As corrupt and stupid as US politicians are, they're bush-league amateurs compared to UN diplomats. The UN is the single most corrupt organization on the planet, and I have no intention of ever letting them have control of anything without putting up the most resistance that I possibly can. I have no love for US politics, but I detest world politics. Can you imagine the security council having say over censorship on the internet?
The high-end Alienware laptops blow. My company has gone through 5 of their "desktop in a laptop" computers in less than 2 years because the level of quality is so low that they just don't last. The Intel systems just stop working after a little while(requiring Alienware replacements because Alienware won't refund our money) and the Aurora 7700 "gaming" laptop won't even play Stronghold 2(too choppy) or Black and White 2 (speeds up and slows down a lot). However, if you read the reviews of the hardware, they're all glowing and happy about them.
The problem is that regular laptops simply aren't powerful enough for our needs. Even the fastest laptop processors are FAR behind desktop processors as far as performance is concerned.
When ATI designs the chips(note that the manufacturer is not ATI, but Sapphire), it designs them to a reference specification that will run with stability under a variety of real-world situations(at least that's what I hope they do). The manufacturer then slaps on a more effective cooler and can overclock the chipset to get more performance.
As a PC and Console gamer (XBox 360), and an HDTV owner, I can say that consoles at 1080i are still disappointing, not so much for how they look, but for how they perform. Several of the BIG xbox 360 titles show signs of slowdown when run at 1080i. Need for Speed: Most Wanted gets really nasty if you try to play split screen at 1080i. Madden 07 seems a little bit slower at 1080. Not all games slow down, but the fact that 1080 is pushing the "next-gen" console system's abilities reflects poorly on rushing to be first to market. I don't run any games under 1280x1024 on my PC, and several games at much higher resolutions, so who's the winner there?
The writer of the article claims that somehow a 256MB video card is going to cost you some huge sum of money and that more RAM will destroy your budget. Hmmm... Well, I can find a GeForce 6600 256MB Video card right now for less than $60 from Newegg, and it will do all that you need for Vista. Gosh, that's a bank-breaker! He also claims that 1GB of RAM is going to destroy your IT costs! That's odd, I can find 1GB of PC2-5400 for around $110. So, for well under $200 I addressed his two main hardware concerns. While that particular RAM might not work out for you, for another $100 at most you can always get much higher quality RAM.
"If your exiting PCs can take full advantage of Vista, I'm happy for you. I don't believe you, but I hope your upgrade goes well."
The above quote smacks of FUD. I am quite certain that every system in my small company could run Vista right now with no problems whatsoever. We don't have a system with less than 2GB of RAM, and an NVidia 256MB video card (has to be NVidia because ATI is awful for OpenGL) is what we recommend as a minimum. I know, I build them all. We're a small business, which is where the article appears, on a small business site. Our slowest processors are 3.2 GHz P4's. For some reason, the article writer feels that "small business" means "company with old decrepit hardware". Even our laptops conform to our system guidelines.
Any time a widely used OS is significantly changed, everyone will have to invest some amount of time with testing, and possibly refreshing, their software. Since there are so many companies that might have to do so, there's a significant software expense in doing so. If there's a large shift in KDE, to make it more future-oriented, then a very large amount of time will be spent by a large number of developers to update software. While they may not be getting paid to do it, their time still has value. Ol' Bill apparently realizes that software development is done by lots of people in lots of ways, unlike you.
I think that it's more likely that they're simply putting an end to the practice before it gets out of hand rather than going after Cleanflix. If it's legal to take things out and sell it, then who's to say it's not legal to put things in and sell it. Editing is editing. It'd be difficult for a law to clearly state that some editing is legal and some editing is not. There are a lot of movies out there that could easily, by removing bits and pieces only, be turned into racist, or sexist, or anti-semite films, or worse, and the movie industry doesn't want that. That's a very reasonable stance. The Cleanflix movement was simply at the vanguard of the re-edited movies movement, and it's very understandable that movie makers would not want re-edited versions of their movies floating around in the long run.
There's also probably a tiny bit of "We hate you religious zealot closed-minded freaks!" Religious extremism is the greatest threat to the stability and peace of the world, you know.
I lived in Utah for a few years...I know what it's like.
Laws have been proven to be true, not not proven to be false. Theories have neither proof of correctness nor incorrectness...yet.
The goal of science is to find either proof, or disproof of theories. Remember your scientific method!
I'm currently working with a military simulation network. That means that speed is of the essence, and memory is tight. We already are using 3GB and more of RAM, and we could expand to use any that we are theoretically given. If there's memory overhead from the interpreted language, it's unacceptable. If there's a speed penalty from an interpreted language, it's unaccpetable. There are times when code is written that is nowhere in the realm of good coding because, yes, function calls do take time because not everything can be inlined. There are others working on the same project using interpreted languages, but they're not able to work at the resolution that we work at.
To mirror some other comments, if you're writing GUIs, or database apps, or web apps, then interpreted languages may work just fine for you. I never intend to do those things as I think I'd be bored beyond belief. I write algorithms...and I use native code.
Unfortunately, judges often tell juries(illegally) that they are not allowed to judge the law, but only the person accused of breaking it. Jury Nullification was included as part of our country's legal system to protect against exactly what we have now, which is rule of the rich. The poor, by acting through the use of jury nullification, can protect society from the ruling rich by simply stating, "They broke the law, but we think the law is unjust, and they are therefore innocent."
You've apparently not kept up with the case. Churchill has been shown to be a plagiarist and has no evidence to support many of his claims. The university will investigate until everyone forgets and then quietly drop it. They have no intention of doing anything to him despite his academic dishonesty. Boulder, CO, is a different world. I've lived there and hated it. I would never EVER call myself a Republican, and I still think Boulder is far out left. CU is a perfect example of a far-left sociology faculty that will punish any non-far-left view. The university has no spine because they are paralysed by PC fear and the will continue to pay that lying hack his six figure salary because they don't have the balls to say, "Get out."
I don't understand why people are so excited about Apple using Intel processors. What's the difference? What made Apple be Apple was the OS, not the hardware. Sure they made a point of having hardware that wasn't really open and you couldn't really build your own. So? Now you can? Whoop-de-doo! Anyone who thinks that this is some amazing achievement should have been completely bashing Apple up until now because PC's already use the hardware that Apple has switched to. I don't care what Apple does. If they turn into serious gaming systems, then I'll consider them cost vs. cost, in which case they'll likely lose to something I can build myself.
Your schedule is completely wrong. Get away from digital entertainment for a while. You're as much a slave as the person who freaks out if they don't see all "their shows" on TV. Sleep more. Get outside. Ride a bike. Just get away from a screen.
Women are, on average, more social creatures than men are. I think we can agree on that. In my 10 years of professional experience writing software, I'd say that the VAST majority of people that I've worked with have all the personality of a sack of flour. I'm a social person. I've gotten to the point where I've seriously considered changing careers just so I can be around people who have personality. I worked at a company where beers were provided FREE after 5 on Fridays. Good beers! Any beers you asked for! I love beers and I couldn't bring myself to go to that after the 4th time or so. It was just too painful to be around such a large group of people who had so little personality. Now, I'm not a social butterfly, but I like to talk to people. Maybe the reason that women aren't going into CS is the overwhelming lack of personality they encounter in professors and fellow students in school.
If all you do is develop GUIs or other such dreck, then you're right, they're not engineers. If you develop mathematical algorithms for a living, you're doing all of the work of an engineer. I'd love to see some standards applied that would force software folks to live up to a standard to get the engineer title. There are a great deal of software engineers in the world, but there are far more software developers.
I use a computer to get things done. I don't use one computer, I use many. I want to be able to get things done without having to memorize 1000 obscure CLI commands or trying to use extremely poorly formatted man pages. GUIs are there to help organize data into a form that is more in tune with how human brains work. Maybe you've trained your brain to do everything by the command line, and are afraid of change or learning something new and moving to a much more convenient GUI. Maybe it gives you a sense of power to be able to do things in an environment where others wouldn't know where to start. I don't care. I just want to be able to grab the computer, and with minimal poking around, get what I want done. In that regard, KDE is far superior to GNOME. As a developer, I HATE not being able to put in useful functionality only because the interface might have too much power for a dolt of a user. I say we should make everything powerful and expect users to rise to the challenge instead of making everything dumb and limiting the powerful amongst us.
Nah, it's clearly a way to mislead us into thinking that they exist only in some geek fantasyland. He's really a pawn and there are four others (mis)leading us in different directions. Go ahead, ask Hagbard if you don't believe me.
Certain applications take a big hit in performance with HT turned on. It's not just server apps. I don't know the specific class of problems, but some of our software has been benchmarked running faster with HT off.
Please make sure you tell anyone that tries to return ints that have meaning that you'll kill them unless they use enums. There's nothing worse than having to try to sort through a ton of code to determine what '2' means in a given context. Additionally, tell those that use spaces instead of tabs to stop doing so immediately. I'm assuming you're using a dev environment that supports setting tab widths for coding. I have a coworker who only uses 1-space tabs. The hardest part is dealing with how awful his code looks when you bring it over to a 4-space tab environment to find out that sometimes he used a tab for an indent, and sometimes he just hit the spacebar. Force code reviews. They're very useful in the long run since more people will have familiarity with the code. Code reviews aren't needed for small tasks obviously, but for large tasks, they can be invaluable for finding those hidden little gotchas. Just a few things.
It's not like a calculator since you can't use a calculator to actually do the computations by hand, whereas you can use Visual Studio to write an app completely by hand....just like the old days.
Why bash Visual Studio because you can quickly and easily write a GUI using it? Who here really feels that writing a GUI is any sort of software engineering? If you mainly write GUIs using APIs, you have no business calling yourself a software engineer. You can be a programmer, or some other name, but never attach "engineer" on it. When you get down to writing algorithms to solve complex problems, then you can start using "engineer". At that point, Visual Studio is just a handy IDE that's VERY well documented and can be configured to do whatever you want it to do. Who cares if you never use 90+% of the tools available in Visual Studio? As long as you can write fast, efficient, and correct code, it doesn't matter where you write it.
I've been developing simulation software on Win XP for years without a BSOD...except for when the fan went out on my video card and it was overheating....hardly Microsoft's fault. I leave my 3 systems(2 Windows, 1 Linux) running 24/7 and have NO issues with the Windows systems. I run XP pro on both the Windows systems. If your opinions of Windows are based on anything before XP, I'd recommend looking into XP. You'll find that it's fast and stable. I noticed a huge slowdown compared to Windows when I converted the one system to Linux. Sure I run KDE. I don't like a simple command prompt unless I'm doing something specific. The linux system is running an Athlon XP 3200+ with 2GB of RAM for god's sake. It should not feel slow. I'm about to upgrade it to an Athlon 64 4000+, and it better not be slow after that, but I realize it will never be as responsive as Windows.
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As corrupt and stupid as US politicians are, they're bush-league amateurs compared to UN diplomats. The UN is the single most corrupt organization on the planet, and I have no intention of ever letting them have control of anything without putting up the most resistance that I possibly can. I have no love for US politics, but I detest world politics. Can you imagine the security council having say over censorship on the internet?
The high-end Alienware laptops blow. My company has gone through 5 of their "desktop in a laptop" computers in less than 2 years because the level of quality is so low that they just don't last. The Intel systems just stop working after a little while(requiring Alienware replacements because Alienware won't refund our money) and the Aurora 7700 "gaming" laptop won't even play Stronghold 2(too choppy) or Black and White 2 (speeds up and slows down a lot). However, if you read the reviews of the hardware, they're all glowing and happy about them. The problem is that regular laptops simply aren't powerful enough for our needs. Even the fastest laptop processors are FAR behind desktop processors as far as performance is concerned.
When ATI designs the chips(note that the manufacturer is not ATI, but Sapphire), it designs them to a reference specification that will run with stability under a variety of real-world situations(at least that's what I hope they do). The manufacturer then slaps on a more effective cooler and can overclock the chipset to get more performance.
As a PC and Console gamer (XBox 360), and an HDTV owner, I can say that consoles at 1080i are still disappointing, not so much for how they look, but for how they perform. Several of the BIG xbox 360 titles show signs of slowdown when run at 1080i. Need for Speed: Most Wanted gets really nasty if you try to play split screen at 1080i. Madden 07 seems a little bit slower at 1080. Not all games slow down, but the fact that 1080 is pushing the "next-gen" console system's abilities reflects poorly on rushing to be first to market. I don't run any games under 1280x1024 on my PC, and several games at much higher resolutions, so who's the winner there?
The writer of the article claims that somehow a 256MB video card is going to cost you some huge sum of money and that more RAM will destroy your budget. Hmmm... Well, I can find a GeForce 6600 256MB Video card right now for less than $60 from Newegg, and it will do all that you need for Vista. Gosh, that's a bank-breaker! He also claims that 1GB of RAM is going to destroy your IT costs! That's odd, I can find 1GB of PC2-5400 for around $110. So, for well under $200 I addressed his two main hardware concerns. While that particular RAM might not work out for you, for another $100 at most you can always get much higher quality RAM.
"If your exiting PCs can take full advantage of Vista, I'm happy for you. I don't believe you, but I hope your upgrade goes well."
The above quote smacks of FUD. I am quite certain that every system in my small company could run Vista right now with no problems whatsoever. We don't have a system with less than 2GB of RAM, and an NVidia 256MB video card (has to be NVidia because ATI is awful for OpenGL) is what we recommend as a minimum. I know, I build them all. We're a small business, which is where the article appears, on a small business site. Our slowest processors are 3.2 GHz P4's. For some reason, the article writer feels that "small business" means "company with old decrepit hardware". Even our laptops conform to our system guidelines.
Any time a widely used OS is significantly changed, everyone will have to invest some amount of time with testing, and possibly refreshing, their software. Since there are so many companies that might have to do so, there's a significant software expense in doing so. If there's a large shift in KDE, to make it more future-oriented, then a very large amount of time will be spent by a large number of developers to update software. While they may not be getting paid to do it, their time still has value. Ol' Bill apparently realizes that software development is done by lots of people in lots of ways, unlike you.
I think that it's more likely that they're simply putting an end to the practice before it gets out of hand rather than going after Cleanflix. If it's legal to take things out and sell it, then who's to say it's not legal to put things in and sell it. Editing is editing. It'd be difficult for a law to clearly state that some editing is legal and some editing is not. There are a lot of movies out there that could easily, by removing bits and pieces only, be turned into racist, or sexist, or anti-semite films, or worse, and the movie industry doesn't want that. That's a very reasonable stance. The Cleanflix movement was simply at the vanguard of the re-edited movies movement, and it's very understandable that movie makers would not want re-edited versions of their movies floating around in the long run.
There's also probably a tiny bit of "We hate you religious zealot closed-minded freaks!" Religious extremism is the greatest threat to the stability and peace of the world, you know.
I lived in Utah for a few years...I know what it's like.
Laws have been proven to be true, not not proven to be false. Theories have neither proof of correctness nor incorrectness...yet. The goal of science is to find either proof, or disproof of theories. Remember your scientific method!
I'm currently working with a military simulation network. That means that speed is of the essence, and memory is tight. We already are using 3GB and more of RAM, and we could expand to use any that we are theoretically given. If there's memory overhead from the interpreted language, it's unacceptable. If there's a speed penalty from an interpreted language, it's unaccpetable. There are times when code is written that is nowhere in the realm of good coding because, yes, function calls do take time because not everything can be inlined. There are others working on the same project using interpreted languages, but they're not able to work at the resolution that we work at. To mirror some other comments, if you're writing GUIs, or database apps, or web apps, then interpreted languages may work just fine for you. I never intend to do those things as I think I'd be bored beyond belief. I write algorithms...and I use native code.
Unfortunately, judges often tell juries(illegally) that they are not allowed to judge the law, but only the person accused of breaking it. Jury Nullification was included as part of our country's legal system to protect against exactly what we have now, which is rule of the rich. The poor, by acting through the use of jury nullification, can protect society from the ruling rich by simply stating, "They broke the law, but we think the law is unjust, and they are therefore innocent."
You've apparently not kept up with the case. Churchill has been shown to be a plagiarist and has no evidence to support many of his claims. The university will investigate until everyone forgets and then quietly drop it. They have no intention of doing anything to him despite his academic dishonesty. Boulder, CO, is a different world. I've lived there and hated it. I would never EVER call myself a Republican, and I still think Boulder is far out left. CU is a perfect example of a far-left sociology faculty that will punish any non-far-left view. The university has no spine because they are paralysed by PC fear and the will continue to pay that lying hack his six figure salary because they don't have the balls to say, "Get out."
I don't understand why people are so excited about Apple using Intel processors. What's the difference? What made Apple be Apple was the OS, not the hardware. Sure they made a point of having hardware that wasn't really open and you couldn't really build your own. So? Now you can? Whoop-de-doo! Anyone who thinks that this is some amazing achievement should have been completely bashing Apple up until now because PC's already use the hardware that Apple has switched to. I don't care what Apple does. If they turn into serious gaming systems, then I'll consider them cost vs. cost, in which case they'll likely lose to something I can build myself.
Your schedule is completely wrong. Get away from digital entertainment for a while. You're as much a slave as the person who freaks out if they don't see all "their shows" on TV. Sleep more. Get outside. Ride a bike. Just get away from a screen.
Women are, on average, more social creatures than men are. I think we can agree on that. In my 10 years of professional experience writing software, I'd say that the VAST majority of people that I've worked with have all the personality of a sack of flour. I'm a social person. I've gotten to the point where I've seriously considered changing careers just so I can be around people who have personality. I worked at a company where beers were provided FREE after 5 on Fridays. Good beers! Any beers you asked for! I love beers and I couldn't bring myself to go to that after the 4th time or so. It was just too painful to be around such a large group of people who had so little personality. Now, I'm not a social butterfly, but I like to talk to people. Maybe the reason that women aren't going into CS is the overwhelming lack of personality they encounter in professors and fellow students in school.
If all you do is develop GUIs or other such dreck, then you're right, they're not engineers. If you develop mathematical algorithms for a living, you're doing all of the work of an engineer. I'd love to see some standards applied that would force software folks to live up to a standard to get the engineer title. There are a great deal of software engineers in the world, but there are far more software developers.
I use a computer to get things done. I don't use one computer, I use many. I want to be able to get things done without having to memorize 1000 obscure CLI commands or trying to use extremely poorly formatted man pages. GUIs are there to help organize data into a form that is more in tune with how human brains work. Maybe you've trained your brain to do everything by the command line, and are afraid of change or learning something new and moving to a much more convenient GUI. Maybe it gives you a sense of power to be able to do things in an environment where others wouldn't know where to start. I don't care. I just want to be able to grab the computer, and with minimal poking around, get what I want done. In that regard, KDE is far superior to GNOME. As a developer, I HATE not being able to put in useful functionality only because the interface might have too much power for a dolt of a user. I say we should make everything powerful and expect users to rise to the challenge instead of making everything dumb and limiting the powerful amongst us.
I think that they're looking for funding. There's no way their system lives up to their hype.
How come you always assume that if you can't do it, nobody can?
Tonight with special guest writer, Jack Thompson.
Nah, it's clearly a way to mislead us into thinking that they exist only in some geek fantasyland. He's really a pawn and there are four others (mis)leading us in different directions. Go ahead, ask Hagbard if you don't believe me.
Certain applications take a big hit in performance with HT turned on. It's not just server apps. I don't know the specific class of problems, but some of our software has been benchmarked running faster with HT off.
Please make sure you tell anyone that tries to return ints that have meaning that you'll kill them unless they use enums. There's nothing worse than having to try to sort through a ton of code to determine what '2' means in a given context. Additionally, tell those that use spaces instead of tabs to stop doing so immediately. I'm assuming you're using a dev environment that supports setting tab widths for coding. I have a coworker who only uses 1-space tabs. The hardest part is dealing with how awful his code looks when you bring it over to a 4-space tab environment to find out that sometimes he used a tab for an indent, and sometimes he just hit the spacebar. Force code reviews. They're very useful in the long run since more people will have familiarity with the code. Code reviews aren't needed for small tasks obviously, but for large tasks, they can be invaluable for finding those hidden little gotchas. Just a few things.
It's not like a calculator since you can't use a calculator to actually do the computations by hand, whereas you can use Visual Studio to write an app completely by hand....just like the old days.
Why bash Visual Studio because you can quickly and easily write a GUI using it? Who here really feels that writing a GUI is any sort of software engineering? If you mainly write GUIs using APIs, you have no business calling yourself a software engineer. You can be a programmer, or some other name, but never attach "engineer" on it. When you get down to writing algorithms to solve complex problems, then you can start using "engineer". At that point, Visual Studio is just a handy IDE that's VERY well documented and can be configured to do whatever you want it to do. Who cares if you never use 90+% of the tools available in Visual Studio? As long as you can write fast, efficient, and correct code, it doesn't matter where you write it.
I've been developing simulation software on Win XP for years without a BSOD...except for when the fan went out on my video card and it was overheating....hardly Microsoft's fault. I leave my 3 systems(2 Windows, 1 Linux) running 24/7 and have NO issues with the Windows systems. I run XP pro on both the Windows systems. If your opinions of Windows are based on anything before XP, I'd recommend looking into XP. You'll find that it's fast and stable. I noticed a huge slowdown compared to Windows when I converted the one system to Linux. Sure I run KDE. I don't like a simple command prompt unless I'm doing something specific. The linux system is running an Athlon XP 3200+ with 2GB of RAM for god's sake. It should not feel slow. I'm about to upgrade it to an Athlon 64 4000+, and it better not be slow after that, but I realize it will never be as responsive as Windows.