... We at MS also would like to introduce the blue screen of happiness! Yes, you can enjoy pictures of flowers comfortable music while you muse on the hours of work you just lost.
I have been bouncing back and forth from Beta 2 and latest stable release. I love the performance improvements and several general rendering bug fixes but I have been plagued with JavaScript failures that are unfortunately way too difficult to debug.
Hopefully some other developers have hacked together some JavaScript acid tests to root these babies out because they are really show stoppers for my apps.
MS has been very good at optimizing their software to run fast and have a relatively low memory hit *but* always at the sacrifice of stability and maintainability.
They have also had many years to optimise their code bases. OOo is stil very new and will get better over time. I doubt that MSo will improve.
Now don't get me started on the 1gb plus installation of MSO on my new laptop when I got it from my IT group:[
It rots in the same way that windows proliferates stupidity.
Give me a BSD box with a decent text editor and some decent scripting languages and I will show you something that is maintainable over the long run. Rather than some get it out quick and rewrite it next time you need to make a patch crap.
I stopped ussing VB / Visual Stupido 4 years ago and would rather work at McDonalds cleaning grease pits than doing that again.
I was blown away with the efficiency of work flow and general editing tools in ACDSee. I was in a rush to pull together some marketing material based on tons of pictures I whipped out. The experience was actually enjoyable. The developers at ACD systems obviously spend quite a bit of time on the UI.
Gimp - Well, it just plain rocks. I still have Photoshop but for 99% of my image hacking, Gimp passes with flying colors.
If you do not want the bloat of a Cygwin, or want to fall under the radar of sys admins but still need to have Unix command line tools available from MS Command Prompt (aka Werminal), just install Unix Utils - GNU Utilities for win32.
A simple install and just add the wbin directory to your Path env var and presto, you can GNU your little heart out.
Binaries are pretty small and most functionality is there for the pickings (ls, mv, gzip, pwd, touch, grep, cat, tail).
If you don't need any of the Cygwin apps, this is the best way to help you maintain a windoze running various scripts and applications.
Tail is probably the best little app to use on windoze. You can call the app from a shortcut and have a tail window pop up showing you the output of any log file on the server.
Sample shortcut target to tail any log file log `file:~GNUUtil Home dir~\usr\local\wbin\tail.exe -f ~your log file full path and name~`
Another interesting point is trying to compare the number of bugs between two totally different development lifecycles.
IE has not had any new updates for years now with the exception of security patches. Yet, they still keep on finding bugs and flaws. Also, many flaws that were notified in the past are still not fixed. There are probably more of these in IE that Mozilla.
Mozilla is constantly having code improvements and features being added many times every year. Of course when you release new code, some security holes are exposed and sometimes they are missed in the initial releases. The important thing is that Mozilla group readilly puts out patches to fix the issues when they come out.
Mozilla is way more secure than IE no matter which way you slice it. Anybody who does not understand this simple fact is being just plain ignorant!
Sure, they may build a OS under the ideal of `ground up` approach. But the fact that they are doing it so late in the game is not suprising.
OSX may be a pig but it will still outperform Vista in many aspects.
Just look at the system requirements for Vista and I'd love to see how OSX will just smoke under such a system.
Bring it on MS!
Also, with BSD and GNU/Linux moving forward in the server and desktop realm at a very fast pace. I don't think that it will be possible for MS can hold onto their market share. They will always have a place but not at their current numbers. Market dominance is a thing of the past for the Redmond ranglers.
MS knows that this is the last OS that they can make any serious profit margins on. By the time that SP2 of Vista is out, the alternatives will be even farther ahead in their offerings. The future looks promising indeed.
My money is on the BSD to take a significant part of market share in the future although no where near what Linux will hold and take. However, I have seen very little on BSD in enterprise Clustering solutions.
Are there any companies successfully deploying BSD clusters that be used cost effectively in the enterprise realm? Or is this just something that Universities and the like are playing around with with little commercial applications.
I personally will not install any Beta microsoft product so I cannot verify.
Does anybody know if they finally have undo past savepoints.
Because of my experience with MSO (been using since Excel 4.0) is that it is best to save the document ALL the time else the app will crash and you will loose hours of work. BUT when you save, you loose the undo history:[
MSO up to now has never had this feature (bad programmers BAD).
I am the biggest UI ludite and the search at the bottom is extremely user friendly. Sure, it is a new way of doing things but I hope other apps follow suit.
Firefox could easily move this to the top of the screen for those who have a bad neck and cannot see the bottom of their screens:]
I use Ecco every day and it rocks. Although written for win95 and not having an update for the last 10 years, it is still a very well written PIM with very competent outlining capability.
I know of some people who have already gotten it working via wine.
Have not tried myself as I do not hack in linux and am tied to my windoze box:
Regarding NoteTaker types, single panel outliners are the only way to play. I have always found the common multi-pane outliners to be too abstracted visually and non-intuitive.
If you decide to play with a Mac, Omni Outliner and NoteTaker are very competent products as well. Omni is very simple and written by some of the best hackers in the industry. NoteTaker has very nice features including OPML xml support.
I tried MS OneNote and it SUCKED (compared to Ecco, Omni Outliner, NoteTaker)... I mean really sucked. It is amazing what kind of over featured under planned crap 1000 underpaid monkeys can create.
BTW - NoteTaker is planning a multi-platform release although they have been saying this for some time now.
The Coolpad is probably the best money I have spent on a product for my laptop usage. By positioning differently for different conditions. ie. laying down in bed, leaning on steering wheel while parked, or just on a desk).
Many business inefficiencies can be reduced with Product Lifecycle Management solutions. Such systems could make any paper based business processes and most manufacturing processes much more effective and profitable. Hopefully also reducing redundant and tedious work allowing users to do more intersting things:}
Anybody explain why has there not been any serious Open Source alternatives in this domain?
Multiple language apps (MLA) is another serious contender in future is in programming paradigms. By prototyping in scripting languages like Python or Ruby and porting refined code to Java, Obj-C, C++ or C is the ideal design for large and complex apps.
The MLA design is not new and has been used by Apple for several years now and also by open source and other developers through Jython, PyObjC...
These MLAs would be ideal to run n-tier server apps but should have alot of success with many client side only applications.
1) It was difficult enough for me to convince my bosses to install a Python interpreter on our production servers.
2) Python has very good bridging support with libraries for binding to Objective-C and Java. Since multi-language apps is where I want to go for my larger hacks this is important.
3) Python has been around longer, has a larger user base and has tons of libraries and apps out there. Ruby is still quite young and will take more time to gather more libraries under their wings.
[Question] Does Ruby natively support JSON?
What... no C64 or Amiga games :[
on
IGN's Top 100 Games
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I would have had Lode runner (c64) and stunt driver (amiga) on my top 20 at least.
There was also a apple II game called dungeon quest or something like that which I know some people were very addicted to.
The {{ }} syntax is quite readable. I've been waiting for a decent Python template engine to jump on and migrate away from Java. Don't mind a performance hit when I get easier to read code that has a shorter iterative development cycle.
Waiting for WebLogic to compile a JSP is way too painful and having to write strait in Servlet is troublesome as well. Aside from going to Velociy templates, This looks very sweet indeed.
Nice to also have native JSON interpretation in the language to aid client (JavaScript) to server (Python) communication.
Debugging JavaScript in IE just plain sucks. It's so bad that I just do not even debug in IE anymore, if the bug is reproducable in Mozilla, I debug there.
It would be nice to see MS fix with IE by adding a parsable stack dump like Mozilla (error.stack) including function name, file name and an accurate line number.
With Java and Jython on the server side, you have many solid libraries and full scalability. By leveraging Java side, you will also have fantastic multi-threading support for large deployments.
By using Python as probably your templating layer on the server, you could easily utilize JSON to transport data from your JavaScript application on the client and the server. The nice thing about Python and JavaScript is that they both natively interpret JSON which will allow for more compact data transport and rapid interpretation. Throw in JSO/XML-RPC and you will have some really sweet UI's for your users (ie google maps).
Slashdot Mirror
... We at MS also would like to introduce the blue screen of happiness! Yes, you can enjoy pictures of flowers comfortable music while you muse on the hours of work you just lost.
I have been bouncing back and forth from Beta 2 and latest stable release. I love the performance improvements and several general rendering bug fixes but I have been plagued with JavaScript failures that are unfortunately way too difficult to debug.
Hopefully some other developers have hacked together some JavaScript acid tests to root these babies out because they are really show stoppers for my apps.
Fantastic work otherwise!
JsD
I know it is a bit offtopic but this one has been warming my gray matter.
1) Is it possible for Apple to go back to PPC after they go x86?
2) If it is a possibility, what is the risk to x86 developers who plan to port their windo*s apps to OSX-86?
JsD
MS has been very good at optimizing their software to run fast and have a relatively low memory hit *but* always at the sacrifice of stability and maintainability.
:[
They have also had many years to optimise their code bases. OOo is stil very new and will get better over time. I doubt that MSo will improve.
Now don't get me started on the 1gb plus installation of MSO on my new laptop when I got it from my IT group
JsD
It rots in the same way that windows proliferates stupidity.
Give me a BSD box with a decent text editor and some decent scripting languages and I will show you something that is maintainable over the long run. Rather than some get it out quick and rewrite it next time you need to make a patch crap.
I stopped ussing VB / Visual Stupido 4 years ago and would rather work at McDonalds cleaning grease pits than doing that again.
Dude - You posted what I was going to post.
I was blown away with the efficiency of work flow and general editing tools in ACDSee. I was in a rush to pull together some marketing material based on tons of pictures I whipped out. The experience was actually enjoyable. The developers at ACD systems obviously spend quite a bit of time on the UI.
Gimp - Well, it just plain rocks. I still have Photoshop but for 99% of my image hacking, Gimp passes with flying colors.
JsD
If you do not want the bloat of a Cygwin, or want to fall under the radar of sys admins but still need to have Unix command line tools available from MS Command Prompt (aka Werminal), just install Unix Utils - GNU Utilities for win32.
A simple install and just add the wbin directory to your Path env var and presto, you can GNU your little heart out.
Binaries are pretty small and most functionality is there for the pickings (ls, mv, gzip, pwd, touch, grep, cat, tail).
If you don't need any of the Cygwin apps, this is the best way to help you maintain a windoze running various scripts and applications.
Tail is probably the best little app to use on windoze. You can call the app from a shortcut and have a tail window pop up showing you the output of any log file on the server.
Sample shortcut target to tail any log file log `file:~GNUUtil Home dir~\usr\local\wbin\tail.exe -f ~your log file full path and name~`
.:JsD:.
I am with you.
Another interesting point is trying to compare the number of bugs between two totally different development lifecycles.
IE has not had any new updates for years now with the exception of security patches. Yet, they still keep on finding bugs and flaws. Also, many flaws that were notified in the past are still not fixed. There are probably more of these in IE that Mozilla.
Mozilla is constantly having code improvements and features being added many times every year. Of course when you release new code, some security holes are exposed and sometimes they are missed in the initial releases. The important thing is that Mozilla group readilly puts out patches to fix the issues when they come out.
Mozilla is way more secure than IE no matter which way you slice it. Anybody who does not understand this simple fact is being just plain ignorant!
JsD
Sure, they may build a OS under the ideal of `ground up` approach. But the fact that they are doing it so late in the game is not suprising.
OSX may be a pig but it will still outperform Vista in many aspects.
Just look at the system requirements for Vista and I'd love to see how OSX will just smoke under such a system.
Bring it on MS!
Also, with BSD and GNU/Linux moving forward in the server and desktop realm at a very fast pace. I don't think that it will be possible for MS can hold onto their market share. They will always have a place but not at their current numbers. Market dominance is a thing of the past for the Redmond ranglers.
MS knows that this is the last OS that they can make any serious profit margins on. By the time that SP2 of Vista is out, the alternatives will be even farther ahead in their offerings. The future looks promising indeed.
JsD
I agree, I was finking it two years ago on my ibook and had kde running for fun as well. This is not news or at least they should not say `Finally`.
JsD
My money is on the BSD to take a significant part of market share in the future although no where near what Linux will hold and take. However, I have seen very little on BSD in enterprise Clustering solutions.
Are there any companies successfully deploying BSD clusters that be used cost effectively in the enterprise realm? Or is this just something that Universities and the like are playing around with with little commercial applications.
JsD
I personally will not install any Beta microsoft product so I cannot verify.
:[
:]
Does anybody know if they finally have undo past savepoints.
Because of my experience with MSO (been using since Excel 4.0) is that it is best to save the document ALL the time else the app will crash and you will loose hours of work. BUT when you save, you loose the undo history
MSO up to now has never had this feature (bad programmers BAD).
BTW - OOo has this feature in 2.0
God I love open source
JsD
Sorry, but this guy is so wrong.
:]
I am the biggest UI ludite and the search at the bottom is extremely user friendly. Sure, it is a new way of doing things but I hope other apps follow suit.
Firefox could easily move this to the top of the screen for those who have a bad neck and cannot see the bottom of their screens
JsD
True, but at least they are still saying no to software patents (for now)
... with the status of copyright and patent laws in North America, they will have less and less ways to express their creativity.
:]
Hopefully some will become patent reform lawyers and find ways to make the world creative friendly again. Or just move to Europe (for now...)
JsD
I use Ecco every day and it rocks. Although written for win95 and not having an update for the last 10 years, it is still a very well written PIM with very competent outlining capability.
I know of some people who have already gotten it working via wine.
Have not tried myself as I do not hack in linux and am tied to my windoze box:
http://www.thenakedpc.com/dan/pims/ecco.html
Regarding NoteTaker types, single panel outliners are the only way to play. I have always found the common multi-pane outliners to be too abstracted visually and non-intuitive.
If you decide to play with a Mac, Omni Outliner and NoteTaker are very competent products as well. Omni is very simple and written by some of the best hackers in the industry. NoteTaker has very nice features including OPML xml support.
I tried MS OneNote and it SUCKED (compared to Ecco, Omni Outliner, NoteTaker)... I mean really sucked. It is amazing what kind of over featured under planned crap 1000 underpaid monkeys can create.
BTW - NoteTaker is planning a multi-platform release although they have been saying this for some time now.
JsD
If you don't mind using a touchpad, I strongly suggest getting a coolpad and just lap your laptop.
P A241U
http://www.targus.com/us/product_details.asp?sku=
The Coolpad is probably the best money I have spent on a product for my laptop usage. By positioning differently for different conditions. ie. laying down in bed, leaning on steering wheel while parked, or just on a desk).
JsD
Many business inefficiencies can be reduced with Product Lifecycle Management solutions. Such systems could make any paper based business processes and most manufacturing processes much more effective and profitable. Hopefully also reducing redundant and tedious work allowing users to do more intersting things :}
Anybody explain why has there not been any serious Open Source alternatives in this domain?
Multiple language apps (MLA) is another serious contender in future is in programming paradigms. By prototyping in scripting languages like Python or Ruby and porting refined code to Java, Obj-C, C++ or C is the ideal design for large and complex apps.
:]
The MLA design is not new and has been used by Apple for several years now and also by open source and other developers through Jython, PyObjC...
These MLAs would be ideal to run n-tier server apps but should have alot of success with many client side only applications.
Both OSX and GNUStep are using MLAs extensively.
JsD
GNUStep + Gnome + Moz + OOo ==
The reasons I have avoided Ruby has many tails:
1) It was difficult enough for me to convince my bosses to install a Python interpreter on our production servers.
2) Python has very good bridging support with libraries for binding to Objective-C and Java. Since multi-language apps is where I want to go for my larger hacks this is important.
3) Python has been around longer, has a larger user base and has tons of libraries and apps out there. Ruby is still quite young and will take more time to gather more libraries under their wings.
[Question] Does Ruby natively support JSON?
I would have had Lode runner (c64) and stunt driver (amiga) on my top 20 at least.
There was also a apple II game called dungeon quest or something like that which I know some people were very addicted to.
The {{ }} syntax is quite readable. I've been waiting for a decent Python template engine to jump on and migrate away from Java. Don't mind a performance hit when I get easier to read code that has a shorter iterative development cycle.
Waiting for WebLogic to compile a JSP is way too painful and having to write strait in Servlet is troublesome as well. Aside from going to Velociy templates, This looks very sweet indeed.
Nice to also have native JSON interpretation in the language to aid client (JavaScript) to server (Python) communication.
Will be keeping a close eye on this one as well.
True, out of the box, JavaScript does not come with enough methods to make JavaScript debuggable to beginners.
But, once time is spent using good debugging libraries and structures, it's not all that bad. But IE just plain sucks any time of the day.
How many times have you seen `object expected` where they could give a little more information like Mozilla does like `oVar.myProp is undefined`.
I am sure that M$ purposley made IE debugging a very painful experience and would not be at all surprised if they continue in that vain.
JsD
Debugging JavaScript in IE just plain sucks. It's so bad that I just do not even debug in IE anymore, if the bug is reproducable in Mozilla, I debug there.
It would be nice to see MS fix with IE by adding a parsable stack dump like Mozilla (error.stack) including function name, file name and an accurate line number.
JsD
With Java and Jython on the server side, you have many solid libraries and full scalability. By leveraging Java side, you will also have fantastic multi-threading support for large deployments.
By using Python as probably your templating layer on the server, you could easily utilize JSON to transport data from your JavaScript application on the client and the server. The nice thing about Python and JavaScript is that they both natively interpret JSON which will allow for more compact data transport and rapid interpretation. Throw in JSO/XML-RPC and you will have some really sweet UI's for your users (ie google maps).