If I was in Spain I'd be required to help pay for people illegally downloading? Why not send me a traffic ticket every month because some people speed?
Because this happens all the time. To offset the costs of shoplifted goods, stores increase prices by 5% rather than increase security. To reduce the costs of the damages done by hooligans during football matches, government pours tax money into the police force, rather than making the hooligans pay for the damages.
That is the whole idea behind taxation. Get money from all people, and use that to pay for stuff which is too hard to pinpoint on a specific group of people. For certain costs, that is reasonable: all people benefit from the fact that there are roads, so roads should come out of tax money. However, for many things it is just a costs/benefits analysis: it is too hard to go after culprits who may not be able to pay for the damages they caused anyway, and it is very easy to levy taxes. Most people in power are not overly concerned with the ethics of their decisions.
That's a nice suggestion, but unfortunately in many countries the blank media tax is applied to those too. Don't know if that is the case in Spain, but it probably is, since they are basically following what other European countries have already done.
Usually the tax is not applied by a government, but by an government-approved independent agency, which has been given the right to decide by themselves what should be taxed to "give something back to those poor artists whose work gets ripped". Although, in general, the money does not go to artists but to producers and publishers, who make sure that they own the particular rights for which money is awarded (e.g., usually the person who plays the music or sings the song does not get any benefits, but those who own the rights to the lyrics and musical notes do - and to sign up with a publisher an artists has to relinquish those rights).
There are plenty of tools that can detect embedded information.
No, they cannot. I gave two conditions. One is that the person who is trying to detect hidden information has no access to the original container file. Two is that the container file should be quite large compared to the hidden file. Suppose, for instance, that I record myself reading the first chapter of the Bible. I get an MP3-file which is pretty big, and contains lots of noise. Now I take a small picture, and hide it in the noise, for instance by replacing bytes which are selected using a random number generator which I feed with a specific seed. There is absolutely no way that any tool can detect the existence of a picture in the noise, because the nature of noise is that any byte can occur at any place. Of course, if the ratio between the picture bytes and the original noise-bytes is small, then a tool might detect a fishy pattern, but if this ratio is, for instance, 1000:1, it is completely indetectable. If I am in doubt whether the ratio is OK, as an extra precaution I can also turn my original file into a mess before hiding it, for instance by zipping it or encrypting it. That'll certainly do the trick.
Basically, DirectX is meant as an Interface between Windows and (Video) hardware. It says "if you call my function xxx, I will translate that to a certain call to the hardware". It is terribly easy to make DirectX 10 compatible with XP. You just take DirectX 9, add the new calls, and let them return "sorry, I cannot do that". Then game developers will simply add an option "activate advanced DirectX 10 features" to show off the cool stuff, but any XP user will still be able to play the game. So there is no good reason to exclude XP from the new games market, as Microsoft is trying to do.
Even better, they could (and IMHO should) open up the source code of DirectX. I am dead certain that an XP version of DirectX 10 would be created in days.
But of course, they have great MARKETING reasons why they will not do that. Yes, it is all marketing. The rest of the argumentation is blah.
Also, as others mentioned, 11,000 fonts is absurd. They probably counted each and every copy on every computer whether it was used or not.
Actually, it is probably quite different. I have had a book printed at a publisher, which I generated with TeX. The publisher prefers to receive a PDF-file. So I generate one. PDF asks whether it should or should not include fonts. I include fonts, because if I don't there's a good chance that the publisher will not receive the document as I intended it. Basically, that is what everybody does. So the publisher has all these PDF-files on his hard drive of documents clients sent him. All including the most esoteric fonts the clients used (and believe me, most people's taste in layouts sucks, so you can expect there to be some ridiculous fonts there). The BSA "discovers" these files, and thus the fonts. Not that the publisher was really using them, but they were there.
You mean "steganography". Stenography is shorthand.
And yeah, steganography is the solution to all picture hiding. Without the original source of the container file, and with a large enough container file, no tool will be able to discover the hidden pornography.
But you forget about the main reason that men want to buy a big-screen HDTV and BluRay player. Having them clearly demonstrates that they have an enormous penis.
Sounds like a plan. Litigation firm: "You people over in Europe and Asia. You go innovate and enjoy the good life on your continents. Then we'll patent your stuff in the US and sue the crap out of any American that wants to apply your inventions."
Maybe. But think of it like this: Mr. A steals $100 from mr. B. He then gives these $100 to charity. Does this excuse the stealing? Of course not. For one thing, mr. B might have needed the money. For another thing, mr. B might not have needed the money but had a completely different charity in mind. For a third thing, it was mr. B's money, so whatever plans mr. A has for it, they are irrelevant.
Now, you might say that Microsoft did not steal. But actually, what did they comes pretty close. Abusing a monopoly to get more money from people is illegal, and is tantamount to stealing. And that is what Gates got most of his capital from.
You are excusing Gates by saying he is Robin Hood. But (a) Robin Hood was a pretty evil character for using his own individual opinion to decide who he should steal from, and (b) Gates steal from both the rich and the poor (and, relatively speaking, much more from the poor).
As far as I know, the whole tournament could have been played entirely in software. The little robots were there only for the audience to see something.
You have to remember that robotics is about hardware and software. Both of these have their own problems. Usually competitions of hardware robots are all about solving issues with hardware noise. That is why RoboCup has separate hardware and software (i.e., simulation) competitions.
As a goal to encourage scientific progress it may be a good idea. As a practical matter, I don't think it is.
And that is the whole point. To encourage scientific progress. It is an enormous challenge to create a robot that can be a match for a human in a sport such as soccer. The difficulties that have to be resolved are huge. These matches provide a forum for comparing work with others and for exchanging ideas. It speeds up progress considerably.
A similar event has started this year around RTS game AI. As most of us know, there has been very little progress in game AI in the last decade. Now scientists finally get involved, game AI competitions will help to increase the quality of the AI significantly. Game developers are usually guarding their ideas and code closely, as an industrial secret. It is no wonder that we have seen little progress from them. The event is still small, but hopefully it grows after its start this year.
So, I expect that I am not hardcore since I read neither 1Up nor IGN.
Anyway, I thought I may count as a hardcore gamer since games are an integral part of my life, and have been for the last 25 years. I have never stopped caring about games, and never stopped playing them, even when real life started to interfere with my gaming time. But I have never bought a console, since I think that, in general, console games suck and are far too expensive. I guess that that particular thought, in itself, clearly removes me from the class of hardcore gamers.
Who cares whether global warming is real or not? The point is that the population of human beings on Earth currently has such an enormous impact on the environment, that there is an incredibly high risk of destroying something vital. And even if humans manage to leave the Earth more or less habitable, there is still the question whether it is a good idea to burn all the oil in existence in the coming 30 years or so, while it takes billions of years to produce new oil. Oil is not only for burning, it is also, for instance, for making plastics.
I am pretty much certain that I'll live my life in a world that is reasonably habitable. My daughter, however, has to stick around for four to five decades longer. I want her to lead a good life too. And her children also, for that matter. Is it really too much to ask to treat the world with a bit of responsibility?
companies are allowed to maximise their own profitability and they can do this by outsourcing.
It is questionable whether this is true. Usually it is not a company that maximises its profitability, the managers are maximising their own income. If they cut costs in half, in the short run the company will be more profitable and they can raise their own salaries, get a huge return on their stock options, etc. In the long run, they don't care if the company goes down, they have left their previous post a long time ago. Capitalism works if it is in the best interest of all employees, especially upper management, to make a company profitable. Unfortunately, that is not how it works in practice.
Is the fact that these replacements will be trained by current employees bad?
Yes, it is. If I was forced to train my replacement, I would do a pretty bad job. I would give him source code (maybe that three weeks old version which has some obscure bugs in it), some out-of-date documentation, tell him a bit about what the programs are for, and end with, "if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask." Believe me, there is no way he will be able to ask the right questions before I have left the company. After a year or so the shit will really hit the fan, and the boss has two choices: either hire me as a consultant, for which I will ask an exorbitant amount of cash, or suffer the complaints of angry users. In the end, the company will have to bear the losses.
Now, the way to do some successful outsourcing, is to fire the employees who are rubbish anyway, and promote the remaining employees yo a job as coordinator of outsourcing. Then you have the people who know how to do the job guide the people who are doing the job. And your new coordinators will be pretty happy about training their replacements because they benefit from it too.
I'll end up by telling you a true story. I once worked at a software company, and we got a big job for maintaining some specialized software for which there were a few dozen clients. The guys who originally wrote the software were too expensive for the company where they worked, so they fired them all and outsourced the job to us. Our first task was to make a small change to one of the programs. Unfortunately, the system was constructed in such a way that you could not compile just one program, you had to compile them all, and deliver new recompiled versions of all programs to all clients. We tested our change and delivered the programs to the clients. We soon found out that the guys who had written this stuff had been pretty angry for being fired, and had riddled all programs with small bugs. Not things you would notice immediately, but things that would rear their ugly head after working a while. There was no good way to trace these small surprises, the only thing we could do was fix bugs when they were reported by clients. We had one client who had to restore backups on a daily basis. After a year, ALL the clients had dropped the software and moved on to a competitor's product. Those are the dangers of "insensitive outsourcing".
On another tentacle, I'd rather like to be able to take posession of the houses of people who have been killed. Argamir is a character in a quest you end up killing for graverobbing. Glarthir gets killed by the Imperial Guard for being a nutjob. Both of them own houses in their respective cities but, once they're dead, the game still marks me as a trespasser when entering their houses.
Perhaps they have family members who inherited the house. Of course, it would be fun if, in that case, the house became "for sale" for a short time, and after a while somebody would move in.
It seems at least logical to me that if you kill someone, you do not automatically own his house. It would be a pretty strange world if that would be true. In conflict with that, it should be noted that if you kill a guard you can lift his armor off his corpse and wear it without repercussion. It seems everything that is worn by someone and that is not pickpocketed is free game.
KotOR 2 was a pretty good game, but the ending indeed sucked. It was completely unsatisfactory. There you were, having trained all your crewmates and influenced them to become either good or evil, with lots of tensions rising between them and open ends with nearly everybody... and suddenly your whole crew is gone, and you have to fight through hordes of big-bad-bully-enemies on your own. And the final boss just tells you what happened to everyone, after which you kill her off. This is absolutely awful. And if you scan the sound-files which are still on the CDs, you find that there actually were great resolutions planned for all characters, tuned to how you treated them and how they evolved during the game. That would have been great to have. The problem is that a game with a sucky ending leaves a bad taste, and the bad taste of KotOR 2 was poison. Stupid publishers.
Probably because you are not high-up in a big company that makes high-profile games. BioWare released Jade Empire as an XBox exclusive because that is how Microsoft wanted it, and made it worth their while. It would have been just as easy to release it for the PC too; the engine was almost the same as the KotOR engine. It seems Microsoft only specified a limited time, because Jade Empire will be released for PC soon. Why does BioWare release an old game for PC only now? Because it is easy to do, but they were not allowed to do it earlier.
The first teaches us that it is mean to be a bully. You should not kick a weaker kid, steal his stuff, and sell copies of it. Captain Copyright is there to protect you against bullies. This leaves the impression that if you are NOT a bully, it is no problem to copy stuff.
The second teaches us that the reason that you should not buy cheap copies, is that some of the pages might be missing. This actually is the argument you hear a lot: don't copy, because your rip might not be of the high quality of the original work. This leaves the impression that if you ensure that the copies are of the same quality as the original, it is no problem to copy stuff.
I understand where this is coming from. They want to teach kids that they hurt themselves if they violate copyrights. Unfortunately, that is never going to work; in practice, the kids only enrich themselves by violating copyrights. Of course, for kids the message "this work is OWNED by someone else who does not want you to copy it, and you must respect his will" is not really convincing. But it is the only message that holds truth.
Over on Boing Boing, they've noticed that the Captain Copyright web page has stolen a couple of sections from Wikipedia without including the required attributions.
But that is not copyright theft. It is more of a job for Private Plagiarism.
I am not accusing you of being an MS fanboy. However, you should know that MS specs are not to be trusted. They are often built on dreams and wishes, and released by marketeers who want to hype a product. With MS, the only thing that really speaks is the actual product. As long as that does not exist, it is all guesswork. This is 20 years of experience with MS products speaking here.
I was facing the same problem a couple of years ago. We had to build Telebanking software, and my boss was adamant that we had to do it in Visual Basic. Luckily, nobody in the company used Visual Basic. My preference was to do it in Delphi.
So this is what I did. I said to my boss that I thought it might be a good idea, but that we should bring people up to speed with Visual Basic. And I would do that: I would design a self-teaching course on building applications with Visual Basic. So I created a course in which the students would build a small application, which basically was a simplified version of the Telebanking system for which my boss wanted to use VB. About 20 of my colleagues did the course, and after that we sat down with my boss, and I just let my co-workers thrash VB. They all said that at the start it seemed to be fun to work in VB, but when you had to get down to do some serious work, it was absolutely terrible. In the end, my boss had no choice to drop VB, and I could bring in my preferred Delphi.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people keep saying "methodology" when they mean method?
Because they also like to say "utilize" instead of "use".
If I was in Spain I'd be required to help pay for people illegally downloading? Why not send me a traffic ticket every month because some people speed?
Because this happens all the time. To offset the costs of shoplifted goods, stores increase prices by 5% rather than increase security. To reduce the costs of the damages done by hooligans during football matches, government pours tax money into the police force, rather than making the hooligans pay for the damages.
That is the whole idea behind taxation. Get money from all people, and use that to pay for stuff which is too hard to pinpoint on a specific group of people. For certain costs, that is reasonable: all people benefit from the fact that there are roads, so roads should come out of tax money. However, for many things it is just a costs/benefits analysis: it is too hard to go after culprits who may not be able to pay for the damages they caused anyway, and it is very easy to levy taxes. Most people in power are not overly concerned with the ethics of their decisions.
Hey, I never said it was a good reason.
And if you don't like the tax, buy harddrives.
That's a nice suggestion, but unfortunately in many countries the blank media tax is applied to those too. Don't know if that is the case in Spain, but it probably is, since they are basically following what other European countries have already done.
Usually the tax is not applied by a government, but by an government-approved independent agency, which has been given the right to decide by themselves what should be taxed to "give something back to those poor artists whose work gets ripped". Although, in general, the money does not go to artists but to producers and publishers, who make sure that they own the particular rights for which money is awarded (e.g., usually the person who plays the music or sings the song does not get any benefits, but those who own the rights to the lyrics and musical notes do - and to sign up with a publisher an artists has to relinquish those rights).
There are plenty of tools that can detect embedded information.
No, they cannot. I gave two conditions. One is that the person who is trying to detect hidden information has no access to the original container file. Two is that the container file should be quite large compared to the hidden file. Suppose, for instance, that I record myself reading the first chapter of the Bible. I get an MP3-file which is pretty big, and contains lots of noise. Now I take a small picture, and hide it in the noise, for instance by replacing bytes which are selected using a random number generator which I feed with a specific seed. There is absolutely no way that any tool can detect the existence of a picture in the noise, because the nature of noise is that any byte can occur at any place. Of course, if the ratio between the picture bytes and the original noise-bytes is small, then a tool might detect a fishy pattern, but if this ratio is, for instance, 1000:1, it is completely indetectable. If I am in doubt whether the ratio is OK, as an extra precaution I can also turn my original file into a mess before hiding it, for instance by zipping it or encrypting it. That'll certainly do the trick.
Basically, DirectX is meant as an Interface between Windows and (Video) hardware. It says "if you call my function xxx, I will translate that to a certain call to the hardware". It is terribly easy to make DirectX 10 compatible with XP. You just take DirectX 9, add the new calls, and let them return "sorry, I cannot do that". Then game developers will simply add an option "activate advanced DirectX 10 features" to show off the cool stuff, but any XP user will still be able to play the game. So there is no good reason to exclude XP from the new games market, as Microsoft is trying to do.
Even better, they could (and IMHO should) open up the source code of DirectX. I am dead certain that an XP version of DirectX 10 would be created in days.
But of course, they have great MARKETING reasons why they will not do that. Yes, it is all marketing. The rest of the argumentation is blah.
Also, as others mentioned, 11,000 fonts is absurd. They probably counted each and every copy on every computer whether it was used or not.
Actually, it is probably quite different. I have had a book printed at a publisher, which I generated with TeX. The publisher prefers to receive a PDF-file. So I generate one. PDF asks whether it should or should not include fonts. I include fonts, because if I don't there's a good chance that the publisher will not receive the document as I intended it. Basically, that is what everybody does. So the publisher has all these PDF-files on his hard drive of documents clients sent him. All including the most esoteric fonts the clients used (and believe me, most people's taste in layouts sucks, so you can expect there to be some ridiculous fonts there). The BSA "discovers" these files, and thus the fonts. Not that the publisher was really using them, but they were there.
hidden inside other files (stenography)
You mean "steganography". Stenography is shorthand.
And yeah, steganography is the solution to all picture hiding. Without the original source of the container file, and with a large enough container file, no tool will be able to discover the hidden pornography.
But you forget about the main reason that men want to buy a big-screen HDTV and BluRay player. Having them clearly demonstrates that they have an enormous penis.
Sounds like a plan. Litigation firm: "You people over in Europe and Asia. You go innovate and enjoy the good life on your continents. Then we'll patent your stuff in the US and sue the crap out of any American that wants to apply your inventions."
Secondly his donations for AIDS IS important.
Maybe. But think of it like this: Mr. A steals $100 from mr. B. He then gives these $100 to charity. Does this excuse the stealing? Of course not. For one thing, mr. B might have needed the money. For another thing, mr. B might not have needed the money but had a completely different charity in mind. For a third thing, it was mr. B's money, so whatever plans mr. A has for it, they are irrelevant.
Now, you might say that Microsoft did not steal. But actually, what did they comes pretty close. Abusing a monopoly to get more money from people is illegal, and is tantamount to stealing. And that is what Gates got most of his capital from.
You are excusing Gates by saying he is Robin Hood. But (a) Robin Hood was a pretty evil character for using his own individual opinion to decide who he should steal from, and (b) Gates steal from both the rich and the poor (and, relatively speaking, much more from the poor).
As far as I know, the whole tournament could have been played entirely in software. The little robots were there only for the audience to see something.
You have to remember that robotics is about hardware and software. Both of these have their own problems. Usually competitions of hardware robots are all about solving issues with hardware noise. That is why RoboCup has separate hardware and software (i.e., simulation) competitions.
As a goal to encourage scientific progress it may be a good idea. As a practical matter, I don't think it is.
And that is the whole point. To encourage scientific progress. It is an enormous challenge to create a robot that can be a match for a human in a sport such as soccer. The difficulties that have to be resolved are huge. These matches provide a forum for comparing work with others and for exchanging ideas. It speeds up progress considerably.
A similar event has started this year around RTS game AI. As most of us know, there has been very little progress in game AI in the last decade. Now scientists finally get involved, game AI competitions will help to increase the quality of the AI significantly. Game developers are usually guarding their ideas and code closely, as an industrial secret. It is no wonder that we have seen little progress from them. The event is still small, but hopefully it grows after its start this year.
And don't forget: Pope says Catholicism is the religion most likely to get you into heaven.
So, I expect that I am not hardcore since I read neither 1Up nor IGN.
Anyway, I thought I may count as a hardcore gamer since games are an integral part of my life, and have been for the last 25 years. I have never stopped caring about games, and never stopped playing them, even when real life started to interfere with my gaming time. But I have never bought a console, since I think that, in general, console games suck and are far too expensive. I guess that that particular thought, in itself, clearly removes me from the class of hardcore gamers.
Who cares whether global warming is real or not? The point is that the population of human beings on Earth currently has such an enormous impact on the environment, that there is an incredibly high risk of destroying something vital. And even if humans manage to leave the Earth more or less habitable, there is still the question whether it is a good idea to burn all the oil in existence in the coming 30 years or so, while it takes billions of years to produce new oil. Oil is not only for burning, it is also, for instance, for making plastics.
I am pretty much certain that I'll live my life in a world that is reasonably habitable. My daughter, however, has to stick around for four to five decades longer. I want her to lead a good life too. And her children also, for that matter. Is it really too much to ask to treat the world with a bit of responsibility?
Still, then what is the definition of a "hardcore" gamer? I am really wondering whether I am one.
companies are allowed to maximise their own profitability and they can do this by outsourcing.
It is questionable whether this is true. Usually it is not a company that maximises its profitability, the managers are maximising their own income. If they cut costs in half, in the short run the company will be more profitable and they can raise their own salaries, get a huge return on their stock options, etc. In the long run, they don't care if the company goes down, they have left their previous post a long time ago. Capitalism works if it is in the best interest of all employees, especially upper management, to make a company profitable. Unfortunately, that is not how it works in practice.
Is the fact that these replacements will be trained by current employees bad?
Yes, it is. If I was forced to train my replacement, I would do a pretty bad job. I would give him source code (maybe that three weeks old version which has some obscure bugs in it), some out-of-date documentation, tell him a bit about what the programs are for, and end with, "if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask." Believe me, there is no way he will be able to ask the right questions before I have left the company. After a year or so the shit will really hit the fan, and the boss has two choices: either hire me as a consultant, for which I will ask an exorbitant amount of cash, or suffer the complaints of angry users. In the end, the company will have to bear the losses.
Now, the way to do some successful outsourcing, is to fire the employees who are rubbish anyway, and promote the remaining employees yo a job as coordinator of outsourcing. Then you have the people who know how to do the job guide the people who are doing the job. And your new coordinators will be pretty happy about training their replacements because they benefit from it too.
I'll end up by telling you a true story. I once worked at a software company, and we got a big job for maintaining some specialized software for which there were a few dozen clients. The guys who originally wrote the software were too expensive for the company where they worked, so they fired them all and outsourced the job to us. Our first task was to make a small change to one of the programs. Unfortunately, the system was constructed in such a way that you could not compile just one program, you had to compile them all, and deliver new recompiled versions of all programs to all clients. We tested our change and delivered the programs to the clients. We soon found out that the guys who had written this stuff had been pretty angry for being fired, and had riddled all programs with small bugs. Not things you would notice immediately, but things that would rear their ugly head after working a while. There was no good way to trace these small surprises, the only thing we could do was fix bugs when they were reported by clients. We had one client who had to restore backups on a daily basis. After a year, ALL the clients had dropped the software and moved on to a competitor's product. Those are the dangers of "insensitive outsourcing".
Perhaps they have family members who inherited the house. Of course, it would be fun if, in that case, the house became "for sale" for a short time, and after a while somebody would move in.
It seems at least logical to me that if you kill someone, you do not automatically own his house. It would be a pretty strange world if that would be true. In conflict with that, it should be noted that if you kill a guard you can lift his armor off his corpse and wear it without repercussion. It seems everything that is worn by someone and that is not pickpocketed is free game.
Vecna, probably.
KotOR 2 was a pretty good game, but the ending indeed sucked. It was completely unsatisfactory. There you were, having trained all your crewmates and influenced them to become either good or evil, with lots of tensions rising between them and open ends with nearly everybody... and suddenly your whole crew is gone, and you have to fight through hordes of big-bad-bully-enemies on your own. And the final boss just tells you what happened to everyone, after which you kill her off. This is absolutely awful. And if you scan the sound-files which are still on the CDs, you find that there actually were great resolutions planned for all characters, tuned to how you treated them and how they evolved during the game. That would have been great to have. The problem is that a game with a sucky ending leaves a bad taste, and the bad taste of KotOR 2 was poison. Stupid publishers.
Probably because you are not high-up in a big company that makes high-profile games. BioWare released Jade Empire as an XBox exclusive because that is how Microsoft wanted it, and made it worth their while. It would have been just as easy to release it for the PC too; the engine was almost the same as the KotOR engine. It seems Microsoft only specified a limited time, because Jade Empire will be released for PC soon. Why does BioWare release an old game for PC only now? Because it is easy to do, but they were not allowed to do it earlier.
The first teaches us that it is mean to be a bully. You should not kick a weaker kid, steal his stuff, and sell copies of it. Captain Copyright is there to protect you against bullies. This leaves the impression that if you are NOT a bully, it is no problem to copy stuff.
The second teaches us that the reason that you should not buy cheap copies, is that some of the pages might be missing. This actually is the argument you hear a lot: don't copy, because your rip might not be of the high quality of the original work. This leaves the impression that if you ensure that the copies are of the same quality as the original, it is no problem to copy stuff.
I understand where this is coming from. They want to teach kids that they hurt themselves if they violate copyrights. Unfortunately, that is never going to work; in practice, the kids only enrich themselves by violating copyrights. Of course, for kids the message "this work is OWNED by someone else who does not want you to copy it, and you must respect his will" is not really convincing. But it is the only message that holds truth.
But that is not copyright theft. It is more of a job for Private Plagiarism.
I am not accusing you of being an MS fanboy. However, you should know that MS specs are not to be trusted. They are often built on dreams and wishes, and released by marketeers who want to hype a product. With MS, the only thing that really speaks is the actual product. As long as that does not exist, it is all guesswork. This is 20 years of experience with MS products speaking here.
So this is what I did. I said to my boss that I thought it might be a good idea, but that we should bring people up to speed with Visual Basic. And I would do that: I would design a self-teaching course on building applications with Visual Basic. So I created a course in which the students would build a small application, which basically was a simplified version of the Telebanking system for which my boss wanted to use VB. About 20 of my colleagues did the course, and after that we sat down with my boss, and I just let my co-workers thrash VB. They all said that at the start it seemed to be fun to work in VB, but when you had to get down to do some serious work, it was absolutely terrible. In the end, my boss had no choice to drop VB, and I could bring in my preferred Delphi.
Problem solved.