Thats a funny story:) Shitty web cams do that crap quite often in general... A long time before Vista came out, a friend of mine had gotten a 30$ microsoft web cam... the drivers for it sucked so hard, it would blue screen -XP- constantly...
People don't care wheter they can use it, because people don't care when you tell them they CAN'T.
Eliminate 100% (hell...just 50% would be enough) of software piracy, and they'll start caring. As long as so many people cheer The Pirate Bay and equivalents, the average joe will never give a flying duck about software freedom: they don't need people to fight for it, they can just TAKE it.
The current mob's opinion of Vista comes from A) People who didn't even try it, B) people who WANTED Microsoft to fail before Vista was even in development, and C) people who did try Vista, either from piss poor OEM installs (fuck you Dell, can you at least CHECK if your bundled drivers are of the correct version when you modify your XP images to run Vista instead of making a Vista one from scratch? dumbass OEM), or from the early driver screw ups (Creative...Nvidia...)
Then when someone brings that up, one of the 6 people who had -REAL- issues with Vista (hey it happens, I've ran Linux for years and once in a blue moon I have had some REAL issues with it...it even happens to Macs) pop up to validate the claims of A, B and C, even though their situations are completly different.
Vista is a self fulfilling prophecy, nothing more. The OS itself works just fine (I have to use XP at work, and man its driving me batshit insane after using Vista for a while, in real production scenarios and at home)
What happened to the OTHER crystal chronicle that was supposed to be on the Wii (no, not Life as a King, Im talking about The Crystal Bearers). It looked pretty cool, but no words of it.
Re:One of the most widely used languages?
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C# In-Depth
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· Score: 1
DBAs are probably the worse people to ask these kind of questions to. The kind of shit ALL DBAs I've talked to have told me is just...stupidly amusing. "Stored procedures are faster than SQL dynamically generated by an ORM framework!". "Stored procedures are precompiled!" Just... rofl.
But damn, that F# language is ugly. I have no idea why they are inventing yet another language when python already supports functional programming
C# 3.0 also supports functional programming. But its not a primarly functional language. There's a lot of problems that are more easily solved in F#. The trick is to solve these problems in independent components/objects/librairies, and import them in a language that is better at handling the rest of the problem. No different than how even in Python, some problems will be solved in, let say, C, and then glued up with Python (since you often don't want to do the whole app in C)
Why do we have to keep fracturing the developer space by segregating people into what languages they know?
the.NET platform, and more and more the Java platform too, are making languages irrelevent. I know C#, I know Java...now if you toss Scala or Groovy at me, if you toss IronPython, VB.NET or F#, it doesn't matter. Language syntax is the easiest part to learn, the platform is where its at. So if nothing else, its bringing people together. You learn the platform, use whatever language fits the project the best, and the knowledge will be transfered.
Before that, the language was tied to the platform, so your language choice was almost made for you (it stil is to some extent because of how few bare metal languages there are, but its a smaller subset, fortunately).
For the rest...just understand that languages are insignificant., especially on their surface. Its when you go deep in the functionalities and the platform that you start understanding. Thats why Java's promise of platform independence was always taken as a joke: sure, like with any other platform independent language (PERL, Python, Ruby, Java itself, whatever), 90% of the job can easily be made platform independent. Until you need to get something serious done (something that forces you to go deeper in the OS... let say an installer?), then you end up tied to the OS anyway.
An environment that makes that easy becomes crazy important. A language that doesn't easily let you interface with COCOA easily (there's a few...I think Python even is one, yes?) is worthless if you plan to -sell- an OSX app, to take a non-Windows example. Thats why Windows shops are attracted to.NET like flies. All that integration works is very very easy to do with it. Some stuff doesn't require that. Thats why even on Windows.NEt doesn't have a 100% marketshare:)
Oh, and "before.NET everyone had moved to POSIX" what? I think you forgot how insanely dominant VB6 and MFC were. Heck, those -still- compete with.NET after so long.
Its ignorance in general that does that kindda stuff... its not just with firms. Having a buzzword filled resume will net you a well paying job (if you don't mind working for idiots), having a buzzword compliant product will get you customers, etc.
It gives people unfamiliar with the details a sense of security. "Oh! this is WEB 2.0, I can't go wrong!". "Oh this web app has Ajax! Its going to be FAAAAAAAAAAST". "Oh this doesn't have any trans fat in it, its healthy FOR SURE!"
Re:a bunch of questions
on
C# In-Depth
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· Score: 1
There is a chance, but it would literally kill.NET in the process. If you read a lot on the top dogs of the.NET teams (the project managers and architects, the core devs, etc, on forums, through their blogs, or meeting them at conventions), you'll see they are very friendly to open source, they push Firefox like crazy, they talk about Mono left and right, want to help Miguel, and some even get pretty pissed when MS do something retarded when it comes to.NET and it usually gets pushed back (like JQuery being bundled in the future instead of redoing the same damn thing from scratch with ASP.NET AJAX)
If MS said "No more!" to Mono, the next day half of those guys would quit (since a lot of them accepted jobs at MS to help fix it from the inside), and.NET would die at the same time.
MS wouldn't dare =P
Re:One of the most widely used languages?
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C# In-Depth
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· Score: 1
SQL Server 2000 has shit locking. SQL Server 2005 and up has locking strategies similar to Oracle (snapshots-based), but they're not enabled by default to avoid screwing over people who upgrade (not sure I agree with that, especially for new databases, but whatever), so that solves that.
The newer stuff of Microsoft, and their public APIs, are pretty well documented. Keep in mind though that stuff like Office and Windows pre-date Microsoft's insane popularity (in numbers, not in spirit) and monopoly. So there's a lot of stuff that was never documented, and the people who wrote it aren't even there anymore, and there's a lot of code built on TOP of that. Microsoft didn't get the luxury of a 0.1% market share that would allow them to scrap everything they did and start over, like a certain hippy company did. There's no need to cite anything. Just LOOK at it, its painfully obvious.
You can bet the new stuff is documented in excruciating details.
Yup. Not only that, but latest and greatest cards (or god forbid: SLI) usually use a lot more power, are noisier, are more prone to problems, etc (historically at least, there are exceptions every so often). If you get something closer to what you need -today-, instead of investing for 3 years, you can get a slightly lower end card that can be more quiet, draw less power, and often is less prone to break (since it will probably be a revision of an older chipset).
The amusing thing is that DB normalisation is in very, very few CS programs (and when it is, its usually in optional classes), and that by far the majority of people who know it (or well, about 1/2 of the things you mentionned) learned it outside of their degrees. Thats why when you go to virtually any interview to do high end business related programming, the interviewers have to ask you if you know anything at all about databases (especially the theoritical parts): because no one does.
Indeed. PC gaming isn't what its used to be: cards are slowly catching up to Dev's abilities... even more so with 1:1 ports between consoles and PC this gen being so common. A 8800 GT is fairly old by videocard standard, yet it can run pretty much any relevent game at max depending on your monitor's resolution. And there are more cost effective offerings than a 8800GT now...
Correct, and OEMs really suck at this stuff to begin with. From my experience with Vista (entire companies using it, as well as me since day 1, on various machines), aside for the initial driver fuck ups (Creative and Nvidia mainly), the vast, vast majority of issues with Vista were related to OEMs putting junk on it that really conflicted and caused a LOT of problems, or even worse, were not up to date (security vulnerabilities and incompatibility, yay!).
A dell I saw wouldn't even load the control panel at all, because some codecs that were installed by the OEM were XP-only (a new version for Vista had been available for MONTHS, but the didn't update, and never tested Vista with the old one or something).
This will be another free for all like that, and all the blame will fall on Windows 7. Microsoft is commiting suicide with this...so they were probably forced to do it by some legal entity or another.
In early versions of Vista RTM (like, really early, as in MSDN or corporate customers-only RTM kind of early. Don't know about Betas, I've never used it), you could end up at the login screen, enter your password, and attempt to go in, only to be greeted with a popup with a message along the line of "A catastrophic error has occured", with absolutely no other detail. No crash either, so you could try again and sometime it would work just fine.
That was quite entertaining the first time I saw it.
As long as they make sure that OEMs include some. Any, doesn't matter if its Outlook, Windows Live Mail, or whatever third party or open source app you want... Else customers will not be too happy out of the box.
However, historically, with other things that were not included (like, let say, anti-virus for a while), the total trash that OEMs put on it (because they're paid to) really sucks ass, even if there are free alternatives that are really, really good.
It will really depend on the nature of your clients, regardless of the country...
As an example: we're a -medium- (not large) size retail company here... Licensing cost is so freagin insignificant to us, we don't even -consider- it when picking a product (unless its something huge, like 200k a year for a single server license, like some enterprise solutions can be).
When we open a store, you need the building (in downtown that can be millions), the licenses for the POS services (not even the software, just the deal with the banks), the custom development (need an army of admins and project managers to do it), etc.
Then when we throw on the balance "Oh, and the guy in the backstore needs Office", you're talking a 1 to 20 million dollar project, and you're tossing an extra license on our volume licensing agreement...its going to end up something like 60$. It gets lost in the round, and would even if instead of Office, it was 3D studio max or whatever. We do.NET development, and recently we asked for extra MSDN licenses, which, for our needs, are about 1400$ or something like that (MSDN Pro with Visual Studio Pro). The first thing the guy handling the budget said was "Oh, why don't you want the full Team Suite? Its only a bit over 10 grands per license, and you only need 10".
Because really, compared to the cost of other things, and the salary we need to pay for our employees, a company with a few thousand employees is spitting millions left and right to begin with. So you'll really go for whatever solution either fits your needs best, or makes your employees happiest and comfy (because you don't want them stressed out, or quitting, requiring more training, etc, because that costs a heck of a lot more).
In opposition, if you have, let say, a small real estate investment firm right now... every CAL of Exchange and license of Windows stings. They'll have a totally different vision.
Meh, im sure a text file in Unicode or another more archaic encoding could screw up Internet Explorer or some word processor or another. I mean, databases have had encoding based attacks for SQL strings (not the same as SQL injection attacks), so why not text processors =P Especially if that have some inner scripting support. That would be amusing. Fear the txt of doom!
Yup, exactly. I've unfortunately end up in companies like that a few times (consultant and all, I've seen everything). Its clear that liars catch a lot of jobs like that... its just too easy to say "I've worked in.NET since 1999!" and have HR eat it up. Then when the interview process moves on to you talking to the architect or project manager, THEN you tell the truth (prettied up). At that point you basically don't have competition, and its very easy to snatch the job.
Its so sad, I am down to telling all potential employers that I will stay a consultant and never end up on their payroll if I am not part of the hiring process (for software development), because otherwise I end up having to work with a bunch of lying idiots, and that is unaccessible.
Wouldn't that describe PostScript better? And even Microsoft's XPS! PDF was pretty much always doing too much IMO... but its what caught on, meh. The features it provides are very very useful. Just not so useful in non-trusted environments.
Well, I know you're joking, but technically the email part is the least important bit of Exchange and the one people would probably give up first...so well...
Slashdot Mirror
Thats a funny story :) Shitty web cams do that crap quite often in general... A long time before Vista came out, a friend of mine had gotten a 30$ microsoft web cam... the drivers for it sucked so hard, it would blue screen -XP- constantly...
People don't care wheter they can use it, because people don't care when you tell them they CAN'T.
Eliminate 100% (hell...just 50% would be enough) of software piracy, and they'll start caring. As long as so many people cheer The Pirate Bay and equivalents, the average joe will never give a flying duck about software freedom: they don't need people to fight for it, they can just TAKE it.
The current mob's opinion of Vista comes from A) People who didn't even try it, B) people who WANTED Microsoft to fail before Vista was even in development, and C) people who did try Vista, either from piss poor OEM installs (fuck you Dell, can you at least CHECK if your bundled drivers are of the correct version when you modify your XP images to run Vista instead of making a Vista one from scratch? dumbass OEM), or from the early driver screw ups (Creative...Nvidia...)
Then when someone brings that up, one of the 6 people who had -REAL- issues with Vista (hey it happens, I've ran Linux for years and once in a blue moon I have had some REAL issues with it...it even happens to Macs) pop up to validate the claims of A, B and C, even though their situations are completly different.
Vista is a self fulfilling prophecy, nothing more. The OS itself works just fine (I have to use XP at work, and man its driving me batshit insane after using Vista for a while, in real production scenarios and at home)
What happened to the OTHER crystal chronicle that was supposed to be on the Wii (no, not Life as a King, Im talking about The Crystal Bearers). It looked pretty cool, but no words of it.
DBAs are probably the worse people to ask these kind of questions to. The kind of shit ALL DBAs I've talked to have told me is just...stupidly amusing. "Stored procedures are faster than SQL dynamically generated by an ORM framework!". "Stored procedures are precompiled!" Just... rofl.
C# 3.0 also supports functional programming. But its not a primarly functional language. There's a lot of problems that are more easily solved in F#. The trick is to solve these problems in independent components/objects/librairies, and import them in a language that is better at handling the rest of the problem. No different than how even in Python, some problems will be solved in, let say, C, and then glued up with Python (since you often don't want to do the whole app in C)
the .NET platform, and more and more the Java platform too, are making languages irrelevent. I know C#, I know Java...now if you toss Scala or Groovy at me, if you toss IronPython, VB.NET or F#, it doesn't matter. Language syntax is the easiest part to learn, the platform is where its at. So if nothing else, its bringing people together. You learn the platform, use whatever language fits the project the best, and the knowledge will be transfered.
Before that, the language was tied to the platform, so your language choice was almost made for you (it stil is to some extent because of how few bare metal languages there are, but its a smaller subset, fortunately).
For the rest...just understand that languages are insignificant., especially on their surface. Its when you go deep in the functionalities and the platform that you start understanding. Thats why Java's promise of platform independence was always taken as a joke: sure, like with any other platform independent language (PERL, Python, Ruby, Java itself, whatever), 90% of the job can easily be made platform independent. Until you need to get something serious done (something that forces you to go deeper in the OS... let say an installer?), then you end up tied to the OS anyway.
An environment that makes that easy becomes crazy important. A language that doesn't easily let you interface with COCOA easily (there's a few...I think Python even is one, yes?) is worthless if you plan to -sell- an OSX app, to take a non-Windows example. Thats why Windows shops are attracted to .NET like flies. All that integration works is very very easy to do with it. Some stuff doesn't require that. Thats why even on Windows .NEt doesn't have a 100% marketshare :)
Oh, and "before .NET everyone had moved to POSIX" what? I think you forgot how insanely dominant VB6 and MFC were. Heck, those -still- compete with .NET after so long.
Its ignorance in general that does that kindda stuff... its not just with firms. Having a buzzword filled resume will net you a well paying job (if you don't mind working for idiots), having a buzzword compliant product will get you customers, etc.
It gives people unfamiliar with the details a sense of security. "Oh! this is WEB 2.0, I can't go wrong!". "Oh this web app has Ajax! Its going to be FAAAAAAAAAAST". "Oh this doesn't have any trans fat in it, its healthy FOR SURE!"
There is a chance, but it would literally kill .NET in the process. If you read a lot on the top dogs of the .NET teams (the project managers and architects, the core devs, etc, on forums, through their blogs, or meeting them at conventions), you'll see they are very friendly to open source, they push Firefox like crazy, they talk about Mono left and right, want to help Miguel, and some even get pretty pissed when MS do something retarded when it comes to .NET and it usually gets pushed back (like JQuery being bundled in the future instead of redoing the same damn thing from scratch with ASP.NET AJAX)
If MS said "No more!" to Mono, the next day half of those guys would quit (since a lot of them accepted jobs at MS to help fix it from the inside), and .NET would die at the same time.
MS wouldn't dare =P
SQL Server 2000 has shit locking. SQL Server 2005 and up has locking strategies similar to Oracle (snapshots-based), but they're not enabled by default to avoid screwing over people who upgrade (not sure I agree with that, especially for new databases, but whatever), so that solves that.
Huh, what? No it doesn't o.O
The newer stuff of Microsoft, and their public APIs, are pretty well documented. Keep in mind though that stuff like Office and Windows pre-date Microsoft's insane popularity (in numbers, not in spirit) and monopoly. So there's a lot of stuff that was never documented, and the people who wrote it aren't even there anymore, and there's a lot of code built on TOP of that. Microsoft didn't get the luxury of a 0.1% market share that would allow them to scrap everything they did and start over, like a certain hippy company did. There's no need to cite anything. Just LOOK at it, its painfully obvious.
You can bet the new stuff is documented in excruciating details.
Yup. Not only that, but latest and greatest cards (or god forbid: SLI) usually use a lot more power, are noisier, are more prone to problems, etc (historically at least, there are exceptions every so often). If you get something closer to what you need -today-, instead of investing for 3 years, you can get a slightly lower end card that can be more quiet, draw less power, and often is less prone to break (since it will probably be a revision of an older chipset).
The amusing thing is that DB normalisation is in very, very few CS programs (and when it is, its usually in optional classes), and that by far the majority of people who know it (or well, about 1/2 of the things you mentionned) learned it outside of their degrees. Thats why when you go to virtually any interview to do high end business related programming, the interviewers have to ask you if you know anything at all about databases (especially the theoritical parts): because no one does.
Indeed. PC gaming isn't what its used to be: cards are slowly catching up to Dev's abilities... even more so with 1:1 ports between consoles and PC this gen being so common. A 8800 GT is fairly old by videocard standard, yet it can run pretty much any relevent game at max depending on your monitor's resolution. And there are more cost effective offerings than a 8800GT now...
No one needs to pay 300$ for gaming anymore.
Are you freagin serious? So its not just a fluke of some idiot localization bozo who thought they were being funny? Its actually DOCUMENTED?!
I'd die a little inside...if I wasn't dying from laughters...
Correct, and OEMs really suck at this stuff to begin with. From my experience with Vista (entire companies using it, as well as me since day 1, on various machines), aside for the initial driver fuck ups (Creative and Nvidia mainly), the vast, vast majority of issues with Vista were related to OEMs putting junk on it that really conflicted and caused a LOT of problems, or even worse, were not up to date (security vulnerabilities and incompatibility, yay!).
A dell I saw wouldn't even load the control panel at all, because some codecs that were installed by the OEM were XP-only (a new version for Vista had been available for MONTHS, but the didn't update, and never tested Vista with the old one or something).
This will be another free for all like that, and all the blame will fall on Windows 7. Microsoft is commiting suicide with this...so they were probably forced to do it by some legal entity or another.
In early versions of Vista RTM (like, really early, as in MSDN or corporate customers-only RTM kind of early. Don't know about Betas, I've never used it), you could end up at the login screen, enter your password, and attempt to go in, only to be greeted with a popup with a message along the line of "A catastrophic error has occured", with absolutely no other detail. No crash either, so you could try again and sometime it would work just fine.
That was quite entertaining the first time I saw it.
As long as they make sure that OEMs include some. Any, doesn't matter if its Outlook, Windows Live Mail, or whatever third party or open source app you want... Else customers will not be too happy out of the box.
However, historically, with other things that were not included (like, let say, anti-virus for a while), the total trash that OEMs put on it (because they're paid to) really sucks ass, even if there are free alternatives that are really, really good.
Customers are not going to be happy...
It will really depend on the nature of your clients, regardless of the country...
As an example: we're a -medium- (not large) size retail company here... Licensing cost is so freagin insignificant to us, we don't even -consider- it when picking a product (unless its something huge, like 200k a year for a single server license, like some enterprise solutions can be).
When we open a store, you need the building (in downtown that can be millions), the licenses for the POS services (not even the software, just the deal with the banks), the custom development (need an army of admins and project managers to do it), etc.
Then when we throw on the balance "Oh, and the guy in the backstore needs Office", you're talking a 1 to 20 million dollar project, and you're tossing an extra license on our volume licensing agreement...its going to end up something like 60$. It gets lost in the round, and would even if instead of Office, it was 3D studio max or whatever. We do .NET development, and recently we asked for extra MSDN licenses, which, for our needs, are about 1400$ or something like that (MSDN Pro with Visual Studio Pro). The first thing the guy handling the budget said was "Oh, why don't you want the full Team Suite? Its only a bit over 10 grands per license, and you only need 10".
Because really, compared to the cost of other things, and the salary we need to pay for our employees, a company with a few thousand employees is spitting millions left and right to begin with. So you'll really go for whatever solution either fits your needs best, or makes your employees happiest and comfy (because you don't want them stressed out, or quitting, requiring more training, etc, because that costs a heck of a lot more).
In opposition, if you have, let say, a small real estate investment firm right now... every CAL of Exchange and license of Windows stings. They'll have a totally different vision.
In quite a few Unions, you'd get more than that...
Meh, im sure a text file in Unicode or another more archaic encoding could screw up Internet Explorer or some word processor or another. I mean, databases have had encoding based attacks for SQL strings (not the same as SQL injection attacks), so why not text processors =P Especially if that have some inner scripting support. That would be amusing. Fear the txt of doom!
I swear if you take enough of my posts together, you'd have content to feed http://engrishfunny.com/ for weeks... ::sigh::
Yup, exactly. I've unfortunately end up in companies like that a few times (consultant and all, I've seen everything). Its clear that liars catch a lot of jobs like that... its just too easy to say "I've worked in .NET since 1999!" and have HR eat it up. Then when the interview process moves on to you talking to the architect or project manager, THEN you tell the truth (prettied up). At that point you basically don't have competition, and its very easy to snatch the job.
Its so sad, I am down to telling all potential employers that I will stay a consultant and never end up on their payroll if I am not part of the hiring process (for software development), because otherwise I end up having to work with a bunch of lying idiots, and that is unaccessible.
Wouldn't that describe PostScript better? And even Microsoft's XPS! PDF was pretty much always doing too much IMO... but its what caught on, meh. The features it provides are very very useful. Just not so useful in non-trusted environments.
Well, I know you're joking, but technically the email part is the least important bit of Exchange and the one people would probably give up first...so well...