Due to the pressure that the open source world has placed on Microsoft, the Redmond based giant has announced it will now include a swear count feature to rival that of the Linux survey tool for source code statistics. Betatests of the software have revealed that the source code for Windows XP contains the word 'crap' appears on a scale ten times larger than that of the linux kernel. Most instances of the word crap however, are not located in the comments of the source code, but come mostly from names of most functions, procedures, and objects - thus giving an accurate description of their value.
IMO Mandrake is going to become the desktop solution for windows migrators who need to have ease of use as much as anything else.
I must concur with this point. I was converted to linux simply by using Mandrake, as it was an operating system that was Linux (which at the time I was interested in, but not quite technically up to par), and wasn't difficult to use. Mandrake was a pretty good distro as far as weening me away from the MS world slowly into linux. What I'm referring to is that Mandrake has enough GUI tools for a new user like me, but I as I became more accustomed to the system, I became more comfortable with things such as manually editing/etc/fstab, for instance.
The downfall, which is what is constantly harped on in regards to Mandrake, is how buggy it is. I've since moved on to the Slackware distribution and am not looking back. I however do owe it to Mandrake to getting me in the linux world and I hope their product does nothing than continue so that other users do the same.
Is this really the right way to go about making users take steps in doing this? The last thing I'd want is to have my customer base calling support screaming over their connection being cut. Of course, I didn't RTFA, so I don't know if the customers are informed prior or concurrent to their connection being cut. But if there is no notification and a all of a sudden a customer has a dead connection, you are going to have one unhappy customer.
A viable solution could have a snail mail or phone call made to the subscriber detailing the situation along with a warning that if it isn't alleviated within a fixed amount of time, then the connection is cut, while at the same time providing some sort of basic initial consulting to the customer about how to "fix" their computer. If the service provider is going to go about cutting people's connections because of virii and worms, they should also be responsible for providing the user help in cleaning their system.
This is of particular concern to me because I myself am considering switching to Comcast from a dialup and definitely wouldn't want the possiblity of this happening to me or those that I live with.
A little further than that actually... they will host a free Doom3 server, and then track down and convict anyone playing an excessive amount of hours on it with suspicion of terrorist activities.
Re:Software? no - humans, yes.
on
Can Software Kill?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The physicists, of course, thought they were helping the patients. Having consulted a doctor at the hospital and the software's manual, they thought they had figured out how to place five radiation shields over each patient's body, instead of four, to protect against possible overdoses.
What failed to get mentioned here is the documentation on the software they were modifying. The vague statement of "consulting the software's manual" almost reveals that after reading through the documentation, the doctors thought they found a way to accomplish what they wanted to do. Obviously, they were wrong. However, if there was inadequate documenation, can the doctors be held fully liable for this?
Microsoft's next major operating system release, dubbed Longhorn, aims to integrate numerous products into the operating system and desktop, creating interdependencies that could further lock customers to Microsoft
How is this an advantage. Everyone I know that is halfway technically savvy finds this a disadvantage about the Windows line of operating systems. People like having choices when it comes to the products and services they buy. Microsoft is going to shoot themselves in the foot with this line of thinking.
Simple reason - the quality of video games is consistently improving, and the quality of television material is consisently regressing. What kid wouldn't want to play the latest Final Fantasy/Legend of Zelda/id first person shooter when the other option is watching American Idol.
I've found with the older generation, my father in particular, that the GUI's indeed cause more confusion. He can halfway type and I've managed to get him to navigate in a DOS prompt to find a word processor once without too much pain, but give him a mouse and a bloated GUI (ie: Windows 98 and later editions) and he is about as disoriented as neutered cat. He doesn't know what to click, when and where, and what all of these buttons are supposed to do.
When I was this age, enrolling in martial arts normally further the labled that you were an outcast to the normal everyday culture of the elementary crowd, whether you were actually a geek or not. Then again, this is the culture of a rural, hog producing area where anything outside of baseball and hunting are unheard of for youth.
I concur on one point; that is that the kid must have some other interest that is semi-social (anime, video games, etc) that directly corelates with his passion for the more geeky activities. There are bound to be everyday youngsters with the same interests.
As for the hair, just shave it. It worked for the atrocity that was my collection of folicles when I was a youth.
I started on Redhat, but found Mandrake years ago, and haven't seen anything that beats it for usability and adherence to Linux and open source traditions.
I started on Mandrake, and I haven't seen a Linux distribution that is anything close to being as buggy as Mandrake. Don't get me wrong however, despite the fact that there are things about Mandrake that would turn off your average linux user, Mandrake was the painless conversion distribution that got me off of my Windows seat and into the Linux luxury chair. However, having the random app/mandrake utility crash on a fairly regular basis has since caused me to switch to Slackware, which is revered for its stability.
Mandrake isn't bad, and I would recommend it to the person who is converting from Windows, but it's not the cream of the crop either.
Kudos to intel. Even if the drivers are proprietary, at least they are releasing drivers tailored for their hardware to run under linux. This has been a concern of mine ever since recently switching from the Windows world to linux. Although I may sound like a typical end user when I say this, when I switched from Windows to Linux, but it was an extreme pain in the tail to even configure a sound card in Linux. I know there are things like ALSA and similar projects, but hardly any organizations were packaging any of their own drivers customed suited to their hardware to be delivered in Linux. The result is that the novice user loses from this because he/she cannot use the hardware he/she chooses to use with the software and/or OS he/she chooses to use.
With that said, this is a step in the right direction and I hope other hardware manufactures do what Intel has pledged to do. Closed source, proprietary drivers are better than no drivers at all.
I just graduated from an Information Systems program in which programming was introduced to us using VB6/VB.NET. This is fine and all, but not a whole lot of emphasis was made by faculty in getting students to go out and learn another language after gathering a background in VB. As a result, a lot of people have graduated with very minimal programming expertise and have fell flat on their face in the job market
Our own beloved industry - IT - has near double-digit unemployment. Good luck to new graduates trying to enter.
Already feeling it on this one. I graduated in Decemeber with an Information Systems degree and am having little to no success on the job hunt. Nobody is hiring anybody straight of college as all of the jobs that are publically posted are requiring people with 3-5 years or so of working experience. What's that leave a newly graduated person like me to do? I've had professors and other people I've networked with try to hook me up, but the best I've come up with, and consequently accepted, is a temporary position for an indefinite amount administering Windows 2003 Servers and coding in VB.NET!
Of course I'm happy to find that much since it will provide that oh so valuable working experience that hardly no college graduates have. Unfortunately, most college graduates may not recieve any opportunity to gather a strong working experience and may have to turn to some other discipline.
Not only that, but this band is taking the humble initiative that the record companies are too ignorant to take. This being that the CD's they market are not worth the $15-19 dollars they charge for them and are finding a way to circumvent the markup. It's finally good to see a band actually "seeing the light", per se, and making the effort to do something with the selling of their music that benefits the consumers and fans.
People still use ICQ?
Ever since Mirabilis was bought out by AOL, ICQ has been an overbloated piece of IM software with entirely too many useless features. It basically turned into AIM on crack.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, engineers and technicians will be chomping at the bit to have an opportunity to work at a plant that will smell as good as these will.
Due to the pressure that the open source world has placed on Microsoft, the Redmond based giant has announced it will now include a swear count feature to rival that of the Linux survey tool for source code statistics. Betatests of the software have revealed that the source code for Windows XP contains the word 'crap' appears on a scale ten times larger than that of the linux kernel. Most instances of the word crap however, are not located in the comments of the source code, but come mostly from names of most functions, procedures, and objects - thus giving an accurate description of their value.
I must concur with this point. I was converted to linux simply by using Mandrake, as it was an operating system that was Linux (which at the time I was interested in, but not quite technically up to par), and wasn't difficult to use. Mandrake was a pretty good distro as far as weening me away from the MS world slowly into linux. What I'm referring to is that Mandrake has enough GUI tools for a new user like me, but I as I became more accustomed to the system, I became more comfortable with things such as manually editing /etc/fstab, for instance.
The downfall, which is what is constantly harped on in regards to Mandrake, is how buggy it is. I've since moved on to the Slackware distribution and am not looking back. I however do owe it to Mandrake to getting me in the linux world and I hope their product does nothing than continue so that other users do the same.
A viable solution could have a snail mail or phone call made to the subscriber detailing the situation along with a warning that if it isn't alleviated within a fixed amount of time, then the connection is cut, while at the same time providing some sort of basic initial consulting to the customer about how to "fix" their computer. If the service provider is going to go about cutting people's connections because of virii and worms, they should also be responsible for providing the user help in cleaning their system.
This is of particular concern to me because I myself am considering switching to Comcast from a dialup and definitely wouldn't want the possiblity of this happening to me or those that I live with.
Who are they gonna send? Terry Tate?
A little further than that actually... they will host a free Doom3 server, and then track down and convict anyone playing an excessive amount of hours on it with suspicion of terrorist activities.
What failed to get mentioned here is the documentation on the software they were modifying. The vague statement of "consulting the software's manual" almost reveals that after reading through the documentation, the doctors thought they found a way to accomplish what they wanted to do. Obviously, they were wrong. However, if there was inadequate documenation, can the doctors be held fully liable for this?
How is this an advantage. Everyone I know that is halfway technically savvy finds this a disadvantage about the Windows line of operating systems. People like having choices when it comes to the products and services they buy. Microsoft is going to shoot themselves in the foot with this line of thinking.
Simple reason - the quality of video games is consistently improving, and the quality of television material is consisently regressing. What kid wouldn't want to play the latest Final Fantasy/Legend of Zelda/id first person shooter when the other option is watching American Idol.
I've found with the older generation, my father in particular, that the GUI's indeed cause more confusion. He can halfway type and I've managed to get him to navigate in a DOS prompt to find a word processor once without too much pain, but give him a mouse and a bloated GUI (ie: Windows 98 and later editions) and he is about as disoriented as neutered cat. He doesn't know what to click, when and where, and what all of these buttons are supposed to do.
Yes, I learned the deep knowledge of computing that turns into carpal tunnel syndrome after repeatedly typing "cd x", "dir /w", "cd x" "dir /w" [...].
I concur on one point; that is that the kid must have some other interest that is semi-social (anime, video games, etc) that directly corelates with his passion for the more geeky activities. There are bound to be everyday youngsters with the same interests.
As for the hair, just shave it. It worked for the atrocity that was my collection of folicles when I was a youth.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/30/204622 6&mode=thread
This thread was about on the ridiculous pricing of college textbooks posted some time back, which can be supplementary to a book review like this
I started on Mandrake, and I haven't seen a Linux distribution that is anything close to being as buggy as Mandrake. Don't get me wrong however, despite the fact that there are things about Mandrake that would turn off your average linux user, Mandrake was the painless conversion distribution that got me off of my Windows seat and into the Linux luxury chair. However, having the random app/mandrake utility crash on a fairly regular basis has since caused me to switch to Slackware, which is revered for its stability.
Mandrake isn't bad, and I would recommend it to the person who is converting from Windows, but it's not the cream of the crop either.
With that said, this is a step in the right direction and I hope other hardware manufactures do what Intel has pledged to do. Closed source, proprietary drivers are better than no drivers at all.
I just graduated from an Information Systems program in which programming was introduced to us using VB6/VB.NET. This is fine and all, but not a whole lot of emphasis was made by faculty in getting students to go out and learn another language after gathering a background in VB. As a result, a lot of people have graduated with very minimal programming expertise and have fell flat on their face in the job market
.
Already feeling it on this one. I graduated in Decemeber with an Information Systems degree and am having little to no success on the job hunt. Nobody is hiring anybody straight of college as all of the jobs that are publically posted are requiring people with 3-5 years or so of working experience. What's that leave a newly graduated person like me to do? I've had professors and other people I've networked with try to hook me up, but the best I've come up with, and consequently accepted, is a temporary position for an indefinite amount administering Windows 2003 Servers and coding in VB.NET!
Of course I'm happy to find that much since it will provide that oh so valuable working experience that hardly no college graduates have. Unfortunately, most college graduates may not recieve any opportunity to gather a strong working experience and may have to turn to some other discipline.
Not only that, but this band is taking the humble initiative that the record companies are too ignorant to take. This being that the CD's they market are not worth the $15-19 dollars they charge for them and are finding a way to circumvent the markup. It's finally good to see a band actually "seeing the light", per se, and making the effort to do something with the selling of their music that benefits the consumers and fans.
People still use ICQ? Ever since Mirabilis was bought out by AOL, ICQ has been an overbloated piece of IM software with entirely too many useless features. It basically turned into AIM on crack.