Honestly, I'm not certain to which situations you are alluding.
If you are looking at it by probability, given the number of people who are murdered, how many died who were unarmed and how many died in spite of being armed? What else matters here?
We are not talking about people looking for trouble. We are not talking about people who, after getting into an argument in a bar, go back to their car to get a gun. We are talking about self-defense.
When someone threatens you with deadly force, you are at their mercy. I fail to see how being armed is going to decrease your chances of survival. Is the concern that you will be shot with your own gun, that you will fire and miss? Statistically speaking, this just does not happen as often as conventional murder. It also does not jive with case studies.
The worst of all situations however, is owning a gun, but not being trained to use it. That, to me, is a true liability, and probably were a great amount of misunderstanding and irresponsibility lies. Simply owning a gun is not sufficient for one's defense.
In the program in which I participated, people are trained specifically to order the home invader out at gun point, and if they do not comply immediately, shoot them dead. This go, no-go level of decision making is required because under normal circumstances, people panic, and according to case studies, often fail to fire, or simply relinquish their weapon.
If you are not prepared to fire, have not trained for such an eventuality, and are not willing to take on the responsibility and burden of possessing a gun, then it is not an asset for you.
For what it's worth, the statistics that I read when getting my CCW indicate that in most armed confrontations, 9 out of 10 times, only one shot is fired, by either side. The flash and noise, particularly if in close-quarters, is generally enough to render everyone shell-shocked. This was based on an FBI study involving actual agents in the field. My memory could be spotty, but if anyone cares, it's probably a google search away.
One thing I would not want to rely on is a criminal's ability to rationalize not killing me if he has already brought a gun with him. Under this circumstance, rationally, if any shots are to be fired, they had best come from my gun. And for liability reasons, if I am put in a position where I have to fire my gun in my house, he had best be obliged to stop that bullet before it continues onward. I'll do my part by staying in practice and keeping HydraShock chambered and in the magazine.
Sound nutty? I don't care what of my possessions you take from my house. Everything's insured, the data is backed up to multiple locations daily. My family however, is irreplaceable, and I will take any threats to their safety all the way to wall, every time.
Although I'm not completely familiar with the epistemology, Objectivists do believe just that. And they purport to have a logical proof beginning with what is effectively "something cannot exist and not exist at the same time" extending through "non-initiation of force" and the like. From there, they layout a basis of morality using only rational constructs. It's a seductive argument, even if it's too hand-wavy for my tastes.
I have the Windows taskbar on the left-side so it doesn't conflict with the menubar or dock on OSX. Running windows outside of an integrated VM (Parallels Coherence or VMWare Unity) just seems silly now.
I can't comment on the effect of the drugs mentioned, but the effect of specific over-the-counter drugs on people with ADD can be the difference between standing in a fog and the clearest day of your life. It has more to do with reaching your innate capacity than expanding it.
> Is your house on a private road, set way back from other houses, and surrounded by trees?
No. And since 99.99999% of houses in the United States are assuredly not, it hardly seems unusual to photograph them. If someone drove up a private drive and took photographs of a house for which the owner took explicit steps to keep private, then the photographer clearly did not have license to be there. That's trespassing, and the owner has a legitimate claim.
I don't even think I'm playing devil's advocate by asking... "why not?"
People walk past my house every day. I have no reasonable expectation that someone will not see the front of my house. Likewise, I have no reasonable expectation that someone will not take a picture of it, regardless of their purpose. If it can be seen by one person without license, it can be seen be all people without license.
The solution is called a "wall," the demarcation of that which is public from that which is private.
Your entire argument hinges on this being a zero-sum game. It's not. If you want to hand-wave away that the system is closed, then the only system you should be considering is the complete output of the sun plus the potential nuclear energy of this planet. Everything else is a product of one of these two and I don't see either running out in millions of years.
Only 8 nuclear reactors can be opened a year? Please. Come up with a thermodynamic constraint to back that up and we'll talk.
Actually, when possible, you should do both. Hungarian notation is a grammar. In the same way that English has rules for writing which include capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, proper names, and so on, Hungarian notation provides visual cues to programmers that make certain types of semantic errors "sTanD oUt." There's nothing particularly unusual about the text "sTanD oUt," and it's meaning does not change by writing it that way, but it violates the English grammar and your brain's pattern recognition identifies it as an outlier. So too with Hungarian notation. Code that does not use at least some form of Hungarian notation looks devoid of the meta content I expect my follow programmers to provide, namely what decision they've made, and whether the code conforms to those decisions. To someone accustomed to Hungarian notation, finding "double fValue;" or "if (uCount < 0)" in the code prompts the eye to linger, the brain to reparse. Ultimately, many conceptual errors are identified and resolved this way, even if the compiler fails to catch them.
Also, like any grammar, the rules depend on the circumstance and should be followed in order to resolve an existing problem or ambiguity. Fully qualifying a variable name "caiIndex" to imply "constant array index" is silly. That is cargo cult mentality. Any of the following would be fine according to the guidelines at my company and each reflects a different decision by the coder: "int nIndex;" "unsigned int uIndex;" "index_t index;". The first works best if the index will be used backwards and the loop constraint is that the index is positive. The second works best if the index is random access, so that functions that use it can check the range with one comparison rather than two. The last case indicates that the semantics and nature of the index could be dependent on a variety of factors including processor architecture, and care should be taken. Therefore, the code "--nIndex," "++uIndex," and "next_index(&index)" look correct while "for (uIndex = 4; uIndex >=0; --uIndex)" looks very bad, and "++index" should make one immediately recognize that any of the following are possible: 1) the ++operator has been overridden, 2) index_t is typecast to an integer type, or 3) this won't compile as would be case if index_t was a struct.
And so, after 28 years of programming, dealing with all different styles of C and C++, I've come to recognize that understanding and using Hungarian notation correctly is a skill. Your productivity increases as you use it, eventually you don't even notice it, and the benefits come later, particularly when refactoring, or making changes to older code, especially if written by someone else. Like syntax highlighting for your brain, if you use it long enough, you'll know when there's an error in the code without having to compile it because it will look wrong. Supposedly for lisp programmers, the same epiphany comes when you no longer see the parentheses.
Why is this marked informative? There's no content here! What things are changed? What menu items are moved? What icons are unreadable? What features are useless? I swear... what passes for moderation around here?
The system is updated; therefore it has changed. This is normal and good.
Menu items move for lots of reasons, some of them good. What specifically are you concerned about?
Unreadable icons is an issue, but not something that Apple is known for. Which ones are you having trouble with?
If you find the features useless, don't use them... most of the new features are huge, anticipated, and necessary.
Well we have no way to contrast whether your experiences are legitimate concerns caused by Vista or are just the result of a couple of bad IT people or your own ignorance.
Of course not; this is a psuedo-anonymous forum. However, I think the moderation speaks to that just fine.
How sad that you reference something hyberbolic to anything we have discussed...
If you thought NeWS was hyperbolic to XAML and WPF, than I overestimated your understanding of the UI problem space. If you've even touched X11, I'd be shocked.
You are the type of person that can see a shelf of understanding above you, but you can't quite see what is on the shelf, and refuses to look any higher.
Son, I wrote most of the work on that shelf. Just so you know.
You basically bypassed the entire argument, and went on about nothing at all. I'm declaring victory and going out for a beer. I don't really care what you do.
On a final note before I go, everyone here knows what disk caching is. But if your build is disk-bound, then pre-caching does nothing for you. You still have to load the data.
As for the display issues, it seems like you know enough to be dangerous, not enough to use it constructively. Unlike you, I recognize everyone's accomplishments in the field. You're too busy being amazed by stuff that I find unremarkable and not unique. Just for kicks, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS. That idea is so old it farts dust.
You want real world examples? Let me go on and on about Vista and what EDS, IBM, NASA, Lockheed Martin, GM and even EDS Europe thinks of Vista...
I think they should speak for themselves. And IBM didn't seem to think that highly of it. Makes me wonder about the rest.
I'm sure your developers and IT people are far smarter than the average person at EDS or Lockheed...
It's possible that we might be... who knows. We have our share of chumps and yes-man, but our senior developers are all world-class. Some of us consider reverse-engineering the Windows kernels to be entertainment. Some of us turn out multi-million dollar products in a month that would have taken lesser teams years. I don't know if that makes us smart or just very capable.
I bet they understand computers better than my colleagues at NASA as well...
Well, better than you, anyway.
I get so tired of 'my experience' is the greatest and represents the world crap...
What other experience do you think possibly matters to me, my company, and my clients? It was your so-called experience that was so far out of line with virtually the entire world's experience that prompted me to reply in the first place. The only other possibility was that you're just a troll. Unfortunately, you know more about the underlying technology than a troll which makes you worse, an amateur with a big mouth.
Go out and get some air. You've worked hard for it.
I've answered the same things in other posts, so I'll comment on the one thing you said that no one else has...
It's not my fault your shitty software doesn't work under Vista.
This is the wrong way to think about it.
1) It is Vista that does not work with our application. We are not experiencing crashing problems -- that would be our problem. We are experiencing failures in the operating system. When I call CreateFile, providing valid arguments, I expect a file handle back. When that doesn't happen, I have to diagnose the problem. On Vista, it's a crap shoot as to what might be wrong today. Sometimes, we never find out. Reboot and the problem goes away. Drop the network share and bring it back up, problem goes away from some processes, but not all of them. What the hell. And this is just one of dozens of show-stoppers.
2) Vista is not an application. People do not buy it to play around with Explorer. They have work to do and applications to run. If those applications do not run on Vista, they must get an operating system that those applications do run on.
Not to be a dick, but you 'claim' to be a Windows developer, yet your post is riddled with simple errors...
There were no errors. You choose to make distinctions that more experienced programmers simply gloss over as uninteresting, and I dismissed them out of hand.
that even a novice Windows or novice Vista user would call you out on...
Let them try. I'm on vacation right now, so I can't promise to respond, but given your initial argument, I figure any refutation you bring would be trivially shot down, so I'm content to let other people do the actual research.
I am not going to take time to correct your post...
You should have. That was the only opportunity you had bolster your argument.
I just don't have the time to educate people when they are so mis-informed or intentionally are trying to mislead people.
I'm on vacation, and I just corrected your intentionally misleading post.
You keep referencing OS X as the 'shining' example of a 'good' OS...
I did not, and I do not code to OSX.
Let's take one: You say Aero=Quartz...
Aero and Quartz are popular names for the respective display rendering technologies. You're asking for a level of detail that is irrelevant to the scope of this thread. If we were going to seriously get into it, I'd have you explain how Aero doesn't use double-buffering for 99.9999999% of the windows applications out there today. Then you can explain how any new-fangled application that doesn't answer to WM_PAINT and make GDI calls like the rest of the world can be expected to run on XP. When you're done with that, speculate as to why calling QuickDraw is any different from calling the Win32 GDI. If you honestly believe that Aero takes all those MoveTo, LineTo, FillRect, and DrawText calls and turns them magically into vector graphics, you need to check again.
...and it IS FASTER than XP because Vista smart caches the libraries...
I don't buy it. If the library is on the disk, you still have to load it into memory. If you cache the data so you don't have to load it again, so what, any operating should be able to do that. That's why you have so much RAM, so the file-system can cache pages. If that was a serious issue, we'd put the libraries on a RAM disk.
Superfetch is also why large application like VS or AI open 5-10x faster because it is a 'smart' caching system, and our developers like the fact the applications load and run faster.)
So what you're saying is, you're pre-loading a bunch of stuff, wasting valuable memory in the process, and this is somehow better. How about this instead: provide APIs and technology that makes it possible to write code that doesn't require loading 50MB of dynamic libraries before giving the user control.
I'm a professional Windows software developer who has been there since Windows 3.0. Windows and Windows APIs are my bread and butter. And you sir, are living in a complete fantasy land.
...the people that 'actually' used Vista for a significant amount of time (i.e. the testers) don't see Vista as the horrible OS that others looking in that haven't used it extensively do.
We beta tested this from alpha to release. It was clunky and busted all along, and it didn't even firm up until the end. Our company still, after dedicating all that effort, will not support running our product on Vista. Which is just as well, since none of our customers, all major financial institutions, are asking for it.
Vista added a lot of architectural changes...
The fact that Vista has revised how its internal subsystems interconnect has had zero impact on the user experience, and your assertation that Vista is faster than XP flies in the face of reality. It is so much slower that we have to reimage all our new computer purchases back to XP because none of our developers will stand to have one on their desk. It literally takes 50% longer to build our entire product tree on Vista than XP. It boggles the mind.
The other big shove Vista has going for it is the migration for development to not only a new set of APIs, but a new concept of development that is as revolutionary as Drag and Drop event based programming made popular with Visual Basic back in 1993.
I'll tell you straight out, no one's going to touch it. No developer in their right mind is going to code to an API that is not backwards compatible to XP. Not going to happen. And in our field of software, financial services, if it doesn't run on W2K, it doesn't ship. Forget shiny, we do not care about shiny. Amateur programmers play with that stuff. Professional programmers code with event horizons of five to ten years. We will not be beta-testing yet another crazy development model from Microsoft. Ask VB6 programmers how well their legacy code bases are doing today. Our company still has mission-critical code written to MFC for God's sake. Do you honestly expect that successful businesses are going to recode their entire product line every time the wind changes in Redmond? We're tired of this crap.
Vista also added enough new features... more than XP...more than Leopard, which makes Leopard look like a catch up OS...
Now here, you're just deluding yourself. Vista announced plenty of features and FAILED to deliver on damn near every single one. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of one single feature Vista introduced that was not already available in OSX by the time Vista shipped. WinFS? Didn't happen. Aero? Meet OSX Quartz. Successfully implemented and delivered on time. Full system indexing and searching on Vista is a dog. Ever tried Spotlight on OSX? You don't even it notice it's there. Look at the underlying designs for both and you can see why.
Pick almost any Leopard feature and Vista has the feature, and architecturally there is no 'killer' feature of OS X that Vista cannot implement via 3rd part support.
Which is just another way of saying, Vista has some features and doesn't have the others.
On the other hand Vista has technologies that OS X, Linux, etc don't have yet and won't have for several years.
Name one.
Until OS X or Linux can handle and pre-emptively multi-task GPU operations...
I think if you talk to the Core Video, Core Audio, Core Animation, and Core Whatever-the-heck developers at Apple, you'd find that you're talking out of your ass. As for Linux, who cares. If they cared about that kind of thing, they'd have implemented it.
On Vista you can run several CAD/High End graphical applications under the Aero interface and not lose performance in any of the applicat
The missing A2DP functionality means that my nice Motorola S9 headphones will answer the phone, but won't play music. I bought an Oakley "icombi" to resolve that, and now it plays music fine. Of course, for some reason, the phone will no longer ring through. Perhaps some additional fiddling is necessary.
Given that Linden does not allow people to edit or copy scripts without your permission, how did this happen? I can understand how someone could duplicate your efforts, but I don't see how they could have gotten your exact scripts unless they had help from Linden Labs. By what means exactly, are you asserting that your work was stolen?
I have no problem with an encoding that is capable of encapsulating all the world's languages. I use it daily.
I take issue with the fact that they implemented it so poorly.
1. It is impossible to determine if a character is whitespace; you have to look it up in a table. 2. It is impossible to determine if the character is even printable; you have to look it up in a table. 3. It is impossible to determine if the character has another, more canonical presentation; you have to look it up in table.
That's a lot of tables. And they change. And they take up space in memory. If you compact them into sorted lists, you still have to search them. That's a huge cost, per character, when parsing strings.
Moreover, the fact that there are multiple encodings for exactly the same string is an error in design. The whole canonical forms nonsense is just the tip of the iceberg.
4096 bit symmetric encryption is serious business. Unless the system itself is flawed, they would be lucky to recover the key before the end of this century. It would be easier to recover the key from the airfield. -Hope
One of our developers applied the Microsoft fix (along with ten others) this morning. He can no longer debug multi-threaded code in MSDev version 6.0. Stopping on a break point in any thread other than the main thread locks the GUI for all processes. At this point, we are testing if this is isolated to MSDev version 6 or all debuggers. We also do not know which of the ten or so patches was responsible. I would be interested to know if anyone else encounters this. At this point, our developer will be reinstalling his machine on Tuesday.
You can dislike the solution all you want, but every database considers a rollback as a form of recovery. If rollbacks and failures do not occur frequently, systems such as this can and do outperform larger, more complex systems.
No one argues that wrapping a database within a transactional system has the potential to be less efficient. Your assertion that it is impossible however, has been refuted. If you weren't so hot-headed you might have realized that you were not only wrong, but a jerk about it, too.
The example you provided has only two outcomes. Either both statements execute and the journal is closed or there has been some type of failure and the journal is hot. If the journal is hot, the database must be recovered from the last check point.
Write Journal: BEGIN; TRANSFER 100 FROM 6 to 5; Journal is now hot.
Execute: update accounts set balance = balance + 100 where id = 5
Execute: update accounts set balance = balance - 100 where id = 6
Write journal: END Journal is no longer hot.
If either statement fails or the server crashes, the journal is hot. Recover:
Close database.
Recover database from last checkpoint.
Open database.
Apply all completed (BEGIN-END) transactions from journal.
You are now back where you started.
If you're complaining about the hassle of recovering the database, you should know that every database performs some variation of this method. Obviously, they do not need to close and reopen the store files, but they most certainly have internal state to recover. Each design has different costs depending on whether it use forward or reverse deltas, maintains change data in memory or on the disk, uses checkpoints, append-based stores, page-overlays, multiple files, or filesystem-level revisioning. Begin a transaction on Oracle and try rolling back after inserting 100GB of data. There will be a delay while the system unwinds.
Recovering from a checkpoint is only onnerous if your transaction has failed, which it clearly should not do under normal circumstances. The only reason why anyone goes through the trouble to checkpoint in the first place is to guarantee that the database is not destroyed if something does go wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I'm not certain to which situations you are alluding.
If you are looking at it by probability, given the number of people who are murdered, how many died who were unarmed and how many died in spite of being armed? What else matters here?
We are not talking about people looking for trouble. We are not talking about people who, after getting into an argument in a bar, go back to their car to get a gun. We are talking about self-defense.
When someone threatens you with deadly force, you are at their mercy. I fail to see how being armed is going to decrease your chances of survival. Is the concern that you will be shot with your own gun, that you will fire and miss? Statistically speaking, this just does not happen as often as conventional murder. It also does not jive with case studies.
The worst of all situations however, is owning a gun, but not being trained to use it. That, to me, is a true liability, and probably were a great amount of misunderstanding and irresponsibility lies. Simply owning a gun is not sufficient for one's defense.
In the program in which I participated, people are trained specifically to order the home invader out at gun point, and if they do not comply immediately, shoot them dead. This go, no-go level of decision making is required because under normal circumstances, people panic, and according to case studies, often fail to fire, or simply relinquish their weapon.
If you are not prepared to fire, have not trained for such an eventuality, and are not willing to take on the responsibility and burden of possessing a gun, then it is not an asset for you.
-Hope
For what it's worth, the statistics that I read when getting my CCW indicate that in most armed confrontations, 9 out of 10 times, only one shot is fired, by either side. The flash and noise, particularly if in close-quarters, is generally enough to render everyone shell-shocked. This was based on an FBI study involving actual agents in the field. My memory could be spotty, but if anyone cares, it's probably a google search away.
One thing I would not want to rely on is a criminal's ability to rationalize not killing me if he has already brought a gun with him. Under this circumstance, rationally, if any shots are to be fired, they had best come from my gun. And for liability reasons, if I am put in a position where I have to fire my gun in my house, he had best be obliged to stop that bullet before it continues onward. I'll do my part by staying in practice and keeping HydraShock chambered and in the magazine.
Sound nutty? I don't care what of my possessions you take from my house. Everything's insured, the data is backed up to multiple locations daily. My family however, is irreplaceable, and I will take any threats to their safety all the way to wall, every time.
-Hope
Although I'm not completely familiar with the epistemology, Objectivists do believe just that. And they purport to have a logical proof beginning with what is effectively "something cannot exist and not exist at the same time" extending through "non-initiation of force" and the like. From there, they layout a basis of morality using only rational constructs. It's a seductive argument, even if it's too hand-wavy for my tastes.
-Hope
I have the Windows taskbar on the left-side so it doesn't conflict with the menubar or dock on OSX. Running windows outside of an integrated VM (Parallels Coherence or VMWare Unity) just seems silly now.
-Hope
I can't comment on the effect of the drugs mentioned, but the effect of specific over-the-counter drugs on people with ADD can be the difference between standing in a fog and the clearest day of your life. It has more to do with reaching your innate capacity than expanding it.
-Hope
> Is your house on a private road, set way back from other houses, and surrounded by trees?
No. And since 99.99999% of houses in the United States are assuredly not, it hardly seems unusual to photograph them. If someone drove up a private drive and took photographs of a house for which the owner took explicit steps to keep private, then the photographer clearly did not have license to be there. That's trespassing, and the owner has a legitimate claim.
-Hope
> Then maybe they shouldn't do that?
I don't even think I'm playing devil's advocate by asking... "why not?"
People walk past my house every day. I have no reasonable expectation that someone will not see the front of my house. Likewise, I have no reasonable expectation that someone will not take a picture of it, regardless of their purpose. If it can be seen by one person without license, it can be seen be all people without license.
The solution is called a "wall," the demarcation of that which is public from that which is private.
-Hope
Your entire argument hinges on this being a zero-sum game. It's not. If you want to hand-wave away that the system is closed, then the only system you should be considering is the complete output of the sun plus the potential nuclear energy of this planet. Everything else is a product of one of these two and I don't see either running out in millions of years.
Only 8 nuclear reactors can be opened a year? Please. Come up with a thermodynamic constraint to back that up and we'll talk.
-Hope
Actually, when possible, you should do both. Hungarian notation is a grammar. In the same way that English has rules for writing which include capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, proper names, and so on, Hungarian notation provides visual cues to programmers that make certain types of semantic errors "sTanD oUt." There's nothing particularly unusual about the text "sTanD oUt," and it's meaning does not change by writing it that way, but it violates the English grammar and your brain's pattern recognition identifies it as an outlier. So too with Hungarian notation. Code that does not use at least some form of Hungarian notation looks devoid of the meta content I expect my follow programmers to provide, namely what decision they've made, and whether the code conforms to those decisions. To someone accustomed to Hungarian notation, finding "double fValue;" or "if (uCount < 0)" in the code prompts the eye to linger, the brain to reparse. Ultimately, many conceptual errors are identified and resolved this way, even if the compiler fails to catch them.
Also, like any grammar, the rules depend on the circumstance and should be followed in order to resolve an existing problem or ambiguity. Fully qualifying a variable name "caiIndex" to imply "constant array index" is silly. That is cargo cult mentality. Any of the following would be fine according to the guidelines at my company and each reflects a different decision by the coder: "int nIndex;" "unsigned int uIndex;" "index_t index;". The first works best if the index will be used backwards and the loop constraint is that the index is positive. The second works best if the index is random access, so that functions that use it can check the range with one comparison rather than two. The last case indicates that the semantics and nature of the index could be dependent on a variety of factors including processor architecture, and care should be taken. Therefore, the code "--nIndex," "++uIndex," and "next_index(&index)" look correct while "for (uIndex = 4; uIndex >=0; --uIndex)" looks very bad, and "++index" should make one immediately recognize that any of the following are possible: 1) the ++operator has been overridden, 2) index_t is typecast to an integer type, or 3) this won't compile as would be case if index_t was a struct.
And so, after 28 years of programming, dealing with all different styles of C and C++, I've come to recognize that understanding and using Hungarian notation correctly is a skill. Your productivity increases as you use it, eventually you don't even notice it, and the benefits come later, particularly when refactoring, or making changes to older code, especially if written by someone else. Like syntax highlighting for your brain, if you use it long enough, you'll know when there's an error in the code without having to compile it because it will look wrong. Supposedly for lisp programmers, the same epiphany comes when you no longer see the parentheses.
Happy Programming,
-Hope
Illegal is what the People decide it is. The People may change their mind. It's happened before. -Hope
- The system is updated; therefore it has changed. This is normal and good.
- Menu items move for lots of reasons, some of them good. What specifically are you concerned about?
- Unreadable icons is an issue, but not something that Apple is known for. Which ones are you having trouble with?
- If you find the features useless, don't use them... most of the new features are huge, anticipated, and necessary.
Ugh.-Hope
Well, it works for me, too. So maybe it's 50/50...
Well we have no way to contrast whether your experiences are legitimate concerns caused by Vista or are just the result of a couple of bad IT people or your own ignorance.
Of course not; this is a psuedo-anonymous forum. However, I think the moderation speaks to that just fine.
How sad that you reference something hyberbolic to anything we have discussed...
If you thought NeWS was hyperbolic to XAML and WPF, than I overestimated your understanding of the UI problem space. If you've even touched X11, I'd be shocked.
You are the type of person that can see a shelf of understanding above you, but you can't quite see what is on the shelf, and refuses to look any higher.
Son, I wrote most of the work on that shelf. Just so you know.
-Hope
You basically bypassed the entire argument, and went on about nothing at all. I'm declaring victory and going out for a beer. I don't really care what you do.
On a final note before I go, everyone here knows what disk caching is. But if your build is disk-bound, then pre-caching does nothing for you. You still have to load the data.
As for the display issues, it seems like you know enough to be dangerous, not enough to use it constructively. Unlike you, I recognize everyone's accomplishments in the field. You're too busy being amazed by stuff that I find unremarkable and not unique. Just for kicks, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS. That idea is so old it farts dust.
You want real world examples? Let me go on and on about Vista and what EDS, IBM, NASA, Lockheed Martin, GM and even EDS Europe thinks of Vista...
I think they should speak for themselves. And IBM didn't seem to think that highly of it. Makes me wonder about the rest.
I'm sure your developers and IT people are far smarter than the average person at EDS or Lockheed...
It's possible that we might be... who knows. We have our share of chumps and yes-man, but our senior developers are all world-class. Some of us consider reverse-engineering the Windows kernels to be entertainment. Some of us turn out multi-million dollar products in a month that would have taken lesser teams years. I don't know if that makes us smart or just very capable.
I bet they understand computers better than my colleagues at NASA as well...
Well, better than you, anyway.
I get so tired of 'my experience' is the greatest and represents the world crap...
What other experience do you think possibly matters to me, my company, and my clients? It was your so-called experience that was so far out of line with virtually the entire world's experience that prompted me to reply in the first place. The only other possibility was that you're just a troll. Unfortunately, you know more about the underlying technology than a troll which makes you worse, an amateur with a big mouth.
Go out and get some air. You've worked hard for it.
-Hope
I've answered the same things in other posts, so I'll comment on the one thing you said that no one else has...
It's not my fault your shitty software doesn't work under Vista.
This is the wrong way to think about it.
1) It is Vista that does not work with our application. We are not experiencing crashing problems -- that would be our problem. We are experiencing failures in the operating system. When I call CreateFile, providing valid arguments, I expect a file handle back. When that doesn't happen, I have to diagnose the problem. On Vista, it's a crap shoot as to what might be wrong today. Sometimes, we never find out. Reboot and the problem goes away. Drop the network share and bring it back up, problem goes away from some processes, but not all of them. What the hell. And this is just one of dozens of show-stoppers.
2) Vista is not an application. People do not buy it to play around with Explorer. They have work to do and applications to run. If those applications do not run on Vista, they must get an operating system that those applications do run on.
-Hope
Not to be a dick, but you 'claim' to be a Windows developer, yet your post is riddled with simple errors...
...and it IS FASTER than XP because Vista smart caches the libraries...
There were no errors. You choose to make distinctions that more experienced programmers simply gloss over as uninteresting, and I dismissed them out of hand.
that even a novice Windows or novice Vista user would call you out on...
Let them try. I'm on vacation right now, so I can't promise to respond, but given your initial argument, I figure any refutation you bring would be trivially shot down, so I'm content to let other people do the actual research.
I am not going to take time to correct your post...
You should have. That was the only opportunity you had bolster your argument.
I just don't have the time to educate people when they are so mis-informed or intentionally are trying to mislead people.
I'm on vacation, and I just corrected your intentionally misleading post.
You keep referencing OS X as the 'shining' example of a 'good' OS...
I did not, and I do not code to OSX.
Let's take one: You say Aero=Quartz...
Aero and Quartz are popular names for the respective display rendering technologies. You're asking for a level of detail that is irrelevant to the scope of this thread. If we were going to seriously get into it, I'd have you explain how Aero doesn't use double-buffering for 99.9999999% of the windows applications out there today. Then you can explain how any new-fangled application that doesn't answer to WM_PAINT and make GDI calls like the rest of the world can be expected to run on XP. When you're done with that, speculate as to why calling QuickDraw is any different from calling the Win32 GDI. If you honestly believe that Aero takes all those MoveTo, LineTo, FillRect, and DrawText calls and turns them magically into vector graphics, you need to check again.
I don't buy it. If the library is on the disk, you still have to load it into memory. If you cache the data so you don't have to load it again, so what, any operating should be able to do that. That's why you have so much RAM, so the file-system can cache pages. If that was a serious issue, we'd put the libraries on a RAM disk.
Superfetch is also why large application like VS or AI open 5-10x faster because it is a 'smart' caching system, and our developers like the fact the applications load and run faster.)
So what you're saying is, you're pre-loading a bunch of stuff, wasting valuable memory in the process, and this is somehow better. How about this instead: provide APIs and technology that makes it possible to write code that doesn't require loading 50MB of dynamic libraries before giving the user control.
All I see is more bloat.
-Hope
I'm a professional Windows software developer who has been there since Windows 3.0. Windows and Windows APIs are my bread and butter. And you sir, are living in a complete fantasy land.
...the people that 'actually' used Vista for a significant amount of time (i.e. the testers) don't see Vista as the horrible OS that others looking in that haven't used it extensively do.
... more than XP ...more than Leopard, which makes Leopard look like a catch up OS...
We beta tested this from alpha to release. It was clunky and busted all along, and it didn't even firm up until the end. Our company still, after dedicating all that effort, will not support running our product on Vista. Which is just as well, since none of our customers, all major financial institutions, are asking for it.
Vista added a lot of architectural changes...
The fact that Vista has revised how its internal subsystems interconnect has had zero impact on the user experience, and your assertation that Vista is faster than XP flies in the face of reality. It is so much slower that we have to reimage all our new computer purchases back to XP because none of our developers will stand to have one on their desk. It literally takes 50% longer to build our entire product tree on Vista than XP. It boggles the mind.
The other big shove Vista has going for it is the migration for development to not only a new set of APIs, but a new concept of development that is as revolutionary as Drag and Drop event based programming made popular with Visual Basic back in 1993.
I'll tell you straight out, no one's going to touch it. No developer in their right mind is going to code to an API that is not backwards compatible to XP. Not going to happen. And in our field of software, financial services, if it doesn't run on W2K, it doesn't ship. Forget shiny, we do not care about shiny. Amateur programmers play with that stuff. Professional programmers code with event horizons of five to ten years. We will not be beta-testing yet another crazy development model from Microsoft. Ask VB6 programmers how well their legacy code bases are doing today. Our company still has mission-critical code written to MFC for God's sake. Do you honestly expect that successful businesses are going to recode their entire product line every time the wind changes in Redmond? We're tired of this crap.
Vista also added enough new features
Now here, you're just deluding yourself. Vista announced plenty of features and FAILED to deliver on damn near every single one. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of one single feature Vista introduced that was not already available in OSX by the time Vista shipped. WinFS? Didn't happen. Aero? Meet OSX Quartz. Successfully implemented and delivered on time. Full system indexing and searching on Vista is a dog. Ever tried Spotlight on OSX? You don't even it notice it's there. Look at the underlying designs for both and you can see why.
Pick almost any Leopard feature and Vista has the feature, and architecturally there is no 'killer' feature of OS X that Vista cannot implement via 3rd part support.
Which is just another way of saying, Vista has some features and doesn't have the others.
On the other hand Vista has technologies that OS X, Linux, etc don't have yet and won't have for several years.
Name one.
Until OS X or Linux can handle and pre-emptively multi-task GPU operations...
I think if you talk to the Core Video, Core Audio, Core Animation, and Core Whatever-the-heck developers at Apple, you'd find that you're talking out of your ass. As for Linux, who cares. If they cared about that kind of thing, they'd have implemented it.
On Vista you can run several CAD/High End graphical applications under the Aero interface and not lose performance in any of the applicat
The missing A2DP functionality means that my nice Motorola S9 headphones will answer the phone, but won't play music. I bought an Oakley "icombi" to resolve that, and now it plays music fine. Of course, for some reason, the phone will no longer ring through. Perhaps some additional fiddling is necessary.
Otherwise, I'm very happy with my iPhone.
-Hope
This is very interesting. Apparently, the scripts are not merely server-side executables.
Given that Linden does not allow people to edit or copy scripts without your permission, how did this happen? I can understand how someone could duplicate your efforts, but I don't see how they could have gotten your exact scripts unless they had help from Linden Labs. By what means exactly, are you asserting that your work was stolen?
I have no problem with an encoding that is capable of encapsulating all the world's languages. I use it daily.
I take issue with the fact that they implemented it so poorly.
1. It is impossible to determine if a character is whitespace; you have to look it up in a table.
2. It is impossible to determine if the character is even printable; you have to look it up in a table.
3. It is impossible to determine if the character has another, more canonical presentation; you have to look it up in table.
That's a lot of tables. And they change. And they take up space in memory. If you compact them into sorted lists, you still have to search them. That's a huge cost, per character, when parsing strings.
Moreover, the fact that there are multiple encodings for exactly the same string is an error in design. The whole canonical forms nonsense is just the tip of the iceberg.
-Hope
4096 bit symmetric encryption is serious business. Unless the system itself is flawed, they would be lucky to recover the key before the end of this century. It would be easier to recover the key from the airfield. -Hope
One of our developers applied the Microsoft fix (along with ten others) this morning. He can no longer debug multi-threaded code in MSDev version 6.0. Stopping on a break point in any thread other than the main thread locks the GUI for all processes. At this point, we are testing if this is isolated to MSDev version 6 or all debuggers. We also do not know which of the ten or so patches was responsible. I would be interested to know if anyone else encounters this. At this point, our developer will be reinstalling his machine on Tuesday.
-Hope
You can dislike the solution all you want, but every database considers a rollback as a form of recovery. If rollbacks and failures do not occur frequently, systems such as this can and do outperform larger, more complex systems.
No one argues that wrapping a database within a transactional system has the potential to be less efficient. Your assertion that it is impossible however, has been refuted. If you weren't so hot-headed you might have realized that you were not only wrong, but a jerk about it, too.
-Hope
If either statement fails or the server crashes, the journal is hot. Recover: You are now back where you started.
If you're complaining about the hassle of recovering the database, you should know that every database performs some variation of this method. Obviously, they do not need to close and reopen the store files, but they most certainly have internal state to recover. Each design has different costs depending on whether it use forward or reverse deltas, maintains change data in memory or on the disk, uses checkpoints, append-based stores, page-overlays, multiple files, or filesystem-level revisioning. Begin a transaction on Oracle and try rolling back after inserting 100GB of data. There will be a delay while the system unwinds.
Recovering from a checkpoint is only onnerous if your transaction has failed, which it clearly should not do under normal circumstances. The only reason why anyone goes through the trouble to checkpoint in the first place is to guarantee that the database is not destroyed if something does go wrong.
-Hope