I actually don't think that's that bad of an idea. In principle, maybe. In reality...
What happens now if someone doesn't buy health insurance? They go to the emergency room and get treated anyway. Other people end up paying for it in the form of higher hospital costs.
Obviously, the pure capitalist solution would be for hospitals to just refuse people who don't have money. I'm not necessarily against that idea either, but I doubt it'd ever fly.
So if Bob doesn't want health insurance and our choices are: A) Bob is forced to pay for health insurance or B) I'm forced (effectively) to pay for Bob's health insurance
Yeah, sad to say Ron Paul is 2008's closest Howard Dean equivalent. Mad internet buzz and fundraising, seen as a nut by the mainstream, and little to no actual voting traction.
The man's got some interesting ideas, and he's not afraid to take unpopular positions. You could have fairly said the same thing about Dean in '04. Just as Dean was out of the realistic running a long time before the primaries were over, so Paul is now. Maybe we're all poorer for that, but, that's the reality of it.
Big, successful companies buy smaller, less successful companies with strengths in areas that they lack. It's just the nature of the market.
Google essentially left Google Video to sleep with the innovation fishes and just threw a bunch of cash at YouTube instead, and obviously Microsoft has done this a million times before. Hell, Yahoo itself has bought smaller companies in areas where it wasn't doing well.
I guess as long as you're willing to admit that you're basing that on your own paranoia rather than the current state of reality then there's not much I can say to argue with it.
I disabled UAC after a couple of weeks because the constant warnings were driving me up a wall.
For what it's worth, for me, I saw UAC pop-ups a ton during the first week or so that I had my Vista machine as I was getting everything I wanted on it installed and set up... and now I maybe see it 1-2 times a week about something that I'm actually glad it's prompting me on.
Clearly other people have had different experiences but I've got no complaints about UAC.
I would argue that everyone is poorer for the loss of that type of job. My concern is not about what those people are entitled to, it's about what results in the greatest good/happiness for everyone.
You seem to have come to the erroneous conclusion that the people who work the most hours are the most valuable to the company or accomplish the most in a week. You're not alone in this, but it's still not correct.
Don't get me wrong, there are super-producers out there who get a ton done in a 40 hour week and then work another 40 hours every week. (Although I'd argue that this isn't really sustainable long term.) But for every one of those, there's at least one person who works a ton overtime and makes a lot of drama about what a hard worker they are, but doesn't actually get shit done, and there's also at least one person who works hard and busts out more than their fair weekly share of work but manages to do it within 40 hours.
A lot of company cultures reward the high hours low output employee over the 40 hours high output employee, and it's their loss when those people leave.
This is the difficulty I always have with the idea of eliminating copyright, even though I'm mostly on the "copyright has gone crazy and needs to be drastically fixed" side of the argument.
It's easy to say the real artists will be the ones making the money from live performance again, but what if I'm a songwriter but not a singer, or a playwright with no interest or talent for being a director/producer, or a novelist, or... you get the idea.
I didn't read it as a comment on race so much as culture.
People who grow up in different environments like different kinds of games. In Brazil more people watch international football / soccer and in America more people watch American football. That isn't a racist statement, and it doesn't mean that you won't find a kid in Brazil with a Brett Favre jersey -- but you're much more likely to find one in Wisconsin.
Similarly, MMOs that many Americans see as grindtastic find much more success in a country like South Korea. It's just something different in the cultures.
Presumably, American-born people of Korean ethnicity would tend to prefer the kinds of games that other Americans do.
In case you hadn't noticed, we don't do threads anymore: slashdot now shuffles all messages into utter randomness. So your post was the top post for me, and without any quotation or other meaningful context it is just another piece of spiteful Microsoft propaganda. The kind that makes me sick, because it just sounds so incredibly righteous, and yet we all know it is so incredibly fake. So maybe you made a fantastic joke (although I doubt it) but you still come across as a Microsoft shill.
Threads fine for me. Check your settings.
And I stand by my criticism that your "joke" is typically american: righteous, fake, and not at all funny. Go ahead, mod me down some more - I've scheduled some time in my agenda somewhere in 2073 to care...
My question wasn't a joke. It's just a question. My being American isn't the cause of your reading comprehension problems.
One thing that isn't clear in the article and seems important is whether schools need to agree to exclusively use Windows to receive the cash.
If it's the case that a school can take this money to provide some Windows machines and still provide other OS machines normally at their expense, I can't see how this would be anything but good for the students. If it's an exclusive deal, I'd agree with you that that really isn't good for the students, unless the school is so poor that this is the only way they're going to get a decent number of computers.
In case you hadn't noticed, the post I was responding to was making a joke that Microsoft gets all their best ideas from their competitors. I find it hard to justify your description of my response that, hey, didn't Apple do something similar to this a while back as wildly inappropriate.
For the record, I don't see Microsoft pushing Windows in schools as evil, and I didn't see Apple pushing IIe's in schools back in the day as evil either. Both companies were making smart moves for the future of their business, and in both cases, probably the kids in those schools ultimately benefited from it.
Well, no, not really. I'd been programming as a hobby for about a dozen years before college, and the AP Comp Sci class I took as a senior in high school gave me the basics in things like data structures and cleaned up the worst of my bad habits.
I can't say my time spent in college was worthless to me today, and I definitely learned a lot there that was never part of the official cirriculum -- but "learning how to learn" wasn't on the list.
The reality is that there's a wide, wide variety of computer science careers out there, even just within the realm of programming, and it's hard if not impossible to teach to all of it in four years.
My undergraduate programming was nearly all C/C++. I had all kinds of classes in computer architecture, computer hardware, assembly language, and all things 'close to the metal'. I had classes in compiler and operating system design. I had classes in math that's useful to certain kinds of programming, and classes in programming computers to solve math problems.
If some horrible apocalyptic event had wiped out all computers on Earth shortly after my graduation, I probably could've built you a 286 out of NAND gates given enough time and a giant pile of NAND gates. If those survived for some reason.
Unfortunately, the apocalypse did not immediately follow my graduation and I was unable to roam the wastelands of the near now like Mad Max's closest building-shit-out-of-NAND-gates equivalent. Instead I became the kind of developer who whores for businesses. Solving those kinds of problems rather than the 'close to the metal' kind of problems turned out to be what I enjoyed.
I've used a database in nearly every project I've worked on in my career. My exposure to databases as an undergrad was zero. I tend to use languages like Java or C# for most of my work. My exposure to them as an undergrad was zero. I use object oriented design patterns and principles nearly every day. My exposure to them as an undergrad was... half-assed at best. Yes, here's C++, it has classes. Next week we'll talk about something else and never mention that again.
For what I do now, my college education was of little real value. If I had become a game programmer, or someone who writes device drivers, or works on embedded devices, or a thousand other things, my education would've been great. Unfortunately, when you pick which colleges to apply to as a high school junior you're not really equipped to make those decisions. Even if you understood what school was good for what, your likelihood to understand what will really make you happy isn't great.
So, I don't know. I'm not convinced teaching Java damages students so much as prepares them for different kind of jobs. I don't think it'd be good if all students learned the Java way and I don't think it'd be good if all students learned the C way. I've worked with brilliant people who started out with a language like Java and -- in that kind of project -- were awesome programmers who never would have had the right mindset to wrap their heads around pointer math. C and other 'close to the metal' languages never will and should never go away, but equally it's very possible now to be a good programmer and not understand those concepts. The abstractions have evolved to that point.
It's certainly possible. In retrospect, I mixed context a bit in my post because most of the Mac people I know aren't developers, so while I was thinking of them while writing that they really aren't relevant.
No question, the Mac command prompt gives you a ton of power -- which I've both seen used to good and terrible effect.
Eh, it probably depends on the language/environment. People who do a lot of *NIX work probably shell a lot more than people who work more on Macs or Windows machines. (I know, the Mac gives you a bad ass command prompt, but I only know one Mac owner out of many that uses it at all.) I've worked at a pretty wide variety of companies (I'm a consultant, mostly.NET or Java work lately) and I'd say the developers that I've met that used the shell are vastly in the minority. Not to say there weren't occasional tasks that most of those developers would use a shell for when necessary or that they didn't understand the shell, but for things that could reasonably be done with either the GUI or the shell, they used the GUI.
I haven't actually seen someone debug or trace from a shell in the workplace ever, though I've certainly done it myself back in college or on personal projects since.
I've read the whole thread to this point and this is the only post that points out this kind of technology could actually be used for good.
I could see Microsoft producing the evil version of it, but I couldn't see them using it on their own employees. It's just too contrary to their (internal) corporate culture and the Kool-Aid they coax their employees to drink.
Honestly, I think you have it backwards. The combination of Office 2007 and VSTO is the only thing that seems, to me, like a killer app out of this generation of MS stuff. Anything they can do to nudge more people to get rolling on it is probably smart.
First, take as a given the ubiquity of Office (outside of slashdot-land). I've worked as a consultant in dozens of different companies with a wide variety of platforms. Some of them were, codewise, Microsoft shops, sure. Lots were Java shops full of people that sneered at all things VB/.NET or Microsoft in the development world. Several based their whole business in ancient technologies such as COBOL or RPG. Some had half their staff using Macs. Some didn't have much technology presence at all. But damned if 100% of those companies weren't using Word and Excel, and nearly all were using Outlook.
You now can write apps that sit within one (or more) of the Office apps, integrate seamlessly with their UI, are visually appealing, and interact with their data -- and it's, if not VBA easy, still stupid easy. A lot more is exposed API-wise to developers from Office than ever has been.
Suppose you've got a pre-existing manufacturing company with some kind of database of their sales used by existing applications. Maybe it's in SAP, maybe it's in an Oracle database. Whatever. Imagine you could write an application for their customer service people that would sit in Outlook and, any time they got an e-mail from one of their clients, would load up information on their sales history or other information from the database that would help them do their job and display it in a resizable/configurable panel that could be moved or interacted with like any of the native panels in Outlook.
Or imagine if you could write an add-in for Excel that would recognize certain kinds of spreadsheets the company frequently had to manipulate, and would helpfully add a button to the Excel UI to perform some specialized common task on that type of spreadsheet.
Imagine if this was the kind of thing that someone who knew what they were doing could write in about an hour, and any moderate programmer with passable.NET familiarity could write in a day or so.
This isn't the kind of thing that really impresses programmers, but it's the kind of application that, once less technical business people see in action, they don't want (most of) their business applications written any other way. Sure, not everything logically ties in to one or more of the Office suite, but an awful lot does. I've seen and worked on countless applications for businesses that had an Excel spreadsheet either as input or output, or that their users would load up when they got an e-mail from a customer, use it to do some calculations, and then send an e-mail back.
I think once Joe Business Middle-Manager sees this stuff and realizes they can only get it with Office, Microsoft could charge them five times as much for Office and they'd still pay it. Worse, in a lot of cases that would actually be the smart choice because the productivity gains would make up the cost and then some!
Obviously, you can customize Open Office. Obviously, there's stuff in the Java world to do a lot of these things, too... but if you want to write an application that works with Office, and do so quickly and easily, VSTO is going to be the way you do it. I haven't personally seen alternatives for other platforms that are going to give half as much result in twice the time. This is the VB revolution/plague of RAD come again.
It's extremely obvious you've not run Vista. You'll have better luck in supporting those gadgets with OSX or Linux, although the generally supported OS is still, of course, XP.
FWIW, I'm running Vista and haven't had any problems getting any of my stuff to work with it.
I don't doubt it was a drivers nightmare a year ago, but now... not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually don't think that's that bad of an idea. In principle, maybe. In reality...
What happens now if someone doesn't buy health insurance? They go to the emergency room and get treated anyway. Other people end up paying for it in the form of higher hospital costs.
Obviously, the pure capitalist solution would be for hospitals to just refuse people who don't have money. I'm not necessarily against that idea either, but I doubt it'd ever fly.
So if Bob doesn't want health insurance and our choices are:
A) Bob is forced to pay for health insurance or
B) I'm forced (effectively) to pay for Bob's health insurance
I'll pick A over the B we have now.
Yeah, sad to say Ron Paul is 2008's closest Howard Dean equivalent. Mad internet buzz and fundraising, seen as a nut by the mainstream, and little to no actual voting traction.
The man's got some interesting ideas, and he's not afraid to take unpopular positions. You could have fairly said the same thing about Dean in '04. Just as Dean was out of the realistic running a long time before the primaries were over, so Paul is now. Maybe we're all poorer for that, but, that's the reality of it.
Big, successful companies buy smaller, less successful companies with strengths in areas that they lack. It's just the nature of the market.
Google essentially left Google Video to sleep with the innovation fishes and just threw a bunch of cash at YouTube instead, and obviously Microsoft has done this a million times before. Hell, Yahoo itself has bought smaller companies in areas where it wasn't doing well.
I guess as long as you're willing to admit that you're basing that on your own paranoia rather than the current state of reality then there's not much I can say to argue with it.
Rest of the post aside, Silverlight isn't a single platform technology.
Tonight, thank God it's them, instead of you?
(Ok, technically that's just Bono and not U2.)
I disabled UAC after a couple of weeks because the constant warnings were driving me up a wall.
For what it's worth, for me, I saw UAC pop-ups a ton during the first week or so that I had my Vista machine as I was getting everything I wanted on it installed and set up... and now I maybe see it 1-2 times a week about something that I'm actually glad it's prompting me on.
Clearly other people have had different experiences but I've got no complaints about UAC.
I would argue that everyone is poorer for the loss of that type of job. My concern is not about what those people are entitled to, it's about what results in the greatest good/happiness for everyone.
You seem to have come to the erroneous conclusion that the people who work the most hours are the most valuable to the company or accomplish the most in a week. You're not alone in this, but it's still not correct.
Don't get me wrong, there are super-producers out there who get a ton done in a 40 hour week and then work another 40 hours every week. (Although I'd argue that this isn't really sustainable long term.) But for every one of those, there's at least one person who works a ton overtime and makes a lot of drama about what a hard worker they are, but doesn't actually get shit done, and there's also at least one person who works hard and busts out more than their fair weekly share of work but manages to do it within 40 hours.
A lot of company cultures reward the high hours low output employee over the 40 hours high output employee, and it's their loss when those people leave.
This is the difficulty I always have with the idea of eliminating copyright, even though I'm mostly on the "copyright has gone crazy and needs to be drastically fixed" side of the argument.
It's easy to say the real artists will be the ones making the money from live performance again, but what if I'm a songwriter but not a singer, or a playwright with no interest or talent for being a director/producer, or a novelist, or... you get the idea.
I don't have a good answer for that yet.
Other than being able to pass the ACID test(s), what would it really mean to Microsoft either way if IE8 did or didn't?
I didn't read it as a comment on race so much as culture.
People who grow up in different environments like different kinds of games. In Brazil more people watch international football / soccer and in America more people watch American football. That isn't a racist statement, and it doesn't mean that you won't find a kid in Brazil with a Brett Favre jersey -- but you're much more likely to find one in Wisconsin.
Similarly, MMOs that many Americans see as grindtastic find much more success in a country like South Korea. It's just something different in the cultures.
Presumably, American-born people of Korean ethnicity would tend to prefer the kinds of games that other Americans do.
In case you hadn't noticed, we don't do threads anymore: slashdot now shuffles all messages into utter randomness. So your post was the top post for me, and without any quotation or other meaningful context it is just another piece of spiteful Microsoft propaganda. The kind that makes me sick, because it just sounds so incredibly righteous, and yet we all know it is so incredibly fake. So maybe you made a fantastic joke (although I doubt it) but you still come across as a Microsoft shill.
Threads fine for me. Check your settings.
And I stand by my criticism that your "joke" is typically american: righteous, fake, and not at all funny. Go ahead, mod me down some more - I've scheduled some time in my agenda somewhere in 2073 to care...
My question wasn't a joke. It's just a question. My being American isn't the cause of your reading comprehension problems.
One thing that isn't clear in the article and seems important is whether schools need to agree to exclusively use Windows to receive the cash.
If it's the case that a school can take this money to provide some Windows machines and still provide other OS machines normally at their expense, I can't see how this would be anything but good for the students. If it's an exclusive deal, I'd agree with you that that really isn't good for the students, unless the school is so poor that this is the only way they're going to get a decent number of computers.
In case you hadn't noticed, the post I was responding to was making a joke that Microsoft gets all their best ideas from their competitors. I find it hard to justify your description of my response that, hey, didn't Apple do something similar to this a while back as wildly inappropriate.
For the record, I don't see Microsoft pushing Windows in schools as evil, and I didn't see Apple pushing IIe's in schools back in the day as evil either. Both companies were making smart moves for the future of their business, and in both cases, probably the kids in those schools ultimately benefited from it.
Isn't this pretty similar to what Apple was doing with schools back in the 80's?
Well, no, not really. I'd been programming as a hobby for about a dozen years before college, and the AP Comp Sci class I took as a senior in high school gave me the basics in things like data structures and cleaned up the worst of my bad habits.
I can't say my time spent in college was worthless to me today, and I definitely learned a lot there that was never part of the official cirriculum -- but "learning how to learn" wasn't on the list.
I pretty much agree with this.
The reality is that there's a wide, wide variety of computer science careers out there, even just within the realm of programming, and it's hard if not impossible to teach to all of it in four years.
My undergraduate programming was nearly all C/C++. I had all kinds of classes in computer architecture, computer hardware, assembly language, and all things 'close to the metal'. I had classes in compiler and operating system design. I had classes in math that's useful to certain kinds of programming, and classes in programming computers to solve math problems.
If some horrible apocalyptic event had wiped out all computers on Earth shortly after my graduation, I probably could've built you a 286 out of NAND gates given enough time and a giant pile of NAND gates. If those survived for some reason.
Unfortunately, the apocalypse did not immediately follow my graduation and I was unable to roam the wastelands of the near now like Mad Max's closest building-shit-out-of-NAND-gates equivalent. Instead I became the kind of developer who whores for businesses. Solving those kinds of problems rather than the 'close to the metal' kind of problems turned out to be what I enjoyed.
I've used a database in nearly every project I've worked on in my career. My exposure to databases as an undergrad was zero. I tend to use languages like Java or C# for most of my work. My exposure to them as an undergrad was zero. I use object oriented design patterns and principles nearly every day. My exposure to them as an undergrad was... half-assed at best. Yes, here's C++, it has classes. Next week we'll talk about something else and never mention that again.
For what I do now, my college education was of little real value. If I had become a game programmer, or someone who writes device drivers, or works on embedded devices, or a thousand other things, my education would've been great. Unfortunately, when you pick which colleges to apply to as a high school junior you're not really equipped to make those decisions. Even if you understood what school was good for what, your likelihood to understand what will really make you happy isn't great.
So, I don't know. I'm not convinced teaching Java damages students so much as prepares them for different kind of jobs. I don't think it'd be good if all students learned the Java way and I don't think it'd be good if all students learned the C way. I've worked with brilliant people who started out with a language like Java and -- in that kind of project -- were awesome programmers who never would have had the right mindset to wrap their heads around pointer math. C and other 'close to the metal' languages never will and should never go away, but equally it's very possible now to be a good programmer and not understand those concepts. The abstractions have evolved to that point.
I think I just know better mac people than you.
It's certainly possible. In retrospect, I mixed context a bit in my post because most of the Mac people I know aren't developers, so while I was thinking of them while writing that they really aren't relevant.
No question, the Mac command prompt gives you a ton of power -- which I've both seen used to good and terrible effect.
Eh, it probably depends on the language/environment. People who do a lot of *NIX work probably shell a lot more than people who work more on Macs or Windows machines. (I know, the Mac gives you a bad ass command prompt, but I only know one Mac owner out of many that uses it at all.) I've worked at a pretty wide variety of companies (I'm a consultant, mostly .NET or Java work lately) and I'd say the developers that I've met that used the shell are vastly in the minority. Not to say there weren't occasional tasks that most of those developers would use a shell for when necessary or that they didn't understand the shell, but for things that could reasonably be done with either the GUI or the shell, they used the GUI.
I haven't actually seen someone debug or trace from a shell in the workplace ever, though I've certainly done it myself back in college or on personal projects since.
I've read the whole thread to this point and this is the only post that points out this kind of technology could actually be used for good.
I could see Microsoft producing the evil version of it, but I couldn't see them using it on their own employees. It's just too contrary to their (internal) corporate culture and the Kool-Aid they coax their employees to drink.
Honestly, I think you have it backwards. The combination of Office 2007 and VSTO is the only thing that seems, to me, like a killer app out of this generation of MS stuff. Anything they can do to nudge more people to get rolling on it is probably smart.
.NET familiarity could write in a day or so.
First, take as a given the ubiquity of Office (outside of slashdot-land). I've worked as a consultant in dozens of different companies with a wide variety of platforms. Some of them were, codewise, Microsoft shops, sure. Lots were Java shops full of people that sneered at all things VB/.NET or Microsoft in the development world. Several based their whole business in ancient technologies such as COBOL or RPG. Some had half their staff using Macs. Some didn't have much technology presence at all. But damned if 100% of those companies weren't using Word and Excel, and nearly all were using Outlook.
You now can write apps that sit within one (or more) of the Office apps, integrate seamlessly with their UI, are visually appealing, and interact with their data -- and it's, if not VBA easy, still stupid easy. A lot more is exposed API-wise to developers from Office than ever has been.
Suppose you've got a pre-existing manufacturing company with some kind of database of their sales used by existing applications. Maybe it's in SAP, maybe it's in an Oracle database. Whatever. Imagine you could write an application for their customer service people that would sit in Outlook and, any time they got an e-mail from one of their clients, would load up information on their sales history or other information from the database that would help them do their job and display it in a resizable/configurable panel that could be moved or interacted with like any of the native panels in Outlook.
Or imagine if you could write an add-in for Excel that would recognize certain kinds of spreadsheets the company frequently had to manipulate, and would helpfully add a button to the Excel UI to perform some specialized common task on that type of spreadsheet.
Imagine if this was the kind of thing that someone who knew what they were doing could write in about an hour, and any moderate programmer with passable
This isn't the kind of thing that really impresses programmers, but it's the kind of application that, once less technical business people see in action, they don't want (most of) their business applications written any other way. Sure, not everything logically ties in to one or more of the Office suite, but an awful lot does. I've seen and worked on countless applications for businesses that had an Excel spreadsheet either as input or output, or that their users would load up when they got an e-mail from a customer, use it to do some calculations, and then send an e-mail back.
I think once Joe Business Middle-Manager sees this stuff and realizes they can only get it with Office, Microsoft could charge them five times as much for Office and they'd still pay it. Worse, in a lot of cases that would actually be the smart choice because the productivity gains would make up the cost and then some!
Obviously, you can customize Open Office. Obviously, there's stuff in the Java world to do a lot of these things, too... but if you want to write an application that works with Office, and do so quickly and easily, VSTO is going to be the way you do it. I haven't personally seen alternatives for other platforms that are going to give half as much result in twice the time. This is the VB revolution/plague of RAD come again.
Man, I feel old just thinking about it.
What language are you programming in? VS2005 certainly does it for C#.
It's extremely obvious you've not run Vista. You'll have better luck in supporting those gadgets with OSX or Linux, although the generally supported OS is still, of course, XP.
FWIW, I'm running Vista and haven't had any problems getting any of my stuff to work with it.
I don't doubt it was a drivers nightmare a year ago, but now... not so much.