Whats to blame is the psychiatrists. They're virtually trained (and not by the big pharams, though they don't help) that meds are the cure to everything, as opposed to psychologists. I remember reading statistics showing that the VAST majority of people who go see a psychiatrist end up with a prescription, regardless of if they truly had problems.
The best example is the insane amount of kids with an ADD diagnostic... sure, there ARE people who are truly chemically imbalanced and such, and need treatments of some kind...I really feel for these people. The rest just need some discipline stuck in their head. As far as I know (and I know quite a few people in the field), most people getting these prescriptions don't even pass a fraction of the tests that would be required to make a proper diagnostic. The psychiatrist just go by "guts feeling".
And then you end up on mind control medication.... You're "better", but you're not "you" anymore... Some treatments are required... some mental illness CAN be treated... but in general, whats available right now is just a big cash cow, not treatments.
Well, technically, our worse schools probably don't offer engineering degrees, especially not software engineering:) In my area, out of 6 (or so) well known universities, only ONE offers it, the others offer normal computer science.
High quality is one that could fool the best of us. If the box's design is virtually pixel perfect, the CD has the hologram, there's a serial number label, etc, not even a Slashdoter will be able to tell them apart when buying one, until they install it (shady vendor aside).
Thats not as bad as I expected honestly, I just looked up the pricing, and thats about there for the Standard edition, yeah. That may actually be worth it.
Its not getting much press as Vista or XP alternative because its freagin 5000$ or something (I'm making up the number, but thats about it), and is far too complex to be used by noobs. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 are locked down by default to the point of rediculous, so many non-sysadmin would get pissed off at the configuration needed to make it usuable as a desktop.
Once you do though, its good as a development machine (since you said Workstation, I assume games and the like are not a priority). Scott Guthrie (one of the general managers that oversees the development of a lot of dev tools and products of Microsoft) has recommended it as a workstation a couple of times, especially for web development.
Its a lot leaner in general (you can install a GUI-less minimalistic version even, if I remember well), though I'm guessing it has a lot more security and server mechanisms that would hog down the memory a bit... For a pure workstation/development machine, where money isn't a concern (unless you use it for actual server development, in which case you can use the MSDN license), it is pretty top notch.
Just as an example, in Quebec, the ETS has an accredited software engineer program. I didn't take it, so take the following with a grain of salt, but I had a few friends who did... To enter, you need to already have a CS background of some kind (be it from another school, work experience, etc) so they can give you credit for the basic CS classes, and they replace them with the engineering classes (and also allows them to start a decent bit further... I don't know if its still that way, but my friend's first semester had classes involving application servers, design patterns, software architecture, etc... no IF/Do/While/variables/Methods classes in there).
It is quite a good program... the graduates are actually able to be productive afterward, as opposed to spending days arguing about if they should use a quicksort or a bubblesort to keep 5 items in a dropdown menu ordered...
Wouldn't you be able to get more than just pitch, roll and yaw if you have accelerometers? Let say when I start the game, I do a calibration check. Put the controller so it touch a dot in the middle of the TV or something. Then I hit a button on the controler, and its done. By calculating the speed at which the controler is moving at any given time, its position from the TV should be possible to obtain, no?
I'm really no expert, so take that as a question, not a correction.
A lot of it is copied, but Microsoft's flavor is often better, or has a different take at it. I don't have dates, but i'm fairly sure MSDN predated the others you mentionned, since it was there before Linux was even on the map, but I didn't check... it is, however, vastly more comprehensive than most people would realise.
Powershell is an object oriented shell (you don't pipe text output around, you pipe objects)..NET has its roots in Java, but the resemblance ends there. Visual Studio has no equals in its features. Other IDEs (which came much, much later) have been trying to clone it for most (if not all) of their lives. They did better than it in some instances, aren't close in others, but it did a large amount of it before Eclipse even -existed-. SQL Server Analysis Service's query language is now the de facto standard across OLAP systems (its used everywhere now), and its Microsoft that made it. Oh, and how many Outlook clones are there (I'm not even talking about outlook replacements because companies are stuck with the server.. I'm talking about projects to clone its functionalities over a different server...Outlook must be doing something right eh?). The whole AJAX fad... it was MS that made the first implementation of an http request object (which was made to fuel Outlook Web Access).
For the rest, it was just products that are very, very good takes, or great alternatives at existing ideas. SQL Server's dev tools are top notch and mostly unrivalled in the industry. I mentionned XP SP2 because no matter how you look at it (unless its with foggy glasses), it is an excellent OS. You can't just look at things at face value..NET is the best example of that. To someone who didn't try it much, it looks like a Java clone (And why are you even mentionning Ruby on Rails? Its roots existed, but it was not released until 2 years after.NET's official release), but aside the core language, the framework itself doesn't resemble it whatsoever (and no, comparing the basic data structures doesn't count...). Also, the web framework is quite different from the other languages (which is why recently they had to make an MVC implementation.. ASP.NET was -TOO- different for people moving from Java or Ruby to.NET)
Even that considered, it is rare for something to be truly innovative in the software world (thats why software patents are bogus), its almost always about taking something existing and making it better. Isn't that part of the OSS community's moto? That monocultures are bad? And that what makes Linux great is that you have 15 window managers and desktop environments, 18 boot loaders, 26 mail clients, and so on? That was my point. MS makes good products, and have interesting takes on existing ideas, on top of adding a few of their own.
MS needs a reality check and to be put in its place, I'll never argue that. The BEST thing that ever happened to MS was Apple actually making a real OS (as opposed to the old joke that was the original MacOS), and Linux puts heavy economic pressure on them. MS would have stagnated to oblivion without them. But with that said and done, I think the software world would be taking a net loss if MS went bankrupt.
There is currently no free fully functioning implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight
Of course there isn't. Even if you consider Moonlight as being free, its an implementation of Silverlight 2.0 (no one will ever bother porting Silverlight 1, its useless), and even Microsoft's silverlight 2.0 isn't finished yet.
Win2k, WinXP SP2, SQL Server 2005, SSIS and SSAS with their related tools, VS2005 and VS2008 (especially 2008),.NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 (1.0 and 1.1 were trash). MSDN in general. Office 2007 (the price may not be right, but the product is good). Windows Powershell. Windows Server 2003. IIS 6 and 7.
These are just the known one that an average Slashdoter MAY have heard about. But there's also a LOT of stuff Microsoft makes that isn't everyday news that are excellent products, too, but I'll leave it at that for now.
Last time I checked, when I was in highschool, I was being teased to no end and cast aside because I was "good in maths and science", instead of having better fashion skills.
The only place where these pure sciences are respected, is when you're surrounded by geeks. I heavily suggest you leave slashdot for a sec and look around to see what people actually find important. If you go by effort::payout ratio, the LAST thing you want to be is a freagin engineer.
And even if that wasn't the case, the fact that society is full of idiots that don't have their priorities straight doesn't change the fact that a math major isn't going to get you far in life unless you like teaching (whoops, social and nurturing skills required here. Probably why most Ivy league professors suck).
I don't know about you, but thinking back of when I was too young to think about this... between my mother (who was a single mother, unfortunately) being a math or science buff, and her instinctively knowing how to take care of me, I place a pretty freagin high value on the later.
And 'nest-making?' What is that even supposed to mean?
Either you never had kids or had friends who did, or you live in quite a weirdo world, as this is one of the first thing they'll tell you about in prenatal courses and it is quite hard to miss.
Women have an extremely strong "nesting" instinct when it comes to dealing kids... that is, an incredibly powerful instinct to do everything they can for the kid. That seems like common sense to do, and guys (at least, the non-stupid ones) know what to do, but it is a learned thing, while for women, it is almost by instinct. The ultimate way to see it, is about 24 to 72 hours before a pregnant woman has the baby. No matter how much they are warned or know about it, they can't help it: they'll have an incredible urge to get everything ready for the baby (In the "worse" cases it gets a bit comical... they'll want to paint the house, clean up things tha are already clean, and all around flip everything upside down).
It is usually refered to as simply "the nesting instinct", and because of that, an average woman is much, MUCH better than a guy at doing it, since they have a biological drive to it that dwarves even a teenage male's sex drive.
Correct. Average slashdotters may agree, but aside for the whole monopolist part (which, I'll agree, is a pretty big issue), Microsoft has been a decent company, deliver quite a few decent products (2 bads for each good, but the good ones are really good), and I can't shake the feeling that Ballmer is going to make em lose it all. Beating Google is just not worth it. Stop it Microsoft.
The demand is there. Its just that we're so used to taking it up the rear hole that no one fights for that demand... I mean, the amount of -corporations- (including multi-billion companies)I've worked for that had issues with crappy internet because the head office was in a poorly wired downtown area was amazing.
Sure, we could pay to get our own dedicated infrastructure, but that was quite troublesome, when you look at other countries and home users have for 40$ USD a month (equivalent) the same thing that costed us in the 6 digits or even millions.
The problem arises when people want the commercial stuff too without financing it and people like you try to stop them at getting it
So the problem is people who want to have their cake and eat it to, yes? Its people who want people like me, to fiance stuff for them? Really, the choice we have here is:
A) don't have commercial stuff whatsoever, and have free stuff attempt to get to that level through donation and deals (wikipedia, firefox, etc).
B) have both free and commercial stuff, but have people finance the commercial stuff.
If you pick B, yet you don't want to pay for the commercial bits, then just don't use the commercial bits... Else its just dumbasses leeching on others. Leech, thats all it is.
So I mean, go ahead, have a referendum and eliminate copyright. Many formerly "commercial" things will live on, just like there are open source businesses today, or there are Indy music labels. If those "commercial-only beauties" as you call them were so easy to live without.... people wouldn't spend hundreds of hours of their lives hacking them up eh? You think all the piracy is done in the name of freedom of communication or something? Sure, some of it is...but the vast majority? Dream on:) People just want free lunches, nothing more, nothing less. And with all the manufacturing industry being shipped to China, leaving only the creative and service fields of business...if you take out the creative... you'll have 350 million people in North America all trying to live off of services.... good luck.
I reread the second part of your post. You're right actually. This is how it should be. Make people decide. Then 20 odd years from now, have another one. If we were to do that and people decided they were happy that way, I'd gladly shut the hell up. Personally, I still think having the option of commercially locked stuff is for the best.
I think they'd side with you though. I mean, no more Britney Spears DOES trump everything else:)
Ok, so let say I "finance" game developement. Then everyone else can get it free? Yeah, thats fair right there.
Look, its already how it works. Some work is free. Some is paid for. The people who want to finance commercial stuff get commercial stuff. Those who want free stuff get the free stuff. Its not like things HAVE to be commercial.
Re:Is UAC really bad? (Not trolling, just asking)
on
Time for a Vista Do-Over?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I was talking about user applications. You speak of Postgres, so the MS equivalent is SQL Server. Does it do that? -YES-, it does. It creates a COUPLE of roles for various features, assign them to the required users, and it works fine. It indeed writes to the app's directory, and you won't see a popup aside during install. Those are services though. "You" aren't running Postgres: the system is. It runs even if you log off.
Applications that you use directly though? They write to your home directory. Your personal KDE/Gnome/whatever user settings aren't in the same directory as the libs, are they? Well, a lot of stupid windows software written by wannabes do that, and it will make you see UAC.
Oh, and sorry for double posting, but..whats wrong with putting stuff on the desktop in Windows? Call -me- an idiot if you will...but my desktop is filled to the brim:)
Slashdot Mirror
Whats to blame is the psychiatrists. They're virtually trained (and not by the big pharams, though they don't help) that meds are the cure to everything, as opposed to psychologists. I remember reading statistics showing that the VAST majority of people who go see a psychiatrist end up with a prescription, regardless of if they truly had problems.
The best example is the insane amount of kids with an ADD diagnostic... sure, there ARE people who are truly chemically imbalanced and such, and need treatments of some kind...I really feel for these people. The rest just need some discipline stuck in their head. As far as I know (and I know quite a few people in the field), most people getting these prescriptions don't even pass a fraction of the tests that would be required to make a proper diagnostic. The psychiatrist just go by "guts feeling".
And then you end up on mind control medication.... You're "better", but you're not "you" anymore... Some treatments are required... some mental illness CAN be treated... but in general, whats available right now is just a big cash cow, not treatments.
Well, technically, our worse schools probably don't offer engineering degrees, especially not software engineering :) In my area, out of 6 (or so) well known universities, only ONE offers it, the others offer normal computer science.
High quality is one that could fool the best of us. If the box's design is virtually pixel perfect, the CD has the hologram, there's a serial number label, etc, not even a Slashdoter will be able to tell them apart when buying one, until they install it (shady vendor aside).
Low quality is...everything else.
Thats not as bad as I expected honestly, I just looked up the pricing, and thats about there for the Standard edition, yeah. That may actually be worth it.
Its not getting much press as Vista or XP alternative because its freagin 5000$ or something (I'm making up the number, but thats about it), and is far too complex to be used by noobs. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 are locked down by default to the point of rediculous, so many non-sysadmin would get pissed off at the configuration needed to make it usuable as a desktop.
Once you do though, its good as a development machine (since you said Workstation, I assume games and the like are not a priority). Scott Guthrie (one of the general managers that oversees the development of a lot of dev tools and products of Microsoft) has recommended it as a workstation a couple of times, especially for web development.
Its a lot leaner in general (you can install a GUI-less minimalistic version even, if I remember well), though I'm guessing it has a lot more security and server mechanisms that would hog down the memory a bit... For a pure workstation/development machine, where money isn't a concern (unless you use it for actual server development, in which case you can use the MSDN license), it is pretty top notch.
Correction: You ARE allowed to call yourself a software engineer in Canada, if you ARE one. That is, with accreditation, the ring, the degree.
Just as an example, in Quebec, the ETS has an accredited software engineer program. I didn't take it, so take the following with a grain of salt, but I had a few friends who did... To enter, you need to already have a CS background of some kind (be it from another school, work experience, etc) so they can give you credit for the basic CS classes, and they replace them with the engineering classes (and also allows them to start a decent bit further... I don't know if its still that way, but my friend's first semester had classes involving application servers, design patterns, software architecture, etc... no IF/Do/While/variables/Methods classes in there).
It is quite a good program... the graduates are actually able to be productive afterward, as opposed to spending days arguing about if they should use a quicksort or a bubblesort to keep 5 items in a dropdown menu ordered...
Its a good start.
Wouldn't you be able to get more than just pitch, roll and yaw if you have accelerometers? Let say when I start the game, I do a calibration check. Put the controller so it touch a dot in the middle of the TV or something. Then I hit a button on the controler, and its done. By calculating the speed at which the controler is moving at any given time, its position from the TV should be possible to obtain, no?
I'm really no expert, so take that as a question, not a correction.
Now for part 2.
Gnome & Vim
vs
Aero & Visual Studio!!! Fight!
A lot of it is copied, but Microsoft's flavor is often better, or has a different take at it. I don't have dates, but i'm fairly sure MSDN predated the others you mentionned, since it was there before Linux was even on the map, but I didn't check... it is, however, vastly more comprehensive than most people would realise.
.NET has its roots in Java, but the resemblance ends there. Visual Studio has no equals in its features. Other IDEs (which came much, much later) have been trying to clone it for most (if not all) of their lives. They did better than it in some instances, aren't close in others, but it did a large amount of it before Eclipse even -existed-. SQL Server Analysis Service's query language is now the de facto standard across OLAP systems (its used everywhere now), and its Microsoft that made it. Oh, and how many Outlook clones are there (I'm not even talking about outlook replacements because companies are stuck with the server.. I'm talking about projects to clone its functionalities over a different server...Outlook must be doing something right eh?). The whole AJAX fad... it was MS that made the first implementation of an http request object (which was made to fuel Outlook Web Access).
.NET is the best example of that. To someone who didn't try it much, it looks like a Java clone (And why are you even mentionning Ruby on Rails? Its roots existed, but it was not released until 2 years after .NET's official release), but aside the core language, the framework itself doesn't resemble it whatsoever (and no, comparing the basic data structures doesn't count...). Also, the web framework is quite different from the other languages (which is why recently they had to make an MVC implementation.. ASP.NET was -TOO- different for people moving from Java or Ruby to .NET)
Powershell is an object oriented shell (you don't pipe text output around, you pipe objects).
For the rest, it was just products that are very, very good takes, or great alternatives at existing ideas. SQL Server's dev tools are top notch and mostly unrivalled in the industry. I mentionned XP SP2 because no matter how you look at it (unless its with foggy glasses), it is an excellent OS.
You can't just look at things at face value.
Even that considered, it is rare for something to be truly innovative in the software world (thats why software patents are bogus), its almost always about taking something existing and making it better. Isn't that part of the OSS community's moto? That monocultures are bad? And that what makes Linux great is that you have 15 window managers and desktop environments, 18 boot loaders, 26 mail clients, and so on? That was my point. MS makes good products, and have interesting takes on existing ideas, on top of adding a few of their own.
MS needs a reality check and to be put in its place, I'll never argue that. The BEST thing that ever happened to MS was Apple actually making a real OS (as opposed to the old joke that was the original MacOS), and Linux puts heavy economic pressure on them. MS would have stagnated to oblivion without them. But with that said and done, I think the software world would be taking a net loss if MS went bankrupt.
Win2k, WinXP SP2, SQL Server 2005, SSIS and SSAS with their related tools, VS2005 and VS2008 (especially 2008), .NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 (1.0 and 1.1 were trash). MSDN in general. Office 2007 (the price may not be right, but the product is good). Windows Powershell. Windows Server 2003. IIS 6 and 7.
These are just the known one that an average Slashdoter MAY have heard about. But there's also a LOT of stuff Microsoft makes that isn't everyday news that are excellent products, too, but I'll leave it at that for now.
Last time I checked, when I was in highschool, I was being teased to no end and cast aside because I was "good in maths and science", instead of having better fashion skills.
The only place where these pure sciences are respected, is when you're surrounded by geeks. I heavily suggest you leave slashdot for a sec and look around to see what people actually find important. If you go by effort::payout ratio, the LAST thing you want to be is a freagin engineer.
And even if that wasn't the case, the fact that society is full of idiots that don't have their priorities straight doesn't change the fact that a math major isn't going to get you far in life unless you like teaching (whoops, social and nurturing skills required here. Probably why most Ivy league professors suck).
I don't know about you, but thinking back of when I was too young to think about this... between my mother (who was a single mother, unfortunately) being a math or science buff, and her instinctively knowing how to take care of me, I place a pretty freagin high value on the later.
Women have an extremely strong "nesting" instinct when it comes to dealing kids... that is, an incredibly powerful instinct to do everything they can for the kid. That seems like common sense to do, and guys (at least, the non-stupid ones) know what to do, but it is a learned thing, while for women, it is almost by instinct. The ultimate way to see it, is about 24 to 72 hours before a pregnant woman has the baby. No matter how much they are warned or know about it, they can't help it: they'll have an incredible urge to get everything ready for the baby (In the "worse" cases it gets a bit comical... they'll want to paint the house, clean up things tha are already clean, and all around flip everything upside down).
It is usually refered to as simply "the nesting instinct", and because of that, an average woman is much, MUCH better than a guy at doing it, since they have a biological drive to it that dwarves even a teenage male's sex drive.
Skynet, duh.
Correct. Average slashdotters may agree, but aside for the whole monopolist part (which, I'll agree, is a pretty big issue), Microsoft has been a decent company, deliver quite a few decent products (2 bads for each good, but the good ones are really good), and I can't shake the feeling that Ballmer is going to make em lose it all. Beating Google is just not worth it. Stop it Microsoft.
I'd patent that idea or something. Because now for sure MS is doing it. Thats actually stupidly smart.
The demand is there. Its just that we're so used to taking it up the rear hole that no one fights for that demand... I mean, the amount of -corporations- (including multi-billion companies)I've worked for that had issues with crappy internet because the head office was in a poorly wired downtown area was amazing.
Sure, we could pay to get our own dedicated infrastructure, but that was quite troublesome, when you look at other countries and home users have for 40$ USD a month (equivalent) the same thing that costed us in the 6 digits or even millions.
A) don't have commercial stuff whatsoever, and have free stuff attempt to get to that level through donation and deals (wikipedia, firefox, etc).
B) have both free and commercial stuff, but have people finance the commercial stuff.
If you pick B, yet you don't want to pay for the commercial bits, then just don't use the commercial bits... Else its just dumbasses leeching on others. Leech, thats all it is.
So I mean, go ahead, have a referendum and eliminate copyright. Many formerly "commercial" things will live on, just like there are open source businesses today, or there are Indy music labels. If those "commercial-only beauties" as you call them were so easy to live without.... people wouldn't spend hundreds of hours of their lives hacking them up eh? You think all the piracy is done in the name of freedom of communication or something? Sure, some of it is...but the vast majority? Dream on
Enjoy your free lunch. Hope its worth it.
I reread the second part of your post. You're right actually. This is how it should be. Make people decide. Then 20 odd years from now, have another one. If we were to do that and people decided they were happy that way, I'd gladly shut the hell up. Personally, I still think having the option of commercially locked stuff is for the best.
:)
I think they'd side with you though. I mean, no more Britney Spears DOES trump everything else
Ok, so let say I "finance" game developement. Then everyone else can get it free? Yeah, thats fair right there.
Look, its already how it works. Some work is free. Some is paid for. The people who want to finance commercial stuff get commercial stuff. Those who want free stuff get the free stuff. Its not like things HAVE to be commercial.
I was talking about user applications. You speak of Postgres, so the MS equivalent is SQL Server. Does it do that? -YES-, it does. It creates a COUPLE of roles for various features, assign them to the required users, and it works fine. It indeed writes to the app's directory, and you won't see a popup aside during install. Those are services though. "You" aren't running Postgres: the system is. It runs even if you log off.
Applications that you use directly though? They write to your home directory. Your personal KDE/Gnome/whatever user settings aren't in the same directory as the libs, are they? Well, a lot of stupid windows software written by wannabes do that, and it will make you see UAC.
Oh, and sorry for double posting, but..whats wrong with putting stuff on the desktop in Windows? Call -me- an idiot if you will...but my desktop is filled to the brim :)