I disagree. My 85 years old grand father, who has never booted a computer of his own life, never had an email adress, or anything of the sort, knows what a computer language is. Same with a lot of people. That is a bit of my personal experience, so it might not reflect the rest of the world, but it is what I'm going by here. I've used the terms "computer language" while describing what I do for a living to a -lot- of people, and it virtualy always goes through. The term "software" doesn't always, so...
Regardless of how it happens,.NET is a way to tell a computer to do stuff. Of course, we can go in the technicalities that the.NET platform supports multiple languages (which in the end are all quite similar, because the platform affects them so much), that its a virtual machine environment, blah blah blah.
But its a way to -tell- a computer to do "stuff". So I guess saying its a computer language is "good enough". Misleading, and I'd get annoyed if this appeared in more technicaly oriented articles, but like this, being specific while still allowing the average joe to understand would just shift the scope of the article. What.NET truly is simply cannot be explained to a technicaly challenged person without spawning on several lines, which wouldn't have their place in that article.
Basically what it means, confirmed by what you say, is simply that a large audience is worth hundreds of millions. Microsoft lost all that money on Xbox to try and steal itself an audience. Google is doing the same thing, but with very little effort... so in their eyes, its worth it. Especialy since running youtube will be a joke for them.
Considering the "quality"::cough:: of the offerings by McAfee and Symantec, I'd say its pretty reasonable to say their softwares are malware. Therefor, AVG works peachy, since it is not a malware, while McAfee and Symantec don't work:) Perfectly normal behavior, if you ask me.
Thats true. I work for a consulting firm (though what i'm gonna say has nothing to do with software outsourcing) which deals a lot with companies in the fabric industry, the kind that make shirts and whatsnot. Basicaly 100% of their stuff is made offshore according to their specs... And its fairly bad (and we're talking 6-7 companies here, so its not just an isolated case).
Stuff like a box for a "blue shirt #123", with the barcode written over that says "red shirt 456", and inside, you find a ripped, green shirt #789. And that happens on a regular basis.
Can't blame the chinese (or whatevever country it comes from). Those guys do have the internet, and they often know for which company they're making that stuff. They can go and look that the shirt they're making sells for 50$ (fancy stuff), while they just single handedly made 70 of em at 1$/hour. So of course they don't really give a damn:)
Correct. Hell, my boss has a Master in software engineering, and blinks at me totally confused if I ever mention something as "complicated" as a primary key in a database, or a design pattern.
There are some exceptions, and it really sucks for those people, but usualy, the jobs being offshored are jobs any self respecting IT guy (unless they have kids, a wife, a morgage, a house to pay, etc, and are really desperate) wouldn't want in the first place. Sitting in a cubicle coding mindlessly without even having to use your brain, tech support, debugging, etc. MOST (not all, unfortunately) of the real IT jobs, the ones we went to college for, the dynamic ones where you get involved in a projects, analysis, design, and so on, -usualy- stay. Actualy, I ditched my current job on my own right now, because there are so many opportunities, I know it won't be more than 2 weeks before I get snatched. And I do not live anywhere close to an area with a "lot" of IT jobs... such areas will have it even easier.
I'm sorry for the bunch who lost "real" jobs because their bosses were retarded, but in general, its not the kind of jobs that are being offshored.
Thats because its an average, and a country like that US has both highly populated cities, and....holes in the middle of nowhere. If you go to Los Angeles or New York City, a house like that will be way, WAY more expensive. Its being averaged out by the little towns that almost give their houses away.
That doesn't work, really..NET is already pretty darn good at doing that, among other similar solutions, and its just not a good idea to move everything server side. Because then you have to make the data travel back and forth too, and thats way, way too much overhead... The client must do as much as it possibly can without compromising security, its the only way for the system to scale well.
But you're right, there needs to be a from scratch solution for this problem. Solutions already exist, but none are widely accepted enough, so I honestly don't know where the solution is at this point..
Honestly, the only thing that would work would be for CSS specifications to go forward faster and evolve in a more "business" oriented fashion instead of only caring about document layouts, and for companies like microsoft to push them faster..
That, or the frameworks for Flash to start being more accepted...or something. To get any solution before I have to retire (and thats quite a few decades away), it has to be built on something that already exists, unfortunately.
In a way this has already been done by a couple of toolkits out there, though none of them really picked up.
Honestly, as sad as it is, I find myself wishing something like Flash had picked up more than it did. Flash or another technology. Yeah 99% of Flash sites are annoying as hell, but thats the implementation. You can do annoying stuff with javascript and DHTML too:). If Flash (or something similar thats more open, some standard or another... vector graphics maybe, thats picking up a bit) had picked up, then we wouldn't have to worrie about browsers anymore.
As it is now, between issues with standard compliance, javascript being a mess, CSS being the most stupid implementation (even if the standard was being followed) of a good idea, EVER, making web APPLICATIONS is just a hell, probably the same kind of hell developers felt at the dawn of the GUI. Hopefully someday a good abstraction layer will come out and be widely accepted, then we'll be able to actualy solving business problems, instead of fighting with how to align pixels.
Hahaha, too funny, because I went through that hell last week and almost quit my job because of it. Finally convinced my boss to stop thinking that way (saving 2 days by reusing "MegaMess" to lose 3 weeks later is just rediculous... Sometimes managers just want to reuse stuff for the sake of reusing stuff.).
However, I'll say... a well architected system will have a lot of very small, highly reusable components and structures...so reusing those usualy won't turn into a "megamess"
Well, my point is that yes, it can be responsible for more PSX sales than it sold... Word to mouth.
Person A is a FF fanboy, and shell out for a PSX just to play one game. 2-3 other games come along, they get it. Friend comes over, see those games (and would NEVER have seen a PSX in the first place if it hadn't been for the FF fanboy), and decides to buy one too, and so on.
You said it. FF7 jump started the PSX. But without that jump start, it would have suffered the fate of the 3DO. So in a way, the very existence of the PS2 today is in no small part due to FF7. Its stupid that such a crappy game had such a cascading effect, but it seems like its what happened to me.
Its a chicken and the egg situation, if you see it that way. A lot of games would never have been published on the PSX without the FF7 fanbase buying PSX...and a lot of people wouldn't have bought a PSX without those games being published.
The main thing I beleive, is that Square put the FIRST Playstation on the map with FFVII. I hate the game with a passion, so I'm not saying this as a fanboy, but I remember that until FFVII, the PS was just one of 102974071240912 CD-based consoles that would have flopped, like all the others who tried...then poof it came, all the FF fanboys shelled out regardless of if any other good games were out for it...and then the rest followed... And the PS2 kind of inherited and enhanced that popularity, and so on.
Wow thats some nice stuff. I might have to dust off my Linux harddrive (I have a dual boot, but didnt boot in Linux in forever) once this is out.
One thing that I've learnt doing web apps for high profile customers lately (though its an obvious thing): GUI sells, period. Yes it has to improve productivity. However, the fact remains, many people have that darn screen in their faces 8 hours a day. It then becomes important that the GUI is interesting and attractive.
So all these seemingly useless bells and whistles...I can't get enough of em. Just because it makes my job more interesting, hehehe.
Well, yeah. After what...5+ years now or something? While it can still do the job, even in the *Nix world, after 5 years a large amount of people need to consider an upgrade (assuming they don't do incremental ones anyway).
I for one know I can't wait to upgrade from XP for the stuff that can't be done easily with other options, since by now it is fairly obsolete.
You are correct. My only gripe, is that Sony stated a while back that Microsoft was just copycats stealing of their ideas.
While Microsoft is definately a copycat of extreme proportions... Sony really has no room to talk =P So, while its perfectly peachy that they steal stuff...its hypocrite like hell, thus gets attention.
Its not really fanboys that did the hypes... Since until the Wii, nintendo had a very narrow line of followers, with everyone worshipping Sony.
The big issue here, is that a lot of people (not just fanboys) were mislead. Or were hopeful. With Sony screwing up so bad, and Microsoft not being the most popular company in the book, a lot of people were almost praying the Wii would be great, almost making Nintendo's business model for them... And if what people were expecting had been true, Nintendo would have -crushed- the market. But Nintendo, in its attempt to "make a profit from the hardware from the get go", screwed up insanely. And now, while the Wii -probably- will be a success, its not a surefire bet anymore.
This is college we're talking about, not highschool, so it is likely that students are being prepared for the real world. The internet is part of the real world: what it means is, it should be part of college.
Now, there's 2 places where you can cheat in college: exams, and homework. Exams shouldn't be an issue if the school handles them correctly (They don't, but thats their problem). Don't crowd the classes as much, have the room in which its being held be "wave proof" (no cell phones, no wifi), and so on. Have TAs look around for people using point to point wireless devices and old school cheats (like someone using a Nintendo DS's pictochat or something to give answers), but that last one is the same as it was 20 years ago.
The rest, is homework. Really. we're talking about college here: students should be given homework that are relevent. If anything can be straight copy and pasted from some web site, then it is not relevent: in the real world, they would have been able to copy and paste it -TOO-. "Googling" answers is a useful real life skill. I remember when my girlfriend started college (as a CS major). She couldn't find stuff on the net if her life depended on it. I had to push her a bit:) And now she does much better.
So when making homework, always have the internet in mind. Yes, it forces schools to redesign some of their content. I'm sorry, but the world changed, if school doesn't, students will not be prepared for the world.
Yes, I know. My main point was that in the real world, email is -already- getting useless, so we're already more and more doing without it. For the rest, I guess it depends. As long as other (unrelated) kinds of communications are allowed (like forums), and that data transfer is still possible (like the newish EDI network replacement...err...I forget the name, uses HTTP POST instead of proprietary network), and things like debit cards still work, and so on, email could go away. It hurts more without IM, text messaging and web mail, mind you, but I'd still have my job without such things. I wouldn't, however, if it wasn't for the web.
I both agree and disagree with you.
I definately see where you're coming from here, and honestly, it makes sense. There are few gotchas around though
For example, while you as a slashdot reader are probably slightly more understanding of the technological world than the average, a lot of teens are flat out retarded when it comes to it (like older folks, really). That causes an issue, where the things thay you tell them are out of bounds, simply don't compute. Remember a large amount (the majority?) of teens don't even KNOW about certain laws, for example with piracy, and don't even know why its bad to install every single thing that pop up while they're using the family computer. So unfortunately, at least the first time, long speeches tend to be needed, as long as they are kept mature and make the teen feel like they are discussing with an equal, not being belittled.
Repeating is indeed bad, so we have to make sure it is UNDERSTOOD first time around. By understood, I mean attaching a -reason- to the "ban", including a way for the teen to understand the reasoning and be able to track down the steps that lead to the banned thing being seen as "bad". Of course, certain things like porn are obvious (but then again, porn really isn't that bad... I've been exposed to it since I was -7-, and since I simply wasn't curious at all and knew just about everything about the subject eventualy, I can honestly say I made all the "right" decisions in that part of my life, and didn't make a single mistake, so banning porn is probably not that important =P )
All around, making sure there's a clear understanding is the primary concern. Beyond that, it should work the same way as handling any other kind of rules, no exceptions for tech stuff.
With all the spam and such (while it can be controled on an individual basis), email is going downhill. Soon enough it really won't be all that useful and will be replaced by alternatives (like IM, SMS, etc ). On the other hand, the web pushed is in a new age, where information is free. I honestly probably would probably be washing dishes at some restaurant instead of being a software architect, if I hadn't been able to suplement my education with the knowledge found on the web. So in my opinion, email can go where I think.
I agree with you, except on one thing:) You're only half right about the wifi thing. From my understanding, the USB adapter for Nintendo DS will work with the Wii...and a lot of people have those too. Its not a perfect fix, mind you, but I know I have one, and Im not buying a Wifi Router (if only because the Nintendo DS is WEP only, so even if I had a Wifi Router... I wouldn't want to have to configure it in WEP mode >.> )
Makes sense. Well, honestly, the important thing with VB.net is to set option strict. Then really, it becomes C# with different keywords. Without it, there's a ton of implicit casting, and THEN it really is garbage. But I'll say this... once you do option strict vb.net, you might as well switch to C#. So in the end I guess we agree, in a way.
And item == "blah" ? somestuff : whatever; is actualy in C#, and has ONE good use, in my opinion. To read from a datareader while checking for null values..
Like with Windows XP, when it came out, it was a piece of crap, and Windows 2000 was miles better. Now Windows XP is quite solid with the service packs and third party support. Same thing will happen here, nothing new, just people who have nothing to talk about. Same thing with just about anything and everything. The big killer here is that Vista won't be all that hot even though it took so long to deliver, but meh. Will still probably get a copy bundled with the MSDN subscription or MS Partnership or whatever, so why not, and for most others, it will come bundled with their PC.
Aside for a few exceptions, like companies who need a specific feature of an OS, is there -anyone- who actualy pays specificaly (and not as part as something else) to upgrade Windows? All of 3 people maybe? So i'm not sure that it matters. As long as its not -worse- than XP, who cares?
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. My 85 years old grand father, who has never booted a computer of his own life, never had an email adress, or anything of the sort, knows what a computer language is. Same with a lot of people. That is a bit of my personal experience, so it might not reflect the rest of the world, but it is what I'm going by here. I've used the terms "computer language" while describing what I do for a living to a -lot- of people, and it virtualy always goes through. The term "software" doesn't always, so...
Regardless of how it happens, .NET is a way to tell a computer to do stuff. Of course, we can go in the technicalities that the .NET platform supports multiple languages (which in the end are all quite similar, because the platform affects them so much), that its a virtual machine environment, blah blah blah.
.NET truly is simply cannot be explained to a technicaly challenged person without spawning on several lines, which wouldn't have their place in that article.
But its a way to -tell- a computer to do "stuff". So I guess saying its a computer language is "good enough". Misleading, and I'd get annoyed if this appeared in more technicaly oriented articles, but like this, being specific while still allowing the average joe to understand would just shift the scope of the article. What
Basically what it means, confirmed by what you say, is simply that a large audience is worth hundreds of millions. Microsoft lost all that money on Xbox to try and steal itself an audience. Google is doing the same thing, but with very little effort... so in their eyes, its worth it. Especialy since running youtube will be a joke for them.
Correct, though Microsoft DOES have telephony solution softwares. Not that it matters though.
Considering the "quality" ::cough:: of the offerings by McAfee and Symantec, I'd say its pretty reasonable to say their softwares are malware. Therefor, AVG works peachy, since it is not a malware, while McAfee and Symantec don't work :) Perfectly normal behavior, if you ask me.
Thats true. I work for a consulting firm (though what i'm gonna say has nothing to do with software outsourcing) which deals a lot with companies in the fabric industry, the kind that make shirts and whatsnot. Basicaly 100% of their stuff is made offshore according to their specs... And its fairly bad (and we're talking 6-7 companies here, so its not just an isolated case).
:)
Stuff like a box for a "blue shirt #123", with the barcode written over that says "red shirt 456", and inside, you find a ripped, green shirt #789. And that happens on a regular basis.
Can't blame the chinese (or whatevever country it comes from). Those guys do have the internet, and they often know for which company they're making that stuff. They can go and look that the shirt they're making sells for 50$ (fancy stuff), while they just single handedly made 70 of em at 1$/hour. So of course they don't really give a damn
Correct. Hell, my boss has a Master in software engineering, and blinks at me totally confused if I ever mention something as "complicated" as a primary key in a database, or a design pattern.
There are some exceptions, and it really sucks for those people, but usualy, the jobs being offshored are jobs any self respecting IT guy (unless they have kids, a wife, a morgage, a house to pay, etc, and are really desperate) wouldn't want in the first place. Sitting in a cubicle coding mindlessly without even having to use your brain, tech support, debugging, etc. MOST (not all, unfortunately) of the real IT jobs, the ones we went to college for, the dynamic ones where you get involved in a projects, analysis, design, and so on, -usualy- stay. Actualy, I ditched my current job on my own right now, because there are so many opportunities, I know it won't be more than 2 weeks before I get snatched. And I do not live anywhere close to an area with a "lot" of IT jobs... such areas will have it even easier.
I'm sorry for the bunch who lost "real" jobs because their bosses were retarded, but in general, its not the kind of jobs that are being offshored.
Thats because its an average, and a country like that US has both highly populated cities, and....holes in the middle of nowhere. If you go to Los Angeles or New York City, a house like that will be way, WAY more expensive. Its being averaged out by the little towns that almost give their houses away.
That doesn't work, really. .NET is already pretty darn good at doing that, among other similar solutions, and its just not a good idea to move everything server side. Because then you have to make the data travel back and forth too, and thats way, way too much overhead... The client must do as much as it possibly can without compromising security, its the only way for the system to scale well.
.
But you're right, there needs to be a from scratch solution for this problem. Solutions already exist, but none are widely accepted enough, so I honestly don't know where the solution is at this point..
Honestly, the only thing that would work would be for CSS specifications to go forward faster and evolve in a more "business" oriented fashion instead of only caring about document layouts, and for companies like microsoft to push them faster.
That, or the frameworks for Flash to start being more accepted...or something. To get any solution before I have to retire (and thats quite a few decades away), it has to be built on something that already exists, unfortunately.
That is the first time in the last year or so that I laughed out loud at a post on slashdot.
In a way this has already been done by a couple of toolkits out there, though none of them really picked up.
:). If Flash (or something similar thats more open, some standard or another... vector graphics maybe, thats picking up a bit) had picked up, then we wouldn't have to worrie about browsers anymore.
Honestly, as sad as it is, I find myself wishing something like Flash had picked up more than it did. Flash or another technology. Yeah 99% of Flash sites are annoying as hell, but thats the implementation. You can do annoying stuff with javascript and DHTML too
As it is now, between issues with standard compliance, javascript being a mess, CSS being the most stupid implementation (even if the standard was being followed) of a good idea, EVER, making web APPLICATIONS is just a hell, probably the same kind of hell developers felt at the dawn of the GUI. Hopefully someday a good abstraction layer will come out and be widely accepted, then we'll be able to actualy solving business problems, instead of fighting with how to align pixels.
Hahaha, too funny, because I went through that hell last week and almost quit my job because of it. Finally convinced my boss to stop thinking that way (saving 2 days by reusing "MegaMess" to lose 3 weeks later is just rediculous... Sometimes managers just want to reuse stuff for the sake of reusing stuff.).
However, I'll say... a well architected system will have a lot of very small, highly reusable components and structures...so reusing those usualy won't turn into a "megamess"
Well, my point is that yes, it can be responsible for more PSX sales than it sold... Word to mouth.
Person A is a FF fanboy, and shell out for a PSX just to play one game. 2-3 other games come along, they get it. Friend comes over, see those games (and would NEVER have seen a PSX in the first place if it hadn't been for the FF fanboy), and decides to buy one too, and so on.
You said it. FF7 jump started the PSX. But without that jump start, it would have suffered the fate of the 3DO. So in a way, the very existence of the PS2 today is in no small part due to FF7. Its stupid that such a crappy game had such a cascading effect, but it seems like its what happened to me.
Its a chicken and the egg situation, if you see it that way. A lot of games would never have been published on the PSX without the FF7 fanbase buying PSX...and a lot of people wouldn't have bought a PSX without those games being published.
The main thing I beleive, is that Square put the FIRST Playstation on the map with FFVII. I hate the game with a passion, so I'm not saying this as a fanboy, but I remember that until FFVII, the PS was just one of 102974071240912 CD-based consoles that would have flopped, like all the others who tried...then poof it came, all the FF fanboys shelled out regardless of if any other good games were out for it...and then the rest followed... And the PS2 kind of inherited and enhanced that popularity, and so on.
Wow thats some nice stuff. I might have to dust off my Linux harddrive (I have a dual boot, but didnt boot in Linux in forever) once this is out.
One thing that I've learnt doing web apps for high profile customers lately (though its an obvious thing): GUI sells, period. Yes it has to improve productivity. However, the fact remains, many people have that darn screen in their faces 8 hours a day. It then becomes important that the GUI is interesting and attractive.
So all these seemingly useless bells and whistles...I can't get enough of em. Just because it makes my job more interesting, hehehe.
Well, yeah. After what...5+ years now or something? While it can still do the job, even in the *Nix world, after 5 years a large amount of people need to consider an upgrade (assuming they don't do incremental ones anyway).
I for one know I can't wait to upgrade from XP for the stuff that can't be done easily with other options, since by now it is fairly obsolete.
You are correct. My only gripe, is that Sony stated a while back that Microsoft was just copycats stealing of their ideas.
While Microsoft is definately a copycat of extreme proportions... Sony really has no room to talk =P So, while its perfectly peachy that they steal stuff...its hypocrite like hell, thus gets attention.
Its not really fanboys that did the hypes... Since until the Wii, nintendo had a very narrow line of followers, with everyone worshipping Sony.
The big issue here, is that a lot of people (not just fanboys) were mislead. Or were hopeful. With Sony screwing up so bad, and Microsoft not being the most popular company in the book, a lot of people were almost praying the Wii would be great, almost making Nintendo's business model for them... And if what people were expecting had been true, Nintendo would have -crushed- the market. But Nintendo, in its attempt to "make a profit from the hardware from the get go", screwed up insanely. And now, while the Wii -probably- will be a success, its not a surefire bet anymore.
This is college we're talking about, not highschool, so it is likely that students are being prepared for the real world. The internet is part of the real world: what it means is, it should be part of college.
:) And now she does much better.
Now, there's 2 places where you can cheat in college: exams, and homework. Exams shouldn't be an issue if the school handles them correctly (They don't, but thats their problem). Don't crowd the classes as much, have the room in which its being held be "wave proof" (no cell phones, no wifi), and so on. Have TAs look around for people using point to point wireless devices and old school cheats (like someone using a Nintendo DS's pictochat or something to give answers), but that last one is the same as it was 20 years ago.
The rest, is homework. Really. we're talking about college here: students should be given homework that are relevent. If anything can be straight copy and pasted from some web site, then it is not relevent: in the real world, they would have been able to copy and paste it -TOO-. "Googling" answers is a useful real life skill. I remember when my girlfriend started college (as a CS major). She couldn't find stuff on the net if her life depended on it. I had to push her a bit
So when making homework, always have the internet in mind. Yes, it forces schools to redesign some of their content. I'm sorry, but the world changed, if school doesn't, students will not be prepared for the world.
Yes, I know. My main point was that in the real world, email is -already- getting useless, so we're already more and more doing without it. For the rest, I guess it depends. As long as other (unrelated) kinds of communications are allowed (like forums), and that data transfer is still possible (like the newish EDI network replacement...err...I forget the name, uses HTTP POST instead of proprietary network), and things like debit cards still work, and so on, email could go away. It hurts more without IM, text messaging and web mail, mind you, but I'd still have my job without such things. I wouldn't, however, if it wasn't for the web.
I both agree and disagree with you.
I definately see where you're coming from here, and honestly, it makes sense. There are few gotchas around though
For example, while you as a slashdot reader are probably slightly more understanding of the technological world than the average, a lot of teens are flat out retarded when it comes to it (like older folks, really).
That causes an issue, where the things thay you tell them are out of bounds, simply don't compute. Remember a large amount (the majority?) of teens don't even KNOW about certain laws, for example with piracy, and don't even know why its bad to install every single thing that pop up while they're using the family computer. So unfortunately, at least the first time, long speeches tend to be needed, as long as they are kept mature and make the teen feel like they are discussing with an equal, not being belittled.
Repeating is indeed bad, so we have to make sure it is UNDERSTOOD first time around. By understood, I mean attaching a -reason- to the "ban", including a way for the teen to understand the reasoning and be able to track down the steps that lead to the banned thing being seen as "bad". Of course, certain things like porn are obvious (but then again, porn really isn't that bad... I've been exposed to it since I was -7-, and since I simply wasn't curious at all and knew just about everything about the subject eventualy, I can honestly say I made all the "right" decisions in that part of my life, and didn't make a single mistake, so banning porn is probably not that important =P )
All around, making sure there's a clear understanding is the primary concern. Beyond that, it should work the same way as handling any other kind of rules, no exceptions for tech stuff.
With all the spam and such (while it can be controled on an individual basis), email is going downhill. Soon enough it really won't be all that useful and will be replaced by alternatives (like IM, SMS, etc ). On the other hand, the web pushed is in a new age, where information is free. I honestly probably would probably be washing dishes at some restaurant instead of being a software architect, if I hadn't been able to suplement my education with the knowledge found on the web. So in my opinion, email can go where I think.
I agree with you, except on one thing :) You're only half right about the wifi thing. From my understanding, the USB adapter for Nintendo DS will work with the Wii...and a lot of people have those too. Its not a perfect fix, mind you, but I know I have one, and Im not buying a Wifi Router (if only because the Nintendo DS is WEP only, so even if I had a Wifi Router... I wouldn't want to have to configure it in WEP mode >.> )
Makes sense. Well, honestly, the important thing with VB.net is to set option strict. Then really, it becomes C# with different keywords. Without it, there's a ton of implicit casting, and THEN it really is garbage. But I'll say this... once you do option strict vb.net, you might as well switch to C#. So in the end I guess we agree, in a way.
:)
And item == "blah" ? somestuff : whatever; is actualy in C#, and has ONE good use, in my opinion. To read from a datareader while checking for null values..
double blah = myreader["field1"] == DbNull.Value ? 0 : (double)myreader["field1"];.
When you have a bunch of these in a row, its suprisingly cleaner than the alternative. Only exception though
Really, its a whole lot of the same thing.
Like with Windows XP, when it came out, it was a piece of crap, and Windows 2000 was miles better. Now Windows XP is quite solid with the service packs and third party support. Same thing will happen here, nothing new, just people who have nothing to talk about. Same thing with just about anything and everything. The big killer here is that Vista won't be all that hot even though it took so long to deliver, but meh. Will still probably get a copy bundled with the MSDN subscription or MS Partnership or whatever, so why not, and for most others, it will come bundled with their PC.
Aside for a few exceptions, like companies who need a specific feature of an OS, is there -anyone- who actualy pays specificaly (and not as part as something else) to upgrade Windows? All of 3 people maybe? So i'm not sure that it matters. As long as its not -worse- than XP, who cares?