a Fortune 100 company that mandates IE6 as the browser of choice and is planning to move to IE7 sometime next year. There's thousands and thousands of people right there still using IE6 essentially through no choice of their own.
Big, non-software business is always about the last to adopt any technology.
Anyone who is happy with the Heller decision simply must recognize that without Bush in the White House appointing two justices, gun rights would have taken a serious hit today.
Do we know who another president would have appointed and how they would have voted? No, we don't.
You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts or law.
If what the law says wasn't open to argument and interpretation, there wouldn't be any need for lawyers or law professors.
Violent, armed criminals almost never own guns in compliance with the law, and so further restrictions won't help stop them from shooting you.
Well, that's not strictly true. Most illegally owned guns were legally owned by someone else at some point. You as a legal gun owner might not shoot me, but the guy who breaks into your house when you're not home might, or the guy he sells the gun to might.
I'm not saying the ruling is a bad thing; it's just a less simple issue statistically than you're presenting.
Why would you aim for 1/3 of the market when you can aim for 2/3?
Because, on average, I enjoy my job a lot more when I'm doing .NET work. I tend to spend a lot less time dicking around with XML files and the environment, a lot less time fighting my IDE (disclaimer, my recent experience is mostly with Eclipse and I expect the alternatives would be better, for me) and a lot more time writing code that solves the problem at hand. I understand that not everyone will have the same preferences or experience, but for me, that's much more satisfying.
I only need one job at a time, it might as well be one I like.
(I've got about double the Java experience, so it's not like I can't go that way if I need/want to as well.)
It's literally C# with crappier (unnecessarily verbose) syntax. There's a difference between nice syntax, and having to spell everything out. Do they still have 'If ... [...] End If'?
As of .NET 3.5, this is no longer true. VB.NET actually has some features that C# doesn't -- XML literals and a few other things that are mostly useful if you're using LINQ.
(I assume C# will get them in the next version if they turn out to be useful out in the trenches.)
Probably true. But what does that tell us about general language fitness really since it's equally as easy to hog resources in a language with GC? Database connections for example.
When you absolutely need deterministic release of resources you end up having to approach the problem in a similar fashion to c++ memory management anyway.
Many people believe seem to believe GC allows you to forget about resource management when it doesn't at all.
It's a great tool for a certain class of problems but not a panacea.
That's a good point, and absolutely true. My 'other resources' management code in GC languages does look a lot like my memory management code in C++ -- but slightly less so, because there are generally less gotchas around exception handling in those languages.
In response, I'd only offer that almost all of the code I write uses what would amount to dynamic memory allocation in C++, but a much smaller subset of it uses database connection or other "unmanaged resources." I think it's easier to be good about something like that when it's less ubiquitous.
Don't write destructors that leak exceptions.
Well, right. Wouldn't you say that's an added "gotcha" / source of complexity as far as doing memory management correctly, one that doesn't exist in most other languages?
How well has your shop been able to port managed code to handheld devices?
There's the .NET compact framework specifically for that.
I personally haven't done anything with it, but the handhold folks I know are pretty happy with it, and a couple of those guys are rabidly anti-Microsoft in the general case, so I assume it must be decent.
With constructor destructor pairs, there should not be a problem in managing memory unless you neeed to do fancy tricks.
What happens when an exception is thrown in your constructor or destructor?