Microsoft could open-source VB6. This is a perfect opportunity for them to show that they are truly open. The community could maintain VB6 for as long as they want, and Microsoft could be hands-free. You wanna code in our old dead language? Go for it. Just maintain it yourself.
I suppose they won't do that because it would bring competition to Microsoft that they don't want. It would be interesting to see what someone would do with it. Maybe make a new language?
1) Indoor composters compost faster, and they work all year round. 2) They also work in cold climates with longer more extreme winters. 3) They work for people in apartments. 4) They are good in educational environments. 5) They can produce liquid fertilizer for indoor houseplants. 6) They won't attract animals
Cjheck out the Worm Bin Factory have worms in them. It has a little nozzle, like on a water cooler, that allows you to drain a highly potent liquid plant fertilizer, which can be used for indoor plants more conveniently than a big thing of compost.
When you leave, can I have your job? I would love to work for a comapny that is migrating to some new technology. And since you don't like that, you can have my position maintaininy a 10 year old legacy C++ application. That's good too, because everyone is leaving to take positions using C#. You will probably get better pay here because it is tough to find someone who will maintain this old code.
Oh, and you said they changed management? Great! That will make it easier to make a good impression and show initiative.
Someone please explain to me the purpose of provisional ballots. It seems to me that we've been fine for a long time without them, and they seem ripe for fraud.
I thought it was to assist people who arrive at the wrong polling place. But that seems like a real stretch. At least in Maryland, you don't have to go but a few miles to reach a polling place (nearly every school, public or private, is a polling place). The location is sent to you many months in advance. Plus you can call and verify it ahead of time. It seems more likely to be a way for people to vote numerous times without any real way to track down the duplicates.
I have not used shared source, so please correct me if I misunderstand this:
When they did this to ATL 7, that seemed useful since that is a lightweight library that developers commonly call into. A C++ developer could trace into it and it would help them figure out a crash in their app, or contribute bug fixes/improvements to ATL7.
I want access to the source for libraries that I call into directly such as MFC. That would me debug MFC applications better. Shared source of IE would help me figure out why IE doesn't render something properly or why it crashes when I embed it in my application to do something.
But what good is shared source to SQL server? SQL server isn't a library I call into directly. I don't plug-in to it or link to it directly. It is a huge program, and not likely that an individual developer will find bugs or contribute patches to it. So what's the point? Do I understand the purpose of shared source?
A big player needs to create a serious well-supported development system that allows writing drivers on both multiple platforms. Device drivers are a pain. An SDK that allows a developer to create a driver that runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac, would be well received.
It doesn't matter if the FCC is forced to repeal the broadcast flag. Manufacturers have already spent money to implement it, and the consumers probably won't force them to change it. Manufacturer's wallets are probably influenced more by the MPAA than by their customers. (As evidenced by PC manufacturers embracing DRM technologies and trusted computing.)
I bet that the flag will be repealed but manufacturers will continue to see the crippled hardware. Consumers will whine and complain but that will change nothing. The best we can hope is that it will become an excuse to sell you new hardware that is identical to what you just bought, except with a solder connection removed somewhere. The manufacturers then stand to double their money. Still, the consumer loses.
Apple first should show that these are trade secrets and that NDAs were involved. If so, it becomes the right of the courts to subpoena the journalists to reveal the sources because the sources are committing crimes, and the journalist is an accessory to that crime. Once this is a criminal matter then there is no question about "rights" of journalists since the right to free speech doesn't include the right to stealing trade secrets and violating contracts.
On the other hand, if these things aren't trade secrets and people aren't bound by NDAs, then there is no crime, and no issue.
If the PR group were smart, they would have had their legal department coach Mr. Salyer against saying certain things that had legal ramifications -- rather than inserting obvious PR crud. Steve could have just said "There's serious legal implications to that, and I think I'm going to have to skip that one." This is a common thing to do. Quite sad when they can't even be professional enough to speak with one company voice.
Can they acquire an old laptop with a CD-ROM drive? Maybe something that can be recharged via solar power?
Someone else mentioned shipping things disassembled so they won't get stolen. Laptops are easier to reassembled than PDAs. Marking them as broken parts and REALLY pack the hard drive.
Better yet: make the CDs bootable so they don't even need a hard drive.
Just to expand on that point a bit. Command-line interfaces are not IPC. Application and library developers need to create C interfaces to their apps, not command-lines.
Why aren't there hardware standards for webcams like there are for other USB devices? All USB still cameras support Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP). All joysticks support the USB Human Interface Device (HID). Why not webcams?
Re:Reviewing the review
on
Arch In Depth
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, I like that. One of my complains about Linux distros is that they install too much crud. The last Mandrake I saw in the stores had a super duper hyper-fighting edition which boasted 7 CDs and a bonus DVD. Do people have a fetish for installing stuff?
Whenever I install some generic media package from the install CD, I get 5 image viewers and 3 mp3 players and 6 text editors. And of course, 1 image viewer scales up cleanly, 1 scales down cleanly, 2 have a slide show, and 1 plays movies.
Compare that to Windows XP, which comes with one image editor (paint, yes, it sux.) one image viewer (Windows Picture and Fax viewer, which is excellent) one media player (Windows Media Player, which is okay).
They don't have to be the best most whizbang - just give me one. Better yet, give me none and let me select one. But don't give me 5!
Software spending CPU cycles hiding complexity is a good thing. Software spending CPU cycles hiding simplicity is a bad thing. Many times, "wizards" are used that make things harder than the manual process. For example:
The dekstop files & folders paradigm is fine if marketing dweebs stop designing wizards that hide simplicity in a layer of complexity. What if I had a maid who said "I see you just set a piece of paper on your desk? Do you want me to file it for you? Great, I'll just shred this original while I'm at it, and you can conveniently ask me to find it whenever you need it!"
Example 1:
My dad plugs in his digital camera, and it displays a camera wizard. Great! It asks for the album name and places it in a convenient album with a nice slide-show.
The next day, he wants to edit one of the pictures, or copy it, or rename it. Too bad. Because it's now in a proprietary format in an album management program. The wizard was completely unnecessary. It have been easier for him to create a folder and drag the files into it. It would have functioned in the normal way files and folders work. He would know where they are, and could open, email, rename, delete, etc.
Another example:
My mom inserts a CD and Media Player asks her if she wants to rip the files to the media library. It even does a CDDB lookup and names the albums accordingly. Great! So where's that.MP3 file? No? Maybe it's a.WMV file?.OGG?.WAV? No... it's in the media library. And there it lies forever. You can't play it with anything else. Now I show her how to use CDEX, and click the CDDB button, then the RIP button, then whoa! And she can do whatever she wants with it.
Now I want to email that file. But I can't. Because it's not in a file on the file system, it's hiding in some "convenient" media library for me. And I want to view the pictures in the order the camera took them.
Is it possible that many geeks are tuning out TV as a medium and moving to books, anime, webcomics, and the 'net?
I consider myself an avid Star Trek junkie. But I don't watch Enterprise. I haven't since the first season when I dropped cable and stopped watching TV entirely. Enterprise could be the best Star Trek ever, and I wouldn't know or care.
Be aware that FireFox won't harm Microsoft's profits, so long as those people are running Firefox on Windows. In a way, perhaps Firefox for Windows is harming Linux. Get those users onto Linux & Firefox, and then there is something to be joyous over.
1) The Declaration of Independence is not copyrighted. 2) The Declaration of Independence is a government document. 3) The copyright on the Declaration of Independence would be expired by now.
At a local Lowes I had an employee ask for ID. Afterward, I went over to the customer service desk to say thank you for doing that. The manager asked me which cashier did it. I happily told them, thinking I was doing something good. Then the manager told me that it was illegal in the state of Maryland, and that the employee would be warned against doing that again!
A quick Google search indicates that it is also against the credit card companies' rules, since it is a privacy violation.
It is kind of like asking "Who doesn't comment their code?!?"
1) It is not part of CS curriculum so students never hear of it. Unfortunately, That goes for concepts like "design" and "requirements" too. 2) It is seen as an enterprise solution, not for individuals. 3) Many individual developers are lazy. They only use it because they are forced to do it. 4) Many developers first see source control systems that are expensive and complicated. (I won't name names right now). Free/OSS solutions like subversion are almost "cult" even if they are better than most commercial systems.
My big complaint with FF isn't that you can't use Active-X.
Why? To me, this is the biggest FEATURE of FireFox. Please DO NOT ADD ANY SORT OF ACTIVEX SUPPORT. To met, that's like saying "My Email doesn' thave spam and spyware support."
The only time I've ever used ActiveX is on an employer's intranet, for filling out my timesheet. And even then, they used ActiveX to instantiate the Java run-time because it was a Java applet!
a) Download Firefox [getfirefox.com].
b) Download anti-spyware (ad-aware, Spybot)
c) Get off the internet.
d) Run the anti-spyware to make sure your machine is 100% virus and spyware free.
e) Activate your winxp firewall.
f) install Firefox.
Those a re not easy instructions. Any college student in need of a job can charge >=$30/hour to do exactly that. It takes hours to do. That alone makes it difficult.
Despire your suggestion, the average computer user finds installing software complicated. The anti-spyware tools are very difficult to use. They don't understand what spyware really is, or what quarantining is. Half of the anti-spyware tools are really spyware. They can misdetect things. Installing ad-aware and spybot on one PC causes them to detect each other as spyware (not because they are evil, but because they see the signatures in the other product).
Activating the WinXP firewall is also a complication. I've discovered that it really does no good, because all of the Spyware I've ever seen either 1) has a legitimate reason to connect out, like getting the weather, so people say "okay" to allow it. Or 2) Just uses IE for communication, so the firewall allows it.
Sorry to sound negative, your suggestions are actually good and appropriate. But don't misconstrue that they are easy. If you think it is that easy then people wouldn't pay for the service.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't wait to see that... no, hear that... no, ummm... ?
Microsoft could open-source VB6. This is a perfect opportunity for them to show that they are truly open. The community could maintain VB6 for as long as they want, and Microsoft could be hands-free. You wanna code in our old dead language? Go for it. Just maintain it yourself.
I suppose they won't do that because it would bring competition to Microsoft that they don't want. It would be interesting to see what someone would do with it. Maybe make a new language?
1) Indoor composters compost faster, and they work all year round.
2) They also work in cold climates with longer more extreme winters.
3) They work for people in apartments.
4) They are good in educational environments.
5) They can produce liquid fertilizer for indoor houseplants.
6) They won't attract animals
Cjheck out the Worm Bin Factory have worms in them. It has a little nozzle, like on a water cooler, that allows you to drain a highly potent liquid plant fertilizer, which can be used for indoor plants more conveniently than a big thing of compost.
When you leave, can I have your job? I would love to work for a comapny that is migrating to some new technology. And since you don't like that, you can have my position maintaininy a 10 year old legacy C++ application. That's good too, because everyone is leaving to take positions using C#. You will probably get better pay here because it is tough to find someone who will maintain this old code.
Oh, and you said they changed management? Great! That will make it easier to make a good impression and show initiative.
So, why were you leaving again?
Someone please explain to me the purpose of provisional ballots. It seems to me that we've been fine for a long time without them, and they seem ripe for fraud.
I thought it was to assist people who arrive at the wrong polling place. But that seems like a real stretch. At least in Maryland, you don't have to go but a few miles to reach a polling place (nearly every school, public or private, is a polling place). The location is sent to you many months in advance. Plus you can call and verify it ahead of time. It seems more likely to be a way for people to vote numerous times without any real way to track down the duplicates.
I have not used shared source, so please correct me if I misunderstand this:
When they did this to ATL 7, that seemed useful since that is a lightweight library that developers commonly call into. A C++ developer could trace into it and it would help them figure out a crash in their app, or contribute bug fixes/improvements to ATL7.
I want access to the source for libraries that I call into directly such as MFC. That would me debug MFC applications better. Shared source of IE would help me figure out why IE doesn't render something properly or why it crashes when I embed it in my application to do something.
But what good is shared source to SQL server? SQL server isn't a library I call into directly. I don't plug-in to it or link to it directly. It is a huge program, and not likely that an individual developer will find bugs or contribute patches to it. So what's the point? Do I understand the purpose of shared source?
A big player needs to create a serious well-supported development system that allows writing drivers on both multiple platforms. Device drivers are a pain. An SDK that allows a developer to create a driver that runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac, would be well received.
It doesn't matter if the FCC is forced to repeal the broadcast flag. Manufacturers have already spent money to implement it, and the consumers probably won't force them to change it. Manufacturer's wallets are probably influenced more by the MPAA than by their customers. (As evidenced by PC manufacturers embracing DRM technologies and trusted computing.)
I bet that the flag will be repealed but manufacturers will continue to see the crippled hardware. Consumers will whine and complain but that will change nothing. The best we can hope is that it will become an excuse to sell you new hardware that is identical to what you just bought, except with a solder connection removed somewhere. The manufacturers then stand to double their money. Still, the consumer loses.
The article describes a (new?) challenge-response authentication algorithm.
If we named cars after what they did, it would get rather confusing, since they all do basically the same thing.
Ford DriveAround
Hyundai GoesOnRoads
Honda MovesRealFast
Also:
Napster sounds like "to nab" things.
Google indexes an innumerable number of things, maybe about a google worth of things.
But we already know what cars do. Software is so ubiquitous that we it helps have some indication what it does in the name.
Apple first should show that these are trade secrets and that NDAs were involved. If so, it becomes the right of the courts to subpoena the journalists to reveal the sources because the sources are committing crimes, and the journalist is an accessory to that crime. Once this is a criminal matter then there is no question about "rights" of journalists since the right to free speech doesn't include the right to stealing trade secrets and violating contracts.
On the other hand, if these things aren't trade secrets and people aren't bound by NDAs, then there is no crime, and no issue.
If the PR group were smart, they would have had their legal department coach Mr. Salyer against saying certain things that had legal ramifications -- rather than inserting obvious PR crud. Steve could have just said "There's serious legal implications to that, and I think I'm going to have to skip that one." This is a common thing to do. Quite sad when they can't even be professional enough to speak with one company voice.
Can they acquire an old laptop with a CD-ROM drive? Maybe something that can be recharged via solar power?
Someone else mentioned shipping things disassembled so they won't get stolen. Laptops are easier to reassembled than PDAs. Marking them as broken parts and REALLY pack the hard drive.
Better yet: make the CDs bootable so they don't even need a hard drive.
Just to expand on that point a bit. Command-line interfaces are not IPC. Application and library developers need to create C interfaces to their apps, not command-lines.
Why aren't there hardware standards for webcams like there are for other USB devices? All USB still cameras support Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP). All joysticks support the USB Human Interface Device (HID). Why not webcams?
Actually, I like that. One of my complains about Linux distros is that they install too much crud. The last Mandrake I saw in the stores had a super duper hyper-fighting edition which boasted 7 CDs and a bonus DVD. Do people have a fetish for installing stuff?
Whenever I install some generic media package from the install CD, I get 5 image viewers and 3 mp3 players and 6 text editors. And of course, 1 image viewer scales up cleanly, 1 scales down cleanly, 2 have a slide show, and 1 plays movies.
Compare that to Windows XP, which comes with one image editor (paint, yes, it sux.) one image viewer (Windows Picture and Fax viewer, which is excellent) one media player (Windows Media Player, which is okay).
They don't have to be the best most whizbang - just give me one. Better yet, give me none and let me select one. But don't give me 5!
The dekstop files & folders paradigm is fine if marketing dweebs stop designing wizards that hide simplicity in a layer of complexity. What if I had a maid who said "I see you just set a piece of paper on your desk? Do you want me to file it for you? Great, I'll just shred this original while I'm at it, and you can conveniently ask me to find it whenever you need it!"
Example 1:
My dad plugs in his digital camera, and it displays a camera wizard. Great! It asks for the album name and places it in a convenient album with a nice slide-show.
The next day, he wants to edit one of the pictures, or copy it, or rename it. Too bad. Because it's now in a proprietary format in an album management program. The wizard was completely unnecessary. It have been easier for him to create a folder and drag the files into it. It would have functioned in the normal way files and folders work. He would know where they are, and could open, email, rename, delete, etc.
Another example: .MP3 file? No? Maybe it's a .WMV file? .OGG? .WAV? No... it's in the media library. And there it lies forever. You can't play it with anything else. Now I show her how to use CDEX, and click the CDDB button, then the RIP button, then whoa! And she can do whatever she wants with it.
My mom inserts a CD and Media Player asks her if she wants to rip the files to the media library. It even does a CDDB lookup and names the albums accordingly. Great! So where's that
Now I want to email that file. But I can't. Because it's not in a file on the file system, it's hiding in some "convenient" media library for me. And I want to view the pictures in the order the camera took them.
Is it possible that many geeks are tuning out TV as a medium and moving to books, anime, webcomics, and the 'net?
I consider myself an avid Star Trek junkie. But I don't watch Enterprise. I haven't since the first season when I dropped cable and stopped watching TV entirely. Enterprise could be the best Star Trek ever, and I wouldn't know or care.
Be aware that FireFox won't harm Microsoft's profits, so long as those people are running Firefox on Windows. In a way, perhaps Firefox for Windows is harming Linux. Get those users onto Linux & Firefox, and then there is something to be joyous over.
That analogy doesn't work:
1) The Declaration of Independence is not copyrighted.
2) The Declaration of Independence is a government document.
3) The copyright on the Declaration of Independence would be expired by now.
In some states, it is ILLEGAL to ask for ID:
At a local Lowes I had an employee ask for ID. Afterward, I went over to the customer service desk to say thank you for doing that. The manager asked me which cashier did it. I happily told them, thinking I was doing something good. Then the manager told me that it was illegal in the state of Maryland, and that the employee would be warned against doing that again!
A quick Google search indicates that it is also against the credit card companies' rules, since it is a privacy violation.
It is kind of like asking "Who doesn't comment their code?!?"
1) It is not part of CS curriculum so students never hear of it. Unfortunately, That goes for concepts like "design" and "requirements" too.
2) It is seen as an enterprise solution, not for individuals.
3) Many individual developers are lazy. They only use it because they are forced to do it.
4) Many developers first see source control systems that are expensive and complicated. (I won't name names right now). Free/OSS solutions like subversion are almost "cult" even if they are better than most commercial systems.
Because we won't be burning them. That's really the problem. I don't care what we dig out of the ground.