I think the main problem with Linux is the desktop never seems to get to the level of Windows or a Mac no matter how many frameworks are added. They keep changing it all the time and amazingly, the same lack of features still exist. Be it, KDE, Gnome, Unity, etc the simplest things that have been around for years in proprietary systems that people use everyday are simply avoided by Linux GUI library developers. For example, the Open/Save dialog boxes in gnome (GTK+) are incredibly watered down and weak. Example, they do not allow you to type a path or use a filter in the path. So if I type *.jpg in one of these boxes it tries to save or open a file name called "*.jpg", rather than show me only jpeg files. This is completely stupid. Easy fixes like this I find annoying and unnecessary in Linux desktop environments. Instead the developers seem to have a fetish for spending their time working on multi-desktop 3D cube animations (ie. compiz) and other useless windowing effects that are simply not productive but more of a novelty for people to ooh and ahhh about until they need to open a common dialog.
The other problem I have (as an application developer) is that these libraries are not intuitive and lack good solid documentation and non-trivial examples. Take GTK+ for instance. The GUI builder that is supposed to help you develop apps quickly using this library (glade) is weak and almost featureless. IMHO Visual Studio is still the undisputed champ of ease of use for the developer. Linux GUI's and their apps will not improve by much until a viable fully functional IDE with seamless and fully functional Drag and Drop component support is available. The ability to drop highly complex components like Internet Explorer and Excel grids into a window and access their functionality through ActiveX gives the developer in Windows a tremendous advantage over developing in a much simpler environment like Gnome or KDE. In Windows I can drag and drop a Media control and a PDF viewer into a custom app and save myself tons of time. The Linux GUI library developers need to start thinking about building in this advanced capability which Windows developers have had at their disposal for almost two decades! Otherwise Linux will sadly and unnecessarily remain in the server console environment. This is 2011, vi and emacs just don't cut it anymore.
I got a great idea! Instead of pulling out the lawyers with yet another hi-tech pussy lawsuit, how about pulling out the engineers instead and solving the REAL problem. That is, fixing AT&T's shitty cell service! Wadaya think AT&T?
> Either way, see what happens next time you travel and get sick. Chances are high you'll be covered for free
That's simply not true. I've travelled outside the U.S and this is NOT the case. When a person travels outside of the U.S. they usually buy temporary/limited coverage through their credit card (Amex offers one) or through other travel insurance companies. Unlike the U.S., almost all other countries WILL NOT give you free access to their health care system. In some ways these countries have smartened up. We're going the opposite way!
I am so glad the people who bankrupted Social Security and Medicare will finally have their hands in everything to do with our health care. This bill doesn't lower prices, but only shifts the actual insurance from 1100 competing private companies to one big government bureaucracy. Each year, less and less doctors are accepting Medicaid and other government health insurances because their payments stink. Of course liberals don't seem to mind because doctors are all rich people anyway who can afford to work for low wages. Nevermind that they pay hundreds of thousands in malpractice insurance, rent, electric and other business expenses. Who cares about business anyways? It's only math and numbers! Truth is, all of that doesn't matter when people are sick. In fact, I heard that the laws of gravity cease to exist when people get sick. Seriously, it seems only the lawyers are allowed to charge $500/hr because democrats love litigation, especially litigation that brings down private companies so that ill-funded and high taxing government programs can step in. I feel all future doctors should be forced to spend 10 years in medical school, come out with hundreds of thousands in school loans and do this to get paid low wages because the government says so. That will give the future doctors of America something to look forward too! However, there is one way to remedy this. Make medical school only 1 year, this avoids a lot of the expensive school loans, but gives us tons of uneducated shitty doctors who will work for government pay. I'm sure liberals don't mind that as long as everyone is covered, right?
The next thing we should do is force pharmaceutical companies to lower prices for all drugs to 1 cent a pill. That's right! Where do these big pharm companies get their nerve spending billions on new life saving drugs and then charging us a dollar or more a pill so they can keep funding their research?? Why can't these people simply work for less money? In fact, the engineers and the construction workers who build the pharmaceutical buildings, the electric companies that power the research departments and the companies that supply all the medical testing equipment should all take a pay cut because these pills are just too important! All pills that can save lives should be free, and the people who helped develop those pills shouldn't complain. If they do, then throw them out and hire cheaper chemists and scientists. If that doesn't work, we can always unionise the chemists and scientists so that instead of making drugs, they can be sipping more coffee and can keep their job even if they suck at it . That'll fix these rich pharmaceutical bastards! Right??
I love the fact that the people who scared us into getting the H1N1 vaccination and then couldn't even deliver 1/8 of the vaccines it promised are now going to run our health care system. Of course, liberals love free things. They love when someone else has to pay for their problems and they certainly couldn't care less about quality as long as everyone gets something. Something is better than nothing, right?? It's better that all 300 million citizens end up with crap than $270 million end up with good health care. Who cares that no one has read all 2,000 pages of this bill? Who cares if good doctors can't make a living and are forced to find other lines of work? Who cares if Big Pharm can't create life saving drugs because they can't fund research? Who cares if taxes go way up? Just as long as we have Hope & Change. Because without Hope & Change there is no reason to go on living.
Here we go again! More know-nothing government bureaucrats want to somehow interfere with technology. Unless the software were embedded in a machine built by one company, you can't hold developers accountable for software simply because there are so many variables that go into making software it's very difficult to know what type of computer and what patches, upgrades or other software will be running along side your software.
People misuse computers all the time and not all software is designed to be secure from the start. In the OS arena, hackers are constantly trying to break into Windows. Microsoft "supposedly" does their best, but even if they don't, how can a software company justify going into business only to be forced out of business by law suits where the plaintiff knows very little about securing his/her computers?
The fact that this dumb idea came from Europe does not surprise me in the least. The EU has always been very business unfriendly when it comes to how they treat their tech companies which is why very little OS and large scale application development is done there in the first place.
The only people who will benefit from stupid laws like this will be the lawyers.
So how is California going to save money now? First it was legalize pot, now it's open source text books. Perhaps not giving illegal aliens free government health care would do the trick. Ya think?
Have you ever stopped to take a long hard look at the people who run this country? You know, the congressmen, senators, etc? Sadly, these are the people among us that create policy every single day affecting the very mechanisms of society they simply do not understand.
The problem is most of the criminals on the Internet who aim to do harm to our country are not the same idiotic dirty old men that show up on NBC's "To catch a predator" because they were horny for a 12 year old. Proxy servers and onion routing are technologies that have existed for sometime now and are becoming more and more common and easier to use everyday, even for 60 year old perverts.
When are these empty suits in our government gonna wake up and realize that this cat and mouse game is only gonna cost our society more money and wasted effort leading to just a few more arrests than they had before? If you're worried for your child's safety on the Internet, then keep him off the damn computer! Hows that for a novel idea! I liken this whole thing to the driving with a cell phone ban. The cops can't enforce it and people keep driving with their cell phones pressed into their faces more than ever. So what's the point????
I'm all for law enforcement, just not law enforcement that amounts to wasted effort and my hard earned tax dollars thrown out the window by a clueless empty suit with a bad haircut and a southern accent. If you don't believe me, just ask Al Gore (the inventor of the Internet) what he thinks!!
Cyber? Seriously, anyone who names a person place or thing containing the word "cyber" is a fruit cake and probably knows horse crap about how to secure a computer to start with.
When I say that I mean the way it is used currently as a Desktop OS. I've been using Linux a long time from the command line. Every now and then I pop my head up to see what's new in the desktop arena for Linux, but I'm always disappointed.
Here is what I think the problem is...
1. The GUIs are getting slower and slower.
2. Difficult for the GUI to take control of itself if a runaway process is eating up all the CPU time (Task Manger in Windows is much better).
3. Still not enough good hardware support. Configuring simple things like sound and desktop video modes are weak and buggy.
4. Playing movies is always a chore because one "good" media player does not exist for all possible video formats (you have to bounce between MPlayer, VLC, Noatun, KPlayer, etc).
5. Different programs compiled using different libraries (GTK, QT, XLib) all feel and look different. Simple and important features like Cut & Paste and object embedding don't always work between programs.
6. They are no good visual application development tools. A tool similar to Visual Studio is needed in Linux. IDE's like Netbeans and Eclipse are okay for small programs or web scripts, but simply doesn't cut it for full blown desktop application development.
There are more but you get the idea. In my opinion, if some of the above can remedied soon enough and Microsoft is stilling selling their latest OS in the same vein as Vista. Then yes, Linux would have a good chance on the desktop.
> Enforcing OO from the outset is a terrible way to teach programming
I couldn't agree more! I've always taught C first. Give them good foundations on data types, functions, argument passing, how memory works with pointers in C, arrays, dynamic memory management, etc. Once that stuff is locked in, then OOP principles can be applied later with relative ease because the fundamentals are now there.
I tutor students in computer science courses and have seen so many students complain that they don't understand functions and data, yet their teacher has moved onto classes and objects.
The problem with teaching C++ and not C is the that too many teachers move too quickly to the OOP stuff because they feel that it somehow "replaces" non object C programming. This is not only wrong but dangerous because these students are rushed into OOP without understanding the problems it solves. Besides, not all problems are best solved with OOP.
The C programming language is actually a simple language. You'd be surprised at how quickly students can pick up concepts like pointers and dynamic memory management if the teacher only expose it to them early on and give them short projects to boost their understanding. Sadly, many teachers do the students a tremendous disservice by trying to avoid pointers because it gets in the way of teaching OOP. Or perhaps the teacher himself is rusty.
Just yesterday I was tutoring a student and he has never even seen a switch statement, never heard of new and delete, never heard of an enumeration and never knew how to pass a variable to a function by reference. This is his first course in C++. Yet the course has ended and the next course that follows in the spring starts with teaching const member functions! Have you ever heard of such crap in your life?
Talk about teaching bad code design... The teacher insists that the students call exit(1) in all their functions when the user inputs an incorrect value from the keyboard. As apposed to prompting the user and asking to try again.
Seriously... I'd love to meet this teacher and ask her how much programming in C++ she has done professionally.
By the way, this is supposed to be a very prestigious school in Westchester County New York. Then we all wonder why companies hire programmers from Israel and India.
I've been developing for the past 11+ years now and I've taught a few C/C++ courses along the way so I thought I'd throw my two cents in.
Now, I hate to say this but some of the curricula offered at some of these colleges are a sick joke! Is it me or do mathematics professors make bad computer programming instructors? Unfortunately, some of these fine institutions are too cheap to hire a separate computer programming instructor who is actually up to date with the rest of society and who has received the news that Java is no longer state-of-the-art.
I also think that these teachers are WAY too quick to rush into Object Oriented Programming (again because it's so "**state-of-the-art**") and not solidify the basics "like what a function is" or "what a variable is", etc. You would be amazed at how many students I've tutored where the teacher is explaining virtual function pointers and still 90% of the class still doesn't know how to pass an integer to a function!
Open source is really starting to get on my nerves. I'm really getting tired of these losers who have produced nothing but 3rd rate junkware with bad documentation at best, telling the rest of us that somehow we're all bad people if we charge money for the fruits of our labor.
I used to like Stallman but now he's becoming to nazi'ish about open source. To be honest, Firefox is one of the very few open source software packages out there that actually works well. Who cares about the license! Its a free download, it works well and that's that!
When Richard Stallman produces software that "everyday people" actually use, without having to go to a news group and ask questions, then he can open his mouth.
As a developer, the one thing Microsoft seems to have done right in the past when it comes to their office and web software was to develop those applications from the ground up to be automated. When I say automated I mean that I can embed Word, Excel or IE in my C++, VB or C# application to enhance it.
This is no small feature, because I've seen tons of software out there that rely on embedding or controlling a web browser. This is something Firefox and all the other browser makers didn't think about when they created their software. If Google is smart they will make their browser automation friendly, whether that means ActiveX,.Net or some other API with which to control their browser.
In my opinion, XP was their best system to date. At least for a desktop. With Vista they went backwards. I am very surprised they allowed this crappy OS to remain like this. There are alternative systems slowly but surely getting better each passing day. If Microsoft isn't careful to produce a much better system soon, people are going to start looking elseware. Although Microsoft has a monopoly of sorts on desktop software, they should never underestimate people's impatience. No one ever thought IndyMac, Fannie May and Freddie Mac would fail.
Windows XP has a feature called the Limited Account. The problem with it is that it's a bit flakey. The "Run As" option works fine. All Microsoft had to do was improve on Limited Accounts by making them more flexible. Instead they went berzerk and created a whole new security feature that wasn't necessary and that's what annoys people.
Microsoft's philosophy needs to change from "shock and awe" to "less is more". Revolutionary operating systems shouldn't have to take up 15 gigabytes of hard disk space. At least not in 2008. Especially since so much is being done with less than 100MB by people with a lot less technical and financial prowess. I really never saw the point in Vista to start with. There isn't anything I can do in Vista that I can't already do in XP. Moving from Windows 3.1 to 95 made sense. Moving from 95 to 2000 made sense. Moving from XP to Vista makes no sense unless your whole motivation is to boot up a screen that says Vista on it instead of XP. The Aero interface is 100% complete hype and is a waste of resources and money upgrading to this feature.
In my opinion, I think Microsoft is realizing greater financial potential in creating new versions of their systems rather than just improving on existing ones. Which is a shame because all the effort of Vista should have went into XP Service Pack 3. This would have made more technical sense. Of course the sales people would have nothing to promote.
With tons of new developers using their tools for free they are benefiting both the students and Microsoft. I think the open-source hard-heads need to face the facts, Microsoft's tools are the easiest to use and very feature rich and there is no getting around this. Each new library they come out with just gets better and better. From MFC to VB to.NET, their tools integrate well.
I look at it this way, programming is hard enough without having to learn how to use a complex and painful development system. It's a shame but the open-source world never really united to create a serious IDE that could even remotely compete with Visual Studio. Hopefully this will change one day. However, the result of this is exactly why most open-source applications are third rate and have never won over the average computer user. I feel there is a definite correlation between the quality of the development tools and the quality of the finished product. All things being equal, if the developer has an easier time developing, then this almost always translates to better software.
Perhaps Microsoft feels that allowing other software companies to interact with their technology will one day give users an excuse to switch to something else down the road. Whatever the reason, they feel they are protecting their bread and butter, which is entirely within their right. It is their system! This is why we have "proprietary" software! If these people don't like it, there is always Linux or Apple. Which personally I feel are better systems for certain tasks. In fact, I'm writing this from a Linux system. But to ask a judge to force a company to play nice with other vendors because they feel the need to "inter-operate" is ridiculous at best and is simply not right.
What if tomorrow KFC was forced to give up the eleven herbs and spices used in their secret recipe? Don't laugh, it may happen someday. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but can't people just create something better? Sure, there are anti-trust laws, but whatever happened to beating someone in the market by creating a better product? Years back, Netscape tried to sue Microsoft because they felt their browser was unfairly marketed since it came with the system. Today, Mozilla is proving Netscape dead wrong and is almost 20% of all browsers while Microsoft is down to almost 60%. It's a sad day when the lawyers are writing better code than the developers.
I must say, I've always thought Linux's desktops sucked. However over the last few years Gnome and KDE have improved exponentially. I currently have Ubuntu 7.10 installed and it really works great. Sure there are some quirks here and there and it's not quite ready for the everyday user, but it's getting there. At the same time, Microsoft has been slacking on their new Vista OS. Originally it was touted to have tons more features than it currently has. The other day, someone handed me a Vista laptop to fix loaded with viruses and spyware and I thought, "Now wait a minute, this isn't supposed to happen in Vista!". Perhaps Vista's SP1 will vastly improve it. I don't know. But if it doesn't and this keeps up, I predict Linux will eventually take a sizable percentage of users away from Windows within the next 3-5 years. I also believe this is why MS is eventually going to try to pull a SCO special.
> eBay has claimed that they have changed the code in order to prevent any patent violations claimed in the suit, but > MercExchange lawyers say that they are still entitled to a hearing in order to force eBay to license the patents.
But that's not good enough for MercExchange because they're entitled to a few bucks, no?? I'm surprised Ford hasn't sued GM for making a car that looks similar to theirs. A LAW SUIT OVER A F**KING BUTTON!!! Give me a break!! This is exactly why countries like China, India, Israel and Japan are kicking our ass!! American companies don't innovate anymore, they sue!! Lawyers are destroying this country one suit at a time.
> First, it isn't like Windows can't get corrupted and mimic a hardware problem such as a flaky keyboard. This is > why so many decision trees used by first line techs at hardware vendors end in `reinstall the OS' and call back > if you still have a problem.
True BUT... Windows is a known system. In other words, there aren't 27 distros of Windows or recompiled Windows' kernels. A trouble shooting tech has a much better chance of differentiating a hardware problem from a software problem when the user can't create his "own version" of an OS kernel or choose between 50 versions of one. Like you say, there are databases of trouble shooting information these techs use to query for help, that would be very difficult to create for every OS, especially an open source OS like Linux unless it's narrowed to a specific version. Re-installing the original OS that came with the system is always the best option as far as the manufacturer is concerned because it makes their life easier and ends up costing them less.
> Second, they built the hardware, they have a moral obligation to warrant the hardware
Well yes, they built the hardware, but my point is that this isn't about morals, it's about business and I'm sure if the user where to re-install Windows and still have the keyboard problem, HP would support and warranty the hardware. Companies don't want to replace hardware just because a customer claims it's broken. The manufacturer has an obligation to itself to see if if the hardware can be fixed or if the problem lies elsewhere before accepting returned hardware under a warranty.
> most vendors will continue to honor warranties after things like RAM and hard drives are replaced by the user
Yes, but techs can still trouble shoot bad memory modules much quicker than an OS that mimics bad memory such as a newly compiled kernel driver that suddenly causes a memory dump.
I think people need to start realizing that unless there is some kind of deal made between a hardware vendor and a specific distro/version, Linux is otherwise a "do-it-yerself" system that is probably not going to be supported by many hardware manufacturers. Now, I'm sure that when IBM sells their servers running Linux, they only support a very specific version of it, which makes sense.
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I think the main problem with Linux is the desktop never seems to get to the level of Windows or a Mac no matter how many frameworks are added. They keep changing it all the time and amazingly, the same lack of features still exist. Be it, KDE, Gnome, Unity, etc the simplest things that have been around for years in proprietary systems that people use everyday are simply avoided by Linux GUI library developers. For example, the Open/Save dialog boxes in gnome (GTK+) are incredibly watered down and weak. Example, they do not allow you to type a path or use a filter in the path. So if I type *.jpg in one of these boxes it tries to save or open a file name called "*.jpg", rather than show me only jpeg files. This is completely stupid. Easy fixes like this I find annoying and unnecessary in Linux desktop environments. Instead the developers seem to have a fetish for spending their time working on multi-desktop 3D cube animations (ie. compiz) and other useless windowing effects that are simply not productive but more of a novelty for people to ooh and ahhh about until they need to open a common dialog.
The other problem I have (as an application developer) is that these libraries are not intuitive and lack good solid documentation and non-trivial examples. Take GTK+ for instance. The GUI builder that is supposed to help you develop apps quickly using this library (glade) is weak and almost featureless. IMHO Visual Studio is still the undisputed champ of ease of use for the developer. Linux GUI's and their apps will not improve by much until a viable fully functional IDE with seamless and fully functional Drag and Drop component support is available. The ability to drop highly complex components like Internet Explorer and Excel grids into a window and access their functionality through ActiveX gives the developer in Windows a tremendous advantage over developing in a much simpler environment like Gnome or KDE. In Windows I can drag and drop a Media control and a PDF viewer into a custom app and save myself tons of time. The Linux GUI library developers need to start thinking about building in this advanced capability which Windows developers have had at their disposal for almost two decades! Otherwise Linux will sadly and unnecessarily remain in the server console environment. This is 2011, vi and emacs just don't cut it anymore.
I got a great idea! Instead of pulling out the lawyers with yet another hi-tech pussy lawsuit, how about pulling out the engineers instead and solving the REAL problem. That is, fixing AT&T's shitty cell service! Wadaya think AT&T?
> Either way, see what happens next time you travel and get sick. Chances are high you'll be covered for free
That's simply not true. I've travelled outside the U.S and this is NOT the case. When a person travels outside of the U.S. they usually buy temporary/limited coverage through their credit card (Amex offers one) or through other travel insurance companies. Unlike the U.S., almost all other countries WILL NOT give you free access to their health care system. In some ways these countries have smartened up. We're going the opposite way!
I am so glad the people who bankrupted Social Security and Medicare will finally have their hands in everything to do with our health care. This bill doesn't lower prices, but only shifts the actual insurance from 1100 competing private companies to one big government bureaucracy. Each year, less and less doctors are accepting Medicaid and other government health insurances because their payments stink. Of course liberals don't seem to mind because doctors are all rich people anyway who can afford to work for low wages. Nevermind that they pay hundreds of thousands in malpractice insurance, rent, electric and other business expenses. Who cares about business anyways? It's only math and numbers! Truth is, all of that doesn't matter when people are sick. In fact, I heard that the laws of gravity cease to exist when people get sick. Seriously, it seems only the lawyers are allowed to charge $500/hr because democrats love litigation, especially litigation that brings down private companies so that ill-funded and high taxing government programs can step in. I feel all future doctors should be forced to spend 10 years in medical school, come out with hundreds of thousands in school loans and do this to get paid low wages because the government says so. That will give the future doctors of America something to look forward too! However, there is one way to remedy this. Make medical school only 1 year, this avoids a lot of the expensive school loans, but gives us tons of uneducated shitty doctors who will work for government pay. I'm sure liberals don't mind that as long as everyone is covered, right?
The next thing we should do is force pharmaceutical companies to lower prices for all drugs to 1 cent a pill. That's right! Where do these big pharm companies get their nerve spending billions on new life saving drugs and then charging us a dollar or more a pill so they can keep funding their research?? Why can't these people simply work for less money? In fact, the engineers and the construction workers who build the pharmaceutical buildings, the electric companies that power the research departments and the companies that supply all the medical testing equipment should all take a pay cut because these pills are just too important! All pills that can save lives should be free, and the people who helped develop those pills shouldn't complain. If they do, then throw them out and hire cheaper chemists and scientists. If that doesn't work, we can always unionise the chemists and scientists so that instead of making drugs, they can be sipping more coffee and can keep their job even if they suck at it . That'll fix these rich pharmaceutical bastards! Right??
I love the fact that the people who scared us into getting the H1N1 vaccination and then couldn't even deliver 1/8 of the vaccines it promised are now going to run our health care system. Of course, liberals love free things. They love when someone else has to pay for their problems and they certainly couldn't care less about quality as long as everyone gets something. Something is better than nothing, right?? It's better that all 300 million citizens end up with crap than $270 million end up with good health care. Who cares that no one has read all 2,000 pages of this bill? Who cares if good doctors can't make a living and are forced to find other lines of work? Who cares if Big Pharm can't create life saving drugs because they can't fund research? Who cares if taxes go way up? Just as long as we have Hope & Change. Because without Hope & Change there is no reason to go on living.
Welcome to socialism my friends. Enjoy. :-)
What did you expect? It's liberals like Obama that embrace and encourage litigation and big $$ awards. Did someone say Hope and Change??
Here we go again! More know-nothing government bureaucrats want to somehow interfere with technology. Unless the software were embedded in a machine built by one company, you can't hold developers accountable for software simply because there are so many variables that go into making software it's very difficult to know what type of computer and what patches, upgrades or other software will be running along side your software.
People misuse computers all the time and not all software is designed to be secure from the start. In the OS arena, hackers are constantly trying to break into Windows. Microsoft "supposedly" does their best, but even if they don't, how can a software company justify going into business only to be forced out of business by law suits where the plaintiff knows very little about securing his/her computers?
The fact that this dumb idea came from Europe does not surprise me in the least. The EU has always been very business unfriendly when it comes to how they treat their tech companies which is why very little OS and large scale application development is done there in the first place.
The only people who will benefit from stupid laws like this will be the lawyers.
So how is California going to save money now? First it was legalize pot, now it's open source text books. Perhaps not giving illegal aliens free government health care would do the trick. Ya think?
Have you ever stopped to take a long hard look at the people who run this country? You know, the congressmen, senators, etc? Sadly, these are the people among us that create policy every single day affecting the very mechanisms of society they simply do not understand.
The problem is most of the criminals on the Internet who aim to do harm to our country are not the same idiotic dirty old men that show up on NBC's "To catch a predator" because they were horny for a 12 year old. Proxy servers and onion routing are technologies that have existed for sometime now and are becoming more and more common and easier to use everyday, even for 60 year old perverts.
When are these empty suits in our government gonna wake up and realize that this cat and mouse game is only gonna cost our society more money and wasted effort leading to just a few more arrests than they had before? If you're worried for your child's safety on the Internet, then keep him off the damn computer! Hows that for a novel idea! I liken this whole thing to the driving with a cell phone ban. The cops can't enforce it and people keep driving with their cell phones pressed into their faces more than ever. So what's the point????
I'm all for law enforcement, just not law enforcement that amounts to wasted effort and my hard earned tax dollars thrown out the window by a clueless empty suit with a bad haircut and a southern accent. If you don't believe me, just ask Al Gore (the inventor of the Internet) what he thinks!!
Cyber? Seriously, anyone who names a person place or thing containing the word "cyber" is a fruit cake and probably knows horse crap about how to secure a computer to start with.
When I say that I mean the way it is used currently as a Desktop OS. I've been using Linux a long time from the command line. Every now and then I pop my head up to see what's new in the desktop arena for Linux, but I'm always disappointed.
Here is what I think the problem is...
1. The GUIs are getting slower and slower.
2. Difficult for the GUI to take control of itself if a runaway process is eating up all the CPU time (Task Manger in Windows is much better).
3. Still not enough good hardware support. Configuring simple things like sound and desktop video modes are weak and buggy.
4. Playing movies is always a chore because one "good" media player does not exist for all possible video formats (you have to bounce between MPlayer, VLC, Noatun, KPlayer, etc).
5. Different programs compiled using different libraries (GTK, QT, XLib) all feel and look different. Simple and important features like Cut & Paste and object embedding don't always work between programs.
6. They are no good visual application development tools. A tool similar to Visual Studio is needed in Linux. IDE's like Netbeans and Eclipse are okay for small programs or web scripts, but simply doesn't cut it for full blown desktop application development.
There are more but you get the idea. In my opinion, if some of the above can remedied soon enough and Microsoft is stilling selling their latest OS in the same vein as Vista. Then yes, Linux would have a good chance on the desktop.
> Enforcing OO from the outset is a terrible way to teach programming
I couldn't agree more! I've always taught C first. Give them good foundations on data types, functions, argument passing, how memory works with pointers in C, arrays, dynamic memory management, etc. Once that stuff is locked in, then OOP principles can be applied later with relative ease because the fundamentals are now there.
I tutor students in computer science courses and have seen so many students complain that they don't understand functions and data, yet their teacher has moved onto classes and objects.
The problem with teaching C++ and not C is the that too many teachers move too quickly to the OOP stuff because they feel that it somehow "replaces" non object C programming. This is not only wrong but dangerous because these students are rushed into OOP without understanding the problems it solves. Besides, not all problems are best solved with OOP.
The C programming language is actually a simple language. You'd be surprised at how quickly students can pick up concepts like pointers and dynamic memory management if the teacher only expose it to them early on and give them short projects to boost their understanding. Sadly, many teachers do the students a tremendous disservice by trying to avoid pointers because it gets in the way of teaching OOP. Or perhaps the teacher himself is rusty.
Just yesterday I was tutoring a student and he has never even seen a switch statement, never heard of new and delete, never heard of an enumeration and never knew how to pass a variable to a function by reference. This is his first course in C++. Yet the course has ended and the next course that follows in the spring starts with teaching const member functions! Have you ever heard of such crap in your life?
Talk about teaching bad code design... The teacher insists that the students call exit(1) in all their functions when the user inputs an incorrect value from the keyboard. As apposed to prompting the user and asking to try again.
Seriously... I'd love to meet this teacher and ask her how much programming in C++ she has done professionally.
By the way, this is supposed to be a very prestigious school in Westchester County New York. Then we all wonder why companies hire programmers from Israel and India.
I've been developing for the past 11+ years now and I've taught a few C/C++ courses along the way so I thought I'd throw my two cents in.
Now, I hate to say this but some of the curricula offered at some of these colleges are a sick joke! Is it me or do mathematics professors make bad computer programming instructors? Unfortunately, some of these fine institutions are too cheap to hire a separate computer programming instructor who is actually up to date with the rest of society and who has received the news that Java is no longer state-of-the-art.
I also think that these teachers are WAY too quick to rush into Object Oriented Programming (again because it's so "**state-of-the-art**") and not solidify the basics "like what a function is" or "what a variable is", etc. You would be amazed at how many students I've tutored where the teacher is explaining virtual function pointers and still 90% of the class still doesn't know how to pass an integer to a function!
Open source is really starting to get on my nerves. I'm really getting tired of these losers who have produced nothing but 3rd rate junkware with bad documentation at best, telling the rest of us that somehow we're all bad people if we charge money for the fruits of our labor.
I used to like Stallman but now he's becoming to nazi'ish about open source. To be honest, Firefox is one of the very few open source software packages out there that actually works well. Who cares about the license! Its a free download, it works well and that's that!
When Richard Stallman produces software that "everyday people" actually use, without having to go to a news group and ask questions, then he can open his mouth.
As a developer, the one thing Microsoft seems to have done right in the past when it comes to their office and web software was to develop those applications from the ground up to be automated. When I say automated I mean that I can embed Word, Excel or IE in my C++, VB or C# application to enhance it.
This is no small feature, because I've seen tons of software out there that rely on embedding or controlling a web browser. This is something Firefox and all the other browser makers didn't think about when they created their software. If Google is smart they will make their browser automation friendly, whether that means ActiveX, .Net or some other API with which to control their browser.
In my opinion, XP was their best system to date. At least for a desktop. With Vista they went backwards. I am very surprised they allowed this crappy OS to remain like this. There are alternative systems slowly but surely getting better each passing day. If Microsoft isn't careful to produce a much better system soon, people are going to start looking elseware. Although Microsoft has a monopoly of sorts on desktop software, they should never underestimate people's impatience. No one ever thought IndyMac, Fannie May and Freddie Mac would fail.
Windows XP has a feature called the Limited Account. The problem with it is that it's a bit flakey. The "Run As" option works fine. All Microsoft had to do was improve on Limited Accounts by making them more flexible. Instead they went berzerk and created a whole new security feature that wasn't necessary and that's what annoys people.
Microsoft's philosophy needs to change from "shock and awe" to "less is more". Revolutionary operating systems shouldn't have to take up 15 gigabytes of hard disk space. At least not in 2008. Especially since so much is being done with less than 100MB by people with a lot less technical and financial prowess. I really never saw the point in Vista to start with. There isn't anything I can do in Vista that I can't already do in XP. Moving from Windows 3.1 to 95 made sense. Moving from 95 to 2000 made sense. Moving from XP to Vista makes no sense unless your whole motivation is to boot up a screen that says Vista on it instead of XP. The Aero interface is 100% complete hype and is a waste of resources and money upgrading to this feature.
In my opinion, I think Microsoft is realizing greater financial potential in creating new versions of their systems rather than just improving on existing ones. Which is a shame because all the effort of Vista should have went into XP Service Pack 3. This would have made more technical sense. Of course the sales people would have nothing to promote.
With tons of new developers using their tools for free they are benefiting both the students and Microsoft. I think the open-source hard-heads need to face the facts, Microsoft's tools are the easiest to use and very feature rich and there is no getting around this. Each new library they come out with just gets better and better. From MFC to VB to .NET, their tools integrate well.
I look at it this way, programming is hard enough without having to learn how to use a complex and painful development system. It's a shame but the open-source world never really united to create a serious IDE that could even remotely compete with Visual Studio. Hopefully this will change one day. However, the result of this is exactly why most open-source applications are third rate and have never won over the average computer user. I feel there is a definite correlation between the quality of the development tools and the quality of the finished product. All things being equal, if the developer has an easier time developing, then this almost always translates to better software.
Perhaps Microsoft feels that allowing other software companies to interact with their technology will one day give users an excuse to switch to something else down the road. Whatever the reason, they feel they are protecting their bread and butter, which is entirely within their right. It is their system! This is why we have "proprietary" software! If these people don't like it, there is always Linux or Apple. Which personally I feel are better systems for certain tasks. In fact, I'm writing this from a Linux system. But to ask a judge to force a company to play nice with other vendors because they feel the need to "inter-operate" is ridiculous at best and is simply not right.
What if tomorrow KFC was forced to give up the eleven herbs and spices used in their secret recipe? Don't laugh, it may happen someday. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but can't people just create something better? Sure, there are anti-trust laws, but whatever happened to beating someone in the market by creating a better product? Years back, Netscape tried to sue Microsoft because they felt their browser was unfairly marketed since it came with the system. Today, Mozilla is proving Netscape dead wrong and is almost 20% of all browsers while Microsoft is down to almost 60%. It's a sad day when the lawyers are writing better code than the developers.
I must say, I've always thought Linux's desktops sucked. However over the last few years Gnome and KDE have improved exponentially. I currently have Ubuntu 7.10 installed and it really works great. Sure there are some quirks here and there and it's not quite ready for the everyday user, but it's getting there. At the same time, Microsoft has been slacking on their new Vista OS. Originally it was touted to have tons more features than it currently has. The other day, someone handed me a Vista laptop to fix loaded with viruses and spyware and I thought, "Now wait a minute, this isn't supposed to happen in Vista!". Perhaps Vista's SP1 will vastly improve it. I don't know. But if it doesn't and this keeps up, I predict Linux will eventually take a sizable percentage of users away from Windows within the next 3-5 years. I also believe this is why MS is eventually going to try to pull a SCO special.
> eBay has claimed that they have changed the code in order to prevent any patent violations claimed in the suit, but
> MercExchange lawyers say that they are still entitled to a hearing in order to force eBay to license the patents.
But that's not good enough for MercExchange because they're entitled to a few bucks, no?? I'm surprised Ford hasn't sued GM for making a car that looks similar to theirs. A LAW SUIT OVER A F**KING BUTTON!!! Give me a break!! This is exactly why countries like China, India, Israel and Japan are kicking our ass!! American companies don't innovate anymore, they sue!! Lawyers are destroying this country one suit at a time.
> First, it isn't like Windows can't get corrupted and mimic a hardware problem such as a flaky keyboard. This is
> why so many decision trees used by first line techs at hardware vendors end in `reinstall the OS' and call back
> if you still have a problem.
True BUT... Windows is a known system. In other words, there aren't 27 distros of Windows or recompiled Windows' kernels. A trouble shooting tech has a much better chance of differentiating a hardware problem from a software problem when the user can't create his "own version" of an OS kernel or choose between 50 versions of one. Like you say, there are databases of trouble shooting information these techs use to query for help, that would be very difficult to create for every OS, especially an open source OS like Linux unless it's narrowed to a specific version. Re-installing the original OS that came with the system is always the best option as far as the manufacturer is concerned because it makes their life easier and ends up costing them less.
> Second, they built the hardware, they have a moral obligation to warrant the hardware
Well yes, they built the hardware, but my point is that this isn't about morals, it's about business and I'm sure if the user where to re-install Windows and still have the keyboard problem, HP would support and warranty the hardware. Companies don't want to replace hardware just because a customer claims it's broken. The manufacturer has an obligation to itself to see if if the hardware can be fixed or if the problem lies elsewhere before accepting returned hardware under a warranty.
> most vendors will continue to honor warranties after things like RAM and hard drives are replaced by the user
Yes, but techs can still trouble shoot bad memory modules much quicker than an OS that mimics bad memory such as a newly compiled kernel driver that suddenly causes a memory dump.
I think people need to start realizing that unless there is some kind of deal made between a hardware vendor and a specific distro/version, Linux is otherwise a "do-it-yerself" system that is probably not going to be supported by many hardware manufacturers. Now, I'm sure that when IBM sells their servers running Linux, they only support a very specific version of it, which makes sense.